Tag: Adventure

Review – Luna: The Shadow Dust

The world’s gone dark, but you can’t remember why. Now a tower stands before you, imposing yet inviting from the light behind its front door. Perhaps it would be good to come inside, find shelter…and more importantly, answers. This is Luna: The Shadow Dust.

The Good

  • Visual Spectacle: Luna the Shadow Dust is a wonder of not just visual arts, with astonishing hand-drawn environments and characters but also of visual storytelling. There is no dialogue, not single word spoken or written and yet it manages to convey its narrative and the sheer depth of the characters’ emotional journey. And it’s not just cutscenes, even the gameplay sections contribute to the storytelling. If there was ever a game that exemplified “Show, don’t tell,” it’s definitely Luna: The Shadow Dust.
  • It’s all Logic: Every room in the tower in Luna: The Shadow Dust holds a puzzle and every single one of them is entertaining as hell, and while only a handful are delightfully complex (it’s fairly well-known at this point that I love complex multi-part puzzles), none of them is trivial or feel tacked on. Best of all, they’re all logic or observation based, meaning the hints are all around you, you just have to pay attention.
  • Never had a friend like me: You begin the game controlling a single character but soon enough you find a curious little beast who becomes your inseparable companion in solving puzzles, exploring the tower and in the story itself and I have to praise Luna: The Shadow dust for getting me to care about the little thing and the relationship with the main character well before there was ever a cutscene that showed any tenderness between them. Switching between them freely, to solve puzzles by collaborating, is a genius way to get you to care about both characters.
  • Deep Hidden World: Luna deserves more than one playthrough, which is unusually for me to even consider with adventure games or any that are puzzle-heavy. After all, if you already know the solutions what’s the point of playing it again. Well, in Luna: The Shadow Dust’s case, there is a great deep lore about the world and the game’s events that I frankly just got the gist of when playing through it. I’m jumping back in to carefully pay attention to the all the visual cues and clues about the world and the narrative that starts well before the beginning of the adventure.

The Bad

  • Shortround: Luna: The Shadows Dust is not a very long game, I personally finished it in one sitting, with only the last handful of puzzles making me struggle a bit (I see you, clocktower puzzle!). I would have liked to see much more complexity near the end, some real brain-zingers, and perhaps a few more puzzles. But there is a point, about midway through the game where I couldn’t help but feel things were rushing towards the end a bit, as if the pace changed. It doesn’t ruin the story, and perhaps contributes to the tension, but I would have liked a bit more to play with.

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Review – Deliver us the Moon

It’s the future, the world is dying and the last lifeline for humanity, the MPR system on the Moon that provides clean energy to the Earth is offline. Before time runs out, you launch into the heavens with a simple mission – Deliver us the Moon.

The Good

In Space no one can hear you Panic: One of the best things Deliver us the Moon does is create a sense of panic and urgency. The lack of environmental sound—or muted ones as the case may be in the vacuum of space, the countdown to your oxygen running out, the sharp but shallow breathing by the character, it all helps create this incredibly tense atmosphere that elevates what could simply be a walk across the lunar surface into a harrowing chase for the nearest airlock.

The Final Frontier: I’ve wondered many times what it would be like to stand on the moon, to walk in low gravity, to see and be among the stars and Deliver us the Moon brought me the closest I’ve ever been to what that experience could be like and despite the pressure to complete objectives or the need to find shelter, many a time I ran or drove across the surface with pure and perhaps even child-like glee. Deliver us the Moon brought me to the moon and it was awesome.

The First truth is, the world is dark: The world in Deliver us the Moon is a frightening future where not 50 years from now the earth will have deteriorated to the point where we either drown from rising sea levels and tsunamis or become buried in constant sandstorms that transform the world into a post-apocalyptic setting. Worse still is that without the moon, the world has reached a point where it can’t sustain itself, can’t produce the energy it needs to power our cities and technology. And despite being fiction, it’s impossible to play this game and not ask yourself “What if?” The desperate state of the world adds to the intensity of the story and the characterisation, a bit of world-building that goes a long way.

Patience, We’re only human: Deliver us the Moon is a game about saving humanity, yet as you’d expect it’s also a story about people, about those on Earth and those on the Moon, whose lives revolve around feeding a dying world and the decisions taken to perhaps secure a better future for themselves. It’s a story of passion and desire vs duty and obligation, about families, the desire to protect what one loves, to ensure hopes and dreams remain alive, but also the question: what’s more important, your desires or those of billions? I found myself engrossed in the different stories running through it.

The Gravity of the Situation: It wouldn’t be a game set in outer space without Zero-G mechanics and movement and I loved how disconcerting it is at first and how slowly you get used to it, to the point where changing your axis of movement feels as natural as sprinting across the moon’s surface. The initial section, before reaching the moon when you’re moving along space debris is a wonderful example of everything this game does right, not only in the Zero-G movement but also on every other point I’ve mentioned, audio, atmosphere, stories, etc.

The Bad

One small step for man, a short leap for players: Deliver us the Moon has enough variety in gameplay to save it from being a walking simulator (in which case it would still be a walking simulator IN SPAAAACE, which is awesome) but it makes the mistake many games make where their puzzles and challenges are too simplistic for too long, so by the time the complex challenges emerge and you’re dying to sink your teeth into the meaty part of the gameplay and story, the experience comes to an end, not with a bang but a whimper. The story ends beautifully, but I would’ve liked more in terms of the gameplay, more length, more complexity, some real challenges. Too many things have very simple solutions, very few of them force you to think and analyse the situations. The overuse of the “push heavy object to incline to break through wall,” was a severe disappointment.

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Review – The Sinking City

It’s time once more, the stars align, strange eons come to pass and death may even die. It began with the flood, and will end with The Sinking City.

Good

  • By Lovecraft, For Lovecraft: The Sinking City is not just an open world investigative action/adventure/horror title, it’s also a love letter to the Lovecraftian mythos. There are elements of Lovecraftian fiction in every aspect of the city, its cases, its characters and of course, the plot itself. Streets named after important locales, avenues sharing names with important mythos characters and even advertisements for a certain medical doctor all Lovecraft fans will recognise.
  • Weird Tales: The cases and the main plot in The Sinking City are wonderfully weird, twisting and twisted. There are characters that seem closer to primates than humans, other closer to fishes (that gorgeous Innsmouth Look), sacrifices, rituals, good ideas that backfire, bad ideas that go horrendously wrong and weirdness galore. Best of all is the main character becomes rather savvy in the madness taking place around him, even if and especially because he’s also descending into insanity. By the end, when faced with the weirdness he will casually state “you’re rather normal, at least by this crazy city’s standards,” when meeting an NPC. I love this. Also, in case it needs saying, the story is gripping and fun.
  • It’s a Mad World: The Sinking City is a bad place, it’s despair-ridden, maddening and incredibly cold towards outsiders. People in the city are at their wits end, and even the help you provide in solving their cases doesn’t make their lives any easier. In fact, on learning the things you discover, their lives are more likely to take dark turns. I love this, it’s pure Lovecraftian goodness, as are the grotesque apparitions, both the spectral and the physical monstrosities you encounter.
  • Fear is the Mind Killer: As with every Mythos game, there is a sanity meter and fun things happen as it lowers. The most common are audio-visual hallucinations, visions of creatures and your own grim future—seeing yourself hang from a noose—but as it gets worse, you’ll eventually have to contend with the figments of your deranged imagination in physical ways. This was a genius decision in my opinion, having your insanity sometimes spawn new enemies that aren’t really there but can still hurt you. Best thing is that if you take the sanity medkit aka anti-psychotics, they vanish instantly.
  • Fortune favours the Bold: There are infested areas in the Sinking City, where the Wylebeasts, the monstrous creatures that came into the city with the flood, have taken over and created nests for themselves. These areas are full of loot and crafting materials but are deadly to explore. But if you’re clever, lucky, brave or all of the above, you can make a killing without getting, well, killed.
  • Sherlock meet Lovecraft: Frogware is, of course, the wonderful people behind the Sherlock Holmes series, one of my absolute favourite video game series in the world and The Sinking City inherits many elements from that series, from deduction boards to scene reconstructions. This is a game where exploring every corner in a crime scene is recommended as it may just yield the right clue. Best of all, you can set the difficulty of the detective side to expert, where there are no hints on how to proceed, truly challenging your detective instincts.
  • Find your own way: Clues, important locales, crime scenes, houses and nests are all over the city, but it’s up to you to find them. You have the map of the city and often vague addresses, meaning you gotta open the map, find the right streets and place a marker for where you think the objective might be. But after that, it’s all exploration, on foot, on boat, whichever way you can.

Bad

  • Underwater Slog: I think the intent was for the underwater segments to be tense, dangerous and uncomfortable but they’re really just boring. There’s very little to do but walk or fall or climb your way to the glowing exit and occasionally shoot some horrific fish thing in the face to stun it and leave it behind. There’s very little tension.
  • Survival Horror Syndrome: Your first encounter with the Wylebeasts will be horrible, especially when you first encounter the really big onces with multiple limbs and teleportation abilities. But as with every other survival horror game, once you’re a walking armoury, there’s very little to fear. Hell, the moment I unlocked grenades, I didn’t fear a single thing. Also, Lovecraft is more about fear of the unknown, and with so few enemy types, the unknown doesn’t last too long.
  • Elementary Watson: I find cases are too simple in The Sinking City, at least compared to previous Frogwares games. Cases are more or less a series of trips to visit locales, pick things up, maybe uncover something with your third eye and then piece together the clues in the deduction board—which more often than not is click on everything with everything. There aren’t any juicy puzzles to create new clues, like the stuff in Crimes and Punishments and The Devil’s Daughter. It’s a shame.
  • It’s not Inns-Mouth, it’s Inns-Muth: Ok this is just nit-picking and a personal gripe but the correct way of pronouncing Innsmouth is INNSMUTH, like Plymouth, Dartmouth, Portsmouth. Inn’s-Mouth is just wrong and caused me to lose more sanity than the horrors in the game.

Review – Nelly Cootalot: Spoonbeaks Ahoy!

Someone’s kidnapped a bunch of spoonbeaks and now it’s up to Nelly Cootalot to rescue them. Why? Because a ghost pirate said so!

Good

  • One Man, many voices: Alystair Becket-Smith, creator of Nelly Cootalot voices all male characters in the game and he does a pretty damn good job, as every character feels unique in their own way. It’s impressive really.
  • Fun & Silly: The world of Nelly Cootalot is funny, silly and full of wonderful charm. Considering this is a remaster of a very old game, it’s surprising how well the comedy holds up. It’s still as funny and charming now as it was when first created.
  • Canny Pirate: Going into Nelly Cootalot: Spoonbeaks Ahoy! I expected puzzles to be simple and just about finding the next segment of the inventory puzzle chain, but instead I found many instances of clever curve-balls thrown my way and I loved that.

Bad

  • End of Prologue: Spoonbeaks Ahoy is a fun game but a very short one, with very few locations to visit and puzzles to solve, making it feel more like a prologue to its sequel than a standalone game in the series.

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Review: Guard Duty

A drunken guard lets in a dark stranger into town and in doing so he inadvertently steps into an epic time-spanning and twisting adventure that will definitely hammer in the importance of his Guard Duty. Continue reading Review: Guard Duty

Review – Iris.Fall

A girl wakes up just in time to see a black cat leave her room, only to stop at the threshold and beckon her to follow. Doing so, the little girl dives into a world of adventure, bizarre rooms and curious contraptions playing tricks with light and shadow. This is Iris.Fall. Continue reading Review – Iris.Fall

Review: Return of the Obra Dinn

The Obra Dinn was lost at sea, the souls aboard it missing along with the vessel. Now it’s been found but empty, save for the skeletal remains of its crew and evidence of great violence. It’s up to you, as insurance agent for the most honourable East India Trading Company to find out what happened on the journey before the Return of the Obra Dinn. Continue reading Review: Return of the Obra Dinn

Zen Gaming – Marvel’s Spider-Man

Recently I finished Marvel’s Spider-Man and it’s the first game in months I found deeply relaxing to play. Much like the last title to do so, I slipped into something of a Zen state with this game, my troubles evaporating as I did. Continue reading Zen Gaming – Marvel’s Spider-Man

Review: The Gardens Between

The Garden Between is an adventure game where you play as two friends traversing through strange landscapes created from the fragments of their joint past. The important events in their relationship become worlds to explore, worlds where the characters control the flow of time and can cause things to happen in different ways to open new paths. Continue reading Review: The Gardens Between

Review: Another Sight

Another Sight is a game I played during Rezzed 2018 where you control Catherine, a young woman falling to the London underground, losing her sight in the process but also awakening a form of synaesthesia, allowing her to see colours and details in the environment based on sound. Trapped in this new environment, she crosses paths with a mysterious feline who becomes her new companion on the journey back to the surface and her family, becoming accidentally embroiled in a secret war in the underground. Continue reading Review: Another Sight