Highly recommended – Page 9

In love with: Treasure Adventure World

29/04/2018 28/06/2019

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.

In love with: CHUCHEL

12/03/2018 28/06/2019

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.

Happy about: Zero Escape Trilogy

23/02/2018 28/06/2019

I’ve been curious about what became Zero Escape Trilogy for a while now. Original 999 (Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors) was released back in 2009 on Nintendo DS to very positive reviews on how it tackled the mix of visual novel and “escape the room” puzzles, while also using it’s branching narrative, common for visual novels, as a plot point for many worlds interpretation influenced plot. It was also one of the first attempts, to my knowledge, to bring the Cube (the movie) ideas to video game format, mixing horror, thriller and mystery novel and becoming somewhat of the “What if Cube, Saw and Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None” were anime”. Virtue’s Last Reward followed 3 years later on PS Vita and 3DS, and then in 2016 Zero Time Dilemma was released as a final chapter of the plot on the same systems, but also on PC. However, it wasn’t until Zero Escape: The Nonary Games release last year, that updated and re-released the first two games in one package, that I finally had a chance to check on them.

O tempora: System Shock 2

21/01/2018 13/05/2023

O tempora is a series of retrospective posts where I play games from ages before to see if they stood the test of time.

This has been a long time coming. I’ve attempted to play System Shock 2 ever since 2001, when I first got my own modern (for the time) PC. And even back then, just few years after the game release, it already worked with issues. After that for the longest all games on this in-house game engine made by Looking Glass Studios, along with the Thief 1 and 2, were borderline unplayable on most PCs. Until one day a mysterious person (often believed to be one of the ex-Looking Glass employees), released an updated version of the source code of the engine, which made things work again. Ever since then, all 3 games on the Dark Engine have been receiving updates and fixes making games not just playable again, but often better than they were originally. And several years since I had a chance to replay all the Thief titles and a year and a half since I’ve first experienced the innovative undying beauty of the original System Shock, I finally had the chance to finish System Shock 2. And I can sum up my experience in a very short review: Wow…

For more in-depth analysis, read on. :)

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In love with: HITMAN – Game of the Year Edition

26/12/2017 09/12/2019

Hitman series are 17 years old by now. They started out with Codename 47, a PC-exclusive fresh new take on the freeform stealth ideas introduced in Thief: The Dark Project. Where instead of stealth, it focused on “social stealth” and blending in, and instead of stealing, on the art of killing. Despite all the flaws, like unnecessary action-focused missions, incredibly simplistic concept of blending in with no in-between states of suspicion, and less complex AI patterns than the ones you get today, it remains an amazing game, with some of the best missions in the entire series (like “Traditions of the Trade” or “The Massacre at Cheung Chau Fish Restaurant”). Of course, most of the good stuff has been later remade in Hitman: Contracts, which might as well be considered the proper start of the series (Hitman 2 also being rather rough), which finally realized that pure stealth and pure action sequences just don’t fit the series. And Blood Money remains one of the best examples of the stealth games to this day.

Then we had Hitman: Absolution, which was… well… It was a rather cool stealth action game, but a terrible Hitman game. A linear, story-driven game, where social stealth and blending in usually worked against you, since most of the time being dressed as someone you want to blend in with meant higher of getting noticed. But a lot of the ideas and concepts introduced in that game were great, ready to be taken, modified and perfected to work in a proper Hitman game. And that’s what the game, simply called HITMAN, is – best ideas from all the previous games in one package. And then some.

In love with: Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments

28/11/2017 28/06/2019

It took me much longer to finally get to Frogwares’ now not even latest Sherlock Holmes game than I anticipated. I actually bought it back in Warsaw 2 years ago, but had to ask Steam to remove it from my account, because it was a region locked Polish and Russian version or something along the lines. Still have the box, though, which contained the full walkthrough (which I didn’t use, however). And after finally finishing the game my first thought was – damn, I wish I had played the game earlier.

In love with: Tales from the Borderlands

05/11/2017 28/06/2019

There’s been a lot of games by Telltale games. Way too many, I’d say. And that’s one of the main reasons I’ve stopped caring about the games they make. They started with pretty average and often boring to play (but fun to watch) adventure games with 3D controls and a lot of classic point and click adventure elements in. That didn’t work out well. Then they tried switching to “interactive stories”, and it didn’t work out at all (with the Jurassic Park game), yet the second try was much better and their Walking Dead series, based on the comic book series of the same name, won several awards and were lauded as a story-driven evolution of adventure titles. So they did what a lot of studios do after they find a success formula that works and made, mechanically speaking, the exact same game over and over again for the past 6 years. Sometimes, based on franchises that don’t even make any sense (Story-driven Minecraft? Really?). But I heard good things about Tales from the Borderlands, and last time I heard good things about the Telltale game, it was about The Wolf Among Us, and that game was really good. So, how about the Borderlands game without the bazillion guns?

In love with: Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice

20/08/2017 28/06/2019

Ninja Theory have established a reputation for making games that are solid, if average mechanically, but really memorable in terms of storytelling. With one glaring exception being DmC: Devil May Cry, where the game had solid and fun (if weaker than previous DMC games) gameplay, but unbelievably terrible story and script. With Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, their first fully independent production, things looked a bit different from the announcement. And I’m glad to say, that what we got is a really unforgettable experience.

In love with: Wasteland 2: Director’s Cut

02/07/2017 28/06/2019

It’s been a while since I could write anything in the blog. Whenever you have a job that takes most of your day, playing long titles takes much longer than whenever you have a lot of free time. And apart from open world titles, most of which I tend to ignore nowadays anyway, RPGs tend to take most of your gaming time. Luckily, Wasteland 2 was that particular type of an RPG that was a joy to return to, no matter how long it took.

O tempora: Bayonetta (PC)

14/05/2017 28/06/2019

My O tempora posts tend to be about older titles, than 2009, the year Bayonetta was released originally in Japan. But Bayonetta became a milestone release, a new classic that ushered a new era of “stylish action” games and gave the Capcom alumni at PlatinumGames a much needed boost, despite the lower than expected sales. In addition, the core gameplay has been evolved and perfected so much since then it’s interesting to look back at where it started. But now on PC, with a surprisingly solid port.

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