I picked up Alveole shortly after playing PULMO because I was hoping to enjoy another art game from the same developers, and this one was… different. Different than what I was expecting, different in its gameplay mechanics, different in its message, and different stylistically in almost every way possible. Except there was the animated black outlined figure that was also used in PULMO. Everything that I'm going to write is going to be bare bones compared to other Game EXP articles, because, almost the less that's said about the mechanics of Alveole, the better, but we'll scratch just the surface.
Alveoleis a minimalist game. When you start, there's an exhalation of breath as the essence or spirit of your figure falls into the character lying in the middle of an all-white screen. The screen then becomes populated with seemingly random images, all around your black-outlined figure, who is standing in what looks like a one-ton human hamster wheel. The game is controlled by making your character jump or deciding not to jump as they run on the wheel. Periodically, a trapezoidal obstruction appears that you can either jump over or stumble through. What any of this means is up to the player to decipher. A lot of the objects on the screen, though, are dynamic, so again, it's up to the player to try to recognize the cause and effect of something happening.
Because Alveole is a puzzle game, it's up to the player to figure out what all of the images surrounding the player mean, what the mechanics mean, and how jumping or not jumping affects the game. As you play, you collect pictures that populate the middle third of the screen. Once you have collected all sixteen pictures, the "game" is over. And I say "game" not as a derogatory statement against Alveole, but because it feels more like an interactive art exhibit with gameplay and puzzle elements. The biggest downside is that oftentimes, the player will be rewarded with a snapshot that they've completed one of the "tasks," but there is no immediate inclination to decipher what the player did to specifically earn that picture. It's also a memory game, to try and remember which image that used to be above the player is now gone.
The whole "game" took me about 40 minutes, usually playing for 3-5 minutes at a time, though you could easily finish it in a single sitting if you're in the right mindset. I can't really say that there is much replay value, maybe apart from watching someone else play and maybe giving hints when asked for to unlock some of the more potentially obscure puzzles; here's looking at you, Adventurer.
[Disclaimer: I received a review key for PULMO through Keymailer, a third-party company that connects publishers and developers with content creators. The game key was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that it be played, and content be created. Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]
PULMO is an art game in the purest sense of the definition that Roger Ebert would shake his head at. It's also a game about death, isolation, trauma, grief, hope, and as many interpretations as you could get from anyone playing. But because it's art, it can also be perceived in any way you want. Someone can tell you that you shouldn't feel a sense of wonder and awe while looking at any element of Hieronymous Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, and they would be wrong. Someone can tell you that you shouldn't feel a sense of sadness while gazing into the eye of the Mona Lisa, and again, they would be wrong. PULMO is a vehicle to play through an interpretation of various emotions that a lot of us go through during our lives, but how we express those emotions and how we interpret them can be an indivudualized experience. Such was the case for me with PULMO.
PULMO is a collection of about 10 semi-interactable title cards, followed by 10 playable scenes or vignettes, interconnected by 11 short animated sequences in a similar vein to the game. Each scene is titled (in the scene selection) with names such as "Ego," "Border," "Pressure," and "Thesus." Each of the animated sequences is also titled in the menu: "Diversity," Smallness," Uncertainty," and Insignificance." These are the only kinds of hints the player receives as far as what each scene and animated sequence might be about, but as they're only viewable after you've completed the respective scene/animation, there is no influence on what the player's interpretation during the game. And since the game could be played in a single sitting, I would be hard pressed for someone to constantly play a scene, exit back to the main menu to look at the Scene Selection or Memories section to be directed on how they think they should feel according to the titles.
I think I finished PULMO in two sittings in a single day, spending just over an hour from beginning to end. Two scenes took me a silly amount of time. In one scene, you have your featureless character with an umbrella out while it's raining, and after a few seconds, it starts raining bodies. Your task is to walk down the screen and avoid the bodies as they rocket towards the ground. You are given some warning as a shadow grows on the ground where they're going to land, so all you have to do is avoid the plummeting bodies. This second, embarrassingly, took me 24 minutes. After the handful of attempts, I thought maybe I was supposed to stand still, but that wasn't it. I also thought maybe you could make it by taking a straight line down, but that wasn't it. Turns out it was just good old-fashioned serpentine. There's another section that took me 17 minutes to find a hidden and winding path in a large body of obscuring water. So if you're a better gamer than I am, you could probably complete PULMO in about 30 minutes.
PULMO feels like it's the kind of game that would be perfect for a video game club. A bunch of people play the game from start to finish, and then discuss it over your preferred beverage of choice. I would 100% discuss this game further over a couple of drinks and a Switch to pull up reference material if I knew anyone else who has played it.*
[Disclaimer: I received a review key for Only Cards through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators. The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience. Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]
Well, here we are with our first review for an adult video game, although not rated by the ESRB. What initially drew my attention to Only Cards was the UI aspect; that you are using a desktop background as the primary interface was a novel choice, considering that it is essentially a visual novel with an integrated deck-building puzzle game. The story, too, was initially intriguing, although the final explanation fell beyond flat for me.
Your perspective is that of Detective McSnoop, who is more or less pulled out of retirement to help the local police department's CEI Division (Cyber Erotic Investigations) after a string of seemingly random deaths. When McSnoop joins the story, a sixth man has just been found dead after visiting an OnlyFans adjacent site called Only-Simps. Due to Only-Simp's encryption policies, the images that the CEI has are only partials that have to be reconstructed to know who is in the picture and how it might be connected to the five other open murder cases. McSnoop is brought in because of his expertise in working around encrypted images, which is how he's brought into the story. It's all very silly and doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you think about it beyond the initial explanation, but you run with it anyway.
The in-game explanation for calling in each of the women for questioning feels a bit odd. Each day is accessed by opening a separate text document, which are grouped by Chapters one through seven. Under each of the Chapter text documents is a picture with the woman's name and an unrelated "bonus" picture that you can unlock as you earn higher scores during the puzzle stage. When I played the first five chapters, I played the text/visual novel portion first, but then realized that it felt like I was supposed to 'decrypt' the image first and then call in the woman in the picture. So for Chapter 6, I solved the puzzle first and then read the chapter, but the story that unfolded assumed that I hadn't already looked at the picture, which is taken by your partner at the end of the visual novel section.
The puzzle portion of the game is where the deck building comes in, and was an interesting take. For each picture, you start out with a certain number of pieces already filled in on your square grid. You are dealt five cards that are a combination of pieces from the puzzle, as well as cards that have varying effects that can help you solve the puzzle in fewer turns. There are cards that pixelate blank spaces on your puzzle, but some require a condition to be met, such as only if the space is surrounded by three unsolved spaces. Any pieces you incorrectly place go into your discard pile, but can be drawn again when you run through your deck or if you have a special card that lets you pull from the discard pile. Some puzzles introduce complications, such as garbage cards that fill up your hand with useless cards, while some spaces won't let you put down a piece if you have a garbage card in your hand; thankfully, there is a card that gets rid of all of the garbage cards in your hand. You can build up your hand of cards between solving puzzles by using money earned from solving puzzles, but only once between puzzles by buying one of six randomized cards from the shop.
Everything up to this point has been tame and definitely wouldn't warrant being an adult game. Even the 'decrypted' pictures for the main game are fairly unassuming. None of the women are naked and are all wearing underwear, one might even say "tasteful", which is reinforced when the women are brought in for questioning. Nearly everyone reiterates that taking photos of themselves and selling them to people online is perfectly legal, even when McSnoop tries to shame them for questionable, immoral behavior. A lot of McSnoop's questioning I found to be annoying and degrading, like something you'd hear from a 1970s cop, all, "Back in my day, a real man would watch Hot Plumbers 3: Laying Pipe and not pay for a picture of a woman in her underwear licking a bible." The bonus pictures are where the nudity arises, but only in pictures four through six, and even then, it's closer to what you could see from Titanic than an NSFW subreddit; the first three bonus pictures are similar to the in-game puzzles with women in their underwear. I do wish that there had been some narrative integration of the bonus pictures, or maybe I just missed the brief mention that they were also pictures from Only-Simps, but McSnoop had cracked the case before needing to call in these six other women.
In two instances, I had to start a puzzle over from the beginning because I accidentally softlocked myself from being able to solve the puzzle. In several puzzles, there are conditions such as a red cock on a blank space that meant you "Can't solve this piece if you've already solved 10 other pieces," or a blue water droplet icon on a blank space indicating that "You must not have garbage cards in your hand to solve it." What was frustrating about these and other similar conditions was that if you couldn't meet the specific condition, for example, if you placed 11 pieces and still didn't solve for the one piece with a red clock, then if you tried to place a puzzle piece on it, the game would reject it, but would still allow you to continue with the puzzle. You could reach the end and have any number of blank spaces on your puzzle because you failed to meet the conditions. I feel that the game should immediately let the player know that, because they failed to meet a certain condition, they will have to start the puzzle over immediately. This happened when I only had a space with a blue water droplet icon, and I still had two garbage cards along with the one remaining puzzle piece and two unrelated cards that I couldn't use.
I did experience a game-breaking glitch after Chapter 4, but never again after that. I had finished Chapter 4, both the visual novel and the puzzle, and had saved and exited the game. When I came back later, when I clicked "Continue" on the home screen, it immediately brought up a puzzle, but without access to any puzzle pieces or cards on the bottom of the screen. I tried both forfeiting and quitting the puzzle, hoping that it would take me back to the home screen, and I could start the puzzle over. Unfortunately, selecting either Quit or Forfeit brought me back to the main menu screen, and clicking "Continue" just brought me back to the broken puzzle again. This required me to restart the game, which meant having to redo the first four puzzles again, although this time I had a better idea of the game mechanics and how the cards worked and when best to use them. Another bug I encountered was during the Bonus 6 puzzle when I used a card to show which of the unsolved spaces included the woman's lips. The placement seemed odd, but since it was the beginning of the puzzle and I had only a few pieces placed, I thought that the angle and pose were purposefully misleading. But no, the lips icon had been placed over the woman's butt.
Like I mentioned at the beginning, the ending of the game was dumb. I won't spoil the explanation for why these six men died immediately after looking at a picture they purchased of a woman in her underwear, but it's very underwhelming in a way that made me think, "Wait, that's it?" McSnoop and his colleague Claire even come up with a couple of theories that would have been better conclusions, such as some connection between several of the men having paid more than $1,000 for their respective fatal pictures. I don't know if I was expecting something supernatural, but what actually happened was so mundane that it warranted a furrowed brow instead of an eyeroll. There was one point where I thought it was going to have to do with all of the men being in debt and having taken out loans from an illegal money lender company, and then they were killed, which isn't the most innovative story, but I feel it's slightly better than everyone dying of a panic/heart attack.
Yes, laugh all you want at me critiquing the story of an adult-rated (but not ESRB-rated) video game where you complete puzzles of cartoon women in their underwear, but you have to admit that the initial premise is intriguing. Coupled with the deck-building mechanic and the desktop UI, it had the promise of something a little more than what Only Cards ended up being.
[Disclaimer: I received a review key for ROBMEMBOR through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators. The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience. Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]
I feel like I should have enjoyed ROBMEMBOR more than I did, and I'm disappointed to say that I didn't enjoy it for several reasons. Although, let's start off with how the game advertises itself.
Navigate the labyrinthine corridors of an elderly woman's mind, whose memories have been broken by Alzheimer's. As the chosen mind-repairer, you will solve puzzles, guided by a witty robot, to piece together the tapestry of her life. Merge technology with empathy to revive beautiful memories from oblivion.
That there sounds like a great experience. A moderately chill VR video game tackling the topic of Alzheimer's in video game form in a way that doesn't seem to make light of this condition. The game's title is a portmanteau of the words Robot and Remembor, as you help a robot fit back together the memories of a woman with Alzheimer's disease. The in-game narration even describes the process and mechanics as similar to an escape room. On top of that, I have about six years of experience working with people with dementia, Alzheimer's, and in memory care units. I should have liked this game. What ended up turning me off from ROBMEMBOR wasn't anything to do with the content, but the execution of the game itself.
One of my biggest problems with the game was that the in-game menu and any dialogue text boxes were physically (virtually?) attached to the head of your robot guide. This wouldn't necessarily be a problem if the robot didn't move around in the playable area and wobble its head so damn much. Trying to read the menu screen or text while I was standing still with the screen bobbing about was starting to make me motion sick, something I was not expecting from this game at all. Even the second time I played, for the short amount of time the menu was visible, I felt my stomach churning. Thankfully, you're able to minimize the menu screen, and the dialogue disappears after a short while so it's not visible the entire time, but during the tutorial, as you become accustomed to the controls and what you're supposed to do, it seemed somewhat important.
My next issue was with the controls themselves. In the game, you're basically playing as two floating hands that serve multiple functions. First, you can pick up and manipulate objects. By pressing the X/A buttons on their respective controller, you can turn on a transparent/duplicate mode where your hand can pass through objects and duplicate any object you pick up in the process, just by picking it up, leaving the original object in its place. The third function is that your hand becomes just an outline, and you can swap colors, in the most rudimentary sense, with the object you're touching. You can also raise both your hands to your head, which will reset the colors of the objects you've altered to their original color.
Now, I'll be the first to admit that in my first time playing, I missed part of the text from the robot about using its head, which I realized while thinking about the game between my first and second time playing. I can't explain, though, is why the game didn't seem to want to accept my solution the first time (in Part 2), but after exiting and redoing the puzzle (again), it did seem to work. I also don't know why the game wouldn't let me place the head back on the pedestal after thinking that one head wasn't where it was supposed to be. That led me to think that there was some kind of glitch, and I needed to either reset the puzzle or just exit out completely.
That was when I decided to give the freeplay/playground mode a try, but that ended up with its own issues. To me, there was just too much free rein and not enough direction, but I guess that's kind of the point of a playground. It really just felt like I could spawn any of the objects from the catalogue and then change their color if I wanted. I did find out that I could change the environment, but that seemed to have an unintended consequence on the other objects in the room, like the table and the robot, not taking into account the rocky terrain of the moon/tree landscape. So I went back to the tutorial level.
This time around, I again couldn't tell you what I did differently from the previous attempt, but whatever it was was an acceptable solution, and so I was (finally) taken to the first chapter in the story mode. I admit that I probably didn't give this first chapter a fair shake in terms of really exploring the room and trying to actually figure out how to solve whatever the puzzle(s) were. I genuinely thought that the layout of the room was odd and not initially clear on what it was that needed to be done. Likely something to do with the figurines and the pedestals. And I probably could have tried to connect the dots. And done something with the weights and the scale. By this point, though, my left hand seemed like it had glitched beyond repair, as I wasn't able to cycle through the different functions, and eventually the same happened to my right hand. I was also starting to feel more and more nauseous from moving around the environment and the robot's bobbing text box. So I gave up.
I know. That's bad journalism to stop playing a game after fewer than 60 minutes and only just past the tutorial stage, but I felt like I was playing a game that was buggy and making me physically ill due to a design choice. I also wasn't having fun due to the aforementioned issues, something that I felt that I should've been experiencing by this point, especially in a VR game that wasn't in the horror genre. I love the concept of approaching memory loss and Alzheimer's in a video game, and VR does offer the unique experience of the medium, but I just wish that ROBMEMBOR had been a better game than the one I experienced.
[Disclaimer: I received a review key for Stupid Cars through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators. The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience. Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]
Stupid Cars Release Date: January 9, 2025 Systems: Meta Quest, Windows, Nintendo Switch Publisher: Gimbal Studio Developer: Gimbal Studio Time Spent: 1 Hour 17 Minutes
It's probably my fault for not looking too closely at Stupid Cars before I established in my brain what I thought the game was going to be. Even after watching the trailer, what I was expecting it to be, a VR puzzle game that would be filled with individual puzzles kind of like the board game Rush Hour but played in real-time instead of turns. Even the trailer almost feels like it leaves a lot to interpretation, not even once focusing on the fact that there is a score counter at the top of the screen.
Stupid Cars is instead closer to what is presented on the surface in the trailer. A large arcade cabinet with cars and motorcycles zipping by that you're able to manually speed up and slow down, and for each vehicle that safely makes it through to the other side, you get one point. The highest score. . . is the highest. There is an online leaderboard but I never felt compelled to attempt to even get close to any of the listed highest scores. The score is also there as a way of keeping the next level locked, so you have to earn at least 50 points to continue on to the next stage. There are some modifiers to the score, such as random gold cars that are worth two points, and an unlockable mechanic that speeds up the cars and doubles your score while it's turned on; you're able to toggle the Turbo Mode on and off. You're also allotted a continue if any of the cars crash to carry over your score when you start the same stage again, although it seems that the rate of the cars driving out is the same as when the car crashed, but the board starts out clear.
Let's go through each level because as you're probably aware, I have some thoughts.
Level 1: Classic
You know, just your basic poorly planned out intersection immediately after a series of eight tunnels. I don't know why it didn't stick out to me at first, but the cars are driving on the left side of the road, but that obviously didn't bother me as it wasn't something I noticed until level 3. The tutorial itself is pretty rudimentary and I still found it a little misleading. I thought that along with being able to speed up the cars, that you could also slow them down beyond their initial starting speed, so three speeds altogether. I think that's what I was trying to do at 1:40, was to slow the Jeep down, not drive it right into the convertible. That's also why I was looking down at the control panel, convinced that I missed something about the controls and looking for where the "slow down" button was, not just the "speed up" button.
"Classic" was the only stage I actually felt moderately compelled to get a higher score beyond 50, which is why I played for an additional seven minutes. It was fun, but at that point, still only about 12 minutes, I decided that with no additional gameplay elements in this mode, I was going to stop.
Level 2: Bus Rush
Yeah, I went into this stage a bit cocky. Getting 92 points in the previous level and feeling like I had a decent grasp of the mechanics along with fewer intersecting roads felt like this was going to be a proverbial cakewalk, but this one really put me in my place (or did it?). Not even a minute into the Bus Rush I was barely able to score 8 points, distracted by the bus and where the various roads were intersecting, and seeing two gold-two-point cars got me excited.
The buses ended up being harder to predict how they would affect the rest of the traffic, despite the in-game warning that a bus was coming. I just found it hard to factor in their length and speed with the rest of the cars on the road, which is kind of the whole point of the game. But even after the second attempt where I got 43 points, I still felt like I had a decent grasp on the mechanics. I think the difficulty I faced with this level cemented my desire to not try and go for not a leaderboard high score, but a personal best high score, higher than the 50 required to unlock the next level.
Level 3: Bike Blitz
If I had thought that Bus Rush was hard, I had no idea what was in store for me with Bike Blitz. This was also, surprisingly enough, the level where I realized that the vehicles driving on the left side of the road, as opposed to the right side like here in the United States, was throwing off my perspective and previous knowledge of traffic circles. The other complication here was keeping track of the motorcycles/mopeds once they entered the traffic circle because once you get two or more bikes in there at the same time, it's all a manner of remembering when each vehicle entered and where they're going to exit.
I do love how around 19:00 I just gave up a kind of meddling just to see how many points I could score without touching any of the bikes. Like, maybe that was the trick to this level, was to just let the bikes to their thing and you could get to 50 points. But, as evidenced by the video, leaving the bikes alone will net you zero points on average. And it's not like I could feel myself getting any better at this, like it all just felt like luck. Which is probably why at 21 minutes in, my high score was still only 39. And then on the next run, I managed to score 39 on my first try, briefly thinking that I would turn Turbo Mode on and off anytime a gold car was about to finish, but I found that tactic to be too risky. That excitement you see in my magnificent attempt at a laser light show at 22:57 is 100% real. I wasn't doing that for the camera.
Level 4: Train Wreck
After the chaosness that was Bus Rush and what felt like an exponentially increasing difficulty curve in the game, I was so thankful that this level was easier and thereby, actually felt fun again. The train moved faster than I thought it would and was on its own dedicated track (as opposed to the bus also using the road) and came at a regular 15 seconds. I mean, I got 49 points on my second attempt. Then after only about three minutes, I got 50 points. I briefly thought about quitting, but because I was feeling more joy than I'd felt since the first level, I decided to continue and just see how high I could get my score; it was 90.
So while it took some getting used to keeping my eye on the track and the rest of the cars on the road, overall, I really enjoyed this level.
Level 5: Loopy Lanes
Like Train Wreck before, Loopy Lanes was more fun than I expected with the return of traffic circles (traffic quarters?). This level actually feels like it should have come before Bike Blitz as it felt easier despite there being two traffic circles instead of one. That being said, this level was still pretty challenging having to time the delayed turn of the traffic circle in cars making an elongated right-hand turn; like I'm genuinely curious what the road sign prior to entering that intersection would look like.
Level 6: Chaos
You know, for a level titled "Chaos," I expected the culmination of all of the elements from each previous level to actually feel more chaotic. I don't mean having cars and bikes and trains and buses all in the same level, and while that would have been entertainingly chaotic, this didn't feel chaotic. Just busy. Instead, we have 20 straight lanes of traffic and four intersections with only cars to deal with. I would have at least expected there to be both cars and bikes or maybe a turn or two. Maybe an overpass or something. But sadly no. Apart from there just potentially being more cars on the roads, the actual playing area was pretty disappointing.
Now, that doesn't mean that this level was easy because dealing with 10+ cars on the screen at the same time is mentally taxing and hard to keep track of. I probably could have tried additional plays after getting to 69 on my go (at 5:14), but with how uninspired Chaos felt, I didn't really feel like trying to get a higher score than 70.
So that's Stupid Cars, or at least most of it. I only unlocked two medals which can give you bonus points, which is probably how people get 350+ points on Classic, although I never looked into how to unlock all of the medals or how to actively try and score bonus points based on the medals I did have. I'm not a big multiplayer person, but something about this game feels like it could somehow benefit from multiple players, although not even the Nintendo Switch version is multiplayer, so it's not just an issue to get it to work in VR. I don't really know how much this game benefits from being a VR title as the controllers basically felt like mouse pointers and even though I was equipped with two of them, I never felt coordinated enough to use both at the same time; plus I felt that one was more than enough in most situations. The environment was neat, but it was always the same skybox and ther was no change in the decore as you progressed through the game. I guess I just feel like even without trying to unlock all of the medals, there didn't feel like there was a whole lot of game here. Six levels that are already in endless mode so there really isn't anywhere to go unless you're trying for the leaderboard.
So yeah, I did have fun 60% of the time, with two of the middle levels causing me all manners of grief. But if high-score hunting is your thing, then a VR game for less than $6.00 might just be your thing.
[Disclaimer: I received a review key for Seed of Life through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators. The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience. Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]
Seed of Life Systems: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox S/X, Release Date: August 11, 2021 - May 30, 2024 Publisher: GS2 Games Developer: MadLight Time Spent: 3-3.5 Hours
I wanted to like Seed of Life, I mean, I requested a review key for the game after all because I liked the idea of a 3rd-person adventure puzzle game from an indie developer that I had never heard of, and I wanted to support publishers and developers who list Switch games on Keymailer. "Wanted" is the key word here because while there were times when I enjoyed Seed of Life, there were just too many little things that prevented me from enjoying the game any more than I already had. I know that there are different versions and ports of Seed of Life, but I will focus on the Switch version rather than try to compare this to other versions. Yes, the port on the Switch is a pretty massive visual downgrade, but that doesn't immediately mean it is a worse game or that it's not playable. A visually downgraded game is still 100% playable and enjoyable, especially if you're not comparing it to other iterations.
The plot is pretty straightforward. You play as Cora who tasks herself with finding/locating an alien artifact that will help revitalize her dying planet, the seed of life if you will. The game is played as a third-person adventure game with environmental puzzles and some platforming elements. Where I stopped in the game, there was no combat system, only a runaway system from enemies that largely ignored the player and would follow a pre-set path.
The problems I had with the game, at least on the Switch, became evident early on. First, the frame rate wasn't great, but not such a red flag that I stopped playing immediately. Games don't need to run at 60 or even 30 fps to be playable, and while the game likely ran into the single digits in the clip below, I still felt that there was something here that could be enjoyed.
The second issue had to do with how Cora moved. When I started, Cora could only walk, which only made the game feel slower. Yes, there is a toggle in the settings menu before you start the game and I did select walking, but I had interpreted that as what your base-walking speed was and thought that I could hold down ZL or another button to have Cora sprint when I needed her to. This was not the case as I found out after an hour of playing. I then discovered that to have Cora run at all, you have to exit back to the main menu to turn running on, then continue. There is no in-between which is a very bizarre design choice and one that I don't recall having ever seen in a third-person game before. Had I not toggled the option for Cora to run, I don't think you could actually beat the game as the large canyon area where I stopped requires the player to quickly reach landmarks because your health is drained (like the timer life mechanic in the original Gauntlet). Why then have the movement speed be anything but running or even have this atrocious mechanic where you can only toggle via a menu only accessible from when you first turn the game on? There are platforming sections in the canyon area that would have been easier if you could toggle between walking and running. It doesn't make any sense to me and just makes me irritated the more I think of it.
The combination of these two issues ultimately contributed to my needing/wanting to stop playing the game. A couple of hours in, you come to a sprawling canyon area where the point is to reach far-off Lumia Capsules while you make your way through an area that automatically starts draining your life once you cross a threshold, so in essence you have a timer that is counting down until you die. There are large worm-like monsters that patrol this area that will further deplete your life and large Lumia plant-things that will recharge your own Lumia (an energy source that lets you track where you're supposed to go and fuels certain special abilities) and prevent your life from draining. So this whole area is a series of puzzles that require the player to determine where they need to go, and how to reach the goal while navigating a hostile environment, while also using the environment to their advantage. It makes a good case for why this should be a fun area and overall, a fun game, but because of how the game was ported to the Switch, it makes navigating platforms and jumping incredibly difficult. Case in point:
So the platforming itself isn't complicated, but only being able to run while the game fps stutters makes timing jumps very difficult. At least the load time between dying and respawning is only a few seconds, which I guess makes dying in the exact same area twice in 30 seconds all the more frustrating. But then when you compound the situation with additional elements like the game needing to render the environment along with particle-like smoke elements and enemy movements, the game becomes what I would define as unplayable.
This is what really frustrates me about Seed of Life. When I started the game, and I was only walking around, because there wasn't a need to run around apart from getting somewhere faster, the game was fine. Not great, but playable and fine. But once you really needed to run to traverse locations faster because of the life timer mechanic, that's when the lag and stuttering became more pronounced because the game was becoming more difficult. But that's fine that the game was becoming more difficult, it makes sense otherwise the game would be too easy and less interesting. It all comes to a head because the company that ported Seed of Life to the Switch* did such a poor job that it negates any positive aspects that MadLight put into the creation of the game.
Obviously, I can't recommend the Switch port of Seed of Life at any price point and I would need to watch a thorough review of the original PC game before I think about trying to play this on the Steam Deck.
* All I could find about the company that ported this was "NXY Digital, LTD." from the review site GameHype, but I couldn't find anything about the company itself. All searches tried to direct me to NXT Digital, which is an integrated cable service provider, with no mention on their site about porting video games. So I'm not really sure at this point.
P.S. The other thing that really irks my gourd, is that all of the pictures on the Nintendo eShop page are all taken from the PC version of the game, not the Switch port. It's really obvious in the second and third pictures and the fact that there isn't a video trailer either on the eShop page or one released by the developer/publisher on YouTube.
Botany Manor is a cozy little fantastical puzzle-laden gardening sim that I ended up taking a little too seriously, meaning that I once again over-thought a few puzzles and was fully expecting something creepy to come crawling out of a flower pot. But no. Botany Manor is simply just a first-person perspective game where you solve plant-based puzzles in late 19th century England in a typical point-and-click fashion. The puzzles are not overly difficult if you take them on one at a time, and are well crafted in a way that makes complete sense within the world building just within the demo. There are also hints of a mystery through friendly albeit semi-cryptic letters and newspaper clippings uncovered throughout the stage while you search for hints on how to solve your area-progressing puzzle.
The game/demo starts you off in a greenhouse made up of a couple of rooms that function as a tutorial for the game's mechanics and the basis for the overarching story that is only hinted at during the duration of the demo. Here you have a journal where you keep information about the story as well as information you uncover about specific plants that includes a clues-board that helps you solve the puzzle that lets you further explore the manor grounds and later the manor itself. The puzzle themselves consists of finding a flower pot, filling it with dirt, finding the specific seeds to plant (I believe that only one seed per area is available at a time), and then solving a series of informational puzzles to determine what it takes to make that specific plant grow. And this is where most of the fantastical elements come into play.
During the demo, you only end up growing two separate flowers although the second flower requires a lot more steps to go through, it is still equally satisfying when you manage to get the flower to bloom. Because this is a video game about gardening, a few real-world steps had to be slimmed down to make the game playable. So after you plant and water a seed, the plant immediately sprouts. Then, depending on the flower, your next step is to find a suitable location for the sprout followed by an additional step that allows the sprout to bloom into a flower. On top of the rapid growth rate of the flowers, the flowers are also fictionally based with names that wouldn't be out of place in a slightly less punny Plants vs. Zombies game. The Windmill Wort has petals reminiscent of a windmill that can purify the air of toxins within seconds, and the Fulguria with lightning bolt-shaped petals.
The demo for Botany Manor ended after only completing two flower-based puzzles although another puzzle was hinted at by a blocked door. I don't know if elements of the second puzzle would be used again for the third or future puzzles, but I wouldn't be surprised if this wound up being the case. What I really enjoyed about Botany Manor was that the puzzles were reminiscent of those that you might find in Resident Evil or an Amnesia game but without the tension of worrying about what was lurking around the next corner. The puzzles were logical and satisfying; sometimes I just want to play a stressless game. A cozy game if you will.
I played INSIDE over the course of about 24 hours. The first night I played from around 12 am until roughly 3:30 am, both a testament to the game itself and the battery longevity of the Switch OLED; and even then it was only down to about 15%. That next afternoon, I played for a couple of hours (after a brief look-up on how to solve a particular puzzle because I again was overthinking every element of the puzzle except the obvious solution) and then finished it later that evening. I was a little confused about the meaning of the ending, of which I have since learned that there are two, but I agree with the general consensus of what everything led to and what it meant.
Just a brief warning, the game does involve a child being put into deadly situations not dissimilar to Playdead's first game LIMBO, but less fantastical and more realistically dystopian where giant spiders are replaced by packs of guard dogs and automated machines akin to the Sentinels from The Matrix if they were attached to tracks and rails. I had suggested to Conklederp that it probably wasn't a great game to watch me play since I am not a pro gamer and there were plenty of times where the boy character was killed over a dozen different ways. While I will not be showing screenshots of the character dying, it will be brought up to a degree as part of game mechanics and the like. So just a heads up that if that's not something you want to read about, then there are obviously no hard feelings there.
INSIDE feels like the natural evolution from LIMBO, where you played an unnamed boy looking for his lost sister, here, you play as an unnamed boy running from various antagonists straight out of an episode of The X-Files. Like LIMBO, you also start out in a forest solving minor environmental puzzles that only require you to move and jump, and pretty early on, the threat comes not from the sides like a typical side-scrolling platformer, but from the background as men with flashlights and guns exit cars and patrol the surrounding woods looking for you. Why they are looking for you is the primary crux for nearly the first half of the game as you run through various environments like woods, highway offramps, cornfields, pig farms, and eventually to industrial areas filled with your first big jump in puzzle mechanics.
Once you reach this section of the game, you start controlling other human-like creatures called husks (more on them later) through the use of a psychic-like helmet that lets you either move them left or right, or they follow you. At this point, the puzzles become a bit more complex because not only are you moving around the characters and making sure that they stay out of danger, but you also now have other people to think about and how they interact with the environment. After this section (which includes the one puzzle I had to look up, although it did not involve the husks) you continue through the industrial-like area although it takes on a more scientific-lab-like appearance and there is a lot of water.
The water stages are where the story starts to get really strange and where I lost the thread of the plot until I finished the game and looked up what actually happened. Thankfully, these areas were not as problematic as your stereotypical water stage and were actually quite fun. There was a fair amount of "figure it out as you go," but since there were so few buttons that actually functioned in the game, determining how a submersible worked and its additional functions was quite easy. There were a couple of sections that required significant amounts of dying to figure out how I was supposed to solve particular puzzles how a black-haired swimming creature moved and how I was supposed to manipulate the environment to block their path.
The last quarter of the game is really where things kind of went off rails, or at least what I thought I understood what actually consisted of the rails in this game. Without getting too heavy into spoilers (and because I didn't take too many pictures specifically to avoid spoilers). Most of these areas were in a lab-type setting which I was thankful to actually be in after the water levels and the water-based puzzles which often required a different type of problem-solving process than the first half of the game. It was here that I felt pretty confused and just pushed forward, solving puzzles not because I understood what was going on, but because I thought maybe I might have a better understanding at some later point. But, there were a lot of very cool set pieces that I don't think I have experienced before in a game, even if the avenue was some of the strangest I have played and seen.
Then the game ended. When I looked up the different interpretations of the story, I nodded along thinking, "Yeah, okay, that makes sense." Then I saw that there was an alternate ending, which again, kind of made sense. But what are these orbs that everyone is talking about? I don't recall ever collecting, let alone seeing anything that could have been described as an orb that could have been collected. And after watching the first minute of a video, I know for certain that I never collected or interacted with anything that looked like that. Scratch that, I did find the fourth orb but must have forgotten about it because nothing immediately came from doing whatever interacting with the orb did. And while I do enjoy alternate or hidden endings, I think I feel a little miffed/bitter because of how well hidden these orbs were and that you needed to collect all of them in a single playthrough to see something potentially integral to fully understanding the full story.
Taking INSIDE without the stupidly-well-hidden alternate ending, I really did enjoy the game and think it's a great follow-up to LIMBO without feeling that Playdead is a one-trick pony and I still don't fully understand how/why Polygon could put both of these games together and say that they're "essentially the same experience." That would be like saying that Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. 3 are "essentially the same experience" because in both games you play as a plumber in a platformer as you rescue a princess from a large cow-like turtle crime boss. LIMBO might be easier to stomach for some people who would rather not watch a more realistic-looking child be killed in dozens of ways over and over (because I'm a bad gamer), but I enjoyed the storytelling in INSIDE a lot more.
P.S. Oh, and the game played wonderfully on the Switch, with zero crashes, and no noticeable frame rate drops. I was actually pretty surprised and how smoothly everything ran and looked during the entire game. Just wanted to throw that out there for people who are looking at various platforms.
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