Digital: A Love Story

Christine Love - 2010 - PC

Aaaaand we're back after a nice two month break. Strange to think that this is pretty much the first extended break I've taken from this since starting writing games reviews and criticism since like 2013. This week I want to talk about Christine Love's Digital: A Love Story. Yes, it's another visual novel. I know I've posted several of these recently, but if you're not into visual novels, check back soon for more reviews of "real games". But you should know that there will be a review up in the next few months for Zero Time Dilemma which is another visual novel and a game that I am highly anticipating since it will finally resolve the cliffhanger ending of Virtue's Last Reward. Anyway, back to being on topic...

Digital: A Love Story is developer/writer Christine Love's first successful game. It started picking up traction and gaining attention after being released on the internet for free in 2010. Digital is a mystery/romance story set in the late 80s where you, the player character, purchase a PC and connect it to the internet for the first time. The game can kind of be considered a desktop simulator as the entirety of the story is communicated to you by logging in to early era electronic bulletin board systems and reading message posts. The game clearly has a nostalgia for this early era of the internet and wants you to feel that nostalgia too as it plays the entirety of the old dial-up modem sound while you wait for your computer to connect to the message board. It even has you type out the entire phone number for your modem and makes you keep track of your logins and names of different bulletin boards. 

One of the most interesting creative choices Digital makes is that you only see the messages and replies of other people, but never what your character types. It's a neat way of engaging the player and your creativity when you read a response message and then try to infer what your character must have typed. In order to keep up with the story, you also need to pay close attention to the names of the people you're chatting with in various message board forums and any information they give you as you may need this to progress further in the game. Thankfully, the game keeps an archive of all messages you received so you can go back and re-read any important information if you find yourself stuck. And you WILL find yourself stuff in this game, which I feel was one of my biggest frustrations with Digital. It's an interesting story and I felt the pacing kept being slowed by repeated nostalgia trips which eventually become annoyances when listening to the modem connecting sound effect and typing out usernames and passwords to various forums over and over. The peak of my annoyance with this weird pacing came when I downloaded a virus in the game that obscured the text on my screen and made it nearly impossible to tell what I was doing. I couldn't really tell what the point of this part of the game was, it really just seemed like Digital was getting in the way of itself

Summary

Digital is a quirky visual novel with a lot of nostalgia for the late 80s. It has some self imposed pacing issues in an otherwise interesting and and novel form of story presentation. I'm not sure if this game really has a good soundtrack, but "Paper Dolls" is one of the most catchy tunes you will hear in a video game. I'm not even sure where this plays in game. Anyway, your mileage with Digital will likely depend on whether you find this game's constant throwbacks to the technology of the late 80s charming or tedious. I think I fall into the latter camp, but this is still worth a look if visual novels are your thing

You can download Digital: A Love Story for free here

Thirty Flights of Loving

Blendo Games - 2012 - PC

I just finished Thirty Flights of Loving and I'm not sure what I just played. I do know that it's a roughly 10-15 minute experience telling a story about spies... carrying out a heist? ...I think? What I do know is that it was created by Brendon Chung, the one-man team behind Blendo Games who is also responsible for Flotilla, Atom Zombie Smasher and the upcoming Quadrilateral Cowboy. Thirty Flights of Loving (TFOL) was created as part of a Kickstarter campaign to support the Idle Thumbs podcast, of which I am a frequent listener. According to Chung, TFOL was an excercise in creating a game that tells a story without any dialogue. TFOL is certinaly a realization of that concept, but I don't think it's very successful in telling a clear and understandable story

Part of the problem here is that in order to get the whole picture of what's going on in TFOL, you had to have played some of Chung's previous games. TFOL opens by announcing that it's the sequel to a game called Gravity Bone, which is jarring to anyone (myself included) who wasn't aware of Gravity Bone and was expecting TFOL to be a standalone experience. I found TFOL to be a pretty hard and confusing game to parse through. Part of it is the lack of any dialogue, part of it is the smash cuts and non-linear presentation of the story, and part of it is the expectation that the audience has also played Gravity Bone. By doing a bit of research and also watching an excellent video by Errant Signal, I was able to find out that Gravity Bone is part of Chung's long running series of games called "Citizen Abel". Now I'm not sure if playing all of the other Citizen Abel games helps TFOL make more sense, but that's a lot to expect your audience to do espiecially considering some of the older Citizen Abel games are Quake II and Half Life II mods. And if having played those games doesn't contribute anything to the understanding of TFOL, why brand it as the sequel to Gravity Bone? I acknowledge that some my confusion with the story may be my own fault for not having played the other games, but this was one of several nits I had to pick with this game.

As I mentioned earlier, the story in TFOL is told non-linearly and without any dialogue at all. As you might guess, it makes the story a bit hard to follow. Even though I played through the game twice to try to piece it together, I still can't come up with a reading on this game that isn't jumbled nonsense. I'd love to hear someone else's interpretation of the story though, if someone can actually manage to follow it and come up with an understanding.

Summary

I'm all for smaller games made for a specific audience, so I feel bad picking on the little guy here. Nevertheless, I found TFOL to be a short and confusing experiment in weird and nonsensical storytelling. I've now written quite a few words about a game that has none.

The Jackbox Party Pack 2

Jackbox Games - 2015 - PS3/PS4/XboxOne/PC

As I did when I reviewed the original Jackbox Party Pack, I'm going to divide this review into several little mini-sections: one for each game in the pack. The Jackbox Party Pack 2 is at its core, the same concept as its predecessor - a bunch of multiplayer mini-games where your cell phones are the input devices. The novelty here is that because your phones are the input devices, no one knows who typed or drew what except for the author. So now on with the review:

Fibbage 2
This is exactly the same game as the first time around, but with new questions. The game presents you with a weird fact, and you have to fill in the blank to try to trick your opponents into guessing your answer. Still pretty much Balderdash if you've ever played that.

Earwax
In earwax, you're presented with a category or an event or some similar thing and you have to choose a sound effect to match what's presented.  Then two player's selections go head to head and a judge votes on which is the most appropriate sound effect. I thought this game was pretty weak and the selectable sound effects started to repeat with just two or three rounds of play. Disappointing.

Bidiots
This was the strangest game in the pack. It seemed like an attempt to evolve on Drawful, which I believe to be the strongest game in the previous pack. In Bidiots, each player draws several art pieces based on several prompts. The pieces are assigned random monetary values, then players bid on each piece. Sometimes you'll be given clues to what a piece is worth based on the prompt that was used to draw it, but it's not always clear what prompt matches with what piece. And sometimes, you're not given a prompt at all. It turns one of the best games in the previous pack into one of the most unsatisfying experiences in Jackbox Party Pack 2. The rules are unclear and the games take way too long. The fun and silliness of drawing and guessing other's drawings turns into a boring bidding game. Bidiots was also a huge disappointment.

Quiplash XL
This is pretty much Earwax but without the sound effects. Players type in responses to the game's prompts to fill in the blank, then a judge votes on the best one. Quiplash still seemed somewhat lazy to me but was slightly more enjoyable than Earwax, only because a freeform response seemed more creatively satisfying to me than picking from pre-defined sound effects.

Bomb Corp.
I'm not sure who worked on this game whether it be a different group internally or a secret different studio altogether or something, but this game is so different from the others in the pack, both in visual aesthetic and gameplay quality. This is definitely the highlight of Jackbox Party Pack 2. In Bomb Corp. , each player is given a crucial step to disarming a bomb on their phone, but all steps need to be followed in order to diffuse the bomb correctly. It's a really fun excersise in communication and cooperation as all players need to work together to diffuse the bomb properly. This game was pretty cool

Summary
Even with the inclusion of the excellent Bomb Corp., The Jackbox Party Pack 2 was still a disappointment to me. Other than Bomb Corp., the pack felt like a rushed package with incomplete or creatively dull ideas resulting in unsatisfying gameplay experiences. The absense of the well-known "You Don't Know Jack" mini-game was puzzling as well. I'm not sure if they tried to rush this package out in order to capitalize on the success of the first game or what, but that's what it felt like. If you haven't played the games from the first Jackbox Party Pack, I'd strongly reccommend giving those a look first. But if you have, prepare yourself for a disappointment

DOTA 2

Valve - 2013 - PC

This is a bit of a strange review as I'm not sure who my target audience is. I feel like most people who have heard of DOTA 2 are quite aware of what it is and already know whether or not they like it. Similarly, I feel like the gamers who have somehow managed to not have heard of the massively popular DOTA 2 are also probably the people who either won't like or won't care about this game. So let me preface this review with a few disclaimers: First of all, I'm not being critical of DOTA 2 due to some MOBA bias. I realize both DOTA 2 and League of Legends are currently both massively popular and players of each game tend to have strong opinions about which is better. I don't care. I'm completely apathetic towards both games. Secondly, it should probably be known that I'm not very good at DOTA 2. Like at all. I've probably played maybe 4 or 5 games of DOTA 2 total, but it's enough to know that this is not a game for me.

So for those who aren't aware, the basic rules of a multiplayer online battle arena or MOBA are that two competing teams of players are pushing towards some sort of team goal which is usually the capture or destruction of the enemy team's base. There are also usually strong RPG elements to the game where players will have to level up to improve and strengthen their character. This can be done both by killing players on the enemy team which is risky, but rewarding or also by killing weaker non playable characters known in the MOBA communities as "creep". Character choice plays an important role in MOBAs as most characters have vastly varying strengths, weaknesses, statistics, abilities and playstyles. Ideally, teams will consist of complimentary characters and playstyles to create a strong and versatile team. Some MOBAs have further in-match customization of characters through equippable items, weapons, or armor

I love competitive games with a lot of depth, strategy and skill, so several of my friends have recommended this game to me many times. I don't deny that DOTA 2 has a ton of depth, demands a lot of high level thinking and strategy and also requires a fair amount of actual technical skill to be good. These are the aspects of DOTA 2 that appeal to me and make me want to play the game. But it comes in a wrapper that includes so many other aspects that I don't care for. The biggest and most off-putting aspect of DOTA 2 is the community. The DOTA 2 community is notoriously hostile and unwelcoming towards new players, which I am one of. I mean, I kind of understand the problem. It's a team game and people want to win. No one wants to play with a team member who doesn't know what they're doing. The other problem is match length. A typical game of DOTA can last upwards of 45 minutes. Finding 45 consecutive uninterrupted minutes is a lot to ask of my free time. That's not even counting the time spend waiting for other players to join and queue up the game. I like the freedom of starting and stopping my games on my own time.

The final and maybe most fixable problem is the immense barrier of entry to this game. There's a ton of game mechanics, item functions and matchup knowledge to learn before you can start to really compete in this game. Any good game has a learning curve, but I found DOTA's tutorial to be buggy and uninformative. During one part of the tutorial, my character got stuck on a bridge and was unable to move. Then a later section of the tutorial was uncompletable for me because the game wouldn't detect when I bought the correct items from the shop, then I ran out of gold. The character specific player guides didn't seem that helpful unless you were already comfortable with the basic mechanics and terminology of the game. DOTA 2 has an assumed set of knowledge from its users that brand new players don't and won't have. Even the UI seems clunky and unintuitive to me. It took me 5 minutes just to figure out how to leave a game. I'm sure if I was really driven to learn this game by myself, I could look past some of these flaws, but I just don't want to put in the time to learn a game I don't think I'll have fun with

Summary
I know I'm being harsh on a popular and well-liked game, but it's not for me. A hostile community, long play sessions and a nightmarishly large learning curve will likely bar me from playing this game indefinitely. On the bright side though, it's free to play. So try it yourself and make up your own mind as to whether DOTA 2 is worth your time investment

Beyond: Two Souls

Quantic Dream - 2013 - PS3

Beyond: Two Souls is the fourth game from developer Quantic Dream and director David Cage. Other titles by Quantic Dream include the excellent Heavy Rain, Indigo Prophecy - which I really want to play, and Omikron: The Nomad Soul - which I had never heard of prior to reading the Wikipedia article for Quantic Dream. Beyond plays very similarly to Heavy Rain (and Indigo Prophecy, from what I understand) which made me very excited to try it as Heavy Rain was one of my favorite games I played last year. But, oh boy, Beyond has so many problems. This was such a disappointment after what was a very promising game in Heavy Rain. This review is probably going to get pretty rant-y, so heads up. I don't even know where to start with this game. I guess I'll start by tearing apart the plot.

Beyond: Two Souls tells the story of the life of Jodie Foster who is played by actress Ellen Page. Yes, this is the game that actually stars Ellen Page, as opposed to The Last of Us, which just stole her name and likeness. Anyway, Jodie was somehow linked at birth to a ghostly entity named Aiden, hence the "Two Souls" moniker in the title of the game. Aiden has the ability to manipulate objects in the physical world, give Jodie visions of the past, can phase through walls, and has the ability posses others and force them to do whatever actions he pleases. But Aiden cannot otherwise speak or interact with the physical world. How did Jodie and Aiden come to be linked together? How did Aiden get his powers? How do we even know Aiden's name to begin with??? These are important plot points that the game just chooses to never address.

The plot of Beyond is delivered Pulp Fiction style, which is to say that important parts of Jodie's life are sliced up and given to us out of chronological order. Why is the story presented this way? I have no idea, it only serves to make the narrative more confusing and it felt unjustified. A lot of the pieces of Jodie's life that we are given seem to be largely unrelated to one another and are stylistically and tonally completely different from the last. I remember noting this back in my Heavy Rain review - that some pieces of the plot didn't seem to fit in or progress the story in any meaningful way. But Beyond is an entire game made of these unrelated segments. It's as though 20 different writers wrote 20 different stories about Jodie and no one bothered checking to see if they were related in any way. Then to make things worse, they're presented to us all out of order.

I'll say this though: Beyond has a very promising and interesting open. The first tutorial chapter sees a young Jodie being tested for "physic powers" by recreating the scene in Ghostbusters where there's a supposed physic on one side of a room and someone with symbols on flash cards on the other side of the room. The game wants you to take control of Aiden to peek at the flash cards before Jodie gives her answer. This is a really interesting scenario because it gives the player information that the playable characters in the game shouldn't otherwise have. Aiden essentially becomes a personification of "The video game camera", which is a really interesting concept. The physic tester then asks Jodie to manipulate objects in the other room. The game lets you take control of Aiden to accomplish this. Then Jodie asks Aiden to stop, but you don't necessarily have to listen to her. This is another interesting scenario because it puts the player in the position of performing actions that directly oppose what Jodie, your player character, wants. This is another really interesting scenario that I was really excited to explore. But nowhere else in the game do these scenarios exist. Okay, maybe there's more time where the game gives you the option of pitting Jodie and Aiden against each other, but it's still a really interesting concept that went way underexplored.

These missed opportunities are a symptom of a larger problem: Beyond is a game that has no idea what it does well. The best parts of Beyond, for me at least, were the sections where I was roleplaying as Jodie and making decisions about how she would act in certain situations. Would she tell her friends about Aiden even though it may make her seem strange? Or lie to fit in? But the game seems less interested in these character shaping decisions and would rather tell this action story about how the U.S. government wants to weaponize Aiden's abilities.

(Mild spoilers in this paragraph). Okay so there's this scene later in the game where the CIA sends Jodie to Somalia to assassinate a warlord. After the successful assassination, Jodie learns that the CIA had lied to her and her target was not an evil warlord at all, but a democratically elected president. What's worse is that she learns she has made a young boy fatherless after also killing one of the president's bodyguards. It's a pivotal moment in the game where Jodie realizes she can't trust the CIA and is only a tool being used to perpetuate an endless cycle of death and violence. So she throws away her weapon, quits the CIA and goes into hiding. But then after the next couple scenes, she's right back to killin' more dudes again! Aaaand then she rejoins the CIA... YOU CAN'T DO THAT!!! You can't write these pivotal, character defining moments and then undo them a couple chapters later when you want to tell another story and it becomes convenient to the plot! It was pretty obvious that there were sections of the story that were added in order to pad out the game's length, but these sections didn't fit in at all thematically and sometimes clashed directly with the rest of the story. It seemed to me like Beyond struggled to find its identity throughout the entire duration of the plot. This culminates in the game's ending where the last topics and themes have absolutely nothing at all to do with the story leading up to that point. The game then tries to execute what I'm guessing was supposed to be this surprise twist ending, but the twist doesn't really add anything at all or change the player's understanding of the story in any way. It was a confirmation of my theory that the writers were not at all on the same page about what they wanted Beyond to be about and the result is an incohesive mess of a plot.

Alright, alright, enough ragging on the plot. So how does the game actually play? It's fairly similar to Heavy Rain which is to say there are lots of quick time events and moments when you can give input on what choices Jodie will make or what her dialogue will be. The main difference coming from Heavy Rain is that you can also take control of Aiden during certain action sequences to either strangle enemies or possess them in order to use their physical bodies to take out more enemies. How does the game determine which enemies you can possess and which you can strangle? It seemed totally random and inconsistent to me. There were enemies I wanted to strangle that I could only possess and there were enemies that I wanted to possess but could only strangle. Coming from Heavy Rain, the QTEs are a bit different as well. I see what they were going for here, they wanted to eliminate all of the button prompts from the screen so the player can focus on the action, but I don't think it really works. The idea is that when the game prompts you for a QTE, you're supposed to simply follow the motion of Jodie's body and press the joystick in that direction. But it's often really ambiguous and hard to tell which direction Jodie is punching or dodging or whatever. No meaningful feedback is given to the player when they miss a QTE either, the screen just flashes red as if to only say "NOPE! YOU DID IT WRONG!".

(Sigh). Beyond was a pretty big disappointment for me especially after playing through Heavy Rain. This game felt like a big step in the wrong direction. I'd like to close this review/rant with an open letter not only to Quantic Dream, but to all game developers: Please respect the player's time. If you have a story to tell, tell it. But please don't pad out the game with filler or copy/paste segments of the game to artificially lengthen the play time. I may not speak for all gamers, but I'm way more likely to be angry when I can tell that my time is being wasted as opposed to the notion that a game I'm playing might feel too short. Sincerely, James.

Summary:
As for a recommendation - if you haven't played Heavy Rain, please go do that first. It's a much more complete, cohesive and interesting game than Beyond. If you have already played Heavy Rain, just be sure you know what you're getting into before you start Beyond.

Proteus

Ed Key, David Kanaga - 2013 - PC/PS3/Vita

This week, I played through Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow and also the XCOM expansion, Enemy Within. Both are fantastic games, and I'd highly recommend either of them, but Aria of Sorrow is great for the exact same reason Symphony of the Night is great and Enemy within is great for the exact same reason XCOM: Enemy Unknown is great. I considered writing a more fleshed out review for XCOM since I did that one so long ago, but Enemy Within is essentially the same game as Enemy Unknown and I don't want to review the same game twice. Also Aria of Sorrow is pretty much the exact same game as Symphony of the Night, they just changed some of the character names and the castle is laid out differently. Just know that these games are totally fantastic and worth checking out. However this week, I think I'd like to talk about a little indie game I picked up for free on PlayStation Plus called Proteus.

I'm actually not even sure if I should be writing about Proteus on this blog, only because I'm not sure if Proteus qualifies as a game. This really raised the question of "What is a game?" for me even more than Journey did. At least with Journey, there was a definite end to the game. While the goal of the game wasn't directly stated, it was implied that you were progressing towards something by the various scenes and events in Journey. But Proteus has no end, no goals, no progress, no events or story of any kind. Now I'm not sure how you exactly define what a game is, or even if it matters whether or not Proteus is one, but for the sake of not being misleading, you might want to consider Proteus as an "audiovisual experience" rather than a game.

Proteus was created by just two dudes, Ed Key and David Kanaga. Development started in 2008 when David had the vision of making a unconventional and completely non-violent video game. Proteus was finally released last year and David certainly realized his vision. It's a very unusual game and there's certainly no violence. You begin the game standing offshore while staring at a very pixelated island. As you move toward the island, you'll realize that nearly everything on the island makes some sort of unusual synthesized sounds that all sort of meld together to make the game's soundtrack. The game will sound different depending on where you are on the island and what you're standing next to. For instance, in a forest, you'll hear the electronic purrs of all of the pixelated trees. Or on top of a tall mountain, the soundtrack may dim a bit and you'll hear only the quiet sound of the wind blowing. It's another game that you can just watch a YouTube video of and probably get the gist of it. Everything is procedurally generated, so the island is different each time, and everything is very pixelated and musical. It kind of feels like something that would belong at one of those "games of tomorrow" places at Disney World.

I hate to sound like I'm picking on the little guys, but Proteus is totally not my kind of game. The two things I love to look for in games are either a strong gameplay hook or excellent narrative. Most of my favorite games combine both of these elements to make a fun game that also tells an interesting story. Proteus has neither of these elements. There's absolutely no story, and there's really no gameplay either, at least not in the traditional sense of that word. I really did try to give Proteus a chance though, I tried to explore the island with no expectations and just enjoy the whimsical electronic music. But I just couldn't get into it. Sorry, Proteus.

Summary:
Proteus offers a very unusual and non-violent audiovisual experience. If that sentence sounded interesting to you, maybe Proteus will be your game. It certainly wasn't mine, but that's okay. If you're like me and you know that Proteus won't be your thing, Aria of Sorrow and/or XCOM: Enemy Unknown are excellently designed games that are boatloads of fun. Both are worth a look if you like Metroidvania style games or turn based strategy games.

Thomas Was Alone

Mike Bithell - 2012 - PC/PS3/Vita

What an unusual game this was. In Thomas Was Alone, you can switch control between several multi-colored rectangles while trying to guide them through each of the game's 100 levels. Throughout each level, a narrator with a British accent tells you what each of the rectangles is thinking or feeling. Each of the levels are very short and are completed by aligning each of your rectangles with its matching outline that is found somewhere in the level.

I found this game to be a bit disappointing and uninteresting. Oh it has interesting ideas, sure, but the execution of these ideas falls flat. For instance, the game's story is about these multicolored rectangles that are given names and personalities and are supposed to represent artificial intelligences in a computer system. But I couldn't remember which name belonged to which color rectangle and the story became very hard to follow. Even if I could remember who was what color, the story was pretty abstract and uneventful. The rectangles just wander around and you hear what they're thinking, but nothing interesting ever really happens to them. There's also several references to other games and pop culture, but they're not at all clever or well done. They're just kind of thrown in without purpose

The other interesting idea this game has - but doesn't execute well on - is the concept that each rectangle has a different ability. There's one that can double jump, one that can float in water, and one that has a bouncy trampoline-like property. But there's nothing really new or novel done with the puzzle solving sections that incorporates using all of your rectangle's abilities in a mechanically interesting way. There's one rectangle who's slow and fat and can't jump high. And nearly all of the puzzles in the game involve simply getting the fat rectangle to the end of the level which is usually time consuming and annoying. The puzzle solutions are almost always obvious and very frequently tedious. I feel Thomas Was Alone misses the fundamental point of why puzzle games are fun. In a good puzzle game, the fun is found in trying to figure out the solution to a difficult problem. You feel an endorphin rush when you have that "Ah ha!" moment and finally figure out a problem you've been stuck on. Carrying out the solution to a puzzle once you know what to do is usually not that fun or interesting. Thomas Was Alone presents you problems with obvious solutions over and over again. It's all execution and no critical thinking.

Summary:
I didn't really care for Thomas Was Alone. It doesn't have the charm or humor of Portal, it doesn't have the exhilarating platforming of Donkey Kong Country 2, and it certainly doesn't have the mind bending puzzles of Braid. But it's unique and it has its own identity. And I'd rather unique games like this be made than copy/paste sequels or games recycling the same ideas and gameplay for the millionth time

Shadow of the Colossus

Team ICO - 2005 - PS2/PS3

Shadow of the Colossus is another one of those artsy games that I know is probably just not meant for me. I don’t exactly know who this game is meant for though; I think nearly everyone I've asked about this game has either never played it or found it unremarkable. Yet I frequently see this game on lists of the “best games of all-time” and lists of “games as art”. Games as art? Yeah, I could see that. One of the best games of all time? Ehhhhh I don’t know about that.

In Shadow of the Colossus, you play a nameless hero who has traveled via horse to a faraway temple to bring back the life of some other nameless dead chick whose body you brought with you. The game doesn't tell you how she died or why it’s important to you to bring her back, which seem like kind of fundamental storytelling details to me, but whatever. Some mystical disembodied voice in the temple tells you that if you kill the 16 giant creatures known as colossi that inhabit the surrounding land, that it will somehow magically bring the dead chick back to life.

So the gameplay in Shadow of the Colossus consists of traveling to the various colossus lairs and trying to figure out how to take them down. For each one, you’ll need to figure out where their weak point is and then figure out how to climb up on the colossus and strike it. This usually involves knocking the colossus down or using the environment to climb up on it or something like that. It’s kind of like 16 boss fights from a Zelda game all strung together in a row. If you’re like me, you’ll get a really strong sense of repetition playing this game, which was kind of a turn-off. Plus the colossus fights are usually quite long, which I guess gives a feeling of epicness to the battle when it’s finally over. But if you die or fall off of the colossus while climbing it, you’ll probably get frustrated with the slow pace of the battles like I did.

Summary:
The game does have a few bright spots though - it conveys emotion with very little dialogue which is always cool to me. And figuring out the puzzles on how to defeat the bosses is kind of fun even though executing them can feel kind of tedious. I've seen the soundtrack to this game given a lot of praise across the internet, but the overly epic orchestra sound doesn't typically do a whole lot for me. When new games boast that they have a “fully orchestrated soundtrack!!” my response is usually “well that sucks”. It's not bad I guess, but it's no DKC2

I’m now going to drop some mild spoilers about this game’s ending, so if you’re thinking about actually playing Shadow of the Colossus, you may want to stop reading.

The ending to this game is insanity. Complete insanity. It’s not clear or understandable what happens or why it happened at all. I guess “open to interpretation” is the polite thing to say, but I’m going to stick with “insanity”. It's just so bizarre and abstract and doesn't serve to wrap up the game or conclude the story in any satisfying way. Just weird random crazy things happen to all of the characters. The end. I've heard ICO actually does have a really good ending, but Shadow of the Colossus has kind of scared me away from playing ICO. I still have it on my “games to play” list though, so maybe I’ll finish and review it one of these days, but don't count on it

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

Naughty Dog - 2009 - PS3

A copy of The Last of Us has literally been sitting, unplayed, on my TV shelf for the last 3 months because of Uncharted 2. Not because I've been busy playing Uncharted 2, but because I finished Uncharted 2 a couple years ago and it had to be one of the most overhyped and uninteresting games I think I've ever played. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Uncharted 2 is a bad game, but I don’t quite understand how it won over so many critics and sold so many copies.

The platforming sections are slow and unremarkable. The puzzle solving sections are too simple and usually just involve opening Drake’s notebook to the proper page to find the solution. The cover based shooting is just… cover based shooting. There’s nothing new here, this game retreads ground that many other games have already tread. By the way, I really hope you like cover based shooting because there’s A LOT of it here. Granted, I played Uncharted 2 immediately after finished the first Uncharted, so I might have burned myself out on Uncharted.

But I think the issue is deeper than that for me. I think I’m burned out on shooters. If the 90s were the era of the platformer, the 00s are definitely the era of shooters. I think I’m just bored and ready for something else. Modern shooters have to do something else interesting in order to hold my attention. Tell an interesting story. Layer an interesting mechanic on top of the shooting. I don’t think I can handle any more pure shooters though. Not that Uncharted is a pure shooter, but it feels close enough. The story feels like a script to a typical Hollywood action movie, it’s kind of forgettable and bland. I never felt invested in the story at all or any of the characters in it for that matter. Nathan Drake comes across as very smug and cocky to me which really started to rub me the wrong way after a while. I feel like the player should never be put off by the character he’s controlling unless it’s intentionally comedic or something.

Summary:
There’s really nothing about this game that I found warranted the praise and acclaim that it got at its release. I guess it does look really graphically impressive, but that usually never matters me especially if the game itself isn't that fun. I’m hoping none of the things I've just described are true about The Last of Us, but I've yet to work up the nerve to try and play through that game.

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons

Starbreeze Studios - 2013 - PC/PS3/X360

I saw this game come up several times on various “best games of 2013” lists across the internet, so I figured I needed to check this one out. Brothers is a short indie game where you guide the title characters on a quest to save their dying father by collecting an antidote from a far away place. It’s kind of got a dark European fairytale thing going on too, if that does anything for you.

Brothers is one of those games that kind of defies genre classification. It’s kind of story driven, it’s kind of a platformer and it’s also got some basic puzzles in it, but I didn’t think it did any of those things particularly well. You’ll control the two brothers simultaneously: the older brother with the left joystick and the younger brother with the right joystick. Oh by the way, this game requires you to play with a controller. I thought this game may do some interesting things with puzzles by requiring the player to move the two characters asynchronously or something like that, but not really. One of the most difficult things in this game is just trying to navigate the brothers down the path when your thumbs wont coordinate with each other.

Summary:
The one thing I did like about Brothers is that it did an excellent job of storytelling and conveying emotion without a single line of dialogue. I love when games do that well. Brothers is not a bad game par se, but it’s certainly wouldn’t be on my “best games of 2013” list. Brothers actually reminded me quite a bit of Journey in that most of the gameplay is simply navigating through the environment and just kind of watching things happen. Also both of those games implement storytelling without dialogue. Also I didn’t care much for either of those games. Their stories, while well delivered, just aren’t that interesting to me. And their gameplay is, well, just not that much fun. But I have a feeling that the same people who loved Journey will be the same people who will enjoy this game. It’s just not my thing, I guess

Journey

ThatGameCompany - 2012 - PS3

Okay, I totally didn't understand this game. At all. This game gets a lot of recognition in the indie game scene for being a case for “games as art” and its won all sorts of awards and what not. I love games with atypical gameplay or games that try to do something completely new or unique. This game definitely does that but… but I don’t get it.

I don’t understand why this game gets the love that it does. Maybe I need to do another playthrough, I feel like I must've missed something. It’s a pretty short game, I finished it in one sitting. You just kind of navigate through the environment really. That’s about it. Sometimes other random players will join your game from online. But they don’t seem to contribute to the gameplay or progress the game in any way that I could tell. I get that the music sets the mood of the game really well, but video games do that all the time.

Summary:
I don’t know; this game was very baffling and disappointing to me

FEZ

Polytron Corporation - 2012 - PC/X360

I was so excited to play this game. I preordered it on Steam and played it for hours the day it came out. FEZ is an indie platformer with puzzle solving elements, a retro feel and an emphasis on art style and music. All stuff that I love. But after about the first hour or two, this game’s charm wore off pretty quickly for me. After completing one “world”, FEZ redirects you to kind of a “hub world” where you can explore new pathways that link to other worlds. The problem is after I explored enough pathways, I had to tread back through worlds I’d already been through in order to try to find new pathways. Which is really not that much fun; to repeat sections of a level you've already done two or three times already.

FEZ’s main puzzle solving mechanic is based on the fact that you’re viewing your character in a 2d plane, but you can rotate the camera 90 degrees around your character to reveal that the world actually exists in 3d space. This mechanic had been done before in Super Paper Mario for the Wii, a game I found to be equally disappointing, but I digress. After solving a handful of FEZ’s perspective puzzles, the novelty wore off and all of the puzzles felt same-y. I found it to be just a matter of rotating the camera around and around until I saw a platform or whatever it was that let me get where I was trying to go.

Summary:
I admit that I didn't finish this game, and I hear there’s some cool stuff it does near the end. I’d like to try to go back and finish it, but it seems more like work than fun to me.

Bioshock Infinite

Irrational Games - 2013 - PC/PS3/X360

This, to me, was probably the most disappointing game I played this year. Nearly all of my friends and other people I spoke to who had played this game enjoyed it and the game was critically reviewed well, so I may be a bit alone here. I thought this game took a pretty big step backward in overall game design and pacing compared to the previous Bioshocks. There were large chunks of this game where I did nothing but shoot enemies, then there were large chunks where the game decided it wanted to tell a story for a while and just guided me around Columbia. But the chunks weren't mixed in throughout the game. They were just…chunks. It also took out the excellent level design that I loved from the first two games where upon entering a new area, you had to be aware of your surroundings and the enemies you were fighting and use the appropriate plasmids to lay traps and what not. Infinite mostly just had large open areas filled with enemies that you had to kill with… whatever. Again and again and again.

I didn't think Columbia had the charm, atmosphere and polish that Rapture did so well in the earlier games either. I also experienced some balancing issues with this game. I pretty much had my character maxed out in everything about halfway into the game and was mowing down anything in my way without much thought or effort.

Summary:
There’s so much more this game could have done with mixing up gameplay/artwork/music with their parallel dimensions theme too. A lot of lost potential. To its credit, the ending of this game was pretty cool though.