I noticed that the pattern on the middle pillar looked like a QR code. I was like “did they really…?” I took out my phone and it did in fact scan the code, which encoded the phrase “Continue standing here to break the floor.” So I left my character standing on that floor and just watched. After 10 minutes nothing happened, so I decided to look it up. I found a bunch of people asking about this. It turns out the game’s clue is inaccurate. You actually have to jump on that part of the floor 50 times to break it open. And then the item beneath it is an unremarkable sword with a description that calls it a joke item.
I got owned. I don’t even know whether it was a mistake or an intentional prank on the player, but it’s weirdly hostile.
Crossing Souls is a Zelda-like with a character switching mechanic and an 80s Saturday Morning Cartoon pastiche/yet another Stranger Things sort of story. Plucky 80s kids in small town America stumble across a supernatural phenomenon and the shadowy organizations which seek to exploit it yada yada… There’s some good morsels in there but otherwise it’s a lot of slop.
Liberated is the most recent example I can think of of the “takes place in the panels of a comic book” microgenre. It also happened to seem miserably bad aesthetically and mechanically within the first few minutes so I bailed out.
Before I Forget is a walking sim where you play a woman with dementia, wandering around her flat trying to make sense of things. It’s pretty heavy-handed (these things always are, aren’t they?) but it was affecting. If nothing else as a result I know what the Indian names of some familiar constellations are, now.
It’s extra funny because so far the rest of the game is just a really cozy and attractive Symphony of the Night imitator. This was totally out of character for it.
Sounds like the same kind of translation as the clues in Kowloon High-School Chronicle where it’ll say “attack in front” which actually means “attack from behind”
Candleman is a surprisingly cool-ass little game. You’re a little candle guy! You can’t let yourself burn all the way down so you navigate platforming challenges mostly in dark/very dim conditions, occasionally lighting up to briefly glimpse your surroundings or light stationary candles to create islands of light in the darkness. The platforming isn’t the most graceful so I hope it doesn’t ask me to perform any really super precise jumps.
GRIP is a futuristic racer where the gimmick is that your vehicles (whether they hover or have wheels) produce enough downforce to stick to walls and ceilings. Apparently a spiritual successor to some old game from the 90s? From my experiencing the closest thing I’ve played to it is Extreme-G (shit, now there’s a game I want to come back. I think I’m experiencing some kind of glitch or something because I could swear to God the OST I’ve looked up both in the game’s own menus and on YouTube are absolutely not the same. It’s supposed to be a bunch of electronica like you’d hear in a Wipeout game but instead I’m getting… some sort of EDM with a female vocalist and/or what sounds like a Disco song? I’m too tired to figure it out right now.
booted up that f2p SaGa and as soon as the tutorial was over it hit me with like 20 separate daily rewards each with their own individual popup. so i deleted it.
If I had billions of dollars would I fund the passion project of a very minor Australian rocker whose main influences seem to be Starship and x-entertainment.com? Maybe. Guys like this make me look really, really good in comparison. And I already look really good.
You can make anything happen in digital. Especially if you have money. So why not dress your protagonist up like he’s gonna play laser tag and have him slowly walk around his sleepy suburban town, dealing out Don Dokken-style licks so nasty they cover all those bougie boutiques in tastefully arranged Christmas lights.
The alien is accompanied by an elderly Black man who is the second person in the game to recognize this white boy’s secret ability to rock. The first was a Daria who does crimes. Hopefully the third will be a homosexualist from Uranus* who says it’s okay for Li’l Nephew to use ‘gay’ as a pejorative, as long as you can shred guitar real good. Then this will truly feel like wish fulfillment aimed squarely at me.
So this is a world where Bob Dylan died in the motorcycle wreck and, don’t forget, was Italian. But it’s otherwise pretty much the same, like they even had skiffle bands and the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, that’s so fucking wild, man, my mind is so blown, I can’t wait to play another 4 hours and find out my Italian uncle faked his death and is touring the stars and hopefully there’s a really fucking awful Bowie tribute in there, I am having such a good time playing this now and I am pretty sure I’m not still drunk from last night. I’m pretty sure this is the 44th best game of 2021. Somewhere around there.
*Pronounced like Sinatra on “What Time Does the Next Miracle Leave?”
I love finding these curios just as an answer to like “where did all this recycled hipster cultural production go” because you know it’s hiding out there somewhere siphoning money around
I also like how consistently alarming it is when australians get hold of american pop culture and are given all this money to produce psychotically naive reinterpretations of it. like, who is encouraging this
is night in the woods the patient zero for “limp 2D platformer framing for a walking sim?” is that why this keeps happening? it’s challenging for me to even imagine the audience for these (which, granted, I don’t think exists, I think it’s purely a prestige media funds siphon, but if it did) actually wants to play a “video game”
Most of these are decidedly not epistolary solitary games like Gone Home so I assumed it was just a matter of the relative cost of animating, modeling, etc. characters in 3D. Life is Strange was right on the edge of asset quality with a €4 million pre-production budget.
There’s also the relative translation of art from concept to game which is done more directly with 2D.
afaik Australia’s traditional game industry more or less collapsed so there’s been way more of a push towards developing indie studios there… which is why so many prestige indie games have been from Australia (i.e. Hollow Knight, Goose Game, etc).
