![]() ![]() What you get with Unavowed is a conspiracy thriller wrapped in fantastical mystery wrapped in charming character and storytelling. As for your origin story, you get a choice of 3 different openings to play from, each giving you unique options you can utilize later in the story. In a fantasy Men In Black take, your character, recently freed from demonic possession, becomes part of a secret group pledged to maintaining the supernatural balance in the world while it works to uncover what your demon did during your year-long possession and why. The world that’s crafted this time for your entertainment is a world of magic and folklore concealed by enchantment and conspiracy in the most exotic of locations: New York City. So let’s talk about it (spoiler free, of course). It’s what you’re curious about and what you came for. The main event, the upcoming release of Unavowed, is where we’re at, though. It’s no small thing they’ve done, changing the pace of the base adventure gameplay like this, and I find I much prefer it. If Thimbleweed Park is the grand, extravagent modern adventure game, Wadjet Eye's titles are the powerful and compact ones. All the while quietly preventing “game bloat,” letting the theme and narrative carry you away as they should. They take what’s most fun about the game, experiencing that story and solving puzzles, and get right to it. ![]() Wadjet Eye titles are a bit more streamlined. Whereas Thimbleweed Park was nostalgic to the point of putting me back into the 90s (with some interface upgrades and a ‘tip hotline’ in-game to keep the action moving), it was still very big. I’ve found I’m still just as eager to see the next chapter in whatever story of theirs I’m playing as I ever was in any of the “classics”. Whatever the magic combination, Wadjet Eye has spent its time boiling down those aspects until they’ve crystalized like sweet rock candy. Or maybe it was just the hook of finding out what happened next in a well-written story, the same loves I have for a good novel or movie. Perhaps it was the world that was created, that I just loved being in it, or the characters, so quirky and full of personality. It sounds like a terrible gaming experience, boring if anything, but amongst the best adventure games there was something that kept me enthralled. The games themselves could be beaten in a matter of a several hours if you knew the solution to every puzzle, and inflated game length was commonly a factor of being stuck on a particular puzzle for a few days at a time, logging in an hour here and there to try new ideas or see if there was an item that wasn’t picked up somewhere along the way. Old adventure games were, to put it bluntly, tedious. In a lot of ways I think what Wadjet Eye does, it does better. I take back what I said in that article, though, about Thimbleweed being arguably the best modern point-and-click, because at the time I hadn’t played many of Wadjet Eye’s titles (sorry, Thimbleweed, I still love you). And like Thimbleweed, I’ve noticed how Wadjet Eye Games cleans up the classic formula, as well. Playing it was like being seven years old again, sitting behind my parents’ clunky IBM with a glare-reducer across the monitor because I’d developed eye problems from staring at the screen too long. Thimbleweed Park was a game that took me back, from its classic, pixelated graphics to the inventory and interaction commands reminiscent of Monkey Island (same designers, actually). I’m no stranger to the modern point-and-click, as I showed in my reflections on Finish The Damn Game Month. Why, you might ask, would a developer cling to such a dated design like the point-and-click, and how could it possibly be worth your time in our modern age of face-paced shooters and trendy indie platformers? Old Meets New In recent decades, this style of game has fallen out of favor with the gaming community at large, and yet there are some developers who still see value in it. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |