Impression: Attractio

I feel like writing an article about how stupid this subtitle is.

Hey, remember how good ‘Portal’ was and how you always wanted a game that’s inferior to it in any extent? Me neither. Nine years later ‘Attractio: The Reality Show Begins”, a game with a really silly name, provides you with just that. While clearly aimed at the Portal fan base, it offers less of anything that made Portal so dear to me. Continue reading “Impression: Attractio”

Impression: Antichamber

Antichamber: a black and white minimalism corridor
Look everybody, it’s art!

Antichamber is one of those games you chose to show your ignorant non-gamer friends as proof that video-games are not just cynically marketed products full of violence and questionable ethics targeted at white, male teenagers without a soul, but thoughtful art.

It’s an indie puzzle game. It has a minimalist art style which is nice, but maybe has a bit too much of a ‘Look at me, I am art!’-vibe going. I played for a while and the game made me feel clever, which I enjoyed while it lasted. Then I got stuck, felt less clever and remembered that I would much rather like to kill someone and loot their corpse, because that’s what this hobby is all about. I am talking about video games.

Antichamber is the game you give to your kid to share your hobby in a save and positive way. It also keeps your offspring distracted for some hours while you tread your inner 15-year-old with the immature, violent and sexist content he or she craves.

Info: Antichamber was developed by Alexander Bruce and released in 2013. Buy it on Steam to make others believe that video games are evolving.

Impression: The 11th Hour

The 11th Hour: a man between tired and facepalm
Again?

The 11th Hour was actually the first game on my list, but I didn’t want to start off with a 20+ year old fmv game, which is also a sequel. You can read how well that turned out. Playing this directly after the 7th Guest I was relieved to see that the graphics had much improved by 1995. The pre-rendered sequences were much smoother, and more importantly, much faster. The videos like the charming 90s-tv-schlock looking intro movie were also less painful to watch. The other thing that seems to have changed is that the difficulty of the puzzles has been noticeably increased. It all takes place in the same old mansion, and Old Man Stauf seems to have become even more MEAN! over the years. He mocks me at every turn (because I’m shit at his puzzles).

If you’re into puzzle games, I think the game would still be worth playing today. I’m not into puzzle games, and I’m sick of being mocked.

Impression: The 7th Guest

The 7th Guest: A view of a former guest and now ghost
Hey Guest, try not to fall!

The Horror – of early 90s FMV-game graphics! The 7th Guest stems from a time when the vast memory of CD-ROMs needed to be filled, and Full Motion Video did the job quite well. It did such a good job, that the videos had to be compressed a lot to actually fit on the medium. 24 years later they are rather hard on the eye. I remember reading in magazines (bundles of paper with words printed on them) about the game back in the day (I am old), but I never actually played it.
The 7th guest is a adventure/puzzle game in the horror genre. You are the seventh guest in a mansion haunted by the ghost of a mad man, who killed the six guests before you and forces you to do puzzles. You walk from room to room via slow pre-rendered videos, to then solve static puzzles, which open rooms with more puzzles. There are a lot of amateurish and very compressed looking ghost entering and exiting the screens.
Once you get used to the ugly graphics and blasting general midi soundtrack, there seems to be a decent puzzle game hidden beneath, but I won’t find out for certain, because I don’t care much for puzzle games or haunted mansions. Luckily enough I played far enough to stumble upon this beautiful poem from the game:

Old man Stauf built a house
and filled it with his toys.
Six guests were invited one night,
their screams the only noise.
Blood in the library,
blood right up the hall,
dripping down the attic stairs,
‘Hey Guests, try not to fall!’.
Nobody came out that night.
Not one was ever seen.
But old man Stauf is waiting there…
Crazy! Sick! and MEAN!

When you quit the game a voice screeches ‘Come baaaack!’. I won’t.