Steam Sale Review: World of Goo

It's day's like this that make me hate summer much more than winter. The heat just wafts and spreads everywhere, ignoring walls and closed doors. This unwanted presence engulfs me and makes everything seem less attractive than usual.
So I'm going to do the least demanding thing I can do at this moment in time; I am going to post on my blog. With that high note, let's look at today's game:


Of all the games I purchased, WoG is the only one I had played before. In fact I had finished it and was planning on buying it eventually, it's just that there was always something better clamouring for my attention. But now (for a given value of now) thanks to the awesome power of capitalism WoG is now mine.

World of Goo is an indie puzzle game released on both PC and Wii. Each level gives you are certain amount of goo balls with which you must use to build some sort of structure to reach the pipe which then sucks up all the remaining goos. Each level requires you save at least a certain amount of goos so the constant challenge is to build a sturdy structure without consuming too many of the little guys.

As you progress through the levels you will encounter various types goos, such as floating Balloon Goo or detachable Green Goo, and plenty of hazards for both your building and your goos, such as spinning blades and bottomless pits.

The difficulty is largely dependant on how many goos you want to save. Just completing the game with the bare minimum can be challenging at times but ultimately is not that hard. If you want more of a challenge simply try and save more in each level; if you are feeling masochistic you can aim for the Obsessive Completion Distinction in each level which seperates the men from the boys, and the freaks from the norms.

While fun, the mechanics are nothing compared to the aesthetics.

The visuals, sound and plot all come together to create something that teeters between wondrous and heartbreaking like so many kids movies from our childhood. I can't adequately explain the tone of WoG nor how it achieves it so I guess that's all.

I'm aware that the above is quite a cop out but it's too damn hot for me to care.

Steam Sale Review: Braid

Anyone who knows me well knows that I tend to be turned off by popular things, partly because the masses have low standards and partly because I'm fairly juvenile. So when Braid came out and had praise and awards heaped upon it again and again I lost interest in playing it. But when it was being sold for less than milkshake, why wouldn't I give it a go.

Braid is a puzzle platformer, which differs from more traditional platformers (like Mirror's Edge) in that the challenge isn't making difficult jumps as much as working out how to use your jumps to solve the current problem.
You also can rewind time as for back as you want, and each world after the first have their own unique time manipulation feature, such as the world's time moving only when you do, or that you leave a shadow double after each rewind which follows what you just did.

The game's difficultly may as well be a feature. It starts off easy enough but with each world it gets harder and harder to collect all of the jigsaw puzzle pieces till you hit a brick wall where there's nothing left you can solve yourself. Or at least that's what I found.
It's hard to design challenging puzzles as at any difficultly there's going to be people unable to complete it and other's who aren't breaking cerebral sweat. Once I gave up and started using a walkthrough I found that there were some puzzles that I could have worked out if I had tried harder and there were others that I never would have thought of.
So my point is that Braid is hard. Really hard. Often it is clever, and some times it is totally bullshit, but once you get past the early stuff it is always hard.

Braid's story is very dividing. You play as Tim, a guy searching for the princess; that's about all you can be definite about. At the start of each world and in the conclusion of the game there are rooms with books that display text of debatable clarity and relevance. In the actual gameplay only the very last level of the last world has any storytelling what so ever (and that one level redeemed many of the game's flaws).
If the game's strange story bread crumbles don't indicate it, the quaint hand drawn art and the peaceful classical music will. Braid is an artsy game, and it follows the line of thinking that true art is incomprehensible. Fans claim that the story is layered and deep, and critics claim that it is just random stuff thrown together. Personally I think that there is some sort of a coherent story, but that it was deliberately distorted to be more artistic.

The levels themselves undermine Braid's plot (see above) and tone (dark) in my opinion. The locations and puzzles are abstract and don't seem to fit in anywhere. This is probably just another case of the drastic segregation of gameplay and story. As for the tone, Braid is full of homages to Mario Bros; goombas and piranha plants are common enemies, and at the end of each world you are in formed that the princess is in another castle. These less serious tributes clash noticeably with the a lot of the games themes such as a protagonist (for lack of a better word) being consumed by obsession.

Steam Sale Review: Mirror's Edge

Right from the start I had my doubts about this game. It's a console port of a first person platforming game where when faced with enemies you are advised to run as opposed to fight. To some people, the previous sentence is enough reason to avoid Mirror's Edge, but because I'm so dedicated to my blog I won't just call it a day here.

You play as Faith, a Runner who transports information and goods via parkour while dodging armed guards. You have a large repertoire of skills to cross the rooftops and navigate the environment such as wall running, sliding, climbing, vaulting and much much more.

While the levels are linear, often the exact path you take is up to you. Runner vision frequently helps by making possible options turn red, and when you get some momentum going and you are chaining together acrobatic feats across a roof top you can really see what the developers were aiming for. Too bad this euphoria gets periodically punched in the gut as though the developers also wanted to make sure that you didn't enjoy yourself completely. General gameplay and the underlying physics are the main (but not the only) gut-punches present.

Despite saying it already, it needs repeating: it's a platforming game....in first person. The inability to see your feet without looking down is frustrating when you plummet to your death because you jumped too soon and missed the ledge, or waited too long and just ran straight off the edge.
The standard response to this is that you can't see your feet without looking down in real life as well, but unlike Mirror's Edge in real life you can feel your feet so you have some indication of where you are standing.

To help with this issue as well as others, some of the moves Faith can do are automatic. How well this work varies.
Wall running starts off as terrifying as Faith will briefly run across any walls you leap into at a shallow angle; once you get the feel for it it actually works rather well.
Faith will automatically grab onto pipes should you jump directly at them, but if you have done a more general leap and come across one whilst falling you better remember to melee the pipe on the way past. Sounds simple, but this is not the sort of thing you want to have to work out via repeated deaths. Which is what I did.
There's more that could be said about this mechanic and the associated deaths of mine but I've got more ground to cover.

Ground such as the level design. For some reason the developers decided to make a considerable amount of the game (ie any) set inside. Some of these areas are spacious like the mall but others like the ship are narrow and confining. Is there a law or something that says that a video game has to have parts where you crawl through a vent?

I'll move on past gameplay after this last paragraph because while I have much more to say, most of the complaints are anecdotal. The gameplay isn't actually bad, just flawed, and these flaws kill you in ways that make you scream at the monitor. Two memorable instances was when a swat guy shoved me away from him as I was jump kicking him in the face, and the time when Runner vision highlighted an elevator's button to show me the right direction, which I interpreted as me being supposed to use the lift (bear in mind I had a dozen armed police behind me).

Mirror's Edge uses a minimalist colouring style. Most of the world is white and full of bloom. Various objects are coloured blue, orange and yellow (plus red with Runner vision). I'm not sure whether the colours are associated with anything in particular or if it is just random. I like that the stylised look but I don't think it fits with the tone as everything else is realistic.

And this just leaves the plot, setting and characters. We are told that the government monitors basically everything and that the Runners are a means to avoid this. I have two problems with this premise. For starters we see things through the view point of the Runners who of course are going to see themselves as just rebels against an evil government. And then there's the issue that anyone who feels they need to use an illegal courier service probably don't have the best of intentions.

The game sidesteps these grey areas by having you only ever deliver something in the first level and then your sister Kate gets framed and the rest of the game is of Faith trying to get her cleared and all the resulting misadventures. The plot differs from most games with a similar context; when you are given an oppressive government and a group of outcasts it generally ends with the government's HQ in flames, possibly with said outcasts standing over the rubble looking down at the city/country/whatever.
But Mirror's Edge presents something much more small scale. You move around meeting with various contacts who direct you to new ones. The new contacts tend to end up betraying you or dying (often both) so you go back to the originals only to have them betray/die/both as well. By the end you have uncovered a conspiracy but it's fairly minor given that there already is an all seeing government.

I'm not sure what I think of the plot but I'm not fond of the characters. Mostly this is because none save Faith get any real screen time and even she doesn't get that much. So when someone from the less-than-a-dozen cast betrays you or gets killed, you the player don't care that nuch because they were just 'suspicious guy', 'dumb muscle' etc.

Faith annoys me more though. She's a badass action girl, which of course translates into remorseless, self centred bitch. The whole evil oppressors/good underground thing wouldn't bother me nearly as much if it wasn't for Faith's attitude. Sure, constant surveillance is unpleasant but don't believe you have such a moral high ground after you wilfully break the law and punch cops who are only doing their job off ledges to their doom. The scene that cemented my dislike for the protagonist is when you meet Kate at the murder scene. They both know Kate's been framed and time is limited, but this doesn't deter Faith from still correcting Kate about her politics.
Wow what a class act.

Steam Sale Review: Trine

I can't find anything worth watching on TV so I guess I'll do a post. The world turns to antisocial nerds who live with their parents for blogs and who am I to say no.

The next game that I have played enough of to declare myself a legitimate authority on is:


This game is a 2D platformer where you switch between playing as a warrior, a thief and a mage depending on the situation. If the aforementioned classes didn't give it away, Trine is traditional fantasy, so don't expect much originality in the setting/plot.

The levels consist of a mix of platforming and action, with a considerable amount of physics applied to both. Each of the three characters have rolls to play, and a lot of the challenges you come across can be solved in multiple ways so you can afford to occasionally lose one of your team.

The warrior is basically pure combat. His sword makes quick work of enemies and his shield can block anything. As you level he can learn several new but fairly pointless abilities, and by the end of the game the warrior is the least useful character. Eventually I found myself only using him when I wanted to keep the others from taking damage.

The thief is the balanced party member. Her bow while weaker than the sword can naturally pick off enemies from afar and her grappling hook lets her swing from any wooden surface. The thief's upgrades make her a force to be reckoned with, as one increases how many arrows you fire at once and another reduces charge time. The capacity to spam four arrows every few seconds kind of makes the warrior redundant.

The mage is the problem solver; he can conjure boxes and levitate objects. Though he doesn't any direct attacks, with some quick manoeuvring it is possible to spawn a box above an enemy and crush them with the awesome power of physics. Gaining levels allows you to summon more boxes, as well as planks and eventually a floating platform, at which point all but the hardest of puzzles become trivial.

A big let down for the game is the combat; there's just not much to it. When playing as the warrior all you would do is:

raise shield > block attack > attack till skeleton is dead (again) > repeat

Not only is the combat simplistic but there is not much diversity in the enemies. Almost everything you fight is a skeleton, who come in several slightly different varieties (normal, shielded, bow-using etc). There are four other types of enemies in the entire game, and that includes the final boss, and the goddamn bats.

....I swear I hate those freaking bats.

Moving on.

Visually the game is great. I admit these days all games look good to some extent and when compared to 10 or 15 years ago, but what I like about this game is that it is consistent. All too often video games have good graphics in most places but in some situations the quality dips; such as if the environments are nice but the characters are residents of the uncanny valley. My point is that Trine doesn't seem to have a dip in quality anywhere in it, or if it does, I was sufficiently distracted enough to not notice.

Steam Sale Review: Eufloria

All you diehard fans of this blog might have noticed that I've been even more slack than usual. Since I last posted I've celebrated Christmas, flown to Brisbane, bought SH2, flown back to Sydney, celebrated New Years, and then bought two more games because of the Steam holiday sales.

All this rampant consumerism has made it rather hard for me to focus on any one particular game long enough to finish it. The 40+ hours of anime demanding to be watched has also proved a bit of distraction. In spite of these hardships I have managed to finish one:


Of all the indie games I bought, Eufloria is the most indie. It doesn't even a name in the developer section.

The gameplay consists of simplistic real time strategy. You command seedlings which explore meteors, fight enemy seedlings , and grow trees. The trees either produce more seedlings or are used to defend the local meteor. When you attack opposing meteors your seedling destroy a tree so they can burrow into the core and assimilate the meteor to your command.

And the above paragraph explains about 50% of Eufloria's gameplay.

This simplicity makes the game very accessible, but also means that it is very easy. Almost every level is simply beat by growing the largest seedling swarm and steamrolling over any competition. The few times there's any other sort of objective, you still just build up a huge force because it's all you can really do.

I mentioned in a past post that there is a game on Kongregate that is similar. It is called Phage Wars and it manages to be even more simple than Eufloria but alot more challenging. PW's has cells instead of meteors and....little squishy things instead of seedling. Cells generate more LSTs and when you attack or move LSTs at half of the cell's current total. during attacks or defence the opposing LSTs outright cancel out with a 1:1 ratio (Eufloria's seedlings have differing stats which are hard to determine, predict or control).

I'm going off on this tangent because PW's rules create levels of fast paced action where you have to work out which risks are worth taking as attacking diminishes your own forces and defending often involves sacrificing your own cells. Eufloria's rules prevents this kind of gameplay though, as a large enough attacking army will not incur many if any losses, and meteor's are considerably easier to protect.

I could go on but let's move to a fresh topic: story.

There isn't one.

Or rather, there's so little that you wonder why bother at all. You have some manner of commander who tells you to colonise worlds in preparation of the Growers. There are other seedling factions that you fight mostly because they are there, and there is also the grey infected seedlings who are made out to be worse but in gameplay terms they are just the same as everyone else.

At the very end your commander discovers that the greys were made by another seedling team and laments that all this infighting is pointless, a conclusion the player would have come to about 10 hours earlier.

It gets worse when you notice that your colour varies in each level so that in one level you might be red fighting green and then next level you are green fighting red. Briefly I thought that maybe the idea was that all the different teams had the same thought process and it is showing how pointless their struggles are. But then I remembered that there is some brief continuity between the missions and that idea went down in flames.

This vague attempt at plot just generates questions. Who/what is your commander? Who/what are you? Are you both seedlings? Are all the seedlings you've been sending to their doom thinking feeling beings? Since all the teams are the same apart from their colour, is the game just an allegory for racism?

Now for the positive elements of Eufloria, the visuals and sound. While peaceful music plays, stylised seedlings orbit around a flowering meteor. There's really not more that can be said. The graphics are consistent and the sounds appropriate for the atmosphere. This design coupled with the ease of play makes me suspect that this game was made to be played while incredibly high.

And that's really it for the positives, and the game as well. Anything else would be either repetition, trivial points or repetition.

One down, nine more to go.