Source: Review Copy
Price: 79p. Yes, you heard that right. £1.99 with the artbook and soundtrack.
Where To Get It: Steam

Never let it be said that developers don’t know what works for them, at least some of the time. Once again, Sometimes You creates something cheap, simple, and logical, involving making things add up. But don’t worry, math phobes… This time, it’s colour matching, not equations. And I say that this is okay without a hint of sarcasm.

This is an example of how you start a puzzle…

Essentially, there are rows and columns of coloured blobs. Clicking one of those rows or columns changes the whole row or column, and you want them all to be one colour. Nice, simple, easy to understand. It’s enough to make a critic’s hair come out in clumps. After all, it works, it’s cheap, it’s fun. That should be ideal, right? I can even point to it and say “This is for people who like logic puzzles, don’t need to worry about story… Oh, and digital art of some flavours of sci-fantasy abstract cats of varying quality is in there too, so… Maybe cat fans?”

But we love our words. We love having things to say. What, in the end, can we say about a game so simple, so deadly simple, that if the developer fucked it up, we would feel pity? Oh, they didn’t, by the way. Last time, I talked about aliens and their strange foibles. This time, I think, we shall meditate on colour blindness.

…And this is a particularly nice finish, and a particularly growly cat. Go me. Go cat.

Colour blindness afflicts many of us. It makes certain games unplayable, and developers either know how to deal with it, or they find out they have to learn, quite quickly. Games have lived or died on the colour blindness vote. Energy Cycle, I am happy to say, is distinctly colour blindness friendly. A black background, with swirly bits. The plasma balls that form the puzzles are one of (at the beginning, at least), three colours, all very distinct in terms of hue, all brighter than the background by far, all fairly saturated. The only part of the screen that isn’t terribly clear is the little menu button in the top right, and I fully expect that can be fixed quite quickly. I even trust Sometimes You will do it, too… They seem quite considerate like that.

Musically and visually, the game is, in a sense, dark as heck. The plasma balls aren’t, but the digital cats are all ferocious, the music pumping with square and saw waves, dark pieces of electronica that pulse to a seemingly authoritarian beat. Combined with the swirl behind the level select screen, it seems to cry “OBEY. OBEY YOUR CAT OVERLORDS.” I laughed, when I realised what dirty tricks the designer had put into level 6, which has almost every single little ball affecting both a row and a column, as clicking intersections shifts both by one colour. And I understood the logic behind it. 18 clicks, fuckers. I reckon that ain’t bad. Similarly, there’s a time attack, a level editor, and they’re all really accessible.

There… Really isn’t much more than this, so have another cat, this time from the title screen.

I like Energy Cycle. It’s hard not to, because it’s cheap, it’s simple, it’s accessible, and the developer still had room to put their own little stylistic touches in that I can say, without any fear, are theirs. For its price, for what it is, I’d say the game is exactly right. Fair dos, it’s not often I get to say that.

The Mad Welshman is totally not a front for your secret cat overlords. Meow.

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Source: Cash, ‘cos, like, I couldn’t not support the developers of this one!
Price: Iunno, it says £14.99 for the game, and, like, £18.99 for the game and the soundtrack and stuff?
Where To Get It: Well, Steam  has it, you should, like, totally check it out… If it’s your thing, y’know!

Okay, so, listen up. This is a game about, like, teens. Also spooky scary ghosts, but mostly teens. Y’know, with the awkwardness, and the sentences that are either, like, way contracted, or run on for ages and ages and ages… You, like, remember being one of those, right? Or maybe you are one? Y’know, when you’d say like, and y’know, and gaaaahd? Or be totally quiet? Oh, yeah, sometimes you’d forget words you totally use all the time, like… Well, totally!

See? Like, teen stuff, like Truth or Slaps, which is kinda like Truth or Dare, but with less butthole licking, like he said!

I’d like to tell you this is a game about happy endings. But that’s literally up to you. Like, literally. Your choices actually lead to things, because there’s only a small amount of things it can lead up to. And most of it has nothing to do with whether you, like, save the world, or whatever. Because it’s entirely possible you can do that. Although it’s also totally possible that none of it actually happened, or all of it happened, and, like, keeps happening, because timey wimey stuff is involved. Also it hella reminds me of The Fog… Oh, wait, you might not have seen the fog, it involved radios too, and creepy voices, and a shipwreck of some sort… Unless it’s the new one, in which case it was a bit weirder, and not as cool. But either way, things happen, and you kinda have to keep everything together when… Well, things really… Really aren’t together, do you get that?

Anyway, the point is that there are drama bombs, and if you’re not ready for those, or the fact that, y’know, it starts slow? Maybe this isn’t the game for you. Because these teens, they’re like… Their concerns are what you might call “Boring teen drama”, or you could, like, remember when all of that stuff was super important, I mean, universe endingly important. That’s kinda what I did, and I spent the whole game in various states of “Oh… My… GAAAAAHD!” or “OH NOES!”

This is, like, most of the teens, something like halfway through the night, I guess? I mean, look at how they’re tryin’ to be brave, and totally sucking at it!

Because the game definitely does a lot to give you a bad case of the Oh Noes. It, like, threatens your friends, or… Well, they’re not your friends, but they kinda are, because you’re a girl called Alex, even if, y’know, you’re not a girl, or a Person of Colour, which Alex also kinda is? Either way, it was really cool to see these teens being treated as… Well, people, not just scream queens or puppy princes or whatever. They make dumb choices, like eating space cakes at bad times, or bring out their drama, and half the drama comes from… Well, maybe they’re not all there in ways that aren’t related to those cookies that make you hungrier the more you eat them, y’get what I’m saying?

The game looks kinda cool, although it’s hard to see things on a big monitor, and the characters look kinda small, but that’s okay, because the island is really cool too, and the music that plays, all the sounds and voices and weird effects are good too, as is, like, how easy it is to work out how to use the radio to, y’know, do spooky things (because there are spooky radios), because when you get on the right frequency for, like, things to happen, something obvious usually comes with it, like a light, or triangles, or whatever.

I’ve only done one run through of the game so far (The game pulls a really, really mean trick to show multiple playthroughs. Like, what the hell, Night School, I was all “NUUUUUUUU!” when you pulled that!), and it took me, like, four whole hours to get through it once, but I liked it, and I’m gonna try and see what happens if I do things differently, because there’s, like, hidden achievements for drama choicey stuff and not-so-hidden achievements for finding letters and backstory and stuff, which would be cool, because your first time through, you’ll kinda be all “Whuuuuuhhhhhh?” for at least the first half, maybe more if, like, you don’t get it?

What Jonas is saying is, like, my reaction through, like, the ENTIRE game. With, y’know, a lot of “Oh cool!” too…

Article Translation/Summary: If you like adventure games along the lines of The Cave or the newer Telltale stuff, with well written teenagers being well written (And voice acted) teenagers in a spooky situation that, on your first run through at least, is going to leave you with lots of questions, then this is definitely a good purchase, and well worth checking out. Just be aware that the slow start is just a build up, and stick with it, you might find it worth it. Also please be aware that there is death and teenagers (rightly or wrongly) blaming each other for some of the shit they did, space cakes (That’s “hash” browns, emphasis on hash, to many others), and it is a horror game. Thanks for reading through what I felt was a fitting style of reviewing for the game!

The Mad Welshman is totes a cool dude who, like, isn’t a freak or a… Wait, are we even allowed to say freak anymo-ooooh, these cakes taste so good….

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £10.99
Where To Get It: Steam

Sometimes, you have games seemingly designed to encourage us never to leave this green earth again. Games which say “Space is so stupidly dangerous, there is literally no point in going up there.” Tharsis is one such game… And I don’t really think that’s so much intention as theorycrafting over testing.

No, you weren’t prepared. You weren’t prepared at all, and you’re going to die.

Make no mistake, Tharsis is beautiful. Digital paintings abound, the Tharsis itself doesn’t look bad by any stretch of the imagination, and the UI, while not as helpful as it could be, is laid out well. The music, similarly, hits the right note, with the cutscene music’s mood of “We are fucked” and the main game’s “Okay, but let’s go down working, eh?” It fits. Which makes the game’s core problem of… Er… The core all the more heartbreaking. Essentially, while on a mission to Mars to investigate a transmission, a micrometeoroid shower blows up one of your modules, setting off a cascade of problems, and killing two of your crew, leaving you four crew, and… Well, an ever growing list of potentially lethal problems on your mission. And that, right there, is both the thematic core of the game, and its core problem.

Simply put, there is never, ever enough work to go round. I wouldn’t mind it so much if it were a case of “Welp, I missed saving the ship by one die roll, I can do better next time!”, but it never is. It’s nearly always around 4 weeks in, with an absolute mess of sudden, critical, and life threatening problems. On “Normal” difficulty. And it seems to show how little thought went into the interaction between game elements that I cannot find a single way to get myself through this block. If I somehow had seven dice (out of a maximum of six), and managed to roll every single number on those dice once (Plus a 5) and got the right piece of research, I would be able to manage one out of five critical problems that arise. But this is also assuming, firstly, that I had seven out of six dice (An impossibility), secondly, that none of those six results were Void (Removes dice), Injury (Removes a health level from a crew member), or Stasis (Locks the number rolled), and, last but not least… It would be assuming it’s only one 20 odd dice problem, instead of… Er… Up to four.

Sometimes, your end is as ignominious as this. Others, it’s at least mercifully quick.

There are things that can sort of help, but they require dice to use, and usually specific numbers. Want some food to give one of your crew more dice next turn? This requires firstly, that nothing else life threatening is distracting you (Good luck with that), and secondly, that you get… Er… At least two dice with the same number. Assuming, of course, that you have two spare dice to go around. There’s more, of course, but it all comes back to the same core problem: You simply do not have enough dice to even attempt anything but prayer. In a sense, this is fitting with the mood the game is trying to portray. You will not win this game through strategy, because the dice are the true arbiter of whether you survive a turn. On the one hand, it’s relatively quick. On the other, once you’ve won it once, there’s really not much incentive to come back, as the story, and the ship remain the same. All that changes is the crew (Four members, with most choices being unlockable through… Well, grind, basically. Did you research 800 things? Have a crew member choice!) the specific set of disasters you’re going to go through (Which come in flavours of “Will blow up bits of the ship”, “Will turn off those features you rarely use because you’re too busy stopping the ship from blowing up”, “Will take away food”, and “Will take away dice”), and the side projects, combination heal and harm decisions that might give you that edge you need… But it’s generally doubtful, and as the stress mounts, the decisions get worse, and the chance of fuckups costing heavily increases. Oh, just for reference, stress is the bar on the left of the character’s portrait. Research falls to the same problem: You do not have the dice to spare, most of the time.

Do I think it’s well designed in terms of trying to recreate a mood? Yes. Do I think anyone except the masochistic or those who explore thematic design principles will enjoy it? Jesus wept, no. Do I think it could be rebalanced to be less sadistic to appeal to a broader audience? Yes. Right now, however, it just isn’t that approachable. There’s a lot of potential clarity work to go in, there’s grind for questionable results, and this is basically a game about managing luck. Skill will usually get you 4-6 weeks in, but you’re going to need 10, and for that? RNJesus is your only real recourse. For the price it’s asking… I’m not really sure this would appeal very broadly.

There is rarely a good choice here. There is rarely a good choice *anywhere*

The Mad Welshman groaned as yet another monitor sparked in an alarming way. He was six weeks from retirement, dammit, this was meant to be an easy mission, and he couldn’t even get the satisfaction of recreating that one scene from Dark Star at the rate things were going!

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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: £3.99
Where To Get It: Steam

Lucifer, it appears, is a game developer. Through the receptacle of Daniel Mullins Games, they have created something devilishly amusing, and somewhat fourth wall breaking. There’s just one problem with reviewing it… If I tell you pretty much anything that happens, it’s going to spoil the damn game. So let’s talk in generalities, and in mood.

PonyIsland.JPG

Your mood when you begin (Or, indeed, look at the Steam page) can be summed up as something like “Oh christ, ponies. Fucking ponies.” Followed quickly by “Oh christ, Creepypasta… Bloody creepypasta.” It is my recommendation that you ignore these first two instincts. After all, the store page pretty much told you that the game was (in-game, at least) written by the Devil themselves, so you only have yourself to blame if you think these things after it’s outright told you.

Indeed, once you ignore these two beginning urges, you get to the puzzle elements of the game. And they’re clever. At first, they’re simple, switching symbols to get code to work. That much, I can mention. But it gets cleverer, and requires timing, and both the puzzles and the game begin to escalate. Kill things as soon as you’re able. But don’t kill other things. Beat the devil at his own game, or rather through the code of his own game (While playing his own game), and eventually, you will come to an awesome, hectic, and somewhat odd finale. Then, if you’re a good person, you will uninstall the game. All the while, you will be encouraged to give your soul to the developer of the game within the game. But screw that! (At least partly because it is “common wisdom” that we reviewers don’t have one. Pfeh, common wisdom. We just don’t like giving them away.)

ALSO PonyIsland.JPG

Of course, I am a moustache twirler, not a nice person. So I reinstalled, and went back in. And not everything fits as well as it could. The overall narrative? Yes. It twists, it turns, it has some clever moments that are only implied through showing, never outright shown, never outright told. But it has moments of “BUT THOU MUST” that you’ll probably only notice on a second playthrough. I can’t deliberately fail certain moments, though I know I want to fail them, no matter how innocent (or not) they appear.

But the simple sound, the lo-fi aesthetic, the implications within the story (Despite having all the time in the universe, the Devil, it seems, is an insecure and passive-aggressive game developer) draw me back in for another go, to see the rest of my life story (Such as it is, and slightly cliched though it may be), and to experience that finale one more time. For £4 , I won’t say it’s for everyone. Not everyone’s going to appreciate the puzzles, or the switches between a simple arcade style using the mouse, and the not so simple segments. But if you’re okay with games that switch between simple (And I do mean simple) arcade games, a boss fight or two (More complex), some logic and timing puzzles in between (Forming around half of the game), and humour that I’m guessing is aimed at “Oldschool Gamedev”… Y’know, the kind of folks who think a game isn’t fun without a death pit, or one-hit kills, then this might be worth a shot.

If you guessed this was also PonyIsland.JPG , you can now give me your soul as a reward.

There’s a lot I could say about it. About how the dutch angles are a nice touch, nice and subtle. About how the developer has nailed “Sickeningly cutesy” in places, and “OhGodWhy” in others. Little touches, little things. But all I will say is: It’s worth a go if you like something moderately amusing that will take you about 3 or 4 hours to finish the first time, then go back to see if you can get all the tickets, or remember a password, or maybe learn the full story of… Well, something.

Things it is not too much like: Undertale. Things it is somewhat like: Frog Fractions. Things it is exactly like: Not a bleeding one, it’s its own thing.

The Mad Welshman also wants your soul. Well, actually, all he really wants is to pay his bills. He has enough trouble with one soul, ta muchly!

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