Damn, every once in while I think about setting up a blog to write a few lines about games I liked enough to finish. Posting in this thread instead might actually get seen by somebody other than search engine bots.
Okay, maybe not, but at least I don't have to set up a blog. Guess this will be my post.
Jan:
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Afterparty (Night School, 2019) - Modern 2.5d-point-and-click adventure.
I liked this one, even though none of the characters or any particular bit of the writing really spoke to me. Just a very nicely art-directed, charming game that doesn't overstay its welcome. And, if you're really vibing with it or come back to it years later, has branching story-lines and outcomes for some real replay-value.
Played on Game Pass.
4/5
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Kentucky Route Zero (Cardboard Computer, 2013-2020) -
If this game is for you, it's probably a big deal. If it isn't, you will probably bounce off of it so hard that you will eternally wonder why it's such a big deal for others.
Looked at from the widest angle, it's a 2.5d-point-and-click adventure game. More zoomed in however, it's a very intertextual work of fiction and is jam-packed with multiple layers of references to various fields of culture including films, plays, early computer games, literature, modern art in various mediums, academic linguistics, poetry, politics, all tied into the game's quite specific setting and location.
The game has heavy, heavy emphasis on character dialog and very few puzzles, so much so that the ratio of interaction and reading reaches visual novel levels. And it is literally reading, too - no voice-overs. I have watched many-a-variety-streamer bail out of this game real quick after realizing that fact. Those who soldier on will often find that the game's incredible balancing act of being quite specific in setting, but incredibly varied in its references, just leaves them dumbstruck.
The secret to enjoying this game to me has been to follow its references outside of the game and slowly get into the creators' headspace. Doing so has literally expanded my mind - I learned about so many things and got so many new contexts to put the world into out of it. That's why I fall into the "big deal" category mentioned above.
Thing is though - I only played that quite short last episode in January. The rest of the game I played as it came out - over the course of 6 years. It's not that hard to go on a game-directed self-education adventure if you have 6 years to do so, with plenty of time between each episode to let it all sink in.
Having it all put on your plate at once - oof. This is a game that could be taken on like a book-club project. But how large is the intersection in the Venn-diagram of book-club participants and gamers?
(Very personally) 5/5
Feb:
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Last Day of June (Ovosonico, 2017) - Another modern indie take on a 3d-point-and-click. This one certainly has a striking look to it, but I found out I can't technically call it original - the whole thing is an expanded adaptation of a Jess Cope-directed music video for a song by prog-rocker Steven Wilson. And while it looks and sounds great and for long stretches is an actual game - puzzles and everything - I couldn't quite get over the overt sentimentality of the story. Little too on-the-nose.
EGS freebie.
3/5
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A Plague Tale: Innocence (Asobo Studio, 2019) - Third person stealth/action-adventure. Sets a new standard for premium-tier indie games, which now is "basically indistinguishable from AAA titles", Incredibly pleasant to look at (I took so many screenshots!) and a really smooth gameplay experience, albeit not very challenging at all and despite all the polish, it's not quite on the level of recent Uncharted and Tomb Raider titles either. Quite original scenario though, at least for a video game.
Played on Game Pass.
4/5
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GRIS (Nomada Studio, 2019) - Looks and feels like a stylized 2D-metroidvania, but: 1) You actually cannot die, 2) There are sections that look like an epic boss-battle, but again, there is no actual peril. Now this might sound very bad, but I actually loved it. The game's art-direction totally connected with me and there is an actual challenge in there, too, which is finding the secret collectibles. And looking for them was very enjoyable because of the great level design, exploring and beating the little platforming challenges/puzzles had me so captivated I completed the thing in two afternoons.
3.5/5
Mar:
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FAR - Lone Sails (Okomotive, 2018) - Amazing little indie-gem of a 2d action-adventure with a pretty unique vehicle mechanic - you pilot a steam-powered vehicle through a strangely barren and abandoned land towards an unknown destination. Lovely presentation all around (again, took a lot of sceenshots). Short game, totally playable in one long afternoon, left an impression though.
4/5
Apr:
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Broken Age (Double Fine, 2014-2015) - Not-so-modern take on a 2d-point-and-click-adventure by the point-and-click veterans from Double Fine. Largely powered by nostalgia and paid for by a record-breaking early Kickstarter campaign, this one was nice-enough-I-guess, but I'm glad I waited all these years to get it for literally four bucks in a PSN sale.
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Close to the Sun (Storm in a Teacup, 2019) - Steampunk-ish walking simulator with occasional run-away-from-the-monster action bits. Some bits look very good, some oddly generic. Great voice-acting and pretty good soundtrack. This one was pretty grating towards the end for me, but that might be because of my strong bias against all things Steampunk. A more objective problem with the game is the hilariously bad optimization, I had to put the game down to 720p in order to keep the framerate nice and smooth. On an RTX2070.
EGS freebie.
2/5
May:
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Arise - A Simple Story (Piccolo Studio, 2019) - Indie action-adventure with an interesting time-manipulation mechanic that shifts the environment. Tugged at my heart strings. Really beautiful game, great soundtrack. Some parts of it struck me as very weird though. Like, one level is sort of an extended reflection on pregnancy and it's, uh. You'll get what I mean if you ever play it.
3/5
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Observation (NoCode, 2019) - Narrative-heavy first person puzzle game, set on a stricken space station. Gameplay twist: You don't play an astronaut, you play as the station's AI and interact with the station through video camera feeds and robotic drones, which you control in first-person perspective. Liked this one a lot, I also posted about it
here.
4/5
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Hob (Runic, 2017) - is a fixed-camera third person action-adventure centered around exploring the map and enhancing your wea- ok, look, it's a Zelda clone, but it replaces Nintendo's cutesy formula with completely non-verbal story-telling and puts a bit of gore on top (which you can optionally disable so your kids can play, too).
It's about as easy to get into and as addictive as Link to the Past or Link Between Worlds, but shorter by about a third. Enjoyed every minute of it, but ultimately it lacked that extra special something to make it a five.
EGS freebie.
4/5
Jun:
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OVIVO (Izhard, 2017) - Neat (and short) little monochrome platformer with cool art direction (every level is a cool piece of ink-style artwork that zooms out after you complete it to reveal the art behind the platforms) and gravity-bending mechanics. It's so tidy and tight, I would like to have said 5/5, but I feel like the music could have been a little more integral to the game (particularly since there are almost no sound fx) and it seems the main item collection achievement was never fully debugged and thus is easy to miss through no fault of your own, thus:
4/5
Jul:
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Mutazione (Die Gute Fabrik, 2019) - Puzzle-less adventure game in the vein of Oxenfree, but with the magical realism of the story slanting more towards the magical. This might be the most itch.io/tumblr-esque game I ever played and still ultimately enjoyed. Seriously, this game at one point has dialog that unironically goes "your feelings are valid" and credits a "Diversity Consultant".
But more than anything else, it's supremely chill. The art style got me in a Mediterranean vacation mood immediately, the
soundtrack is so chill I've been using it as background music for naps and the only game mechanic to speak of besides running around and reading through dialog (no voice-acting in this game) is planting seeds and watching them grow. The story and characters also are fluffy as clouds that pleasantly blow past you without leaving much of an impression, but also without harshing your mellow (the game's own promotional material self-consciously and accurately describes itself as a "soap-opera").
Got it as part of a
five-game-bundle for which I paid 10 bucks, so no complaints about value-for-money either - for the regular MSRP however, your mileage may vary.
3.5/5
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Eastshade (Eastshade Studios, 2019) - The big followup to Danny Weinbaum's 2017 short walking sim
Leaving Lyndow is a first person adventure game that looks and feels like a classic Bethesda RPG (Morrowind in particular), but with all the RPG elements as well as all combat mechanics taken out.
Your main quest, after arriving on the island of Eastshade by ship-wreck, is to honor the memory of your late mother by painting four locations on the island - and in between doing that and going home again, there are 36 quests to discover and complete. Weinbaum is an ex-AAA 3D environment artists, and so, unsurprisingly, the quality of the graphics is exceptional - relative to the development team size. Think about the most pretty mods for Oblivion you have ever seen, add a bit of extra quality for the environments and subtract a few for the character design and animations, and you get an idea of how good this game looks.
This game was really nice and relaxing to play, although it suffers from all the same faults Bethesda RPGs tend to suffer, too - at some point, the exploration ceases to fascinate and traveling becomes a chore. Another similarity to a Bethesda RPG is that the bug density notably increases the closer you get to the finish. And the more items you get, the easier it gets to break the game.
All in all a lovely, lovely game that I would especially recommend to every parent on here who is looking for PC games to give their kids aged 8-12 to play, if they aren't completely brain-poisoned by Fortnite yet.
4/5
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A Short Hike (adamgryu, 2019) - is a hyper-condensed isometric top-down action-adventure (minus combat). You're a little bird-gal on holiday with your aunt in a nice cabin at the foot of a mountain and need to climb to the top in order to get cellphone reception. You're expecting a call. It's important. You're a bird-person, so you can jump, run, and glide. On the way up, you meet people, get mini-quests, play mini-games, find tools, collect tokens, money and upgrades to your abilities until eventually, you're ready and able to make it to the top. You receive that call, you go back to your aunt, take a nap and the game ends.
Every mechanic in this game is fine-tuned to perfection and immediately usable for anybody who has ever played any game in the genre. The music is great, the visuals are super-cute (and the pixelization effect, one of those indie-darling style choices I will never be a total fan of, can be completely turned down), the game-play is just maximally satisfying and there's a couple mini-games/challenges with global/friends leader-boards (in the Steam version), so it even comes with replay value and a competitive element (*).
5/5 (N.B.: For a game that can be beaten within two hours and probably achievement-perfected in 4).
(*) I can't believe my stick-ball score of 24 only gets me #19,223 in the world.
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Stela (Skybox Labs, 2020) - is playable praise of the work of
Playdead Games. In the sense that imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. And like most imitations, it's lacking. It's most painfully lacking in the character animation department, which is kind of surprising and somewhat hard to understand, given that Skybox Labs is mainly an outsourcing studio, founded by ex-EA Vancouver staff, that makes its bread by subcontracting for AAA development and DLC, mainly for Microsoft (Age of Empires, Project Spark, Halo, etc.) and surely would have had the means and the contacts to get more than what really looks like the sort of basic Poser stuff you get from indie devs who are just starting out. The second area where it's lacking is the gameplay, most of the time you're just running the gauntlet, there isn't much of puzzling, platforming or stealth and moments of "oh, wow!" that especially
Inside has so many of are non-existent. Finally, it's lacking in length. I completed my first playthrough in two hours.
One saving grace: There are secrets to collect and they aren't trivially easy to find, so you will probably get a second playthrough out of that. The reward for finding them is not just achievements either, you unlock little animated 3d scenes in the main menu explaining a bit of the backstory of each level, and those are pretty neat.
Another: The level design, general art direction and music are quite nice, but, as mentioned, there's no mistaking whose games it's flattering.
I got this game during the Steam summer sale for 50% off and to be really frank, that's what the MSRP should be. It's a two hour game that you will play, at best, twice.
2.5/5
Aug:
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Manifold Garden (William Chyr Studio, 2019) - Three main ingredients: MC Escher-inspired level design, gravity shifting relative to the surface you are standing on and the 3D environment being actually contained inside a 4D torus, which makes the environment seamlessly wrap around in every direction.
The result: The most stylish and mind-bending puzzle exploration game since
Antichamber.
Unlike Antichamber and other critically acclaimed games of the genre however, Manifold Garden restricts itself to a very limited set of puzzle mechanics, so that in the latter half of the game, players will be less and less occupied with unlocking progress and instead get an opportunity to really take in the fantastically surreal world they are moving through. Most people should be able to complete this game completely on their own. I did - in 8.5 hours combined playtime.
The constant sense of awe that the visuals create is helped along greatly by the sound design and soundtrack, which mixes natural soundscapes (wind, birdsong, flowing water) with synthesized sounds to make the world feel a lot more real than it looks. The package is completed by a set of simple and tidy controls for mouse/kb, controller and even touch (on iOS).
This one might be my new favorite game of the genre - definitely in the top 3 (from which it will bump
The Witness).
5/5
Sep:
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XING - The Land Beyond (White Lotus Interactive, 2017) - (
Review)
Oct:
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Creature in the Well (Flight School, 2019) - (
Review)
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Superliminal (Pillow Castle, 2019) - (
Review)
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Submerged (Uppercut Games. 2015) - (
Review)
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Night Call (MonkeyMoon / BlackMuffin, 2019) - (
Review)
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Assassin's Creed Unity (Ubisoft, 2014) - (
Review)
Nov:
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The Last Campfire (Hello Games, 2020) - (
Review)
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The Ball (Teotl, 2010) - (
Review)
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Murdered: Soul Suspect (Airtight / Square Enix, 2014) - (
Review)
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Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP (Superbrothers / Jim Guthrie / Capybara, 2012) - (
Review)
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Deliver Us the Moon (KeokeN Interactive / Wired Productions, 2019) - (
Review)
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Rise of the Tomb Raider (Crystal Dynamics / Nixxes / Square Enix, 2015-2016) - (
Review)
Dec:
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Ghostbusters - The Video Game (Terminal Reality / Atari, 2009) - (
Review)
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Fe (Zoink! / Electronic Arts, 2018) - (
Review)
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Mørkredd (Hyper Games / Aspyr, 2020) - (
Review)
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The Touryst (Shin'en, 2019) - (
Review)
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Call of the Sea (Out of the Blue / Raw Fury, 2020) - (
Review)
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Carrion (Phobia Game Studio / Devolver Digital, 2020) - (
Review)
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Beckett (The Secret Experiment. 2018) - (
Review)