Tag: Let’s play

Loom Review: Unfinished Symphony

Sometimes, a game comes along that does something extra-ordinary.

Before you play it, you can't help but wonder if you're going to like it - exactly because of it's differences - but once you have played it, you see the world just a little bit differently.  The game opens new possibilities, new vistas.

Loom's story isn't wholly original, but given it's run time and the themes it's trying to convey to the player, that's just fine.  What is masterful is the way it presents this story. Read more

To The Moon Review: Memories Of The Way We Were

Last week, we talked a little about Brothers and games very like it.  These titles are often experiences more than they are games.  You get into them and you direct a protagonist, but you don’t do much actual video gaming:  there’s no one to kill, there’s no score to beat and – most tellingly, often, no way to really fail.

There’s just you, the story and whatever medium the story passes through as it unfolds.  Sometimes, this is a walking simulator, [you are in a 3d environment where you can roam around and encounter the story] sometimes, it’s a text-driven experience where the narrative unfolds as a collection of still pictures and verbose writing, but sometimes – as is the case with To The Moon – the entire affair is top-down and looks remarkably like an old-school 16 bit RPG.

At first, that sounds like a supremely odd thing to do, but it works here.  It works because a lot of the story is conveyed by dialogue and RPG’s can sometimes by very dialogue heavy. Read more