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Developed by Tequila Works, Rime is an adventure game that offers a fantastical setting dominated by a melancholic atmosphere, which gives allegorical undertones to the journey of its young protagonist. The game’s level design, however, is problematic in the way it discourages exploration with an abundance of points of no return.
The story begins with a shipwreck, when a young boy wakes up on the shores of a mysterious island. Towering above him is a gigantic tower with the symbol of a lock carved into its top. The boy proceeds to find a way to reach it, being occasionally accompanied by a fox and followed by a shadowy figure in clad red.
The game’s [...]
The tricky thing about mysteries is that the answers to them are rarely more fascinating than the questions themselves, which can lead to a disappointing payoff if those answers are the only thing that matters to the narrative. Observation falls into this trap: it successfully builds an intriguing atmosphere of dread in its first hours, telling a story about a space station under the influence of mysterious forces, but then decides to lean heavily on some late twists and revelations that are supposed to be surprising and thought-provoking, but end up being just obvious and silly.
The story takes place in the eponymous space station, focusing on an astronaut named Emma Fisher, [...]
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 [...]
Professor Layton is a franchise that has never needed constant revamps to work well. Its games, after all, are about only two things: their story and puzzles – and two puzzles are never the same. The fact that Miracle Mask doesn’t do much to reinvent the wheel, then, is far from a problem, as it still offers the franchise’s best story after The Unwound Future, and a large number of puzzles to solve.
Miracle Mask begins with Professor Layton being called by a former friend to the town of Monte D’Or, which is being terrorized by a mysterious fellow called the Masked Gentleman. After arriving in town during carnival festivities, Layton is witness to one of the villain’s [...]
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 [...]