Gruesome is a roguelike in which you play the Grue. Instead of conventionally exploring dungeons to find treasures and slay enemies, you play as the enemy, hiding in the shadows waiting for explorers to stumble into your slavering fangs. Each floor of the dungeon has a few adventurers wandering around, carrying torches that deal a fatal flash if you are caught within the radius. You cannot step into the light willingly, nor can you advance on an adventurer – they must fall into you inadvertently.
Before reading our review of Downfall below, you could also view an alternate take on the game in the form of our interview with the game’s developer Remigiusz Michalski. The interview contains intriguing side-to-side comparisons of Michalski’s work-in-progress sketches turning into the full-fledged game.
The Davises are on a holiday road trip from London, but find themselves in pouring rain and lost in a tiny rural village in Devon, South West England. Suddenly Ivy’s not feeling well, and as the couple stops for a much-needed breather, Joe Davis decides to seek for medical help and a place to stay overnight at a nearby hotel. With the couple’s relationship already under some considerable strain, the hotel seems to exude unexpected hostility, and the foreboding little town seems blanketed in dirty secrets.
Joe suddenly finds himself falling, all too conveniently, into the role of the problem-solver.
You find yourself standing on a pier, jutting out from a silent shore with only a small house in sight, a rocky mountain looming behind in the mist. You appear to be on an island, deadly quiet and devoid of life except for a lone seagull fleeing at the sound of your step. Venturing forth into the house you discover an abandoned shack with only boxes lying about, and on the walls a curious set of chalked symbols. Setting off on the path behind the house you make your way up the mountain in an attempt to make sense of this desolate place.
Dear Esther,
the gulls do not land here anymore. I’ve noticed that this year they seem to shun the place. Maybe it’s the depletion of the fishing stock driving them away. Perhaps it’s me.
Dear Esther is an interactive first-person adventure. Based on the Source engine popularised by Half-Life 2, it is a free mod that requires the game to run. Created by British games researcher Dan Pinchbeck under the development moniker thechineseroom, the mod is described as an interactive narrative that “puts traditional game technologies to new use”. Essentially the player has one action available to them, and that is to move around and explore the island. The narrative arrives in the form of the atmospheric visuals and sound, and short spoken fragments of story that are triggered at various spots on your journey. The narrator reads out extracts from a letter addressed to someone called Esther, and relates his attempts to follow in the footsteps of a man arriving to the island before him. Throughout his monologue he alludes to his experiences as well as those of other characters, all seemingly related in some way. The accounts sometimes appear literal but at other times feel more metaphorical and nebulous in their meaning.
This was to be the space for a review of Paleo Entertainment’s new game, Merchants of Brooklyn. In MOB, you play as Matteo, a cybernetically enhanced Neanderthal clone. Suffice to say, Matteo suffers a life-threatening dismemberment in combat but ends up being saved by a scientist who grafts him a new robotic arm to replace the lost one.
The problem? The game’s launch on Steam was unfortunately a miserable one, and Paleo Entertainment have now confirmed an alpha version of the game was uploaded to Steam at first: This meant the load game mechanism tended to break scripting and a degree of graphics settings were unavailable. Most importantly, however, the sound levels of the audio were such that players were completely unable to hear the game’s narration and thus follow the plot!
Go Matteo Go!
Luckily, Paleo Entertainment has jumped to the save instantaneously and a massive first-day patch, one that amounts to more than half the original size of the game (of 690mb), has already been released. So far, we’ve head reports that the menus have been improved (AA is now selectable), a difficulty setting has been added and the sound is now indeed correctly balanced.
When will Matteo be truly unshackled? While we wait for our patches to download and bugs to be fixed, you can read more about the game in our introductory post for the game.
So far I’ve had the delight to try out – for free, if I may add, the defining characteristic of this endeavour – the first and fourth chapters of American McGee’s Grimm, the new episodic series published on GameTap. To get the monkey off my back, both episodes, Puss In Boots and A Boy Learns What Fear Is, have felt perfectly fine to me. In the answers section of his personal forums, McGee writes that
[Grimm] was designed to be played by people who’ve never played a game before. Of course this means that hard core gamers are going to literally *hate* the experience. But that’s OK.
Though I full well understand the defensive attitude, and considering I would probably have to label myself a “hard core” gamer, it’s somewhat surprising that my biggest (sole!) gripe so far would be that I keep on forgetting when a new episode is released. I’ve therefore missed the more platform-oriented, sea-scaped The Fisherman and His Wife and the classic Little Red Riding Hood.
GameTap offers you the possibility of downloading the first episode as a stand-alone installer, subsequent episodes will have to be downloaded via the GameTap interface or through the recently introduced TryGames. The fourth episode racks up around 300mb. Though McGee promises more download services (I’m sure some users are “Steaming” by now) shortly, it remains to be seen what will happen to Grimm and GameTap now that Time Warner have decided to sell off the service.
How Grimm.
The basic starting point for the game series is that the team reimagines an old Brothers Grimm story. Check out the pictures and the rest of the review after the jump.
