Zombie Night Terror

 Lemmings is a name that may not be some commonly recognisable with some of today's younger gamers won't remember which is sort of a shame but when the only thing that series has come out with is a crappy mobile game that no one plays, it's sort of to be expected.  Well the lads over at NoClip have us covered with Zombie Night Terror, a game that has clearly taken a lot of inspiration from Lemmings but added it's own post apocolyptic twist.  

In most zombie games you play as survivors trying to fend off the hordes of the undead but Zombie Night Terror flips that around and instead puts you in charge of a horde of zombies that you must command through various levels and tasks the player in most cases with infecting a certain number of people or getting the zombies from point A to point B so the outbreak can continue.  There's more to it than just that but in a nutshell that makes up most of what you'll be doing.

If you're not sure why I mentioned Lemmings at the top of this post it's because gameplay wise it's basically the same thing.  For those that haven't seen Lemmings I'll take a moment to explain.  You don't actually control the zombie horde directly, instead they are dropped in in to the stage and in most cases will just aimlessly walk from left to right with no regard for anything that might stop them or kill them.  Your job is to direct them around the map with little arrows on staircases, for example, or mutate them into diffent zombie forms to help them avoid or get through an obstacle.  For example you may be faced with a situation where your zombies will mindlessly walk themselves off a cliff so you must mutate the first zombie in the line into an overlord, which will turn the zombies around and prevent them falling to their doom.  Aside from mutations you get a number of skills which a zombie can perform such a run to get past falling objects or close the gap on their prey or a jump to well.....jump.

What makes the game interesting is that you can combine the mutations and skills to come up with pretty clever solutions for various puzzles.  For example the basic one is to turn a zombie into a direction altering overlord and then using the jump skill on it which will permenantly change the overlord into a sort of catapult so you can lob zombies into hard to reach places.  Another example is using the tank mutation with the scream skill.  Scream on a regular zombie will make it scream either scaring nearby humans or waking up zombies that aren't currently part of your horde, mainly used for paralyzing guys with guns so you can bite them.  If you use the tank mutation to turn a regular zombie into a big strong lad though, scream will send targets in front of the tank flying away from it allowing you to cross gaps or send smaller lads towards their targets much faster.

The regular levels are pretty fun to work out and get through but there's a number of stages where the game starts to get cute with it's design and I don't mean that in a good way.  One bad example of this is an auto scrolling platforming stage where you have to use mutations and skills to get away from a vehicle that kills your zombies on touch.  At the start it's fine but you end up losing a great deal of guys and ending up in an unwinnable position because you got fucked by some trap you had no idea was coming and had way too little time to react to.  That's only a mild annoyance in comparison to the dark levels.  Long stages in pitch black where the only way to see is one radioactive zombie and the rest are just 2 blinking eyes in the darkness.  Somewhat maze like and full of pitfalls you can't see until you've already thrown a few zombies down there they are hair-pullinglly annoying and whoever decided to include these in the game deserves a slap hard enough to maybe cause a tooth to go flying.

Thankfully though, those levels are few and far between and overall Zombie Night Terror is a fun little puzzle game that will leave you feeling pretty satisfied when you eventually solve a level.  So if you're a puzzle game fan looking to scratch an itch then maybe check this one out and if you're an old school Lemmings fan looking for a similar kind of game then absolutely check this one out.

Tau Vs Cole Phelps: Masterminds Clash

 

Last night I started playing L.A. Noire as part of my viewer request segment on the stream.  I'm usually not taken with games from Rockstar if I'm being honest and I didn't think I'd enjoy this one that much, but after 4 hours I'm pleasantly surprised.  I basically had to rip myself from the stream last night because I was so engrossed in playing detective.

I won't comment concretely on the quality of the game just yet because I'm still pretty early on in the story I think but there's something quite annoying about this game that really stands out in a game about being a detective.  You may think that the goal of this game is to use clues and information to work out who did whatever crime your working on but that's not really true.  Your job as the player is to work out what the hell Cole, the main character, is thinking and make sure that the answers you give to a situation match what's going through his mind.

For example, there's a case very early on where you find a car crashed an abandoned in a train yard.  The car is full of blood but there's no body.  In the trunk of the car you find a receipt for the sale of a live pig and by the car you find a bloody pipe and a dropped wallet with, what you assume, is the victims address.  So fine, maybe its a murder or maybe something else is going on.  The next step of this case is to go to the victims house and tell the wife that her husband has been killed...

Now hold on there, Cole

There's no fucking body, I don't KNOW that the husband is dead.  It MIGHT be the victims blood, it MIGHT be someone else's blood or, for all we know, it might be pigs blood.  But no, because Cole thinks the man is dead, I'm not allowed to explore any other avenue, I HAVE to go to the house and tell the wife her husband is dead.  When exploring the house you find evidence of an unhappy marriage, separate bedrooms, train tickets to Seattle and, most damning, a missing pipe from a boiler outside the house that matches the pipe at the scene.  The wife seems to cooperate and tells you about a shifty friend of the victim.  If the guy is dead, this guy might have something to do with it, so down to a bar to go find him and ask him a few questions.

So you get to the bar, ask the guy some stuff and find out that while on trips to Seattle he's fallen in love with another woman and this guy used the pig to "help him out"

OH OK! I GET IT! This guy crashed a car and bludgeoned the live pig in order to fake this dudes death so that he can escape to Seattle and spend his time with his new lover.  So Cole asks the obvious question of where is this guy, and in response you get a sort of roundabout answer where's like "I can't say my hands are tied".  When I pressed the Doubt button on this dialogue, Cole immediately gets mad and starts accusing the guy of bloody murder.  Me as the player meanwhile am facepalming at my monitor screaming "No Cole you fucking idiot, he killed the Pig, we just want the location of the guy, HES NOT FUCKING DEAD"

This sequence ends and you tail the guy to his apartment, find him with the "victim" and then make your arrest and beat the chapter.  Yeah great, but I was penalized at multiple points during the case because my train of logic of the guy not being dead didn't match with Coles' logic of there being a murder.  It's annoying when you get told your wrong during the investigation because your logic doesn't match the game, only to be COMPLETELY CORRECT come the conclusion.  It's an irritating disconnect between character and player and it's exasperated by the fact that the only options you get during an interrogation are Truth, Doubt and Lie and the difference between Doubt and Lie is pretty fucking abstract. 

This isn't a problem exclusive to L.A. Noire.  Personally I find it most common in horror games with no combat where you'll be running from whatever it is through hundreds of rooms and corridors FILLED with blunt and sharp objects that would make an effective weapon but you aren't allowed to pick them up because the dumbass you're controlling isn't allowed to.  Only in L.A. Noires case the problem is made way more obvious because you're supposed to be solving puzzles but you're sort of limited in your approach by Cole's smooth brain.

But despite how much I just wrote about it, I'm still really enjoying the game and I'm VERY excited for another session.  You can come check out the rest of my playthrough and watch me berate Cole for being a dipshit some more a www.twitch.tv/taurinensis 

Hellblade: Senuas Sacrifice

 

This weekend I played through Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice from start to finish on stream and it's another one of those games that completely baffles me because it seems to be rated pretty highly among the gaming masses and yet I feel that unless I play Outlast 2 again, Hellblade is a strong contender for this worst game I will play this year.

The story follows Senua going into hell to save the soul of her lover Dillion.  That's it, that's the entire plot.  There's a bunch of other shit going on with Senua's "mental illness" that I'll talk about later, about her being blamed for a plague and abuses from her father but as far as plot objectives go, the only thing to do is go to hell and save the soul of Dillion and bring his ass back to the world of living. 

Game play wise Hellblade is an absolute snorefest.  Most of the game revolves around "match the shape" puzzles usually in the form of locked doors but sometimes taking the form of broken stairways or bridges.  In the first form you come to a locked door with some runes on them, you study the runes and then walk around the environment until an outline of that rune appears in the middle of the screen.  When that happens you hold down R2 and pan the camera around until you line up something in the environment with the shape of the rune, rinse and repeat 2 or 3 times and then you go through the door and do it all again.  The second type is exactly the same but you just have to look at weird floating bits of debris from a certain angle so the thing you need to cross looks repaired and then it magically repairs itself.  I am not joking by the way when I say that this is EVERY. PUZZLE. IN. THE. GAME.  When you aren't doing that, you are holding up on the joystick and listening to stupid dialogue as Senua walks or jogs VERY SLOWLY around.

Sometimes though things are broken up by a little bit of combat and while the combat has a sort of heavy, satisfying feel to it, ultimately it's extremely boring.  The best way to imagine Hellblade combat is to first imagine the combat from Punch Out on the NES, adding a half assed dodge roll mechanic and then removing every single enemy special attack, that about sums it up.  Enemies will walk slowly towards you and then attack, you can dodge literally every attack by mashing the dodge button, no timing required.  After they whiff, you make a couple of light or heavy hits and you repeat this process until they fall over.  After fighting the crow dude you get a mirror that lets you "focus" which slows down the enemies and lets you go on a big killing spree until it's over.  If you do manage to take a few hits, you can also use focus to fully recover and thin out enemy numbers.  The first few encounters are sort of fun but by the time you've killed the first major boss you'll probably be begging for some combat variety and you definitely aren't getting any.

But the real reason I hate this game isn't the lackluster game play or the crap plot, but for the fact that it's incredibly dishonest.

After the first main combat encounter the game tells you "every time you fall in combat the curse will creep up Senua's arm, and when it reaches her head, all progress will be lost", meaning that if you die too often, the game is going to delete your save file.  Well guess what? It's not fucking true.  You can die as many times as you damn well like in Hellblade and sure as shit, the curse on her arm WILL creep up towards her head but it will never get there.  It gets about as high as her shoulder and then just....stops.  You're in no real danger at all.  I've heard people try to justify this with "but it's a game about mental illness and it's supposed to make you feel some of the anxiety she does blah blah blah I'm a huge dipshit that takes PR talk 100% seriously"  It didn't make me FEEL anything, I don't play games with the intention of letting the enemies or environmental hazards kill me.  You don't need to LIE to me to try and create some fake-tension, there would have been plenty of that naturally if you'd just made a competent game, but ya didn't, so all I got was boredom and anger from that stupid warning.

Leading me finally into the theme of "mental illness", a touchy and very serious subject for sure and something that should be treated with respect.  A subject matter that, if done well, may shine some light on what it's like for sufferers of mental illness for people like me who have never really struggled with it.  Well they didn't do that and I think the best thing to illustrate that was that I had a few people in my chat, people I know personally, people who I know HAVE had some kind of mental health problem and do you know how they described the depiction of mental health in Hellblade? "Insulting"

The game makes such a huge deal of how much effort went into the research and depiction of mental health for the game with a big warning at the start and the credit for the "Mental Health Advisor" being the first credit you see at the start of the game.  Well even an uninformed idiot like me can tell that it's a shitty depiction of mental health because what happens near the end of the game is that Senua goes down a hole to get Dillion's skull that she dropped, finds Garm, the Norse guardian of Hell's gate, kills him and then just sort of gets over it all.  I guess not fully but all the "psychosis" that plagues Senua throughout the game is just gone, poof, just like that, after the Garm fight.  Like I said I'm not expert on mental health issues but I'm pretty sure they don't just recover like that because you killed a big dog.  It's not the fucking flu or a mystic curse that just goes away with a magic spell, it's deep seated trauma and it just vanishes because she put a big glowy blue sword in a dogs face.  

Personally, and this is just a theory (A GAME THE..no sorry), that Ninja Theory put the mental health aspect of the plot at the forefront of the game in order to deflect criticism.  You've seen it before with other media, I think the most famous example of which being the new Ghostbusters movie.  "You can't hate the new Ghostbusters film otherwise you're a sexist".  This is just "This games about mental health so you can't hate it or you're being grossly ableist(?)" A shit ploy to sway peoples opinions, a way of stopping people saying anything bad about your boring, walking simulator-esque shit fest for fear of being seen as looking down on the mentally ill.  Maybe I'm being cynical, or maybe Ninja Theory are a bunch of pathetic fucks who haven't made anything better than a 6/10 their entire lives.

Cynical or not, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is an AWFUL game.  Don't let the pretty Unreal Engine graphics fool you into thinking it's an experience worth having because it isn't.  It's a big turd.  A very polished and pretty turd, but still a turd nonetheless

Nihilumbra

So here's another one of those games I got for free as part of my PS+ subscription.  When I downloaded it and fired it up I had absolutely no idea what to expect but what I got was pleasantly surprising.  At time of writing I'm on the final world and I've not finished it but I was so elated to play this game that I had to talk about it early. 

Nihilumbra is a puzzle platformer developed by BeautiFun Games and was originally released for iOS back in 2012 but later ported to Windows, Vita, WiiU and Android.  The game follows the adventures of a little creature as he tries to run from an all consuming void.  The character itself is mute but bits of story are given to you by a narrator as you travel from screen to screen and I'm dropping that voice actor along side the guy from Bastion in my bag of "sexy narrators".  The game itself revolves around using colors to solve the various puzzles in each world.  For example the first color you get is blue which makes the surfaces slippy allowing for faster movement and increased jumping to scale large gaps.  As you get further and further you have to use all these colors together to defeat enemies and make it through the traps that stand in your way.  At the end of each stage you get a sequence where the void chases you.  In game play terms this is a auto scrolling section which tasks you with solving puzzles on a strict time limit.  These sections are probably my personal favorite parts of the game since they create a sort of intensity and pressure that I really enjoy.  It's also got a really nice soundtrack composed by Álvaro Lafuente which is worth going and looking up even if you haven't played the game.  It's ambient and I can see myself using the tracks from this game to accompany my study or writing.

My only real complaint about Nihilumbra is that it's WAY too easy.  I don't want to toot my own horn and say that I'm some kind of big brain Mensa bad ass (because I'm not) but none of the puzzles in Nihilumbra really taxed me.  The solutions all seem extremely obvious and when it does throw a difficult section at you the checkpoints are disgustingly nice and will never set you too far back.  There was an extra mode which I've not tried out yet so I'm hoping that there will be some more challenge there but the main story is VERY easy.  The game is also quite short which may be a put off for some but considering it's only £5 on Steam it's a reasonable length for the price.

If you're into your dark indie platformers and you're looking for something new then absolutely give Nihilumbra a try.  It's a short, sweet and satisfying experience and given you can get it for a series of portable systems it suits short commutes perfectly.  Pick it up and give it ago, jump into the void.  

One to Watch: My Friend Pedro

Usually when I'm flicking through Facebook videos and something gaming related comes up it's usually some kind of thing that I'll close out of pretty quickly.  Some kind of meme video, top 10 or people getting their jollies off whatever big AAA game du jour is. However when the trailer for this little unheard of title crossed my feed I felt compelled to watch it all the way through.

From what I can tell, My Friend Pedro is a game about a man who seems to enjoy cosplaying as Deadpool a little bit taking instructions from a sentient banana to go into buildings and kill a bunch of bad guys.  As far as the premise in concerned it's not going to win any awards for best writing but let's be honest, with a tagline like "blood, bullets and bananas" were you really here for the plot in the first place?

The game play on the other hand is where this game looks absolutely mental.  With the main character flying around the room blasting dudes like he thinks he's Dante from Devil May Cry or some shit.  There seems to be a big focus on environmental kills as well utilizing explosive thingies or having your bullets ricochet off certain surfaces to kill dudes from the safety of a nearby wall.  There's a part in the trailer (which I'll post at the end of this post) where he throws a frying pan in the air and has his bullets bounce off it to clear an upper room of guys.

The big reason that this game piques my interest is it has a very sort of Hotline Miami vibe to it but only now it's a side scroller rather than a top down game.  I get the feeling that while there is a lot of high octane action My Friend Pedro will probably, like Hotline, be more of a puzzle game with action elements rather than a straight up shoot-a-thon.  Lot's of strategizing and probably a lot of dying with quick restarts is what I envision for the first time player (just speculation) but either way it looks like the kind of game I will get very into very quickly.

Here is the trailer if you want to check it out for yourself, it's really fuckin' cool

 

Eggggg and Illi

Every week a paid app on the app store goes free for a while and I always take the chance to grab that shit because fuck paying money for app games.  However sometimes I download a title that makes me feel a little guilty for not directly supporting the creator and while I'm not about to go and pay for a game I already own, I want to highlight a couple of titles I got for free so many you can go and support the better side of the mobile game spectrum.

The first game is Egggg, I'm not sure exactly how many Gs are in there but it's more than usual.  Egggg is a two button platform game and the aim is just to get from one end of the stage to the other without dying.  The thing is though that once you press a direction button, you can't stop.  If you push the way you're running you jump and the other button will make you turn around.  While you're running from one end of the stage to the other there are things to collect and little hidden areas of each stage for you to explore which net you stars at the end.  Simply finishing a level isn't too much of a challenge but getting 3 stars on a stage will require some strategising.  The game also mixes things up every so often by giving you a stage specific mechanic or having you fight a boss but generally just reaching the end of the stage is your only worry.  Still, it's a nice, pure little platforming experience and it's the kind of thing you'd easily find on something like Steam for a few pounds but instead its phone exclusive.

EDIT: As soon as I posted this thing I googled Egg and found a Steam page for it and it's "coming soon", so worth buying there if you don't like playing games on a shitty phone screen.  Seriously, it's a goodun

The second game I want to talk about briefly is Illi.  It's a very simple, cute little platform puzzle game that will eat through your commutes like nothing else.  The game play is super simple with each stage being made up of a number of squares or rectangles and you must jump your way to the exit by tapping the screen.  Illy moves around each square by himself and which way he falls depends on which side of the cube you're on when you press jump.  So press jump on the top and you'll fall down but press it on the right hand side and you'll fall to the left.  Illi does not respect the laws of physics.  Each stage comes with a number of "quests" which involve collecting a thing, getting to the exit in a certain number of jumps or beating a stage in a certain time and finishing these quests unlocks more levels.

The good thing about Illi compared to other puzzle games I've played is that it's not bullshit difficult like other shitty iPhone games like Cut the Rope.  The solutions to certain levels in things like Cut the Rope where there's no way you'd figure that shit out without spending money on a solution fairy or whatever piss me off but Illi has that nice level of challenge sort of similar to Portal.  Things that look hard but if you take a moment to think about them carefully are actually quite simple.

I got these games for free but if it wasn't such a stingy piece of shit and someone had told me about them beforehand, I would have easily dropped a few pounds on these titles.  So go check them out because instead of complaining about the sorry state of mobile gaming we should be supporting the people who are actually at least TRYING to do a good job.

Picross

The last few weeks I've been depressingly busy with stuff and finding time for any real meaningful gaming sessions has been tough.  With what time I can squeeze in I've been playing Persona 5 which I can't share with you guys so I've had to horde that experience all to myself.  However, if I didn't find time to game at least a little bit in a 24 hour period I might go insane and that's when Picross came to the rescue.

I discovered Picross a few weeks ago in my local bar on a weekend.  That seems like a weird place to discover a video game but it's a video game bar where there are systems on the counter and games for days, it's a great place I'll do a post on it one day soon.  Anyway, I'm just sat having a drink but the dude next to me is playing Picross and usually I'm not drawn to puzzle games but for some reason I couldn't stop watching him play it.  Eventually I ask him to explain to me what's going on and after the evening was done I got curious and gave it a try myself the next day.  Well I was fucking hooked since it's incredibly easy to understand and yet still manages to be quite challenging.

The idea is simple, you get rows and columns of numbers and those numbers tell you how many filled in squares there are on that line.  If there are multiple numbers in the column it means that there is a space between the filled in areas and using nothing but these numbers you must uncover a picture on the grid.  The game on Gameboy and SNES has you trying to figure out these puzzles within 30 minutes and hitting an incorrect space causes you to lose time.  As you go on the grids get bigger and bigger which of course means the puzzles get harder and harder.

It's just an incredibly relaxing game to play and the challenge never really feels stressful.  Despite the timer going in the background as long as you take your time to work it out it's never really an issue but in the instances where mistakes are made and you really do end up battling the clock you get quite an intense experience. 


There are a pretty large number of Picross games.  There's the original game boy game and the sequel to that on the Super Nintendo.  There's also Picross 3D on the DS and a sequel to that on the 3DS which I'm told are very good and the extra dimension adds a good amount of extra challenge.  There's also a number of free Picross games on mobile too so if you wanted to give it a try then these might be a good place to start too.  There's even a fucking Final Fantasy Picross RPG for mobile called Pictologica where you solve small Picross puzzles in order to make your party of heroes attack stuff.

There's probably a bunch of other games I don't know about too but that should be enough to get you started.  Give it a try, it's fun, addictive and can be played in very small and quick bursts which means that even if your schedule is fucked you can squeeze in a quick puzzle here and there.

The Last Guardian

So recently I just finished The Last Guardian and considering that we all waiting about 10 years for the bloody thing to actually get released I feel it would be rude to not say a few words about it.  I'll keep it as spoiler free as possible so don't worry if you've not played it.

So if you've been living under a rock and you don't know what the fuck you're looking at, The Last Guardian (Also known as The Man Eating Giant Eagle Trico in Japanese) is an action adventure/puzzle type affair created by the same guys that brought us Ico and Shadow of the Colossus.  Considering how good those games were, if you weren't running outside of your house to pick this shit up on release day then I feel like you might need to see a doctor for your severe brain problems and I don't say that lightly considering I usually hate buying shit day 1.

The game starts out with a nameless young boy stuck in a pit with a big dog, bird, griffin type thing all chained up and hurt and after you help it recover a little bit and free it from it's shackles you go on a grand adventure to escape the shit pit that you find yourself stuck in.  Escaping involves riding Trico around the environment, platforming and puzzle solving.  To hinder your escape there are sentient suits of armor trying to carry you off into blue doors and unless Trico is directly by your side encounters with these things should generally be feared. 

From a game play stand point I really enjoyed it but I can see why people would get frustrated with it.  The boy controls a little strange which will very occasionally cause you to fuck up platforming sections but if you aren't complete trash at playing games you'll adapt fairly quickly.  The real problem comes with controlling Trico who has been painstakingly programmed in order to act like a real animal.  That means that sometimes you'll know what to do in a given situation and you'll be using your gestures to try and make him do it but he'll just wander of and scratch his balls or stare at wood for a while instead.  While it is a sort of annoying aspect it does make it feel like your companion is an actual animal rather than just some AI helper than helps you scale large gaps.

I'm really glad a game like this game out now though because this is finally the thing that you can point to and be like "THIS is how you make a proper interactive "experience"".  Whenever anyone starts talking about these shitty walking simulators and they start raving about how good they are as "storytelling experiences" you can officially tell them to shut the fuck up and point to a nice modern game to rub their face in it.  The Last Guardian provides and experience far more powerful from anything in that genre and still manages to function as a game, it's brilliant. 

So with that said, you should just go and play The Last Guardian.  While it's a bit of a draining experience it's one you'll never forget and if you happen to be scared of heights like I am it'll probably be the best horror game of 2017.

A Tetris Movie?!

Tetris is one of those games that everyone and their dog knows about.  It's one of those games that is almost synonymous with the word "gaming".  Even people who generally dislike video games can get a good kick out of dropping blocks into neat lines for points.  It's simple, fun, puzzle gaming bliss.  

So while I'm doing my usual morning routine of wasting time on the internet I come across some strange news that there is a Tetris movie in development.  Now I understand why people may attempt to make movie adaptations of other games since they have a story to work with but Tetris? Not much to go on there for a film.  

Ah, but wait of course!  Tetris and its development has a sort of rich history. Originally developed by Alexey Pajitnov as a means of testing hardware for the Moscow centre of Computer Science, things got a bit complicated with licensing rights and publishing thanks to the Soviet Union.  With that in mind there is actually a decent idea for a sort of documovie about the history of one of gamings biggest and most beloved titles. 

But it's not about that is it.....? 

Information on this movie is proving to be a little hard to come by but from what I can tell so far it's going to be a 3 part sci-fi epic.  I can't even begin to imagine the levels of retardation that are going to come out of this movie, I'm expecting something on the same level as Pixels at this point.  

Maybe they were inspired by this image from the Amiga version 

But even then fuck knows what they are gonna do with that.  It'll be a standard space story but every time the ships engines fail the engineer has to get 100 line in Tetris? 

Sort of hoping the project falls through and it goes away so this buffoonery can go away. 

Gyromancer

Gyromancer is one of those games in my steam library that I bought years and years ago but only just got around to finally beating.  I must have bought it in some kind of Steam sale way back when because I can't imagine myself buying a match-3 puzzle game in this day and age. 

Anyway, Gyromancer is a puzzle-RPG game about a dude called Rivel Arday going into a forest in order to stop some evil dude from doing something bad I don't remember.  While each level is sandwiched between cut scenes that involve still images of the characters chatting via text, the story is kind of dumb and isn't really what you are here for anyway.

So a long time ago, back in my younger days when MSN messenger was a thing and I didn't have a job to buy proper games with, Pop Cap was an old website that provided free to play flash games.  One of these games was called Bejewelled.  This game involved swapping two adjacent gems in order to match 3 of the same color and you had to build a certain amount of score in order to progress to the next level.  After I long gave up on Pop Cap they released a variation on Bejewelled known as Bejewlled Twist which was the same game but you would twist a small circle of gems in order to match 3 rather than just pairs.  So take that, add monsters doing battle and a shitty story about a dude in a forest preventing evil and you have Gyromancer.

Monsters battle by having these little gauges that fill up as you match gems and when the gauge is full it drops a sparkly gem on the board, smash the gem and do the damage.  Enemies do their attacks in the same way but on a timer, so if you fail to smash their attack gem in the certain number of turns then they attack you.  Aside from the main game there are little side objectives in each stage and a bunch of bonus shit that you unlock after the first chapter that I never bothered with so I can't comment on that.  But if you like your Bejewelled Twist then Gyromancer has a lot to offer you.

If however you are like me and you don't give too many shits about these kind of puzzle games then it'll be fun at first but quickly start wearing a bit thin.  Cool monsters and a story line are not enough to pull one into the genre of match-3 gem smashing.  I'll be sticking to Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo thank you very much.

Decay: The Mare

The point and click adventure is a long dead genre as far as I'm concerned, I've not seen a good one in a long long time and while Decay: The Mare isn't quite the genre coming back to life, it's sort of a step in the right direction.

The game follows the adventures of Sam, a young man who has ended up in a rehab clinic called Reaching Dreams.  He starts to have these weird dreams and this is where all the horror begins.  The dreams are full of weird imagery, run down environments and a strange creature that appears to want him dead and it's up to you as the player to help him get out.

Game play is standard, old school style point and click fare.  You are given a still of the room you are looking at and sweeping your mouse across it will uncover various elements that can be inspected or interacted with.  You have to solve puzzles and find clues in order to make your way through each episode and uncover the mystery of Reaching Dreams and just why it's so fucked up.

I enjoyed Decay: The Mare, it was kind of atmospheric and had a surprisingly amount of quality for game that was, as far as I understand, initially released on the Xbox Live Indie Game service.  If you've seen anything from that fucking cesspool you know most of the stuff on there is garbage but Decay manages to be actually OK.  The game has 3 episodes which are all nice bite sized lengths so you can fire it up on a lazy weekend, play for an hour or so and then put it away when you beat the episode.  This of course means that the game is kind of short but considering it's cheap price point of £8 you are easily getting £8 worth of content here.

There are however 2 big fat glaring problems with the game.  The first is that's its too fucking easy and for a game like this that's a big problem.  Back in the day a point and click adventure could take days or even fucking weeks to finish because of some weird puzzle that you couldn't wrap your head around but Decay doesn't quite have that.  The puzzles seem cryptic at first and it's clear that an effort was made to make them challenging but they all fall a bit flat.  My wife played the game as well and she commented on how the hardest aspect of this game was navigation of the confusing environments.  I didn't think that personally but it's something to consider.  The game also comes with a hint button so if you really can't be fucked then just slam that and find out what to do next.  But then again, if you're playing a game like this why bother if you're just going to resort to the hint button every time you get stuck?

Secondly the game isn't scary at all.  It presents itself as a horror game and the opening cinematic gave me a weird Silent Hill vibe but the horror is just kind of bad and the game relies too often on jump scares.  The most egregious example I can think of is a puzzle that involves looking at a code for a box with a telescope.  The game purposely gives you the wrong code so that you second guess yourself and when you go to look the second time the big scary monster is eyeing up the camera and a big CRASH plays to tell you to be scared now.  The creepiest thing in the game was a talking, disembodied but heavy breathing handbag but all that did was remind me of the talking head in Killer7 and now I just want to play that again.

All in all, Decay isn't a bad game by any stretch it's just rough round the edges.  If you have some time to kill and you're a fan of point and click adventure games then you could do a hell of a lot worse than this.  Despite the problems I mentioned above me and my wife played it through and came away feeling like we had a good time so I'd absolutely recommend giving it a go.

Spooky's House of Jump Scares

You know, when I download a title from Steam that costs exactly £0 and has a name like this I'm not exactly expecting a masterpiece.  Hell, I'm not really expecting anything more than a couple of horror themed jokes and a game that you can finish in about 10 minutes. 

Well I was fucking wrong here

Spooky's House of Jump Scares is a strange game.  I've actually forgotten what the plot is even though it scrolls for you every time you load up the game but I think it's about someone with an interest in history hearing some stories about this old house and going in to check it out.  As soon as you get inside you are confronted by Spooky, a cute ghost that tells you that the house contains 1000 rooms and challenges you to get to the end of it.

Game play for this game is very simple, walk through a bunch of corridors and press E when you get to the end of each room.  Occasionally, the game will throw a puzzle or two at you and you must spend a little time to solve those but most of them are just things like "find the key" or "read the bit of paper with the door code on it".  While the game play isn't particularly great and the story isn't anything new or interesting it's the way the game delivers it horror that makes it a real success.

Now the horror aspect to this game is really hard to talk about because part of the reason it's so effective is that you aren't expecting it to take the turn that it does.  The first few levels are populated with cute little cardboard cutouts of  animals and cartoon skeletons but don't let that put you off because if you press on you really are in for a bit of a surprise.  I really don't want to say any more than that but let's just say that by the end of the game, even those cute little cut outs had me jumping in my chair a little bit.

The game also features multiple endings which adds some replay value but a single play through of this games 1000 rooms can be a little draining so getting the other ending is not something that I have got around to yet.

The game is free to download and play on Steam and I would encourage you to give it a go.  It's a hard game to talk about but don't read anything other than this going in and you're in for a really good time.  Sometimes it's the simple stuff that gets under your skin the most.

Sword&Dragon

This is a game I would have initially never have heard anything about if it wasn't for a friend of mine asking me to play it and say a few things about it for the blog.  Of course, I agreed and what I got was a pleasant little surprise for my phone.

Sword&Dragon is a free to download and play puzzle game for iOS.  The game contains 100 levels with each stage presenting you with a 4x4 grid and some pieces for you to work with.  The pieces involve things like swords used for killing dragons, dragons for killing you, a heart which represents your life and finally treasures to collect which act as level goals and points.  There are other things too but I've not beat the game so I'm just listing the things that appear in every stage.

The idea is that you sweep the pieces across the board in order to kill dragons and collect loot.  Each level has a number of goals which may be "kill x dragons" or "kill x dragons and collect y gold bars".  While the game starts out fairly simple the game throws obstacles at you as the levels go on throwing things like fortresses to break your swords on and move limits to make your life hard.  On each board there is a heart piece that will die if it collides with a dragon which also results in a game over.  You can prevent this by collecting potions but it's surprisingly easy to get overly focused on the objectives and get yourself killed despite the small size of the stages.

My playtime over the weekend was fairly limited due to being busy testing new capture equipment but the 35 levels that I did play were very fun and it's a title I'll keep coming back to when I have some time to kill with my phone.  I do have one little complaint which is that the new pieces that spawn in each turn seem to be random, so sometimes I feel like I'm getting lucky rather then figuring out a puzzle but this doesn't detract from the overall fun of the game.  Levels will fly by so having a bad run or two doesn't waste too much time and it doesn't happen enough to be overly frustrating.

If you are looking for a new game to play with on your phone then I'd absolutely tell you to give Sword&Dragon a go.  It's not going to revolutionise anything but it's some good, simple fun for your mobile device and you could do a hell of a lot worse.  Check out the website for more information here

http://www.i-yoda.com/products/iphone/sworddragon_ios.html

and go get the game off the app store if you're interested.  Happy dragon slaying!

Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number

So it finally came out and the wait was so very very worth it!  Hotline Miami is easily one of my favorite games due to its fast pace and challenging nature and Miami 2 is essentially just more of the same thing.  That isn't to say though that Hotline Miami 2 is lacking in new things, quite the opposite but at it's core its the same fast pace murder spree that it always was.

This is usually the part where I'd go on to talk about the story but Hotline Miami 2s plot is actually rather hard to follow.  Taking place both before and after the first game you follow the adventures of multiple characters so you get to see the story unfold from a number of different perspectives.  These characters include an actor with a dark streak, a group of vigilantes, a detective, a writer and more.  However, knowledge of what went down in the first game is pretty much vital for understanding what is going on in this one so if you haven't played the first game then expect to get very lost very quickly.  While I quite like Hotline Miami's story, it isn't vital to enjoying the game so even if you don't have a fucking clue what's going on you can still enjoy the experience.

The game play is essentially the same as Hotline 1.  The game is played from a top down perspective and you use your mouse and keyboard to move and aim.  The goal of each level is to kill all the dudes and while sometimes you may have to collect a key or a briefcase off a table the objective is only ever kill all the dudes.  However, Hotline Miami 1 featured only 2 characters with slightly different play styles while each character in 2 has a unique spin on them.  For example, the group of vigilantes each has their own special ability such as a dodge roll, lethal punches or a two person team of chainsaw with pistol backup.  This game even features one character that doesn't kill people and picking up weapons will make him unload them for bonus score.  Whenever the story switches perspective you will end up having to play a little differently to suit the strengths and weaknesses of your character.  What's good though is that no character feels useless and while some will fare better in some stages than others you can complete each level with any mask/weapon etc.

I do feel like one would be Mistaken to call Hotline Miami 2 an action game though.  Sure the game is fast and there's lots of shooting and fighting but it plays very much like a puzzle game with the player having to work out the best route through the level and its enemies to survive.  Not to mention that the levels in 2 are a lot bigger than they were in one so it's no longer possible to just punch your way through the whole game like I do when I speed run the first one. 

The game has a few bugs such as enemies walking through walls sometimes but generally speaking Hotline Miami is a well made and super fun game that I think everyone should at the very least try out. 

Japan Escape Games

Escape the room games like the one featured on the top of this post have been a thing for a good while.  Most of them are made in flash and they are the kind of games that I can never be bothered to spend much time with because I'd rather be playing something....not flash.

Anyway thanks to my wife and her friends I was introduced to some REAL escape type games being hosted around Japan by a company called Scrap (http://realdgame.jp/). 

The idea is simple, there is some kind of plot laid out before all the attendees at the start of the event, then people must solve a number of puzzles and reach the end within a set time limit.  The one we went to was being hosted at a place called Monkey Park near Nagoya

The thing was laid out over the whole park and the first puzzle presented was a cryptic display of where all the other puzzles were.  There were 4 big puzzles in all which had a number of smaller puzzles inside them that you had to figure out in order to get the answer to progress to the next section.  We were also given a 70 minute time limit to get everything done so if you can't do it in that time then tough shit, game over.

The first few puzzles were laughably easy but by the time you reach stage 3 things start to get complicated and me and my group were stumped.  We weren't the only ones though as the vast majority of people attending the event had to take the walk of shame back to their seats at the start when the timer was done.  The winners were paraded out and applauded but you would be surprised at just how few people it was in comparison to the number of attendees.

The problem isn't so much the puzzles themselves, given enough time to think over them I think anyone could work them out but park navigation and time limit make things extremely difficult.  Also a lot of the puzzles require a pretty decent knowledge of Japanese, so if you're a visiting tourist looking for a fun day out then maybe this isn't quite for you.   It's also a little expensive (around 4000 yen for a ticket) but if you can get a decent group of friends together for it then it's a really enjoyable way to spend an evening.

At the end of the event I was given a pamphlet for all upcoming escape games hosted by the same company.  Right slap in the middle of the thing was an advert for a Biohazard (Resident Evil) themed escape game going down at some point in Osaka's Universal Studios theme park.  I absolutely plan to attend that and I'll try and take some non-spoilerific pictures when I do.

Getting Excited For Murdered: Soul Suspect

It's not very often that I get excited for upcoming games much any more and I haven't seen all that much of the game I'm about to be talking about but never the less I'm still very excited for it.

For anyone who is less in the know than I am, Murdered: Soul Suspect is a game coming out very soon developed by Square Enix Japan and Airtight Games (apparently, at time of writing, it has already been released in North America).  From what I know about the game it's about a cop who is killed at the start and it is up to him as a ghost to solve his own murder so that he may move on to the after life.

While that is a really interesting premise the main reason I'm so excited for this game is because it reminds me ever so slightly of something else....

That's right! Goddamn, motherfuckin' Ghost Trick on DS! This is easily one of the best games on the DS and it basically shares the same plot as Murdered: Soul Suspect so if they are even just a little bit similar, Soul Suspect is gearing up to be a bloody good game.

Ghost Trick was very much a puzzle game where Soul Suspect appears to be more of an adventure so it'll be interesting to see how square takes basically the same premise and runs it in a different direction. 

So for anyone waiting for Soul Suspect to come out or for anyone who doesn't have the money to throw down on a brand new release, go find and play Ghost Trick.  It's a wonderful little puzzle game with a great plot and some of the best graphics I've seen on the DS, everyone should try this game.

Then we can all hop on Soul Suspect together and hopefully have another great, ghostly murder mystery game to have fun with!

Gunpoint

Gunpoint is a game about rewiring things and punching people according to the developer website and it's a game I picked up on steam for basically no money thanks to a combination of steam sales and selling stuff on the marketplace.

Gunpoint is a game about a freelance spy called Richard Conway who uses his techno trousers to infiltrate buildings and do all sorts of other spy stuff.  He gets caught up in a murder mystery as well as a tale of espionage between two rival gun companies as he tries to clear his name for a murder he didn't commit.  They story isn't exactly the deepest thing in the world and it's made up entirely of text conversations between Conway and his clients that are completely skipable and sometimes a little bit stupid, but there is enough there to keep the player entertained between missions.

Game play is a mix of stealth and puzzling where you have to rewire building electronics to get to your target all while trying to avoid being seen and shot in the face by the various guards that patrol the corridors.  Each level is a building presented in 2D and you are free to scope it out as much as you want so that you can plan a route through the level.  Flicking the mouse wheel will activate your PDA thing where you can see the buildings electronic devices and how they are all wired up.  From here you can change them round so that a security camera might open a door or a light switch might send a power surge through a socket to shock a patrolling guard.  It's a cool system of game play and when you combine it with the various upgrades you can get throughout the game there are a few ways which you could tackle a single level.

The only problem for me is that the game is little too easy and a bit short.  I basically blasted through the whole thing in an afternoon and I managed to get most of the side objectives and an A grade or higher on the majority of the stages.  I'm not going to pass myself off as some kind of super genius but I don't think the majority of people would have much problem with this game and it's sort of a shame in a way.  There's such a great amount of potential in this game for some real head scratchers and while it's a shame that there was nothing brain busting in the core content, there is a level editor so you can share and play user designed levels that might really test you.

I suggest that anyone reading this article go and play Gunpoint.  It's pretty cheap anyway but if you don't want to pay £7 for a game that is a little on the short side, just wait for a steam sale again and you'll be able to pick it up for basically nothing.  Fun game worth checking out and a great way to kill an afternoon when there isn't much going on.

Alice: Madness Returns

Alice: Madness Returns is a game that came out ages ago that I only really just got round to playing because steam made it available in the last sale for basically no money.

So, back in the year 2000 a game was released called American McGee's Alice.  Acting as a sort of sequel to the books according to wikipedia, the player had to control Alice and her adventures through Wonderland while she went nuts in the real world.  I never beat the first one but I had a buddy with a copy that I sunk a couple hours into.

Anyway in 2011 the sequel to that game was released and it's basically about the same thing.  Alice's family was killed in a house fire and thanks to this tragic event she's going a bit crazy.  As you go through her adventure through Wonderland she starts to piece together what really happened and slowly beings to realise that basically 100% of the people around her are pieces of shit.

Game play wise we have a standard action platforming game.  You jump through lots of different areas, stopping in certain places on each level to shove your knife inside somethings face and you rinse and repeat this process until the end of the game.  This does sometimes get a little bit boring but the game does try to mix up it's game play with something different on every stage.  For example, in the underwater level there is a 2D side scrolling shooter section where you control a boat shooting a wooden sharks.  In another stage you drink a potion and control a giant Alice as she stomps all over various enemies while being shot at by cannons.  These sections are a bit few and far between though, so sometimes the platforming can get a little bit boring.

The level design is both pretty good and pretty bad at the same time.  Everything looks really cool and each world is unique with lots of cool stuff to look at but from a gameplay standpoint it's all a bit samey.  Jump on the floating platforms and if something is too far look for a switch to summon a air vent that'll give you some extra distance.  There are collectibles peppered around each level but it's kind of hard to miss most of them unless you're just blinding running towards the goal of each stage.

The one thing I absolutely cannot forgive about this game is the inclusion of sliding puzzles.

Sliding puzzles are dogshit and I don't know a single person that enjoys doing them.  What makes this even worse is that all of them in Madness Returns are really fucking easy so it just feels like a massive waste of time because not only do you have to do the puzzle but you have to find the pieces for it beforehand too.

Still, even with it's shortcomings, Alice: Madness returns is a good bit of fun with some solid voice acting and visuals so if you can pick it up on the cheap it's worth a play through.  Although you won't be wanting to go back and 100% it any time soon I don't think.

Antichamber

What's funny about Antichamber is that a few days ago I showed my friend the infamous dog clip from the new Call of Duty, and in a moment of despair he said to me "Find me a modern game that won't make you stupid"  Then it's as if the heavens opened and gave me Antichamber in a Steam sale.

Antichamber is a puzzle game like no other made by one dude who spent a good amount of time and effort creating something that will completely fuck with your brain.  Now don't get me wrong, I have not spoiled anything for you by telling you that Antichamber is going to fuck with your brain because even if you know what kind of game it is going in, it's still going to mind fuck you sideways.

There is no story, no opening cut scene or anything like that, you are just plonked in a small room with an options menu, a map, a mostly blank wall and a window staring at an exit.  It is then up to you to explore, solve puzzles and just generally figure out what the hell you are supposed to do.

Puzzles in Antichamber are extremely clever and basically come in two flavours.  One is bog standard logic puzzles where you use a gun type thing to manipulate cubes to do certain things like open doors or call elevators.  Then there are these strange lateral thinking puzzles that require you to do all sorts of weird thinking outside the box shit that you never usually have to do with a video game.  A lot of the time the block puzzles will be combined with these lateral thinking puzzles to create something truly fiendish.

On top of solving puzzles you also have to deal with navigating your way round the maze of non euclidean space which may have you backtracking round certain areas without you even realising it.

Now I'm going to stop talking about this game here because it would be a damn shame if my gushing ruined the experience for someone.  I'm just going to finish by saying that Antichamber is a truly brilliant little game that you absolutely must experience for yourself.  It's pretty cheap on steam so you don't have to break the bank to play one of the best games of 2013 so far.

Also I've not beaten it yet.

Dreadout Demo (With Video)

First of all watch the video of me playing the Demo

Right, now to discuss some of my thoughts.

First of all, I was really impressed by the graphics, it looks real slick considering that we're dealing with an indie developed horror game.  The last indie developed horror game I played was Lone Survivor and that had fucking pixel art, so it's nice to see a small developer going the extra mile with the graphics.

Mechanically it works very well, the controls are nice and slick and easy to figure out without looking at the tutorial.  Basically if you have played a game on the PC ever, you will instantly be able to figure out how to control your character.

The puzzles in this game I both enjoy, but have sort of a problem with.  For example there is a bit near the start of the video where I get stuck for a short while because I wasn't able to figure out right away that I had to walk through the wall.  One thing I am glad about is that the game didn't tell me what to do, it let me work it out for myself.  That said I feel what it should have done is maybe made the hole in the wall pop out a bit, like having vines growing out from around the edges or something to indicate that it's something you can walk through.

The other problem I had, puzzle wise, was the candles.  There is an edit where I wasted a shit ton of time trying to figure out what to do, and this is because I think the objective was badly put forward.  What I was doing was trying to use my camera to light the other candles.  I was clicking around, pressing buttons on my keyboard to try and activate the flash and all sorts of shit.  I was even convinced at one point that there was something in the sky I had to snap in order to make the puzzle work.  At the end of the day it wasn't a puzzle, it was trying to make me go back and fight some enemies.

You see the problem is that a blue border pops up when you get near the candles, which means something important is there, so I was convinced for a long time that the key to those candles was in that area.  You could argue that the music was an indication of something being there that I had to go kill, but I thought the music was playing because of the big hangy dude.  If they had just played a sound of something crawling out of one of the nearby graves or ANYTHING.

Finally, is it scary?  Well to me, no, not really, but the potential is there.  The scene with the ghost facing the wall in the room was quite effective as you can probably tell from my reaction in the video, but I find there is no tension in the combat music when you fight the dudes in the graveyard.  The dudes are slow and crap, probably because they are there to teach you about combat, but the sound design for these encounters is a little weak.  Take Silent Hill for example, where the monsters sound truly horrible and the music that plays does a good job of making you panic. 

It's a good demo worth checking out and there is the potential for something really good here I think,  With it just being a demo and no release date in sight, I'm hoping that they will be able to put out a finish product that will rock our socks and fill our pants with large volumes of wee.