Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I had a jolly good time with Crysis, mostly just watching things fall over and cooing with delight, but if I could have changed one thing about it I would have made it less about wearing a nanosuit and punching people through buildings and more about being STALKER. Nothing against Crysis, it’s just my way of looking at things. In my least impressive moments I’ll rabidly argue that Peggle should be more like STALKER. Turns out I’m not alone, on the Crysis front at least, as a group of Russian modders by the name OWL Game Studio have been working on a Zone-based anomaly-ridden bleakness of an experience called CryZone: Sector 23. The stabilisers are coming off and it’s going to be a standalone game.

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One day there will be a tag, ‘indie games that Adam honestly intends to play for hours and hours but hasn’t had a chance to yet’. It’d cover all the hundreds of exciting projects people write to me about, or that I discover on my many nocturnal voyages around the internet, but never quite find the time to become properly acquainted with. I’ve played Warbarons, a browser-based strategy game inspired by Warlords, but I’ve certainly not explored Warbarons. Maybe it’d be easier if I didn’t insist on enjoying this sort of thing and plumped for games that have a more obvious and concrete narrative route instead. Maybe now and then, but here’s to all the stories that are mine and mine alone. Warbarons might provide a few.

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I spent most of last night and this morning punching things so hard that their skin had no option but to fall off. Most of the time I don’t actually want to play the murderous hero though, even when that hero is a monk who thinks the path to holiness is a fist-inflicted form of trepanning. Sure, that guy’s got chutzpah, but I’d rather be watching him go about his business, perhaps tactically teasing the best out of him instead of steering him around in a more hands-on fashion. If you like the idea of visiting Tristram but don’t have an internet permanently plugged into your face, or simply don’t care for Diablo III, it’d be a fine idea to play Towns instead.

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Since we last caught up with it, the extraordinary-looking (and sounding) Fract OSC has released a bundle of new screenshots, and they’re a bit pretty. Described as Myst meets Rez meets Tron, a first-person puzzle adventure in an abstract world, designed around electronic music. The game, they say, is inspired by synthesisers, in a world that “literally runs on sound”. Previous footage has been remarkably interesting, but arguably not that pretty. However, that’s beginning to change, thanks to some new atmospheric art, and some extremely effective lighting. Take a look.

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Oh thank goodness – I was just getting all cross about something entirely unrelated to games, and then games made everything better! There’s a team made up of developers formerly of Irrational, Harmonix, and Iron Lore, wonderfully called Eerie Canal Entertainment. And they’re making a game about monsters who travel through history to kill people. Where you play as the monsters. It’s called Dreadline, and it’s PC only. I want it. There’s a teaser and more details about it below.

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My Age of Decadence was my early twenties. I travelled slowly down the Mekong river longing for the horizon, drank copious amounts of bourbon in all-night jazz bars and dusty, dilapidated dives, all the while studying the world through an eyeglass of glamour and sleaze. Perhaps not coincidentally I also spent a lot of time in Manchester cafes reading Graham Greene and Paul Theroux. The game Age of Decadence aims to provide players with freedom of choice although I doubt it’s possible to recreate my own youthful exuberance. The trailer below draws attention to a host of other features that can best be described as ‘old-school’, words which I can write but should never say aloud.

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Reversion is a freeware adventure game set in a collapsing Buenos Aires, with civil war and other excitement going on in the background. I know that all sorts of exciting things have happened in the recent past because a doctor told me. He had to tell me because I’ve woken up in a hospital bed with a severe case of amnesia. Whenever I find myself in control of an amnesiac I smash the emergency glass that covers my Hat Of Exposition Deflection immediately. That once robust garment is now in tatters and every time I breathe, I regurgitate a fragment of the couple of decades’ worth of fictional Argentinian future-history that’s been inflicted on me.

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That was unexpected. I saw a link over at IndieGamesMagazine and half an hour later I sit here barefooted, the socks charmed off me by the demo version of Lilly Looking Through which is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever pointed at and clicked on. There’s a short trailer below in which you’ll be able to see that the heroine might just be one of the most delightfully and attentively animated characters to ever grace a game. It’s more Amanita than Lucasarts, with hotspots to click and activate rather than the freedom of the environment, although the short demo ends with a magnificent introduction to a wider world.

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With Lovecraftian tactics having recently ported from iOS to PC, it’d be great to see more games following the same path. There are plenty of interesting developments in the touchy world of portable gamesquares and one of the most interesting is Waking Mars, an exploration game in which the puzzles are based around manipulating and understanding the interactions between alien flora and fauna. It’s quite a special treat and developers Tiger Style, also responsible for the exquisite Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor, have announced today that they “are taking early steps to bring it [Waking Mars] to PC/Mac/Linux later this year”. Splendid news.

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Words & Physics is so close to being a brilliant game. The concept is amazing: each screen features the challenge of getting rid of the words “REMOVE ME”, and you do this by deleting and typing new words into the level. As the title suggests, physics comes into play, meaning you can type letters that push the REMOVE ME block over an edge, or delete words making up supporting platforms so things fall. And then it gets even more interesting, with certain words behaving according to their meaning – in one level typing in “WATER” causes the word that space takes up to be occupied by water. In another, “FIRE” sets things alight. The possibilities seem incredible!

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