Just as he did with Machinarium, Mr. Brandon Boyer gives us a peek of the art direction behind Capybara’s gorgeous Critter Crunch, a ridiculously cute puzzle game that nonetheless involves a lot of puking into someone else’s mouth. This is 2 critters and NO cup, ladies and germs.
The game started off on the iPhone, where it won the IGF Mobile Best Game award and the Audio Achievement award, but it’s now available on PSN for $6.99.
Amanita Design’s Machinarium was released last Friday. The game is superb. It’s a beautiful adventure game set in a unique world populated with all kinds of lovable, crazy robots (the protagonist is especially endearing). In my opinion, the visuals are peerless – every room is gorgeous, and filled with little details and surprises that ignite the imagination. The puzzles can get pretty difficult, but by and large I found them to be relatively intuitive and well-done. They’re quite varied, too, and include a mix of hotspot-hunting, inventory-management, timing, and mini-games.
Machinarium marks a very high point in the adventure-gaming and I highly recommend it. Even people who are put off by the slow pacing of most adventure games should try it, as there’s no dialogue in Machinarium and you are sucked into the game itself very quickly (even the title screen is fun!). You can play the demo right in your browser on the game’s website. The full game is $20.
Joe Larson has released ASCIIpOrtal, his ASCII demake of… Portal. I’ll be honest, I know that there are other demakes of Portal out there (at least two from our Demakes Competition), but I’m not very familiar with them. This one is well-made, however – seeing “through” the portals is a nifty visual effect and the puzzles are nice and challenging. The game comes with a level editor as an added bonus.
Just One More Game conducted an interview with Joe for the launch of the game.
It’s time to get fcuked! Time Fcuk, the puzzle-platformer from Edmund McMillen, William Good, and Justin Karpel (previously teased here), is out now on Newgrounds. I don’t want to spoil too much, so I’ll just say this: It’s very good! It’s got a slightly unsettling vibe to it, and a surprising amount of atmosphere, but the real treat is the gameplay. Throughout the game more and more ways to manipulate each screen are introduced, and by the end your brain will be tied in a knot. There’s quite a nice balance between logic and action here. Do give it a try!
Time Donkey, the latest game from Flashbang Studios (and the 9th on Blurst!), has been released. In the game you play as a donkey working at a fast food joint who discovers a portal and becomes "trapped in the very fabric of time itself, doomed to relive the same 30 seconds again and again."
It mostly plays like your standard 3D platformer -- running, jumping, collecting tacos -- but the trick here is that you can press R to jump back in time and try again, while "ghosts" of your previous tries play out. You can then interact with them, allowing you to reach new areas and such. It's a bit overwhelming at first, but once you get a handle on the controls and start planning your moves, it's quite fun. (And pretty darn hilarious!)
The music is, of course, by the indefatigable Danny B.
Research and Development is a mod released for Half-life 2: Episode Two, made by someone named ‘mbortolino’. I really can’t find anything else on the man past that name, which is a real shame because if this isn’t the only product of his work then I really want to see the rest.
RAD is a short two-hour adventure in the HL universe, where you again battle combine and zombies as you travel from point A to point B. The key difference here is that you don’t actually use any guns, with the Gravity Manipulator only showing up after the first 45 minutes or so. Instead you have to pass a series of physical obstacles by putting your mind hard at work, and this is where the mod really shines.
Independent Developer Twisted Pixel’s previous effort Maw was a fun if flawed experience. Undeniably charming it lacked any real amount of depth to keep you playing after the credits rolled.
Their new game Splosion Man just hit the XBLA this week for 800 Makeshift points and, given the amount of people involved in the production according to the credits might possibly be the last one I could get away with calling ‘indie’. However at the very least I wanted to see how their follow up to Maw fared, and it must be said it’s pretty damn fun.
Strangely, while Maw didn’t have much of a story there doesn’t seem to be any story to ‘Splosion Man whatsoever. I think he must be some kind of escaped experiment, but nothing is literally described to the player, so lets just say you play a man made of explosions ‘because videogames’. So now the story is out of the way we can talk about the game itself. It’s pretty much a standard platform/action/puzzle game where dexterity is generally more important than lateral thinking. There’s about 50 stages in the game, each about 5 minutes in length and the entire campaign can be run through in about 4-5 hours.
You only have one button that really does anything beyond the movement commands which is ‘Splode’, causing your character to rocket jump and blow up anything around him. This can be used as you would expect for regular jumping and wall jumping, but also means you can blow up different forms of explosive barrel to give yourself a much more powerful leap. It’s a simple mechanic which only really gets more complex by increasing the number of successive jumps between safe ground or checkpoints. Sometimes however you will have to press a button to cause a barrel to appear for a limited time as it fires out a depositor, in which case you’ll have to time a jump accurately in order to explode the barrel at the right time to push you in the right direction.
Squids may not be ‘ballin’’, you may be certain of that, but the game is pretty fun, kinda similar in style to the Karoshi games, the principal concept being that you sacrifice your friends in order to acquire the shiny white box (Greg possibly using this symbol to evoke thoughts on racism?). The game gets pretty frustrating in the last couple levels, relying more on timing than puzzle-solving, but overall it’s a good game and the inter-level blurbs are pretty charming; they got me all hot and bothered.
I do prefer the WIP title the game had, ‘Use Friends’ more than the final ‘Use Boxmen’.
Tower of the Sorcerer is an old (first released in 1998) game created by two indie developers in Japan, Oz and Kenichi. Although its site is still up (linked to above, charming 90s design and all, complete with an auto-playing midi), the download link doesn’t seem to work on it, but the one here does.
It may look like an RPG, but it’s actually more of a puzzle game. The video Let’s Play by Malefact will give you a feel for how it works. The game bears some resemblance to another game series, Deadly Rooms of Death, in particular DROD RPG (which Tower of the Sorcerer served as inspiration for), but is otherwise unique in its play experience.
It’s very addictive, it had me playing it most of today, and it’s extremely difficult—do save often because it’s very easy to get yourself into a situation where you can’t advance. The video Let’s Play does go through the entire game for those who may have trouble solving the game.
Posted by Brandon "BMcC" McCartin
Wed, 20 May 2009 22:12:00 GMT
A quick one, for all you Apple eaters: Award winning, time-bending puzzle-platformer Braid has been released for the Mac! You can find it here, at Greenhouse, with a free demo and everything.
A lot has been said about this fine little game, but I thought I’d throw in my two cents, before it’s too late. (After the jump.)
