Life Is Strange

A few weeks ago, while checking a list of recommended games on Steam I came across Life Is Strange.

I watched the trailer, and it seemed to me like a very interesting premise. I researched a little more, and I though the idea was really awesome, so I decided to buy it, and I would recommend anyone to do so too.

In the game, you are a young 18-years old girl studying in some academy in a small town. Because of a confrontation, you discover you can go back in time for a couple of minutes, giving you the ability to change actions and conversation, and to obtain clues and knowledge to use after rewinding time.

This is the basic premise, and then you need to explore this world with the small town and the academy, investigating certain dark occurrences and a disappearance.

From the start, the game gave me a very strong "Twin Peaks" atmosphere. The setting is quite similar, a small town with power plays, secrets and some supernatural occurrences. You can even find a "Fire walk with me" graffiti at some moment, so this similarity is done on purpose. The atmosphere becomes quite mysterious and interesting thanks to that.

At the same time, the calm indie soundtrack makes you feel relaxed and sad, slowing down the pace and making you sometimes to just sit and observe the scenery. You want to read and observer every little detail of each of the places you can visit, to make sure you don't miss a thing. The process is incredibly immersive, and you get easily lost in this world.

The time-travel skill is really useful, and there are several nice puzzles where you need to play with the ability to extract information, or fix an action that caused unexpected effects (like breaking something by accident). Lots of actions show a small butterfly afterwards, indicating to you that the action will have consequences. Most of the time those key actions are based on conversations, about what you decide to tell or do with someone. And there's way too many to easily control them, so plenty of times you set for a certain course and hope for the best.

Of course here a big point is that you know you're in a game, so sometimes some action may seem weird if you would be in real life. Since you're in the narrative of the game, where you are extra aware of being in a story that follows certain tropes, you need to guess if sometimes the game is playing a trope straight with you or is trying to subvert it (or if it is trying to make you think they subverted it when they played it straight actually), so it is quite a fun mental exercise of deciding which action will have the best outcome in such a story, the usual "I know you know I know you know", and trying to guess in which step we need to stop. Hopefully you can always rewind and see the direct outcomes, but the ripples these create are hard to predict.

The game comes in episodes, and last episode (episode 5) has not come out yet and is expected in October. I finished the first 2 episodes and I'm in the middle of the third, delaying it a little bit so I don't need to wait for the 5th one.I don't want to get caught in a cliffhanger or very tense situation, waiting to see the final outcome of everything....

The story turns very serious quite fast and punches you in the gut repeatedly, reminding you that it was your choices the ones that created this situation. It is clearly dramatic, and we still don't know how it will end, but even with time-travelling, the situation you put yourself in is quite complicated and hard to solve....

I will say that it is true that every single thing you do may affect greatly the outcome of the game, and that some plot points that I have seen would not have been possible using other choices. The game itself does not have hard puzzles, but the overall puzzle of making the best choice selection is not an easy one, and it makes you obsess about past actions while considering things very carefully.

I believe it is a very innovative game (even if other games have done the time-travel thing already), also in the aspect of characters used and the story it tells. Not many games really commit to the idea that your choice matters, triggering completely different outcomes based on that and in this way creating not a single story, but the possibility for thousands.

This game was recommended by Feminist Frequency because of its use of female characters, and I was appalled to know some publishers wanted to convert the main character into a boy. The story works perfectly as it is because it is a girl, and I cannot understand how some people, in this day an age, still believe such a game cannot work. However, I want to dedicate another post about these topics, soon...

For the moment, I'll just finish saying that this is an amazing game that will suck you into its world, and you need to give it a try, it is totally worth it.

Double Fine And Broken Age

A few weeks ago I was finally able to play Broken Age for a little bit, and I thought I wanted to explain the story, since we're rather proud to have participated in it :)

For those of you who do not know, Double Fine is a games development company created by Tim Schafer. Tim was one of the people working in LucasArts when they developed some of the greatest graphic adventures ever created, and he did or participated in most of them. However, one of the last games, Grim Fandango, didn't do good in sales. This, accompanied by other great graphic adventures that failed to produce money, caused big studios to abandon this format of gaming. 

After Grim Fandango, Tim went to create Double Fine, and they produced a number of games. Their first one was Psychonauts, another great game (this time a platformer) that did not do so well on sales at the beginning and did not help the company in stabilizing its situation. 

The next game they developed was Brütal Legend. However, during its development, their publisher (Activision) decided that they wanted a different game, and when the studio declined to change it, Activision dropped them. The studio managed to make an agreement with EA to publish the game instead, but then Activision filled a lawsuit claiming that they had invested in the game and were still interested. Things eventually got resolved, but the studio suffered from it, and the game didn't have all the content it originally should have, and became quite shorter. It still is a pretty good game. The gameplay is a little bit lacking, but the story, cast and atmosphere are really awesome. 

After this incident, Double Fine was in a precarious situation, lacking money and low on morale. They managed to stay afloat by releasing some smaller games produced with the same engine used in Brütal Legend. In this situation,  they remembered that fans constantly were asking them to do one graphic adventure like the ones in the past. Big companies said that this was no longer profitable, and therefore no one wanted to invest on them...but with the internet, there were alternative ways of financing such a project.

Kickstarter is a website that lets you donate money to projects you believe are worth doing and that lack funding. At the time when Double Fine was considering its future, Kickstarter had done some small campaigns, with only one or two very successful ones.

Double Fine decided to make their fans prove what they were saying and proposed to fund a new graphic adventure, using this video to promote the bid. The initial bid was 400.000 dollars, which is quite a big sum, of course...

For some weird reason, I managed to find out about this the same day that they put this video up. I got really excited about this, and I went to check the Kickstarter page. I wanted to donate money so a small, great game company could basically do whatever they wanted with no publishers messing around the final product.

When I entered the page, donations had reached 800.000 dollars. The 400.000-mark had been crushed in less than 8 hours. The Kickstarter server was crashing and didn't handle the load well. In the middle of this, I managed to make a small donation. I explained the story to Olia, and she got excited about it as well, and we started to check the page and refresh to see what was happening. In a few minutes thousands of dollars were being donated to the project. Everybody was crazy about it, the comments of the people participating were awesome, and checking twitter accounts of people from Double Fine and Tim Schafer, they couldn't believe it either.

We actually saw it arrive to 1.000.000 dollars. It was amazing, and less than 24 hours had passed. It felt like  a special moment of partying with the world.

After this, the rhythm of donations slowed down, and days passed without big donations. However, in the month that the campaign lasted, they managed to get 3.3 Millions.

I forgot about this for a long time, and after I while I read that even with that money they had production problems, because they made the game way too big. In the end they divided the game in two, and decided to sell the first part and then produce the second part (that would not require another purchase).

The game came out just recently, and since I was a backer, I had the right to get a copy. I didn't install it in a long while, but some weeks ago we finally tried the game that we helped a little bit to make.

We haven't played much, for obvious reasons....but we can already tell: Broken Age is awesome. The animation, the drawings, the voice acting, the music,  the little details...it's incredible, it feels like playing inside of a painting.

What remains to be seen is if the plot and the puzzles are also top notch since we haven't played much....but so far the feelings we're getting are pretty good.

The most important thing about all that is that it has shown that publishers can be very, very wrong about their opinions. Sure, publishers know a number of tricks that increases your chances of being economically successful, and they may correctly guess that some projects will fail...but this is not an exact science. Publishers are also usually ruled by rich people with very fixed ways of thinking that prevents innovations, or just adapting to new times.  And now there's lots of chances to make something awesome and popular, that innovates in things that nobody has dared to try, and we're free to put such ideas to popular vote in form of donations.

Anyway, Broken age seems like a great game, and  supporting it guarantees that Double Fine will keep producing imaginative, incredible games. 

New Graphic Adventures

Since I discovered the GOG page, I also discovered that graphic adventures, one of my favourite genres that has spent some years without new developments, actually have survived and there are some new ones available.

Made mostly by indie companies, these new graphic adventures may not be innovative regarding gameplay, but they transmit a similar feeling as the old ones, using today's graphics.

In the past months I have bought (always important to buy games if you want similar ones to be produced in the future) and played some of them. I have not finished them all, but all of them seem to be really great. I'd like to comment on a few of them:


Deponia: This is the first game I found in GOG that was mentioned as a very nice and new graphic adventure, while being funny like the original ones (Monkey Island, Day of The Tentacle) or some others (like Discworld). I was afraid I would find it childish or stupid, but there was an offer for this game, so I decided to get it and try it.

The game puts yourself in Deponia, a world made of trash. You're Rufus, an idiotic young guy who invents all kind of things, usually resulting in injuries and mayhem. He wishes to leave Deponia and reach the Elysium, a futuristic floating palace that has no contact with the Deponians.  After one of his latest inventions, he ends up causing Goal, a girl from Elysium who is exploring the planet, to fall into Deponia's surface, rendering her unconscious. From this point, Rufus will try hard to make her recover from her fall and bring her back to the palace together with him.

First, the graphics are rather awesome. Everything is made out of 2D drawings in high resolution, and I believe the animations are also very nice. The music is good, without being specially memorable. The gameplay is simple and traditional, point and click style, and you don't have any inventory limitation (which is also traditional and funny sometimes, considering the amount of clutter you carry around). All this is technical stuff, and even if it is nice to have good graphics and good interface, the most important things are other ones.

Graphic adventures are usually based and evaluated on their plots and their puzzles. Deponia's plot is a kind of traditional "Distress Damsel" plot, but it is well executed. The best part are the characters, clearly defined and interesting. The world setting itself is quite weird, impossible to actually be functional but still interesting. You're curious to learn all the little details of this society, and as the plot advances, you want to know what will happen next. The main character is idiotic, but he does try to do good things, even when making a couple of bad decisions.

The puzzles themselves are rather hard. The logic behind them is quite twisted, and some particular ones are too obscure or illogical for my taste, it's hard to think that certain actions will work as the solution of a particular problem. Nevertheless they are interesting. Mixed with the normal puzzles, there are sometimes "mini-game" puzzles, which you can skip if you want but that are usually very interesting, while possible to do.

The humor in this game is ok, maybe not very smart, or maybe not that good, but good enough that I enjoyed it while playing. Comedy is a very subjective thing, and evidently it's not the same as some of the works that advertisements says this game resembles (like Discworld), but it's still good.

The game ends in the middle of the action, since this is supposed to be the first out of 3 games, but I enjoyed it very much in the end. Since I wanted to know how the story continued, I got the second part too.

Chaos on Deponia: This is the second Deponia game. It has mostly all the strengths and weakness of the previous one, with a few differences: First, in this game we see more of Goal, who was unconscious most of the time in the previous one, and we can get a better idea of her character. This makes her more interesting, before that we didn't know anything about her. Some other characters are given also more definition, and the plot becomes more complex and important. All this is good. The bad parts of this game are that some jokes and puzzles are...cruel. They make the main character a stupid mean person, while during the first game he was just stupid, but with good intentions. Some things are not really funny, even considering black humour, and I didn't like that part. I will talk about later, but Harvey's New Eyes manages to do cruel things while making sense, being funny using black humour, and keeping the characters interesting. This one does not achieve such things. Still, the plot remains interesting, the puzzles and worlds to explore are quite nice, and I definitely want to play the third and final part, whenever they release it.

A New Beginning: In contrast with Deponia, this game has a more serious approach, while still having humour in it. The company that developed it is the same, but in this case they tried to made a morality tale, to give awareness about environmental problems. However, the game does not feel preachy, and is interesting and compelling.

I haven't finished this game, but what I've seen and played has given me great sensations. The animations and graphics are all very detailed and high resolution 2D drawings, but not as cartoonish as with Deponia. The music is nice, the voice acting is good, and in general it seems a very good game.

The plot is interesting, involving time travel and surviving in a post-apocalyptic environment (at least, that's what I've seen so far). The puzzles are logical so far, while still being hard, and there is also an occasional "mini-game" puzzle, which are always fun to solve. I don't know if this will be true during all of it, but it's certainly worth to play.

Edna & Harvey: This is actually two games, "The Breakout" and "Harvey's New Eyes". I finished the Breakout and I'm currently at the beginning of the second one.

The Breakout explains the story of Edna, a mental patient who wants to escape the clinic, together with her imaginary friend Harvey, a bunny toy. Edna does not remember anything, but believes that she's quite sane. While trying to escape, she will interact with other patients and doctors, while remembering more and more about her past with the help of Harvey.

The graphics and animation in this game are 2D, cartoonish and very simple (compared with Deponia). However, the voice acting is very good. The puzzles are quite logical, which is surprising for an asylum, but it makes the game less frustrating, since what you need to do makes sense if you speak with the people around you. The music is great, very simple while managing to transmit lots of emotions, specially in the most serious parts of the game, or in the flashbacks.

The plot is amazing. You can guess what's going on and what will happen in the end after the first 5-10 minutes, but it doesn't stop it from being amazingly done. The gameplay makes you do things that clearly show that Edna is insane, and it's stuff that you do yourself, a nice touch to provide immersion. I liked a lot the humour used in the game, crazy and surreal sometimes. However, the game has quite serious moments, and it's not only some whacky adventure. The game is not very hard or long, but the experience of playing is really a great one, very recommended.

Harvey's New Eyes follows the adventures of Lilli, a little girl in a convent. There are elements in common with the Breakout, but it cannot be considered a direct sequel. It works in a very similar way, with improved graphics and animation. I have not finished the game yet, but so far it's also great, with lots of really really dark and black comedy. As I was commenting before, Chaos in Deponia has black comedy, but it seems cruel in there. In Havery's New Eyes, on the other hand, it fits quite well with the game, showing that something very dark and twisted is going on, in this world and in the twisted mind of the main character, who seems quite innocent while being clearly disturbed somehow. The gameplay also helps in the experience, in which you're doing terrible things yourself. The game so far manages to be funny while being very, VERY dark. Just as an example, a narrator explains everything that is happening in a kid-friendly and excited way, while you can see that reality does not match that description at all, like when you find an active bomb buried in the ground.

 The Cat Lady: I have only played 5-10 minutes of this game, but I already love it. I read it's a psychological horror graphic adventure, and it seems exactly that. The graphics may not be the best, but they're creepy and beautifully detailed, also 2D drawing-based. The interface is a little weird, and the animations are a little bit clunky. However, the voice acting, the atmosphere, the music and images seem great, really really creepy. Another example of a game that should be considered "art", I believe.  I'm at the very beginning, but as I mentioned, with just 5 minutes I got all these sensations, and not many games can pull something like that.


And that's all for the moment. I haven't tried yet Book of Unwritten Tales, which seems that it's also going to be very nice, and I need to really play and finish Harvey's New Eyes, A New Beginning and The Cat Lady. There's also the third part of Deponia in the near future, some other games that may not be a traditional graphic adventure but that I will try, plus the Double Fine new graphic adventure still in development, that may be really awesome, we'll see...

In any way, it seems that this "dead" genre (according to the big publishers) is still offering great titles that are totally worth buying...

Good Old Games and Indies

My birthday was on 6th of March, and I got lots of very nice presents.

One of these gifts was an electronic gift, by Denis: A game added to my account in some website, provided I create one in there. At first I thought it was spam from some website where I registered and put my real birth date  but after reading the personal comment I saw that it was for real. The game was System Shock 2, and after creating the account I was able to download it.

The website is called GOG (Good Old Games)

First, I will say that System Shock 2 seems really cool. I haven't finished the game (I haven't played very long, actually), but it's a hard game, with clearly lots of options and stuff. Graphics are old, of course, but the overall feeling is tense and scary, and I still don't know what's going on in there at all. I was told Bioshock is like a worse version of this game, and I can see that Bioshock, even with better graphics because of being released years later, has huge similarities with simplified gameplay. We'll see how it progresses.

Anyway, I'd like to talk about this website, and it's awesome. It has looots of old computer games that were absolutely awesome, and lets you buy them for a cheap price  usually, and modified so they (sort of) work with new computers. You basically just download the installer, and it installs the game with the necessary emulators, if any needed. Games do not have any DRM or anything like that, and anyway you have an account with the purchased games, so you can download them again if you need to. You also get some extras, like soundtracks or concept images, wallpapers and such things.

I like to pay for games, because of several reasons  First, it requires a lot of work from lots of people, so it's always good to support that work if you enjoy the game. Second, I don't have much free time, so if I only play games that I bought, I manage to keep their numbers under control. When I buy a game, I try to finish the game before getting 4 new ones (even if sometimes I do just that).

Of course, I like to pay when the prices are reasonable. This website is charging reasonable prices (6-10 dollars for an old game seems right), so I don't mind buying them.

The website also has indie games, which are also rather cheap. I don't know if you can get them from any other place that is cheaper, but it seems to me they're cheap enough. I'd like to comment about two more games I tried, Sanitarium and Hotline Miami.

Sanitarium is an old graphic adventure, one of the last ones made when they were still popular. In the game, you apparently have some kind of car accident and wake up with a bandaged face, in some kind of mental asylum. Things got weirder and creepier from there, where you explore places without knowing what's real and what's just in your mind.

This is an old game, so the graphics, voice and controls could be better...however, it's still pretty immersive, and really creepy. You explore really demented places, when trying to solve different types of puzzles, with a few action segments. It's hard to get really stuck, although sometimes you need to pixel hunt to find some hidden object...or you need to apply certain weird logic to solve some complex puzzle.

As you move through worlds, there's a number of repeating themes in them, that develop the story and give hints about what's going on...even if the plot itself has been used other times, so it's not that hard to guess. Still, it's quite a nice experience, and it gave me a very nice feeling, like playing old adventure games.

Hotline Miami is a new indie game. You can see Yhatzee's review here.  The game is new, but it's made in a a very retro style, with very simple graphics made by pixelated figures and scenarios (that still contain huge amounts of detail, usually quite gory). The music tries to emulate electronic music from the eighties, and it gives the whole thing a very special touch.

The game itself, when explained, seems to give arguments to those who say that videogames are just violent crap: You're some kind of professional killer, clearly demented, who gets messages in your answering machines with contracts. Once you have a contract, you go to the indicated place and kill everything that moves.

The gameplay is just that. You see everything from the top, so you see buildings as if they were maps of the floors, and you move around killing everything. You can punch people to stun them and then kill them on the floor, or you can steal their weapons and kill people with them. Everything kills in one hit or shot, and everybody, you included, dies after only one (well, there are some exceptions later in the game). If you die, you press R and restart right away, without loading times or anything. Firearms make noise, and when people hear it they rush towards that position, but they can kill from a big distance.

And that's about it. You need to plan your killing spree, and you usually need to react in milliseconds to new enemies coming towards you, or sudden changes in your plan. There's also the masks, which you gain when you complete missions, that give you different extra powers or advantages. It's incredibly addictive, really.

Between killing rampages the game even develops a complex and quite touching story, and without using any text, just by showing your house every time a mission start, and showing the changes that keep happening in it. It also shows that you, the main character, is clearly going insane as well.


I've heard that this game is the computer version of Drive. And in a weird way, it is....set in the 80s, with old music and style, you're some crazy psychopath that between jobs is trying to help some people...really, quite a deep and layered game for something that looks like this....

Highly recommended.