The art of point and click adventuring can be tackled in many different ways. Some focus on story, some on puzzles, some on comedy, some just try to create an unexpectedly deep adventuring via a simple mouse-based controls interface. The Silent Age, Mr. Pumpkin Adventure and Four Last Things, however, are of the simple sort. The story, the puzzles and the comedy.
Read more“Thoughts on: The Silent Age, Mr. Pumpkin Adventure and Four Last Things”
Three first person view games with heavy focus on exploration and open-ended maps. Three completely different approaches to that concept. Survival, drama and comedy. Done to varying degrees of success.
It is time again to write about a bunch of games I played, some of which I finished, but which didn’t really require a full on exclusive review for them (or even the dual/triple review post, for that matter). The games I will cover here are these: Pony Island, Refunct, Deus Ex: The Fall, Layers of Fear, Dream Machine, Hidden Folks, Clustertruck, Superhot, 2000:1 A Space Felony, Goat Simulator, Environmental Station Alpha, Ori and the Blind Forest and Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse. Yep, that’s a lot of stuff that piled up over the course of about half a year. Let’s get to it.
Read more“Thoughts on: Several games I’ve had no time to write about before”
For the past 10 years or so understanding of what can be achieved with videogames in terms of storytelling has changed quite a lot. From feeling too dependent on the gameplay mechanics to “be successful” which was then crushed by several titles like original Dear Esther mod or strange experiences from Tale of Tales we came to the almost opposite reality of games trying to brush off gameplay as unnecessary and trying to be as non-game as possible to tell their stories. But this whole movement seems to have finally matured in recent years and we’re getting more an more titles that try to mix gameplay and storytelling in ways that naturally complement each other, rather than compete with each other. And two new interesting examples of that are Stories Untold and What Remains of Edith Finch.
Read more“Happy about: Stories Untold and What Remains of Edith Finch”
When you think Double Fine, you usually think adventure games, either point and click or action adventures. They do have attempts at strategy games and even simple jRPGs, but it still feels a bit weird to see something like Headlander pop up. Because Headlander is a metroidvania… At least, Pixel is consistent in his love of cutely drawn action platformers, even if, unlike Cave Story, Kero Blaster is linear. So, let’s take a quick look at these two games.
I gotta be honest with you. I didn’t expect to write about this DLC separately when it was announced. I’m preparing another “thoughts on several games” post and wanted to put it there, but… Goddamn, Yoko Taro. Goddamn.
It might seem strange for me to pair these two quite different adventure/exploration/puzzle games into one post, but there’s a good reason for that, I feel. That is, apart from me playing them one after the other and not feeling like making separate posts. They’re both beautiful but flawed games. Flawed at the execution of the key ideas they aim to shine at.
Wadjet Eye Games has become somewhat of go to publisher/developer for story-driven point and click adventure games resurgence. With both their own developed games, and games they produce and publish they’ve shown how the seemingly outdated low res pixelated point and click adventuring can tell stories better than some of the high budget newest technology based titles. The quality of the games they publish is also mostly consistent and to this day I only missed a few projects due to rather mediocre reviews of those. Technobabylon was a game I heard good things about, while Shardlight reviews seemed a bit lower, yet still praised the game, so I was quite interested in checking both projects for a while now. Let’s see what Wadjet Eye Games helped build this time.
By now, there’s not much to add on Dear Esther, really. Cleverly named “Landmark edition” already casually mentions how important the original mod and 2012 commercial release were in showing that games can be all about story and still find an audience. The main goal of this particular re-release, really, was to just make sure bigger audience can experience the game, since the original Source remake couldn’t work on consoles and additionally locked the developers into specific legal restrictions. So let’s quickly check what’s been changed.
I love Dragon Age 2. I love it much more than Origins. It still seems to be a controversial opinion to have, even past the point where the series were relevant or where some expected them to be “new Baldur’s Gate” (something Origins never was). Before playing Dragon Age: Inquisition I wanted to revisit the second one, to check on 3 story-driven DLCs I’ve missed originally: a character and two small stories. And since I’ve replayed DA:O so much back in 2011 that I can’t bring myself to playing it again even now, when it’s finally DRM-free on GOG, I decided to skip it. So, back to Kirkwall of copy paste dungeons we go.
