Holy mother of shitting crikey that was horrible. Paul and I just played through the demo of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and it has to be the scariest demo I’ve ever played, and quite honestly I don’t know HOW I managed to finish it. It’s by the maker’s of Penumbra, but its undoubtedly better… Major demo spoilers below, but go play it for yourself right now.
If you look at the enemies in this game, your character starts to go INSANE. Like, literally. That’s the sort of game this is – you are physically encouraged to stare at the walls in order to stay alive. You have no weapons. You are completely alone, an ordinary man trapped in a hellish castle dungeon, and according to a letter written and left by your former self, wherever you go, you’re being hunted by a “living nightmare”. You can’t fight it, all you can do is run and hide.
Luckily, you can hide in cupboards – something I wish more horror games would allow me to do – and frankly it’s one of the safest places you can be. Light and dark play a significant role, in that the things hunting you apparently can’t see very well in the dark, making you safer. Yet linger there for too long, and Daniel (you) will start getting blurry vision, his teeth will start to tremble together loudly, and he may even lose control of his legs. You have a lantern, which requires oil to light. Save it for when you really need it, please… Don’t do what I did and have it on permanently, only to watch in horror as the oil runs out and you’re left stranded in a pitch-black wine cellar, huge cobwebs hanging from the ceilings, and…what was that!? SOMETHING just opened that door…but there’s nothing there!
The sounds! Good grief the noises. And the water… the final section of the demo has you knee-deep in murky water, apparently some sort of flooded cellar. And something is down there with you. You can’t see it, only hear its heavy, sloshing footsteps. KEEP OUT OF THE WATER! Thank god for dismembered body parts… no other game has made me even consider using a torn-off arm as a distraction… There’s a key moment in this demo which cemented my decision to buy the full game – the thing in the water couldn’t see me… all I could see of it was the splash of water every time it took a step, and I realized that’s exactly what I looked like to it. We were the same. Only difference was I was smart enough to stand on the crates. KEEP OUT OF THE SODDING WATER!
This game is out today, however, BcR may not be reviewing the full version of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, because Matt does not own enough underwear.
Dome Keeper is an excellent little spin on the tower defense game, in which you play the role of a jetpacking miner defending his base from swarms of aliens, whilst searching for a hidden relic buried somewhere beneath him. And now, with this huge free update, you can play it with friends.
I want to talk about Cloudpunk, a game where you get to be a flying-car delivery driver in a futuristic cyberpunk city. Its world is an incredible achievement of environmental design, and while the gameplay itself may be basic, the city of Nivalis is a thing of beauty to behold. Nivalis is built out of hundreds of hand-modelled cuboid buildings; there’s nothing procedural about it. Apparently it took 3 years for the devs to design the city, and it really shows.
I do love me some quality pixel art, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Cast n Chill is a cozy side-scrolling fishing game by small indie dev team Wombat Brawler, with absolutely gorgeous visuals. It’s simple to play, and you you can dip in and out of it at your leisure, making it a fine addition to our collection of coffee break games.
It’s difficult to describe the levels of hype that I felt leading up to the release of Half Life 2, and I know I wasn’t alone. This was a generation-defining moment in gaming, the likes of which has never really been replicated, and likely never will, for multiple reasons. Not only was HL2 a huge leap forward for its artistic and technological design, it ushered in an entirely new way to buy games and changed the gaming landscape forever.
WoW consumed my life for almost the entirety of 2004/05, when I was studying for my A-levels, and was probably a key contributor to my D-grades. I’m probably not the only person who would admit to daydreaming of roaming through Elwynn Forest, even many years after I stopped playing. I just spent so much time there, and other places of that world, sometimes roleplaying, always questing, but best of all simply exploring an unknown land. Even though I LOVE what Blizzard did in Cataclysm, my favourite memories all come from what they call Vanilla WoW, the original version of the game.
Last summer, I collaborated with my mate Mark Vale to create our very first mobile game app. It’s all about pushing buttons as fast as you can. So, a great little time-waster when you’re on the loo, or waiting for your bread to toast. Mark came up with the concept, did all the programming in Unity, and I provided the art and music. There’s only one rule – hit the green light as fast and as many times as you can.
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