Category: Horror

This Strange Realm Of Mine – Doom of the Poet

Phew. This one’s a doozy, huh?

Have you ever wanted to play a game about dissecting consciousness that starts off under the guise of a Doom clone? Me either! But I’m glad I did.

This Strange Realm Of Mine’s Steam page describes it as “a First Person Shooter mixed with poetry and psychological horror.” but I’m not sure even that prepares you for what you’re in for. You’ll start off shooting at spooky monsters through some dark corridors with nothing but a pistol and a torch, solving a few simple (but well done!) puzzles. After escaping, you’re dumped into The Limbo Tavern and are told that there is still work to do.

This tavern is where you’ll spend your time in between each of the game’s stages. NPCs eventually gather here as it becomes a haven for those lost, and you’ll get to know these people before jumping back into These Strange Realms. Where you jump back into, though, is what makes @Encaved‘s latest project so unique.

If you’re wanting to go in blind, I suggest you stop reading here. If not, well, it’s about to get weird.

I had expected that first stage to set a precedent for what’s to come. Nope, not at all. The next stage is familiar enough, you find out that you have to bust into a gang of rat’s headquarters to get to your next objective. After you start popping off rat heads in the alley is where the game shows a bit of its hand. Graffiti is painted all over the walls of these streets that the rats call home. You follow the story of them coming up with a name for their gang, how they feel bad about picking on certain members of the group a little too much, and more. This fleshes these characters out… but only after you’ve smeared that flesh all over the walls with your handgun. Once you break into their tower it feels like a page was taken directly out of the Hotline Miami handbook. You brutally take down scores of these people as you climb higher into their base, eventually finding their boss and, if you choose, splattering his brains all over his room after you get what you want.

And that’s just level 2.

Each time you complete a mission, you head back into your safe haven, have a chat with everyone hanging around, and then head back out to see what could possibly be next. And trust me when I say I don’t think you’ll be able to guess. You’ll go through Minecraft parodies, explorations of social anxiety, and entire genre-shifts. I was glued to my screen as I stayed up into the wee hours of the morning just to see what they might have come up with next.

This game sounds perfect right? Uh, well…

If you’ve played the game already or paid attention to the word “poetry” in the game’s description, you might notice that I’ve neglected to mention a pretty core tenant of the game. That’s because I think a bunch of it isn’t any good.

This isn’t to say that the writing is a total loss, though. There are bright spots in the dialogue that legitimately hit points of shocking poignancy, but they come in between literal name-checks of Rick and Morty characters (it’s a good show with some bad fans) and 2deep4u discussions of religion. Those aforementioned discussions coming from a guy sitting in a cell with some Suicide Squad level of “deep thoughts” scribbled all over the walls. There are moments in the game’s story where I couldn’t figure out if the developer was making fun of people like this, or actually was one of them.

These instances of annoying writing are luckily limited to only about two of the game’s characters, and the rest of the cast is allowed to have some surprisingly thoughtful expression. One of my favorite characters is a girl who fights against her anxieties to be an optimist, and shares some personal stories with you along the way.

Personal is a word I keep coming back to when trying to describe this game. For better or worse, This Strange Realm Of Mine feels like a deeply personal work of an artist. It just happens to be really fun to play.

If you’re ready to jump into someone else’s mind and shoot some monsters, check out This Strange Realm Of Mine on the game’s Steam page.

September 21, 2017
The Tomatoes are OK (But You Might Not Be)

So I went into The Tomatoes are OK knowing… not really much of anything at all. I hit the strange landing page after hearing that it was little unnerving, and jumped straight in. I suggest you do the same.

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September 9, 2017
Games of the Month – April 2017

Not ready to slow down, 2017 keeps on truckin’. Game releases are finally slowing down a bit now that we’re halfway through May, but that barely gives a breather from everything else we’re all still catching up with from earlier this year. Persona 5 seems like one I’ll be trying to finish for a good long while, and Battlegrounds is one I’ll continue to play and watch every good stream of. With The Surge and Rime right around the corner, let’s take care of last month’s unfinished business.

1. Persona 5

I’m about 30 hours into this one, and just finished the second major “Chapter” for lack of a better term. I have a feeling that if I ever finish this, it’s not gonna be anytime soon. Though I don’t think the writing is nearly as good as Persona 4’s, I’m still having a lot of fun with it. Despite some early story issues, a few of them have already ironed themselves out. Fair warning, this isn’t a game that you’re going to be able to recommend without several caveats, maybe even moreso than Persona 4 this time. The writing often feels awkward and mistranslated, the only woman character in the group so far is treated like a sex-object more often than not, and the main conceit of the story (focusing more on the villains than the protagonists) means that we get to know the characters less than we would have in Persona 4. Even though we’re stuck with more issues than I was hoping for, I’m still enjoying my time with it and am excited to meet new characters as the story goes on. I hear that some of my issues are touched on the further I get, so I’m hoping that happens sooner rather than later. The dungeons are fantastic though, and are a necessary improvement that should have been made before the fifth game in this series. As it stands 30 hours in, Persona 5 plays better than any Persona game to come before, and I’m hoping the story and characters can catch up.

2. Little Nightmares

Little Nightmares isn’t made by Playdead, but if I hadn’t known that ahead of time I’d have probably assumed it was. Sitting easily along Limbo and Inside, Tarsier Studios nailed the style they so obviously were aiming for. You play a small child in a raincoat making her way through a series of terrible, malicious environments. It’s dark, tense, and I kind of already want to play through it again. Clocking in at roughly three hours, you have no excuse to skip this one if you’re interested in this kind of platformer.

3. What Remains of Edith Finch

Following in the footsteps of Gone Home, the creators of The Unfinished Swan have crafted a short story about a girl returning to her childhood home. Where the similarities end, though, are when you explore the rooms of the family you used to know and the ones you’d only heard stories of. Once you find their quarters, you’re whisked away to take control of them in their final moments before they passed away see those moments through their eyes. What Remains of Edith Finch is essentially an anthology told inside the trappings of the now well-worn “Walking Simulator” genre that I tend to enjoy so much. If those kinds of things scare you away this one probably isn’t for you, but for everyone else, this is a very solid entry in that genre. It didn’t resonate with me as much as Gone Home or The Beginner’s Guide, but by the end I felt like I had finished reading a nice short story. Sometimes just being pleasant and good is good enough.

Honorable Mentions

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – The best version of the best Marion Kart game, and another reason the Switch is potentially the coolest video game system of all time.

Banana Boy – A weird arcade thing that you’ll play for about ten minutes and probably remember forever.

Yooka-Laylee – A game that had a lot of potential and lives up to about 40% of it. If you’re desperate for the return of Banjo… I mean, I guess this is an option.

May 14, 2017
Games of the Month – January 2017

We’re back in this thing, huh?

While January was an epic garbage pile for a handful of reasons, the games weren’t one of them. A huuuge surprise came in the form of this month’s #1, and second place wasn’t too far behind. I wish I liked the Gravity Rush games but am glad that apparently a lot of other people do. In terms of indies…I don’t know! A few decent ones here and there but no early Pony Island like last year. AAA’s have my attention for the first time in a while this year, so I hope there are enough great indies to keep up.

#1. Yakuza 0

So whose job was it to let me know Yakuza was 100% my jam? It’s all I’ve been able to talk about this month. If you’re as new to the series as me, it’s tough to explain what exactly what this is. So let’s hit the questions:

Is Yakuza a serious crime drama? Yes, much of the game’s main story is focused around typical crime story scenes of family betrayal, honor, and that kind of stuff. It’s pretty good. Once a jumped through a window and punched a man into a toilet.

Is it a comedy? Yeah, it’s that too. Once you’re outside of the “main story” missions, the open world allows you to roam around and take on side quests. Hilarious side quests. Without spoiling anything, Yakuza 0 stands up as one of the most genuinely funny video games I’ve ever played.

Open world? Side quests? …Is Yakuza an RPG? Huh, I guess it kind of is. Yakuza 0 blends so many different things together that it’s hard to pin it down and give it a label. There are random encounters, multiple skill trees, side quests with branching dialogue options…so yeah, I guess. Yeah it is.

Is there good punching? Yes, the punching is very good. Sometimes you can punch someone while holding a bicycle. That is also very good.

I like punching, but what if I get tired of punching? Go sing one of the many songs and play the rhythm based karaoke mini games. Or the disco one in the dance hall. Or go win prizes in a crane game. Or go to an arcade and literally just play some other games made by Sega. Or go to the bowling alley or the Shogi with the old people.

Is there any reason not to play Yakuza 0? If you refuse to do anything other than the main story and you also hate melodramatic crime fiction. Otherwise, no. Not at all.

#2. Resident Evil 7

Attempting to play Resident Evil 7 in Virtual Reality with headphones on is the scariest video game experience I’ve ever had. You tiptoe through a claustrophobic house fully aware that awful things are going to happen to you, and when they do it’s not any less terrifying. If you’ve yet to try horror in VR, this is the end-all be-all of the genre so far. I’ve barely scratched the surface of the first hour after playing for nearly a month. It’s that rough. I swear I’ll see more of it by the end of the year…but man, it’s something you’ve gotta see for yourself to believe.

Honorable Mentions:

I didn’t like anything else enough this month to have a solid #3… but here are the good ones that are still worth your time!

Hidden My Game By Mom 2: A sequel to an original puzzler that has me hoping for a third one sooner rather than later.

It’s 2:51A.M. Can You Fall Asleep?: A return to form for ClickHole. This gives me hope that 2017 will have a good set of top tier adventures from some of the funniest people writing games.

ARACHNAFOE: A pretty simple dual stick shooter about wrecking shop on some spiders. They deserve it.

Ninja Spinki Challenges!!: Flappy Bird creator, Dong Nguyen, is back at it again with a mini game collection. Not quite WarioWare, but it’s a set of fast-paced challenges that kept me coming back all month long.

February 9, 2017
Games of the Month – October 2016

Yeah, you read that one right. I never did October’s. Whoops! I didn’t forget, I’ve just been stupidly busy, and there were actually some really cool games to play in the free time I could find! How about we talk about those now…and then I’ll do November’s. 🙂

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November 30, 2016
The House Abandon Makes Text Adventures Modern (And Scary)

I’ve never been a huge fan of text adventures. I didn’t grow up with them, and I end up getting frustrated after I feel like all of my options are exhausted. Hell, I didn’t finish Frog Fractions (A game that I adore) for the longest time simply because I couldn’t force myself through the text section. The House Abandon is different.

Admittedly, I don’t play a ton of this kind of thing, so I’m sure something like it has done before. The House Abandon feels surprisingly modern in comparison to staring at a black and white screen inputting WEST and EAST over and over. The text adventure game itself resides on a desk inside The House Abandon, and you’re playing a game within that game. And no, the potential of this idea does not go untapped.

As an Interactive Fiction newbie, I appreciated the limited range of actions you’re forced to take throughout the adventure. The House Abandon pretty clearly lays out what you need to do so you’re not tossing a dozen things into a parser just to get a result. The flow isn’t broken after getting stuck on a puzzle for so long that you forget you’re wandering a dimly lit abode. And as a game created by an Alien Isolation designer and Co., this team knows how to keep the tension going. You’ll just need to see for yourself how they do it.

The game ends with a promise of the No Code team making more short stories like this, and that’s a promise I want to hold them to. Hopefully we’ll see another one of these around Halloween time…please?

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If you’re curious about The House Abandon, check out the game’s wonderful trailer…

…and go play it here, because there’s no way you don’t want to after watching that.

September 5, 2016