John Walker
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Writing For
Rock Paper ShotgunLatest Reviews
I'm not going to pretend to have finished it. I'm hoping this is a game I'll keep playing for a long time, picking away at puzzles, and then desperately hoping for extra levels to be added later. But this is wonderful. Completely wonderful. Original, inspired, challenging, and most importantly of all, that constant sense of "Oh no, how will I ever do this one!" so quickly followed by, "I AM A GENIUS!" It's a very, very smart game, that has the humility to let you, the player, feel like the clever one.
There's obviously a long and sad story to be told here. The tales of how it swapped development studios, of how it was supposed to be an Xbone launch title, why it never became the promised technical masterwork that made cloud-based processing a part of gaming. It reeks of development hell, as demoralising to play as I imagine it was to make. Yes, clearing a map of its icons can be readily distracting, and it fulfils this role at least. But that's no longer nearly enough. Although I'll say one thing for it, that shouldn't be underappreciated. It's fast travel is fast - it loads anywhere on the map incredibly quickly. Which would be a nice thought to end on, if I didn't add: it's just it's not that much fun when you get there.
It's definitely a shame that painting isn't more of a thing. But this really comes together. A slow, gentle, personal RPG, with neat little stories, characters I remember, and a real sense of having spent time in a special place. Oh, and last of all, in Eastshade if you want to get around a bit faster, you buy a bicycle. Yeah, it's exactly that sort of place.
This is a joyful, happy-faced good time. There are "boss fights", but they're deliberately not an impediment to progress. (One especially in a way that I shan't spoil, but gosh it made me laugh.) The chatter is plentiful, but always fun to read (or enact). And it's extremely funny.
I've adored this. It's so damned smart, the level layouts as good as anything from the '90s heyday of the genre (perhaps with the exception of Dark Forces? I'm not sure if I'm willing to let that game's meticulous architecture slip from the top spot), the secrets rewarding to hunt down. The more you progress, the more elaborate its ambitions, and the more it starts to play with the nature of the limitations of the early version of the genre. Oh, and there are some lovely nods to other games. At least I hope they are, anyway, or someone from Looking Glass should be perturbed by this corridor:
I'm just at a loss as to how this has happened. Just Causes have been buggy, sure. But they've never felt at least six months from finished. I cannot fathom how this wasn't lengthily delayed, because it's in such a dismal state. Although that said, even if the bugs and AI were fixed, it would still leave behind a version of Just Cause that barely changes anything you actually do since the third edition, yet has made every aspect of doing it so astronomically more annoying. What went wrong? How did such an established and entertaining series end up in such a quagmire? Gosh I'd love to know.
While I've not completed the game due to some technical issues before release, I've spent a good 20 hours with Shadow Of The Tomb Raider, and they really have been good. This works out as a great balance between the icon-ticking compulsion of a top tier Ubisoft game, with the puzzling chops from a team that have suddenly remembered they were the best in the business. It's huge and detailed and stupid and probably most of all, fun. Problematic fun, without question, in a way that the game loudly invites upon itself, and the gets completely arse about tit. And even without that aspect, the story is absolute balls from top to bottom. But I came for the running and jumping and grabbing and sliding, and I got that in spades. Combined with the quite astonishing detail in the game's towns, there's an awful lot here that's awfully good. In a dumb way.
Still, The Forest remains a huge achievement, and a survival horror game that somehow manages to keep those two elements surprisingly separate and yet let each impose upon the other in very interesting ways. I do wish it had been tidied and bug-fixed by now, but I can't stop wanting to play despite it.
There's lots to it, even if it's not the longest game. So many puzzles, challenges, collectibles and details to discover, along with fun chatter and nifty ideas. Sections seem impossible, then suddenly so possible, super-quickly, and whenever you're stuck somewhere there's always another unexplored direction to head in, or a previous area you may now be equipped to conquer. It's very charming, a lot of fun, and perhaps most importantly, executes its central conceit with deftness.
More than anything, the feeling that dominated throughout was one of magic. Its impossible logic made so much sense, its undimensional structure somehow coherent, so long as you allow yourself to float between the solving and the unsolving. It is that suspended place, between confusion and understanding, reality and impossibility, that makes Gorogoa so bewitching and enticing.