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Almost a year ago, I played the demo of Freedom Planet which was released with a million other Wii U demos as part of Nintendo’s E3 stuff. This is what I had to say about it then:
What looks like Sonic and sounds like Sonic but is terrible (like Sonic is now, I suppose)? Freedom Planet! Awful animation, screen juddering everywhere and all hopes and dreams of a possibly good Sonic game (even though it isn’t Sonic) up in smoke. Boo.
Numerous people have told me since that these animation and juddering issues aren’t in the PC version, and in fact, when the Wii U version came out, finally, I was told they’d gone there too.
They haven’t.
The screen still jerks around like the camera isn’t sure where it’s supposed to be. The animation is excellent in cutscenes and set pieces, but when you run round loops and up hills, the animation is really quite terrible – the sprite is rotated instead of redrawn, and it literally just looks like the sprite is being rotated. The physics are all wrong, and you’re able to run up vertical slopes (and upside down) without needing much momentum. The controls are unresponsive, especially the “dash” button which caused me to die numerous times as it didn’t activate. And yes, I did have enough power to do it.
It rips off Sonic so much, even though your main character Lilac is not really much like Sonic at all. Many of the levels are similar – there’s a Lava Reef Clone, an Aquatic Ruin Clone, a Death Egg Clone, a Flying Battery Clone – and there’s even a bit with what are remarkably similar to Chaos Emeralds. You loop like Sonic, there are springs and bumpers like in Sonic games, the music could easily have come from a Sonic game and the power-up “bubbles” are effectively clones of Sonic 3’s. One of them even sucks in rings-er-gems when you go near them. Marble Garden’s spinners are here too, and many of the enemies could well be lifted from various Sonic titles as well. The extra life sound effect is eerily familiar.
Click to view slideshow.But. And this is a huge but. I really rather enjoyed it. Once you see past the Sonic bits, you realise that it a more than decent game in its own right. The levels are gorgeous and huge, and some aren’t Sonic-like – such as the shopping centre. The bosses too are pretty impressive, with normal character fights and massive several-screens-wide dragons and things. There’s a proper story too, which you have the option of completely skipping (I didn’t, as I thought it might separate it from Sonic a bit more – it does), with some mixed success voice acting and humour.
It was a pretty easy game overall, with almost all my lives lost on bosses, most of my deaths coming on the final boss, and most of them lost on the final boss’ final form. I’m pretty sure now I know how to defeat the bosses I’d be able to complete it on a single credit, so it isn’t too difficult.
I can’t completely commend Freedom Planet, as the animation and jerkiness does detract a little and the unresponsive controls are a crime, but I paid just over a pound for it, and it’s definitely worth more than that. I’m glad I gave it a chance as it surprised me, and if I’d just left it at the demo I’d never have realised there was a decent game there. Stupid demo.
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I’m going to keep this short, because not only is the game itself pretty short, but it’s something you have to experience and play yourself, rather than read what I have to say about it.
The Beginner’s Guide involves a walk through a number games written by the (presumably made up) Coda. The narrator tells you about them, Coda’s likely state of mind at the time, and various other facts about the simple games as you progress through them. There aren’t really any puzzles, there’s very little shooting, and each “game” is very short and mostly simple.
But, as usual in games of this type, that’s not the whole story. The narrator has more than just a history lesson to talk about.
Click to view slideshow.I enjoyed it, although not as much as either The Stanley Parable or Dr Langstrom, with both of which The Beginner’s Guide shares DNA, but it’s worth the 90 minutes or so I spent on it. It’s just a shame it crashes so much on the Mac!
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Firewatch has been on my wanted list for quite a while, but I felt I should both clear a few other games out first, and wait for a sale before picking it up (plus, it had horrible framerate issues to begin with – these have mostly been patched out now). This week, thanks to it both being on sale and me picking up some very cheap PSN credit, I nabbed it from the Playstation Store for just £8.92. And then I completed it.
The plot, which I’ll be vague about because spoilers, involves you, as Henry, taking a summer job as a fire warden in a remote part of the Wyoming wilderness. Your marriage has run into… complications… and you’ve decided to escape for a while, so this seemed perfect. You’re stationed up a watch tower, alone but with another nearby warden called Delilah for company via a radio link. You’re tasked with chasing off some teens for starting a campfire, keeping an eye on things, and generally hiking around a bit mainly just to pass the time.
Delilah chats with you, and you get to know a bit about each other (how much is up to you via dialogue choices) as the days pass. Soon, however, it becomes clear that something is going on. Somebody is listening in on your conversations. Someone is watching. Something is happening.
It could be some sort of conspiracy. Is Delilah who you think she is? Are the teens? Who keeps starting fires? What is the fence for? At times, it’s a mystery, at others, it’s almost paranormal. From the moment things get a bit weird, though, it’s utterly compelling.
Firewatch is a Narrative Discovery Game. Some people call games like this, Gone Home, The Stanley Parable, and so on “walking simulators”, but I take offence to this as there’s more to it than that. Yes, they’re very light on actual gameplay elements – Firewatch has no real puzzles and very little interaction bar opening stuff and chatting – but the exploration is how you progress the story, so I prefer to the term “narrative discovery”. I’ve said many times that a good story in a game can overcome most other limitations, so even though most of your time is spent walking around (although having to navigate by map and compass is fun) you’re following an excellent tale.
Click to view slideshow.Henry doesn’t see much in the way of other people (or animals) in and around his watch tower, although I did adopt a turtle and call him Turt Reynolds, so you really feel how isolated he is. Even Delilah, who can see you from her tower feels a hundred miles away. When you enter a cave system and can no longer contact her by radio, you immediately feel vulnerable as your only lifeline is cut off – this is amplified when you make certain discoveries too.
In all, it’s a wonderfully told story, with some beautiful scenery and is pretty short so the long hikes never get a chance to become tedious as they surely would if the game was twice as long. The ending is perhaps a double twist, the discovery of may come as a disappointment to some, but I actually felt it was a relief: Again, spoilers so I won’t elucidate. If you liked Dear Esther, Gone Home or even Life Is Strange, then I can’t recommend Firewatch enough.
Here’s part of my playthrough, roughly the middle third of the game. It contains lots of spoilers, so beware:
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So things carried on much as before. Puzzles that were impossible were suddenly solvable if I went away somewhere else for a bit and came back. I found more lasers – seven of them, in fact – and triggered the puzzle at the top of the mountain. A puzzle that took over an hour to solve by itself, I should point out. This (spoilers!) opened the inside of the mountain, and here there were even more puzzles. Because of course there were.
A lot of the puzzles here were corrupted in some way. The screens were broken, flashed, scrolled or had incorrect colours. One of them even span round, faster and faster as I got closer to completing it. Frankly, the whole area was a bit hard on the eyes as well as the brain, but I persevered and eventually made it to the base of the mountain and even here – right at the end of the game – they devs found yet another way to reuse the same grid puzzles in a different way by wrapping them around pillars.
With those completed, I was treated to the end of game island flyby, and then was plonked back at the very start of the game again – only I noticed a secret environmental “circle and tail” which involved the sun, and activating that allowed me to enter the most bizarre end of game credit sequence since… well, The Stanley Parable, I suppose. And after that, there was a FMV sequence which I won’t describe as it really is a spoiler. It was all very odd.
Now, I’d finished seven lasers but I’d been told there were eleven. I knew where the missing four were, and most were very close to being activated so I reloaded a save from just before completing the game, and didn’t take long to get three of them. The area in the desert, however, I’d not even started so it took a little while to work through there. With all eleven lasers pointing at the mountain (one needed tweaking with a mirror in the town, I noticed), I found The Great Glass Elevator again and triggered it only to be given the same ending. I thought I’d missed something, but it appears not. Aside from Challenge Mode, which I found and opened up. Oh god.
Challenge Mode then, is a set of puzzles you trigger by playing In The Hall of the Mountain King on a record player. Each puzzle is random, and you have until the song finishes to do them all. None are especially taxing, but you’re under pressure. Many hours passed. So many attempts. Then, finally, everything clicks and I make no mistakes (that require you to redo puzzled) and I make it to the final secret – a box! And in it, the solution for a puzzle in the theatre! And that’s it. Apparently the video it unlocks is an hour long. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
Click to view slideshow.I went back and solved a few missed puzzles, found a handful more environmental puzzles, and wandered through the caves a bit solving all the puzzles there, but I think I’m now done with The Witness. It was beautiful, it made me feel very clever, and even though there were over 400 puzzles – all of which are essentially the same basic premise – somehow it never got too frustrating, too repetitive, or too boring. I don’t think I want to find every hidden puzzle in the game, but what I’ve done has been throughly enjoyable.
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