Last day of my Rezzed 2017 coverage, before we return to our normal programming of rants, annoyances and reviews…plus the occasional short story when something bad happens. To recap, this week I spoke of my experience at Rezzed this year, and on Wednesday I told you about the games I saw on the sessions I booked with the Square Enix Collective, Bandai Namco and R8 Games.
Remember I mentioned that I booked few interviews and slots so I could go exploring? Well that’s what today’s about, the fun things I saw on my own at Rezzed 2017.
The Room: Old Sins
I found out that Fireproof Games was attending Rezzed only a few days before the event started and when I saw a new The Room entry in the list of games, I almost jumped with joy. It’s no secret I adore the series, having reviewed The Rooms 1 & 2 in a single go and then diving into The Room 3 when it released.
The Room: Old Sins, as Fireproof explained, follows a new story and characters, with similar elements as they’re part of The Room universe but without any cross overs. It’s essentially a fresh start for the series, with a clever new idea that builds on the mechanics and concepts we saw in past entries.
This idea is that everything is in a dollhouse. When you start The Room: Old sins you find yourself in a room with the little house facing you. After a couple of relatively simple puzzles you open the doors and notice something strange about the room. The threshold to it looks like a curtain of clear water, shimmering in the air. By using your eye-piece, you pierce this veil and transport the character into the room, like it happened in some buildings of The Room 3.
Each room in the dollhouse has a theme and certain puzzles lead you to open new paths and complete other challenges, with the difficulty slowly ramping up. What I loved about it is that even when things got complicated and I moved around different locations trying to figure out what I needed to do, I never left the confines or the vicinity of the dollhouse.
The dollhouse is the central theme and location of The Room: Old Sins and it’s amazing how fresh it feels. Every discovery makes the dollhouse feel new all over again.
I’m impressed and I want to play it as soon as it releases.
Steamworld Dig 2
I mentioned on Monday how I had a lovely chat with someone from Image & Form games, about such things as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and the Nintendo Switch.
Their booth had Steamworld Dig 2 on Nintendo’s new console and when the opportunity presented itself, I took a little chance at playing it and I loved it.
Steamworld Dig 2 is the kind of game that gives you a tutorial but doesn’t interrupt your gameplay. It doesn’t assume you need handholding and lets you experiment with every ability from the start. It’s the purest form of Metroidvania style, where you discover your limitation and obtain new abilities by merely exploring and using your skills to traverse the environments and defeat enemies.
The demo they had was the tutorial level for the game, a fully polished and ready level we’ll all get to enjoy once the title fully releases and it concluded in a very cool boss with multiple phases and shifting attack patterns, which I like very much…though when I gave them my feedback on perhaps making the patterns shift a bit more they told me it’s the tutorial level, they want to keep it on a basic level.
Fair enough, but do it on Hard Mode! Can’t wait for this game to release.
Four Last Things
This one caught me by surprise and if it hadn’t been for an acquaintance mentioning it, I would never have found it.
Have you ever seen Monty Python’s Flying Circus, or more specifically, have you ever seen one of Terry Gilliam’s animations? They are weird sequences combining classical art with surreal landscapes and situations, and they’re funny, intriguing, disturbing and all the above.
Four Last Things’ developer, Joe Richardson, found four paintings he liked and decided to make a game out of them where your character would have to travel between them on a quest. It’s a point and click adventure game with a Terry Gilliam-like visual design and a setting just as surreal.
The plot is even zanier. Starting off in the Garden of Eden, the character attempts to confess his sins but is told that they can’t do that for him since his church belongs to another jurisdiction. To earn back his place in the Garden of Eden he must travel the paintings and commit all seven deadly sins again, so that he can confess in the right jurisdiction and earn his place in the garden.
Right…
The game is out now on Steam and I will be reviewing it soon.
Yooka Laylee
This is the game I queued up for. It was the end of the afternoon and the queue was short enough that I gave it a go. Besides, it was my last chance to drop one of my cards with Team17 for perhaps a review—which worked as I’m currently going through the title for that very purpose.
At Rezzed, when I sat down to play this game I felt an overwhelming sense of Nostalgia. I felt as if I were playing Banjo Kazooie again with my younger cousin, both of us going through the game, trying to pick up every puzzle piece we could find. As I played the game for a short while and saw more of the content and the writing, I remembered the playthrough of Conker’s Bad Fur Day.
In essence, I felt as if I were back in the 90s playing those Nintendo 64 classics, running around large environments and solving ludicrous puzzles to collects new items, fighting the controls at times and very often dealing with an annoying camera.
The one thing that I didn’t like was the demo dropped you in the second level, and so without any context, it was difficult to know what skills Yooka and Laylee had, which in this kind of game is tremendously important, as it might be the key to solving a puzzle and collecting a Golden Page, this game’s version of the Banjo Kazooie puzzle piece.
Yooka Laylee releases next week and you will be able to read my review on it very soon!
I know, you’re wondering why so few games. Well, as I mentioned, many of the games I saw were repeats from previous events and many titles on show at publisher rooms had already been released, so they didn’t grab my interest.
And that’s it for Rezzed 2017. I hope you’ve enjoyed the coverage. Make sure you follow the developers and games you like and let’s see what EGX 2017 will bring!