The day Valve announced the availability of the television-friendly Big Picture Mode for Steam I hooked up my laptop to the PC, dug out my Bluetooth game controller, and began downloading Transformers: Fall of Cybertron.
This is not actually a little blue apple, though you might be forgiven for thinking so. It's a lonely little helicopter, who got separated from its little helicopter friends and sucked into a bizarre underground labyrinth.
The dark and twisty maze in question is a series of contradictions. Some areas move right to…
Slow jazz? Check. Disheveled office? Check. Intimations that someone will walk through the door at any moment? Check. All the signs of a classic film noir-inspired game are well in play.
Except our detective seems awfully young. And grabby. And in fact not detective-like at all. Really, the whole opening of the game…
I am a big fan of adventure games. They've been my favorite genre for decades. I like them quite a lot. Enough to have named my cat Guybrush. I have sampled and enjoyed many indie adventure games, both old and new, this year. And I mention all of this so that you will realize the weight of my words when I say:
The early Miner Wars 2081 alpha I played last year was little more than a spaceship equipped with a mining laser capable of blasting tunnels through massive asteroids. I played with it for hours. Since then the Descent-inspired space sim has grown into something much bigger.
I'm a sucker for a classic point-and-click adventure game. The LucasArts adventures of the early 1990s are how I fell in love with gaming, and to this day remain the biggest influence on my taste in digital worlds. So whenever I see a new entry in the genre appear, I have to jump on it. The most recent to catch my…
It's the far future. You're a salvager, and you've been notified that a derelict, ancient 25th-century colony ship, one of the generation ships Earth sent out eons before you were born, has been found drifting aimlessly in space. Your task is to dig through all of the log files you can turn up on board the…
You Have to Win the Game, it tells me—it's right there in the title!—but I just can't. At least, not yet. I've tried, and with more hours to play maybe I could. But I have to admit that on first blush, this retro platformer stumped me more than once, which is awesome.
Most games concerned with keeping their heroes undetected create a reliance on a few familiar mechanics. Sticking to shadows, staying out of sight and keeping quiet have staple stealth mechanics for as long as the genre's been around. And Dynamite Jack uses all of those. But, given that the only weapon that the…
While I was playing A Valley Without Wind, someone asked me what I was up to. Here's what I said:
Joy is a terribly underrated commodity in video games. Most of the games I play inspire all kinds of feelings—stress, tension, exhilaration, frustration, even less-celebrated but still mentionable sensations like "comforting routine" and "empowering murder-fantasy."
I'm playing an April 2011 build of a game due out in 2013. It only has one level, one hero and only six enemies to dispatch. I've played through it a dozen times since last night.
Why would I feature a game that came out last year in our relatively new weekly PC Indie Spotlight feature? I simply couldn't resist the sweet allure of a procedurally generated twin-stick shooter that never played the same way twice.
Our beaten, bloodied and bruise party stood before the gold-trimmed door, attempting to unravel the secret means of accessing the treasures beyond it. Decimated after a fierce battle with skeletal knights, we should be making haste to the nearest healing stone, but we'd caught the whiff of treasure, and there was no…
A single beam of light must travel through a solar system plunged into darkness in Waveform, a musical arcade adventure that places the hopes of entire galaxy on a single mouse button.
