Ever since Ico became popular I’ve seen a lot of games attempt doing something similar – a puzzle and platforming 3D game with no spoken narration, simple but beautiful artstyle, moving music and some central concept/idea to it all. And as more and more indie developers became enabled to use powerful engines that allow creating something mechanically simple, but beautiful and, hopefully, evocative, the amount of games of this type went up dramatically. RiME is just another example of this type of game. Made with lots of care, genuinely good looking, with a good story concept behind it and yet all too familiar, not particularly fun and ultimately forgettable.
Tag: game review
O tempora: Scratches: Director’s Cut
O tempora is a series of retrospective posts where I play games from ages before to see if they stood the test of time.
Scratches was originally released in 2006 (with updated Director’s Cut being available since 2007) at just the right time. By that point both adventure games and horror titles not focusing on action became somewhat rare, and a change was yet to come. It was far from being the first attempt at a screen-by-screen transition first person view game (like Myst) that focused on horror, but unlike a lot of its competition it was really well made and told a simple, yet genuinely engaging story. Returning to this game 12 years later certainly feels interesting.
Happy about: Assassin’s Creed Origins (Gold Edition)
Back in March, when talking about AC: Syndicate, I opened with “It’s been a while since I’ve genuinely enjoyed my time with an Assassin’s Creed game.” And I’m surprised to say, Origins finally changes that.
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Happy about: Sanguine Sanctum and The Room Three
Time to pair up two more games that aren’t really similar at all! Though, I suppose, they actually are this time, since both of them have Lovecraftian themes. And they’re both good.
Disapprove: Remothered: Tormented Fathers
It’s not surprising that people want more games like Clock Tower. While exceptionally clunky, it was a pretty unique blend of adventure, stealth and some survival horror elements that, unlike most horror attempts at the time, was closer to the slasher or Italian giallo thrillers in mood and themes, rather then zombie, monster or gothic themes. Yet, the last big budget title in that vein was Haunting Ground released back in 2005. So a lot of people backed the Kickstarter for NightCry and quite a lot of people were excited about Remothered: Tormented Fathers, which is supposedly the first game in a trilogy of games. And, well, this game is very definitely better than NightCry turned out to be. Then again, it’s not hard to achieve that.
Happy about: Divinity: Original Sin 2 – Definitive Edition
Larian Studios have been doing Divinity series for 16 years now and if anything, I cannot call any of their games “boring”. Divine Divinity was an attempt to mix the depth of Ultima series with simplistic aRPG gameplay of Diablo, Beyond decided to add dual character control into that mix, Divinity II allowed you to read NPCs minds and turn into a dragon at almost any point in the open map and Dragon Commander was a bizarre mix of genres where you played as a dragon with a jetpack. When going with crowdfunding for Original Sin, they decided to switch from action RPGs to turn based RPGs and focus on cooperative gameplay, half-jokingly saying that the game was designed to be played specifically by people in a romantic relationship.
But despite all of these creative and fun ideas, every single game they’ve made felt clunky, not particularly good at anything it tried to be and somewhat half-baked. I did enjoy my time with Divine and Divinity 2 back in the day, but none of the other games, including Original Sin, could get me interested for longer than a few hours, either because they were boring, or plot was terrible, or something else, or all of the above. So, I’m glad, that it wasn’t the case for Original Sin 2, when I’ve recently completed it in the updated Definitive Edition package.
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Thoughts on: Old Man’s Journey and Subsurface Circular
Another good bundle, another chance that some of the games in it are complete unknowns to you, but seem to have good reviews. In this case, Subsurface Circular most certainly turned out to be a fantastic title and from a developer, previous projects of whom I loved. Weird how I’ve missed their newer projects. As for the Old Man’s Journey… Well, not every unknown is going to turn out a pleasant surprise.
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In love with: Return of the Obra Dinn
Return of the Obra Dinn is a mystery adventure game from Lucas Pope, best known for Papers, Please. And it’s quite a unique experience.
In love with: The MISSING: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories
This could’ve been just another solid attempt at a gruesome puzzle platformer in the vein of LIMBO, but with a more defined and very intriguing story. But that’s not how Swery makes games, now is it? No, even when his games are full of references and clear borrowing of ideas and concepts from other games, they have so much personality to them, they feel unique. And even when his games have bizarre and somewhat comedic stories, they seem to have some sort of concept or message to tell, and it’s done in a really unforgettable way. As it happened with The Missing, the first released project from Swery’s (Hidetaka Suehiro) new studio.
Read more“In love with: The MISSING: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories”
In love with: La-Mulana 2
It seems forever ago now that I’ve first played and fell in love with the original (technically, the remake) La-Mulana, even though it’s only been 5 years. The original “Archaeological Ruin Exploration Action Game” was a very unique, even for today, approach to exploration-focused platformer titles, borrowing heavily from unknown in the west The Maze of Galious. Despite having a lot of similarities to the “metroidvania” games, it focused much more heavily on puzzles that could go from covering just the room you are in to the entire game world and required you to pay close attention to the details you see. It had a lot of unique and fun elements to it, but it was also often infuriatingly obtuse with puzzle design, sometimes requiring you to not just think outside the box, but realize that you might be in the box, visualize it on paper, then translate it into some invented language and then find a way how to think outside of it.
When the Kickstarter project for La-Mulana 2 appeared in 2014 one of the biggest promises was to keep all the excitement of the exploration, puzzles, challenge and sense of adventure intact, but also improve on those frustrating elements, that were originally intentionally done in such an annoying manner to emulate the design of games from the MSX. After throwing my money at the screen and waiting for 4 years, I’ve decided to wait a few more months until the first few patches were released to iron out most of the issues. And finally, I was able to get into La-Mulana 2. 42 hours later…