Katamari Damacy REROLL (2018) - Review

The Katamari Damacy series has always existed in my mind as the best kind of video game that I never intended to play. It would've probably stayed that way if my then 5 yo son hadn't seen it somewhere and loved the concept. I decided I would get it so we could play it together. So I did get it, but we ended up playing something else together instead.

Katamari Damacy stayed in my game log untouched until I had one of those days when you go "Eh, why the heck not" with a shoulder shrug. It's not that I don't like the idea of Katamari Damacy, like mentioned I think it seemed like a brilliant game concept. Make a huge ball out of random stuff just because? You couldn't make a movie or book out of that, that idea could only exist in a video game.

The game was originally released on Playstation 2 in 2004, but as you can see I am playing the Reroll release from 2018. As far as I read up on it is about the same as the original but with updated graphics, but if you happen to be curious to know more details there is a great video on Youtube about it.

You have probably heard of Katamari Damacy before but if you haven't, you read that right - the core concept of game play is to make a huge ball of random things lying around on the ground. You play as the little prince who has to clean up the mess his father, the almighty King of All Cosmos, has made when he accidentally destroys all the stars in the sky. Apparently, balls made of random stuff can substitute for stars in the sky if you don't think too hard about it. 

And really, you could make up any excuse here because why wouldn't you want to roll things up into balls anyway? It's just plain fun, that's why, you don't need another reason. Each level comes with a minimum ball-size requirement and a time limit. Rolling things into balls isn't as easy as it first might seem. You can't just grab any old thing immediately, for things to stick to your ball they have to be smaller than your ball. Larger things will at best make you bounce off, at worst make things fall off your ball. So you have to be smart about how you go around collecting things, trying to avoid the things you can't pick up just yet and get back to them later. There is definitely a kick to get from finding a good path through the random items (they are very random and can even include living things like cats and dogs) and a high level of annoyance when you screech to a halt from something that you can't pick up yet. 

As your ball grows the area you're in will grow, revealing more items for you to pick up. Everything that attaches itself to your ball makes a satisfying ploppy, bloppy and shwoppy sound, for lack of better description. And let's talk a little bit about the music. It is great. From the intro song to the stage themes, each tune fits perfectly and makes it a joy to fail, because fail you will.

The game is a joy to look at as well, and the items scattered around are clearly organized in a way to entice you to move around the levels in certain ways. I want to mention it again here that the items you get to pick up can really be just about anything, but every now and then you get special stages where the Almighty King wants you to create a ball made up of some certain item - swans for instance. It all makes perfect sense when you play the game. I'm kidding, it doesn't, but rolling a ball of flapping swans around is equal parts hilarious and disturbing.

Knowledge of the places you go around in seems crucial to be able to make the time limit because despite the games best intentions to give you control and overview, it fails somewhat on that.

The game designers have really tried to think hard and clever when designing the controls, realizing that a game like this above all requires this to work well. To wrestle your ball around you have to use both control sticks, which allows you to get more control over things like speed and turning - absolutely essential to be able to cut corners and avoiding rats that are trying to ruin your ball. (On the keyboard it is a double-WASD setup, using JIKL as the other "stick", and I actually had more success with playing it this way).

Shoulder buttons allow you to get an overview but for all the good things they've thought of I can't help but feel like they've missed a huge point - how to control the camera. This problem becomes very frustrating when you try to get your ball the way you want it to, but you can't even see what is around you. The overview button, which gets your character to jump up in the air, doesn't solve this issue at all. As I wrestle the control sticks I literally feel like I am rolling a big ball of garbage in front of my face, and plus points for realism I guess. Unfortunately it takes a lot of the fun out trying to doing a good job when you feel like you are constantly being resisted. The ball at times doesn't feel cooperative in the slightest, making any bumps and knocks you take a lot more frustrating than they should be, as you see your hard worked bits fly all over the place.

The timer continues to tick down as you find yourself stuck in a corner, or trying to get up a tiny ledge, and it takes way too many precious seconds to try to find a way to move forward. There is a lack of control and cooperation that feels unforgivable for a game like this, despite what seems like their very best efforts to avoid these problems.

Maybe I am just getting old and slow, I am noticing I have a hard time taking good turns in Mario Kart 8 as well... But whatever the reason, and however much I think Katamari Damacy in many ways can stand as the perfect example of something that a video game can do that other media can't, I end up struggling too much to have fun. And yet, when I am not playing it I find myself thinking it would be nice to load it up to roll some more balls. There is something about it that is simultaneously relaxing and frustrating. It seems I am not the only one who thinks this way, the comment section on the OST on Youtube is full with similar sentiments like "Katamari Damacy is the most infuriating, frustrating, stressful, stress-reducing, enjoyable, satisfying, joyous game ever made" and "the katamari franchise is simultaneously the least stressful and the most UNGODLY STRESSFUL game i've ever played.",

I've decided to uninstall it several times, but I haven't. I am having more success when I am not trying to use a controller, so maybe Katamari will get to stick around a while longer still... there is just something appealing to the idea of rolling up garbage.

There is a two-player mode that works quite well since there can be some fun to be had from sharing the pain of trying to build the bigger ball. You can even roll each other up if you manage to get that much bigger than the competition. For all the frustrations I still want to recommend checking it out, if nothing else than to experience something truly unique. And then I am going to do something as horrible as recommending a mobile game if you want a better version of this style of gameplay. Check out the Tasty Planet series - it's fun.

Limbo (2010) - Review

I personally think the indie game landscape is one of the best and freshest things to happen to the video game world. It was looking quite dark there for a while in the mid 00's, with triple A developers only hinging their money on the safest of bets, ergo the most predictable of games. The video game industry seemed to be caught in a loop of trying to predict and deliver exactly what video gamers wanted, which only led to games that no one fully enjoyed. Things were glum indeed and suddenly, almost as by design, developing tools became accessible and user friendly enough that any basement game designer could give it a go. It was a beautiful full circle back to the very dawn of computer and video games, when most of them were made by people just playing around on their machines, trying to create something that they themselves wanted to play and not necessarily make the most money out of.

Limbo, released in 2010 by Playdead, wasn't among the very first indie games, but in my mind it definitely belonged to the first batch of games that showed players what indie games could accomplish that triple A developers were missing out on or were overcomplicating. It was a game that dared to be simple and concise, something that video game designers seemed to have almost forgotten the art of. Instead of moving towards even more content, even more open world, even more customization, Limbo was a game that removed all of that and told the simplest of stories with the most straight-forward of gameplay, like the darker twin of Super Mario Bros.

I was deep into my World of Warcrafting when Limbo was released and had little interest for it at the time. And in all honesty, the only reason I decided to eventually check it out was simply because it still lingered in the back of my mind as a game that was part of a big moment in video game history, and as such at least something I should know a little more about than the name and that it seems to have huge spiders in it.

Puzzle platformers are really not my thing, I must admit. I also tried Braid and didn't like it, so I didn't have high expectations for Limbo either. I also suck at Mario games, but those I still enjoy playing every now and then. My problem with indie puzzle platformers have often been that focus has been so much on making interesting puzzles, that it seems that the most important part - good platforming - has been lost on the way. Nothing is more frustrating than trying to solve a puzzle and constantly failing because your character doesn't control well enough. This was one of my issues with Braid.

I found this to be part of the issue in Limbo as well. The character, who seems to be a young child lost or running through dark woods, controls just fine until you get to parts that require timing. The controls are super simple, you can go left, right, up and down and with "ctrl" (on computers at least) you can grab things. The child will automatically cling on to ropes and edges if you're close enough. That's all there is to it. But it doesn't always work well enough and your character will suddenly do a short jump where you needed a long one, or fail to climb over an edge in time. I'm not saying the controls are badly programmed, but they are not tight enough for what is requested.

So you have to be prepared for a lot of trial and error. Limbo will throw traps at you that reverses the rule of a previous trap, which just feels devious. Or maybe hilarious, depending on your mood for the evening. Some times the puzzle is on a time limit for varying reasons (rising waters being one) and you don't get much time trying different ideas. Some times you know exactly what you need to do but fail at execution for unfair reasons, see above.

I am not entirely sure what Limbo is trying to tell with the atmosphere, but there must almost be a subgenre of games that has the "lonely in dangerous woods"-feel. If you like the feeling of being alone in the world, everything out to get you and nothing making sense (and why would you, it literally sounds like a nightmare), while solving puzzles, I can recommend checking out the games Rymdresa and Year Walk as well. The black and white in Limbo really works in its favour, and it probably helps hide the fact that Limbo itself feels like only half a game.

Because something struck me as interesting while playing Limbo - I am not so sure Limbo would've been noticed at all if it had been released in todays indie landscape. I am in fact sure it wouldn't be. Limbo in itself isn't much of a game, really. You run in one direction and  But what it represented when it was released meant a lot more than the game itself. It was what the game industry needed at the time. But now that we have indie games galore, we're spoiled with out of the box ideas and underdog design choices and a game like Limbo doesn't seem like a game that's out on a limb(o) anymore. In todays indie world Limbo seems a bit simple and tame.

But it wasn't back then. Back then it represented fresh and daring thinking, and no one can take that away from it. If you're like me, a bit curious about gaming history and gaming milestones, you could give Limbo a few hours of your life. Otherwise I think it's enough to just know what it once was, and enjoy the fruits of what it sowed.

The Whispered World (2009)

There is a game genre I keep coming back to even though my success rate is abysmally low, and that is the point-and-click puzzle genre. The amount of PoC games I have legitimately cleared compared to the amount of games I have tried is a pretty sad read, but I just can't let it be. A good PoC adventure will stay with you for a long time and a good PoC adventure is one I am the most likely to want to replay. I've replayed Broken Sword and The Dig several times and I am currently replaying Secret of Monkey Island.

The Whispered World was released in 2009 by German company Daedalic who are now probably mostly (in)famous for their terrible Gollum game which was released last year (2023), which in fact was so poorly received Daedalic decided not to develop any games anymore and instead focus entirely on being publishers. Before that they made games like the Deponia series, which I've only tried for a bit, and The Pillars of the Earth, which I completed.

The Whispered World was one of the very first games Daedalic released and maybe it was a sign of what was to come. It seems like Daedalic was always stronger in ideas than they were in programming and realization of those ideas.

The game centers around the circus clown Sadwick. He tours the world with his brother and grandpa, and a larva named Spot which is also used as a tool for some puzzles in the game in a Deus Ex Machina way. True to his name, Sadwick is ironic and some times cynical about himself and the world around him and quite likable. The writing is decent, I especially enjoyed the fact that most combinations you end up clicking seemed to have its own unique line of dialogue attached to it, which is a nice change from the umpteen "I can't do that" you often get to hear in PoC games. I couldn't stand the voice acting however and it's a blessing that the option to turn it off existed. 

The game is almost exclusively controlled with the mouse, with which you move Sadwick around and make him interact with the world. This works fine and I don't particularly miss the old verb-boards where you had to guess your way through "pull", "push" and "pick up". Though I guess you could argue it added to the puzzle element. Either way, I always find that I am bad judge for the quality of puzzle designs, since even the simplest puzzles can stump me. In Whispered World there are certainly a few head scratchers that feel like the way to get there is to start combining a bit of everything. There is a point where you have to scare your brother, and to do that you have to build a scary figurine from odd things you've picked up. I doubt anyone would figure out exactly what pieces fit together, this is a matter of trying everything with everything. There is also a few points where you have to give the correct dialogue options to NPC's and I never could get the hints as to what was the right thing to say. 

The story of Whispered World starts with Sadwick having a bad dream. The animation is very of its time, I got instant flashbacks to homebrew flash animations that were floating around the internet around then. The world is going to end somehow, and Sadwick involuntarily ends up being both the only way to save it and the possible cause of it. It never bothered me that it doesn't make much sense, the world is a cozy fantasy world full of odd creatures and is fun to explore. Things are random, but they make sense within the setting of The Whispered World.

The game was good enough to keep me interested and when I was about to give up because I got stuck I enlisted my kids to help me out. It became something for us to try to solve together, and progress was a lot easier with three heads (albeit some young ones) at it than just my own. Too bad then about the programming.

It started already pretty early in the game, where something that was required to happen to progress just didn't. Fortunately a restart of the game solved it then, but about half way through it happened again. I needed a certain object (hay from a pile of hay) to continue the game, but trying to pick it up Sadwick just kept telling us he already had it. Googling around it seems that game breaking bugs were not uncommon in this game and after having tried for a while without success we decided to give up. Even though the game was ok, none of us were interested in replaying two hours to get to where we were, only to perhaps end up getting the same bug again.

If you're starved for some PoC gaming and haven't come across this one yet I would say it could be worth checking out. Unfortunately this game requires you to be careful for the wrong reasons so don't repeat our mistake and make sure to keep several save spots going.

Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris (PC, 2014)

There can be defining moments of your teenage years, and the movie The Mummy was definitely one of those for me. It hit me like a slap across the face and I woke up to the glorious mystery that was Ancient Egypt. I became a little bit obsessed, when other teenagers had posters of Legolas and Anakin on their walls (that's what people had in the early 2000's right?) I begged my mom to take me to Egypt to visit the pyramids. I decided to learn how to read hieroglyphs and... well long story short, a game themed around ancient Egypt sounded like it would be right up my alley, because even though the obsession has mostly died down by now, I still think ancient Egypt is rad has hell.

I have also always had the intention to play some sort of Lara Croft game, and by now there are many to choose from. Well, there you have it - two good reasons for me to check this game out.

I liked the isometric design of it, being a big fan of games like Fallout 1 & 2. Somewhere I also thought that the rest of Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris (LCTO) would be in that vein, but I was very wrong. Turns out LCTO is a multiplayer action-puzzler and I was immediately struck by two problems: 1. A game designed around multiplayer but no one to play it with and 2. An isometric game but only WASD to control it with.

Let's just establish that WASD is not the best way to control any game that is viewed at an angle (hilariously the control scheme is compared to a SpongeBob Squarepants game on Wikipedia). I couldn't get my usual trusty setup of PS2 controllers to work with this game though, so keyboard is what I've got. Just think about it, to move the direction the game considers straight, I have to press two buttons. During the platforming elements and heated moments of battle it was easy to get confused and this definitely got me killed more often than I liked.  On the flipside, I think aiming is probably a whole lot easier done with the mouse than a controller, though weirdly Lara can't shoot urns that are right next to her. It does mean however that I can't make any comment as to the qualities of the game as a multiplayer experience, I am sadly without friends... who play video games.

It is weird to play this game on your own though. The other people on your team - Horus, Isis and some schmoe named Carter Bell - constantly talk to you, yet are nowhere to be seen within the dungeons. It just emphasized that I was playing it alone, and even the game was confused about it like it was saying "wait, you really don't have friends?".

It's usually clear where you need to go and what you need to do, the game gives you plenty of hints. Enemies are thematically obvious being mostly mummies and scarabs of varying kinds but this is what I expect and want going into a game taking place in ruins from ancient Egypt. It is clear they've borrowed more than a few things from the aforementioned 1999 Mummy movie, I swear the music that plays occasionally is almost exactly the theme tune to the movie. The atmosphere is definitely ancient Egypt, albeit with cool and magical machinery around every corner.

The story is... well, barely worth mentioning. Osiris and Isis were tricked by their brother Set who kills Osiris (the game mentions that Osiris and Isis are married, but not that they're siblings) and now Set has machinations on the human world. To prevent this from happening you need to re-awaken Osiris by reassembling his body parts. Setting out from a hub world, you enter different crypts/dungeons and make your way through, solving puzzles and shooting up the place like any good grave robber would do.  Lara still does what she does best and I never got bored of hearing the noise of an urn breaking or bombing pillars. The reward at the end of each dungeon is a another part of Osiris. Just be careful how you decide to google that, "How to find body parts in the crypt" might put you on some register somewhere.

All over the dungeon you can pick up gems that allow you to open chests in the hub world. The chests contain gear of varying and random quality, the more gems you pay the better the gear piece. The balance between puzzling and shooting is overall good, but actually leans a lot heavier on the puzzling than I was expecting. There are collectables and upgrades to find on each stage and the puzzles are not difficult to figure out, even for me - a notoriously bad puzzler.

To execute them is a different matter though. If combat gets tricky with the WASD control system (though never hard), puzzling can get downright irritating. Especially when there are timed puzzles where you need to really get your button presses correctly and Lara. just. won't. do. what. I. tell. her. to. Of course she does exactly what I tell her to, there is nothing wrong with the controlling - just the counter intuitive nature of it. After a particularly frustrating puzzle segment about 3,5 hours into the game I decided it was time to quit. I really wonder how the games are designed to be solved in multi-player, if they're the same then they're just way easier to do with more people.

Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris is ok. If you love action-puzzlers or you're looking for a game to play with some friends then this has potential. Just make sure you play it with controllers.

Timelapse (PC, 1996)

I have a "will they, won't they"-relationship with puzzle games. I love them, I want to be good at them but I just ain't. I have found the perfect place for them in my life however - as something to do with my kids. Turns out, trying to solve puzzles together is just as fun as playing any other old game together. Me and my son (now 10) have played a whole bunch so far, all through The Room 1-4, World of Goo, Trine 2 and now we played through a little gem called Timelapse, released in 1996 by GTE Entertainment (the "content creating" subdivision of GTE Corporation that later became Verizon).

I had never heard of Timelapse before it somehow ended up in my games library on GoG (I really wonder how some games end up there...). It looked a lot like Myst, which I have not played but remember watching my mom play through back in the 90's, and I thought maybe it could be a fun challenge for me and the kid to try out.

Turns out it was, I'll even go on right now and spoil my end conclusion by saying that Timelapse is a bit of a hidden gem as far as Myst-likes go. So if you don't feel like reading farther than this, just know that this is a game worth your time if you like that genre.

Don't worry too much about the story. As far as I remember it barely makes sense in Myst, and it barely makes sense in this game either. I would like to recap it, but honestly I only understood half of it so here is my best try - you're helping some sort of dude, maybe a professor, to look for Atlantis. You can travel to different eras and civilizations in time that seem to somehow be connected to Atlantis through sheer myth-building, like the old Egyptians, the Maya, Easter Island and the Anasazi. In each of these locations you need to solve puzzles to move on.

So let's not dwell more on the story, because the real star of the game has to be the puzzles. For any one not used to puzzle games it is easy to believe that there is just one way of crafting them. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are quite a few different ways you can design puzzle games, here are some off the top of my head (there are more, and there are some that mix them, like Resident Evil);

1. The "fake" puzzle games, like The Room, which actually just require you to find one item to open an item to find an item to open an item and so on. There is little puzzling and mostly searching, in these kind of puzzle games.

2. The environmental puzzling which mainly require you to manipulate the environment to get through the game, like the aforementioned Trine-series and World of Goo.

3. The "real" puzzle games which present you with puzzles that are superficially connected to the game world and/or story, but really are designed to be self-contained puzzle challenges. In this category you'll find games like Myst, Timelapse and Safecracker.

Timelapse is definitely in the latter category. While the puzzles are presented as to fit in the general esthetic of each area, the puzzles themselves don't necessarily logically connect to anything in the world. It's the classic trope of puzzle games, if you think about it too much it doesn't make sense that you would have to play game of Snakes and Ladders to be able to open a certain door. Or a game of Simon Says to be able to open a certain chest. We ignore all that, as long as the puzzles are well designed.

To my amateur eye I find the puzzles in Timelapse very well done and fun to try to puzzle through. Very few of them were so weird that I felt like I never had a chance to get it. They range from the abovementioned examples to finding patterns, assembling objects and traversing courses. At your disposal is a journal full of information and quite vital to your puzzle solving. It also contains a lot of interesting information about the civilizations you are visiting, if you're interested in that. Even if the journal, and a camera that allows you to take pictures of important clues you come across (the camera bugged in my version of the game, so I ended up never using it), I had to take so many notes of everything we saw. Quite a few puzzles require you to take not of a series of symbols in one area to be able to decipher a series of symbols in another area. 

Only once in the game is there a time limit to what you do, and if you fail you get the bad ending. Fortunately this part is right at the end, allowing you to simply try it again to see if you can manage differently.

The controls are fine, just like in Myst you move around the world with arrow keys (or WASD) through different screens. An arrow at the bottom always shows you which directional options you've got and there is a map as well. I still got lost quite a lot however, but my kid didn't so I think that is more indicative of my sense of direction than anything else. You don't have an inventory per se, so no worries that you're going to have to carry around a lot of random objects that you need to figure out where to use. You can only ever carry one item at a time, and it's only usable in the time period it was found. 

The times you have to manipulate objects on the screen you notice the age of the game. Knowing where the game wants you to place something or click on the screen to make something happen can be patience testing and time consuming for some of the puzzles. Fortunately these are rare enough to never ruin the overall experience.

To your further enjoyment, this game is of course full of extremely badly acted FMV's. Think Command & Conquer, or of course Myst itself for that matter. The sound effects and music are what you'd expect from the time, looped stock and completely unobtrusive background jingles. Nothing that you will remember fifteen minutes after you've turned the game off, neither something that will annoy you in the long run.

It took me and the kid around 10 hours to complete the game, scattered across a year roughly. We played it in bouts. Whenever we got too stuck on a puzzle we moved on to something else, but we always came back to this. We definitely had to use a walkthrough for some sections (especially the symbol deciphering), but a lot of it was possible for us to get through with mental team work. There was a fun variety of puzzles and we both really enjoyed it.

GTE Entertainment closed down just a year after Timelapse was released, so even though the end of the game teases a sequel, it sadly never came to be. It is unfortunate, because I definitely would've loved to check that out.

Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery (PC) - Review

Swophisticated or Swo-Swo

It's unclear how the EP relates to the rest of the game.

One of the things I like best about indie-games is the feeling I get that a lot of them weren't made solely for the purpose of making money. Instead, I can almost believe that some were made because the creator believed in the story or experience it would give. I am sure they also hope that their game will make money, but I have so much respect for the integrity of standing behind your idea and not compromising details because you think they would work better for the mass market. I have nothing against money-grabbing triple-A titles as such, you either buy them or you don't, but I am glad there is a great variety nowadays - from the really peculiar to the extremely standard.

But in all of this I still have one rule - the game has to be fun (ok, I have some exceptions to this rule). Because if your game is mostly tedious to get through, it will probably affect the impact the story or experience has on me as well, and unlikely to the better.

And then we have a game like Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP. It's definitely interesting. It's cool. It's unique. It has great music and a very special art style. But is it fun though?

S:S&S is one of those games that are really more of an art project than just a game, and as such whether you're going to enjoy it or not probably comes down to how much patience you have for those kind of things. Just about everything about this game will either rub you the right way or the wrong way. Just look at the title, "sworcery". Is that a good idea, or a dumb one? EP, as in "extended play" as in a vinyl record? Cool? Or... lame? The game allows you to tweet your progress at pretty much every turn. Hip? Or annoying? This game managed to simultaneously make me think the creators knew exactly what they were doing and just tried to cram every idea they had in there.

There are people here, but they can be hard to find.

Released in 2011 for Iphone and Ipad, Wikipedia calls S:S&S an adventure game, but I thought of it more of a puzzle game. There is a story to follow, but it honestly makes no sense and my lasting feeling was rather of bumbling around trying to find the next place to interact with and to solve whatever I needed to solve there. Accompanying you is some pretty sweet music and a roster of odd characters. Sometimes something evil chases you. Something about moon phases. You can pick up mushrooms and eat them. I couldn't even try to explain what the game is really about more than that, because I can't say I understood more than that. And maybe that is just as well, as I suspect half the fun of this game is to discover it for yourself.

I first heard of S:S&S on a podcast (I can't remember which one unfortunately) and again an enthusiastic description won me over. But I was sceptical almost from the start. And I've played some odd games. The art style gets a lot of praise, but to me it was just a gloomy pixel style and really nothing special. The gameplay is probably the weakest part, but I wouldn't go all the way to saying it is bad. Walking around, talking to cryptic people with their cryptic and barely helpful dialogue, trying to decipher the world and what I am supposed to do, it was half-interesting at some times. It didn't help that the world feels pretty constricted. There aren't many things or screens to discover. For a game trying so hard to be deep it really lacked a lot of depth.

Who knows what people are trying to tell you.

The music has been praised as well, and it is very good. I even wish there would be more of it but the creators seem to be wanting to use it sparingly. I'm ok with that though because it makes it more impactful when you do get to hear it, unfortunately it has the drawback of adding to the somewhat empty feeling of the rest of the game. Jim Guthrie's soundtrack does immensely for adding atmosphere to the game however, I would say this is where the game nails whatever it is that it's trying to achieve and tell you (I don't know what it is, but it must be that). Either way you end up thinking about this game you should really give the game OST a listen.

As this game wants you to connect with social media, I thought it only suitable to seek out some other thoughts on this and went to check out some Youtube comments (always the best source of human greatness, slash end sarcasm). I was actually surprised to see how many people were saying a lot of the same things I was thinking regarding this game.

I couldn't finish this game. I got about half-way through before I got stuck and there was something about moon-phases and more cryptic information and I leant back in my chair and had to think about whether I thought continuing was worth my time. Did I really want to know what was going to happen next? Not really. Instead, I decided to enjoy the soundtrack on Youtube and move on in my game library.

In the end I can't bring myself to tell people not to play this game though. It's a divider, and it probably has to be experienced for you to really know if you think it goes down as an extremely memorable and eye-opening experience or not. It's a bit like the movie Donnie Darko that way. It's either cool-weird or just silly-weird. Neither of those options have to be good nor bad, it probably mostly comes down to your mood the day you decide to play this, because while a lot of the Youtube comments were like the ones above, there were plenty like this one as well.

Lifeless Planet (PC) - Review

Joyless Planet
With zpoilerz.

I don't know guys... This one was a bit difficult for me to write, because I want to say nice things about it but I just... can't.

Let's see if I can find somewhere to start. I am a pretty big sci-fi nerd. Put the word "space" or "planet" or any other astronomical phenomenon in your product and I will probably be interested. I am pretty sure that is how I got my eyes on Lifeless Planet. Apparently I must've let the name woo me enough to buy it, because I did not read the plot synopsis on Steam, nor watch any images, revealing that you find a Russian town on this lifeless planet and thought that was a genuine plot twist (albeit about three minutes into the game) at first. While it's not a plot twist as such, uncovering why there is a Russian town on the planet is one of the driving forces of the story.

50 shades of brown.

You play as an American astronaut who wakes up after crash landing on a planet that you've been travelling towards with two colleagues. They're gone and you're about to suffocate. Good thing you've got the solution to that problem in your immediate vicinity and it literally takes no effort. That should be your first hint that this game isn't what you hoped for it to be, but you will trek on. You will think "oh boy, this place is ugly and boring to look at, but it's lifeless so that makes sense I guess". Maybe that will even make you excuse the fact that the game is sporting basically Playstation level graphics. Not Playstation 4 mind you, PSOne. Graphics are often the last thing I care about as long as they're functional enough to play the game, and here they work well enough in that regard. What I often forget about tedious graphics however is that they can make a tedious game even more tedious. See what I did there? Repetition is tedious.

Pretty immediately after you set off to find your lost colleagues you encounter buildings that look strangely familiar. They're clearly built by humans, so now you've got two mysteries on your hands. Why is the planet lifeless (because of course you didn't set out to explore a lifeless planet) and who got here before you? It takes another two seconds (I am exaggerating, but not by much) to find out that the Russians got here some decades before you through some portal. Sounds pretty promising right? Unfortunately that is as good as it is going to get.

Yay, platforming.

The major problem with this game is that it just doesn't know what it wants to be. If it had settled on being a walking-simulator á la Gone Home or What Remains of Edith Finch and just focused on the story I think this could've had a lot of potential. But for some reason they've thrown in platforming. So much platforming. So much pointless platforming. Pointless because it's hardly ever a challenge and it always feels as just a way to make you travel from point A to point B or from unrealistically placed audiolog to unrealistically placed audiolog.

I usually love audiologs. I know a lot of people don't and think they're overused at this point. That's bullcrap, I think they're still a great way to convey story - but that doesn't mean you can just let them lay around anywhere you think it's time to continue the story-bit of your game. This game does this all the time though, and it's just structured so badly. You'll get to a platforming part and right before it you receive a tool to traverse through and right after the tool is snatched away again (until next platforming bit where it is specifically needed) and now it's time for some more story-telling so let's leave an audiolog lying around in the middle of nowhere for the player to find. It feels forced and unnatural game-design wise.

I think the bad structuring of the game is affecting the structuring of this blog post.

You'll get another tool that will allow you to move rocks from a little crevace to another crevace and that feels pointless too because there is just no challenge to it. Imagine if in the Mario games there was a switch that you needed to stand on at the end of each stage before you could enter goal. Not out of range or hard to get to or anything, just right there next to the goal.

And here is an invisible wall, preventing me from going in this direction.

A couple of times you'll get the prompt "NEW OBJECTIVE: You're running out of oxygen, find an oxygen source before you run out". This could've been interesting if it wasn't solved by the oxygen source often being only a few steps away. I have literally no idea what the purpose of these sections are.

The story is the best part of Lifeless Planet, but it's not given any time to grow, shine or even make much sense. And there is so much potential here, but other than the nameless protagonist and a Russian alienplantwoman (don't ask) there are no characters and even these two are as flat as a sheet of paper. The astronaut has a subplot about his wife that also doesn't amount to anything. Apparently, before the astronaut leaves for his mission, she goes missing in the forest by their house and when he finds her unconscious, moss has started to grow on her toes. How long has she been unconscious for?! But this doesn't lead anywhere or affect the game in any way. Maybe it is meant to make us understand the astronaut's choice to leave Earth and venture into space and... I really have to struggle to over-analyze the thinly slized pieces of story that we're gotten here. Each new revelation is thrown at you without much or anything inbetween making them feel grossly under-explained. This is actually well illustrated by the fact that after most of the cut-scenes you are inexplicably thrown into a completely different area and it's always very confusing. In one instance it's even suddenly night. Or the fact that you'll find random buildings and other derelict structures standing around without any consistency or sense of realism.

You never once feel like you're walking a planet that has been through what the audiologs tells you, every part feels like it's been designed to give you the next platforming "challenge". Over and over the game fails both at the story-telling, because it just doesn't sell the story with its setting, and the platforming because it just doesn't hold any challenge.

Here are some other random annoyances;

• Why do you have a "Save & Quit" option when it doesn't actually save? You'll be thrown back to the nearest checkpoint, which admittedly rarely is far off, but also almost always means you have to replay some part and thus is the opposite of the meaning of "save".
• Why can't I strafe? With all that walking you'll really miss a strafe option.
• This game has way too much running. All the platforming just feels like you're running, and in-between the platforming there is more running. It took me 5 hours to finish and it could've been done in two with some tighter writing and a whole lot less unnecessary platforming. It most likely would've left much less of a "meh" aftertaste too.

Similar concepts, completely different results.

I feel like this game really wants to be Another World, with its mysterious otherworldly setting and one-hit kill platforming challenges, but it fails in execution. Like I said in the beginning, I want to say some nice things about it too though. The checkpoints are very generous, which is nice because even though the platforming isn't challenging you'll die plenty from clunky controls and/or hard to judge distances. Oh, guess I went back to complaining again.

I really like the soundtrack, which actually puts down a great ambient sound that helps you endure all the brownish graphics you're about to experience. And Bob Carter who voices the astronaut has such a nice voice I really wish he had a lot more lines than he does.

Interestingly enough, Stage 2 Studios that made the game aren't your average game studio. Looking at their homepage (they don't have a wikipage from what I could find), they seem to be focusing on science-apps and movies and Lifeless Planet is meant as a way to promote interest in science and space-exploration. Well I am sorry to say, that is probably one of the last things it does!

For some reason I decided to finish this game, and I think that was purely on the fact that it was basically just to run through. But those are still five hours I actually wish I had put into something else. Here's a suggestion; Develop that story into a novel and I will gladly spend five hours reading it while listening to the soundtrack.

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers (PC) - Unfinished Playthrough Review

Sin of the 90's.

Sometimes I really wonder why I think I like point-n-click games. I am notoriously lousy at puzzle solving and this genre is pretty much all about exactly the out-of-the-box thinking that I constantly fail at. And still I have played a fair share of these games and I keep coming back to them. P&C games (as I am going to refer to them) hold a special place in my heart, as they are among my first video game experiences and fond ones at that. I remember watching my mom play games like The Dig and Myst and loving it. I'm not sure she's much better than me at puzzle solving, but her enthusiasm was infectious and definitely helped a lot in developing my love for gaming in general. I think by playing P&C games I get some of that nostalgic feeling in a way that makes me enjoy the game even when it frustrates the heck out of me.

That isn't to say that I succeed at every P&C game I play, far from. I often end up having to use a walkthrough for more than I'd like to admit, but at least most of the time I get through them. But every now and then there will be one that is more frustration than it's worth.

Gabriel Knight was one of those series of games I had heard of for the longest of times but knew very little about. I pretty much only knew it was a P&C game and well spoken of. Which is probably for the best. Most P&C games are story-heavy and are best experienced knowing as little as possible about what you're going to get through. Every now and then I have the urge to play some P&C, more often than not I will go back to one I have already played (probably because I know more of the puzzles) and the last one I played was Broken Sword for the fifth or so time. But a while back when I got the itch again I decided it was time to check out something completely new. Well new for me at least, but quite old in the gaming world.

Anything or nothing could be of interest.

Released in 1993, one of the first things that I noticed (and had sort of expected) when starting up Gabriel Knight was that this was not going to be a helpful game. You're released into the world (New Orleans) as the titular Gabriel Knight, not knowing much more than that there have been some murders, dubbed the "voodoo murders" and that Gabriel has an interest in them in his role as a wannabe-author.

I immediately noticed that nothing in the world is highlighted for you as important. Oh no, this game was really going to make me work for it. Instead you can choose to look at things in your surroundings, and that can be literally everything - from the magazine half-covered under a stack of books to magnets on a refrigerator. Some of these items you will need further down the line, but trying to figure out which ones you need to interact with and in what way was the first massive hurdle to pass. And that's true for every screen you enter. The game even recommends that you thoroughly search through every area you encounter and while that is more or less true for every P&C game this one takes it to a whole new level (I think the 20th Anniversary Ed. might've improved on this issue).

So far it was pretty much what I expected though. P&C games are about scouring the surroundings and trying to figure out different interactions, either between you and items or between items. Gabriel Knight was just not very forthcoming in telling me exactly (or even slightly) what items were worth interacting with, but that's just the way it was back then. Something I wasn't ready for though (although I should've been), was the fact that you also often had to talk to people about the same things several times before they'd spill the beans you were actually after. In the end it all came down to the regular case of trying everything with everything... but then doing it several times.

George might look like a bore, but at least he's not a creep.

It didn't help that Gabriel himself came off more like a creep than the suave player he probably sees himself as. Of course it's hard to not see his "harmless" 90's banter with his secretary without modern #MeToo glasses, but for the short time I played the game he also had little else interesting going on about him. He wasn't the guy-next-door-average like George Stobbart in the Broken Sword series, and nowhere near anything as whacky as something from a LucasArts game. To me, Gabriel had not aged well and would've probably been written differently today. Further aggravating was the narrator of the game, whom, while I assume meant to add to the atmosphere of the game, was an absolute chore to have to listen to. And she speaks every line of text not said by a character. Fortunately you can turn her off.

The story seems better written however and starts out interesting enough. As mentioned there are murders and Gabriel needs to investigate them. The history of his family seems involved somehow (maybe this is what the title is about?). Presumably this all leads to him getting involved in more sinister stuff (yet again I see similarities with Broken Sword, released three years after this), maybe a bit like the Da Vinci Code? I enjoy stories with a bit of the supernatural and conspiracy thrown in as much as the next person, but unfortunately I never made it far enough to explore much of anything.

The puzzle that broke this camels back was when I was required to use a mime to lure a cop away from his bike for me to be able to listen in on his cop-radio (and this is still right at the beginning of the game). Even if I could've figured out I needed the cop radio (which doesn't seem too farfetched considering the objective was to locate the police chief), I don't think I could've in a million years figured out to use the mime to lure away the cop. There is simply not the slightest hint for it. You have to make the mime, which is in a completely different part of the area, follow you around until you get to the cop at which point they will interact in a way that allows you to use the radio. But apparently (according to the walkthrough I was reading), just getting the mime to follow you around is pretty tricky. And then to surmise that the mime would be what makes the cop leave...

Of course it's the mime

I realized right then and there that I wouldn't be able to get through the game without using a walkthrough 95% of the time (or spend 30 minutes on each puzzle), and at that point I'm not really playing the game anyway. If all I was going to get was the story without doing any actual puzzle solving myself I might as well just watch a playthrough on YouTube. After two hours of really trying to be clever enough for this game I had to face the facts that I didn't have the time (nor patience) it required of me.

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers is probably not a bad game. And it might have a really cool story. Unfortunately it's buried in gameplay mechanics too old for me to handle and honestly I doubt few people except the buffest of puzzle-nerds will have the patience to struggle through this. While I am not a fan of handholding and leading by the nose in modern games, let this be an example of what it's like when a game veers too much in the other direction. In the end, neither of those options are much fun to play.

The Room (Android) - Review

When life is like a box of puzzles.

Since my bf is in somewhat in a gaming slump, and it makes me sad to see him drown his time in Dokkan (google it) instead of, you know, a real game, I am always on the lookout for something that might get him back into it. As I was listening to the Cane & Rinse podcast about The Room, a game I had heard and knew nothing about, I thought this could probably be one of those games. Described as a short but well-designed puzzle game I thought it would be right up the alley of someone who loved Safecracker and enjoyed Myst. Personally I have very little patience and thus fondness for puzzle games of all sorts, so when I decided to give The Room a go it was solely with the purpose of seeing if I could get my bf interested in it.

Turns out I was the one to complete it. Also turns out my 4 year old absolutely loved it and we had a blast finishing it. 

But before I jump too far ahead of things - I did catch my bfs interest with the game, but I found myself not wanting to relinquish control. This was a puzzle game I could actually figure out. This was a puzzle game that didn't bore me with its obtuseness and abstractness while at the same time not being so simple it was talking down to me (although that is often needed, I really do suck at puzzles).

The idea is simple - you're in a room with a box. The box has all the bells and whistles of a well-designed puzzle box that could only exist in the gaming world and it's up to you and your wits to open it up.

While there are many games about opening boxes, Safecracker is probably one of the better.

I do recommend listening to the Cane & Rinse episode on The Room if you're interested, even if you haven't played it before. They talk about The Room 2 and 3 as well, but I found there was nothing to spoil about the first one (it's not as they talk about specific solutions to puzzles anyway) since the story matters very little for the gameplay. While I agree with the episode in that The Room was a fun little game to spend some few hours with (some very few hours, but I'll get back to that) I disagreed with them on a couple of things.

For instance they praised the tactility of the mobile version of the game and definitely recommended players to play that version rather than the PC version. Since I don't own a tablet I got it for my phone. While I was worried that the screen would be too small for comfort, even though I own a 5,5 inch phone, this turned out to be no problem. The tactility however, I didn't have much enjoyment out of and would've personally preferred a mouse to click myself around rather than using my fingers. That being said, I haven't tested the PC version so I can't attest to the quality of that gameplay, only that the way I imagined a mouse working with the puzzles seemed to fit better with how I wanted to deal with them. 

There is a lot of dragging, spinning and pulling - all of which worked well enough, but I realized I am just a lot more comfortable using a mouse than my fingers for playing games. I guess experience has something to do with it since I don't really play any mobile games otherwise.

Graphically it's practical. Subtle and "hidden" drawers were just that, rather than completely hidden from view or requiring pixel perfect interaction to react. I also rarely felt that the game didn't understand what I was trying to press or do with a puzzle. Sometimes my clumsy fingers couldn't quite "grab on" to the right part of a drawer or lever to make it do its thing, but this never became an annoyance. EDIT 12/2-18: On subsequent playthroughs I have more often come across instances where an object simply would not interact in the way it needed to, most often something that needed to be pulled. At one point I even had tor restart the chapter because of it. Other things that I really liked about the game design was that you only really had one puzzle going at the time and once you were done with it, it became completely inert, so signalling that there was nothing else to do there and you could move on. That way I never got stuck with a handful of cranks, cogs and buttons that didn't fill any other purpose other than to confuse me. 

Not like some other games I know...

While I barely noticed the music, I found it definitely needed the sound effects as some of them signalled functions to a puzzle that would otherwise have been difficult to figure out. One of those puzzles in fact was the only one I got stuck on long enough to feel the need to use the hint system. That should say a lot since, as I have already stated several times, I am completely useless at puzzles.

I wouldn't say that that necessarily means that The Room is too easy though. Rather that the puzzles are quite logical in their design, and like I mentioned before you do them consecutively, further removing any confusion as to what to do next. Because of this I sort of disagree with the podcast saying the game can be quite difficult - while I realize it's very subjective and I should probably be the last person to complain about someone finding a puzzle difficult, I found that these were some of the most step-by-step logical puzzles I had come across. Even when the next step is a hidden button the box is only so large and scouring the surface doesn't take long or much effort. Which is fortunate, because other than the puzzles themselves there is little to entice you to move on.

The story, if it can be called that, is about as fleshed out as in a Mario-game i.e virtually nothing. You find notes lying around the puzzle box and they speak about elements and especially the null element although I can't say I paid much attention to any of it. From the podcast I gathered that later instalments put more time into the story aspect, but not necessarily with good results. You need the story in this game about as much as you need a story to play Mario Kart, if it hadn't been there at all it wouldn't have made the game any less fun to play. The puzzles kept me interested throughout without any trouble and it was perfect to pick up for a 5-10 minute session while commuting or waiting for something, just as a good mobile game should be.

Even shorter than this.

The game is short though. Even knowing it was short, I was shocked by how short it was. I didn't exactly time myself but it can't have taken more than three hours at the very most to complete the game. Still, for the 2-3 hours it lasted it was quite fun to tinker around with the box and actually feel like this was something I could wrap my head around. Like I said it was extra fun to be able to play it together with my 4 yo and see how he tried to solve the puzzles and he thought it was a blast (so much in fact he wanted to replay it instantly after finishing it).

This game now comes with an Epilogue part, which as far as I know was added later to the game but is now a standard feature. It simply elongates the game for about 30 minutes with more of the same and was no more or less fun than the rest.

I've used 1 euro a lot worse than this so I can only recommend The Room, even if you usually really don't like puzzles.