In June me and five other friends set a challenge to ourselves to complete six games. We each put up a shortened hitlist from our backlog and then chose one game for each other and one for ourselves. It was a pretty good system as it cut down the agony of choice over 'what to play next', Here are my games and reviews pasted from our Google tracking doc.
The Longest Journey - PC
Old school adventure game with old school puzzles. The kind you can't figure out unless you look at a walkthrough. The overall story was good fun though, and April Ryan is, despite being an annoying girl, a pretty cool protagonist. Game shows its age now. Having played the Walking Dead, I feel the obtuseness of the puzzles got in the way of story flow. Walking Dead puzzles never got more complicated than 'use wrench on nut', which made the story flow and put character interaction and choice and consequence into the foreground, things I'm much more interested in. I'm not a big puzzle guy. Especially of the 'combine duck with pliers' variety. Enjoyed it though, and now I can finally play the sequel, which I'll move on to as soon as June is over.
7/10
Alan Wake - PC
I'm surprised that I gave this a 9 actually. Act 3 dragged on so long and at that stage it seemed as if the game had blown its load early and all I had to look forward to was forests, flashlights and grunting yokels throwing axes at my head for the next 6 or 7 hours. But, even though the basic ingredients remained the same throughout, the game really shines in terms of pacing, slickness, and above all, atmosphere and an amazing sense of place and world design. Definitely one of the most haunting and atmospheric games of its generation.
9/10
Mirror's Edge - PC
That was awesome and short! I really really liked this, but the main campaign was so slight it came off as a proof of concept rather than a fully fledged game. I dunno though, maybe the mechanics suit more time trial stuff, which I've yet to touch, and a longer campaign wouldn't have been able to support the minimalism of the design. I'm fine with the length really, but it does seem as if the full potential wasn't really explored. Story was also shit. What I want to know is, why aren't all first person games doing what this does with full body awareness and movement now? So well designed, beautiful to look at, very unique. Got annoyingly stuck at some points, as it wasn't always clear where to go - I preferred the skill aspect of navigation over the puzzle aspect as this ended up feeling frustrating. I am now hoping hard that Mirror's Edge 2 isn't an Xbone exclusive with Kinect controls. Going to keep this installed and do time trials now.
8/10
To The Moon - PC
Don't really know what to write here. Made me think and feel more than any game I can remember really. Play it.
9/10
Psychonauts - PC
There were points playing this when I felt like throwing my controller at the screen. Some absolutely horrible platforming combined with a checkpoint system seemingly designed by one of the game's insane inhabitants meant there were points where I was stuck on the same series of jumps for about half an hour, gritting my teeth and growling as I fell to the bottom of a long and tedious series of jumps because of one stupid fucking designed one near the top made worse by erractic camera behaviour and controls that sometimes just didn't seem to fucking do WHAT I WANTED THEM TO DO, FUCKING HELL, NOT AGAIN, FUUUU. If it wasn't for the prize of completing the final game of six, and most importantly, beating Reece, I would have quit out and played something else and not picked it back up for ages. But ultimately I'm glad I persevered. The overall twisted design and humour is what makes this game, it's brilliantly written, genuinely laugh out loud funny at some points, and has a heart. Some of the levels and concepts really are wonderful bits of game design, and overall it's a charming game. It's a charming game that I fucking hated at some points. But now, I can honestly say, if Psychonauts 2 came out, I would buy it. And I would hope that some of the kinks in the actual gameplay got ironed out and the game was made less frustrating so all the great bits could shine all the brighter for it.
7/10
Dishonored - PC
Brilliant game. Level design, art style, gameplay mechanics and flexibility are all extremely strong. Went through as mostly non-lethal and stealth. Going to replay it as a murdering bastard. Only weak point is that the overall story isn't that compelling, which makes becoming involved in the game and characters somewhat slow (which the brilliant heart does a lot to make up for). Also the last level is a bit anticlimactic, to say the least.
9/10
