(Originally Posted Jul 2018)
Another fortnight has passed so it’s time for another Triple Threat Review!
If you’re new, then please check out the previous article; this is a series where I pick 3 games semi-randomly from my Steam list – ones that I’ve never played before – I play them for an hour or so and then I give you my first impressions on them, scoring them on a scale of 1-3 based solely on how much I enjoyed playing them.
So let’s look at this week’s games!
Dreaming Sarah
Well, Dreaming Sarah was certainly able to capture what it felt like to be in a dream considering I didn’t have a clue where I was, what was going on, or what I was supposed to be doing at any given moment.
Dreaming Sarah is a very obtuse game, it just sticks you in a location and expects you to explore and work everything out for yourself. This isn’t an inherently bad thing, plenty of games have done it to great success, but Dreaming Sarah really missed the mark with it.
The first 10-15 minutes are pretty straight forward, you just wander about and sort of just stumble into puzzle solutions and there’s not really a whole lot of thinking to it, but things very quickly get harder from there. It wasn’t long before I found myself reaching puzzles where I didn’t have a clue what I was supposed to be doing. Granted a couple of times this was just due to me being inept, but often it came down to the developer essentially saying “guess what I’m thinking”, resulting in me having to look up the solution on YouTube.
While that wouldn’t be a deal breaker on its own for me, as it is only one aspect of this game, it adds a couple of mechanics that make things very frustrating; the main example of which, is the compass. The compass is an item you receive fairly early on that points to places/items of use to you, which I assumed would act like a bit of a guide, if I ever got stuck I could use the compass and it would point me in the right direction; this is not the case however. The compass isn’t context sensitive in its hints, which means instead of pointing to where you’re supposed to go next, it just points to a specified location on the map depending on where you’re standing, this means that it can often be completely useless to you, or worse lead you way off in the wrong direction, to the point where you think you’re making progress, only to realise you’ve been going the wrong way this entire time.
Despite all of this, I kept trying to push through with the game, because there is kernel of something great here. The world is pretty intriguing and there’s a lot of mystery surrounding everything you’re doing, and there was part of me that cared and wanted to find out what happened; but I kept coming across frustration after frustration. In my hour of playing I got to about the halfway point and I still wanted to push forward to get to the end, however I took a pill that teleported me, and then the game crashed so I decided I’d had enough and put it down there.
In summary, Dreaming Sarah is a great concept, with great art and world design, but is ultimately crippled by poor choices in core mechanics and gameplay elements, and for that reason, I sadly can’t recommend it.
1/3 – Bad
Toy Odyssey
I was quite looking forward to see what Toy Odyssey had to offer when I booted it up, a quick scan of the Steam store page made it look like it was right up my alley; a roguelike with some tower defence elements and a nice art style was just the thing I was looking for. Unfortunately, the universe isn’t always that kind and now I sit here typing this review feeling annoyed and disappointed; so let’s dig into this shall we?
The game starts off fine, with some still images telling us the story of a family who move into a new house and the kid falls in love with this toy, the music was a tad over the top, but that’s a minor nitpick. Then it feels like there’s a scene missing between the end of the cutscene and the gameplay, as the character just wakes up Toy Story style, with no explanation as to how he got there, or why he’s suddenly sentient when he wasn’t before.
Here’s when we get to my first major issue with this game. Take a look at the image above, now like me, you probably assumed that the armchair and draws are part of the background, and I could just walk in front of them, however that’s not the case. A lot of the terrain doesn’t stand out from the background in any way, which often lead to frustrations where I would either try to run along something only to find it’s a solid surface, or jump for something thinking its a surface, only to go sailing through it.
The game also hasn’t worked out the kinks in its procedural generation either. As you can see in the image above, platforms sometimes generate in such away that you can’t actually get through, the gap is too small for my character to fit through, and there’s no way around to climb up, meaning I couldn’t get certain items or progress to the objective.
Then we get to the combat, and there isn’t really much to it, it’s pretty boring and there’s no weight to any of your attacks. You have a secondary slot, but I didn’t find it very useful in many scenarios. Enemies will also sometimes blend into the background, meaning you’ll often get attacked and lose health out of nowhere. The enemies attack very fast, with no telegraphing, and the limited combat system means there’s no way to dodge an incoming attack; all of this pretty much means that if you’re fighting more than one enemy at a time, then you may as well give up.
Finally, there’s the tower defence aspect, while you’re out in the world, fighting enemies, you can also collect resources, which you can then use to build up your “base” (it’s the kid’s bedroom…who now I think about it is seemingly non-existent in this game). At nighttime things will attack your base, but you don’t get to play this section so it’s basically just a dice roll as to whether you lose everything you’ve built or not.
Overall Toy Odyssey is nothing special, the core gameplay is middle of the road at best, and just plain bad at worst. There are plenty of other games out there that do what it does better, so I’d recommend you go play one of those games instead of this one.
Score: 1/3 – Bad
Bear With Me
Bear With Me immediately caught my eye, it’s a point and click, noir game, where you play as a girl and her stuffed bear, who takes the role of a traditional, 1960’s run down drunk PI.
The first thing I noticed about the game was how it oozes charm, the art style works really well with the noir colours and the sound design compliments it greatly. The voice acting is a little over the top, but I feel like that’s the point, it all adds to the feel of the game, you click around stuff and the way the main character will reacts or makes remarks reminds me of the way characters behaved in old point and click games.
Sadly I don’t have much more positive to say about the game, because once you start to get into it, everything seems to grind to a halt; the mystery of the game is set up pretty well, and the cutscene upon first meeting the bear is great. But the one major criticism that carried through my time in the game is that there is just SO MUCH TALKING. I fully appreciate that a mystery game is going to need a large amount of dialogue to tell its story, but this was just ridiculous; There’d be a 2-3 minute long conversation, and in the whole thing only 1 or 2 lines would actually be of importance to the story.
If the meaningless chatter was funny, or telling us more about the characters then I’d be interested in it, but for the most part it’s just meaningless banter that only serves to slow the pace of the game down. If you’re going to have that much talking in your game then make the talking a major part of the game, give me branching dialogue options with choices. Expand on what LA Noire did and make every conversation a puzzle in and of itself; that was not the case however, and after a little while I found myself skipping most conversation.
When you finally get to play the game, you’re greeted with a pretty standard point and click affair, you click around the room until a character picks something up, or shows interest in something, and then you use it on something else to progress. It’s an enjoyable enough formula, but I don’t think this game did as great a job of it as it could have. Most of the puzzles were pretty obvious, and there are multiple occasions where the game basically tells you the solutions if you read between the lines in the dialogue. As such it can sometimes feel like you’re not really a part of the story, but more just there to move the story along to the next conversation.
The weird thing is though, with all of my complaints and frustrations with the game; I still want to keep playing. All that charm and great design I talked about earlier really were enough to keep me in on this one, while the waves of dialogue were annoying, I wanted to get through them because I wanted to see what came next, and while the humour isn’t the best it has its moments and I found myself giggling at the game on multiple occasions.
Overall my advice would be, if you want a point and click with good puzzles and gameplay then maybe look elsewhere, but if you just want to experience the art style and take in the game world, then I’d say you should give this one a try.
Score : 2/3 – OK
Well I eluded to it last time, but I was bound to hit a downer week eventually. As always feedback is appreciated, especially with more negative content like this, it can often be much harder to write effectively than positive stuff.
Please share this around and make sure to follow me on Twitter @10ryawoo, a big thanks to Elly from the Strong Style Podcast for editing this one I’ll see you next time!
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