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. In this series, I’ll bring you a new puzzle every week, 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!
Today’s puzzle also comes from the vaults of LucasArts, from its most popular adventure game series: Monkey Island, specifically the 2nd in the series, LeChuck’s Revenge.
After dealing with Largo LaGrande on Scabb Island, Guybrush Threepwood, Mighty Pirate, sets out to find the four pieces of the map to the legendary treasure of BIG WHOOP. One of these pieces is in Rum Rogers’s shack but to get to it you need to shut-off a particularly impressive looking waterfall. How do you do it? Well, there’s a fire hydrant at the top of it, so of course you need a monkey wrench. Good thing you have a catatonic monkey in your pocket, right? How do you get the monkey? We’ll leave that alone because I don’t want to ruin the puzzle if you haven’t played Monkey Island 2.
Yes, this puzzle is moon logic, and I usually hate these. But this is moon logic at its best, based off wordplay. You need a monkey wrench and you have a stiff monkey, quite easy to make the leap. It shows the strength and weakness of this style of puzzle design. If you’re familiar with the English language, then you’ll figure it out instantly, but if you’re not or you’re playing it in another language, then the puzzle makes little sense.
This puzzle also shows how creative the LucasArts team was when it came to designing silly puzzles. The entire sequence, from finding the monkey, shutting off the waterfall to getting your hands on the map is one ridiculous moment after another.
Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge has wonderful and challenging puzzles, but for me the best will always be this monkey business. When I played the game, I finally had enough of a handle with the language that I picked the word-play clue instantly. It didn’t just make me laugh but also made me feel proud of my linguistic ability.
Do you have a favourite Monkey Island puzzle you’d like to mention? Don’t forget to come back next week for two new puzzles, one from a game and one of mine!
I even considered ranting a bit more just on the very sore subject of the timed exclusivity, but that topic’s been run to the ground and as a very wise friend said on twitter, enough is enough.
But I still feel there’s a lot to say about this 20 year-old series.
In past articles I’ve been quite negative and resistant to change, but I’ve made it clear that I want to be wrong! I want Rise to make me eat my words. I want the Tomb Raider not only to rise but also to stand tall and keep going.
I know I’ve made it seem as if I wish this Lara never existed, and it might be partially true, but it’s just because I know how strong a character the original was, even in all the silliness of her series. She was confident, strong, capable and brilliant. She faced everything head on, even if she had doubts, remorse or reservations. But she also enjoyed herself. She saw the wonder and beauty in every place she visited and she pulled you in so you could see things from her point of view. Everything was an adventure to her and she took as much joy as she could from whatever she did, something I wish I could do more often.
As a character I admire the original Lara and I found her more inspirational and captivating than most male video game characters. As gaming changed and we entered the dude-bro era, Lara remained herself, with all her charm, wit and copious amounts of sarcasm. And of course backflipping, diving and shooting animals!
At least until they moved on from her to Nu-Lara.
I don’t want this new younger Lara to be exactly the same as the original, as much as it may seem like it. But I do want her to inherit some of her traits. Tomb Raider 2013 was a misery fest, and so far, between all TR media, it seems they want to take her into the “angst-filled hard-ass” archetype and I hope it doesn’t happen. The world doesn’t need any more of those. We need someone who sees the beauty and wonder in everything, someone who reminds us that even the worst circumstances have some good in them. Nu Lara is strong, we know that, but so far the only growth has been on the scabs covering her many wounds. Even the comics—bridging the games—have too much pain and misery and very little happiness.
I’ve said it before. When you’re telling a story, if there aren’t good moments, then the bad ones lose effectiveness. And so far, Lara has had too many bad moments and very few good ones. Her close circle of friends is less there to offer comfort and support but to be victims and hostages.
(Image Credit: Dark Horse Comics) Enough with the blood & mud and doom & gloom. Let’s hit some ruins!
If Tomb Raider were a novel, I wouldn’t worry about the character because she would be in Rhianna Pratchett’s hands and she is an outstanding writer. But the creative vision for the character belongs to the developers and so far, they seem to prefer grit and misery to adventure and excitement and joy. For Rise, they tell us she’s having issues dealing with the events of the first game (or possibly the events of the 2nd, as we don’t know if the therapy is before her trip to Siberia or after), and she’s going to a therapist. I fear this is just to make Lara much more vulnerable, and that the therapy is just a “plot gimmick” for this game instead being instrumental in the character’s development.
But there I go again being negative. Sorry about that.
I want Lara and the new Tomb Raider series to learn the lessons of its predecessor and combined with its own stories evolve into something new and better. I want this Nu Lara to be better than the original. I want her to inspire people as much as the original did—including me. I want her to find the joy of exploration, the awe and wonder and the adventure in life, instead of just wading through pockets of misery.
For the games, yes I want to see more puzzles. I know, I sound like a broken record on this, but it’s part of the adventure genre. It’s part of that sense of wonder I mention, to find ancient ruins with incredibly complex mechanisms you need to piece together or use in some way to progress. Sure, we can get away from box pushing, I’ll be the first behind that idea, but we need that awe, that joy of discovery and that’s what I want the series to bring in the future. I hope Rise’s tombs will be as good as they promise or even better. I want them to be complex, and combine items and physics and platforming.
(Image Creidit: Otakusphere) Go big, go silly, go insane! Be stupid, be brilliant!
In terms of platforming and acrobatics, I want Rise to take it into a bolder direction and future games to go even further. From the classic pits with a rope over them to ditching the climbing gear and just do it by hand. My good friend, Kelly from the Archaeology of Tomb Raider, said that a lot of the challenge of platforming went away with the auto-grab and that is generally true, but there was still a great chance of failure. If you don’t believe me, just check out my Tomb Raider Underworld and Anniversary videos, you’ll see me dying often enough. And that’s where I hope we’ll move, not into the same platforming elements from the past, but the same challenge and risk, to those moments where if you don’t jump at the exact edge, you won’t make it across the gap. I know I’m sounding nostalgic and wishing this series was like the past one, but again, I just want it to learn and use the past series to evolve into something better.
Finally, combat. They’re already going in a very good direction by letting you sneak past enemies instead of just shooting and killing.
However, the one thing I want the most for Tomb Raider—as a game—is for it to be sillier. Gameplay and events grounded on reality are good but sometimes you can squeeze a bit more fun out of a sequence if you allow for some nonsense. Perhaps it’s physics not working exactly as they should, or the character being more agile than she should in a given situation, such as five back-flips in a row while firing two guns at incoming raptors. The Oni were a good first step, but I hope they step further away from ‘reality’ and more into the silly bits!
And all that together is what I want and what I hope from the Tomb Raider series in the future. I don’t want Lara and her games to mimic the classic series, but I do want them to acknowledge their existence and use them to improve upon, to evolve into a series that will have cynical fans like me jumping for joy and enjoying adventures with this Lara as much as we did with the Classic.
But until I play Rise, I can’t do anything but that: hope.
I love puzzles, not the 1000 piece landscape ones everyone’s tried to assemble at least once in their lives. No, those drive me insane. The ones I mean are the gaming puzzles, riddles and brain-teasing challenges. Some need items and for others you just need to use whatever brain cells you have left after binging on Dragon Age Inquisition for eight hours a day.
Puzzles are at the core of Adventure gameplay, they offer 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.
Over the past few months, I’ve been hard at work on designing my own puzzles for an in-development adventure game demo. I’ve gone through the classics: inventory, moon-logic, number sequence & math, cryptography and text-based and even old school riddles. For example, here’s one I posted on twitter a few weeks ago, just popped in my head and it was better than I expected:
Ominous when empty. Sad when full.
What is it? Only one person has solved it and in fact offered a different response that works well!
In this series, I’ll talk about some of my favourite puzzles in games, from the silly to the brain melting. But that’s not all, every other week, I’ll also give you one of my puzzles for you to solve, some of them are simple and others not so much. If you solve one first and you’d like to submit one of your own then I’ll feature them in a future issue. I’ve already given you one to get started, and now I’ll focus on this week’s puzzle. It’s from a really old, classic LucasArts adventure: Full Throttle.
At one point in the game, you need to get into The Vulture’s hideout, but it’s protected by a minefield. Getting through it is hilarious and it involves a remote-controlled car and a boxful of Powerblast-battery-powered bunnies to clear the way!
When I first played this game, I wondered what to do with the minefield, and I tried a single bunny, got an item in return but ten I was stumped, because as is the usual case for me, I hadn’t seen something in the environment, but once I did, it all clicked into place and I solved the puzzle and finished that sequence, laughing like a maniac while doing so. It’s funny, on hindsight maybe not that funny, but it just caught me by surprise, especially because the music shifts to Flight of the Valkyries!
It’s another example of how creative the people at LucasArts were/are at creating puzzles. Sure, it’s on the edge of being moon-logic, but there’s enough sense in it that it doesn’t seem far-fetched.
Below you’ll see the end of the puzzle. I want you to have a giggle but not ruin the entire thing for you!
Do you have any favourite puzzle or memory from Full Throttle or any other adventure game? Let me know in the comments!
Last week I finished the playthrough for TR Underworld so it’s time for Anniversary! All part of my plan to play all the Classic-Lara games in reverse order.
For those unfamiliar with this game, it’s a remake of the first Tomb Raider, but with story elements adjusted to fit those of Tomb Raider Legend, which I’ll be playing next as part of this series!
For the first video I did some commentary, not only about the game but the series in general as well as some random musings. The rest of the segments have no commentary as I’ve been playing the voice activated Action-adventure In Verbis Virtus, and now my throat hurts quite badly.
Be sure to check out the polls below and tell me what you want for the rest of the Tomb Raider Classic Plays and what game series I should tackle next. If it’s not listed n the poll, you can add one!
Part I – Vilcabamba
Part II – Greece
Part III – Egypt – Temple of Khamoon
Part IV – Finale – Natla Mines & Atlantean Pyramid
If you like the video, give it a like and consider subscribing to the YouTube channel and of course here on the site.
If you read my Rezzed coverage you’ll know some of the best games there were those from Fireproof Games: Omega Agent and The Room Three, and that thanks to them, I discovered The Room One & Two.
The Room and The Room Two are puzzle-centric adventure games. As your almost silent protagonist you progress through a series of rooms solving intricate puzzles and slowly piecing the story of your predecessor’s research into the Null Element, a strange and otherworldly material and power source that slowly draws people close to it mad. During the events of the first game you’re following your friend’s footsteps, opening a puzzle box that draws you ever closer to the Null. During The Room Two however, you travel to rooms used by others who discovered the element, trying to escape from the endless maze of rooms and puzzles. The Room series, as stated by the developers themselves, is light on plot and following it will depend on each player—and they expect most to ignore the story altogether.
The Room revolves around giant puzzle-boxes, one per chapter. Each of them has multiple puzzles to solve, ranging from inventory to deduction, and solving one will open the way to another or give you an important item needed to complete yet another puzzle. The game starts you off easily but soon enough drops you into the deep end and you’ll have only your wit—and the useful hint system—to help you solve the puzzles.
Don’t get used to the tutorial, it won’t last long!
One of my favourite boxes is also one of the last in the game, where you have puzzles on the side that open as you find ways to generate and reflect light. They’re all wonderfully intricate and the way solving one puzzle opens up the others in a chain reaction is fantastic. I still replay this segment every so often.
This game is where you can most clearly see the Chinese Puzzle-boxes that inspired the development—as well as the Hellraiser elements that inspired the tone and atmosphere.
You learn plot elements through other people’s notes and letters!
The Room Two expands on its predecessors offering larger rooms with multiple locations and puzzles to complete. These puzzles become increasingly complex. One of the early rooms is a pirate ship and it took me the longest to complete of all of them, but every time I pulled a puzzle off I felt like a genius…until the next one stumped me.
The controls are very simple, consisting of just swipes and taps, but everything from turning a key to pulling open a drawer controls smoothly. To use the inventory items, you can tap for a closer look (needed, as some items are themselves puzzles) or drag them to use.
You also have a special lens. You find it in The Room and in its sequel, you first need to repair it before putting it to use. The Lens shows you hidden messages and lets you see and interact through objects made from the Null element. If you see an iridescent object or surface, then it’s time to pull out the lens! Point-of-view puzzles using the lens feature heavily in both games, so you first use it to make random symbols visible, and then rotate the camera to form numbers or letters with them.
I do wish the lids on objects opened automatically or with a tap. I was playing on my mobile, with very little surface area so I always had issues with lids. This was a game developed for tablets and while you can play it on mobile phones, I wouldn’t really recommend it. You’ll often squint or tap like crazy to find small hotspots and it gets a bit uncomfortable. Dragging items to hotspots proved a challenge as well, as the aspect ratio made it so my—admittedly chubby—fingers completely covered the item, so I couldn’t see if the item was useful in a given situation or not at all. And it might be my mobile, but playing the game violently drained the battery.
The lens reveals things hidden to the naked eye!
Visually it’s impressive, perhaps the best-looking game I’ve ever played on mobile. They’re the type of visuals you expect from a PC game. Puzzle boxes and rooms are intricately detailed and there are tons of tiny elements that bring rooms to life, from delicate wine glasses on a table to hay and cannonballs in the pirate room. The Room Two even features a full cinematic ending that before playing I didn’t ever expect to see running on my mobile.
In terms of sound, both Room games have wonderful soundtracks. The main theme for the games has become of my favourite videogame pieces, both soothing and eerie at the same time if you can believe it. Speaking of eerie that’s the music’s direction in each room. It can be as subtle as a single tone, almost a whistle, to more intense pieces, often with dissonant cords to take you over the creepy edge into disturbing. It all plays fantastically into the madness theme and with the visuals and the sound effects—creaking boards, whispers, and even footsteps—they all make up this lovely atmosphere of fear. I sincerely recommend playing this game with full volume. If you don’t you won’t get the true experience.
Sometimes, items are puzzles as well!
Conclusion
With The Room Three soon to hit the Apple App Store, now is the time for you to go play these two games. They are outstanding puzzlers with an intriguing plot. If you’re like me and you love a brainteaser, then you’ll enjoy The Room and The Room Two
Monument Valley is a puzzle game for iOS & Android, in which you help a princess explore strange monuments left by her people, restoring them to power.
I first heard about this game during this year’s BAFTAs, where they nominated it in pretty much every category. It won the Best British Game and Mobile & Handheld awards. Once I finished watching the awards, I decided to buy the game on the Google Play Store and I even got the expansion pack.
As this is a mobile game, you control everything through taps and swipes. You tap on the screen to where you want the princess to move and you swipe to interact with the environment. There are cranks to turn, and segments of the environment with small stubs on them that you can move horizontally, vertically or even rotate the stage, to help the princess move along the monuments. Each level ends when you approach a certain tile and the character places an increasingly intricate geometrical piece on it, the Sacred Geometry, which is central to the plot, which I won’t comment on due to its simplicity. Anything I say will ruin it for you.
Some stages shift around and rotate, showing new rooms and puzzles.
The mechanics are simple but the stages will take some trial and error as you learn to properly navigate them and make use of the different movable pieces. I’m certain one of the inspirations for this game were the works of M.C. Escher, as you have to take perspective into consideration. For example, something that is far away can be an adjacent platform if you turn the camera in a particular way. Perspective is central to many of the Monuments. There is one in particular where a door takes you to another one, placed in a different perspective so that now you’re walking on what you thought was a vertical wall. At certain times I had to turn my mobile around just to see things from the character’s new point of view. It was these moments, when the game took perception into consideration, where it truly shined for me and left me awed.
The Forgotten Shores expansion adds new levels and different mechanics, such as these twisty corridors.
It’s difficult to talk about Monument Valley’s sound as a separate thing to gameplay. There is a soundtrack and the music is beautiful and ranges from subtle soothing melodies to haunting ones and even some upbeat adventure-y tunes, but also every stage is essentially a giant music box and interacting with them generates its own music, from pulling cranks to pressing a button that shifts the entire stage around. It’s almost as if by playing, you’re composing the stage’s music. It didn’t matter what level it was, this always made me smile.
I do wish the stages were longer. This is a game, like many mobile ones, meant for short play bursts and as such, the different monuments take at most ten minutes to complete. The Lost Shore—the 8 level expansion—has longer levels but still not long enough. It doesn’t detract from the marvellous experience, but it did leave me wanting more. Some of the later stages get complicated but as an experienced adventure gamer used to intricate puzzles, I felt as though the game could’ve given me much more than it did.
The visuals are minimalistic but gorgeous. Each monument is a work of art—if I could I would frame and hang them on my wall—that would make M.C. Escher blush, and it’s a joy to watch these music puzzle boxes change and move around to reveal new rooms and alcoves. The developers at ustwo must’ve known this because they added a camera mode for you to turn the world around however you want for screenshots. They even built in some of the more popular Instagram filters.
Conclusion
Monument Valley is a wonderful game, one of the best mobile games I’ve ever played and while I do wish there was much more and a higher difficulty, what is there is breathtaking and you should all play the game right now!
Resident Evil: Revelations 2 puts you in control of four characters, searching for answers in a hostile island and a way out, before fear consumes and changes them—literally so.
I still remember the announcement for RER2. It came during a week when female members of our community were under fire and the women’s role and portrayal in games were under debate. When they announced Clare was coming back, I honestly thought, “This is what we need, one of the original female badasses, Clare Redfield!” Capcom definitely nailed the timing for their announcement.
And that is one thing Resident Evil: Revelations 2 does right: character portrayals. Clare isn’t the same girl we met in Resident Evil 2 but one of the senior Terra Save agents. She’s strong, decisive and courageous, but without losing her humanity, which is harder to do than you’d expect—most of the times writers just cross the line into Impossible Hardass.
It’s all about Kafka!
With Clare is Moira Burton, Barry’s daughter and the most foul-mouthed character in all of Resident Evil. What I like most about Moira is she shows significant growth during the story. At the start she refuses to even hold a gun because of a childhood trauma, but by the end she manages to push herself beyond it. I liked that development and it feels real and believable…you know, even with the crazy genetic monstrosities.
The rest of the main cast consists of Barry himself, coming to the island where the plot takes place (I’ll get on that in a bit) a few months later than Clare and his daughter, hoping to find answers to her fate. Barry is a rock of a character, acting as the strong and collected one to his companion, Natalia, an 11-year-old-ish girl. Where she falters he’s there to offer support and as such he doesn’t evolve as much as the rest, but is instrumental in the other character’s development.
The nonsensical skill tree
RER2 doesn’t waste time in setting up its premise. During the opening cinematic, an assault team attacks and captures all Terra Save workers at their yearly corporate party. When Clare wakes she’s in a mysterious prison with Moira and fitted with a strange metal bracelet. The bracelets change colour depending on the person’s state of mind, going from green to a deep red the more frightened they become. The island is home to savage mutants like those found in Resident Evil 4 and 5 and there’s a woman, The Overseer, constantly taunting them and driving them closer to fear and despair.
Clare and Moira’s half is all about survival and finding out and stopping The Overseer’s plans. Barry’s half is about finding his daughter, arriving on the island 6 months after Clare’s initial chapter, following an SOS. He meets Natalia, a young girl surviving on her own, and with the mysterious ability to sense monsters and even their weak spots. She met Moira & Clare in the past and guides Barry to where they last saw each other.
Tourniquets are the way to go…unless you’re out of herbs!
The story itself is the usual Resident Evil fare of crazy viruses and deranged genetic experimentation that ultimately becomes so out there you lose all interest in it. But in its episodic storytelling, RER2 splits the reveals very well between its two story arcs, keeping you interested and asking questions until it finally shows its hand. The works of Franz Kafka, The Metamophosis in particular, are at the core of the plot, just taken literal and to the extreme. This game’s writers don’t believe in subtlety.
The narrative split might be good but the pacing is uneven between the Clare and Barry segments—some are plot-heavy while others are combat-centric—and it doesn’t take long for you to learn or figure out everything about the story, making some of the last episode’s climaxes fall terribly short.
Resident Evils have always supported their narrative with documents strewn around the environment and RER2 continues this tradition but there are too repetitive and useless documents. I don’t mind backstory if it adds to the experience, but it feels as though they enough documents to make sure that you’d pick up at least one. It’s even worse considering much of what the documents tell you the characters later mention in cutscenes.
In terms of visuals, they’re around the same quality as Resident Evil 6’s, which isn’t surprising considering they both use the same engine. For this game, it’s not graphical quality that I look for, because I know it’ll be good. What I care about is the little details and the overall environment and creature design, which are some of the elements the horror will hang on. One thing in particular that stood out for me was how bad the lip-synching was. I played the game originally with Japanese audio (more on that later) and even switching to English didn’t make the lips sync-up with the words. In fact, the lips barely move.
Monster design differs greatly between Clare and Barry’s segments. Clare’s enemies are more akin to the wild enemies from The Evil Within, self-mutilated and with heavy body modifications, while Barry’s are more traditional RE monstrosities and desiccated zombies. Clare’s work very well the first time they show up, but lose their effectiveness as a visual fear stimulus very quickly. Barry’s on the other hand remain effective for much longer, especially since they are very difficult to kill if you don’t target their Ouroboros core.
Bleeding is extremely dangerous in RER2
Sadly, the environments themselves are dull, drab and lack any form of atmosphere and rehash locations from previous titles—prison facilities, derelict villages and ruined buildings. There’s even a moment in Episdoe 2 where you must survive an assault from enemies while inside a building, killing enemies before they jump inside. Sound familiar? Setting the game in a wider open area presents challenges, that I understand, but I do wish they had done a better job, made them much more interesting. The environments also clashed with the accounts from the documents—you should have seen more remnants of the previous occupants, more signs of violence. Instead of helping the immersion, this clash countered it.
Clare’s enemies are fast and strong!
Music is largely absent from the game, coming in during high-stress sequences with the appropriate tense music and almost at random during investigative and exploration segments. These pieces are moodier and eerie but the volume is low, almost like background noise and often drowned out by other sounds. It left me to wonder what the point was. The moody bits are very good but with the bland environments, there’s not much they can do to help the immersion opportunities the visual side already squandered.
I played the game in Japanese first, as I often do with Japanese games. I still used English text for subtitles. I have a less than rudimentary grasp on the Japanese tongue but I can tell right away when the English script is departing radically from the Japanese one. For example, Moira doesn’t curse in the Japanese version, not as much, but instead says “Saiyaku,” which literall means Disaster but you can take it—transliterated—as “This is the worst!” which is also Barry’s common catchphrase, a shared mannerism between parent and child. The voice acting is generally good but I find the Japanese to be superior, as there’s a lot more strength put into the performances. The American cast falters during emotional sequences. Pedro’s actor in Japanese sounds genuinely terrified and panicky during the Episode 2 village sequence, while the American doesn’t and the emotion he portrays doesn’t match up with the character’s body language.
Natalia can sense monsters, even through walls. Pretty handy for stealth-kills!
The gameplay remains very much like Resident Evils after the 4th instalment, with the over the shoulder camera and aiming. It’s a style I like very much and allows me to headshot enemies as much as I want to, which I enjoy doing, just to test my accuracy. You can instantly switch from the main characters (Clare & Barry) to their partners and you’ll need to as most of the ‘puzzles’ revolve around doing two things almost at once with the characters, such as pulling levers in separate rooms. Only your main characters carry weapons, the secondary ones have melee attacks and are just there for support really. Though the AI partner did finish off a few enemies for me when I was out of ammo.
Battle Points (BP) are back, used to upgrade your characters with the obligatory skill system, increasing some of your base abilities and the effectiveness of items. Some of the upgrades are pretty useful but most are worthless. For example, one of them increases how effective Green Herbs are, but even without it they already heal you completely. The only point in getting that ability is unlocking the one further down the tree. The tree itself makes no sense, with abilities having thematically unrelated ones as prerequisites. The previous Green Herb skill is a prerequisite for the Charged Melee attack skill, for example.
RER2 gives you a dedicated “Pick-up” button that works well for consumables but the game then alternates between it and the “Use” button so many times I found myself shouting “Make up your mind!” at the screen. At some points it prompted me to pick up items with one button then with the other, leaving me irritated and confused.
Speaking of weapons, RER2 features a crafting system for secondary items. You can use bottles to make up to four kinds of bombs—Molotov cocktails and smoke bombs for example– and cloth for tourniquets, as a minor healing kit and to stop the bleeding effect, and disinfectants, for clearing your HUD of monster goop. The latter isn’t really useful due to the very small number of blinding monsters. Weapon upgrades return from the previous game and they work exactly the same, providing mostly passive bonuses such as increased damage, capacity or reduced recoil. Golden Upgrades give your weapons new powers. They aren’t necessary but they do help, especially the rare ones, and I found myself exploring the dreadfully bland environments looking for secret chests.
In terms of enemies and combat, Clare’s are much closer to the original RE series’ bullet sponges, taking in tons of damage before falling—though headshots help and it’s why I go for them. Barry’s on the other hand are much closer to the Resident Evil 4+ style of enemies with weak points. Bosses, for either character, fall into this latter category, with a single weak point you first need to reveal before actually damaging the boss.
Language Moira!
Conclusion
Resident Evil: Revelations 2’s gameplay and characterization make up for some of its design and narrative flaws, and while it’s not the deepest of stories it will keep you hooked until the end and beyond if you like to indulge in the RPG-esque raid mode. It’s a flawed game, definitely, but worth a shot, even if it fails at the horror half of Survival Horror.
Originally released in 1999 Grim Fandango is one of the last adventure games released by LucasArts. It combines Mexican folklore with a Film Noir plot and stars the grim reaper himself…well, one of them anyway.
Fantastic world combining Noir and Mexican folklore.
Superb voice acting and music.
Revamped control scheme.
Bad:
Clunky inventory system.
Peyote-logic puzzles.
Review
I won’t deny it. I was excited when I saw the news for the Grim Fandango remake. I remember playing it when I was younger, about a year after release, in 1999. I borrowed the game from a friend—you know, back in those days where DRM and serials weren’t a thing.
I’ve been playing the game recently, going through it once more and I realised I didn’t remember a thing about it. I couldn’t remember the solution to even a single puzzle, which to be honest is perfect for a review. So let’s get to it.
How it all starts: with hole-punched card!
Grim Fandango puts you in the shoes of Manuel “Manny” Calavera, an agent for the DOD, The Department of Death. As an agent his job is to find the recently deceased and depending on their personal history get them the best deal possible on their trip to the afterlife. If the soul has been especially good, they can get a direct trip on the Number Nine express train to the Ninth Underworld. If there are dark spots in their bio, the options range from lying in a coffin shipped by mail to a walking stick for the long journey.
At the start of the game, Manny’s been in a slump, only getting bad clients and cheated out of new ones by his colleague, Domino. Deciding to take matters into his own hands—and yours—he intercepts one of Domino’s clients and claims her for his own, thinking she’s assured a spot on the Number Nine. But it turns out his bosses rigged the system and have stolen everybody’s tickets. With Meche, his would-be client, now lost in the underworld and the conspirators pursuing him, Manny sets out to find the girl and stop the bad guys…but mostly find the girl.
The lovely Meche Colomar!
The story is a traditional Noir plot. There are conspiracies, intrigue, betrayals and deceit at every corner. But it is a Tim Schafer and LucasArts game so there is plenty of comedy as well, mostly from how surreal the world and locations are. Unlike other LucasArts games there aren’t many pop-culture references, instead they take jabs at familiar Noir tropes and poke fun at how we all imagine death and the afterlife to be. It is however a darker game than other in the Lucas catalogue.
The story plays out in four acts or Years, each with a different location, new characters and new pieces to the conspiracy. I loved the Year transitions. Years 1 and 2 end with Manny in a precarious position, stuck at a dead-end café and a broken down ship respectively, but the opening cinematic for the following one show him turning those around—the Café into a successful nightclub and casino called Café Calavera and the ship into a mercantile vessel. And all of it without losing sight of his goal of finding Meche and get her to the Ninth Underworld.
In the end perhaps, but in the meantime we all dance the Grim Fandango!
Manny as a character is one of the best in adventure games. He’s both selfish and selfless at times, he cares even if he has to manipulate and cheat. He’s not an angel, but he’s not evil either. In essence, he’s a very human and relatable character, with strengths and flaws. The supporting cast on the other hand is a collection of extremes and Noir tropes, from the sultry femme fatale to the extremely greedy villains. But that isn’t to say they aren’t as interesting as the main one. Each has their unique personality and they make you want to know more about them. Glottis, for example is one of my favourite characters. He’s a Mechanic Demon, first acting as Manny’s driver and on the way becoming his loyal companion…and comic relief. Meche starts off as the typical good girl, but shows more strength and determination you would think she had. The central characters all grow during the story, and that is rare in adventure games.
Manny’s inventory…grrrrr
Grim Fandango’s visual style takes its inspiration from Mexican “Dia de los Muertos”—and in fact it is that exact day at the start of the game, the only time when the dead can visit the living. All characters look like Calaca figures, walking skeletons. When Manny reaps a soul, what comes with him isn’t a ghost but another bony figure. Environments area mix of 1930s aesthetics, such as you would find in classic film Noir, and Aztec architecture. There are high-rise buildings and race tracks with Aztec colour tones and even temple-like structures in the last act, but there are also more traditional Noir locations, such as the Poet’s nightclub The Blue Casket or even Café Calavera. The locations and character designs draw you in as much as the voice actors and music do.
The game uses static environments with 3D objects and characters and fixed camera angles. The remake improved on the character models, though considering they’re all skeletons there wasn’t much to improve. Mostly they just made the faces more detailed. But they also improved on the lighting, and this bit adds a lot more to the game’s atmosphere, especially at the start. Now light streams through Manny’s blinds, falling on him in stripes as if it were the office of a Noir detective.
Good solid advice!
The game also features FMV both during gameplay, such as when opening the mailing machine’s door or the elevator in Rubacava, and for story cinematics. The latter mostly take place between acts or at significant moments, such as when you pull up the SS Lamancha. The remake doesn’t change anything about these, nor did they have to because they work perfectly well. In fact, the best thing about them is the original development team went to great lengths to make sure the characters and environment in the FMVs looked exactly as they do in the game’s engine—called GrimE and based on the Jedi Knight engine, no SCUMM for Grim Fandango—so that players always saw familiar faces.
Speaking of actors and music, there isn’t anything bad to say here. The sound design is outstanding. The soundtrack mixes the jazzy tunes you need for the Noir vibes with traditional Mexican music, in the process creating a new style that instantly brings the name Grim Fandango to your mind. Hell the music is so good there were moments I stopped progressing just to take in as much of it as I could. It’s the kind of videogame music you’ll buy the soundtrack and listen to it every day!
Voice acting is superb, particularly because most of the actors are native Spanish speakers, making them much more authentic and convincing, but also because as actors they give strong performances. I often complain how screams and shouts in games feel half-assed, but in Grim Fandango the actors give their all and remain convincing no matter the situation.
Finally, there’s the gameplay and this is where I have a problem.
I hate the inventory system for Grim Fandango. I sincerely do. Instead of the grid-like inventory used in other LucasArts titles or the horizontal list-like inventory of games such as Sam & Max, you can’t see all the items you have at once. Manny’s suit is your inventory and every time you need an item, you’ll have to scroll through the entire inventory. Worst still is that it doesn’t remember what the last item you looked at was, and it even gave me the impression that the item positions changed from one look to another. I knew an item, a piece of bread, was two items to the right when I first looked, but the second time I had to scroll even further. It ties nicely with the item-drawing animations, as the inventory is essentially part of it but it’s clunky and can make you waste a lot of time. It actually made me grateful there aren’t any item combinations, because that would’ve bene a terrible hassle.
You’ll find traditional Mexican/Aztec designs and colours throughout the game!
As this is a LucasArts game, the puzzles are almost exclusively inventory ones and they are generally in the moon-logic realm. To be honest, I’m now convinced Schafer and his team were on peyote while designing some of these, because you would have to bombed out of your head—or be a long-time adventure gamer—to figure them out. For one puzzle you need to figure out the combination of numbers and days for a winning betting ticket using pieces of casual conversation, a plaque for a statue and the complaint of a worker. For another, you’ll drink alcohol with gold flakes just so you can have some stripsearch time with a sexy officer to get her metal detector. See what I mean?
As you progress, however, the complexity lowers and the last act has generally easy puzzles, which is slightly disappointing.
One of the best aspects of the remake for me is they built in a fan patch, released years ago, that changes the control scheme from the tank-controls the game originally had—inspired by Resident Evil, popular at the time of the game’s release—in favour of point & click controls. It’s much more comfortable though the originals are still present and work really well with the added gamepad support.
There’s tons of commentary to hear and enjoy!
I mostly played the game using the original rendering, which you can switch to at any moment in the game’s menu, but I did enjoy the developer commentary. In commentaries we often hear from the designers and storytellers about something fun they did, but this commentary is from the entire team. From their field trips for environment design ideas to the struggles to program certain things in the game, to how many pieces of different engines they cobbled together to build Grim Fandango. As a software developer, it was fascinating to know the ins and outs of the development side of this great title.
Tim Schafer mentions something very interesting during the commentary. He states that the game happened because of the amazingly talented people that came together at the time, but also because they and he infused in the game a lot of what was happening in their lives. And that if they decided to make the game now, it wouldn’t even get close to what we have, even if they made it with the best of intentions.
The original visuals aren’t the prettiest, but I still prefer to play with them!
Conclusion
Grim Fandango is a hell of a ride. There are grievances with some of its design decisions, especially with the inventory and the original controls, but they don’t really detract from the outstanding experience. It’s a folklore story with Noir soul, and one of the fines adventure games ever released. And I think Mr. Schafer is right, this game couldn’t be made today and have it make the same impact.
When I was a child, I was an extremely avid reader. My grandmother taught me to read before I started school and I had my head stuck in a book continuously throughout; at eight-years-old my father gave me my first Stephen King novel (The Eyes of the Dragon); and I spent many summer holidays with books on a blanket in my grandparent’s garden. So when I found adventure games, it was almost an epiphany.
I’ve mentioned this story several times already and it still brings a smile to my face whenever I recall it. When I was nine, my father chose to get me my first Amiga for Christmas and after spending ages looking at all the floppy discs that came with the hardware, I finally decided to give The Secret of Monkey Island a try. He asked what I was doing and I showed him the game, then gradually both he and my grandfather got sucked into playing it too. I remember being so proud of myself because I’d managed to figure out the grogs-and-mugs puzzle before they did (sorry Dad!).
I fell in love with adventures that day and afterwards I devoured anything in the genre I could get my hands on, particularly titles by LucasArts (damn you, Disney). I went sailing around the Caribbean with Guybrush (and envied Elaine) through the rest of the Monkey Island series; I learnt how to become a wizard with a horny and slightly sarcastic teenager in Simon the Sorcerer; and I searched for Princess Cassima with Prince Alexander in King’s Quest. My love of books and vivid imagination had been combined in a medium that I could not only read, but experience and influence for myself.
The Secret of Monkey Island started my love for adventure games.
Unfortunately however, as you grow older you start to realise society may not view you or your hobby in the same way that you do; and against your better judgement, you try to change the person you are just to fit in. When I progressed into secondary school it was hard enough being the shy, awkward, quiet kid who always sat the corner so as not to be noticed. But add to that the fact that I liked to play video games and preferred to spend time with the boys rather than my female counterparts, and it resulted in being quite a difficult period in my life.
To turn myself into something more ‘acceptable’, I gave up the games and forced myself to make friends with a group of girls when I became a teenager. I went from spending the weekend with the likes of Guybrush and Simon to instead hanging around shopping centres, going to sleepovers and dressing up for the local under-eighteen-night (admit it, you all did it). But while this change seemed to make me more tolerable to my peers, I can’t say it ever made me completely happy; and my teenage years aren’t exactly something I look back on with a great deal of fondness.
When you’re growing up, sometimes you feel you have to change to fit in.
I stopped playing video games for around eight years although I guiltily dipped back into them every once in a while, but after leaving college I grew apart from my female friends because I really had nothing in common with them. I preferred being a tomboy, I didn’t want to go out shopping with them every weekend, and I wasn’t particularly interested in any of their other ‘girly’ activities. Instead, I started making more male acquaintances of which there was one I frequently hung out with. Over time it became commonplace for me to watch him playing on his PlayStation 2 whenever we got bored with the television, and one day in 2004 he turned up at my apartment with an Xbox under his arm along with a copy of Fable.
That was the day I turned into a gamer who wasn’t ashamed to admit it. After thirty-minutes of playing I was hooked; my friend and I spent the next week ploughing through the title, trying to find every side-mission, figure out how to get through all the demon doors and meeting as many residents of Albion as possible. You know everyone has those gaming moments they’ll never forget? Well, Fable plays a massive part in mine.
After finding Fable, I no longer felt ashamed admitting I was a gamer.
For those who have never touched this role-playing game, let me give you a brief overview. You take control of a protagonist known only as the Hero of Oakvale after your home is raided by bandits and your entire family is killed, and you’re rescued by the wizard Maze who sees great potential in you. As with any RPG, it’s necessary to complete quests in order to advance the plot with optional side-missions if you wish to gain gold or renown, and your character can be levelled up by collecting Strength, Skill and Will experience. The world of Albion is dotted with activities other than quests: for example, towns have houses that can be bought and rented if you wish to become a property tycoon, or you can woo and marry someone of the same or opposite sex if you’re feeling amorous.
The thing that fascinated me most about Fable was the sense of character development as it was the first time I’d seen anything with a real alignment mechanic. Good deeds such as saving villagers result in you becoming a light-featured champion with a halo above your head and butterflies fluttering around you; while evil acts such as eating crunchy chicks see you turn with glowing red eyes and a malevolent haze around your legs. Other actions affect your Hero also; eating too much and drinking excessive amounts of beer will make you ill (as we’re all too aware in real life), and clothing can change how townspeople react to you depending on how attractive or scary you appear.
Whenever I play games with alignment, I tend to go for the good side…
Fable took around four years to create by a team of seventy developers at Big Blue Box, a satellite studio of Lionhead. This developer was originally formed as a breakaway from Bullfrog and was founded by Peter Molyneux in 1996. The majority of gamers know who this guy is and you’ve probably played one of his titles before; there aren’t many people who won’t have heard of classics such as Populous and Dungeon Keeper, or the upcoming ‘regeneration of the god game’ Godus that was funded via Kickstarter back in December 2012.
Despite the critical and financial success of his titles, Molyneux has managed to get a bit of a reputation for being somewhat over-ambitious – a trait that has caused many to lose faith in him. In the past he has issued enthusiastic descriptions of games under development, only to cause uproar with the gaming public when his promises weren’t delivered in the final version. This goes all the way back to Black & White in 2001 but the most well-known case is with Fable, when it was released in 2004 without many of the features Molyneux had talked about in interviews during its development.
Molyneux is known throughout the gaming community as being over-ambitious.
For example, he had previously mentioned that the Hero of Oakvale’s children would be significant in the title and that trees would grow as time passed, but both were completely missing from the released title. Molyneux reacted to complaints by posting a public apology on the official Lionhead forums in which he regretted his overhyping and the missing promises. He went on to say: “I have come to realise that I should not talk about features too early so I am considering not talking about games as early as I do… I will not mention them to the outside world until we’ve implemented and tested them, and they are a reality.”
Three years later, Molyneux said in an article with GameSpot: “After Fable, there was a pretty dark time where people looked at the game and compared it with what I said in the press, and they felt cheated. I realised I couldn’t keep on doing that. But that was very much a reflection of how we worked, because what I was talking about in the press was what we were experimenting with at that moment, and a lot of those experiments would sort of come out as you were making the game… People understandably get enormously upset about it… I think a lot of what we do is realise what we’ve done wrong and work to try and make that right. It’s far better than thinking that we get things right all the time.”
Molyneux said children would be significant in Fable, but this feature was missing.
So there tends to be a bit of a love-hate with both Molyneux and Fable for many gamers. But for myself, if it wasn’t for the developer and his title I wouldn’t be here writing this today.
Sure he may be over-ambitious, but where’s the problem in reaching for the stars and challenging the status-quo? He might make grand promises that don’t always work out, but what’s wrong with dreaming, and having enthusiasm and big ideas? I’m far more intrigued by and interested in a developer who takes risks, rather than those who churn out carbon-copy titles with little vision; I understand there are a lot of people out there who enjoy them, but in my opinion the world doesn’t need another Call of Duty or FIFA. Give me someone who’s going to push the boundaries, be inventive time after time, and create stories that remain in the minds and hearts of those who experience them for years afterwards.
If it weren’t for Fable, I honestly believe I wouldn’t be here creating this post. I wouldn’t be the gamer I am today and I’d be less happy with the person I’ve grown into since leaving school. I wouldn’t write for 1001-Up.com or The Mental Attic or have been fortunate enough to experience the wonderful times we’ve had together as a team. And, most significantly for me, I wouldn’t have made some of the great friends I’ve gotten to know both in person and online. That may sound like a bit of a grandiose statement and it’s possible there’s a touch of rose-tinted-ness here but, alongside finding The Secret of Monkey Island aged nine, the moment I picked up Fable was one that really shaped me.
There’s only one thing that makes my memory of the game a little melancholy: the fact I can’t go back and it’s impossible to experience it all over again for the first time. It’s extremely unlikely that anything will be able to capture that feeling of when I first stepped into the Hero of Oakvale’s shoes or met the mysterious Theresa, Blind Seeress. But that’s not to say I’m not going to try; I recently bought Fable Anniversary and Phil and I will be playing it together very soon. It won’t be the same, but I’m looking forward to experiencing the wonder of Albion through a new player’s eyes.
As is obvious from the size of our adventure category, I’m still a big fan of the genre. Fable gave me the opportunity to meet people with similar loves and they’ve have introduced me to newer titles that now reside in my heart alongside the classics, such as To The Moon and Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller. Lionhead’s RPG and its creator taught me that it’s good to dream big and, even if your ideas don’t always come to fruition, you shouldn’t let that stop you from being ambitious and pushing forward. I’d love to meet him one day, shake his hand and explain how much his ambition has done for me.
So, thank you to Peter Molyneux and the rest of the team that created the wonder that is Fable. I couldn’t have done this without you.
