janosbiro

It's a great game for children, where you have to draw your own characters and tools, and save a friend corrupted by the inkevil. It's nice and simple, with some exploration, easy puzzles and some challenging bosses.

Most people will not get it at first. It's confusing and you may realize it is not really a game, but a social experiment. Look for bottles in outer space, they are like stars. When you open then, you can read a real message from someone, and it can be an amazing experience. You can leave messages for people, and you can also get messages back, or you can condemn them. It has great music.

The game has some technical problems (with screen resolution), and it's a RPG Maker game, which means simple graphics and limited gameplay. But it uses RPG Maker's more complex features to make a non-RPG game. Instead it is a puzzle game with casual challenge, evolving story and great voice acting. It is very short, can be finished in 2 hours or less. But it is very enjoyable, and I would like to see more games like this. The main theme is fighting death while dealing with an unjust life.

Portal is a contemporary version of Chaplin’s Modern Times. The main character is a woman stuck in the machine, but the contemporary machine is no longer constraining the individual through repetitive body movements in order to produce material goods. The contemporary machine plays with our emotions in order to create science. What kind of science? It is probably neuroscience. GLaDOS is not really testing a gun that makes portals. It is testing Chell’s emotional reactions. GLaDOS is fascinated by the human mind the same fashion a taxidermist is fascinated with animals. Portal 2 even explains this obsession. A lot more could be said, but not without spoilers, so play this game if you haven’t already.

Serena is a game about love, hate, obsession and the thin line between those. This game deals with this question with a simple mechanic: changing object descriptions while the character’s reaction changes by the act of examining and remembering. All you do in the game is to examine objects. There are no puzzles, except for a very simple one. The changes in the descriptions represent the passage through different psychological levels. Nothing around you really changes, but the comfortable cabin turns into an oppressive and scary limbo, because your mind changes. That’s the point the game is trying to convey. Games are the perfect platform to create this dramatic effect. In a movie, it is possible to show exactly the same scene and make it look completely different by using a different soundtrack, for example. But in a game you can do it much better, because the player feel attached to the character’s reactions, taking them as their own. Serena also plays with the idea of slowly sliding into insanity. Games are also very good at this, because players can experience this transition on their own pace.

Dear Esther is a living metaphor. A man lost within his own world, represented as an abandoned island. As he walks, he studies the traces of his own past, in search for hope. All you do in this game is walking and listening to the narrator. But if you let yourself be taken by the narrative, the experience can be amazing. This game is really special to me, because it helped me think about my own situation of loss and confusion. Thank you for this wonderful game.

This game makes me feel like I was inside the dreams of a weird engineer/architect. It is great how it can give you so much with so bare materials. You walk around huge constructions, trying to make sense of it. And then you realize you are the life inside these dead empty endless halls. This game is about second changes. You move from a lifeless place to a garden with flowing life. It is really about coming back to life, so it is another game that helped me recover. It is amazing how this message is there without the need of any word. It is a memorable experience.

The Swapper is a game about philosophy of mind, staring Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers discussion over the question of whether consciousness can exist independently of the brain. This discussion is presented piece by piece, and very slowly. You solve the game’s puzzles by swapping your mind to other vessels, your clones. It makes you ask: What is a mind? Am I my mind? How am I, if I’m not sure if this is my original mind or someone else’s mind? It is a delightful experience from the beginning to the end. The fact that it is made out of clay, like The Neverhood and The Dream Machine, is a very nice touch too. This is an all-time favorite.

Primordia is a cyberpunk game about faith. Much like in the movie Tron, the main character is a robot with a mission he forgot. A mission given by his own creator, Man. But it is still his choice to fulfill this mission or not. He can be a faithful warrior that defeats the evil progressive mind and unites the robots, or he can fail. In the game, the robots live under a totalitarian secularist regime, where the belief that the machines were created by a mysterious being called Man is forbidden. His faith in Man keeps the protagonist alive. It is a very interesting twist for the cyberpunk genre.

Shelter is a game about the hardships of motherhood, and so the game truly speaks a universal language. You are a mother badger taking care of your cubs, feeding them and defending them from predators. It makes you care so much about your little cubs that you can even think they have very distinguished personalities. Some players have given names to them, and reported interesting emotional responses when one of them died. This game can communicate with a primitive instinct in all of us: the love for the little, the innocent and the frail. Throughout the game you learn to fear and hate eagles as they were monstrously evil. But in the end, you identify with them. They are in the exactly same position you were: trying to feed their loved ones. The threatening predator becomes a loving mother. And so the games shows how every mother is also a fearsome predator, ready to kill for the most pure and sacred love of all. This alone made me cry.

The Cat Lady is a bittersweet story. It starts with suicide, anger, horror, pain, violence and despair. But it is all worth. You begin with no empathy for this sad bitter woman with strange habits. She looks like a coward who tried to kill herself, a person with no value. But then, just like it happens with cat people, you began to understand her, to identify with her, and by the end, you even love her. This love is so pure that she becomes a beautiful person; even so she is still the same person. It is a game about loving strange people, which is the same as saying that it is a game about loving people, period.

To the Moon is a very different kind of game made with RPG Maker. The main objective of the game is to create an emotional effect, and it is very successful in doing that. It is about finding your way to reconnect with a lost love, even when everything is broken. It is about healing by dealing with memories from the past, and about the sacrifices you do in the hope of staying together forever. It is about something that you said or heard that would determine your whole life from that point on. When you look at the sky and you see meaning in what could be just a set of lights, and you find someone that shares this meaning. It is about the lighthouses we build to find our way home, back to our first love. It is one of the most beautiful love stories I ever heard. I cry just talking about it.

Unlike other games in the series, Max Payne 3 attempts to address social issues instead of the main character’s personal issues, such as police violence, the gap between the rich and the poor and drug trafficking in Brasil. Here, the rich try to live the American life style, while the poor are slaughtered. Payne witnesses a favela raid and a prison riot, in scenes reminiscent of some Brazilian movies like City of God, Carandiru and Elite Squad. Even after facing a satanic gang, Max Payne is still surprised by the violence of the Brazilian police. In this game, the police are the real enemy, not gangsters. The police are involved in the most heinous crimes, with the support of a corrupt politician. This becomes clear when the gang boss becomes the victim, and Max Payne allows him to kill the doctor who was involved in organ trafficking. The game features a São Paulo dominated by organized and disorganized crime. A Brasil that worships football, where poor people are killed by the police, while the rich are vying with each other through drug watered parties. Is this so far from reality? There are two interesting characters: the American ex-cop who does volunteer work in Brazil, and the sex tourist. Both sides of the relationship between Brazilians and Americans. But in the end, Payne is the one who breaks the leg of the corrupt politician. Not unlike any american action movie, after all.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]