Reseñas recientes de HarVeeGee

This is a really clever & interesting little game and you should play it because it's free, but I've got a bone to pick.

I'll try to avoid spoilers, but a decent amount of the dialogue in this game concerns poetry theory - different characters show you their poems and then expound a little on their intent behind it and their writing philosophy. I was always in furious agreement with the character Natsuki about what makes good poetry, and found her poems to be far more interesting and impactful than those of the other Literature Club members. Then after finishing the game I read the developer's notes, and there's a little discussion about the idea behind each character. Apparently, Natsuki is meant to be "not very smart" and her poems are canonically bad & dumb.

Years of immersion in gaming culture has taught me this medium is supposed to be a wish fulfilment/power fantasy experience, not the vehicle by which I get owned. ♥♥♥♥ this game.

First Lucas Pope made a paperwork simulator which was one of the most emotionally affecting and mechanically interesting games I've ever played. Now he's made an insurance adjuster simulator which is the most exciting and intellectually stimulating detective game ever made. I look forward to his next game, You Play As A Bank Teller But, Hear Me Out, It's Actually Amazing.

If you suffer from insomnia, sitting through the gargantuan loading times then enduring the incredibly slow pace of the gameplay of Rainbow 6 Siege is a better sleep aid than temazepam. Otherwise, Counter-Strike is already a game that exists.

Supergiant's most unique and original game to date, which is definitely saying something. Part visual novel, part party-based RPG, part sports game, all great. I daresay impossible to play through without getting attached to at least some of the charming cast of characters, brought to life as they are by brilliant writing, as they drive a story which makes you feel the stakes every step of the way. If I have a criticism of it it's that the European handball-style "Rite" element of the game, while fun, isn't particularly well-balanced - some "Exiles" (players) are just way better and more useful than others (the Stowaway is OP as hell, pls nerf), and consequently rather than being a game with a variety of viable tactics as I think was intended, there are definitely tactics which work and tactics which don't. But then you could say the same thing about every iteration of FIFA...

If you're like me, you enjoy the physical board game Twilight Struggle, but sometimes worry that you've been misinterpreting the rules and playing the game wrong. Well, playing this digital copy of it is a great way to confirm that yes, actually, you have been. Strongly recommended.

I already got a copy of this game in a PlayStation Network sale earlier this year and I bought it again because it made me feel really good and happy the whole time I was playing it and I want to support the developer who did that for me.

Ugh. What a nerd.

Anyway, this game is sort of like if the pixel art worlds viewed from a slightly oblique top-down perspective which were a dominant presentation method for action-adventure games and RPG's during the 16-bit era were never usurped by 3D environments and polygonal graphics. By which I mean, it doesn't feel like a self-consciously nostalgia-laced throwback to the 2D era like many other indie games, but like the result of years of evolution in 2D game design and pixel art, culminating in this beautiful, visceral and mysterious experience.

The most direct comparison I can make is with top-down Zelda games like A Link To The Past or The Minish Cap, but with a heavier focus on exploration and (especially) combat, rather than on puzzle-solving, narrative and RPG elements. This focus on getting the combat and the feel of moving in the world absolutely perfect pays off, creating an experience that in many ways is far more satisfying than any of these classic Zelda titles. Link's controls can feel a bit clunky in those games, sometimes making it seemingly impossible to avoid being hit, whereas The Drifter becomes like some sort of perfect ninja assassin in your hands, and every time an enemy attack lands it feels like your fault. And while the RPG elements aren't as important here, they're still intelligently implemented with the combat emphasis in mind. In Drifter it is totally possible to finish the game with your starting equipment only and no upgrades, so the focus in the design of many unlockable items and skills is on simply adding a bit of variety to the ways you can kill enemies and in a few cases just making the Drifter *cooler* which I, as a shallow person, appreciate.

It's also just a beautiful game, a feast for the senses. Some of the most beautiful pixel art I've ever seen brings to life an utterly unique and truly original game world, aided by an amazing soundtrack from Disasterpeace, who also did the music for Fez as well as the film It Follows.

Your mileage may vary somewhat however. This is in some ways a game that can be described using the lazy shorthand of "it's a bit like Dark Souls". That is, the story is obscured from as much as it's told to you and the emphasis is on atmosphere and creating a mood rather than conveying any sort of coherent narrative; what you're actually supposed to be doing and almost all of the RPG systems involved are barely explained to you if at all, and you can only discover these things by exploring (or simply by Googling, which is perfectly legitimate if it makes the game more fun for you in my opinion); and it's hard. Not frustratingly hard in my opinion due to impeccable controls & enemy design as well as frequent checkpointing, but the combat does demand a little bit of practice to get good at it, and in some respects it's a game that does demand that you be at least fairly decent at games if you want to get to the end of it.

In some respects it almost feels like this game was designed with me in mind so you can take the next part with a grain of salt if you like, but in my opinion this is a masterpiece, the best indie game of all time, and for me it's a no-brainer that this was the game of the year for 2016.

*revised review - initially a 'do not recommend'*

Well, when you're wrong, you're wrong. This game is amazing. Hauntingly beautiful and atmospheric, tight as a drum mechanically, with some of the most exciting and satisfying boss encounters you can find outside of Dark Souls. My initial review complained about poorly-explained, obtuse mechanics, and a design which didn't fit with the way they cribbed Dark Souls' checkpoint system. I don't know what headspace I was in the first time I tried to play this game, but I have to retroactively accuse myself of not paying enough attention and being far too impatient. Immerse yourself in this world, play it carefully, and the experience you'll be rewarded with will delight you.

It's like Left 4 Dead, but worse.

So, pretty good.

I recommend you watch "Indie Game: The Movie", which chronicles the developers of Super Meat Boy and Fez spending years of their lives perfectly crafting, in painstaking detail, these polished, beautiful, perfectly calibrated experiences which are a whole expression of their creative vision. These guys grind themselves to the bone, with seemingly no version of what they're building being quite good enough, and there's one particularly tense scene where Phil Fish finds a bug which crashes Fez the day he's about to demo it at PAX. You can see the way it wounds him somewhere deep inside of him. The results speak for themselves; Fez is maybe the prettiest game ever made, and Super Meat Boy is about as perfect an example of game design there is, with platforming that controls better than Super Mario.

I wonder how these guys feel when they compare the relatively modest success of their games with the runaway sales of this buggy, laggy, half-assed glorified asset flip.

This game opens with a beautiful, haunting introductory sequence, making excellent use of the fantastic soundtrack and sparse use of dialogue, while somehow wringing genuinely cinematic storytelling out of its very basic visuals and the simplistic tools available in the RPG Maker platform. Said sequence economically and sensitively relates the backstory of our protagonist Brad, a man who suffered traumatic abuse earlier in life and now battles a drug addiction while raising an adopted daughter in a post apocalyptic hellscape. So after the first half hour or so I was on board for a game which maturely deals with tough issues, while using gentle humour to endear you to the cast of characters. Then an hour or so later you meet a comic relief character whose hilarious schtick is... he's a multiple rape victim.

This schizophrenia of tone in the way it deals with issues is so prevalent it must be intentional. In one scene you're forced to decide between sacrificing a friend or one of your arms, with some heavy-handed dialogue about how your choice says a lot about you as a person, so I sacrificed the arm... then you're forced into an unskippable Russian roulette sequence where your friend dies anyway, and THEN you're treated to a motorcycle riding sequence where you unavoidably commit a number of vehicular homicides, all played for laughs. In another instance your character has a flashback to his childhood trauma, right before an utterly pointless scene in which the game makes you "accidentally" immolate five children, totally played for laughs. I'm utterly mystified as to what the intent or message of this total tonal whiplash mode of storytelling, maybe it's just 3 edgy 5 me and I need to go hide in my "safe space", but to me the experience was like if the schoolyard bully started sucking some dude's ♥♥♥♥ in front of you while saying "This is my impression of you dude, this is how gay you are." What I'm saying is, you can't have it both ways: be the deep mature game about trauma, or be zany nihilistic murder romp. You can't suck the ♥♥♥♥ and call everyone else gay too.