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.
Format: Sega Mega Drive
Year: 1992
Another rare game in my long list of memories that include my brother, Sam, is Streets of Rage 2. It was the best in a trilogy of side scrolling beat-em-ups on the Sega Mega Drive. (Genesis in America). We would always play as the same 2 characters: I was Axel, and my brother would be Skate. He loved the agility and bombastic acrobatics that the tiny skater dude could pull off. Many of the boss fights would end with Sam leaping onto their necks and pummelling them in the back of the head. I liked Axel’s swinging flaming punch, and his multi-hit special combo. It’s a simple but satisfying game built around stylised hand to hand violence.
I’ve been pretty absent from PC gaming for some time, since moving to Canada in early 2017, because I haven’t had a proper computer to play games on. That has recently changed, since I got myself set up with a new gaming rig that can handle pretty much anything that’s out at the moment. I […]
Format: PS3
Release date: 2010
Heavy Rain is more like an interactive movie than a game, and it is mostly excellent. It’s a game about choices and living with the consequences. I played it through twice myself, just to see how different decisions affect the story and its ultimate conclusion, but to say that my first try was emotional would be the understatement of the century. This game almost broke me. I’ll tell you how soon, but first I want to recount the story of one of my friend’s choices… Like I said, watching Heavy Rain is just like watching a movie, but watching your friend play Heavy Rain gives you an amusing bit of insight into their psychology. The results can be hilarious.
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