Viewing entries tagged
puzzles
Not long after I'd finished playing Stray, someone asked me if it was any good, with the implication being that this was nothing more than a meme. It's no surprise that any game featuring a cat as its main character would garner a lot of internet attention, but I tend to stay away from those kinds of things and hadn't seen a single meme during my time with the game. Thankfully I was able to respond with the clarification that this is indeed, more than just a meme.
It's not often that I get excited on release day for a game, but after playing the excellent FAR: Lone Sails back in 2018, the news of its sequel immediately filled me with anticipation. The first game was a beautifully explorative and ambient puzzle adventure that gripped me from start to finish, and even from early trailers I could tell that this second instalment would be more of the same.
Puzzle games are often doomed to be limited in scope, as they involve some kind of abstract game mechanics that have been taken from real world equivalents. Translating something like a sudoku puzzle into a video game actually appears to be a difficult task, at least if you're trying to jazz it up a little and not just make another cookie cutter version of the same thing. With that in mind, I'm thrilled to have discovered that Murder by Numbers is to Picross, as Huniepop is to Match 3.
Sometimes I find it quite difficult to sum up my feelings on a big budget game from a large studio. Partly because the good studios have a track record of making decent games with few issues and that doesn't really make for much of a discussion. When my opinion of a game is a simple "it's good", I tend not to make much of a stink about it, even though it probably deserves some praise.
It's easy to forget that Telltale Games made a bunch of excellent adventure games before they became a household name in the gaming industry. They were always around, but I'd argue that it wasn't really until The Walking Dead came around that the studio was firmly placed on the map of notable developers. Although, with their recent closure surrounded in questions of mistreated workers and other controversial headlines, it might be worth remembering some of the good work they did before turning into the 'licensed game sweat-shop' (my words, nobody else's).
It's been a long time since I've been as obsessed with a game as I was with the original Myst series. I played the games multiples times to get all the endings, I even ended up reading the novels based in the games' world. Not only was it a compelling science-fiction concept, but Myst was a game unlike any I'd ever seen before, which fascinated me to no end.
There has to be a point in life when you realise that interacting with art can be an experience without form, or end. When I studied philosophy, I quickly learned that a lot of people really hate wrestling with questions that have no immediate answer. It seemed that no matter how compelling the discourse was, some of us can't handle a lack of definition.
There's something exciting in the process of discovery that's often ruined by mass marketing and the hype machine. It's kind of impossible to be surprised by a big budget game with an even bigger advertising budget, as they tend to throw all the good stuff at you before you even make a purchase. Thankfully though, the lower end of the market is full of little surprises waiting to be discovered.
In a world where narrative gaming and visual novels are more popular than ever before, is there room for an actual comic book to enter the gaming space? I often think about how games can tell stories better, but I'm rarely asked to consider how gamification can enhance other story-telling mediums.
