Format: PC
Release date: 1993
I have 2 memories of this game that are separated by over 20 years.
I first played it on my father’s old DOS computer as a state-of-the-art CD-ROM game not long after it was released. The game is essentially a series of puzzles possibly ripped straight out of a “difficult problems” textbook threaded through a campy horror story about a haunted house and the oddball toy creator who lived there.
Its proper old-school, sprinkled with full motion video (FMV) sequences, real actors filmed and then superimposed into the pre-rendered 3D environments that you explore as a point and click adventure. The FMVs are creepy as fuck, and several of the ghostly apparitions scared the shit out of the 7 year old me. One encounter at the top of the grand staircase showed a ghost woman floating backwards as she beckons you to follow her down a long ‘The Shining’ esque corridor, with wavy arms, tattered robes fluttering all around her body. That terrifying image burnt itself into my brain and haunted my nightmares for literally years.
After that, I was reluctant to explore any more of the upstairs, so I mostly remember the lobby and front door area. And I was near hopeless at solving the actual puzzles back then. I remember my grandad taking an interest though. He loves crosswords and Sudoku and any good brain teasers and when he saw my dad and me trying to solve a puzzle that involved getting a spider to cross each branch of a web located on the front door of the mansion, he decided to help.
He sketched the whole puzzle onto paper and took it home with him to figure out. He returned a day or 2 later with the solution and… success! He’s very smart, my grandad.
I don’t remember getting much farther than that back in 1997. It wasn’t until 2015 that I even thought about the game again. It appeared on Steam and a bunch of us got together at the flat in Baldock to play through it. We do love to session puzzle games, particularly if they have a horror theme, and 7th Guest proved to be an entertaining romp. We played it pretty much nonstop all through the night, occasionally getting stuck on the frankly obscure as shit puzzles (Fly my tryst sly gypsy try by my crypt, WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS BULLSHIT?) and spent over 7 hours trying to figure out an optional puzzle involving virus-like bacteria spreading across a grid.
But we did it. We beat the entire game, scary ghost lady and all. Together, my mates and I are a force to be reckoned with, and there’s not a survival horror / puzzle adventure game we couldn’t complete so long as we are all monging out together with beer, coffee drinks and pie.
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.
Now and then one can’t help climbing aboard the hype train. You work yourself up into a frothing frenzy in anticipation of some new game whose trailers and screenshots make it seem like the best…thing…EVER. That’s how I felt about Conker’s Bad Fur Day when I first read about it in N64 Magazine (before the internet butchered the magazine industry). They did several preview write-ups about it in the years before it was released, and it changed from being a cutesy 3D adventure, to merely looking like a cutesy 3D adventure plastered with a layer of adult filth. I couldn’t have been more excited to play it. Did it live up to my expectations? Hell yes.
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 night I finished Firewatch. It’s a first-person mystery game, being rudely dubbed a ‘walking simulator’ by some of the reviews I’ve seen elsewhere. While it’s true, the game has you fulfilling various tasks in a forest in which you navigate solely by hiking, that description completely ignores the beautifully told story and the reason you are there at all. Having completed it, I want to recommend it to everyone because it’s fantastic. I also would say that the less you know the better, so don’t read the rest of this review, just go and get it.
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