In its mission to make you listen to its music, A Musical Story practically hands you a blindfold. The story asks you to relax into its acid-trip jam-session cool, but somewhat harshes the mellow with its insistence on repeating long phrases until they’re perfect. However, it looks and sounds fabulous, and will reward perseverance and repeated plays.
A wonderful experience from the moment you set sail, FAR: Changing Tides builds out the world and gameplay ideas of its predecessor with scale, detail and awesome moments of discovery. Okomotive has started with its original neat mechanic about a left-to-right juggernaut, then taken it in every other direction it could go.
The Artful Escape is a thrill. It's true that the most joyous bits of action are underused – in terms of both playtime and what they could give the story – and some scarce but present graphical issues on Switch are a shame. Overall, though, the strengths are major, the niggles minor, and it will strike a chord with any pipe-dreaming rock star.
Solo developer Jonas Manke has aimed for the comfort of an easy-in-every-way game and hit the mark. The play feel of the later game and gorgeous environments are what lift it above a paint-by-numbers explore-em-up. It will test neither your skill nor your patience, with solid execution that respects the player’s time. While there’s little to blow you away, there’s lots to impress, delivered confidently and without asking much in return.
Nonetheless, Beyond a Steel Sky magically brings its 1994 ancestor back to life. The style, the humour, the chirpy dystopia are all revived. However, a lot has happened since that first golden age of adventures, and if you want a creative addition to the indie-fuelled inventiveness of the modern genre then you should look elsewhere. This is a game that remembers exactly how great things were in 1994, but isn’t much interested in how great they were last week.
Unsighted combines some very familiar ideas: it's a top-down, roguelite, sci-fi Metroidvania with a strong 16-bit aesthetic. Its time-is-ticking, post-apocalyptic scenario is brought to life by the enchanting palettes of its pixel art, making a world you want to explore, full of characters you want to know. Far from punishing, it leans more on the 'lite' than the 'rogue', letting fun prevail – as it will, thanks to the addictive rhythm of the controls, backed by punchy sounds. The cooperative multiplayer is icing on top of an already well-iced cake. Combining flavours of Super Nintendo classics with modern playability, Unsighted is the game 1995 desperately wanted to make but just didn't know how.
Beyond Blue has noble intentions, with an urgent and vital message about our impact on the Earth. However, it doesn't do itself justice. Although there is some decent content in here – videos, music, sound design, gameplay, narrative – those parts do little to support or enhance one another. Gameplay is soothing but one-note, the video documentaries don't frame the missions and neither are well connected to the narrative. While there are moments of majesty in exploring the ocean, the limited draw distance and pop-in frequently interrupt the awe. Edutainment's a hard one to pull off, and Beyond Blue feels less like an awesome rock concert about dolphins and more like your science teacher trying to do a rap.
Unpacking manages to do several things very well, all at the same time. It's a touching story told through interaction, it provides the creative play space of a great dollhouse game, and it deftly applies established game design ideas from completely different genres. Its only real shortcoming is the repetition that is a necessary byproduct of landing its message. Effort has gone into making the controls satisfying on Switch, and the visual and sound design are delightful throughout, making Unpacking, like any sane person's cutlery, absolutely top-drawer.
Tunche looks and sounds good, plays neatly and consistently and is fun for couch co-op. However, it takes its punchy ideas and sneaks off into a dark, dirty alley where people just won’t want to go and find it. It is fun if you’re willing to get in there and get stuck in, but you’ll need to step over the broken glass of tiny screen text, try not to touch the wet-stained walls of repetitive, roguelite early encounters, and apologetically deny having any spare change to the drugged up yuppie of verbose exposition. In conclusion, if you are looking for a fight, mate, let us point you in the direction of Tunche.
Circa infinity is a game where form follows function and function follows form. If the image of a bold circle on the screen was the chicken, then the mechanic of a wrap-around platformer was the egg. The constant trickery of its concentrated concentricity is confoundingly circular, but once you’ve bought into the premise, it makes perfect sense. Player-friendly level design and a well judged difficulty curve let the fluid intricacy and fiendish challenge shine, while its distinctive appearance will leave an indelible mark on your mind.
Dungeon Encounters is a masterstroke of game design, character and narrative – it's storytelling in the way only games can be. It teaches how scale is felt in a game, and it teaches, through their absence, the roles of rich visuals and verbose storytelling. Next time we play an RPG with baroque graphics and forests of text, we will understand a little more deeply where a game's atmosphere really comes from.
The Good Life knows where its strengths lie. Its functional open-world model and mostly-dated gameplay systems sit quietly in the background and allow its quirky charm to take the spotlight. That charm is piled on thick, with absurd characters (and absurd accents), a plot that digresses so wildly it seems unable to remember where it started and, lest we forget, the whole dog/cat transmogrification thing. The charm and atmosphere have to be seriously compelling if they are to excuse the well-worn mechanics, repetitive tasks and frequent slowdown and pop-in. If Japanese old-school gaming whimsy × twee Englishness isn't for you, then neither is The Good Life. But if you're a SWERY fan and that sounds like your cup of tea, get dunking.
More sophisticated curation would have made this a genuinely new way to engage with games and gaming: a prompt to see all games in a new light, promote the whole indie game proposition and popularise the appreciation of gaming as – ugh, dare we use the word? – "art". But the star feature is instead just an animated menu. As it stands, Short Games Collection is great if you can bring some inquisitiveness and insight of your own to the table – the games themselves are worth the time – but it's nothing more than the sum of its parts.
First Cases is a significant change of direction from The ABC Murders, Poirot's last outing also published by Microids. Stepping comfortably into visual novel territory and casting aside the puzzling that would hold back narrative flow, your fantasy is one not of being Hercule Poirot but rather of enjoying a Poirot novel. The Switch let's you indulge in that as you would a great book, whether in the wingback of your stately home's library or, indeed, on the toilet of your bedsit. For storytelling, the game format is ideal – even ingenious. The trademark Christie web of connections between events, evidence and the psychology of the characters is planned out in front of your eyes – either to pore over on a diagram or to stroll through in the neatly presented settings. The game's main limitations are the inanimate world and workaday writing that fail to lend the sparkle of life to a well-machined story. Nonetheless, while puzzle-loving gamers shouldn't pick this one up, visual novel fans and Hercule-heads won't be able to put it down.
If there's an idea no one's done before, it's probably because it's just a bad idea. But Zoink has managed to hit on something original that actually works with Lost in Random. Its audiovisual world-building is tremendous, ably lifting a servicable quest structure and story, and inventive combat plays to its strengths and is taken carefully up to the limits of its potential. However, the layers of interaction during battles make a promise of strategic complexity that isn't kept, and encounters last too long without the depth to sustain interest. Nevertheless, everything is packaged beautifully and Lost in Random doesn't outstay its welcome, either, leaving you craving one last roll of the dice.