Near Death Review: The Martian on Ice

You are a pilot running supplies to Antarctic Research stations. Your Plane goes down in a storm. You stumble out to try to find shelter. It’s -38C with the wind. You make your way into the nearest base. It’s abandoned.

An hour and a half later, you’re using the rope lines you’ve been planting to guide yourself through the blizzard. It’s now -80C and you can’t see anything but the mild glow of the base’s wall lamps. You ran out of batteries for your torch when you left the last shelter. You need to reach a safe spot right now.

Near Death was created by Orthogonal Games. (previously of The Novelist, a game which has been highly recommended to me) to paraphrase their own words, “it’s not a survival game, It’s a game about survival”. And it is great.

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. 

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.