The Talos Principle: Road To Gehenna Review

This review was originally published on www.veizy.com but that was deleted, so now it's archived here.

In an effort to stay up to date with the hottest releases in gaming, here’s a review of some DLC that came out in July for a game that came out last December, it’s the Talos Principle and Road To Gehenna, developed by Croteam and published by Devolver.

The Talos Principle is a post-Portal first-person puzzle game, where you play a robot who awakens in the middle of some mysterious ruins and is compelled to complete a number of puzzles by a mysterious voice from the sky. Puzzles are small and self-contained chambers, which are grouped into sets of 4 or 5 in a small hub world, which can be reached from a larger hub world. The puzzles start off simply enough, with you having to use signal jammers to disrupt forcefields and roaming bombs and the like, but over time they progress to boxes, switches, lasers, and the dreaded device where you can record your actions and then play them back at a later time, creating a sort of co-op experience with yourself. That gameplay concept should have a name because I’ve seen it often enough, such as in Braid or Super Time Force. Probably others too.

Completing puzzles in Talos Principle awards you with tetrominos(you know, the Tetris pieces) which you have to use to solve block-fitting puzzles which then unlock more puzzles. And so the cycle continues. All the while doing this, the booming voice warns you to stay away from “The Tower” that is in the middle of the world. Climbing “The Tower” angers the voice, and is unsurprisingly what you have to do to finish the game. There are audio logs that tell you the backstory of the game, along with computer terminals you can access which contain text logs, and an AI with whom you can discuss philosophy. (Full Disclosure, the original version of that sentence ended with “an AI you can discuss philosophy with” but ending a sentence about discussing philosophy with a preposition just seemed altogether dirty. Please ignore all other grammar errors in this, and all future, reviews. Thankyou.)

For the masochist, there are also completely horrible secret stars that require collecting, the vast majority of which are hidden out of sight so you have to work hard to even find them, let only collect them. They often require you to break puzzles by removing objects from one puzzle and smuggling them into another, which can be maddening. Collecting all of the stars unlocks even more puzzles for you to conquer, so they’re worth getting. I will not lie to you, The Talos Principle is a pretty difficult game but I managed to solve all the standard puzzles on my own. However, I did use a guide for some of the stars. Be warned if you go for them.

Road To Gehenna follows much the same pattern as the main game, with you having to complete a number of self-contained puzzles set in a number of larger hub worlds. Gehenna contains four hub worlds(five if you count the secret world I suppose) each of which contains four or five puzzles, bringing the total puzzle count to 25ish. This figure will seem very small when compared to the main game as the number of hub worlds there is about 25, each containing four or five puzzles bringing the total puzzle count to nearly 150. However, the difficulty of Gehenna assumes that you have completed the entirety of the main game, meaning those 25 puzzles are all a step up in difficulty from the main game. To put it into a time scale, it took me about 20 hours to fully complete the main game, and 8 hours to full complete Gehenna.

After solving each puzzle in Gehenna, you free a trapped robot who leaves behind a computer for you, on which you can log in to the trapped robot’s discussion forum. The storyline of the game is revealed when you navigate and post on this forum, selecting from a few pre-selected options on how to respond when prompted. You can play through a number of basic text adventures, as well as read the musings and stories created by other trapped robots who’s only understanding of human culture was gained by reading through history books. I liked this approach to story telling, as when you’ve completed a particularly tough puzzle it’s nice to take a breather and relax. It also allows people to easily skip the story if they want to hurry on to the next puzzle. More games should take this sort of approach as there are a large portion of gamers who don’t really care about the story, and forcing people to watch lengthy cut-scenes when they’re not invested in the story is the worst.

I would completely recommend The Talos Principle and Road To Gehenna to go along with it. The game is now old enough that it’s likely to show up in some Steam sales if it hasn’t already, and if you’re a fan of puzzle games I think getting this is a no-brainer. In that it will make you feel like you have no brain. Because of how difficult it is. Puns!

I played The Talos Principle and its DLC on the PC, but it’s also available for the PS4 in which the DLC is bundled in. I have 32/40 Steam Achievements over 34 hours playtime. That includes two full playthroughs of the main game in which I got the three different endings, plus a full playthrough of Road To Gehenna. The achievements I didn’t get related to collectibles and performing specific tasks that I didn’t bother doing!

The Talos Principle Website
The Talos Principle Steam Page
The Talos Principle Playstation Store Page

Soma Review

This review was originally published on www.veizy.com but that was deleted, so now it's archived here.

Hello Veizy.com exciting website. It has been ages since I wrote anything because for the past couple of months all I’ve played is Rare Replay, which is super awesome and highly recommended but not that interesting to write about. I have now just played Soma, the new game from Frictional Games, and that IS something interesting to write about. So I’m going to write about it now. Now. NOW!

Soma is a sci-fi horror game by Frictional Games, who are probably most famous for the fantasy horror game Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Soma is an evolution of the gameplay from Amnesia, putting more emphasis on narrative structure and doing away with much of the monster sections and physics puzzles. A change for the better is what I think.

In Soma you play as a man who, in recovering from a car accident, agrees to an experimental brain treatment from a slightly shady doctor. After sitting in an incredibly creepy brain-scanning chair, you wake up 100 years in the future on a research station at the bottom of the sea that’s falling to pieces. There are also creepy robots out to murder you for unknown reasons who you have to avoid. Like Amnesia before it, Soma is combat-free. Enemies must be avoided rather than confronted.

The story of Soma is brilliant. It discusses many mature themes about philosophy, identity, and the nature of being, and somehow it does all that with real sincerity and without being pretentious. A huge improvement over Amnesia is how the game deals with real issues and you have real problems to solve. For example, in Amnesia you’re dealing with magical mystical orbs and unknowable Lovecraftian horrors. In Soma you have to restore power to essential systems, or transfer data from one computer to another. The tasks are more mundane but also grounded in reality and to me, it felt like I had greater connection to the character. It also helps that you play as someone from modern times who awakens in the future, as opposed to the 19th century man from Amnesia.

One of the major things I liked about Soma is how it doesn’t let its mystery drag on. There are a few possibilities for how you woke up at the bottom of the sea, and it isn’t that long until the game tells you what’s up. I had expected for the reveal to be a late game twist and set myself up to be annoyed as the game would throw curve balls at me, as it tricked me into believing the wrong thing. As it was, a subtle thing happened that I picked up on, and then about thirty minutes later the game explained everything. This does leave the unintentional problem of being unable to talk much about the story or characters, as doing so would spoil the first part of the game where you have no clue what’s going on.

My only real problem with Soma is the enemy encounters. You can’t fight the evil robots so you have to either run away or hide from them. This is supposed to make your character feel helpless and weak, but it just feels annoying. There are a few sections that work well with enemies, but they were limited to places where you only have to perform simple tasks whilst avoiding them, such as turning a valve when the robot’s back is turned. Later on in the game where you have to navigate tight tunnels and do complex tasks, the enemies are just an annoyance. There’s no real penalty for death, getting caught by a robot makes your screen go a bit fuzzy and if you get caught too many times you have to restart the section, so enemy sections lack tension. I imagine after the backlash Amnesia-sequel A Machine For Pigs had for its simplistic enemy encounters, Frictional felt they had to make enemy presence more notable, but I think the game would have been better off with a different take on how the enemies should be presented. As is, they don’t really fit in with the high-concept themes the game is trying to convey, following up a monologue about the nature of self with a game of hide and seek with a creepy robot doesn’t really fit. However, this problem is in no way a deal breaker. There were only two enemy sections in the game that I felt were truly frustrating, the rest were solely an annoyance.

I would completely recommend Soma to anyone who can handle mature themes mixed in with a few scares. It isn’t that long and explores subject matter not usually found in video games, told in a very video game-y way. Recommended!

I played Soma on Steam where I finished the game and got all 10 Steam Achievements in a little over 7 hours. The achievements were all story-based and unmissable. Soma is also available for Mac, Linux, and PS4.

Soma Website
Soma Steam Page
Soma UK PSN Page

Short Peace – Ranko Tsukigime’s Longest Day Review

This review was originally published on www.veizy.com but that was deleted, so now it's archived here.

Short Peace – Ranko Tsukigime’s Longest Day is a succinct and easy-to-remember title for a game. It only came out a year ago, totally within the time limit for an exciting review. Also, it’s a PS3 exclusive. Long live the old generation!

Short Peace is an anthology of four short anime films and one short anime game. One of the short films was directed by Katsuhiro Otomo who wrote and directed Akira. The game was written by Suda51 who heads up Grasshopper Manufacture and is primarily responsible for games like No More Heroes and Lollipop Chainsaw. I can tell you right now, this is so going to be my jam.

Starting with the four short films, they are all set in Japan during various time periods. Three are set in the past, one set in the future, and the game is set in the present.

Possessions is about a man getting lost in a forest during a storm and taking shelter in a small shed. Unfortunately for him it’s filled with discarded items that have become possessed by spirits and are seemingly angry at the humans that have tossed them aside. The film deftly switches between horror and comedy, as the strange spirits want to torment the man but he just sees them as useful spare parts. It’s very good.

Combustible is the most artsy of the four and is about a girl from a rich family who is being forced into a marriage she doesn’t want, while longing for the time she spent as a child playing with her rebellious neighbour. Large portions of Combustible are shot as if inside a scroll painting and looks really lovely. The story is the most tragic of the four, and is very good.

Gambo is about a giant bear fighting a demon from space. YES! What more do you need? It’s pretty excellent.

A Farewell to Weapons is set in a post-apocalyptic future where a small military team fight an AI-controlled tank. This was my favourite of the bunch as it had mechs and explosions and all that good stuff. The action scenes are incredibly tense, you are quickly introduced to all the characters and they’re reasonably likable so you don’t want them to die horribly. It is the most excellent.

All of the shorts are great, I would recommend trying to see them.

On to the actual game part, and we have Ranko Tsukigime’s Longest Day! It’s a 2D platform game in which you mostly run right as fast as possible, hitting enemies and jumping onto platforms. If you go too slow, evil spirit hands will catch up and murder you so there is a racing aspect to the game. A few levels eschew this formula, but there isn’t a lot of variation. The game is short too, about an hour long, and a large chunk of that is made up of cut-scenes. Glorious cut-scenes.

The actual gameplay of Ranko’s Longest Day isn’t anything interesting, but the story written by Suda51 is absolutely amazing. The game intentionally fills the short running time with the most overblown, dramatic, and cliched story possible. Ranko Tsukigime is a seemingly normal teenage girl but she’s actually an assassin who uses a violin-sniper rifle, on a quest to murder her father. Along the way she kills people, encounters spirits, discovers her best friends have magical powers, and fights masked lucha libre wrestlers. The entire game is filled with ridiculous plot twists that poke fun at various tropes inherent in anime and could easily fill up a standard 26-episode anime season. And it all takes place in about twenty minutes of cut-scenes.

Every cut-scene in Ranko’s Longest Day is animated in a different style ranging from standard anime animation, 3D CG, static manga panels whizzing about the screen, and my personal favourite, a sort of painted homage to 80s shows like Fist of the North Star with the characters having weirdly detailed/ugly faces. It’s great. The ending is also brilliant, as the game shifts from anime to live action with an idol group singing karaoke. I love it so much.

Were I judging Short Peace as solely a game it would be difficult to recommend. The gameplay is basic and it’s very short. The story is wonderfully chaotic, but twenty minutes of great cut-scenes aren’t enough to make up for the shortcomings. As it also comes packaged with the four short films I would highly recommend it if weird short films are your thing. They’re are all highly entertaining and interesting, and you should probably watch them. And play the game as well.

I completed Ranko Tsukigime’s Longest Day in a little over an hour and earned 5 of the 14 trophies available, the other nine are for collectibles and stuff that I can’t be bothered with. It’s unlikely I will ever play it again. It took about an hour to watch the four short films, bringing the total time for Short Peace to two and a bit hours.

Short Peace at Amazon UK
Short Peace Wikipedia

In generating my links I discovered this was never released at retail in the US and is only available on the US PS Store for $40! That’s quite high. I’m hesitant to recommend Short Peace at all for that price. You can pick up just the four anime segments for $14 from Amazon US, which is still much higher than the £5 for everything on the UK release. Nice to see the US getting the shaft for once. Sad to see a cool, weird thing being priced so stupidly.

Risk of Rain Mini Review

This review was originally published on www.veizy.com but that was deleted, so now it's archived here.

I got Risk of Rain in a Humble Bundle I think, and it’s pretty rad. How rad? You’ll find out right after this gigantic image!

I went into Risk of Rain knowing little about it. It turns out the game is a rougelike action-platformer. Your character is a space marine-type who is aboard a cargo ship full of monsters and special items that is attacked by a dude with a huge sword, causing all the stuff to fall onto the planet below. You then battle through the monsters using a random assortment of the special items in order to activate teleporters that will inevitably lead you to victory.

I played 3 games of Risk of Rain, I didn’t quite hit the hour mark but it’s a roguelike, I know what the deal is. There are multiple different characters to unlock, but you only start with the one so he’s the only one I played as. I found the movement to be quite nice but was slightly dismayed by the shooting. Not being able to shoot up when there are flying enemies who have full 360° movement is annoying; having to run away just to get a good vantage point isn’t something that takes skill, it just takes time and that makes me feel urgh. Aside from that small problem I liked the combat. The different types of gun attack felt nice, the standard attack felt standard, the heavy attack felt nice and meaty, and the combat roll felt cool.

The graphics are gorgeous. They are a minimalist pixel style that look lovely. The design of the monsters is great, they’re the type of thing that would probably look generic if rendered at a proper resolution, but the limited pixels really help to differentiate them from every other game out there. The pixel art explosions are also lovely, I am a huge fan of a good animated explosion. The soundtrack sticks with the retro theme, sounding very chiptune-y but with some actual instrumentation too, and compliments the visuals wonderfully. My ears and eyes were happy.

Am I going to play Risk of Rain again? Yes, I am. I like roguelikes but I feel the genre has become slightly overcrowded recently – I assume due to the success of Spelunky and Binding of Isaac – which has sort of put me off playing some of them as it feels like some developers are trying to cash in on what’s hot right now. Risk of Rain does not make me feel that. It’s been made with the love and care that only someone who truly loves shooting monsters in the face can feel. It’s good.

Risk of Rain Website
Risk of Rain Steam Page

The Novelist Mini Review

This review was originally published on www.veizy.com but that was deleted, so now it's archived here.

A game I got as part of a Humble Bundle, and in the interests of full transparency the first failure of the Veizy.com Steam Summer Sale Playtime, it’s The Novelist.

I played The Novelist for 18 minutes, I couldn’t finish out the hour. The Novelist is one of the least interesting games I’ve ever played, and I am a huge fan of artsy non-games. In The Novelist you play as a ghost who is observing a family that’s staying in a summer house. The family have incredibly boring issues that you, as a ghost, have to help them with. The father is a novelist with writer’s block. The wife thinks her marriage is failing. The child wants to play with his toys. I don’t care.

I see what The Novelist was trying to do. Maybe if I played it for longer I would have found out they succeeded, however I highly doubt that. It seems like they wanted the game to be about the minutia of life and how the little things are what’s most important. Instead all I saw was the minutia of life and how dull and boring it is.

I don’t want to write any more about this game. It was so, so dull. Urghh. I am never to play it again.

The Novelist Website
The Novelist Steam Page

DeadCore Mini Review

This review was originally published on www.veizy.com but that was deleted, so now it's archived here.

What I love about the Steam Summer Sale is that so many games go on sale for such a cheap price, it’s almost impossible to not look at what the games are. When a game I’ve never heard of is available for £2 it would be insanity not to see what it’s about. And with DeadCore I am so glad I did.

DeadCore is a fast-paced first-person platform game. The official synopsis says it’s for speedrunning and it’s clear the game has been designed for people who can do super impressive trick jumps at high speed. You have double jumps and air dashes at your disposal and your goal is to keep going forward! This is a purely gameplay-focused game, but there are some text logs to pick up that give some context to the abstract world you find yourself in.

The game looks gorgeous. The platforms are all floating in a fog-filled void with some sort of whirlpool-esque thing far below. I love the art design, it hits me right in the cyberpunk. The music is great too, it has the right level of rhythm and oomph to enhance your jumping and make everything feel so cool.

On the whole, the gameplay feels lovely. The player movement is smooth and the level design is such that you never have to slow down, you keep to the rhythm and you keep moving. I ended up finishing the 3rd level during my playtime, and I was slightly annoyed by some of the laser grids you had to dash through. I felt the game was a bit unforgiving with how accurately you must dash through small laser tunnels, there was one checkpoint where I easily died 20 times messing up by dashing into the lasers, and the game doesn’t really give you feedback on whether you were too high or too low. It’s a bit nitpicky because by the end of the level I was getting a feel for the laser tunnel dashes, but I still feel it’s a valid point.

To be played again? Yes! There’s a specific part of my brain that loves running crazy fast, jumping in-between rotating death lasers, and being flung through the air by pressure cannons. DeadCore appeals specifically to that part of my brain and it is glorious. Play it!

DeadCore Steam Page

Legend of Grimrock Mini Review

This review was originally published on www.veizy.com but that was deleted, so now it's archived here.

The first game I bought in the Steam Summer Sale 2015, it’s Legend of Grimrock!

Legend of Grimrock is a first-person grid-based dungeon-crawler action-rpg. You command a team of prisoners who are absolved of their crimes by being thrown into Mount Grimrock, a scary mountain full of monsters and traps that nobody has ever escaped from. I wandered around the dungeons murdering things, standing on pressure plates, and opening doors with keys. It has a lovely old-school Dungeon Master feel but without being bogged down by the tedium that older games tend to have.

The game looked very nice, but in the hour I played there wasn’t much variety, the walls and floors were all the same grimy stone. It’s entirely possible – and probable I suppose – that if you descend further the scenery will change, but I can’t comment on what I didn’t see. The lighting effects were very lovely and the monster design was interesting. In my short playtime I fought giant snails, skeleton warriors, two different sorts of weird mushroom monsters, and some horribly flying bat thing.

I found the combat to be a bit slow paced for my liking. Most fights involved me hitting the monster for low damage, then the monster hitting me for low damage, and this repeated for about 30 seconds. It wasn’t difficult to fight enemies, just time consuming. I think if enemies did more damage to me per hit, and I did more damage to enemies per hit, the game would go quicker but wouldn’t change the end result. Also, I didn’t appreciate the game flat out lying to me. “Only the 2 characters in the front can do melee attacks” the game said, and I believed it because why would the game lie to me? And then after 15 minutes of an unused spear in my inventory, I accidentally equipped it to a character in the back and discovered it was a long weapon so could be used to attack. Thanks game!

This mini review came off more negative then I was expecting, but I really liked Legend of Grimrock and I will be playing it again. I had a lovely time killing the giant snails and I felt the game did a great job of capturing the feel of old-school dungeon-crawlers but updating them for modern times. Wonderful!

In the interests of full transparency, I bought the Grimrock bundle that contained the sequel as well, but I’m not going to play it as part of the VSSSP because playing a sequel before finishing the first would be wrong on multiple levels. This technically breaks one of my rules, but they’re my rules so I can break them however I want! Haha!

Legend of Grimrock Website
Legend of Grimrock Steam Page

Jazzpunk Mini Review

This review was originally published on www.veizy.com but that was deleted, so now it's archived here.

Jazzpunk! It fell into my Steam Library via a Humble Bundle, it’s the third game in the Veizy.com Steam Summer Sale Playtime, but it’s the first where I’ve broken one of the rules. Instead of playing the game for an hour, I instead played it until completion which took about two and a half hours. A short game for sure, but an excellent one!

Jazzpunk is a first-person comedy-art puzzle game. You play as a secret agent operating out of a train station and must undertake missions heavily influenced by the aesthetic of 1960s spy fiction. There are also a large number of references to sci-fi, video games and other alt-pop culture sprinkled throughout. There’s a side quest where you must help a frog cross the road. You throw a jar of spiders in someone’s face. You return rented videos. It’s brilliant. Its short running time is filled with so many ideas that I found genuinely hilarious and I’ve never really encountered before. Perhaps the funniest moment for me is early on when you infiltrate the soviet consulate and get an unexpected camera move. It’s a genius idea that can only be done in video games and I loved that the game was funny in multiple different ways. Even top-tier comedy games like Portal still rely on just excellent writing to be funny, whereas Jazzpunk makes jokes with its gameplay mechanics and that’s amazing. There’s a brilliant YouTube video by Every Frame A Painting about Edgar Wright that explains this better than I can, and although that video is about cinema, the idea that there are multiple styles of comedy and most aren’t being used is true in video games too.

Jazzpunk most reminded me of the excellent work of Blendo Games, specifically Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights of Loving. I would highly recommend both of those, Gravity Bone being available for free from the Blendo website. They are first-person spy-comedy games that have a similar aesthetic and I love them both.

I ended my previous two mini reviews with the question of whether or not I would play the game more. Seeing as how I finished Jazzpunk the answer would be no. The game has a lot of side stuff in each level, but I feel that I found the vast majority so there isn’t much replay value for me. I would still highly recommend everyone play it. It’s the best game I’ve played in the Veizy.com Steam Summer Sale Playtime so far, and if you’re the type who gets annoyed if a game is too short then make sure you buy it when it inevitably comes on sale. Do it!

Jazzpunk Website
Jazzpunk Steam Page