Gone Home

"Gone Home" was a really interesting game. It's what one might call a narrative exploration game. I'd never played one of those before, but for those who don't know what that is, it's a game where there are no enemies to fight, merely a space to explore, and a story to uncover.

You are a 21 year old girl, Katie, returning home from a year long trip to Europe. Your family has moved to a new house since you've been away, and when you arrive there for the first time, no one's home, and your sister has left a perplexing note on the door.

As you make your way through the house, you'll find notes and clues that you can piece together to figure out where the hell everybody has gone to. Like I mentioned, there are no enemies to battle in this game, there's no beasties going to jump out to scare you, but the game still manages to keep you on edge at all times. Making your way through this eerily empty house while a thunderstorm rages on outside, you fully expect something to be lurking in the shadows. Every dark room or area I entered, my first priority was to find a light to turn on. Every creak of the house kept me on high alert.

And it's surprising how compelling a game that's based on simply reading bits of paper can be. As you explore the house, you'll start getting a sense of who each character is and hypothesizing on what happened. Those hypothesis will probably be wrong, and you might get them wrong a couple times as this game is quite good on playing with your expectations.

"Gone Home" is a fairly short game, being only a couple hours long, but you'd do well not to rush through it. Entire character storylines can go over your head if you don't piece together all the data that's available. Take your time, explore everything thoroughly, and enjoy the interesting experience that these developers crafted.

Hammerwatch

I'm going to write this while my rage is still fresh.

Hammerwatch is a dungeon crawly hack and slash title that feels kind of old school NES. My opinion of it changed from "It's alright, I guess" to "Fuck you" after I beat the game. I actually wanted to quit playing numerous times and almost did after beating the first boss. At that point, I had played enough to learn what the game was about and realize that it didn't have a lot extra to offer me, but I continued because I had quitter guilt.

It's a rather simple game. You're in a dungeon. There are monsters and puzzles. Why you're there, who you're fighting, who the fuck you are...you won't find answers to these. Story driven this ain't. Kill the monsters and solve the puzzles to make your way through the dungeon. Got it? Got it. Now, I said "puzzles", but what I meant was buttons strewn about that you'll press simply by clearing each room of monsters and loot. Brain busting this also ain't.

The controls are simple. WASD moves you around, the up arrow performs your attack, and the left arrow performs your special ability. These differ depending on which class you choose: Paladin, Ranger, Wizard or Warlock.

I chose Ranger. The ranged main attack was good at picking off beasties from a distance. The general tactic was to kite a group of critters around a corner, and pew pew pew the lot of them as they so kindly line up single file to turn the corner. The main hinderance to progression was finding all the switches around the level. This was made difficult at the beginning because my screen was not cranked up on brightness. It made some of the monsters hard to see, it made switches hard to find, and I was unable to find many of the secret areas because of this. My Hammerwatch life got much better once I turned my brightness all the way up.

And thus I continued to play, though I probably shouldn't have. The entire game is very samey. You're just shooting a bunch of assholes that don't differ that greatly from one another. Murder all the dudes on 4 floors then kill a boss, murder more floors full of beasties and another boss, lather, rinse, repeat for 12 total floors until you get to the dragon.

It's after the dragon is slain that I go from apathetic to angry. The dragon is slain, huzzah! But the castle begins to crumble and I must run. I run to a passage that has opened, and there is no walkway but a series of columns that you must put planks on in order to cross. You need to have found 12 planks throughout the game or you're just fucked at this point. I found about 5 because I had no idea what those motherfuckers were for and I wasn't going to spend anymore time than I had to on each floor to find some bullshit that hadn't been useful to me the entire game. I use my 5 sad little planks and a score screen pops up saying you have slain the dragon but didn't escape the castle, here's your score. Uhh...that's it?

I look on Youtube for someone who finished the game with all the planks. They use all 12 and are then required to run through a few floors to escape as the camera shakes to say, "Hey, shit's crumbling. Nothing's really visually breaking but trust me, it's crumbling." When they reached the exit, that same score screen pops up but with no text except for their score. Great... Way to wrap that up nicely...

In summary and conclusion, suck 14,000 dicks, Hammerwatch. You were boring. I can't believe I wasted as much time as I did on you, and your ending was bad and you should feel bad.