Nylige anmeldelser av Jonesy

Like its predecessor Limbo, Inside is a simple to control puzzle platformer where you guide an extremely athletic but rather fragile young boy through a perilous world towards an unknown goal, with every success likely interspersed with frequent, and sometimes horrific, deaths. But as enjoyable as Limbo was to play, Inside is simply better.

The setting is more interesting - dystopian factories, control rooms, laboratories in the midst of conducting bizarre experiments, ruined buildings, flooded underwater sections, and a handful of outdoor areas, all filled with weird, creepy, and occasionally stunning visuals, creatures, characters, and events. The puzzles hit that sweet spot of requiring contemplation and experimentation, but not requiring a walkthough, and it's thoroughly satisfying to walk into a new area, initially without a clue as to how to proceed, but then with a lever pull here, or a crate move there, have things slowly fall into place (sometimes literally) until suddenly it all makes sense and you can move on. There's a few timing-based puzzles that can get a bit frustrating, but they're nothing more than a minor negative, and are more than balanced out by some truly creative ones. Like Limbo, Inside's world is primarily black and white, but the graphical style is superior, with many areas featuring an incredible visual depth, and detailed, well-populated backgrounds. Your young avatar might be limited to moving in a 2D plane, but Inside's inhabitants are not, and sometimes a character off in the distance who initially seems like nothing more than interesting window dressing will unexpectedly rush forward to pose a significant threat. And the various character animations are excellent, particularly towards the end of the game.

And what an ending it is. Inside starts out good, gets REALLY good, and then the last half an hour is simply some of the most enjoyable, memorable gameplay I can recollect. It's all backed by a great story too, but one that's told without a single line of dialogue or written text - everything is left to your interpretation. It's the kind of game you'll find yourself thinking about after finishing, or hunting down fan theories to try to determine what the heck you just experienced. There's a brief alternate ending that can be unlocked as well, and while it's not especially impressive by itself, it certainly will supply some serious fodder to the theorists.

I expected Inside to be a solid puzzle platformer, but it's more than that, and has become one of my favorite games of 2016. If you liked Limbo, if you're a fan of the genre, or simply want to play a good, interesting, different kind of game, I highly recommend it. The only caveat is that for a game that will likely take you about six hours to complete, the current $20 dollar price tag might be off-putting. But I for one found it well worth it.

Although you probably won't find yourself wanting to go beyond a single 10 hour-ish playthrough, while it lasts it's a surprisingly fun, deceptively deep strategy game that allows you to work both halves of your brain, first pushing you to logically determine the right mix of genre, audience, platform, and developer skills to create that 10 out of 10 masterpiece, and then allowing you to give that masterpiece the most creatively ludicrous or obscene title your devious little mind can come up with.

NOTE: This review is for the original version of State of Decay (which sadly is no longer available for purchase), not the Year One Survival edition.

State of Decay is a third-person open-world zombie apocalypse game where you build and fortify a base of operations, recruit survivors, and scavenge for useful items and vehicles. It's a highly addictive, frequently tense, and often action-packed game that exceeded all my expectations, and I strongly recommend it.

While you initially start by playing one survivor, as more people are saved and given shelter in your community you'll be able to switch back and forth between a dozen or more playable characters. This becomes a necessity, as survivors will get injured (or even permanently killed) or just flat-out exhausted when performing missions, and will need time to recuperate. Characters have a handful of skills such as melee combat, fitness, or shooting that will level up with use, and some survivors you recruit will even turn out to have special talents, such as an expert gardener who can increase the amount of food supplied by the greenhouse you built at your base, or a munitions expert who can use your workshop to create useful items such as pipe bombs or mines. Your community as a whole has a morale level that you need to keep reasonably high by completing missions and scavenging supplies, or risk adverse results such as a survivor abandoning the group, or even deciding to off themselves. Influence is also measured and plays a huge factor. Provide for and assist the community and you'll be able to equip yourself with better gear from the group's communal supply, convince another survivor to tag along and watch your back, or direct the group's radio operator to keep an ear out for the location of especially needed supplies. Slack by letting missions expire or by failing to scavenge enough useful items, and you'll end up poorly equipped and with minimal clout until you can turn things around.

While there's a variety of activities and missions to take part in - rescuing newly discovered survivors and getting them back to base safely; hunting down relatively rare boss zombies (or "weird ones" as the characters sometimes refer to them); working your way through several threads of primary story missions; or simply trying to return home in one piece with that valuable case of medicine or that fragile high-end sports car you happened across - there's no doubt that Decay is primarily about fighting zombies. And seeing as how they're virtually everywhere, you can't outrun them beyond short distances (zombies don't get winded, but you definitely will, often at the most inopportune times), stealth is only practical on occasion, and vehicles are too fragile to be used as your main zombie-killing method, you'll be engaging zombies quite frequently whenever you're away from your base. There's a reasonable variety of nicely-done fighting animations. Special combat moves can be unlocked as your skills improve, and that weakling survivor who started out by barely being able to swing a pipe and had trouble defeating even a single zombie without getting gnawed on rather extensively can become a real powerhouse in time, rendering an encounter with a few zombies as nothing more than an annoyance, and even becoming capable of wading into the middle of an entire horde of half a dozen zombies or more and coming out alive (although almost certainly not unscathed). While guns are a relatively common find, making noise in Decay generally leads to bad things happening, so you'll likely be doing most of your killing hand to hand. The noise from bashing in a door or a zombie's skull, the engine of a vehicle, or even just searching through an abandoned house can be enough to alert a nearby zombie or two; firing off a few shots from a pistol, shotgun, or rifle, even one with a suppressor attached, seems to bring every zombie for blocks around running, and is best done only as a last resort, or when you're a few steps away from a nearby vehicle or the safety of your base, or in the handful of story missions where you actually have some significant backup. Fortunately, even though you may do it hundreds of times by game's end, sprinting up to a zombie so you can dropkick it to the ground and then finishing it off by driving your knee through its face never really gets old.

It's a thoroughly addictive game, building and improving your base and leveling up your various survivors. It's also often a surprisingly tense one. The game has a day/night cycle, so half the time you're in the dark, and getting a request to clear out a nearby infested warehouse or hunt down a dangerous boss zombie when you can barely see ten feet in front of you is unlikely to be something you'll look forward to. Even during the day, some of the structures you'll enter will be shrouded in darkness, with a zombie unseen (but fortunately usually not unheard) ready to pounce from some dark corner. And of course there's the ever-present threat of permadeath. No matter how badass your survivor is, there's always the possibility that a fight will spiral out of control, that beating one zombie to re-death makes enough noise to alert another, and fighting that one draws in two more, and suddenly routine combat has turned dire and potentially deadly. That one time you keep your injured, exhausted, broken-weaponed, out-of-healing-items survivor out extra long because you're low on influence and you've decided to search one more house for supplies may also be the one time they manage to accidentally alert a nearby horde. Which quite possibly will lead to you becoming an unwilling witness to the rather brutal death animation.

Decay is not without some issues. There are minor annoyances, such as the lack of variety in the vehicles, or the fact that despite gasoline being a salvageable resource nobody thought to bring a generator along and you're forced to stumble around your base bumping into walls in the dark with an under-powered flashlight. But there are a few more serious issues as well. At least one side mission failed to trigger. One of my survivors clipped into a piece of furniture and became stuck, forcing me to exit mid-mission and lose progress, while on another occasion a favorite survivor became inexplicably glued to a structure's outside wall, making her a nice easy target for a charging boss zombie and getting her killed (on the final story mission, no less). And the game essentially continues to play after you exit, with the continued, unseen scavenging and activities of the community members simulated the next time the game is launched, and while that lends it an interesting twist, it has a tendency to cause overtly negative events, such as illogical, precipitous morale drops, and some players even reporting returning after an absence to find significant items or survivors themselves having disappeared without even a journal entry of explanation.

Ultimately though, those issues have little bearing on the overall experience, and the positives far outweigh any negatives. In short, not only is State of Decay the most enjoyable game I've played in recent memory, it's quite probably my favorite game of 2013.

I thought this was gonna be about an architect who does something bad and goes to jail, but it's not.