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Sometimes it seems like there are just too many games to keep track of out there, especially in the Indie market. This often leads to good games get looked over because there are so many to look though. So I thought why not bring attention to some of these interesting games that may have gone under your radar.
This Edition will feature some interesting puzzle games I have come across in the last year or so.
Haunt the House: Terrortown
Haunt the House is an action puzzle game where you play a ghost that was disturbed by the nightly noise of Terrortown. To get rest you most scare everyone from 4 crowded places: a theatre, a cruise ship, a museum, and a hospital. You do this buy possessing the various objects in each location. At first you are only allowed to do one thing with each object, but as the terror in the building goes up, more scary actions are unlocked for objects making it easier to drive everyone out. For example you can possess a chair, at first you can only move it, but after the terror level increases you can then make a haunting figure appear in it to scare people more.
The point of the game is to find the most unique ways to scare everyone out of a location. Some people seem to be harder to scare then others and some seem more susceptible to certain things than others. Each level also has a couple of unique people that can’t be scared away at first but at the highest level of terror you can literally scare them to death, making them into a ghost you can then play as well if you want.
This game has a very nice art style and the music and sound effects just add to the game’s atmosphere greatly. Many of the scary actions of the items are unique and fun to discover. It is definitely a fun, short game. I do wish it was longer, and it could totally be longer without taking away from the charm of the game, but it is still very much a game worth getting. And recently they came out with an extra level for the holidays, so maybe we will see more added to this game in the future.
In this game you control a little ball of a character Cyto who has lost all his memories. You most help him on his journey to reclaim what he lost. Cyto is a physics puzzle game where you slingshot and stretch him around obstacles to collect his memories, 3 per level. As you collect them it unlocks the story little by little.
Each level starts out with Cyto attached to an orb that has these little grabbers on them. You can then slingshot him to other similar orbs, collecting memories as you go or shoot him toward a portal that is the exit of the level. While some of these grabbers are used for the slingshot move, some of them allow you to stretch him over long distances to grab onto other orbs or memories. Just be careful not to fall or touch red spikes, doing so would mean restarting the level. And as you continue though the game more and more mechanics are added to give more challenge to the game.
This game is a fun and challenging puzzle game with a lovely art style and beautiful music. It would be a nice pick up for any puzzle game lover. Also Cyto is just really cute to interact with ;3.
Ichi is a cute, simple one button puzzle game with a hand-drawn art style and calming music. But don’t be deceived by this. While it is controlled only by clicking one button, the game is challenging.
The point of the game is to move a little ball around a level to collect all the rings without dying. The only things you can control in this game are these red wedges that rotate every time you click. These wedges direct the ball at whatever angle the ball bounces off of. The more clicks you do the lower your score is at the end of the level, so you need to try and complete the puzzle in as little clicks as you can. Besides the movable wedges there also breakable bricks, portals, spikes and other level pieces that can impact the ball. So you need to plan out when and where you want the ball to go bit by bit because if it hits a spike wall then you will have to restart the level.
An interesting thing about this little game is besides the developer made levels, there are also over 40,000 player made levels you can play as well. With the built in level editor you can create your own levels too.
Definitely a nice game for any who want a simple yet challenging puzzle game that they can jump in and out of anytime.
Gone are the days when PC games automatically came released on discs, sold in shops for you to purchase and then take home to play. Digital distribution is slowly dwindling the number of boxed copies games are getting nowadays but there are still some who enjoy having a physical copy of the game to hold in their hands.
Because of that Schafer and co have done a deal with publisher Nordic to get their game Broken Age released on physical disc as well as digitally, and they’ll be up for sale around about the same time as the second act of the game is released this spring. This will make it more likely to stand up to “solar flares and EMP bombs and stuff” according to Schafer himself.
The disc will include both of the acts, the game having been split into those two parts last year after the studio ran into some money troubles despite having had a very successful Kickstarter campaign, exceeding the target by around $3 million. We’ve been told to expect harder puzzle elements in the second act of the game.
In the last few years, Virtual Reality headsets have taken off as a kind of ‘next big thing’ type of hardware. Oculus were the first to come to the gaming community’s attention, with other people like Sony beginning to follow suit after. Now we’ve got an entry into the field from Razer with an open-source version.
Revealed yesterday at CES, it combines open-source software and hardware into an initiative named “OSVR” which stands for “Open-Source Virtual Reality” and there was already a headset to show off and for people to have a go with. The reason that they’re aiming to make the project open-source (revealing every detail of the headset and the software that makes it work) is that they aim to accelerate the speed at which virtual-reality headsets, the software it uses and all related technologies are being developed because they’re tired of the dev kit/prototype limbo it seems to be stuck in at the moment. In other words, if Oculus started the train, Razer are planning to increase the speed its racing along the track towards ‘perfection’.
They hope that by having everything available to the public enterprising creators can develop their own methods of use and make improvements to the model they provide. They’re even going to put together and make available what they call a “Hacker Dev Kit” and hopefully have it out for June.
The headset itself that was shown at the event used a 5.5-inch FHD display screen and used two pairs of lens, one concave and the other convex in an attempt to minimise edge distortion around the frame of your VR viewpoint. Otherwise technologically it isn’t more impressive than any other showing, but as it’s meant to be a platform on which others can build it doesn’t really need to be.
Razer’s taking a chance that their base headset will provide the means for someone to make the next big step in VR technology, and that could be just what is needed to make sure that virtual-reality headsets aren’t just a temporary craze.
If you’ve somehow not been put off by the debacle that has been Assassin’s Creed Unity, or you own the game and actually want to get a little extra content you might be interested to know that a release date for the DLC is available, along with a trailer.
The DLC, entitled Dead Kings, will add Saint-Denis to the map of Paris for Arno to leap, jump and murder in, an open world with diversions and a single-player campaign that will take you underneath the city into a large necropolis. This necropolis was built to house dead royalty so will be filled with long-gone royal dead and all of their secrets, as well as the enemies you can assassinate of course. It’s been made free after originally being part of the Unity Season Pass that got cancelled due to all of Unity’s… problems since its launch. It will launch on January 13th.
Gaming’s sort of divided on the Five Nights at Freddy’s games. On one hand you have some people who dislike it because it relies on jumpscares to end a game and because the first game got so popular so fast it became one of those “Let’s Play fads” where everyone was playing it and therefore some swore off it because everyone else had already done it. But as a game it did have a wonderful tension-setting atmosphere, arguably most of the horror came from the waiting and paranoia it would grip you with, there were some great design elements (oh Mangle, you poor twisted fiend) and if you took the time to find all the hidden easter eggs you would be rewarded with some parts of what is a wonderfully creepy story.
I fall into the latter camp, mainly because I love the lore (missing just enough information to keep us guessing) and have a thing for creepy yet child-friendly things. So when I found out that the website at scottgames.com had changed from the OFFLINE image that’d been displaying since late last year to the image below, I was excited.
Wonderful creepy image, and looking at the website’s source also reveals one more chilling message of “I remain”. But then you lighten it a bit to reveal the 3 in the bottom-right corner… and something else that makes the image even more scary.
See those teeth on the animatronic? Stained red with blood maybe? Possibly whoever was responsible for the infamous Bite of ’87? There’s just so many things you could guess from this image if you know the backstory, and that’s what excites me.
Of course, this was only put up a few days ago so there’s been no more details revealed yet, but the auto-e-mailer for Scott Cawthon does confirm that yes he is working on a third game for the series and no he’s not going to tell us anymore yet. If it’s anything like FNAF2, we’re going to get more teaser images in the weeks to come and might even get to see what state the animatronics are in now… and that might help us place whether it’ll be a sequel or a prequel or a midquel or… something.
