Ethan: Meteor Hunter is a platformer that mixes puzzle elements, including the unique abilities of pausing time and manipulating objects using the power of the mind. Our hero is a rodent who obtained his telekinetic power from coming into contact with a meteor and he’s now on a mission to collect fragments of the fallen rocks.

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Seaven Studio was set up by a group of former Hydravision Entertainment employees after it closed down in September 2012. The team have decided to go ‘full indie’ which has the benefit of getting closer to their target audience during development, and are therefore able to share a lot more about their project with their fans. Ethan: Meteor Hunter is their first project together.

We initially got our hands on the title at the Rezzed 2013 indie show earlier this year, where its high quality and the variety of game mechanics immediately caught our attention. Seaven Studio were kind enough to provide us with a preview copy and help with some of our questions, answers to which went into our first article about the platformer. Our initial experience with the gameplay was very positive; we could tell it was going to be an addictive and challenging game.

If only it was just another day for Ethan, the calm before the storm.

Ethan is a rat who finds himself caught up in a meteor storm, interrupting a feud with his neighbour who quickly becomes his nemesis. After coming into contact with one of the rocks, our hero develops the special ability of telekinesis and sets off to collect all of the other meteor fragments that fell from the sky. It’s a very comic-book-style story that is introduced briefly at the beginning of the game, although not much more is revealed throughout which is pretty normal for titles of this genre.

Ethan: Meteor Hunter’s gameplay begins with some easy platforming and puzzles, but the difficulty is quickly ramped up like a slap in the face. This isn’t a bad thing as too many games are dumbed-down these days with lengthy tutorials and so it’s a welcoming change to be thrown head-first into acidic goo, crushing machinery, sharp saw blades and hot burning flames without the usual hand-holding. Ethan is best played using a gamepad; we used a wireless Xbox 360 controller which is perfect for this type of game.

This particular puzzle took the team quite some time to figure out.

Each level is short and only takes one or two minutes to complete, and this would be a problem if it wasn’t a platformer that has such a variety of game mechanics. But something new is introduced with each: for example, an early stage features a pogo stick which allows Ethan to bounce his way upwards, and later on mouse traps can be used to launch objects. Seeing a new mechanic at each level is refreshing and ensures the gameplay doesn’t get stale as it progresses – something we also found in Thomas Was Alone.

The most unique mechanic comes from Ethan being in the meteor storm: a telekinesis ability that allows him to freeze time and manipulate objects in the environment to build structures or traverse obstacles. This power forms the basis of most puzzles such as stacking wooden shapes to reach ledges or conduct electricity with metal blocks to active machines. Controlling it is simple: a button-press pauses time, allowing Ethan to move certain objects with his mind within a restricted area. The controls may be simple but the puzzles aren’t, and they provide quite a challenge involving both logic and timing.

Ethan doesn’t have an unlimited use of his telekinesis ability; he must collect tokens that can be used to pause time and these are typically used-up for one puzzle. A sense of achievement can be had when completing a challenge and finding you still have one token left, but this doesn’t make the rest of the level any easier. Only the exact amount of pauses needed to get past a puzzle are provided. If you make a mistake it’s possible to rewind time to attempt the puzzle again, just like in Braid, and this cleverly ensures that you’ll never get stuck.

Seaven Studio set out to make Ethan: Meteor Hunter challenging for gamers, and we definitely found it to be a difficult game – welcome in today’s world of quick-time-events and regenerating health. You can expect to be replaying short segments repeatedly until you get it right which can be slightly punishing, but overall the experience is enjoyable. Some of the harder parts are introduced by Ethan’s nemesis and this can be a little frustrating; if it takes ten attempts with a forced five-second cutscene each time, it tends to break the flow of the gameplay. Thankfully, switching between puzzling and platforming feels natural and mostly uninterrupted unlike other similar games that insist on breaking up the action constantly.

How would you place these wooden blocks to pass the flames? The blocks will burn too.

The visual design takes a familiar style we see in platformers today: it’s rendered in 3D with 2D side-scrolling and a sense of depth provided by two backgrounds that move independently. Most of the action keeps the focus at the foreground leaving the background easy to ignore even though it does include some interesting animation based on the style of the current level such as a sawmill, a strange underground chemistry lab and a greenhouse. It does feel like everything takes place underground but that’s understandable considering Ethan is a rat.

The environments are detailed and our hero himself is well-animated (check out his long tail). Objects both useful and dangerous are clearly drawn with the green glow of meteor fragments or the bubbling of acid being the most visually pleasing. As with any game, it’s important that interactive objects are instantly recognisable and that their function is obvious and this is something Seaven Studio have accomplished well; there are no problems with attempting a speed run through a level and getting stuck when you have to pause to remember how something works.

This cutscene plays each time you attempt the level which can get annoying after many retries.

Death scenes for Ethan aren’t gory but do show some mild violence, depending on whether he’s being sawn into small pieces or burnt alive. This keeps the age rating down and a dedicated section of the developer website explains how safe the game is for kids. Take a look at their a humorous video of Ethan’s various death animations.

Music and sound effects are subtle but do well to represent what’s going on and give the title a feeling of being underground. The sounds for objects and traps clearly identify their functionality which is enough to support the gameplay, but unfortunately they aren’t memorable enough to stand out. The background music doesn’t demand much attention but its bass line and melody certainly provides some tension.

The game looks rather pretty at times and is generally visually pleasing.

Ethan: Meteor Hunter was made to appeal to all types of gamers; those that want hard-core challenges, achievement hunters, laid-back casuals and speed-run enthusiasts. There really is something here for everyone, especially if you want to be tested, as one particular boss battle took us an hour of retrying to overcome. Thanks to the wealth of innovative mechanics there’s a lot of variety in the gameplay, and replayability comes from collecting all of the meteor fragments and discovering the hidden cheeses. At one point we found ourselves asking: how did we come to play as a rat riding a shark bumper-car shooting mines? It’s rare to be asking yourself such questions whilst playing video games these days.

Overall we’ve thoroughly enjoyed Ethan: Meteor Hunter: it’s a challenging but enjoyable title with some well-executed and innovative gameplay mechanics. It doesn’t matter what you’re looking for in a platformer because it will definitely provide it. As the difficulty can quickly change from easy to hard, this is a game we imagine is very suitable for a parent to play with their child – as long as the elder can get through the more challenging sections without having to hand the controller over for it to be done properly! For those who don’t do too well with difficult titles requiring trial and error, there are bound to be some moments of rage but keep calm and stick with it for a feeling of accomplishment.

This boss battle took a lot of retrying to defeat.

A big thank you to Seaven Studio for answering our questions in our preview and for their time at the Eurogamer Expo 2013 where they joined us for an interview. It’s been a pleasure and we look forwarding to seeing more games from them in future.

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Horror-puzzler The 7th Guest was praised for its innovation back in 1993, as it used FMV clips as part of its core gameplay and featured a sprinkling of adult content. But has this title stood the test of time or do gamers now prefer their horror a little more polished?

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The 7th Guest was one of the first video games to be released on CD-ROM only and this title, along with LucasArts’ Star Wars: Rebel Assault and Brøderbund’s Myst, helped promote the adoption of CD drives over two decades ago in 1993. It was very successful and sold more than two-million copies worldwide, as well as receiving a lot of attention for making live-action clips part of its core gameplay (as well as its so-called ‘adult’ content!).

I first played The 7th Guest shortly after its release and I remember that it scared the hell out of me. Admittedly I’m a bit of a wimp, but it was one of those games that I’d only touch when all the lights were on and my parents were at home. Unfortunately I never did finish it because I found some of the puzzles too hard and, being as it was a time before the use of internet in the home had really taken off, a walkthrough wasn’t available. So I was kind of looking forward to picking up Trilobyte’s puzzle-horror again and finally putting it to rest.

Players find themselves in a haunted mansion without a memory.

The story is set in 1935 in the town of Harley-on-the-Hudson and centres around a drifter named Henry Stauf. After having a dream about a beautiful doll, he betters himself by becoming a popular toy-maker and his playthings are given to all of the local children. However, at the height of his success many of them die after coming down with an incurable virus; and meanwhile, Stauf builds an eerie mansion on the edge of town after being guided by another vision.

Players find themselves in his house without a memory and no recollection of how they got there. As you explore, you’ll discover that the building is haunted by the ghosts of six people whom Stauf called together for a party, with the expectation that an unknown seventh would eventually join them. But what happened to them? Will the toy-maker’s true nature be revealed? And who is the mysterious seventh guest?

Who is the mysterious seventh guest that everyone is searching for?

There’s not too much to say about gameplay, except that The 7th Guest is all about puzzles. The mansion is made up of a number of different rooms and players explore these looking for the next challenge. Occasionally you’ll bump into ghosts who reveal the next part of the plot through live-action cutscenes, and you may come across a number of ‘supernatural events’ such as hands moving through a painting or a head emerging from a pot full of soup in the kitchen (see the video below).

It’s not hard to find the puzzles however so those looking forward to a spooky search for clues will be somewhat disappointed. You’d therefore expect the challenges to be good ones seeing as the game is based entirely around them, but unfortunately they’re a bit of a mixed bag. Some are very simple and require hardly any thinking; some are extremely difficult; and some are too long, taking ages to complete even though the solution itself may in fact be easy. Top this off the animated pieces of the puzzles moving as slowly as they do, and you’ll probably end up cursing at the screen at least once.

The blood-flow challenge is one of the better ones.

There were twenty-two puzzles in the original game and two have been removed in the iPad version due to ‘various technical reasons’. This is possibly a good thing as you might not want to subject yourself to an additional couple because the controls are so sticky; but the downside is that they’re not the ones you wouldn’t actually want to play. Many of the challenges are duplicates and the originality of some, such as the cake and blood-flow pieces, are outweighed by repetitive coin-flip and chess-based scenarios. This is the reason why I never completed the game when I originally tried it all those years ago: I simply got bored of seeing yet another chess board, and the plot holes meant that even the story wasn’t enough to keep me going.

The 7th Guest was originally released a year before Myst in 1993 and gamers flocked to stores in order to buy it. But now, twenty years later, Brøderbund’s masterpiece is an adventure classic while Trilobyte’s horror-puzzler has pretty much faded into obscurity. Myst immerses players in a number of detailed worlds; its puzzles are woven into the environment; the game can be completed in a number of ways; and there’s a pleasant difficulty level throughout. The 7th Guest restricts you to the rooms of haunted mansion; its challenges are strictly standalone; it’s a very linear title that requires certain mysteries to be solved before others; and the quality of the puzzles is inconsistent. For me, there’s just no competition.

Not another chess puzzle!

It sounds as if I’m being extremely negative about this title but it does have a couple of redeeming features. It started the FMV trend and was seen as the future of gaming, being heralded as a massive jump in the evolution of game design back in the day. The transition between areas in Myst was done instantly so that it kind of resembled a slideshow, whereas those in The 7th Guest show the whole movement from location to location and this does look somewhat better. Additionally, the horror-puzzle genre was quite unique at the time so many players wanted to get their hands on the title to see what it was all about.

Unfortunately however, I found the script to be poor and the acting is almost terrible. Everything is really hammed up, from the cutscenes where ghosts appear and reveal how they were murdered to the screams that can occasionally be heard throughout the mansion. I understand that video game horror wasn’t so subtle or ‘psychological’ back in 1993 but it’s hard to believe I found The 7th Guest as scary as I did then. For example, take a look at the ‘head in the soup pot’ below – it’s pretty funny, right?

There’s a small possibility that I might return to this title at some distant point in the future, when I want a puzzle title that doesn’t require too much involvement. But I can’t see this happening any time soon; in fact, Craig played most of the game with me and never wants to see it again! However, if you do find that you enjoy it you might want to take a look at the sequel The 11th Hour (although this didn’t exactly receive glowing reviews); and Trilobyte have confirmed that they’re working on a third instalment.

If this title hadn’t been so innovative with its genre, FMV cutscenes and ‘adult content’ in 1993, I doubt it would have received such a positive reception at its original release. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not the worst puzzle game I’ve ever played, but it’s certainly not the best either. You’re probably better off going with something that’s a pure puzzler, such as an instalment from the Professor Layton series or The Tiny Bang Story, or a complete horror, such as Outlast. Unless of course you want to see that soup head in the kitchen of Stauf’s mansion.

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Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers is Sierra’s 1993 point-and-click adventure, set in New Orleans and based on a tale of voodoo and murder. A game full of mystery, intrigue and a little bit of horror – perfect for Halloween.

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Under the direction of acclaimed writer Jane Jensen, the first title in the Gabriel Knight series was among the first adventure games to feature fictional stories based on real legends. In an interview with Game Informer, she said that she was given a great deal of freedom in creating the title’s concept: “One of the great things about Sierra was that Ken Williams really believed in the artistic vision. If he gave you the chance to do a game, that was your responsibility. Nobody told you what to do with it. If it didn’t sell, then you wouldn’t do another game for him, but he would let you have that freedom.” And it looks like his ‘hands-off’ approach worked, because Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers won the Consumer Electronics Show’s ‘Best of Show award in 1993 and two ‘Adventure Game of the Year’ awards in 1994.

I downloaded the title from GOG because the 1001-Up.com team were planning some articles on horror games for our Halloween week, believing that I’d never played it before. But there was something about it that seemed too familiar and now I’m not quite sure whether I’ve picked it up in the past or not! Whatever the case may be, the retro opening screen and pixelated graphics were a welcome sight and I couldn’t wait to get engrossed in Gabriel’s world.

I couldn’t wait to get engrossed in Gabriel’s world.

The story takes place in New Orleans and follows Gabriel Knight, a struggling author who’s a bit of a ladies’ man. Hoping to use the investigation as the basis of a new novel, he uses his friendship with old pal Detective Mosely to his advantage and starts looking into a spate of murders which apparently have voodoo overtones. As the case progresses, his recurring nightmares get more horrific and he finds himself drawn to a mysterious and beautiful socialite. Who is the lost relative from Germany who keeps trying to contact him about his ‘destiny’? Why do the killings seem to always lead back to him in some way? And when it comes down to the line, will Gabriel choose between love and forgiveness or fulfilling his duty?

The depth of background material that the game is based on is amazing. The history of New Orleans, the slave trade in the West Indies and United States, the Haitian slave rebellion, Voodoun and African tribal religions all figure into the story, along with some real-life locations. It’s a well-researched, gripping tale that’s guaranteed to keep you glued to your seat from the beginning until the very end.

Gabriel gets cosey with the mysterious socialite.

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers is a classic point-and-click adventure. Actions such as examine, move and talk are completed by right-clicking to rotate through their icons or moving the cursor to the top of the screen to uncover a hidden bar. This has the benefit of freeing up visual real-estate allowing for more of those lovely old-school graphics but unfortunately, the lack of a smart cursor does tend to slow down gameplay a little. Also, the correct icon to use can sometimes be a bit ambiguous; for example, the ‘move’ and ‘open’ actions seem to work on the same object at different points in the game.

The story unfolds over a sequence of days, each of which has a required set of actions to be performed before moving onto the next. This means that the story is mostly linear but play within each chapter can take many different routes. Each opening sequence begins as Gabriel wakes up, grabs a cup of coffee and discusses his current situation with his assistant Grace Nakimura at his rare book shop in the French Quarter. Her part in the game is limited at the start but does increase over the duration of gameplay; this wonderful character acts as a resource for the lusty author completing any research requested, while continuing to bat off his advances.

Grace and Gabriel have a love-hate relationship.

As with most classic point-and-clicks, conversations are frequent and very important to story progression. Gabriel has access to two talk actions, ‘chat’ and ‘interrogate’, the former being a great way to get to know more about the characters and their personalities. If the latter is selected, players are presented with close-ups of our author and his subject along with a menu system, which then allows them to ask pertinent questions which may open up further lines of enquiry. Only eleven characters throughout the game can be interrogated and while this may not seem like many, they actually have quite a lot to say for themselves; gamers who prefer a faster-paced action may therefore not find Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers to their taste.

Gabriel is equipped with a tape recorder and he uses this during his investigations. It means that the player can replay any past conversation they’ve had with an interrogation subject and this proves to be invaluable when piecing together puzzle solutions. The only annoying thing about the device is that it records absolutely everything that’s said – so, if in error you click on a line of enquiry that has already been exhausted and the character repeats what they’ve just said, you’ll hear them say the same thing twice when you replay the dialogue.

Interrogating subjects results in a wealth of new information.

This game is generally regarded as being a difficult one and some clues are extremely subtle. In some cases, you’ll only realise there was a clue after completing the related puzzle! There are a few points during gameplay which seem to intentionally leave players unsure how to proceed and for me this was great way of conveying Gabriel’s feelings. It may be a case of revisiting areas already seen, interrogating subjects already spoken to, or replaying conversations using the tape recorder. Some challenges will require you to make leaps of intuition based on the information you’ve managed to discover, which means that Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers probably wouldn’t suit novice adventure gamers.

There are a variety of puzzles, the usual conversation- and inventory-based ones you find in similar games along with some that rely on timing and conditions. There are a few points at which Gabriel can die if he chooses the wrong decision or hesitates to act; one such situation took me by surprise and, although it wasn’t difficult to solve, I can imagine some players finding Gabriel coming to a sticky end here. Personally I’m not a fan of challenges like this because I prefer puzzles that are based on logic and reasoning. But they do add a sense of danger to the storyline, and if you’re going to chase a voodoo murderer you’re probably going to encounter at least one risk along the way.

Speaking of puzzles, the graphics unfortunately do make some of these a bit tricky. The backgrounds are easily identifiable but the limitation of technology at the time of the game’s release means they’re lacking in finer details. This makes it hard to identify interactive items or symbols sometimes; for example, when trying to complete the clock challenge, I knew exactly what I had to do but found it difficult to tell which icon was which.

Saying that though, the graphics are excellent if you love a retro style: lots of lovely pixelated environments, each of which manages to convey depth and personality. The home of Gabriel’s grandmother looks warm and inviting, while the ‘wheel within a wheel’ in Africa looks like somewhere you’d do well not to explore, and the comic-book-style cutscenes add to the game’s graphic look. The character portraits displayed in the interrogation interface are excellent but I’ll admit that I couldn’t help laughing at some of them; it’s great that their lips move to add to the realism of the scene, but they kind of look like the Annoying Orange!

That line would have more effect if Gabriel didn’t look like the Annoying Orange.

There’s just one other thing that I’d like to pick up on with regard to Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers’ visuals. What the hell is going on with Gabriel? Maybe it’s just me but there seems to be several different versions of him: one on the title screen, one in the interrogation scenes and another in the title’s manual. Add to the fact that he looks entirely different again in the sequel, The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery, and here’s one hero who’s got a bit of an identity crisis on his hands.

The voice-acting is all done by Hollywood talents including Mark Hamill and Michael Dorn. Leah Remini is great as the sarcastic Grace and at conveying the love-hate relationship she has with Gabriel; when I first heard her I knew I recognised the voice, then I realised that she’d played Stacey Carosi in Saved by the Bell! In fact, the only voice-acting I wasn’t keen on was that of the Narrator. Virginia Capers lilt really suits the New Orleans setting – and don’t get me wrong, her acting here is excellent – but her slow pace had me clicking through some of the dialogue because I was eager to the next part of the game.

The Narrator has some amazing insights into Gabriel’s character.

During my research I found that Tim Curry received mixed reviews for his portrayal of Gabriel. Admittedly, his New Orleans drawl is extremely over-the-top at times but I absolutely loved it! Our hero comes across as a total ladies’ man who’s definitely the ‘love-‘em-and-leave-‘em’ type. Some of his lines will go down in history because he’s just so pleasingly sleazy, and I completely agree with the Narrator: “Gabriel’s mini-stereo isn’t exactly high-fidelity. Then again, neither is he.”

Similarly, opinions on the title’s soundtrack were mixed but I kind of liked it. There was the odd track that was possibly a little out of place when considering the setting but overall I thought they were pretty good. There’s obviously a wealth of inspiration that can be taken from New Orleans and it was nice to see the different bands playing in the Jackson Square park. The theme from the Detective Mosley’s police station was probably my favourite and the same can be hard in Kriminal-Kommissar Leber’s office in the sequel.

I’m not sure that’s the forking that Gabriel was thinking of.

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father does have some replay value as, in keeping with other Sierra games of the time, each completed puzzle or new discovery adds to a score displayed in the hidden bar at the top of the screen. Players won’t be allowed to progress unless they’ve finished all essential tasks for the current day but it’s possible to leave some lesser jobs behind, resulting in a lower score. If anyone can tell me where I may have missed the final point I’d be really glad to hear it!

There’s good news for fans, as creator Jane Jensen recently confirmed on Twitter that she’ll be remaking the title in HD. This is due out next year on Android, iOS, Mac and PC, and the writer hopes this will launch a line of new Gabriel Knight adventures. In an interview with Game Trailers she mentioned that she has ‘two fairly developed game ideas’ for future titles sitting on her hard drive and waiting to be developed, so here’s hoping!

Another game would mean even more money for Gabriel.

Towards the end of the game the pace is fast and furious, and players will hate having to tear themselves away from the screen for any reason. I absolutely loved Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers and it’s now included in my list of favourite retro games. Its mysterious premise is a great hook to pull anyone into the supernatural world of Voodoo-haunted New Orleans, and it’s the perfect game if you want to get wrapped up in some risk and intrigue.

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As part of our Scare-Up week of Halloween nasties, the 1001-Up.com team took to the safety of the sofa to play and review Slender: The Eight Pages. Why are we stuck in the woods in the middle of the night looking for eight pages? Who knows, but that’s the least of our worries right now.

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Developed by Parsec Productions using the Unity game engine, Slender: The Eight Pages was spawned from the idea of the Slender Man – a fictional character originating from an Internet meme. Back in 2009 a contest on the Something Awful forums tasked members to edit existing photos to contain supernatural entities, and user ‘Victor Surge’ submitted a black-and-white photo of a group of children with a barely visible, spooky figure in the background. This tall faceless creature wearing a black suit was named Slender Man and became extremely popular on the Internet, spawning online fiction including this very title. Several other games based on Slender: The Eight Pages have been released since including a sequel created by Blue Isle Studios and distributed by Parsec Productions called Slender: The Arrival.

I have great difficulty playing horror games and so the closest I’ve come to playing them myself is by watching ‘let’s play’ videos online and laughing at how scared other people are. When the 1001-Up.com team decided to get together to record some reaction videos for our horror week I was finally able to play the for real without having to quit every five minutes. It’s easy to shrug this game off at first as nothing much happens, but once you grab the first page and the drum starts beating it’s almost time to think about changing your underwear.

The search begins for the eight pages.

The Slender Man is faceless monster dressed in a black suit who stalks and abducts people lost in the woods, and you play as his next victim searching the spooky forest for eight pages armed only with a torch. That’s not to say you can defend yourself from Slender because as soon as he’s nearby there’s no escape. There isn’t anything more to the plot, which won’t be that much of a problem if you have a good enough imagination to come up with your own reasons for being stuck in the woods at night.

The game is played from a first-person view with only the ability to turn the torch on and off or sprint; apart from that it’s just a case of moving from place to place collecting the eight pieces of paper. Sprinting doesn’t last very long and over-use can reduce the amount of time further although as the game progresses it’s possible to run faster once Slender is active and has your scent. This basic gameplay feels lacking at first but once the atmosphere takes hold and you become more immersed, you forget about such trivial matters as interesting mechanics. You have the ability to zoom in with the camera but this isn’t recommended as staring into the blackness between the trees will definitely give you the goosebumps.

All eight pages shown together by SlenderFan.com

It’s easy to get lost in the woods as every direction looks the same with only a worn path leading the way to the next location. Scattered around the map are places where the pages are found, and these vary from a broken down truck, a spooky toilet block, rusted tankers, a tunnel, a silo and a scary tree. Once one of these locations looms into view it’s simply a matter of finding the hidden page before heading off to find the next one; but as you collect each page the Slender Man moves faster in his search for you.

Graphically, Slender: The Eight Pages is nothing amazing although once the fog starts to appear you will find yourself seeing shapes in the mist. At one point I almost jumped out of my skin when I thought I saw a ghostly figure! The torch adds some much needed detail to the game as it lights up the path in front of you, but it does create a tunnel vision that induces a feeling of claustrophobia adding to the already spooky atmosphere. Once Slender has caught up with you the screen begins to fill with static and we all jumped when the screen flashed bright. It’s definitely a good choice for a warning mechanism whereas most games rely on just sound to signify impending doom.

Once the static appears you know he’s near, perhaps even just around the corner…

Apart from the audio cues alerting you to the Slender Man’s presence and a creepy soundtrack, there isn’t much else to sound effects. Hearing your own footsteps does enough to increase the fear as they ring out from the silence with twigs snapping at every step. Once the first page is found a drum beat begins that develops a low droning sound followed by wind and beeping effects that increase as the gameplay escalates. It all comes together to increase the fear factor until the final moments when the Slender Man finds you.

The first few attempts at Slender: The Eight Pages will most likely be unsuccessful as the panic when he arrives is enough to seal your fate, and those who are determined will go back into to try and find all eight pages. After finding them all there really isn’t much reason to jump back in although as it’s a free game this won’t be a problem for most. Most horror titles today follow the same style where the player can only run and hide; Slender: The Eight Pages doesn’t bring anything new to this idea but it does provide another unique monster in a genre full of zombies.

At face value Slender: The Eight Pages doesn’t seem to provide any new experiences but once in-game none of that matters thanks to the atmosphere it creates. It’s free and doesn’t take long to play so if you’re looking for a quick scare this is definitely a game worth playing. The idea has been improved upon with a full title released on Steam called Slender: The Arrival which expands upon this version by adding more locations and enemies, and is technically superior.

Check out our Scare-Up video above to see the game in action and our reactions.

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The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery is an interactive movie, point-and-click adventure released by Sierra in 1995. Unlike the first game in the series, it was produced entirely in full motion video; would I be able to overcome my aversion to FMV in order to finish it?

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Following from the success of Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers in 1993, a sequel was released a year and a half later. But this time around Sierra decided to use full motion video (FMV) rather than the 16-bit VGA graphics featured in the original game. In an interview with Game Informer, talented writer Jane Jensen said that the storyline for The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery was much more involved than that of its predecessor because of this: “[The FMV] limited the amount of interactivity we could do. I specifically tried to put a lot more intrigue in the plot, so even though the interactivity was easier, there would still be enough meat to keep people engaged.”

I remember being a kid in the mid-nineties and the latest thing on the gaming scene was ‘interactive movies’. Hollywood had invaded the industry and developers now had to worry about blue-screens and actors as much as puzzles and gameplay. Unfortunately however, very few FMV titles were actually any good; the method seemed like a good idea but the emphasis almost always ended up being more on ‘movie’ than on ‘interactive’. Eventually it was found to be too expensive and complicated, hiring actors to film every possible action within the constraints of a game, and with the advent of 3D technology FMV gradually fell to the sidelines.

Gabriel always seems to find himself in awkward situations.

It was because of my previous bad experiences with FMV titles that I went into The Beast Within with a bit of a heavy heart. That, and the fact that the lovely Kevin Kutlesa from The Mental Attic had recently told me that Tim Curry’s original depiction of Gabriel Knight had been replaced by Dean Erickson! How could anyone top the drawling, lady-loving sleazebag from the first game in the series? I therefore really wasn’t expecting to enjoy the sequel at all but I’ll hold my hands up: it did in fact grow on me over time. Yes, I didn’t enjoy the gameplay as much or Erickson’s interpretation of the loveable rogue, but it’s probably the best FMV game I’ve ever played.

While it isn’t essential to have played Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers before embarking on this title, I think the majority of players would find it beneficial although their liking of the new graphics and actors may be damaged because of it. The first game will help to explain a lot of the plot at the beginning of The Beast Within and fill in how a New Orleans book store owner and author ends up owning a huge castle in Germany, and why the villagers are drawn to him for help when something mysterious happens.

He may not be played by Tim Curry, but Gabriel is still a ladies’ man.

The storyline takes place a year after the voodoo murders of the original instalment and we find Gabriel ensconced in his family’s seat in Schloss Ritter in Rittersberg. His attempts at trying to recreate the success of his first novel are interrupted by the locals who ask him to investigate the death of a young girl. Meanwhile, his acerbic assistant Grace Nakimura grows tired of being left on the sidelines in New Orleans and begins to work the case on her own, learning of the German village’s history and one of Gabriel’s ancestors who faced a creature which called itself the Black Wolf. As the story continues, she discovers the fate of King Ludwig II of Bavaria and the history of Wagner’s missing opera, and author’s enquiries lead him to a group of men who indulge in their primal natures led by the charismatic Baron Von Glower. The both face their own temptations and trials: can Grace come to terms with her feelings for Gabriel in order to save him and can he overcome the beast within?

As with the original game, Jensen obviously did some serious research on German history and culture. Although the story is fictional, some characters and geographic landmarks such as the castle museums of Bavaria are real. My only disappointment with the plot was that its ending was given away fairly early on in the title through a clue uncovered by Grace and after this, none of the so-called ‘twists’ were really that surprising. However, that’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it; despite its predictability, I thought the storyline was great and it will keep many a gamer gripped for a number of hours.

Another well-researched game by Jane Jensen.

As well as the move to FMV, the title’s interface is a radical change from the first instalment in the series. Rather than feature a menu of icons representing various actions – pretty standard for a lot of classic point-and-clicks – the player is presented with a cursor which highlights hotspots in the environment and performs a designated action when clicked. Unfortunately, this does cause some problems as it’s not always clear what’s going to happen; for example, you may click on an item to look at it and understand what it is, but your character will automatically operate the object and thus another puzzle is ‘solved’.

The inventory interface also takes a little getting used to. Rather than choosing an action and then applying to an item, as is the case with most other adventure games, the order is reversed: once chosen, an object can be examined, combined with other items or used with hotspots on screen. On a positive note, your character will read any notes or books out loud when they’re selected meaning that you don’t have to struggle to read any terrible handwriting.

As with Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, the story unfolds over a sequence of days and each has a required set of actions to be performed before moving onto the next. What’s different this time however is that players take on the role of both Gabriel and Grace, switching between the two for alternate chapters. For me this provided a great change in gameplay focus with the author’s scenes being more danger-filled and his assistant dedicating herself to researching and uncovering the past. Their love-hate relationship remains, although towards the end of the game Grace finally confronts her feelings for Gabriel – even if she doesn’t admit them to him.

Unfortunately, the switches between cutscenes and play aren’t seamless and this slows down gameplay. For almost every object it’s possible to examine, a video sequence is loaded after which Gabriel or Grace step into frame; cut to item; cut back to a close-up of our heroes for a comment or simply a raised eyebrow. The sequence then closes with the character stepping out of frame, and the player is returned to them standing stiffly to attention awaiting further instructions. As well as this having the effect of making actions seem very unrealistic, it can be a bit disorientating: your character will often exit a cutscene in one direction and be standing in the opposite when you’re returned to play.

Will Grace ever admit her true feelings to Gabriel?

Luckily you can skip through any videos in order to speed up the gameplay but this does have its own problems. For example, at one point I accidentally clicked my mouse, resulting in me entirely missing Gabriel’s lawyer’s important translation of a German conversation and being unable to replay it. There’s the chance that players will blithely click through cutscenes thinking they’ve already seen them and then become stuck when a vital piece of information is missed, so unfortunately it’s for the best to watch every video even though this can become tedious.

Puzzles are conversation- and inventory-based, although the introduction of the one-click interface simplifies the game dramatically; this is great for gamers new to the point-and-click genre but for experienced players like myself, it can feel as if there wasn’t an awful lot to do. During my research I discovered that many reviewers disliked Grace’s chapter where it was necessary for her to examine three museums across Germany in order to uncover clues about Ludwig’s past. For me however, this was probably one of the best sections of the title because it seemed like there was more plot and puzzle-solving to get involved in.

Grace needs to scour this museum for clues… if the receptionist will let her in.

Grace and Gabriel’s narratives eventually converge towards a ‘climatic’ ending in the basement of an opera house. Sadly, the final sequence of actions is timed and seems only solveable through trial and error. I’m not a big fan of timed puzzles and I found this combination frustrating because I couldn’t figure out whether I’d made a wrong move or simply mistimed it. There are other similar sequences in the game but they’re all easily handled, and the ‘Try Again’ feature means you won’t have to start again from your last save point.

Speaking of our two protagonists, I feel it’s important to point out some character changes here. Grace was full of biting sarcasm in the original title and it’s the reason why we loved her: always ready to put Gabriel in his place and tell him to ‘stop looking down her shirt’. But in The Beast Within she comes across as an extremely green-eyed person and her misplaced jealously at Gedde had me screaming ‘CAT FIGHT!’ at the screen on several occasions. As mentioned above, the role of the author was recast since Jensen felt Curry didn’t look the part and this won’t go down too well with fans of Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. Erickson’s take on the character is totally different; I felt like shaking Gabriel when he had a massive clue on his hands but couldn’t make an intuitive leap and figure out its meaning.

Mmm-mmm, dinner!

Given modern technology, it would be a lie to say that The Beast Within’s graphics don’t look dated. But if you consider that in 1995 FMV technology was seen as the next big thing, it’s actually quite impressive. Sierra comes out on top when comparing their title to other FMV games of the time but it does have some issues. As well as the cutscenes being disorientating as mentioned above, the grainy and low-resolution videos could put some gamers off and, when moving around outside of cutscenes, your character’s feet tend to move faster than the ground. Either there’s a problem with the animation or it was a particularly icy winter in Rittersberg that year.

The biggest change in sound would be that of Gabriel’s accent: the drawling New Orleans voice from the original has been replaced with something less over the top. While this means it’s more realistic, I can’t deny that I miss Curry’s ladies’ man! At times during the gameplay the voice-acting changes in volume and distance, breaking continuity, but other than that the audio is great. The climatic opera sequence towards the end of the game was actually written by Jensen and her husband Robert Holmes and, while it went on a bit too long for my liking, it’s a remarkable piece of work.

This title is probably the best FMV game I’ve ever played.

As with the first game, The Beast Within does have some replay value as each puzzle completed or new discovery adds to an overall score displayed at the top of the screen. Players aren’t allowed to progress unless they’ve finished all essential tasks for the current day but it’s possible to leave some lesser jobs behind, resulting in a lower score.

For an ‘interactive movie’, The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery does make a genuine attempt to provide adventure and puzzle elements and succeeds better than other FMV games. It perhaps lacks the atmosphere and intricacies of Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers but for me, it was a fairly good follow-up. I’m surprised I enjoyed it as much as I did considering my aversion to FMV (and a lack of Tim Curry) and won’t be long before I find myself picking up the third title in the series, Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned.

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It’s time to arm yourself and start swinging as we play Capcom’s action-horror Dead Rising. But with so many other zombie games out there, will this Xbox 360 original measure up?

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Capcom is a Japanese developer and publisher of video games, known for creating multi-million-selling franchises such as Mega Man, Monster Hunter, Resident Evil, Devil May Cry and Street Fighter. Originally established in 1983, it has since become an international enterprise with branches in North America, Europe and East Asia. In 2006 the company released Dead Rising as an Xbox exclusive and since then, bashing zombies has never been so much fun.

When I first picked up this title back in 2006 I was excited about the fact that I could kill the undead to my heart’s content. And I’ll be honest: that’s all I did for the first several hours, a rampage through the mall finding the most creative ways in which I could dispatch of the zombies. The sheer size of the building your character is running around in caught my attention, as players are really spoiled for choice as to where to go, even from the outset of the game.

This could be a long night…

Dead Rising’s story centers on Frank West, a photo-journalist who ends up trapped in a shopping mall in the town of Willamette, Colorado with a horde of infested, blood-thirsty zombies. He must defend himself from these undead creatures, rescue survivors, contend with crazed psychopaths who love the fact the world has ended and are using it to their advantage, and stay alive, while still attempting to uncover the truth behind the outbreak. Players control Frank as he explores the mall using any available object as a weapon. Several main and optional missions can be completed to earn Prestige Points and gain special abilities; the title is designed as a sandbox game and features several endings, depending on the decisions the player makes along the way.

Seeing as this is a zombie tale which takes place in a mall, many comparisons were made to the movie Dawn of the Dead at the time of release – so much so that Capcom had to put a disclaimer on the box basically saying that the game isn’t a rip-off. When you play, you realise that all the comparisons only go as far as the setting; the characters are totally original and so is the story, the many twists and turns keeping you entertained as you wonder what odd-ball survivor you’ll come across next. You find yourself wanting to roam the mall for hours trying to find these people and killing zombies, but a time limit makes all this exploration quite limited.

There’s not many people who can bench press a zombie.

The main objective of the game is to investigate the Willamette Parkview Mall and complete ‘Case Files’, missions that advance the storyline and reveal the cause of the zombie outbreak. The player has three days in which to do this before a helicopter will arrive to retrieve him. Time passes twelve-times faster in-game (ie one day is two hours in real-time) so the title automatically concludes after six hours of gameplay, and could be considered quite short nowadays. If you fail a mission the game doesn’t end, but different actions result in alternate endings at the end of the seventy-two-hour period. In addition to the Case Files, you’re offered the opportunity to rescue other survivors but at times they’re frustrating: they don’t stay with you and can easily be picked off either by the undead themselves or from ‘psychopaths’, boss characters who have either been driven insane by the zombie attacks or are using the outbreak as cover for their own purposes. Alternatively, the player can ignore all missions and play as a sandbox game, wandering though the mall seeing how many strange things they can come across.

A counter at the bottom right corner of the screen helps you keep track of how many zombies have been slaughtered. There can be up to eight-hundred of the rotting undead on screen at once and – believe me – they’re relentless. During the day the zombies are sluggish and weak but at night they become more active and can be quite tough, particularly if a large group overwhelm you.

Dead Rising is notable for the hundreds of weapons that players can find in the mall and use against the zombies: there are over 250 items, ranging from powerful to near-useless. They’ll break down or run out of ammunition over time, and some can be changed by the environment, such as frying pans which can be heated on a stove to both increase damage and gain access to a special move. Large items, like benches or cash registers, can be used but obviously aren’t stored in your inventory and are dropped if you pick up or switch to another item. Many of the more useless weapons exist purely for having a laugh such as a Megabuster from Mega Man that shoots tennis balls, or a glowing light-sword toy.

The game can still hold its own today graphically-speaking, even seven years on. The visuals are crisp, clean and clear and the brightness of the colours make it look vibrant; other zombie games seem dark and grey in comparison where developers try to get too realistic, with burned-out cars and trails of blood everywhere. Don’t get me wrong, I love a bit of scary realism; but in titles like Dead Rising that are there to just have fun with, there’s no need for all that.

Frank’s pretty handy with his wood.

The non-realistic nature of Dead Rising means Capcom could over-exaggerate on pretty much everything, including the sound. The cutting-down of zombies is very satisfying, with a big squelch as you chop them in half or put a hammer through their heads. The voice-acting can only be described as ‘OK’ though, as some survivors don’t really sound as scared as they should be at times. Seeing as this is Dead Rising, I would have expected over-the-top screams and reactions.

You’ll find yourself going back to the game time and time again; maybe not for the story, but for the sheer fun of simply running about the mall and trying to beat your score of how many zombies you knocked off during your last playthrough. Another thing that will keep players occupied is the amount of costumes you can get your hands on. You’d be silly to just stick to Frank’s old brown leather jacket when you can bash the undead in a sharp suit or in casual wear – and I defy anyone to put him in a dress and not laugh their arse off.

This guy is a little odd…

Overall, Dead Rising is a great zombie game that thankfully doesn’t take itself too seriously: if it did, it would fail on all levels. I’ve had this title since its release and it’s one I’ve never gotten rid of or traded in. It’s something you know you’ll play again and again and, in terms games in this particular genre, it has to be one of the all-time classics.

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This article was written by Emil Larsen, one of our lovely contributors. For more information on this writer or if you’d like to get involved yourself, take a look at our Contributors page.

The Lost Planet series has never really managed to raise any eyebrows, either from customers or reviewers. Regardless of this, Capcom has decided that it’s time for yet another alien onslaught on the frozen planet of EDN III. Has the publisher finally found a way to break the spell?

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Lost Planet has never really impressed anyone. Capcom can’t exactly brag about any amazing reviews or massive sales and so they decided to give relatively-untested developer Spark Unlimited a shot at it. Even though nobody really expects the world from Lost Planet 3, the company still have something to prove to gamers worldwide. Previously, they’ve been behind Legendary and Turning Point: Fall of Liberty which – to put it mildly – got a bit of beating by video game reviewers. But nonetheless, they have taken up the task of waking up the Lost Planet series.

The first thing that came to mind when I had just started the game was how much it felt like a budget title. The shooting mechanics were alright, but still had that distinct plastic feel about them – as time went by I started to realise that this wasn’t going to change anytime soon. Maybe Capcom have finally admitted their Lost Planet defeat – putting the franchise in the hands of Spark Unlimited maybe wasn’t such a good idea.

When Jim’s not spending all of his ammo, he enjoys taking his huge mech for moonlight walks.

The plot in Lost Planet 3 actually takes place a long time before the events of the first instalment of the Lost Planet series were even close to happening. Jim Peyton, father to a young son and loving husband to his wife Grace, has decided that he wants to haul in some cold cash for the family. He sees an excellent opportunity for some dollars in the energy corporation of NEVEC which has, for some time, been mining the precious T-energy on the frozen icicle of a planet EDN III. Jim travels to the planet and quickly becomes the go-to guy in terms of dealing with repairing machines or exterminating the Akrid, the indigenous and relentless animal species of the frozen planet.

But just when our hero thinks that he has settled down in his everyday life of killing hundreds of aliens, he stumbles upon an abandoned research station – a station which makes the otherwise innocent and crystal-clear facade of NEVEC show some serious cracks. And now Jim finds himself in the middle of a mountain of betrayal, intricacy and age old secrets. And all in all, it’s an okay story; nothing that will keep you at the edge of your seat, but still something that manages to drive the story forward.

Just about every cave on EDN III is filled to the brim with slimy Akrid.

Lost Planet 3 is your standard third-person shooter in almost every aspect imaginable. Jim, being a super-solider hidden in an everyday-man, wields an arsenal of assault rifles, shotguns, grenades and snipers, and never really has any doubt about whether to use them or not. Being animals and not humans with actual thoughts, the Akrid gladly throw themselves at the protagonist and his weapon. This results in repetitive infinity of constantly squeezing down the trigger in order to keep the shrieking and creepy-crawly monsters at bay.

Whenever you are not constantly hearings booms, bangs, and splats after yet another bunch of kills, you will spend your time traversing the terrain of EDN III – or the central HQ of NEVEC, which both are equally dull and boring. Expect a lot of mindless traveling via breadcrumb trails of waypoints and a lot of loading screens, which often last up to twenty-five seconds or more.

These guys will piss you off…

The characters will happily send Jim out into the wilderness in order to obtain some random mechanism. This sends you flying into an uninteresting cavalcade of icy caves and abandoned stations. Not a single door is functioning in any one of these stations, creating a not so subtle excuse for our hero to take a thirty-minute detour down dark corridors or frozen ravines. It just makes it so obvious that Spark Unlimited has sought to extend the gameplay of the game; but seriously, it could have been done in a more elegant fashion.

And that is basically all there is to Lost Planet 3. The most annoying thing about it all is that the core gameplay isn’t that bad; Spark Unlimited has just chosen to shamelessly recycle it at any given chance. In ultra-quick flashes the title sometimes manages to shine but that doesn’t make up for the other 99% of the game, which is unpolished to say the least. Any kind of beautiful scenery is washed out by poorly-visualised snowstorms, and textures are dull and muddy. Jim’s surroundings are mostly put together in a depressing and lazy celebration of the colors grey and blue. Almost every cutscene is realised in CGI, which stands as a magnificent and well-detailed contrast to the remaining, unfinished part of the game.

Get ready to battle this guy at least eight times.

The music and sound effects mostly manage to stay clear of the mess which is clearly being made in the graphics department. Yeah sure, the weapons only manage to sound like slightly beefed-up nerf-guns, but still it’s not horrendous. The music is pretty solid throughout and actually manages to genuinely induce some kind of panic during a Dead Space-esque part of the title where – you guessed it – hundreds of Akrid are thrown straight in your face with no mercy. Some of the voice-acting, especially for Jim, actually manages to bring the characters to life but some of it is also lost in stupid stereotypical accents for Frenchmen, Indians and Russians.

It’s not very likely that you would play through Lost Planet 3 more than once. Sure, there are always the harder difficulties which definitely would make it more of a challenge; but challenge is supposed to be fought off with skills. Harder difficulties simply result in the same amount of crazed aliens dealing two times the damage, and that makes prevailing against the horde slightly less rewarding.

The Akrid really like jumping straight at you.

In terms of innovation, Spark Unlimited has actually managed to dumb-down and reverse the evolution of the third-person shooter. Even the slightest hint of trying to do something new is well and truly buried beneath the commonly-approved attempts of doing the right thing. Maybe in 2004, Lost Planet 3 would have been innovative. Too bad that they’re nine years late.

I won’t hesitate to call Lost Planet 3 a bad game. The mediocre graphics and okay story is to be considered some of the best aspects of the game. Shameless recycling of every gameplay aspect ends up, hopefully, burying the series where it rightfully belongs. Three definitely wasn’t the charm for Lost Planet and Capcom – please just let it rest in peace.

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This article was written by Emil Larsen, one of our lovely contributors. For more information on this writer or if you’d like to get involved yourself, take a look at our Contributors page.

This article was written by Kevin Kutlesa, one of our lovely contributors. For more information on this writer or if you’d like to get involved yourself, take a look at our Contributors page.

A few months before The Legend of Zelda’s Link turned into a wolf and tore into Hyrule, another Wolf roamed a strange and wondrous land, solving puzzles, clearing dungeons and fighting evil with a tiny partner on her back! Her name is Amaterasu, and she has one up on the Hero of Time: She’s a Goddess!

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Okami is an action adventure, Zelda-esque game developed by the now defunct Clover Studio and published by Capcom

in 2006 for the PlayStation 2, 2009 for the Wii (the port developed by Ready at Dawn in collaboration with Tose) and a 2012 HD remake for the PlayStation 3.

I first saw the game during the 2005 E3, and I was very disappointed when I found out it would a PS2 exclusive, because the Zelda styled gameplay (and inspiration according to the game’s Director, Hideki Kamiya, a self-proclaimed Zelda fan) appealed to me greatly, as did the Japanese folklore and myth references. I’ve always been interested in mythologies, legends and folklore and the Japanese are really interesting, so a game drawing on them as inspiration and being Zelda-styled to boot was a dream game, an experience I couldn’t pass up. Thankfully, roughly three years later I had the chance to play it. I lost hours of my life on it and even now, looking back, I can’t say any of it was wasted. It was very well invested.

Next stop: The River of the Heavens, all interested, go through the creepy tree hole.

The game’s setting is a fictionalized version of Classical Japan (5th to 12th century) called Nippon (the actual Japanese name for the country), and stars the wolf-shaped version of Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess, one of the central figures in Japanese myth and the Shinto religion. The Emperor of Japan is said to be a direct descendant of Amaterasu, and the Imperial Regalia, the national treasures of Japan, are said to be gifts from her. In fact, the name Okami is a pun, meaning “Great God” or “Wolf” depending on how you write it, and you’ll agree it’s a very appropriate name for this game.

The game opens with Amaterasu returning to earth awakened from a statue by the lovely Sakuya, the wood sprite, who informs her that the whole of Nippon has been cursed by the recently revived Orochi, the Eight-headed Serpent, whose darkness has spread so far it’s even blotted out the sun. With her mission clear, the awakened (though severely depowered) Amaterasu goes off to save the land starting with the nearby Village whose inhabitants had fallen under the curse. Before she can save them by restoring power to Sakuya’s tree (a Cherry Blossom tree), the deuteragonist, Issun (a flea-sized human) makes his appearance and joins Amaterasu (though unwillingly at first after Amaterasu tried to eat him) and the two cross the gateway at the base of Sakuya’s withered tree, reaching another realm called “The River of the Heavens”; the first of the many gorgeous locations in the game where Amaterasu (and you, the player) learn of the Brush Gods and their techniques, all of which Amaterasu knew and mastered in a previous incarnation but has since forgotten. They meet the first two of the Brush Gods Yomigami and Tachigami, the Dragon and the Rat in the Asian Zodiac, and using the powers of the new Brush Techniques the two save the village, releasing its inhabitants from the Orochi’s curse.

His is the power to repair broken stuff by smudging them with ink!

That’s where the real game begins, this first section being the game’s tutorial teaching you the basics, both in-plot and game mechanics and introducing some of the recurring elements and characters.

On the gameplay side, Okami has a lot of depth. Controlling Amaterasu is easy, moving with the nunchuk and attacking by swinging the Wii remote. You press A to Jump, B to bring up the Celestial Brush screen (the game becomes flat and the camera pulls out revealing it’s all happening in a scroll, on which you use the Celestial Brush), C to dig and Z to interact and use secondary items in combat.

The game manages a few “resources” the first being Solar Energy, Amaterasu’s health, increased by finding Sun Fragments or spending Praise; and the second, Celestial Ink, which powers your Celestial Brush. You can increase the number of ink pots by spending Praise, the game’s “Experience Points”, gained completing quests, some mini-games, feeding animals (the number of seeds you can carry also upgradeable with Praise) or restoring withered/corrupted nature, like clovers or cherry blossom trees. You can also spend Praise to increase your Purse size, allowing you to collect more Yen, the currency in Nippon, which you can use to buy new weapons, accessories and support items, such as healing items. You can also spend money on Dojos, learning new techniques, both for combat and exploration.

This little Oni’s about to split…

Speaking of combat, it has some nuances to it, you need a specific rhythm with each Divine Instrument (your weapons, themselves modelled after the Imperial Regalia: Mirrors, Swords and Beads), timing your attacks to form a combo. If you miss the timing, the attacks become sluggish and often leave you open for counter-attack. As soon as you get your second weapon, you can equip one of them as a sub weapon, its effects depending on its weapon type: reflectors become shields; you can shoot rosary beads; and perform upward and downward slashes with the glaives, as well as a Devil May Cry-styled Stinger lunge attack. Glaives can be charged empowering their attacks, be it as main or subs.

The Celestial Brush might be the high point of the experience, and aside from its sequel, I have never seen a similar mechanic in any game inspired by it or with such a level of depth. The techniques affect not only combat, but also story events, exploration and even puzzle-solving (especially the elemental techniques), and in fact to advance in a new area you will often need to look for its sacred tree and use one of the Techniques to purify it and remove the corruption in the area manifested as grayish areas that damage and slow you down. Pulling up the Drawing Screen to use Brush Techniques is also Okami‘s version of QTE (Quick Time Events), though in general they’re more forgiving than other QTE-using games. This is also where the Wii version feels like the definitive Okami experience with the control of the Brush in the Wii remote, making the strokes feel natural and in turn, enhancing the immersion.

This Ninetails isn’t like those cute ones you keep in Pokéballs!

Because it’s Zelda-inspired, Okami has plenty of Dungeons varying in length and difficulty (the curve sometimes a bit steep), my favourites being Oni Island and Wawku Shrine for their scale, complexity and difficulty. Each zone/hub is comprised of a few minor dungeons or zones and one large main dungeon housing the chapter’s boss. The first main dungeon, The Moon Cave features the coolest “entrance” to a boss room in any game I’ve played since then.

Similarly, because of its roots, the game features plenty of collectibles. Aside from the Sun Fragments used to increase your health, there’s also 99 beads spread around the world, the 100th given to you for free once you finish the game, and collecting them all unlocks a few goodies for the New Game+. There are also plenty of Dojo techniques, each costing more than the previous one. Demon fangs drop from enemies by killing them using the correct Brush Technique on them, and they’re traded with certain characters for some very useful items, the most notable being the tablets you can trade with the Emperor of Nippon, which you can equip as accessories and grant abilities like walking on water. You can Fish (there are a couple of Fishing quests in the game as well) and look for animals, all of them recorded on your journal.

Eight Heads, and none of them Happy, Sleepy or Dopey!

Completing the journal isn’t an easy task, trust me, it took me a long time and will probably take you one or two playthroughs. Sadly, the New Game+ adds little in terms of difficulty, in fact none whatsoever. You’ll play through it again and collect everything you missed, but it won’t be a challenge. I personally have played it 3 times, 4 counting my current playthrough as I prepared for this review.

Visually the game is stunning, and because of its Sumi-e (ink wash painting) cell-shaded style, it still looks as good as it did back in 2009. The only downside to the Wii version is one of the filters applied the screen, the “paper” filter that makes everything look as if part of a scroll and which complements the draw screen effect where the game becomes flat, couldn’t be translated to the Wii perfectly; and while it’s still present the effect is a bit watered down.

Yes, that is a Lightsaber coming out of a flute. They used to be a lot more common in ancient Japan!

Originally, Clover Studio designed Okami with a photo-realistic visual style, but the developers felt the realism wouldn’t allow them to properly display the rejuvenation effects on nature, not as strongly as they wanted to, so they shifted to this more colourful approach, and to be honest I agree. While I did mention you purify areas before fully exploring them, it never becomes tedious because the purification cinematic is breathtaking and makes it all worthwhile. There’s also nothing quite like running with Amaterasu and seeing the trail of leaves and flowers bloom in her wake, the grandeur of them only becoming greater the faster you go.

There’s plenty of eye-candy in the game as well, from the small details adding charm to the already colourful world and its characters, to the various Brush Technique effects. For instance, there are three major Elemental Techniques: Fire, Water and Electricity, and the “first level” of each allow you to drag a source of that element to another by drawing a line between them. Once you release the draw-screen and come back, you’ll see the watery or flaming and electric line flying through the air, and considering you don’t need to make it a straight line but whatever else you want, you can really make it a breathtaking spectacle.

Hand-in-hand with the beautiful visual style is the marvellous soundtrack, and like its setting and plot, the music has its roots in classical Japanese music, with abundance of string, flutes, reeds and drums. There isn’t a single bad piece in the soundtrack, each beautiful and unforgettable, and more than once making you stay in an area for a bit more time just so you can hear the zone’s music.

While Okami does feature voice acting, you’ll never make out a single word. The developers generated the voices for each character by computer, the speech itself seemingly distorted, using pitch and cadence to not only mimic the natural rhythm of the Japanese language, and convincing you they’re speaking Japanese, but also to express emotions, the voices themselves becoming part of the soundtrack. Before Okami I had never seen someone do that, and I haven’t seen it done since.

Gotta love the beautiful cell-shaded art style!

The story, as I previously mentioned, draws heavily from Japanese history, legends, classical mythology and folklore, in characters, plot and even enemy designs. While each act has its own story and may feel like “Villain of the Week” at one point or another, there’s an overarching plot threading each act together. There are plenty of spiritual elements to the story, such as the roles of Gods, and the nature of Belief. Nature preservation is also a big part of the story, as Nature is the first thing impacted by both the spreading darkness and your actions.

There are also plenty of references to other media, such as the eight dog warriors, homage to a very famous 106 volume long Japanese epic of the 19th century, as well as other more modern sources, with both Viewtiful Joe and Street Fighter references.

Running on flapping banners is no big deal for Amaterasu!

Characters are unique and have a lot of personality. Amaterasu’s characterization might be the best in the game, as it’s not only charming but also very subtle, merging some of the goddess’ more classical personality traits with that of an animal. She’s honourable and courageous and caring, but she’s also playful and has a bit of a short attention span and often falls asleep during long expositions. The secondary characters vary in quality, yet the overall characterization is very strong and well developed.

The game features the best localization ever done for a game, with Kamiya and the localization team coming up with distinct mannerisms for the characters that would be familiar to western audiences and even changing a puzzle in the game, since it depended on the ability to write Kanji, something very basic in Japan but not so much over here. Waka, one of the main characters, often uses French expressions in the English version, using English ones in every other. At first, it can be jarring, but it’s a pretty smart choice considering they wanted to convey a sense of strangeness to the character, and making him use an entirely different language is a brilliant way to do so.

No, that’s not a mushroom on her head; it’s your sidekick Issun!

The only major flaw in this game is it sometimes goes on a bit too much on the exposition, making you read walls of text for a few minutes at a time; which, depending on the gamer, can disrupt the rhythm of the game and slow it down to a crawl, especially at the start and during the Ryoshima Coast arc. Other players have also complained about the Wii controls not being very solid with some input issues, though I never experienced that myself.

Okami is a fantastic game with an engrossing story and setting, with beautiful visuals and awesome soundtrack, with unique mechanics and is one of the rare few Zelda-style action adventure games not made by The Big N, and possibly the only one having the same level of quality as those titles it draws from for inspiration.

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This article was written by Kevin Kutlesa, one of our lovely contributors. For more information on this writer or if you’d like to get involved yourself, take a look at our Contributors page.

Richard & Alice is Owl Cave’s first full-length release in February 2013. A point-and-click adventure set in the near future, it’s a heart-wrenching story about family, desperation and extreme weather that contains snow jokes… sorry.

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Owl Cave is a small collective of writers, designers and general game-related people who, according to their website, ‘share a love of story-centric video games, which place focus on character-building and world design.’ They believe that games can tell stories in a way that no other medium can and this is certainly apparent in the first release by Ashton Raze and Lewis Denby (whose journalism credits include Eurogamer, Gamespot and The Telegraph) in February 2013, Richard & Alice.

Probably the biggest gaming revelation for me this year was To The Moon. It had been a very long time since I’d played anything that conveyed such a depth of emotion and I’m not ashamed to admit that I cried like a baby when I reached its conclusion. So when I heard about Owl Cave’s point-and-click adventure I was pretty excited: a story where no character is without substantial baggage and happy endings won’t arrive without numerous tragedies along the way. But would Richard & Alice have me mopping up tears once again?

This prison has all the mod-cons.

The game is set at some point in the future, where unexpected weather systems have led to half the planet being covered in snow. Elsewhere, parts of the world have been rendered into an inhospitable desert. The governments were unprepared and this has led to the downfall of society: the lucky ones live in zones, while those on the outside have to battle with marauding gangs and freezing temperatures.

Richard and Alice are both prisoners but their cells probably aren’t like you’d imagine: they have sofas and state-of-the-art computers, although only the former’s has a television. When they’re thrown into opposite rooms they begin to talk and share stories, and Alice opens up about her journey through the snowy tundra with her young son Barney. But they both have secrets: how did they both end up here and what were they forced to do on the outside in order to survive?

In this future, everyone does what they can to survive.

The game has two main layers and in the first, players control Richard as he moves around his cell. Apparently there’s not much to do in prison (aside from fashioning poles of various lengths) and so gameplay here is extremely limited. Most of it is taken up by the characters getting to know each other and, in this fictional world, you can hardly blame them for wanting someone to talk to; but for some it’ll be a test of patience to click through the sheer amount of dialogue you’re presented with. But on the plus side, it’s well-written and does a good job of divulging information about the breakdown of government and the safe zones where residents are lied to about the dangers waiting for them outside.

In the second layer, players control Alice as her story is revealed through a number of flashback scenes. Notes, letters and other written discoveries reveal the world in all its hopelessness, and there are no punches pulled in some of the horrific descriptions. These sections have no real objective other than the immediate survival of her son through tasks such as finding shelter and medicine, and this mechanic really conveys a sense of isolation and desperation. There are no real heroes of villains here – only survivors who are driven to do terrible things in order to get by – and Alice makes judgement calls about what she witnesses, although at several points alternative outlooks are suggested.

The transition between the stories in the prison and the snowy outside are smooth, and both plotlines have enough intrigue to keep you engrossed throughout approximately three hours’ gameplay. But please bear in mind that I use that term extremely loosely! It wouldn’t be a point-and-click adventure without puzzles, and most of these exist in Alice’s flashbacks; but while they tend to be logical, most of them are entirely too convenient.

With a very small number of interactive items, an inventory taken up by notes scribbled by other survivors and challenges that rarely span more than one area, there isn’t really much to do. Puzzles are presented to the player in a very basic ‘find-key-and-use-on-lock’ form so as long as you remember to look at everything, you probably won’t find yourself scratching your head in thought. For example, a challenge involving a can of rust-remover in a bin outside a church and a nearby rusty ladder won’t tax any gamer regardless of their level of experience.

Now where did I leave that can of rust remover…?

The limited number of locations in Richard & Alice mean that too many puzzles are based around this sort of convenience, and the gameplay does suffer because of it. I can’t help feeling that Owl Cave have possibly stuck to their mantra of ‘placing focus on character-building and world design’ a little too much. Having said that though, solving a puzzle is generally satisfying – not because it was tricky, but because it moves the story along; and in a game of this type it’s all about the story, right… right?

The title’s visuals are extremely simplistic, and I must admit that I can’t decide whether this is a good or a bad thing. On one hand you don’t need you don’t need flashy graphics to tell a compelling story; but on the other, the poor art does moments of anguish or emotional horror a disservice and they’re somewhat robbed of their impact. The opening scene of the game features the exterior of a house that looks as if Craig knocked it up in MS Paint in ten minutes (sorry, Craig) but the visuals do improve a little as the game moves along; the bleakness of the snowy world works well with the chosen design and the subtly-shifting, ‘static’ overlay reminds you that you’re never far from the next blizzard.

Looks like something Craig would have drawn.

There’s some very light music at times but most of the title is filled with the sound of the freezing wind and the crunching of snow underfoot. There’s no spoken dialogue – hence the volume of text – and again, some players may find that this puts them off. I understand that some reviewers have marked Richard & Alice down because of its lack of audio but I personally felt this suited the game; the absence of music helps convey a desolate and empty feeling, and any more sound may have detracted from this.

As mentioned above, most players will find that they complete Richard & Alice in around three hours which could sound too short for some. But the game does have a number of endings (none of them are particularly cheerful) and this could possibly be enough to warrant further playthroughs, although this isn’t strictly necessary as all have something to offer in terms of closure.

Oops…

I’ve already said that in a release of this type the story is the main draw, and I must congratulate Owl Cave on several fronts. Richard & Alice is an exception to the standard post-apocalyptic game as there are no bombs, zombies or even villains; they’ve focused on telling a more human story, particularly when it comes to Alice’s relationship with her son. And while it doesn’t tell you everything about what’s going on outside the prison, you learn enough to draw your own conclusions. This ambiguity creates a sense of intrigue and means you know as much about what’s going on as Richard and Alice do.

So why did I feel a little disappointed then? Throughout the game it felt as if we were building up to something exceptional, the reveal of some great secret that would shock us all; but it just didn’t hit the mark for me when it finally arrived. I think this was probably because I’d already had an inkling about what it was going to be and there were some questions left unanswered (one particularly big one that very few others seem to have picked up on). But most reviewers have scored this title highly on its storyline, so I think I must just be an anomaly here.

Owl Cave have tried to tell a more human story than your standard post-apocalyptic game.

In conclusion, I’d say it’s pretty obvious that Richard & Alice is the first full-length release from a two-man studio and I’d be more likely to recommend To The Moon to adventure fans. But that’s not to say I won’t be keeping an eye on what Owl Cave come up with next, because if they concentrate on fixing this game’s shortcomings they could have something quite special on their hands. Just don’t play it in an area where it’s likely to snow very soon, and keep that can of rust-remover close by.

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Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned was the last instalment in the series in 1999. This time creator Jane Jensen takes us on a trip to France involving the Crucifixion, the Templars, the Cathars and the Freemasons – throw vampires into the mix and you’ve got yourself one hell of a party.

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By the time work began on Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, it was already clear that it would be the final Gabriel Knight game. Regardless, Sierra On-Line felt that the series should move to 3D graphics to keep up with the times but the development team had had little experience with or understanding of the format. When programmer Scott Bilas was brought on board mid-production, he was told that the game was nearly finished but found out that a number of features needed to make the title playable had been left out.

I’ve been working my way through the Gabriel Knight series alongside the lovely Kevin from The Mental Attic, and he recently sent me a post-mortem article from Gamasutra written by Bilas. After reading about all of the development issues faced and the struggle that the programmer went through, it’s a wonder that the game even made it onto the shelves! It didn’t have a great start in life and unfortunately didn’t have a good time after release either: launched shortly after the ‘crash’ of the genre, it couldn’t match the critical and financial success of its two predecessors and was the adventure title published by Sierra.

After playing through second instalment – The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery – with its FMV gameplay and portrayal of the lead character by Dean Erickson, I was looking forward to returning to blocky pixels and the fabulous Tim Curry – who depicted the drawling ladies’ man in the original Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. But as soon as I started playing Gabriel Knight 3 I immediately had to send Kevin a message: “What the hell have they done to Gabriel?!” The title does have several positive points but unfortunately there are a number of negatives that prevent it from reaching its full potential.

The game begins with our hero coming round after being knocked out by two ominous strangers while following them on a train, and finding that he’s now close to the French village of Rennes-le-Chateau. Grace eventually arrives on the scene and while Gabriel searches for a kidnapped child, she slowly begins to uncover a mystery that has been hidden through the times of the Crucifixion, the Templars, the Cathars and the Freemasons right up until the modern day. As they both continue to dig (both literally and figuratively) they soon realise that everyone – even the man who originally hired them – has a secret agenda.

Grace always seems to be the brains of the team.

Notice that in the paragraph above I just threw in the ‘kidnapped child’ phrase without explaining anything? Well, that’s what Gabriel Knight 3 does to the player. You’re thrown into the middle of Rennes-le-Chateau with very little information about why you’re there and soon Gabriel starts saying to himself that he’ll keep an ear out for the baby (cue another message sent to Kevin: “Who said anything about a baby?!”). I’ve since found out that when the game was originally released it came with a comic book that covered the backstory, something that’s missing from the GOG version, and this in itself causes a lot of issues with gameplay.

After getting over any initial misunderstandings or plot holes caused by the absence of the comic, players will find themselves in a tale involving the kidnapping of an infant from a family of Scottish nobles and concentrating on vampires, the legend of the Holy Grail, the Knights Templar, the Freemasons, the Priory of Sion and – to top it all off – Jesus. If you struggled to take in all of that last sentence just imagine what it’s like playing the title. While the plot’s complexity is good in that it’ll give even seasoned adventure gamers a proper mystery to sink their teeth into, it quickly becomes difficult to keep up with what exactly is going on.

Despite the murders, there’s never any real sense of urgency.

Add to this the fact that much of the backstory involving the history of Rennes-le-Chateau and the related conspiracy is handled via conversations between Gabriel and Grace rather than actual investigative gameplay, and you’ve got a narrative mess on your hands. It perhaps would have been better if there was some kind of urgency but the storyline seems to progress at a leisurely pace; even though a Scottish heir has been kidnapped, a few murders have occurred and vampires are in town, the events never seem particularly dangerous.

Gabriel Knight 3 is a point-and-click adventure and the interface is pretty much what you’d expect from a game in the genre so I won’t spend too much time covering the basics. But something worth writing about here is the player camera: you have complete control of the view and can move about independently of Gabriel and Grace (except during conversations and cutscenes). There are a couple of positives to this. You can go virtually anywhere in the current location you’d like without having to wait for the character to tag along; and if you move too far ahead of them, they ‘teleport’ to a spot behind the camera to save time when you need them to appear.

However, I found that this mechanic didn’t work for me – technically it was fine and I didn’t experience any issues but it wasn’t ideal in terms of gameplay. The reason I like playing adventures is because I want to be immersed in the character and their story: why are they here, what are their motivations, how are they feeling? But being able to move independently to the characters made me feel somewhat distanced from them. I guess the camera mechanic could mean that some players will find the title less ‘restrictive’ than others in the genre but personally, it made me feel more like a spectator and less like a part of Gabriel and Grace’s world.

As with the previous instalments in the series, Gabriel Knight 3 takes place over a number of days, each broken up into ‘time blocks’ which span periods of between two and four hours. They’ll only end when certain conditions are reached and there are also optional events which you’ll miss if you’re not in the right place at the right time. Sometimes the actions required to complete a block are unclear and, since most of the locations contain several sub-locations, it can be tough to figure out exactly where to go next. It can mean that you’ll end up blindly revisiting everywhere and, while not necessary to complete the game, missing out on sub-plots that are important to your understanding of the storyline.

A puzzle involving SIDNEY is probably the one of the best I’ve come across.

Aside from the plot, the most important aspect of an adventure is the puzzles; and unfortunately the quality of those included in this title varies wildly. On the positive side it does contain what’s probably the best puzzle I’ve come across so far and one that’s sure to kick any player’s butt regardless of their adventuring experience. During day two Grace learns of ‘Le Serpent Rouge’, a pamphlet connected to the Rennes-le-Chateau mystery, and much of the gameplay in the second part of the game is devoted to solving a series of riddles embedded in its text. She uses SIDNEY (the Schattenjäger Informational Database) to analyse diagrams and maps, translate passages from other languages, and perform cryptographic and anagrammatic functions, helping her solve the overarching enigma.

A number of other challenges are in direct contrast however. An infamous puzzle on day one that sees Gabriel trying to figure out how to access a motorcycle is ridiculous – why he didn’t just accept the bike he was offered (seeing as there was one right there), ask the hotel about car hire (seeing as a receptionist seems so keen to help him) or take a taxi (seeing as that’s how he arrived at the village from the train station in the first place) is beyond me. Even Bilas thought it was bad, according to an interview with Game Informer: “It was terrible! There was something that Jane [Jensen] wanted to do that was just too hard, too expensive, too complicated to make it happen. I think our producer came up with the cat puzzle [as a replacement]. I’m pretty sure Jane didn’t like it. None of the developers liked it, but we were really late and needed to get something in there.”

Guess what the moustache is made out of?

Each instalment of the Gabriel Knight series features a significant change in graphic design, with the first featuring 16-bit VGA visuals and the second being entirely in FMV. Gabriel Knight 3 was the first to be in full 3D but I can’t say that this has done it any favours. While environments are accurately modelled and based on real locations, the horrible texture mapping make the title feel more like a simulated architectural walk-through than an adventure game. The characters models are clunky (Detective Mosely has a particularly ‘square’ butt) and cause some issues with gameplay; in a puzzle where players must watch a complex handshake and then repeat it later, the sequence is made much more complicated than necessary.

Sound is better – at least in terms of musical score, anyway – and players familiar with the series will remember several themes (yes, When the Saints Go Marching in is in there somewhere!). There’s a particularly good moment during Grace’s explorations of the sinister Chateau de Seres on day two, where a single theme is used but becomes more intricate and menacing the deeper her investigations take her into the mansion. It really adds to the sense of atmosphere.

Mosely is certainly carrying junk in that square-shaped trunk.

Unfortunately though, the voice-acting is pretty bad. Tim Curry received mixed reviews for his portrayal of Gabriel in the original Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers but I thought he was great, making our hero come across as a loveable rogue who was definitely the love-‘em-and-leave-‘em type. But even I have to agree he did quite a poor job in Gabriel Knight 3. The character is almost unlikeable with a fake accent and overly-dramatic delivery; for a particularly intolerable example, have Gabriel look at the notebook in his inventory and tell you what he sees.

It’s not entirely Curry’s fault though as he wasn’t exactly given a great script to work with. Sexual innuendos are a staple of the series (and in fact for a lot of other Sierra titles also) but here they’re probably the worst they’ve ever been. One character tells Grace: “I’ve never had me an Asian girl before” and another says to Gabriel: “A wife need not be a burden, if she knows her place.” And if that wasn’t bad enough, our hero’s lines are even worse. Instead of establishing him as a ladies’ man with a keen sense of wit, he comes across as an immature college jock and you start to feel embarrassed for him (particularly when he starts comparing Grace to a chair).

Eyes upwards, Gabriel.

By the time I finished the game, I can’t say that I was eager to start it all over again; but in actual fact Gabriel Knight 3 does have quite a lot of replay value. The points system featured in the previous instalments is back and it’ll probably take you several attempts to get a perfect score. Many scenes and items are entirely optional, and events play out in several different ways depending on what you’ve already witnessed or collected. But just because a title has replay value doesn’t mean that you’ll actually want to revisit it.

I should point out here that I experienced a number of issues with the title after installing, and looking at the GOG forum it seems like many other players came across them also. It took me several days to get the title to work and I count myself lucky that I work in IT (if I can’t figure something out, I’ve always got someone to ask); I believe Kevin didn’t have as much trouble as I did but he still experienced a graphics issue. They’re all things that can be resolved, but it’s something to bear in mind if you’re thinking of purchasing the game.

Oh baby… Gabriel Knight 3 just doesn’t live up to its predecessors.

Kevin told me that he wasn’t going to be reviewing the game because he wouldn’t be able to find anything positive to say about it! And, while I can’t say that I disliked it as much as he did, I’m afraid I can’t be entirely positive myself about Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. Jensen’s attempt to cover over two-thousand years of history and legend in one game is commendable but it’s both its glory and its failing; there’s so much here to keep you interested but it’s too easy to lose track of what’s going on.

I can’t help feeling that there’s a real classic with an amazing story in there, if only it was handled in a slightly different way and did more to guide the player through its twists and turns. But sadly it just doesn’t live up to its predecessors and I can imagine many new Gabriel Knight fans coming away disappointed. An adventure game where its necessary to reveal its final revelations through a narrative cutscene rather than gameplay – that’s something I just can’t forgive.

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We first came across New Star Soccer at this year’s Eurogamer Expo, and founder Simon Read kindly answered some of our questions about the game for a preview. But with such titles as FIFA and Pro Evolution Soccer being considered the holy grail of titles in the genre, how does New Star Games’ title separate itself from the pack?

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British independent video game studio New Star Games was founded by Simon Read in 2003, and specialises in sports role-playing video games. Their most well-known franchise is the New Star Soccer series but they also made futuristic combat-racing game Super Laser Racer. This was the first of their titles to be made available on Steam; Read approached Valve with the latest New Star Soccer, but Valve were apparently not interested in distributing it – a decision they would later reverse.

When I first downloaded New Star Soccer to my iPad I was a bit sceptical about it, seeing as I’m not really a football fan. But it looked interesting when we saw it at this year’s Eurogamer Expo so I thought I’d give it a go. At first I was confused by everything happening on the home screen all at once, along with the tabs at the bottom of the page taking you to even more busy screens; but once I got to grips with what icons and bars meant, I realised how cleverly the screens were laid out. New Star Games provides as hassle-free an experience as possible, and title flows pretty well.

As New Star Soccer is a football game, it doesn’t have an in-depth story mode with a plot line of twists and turns – just a normal, run-of-the-mill, join-a-club-and-try-to-win-the-league tale. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not hating on this because the title does this tried-and-tested formula extremely well and is probably as good as any football game I’ve ever played. This is all down to the fact that it’s added a lot of totally unique elements, such a ‘girlfriend manager’ (if there was only such a thing in real life, eh Phil?) where you can make sure she’s happy and living the lifestyle she thinks she deserves. You can get sponsorship deals that let you earn more money per match, and you can use your cash to upgrade your lifestyle. Try going to the shop to buy things for your new multi-million pound house including new phones, big flashy boats and expensive pieces of art. If you feel like you’re still not earning enough you can take a trip to the casino and bet it all on the roulette wheel or a hand of black jack; but if you don’t like that sort of thing, maybe a trip to the dog track is more your bag.

All these extra elements really make you smile because it’s more entertaining than your usual football game. You feel like you’re shaping someone’s life and career into what you would do if you were in their position. Don’t get to carried away though, because you must first start at the bottom in the national conference league as a fresh-faced sixteen-year-old (we can’t all play for Barcelona on our first day); from there you must not only get promoted but try to win other domestic trophies and get into the England team.

Right, where do I start?

The gameplay is also a unique element because you don’t play full matches: just important moments that could lead to a goal or, if you make the wrong move, could let the opposing team through to score. The rest of the match is played out on a text screen where every minute is written for you to follow as you bite your nails hoping that your team wins. This I admit sounds pretty weird, and if I saw the concept written down on paper I’d think to myself that it would never work – that people would hate the idea of not playing a full football game. But believe me it does, and it makes a lot of sense while fitting in with the overall feel of the title. After all, New Star Soccer is made for mobiles and people don’t have the time to play whole matches on the go.

While in a match you see a stamina bar which lets you know when your player is getting tired, and this can go down as fast or as slow as you want depending on how hard you put them to work. Keep in mind though that if you set it to the lowest setting, at the end of the game you’ll get no star points from your boss, team or the fans, meaning your rating will stay low and you won’t become as good as the other players. But if you set the stamina bar to its highest setting, you’ll work your socks off and everyone will praise you; you’ll earn the ‘Star Man’ award (Man of the Match) and will make the headlines in the next day’s papers. However, you won’t be able to keep this pace up because energy drinks are needed to keep your stamina high. They don’t come for free and you’ll need to buy them with your earnings, otherwise you will find yourself being left out of games.

The overall look of the game is quite nostalgic; it looks a lot like an old football game on the Super Nintendo called Striker. My brother and I would play for hours on end without getting bored and New Star Soccer took me right back there. The animations in-game make it clear what’s going on along with the direction of the ball, but you need to act fast as it only gives you a couple of seconds thinking time to get your shot right. One visual criticism I have is that the kits aren’t very detailed. Nobody has a number on their back and the majority of the actual shirts are just a simple block colour with no detailing; but seeing as the title is meant to be a retro-looking one, I guess this fits in with the theme.

An area that lets the game down is the sound effects. You expect a roaring stadium all the way through your match but what you get is a two second burst of an unrealistic-sounding crowd when you do something good. The noise of the ball when kicked doesn’t sound unlike any football I’ve heard before, add it somewhat takes away from the overall experience.

It’s a shame you can’t hear the roaring crowd.

As I found myself playing New Star Soccer more and more I realised that it’s completely addictive: hours just seem to fly by when you’re determined to win the league. I ended up putting this game on at every spare moment and enjoyed every single minute of it. As mentioned above, I’m not a big football fan so if a real soccer enthusiast was to pick the title up I’m sure they’ll love it even more. The the outside goings-on with the casino and lifestyle choices you make, are truly innovative. FIFA and Pro Evolution Soccer would do well to take note of these, as adding such elements would make career modes much more enjoyable and fun to play.

There’s been a lot in the news recently about microtransactions and it’s becoming a bit of a dirty word. Just take a look at the new Angry Birds Go! racing game and the $100 charge for the ‘Big Bang Special Edition’ car. With New Star Soccer, if you run out of in-game money you can purchase more with real cash; prices range from £0.69 for twenty-five to £16.99 for five-thousand. Energy drinks can also be bought for £0.69 each and, as their effect only lasts for one match, it’ll soon add up if you do this a few times during a season. Thankfully though, these purchases aren’t essential and you can easily progress through the game without them. The microtransactions here aren’t intrusive, but enhance the experience if you choose to use them.

Gamble responsibly, kids.

New Star Soccer isn’t just a great football game, but a great game in general. There’s enough here to keep the most hardcore football fan hooked, all the way down to the non-football fans like myself. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on New Star Games for any future releases, and I’ll be going through their back catalogue; if any of their other titles are even half as entertaining as New Star Soccer, then I’ll prepare myself to get addicted all over again.

Due to the limited plot and graphics, it’s hard to score this title higher than we have done in the following section. But its addictive gameplay makes it one that should be on every gamers’ to-play list.

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It’s possible that explaining why Half-Life is a good game to the Internet is a waste of time, as you’re either aware of it and its significance or you’ve had the pleasure of playing it for yourself. It comes as no surprise that it’s on our 1001 reviews list as a game you must play before you die.

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We all know who Valve Corporation are thanks to the Half-Life series and the more recent Steam video game distribution service. The original Half-Life takes us back to the founding of the company in 1996 by former Microsoft employees Mike Harrington and Gabe Newell, who took inspiration from Stephen King‘s novella The Mist for the game’s plot. This was the first title from the developer built using a heavily-modified Quake engine licensed from id Software, creators of the Doom series. This wasn’t the only aspect Valve Corporation took from first-person shooters of the time and re-imagined; it was the first game of the genre to move away from the typical arcade-style and successfully delivered what could arguably be the first story-driven FPS.

There were two demos released, with the first being Half-Life: Day One that was distributed with graphics hardware which demonstrated the first part of the game; the second was the demo I played called Half-Life: Uplink, released at the beginning of 1999. My first ever experience of a first-person shooter and also my earliest memory of PC gaming, it comprised of revised levels that were cut from the full title. I was astounded by how immersive the game was and also quite scary – I’d never come across anything like it before and it has made me the gamer that I am today. In April 1999 an official multiplayer mod by the name of Team Fortress Classic was released for Half-Life, based on a QuakeWorld mod by the same name released in 1996. After my family finally signed up for a 56k Internet connection I was able to jump into TFC for my first ever multiplayer experience and I was hooked. By the time I had purchased Half-Life, an expansion to the game had already been released by the name of Half-Life: Opposing Force (also developed by Gearbox Software); I bought them together in a box set that I still have to this day.

Welcome to the Black Mesa Research Facility. Gordon, you’re late for work.

We play as the game’s protagonist Gordon Freeman, a theoretical physicist with a PhD from MIT who turns up late for work at the Black Mesa Research Facility one morning. His role is working with specimens for experiments and this day is an important one, as he’ll be looking after one of the rarest materials the lab has ever worked with. Playing as Gordon, you put on the hazardous environment (HEV) suit before entering the anti-mass chamber of the anomalous materials lab to place the rare specimen into the anti-mass spectrometer for analysis. While this sounds quite simple, the specimen explodes catastrophically in what’s called a ‘resonance cascade’, causing Gordon to be briefly teleported to various places including what looks like an alien planet before blacking out. Once he awakens it’s clear that something has gone extremely wrong, with the lab destroyed and the bloodied bodies of scientists scattered everywhere.

It’s important to know that the character of Gordon Freeman has no personality, nor does he speak, but we see the entire story through his eyes. Apart from on the game’s box and in the marketing materials, we never see his face in-game and even interaction with other characters is written so that he doesn’t need to say anything. This is done to force the player to experience the story as Gordon, turning him into any character that your imagination wants him to be. This has ensured that he is a beloved character, and potentially any kind of added traits could detract from the ability of players to identify with him. In Half-Life 2 this is played on a bit when particular characters tease Gordon about not saying anything but it’s important to realise that while this design sounds counter-intuitive, it actually worked tremendously. Have you ever played a first-person shooter and wished the character you’re portraying would shut up? That’s exactly what Half-Life does and it makes a world of difference if you are looking for an immersive experience.

A crowbar is essential when working in the anomalous materials lab. Pesky head crabs!

Half-Life was one of the first first-person shooters to break away from the typical style of games from that genre with spinning weapon pick-ups littered across the levels and power-ups. The developers set out to create a story driven FPS containing a deep narrative that doesn’t impact gameplay with forced cutscenes taking the control away from players. This is something that developers still have problems with even today; pretty much any of the popular modern shooters will take the controls from the player to progress the story before throwing them back into what is an equivalent of a duck-shoot with enemies popping up everywhere. Half-Life prevented this by never taking control from the player and allowing characters and events in the environment to tell the story. The entire title is played as one long stream of locations separated by short loading pauses that just freeze-frame the gameplay before resuming, although with PCs back then the loading times could be quite lengthy.

What appears to be freak accident at first is soon revealed to be an inter-dimensional war, with Freeman stuck in the middle. As you make your way through the facility corridors and labs armed with only a crowbar, it feels very much like a survival-horror game with teleporting alien creatures and zombified scientists lurking around every corner. The previously mentioned HEV suit hosts the player health and energy which must be regenerated by using wall-mounting charging systems placed logically throughout the game; if it looks like a location for dealing with dangerous materials you can be assured to find a recharging station nearby. Today we have boring regenerating health and shields in modern shooters but Half-Life opted to put aside the health pick-ups of the time and use more a plausible system instead which aided immersion. I feel this also adds to the survival aspects as well; if you didn’t use all of the health available at the last recharge station, you may decide to backtrack to it later after taking damage later on.

The HEV suit helps Gordon survive the chaos of the resonance cascade.

As the game and story progress you soon come up against the tougher alien and human soldiers which feature quite some advanced artificial intelligence compared to other games. It was impressive at the time that instead of enemies running toward you as you cower behind cover, they would throw grenades instead along with other basic tactics. Another aspect that contrasts with today’s releases was the ability for Freeman to carry every gun at once allowing the player total freedom to play how they wanted. It wasn’t until the Halo series came along that the idea of only being able to carry two weapons at once became the norm; it does add a strategic aspect but there’s nothing more fun than having the entire game’s arsenal available to play with. The various weapons are handed to the player steadily as they progress starting with the typical modern firearms of sub-machine guns, shotguns, rocket launchers and all the way up to high-powered particle accelerators before eventually getting your hands on some alien gadgets and weaponry.

There is one particular enemy that stands out, and that is the head crab. These little things like to jump on their victim’s heads and attach themselves to the brain allowing them complete control, therefore turning the poor soul into a zombie. It’s one of the most iconic aspects of the Half-Life series along with the crowbar, and made the game quite scary by providing what is basically a jump-scare as they leap out of the darkness. Besides the typical shooting sequences the rest of the gameplay is made up of simple puzzles such as restoring power to a reactor or launching a rocket. One particular challenge that stands out is a tentacled monster that has taken refuge under an experimental rocket engine; Freeman must restore fuel and power to the rocket before he can activate it and kill the beast. The catch is that he must navigate around the creature who uses sound to hunt it’s prey – so if Freeman makes any noise, the tentacles make their way over to the source and pound the area. This is quite an interesting idea that quickly becomes frustrating after multiple retries, but it teaches patience and strategy in what today would be simply labelled as a ‘stealth sequence’. Unfortunately at times it feels like the game relies too much on jumping puzzles which are made somewhat easier by the quick-save system that allows you to save anywhere and therefore reduces the challenge.

It’s a more clever FPS that doesn’t forget its roots, with plenty of action sequences.

At the time of release Half-Life was considered to be a technical masterpiece and the opening scenes are obviously used to demonstrate this. As stated before, Gordon Freeman is running late for work and so the opening takes place on a monorail system transporting him to his lab within the Black Mesa Research Facility. During this opening sequence we are treated to a number of scripted events showing other scientists at work while the monorail runs through long tunnels and wide open areas including an section outside where a helicopter takes off. Again, this all takes place through the eyes of Freeman and the player is always in complete control. Everything is expertly modelled and detailed for the time with impressive lighting effects with a very wide variety of locations such as laboratories, warehouses, missile silos, canyons, cliffs, sewers, a military base, and finally the alien planet of Xen. All non-player characters are uniquely modelled with enemies being the most animated in combat.

Half-Life features a soundtrack that mixes techno and electronic music to help emphasise certain game sequences. It’s one of those games where you know something amazing is about to happen when a track starts playing. The ambiance created by the audio can be quite frightening in places; I didn’t imagine this would be a scary title but it can easily become creepy thanks to the horrific noises some of the enemies make. All of the non-player characters are voiced by decent actors with a particular Black Mesa security guard – Barney – becoming one of the more well-known characters that returns in later games.

Meet Barney – he was so popular that he returned in the sequel.

As a lengthy single-player game there is plenty of content to experience but the title shipped with its own multiplayer component in the form of Half-Life Deathmatch, which used maps in the same style as the story mode and all of the weapons. It was basic and a lot of fun but the real multiplayer experience was with Team Fortress Classic, a team-play modification which I ended up playing for years. Valve Corporation provided the tools to enable anyone to modify the core game and spawned hundreds of mods over the years, including Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat. These were very popular mods created by fans at home which were soon purchased by Valve to expand into full releases, and they became very successful. With the release of Half-Life 2 came the Steam distribution platform which has made PC gaming what it is today.

At a time in the late 1990s of copy-and-paste first-person shooters, Half-Life stands out as one of the most imaginative and innovative games ever. It smashed the mould and gave gamers something they didn’t even realise they needed: a story-driven FPS. It isn’t so much of an impressive title because of its story but because of how it presents that story to the player, with Gordon Freeman – the muted hero – allowing us to decide what kind of person we are portraying. All of the game’s elements come together to assist with the suspension of disbelief required to allow the player to have an amazing experience, something that most developers of the time understood but Valve Corporation being the first to use successfully.

Half-Life will go down in the video game history books as a key turning point for the genre, with the sequel expanding on the original with the Source engine and Steam. At the time of writing there is no news on Half-Life 3 apart from rumours, but we’re hoping that it repeats what the original did in breaking us of the boring repetitive first-person shooters with something new and amazing that others would copy for the next decade.

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How do you survive in a gothic insane asylum, surrounded by screaming and self-mutilating inmates? And how much harder would it be if you consciously couldn’t remember who you were or how you came to be trapped in such a nightmare? This is the premise of DreamForge Intertainment’s horror-adventure Sanitarium.

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DreamForge Intertainment was founded by Thomas Holmes, Christopher Straka and James Nemestka in 1993, originally as Event Horizon Software. It produced several well-known and awarded video games mostly in the role-playing and strategy genres including isometric horror-adventure Sanitarium. Struggles with the publisher while developing the unfinished Werewolf: The Apocalypse – The Heart of Gaia led to the shutdown of the company in 2000.

Last month I became a backer for science-fiction game Stasis after receiving an email from The Brotherhood about their Kickstarter campaign. In the promotional material the developer names a number of influences including The Dig, Gabriel Knight and Broken Sword – some of my favourite classics – and visual comparisons are quickly made between the upcoming title and Sanitarium. This led me to seek out DreamForge’s gem on GOG and I have to say that I wasn’t disappointed.

It’s hard to tell you much about Sanitarium’s storyline without spoiling it for future players and taking away some of what makes it special. I’ll therefore try to keep this as brief as possible! It centres on Max Laughton after he wakes from unconsciousness wrapped in bandages in a room at a mental institution, with no idea who he is and a fire breaking out in the ward. From here things take one strange twist after another as our hero tries to regain his sanity and identity, and find out what has happened to him.

The story’s slow build-up and reluctance to give answers away freely makes for an unsettling atmosphere that sets the tone for the entire title. Max experiences tattered memories and flashbacks triggered by game events, displayed in the style of old and flickering film reels; it’s an interesting plot device and one that’s used to great effect, keeping players guessing right until the end. A lack of clarity in narrative can be harmful to some adventure releases but it’s actually a big part of what makes Sanitarium so good.

As if waking up in an asylum wasn’t bad enough…

If waking up in an asylum wasn’t disorientating enough, suddenly finding yourself in a dilapidated town inhabited only by disfigured children will really get your head spinning. Game chapters dealing with the unfolding mystery take place in the hospital’s foreboding rooms and these sections are interspersed with segments set in strange hallucinatory worlds within Max’s mind. They often see him cast in new personas, and unexpectedly changing into a little girl and finding yourself in a circus terrorised by a giant squid can be disarming at first; but gradually, the underlying symbolism starts to become clear.

These weird environments and characters slowly begin to tell a different story and, as you’re aware that they’re taking place in our hero’s tortured head, it’s all given a deeper significance. Abandoned children, a history of abuse, a corrupt teacher and a grotesque alien may sound completely unrelated but their connections cleverly make sense by the end of the title. I recently criticised Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned for revealing its final revelations through a narrative cutscene rather than gameplay and this is thankfully something that DreamForge’s adventure can’t be accused of. You may only be in Max’s body for a small part of Sanitarium but it never feels as if he is forgotten; the focus is always on exploring his past and, as you’re given the tools to answer your questions rather than having their solutions handed to you, it makes for an intriguing storyline that will keep you engrossed.

In the halls of Max’s mind, this all makes sense.

If the plot and level designs are the game’s high points, sadly the controls are its downfall. To move Max, you hold down the right-mouse button and manoeuvre him to the desired point; it sounds simple but sometimes it’s necessary to literally drag him along step by step. Whereas in other point-and-click adventures it’s possible to click on a location on the other side of the screen to have the character walk there unaided, there’s no such functionality available in Sanitarium and you must guide Max through every part of the journey.

This mechanic results in many unwanted stair ascensions, a process which can’t be interrupted and takes several seconds. It also means that Max will often tell you that something ‘simply isn’t possible’ because you haven’t yet made him stand directly in front of an interactive object or character. This caused issues with several puzzles for me: because of his response I thought I’d come up with an incorrect solution, whereas my logic was sound and he just wasn’t facing in the right direction. The area where the controls probably cause the most problem are the action sequences but fortunately these are too few in number to put many off continuing to play.

Speaking of the puzzles, sadly many of these are far too easy. At one point Max comes across a cracked wall and tells you that he’ll need to find something to ‘bust’ through it; and low and behold, there just so happens to be a heavy iron bust situated on desk nearby. As mentioned above, there are several action sequences and when I first heard this I was a little put off (I’m an adventure game purist – and besides, my hand-to-eye coordination is particularly atrocious). But they’re really nothing to worry about: aside from the poor controls, they’re all easy to complete and you’re immediately reborn without any consequences if you do happen to die.

Due to its age, Sanitarium obviously isn’t as flashy as the horror titles we see nowadays and it doesn’t actually seek to scare. But its creepy isometric visuals somehow manage to get under your skin. I’m not sure what’s more unsettling: seeing young children deformed into vegetation by a malevolent alien force, or watching insect-cyborg mutants drill into human foetuses. The asylum itself is probably the sanest place within the entire game but even then Max is surrounded by hostile doctors and shrieking patients.

Max is surrounded by hostile doctors and shrieking patients.

The different worlds visited in our hero’s mind establish unique moods which help drive the game forward. I particularly liked the sequence that takes place in Max’s childhood home, as the rooms rendered in washed-out sepia tones make an ideal setting for you to observe the ghosts of your family coping with monumental grief. The shifts in tone and style prevent the title from getting boring as there’s always something new to see in the next chapter, and they help to engage players emotionally as you’re always trying to figure out the connections to Max’s current situation.

During my research for this post I found that many other reviewers were critical of the portrayal of Max. While I didn’t dislike it as much as they seemed to, I did pick up on some issues. A number of phrases are repeated over and over, particularly those heard when you’re standing in the wrong location (‘That just doesn’t make sense!’); and the voice-acting was obviously recorded at different periods as the tone and sound quality varies between sentences. However, there are a couple of highlights. The girl’s voice that can be heard when hovering your cursor over the icons in the options menu is delightfully creepy, and the music over the end credits – a mash-up of various phrases heard throughout the game – is pretty funny.

Two of the former DreamForge team members are still around and looking to bring back the psychological horror of Sanitarium in the form of ‘spiritual successor’ Shades of Sanity. A Kickstarter project was launched in September 2013 but was unsuccessful after receiving only eight percent of its funding target (we actually considered it ourselves but ended up backing The Long Dark instead); however, this hasn’t stopped them from saying that they will continue its development. According to their campaign page: “The next logical step is a playable demo. We plan on heading to PAX East in 2014 to show off our progress. We are currently creating our own internet forum so we can continue with the community.”

After playing through Sanitarium and enjoying it as much as I did, I have to say that I’m curious to see what this sequel will be like. But with the advances in technology since the original’s release in 1998 and current gaming trends. I’m worried that it’s going to be full of jump-scares and the in-your-face horror we typically see today. I hope Robert J Seres and Keith Leonard manage to retain some of what made Sanitarium special – I’m not necessarily talking about the four-armed Cyclops, but you get what I mean.

It’s not only the Cyclops that made Sanitarium special.

The title’s strong point is definitely its storyline although it does have its faults. In the final chapter your antagonist comes across as unconvincingly villainous and this seems a bit off-kilter when compared to the rest of the game which shows a lot of maturity in its approach. But for a plot that takes place in one man’s mind, Sanitarium manages to transport players to many places – I can’t think of anything else that lets you control a little girl, Cyclops and Aztec god. It may be less ‘horror’ and more ‘bizarre’, and the controls won’t be to everyone’s liking, but DreamForge’s insanity is a worthwhile experience.

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A game that employs the talents of the amazing Jane Jensen, creator of Gabriel Knight, as a story consultant is sure to have a great plot. But does Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller, a dark and gritty point-and-click adventure by Phoenix Online Studios live up to the hype?

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Phoenix Online Studios launched a Kickstarter campaign at the end of 2011 in order to raise funding for their supernatural adventure Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller. Not only did they receive the requested $25,000, they smashed the target when 634 backers helped them reach 137% of their goal. Jane Jensen was brought in as a story consultant to help streamline the plot and her husband Robert Holmes composed a song for the game, which was finally released in four episodes with the latest becoming available during September 2013.

Earlier this year I had the pleasure of playing through the Gabriel Knight series alongside the lovely Kevin from The Mental Attic, and afterwards he was eager to get his hands on anything else the mighty Jensen had something to do with. It wasn’t long before he recommended Cognition to me and, seeing as he deemed it worthy of receiving his highest award, my interest was piqued; plus the fact that it was at a bargain price on GOG at the time made it hard to resist. I picked up on the title on his endorsement alone and I have to say that I wasn’t disappointed.

Cognition tells the story of Boston FBI agent Erica Reed, with the four episodes focusing on the chaos caused by a different serial killer. Although each covers a contained story they also continue the overarching plot of the entire game: her search for the evil Cain Killer, the murderer of her brother Scott three years ago. It gradually becomes clear that the seemingly-unrelated killings all have clues that only Erica can pick up on meaning that someone else must know her secret; and the closer our heroine gets to the truth, the more people around her start getting hurt. She’ll have a difficult decision between justice and revenge when the final confrontation arrives.

I’ve tried not to give too much away in that description because the storyline is definitely one of the title’s highlights, but it should be obvious that this isn’t a point-and-click adventure in the same vein as something like Monkey Island. Far from light-hearted jokes and slapstick humour, it’s a dark and gritty tale – when you consider the twisted criminal that Erica is hunting and his increasingly-violent traps for his victims (he’s obviously taken inspiration from Saw), it couldn’t be anything else. One particular puzzle encountered early in the game forces the FBI agent to turn a wheel as it causes large spikes to bore through her legs; and as the player is required to perform the action rather than the character automatically, it’s made even more real. It’s all a bit horrifying but yet somehow strangely compelling.

Forcing the player to turn the wheel while Erica gets hurt is gruesome, but clever.

As mentioned above, Cognition is a point-and-click so I won’t spend too much time covering the basics as they’re pretty standard. It’s all as you’d expect; players click on the screen to move their character, interact with objects in the environment and use their inventory to solve puzzles. However, there are a couple of interesting features that it’s definitely worth talking about here.

First is Erica’s cell phone: rather than being just a standard inventory item, she uses it as a research tool while she’s out in the field. At various points throughout the title she can contact her colleagues for advice or to request information but the phone’s use doesn’t stop there. If our heroine needs to find out which team won a particular football match six years ago in order to convince someone to trust her, she can google the answer. It also doubles as a hint system where Erica can call her father for tips and, although I didn’t need to resort to this as most of the challenges are intuitive, it’s handy to have just in case.

Along with her cell phone, Erica’s PC can be used for research and email.

Next up is probably the feature that will define Cognition for most players: Erica’s ability to see the past (pretty handy for an FBI agent). Quite a bit of time is spent teaching players how to use her ‘psion’ powers and they eventually expand into three distinct areas. Cognition enables her to see how the past played out; then she learns how to find connections between objects and bring spectral images into view; and finally she’s trained to access other peoples’ memories and discover the truth held within them.

With potent abilities like these it would have been all too easy for Phoenix Online Studios to resort to them in order to push the plot along but Cognition is never reduced to this sort of cheap story-telling. Erica’s powers aren’t the automatic solution for every problem and this limitation is cleverly handled; they don’t always work as intended and instead cause our heroine a great deal of mental trauma. In addition, her abilities make for a great plot device. Both the past and future are available at the press of the button, meaning that players can uncover revelations for the entire season and not just for the current episode without ruining the finale.

Each of the four episodes introduces a new mechanic and this helps keep the entire title fresh and engaging. For example, episode three takes place in only one location with different rooms and players control Erica as she sees her environment through the eyes of one of its inhabitants. However, some mechanics are a little underused and could have been expanded further. For instance, the final episode presents a gauge that indicates how much other characters trust you and it’s obvious that either Erica or someone else will die if the level gets too low. This would have been an excellent feature if there were more than two black-and-white options presented to the player during conversations; if there’s a psychopath in front of me and my choices are ‘You’re a monster!’ and ‘I understand your need to kill’, I know which I’m going to choose in order to save my skin.

Other than the storyline, the most important part of point-and-click adventures is the puzzles and the majority of those in Cognition don’t disappoint. Not too easy but logical enough to be solved with a bit of thought, most players will find that they strike a nice balance; I particularly liked the lengthy challenge set in the Lake House in episode four. However, there was one puzzle in the first episode that I did have an issue with. Erica is required to interrogate a witness but has to leave the room several times in order to gather more clues, and this just feels like needless backtracking in order to lengthen gameplay. In addition, the witness is living on the streets and refuses an egg sandwich because he ‘wants something lighter’ – and although he asks for something sweet, Erica won’t offer him a doughnut because ‘that won’t work here’!

The Lake House puzzle is a great challenge.

Cognition’s visuals are a bit of a mixed bag. Not because they aren’t good – the painted backgrounds are gorgeous and the comic-style cutscenes successfully convey the urgency of the situation at hand. But sadly there are a number of issues that detract from how beautiful everything looks. Character models float through walls at times and Erica frequently appears sitting at her desk but facing the wrong direction; some of the walking animations look slightly weird and our heroine seems to ‘lunge’ before taking her first step. In addition, I experienced a few crashes and my laptop didn’t like a lot of the transitions between scenes, becoming unresponsive for several seconds. But you shouldn’t let these minor glitches put you off playing as I found that they did very little to actually spoil my enjoyment.

Along with the storyline another high point for Cognition is the sound, particularly the voice-acting. This was definitely a family affair: Jensen was a story consultant, her husband Holmes composed the great ending song which was performed by The Scarlet Furies, and his daughter Raleigh Holmes is not only the lead singer for the band but also the voice of Erica. She does a superb job of portraying our heroine as a real person who’s struggling with a stressful job, tragic past and powerful secret. In fact, the only thing I didn’t like about it was the use of the word ‘wicked’ too frequently (‘wicked angry’, ‘wicked cool’, you get the idea) but that’s probably because I’m a cynical Brit more than anything else!

During my research for this review, I realised that a number of critics who had played and reviewed the game episode by episode gave it a much lower score than those who played the title through continuously. I can see why this would be the case; having to come in and out of such an in-depth story with so many twists interrupts the flow, and the cutscenes at the beginning of each episode are only images stitched together and don’t necessarily provide a sufficient recap. I’d therefore recommend purchasing the entire season and playing from start to end if you’re able to.

Minor spoiler alert – please jump to the final paragraph if you don’t want to read!

Cognition kept me gripped from start to end and I became very invested in helping Erica solve the case of the Cain Killer. There was just a tiny measure of disappointment on my part because I was hoping that it somehow tied into our heroine’s past so she could gain some closure in connection with her brother’s death; I was left feeling a bit let down when it was revealed that they weren’t entirely related. Kevin and I recently had a conversation about this and he has a different point of view but regardless, the finale is definitely gripping and leaves the player wanting more.

When it comes down to it, will Erica choose revenge or justice?

Both Kevin and myself are both hoping that there’ll be a second season for Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller, and I’m looking forward to seeing what Phoenix Online Studios have planned for the FBI agent in the future. Even someone who isn’t a psion can see that their future is bright.

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While many might not have played a Telltale Games’ release until they picked up The Walking Dead, the developer has been making episodic adventure games since 2005. One of the first they worked on was Sam & Max Save the World, a predecessor to LucasArts’ classic Sam & Max Hit the Road; but does it hold up to Telltale’s more recent titles?

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Between 2002 and 2004, LucasArts was working on Sam & Max: Freelance Police, a sequel to their 1993 classic Sam & Max Hit the Road. However, they ceased production of the game, underwent major restructuring, and many of the developers who worked on the original game were made redundant. Some of the team went on to form Telltale Games and Sam & Max’s creator Steve Purcell took the franchise to this new company after the LucasArts’ license expired. Sam & Max Save the World was then announced in September 2005 with the project primarily being led by Purcell himself alongside Brendan Q Ferguson and Dave Grossman.

During one of many conversations about adventure games, I mentioned to Kevin from The Mental Attic that I hadn’t played a Sam & Max title for an extremely long time. Then Santa happened to pay me a visit over the Christmas holidays and the first of Telltale’s instalments in the series appeared in my Steam library as a gift! At first I was a little apprehensive because I wasn’t sure if a developer other than LucasArts could bring to life the lovable detectives I remembered from my childhood; but I needn’t have worried, and Kevin’s present ended up being one of the best I received over the festive period.

Sam & Max Save the World’s plot is hard to describe: partly because it’s quite loose, and partly because it’s just so crazy. It revolves around a fiendish plot to take over the world through an ‘optical workout’ video, some scary teddy bears, an Oculus-Rift-wannabe and large-scale mind control. Freelance police Sam and Max must confront the evil menace behind all this in order to save the world, whilst dealing with former child stars, a psychopathic internet and a robotic Abraham Lincoln – amongst other things! The game is composed of six episodes with each having their own contained story, while an overarching plot is continued throughout.

This first season doesn’t show a great deal of coherence between episodes and it can be hard to remember what each has contributed to the overall storyline. Those looking for a grandiose plot may therefore be disappointed, but it suits the episodic nature of the game perfectly. In a recent review of Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller I mentioned how the episodes interrupted the flow of the game somewhat; but for Sam & Max Save the World it makes it feel exactly like you’re watching Saturday morning cartoons again. You may not get one cohesive title, but you do end up with a series of great shorter ones that will each keep you occupied for several hours.

It’s like being a kid and watching Saturday morning cartoons.

If you’ve ever played Maniac Mansion, The Secret of Monkey Island or any of the other SCUMM games, then you’ll feel right at home with Telltale’s adventure. The interface is extremely simple; in fact all you have is a cursor and an inventory box, and to interact with an object you simply click on it. Unfortunately this means that some of the discovery you expect from point-and-clicks is removed as actions are completed automatically, but there are several benefits. Players are able to get stuck into the title straight away, there’s no real learning curve and there’s very little distraction from what’s happening onscreen.

Speaking of the inventory, this is located in the bottom left-corner of the screen in a cardboard box. Clicking on this will allow you to use items collected from Sam and Max’s neighbourhood in conjunction with characters they meet and situations they get themselves into. These objects are context-specific and can’t be used together to create new items, so there are none of the random inventory puzzles you’d usually expect from what was originally a LucasArts’ adventure.

Telltale’s goal throughout Sam & Max Save the World was for players to proceed through the story with minimum frustration and this translates into a lack of challenges that are… well, challenging. Most of them take a bit of thought and consideration but if you pay attention to the dialogue and fully explore all areas available, you won’t have much trouble working your way through the episodes. A few leaps of logic are required but solutions are generally quite sensible – providing you can put yourself in that Saturday-cartoon-frame-of-mind.

Saying that though, you shouldn’t let the lack of a challenge put you off playing because some of the puzzles are the funniest I’ve ever come across within an adventure game. Just when you think Sam and Max can’t make a situation any more ludicrous they somehow manage to take it even further. Two particular puzzles had me laughing out loud: one sees the guys take down a villain, not through violence but with ‘yo’ mama’ jokes (Phil would love it). The other is kind of hard to explain but involves a talking bug who impersonates Abraham Lincoln while trying to chat up the local hottie… I’m giggling to myself now just thinking about it.

She has more folds than an origami accordion.

You’re going to love the writing in this game if you like an ‘off the wall’ kind of humour. There are plenty of items to click on and conversations with characters to be had, and a simple right-click will speed through dialogue if you don’t want to listen to it but you’re likely to be too busy laughing. Unfortunately there are a few occasions where it can feel a bit repetitive as the same lines are heard a number of times in different episodes. If it was one big game this would probably be accepted by most players; but as Sam & Max Save the World is of an episodic format, it becomes more apparent.

An amazing 1950s-style jazz soundtrack by Jared Emerson-Johnson fits the title perfectly and is definitely worth a listen for its sheer imaginativeness. There aren’t many games that can pull off songs about a casino that’s mafia-free or how useful obsolete computers think they are. Just take a look at the video below which shows a musical number from the fourth episode and features some high-kicking by the secret service – who knew they were so tuneful?

Sam & Max Save the World’s cartoon style makes for plenty of sight gags. Their seedy office suggests a couple of downtrodden detectives but look closer and you’ll see bullet holes in the shape of a rabbit on the wall, a goldfish inside the water-cooler and a rat hole complete with a mailbox. The amount of work that has gone into the visuals is impressive, with minor jokes featured on everything from notes stuck on a bulletin board to magazines in the local ‘inconvenience’ store. The animation is also good and I particularly like that for Max – it’s hard not to fall in love with the crazy rabbit as he stomps around the place menacing the other characters.

This is a game I’ll definitely play again in the future. After being immersed in Sam and Max’s world for around fifteen hours I feel I now need to pick up a game that’s a little more serious in nature – but when I’m ready, I’ve got another two seasons to get through thanks to Kevin! I’m not sure if anything can top the talking-bug-impersonating-Abraham-Lincoln joke mentioned above but I’m looking forward to finding out (sorry, I’m giggling to myself again).

Oh Max, you’ve just summed up my life.

Although Sam & Max Saves the World does have its weak spots, it also has plenty going for it: madcap situations, puzzles that will have you laughing out loud and a couple of great protagonists who you can’t help but adore. You’ll fall in love with their craziness quicker than you can say ‘holy jumping saints aplenty riding sideway on a candy pink fat boy’ (and yes, that’s a real line from the game!).

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This article was written by Kevin Kutlesa, one of our lovely contributors. For more information on this writer or if you’d like to get involved yourself, take a look at our Contributors page.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is the third instalment in the series. It was released on the SNES in 1991 in Japan and in 1992 to the rest of the world, but not before Nintendo made fools of themselves with some of the most ridiculous trailers to date!

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Development of a third The Legend of Zelda game for the NES began in 1988 but one year later the project was brought to Nintendo’s next console: the Super Famicom in Japan, the SNES in other regions. The company was able to invest a large budget and ample development time into The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past’s production due to the success of the previous instalments in the series. And, as the title broke the current trend by using 8 instead of 4 Mbit, it resulted in a remarkably expansive world for Link to explore.

I first came across A Link to the Past when a friend of mine had it and needed help going through it. I’d played the first and second instalments, but I wasn’t the fan of the series I am now; this game changed that. We spent days trying to beat it, but we weren’t really good and we eventually gave up. It would take me a few years to get my hands on it again and this time play it from start to finish, completely engrossed in the expansive world and mythology it presented. It also helped that by then, my English was a lot better (it’s not my native tongue) so I could actually understand what was being said to me by the many characters in the title. Since then, I’ve played the game in all re-releases, from Gameboy Advance to the Wii Virtual Console, enjoying it over and over again.

Until the recent release of the book Hyrule Historia, A Link to the Past was on yet another completely independent timeline from its predecessors: The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. But now we know it’s set in the distant future of the Downfall timeline, the grim future where Ganon defeated Link in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, only to be sealed at a later time during the Imprisoning War.

The game opens up on a stormy night with Zelda sending Link a telepathic message urging him to come to her aid. When he wakes up he sees his uncle about to leave but is then instructed not to leave the house. Link doesn’t obey and follows him to the castle, and after dropping down a hole into the dungeons, finds him mortally wounded. His Uncle gives him his sword and shield and instructs him on how to perform the spin attack, then urges him to save Zelda before taking his final breath.

Every adventure requires a first wet, stormy step!

This opening sequence and its small dungeon serve as a tutorial for the game and wastes no time getting players into the think of the plot, because right after rescuing Zelda you’re sent to the Sanctuary’s Priest to find the Master Sword. This is the only thing capable of defeating the evil wizard Agahnim, who’s taken control of Hyrule Castle and has been kidnapping the descendants of the Seven Sages, those who sealed Ganon away in the Golden Land before the imprisoning War.

The first part of this quest takes you to Sahasrala, the Kakariko village elder, who informs you of the three pendants you must acquire in order to pull the Master Sword from its shrine. From then on, you explore the vicious dungeons of Hyrule to collect the artifacts in order to obtain the sword and defeat the evil wizard, but things obviously don’t go as planned.

Kakariko’s debut, isn’t it beautiful and peaceful?

Your quest eventually takes you to the Dark World, the twisted version of the Golden Land and home to the Triforce, corrupted by Ganon’s power during his ages of imprisonment. It’s a horrible wasteland of a place where everything Ganon and every new location is more intimidating than the one before. Enemies, dungeons and bosses here are even more challenging that those in the Light Realm. This is where the second act of the game takes place, though you’ll be switching from one world to the other in order to progress in your quest.

The title’s plot is extremely good with fantastic pacing, with the exposition genially broken down into smaller pieces given to you by Sahasrala at first and the seven Maidens later. This keeps the text-reading portions of the game as short as possible while still giving you all the relevant information, urging you to complete the next quest to find out a bit more about the story. What’s even better is if you leave the game on the start screen for too long, it will go into a cinematic explaining the events of the Imprisoning War, thus giving you all the background lore you could want but without being intrusive about it.

Behold! The Sword of Evil’s bane!

The gameplay is fantastic, addictive and engaging. The controls are simple: A for interaction, B for swinging your sword, holding it down for a few seconds to unleash the Spin Attack; you use Y for items and X to bring up the map. Unlike many other The Legend of Zelda titles, you can save at any point in time and you have three save files to choose from.

For the first time in the history of the series up to the date of release, you have you to do more than just go dungeon-diving. There are plenty of mini-games and shops, optional inventory items, and something revolutionary and Zelda-changing: pieces of hearts, collect four and get a new health container. Doing this was a matter of exploration, puzzle-solving and having quick reflexes to win at mini-games. Adding to this is the sheer size of the world map, with Hyrule being the largest it had ever been, and still among the largest seen in the series today.

The map is huge – and tells you where you need to go next, so it’s handy!

As for the dungeons themselves, they’re hard to the point of being unforgiving, each with complex and unique mechanics; for example, the water level in the Dark World’s Swamp Palace or the star-shaped-floor-layout-altering switches and pitfalls of the Tower of Hera. The dungeons in A Link to the Past remain some of the most difficult in the entire series, each one with a merciless boss at the end such as the Skull Woods’ Mothula, surrounded by conveyor belts and bouncing blade traps in addition to its abilities.

Visually-speaking, the game is a 16-bit masterwork with beautiful and colourful environments, characters and enemies that even to this day look amazing in all their pixelated glory. A Link to the Past was also of the few to push the SNES to its limits, with special effects such as the mist overlay in the Dark Woods, the leaves in the Lost Woods and the thunders overhead on the Dark World’s Death Mountain.

On the sound side, the title features one of the most diverse tracks in all of the series. Unique themes have been written for both the Light World and the Dark World, for their overworlds and dungeons. The Dark World overworld song is one of the best pieces of music ever composed; and for its light counterpart, they used The Legend of Zelda theme from the NES original. Boss fights however all use the same piece of music: an adrenaline-pumping piece with a fantastic and very powerful organ opening.

Of all The Legend of Zelda games in history, and counting Ocarina of Time’s honour of making the transition to 3D, A Link to the Past is the most innovating title in the series. It takes the skeleton-of-a-world presented in the original and gives it shape, story and life. This is a game that defined what we now call the ‘Zelda formula’ and introduced many of plot and gameplay elements that are a part of the series even now. For example, heart pieces, mini-games, Zora’s Flippers, the Hookshot and the dungeon’s big key; and of course the Master Sword, which has become an icon of the series. The aforementioned blade traps, along with plenty more gameplay elements, mechanics, characters and even locations such as Hyrule Castle and Kakariko village, had their debuts in this title – making one of the most influential in the series.

A hero’s reward: the Triforce. One wish, one limitless wish.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is the jewel of the series, and a must-play and must-own title for all fans – and even for those gamers who aren’t. This is a part of the master-class of game development, on all fronts, and is the game that made The Legend of Zelda series what it is today.

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This article was written by Kevin Kutlesa, one of our lovely contributors. For more information on this writer or if you’d like to get involved yourself, take a look at our Contributors page.

Gray Matter is industry veteran Jane Jensen’s point-and-click adventure game that explores the relationship between magic and science. Did this title fail in an underwhelming puff of smoke or were we all left feeling spell-bound?

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Jane Jensen is a name you probably know if you’re an adventure gamer. Creator of one of Sierra’s best-known series, Gabriel Knight, many fans revere her as one of the best writers in the industry. Her point-and-click Gray Matter had a turbulent development history since its announcement in 2003; initially dubbed Project Jane-J, the title suffered many unforeseen delays which included changes in both the developer and publisher. So was this game worth the eight-year wait?

The lovely Kevin from The Mental Attic put me onto Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller over Christmas, a title for which the mighty Jensen was brought in as a story consultant and one which I thoroughly enjoyed. He then suggested I try Gray Matter to get my next adventure fix and so, seeing as his suggestions haven’t let me down so far, I thought I’d give it a go. In some respects I wasn’t disappointed – the story builds wonderfully and the backdrops are gorgeous – but there’s just one major thing which keeps me from adding this title onto my favourites list.

During a trek to London to pursue a career as a stage magician with the infamous Daedalus Club, Samantha Everett – or Sam, as she prefers to be called – suffers a motorbike breakdown in Oxford on the doorstep of Dr David Styles. This troubled neurobiologist lost his wife in a tragic car accident three years earlier and is determined to make contact with her from beyond the grave. Posing as a prospective assistant, Sam helps David with an experiment by recruiting student volunteers; but the mysterious outcomes lead her to believe that a great illusionist is stringing them along, while the Doctor is adamant that it is Laura’s ghost. Will the truth be something that either of them can comprehend?

On the surface this is a story that explores the relationship between magic and science, and the power of the mind. But deeper down it’s a tale of two people in very different situations who are both learning to come to terms with a terrible loss. Jensen is renowned for doing extensive research for her games and it’s obvious here that she put a lot of working into studying neurobiology and neuropsychology for Gray Matter. In addition, the title’s portrayal of Oxford is wonderful; from the town’s winding streets and quaintly-named pubs (I may not have seen ‘The Windy Dog’ in real life but I’ve been to a pub there called ‘The Spread Eagle’), to the existence of Mivvi ice-lollies (remember those?).

Fancy a pint at the Windy Dog?

Gray Matter is your classic, third-person point-and-click adventure game. Players take on the role of either Sam or David throughout its eight chapters; our heroine’s sections primarily revolve around solving riddles set by the Daedalus Club and performing magic tricks on unsuspecting victims, while David is more concerned with finding items to strengthen his memories of his late wife. The inventory is hidden at the top of the screen until your mouse is moved over it, with a left-click prompting your character to comment on an item and a right-click selecting it for use. In addition to the items they pick up both Sam and David have access to a diary which lets you review their dialogue and re-watch cutscenes.

A feature I particularly liked was the map as it enables players to visit places they have access to and keep track of any outstanding tasks. A gold label means that there are tasks still to be finished; a silver location means that only bonus tasks are left; and a grey label means that everything in the area has been completed. This system greatly reduces the amount of needless backtracking but unfortunately it can’t all be avoided. Some hotspots in certain locations don’t become active immediately while others may illicit different responses at a later point in the game. They’re pretty easy to find though and pressing the spacebar reveals all of a room’s interactive objects; this means that there’s no dreaded pixel-hunting, although sometimes the feature does respond a little sluggishly.

The interactive map reduces the amount of needless backtracking.

Gray Matter is quite a big game – it took me around eleven hours to complete – and at times I found myself unsure of what I needed to do next. Each chapter has five or six different objectives; for example, in the first section Sam has to learn more about Dread Hill House, find out if the Daedalus Club has a presence in Oxford and recruit volunteers for David’s experiment. It can sometimes be hard to figure out how these relate or what action is required to progress them, as the characters themselves don’t give you much of a clue. Fortunately progress bars show the percentage completed for each objective and these provided a little guidance when I was lacking a direction.

The puzzles are good in the sense that they’re worked into the storyline particularly well, as none seem out of place and all are solvable with a bit of logical thinking. But most don’t provide much of a challenge so seasoned adventures may feel somewhat disappointed if they’re hoping for a mental workout. Highlights however are some of the final puzzles which take place in the Daedalus Club itself; they’re no ‘Le Serpent Rouge’ but intriguing nonetheless. Sam has to make her way through a number of doors as she tries to navigate the unusual underground lair of the elusive establishment, and solutions to the smaller brainteasers come together to reveal a solution to the larger mystery.

The Daedalus Club puzzles are a highlight of the game.

Another feature I liked was our heroine’s book of tricks. At key points in the game it’s necessary to find the items required and then perform each step in the proper sequence to complete an illusion; this is done by placing objects over different areas of Sam’s body and then clicking on a magic wand. This mechanic is innovative and a nice compliment to the standard point-and-click gameplay but again, the challenge element is somewhat lacking. The game won’t let you perform the wrong trick on someone and the pertinent bits of the instructions described within the book are written in capitals, so it’s sadly reduced to little more than an exercise of trial-and-error.

I just have two questions about this area of the game. Why does Sam’s target never get suspicious, no matter how many times she fails to perform the trick correctly? And if she’s a magician who’s potentially good enough to get into the notorious Daedalus Club, then why does she need to consult a magic book written for children before trying to pull off an illusion? Similar to how the Magic Circle never reveals its secrets, I guess we’ll never know for sure.

If Sam is such a great magician, why does she need a children’s book?

The backgrounds used in Gray Matter are beautiful and have a hand-painted feeling to them. I loved the way that if you looked at them a little closer, you’d notice small details you may have missed at first; dust particles glistening in a beam of sunlight, a spider spinning a web in the corner of a dusty basement, steam rising from a vent in the street. But as seems to be the case with a lot of elements of this adventure, for every positive there also seems to be a downside.

After completing the game, I pointed out to Kevin that a number of characters look different in the cinematics than in the actual gameplay. And it’s not just the fact that the clothes they’re wearing are sometimes different – it’s their facial features as well. For example, the vain Helena looks almost bland in-game but it’s clear she’s meant to be absolutely stunning when watching the cutscenes (and speaking of clothes, she really needs to get some that aren’t so tiny). Kevin tells me that I’m just being picky (and he probably has a point) but this, combined with the the totally-different-art-style cutscenes and creepy-looking dialogue portraits that appear when the subtitles are turned on, made for a bit of an inconsistent experience.

David… is that you?

As with Cognition, Gray Matter is a family affair: Jensen wrote the story, her husband Robert Holmes composed the music, and his daughter Raleigh Holmes is the lead singer of The Scarlet Furies whose beautiful songs are featured in the game. I loved Holmes’ music, particularly the main piano theme which I wished could have been longer. It’s sweeping and melodic, but there’s an undercurrent of sadness which pulls gently at the heartstrings and this suits the atmosphere of the title perfectly.

Apparently, each chapter within the game has a bonus objective which is supposed to encourage players to look at everything and exhaust all possible dialogue options. But to be honest, I didn’t even notice what they were and didn’t see that there was any payoff when I was able to score a hundred percent in a section. Unfortunately this feature, along with one other, isn’t enough to make me want to replay the title in the near future and I can’t see that many players would find much replayability value here.

So speaking of that ‘one other’ point, remember I said at the beginning of this review that there’s something which keeps me from adding this title onto my favourites list? Well, that thing is the ending. I loved the basis for the plot and it’s superbly written, and the way the suspense builds throughout – are the mysterious occurrences caused by David’s late wife or is a master illusionist stringing everyone along – is wonderful. But it all came crashing down for me at the end. I won’t give anything away here but I couldn’t help but feel a little short-changed, and the use of a deus ex machina just seems like an easy and cheap plot device to wrap up a conclusion.

Despite its shortcomings, Gray Matter shows glimpses of a great game with real style and substance. It’s definitely worth picking up if you’re hoping to get caught up in a title with a plot that makes you think but puzzles that aren’t too challenging. But if you’re a seasoned adventure gamer looking for your next Jane Jensen fix, I’d personally recommend that you give Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller a try rather than hanging out with Sam and David in Oxford, no matter how pretty it is – sorry guys.

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This award-winning wireframe arcade music-based shooter by Tetsuya Mizuguchi was originally released for the Sega Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 in 2002. Has the HD version helped the original gameplay withstand the test of time?

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The original Rez was released for the Sega Dreamcast and Sony PlayStation 2 in 2001. It was created by Tetsuya Mizuguchi and developed by his team United Game Artists, a division of Sega. Since then it has been ported to the Xbox 360 by indie Japanese developer HexDrive and released as Rez HD due to its upgraded visuals designed for the high definition consoles.

I experienced the original Rez thanks to a Dreamcast-obsessed friend who was keen to show off the console (it was more powerful than the PlayStation 2). The game fit really well with the popular trance music at the time so I rushed out to buy a copy for my hardware. When I listen to the soundtrack now it doesn’t impress me nearly as much as it did back then; I remember playing the title over and over like you would with your favourite album. What made Rez different from listening to normal music was that the typical sound effects for an on-the-rails shooter were replaced with sounds that complimented the electronic music, turning it into a basic version of Guitar Hero but without an instrument.

The sentient AI, Eden.

The plot is fairly simple: a sentient AI named Eden has gone rogue after becoming overwhelmed with knowledge, causing it to doubt its own existence. Now that Eden has launched the shutdown sequence it’s up to us to take on the role of a hacker that must reboot the system, analyse what went wrong, and take out any viruses along the way. As with any simple games such as this, it’s more about the gameplay than it is the plot which is one of Rez‘s strong points.

Our hacker progresses through five stages along a set path at a fixed speed with enemies appearing from in front or behind our humanoid character. The combat is simple; enemies are destroyed by moving the aiming cursor over them to obtain a lock-on by holding a button and then letting go to unleash the attack. We aren’t talking bullets and missiles here as everything is set in a computer-generated wireframe world that’s designed to be more visually pleasing than having any kind of realism. The only real challenge is to target and destroy enemies quickly enough so that they aren’t able to fight back, apart from the boss fights which are more of the same but with attack patterns that need to be memorised.

Up to eight enemies can be targeted at once which is counted within the targeting reticle.

Along the way you’ll collect health pick-ups that increase your health bar and finding enough will evolve our hacker into a different form, while taking hits will devolve him into a lesser state. What really makes the gameplay enjoyable is the combination of the soundtrack and musical effects that are generated by your actions, although you don’t score any points for timing as you would in modern music-based games. Rez HD gives the feeling of playing along with music much like Guitar Hero and Rocksmith do today but in a more primitive and less obvious fashion. As you progress through a level special orbs appear that, when destroyed, increase the complexity of the music and the amount of detail on screen. It provides a build-up to the end of level boss in much the same way a piece of music has a gradual crescendo before the finale.

Even though Rez HD looks like a retro game with its wireframe graphics, it doesn’t take long to realise there’s a lot of detail to be found. It’s believed that the visual style was inspired by the work of Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, whose name is listed at the very end of the credits, and it’s easy to see the comparison between the design of Rez and his art especially in the colour-schemes used. Some if not all of the visual style is inspired by computer technology with circuit board designs appearing in the background along with pixelated explosions and shaded basic 3D objects. It’s safe to say that Rez has a unique style that is easy to recognise and most likely inspired the creators of many recent shooters such as Geometry Wars.

There is a wide variety of impressive visual themes spread across the levels.

Rez‘s soundtrack is just as important as the gameplay if not the most important aspect, as without it we would have a much poorer experience. Every action has a sound effect attached that compliments the music and adds to the intensity of the audio as the gameplay becomes more frantic. Each level has its own track and the sound effects are changed to match, although after playing through the game enough times the soundtrack can become a bit repetitive. Also, because of the way shooting works in Rez, the frequency and timing of your attacks will rarely match the music and often sound off beat. Trying to force it to match the soundtrack can only end up in losing.

While I suggested that the music can become repetitive after multiple playthroughs, that doesn’t mean it’s boring at all. For example, Guitar Hero is easily replayable as the experience of playing along to a soundtrack is rather addictive, but a change of music is often needed to keep things fresh. If the game itself could be adapted to play along with any music it would be a different story, but the technology of 2001 wouldn’t have made this easy or worthwhile. Interestingly, a device was released for the game in Japan called the Trance Vibrator that pulses in time with the music and was designed to be sat on or held.

The original Rez was at the beginning of the music game genre; the experience I now get from software such as Rocksmith 2014 is much more developed but with its origins in games such as this. Today we can now plug guitars and DJ equipment into our computers and use games that let us combine our love of music with addictive gameplay. That’s not to say that Rez HD isn’t worth picking up because it still is and continues to provide a positive experience for those that enjoy music and gaming.

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Cinders is MoaCube’s retelling of Cinderella, a classic fairytale I’m sure we all know. But far from being obsessed with attending the ball and marrying the prince, this visual novel asks its players two thought-provoking questions: how do you define independence, and what are you willing to do to get it?

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We recently had the opportunity to talk to Tom Grochowiak from MoaCube and he kindly answered our questions on Cinders. When asked how the development team formed and why they decided to make this title, he told us: “MoaCube was born when me and Graciana, our artist, were stuck in traffic and had way too much time to talk. We worked for the same company, Codeminion, and pondered the idea of making a fairtytale visual novel of a similar quality to the games we did for our employer. When months later we found ourselves without a job and decided to go indie, this seemed like the natural choice for our first project.”

I was instantly attracted to one of Cinders’ screenshots whilst trawling through Steam Greenlight one morning. It was an image of a lake, with blue bells flowering around the water and god rays streaming down through the trees, and it reminded me of a jigsaw puzzle that I’d completed with my grandmother when I was very young. I reached out to Grochowiak to ask if he’d mind telling us a little more about the project and he generously gave us his time, along with a review copy of the game.

This is the image that initially attracted me to Cinders.

Let me start off by saying that I use the term ‘game’ very loosely here, because Cinders is in fact a visual novel. I can count the number of these I’ve picked up over the years on just one hand; I love the story side of such titles but, where I’m typically an adventure gamer, I usually get a twitchy finger if I can’t start clicking on things in the environment and solving puzzles. But the visual style of MoaCube’s project was enough to persuade me to give it a go and I have to say that I wasn’t disappointed.

Described as a ‘mature take on a classic fairytale’ on the Steam Greenlight page, the basic components of the Cinderella story we all know are there. Take an orphaned child of noble descent; throw in a dominant stepmother and a couple of bickering stepsisters; add a masquerade ball and a princely love interest; and finally, include a fairy godmother for a sprinkling of magic. But that’s where the similarities end. As Grochowiak said in his interview with us: “We hated how Cinderella in this original story is a very passive character and thought it’s a good basis for a story about growing up and learning to take responsibility for your life.”

In this contemporary re-telling, the heroine – who goes by the name of ‘Cinders’ – is a headstrong young woman who’s a lot feistier than the protagonist you probably remember from your childhood. She still acts as a servant to her step-family but she actively plans to do something to improve her situation and decides to take matters into her own hands. The stepsisters here are conventionally beautiful rather than ugly but there are spiteful aspects to their personalities; one because she fails to live up to her matriarch’s expectations and the other because she feels that she’s one of life’s losers. All three women take their anger out on Cinders but this time however, the way she reacts to the situation is entirely up to the player.

As this is a visual novel, gameplay here is reduced to a matter of clicking on an option whenever the story presents you with a decision. This may sound simple but when you consider that Cinders contains 120 decision points, three-hundred options to choose from and multiple endings with different variants, it’s obvious how much hard work MoaCube put into the project.

There are over three-hundred options to choose from – which will you pick?

The direction of the story and Cinders’ character development is entirely dependent on your decisions and even those choices which initially seem minor will affect your playthrough in some way. It really feels as if you’re affecting her future when selecting an option rather than just moving the story on to the next scene, and there were a number of times where I had to pause for a moment to reflect on the kind of person I wanted my heroine to be before proceeding with my choice.

The most interesting decisions for me were the ones where Cinders has to react to her stepsisters Sophia and Gloria: does she sympathise with them, try and placate them, or does she rebel against their imposed authority? Such conversations revealed a lot about these characters and it was hard not to feel sorry for them after learning the reasons why they act the way they do. The same is true of Lady Carmosa, the stepmother; she does indeed make our heroine’s life difficult but there are hidden motives for her behaviour, and whether she is truly wicked is something of a debate.

Lady Carmosa may seem wicked, but she does have motives for her actions.

And this is one of the great things about Cinders: nobody in the cast in perfect, not even Cinders herself. They all have a number of flaws and regardless of how virtuous or villainous they may initially seem, they’re not without their redeeming qualities. For example, Perrault, the striking Captain of the Guard, obviously has a heart of gold but he’s sometimes blinded by his loyalty and is all too eager to resolve a situation with his sword. There’s something human about every single character, each has a story to tell and secrets to reveal, and this makes the plot all the more poignant when it concludes.

While I absolutely loved the way the female characters were written, I wasn’t as keen on the male characters. There are three main men in Cinders and unfortunately it feels as if they each fall into a ‘lover’ stereotype: the bit-of-rough Captain of the Guard; the charming prince in his castle; and the childhood friend who seems to have had a crush on Cinders for a very long time. Tobias, the latter, is the exception but I’m also not entirely sure I believe that Perrault and Prince Basile could become besotted with our heroine after so few meetings. This just came across as being too much like your typical fairytale, although maybe that’s because I’m an ice queen who doesn’t believe in love at first sight.

The male characters tend to fall into ‘lover’ stereotypes.

For those who are now worrying that the headstrong, feisty Cinders I described above will go weak at the knees in the presence of one handsome man or another: fear not. It’s entirely possible for her to find the love of her life but the game’s focus isn’t on romance and our heroine isn’t defined by her romantic relationships. During my first playthrough I wanted her to be independent and the storyline ended with Cinders leaving town on her own. Yes there’s a prince, and yes there’s a ball, but these are given to the player as options; additionally, our heroine’s motives for wanting to go to the masquerade in the first place are varied and not ones players may have initially considered.

As I’ve said above, the thing that initially attracted me to Cinders on Steam Greenlight was the gorgeous visuals. The scenery backdrops looks like something out of a children’s book (although the story itself is too mature for a younger audience) and contain very subtle animations; sunflowers blowing in a breeze, and a fire crackling in the hearth for example. The character portraits work extremely well against these and I loved the way each was introduced in a paper-cut-out style; I particularly liked the contrasts between the two opposite godmother figures, Madam Ghedde and The Fairy. Add to these points a lovely menu screen featuring Cinders herself and you’ve got yourself one beautiful looking game.

Characters are introduced in an attractive paper-cut-out style.

The music stands up to the visuals and is something suited to a ballet version of Cinderella, and the background noise over the top of the tracks adds to the atmosphere. For example, when visiting the inn you’ll hear the sound of moving tankards, murmurs of conversation and the clattering of plates being cleared away; and if you take a walk by the lake, you’ll experience the chirping of birds in the trees. During my first playthrough I wondered whether voice-acting would add something additional but on subsequent attempts I realised I didn’t actually miss it. It’s possible that including voices for the characters would have taken something away from Cinders’ fairytale book charm.

I’ve now played through the title several times and I still haven’t uncovered everything there is to see. There is a ton of replay value here: four possible endings each have a number of possible variations and players will keep coming back to find out what happens when they make a different choice. For example, the ‘Fairytale Ending’ will see our heroine upon a throne but, depending on her previous actions, she could be an evil queen with a supernatural adviser or one who’s kind as well as intelligent. The game lets players make as many saves as they wish so you can do so right before making a choice, therefore enabling you to replay from certain points and see what the alternative outcomes are.

MoaCube’s gem deserves a big thumbs-up on Steam Greenlight.

As I said at the start of this review, I’m not the biggest fans of visual novels as I prefer the involvement of an adventure game. But Cinders had me hooked from the start and I think it’s extremely likely that I’ll go back to it again in the future. Rather than forcing strict morals on the reader as is the case for traditional fairytales, MoaCube’s gem gives the player reason to think: what lengths would you go to in order to secure your independence, and how do you define freedom?

I can’t wait to see what this development team has up their sleeves next. In the meantime, make sure you head over to the Steam Greenlight page to give Cinders a big thumbs-up – and check out the demo available from the MoaCube website.

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