No Payne, No Game

For Thanksgiving, the next two games I'll be talking about here are going to be about going home. The first one is the aptly named  Gone Home , developed by The Fullbright Company in 2013. It's a game about coming home and finding that nothing is as you left it. Gone Home fits tentatively into a genre of game called "Immersive Sim," a topic covered extensively by  Waypoint on their flagship podcast . It includes games such as Dishonored, Prey, Deus Ex, and many more. It also covers games like Gone Home, and Fullbright's sophomore release, Tacoma, though some would refer to these games as "walking simulators" with varying degrees of distaste and admiration. Gone Home won awards for its passive storytelling mechanism, and won hearts with the fan favorite  Christmas Duck . In the game, you play as a college student returning to her family home and finding that no one is there to greet her. The game starts innocently enough, as the player wanders around

Over the past few years since the popularization of licensed game productions by Telltale Games, such as The Walking Dead, or Game of Thrones, choice-based episodic series have become more and more popular. One of the other companies leading the charge has been DONTNOD Entertainment, creator of the award-winning video game from 2015, Life is Strange . Life is Strange won its awards for its raw emotional appeal and brilliant soundtrack at a time when emotional experiences were lacking in games. It's appeal was largely in its story of struggling youth in a private arts school in a lonely Oregon backwater. Many celebrated various story beats which hinted at a deeper relationship between two young women, while others were upset that the game's ending forced their hand in a tough decision. Life is Strange is a narrative experience that did what it set out to do and create a true-to-heart experience for its players, and while its  writing got its fair share of heat , the game was &qu

Darkest Dungeon is a "dungeon-themed management sim" which arrived to PC in January of 2016. Like many dungeon-based RPGs, it's based on a 4-member party system designed to force players to think about balancing a team. However, the complication of this game doesn't rest in the typical RPG mechanics. The game isn't a top-down RPG, but a side-scrolling march down a hallway. Nor is Darkest Dungeon a game where you form a party and must live with the consequences forever. It's a game where you have a wide band of adventurers which you can mix and match up before sending into various dungeons on different quests. I think it's pretty well suited to new players despite it's difficulty. The game reels you in with a quick hook. You've inherited your family estate, which has fallen to a curse due to the greed and hubris of the previous owner. You have been tasked with reclaiming your land from demons and monsters which have inhabited the various landmark

With the recent announcement of Spelunky 2 , a lot of gamers are powering up their devices and downloading the major hit from 2012. Spelunky, a game originally released for free in 2008 as a small, innovative 16-bit platformer, made huge waves when the developer polished it up for a release on the Xbox 360's Xbox Live Arcade. The Arcade is gone now, but Spelunky is alive and well. With ports to PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4, Derek Yu's first shot at game design is a ubiquitous title that has made itself one of the most well-known independent titles to date. The premise is simple. An adventurer of a similar style to a popular Nazi-fighting archaeology professor sets off to explore a mine with a dangerous legend. Upon entering, a curse is placed upon him, and his pursuit of treasure becomes an unending cycle of death and rebirth. If he is able to leave at all, it must be by retrieving the treasure at the end of the tunnels. From a gameplay standpoint, Spelunky did something

Hey folks, and welcome to No Payne, No Game, my small games review blog. I'm a college student in Communication Arts looking to pass my classes and start building up a small cache of reviews to point at when people say "can you do any work?" I'm also an avid games enthusiast. I've been playing games since I was five or six years old. The advancements in technology and narrative effort in the decade and a half that I've been gaming have been incredible. My first gaming loves were JRPGs, with their incredible narrative efforts, and over the years I've been moving over to Western RPGs which allow for more of a customized, individual experience. My first game that I can remember falling in love with was Square Enix's Kingdom Hearts, which came out when I was very young, and the Disney characters were appealing. My favorite game in the past few years has probably been Bioware's Dragon Age: Inquisition, a massive undertaking which I poured 100 hours in