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

First Impressions: Penumbra - Requiem

Penumbra: Requiem, is the final installment of the Penumbra series from Frictional Games.  

P:R is an odd hybrid, considering the series and genre that the game is coming from.  The first two games in the series were straight up survival horror although the second game lacked the hell-bent wolves of the first game, although it was no less terrifying. The game starts right after the previous game ended.  There might be some time that passed, but it's minimal.  However long it takes for you to wake up after being knocked unconscious. So, kind of like the transition between the first two games.

So yes, hybrid-esque.  And I really want to like this game.  Is that not a great way to start a review?  Coming from a survival horror genre, Requiem takes a hard left turn and drives through the guard rail.  I don't know what that means.  Requiem really reminds me of Portal except there aren't any turrets.  Correction, I don't know if there are any turrets, but there are explosive bottles of rejected ketchup from the Heinz Corp.

  

Requiem removes all enemies and turns the game into a straight puzzle-platformer.  You have to go from point A to point C while avoiding pit B.  It's very much out of place and feeling with the rest of the series. I'm currently in conflict with how I feel about the game.  

Okay, the world is the same.  You find yourself, I think, in The Tomb that was heavily mentioned in Penumbera: Black Plague and I'm assuming that your mission is to find your way through/out.  A lot of the puzzles are based around moving one object over to another area where you have to manipulate another object, then go back over there to press that button and run across the floor to make it through that door on the other side of the room, which is full of moving platforms on conveyor tracks.  Get it?

It would be like playing Resident Evil one moment, then playing Portal in a haunted mansion the next.  Okay, that game sounds pretty cool and I would want to play that.  That essentially is what Penumbra: Requiem is though, so I'm at a bit of a lost.  And I don't know why I'm having such a hard time coming to terms with how I ultimately feel about this game.  I love the series, I love the company, I'm just having a hard time putting as much time in a single sitting as I did with the previous two games in the series.

That's where I'm at and I'm really hoping that I like it there.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
I Can't Even Wrap My Brain Around How You Do That!



P.S.  I should also mention that Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is now available to pre-order from anywhere that sells online/downloadable games.  The Gog, Steam, Frictional Games' all have the game available.  So go do that if you've like anything that either Frictional Games or co-developer The Chinese Room has ever made.

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

It Looks To Be Another Update Of Sorts

I'm only kind of at a loss as to what to talk about today.  I wasn't able to post this last Friday (8/9/2013) as Conklederp and I had some friends (Vorlynx and Mills Co.) visiting from Nor*Cal all last week.  There was a robotics conference up here in Portland and there was some river floating and blackberry picking that had to be done as well.  We also started the process of making blackberry wine (adapted recipe to follow) and now our kitchen smells like fermenting fruit, which in turn brings me back to my time working for R.H. Phillips Winery during the 2006 harvest season.  It's the kind of smell that would make you think some fruit somewhere has done something it shouldn't have, if you didn't already know where it was coming from.  Goodtimes.

I've (still) been playing a lot of Infinite Space, (still) and have acquired some more "abilities" such as having a docking bay for individual fighters (a la Battlestar Galactica's Colonial Vipers) which cause minimal damage to the opposing fleets flagship while slowing down the rest of their fleet; realizing that icons above each of the ships in your fleet correspond to weapons and each have their own max and min range; melee battles are a pain-in-the-ass and play like a constant game of  roshambo; ship modules of a certain type (such as bridge/red modules) can fit in other areas of the ship as long as they don't say they have to be in a specific location in the description; "Grus" is a word used in the game that is substituted interchangeably for both "shit" and "fuck" and any other variation thereof; the game is pretty mature, considering it's Teen rating, such as the main character cutting off a bad guys arms to get information and a main character shooting a bad guy at point-blank range in the face out of frustration/fear/anger.  There's a lot going on in the game and a lot of space to do it in, sometimes almost too much space.

I also played a bit of Portal 2 co-op with Vorlynx, but only so much before I had to leave for work (which was also before he had finished the single player campaign).  I've also put roughly six more hours into Torchlight, 2 hours into Half-Life and maybe an hour into Penumbra: Black Plague.  Torchlight is more-or-less just dungeon crawling fun that I continue with after Half-Life becomes too frustrating with having/needing to save after every encounter with enemies and then reloading every time I feel I've wasted too much ammunition or taken too much damage.  I want to play more of Penumbra: Black Plague (partly so that I can write up my First Impressions, but also) because I really liked the first game in the series, I like the company (Frictional Games) and I want to see how the story will end.  And semi-most importantly, I want to play it in the dark for maximum un-nervingnous.

I also went through a couple of the demos that I have on my 3DS, most successfully were the two demos for Style Savvy which will make their way to Demo Time in the coming weeks.  Yes, stop laughing.

I haven't kept up with video games in the news and what's been going on in that world.  I haven't played enough "older" games to warrant another Emulator Hour.  I kind of feel like a bad person, except that I don't.  Boo hoo me, I know.

With all the PAX timbits floating around, I'm very sad that I will not be able to attend PAX Prime this year (as I haven't been able to since PAX2010) due to work scheduling problems.  It doesn't help either that I live 600 miles closer than I did when I was able to attend, but things are in the works (loosely) so that I will be able to attend in the future, although I vaguely recall making a similar statement last year around this same time.

Oh hey look, The Bridge is on sale.  Time to go and take care of that.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Wonders Need Time

Full Review: Penumbra: Overture (PC)

I just finished Penumbra: Overture and I really want to tell you the last scene/event and post a picture of it, but that would be giving away part of the story and I don't want to be that guy.  I will say that some may find the ending a little anti-climactic and unfulfilled, as in there is not a "true" ending, but the game pseudo-segue's into the next game in the series, Penumbra: Black Plague.  The game even says "Part I" when you load, so there shouldn't be too much of a surprise by the lack of closure.

STORY

The story is somewhat of a mystery and I mean that in both the sense that the game falls under the genre of Survival Horror Mystery, but also that you find out more about the story while you're playing it.  You start off the game with a prologue saying that you received a letter from your father, whom you thought was dead and you end up heading to Northern Greenland, taking a plain then freighter.  You get dropped off in the middle of nowhere, which apparently is where you want to go and after solving the problem of the frozen hatch, your first person dungeon crawl begins.

The game's story is fairly well hidden throughout the entirety of the game.  You find out bits of information as you run from dimly lit room through darkened hallway to well lit room.  Most of the information you find through bits of journals left behind and the occasional newspaper clipping.  I have absolutely no qualms with this method of story telling although I could see how someone else may not find all too fun.

GAMEPLAY

As previously mentioned, the game runs like an FPS without any emphasis on the Shooter part.  You do have some weapons such as a hammer and pickaxe, but it's incredibly hard to kill a starving feral wolf who's darting around you, taking bites out of your ankle, shin, calf, thigh, butt, arm, back and only after three bites do you "die."  

Being the case with most/all FPS's, I had to switch the mouse's y-axis to be inverted, which only became confusing on a couple of occasions.  While playing, if you want to manipulate anything, a hand icon appears over your normal simple looking cross hairs.  This hand uses the same controls as the camera.  However, if you take something out of your inventory and want to say, try and use your screwdriver on a screw, the y-axis reverts to standard, non-inverted.  This can be a bit disorienting if you were to have a giant spider coming at you.  (Thankfully there are no giant spiders, only jumping spiders the size of a Nerf football).

The game itself though is broken up into getting from Point A to Point B to Point C.  Wherein Point B and C you'll have to solve some type of puzzle.  Getting to Point B though can be difficult if you don't have a map drawn.  Luckily, as the area you're in was once a functioning mine, there are handy "You Are Here" maps every so-many yards.  I decided that I would camp out in front of a map with my flashlight illuminating the map and just draw it down in my handy-dandy notebook.  (I highly recommend keeping a notebook to write down maps and the occasional note).  I will say that I was probably a lot more conservative about using my flashlight than I would have been if I hadn't first played Amnesia.  As there were no sanity effects and constant fear of running out of fuel/power, I only had my flashlight on sparingly.  I also didn't use any of the flares and only in the final area did I break out my glow stick.  It's not that I liked seeing in the dark, I just kept thinking that I'd reach an area where I was blocked in and I would have no battery power left to spot potential danger or solve a puzzle

Some of the puzzles though were quite difficult and I had to revert to using either gamefaqs or youtube to find out what to do next.  Other sections were flat out difficult.  As in an area where I was crouched (so no sprinting) in a tunnel and had to make it past some spider eggs, knock some boulders out of the way with a pickaxe, enter a room then shove a boulder to cover up the hole leading back into the tunnel.  Do all of this before you were bitten 3-4 times by the spiders.  I don't know how many times I replayed trying to find my way through the tunnel without dying, and then trying to figure out how to close up the hole without dying (turns out piling up chairs and rocks isn't a good enough barricade against spiders).

I'll also briefly cover dying.  Dying was something that happened to me a lot while playing.  Granted I didn't do it intentionally, but I wasn't overly frightened by death either.  Definitely by the end of the game, it was more of an annoyance than anything else.  I would run down a hallway to try and avoid Wolf #1, only to run into Wolf #2 and in the process of avoiding that wolf, Wolf #1 would catch up and kill me.  Upon restarting, I would maybe wait another 10 seconds before running down the hall, just to see if the different location of the wolf would change my outcome.   The point is, I rarely used any of my healing pills and just went for death.  I could possibly see this as a failure, but I can't initially think of how to fix it.

MUSIC & SOUND

The music I enjoyed very much although most of it was ambient background sounds designed to unnerve you, which it did very well.  When there was impending doom though, the score really kicked up and got interesting, at least long enough to know that you were about to die.  The sound effects were also really well done.  There were multiple times where I could just faintly hear the growling of a wolf and knew that I'd either have to hide quickly or make a break for it and sprint to the next door down the hall and around the corner.

FINAL THOUGHTS

In short, I really liked this game and I feel like I've become a fan of Frictional Games.  There were some aspects that I didn't like, such as not caring about dying and some of the puzzles which had to be solved on the fly while being chased by something that could kill you was a bit frustrating.  It definitely had the feel of wanting to ask a friend how they made it past the noxious gas pits.  As a whole though, Penumbra: Overture had a solid 10 hours of gameplay with about an hour or so of frustrating gameplay.  So now I'm looking forward to delving into part II, Penumbra: Black Plague.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
We'll All Sleep Well Tonight

When Worlds Collide II: Awesome Collaborations for 2013

I'm one of those kinds of people that likes it when two things that I like, happen to separately like each other back.  And through that liking, have their own child instead of my imaginary brain child.  This has been happening since I first found out that J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were friends and were part of/founded a literary group at Oxford called The Inklings.  This continued when I was about 11 and discovered that George Lucas and Steven Speilberg were friends, hence why I was seeing George Lucas on set while watching a documentary about Raiders of the Lost Ark.  It's these kinds of collaborations that make me happy.

One of the first games that I bought via Steam that wasn't part of a Humble Indie Bundle was Dear Esther.  I bought it because it looked beautiful.  Yes, I was judging a book by it's cover and let me tell you, it was god-damn-beautiful.  So Dear Esther was developed by a small company called thechineseroom, which is amusing as they're a British company.  So they made this game, which I didn't fully understand until about the time I finished it, which was after about two hours of playing, but that's beside the point.  The point is, is that it was beautiful and fun.

Moving onto Frictional Games (but not forgetting thechineseroom), they're the company that made both the Penumbra series and Amnesia ~The Dark Descent~.  I've already talked about both games previously here and here, so I won't need to go into either of those again.

NOW, Frictional Games is teaming up with thechineseroom to develop the indirect sequel to Amnesia called Amnesia ~A Machine for Pigs~.  Yes, the title is a bit obscure, other than being slightly obvious with the quote/reference during the beginning of the trailer but other than that, there are both living and dead pigs featured in both trailers for the game.  The point is, is that I've really liked both Amnesia and Dear Esther and this collaboration looks to be pretty amazing.

Okay, now jumping back to thechineseroom, they are in development of another game dealing with a genre that I've been a fan of for a very large portion of my life.  I don't really know when it was that I realized I liked the apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic genre, but it was definitely sometime in the early to mid 1990s, so in my early teenage years.  So thechineseroom's new game will be titled Everybody's Gone to the Rapture.  According to thechineseroom, the game will be in a similar vain to Dear Esther, in that it will be an open world exploration POV game.  

This is almost too much for my brain to handle

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Be Careful Not To Slip On The Puddle

First Impressions: Penumbra Overture (PC)

Penumbra Overture is the first game in a trilogy from Frictional Games.  I previously reviewed their lastest release, Amnesia ~ Justine ~ which was a stand alone expansion for Amensia: The Dark Descent.  After I finished Amnesia, I looked up the company and found that they had released the Penumbra trilogy three years prior in 2007.  I only recently started playing at Conklederp's request, although it didn't take long for her to convince me.  Now on to the game itself, although I'm going to be making a lot of comparisons to Amnesia as that was the game from Frictional Games that I played first, so you'll have to bare with me on that front.

Having already played Amnesia, Penumbra Overture. felt very familiar.  They're both exploration games in and fps world.  Manipulating objects is also the same as in Amnesia, in that you move the cross hairs over a particular object such as a door or a chest and the cross hairs change to a hand.  By clicking on the object, your hand grasps the item and you're able to pick up, open, throw said item/object.  One big change I noticed with Penumbra Overture was that objects here seemed to have more weight than in Amnesia, which was odd considering that this game came first.  In Amnesia I could lift boxes and barrels, hurling them across the room as if I was throwing a baseball.  In Penumbra Overture, if I can throw a barrel, it's most likely because it's empty while I can only just lift a machine motor (and move slowly while doing so) because it's made out of dense materials.

There is another major departure between Penumbra Overture and Amnesia:

Yes, you are wielding a pickaxe.  Granted it's not the most graceful of wieldings, but it does the job when you come up against the stubborn boarded up door or air vent grate.  It's not as useful against feral wolves, but it has proved effective on at least one occasion.  Yes, you have physical weapons and there's more than one way of wielding them.  Let's stay with the pickaxe for the time being as it's still right there.  You're able to slash from upper right to lower left, back hand slash (upper left to lower right) and jab with the top part of the pickaxe.  This is done by holding the left mouse button and mimicking the motions you want to do.  Now, before you start thinking that by being armed with a pickaxe, you're a death dealing miner from hell.  As any normal person swinging a weapon at an attacking feral wolf, you're somewhat clumsy.  I don't feel that that's an error on the part of the programmers, but this isn't an fps action game, it's an fps exploration/adventure game and the safer thing to do, would be to either run away or hide.

Now hiding is a big part of this game, so big in fact that you have your own visual cues to let you know how well you're hiding.  "Hiding" is activated whenever you crouch.  When you stop moving, a thin blue "fuzz" circles the screen, which lets you know that you're kind of hiding but when the screen looks like this:

(by "this" I mean when the foreground is all blue and saturated), you know you're well hidden.  Bare in mind, that doesn't mean you're invisible.  If a wolf were to come around that far corner, it would be far less likely to see/react to me than if I were standing.  If a wolf came around that nearby corner, it would spot me, stop, growl, back up, then charge and kill me in three bites.

To answer that question, yes, you do have life, although it's a slightly arbitrary health meter.  You have a outline of your body standing, highlighted in green as well as a textual description such as, "I'm as fit as can be expected."  Health can be regained by either staying put for a short while or by taking pain killers.  The only problem with this approach, is that in the amount of time it takes to open up your inventory (which doesn't pause the game mind you), and take the pills, you could almost, just as easily find a corner to duck into until your health reaches full.  As in Amnesia, death has become more of an annoyance than something that I fear.

Death now brings me to saving.  Until I began writing this, I was not sure at all about what/where the save spots in the game where.  I knew that the game kept a number of auto saves, usually when you go through a door that requires the loading screen, but an obvious place to save?  I figured they didn't exist.  It turns out that whenever you encounter an odd, creepy looking lantern that seems like it's burrowing into your soul/subconscious, the game saves.  There's no hitting "escape" then clicking "save & exit," which to some extent makes me fear for wondering when I'll come to the next transition door.  It does feel a bit odd though having/needing to go to the "Auto Saves" file to find where I want the game to load from.

One really cool thing that I've been doing while playing is keeping a notebook.  The character in the game has a notebook and I figured, why shouldn't I?  It has come in pretty handy as well.  Now instead of going to the in-game notebook to look at the page with the Morse Code cipher to figure out what the pass code is for the key pad on the other side of the area, I can just look at my own notes while listening to the radio transmission and write down the sequence.  That way when I go to the keypad, I'll know exactly what to press.  It's also been very handy for making maps.  There are in-game maps, but those are in the form of a map being on the wall of the mine and you looking at it.  You can't take it with you, so I thought it best to carry one with me.

Now, I just realized that I haven't said anything about the story and that's mainly because I'm still trying to figure out what the story is.  Similar to Amnesia in that I only was able to put all the little pieces together near the end of the game, I feel like Penumbra Overture will operate in a very similar manner.  This game also involves a lot of reading, either from notes, diary entries and newspaper clippings from topics ranging from Inuit culture, Greenland mythology, to the ravings of a man eating spiders.  It's all about creating the world and mood.

In closing, Penumbra Overture is a very creepy, atmospheric survival horror game where you go to open a door, and shit like this happens:

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

We're Gunna Need a Bigger Boat

The Red Pill? The Blue Pill?

Bottle Sprite ripped by A.J. Nitro.  Everything else from some other source.

Believe it or not, The Matrix became an angsty teenager this year, but I digress even before I able to start.  But let's continue.  I actually had to look up which pill was the one that put you back in the Matrix and which was the one that brought you out of it.  There might be some symbolic meaning behind the specific color choices, red=freedom & blue=ignorance, but if there is, I don't know about it.  But lets stay with that blue pill for a while.  Ignorance and not knowing are the reasons for this post today and hold onto that thought.

For the past week or two, I've been playing a lot of Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2.  The week of Halloween, Steam was having a sale on a lot of their "scary" and Halloween-esque games so I decided to take advantage and pick up some AAA titles that I never played due to not having the appropriate system (Xbox 360 or a gaming computer).  However, when a game like Left 4 Dead 2 is looking at you with that blank hungry stare and it has a $4.99 sticker on it's forehead, I couldn't pass it up.  I also picked up the Penumbra collection, which consists of the three games in the Penumbra series (Overture, Black Plague, and Requiem).  Wait, you've never heard of Penumbra?  There's the French gothic metal band Penumbra, but we're referring to the game by Frictional Games, the people who brought us Amnesia: The Dark Descent and ~Justine~.  

Never having played any of the games in the Left 4 Dead series, you could look up a trailer and get a gist for what the game is about:

However, if you watch the trailer for Penumbra - Overture: 

You still don't know what the game is about.

With the Left 4 Dead games, you know exactly what you're getting.  I have only a vague idea with Penumbra, and that's something that I really like.  I've played about an hour and-a-half and I still couldn't tell you what the story is aside from what I've experienced.  But don't get me wrong, having a straight forward story that you know about before even starting the game isn't a bad thing and sometimes it's just refreshing to land in a world and go from Point A to Point B and kill as many zombies as you can without dying.  It's also very refreshing to play a game that you know absolutely nothing about.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

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.