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.
I don’t get on with the Souls games at all, but I really wish that I did. For me, the combat was just a little too clunky and, oh, you know, fucking difficult.
I don’t know many people who played Quantum Break, and nobody ever talks about it anymore, so it must have been rather forgettable for those who did. Even as I write this, two days after blasting my way to the end-credits of the 2016 bombastic time-travelling action romp, I am struggling to remember some of […]
Format: PC
Year: 2000
It may look clunky as hell thanks to the original Unreal engine, but Deus Ex was a pioneer in videogames because it gave the player so many choices to make. It resulted in one of the deepest gaming experiences of the time, because it went to great effort to show the consequences of those choices. The story was spread across many ‘hub’ levels, giving you total freedom to approach your objectives whichever way you wanted, aided by an RPG style upgrade tree that you invested in as you played. Wanna finish it without killing a single soul? That is entirely possible. Prefer to tool up with a rocket launcher and just murder your way to the end? Nothing could stop you. Your NPC allies would respond differently back in the Unatco base, depending on what you did out in the field. This level of responsiveness was unparalleled for a long time, to the point that even if you walked into the ladies toilets, your boss would scold you for it during the mission debrief later on. It was many little moments like that which made the game so memorable for me.
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