Recent reviews by Richard Whitman

Styl który zabija.

Suda51 hiper-stylizuje życie płatnego zabójcy który w imię dobra (i pieniędzy) wyrusza na kolejne misje. Sensu tutaj specjalnie nie ma bo historia to majaki które z klisz wpadają w totalny surrealizm i, mimo iż na papierze może brzmieć to fantastycznie, przyprawia bardziej o ból głowy niż o opad szczęki.

Żal że system walki ogranicza się do jednego przycisku chociaż muszę przyznać że z boku całość może robić oszałamiające wrażenie. Mondo tnie jak opętany co rusz wpadając w (triggerowaną przez gracza) furię pozwalającą na ciosy końcowe z wszędzie tryskającym osoczem mimo to brak tu dostarczającej głębi i kontroli nad bohaterem; mało jest również sygnałów lepiej pozwalających na reagowanie na przeciwników i otoczenie - a jeżeli są to znikają niestety w chaosie ostrych krawędzi i maksymalnie podkręconych kolorów.

Nie każda gra może być od Platinum... ale aż by się chciało by te dwie ekipy połączyły siły.

Aha.
Jednym z bossów jest pociąg.

Very sweet experience that has been missing from video games from some time. If you have been raised on older consoles and still remember the mediocre yet charming titles that the Japanese developers churned out at that time do not miss Gurumin.

The game itself is a laid-back action 'RPG' about a young that has moved to a remote village to live with her grandpa only to find new friends in and adventures with... monsters living next to the village.

Now, this was originally a early-2000's-PC-turned-PSP game so the levels themselves are rather short and the optional ones are reverse-copies yet are still enjoyable to traverse to and fro. The controls are not perfect but the porting Team is very helpful though and updates the game with new, requested PC-oriented features like button re-mapping etc. The game, obviously, runs very well and should budge even on toasters.

If your sick of the Assassin's, Duties, and other lifeless products get Gurumin - a result of nerdy love for video games, no more and no less.

Dust: An Elysian Tail harkens back to those childhood experiences that molded most of us. Be it the lengthy afternoons spent with Castlevania or seeing another rerun of The Neverending Story, it was always about the illusive sense of adventure. Not just saving the world and rescuing the princess, but about places that were ‘out there’ and yet to be explored. Dust, while not flawless, is sure to bring back those feelings.

The first thing anyone will notice about Dust, whether by playing it or by watching a trailer, is how great it looks. Indie games get a lot of flack for being uninspired in this regard, often falling back to the pseudo-retro graphics known from the 8 or 16 bit classics, so a game like this, whose art is completely hand-painted, will feel like a breeze of fresh air. Colourful, yet withheld when needed, the carefully drawn surroundings and characters paint an image of a vibrant world that most would crave to explore.

You’ll notice that the land of Falana is always in motion, either by environment animation of flora and fauna or weather effects, both of which breathe life into the gorgeous frames of Dust. Along with the fantastic score by HyperDuck SoundWorks, this creates a sense of wonder which fuels a need to completely explore the Metroidvania-like levels filled with branching paths and hidden nooks and crannies. Dust: An Elysian Tail offers a sense of adventure of the best kind, one that looms just around the next hill or valley; it screams of creepy haunted houses, frozen caverns, scalable mountains and dense forests brimming with life, and with each screen traversed it makes you want more.

You travel the world of Falana as Dust, an amnesic who wakes up in the middle of a forest with a talking sword in his hand and a flying squirrel-like, soon-to-be sidekick character Fidget by his side. From there, the story travels the well-known twists and turns of evil generals, scorned warriors, dying lands tied in a bow of redemption and hope, ect. It is, by all means, a classic Disney-like story that offers both sorrow and cheer in healthy doses but somehow lacks any serious grip on a seasoned player. While the story sometimes touches on more serious themes like death and identity, it does so in a very straightforward, one-dimensional manner, which doesn’t help the message delivery. It is absolutely mediocre, which I guess is its main flaw, but on the bright side, it never feels like something you must pay attention to. The ability to skip any dialogue or scene to get back to the action helps in this regard.

Dust: An Elysian Tail’s gameplay is built upon the classic action RPG mechanic that pits the amazingly proficient main hero against dozens of enemies at once; in Dust’s case, both on the ground and in the air. It’s a frantic experience that utilizes two attack buttons (one for a normal attack, second for a move called the Dust Storm), Fidget’s ability to throw projectiles, and lots of jumping and evading.

In combat, the player feels powerful and always in control, which is underlined by the game’s snappy and responsive controls; toying with enemies or trying new tactics are the end results for a skilled player. Sadly, the lack of challenge turns the combat into a nearly mindless slasher that, while it feels good, offers little in terms of real satisfaction. The game’s normal enemies are mostly cannon fodder (minus the big enemies that require waiting for a counter-attack), and the bosses are unimaginative and lack any emotional weight. It’s far too easy to breeze and slash through without any hindrance.

Perhaps most disappointingly, while you gain some new moves useful for exploration and Fidget gets new projectiles, Dust never really evolves in battle. You gain levels and bump your stats, but you never learn any new combos aside from the starting few, which completely undermines the character development that might (or rather, should) be tied to it. I am all for games that rely on the skill of the player using a limited number of abilities but Dust, with its laughably easy enemies could be hardly counted as one, so having the game come up with new tricks to entertain the player would be preferable. Unfortunately, the game is stuck in complete limbo in this regard, offering an entertaining system that will, sadly, be completely forgotten once the game is shut off.

As it stands, the weight was put on the wrong aspect of the gameplay, offering more slashing than exploring. This ended with both areas of gameplay being seriously hindered. The maps, while fun to go through with all their hidden areas to find and environment dangers to avoid, sometimes feel lackluster and not developed enough, and the combat gets rather mindless after a while.

While it does get halfway in both, it is still a very enjoyable experience that will suck you into its world for a good 12 or so hours. The introduction of puzzles, more complex and inter-connected maps with more secret nooks and crannies, some more fleshing out of the combat system, and prioritizing quality over quantity would be a godsend for Dust. It seems like a long list of flaws, but again, Dust: An Elysian Tale establishes a great foundation for a possible sequel and is not to be missed if you are an action RPG fan. Once you take a step in the world of Falana, it’s hard not to fall in love with it.

http://www.gatheryourparty.com/articles/2013/06/06/dust-an-elysian-tail-review/

After AMC’s disappointing TV adaptation of the comic, and the terrific flop that was Telltale’s Jurassic Park, it was hard for me to have faith that Telltale’s interpretation of The Walking Dead could work. “Here we go,” I thought, “Another soulless cash grab riding on the zombie hype train. Another licensed game that, like so many, will be terrible.” But suddenly and unexpectedly, the release of the first episode brought praise from the masses, and this praise only increased as the later episodes were released. By Episode 3 even I, as cynical as I had once been, took the plunge into the zombified apocalypse of The Walking Dead. And through some miracle, I was wrong in not believing.

Telltale’s game follows a new character in The Walking Dead universe; Lee Everett, a teacher-turned-felon who, while being transported to a prison when all hell breaks loose, begins a harrowing struggle for survival. During the journey, Lee and his group of survivors travel from one haven to the next, seeking refuge from not only mindless zombies, but other survivors who may be an even greater threat than the undying horde. The game’s story takes advantage of its episodic style of delivery, as each of the five episodes has its own “mini-arc” laden with new challenges and threats that serve to slowly and steadily develop the group and the internal relationships they share, as it works towards its tear-jerking finale.

The group is colorful; consisting of a Floridian family of three, a radio reporter, a female soldier, her prick of a father, and many other ordinary people, who are constantly evolving over the 10-hour campaign. Your group will change, depending on your responses in the conversations that Lee will have, and his actions in dramatic moments. Some options will have people staying by your side to the very end, while others options will cause them to run and hide, or worse yet, die. The fate of the group is in your hands.

It’s hard not to enjoy spending time with characters that are so brilliantly designed and written. Each person has personal goals, dreams, and an elaborate past which guarantees that even the most unlikeable character is interesting and sympathetic. Getting the chance to have a peaceful chat with the group during the brief and sparse downtime is an essential element to understanding these characters, making each action they take seem, well, human – driven by their needs, fears and paranoia.

In amongst all of the commotion is Clementine, an eight year old that pairs up with Lee at the beginning of the adventure and is, without a doubt, the second most important person in the game. Personally I have enough problems with children in real life, let alone videogames, but Clementine feels so natural and essential to the story it is impossible not to feel something for her. What makes Lee and Clementine’s relationship unique, and endearing, is that it is not forced down the player throat. While she does follow you throughout the game, no matter the options you choose, you don’t have to talk to her during the ‘free-roam’ parts and during conversation; in fact you can be downright mean and condescending to her, if so inclined. This creates a joy of choosing your own comrades, and it makes the link between you, the player, and Clementine all the more important because you craft it on your own – carefully choosing words as to not hurt her while at the same time keeping in mind that she has to learn so much to adapt to the lethal environment. Other game developers could learn a whole bunch from Telltale as this is the main distinction between making the player care for the character and making him indifferent or worse, annoyed.

There are places where, unfortunately, The Walking Dead fails to deliver; notably in its gameplay. Frankly, there’s just not a whole lot to do in the game. The puzzles, if you could even call them puzzles, are laughably easy and the vast majority will breeze through them as they stumble onto another segment of talking-heads. The game is also very empty outside of the main story. In the more relaxed moments of the game you can walk freely around certain areas, but don’t even bother trying to find any additional puzzles or secrets not related to the main story, as there simply are none.

However, the intense adventure game point-and-clicking is surprisingly engrossing; due to the very real threat of failure meaning the death of those you have come to care about. Besides the emotional investment, the game also does some interesting things to make its clicking-frenzy more interesting, for example; you may have to manually hack away at a zombie to retrieve something from him, and as you hit it strike after gory strike, finally it falls dead and while both Lee and yourself are disgusted, it brings a sense of relief that the ordeal is finally over.

And while Telltale boasts of a “tailored story,” ultimately the game does not have a truly branching storyline. The Walking Dead is ultimately an extremely linear narrative that simply gives you the illusion that your choices have an effect on the overarching story. Some may argue that, in a real apocalyptic world with the undead running wild, your choices would not ultimately mean anything either, but the lack of true choice is simply the cost of the huge amount of work that the small team at Telltale had already put into the game, they couldn’t possibly hope to develop a game with an incredibly large branching story with the scope of the game they created. While it is a shame that the story is not as “tailored” as Telltale would have you believe, ultimately the story they have created is stunning and much preferable to a more simplistic story with many inconsequential branching paths. The promise of a “tailored” experience almost hurts the game, as players agonize over decisions to keep their favourite minor character alive instead of enjoying the wonderful principal story of the game.

Telltale’s newest outing is by no means a perfect one. There is much to fix before the inevitable Season 2, from the inadequate gameplay to the poorly handled story-branches, but after experiencing The Walking Dead, I’m hopeful that Telltale knows what they are doing. The Walking Dead has one of the greatest stories in a video game, and with it Telltale has marked its presence in the industry. If you can ignore the lacking gameplay then you are in for a thrilling ride on an emotional rollercoaster that you won’t soon forget. The stakes are high for the sequel but now I believe.

http://www.gatheryourparty.com/articles/2012/11/30/the-walking-dead-review/

Thomas Was Alone is a game that has you control a band of suddenly sentient AIs roaming around the computer world stacking, jumping in portals and looking for an exit of their quadrate prison. Originally conceived during a personal 24-hour gamejam by Mike Bithell in 2010, the game, of course, has undergone much polishing and has definitely been deepened as an experience. The finished product is not only a simple platforming game in which you have to use different characters to progress through the level but also an interesting experiment in storytelling and, for the most part, characterization.

As you would expect, the core of Thomas Was Alone is jumping and using the right character for the right job, which the game handles in a very standard manner. The Blocks (characters) are of different width and height and also sometimes possess specific abilities – one can float on water, another acts as a trampoline – which is all what you would expect from a single-player puzzler. When you are given the right combination of unique characters the game truly shines. Combining the abilities of the anti-gravity James with the double-jump Sarah is immensely fun and, while the levels are rather easy, it is still very satisfying to see this small ensemble prevail. Sadly, most of the time, and especially in the levels that use a large amount of characters, the cooperation feels like a chore as many of the obstacles put before you are of a very artificial nature.

Thomas, the main character of the game, is an all-rounder and it feels like you could finish most of the levels using just him but the game imposes you with other characters that sometimes serve only as stepping stones once or twice, only to be left waiting for the player to finally switch to them and perform the menial task of controlling their useless, hard-edged bodies to the teleport. Most of the other puzzler games have the main character utilize tools, levers or switches to get to the end of the level, which then serve no other purpose. In Thomas Was Alone the tools are the characters and it simply does not work well. I assume the developer wants us to care about the characters, something that would create a natural drive to get them to safety, but the style of characterization makes this impossible.

Before I explain what exactly is wrong with the characterization and effectively flaws the whole design, I have to mention the base that drives the narrative in Thomas Was Alone – the narrator. The game, as many others after the success of Bastion, employs an all-knowing entity that outlines what is happening throughout the 5-hour journey. There are no visual cues, no gameplay mechanics that would serve to push the narration forward, so we have to rely on the voice of the British comedian Danny Wallace (who also helped with the script) and, as much as I loathe the idea of a narrator in a video game, he does that quite well, effectively adding to the overall soothing mood of the game. In the end though, one has to wonder if the inclusion of an external voice was, in fact, necessary. Would it not be better to make the narrator be the voice of Thomas, the main hero of the game, thus fleshing him out into a full character instead of the shell that he is now? Instead, the narrator provides us with bits and pieces of characterization for every AI we encounter, making the overall narrative heavily lean onto “telling” instead of “showing”. This makes the whole design fall flat as, in result, we do not really care about any of the controllable Blocks as they are not correctly shaped into characters. The narrator might tell you that X is feeling morose/happy/excited/etc., which is fine and dandy, but when it does not have any effect on the game you are playing, it makes the information completely pointless. The best example would be (and I hope you will not regard this as a spoiler) the situation when we are told that one AI is in love with another and… that is all that happens. No new mechanics are introduced, the Blocks do not suddenly work together in perfect harmony nor do they change their normal behaviour. The information changes nothing. To give credit where credit is due – the characterization of James is perfect. He is introduced as a lonely soul, forever ridiculed for being different from the rest and this actually translates to the gameplay – he is the only one that can, and even has to, move upside down. Unfortunately, no other character, maybe with the exception of the late-game Sarah, is crafted so well, making the platforming aspect loose most of its appeal.

Thomas Was Alone is certainly an experiment in the field of narration. Have everything that Mike Bithel designed clicked, it might have been a unique experience marrying the retro nostalgia with charmingly quirky modern storytelling. Sadly, it falls short of its noble goal, ultimately ending in a product that would be best labeled “style over substance”.

http://www.gatheryourparty.com/articles/2013/02/07/thomas-was-alone-review/

Many, if not all, cultural phenomena can be traced back successfully to a point of origin, something that Hunter S. Thompson would call a “long fine flash“ condensing the energy of an entire generation, ushering forward the new and unexpected. For adventure games that point was late 80s and the reason was Ron Gilbert with his crew at LucasArts. When the team was busy laying the foundations of an entire genre with Maniac Mansion, my parents were still enjoying a carefree and childless life so, unfortunately, I have missed what some consider the golden era of point-and-click adventure games. Even later on, my path has rarely crossed with the classics, being a primarily console gamer and all, but finally the genre has caught up to me and sparked my interest like not many do (maybe it was the top hat). Finally, upon seeing the trailer for The Cave, the title that Ron Gilbert was returning to adventure games, I knew that fate was giving me a chance to confront the past of the genre and maybe even the future. After finishing the game I’m pretty sure I saw neither.

The game starts with the player being greeted by the titular Cave, who will also be the narrator further on, and being given a choice of 3 out of 7 distinct characters with vague names such as The Scientist, The Adventurer, The Monk and so on. Each of the characters not only has a unique ability to them but also an exclusive storyline. Quite soon you will realize that the narration is something different from what we are accustomed to – none of the characters, except the Cave, have any dialogue and their past is discovered by the player in comic book-like pages that are plastered on the walls with an occasional nod or hint from the omniscient narrator. The Cave offers a rather rarely seen exposition by gameplay where you unravel the mysteries by your own actions – and most of them are not what would be generally considered “nice”. You accidentally murder people on your quest to get the treasure, push the switch or any other achievement-trope you can think off which generates an unique feeling of dread of what will the next area and next puzzle bring. The pinnacle of suspense is by far the campaign for The Twins, which presents us with two children determined to break away from their over-loving parents – at all costs (think of Tim Burton when his creative juices were still running). It is easy to spoil what happens in The Cave so I will not go into further details as the stories presented are not exactly complex, yet they somehow latch on to you, as every parable should.

The gameplay is broken into 6 areas – 3 unique to their characters interwoven with 3 more general with everybody in your team taking part in the action. As you go further down, the spelunking will take you from an old mine through a monster-infested route up to an isolated island whose only residents are an old hermit, his parrot and his dog (hilarity ensues). The puzzles contained within the sectors, while not very creative or fresh, flow naturally from one to another and very rarely do you feel like your path is being artificially blocked. When you leave the island you have seen the worst side of your back-stabbing, money-grubbing, fame-craving team and you are ready for a catharsis, a moment where you can make all wrongs into rights and somehow redeem your ensemble. Unfortunately, you are thrown to the entrance of the Cave where you uncover the last page of the comic book. The game ends.

With 4 hours on the clock you feel cheated, not only by the game time (you still have other characters to play after all) but by the lack of resolution. After all you have went through, it feels like the game-creators have thrown the towel in mid-sentence and called it quits, leaving the player yearning for a proper ending to a story they have witnessed. With each next playthrough the feeling only intensifies. Once again you are forced to complete the same general areas which offer nothing new – not in terms of cooperation which boils down to “have three people pull three levers” and not in terms of using unique abilities to solve puzzles. The platforming, with which the game is abounded, is stiff and rather annoying, not surprising given Gilbert's detest of it. You begin to long for a normal inventory instead of going to-and-fro carrying items one at a time. The character-specific areas feel wonderful and refreshing but once again the crew’s struggles feel futile in the wake of the ending. Even the addition of a “good” ending that can be achieved is meaningless, as it feels tacked on and irritatingly un-final.

When you look back on The Cave you see an unpolished gem that, with a bit more work and thought put into it, might be seen as an example of proper gameplay-driven narrative dealing with common, but not trivial, themes. It is a journey that does as much well as it does bad leaving the player with a thirst for more. As for my dilemma – unfortunately it is neither the past nor the future but the present, in all it’s wobbly, uncertain and disappointing glory.

http://www.gatheryourparty.com/articles/2013/03/29/the-cave-review/

(Do not buy this at full price.)