Tag Archive: “video games”, page 2

Review of Ultreïa

Posted in entertainment by Adam

8 September 2022

The classic story of a robot out for revenge.

Ultreïa is a science fiction point-and-click adventure game in which you play a robot named Nymo on a pilgrimage to Ultreïa, a satellite of whatever rock you’re native to, to learn the secrets of life and death.

The most obvious draw for this game is the graphics, which are very nice in 2.5D, but even better are the cutscenes which are 3D animations. A few of them suffer slightly from what I assume are compression issues (they look noisy to me, anyway; possibly done to keep game size smaller or for rendering reasons), but aside from that they add a lot to the feel of the game. The whole game has a cool post-apocalyptic future feel which makes you want to adopt that robot you’re always seeing salvaging spare parts from behind the computer store, the one that was stranded in a time-travel accident from the year 2525.

At its base, Ultreïa is a fairly standard point-and-click, with an inventory and click-on-the-active stuff to select an action. That modern control scheme is easy to learn and stays out of the player’s way, and the game offers a super-brief tutorial to teach it for new players. That’s a solid choice for any adventure.

There are a few rough edges. At least a couple inventory items don’t do anything (that I found, anyway), which violates the principle of Chekov’s gun—if you introduce a rubber chicken in the first act, it must have a use by the conclusion. Significant items are too easily acquired, which feels more like the need for Chekov’s gun control: if an item is useful, it should be behind at least one obstacle. Also, the quick-travel map for the city, Mount St-Troy, could use labels and perhaps larger thumbnails.

The overall story arc is great, built as a combination of noir and Eastern philosophy. While most of the character interactions are fleeting, it fits the story well enough to be forgiven. The puzzles are mostly logical, and none felt too hard. There’s even a nice (optional) card game you can play.

It took me about four hours to complete the game, including all achievements. I enjoyed my time, and if you like the robotic, post-apocalyptic aesthetic and adventure games, take a look.

Review: The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark

Posted in entertainment by Adam

18 August 2022

Not actually an American football simulation at all!

The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark is the sequel to The Darkside Detective, a point-and-click adventure game. It is divided into cases, as was its predecessor. The case-based adventure game has become a subgenre of sorts, though I am not aware of its origins. (Oniria Crimes (diehealthy.org: “Review of Oniria Crimes“) and Nobodies spring to mind. The latter is a different spin on point-and-click, in that the goal is to quietly dispose of corpses.)

Whatever the cause of the trend, it is a reasonable way to break up development and still create a cohesive game, as shown by The Darkside Detective and this sequel. Like the previous game (and like the others mentioned) there is usually some connection between cases, which makes each case feel like an episode rather than an isolated story to itself.

Here you play as Detective Francis McQueen, now-formerly of the Darkside Division of the Twin Lakes Police Department. The darkside isn’t a reference to the yin-aspect of the Star Wars force, but to an alternate dimension or parallel universe where things are kind of screwy (in a different way than they’re normally screwy). The darkside itself doesn’t feature as heavily or directly in this game as in the first one.

Each case follows the same basic shape that detective stories have since Sherlock Holmes first solved a case. There’s the exposition, in which we find out the nature of the case. There’s the rising action when we uncover clues as to who’s responsible or, in the case of point-and-clicks, we cobble together inventory items into solutions to puzzles. And finally, there’s the denouement, when we pull the disguise off of someone and they complain about us and our dog foiling their scheme.

Case locations include an older-peoples’ home (the grandmother of your sidekick, Dooley, lives there), Ireland (not the whole island, but a castle there, the ancestral home of your sidekick), a carnival, a pro-wrestling event, and your highschool reunion. There are also two bonus cases (with a third planned, according to the case selection screen). The first bonus is a nice time-travel case for Christmas (loosely after Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol), and the other is occasioned by your sidekick’s nephew being missing.

The writing has good humor to it, including some absurdity which I always enjoy. It does tend toward memery in places, but it’s not terribly online. The writing is British English, which is kind of strange at times given the game takes place in America. But it’s not really America is it? It’s a fictional America where British gamemakers have replaced America with a British imagining of an America—bizarro America—where supernatural things happen. In any case, the puzzles tend to the easy side, and are mostly logical.

It took me about 14 hours to complete eight cases and all the achievements. If you want an easy-ish, pixel-graphics adventure game, particularly one with light elements of supernatural themes, give it a look.

Review of Summoner’s Mess

Posted in entertainment by Adam

28 July 2022

A modern Pac-Man without the ghosts?

Summoner’s Mess is a 2D top-down game similar in appearance to the classic Legend of Zelda. It is a short maze-running game. And I mean short. It took me two hours to beat the game and get all ten achievements.

Graphics are what made me look at this game, as they are meant to be retro pixel sprites (including a rounding effect to give the game a fake-round-screen CRT styling) but are well made and have some modern touches added.

The plot is simple enough: you’re a low-tier member of a death cult that wants to summon evil to do its bidding, but being low-tier pisses you off, so you attempt to summon evil all by yourself, for fame, glory, and leadership of the cult. Army of Darkness-style fumbling with the incantation causes evil to scatter your books across the dungeon, and you need to go find them to take control of the abomination.

The conceit is that you have limited light, so as you make your way through the dark dungeon, you must constantly pick up torches and candles to renew your light. If your torch dies out, as in Zork, you get eaten by a grue. At which point you start anew.

Controls are limited to WASD or arrow keys (or controller), but it’s a simple enough game, which makes it mostly forgivable. You have three inventory slots, and if you pick up more items then you will drop one of them (though you can pick it back up to cycle to the one you choose to drop). The torch is a separate thing, not taking up inventory, and it has a subtle back-fill that indicates how close it is to burning out. It could be more obvious, as I didn’t even notice the background fill until I was writing the review. But I could tell from the lighting alone when I was in danger, so the HUD element wasn’t that important.

There is a speedrun mode, which starts the timer when you move and displays a clock. Pressing the escape key pauses the game, letting you restart. You’ll want to hold down the escape key when starting runs (after your first) to skip the exposition at the start of an attempt.

There are also some accessibility options in the settings if you need them, though it warns you can’t complete achievements while they’re turned on.

Again, it’s a simple and short game. Perhaps too simple, but it’s hard to say what would have added to the game without changing its character entirely. It’s well-made as it is. Adding an enemy to kill or flee wouldn’t have done much. While the avoid-the-dark mechanic is getting to be overused in general, it is well-suited to the pacing of the game. Keep moving, get your books, keep your torch lit.

In all, it was a tidy diversion. If you like retro art, maze-type games, or if you think Cthulu is cthool, it’s worth a look (if you have the light left by which to see).