Stuck in LIMBO

I had a few other ideas for posts, but I decided to put them on hold so I could talk about a game that missed the mark for me: Limbo.

Limbo is a 2D platformer with a wonderful, creepy aesthetic. There's a very consistent art style that invokes a feeling of near powerlessness in a strange world of large spiders and crushing cogs. You play as a young boy navigating a weird world in shades of grey with death lurking around almost every corner. I think you're looking for your sister, though that is information I've gleaned from other sources than the game.

I picked up Limbo because it garnered a lot of praise as a puzzle platformer. I enjoyed the art style, and the music lends itself to a consistent aesthetic. You feel very alone in this strange world as you manipulate it to avoid death and further your journey.

For the first part of the game, I was somewhat interested. There were a few interesting puzzle moments, and it was interesting that there were also large breaks in the action. But for some reason, it just didn't grab me. It could be that the story wasn't laid out for me or just that the action was too spread out.

The puzzles were either very transparent or obtuse. The latter version left me irritated as it took dying to determine what the rules of the game were. In a few cases, while it was potentially possible to make the right decisions the first time, I found that I couldn't react to new information in sufficient time to live. Puzzles either left me underwhelmed or incredibly frustrated. Either I couldn't determine how to overcome an obstacle or I couldn't execute to the precision needed.

The game lingers a little too long on the death scenes for my liking. There's no easy way to restart a checkpoint once you realize that you've botched a puzzle, so instead you have to surrender to the circular saw or jump into the spiked pit. The scene lingers on your impaled or dismembered form before resetting you. While this may lend to the aesthetic, from a gameplay perspective, it took me out of the experience. Compare that to a game like Super Meat Boy, in which death takes a matter of a second or two before you're back in the saddle again. That approach is designed to facilitate flow, which I never achieved in Limbo. Granted, they have different approaches to the dynamic, but Limbo failed me on this point.

This sums up my feelings on this game

I actually realized while playing the game that I wasn't enjoying the experience. I was just going through the motions in an effort to not let the game get the better of me. Either I was detached from the experience or incredibly frustrated by it. I finally called it quits to write this about 2/3 of the way through when I encountered a puzzle that I'm not certain is solvable. (Obviously it is, as many other people have completed this game, but I can't figure it out. Even turning to a guide has left me with instructions that don't make sense. And before you offer, no thanks, I'm done.) Maybe I'm just bitter because I can't do it. But I'm no longer beholden to this game.

Limbo's main failing points, then, are an odd approach to pacing that didn't keep me invested in the experience and a discrepancy in puzzle difficulty coupled with lingering too long on deaths. I enjoyed the art style and the seamless transition without a HUD or loading screens. The music was largely absent (what is even on the soundtrack?), though, which was an interesting artistic choice. This is the first game I've played in a while that I simply didn't enjoy, despite many reviews to the contrary. I guess we're all entitled to our own opinions, then. Now I'm going to go play more Gauntlet: Dark Legacy while unsuccessfully trying to avoid the Steam sales.

Finishing the Unfinished Swan

So after I fell in love with Journey, a few friends pointed me towards the Unfinished Swan. It's a game of exploration developed by Giant Sparrow games, and is only available on PS3. The $15 price point seems a little steep, but it was a delightful experience that I don't regret purchasing. This review will be a little light, as it's a short game and I don't want to ruin the aspect of discovery for those who have yet to give it a try.

You play as Monroe, whose mother was a painter, though she wasn't very good at finishing things. When she died, the orphanage allowed Monroe to keep one of her hundreds of unfinished paintings. He chose her favorite - the unfinished swan. One night he wakes up to find that the swan is gone! He grabs his mother's silver paintbrush and enters a door that hadn't been there before.

The game starts you in a completely white area and leaves you to figure out how to play. The main mechanic is being able to throw balls of paint around, which splatter on the walls and reveal the environment around you. I felt a delightful sense of childlike wonder as I explored this first area, a silly grin on my face. The music sneaks in, revealing itself as the world around you does. The score is perfectly whimsical and the intermittent narration adds to the storybook feel of the game.

Even though the initial area felt like it could be the entirety of the game, the mechanic evolves a few times, keeping gameplay fresh. I was only at a loss for what to do a couple times and never felt that anything was beyond my abilities. It seems like a game that would be great for playing with kids, though the nighttime levels got a little scary for me.

All in all, it was a delightful experience that I've enjoyed sharing with others. After finishing the game, you can use the balloons you've collected to purchase toys and even an initial test level. I may go back to some levels and try to get more of the balloons, especially now that I've gotten the balloon radar.

Amnesia: Because a dark scary castle is a great place to spend a Saturday

I'll admit it: I'm a scaredy-cat. I don't do horror movies or haunted houses (unless I'm working them). I jump at little sounds and still sometimes get spooked by things that go bump in the night. This is why I didn't actually play Amnesia: The Dark Descent, a first-person survival horror title from Frictional Games, for myself - I watched as a friend of mine, Alex, played. I should get credit however for not running away screaming (and helping with puzzles).

Amnesia starts you in an apparently empty castle. You can't remember anything, but you find a note addressed to you directing you to kill Alexander, who is in the Inner Sanctum. It's signed by you, so it's gotta be legit. Assuming that your previous self knew what was going on, you proceed gaily through the castle to find him. The rest of the story is disseminated through pages of your torn-up diary and, interestingly, the load screens. (There's a minimum time set to display the message, in case you're playing on a really fast computer.) They do a good job of keeping you in the dark, but informing you enough that you remain intrigued. And, yes, amnesia is a well-known crutch of writing, but they work with it quite well.

Because when I steal and rip apart a diary, I leave all the pages in a convenient order for him to follow.

Amnesia's got a couple of interesting mechanics going for it. The main one is a balance between light and dark: enemies can see you if you're standing in the light, but standing in the darkness for too long makes you lose your sanity. You also have no weapon, so your only options when you see an enemy are to run or crouch in the darkness, praying it won't find you. Oh, and don't look at the enemies too much - you'll lose sanity. You also lose sanity by experiencing "unsettling events." Lack of sanity makes it harder to control your character and your vision will shift and warp. Eventually you just crumple to the ground in what I assume is a blubbering mess. Solving puzzles and staring at light regains sanity.

Another interesting mechanic is that doors are opened and shut with click-and-drag with an option to slam them quickly with the right mouse button. While it took Alex some getting used to at first, he tells me it was eventually pretty intuitive. It allows the player to swing a door open for a peek into the next room (which we didn't use much), but more importantly, it impedes a player who is running away flailing. Running from an enemy is that much harder when you have to remember which way a door swings and spin around quickly to slam it shut.

I didn't expect the game to be as puzzle focused as it was. Overall, I expected more enemies, but it turned out to be a good balance given the no-weapons part, and contributed well to pacing. The castle was reasonably linear without feeling like it - because you're never given a map and have to rely on limited tinderboxes and lantern oil to find your way around, it feels bigger than it is. It's also nicely impossible to get too lost or wander forward without all the tools you need. A few times we had some difficulty tracking down the last cog or pipe because Alex had a tendency to pick up and throw them around, but overall the puzzles weren't too bad. The game will generally give you a hint if you try to use an item but need something else as well. Many puzzles were fairly trivial, though - the game is relying on the horror mechanic.

Next up on our scenic tour, the sewers...

I think the sounds are actually the scariest part of the game. I know many people *cough Jeremy cough* who couldn't make it five or ten minutes into the game, and it takes about ten to find the first enemy. (Though you do catch glimpses of things moving before then and frequently try to go the other way only to have the game force you to Even longer before you're in actual danger - the game uses the first encounter to teach you how to hide from them. The aesthetic is very well done overall, becoming scarier as you descend deeper into the castle and uncover the more gruesome parts of the tale.

The sanity mechanic worked reasonably well, though both sanity and health are described on your inventory screen with a series of descriptors rather than any numerical scale. While this was a reasonable choice for the game, it was a little frustrating for seasoned gamers who wanted to make sense of it. Sanity, for instance, ranges from "Crystal clear" to "..." with descriptors in between like "A slight headache." This system didn't seem to correspond with the aforementioned warping of the screen, though. I suppose it is somewhat appropriate that we spent the game not understanding the insanity scale.

As far as enemies go, while there were less encounters than I expected, the various encounters were well designed. There was never a time we felt that getting by was impossible, though many were close calls of slamming doors behind us and crouching in a corner as the creature pounded at the door. A few times we got by because an enemy simply didn't spawn, though we're unsure whether that was a glitch or the game pitying us. When something kills you, the screen will bring up a message, which is generally something like "You must carry on..." but ocasionally explains a new enemy trick for you (like the helpful "Run!"). While it was clear after dying once what needed to be done, it was a little odd to have to die to get it. I suppose an observant player could figure it out in most cases, and luckily death didn't set you back too far. The pacing was mostly good, with high points and lulls, even if it got a little predictable. We still got spooked though, to the game's credit.

You've - you've got something on your chin there, dude.

Overall, Amnesia does a lot of things about survival horror right. While it isn't a genre I play often, I do think it's perfectly suited to video games due to interactivity. Amnesia, possibly because it lacks the graphics budget of a AAA studio, goes back to survival horror's roots in early 3D gaming, which relied more on darkness and surprise than impressive and creepy enemy models because they simply couldn't be rendered. Amnesia's enemies look a little goofy when you stare at them for a while, but they'll still make you jump when you turn around to find one right behind you. I recommend it to anybody who's at all interested in the survival horror genre, even if you get scared. The triumvirate for beating Amnesia (only 2 required) is to play in daylight, with a friend, and/or without sound. Mix and match so that you can get through it, but I do recommend enjoying the sounds - they add a lot to the experience.

Game Dev Story and Angry Birds Space

I recently got a droid smartphone, and thus have been trying out all the great Android games that I never had a chance to play before. And all the mindless ones, like Temple Run and Fruit Ninja, but those are topics for another post. Or maybe just not topics ever, since well, there's not much to say about Temple Run and Fruit Ninja aside from "they're addictive". Today, as you may have gathered from the post title, I want to talk about Game Dev Story and Angry Birds Space, so let's get started with Game Dev Story.

Game Dev Story places you in charge of a fledgling game development studio. You start the game by naming your studio, and then your secretary introduces you to the game. You need to hire a team, and then develop the best game ever. Fairly straightforward, but the path to the top is long and difficult. I'd go into more detail about what the process consists of, but it's somewhat long to explain and really quite simple to understand when you play, so I'm not going to. Pretty much: hire a team, work on a project, use research gained to level up team, use money earned to train team and start next project, repeat until success. Gameplay simply involves making the decisions in leading your studios along its path towards the top, and it's very addictive. You will always want to play through one more project, because this time you'll be able to pull off something even better. It's quite amazing how they managed to make the game so addictive despite not really having that much in the way of actual gameplay. In addition, if you have any desire to go into video game development at all, I think you should try out Game Dev Story. While it's not exactly a simulator for what working in game development is like, it might help you learn a few things. It definitely made me stop and think about my goals in life more than once.

Next up, Angry Birds Space. It took Mario over two decades to make it to outer space, but the Angry Birds have done it in something like two years. I've played through a fair bit of the original Angry Birds, and it was quite addictive (achieving 3 stars on every level is a practically herculean task). However, I eventually got bored of it and moved on to other games. The premise for Angry Birds Space is the same: use a slingshot to hurl angry birds at pigs for massive damage. The only difference is that the slingshot is now in space. Some planets have gravity, in which case objects will be drawn towards the center of the circular gravity field, but otherwise launching a bird will send it straight ahead in that direction until it hits something. It may not sound very significant, but the space physics change the entire feel of the game for me. I wasn't expecting much out of Angry Birds Space, but honestly it blew me away within a few levels. You start with some basic launching birds into the right orbit trajectory to smash into the pigs, but it quickly escalates from there, until I was bombarding the pigs with asteroids that I blasted into the orbit fields. Nothing short of addictive, and this time I feel like I'm addicted more to the mechanics of the game than the need to 3 star everything (not that I haven't 3 starred all the levels I've played so far anyway). I definitely recommend you give this one a try as well, you might be as surprised as I was.

That's all for Silver Asterism smartphone edition this time! Next up, a rundown of my impressions of E3!

REVIEW- Warp

The best thing about indie games on PSN is that they're shorter, which means that it doesn't take as long for me to get through one, and I also don't have to write as much about it. As indie games, they are often also more exciting or innovative, but me being as incredibly lazy as I am, the main draw is the shorter time commitment required. So on that note, next up is Warp, by Trapdoor.

The premise of Warp is that you are an alien that has crashed on Earth. Incapacitated by the rough landing, you are captured, taken to a secret underwater facility, and experimented upon by scientists. However, you manage to break out using the titular ability, and proceed to wreak havoc throughout the facility in an attempt to break out a fellow alien and escape the facility. As you progress, you'll gain various other abilities that will help with your bid for freedom, such as being able to create an 'echo' of yourself that draws enemy attention. The levels are well designed, and the player can either aim to be stealthy or warp into enemies and tear them apart from the inside, and each method is generally equally viable. Following the main path tends to be fairly simple through the course of the game, but the levels have collectible grubs hidden or well placed throughout the level that require some more creative thinking to reach and obtain.

One of my favorite parts about Warp is the whimsical feel of the characters. Your character communicates through adorably unintelligible gargles, and acts like a curious small child when dealing with humans (even while gruesomely tearing apart their bodies). The scientists in the facility are total pansies, and upon sighting you will scream and run away, bemoaning their fate (and how they've had such an awful day) as they cower in a corner. On the other hand, the soldiers that patrol the facility are stereotypically gung-ho in their efforts to kill you, spouting macho lines about how you must have run away from them, you chicken. The extreme silliness that ensues whenever I revealed myself in a room was more than a little motivation to keep going even on the occasions that I got somewhat bored with the puzzles the game threw at me.

That's all for now! To sum things up, Warp is a short and fun stealth stealth'ish puzzle'ish game. Definitely give it a try if you like warping based puzzles, top down stealth games, or if you like warping into the bodies of enemies and tearing them apart from the inside out. Maybe next time I'll write about a bigger/longer game.

QUICK REVIEW- Batman: Arkham City

Haven't posted in a little while, but I'm still doing better than October! And now I have plenty more things to write about, by which I actually mean I have maybe three more games to write about. So first up is Batman: Arkham City.

Arkham City is the sequel to Batman: Arkham Asylum, and shifts the focus of the game to a more open world. In Arkham Asylum, inmates have taken over the asylum and Batman goes in to sort things out. Arkham City takes place several months later, and Mayor Quincy Sharp has sectioned off a portion of Gotham City to become the new Arkham Asylum. Bruce Wayne is campaigning against Arkham City when he is arrested and thrown into the asylum. Bruce Wayne becomes Batman, and sets out to take out the super-villains causing trouble in Arkham City, and to stop the dastardly plans of the new warden of the asylum, Hugo Strange. The story is still linear, but now there are more sidequests, and a much wider area for collectibles to be hidden in.

The story of Arkham City is interesting, with a very large mix of Batman villains getting caught up in the mix. However, though many villains show up, a lot of the appearances are very brief, and it frequently feels like the villain was included for the sake of inclusion. In particular, I feel like Two-Face was rather heavily featured in the advertisements, but only shows up at the very beginning, after which he apparently disappears. He does return in the Catwoman content, but only once at the very end, and in an entirely unsatisfying way. As a second 'however', though, each villain's character is portrayed amazingly, even with the short screen-time given. And as a second 'in particular', Penguin very quickly left me feeling disgusted at his sadism, while the battle with Ra's al Ghul is extremely cinematic. I don't feel like the campaign is particularly long (but then, I am currently in the middle of playing Skyrim), but there is a scattering of sidequests available, many of them featuring villains from Arkham Asylum.

As for gameplay, Arkham City takes what Arkham Asylum does well and adds more to it. Fighting flows beautifully when you're in hand to hand combat, and it feels amazing to rack up immense combos while fighting off hordes of enemies. Multiple enemies can be countered simultaneously now, making larger groups of enemies more manageable. A couple new types of enemies have been added, such as ones carrying sharp weapons, ones with body armor, and ones with riot shields, to force the player to mix things up even more. Most of Batman's gadgets can now be used on the fly with a simple button combination, allowing a much greater variety in combo possibilities, which makes the overall combat system much deeper and considerably more difficult to master. It is entirely possible to get through the game by mashing mostly the attack and counter buttons, but to do it stylishly and still avoid taking lots of damage takes a lot of work and feels immensely satisfying.

The stealth sections also have added several new elements to the mix. Enemies in these sections also come in more varieties now. Infrared goggles allow thugs to scan a vantage point to see if Batman is hiding there, some thugs will place mines that only detonate when triggered by Batman, and some even have signal jammers that prevent the absolutely crucial detective vision from functioning properly. As a stealth game fan, I personally loved every single one of these segments, and honestly I think that they don't happen enough in the game. While thugs with guns do appear more frequently on the overworld near the end of the game, taking out a group of thugs with guns while outside feels significantly different from taking out a group of them while inside a building. Because of this, I feel like the focus of the game shifted more towards hand to hand combat than stealth, while I remember Arkham Asylum as a more equal blend of both.

And finally, the replay value. Arkham City is absolutely immense, and there are hundreds of Riddler challenges to complete, scattered all over the world. Riddler trophies can require quite a range of gadgets to acquire (those that Batman can't yet acquire can be tagged and marked on the map), and some are only available for Catwoman to collect. To help with obtaining every single collectible, Riddler informants are randomly thrown in with groups of thugs. If Batman can take out every other thug before the informant, he can then interrogate the informant to discover the locations of a few Riddler challenges. After beating the game, a New Game Plus mode is unlocked, which puts Batman at the start of the game with all upgrades and gadgets intact. Thugs come in larger and more complicated combinations, and the counter icon that appears over an enemy's head disappears. And finally, there are challenge maps, where the player can pick one of the characters (Batman, Catwoman, Robin, and Nightwing) to take on waves of unarmed enemies (earning points for performance and medals for reaching point thresholds), or clear a room of armed enemies (earning medals for taking out a thug in a particular way). Basically, you can play Arkham City for as long as you could possibly want.

So in case you couldn't tell yet, Batman: Arkham City is an amazing game. The story is exciting and the characters are interesting. The hand to hand fighting is fluid and the stealth gameplay makes you really feel like a predator stalking the darkness. And there is more than enough content to keep you playing for weeks. There are some flaws, but it does so much more right, which makes Arkham City possibly the greatest comic book game yet created.

QUICK RETRO REVIEW- Psychonauts

Only one post in all of October? I was really hoping to do better than that... Also, just a note, I've gone and edited past posts so that the entire article isn't visible on the main page, figured it made everything a bit cleaner. Unfortunately, not all of the posts were very easy to split up, so some of the splits might be a bit ugly, and I apologize for that.

Since the last post got me thinking a lot more about DoubleFine, I figured I might as well also talk a bit more about Psychonauts, because omgPsychonautsisamazingspaz. Anyway, on to the review thing!

QUICK REVIEW- Stacking

Once again, apologies for not posting and whatnot. The game for today is one that I actually finished quite a while ago, but then never thought to write about because it's a Playstation Network game and therefore somehow slips my mind when I think about what I've played recently. But enough about my forgetfulness! Onwards to the review!

QUICK REVIEW- Defy Gravity Extended

This whole 'class' and 'homework' business really gets in the way of keeping up a regular posting schedule, clearly a sign that I need to learn to write faster. The game for today is a small indie game called Defy Gravity (the extended version recently released on Steam).

INCOMPLETE REVIEW- Bastion

Oops. We forgot to post for a while. This doesn't bode well for when classes actually start up again... Oh well. We'll figure things out. Anyway. The topic for today is Bastion, an indie game that recently came out on XBLA and Steam.

Oh, what tangled Braids we weave

So we've talked about Braid before, but now that I've beaten it, I felt it deserved its own post. As a quick recap, Braid is a pretty standard indie puzzle platformer with time manipulation as its special gimmick. Each world introduces a new way that Tim's time reversal can interact with the game.

Tim puts together puzzles while a city burns

QUICK REVIEW- Cave Story

I feel like I should write something other than a review at some point. But I don't know what to write about. So whoever reads this, if there's any topic in particular (related to video games) that you want to read my thoughts on, post it in the comments or write me an email about it!

REVIEW- Patapon 3

And yet another post that I should have written months ago while I was actively playing the game. Like with Terraria, I haven't actually beaten Patapon 3 yet, but I'm not going to mark this review with 'INCOMPLETE' because I have sunk a considerable amount of time into the game, and don't think that investing considerably more time to complete the game would particularly change my opinions. Also, when reading this review, keep in mind that Patapon 3 has a huge focus on playing the game multiplayer, but I've only played singleplayer. Anyway, here we go!

REVIEW- Terraria

Man, I wish I could write clever titles. But if I tried, I'd probably always get stuck on the title writing part and never actually write anything, so I'm going to stick with my simple, if boring, title method. Anyway, today's topic is Terraria!

Off the edge of the map: Here there be dragons. Or, treasure and enemies to shoot. Whichever.

Woo! Uncharted! Here I'm going to review the first two games, Drake's Fortune and Among Thieves, at the same time.

My driver's license should be revoked.

dude, check out that sweet car!

I am addicted to racing games.

RETRO REVIEW- Deus Ex

Alright. Time for a RETRO review! I am extremely excited for Deus Ex: Human Revolution (coming out in August), so while I wait for that to come out, I've been playing its predecessor, Deus Ex, which came out for the PC back in 2000. Deus Ex is a game that I've seen pop up on Top 10 lists of awesome games for a while (notably there are many people that would place Deus Ex as the best game of all time), but never got around to playing until now. And to put it really briefly, I have to say that it deserves the praise. Without further ado, here we go!

Plants, Zombies, and Ropes, Oh my!

Hello! I'm quixoticdreamer (Maggie), the newest and gender-diversifying member of the Silver Asterism crew! :-D So, without further ado, let's jump into a quick review!

Since I spent the weekend playing on my mom's iPad, I was inspired to write about two games that I obsessed over: Plants vs. Zombies and Cut the Rope. And to introduce my experimental smiley-face rating system (that will last as long as I'm not bored with it), here we go!

INCOMPLETE REVIEW- Duke Nukem Forever

A brief word about my titles, at least with regards to game reviews. QUICK, a la my Portal 2 review, means I'm not putting as much time into writing the review. Mostly just spouting off a few thoughts as they come to me. Most likely means it's a game that doesn't have much for me to criticize in the first place. INCOMPLETE, as this one is titled, doesn't mean the review itself is incomplete, but is based off an incomplete experience of the game, where I'm limiting the definition of a complete experience to finishing the single player campaign. And RETRO, which I haven't used yet but plan to very soon, is for a game released before this current console generation (so games released around or before 2005). I'll come up with other important title words as I need them. Just note that they're not exclusive, so I can have a QUICK INCOMPLETE RETRO REVIEW if I want.

Anyway. Onto the review. First, as usual, the long version:

Alright, maggots. Let's kill some space Russkies.

Hi again! We're back for another episode of Everybody Loves Sho- wait, you mean I haven't been posting? Oops. I guess I forgot. My sincerest apologies.

I'm sitting at home, and am not yet working. I'm also taking care of a friend's PS3. And the collection of games that come with it. So I pick up one that I thought looked interesting while he was playing it.

Yes, it's time for... [cue over-dramatic gravelly voice] Vanquish.