Format: PC
Release date: 2013
Well, fuck. A FPS horror game, set in a mental asylum where all the patients are violent hyper crazed lunatics, and you are a guy armed only with a night vision video camera and can’t fight back? Better get Clarkie to play that shit.
Outlast is actually amazing. It’s a superb horror game, crafted with so much care and attention to detail. Its pants shittingly scary, and I hated every minute of it. That’s why I love it.
By this point, my friends have subjected me to so many scary games, I’ve grown to both admire and ALMOST enjoy them… I certainly know a good one when I see it. Too many cheap jump scares for example, quickly becomes tedious. A good horror game knows when to ramp up the tension with silence, when to stretch the quiet moments where anything could be waiting around the next corner. It must have thoughtful sound design and make expert use of lighting effects to create an atmosphere of pure terror. And if you must have a scary monster or creature to hunt the player, give it the entrance it deserves by building it up, tease its existence and make the player doubt himself of its existence at all…
The best horror games know how to really get under the player’s skin. The creators of Outlast understand this perfectly and made a game that had me screaming in blind panic when it finally revealed the reason for all of the madness that was occurring in the asylum. I barely even saw the fucking Wall Rider monstrosity, and I didn’t have to – all I knew at that moment was to run for my life. My mates’ ears are still ringing from the scream I released that night.
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’ve played many versions of Mario Kart, first on the Snes at a friend’s house, followed by my own copy of the N64 version. The Nintendo DS edition got a lot of play during the various anime conventions that I attended between 2006 and 2011, where you could LAN it up via Bluetooth with anyone else in the vicinity. But the version I truly have the fondest memories of has to be Mario Kart Wii.
Years: 1996 – 2003
To this day, the N64 holds my fondest gaming memories on a console. The PC may have stolen my heart eventually, but I’ll never forget the fun of my childhood, playing multiplayer games on my N64 with a bunch of mates after school, and during sleepovers.
Format: PC
Year: 2001 – present day
If Return to Castle Wolfenstein was my first date with PC gaming, Battlefield 1942 was when she invited me to meet her parents, and the relationship went to the next level. My god, did I really just write that analogy?
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