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.
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.
The Trials franchise is surely the most successful game to ever start out life as a Flash browser game. I remember playing the original game on Miniclip back in the day, and I have played every single iteration since. The game’s core concept is simple – you control a trials bike, and must navigate it across a series of increasingly difficult obstacle courses on a 2D pane. It’s the perfect pick-up-and-play game, because it’s easy to get the basics, but insanely difficult to master.
Doki Doki Literature Club has dug its way into my chest and ripped me apart over the last couple of nights. It’s a free visual novel game where you get to know a bunch of girls in an afterschool book club… except not really. It looks exactly like any other tropey Japanese dating sim type game, but what lurks underneath this cutesy exterior is something really quite sinister and thought-provoking. The game’s tagline does a good job of reminding you that all is not what it seems: “This game is not suitable for children or those who are easily disturbed.”