Just like the Zero Escape series, Danganronpa has been a series I’ve been curious about for a very long time now. It has gained a huge following outside of Japan years before getting an official localisation for its quirky dark humour, fantastic soundtracks and curious approach to mixing adventure game visual novel elements in rather novel ways. But are they really that great?
Read more“Thoughts on: Danganronpa 1, 2 and Ultra Despair Girls”
There aren’t that many good examples of a free game turned into a paid product I can think of from the top of the head. Can think of plenty mods turned to paid games, sure. But free games? World of Goo was made from a free Experimental Gameplay Project title that simply had the same basic mechanics and looks. Super Win the Game is more of a successor to the free You Have to Win the Game. Only La-Mulana, Spelunky and maybe Eversion feel like actual “remakes”, which follow a more or less same structure as their original free counterpart but with updates. I suppose, Cave Story can somehow fit this list too. But point is – not that many I can think of, and, interestingly, almost all of them are somewhat metroidvania-ish.
Treasure Adventure Game is a free exploration-focused platformer with Zelda and Metroid influences that was released about 6 and a half years ago. I stumbled upon it due to it being featured on GOG and had a blast playing it 6 years ago. Then about a year later a remake was announced. Treasure Adventure World is a higher resolution, higher fidelity remake, with minor updates and several pacing changes, but overall unchanged design. For better and worse.
For a while now I wanted to give the BioShock: The Collection a go on PC. In case you don’t know what this is, it’s a remastered re-release of all BioShock games with visual updates, with the exception of Infinite, which remains unchanged on PC, while modern consoles got a port from PC. Now, I’ve talked about all the games and DLCs, with the exception of Minerva’s Den, before, so I won’t delve deep into analyzing each game or DLC, but instead I wanted to just share some thoughts on The Collection as a whole and do a quick look back at each game.
I really did. It might come as a surprise to you if you know how I dislike the pointlessly drawn out titles, how bored I was of Dead Island and how I find about 60% of stuff in Far Cry titles extremely tedious and boring. But Dying Light seemed different. So I tried it back when it was just released and decided that it was a mistake to do. Yet, AGDQ 2018 happened and it had a very entertaining to watch run of TheFuncannon and Amyrlinn that made me want to give the game another chance. It made it look exactly like what I was hoping the game to be when it was first shown – Mirror’s Edge with a more open-ended level structure and zombies. I suppose, I should’ve taken into account that to achieve that, the runners had to break the whole game balance first…
What I love most is when a genre is revived by people who really truly understand it. The developers of Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun clearly understood why the classic tactics stealth games like Commandos worked. It has always been a very niche small genre, seemingly influenced by both real time tactics classics like Myth series and by the stealth titles like Metal Gear, and it hasn’t seen any truly worthy successors for years. Even later Commandos games and the similar Desperados games usually never got the same love and praise the original titles did and some (citation needed) might even claim those games to “not get it” as well. But Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun? Now this game gets it. And I suck at it pretty badly, as expected.
Read more“Few words on: Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun”
Path of Exile, a free 2 play action RPG game, has been released back in 2013. Well, the first part of it was. You see, it’s an always-online game, fully free to play with all microtransactions being essentially solely cosmetic, that had several rather big changes since that 2013 release. For example, back then it had 3 story Acts. Now it has 10 (and that’s supposed to be the end of the main story). It also has “leagues” – special events, that require a newly created character that last a finite amount of time and do not repeat. Yet, at it’s core, it’s still a “Diablo-like game” that can be enjoyed very much singleplayer. As long as you are connected to the internet, that is.
I also haven’t finished it, but played 15 hours of it and wanted to share my thoughts on it.
Read more“Couple of thoughts on: Path of Exile (as a solo game)”
I’m glad to see cinematic platformer genre to be slowly picked back up. Unfortunately, however, for every INSIDE we get a dozen Black the Fall or worse. Little Nightmares is in a unique position, due to its DLCs, to be both a great example of the genre, and one of the bad examples.
Read more“Happy about: Little Nightmares (Complete Edition)”
It’s been a while since I’ve genuinely enjoyed my time with an Assassin’s Creed game. I play them more out of weird interest in the series, than out of love or even liking anything they have to offer lately. They have good ideas, but usually fall flat at being actually interesting. I think last time I was genuinely invested in the AC game was with 3 – there was a truly great storyline, which devolved into crap, but had really strong themes. Black Flag and Rogue had some fun gameplay and Rogue wasn’t a complete flop as a story. Unity had potential to be the next AC1 – properly well done story driven stealth action adventure, but turned out to be a mess. Syndicate tries to be something like Brotherhood to Unity’s ideas. Tries is the key word here, though.
Read more“Disapprove: Assassin’s Creed Syndicate (Gold Edition)”
Amanita Design have tried their hand at different extremes of adventure game design – they’ve made games focusing on Puzzles (Machinarium being the most puzzle-centric), and they’ve made games that are more like fun toys, digital art installations (original Samorost being one). But what was constant throughout all their titles, no matter the focus, is the humour, the style, the charm, the character – all just oozing from both the visual and audio design of their games. You didn’t honestly expect CHUCHEL to become a disappointing exception in that, did you?
No, this is Amanita Design doing what they do best, this time again going closer to that digital toy-ish design of the very first game they’ve developed.
Hey, it’s time to check those Assassin’s Creed games I’ve missed again. I don’t know why I even care about the series anymore, with Ubisoft’s lack of understanding of international digital distribution (I still have to invent ways to play the game in English, since all they sell here is in Russian with no choice), lack of understanding what the series are even about and constant boring design decisions. But I still do. So, I decided to check the 3 2.5D stealth action platformer titles called Assassin’s Creed Chronicles – China, India and Russia. All of them were designed by Climax Studios (who have very few good games on their very long profile) and made in Unreal Engine, which already makes them different from the “normal” Assassin’s Creed game. They are also linear and not open world. And they were all released and probably designed years after the fantastic Mark of the Ninja got released. So, I was hoping, that these games will be an interesting take on the rather stale franchise. Oh boy was I wrong…
