Recent reviews by Cheeseness

The Way is a "cinematic platformer" that tells the story of a scientist trying to unlock the secrets of an alien planet in order to revive his deceased wife.

From the outset, the game ensures that the player is invested and complicit in the acts that put the protagonist "Major Tom" along his path through the game, meaning both that players' are already beyond the point of no return by the time they realise the importance of their actions, and that those pivotal movements are performed by the player rather than seen in a cutscene.

Gameplay wise, The Way draws upon a range of cinematic platformers for its moment-to-moment platforming, coming across as something of a blend between Flashback and Impossible Mission - pixel precise movement rather than tile based movement, and with a camera view that typically shows enough surroundings to allow players to think strategically about how to approach obstacles and enemies.

For the most part, combat revolves around Abuse style controls with a pistol that can fire several shots before needing to recharge. Later unlockable abilities include a shield that can reflect enemy projectiles. Many enemies within the game can not be defeated through normal combat mechanics, however, which brings us to puzzles.

The Way is far more puzzle heavy than I had anticipated, and it was a hugely welcome surprise. Puzzles range from following simple clues to logic puzzles, from sliding blocks to "Lights Out[en.wikipedia.org]" puzzles, from navigation challenges to observational puzzles. Most puzzles have some degree of repetition, often occurring in triplets or pairs with a third example in a completed state, but those repetitions always offer some variation on the puzzles mechanics to provide additional challenge.

Puzzle clues and solutions are typically communicated through nearby background details, though "nearby" may mean a couple of rooms away. I generally appreciate this as a little traversal time usually gives more time for thinking about puzzles, and more opportunities for the game's plot points and emotional beats to sink in.

The Way takes players on a journey that is about devotion, inspiration, friendship, life, death and value, though most of this doesn't come into focus until the end of the game and even then, it's up to players to infer. On the surface, the protagonist explores alien ruins and activates ancient technology in search of the game's macguffin - the ability to spend more of his life with his wife.

The game does a fantastic job of portraying the passage of time, skipping through extended periods of research and archaeology while also showing the impact of the protagonist's presence on the world around him as the months and years pass. In the background, a dog-like companion named Tincan is raised from a pup, an alien tribe flourishes, and life is brought to a small patch of desert as Major Tom draws ever closer to his quest's conclusion.

Backstory, exposed through collectable memories, explores the protagonist's history before the start of the game and the death of his wife. With these primarily sitting along the critical path, they feel like they serve as an interesting pacing device, giving more context to the character's history as time progresses forward.

The Way draws upon a lot of games that resonate with me personally, citing inspiration from titles such as Another World, Flashback and The Dig. While all of these inspirations shine through in the game's mechanics, presentation and story (The Way is very much not ashamed to wear its homages on its sleeve), these influences combine with Puzzling Dream's own sensibilities and outlooks to create something that carves out its own territory. The Way very much feels like a title that might have stood alongside the games it draws upon in the halls of memorable classics had it been one of their contemporaries.

I think a lot of people will attribute this to the power of nostalgia and say that the industry has moved on, and while on some levels I can accept that, I think it's foolish to not also acknowledge that getting noticed in 2016, a market where 4,200 games released on Steam alone, is a very different proposition to what it was in the early 90s, when you could expect to see around half that a year[www.mobygames.com] across all platforms. Generally speaking, I think this is a good thing (the more people making stuff, the better), but I also think that as a community and a consumer culture, we're not great at acknowledging that different people have different tastes and instead spend more effort on trying to identify good from bad while failing to admit that it's OK for everybody to have different tastes and for all creative works to have flaws (even this lovely article).

Maybe The Way aligns with your tastes, maybe it doesn't. Either way, it touched and moved me in ways that I wasn't expecting, and I absolutely love it to pieces ^_^

For those who've played the game and are keen to reflect on it more, I discussed the game, its inspirations, gameplay, themes and outcomes with HexDSL last year. A recording of that can be found here.


This was originally written as part of a retrospective[cheesetalks.net] on games I finished in 2016.

It all started with Descent, which was this FPS/space sim hybrid thing that would create and solidify an entire genre of games known as 6DOF shooters. In addition to all the other cool stuff it does, by allowing players to move through "six degrees of freedom" and by providing interesting navigational challenges, Descent lets players form a kind of relationship with its spaces that isn't found in other styles of games.

Fast forward 20 years, and while the original Descent and its sequel continue to live on through projects derived from engine source releases (like DXX-Rebirth, D2X-XL), the number of 6DOF Descent-likes made since has been fairly small until a recent resurgence through titles like NeonXSZ, GeoCore and the in-development Descent: Underground (more on that and Overload another time), but it wasn't until I played Sublevel Zero that I found something that really scratched the itch I'd had since playing as the Material Defender all those years ago.

It's easy to infer from that that Sublevel Zero is nothing more than a Descent clone. It's clearly drawing a lot of inspiration from Descent, with its robotic enemies, maze-like level structures and reactor fights, but Sublevel Zero deviates enough that I was surprised to enjoy it as much as I have.

Set in a crumbling universe populated by the fragmented remnants of humanity, Sublevel Zero puts players in the role of a scout for an unnamed clan, who stumbles across a lost, ancient facility guarded by automated defences, which seemingly holds both clues to the flux storms that ravage the universe and "pre-Event" technology that might benefit your clan. Upon approach, you discover that the facility is creating flux events as it rips itself and your ship from the universe. Your only hope rests in scavenging components of a larger flux drive with which to make the jump home.

Sublevel Zero's levels are procedurally generated from a large set of pre-made rooms that are joined together by dynamic corridors. I had long assumed that the enjoyment of navigating and learning a space that I enjoyed so much from Descent came from conscious level design sensibilities, and although Sublevel Zero's individual generated levels aren't as memorable as Descent's crafted ones, the sense of exploration and mastering a layout is still very much present.

Each level, or "sublevel" introduces new visual styles and room layouts, creating progressively more sprawling environments to explore. More diverse and difficult robot enemies are introduced over time, and while these may not be as memorable as Descent's (perhaps because there are far more of them), they are distinct and fill specific roles. A sublevel ends when its reactor is destroyed, leaving a flux drive component to be collected before you make your jump to the next.

There are six sublevels in total, starting at zero and working up to 5. Sublevel Zero offers one save slot, which is cleared whenever the player dies or a new game is started, giving it the kind of permadeath that rogue-likes are known for. When resources are low, suddenly the risk vs reward proposition of clearing out an ambush room becomes vastly different than it would have been in a game like Descent, where the consequence of a death is restoring a save.

Another decidedly non-Descent-ish mechanic that Sublevel Zero sports is its crafting system. Collectable nanites serve as a currency that can be spent on combining existing weapons, missiles, engines and hulls into new, more powerful weapons according to a range of blueprints. The equipment drop rate and blueprint requirements are tuned in a way that often forces players to make do with what they have rather than ignore crafting opportunities and hold out for what they'd prefer, prompting exploration and discovery of gameplay outside players' comfort zones.

Aesthetically, SubLevel Zero pushes a high fidelity/low detail feel, with sharp pixel art textures mapped onto low poly models rendered at high resolution with bloom and dynamic lighting. Conscious palette design sets interesting tones for each of the game's rooms and environments, while well-placed lighting and detailing helps spaces feel identifiable and navigable. In sublevels 1 and 2, lava cavern and crystal cavern environments are introduced, which provide a more organic counterpoint to the majority of the game's rooms, which feel engineered from metal sheeting.

Each reactor provides an increasingly difficult challenge. Sublevel 1 introduces laser beams that chaotically scorch the room as the reactor spins wildly. Sublevel 2's reactor constantly fires projectiles and is positioned in a way that requires players to expose themselves in order to deal damage to it. Sublevel 3's reactor is in a cavern with columns of falling lava that trigger splash damage when shot, and spawns turrets in the room's nooks and crannies when the reactor is attacked. The difficulty of each reactor encounter feels like it works along different axes to the advantages that higher tier weapons provide, creating a level of challenge and intensity that requires players to think strategically and have a plan of attack when engaging a reactor.

Most of the enemy robot have distinct silhouettes, though some that feel like upgraded variants use similar models and can be identified through their different colour and behaviour. For example, the base Grunt is coloured blue and fires large medium speed projectiles, while the purple Seeker Grunt fires slower moving projectiles that doggedly home in on the player. Robots can also usually be identified by their alert sounds as their AI becomes aware of the player. Robots such as the Sniper or Lava Miner have distinctive charging sounds before their attacks.

There's something almost melodic about the robot sounds and their movement behaviour that gives them a degree of charm and personality. Drones will chirp, then approach quickly while firing, approaching at the same speed as their projectiles before slowing down to track from a close distance. Missile Defenders will bellow before slowly turning their hulking frames to track your agile ship's movements in a way that feels inexorable. The Lava Miners will play an extended note as they charge their drills and fly toward you at breakneck speed, bounding into and off walls as you dodge past, then singing before doing it again.

All of the game's sound effects feel synthetic and processed, giving a constructed, mechanical vibe that is echoed by the visual style of the non-cavern environments. While the effects are well presented and generally do a good job of communicating what they need to, the star of Sublevel Zero's soundscape is its soundtrack. Primarily dominated by retro feeling chiptune-esque sounds, real-world style instruments like percussion, horns, strings, pianos, flutes and electric guitar can be heard in most of the arrangements, giving extra dimension and weight to the tracks that I think would be hard to achieve without them. Will Bedford's work does an amazing job of supporting the quietness of lonely exploration, the danger and intensity of big battles, the ambivalence of being lost but having purpose, and the epicness of being an awesome space pilot facing down the odds with confidence.

I had my first successful Sublevel Zero run on my birthday, and managed to capture it on stream[www.smashcast.tv] (including unabashedly cheesing the final reactor). I've since had two successful runs, though none after the Sublevel Zero Redux update, which restructures some of the campaign, adds more enemies, classes and several other features that give the game additional polish. Between Steam and non-Steam versions, I'm well over 100 hours deep now, and expecct to continue coming back to Sublevel Zero for years to come.

This was originally written as part of a retrospective[cheesetalks.net] on games I finished in 2016

I picked up Stealth Bastard Deluxe as part of the Humble Bundle with Android 6 in 2013. Out of the games included, it was the one that interested me the most, and over a period of a month, I played my way through the first four sectors. In my memory, I'd hit some difficult puzzles in Sector 5 that were beyond my skills and ended up moving onto other things.

It wasn't until the end of October 2016 that I found time to return to it and work through the rest of the game, but when I did, I was quickly able to push through the barriers I'd come up against (perhaps my initial hurdles were just fatigue and all I needed was a break) and complete Sector 7 within a few days.

Stealth Bastard Deluxe advertises itself as a fast paced stealth game. Narratively, you play as a cloned test subject guided through a series of deadly tests by a kind-of narrator that speaks to you through signs and graffiti about upcoming puzzles, the questionable nature of the corporation that is conducting the testing, and your eventual fate.

Gameplay takes the form of a precision platformer where robotic sentries and sensors must be avoided/used to solve movement challenges, logic puzzles and timing puzzles. The difficulty curve is fairly smooth, and the game constantly introduces new challenges/mechanics/puzzle structures that escalate it to a point that I'd probably call brutally difficult.

Equipment such as the Camo Suit which renders the player invisible for a short period or the Anti-Light device, which creates a field of full shadow around it are unlocked by re-playing levels. In effect this provides a reward for finishing each level with every piece of equipment, but without that being a hard requirement if one item is proving more difficult to finish with than others.

Stealth Bastard Deluxe's 80 levels contain plenty of collectables, which apparently can unlock further content. I've not explored that or the in-game level editor, but between those two features (not to mention the equipment that I've only experimented with in the first sector), I feel like there's still a lot of game left for me beyond the dozen or so hours I've put into Stealth Bastard Deluxe.

It's been a fun ride so far, and I'm sure I'll be back for more if the sequel ever lands on Linux.


This was originally written as part of a retrospective[cheesetalks.net] on games I finished in 2016.

Like Gravity Ghost, Solar Flux is a game that I was surprised to not enjoy the gameplay of. The challenge of efficiently managing inertia, limited fuel and gravity is something I'm excited by, and combining that with navigational puzzles/movement challenges is for want of a better term, my jam. My space jam, if you will.

Maybe it's the way that orbits in Solar Flux are mechanically expressed as rigid states or that gravity based slingshotting isn't really possible. Maybe I just never mastered the controls. Either way, I felt like I rarely found the gameplay or puzzles rewarding.

This has been interesting as it's given me some things to reflect on for the gravity/inertia based game prototype I made a while back and the way it exposes and expresses its gameplay.

I don't regret playing Solar Flux, but I feel like I exist on the periphery of, if not outside its audience.

Dutch developer Two Tribes was one of the early Humble era developers to support Linux, and after having a good time with Toki Tori, RUSH, Edge, and Toki Tori 2, I found myself eagerly looking forward to RIVE.

I'd previously helped pull together some love from the Linux community and lent a hand with testing a few things for Two Tribes, and over the years, I'd formed at least a passing friendship with a few people there. I'd been aware of the company's financial struggles and the ups and downs of the company's downsizing/reboot[twotribes.com] after filing for bankruptcy in 2013.

RIVE (called RE:Wind during development) was the title that the newer, slimmer dev team worked on, and it was something of a last ditch attempt to keep the Two Tribes name alive. For better or worse, six months before the game's release, it was announced[twotribes.com] that RIVE would be the studio's last title (though Two Tribes Publishing still exists, and the studio's games continue to be supported/ported to new platforms).

In spite of this (or perhaps because of this?), RIVE still pushes already high bar for audio, visual and gameplay production values seen across Two Tribes' catalogue, resulting in an engaging and bombastic last hurrah.

Players take on the role of Roughshot, a space scavenger running low on fuel who becomes trapped on a massive starship full of aggressive robots and malfunctioning AI. Story is pretty light-on and light-hearted, with the game primarily focusing on being an over-the-top shmup full of explosions and challenge.

It's clear from the outset that while RIVE might be seriously challenging, it doesn't take itself very seriously. The first level begins with Roughshot running "> enable_sidescrolling_game_view" and putting on some "classic game music" after finding himself in an asteroid field. Pausing after dying shows a "Guru meditation" error. The protagonist offers a almost-but-not-quite-constant stream of silly quips, which I found irritating at first, but eventually grew on me, and the "Messenger" bot's presence also feel a touch pantomime.

There's some nice variation in gameplay, with some light puzzles, movement challenges, zero gravity sections, disabled weapons sections, and so forth, which all provide some welcome variety among the game's more frenetic blow-things-up sections.

As the game progresses, Roughshot gains the ability to "hack" robots, causing them to become friendly and follow the player around. Each enemy has a different behaviour/role, and sometimes they end up becoming integral parts of puzzle solutions.

While I'm sad to see the end of Two Tribes' 15 year run, I'm glad that RIVE ended up as a game worthy of being the studio's last title, and I'm happy to have helped out with pre-release testing on the game.


This was originally written as part of a retrospective[cheesetalks.net] on games I finished in 2016.

Pulse is a first person exploration game in which players take on the role of Eva, a girl without sight, who experiences the world around her through echolocation.

This is presented to players as waves of visibility that ripple across an otherwise unseen world in response to Eva's footsteps, animal sounds, wind, crackling fires and tossing around noisy creatures known as Mokos.

The effect can be disorienting sometimes, but I think that might be a valuable part of the experience. Needing to stop and listen or make intentional noise to get your bearings feels right. The effect is at its best when a moving environmental sound, such as a gust of wind blowing through a gulley, reveals a large portion of the environment ahead, but very little of it at once, leaving a mental impression of the space that players must keep track of/assemble in their minds.

As the game opens, players find Eva on a pier at the foot of what I imagine to be a volcano. An encounter with some kind of spirit in the form of an abstract crow reveals that Eva has run away to go on a rite of passage that her people had never allowed. By experiencing the world differently to the sighted members of her tribe, Eva is able to "see" past the things that inspired her people's legends and rituals to the heart of an existential threat to her world.

Sadly, my playthrough was slightly diminished by shader bugs in the Linux version, which cause animals like birds and beetles to be rendered black, and for geometry faces to flicker black randomly. It's not impossible to overlook, but it did make things a touch awkward sometimes.

On the whole, I enjoyed Pulse's presentation, and the light puzzles it pops in to supplement the challenges of navigating spaces with limited visibility are welcome. The story is, for the most part, well written and decently presented for what it is.

I get the impression that Pulse isn't likely to be accessible to sight-impaired players, and there's something about the notion of telling stories that can't be reasonably experienced by the kinds of people represented within that makes me uneasy. I don't see anything specifically problematic within Pulse, but more generally speaking, that disconnect feels like it leaves a significant opportunity for poor representation to go unnoticed.

Regardless, I found Pulse to be an enjoyable, short-but-sweet experience and I'm happy to have backed it on Kickstarter.

This was originally written as part of a retrospective[cheesetalks.net] on games I finished in 2016.

In Oxenfree, players take on the role of Alex, a teenager on her way with her best friend and new step-brother to attend a beach party on an abandoned island. After discovering an inexplicable, presumably supernatural force through the use of a radio, the three of them, as well two additional teens, are set on the path of uncovering an eighty year old mystery while trying to cope with temporal anomalies, intersecting realities and possession.

I want to describe Oxenfree as a point-and-click adventure, but with its gamepad oriented control scheme (which maps fine to mouse and keyboard controls), there isn't much pointing going on.

With the exception of loading screens and the radio mechanic, which narratively fits as a break in focus, most of Oxenfree plays out as a kind of "continuous experience," there aren't any state changes. Items in the environment can't be interacted with until the player is close enough, and typically actions don't restrict player control, and walking away interrupts those actions. Dialogue options present themselves while other characters are talking, and if unused will fade away as conversation shifts to other topics or the moment passes.

This keeps the game's presentation consistent in a way that helps the supernatural "glitches" feel significantly more invasive.

The dialogue mechanics are interesting. In principle, they allow for smoother flowing conversations, but without knowing whether further dialogue opportunities will present themselves or whether selecting one will result in Alex interrupting another character's train of thought it can make things feel a bit disjointed or oddly stressed. Perhaps in some ways, this exposes some of the awkwardness of unscripted real-life conversations, but it still feels a bit odd to me.

The mechanics of exploring and unlocking clues, secrets and, potentially, Bad Things by wandering around fiddling with knobs on a radio are fun, and it feels like the sort of game that one could sink a lot of time into if the atmosphere and environments feel enjoyable to explore. I haven't gone through to find all of the caches Maggie left behind, but I suspect I'll come back to do it at some point.

On the note of secrets, hidden within audio recordings that can be found is a phone number, which had a voice recording which set a group of community members on the trail of an ARG that took them to an abandoned military fort similar to the one depicted in the game.

There's a nice photo mechanic aimed at getting particular moments in the group's relationships and story beats to resonate. The game is more or less book-ended by these photos in a way that invites reflection on the impact of the story's events upon its characters.

Aesthetically, the game has a painterly style that I really enjoy (I particularly like the trees in the Edwards Woods). The 3D characters have a style that can sometimes be a bit hit and miss when it comes to fitting into the environments. I'd be interested to know whether the developers were trying or had tried to create something similar to the flat style with outlines seen in the in-game photos.

I massively dig the mystery, the cyclic time loops and the opportunity to affect history, but the game is steeped in a style of teen drama/angst that I personally have low tolerance for. That said, while writing this, I fired up the game to double check the points at which the game takes control away, and somehow managed to accidentally play through the entire game again by accident.

Oxenfree does a bunch of cool stuff along a bunch of cool axes, some of which resonate with things I appreciated about Moirai (players communicating with each other through a game in ways that invite reflection) and Firewatch (depictions of realistic relationships and people). I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for whatever Night School Studio make next.


This was originally written as part of a retrospective[cheesetalks.net] on games I finished in 2016.

Hue is a puzzle platformer in which players take on the role of Hue, a young boy in a monochrome world whose mother, a scientist researching colour, has disappeared, trapped in a shade that is not visible to and can not interact with Hue's world.

Having previously assisted Hue project lead Henry Hoffman with testing Linux versions of game jam games, I was keen to assist with helping Hue have a solid Linux launch. In the month leading up to release, I played through the game multiple times, and hung around afterward to lend a little bit of a hand with community support.

Gameplay involves alternating between "background colours" to render foreground elements invisible/ineffective. A blue box might be suspended out of reach by pink balloons. Switching the background to pink will make the balloons disappear, causing the box to fall to the floor where it can be interacted with. A nearby red wall can be bypassed by switching to red, but that will cause the pink balloons to become visible again and raise the box into the air.

Puzzle difficulty isn't particularly high, but there are some nicely challenging set pieces late in the game as well as some sequences where pacing of moving elements requires reactive colour changes while platforming.

The game presents a dual narrative, following Hue's journey to discover his mother in the form of progressing through the game's puzzles/interacting with the game's few characters along the way, and Hue's mother expressing her feelings and the background of her predicament through letters left for Hue to find.

There's something really nice about the layering of character arcs through this background narrative. Grey's depiction shifts from antagonist to caring partner/paternal figure in a way that inversely reflects Hue's mother's progression from someone being victimised to someone being self destructive.

Hue invites reflection on the nature of perception, and I think does so in a more subtle way than most other stories that I've seen try to tackle that. It's also a competent puzzle platformer and is accessible without that philosophical underpinning.

I'm super happy to have played a tiny role in Hue's existence, and I'm looking forward to whatever Henry makes next.


This was originally written as part of a retrospective[cheesetalks.net] on games I finished in 2016.

My motivation to play Headlander was pretty low. I've got a lot more time for games that support Linux than I do for those that don't, but I found myself travelling late in 2016 with my Mac laptop and a bit of spare time, so figured I'd give it a go and see how well it ran.

The game itself is a light metroidvania style platformer, where you play as a disembodied head, perhaps the last non-digitised human consciousness in existence, who has been revived to challenge a nefarious AI named Methuselah. Placed inside a rocket propelled helmet, equipped with the power to suck the heads off robots and land on their bodies to control them.

Gameplay primary revolves hunting for the right body type to overcome the obstacles immediately before you. Locked doors are opened by shooting particular coloured laser bolts at them, which are only emitted by a security robot of that colour. Certain coloured security bots are rare and more difficult to yoink/shoot the head off, requiring you to work your way up to them.

Beyond doors, many other body types offer unique abilities. Similar to project lead Lee Petty's previous game Stacking, environments are filled with a vast range of potential hosts, and a lot of the enjoyment comes from exploring the possibility space that they represent between them. Scattered across the game are side quests and puzzles beyond door unlocking make almost all of the different body types useful in some way.

Aesthetically, the game has a 70s soft neon feel going for it which I dig, and is chocked full of subtle (and not so subtle) innuendo and silliness.

I'm sad that Headlander isn't available on my platform of choice, but it was a fun game to spend a couple of days with.

This was originally written as part of a retrospective[cheesetalks.net] on games I finished in 2016.

Gravity Ghost is a tough game for me to write about. I dig its visual design, its narrative and its general style. I also appreciate its air of happiness-encased-within-melancholy and the way that that resolves. I enjoy the soundtrack. I love the animal guardians. I love the game's puzzles.

I like the notion of its mechanics - the idea of drifting and gliding through space while consciously using the effects of inertia and gravity are appealing to me. In practice however, Gravity Ghost's gameplay didn't really gel with me, and I can't quite put my finger on why. It's possible that by playing with keyboard and mouse, I was not getting the optimal experience, but since I don't find gamepads comfortable, I wouldn't be playing the game otherwise.

In Gravity Ghost, things feel a tiny bit awkward and a tiny bit cumbersome, but I've been choosing to think that maybe those are just feelings that go hand in hand with death and dying, and on that level, I've found Gravity Ghost to be a rewarding experience.

This was originally written as part of a retrospective[cheesetalks.net] on games I finished in 2016.