Gaming
Simon Munk
It begins so gently. Initially, Prune is a slow-paced and simple puzzle game – you stroke the screen to start growing a tree, then encourage it to bloom by pruning away errant branches with finger-swipes. It's simple, but beautiful and calming. That doesn't last, though.Wordlessly, the game gradually ups the tension. The trees you're growing are so delicate, so beautiful. And the world you're growing them in is so inhospitable. The only puzzle is how to encourage your tree upwards towards the light, where it can flower sufficiently to pass the level.As the levels pass by, however, soon you're Read more ...
Helen K Parker
Congratulations, Krams. After three long years of chapter by chapter instalments, the epic fairytale is complete. Fans who have been following the wanderings of the heavily sedated Anna and her companions since 2012 can now see the whole story in context, and new players can see an end in sight, which is helpful because playing through the first chapter is akin to pulling teeth.Poor little Anna seems to be surrounded by adults with a Fritzel complex. Grandpa wants to keep her locked in their farm away from the dangerous outside world, and the evil witch Winfriede wants to keep her locked in a Read more ...
Simon Munk
If the interface is simple, the story it gradually reveals is anything but. Her Story is an absolutely stunning piece of interactive storytelling, taking in murder, identity, history, yet driven simply by you typing a word or two into a search bar. You're presented with a beautifully rendered and retro computer screen – the kind of thing you'd expect to see coppers in The Bill tapping into. You simply decide what "search term(s)" you want, then hit go, and in return you get videos.When the game starts, the search term is "murder" and you have access to the first five videos returned, of many Read more ...
Simon Munk
A throat-slitting, daredevil samurai in a motorbike helmet out for bloody vengeance against their enemies, flying through the air. Sounds like an action game, looks like an action game, plays like a puzzler.Ronin steals liberally from the side-scrolling brilliance of Gunpoint. Similarly to that game, the ninja/samurai/motorbiker hero here must break into semi-lit buildings – jumping through windows, stealing keys to get in through locked doors and always slashing through groups of enemy guards to get to the bosses the samurai is out to bring down.Like Gunpoint, the hero here can jump in Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
At first glance, Desktop Dungeons is a slick update on the classic "roguelike" dungeon adventure. You move your hero around a maze of passages, carefully juggling your resources as you attempt to survive in a turn-based battle of tactics and wits.At second glance, Desktop Dungeons seems a bit rubbish. The enemies don’t attack you unless you attack them first and you restart each dungeon with a brand new character that you must laboriously level-up until it is strong enough to defeat the final boss.At about glance nine or ten you might get an inkling that this grind is actually the point of Read more ...
Simon Munk
You crouch atop a gothic skyscraper, barely distinguishable from the gargoyles you're surrounded by. A rainy sheen dimly reflects off your armour. Your cape flaps and cracks in the wind. You dive into the city… The Arkham game series has at least delivered a real chance to "be" Batman. But as each has gone on, and your moves list, your gadget bag, the city you roam and the things you can do has got larger and longer, the series has increasingly lost its way. Arkham Knight is simultaneously the worst and best of the series – perhaps a fitting finale, then.Starting with the good, swooping down Read more ...
Helen K Parker
KholatFancy a trip up the Ural mountains some time in deepest winter circa 1959? No? Me freaking neither, especially when nine bodies have been found variously mangled on the "dead mountain" of Kholat Syakhl, and your mission is to retrace the steps of the investigating team who found their corpses. With naught but a map, compass and torch to guide you, you are thrown alone into the thick of a Soviet winter in the woods, and expected to hunt down scattered pages of journals and long lost artefacts from both the victims and the investigators and piece together the truth of what really happened Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
I’ve been trying to imagine the elevator pitch for EightyEight Games’ fine new puzzler, You Must Build A Boat. The best, most succinct description I can come up with is: “imagine if Candy Crush was any good.”You Must Build A Boat is the sequel to 2012’s 10000000. In that game, a little pixelly dude ran across a dungeon corridor at the top of the screen, trying to retrieve treasures without being defeated by monsters. You helped him out by playing a match-3 sliding block puzzle at the bottom of the screen so he could beat the monsters, unlock chests and escape the dungeon by reaching the magic Read more ...
Helen K Parker
Welcome to Newton, 2087. In this dystopic cityscape of neon lights, seedy underbellies and scientific industry, the overwhelming influences of genetic engineering, CCTV, AI and techno-terrorists are running rampant over the lives of its troubled inhabitants. The only means of escape is in the Trance, a digital world of obsolete physics, where any computer programme can be made manifest and interacted with on a human level. It’s now the norm to have wetware implanted in your brain so that you can phase in and out of Trance whenever you like.And it’s within this matrix that the first of our Read more ...
Simon Munk
1972, a South American revolution, seen through the eyes of a cleaner. Sunset neatly side-steps the usual banana republic videogame clichés by shifting focus. You are neither the Generalissimo lording it over a strategy game, nor the first-person soldier running through the jungles. You're a cleaner.Of course, you're not just any cleaner. You're a US engineering graduate who has, in seeking a better life, ended up working a menial job in the fictional Anchuria, for a rich man with links, it emerges, to the current dictator – General Miraflores. And a dictator facing an increasingly forceful Read more ...
Simon Munk
In short, Game Of Thrones the videogame. The Witcher 3 sees this epic role-playing fantasy series truly rival its key competitor, the Elder Scrolls series. The Witcher 3 particularly scores on delivering a huge, credible and complex world with incredible granularity – it's real go anywhere, do loads of things stuff.The game sees Geralt of Rivia, the series' hero, out to hunt down a younger Witcher who is being chased across the kingdom by a mysterious bunch of rather nasty-looking ghosts called the "Wild Hunt". The Witchers are monster-hunters who'll rid a town of infestations such as ghosts Read more ...
Simon Munk
Shiny cars, going fast. In real life, obsessing over gravel-crunching oversteer or the downforce your rear spoiler exerts is one for Jeremy Clarkson fans or pimply youths in suburban retail car parks, late at night. But there's something about the mix of sheer muscularity and precision strategy that appeals when racing is on TV or in videogame form. It's a spectacle, meant partly in the situationist sense.Project CARS doesn't start out spectacularly, though. Perhaps because it's come not funded by a big publisher, but as a crowd-funded developer project, Project CARS comes in with a menu and Read more ...