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...

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...