Recent reviews by Futura&!

When Grim Fandango was originally released in 1998, it was met with critical acclaim but poor sales. Trends in gaming were changing, and players were looking for more graphics-intensive titles with the novelty of Internet multiplayer. The age of the first-person shooter had begun and adventure games were on the wane. LucasArts, the monolith of adventure game developers, decided to cancel further development of adventure games, and let go most of their dev teams in the years that followed. For a while there, it seemed like Grim Fandango would be the last great adventure game ever made. When new games pushed it off the shelves, it basically became lost to time—out of print and held by a company uninterested in reviving it.

Fast forward to a little over a decade later, and adventure games are thankfully back on the up and up. LucasArts veterans at Telltale Games have achieved a noteworthy level of commercial and critical success with The Walking Dead games. Video game auteur and Grim Fandango creator Tim Schafer is finally revisiting the point-and-click adventure after his 2000 split with LucasArts; the Broken Age series is being developed at his own Double Fine Productions. With this new resurgence in mainstream popularity, the adventure game genre looks like it is finally here to stay. Good news for new games—great news for old ones and the people who remember them.

Now, with a new deal between the newly Disney-acquired LucasArts, Sony, and Double Fine, Grim Fandango is finally seeing the light of day again, by the hands of its original authors. While the adventure games of today have evolved in Grim’s absence, many of them are still indebted to Fandango’s artistic success. It’s about time we got the chance to revisit it. The remastered edition is a loving look back to an era when adventure games were not merely a thing, but the thing.

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Pop culture has an obsession with being “edgy,” whether it be through grittiness, hyperviolence, or manipulative melodrama. “Edgy,” as a term for describing somehow-exciting and somehow-different new art, has seemingly been drained of any positive connotations. It has become a word that’s to be used exclusively with a sarcastic tone, mocking the tryhards that would use it unironically to describe their supposedly daring and incisive new thing.

So what is LISA? A game with the unofficial subtitle of “The Painful RPG,” that touts a post-apocalyptic setting defined by amorality and violence, that features amputation and drug addiction as game mechanics—it’s edgy, certainly. But LISA is an effective reminder that “edgy” doesn’t always have to be said with an eyeroll and a scoff. Developer Dingaling has put in the effort to present a game that varies wildly in tone and charms, that does all it can to dodge the fatal one-note nature of so many other games that have tried and failed to claim edginess. LISA is a Venn diagram of “disturbing” and “silly” with a surprising amount of overlap, making its tangents purely into either side all the more effective.

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Damian Sommer and Emily Carroll’s The Yawhg is easily the most beautiful piece of choose-your-own-adventure fiction ever published. Carroll’s indie comics superstardom is immensely deserved and her work here depicts a wonderfully colorful world with a sensitive fairy tale look, defined not only by the setting, but by the flourish of the visual interface and of her distinctive hand lettering. Sommer and Carroll’s writing is whimsical, amusing, and mysterious, all in good measure. Ryan Roth’s shifting soundtrack feels perfectly of this world without being overbearing. As a production, The Yawhg is an aesthetic triumph.

As a game, its success is tempered. The Yawhg tells a story that would have benefitted from more prose. Completing one cycle in the coming and going of the apocalyptic Yawhg event takes only a few minutes. The random events are interesting but never deep, always dropping a choice in your lap before you know it. Every encounter is succinct to a fault, eschewing any sort of satisfying narrative exploration for an exceedingly quick presentation. Some choices and events will affect future encounters for other members of your party in different areas of the world, which is quite impressive. Still, the number of possible events is not astoundingly numerous, and given the short length of each “run,” events may repeat themselves as early as the second playthrough, before they’ve even vacated your short-term memory.

Playing the game with other people does somewhat alleviate the problems I’ve mentioned. It’s a joy to actually play a choose-your-own-adventure that actually allows for multiple people. Seeing the consequences of certain events weave between characters controlled by different people leads to some wonderful reactions. Chatter will do a lot to lengthen each go-around. As a social game, it’s quite nice. However, hosting or attending the right party that wants to kill an hour playing something like The Yawhg is an uncommon occurrence at best. And when it comes down to it, I prefer to immerse myself in the twists and turns of a good narrative and the beauty of great visuals all by my lonesome.

For me, the pleasures of The Yawhg are few – too few for me to heartily recommend. It is not a bad game, but it is a game that caters to a group of people who often play games and experience art together. It’s just not a game for someone like me.

Type:Rider is a beautiful game about the history of typography. It is obvious that much love and care was put into its visual aesthetic. Each level is a collage-like smattering of gigantic letters, mixed in with the imagery and visual artistry that we associate with that era in history. For instance, the Clarendon level explores the evolution of slab serifs in the 19th century, throwing you into the Wild West among mine carts, wanted posters, and a bounty hunter’s roving crosshair, out to end you. The Futura level explores the “function over form” design of the Bauhaus School and the experimental typography of many modernist movements, littering the level with the colorful deconstructivist shapes of Malevich and Arp. The music and sounds of each level are also lovingly composed on top of that. There’s a great deal of visual and auditory pleasures to enjoy while playing this game; it’s just too bad that playing it for the gameplay is an experience that starts with disappointment and ends with frustration.

In keeping with the theme of type, your player character is a colon (:) that rolls and bounces about each level to collect the 26 letters of each font’s alphabet and asterisks which unlock different facts in that level’s book. It’s a creative idea and the colon was probably the best choice of punctuation mark around which to design.

Despite the strength of the idea, the bottom falls out of the entire execution very quickly. Sometimes you will just not roll fast enough, weighed down by being awkwardly long and flat. Jumping can be a nightmare as the colon’s physics can seem random and capricious, causing you to restart certain sections over and over again because it decided to bounce this way instead of that way or jumped from the wrong end, sending you backwards into a hazard.

The levels seem to have been designed and tested with a placeholder player character instead of this unwieldy one. Sometimes you are expected to land flat on the dot of a giant “i,” but the square is simply not long enough to hold you, dropping you to your death over and over until you land it just right. Some of the more challenging sections in the game involve passing moving hazards in a rhythm – certainly possible for a character that takes up a square hitbox, but infuriatingly difficult with the character you have. Neat level design such as rogue pixels in the Pixel section or the smashing pistons of the Times section are regrettably remembered as design flaws because of this shortcoming. The game consistently presents you with a nice amount of “game” for what is basically an edutainment title, only to immediately give you too much “game” and ruining the flow of something that should have been enjoyable and relaxing.

It’s also disappointingly evident that the game half and the educational half were worked on by two different teams. I’ve already mentioned the easily recognized love and care in the visual design. However, the facts you pick up about each historical era of typography read, at best, as lazy rehashes of a Wikipedia article. The worst are the entries that just throw a bunch of names and dates at you without truly looking at the importance and influence of those people and events. There’s a distinct lack of discussion about the design benefits of each font. Typos are almost ubiquitous and most are glaringly obvious. Did no one proofread this?

Type:Rider is such a beautiful game to look at and listen to; it’s a shame that I can’t honestly recommend it since all that looking and listening would have to happen while attempting to play it. The game design is not lacking in interesting ideas, but they could have been less lazy in testing them. The first line you see in the credits sequence tells you that the game was created by Cosmografik, with their company name kerned incorrectly. Surely there was room to try harder.

There has been much written about heaven and hell. The absolute paradise of the former and the absolute pain of the latter are some of only a small handful of human ideas that are immune to hyperbole; our mortal descriptions of such places will never be too much and of that we can be sure.

But what about what lies between? The concept of purgatory is a much harder one to pin down. Thoughts on the concept, both lay and philosophical, have defined it as anything from a second mortal existence to an afterlife of absolute nothingness. If the title is to be believed, LIMBO ostensibly takes place in this in-between afterlife. It may not be hell, but it is a far cry from heaven.

"Uncertain of his sister's fate, a boy enters LIMBO." This lone sentence is the closest thing to a synopsis that the creators have given us. How the boy got to limbo is unclear. Why you must press forward is unclear. But to stand still is to both promise and condemn yourself to nothing.

But after all, LIMBO is a puzzle platformer and the instinct to move forward is natural. The puzzles are elegantly designed and make the most of your limited capability for interaction: running, jumping, and moving objects. Everything feels right and the game plays as a good platformer should.

LIMBO is not content to only be another decent indie platformer, though, as the puzzles very quickly become trials of dread and fear. Death has always been part of platformers, but LIMBO is almost eager to remind you of the pain. In your desire to move forward, you only introduce to your character more ways to die. If you miss that jump, you will fall down a pit and be impaled on the spikes below. You will have your body torn to pieces by the crushing force of a giant bear trap. You will fall into a ragdoll's seizure as electricity fries you. Even the more quiet deaths feel horrible; drowning in water is a whole process of struggling and sinking before becoming still. The screen will linger and you will sit with it until you are ready to press a button to respawn. Do you want to try again?

The hazards of LIMBO seem too much to all be manmade, but they all seem purposeful. It is hard to ignore the sense of malice that pervades this world. The colorless settings and the silhouetted character designs do some amount in making the deaths less gruesome, but only so much. You might find yourself standing still when you get that second chance. To stand still is to do nothing, but to move forward is to create your own hell.

But maybe you do keep pushing forward and maybe you do succeed more often than you fail. The purpose of this boy's search for his sister is unclear: it could be a journey of redemption, or love, or curiosity. Either way, that there is even a chance at success and a chance at relief at the other end of each dangerous trial is, in a way, a promise of heaven. There will be hard times ahead, but the pain is not infinite. To be given the chance to find an answer and reach an end is a small but merciful thing. But before that, the hard times will only get harder.

There will always be ideas about what lies between heaven and hell, life and death. LIMBO has earned its spot among the best artistic representations of such a place – not only through its undeniable dark beauty, but also the fear that a similar world might await us.

I'm a proponent for expanding our limited and stagnant definition of what constitutes a "video game;" that games like Dear Esther exist is a good thing for the medium. The more we challenge the status quo through the creation and the experience of such games, the more we do to progress video games as a medium of artistic worth. I'm glad that Dear Esther has been as well-received as it has been; it's a modest landmark for the real success that such experimental titles can find today.

However, I am nothing if not a harsh critic, and Dear Esther has its problems, small piece of history that it is. It is possibly unfair to judge an experimental video game by the standards of more established media, but if video games expect to play in the big leagues, they shouldn't be exempt from playing by the same rules.

But first, there are things which Dear Esther does right. Easiest to praise are the visuals, which depict the island on which you wander as lonely but yearning to be explored. Each point of visual interest has been crafted with great care – from the vistas to the smallest details, like a lone buoy, far offshore and barely visible.

The size of the island itself is something to appreciate. Regardless of your feelings with regards to the game's very casual walking speed, the island's stretches of nothing have their own desolate beauty.

But while the setting of Dear Esther can easily hold interest, its story has a much harder time attempting to do the same. From what you are allowed to piece together, the narrator is attempting a sort of redemption by exile. His disembodied voice pops in occasionally at certain checkpoints to provide you with vague details about what basically amounts to "stuff." A small collection of first names, a meandering history of the island, and unclear, melodramatic recollections of ailments and car crashes are some of what you can expect from these telling monologues that are anything but. I very quickly came to realize that the game's visuals were better than its writing deserved. It is frustrating.

For a game like Dear Esther, the story's the thing. The plot here lacks so much specificity and context as to void its stabs at emotional poignancy. To be vague is one thing, but that artful reluctance to provide specifics is a better trait for a rational character than the opposite. When reasonable people are weighed down by guilt, the poetic musings they conjure surprise you by contrasting with the voice you expect; but the narrator of Dear Esther is too unhinged to make a clear point among all the overthinking. What we get is a voice that constantly oversells things and scurries back and forth much too often between too many incomplete themes. It is unsatisfying to follow and even more unsatisfying still to piece together. There are bits and pieces of good phrasing scattered within all the overwrought prose, but the story would have benefitted from the writers falling out of love with this character.

Dear Esther was made in a time when video games needed a reinvention. It tried for some big things and for that it has my respect. Visually, it is a full experience; I just wish that same amount of polish and editing was present in its other, crucial half.

In Starseed Pilgrim, the first thing you learn is that you can break blocks and plant seeds. You are then set upon a large, earthy block suspended in white void and expected to use your fresh and limited knowledge of this universe so far to explore away from your starting point. Different seeds grow at different speeds, shapes, directions, and wonderful sounds. You plant away and start to climb, sure without being sure that there must be something else in this vast emptiness besides yourself.

There is a challenge to the exploration, discovery, and successful return home – enough that even with the game's insistence on minimal to absent guidance, you'll want to make it at least once.

However, it is after surmounting this first hurdle that I no longer felt compelled to play, because the more I saw of Starseed Pilgrim, the more I recognized it as a solid proof of concept rather than a complete and satisfying game. Allow me to explain.

The blocks, the seeds, and the void are simple components: easily understood with some trial and error. These same elements, however, are also samey to a fault and become bland with overexposure. While the simplicity of the core mechanic is both visually and sonically polished, the simplicity of the game that contains it is lonely and boring; it feels incomplete. You will make your way from base block to base block with practiced efficiency, but there is less and less of a reason for you to do so. Exploration continues to reveal more of the same, as if the game had something against variety in design.

I have heard that, with some doing, you can indeed find the novel experiences that I expected as the rewards for my progress. I'm afraid that I just don't have the patience. I enjoy exploration for exploration's sake, but when a game tells me nothing and shows me even less, should I really be expected to keep at it?

You come home at 1:15 AM after a year away to a new family house you do not recognize. Of the three family members you expect to see, you find none. Doors are closed and lights are off. You begin your cautious search of this alien place. Among your first pieces of evidence are journal entries from your sister: apparently, your family has moved into this town's "psycho house." Your mind races to dark fantasies of poltergeists and serial killers. All of the clichés apply; it is a dark and stormy night.

Gone Home gives us constant hints that, at any time, it's going to lay it on thick. However, The Fullbright Company's inaugural game is more interested in dismantling and repurposing these horror tropes than reveling in them. We expect a "video game," broad and sensational; what we get is an emotional drama, affecting, sensitive, and satisfying – not to mention quietly ground-breaking for the medium of video games.

Nestled within a familiar framework of extreme fiction is an intimate story focused instead on the dramatic of the everyday. You are Kaitlin Greenbriar, coming home from a year abroad to a house you find unfamiliar. Your family isn't there. Gone Home will have you asking, in the most common yet resonant sense, if they are OK.

Gone Home pushes aside the exaggerated in favor of the real. It is not a game of thrills or reflexes, but that doesn't make it any less of an engrossing story experience. You will only experience as much as you find, but that is not to say that the story is hidden away – most of your family's things and thoughts are left in plain sight, though puzzle adventure game instincts will drive you to eventually leave no corner unexplored. However, as your thoroughness uncovers more guarded secrets and insecurities, you may come to feel that your roving eyes are piling on multiple counts of casual voyeurism. You may also feel ever more unable to rein in your curiosity. The various feelings you find laid bare in each successive tidbit, from humor to heartbreak, spur you on to find the next. The stories and characters are the driving force here, falling into place in a way that is nothing short of impressive. If you think of yourself as particularly empathetic, these emotional beats might make you feel as if you were discovering your own family.

Throughout the game, you are never sure if you'll see another person in this empty house, but you will discover a full sense of the characters nevertheless. They are presences absent and missing from the house: not just "offscreen." You'll find your father's discarded drafts and the regular distractions he used to dispel his writer's block. You'll find your mother's attempts at artistic appreciation and creation that took her mind off of what she sees as a happy marriage becoming less so. But most of all, you'll find your sister – every aspect of her – as growing up a teenager tends to leave behind many rambling thoughts. It is clear that she questions who she is and what she's doing with her life, but amid the uncertainty is the core of a wonderful little sister who has grown a lot in the year you were away. Her mixtapes of cathartic and immediate riot grrrl singles are my absolute favorite of the family's artifacts.

Human connection comes at a premium. The disconnected lives of our average, nuclear, suburban family have led to the conception of many modern horror stories and the clichés they represent. In a medium so commonly used as a delivery system for escapist fiction, it means very much that this small game has opted instead to tell us a down-to-earth story of love and its byproducts. Gone Home is about connection over separation, and the wonderful contradiction that is extraordinary love from ordinary circumstances. One can only hope that there will be more such stories to follow.

Ben and Dan are a pair of seasoned point-and-click adventurers who also happen to be your average British smartasses – though their jokes tend to be noticeably dumber (in a good way) and dirtier (again, in a good way). While trying to fix their TV in time for a relaxing episode of Magnum, P.I. they set off a chain of events which leads to the universe-hopping and time-jumping plots of Ben There, Dan That! and its sequel, Time Gentlemen, Please! The places and times they visit get sillier and sillier, but who really needs a deep plot when you've got good jokes?

Heavily influenced by classic point-and-click adventure games, both of the Ben and Dan games take their sense of humor and game feel from those old titles. Every line is a bad joke, an embarrassing pun, or an eye-rolling bit of meta-humor, and it's all a blast to read. The writing hits that perfect tone of "smart in the dumbest way" and keeps the energy high with line after line of funny, stupid goodness. It's hard not to be impressed with the writers when the necessary evil of attempted item combinations yields lines that are just as funny as the main dialogue. There must be thousands of lines across both of these games, and I can't think of even one that I didn't enjoy. The art style works into this, too, with a rough look that is nevertheless very charming, colorful, and quite cohesive across every level.

Of course, while old adventure games were remembered for their writing and aesthetics, their gameplay isn't remembered quite so fondly. Unfortunately, Ben and Dan sometimes dive headfirst into those nasty pitfalls. For every few puzzles that goes along smoothly and logically, there will be a puzzle that will absolutely stump you, leading to far too much time mucking about in an overflowing inventory or with the finicky interface. The later puzzles of both games tend to throw logic out the window and require solutions that, while amusing once you know about them, are basically impossible to find without a walkthrough. Still, despite taking the bad with the good of the classic adventure genre, I'd say that the good is easily good enough to outweigh some awkwardness in design. Worthy new entries into a near-forgotten genre.

There has been much praise and criticism thrown in the direction of Fez since its release in 2012, both for the quality of the game itself and also to reprimand and counteract the behavior of its PR disaster of a creator, Phil Fish. I have no doubt that there are already dozens of reviews more (or less) verbose, or critical, or exultant than mine if you're looking for something to exactly echo your crystallized and inexorable opinion of a game that came out over a year ago. Reservoirs of digital ink have long been drained on this topic. If you're sick of Fez reviews, I'd probably skip this one.

But certainly, Fez is just one of those games that is irresistible to discuss when given a new chance to do so. If you'll kindly excuse yet another Fez review, I'll take my turn at saying a few things, for I love this game unconditionally.

The genre of artsy indie platformers has become defined by several hits from the recent (and ongoing) indie game boom. Fez falls in line with the other standouts of the genre by providing satisfying platforming, a distinct visual design, and an exploration of some high-flying literary theme. Now I don't fault people who rail against the critical praise afforded these titles; after all, the desire for pure gameplay is a real one and these games tend to deliver on feel more often than complexity. I know I'm not changing the minds of these gamers. Fez is a leisurely collectathon with solid platforming and one core mechanic that works just right but only provides just enough. A decent game, if you like its particular blend of familiarity and novelty, but only that.

However, for those of you who like your games as gameplay plus x – for those of you who like a world that can hold you with its beauty, and for those who understand wanderlust and long for adventure and movement for their own sake – Fez is that.

Each node of Fez's game map is a little world unto itself. Each contains a secret or two that gets you closer to your end goal, but there exists a curious joy in the universe's "non-functional" elements. Infinite bookshelves encase a planetarium. A frightening mechanical tower hides within an unassuming lighthouse. Neon signs surround a floating bus stop that was surely once part of an ancient transportation hub. Seagulls squawk and waves break with a digital timbre. Ambient synth lines become synonymous with the environment over which they sometimes float and at other times cascade. Sometimes, deadly patches of glitch will manifest as crackling areas of starry space framed by RGB static. Magnificent sights and sounds surround you at every turn as both obstacles and gifts, giving you a wonderful sense of exploration into a beautiful unknown.

Even the game's more obtuse secrets arguably offer their own meta-appeal. Upon searching the Internet for ciphers to translate the game's fictional languages and passwords, I found that I had stumbled upon a community of virtual archaeologists. Scholars who had faced the same questions and decided to leave behind guides for inevitable explorers to come. I probably think too much of these sorts of things, but there is something special about a small game getting big. There's a charm to imagining a million identical, parallel universes of Fez being explored and solved in tandem. It was an unexpected group experience nested within a singleplayer one.

Fez: a game considered by many to be overrated – and I've done that perception no favors. I will admit that I might just be the right kind of pretentious to discover and enjoy accidental meaning where there isn't any. Still, the potency of my experiences stands. Fez is charming, whimsical, simple. However, the great mass of language devoted to it might exist because it is also magic, despite whatever anyone else might say. To those of you who romanticize adventure, Fez might just be the love letter you've been waiting for.