Nylige anmeldelser av Aquarion

It's good. If you liked the others, and you like puzzle games and complicated stories with complicated resolutions, you'll like it. It's darker and heavier than the others, but I found the puzzles less complex (I've got fewer notepad pages of things that might get me into complicated questions if the police found it than previous games have left me with.)

Interestingly where the previous games got extremely fragmented towards the end as you jump around multiverses up until the final rooms, this one starts off fragmented and impossible to follow and draws itself more together towards the end.

There is a twist, and it's really weird, though the clues are all there, but it does involve the game lying to you a bit (though not the characters). I've got mixed feelings about it.

I would award this game y chain-swords out of a possible x.

Half visual novel, half puzzle escape rooms, very Japanese, extremely complicated plots that take sharp turns into the weirder end of scifi and conspiracy, branching narratives that feed into each other in a complicated layer cake of weirdness. I have now completed them, and thrown into the recycling a small shrubbery of actual literal paper notes.

If you like escape room puzzle games, you will like this. The plot is weird, the characters are mostly fun, and the reveals are appropriately twisty. The puzzles aren't too crazy, but you may need a notebook.

A worthy successor to one of the seminal adventure games. It's not perfect - the targeting can be a little finicky, and a couple of puzzles require you to do things in exactly the right order before the next thing fires - but the hacking gimick is neat and well used, and the puzzles on the fairer side of brain-bending. I dearly hope it's not another 26 years until the next one...

Do you like: Classic adventure games, well written characters, Trippy worldbuilding and a distinct lack of "Use rubber chicken on concept of sand" beat-the-designer puzzles? Buy this game, it's great.

Do you like open world 3D shooters? Probably try the next door along,

Maize is an adventure game about talking corn which features a small teddy bear with a thick russian accent who is increasingly annoyed at how often you ask him to crawl through grates to solve puzzles. The puzzles aren't hard, the humour reminds me of early Zork, the writing's not awful and the voice acting's quite good. The problem is that if you don't click with the humour, you're going to hate it fairly quickly.

I'm not sure the three hours it takes to play is worth the full £15 price for it (I picked it up in a bundle) but if you see this going for less than a fiver or so, I'd recommend picking it up.

The Magic Circle is the the closest thing to an advancement of whatever genre Portal is since… well, since Portal. It’s not Portal, though. It’s kind of an RPG in the same way that Portal is a First Person Shooter. The trappings of its mechanics are within the recognised mechanics from a million first-person RPG games, but that’s wrapped inside a well-devised universe with well-written characters, and the actual gameplay is spun out at 90 degrees from that. If I had to add another game’s influence to cite, The Stanley Parable is where I’d go next.

And I can’t say a lot more than that about it. The game is a metafiction, as you can see from the mostly-in-universe website. In-universe, The Magic Circle is the long awaited, long delayed sequel to a massively beloved twenty-year-old text-based adventure game (Real-world touchstones: Ultima, Bards Quest, Fool’s Errand). The author of that game is a classic games-autor white-bearded-male, who has taken on the avatar of the great God within the game – the Skyfather – but whose twenty-year promises of future games are starting to ring hollow. Veteran gamers will instantly recognise the heavy flavours of Richard Garriott in the character’s history, along with strong notes of Peter Molyneux and even to people like Cliff Johnson, and here you start, as a player given early access to this massively long awaited sequel to a hugely popular game. Except there are some assets which look… strange in context. Something isn’t quite right. The trailer hints at this fairly well.



The game plays a lot with concepts of game space, of being inside which game. It has a lot to say about narrative vs mechanics (coming from former Bioshock developers, there’s an air of critical catharsis which I would suspect more of being dirty laundry if they hadn’t got Ken Levine to voice a character), game development, fandom, actually getting things done and the sorrow of half finished universes.

It took me about 6 hours of playtime to get through it, and while that’s quite short, it’s fully formed and… complete, really. There’s a lot there, and a late twist that spins a lot of the game on its head.

It’s in early access at the moment, but as I say the game is complete. Early Access is an early release before they’ve got the translations down, which will take a while to finish and collate – there’s a lot of there there – and as far as I could tell all the glitches were intentional (it is, in part, a game about inserting your gameplay crowbar into the cracks of the world).

You should play this game. I hope they release a demo too, but don’t watch Lets Plays, don’t watch it streaming.

… And that’s it, really. There’s some deeper stuff about the mechanics, about juxtapositioning, about commentary that I’ll get into eventually, but so much of what’s cool is tied heavily narrative-based modification of the mechanics, and I like the story too much to spoil it for you without giving people a chance to buy it first.

First Glance Review: Did you like Baldur's Gate style games? Don't buy this. This will suck sixty hours of your life, and do you have sixty spare hours to spend on computer games? I didn't think so. Don't get this game. Your loved ones and dependants will thank you. It's awesome.