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.
(Image Credit: Moby Games) Irina’s office makes me jealous!
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!
It’s no secret that I hate this game and Chronicles. They are the worst Core Design ever came up with for the Tomb Raider franchise. I hated every second of this game and its inane mechanics, especially the ‘power-up’ thing where Lara needs to perform certain actions to become stronger and be capable of climbing further and such. I remember web comics mocking this years ago, much like I did.
Recently I completed my Legend–Anniversary–Underworld Trilogy Classic Play run, and some people voted that I should play the ones I hate. So to prove that your votes matter, I will suffer through the indignity that is The Angel of Darkness.
For this run I’m trying a new format, just a commentary at the start and end of the video, but leaving the middle of it free of my lovely voice. Let me know in the comments if you prefer it this way or you’d like me to talk all the way through the videos.
As always, before the videos you’ll find a couple of polls. Vote and let me know how you want me to play future TR games and which games to pick for the next Classic Play series. I’ll be updating this post as I record more episodes so keep an eye out in the coming weeks!
The meetup started three years ago and each month has a theme, like many other game jams, but the event is relaxed and casual, the theme only there if you can’t come up with anything else. “If you have an idea for a game, then just do that, the theme is just there to help.” Colm mentioned. He sees 1Gam as an opportunity to meet new talent and catch up with friends. And that was the vibe I go from it all, these were old and new friends, sharing drinks, food and a good laugh over their ideas. There were developers, designers, artists, composers and some writers.
For this jam the theme was depth, but the games were an eclectic sort, reflecting the creative freedom One Game a Month is all about. One of them was a procedural music game. In another you controlled a quicksilver shaft across a road, avoiding giant spheres and other obstacles and another involved digging and shaping a landscape to merge spheres together. There was even a point & click adventure game, developed with a new set of tools for Unity that allow drag & drop game development.
But while other game jams focus on the competition and a winner, One Game a Month, as I previously mentioned, is more about the community. The devs there were just as interested in showing their game to the attendants as they were of sharing a good pint, a nice story and a good joke with everyone else. It was a terrific and relaxed environment and one that I feel is great for new developers. There isn’t any pressure to deliver, just enjoy your time there.
Sons of Sol looks cool already!
Last Thursday I went to another Dublin indie event at Colm’s suggestion, DubLUDO. Compared to 1Gam, Colm described this as a more official meet, for more professional indie developers. And if the quality of the products on show is anything to go by, he was spot on.
Owen Harris started DubLUDO two years ago with the goal of creating a space dedicated to quality. Not for marketing and sale, but for indie devs to show what they were working on and could receive honest feedback on how their game played. He told me it came to him after spending years going to evens and only hearing chats about marketing and sales, but none on polishing a game until it worked.
As it is now, DubLUDO is a more casual event where the different developers can meet and catch up and work with each other, but Owen aims for it to become that collaborative quality-focused space he envisioned.
As I arrived at the event in the Odessa Club, Owen took the mic for a speech and revealed the meaning behind the differently coloured tags everyone wore (and which confused me on arrival). Whoever had a blue tag was someone offering their services to indie developers, be it coding, art, music, etc. And those with green tags were looking for help. It might seem silly to you but I felt it was a big step in the direction of Owen’s ambition for the event. The moment he put the mic down, I saw a group of people with green and blue tags huddle together and exchange business cards and speak of their different projects. It worked, it got people to talk and hopefully collaborate on building great games and I tip my hat to Owen and co-organiser, wife and Larian Studios writer Char for the brilliant idea.
As for the games, the ones I tried hooked me instantly. Sons of Sol: Crow’s Nest is an interesting SHMUP. Your ship is part of a squad protecting a vessel through an asteroid belt. You need to destroy the giant incoming space rocks and fight off enemy fighters. Sounds straightforward so far but what makes it unique for me is that there are proper Newtonian physics at work. Thrust will generate momentum in whatever direction you’re facing, and if you want to move in the opposite direction, you’ll first have to come to a stop by using your thruster in the opposite direction and fight the current directional speed. It makes maneuvering in the asteroid field extremely challenging but also quite rewarding when you pull it off. The game is on pre-Alpha, but developer Kevin Murphy—a dude with a cool name—plans to hit kickstarter next year once he’s progressed enough. He’s currently on the lookout for a pixel artist, so if you’re interested, let me know and I’ll get you together!
F-Drum is pretty awesome!
Ballistic started out as “The Paddle Game,” before Andrew Carass decided to give it a proper name. I only had a few minutes to play it but it struck me as a wonderful party game. Each player takes control of a coloured paddle in a multicoloured-walled cage. There are light balls bouncing around the room, and you need to intercept them with your paddle to change their colour and that of the walls they hit. But with the balls coming from multiple angles, you need to turn your paddle to face them or they destroy you, forcing you to respawn and waste time and possibly lose the walls you had already claimed. It’s fast-paced, engaging and extremely fun! The game is Andrew’s final project for university and he has plans on taking it further, hoping Steam or Xbox Live and PSN.
The Umbrella Game is a project by Stephen Larkin and Peter Cantwell, two of Owen’s students. It’s an umbrella-flying simulator. As the name implies you control an umbrella and you float, glide and pivot to move through the environment. What I played was a proof of concept demo, but the guys assured me they had a lot more planned. And to keep with the feedback and quality focus of DubLUDO, they grilled me for honest feedback on what worked and what didn’t and I obliged.
F-Drum Masta is Esteban Moreno’s graduation project. It’s a visually simple game but it’s extremely fun and complex. It’s a rhythm game, like Rock Band or Guitar Hero, but instead of playing on a guitar or similar instrument, you press button on a small number-pad-like controller. Each button has a color and it matches one on screen. As the notes scroll towards a black & white bar on the edge of the screen you need to press the buttons on time to keep the music going. It sounds simple but with 9 possible buttons to press, it takes precision and coordination, and I don’t have much of that to be honest. Still, I managed to clear the intro level and Esteban congratulated me for being the only one to finish it that evening. Then again, I only had one pint of Guinness in me while the rest had about triple that amount by the time I arrived, so maybe being sober is the way to go.
As I’ll be living in Dublin now, I think I’ll go to more of these events and see what new stuff the Irish indie community comes up with and to keep an eye out on the progress on some of these titles I’ve seen.
I’d like to thank Colm Larkin once more for inviting me to both events!
During Rezzed 2015 I played a few minutes of the Toren demo and since then I’ve had my eye on the title. I finally got my hands on it, read on to find out what I think about it!
Toren, developed by Brazilian studio Swordtales and published by Versus Evil, puts you in the bare feet of the Moonchild, seeking to reclaim her memories, her sword and make it to the top of the eponymous tower to confront her greatest enemy, the Dragon, guided only by the ancient Mage, a figure who speaks in riddles and takes her on dream journeys to help her grow.
When I say grow I mean it literally. After a prologue in which the character seemingly dies, she reverts to a small baby, crawling on the floor and later taking her first steps. After waddling a bit she falls unconscious and wakes up a young girl. This is where the adventure truly starts, at the bottom of the tower. The Mage instructs us to push forward and reclaim our memories and sword, but to do so we must plant a seedling and help it grow in any way we can.
The main screen is amazing, and it shifts depending on your progress!
Toren’s plot is a Sun and Moon myth mixed with hints of the Tower of Babel (or some similar story). Exposition comes in fragments, sporadic and often cryptic, though the backstory of the Mage’s tower, how he ripped the Moon from the heavens and put it in a child’s body, and the Sun’s knight are at the core of game’s premise. Completing tasks in each dream journey gives you another message from the Mage, an advice, a warning or a bit of storytelling as well as aging the Moonchild a bit more until she eventually regains her former self. In the real world there are small fragments of lore, but they’re very few and very far in between, such as the one with the telescope that gives you fragments of Solidor’s story. Finally, when you die, it triggers a vision in which the mysterious horned sorcerer imparts his wisdom on you.
The plot itself is very simple and quite straightforward, but both the nature of the story or myth and the way it’s told open it to perhaps multiple interpretations, especially on what it all represents. You can see it as a Sun & Moon myth with some lessons on mortal hubris—the Mage—or you can see it as the journey of life, how everything seems a dream and we stumble and fall and learn from our mistakes. You can also see it as the constant struggle to defy fate, to impose our will on the world. Or you could even look at it as Light versus Dark, Good versus Evil—no pun intended on the publisher. The great thing about this kind of story is that everyone will find different things in the same plot, different lessons, which is the point of a myth in the end.
Dragon 1 – Moonchild 0
When you first launch Toren it recommends playing with a controller, but I played it with my keyboard & mouse (yes, I’m a rebel!), and the controls are extremely simple with only three buttons: jump, interact and look. The latter is available at all times, to look at important details in the tower but you’ll rarely need it. Interaction can be anything from moving a pillar or clinging to one in a strong breeze to attacking with the sword.
Jumps feel odd in Toren. There is no weight to them. The character leaps as though she were on low gravity and I often found jumping was faster than walking, especially considering you don’t need a running start. With the way they work it’s sometimes difficult to measure jumps and I often overshot the distance and fell down the tower. There’s also some issues with the controls, as I often found myself mashing the jump button but still the character fell of an edge.
Moonchild in awe!
Swordplay is clumsy, but as you control a girl with an oversized sword, I don’t mind it. Combat itself, however, is pointless except when fighting the Dragon. The few enemies you face you don’t even need to kill as jumping makes you somehow invincible to their attacks. If they do manage to latch on to you, a small round of button mashing (or furious mouse clicking for me) will take them off you. You don’t have any health to speak off so an enemy clinging to you is more an annoyance than a hazard.
I wish the dream sequences had varied game mechanics, as it would’ve helped the surreal and highly conceptual presentation. But instead, they all boil down to these three steps: trace symbols on the ground with salt, do some platforming and listen to what the Mage says. The salt pouring in particular gets old very quick because the character moves at a snail’s pace while performing the action. Only the first dream sequence offers a nice change of pace with some underwater platforming. It’s not a big change, but the physics work differently enough to make it refreshing.
Overall, the game lacks challenge. Only the dragon provides a hazard…sometimes. If you do die, you’ll respawn at the nearest checkpoint and get to go again, no penalty or anything. At one point in the game, in a dream sequence, you need to die on purpose to the Dragon’s petrifying breath and respawn to make use of yourself as a pillar to avoid the beast’s attack. I found that a novel idea, each death helping you overcome the challenge, but you only see it used that one time. Some checkpoints are considerably far away from where you’re likely to die, making the trek back a tad annoying.
Movement is one of my greatest gripes with the game, not just jumping. This game loves to put you in forced walking segments. What I mean by this is that you might be running (and as she ages, the Moonchild runs faster) but then reach a scripted walking segment and things will slow down to a crawl and it hurts the game’s pacing and drops the fun-value considerably. You know a mechanic is annoying when you sigh and say “not this again.”
The tower is surreal, rock and metal coexisting with grass and a growing tree. It looks amazing. Sadly, the Moonchild’s models don’t have the same level of polish. Her hair is stiff and moves like a thick rope. Worse still, the character’s body will often poke through the clothes. The character also looks extremely stiff in cutscenes. One example is right at the start, the room with the well, the character looks in awe at the structure and looks like a doll with its mouth open instead of an amazed girl. The expression doesn’t feel natural.
The rest of the limited cast, including enemies, look very good. I particularly liked the druid-ish look of the Mage–though he too is as stiff as the Moonchild–and the amazing cape Solidor wears. The Dragon is especially good, as even if it looks like a dark World of Warcraft Faerie Dragon, it’s convincing and intimidating. The way its breath petrifies things and spreads like darkness is really cool.
The Mage imparting his wisdom!
The music is perhaps the best part of the entire game. There are calming melodies, some more mysterious, the prerequisite action tunes and some with chants and other wonderful vocals, and they all have a tribal vibe to it that matches perfectly with the game’s style and plot. I particularly love the ending theme, which plays during the credits. It’s perhaps the most memorable song in the entire game. Voice acting beyond the Mage is nonexistent and the man speaks in a made up language (I think) so it’s difficult to judge how good or bad the acting is. What I can judge is that the voice acting for this character will often cut out mid-sentence and sometimes the environmental sound effects will drown out his voice.
Toren isn’t a long game. I finished my first playthrough in one 3 hour sitting. But, as I finished it, I saw a cutscene where the Mage speaks of “changing fate” while showing I still hadn’t found all dream sequences. At any point in the game, you can take a look at the Papyrus in the game menu to read up on previous ‘conversations’ and you can also take a look at the Tree of Life, a diagram showing you eight possible dream sequences. I’ve found four or five, and I’ve played through the game three times. So while the game is short, the search for all the sequences keep you playing–unless you find them all in one go, in which case that’s all you’re getting out of Toren.
At your mercy!
Grab hold of something!
Dragon Shield, not fair! Love the clash effect!
Under da sea!!
“In my world your dress is crimson, in your dreams it’s white.”
They grow up so fast!
The Abyss is creepy!
One of the many visions!
Keep a flame lit or you’ll freeze. Love the defrost effect on the tree!
Just plant your sword and hold on!
The haze on the edges of the screen help sell the dream sequences!
Moonchild in awe!
Dragon vs Moonchild. Round 1, FIGHT!
Conclusion
Toren’s story or myth is wonderful and amazingly told, opening itself to multiple interpretations. Sadly, some bad design choices, a lack of challenge and an unpolished protagonist model keep it from reaching true excellence!
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!
As promised and overdue, here’s the new puzzle from my noggin and for yours to decipher. A simple riddle. I’ll admit I’m not the best at making there. I love solving them but they’re not my creative forte. But I wanted to create one as a challenge so here it is. I do apologise, I think I made it a bit too obscure. As always, drop the solution in the comments or wait two weeks for the solution:
“We rarely meet, but when we do, the party’s astronomical. Everyone is welcome to see us, but if you pry, we’ll hurt you.”
Now for this week’s puzzle I’m going back to LucasArts for a three-part puzzle. It’s from The Curse of Monkey Island: the Recruitment. As with every title in the series, the great hero and Mighty Pirate, Guybrush Threepwood needs to find a crew and a worthy vessel. Thankfully for him there’s a trio of pirate barbers in Puerto Pollo. The barbers are Haggis McMutton, Cutthroat Bill and Edward Van Helgen.
The big puzzle is to get them all to work for you, but each of them has a requirement. Haggis won’t go with you unless he respects you, and he won’t unless you show him how strong you are. Being Scottish, he goes for caber tossing and that is too much for spindly Guybrush. You need to challenge Van Helgen to a duel and beat him, and he’s just too good with a pistol. Finally, Bill wants to know how good you are at treasure hunting, and no, those wooden coins in your pocket won’t be enough.
The finest Pirate Barbers in all the seas!
The three puzzles are all about cheating. For Haggis it’s finding a light and bouncy log that doesn’t require much strength. For Van Helgen it’s choosing something non-lethal for the duel and then change the rules midway, to prove to him just how much of an underhanded bastard you can be. And Bill, well, you just need to be extremely friendly, get his jawbreaker candy and use that to relieve someone else of the pressures of jewelry teeth.
What I loved about this sequence is how ridiculous it gets. Bill’s starts out simple, just Guybrush screwing over someone to take advantage of the situation, but when you get to the end, you’ll have met a guy terrified of a giant chicken, El Pollo Diablo. Haggis’ challenge can go on forever unless you realise how to bend the rules to your advantage. And nothing beats Ven Helgen’s banjo solo…until you interrupt him.
Time to jam Guybrush!
The Curse of Monkey island is not my favourite Monkey Island game, but I will always remember it because it was a game that led me to a really good friend. We’d been discussing games and we discovered our mutual love for Monkey Island, so he lent me his copy of Curse, and we spoke about it at length for the next few days. And we both laughed while talking about the crew.
I’d love to know if any of you have fun memories with a Monkey Island title, or any other game for that matter!
Double Fine’s Broken Age is an episodic point & click adventure game. In it we play as Vella and Shay, a girl seeking to escape her fate as a sacrificial maiden and a boy looking for real adventure. They both get far more than they expected.
At the start of each of Broken Age’s episodes, you get to choose whose story you’ll play first. I am a firm believer in “Ladies First” so I picked Vella. She lives in the baker town of Sugar Bunting and when we first meet her it’s the day of the Maiden’s Feast, when she and other girls in town have the honour of becoming sacrifices to appease the dreaded monster Mog Chothra. According to the elders, the Mog appear once every 14 years and if they don’t have any sacrifices, they’ll ravage the town. Her parents and sister are proud but her grandfather hates it and wishes they fight the monster instead of submitting, and that’s exactly what she does, escaping her fate and starting a journey to kill the beast.
Shay’s life is the exact opposite. He wakes up every day to his mollycoddling Mom and Dad, faces on the monitor. He doesn’t even refer to them as parents but as “Computer,” realising he’s alone in his spaceship. He’s outgrown the knitted animatronics around him as well as the different and predictable adventure ‘scenarios’ he plays every day. But when, out of boredom, he decides to go off-script and let a scenario literally derail, he meets Marek, a strange person in a wolf costume. He tells Shay that while he’s been playing around, the galaxy was at war. Wanting to help, Shay joins Marek in rescuing helpless creatures, refugees of war.
If you’re planning on visiting Meriloft, pack your cloudshoes!
Each of the character’s first episode plays out independently, though you can freely switch between them. At the end there’s a big revelation and their paths cross momentarily before they switch places. I won’t go into the details so as to not spoil anything though. The first episode sets the first pieces of the story in place and the second deals with truths, about the characters, the world and the story.
While it’s true their first episodes are independent, you’ll need to switch between them at times during the second episode, as information presented to one of them is useful to the other. An example is a tune Shay hears during this episode. It’s useless for him, but it’s the clue for one of Vella’s puzzles. As the episode advances, the need to switch between characters becomes commonplace and in fact the last segment’s central puzzle revolves around it.
Prima Doooooooooooooooooom!
Vella is strong and decisive, but with a devious streak that comes to play when she needs to get things done. She’s likeable and relatable, but deeply flawed, as her determination often makes her ready to do and sacrifice anything so long as it advances her goals. She’s not above lying and breaking things to get ahead, but it’s all to save the world from having to sacrifice more maidens and to save her family from the monster’s ire. Adventure game protagonists always toe the line between likeable and despicable because of the sometimes horrendous actions they take and how they hurt others, but you can never really fault Vella for what she does, as perhaps we’d all do the same in her place.
Shay on the other hand speaks to the desire of independence we’ve all held at some point in our lives. The need to prove our mettle, to show the world and ourselves that we’re capable of accomplishing everything we set our minds to. In Shay’s case, whatever harm he inflicts on others is due to pure naïveté and ignorance. In many ways he’s still a child and as he learns of the world, we learn with him, but he’s never a faceless avatar.
Shay can be very resourceful when he needs to be, just as Vella!
What I’m trying to say with all of this is that characterisation, for the protagonists, is outstanding. The characters don’t only have depth but they’re capable of growth and understanding and they come out the other end of their journey forever changed, stronger and better.
Secondary characters are just as well developed. Vella and Shay’s families are phenomenal characters, as are the priestesses of the Dead Eye God, minor characters with a surprising amount of depth and a relationship that left me smiling, as I didn’t see it coming. Whil Weaton plays a hilarious hipster lumberjack/metalworker and he’s a joy to talk to and sometimes manipulate.
The villains on the other hand lack polish. Their personalities are one-dimensional, just evil bastards with no other traits. I’m not against a purely evil character, but when everyone else has so much depth, they feel bland in comparison. Their motivation, central to the plot, is a bit weak and the explanation isn’t really satisfying, which is perhaps the most negative thing I can say about Broken Age’s story. There’s a lot going on, and the journey is terrific, but the main conflict lacks punch. The pacing is also a bit off, with the reveals and exposition rushed near the end, to raise the tension before the big climax, but without giving it the proper time to develop.
What the game and its writers did wonderfully is play with your preconceptions and expectations. When you first experience each of the protagonists’ worlds, you’ll make assumptions on genre and where the plot might go, but then the game flips those around and it keeps doing that until the credits roll. They’re subtle reveals, no exposition needed, just things happening that make you reconsider what you held as truth a few minutes before. It’s quite amazing how the game and its developers play with you as much as you play their game.
Puzzles in the game are varied. You have your typical fetch & inventory puzzles, some logic based and others based on timing. The latter are predominant in Vella’s 2nd episode. Broken Age might be the first game in a long time to make me pull out a sheet of paper and pencil to draw and make notes, as there are often so many tiny clues you need to remember to finish puzzles. It’s not something I’m used to seeing in modern adventure games and I felt happy for the challenge, to test not only my deduction skills but my memory as well. With perhaps a couple of exceptions, such as a roundabout Heimlich maneuver, there aren’t any puzzles that are too outlandish and there’s mostly a definite logic in place or a clue somewhere around you. Puzzles can be challenging but they’re never frustrating.
Some puzzles are simple, like the eggs, but that ladder on the other hand might stump you!
While puzzles are central to a point & click adventure game, I do have a couple of issues with some gameplay elements. First is the position of the inventory, located at the lower left side of the screen…right where you’re going to be moving and clicking most of the time to explore the environment. I lost count of the times I opened the inventory instead of moving to where I wanted to go. What makes it even worse is that you don’t even need to click to open the inventory but just hover over it, so it gets in the way quite frequently.
Secondly, this game could’ve used a fast-travel option. The spaceship partially addresses this with teleporters in a couple of locations, but outside the backtrack trips from one puzzle to the other will get long and tiresome, especially during the later stages of Vella’s first episode and all of Shay’s second one. A simple map would’ve done wonders to make the game a bit more fluid.
Finally, I thoroughly dislike how conversations handle in Broken Age. Unlike other titles in the genre where you can skip individual lines of dialogue—if you’re a fast reader like me—conversations in the game handle much like old-school FMV adventures. Each conversation is a cutscene so if you decide to skip ahead you’ll miss an entire discussion.
Before he answers make sure not to skip!
Wil Wheaton’s voice might be one I instantly recognise but the voice talent in Broken Age is outstanding. Even the tiniest and seemingly insignificant character sounds convincing, even the Maiden airheads you meet throughout the game. You can feel in their voice how convinced they are that they’re better than others by being sacrificial maidens. It’s the same with the soundtrack, there’s a piece for every location and screen and it perfectly sells the mood for the place and situation. There’s a particular chime tune at the end of the game that I found extremely memorable, even though it lasts a short time. It’s beautiful and relaxing and successfully conveys the message “This is the end.”
One of Broken Age’s most striking features is its visual design. A paper-like texture that makes it all seem straight out of a children’s pop-up book. Most of the places you explore and the people you interact with are bright and colourful, vibrant and alive and they offer a striking contrast with the villains, who are grayish and faded, with darker colours and purposes. The use of colour, much like in other forms of art, helps transmit ideas and feelings as effectively as words.
One of the many childish scnearios in Shay’s ship
Oh Curtis, we love your stools! And all your stool jokes!
Maidens dress in the mot outrageous costumes!
He can build anything…with sand.
Very solid, painfully so.
Just as the first episode, the second begins with a choice
Shay’s ship is full of his childhood mementos
One of the cleverest puzzles in the game
When you’re desperate, even the craziest plans sound reasonable
The Star Chart sets the Navigation Scarf! Yes, Scarf!
Only person I’ve ever seen sad because she didn’t get sacrificed to a giant monster!
The dreaded Mog Chothra has seen better days!
Conclusion
Broken Age is perhaps one of the best adventures games I’ve played in the past years. It has a wonderful journey, terrific characters and it offered me something many adventures have failed in the past years: a challenge!
Last month, during Rezzed 2015, I had the chance of visiting the Versus Evil room and check out some of the of the publisher’s amazing lineup for 2015. Toren drew my eye with its surreal environments and ICO-like gameplay, but the one to really tickle my geekiness was the visually simpler yet much quirkier Guild of Dungeoneering, a card-based game where you build the dungeon for an adventurer but then use cards to help him fight, becoming part Dungeon Master and part player.
Last Thursday I met Colm Larkin from Gambrinous (a word that according to Colm comes from an urban dictionary and means, “to be full of beer”) during the One Game a Month meetup they organise, to talk a bit about the game and its development.
Guild of Dungeoneering’s (GD) started out as a simple One Game a Month prototype, one of many he developed over the months, to get his feet wet in game development and design. As time passed he decided he wanted to turn one of them into a full-fledged game and picked this title because it evoked fun memories from his childhood, as he fondly remember playing Dungeons & Dragons with his older brothers. The RPG is the title’s strongest inspiration, as well as many other tabletop games.
Might look like a potato had, but this chump is powerful!
At the start of development, Colm thought it would be a three-month project. It’s now over a year in development with four full-time members on the team and a part-time artist, this in part thanks to Versus Evil taking them on as publisher. Once he had a demo built, Colm says he spent the next few months looking for a publisher, but not large ones like EA or Sony but the small but powerful like Versus Evil and Revolver Digital.
It’s thanks to having a publisher that they’ve been able to go to events such as GDC, PAX and Rezzed, so they can show the game’s progress and core gameplay. The build they showed at Rezzed and which other sites covered in the past months, consisted of a single dungeon to explore. The version I saw had significant progress, having multiple dungeons, catchy theme-tunes (more on that later) and the ability to build up your guild, to expand its rooms and skills, giving you more adventurers and powers to choose from when you go out exploring for loot & glory.
During Rezzed I thought Puuba games The Weaponographist was the only non-unity title on show, as every other developer seemed to favour the engine, but I realise now that Guild of Dungeoneering was the other one, as they’re using Flash, Flex and Adobe Air for its development. The upside to this is that it even runs smoothly on Colm’s 8-year-old laptop, which for me only expands its potential customer base, as people still using older operating systems will be able to play it without issue.
One of GD’s more striking’s features is its simple yet charming art style. Colm mentioned he interviewed a number of artists before settling for his friend Fred Mangan who lives in Australia. He based the style on what he could do on his own, with his own drawing skills if he didn’t have an artist working for him. Fred liked the idea of ‘purposely bad’ and polished Colm’s original ideas and sketches into the current look. He’s one of two members of the team not in Dublin, the other being the game’s primary designer who lives in London.
One interesting thing to note is that the artist has done very little in the way of animation for GD. Colm says they “animate by cheating,” making all animations programmatic, adding effects via code.
Once a battle starts, you control the player’s actions!
For the music, they went for traditional Irish music, which works really well in a dungeon-crawler fantasy game. The composer actually found a traditional singer and between the two of them created the game’s theme song “This is the Guild of Dungeoneering,” which plays from the main menu and which they were excited to have people hear. In addition to that, there are many more in-game songs. Every time I died for example, a song would play out lamenting my death but basically saying, “meh, there’s more where that one came from!” Helping to sell the cynical corporate guild idea Colm loves, to make you question if you’re really the good guys or just some monstrous organisation sending chumps (the starting class) out to die.
We shared a laugh when the composer, Steve Stems, turned to us, dead serious and said, “I hate the song,” referring to the main theme. “It’s good, but I’ve heard it so many times and it’s been stuck in my head, I hate it now.” He mentioned.
Part of the deal with a publisher is that they need a fixed goal as they can’t afford to keep a game in development indefinitely. Because of that, and in his new role as Director—or Overlord as I suggested, to make the titles more interesting—Colm has had to shut down some of the team’s ideas for content, even something ‘simple’ as battle music, keeping it focused on the single player dungeon-building, guild-expanding experience. There will be no overarching plot, just different tiers of adventures and possibly even challenge/harder modes. As we spoke, and joined by Owen Canavan (another developer in the team) and Steve, I had the opportunity to see Colm in his director role live, mediating with team members and keeping them focused on the end goal. It was perhaps one of the most interesting moments of the night as you rarely see indie devs talking shop with one another.
Colm says that if the game does well and has its audience, they’ll spend the next year developing add-on content, which could even include some multiplayer functionality. One mode he’d love to see in the game is a cooperative/competitive multiplayer mode, where you have to decide if you’ll use your resources to help your adventurer, or screw with the other player’s little chump.
One question I love to ask developers is what would they do with their game if money and time weren’t a consideration, if they could do everything they wanted, what one thing would they add to a game. Colm was perhaps the first one to tell me, “I have no clue. I’m more used to working with the constraints of time and money!”
You build the full dungeon, down to monster placement.
More than anything, he’s sensible and grounded on Gambrinous and GD’s future. He’s been working full-time on it for over a year after quitting his previous job. Thanks to a start-up incentive by the Irish Government and the publishing deal with Versus Evil, he could hire staff and pay them, but everything from expansions to sequels to other games in his head all depend on GD being successful. “If it is, we’ll use it to build more fun stuff…if it doesn’t, then we can at least say ‘we had fun building this thing we love’ and we’ll disband.”
Guild of Dungeoneering is set to release later this year and Colm is confident they can finish the game within the next two months. As he states, “We’ve already added systems, now we’re adding content.”
I want to thank Colm Larkin for taking the time to talk to me and for introducing me to the One Game a Month event. I had a fantastic time and I will be talking about that soon.
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!
It’s been two weeks and no one even tried to solve my numeric puzzle. For the record, the answer is 22.
Sadly, I don’t have a new puzzle this week. I’ve been without internet for some time and it’s made it difficult for me to do the proper research on certain topics for a puzzle I have in mind, but I will try to have a new one for next week. Also, inventory puzzles are a bit difficult to describe in text without making them too obvious, so those I’m working on slowly and carefully to make them appealing and challenging for readers.
This week I’m actually going to talk about two puzzles, from the same game and both really clever. These are two from Tomb Raider: Anniversary and are simple yet clever.
The first one is at the start of the Greece segment of the game. You come across a panel depicting the Perseus constellation and the different stars are targetable. There is a switch in front to reset them if you shoot the wrong one. The puzzle consists on shooting the right set of stars to open doors and make things happen. The clues are very close and don’t take much exploration to find.
It’s an extremely simple puzzle, but I like it for the sole reason that it involves gunplay in its execution. Many action-adventure games separate the action from the adventure, the guns from the puzzling, but TR Anniversary embraced both and this was just one of the many times where you use Lara’s weaponry as part of a puzzle solution. And because of that it deserves a spot on The Weekly Puzzle.
The second puzzle I’ll mention is in the Temple of Khamoon. You find yourself in a room with four rotating pillars, each with four symbols. If you rotate one, its adjacent pillars do so as well. The point of the puzzle is to align the symbols together, and you have murals depicting the images you should align.
What makes this an interesting puzzle for me is that the clue can also trick you into believing you needed to have the pictures facing the murals, and that is incorrect and made the puzzle twice as long as it should’ve been. Perhaps it was just my lack of attention or maybe the designers intent was for it to serve as both clue and misdirection, but either way, I found it very clever and figuring out the pattern and rotation order to properly align the pillars was a joy.
(Image Credit: Stella’s Walkthroughs) Four pillars, four images, can you match them?
The Tomb Raider series is filled with hundreds of puzzles, and if you have a favourite one, share it!
What are Annoying Game Mechanics? It’s those mechanics that when you encounter them you can’t help but groan. You’ve seen them at their best and worst, but a part of your is just, well, annoyed!
If you find the series name familiar, then you might remember it from its 1001Up days. But now, after careful and hard negotiations (not really, the 1001Up crew are lovely people), AGM has made its move to The Mental Attic. Hope you enjoy it here as much as you did before and make sure to visit AGMs former home as well!
This week the mechanic I’m having an issue with is Platforming!
I’m not talking about platformer games, not Mario, Sonic (no matter how bad some Sonic platforming gets) or even Shadow of the Colossus and Assassin’s Creed. No, what I mean is platforming in games from other genres. Most commonly, you see them in action adventures, to serve as a break from the adventure and/or action elements.
When done right, they can enhance the game’s experience by giving you an additional challenge to overcome or simply be a break from the overall gameplay and give you something fresh and exciting! The problem implementations are those that lack any form of challenge or more specifically the risk of failure. If there isn’t even a chance you might mess up, there’s no excitement possible. You’ve seen these, the obligatory climbing sequences on rails. If something bad happens it’s because you deliberately failed or it was scripted to happen, as the game attempts to use the platforming to enhance its cinematic side and not the game’s experience.
Then there’s Lazy Platforming, where your character does it mostly on its own, jumping over gaps and obstacles without needing your input. These aren’t necessarily bad but they are very tricky.
The staple of an annoying mechanic is that it’s seen both good and bad days. The following are some of the best and most disappointing uses:
Good:
Overall, the Legend of Zelda uses Lazy Platforming, but Skyward Sword gave it an interesting twist: Stamina. When you run, climb or performing any platforming you have to pay attention to your stamina. If it runs out you’re in for a long and painful fall or left out of breath and helpless, until it refills.
The Handheld 2D Zelda titles though have been using Active Platforming ever since Link’s Awakening, by means of a jumping item. Call it a feather or a cape, you often need to time and perfect your jumps to progress and really master them if you plan on collecting secrets.
Even with the Autograb feature, the LAU Tomb Raider games have amazing platforming because there is a great degree of challenge involved. You’re never just climbing, but also avoiding traps, making tricky jumps or even leaps of faith when the camera won’t do what you want it to. It keeps it exciting.
Even more so than the previous example are the Core Tomb Raider games, the ones developed by Core Design. In these the platforming was superb and without autograb you had to make sure the jump was spot on and collecting secrets was extremely challenging.
The Batman Arkham games use a mix of active and lazy platforming. Lazy for running and jumping but active for everything else, and in a game where everything is a hazard and everyone is out to kill you, the platforming damn well works. The best part of it is the gliding, a twist to platforming by giving you limited flight.
Speaking of limited flight, Soul Reaver invented that mechanic. Gliding as part of platforming was one of Raziel’s signature moves and possibly the hardest thing to master in these games.
In an already difficult game, Dark Souls keeps it going with some very tricky platforming. With varying running speeds and environmental hazards, the game will make you dread the idea of jumping a gap. But then again, Dark Souls makes you dread every other sequence as well.
InVerbis Virtus does platforming really well. Not only do you have your usual moving platforms but with the use of its spells, the platforming becomes another puzzle you need to solve. In this case platforming isn’t a break from the overall gameplay but it part of it.
Having said so, there is a degree of frustration when the voice recognition doesn’t pick up what you’re saying.
Bad:
Resident Evil, from the 4th installment onwards started using Lazy platforming and for what it adds to the experience they might as well have cut it out. Worst of all are the high-action chase sequences that are nothing more than quick-time events disguised as platforming.
Thief (not the original series but the reboot) is guilty of the worst kind of Lazy Platforming, the one that adds nothing to the experience. You’ll climb pipes and ledges in 3rd person but there are completely bland and could’ve been replaced with something a bit more exciting, maybe some grappling and climbing like they did in Far Cry 4.
The Castlevania Lords of Shadow series—excluding Mirror of Fate—also features plenty of worthless platforming, especially climbing sequences where you only press UP, before something big, dramatic and entirely cinematic happens.
Platforming in Devil May Cry is a mess and rarely works well. When it does it’s brilliant but more often than not it stumbles and just frustrates you. In this series’ case the problem mostly lies with the fixed camera, as it will often obscure the ledges or items you’re jumping towards. And as is always the case with fixed camera your directional input changes with the angles, making it even more frustrating!
Ugh…that jump…
Fly Link Fly!!
The zip-cord added a lot of challenge…and finicky controls
Stamina changed the game for Skyward platforming
These games had hardcore platforming
Pretty much how you’ll overcome any obstacle
Fixed camera angles and platforming do not mix!
At least these segments are short…
Just push the directional keys and you’ll get through this, no challenge whatsoever!
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!
This week’s puzzle isn’t from an old game, but a rather recent one, about a year or two old, Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller. It’s one of the earliest puzzles in the game, and involves using Erica’s postcognition to figure out the correct way to disable a bomb. You do this by using the power and figuring out the order in which the killer wired the bomb so you can then use the reverse process to defuse it.
It’s very clever!
It’s not an overly complicated puzzle but I always felt it was very clever. It wasn’t an inventory puzzle but a logic one. Each wire gave you a different vision and you had to deduce the correct order from these jumbled images. The Cognition season has plenty of similar puzzles, but this one in particular has always been my favourite, though the Cordelia/Erica power puzzle in a later episode comes really close. But that’s a subject for another week.
Have you made progress with my little puzzle from last week? Next week is the solution to it and a new one, so make sure you come back!
