Submitted by sebastian sohn on Tue, 02/07/2012 - 13:34.
Dixit Odyssey is the European answer to Apples to Apples. Dixit Odyssey is a party game, light enough to play socially even with a drink or two. The game is composed of 84 large, Tarot-sized cards, a scoreboard, player boards, and rabbit score tokens. Each card depicts a childlike, innocent, surreal painting. The beautiful art of the cards make this game magnificent.
The gameplay is simple. At the beginning of a turn, the active player picks a card and describes it with a word or a short phrase. Other players then submit a card from their hand of cards that best matches the active player's description. The active player then shuffles all the submitted cards including her card.
Everyone that guesses the active player's card scores, and players who have their cards (wrongly) picked also score. However if no player guesses correctly, all but the active player score. Thus the goal is to pursue the golden mean of giving clues that are not too easy but not that hard.
The developer says "Attr-X is a pointless game," and, well, he has a point; indeed, under most definitions of 'game' it does not qualify as one, since there are no objectives, either inherent or self-imposed. Think of it as a software toy, therefore.
You move about a rather large virtual world (arrow keys to move and strafe, RMB to change direction and mouselook). It is an eerie and nicely conceived virtual world; nothing like photorealistic, but also not the Tron-like setting we've become used to in many indie 3D titles. It has an abstraction, but beauty, to it, a sort of surrealist virtual world. And the world is surprisingly large, for one created by a lone-wolf developer; indeed, there are subway stations at certain locations so you can move easily from one area to another. There's also a day/night cycle, so lighting changes dramatically over time.
Submitted by TheDustin on Thu, 02/10/2011 - 19:51.
Huh, that picture looks pretty terrible. My little brother could draw better than that, and he's legally blind, arthritic, and also a tad dead. Aw, that Dustin artfag is reviewing again? Figures. He'll no doubt jabber on about how this little shitty platformer is "so fucking punk" because the author put absolutely zero effort into it. I'll humor him though, just so I'll have ammunition to say something snarky in the comment section.
Just as I figured. This game blows. The jump is floaty as hell, don't these punkfags play Mario? Whoo, I can shoot with "X". These spastic NPC's don't shoot back, he'll probably spout some bullshit about how it's "telling of the medium that when players are given the choice between violence and inaction, they will inevitably choose violence". Big fuckin' whoop.
Fuck. I game overed. Stupid controls. Restart.
Do you know what, fuck this game. I'll just leap off the first platform and end this pitif... woah, what's this dot for?Secret area, huh? Nifty. I guess I'll have to scope out the rest of the review below the fold.
Submitted by TheDustin on Wed, 10/20/2010 - 00:28.
Today's title is for those days when you contemplate rope, only to realize you're terrible at tying knots. I'm not going to touch upon what Loneliness is trying to get at -- I'll save that for the comments -- because that would ruin the experience, but I do have to say that minimalist piano Muzak is way too overdone in the 'Art Game' genre. Thusly, in the spirit of today's notgame the following review will be ghostwritten by the ghost of Kurt Cobain:
Won't you believe it, it's just my luck
Won't you believe it, it's just my luck
Won't you believe it, it's just my luck
Won't you believe it, it's just my luck
No recess
No recess
You're in high school again
You're in high school again
just believe No Recess. You're
my Won't it, it's just
Won't it, luck. No
RECESS
it, luck. Won't it's Recess.
Won't just just it, RECESS.
believe it's Won't you just
Creaky Old Memory's gameplay is in itself somewhat jejune, but the art style and emotional tone are compelling. It's a platformer, sort of, except that being a creaky old lady, you cannot actually leap gaps. Instead, your house is equipped with many sliding ladders, and figuring out how and where to drag the ladders to get to your goal is part of the puzzle-solving.
In each level, there are a number of brightly lit pictures, which you must get to. Once you have collected them all, you must then get to an organ, which becomes a combination lock to unlock the next level. While at the organ, you may examine the pictures you collected, each of which has a number. The combination is determined by figuring out which of the pictures you collected are part of a chronological sequence, and arranging them in the correct sequence, then inputting the resulting numbers.
This gets repetitive after a while, but the art itself is stylish, collages of early 20th century imagery, some of it quite disturbing. The thematic connection to the puzzles is that Tatjana, the protagonist, has a 'creaky old memory,' and must assemble her thoughts to recall elements of her past. Since she is Russian, and lived through both the Nazi invasion and years under Stalin, it's not surprising that some of her memories are disturbing, although the imagery never falls over the border into the truly horrific.
It's enough, in fact, to pull you through the game, despite the moderately tedious gameplay; narratology triumphs over ludology, here. One note that might be considered a spoiler but is actually pretty critical to completing the game; the final combination puzzle is not based on pictures encountered on that level, but on the sequence of images shown "between levels" as Tatjana takes the elevator to the next (literal, apparently) level of her house. You'll need to note them as you play.
Creaky Old Memory is a finalist in this year's Indiecade festival.
Submitted by TheDustin on Mon, 05/24/2010 - 00:45.
It's only fitting that I'm writing this review while in the throes of severe sleep deprivation and am verging on a caffeine overdose. Remember those La La Land games from a couple years back? Those oh-so-indie approximations of a Dali lucid dream? He made another game, but this time around it takes more than five minutes to beat.
This is going to be the shortest review I've ever done.
Cactus is beyond a genius. You can't fully appreciate it unless you either play this on 'shrooms during a blizzard or decompile it and realize that it's just 2D sprites with shaders and layering tricks that are systematically deranging your senses. There is a way to win but there are many more ways to lose yourself against the pall of infinity, and I recommend you do so. It's easier than going to Peru and drinking Ayahuasca with the shamans, and much more Scandanavian.
Bob Clark is like Chris Crawford chased with Red Bull, he's got a simple yet elegant approach into interactive dialogue that we first reviewed as feature of his femicide game. Always willing to explore the plight of others through a Question, Yes, No, Answer dialogue system, Bob sort-of outdoes himself this time around. What sort is this of? You control a red robot in a factory full of spikes and coneyors, you press a single button (this was originally made for the Gamma IV competition) to channel the robot's face into a focused grimace, Hiro Nakamura style, and either reverse the flow of the conveyors or to charge up an answer to a bit of a dialogue. Ok, two dimensions to this dialogue game, the conversation puzzles and the conveyor puzzles. The plot thickens.
Quicksand Games, creators of We Want You bring us another politically charged masterpiece, inspired by J.G. Ballard's 1968 short story, Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan, it serves to transplant the political machinations of hyper-personalized political celebrity to the mechanics of puzzle-by-proxy AI manipulation games -- or, it's Lemmings with Barack.
When I dream I sometimes create the story as I'm playing in it, and new scenes and characters are spun out, blurry as I meet them, crisper as we fight, dance, make love, explode, or simply have a surreal conversation. Sometimes I meet people I'd known before who have left me, or who I have left, or who I never met, knowing or at least hoping that they are, at some level, meeting met as well, in their dreams. And now Jason has turned the collective unconscious into a game.
The Last Sorceror combines frenetic Robotron-esque combat with frequent pauses after battles, and a series of RPG quests--making for a nice change of pace from both Diablo-esque click-fests and the turn-based combat of Final Fantasy-style RPGs. (By Robotron-esque, we mean that one set of keys controls movement in cardinal directions, while another controls the direction in which you shoot--so that movement and fire can occur at the same time in different directions.)
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