Category: Video Games

Last month, I bought a bundle of games from IndieGala, as I am wont to do. I purchased it for less than four Canadian dollars, and it contained exactly one game that I was actually interested in: Dragon Fin Soup. I still have not played this game.

However, I did install and play Apartment 666 right away. I had a pretty strong feeling of what it would be from the name, and I was partially correct; it was in fact a barely interactive scare-em-up. What I did not anticipate was that it is also a junky PT clone. That is to say, it’s a game where you keep walking through the same hallway over and over as progressively spookier things happen each time.

It was a pretty crappy game, with exactly one moving object and a record number of typos. If I have to say something nice about it, it’s that the developer at least tried to give it a unique story. I think. I’m not entirely clear on what PT’s plot is.

Also, since I’m a huge baby that gets scared by his own shadow, it did spook me well and good enough that I Alt+Tabbed out of the game while chanting “nope nope nope nope” on at least two occasions. So there’s that.

In addition to Apartment 666, I installed and played NEO-NOW! on a whim, and was similarly disinterested. To be fair, though, at least this one is an Early Access game, while the former is considered to be a complete experience (if that’s actually something you can call a video game these days).

NEO-NOW! is a very odd game. You begin by selecting a character model from a group of about five, and then a woman appears in the background, and suddenly your motorcycle is crashed at what looks like a gas station.

It’s a top-down action-type game reminiscent of old Zeldas or maybe Gauntlet? You waddle around shooting/stabbing enemies and collecting the odd power-up. They start out with a sewer level right out of the gate, which is never a good sign, and then once you finish the sewer, you’re immediately swarmed by guys who blow up once they get close enough. This kills you immediately, of course.

There was no hook for me in this game, so I got bored after about ten minutes, when I had exhausted my small supply of bullets and got repeatedly blown up while trying to stab the kamikaze guys to death. I couldn’t find a path forward on that screen, so my adventure was as good as over anyway.

I don’t know if I’m going to go back to it. Probably not. It’s not like it’s a notably terrible game or anything. I’ve played (and paid more money for) far worse. It’s just that NEO-NOW! presents nothing that makes me want to keep playing. Like I said, it’s got no hook. Also, there aren’t enough bullets and trying to stab your way to victory is no fun.

So there we are. Two more games down, neither of them worth my time, but fortunately I can write them off as having essentially been free with the purchase of another game I was more interested in. I’m going to try to get through the rest of the bundle by the end of the month, but no promises. There be many more interesting games on my plate right now.

I played the video-style game Tulpa the other day. I was going to try to write something long and thoughtful about it in this space, but honestly it’s not really worth the effort. So I’ve copied and pasted my initial reactions, which I posted on Talking Time yesterday. It’s basically the polar opposite of the thing I wrote about Limbo earlier this week. Enjoy.

On my quest to slim down my number of unplayed Steam games, I installed and played Tulpa last night.

My first reaction was more or less “what the heck did I just play?”

After thinking on it a bit, I still don’t really know.

The game starts you off as a blonde girl in a cute dress, and then you solve some wagon-pushing puzzles and then you find a man being sacrificed to Satan I guess in a shed. Then the world gets all spooketized and the sacrificed guy becomes your Ghost Pal who can flip switches and stuff. Also sometimes Ghost Pal gets sucked into wormholes. And if that happens, or if blondie gets too scared or hit by something, she shatters into a billion tiny pieces.

The world continues to get more messed up as you progress, and the puzzles are often dumb and unintuitive: a lot of the time I found myself just clicking around to see what was interactive. It’s especially confusing because right away the game teaches you that white objects are interactive but then there’s one puzzle that requires you to interact with a black object and it took me forever to figure it out. Maybe the game is outing me as an unintentional racist?

When you make it to the end of the game, you solve a puzzle that suggests that blondie either has super-dense bones and weighs as much as three men, or that her soul is as valuable as that of Jesus Christ and also the other two guys that were crucified with him. Then Ghost Pal leaves her in the Scales of Cthulhu and I guess his job is done because then he vanishes.

So yeah, I have no idea what was going on.

That said, the game wasn’t really enjoyable enough to keep thinking about it any longer.

Oh and also I played through a second time to get those easy cheevos.