Like it or not, we’re almost at that time of year and no, I don’t mean the big ‘C’ word either (although it’s getting towards that time as well). I am, of course, talking about the silly season. Come September the gaming calendar starts to get a little crazy and it all too quickly becomes week-after-week of big titles vying for time in your console/PC. It’s not a bad situation per se, but finding the time, and money, for all these can be very tricky. Moving away from indies just for a second, we’ve had Spider-Man swing into action and we’re on the verge of seeing Forza Horizon 4, Red Dead Redemption 2, Fallout 76, Battlefield and Call of Duty launch imminently.
But whilst we’re about to see a massive surge of new titles head our way, we’re seeing a growing back-catalogue of games being made readily available to us at the same time. The Xbox Game Pass service offered by Microsoft brings not only old, but new games as well which is something we haven’t seen before in the games industry. This subscription-based service, priced at £7.99 per month, could well be the killer blow that Microsoft needed as they now look on towards their future and inevitable One successor. That, however, depends on what you’re looking for in a console…
What do I mean by this? Well, let’s think of this from a business perspective and where Microsoft is heading over the coming years. They are clearly aiming for the Xbox to be a singular ecosystem, something where you can access any game, anywhere at any time. From their brief mention at E3 this year, it could be rather exciting if they can manage this successfully. In trying to achieve this, they can offer a complete package where you can access all your Xbox content in one place, using one system and under one (or more) subscriptions.
Xbox Game Pass
Now from a business perspective, this makes complete sense, but looking at it from a consumer perspective this also makes perfect sense too. Think of it this way; you’re new to gaming, or you’re introducing someone new to gaming and they want a console. You can buy one that needs you to buy games from the get-go to tide you over. Or, with an Xbox, you can buy the console and get a Game Pass subscription, and have access to a shed-load of games off the bat. With all first-party titles coming to the service too, it’s a no-brainer for anyone with an Xbox already so it can easily entice newcomers too.
Am I doing this as a means of promoting the Xbox over other consoles? No, I am far beyond such immaturity. In fact, I’m doing it as an exercise of hope and wishful thinking that this may become the future of gaming. Remote access and digital downloads are clearly the way to go moving forward, so imagine being able to turn on your Switch or PS4 where you have access to a massive catalogue of old and new games almost instantly. If this were bundled into the cost of PSN or Switch Online for example, then I’d be more than happy with that.
Whilst many may moan that most games on offer are older and don’t offer anything new, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that at all. Looking backwards allows us to move forward, as long as the value is there.
Nintendo Direct’s featured a terrific one-two last night, starting with the unexpected announcement of Luigi’s Mansion 3 and ending with the insidious Tom Nook rather effectively revealing Animal Crossing for Switch.
Between these two points, games like Diablo 3: Eternal Collection, Game Freak’s new RPG, simply called Town, Yoshi’s Crafted World, Starlink: Battle for Atlas and Daemon X Machina all impressed. That wasn’t the problem.
The Nintendo Switch Online service launches next week, September 19th in the UK, and this was the company’s chance to really sell it to us, to convince the sceptics. Unfortunately, as some might have expected, Nintendo proved once again that their understanding of the online space is limited — to say the least.
Come on now.
The Direct, essentially, gave us a few new details on the basic features. Firstly, it’ll cost £17.99 a year or £3.49 a month and for that:
You can play games online.
You’ll be able to play NES games each month. NES games are added every month.
You can back up your save data to the cloud.
The smartphone app enables voice chat.
There are exclusive offers for members
So, let’s examine each of these:
It’ll cost £17.99 a year, or £3.49 a month
That’s a good price. Xbox Live comes in at £39.99 and PS Plus at £49.99 for a year. But…
You can play games online
Nintendo has taken its time to launch the service, so, by removing something people have already grown accustomed to — playing games like Splatoon 2 and Mario Tennis Aces online for free — they are almost always going to feel cheated unless value is added elsewhere. Does the extra cost improve the online gameplay with better servers, for example? We don’t know and we should do by now.
You’ll be able to play NES games each month. More NES games are added every month.
Cool? I find it hard to believe, considering the duration the service has been worked on since the Switch’s launch, that NES games are all Nintendo can offer here. The idea of playing ‘80s games with added netcode is novel but hugely insignificant in this day and age. Nintendo has the option to create a low-cost Netflix-style service with access to an incredible library of games across the SNES, N64, GameCube, Wii etc. Few could do that, and yet here we are.
What’s more, you’ll need to connect at least every week in order to guarantee access to these NES games — even if your subscription is a long way from expiring. It’s just not practical for travel at all. PS4 and Xbox let you play offline as long as the games are downloaded first.
You can back up your save data to the cloud
A welcome, modern addition in line with PS Plus and Xbox Live… that is, until Nintendo revealed that not all games could be backed up. The reasoning behind this? Fundamentally, they don’t want people to cheat in games like Dark Souls or Pokémon. Scratching your head like me? Take Splatoon 2, Nintendo stores the save data locally instead of online, meaning cheaters do and will prosper with a backup feature. Separating the single player and multiplayer save data in games like Splatoon 2 is the easy fix here.
What’s more, Nintendo will not keep your cloud save data if your online plan runs out. These are kept for six months after a user’s subscription lapses on PS4. Xbox goes one better and keeps them indefinitely.
The smartphone app enables voice chat
You need a companion smartphone app for voice chat. It’s awkward and overly complex. Enough said really.
There are exclusive offers for members
Sounds good, like discounts on games? What are they? ‘We’ll have more to announce in the future’. But it launches next week, shouldn’t some offers be ready to announce? ‘Here are some NES Controllers’.
The Online Proposition
I feel like the Nintendo Direct, instead of selling the online service, reinforced the idea that it offers little of value, and that’s probably why it’s cheap. In that case, what’s the point of it other than for a quick monetary boost?
Let’s alternatively, pretend, that Nintendo offered the following service:
You can play games online with more robust servers – for those that want a premium online experience.
You’ll be able to play a selection of NES, SNES, N64 and GameCube games each month with online added in. Achievements for these titles are an optional extra that can be enabled.
You can back up your save data to the cloud for all games. Cloud data is stored indefinitely.
The smartphone app has been deleted from history. You can talk to friends via the console itself. Friend codes have also been deleted from history.
Custom themes, menu music and folders are available as part of the service.
There are exclusive offers for members, including discounts on games and a free Switch game every month.
Does all of that sound entirely unreasonable, given the time they had? I personally don’t believe so. They could even raise the price to reflect this — most would pay a little bit more for it, I would think. I’m aware that all of this could be added in the future without much difficulty, but I get the feeling we’ll be waiting an awfully long time. And they’ve had plenty.
Wise Yet Strangely Naive
The truth is: I’m not even particularly bothered by online services in general. When I get chance, I spend a great deal of time playing deep single player games, or games locally with others. It’s more the fact the offering from Nintendo is so uncharacteristically poor when compared to their usual workmanship.
I imagine Nintendo to be a master artisan when designing games; inspiring, bold, passionate perfectionists that are almost peerless in their craft. It’s telling that the video they presented to us, with the use of Mario characters to explain the online service, was, on a creative level at least, the best part; Bowser and his son playing together, Lakitu being the literal cloud save data:
The Switch itself is a smart portable, a cool slice of tech for console quality gaming out and about. It’s a great proposition and the sales show people are engaged with it. When it comes to online infrastructure, however, I imagine Nintendo as a bumbling, misplaced clown that has lost the ability to make people laugh. Genuinely speaking, I don’t understand why they find it so hard to get right. It’s like the department for online services at Nintendo is from a different company altogether, with computers still running Windows XP.
The internet is an entitled, odd place. It has its daily, often wild rants, the mutterings or cries of ‘I want this’, things are either absolutely terrible or absolutely amazing. There’s no real logic or sense of balance. I could digress. In a nutshell: this piece shouldn’t come across as one of those — I’m just stating it would be really quite nice to see an online service worthy of Nintendo’s name.
Stories get passed on and permutate over time but there is one story I’ve heard that doesn’t, a story of a knight – one of the knights of Gywn in fact, have you heard of it?
Some say this knight had an immense power that he could traverse the abyss. He set off to Oolacile, a once thriving city that fell waste to the clutches of the Father of the Abyss. The noble knight with his trusted companion, a wolf, journeyed to the land Oolacile. The knight and his companion were to fight the Father of the Abyss and to liberate Oolacile from the ghastly creature. The knight fought valiantly but with his companion downed and on the verge of being defeated, the knight acted selflessly and sacrificed his own life in order to save his companions. This once benevolent knight, now only recognizable by his physique had been consumed and corrupted by the abyss. In his new-found rage, attacked anything or anyone until one day an unnamed knight ended his reign of terror. Stories say his companion still awaits at his grave, waiting for what, I do not know.
You see Chosen Undead, no matter how powerful we believe one’s self to be, we can be corrupted and consumed; do not fall prey to the power of the Abyss, do not allow yourself to be a consumer.
The abyss is pervading the land and tainting the very foundations of its construct. I and other reputable people try to inform the dangers and to fend off this lurid sap. A feeble idea marred by the nascent perception of the populous whom invest their souls on cosmetic items, loot boxes and other such content that should already be allocated within the innards of the game; sometimes that content is already prescribed on the disc. Tis not so much vexation if the game is free to play but one cannot possibly tolerate such etiquette with a full priced retail game. Principally when the game is formulated in such a way that its desiderata is for thee to spend their souls. This ritual has been coined ‘Games as a Service’ or ‘Live Services’, names conjured to send you adrift.
Not all ‘Games as a Service’ are harrowing, Nintendo’s ‘Splatoon’ hosts special events, adds new weapons, new maps and cosmetic items all for free; the only way to acquire the weapons are from points gained from participating within the game and the points are distributed respectfully… Many AAA companies such as EA and Ubisoft for example, have and will, design their games to devour your souls, applying this technique in both Multiplayer and Single player.
To me, this seems an unstable business model because companies are not just competing with other companies, but they will be competing with their own products.
These big AAA developers and producers no longer refer to us as players or gamers, we are consumers. Consumers, ha, must we not enjoy their games? Must we not look at them as entertainment? Must we not see them as an art form or a form of escapism from the atrocities of life? Not in their eyes. They are just consumable items for us to feed on, reducing their own games to just an item with no inherent value, insinuating we gamers just view these as products that we consume and gain no experience from. Ugh, uh… Surely, this implies that some publishers see games as nothing more than a vacuum sucking everyone’s time to serve no purpose other than to exist, acquire souls and then to be abandoned. Games are not the pendent.
Consumer! By the gods… Would you expect that from a director? Would you expect that from an author? Of course not, they are an audience or a reader. A level of respect participates, not mere vessels for conjuring souls. Would thou agree we should be treated with the same dignity?
If only there were more Covenant of Artorias… End this corruption and consumption… We all should protect ourselves, so our faint doth not follow that of the knights.”
It isn’t uncommon for me to sit in my game room and complain about not having games to play – you hear it frequently on the web. The irony of that statement is that I have over 500 video games staring me in the face.
Despite having a huge library of games, I often find myself struggling to pique my own interest. This past weekend I sat back to reflect on my video game collection. Mixed with classic retro titles, indie releases and triple AAA smashes, I pretty much have it all.
So why am I losing interest in my game library? Here are five reasons why I feel that video game collecting has lost its lustre.
1. There are too many games
There are too many games being released and not enough time to digest them all. This was covered in another article here on Nitchigamer back in February.
The author (Stephen) felt the same as I do: that we are always playing catch up. As a collector, I have to have the physical game copies. That doesn’t mean that I don’t buy digital games but, 99% of my library is physical.
I look back at the games I purchased over the holiday season and most of them are still sealed. Many of them are a fraction of the cost I paid for them as well. As much as I try to keep up with the new releases, adult life kicks in. I just don’t have the time.
2. Mobile Gaming
Mobile gaming has grown immensely over the last few years alone. Every company is looking to get in on the mobile craze. I also play games on my mobile device. You could even say that I sometimes spend as much time on mobile as I do on console.
It’s just so easy to sit on the couch and swipe at my screen. It’s pretty lazy when you think about it, but it brings me joy.
3. Indie Influx
In some of my earlier articles, I covered how indie titles were being brought over to consoles in physical form. Sites such as Limited Run Games and Strictly Limited to name a few. All releases are created in small print numbers which becomes a pit for collectors who feel like they may get something valuable.
It started as a release every few weeks and today it’s multiple releases on a weekly basis. I can’t blame the companies for running a business but, it makes me think about a time where things were more simple.
4. Collector’s Edition
Collector’s Edition games are just devilish. Let’s briefly look at an upcoming AAA – Assassin’s Creed Odyssey for example. There are 8 different versions of the game. Starting with the base game, each tier adds something additional. For any huge Assassin’s Creed fanatic, they would have to spend hundreds of dollars to collect each version.
I personally enjoy seeing what companies come up with next, but I can no longer justify spending the cash. Whatever happened to just a standard and a deluxe?
5. Microtransactions
I must make a small confession before I begin. I spend $5 here and there on my mobile games for a little edge. However, I am reluctant to pay for additional goodies for console games. I grew up during a time where video games were released complete. I never had to pay for DLC or cosmetic items. You would beat the game and everything would just unlock.
Today kids can pay their way to the top of the rankings. It’s just a sign of times where things just get easier and easier – where’s the skill? My parents always told me that I had things easy and now I know what they meant.
Wrap-Up
In conclusion, I feel that I need to backtrack 20 years and go back to a time before the internet took over gaming. A time where kids hung out together in one room to enjoy games.
As my age grows I become wearier that everything I loved about gaming will just wash away. With that being said, I have decided to collect retro games only. I will still buy the triple AAA titles that really stand out to me, but with retro at least I know what’s out there. I may even take a leap forward and just buy many of them digitally.
It’s time to do what really makes me happy as opposed to playing what I feel everyone else is. It only took me 31 years to realize this.
The Walking Dead is back. And this time, for the very final season. Telltale Games have expanded The Walking Dead’s universe through 4 seasons, in addition to 400 Days and the mini-series Michonne. We have arrived at the end of the road with our dear Clementine, where we will hopefully receive an answer to the question we’ve been waiting for; will she lead the same fate as Lee?
I won’t be giving scores on each episode but will give a final score for the season in total. Therefore, these reviews will be short (but sweet). With that said, I’ll try to keep it as spoiler-free as possible, but as the series goes on, I will eventually be forced to talk about relevant events.
It was with a heavy heart that I sat down with TWD again, with the first episode “Done Running”. I can always appreciate ending a series when it’s good, but at the same time, I’m not at all ready to say goodbye.
Ever since the first season was published, I have spent a lot of my time on these games. I don’t mean just playing the games – that alone truly opened the world of storytelling in games for me. But they also inspired me to write my bachelor’s thesis on TWD Season 1, studying the video game alongside the comics; combining my passion for games with my studies. Even though I will most likely never have a conversation with someone from Telltale Games, I have a lot to thank them for. And I cannot think of a better opportunity to do that than with these final reviews.
She’s all grown up!
As always, the choices we make will have consequences as the story progresses. However, it will now also have repercussions for AJ – the little boy we came to know in the previous season, whom Clementine has become a parent-figure for. Our choices will have an impact on what kind of person he will grow up to become, how he is shaped as a human being.
In this episode, Clementine and AJ meet a group of kids at an abandoned school, who have created their own society and are generally living in peace. They get to know some of the kids there, they get their own room, and they are served food. Though I gotta say, accepting the kindness of strangers in this game feels weird and unnatural.
In terms of gameplay, some things have changed from the previous season. Because we now have our own room, you can gather collectables to decorate Clementine and AJ’s room, giving us a nice sense of finally belonging somewhere.
In terms of combat, you can choose to incapacitate the zombies before killing them, making it easier to deal with larger packs. In addition, I really have to praise Telltale Games for their development from season 1 regarding the graphics. It doesn’t just look better, but the shifting between scenes no longer have those small pauses they used to have, now they just smoothly move from one scene to another in one coherent motion. I love it.
But, as we have seen throughout the series, all good things must eventually come to an end. Nothing ever stays peaceful in the world of The Walking Dead, and one thing I’ve learned from these games is to never believe in a first impression. Towards the end of the episode, things start to get dramatic and increasingly intense. It ended with my mouth hanging open, saying: did I do that?
Watch this space.
In a way, I feel that as Clementine has grown, so has Telltale Games as a company. As an avid fan, among many others, I feel like I have been following their journey to the top; they went from being one of the smaller ones to becoming one of the most significant game developers when it comes to storytelling in games.
“Done Running” is a great start to the final season, and even though there have already been some surprising turns, I’m guessing that we haven’t seen the half of it, yet. The title is a good description of their momentary sanctuary, and just looking at the other titles for the remaining episodes makes me nervous. All in all, the episode looked amazingly good, it tugged at my emotions right away, and this is only the beginning.
So far, The Final Season is looking very good. One episode down. Three more to go.
Sometimes you play a game that oozes a certain type of magic. It’s not always immediately clear why it does so either, but you succumb to the feeling nevertheless as it draws you into its intricate web of splendour. It’s a rare feeling, one in which only a handful of games have given me — admittedly — but it’s one I experienced while playing Subset Games’ Into the Breach. A strategic indie title that has, to some surprise, arrived on the Nintendo Switch without forewarning.
Into The Breach Review Switch
It’s tempting to say that the Switch finally has a new Advance Wars, at long last, but that wouldn’t really give Into the Breach credit. While obviously similar in its turn, grid-based gameplay, Subset Games offers its own unique take on the winning formula. No longer do you have command of an almost endless supply of troops and tanks to manoeuvre across the battlefield… Instead, you defend earth from the Vek — enormous creatures that are breeding beneath the planet — with just three ‘mechs’.
Every move has to be considered carefully. Good luck, commander.
Each mini battle that takes place is essentially a fight for survival, a ‘hold them off until they decide to run affair’, across a number of different turns. During these battles, your job is to effectively minimise the damage to your power grid, protect your pilots and complete the available objectives in the smartest way possible. The penalty for a destroyed power grid is a literal Game Over and pilots killed in combat will not return. Buildings on the map are integral to powering the grid, so guarding them is important, but you also need to push back the Vek and smash those bonus objectives too — success here bestows reputation (upgrade) points, life is tough without them. In other words: your movements are very limited, yet there’s an awful lot to do.
Yes, much like XCOM, Into the Breach does a remarkable job of making you feel helpless and guilty against your determined attackers. Every resource counts, every decision is questioned, every movement potentially your last. You did well, but remember that single building that was destroyed? Well, hundreds perished inside of it. It’s this state of vulnerability that makes it so thrilling as you just about pull off a victory, allowing you to ever so slightly upgrade your mechs with greater durability or additional moves.
Giant insects infest the earth. It’s a nightmare worth living.
Subset Games ensures a punishing sci-fi journey then; Into the Breach won’t be for everyone, even on the easier settings provided. However, like great strategy titles before it, precision, intelligence and skill are rewarded. Of course, losing to the Vek, as your precious power grid is depleted, isn’t the end of days when the majesty of time travel is involved. Upon defeat, your mechs are transported back through time, to before the point you were overwhelmed, and you can do it all again. The extra catch involved here? One, and only one, of your experienced pilots, can come with you. That’s multi-timeline Ralph for you (my longest serving pilot).
Making your way through each of the islands in Into the Breach demands you learn the mechanics thoroughly. You can reverse a move once per battle, true, but that really serves as a warning that you should be doing better. A large portion of the strategy focuses on using your environment and the unique abilities of the mechs. In lieu of directly attacking a Vek, a more efficient move might be to push it into the sea and drown it. Setting alight the monsters will perhaps validate a long game approach, but, alternatively, maybe you should have shunted two of them into one another. It’s a combined game of chess and billiards, and this is partly where that aforementioned magic starts to reveal itself.
Naturally, with a game of this calibre, the magic transpires in other more observable places too: the simplistic, retro visuals impeccably crafted and synthesised with the harps, cellos and sullen electric guitar riffs of the soundtrack — which composer Ben Prunty describes as his, perchance, most ‘personal’ of all. One thing is for sure, the end of the world has seldom been this wholesome or inventive.
The even better news is that once you’ve vanquished the aliens and saved the earth, there’s so much more to see. New mech squads are available to purchase, think of them as extra chess pieces, which can radically change how you play. There are multiple pilots to recruit each with individual skills, a hard mode that demands just shy of perfection, and earning achievements serves a real, tangible purpose: it’s the currency used to buy these fresh squads. Numerous run-throughs are inevitable and encouraged.
New mech squads mean hours of fun. Forget your life.
The Switch version of Into the Breach is close to identical to its PC brother. It’s distinct, clear and attractive on the screen, with the UI from PC making it over in a rather perfect fashion. There’s some added HD Rumble support, for good measure, that subtly enhances the overall effect, but everything else is exact. Regardless, whatever platform you play Into the Breach on, quite simply, you should just play it. Did I mention that it’s a masterpiece?
I was confused when I first loaded up Victor Vran. Not because I didn’t know what I was doing, more that I didn’t know what I was playing. The reason? Titular monster-hunter come demon-slayer Victor Vran is voiced by Doug Cockle who many will instantly recognise as the voice behind iconic Witcher, Geralt.
Now if you told me I was playing a spin-off of the Witcher series, I would have believed you. Let’s look at that facts; the game is set in an alternate past where monsters, demons and other nasties have started running riot and it’s your job to pursue and end them. Sound familiar? Yeah, that’s what I thought, hence the confusion.
Haemimont Games, having worked on past titles such as the Tropico series, bring Victor Vran in its complete form to the Switch – full to the brim with extra content. More on that later, first of all, let’s take a look at what Victor Vran is in more detail.
Victor Vran: Overkill Edition Review Switch
Like I mentioned, you play as Vran and it is your job to liberate the cursed city of Zagoravia from all manner of evil. Set as a top-down RPG, you begin to understand that this isn’t your average top-down adventure game. You choose how you want to play with outfits giving you different abilities, weapons granting different advantages and disadvantages and a levelling system that doesn’t force you down one particular route.
For instance, you can wield a shotgun running around like a crazy medieval Duke Nukem (which I did) or you can wield a sword or hammer and get up close and personal to your foes. Added to which a sharp fedora-topped outfit allows your demon powers to recharge slowly over time or a hunters outfit will charge your powers whenever you get hit. Using your demon powers on a large group of monsters is also very satisfying, especially splatting a swarm of spiders with a meteor shower! To top it off, each new level allows you to boost a given attribute such as ranged damage, health points or to get a loot chest – of which the content is random.
It’s little things like this that allow you to tailor the game around how you like to play and tackle each mission differently. Each level/area will also have challenges for you to complete which will grant bonus experience points, gold or other boosts to help you on your way.
Now whilst Victor Vran won’t set the genre alight, more likely sit amongst other great top-down titles, it does prove a massive point. That being that these sort of games can work and thrive on the Switch, which it does. Throughout testing, I played in handheld mode and the whole thing ran smoothly and rather quickly. Navigation wasn’t hard, nor was controlling Vran or the camera which made it so easy to play that I just kept going. One area would lead to another and I easily found myself losing a couple of hours at a time taking out skeletons, spiders and other ghostly beings.
The combat is quite intense too and doesn’t allow you to pause for breath for very long. If you stay stationary for too long you can quickly find yourself surrounded so staying mobile is always advisable, finding a brief respite where you can. This is one of the things which will keep you going as each fight is unique, requiring a different tactic each time.
Victor Vran: Overkill Edition Review Switch
In this, the Overkill Edition, Victor Vran comes with a host of extra content for you to tackle. Upon starting out you are given the choice of playing the base campaign, a campaign which is inspired by and revolves around the band Motorhead (paying tribute to the late metal legend, Lemmy) and finally the Fractured Worlds mode where everything takes an even more chaotic turn. Considering that the game can also be played online, there are many different things to play and ways in which to do so making this a great outing and addition to the Switch’s ever-expanding list of titles.
My only worry is over the pricing as this sits at £34.99 meaning it’s competing with the bigger and stronger titles out there, including Nintendo’s own strong first-party outings. Would people buy it at this price? It’s unlikely. Would I recommend buying it at this price? I don’t think so, maybe if it was more like half of that, which is a shame, as it may get overlooked until a price drop further down the line. If that does happen, however, I would recommend playing Victor Vran as I’m sure you’ll enjoy this charming adventure through Zagoravia.
Advertised as “the most inaccurate medieval cemetery management sim of the year,” I went into Graveyard Keeper expecting to find something weird, funny, and moderately inappropriate. What I found was something… very close to it.
Graveyard Keeper is indeed a resource management game made by Lazy Bear Games and tinyBuild, who are also the creators behind the fighter management game Punch Club.
You are thrown right into the game, witnessing our protagonist’s rather unfortunate fate, which leads him into a curious conversation with Death himself. Suddenly, we are being teleported back in time (year 204 to be exact) and are assigned the role as a graveyard keeper. You receive in your possession an old, abandoned house on a hill, with an even older and rustic graveyard next to it.
Enjoy your own little bizarre and slightly disturbing utopia by creating a garden, tidying up your graveyard and home. However, to do these things you need to unlock different technologies. As your skills and experience as a graveyard keeper expand, you will also unlock different ways of preserving and taking care of the bodies you receive.
It may seem complicated at first, but as you get into the game, things gradually fall into place.
Research and upgrade your characters’ skills by collecting red, green, and blue «points» – which kinda look like regular ol’ gems. Different gems are required for different techniques:
Red: represents hand-crafting skills.
Green: knowledge about the nature of things and nature itself.
Blue: spiritual knowledge of the immaterial world.
Collecting these points takes quite some time in the beginning, making the game feel very slow-paced. However, once I learned more skills, the game naturally became more interesting.
The fact that almost every single action in the game consumes energy feels like both a blessing and a curse. While this is not necessarily a problem in itself, one might discuss that each action takes too much energy. This becomes a little tedious when you eventually have plenty of tasks to do. A grave situation indeed!
Visually, Graveyard Keeper has a lovely retro style design. With that said, the geographical design of the game feels quite big. It feels like the distance between each relevant quest site is too far, and it takes me forever to get there; maybe an auto-walk button would come in handy. But hey, at least the game has really pleasant music that I can listen to while I walk!
One grave a day will keep the ghosts away… literally.
The voice effects of the characters are funny and reminded me a little bit of the voices in Undertale. The characters want you to do quests for them, and in return, you gradually build a friendly relationship with them. While the dialogue has many good intentions of being funny, I cannot exactly say that it tickled my funny-bone…
Even though the dialogue isn’t top-notch, Graveyard Keeper has a morbid sense of humour. They don’t take themselves too seriously, and that is kinda refreshing. For example, the local tavern is in dire need of meat for their delicious meals. And well, since you have flesh in abundance, you don’t really have to tell them where it comes from, right? … Right?
As you progress further in the game, you will also receive different recipes you can cook, so that you can restore the lost energy. Perhaps you might have some use for the flesh that you’ve been extracting too – if you know what I mean.
Being the graveyard keeper feels like a minor task in the game, compared to the tons of other stuff you can do: keeping a farm, a garden, working as a blacksmith to fix around your home, and doing various quests for the other villagers. The game runs in a day-and-night cycle, with different weather, even though I didn’t get the feeling it affected anything regarding gameplay. The characters’ availability, on the other hand, depends on which day of the week it is, where each day is indicated by its own symbol.
Moreover, Graveyard Keeper can become rather tedious. One example is being able to only pick up one thing at a time when you have to move quite a distance, making each task long and dreary. If I could pick up two things at a time, that would reduce the workload. If these glitches could be fixed, being a graveyard keeper wouldn’t be such a dead-end job…
Though I must say, after I’ve laid my character to sleep to regenerate his energy bar, I kept finding myself automatically playing another day. Looks I’m just dying to play more… Because even though the game definitely has some flaws, it is nevertheless an entertaining game with a lot of potential.
I believe that the game could become excellent if it received more updates. If you like grinding games, Graveyard Keeper will definitely give you many hours of entertaining gameplay to dig into.
P.S: I hope my editor doesn’t give me the graveyard shift after this!
So, here’s to 10 years of Braid. And 10 years of Blow.
Braid went on to become a hit, critically and commercially. It contributed to the rise of indie games, digital distribution being a viable platform and self-publishing. Its most profound achievement is showing an industry what games can be – like Ico before it – that games can be an art form and it inspired this sensibility, not just for indie games, but the AAA market too.
What Braid is, is a fine – and very rare – example of postmodernism in videogames. Braid takes what we know from platforming games – especially citing the pinnacle of the genre Mario on several occasions – to only flip it on its head; to take what we conceive and then change our preconception of it.
This is evident in the closing level when you finally come to rescue the princess in more ways than one. How its narrative is told through books of text and not a cutscene, or how its story is fragmented and deconstructed is like the postmodern literature of Vonnegut, Moore or Pynchon. It takes the fun and simplicity of Mario (Modernism), then changes it to a high concept and philosophical platformer, Braid (Postmodernism).
Everything in the game has meaning, even if it’s not clear consciously. This has many people speculating and theorizing the true meaning of Braid; such as the game is about a scientist working on the atomic bomb, obsession, etc.
The game’s story sees you playing as Tim to rescue a princess from a monster. The story is told through text at the start of each world, here you’ll read that Tim has made a mistake that he would like to forget. After completion, more text is revealed adding more narrative, in a more ambiguous nature highlighting more of the deeper themes of the game.
Aesthetically the game is seeping with European and British iconography of countrysides and castles smeared with whimsical watercolours. All this accompanied by a folk-inspired soundtrack, that just hearing it makes you smell the fresh moisture produced from the green pastures. It screams of classic children’s novels like ‘Peter Rabbit’, ‘Charlotte’s Web’ or ‘Wind and the Willows’.
Braid, on the first glance, looks like a typical platformer with puzzle elements, with an added bit of collecting jigsaw puzzle pieces to complete a jigsaw on each level.
It’s when you play the game where one of the mechanics is the manipulation of time, mainly reversing time. It’s here where Blow shows his skill as a game designer and takes what I call a ‘Nintendo’ approach to game design; using a single mechanic and exploring that single mechanic to its full potential (now if anyone wants to debate this, please write in the comments as I’ll happily discuss… Even if you are Jonathan Blow yourself!).
This time manipulation is stretched and rolled like a piece of dough with some in-game items not being affected by it, the player’s shadow leaving an imprint on the world, slowing down time in a specific area or the world where time is governed by the direction you walk. Time manipulation isn’t just the mechanic, it’s the central core of the gameplay.
Here in the UK, we never had a video game crash. It was around this time the rise of independent video games happened. Teenagers coding on the ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro or Commodore 64. Hobbyists turned into rock stars and the biggest entrepreneurs in the UK.
So, independent games have been around for decades but the rise of independent games from the past 10 years owe it to Braid. Braid was released on the infamous Xbox Live and then saw ports to various other systems. It cemented Johnathan Blow as a video game legend overnight; ushering a new wave of independent developers with new sensibilities to game design.
I was in my second year of university studying media when a close friend from my hometown, I kept in contact through Xbox Live and party chat, told me about this game he was playing that blew his mind.
Eager to share this experience, my friend purchased me an Xbox cash voucher and told me to buy a game called Braid. Like my friend, I too was entranced by this video game, this piece of philosophy, this work of art. Never had I gazed upon a CRT for that length of time simply not moving – watching, understanding the levels and their logic.
You don’t simply play Braid, you assimilate Braid.
I’m sure you are well aware of the controversy: game giants IGN reviewed the indie game Dead Cells. It was revealed later that the review was plagiarized from a small independent YouTube channel known as Boomstick Gaming.
The channel exposed the giant with a comparison video of both reviews side by side. This resulted in people grabbing pitchforks and flaming torches in the dead of night, ready to hunt down this behemoth who prayed on a helpless mortal man – the pitchfork-wielding community vowing never to trust the giant again.
One thing is for certain, the review was extremely similar, enough for the plagiarism claim leading to the writer’s dismissal, forcing IGN to make a public apology to their audience, Boomstick and the developer in the hopes that just some of the pitchforks will be lowered.
The mob of us
No one except the writer can say with 100% certainty if it was copied knowingly in the hopes that he would get away with it, if he maliciously copied the review due to some internal crazed cosmic justice, if he was frightened of missing a deadline out of fear and panic copied the review, or if he watched or read several reviews and subconsciously copied the review; for the later you only have to look at the genius of the George Harrison plagiarism claim on his iconic track “My Sweet Lord”.
The timescales for any review are daunting; I know that from my own experience working a full-time job and with a review to be completed in a reasonable amount of time on a regular basis.
As some of you may not be aware, a lot of developers or publishers provide you with a code for the game and expect the review to be uploaded in a timely manner (usually within a week); this is usually completing the game, writing, maybe rewriting parts of the review and then publishing it.
Now you are probably thinking, ‘this guy’s full-time job is to write review pieces’ and you’d be right, but this wouldn’t have been the only piece he was working on. By all means, this is not me defending plagiarism, it’s merely an understanding of what variables are in place that may have caused such an endeavour.
My personal favourite Beatles member
To meet developer or publisher timescales for a review is crucial for any game news/review outlet, failing to do so can have lasting repercussions if a review is not met within a professional timely manner; review codes or copies usually are not distributed to you from that point.
Again, I’m not saying timescales and deadlines are bad, they are very good things that motivate us, however; with the ever-increasing length of games and these timescales presented to game journalists, they can contribute to ‘misunderstood games’. How can anyone confidently critique 100-hour experience in the space of a week?
We only need to see reviews of the first Nier to see how games do not always get correctly represented. Unfortunately, this will never change as there are too many forces at play; the developers and publishers want it published efficiently, the outlet requires the piece to be published as early as possible to generate the traffic that helps advertisement and funding.
But the above isn’t the major issue within this controversy, that is just the machine cogs turning. The problem with games writing is the writing itself. Most games journalism/writing is, in my personal opinion, boring. What a review tends to be is a list of mechanics, what it looks like, what it sounds like and an overview with a few fancy words thrown in for good measure so the writer feels credible. In short, it’s a glamorised laundry list devoid of any emotion, personality or creativity.
Very few reviews go into the deeper themes of the game, analyse it or represent games other than a product and not a mature piece of a medium that can be and is art. I want games to be viewed in a positive light, yet we don’t talk about them in any capacity to represent that, in the end, it’s the same old list with different words.
I’m not saying I’m the god of video game writing, nor am I the best writer out there, I am far away from that and I to, fall in the very laundry list trappings, but I try to add as much emotion, personality or creativity in my pieces.
So, Boomstick was plagiarised. Should it have happened? No. Could it have been avoided? Yes.
Write in a way that is your own, do something different, write in a way that can’t be plagiarised. It’s our responsibility to tell people what a great, joyous and inspiring medium video games is; how it has helped people view depression, how it can educate children, how these emotional journeys can offer more than any piece of literature, TV show or movie because these are video games, and they mean something to us.
One would imagine that if you backtrack before the release of Hello Neighbor by Dynamic Pixels, before coding and artwork, before storyboards and script writing, someone, somewhere had a great idea for an amazing game.
Hello Neighbor [Switch] – Great Idea, Little Satisfaction
They wrote pages and pages of scribbled notes on a napkin sitting at a diner booth in the late hours of the night, drinking coffee and eating a cold plate of fries. This budding game designer would feverishly jot down ideas for a wild new concept that would revolutionize a genre. As their fries got colder and the napkin count rose, a fully fleshed out world would start to take shape.
I am sure whatever was written on those grease-stained napkins was pure genius, but that genius never made it past the face towelette stage. Hello Neighbor, a self-professed “Stealth Survival Horror” game, might have sounded like a spectacular idea at the start, but what we got will more likely make you weep then shake in your boots.
Hello Neighbor Review
The main objective is to sneak into your shady neighbor’s house and find a way to break into the basement to discover his dirty secret(s). You have the option of going through open bedroom windows, the front door, via the roof, and more. Be careful though, if the evil neighbor catches you, he’ll throw you out on the street. If he sees you lurking outside, he’ll jump through the closed window to boot you onto the curb. Magically, the window gets fixed in an instant.
Sounds easy enough, but as you find different ways of infiltrating, the Neighbor finds new ways of stopping you. The A.I. in the game is meant to counter your every move. Where once the front door was open and clear, now there will be cameras watching. Certain windows will have bear traps to stop you, or the Neighbor will find new shortcuts to get to you before you complete your mission.
If you manage to make it in the house, you can hide in cabinets and under tables as your enemy searches frantically to no avail. The house itself grows with new rooms and ways of getting lost, which I found to be pretty neat.
Hello Neighbor Review
It should all be fun and innovative, but instead, feels clunky, buggy, and frustrating. For instance, you can stack boxes to reach a window, but the physics engine seems to be off. The boxes are infuriatingly easy to knock over before ever getting anything done. It reminds me of a late ’90s virtual reality game that you think is going to be really awesome but ends up disappointing your childhood.
The colour pallet looks as if Thomas the Tank Engine had a baby with Marge Simpson, and then gave it up for adoption to Gumby. It’s not that I hate the way everything looks, it’s just that it has this uncomfortableness about it.
Hello Neighbor Review
There was one thing I did like about the game, and that’s a rather interesting auditory experience. If you listen carefully, you can hear the Neighbor’s footsteps as he walks inside and outside of the house (and it’s easy to differentiate between the two).
You can hear him as he is using the kitchen or bathroom sink, snoring in the living room, or grumbling to himself. The Neighbor will even turn on a record player or a broken TV, which you can then turn off by sneaking in through a window. Eliminating the extraneous noise allows the player to hear better and locate where the Neighbor might be at a given time. Out of all the things the developers were going for, I really enjoyed this one specific play mechanic the best. It isn’t perfect, but it’s fun.
Truth be told, I never made it too far into unlocking the mystery of it all, but that’s mostly because I stopped caring. I know this review sounds harsh, but that’s probably because I feel the concept is actually really cool, just poorly executed.
I Love the idea of an A.I. that learns and makes things harder minute by minute. I love the idea of using your senses to avoid the enemy and solve the puzzle. I am a huge fan of using your surroundings to aid in the quest. I just wish it all came together better.
Over the past decade, our beloved form of entertainment, the tried and true stress reliever and the ever-so appealing grandeur that is video games, have evolved tremendously.
Graciously lifting the gaming industry while taking gamers along for the, more often than not, thrilling adventure, they’ve thoroughly provided us with countless hours of immersion into vast and wild lands of tropical islands, harrowing apocalyptic worlds, heroic intergalactic space expeditions, ancient times through Greece, Rome and now even Egypt, all while challenging not only our skills, but our dedication, personal endeavors and sometimes rather difficult to uncover emotions.
With so many games at much of the world’s disposal, it’s hard not to get overwhelmed with the vast selection. Getting sucked into the story or thrill of a game can lead to hours, weeks, months, sometimes even years of dedication to perfecting and honing your skills. But where does the gameplay end? For some, once the campaign has been completed once or twice, and/or the fill of online play has been quenched, the game is shelved and replaced by newer content, or in many instances, sold.
Unless, that is, you give yourself added time to the game by hunting down specific trophies or achievements, enhancing your game score and allowing the expensive medium to earn its costly price tag.
Sure, trophies and achievements aren’t for everybody, and I certainly wouldn’t expect the trophy list to replace the actual storyline and gameplay itself, but what these added tasks do provide is more value to your game collection. Allowing you to experience something you may have missed in the traditional campaign, like discovering new weapons, items, quest lines, and characters – these are just a few examples of where these tedious chores can take you.
Some gamers pride themselves on their evergrowing list of achievements and trophies, showing off how many games they’ve played through, or even the astonishing amount of games they’ve completed at 100%. Finding games with an easy achievement or trophy list may also point the dedicated gamer to games they otherwise wouldn’t give a play. Embarking on journeys outside of their preferred game style will not only boost their score but broaden the player’s outlook on the constantly expanding library of video games.
I realize this is solely opinion based through personal experiences with both friends and acquaintances, as well as myself, and the excitement of trophy or achievement hunting may not appeal to every gamer. For the reasons above though, it’s clear why the tasking system has become popular amongst dedicated gamers alike. Whether the reasoning is because it provides added experiences, bonus items/weapons, or maybe because it resembles that of the scoring system of the early arcade games, in my honest opinion, the trophy and achievement system isn’t a terrible thing for the games industry.
Regardless of what may be said about the topic, if you hunt for achievements and trophies or not, purely for the story or the thrill of an online victory, enjoy the experience; it’s why video games exist.
