The Witness

 

After a long development time of roughly 8 years, Jonathan Blow and his small team finally release something after Braid. The Witness has a pretty and colorful presentation, and it's meat consists of many puzzles on maze boards where you must align the lines correctly in order to power the boards up so that you can progress further.

There are plenty of them to be found on different settings such as a boathouse or a desert, and for the most part the learning curve is shown within the first of a series of puzzles, but sometimes I was stuck for minutes without any explanation given on how a new kind of puzzle would function.

Now of course I know who Jonathan Blow is, who has argued for years that hand holding and tutorials are some of the worst things which have damaged the video game industry, but even he complies when it comes to showing how a different kind of puzzle should be demonstrated before throwing players into the abyss of puzzle solving.

If you look online, Jonathan has plenty of seminars and videos where he talks about design and philosophy surrounding video games, and when speaking of Braid and The Witness, he claims that many games out there for instance lack the sense of discovery and feel forced by various sources to label themselves as necessary "fun". Not everything needs to be fun in gaming.

The modern Japanese industry also feels repetitive in general. What Blow not only advocates aside from creativity and originality, he wants to see video games get categorized properly as genres just like cinema, or at least as an addition towards story driven games in particular.

The feeling of epiphany can then come later as more complex puzzles challenges us. Anyway, The Witness is a pretty good puzzle-thon, but I liked The Talos Principle from recent memory even more, so there ya go.

Rating: 7.3

Retro Blog: Torin's Passage

 

The new year starts slowly in regards to my blog articles, but I am sure that I will be able to tell you about my experiences, opinion and insight plenty of times again in 2016. It is also the year that Flok Factory will most likely undergo changes in the form of starting an online video channel.

Now let's go back to the past and re-visit Torin's Passage. It's a point-and-click graphical adventure with handdrawn characters interacting with you in a fantasy setting, where the story is split over 5 chapters.

Developed by a division of Sierra, whom used to be kings when it came to graphical adventures, Torin's parents are imprisoned and he goes on a quest to rescue them alongside a purple dog named Boogle which can turn into a variety of shapes.

The graphical user interface is a combination of the actual gameplay combined with an inventory screen at the bottom. Characters themselves are hand drawn, and are widely depicted over the course of the chapters, which include a hot world, a fairy tale and some kind of entertainment set.

The puzzles involve combining certain items, sliding puzzles and memorizing. There is a hint system which can be turned on or off which is good, but as a kid I never figured all of the puzzles in the game, which is typical for many similar games for me.

It is only later in life that I was able to beat it, but nonetheless it remains one of my memories from the 90's. Looking back at it now, Torin's Passage is not only a memory, but also an above average graphical adventure. Certainly not the best, but not the worst either.

Rating: 7.0

Life is Strange

You play as Max, a teenager who wants to be a photographer. One school day, her best friend Chloe suddenly shows up and Nathan kills her after arguing. Through a miracle in the form of a blue butterfly, Max is now able to rewind and pause time, allowing her to save Chloe.

This is only the beginning of Life is Strange comprised of 5 episodes, and it’s basically a high school drama setting with time traveling, conversation trees and the butterfly effect being intact. Max and Chloe have a wonderful friendship and the plot builds up nicely over the episodes.

Many pop culture references are to be found, such as Cannibal Holocaust, internet memes or Blade Runner amongst many others. An issue I had was with the character animations and the facial expressions being quite bad for 2015, although the voice acting was good.

Whenever you make moral choices, you can change the outcomes of those potential consequences many times through rewinding. Tragic events occur, such as a possible suicide, and starting with episode 3’s ending, which surprised me, Chloe turns from a rebel punk into a confined wheelchair unable to feel her body anymore.

After this unexpected detour, episode 4 ends with a plot twist, while episode 5 gives you several false endings before you finally reach the credits. Life is Strange is certainly inviting for fans who dig modern adventure games with conversation trees and a bit of time travelling.   

Rating: 7.6