No Payne, No Game

Night in the Woods , developed by InfiniteFall, is one of the smash hits of 2017, and will soon be releasing a major update. It's also a story about going home. Though in  Gone Home we find that there is no one there, in Night in the Woods, we find everyone there. Still there in the small little town of Possum Springs, Pennsylvania. Night in the Woods, is, like Spelunky, a 2D platformer, but it's quite different in the requirements. The mode of locomotion is a lot less frantic, and there isn't really a challenge to overcome. Or rather, the challenge is within. Night in the Woods is a tale of failure. Mae Borowski drops out of college in her sophomore year and goes home. She arrives at night, with no one to meet her at the bus station. The game uses this as a nice opportunity to teach the player about jumping to solve one of the game's puzzles. From there, the jumping continues until Mae falls off a telephone pole(one of the game's favorite forms of travel), and c...

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 ...

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...