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[A beautiful narrative exploration hampered by performance issues.]

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TalkBack / Lost Ember (Switch) Review

« on: September 29, 2020, 01:48:16 PM »

A beautiful narrative exploration hampered by performance issues.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/55069/lost-ember-switch-review

Note: The developers reached out on Twitter to say that they’re working on a patch.

Freedom is a valuable currency in gaming. Whether it’s freedom from the heavy shackles of gravity, or an escape hatch into another world entirely, games provide welcome escapism from the everyday. Narrative-driven exploration game Lost Ember offers an interesting twist on this premise: freedom from selfhood, achieved by fluidly leaping between different species to play as a varied menagerie of animals.

The game’s release trailer sold this idea well. We see the main protagonist—a black wolf— sprinting through a bright landscape before becoming a hovering hummingbird, a rolling wombat, a swooping cockatiel, or a stampeding buffalo. It’s an intoxicating gameplay offer that seems like nothing so much as an interactive spin on the BBC’s Planet Earth.

The game started promisingly enough as the nimble wolf ran through a colorful, familiar-yet-alien natural landscape. The grass blew in the breeze as the wolf passed downhill into a long valley. Rivers sloshed along merrily, colorful mountains rolled away into the hazy distance, and clouds of bright leaves passed overhead as I loped along shaded forest pathways. In full flow, Lost Ember has an invigorating, wind-in-your-hair kind of feel.

As the game progressed, however, various niggles started to present themselves. Some were to do with the game’s design. The wolf’s jump, for example, is an ineffectual maneuver, with low clearance meaning you bounce off even the humblest of roots or rocks. While exploring nooks and crannies of the world, you sometimes hit invisible walls that demarcate the play area, or “stick” to the scenery as your avatar jiggles against invisible geometry.

There are also some persistent performance issues and bugs. When falling for more than a second, for example, the wolf respawns nearby – sometimes into thin air, leading to a game-breaking death loop and a manual restart. Frame rate drops start off inoffensive, but become regular screen freezes as the environments become more complex. Lost Ember is a small-team indie title that was brought to fruition via Kickstarter, but nevertheless, a sobering adjustment of expectation was required as the bugs and glitches started to pile up.

The central “soul wandering” mechanic was a high point. Each of the animals you inhabit has unique abilities. Wombats can squeeze through tight spaces and burrows. Armadillos can burrow under walls to find secrets. Fish can dive through underwater ruins, and hummingbirds can fly over obstacles. It’s fun playing as new animals, witnessing their individual perspectives, and finding hidden collectibles. There are some QTE sequences that vary from confusing to thrilling as your creatures encounter storms or crumbling cliffs. Even though you’re generally with them for a short period, there’s always another around the corner, including some late-game treats I won’t spoil here.

There’s also a reasonably engaging story, in which you accompany a lost soul who’s seeking the heavenly City of Light. As you progress on your journey, cut-scenes are triggered at smoking campfires that also act as progress beacons and checkpoints. You’ll discover your own storied past, and that of your disembodied companion, as well as the troubled history of the ruined realm. If you can look past some heavy exposition and dodgy voice acting, it’s a decent plot (tip: subtitles on, voice off).

Lost Ember is laudably ambitious and enjoyable in parts, but it’s hard to wholeheartedly recommend. If you’re prepared for some eyeroll moments as you reset the game because your wombat got stuck in a boulder, you’ll be rewarded with the spectacle of battering through walls as a buffalo, or soaring through rainbows as a hawk. At such moments of wonder, that initial escapist promise of soul-wandering through the animal kingdom feels tantalisingly close. But, in the end, the game’s limitations break the necessary immersion, and bring you back down to earth with a thud.

[A breathtaking and immersive puzzle experience.]

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TalkBack / Manifold Garden (Switch) Review

« on: August 25, 2020, 02:19:00 PM »

A breathtaking and immersive puzzle experience.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/54723/manifold-garden-switch-review

In virtual space, the only limits are those of the human imagination. The rules of physics can be altered, stretched, or completely suspended, creating the potential for mind-bending dreamscapes that defy our expectations. It’s one of the great boons of video games: their ability to provide us with otherwise impossible spaces.

The eponymous Manifold Garden is one such place. A 2019 Apple Arcade title freshly ported to the Switch (as well as Playstation and Xbox), it’s ostensibly a block-based puzzle game. But to describe it as such is to do it a great disservice. While the game does involve ferrying blocks from A to B—plucked like apples from cuboid trees and planted into switch cradles that open the way forward—what’s interesting is the dreamlike world we traverse along the way. In these surreal modernist cathedrals, space can fold and repeat indefinitely, and gravity follows unfamiliar rules.

We’re eased into the game via an initial series of modest instructive rooms, with geometric sunbeams strafing the space. First, a prompt tells us that any wall can become the floor at the tap of a button, meaning the world quite literally revolves around the player. We learn that coloured blocks adhere to their own relative gravity—red blocks can only be moved when we’re walking on a red surface; otherwise, they become stuck fast. The same goes for blue, green, or yellow. This poses problems, but also provides solutions: for example, a red block can be positioned to function as a shelf across which a yellow block can be carried.

But that’s just the small stuff. Manifold Garden’s puzzles also operate on a macro level, as we discover upon emerging into the game’s first outdoor space. It’s quite a moment. On a narrow, vertigo-inducing ledge, we see a vast, neverending yawn rippling off in all directions. It’s an arresting, dizzying, and somehow horrifying spectacle, amplified by a prismic, hallucinogenic colour palette and a swell of Vangelis-like synths.

The way forward seems to lie on the next tower across, which looks strikingly similar to the one we’re on. Climbing the stairs that wrap around the outside of the tower quickly brings us back to where we started. It’s here that the first of many small epiphanies occurs. What if this forest of towers stretching off into the distance was just one endlessly repeating structure? And so, we take a leap of faith, falling through the infinite space, until we land with a thump on the other side of the chasm—just metres from where we jumped.

It’s simple in practice, yet complex to describe. And that’s Manifold Garden for you. Getting a block from a tree to a nearby switch cradle might look simple, but it often requires several steps of four-dimensional lateral thinking. Sometimes the answers come easily, and we rocket through puzzle after puzzle, basking in the game’s rainbow-tinged magic-hour atmosphere. At these moments of intuitive flow, Manifold Garden’s gameplay evokes a kind of quiet euphoria; a sense of harmony with the perverse rules of this gameworld.

There are also moments of discord. Occasionally, I found myself doing laps of large spaces, falling endlessly or crawling like an ant lost in a sea of modernist pillars and atria. The answers weren’t always graceful: finally spotting a tree nestled discreetly against a high pillar didn’t feel like a satisfying epiphany so much as having Nelson from The Simpsons point and say “ha, ha!”

One such low point is the “giant Tetris” level. This convoluted chain of puzzles left me clutching a hard-won yellow block, with no idea where it might go. After much aimless falling, looping and wandering, the solution I came up with felt more like hacking the puzzle than solving it; there was no satisfying click between problem and solution (days later, I’m still wondering what that yellow cube was for).

But Manifold Garden works more often than it doesn’t, and these moments were mercifully few. Overall, it’s an aesthetic and ingenious wonderland of stunning architecture, fluid motion and testing spacial riddles. It introduces new mechanics throughout the 4-6 hour playing time, from lasers that switch block colours, to flowing water that can be frozen, restarted, and bent through space. At every turn, Laryssa Okada’s excellent ambient-melodic score amplifies the palpable sense of wonder that permeates the game.

The game’s creator, William Chyr, identifies primarily as an artist. And it takes an artist’s touch to so masterfully combine gameplay, art direction, architecture, logic puzzles, spacial subversion and audio-visual elements into such a coherent package. I’ve a feeling Chyr’s next project might manifest as an art installation rather than a game. If so, I’ll be holding my breath for a fall as I step tentatively through the doorway.

[A mysterious video database is the key to a complex mystery.]

3

TalkBack / Telling Lies (Switch) Review

« on: May 07, 2020, 09:00:00 AM »

A mysterious video database is the key to a complex mystery.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/53670/telling-lies-switch-review

A lot of effort in the world of video games is dedicated to making characters and settings look more like real life. The main thrust of motion capture, ray tracing, dynamic lighting, advanced physics, and 3D texturing is to make gameworlds seem more lifelike. Telling Lies, however, is a four-hour Full Motion Video (FMV) game that flips this simple foundational principle on its head. Instead of making games more like real life, it asks instead: What if real life were more like a game?

The story begins with a filmed intro in which a blonde woman—your character, nominally— enters a building and sits down at a laptop. From that moment on, your Switch becomes a laptop complete with an OS, a clock and battery indicator, a trash can, a card game, and— most significantly—a database of videos. The entire game is played out with the faint reflection of the woman’s face on the screen. Occasionally, she’ll stop to text or to talk to a roommate, signifying that an hour has passed and reminding you of where you are.

These reminders are necessary as the game’s playing time runs on a clock. It will end between four and five hours. This is the time you have to try and orientate yourself within the scenario at hand, and only then will you learn what percentage of the some 170 clips you managed to unearth.

The whole game is a spoiler, basically, so I’ll try to tread carefully. The first thing you’ll find when you begin to click around this unusual game environment is a text file indicating that the videos are, in fact, an archive of surveillance footage spanning two years. The videos are accessed via a simple keyword search. You’ll quickly lose yourself in a complex web of one-sided Facetime chats, cam girl footage, and covertly taken videos.

Little by little, the characters, timelines, big events and core relationships emerge. Expertly acted by a stellar cast, the hours fly by as you sift through videos that range from the mundane, personal and NSFW, to shocking or revelatory. It’s an engrossing task to play detective as you try to figure out the case at hand.

Even naming the main characters here would be a spoiler. Finding the right keywords are the main gameplay mechanic that allows you to inch further into the story. Each video is subtitled, and you can click on any word to activate a new search, or bookmark a curious timestamp for later. Your analysis skills will be put to the test as you try to find the right terms to blow the lid off the simmering plot.

Any search can act as a doorway to a juicy, hard-to-reach scene, or even lead to a whole new storyline. Any unusually placed word could be a clue leading to a game-altering revelation. It’s a compelling mechanic that leads to easy immersion. Anyone who’s used a simple video editor will feel at home scrubbing back and forth through digital videos, and jumping between clips. The Switch’s touch screen makes this even more intuitive than it would be using a mouse.

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Nintendo Gaming / Re: Switch Friend Code Thread

« on: April 27, 2020, 04:58:21 PM »

Hi everyone! First time poster and a future site contributor here.

I'm John, an Iceland-based gamer, writer and journalist, amongst other things.

I'd love to connect with you all! My With code is : SW-6569-6342-7014.

I'm also on all the social networks as @gaminginthewild - Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. I stream on Twitch using that moniker, and I'm on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2CxEBWZNBMDV5evJvFWkpQ.

I'd love to connect, see what you all are playing, and talk about games!