Gaming
Simon Munk
Which you is you? Where does your soul live? Who cares if a clone of you dies? For a fairly simple puzzle game, The Swapper asks some serious questions. And importantly, it asks them with subtlety, deftness and atmosphere – that enhances the excellent gameplay.Exploring a semi-ruined space station, your fragile astronaut finds a strange device that lets you create up to four clones of yourself. These clones will walk, grab, jump as you do, but you can place them far from you. More than that, you can swap your control, your consciousness, to them if you have direct line of sight. And that's Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
Sartre said that hell is other people but most gamers know that hell is actually a gloomily lit dungeon filled with central-casting undead moaners and decorated as if Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen had ordered a job lot of gibbets, spikes and miscellaneous human remains.Infernal business as usual then in Hellraid: The Escape. You are a lost soul, trapped in the torture pits of hell by an evil sorceror. What to do? The clue is in the title.Hellraid: The Escape is a spinoff from the upcoming PC & console title, Hellraid and the game is set in the same universe as its big brother. Whereas that game Read more ...
Simon Munk
The iconic monster is back in a far more successful way than Prometheus. The first-person, stealth game Alien: Isolation largely successfully returns us to the creeping horror and claustrophobic environments of the original film.Set after the events of Alien, Isolation sees Ripley's daughter chasing the black box recorder of the original spaceship, the Nostromo. On reaching the space station it's on, of course she finds the iconic "xenomorph", the "perfect organism, its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility", let loose among a terrified and splintered population.The Read more ...
Simon Munk
This sprawling post-apocalyptic role-playing game comes long after the original. Wasteland was a critical hit back in 1988. It was a fairly unique proposition then. But that was back in 1988 – which in videogames terms is about the dark ages.In the last 25 years, console manufacturers have risen and fallen, Windows has come into existence (and nearly out of again), and mobile phones have turned from bricks to smart. In the meantime, post-apocalyptic settings for games have become common, so have squad-based role-playing games, so, even, have games with "persistent worlds" (where, when you Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
You are a goat. You are an invincible goat. You are an invincible goat with a jetpack. You are an invincible goat with a jetpack and satanic powers. You are an invincible goat with a jetpack and satanic powers who can turn into a giraffe.Goat Simulator is a not a very serious game. Arguably, it's not any kind of game but rather a joke that got out of hand. What started as a gag put together during an informal, between-projects game jam within Coffestain Studios quickly gained a cult following after the developer released YouTube clips of an early version. The result is an intentionally Read more ...
Simon Munk
The blockbuster game to outblockbuster them all. Creating Destiny required a record-breaking budget of $500 million; it's made by the makers of the iconic Halo series; it fuses that series' first-person, space-opera shooter pedigree with World of Warcraft-style massively multi-player online gaming; and it sold $500 million on its launch day alone. In gaming terms, Destiny is huge – a massively slick and serious enterprise… with a hollow heart that would make Hollywood proud.Destiny is best viewed as a surface. It looks undeniably amazing – simultaneously organically complex, gritty and Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
Appointment with F.E.A.R. is the latest of Tin Man Games' adaptations of the classic Fighting Fantasy gamebook series for smartphones. During the 1980s heyday of choose-your-own-adventure gamebooks, the Fighting Fantasy books by Steve Jackson & Ian Livingstone were arguably the gold standard. A simple role-playing system that presented a multiple-choice story populated by adversaries you could 'fight' using dice rolls at critical points, gamebooks captured the imagination of a generation of kids before being largely obliterated by handheld video games. The series has seen a resurgence in Read more ...
Simon Munk
CounterSpy looks brilliant. This stealth-action adventure delivers a perfect Man From U.N.C.L.E. spy aesthetic in videogame form. And largely delivers on the premise in gameplay terms too.Two superpowers are locked in a pointless and potentially genocidal arms race. Enter C.O.U.N.T.E.R. – on the surface, this sneaky outside agency is there to disarm both sides and stop them from blowing up the moon. Yes, the moon.CounterSpy steals its aesthetics from 60s and 70s spy TV thrillers such as Man From U.N.C.L.E. and Bond films. The US side's levels are filled to bursting with hordes of dimwitted Read more ...
Simon Munk
Don't believe the cute visual style – Road Not Taken is a cold, dark and punishingly cruel puzzle game. It will challenge mentally and emotionally too.You, an unnamed ranger, walk out into the snowy forest each winter to rescue children lost while picking berries. For 15 years/levels you must return these shivering bundles to their parents or suffer their grief.In the forest you dodge creatures and pick up and throw objects – trees, boulders, children etc – in a grid. Initially, Road Not Taken feels like a fairly simple puzzle. In order to reach a parent, you might need to lob a log one way, Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
Geometric shapes move towards a coloured ball. You just have to move the ball and dodge the shapes. Easy. Were it not for one tiny detail, Duet might be almost too simple.Except.. there are two balls. The clue is in the title and the way you beat each level has as much to do with choreography as it does with lightning-fast twitch reactions.Your two balls, red and blue, are fixed on opposite sides of a thin ring and they move in concert. You rotate the ring clockwise or anti-clockwise by tapping and holding a finger on either side of the screen. In each level, white shapes move slowly towards Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
Wayward Souls is an action role-playing game in the mould of Nintendo (NES & SNES) classics like Secret of Mana and Legend of Zelda. It also manages to incorporate elements from that most voguish of retro formats, the roguelike. What this means is that you get a fast-moving action game that puts you in the role of a lone adventurer, battling his or her way through dungeons, mines, castles and all the other trad RPG locations in search of loot. There are six characters to choose from (three must be unlocked by clearing specific areas) and each has a unique load-out of weaponry and Read more ...
Simon Munk
Most first-person games immediately stick a gun in the bottom part of your screen. Developers seem to believe that the only exciting agency a player has in virtual worlds is to destroy them and kill the people populating them. A Story About My Uncle joins a small, but growing band of first-person games that ditch the shooting, for the better.Alongside such titles as Portal and Antichamber, A Story About My Uncle is led by puzzles, by grasping the world with a hand, or traversing through it, rather than shooting at it. Told as a bedtime story (like Princess Read more ...