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...

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...