Adam the Artist

Silent Hill Downpour is finally out, and the reviews I’ve seen are split pretty evenly between love and loathing. I’m about 5 hours in, and though it definitely has its share of blemishes (read: haunted police cars), I’d say Vatra gets it. It’s an interesting character-driven journey in the tradition of SH2 (though it feels less mature so far), and it does some clever things to evolve the series gameplay-wise. Opening the town up into more of a sandbox experience was inspired (but all the choke points and dead ends are pretty discouraging for me).  I think I’ll always have a soft spot for this series, because these are horror games that at least try to approach things seriously.

On iOS I keep coming back to Beat Sneak Bandit, a stealth/rhythm/puzzle game from Simogo. It’s beautiful, clever, and it won Best Mobile Game at the 2012 Independent Games Festival. I don’t have the best sense of rhythm, but this kind of one-more-try gameplay does a pretty good job of sucking me in.

Alex the Codesmith

I managed to find time to play and ‘finish’ (although I don’t think that’s the right word as I think it encourages multiple replays) Journey. The newest game from thatgamecompany (makers of flOw and Flower). The game is an amazing piece of work. And my experience with it was quite fascinating.  They definitely took lessons learned from their previous games and have applied them masterfully here in regards to flow, control, and feel of the game. I recall starting the game out and going through the first few segments by myself. Other than the gorgeous graphics, there wasn’t much else that was keeping me interested and my patience was wearing thin. Then another journeymen’s head popped up over a hillside and then within a few short minutes I understood what TGC was aiming for with this game. They’ve done something really special in terms of making a single player game feel relevant outside the bounds of the game. It’s hard to explain, but once I experienced the feelings and emotions that Journey had me go through with fellow travelers it made me giddy for the future of this platform and the single player ‘experience’. Although, Journey felt much more closely to a work of art than a game to me. In terms of mechanics and story the game is pretty shallow, but what they accomplished with their laser focused premise of Journey I think will stick with me for a while, and I think will serve as an excellent reference for designers who wish to raise the bar in the ‘experience/interaction’ category of game design.

I, sadly, haven’t been doing much exploring on iOS. I’ve been coming back to the usual staple of Disc Drivin’ and Scramble with Friends. I flirted with Draw Something for a bit before letting it go. I appreciate what it’s done and was able to prove. In a marketplace where conventional wisdom tells you that you have to have traditional game mechanics and victory conditions to be successful, Draw Something turned that convention on it’s head and showed us how many people there really are outside our insular ‘gamer circle’ waiting to be entertained.