This is a good adventure game! It’s actually an incredibly clever adventure game doing lots of very subtle smart things! It has its issues, but don’t we all.
The thing is, the problems are there. I don’t know if I can recommend this to someone who isn’t a word nerd. But at the same time, what Inkle have achieved in Heaven’s Vault is tremendous. I don’t know what to compare it to, because there isn’t anything.
Really, if you’re a fan of good stories and good characters – and have a spare 50 hours to work through three games of cases – this is a pretty good bet.
It’s all ever so tranquil on the surface, and never once made my cortisone levels spike, but there’s a fierce brain throbbing away beneath those sedate low-poly models.
Photographs is a very novel experience (well, a very short story experience, fnarr), lovingly crafted, if not fully composed. I don’t love it as a puzzle game, but it’s a vignette of vignettes, and I like it for that.
There’s plenty of stuff I’d change, especially tonally and in terms of international relationships, but I played it happily until I couldn’t see straight.
I am not incredibly enthused to fight more baddies in Outward. I’m not that excited to speak to more of its cardboardy NPCs. I’m not looking forward to getting up from my chair to do some light cardio while I wait for my character to warm up by a campfire in the middle of a snowstorm, so I don’t get diseased and have to trek to the nearest village for a herbal tea and sleep for a day before I’m healthy again. But that travel, maaaaan. It absolutely nails it.
It has so much potential, and is close to being an decent game. I want to love it, and maybe one day I could. As it stands, though, this needs a lot more time invested in it.
Yes, Sekiro hurts. But look at this smile as well. Shadows Die Twice is a beautiful, masochistic misadventure. Some of its boss fights are so stupendous, I dare not speak about them. It is a test of mettle and nerve that proves From Software are still winning the arms race against us cheesey rats.
I find it better to approach this as a good waste of time, a detailed disasterworld to saunter through for a couple of weeks.
Trüberbrook isn’t bad, but it feels like a wedding cake with a couple of tiers missing. Beautiful icing, great craftsmanship on show, but somehow not all there.
But this is wonderful. Completely wonderful. Original, inspired, challenging, and most importantly of all, that constant sense of “Oh no, how will I ever do this one!” so quickly followed by, “I AM A GENIUS!” It’s a very, very smart game, that has the humility to let you, the player, feel like the clever one
There is just SO much to do, to explore, so many secrets I know I’ve missed, and bits I want to return to. This is completely splendid.
The best bit of The Occupation is creeping around and scrabbling through paperwork, and that bit is bloody brilliant.
Vignettes is a toy. And that is why it’s completely splendid.
There is a demon, and I’m going to kill it. With style. I’ll shoot and slash and somersault, chaining together increasingly outlandish combos while listening to electro-metal where I only catch the odd word like ‘sword’ or ‘death’.
I just kept thinking of so many different ways this could have been a much more ambitious take on a cheerful anachronism from an ancient 16-bit era. Sadly, I appear to have been the only one.
Dawn Of Man’s great triumph is that, a dozen hours after I’d picked my first berry, forging my first iron sword felt like an immortal accomplishment.
Objects In Space goes from being “space sim with fun buttons” to being “space sim with heart”.
Its jigsaw pieces, jolly and randomly-scattered as they might be, only assemble in a finite amount of ways.