Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £9.99 (£13.59 for the Special Edition, £4.79 to upgrade to the Special Edition)
Where To Get It: Steam, Humble Store, Green Man Gaming

I was tired of zombie games. So very tired. But that’s all in the past now, as NoClip, developers of Zombie Night Terror, seem to have found a formula that works with those washed up symbols of capitalist greed… By learning lessons from the past. With only a few quibbles so far, I am suitably impressed on both counts: Making me like zombies again, and learning from game design history.

Aaaaah, look at ’em scream and run. It warms my… Okay, that’s a lie, but it *does* make me feel hungry…

Which game? Lemmings (1991, Psygnosis.) After all, Zombies are much like the lemmings of that old classic, in that they keep going, singlemindedly, and, left unguided, would probably fall off tall things, stride into the Marianas Trench with nary a care, and mindlessly wander into soldiers’ kill-zones. Which, of course, is where you come in… Zombie Overperson. Or Queen, Lord… Pick a suitably macabre title. I definitely won’t judge, as High Zombie Human Resources Overseer.

Ehehehe. “Human resources”

Now, what I find interesting about this game is that it tutorialises quite well, while still remaining a challenge, and having a fair difficulty curve… In the first chapter. Each time you learn a new power (Or new combination of powers), you get a short intro to them, just to show you what to expect, with unsuspecting victims. It was a little disingenuous not to allow me to break down doors on the first level (As normally, that’s what you can do), but that’s a minor quibble, and part of the challenge for the first level in any case (Make sure you infect everybody… A laudable goal for a zombie horde on any rampage.)

There’s no shame in screwing up a level, by the way, as restarts are easy, and you’re going to be learning things in any case. A good example would be the Subway of the first act, where the challenge is to kill everyone. This is pretty tough, as there are lots of fatal drops (Even for zombies), and blowing up the wrong zombie at the wrong time is going to lead to a restart (Because it’s so early, I’m going to helpfully illustrate this.

See this? This is not quite the smart move you may think it is.

It’s a challenge I haven’t beaten yet, although beating the level itself only took two tries (One where I cocked up in a similar fashion to the screenshot above, one where I got a zombie to the end, finishing the level.) Of course, from Chapter 2 onwards, the gloves are off, and the Lemmings inspiration shows itself more clearly. Along with some of its problems.

I like that the hitbox on the Overlord (Your main combo zombo) is large, because, due to the fact that selecting zombies in a horde to do things can be tricky (Just like Lemmings), getting someone facing the right direction to do the thing can be difficult. I also like that they’re highlighted, as that eases (But does not eliminate) the problem.

I don’t like that using certain abilities unpauses the game. No, folks, I do want to select several zombies as runners beforehand without unpausing, because timing is kinda important. Oh, speaking of which, timing and micromanagement become important from Chapter 2 on, and that can be a pain, especially with that unpausing.

See those zombies in the lower left? I got things slightly wrong, and now they’re all dead instead of across the way. BOO.

Finally, I don’t like that the menu is unclear. Subtitles on mouse over would help me know that yes, the brain is the options, for example. It’s clever, but it needs to be a little more clear. (EDIT: It’s actually the statistics screen. See? SEE?!?)

Anyways, if you’re looking for a puzzle kick, Zombie Night Terror is a good choice. It’s got good visuals, good music, eases you in before baking your brain, and the cutscenes are blackly humorous. If you don’t like the idea of, essentially, leading brainless minions to nom on brains, this probably isn’t for you.

Braaaaaaaaaaaainsssss (Translation: The Mad Welshman endorses this game. No, not because he is a zombie now, but because he likes it. Now bend your head just a little, please!)

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £6.99
Where To Get It: Steam, Itch.IO, Humble Store

It is a fact that, the faster you go, the slower time goes by. This phenomenon is often noted with drivers of 80s muscle cars, who are often amazed to find that they had been “Out all day” when they only intended a small dri-

-Wait, I’m being informed by my editorial crew that this is for a different reason than time dilation at lightspeed. Which, in part, is what this clever, lo-fi visual novel is about. The rest? Becoming a stranger in a strange land, that land consisting entirely of the river of Time. Which is, I think you’ll agree, an awkward place to live, except that we somehow do it by not thinking about it too often.

As a visual novel, there are concessions to story and game. For example, you don’t have 50,000,000 social media messages to scroll through, rising as the game progresses, but much more managable, almost curated numbers, split into your social circle in FriendPage, and the news on Skimmit. Being a VN, there isn’t a time limit, and you go through the 30 minutes of interstellar travel at your own pace.

Of course… You’ll nearly always be left behind. By the time you’ve left, Augmented Reality has finally hit. By the time you get there… A lot more has happened. Some might argue a bit too much for a single VN to cover. But it’s well written in its simplicity, and I felt a tiny tear or two trickle down my cheeks as, while I fulfilled my promise to never forget my friends, they forgot me. Some found happiness. Some just found new social media platforms. Others… Were never found again. Spending the last four or five days just clicking “refresh”, hoping for a message, an update that wasn’t failing ebooks accounts… Anything… Was just heartbreaking.

At least I was relatively certain they’re not dead. Relatively.

If you want a somewhat poignant game, with some good futurism behind it, Killing Time At Lightspeed is a good choice.

…Okay, I couldn’t resist putting this one in. I’m moderately sure it’s a joke. 😛

The Mad Welshman doesn’t understand qubits. He was never In The Cloud. He feels terribly old.

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £14.99
Where To Get It: Steam

Spoilers. Spoilers spoilers spoilers. There you go, there’s the story of Inside, the latest offering from creators of Limbo, Playdead. Oh, wait, there’s non spoilery things I can say: There is a small boy. He’s running from some weird stuff. Stuff that can kill him stone dead. Also there are brain machines, around which quite a few puzzles revolve.

Pictured: Technically A Spoiler.

This, in essence, is one of the biggest problems with reviewing Inside… That it’s a game that wows you, that frustrates you, and has all of these experiences… And, for fear of the dreaded cry of “UGHHHH SPOILERS DUDE”, we can’t talk about most of it. We can tell you that the animations are subtle and interesting. We can tell you that the movement is fluid. We can tell you that, on keyboard, the action key is right control, and that because the game starts immediately, and is checkpoint based on its saves, you may have a few annoyed minutes of fumbling because there are no tooltips in the game.

But then you get into the game, running from dogs, strange masked people, and other weirdnesses, and you get involved in a story. A story for our time. An enthralling story. A well checkpointed story with well designed, self contained puzzles such as REDACTED, REDACTED, and, of course, REDACTED.

…Y’know what? Sod this, the internet’s saturated with spoilers and I’m going to damn well have my fun. There’s an early puzzle that amused me, and was high octane, even though it shouldn’t have been with how stupid and predictable the dogs chasing me were. I climb a fence… They go the long way round to try and get me. So I climb back, making sure they’re nipping at my heels (But not literally nipping at my heels, or they’d kill me in a particularly gruesome manner), then I climb back over, pull a board out of the boarded up doorway, and climb back over the fence just as the dogs reach me. I repeat this the magic three times, then just manage to get away from the dogs.

Pictured: Something quite atmospheric. Also technically a spoiler.

“I only just managed it” is this game’s thing, when it’s not “Wait, I was actually meant to… [FACEPALM] IT’S SO OBVIOUS!”

The adrenaline, the tricks the developers play that, nonetheless, make perfect sense in the world’s logic, and, furthermore, get applied later so you know that yes, they’re not just doing it as a one off. The secret thingumajiggers that lead to the secret ending… Yes, there’s a secret ending. The subtle horror of a small child in a world gone oh so wrong. That’s the magic of Inside. Not necessarily the puzzles we don’t talk about, which, believe me, won’t help you all that much. The next one’s a doozy. They’re all doozies… Until you solve them, and they’re not anymore.

No, if you’re going to buy Inside, buy it because you’re interested in world building, in how a story can be told without a single line of dialogue. Buy it because you want to see animation done well. Buy it because it’s a story you’ll want to remember, and read again by playing it, occasionally stumbling as you forget exactly how you did that one puzzle. Don’t buy it if you never liked Flashback, or the original Prince of Persia, or any of the puzzle-action-platformers that led up to the creation of Inside, and no doubt will lead to more interesting gems like this one.

It’s really that simple.

Pictured: Something subtly horrific. Guess.

The Mad Welshman scratched his head, and The Mind Controlled Englishman scratched his head. Unseen to both, The Also Mind Controlled Uruguayan scratched his head. But somewhere in those dominated neurons, a personality was chuckling. “They’ll never find me.”

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £29.99
Where To Get It: Steam

Spike Chunsoft, much like their serial antagonist of many faces, Zero, has left me in a bit of a pickle. Thankfully not one involving Running Man style exploding collars, or deathtraps, or locked rooms, but one involving that most dangerous of minefields for a reviewer. SPOILERS.

…Oh, it might be, it might not be. Every screenshot potentially is for me. 😛

Beyond what I just said, and the fact that I think the game is quite interesting and cool (And that it’s good news that the other two games, 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and Virtue’s Last Reward), you won’t find any. Or maybe you will. It can, in the middle of play, feel as confusing as whether this game is a sequel, a midquel, a threequel, or all of the above… Although I’m moderately sure “None of the above” is not a valid answer, leading only to the Bad End of dubious canon. I’m only going to tell you what you need to know to make a decision.

First up, it’s a voiced, 3D visual novel with puzzles that remind one of earlier games like The 7^th Guest and Myst, where skipping dialogue for the first time through is not recommended, and where philosophy, Pop Quantum Physics, and death all reign. There are six billion lives at stake, and this is not a spoiler because you’re told that in the first minute or so of the bloody game. Click on things, move things, escape from rooms, and make choices that will have a momentous effect on the game’s world… Or not. If the Pop Quantum Physics mention didn’t clue you in, not everything is as it appears at first.

And that’s actually the second important thing to note that isn’t a spoiler. The game is, for the most part, non linear. Even in the middle of a puzzle, you can, for the most part, sod off to a different, unlocked part of the story, and the game relies on this for multiple reasons. At first, you will get annoyed at unlocking Bad Ends (Some messier than others), but as the game progresses… As more of the timeline unlocks… Those “Grr”s will soon turn to “Ohhhhhh”s and “Wait, WHA-”s. More of the former than the latter, which is a credit to the writing team.

…For example, even this beginning segment says things. 🙁

Similarly, the voice acting team and musicians deserve kudos, because the English dub of this game is not bad at all. The VA in general is well delivered, the music is mostly fitting to its atmosphere and well crafted (The exceptions not actually being the musical and VA teams’ fault, as there is, unfortunately, a currently unpatched bug that sometimes cuts the music out before it’s meant to end, and if you don’t turn the music and SFX down a little, it sometimes overrides the voice acting), and, while the SFX aren’t always that great (About on par, I would say, with the aforementioned FMV adventure games of days gone by, so still alright), the visuals and area design managed to keep my interest for 8 straight hours in a row, helped along by an intriguing story with twists and turns aplenty.

Of course, no game is perfect. There are bugs, but thankfully not many. Some of the dialogue, due to the non-linear nature of the game, will feel repetitive even with the best VA and writing (And, often, the VA and writing dip into “Only fair to good”, with the occasional pun that even makes me groan. I’m not kitten…) Finally, it’s not greatly intuitive how to unlock certain scenes (Suffice to say, the triggers are sometimes spread across more than one scene), and that can lead to some frustration around the midgame.

Pictured: Not The Midgame, But Somewhat Eye-Murdering.

But, as far as adventures go, this one is a corker. There is an internal logic, and it can be discerned, but exploration is a must, both through space and time. So long as you understand that, I think adventure fans and VN fans alike may well enjoy Zero Time Dilemma, and, while I wouldn’t call it a great introduction to either genre, if you feel like a challenge, this is well priced.

The Mad Welshman is now going to tell your future. You are going to scroll down from these words… Or up from the previous article in the list, and be injected with Rad-Spoiler-7. Fortunately, Rad-Spoiler-7, while 100% fatal otherwise, is the only known antidote to Irritato-BadEnd , which is 75% fatal.

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £10.99
Where To Get It: Steam
Other Reviews: Release

Siralim 2 is, if you’ll permit me to be blunt, a Skinner Box. But it is a moderately entertaining Skinner Box in its present state, and while not much of it is original, it’s pretty competently put together, and takes its ideas from sources that have pretty much already refined the concepts it’s using.

I’ve unlocked a few things. Y’know, simple things: A Chef, few tens of citizens, a pub, breeding ground, alchemy lab…
…Simple things.

So I’m going to get this out of the way right now: If you do not like grind, stop reading. It’s a grindy game, nearly everything about it is grind, and the words “Skinner Box” should have clued you into this from the word go. Do badly, too quickly, no cookie for you. Do well, repeat your tasks in the manner intended, get various kinds of game-related cookie.

From Pokemon and the SMT games comes breeding and evolution. From other JRPGs comes magic, magic items, not-so-magic-items, and turn based combat in a first person perspective. From games like Dark Cloud comes building up your home base, so as to better equip, customise, and breed your monsters (Which, naturally, involves grind.), and, also from some other JRPGs comes Deity relations. Which involves grind.

This is not to say there isn’t game behind all this. There’s a story about an evil demigod that wants to go full deity, and must take McGuffins to do so… So obviously, our job is to get them first, and become a God(dess) first to beat the stuffing out of evil thing. The more deities on your side, the more monsters you own, the better equipped you are once you’ve gotten all the orbs, the better your chances will be. There’s a combat system involving physical attacks, magic, and special abilities such as casting an area effect Cold spell 1 in 5 times when you’re hit at no cost. You can revisit earlier levels if the current ones are too tough for your current party, and, since the levels are essentially small, procedurally generated theme arenas, with a deity somewhere, a quest for that deity (Usually involving getting X things or killing X things), an overall quest, and boss fights. There’s even the thing that the Pokemon games, and other linear progression RPGs would do, where there is the plot appearance of urgency, but in actual fact… Yeah, go hog wild, fill out your breeding library, get friendly with all the gods… It just takes longer if you don’t unlock the higher levels to level your beasties more efficiently.

Imagine a Carrion Worm smacking an Ebony Ent. Forever.

And this is precisely the problem with critically engaging with Siralim 2. It’s competent. It does its job okay, and, beyond a common problem that the game has also inherited (Monsters at higher levels tend to just be palette-swaps with different powers), it’s actually somewhat difficult to judge how well or badly it’s balanced, because if something is too difficult? Use an earlier level to grind up your captured monsters (Told you it was a bit like Pokemon and the SMT games!), and you can nearly always guarantee your creatures will be able to beat a boss sooner or later. I highly suspect I’m overlevelled for the next three or so boss fights, and only my desire to find breeding combos and new monsters to gawp at is stopping me from going to town. Once you’ve seen all the themes the game has to offer, it doesn’t seem to come up with new surprises so often, but, again… Too busy grinding up new monsters. And their breeding combos, because the monsters vanish once they’ve bred, probably to limit you just banging different rocks together until something happens.

So if you like that sort of experience, where, on the one hand, the gameplay can feel a little flat if you’re too efficient, and there’s grinding for new things out the wazoo, then good. If not, it’s possibly not for you.

Sometimes, you get extra bosses. I like to call them “Loot/XP Pinatas”

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I just found out I can make a new kind of Angel, and it looks like it might have some cool powers later down the line.

We haven’t seen The Mad Welshman for a week. Could somebody knock on his door?

Filed under: Early Access Releases, Game Reviews by admin

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