![]() You put the girl into a sprint, her red jumper a blur of color across the monochrome landscape, and cover more ground in the next minute than in the previous ten. You don’t know what’s going on, but this opportunity is too good to pass up. There’s a red flash of recognition, but nothing approaches her. The rules, somehow, have changed.Īs Tomoko stumbles forward other monsters see her. You’ve put hours and hours into this game so far, and never has a monster failed to attack. The game has trained you that getting caught equates to a quick and grisly demise. The monster continues to sob quietly to itself as it watches you go. Slowly you inch her away and then break out in a run. The creature just sits there, a few feet from your 11th-grader, looking at her. It saw you, that much is clear, but it doesn’t move. That’s it, you fucked up, game over.Īnd then, it doesn’t happen. Tomoko has no weapons and no means of defense, and this close there’s no chance of escape. The shibito has turned and discovered your hiding place. But then a flash of red, and for just a moment you see yourself through the eyes of the enemy. As you pass you can hear the mutated ex-farmer crying. The moment comes and you go for it, crouch-walking just behind the shibito as it pauses to examine a flyer pasted on an ancient farmhouse wall. She’s still wearing her red phys ed jumper, as if the cataclysmic event that turned the residents of this rural Japanese town into monsters happened right in the middle of her gym class. ![]() Your high schooler crouches behind some bushes as you wait for the bug-thing roaming around a few feet ahead to establish a pattern. By the time you reach the church stage you are a sneaking pro. A flash of red and quick cut to the enemy’s perspective signals that you fucked up, you failed to sneak well enough, and now you’re about to get killed. Siren is a game in which stealth is paramount if a shibito even so much as hears you it’s all over. The game has trained you well by this point. It is dark and foggy, and to survive the trek you must sneak past these monsters using the title’s signature “sight-jacking.” The landscape is full of crazed shibito, some of whom have begun to grow bug-like appendages and extra sets of eyeballs. There is a moment in Siren in which your character, a young teenager, is trying to reach a church to meet her parents. Add to that titles I really want to play but haven’t yet ( Until Dawn, Galak-Z, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, Fatal Frame 5, The Room Three, Fallout 4, Among the Sleep, etc), and 2015 seems like a pretty good year. Other really good games I played this year: Metal Gear Solid V, Splatoon, TIS-100. When you’re done, go back and read Thomas Grip’s blog on horror games. I can’t tell you about SOMA without ruining it. That’s all I’m going to tell you about Her Story. Satisfaction comes not from reaching the end and finding out what happened, but ending the game when you reach the point that you are confident in your own theory. Her Story evokes that feeling with incredible craft. ![]() The best mystery novels make you feel like you are the detective, tracking the clues and piecing together what happened before the author reveals the truth. It’s up to you to identify clues and decipher what really happened. All of the videos are clips of a woman giving a statement about the disappearance of her husband. You can search through the stored videos by entering keywords. Her Story only has one screen: a ’90s era computer terminal that hosts an aging video database system. When I heard that the writer/designer of that seminal title had released an indie murder mystery called Her Story, the money in my wallet crawled out and made the purchase autonomously. Now I have to own them.Īs regular readers know, I think that Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is one of the best games ever made. Yet, when I finished it and got one of the two endings, I couldn’t bring myself to go back and get the other. That’s the central gameplay mechanic: short-term time rewinding. Life is Strange is about replaying a moment to see how else it could of come out. The people in Life is Strange are real, and when they suffer because of something you did, it hurts. Life is Strange works because it spends nearly all of its time on character development. The game revolves around the feeling of decision ownership: though you have a lot of power when it comes to making and revising choices, eventually you must own up to the effects of all of your decisions. I write a lot about meaningful decisions on this blog, and Life is Strange is a game designed to make every single decision weighty. The premise is easily explained ( My So-Called Life + mysteries + time travel), but the feeling of playing this game is nearly impossible to put into words. Life is Strange is, hands down, my game of the year.
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