For those potentially coming fresh off Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the cyberpunk action-adventure of the moment (also included on our list of recent cyberpunk titles), Flying Wild Hog’s début throwback FPS Hard Reset might take some getting used to. After all, the game’s name could and should be taken in reference to its status as an earnest homage to “all those forgotten Dooms, Quakes, and Painkillers”.

What the ex-members of CD Projekt RED, People Can Fly, City Interactive and Metropolis do is literally drop the you onto a dank, bleak futuristic alleyway, with barrels and crates strewn across the street, glowing power-ups beckoning. Efforts to interact with this architecturally impressive scene will prove much in vain, however, with items merely bumping, bouncing and rolling about; If you discover an explosive barrel or a glowing transformer, you can rest assured its only function is to act as a stationary tool for tactical destruction.

Stuff blows up. Big time. End of story?

Hard Looks

In its outstanding presentation, achieved with a tailor-made in-house engine called Road Hog, Hard Reset presents most importantly a functional façade. The environments are immaculately detailed and flesh out overtly familiar sights for any fan of cyberpunk: The city streets are grungy and gloomy, littered with machinery and debris. Above, a stunning skybox; a vast sprawling future city booming with electronic activity.

At ground level, there is plenty to take in, with dynamic neon lights, signs and electric blue arcs providing mood. In an interesting visual opposition, detail textures are high-resolution while generic world-building textures remain smudgier, illustrating the griminess of the surroundings. For a pure-bred corridor shooter, Hard Reset offers a surprising array of locations. As paradoxical as it sounds, the game’s otherwise generic hallways, streets and corridors remain engaging throughout – at the very least for the very generous 5-7 hours of play the game has on offer, perhaps thanks to the game’s solid aesthetic sense.

While players might not experience much of the city outside the designated corridor, they are certainly able to hear it: Terrific sound design is utilised just as much for combat and action as it is for world building. Interactive advertisements and vending machines are multi-purpose, serving not only as electrical conduits to snare enemies with, but also in creating a sense of place and belonging.

Patrolling hovercars whir past overhead, sirens blaring, with public service announcements imploring players not to vandalize public property (you will vandalize public property). The combat sounds are both heavy and meaty metallic, with satisfying *thunks* and *clanks* and *fizzles* of exploding machinery. In this way, the sound effects accentuate the physicality of Hard Reset’s combat, wherein robots topple over, skitter and crash all over the place. Explosions feel appropriately devastating.

Excellent environmental music by Wojchiech Blazejczyk, ambient and atmospheric, plays in the background intermittently. Heavier, industrial-infused electronic beats are dropped in to heighten the intensity of combat while the more tonal and textural synths are reserved for the quieter moments.

The Flash-animated motion comic cutscenes – clearly done on the cheap, but well enough – stylistically develop slightly as the game proceeds, from slightly tacky to relatively nice. In-game storyline exposition is achieved via radio transmissions, though the gravelly, foul-mouthed main character only speaks during these animated cutscenes. The voice acting itself hardly leaves a lasting impression.

Hard Restart

Old is the new new. Hard Reset inhabits the kind of standard cyberpunkian fare where corporations rule the day, personalities are digital and rogue robotniks are rolling and hating on the streets. Players fill in the shoes of the good Major Whatshisname, working as robot enforcer for yet another Corporation – with a capital C, right? Right! – and nothing, dear readers and players, is ever as it seems.

The names, the faces and the places – Bezoar City, Sector 6, CLN-16, that sort of random thing – are certainly there, but frankly, the game’s exposition is a disjointed, comedic, and often simply nonsensical mess, its dialogic substance formed mostly of curse words and detached technobabble. (Once Greek mythology gets dropped in, one cannot but smile. It’s all very silly, yes, but also curiously endearing.)

“Bezoar this, Sector that” is all pretty much beside the point, though: After all, there are plenty enough bright neon lights and signs, shady streets and exploding robots; that’s as elementary and as visceral a cyberpunk gaming experience as it gets. Klaudiusz Zych in fact states in interview that “[The plot]’s not something you have to pay attention to if you don’t want to – you could just storm through the levels.”

You can indeed clickety-click through cutscenes as soon as the game is done loading the subsequent level. “It’s a shooter, who cares about story!” Some context, a looming MacGuffin, is all you need to kick some shiny ass metal butt. But an uncomfortable feeling lingers, a regret that emerges from this collision of beautiful sight and sound in comparison to the lack of substantial narrative, with the knowledge of merely going through the motions, passing through these corridors and arenas, never once truly connecting on a more sophisticated level with this admittedly fascinating and visionary place.

Despite its obvious narrative failings, Hard Reset does nevertheless create a terrific sense of “being there” given the richness of the world and the physicality of the combat. Sense, it never once makes. It doesn’t… have to?

Hard Shoot

Precognition, shooting experience and luck. These three dimensions play the largest part in the action, which proceeds with minimal bouts of exploration interspersed with waves… and waves… and waves of enemies. Any one battle, poorly anticipated or assessed, can and will result in getting sandwiched and/or cornered. Individually, enemies are seldom very tough, but especially the very first attempt at each major fight can be a tough pill to swallow.

Combative situations are foreshadowed in several ways; there will often be an upgrade station waiting, a closed door to be opened or an electronic shield turned off, and exploding barrels and machines shining in the distance. Often there will also be something intriguing going on in the distance, a little robot scurrying ahead, signalling an imminent encounter. On the “Normal” difficulty, the game is very manageable, (This is why there also exist “Hard” and “Insane” modes.) and indeed many of the rocket-spraying, forward-dashing robots can be avoided with a rudimentary understanding of positioning and circle-strafing, and obviously the streets the are littered with highly necessary environmental elements for electrocuting and blasting the enemies. You can and must create traps with stasis fields, slowing down the advancing onslaught.

Tactical positioning and planning do play a major part in the very biggest of the shoot-outs. Less useful for the player’s survival is a comically short-lived dash, which is often barely enough to get away from enemies, and more often still a fine dandy way of getting caught up in the environmental rubble, a trash bin, a protruding fence, or worst case scenario, an exploding barrel. Bang! Reload. Admittedly, a prolonged run key would have made the game all that much easier. Crouching is not included.

The lavish suite of weapons available consists of two main categories, projectile and energy -based. The two guns, initially an assault rifle and a plasma blaster, neatly transform into the different weapon subtypes, such as a shotgun, a grenade launcher or the compulsory RPG. The upgrade route is altogether familiar and very much resembles that of the Power to the People stations in BioShock. Shooting does have an extra dimension to it, as the forever forward-dashing enemies have to be held at a distance. Many of the weapons have an unlockable secondary fire for this very purpose, and sometimes switching weapons for such defense is key to your survival.

Switching between the subtypes as well as the categories is slow and cumbersome, and often the game is reliant on planning out your each weapon switch beforehand. The switcher also does not loop, instead scrolling back and forth only, which is absolutely an added headache in the heat of battle, especially as the different modes of either weapon are hard to differentiate visually. The game will also fail to register some of your switches and changes, and especially the bigger, more explosive weapons take extremely long to reload or re-energize.

Each these weapons – as well as defensive measures – can be unlocked and upgraded once you discover and amass enough experience pickups, improving them or adding features. As these are littered, for the most part, in the scenery, the game very much rewards a little bit of old-fashioned exploration. Those willing to seek out secret areas will be vastly better-equipped.

The developers make much noise of the engine’s capabilities for havo… Havok, having tailor-made “the Road Hog engine for the kind of game that [the team] wanted to make”. Indeed, the Hog manages to create a nice enough illusion of destructibility and mayhem even though realistically speaking not all that much gets blown up; beyond a few utterly, beautifully destructible sequences interspersed among the game’s more ordinary scenes, what the Road Hog, a powerful little steam engine if any, does very well to cover this fact up.

Upgrade management as well as general terminal usage are self-contained in the game world a lá Dead Space or Doom 3. The decision not to break the ludic experience with yet another tacked-on interface is a great way of preserving and even enhancing immersion, as the terminals are tactfully made. What does potentially break immersion, however, is a constant battery of holographic backsides plastered over the landscape.

Hard Rest

Hard Reset’s PC exclusivity surely denotes no “Press Start” in the menu, right? Right. In addition to its robust configuration options, ranging from controlling input lag, changing cutscene volume (Wow!) and utilizing a gamepad (though who would, right?), you can also designate a specific monitor to play on in your hardcore dual-, triple- and quadruple monitor get-ups. In addition, the game’s performance is top-notch even on a more modest rig, as Hard Reset performs extremely well even on the highest ‘Ultra’ settings, hovering between 40-60 FPS during most scenes. In the most chaotic of moments it drops right down to sub-20, but the game remains playable even if one doesn’t have the heart to change a thing for those few rare occasions. On a slightly newer system the game slowed down only in the two most demanding scenes and remained playable throughout. The only knock on the engine is that pretty as it is (see image on the left), its stylish and animated main menu is dreadfully slow to navigate with each click taking some seconds too many. Fortunately, the developers have listened to player feedback and have included a “fast menu” option in a recent 175mb patch.

Worst for last: As most of you have heard by now, Hard Reset does not contain a save game function (unless you delve deep into the game’s configuration files to bind the quicksave, which does supposedly exist, but is unbound and unadvertised). Instead, checkpoints. CHECKPOINTS. CHECKPOINTS. Let it be in bold. Strangely enough, checkpoint ‘saves’ can be loaded at will, but actual saving is not possible.

As up in the arms as I am about this (in principle! PC players are above all wo/men of principle!), the checkpoints are fairly well-sprinkled out and are not so much an issue as they are an annoyance. But just one single problem with loading and/or saving can nevertheless have a devastating effect on progress. For instance, after crashing to desktop after nearly completing an end-level battle, I found myself set back three big fights and some fifteen, twenty minutes of play. Fortunately for me, the game had just loaded the wrong checkpoint, but what of other players facing similar situations?

As with many indie games – intriguingly, the game followed an all-new fast-track promotional style by Evolve PR, whom also supplied The Slowdown with a review copy – there was minor worry that Hard Reset might not quite reach its proper bloom over the course of its modest length. This fear is and was, for the most part, unfounded. Though the game definitely stays the course throughout, the difficulty level offers a fine curve; while players will quickly learn the ropes, the game never becomes a repetitive experience thanks to the broad array of weapons and environments available. Larger-than-life surprises are not to be found here, but essentially, the game is well-paced and -structured. If you’re thinking Drug Wars (or Merchants of Brooklyn, as the game was called), you shouldn’t.

The game also has achievements, of course – all 80 of them – which cover both natural progression and additional challenges. Flying Wild Hog’s Hard Reset is available on Steam today; a demo can also be downloaded right now.

You play as space Captain Viridian whose crew is scattered across a space station in a strange alternate dimension. The controls are extremely simple, you can move left and right, and switch the direction of gravity. There is no jump or changing direction in between a la And Yet It Moves – you can only either fall downwards or upwards. The mechanics don’t change or become more complex than this; within this basic framework Cavanagh pits you against the environment and enemies in ways that will test your reflexes and your muscle memory. The game is compatible with a controller, but the keyboard is absolutely sufficient. The acceleration curves may take a little getting used to; while the controls are responsive, your affable avatar carries momentum which may leave some players grumbling about his delayed stop.

The initial few minutes of the game have you negotiating a series of rooms with traps and creatures, but the game soon opens up and you are given much more freedom in your exploration and the order in which you rescue each crew member. In addition to the main objective, there are various trinkets placed around the world, requiring you to do the near-impossible to reach them. Believe you me, some of them are a downright bastard to get. Getting them all unlocks a postgame feature, but I suspect the self-satisfaction and bragging rights will be reward enough for your persistence. Every now and then you may encounter a computer terminal that will impart snippets of story or reveal a new area on the map. Talking to your crew once you have rescued them also expands on the story, which is surprising.

What makes it surprising is the fact that VVVVVV has all the appearance of a game from the Commodore 64 era. Pixelated graphics with elemental colours and patterns, a chiptune soundtrack – all in seeming tribute to the 8-bit aesthetic. And yet these ‘retro’ stylings are in conflict with the more modern additions to the package such as the story and meta-features, making its faux-retro nature slightly startling. There is a clash between aesthetic and content, though I don’t say that as a knock to the game – for that matter, it was intentional. The minimalism doesn’t detract from the game’s ability to exude personality; Viridian traverses the hostile surroundings with a determined cheerfulness, until something goes wrong and that smiley face turns to a heartbreaking frown. The psychadelic music by Magnus “SoulEye” Pålsson adds an upbeat sense of exploration and discovery.

It can be aggravatingly, hair-pullingly difficult at times. Just watch the video above to see what I mean. That one multi-screen puzzle is for a trinket, a trinket, and yet I retried that area over and over again until I landed on the other side unscathed. VVVVVV’s brand of difficulty has somewhat of an addicting quality, so rather than throwing the controller at the wall and ragequitting the game, I found myself trying ‘just one more time’ to reach the next room. There is in fact a statistic that keeps track of your deathcount, and die many, many times you will. Checkpoints are very generously given every few screens, ensuring that you don’t lose much progress, and teleports help you get around the map much quicker.

At any one time if a particular route is too challenging, the openness of the game lets you come back to attempt it later. There is no filler, puzzles don’t repeat themselves and there is always something new to see. Total playtime will be around a couple of hours, but there’s more to get out of the game with the achievement-like trophies, which offer ironman and speedrun challenges, and unlocks such as Flip Mode, which, as you can probably guess, is the whole game turned upside down. It’s more devious than it might seem.

VVVVVV is available on the official site, as well as other outlets such as Steam for $4.99. The soundtrack, entitled PPPPPP, is available for purchase separately at SoulEye’s site for $4.

While I did enjoy a handful of the huge AAA releases in 2010, I would have to say that I’ve gotten stuck in deep into the indie scene, playing countless magnificent small scale titles be they fleetingly minimal or elaborately ambitious. RPS brought charming indie effort Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale to my attention, for which I’m ever so grateful. A cute little JRPG that turns the institution on its head and offers a twist on the tired formula of grinding and item management, Recettear had me spellbound for the duration of its campaign – after which there is still much more to discover. I will most definitely return to it to tackle its postgame modes. I spent a lot of time platforming too, mostly with VVVVVV and Super Meat Boy, two triumphant celebrations of the genre. Both incredibly challenging, but hopelessly addicting.

Despite being hopelessly terrible at strategy games, I continue to be fascinated by the many indie strategy offerings out there. Flotilla, from Blendo Games – the same nutters behind oddball Gravity Bone – is a quirky turn-based strategy adventure, reminiscent of previous procedural exploration series Infinite Space. I dig the flat-shaded glowing graphics, the simplicity of its mechanics and the bite-sized gameplay, all of which make for a great quick-fix. I am very much looking forward to the asynchronous turn-based Frozen Synapse, due out very soon. I fired up the beta client often the past few months, and enjoyed the Introversion-like aesthetics and intricately detailed command controls. The second Humble Indie Bundle contained a gem of a tower defense game, Revenge of the Titans, which overcame my dislike for the subgenre and wooed me with its distinct look and tight design.

Having joined the smartphone bandwagon this year, I have been trying to find good games for it, but the selection is disappointingly small save for a few fun time-wasters. Angry Birds has been quite the success story, and I can’t deny that I’ve spent many an idle moment trying to topple some towers. Game Dev Studio, the popular iPhone game about making games, finally came to Android so I was able to get a taste of its completely addictive grind.

I had a good time with all of these titles, but what blew me away in 2010 were the three games I was anticipating the most.

Assassin’s Creed 2 came to the PC a little later than its console counterparts, so I had to wait quite a while to get a chance to play it. The ambitious sequel takes off at a brisk pace right where the first game left off, and doesn’t let up until its bizarre, fourth-wall-breaking finale. I haven’t been a big fan of the story in the series, but it’s the moment-to-moment gameplay that brings me back each time – the AC games have the best melee combat mechanics and environment navigation controls I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing. Not to mention that there sure is an astounding number of things to do in the beautifully reproduced world of Renaissance Italy. Brotherhood can’t come soon enough.

I was excited about BioShock 2, but I never thought a sequel was particularly needed to the adequately self-contained first game. I was curious whether 2K Marin had anything more to say about the world of Rapture, or if this was just the cashgrab that it could so easily be. They proved themselves worthy of the mantle: BioShock 2 is an understated and eloquent return to the tragic underwater city, with a story that takes the ideas of choice and agency in its predecessor forward into the realm of consequences and legacy. I look forward to playing the well-received DLC mission, Minerva’s Den, and whatever next 2K Marin come up with.

At this point, I have become a complete Mass Effect fanboy. I’ve invested in the world and characters created by BioWare – played the games, read the books – and am fully committed to seeing the trilogy to its end. So Mass Effect 2 was going to be no small event for me, and I couldn’t have been more happy with the way it turned out. It’s a daring reinvention of the RPG Shooter, stripping away many things that were thought staples of the genre and of the series. What was broke, wasn’t fixed: it was removed entirely or replaced with something better. The resulting game felt like a tight third person shooter with a tense plot and a fresh sense of player ownership over the direction of the story. I have my canon Commander Shepard and all of her painstakingly-made decisions ready for the final chapter, and I can’t wait to see how it unfolds.

2010 was a great year for games, and I’ll be revisiting a few of these titles as well as other notable releases to examine them in more depth here in the coming months. 2011 looks promising too, so I’ll be previewing some of the upcoming games that interest me most. Stay tuned!

Before its release, the PC and DSiWare title created a minor stir in the games press with its cleverly orchestrated marketing campaign, one that laid out for the game lavish faux origins, as Capcom claimed the game had started off as an ’80s Mega Man clone “locked away for decades.” All this served, of course, to drum up more publicity for its mothership, the triple-A Dark Void, which unfortunately flopped creatively and commercially, perhaps undeservedly banishing Dark Void Zero to the kind of, uh, dark void of infamy that its fictional trappings prophesied for it in the first place.

Indeed, Mega Man is the most evident point of comparison together with the first Metroid, though Dark Void Zero does replace Samus’ ball form for a jetpack, and allows players to shoot into eight(!) directions. Make no mistake, though, these features do not exist simply to make your life easier. In the game, you play as Rusty, a test-pilot sent into the Void, a galactic no man’s land between Earth and the homeworld of an alien threat known as the Watchers. These beings are ominously making their way to Earth by means of a series of portals, and it’s up to the player, with the aid of the great scientist Nikola Tesla, to gain control of these portals and put an end to the menace.

Dark Void Zero goes above and beyond in staying true to its eighties influences. This is evident chiefly in two major ways, the first being its level of difficulty, which comes in beautiful blacks, reds and blues – the hues of an ass-whooping, of course. With this I refer the very deliberate slipping of the player into molten rock articulated in a highly inaccurate, block-based projectile collision detection and exacerbated by a complex two-mode jetpack. The game also extends its sadistic tendencies to text boxes (see on the right) and alerts, which cover from a quarter to an entire third of screen estate, forcing you to slowly skip through information and wait for alerts to pass – or face the potential consequences of slipping into a pool of lava hidden under the box.

As you make headway, fighting through the controls, the collision detection, the alert boxes and the overall difficulty, you’ll eventually come face to face with the very first boss. More than likely, you’ll be on your very last legs, only narrowly edging out the Watcher beast and discovering in the subsequent level that Other Ocean have blessed you with a continue! But make no mistake, this is no ordinary continue, this is your grandfather’s continue had video games existed in the roaring twenties: Instead of awarding you a full set of lives, the game is content with handing out the exact amount of lives in your possession at the time of saving. In other words, to actually benefit from the continue, which is thus more of a save feature, you need to be able to hold on to your lives – otherwise, it’s simply easier to restart and replay the entire game… the tip, the point of this highly barbaric design, of course!

The second aspect that makes Dark Void Zero stand out from the pack is its aforementioned fictional wrapping. Rather than simply giving the game a retro-style audiovisual coating, Other Ocean have gone so far as to implement in the game the aspects that define the games of the past, including their worst. Expecting the game to play like recent game, or say a forgiving rendition of the Mega Man topos, is a surefire path to disappointment. Instead, Dark Void Zero has been designed to leave a lingering taste of haemoglobin in your mouth – and in fact, biting through this all too-familiar a flavour of iron is one’s best weapon in soldiering through the annoyances of the game.

Having persevered for a while, however, a terrible feeling starts to sink in. Amidst the damage inflicted emerges the sudden realization of being had; it all begins to make sense, the game’s outrageous design existing to help you play pretend: Much like all those obscurely obnoxious NES carts (Journey to Silius, anyone?), Dark Void Zero has lured you in, the awful jetpack suddenly intuitive enough for manoeuvring the tightest of spots, the guns start to display their versatility, and the power-ups appear just in the nick of time.

Further enhancing this progressive experience from suffering to enlightenment is how easy it is to mistake Dark Void Zero for a real 8-bit game, with its bright palette and pixelled sprites invoking memories of many of Capcom’s back catalogue. While the art design successfully emulates the style of yesteryear, one woeful mistake mars the splendour. Perhaps in a noble attempt to make the game look emulated, Capcom have plastered a smoothing filter over the graphics, blunting the crisped aliased edges and producing a highly smudged look that undermines the fine pixel art underneath.

The progression is also aided by level design: Unlike the rather monotone first level, the second level is increasingly fun to play, with the final third topping the previous one still. All three levels have their distinct theme, look and feel as well as an increased focus on exploration, even if the correct route is always linear, and the level designers have placed a little too much emphasis on the room unit in order to slow down the gameplay, often forcing players to find keycards to progress or locking down the player in a box with enemies, only allowing for escape after they have been slain.

All in all, it is astonishingly rare for a game to so harmoniously combine its backdrop, fiction and gameplay. In Dark Void Zero, it is impossible to discern one facet from another, with all three ideally blending into a coherent whole of interconnected features that engulf the player progressively as s/he proceeds. Nevertheless, there always exists the rather high chance that Other Ocean’s curious exercise in ludonarrative harmony never opens up for the player. We nearly gave up on the game in the early going, as not once does the game attempt to make peace with the player, its only reward on offer the grokking of its gameplay.

In other words – and here both the review and the analogy of the shellacking come to their ignoble end – Dark Void Zero makes no qualms whatsoever about throwing fists into your face the very first thing you two meet. The onus is on the player to either start enjoying this one-sided face-bashing or start slipping the punches proper. This theme continues well into the game’s Steam achievements, for their acquiring is far and beyond the skill set of a casual player like ourselves. Assiduous players, however, will have a grindfest in their hands that will last for weeks should they so desire.

If Dark Void Zero’s gameplay remains ultimately a matter of taste, its objectionable copy-protection is nothing of the sort:  Not only is the game’s activation needlessly potent and difficult – forcing players to copy-paste a serial key on first run is mind-boggling on Steam – but the game is also packaged with Securom. When the team was questioned for their decision to bundle the game with these hazardous nuggets of code, they cited not having “the resources … to do multiple builds and test passes for it for multiple outlets.”

Don’t let this dubious decision come between you and a fantastic, challenging platformer that should have by all means been but an advertisement yet improbably stands on its very own two legs. And a jetpack. The game currently goes for a -33% discount on Steam, and is also available on iTunes, Direct2Drive, Impulse and GamersGate among others.

As peculiar and confusing as the backdrop sounds, the game establishes its various concepts kindly, one at a time, and lays down a foundation for the core mechanics in a more narrative-oriented, playable introduction at the very beginning of the puzzling adventure.

The key idea of the game, then, is to steal pies with the means of cloning Mr. Winterbottom. Yes, that’s the aforementioned paradox: By pressing down a recording key while navigating P.B. in the back alleys, factories and houses of the murky city, players can generate clones of themselves repeating various tasks, like simply running around, or jumping, or serving as platforms: you can stand on top of their (your?) top hats even when they move! Each level in the game, then, requires a more or less carefully orchestrated set of such clone loops that will ultimately allow the anti-hero to reach each pie. Doesn’t sound too difficult? It isn’t, and yet it is – often, it is perfectly evident what need be achieved in a particular level, yet implementing a working chain of clone loops can be a different matter entirely.

The carefully-designed looping mechanism that forms the backbone of the game’s play is not only unconventional, but also highly defined and refined: Yes, you can fix your mistakes until you succeed, but actually getting it right takes skill and precision. Yes, you can record clones of yourself, but the amount of clones is often highly limited. Yes, the clones do loop, but interference will also confuse them and they will halt, dumbfounded, in their tracks; Mr. Winterbottom can swing at the clones with his cane, propelling them high into air, but also disappearing afterwards. New functions for the clones, like serving as platforms in the water, arise as you proceed through the game’s five levels. It is perhaps thanks to these strange, even incoherent limitations that all-new, fresh mind-bending scenarios consistently appear as you progress onwards.

It’s not that the game is simply carefully designed, either; its mechanisms are jubilant, its whole existence making fun out of the concepts of time and destiny. In this respect, the game’s treatment of time, though much like Braid‘s, is wholly, utterly different in tone; while the mechanisms of manipulating time and the use of a pre-recorded clone remain shared – and Jonathan Blow in fact served as an advisor on the game – the stylistic similarities end here: Where Braid is whimsical yet brooding, its ironies sharp and biting, P.B. Winterbottom remains joyous, comedic and its ironies fanciful and carefree. Where Braid’s design forces players to adapt to situations on the fly, in Mr. Winterbottom players can rest assured that necessary skills have been drilled well beforehand.

Unlike Blow’s highly singular (to the point of being pedantic) game, Winterbottom is progressive in its use of puzzles, piling on more and more mechanisms on top of the baseline record/loop cloning pattern, often resulting in almost an overload of information: You can clearly see where to start, and how to proceed, but actually doing it is different from seeing it, and seeing it is once again different from thinking it. Controlling all your Winterbottoms also requires precision, and though solutions may be apparent from the get-go, much like an all-new recipe, they require much in the way of repetition on the road to perfection.

In this way, the game is indeed very intensive on the player as s/he cognitively maps out (or alternatively, trials and errors) and orchestrates each step of the performance in advance – perchance this is how directors feel, laying out a new shoot? More befuddlement still arises when the pies begin to appear in non-linear order, prompting the need for more segmented solutions still. Many of the more convoluted end-game levels are indeed defined by the performative aspect that lends to the game a curious feeling of play in a fascinating mixture of all the various connotations of the word.

And it is in the looping, pre-recorded nature of the game that lends to multi-layered satisfaction, too: First, the player gets the puzzle and seeks out to realize it. Second, they also have to orchestrate it to meet the possibly very stringent temporal requirements! This often leads to two very distinct “a-has” and epiphanies in the very same level, often further enhanced by the player watching his or her recordings unfold, as if a play or a film, cheering and begging the clones to get through in time. This highly layered construction of seeing, thinking, performing and finally watching makes the game feel far more complex – and rewarding? – than it quite possibly is!

IGF 2008 Version

According to the developers, the fact that the clones do loop in the game was actually an attempt to eliminate failure states in the prototyping stage; designer Matt Korba explains that as the game grows progressively more complex, it “can become extremely punishing. I discovered this early and made Winterbottom’s actions loop so you never lose by missing the timing.“

Eagle-eyed players of the game will also notice that the game sports a copyright for the years 2004-2010! The game’s curiously long gestation period is explained by the games origins as a student thesis project at the University of Southern California. Later, the game was also an entrant to the IGF 2008 Student Competition. Korba talked about the university experience, outlining many of the game’s defining features in one single sentence:

As a first-year student in Steve Anderson’s Survey of Interactive Media class, I was shown the short experimental film Tango by Zbigniew Rybczyński. The film consists of one stable shot that layers looping characters on top of each other until the scene is full of complex choreography. The film resonated with me, and I started to think of a game system based on looping to generate content that would build in complexity.

All this said, it does remain curious how a bewildering amount of graphical design has been applied to a game whose unique charms are principally in the realms of gameplay. It’s not that the game’s “macabre” stylings are particularly superfluous; the fact simply remains that the game could have had any kind of skin, really, and still be worthy of a recommendation. It just so happens that the game’s modus operandi deprives the game of a more profound connection between “skin” and “content”, no matter how skilfully the application of irony, for instance, has been ultimately performed. No amount of pie, I’m afraid, will correct this aspect. (Cake, though, apparently functions as a known remedy.)

Additionally, while the PC interface does display some remains of its XBLA background, the game utilizes so few keys that a gamepad is not in the least necessary. In fact, the game plays excellently on the keyboard. Unfortunately, perhaps thanks to its Flash base, the game performs poorly, with rather ghastly load times, and doesn’t run on low-end laptops. Also overlooked are 4:3 resolutions, which sometimes fail to fully display widescreen-designed text strings.

The Steam release of the game comes bundled with 12 achievements, though most of them are either awarded for completing worlds or rewarded for performing well in a series of “bonus shorts” which extend the game’s length quite a bit. All in all, The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom is a stirring example of ludicrous design come fascinating reality, bundled in a beautiful package. Don’t forget the game is discounted 90% until the 2nd of January on Steam.

That moaning sound in the background? That’s just the good ladies and gentlemen from Impulse, GamersGate and Direct2Drive sighing audibly – the Treasure Hunt has been a devilishly good move from Valve to get more players introduced to Steam’s lesser-utilized features. It has also turned out to be an excellent opportunity for highlighting many smaller titles from developers that may not always have the marketing muscle to stand out from the admittedly crowded Steam storefront. Indeed, the Hunt has been a time to shine for games such as Bob Came in Pieces, Beat Hazard, Droplitz, The UnderGarden and Chime.

Another such game is the aptly titled Shatter from New Zealander niche developer Sidhe. Originally released on the PSN, Shatter is on the surface a high-definition rendition of the Breakout genre, perhaps resembling most closely the classic Arkanoid. Shatter’s claim to the throne, then, is its frustration-free flavour; where other games of the genre may have traditionally strained players with punishing difficulty, Sidhe have altogether subverted the problem by introducing a mischievous sucking/blowing mechanism for your bat, used not only for gathering shattered energy fragments that dissipate from broken bricks, but also allowing players to gently guide their ball’s trajectory curve both left and right.

This intriguing mechanism lends itself to precision play and thus very much eliminates the usual annoyance of not being able to hit your very last remaining brick for prolonged periods of time. In a further twist, the sucking/blowing mechanism applies not only to your balls and fragments, but also loose bricks and other debri. This is especially important in levels with hazardous gravity and bricks in patterns that move around. Bricks in the levels – seemingly forming parts of a larger machine – often have specific functions as joints, motors or even explosives. End-level bosses (and bonus levels, too) change the pace somewhat, requiring a specific, if often straightforwarded, tactic to beat. The player’s bat comes coupled with a powerful “shard storm” attack that is especially useful for handling boss fights.

In terms of its overall difficulty, Shatter is highly adaptive: Players doing poorly will discover 1-ups a plenty, yet see none during a superlative run through the game. In fact, it is largely up to the player to juggle risk and reward: One can take a cautious approach, spending ample time but in turn losing the highest of scores, or choosing to launch arrays of multiballs in the hopes of score multipliers and faster completion. In an unfortunate move, Valve actually incorporated the game into the Treasure Hunt with a rather difficult task related to the game’s undemonstrative Bonus Mode, “not one that [Sidhe] would have chosen and definitely the weakest in the game.”

Shatter’s candy-coated graphical psychedelia is reminiscent of the neon and glitter often associated with the Japanese arcade scene. The only real downside to the graphical fireworks is the loss of readability, an unfortunate but compulsory trade-in with Sidhe’s chosen style. In fact, the most typical cause of losing a life is simply not being able to properly discern the fast-moving balls beneath all the debri and effect work. Important objects like power-ups can similarly either drown balls or be drowned out themselves by the full-on visual assault.

Despite its PSN heritage, Shatter has been ported very well and plays much like a true PC game, taking advantage of Steam’s achievement support and even co-operative play, in addition to a neat selection of other gameplay modes. As a minor blemish, however, the game’s leaderboards seem plagued by blatant cheaters sporting impossible scores. Minor environmental glitches at the very edges of the game’s bottled-up levels can also occur, usually not resulting in anything worse than a lost ball or two however.

Last but not least, cute robots:

Cute robots?! Above, you can view the rad music video to the track “Amethyst Caverns” from the game’s award-winning soundtrack – currently on sale at 50% off at Bandcamp until the 20th of December – which is an award-winning work, written “in close collaboration” with Sidhe, from the artist Module. The utilization of electro on the one hand, retro game music on the other, results in quite the exciting blend, often ambient, other times full-on techno. In fact, the soundtrack is also available as a hard copy on CD Baby.

You can purchase Shatter now on Steam.

At this juncture, I would love to point you all to our interview with the game’s designer, Theodor Waern, published in conjunction with this review. In the interview, we discuss the game’s unique look and feel, Waern’s inspiration for the game and find out more about the game’s history and development.

The first chapter, “Over the Edge,” finally released after being four years in the making, tells the story of Bwana and Kito, brothers abandoned by their adoptive father captain Kaonandodo, whose abrupt disappearance left the brothers struggling to make a living. Apart for some slight “financial instability,” the duo has been running Kaonandodo’s Gas and Charter ever since, that is, until the Armando Power Company throws a proverbial wrench in their gears.

Suddenly, deus ex machina, a damsel in distress appears both willing and able to bail the twins out of their predicament; only, this mysterious bookworm – the university assistant Lina – soon reveals their adoptive father is somehow tangled up in a mysterious conspiracy related to the Armando Power Company. In the backdrop also looms the mysterious, forbidden Underland.

By far the most distinctive feature of The Journey Down is its unique graphical look and feel that, much like Grim Fandango’s (the closest point of comparison), also extends beyond the surface into a more coherent fantasy.

On the outset, I expected Waern to have utilized Polynesian materials as the base for his graphical style, but instead Waern has put together a real hodgepodge of various African sources. For instance, according to Waern, Kito – Bwana’s sidekick – was based on east African Makonde style, while some other characters, like Bwana, were inspired by central African Chokwe carvings. It is utterly striking how these designs seem to inhabit the very same space that the Calaca occupied in Grim Fandango.

In our interview, Waern also explained that while many of the game’s characters were simply given names without research, some of them are actually traceable to Swahili and other African languages. In this way, the game is, like Waern himself described the game, a “mess of different styles.”

Apart from the strikingly designed facial features for each character and the awe-inspiring presence of the metropolis that is St. Armando, looming in the background, the primary strength of the game is its immediacy and welcoming style of gameplay. The game succeeds in capturing the player’s interest at once simply by making the game’s fiction understandable in mere minutes – something that classic adventures always seemed to excel and even take pride in: A pirate wannabe? Check. A bad-ass biker? Check. An undead travel agent? Check. You’re instantly at home, pointing and clicking Bwana around Kingsport.

Now, beyond the unique visual direction and the aforementioned game influences, there exist at least three potential points of contention in “Over the Edge” that relate to the game’s allure.

Firstly, the game exhibits an uncanny ability to roll forward with superb momentum, constantly leaving you pleased with your puzzle-solving performance. In fact, some of the game’s puzzles are deviously simple, and as the game is medium length, it should offer an hour or two of gaming for most players. But this is no complaint – truly, where the game excels is in its carefully crafted balance, polish and eye for pacing; many locations were simply left out by the developer in order to maintain better and smoother playability, and Bwana indeed traverses Kingsport at true and tested LucasArts speeds (something that Telltale mucked up in their “Tales” series, for instance).

Like many adventures, the central puzzles figure around gathering ingredients – luckily made easy by the game’s highly intuitive (read: standard) interface. A directional arrow that appears when hovering over doors helps pinpointing passageways and entrances. The inventory is standard fare, too, with combination puzzles to go. Having only one save game slot is one of the few bigger offences towards adventure gaming aficionados.

Apart from the puzzles’ easygoing nature, another feature that may be divisive – and potentially a real deal breaker – is how in “Over the Edge,” Bwana has to have a reason why for his actions. If he is yet to find a meaningful use for an object or an item, he’ll simply shrug it off for the time being. I personally view this aspect to the game simply as successful writing, but others may disagree with Waern’s chosen method.

Finally, the game does utilize Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer -like meta-level comedy and writing, and thus often pokes fun at the common threads found in adventure games, including the kleptomania that so deeply permeates the genre. There may be moments in the game where these aspects of the writing can take players out of the game’s base-level fiction.

There does exist a slight lack of polish with the writing, primarily typographical, but easy to shrug off as characterization appropriately remains its chief focus. Intriguingly, several dialog trees also exist with choices that can only be accessed on separate replays.

While the game’s debt to both Full Throttle and Grim Fandango – the former thematic and technical, the latter stylistic – remains obvious, the game primarily operates closest to Monkey Island, and not only because of Kingsport Bay, an industrial cargo dock and one of the seven bays that surround St. Armando. In conversation, Waern explained to me that he simply believes the maritime theme and adventure games go well together. “No point fixin’ that which ain’t broken eh?,” he quipped.

Simon D’souza’s bubbly and energetic reggae compositions also highlight the aforementioned marine parallel; furthermore, almost every location in the game impressively has its own musical theme or jangle. Surprisingly enough, it is also the sound effects that play a major part in the creation of the game’s ambience – a fact quite hard to believe as the game’s canvas of sound has been assembled strictly with the help of the Freesound project. You wouldn’t know that, though, as the sound effects never take you out of the fiction by sounding of poor quality or out of place.

Of special note is the very final stretch of the game, during which the game takes a brilliant audiovisual spurt and leaves players on a game-high note and expectant of the follow-up chapter, “Into the Mist,” which is slated for a summer 2011 release.

Visit Skygoblin.com for a download link to the game. For those more interested in the inner workings of the game, there exists a production thread with big versions of some of the paintings for the game, and another post contains sketches and deleted scenes. Combined, these make for a neat “making of.”

Finally, do remember to take a look at our interview with Waern.

Eternally Us

One bad hand and it’s all over. -Fiona

Broken rules aside, context is everything with Ben “Ben304″ Chandler and Steven “Calin Leafshade” Poulton’s entry to the compo, Eternally Us. Context-free, the game is, like Steve Ince (So Blonde) calls it, a “beautiful” adventure. For a MAGS entry, then, the game is not only breathtakingly complete but also a fulfilling gaming experience.

The game is also yet another extension to Chandler’s formidable repertoire – a constant stream of short, self-contained adventures – that broadly discusses the same primary motifs, vehicles and themes, in many ways tying his output down into a more coherent whole. Conversely, Poulton is best-known for his well-esteemed (though also controversial) The McCarthy Chronicles.

Ostensibly an entry point into the relationship of two soulmates – Amber and Fiona – spending a beautiful afternoon out in the park, the game begins in subdued and relaxing tones. It also very, very quickly degenerates into a discussion of emotional distress.

In fact, whether it’s the loss of memory or knowledge, teleportation or even planar shift, Chandler has now juxtaposed the real world to a netherworld/spiritual world/otherworld in nearly all of his recent games, including Shifter’s Box, Heed, Hope and Featherweight. The same can be said of Eternally Us. While the game does technically utilize one and the same “room” as far as the concept is defined within the actual AGS engine, it nevertheless proceeds through a series of symbolic locations tied together by the thematic confines of the Kübler-Ross grief cycle. The author himself promised to explain these aspects in the form of a forthcoming post-mortem, so I won’t linger on this further.

The game seems equally informed by the standard dramatic structure of a five-stage play, from exposition to resolution. After all, adventure games have traditionally mimicked the spectators’ viewpoint in their presentation, and Eternally Us actually proceeds to acknowledge this fact.

Poulton’s dialogue utilizes a wildly poetic register, prosaic in a way that borders on the verbose. Let me quote the character of “Hurt”:

Why, when faced with the truth, do you close your heart and bear false witness to those who only wish to cleanse you of your pain? / You are bound by nothing more than your own clenched fists. By your fury at the realities that plague every one of us.

While the above clearly illustrates Poulton’s effortless lexicon and understanding of genre, these dramatic and overstated sections ultimately make out about 90% of the game and do hamper character-level relatability terribly; where overwritten dialogue in The McCarthy Chronicles is still directly used in the fleshing-out of characters, the stylings here are wasted on secondary and even tertiary characters that leave little mark on the protagonist or the player.

In comparison to Poulton’s previous work, Eternally Us also lacks the concise minimalism of Hope, as well as omits some of the more intricate details and touches of The McCarthy Chronicles, like the titular hero’s untouched revolver; his wish to be able to play the piano and so forth.

Poulton himself characterises his overall enterprise in the following way:

I only wish to create something which makes people feel truly alive and challenges their perceptions. I want to generate the power of Aesop with the elegance of Shakespeare. It’s fair to say that I want to make something special.. I want to make something which is truly Of Heaven.

The aims outlined above are, in no uncertain terms, lofty. For a writer to grow, of course, the utilization of schemas and narrative structures is surely recommendable. That being said, the structural choices here render the primary characters secondary while the narrative, though at the forefront, remains oblique and suffers from being squeezed into its formal constraints.

By now, you must have realized there exists quite the rift between the tone of my commentary so far and the actual merits of the production. There is obviously no doubt whatsoever that Eternally Us both looks and plays most excellently, with production values, polish and sheen of incredible calibre for a MAGS project.

The game also sports a wondrous cast of voice actors, with Miranda Gauvin’s performance especially of note, and Poulton’s musical score is similarly neat. Chandler’s background art is equally painterly and atmospheric as usual: Some of the latter-half scenery especially, with animated full-screen falling snow and leaves, begs to be seen in motion; speaking of motion, there is a-plenty of that, too. Only the artist’s obsession with lamps and lamp-posts is beginning to stand out like a bit of an eyesore.

Again, as outlined at the very beginning of the article, only a ludographic contextualization reveals these gripes, which do not arise much in relation to the compo at hand.

In terms of gameplay, Eternally Us is not so light on puzzles as its puzzles are light. I would draw attention to how the game forms no exception to Chandler’s recurring use of kinetic, movement-based puzzles that push the game more into the realm of the interactive novel. In my admittedly superficial and incomplete reportage of Heed I wrote that “[t]here is a definite emphasis on positioning, movement and object states”.

This is not a criticism. However, while the kinetic approach was still extremely novel in Shifter’s Box, and fresh enough in Heed, the issue of repetition is beginning to rear its head: As repeated action forms the solution to most of the puzzles here, more variation would be required for the game to create more of an illusion of a problem-solving game. As is, the term point and click could simply not be any more appropriate.

I would also like to further clarify how I find the game’s failures in the writing department to be ultimately far less about register and more about its actual use. While the game begins in the present day, and looks to be a discussion of banality, it abruptly delves into a more fantastic sphere. Sadly, these two modes, the banal and the symbolic, are ultimately irreconcilable in the game’s fiction: The main character, Amber, takes her predicaments always at face value, never questioning or negotiating her own role. Is there no lingering doubt, at all?

This, in turn, is rather dangerous to the game’s use of location- and character-based symbolism. Consider Shifter’s Box, where planar travel is beautifully motivated by the game’s in-game fiction, or even Poulton’s own The McCarthy Chronicles, which works to avert the obvious trappings of the genres of noir and hardboiled. Perhaps games like Downfall, in their discussions of the human psyche, succeed in part thanks to not relying so closely on structure and form?

Whenever Poulton lets his romantic stylings drop and subsequently allows the characters to shine through, whether cognizantly or accidentally, the game finds just enough time to deliver a fantastic payoff. In this way, the very best portions of the game in my mind are, by far, its beginning and its end.

Chandler, “Ben304,” one of (if not) the most prolific games writers currently working with AGS, can maintain an inhuman pace: Poulton and Chandler’s earlier collaboration, Hope, was completed over a 48-hour span. These men are clearly familiar with the presence of temporal constraint. What I would most like to see at this juncture, however, is for the authors to take a jab at producing a full-length; in short bursts, their games tend to dwell on the same topics each time around. Perhaps their forthcoming project in Winter’s Shadow – the second game to be released under the Infinite Grace moniker – shall be exactly that?

All things said, I hope the various references to all these wide-ranging earlier projects as well as the length of this write-up speak for (and, heaven forbid, not against!) Infinite Grace’s excellent contributions to the freeware adventure scene. Again, do not hesitate to cast your vote – there’s still enough time to check all the entries out. Please also remember to check back soon for the final portion of our reportage!

It has been a while, has it not?

Not only is this game a long six years in the coming, but we have also not been treated to a high-resolution, 100% hand-drawn point and click adventure game in aeons, as even The Biller’s painterly A Vampyre Story and Pendulo Studios’ latest stylised offerings have resorted to 3-D in justified attempts at providing relief to the heavily budgetary nature of animation. And who could, in their right mind, blame them for doing so?

But still – one hundred percent. In light of the above games, that striking statistic alone makes Marco Hüllen’s The Whispered World stand out from the pack – and boy, does it ever: There is a breathtaking array of various character animations – actions, emotions, expressions and movements – that quite possibly has not been seen before, at the very least not since the heyday of the genre in the latter part of the 1990’s.

Perhaps the closest touchpoint in terms of the game’s graphical look and feel, then, is not to be found in the gaming medium at all, but among lead artist Hüllen’s primary influences: Japanese anime and classic children’s animations, like Spirited Away and The Last Unicorn (a cut-scene example on the left)?

As things stand, every forthcoming review of the game will surely be gushing all over the graphics in the manner above. Therefore, we should probably move away from discussing the Captain Obvious -grade graphical prowess of the game and instead touch upon other aspects of the demo, the aspects that may potentially set the game apart from its counterparts.

What? Right, sure, yes, it is a generously budgeted adventure game – you’re right in your assessment in that we don’t get those too often, either. But what I meant to venture is that video games have seldom, if ever, touched upon the rather cruel existential position of the circus performer (For your information, The Secret of Monkey Island does not count! Cirque de Zale just might); the showmen and -women of the circus find themselves perpetually outside society, bound to their work and travel, only getting glimpses of normality in their day-to-day life.

Sadwick the clown, the protagonist of The Whispered World, is clearly in the throngs of an inverted Wanderlust, aching to be rid of the travelling life, wishing nothing more than to escape into normalcy. While the unwilling protagonist as hero -set-up is theoretically nothing short of a video gaming staple, the marked difference here in practice is that though Sadwick may be extremely resistant to his current lot in life, he exhibits very little reluctance over his role in the grander scheme of things, and is ready to embrace anything that should break the boundaries of his current existence.

Sadwick would give everything to become a pira… someone, anybody, and in the demo, he indeed tries his very meek best to find a way out of his current position, out of acting as a human cannonball. Whether it be poetry or philosophy, though, his suggestions are rather mercilessly shut down, utilizing a perfunctory capitalist logos, by his family.

As soon as it is revealed that Sadwick has actually been assigned the role of the clown from the outside, forced to comply with the wishes of the rest of his entourage, it also becomes clear that we’re not really controlling the archetypal clown; instead, we’re playing a young man that has been involuntarily marked, classified and, in the process, nullified; it’s no surprise that Sadwick is trying to find ways of becoming more of a non-clown, a non-entity.

Often, you will find other characters in the game remarking on his failures as a clown, and in many ways, this is what Sadwick wants, even desires: The closer to a real clown he gets, the more he loses grip on his true identity. A contradictory one.

Though young Sadwick is presented rather dangerously in a high-pitched, nasal voice, the character ultimately comes across as sentimental and understandable instead of merely whiny and annoying, and the actor cast in Sadwick’s silly boots fills them rather admirably. Like so many existentialists in their youth (or is that youths in their existentialism?), Sadwick does seem to exhibit the side-effects of a tube vision, and subsequently comes off as single-minded in some instances, multi-faceted in others, ultimately promising enough variation and depth for the character to remain intriguing.

In fact, merely over the course of the demo, the voice actor behind Sadwick’s buffoonish façade clearly gets more comfortable in his role, loosens up and becomes more enjoyable to listen to, even if the game’s writing sometimes gets a little over-the-top verbose. Then again, players are free to click through dialogue as they please, as the game delightfully supports both line-skipping and double-click quick-exits – two elementary, baseline features that all adventure games should come with.

I can’t speak for the writing of the German version of the game, but the English-language translation comes off as both competent and polished, and perhaps offers to us a partial explanation to the rather long delay in-between the EU and US releases and the German release date.

Some of the wordplay (“compass-compote-complot-compost” – ugh!) might strike you as stilted, and its tone is often, uh, as the game would put it – loquacious. Overall, creating a successful sense of being in a completely new fantasy world, a sense of belonging, always requires more contextualization than other genres. That is the baggage of fantasy, and indeed suits some players better than others, just like fantasy literature suits different readers. Be that as it may, The Whispered World is certainly successful in making its world understandable and intriguing, and any adventure that attempts proper dialogue-based puzzles should be lauded for even trying.

For those who prefer their games voiceless, there also exist subtitles; both features can be turned on and off at will. There is little to say of the soundtrack at this juncture except that it is both outstanding and Hisaishi-like, contributing to the overall atmosphere.

In Wednesday’s interview, Hüllen emphasised how Sadwick’s character was redesigned to better appeal to adult players and convey a broader spectrum of emotion. It is incredibly easy to write both these attempts down as successes. Many of the added character animations have a profound effect on the game and its player, and I only need to show you two sequential screenshots to perfectly illustrate what the artist means:

There is a depth of expression, beyond the more common narrative means here, that often remains untapped in games; as I showed these images to Artful Gamer‘s Chris Lepine, he remarked that the team at Daedalic had seemingly very much succeeded in capturing “the miyazaki-style focus on simple/effective facial expression.”

The demo, which contains a section from the very first of the four chapters of the game, is set in the Autumn Forest location and is elegantly orchestrated overall, with unobtrusive restrictions in place, and allows players to experience enough of the game while still leaving enough locations untouched to engage players’ wallets.

For one, the download is one of the longer adventure game demonstrations that I’ve seen, and definitely offers a good few hours of active playtime as well as a brain-crunching challenge. The installer weighs in at 593mb and can be acquired from Deep Silver at this address. The full game is out tomorrow in Europe, and on Monday in the United States. So far, the game is digitally available at Direct2Drive, GamersGate and The Adventure Shop. Daedalic also promise a release on Steam.

At the end of its animated intro, “OBEY” reads imprinted in upper-case on the sides of two massive missiles standing upright, shining and erect, at once establishing a poignant scene of the promulgation of violence and power.

In retrospect, the aforementioned scene is rather astonishing given the game’s relatively humble origins in a ghastly, ghastly Flash flick, Albatropolis, that has quietly morphed into a vivid, mature work by the Asiatic offshoot of Ratloop, developers of the fascinating drawing game and 2009 IGF competitor Mightier, and Malice, the relatively well-known total conversion for the original Quake.

Rocketbirds, then, headlines the “Original *beep* of War,” a commando-cock called Hardboiled, on a mission to rid the world of the evil penguin dictator Putzki in a Flashback-tinged action-platformer realized in Adobe Flash. Due to circumstance, Hardboiled finds himself sandwiched in a battle between an underground resistance and Putzki’s totalitarian regime.

Putzki has, at his command, an endless swar… err, rookery of penguin mooks in addition to his distinctly (in my mind, anyway) Austrian albatross muscle, Brno [sic]. The game’s primary developers, Tan Sian Yue, James Anderson and Teck Lee Tan, have intriguingly utilized here an anthropomorphic cast of birds much in the vein of, say, Petersen’s Mouse Guard, where strife in the animal kingdom is represented in humanized scope and style. In Albatropolis, budgerigars figure as downtrodden, sidelined protestors; cardinals form the underground movement, and penguins, of course, have become goofy military overlords(!).

Hardboiled – the ma… cock of action that he is – runs, jumps, ducks, rolls, hangs and blasts his way towards Putzki. Now, before I venture any further, I should make it explicit that I consider the controls of Flashback to be the very pinnacle of the genre, and Rocketbirds, to give credit where credit is due, comes much closer to achieving comparable motion than any other game that I have had the pleasure of playing over the past years.

My personal affinity for Flashback, Blizzard’s Blackthorne, Yahtzee’s 1213 and Eric Chahi’s diamond-in-the-rough Another World certainly came in handy in approaching the game, and I should think one prerequisite for appreciating Rocketbirds to its fullest is therefore a willingness to abandon expectations of one-button shooting, fast-forward progress and hand-holding. Don’t get me wrong, though – a very thorough set of instructions on the controls is included, for instance.

But what is it, exactly, that ultimately separates this particular flavour of action-platforming from other shooters and platforming games? Perhaps a common characteristic in the aforementioned can be found in their shared treatment of motion: Where other games offer freedom as a trade-off for precision, these do the very opposite, with snap, rigidity and restraint. The underlying control-related constraints, then, erase imprecisions, awarding the player with admittedly a stricter learning curve but also further fluidity and the potential execution of extremely complex movements in a precise manner. What ostensibly should figure as limitation actually becomes liberating.

Like Rocketbirds, these games also utilize two important methods: First, level design based on the one-screen unit, which effectively turns all locations to puzzles of varying difficulty and type. Second, the cunning technique of blatant, tangible exposition of objectives and goals, with progress and reward always looming around the very next corner, and victory right at your fingertips. You’ll fail, quit, restart, knowing full well the futility and the inevitability of your return and retry. This is potent, arcade-style design, surely a factor in the success of Jordan Mechner’s original Prince of Persia, for instance. Good thing Rocketbirds saves your progress into an online account, too.

Rooftop

That being said, the game is not particularly difficult, and serves the player simple but devious physics-based stacking puzzles as breaks in the action, adding important atmospheric flavour and balancing the flow between action and exploration. While I have seen others react negatively to them, I thought they worked very well to underline the quieter moments of the game. After all, the game’s bleak military dystopia is presented in vivacious, hand-painted art instead of vector-based artwork beyond the cutscenes detailed above.

In fact, I seldom cover Flash games due to my slight disdain for motion tween –based animation, but here, the graphics of Rocketbirds look pleasantly hand-crafted, and especially the animations are fluid, full of character and often absolutely hilarious. Hardboiled walks with a toughman’s gait, the penguin mooks wobble on, and special actions have their own curious touches. At times, the game benefits from the elasticity of Flash: Unlike with pixel-based artwork, sometimes the camera’s viewpoint zooms very close to the action only to pan far away elsewhere.

The hand-painted backgrounds consist of a thorough array of locations straight from action and espionage film. The game features, overall, nine levels of slightly varying length; among others, a prison, an airfield, and a subway. The subway, a prevalent location found both in Flashback and 1213, nevertheless manages to stay relevant: I literally gasped for air when I realized what I was being asked of, and then more – even if the developers do eventually go all in with the crates, you’ll ultimately be amused rather than frustrated.

This is, perhaps, a lesson learned from Valve: Half-Life 2’s tunnel of light remains the landmark example of balancing flow with feedback in order to create a sensation of success and accomplishment after a hard-fought, prolonged battle (for the surface, in that case). In fact, like Half-Life 2, Rocketbirds manages to switch gears constantly, tackling mature themes and even incorporating questions of duty, morality, reason and even fear: An important mechanism in the game allows you to position the guards’ own weapons on their temple, forcing them to pull the trigger, for instance.

By far the most intriguing element of the game to me is its written dialogue, as the lonely monologues and conversations of the enemy guards are chock full of character and emotion:

Surprising depth can also be found in the game’s utilization of music. While the ambient soundscapes and –effects are very neat, often working to enhance the scenario at hand, major scenes feature songs from the band New World Revolution in a seldom-seen coupling of pop music and animation that actually gives the game some further character – as if any more were required for a game of such thematic eccentricity!

A minor blemish on an otherwise spotless record for the game remains: On my temporary fallback computer (an AMD64 3000+), the game borders on unplayable especially during its latter levels. Whatever settings I touched would have very little effect on the game’s performance – an issue I believe is Flash-related. It’s not that the game becomes unsmooth or laggy, but rather unresponsive; it would often take two, three, even four button presses to elicit an action, like switch to the inventory, in a busy sequence.

Full-fledged combat situations therefore became, if not impossible, far more intolerable than they were envisioned to be: I found myself inching onwards, perhaps with too much perseverance: On a different set-up, a Macbook Pro, the game ran smooth as butter and I was able to get through whichever parts I was stuck at effortlessly. This is no more than a heads-up to those with lower-end machines. Ratloop Asia have in fact also produced a downloadable launcher both for Mac and PC that allows you to play the game full-screen and free of annoying browser dependence.

The argument can also be made that the game never quite takes the ball, character-wise, and runs with it, but as the first episode of a potential series – added with the presence of the Albatropolis Flash still looming over the series – I thought restraint seemed to be, at this juncture, the right choice. At the end of the day, all that really matters is that right now, Rocketbirds: Revolution! is the next-best thing you’ll have to Flashback – a coherent work with crisp controls and stylish, cinematic wrapping.

A demo is available right now, from www.rocketbirds.com, and the full game can be bought, from Ratloop Asia, for the price of $9.95.

As the title suggests, you play as a whip-cracking cave explorer, sporting a fedora and leather jacket to complete the image. You have at your disposal some bombs and ropes as well as additional tools found along the way to help you navigate the levels, overcome enemies, and find treasures. Inhabiting the dark caverns are various dangerous creepy-crawlies like snakes and spiders, and friendly NPCs like shopkeepers and damsels in distress.

As is the norm for conventional roguelikes, every level in Spelunky is procedurally-generated, so every single time you start it up the experience will be fresh. And return to the start you will, many many times. The game inherits yet another trait from the genre – it’s bloody hard. Dying is all too easy, what with the dangerous heights to descend, baddies to face, shopkeepers to piss off, and … your own clumsiness to avoid. I don’t know whether to cry or laugh when I successfully dodge a dart trap, pick up the spent dart and aim at a spider – only to miss it and have the projectile bounce off the wall right back at me, killing me instantly.

The game is full of these unexpected, water-cooler story moments. Playing it I keep slipping back into ‘indie platformer’ mode – treating it as another Rick Dangerous, perhaps – and expect to have a predictable playthrough time and time again. But the game is first and foremost a roguelike, and therefore it continues to provide surprises, the kind of things that we tag with [Spoiler] so as not to ruin anyone else’s first encounter. Things like the complete overhaul of the graphics every few levels – which I’ve deliberately chosen to avoid showing in the screenshots – or what happens when you pick up a golden statue from its base. In this way Spelunky rewards persevering players who embrace the short life expectancy and put in the time and effort to get to the end. It retains that addictive nature that dungeon crawling fans know so well, and keeps you wanting to come back.

The game was released in beta form last year, so most people in the indie circles would have already had a chance to play it by now. However, only recently has the game reached version 1.0, and with this release comes the announcement that developer Derek Yu will be bringing the game to XBox Live Arcade next year. It won’t be just a straight port, either. Yu intends to lead the two versions down separate paths with the PC version becoming an open source project, moddable by the community, and the 360 version taking on the expected features like more levels and integrated achievements.

Nostalgia is to memory as kitsch is to art –Charles Maier

Stevie Jack, I’m sorry to say, but we just didn’t get you. Or more importantly, we didn’t expect you, at least not to come waltzing down the street, dropping Barthes and Foucault, least of all, amidst all that jazz. We received you expectant of two things only: A sequel to The Apprentice, and colourful, fantastical artwork and animation.

Strictly speaking, we got neither.

Only now, three years later, am I prepared to face the fact that I was not ready, Stevie Jack. After all, in ‘06, the commercial AGS scene was still very much in its infancy, with very little on the market beyond The Adventures of Fatman. We had yet to accustom ourselves to the idea of rewarding indie game designers for their time, with the scene additionally still steadfastly shackled to the gaming heritage of the early 90s. All this despite the flavours and flairs of contemporary retro adventuring having already largely reached the plateau of its predecessors: The freeware version of The Shivah, for instance, had been released in June of the same year, and free games like Reactor 09 continued to push the content envelope.

In this article, my primary wish is to illustrate how Herculean Effort’s adventure game, Super Jazz Man, could and would not have been made possible in the heyday of the adventure gaming boom at the turn of the 90s, in the form of a reappraisal of elements and features of the game that we might have, should have paid more attention to at the time. In a fantastic turn of events, having picked the game up for review some weeks back, the game is just now being sold by Dave Gilbert’s Wadjet Eye Games store as the latest part to its “recommended games” series. Timing, it seems, is on Stevie Jack’s side this time around!

Formally, Super Jazz Man masquerades as an adventure game of the superhero variant. At first glance, it contains the immediately familiar symbols and icons of the adventure, ostensibly also matching its look and feel to its subject matter. Starting with the various icons representing various actions (Walk, Look At, Take, Use and Talk, respectively), for instance, the game’s visuals are characterized by that of a caped crusader – commendable attention to detail, indeed – heck, there even exists a special letter “J” reserved for Stevie’s alter-ego; its curvature is that of a saxophone!

The game begins as the aforementioned Mr. S. J. Marcell, a waiter’s helper and an increasingly popular saxophonist, suddenly receives a distress signal from his girlfriend, Cadence, who explains their adorable little kitty, Bebop, has gone awol. Off we go, pointing and clicking the initially-denominated hero in search for a cat. Due to (or despite of?) some light surrealist leanings, it quickly becomes evident that the writing of the game is very competent, with an admirable degree of zing and twang in the dialogue department. At the beginning, for example, Marcell asks the High Rollers, a group of prosperous gangsta rappers at their table,

Marcell: “How is everything tonight?”
The High Rollers: “Real tight”

Real tight indeed: The concise writing never does bore you out over the course of the short to medium -length game, exhibiting the kind of youthful pop culture leanings also found in Dave Gilbert’s Blackwell series; as with Gilbert’s referential style, though, players not overtly familiar with US pop culture and/or the genre of jazz music may have to resort to ogling for references if bothered, but most of the turns of phrases are relatively self-explanatory, with mention of Charlie Parker, Artie Shaw, etcetera.

That being said, beyond the realm of music in the game, the coupling of form and content is not nearly so straight-forwarded as it appears to be at first. Mr. Marcell does indeed have all the makings of a superhero: A costume, a special ability. A secret identity, an alter-ego, a name out of a DeLillo book. A strong-willed girlfriend – a damsel(!) in distress. Villains. The utilization of these elements, however, is rather post-modern, as we do find the more general rules of superhero fiction often being broken down: Marcell, as Super Jazz Man, comfortably blends in the crowd – no questions ever asked about his flamboyant costume or ever-so-protruding instrument.

In several instances, too, the protagonist enters the landscape by floating down from the sky, breaking the laws of physics and entering the hyperreal, yet in others, he is insistent on walking. Some puzzles even take advantage of this seeming disparity, and on one screen, Stevie’s fly-by is classified as a “neat trick” by Cadence’s friends, ultimately leaving us scratching our heads: Is he a superhero, or is he not? What the heck is he, exactly? Also, many of the game’s puzzles utilize tools, items and gadgets rather than the hero’s superpowers, purposely blurring the line. Puzzle-wise, the focus is on real-world problems, though some of these also require thinking outside the box, a few slightly tarnished by obliqueness: Getting stumped is a very real possibility. The best and worst puzzle, I should say, involves lifting weights. Perhaps you’ll agree.

Our eyes are set, for good reason, on the unconventional protagonist, with reviewers eliciting pleasure over having such an atypical lead. But what is it, exactly, that makes Super Jazz Man so special, especially if he’s not a superhero per se? Should we see here nothing but a saxophonist in spandex? And how does he compare to the previous decade, of canine craziness, janitorial jeopardy and burly bikers? In that respect, the game’s biggest strength is neither its theme nor characterization, but the breaking and bending of the aforementioned. The games hinted at above – Sam & Max, Space Quest and Full Throttle – all firmly stood within the set limits of their genres, but how about Super Jazz Man?

Certainly, the superhero genre’s deeply wound relationship with detective fiction does create certain compulsory connections: After all, superheroes often function as supernatural detectives, uncovering leads, discovering trails, investigating, interrogating. This is essentially what Super Jazz Man consists of, too. But so do most (if not all) adventure games, by design. Structure and gameplay aside, it seems, neither of the these fictions would adequately explain the deeper make-up of the game; in my view, the key element to unlocking its meaning is the concept of pretending.

Players find themselves positioned, out of the blue, in a game whose structure and setting oddly resembles that of a theatrical performance. In the opening sequence, Super Jazz Man masquerades, if you will, as Stevie Jack Marcell – not the other way round. Also: Indoor locations always have their ceilings omitted, revealing the stylized skyline of the cityscape instead. The absence of roofing leaves you, the player, and the characters peculiarly uncontained, serving as a constant reminder of the game’s fictions and fictional states, also further serving to detach the actors from their dwellings and thus rendering the backgrounds as replaceable set pieces.

Further fuelling this feeling of displacement is the perspective of the camera, which is directly, frontally and conservatively positioned as if players were watching a play from an auditorium. This perspectival choice moves the player more into the role of a member of the audience rather than in the boots of the protagonist.

These factors, in conjunction to the understated art, lead us toward the concept of post-modern pastiche: Bobbing and weaving in-between literary modes, taking portions that fit, parts that don’t, with little worry of established rules or influences, which serve as a starting point for use and abuse thereupon. Even the very name of the game seeks, on the one hand, to position itself – via pastiche – next to the already established discourse, and on the other hand, to separate itself from it. At the danger of sounding haughty, here is a quote from Harold Bloom:

Freedom, in a poem, must mean freedom of meaning, the freedom to have a meaning of one’s own. Such freedom is wholly illusory unless it is achieved against a prior plenitude of meaning, which is tradition, and so also against language.

I do not seek to entirely disconnect the game from its sphere; its sincerity and seriousness would prevent me from doing so anyhow. The above quote hopefully nevertheless illustrates both the complexity and the simplicity of a cultural product in relation to its influences. In this way, it seems only natural for us to designate and classify; Even this article is a blatant act of demarcation as I seek to nail down Super Jazz Man, to explain it and nullify it, make it palatable. But playing it today, the game feels resilient, refusing to belong. Yes, we do have our established discourses, of adventure games, of superheroes, of detectives, but can they really be used to define the game?

In my view, Super Jazz Man is not a nostalgic return to any kind of tradition, be it adventure, superhero, detective, sitcom or otherwise. It is a continuation; therefore, the prospect of analysing the production values of the game via concepts such as “old school” or “retro” seems awfully disheartening. Beyond the obvious parallels, like its resolution of 320×200 and the omission of voice acting, we have not seen such strict palette work since the very dawn of gaming, and even then, Super Jazz Man’s selection of colour and shape is 100 percent methodological decision-making.

I do admit to having filed the game under generic terminology back at the time of its release. I thought I agreed when the now defunct Man!festoGames described the game as “a nostalgic homage to 1980s LucasArts adventures”; I paid little attention when AdventureGamers saw the game as “the fun nostalgia-fest it aims to be”. But today, when the Wadjet Eye games website files the game under “nostalgic low-color graphics”, I accept the market-driven need to designate, but refuse the rest.

For in this case, the carefully selected monochrome-toned palette, the geometric abstractions and colour fields, and the comical, pop-arty pixeled characters are all conscious methodological choices on the part of the developers. There is a world of difference between a self-imposed limit and a dictated limit, after all. While the understated technical aspects were also undeniably motivated by constraints with resources, manpower and time, comparing such application of technique to, say, the hardware-imposed limitations of the “Quest” series, strikes me as simply uneducated.

After all, there are wide-ranging possibilities for pixel artists to engage in meaningful methodological, technical and stylistic conversation about palettes, animation, shapes and technique on websites like Pixeljoint or Pixelation. The Schlaepfer brothers are known to take part in this discourse, and I can assure you, very little about the game’s look and feel is unmediated. The game may not have the same kind of vibrancy and vivacity the brothers’ other series, The Apprentice does, but even as is, the beach scene of the game is one my favourite pixel art pieces to date.

Yes, the understated graphical style is a bold choice, worthy of note, and perhaps best illustrated by my favourite piece from the game – its “world” map:

Laugh if you want, but also see the strong-willed elegance of the lines, the interplay of the unisonous, mild-mannered tones, the geometric, surficial balance. But aren’t we forgetting something? A jazz-themed venture, surely, must have its music dissected. The soundtrack, then, composed by Greg Schlaepfer, first feels strangely informed by the easygoing lounge ditties of Sierra’s Leisure Suit Larry series. A backwardly and fallacious interpretation as any: After all, all there is to this connection is the haphazard nostalgia hampering my interpretation and the indefinite, uncertain potentiality that these two games share some aural influence from the past…

Though midi-based, the music thoroughly exhibits a smooth, jazzy style and register, sometimes bordering on lounge, even swing on others; this is perhaps why, at times, the music felt just an iota too insistent, too spirited and piquant, but is obviously well-read, thought-out and more than a fitting match overall. Additional saxophonic solo interludes – courtesy of Brendan Buss – are thrown in for good measure.

Even by today’s standards for indie games, Super Jazz Man is polished, and adventure gaming specialists will know to appreciate a vast array of hotspot actions and reactions, something often missing from non-commercial (and even the commercial ones!) projects. Minor sour grapes – from a perfectionist point of view – might include the lack of rotating the various available actions with the right mouse button, a handful of puzzles out there and perhaps a slightly wonky action sequence at the very end that also bring the otherwise classy gameplay down just a notch.

My first-hand experience of the game, during the Christmas holidays of the year 2006, was very much characterized by feelings of disappointment, as the game failed to answer to my expectations in any tangible way. Today, no longer bound by the baggage of its position in the genre, and free of its sequential expectations, the game feels vastly improved. This time around, I enjoyed playing the game, and I do believe you would too: After all, the brothers Schlaepfer are a proven commodity, always able to provide a game equipped with a solid interplay of visuals, content and sound.

What seemed like a misstep at the time, coming off the heels of the first two Apprentices, now feels like a logical, if unexpected, continuation of Herculean Effort’s experimentation with style, content and form.

Super Jazz Man was originally released in December 2006 and is still available on the Herculean Effort website. A playable demo can be downloaded and the game no longer comes packaged with copyprotection. Lastly, the game is available at Wadjet Eye Games’ recommended games section, for the price of $9.99.

Players take on the role of biotic soldier Jacob Taylor, formerly an Alliance marine. Initially called into action to resolve a terrorist attack, Taylor is sent on a mission to stop an impending attack on the Citadel by the batarians. Along the way he picks up companions like Miranda, an informant, and gains new leads on where to go next. Like in the first game, players choose which location to travel to next in their ship by means of a galaxy map, in any order they choose.

The game is divided into three kinds of scenes – combat, cutscene and dialogue. Equal time is given to each, moving the story forward at a brisk pace. The cutscenes play out in the manner of an animated graphic novel, in a cartoony style quite different from the main game’s more realistic and cinematic aesthetics. The scenes are fully voiced and accompanied by the recognisable original soundtrack of the series, unlike the dialogue sections, which are usually just voiced in the first line and then silent for the rest of the conversation. For most of the conversations players have a choice of responses, in the usual array of Renegade, Paragon and neutral tones. However there is no character progression, as such. Moreover, while the series has been known to offer players different paths and outcomes branching from the dialogue trees, here the variation is much less. At most it will mean the possibility of avoiding a fight.

Which brings us to the combat. The main game on the PC and XBox 360 provides a blend of third-person, tactical shooting action with a backend of RPG numbers, and the iPhone version resembles none of it. The view is from above looking down, and players control Taylor around the arena by tilting the device. The soldier shoots on his own accord, given an enemy to shoot at; a targeting reticule automatically attaches itself to enemies but can be overridden with a touch. In addition to the basic assault rifle attack players can make use of three special abilities: the biotic talent Overload which disables enemy shields, a rocket launcher, and another biotic talent called Stasis, which freezes enemies. These abilities take time to recharge and so must be used wisely in battle.

Fighting enemies is hence distilled to a gimmicky minigame mechanic with little extra to provide any tactical depth. Combat boils down to just the cumbersome occupation of moving the avatar around dodging bullets, with only the occasional correction of the targeting. Galaxy suffers from quite a bit of slowdown during more heated battles, which a patch was meant to improve but doesn’t quite.

The disappointment that is the combat pulls the rest of the game down into mediocrity. For fans hoping that at least the story is engaging so that the title can justify a purchase, the story underwhelms too. It is a self-contained adventure that has pacing and a climax, but doesn’t offer anything particularly new to the franchise. The plot feels inconsequential to the bigger picture – though how exactly it ties into ME2′s story is not known – and the characters don’t have lasting power that would have us especially wanting to see more of them. The voice acting is above par, and the slickness of the cutscenes illustrates the high production values, but that’s all that will attract fans of the series.

So the end result is a game that does not impress, and doesn’t give much relief to the agony of the wait for the big sequel. Die hard fans may find something in the expanding canon, and perhaps in the promised ME2 reward that Galaxy unlocks, but others will just find a wiki summary to suffice.

British developers Rocksteady dropped demos for the game last week, and rather than crumble under the excitement, we dedicated the entire Slowdown team to combing through the demo, three-man Bat-style, giving it a hard long look in anticipation of the forthcoming September release of the PC version. In fact, this may very well be the most ridiculously in-depth look at the demo you’ll happen to chance upon. Should you find a more thorough article, though, let us know in the comments section… and we’ll retract this boisterous claim. Consider yourselves warned!

There is a simple reason for Arkham Asylum being awaited with such bated breath, we all agreed: Batman simply does not have a great track record in the video game medium, to say the least, with a fat share of unbalanced justice awarded to our favourite caped crusader. Bein’ a gamin’ Batman fan is what it is, but that has yet to prevent everybody from seeing the obvious potential in doing a Batman game right. In a “Making the Game” video, game director Sefton Hill implies that Rocksteady, too, get this:

The world wants a great Batman game. … He’s such a cultural icon; he deserves a game to match.

As far as previous attempts go, though, it turns out Nabeel’s favourite is the SNES version of The Adventures of Batman & Robin, Konami’s beat ‘em up based on the animated series. I personally have a soft spot for the first NES Batman: what it may have lacked in authenticity and faithfulness, it made up with sharp controls, Batman’s abilities and weaponry. Even in this early work, the developers understood how important it was for players to feel like they were controlling the Avenger of the Night. Lastly, the Sega CD version of Batman Returns, though a masterful technical feat by John O’Brien, is unfortunately a very difficult and sometimes grating experience.

That’s about it. Richard would be quick to mention the PC Engine Batman, but while the game is good, it’s far more Pac than Bat. In any case, Nabeel points out that Batman: Arkham Asylum does in fact share a few things in common with the aforementioned Batman & Robin game: Voice actors from the animated series, and… holy Batgame, it might be good, too! The actual demo under review, though, is very short, with only three successive combat areas containing less than 20 enemies overall, a cut-back combat move set, no boss battles… hardly representative of the full game.

As the demo begins – after a barrage of company logos (that you can turn completely off, thanks to the adaptable engine) – we are treated to a shortened intro to the game, wherein The Rock has come ba… Batman brings the Joker back to Arkham Asylum. As well all knew to expect, the two are barely through the massive security doors of the high-security facility when the clown prince of Gotham already breaks free.

After the theatricals, players gain control of the man, who has to face a series of thugs released from their cages. The major theme of the game is instantaneously revealed, that Batman is not the hunter, but the hunted; that he is not free, but contained, and instead of taking the lead, he is forced to react and respond to the whims of the Joker.

The sequencing of the demo mimics the full game: Players face action interspersed with talk and exploration, a sample of the three hats Bats is to wear: brawler, detective and predator. The smooth transitioning between each style allows you to theoretically approach dangerous situations as you please, though in practice, some of the apparent freedom is clever masking: Batman being so vulnerable to armed groups beautifully disguises the otherwise clear-cut differences in-between hand-to-hand brawling and the “predatory” gameplay. Other games tend to solve this very real dilemma of motivating stealth-based play by infuriatingly stripping off the players’ weaponry, often more or less arbitrarily.

In any case, the game most decidedly encourages players to vary their approach to dismantling baddies: Where facing a handful of unarmed thugs resembles a sparring session, armed groups in larger numbers become harder – if not altogether impossible – to beat with brute force. This is where the detective mode comes in play; with the press of a single key, a neat locational scanner allows you to see and analyse threats in the area, and discover vantage points that you can use for hiding and planning your attack. Pouncing from gargoyle to gargoyle is very satisfying indeed!

In closer combat, each move by the hero blends beautifully into the next, and successful strings of attacks chain combo points that award you with more experience points. The game has an extensive array of various martial arts -based moves: Punches, kicks, chokes and takedowns. While much of the game’s close combat is raw and visceral, we found Batman’s silent rear chokes to be on the softer side, perhaps a manifestation of Rocksteady’s commitment to maintaining the character’s heart?

Nabeel: I was worried that the elaborate fighting animations would interfere with the experience, making it more about flash and less about reaction and feedback, but the developers have managed to strike a balance. While I am not always sure what particular animation is going to play when I hit the attack button, I feel like I am in control.

The combat is built on three actions: Attack, stun, counter. Both Nabeel and I were very pleased with the mere existence of the counter-attack: In Nabeel’s vision of the Batman character, he is more of an anticipatory and calculating fighter. Personally, I still get flashbacks of the fistic acrobatics of the original series… Zap! Boom! Bang! Just before an enemy strike, then, a spider-sense -like alert appears above the attacker’s heads, giving players time to respond to the attacks. Increasing the difficulty level will remove the tattletale warning for players with actual reflexes.

Nabeel: I’m pleased with the controls, one of my initial concerns. Rocksteady have provided a smart control scheme playable with either the mouse and keyboard or on a gamepad. The XBox 360 controller, for instance, is instantly recognised by the game and the on-screen button prompts change the moment you start doing something on either.

We did ask Rocksteady whether they planned on supporting other gamepads, but so far, we’ve yet to receive an answer. Nabeel continues on the topic of the controls:

Having run through the game using each controller set exclusively, I prefer the mouse and keyboard simply for their precision. On the gamepad, while the camera is mostly automated and unintrusive, it’s also a little slow when handled by the right analog stick.

While the controls are fluid and functional, “smart” is not the first word that springs to mind; in fact, a scheme that forcibly combines the same button for running and jumping is closer to “crazy” to me. The game does also lack the very necessary ability to define controls in-game, and even fails to remember its configuration settings (such as turning vibration and subtitles on/off), or retaining discovered character bios and trophies, which function as the reward for the more scrupulous explorers. There are plenty of vents, nooks and crannies to uncover, after all.

Despite these demo-related gripes, there is considerable depth to the control set: To counter an incoming enemy attack you must hit the right mouse button, holding the same button down an aiming reticule appears for the batarang. Furthermore, if you left-click while aiming, you will throw the batarang as expected; however, if you middle-click on the mouse-wheel (which normally executes a stunning blow) the camera will follow the weapon in its flight.

Nabeel: The aforementioned feature is hardly useful, but nice to watch as you snipe enemies from further afar.

Nabeel: Another concern I had when images were first released was about the general look of the game. Sporting the Unreal 3 engine, the game has the sheen and saturated colour scheme typical of this generation’s actioners. Moreover the characters are incredibly bulky and slightly stiff in animation, and their gritty makeoever feels odd matched with the voice talent from the animated series. In-game though, the art direction holds together quite well and makes more sense in motion.

The entire gallery of rogues has been given an aesthetic overhaul, and though the character designs are bound to draw more fire after the game is released, at the end of the day, it’s only natural to borrow vigorously from the grotesquely exaggerative tradition of the American superhero comic book. The interiors of Arkham Asylum, then, are appropriately dark and moody, with intricate detail sprinkled about. With the few areas revealed so far, we’ve already seen people draw parallels to the art deco -influenced architecture and mise-en-scène of BioShock.

Richard, though, was very sceptic of that particular comparison, noting that where BioShock’s aesthetic consisted of aims and ideals, Arkham’s seems to be more about adapting the past as a vehicle. Early hype promised a concoction of BioShock, Metroid Prime and Zelda; whether these, or the newer BioShock/Riddick parallels thrown about have anything concrete to them remains to be seen. My gut feeling is that both 2K Boston and Rocksteady were willing to sacrifice certain gameplay-related features in order to achieve a thicker narrative ambience.

One more comparison, a combat-related parallel drawn to Assassin’s Creed, drew the ire of the Assassin’s Creed II Combat Team Lead, Charles Randall:

[The demo], on the other hand, has a ridiculously simple system that’s going to get pretty stale pretty fast, and doesn’t even have close to the complexity of AC (which, BTW, pales in comparison to what AC2 has).

Last things last: As mentioned in our earlier post, the PC version of the game was unfortunately delayed so that Rocksteady could better implement PhysX. While the demo does contain these enhancements, Nabeel felt the touch-ups to the environments did not quite justify stalling the launch. Just to be certain; for maximum effects, you will need GeForce 260-level card (or an entirely PhysX-dedicated 9800), otherwise the game performance takes a large hit.

Added details include fog, papers strewn across the floor and banners across the ceiling that react in believable, cloth-like fashion, with more breakable elements in the environment like pillars and floor tiles. It helps to provide a feeling of feedback as you interact with the world; With the functionality turned off, the world remains considerably more static and untarnishable.

Arkham Asylum will be released for the PC on September 15th. The demo version is available now, and though much has already been said, here and elsewhere, many things nevertheless remain both unseen and undiscussed. With highly scored reviews already trickling in for the console versions, and with Eidos seemingly once again shocking the game media with questionable press tactics, Batman: Arkham Asylum is bound to be one of the most controversial titles this year.

Both parts will also touch upon topics beyond the make-up of a “review”; whether we should chalk them up to “analysis” or “discussion” remains open for interpretation. Should you agree or disagree, let us know what you think in the comment section! Finally, if you are yet to familiarize yourself with this ongoing series of adventures, I do hope you should come back to check out part 1/2. The easiest way to find out when is to either subscribe to our Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/slowdownvg) or to our RSS feed (http://www.slowdown.vg/feed/)!

In its most oft-applied format, the first paragraph to reviews of indie adventure games often touches upon resolution and pixel art, with glancing references to “retro”, “VGA” or “MIDI”, coined with comparisons including but not limited to Monkey Island. In this particular register, turns of phrases like “go back in time”, “a return to the age of” or “the good old days” are prevalent if not altogether ubiquitous. In closing, then, we should agree that the game under review is worth its moderate price tag and a generous three stars.

Instead of utilizing the aforementioned paradigm – building parallels, making comparisons and bridging together references – I would rather focus, this time, on facets that separate, on features that differentiate. While I do admit that each game bears traces of its influences (this particular game’s designer is pleasantly forthcoming about his), with the Blackwell series, nevertheless, the one distinguishable element I want to pay closer attention to is its fervent, methodical application and utilization of real-world puzzles and conversations, characters and locations. It is these factors that ultimately push the game over the biggest hurdle in today’s adventure gaming, that is, an overbearing reliance on the fantastic and the historical. The Blackwell series, despite its paranormal leanings, operates within a convincing blend of fact and fiction.

Before we delve deeper in, however, let us briefly go back to the core fundamentals. The Blackwell Convergence, third of a series, is a commercial point-and-click indie adventure game, built upon Chris Jones’ popular Adventure Game Studio engine. The game, written and programmed by Dave Gilbert (also of The Shivah fame), discusses the women of a family beleaguered by their innate, involuntary ability to create a link to the spirit world.

In each of the three last generations of the Blackwell family, a woman has discovered her capacity to function as a medium at some point in her life, each to varying degrees of success. All have also been forcibly bonded to the very same spirit guide, Joey Mallone, because there exists a seemingly unbreakable link in-between the medium and her guide that prevents one from leaving the immediate company of the other.

Over the span of some six months, the leading lady of the first game, Rosangela Blackwell, has grown slightly more accustomed to her new role as medium, perhaps simply because she has little choice in the matter: Not only is Mallone not going anywhere, but such pairings are the only ones able to help spirits trade their physical trappings for the eternal, spirits that are left behind when violently ripped from the wheel of life, creating a regressed dependence to the time and place of their death and a strong denial of their non-existence.

For those who felt the earlier parts of the series were justly critiqued for their “commonplace” premise and “formulaic” nature, then, Convergence may seem to offer little new at first fright: Once again, the game introduces to us a new class of souls in peril. The major revelation found within, however, is very closely related to this seeming repetition, as I discovered a substantial upgrade to Gilbert’s treatment of the dichotomy of the old and the new, junior and senior: Where Legacy and Unbound relied strongly on temporal and generative themes and concepts, Convergence is much less reliant on these. I hope to clarify this further in part 1/2.

The end result, in any case, is a fleshier canvas of character interaction – best exhibited within the bounds of an art gallery – and a new-found willingness to engage on Rosa’s part. Though not obvious at first, it would seem to me that these little adjustments are very significant in the context of the overarching storyline. While the changes cannot exactly be called subtle, they nevertheless begin to bridge together the various generations found within in the game, simultaneously allowing the characters to become more fully rounded. This comes after the fact that the writer himself found Rosa perhaps too “scared and nervous” in the first instalment.

Several examples of the aforementioned character development can be named: At the opening of the art gallery mentioned above, the player can choose between partying late (and hard!) or leaving early. This choice results in Rosangela receiving two very different sets of reactions from the rest of the cast. Similarly, the delightfully odd Nishanti Sharma, Rosa’s neighbour, is no longer as unperturbedly insistent on mothering Rosangela, as the two have come considerably closer to resembling peers. The same can be said of Joey; although he still has his pockets full of snide remarks and a domineering turn of phrase, after six months of working with Rosa, he too sees her as more of a partner than an apprentice.

To say something of the tangibles, Convergence is the most polished Blackwell so far: Shane Stevens’ redrawn character art and animations are true to existing source material, and leave me expectant and hopeful for future “deluxe” editions of the earlier games. Herculean Effort’s Ian Schlaepfer continues to contribute evocative, colourful portraiture, something that was sorely missing in Legacy, and the backgrounds were successfully sourced to Luminous Arts. A notable feature to the game is the constant presence of rain.

Thomas Regin is back at the musical helm, continuing largely on the stylistic path set by the first game. The production values for the music, too, have increased along with the rest of the game’s façade: The lounge-y, jazzy soundtrack is lusher, thicker, a more fully realized affair.

Of note to players already familiar with the series is the fact that the game’s notes system has been truncated somewhat. Left out is the possibility of combining clues in order to deduce solutions to problems. This is slightly unfortunate, as this particular omission does make the game considerably easier. Similarly, because Convergence’s gameplay is tremendously polished overall, the combination of the two-button use/look interface and the now-streamlined note system in turn reflect negatively on the overall length of the game.

As far as the voice acting goes, Rebecca Whittaker, the replacement voice for Sande Chen’s Rosa, is sassier and perkier; subtle enough, in any case, to be well-enough suited to the ongoing character development illustrated above. Abe Goldfarb (Gilbert’s made man), then, has irreplaceably become Joey Mallone. Nonie Craige‘s Nishanti is also more to my personal preference than the first game’s by Ruth Weber, but all in all, since the voice cast is professional through and through, perhaps it was simply an easier task for Whittaker to convey a more socially apt Rosa? An interesting detail is how players can constantly consult Joey for information and new ideas during the game. He is hardly ever short of new, fully contextual lines of dialogue to respond with, and indeed many a line of dialogue have been written and recorded for this feature alone.

Now, to finally get back to my original premise of differentiation: While the game, plot-wise, does little to somehow miraculously separate itself from its primary genre of paranormal detective fiction, in fact moving closer still to that particular mode of writing, what is ultimately more important, overall, is the quality of the actual storyline: Detective fiction requires meticulous pacing, planning and execution, and at that, Convergence succeeds. In fact, we’ve only really begun to understand the depth and extent of the narrative, with the game taking one step forward by essentially taking another backwards.

We can either lambast the game for the tangibility of its storyline or its puzzles for being too obvious or “commonplace”, or we could simply accept that these very same factors greatly add to the overall verisimilitude and ambience of the gameplay. For instance, some of the more chore-like actions, like having to log on to Rosa’s e-mail (or “B-Mail” as it is called in jest) account or “Oogling” for information does, in a very understated way, involve us in the character’s everyday life.

This type of everyday-based experience is also visible on the general characterization and serves, in my mind, to remove some of the more contrived video game oppositions from the game. Unlike most games, in which the spirit world of ghosts and altered states are often simply blatant symbols and vessels for conveying “enemy” or “danger”, in Blackwell, the spirits are ambivalent and often represent failure – in life, or death, or both.

The significance of this cannot be understated, as it means the series contains few clear-cut antagonists – or protagonists, for that matter. The spirit world is, instead of generating dissidence or schism, utilized in blending together the game’s fact and fiction. Gilbert’s incorporation of some very real characters and situations creates a clever literary mix that borders on alternative history, gently twisting and squeezing reality to produce necessary results.

Such utilization of real-world characters also gives the game a dangerous edge not altogether apparent at first glance. Gilbert, in his commentary for the game, explains how he felt especially uneasy about a scene that incorporates several real (though now deceased) persons. The potency of this particular scene is further doubled when Gilbert himself voices one of the characters in the scene. It is at this very moment in the game that we begin to lose our grasp of the voices present: Who, exactly, is speaking? What’s being said?

This is intriguing in relation to the series’ primary motif of Jungian interconnectedness and synchronicity – especially so with Convergence, which proceeds to take one step further towards opening the mechanisms of the spirit world to the player.

In an earlier post, I expressed some concern over the comedic Blackwell video shorts being potentially damaging to the characters. This fear turned out to be unfounded insofar it relates to the actual game. It must be said, however, that Convergence, like its two predecessors, nevertheless fluctuates between two modes of dialogue: biting irony and sarcasm on the one hand and sentimentality on the other. This does ultimately result in the characters becoming slightly less relatable at times, as if the game was part Cosmopolis, part White Noise – and unable to choose. While I’m going to discuss these sitcom-like qualities in the forthcoming “first” part in further detail, to those with experience of the New York lifestyle and US television programming, this register may already be perfectly familiar.

So many words, so few conclusions. In this article, I’ve attempted to illustrate that Gilbert’s “Blackwell” is an ambitious, literary series with intricate, reality-based narrative design, fully rounded characterization, books for sources and inspiration, and New York City for a heart.

Have you played anything like that in a while?

The Blackwell Convergence is available now, for the price of $14.99, from Wadjet Eye Games and Direct2Drive, and over the course of the next weeks, at Big Fish, PlayFirst, and iWin. A demo version of the game is also available on the Wadjet Eye Games website.