Humble Narrative Bundle
Jul. 18th, 2016 04:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroCibele - This is less a game (in that there’s no way to lose) and more an interactive narrative. You play as game designer Nina Freeman, and get to explore her desktop and then play a mock-MMO as she chats with a boy and falls for him. It brought back amusing memories of chat rooms for me (because I’m old), along with the occasional wince of recollection of what a dumbass I was as a teenager.
Her Story - This is a pseudo-procedural mystery in which you have a database of film clips that you can do keyword searches of, all of interviews of a woman pertaining to the disappearance of Simon Smith. You only get the first five entries with any query, so you need to get specific with your searches in order to get the full story. This was a fascinating fragmented mystery and brilliantly set up to keep certain things secret from you.
Read Only Memories - Pixelated point-and-click adventure game set 50 years in the future, when an old friend of your disappears and his big research project, a theoretically-sentient AI, comes to you for help. I gave it a go, but it didn’t really appeal to me.
80 Days - A choose-you-own-adventure style journey around a Steampunk world as Passepartout, Mr. Phileas Fogg's loyal valet. You need to balance your funds, Fogg's comfort, your luggage and, of course, your remaining time. Whether you travel by carriage, boat, airship, or train, there are various colorful characters to meet and events to be cautious of. The contents of your luggage are particularly critical, as different items provide protection against the elements, assist in negotiations, or simply can be sold at a very high price in certain locations. I have no idea how many of the events are randomized, but the depth of options for your journey is very impressive.
Sorcery! Parts 1 and 2 - This plays like a Steve Jackson Fighting Fantasy book, just with a somewhat better interface and an irritating spellcasting mechanic. The events are all giant blocks of text. You can rewind to earlier points in the story and try different paths. I lost interest midway through part 2; the story was kind of repetitive and I wasn’t crazy about either the spellcasting or the dueling mechanics.
Broken Age - Much more of a traditional adventure game (made by the same guy who made Grim Fandango). On one hand, I think I prefer the gameplay of the point-and-click adventure games, particularly when they give me a map I can teleport around and break up the “find an item and use it somewhere” puzzles with other things. On the other hand, this has a much stronger plot and actual characterization. This is an excellent example of the adventure game genre and has a lot of solid hallmarks of it: Strong story, detailed world and characters, humor, and an inability to die/end up in an unwinnable situation. That said, the puzzles were often either simplistic or completely obtuse (and I had to check a walkthrough several times when the solution turned out to be "click on this thing again") and I'm apparently really impatient when it comes to voice acting. The fact that you couldn't skip ahead in dialogue (only whole cutscenes) was maddening.
Overall: Her Story was surprisingly fascinating, a mystery with a search engine mechanic to drive it as a game. The others all had their merits, but they didn’t bowl me over with wonder.
Her Story - This is a pseudo-procedural mystery in which you have a database of film clips that you can do keyword searches of, all of interviews of a woman pertaining to the disappearance of Simon Smith. You only get the first five entries with any query, so you need to get specific with your searches in order to get the full story. This was a fascinating fragmented mystery and brilliantly set up to keep certain things secret from you.
Read Only Memories - Pixelated point-and-click adventure game set 50 years in the future, when an old friend of your disappears and his big research project, a theoretically-sentient AI, comes to you for help. I gave it a go, but it didn’t really appeal to me.
80 Days - A choose-you-own-adventure style journey around a Steampunk world as Passepartout, Mr. Phileas Fogg's loyal valet. You need to balance your funds, Fogg's comfort, your luggage and, of course, your remaining time. Whether you travel by carriage, boat, airship, or train, there are various colorful characters to meet and events to be cautious of. The contents of your luggage are particularly critical, as different items provide protection against the elements, assist in negotiations, or simply can be sold at a very high price in certain locations. I have no idea how many of the events are randomized, but the depth of options for your journey is very impressive.
Sorcery! Parts 1 and 2 - This plays like a Steve Jackson Fighting Fantasy book, just with a somewhat better interface and an irritating spellcasting mechanic. The events are all giant blocks of text. You can rewind to earlier points in the story and try different paths. I lost interest midway through part 2; the story was kind of repetitive and I wasn’t crazy about either the spellcasting or the dueling mechanics.
Broken Age - Much more of a traditional adventure game (made by the same guy who made Grim Fandango). On one hand, I think I prefer the gameplay of the point-and-click adventure games, particularly when they give me a map I can teleport around and break up the “find an item and use it somewhere” puzzles with other things. On the other hand, this has a much stronger plot and actual characterization. This is an excellent example of the adventure game genre and has a lot of solid hallmarks of it: Strong story, detailed world and characters, humor, and an inability to die/end up in an unwinnable situation. That said, the puzzles were often either simplistic or completely obtuse (and I had to check a walkthrough several times when the solution turned out to be "click on this thing again") and I'm apparently really impatient when it comes to voice acting. The fact that you couldn't skip ahead in dialogue (only whole cutscenes) was maddening.
Overall: Her Story was surprisingly fascinating, a mystery with a search engine mechanic to drive it as a game. The others all had their merits, but they didn’t bowl me over with wonder.
