my thoughts on 3 games, deliberately ignoring the stupid amount of hype or hate surrounding each on them on the blogosphere and twitterverse. despite never hearing much about this garbage on my own, I've always felt the need to reference the crowd opinion in order to get the Full Scope before I weigh in and it's all really dumb and boring!!! I'm exhausted -
Fez is a solid game. it picks the fairly appealing concept of a 2D world discovering a mythological 3rd dimension, and extensively develops it in a pretty fun way. it's effective, and actually kind of refreshing, to see how fez effortlessly extends this concept to these relic game interfaces (world map, inventory, title screen), taken as artifacts from the vintage period of gaming it's referencing. the game also sorta creates a certain logic that the player involuntarily adopts. I don't exactly find it earth-shattering though, and while the game does create some rather pretty environments and decent puzzles out of this cubescape, I feel it fizzles out before achieving anything really satisfying. I found it kind of bland when I finally decided to set it down, but looking back I still found it to be a pretty fun, reflective video game to play on your nintendo.
Amnesia: a Machine for Pigs is pretty good. when I played the first Amnesia I didn't know anything about the game and I wasn't a horror fan at all, but I ended up loving it. I found the game to be a gripping experience with a surprisingly effective milieu. this game, dev'd by the same crew as Dear Esther, is a lot different. for the most part it's not very scary, rather unsettling. the story is a lot stronger and more prominent. I've always been pretty invested the theme it follows so I was gonna enjoy it no matter what, but it could have been delivered much more effectively. probably the biggest failure of the game is how it's frequently interrupted by the PC's journal, which is a vital part of understanding the story, but really takes the player out of the game and hampers progress towards achieving the engrossing sort of environment that the first Amnesia so effortlessly established. replay would bring more clarity to the experience, only the lack of puzzles and unpredictable events makes the trek back through the machine tedious. I think it was an excellent idea to scrape away all of the relic video game mechanics and think about what's really necessary to convey this sort of experience though, and I think the result is still worthwhile.
Bear Stearns Bravo is pretty good, and playable
here. it faithfully recreates those old live action video adventures in a pretty entertaining and occasionally funny way. the game parodies the events leading up to the 2008 financial crisis in a dystopian alternate reality where everything is about market shares and mortgages and celebrity bankers with stock tickers attached to their heads. each of the (currently) two videos has a surprisingly large world locked away inside them, and it's pretty fun to dig around and find out what new things you can see just by choosing different options. for a video game, I really dig the characters and the experience of interacting with different people. I hope they expand it even further.