The Room games are a love letter to beautiful, haunted things
Games Features What Are You Playing This Weekend?
Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off our weekly open thread for the discussion of gaming plans and recent gaming glories, but of course, the real action is down in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What Are You Playing This Weekend?
For as much as movie producers have driven themselves nuts over the years, trying to recreate the look and feel of video games in the real world—an endeavor that’s led to everything from Dennis Hopper in Jurassic cornrows to James Marsden cracking shit jokes with a digital hedgehog—the escape room people got it pretty much in one. Inspired by games like Myst—and, even more specifically, the Myst-ish single-room escape games that started popping up on the internet in the early 2000s—the rapidly growing industry intuitively grasped what Hollywood so frequently didn’t: That you can’t just cobble together a bunch of Koopa shell props, or toss a white hoodie on Michael Fassbender, and expect to call it a day. Video games have their own logic, one that has to be respected, even when (possibly even especially when) it doesn’t map very well onto the real world. Marry that love of abstract rules to the creation of an impossible or fantastical space, and you’re far closer to putting people inside a video game than the folks behind Hitman or Warcraft could ever hope to get.
As a consequence, the relationship between escape rooms and video games has gotten weirdly recursive over the last few years, a trend that the COVID-19 lockdowns have only exacerbated. With their physical doors shuttered, many escape room companies have taken their game design skills online, crafting (often shockingly high-quality) digital experiences that you and your Zoom buddies can play through from your own personal quarantine zones. At the same time, we now have digital titles like Nocturnal Games’ The Escaper, which aim to explicitly recreate the feeling of paying $40 to spin combination locks in an office rental space that’s been converted into an evil lab/Victorian sitting room/old-school video game arcade/etc. And that’s to say nothing of the whole side industry of escape-rooms-in-a-box, which can vary widely in how strong an experience they give you and your family as you huddle around the dinner table, spinning codewheels and arguing about when it’s time to check the hints.
And yet, for all these efforts, there’s still one series of digital escape rooms that take the brass ring when it comes to getting that all-important feeling of strange logic in strange places right—and then promptly take that brass ring, attach it to some massive mechanical monstrosity, and ask you to fiddle with it until the whole thing goes satisfyingly “Click!” We’re talking, of course, about Fireproof Games’ The Room series—still the best prospect going to get that all-important “Does this makes sense?” “I think this makes sense.” “This absolutely makes sense” sensation running through the back of your brain. That includes the series’ latest game, The Room VR: A Dark Matter, which took the franchise’s long-running obsession with flipping switches, turning knobs, and (occasionally) wrestling with dark magicks to its wonderfully illogical extreme.
Even if you don’t want to shell out for VR, though, there are still four other Room games out there waiting for you, each filled with fantastical contraptions hoping to lure you in. (Sometimes literally, since the games have a running theme of the player being pulled deep within various clockwork devices.) What makes the games—all available for a song on iOS or Android, by the by—different from their contemporaries (including many of the offerings from actual escape room companies), is their tactile, physical nature. Centered on a wide variety of strange, beautiful devices, the games luxuriate in every moving piece, every click of a button or snap of a latch. Even when they’re clearly impossible—like the Game Of Thrones-intro-esque city model that makes up most of the second chapter of The Room Three, or the elaborate doll house that occupies most of your time in the fourth game, Old Sins—they still have an internal logic, and a beauty and presence that so many games of this ilk lack. (One of the reasons The Room VR is so satisfying is that the motion controllers allow you to physically reach out to slide every slide and flick every switch.)
The best video games—and escape rooms, for that matter—create spaces that feel like they couldn’t exist in the real world, liminal realities where you can trick your brain into believing that a different set of rules might possibly apply. Escapism, in addition to escaping. The Room games might occasionally feint toward horror—spooky tendrils abound. But in their devotion to the forging of beautiful, haunted objects, they serve as clockwork engines in the service of creating wonder. It’s something that few of their contemporaries, real or otherwise, have even come close to matching.
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Since I successfully finished Alone in the Dark last week – a game that was incredibly influential while also having a ton of issues – I’ve decided to stick with the tank controls and blast through Onimusha since it seems really short and I’ve been having fun with it. That or Cursed Mountain, a game notable for being hard to see.
The posable-dragons bit towards the end of Old Sins was one of the most surprising, beautifully designed things I’ve ever played.
So one game from the big BLM bundle that I’ve played is Voyageur, which is a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style game about space exploration. You can trade goods and hire a crew and make scientific discoveries, with the caveat that you can never backtrack- the weird FTL device you have is strictly a one-way thing. It’s pretty in-depth for what it is, lots of options, I managed a full playthrough with one of the possible endings. Recommended, it’s $5 on its own now.Dipped into Outer Worlds, went through one of the missions. The combat is still tricky to get a hang of and I find myself frequently trying to talk past it. Basically with wild animals and rogue robots it’s fine enough but marauders and such are intelligent enough to overwhelm you with numbers. Still fun, and the writing’s damn good. Finally solved the problem I was having with that Gamemaker tutorial! Still not 100% clear what was going wrong but I managed to fix it anyway. Really ought to get back to my main project.
“Video games have their own logic, one that has to be respected, even when (possibly even especially when) it doesn’t map very well onto the real world.”This is a take I see a lot, and it’s not a good one. The problem isn’t that game franchises are inherently unfilmable, it’s that Hollywood likes to slap characters/settings onto the same old formulaic movies (rather than respect the source material).“Game movies don’t work”, “comic movies don’t work”, “female/minority-led movies don’t work” – they’ll blame anything but lazy writing, because they worship formula. A critic shouldn’t be making the same excuses for them; it’s your job to know better than that.But yeah, weekend. I’ll probably be playing some Civ 5 tonight whilst catching up with an old friend; and maybe some more Civ, Minecraft or TABS on a hangout with siblings. “Hangout” games like that are a social lifeline for me these days.
is the writing always “lazy”? I really liked the “Dawn Treader” Narnia adaptation because it stuck SO close to the book…it killed the damn series, nobody else wanted that but me. Compare with how well the part of the Magicians ripping off Dawn Treader worked…sometimes you have to meet conventional narratives halfway? What’s your favorite videogame movie? Mine is probably “Resident Evil”…but I never played the game 😀 Boy am I leery of this Borderlands movie with Cate Blanchett, sounds iffy.
I didn’t hate Dawn Treader, I liked that they kept a lot of the weirdness; the added subplot with the swords was a bit iffy though. If you try and “meet conventional narratives halfway” you end up pleasing nobody. I thought the first Silent Hill movie did a pretty good job of capturing the games’ style – it changed the plot and characters up, but had similar themes and tone. The essence was there. The sequel meanwhile played like a more generic action-horror and it was awful (and flopped pretty hard).I didn’t care for the Resi flicks, they didn’t really work for me as action or horror movies. They felt like original, trashy B-movies with the characters dressed as Resi characters – they could change the name and noone would even know they were meant to be an adaptation.Weirdly, there were also 3 Resi films that were entirely CGI and tied into the games. They weren’t any less wacky than the Hollywood ones, but they were the same flavour of wacky as the games, and they weren’t trying to be anything else. At the end of the day, it comes down to whether they’re trying to do the source material justice – that doesn’t necessarily mean a direct translation, but it does mean trying to capture what makes it special rather than using it as a veneer on a generic script.It means not making a Doom movie that doesn’t have demons.
dude I forgot Silent Hill…that movie is pretty extreme, the part where they burn the lady from The Majestic alive was dope. The sequel was really terrible (Carrie Anne Moss dabbed her tears with her paycheck). I forgot the swords thing in Dawn Treader…was that from another novel or did they just throw it in? I think the most recent Watchmen is the gold standard for new takes “in the spirit of”…although perhaps to be the true gold standard it might have had to go a little harder on even Angela’s attraction to authoritarianism…after all she was complicit in the police state and then became the most powerful being in the universe (or did she wink). Yeah, at least trying to do right by the source material gets you at least good will unless you’re Ed Wood incompetent (uwe boll incompetent). I know the first “Doom” isn’t “Doom” but I actually don’t hate it as a Romero ripoff B movie.
If you liked Silent Hill, give the games a go. SH2 in particular is god-tier (if you can get past the clunky controls, anyway).I need to watch Watchmen (ha). Lindelof’s involvement put me off, but people are really rating it, so I should give it a go. idk if it counts as an adaptation though, isn’t it supposed to be a sequel to the comic?I think that old Doom movie would’ve worked better if they just called it something else, given it took the basic conceit of the games (portal to hell!) and threw it out completely.Uwe Boll’s movies were just a tax scam. He doesn’t even count 😛
Wasn’t a fan of the third one, which tried to be more of a Myst-type game, but the other three are fantastic. Hope we get more soon.
Yeah, they still got the core gameplay of improbable clockwork machines morphing into different improbable clockwork machines after keys were inserted and passwords were entered, but having the entire game’s world open to you, allowing you to backtrack and bring items from one location to another, just made it harder to answer the question, “What should I be working on right now?” It didn’t make the game harder or more interesting; it just took away from the sense of direction. But the puzzles themselves were still a lot of fun.
Exactly. I was kinda grading on a big curve in my comment. “Wasn’t a fan of the third game” is true only when compared to the other three, which still means it was better than 99% of the games out there.
Sadly, as far as I know, none of the games involve a character named Lisa tearing the protagonist apart.
Glad to see I didn’t have to make that reference. May I offer you a meme in these trying times?
Hahaha what a story, Frank!
Oddly, a character does get diagnosed with breast cancer. But even stranger still, nothing comes of it.
Oh hai, Frank.
I like the puzzle where you have to mix together just the right amounts of scotch and vodka for it to taste good.
I’ve got to the first “ending” of MGS: Peace Walker. I say first ending because, being MGS, it’s far more complicated than that.It’s really good. As with every other MGS game I start off going “This is stupid. And why are the controls so fiddly?” and then by the end the gameplay’s really fluid and the storytelling really gets under my skin. The storytelling in this one is great. It works really well in linking MGS3 with what we know of The Patriots in MGS4, and manages to make Snake (Big Boss) being haunted – figuratively and quite possibly literally – by The Boss something surprisingly affecting. So over this weekend I’ll be having a go through some of the ton* of side quests I need to get through in order to get to the real ending. *literally – there’s over a hundred of them. (This might be a bit too much of a cricket reference for most of you).
Peace Walker is really good, but is hampered by the weakest antagonist in the series. The downside to the numerous side missions is that a ton of them are the same with increasing levels of difficulty, so it can get repetitive.
The side mission rabbit hole is actually the thing I’m finding most frustrating about it. And you’re right, it’s difficult to think much of anything about either Coldman or Zadornov.
I don’t know how much you’ve looked up or exactly how much you’ve already done in the way of side quests, but I’ll be vague: there’s at least a small handful of wacky missions that break the formula of, “Tank, stronger tank, even stronger tank, tank on different map…” that, yeah, quite a few too many of the auxiliary missions follow. They were a nice, unexpected reprieve from the repetitiveness of tank after tank after tank.I ultimately found it rewarding fighting the same handful of tanks and choppers once I could consistently get As and the challenge was just getting the perfect run for an S, but I definitely hit tank fatigue a few times before I got to that point.
Yeah, I had the “Date with Paz” mission over the weekend, which was a good change from the usual.
Ah, gaming thread, I’ve missed you this last few busy weeks, though I sincerely doubt that you missed me.What have I been up to when I’ve found time to game?A little bit of Minecraft, since son_limey joined our local gaming group server and teamed up with lost_wifey to build a truly impressive village, a large wall of maps, and several portals to and from the nether. Meanwhile, I’ve been slowly mining coal, iron and gold and smelting so, so much glass. This is partially because I want to build a monorail on glass blocks (even if I’m not sure redstone suff works through glass) and partly because I found a whole bunch of blueprints online for skyscrapers and stuff and think it might be funny to turn my current log cabin looking house into the Sears Tower (or whatever it’s called these days).I also tried to make some progress trying to find the water chip in the original Fallout and that didn’t go super great. I did do the main quests at Shady Sands in killing the radscorpions and rescuing Tandi from the raiders. Also ended up hiring Ian and exploring Vault 15 before discovering no water chip there. Went to The Hub and found out I need to explore the Necropolis. Headed straight to the Necropolis and am just immediately getting slaughtered by super mutants, so I need to head back to The Hub and Junktown to do some side quests and level up significantly. Since I haven’t played any Fallout games before, I’m enjoying discovering the world for the first time…After getting sick of bleeding out in the sewers under the Necropolis, I figured I’d try playing some Evil Genius. So far, I’ve only done the tutorial to learn the controls, but I love the concept of a Bond Villain simulator, so much so that I played it whilst stroking a cat on my lap. I think i’m going to enjoy this.After seeing all the stuff about the Destiny 2 roadmap, I realized the base game was free to play on Steam and tried to install it. Unfortunately, the keyword is tried, as my relatively new external hard drive died during the install (specifically after 95% of the 86GB install was done) much to my frustration. I attempted to install it on my potato laptop’s internal drive, and it still won’t connect and launch, giving me error code “chicken.” I think that might be because I don’t have enough memory/virtual memory for the game to actually go. With budgetary re-jiggering, I should have around $1,200-$1,500 to spend on a new gaming PC by July 31st, so it remains a dream deferred.I also took advantage of the truly ridiculous itch.io Black Lives Matter bundle to add 1,600 games and effectively nuke my backlog catch up project into utter oblivion. Of those indie games, so far I’ve played Catlateral Damage, where you get to be an asshole cat and knock shit on to the floor. It’s soothing. I also played the visual novel(?) type thing One Night Stand where you wake up in a stranger’s bed and have to figure out what’s going on. So far, I’ve managed to unlock one of the “Walk of Shame” endings, but one where I’m wearing Jeans and underwear at least.I also bought the Humble Bundle racial injustice bundle. I already had some of the games, but it included 2 things I definitely want to play: Baba is You and Football Manager 2020. I haven’t had time to play either yet, but I plan to this weekend.I also had some duplicate games there that I was offering as free gifts on my local gaming group’s discord server, but since they haven’t taken advantage of that, if someone here wants one of:* Age of Wonders III
* Broken Age* Company of Heroes 2* FTL* GoNNER* Hyper Light Drifter* This War of MineLet me know, and I might be able to work something out.On tabletop between pandemic, and the protests (which have been pretty heavy here in Richmond, VA especially with the Confederate participation trophies) my regular group hasn’t had teh energy to meet even online, but I did get to play in a Dungeons & Dragons 5e One Shot based around a magical library with flying book monsters. I played an Orc Necromancer who was basically an insufferable hipster. He claimed he was into dark magic before it was cool, would only drink artisan hand-crafted healing potions, that sort of thing. His spell focus was a set of arcane spectacles which he claimed helped him focus the magics but the rest of the party noticed the thick frames didn’t have any lenses. That sort of thing.
Wow, Evil Genius, I forgot about that game. It was really funny as I recall.
I’m liking the humor, including killing off the tutorial narrator as she has outlived her usefulness.
I haven’t played escape room board games like EXIT: the Game and Unlock! yet but I’d like to try them out. I don’t mind a time limit with real life escape rooms, but I’m curious to see if that also applies to board games. A time limit adds a kind of stress, while playing board games usually is something relaxing for me to do, even when playing a difficult game.The only escape room style board game we’ve played was Adventure Games: the Dungeon which we enjoyed. That one doesn’t have a timer. The solutions to the puzzles were a little bit easy for our taste, but on the other hand that made for a smooth playthrough for our first trip into this type of board game.
I ran through the first three The Room games during my downtime through AGDQ week last year. Most of the puzzles were great. In the third one, there was a point where I just had access to too much stuff and the game wasn’t giving me enough direction as far as what to focus on, so I started letting the game babysit me with the hint button. Oh, I’m supposed to go back to chapter 1 areas. That’s cool. Oh, the code to this part of the box was written on my shoelaces the whole time. I guess that’s a thing. Oh, I thought I solved this puzzle, but I guess it becomes like 12 other puzzles as I solve other things throughout the game. Well, OK.But when I didn’t feel like I was traipsing through areas, wondering where the next puzzle was… when it was clear what I was supposed to be looking at, even if the solution was cryptic, the games were just incredibly engrossing. I love me some puzzles.Video GamesI blew through the Mega Man 11 sub-hour speed run pretty easily after my experience beating Superhero difficulty. I just kept buying up the item that halved damage to avoid getting needless deaths, and never stopped to fight anything I could damage boost through. If I got a bad death or fell down a long upward climb, I’d load my old save, but I really didn’t even have to do that once. I beat Wily in like 1:01:30 with a really bad final fight, then came back and knocked like 2 minutes off my time just by doing a better job managing weapon energy.That left me with Dr. Wily’s Trial left for my 100% achievement list. I gave it a go for like an hour, and as predicted, it was miserable dying a cheap death to an obstacle I’d never seen before and having to work my way back through to my furthest room just to get another 15 seconds of quality time trying to figure out what my strategy was going to be. I could probably look up videos and make the chore a little easier, but it’d still be a chore. I moved the game out of my backlog and uninstalled it. I may bring it back when I inevitably decide to stream another Mega Man 1-11 marathon.I poked around through a few other games, replaying the Spectre Knight campaign in Shovel Knight, working my way through Mega Man 2 and Zelda 1 and a game or two of Pandemic, and having a pretty rotten go at a Jester chapter in Dicey Dungeons. By midweek, I committed to finishing a four-job fiesta in Final Fantasy V and so far have only just made it through the ship graveyard. I only know my first job, thief, which gives me steals, easier escaping, secret passage vision, and, maybe most importantly, Dash.I can’t imagine feeling like I need more than one thief in my team, so I’m looking forward to whatever my water crystal job will be. I honestly don’t know if I’ll clear the challenge before I get distracted, but I’d at least like to see what all 4 of my jobs are. I stopped short of that during my last attempt two years ago, and I think I learned my lesson about allowing berserkers in the options until I get a much better sense for cheap tactics to take down rough bosses.I’m expecting the Steam Summer Sale to hit next week. I’ve been accruing new wishlist items pretty rapidly over the past month and I’m going to need to decide how much I actually want to spend, how much I really want my backlog to balloon back up to 40 games. I’m almost certain the discounts will get me, and I’ll be grabbing most of my wishlist. It’d be hard to convince myself that I can’t afford a dozen indie games at 50% off.Board GamesI set Robinson Crusoe up for the first scenario, Castaways, again. This game is rough. Every card’s trying to set you back and prevent you from getting even the most basic of campsites together, everything in the game wants you to hemorrhage wood, you’re almost guaranteed to lose your entire health bar if you don’t manage your HP before it becomes a problem, and in general, it’s just entirely fucking unfair.Also, I won this time around, and it was incredibly satisfying. My first failed attempt taught me everything I needed to know to adjust my strategy and focus on upping wood production as early as possible so I could get a proper roof built before all the weather dice started trying to kill me. I finished on the last possible turn, with three extra wood sitting in my reserve, reminding me that I could’ve handled slightly worse luck.But… I don’t know if I want to jump right back in with the second scenario just yet. This game’s pretty stressful, and I don’t know if I need more of that in my life right now. There’s a huge chaos factor. You cannot know which disasters are going to come up on your adventure cards, so you have to prepare for everything, which you of course don’t have enough actions to actually do. You can spread your characters out, but it introduces the possibility of failing your actions and drawing even more adverse cards – and I survived having 4 of these added to the deck, so maybe those aren’t that big a deal.I dunno. A big chunk of the game’s challenge comes from what you roll on those dice, whether you find the terrain type for the most useful inventions early on, what animal you draw from the hunt deck, and how many of the cards you draw want to chip away at your shelter’s roof. If the game wants to be easy, it can be. If the game wants to create a scenario where there’s no path to victory, it can do that, too. Maybe I’ll work out better strategies and the margin of error will seem wider, but this seems to be a game more built around telling the story of the doomed crew of a shipwreck than it is about laying down a level of adversity that players can consistently overcome if they’re aware of all the tools at their disposal.In any case, from watching a failed playthrough of the first scenario after beating it, I’m confident I didn’t miss any key rules or underestimate the importance of any actions. It was neat seeing how much the focus changes in a two-character game – you have more actions to work with, but you have to actually work to keep your morale up and keep your characters fed, vs the single-player game where your morale just increases every turn because you’re happy to be alive, and your shelter generates a day’s supply of food at the beginning of each turn. And with how they pull away the dog, then Friday, then reduce the effectiveness of the Arrange Camp action as you add more players, it really feels like they must have play-tested this with all numbers of players and worked out how to keep the challenge level even.Andrew made a big trip, dropping off all the board games he’d borrowed and picking up most of the knickknacks he hadn’t realized he’d left behind. I’ve now got access to my copies of Zombicide, Elder Sign, Spirit Island, and Magic Maze again. With Spirit Island’s new expansion set to arrive next month, this is all very exciting. I mean… given the circumstances. It’s no, “Yay, they made a vaccine for COVID and now we can go back to being social animals again,” but as far as solo activities go, oh boy oh boy oh boy.I played through the first four scenarios of Zombicide again and, actually stopping to count out noise and pay attention to zombies’ shortest routes to the biggest din, I’m seeing more and more that zombies love to get stuck with two equally long routes and clone themselves in order to follow both routes. Without doing the math, I made quick assumptions about zombie behavior on my first pass through the game, and I think I made the game slightly easier than it’s intended to be. I also ignored that cards that spawned zombies on manholes, and I didn’t appreciate that most building entrances, where you flip cards to spawn indoor enemies, have a decent chance of getting you ambushed.I’ve been experimenting with different balances between opening all buildings immediately to spawn all those extra zombies while the danger level’s low vs. giving the crew enough time to build up an arsenal. I think my original impulse of waiting until you’ve got some chainsaws and double sawed-off shotguns and double uzis to work with was the right one, but it’s been fun trying out less cautious strategies and seeing them almost work out before blowing up in my face in spectacular fashion.In any case, I’ll probably be switching to Spirit Island over the weekend to refamiliarize myself with the game and the strengths/weaknesses of each spirit so I can better adjust to all the new choices when 10 new spirits land on my doorstep next month.Have a good weekend, everyone.
Congrats on winning your first Robinson Crusoe scenario. I’d recommend trying the next scenario when you feel ready to try a different challenge. They all have different problems to overcome and because of that, some feel less unfair than others. For instance, you don’t have to deal with rolling the weather dice in every scenario. Wood isn’t necessarily as important in other scenarios as in the Castaways one. We don’t play Robinson Crusoe very often because of the stress/frustration that game can induce. Our last game was months ago because my husband became so angry at how unfairly brutal that playhrough was. We died in like 3 rounds because everything went horribly wrong right at the start of the game.
Yeah, I recognized that having to accrue 15 wood while building up the shelter was a unique demand to scenario 1, but I felt like it gave me a pretty good idea of the types of challenges the game would offer, and I don’t know if I’m ready to throw myself back into that for a third weekend in a row, but I definitely think the variety of inventions allows for an interesting amount of control over which needs you prioritize. It scratches a certain itch for me, but the big role luck plays in the game means I’m probably going to be spacing the experience out so I don’t get too frustrated.I was seeing that the next scenario – the one where you have to build 5 crosses on a foggy island – only involves one die, but it requires that you roll that snow die every single turn. I’m just imagining what happens if you roll 2 snow on the first turn – you lose 2 wood for snow, then you can’t have a roof yet, so you lose another 2 wood and 2 food for lack of preparedness, with any shortages of wood or food being taken directly out of your health, and then you lose 2 health for not having anything to eat and another for sleeping under the stars. Then the loss of wood/morale still means you can’t build a roof on the second turn, unless you were able to move to a natural shelter during the night phase.Was there a snow roll reprieve on the first turn? Were there scenario-specific rules for snow? Maybe it sounds more reasonable when you actually give the scenario a closer look, but my first impression was just one big EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!
I read Robinson Crusoe last year, so to me it sounds like they’ve made a game that’s as frustrating and as hard work as the book.
Backlogged: On the Run from the Hypno Orb Edition
This week in my ongoing quest to experience all of the games I’ve missed out on over the years, I toppled a dark queen from her twirling tower and took lessons in town planning from Dr Wright.First up this week, I finished off my playthrough of Battletoads. The obvious talking point for the infamous NES brawler is its difficulty, and in that regard I certainly found that it delivered on its reputation. There were numerous difficulty spikes that would have proved terminal road blocks to a lesser gamer (i.e. someone not relying heavily on savestates), and in many cases the game wrung extra challenge out of cheap tricks (e.g. blind drops that require trial-and-error under pressure, or suddenly zigging after repeatedly teaching the player to zag). And yet, for me, the game more or less managed to remain on the right side of fun. Sure, the infinite attempts afforded by savestates helped alleviated the pressure, but full credit to the developers for the sheer variety and invention on display in the game’s later levels, from the waterlogged obstacle courses of level 9 to the deftly navigated rat races of level 10 to the laser-focused, breakneck chase sequence of level 11 (that soundtrack!). Capping things off with a dazzling, whirling ascent to the final boss battle, it’s a game that keeps throwing out surprises in an era when many titles were content to settle into repetitive (albeit still enjoyable) patterns, and I’m glad I put myself through the wringer to experience it.Slowing things right down, my other title this week was the SNES port of SimCity. One of the more unique games on my list thus far, it took me a while to wrap my head around the game’s systems, but I seem to have things under control for now (though given everything that’s going on right now, the game’s repeated urges to build police stations in order to crack down on crime are a little jarring). After hitting a population of 30k in practice mode, I’ve moved on to the real thing, with my new city currently sitting comfortably around the 35k mark, puttering along while tax revenue rolls in year after year. I’ll probably aim to hit 50k before moving on to the scenarios; this seems like the kind of game that will go on for as long as I want, so once I’ve seen most of what it has to offer, it’ll be time for me to hid the road and continue on with my retro gaming quest.Anyway, that’s all from me for this week. See you folks next time!
I love The Room series. I hope they come up with a non-VR version of the new one.
The Room series is great. Although interestingly enough, even though its frequently described as an “escape room” game, the emotions it promotes are almost the opposite of the ones I get from doing an actual escape room. The Room is about solitude and quiet, carefully putting puzzle pieces together on your own. Escape rooms are about working collaborative to split up and solve puzzles, often with lots of yelling, running, and a general feeling of mania as the clock winds down.
Only two games on the loose this week, both fit the Switch. Jump Rope Challenge & Heave Ho. I’m really impressed with Heave Ho. It’s the kind of game I’ve been looking for with it’s challenging co-op elements. I don’t know if my wife & I will complete it but it’s got better starting power so Far than Chariot, a game I seriously wished we stuck with.