Hi everyone!
It’s been ages since I wrote here, but I’m not dead… My time during Christmas break is usually terribly busy, and afterwards work hit again like a brick wall (was hoping the mad rhythm from last months was gone, but I was wrong).
Anyway, I’ve been doing some things related to Grey and my Indie Speed Run unfinished entry, but you can read about it on Spellcaster Studios’ website…
Here, I want to talk about the games I’ve been trying out lately… Besides the usual Christmas binge on new Triple-A games (Assassin’s Creed III was pretty good, with some flaws, but still a lot of fun… The naval battles rock), I’ve been working through my Steam collection, looking at games I haven’t really tried. Here’s my impressions on some:
“The Binding of Isaac” is a procedural Zelda-like game… That said, I should have liked it, but to be completely honest… I didn’t… The controls were cumbersome for my taste, and there was too little storyline to keep me entertained; this is the problem with most rogue-likes out there (not only indie, but also Triple-A, like Diablo 3); I‘m not the type of person that walks around doing the same thing over and over again without anything to drive me forward (usually story)… Exception to this is probably “World of Warcraft”, where I raid over and over again, but there we have the social component as well.
Anyway, “The Binding of Isaac” is a well made game, with a very cool aesthetics (both visual and thematic), so if you enjoy roguelikes, give it a whirl!
“Closure” is a puzzle platformer whose main mechanic is easy to understand if you see it, but kind of hard to put into words… Basically only things in range of light have any physical substance (or are visible at all)… That means that if you see a wall in front of you (using a source of light), you’ll collide with it, but if you don’t have a light shinning on it, you’ll just pass through it.
This mechanic works making very nasty puzzles that remind me of “Portal”: puzzles that look very hard, but when you finally overcome them, you think: “Damn, this was so obvious!”… So, the game gives you a pretty good sense of accomplishment and I had tons of fun playing this one… the music gets on the nerves eventually, specially when you’re swimming around (music plays at a slower rate, which means it becomes just very very vey annoying, albeit atmospheric).
I didn’t spend much time on this one, to be honest, too little story going around… But the execution is top notch, has a good tutorial (which does a good job of converting an immense amount of instruction into something more manageable) and the overall feel is fun enough, if you’re into this sort of thing…
I’d like someone to make a Tower Defense game where you’d feel more “story" on it, but I’m guessing it’s kind of hard.
One of my complains about most of the strategy indie games is that how heavy they are from the start. Although this one has a good tutorial, after 2 or 3 levels I’d already have too much to do… so, I didn’t have enough time to absorb the previous concepts and I would be already buried in new ones…
On that front, Blizzard games are the best… They introduce everything slowly enough in their games so that me, as a player, never feel overwhelmed by new concepts and ideas. Of course, what I’m complaining about here is the inverse that most people complain (“tutorial was dragging on for ages”), but I think there’s a balance in between.
For me, when choosing a new game to play, I don’t want to spend much time mastering some ground rules… I just want to get into the action/story as fast as possible and spend one hour in the game without feeling overwhelmed, trying to figure out if I actually think I’m going to have fun in the game if I commit enough time to it…
Ok, this post is big enough already, more to follow!