Recent reviews by ichik

Vigil: The Longest Night wears its inspiration sources on its sleeve. Developers will straight up tell you that the game was made as a deliberate homage to Salt & Sanctuary and the Castlevania series. This, of course, brings in “inspiration by proxy” into the mix with Salt & Sanctuary being a love letter to the Dark Souls series. It might be a fun exercise to dissect the game like this. Visual motif, story progression pace and tone, from Bloodborne. Tempo and choreography of the combat, from Dark Souls. Character design inspiration, from Salt & Sanctuary. And that upbeat background music piece that is played in the graveyard location sounds like an outtake from Symphony of the Night.

But as entertaining as this dissection would be, I'd like to instead admire the fact, that Vigil is bigger than a sum of its parts. A small Taiwanese indie developer managed to pull off a great feat. The game is not just a wink to the fans of the inspiration sources, no: it deserves its place among and maybe someday it'll be regarded as such.

It all starts inconspicuous and restrained without a hint of future depth. The Protagonist is not customizable, you're just simply dropped off at the start of the game. You play as Leila, a recent graduate of a mysterious order called The Vigil, who is returning to her hometown after being away training to become the member of the order. You are on the outskirts of a settlement in the woods. Just a few steps away are some undead enemies hungry for your blood.

Two types of attack, danger evading dodge-rolls, stamina bar, enemies respawning after their death — similarities are unmistakable. But if you don't know them, these basics are easy to grasp. Overall difficulty is smoothed out by some quality-of-life improvements. You can teleport between local save points. Manual save is possible too with special items that are available in abundance. Active quests are tracked in a special UI. That doesn't mean that they point you to a specific place on a world map with a marker or any such help. The hints can be pretty obtuse, but some memory aid, at least, is a welcome thing for sure.

There's also a world map that fills automatically as you progress through the world. Not having it would be one step too far, considering that some traversal back and forth and revisiting old areas is critical, and you can't rely on landmarks being visible from afar. It won't lay all the secrets bare in front of you. It will be very stingy with revealing new portions of the world. Parts of it will seem like it is trying to play a trick on you. It doesn't help that there are separate underground and surface maps, and both are huge. It is vague supplement to your memories of traversing the game's world.

It's not foolproof and that's by design: Vigil holds some of its secrets close to the chest. There's no shortage of things you might miss: bosses, quest lines, whole areas are completely optional. The journey is, of course, non-linear and the game's world will change in response to your actions. Piecing together what is really happening is a task in and of itself. The game's characters will mention centuries old historic events and phenomena that are a complete mystery to you. Picking up on subtle clues about the world and cross-referencing them between conversations with different characters makes for quite a challenging detective mini-game. The main story is a lot easier to decipher. That is not to say it is straightforward. The story would involve time travel, NPCs deliberately lying to you and a fair share of symbolism. At the end of the day, if you just press on you'll get to the end of it.

The journey towards the end is not a cakewalk, but it is not riddled with insurmountable obstacles either and there's fun to be had along the way. Paradoxically the journey feels bigger than it actually is. When you zoom out all the way it looks like the map is enormous, but in practice it'll be a fairly compact experience. The path you'll make through the world is largely shaped by story bits and by unlocking traversal abilities. Those are the fairly standard double jump, slide and dash (plus an optional air dash). You unlock them as rewards for beating certain bosses and not all of them are mandatory, true to the spirit of a genre focused on exploration and uncovering secrets.

And there's a lot to unravel if you're willing to go through with it, multiple endings included. A true gem. It wouldn't be a stretch for Vigil to be put on the same shelf as all the games that inspired it.

Steam's review length limitations don't allow me to post the full text here, so just check it out in full at https://sqncbrk.com/sekiro-shadows-die-twice

The Mooncrash DLC plays by its own rules. It is a standalone mini campaign set on the moon (hence the title). You'll play as an employee of Kasma Corp. (a rival to the main game's Transtar). Your task will be investigating events on Transtar's lunar base which suddenly went dark. Oh, you bet this had something to do with mimics. You won't get to live through catastrophic events though — instead the premise of the DLC is slightly more game-like. You simply play through incomplete virtual reality logs of various employees. Each of them comes with their own backstory. Their abilities are tiny focused slices of the original expansive tree of Morgan, main game's protagonist. You are not quite free to just select any “class” at the start. Only one is accessible and you'll have to unlock more options.

You explore the premises, familiarise yourself with base layout. Central area with a watchtower, a few small facilities around it, some underground structures. Three big wings of research station: labs, mining and crew annex. You explore and conquer, figure out working strategies and where the useful items were stored, what were the dangers and where the paths to your goals lied. Eventually either your character dies or you escape the station via one of the five ways. Then you can switch to another character, if you've unlocked them by completing objectives or finding certain well-hidden items. After you're done with all five it's time for some outside-of-the-simulation story and then it's back to square one. Well, not exactly — you keep your resources and unlocks and fabrication plans; and you can outfit your character to your heart's desire.

Most importantly though — you keep your knowledge. To throw you off-balance the game will employ small doses of randomness: sometimes there's no power in laboratories and sometimes it's the crew quarters that are pitch dark. Some of the paths are now blocked by rubble; some enemies have changed their locations — nothing major, just enough to keep you from literally starting to repeat the same action sequences without any thought. Still, though, it feels a bit like training yourself for a speed-run. You don't just learn the most effective route, you learn to “read” the game's environment quickly. Eventually you'll get there: a perfect run, all five characters escaped the station one after the other. The order is important, of course, each escape route can be only used once and activating some of them requires “cooperation” from your characters (i.e. only the engineer can repair a certain terminal which only the custodian can hack after that).

It's not just a miniature metroidvania set apart from a bigger one, it's an encapsulated experience of mastering one.

You may already know how it starts: opening sequence was heavily spoiled by various trailers. You stare into the mirror, you select your protagonist’s gender. You are in your sunlit apartment on the top floor. “Good morning, Morgan”. You go to the mirror. You pick your character’s gender. You stick that needly thing into your eye (it’s called neuromod and it’s how you upgrade your abilities in Prey). You’re about to start your day. Of course, something awful’s about to happen: monsters will ravage the space station, people will die. Illusions will shatter; that’s right, and your apartment isn’t really your apartment. You’ve been in a weird Truman Show experiment augmented by daily memory erasure. You’re about to break out.

It looks simple on the surface: first-person combat, jumpscares, “magical” powers and a light sci-fi setting. And a million other small things that make it look so in its place between Bioshock and Dishonored. This may even be an appropriate explanation if you only have a few seconds to describe this game. What's different is how the world of Prey is structured. It is contained to the interior and immediate exterior of a space station.

Stepping out of the airlock for the first time is breathtaking: the sound is muted, the air is hissing being sucked away into the void, there's no up and down anymore. And your playground suddenly is very, very big. The near space of the Talos I is filled with mimics, items, dead bodies of former station inhabitants and a few still alive bodies of NPCs. Zero Gravity takes some getting used to: you have a propulsion system which can push you in any direction, but the inertia prevents you from stopping quickly. The journeys anywhere but the immediate destination are there, within reach, but they are filled with deadly late-game enemies. If you get through them you may be disappointed though — all airlocks have to be opened from inside, so you have to go back inside before you'll get access to space as a method of transportation.

On board there are three ways of getting around: you can quite obviously walk around, you can eventually unlock a huge elevator that you stumble upon immediately after the prologue and finally you can get inside service tunnels. This is where maneuvring with the thrusters comes in handy once again and gets you up to speed before the next time you go into the big outer space.

Getting access to huge swaths of new areas to explore is paced with powerful enemies and environmental puzzles. Both send you out on hunts: getting past them would require more weapons found, more abilities unlocked, more keys, passwords, and secrets accumulated. The exploration is paced around gathering tons of junk and getting back to the recycling station to extract another batch of crafting materials. And those get you anything you need (granted you found a recipe for it).

Prey certainly truly shows how liberating huge interconnected spaces can be despite all the constraints they impose. You can’t have a story that keeps turning the heat up to eleven all the time; in fact you can’t count on any specific pacing at all — the usual ebb and flow, the moments of calm intermixed with high-octane action — this is something that players have to construct themselves out of pieces that you give them. But instead of that perfect handcrafted rhythm Prey offers a vast variety of possible outcomes. Going in you may expect your typical side-quest will have only a couple of outcomes: failure and success, maybe and “evil” and “merciful” outcomes. That’s not how it goes here: options are numerous, some are more hidden than others, but all of them are logical and believable. Even the main objective has an unusual option: halfway throughout the game you can just bail from Talos I in an escape pod leaving it to someone else to deal with the mimic outbreak.

There may be no hand-holding about moving forward, but there’s still some nudging. The game unsurprisingly relies on scripted events and radio calls, the ones with the little portrait of a caller in the corner of a screen. Perhaps, it’s not even fair to call them calls: they’re more like voice mail. Complete disregard for what is happening with the protagonist, who, of course, stays awkwardly silent the whole time. Still, that’s what moves the story forward and that’s what gives you objectives and provides reasons for more exploration.

Sticking just to the critical path may seem like a right way to go for starters, but quite soon you'll stumble upon your first NPC in distress and then another one. There will be paths going sideways to your current main objective: locked doors — and it will be hard to resist their call.

The smoke and mirrors game from the prologue never really stops: nothing is exactly what it seems on the surface. You'll uncover characters' secret motivations, their conspiracies, their past. The final big reveal of a magic trick is saved right for the very end. It’s not clear where the series could go after such a conclusion, but it's worth it; the theme is consistent.

There will be a tool for every obstacle and every little thing will be useful (even the foam bolt crossbow). You'll walk around and notice stuff. Those “cashier windows” on locked security stations. Those heavy crates barricading the passage. That poisonous gas or impossibly high jump — all of that leaves in a mark in your memory. Coming back, passing by again and again — that is what ultimately turns Talos I into a real place.

… and it all just is too familiar. You’re on the ferry headed to Edwards Island. The protagonist’s name is Alex. She’s a blue-haired high-school senior. Two more characters that accompany here are Jonas, dry-witted step-brother and Ren, an easy-going goof. It’s late evening, the island’s deserted. You’re meeting two more important characters on the beach: Clarissa and Nona. The plan? Hang out around the bonfire, drink some beer, play ♥♥♥♥-Marry-Kill. Finally, when the guys have had enough, it’ll be time to go take a peek at a nearby cave.

A group of teenagers on a night trip to an abandoned island, beach party and descend into darkness. Oh, you know what happens next: the obligatory scary stuff happens. Screen shakes, creepy distorted voices chant ill omens, flashes of evil red laser light illuminate the screen. Is it a horror? Undoubtedly. It’s really not that different from what you’ve seen, heard, experienced numerous times in various media.

Is it somehow different? Does it have something to pull you in? What is it? You got into this cave idly pushing thumbstick on your gamepad. As boring for a videogame as it gets, isn’t it? Toying with frequencies’ dials of your pocket radio, however cute, can’t overcome the fact that it’s just a fiddling momentary thing. No, the distinctive thing about Oxenfree is simply how it controls its flow of dialogues. It feels natural, organic: characters talk over and interrupt each other, make pronunciation errors; sometimes they stutter and traif off. How do you make sure then that the main plot-line happens? You simply insert something “as I was saying”, you check when a character leaves the audible area, you check that the dialogue ended, you add checkpoints. Simple algorithm, but that’s how people in groups actually behave. Then there’s the protagonist. Your unique blue-haired Alex will have dialogue balloons pop over her head — you’re free to choose any one you like. Including pressing no button at all and keep enigmatic silence. That’s it, that’s the whole trick. Not a whole lot of mirrors and just a tiny puff of smoke.

Meanwhile the story takes off. In a series of disturbing events you’ll get to stroll around the island and uncover what’s really happening. Your fiddling with the radio in the cavern woke up a bunch of ghosts, trapped in some kind of temporal rift. They’re “souls” of submarine passengers, which was caught in friendly fire due to a mistake. They are stuck in eternity experiencing their deaths over and over. This is why they want to possess human bodies to escape, naturally. As a result of your initial contact with them your teenager friends are spread out throughout the island. So the first thing to do is to find them. Along the way you’ll be picking up letters and notes of Maggie Adler, a late resident of the island. Her tragic past is intimately interwoven game’s story. But all that you’ll only know as a result of the journey, so time to move out!

There is a modest-sized map; you’re free to roam in any direction as soon as you’re done with prologue. Only there’s little to no point in doing so. It’s deceiving: most of the time there’s only one actual destination that would move the plot forward. Turns out the fatalist outlook on choice not only runs through the story, but is reflected in the gameplay form as well. That makes the break out of the time-loop so sudden in the second playthrough (and so, so missable obviously).

In the New Game Plus Alex can convince her past self to get Ren to cancel the Edwards Island trip, preventing the game's events from happening and preventing Alex from getting trapped in the ghost dimension. The ghosts though imply that the playable Alex isn't overwritten by the Alex who doesn't go to the Island, meaning that some form of her will remain trapped in the ghost dimension for all eternity.

Ultimately you’ll get to the point when all decisions were made and all there is to find is found. At least it feels like it. You’ve walked the way, you’ve made your choices and lived the consequences. The game doesn’t shy away from completely twisting its own time continuum in order to account for what you chose. Sacrificed one of the characters to the ghosts? Nobody except you will remember her. You fiddle with moving pieces, but finally the game ties up its loose ends. How tight will they be — that’s on you.

There are many false bottoms in this cache of secrets. You can occasionally find spots on the island where you can receive Morse code on your radio. None of the characters translates it; up to you to figure out what these transmissions mean (They're Anna's messages from the ghost dimension to Maggie Adler and how she's stuck there).

Alex (and by extension the you) recalling the events of the game is a key element of the New Game Plus mode, that is the reason to start it again; that’s the way the story goes. You proceed with a touch of a button and it all just is too familiar…

Axiom Verge may very well be the most interesting indie metroidvania of recent years. It’s not most groundbreaking and you can spot where the game’s roots are easily. Still, every element of the game is done competently and is tuned to fit in the whole system. You can’t overlook the fact that whole game was done solely by Tom Happ. Sometimes whole teams fail to not put average pieces in the way of really great ones.

At first glance the game is an undeniable copycat of Super Metroid (perhaps any 2D metroidvania centered around shooting is) with all the foundation taken straight of it: the isolation feeling, save point system, health replenishment particles that some of the dead enemies leave behind, and the eerie vibe of psychedelic 80s sci-fi.

So it goes like this. You are “the scientist” named Trace, there’s an explosion in your lab. You are awaken in the alien world and contacted by Elsenova who is giant war machine representing “species” of Rusalki. They are at war with Athetos a mad scientist destroying space-time. More accurately speaking they lost the war and now you are their last chance. But that are the bits of the story from later on, for now all the instructions you get are “There is a gun in the next room” and “You must go, now”.

So you get out and start exploring. Enemies hit hard encouraging slow and methodical approach. Learning attack patterns and using distance to your advantage keeps you from restarting back at egg-shaped rebirth chamber. You make your way to the next rebirth chamber. You find few upgrades in the process and a new gun, which has a different firing mechanic (making it a highly situational weapon). And then you get to the boss; the slow and tense rhythm fades away.

It all just goes nuts. Boss fights are punctuated with delirious high-tempo electronic music and filled with adrenaline up to the brim. The screen is traced with enemy shots. You dodge and jump. You keep firing. Precision, speed and reaction will get you through first few bosses. Pattern-learning and staying focused will pick up after that. Bosses will have phases with tricky moves and more deadly attacks. You avoid damage and keep shooting watching how your enemy slowly turns red. All of this just turns itself into red pulsating blur.

The rhythm slows down again. You proceed further to keep on exploring. This is a simple loop of going through building up tension to climax points and back to calm concentration. You’ll collect more items, more weapons. You’ll meet NPCs. Piecemeal storytelling: cryptic dialogues and ciphered messages. Backstory takes significant effort to uncover itself. Same for some of the most powerful weapons.

Somewhere around the middle of the game Axiom Verge suddenly plays homage to Blaster Master repeating one of its key mechanics in reverse. Trace is granted an ability to launch a miniature remote-controlled drone to explore narrow spaces. Most innovative though is the Address Disruptor. The Glitch Gun. You fire it in a cone in front of Trace and it lets you pass through inaccessible wall (by evaporating them). Or it changes the properties of your enemy. Or it materialises a platform hanging in the air. It glitches. Magic happens.

The game’s most amazing secret though is its very well hidden procedurall-generated dungeons system. The existence of such a system within the game is what defines its author’s dedication to traditions of the genre. It’s this little details like a special mode for speedruns with some thought put into it that make a metroidvanian labyrinth interesting to explore, not just pass by.

The original text was published on Kanobu on 25.02.2014

I don’t know if a secret contest is taking place among the slasher game developers for the most over-the-top prologue*; but if there is one, then Lords of Shadow 2 is a shoe-in for the grand prize. First game of the series reboot by MercurySteam has greeted you with a slow gothic fantasy. This time the game gets right into the action. The protagonist is Dracula himself. He uses his own blood as a whip. His castle is under attack by an army of thousands. This army has a giant humanoid robot. The stakes are high, rivalries are thousands-of-years-old, prophecies are dark, and angels are fallen. And then there’s the usual removal of all those nice abilities which used to allow you to perform a complete massacre on poor grunts of the army which was attacking you.

The combat system looks exactly like the one of its predecessor: accentuated counter-attacks and two bars of special energy used to break blocks and heal. Both kinds of magic now have unique weapons, but controls are still the same. What stands out is a free-floating camera as opposed to static angles from the first game. A lot of delightful improvements to what already worked perfectly before aren’t the biggest surprise. The game looks back at the series’ legacy and remembers where the second part of metroidvania term came from. The world is a holistic labyrinth with inaccessible high passages and grates standing in your way. This promise of big and small secrets is the foundation for everything else here. The story progression path goes in big stretches only occasionally offering to come back to the earlier places. You could replay levels in the first game to access locked upgrades once you’ve acquired the required ability, but you also had to go through the repetition of story scenes and routes weren’t particularly interesting.

The second installment simply blends the secrets in the world as a part of a bigger picture. The scenery is grotesque most of the time and is occasionally filled with details for you to look at for some time. Half of the locations are in the future, of course, so it adds up to a final result of a truly bizarre over-stylized collage.

The wild outlook in accompanied by an equally wild script. It defies logic in favor of having more and more bizarre characters and spectacular action scenes. If there’s a fight on a moving train it’ll end with a crash, explosions and acrobatics. You can’t just kill the giant boss — you have to rip out its heart. It is completely normal for the protagonist to ride a giant gas bottle because he needed a new entrance in the building. The headcount of unlucky enemies of Dracula is in a thousands range. Relentless postmodern carnival wouldn’t give you a break, so at some point you just can’t be surprised by anything. Raisa Volkova, the daughter of Satan? Sounds completely normal!

Lords of Shadow 2 wants to go further than its predecessor so desperately and tries so much new stuff, that sometimes it ends with stuff that is just too cringeworthy. Clumsy stealth sections simply don’t hold up to the pace of the game and are irritating rather than entertaining.

Still, you get transformations into blood mist and rat pack out of this torture. Two more instruments for world-exploring toolset. You can see in it the reminiscence of what Symphony of the Night did to Rondo of Blood. The story of the series also goes in circles on the moebius band of time-travelling nonsense. The game may pass a self-parody for the long franchise with a few dozens of titles in it. And that may be a good thing sometimes.

You unearth at the graveyard among ash and bones. No rest for the undead again. Or you can use the fancy The Ashen One as your new Maiden in Black calls you, or unkindled as everyone else does. There’s a nitpicking explanation for the difference between unkindled and undead. The short version is: you tried to link the fire like Gwyn did in the first game, but was found unworthy of the task. You’ve turned into ash and not into cinder like those who were capable of performing the task. Now you rise again because those who unlike you were good enough as a kindling (Lords of Cinder) have abandoned their thrones. The massive boulders shaped into armchairs that are left in the Firelink Shrine look like distant relatives of tombstones in Hunter’s Dream from Bloodborne. Or rather even archstones from Demon’s Souls since Firelink Shrine now looks a lot more like Nexus (but has a secret dark counterpart like Hunter’s Dream did).

The only thing in common (besides the obligatory bonfire) between the old and new location is the complaining knight. This ever present character of hub locations for the series gives you riddled insights on what to do next and reminds you that any hope for success is futile. In the first game he’s greeted you when you got out of the introductory zone. Now he’s at the end of it. He’s at the borderline between abstract time-space of your base of operations and that real fight that begins according to the messages left by other players.

The funniest joke of Dark Souls III is how it reverses the common trope of video games. Your usual path is upwards, from the faubourgs, forests and bogs to the final castle of the ultimate evil. Here you start in it and slowly descend to the foothill and further into the depths where more dangers lurk. That makes you question who you are. And that is the right question for the series, but as usual this mystery is open to interpretation (and largely depends on your actions and choices). It’s easy to miss even though you’re told directly about it by the NPC. Details like this tend to not be the focus of your attention, which usually is centered on how to deal with the hordes of dangerous enemies trying to stab you on your way to the next bonfire.

http://coub.com/view/d6m2v
In the transition from one zone to the other there will be time to just admire the view.

Dark Souls III is like a happy marriage: the tricks aren’t really new, but it still is titillating and enjoyable. And most importantly you don’t wanna trade this comfort for something new because you’re convinced that nothing can be better.

In a way this game is more accessible than ever, more robust and fluent. No more riddles about starting gifts; access to the multiplayer is not so far behind the tricky boss fight and AN incredibly punishing (for a beginner) zone. Now you just purchase your white sign soapstone from a vendor in Firelink Shrine. You don’t even have to find and rescue this seller of marvelous goods, handmaiden. She’s just there. But then again, you have to know what it is you’re buying. You have to know if it’s better to stock up poison-reducing items or packs for arrows for sneaky dragon-killing. You have to be a veteran of the series for that particular pricy key in her stock to immediately catch your attention. Yes, Dark Souls III is a tad easier, but only if you’ve already come prepared with the knowledge and loaded with nostalgia. Only then the silhouette of a blacksmith sitting further in the underground cave besides the handmaiden will make your heart beat faster.

Self-quoting and straight-up repetition of elements from previous titles is yesterday’s news about FromSoftware games. If anything, that’s admirable how essentially doing the same very hardcore and niché thing again and again they’ve gained such a widespread acknowledgment. It’s still a far cry from your typical AAA experience, but for a long-time fan it looks more like a remix, like a fevered dream filled with all those memories blended together than a new adventure. The series are at the point of calling exciting new feature a re-introduction of mana bar which wasn’t present in the series since Demon’s Souls. Well, it’s blue and shows you the amount of mana you spend to cast spells, which isn’t that exciting. What’s more interesting is that you also use it for special 2-handed weapon attacks. This introduces you to the new mechanic of balancing two types of estus-flasks if you use spells or goes completely unnoticed if you only use these special attacks occasionally and stick to the old ways. This is how it goes: a bit of this, a touch of that, familiar NPC making a return, a poisonous bog, an underground cavern, a jail with an NPC trapped behind a locked door. Everything is chopped, sliced and added to the brew.

There’s NPC that kills other NPC and revenge invasion, though implications are far less dramatic. There is a simplistic puzzle with the two elevators far less decorated than in Bloodborne. You do things the same way, look for familiar clues. You jump off the elevators when you see those platforms you can jump off to. If you get bored, the ability to choose a new playstyle is there. It’s worth noting though that attributes’ reallocation is accessible way far into the game as opposed to Dark Souls II. You can easily miss it altogether or discover it at the point when there’s just four bosses left, and all of them are just pathetic wankers. Anyway you’re free to choose from melee to magic to bow to something even more exotic. And when you fail with your build optimisation you can always just throw toxic feces at enemy knights. Dozens of armor sets, weapons and rings — enough to justify a replay. You were curious to try out that mechanic that you’ve missed on previous playthrough anyway.

Second playthrough with the comfort of coming prepared. Now you know which chests are mimics and have time to chuckle at “Regret!” message at the dead end. The structure of the world comes back into focus. Vertically stretched layout with intersections, connections, elevators, traps, closed doors and completely cut-off zones. Geography makes sense now.

Even two bonfires mere few dozens of steps away from each other actually make sense when you consider the shortcut you discover later. The story of Dark Souls series revolves around endless cycles of misery and futility of any attempts to overcome it. You’re not even sure if that is the irony or the prophecy of some kind for the company and its games.

It’s 1989. Your name is Henry. You’re standing in the elevator going to the underground garage. You’re about to take a trip to your new job: a fire lookout in Wyoming wilderness. The reason you took the job will be explained promptly. There’s nothing left to do other than get in the van. In a few short sequences you’ll arrive at the lookout tower. First trips out will be mundane, nothing much happens yet, you have time to get accustomed to traversing cliffs, opening storage boxes, using the compass and the map. Quite soon though some weird and creepy stuff will begin to happen. Two trespassing teenagers will disappear, somebody will raid your tower, wires will be cut preventing communication with the outside world. All the components of the classical horror are here, but is that really it?

It’s easy to draw parallels between Firewatch and Gone Home, to focus on what’s conspicuous. Both games make you spend a fair share of playtime walking, both have soundtracks composed by Chris Remo, both even have enclosed continuous worlds with parts that are initially locked. And yet these two are very different. Gone Home explored the possibilities of a static installation engulfing you in thousands of ordinary household items mixed with the occasional important note or a peculiar artifact. Firewatch dismisses such disjointed freeform approach in favor of directing. The beginning is sliced and mixed like a good trailer: a few seconds of looking around in a serene and lonely environment are followed by a story premise retold with nothing more than a text. The game even is generous enough to let you pick a more personalized version of happy memories. The horror that destroys them afterwards is as imminent as it is calculated. And then it fades to black and cuts to the next scene, and fades to black again and cuts to the next scene again. The increasing speed of these transitions isn’t supposed to erase protagonists’ problems or your memories of them. It’s just a reminder of lesson learned long before: running away doesn’t work.

https://camposantogames.bandcamp.com/track/camp-approach The mimimalist soundtrack surely goes nicely with oversaturized poster-like game look.

Lush and colorful wilderness that you’re supposed to traverse with map and compass in hand is deceiving. Gigantic national park disorients at first (especially if you turn off your position display on the map), but after a few hours of running various errands you start to see right through it. You get accustomed to it, like Henry got after living in the cabin for days. It’s your home now, and it’s nothing more than a set of corridors loosely connected with shortcuts that will become available in time. Firewatch exploits metroidvania mechanics in a straightforward way: all those overgrown bushes will remain impassable until the very end when you finally lay your hands on the axe. The sequence is unbreakable and all that you’ll get from wandering too much around is an occasional easter egg or particularly scenic view of the sunset.

Small yellow hand radio is two things at once: your agency and director’s will. It tells you what to do next with the voice of Delilah, your supervisor. It lets you to react to the unfolding of the story and game’s world by selecting a remark from a list. The choice of words serves seemingly no purpose other than letting you feel the attachment to your bodiless guide. You don’t have a choice in what to do next, but at least you can express your opinion (or at least select one from a predetermined list). Dialogs are the beating heart, the rhythm of the game. There’s just the right amount of jokes and witty remarks to make you feel at ease and become attached to the invisible partner. And just enough guiding to go forward with the story.

http://coub.com/view/bcuea The good amount of humor and bantering gives this story a human side.

Delilah tells you what to do, you try your best to not let her down. She relies on you to know what’s happening, you rely on her on what to make of it. You both struggle to make sense of what’s happening and both wait. It is your job after all to watch. It’s in the title. And of course it happens. The fire. The inevitable conclusion to your waiting, the backdrop to the mystery that you’ve been trying to solve and the catalyst for the final stretch to the finalé. It forces you to retreat from your temporary shelter back to the pain of the unsolved problem that you’ve ran away from.

The fire burns away not just trees, but the fabric of the game itself. You lose access to most parts of the world. Most importantly it destroys all the red herrings, that distracted you. The Truman Show atmosphere, the horror movie scares fade out in the smoke. The irony is unbearable. There’s nothing left but guilt, sorrow and emptiness. The single jumpscare (which is actually pretty hard to find) turns out nothing more than a joke. The explanation for all the disappearances and other mystical events is simpler that you would’ve prefered. The ending is anticlimactic, there’s no point to it other than sad truth that you’ve known right off the start. It’s time to get back to the city and move on.

Gomez wakes up on a sunny day and leaves the house to receive an important letter that’s about to change his life. Who is Gomez? He’s a weird-looking blob of white pixels living in a colorful flat world of neon green platforms hanging across the cyan sky. The message in the mailbox asks you to meet one-eyed Geezer at the top of the village. That meeting is going to change the life of the protagonist in a most peculiar way. Gomez will receive a fez. The red hat isn’t just an exotic accessory. It allows you to manipulate the world by rotating it sideways. And of course you don’t just receive it: getting ahold of such a powerful artifact is accompanied by the appearance of a giant golden hexahedron spewing cyphered messages at you, tearing the space-time continuum and “resetting” the game.

You wake up once again and go out of the familiar house. At first glance — nearly nothing’s changed. Villagers still wander around minding their own 2D business, but you know you can see more, can reach places you couldn’t reach before. And that will help you on your quest that your newest Zelda-referencing flying companion, four-dimensional hypercube named Dot tells you about. Collect the cubes. Open the doors. Save the world… perhaps?

Fez rightfully assumes that for now all you need is more of that gorgeous scenery. It was enough for the game to receive two IGF awards despite being still in development both times. And it is in its right being so confident about its looks. Visual styles so distinctive and appealing don’t appear every day. It’s retro and modern at the same time, a lovechild of technological experimentation multiplied by childhood nostalgia. It took its creator Phil Fish more than five years to build a game around the initial trixel idea, which makes you wonder just how much of that time has been spent scraping the work results and redoing stuff all over again. That doesn’t save you from having game-breaking bugs in the final product, but it nearly guarantees having a puzzle so difficult, that it took the community a whole year to crack it “properly”.

The mystery of the black monolith was initially brute-forced by collective online effort. But of course that solution was far from satisfying to say the least. Uncovering the logic behind the artifact that was not so easy to discover in the first place would be a proper way. There was no shortage of fourth-wall breaking hints before with QR codes, pop-culture references and messages encoded in binary with the star patterns of first “regular” ending. Fez teases you, challenges you to solve it; the game gives you the deciphering key to its baffling coded messages with a visual representation of a famous pangram.

There was no shortage of theories surrounding an obvious 2001: A Space Odyssey reference, but the reasoning behind it was elusive. Much like the original Clarke's black monolith its counterpart from the game’s gotten its share of explanations, but still stayed unfathomable. Maybe it was its meaning — that we can’t have all the answers. Or maybe it was the ultimate prank of Phil Fish, who managed to keep a three-dimensional nature of the game a secret when it was unveiled in 2007 at TIGSource. In 2008 when the rotating mechanic became known the second cryptic part of the game remained undisclosed. One can only imagine what it takes to keep your mouth shut for so long and not hint it even once.

Your perception of Fez shifts and rotates much like you do within the game world. A slow relaxation of a starting zone gives way to some underlying mystery; then you’re distracted from that with some really smart puzzles that don’t even seem like puzzles at first glance. Finally, when (if) you get through all of this, you get to see the fourth side of the cube. And it blows your mind. These transitions are subtle. You can’t really put your finger on what’s changed at first (except for the big final development). And is that really a change? Maybe it’s just a look from a different angle, a perspective alteration revealing content that was always there, but you were too distracted to notice it. Just to prove this point Fez doesn’t really reward you with anything. It just starts anew leaving you with nothing more than a buzz in your head from all those riddles and suspicious hints to a bigger story.

Supposedly some of them were meant to be picked up in a sequel, but we aren’t getting it anytime soon. Well, time to rotate that cube again then. Maybe there’s something on the side that you’ve missed?