Regardless of your position on the worth, correctness, or validity of Art Games, Antichamber is a game I would defend as “An Art Game” to the death. It is, in its sense, art. It is most definitely a game, with challenges, obstacles, and mechanics. And it is a utopian game.

Wait, what the hell is a utopian game when it’s at home? Read on, and I’ll try to explain.

There’s a lady who knows… All these puzzles are gold… And she’s sung in the title of the puzzle.

Antichamber is a game without a fail state beyond you giving up. Now before you think that’s boring, let me point out that that doesn’t mean you’re not going to fail to solve a puzzle. But you’re not only always going to be able to have another go, you’ll be able to travel between most puzzles without a care in the world. Nothing is going to kill you. Nothing is telling you you’re shit at the game. In fact, quite the opposite: The game’s signposts are basically life advice, generally quite chill life advice at that. And it’s often pertinent. For example, there’s a bridge of sorts, and the signpost for both crossing it successfully, and falling off it reference a tightrope. The game shows you what happens if you take that bridge too quickly beforehand, and what doesn’t happen if you take it slowly (It won’t disappear from under you unless you deliberately step off it or speed up at the wrong time), so… It’s basically an analogy for tightrope walking, which is generally best done at a relatively sedentary pace. Another has a sheep leaping off a cliff, after you followed an instruction to, er… Jump off a cliff. Something something cliff something something everyone else something? I’m sure, if you’ve even encountered fictional parents, you can fill in the something somethings there. It’s a thing parents like to say.

Antichamber owes a lot to… Well, a lot of things. Life is what the game is an analogy for, but it owes bits and bobs to Portal (As it uses a sort of non-violent, puzzle solving “weapon” with multiple functions unlocked as the game goes by), to M C Escher (As it plays with perspective, direction, and space being a bit bendier than usual), and to logic puzzles (As everything has internally consistent rules, and so you can deduce, reasonably, how doing thing A will affect problem B with at least good accuracy most of the time.) You are… Well, you, really. And you’re in a maze. A maze that is life. You start with no tools, no knowledge, and a fleeting sense that you don’t have enough time (Because, at first, it appears you are on a timer, and it’s not a long one for a sprawling puzzle game.) As the game goes on, you accrue knowledge (Certain walls go away when you do one thing, this part of the maze acts like this), tools (One of four cube guns, each one adding an ability to your arsenal, from the ability to take individual cubes and put them somewhere else, to the ability to make nigh infinite cubes, to the ability to make walls of cubes, moving them around), and, along the way, you discover… That actually, you can take the game at your own pace. Just like life, Antichamber is not a race to the end. Stop. Enjoy the flowers. Or, in this case, a picture of a man with his trousers off, and the associated life lesson.

You may be mistaken for thinking this is an easy puzzle. It still has challenge. Because everything except those crates is lava. To that brick.

The thing being, of course, that you are, in this game, trying to get to the end. The game tells you what a bad idea it is to try and race there. It shows you little easter eggs, misdirects you, tries to slow you down with increasingly more skill intensive puzzles… But you’re curious. There is something that eats light. Something to which doors are no obstacle. Something which seemingly eludes you at every turn. And… When you catch it… It’s all over. That’s right… The game ends, and oblivion results. That something, that nebulous, slightly ominous thing you’ve been chasing for no reason you can determine beyond the goal… Is death.

It’s rather clever. But it doesn’t stop there. Everywhere you look, there aren’t only puzzles involving perspective, there’s the overriding message that hey, maybe… Just maybe… If you look at things from a different viewpoint than the one you’re used to, think sideways? Things will go better for you. You’ll expand your mind. You won’t only get better at the game, you’ll get better at being you. It’s a positive message. In fact, the only negative messages in the game are that you shouldn’t really hurry (The antithesis of many games), and that you won’t get through things consistently by just bulling your way through (And you won’t.) Like I said, utopian. No danger unless you actively seek it out. No challenge that you have to accept (There’s often another way until near the end, when your choices narrow due to… Well, having solved everything else!), and you can always, always go somewhere else… Maybe play with an old puzzle just for the heck of it. You just have to remember how to get there.

It’s kind of clever, really. Normally, this room is actually quite well lit.

Finally, it’s tightly designed. There is no HUD. The options, as well as the map and your collection of signposts are all in a single, easy to return to location, and whenever a new mechanic is to be introduced, you can guarantee something’s going to either be nearby to show you how it works, or you’re going to come across something that teaches you sooner or later. Good example, Eye Walls. Eye Walls are terrible at staring contests, fall asleep, and vanish when you stare at them for a time (The time being dependent on the door.) There’s a crossroads at one point early in the game, a door that won’t open if you look at it, and directly opposite that door? An Eye Wall. Walking slowly backwards, you’re guaranteed to see it close. Or, another, sharper example happens when you enter a room with a tantalising hole in the ceiling. Inside the hole? “Don’t Look Down.”

Well… Whyever no- AAAA EYE AAAAAAA FALLING AAA WHERE DID THE FLOOR GO?

And then you land harmlessly somewhere new. Because the game’s cool like that. And you’ve learned a new thing.

So, Antichamber is tightly designed around a theme. Good. It imitates life (Via analogy). Good. It is, indisputably, a game. Cool.

So it’s an art game. And it’s well worth checking out.

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £10.99
Where To Get It: Screwfly Store , Steam

The Fog hates you. Nobody really knows what happened. Nobody really knows what caused it. After all, The Fog just… Happened. But there is hope. A slim hope, in the form of a train. It may be… Just may be… That The Fog can be escaped, and the nightmares can end. And Screwfly Studios are quite fine with helping you achieve that.

The map is one of three tools you’ll be looking at a fair bit. This is how it looks with Maxed Radio. :V

A little backgrounder before we begin: Screwfly have experience with strategic, procedurally generated survival horror games, with their first game being Zafehouse Diaries (Zombies!), and their second being Deadnaut (Eldritch Horrors From Outside Space-Time, Bug Hunts, Super-Soldiers Gone Wrong, among others.) Their games generally involve interpersonal relations, unorthodox control schemes that are nonetheless quite atmospheric, and hidden mechanics. Fear Equation is possibly the most atmospheric yet. Fortunately, I remain a filthy lucker. Let’s go through my first game to show both this, and why the game is worth checking out.

It began with a train. A steam train, from the looks of things, a junker… But thankfully, a sturdy junker with an emergency flare. This is always the first step: Summon some survivors with the beacon. It’ll generally be between 2 and 5, and the first group, at least, is generally cohesive. From there, the ride truly begins. A hellride through an unreal fog that makes nightmares real, with no guarantee of survival. I get three this time.

I look at the map… There’s a few buildings nearby, and so long as we go slow, we won’t run out of fuel doing so. I can plan where to go at any point in the day, but when we reach it determines whether we’ll have to stay the night. So I decide to hit up a small village along the way, with a Pub, a Supermarket, and a School in easy reach. My radio defaults to “Looking for Signs of Survivors” (HELP), but I switch it to Supplies. Believe me, survivors aren’t too tough to come across. Fuel, on the other hand, is going to be a constant worry.

Always keep an eye on the dreams of each carriage. Preparedness means less visits from… THE SALESMAN.

Having decided my destination, I set up The Lottery. This train isn’t a democracy. I, The Driver, secretly control what’s meant to be random chance. I have to, because if people are sent into the Fog too often, or don’t get what they want, or just decide they think they can run the train better, they’re going to try and rebel. And I want them to survive… Even if they’re idiots. Right now, though, there’s no point. Starting survivors, with whatever skills they have, are going to have to make do until we find more.

With the lottery over, I can order them to do several things. They can move supplies between carriages, move people between carriages, and either build defenses against the coming nightmares, indicated by their dream diaries, or upgrade the train. The first night, I opt to improve my Radio. The bigger my coverage, the more of the map I can get a handle on ahead of time. I could have improved fuel, carriage strength, the amount of power my train generates, or even medical facilities… But I go for radio.

It takes two days to get to the village, and I’m attacked on the second night. This time, it’s spiders. Folks are injured. Not a good start. But the fog is, thankfully, still weak, and I try to explore. The school has survivors, and… The first group doesn’t want any of them. All four go to different carriages. Carriages with neither food nor defenses. Sadly, I can neither move them or give them food until the morning (One of the few flaws with the game), but, being both brave and foolhardy, I explore the other two buildings, and food is obtained for them. I don’t lose anybody, although I come damn close.

They’re going to die. At least one of them died that very second. And all because I was too gutsy.

Much like Deadnaut, I don’t have high tech equipment. Some LEDs, a barometer (Which shows how dangerous the Fog is getting), and a greenscreen CRT are my window to the survivors, and, like Deadnaut, it’s surprisingly tense to watch those little radar blips move around a building plan, with the radio occasionally telling me things (Mostly plans of sedition and cries to shut up about said plans.) I will never know what they face, and, in a sense, I’m glad. As it is, the Nightmares make me cower in the head carriage… I don’t want to know.

By the time I’m halfway across the map, I have lost some survivors, but gained quite a few more. Mostly, when I lost them, it was because I ran out of fuel. Running out of fuel is Bad. Not only are you defenseless, you have to send your survivors out to gain fuel in the middle of nowhere, and they are much more likely to die. I’ve had attempted rebellions, things are tense… And there are flags on the map. I find out what the flags mean in short order…

…They’re the military. And, for some reason, they don’t want me to leave. They bombard the train. Luckily, nobody is injured… But there are more flags on my planned route.

There’s more, of course, but this is the game. You grab what survivors you can, make compromises and enact dirty tricks to manipulate the survivors… Sometimes, you deliberately send people to get killed to quell rebellion. The Driver is an Old Testament God. Maybe this ark will save humankind… But you can guarantee that sacrifices will be made.

Nightmares… Are real. I only hope we propitiated the dead enough.

If you like strategy games with unorthodox UI, atmosphere out the wazoo, and the feeling of commanding lives from a distance, maybe Fear Equation is for you. It’s definitely not for everybody, but it’s worth at least a look in. There are lots of things I haven’t mentioned, like the variety of fears (from Soldiers, to Chinese Ghosts, to the SALESMAN and The Engineers, each with their own atmospheric touches), special crew (Who fully upgrade a section of your train as thanks for rescue), and other fun stuff.

The Mad Welshman sighed as he looked at the lottery card. Taking his eraser, he rubbed out the name of the new folks, and added in the troublemakers. There were four buildings here, a rare opportunity. Either they’d prove themselves, or they would die after bringing in some useful supplies. So long as The Train survived…

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This is a reprint of an article originally published on the older version of Da Game-Boyz. It has not been edited, including the original editorial mistake, as a complement to this article. The game scored a 7.5 overall, with 7 in half the categories, 8 in the other half.

What the hell have I gotten myself into? First I got involved with some rebellion, and that led me to the headsman’s block, and then there was a dragon, and weird voices, and… now, I’m wandering through a dungeon killing some people called the Silver Hand because I didn’t realise my fellow warriors were actually werewolves! Heeeelp!

Okay, so that last bit may seem like a spoiler, but it really isn’t. See, everything except the werewolves happened in my first hour of main plot play, and that last bit? I’m not telling you. Skyrim, to those who don’t know (for shame!) is the latest in the Elder Scrolls series of RPGs, games with lore so deep, and so thick on the ground, that not even a +15 chainsaw could get through it all. The basic idea of this installment is that… well, after centuries of being who-knows-where (maybe having a good sleep?), dragons have come back to the land of Tamriel, and you, through the usual Elder Scrolls mcguffin of the prophecy, are the fated one. Don’t let the corniness fool you, Bethesda are good at their job of storytelling, and I’ve seen them pull off cornier premises. In the same series.

Visuals

For those looking for an improvement from the last game graphically, there is… and there isn’t. See, the creatures and characters are even more beautiful to look at, although the character engine doesn’t seem to allow true obesity (if it did, my chargen abominations would have been so much more evil). So yeah, the characters look great, most of the creatures look great. Know what doesn’t look great? Watching trees suddenly pop into clarity in the distance as I run forward. On High settings. Seeing the base ground texture if I look at it in just the right way. But in dungeons, and when exploring ruins, my two favourite activities, it’s just fine, and the architecture, as always, is pretty damn stunning. Sure, the cities aren’t always great, but when you see a barrows with huge stone ribs poking out of the ground? You know you’re in high fantasy country, and the immersion skyrockets.

Sound

If you’ve heard the soundtracks of Morrowind and Oblivion, you have at least some idea as to the music. The sort of music you’d hear while Aahnold and James Earl Jones have a good staring match, or when Aragorn is kicking righteous buttock. It fits with the theme, is stirring when it wants to be (in combat), and, while it’s nothing new under the sun, it’s still pretty cool. The Bethesda Curse, as it was known in gaming circles, is also much less evident here. No more does it sound like there’s maybe 5 voice actors phoning it in. It’s definitely quite a few of them, and only one or two characters sound like their lines are being read in a classroom. Combat sounds, similarly, are slightly improved, although it’s sorta hard to improve on “BASH, CLANG, THUMP, Urrrrggh!”. They still pull it off, and even manage to make arrows swoosh past. The one thing I personally found special however? The dragons. They’re obviously the focus of the action, and… wow. Every wingbeat sounds visceral, and the sound of dragonfire is audio-coded for “This will roast you. Hard.” Even the other creatures occasionally sound cool, like a wolf howl on the plains at night. How many are there? Daaaamn, can’t tell! And that, again, adds to the immersion.

Gameplay

One thing you ought to know, if you’re new to Elder Scrolls games, is that they’re always pretty big, world wise. Not always full of content, but big. At the time of writing this paragraph, I’m 4 hours in, and, while I’ve completed something like 11 quests across 8 or 9 locations (and explored another 4 or 5 on top of that), I have only finished two, maybe three story missions out of god knows how many. Including the mandatory tutorial quest. One thing that old Elder Scrolls players will either take or leave, and experienced CRPG players may be a bit concerned about, is that some quests are not “take the quest and finish it when you can be bothered.” They have to be done, as far as I can tell, immediately after taking them. On the one hand, this means people going for the main quest will be rushing into situations they can’t control, and possibly moving further along than they feel comfortable with, but, on the other, it does keep that vital immersion factor going. Good example: Killing your first dragon. The military aren’t going to wait for you, and so, going seems pretty important. Even if it turns out I’m wrong, and it isn’t mandatory to follow them, it certainly puts some virtual pressure on. But, as my play time increased, I saw the cracks…

Skyrim is the first Elder Scrolls game to be designed for console accessibility, and, in places, it shows. Is this a bad thing? It’s not bad, it’s not good, it’s just different. For example, while the mouse controls for inventory and conversation choices are finicky (and downright annoying in the character creator, due to small sliders), using the keyboard is actually much simpler, and the interface itself has become a lot more user-friendly, with nearly everything do-able with just the direction keys, mouse buttons, E and Q keys. The obviously regenerating health (not ultra-speedy, we’re talking obvious to an RPG player here) feels sort of odd, but considering factors I’ll get to in a bit, it’s nonetheless welcome. What isn’t so welcome is the lack of HUD tips for things previous games told you, like the fact that you have a disease. Check your active effects semi-regularly people, because the messages are easy to miss, and I almost became a vampire, thanks to not realising I was about to catch it. Dual wielding finally came to the Elder Scrolls with Skyrim as well, and good god, it feels good… although instakills for both you and your opponent when low on stamina is a mixed blessing.

There’s too much to talk about in one sitting, so, with these examples in mind, I’m going to say that, where Skyrim gives with one hand, it takes away with the other. Argonians, for example, finally have some semi-regular use for that Water Breathing fix they had back in Oblivion, yet melee characters will quickly find themselves in large amounts of the brown stuff if they don’t also take mage and rogue skills. This isn’t much of a problem, because characters in the Elder Scrolls can learn anything they want, but pure melee characters are definitely a tougher proposition than in previous games.

One thing that I will finish on is the difficulty. To say the difficulty in this game is erratic is like saying ghost chillis are “slightly warm”. One second, you can be happily slaying skeletons in single hits, and the next, a Master Vampire might lay the smackdown. Or you could be walking merrily along, slaying some bandits as you go, and… you hear the dreaded wing-flaps of a dragon, the screech that lets you know it’s seen you, and… you might as well savescum there and then until you’ve got some decent cutlery. It’s also quite glitchy, crashing while screenshotting, screwing up the Steam overlay on PC, and, in one instance, hurling me 200 feet up from a giant’s smackdown, only to crash as I tried to screenshot the awesome. And then refusing to catapult me when I reloaded the game and died again to try and bring you some awesome-sauce.

Conclusion

Skyrim is good, but it’s a flawed good. It’s a different experience in many ways to previous Elder Scrolls games, but, at the same time, it’s still the familiar world Elder Scrolls fans know and love. It has the usual kickass story, but the difficulty curve is a bit wobbly, to say the least, and, in general, it’s a story of give and take. I’d still give this my thumbs up, but only to RPG fans, as opposed to newbies to the genre. You want a “my first RPG” to ease you in, this isn’t it. You want an entertaining, but sometimes frustrating experience? Go for it, empty your wallets, and don’t be like the douches who torrented this game with no intention of buying.

EDIT: The review was written after 33+ hours, the specific paragraph was written 4 hours in. Apologies for the confusion.

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £7.99
Where To Get It: Steam

There is a world you don’t know out there. A world where a soggy newspaper, picked up out of boredom, can achieve sentience and shoot you in the face. A world, split into levels, with a maximum of 5 clues to a grand conspiracy in each one. Unless you have to kill someone, or blow an office up, or encounter a boss… It’s a world where everything is simple, and yet… Quite, quite complex. Welcome to the world run by the IlluminASCII… Good luck uncovering the Conspiracy.

Well, part of that wasn’t true… Or *was* it? The mystery deepens…

IlluminASCII is a first person shooter roguelike with ASCII graphics. Sort of. Now, when you think ASCII graphics, the average person will say “What, like Dwarf Fortress, with all those unreadable commas and ampersands and smileys?”, but IlluminASCII is… Slightly different. Many of the graphics are made of ASCII symbols, it’s true, and the enemies, just like in traditional roguelikes, are massive letters representing species, but there’s also nice, simple, 3D models to represent the landscape. So… An ASCII aesthetic, rather than “The graphics are letters and symbols.”

It’s a pretty simple game, and a single game can be played in a coffee break (For example, just before starting this review, I’d finished three games of varying levels of success in half an hour), but that’s not to say that score attack Shootmans with a boss every five or so levels is the entirety of the game. You get hungry, the guns and pickups are procedurally generated (So it’s unlikely that a second pistol will act exactly the same as the first, in terms of ammo), and there are features you can miss, like gambling machines, timed escapes, and the fact that there are “Big” enemies, harder to defeat than the average. You’ll know them by the sheer firepower they bring, and the angry eyes stapled onto their threatening typefaces.

For being built of simple models and ASCII graphics, the game shows its dystopian world quite well.

The thing is, I can’t guarantee you’ll enjoy it. I like it for what it is, with the silence punctuated by the angry beeps and boops of enemies spotting you, the interplay between simple models and ASCII, the simplicity of play, and the references both to memes and conspiracy theories in the scores (One day, I’m certain, somebody will make a conspiracy theory linking Jet Fuel Can’t Melt Steel Beams to Alien Astronaut RFID Tagging), but it is a coffee break, score attack type deal, and that’s definitely not for everyone. Having the roguelike elements it does, the difficulty curve can be quite erratic, with the skill being in adapting to difficult situations… And again, that’s not for everyone. As such, while I personally like it, I’d have to say “Only go for IlluminASCII if you’ve seen footage of it, and decided ‘Hey, I wouldn’t mind paying £8 for that game I can come back to every now and again!’”

As the textual blood seeped down the screen, I knew it was over. But it doesn’t take more than a few seconds to hop back in.

The Mad Welshman was already aware of The Conspiracy. Everywhere he looked, threatening letters made eldritch patterns. But he wasn’t afraid. Sooner or later, he would go after Big Comic Sans, even if it meant his life.

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Source: Own cashmoneys
Price: £4.24
Where To Get It: Steam, Developer’s Site

I knew, when I heard the gloating words of Lord Herx, that I was going to die. It was the second dungeon level, and he was sending a minotaur? I didn’t have much time, so I…

…Crap, it’s coming… It’s HUGE! It’s somehow phasing through the roof of the dungeon, it’s that bi-

-Last Words of Mika, Mercantile Adventurer into Lord Herx’s Dungeon.

This boulder trap… Didn’t really stand a chance

There are times when you celebrate someone for trying, for experimenting. Barony, by Turning Wheel LLC, is not one of those times. I’d just like to quote the Steam summary of this game for a moment:

“Barony is a 3D, first-person roguelike that brings back the cryptic and intricate designs of classic roguelikes such as Nethack and melds them with RPGs like Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and Daggerfall. Challenge is the calling card of this hard-boiled dungeon-crawler.”

This is what we in the industry like to call “an overly ambitious description.” Also one that is wrong. What Barony actually is is a real-time first person roguelike using Minecraft style graphics that owes a little to Nethack, but hasn’t really learned what a good Roguelike is about. For example, for all that Roguelikes are about challenge, they are not, for the most part, about dicking you over. That segment I wrote at the top? Is a thing that is entirely likely to happen. The minotaur is big. He has oodles of hitpoints. And, if he is the “insane event” of the second level (Because hey, the game promises “insane events one could expect to find in games like Nethack”), there is very little you can do to stop it. There’s a chance you’ll find the imaginatively titled ZAP Brigade (Lightning staff wielding nutters who love to hunt Minotaurs), or the stairs out of the level, but, just as likely, you’ll note the event is coming, try and find the exit for a minute or two, then get squished in one or two attacks by a Minotaur that, if you’re “indoors”, will clip through the ceiling.

Combat involves smacking things and hoping they don’t die first, or being a Wizard who has mana and winning. Shields are nigh useless.

…Or you could just hit enter, and type “/killmonsters”, hitting enter again at the right moment. Won’t get you any XP, but it’s clearly documented in the README (The only documentation for this game that I could find, apart from a new and largely incomplete Wikia), so why not use it, eh? These two things alone will give you some idea of the implementation of the grand vision described in the game’s Steam summary. Think I’m being unfair? Then pay the £5 for the game, open up the game’s directory, then go to the “books” subfolder, and read “The Lusty Goblin”, which I can only imagine to be a pastiche of the “Lusty Argonian Maid.” It’s easy to do, as, presumably to allow easy modding for the IP based multiplayer shenanigans, the 31 books of the game are all in .TXT format.

Character generation, similarly, is disappointing. Ten classes, two genders, and five skins that are all white human beings (presumably it’s to do with hair colour), and the classes are not amazingly balanced. The Merchant, for example, starts with weak weaponry and bad HP, but, and this is an important but, can quickly and efficiently identify nearly every item dropped on the first and second floors. The only one I’ve found trouble with? Glass Gems (Which are worthless.) By contrast, the warrior starts strong, but will quickly find himself in a world of death and pain if he encounters, say, a poisonous spider (Spawns on the second level.) The Wizard can cast Force Bolt to his heart’s content, murdering quite a few enemies quickly and efficiently, but Light will drain his mana more rapidly than you’d like.

60% of this was gotten on the first level. 90% of it was identified without the use of scrolls. Merchants are great, in some respects…

In short, the game’s description is constantly reminding me of better games, and sometimes, the game itself is reminding me of better games. The graphics are voxel based, so, if you’re like me, you immediately think “I could be playing Minecraft right about now. Or maybe even Vox. Yeah, Vox sounds like a plan.” When you find that Lusty Goblin Maid book, you think “I could be playing Morrowind.” There’s enough replayability in this game for £5, but that same £5 could, by contrast, get me a better game. One which documents itself, tutorialises well, and doesn’t have a random event on the second floor that will most likely kill you, or rolling boulder traps, that, more often than not, you don’t even realise you’d triggered until it’s rolled past behind you.

This game, in short, is sadly not recommended for anybody, at least until some hefty reworking is done. Being able to starve on the second level is not good roguelike design. A “get through the level and/or find this thing before another thing kills you” on the second level is not good design. And I honestly can’t think how this would “improve” with Multiplayer.

This is the Minotaur. Very often, he’ll spawn on the second level. The ZAP Brigade did way more than I did.

The Mad Welshman sighed as another boulder trap rolled merrily along behind him. The town of Hamlet remained unsaved, and Baron Herx’s Devil’s Dungeon remained closed.

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