Betrayer
by LepcisMagna

Betrayer is an interesting game.  The environment is almost entirely black and white, while enemies and items you can interact with are in red.  This aesthetic lends a unique air to the game, but I think it works.  As for the plot, you are shipwrecked on a foreign shore sometime in the 1700s and discover that everyone in the fort you come across is dead, with hints of Indian magicks at play.  An hour isn’t enough time to really get into this game, but if it keeps the same mood going, I can definitely see myself playing this to the end.

Betrayer seems to strike just the right balance of suspense, mystery, and discovery.  From what I read on Steam, it sounds like it drags on a bit as you continue to play.  But for now, Tier One.

Steam link

BeamNG.drive
by LepcisMagna

I don’t understand why I didn’t buy this sooner.  Welcome to “Movie Car Crash: The Game”.  Have you ever wished that crashing cars in racing games was more realistic?  How about “so realistic it will overheat your computer”?  Well, that’s precisely what BeamNG.drive is.  Every surface and component of your car is modeled and deformed.  This turns the game into a Garry’s Mod of car destruction.  And I love it.

Really my only complaint is from the first time I opened up the game.  It greeted me in glorious…. 624×441?  I changed it to 1080p fairly quickly, but was then asked if I wanted to run at 39, 48, or 59 hertz.

As a person who watched action movies as a child solely for the explosions and car crashes, this is possibly the most fun I’ve had in 20 minutes in quite some time.  In fact, I’m going to cut this impression short to go play around with this some more.  ….Wait.  There’s mods?  Well…there goes my next week.

Steam link

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light
by Chezni

 

Ye olde Guardians of Light? She better keep her robes on.

 

Lately it’s been hard to drag myself away from watching an infinite number of Netrunner games on Jinteki.net and play the next game on my list, Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light. Partially this is because I’m developing an unhealthy obsession with Netrunner and partially because beyond the initial “legacy” Lara Croft games, I have trusted mainstream game developers with the Lara Croft franchise so little that I’ve never even bothered to play any of the new games. Plugging in LCGoL and giving it a play gave me a surprise… but not necessarily for the reason you might think. I give you…

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Ghost of a Tale
by LepcisMagna

This impression may be rather biased.  This game is basically Redwall in video game form, and Redwall was one of my favorite books growing up.  You play as a mouse bard that was jailed under an oppressive rat regime.  At least in the first hour, you’re trying to find your wife and figure out what happened to you.

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Everything
by LepcisMagna

Everything is an unusual game.  It’s also a game that is far too easy to make jokes about – so much so that even the initial loading screen does it: “Everything is loaded.”  After you pass the loading screen, you are dropped into the mind of an animal on a rocky planet.  And, true to the name of the game, you eventually find yourself hopping from animal to animal, letting you play as everything.  Soon, I controlled a fleet of animals and we galloped across the plain:

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A Normal Lost Phone
by LepcisMagna

This game is a lot like Gone Home.  So much so that if you have played Gone Home, that’s all you really need to know to decide if you like this game.  The differences are primarily in format – Gone Home had you walking through your childhood home, while A Normal Lost Phone has you, as you may have guessed, looking through a phone you found.  To actually beat the game, you need to be a bit more invasive than a normal person might be – and it requires guessing the owner’s passwords.  It’s not a bad experience, but Gone Home is a little better executed since you are placed in the position of a relative, so it feels less invasive than just browsing a stranger’s phone.  Tier Two.

Steam link

ABZÛ
by LepcisMagna

Brought to you by the Summer 2017 Steam Sale and bad impulse control.

I am of two minds about ABZÛ.  On the one hand, it’s a quiet, contemplative, and very pretty game.  Extremely pretty.  I mean, look at that.  There will be a heavy sprinkling of screenshots just because this game is so pretty.  It’s clearly intended as a meditative game…perhaps suggested by the various meditation spots throughout the game.  You play as a creature of some description that is as at home in the water as in the air.  The whole game is perfectly backed by chorals and strings, and is generously sprinkled with hints of a long-forgotten civilization’s ruins and Babylonian creation myth.  Honestly, all that on paper makes up what would seem to be a game I would love.

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Voyageur
by LepcisMagna

Mobile Gaming

Typically, I stay away from mobile games.  It’s hard enough to get people to pay 99¢ for a game on mobile, so either development costs have to be irrationally low or the developers have to monetize the app through micro-transactions and/or ads.  The control scheme is necessarily limited, since your only easy input is touch – which means all controls need to be accessible all the time.  Worse, the average time in a mobile game play session is measured in minutes (if not seconds) rather than hours, so complex mechanics also get thrown out.  The cherry on top of this particular sundae is the remarkably terrible interface associated with the iOS app store which makes it nearly impossible to find good games.  These factors have lead to what I consider to be an extremely hostile environment: a responsible developer won’t be able to recover their development costs (unless they get very lucky or also have a port on PC/Mac/Playbox DS 3½), and an irresponsible one will often lead consumers to spend tens, hundreds, and even thousands of dollars on their “free” app.

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