manchego obfuscator 最近的评测

Dystopian 2.5D black-and-white cinematic platformer heavily influenced by Limbo and Inside, in which you play a bird-girl trying to escape a decaying, underground industrial world of anthropomorphic animals. Clearly a game that placed a high priority on its art direction, even for this subgenre, as there are lots of gameplay-minimal sections where you just walk forward, or have no real control over your character while the camera pans or flies through its environments; as for the actual gameplay, the puzzles and platforming are fairly simple, with a few somewhat frustrating timed platforming sections, and a few spots where the art direction makes it tough to distinguish between scenery and your path forward. The story also ends on a frustratingly ambiguous and less than satisfying note. But that said, despite its flaws, it's appropriately short (at approximately 2.5-3.5 hours), well paced, and the art direction is absolutely beautiful, with some very good use of public-domain classical music on the soundtrack as well. Despite its flaws, I still enjoyed it a lot, and fans of cinematic platformers should definitely give it a try, at least when on sale; in fact, it's currently only $2 on Steam as of this writing.

(Warning: this ran well enough on my RTX 4070 - or at least, any frame drops weren't significant enough to bother me - but is apparently not well optimized, especially for lower-end PCs; it's unsupported on Steam Deck for that reason)

An opening voiceover from none other than Shohreh Aghdashloo, a distinctive Persian mythological setting, and a short 2.5-hour length (at least, if HLTB is to be believed; I couldn't bring myself to finish) aren't enough to overcome incredibly simplistic and linear gameplay that makes your average Lego game look deep and complex.

Also opens with a famous Milan Kundera quote about kitsch ("Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion."), which seems bizarrely out of place here unless the latter part of the game takes a drastic narrative swerve; nothing about the portions of the game I played suggest any sort of self-aware irony or deliberate pursuit of a kitsch aesthetic.

1000xRESIST frequently betrays its limited budget in ways that aren't to the benefit of the storytelling here, with extremely simple and not particularly expressive character models, fairly minimal character animation outside certain key parts of the story, and dodgy voice acting for some secondary and tertiary characters; additionally, some of the gameplay, such as it is, is fairly clunky, particularly the sections where you need to wander around a semi-open area to find and talk to various characters in order to progress the story. But despite its faults as a game, I can't really give it a lower rating than four stars, thanks to its generally captivating, millennia-spanning story that encompasses themes of Asian diasporic identity, individual and collective resistance, trauma, COVID-19, and more. Not every narrative beat or aspect of its world-building lands perfectly, but it's still remarkable to see such ambition from Sunset Visitor's debut game, and it adds up to a story that has real emotional power, even for all its imperfections.

As a streamlined open-world game with an emphasis on light puzzle-solving and platforming as well as traversal, Giant Squid’s second game is significantly more ambitious, and significantly more of an actual game, than its debut title, the very linear and gameplay-light underwater swimming sim Abzu. While the exploration, atmosphere, and puzzles are all fairly engaging for most of its running time, The Pathless ultimately doesn’t feel as tightly designed or polished as its predecessor: all the puzzles are designed around a small handful of gameplay elements that start to wear thin by the end; the story would have worked better with abstract text-free storytelling a la Journey or Abzu; and the boss battles that end each region start as welcome changes of pace from the exploration, but end up as overly drawn-out affairs with frustrating difficulty spikes (you can’t actually die, but taking too many hits will kick you out of the arena and force you to restart the current phase of the boss). And while a traditional map or quest markers obviously wouldn’t have fit the deliberately streamlined approach to open-world design, I do wish there had been a feature like the one in Sable, which allowed you to set waypoints anywhere you could see from a suitably high vantage point; as is, I spent too much of the time using the Spirit Mask, which highlights key landmarks, but also desaturates the visuals and slows you down. It’s still generally fun to explore and solve puzzles, and I enjoyed most of my time with it, but it’s more flawed than I had hoped.

Going by the reviews here, a lot of people clearly found the central gameplay loop of Loddlenaut to be highly addictive… but while I can certainly see what it’s going for, it just didn’t click for me after an hour or so, with its cleaning mechanics not feeling particularly satisfying, and the process of gathering the necessary materials to craft an upgrade feeling overly slow and grindy. Maybe it’s better balanced once you get the first few upgrades out of the way, but I’m not sure I’ll come back to find out.

A short, relatively polished, and enjoyable 2D action-adventure platformer (very much linear and not a Metroidvania, but it’s neither divided into thematically discrete stages, nor is it a cinematic platformer), with its central platforming and puzzle mechanics revolving around a magic sword that allows you to wield fire to your advantage. Admittedly, it ultimately feels like a proof of concept for a more ambitious sequel - outside of the fun but fairly simple combat, you don’t end up using your fire powers to do much more than light torches that act as switches or burn away obstacles, the story is underdeveloped, and there isn’t a lot of visual variety - but still worth your time given its brevity and that the fire abilities are visually and mechanically satisfying to use, and hopefully Nocturnal II delivers on more of the potential here.

A generally lovely and affecting short visual novel from the perspective of a trans woman in 1993 Ireland, with an eraser-themed UI mechanic thematically tied into the narrative and various animated flourishes that thankfully distinguish its presentation from more conventional entries in the genre. The ending did feel a little pat, but maybe that’s just me; regardless, the personal nature of the story, and the specificity of its setting, come through and make this well worth a play for anyone interested in queer narrative games, trans or otherwise.

If you can't already tell from the premise (you play as a nun who hears the voice of the devil in her head), Indika is very much an art-house style of narrative game, with a story that ambitiously tackles weighty themes of Catholicism, free will, and morality, and an XP/skill tree system which involves deliberately incongruous UI elements and sound effects and has literally no impact on the gameplay, but does end up playing into the narrative in a meaningful way. I don't think it entirely coheres for me - a few of the puzzles are clunky, the ending feels anticlimactic, and the general surrealism of the world isn't quite justified by where the story ends up going - but it's hard to find too much fault with a game with this level of narrative ambition, and a story and voice acting that were strong enough to keep me playing despite some general jank. May play through it again down the road and see if the story holds up better now that I have a better sense of what it's going for.

An open-world indie platformer with a grapple mechanic sounds like a good time, but an hour or two in, the grapple just feels janky and unsatisfying to use (as does basic movement, to a lesser degree), and the open-world elements suffer from a lack of any objective marker or onscreen map. Sludge Life may not have had a grapple mechanic, but it did this sort of quirky low-fi indie first-person open-world platformer much better.

A very short (under an hour), experimental narrative game with only one limited gameplay mechanic (archery), and script that uses its conceit (you have one chance to light a flame that will determine whether or not people will get their wishes granted) to tell a story about moral choices and the weight of expectations. I'm not entirely satisfied with either of the two endings, which feel anticlimactic (especially the "bad" ending I got) even if I can see what the developers were going for, but it's an interesting experiment nonetheless, and definitely worth the $3 it'll cost you on Steam.