Category: Spel / Game

Three decades ago, in the reign of Victoria, London was stolen by bats. Now it lies a mile below the surface.

Does that make any sense? Anyway, that is how the story of your adventures as an Unterzee captain begins in Sunless Sea. In the game you explore the Unterzee, a vast underground black ocean, in order to achieve your main goal. That goal is chosen at the beginning of the game, but the path to success is it not very straightforward. You need to keep sufficient amount of fuel and supplies to survive the journeys, you need to keep your crew’s terror level down to keep the madness away (the Unterzee is a very scary place filled with monsters and unseen horrors), and you will die anyway. That is not a problem, you will always have a successor that can inherit something from you to make the life somewhat easier.

The world is based on that of a browser adventure game called Fallen London. It is a little bit of steam-punk and and a little bit of Lovecraft, and it is a very fascinating place. The world and the story are truly the main reasons to play this game. The game is nice to look at, and the music is atmospheric and fitting to the theme. The pace is extremely slow, and at times it is very tricky to balance the economy so that there can be any progress at all in the story. There is a lot of text to read and there are many choices to make through the game, and most of these choices do matter in one way or another.

I like Sunless Sea. The clunky user interface that shows the game’s roots as a browser game and the somwhat repetitive gameplay do not stop me from that. The reason I play is to sink deeper into the Unterzee and in a leisurely manner deal with the myriads of subplots on its islands, and to explore the boundaries of the known darkness.

Expand är ännu ett minimalistiskt abstrakt spel där man får klura och trixa lite för att finna lösningen, och jag brukar gilla sådana. Så även denna gång.

I spelet styr man en liten fyrkant genom en cirkelartad labyrint som vrider sig, tänjer sig och reagerar på hur man rör på sig. Svarta väggar är ofarliga att beröra, men man måste se till att man inte kläms fast, medan röda väggar bränns, så man får börja om från den senaste säkra platsen. Mer än så krävs inte för ett spel som jag kan sjunka in i.

Designen av spelet är snygg och ren, även om de tre färgerna och cirkelgeometrin olyckligtvis för tankarna till tredje rikets flagga. Musiken är riktigt bra, och anpassas effektivt efter hur labyrinterna ser ut. Den gör till och med så att det känns som om spelet har en handling där man med spänning ser fram emot upplösningen trots dess helt abstrakta grund. Styrningen är lite trixig att vänja sig vid eftersom den bygger på de fyra riktningarna in, ut, motsols och medsols, så till att börja med styrde jag ofta fel när jag befann mig i den halvan av labyrinten som ligger under cirkelns mitt. En del av banorna är dessutom ganska kniviga att komma igenom, eftersom det ibland krävs att man håller ett högt tempo och inte bara behöver koncentrera sig på tajmingen.

Man känner sig nöjd när man har klarat sig igenom Expand, även om man blir sugen på fler banor. Det roliga är nämligen över lite för fort och banorna lockar inte till omspel.

When I grew up I believe I managed to read every book by Jules Verne that was available at the local library, including mostly forgotten titles such as The Purchase of the North Pole and Dr. Ox’s Experiment, but the favourite one was Around the World in Eighty Days. Hence, I felt great excitement when I had a chance to play the game 80 Days which is based on that book. The game started with a spinning globe with a number of cities marked, but I noticed immediately that it is spinning in the wrong direction. I saw that as a bad sign, that maybe the game lacked attention to details (such as having the sun rising in the west), but apart from that bad mistake I found 80 Days to be extremely enjoyable.

London, 1872
I have entered into the service of a new gentleman.
It would seem he is a gambling man.

The story starts very abrupt. You play as Passepartout, the valet of a certain Phileas Fogg who has just made a wager to travel around the world in 80 days, and you have to pack a bag in a hurry in order to get on the evening train to Paris before you even know how to play the game. Already on this first train it is clear that the 1872 in this game is much more steam-punk than the real version of 1872. The world is rapidly changing thanks to fantastic machines and strong empires are growing everywhere around the world. This makes the journey difficult to plan since you do not really know which routes are more convenient than others. The first time I played the game I actually managed to return to London in the afternoon on the 80th day, so I beat the game immediately. However, there were so many adventures and encounters along the way that I wanted to follow up on, and so many more wonderous places in the world I wanted to explore, so I needed to play the game again, and again, and again.

80 Days is more an interactive story than a game, but since there are so many choices available it does not feel restricted. The writing is excellent. It is condensed, but still it manages to be both detailed and evocative. The characterisations of the multitude of characters encountered are made with finesse, and the adventures along the jorney often takes unexpected turns. In fact, the writing is actually the only really good thing in this game, but it is so good that it defines the game. I really enjoy 80 Days.

What defines a human? This question seems to be a common theme nowadays. It is also the main drive behind Read Only Memories – a point-and-click adventure with a stylish retro design and a focus more on story-telling than on puzzle-solving.

The story is set in Neo-San Francisco just before christmas in 2064. The city is filled with people with various levels of cybernetic augmentation and genetic modification, as well as ROMs (Relationship Organisational Managers) which are performing the more mundane tasks in society. You are a struggling to make living as a journalist and have to take on boring review tasks, in this case for a smart headphone. After writing the review, and a good night’s rest, you find a tiny ROM in your room. He/she/it calls him/her/itself Turing, claims to be the first sapient machine in the world, and is in need of your help. This is the beginning of the adventure. The world is about to change, and you may influence in which direction.

Read Only Memories should be considered an interactive story more than a game, and as such it is great. The retro aesthetics feels natural since it is well known that the future looked better a couple of decades ago. The pixels feel a bit too large on a big screen, making the text difficult to read, but this is only a minor technical remark. I enjoy the story and the characters in it, but for me the best part is actually the world that is seen behind it all. That is where most of the depth in this game lie, and I think it could work quite well as a setting for some old-fashioned analog role-playing.

New Rush City är en storstad där brottsligheten är fullständigt under kontroll. Att det är så beror på att ett löjligt stort antal superhjältar håller till i staden. De är så pass många till antalet att de har svårt att hinna först till eventuella brottsplatser vilket anstränger relationerna mellan superhjältarna. För att komma tillrätta med den besvärliga situationen har kampen för att hinna först utvecklats till regelrätta varvtävlingar i stadsmiljö där man objektivt kan avgöra vem som egentligen är snabbast och därför är den bästa hjälten. Eftersom superhjältar tål det mesta så är hjälpmedel som raketer, dynamit och eldbollar också tillåtna för att även belöna snabbtänkthet vid sidan av fotkvickheten. Bara en kan vara snabbast!

Det finns förstås ingen som helst anledning att bry sig om bakgrundshistorien till SpeedRunners. Det är ett spel där upp till fyra spelare springer, hoppar, svingar sig och klättrar runt ett antal olika banor med blandade hinder och svårigheter. Har man släpat efter så pass långt att man försvinner ur bild har man förlorat och är ute ur racet. Den som är sist kvar har vunnit racet, och den första som vunnit tre race har vunnit tävlingen. Mer komplicerat än så behöver inte ett spel vara.

SpeedRunners är ett mycket underhållande spel som är perfekt som partajspel men som fungerar lika bra att spela online om man inte kan skrapa ihop ett fyrkompisgäng. Det är riktigt skojigt att bara hoppa in och köra några race mot slumpvist valda andra online-spelare när man har några minuter till övers. Det är ett härligt driv i spelets hela design, både grafiskt och musikaliskt, som gör att det inte känns särskilt tröttande även om man ibland tillbringar en hel del tid bland spelets olika menyer. Styrningen känns så gott som helt rätt. Med lite övning lär man sig efter ett tag hur man tar sig runt de olika banorna på tillfredsställande sätt, bara för att senare få se hur bättre spelare gör det på bättre sätt. Som tur är kan man då kasta ut en gyllene krok som rycker ner dem från deras höga hästar. Man har helt enkelt skoj!

The time it takes for “anything” to become a classic depends largely on the the nature of this “anything”. A literary classic is rarely younger than 50 years and in architecture maybe 500 years is typical. The time perspective is a bit different for computer games. Grim Fandango is certainly a classic game, and has been for some time, although it is not yet even twenty years since it was originally released. More recently the game has been remastered, receiving the new title Grim Fandango Remastered in the process, to reach both a new audience and, naturally, the old and nostalgic audience that is firm in their belief that “games were better in the 1990s”.

Grim Fandango is an adventure game set in the Land of the Dead. Manuel (Manny) Calavera is a travel agent at the Department of Death whose work involve selling transportation to recently departed souls so that they can reach the gates of the Land of Eternal Rest. If the newly dead has lived a good life he/she/it can get access to better travel packages, which also would give Manny a better provision. However, for some reason Manny’s clients are always on the bad end of the goodness scale while his colleague Domino Hurley consistently gets the good clients, which leads to Manny stealing a promising client, Mercedes (Meche) Colomar, from Domino. Something strange is going on, though, since even if her heart should be pure enough for the best possible travel package, only the worst one is actually available. This realisation starts the epic adventure which takes place over four years (four acts in the game) and where Manny navigates through crime and corruption among the dead.

The whole game is soaked in a film noir atmosphere, complete with an adapting excellent soundtrack that follows the different settings in which the adventure takes place. The style of the characters, on the other hand, is based on Mexican calaca-figures. This contrast between the atmosphere and the styling makes the visual appearance of the game very distinct. And I like it. I also like the story, which manages to be original while still keeping the traditional elements in the film noir genre. I believe I am not the only one who enjoys this experience. It is clear though that the success of the game builds mainly on its atmosphere, its soundtrack and its story. On the other hand, the games suffers somewhat from the typical problem of all point-and-click style of puzzle based adventure games I have played: it seems to be extremely difficult to construct puzzles that are neither far too simple nor far too unintuitive. I found that I solved many puzzles in the game more or less by mistake, and only afterwards understood the logic behind them. There were also a small number of situations where I had to seek online help to be able to get further, but these situations were all of the type that I had missed an object I could interact with somewhere, or that there were an area I had not realised I could access. At least I am proud to be able to truthfully say that I solved at least the fourth act in the proper manner.

What is most noticable for the player from the remastering process in Grim Fandango Remastered is that the graphical representation of the characters has been modernised as well as the controls. For me, the most important remastering effort is that the whole soundtrack has been fully orchestrated (using Melbourne Symphonic Orchestra). There were some minor glitches in the game which are not expected to be found in a game that has had almost twenty years to mature, but I only encountered one that forced me to restart from an earlier save. That is a minor issue in a game that I truly enjoyed.