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Evoland (2013)

Genre: Action Adventure, Role-Playing Game Developer: Shiro Games Price: £6.99

The best way to nurture a sense of nostalgia is to present something to people in the way they remember it, rather than how it was. After several hours of slogging through Evoland, I feel secure in saying that its history of gaming theme offers an experience that was less the way I’d like to have remembered things, and more just the elements that needed to be repressed.

Evoland is a hybrid action-adventure and RPG game that promises a ‘journey through the history of action/adventure gaming’. Mostly this just means that the developer designed a cool gimmick in which the graphics occasionally ‘improve’, but didn’t really put in enough effort to attach a decent game to it. The player stars as a hero called ‘Clink’ (and yet somehow this isn’t the laziest reference in the game) who is tasked with saving the world from a not particularly well defined threat. He and his travelling companion/healing mage Kaeris must travel to some-place-or-other to fight the dastardly Zephyros. Mostly this just involves being dragged through a series of setpieces designed to show off the game’s duelling graphics engines whilst a series of unsubtle references are paraded in front of the player.

Most of  the game feels barebones and skeletal. It’s not very often that we see something so inherently polished and yet so amazingly soulless and empty. Advancement through the game is entirely linear, and, whilst there’s a plot of sorts there’s very little character development or worldbuilding done to augment the main gameplay. It is as if the developers expected the product to work based upon systems alone, which, when the game’s structure and underpinnings are such a mess, is quite a laughable idea. It has a jack of all trades approach to gameplay, switching between Zelda-like action-adventure and Square-Enix style JRPG formulas unpredictably, but this unfocused approach means that little effort has been made to develop either these two different styles of gameplay any further than their most basic, vanilla forms.

The turn based combat is tedious, overly simplistic, and quite frankly unpleasant, with random battles occurring every few steps along the way in those areas in which they are prevalent. The action-adventure combat fares a little better, but the design of the Zelda-style dungeons is dull, and filled with enemies that just aren’t fun to fight against. In one particularly egregious example, the weapon required to beat one particular kind of enemy isn’t granted until well after those enemies start appearing in the game, resulting in the only option being to power through them slowly with repeated chops. A third, one-off dungeon presents what is possibly the second worst attempt at Diablo-style combat I’ve come across in a game, and whilst it sort of works as a joke, the actual gameplay involved far outstays its welcome. Anyway, the addition of American ARPG combat to what is essentially a (badly written) love letter to the works of Nintendo, Square and Enix seems vastly out of place.

Frankly, Evoland is a disappointment. A soulless shell composed of half-remembered ideas and threadbare reference jokes covering a mediocre stumble through systems that were heavily refined or abandoned long before many of the games being referenced were even released. Whilst the visuals are interesting, and there’s some music that harkens back to classic tracks from games you may well remember, between frustrating random battles and slow trawling through poorly designed dungeons it offers far more boredom than it does nostalgia.

How long did I play? - 5.8 hours, but that includes the 2 hours or so that I left the game running because there weren't any save points nearby. Did I finish it? - Yes Would I play it again? - No

[steamgameaday]

Velocibox (2014)

Genre: Arcade Developer: Shawn Beck Price: £5.59

Veloxibox is a simple game. This is not to say that it’s an easy game: quite the contrary in fact. Velocibox is the type of game where within a minute of gameplay you’ll most likely have died and had to start over from the beginning several times. In Velocibox you play as a cube sliding quickly down a passageway, and must dodge barriers, whilst collecting smaller cubes. Rather than being barriers themselves, the walls are actually a continuation of the floor, and the player may move the cube a full 360 degrees around the walls and ceiling of the passage, which will rotate to suit the player’s current position. The player can also flip, VVVVVV style between their current floor and the ceiling, although they must keep in mind that if they come into contact with a barrier mid-air that will immediately end the game. Along the way the player must also collect smaller cubes, and collecting enough of these to fill a bar immediately activates the next level of the game.

Like so many truly simple games, it holds its inspiration on its sleeve. Basically, Veloxibox is 3D, quadrilateral Super Hexagon. From the pulsing background beats to the intensely challenging gameplay through having a series of memorisation-based challenges in a mostly randomised order it’s all very reminiscent of the Terry Cavanagh classic, and the loop of ‘Game Over’ and ‘Level One Begin’ is nothing short of homage to Hexagon’s 

Where the game diverges from Hexagon is where it weakens, however. Whilst the cube-collecting thing for advancing through several levels is a good idea, some of the levels are basically just traps designed to kill the unprepared player immediately, leaving them having to immediately restart the game from stage 1. This may seem amusing a couple of levels in, but it’s nothing short of infuriating at higher levels. The music isn’t anywhere near as good either, which is a shame but it’s still pretty passable. Still, whilst it’s an obvious copycat, there’s enough here that’s different enough to make it more than interesting. Velocibox is an extremely fun little game that gives the player a lot of gameplay in incredibly tiny chunks.

How long did I play? - 1.0 hours Did I finish it? - No Would I finish it? - Unlikely, but I can give it a good try.

If you enjoy my regular ramblings on the utterly baffling contents of my ever-epanding Steam Library, then you might also enjoy my new podcast, Like What I Like, in which me and a friend force our interests on each other on a bi-weekly basis.

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I’ve got a new podcast!

Sorry about my absence for the last few days; I’ve not been quite able to keep up the ‘a day’ part of my title. Thankfully this isn’t because I was being lazy (for once), but instead because I just launched a new podcast!

Like What I Like is a podcast in which Me and my friend Lain exchange an interest every couple of weeks and then talk about it. This episode, I had Lain watch the Terry Gilliam movie ‘Brazil’, and Lain made me watch the second arc of ‘Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure’. 

The project has its own page at likewhatilikepodcast.tumblr.com, and our RSS feed is at likewhatilike.podbean.com/feed. We’re not on iTunes or any other podcast libraries yet, but it’s only a matter of time and whether or not we can keep the momentum going after the first episode.

So yes, please check us out. I’m really proud of this, which either means I’ve had some sort of weird personality change or it’s something that’s genuinely good.

Anyway, with that all done with, I should try and get back on top of things and return you to your regularly scheduled gaming content.

[steamgameaday]

Voxelized (beta 0.9.6, 2015) & Journey of the Light (2015)

Genre: Sandbox, Puzzle Developer: Lord Kres Price: £1.59, Not currently available on Steam

Voxelised is a shameless early access Minecraft ripoff. Whilst it may seem harsh to state this so bluntly and in such an undipolmatic manner, Voxelized is far more than deserving of this lack of courtesy. When it works, it’s an unoriginal block-building game that looks suspiciously like a pre-packaged gamemaker asset pack (sort of a prebuilt example) called Block Engine that’s been locked into an 800x600 resolution and thrown out onto the Steam Store in the hope that somebody would buy it. In this case you’re given a small world in which you can place and remove cubic blocks with a variety of very simplistic batterns. It’s basically a big, empty Lego set, if you’ve somehow found yourself reading this without any context for as to what Minecraft is. Of course, I found that most of the time it just freezes up whilst generating worlds instead, causing the desktop to get stuck in 800x600 resolution until manually reverted.

Of course, when I visited the game’s community forums to see if this was a common problem, I found something far more interesting about Voxelized, and that is that it was developed by the same one-man dev team as ‘Journey of The Light’, a game that was infamously pulled from Steam last year after it was outed as essentially being a confidence trick.

You see, Journey of the Light was a game that advertised itself as being a seven-chapter puzzle game so difficult that you may never even beat the first level. Of course, the scam there was that, despite the claims of the developer, there was only one level, which had no win conditions. In fact, the level was simply an art pack designed for tower defense games purchased from the Unity Store for around $65, around which the player rolled a ball. The ‘E’ button toggled all of the lights in the level, which the developer claimed was an important part of solving the puzzle. I suspect that the developer may have gotten away with this clever rouse for longer, with players simply giving up and assuming that the game had beaten them, had it not been for the fact that games are incredibly easy to datamine. A quick examination of the game’s files showed that all of the levels were the same and that that the game was programmed to show an intro and to allow players to toggle the lights and nothing else.

Fear any developer that puts their pre-alpha software into early access and then immediately asks the community what they want it to be. Not only does it imply that the developer has absolutely no original ideas of their own, but it’s also an indicator of a lack of skill. Fear also any developer that claims to have created a puzzle too hard to solve, as not only is designing puzzles that lack logic and reason a very poor approach to game development, you might just find that the game you’ve purchased was never designed to be solved, and never will be. If you find a developer offering both, run for the hills.

How long did I play? - 0.2 hours each Did I finish it? - N/A. Would I play it again? - No.

[steamgameaday]

Ancient Planet (2015)

Genre: Tower Defense Developer: Moonlight Mouse Price: £3.99

Ancient planet seems like a solid, well-designed tower defense game until about 8 levels in, at which point your base is utterly flattened by a massive horde of self-healing robots. From that point the designers’ intent becomes apparent; Ancient Planet is a grindfest designed to alleviate mobile phone gamers of their hard earned cash through gratuitous microtransactions, and yet which wasn’t in any way rebalanced when he game transitioned to PC last year.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself. Ancient planet is a tower defense game, which means it’s a type of real-time strategy game in which the player must place towers alongside a road. These towers attack enemies, different towers have different abilities, enemies drop loot that can be used to upgrade towers and so on and so forth. The difference between Ancient Planet and traditional tower defense is that between missions players can upgrade the abilities of their towers using gem points, which are a tertiary currency earned through the completion of levels without spending all of their gold coins (the secondary currency) on factories that produce silver (the primary currency) to build towers with. Whilst this initially seems to allow for some degree of customisation, it quickly becomes apparent that you need ALL of the upgrades, and yet only have the gems for a few of them.

And so the only way to continue the game is to go back to the first few levels and mindlessly play them over and over again, hoping that the random number gods drop more than a handful of gold coins each time. You’ll need a few hundred of those gems, so it could take you a while to make any actual progress. As you can imagine, this rather sucks any of the fun out of the game and, let us face it, if tower defense game isn’t fun, then what’s the point in playing it at all? 

Which is a shame, because if it were, there would be a lot to recommend the game on; it’s got great painting-style graphics, a very clean design that includes colour coding and some surprisingly decent animation. The levels, the first time around at least, are actually vaguely fun and likable. Sadly, most of the game is entirely pointless grind, so who cares? Moving on. Next game.

How long did I play? - 2.5 hours Did I finish it? - No Would I play it again? - No

[steamgameaday]

Hexcells (2014)

Genre: Puzzle Developer: Matthew Brown Price: £1.99

It’s basically Minesweeper. Well, that’s not true; Minesweeper is better and has a lot more replayability than Hexcells, which is a similarly played game in which you locate a particular kind of cell using numbers on the surrounding cells. Minesweeper. It’s also free and already built into windows, although it’s been degrading in quality since Windows 8. Regardless, Hexcells is basically a static set of 20 Minesweeper-style puzzles presented in a minimalist style with an ambient soundtrack. 

Hexcells has a few differences to Minesweeper, of course. For one thing, the cells are all hexagonal (as you may have guessed) instead of square. Secondly, there are now a variety of different ways that the numbered clues can be displayed to the player; numbers surrounded by brackets means that all of the nearby not-quite-bomb cells are connected to each other, whereas numbers surrounded by hyphens means that the not-bombs have at least one gap between them all. Numbers can also appear at the top of columns or at the edge of rows, Sudoku style, which indicates the number of not-bombs in that line of cells. It’s a good idea, and it does indeed add another layer of logic to the puzzle design over the standard Minesweeper formula.

And the puzzles are well designed, but it takes far too long top get to the ones that offer any kind of meat to them. Most stages of the game primarily act as tutorials to the various concepts of the game, and it’s not until the last few stages that anyone who’s played a lot of Minesweeper should ever actually feel challenged. Of course, what will really challenge seasoned Minesweepers is the fact that the game switches the left and right mouse buttons from the usual Minesweeper controls, with a left mouse button indicating the locations of the not-bombs and the right click indicating the numbered clue cells. Get this wrong and it appears as a mistake on your record, and two or more errors in a single stage costs completion points, meaning you may have to replay levels if you're struggling to get enough points to unlock later stages, or you want those achievements.

So between all of the restarting because of muscle memory and the four hours of ‘ambient’ music this relaxing puzzle game has mostly just made me angry and frustrated. I severely grew to dislike Hexcells. There’s nothing really that wrong with it, there’s just not enough there to recommend it over any other Minesweeper-alike on the market, and the static levels means there’s absolutely no replayability. Ultimately, whilst there’s some great design in there, It tries to reinvent Minesweeper, which is like trying to reinvent the wheel.

How long did I play? - 3.9 hours Did I finish it? - Yes, 100% completion. Would I play it again? - No.

[steamgameaday]

Hello Kitty and Sanrio Friends Racing (2015)

Genre: Kart Racing Developer: Scarab Entertainment Price: £14.99

Remember the good old days? The days before the Arkhams and the Telltale Presentses and the Lego Xes of the world, when the words ‘Licensed Game’ were synonymous with ‘unredeemable mulch’? Well why not relive those days for the low, low price of fifteen quid by purchasing Hello Kitty and Sanrio Friends Racing from your local Steam store: You too can live with the frustration and disappointment of purchasing a game with a popular character on the front and finding nothing but torment and boredom inside!

Come see the wonders of the badly-made Mario Kart clone, made by people who played Diddy Kong Racing at least twice! Gasp in wonder as a variety of cosmetically different cars (all of which have precisely the same speed and handling properties) race slowly around a series of sterile, uninteresting tracks. adorned with colourful but ultimately generic looking decor, some of which is hovering slightly above the ground. Marvel at the addition of planes, which slowly potter around, and of speedboats, which have so little torque on the track as to be practically uncontrollable.  

But you truly cannot miss the star attraction; the astonishingly substandard AI! You and all your family will laugh and applaud as half the racers get stuck driving directly against a corner you easily turned around, stopping there for the entire duration of the race! And how you’ll chuckle as cars appear to drive in entirely the wrong direction as you pass them! If you’re really, really lucky, you may even see the entire cast of Hello Kitty trapped in a line against an invisible wall that stretches partway across the game’s final track!

Should you really feel the need (and you won’t) you might even want to fire at these entertaining automatons with the game’s handful of weapons. Cakes are fired directly in front of your car (none of this Mario Kart jettisoning it behind you lark), and a direct hit will cause a car to spin off. Traffic cones are left directly behind your vehicle, and for some reason still work the same midair during aeroplane levels as they do during any other vehicle segment. Aside from those, there are also powerups that slow time (or rather, just your opponents’ vehicles, but there are clocks that appear), give you a shield that doesn’t actually protect you from most of the game’s hazards, and some rather generic boosts that you won’t need, and will probably never actually get because you’re too far ahead to need them.

But wait, that’s not all! Once you’ve finished with the many glories of the game’s 16-track ‘Contests in Happy Lands’ mode (actually 5 tracks repeated with slight variations on vehicle and direction), you should also experience the game’s 20-level ‘Adventures with Sanrio Friends’ mode, which includes such fascinating and varied minigames as ‘collect the apples’, ‘collect the cakes’, ‘drive through the gates’ and ‘drive to the finish line’, most of which can be finished in a single attempt. The rest of them involve the boat physics.

But before you go, perhaps you should try out the multiplayer! Unless, of course, you’re trying to play it with one controller and one keyboard. In which case it won’t work at all, as they didn’t set separate keyboard and pad controls for players one and two in the menu. Such a shame. Ah well, you won’t be able to get that last Achievement until you’ve got two Xbox pads plugged in at the same time then, will you? It’s not like you were hoping to wield that like a badge of honour showing that you’d endured the entirety of Hello Kitty and Sanrio Friends Racing start to finish and survived, were you? Because that would be silly.

Hello Kitty and Sanrio Friends Racing is a wondrous throwback to those days of old. You’ll wonder why the Sanrio Company ever signed off on this. You’ll wonder who genuinely thought that they could charge £15 for this on PC when it’s only 40 cents (plus a series of ridiculously-priced microtransactions) on mobile phones. You’ll wonder why you’re playing this when you could be doing something more productive and less boring, like watching a really vibrant coat of paint drying. You’ll wonder why you’re not asking for a refund just there and now rather than giving the game the whole hour and a half it requires for full completion first. Just take the refund. Or better yet, don’t get it at all; that would be wonderful.

How long did I play? - 1.6 hours Did I finish it? - Yes. Would I play it again? - No. No, no, no. No.

[steamgameaday]

The World Named Fred (2015)

Genre: Action Adventure Developer: Here Be Dragonz Price: £2.79

Leet Nym is a poorly-named Hal-Mart employee until one day he sees a Cat on the other side of a mirror. This bizarre occurrence leads him to being dragged into a world known as Fred, where he is needed as the bodyguard of a magical princess (of sorts) who might just possibly save the world. It’s a sort of first person comedy adventure thing with some swordfighting and exploration. And a lot of dialogue.

The game’s writing contains a lot of worldbuilding. We hear about weird places, people and the historical events that they were involved in, but anything we actually see feels cold and lifeless. Settlements are sparsely populated, with those people who do occupy their walls being mostly motionless mannequins, completely still and silent until they’re needed for the game’s script to continue. Some places have a bit more of a real-world feel to them than others; the Gothic city, built into a cave for example has striking architecture and several buildings that can be entered, but other places just feel like (and are) poorly structured video game levels, or are simply vast buildings containing some scenery and a single quest NPC. It’s all very ugly and artless, moreso in some places than others.

The game’s lack of cinematic music is also of concern; whilst there are a handful of places that contain in-world music tracks, there’s nothing to underscore the adventure in general. As a result, very little actually sets the mood of the game and so everything feels rather flat and boring. When there actually is music, it feels incredibly out of tone; also why do the coffee houses all play Christmas music? I mean, aside from the fact that it’s in the public domain? Is that supposed to be a joke that I’m not getting? It’s certainly not signposted or mentioned anywhere that I saw.

Speaking of jokes, the game is full of them and a lot of them fall flat. There’s a lot of acceptable target humour about hippies, hipsters and goths, some playing around with mathematics and computer programming and some absurdist humour, but whilst there’s a few very clever jokes in there, they’re underneath a heap of jokes about old stereotypes and further mixed into a huge pile of overly long dialogue boxes. There’s much better ways to exposit information in games than through long, unskippable dialogue sequences, and yet this game is full of long, dreary conversations that drag the whole thing to a halt again and again.

But the worst of it all is the gameplay. The game is essentially a sequence of fetch quests (go here, collect this item or person, come back) one after the other, but occasionally punctuated by some genuinely awful combat. Enemies walk towards you and then swipe occasionally whilst you guard against them using the right mouse button or swipe back at them using the left. After enough hits they ragdoll over and stop moving, then you go back to running to your next location. Rather awkwardly running sheathes your weapon, and so you have to pull it back out any time you’re attacked. This is mostly just an annoyance for most of the game, but becomes an active gameplay issue when fighting the final boss, whom the player has to hit and then run away from within a series of rather short windows of time.

The World Named Fred has its moments, but it’s bogged down by weak gameplay, ugly graphics and the developer’s lack of ability to make their ideas tangible. It’s a shame, because there’s some great ideas hidden behind the lacklustre presentation and humdrum design and it often feels that if the dev had decided to go a slightly different direction, exploring the world in minutia rather than simply creating a series of scenarios to be quickly run through, this could have been something special. And then it just ends abruptly, because it’s the first of an episodic game series that I doubt we’ll ever see the rest of. Whilst I’d like to spend more time in the World Named Fred, I’d much rather see it in a manner that isn’t like this dreary episode.

How long did I play? - 3.0 hours Did I finish it? - Yes Would I play it again? - No

[steamgameaday]

Murder (2015)

Genre: Adventure Developer: Peter Moorhead Price: £1.99

So we’ve got a moody cyberpunk cityscape, a tough as nails female homicide detective and a mystery murder with no leads. She’s been getting weird dreams about being murdered by robots, and the whole world may or may not be some sort of digital construct. These should all be elements that work together into a pretty interesting noir-esque yarn, or at least they would were this not a Peter Moorhead game and therefore is once again sorely lacking in interactivity, plot and (most egregiously) content.

The fascinating thing about Murder is that it has precisely the opposite problem with pacing to the problems found in Moorhead’s previous work ‘Stranded’. Whereas Stranded played things much slower than they quite frankly needed to be, presenting a few tiny setpieces separated by long meandering portions of nothing, Murder rushes through its plot points at an almost violent speed, taking players from pivotal scene to pivotal scene without any room for thought or reflection. It feels structurally broken; the game has a prologue in the form of a short tutorial, a beginning, an end and an epilogue, but somehow there’s nothing that actually takes players from the beginning to the end organically. 

It could be argued that this is part of the design of the game; that the flow is meant to be dreamlike because (sort of spoilers) the story more than likely takes place in a simulation of some sort, but that reveal is itself a storytelling issue, as despite the fact that the game dedicates an entire epilogue towards hinting at that conclusion, it’s so self evident throughout anyway as to be completely redundant. “Do you even remember the process of getting dressed today?” asks an ominous glitchy figure. Well, yes, I do. The main character’s clothing transitioned onto her with a bottom to top wipe animation, at which point I thought ‘simulation’. 

Incidentally, I think this is supposed to be some sort of philosophical statement. ‘Aha!’ It says. ‘How do you know things are real when you don’t remember putting pants on this morning?’ which, would be an interesting idea, except that remember that too. I chose the Dark Side of the Moon Eevielution tee because I knew a friend might pop round, and then a put on a jumper and she never saw it. But that’s neither here nor there, but it seems weird that a statement about how human memory fails to remember the routine seems out of place in a game where no routine is established, regardless.

Still, it’s a Peter Moorhouse game, so once you overlook the massive issues as to the poorly written (albeit vaguely competently acted) plot, there’s some wonderful looking landscapes to goggle at, and some nice moments of worldbuilding. The soundtrack is also interesting and varied, and offers a lot towards the game’s cyberpunk aesthetic. 

Ultimately, the biggest thing wrong with Murder is that there’s just not enough of it. I don’t mean this in the good ‘leave ‘em wanting more’ way, I mean that it’s literally only 20 minutes long and feels like it’s missing a big chunk of plot in the middle. Whilst I understand that what Peter Moorhouse tries to make isn’t conventional gaming, but is in fact Art, that doesn’t entirely excuse him from the conventions of storytelling when it comes to making a coherent narrative. It also doesn’t really excuse him from trying to sell a tiny experience that feels extremely incomplete to the average player as if it were a premium entertainment product. Murder is an interesting little experience, but it’s just so sorely lacking in so many areas that it’s probably just not worth your attention.

How long did I play? - 0.5 hours Did I finish it? - Yes Would I play it again? - No

[steamgameaday]

Volchaos (2011)

Genre: Platformer Developer: Fun Infused Games Price: £1.99

So after the wondrous interlude that was Slime Rancher, it’s straight back to the bucket of ageing indie games that fill my Steam Library full to bursting. Today’s game is ‘Volchaos’, a game I mostly know for being one of the popular games back on the Xbox Live Indie Games (XBLIG). You play as an Indiana Jones style adventurer running through level after level collecting gems and trying to get to the exit without dying.  It’s one of those Meat Boy style frustration platformers, but with the twist that every single level features a slowly (or in some cases quickly) rising flow of lava that gradually engulfs the level, forcing the player to move quickly. Hitting lava, spikes or any enemy results in the player’s immediate death and a rapid return to the start of the level.

Each level has a handful of gems that players may have to go out of their way to collect, and which apparently unlock a bunch of secret levels. Alternatively each level also has a leader board based purely on time, meaning that rushing through levels without completing the gem-based side objectives is also rewarded. It’s all simple and fun enough, although some of the enemy types don’t react the same way each time the level is restarted, which is a bit of an issue when it comes to time-attack based games. Still there’s a decent amount of immediacy the rapid loop of death, and some fiendishly designed traps to trial-and-error through on the first playthrough.

But despite this, I just haven’t been feeling it. The best I can really say about Volchaos is that it’s a perfectly competent game, but it never really clicked for me. It all feels a bit samey and flat, even as the challenge ramps up over the course of the gae. It’s suitably well designed and challenging, but ultimately I found myself dispassionately disinterested in getting through this one. 

How long did I play? - 1.3 hours Did I finish it? - No Would I finish it? - No

[steamgameaday]

Slime Rancher (v0.2.4b, 2016)

Genre: Business Management? Action Adventure? First Person Strategy? First Person Shooter? You know what, lets just go with Slime Ranching Simulator. Developer: Monomi Park Price: £14.99 (or get it via the devs’ Humble Widget for £13.99)

So I’ve been down on the ranch all day, running around and tending to my slimes. I’ve got all sorts of slimes! I’ve got Phospor Tabby Largos, Puddle Slimes, Honey Boom Largos, Phospor Rock Largos, Tabby Slimes... Oh, and one of my Tabby slimes somehow got out and into the chickens and... hold on, you’ve got no idea what I’m going on about have you?

Okay, the easiest way I can explain this is to give you a quick mythozoology lesson. Slime Rancher is an Early Access game where you’re in charge of a farm that deals in the byproducts of an alien lifeform known as Slimes. Slimes are happy bouncy creatures that can be found in the wilderness all around your ranch. Whilst their personalities depend on their species they mostly do three things; bounce around, eat things and poop out a crystaline substance known as plort. The plort from various different species of slime has real world uses in the fields of science and manufacturing (and in some cases, food. Ew.), and so is a hotly traded commodity, with plort market prices constantly fluctuating.

No matter how omniverous the breed of slime, they won’t eat their own plort. They will, however, eat the plort of other types of slime, which is where things get weird. Well, weirder at any rate. When a slime of one variety consumes a plort from a slime of another variety it transforms into a big hybrid slime called a Largo, combining characteristics from both the host slime and the plort. These Largos are bigger than their counterparts (too big to fit into a vacuum pack), and will produce two plorts each time they eat, making them cheaper to farm than the normal sized slimes.

Farming Largos is not without its risks, however; should a Largo happen to consume a plort from a third type of slime they will mutate into a Tarr, a oil-slick rainbow coloured mass of opaque monstrosity that will consume anything and anyone it comes into contact with. This includes ranchers. These creatures produce nothing but more Tarr and so will need to be put down quickly, either by incineration, or through judicious application of water. A Tarr in the wild is a not uncommon occurrence that can be easily handled or fled, but a Tarr on the ranch can quickly turn into an infestation that can wipe out a large amount of your current livestock.

So naturally it’s important when building your slime ranch that you try and avoid being caught out by such eventualities. Luckily, whilst the initial pens aren’t up to much, they’re designed to be modular and upgradable; you can fit out your little force-field cubicles with higher walls, a lid and tools that automate feeding and plort collection, and you can alter environmental factors currently including playing music to your slimes, or protecting them from harsh sunlight. Still, you may still need to consider the possibility of escapes and the unintended consequences that can unfold. On that basis, perhaps it would be best not to keep the Exploding Cat Slimes next to the Honey slime pen. Just a thought.

You also need to keep a tabs on keeping your slimes well fed; aside from the fact that feeding slimes is what gets you your hard-earned plort, hungry slimes are misbehaving slimes, and will climb into big stacks in an effort to escape their confines. You also don’t want to let them get hungry because... actually I don’t know what happens if they get too hungry; I just can’t stand the looks on their faces when they do. It’s therefore important that a rancher come up with a food supply for each of their slimes, whether it be through gardening or raising chickens. There’s a variety of fruits, veggies and poultry that can be used to fill these 

So how do you get your slimes, plants and chickens? Well that involves going out into the world with a vacuum cleaner strapped on your back and sucking up the stuff you need from out in the wild. By default the Vacpack can carry twenty of each of four different types of item at a time, but this limit can be increased with upgrades purchasable back at the ramp, along with some upgrades to the player’s health, stamina and speed. In many ways it’s yet another retread of the tried and tested loot, sell, upgrade formula, but it’s one that’s got plenty of variety and a great amount of style to it. And let us face it, if the looting, selling and upgrading gameplay loop ceased to exist tomorrow, most games with any kind of depth would just cease to be.

Quite frankly I am more excited for Slime Rancher than I have been for a commercially available alpha of a game since Minecraft. Much like with the latter there’s already a solid game implemented in the core of the experience and it’s very clear exactly how and where expansion will flow. I look forward to an expanding world, a larger variety of slimes and, (and I may have to suggest this to the designer) cat toys to keep the Tabby Slimes occupied. Slime Rancher is one of those rare games that feels utterly brilliant despite being very visibly a work-in-progress.

How long did I play? - 6.9 hours Did I finish it? - N/A, although I saw most of the current content. Would I play it again? - Yes. Definitely. I need to set up a Google alert for this game’s patch notes.

[steamgameaday]

Synonymy (2014)

Genre: Puzzle Developer: Christopher Cinq-Mars Jarvis  Price: £1.59 (Currently £0.39 in the Steam Lunar Sale)

Synonymy is a very simple game with very simple rules. You start with a random word (for example, Steam) and are given a second word that you have to get to (for the sake of simplicity, Desperation), and are tasked with getting from one to the other using synonyms. In this case, I could go from Steam to Vigor to Urgency to Desperation, which would complete my path in four words. Score is determined upon the completion of a path based both on the speed and number of words in the path, with lower being better.

Let us first try and ignore the fact that the game advertises itself on the idea that it’s narrated by Richard Dawkins. Whilst I could write a large amount about the politics surrounding Richard Dawkins, especially his tendencies towards Islamophobia and his general arrogance towards and inability to comprehend modern feminism, this would be completely irrelevant as the claim that Mr. Dawkins narrates the game is nonsense of the highest order. Instead his voice is heard only on the game’s tutorial. Which is just a copy of the game’s Youtube trailer. And which rather unhelpfully only indicates the controls for the mobile phone version.

Speaking of this being a terrible mobile port, nothing whatsoever has been done to try and make the PC version bearable in any way. Whilst the clean aesthetic and large text may look and function great on a 4 inch iPhone, on a PC monitor everything seems uncomfortably large and sometimes extremely difficult to read. The developer could easily have fixed this problem and improved the gameplay massively by listing more than 3 synonyms per page, which would render the game quicker and more immediate.

But there’s probably not enough game here to justify the effort anyway. Whilst the concept itself is sound, there’s really nothing to actually drive players towards actually playing it. Everything in the game is randomised, so there’s no set single player campaign offering a feeling of achievement or progress, and the highscore charting against friends is cumbersome and requires the exchange of codes for every single puzzle.

And then there’s just the fact that the thesaurus isn’t powerful enough. I found myself, within half an hour, finding myself at a dead end when I tried to get to ‘sell’ via ‘push’. I think that ‘push’ is actually itself a synonym of ‘sell’, and Roget’s Thesaurus agrees with me, and yet Synonymy was having none of it at all. If I can find a word link that’s patently missing within 30 minutes, imagine what it must be like to play the game for any serious amount of time.

Ultimately, Synonymy is a great idea for a game, but there’s no compelling reason why one should play this rendition of it rather than, say, clicking through an online thesaurus, which would give better results, more options and would actually go as far as to improve the player’s vocabulary by teaching them the meaning of the words they take a chance on. Synonymy is a rather thin excuse of a game, ported with zero effort whatoever and, quite frankly, being sold under false pretences.

How long did I play? - 0.5 Hours Did I finish it? - N/A Would I play it again?  - No.

[steamgameaday]

Godus (v. 2.4, 2014)

Genre: God Game Developer: 22 Cans Price: £10.99 (Currently £9.89 in the Steam Lunar New Year Sale)

In the beginning were the words, and those words were “Hello, welcome to Godus, the PC Version.” spoken in the dulcet, overly English tones of Mr. Peter Molyneux.

Molyneux has, of course, spent the last 27 years trying to make the same game over and over again. Godus is Populous in the same was as Black and White was Populous; you play as a God with indirect control over a group of followers, and it’s your job to expand your tribe, their devotion to you, and the sphere of your influence. In this case you do this by... well, generally by flattening the landscape and then clicking on things. Lots of things. Specifically, you click on houses to make builders come out and build new houses. You click on houses to collect the belief points that they generate. You click on rocks and trees to clear them and harvest belief. You click on fields to harvest grain. I’m only a few hours in, and I’m pretty sure that the game is going to introduce another set of things to mindlessly click at any second now.

Okay, that’s not entirely true. There’s some dragging as well, but only when your followers are too far away from something that a click will work. Aside from that, the vast majority of the game involves clicking on things that should really be entirely automated in order to accumulate resources so that you can unlock things that allow you to accumulate more resources. The unlocking things is also a drag. As you progress through the game increasing your ability to produce materials, it unlocks cards that have new abilities or upgrades on them. It doesn’t give you the abilities or upgrades, though; to get those you need to collect an ever-growing number of stickers to put onto the cards you’ve already collected. These stickers can be collected in a minigame collection (which is currently so incomplete that this source dries up by the end of the second hour) or found by digging around all across the map looking for hidden chests which have a single card in them each. If you’re lucky.

Sometimes the chest contain fragments of the plot instead. Because disappointment and annoyance really ingratiates people to the backstory of your world.

And yet, to be honest, I wouldn’t mind this were it not for the fact that it’s accompanied, by default might I add, by the voice of Mr. Molyneux telling me that I’m not playing his game right. “You shouldn’t be waiting around at this point” he says, as I sit, clicking periodically until I have the resources I need to advance. ‘You can get gems to speed things up by sacrificing your people at the Temple of Doom’. Well, I don’t want to, Peter. I don’t want to sacrifice either my people or the cute little masked villagers that joined my tribe of their own free will just because you think you can use that to justify your inclusion of Pay-to-Win mechanics in the PC version. Was it not you yourself who introduced the idea of black and white morality scales into mainstream gaming? Why would you build something that actively hobbles players who don’t want to be evil right at the start of your brand new unfinished game? Every step along the way of the commentary it feels like he’s telling players ‘no, this game isn’t a boring and often meaningless grind, it’s you who’s playing it wrong’, a sentiment diametrically opposed to his intent that you should be able to play in the style that most suits you.

On the plus side, however, the game looks astonishingly good. Between the wonderful gradient colours that make up the game’s cleverly designed topography and the soft palette that make up the various details, Godus presents a world that is sharp and colourful. There’s an impressive amount of detail in the animation of the tiny figures that populate your world, and there’s some impressive lighting and weather effects that batter your tiny settlements. It all looks the part, which just makes it even more annoying how flat and unfinished the whole thing still feels to play so late into the game's development.

Godus is baffling. On the one hand, you can see that there’s been love and effort put into making a product of high quality, but somehow it’s still just a mishmash of systems tied together with Farmville-style resource collection mechanics. Certainly I can see that the game has potential, but with two years of development, half a million pounds in Kickstarter funding and the world’s most famous god game developer involved, the result being merely potential feels underwhelming.

How long did I play? - 4.2 hours Did I finish it? - No, but then neither have 22 cans Would I finish it? - Possibly? Certainly I shall have to see how it develops. If it develops.

[steamgameaday]

Pix The Cat (2015)

Genre: Arcade Developer: Pastagames Price: £6.99 (Currently £1.74 in the Steam Lunar New Year Sale)

Pix The Cat is a neo-arcade game very much in the vein (and heavily inspired by) PAC-MAN Championship Edition DX+. In it you play as a tiny cat collecting eggs and rescuing ducks, because that's the sort of thing that happens in arcade games and nobody questions the lack of logic involved. 

So yes, anyway, the idea is to collect the eggs, which immediately hatch into ducks, and then deposit the ducks at exit points marked with a crosshair. Once you've cleared all the eggs from a screen you can then move on using a teleporter which will take you to the next screen, which is tiny and hidden somewhere on the current screen. Ideally the player should be collecting all of the eggs and then dropping them off at the dropoff points as this garners the highest possible score for each screen and a 'perfect!' status. 

It's not quite as simple as all that, though, as the ducks follow you in a line in a manner not unlike the old arcade game 'Blockade' (or the more well known Nokia cellphone game 'Snake'). Crashing into that line, running into a wall for too long or colliding with an enemy will cause you to lose all of your ducks and lower your combo meter. The longer you go without making any errors, the higher your combo meter gets, increasing the score multiplier and the speed at which the game is played. Finally, the game ends after a set timer regardless of progress or score, and the highscore is tallied.

Graphically it’s great, if a little distracting. The whole game is presented in a sort of glowing neon that smoothly but quickly zooms in every time you go deeper into the mazes, showing more weird glowing details as things progress from normal to macro to micro sizes. The whole thing also changes colour whenever the combo bar hits (or drops) another rung, starting at a rather cool and calm blue, and ending at the completely colour-reverted ‘fever mode’, where the player is invulnerable to skull enemies and ridiculously quick.

Whilst it's not quite as fluid as PAC-MAN Championship Edition DX+, it's still great fun. The game straddles the line between twitch-quick arcade action and memory puzzle, and is as much about shaving time off of the levels you already understand as working out the ones which have been designed to goad you into making a mistake. It's often frustrating, but generally in a good way as failure feels far down to your own errors and limitations than any part of the game itself. 

The game also bundles extra modes that could arguably be considered entirely different games that stand up on their own merits. The first to unlock is Laboratory mode, which switches the multi-screen timed mayhem for single screen puzzles. In this game mode the player must collect cells and then deposit them in the least number of moves (a move in this case being an up, down, left or right direction which results in Pix walking until he hits a wall), whilst making no mistakes. 

A second more arcade oriented Retro mode has the player rushing to collect a set number of quickly-spawning eggs across a number of levels, and it’s not quite the retro style you may be expecting; taking a rather wonderful 1920s animation aesthetic rather than the usual pixels and chiptunes associated with that word. Another mode adds a multiplayer function, but as I lack the required second person to test that with I haven’t been able to look into it.

All in all Pix The Cat is both a great game, and thanks to the extra modes, a much meatier package than it really ever needed to be. Whilst it’s perhaps a little silly that some of the modes are hidden behind high score unlocks, the main game is thoroughly enjoyable enough that the extra content should unlock pretty much organically. If you’re looking for something that can scratch that arcade itch and you’ve already got DX+, I thoroughly reccommend Pix The Cat, especially if you can coax your friends into doing high-score runs against you.

How long did i play? - 1.9 hours Did I finish it? - No, I’m 39% of the way towards unlocking everything, apparently. Would I finish it? - Yes

[steamgameaday]

Woodle Tree Adventures (2014)

Genre: Platformer Developer: Fabio Ferrara Price: £1.99 (currently £0.99 in the Steam Lunar New Year Sale)

Back when Sony first entered the console war and the idea of full 3D gaming was new and exciting, it was the assumption of most game publishers that mascot Platformers would continue to be all the rage. Whilst the short couple of years following the success of Crash Bandicoot and Mario 64 is remembered as a golden age for fun, interesting platformers, it is all too often forgotten that it was also an age of utter unadulterated garbage as everyone and their mum tried to recreate their otherwise serviceable 2D platforming style into a three-dimensional extravaganza. On the one hand, this was a time of experimentation which gave us such classics as Spyro the Dragon and Banjo Kazooie. On the other, the inexperience of developers in working in 3D spaces and just a lack of understanding of what was and wasn’t fun also gave us likes of Croc 3D: Legend of the Gobbos, Earthworm Jim 3D, and the utterly infamous Bubsy 3D.

But, as ever, I’m getting ahead of myself. Woodle Tree is a 3D platformer inspired by the games from that short period of time. In it you play as a walking log of wood and are tasked with collecting fairy teardrops that will return water to the Woodle Tree (a sentient talking tree) saving the world from thirst. Play proceeds across half a dozen levels of platforming action, including jumping, hitting enemies with a big leaf, and more jumping.

Woodle tree falls down a lot of the same pitfalls as those early 3D platformers. It offers uninteresting platform mechanics, has an utterly terrible camera that constantly gets stuck in the least useful location, a vast number of entirely arbitrary collectibles, and constant, repeated one-hit-kill deaths that are backed up by a very poor checkpointing system. It also has its own special hell of poor design: the collect-a-thons aren’t merely arbitrary, they respawn when the levels are re-loaded, making gathering them less of an objective and more of a grind. In an especially poor bit of game design, entering a level locks the player into that stage until they either complete it or exit the game, meaning that if you accidentally choose the wrong stage (quite easy as the stage selections look very similar) you have to close the game and load it back up again to choose a different one. 

If you stand under an elevator, you get pushed into the floor. The designer knew this, so what did they do? They put a hidden platform underneath so that you can jump back out.

The presentation is worse. Whilst the bright colours are pleasant enough and there’s some nice simplistic design to some of the character models, none of them have animation speeds that actually match their movement, leading to their dangling legs gliding around environments like noodles. This lazy animation is especially bad in the slippy-slidey ice world (every platform game has to have one!) where the dev didn’t bother to stop the animation when the player slides around, making them look like they’re still just walking. The rounded edges to platforms may look good onscreen, but as this actively makes the edges of platforms in some areas smaller and more treacherous this mostly just makes moving around even less fun. 

And the music, good god, the music. Woodle Tree Adventures has some of the most astonishingly amateurish compositions I’ve ever come across in a professionally released video game. The game’s tracks are short, don’t loop properly, sound like early 90s MIDI files and are just downright discordant and cacophonous in places, like somebody threw notes onto a stave and called it a day. It’s downright awful.

Woodle tree is infuriatingly poor. It has design issues that should have been ironed out over a decade ago alongside brand new frustrations borne of poor design and shoddy workmanship. Any enjoyability in the pleasure of old fashioned 3D platforming is sucked out by repetition, poor controls and the horrible grinding music that just continues on and on and on throughout the game. Whilst there are definitely things to like about Woodle Tree, there’s far more here that actively annoys.

How long did I play? - 1.5 hours Did I finish it? - Yes Would I play it again? - No 

[steamgameaday]

Contradiction: The All-Video Murder Mystery Adventure (2015)

Genre: Adventure Developer: Baggy Cat Price: £6.99

FMV games are going through a resurgence lately. Whilst once upon a time they were extravagant projects that required special technology, impossible to reproduce on home systems, everyone and their mum now owns several different machines that can quite happily run Dragon’s Lair. Bolstered by cheaper video production, platforms that lend themselves well to the less hands-on nature of video-based games and the fact that bundling 3gb of video files into your downloadable game barely bats an eyelid, several Indie studios have jumped onto Full Motion Video as a fun gimmick that makes their game stand out in an ever more crowded marketplace.

A lot of the best FMV games tend to be detective games, as the nature of police style interviews lends itself well to the full motion format. Contradiction is no exception to this. Playing as Detective Inspector Jenks of Scotland Yard (because apparently there’s no such thing as regional police offices in this vision of the UK) the player is tasked with solving the murder of Kate Vine, a student found drowned in the village of Edenton. They do this by moving from location to location around the quiet little hamlet looking for clues, asking the suspects about their findings and then pressing subjects on any contradictions that may come up between their testimonies.

I have to admit that I was surprised to learn that the game’s budget was a meager £4000 (although it apparently went over budget somewhat), minus tax and Kickstarter fees. As B-Movie grade as the production and acting is, aside from a few minor sound production issues (they really should have gotten a retake on the scene with all the shouting) there’s not actually that much to suggest quite how little they spent making it. Aside from a couple of examples the acting is pretty decent, the cinematography makes the little village in which is is set look absolutely lovely, and there’s just so much footage to gawp at and carefully analyse for clues. Occasionally it’s obvious that they’ve used a still image, or simply altered the colour of footage to make out that it’s a night shot when it was filmed in the middle of the day, but for the most part the game looks great.

It does, however, feel like an ITV detective drama from the 90s, even following the same beat-for-beat reveals: You’ve got the overly suspicious ‘business course’ going on at the local manor, somebody having an affair with somebody rich and powerful, somebody growing drugs in their greenhouse, pagan rituals... it’s all very Midsomer Murders. The villains are camp, the victim pretty and female, and the suspects surprisingly amenable to have a detective turn up on their doorstep five times per hour for 6 hours running, even those who actively protest at the initial meeting. To be honest, however, the casting of Rupert Booth as Jenks doesn’t quite fit the rest of the game, and with his unthreatening demeanour and jolly bouncing about he feels far more like a BBC One Show presenter than a police detective, hat or no hat.

And I can’t help but feel that the game went on rather too long to come to what was ultimately a quite shallow and sudden conclusion. Whilst the extensive look into the dodgy dealings of the Atlas Management Course and their weird neo-pagan objectivist nonsense (you can see the objecitivism coming a mile off, it’s so unsubtly signposted) is thoroughly entertaining, the game takes several hours to wrap up what would have been the plot of a 90 minute TV movie. Played in a single stint the awkwardly darting around from place to place to ask just one more new question to each suspect quickly outstays its welcome, and yet somehow the way the eventual culprit eventually just admits every single detail without any actual coercion feels a bit flat and weak. Presumably there wasn’t enough budget for the traditional Agatha Christie ‘get everyone in a big room and start pointing fingers’ ending.

Whether or not you will enjoy Contradiction is ultimately down to your tolerance of daytime TV detective dramas and adventure games that take far too long to get to the point. At its best it’s a fun and occasionally witty breeze full of an intriguing plot, silly clichéd setups and some wonderfully hammy acting (that still qualifies as some of the best seen in FMV game history) that string together logical, sensible puzzles. At its worst, however, Contradiction feels like an Ace Attorney game without the jokes or the courtroom scenes. Personally I found it to be an enjoyable and well presented experience that perhaps could have done with being a couple of hours shorter than it was.

How long did I play? - 5.8 hours Did I finish it? - Yes Would I play it again? - No, but I’d be willing to throw a tenner at another Kickstarter for the sequel!

[steamgameaday]

Q.U.B.E: Director’s Edition (2014)

Genre: First-Person Puzzler Developer: Toxic Games Price: £6.99 (Currently £1.74 in the Steam Lunar New Year Sale)

When I wrote about the original Q.U.B.E back in 2013 I had a few nice things to say, but also expressed my dismay at feeling that the whole thing was a derivative portal wannabe. Certainly you can see my point; it’s a game set in a clean, white enclosed environment where the player solves a series of puzzles from the first-person perspective. I also said that should they ever get round to making the DLC that re-added the cut content; the plot and dialogue that wasn’t ready in time for the original release, I would play it again. Well, apparently that happened back in 2014 (presumably to coin, and it’s been sitting around on my account for two years.

I had a lot less complaints with the puzzle design this time than I did the first time around. I couldn’t tell whether it was due to the fact that I’ve played it before, whether I’m just better at games than I was, or due to undisclosed tweaks, but I found the same puzzles to be less fiddly and certainly less tedious than they were back in 2013. Whilst the final magnetic puzzle is still awkward and frustratingly designed, everything else seems to have been tightened up since the original. Weirdly they’ve cut some of the dark room puzzles (which I rated rather highly the first time around), but I can see why as their complexity breaks the flow of the game.

But that’s not what you’re here to know; you want to know whether the addition of a plot to a game that was originally released without one in any way improves the experience. Well, yes, and no. Certainly it helps guide the direction and pacing of the game a lot more than the cold, silent original, but at the cost of losing some of that lonely, sterile atmosphere and the sense of mystery.

But the plot itself is intriguing, even if some of the writing is a bit clunky. Like in the original you wake up in the mysterious Qube with no knowledge of who you are or why, but this time you've got two different explanations as to what’s going on; one tells you that you’re in space trying to save the world, the other tells you not to trust the first, and that you’re a subject in an underground testing facility. The game’s ability to juggle the player’s doubt in these two different accounts is quite impressive, but is rather ruined by the fact that anyone who has played the original can quite clearly remember how it ends, which is only actually compatible with one character’s explanation of events. Still, there’s some sterling work on the voice acting here, especially from experienced stage and TV thesp Rupert Evans who does especially well at sowing the seeds of doubt in your mission.

Essentially, it’s still the same game albeit with some minor tweaks and slightly prettier graphics, but overlaid with a story that sort of improve the pace. It also feels quite a lot less like Portal than it used to (even though some of the dialogue actively invokes and parallels the Portal plotline), although whether that’s due to the larger volume of first person puzzle games or down to the alterations is as much your guess as mine. As with the original, If you enjoy First Person Puzzlers, especially those in the Portal style it’s definitely worth your time.

How long did I play? - 2.6 hours Did I finish it? - Yes Would I play it again? - I might, actually. It’s a genuinely nifty little first person puzzler, and one of the few games I actually remember from the original batch of SGAD games.