Telltale have been busily making fun point and click adventure games for a while now, with mostly good results. I didn’t play any of the new Sam and Max games, admittedly, but I tried the Strong Bad and Monkey Island episodes, and they seemed alright. Just nothing spectacular. Then recently, they’ve been trying some new game ideas such as Late Night At the Inventory, a simple but entertaining poker game. They also made the surprise jump to a more mainstream popular franchise in Back to the Future (the second episode of which is out today, in fact). Still, none of these have piped my interest as much as the prospect of a JURASSIC PARK GAME! YEEEAH!
A few details: it’s going to be a third person adventure, set during the timeline of the first movie, and apparantly follows some all-new characters. Dennis Nedry’s can of dino-embryo’s seems to be integral to the plot in some way or another, but thats pretty much all I can work out from the trailer. I’m just excited at the idea of DINOSAURS! I’m a huge fan of the Jurassic Park films and I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this game, which is not far away: April 2011 seems to be the planned release date. Check out the first trailer below.
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.
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.”
The successor to Goldeneye, Perfect Dark improved every possible aspect of the classic shooter and created an original masterpiece. 4-player multiplayer game modes, with the option of adding 8 extra bots made matches frantic chaos and endless fun. The singleplayer was fantastic at the time, featuring such state-of-the-art features as realtime lighting, blood spatter effects, and fully voice acted cinematic cutscenes. It even let you play the story in local co-op with a mate – player 2 got to be Joanna Dark’s weird-looking blonde sister – the first game I ever encountered with a co-op singleplayer mode.
Last night I finished Firewatch. It’s a first-person mystery game, being rudely dubbed a ‘walking simulator’ by some of the reviews I’ve seen elsewhere. While it’s true, the game has you fulfilling various tasks in a forest in which you navigate solely by hiking, that description completely ignores the beautifully told story and the reason you are there at all. Having completed it, I want to recommend it to everyone because it’s fantastic. I also would say that the less you know the better, so don’t read the rest of this review, just go and get it.
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