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The Turing Test is a puzzle game that is often at odds with itself: it is packed with design decisions that work against the discussions present in its story. It’s a game that contradicts itself at every turn.
You play as Ava Turing, an engineer on board a space station above Jupiter’s Europa, who one day is awakened from cryosleep by an AI called Tom. Tom immediately briefs her on the situation: after encountering a life form on the surface of Europa, the rest of her crew went dark. She’s to go to the station on the surface and find out what happened to them. When she arrives there, however, Ava discovers that the station has been modified by her colleagues, who transformed [...]
Affordable Space Adventures is a puzzle-adventure game that manages to make better use of the Wii U gamepad than any of Nintendo’s own titles on the system. Telling a story that confronts the exploitative practices of large corporations while offering innovative mechanics that create unique puzzles, the game only falters when it comes to its difficulty curve, which falls sharply during the climax.
The game aptly opens with a commercial: Uexplore invites people to participate in its exploration program to the planet Spectaculon, showing lush green landscapes, magnificent waterfalls under a striking rainbow, and dolphins jumping out of the water at sunset. The video promises [...]
Zero Time Dilemma, the third and final entry in the thrilling adventure series Zero Escape, has a narrative structure as complex as those of previous games, although it introduces less interesting characters and ends with a couple of questionable twists that don’t survive a retrospective analysis.
The game begins when nine people wake up trapped in a cell and are approached by a mysterious individual – dressed as a plague doctor – who presents himself simply as Zero. Zero informs them that, if they want to live, they must participate in the so-called “Decision Game” and starts the first round by throwing a coin up in the air: if they can guess the result, they will [...]
Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy is the sixth and – hitherto – last game in the series to feature the archeologist Hershell Layton as the protagonist. It is, however, an uneven game that tries to offer more freedom to the player but at the expense of pacing and narrative focus. It still has its share of bizarre and tragic characters, but the narrative loses steam too soon to have the same impact of previous installments.
The story begins when Layton receives a letter from an esteemed professor that tells him of an archeological breakthrough: professor Sycamore claims that he’s found a “living mummy” in the isolated and snow-laden town of Fraenbourg. Hershell Layton, [...]
The World Next Door is a frustrating game. It presents a story about alterity, introducing a world of magical creatures just a portal away from ours, with a protagonist that feels more at ease in this alien environment than at home. It subverts match-three puzzle games, creating a dynamic combat system that requires constant movement and thinking. And then it throws everything out of the window by refusing to develop its themes, its characters, its world, and its mechanics.
The game’s protagonist is Jun, a human girl who “has been dreaming of leaving Earth her entire life,” and that suddenly has the opportunity to visit the world of Emrys for a single day after she wins the [...]
Paper Mario: Sticker Star is one of the most unusual entries in its franchise thanks to a controversial decision by Shigeru Myamoto. Treating the great volume of story in the previous games as unnecessary fat, Nintendo’s most important developer advised the development team to rip it out from the adventure as much as possible, thereby shifting the focus to its main mechanic: the use of stickers.
The story, however, has not been completely removed from the game, being only simplified. In the midst of festivities commemorating the passage of the famous Sticker Star, Bowser performs the only action expressly forbidden by local conventions – touching the star –, which results in [...]