Let's Spend $100 on Kickstarter! (Part II)

Earlier this month, I decided that if I wanted to keep calling myself a "fan of indie games", it was finally time to join the cause and throw some money down on Kickstarter. Of the 100 bucks I promised to cough up, half went to the four projects I talked about in my last post. In case you're curious how they're doing, two got funded (Stonehearth and A.N.N.E), one is looking fairly troubled with about $40K and six days left to go (Clandestine: Anomaly) and one was outright cancelled (Ray's the Dead), though it sounds like the campaign was terminated because the devs struck a deal with a publisher.

But enough about the past... I've still got a crisp General Grant in my pocket, which left unoccupied is liable to be spent on exotic skin creams to deal with these terrible crows' feet I'm developing. (I'm kidding, of course—there's really no practical way to use paper money to buy anything on the World Wide Web.)

Anyway, here are the rest of the games I chose to fund...

Review: The Cave (XBLA)

Though it's a clever and enjoyable enough way to spend a few hours, The Cave is unlikely to impress anyone who knows how great Ron Gilbert's games can really be.

In 1987, the debut works of two great artists were released: Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction and Ron Gilbert's Maniac Mansion. Each was a landmark contribution it its respective field, a herald of great changes yet to come. While their contemporaries were concerning themselves with trivialities like stomping adorable Japanese mushrooms and pouring some sugar on things, Ron Gilbert and Guns N' Roses were visionaries alike, breaking new ground whilst addressing raw and edgy concepts like heroin addiction and sentient disembodied alien tentacles.

During the subsequent five years or so, Guns N' Roses would release legendary rock epics like "November Rain" and "Civil War", while Ron Gilbert would create The Secret of Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle, which are essentially the point-n-click adventure game equivalents of legendary rock epics. After that, the members of GnR and Gilbert would do what all great artists seem to do these days: hang around for another two decades occasionally producing works that will never hold a candle to their previous masterpieces, but that I—like all the other nostalgia addicts out there—buy anyways.

Gilbert's newest work, The Cave, is a downloadable title available on PC, OS X, the PS3 Network and Xbox LIVE Marketplace. A puzzle adventure game vaguely reminiscent of his original Maniac Mansion, The Cave lets you choose three out of seven playable characters with whom to explore a surreal, hostile environment, solving puzzles with found items while unlocking the secrets of a mysterious world. (For some reason there's also a platforming component, presumably to meet some sort of genre diversity quota imposed by our liberal activist government.) The cast is a predictably diverse set of zany characters, such as a a time-traveling museum worker and a pair of possessed twin children. Each has their own special ability that alters the way you solve puzzles in "The Cave" (such as the ability to bypass locked doors or to hold one's breath), and each has a dark motivation for pursuing the wealth and power hidden in its depths.

Welcome to "The Cave".

Despite having been underwhelmed by Gilbert's recent Deathspank games, I approached The Cave with uncharacteristic amount of optimism, in part because it was a collaboration with one of my favorite studios, Tim Schafer's Double Fine Productions. Unfortunately, I've found in my life that such incidents of optimism rarely go unpunished, and this time was no exception. Even though Gilbert's Maniac Mansion pioneered the multi-character puzzle adventure, the past 25 years have seen amazing innovations on the original concept (see the classic SNES game The Lost Vikings, or last year's PC title Resonance), and The Cave feels a bit behind the times by comparison. Most of the features that set it apart from similar games feel like concessions instead of improvements, such as the fact that your characters can only carry one item at a time, or that the platforming elements are as tedious as they are unnecessary.

I'm certainly not asking Gilbert to retread old ground, but The Cave could go much further in building on the essence of what made games like Monkey Island great. For me, the magic of these games was that moment when the moving parts of a puzzle clicked into place, when your brain twisted in just the right way and you could suddenly see the perverse logic that governed these fantastical, comical worlds. There's times when The Cave dabbles in these mind-bending realms—for instance, when a guard slips because you placed a "wet floor" sign in front of him—but for the most part, the puzzles are of the fairly straightforward "lock-and-key" variety. Even the multi-character component is only delivered by half-measures, as most areas are either generic enough to be traversed nearly identically regardless of your team, or they're so particular to a single character that the other two are irrelevant.

Fun fact: advertising revenues from grog companies have funded nearly all of Ron Gilbert's games.

In the end, though, I found the biggest barrier to enjoying The Cave wasn't the mediocre gameplay, but rather the setting itself. I've always had a limited affection for places like Alice's Wonderland, fantasy settings where literally anything can happen... because if anything can happen, then essentially nothing can happen. In such lands of sheer absurdity, nothing is of consequence, nothing is surprising, and this utter lack of terra firma means there's no foundation upon which to build a compelling narrative. In other words, Gilbert's particular brand of charm shines much better in a place where the rules are ludicrous—like the Edison family mansion or Melee Island—than in a place with no rules at all.

What I've Been Playing

Summer is one of the toughest times in the childhood of a video gamer. Even back when I was in elementary school, I remember lamenting the cutting irony of the fact that summer vacation arrived (a) well after I had thoroughly exhausted all interest in whatever game I'd gotten for Christmas, (b) well before my autumn birthday (at which time I would inevitably recieve gifts of clothes and school supplies anyway), and (c) at a time of year when hardly any new games were released. In the end, I suppose all these barriers to gaming were likely of little real consequence; even if I'd had a stack of unplayed cartridges at my disposal, my fascist parental overlords probably still would have forced me to play outside.

As an adult, I find summers to be much more palatable. Sure, I don't get two months of contiguous vacation, but instead I have disposable income, free will, and air conditioning. And even though there aren't many triple-A game releases this time of year, there's a nearly endless supply of cheap downloadable fun to be consumed via Steam's Summer Sale (which just ended) and Xbox LIVE's "Summer of Arcade". Here's what I've been playing...

Diablo III (PC / Mac)

Released this May following a 12-year hiatus in the franchise, Diablo III has been the preeminent time-sink for something like 10 million people this summer. Despite its success on paper, the game itself has traveled kind of a bumpy road, one rife with server issues, bizarre gameplay limits, and game hacks and exploits. In a typical video game, these issues would be less of a problem; however, Diablo III incorporates a "Real Money Auction House", which (for those of you who don't know) is a virtual marketplace that allows players to buy and sell in-game equipment and commodities using real-world currency. Apparently, the lesson to learn here is that if you create a virtual economy that is already incredibly unstable because of its implicitly artificial nature, piling a bunch of additional problems on top of it yields results that are somewhat of a total clusterfuck.

Is there someone out there willing to drop $200 on a "Focused Beating"? Only time will tell.

Being one of those crazy people who doesn't play games so I can farm loot to sell on the Internet, I tended to approach Diablo III as... well, a "game". While Diablo III is undoubtedly highly-tuned, expertly polished, and addictive as hell, even after my first 30 hours of gameplay I'm still not sure if it's actually "fun". It's entirely possible Blizzard has simply figured out an algorithm for directly triggering the pleasure centers in my brain via randomized loot drops.

Resonance (PC)

Eventually I took a break from Diablo III and returned to my traditional summer practice of snapping up old titles and indie games in bulk off of Steam. One of my first purchases was Resonance, an indie point-n-click adventure game in the old-school pixel art style.

Resonance: why wrestle with Diablo III server issues when instead you could be riding the subway as a particle physicist?

Compared to staring at Battle.net error codes, I much preferred Resonance as a way to pass the time. Although the puzzles aren't terribly mind-blowing and the voice acting has the kind of stilted, canned quality that is hard to avoid in adventure games, Resonance is still well-executed in many ways. Not only does it build on the traditional adventure-game formula with a few interesting gameplay innovations, but its plot and character development were more than enough to make Resonance worth a few hours of my time.

Penny Arcade's On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 3 (PC)

I really enjoy the webcomic/blog/Internet institution Penny Arcade. I think one of the reasons I like Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik's commentary so much is that it spans the full dynamic range of the human experience from the existential to the profane, in much the same effortless manner of comedians like Jon Stewart or Louis C.K.

It's because I enjoy the eccentricities of the Penny Arcade world view so thoroughly that I've continued to play their "Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness" series, despite the fact each installment thus far has been decidedly middling. Granted, this newest offering is a departure from the two previous Hothead-produced titles, rendered instead in the style of a 16-bit console RPG by the qualified retro enthusiasts at Zeboyd Games. However, the end result is still a mediocre role-playing game that could (and should) be ignored by anyone who isn't a Penny Arcade fan.

Assassin's Creed: Revelations (Xbox 360)

As I've mentioned before, seeing the Assassin's Creed III gameplay trailer at PAX earlier this year really got me getting back on the AC bandwagon. After playing Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, I decided to ride the sequel train right on through Assassin's Creed: Revelations, the third part of the "Ezio Trilogy". This (hopefully) final chapter follows Ezio's exploits in 16th-century Constantinople, where despite being well into his fifties, he somehow manages to keep free solo climbing, base jumping, and serial murdering as though he was still a teenage assassin.

Apparently three decades of jumping off rooftops and stabbing dudes in the face really ages a guy.

Unless you are deeply fascinated by the lore of the Assassin's Creed universe, AC: Revelations is a sequel that could easily be skipped. While it is certainly as expertly crafted as other entries in the series, its more-of-the-same gameplay and its insistence on extending the already overdrawn Ezio plot line offers more exploitation than revelation.

Double Fine Happy Action Theater (Xbox LIVE Arcade)

Recently my kids and I had a playdate with a friend of mine and his two children. After a three-hour maelstrom of toys, tears, and bathroom mishaps, we were starting to run out of hope, as well as beer. Enter Double Fine Happy Action Theater, an Xbox LIVE downloadable arcade game for the Kinect that also seemed to be a safe and legal toddler narcotic. Although it's little more than a tech demo of 20 or so minigames, Happy Action Theater includes some of the most innovative uses of the Kinect sensor I've seen thus far, and each is delivered with trademark Double Fine flair. If you have young children I highly recommend it... at $10, it's one of the cheapest and most effortless ways you'll find for wearing out your offspring.

Terraria (PC)

The first time anyone hears about Terraria, it's always the same description: "It's 2-D Minecraft." To be fair, it's an accurate description; Terraria not only borrows Minecraft's core gameplay concepts (i.e. "mining" and "crafting"), it also borrows almost everything else. However, it's a testament to how genuinely well designed and innovative Terraria is that it can plagiarize so heavily while ultimately delivering an experience that is quite different from that of Minecraft. While life in Minecraft is an exercise in solitary exploration that occasionally borders on survival horror, Terraria is like Legend of Zelda would be if after conquering a dungeon you could lug it up to the surface and use pieces of it to build yourself a kick-ass fortress.

Now if only I would put this much effort into my real house.

My only gripe about Terraria is that the difficulty curve is steep. Even with heavy coaching from online walkthroughs and FAQs, after 20 hours I still couldn't beat the first boss. In the end, I decided just to be happy with the fact that I had built another sweet residence to my long list of virtual properties.

Well, that pretty much wraps up July's gaming exploits. God and Amazon Prime willing, this time next month I should be writing about one of my most-anticipated games of 2012: Darksiders II.

Review: Stacking

Stacking is the latest adventure from the developers at Double Fine, makers of Psychonauts and Brütal Legend. Available as a XBLA and PSN downloadable title, Stacking is a puzzle adventure set in a quirky Industrial-Age world inhabited entirely by Russian nesting dolls. As Charlie Blackmore—a child laborer and apparently the smallest denizen of this bizarre universe—the player solves puzzles by possessing larger dolls and using their abilities. In the interest of dispensing with any obvious off-color jokes as quickly as possible, let me add that this is a great game concept for anyone who enjoys being inside several people at once.