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…
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.
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.
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 […]
A friend on Facebook posted a list of their favourite movies, listed in the year they came out, which I immediately followed up with my own list. There’s only one rule: you must pick your favourite for all of the years that you’ve been alive, and you can only pick one per year. I decided to give it a go for videogames. It’s a lot trickier than you might think! Some years have featured an abundance of incredible titles, whereas other years it’s easy to pick out a clear winner in your mind. So, without further ado, here’s my list of favourite games, one per year since I was born. This was insanely difficult…
Hello, world! This post marks the moment in time and space when BangClickReload got a little redesign and was dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Every post before this point is rather old and might not look right, and unless I decide to go through them all to fix them, they’re going to […]
