Corvusbar Plays Games!

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2064: Read Only Memories - Click. ….Click-Click. Click-Click. Click-Click. Click-Click.

Do you have a deep, enduring relationship with your spacebar or mouse? Do you want one? This fuckin game is for you.

This dialog-based adventure is hailed as “thoughtful,” “contemporary,” and “diverse,” and ok, it is definitely some of those things.  In a cyberpunk year 2064 you get to decide your gender pronouns, even including non-binary choices, there are characters of all orientations, and the game explores genetic modification vs. “human purity” vs. sentient AIs. The future has a lot of the same societal fears, but we’ve all just found new things to take it out on.

However, and this is a big however, it’s absolutely NOT a point and click adventure. At best, it’s a visual novel, at worst it’s a snoozefest of skip-clicking.  For each line of incessant, pointless dialog there’s one click to advance the subtitles to the end of the line, time to read it in about ¼ the time the voice actor does, and another click to move on to the next line.  Don’t get me entirely wrong, the voice actors are decently convincing, but with the 8bit style direction it feels like the most excruciatingly slow podcast that requires an occasional dialog choice for yourself.

Speaking of dialog choices, these (combined with a pass/fail puzzle at the end) determine your ending from 6 possibilities.  ...Cool? Except there is absolutely no way I am sitting through 5 hours of dialog 5 more times to see them.  

Who should play:  People who really like to be read to Who should not play:  Anyone that wanted to play a damn game

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I appear to have developed a problem.....

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Jotun: I am dead... but also very wee!

Did anyone reading this play World of Warcraft? I bet not… statistically unlikely, right? Well anyway, if you did, Jotun is all the fun of like...Icecrown Citadel minus all of the nublets in your raid getting you murdered! There’s stand-in-its, there’s DON’T stand-in-its, there’s 50% boss mechanics changes, and you get to rock it solo, and it’s God. Damn. Amazing.

I love this game.

It's got a standard Viking storyline of proving yourself to the gods to get into Valhalla, but they bothered to insert a backstory for the main character about her life and death that was short but cool.  The (optionally) linear path has you do 2 levels of thematic wandering/trashfighting for each boss during which you grab power ups if you can find them... Btw you should do that. For srsly.

Ok tho, so what I really want to talk about is the art and the music, because if you still haven’t noticed they are kindof important to me (read: can nearly throw an entire opposing opinion.)  Holy balls this game is beautiful. The entire thing is hand drawn, often creeptastic and fucking amazing. The fights and explore-puzzles were well and good but “omg what’s the next thing gonna be like??” definitely kept me playing longer than I should several times. I have absolutely no idea how I’m going to pick only a couple of screencaps for this post.

Is it a tree? ...with tits? ….and bad dentistry?? OH GOD, AND IT HATES ME.

If you’re still not on board, the entire game is narrated in Icelandic.  SRSLY.

Go! impress the gods!

Who should play:  Everyone. Now. Who should not play:  ….see above.  Oh wait, unless you have an incurable case of the stand-in-its.

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Lumino City: Grandpa is kindof an Asshole

It’s pretty safe to say I like puzzle games at this point, even poorly designed ones sometimes... Lumino City does its best to make me question this though. Not so much “do I even like puzzles?” but something more like “what even makes a good puzzle?” Don’t worry, I won’t get that esoteric here.

The conceit is pretty simple, you’re the grandkid of the local handyman who is kidnapped in the opening sequence of the game. Guess what though? All of his shit is broken and you have to fix it in order to get to the other side of town. What have you been DOING Granddad? Because it obviously wasn’t your damn job.

As a basic point & click puzzle adventure there’s a lot of both good and terrible puzzles around.  Interestingly, it was the mix of real life information in the solutions that I both enjoyed and absolutely hated.  For example, One puzzle early on required you to use lemons to patch an electrical circuit. Ok, kinda clever.  Even an accurate use of morse code made an appearance (seriously, 2 reviews in a row, how weird is that?) Later in the game though came the facerolling puzzle… and even that was benign compared to coding letters to sheet music where knowing how to read it IRL was a momentary disadvantage. No one asked you guys to break the periodic table either, brah.

           Why?  Because fuck you, that’s why.

Good things? Well... it’s certainly pretty.  There are a few heavily graphic-designy parts that were gorgeous, while the majority of the game strikes me more like a little-big-planet feel. I also enjoyed yelling at the inconsistencies once I had passed a certain point of wtfery - does that count as a good thing?

In the end I finished it even tho it was annoying - but for fuck sake, if you’re going to give me a puzzle that takes 10 minutes of trial and error (looking at you, pinball) please don’t force me to listen to a looping song that seems to have a progressively shorter loop with each passing minute.

Who should play:  Genuinely bored puzzle not-minders Who should not play:  Trivia buffs with an intolerance for wrongness

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Oxenfree: For the first time ever I regret forgetting morse code

Oxenfree had been in my wishlist forever, right next to Kentucky Route Zero, and at some point I finally snagged it for cheap.  Described as “a supernatural thriller about a group of friends who unwittingly open a ghostly rift,” and being fantastically pretty, I was really pretty sure I would love this game. However……. This game probably wasn’t meant for me.  

You are Alex, a high school student who recently lost her brother in a drowning accident and who has a radio that can…speak to the dead? It’s an auditory pocketknife I guess - you use it to solve most of the puzzles in the game by tuning into anomalies/doors/repeaters/etc. Sort of.  Anyway, in a questionable teenager decision you unleash some angry undead on a haunted island and then spend the next 3 or 4 hours dealing with your mistakes.  The ghosts and time dickeries are some of the most deliciously creepy fun in an indy game I’ve seen, however the game is really invested in trying to make me build relationships with the other kids on the island and OH MY GOD, I DO NOT CARE.

The game has several endings… all of them are based on how much each of your “friends” likes or hates you at the end.  Somewhere about 1/3rd of the way in I noticed the cheevos referencing this so I took a second, peeked at a guide, and learned that my normal inclination is apparently the mean playthrough lol.  Early on I’d had to do something deeply mundane like opening a door or lifting a box, I don’t even remember, and the boy that was with me tried to get all chivalrous.  I mean, obvi I eye rolled and clicked the option for “I got it, its fine.” and BAM: mean path. Hoooooookay then. Fine. Agency is mean. Got it. Fantastic.

At the end of the day though… I can’t give you a clean yes/no on this game.  It has a ton of annoying little things, like a set of collection cheevos (which are def my personal problem lol) and the pacing felt slow because it kept making me talk to people… but it had a solid story and the radio “tool” was a neat idea.  I think the only place this game really stumbled was they had an amazing idea with user-generated content late in the game, but it was subtle and felt tacked on. Really though, how upset can I get about a cool idea that just wasn’t developed enough to suit my interest?

Who should play:  Adventure clickers who also have some patience Who should not play:   Anyone with a low tolerance for human drama

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A Story About My Uncle: AKA Parkour, the Bedtime Story

I snagged this game in a Humble Bundle probably AGES ago... which I remember because I opened it, played the intro, got immediately frustrated and quit.  Retrospectively?  Mistake.

ASAMU is an upfront narrative (Uncle lost, find uncle) but told through the lens of a bedtime story, à la The Princess Bride. (If you somehow don’t know what that means stop everything you planned today and go watch that instead. What is wrong with you?) A younger version of you goes through a portal of some sort and ends up in a world made of floaty rocks with only your trusty grapple laserbeam suit to save you.  Handy you had that, really.

So... if your idea of a fun time is NOT jumping from rock to rock you may as well stop here.  

To call ASAMU a jumping puzzle game is, while true, probably a disservice. Sometimes you don’t know where to jump, you often have to grapple swing on things you can’t land on, some things move, and occasionally the game has other ways to kill you in mind.  

If I had to complain, I guess the dying should happen faster? Like N+, where you get the dying out of the way so that you can get on with more dying faster. There are also a couple of difficulty spikes that almost made me quit, but then I realized I was just dumb and doing it wrong, so if you play it keep that in mind. lol.

Who should play: Adults who platonically like children between the ages of like 6 to 12. Who should not play:  Anyone who gets hives from jumping puzzles

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Hexcells Infinite: Welcome to my new Hexagonal Overlords

Forget anything I said before; I love this game.  

Sure, when you load it the first time there’s definitely a moment of “Oh, someone remade Minesweeper to be prettier and less complex,” but oh how wrong this impression is. The “campaign” levels space out the tutorial mechanics over the first 4 “worlds” and thank god for that because this shit is bananas. Over the course of 30ish levels I went from a solid “YAAAAWN” to being completely utterly hooked.

Gameplay-wise it IS an evolution of Minesweeper. There are “blue hexes” that equate to bomb flags and black ones that tell you how many adjacent blues there should be. However, clicking “bombs” doesn’t kill you, just ruins your perfect score, and there are three(ish) more solid bomb-indicating mechanics that are eventually introduced.  One more thing that stands out from Minesweeper is I remember clicking aimlessly around the map for a few seconds to get some starting points – you should never have to do that in Hexcells. In fact, you should never have to click at all without at least a statistical knowledge of how bad your random choice might be, but even this comes only in rare moments of desperation.

The menu system is a little bullshit, but such is the curse of minimalism.  One pro-tip: you can change which click flags a bomb as blue vs which one pops the yellow marker off.  It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure that out and by default it is the opposite of what you expect.

Who should play:  Ex-Mathletes Who should not play:  Anyone who really hated minesweeper

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The Silent Age: Very ‘stash. Such groovy.

This game won an Indie Prize Award for best narrative and is described as a “thrilling point-and-click adventure,” but….. eeehhhhhhh……… I question the use of “thrilling” at least.

You are Joe, the janitor (what is it with janitor protagonists lately?), who gets wrapped up in a 12-Monkeys-esque rescue-the-future-with-time-travel puzzler. Since time-travel is literally the description, it’s no spoiler to say that toggling yourself from present to future and back is the mechanism for most of the puzzles and the rest follow a Kings Quest: Pick up thing, Use thing format.  

The thing is I like Kings Quest.  It took me a while to figure out why I was so crabby about mechanics that are so normalized – it’s the speed this moron walks. The only way to speed up his stoned out meander is to spastically click on whatever it is you’re trying to do.  It’s like… imagine your computer is locking up so you start frustratingly clicking as hard as possible – someone actually decided that would make a good run command.  Apparently though, this is another case of a mobile game ported to PC, so I may be being a bit harsh.

It IS pretty, with an animated cut-out feel that they really nailed, and the story is ok. Could it have been more involved? Certainly. But it did its job I guess.

Clocking in at about 3 hours to finish, and probably one of those hours being waiting for this asshole to calmly walk around, I give it a solid “Juts Ok.”

Who should play:  Janitor game aficionados. Who should not play:  people who enjoy detail or depth.

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Sunset: Making chores digital still doesn't make them fun

You know... looking back, almost every indy review I've written has been pretty positive.  Well, we're here today to ruin the streak.  Sunset!

I really wanted to like this. I thought it sounded like a cool concept, you play as a housekeeper in the middle of a city in full revolution. I mean, I really rather hate housework in general, but I figured there would be a mini-game aspect of it that would give you some sense of bored accomplishment while the narrative wove a story around you. Sadly... the chores were basically "find a chore and click it to watch the game do it for you" and the narrative was a couple of voice acted sentences dropped at the beginning of each hunt-n-click day. Even the most gripping moment of the voice acting was ruined by the way this played out, "I've got to do something! I can't just sit around and wait!!!" ....and then you go on your bored way, clicking on a pile of laundry while humming.

I didn't even find it particularly beautiful, which is a pretty easy way to score points with me. The graphics were "juts ok," though at times the lighting rescued the halfassed-feeling modeling and textures. The only music in the game happens when the player makes the mistake of clicking on a radio or record. (I call this a mistake because the music in this game was ear-splittingly loud when compared to the dialog and after a while I stopped doing it entirely.)

Lastly, why in the hell does a game that should be beatable in 3-4 hours have 100 achievements?!  I'm not exaggerating btw when I say that about 1/3 of them are unlocked by literally pointing and zooming your camera at book covers. Wtf?

Who should play:  Probably no one, but I wont stop you.  Who should not play:  Anyone with respect for their time. 

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Windosill: That was 26 minutes of straight up weird

Ok so it’s been a while since I’ve done this – like a bad heroin relapse, WoW inevitably happened.  Somewhere after completing a pile of world quests and before looking up the details of if it’s worth archaeologing I sorted my overwhelming cheap game library by average how-long-to-beat time and decided I should do something else.  For a minute or so.  I GUESS.

And Windosill!

…I’m not sure if I am supposed to tell you wtf this game is.  There’s only one thing to figure out, and that’s it.  I WILL say it’s weird, surreal, non-repetitive, and puzzle…esque. It’s way short, and really cheap, which I know is a turn off for a lot of people, but IMO the length to weird ratio was probably about exactly correct.

Who should play:  Esoteric puzzle lovers Who should not play:  People who can’t take the relatively tame weirdness of Japan

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Mage Parties are teh best

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Scumbag Archdruid says, “Drink the moonwater and go to sleep in this bed……….. Yeah, that one.  The one full of corpses.”

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Firewatch: If you still haven’t played it

As I totally expect everyone to already know, this game is a beautiful hiking simulator with a lot of well written dialog. It only takes about 4 hours to finish, and I have some firm annoyances, so I’m glad I bagged it on sale anyway. Before I can say literally anything else, though:

Sweet. Baby. Motion sickness! This is not a problem I normally ever have, but Firewatch gave it to me in abundance.  Every time you climb, rappel, jump a gap, step over a log, etc it’s like the Blair Witch camera crew beat you to the ground and took over your camera for the duration of the action.  Thankfully these actions are not terribly common and gaining a habit of looking at the wall before pressing A made it…survivable.

Ok. So. Aside from that, I wish I had realized before starting the game how off-standard the age of the main character is.  Am I being ageist? Maybe. But without ruining anything, the entire story consistently forces you into a much more …adult frame of mind than I expected. Also, the music in this game rather reminds me of Minecraft: it’s silent the majority of the time but occasionally random music happens before vanishing again. Intentional? I have no idea.

Complaining aside, I did like this game. It wasn’t what I expected, which is not a bad thing, and it was damned beautiful. Also, it impressively managed a vague actual hiking feel with the map/compass whenever I got off-trail (I do sometimes actually hike and have lost trails in wilderness areas more than a few times lol).

Who should play:  People who don’t mind some adulting mixed into in their mystery Who should not play:  Anyone prone to gaming motion sickness – OH EM GEE

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6180 the moon: It hurt me not to cap that title

6180 is a semi-puzzley platformer with a gimmick - a cool one, but still a gimmick. Through the combo of “gravity” and ye olde wraparound screen boundries you’ll be dodging spikes, spinning blades, and general death by landing/bouncing on the “ok” surfaces. I can get pretty bored with a platformer, but this worked for me.  Not long enough to overstay its welcome, and a ramping difficulty that kept it interesting.

Aesthetically though is where I think this game really scored with me. The soundtrack is fantastic and I even enjoyed the over-simplified graphics. If I had one complaint it would be that the respawn time was about twice as long as it should have been to make this incredibly fun - in a game where you die hundreds of times the death/respawn animation shouldn’t make it more frustrating.  

Oh, also the story is kinda lame.  For a couple of bucks and a couple of hours though, I still recommend.

Who should play:  People with a couple of hours to kill and like platformers with atmospheric music Who should not play:  Anyone looking for a deep experience

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Finally got Stardew Valley because steam sale and lulz Grandpa, tell me how you really feel ;)

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Thomas Was Alone: Colored blocks for grown-ups

Sure, this game is old – but I promised untimely thoughts, and by God, I intend to deliver:

Thomas Was Alone released forever ago and apparently was super-acclaimed, even though no one I know had ever heard of it.  Puzzles, platformer, minimalist, blah blah – You can tell all of this by looking at that image up there.  What you can’t tell is that through a simple story & a fantastic narrator you will probably care more about these little rectangles than some real people.  Mostly, it reminds me of the whale/petunia bit from Hitchhiker’s Guide but for roughly 3-4 hours and with a lot of jumping.

One weird note/caution I need to add though is that there’s a music bug that, over time, causes the background audio (which is great when this doesn’t happen) to play multiple tracks at once.  I have no idea how or when it started and oddly enough I wasn’t convinced it wasn’t intentional. I checked online later though and lots of people had the same problem – some rebooted the game and fixed it, but several, like me, just thought the game wanted to be unsettlingly weird and kept going.  Whatev, still a great game.

Who should play:  People who like colored building blocks and sly dialog Who should not play:  Anti-minimalists. …Maximalists?

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Shantae: Risky’s Revenge - Titty’s Annoying Tits Titting Tittily

I tried, I really did, but I just can’t. Despite being incredibly well reviewed by basically everyone, I really hate this game. You play as Shantae, a half-genie belly dancer who attacks things with a hair flip in a metroidvania-esque place called “Sequin Land.” Yep. Sequin Land. The internet tells me this is a beloved series from mobile platforms, and maybe playing it on PC was my first mistake, but in an attempt to not sound like a frothing feminist I will start with gameplay:

Attacking = not moving and the animation to move all that hair around takes a long damn time.  The enemies are likely walking calmly towards you the entire time, which means you can get 2ish hits before you have to wait for your hair to stop and then move. Being nailed to the floor is totes my fav feeling in a game.

The controller button mapping is jank.  Jump is, predictably, assigned to A but so is CANCEL.  Meanwhile, select is bound to B and you aren’t allowed to fix this because the mapping settings won’t let you assign A to both jump and select. Fan-fucking-tastic.

I would complain about the deeply confusing directions and what there is of a plot, but I honestly only played for about 45 minutes before giving up. I am also fully aware the rest of this is not going to make me popular, but I’m sayin’ it anyway:

Perhaps most importantly for me, I literally cannot stand the characters. Shantae herself is the worst, you’re trapped in the body of that chick who’s in half of all anime – you know, the shrieky desperately annoying one. We could argue about anime tropes for hours here, but also the tits seriously never fucking stop. In both giant dialog artwork and animated, ceaselessly bouncing 8 bit. I mean… even when IDLE:

“What’s wrong with tits?” you might be asking – Nothing, usually, but on top of a shitty feeling Castlevanihyrule it feels like being bludgeoned with nonsensical spherically augmented A cups.

Eyecandy Humble Bundle (which you should still get because of other things): https://www.humblebundle.com/eye-candy-bundle

Who should play:  People who enjoy girly ridiculous anime, I guess Who should not play:  Everyone else