Gunpoint is an indie game being developed by PC games journalist Tom Francis. If you read PC Gamer like me, you’ll probably know him for his writing more so than his game development skills. Nonetheless, he seems to be doing a pretty good job of creating his first game. In it, you play a spy who has to break into office blocks, hack computers and take out guards before making a daring escape, quite often by leaping out of a third story window. But that’s not even the best bit. You get a gadget called the Crosslink, which basically lets you rewire any electrical device to almost any other in the building, allowing for some very creative puzzle solving…
In the video below, Francis explains how the game works and shows off some of the unique ways to solve some of the missions. With the crosslink, getting through a locked door can be as simple as rewiring the door’s locking mechanism to a lightswitch. Flip the switch, and bingo – you’re in. But it can get hilariously more complicated than that if you want it to. Guards will patrol floors, and you can predict their movements by changing various switches around. If you turn out the lights on a floor, a guard will automatically attempt to turn them back on, so you can use this time to escape while he’s looking the other way, or take him out from the shadows. But why not set a trap, so that when he flips the lightswitch back on, he gets smushed by a nearby door? All that is possible, and it looks hilarious when you pull off carefully laid plans like that.
He was aiming to have it out by Christmas, but it looks like its been delayed unfortunately. Still, the game is set to be free when it comes out, so I have no problem waiting a bit longer.
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.
VVVVVV is one of the only 2D platform games that I have completed from start to finish, which makes it special to me. I became obsessed with Veni Vidi Vici, an entirely optional sequence of deadly traps that teases you with a collectible orb right in the very first room, which is blocked off by a tiny box. You can’t jump in the traditional way as most other platformer’s, so the only way to overcome the box is by leaping up through the ridiculously cruel chambers above, navigating your way to the top…and then back down again.
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.
Is bingeing bad for us? It seems an obvious question, but I have been thinking about it lately, while revisiting Lost, the tv show that started 22 years ago (cripes, I feel old). Back when it was airing, my friends and I watched it religiously every week, talked about it in great detail, eagerly awaiting the next episode. It was the definitive show of its time, sparking debates and endless theories. It felt great to be a part of that, the sense of all experiencing the same thing together over a long period of time – most seasons had over 20 episodes, which is way more than most shows get these days – and they aired one by one, every week for several months. In today’s age of bingeing a show from beginning to end, I wonder what we are missing by not taking our time.
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