Recent reviews by Mango King

The Fall has everything anyone needs in life: spooky urban exploration, existential robots, and some pretty sweet glowing environments.

TLDR; pretty graphics, intuitive puzzles, KILLER story, very atmospheric. I highly recommend this game, as it's one of my favorites.

I encountered The Fall earlier in the year and picked it up on sale, as you'll often find it in the steam store, and though I'm not always one for puzzle platformed the lead character had me hooked right away. You play as A.R.I.D., an AI built into a military combat suit, as it navigates a strange planet to save its unconscious human occupant. Even as A.R.I.D. is confined to directive coding any willful human would find ludicrous and hampering, the AI shows itself to an incredibly intelligent, motivated, and even compassionate being. The story itself forces you to make some pretty tough decisions in order to progress; I began the game thinking that A.R.I.D. was a cold and callous thing for making these choices, but by the end I felt I was the one responsible for what it did, and while there's no way around these decisions I felt a lot of remorse for what I was doing; even as a scroller, The Fall is an incredibly immersive experience, and by the end I was so caught up in A.R.I.D.'s story that the cliffhanger finish left me two parts infuriated and four hundred parts distressed for the AI's fate.

There are a few things worth mentioning in regards to the game's mechanics; my most prevalent concern, and that of others I know to have played the game, is that the controls are a little wonky and sometimes the trial/error stage of inventory usage became a little tedious for the key combinations, and you can't access A.R.I.D.'s items with a mouse. Beyond that the controls are well explained and pretty straightforward, and movement/combat is really smooth, and to add to that I think a lot of love was put into the game's graphics. You begin the game in a dark cave filled with fireflies and derelict robotics; lights activate in dead android eyes as you pass, and in the distance a faint humanoid follows your progress. As A.R.I.D. moves from the cave to a droid facility you get to explore run down buildings, most shadowy and rotting. It's a really eerie place at times, and the game's atmosphere is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ spooky in parts, which really forwards the story's growing sense of dread imo. It's a pretty game, in all, with lovely environments and clean character animation.

It's also worth mentioning that this game was made by a really small indie company, and John Warner (the director: his steam username is hypnoslave) is really sweet and very active in the steam forums. The Fall is one of my absolute favorites, hands down, and I'd really love to see Over The Moon supported as they go about making the second and much awaited installment.

I initially preorded the collector’s edition of Gods Will Be Watching with a friend because I’m a huge fan of another game Devolver Digital produced, Hotline Miami. I expected to pick it up for a few hours, beat it in a day, and never think much about it after that. I was wrong.

For one, this game is hard as hell. Even after the mercy update which added additional puzzle and narrative only modes that remove some of the chance, I spent honest to god hours trying to beat some of the chapters. The results were rewarding, don’t get me wrong, but every death sent me back to the beginning and with no checkpoint saving that meant every decision I made had the potential to send me down a different path within the level. There were many times that I would have ditched the damn thing, as I’m not a patient person and honestly, point and clicks rarely interest me. But this one did, because it isn’t really a point and click. It’s more of a resource managing survival simulator with a really killer soundtrack.

You follow the life of a man named Burden and direct him in seven different levels; a break in, a torture chamber, a laboratory, a desert. In every chapter, lives are in your hands, and there are often few repercussions for deciding to end those lives or choosing to save them. Do you inject a trusting pet with a poison to find a cure to save your whole team? Do you kill a child to get a security code that might save an entire planet? There’s nothing really stopping you from turning Burden into the most callous antihero you can imagine except that at the end of each level you can see how every other player did and what choices they made.

The game is also incredibly story driven, carefully constructing a gritty universe through simplistic (and gorgeous) pixel graphics and dialogue. The fun part is that while the end in pretty much the same no matter what you do, the small choices you make in early chapters will effect the rest of the game very quietly. I’ve rarely felt so haunted and confused as when I killed a teammate in Gods Will Be Watching, not because what happened was scary but because it didn’t matter.

I’m not going to go too much into that because, spoilers, but if you’re looking for something to lose sleep over for a few days this game will certainly help pass the time. As I type this the game is on sale for $5usd, but it's definitely worth the $20 I paid for the collector's edition.