Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet Trial is Insanely Fun
By Paul Blackburn
August 12, 2011
Do you like 2D games? Do you like flying UFO’s? Do you like the ability to use a wide array of crazy sci-fi tools to achieve results in bizarre situations involving black and red tentacles that want to eat you, and then upgrade everything so you can do it even better the next time? Then after having a good blast of the trial of Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet, I can honestly say you will have a great time.
Released on the 3rd of August, I only heard about this game yesterday when I opened my Xbox dashboard and there it was. The silhouette, shadow art style is very pleasing and totally inspired, resonating back to classic 2D adventure games such as Another World and Heart of Darkness, where enemies were somehow all evolved to be entirely black and, well, shadowy. From what I’ve played and seen in this trailer, I.T.S.P is really one of the most imaginative and inspiring games I’ve ever laid my eyes on, and I’m enormously impressed.
I’m still contemplating buying this, but I have so many gaming related things to pay for this year that I can’t quite afford that I might not bother yet. Besides, it’ll probably come down in price in a few months. Probably…
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.
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.
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?