Platform: PC

I’ve had pretty good luck with the string of adventure games I’ve played lately. It was inevitable that sooner or later I’d come across a dud. Yesterday had promise. I was initially drawn to the slick graphics (well, slick for a point and click game). However, the game is bogged down with nonsensical puzzles and an uneven tone to the story. There’s a horrible tangent where your character needs to learn martial arts that almost made me give up on the game completely. Eventually the story comes back around but it never is that gripping.

Started out okay enough despite the idiotic button mashing mechanics. But, man, this game became pure tedium by the ending. If there was a story here, it was totally lost on me. Just a bunch of feathery haired leather-boys jumping around and killing Raggedy Anne dolls. Is this what console gaming is like? What a bore.

The Witcher is a flawed but ultimately satisfying role playing game that puts you in the role of monster killing mutant named Geralt. In some aspects the game is a bit more hardcore than other recent RPGs. You need to pay close attention to dialogue as clues are not spoon-fed to you and the almighty quest arrow is somewhat deceiving. The first half of the game feels more like an adventure game in which you are talking to NPCs and running back-and-forth across the map to advance. I eventually got the hang of the way quests worked and was able enjoy the game much more about one-third the way through.

While story and questing are complicated, fighting and building your character have been simplified. Combat involved a timing-based system of clicks and weapon swapping. You only have two real weapon choices and five magic spells. While others may scoff at this simple system, I rather enjoyed it. It’s not the mindless clicking of Diablo and not the thinky strategic multi-character battles of a Baldur’s Gate style game. Relaxed but engaging.

The big story arc is a basic one in which you are to recover a stolen goods, but, along the way, you get entangled in politics, romance and lending the occasional helping hand. The side quests eventually tie in nicely with the main story, although I never quite felt like the main baddies were that much of a menace. Oh, and as for the “romance” aspect, that consists of bedding anything with a pair of polygonal boobs in exchange for a racy trading card. Classy stuff.

Not much to say about this one other that it’s a joke game. The gag is that in order to gain required abilities you need to purchase downloadable content. These abilities include moving to the left (as seen in the above screen grab) and colored text. The game itself is a simple platformer where your real goal is to collect coins and eventually get to the final (and only) bad guy. The game can be finished in less than a half hour so if you can get it for less than a dollar, have some time to kill and a low threshold for what you think passes for humor, go nuts.

Brothers is a surprisingly excellent game that’s filled with beautiful visual storytelling and a unique game-play mechanic that has the player controlling two characters on screen at the same time. This game requires a dual-stick controller. Each stick independently controls the movements of each the two titular brothers while the L/R triggers serve as the interact/action buttons for boys. This sounds like it would be impossible to control, but it doesn’t take all that much getting used to. What it does is open up the game to all sorts of puzzle solving where the left side of your body needs to cooperate with the right to get everything working on screen.

Fortunately, this isn’t just another puzzle platformer. There is a simple and effective adventure story that leads the player from set piece to set piece. Each section of the game has its own little story to tell and interesting characters to meet. Although it is really linear, you are encouraged to take time and explore little nooks and corners of the levels to see how the two brothers react. The game is short (finish-able in 2–3 hours), but the length feels just about right for the limited amount of variety the unique control mechanic can offer.

Torchlight is a game that has been resting on my back-burner for a long, long time. I got it for something like three dollars during a Steam sale many years ago and played it off and on since. It’s basically an updated version of Diablo, a game which I played through once and thought was just okay. The whole concept of hack-and-slash with the goal of loot collection just doesn’t appeal to me. Without a decent story it’s just mindless clicking and inventory management.

Levels are randomly generated and your task is to click on as many monsters as possible and hit the heal button at just the right moment. It’s kinda like playing Free Cell or Minesweeper. Not much skill, just watch your health bar. That said, it’s a fine looking game and does what it’s supposed to do. I could see this as a multiplayer game (it’s not) that would allow to to chat with friends while clicking away. Like I said, it took me forever to finish this game because it just got boring after a while.

Oh sweet Shatner, this game is brutal! The Nintendo DS Giana Sisters game was a cute, simplistic and moderately challenging throwback platformer. Twisted Dreams is a relentless, brain twisting modernized update.

First off, the game is visually stunning. The richly rendered backgrounds and overall attention to detail is amazing. On top of that, the game’s primary mechanic is the ability to switch between aggro Giana and sweet Giana which, not only changes your abilities, changes every visual element in the game from dark to cheery and back again. Owls transform into devils and flowery blooms become wilted and rotten. The effect is seamless and jaw dropping.

That switching mechanic is the key to overcoming many of the more puzzling obstacles. The control does not come very intuitively and I would would often find myself fumbling and button mashing as I would try to time a switch just right. The main goal is to finish each level with as many gems as possible and with as few deaths as you can. The better you do the more stars you earn which, in turn, opens up boss levels. Death comes very easy and I rarely could finish a stage without racking up at least fifty deaths. Like I said, this game is brutal. I’m sure a twelve year-old might breeze through it, but my middle-aged reflexes weren’t quite up to snuff.

This was a game that I supported in Kickstarter, and, despite my sore thumbs, I’m glad I did. It has been one of the few crowd-funded projects I paid into that delivered within months of funding and has been more than generous with updates and DLC.

Saints Row IV is an obvious rip-off of Grand Theft Auto all the way down from the open-world mechanics to the gangster themed plot. In realizing this, the makers of Saints Row opted to differentiate themselves by completely disregarding the gritty realism of GTA for an insane sci-fi fantasy plot twist in IV. Aliens have destroyed Earth and the last remaining humans are the Saints gang leaders, all of whom are trapped in a Matrix-style virtual world. The game never takes itself seriously and is filled with amusing quips and plot moments. As the game progresses you begin to overcome the simulation, causing it to glitch and pixelate and giving you unstoppable super powers.

The plot is really stupid and revolves mostly around reviving your friends, none of whom I knew anything about since this was the first Saints Row game I ever played. I guess fan of the previous games may get a kick out of each of these characters, but I really couldn’t care less. The plot and characters are just a necessary background to what is really the fun of this game: open-world mayhem and ridiculous player customization. I spent half the game with a bra on my head and my character talking like a duck.

Like any open-world game this hinges on the variety of missions and activities. Saints Row IV does okay with this for the first half of the game, but once you start to gain powers most of the tasks become trivial and you can just explode everything. That said, I did manage to waste a bunch of time on collectibles and side missions so it must not have been as repetitive as I am remembering it. I would love to see one of these open world games to make the world persistent so that your path of destruction would scar the land forever.

Man, this game was a bit of a mess. I guess I wanted it to be a Baldur’s Gate style tactical role playing game with all the characters and story of Bioware’s other big RPG, Mass Effect. Well, despite the zoomed-out tactical battle mode, this is not an Infinity-Engine style game. Most of the game is played in a stilted third-person view with super-wonky controls. You can zoom out, but you aren’t allowed to pan around the battlefield much. Eventually I got the hang of it, but I had to put the game aside for a while out of sheer frustration.

There was a large chunk in the middle where I appreciated the mindless hack-and-slash game-play. But I found myself just watching my health bars and timing healing while letting the computer control all the fighting. This gets old and it doesn’t help that you will occasionally hit a battle that is inexplicably a zillion times harder than the last hundred or so encounters. You’ll have to replay the same battle over and over again wishing you could save your game during the fight. While the rush of striking the final killing blow at the end of one of these endurance tests is satisfying, they just began to weigh down on me.

I spent the last third of the game on easy mode just so I could grind through the mediocre story. Demons threaten the lands. You must gather your forces. Blah, blah, blah, yawn. There is a hint of the character relationship building we got in Mass Effect but it doesn’t mesh with the game as a whole and just feels like the silly mini-game it really is. I had high hopes for this one (especially being on the heels of completing two stellar RPGs: Skyrim and Wasteland 2), but in the end it just felt like work.

Gemini Rue is another enjoyable point-and-click adventure from Wadjet Eye that has a sci-fi noir theme. Having gotten used to the click for any action mechanism of other Wadjet games, I was a little thrown off by the strange “actions” pop-up interface. You click on a hot-spot and then have to chose whether to use your eyes, hands, mouth or foot. I eventually got used to it, but the few times I was stuck in the game, it was because I forgot I had a “foot” action that I could use.

The story is split between Azriel (your typical noir anti-hero on a quest to find his brother) and Delta-6 (a captive in a prison colony where memories can be erased and the prisoners are being trained for some unknown purpose). Both halves of the story are interesting and much of the motivation to continue on is in finding out how these two worlds connect. The big twist is not terribly hard to predict, but I still was satisfied by the ending.

My only complaints about the game are with its somewhat tedious room-traversal in the name of solving some relatively simple puzzles. There is also a shooting mini-game mechanic throughout the game that is okay, but doesn’t really add much. Other than those points, the game is worth trying out. The graphics are nice and pixelated and the music is excellent (buying it on GOG.com includes the soundtrack).