Folks around here are probably aware enough by now that every May I tend to take on a project wherein I do my darndest to clear out some of my long-standing backlog, usually tying together the various featured games with some manner of thematic connective tissue. My spin on some seasonal spring cleaning, as it were. Last year's feature was May Magnanimity: a focus on the many Indie games I'd picked up as part of Itch.io's enormous social justice charity bundles. This year, I've decided to go way back into the archives to take on a series of games that I'd put aside because my old PC just wasn't up to the task of running them, or at least not sufficiently well for a fair review; however, my new system is fortunately mighty enough to deal with almost anything I toss its way and so it's due time to tie up some loose ends. With many Indie games, this is often the result of poor optimization—Indie dev teams have a limited amount of time and manpower to account for every set of system specs, after all—but a few of these were graphically more intense than I anticipated.
Since many of these games have been waiting a long time for what meager limelight I can provide, I took the liberty of including the gaps between when they were first released and when I finally got around to completing them. After all, what's a good Giant Bomb feature without a little self-flagellation?
(For what it's worth, I have far more games I've had to put aside for "technological deficiency" reasons, but I'll be adding whatever I couldn't get around to this month to the usual IGotW rotation. Yeah... I'm never going to run out of subjects for that thing.)
Adr1ft
- Developer / Publisher: Three One Zero / 505 Games
- Release Date: 2016-03-28
- Date Completed: 2024-05-05
- Gap: 8 years, 1 month, 1 week
In some ways, and I'm sure developers Three One Zero would be thrilled with the comparison, Adr1ft feels like the video game version of movies like Apollo 13 and Gravity. Obviously because there's a lot of space stuff going on but more specifically in how, if you really boil down what actually happens during the story, it's almost entirely a bunch of analytical and meticulous technical troubleshooting often at a level of scientific and engineering expertise that goes well over most of the audience's heads, myself included. However, what makes both this game and the movies mentioned thrilling instead of deeply tedious is a combination of the perceived high peril of space travel as astronauts tackle the least hospitable conditions known to man in addition to the tension that is generated by same, where every error could be fatal but so could any hesitation. In some ways it becomes akin to a series of bomb defusal scenes: another slow, deliberate process that you nonetheless can't look away from.
Adr1ft follows Alex Oshima, the commander of the privately-owned space station Northstar-IV, after she rouses from unconsciousness with short-term amnesia only to find that the station has suffered a major catastrophic... space... thing... and the rest of her six-person crew are missing and presumed deceased. Though her EVA suit is badly damaged and half the station is in pieces due to explosive decompression, she's nonetheless tasked with recovering major systems in order to open the way to the station's escape pods (which seems like a pretty big design flaw) and must carefully avoid electrical dangers, flying debris, and staying outside too long as she floats her way across and through each of the station's four wings with a limited supply of oxygen which, naturally, also doubles as her thruster fuel. The gameplay is built around its first-person zero-G movement, where you're constantly micromanaging your momentum with omnidirectional thrusters and taking in reserve oxygen tanks only when you think you need them so you don't run out while heading back the same way. Thankfully, these oxygen tanks are pretty ubiquitous and your suit can scan the surroundings to point out any nearby supplies if you happen to be floating through space in a most peculiar way and could use some direction. The loop just boils down to reaching the far points of each of the four wings, restoring power (and repairing part of your EVA suit in the process, making the game more accommodating as it goes on), and heading on back to the hub to start your journey to the next wing. Along the way, there's the usual mix of audio logs and email correspondence from all five of your coworkers, as well as the coworkers themselves whom can be found by following a red flashing beacon to their final resting places. That part reminded me a little bit of 2017's Prey—particularly in how it uses environmental storytelling to explain what happened to them—and I wonder if that wasn't something Arkane Austin might've been inspired to add after seeing this game. (Man, speaking of poor suckers left to float dead in the void by an unfeeling universe: RIP Arkane Austin.)
Adr1ft is a largely passive adventure game at its core—a "walking simulator" with floating rather than walking—but at the same time excels at establishing its atmosphere (or dramatic lack thereof) and putting the cautious survival aspect front and center, so even if all you're doing is gliding from one terminal to the next the danger of imminent death by asphyxiation, electrocution, or miscellaneous space mishap is always present. Looking down on Earth is meant to be a majestic once-in-a-lifetime experience for astronauts, but you can't help but worry that it might be looming closer and closer the longer you take to fix up whatever's left that can be fixed or else waste time go around grabbing floating SSDs for collectionism's sake. It's a really attractive game too, fully recreating what a near-future private corporation space enterprise would look like (complete with random devastating explosions, if we're talking SpaceX specifically) which probably goes a long way towards explaining why I couldn't get this to work the first time. If you only liked Dead Space for the parts where you're in zero-G and have to fix things like a proper space engineer then... dang, was that probably a rough playthrough for you. No worries though, as Adr1ft might prove to be closer to what you were looking for.
Worth the Wait?: I'll say yes. Those impressive visuals definitely needed something sturdier to render.
The Deadly Tower of Monsters
- Developer / Publisher: ACE Team / Atlus USA
- Release Date: 2016-01-19
- Date Completed: 2024-05-07
- Gap: 8 years, 3 months, 2 weeks, 4 days
Man, it feels like it's been forever since I last played something from ACE Team. They're not the most underground group in Chile (that would be these guys) yet for as consistently busy as they are they're not a developer I ever seem to hear too much about, at least not in the way of appearing on major showcases like a Nintendo Direct or PS State of Play. Last notable game of theirs was the deeply strange The Eternal Cylinder, where you're an alien creature or series of alien creatures escaping the titular colossal rolling pin, but they've been trucking away with their tower defense boulder series Rock of Ages and other pursuits since I last reviewed a game of theirs (which... I think was maybe the first Zeno Clash? Though I recall mentioning Abyss Odyssey somewhere). Anyway, Deadly Tower of Monsters is paradoxically one of their more obscure games while also being one of their most accessible and immediately charming.
The idea of this top-down action/shooter game is that you're "watching" a terrible sci-fi B-movie while simultaneously also directly controlling it. It involves an enormous tower that you steadily climb throughout the game—and it does some interesting stuff with that verticality I'll get into in a moment—but not a whole lot of logical consistency in terms of enemy types or story beats or the "rules" of this sci-fi universe. The director Dan Smith, whose voiceover DVD commentary is prevalent throughout (as is the occasional quip from the exasperated sound engineer assigned to record it) as a Greek chorus, is quick to point out that in an action movie the action is all that matters and elements like plot and exposition only serve to get in the way. There's some great touches with the enemy designs in this game: most are obviously people in rubber suits or under a veneer of alien make-up, while a few others have the telltale stuttering of classic Harryhausen stop-motion. With some of the larger quadruped alien beasts you can clearly see a puppy's feet sticking out underneath. The whole game is steeped in a loving if not always reverent affection towards '50s and '60s sci-fi: for instance, one recurring sidequest involves finding five actors in ape costumes that are still wearing wristwatches (which, as is pointed out by the game, means that the actors took off their watches to wear the ape suits and then put their watches back on over it).
The gameplay is a fairly simple brawler type where you have a choice of multiple types of firearm (with an ammo cooldown meter to prevent spamming the stronger ones) and melee weapon, only two of each can be equipped at a time. The combat mostly involves crowd control, taking down the quick and persistent foes first before focusing your firepower on the larger and more dangerous enemies. You earn money dropped by enemies which can be spent on upgrades but the upgrade tree is directly connected to the game's achievements: each time you earn one, you can buy a new passive buff from a small selection, and since there's only a few unmissable achievements that come from story progression it's in your best interests to check out that list carefully and work towards its milestones. The brawlerish real-time combat and RPG-lite character development along with the humorous, self-deprecating meta commentary (and a very dumb reason provided for how the in-game economy works) immediately drew a comparison in my mind to the first The Bard's Tale reboot from InXile—the one from 2004 with voice work from a mostly unrecognizable Cary Elwes—which I think I probably liked more than most people did (no musical numbers in Deadly Tower though, for better or worse). I mentioned the verticality: there's plenty of moments where you aim your gun downwards to fight enemies chasing you from below, and you can leap off the side at any time and hit the teleport button to be returned to where you leapt off or else use the very limited jetpack to soften your descent when close to the ground, and there's plenty of secrets and other goodies found by taking the occasional plunge. It's not an exceptional game, but I took to it and its framing device a lot quicker than any of their other games. Maybe that lack of aggressive weirdness made the game less memorable to ACE Team fanatics than something like the narratively surreal Zeno Clash games or conceptually surreal The Eternal Cylinder but I'll admit to being a pretty basic guy who laughs at dumb jokes about flying monsters with visible strings. Basically.
Worth the Wait?: I'd say so. ACE Team might not always hit the mark but their games are always novel enough to be worth a look.
Framed Collection
- Developer / Publisher: Loveshack Entertainment / Surprise Attack Games
- Release Date: 2018-05-17
- Date Completed: 2024-05-18
- Gap: 6 years, 1 day
Framed Collection is a compilation of Loveshack's two Framed games, the first released in 2014 and the second in 2017, which depicts a dialogue-free story of shady figures on the run from the police while trying to protect a briefcase storing god knows what. The player's role in this narrative is to rearrange the comic book panels of this world, changing the order of events in such a way that is advantageous to the current playable character. A wrong configuration could quickly lead to an early death or arrest, but the right one should see you through to the final panel and beyond to the next "page" of their adventure.
The game soon escalates in both difficulty and complexity. Initially, you'd arrange the panels just so and watch as the narrative plays out as you designed it—sometimes you'll want to do a few dry runs just to see what you need to look out for, as it's not always obvious where the protagonist will enter the next scene or what might halt their progress—and the panels would gray out after their part is done. Later, you'll be able to shift panels on their axis to twist them around into several configurations or be able to reorder a panel after you've already moved past it once. Passing through a panel might make some permanent changes to it, such as knocking out a guard or breaking a part of the environment you used to pull off some platforming feat. The ambiguity makes for plenty of trial and error but the game never feels "unfair": it's more that you should sometimes expect the unexpected, which then becomes the expected on your next run and something to account for.
Since you're only ever dealing with a single "page" at a time there's a limit to how many panels you might be tasked to rearrange: I think I saw it go as high as twelve once, but nine is the highest I'm sure about, which mitigates the amount of possible combinations you could employ (and several can be eliminated quickly just based on the set-up: if there's a cop ready to pull a piece on you as soon as you enter that scene, clearly it's not meant to go first). There are times where it felt like I was endlessly reconfiguring the playing field though—especially with the tougher first game, so I guess either the second addressed the difficulty spikes or by that point I'd become used to Framed's tricks—so even for as brief as the game can be it'll throw enough curveballs your way to earn its keep.
Of particular note is the game's style, using silhouettes instead of people with discernable expressions to add to the level of mystique while scoring the whole thing with a noir-appropriate seedy jazz soundtrack that uses drum fills and other musical beats to represent the sound effects of bricks breaking or a security guard getting a probably-undeserved concussion with a quick briefcase to the head (I'm aware it's a sound design trick that's been used many times before in all kinds of media, but I can't help but think of Gabe Cuzzillo's Ape Out whenever I see it in action). The stories are often as ambiguous as the puzzles themselves, relying on subtext to explain what's actually going on until the ending makes things a little more explicit. Given their relatively svelte lengths the pair work well as a duo, lasting just long enough that they don't repeat themselves (or each other) too often.
Worth the Wait?: Sure. Though I'm not quite sure why I couldn't get this to run originally, since it doesn't seem that demanding. Maybe it's an Itch thing (I got it from one of those big charity bundles I mentioned).
Fract OSC
- Developer / Publisher: Phosfiend Systems
- Release Date: 2014-04-22
- Date Completed: 2024-05-23
- Gap: 10 years, 1 month, 1 day
Fract OSC (sometimes styled as FRACT OSC) is a text-free first-person adventure game with a darkened, minimalist look that is inspired by music production and in particular those based on synthesizers. Almost all its puzzles are based around producing music in some way but, conveniently for the tone-deaf amongst us, doesn't require any virtuoso leanings or musical aptitude. Instead, it's more that the process of producing music is incidental to the puzzle, which tends to be more the usual environmental kind you'd see in first-person adventure games of this type after the likes of Portal or Q.U.B.E.. It styles itself as a "Myst-like" which also might be closer to the truth: the game has that same balance of puzzles and emptiness and context-heavy storytelling.
I definitely recall the striking visuals of this back when I first played it many moons ago—my first achievement for the game was dated for 2015, to give some impression of how long this has been stored in some dusty corner of my Steam backlog—but I guess even for as texture-less as everything in this game there's a distinct smoothness to the animations and a whole lot of visual effects that I'm sure introduced a dispiriting sluggishness to my first attempt to play it. The gameplay loop is fairly standard: you're introduced to a plaza with three paths leading away, each color-coded (cyan, green, and magenta). These all link to one "channel" of an enormous synthesizer—the cyan represents the bass, the green the pads, and the magenta the leads—and each requires solving several puzzles to complete the sequence in full and activate it for the central hub. Activating them all opens the way to the second floor of this cave network, where you have one last enormous puzzle to solve to have access to the full synthesizer control panel. That's actually the hidden goal of the game: once you've unlocked all the channels and understand what each of them brings to the final composition, you're free to tinker in the game's track creation mode to produce your own synthesizer jams. Like the most elaborate KORG tutorial married to a contemplative walking simulator.
Fract OSC is cool in that sort of unconditional way that something like Rez is cool; both visually and aurally it has its own distinct approach and finds a variation of synthaethesia that instead conflates music and gameplay. The puzzles are just on the right side of approachable rather than hopelessly obtuse, and there's a semi well-hidden extra puzzle that each area doesn't tell you about but trusts you enough to find it as it's the very last step in completing that particular area. The game balances itself between walking around and interacting with the environment with a special "active" toggle that adds various prompts to your UI in an augmented reality sort of fashion: by regularly remembering to switch modes, you'll find there's much in the vicinity that can be manipulated this way. Conversely, the game's lack of hand-holding and large amounts of empty space to just wander around and get lost in can serve to detract from the core experience (unless losing any sense of place is fun for you) but I guess you can't really go around calling yourself a Myst-inspired game without a whole lot of pointless nothingness to wander around in for hours. Comes with the (frequently desolate) territory. All the same, I'm a sucker for these types of immersive first-person puzzle games and how that perspective draws you into a world where thinking and running around in circles becomes that much more pronounced and oddly therapeutic. When your whole world is just some block-sliding puzzle right in front of you, it's easy to relax and let the rest of the world fall away, and the low-lights and ambient EDM of this game only serves to enhance that feeling.
Worth the Wait?: It's a relief to finally tick this one off the list. Aren't too many games that have been waiting as long.
Small Radios Big Televisions
- Developer / Publisher: Fire Face Corporation / Adult Swim Games
- Release Date: 2016-11-08
- Date Completed: 2024-05-26
- Gap: 7 years, 6 months, 2 weeks, 4 days
Small Radios Big Televisions has a similar vibe as Fract OSC, in that it creates a minimalist low-poly world to explore with little direction or supporting dialogue. The main difference is instead of screwing around with music sequencers, you're getting lost in oil rigs for hours on end. Small Radios Big Televisions is nominally a puzzle-adventure game but this mostly boils down to poking through endless doors to find your way through maze-like areas while solving the occasional environmental puzzle along the way. As with Fract and its Myst lineage it's also a game that's cagey about its goals or what's actually going on, trusting the player to reach their own answers based on what they've been presented with. Maybe it's a lack of imagination on my part but I've no idea what that message or goal might be. Something about the transformative powers of magnetic storage, maybe.
The big gimmick, if I could reductively call it such, is that you'll occasionally find cassette tapes while exploring these oil rigs. You have a magical tape player that will actually transport to you to another world when a cassette is inserted, in a literal sense rather than the usual figurative, and these small diorama-like worlds tend to contain keys that resemble multi-faceted emeralds. However, some tapes won't have these keys on the first visit: what you need to do is find a powerful magnet and warp the tapes, which will transform their once tranquil landscapes into slightly nightmarish distortions (complete with wacky visual and audio glitches) and potentially make those elusive keys appear. Later levels will have multiple of these magnets, causing the tape worlds to warp in different ways and creating more areas to check for the keys you need to progress. Beyond that, the puzzles tend to involve moving gears around to make machinery activate or flipping switches to change the lighting conditions for advantageous reasons. One oil rig even has you raising and lowering the water level, which I'd normally take exception to except it feels way more germane to the theme of all these heavy-duty marine doors and their wheel-based opening mechanisms. So I'll give it a pass. Just for the record though, I hope puzzle/adventure game developers continue to resist the impulse to turn their games partly or wholly into Ocarina of Time's Water Temple for what I hope would be obvious reasons.
The game's been through the wringer, to put it mildly, with its developer Owen Deery (known professionally here as Fire Face Corporation) choosing to make the game freely available on their website after news that the Adult Swim Games publishing label, or more accurately its owners Warner Bros. Games, had elected to delist all their games on Steam and elsewhere for reasons that remain inscrutable even now. Knowing that one David "Enemy to All Art" Zaslav is the perpetrator behind it there's probably some incredibly minor financial gain to be made from throwing various artistic talents and their creations under the bus. He seems like the kind of guy who'd deface the Mona Lisa if said defacement was a stencil advertisement for one of his products. I tried this game a few years back but couldn't seem to run it—despite the minimalist look, it's pretty heavy on the visual distortion effects as stated—but now seemed like a prudent time to highlight it for those who may have missed out due to its awkward situation right now. That said, for as much as I want to support a beleagured developer, I can't say I particularly enjoyed all the confusing wandering that this game made its cornerstone even if visually and aurally it's definitely fascinating (in a positive, "this was clearly an intentional choice" sense of the term).
Worth the Wait?: I guess. Slaked my curiosity at least.
Everything
- Developer / Publisher: David O'Reilly
- Release Date: 2017-04-21
- Date Completed: 2024-05-27
- Gap: 7 years, 1 month, 6 days
Not sure what it is about all these contemplative, artsy games showing up on this "my old PC couldn't run this modest game somehow" list but maybe there's something about putting art above practicality that made them poorly-optimized wonders I could only stay in the dark about given that they refused to load on any device that wasn't expensive enough to run it. Then again, trying to render Everything in real time is going to take some serious computing power. David O'Reilly is some Irish guy who made a game about a big hill once and Everything is sort of a spiritual follow-up, making a natural leap in scale from mountains to everything even if it's perhaps one that doesn't leave a whole lot of room for a successive game to build on. What's left to make after you've made Everything, after all? (And excuse me for the cheap Everything jokes, but I figure Wario64's been getting away with it for years so why not me too.)
If I had to say what Everything is about, maybe something more specific than "everything", I'd probably say somersaults since that's the chief means of conveyance for most creatures in Everything. After that, though, it'd probably be about our place in the grand scheme of things and our relationship to everything else. In case the message of the game wasn't clear from spending hours jumping from plants to animals to solar systems, there's audio logs peppered throughout (they spawn and respawn randomly much like the tutorial messages, so there's no missing them—just as well, given the enormous scale of the game) from a series of lectures given by British scholar and Buddhist Alan Watts about the nature of being one with the universe whose voice has a calming effect that's germane to both the game's philosophy and to its overall chill vibe. I'm not sure I put a whole lot of stock into what's being said but I think the idea is more to get the gray matter in motion than it is to declaratively state spiritual musings as facts, for as much as it can often sound like a stodgy academic class. Either way, it fits the game's chief imperative of making you think without sounding like it's talking down to you (as opposed to a The Witness, for example) though I suppose accounts may vary.
As to what you actually do in Everything, besides everything (OK, I swear I'll stop), it's pretty much an enormous collectathon. I know, my eyes lit up too once I'd realized. You can choose to roam around the various biomes at various levels of magnification—it goes from galactic to solar to continental to "human normal" (i.e. 1-50 feet) to tiny to microscopic to sub-atomic and then loops back to galactic—and get close to other entities in order to switch focus to them. If it's a new entity, there's a brief period of "bonding" until it's logged in the in-game library and you can switch again (completing the tutorial, which is more or less the whole game as far as a sense of progression is concerned, eliminates this bonding cooldown). Taking on larger entities in the environment and grouping with similar types allows you to expand your sphere of influence with regards to what you can bond with in the vicinity, so much of the game is simply doing that over and over and logging all the new things you've found before moving on up (or down) a layer. There's not a whole lot to it beyond that, but between the casual gameplay and the interesting lectures there's something Zen-like about the game's simple (if incredibly large-scaled, since there's more than 1,000 things to inhabit) approach. In addition to all that, you can also sing (communicates) and dance (which, much like the sexytime dances of Viva Pinata, leads to new life) but they seem to mostly only exist for the sake of screwing around. Pretty much the same purpose behind the dance emote in online shooters and MMOs. Everything definitely isn't for everyone but as the kind of weirdo whose favorite part of Katamari Damacy was rolling up new types of stuff and checking them out the library of objects later, this scratched the same itch.
Worth the Wait?: Yeah. I turned around on it quickly after being prepared to dismiss it as artsy BS. Then again, I just like collecting things. My brain is sick.
Spate
- Developer / Publisher: Ayyo Games
- Release Date: 2014-03-28
- Date Completed: 2024-05-28
- Gap: 10 years, 2 months
Spate is a 2D platformer that has an alcoholic private detective infiltrate a physically-bizarre disaster site (sorta like Annihilation) in order to track down a missing millionaire businessman. Since the protagonist, Tim Bluth, has had an absinthe addiction since losing his daughter some time ago he's never quite sure if the trippy visuals are due to the unstable grasp on reality that the disaster site, nicknamed Zone X, contains or his own mind messing with him. The game's mostly cagey about this also. Beyond that, it's a fairly straightforward platformer with obstacles and traps to overcome as well as a few flying sequences that come straight out of Flappy Bird (which, granted, in 2014 was a much bigger deal than it is now).
I've actually covered this game before, back towards the end of 2014 when I was checking out a bunch of possible last-second additions to my GOTY list for that year. I ran into a game-breaking glitch, determined it was probably a hardware issue given the game's intense visual effects, and put the game aside from some point in the future when it would no longer be a factor. Ten years is a heck of a while to wait, but it turned out to be an accidental parallel to the game's story as Bluth lost his daughter a similar amount of time previously. The game was developed by Ayyo Games but really one person in particular: Eric Provan, a CG modeller for numerous big-budget CG animated movies from Disney and Sony. I guess this was an idea for a short he had that he decided would work better as a video game, putting the story's "unreliable narrator" device to use in throwing wrenches at the player that may or may not be real. The visuals are definitely the highlight of the game: there's a murky neon-green fog to everything that represents the absinthe-addled mind of the protagonist, and a few cases where some enormous creature or a conversation with himself proves to be pure hallucination, though the perils of Zone X are very real based on what you can actually walk on and interact with.
The game is narrated with a noir movie voiceover throughout, giving the players a clear sense of the character's interiority and current mental state as the hallucinations serve to rattle him ever further as well as the stark reminders of his deceased child, who frequently pops up as a transparent figure in the background and foreground, due to how she passed away in this very same accursed area. It's not all "crazy drunk man gets lost in the fog of his own mind", as an external narrative slowly forms regarding this missing millionaire and what lies at the center of Zone X, but the game never has you buy fully into the idea that the hero didn't just invent aspects of the current adventure wholesale. One interesting mechanic is that you can take a swig of your drink at any time, which does the discombobulating factor of the landscape no favors as it serves to distort it further, but your jumping height is greatly increased and might often serve as a means of skipping past harder platforming challenges or else make them far easier to handle. No telling what relying too much on your alcohol problem will do, though, especially given how close to the edge this traumatic journey has put the poor sot.
I enjoyed Spate enough for its narrative and visuals, though the gameplay itself leaves much to be desired due to some swimmy physics and a bunch of glitches both visual and mechanical everywhere I turned. There's a moving platform on a central pivot that you're meant to tilt one way with cannonballs, but it keeps hitting something at a specific spot in its rotation: turns out there's an invisible platform there, and I can't imagine why it wouldn't be visible as being able to see it would explain intuitively what this puzzle involves. Other annoying glitches include some very LittleBigPlanet "slipping off platforms that aren't perfectly flat" business, which made those games almost unplayable, and certain physics-based props like a launcher button occasionally dysfunctional. The game checkpoints generously and is otherwise pretty short at an hour and change, so it's not like the game gets too dragged down by its flaws, but there's a certain lack of polish involved. Spate is definitely a game worth checking out for its presentation alone and tolerated for everything else. (Just a shame that it doesn't appear to be available on Steam any more: I picked it up in an ancient Groupees bundle if memory serves.)
Worth the Wait?: Sorta. Like Fract OSC, I've had this one waiting in the wings for far too long.
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