Recent reviews by The Guy

Episode 1 is a huge improvement over Episode 0 (the demo). There are way more options and a bigger space to explore. Puzzles are challenging enough to be entertaining. Most of the fun comes from poking around and trying different approaches to solve a problem — just as you do in real life hacking (I was told).
Story steps up too. There are some cliché parts, but it is overall pretty tense and atmospheric.
I also want to point out: story and gameplay a intertwined very well. The things you do make sense in the games context (please don't hack in real life).

The Wittness is one of those rare games, which respect your intelligence... well, give you have some of that.
Let me assure you: every single puzzle in this game is logical and can be solved with the information provided by the game. All those reviews here, that say you have to look up answers or guess blindley to proceed, are wrong. Those people lacked the intelligence to make the connection.
Let me say it again: every single puzzle in this game is perfectly logical. You can solve them all by paying attention, asking yourself the right questions and making connections.
This right there is the very beauty of The Wittness. You don't just execute; you think.

If that's not for you: please move on.

One of my favourite OSTs

I wouldn't call myself a Jump'n Run fan, but every now and then a strong title appears and sucks me in with its addictive flow state.
Dustforce is one of those games, that are repetitive in the best possible way. Where many games are a sequence of similar levels, each played a single time, Dustforce is a set of unique challenges, which have to be tried again and again to be mastered.

Let's talk about the game's overall structure first. The player is thrown into a hub world, filled with several doors, which lead to the individual levels. While in theory the player can reach every door from the start, most of them are locked with bronze, silver or golden padlocks. Those levels already accessible, need to be played to unlock bronze doors, which again are required for silver keys and so forth. In order to open all locks of a kind, every level below that kind has to be finished with a top ranking (more on that later) — but lower rankings accumulate and can unlock at least some of the higher levels as well.
This is a great way to keep the player within the flow curve. Hard levels — and boy, they get hard — can't be accessed until the player has proven his/her salt. And by using a ranking system the game makes sure, that the player actually played well and didn't just luckily stumble over the finish line. On the other hand, players are still able to unlock a few new levels, as long as they at least perform okay.

There is a second design decision preventing players from taking challenges above their skill level. I mentioned earlier, that levels are accessed through a hub world. Within that hub world, the level doors aren't just lined up, like they are in Rayman Legends for example. Instead the hub world is a level itself, where the doors have to be reached.
Doors to simple levels can be reached by walking, with a few occasional jumps in between. Doors of more difficult levels require skill and a solid understanding of different movement mechanics. And to top it all: it's not like you need any arbitrary trick, but exactly those skills needed within the level you are trying to reach. By this, the game makes sure you know what to do in every level.

Let's talk about level structure next. Most levels are linear, with a clear route and a bad guy to beat up at the end. There is dust on the floor (or on the ceiling or wherever) that the avatar brushes away automatically when running over it. The interface has a combo counter, indicating how much dust has been collected. If no dust is swept for five seconds or the player gets hit or dies, the combo is interrupted and the counter reset.
After finishing a level, the player is evaluated for the amount of dust cleaned (completion) and the number of combo interruptions (finesse). To get a double S (and unlock a key) all dust has to be collected without a single interruption.
Evaluating both completion and finesse is a clever way to ensure good play. Abusing blinking time or brute forcing every single obstacle won't bring you the necessary finesse to advance. Using shortcuts to pass by hard sections won't work either, because dust in skipped sections is guaranteed to be missed. You can use these techniques to finish a level of course — and some levels can be done ridiculously fast using shortcuts, — but harder levels are reserved for good players.

All this dynamic balancing is necessary to keep players engaged while they still learn how the game is played. Dustforce has a lot of movement techniques, from sliding down slopes over fast-falling to running at the ceiling. Every movement requires precise input. In contrast to the heavily automated system of an Assassins Creed, your avatar in Dustforce will do nothing that you don't tell him/her explicitly.
Unfortunately not all of Dustforce's options are taught properly. The game starts with a set of three solid tutorials, explaining most important aspects — how to reset your double-jump for example. Abstruse, while nevertheless useful, techniques like spike-jumping on the other hand, are left unmentioned.
It took me a few hours (and a good youtube tutorial) to "get" the controls and gain a solid level of mastery. Those few hours weren't boring at all though and the top-class Jump'n Run I got in return was a satisfying trade.

There isn't so much, that I want to say about Dustforce's aesthetics, but I can't let them be unmentioned.
The game's sprites have few details and let their well-chosen color pallets speak instead. I also like how the four playable characters differ in design. Each of them cleans with another tool, from broom to vacuum cleaner, and color, animations and hats all differ too. I'm particularly fond of Dustworth's design, who looks like Luigi got old fast after exorcising his mansion.
There are few sound effects — and no voices at all — but that almost feels intentional to underline the game's great chiptune soundtrack. Almost all songs are strong enough to stand their own, but they accompany each levels theme pretty well too.

Mechanics, structure, balancing and aesthetics all interlock and support each other just right. When I started Dustforce, I was expecting a satisfying high complexity platformer, but the game is so fine tuned and works so well that I'm surprised that it isn't more popular. I highly recommend it for every Jump'n Run fan out there.

Read more of my reviews at:
theguygaming.com

Thomas Was Alone is a textbook example for subtractive game design. It has exactly the elements it needs and none more. Every level is a purposeful examination of the given game mechanics; nothing repeats, nothing is unnecessary.

Thomas is a red rectangle. His skills comprise falling and jumping, which are the perfect requirements for a 2D Platformer. But in contrast to most modern games of that genre, TWA abstains from more movement mechanics, like wall jumps or dashing. TWA builds entirely on jumping. It tries different variations of jumping: high jumps, double jumps and jumping with reversed gravity. Later in the game, various combinations and switching attributes on the run are explored.
Every new game element is carefully introduced. The first level is a short movement from left to right, in the second level you fall down several platforms and the third tells you how to jump and drops you in front of a staircase.

Other rectangles join Thomas on his way. Each of them has an own shape and set of skills, and the player has to switch between them to make use of their abilities.
Laura for example is flat and can be used as trampoline by other characters, to reach higher places. On the other hand, her jump doesn't reach very high, so you may need to build a staircase with the other rectangles.
Again every skill is introduced and then built upon in following levels. The player has to combine the different characters, stack them to extend a jump or push buttons to help the others.

The rectangles journey is accompanied by a narrator, voiced by Danny Wallace, who also intones characters direct speech — just like an audio book reader does.
Wallace manges to breathe life into the colored rectangles. He shows off, that you don't need elaborate cutscenes or even realistic character models, to tell a charming while predictable friendship story. The rectangles are quirky and likeable, from the cynical Chris to the energetic Sarah.

The game is a concentrated experience. There is nothing you could take away without hurting it in one way or the other. In a time where many games seem to padded with sidequest and loaded with useless features, it was a joy to play such a refined game as TWA is. I'm a harsh critic with games that don't value my time as much as I do, so I feel a need to particularly praise TWA for its well thought out content. It took me less than 3 hours to finish the game, and it was worth every minute.

Read more of my reviews at theguygaming.com

The prince of hell (a skeleton rabbit with a cape) got photographed together with his rubber duck and is lampooned on the internet for it. The only reasonable reaction — of course — is to kill everyone who has seen those embarrassing pictures.
Developer Arkedo sets Hell Yeah's morbid humourous tone from the very start of the game. What follows is a surprisingly good 2D platformer.

On his journey to kill every single one of the 100 monsters fallen in disgrace, our hero rabbit visits various areas of hell, ranging from a casino to space. The game is packed with comic like brutality; exploding enemies, blood fountains and grotesque finishing moves.
On first sight, Hell Yeah seems like one of those gag games, that aim to be taken with a pinch of salt and don't really try to be good games at core. I'm talking about the likes of Brütal Legend or Goat Simulator; games that wouldn't be enjoyable, if their mechanics were stripped off their context. But after finishing Hell Yeah, I feel like I should give up on that prejudice towards gag games.

Hell Yeah takes typical platformer mechanics, like wall jumps, moving platforms and Donkey Kong Countryesque cannons, and combines them with guns, which can aim in 360 degrees, and a buzz saw. That core mechanic itself is functional — precise jumps were a bit tricky though, because there's next to no acceleration and only one movement speed (the directional input is binary and there is no run button).

Steady variety is what makes the game fun in the end. You can play on gambling machines in the casino. There's a part where you operate a submarine and you can shoot rainbows, that bounce off of walls, somewhere else.
Finishing moves are a source of variety too. The monsters don't have individual moves, but more than 25 different finishers are included in the game. They are occasionally really creative and particularly show of the games polished visuals. All of them start with a short quick-time-event or mini game, making them clearly more interesting than most games finishing moves, but bottom line, they still get old after you see the same animation the third time.

After finishing the game, I was positively surprised how much bang I got for the time invested. Every mechanic and idea is used for a short amount of time and then dropped for something entirely new. Take the rainbow gun I mentioned earlier. You get the gun play three or four different situations with it — which all require the gimmick, that shots bounce off walls — and then you never see it again.
On the other hand, the short innovation cycle leaves no room for any of the mechanics to grow complex, which again, fits the far from serious visual and narrative style of Hell Yeah.
It's a cool game. It cracks the jokes, shows off some crazy ideas and ends before it gets repetitiv. Play this with a friend and a few bottles of beer and I bet you have on or two great evenings.

Read more of my reviews at:
theguygaming.com

Lumino City is a game about playfulness and curiosity, which is most apparent in its stunning visuals — the game world was built in papercraft and photographed, akin to pre-rendered backgrounds in the Playstation era, — but the gameplay underlines it just as well.

The player controls Lumi, a little girl trying to find her grandpa, who got abducted to Lumino City. The game is a point-and-click, featuring only a little bit of, mostly environmental, storytelling, but makes up for that with a lot of puzzles.
The puzzles are challenging. You are rarely told what you have to do and sometimes information, crucial to the understanding of the puzzle, is hidden somewhere else.
There is a section where an old man teaches Lumi a guitar song. The player has to memorize the notes and play them from memory afterwards. If you make a mistake, the old man will repeat the part you flunked, but you have to play through the entire piece at once, without any guidelines, if you want to proceed.
Parts like these make me feel like I'm taking seriously. I don't need a pop-up telling me what to do, if I take longer than ten seconds to solve a puzzle and I don't need someone telling me exactly, where to click or which button to press, at any given moment.

And in case you really don't get the puzzle, there is a pretty clever way to give you a hint.
At the start of the game, Lumi acquires the Handymanual, a book filled with hundreds of pages of strange gadgets sketches. On the second page is an index of equations, corresponding to the games puzzles. The needed parameters can be found in the surrounding area or the puzzle itself. The solution of an equation is the page number, where the puzzles solution is noted.
Of course, no one tells you how the Handymanual is used; you are told how to open it, no more.
I don't want to go into a lot of puzzle examples here. Finding things out for yourself is the most delightful part of this game — And I can assure you, every puzzle in this game can be solved by logical reasoning and only little trial-and-error.

With Lumino City, State of Play delivered a game of "Why not?". Why not hide puzzle solutions in a book several hundred pages book? Why not grow potatoes on the top of your roof? Why not combine a lighthouse with a windmill? Why not attach small houses to the side of a cliff?
Just trying something out is fun and Lumino City conveys this message pretty well. While the game is linear in its core, the player has to be curious, play with the given appliances and ultimately find the path for himself.
In my opinion, this is exactly how a puzzle game should be like.

Read more of my reviews at:
theguygaming.com

It would be just another winter morning in the Neo-San Francisco of 2064, if there wasn't that little distressed looking robot, standing before your bed. Soon you find yourself in a mesh of hackers, androids and a corporation hungry for power.

Read Only Memories, a 2015 released Point-and-Click adventure by MidBoss, tells the story of a fortuneless journalist, who helps the worlds first conscious robot on his quest to find his kidnapped creator.
The game is a homage to the cyberpunk genre of the 1980's, presenting itself in a Snatcheresque pixel-look, underlined by a catchy chiptune soundtrack. ROM's strengths lie in a diverse, albeit unnecessarily forced diverse, character cast and their atmospheric dialogues. Innocuous puzzles in a Point-and-Click typical manner, fill in the smaller, but not less important, part of the game.

With a broke freelancer in a run-down apartment, ROM chooses a cyberpunk typical start. Spam-mail in your inbox and a few pokes towards consumer society (e.g. having to pay for listening to more than 30 seconds of a demo tape) seem to support the noir theme, but soon the game takes on lighter tones and shows less grimness than I expected.
The protagonists financial situation is never mentioned a second time, no inequality between classes of society or consume abuse is shown and none of the characters met during the course of the game are in any serious trouble.
Yes, there is the questionable movement "Human Revolution", demonstrating against the dehumanization of gene manipulation. But the movement stays peaceful and persists on a single argument (humans should be nothing but humans), making it more of a side note than an important party to the game.
The corporation Parallax might have a lot of power and bare evil plans, but none of the power is shown off anywhere. Actually quite the opposite: the hacker Tomcat undermines the Parallax system on a daily basis and the player abuses several security holes throughout the game.
Even the illegal part of society isn't intimidating at all. Teenagers fake passports in exchange for Anime-posters and the most dangerous weapon encountered is a paralyser gun.

That said, the light atmosphere, although genre uncharacteristic, fitted ROM pretty well.
The different characters are joyous natures and engage in easygoing dialogue.

But before coming to a conclusion, I want to point out one issue I had playing ROM. As a development team who strongly supports the LGBT community, MidBoss put a lot of emphasise on characters of different sexualities and gender identities. While this definitely contributes to the diversity of the cast, there were some cases where it felt out of place.
The character Sympathy for example, who appears in a handful of superficial dialogues, is clearly communicated to be transgender. That's fine with me, but why do I need to know? I exchange a few sentences with her, without really getting to know the character. Sympathy's gender identity doesn't influence the tone of the conversation or my non-existent understanding of her character and could just as well be unmentioned.
In situations like these, it felt to me like MidBoss just put in LGBT characters to satisfy a quota, instead of enriching the cast.

Don't get me wrong, ROM does a lot of things right in this regard. Characters like Turing and Tomcat benefit from their unstereotypical personalities. But mindlessly distributing sexualities and gender identities, just for the sake of representing them, is a weak practice of diversity.

To finally get to a conclusion: Read Only Memories is a well-rounded story driven game. Memorable characters and lighthearted humor compensate for the diluted cyberpunk aspects and make Read Only Memories worth a play.

Read more of my reviews at:
theguygaming.com

A photographer and a pig engineer take on an army of aliens to free their planet. Add some airily humor and steady variety for a solid, though unpolished, game. It's a short and easy accessible action-adventure, telling a clichéd story with a cartoony look, while constantly jumping back and forth between several rather shallow mechanics.

The problem I have with BGE is a lack of elaboration on most game aspects.
The game world, Hillys, looks interesting at first sight. With its water heavy scenery populated by hovercraft boats, it emits a Venetian flair, but offers few places to explore or play around with and quickly reduces to a mean of travelling between more important locations (which unfortunately are all monotonous factories and caves).
Similarly the story starts off interesting, with the broke protagonist Jade taking a shady job for a rebel organisation, but wanes to a surprise less "save your friend from the enemy base", with none of the, admittedly likeable and relatable, characters growing beyond their starting point.

BGE draws from a wide range of mechanics without mastering any of them.
The fighting system gives next to no options. The player can only do a series of standard attacks (performed by mashing the button) or dodge, which both don't even work well, due to few rigid movement directions and lack of camera-control. At least boss fights demand to read the opponents moves and occasionally aim a shot.
After being the main mechanic for the first part of the game, fighting is mostly replaced by stealth passages, that neither require any planning ahead nor the creativity games like Deus Ex and Metal Gear Solid are known for. The guards in BGE behave on painfully obvious cycles, leaving the player to the weak challenge of switching cover every time they look in the other direction. A less linear level design or some gadgets for distraction would have been a significant improvement.

But Jade and her friends don't solely travel by foot. A surprising amount of the game is spent driving the hovercraft, be it in a race, a shoot-out or maneuvering a mine-field. I found the hovercraft parts to be quite enjoyable. It is the one game mechanic providing the most options: shooting lasers or guided missiles, jumping and speed boosting. The races have tight curves and obstacles, making them feel a good amount of fast and the adroitness tests have reasonable difficulties, neither tedious nor making me break a sweat.

The last gameplay aspect to keep in mind is Jades iconic camera. The mechanic is straight forward: aim the camera at the subject, adjust zoom and press the button. But the mechanic is less about the execution, but more about the exploration. Rewarding the player for animal pictures, is a clever way to make him care for the game world. The main quests are achieved by taking photographs as well, underlining the theme (although it's made pretty obvious what to photograph in this case).

Despite unchallenging gameplay and extraneous story, BGE overall provides solid entertainment. Most of the games parts are shallow or just not memorable, but none of them are repeated often enough to bore the player. The eight to ten hours of gameplay are packed with racing gangsters, fighting aliens, weaving through mine-fields, sneaking behind guards backs, climbing through factory vents, chasing and being chased.
Beyond Good & Evil is an entertaining game, but leaves no permanent impression.

Read more of my reviews at:
theguygaming.com