It’s like Christmas in July! Here are thoughts on some of the games from 2016’s Christmas Steam sale.
Inside: To the Moon, Helen’s Mysterious Castle, LiEat, Betrayer, Sunless Sea.
Category: Horror
Little Nightmares
Little Nightmares is a gorgeously done game. You play as a barefoot, starving scrap of a child in a world that’s warped and wrong, and malevolent and crushingly empty by turns. But despite the meathooks and monsters, despite the all around horror setting, the game itself isn’t especially scary, which I found interesting. (more…)
Shadow of Mordor
Here’s the story of Shadow of Mordor – You are a ranger guy. Orcs kill your wife and son, then you, in a ritual designed to bind a dead elf’s spirit to your corpse. It works. You resurrect with bonus ghost powers, like ghost arrows and ghost teleporting between ghost buildings and ghost respawning after being killed so you can never really die, in a clever melding of videogame and story.
You proceed to gruesomely murder your way through your surroundings. (more…)
Prom Dreams
So, there’s this boy, and his friend thinks he needs a date for the prom! You’re challenged to find three likely girls, then pick one to actually ask out. While you’re at it, you can explore the school, listen to kids’ hopes and fears as the days pass, and help some idiot who thinks haunted houses are a prank.
Also, it’s secretly a horror game.
That casts an interesting pall over things – does any of the idle chatter foreshadow later disaster? That elevator you can’t use without a key… The fire extinguishers set at regular intervals… Talk of chemistry lab dangers and safety equipment… Does it mean anything how people keep talking about books? Does it mean anything how when your friend’s dialogue is specific gameplay advice in colored text, it goes red? (more…)
Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass, and Open-Ended Stories
Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass is an RPG by Kasey Ozymy, the developer of A Very Long Rope to the Top of the Sky and The God of Crawling Eyes, two games we previously reviewed. It’s clear that the developer learned a lot about game design in the intervening time; Jimmy is actually fun to play, with challenging battles that never feel like brick walls or games of roulette, as well as a tight and intuitive set of tools and mechanics for you to play with. It also just doesn’t bother with elemental effects, which I thought was a nice bit of streamlining. There’s a ton of content and it’s honestly a steal at $15, so definitely pick it up if you’re in the mood for a jRPG.
(Don’t bother with the postgame, though. It just throws you against the exact same enemies and bosses from the main game with literally no difference except bigger numbers, then caps it off with a really tedious battle that’s a total crapshoot followed by you effectively winning halfway through but having to continue punching your way through mountains of HP anyway. Save yourself the time and just look it up on YouTube.)
Unfortunately, story-wise, the author decided to dive into a completely different genre, and his inexperience in that area is very stark. The premise of the game is that it all takes place in the imagination of Jimmy, a young boy — and because it’s a world of his dreams, it’s also a world of his nightmares. To the developer’s credit, this is not your typical “looks cutesy but is secretly SUPER EDGY!!!” affair: the story does genuinely oscillate between horror and truly lighthearted segments, and most of the horror elements are relegated to the edges, which I thought was very fitting — to confront Jimmy’s repressed fears, you have to go searching for them. It does a really good job of making it feel like the horror is intruding on Jimmy’s fantasy, and that he’s actively trying to push it back.
My issue is that none of it really goes anywhere. The horror elements are all flash and no substance — or if there is substance, it’s so vague and opaque I can’t find it. Individual areas are very well-designed, but they don’t seem to add up into any coherent whole. Supposedly, the horror levels are meant to give us a psychological profile of Jimmy via his worst fears, but I couldn’t find any consistent thread that paints any meaningful picture beyond the most banal, superficial, and obvious reading. I wouldn’t mind this so much if the horror levels were just window dressing, but they’re not. The main story is one of those infuriatingly obtuse plots where everything is ~up to your interpretation~, right down to the ending itself, which explains absolutely nothing, not even what the Pulsating Mass is. The horror dungeons feel like they’re supposed to be vital pieces of the puzzle, but trying to use them to read into the main plot feels like grasping at straws.
More details under the cut, with major spoilers, obviously, but I will say that I don’t think the spoilers will ruin the game for you — the plot’s strength is in the characters and areas, and like I said, there’s not even a big ending reveal to spoil in the first place.
Christmas Steam Games 2018: QuickRecs
Our sacred holiday tradition continues! I got so many this year that we get to divide this into recs and pans. Most of these are puzzle games; I suppose those are the ones that go for cheap.
Inside: Hollow Knight, Recursed, Ittle Dew 2, The Dweller, Zasa: An AI Story, NO THING, Quell, Qbik, Reveal the Deep.
I also got Hue, which Act already reviewed. It is wonderful and I second her recommendation.
WORLD OF HORROR
Yes, this is the proper spelling.
Anyway, this is a cute little horror pastiche. You should play it. That’s my take.
Games for Racial Justice and Equality (Part 2)
Continuing where we left off. A much weaker showing this time, with a lot of games I couldn’t even finish.
Games for Racial Justice and Equality (Part 3)
N through P. I got distracted splitting my time with my Christmas games, so this is shorter than the previous posts. Some interesting RPGs in this one.
Yahtzee Croshaw’s Dev Diary
In 2019, Yahtzee Croshaw (the game reviewer who does Zero Punctuation) challenged himself to make 12 games in 12 months and document his progress every fortnight. As someone interested in game design myself, I checked them out and I recommend you do too. They’re all short, free, and incredibly varied.
In this post I’ll give my own ranking, and short thoughts on each one.
Inscryption
Inscryption is a game by the makers of Pony Island, a game our esteemed illhousen previously reviewed. While I haven’t played Pony Island myself, Inscryption makes the exact blunders illhousen details in his review: the metatextual elements fall completely flat because it’s clear you’re playing a person playing a haunted video game, not actually playing a haunted video game yourself. In general, I found them tedious and uninteresting interruptions to the actual game. This is a shame, because the gameplay is actually very good.
Quick Reviews 10
Inside: CrisTales, Axiom Verge 2, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
Prey (2017)
I’ve heard lots of people insist this is the bestest game ever. I was dubious since I’ve never been able to get into FPSs, but a while back Epic Games gave it away as a freebie, so I picked it up on a whim. While going through my Christmas games I remembered it, and decided to give it a try.
File this away next to Fallout: New Vegas in excellent stories that were tragically packaged with terrible gameplay. Because by god the gameplay is terrible. I can tolerate simple FPSs, but ones that try to get fancy with verticality and exploration and platforming are just painful.
Pathologic: Intoduction and Gameplay
Pathologic was a game reviewed here by illhousen… a decade ago, god we’re old. He had the advantage of being able to play the game in the original Russian instead of its bungled English translation. However, recently several years ago the game was rereleased on Steam with a much better English translation, alongside its sequel/reimagining Pathologic 2. Farla and I have been interested in the game for a very long time (even attempting to play the old incomprehensible version), so we thought we should play both the whole way through and give our own thoughts.
If you’re not familiar, Pathologic is a survival horror/immersive sim… thing where you play as a doctor trapped in a rural village during the outbreak of a strange, supernatural plague. It is known for being incredibly grueling and punishing, requiring you to manage survival meters like hunger and exhaustion in addition to janky combat where you can die from a single hit, all while you must complete objectives under the yoke of a strict real-time clock that’s always ticking — think Majora’s Mask, but you can’t time travel. It flopped on release for obvious reasons, but became a cult classic among those of us who appreciate weird, deliberately counterintuitive games. Unfortunately, it ended up a bit too weird even for us; it felt like it tried to do too many things at once and as a result it’s hard to tell what the story was even trying to say.
Also, what it does say is… questionable. As is usual for games of this type, much of the popular analysis just stops at “Wow, isn’t it amazing that it has themes and asks hard questions?” without evaluating the answers it provides to those hard questions. They also tend to gloss over how deeply weird the games are about women, especially the second one.