GOTW: Alan Wake

Throughout the strange, unbalanced thread of Alan Wake's narrative, the writer, who gives the game its name, is mockingly referred to as, among others, Stephan King, Raymond Chandler and, most strangely, James Joyce. Personally I felt more like Garth Marenghi, but it's Stephan King, and his supernatural thrillers, whose presence is most heavily felt throughout. Alan Wake exists in that same liminal place inhabited by many of King's novels - where trashy fiction can be both utter nonsense and kind of important; kind of profound - well, at the very least genuinely enjoyable. Alan Wake gets away with a great deal because it seems to know this; it's trashy nature slips into the game as a whole, leaving memories behind which skitter between pure joy, genuine scares, ham-fisted acting, awful smiles and a few large holes in which moments of the game just disappeared into shear ordinariness. But, as with Deadly Premonition -  the cracked-out Japanese brother to the more straight-faced Wake - the game's faults and instability help it to become endearing. It's a bit messy, but when it hits the mark it does so incredibly well and the messiness only helps to underline the moments of quality.  

Gaming Report: June

A screenshot from Proteus, showing at Rezzed

Hello, hello! So, just a few updates on a couple of reviews I've written recently and a coming plug for a few further articles. Unfortunately I've recently fallen victim to a very slow case of the internet so I haven't managed to play that many new games - so if the head of BT is reading this: Sort it out! I've been trying to download Resonance for bloody ages now. Ok, sorry I'll be quiet....

Review: Dark Scavenger

Here's a review of the game Dark Scavenger which was originally published on Critical Gamer earlier this month. Dark Scavenger is made and released by Psydra Games via their website: http://www.darkscavenger.com/ Check it out. 

Remember when games required the player to use their imagination? When places, characters and whole narrative worlds could be grown from paragraphs of white text on a monitor? When rudimentary representations were merely springboards for the player's desire to experience new imaginative universes? Gamers of a certain age will still be able to fully recall, and may even still play, primitive graphical and text based adventure games but for many others (this reviewer included) such experiences remain vague childhood memories. Psydra Game's adveture-RPG Dark Scavengers feels like a much needed exercise in hypnotic regression; an excavation of all those obscure, childhood adventures of the imagination which many of us lost amidst years of graphical realism and beautifully rendered interactive worlds.