Game Review - Limbo

Limbo is an independent platform game released in 2010 developed by Playdead, it was first released for the Xbox 360 Arcade and in 2011, a version for PC and Playstation 3 was released, there is even a Linux version.

Limbo is officially recognized as an Art Game, a well deserved recognition based on its art style, gameplay and mood. The plot deals with a boy who is looking for his lost sister and for that, the must transverse a bleak landscape avoiding things like giant spiders, children who also want to kill him, deathtraps, and dangers of the environment. Because of the title, it is pretty much stated that this is the afterlife and both the kid and his sister are dead.

The game has black and white-sepia-washed graphics all which give it an air of something out of a dream, and the landscapes give it a feeling of coldness, emptiness and indifference to pain and suffering. For example, the beginning of the game takes place in a forest environment we hear distant birds and wildlife sounds, light filters from the treetops but then we start encountering deathly insta-kill bear-traps, hanged corpses and a giant spider. Later we encounter a cave with a pond with several drowned children and you watch helplessly as kid stumbles into the water and drowns:

This game has a lot of challenging puzzles, mostly physics based, and others in which timing is everything, in the last parts of the game we encounter switches that reverse gravity for select objects, and later they affect everything else. Be careful though, it's very easy to get killed in this game and you will always get gruesome death animations...

The first parts of the game in my opinion contributed a lot for the dark, foreboding mood, however, the game later switches from a woods environment to an urban-industrial wasteland devoid of life, making you feel like a stranger in a strange land instead of a lost boy and unfortunately, although the puzzles almost make up for it, the first part has the most variety of environments and gameplay styles (the cocooned stage and the spider boss encounters for instance) and as such its more emotionally affecting.

The audio in my opinion is excellent, like I mentioned before, in the woods part the sounds of animals rustling and the deep growl from the spider contribute with the immersion. The music is abstract and minimalist and relies heavily on acousmatic effects, for example: In the final part when the gravity starts changing periodically the music hints of every change as if it's also a physical part of the background and also the vibrating sounds in the music which relate to the spinning saw-blades:

The ending is very ambiguous and left open for interpretation, however in this case it works well because we are only invested in the personal voyage of the boy, and depending on your interpretation it can be either a happy or bittersweet ending.

Limbo is an outstanding game, even more so since it was created by a small company and received several awards in the 2011 Game Developers Choice Awards. So I would definitely recommend it.

And to finish this post, here's a hilarious alternative interpretation of the game:

Game Review - Bioshock & Bioshock 2

Well, it certainly took a while :b but here I am talking about BioShock and as bonus, the sequel BioShock 2.

I played the first BioShock in 2007-2008, and without a doubt it is one of the best games I have played, BioShock is one of the few games I would think would pose as an example of "Games as Art", not only it has superb art design but also had top-of-the-line graphics (the PC version was one of the first games to use DirectX 10 effects, the Xbox 360 in contrast uses DirectX 9), and philosophical themes (rooted deeply in Ayn Rand's Objectivism). But all that is background since BioShock plays like a standard First Person Shooter, albeit a very good one.

You play as Jack, the sole survivor of a plane crash in the middle of the Atlantic who amidst the flaming wreckage finds a lighthouse and in it, a bathysphere that takes him to Rapture, an underwater city built by business tycoon and ardent objectivist Andrew Ryan (a play on Ayn Rand); this city was built as an utopia where people would be free from collectivist constrains, however the city has collapsed into rioting and a turf war between the founder Ryan and a mob boss called Fontaine. Why has Jack arrived to the city of Rapture at this precise time?

The Rapture economy's backbone is a substance called "Adam" which allows its user to re-write her genetic code to acquire super-human abilities, this substance must be harvested by especially trained little girls called "Little Sisters" who are also the only one who can produce this substance thanks to a surgical implant on them. Because of their value the Little Sisters are always escorted by a "Big Daddy" to serve as her protector. While playing the game you will encounter them roaming all over Rapture and if you are able to defeat their Big Daddy you have the option of killing them and taking all their Adam for yourself, or freeing them on which you will obtain only half of the Adam. (Ultimately you obtain the same amount of Adam in the endgame so...).

The levels are beautifully detailed with a lot of Art Deco / Art Noveau influence, and the gameplay is very good, always finding new ways to combine powers to survive in Rapture.

BioShock was critically acclaimed and became a staple of classic gaming, as such a sequel was released in 2010.

BioShock 2 plays very similarly to BioShock 1, in this game you play as "Subject Delta", the prototype Big Daddy, the action takes place 8 years after the first game, and in this part since you are a Big Daddy you can experience firsthand what it is to adopt a Little Sister and protect her from attackers. The story lets you explore another facet of Rapture in which a collectivist called Sophia Lamb opposed Ryan and eventually took control of Rapture after the events of Bioshock 1.

In addition to the mutated dwellers of Rapture, the Big Daddies and Little Sisters, BioShock 2 introduces the "Big Sisters" to the equation, which are grown-up Little Sisters, in this case after dealing with all Little Sisters of a level a Big Sister will appear and attack you, acting as a boss encounter.

Although it is not a bad game BioShock 2 lacked a little of the impact the first one had, on the other hand the sequel does include some underwater sequences, something that was conspicuously absent from the first game.

BioShock and BioShock 2 are very good games, and the first one is definitely a classic which you must play.

There is a third game to be released in February 2013, BioShock Infinite, developed by Ken Levine, the main developer of the first game. This game will probably not have any connections to the other two.

Game review - Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit

Fahrenheit is the original title of this game, the title was changed to Indigo Prophecy for the North American release.

Fahrenheit was released in September 2005 for the PC, XBox, and PS2, developed in France by studio Quantic Dream and designed by David Cage.

This was a very good game, it is essentially an adventure game, set in New York city in January 2009, the game opens in a street cafe on a cold winter night; there, in the bathroom a man named Lucas Kane enters in an altered state of trance and with a knife stabs to death an unsuspecting patron that just happened to be there, after doing this Lucas regains control of himself and realizes what he has done, at this point the player assumes control of Lucas, giving him control to either run away quickly, slipping past noticing or avoiding suspicion.

What is original in all this is that the game opens up putting you on the shoes of someone who has just committed murder on a common place, and has to avoid getting caught. Later the game introduces 2 cops: Carla Valenti and Tyler Milles who are assigned in the investigation of the murder, and gives the player control over them to obtain the clues the player left earlier with Lucas Kane, so in another twist you are controlling both sides of the case: the murderer and his persecutors.

The story has the player switching between those characters, helping Lucas to solve the mystery of why he committed that crime and why he has recurring visions of a strange child, and both Carla and Tyler in collecting clues to capture him.

While the tutorial can be confusing for some, once you enter to the game you will find the controls to be very intuitive, many actions require to be performed by mimicking the motion on your control, dialog has you choosing several answers for the conversation before a time bar expires, depending of the situation this will be quick or slow, failing to answer a question will result sometimes in increasing the questioner's suspicion level.

Instead of a life bar, the game uses a mood indicator, that lowers everytime the character gets a setback or something doesn't go as planned, and goes up whenever he/she does something good for him/her, if the mood bar empties the character will commit suicide.

The game makes extensive use of split cameras, making use in them by alerting the player of an important event or for narrative purposes, the animation quality is very good also, it's obvious that it makes extensive use of motion capture technology.

Action scenes require to perform a certain sequences of pressing buttons to do the scene successfully, the player will get an advice to get ready before entering those sequences, what is good about those is that it uses peripheral vision to guide through them, that is you don't have to miss the action to watch the correct sequence to perform, this helps in maintaining the tension and sharing part of the adrenaline your character probably feels.

Gameplay has the atmosphere of a scifi flick, with a lot of suspense, tension and intrigue, although the plot is engaging and there is great deal of immersion, a little before the end the game starts to feel a little hasty, many characters that you would think would be important to the story disappear completely, and the ending feels a little rushed with a Deus Ex machina and The End legend, and that is something that kind of breaks all the mystery and intrigue that prevailed in the first half of the game.

At any case I would recommend this game since it has a very engaging story and will give you a very good experience, the game can be completed in less than 12 hours meaning you can finish it on a weekend.

Fahrenheit is available in America as Indigo Prophecy, this version has some scenes of sexually explicit content removed, a Director's Cut is said to be available but I have not yet seen it anywhere, and I got the european version. It is available for the PC, Xbox and PS2.

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Game Review - Psychonauts

Psychonauts was released on April 2005 for the PC, Xbox and PS2. Designed by Tim Schaffer previously known for his work in LucasArts's classics: Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle and Grim Fandango.

This is one of the best game I have played, it's essentially a platform game with some few elements of adventure, the protagonist is Raz, a likable quick-witted kid with psychic powers that arrives to a Summer-camp like Boot-camp for training psychic kids (or Psychonauts, hence the name). He must solve a conspiracy on which several members of the camp are having their brains removed by a deranged mad scientist.

The character designs looks like a more colorful and psychedelic version of Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas, Corpse Bride or his short film Vincent. Characters with candy-cotton shaped hair, big dumbo-like ears, or with looks like distant cousins of the Jim Henson's Muppet's Show all interact with Raz with their own distinct and well crafted personalities.

The game allows exploration of the camp at will, although some areas become only accessible when the player completes certain levels, progression of the game is linear in most parts. As Raz advances though the plot he unlocks several psychic powers that all become useful for defeating opponents or advancing through obstacles, some times you can try new powers on old opponents and watch their hilarious reactions, for example the "Men in Black" alike "Censors's" reaction to the pyrokinesis is priceless.

Level progression goes by completing the levels inside the minds of people (or animals), this is where Psychonauts shines the most in my opinion: level design is crafted in way that each level is completely unique stylistically and requires different approaches in gameplay, one level is on the mind of a care-free party-going instructor of the camp, as one could expect her mind is shaped like an ongoing dance party with disco inspirations, another level is the mind of an analytical, cold logic professor and the game presents his mind shaped as a cube that reconfigures each time you make progress, one level looks like a black velvet paint portray of Hispanic culture! (trust me: it looks good), bonuses on those levels can be completed by collecting figments of imagination, sorting emotional baggage (watching this happenning never gets old), and cracking vaults of memory.

The game has also lot of details and subplots rewarding exploring players, the mechanics of the game also allow to find hidden items that will allow to unlock psychic powers earlier in the game.

Gameplay looks like typical 3D platforming, some levels are linear in the obstacle course others are like a world you get to explore and solve adventure-like puzzles, or a combination of both. In most cases you will unlock a different psychic power that will become most useful in that particular level. The obstacles although some are intimidating they are not that difficult and are very funny to watch, some bosses require figuring out their weakness, there are cases in which it's easy and others not so, at any case sometimes the game hints you of that via the "mentor on mind" plot device.

Audio is fine, music fills the mood on each level thus enhancing play experience.

I really enjoyed this game and I didn't want it to finish since each level was a feast to the eyes and mind, too bad that this game performed worse than expected in the market, probably with a little more promotion it would have been different, because reception was quite good. Also, the ending hints of a sequel but I see difficult that that come to be.

Psychonauts is available for the PS2, XBox (it recently has been added to the list of compatible games for the Xbox 360), and PC (retail or available via Steam or GameTap service).

If you get a chance to get your hands in it do it, you won't regret it.

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