I’ve decided to retroactively make this an entry in the Short Sessions series. I like the title a lot and it keeps things simpler. The series is no longer just about abandoned games, but also shorter games in general.
This is a series about the shorter PC games I’ve completed or abandoned recently.
Developer: Hello Games | Released: 2021 | Genre: Puzzle, Third Person
I’m going back to the game notes format for this one, only with a few tweaks. There is a short paragraph with my opinion, and the game notes are called musings instead. Also, there won’t be a rating in the bottom.
An isometric puzzle game where I had to revive fellow embers turned to statues. Touching one brought me to a secluded puzzle. When solved, the ember woke up and joined other embers at a campfire.
I was impressed how open world it was – previous campfires remained available – and the unique tasks I found on my way. However, the difficulty of the puzzles were inconsistent. Most puzzles were so easy, they could be solved by small kids – then once in a while, a surprisingly hardcore puzzle occurred. Because of how these felt like aberrations, it made me worried about what challenges I might face next.
Just reaching the ember statues could be a challenge in itself, blocked by puzzles or unique encounters with multi-step tasks. There was a big frog wanting food, a fisherman that could repair a butterfly net for me, luring a pig with a fruit so it could eat a carnivorous plant, raising platforms with treadmills, bringing orchid seeds to a cook, burning bushes with fire, connecting paths on a map, and much more.
At one point I acquired a lanthorn, which was a horn I could blow to invoke specific objects for moving them around like telekinesis, only while they were still touching the ground. I could move small islands I was standing on, or flipping blocks for closing gaps for me to walk past.
Everyone I met and exchanged dialog with, all notes I found in chests, even narrating while solving quests, was almost all voiced by just one girl. The voice acting itself was fine, but I was often wondering if the game would have been more enjoyable without all that chattering.
The camera was often static or on rails, instead of the usual behind-the-character. I always prefer the latter. In my opinion it is far superior to the former, which often introduce corners that are hard to see.
I tried to reach the chests for the challenges themselves, not for the contents of the chests. Each chest just had a humdrum note that didn’t really feel like a nice reward. I think the most apt description is meh.
Most puzzles were really easy, except for the odd ones out that were quite the opposite.
By far the worst was the puzzle where I had to walk on plates depicting frogs and turtles. There was some sort of order to figure out, but it never made any sense to me. I just kept brute forcing it until I got it right. Unfortunately, this meant falling to my death many times.
The one with two flip blocks and two block buttons also had me stumped for the longest time. There was something about it that just didn’t feel intuitive.
I also think the snake puzzles, dragging strings of blocks through pathways, were quite difficult. I really had to experiment a lot to get those right.
My conclusion to these surprisingly difficult puzzles is that it made the game feel uncomfortable to me. I was always wary of the next hardcore puzzle to appear in the ocean of kids puzzles. I really think the developers should have balanced this differently. Easy puzzles in the beginning, then steadily getting more difficult towards the end. You know – the way most games usually work.
A different kind were the pipe rotating puzzles. It was the usual trope. Grab a straight pipe piece, a corner piece, or a tee piece. Place where needed and rotate to continue the flow of energy. These puzzles could be complicated but didn’t feel difficult in the same way. It was just a little bit of fiddling and replacing. They should have made more puzzles like that instead of the painful lanthorn puzzles.
I always smiled at the way my ember sometimes got slowed down by a spider’s web for a second or two, after which it snapped and the normal run speed was back. Such a cute little detail.
I wasn’t too fond of how the boat was controlled using mouse and keyboard. It felt like the controls for the arrow icon was upside down. Later, I found it easier to just click a spot somewhere in front of the boat.
LOL at the green duck boat that builder robot made for me. Totally ugly – I liked it!
Developer: Kojima Productions | Released: 2022 | Genre: 3PS, Adventure
This game was essentially Hideo Kojima discovering walking simulators and then saying:
Let’s make an AAA game out of that!
The human characters models and their facial animations were out of this world in this game. Probably the best I have seen so far. The pimples, the eye colors, the perfect lip sync. Really amazing work.
If anything, the camera was often too close to their faces.
Being late to the party as always, I actually didn’t want to play this for the longest time. It looked like it could be frustrating. While it was certainly not devoid of enemies and boss fights, it had enough interesting treks across Icelandic landscapes to warrant me spending some time with it.
Another reason I liked the game was how refreshingly different it was. In a world dominated by hackneyed tropes such as fantasy games with sword-wielding warriors and wizards with fireballs, first person shooters with reloading guns and bullet sponge enemies, and point-and-click adventures with object-combining inventories and dialog choices, this AAA game dared to try something entirely different.
A package delivery simulator. A more apt definition than walking simulator.
Developer: Cosmonaut Studios | Released: 2022 | Genre: Adventure, First Person
In this first person adventure game, I was an observing rubber suit guy manipulating time in a house with two floors, trying to save the lives of six young adults after a fire in a fuse box.
Using a tool held in my right hand, I could start an event somewhere in the house. It typically lasted a few minutes and showed some of the young adults talking together as ghostly figures that I could walk around. A bit like in Tacoma, but with much clearer character models – and I couldn’t fast forward an event.
The events themselves had a separate overview screen that scrolled far to the right. It was overwhelming at first, with hundreds of dots available on a timeline. Some dots could be selected immediately, and after watching it was no longer a question mark. Most events were solely observing some dialog, but sometimes I was given a opportunity to alter time by making a person change their mind and react differently.
This had a butterfly effect and could change what events were available after that point.
Developer: Clifftop Games | Released: 2019 | Genre: Adventure, Point & Click
I’m changing my mind about canning the balanced reviews. I actually missed doing them. So I’m not going to rule them out after all. I’ll return to them again for a while to ascertain the format.
A solid retro adventure game much in the same vein as Technobabylon and Primordia. I was in a control of a female cop trying to solve a few murders in a small city located on a raised disc.
The developers called it a sci-fi nordic noir.
As the blonde protagonist, Vera Englund – still moaning the loss of her boyfriend – the game immediately started with her arriving at the first murder scene. There were just two screens to navigate here until I had reached a milestone. Then most of the city was available to me.
Apart from the classic point-and-click features with an inventory that can combine objects, there was a triangle for steering towards one of three paths depending on what dialog options where chosen along the way. Since I only played the game once, it didn’t feel like this affected the gameplay all that much.
My guess is it probably did affect what augmentations I was given.
Augmentations? Sure. This was a pretty cool feature and most unexpected to find in this type of game. It felt like it was inspired by Deus Ex. I had a few to begin with, and more were added during the game.
I found this anthill the other day while I was on vacation. There was one ant barely alive on it. When I blew on it, it moved 1 mm and then stopped. The temperature was probably around 5°C.
Last ant standing.
Developer: Chilla’s Art | Released: 2024 | Genre: Adventure, First Person
That sure was one weird ass game. I went in completely blind, not reading any user reviews on what it was about. I think I chose wisely, as my worried feeling about what I should expect worked well for this game. The premise was actually quite simple. I was in the bullet train of Shinkansen heading for Tokyo, and I needed to walk through passenger cars, looking for any anomalies.
It’s worth a try if you’re into weird and eerie adventure games, but know it’s not long – and you don’t get to see anything else than the interior of a passenger car and the toilets in between them.
After some experimentation it dawned on me that I needed to reach the front of the train and press the button to stop the train. Walking through the passenger cars had a floor sticker telling me to walk back if I spotted an anomaly among the passenger seats. If I got this right, the number of the car decreased each time I opened a new passenger car. If I missed too many anomalies in a row, a can dropped and a ghost would start chasing me down. I always managed to outrun it.
The passenger cars were exactly the same in both directions, adding to the weirdness of the game.
Anomalies could be hands somewhere, someone hugging a seat, even all passenger seats missing or plant growth all over the place. It was usually more strange and out of place than actually horrific.
Solving the first set of passenger cars revealed to be just one of two train sets. I then had to do another, with different color seats, a lady selling food and candy, one guy frozen as he put his luggage away above him, and even a dark guy with a green light as one of his eyes. Those were the normal things. Oh, and the rules were swapped. If I spotted an anomaly here, I needed to go forward instead of back.
A shame I couldn’t see the landscape rushing by fast through the train windows. They were just completely black. What I did see in the reflection of the windows was myself. A thin guy with a white shirt and a tie.
I got the first ending in less than an hour.
Developer: Dontnod Entertainment | Released: 2023 | Genre: Platform, Third Person
Just like Submerged, this was solely a climbing game. Borrowing the atmosphere from ICO, it started with a kid walking on the sandy bottom of what was once an ocean. He arrived at a dried out coral mountain and started climbing it to the top, a daunting task since it was exceptionally tall. It turns out there were once a civilization living there, but now it was empty habitats and boats hanging on the side.
Apart from climbing and exploring, I could also find abandoned letters.
The climbing was a lot more sophisticated than in Submerged, and also considerably more challenging. I had a rope with me and could attach it to the wall at up to three spots during a climbing session. The game didn’t allow me to fall to my death, but falling to the end of the rope meant having to redo a lot of climbing. It was also possible to lower the rope and swing it to the sides for reaching a handhold.
Borrowing the hand swapping style from Crazy Climber, I had to alternate left and right hand gripping with each hotkey. I also had a small creature with me that could discharge a magical effect for making plants grow, creating more handholds for me to climb.
Developer: like Charlie | Released: 2022 | Genre: Adventure, Facile
This was a walking simulator across three islands, following a sad story about a dad leaving his wife and child behind. It was first person and I never saw any faces up close, except for a few ghosts on the islands. As the protagonist Riley, I also had the ghost Josh speaking to me, panning between loudspeakers.
The 3D art was simple yet created a nice atmosphere. There was a lot of talking between Riley and the ghost, Josh. The walking was excessive and made it abundantly clear this was truly a walking simulator. In fact, some of the strolling on the islands reminded me a little of Dear Esther.
At times, a dream-like cutscene showed a few ghost figures talking together in the past.
I’m trying something different again as I wasn’t quite satisfied with the game notes format. I’ll try a more relaxed format now, just writing my thoughts about the game. Just like I used to before the balanced reviews.
Developer: The Chinese Room | Released: 2024 | Genre: Adventure, Horror
An adventure game trying to escape an oil rig after a disaster hit it. It was made by the same developer that also made Dear Esther, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture.
Excellent experience. The lighting, filthy details and the profanic Scottish voice acting from the protagonist and the crew was spot on. Things like a convincing rough sea and water drops sailing down windows made it clear this was a game the developer really cared about. The game was also very dynamic in a way that reminded me of Half-Life. The ceiling crashing down, water rushing in, something grabbing you, etc.
The gameplay was not groundbreaking. Jumping, crawling, answering wall phones, using (a lot of) ladders, running jumps, a few QTE – that sort of stuff. Later there were also stealth sequences, sneaking between cover and throwing objects to lure a monster away.
