April

It took an ABC Challenge to force me into finishing Braid at last and it was great ! It's been lurking in my backlog for so many years, patiently waiting for me to finally dive into it... I don't know why I let it wait for so long as I never heard anything but praise about this game.

Maybe it's because of the art... I always thought it was beautifull but unsettling at the same time... I did launch Braid a few times over the years but never went past a few of the first minutes of the game. I'm glad I persevered this time because it is definitively a great game!

All the puzzles are really good, all the mechanics diverse and I'v rarely saw them elsewhere (if ever), even so many years after the release of the game. One thing though : I wish it would have take me a couple more hours to finish it!

Yes, the atmosphere of the game is kind of weird but Braid deserves that you give it a chance to catch you. If you're like me and still couldn't find the motivation to play it for real until today, don't wait anymore : it's a great game and every puzzle-game enthusiast should have played it!

"On our first attempt, I knew we would have to make with some discomfort, yes, but I didn't not picture all the troubles we would experienced ! My mater and I, we overcome thirst and hunger, we survived an encounter with a very special sea monster and unexpectedly had to assume the charges of a midwife in the middle of a perilous landing operation ; but in spite of all our small victories, we ended up short on our bet as it took us 83 days to complete a round trip around the world that Mr Fogg stated he could beat under 80 days..."

"But despair did not fall on us and we eventually made it ! On our second attempt at this trip around the world, we reached London again after only 70 days of travel !"

Borrowing a lot from Jules Verne (obviously), this mostly narrative is a mouthful of historical, literary and other cultural hints and it's a real pleasure to search for those and spot something you weren't expecting (James Cameron's Titanic, maybe ?) ! It helps create a vivid universe and fills your trip with great memories !

The game is fairly easy and I don't think that it involves any random event that might have help you to keep playing the game again and again but is it really an issue ? I don't think so because after you manage to beat the game for the first time you can still try to get better and beat your score, but what seems even more appealing to me : you'll want to take your time and go visit as many places as you can on the map and experience every little reference that you can find !

Maybe not right after beating the game once, but I'm pretty sure that 80 days is a game that you can play on the long run, every time you got a few minutes and want to get a bit of the treats that the dev' have made for you.

A really good experience for me, I'll definitively play it again sometime !

Dominique Pamplemousse is a really short Point & Click, quite easy and straightforward which stands out as it is a Musical (every dialogue is sang) and because of it's clay animation graphics. Those two facts were enough to make me want to look at it

Unfortunately, despite a story that is totally fine, you'll quickly start to feel annoyed by the songs, far too repetitive (there's only one - short - theme for each character) and not really inspired (try to sing about your life to your friends, it will probably seem a lot like the songs in Dominique Pamplemousse...)

As for the graphics, I'd say that it's a nice touch even though nothing really amazed me.

In the end, even though the game is really cheap, I would not advise you to buy it. It's really not convincing. On the other hand, if it was already waiting in your backlog, give it a try, it's really short and the unusual twists of the game might be enough to convince you...

Elliot Quest looks a lot like Zelda 2 (side scrolling 2D action plate-former in the dungeons, looking for new abilities that serves as keys to open new paths into the world) and even though it's not really a bad game, one can't help but think that it really should have been a lot more polished: the difficulty isn't really well balanced (most of the Bosses are fairly easy to beat but some lesser enemies are extremely though to beat or avoid...), the objectives could be far more explicit, the UI more user-friendly (mapping the triggers to switch between our inventory objects for example) and it would not have hurt to work a bit more on the graphics because the sprites seem to "flat"...

To be clear: I kept going from enjoying the game to being frustrated by what I think are silly mistakes of game-design that could have been easily corrected...

Humble Bundle recently offered Spec Ops for free on their website and I thought it would be a good opportunity to play a TPS, a type of game I only play once every few years... usually in coop with friends. And they said the story was cool!

I'm really bad with shooters. I kept dying and dying. Now I know why I enjoy those more when I play with friends: they make it up for my mistakes! Despite my lack of skill, I still quite enjoyed playing Spec Ops, having to switch between weapons depending on what type of ammo I could find was nice and the action was just enough for me. Once again, I only play TPS once every 4 years maybe, and Spec Ops seemed, gameplay wise, like a good one to me (or at least, an average one)...

What did not fit my expectations was the story. It really felt kind of cheesy to me. The fact that the only way to get through the game is by killing about everyone makes it's "anti-war" message far less memorable to me... Yes, it might be nice, for once, to play a shooter where your characters is not considered a hero (and might even be a bad guy), but it's not as impacting when you're forced to become a bad guy...

I might have been more enthusiastic about this game if I played it when it was released but after all those years I was clearly expecting to much from the scenario... I'd advise you, if you wanted to discover Spec Ops, to play it expecting an average-TPS; who knows, maybe you'll be pleasantly surprised!

Open Sorcery is a "visual" novel (it mostly looks like lines of code) which let you embody a "Magic Software" made of fire and created to protect a small portion of its surroundings (a school, a rest home, the houses of its two creators) as an antivirus would protect a computer.

Trying to exorcise the humans under our protection we encounter other spirits and our meetings with them will help us evolve towards a being more conscious of itself which will impact our relationship with our human creators...

You can go through an entire run in less than one hour but as usual in this type of game the real story will unfold as you replay the game and choose to act differently than you did during your previous run. Even though I didn't go through all the possibilities yet I can say that the story is really nice and unusual.

I would definitively recommend those of you who like Visual Novels to take a look at Open Sorcery: not the most ambitious game I played this month but a really nice one nonetheless...

Shantae and the Pirate's Curse has the same ups and downs as its predecessor Risky's Revenge

I think that the game really suffers from the way you travel the world: a succession of levels that you enter from a hub. For a metroidvania game, I think it's harder to get a good impression of the world, more difficult to remember where were the paths that you couldn't enter or the items that you couldn't reach... And so you wander and wander, mostly in vain...

The fact that the levels are divided between very good dungeons but mostly annoying outside areas is another issue of this wandering without any clear goal...

Among the plus are the dungeons (very nice level design) and the bosses that are mostly very cool to fight but for me, it's not enough to save Shantae and the Pirate's Curse. Risky's Revenge earned a 14/20, I don't think that The Pirate's Curse deserves more than a 12...

It took me about 2 hours to beat Scanner Sombre and thanks goodness I knew it was supposed to be short because I would never have finished it otherwise...

As many I supposed, the unusual graphics are what drove me to the game; unfortunately, it's the only thing that I'll remember from this game.

As it turns out Scanner Sombre is an extremely basic walking simulator. In fact, walking is the only thing you'll do in this game and after 20 minutes you just don't care anymore about the unusual graphics as everything looks the same all along your playthrough. You're note even exploring as the world is not open at all, you'll only be walking the straightforward path to the end of the game and the through the bits of a disappointing story that you'll uncover during your walk...

In the end, Scanner Sombre should never have been anything else than a technical demo. If you've seen the trailer, you've seen it all. And if you still want to see more of the game, keep your money and watch a Let's play, this game is not worth your time...

A very short J-RPG/Visual Novel in which you play to characters, one of whose has the ability to uncover the lies of the person she's speaking to and to eat those lies. In fact this character belongs to the Dragon's race (despite the fact that she looks like a young girl) and every dragon possess a specific ability.

The game is divided in three chapters in which, after a simple investigation, you'll be searching for lies, fighting them in order to understand what's happening and finally beat a boss at the end of every of the three chapters.

What makes LiEat enjoyable is the peculiar universe it's set in, the PNJ dialogues and of course, the relationship between the two playable characters. If your allergic to anime-cliché, you can forget this game, otherwise, this is a really nice game that will nicely entertain you during the three or four hours that your playthrough should last.