Playlist (September 2021) (Patreon)

Hey, welcome back to the playlist. Here’s three short reviews of games I’ve been checking out lately! Starting with…

Myst

Okay, so I had somehow never played Myst before. I myst it. Despite being obsessed with adventure games in the mid 90s - I never made the leap from Monkey Island to the island of Myst.

So, if you don’t know - Myst was a mysterious first-person puzzle game where you move between pre-rendered images. A bit like Google Streetview, but with hardly any colours. In the many years since release it has been remastered and remade - culminating in this fancy new version for VR, which is also now available on PC and consoles.

So, the game is about wandering around an island, and poking at buttons, levers, locks, and keypads. The general loop is to find a clue - say, a three digit code - figure out where to apply it, and then do a bit of logical deduction to solve the puzzle at hand.

Now, everything I’d heard about Myst and its sequels suggested that the game was utterly cryptic and indecipherable. And I don’t know if things have been massively changed for this remake, but I found all the puzzles to be rather well designed, with subtle hints and clues to help you out. For example, a puzzle about redirecting water through pipes is helped by a sound effect of gushing water that you can follow. Things like that.

Don’t get me wrong: the game can be tricky. And it does drop you in at the deep end: this is a very open game and so you are immediately faced with half a dozen puzzles you can solve simultaneously. But once I got over that initial hump, I almost never found it too cryptic to have fun. All I’d say is, just make sure you have a pad of paper with you.

And so, in the end, I really enjoyed the game. The puzzles were good, the mysterious vibe was right up my alley, and I ended up wolfing down the game in the space of a couple days. Plus, it made me realise that some of my favourite games are utterly indebted to Myst - like The Room games on iOS, some of Amanita Design’s games, and - most clearly of all - The Witness. So I’m glad I finally played it, and here’s hoping the sequel, Riven, gets this treatment in the future.

Axiom Verge 2

Axiom Verge was a very impressive game. It was a Metroidvania made by one man - and it had great combat, killer music, a cool map, and a sexy Metroid-inspired vibe. Axiom Verge 2 is still incredibly impressive - but unfortunately I didn’t love it as much as its predecessor.

So, this is still a Metroidvania - you explore a giant interconnected map, find pick ups that give you new abilities, and use those new powers to poke further into the world. But pretty much everything else has changed - and, in my opinion, it’s for the worst.

The dark NES-like graphics have gone, in favour of unappealing 16bit art. The music is often quite grating. And the story is more pronounced, and more incomprehensible.

Combat is the biggest shift: while Axiom Verge 1 had guns, the sequel is focused exclusively on close combat weapons like a pick-axe. Plus, a weak boomerang. And while plenty of games make that work, I found combat in Axiom Verge 2 to be really finicky and frustrating - mostly because of the weirdo enemy AI that makes them bounce all over the screen or run straight towards you.

In the end, I found it was best to ignore most enemies or use a handful of hacking powers to render them inert. There’s only a couple mandatory boss fights in the game, so you can almost ignore combat altogether.

The world is still fun to explore though, especially as you get more powers and abilities. At one point you can shape-shift into a spider-like drone and use a grappling hook to catapult yourself over platforms and into enemies. There’s also a cool, though under-explored, light world / dark world concept. And slowly clearing out a Metroidvania map always has a satisfying feeling to it. Like tidying up your sock drawer.

In the end, while I was looking forward to Axiom Verge 2 - it being the sequel to one of my favourite indie Metroidvanias - it just didn’t quite do it for me. And as soon as I was actually beginning to get into it… the game ended. Aw.

Umurangi Generation

I've often thought that we need more photography games. The camera lends itself so well to games, as we've seen in titles like Dead Rising, Fatal Frame, and Pokemon Snap. And if you agree, here's a new one to check out: Umurangi Generation.

Here's how it works. In each level, you're dropped in a small 3D environment with a camera and a list of things to snap. Like "duct tape" or "seven birds". Your job is simple: find the objects and photograph them. Sometimes you'll need to think carefully about position and lens.

It's not a particularly difficult game, but that's fine: it's just enjoyable to figure out the basic puzzles of "where the heck is the word 'mix' for me to shoot" and "how am I gonna get ten solar panels into a single shot".

The whole thing's got a really nifty presentation with low-poly models that look like Roblox characters rendered in the Blendo Games engine. And funky music that's like Jet Set Radio's soundtrack but edited for one of those "Lo-fi hip hop to study to" YouTube videos. I get Paradise Killer vibes from the whole thing, actually.

Anyhoo - I dig it. And I hope you do too.

Cheers, see you next month!