Moonthly update- Octubre

Not a Dragon, exactly, but you might call him a...Wyrm?

Welcome to October, the Spookiest of Months!  

No, I have no plans to dress up and party hearty on Halloween.  But that may change between now and then.  I don't place a lot of stock in Holidays.  Call me Scrooge or Grinch if you like.  I think I just haven't developed traditions of my own as an adult.  Also I've never been all that into costumes. But I'm not completely without seasonal cheer.  I may just carve some pumpkins, which is always fun. 

Because it's October, I think I’ll dust off that Lovecraft Collection Jaconian picked up for me a couple years ago.  Have you ever read Lovecraft?  If you have any interest in American Gothic Horror, you pretty much have to read Lovecraft.  He’s like the awesome sequel to Edgar Allen Poe.  Seriously, he's like the Terminator 2 of American Horror.  Between Poe and Lovecraft, pretty much every Classic Element of American Gothic Horror is brought to life.  Seriously, he’s that good.  You’ll find it familiar.  It will comfort and terrify you.  At least that’s what it does for me.

I would also like to indulge in some horror games.  At least try, if not beat Amnesia: The Dark Decent.  Others I can revisit, such as Six Days a Sacrifice and Lone Survivor.   On the other hand, it also looks like this October is Dragon Month, given our two Dragon Themed posts so far in October, with more planned for the near future.  I've also got a Dragon Themed Magic deck in the works.. This previous month I have been playing Magic: The Gathering – buying lots of packs, building decks, sorting cards.  This marks one of many returns I've made to this game.  It seems like about every five years now. 

Also, I have continued playing Starseed Pilgrim.   I love this game, I've gushed about how much fun it is to figure out how to play it.  But now that I've figured it out and gotten through a lot of the game, I've discovered that it's frickin' hard!   I've confirmed that it has an end.   And I think I'm near it.  But geez louise, this game is tough!  I can only go further through tenacious obsession!  Painfully crawling my way up a hill.  Sysiphus, eat your heart out. 

 I’ve got a new job, with lots of down time, which has led me to write more posts.  Of course, I'm always nervous composing this stuff at work.  .... shiver!  There's a horror game for you, sit at a desk for eight hours, but you never know when boss man will suddenly appear and catch you surfing the web! Ahhh!

-D

First Impressions: Outlast (PC)

Outlast is a game that came out last September (2013) and that I purchased, I think, around December during a Steam Winter sale.  A while back after watching a fairly decent (not great, but not bad either) film on Netflix, I developed the odd urge to start this game up.  Conklederp also asked me if there was a game that I wanted to play, so there was that too. 

Outlast reminds me a lot of the Penumbra and Amnesia series in that the game is in first person, you are a man going into an unfamiliar location where there are things that can kill you and since you are unarmed, your only option is to run and hide when said aggressors decide that your death would make their day so much better.  The manipulation of objects is not as detailed as it is in either of the prior mentioned series as objects are immediately picked up and doors/drawers are either opened or closed, no slowly opening them just a little.  Either doors are slightly open, open all the way or slammed shut.  Yes, your only option while in a psychiatric hospital filled with a lot of murderous minds is to slam doors, even when you know you are supposed to be quiet or are attempting to hide from your pursuer.

The story so far, is that you are a reporter who was tipped off about all sorts of things going wrong/bad at this building that is/was a psychiatric hospital.  So being the wanna-be Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, you head to said hospital in your jeep armed with nothing but a video camera with night vision and two extra batteries that power said night vision.  Your one choice for when you run into hostiles is to run and hide and hope that the baddies were not close enough behind you to figure out that you happen to be hiding in either a storage locker or under a desk.  Thankfully said antagonists are not too bright (although they do seem to have reflective retinas) so when running into a room with say, two lockers, they might check one, grumble something then walk out of the room.  Or they will scour the room, eventually find you then start wailing away on your squishy body with a not-so-squishy crowbar.

One aspect of the game that is a bit odd is the video camera.  When it is up and you are filming, you have the chance of making observations in written form, but when the camera is not up, no notes will be taken.  This I did not find out for the first hour into the game, during which if there was enough light, I did not use the camera.  The main purpose of the camera is to use the night vision in dark areas, of which there are a lot.  The night vision is powered by a separate battery (as opposed to the infinite main battery of the camera) that has a life of two and-a-half minutes before you have to change the battery.  If the battery runs out, you have a limited night vision, only being able to see a couple of feet in front of you, as opposed to the, say, 15 to 20 feet with the night vision activated.  

The visual quality between having the camera up and not using the camera is very negligible.  And you are able to zoom in with the camera up, which is a nice added bonus when you do not want to be killed by whatever that thing way over on the other side of the room.  Why then is there the option to have the video camera down if there is no added benefit?  Just a thought.

Presently I am about 4 1/2 hours into the game and I am in an area where I have to avoid at least two violent inmates at either end of a building.  Both areas are dark (ie: pitch black without the night vision function activated) and I have six batteries in reserve, so I am not doing too poorly.  

I will say that about two hours into the game, the protagonist, one Mr. Miles Upsur finally came to the conclusion that I had within the first 30 minutes.

That.  Exactly that.  Mr. Miles decided to scribe this note shortly after being chased by two very large men who wanted to do all sorts of unspeakable things to his body and then having run into a guy strapped into a wheel chair yelling about something-or-other.

I am getting the feeling that I am about halfway through the game and there are maybe five more hours of gameplay left, which would be perfectly fine with me.  I do not know how long the game would be able to keep up its sense of fear and dread without becoming old and frustrating, what with the being killed every so often and all.  But in the meantime, I am having a lot of fun playing Outlast and there is the DLC Whistleblower which was released back in May of this year, so I will have that to look forward to once I finish the main campaign.

Here is to surviving that long.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Only The Good Die Young

When Is A Game Too Much Game?

I have a queue of unplayed games and this time I'm not referring to just the games that I haven't played on Steam (although that list might be growing again due to Steam's Winter Holiday Non-Denominational Sale), but also the games for the PSP and 3DS that are patiently awaiting their turns to embed themselves in the emotional center of my brain.  This queue of games has recently gotten me thinking about the amount of time required to play all of these game to their conclusion. 

Now, when I say that I beat a game, I'm not referring to "completing" a game with every available character/car/plane, watching every ending and achieving every single achievement.  I just mean beginning a game and playing through until the credits finish rolling.  If I happen to unlock new features and earn achievements in the process, then bonus points for me.

I recently just completed Dead Island after playing roughly 62 hours.  That is a lot of time to spend on anything, let alone a video game.  Recently though, I have noticed that some games are becoming almost too long, or more likely, I am drawn to games that take up a lot of time.  Between the two of us, Conklederp and I have clocked in 571 hours on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and expansions; I currently have 115 hours on The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and have only just completed the main quest, not to say anything about either the Bloodmoon or Tribunal expansions; on Final Fantasy XII, I spent around 125 hours and I still didn't finish all of the hunts or collect all of the Espers.  When Grand Theft Auto V was released last year, it was touted as having over 120 hours of game content.

When does game content become too much content?

Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem and Dead Space took my about 16 hours each while Amnesia: The Descent took 18 hours, but Gone Home and Evoland both took only 3 hours.  Those were perfect lengths of time for their respective games.  Horror games are a hard thing to do for an extended period of time.  I have never played a horror game that lasted as long as, say Morrowind and maintained that level of tension and fright.  Is it possible to maintain that level of tension for 50+ hours?  I honestly don't know as I feel like game length is relative to both the game itself and the person playing the game.  

For myself, as long as the quests make sense, I don't really mind fetch-quests for which both Skyrim and Dead Island are pretty notorious for.  I understand the argument against them as they do eat up a lot of time, especially if fast travel is not an option, but again, I enjoy exploring and looking at the worlds that I explore.  But, as is the case with anything in life, too much can be annoying.  Too many fetch quests to gather supplies for an outcome that is never witnessed is too much. In Morrowind, I was tasked with taking 20 jars of sujamma (local liquor) to the middle of nowhere.  What irritated me was that I had to reallocate my inventory to accommodate 60 lbs of items and travel to a mine just so that some miners who were most likely slaves, could have their liquor.  What I didn't mind was that I was travelling to a part of Vvardenfell that I had not visited so I was exploring. 

So how long should a game be for it to be both entertaining and fulfilling?

I don't think there's a correct answer here.  

Some games work better as a five hour short story while other games, primarily sandbox games almost demand that they last 100+ hours.  And there-in lies one of my problems:  I like sandbox games.  GTA, The Elder Scrolls, I like these games and I like to experience the worlds and the people who populate them.  I recently just started the Assassin's Creed series and I can see Fable, Mass Effect and Dragon Age on the horizon and I know that I will spend as much time in those worlds as I have in others. 

What I have come to realize while putting down my thoughts, is that I am drawn to long, drawn out narratives.  While I do enjoy playing shorter games like Evoland, Dear Esther and Nightsky that may take up only a couple of hours, I also love spending hours upon hours being immersed in a world and it's fictional culture.  Sure, I'll play some games that I know that I can finish in an afternoon, but maybe with the exception of a few games that I cannot recall at the moment, but that doesn't make them any less worth playing.  Sometimes a game that can be played in short segments is just what I need between the doses of massive epic quests.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

I'm Not Ready To Make That Kind Of A Commitment

Full Review: Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs (PC)

Story

First off, you have to understand that this is a game from the people who created Dear Esther, which means that the story might be a little confusing and mysterious.  This is also a game from the people who created Amnesia: The Dark Descent, which means that, as the main character, you're not going to know anything about what is going on because, shocker!, you have some form of amnesia, hence being an integral part of the story/plot yet as the player, not knowing what is going on and exploring the world for the first time.

After I completed the game, I was pretty sure I knew what had been going on, but I still had some questions.  The story in the game is told through your fractured psyche talking to you and finding sheets of journal entries and letters, and never in chronological order.  You might find a letter from December 19, 1899 followed by one from August 5, 1899.  Naturally this form of storytelling is going to be a bit disorienting especially since I didn't play the game in a single sitting.  Additionally, relying on the player to discover potentially key pieces of information before permanently leaving an area puts a lot of faith in the developers.  

Admittingly, I visited the Wikipedia page and read over the plot.  I had a number of "Oh, okay" moments and none of the "Wait, is that what happened!?" variety.  It has made me wonder how much I missed going through and where I missed picking up notes.

Presently, I could see myself going through the game again, knowing what I now know, which is what the industry calls "replayability," but I will probably hold off for a bit to let the game sink in some more.

Gameplay

Gameplay is very simple.  WASD to move, mouse to look, hold "shift" to run and left click to pick up and hold on to certain objects.  Pigs uses Frictional Games' HPL Engine 2, the same that was used for The Dark Descent so there is nothing out of the ordinary or out of place here.  

Because the game was developed by The Chinese Room (Dear Esther), you do a lot of walking although running is also an option, but I only found myself running when I encountered some unnamable horror; I know what they are, I am just choosing not to name them for the sake of not spoiling too much.

Unlike Dear Esther, death is an option, but as there are no save points (of which I was a little disappointed that the relic/artifacts from Penumbra and The Dark Descent weren't brought back as saving mechanisms, but the game does frequently autosave), you will "respawn" in the general area from where you died.

As stated previously, there is no inventory system here.  You also have no health or sanity meter.  There were a couple of times, like after a miss-step and falling down a ladder, that the screen took on a reddish tint, which I took to mean that I shouldn't do that again or I would be dead tone, but after a while the tint went away.  

Graphics

I showed a lot of examples during my First Impressions article about how the game looked while running it at near optimum performance.  But in case you missed that article, here are some more lovely screenshots of that beautiful machine.

Churches are always great places for horrible things to happen

Mapping in the game is achieved by map like diagrams.

Sound & Music

The music to Pigs was written by Dear Esther composer Jessica Curry.  I really enjoyed the score to this game, I think more than The Dark Descent (music composed by Mikko Tarmia) and Dear Esther.  Both of those, while both were very atmospheric scores, they were not very melodic and therefore not very memorable; not that the music wasn't good, it fit the mood and setting of those games very well.  The music in Pigs was really good.  There were a number of cues that I really enjoyed hearing, both as an atmospheric piece and as music that I could listen to outside of the video game setting.

Sadly, the soundtrack was not made available through Steam when I preordered the game, but it is available through Jessica Curry's bandcamp site.  So I may just have to pop on over there (again).

Final Thoughts
As you can probably surmise at this point, I really enjoyed this game.  I was confused at times as to what I had to do and what the overall story was, but maybe that was just me and not a fault of the game designers.  Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is definitely a game that I would recommend to anyone who enjoys storytelling and survival horror games.  

One potential downside is that I was able to complete the game in 8 hours.  That might be a huge turn off to a portion of the gaming community, especially games like Skyrim and currently GTAV, both touting game times of over 100 hours.  I cannot see Pigs maintaining the level of horror/uncomfortability/confusion for more than the time that was given.  Eight hours is the perfect amount of time for this type of game.

Granted it's not your traditional survival horror, but it's one that I came away feeling good about, albeit with the desire to take a long lukewarm shower.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Into That Great Void My Soul'd Be Hurled

First Impressions: Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs (PC)

I've talked a bit about the people at Frictional Games and The Chinese Room a number of times over the past year, be it about either the Penumbra or Amnesia series.  Last August, the newest game in the Amnesia series, A Machine for Pigs was available for preorder.  This was the first game that I have ever pre-ordered through Steam.  For the first few weeks after pre-order I was always checking back to the store page to see if the game was somehow released early, which it wasn't.  Then I seem to have forgotten about it.  I guess I thought that there would be some type of notification or the game would automatically download.  It didn't.

So over a month ago, on September 10th, 2013, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs went live (is that the correct verb?) and I did not notice.  It wasn't until two days ago that I found I could install the game and begin playing it already.  So I did.

A:AMfP, which forthwith I will just call Pigs, uses Frictional Games/ HPL2 engine, which I've talked about a couple of times regarding Amnesia: The Dark Descent and the Penumbra series.  So keyboard moving and mouse looking.  The mouse is also inverted.

But for why you're really here, not to read about me talking about control schemes, but for the pictures and my thoughts.

First off, this game is beautiful.  There was some concern as to whether or not my system could handle playing the game but I have it running at near optimum with only the shadows at medium, because that's what the game suggested based on the hardware I'm using.  I would then like to say that the game is running just fine.  I have only experienced lag once or twice and was very minimal and while I did notice it, I didn't find it distracting.

With three hours in, there are a couple of things that I've noticed and forewarned, I bring up some things that might be considered by spoilers by people who don't want to know anything about the game before playing.

Appearance of gramophones a reference to Amnesia ~Justine~ ??

First, the game feels somewhat familiar to Amnesia: The Dark Descent, you play a character named Oswald Mandus who is looking for his two children who seem to be lost, but talking to you either telepathically or via some other supernatural force.  Since you are thrown into this world without knowing anything about it, you discover story points and back story by locating documents that are scattered throughout the buildings.  I have a feeling that I will be slightly confused as to the overall story until the final act, just as I was with A:TDD.  I had previously read from the creators that Pig while it is not a direct sequel to A:TDD, it does take place in the same universe.

Second, while you do have the infamous lantern as a primary light source, since the game takes place in 1899 London, your lantern is electric and at least presently, does not run out of power.  This is something that I am both thankful and only slightly annoyed about.  I'm thankful because of all the hunting I had to do in A:TDD for lantern oil and tinderboxes.  However, at the same time, I feel this may have been done because of the same reason that I was thankful.  At the moment, I have no fear about running out of fuel.  Similar to what Resident Evil 4 did with removing the need of typewriter ribbons in order to save your game.  And speaking of saving the game, in Pig, you can save at anytime and don't have to look for one of those odd artifacts.

Thirdly, you have no inventory for items.  What inventory you do have is dedicated to personal journal entries and notes that have been discovered.  This has me questioning how certain mechanics in the game will work.  No more collecting items?  Will you now have to carry every single item from one room to another?  I however think that both Frictional Games and The Chinese Room know that since they've created an inventory-less game, that these types of go-to/standard puzzles won't work or at the very least will be very tedious.

Fourth(ly??), I have noticed that I cannot interact with the world as much as in previous Amnesia and Penumbra games.  Books, bottles, tables are all stationary.  For whatever reason, you are able to move any chair you come across and you can turn lamps on/off, but you cannot move them.  There might be a reason for this that hasn't been made apparent yet, but I am a little sad by having my actions limited when before they felt almost limitless.

It's never a good sign when the game reminds you how to run away.

Lastly, because Pigs was also developed by thechineseroom who did the artistic game Dear Esther, combined with the lack of a usable item inventory system, I do wonder at times how threatening the world is.  True, I have jumped a couple of times, but I have yet had to run away from anything chasing me.  I am not sure if Pigs will be taking a Silent Hill / Monty Python and the Holy Grail "Run AWAY!!" approach to enemies/aggressors as I have yet to come across anything hostile, but I feel that time is coming very soon.

I am very intrigued with the story and my love for what both companies have accomplished is helping to fuel my quest through this world.  Part of me is waiting for that gut punching moment when all the story bits fit together and I can no longer run from the horrors of the world.  And I am hoping that from past experience, that I will not be disappointed when that moments arrives.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Somewhere Fate Went Wrong

Full Review: Penumbra: Black Plague

This review of Frictional Games' 2008 release, Penumbra Black Plague might be a little shorter than my previous review for the first game in the series (Penumbra: Overture), but that is because I am omitting the "gameplay" section as the game operates on the same HPL Engine that Overture ran on, so all the mechanics are identical.  I will add though that there was a tutorial of sorts and leave it to Frictional Games to have a tutorial that managed to give me chills.

STORY

The game takes place shortly after the end of Overture.  You wake up to find yourself locked in a room and you have to escape, and to figure out what's going on and if you father (aptly named Howard) is still alive, whom you previously had thought was dead.  Like most sequels, all the gear and notes that you had accumulated from the first game are gone, possibly explained that whomever knocked you out had taken them, so I'm okay with that.

Once out of the room, the remainder of the story is more straight forward than the first game, although you are still attempting to locate your father.  In Overture, you're wandering through many layers of caves while in Black Plague, you find yourself in another section of the same complex, but predominantly in and around research labs and offices.  The setting change was a bit drastic and took me a little while to get used to, but I ultimately preferred this location to the caves.  

Early on in the game, you start hearing a "voice" inside your head who talks to you in consistently demeaning way, frequently calling you "monkey."  Now, the voice that was chosen I had a little bit of an issue with as it was a pseud0-stereotypical New Jersey accent.  Seeing as how the game was made by Swedes, I don't know if this type of accent is unnerving or has some other kind of connotation, but I just found it amusing and not disarming at all.

Like many of Lovecraft's stories, the story takes a hard right turn in the third act, revealing the backstory of the main antagonist.  It's honestly not really my pint of stout, but I do appreciate that this element works for the story that was written and I feel that if H.P. Lovecraft were to write for a video game company, this is probably what he would come up with as well.  Ultimately, it makes sense, and I'm okay with that.

GAMEPLAY

I lied, I am going to go into gameplay a little bit as there were some elements that were new for this game.  Hallucinations played a big part in this game.  During the first part of the game, you find yourself in a series of hallways, forced to complete different puzzles to exit said hallway to find yourself in yet another hallway.

For a research lab's hallway, I don't think this is very sterile.

There's another time in the game when you find yourself running away from something in an area that you've previously spent at least an hour in, so you know the general layout.  During this escape you're trying to make, you find that the layout is changing, hallways are momentarily becoming dead-ends, once open doors cannot be opened or have disappeared all together and all the while someone/thing is laughing at you.  Oh, and your vision is slightly blurry and shaky, so there's that to deal with as well.

SOUND & MUSIC

There was no real noticeable difference between the quality of the music/sound in Black Plague and Overture.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I felt that Black Plague was a very good follow up to Overture.  The game was a little short (I finished it in just over nine hours), but honestly, any longer and it might have felt like I was playing the same set of hallway, room, puzzle, monster, puzzle, hallway, monster, puzzle, room.  And being able to maintain a constant level of fear and paranoia for that long is highly commendable.  In the end, I didn't feel like I struggled as much with Black Plague, but that could have also been due to the fact that the spiders and wolves from Overture had been taken out and replaced with one particular type of monster/creature that was even more terrifying.

I will add that I had to look on gamefaqs for a couple of the final puzzles in the game, but as it turned out, I had either forgotten about something a few rooms back or just didn't notice that switch on the wall that blended in with the drab concrete/bricks.  The last puzzle in the game though I don't think I would have figured out on my own, which is kind of sad, but I guess my brain just didn't work in the way that the Tuurngait wanted it to.

Now it's onto the final installment, Penumbra: Requiem.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Ambient Silence

Or Something Like It

There are a couple of video game related sites that I visit, some on a regular basis and others that I'll visit when I suddenly remember that I haven't been there in a few weeks.  Then there're the handful that I remember existing that I visited for a while, but that was on a different computer that contains years worth of bookmarks that I no longer have access to.  Like the current trends with cellphones, I no longer remember phone numbers or actual website address, I just have them either bookmarked or I just have to type in the first three letters and auto fill in does the rest.

When I do visit aforementioned sites, the large ones like Penny-Arcade, Kotaku, Red vs. Blue, these are professional sites that have some sort of connection to the side of the gaming industry that actually make the games.  I really try to stay away from these places when I know that I have an article to write.  It would be like wanting to do a drawing or sketch and right before you pick up that box of colored pencils, you go for a walk through the Louvre.

I don't visit Penny-Arcade to look for inspiration when it comes to writing articles and god knows I have a closet full of ideas up in that attic I call a brain, but if I find inspiration while reading, that's perfectly valid and not at all guilt ridden.  I might be listening to the Rooster Teeth Podcast and they'll be talking about something to do with early SNES games and I'll think, "Yeah, that was pretty cool.  I'm going to write about that!"  I won't though, listen to them looking for inspiration.  Yes, I just used "looking" to describe the act of listening.

Given the somewhat short history of this blog, you may have found that Dr. Potts and I do not do a lot of reviews of current games.  Neither the good Dr. or I have any of the current generation of consoles although I do have a 3DS and we both play a fair amount of games via Steam, the majority of the games that I tend to purchase are not "new."  

However, with that in mind, I don't think that we are any less relevant.  Pretty much everyday I'll look at the statics and information about our site and how people came here and I'm always excited when I see that there were multiple searches for Amnesia ~ Justine ~ or Dr. Potts' post about Hiroo Isono's artwork.  

And as far as video game related posts go, here are a few that may be showing up in the next couple of weeks:

• Two part Full Review for The World Ends With You
• First Impressions for :
• Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together
• The Art of Balance - Touch
• Dead Space
• Shatter
• Music Reviews for:
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
• Actraiser
• Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy Kong's Quest
• Bit.Trip.Runner: Game vs. Soundtrack
• Hitoshi Sakimoto: Final Fantasy Tactics vs Final Fantasy XII
• Emulator Hours for:
• Metroid II: Return of Samus (Separate from Dr. Potts' post)
• One Year Later: 3DS

So as you can see, I've got some ideas for topics to discuss.  Are they the same topics that other video game related sites are talking about and discussing?  Probably not, but it's what we do.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Taking Yoda's Words To Heart

Full Review: Amnesia ~Justine~ (PC)

Amnesia ~Justine~ is a free expansion of sorts for Amnesia ~The Dark Descent~ and is included in pretty much any updated version of the game you download.  The game also comes with a 52 page PDF book titled Amnesia ~ Remember.  But, today we're here to talk about The Dark Descent's little sister, Justine.

Instead of a standard "full review" as we've done in the past, because everything that I would normally say "game-wise" I've already covered in my main post about Amnesia ~The Dark Descent~, so here I'll just cover aspects of Justine, and try to not give away any spoilers, but just generalizations.

The atmosphere in Justine is very similar, one might even say "identical," except that it isn't.  Yes, you're in castle-esque surroundings and you start the game in a groggy haze not knowing anything about who or what or where you are.  In the first room, a cell, your door is locked with a rope tied to it.  There's also a phonograph (kind of like a record player for you youngsters....... okay, like an MP3 player) that the rope from the door is tied to via a pulley in the ceiling.  You're first objective: get the door open.  

The game is brilliant in that once you figure out how to open the door, your mind will be ready to solve puzzles.  The "point" of this short (although still equally scary) game is to either "save" a person in a potentially deadly torture device by figuring out a way out of the room, or have them killed and you have an easy way out.  Some of the puzzles are a bit difficult to figure out and require trial and error, although in this case, a failed attempt means either someone else dies or you do.

There's the catch.  Death.  In Justine, you only have one life.  If you die, you're kicked out of the game, no helpful game text to encourage you on.  You have to start a new game now.  This was only somewhat frustrating as there was one particularly wet area that I couldn't figure out how to evade a fast moving monster through waste deep water.  My tactics became too elaborate, such as piling up boxes around doors, climbing up onto machinery only to have the creature hunt and fox guard the area.  Conklederp even freaked out when the creature screamed/growled/garbled "I can see you."  The frustrating part being that I was trying different ways I thought I had to evade the monster and it took me 10 minutes to get to that point in the game each time I failed and died and wanted to try again.

However, once I made it past that area and all the "scary" stuff that I'd been going through was no longer scary, the game gave me the finger and scared the poop out of me all over again.  Justine does a very good job of scaring you, letting you calm down long enough to realize that you're about to be in danger and then you are again and you only have time to run!  There's one puzzle, after completing the game twice that I don't have the balls to figure out what to do as I'm just too frightened.  Too frightened to stop and look behind me, to stop and look about the room, to figure out how to possibly save the man who I've killed each time.  Each time I've said "Sorry dude, you're going to die so I don't have to."  I wonder what that says about me?

I also want to quickly add, that the story in Justine fits into the world of The Dark Descent with a couple of items that connect the two story lines, which is nice and at the same time made me think, "Oh fuck I'm in the same world."  So yes, Justine's a really fun game that will take you maybe 30 minutes to complete, maybe an hour if you're like me and like to look at everything and maybe longer if you're a lot like me and have to inspect, read and ponder over every little thing.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Objects In The Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

Full Review: Amnesia ~The Dark Descent~ (PC)

Amnesia ~ The Dark Descent ~ is a first person survival horror game developed by Frictional Games in Sweden.  The game was first released in 2010 and was offered as part of the Humble Indie Bundle IV.  I now give here my full review:

STORY

The story is told in a slightly odd and very non linear fashion.  Initially you begin as a player  and do not know who your character is or where you are.  Most of the character back story is told while exploring areas of the castle and you come across diary entries and journal notes, both from your character Daniel, and other former inhabitants of what you soon discover is Brannenburg Castle.

It might've just been me being slow on the uptake of what the hell was going on story-wise, but it took me about half of the game (we'll say roughly 5 hours in) to put one and one together and figure out that the "Shadow" that was "chasing" me was really/also the strange meaty tendrils and masses that will populate areas and cause damage as the game/story progressed.

Once the entire story is realized, just before the "final confrontation," I felt that in whole it was a pretty good story.  There were some things I did have questions about though, but I will cover those in the "Final Thoughts" section at the end.

GAMEPLAY

Game play in Amnesia is pretty basic.  You move with the WASD keys, and look with the mouse, standard PC controls for an FPS.  You can also "shift" sprint and crouch (which I modified to the "C" key instead of the left Control key (I think that's what it's set as initially).  You also have "Tilt Left" and "Tilt Right" keys (Q & E keys) and I'm not 100% sure what these are intended for.  There were a number of times in the game when your character seemed like he was faltering, but those only lasted for a moment before completely blacking out.

Did I mention running/sprinting?  Because you do a lot of that in this game.  There are a number of monsters, well, three anyway that I can think of and you have to run the fuck away from each and everyone of them.  Maybe an experienced player could run around and "tilt" their way when avoiding some of the faster moving monsters, maybe that's what the tilt keys are for.

Amnesia is basically a point-and-click game.  You wander from room-to-room, see an item, pick it up and look at it in your inventory all the while wondering when you're going to use that sturdy surgical needle next.  It actually reminded me a lot of Shadowgate 64: Trial of the Four Towers, in that they were both FPS games that didn't involve any real "fighting" and you went through rooms in a castle and solved puzzles to progress to new areas.

Another really cool/fun thing with Amnesia is that you're able to manipulate a lot of objects in the game.  Cabinet doors, drawers can all be opened by clicking on "where" you want to grab a hold of then moving the mouse in the direction that you want to pull that object.  Some larger objects such as boulders and wooden beams can only be moved by clicking on them and then walking in the direction you want them moved.  Some objects seem ridiculously light, such as barrels, which you can pick up and hurl across the room as the same you could do with a book.  Most of the objects in the game don't do anything, but are there and you can pick them up and throw them.  They have no purpose, but it helps to solidify that this world is "real."

Regarding your health and sanity meters, they will slowly regenerate although you are able to find "healing potions." If you happen to be "killed" by one of the monsters, you will respawn/regain consciousness in a nearby room.  There was a point in the game where I decided to "fuck it all" and not bother healing myself and if I ran into a monster, I would let them kill me, knowing that I would respawn/come to near by and just continue with what I was doing before I "died."  This mentality quickly took away a lot of the fear and "survival" aspect.

Near the end of the game, I seemed to hit a mental wall and ended up visiting gamefaqs in order to solve some puzzles.  They weren't complicated puzzles mind you, just difficult to figure out.  Like [SPOILER ALERT] combining the copper tube and the sturdy surgical needle (which I figured out on my own), but then injecting it into the skull of a fresh (as in only a day old) corpse in order to have blood pour out of the open tube end, which you then injected yourself with so that you could have an important anti-fungal antibody in order to access a "locked" area.  Yeah, had to look that one up.  I also looked up a map for a large open area that required a lot of running and I was moderately low on lamp oil.

GRAPHICS

From someone who grew up with the original NES, pretty much any game that comes out is going to have beautiful graphics.  Amnesia is no exception.  Shadows in this game move and dance as you think they would in a more-or-less haunted-type castle.  I really don't have much else to say on this front.  The game looked good with the graphics engine in the game ramped  all the way up although I didn't give it a try at the lowest setting.  Maybe I should have, considering this is a full review, but oh well.

MUSIC & SOUND

The music in the game was composed by Mikko Tarmia and was very nice.  Nice in that it was very unobtrusive and didn't distract from whatever may or may not be lurking around the next darkened corner.  The majority of the in game music is dark ambient, designed to maintain the mood of the game.  I've listened to a bit of the soundtrack, not extensively, but again, it's good mood music.

The sound effects in the game are also really well done.  Cringe-worthy really.  There's a good number of squishy and "splotch" type noises when you throw a chair at a fleshy, bleeding, pulsing mass emanating from the ceiling/floor/wall.

SANITY EFFECTS

As I had previously mentioned in my first impressions, that I was really excited to see that another game aside from Eternal Darkness implemented a sanity meter to a horror game.  In the game, this was represented by a brain and brain stem that would shrink and pulse color as you went more and more nuts.  There were also textual descriptions such as "Head is pounding, hands are shaking" and ". . ."  Warping of the screen, seeing hissing cockroaches scurrying across are all visual cues that your sanity isn't as sound as you would like it to be.  You can also hear people screaming, voices saying things "get out of here" or "what do you want?!" as if they were just behind you.

All of these are designed to continually unnerve you although I didn't find them as interesting as in Eternal Darkness, but while those sanity effects worked in that game, doesn't necessarily mean that they would work well or translate to Amnesia.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I really enjoyed Amnesia and is the case with any game that I like, there are also things that may have bothered me, but not to the point that I'm going to not like or hate a game.  There were a number of times that I was getting quite frustrated though, which was usually due to my lack of lantern oil and trying to avoid whatever that noise was that's right behind me.  Or running from candle lit room to candle lit hallway to bit of moonlight coming through a crack in the roof just to avoid going insane all because I have no lantern oil.

All in all though, despite some frustrations, this was a really good, fun game.  I was frightened when I was supposed to be, even if it wore off just as quickly.  I would highly recommend this game if you haven't already played it.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

The Darkness Comes

P.S.  So I just found out that the "Justine" tab when you start up the game leads to a pseudo expansion game.  I'm excited to start this now, or at least when it starts getting dark.

P.P.S.  A really cool part in the game was when I went into a room with only one exit, I picked up something (a diary entry most likely) then there was a growl behind me and banging on the door.  The game told me "Hide, you have nothing to defend yourself with" so I ran into wardrobe I had just finished checking (and knew that it was empty) and closed the door.  The outer door burst open and I could hear the "thing" growling, grunting and breathing heavily while it stomped/shuffled around the room.  I heard it leave after, maybe 20 seconds but even then I hung out in the wardrobe hoping that whatever it was wasn't going to be "right there" as I opened the door.  It wasn't, but it was still pretty fricken scary.

First Impressions: Amnesia ~ The Dark Descent (PC)

I've been playing this game for a bit.  Steam says that it's been for about three hours, which is pretty decent amount of time to get a general feel for a game.  Some might even say, that it's the first impression of the game.  Eh, eh?

I started this game a few weeks ago, one night because Conklederp wanted to watch me play a game.  Any game.  And I had this game called Amnesia: The Dark Descent from the Humble Bundle 5 and all I knew about it was that it was an FPS survival horror game.  Sounded like fun considering it was probably around 11pm and I didn't have work the following morning.

Upon booting up (do people still say that?), the game lets you know that there will be enemies in the game and that it would probably behoove you, the player, to run the fuck away from them as you are unarmed and they will most likely kill you.  That's always a good thing to know.  And as the game was progressing, it gave out hints/reminders that running away from "monsters" will keep you alive even though I spent three hours in the game before I came across anything that could kill me, outside of the invisible bipedal water monster bastard.  But that's getting ahead of ourselves.

Once the game started, I had to acquaint myself with the controls and basic mechanics so that I wouldn't go spinning in circles instead of sprinting forward at the first sight of danger (a la Slender: The Eight Pages).  Your health meter is represented by a physical heart that subtly decreases in size and healthy-looking-ness as you accrue damage and you're given a textual example, such as "A wound is bleeding quite badly."  I was also excited to find out that the game implemented a "Sanity Meter," which, to my own knowledge, has only existed in one other game previously.  I believe the game also said something about if your sanity dropped too low (by witnessing horrific events or by being in the dark too much, that crazy shit would happen and you would die.  Now you're able to regain sanity and health by completing puzzles in game, but that just usually means that you'll be healthy for the next set of darkened hallways.

That brings up another point about the game: the Darkness comes.  Ho-fucking-boy does the darkness come.  Throughout the game, or at least the first four hours of it that I've played, you will periodically find tinder boxes to light candles/torches and lamp oil to use in your hand lamp.  This must be some pretty thin oil too as your lamp will burn through a half-full canister in maybe a minute; probably less though.  I rarely would have my lamp "on" for more than a couple of seconds in order to preserve what little oil I did have left.  And the tinderboxes, I would hoard those like ink ribbons.  The early areas in the game tend to load you up with tinderboxes making you think that you'll be able to find one in every bookcase or desk drawer.  If only we knew then what we know now four hours in.  The game will also give many options for lighting things to give you light.  In a single hallway, you'll easily find three or four torches that you could light and while it would make the hallway nice a pretty, it would not be advisable as you would be out of tinderboxes and left in the dark.  This did in fact happen and I was scared near shitless the entire time.

At the moment, I'm currently in a large hall area with a fountain containing either a corpse or just the statue of one.  The only sanity effects I've witnessed have been warbliness of the screen and once cockroaches were crawling over the screen for about 20 seconds then disappeared. I'm enjoying the game, but sometimes I'll get frustrated with not having any lantern oil and having to sprint between lit candles, so much so that I feel like it takes me out of the game.  So with four hours of game play in (I played another hour since I began writing this article, hence the one hour discrepancy), I'd like to try to finish and figure out what the hell's going on.