Recent reviews by El Syd

First-person puzzle games seem to be quite common now and this one didn't amaze me with its gameplay. Overall, the puzzles were alright. However, the story was ridiculous enough for me to want to write about it. Note that much of the following is not really a spoiler as it is evident in the first hour or so.

The main problem lies in the human characters. I expect a space crew to be bright enough to not expose themselves so easily to an alien life form (an issue I had with the film Prometheus as well), but writers just never seem to learn from past mistakes of other shoddy science fiction stories.

Not only that, but the humans are a terrible combination of naive and selfish. They are naive because they don't seem to be aware of the implications that come from introducing an alien life form to Earth that essentially grants immortality to all living things it infects. And they are selfish because when confronted with the choice of staying away from Earth (and thereby preventing the destruction of its ecosystems), or escaping quarantine, they fall prey to the 'but I just want to go home' mentality.

It should be a no-brainer to humanity's finest, but apparently this is something that warrants a tiresome back-and-forth between the human character (Ava) and the AI (TOM). The needs of the many (billions) really do outweigh the needs of the few (4 or 5 people?).

This was actually rather distracting while I was playing through the puzzle segments, as my mind was constantly churning with thoughts such as, 'Why did the writer not stop to consider how stupid the characters are?' There are billions of people on Earth and you've got these imbeciles not batting an eyelash about their endangerment to humanity? Get outta here...

It should come as no surprise to you that when I finally had the chance togun down the last remaining human characters stationed on Jupiter's moon to prevent them from destroying all of Earth's ecosystems, I had no qualms about pulling the trigger.

And that's about all there is to it. As it was not weaved into the story seamlessly, the rest I consider to be mere regurgitation of philosophy topics that are typically covered in the first year of university. Unfortunately, The Turing Test does not receive bonus marks for this.

I dabble in quite a few genres, with adventure games being one of them. In terms of gameplay mechanics, they don't mesh well with my tastes, but I still sometimes seek them because of the promise of a good story. The best of them tend to have one which makes up for what I find to be tedious gameplay overall. Of the ones I have finished, I thought these were worth my time to varying degrees:

The Blackwell series
The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav (and Memoria)
The Dream Machine
The Edna & Harvey series
Farenheit: Indigo Prophecy
Grim Fandango
Hector: Badge of Carnage
Jolly Rover
Landlord of the Woods
Leisure Suit Larry 6 - Shape Up Or Slip Out
Life is Strange
Lost Horizon
Lydia
MacGuffin's Curse
Midnight Scenes: The Nanny
To the Moon
Night In The Woods
The Shivah

Of the Daedalic Entertainment games I have played (including the Edna & Harvey series, The Whispered World and A New Beginning), I found the Deponia trilogy to be the least enjoyable.

As with previous Daedalic titles, the backgrounds are aesthetically pleasing (if a little too busy in some areas) and the music is mostly excellent. Some tracks evoke a sense of 'grand adventure', which I felt at times might have been a better fit for a different game altogether. It's too bad that playing through this trilogy felt more like a tired exercise than anything else.

I think that it's pretty normal to expect point-and-click adventure games to involve puzzles which are not straightforward and require one to think like the designers did ('moon logic'). In the case of Deponia, this is really all that I had left to amuse myself with, as I didn't find the story interesting. It's also worth mentioning that there are some bugs which require using a downloaded save from Daedalic's website in case you are unable to progress past certain puzzles.

The main character, Rufus is selfish and mostly oblivious to the needs of others. There isn't really anything more to him, but I somehow expected this. The problem is that the other characters in this game aren't very interesting either. For example, the other major character, Goal (interesting choice of name by the way), is out of action for almost two thirds of the series for various reasons despite being on-screen and physically present in some form or another.

The other characters who accompany Rufus don't seem to serve much purpose other than to act as a foil. They were present for much of the trilogy. Despite some moments in the third game, I found them to be under-developed overall.

I think that this might just be the way it is with most comedic adventure games. However, the problem here is that I didn't find the trilogy to be all that funny. For what it's worth, German voice acting and English text was enabled because I thought the voice actor for Rufus was better suited to the character. There's no doubt that some puns and such may have been lost in translation, but I think most of the humour is still easily understood because much of it involves moments of schadenfreude.

Some jokes are at Rufus' expense, but I found there to be an inordinate number of situations where the developers seemed to have gone to great lengths to set me up for a laugh at someone who didn't really deserve their misery or misfortune. There seems to be thread running throughout the series: we the audience are meant to find humour in how clueless Rufus is about the consequences of his actions on others.

Given the contrivances in the setup of many puzzles, it is too much of a stretch for me to find Rufus' obliviousness plausible. Perhaps it might have worked if he had a severe mental disability, and I do mean the drooling, pants-on-head, talking-like-a-Monty-Python-Gumby variety. That would probably necessitate a total rewrite of just about everything though. Suffice it to say, humour involving uncertainty about the protagonist's awareness of what is actually going on around them was better handled in a previous Daedalic title. I think it worked better in Edna & Harvey: Harvey's New Eyes, due to a combination Lilli's apparent childish innocence and the narrator.

Despite all of this, I forged on anyway. As I had little emotional investment in all of the characters, the ending was not very satisfying, and leaves me doubtful as to whether the fourth entry, Deponia Doomsday, will redeem it in my eyes (I hear it's a safe to skip that one). There seems to be a bit of a trend at Daedalic Entertainment. Either it looks as though the writer wrote themselves into a corner, it ends up all being just a dream or a major character gets shafted big-time. More often than not, I don't think they manage to stick the landing in their games.

This one's probably for the hardcore point-and-click people who really like running around exhausting dialogue options and rubbing objects together. Not for me though, unfortunately.

Puzzle games make up about less than five percent of my game library. I don't mind the occasional puzzle in a point-and-click adventure game or action-adventure if it helps to mix things up a little, but if they become the main focus, I tend to lose interest pretty quickly.

With that said, MacGuffin's Curse happens to be the only puzzle game in the past few years that I actually endeavoured to complete. I think that the writing is a large factor which helped me see it through to the end. The plot is rather simple, but much of the dialogue and other interactions are written with a good-natured charm that I found rather endearing, similar to Brawsome's previous release on Steam, Jolly Rover. The story is not overwrought. It doesn't lay itself thick with excessive world-building or verbose character exchanges. It's there to give some context (in an interesting way though) to what you will be doing: pushing blocks around.

Similar to Sokoban, there are many rooms where boxes, crates, batteries and such will need to pushed and pulled around in order to unlock a door and progress to the next room. I never played Sokoban much, but I quite liked block pushing puzzles in the Legend of Zelda series, so this was kind of nice. I found most of the rooms were of a size which ensured that I didn't have to spend too much time on each puzzle. It's for this reason that I found the pacing of MacGuffin's Curse to be quite good, for a puzzle game. On some days, I still played in short bursts to avoid 'puzzle burnout'.

For much of my time though, I was able to stick with the puzzles for extended sessions. The art and music certainly helped with that. Both were pleasing to my senses and I never found either to be grating, as can sometimes be the case when we get stuck and we're forced to listen to the same track repeatedly. It was mentioned in the developer's commentary that a conscious decision was made to avoid composing music which would get on our nerves in those situations. I think they succeeded.

There were other smaller touches which showed me that the developers put a lot of thought into crafting a quality experience for the player, such as the built-in hint system, a quick puzzle reset feature and fast-travel. All of this adds up to a puzzle game that is no longer than it needs to be, with only my puzzle-solving abilities being the limiting factor. I'm not really into puzzle games, but MacGuffin's Curse grew on me and was worth sticking with until the end. It's a hidden gem.

I found Layers of Fear to be a rather shallow experience. Within the first hour or so, I was able to figure out the gist of its structure and where the story would lead. I simply could not see the possibility of there being any surprises for me and the repetitive nature of walking from one room to another made this a real chore.

It is becoming more apparent to me how important it is for the player to feel a connection to the protagonist in order to appreciate the story in these first person view games. As I felt no connection whatsoever, I wasn't too impressed with the story. Much of it can be gleaned from the first twenty minutes or so. The main character is a struggling artist, they have a poor relationship with their wife and alcohol, they probably did something terrible, and the game's scenario is a manifestation of their coming to terms with all of that.

The premise itself isn't necessarily bad, but its presentation is rather typical of first person horror/walking simulator games. There's reading material scattered about the place and the occasional voice over. It's stuff that we've seen many times already, much before this game's release date. Consider the Penumbra series as an example. Unlike those games, there is no immediate danger to the player in Layers of Fear, so the story and jump-scares are all that we're left with. As I know that there is nothing in the darkness that will hurt me, I can simply run through the pitch black, not caring and not feeling.

In addition to the uninteresting story, I also didn't get a good sense of the setting either. The house in which we're forced to stumble around for a few hours seems to suggest the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, but the puzzling choice of words in the writing doesn't appear to resemble anything from that era. 'Nightmare fuel' is a standout example of a phrase which does not belong and it suggests to me that the person who was responsible is heavily influenced by the writing styles of recent generations. There just doesn't seem to be any authenticity so I found this all very distracting.

As I didn't care much for the story, the 'layers' of the game gave way to what is essentially a very shoddy amusement park attraction with sporadic effects that you may-or-may-not even take any notice of. There were often times where I was looking around and somehow, my actions triggered what the developers probably intended to be a jump-scare. I certainly heard a loud noise or musical stinger, but because I was looking at some mundane feature in the room which had nothing to do with the sound, I was left feeling confused rather than scared.

At other times, it felt as though the developers went out of their way to undermine my efforts to inspect objects closely and soak in the atmosphere. I remember one instance in which I strained my eyes to read the plaque set into the frame of a painting, but before I could get a good look at it, the developers once again tried their very best to wow me with yet another jump-scare by making the painting disappear in a burst of loud noise and some cheap distortion effect. How annoying.

All of this adds to the shallowness of it all. Within Layers of Fear, we're all just making our way through a spook house with the occasional 'Boo!' and creepy music being looped endlessly. Some might say that every horror game boils down to this (I don't think so), but I argue that what separates the wheat from the chaff is how well the developers hide these elements, and their ability to make us forget that the horrific imagery and soundscapes are all just one big illusion.

If the subject matter of the story isn't disturbing or horrifying enough, as is the case with Layers of Fear, then other mechanics or situations must be implemented, such as the possibility that one may win or lose, live or die (and often in the most horrible of ways). This brings us to survival horror. Even games in this sub-genre which don't live up to the pedigree of say, Resident Evil or Silent Hill offer more than Layers of Fear because there is tension to be had from the possibility of severe consequences. Perhaps my tastes simply lean more towards survival horror. Unfortunately, Layers of Fear wasn't able to convince me that non-threatening, psychological horror makes for a worthy experience.

I would think that any self-respecting game developer would do everything they can to avoid presenting a horror game which feels contrived. When something comes across as being artificial, there's simply no way that you can elicit a genuine emotional reaction from the player, such as dread or fear of the unknown. I must emphasise that making attempts to startle people does not count as horror. Bloober Team SA relied too much on that and it is for this reason that I think Layers of Fear was just more fodder primarily designed for streamers. I find what they do during their performances to be forced and artificial as well.

This game reminds me of something silly that we used to do to each other at school. One child would ask another, 'Are you scared of a butterfly?', to which the other would reply, 'No'. Immediately after, we would clap our hands in the child's face to startle them, point, and shout, 'Haha, you blinked!' This stupid game or trick doesn't feel much different from Layers of Fear. It made me blink hard at certain times and confused or indifferent at others. Bloober Team SA probably intended for the name of their work to refer to the depths of the fear that the player may experience in this game. Suffice to say, I found this shallow approach to horror to be very much lacking in layers, and fear, for that matter.

Claire is simply not scary or atmospheric. Even if you don't consider it a horror game, it's still just a boring slog. I also did not care for the characters or premise, there was no sense of mystery and the level design was full of padding, with its many empty and featureless rooms.

One of the earliest things that didn't sit right with me was the presentation. There were times when I entered an empty room and I would be met with a sudden, full-screen distortion effect accompanied by loud noises. Is this supposed to terrify people? I assume that this effect is supposed to signify something. Perhaps not though, because nothing happened afterwards and the rooms that I entered were still empty after all, with absolutely nothing interesting or significant to look at. Maybe the developer decided that this would be the best way to keep people from falling asleep.

I could also tell early on that there was a lack of playtesting due to my interactions with the rather annoying enemies. They can manage to get in some cheap shots from distances that really make you wonder if it's their bad body odour that's killing you instead. They can also get you when you look at your inventory and map. Yes, inside the inventory and map screen in a side-scrolling game where you'd expect things to be paused so you can at least get your bearings and try to make sense of the top-down view map. If you thought that was ridiculous, then get a load of this as well: enemies can kill you in the main menu screen after pressing Escape. Intentional design or an oversight? We may never know...

There are also some inconsistencies in the way enemies are programmed to appear which can lead to what are probably unintentional results in their encounters. For example, I made my way to a locked door after finding a lockpick and before I could get a chance to actually get close enough to open the damn thing, an enemy spawned right in from me and immediately started slicing and dicing (I'm just going by the sound effects here since there weren't any obvious attack animations visible in the poorly-lit area) while I just stood at the door reading about how picking the lock is just going to take a 'few more seconds'. I decided to leave the area and come back in an attempt to 'reset' the encounter, only to find the enemy standing right in front of the door that I was trying to unlock. Reloading the game resulted in the enemy spawning further away and it was the only way I was able to unlock that door without taking unnecessary damage. I can only imagine how much more frustrating this would have become if I had continued playing.

So with enemies that are more bothersome than terrifying, and without anything to hook me in the first hour or so, I simply did not want to go on any further. There are a multitude of better horror games. Many of them are from the PS1 and PS2 era, but still, there are many to choose from if you do a little research. I recommend removing Claire from the wishlist or chucking this rotting carcass of a game into the 'Crap' category if it's already in your library. It wasn't great back when it was first released and it's certainly not getting better with age.


*By the way, here's a random tip: If you factor in Sturgeon's law and you're concerned about the size of your backlog, consider a 'Mostly Positive' rating in Steam as meaning 'Mixed' at the very most instead.

I quite like RTS games. Command and Conquer, Age of Empires, Age of Mythology, Total Annihilation, Warcraft, Starcraft, Homeworld, Dawn of War, Company of Heroes, Supreme Commander and Rise of Nations are just some of the series I've enjoyed. They all kept my attention right from the get-go because there was at least one thing from each series that was done exceptionally well, such as the amount of strategic or tactical depth that was offered, the story or the multiplayer experience. The problem is that Tooth and Tail doesn't seem to have anything special going for it

Firstly, the gameplay isn't enough to keep me interested because I don't get to have the level of control or number of options that I'm accustomed to in other games. I think that the lead designer went too far in simplifying the RTS experience. Why did they decide to go down this route?

The store page says that Tooth and Tail is 'Pick-up-and-Play', which is a term that annoys me wherever I see it, by the way. It goes on to say, 'With matches lasting from 5-12 minutes, controls designed specifically for the gamepad, and split-screen couch play, Tooth and Tail is a popcorn RTS for veterans and newcomers alike.' Is that so? They say 'veterans' and 'newcomers', but I say that with the way this game is designed, neither group is likely to get much lasting appeal from it.

The thing is, newcomers already have it pretty good when it comes to being introduced to the RTS genre. Even many of the older games provide pretty decent tutorials. Homeworld and Age of Empires II comes to mind. If a newcomer grasps the basics from an in-game tutorial and plays through the campaign of any of the games that I mentioned, the RTS world is pretty much their oyster. Unfortunately, I can't really say the same about Tooth and Tail, although it's probably difficult to judge that from the perspective of a so-called 'veteran' or 'enthusiast', as I'd prefer to be called. The only true veterans out there are the ones who actually served their countries.

So, why do I think that Tooth and Tail is a bad way to introduce someone to the RTS genre? My view of it is mainly based on the way units are controlled in this game, or should I say, unit. Unlike the games that I mentioned, you have no direct control over the units that actually do the fighting. It's just WASD-based movement with your commander and mouse buttons for telling your other units to follow you or stop. There is also a command to order troops to focus-fire on specific enemy units, but it doesn't seem to work very well.

I was constantly thinking about the things that I am able to do in other RTS games, such as switching between control groups and clicking on the minimap if I wanted specific units to focus on specific tasks. If you're new and don't understand what that means, just ask yourself the following questions:

'Can I click and drag?'
'Can I hold CTRL and press a number key?'
'Can I click on the little square or circle in the corner of the screen?'

If you said yes to even one of those, I think it is safe to say that even you will probably find the functionality available in Tooth and Tail to be very limiting and you will soon desire greater control over what's going on in the game. I believe that it won't prepare a newcomer well for other RTS games because they are controlled very differently.

Hopefully, you can see where I'm going here. Despite what the store page claims, this isn't about introducing newcomers to a genre. It's about catering to controller users. I like controllers, by the way. I find them to be quite good for platformers and third-person action games. However, there are times when you have to recognise the best tool for the job. For RTS, it's the mouse and keyboard. There's no argument against it. Why anyone would want to use anything else, I will never understand, unless a player has some sort of crippling disability.

With all of that said though, there is an RTS game that comes to mind which was designed for controller use and I did enjoy it somewhat: Halo Wars. Although the gameplay was simplified compared to PC RTS games, I do recall that Halo Wars for the Xbox 360 allowed for better control than Tooth and Tail (and exceeding it in other areas as well of course). Did the developers take any notes from that?

So, what about those '5-12 minutes' matches? I'll say this: short matches are good for certain genres such as fighting games where it's about muscle memory, reflexes and yomi (look it up). Why design an RTS for short skirmishes though? A large part of the appeal of RTS games is the tug-of-war aspect and countering your opponent's forces with some higher tech unit that they weren't prepared for. There's tactics for the short-term and strategy for the long-term. I don't really see how any of this can play out in the span of 5-12 minutes. After watching some tournament replays, I can't say that I'm interested enough to dig deeper and find out. Maybe this is for people who are really that pressed for time? Suffice to say, the multiplayer scene is quite dead. With an average player count of about 25 for the past 12 months or so, you may even risk spending more time finding a match than actually playing one, depending on your timezone.

All that is left to examine is the story mode. Actually, it's not very interesting either. The writer was trying to make a funny story inspired by real-life examples of revolution and class struggle, but it's all communicated with rather poorly-written text and Russian-esque voiceovers. By about the eighth mission, I had stopped caring. Sometimes the gameplay has something of a halo effect on me and I end up being drawn in to the story, but again, the gameplay just wasn't that good. The music and character portraits are alright, but that's just not enough.

Pocketwatch Games markets Tooth and Tail as "Real-Time Strategy Distilled". A better way to describe it is 'diluted'. Whether you're new or experienced, this is not worth the time, even if you only have '5-12 minutes'. There are many better options out there.

Rencounter is essentially a turn-based tactics rogue-like that involves hacking away at an enemy's right arm so that they suffer such a huge accuracy penalty that they cannot land any hits on you. Maybe there is a more interesting way to play, but I found this to be the safest. After getting to about the half-way mark though, I just couldn't stomach any more of this repetitive nonsense. Everything, from the map layouts to enemy design just blurred together and I simply stopped caring.

Oh, and in case anyone is wondering, there isn't really much of a story here. The introduction contains a few still drawings showing a man coming out of cryogenic stasis or something. The rest is supposed to be pieced together by gathering these things called "scrolls" which are essentially items in your inventory that contain about one sentence each to read. Yes, intriguing stuff isn't it?

This game doesn't have much in the way of long-term appeal. The campaign mode is short, easy, boring and forgettable and there is hardly anyone to play with as far as multiplayer is concerned. Keeping that in mind, this isn't something I would ask a friend to join me in, for quite a few reasons. The big one though is that something just feels off about the combat. I think it's mostly due to how everything seems to lack weight, whether it be the mechs or even the environments that they interact with.

Speaking of which, I really don't know why buildings are even featured in most of the maps since watching them collapse is less satisfying than watching a Jenga tower topple over. They don't seem to serve any purpose other than to obscure your vision of the enemy. I certainly can't recommend Override if you want to see cities getting levelled.

Combat with the mechs themselves is a bit too 'Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots' for my taste. Is there any depth to it? I doubt it. Aside from the occasional charge attack with both arms, I mostly performed kicks with the right leg. It seemed to be the quickest and most far-reaching attack. And so it was throughout story mode. A kick in the bum for the aliens and mechs. Over and over again. I was like a one-legged man in an arse kicking contest. If that's you're kind of thing, well then, enjoy.

As for me, I think that the developers may have been better off going down the Gundam Musou route. The combat would have been pretty simplistic as well, but at least flashy moves would have made this more interesting to watch. Might not do wonders for the competitive multiplayer scene, but it looks like it would be pretty barren either way.

So, what we have here is boring combat, bland environments, repetitive music, a forgettable story mode and multiplayer which hardly anyone wants to play. There are games that I am done with after only a short time, but some of them can still be memorable because they at least do something exceptionally well, whether it be the story or gameplay (or both). I even return to them every once in a while for that reason. Override offers none of that. I think I'm more likely to remember writing a review for Override, rather than the experience I had of actually playing the game itself.

How did this end up in my library anyway, you may ask? Why, it was part of a Humble Monthly bundle of course! It's junk like this that causes myself to wonder what possessed me to subscribe in the first place. Curse you Humble Store!

The Swapper is everything that I wanted out of a puzzle platformer made by a small studio.

The attractive visuals are unique, the gameplay is clever, the soundtrack and audio is effective in its minimalism and most importantly, the story is interesting. Unfortunately, just about all of the indie games I've played before have downright dreadful storytelling or the developers just didn't seem to try to inject anything that could hold my attention. An interesting story is important to me. It keeps me going and stops my frequent glances at the clock.

Unlike many other indie games, The Swapper didn't wear out its welcome and actually exceeded my expectations. Many will look to the likes of Braid or Limbo as landmark titles, setting the standard which led to the great indie developer explosion. Perhaps they are, but The Swapper and it's more narrative-driven approach has iterated and refined upon what came before it, leaving me to think that many of the so-called indie greats of the past are not so special after all and are in some cases, pretentious.

I will make sure to keep an eye out for anything else that the writer, Tom Jubert, has contributed to.

'Little Miss Lonely is a game about childhood, fear and the relationships.'

What's that? The relationships? Are we talking about the slippery slope of navigating relationships in a more general sense? Or are they specific relationships that we are exploring? What could this possibly mean? Judging by the overall efforts of the developers, it would be safer to assume that the wording of the game's official synopsis is neither of the two possibilities. It is a mistake.

A small thing to be sure, but this sets the tone for me and I wasn't too surprised by the way I felt as I reached the end of Little Miss Lonely. Suffice it to say, it's not a very good game about childhood, fear, relationships or anything for that matter.

It's my understanding that gameplay is not the focus of these kinds of games. Fine. I accept that. The question to consider then is whether Little Miss Lonely offers a worthwhile storytelling experience.

Unfortunately, brief flashbacks of a nine year old girl's life as she experiences family breakdown, the death of a grandparent, bullying and so on are not enough to make this an interesting story. Ultimately, I am left to wonder, what does Club Cotton Games have to express through any of this? That these unfortunate experiences are in fact, gasp, bad?

What is the overall message that the audience is supposed to take away? Don't tell me that we're supposed to come away from Little Miss Lonely feeling something. That's not really good enough. If you want, you can just close your eyes and think back to some of the bad experiences from your own childhood. You don't need Little Miss Lonely for that. Did I feel anything after this was all over? Maybe a little confusion regarding the abrupt ending. Other than that though? No, nothing at all.

In addition, the overall presentation of the game doesn't exactly do wonders for whatever feeling or sentiment that the creators intended. The voice overs played backwards are distracting at best and annoying to listen to at their worst. The music has already been forgotten. The hand-drawn artistic style, however, is adequate and appropriate given the perspective of the main character. That may very well be the only thing that this game has going for it.

It's likely that Little Miss Lonely was inspired by the creator's own experiences. At the risk of coming across as callous, I say, so what? Anybody can recount their experiences. It takes a skilled mind to do so with, how should I say, a strong sense of perspective that carries uniqueness and leaves a lasting impression. Again I ask, what is the message? What is there to be learned?

I think that this is yet another example of an independent developer who had not yet found their voice at the time of their game's release. They just weren't quite ready for the prime time. I hope that the experience of developing this game was in some way therapeutic for them at least.

And with that, I will lastly mention that Little Miss Lonely came as part of a bundle purchased years ago. It was never the main draw, but sometimes we do get pleasant surprises. Not this time though.