Months ago, when the trailer for Mankind Divided first leaked, I was so excited I had to go back and play Deus Ex: Human Revolution all over again. But to make things more interesting, I decided to leave it up to you, my dear readers, on how I should play the game. I set two polls up, one for the style of play and the other for Adam Jensen’s attitude. He’ll always be a sour, inexpressive bastard but he could be a bastard with a heart of gold or a complete arsehole. Continue reading Let’s Play – Deus Ex: Human Revolution – Director’s Cut
Tag: First Person
TMA Let’s Play – Deus Ex Human Revolution
A few weeks ago someone leaked the announcement trailer for the Deus Ex: Human Revolution sequel, Makind Divided. As is often the case when I hear about a sequel to a game I love, I immediately thought, “I need to play HR again!” I did the same with the Overlord game when I saw a teaser image from Codemasters–which has now turned into a teaser trailer for Fellowship of Evil. Continue reading TMA Let’s Play – Deus Ex Human Revolution
The Weekly Puzzle – Green Truth
Puzzles are at the core of Adventure gameplay, they provide challenges for you to overcome with brains rather than brawn. For Action Adventures, they offer a break from the hacky-slashy-stabby-shooty element of title.
Every week I’ll bring you a new puzzle, drawn from some of the best and worst adventure or puzzle games I’ve ever played. Every two weeks I’ll even leave you one of my own for you to solve. If you do, I’ll find a way to reward you!
Last week I left a nice riddle, and someone solved it! The answer was Eclipse.
For this week’s puzzle I’ll go to a game many of you won’t have played but I enjoyed and even reviewed last year: Dracula 3 – The Path of the Dragon. In this game, you pay as Father Arno, a catholic priest sent to Romania to investigate a candidate for sainthood, a local doctor in a small village.
The puzzle you find in Budapest, in the library of Irina Boczow, the foremost expert on vampire lore, as Arno is trying to find the origins of the mysterious Path of the Dragon Vlad Dracula supposedly went through to become a vampire. At least according to folklore.
For this puzzle, you need to open a box with locker like dials, each with a different letter. To find the keyword you need to solve a riddle:
If you wish to contemplate a hidden, terrible and cruel beauty, yet admirable to the sight, know that the green truth may be read in a circle which you will follow in the right direction…
On top of the box is a page from a medieval book, complete with coloured letters. To solve the puzzle you need to draw a circle that hits just the right letters, so you may find the word needed to open the box.
When I first bought the Dracula Trilogy bundle on GoG.com I didn’t know they were first person adventures like Myst. I didn’t really like that type of adventure. But Dracula 3 made me a fan and with this puzzle it showed me just how creative the designers were. There are many possible letters you can combine but only one circle gives you the answer. Even figuring out what you need to do to get those letters can take some thinking as there’s no obvious hint of what you should use. Of all the puzzles in this game this is the one I remember the most as I spent a while looking for the answer, running around the rooms trying to find a solution before deciding I had to think it through on my own. I thought there would be more clues but I had already been told everything I needed.
I just needed to put the noggin to work. Some say the best adventure game puzzles are those hard ones that lead to a “Eureka!” moment when you figure it out, and this puzzle was it for me!
If you haven’t played Dracula 3: Path of the Dragon, you should do so at once. It has nothing to do with Dracula 1 & 2, so you can skip those. They’re terrible anyway. If you have, tell me about your favourite puzzle!
Review: Pneuma: Breath of Life
Pneuma is a first person adventure game putting you in control of a would-be-god as he travels through a new world while commenting on his own divinity and the nature of creation.
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Genre(s): Adventure Developer: Deco Digital, Bevel Studios Publisher: Deco Digital Release Date: February 2015 |
Played: Main Story Platforms: PC, GNU/Linux, Mac OS Purchase At: Steam |
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Review
You start the game in complete darkness, something your character doesn’t like, so uttering famous words a crack opens in the void and light spills in, opening a door towards a beautiful white hallway. Musing on how his words manifested light he comes to the ‘obvious’ conclusion that he is God and he created this world, yet he feels it’s odd he keeps meeting challenges and puzzles. Throughout the story you will hear him philosophise about his nature and that of ‘his’ world.
It’s not a complex plot, but it does lead to a satisfying payoff. Without revealing the surprises Pneuma has in store for you, the game plays you as much as you play it.
In terms of gameplay and puzzles, Pneuma is a one trick pony, with more than 90% of puzzles visual based. This means you’ll be looking at (and away from) things—glowing metal eyes in particular. There is very little interaction and you can count these puzzles with one hand. While it’s a very interesting approach to puzzle design and offers some interesting moments, it can also lead to some degree of frustration when a simple camera movement derails the puzzle you’d been working on for minutes. In the playthrough video below you’ll see two of those puzzles, one involving a wall with holes you need to close by looking and approaching, and one where your point of view changes the colour of the tiles on the floor. Both get tiresome very quickly—though I did solve them for my main playthrough.
Environments are gorgeous and seem straight out of a Roman villa, with classic style architecture and murals. The opening white rooms give way to colour as the character gets tired of their emptiness and this visualstyle remains until the end of the game, where you once again shift into a forest path.
Audiowise, the highlight of this game is Jay Britton’s voice acting. The character is instantly likeable and his quest for answers, to make sense of the world around him and his own existence makes him relatable and quite human, even if you never see anything of him. That isn’t to say the music isn’t good, it’s actually fantastic and you’ll probably want to get the soundtrack—if you don’t get it together with the game in a bundle!
This is a short game, with only five or six chapters and each of these is a few puzzles long. There’s a good chance you might be able to finish it in one sitting, but the story makes this short ride very sweet.
Conclusion
Pneuma: Breath of Life is one of the cleverest games I’ve ever played. It’s quite short and you’ll have some frustrations with the puzzle design, but you will enjoy the ride for as long as it lasts.
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TMA SCORE: 4/5 – Exceptional |
Review: The Talos Principle
The Talos Principle is a first person adventure game, developed by Croteam, where you control a robot working his way through dozens of challenge rooms guided by a voice from above. Will you obey and seek eternity in servitude or will you quest for the truth, no matter how hard it may be?
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Genre(s): Adventure Developer: Croteam Publisher: Croteam Release Date: December 2014 |
Played: Main Story (All Endings) Platforms: PC, GNU/Linux, Mac OS Purchase At: Steam |
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Review
When Talos opens, you find yourself in what seem to be Greco-Roman ruins. As you explore, you find your first puzzles and challenges and a voice speaks to you from on high. His name is Elohim and he claims to be your creator. He wants you to find sigils—Tetris Blocks—to prove you’re worthy of paradise. You will collect the sigils through overcoming the various challenge rooms.
These rooms are in giant simulated worlds in three towers—the first with a Greco-Roman feel to it, the second with an Egyptian theme and he last with a Middle Ages vibe. And as you explore them, you’ll come across terminals with the emails, blog posts, rants, articles and thoughts of the people behind the simulated world and the library containing all human knowledge and history. Through them, and especially through Alexandra Drennan’s time-capsule messages, you learn of their struggle to finish this project before the world—and humanity itself—come to an end. It’s a heartrending epistolary story but also an uplifting one, as you read and hear about humans at their best in the face of inevitability. It’s a wonderful plot and one I’m overjoyed of experiencing. And that is without considering the deep philosophical debates, over the nature of humanity, you have with the Library Assistant AI, always there to put you down and offer counterpoints to your arguments.
But it’s not just the story that kept me coming back, but the puzzles. Each room has a theme, a set of tools you should/have to use and one of the Sigils. You start out with only the Jammer, to disable barriers and hazards such as turrets or bombs. As you collect Sigils you unlock the Connector, to redirect beams of energy—red or blue depending on the emitter; the Fan, to lift yourself and objects off the ground or propel you across distances; the Playback terminal, to record yourself performing actions and then generate a recording-clone to perform them (my favourite tool); and finally the Platfom, which you’ll never use on your own but with a Playback clone.
Talos’ rooms are all about logic and experimentation to reach your goal. You’ll jam doors so you can pass beams through them, overlap red and blue beams without crossing them, lift Connectors on boxes so they reach enough height to redirect beams even across challenge rooms or all the above using the Playback terminal. As you progress the challenge ramps up and it’s such a joy to complete the hard rooms. After playing so many inventory-based games in the past few years, I sincerely missed logical ones and that’s what Talos offers. It’s about logic but also creativity, to think outside the box and find the solution that best works for you.
Completing each room’s puzzle is hard enough but there are also Stars spread across the levels and you need 10 of them at a time to open the star doors in every tower and reach special closed-off worlds with greater challenges. Some star puzzles are straightforward, a variation on the room’s theme and goal, but others will blow your mind with their complexity. One in particular, involving some pillars and buttons, was extremely challenging to figure out. Finally, there are Sigil puzzles, where you arrange a set number of the Tetris blocks together to form a square or rectangle. The first ones are simple but they too become increasingly challenging as you progress through the game.
If there is one flaw to the game it’s the hint system. In some rooms you can find a little shrine where you can ask for help, but unless you’ve woken the messengers up by visiting their home simulations, you won’t get any. It fits into the simulation world’s myth, but the tool you need to unlock them is in the third tower so you’re going to spend a long time without any help from a guardian angel.
The upside is you’ll often find QR codes across the levels and challenge rooms, telling you more about those that came before you, the world and the puzzles themselves. Some are very cryptic, but they can offer significant help if you read carefully. You can even leave your own messages for your friends to find, but these are just random phrases generated from the documents you read and your conversations with the Library Assistant. Some are deep, some are fun and others are just right down silly. “Frogs are people too!” is my favourite.
The fact I mention challenge rooms might make it seem like they’re closed-off, claustrophobic, but you’d be wrong to assume that. Environments in Talos Principle are astoundingly beautiful. The first area is comprised of ruins, true, but there is lush vegetation, sandy and rocky beaches, vast expanses of water and detailed constructions that leave you in awe. The Egyptian one is straight out of your wildest archaeological dreams. And the last one makes you feel in Camelot…if it had lasers and turrets. Even outside the simulated levels, the temple-like lobbies are phenomenal and are in stark contrast to the rusting metal of the towers and the lifeless frozen expanse where they all stand. The visuals in Talos tell as much a story as the documents and voice-overs.
Speaking of voices, you only ever hear Elohim and Alexandra but the voice acting is superb. Elohim is grandiose and imposing, and Alexandra is as human as you can get. It’s her voice that carried me through the journey that is the Talos Principle, even if at times she broke my heart. In terms of music, from the simple melodies to the Latin religious choirs, it’s all amazing. At times when I played Alexandras recordings, there were sweet gentle melodies in the background that seemed both uplifting and saddening at the same time, depending on what she said. Maybe it was the location’s music—her messages mute all other sound effects—or maybe it came with the time capsule, but either way, the music moved me.
This is the only complaint I have of the game!
Documents in terminals can be very philosophical
The nature of humanity and civilisation!
Croteam has good comedy taste!
You can find messages your friends leave!
Names are indeed a funny thing. TMA could well stand for Tested Mature Avocados!
Life lessons right there!
Beautiful castle
These get really difficult later in the game
Is it just me who thought of The Mummy after looking at this?
There are some cool easter eggs in this game!
Handsome bot with a badass axe!
Simba, Everything the light touches is our Kingdom!
Conclusion
The Talos Principle is not only about amazing puzzles, but also about a very human story in a game where you never see one of our species. Instead, you feel the impact they had on the world.
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TMA SCORE: 5/5 – Hell Yes! |