I mean, if you need more than the last four words of the previous sentence, I’m afraid we’re never going to understand each other. You are tasked to descend into the unnatural burrows of dog-kind, fighting their canine minions, and – crucially – recovering your stolen tomatoes. So on the side of Right for once, you play as a skeletal feline raised from the dead by Witch Cat. Cats are the goodies, dogs are the baddies. Osteoblasts gets something right that too many games (and indeed all mediums) get wrong. It’s a grown up game for grown ups, for reasons I shall not give away. Oh, and I should add, despite initial appearances, this is no children’s picture book. And wow, yeah, keep playing after the demo tells you it’s over. And it’s a damned effective demo too – this already feels extremely solid, the art is just storybook perfect, it’s charmingly written, and the idea of repeatedly rewriting a story as a gaming mechanic absolutely intrigues me. This demo is to support a Kickstarter, which is already two-thirds toward its goal. The second time, with the new word gathered, he can come with you, and so everything changes. The first time you go through the early moments, your friend is unable to come with you on your adventure, and… let’s say it goes badly. The examples in the demo certainly prove it. So as you play you’ll reach endings, even see characters die, but the charms you might gather in the process can then be applied to earlier points, taking things off in a new direction. However, it’s a story you can turn back through, and change that decision to see how a different words would have led to different situations – something that is so intriguing as a mechanic, rather than a save-cheesed cheat. You’re writing the book as you play it, as it shifts beautifully between the pages and the fullscreen illustrations themselves. The more you have, the more options you have for how you influence the story. As you play you find “Turning Points”, moments where you can choose a word to enter into the book’s story, selected from charms you’ve gathered. Beacon Pines embraces the idea entirely, played out within the book’s illustrations. Far too many games use a book as their framing device, turning pages at new chapters or what have you. I’d not seen anything of this game before, and goodness me, I’m so glad I’ve seen it now. But by far and away Beacon Pines is my top recommendation. There aren’t so many here, despite my playing a lot, because my standards are pretty high, and, well, yeah – extrapolate as you will. And if it’s already too late, think of them as mini-previews, games worth a click on that Wishlist button. So I’ve gone through it too, played a whole bunch of what’s there, and offer you a few suggestions for what’s definitely worth downloading before the week is over. There’s bound to be a fair few things that’ll grab you. Pick a genre, then scroll down to a sub-genre you enjoy, then scroll through the dozen or so games you’ll have narrowed it down to by then. So I encourage you to go have a sniff around in there yourself. Still so many that it can feel overwhelming, but a number that becomes much more manageable when broken down by genre. So I’m really impressed to see a response to that: this February’s Festival features just (just?) 500 demos. The same was becoming increasingly a problem in these Game Festivals, with over 1,000 demos available for barely a week, and only the store’s abysmal algorithms to “curate” them for you. Finding anything that isn’t already well known is such a tortuous process that… well, that this site needs to exist. Steam is a miserably noisy place, with upward of fifty (50!) games a day being released, to say nothing of DLC, demos, software and so on. While I completely love the motivation behind these events – to get people interested in smaller games before they’re finished, wishlisting them and following their development – it’s fair to say they’ve suffered from the same issues that plague Steam on every level: noise. The latest Steam Game Festival, which are starting to come so quickly they feel like they cover the brief gaps between Steam Sales, is a far more approachable event than any previously.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |