Time to head into August, and see what kicks off the final month of the summer.
Adventure Games
INSIDE Review
Inside is a horror based platforming game by Playdead Games. Their previous game, Limbo, is an excellent addition to any library, a game with a simple aesthetic and gameplay that doesn’t demand too much time to enjoy. With Inside, as before in Limbo, they’ve created a deeply unsettling platformer, starring a young boy who wanders through a steadily more unpleasant environment, solving puzzles and doing basic platforming challenges. If you’re good at something, might as well just iterate on it.
Pokémon Go: The Next Generation of Game
Pokémon in the real world. The dream since 1998. This app is so close to being that. And yet also so very far away.
Pokémon Go is an app for IOS and Android phones. Developed in Co-operation with Niantic, the game uses their experience with Geo-Caching (placing marks on a real map to interact with gameplay) in order to simulate the experience of travelling and catching Pokémon. The game is not a replication of the mechanics of the handheld games, instead choosing thematic and simplified versions of the systems to work for this much larger, multi-player and publicly accessible game.
PRE-3
So E3 this year has begun early, with multiple new titles all being unveiled in the weeks prior to the event. The thinking behind all of this is that the games won’t be lost in the crush of the main conferences, or get overshadowed by bigger, more entertaining announcements. So in that respect, let’s look at this crush of games that all hit at once and that I’m gonna lump together.
Oxenfree: Short, Sweet and Slightly Scary.
I think I had heard about Oxenfree months ago, reading about it in passing before I promptly forgot all about it. More recently, a friend mentioned that I should take a proper look at it. I am so that glad he did.
Night School Studios’s first title Oxenfree is a supernatural horror adventure game taking inspiration from 80’s teen movies, with a healthy dollop of ghost stories thrown in. Playing out in 2.5d, with an absolutely gorgeous visual style, the player takes the role of Alex.
Alex is a high schooler engaging in the traditional rite of passage of spending the night with her friends on the beach of Edward Island. She just wants to have a good time with her best friend Ren even in spite of having to drag her new step-brother, Jonas, along. Ren even knows the stories of the island, legends which state that if you bring a radio along, you might even be able to tune into ghostly frequencies of stations that never existed…
It’s Scooby Doo meets Telltale by way of 90’s Teen movies.
Adventure Games and Life Is Strange
So Adventure games. There’s gonna be some spoilers here, I’ll try and keep them light for Life is Strange, but you should really have played The Walking Dead by now. Both are excellent, go ahead and play throughout them and then come back. This will probably make slightly more sense to you. If you just want a review, go play Life is Strange. It might not seem like your thing, but it’s fantastic because of that. This is a concise, focussed experience where character is king and the ordinary becomes extraordinary.
Geek Errant 