Father forgive me for I have sinned; I didn't post yesterday and I only started writing at 10:49pm today. Blah blah blah, you guys know the spiel by now. My schedule is unpredictable. To make it up for you, I played 2 games today.
First up is Swarm, a game wherein you are the Hivelord, a badass looking albeit very vulnerable fishlike creature who has the ability to transform plankton into soldiers of war. There are (I'm assuming), three different kinds of soldiers you can transform the plankton into, but I only played far enough to unlock two before I got frustrated.
Swarm isn't a bad game, it's just not quite my cup of tea. See, I like games that give you freedom to choose your own strategy. I like a game to challenge both my mind and my reflexes. That's why I'm such a Deus Ex nerd; to me, anything that deviates from that formula is a mistake (I know how closed off that sounds, but it's my mind and it does what it wants).
what bothers me about Swarm isn't so much the fact that it doesn't let you choose your strategy, more so the potential it exhibits, yet forgoes, to do so. Why not let me solely utilize the heavy-hitting ravagers to dispatch enemies quickly at the expense of forgoing the slowing effect of the stingers (yeah, I know, I'm using game-specific jargon. Play it for yourself if you're confused)? Instead, the game tells you straight up that the only way to go is to make an equal number of ravagers and stingers. Indeed, that is, statistically, the best strategy. There's no reason to experiment: the game tells you how to win.
Though, I probably wouldn't have ragequit if the game weren't challenging. I couldn't get passed one level in particular, which ended with a boss fight that looked cool, but to me was laughable because all I was doing was holding my mouse over it while I swam around trying to avoid taking hits. It's a rather unengaging mechanic, to say the least, to simply mouse over your enemies and wait for your minions to take care of them, and it makes for an even less engaging boss fight. Still, though, if you're an adrenaline junkie and you like a game that tests your skill without making you think too hard, there's a lot of fun waiting for you in this one.
Right, then, let's talk Synaesthete. It loses points right off the bat for being friggin impossible to spell without referring back to the gallery, but I digress. After all, it's an IGF finalist. ooooohh, fancy.
The first thing I noticed about Synaesthete was its uncanny similarity to Resonance. My first criticism of the latter was that it got repetitive after only a few minutes of play, but that didn't happen with Synaesthete. I attribute that to its being a lot less cluttered than Resonance. In the latter, you had to balance regular attacks with musical attacks and special attacks all while keeping an eye on the enemies and the other eye on the rhythm bar and the whole thing was such a convoluted mess that you ended up just staying in one place and playing the riffs in time to the best of your ability and ignoring half of the stuff that was going on at any given time. Synaesthete knows that there's a limit to how much the human brain can take in, and has you attack solely by keeping in time with the music(and, occasionally, using a super OP spell move that is quite satisfying and easy to execute).In addition, getting hit by an enemy does more than just make you lose a femtometer of health. You will be stunned and the music will be interrupted. This added punishment gives you an incentive to keep moving and avoid enemies while you play, giving the whole game a hectic yet manageable and very fun feeling.
And that's Synaesthete in a nutshell. The only other thing to mention is that the tutorial is a load of ass on toast. It commits pretty much every tutorial sin there is: unskippable text, context-sensitive controls, slow voice overs (also unskippable), it's just the worst. The rest of the game, though, is a-ok. More than that, even. Not that many games have me deliberately pull myself away from them, even though I want to keep playing, just so I can write up a damn review, but this game is one of the few and proud. Amazing music, fun gameplay, charming graphics (your character looks like one of those incongruous disasters I'd throw together in Blender one night when I'm bored, and I love it), and satisfying feel all combine to deliver a heck of an experience. Give this one a shot. It earns its IGF Finalist title.
That's all I got for now. Until next time, stay focused.
Links
Free Will? Wazzat?: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=25990
Musical Murder: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=383
