Noitu Love 2: Devolution

I played through all three currently available acts of Kentucky Route Zero yesterday, but that needs time to percolate before I can write anything other than "it was brilliant".

A palate cleanser, that's what I needed.  Noitu Love 2 is 2 hours of manic, SNES era homage, combining excellent brawling, shooting, and some fantastic boss design.  Crushing a robotic orchestra conductor with giant piano hammers is something I'll remember for a while.

I expected the controls to be awkward, forcing you to use the keyboard and mouse for a game straight out of a traditionally joypad-only genre.  In practice, it works perfectly.  Clicking an enemy to not only hit them, but to dash to their location anywhere on screen means that the rank and file mooks turn into grapple points for zipping around the level.  You can go an awfully long time in this game without ever touching the floor.

The story is pleasingly nonsensical, and the game finished just as my clicking finger was getting tired.  Great stuff.

Dungeon Hearts

Dungeon Hearts is a match-3 style puzzler, where the coloured blobs to be matched float steadily down 4 separate tracks.  Like a puzzle version of Guitar Hero, sort of?  Anyway, this should, in theory, be a game I enjoy.  JRPG trappings, upgradeable characters, a neat variant on a classic puzzle formula.  Sadly, it's hampered by the decision to dole out upgrades at a glacial pace, presumably a hangover from its mobile roots.

This wouldn't be too much of a problem if it wasn't for the annoying route the game takes to ramp up the difficulty.  In order to match 3 of the blobs, you have to drag them around the screen, and other blobs block your path.  The higher difficulties just clog up the play area with grey blobs that you can't get rid of.  So, not more difficult, just more irritating. 

McPixel

Point and click games have a long history of utterly illogical puzzles, and here is a game that gives you one of these every 20 seconds.  In every level of McPixel, your only job is to stop the bomb going off.  Whether this is done by just throwing the bomb out the window, or angering god so that he punches the bomb into oblivion, McPixel is up front about how arbitrary the puzzle solutions are. 

Fortunately for a game whose main selling point is humour, McPixel is mostly very funny.  It also pulls the same trick that The Fast Show did; it doesn't matter if a joke falls flat, there'll be another one along in 20 seconds.

Crayon Physics Deluxe

I get the feeling that Hexcells is going to cast a long shadow over any puzzle game I play for a very long time.  Crayon Physics sounds like a great idea for a game.  Drawing pulleys, hoists, bridges and ramps in crayon to guide a ball past various obstacles is great fun, and mechanically the game is excellent.  However, where Hexcells shines, this game stumbles:  level design.

About half way through the game, there's a level that introduces you to the idea of dragging the ball over an obstacle by fixing a pulley to an elevated position, building a cage around the ball, and then hooking the cage up to a weight with a length of rope.  The first time you make this work, you feel like a god of engineering.  The problem is, I was then able to use this method to complete all but two of the levels in the second half of the game.

So, I had fun drawing nonsense machines while listening to some podcasts, but this never got beyond the point of being a pleasant distraction.  Hexcells has ruined me.

Super Amazing Wagon Adventure Turbo

Take Oregon Trail, rebuild it as an arcade shooter, amp up the random events ad absurdum,  and you get Super Amazing Wagon Adventure.

The narration and special events make this a very funny game but eventually the jokes start to repeat themselves.  Unfortunately, this happened to me before I got to the end of an adventure.  It's a pretty unforgiving game, and occasionally will just randomly ruin a good run.  Not wanting to sour my initial enjoyment, I decided to leave it while I was still having fun.

I'll keep it installed, because I think I'll enjoy watching my friends play it, but for now I'm just removing this from my backlog.

Blackwell Unbound

I couldn't help it, a couple of days break and then straight into the sequel.  What's this, it's the 70s?  And we're playing as Aunt Lauren?  Now you're talking.

The structure of this follow up game is markedly better than the original.  Running two cases in parallel, with minor overlaps, means a lot more options for what to do next, and a lot less getting stuck. The writing remains very good, although the voice acting is a bit more hit and miss. Still, for an indie game like this to have full voice acting is enough of a surprise, so picking at the quality seems a little churlish. The story behind the two ghosts is just as interesting as in the original, and once again I ended up genuinely invested in putting them to rest.

One thing I'm less keen on is having to ask people multiple times about the same clue in my notebook in order to get the next bit of information I need.  When I play voiced adventure games, I like to try and avoid making characters repeat themselves, but in this game, reaching that point in the dialogue is the only way to know you've got as much as you can.  The identical delivery lessens immersion, and with a game as heavy with noir atmosphere as this, that's a crime.  It's also high praise, of course.  If the atmosphere wasn't worth soaking in, I wouldn't care about the occasions where the cracks appear.

The Blackwell Legacy

One of my clearest memories of childhood is of sitting in front of the family Amiga, with a huge stack of floppy disks next to me, playing The Secret of Monkey Island 2.  Obviously, I played the first game too, but that came on a mere four disks.  The sequel came on eleven, and you never forgot it, especially when you misclicked an exit and had to change disks to load the room you didn't even want to go into.

I was obsessed with point and click adventures, and playing The Blackwell Legacy immediately gave me a pleasant feeling of familiarity.  The art style is very much influenced by Lucasarts, and for the most part the puzzle design is cut from the same cloth.  Even when I found myself resorting to using everything in my inventory (or notebook of clues) with everything else, I had a nostalgic smile on my face.

The writing is smart, and the story had me hooked straight away.  The game did a good job of wrapping up its story without overstaying its welcome, and has definitely got me interested in playing the rest of the series. I've got the first three Blackwell games in my backlog, and looking at the developer's Wikipedia page I'm pleased to see a couple more games on there that I own.  I'm looking forward to finding out a lot more about the Blackwell family, so I imagine the sequel will be up next.