I knew nothing about this game — I think no one did — until I saw a tweet by its creator, Mike Bithell, and that’s all I needed. I loved his previous games, but this is completely different: a short (about two hours) text-based adventure game that tells a very intriguing story about a robot detective. I love the way it’s presented, and the story really was fantastic. Can’t recommend this enough. I really hope he keeps making short game experiments like this.
This is also a supplemental experience to Night in the Woods (like Lost Constellation), except it’s more of a little music experiment. It doesn’t offer a fun story like Lost Constellation, but I enjoyed it for what it is, and the song that plays is a joy to take in – after I was done playing, I kept listening to it, and the rest of the Lost Constellation soundtrack. It’s also a free download.
A few weeks ago I bought that big bundle of indie games for charity (over 100 games), and now that it’s the holiday break, I decided to start digging into them. My first pleasant surprise was the Itch.io app, that basically serves as a Steam-like way to deal with your Itch.io-purchased game library. So Lost Constellation is called a supplemental experience to the upcoming Night in the Woods, a game I was already interested in, but didn’t realize how much until playing this. This is a fairly long (maybe an hour or so) adventure game experience, and I had a wonderful time playing it last night. It made me that much more excited for the release of Night in the Woods, which I’ll now be grabbing as soon as I can. You can download it for free.
Pavilion is a puzzle-based game I remember seeing a few times over the years at events in Japan — one third of the trio (Visiontrick Media) who made the game is based in Tokyo — and it’s just come out for PC/Mac. I’ll be waiting for the upcoming PS4 (and Vita) version before playing it, but if you’re more of a PC gamer, do take a look. I’m in love with the visual richness found in the environments.
I got this game as part of the current Humble Eye Candy Bundle (ends in 3 days), and boy am I digging it. The idea is that it’s an RPG that plays around with RPG eras, and so you’ll be playing with it looking like an NES-era Zelda game, but then you’ll also experience a Gameboy-like look, and at the point where I’m at right now it’s become beautifully 3D. There are also some fun parodies, like a mini game that feels like something straight out of a Layton game. I’m a few hours in, and still really enjoying this.
This is one of those classic games that I absolutely adored when I played it back in the day, and playing the new Remastered edition is my first revisit since then (they’ve already announced a remaster of Full Throttle, which is another classic LucasArts adventure game I love, but that one I re-played a few years ago). I’m still fairly early in the game, but man, I’m getting so many fun nostalgic feels already, especially hearing Hoagie’s voice. They did such a great job on this, giving it a modern aesthetic, but not messing around too much with the original gameplay and story.
I did want to play this game when it originally came out – especially considering how much I enjoy the games by Klei – but for some reason I didn’t get around to it back then. When I got to playing Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China, that I quite liked, a friend of mind reminded me that I really did need to play Mark of the Ninja. I was then surprised to find it in my Steam library (surely something I got as part of bundle). The stumbling block was still to get a controller to play it on my MacBook Air (and now MacBook Pro) – I no longer have my 360, and the PS4 controller is not supported by most Steam games, because it doesn’t do xinput, and same goes for the Nimbus controller I got for my Apple TV). So I finally got the nifty 8Bitdo NES30 Pro controller, and have been enjoying this game immensely. If you like those Assassin’s Creed Chronicles games – a 2D stealth take on the series – then you will absolutely love Mark of the Ninja. There’s just no stopping Klei in making great games.
I’ve been meaning to play Gone Home for what feels like forever, and today I finally sat down to play through it in one sitting, which is how I think you should play this game (and it’s very doable, at about 90 minutes). I found myself really enjoying the experience, and especially dug the music that you play at various points by way of cassettes that you find (since it’s 90s indie rock, which I rather like a lot). The one thing that I felt should be changed is that I was able to finish the game before I made my way to the basement – after finishing the game, knowing I had a key to the basement, I went back in and found there were quite a few narrative elements left to experience, especially when it came to clarifying what happened to the parents. But yes, as has been said by so many people, this is really something you should take the time to play through – a nice bit of experiential play.
I have yet to play The Stanley Parable – something I will soon rectify as I just picked it up (along with The Beginner’s Guide) in the Steam winter sale – but I’ve been following the launch of this new Crows Crows Crows studio, and finally got around to playing that free short game they’ve released as a tease for their upcoming full release. What a fantastic little experience (about 20 minutes), I enjoyed every single bit of it, and I kinda want to play through it again. Now I really can’t wait to dig into Stanley Parable and Beginner’s Guide.
A cyberpunk graphic text adventure game? Sounds good to me. I just started playing it, and I’m already digging the story and atmosphere. I’m still only about an hour in, but I like that I’m investigating a mystery, and I’m really curious to see where this is all going to go. You can grab it right now as part of the “Eye Candy 4″ Humble Bundle.