Trine 2

 

   Alongside horror, fantasy is a genre that is likewise very near and dear to me, particularly those in that of a more medieval setting. While I hadn't played the first, Trine 2 seemed like it was going to fit that bill and it has been a while since I've played a good puzzle/platformer game.
   Trine 2 comes to use from the developers Frozenbyte. Having not played the previous Trine, I personally went in not knowing what precisely to expect. After getting some background information on the game's universe and the characters and the idea of he trine itself, some kind of MacGuffin-esque sounding magical item. My first impression of the game initially came from the writing, which I could best describe as hoaky. My taste for the writing in fantasy generally comes from game series such as The Elder Scrolls which, while laden with some silly and humorous moments here and there, generally keeps itself serious in its tone. The three character's I was presented with (Pontius, a knight, Amadeus, a wizard and Zora, a thief) had dialogue that seemed mostly based around exchanging witticisms and jokes. Pontius in particular seems to be the source of the humor, being generally oafish and concerned with food.

   But I'm admittedly hesitant to consider that a negative point in the game. The tone of the game is clearly directed at a younger audience or those who would probably consider themselves young at heart. For those who like a bit more of a serious tone in stories in their games and not particularly find of more childish writing might find this unappealing about the game. I did at first, but it eventually grew on me, and I actually found a bit refreshing as a break from the games who like to go for the tone of gritty realism these days. In a way, it reminded me of being a kid and playing games like Spyro again. The writing is silly, sure, but it was nice to go back to that sort of imaginative, child's fairytale sort of feeling. Admittedly, as I played, the character's did begin to have their own charm and grow on me.
   But, of course, the gameplay is the most important thing, and Trine 2 certainly has a lot of good gameplay to deliver. The game keeps on a sidescrolling trend in the gameplay, revolving around puzzles that require alternative between the three characters in order to progress. It struck me as a really unique way to go about it. Each character has a different strength or ability that plays into the constructions of the puzzles, though some of them can be done with any of the characters and don't require any specific skills.

   The combat itself is equally as fun, which in my experience, is not always the case with puzzle-platformer games, since that's not the main point of the game. You aren't playing it simply to fight your way through hordes of enemies, and so often times dealing with enemies feels more difficult when you have to. The combat of Trine 2 can still have it's difficulties, but in terms of the general flow, it's very solid and nicely paced. The entire game is nicely paced as well.
    What I enjoyed in particular was that the boss battles are treated like puzzles as well. While the standard enemies you can easily hack and slash your way through, or pierce with arrows and crush with magic and so on, the bosses required some thought and often, as I played, had to be defeated through indirect means. Sometimes I even simply had to find a way to escape from them without actually fighting them. In a sense, all boss battles are puzzles, in a matter of speaking. But Trine 2 tried something different having to notice the patterns in the boss's behavior and look for what their weaknesses might be. While I enjoy that as well, seeing something that felt different and worked well was exciting, too.
    My only negative criticisms would be what I had previously said would be the writing. While I don't think it's particularly bad, it's definitely one that might not be suited to every player's tastes. The voice acting, to me, is not incredibly impressive, either. It's far from the worst that I've heard in games, but far from the best. Though, with Trine 2, it seems like the game where the story and the characters are ultimately secondary to the experience and so it's not of the utmost importance.
   Visually, I feel the game is really stunning. Most of it looked nice, but ultimately kept moving. Every now and then, though, I did have to stop and actually just enjoy the look of some of the levels and areas this game had to offer. They all feel very different from one another and it certainly does have a character of its own, with all the different, vibrant colors and unique plants and animals that populate the areas. It's most certainly a gorgeous game to look at.

The music as well, composed by Ari Pulkkinen, was definitely noteworthy. It seemed to really vary at times between orchestral music and more medieval-folk type music with just a really magical quality to it. It really established the feeling of being in a different world really well and set a good tone for the rest of the game itself.
   Trine was a game I was unsure of, though I had heard some praise for the first, despite ultimately never setting out to play it. Getting my chance to play Trine 2 is one I don't regret. Try as I might, I felt like the truly glaring flaws were difficult to come across (with the exception of perhaps the double jump not quite working in my favor when I felt it should have). If anything, it's convinced to play the first Trine as well.

Contrast

 
   This is a review where I backtrack ever so slightly in my gaming experiences. Contrast was one of the first games that I played for the PlayStation 4. The game itself was developed by Compulsion Games and it's a puzzle/platform game in the purest sense of the genre. When I started the game, the first thing that I notably enjoyed about it right away was the setting.
   The game as a 1920s noir style of setting, clearly taking a lot of inspiration from the Jazz Age. The flavor is one that I feel is unique to the game, but had me reminiscent of certain films I'd seen in the past, particularly films by Jean-Pierre Jeanet, like City of Lost Children and Amélie. There is this dark tone to it, but all the while giving off this very surreal feeling of wonderment. The world has a real personality and style that is fairly gorgeous to look at in the game. The soundtrack itself has a nice charm to it, definitely embracing the music of the era that inspired it. There was something very satisfying of walking down a darkly lit street with the neon signs of bars and clubs in the distance and slowly beginning to hear up-tempo jazz music begin to play.

   What's interesting to note about the world of Contrast is that Dawn and Didi are the only people in the game who appear in a tangible way. They're the only characters to appear with 3D models. Most other characters you meet, interestingly enough, are simply shadows cast on various walls in the environment, which is a constant visual motif throughout the game, both in the puzzles and the overall story.
    The story itself, however, is what I found the most lackluster. You take control of Dawn, who appears to be the imaginary friend of a young girl named Didi. As you venture through the game, you begin to learn more about Didi and the life she has with her parents. You go on learning about the troubles between her parents, her dad's attempts to make money constantly failing and getting himself in shady situations and so on. It wasn't the most terribly original story, but in the context of a game like Contrast, the story is not the main focus.
   The platforming and puzzles all come from this motif, where you often have to play with shadow and light in order to solve them. To me, it's one of the more unique and clever approaches to puzzles in a game that I've come across in a very long time. They were challenging, but they were still possible, and it was satisfying when I found myself able to complete one.

   Visually, the game is far from perfect. It would be pretty far down the list for a game I would choose to showcase what the PS4 and other nextgen systems are presently capable of, as it certainly does not do the system justice. As I had said before, this does not mean the game is looks awful by any means. In light of the small team that seemed to work on this game, going by those standards, I would consider the game to be very impressive.
   The game is simple. It's there to tell you a new and compelling story of human drama (though I do find the characters charming and likable) nor does it really make ground-breaking changes to the way video games are played, particularly in the puzzle-platformer genre. But, the game does manage to feel different and give the notion that I'm not playing every other puzzle game I've played for. Contrast does manage to do some very interesting things with the mechanics it introduces in its puzzles.

Daylight

   Horror is a genre that is very near and dear to my heart, as will probably become abundantly clear in upcoming reviews. I've always been particularly fond of the supernatural variety of horror, dealing with ghosts and various other things lurking in the dark hallways of various haunted places. In terms of games, for me, this goes as far back as the first time I played Fatal Frame and stepped into the halls of the Himuro Mansion and years later into All God's Village. Up to that point, my exposure to the survival horror genre was that of Resident Evil.
   Those games are a fine introduction, but games along the lines of Fatal Frame showed me something new; something different. I was powerless in the horror setting that the game had put me into. I wasn't some well-trained soldier or part of a special task force, with enough allies and firepower to get me through whatever horrors awaited me. No, I was simply one person, alone, with a camera and nothing more. Resident Evil is still very special to me as a game, but Fatal Frame gave my the taste of what I really want out of a survival horror game.
   Sadly, this is a taste that has rarely been satisfied in recent years of survival horror games. There definitely have been some quality ones, Dead Space being among one of my favorites in recent years. It did fall into the usual fare of them recently of giving me enough firepower to dissolve any fear I might have. Though, to the game's credit, the atmosphere of loneliness and isolation was excellently conveyed. But it left me still wanting that old sensation I craved. The feeling like I truly had to survive against supernatural and impossible odds.
   Then I discovered Daylight. Daylight is a game developed by Zombie Studios. The moment I started up the game, I had the feeling it was what I was after. It started in the usual way, waking up in an empty asylum and realized I need to find my way out. I found myself armed only with a cell phone, providing me light and a map, and my main tools being glow sticks and flares.
   The game itself exists in sections, usually placing you in various parts of the asylum and the island it rests on. There is a very simple goal for each of the sections. You have to collect what are referred to as remnants, pieces of evidence that fill you in on the past of the asylum and the spirits that haunt it now. You have to obtain six in each section, but there are always more than six and you can still pick up all of them.

 

A good first note to find. Good for morale.

   That being said, there are two types of notes that you can pick up. The remnants, which tend to glow red, are the ones you need to get to advance. They get you closer to the next part of the goal in each area, but also increase the presence of enemies within the area. There are other notes that have more of a blue aura around them. They also shed light on the past of the asylum, but have no affect on enemy presence and they don't count as remnants.
   Once you find them all, the mysterious and disembodied voice guiding you through this whole adventure lets you know that the sigil has appeared in the area and you must retrieve it. Now, this is where the game gets interesting. The game itself is entirely procedural game play. Everything is randomly generated. This was actually both what I liked about it and also what caused my biggest grievance with the game. It definitely added a good element of panic to the game, especially when you are trying to run and find the end goal of the area while evading enemies, sometimes getting constantly turned around and getting lost repeatedly got increasingly annoying and less enjoyable as it went on.

One of the sigil rooms...

...and the sigil door you need to bring it to.

   Many things about this game are simplistic, and intentionally so. Part of me welcomes the change, as it feels like an interesting direction for gaming to go. While it's never given me trouble, some games now can be fairly convoluted with the tools and skills that makes available to you. With Daylight, you really only need to make use of two. The one you will likely use the most are the glow sticks, which give a little more light to the surrounding area than the light from your phone will. As an added bonus, having a glow stick out makes it easier to find remnants, notes and important objects, like lockers and desks and so on. It gives them a more noticeable look that you can see from a good distance, and lets you find some item stashes that you may have missed otherwise.

Using a glow stick will give objects you can search a distinct outline.

   Flares, however, are strictly reserved for enemies. Various ghosts and shadowy figures wander the halls of this asylum and much like the areas in the game, the enemies are randomly generated. They rarely spawn in the same place and can appear any time. As I played, the glow sticks seemed to keep them away from me and give me enough time to run from, but only the flares will actually kill them, or at least cause them to vanish for a while so you can continue on. Most of the time, these flares seemed to be in short supply and in later areas in the game I found myself running more than anything.
   Interestingly enough, you don't encounter these aggressive spirits until after you go through the first few areas of the game. As you begin, the first few scares come in small doses. Mysterious figures darting quickly down a hallway in the distance, drawers suddenly opening, tipped over chairs righting themselves out of nowhere (even ghosts want their haunting grounds to be tidy, I guess), and so on. None of those really impressed me aside from making me startled for a few seconds. It's a cheap horror trick, but it did get me a little on edge, so maybe it's not as bad of a horror tactic as I think.
   However, for me, the atmosphere really began to settle in when I started hearing the sounds. Most of the time it was strange, vaguely human howls echoing down the halls of the asylum, coupled with the map on my phone getting filled with an increasing amount of static and glitches. This is where I thought the game did a really excellent job of creating that tension. The periodic howls, with locations that were hard to discern, were extremely grating and unnerving. Sometimes they'd be far away, then sometimes they'd be closer and then far away again. I never really could tell if it was getting closer, searching for me, or just idling around making these tortured, animal-like wailing sounds.
   A more common scare I found, a tactic more lifted from the F.E.A.R. games, were the sudden changes in scenery. There would be a crackling snap after picking up the remnants, and I find myself in a different room only to encounter a ghost. It doesn't attack me or harm me, but it will do something or say something unnerving or fairly creepy. A distinct one I remember was in a storage warehouse, a ghost approaching me from amongst the rows of shelves with an increasing amount of fire surrounding it. While an effective scene, it's one I've seen before, and is just about directly lifted from F.E.A.R. as I said before.

Alma would be proud, I'm sure.

   I'm not covering much of the story, for the sake of spoilers, but naturally as you play you learn more of the history of this asylum and what exactly happened. So, in the end, the major question is this: does Daylight satisfy the craving I've been wanting from survival horror games? Well, the answer is more of a yes and no.
   Personally, Daylight doesn't reinvent in the wheel, nor does it really do very many interesting things with the wheel we already have. It's not a perfect game, and for the most part, seems to be making use of tactics that other games have previously used, only not as well. In that regard, I would say that it doesn't. Not as well as it could have.
   But I do have respect for the game and for Zombie Studios as well. Because this, to me, shows that there is that realization of what a survival horror game should be like creeping back into the minds of developers. The way I see it, even if you create a great, creepy atmosphere for your game and give it some wonderful, memorable and terrifying enemies, the moment you give me a really powerful weapon and a suit of armor and even some allies, the feeling of terror gets lessened. Games like Dead Space can still be excellently creepy in their own right, but for me, this philosophy that Daylight is attempting to adhere to is what makes for a truly great survival horror game.
   So, the game is not perfect or terribly original, but it gives me a good sense of hope that survival horror developers are thinking along the right lines again. There are a few more horror games in my lineup to play, and with hope, they'll succeed in giving me that flavor I'm so eagerly looking for.