Demo Driver 8: Among the Sleep
Standing here, with sounds coming through the house, not sure where your mother is, the world too dark to make out details… that’s scary.
At a glance, Among the Sleep is two different games, one of which is brilliant and one of which isn’t. Which is especially interesting as one of the games is only a game by the thinnest stretch of the imagination, and yet it’s the one I found more interesting; the demo lost me when it started inserting a bit more gameplay, which merited far less attention in general.
The premise of Among the Sleep strikes you as novel right from the start. Your character is a two-year-old child, and it’s played from the first-person perspective. And it’s a horror game. More than that, it’s a horror game of the sort that you become immediately familiar with mere seconds after you start up the demo. It is dark, you are young, and you are alone. Bad enough in and of itself, but then your crib tilts over, you hear a crash from downstairs… and you can get out. To find your mother.
Demo Driver 8: Tobe’s Vertical Adventure
Nostalgia coupled with nostalgia married to solid mechanics leaves evaluations in a complicated place.
I may be alone in this regard, and by “may be” I mean “certainly appear to be,” but I am entirely done with the current waves of misguided affection for the arcade games and early 16-bit games that I had in my youth.
This is not to say that the indie love affair with old-school games is an inherent hindrance any more than the triple-A fascination with fabric simulation is an inherent hindrance; it’s more that both tend to produce a lot of stuff that starts with a bedrock of nostalgia and never quite gets around to assembling compelling gameplay to support it. Instead, there are games – which you can probably guess include today’s offering – which are perfectly serviceable homages without adding much on besides.
Fortunately for Tobe’s Vertical Adventure, the game is more aiming at a feel than a particular game or style, which covers a multitude of sins. It’s not a bad game, either, but it certainly feels like the homage cam first and the actual gameplay showed up late to the party without appropriate clothing. So it manages all right, but it never quite manages to pass that threshold of being good enough that there’s no reason to care about visuals.
Demo Driver 8: System Protocol One
Not one of the more interesting layouts, but those are kind of impossible to show in a two-dimensional image.
It’s kind of neat how tower defense games, as a genre, have reached a point where they have two distinct sub-genres as a bare minimum. All of them have the same core elements – enemies come from point A and move to point B, make that as difficult as possible for them – but in some games, the path is already laid out. Your job is to place your towers at the right points for optimum damage, as seen in games like Defender’s Quest (which is excellent). Others ask you to build the path, walling your enemies in and creating the most circuitous possible route through walls of cannon fire.
System Protocol One is of the latter variety. I used to think it was my preferred sort of tower defense game, but time has cooled that particular bit of ardor. I wouldn’t say it’s bad by any stretch of the imagination, and it definitely hits the notes it’s aiming for, but I suspect a good portion of my affection comes down to my usual love of anything involving tower defense. Still, it’s an entertaining enough way to spend some time clicking away, so doesn’t that fulfill its purposes?
Demo Driver 8: Magic 2014
This is as dramatic as it gets.
Usually, I play a demo all the way through to the end before I make a comment on it. But not this one. I passed the half-hour mark and I was already done, largely because I didn’t need a great deal of introduction to playing a card game that I had already played for several years and have opted out of continuing to play for a variety of reasons.
The easy verdict here is that this is the most recent version of the game, and if you’re looking for a version of Magic: the Gathering that works as close to a box set of the game could possibly work, here is your game. Based on the demo, it provides exactly what it advertises on the tin, which is a faithful digital recreation of the card game as it stood when the game was made, frozen in time and yet with a clean visual interface and implementation of the rules. It manages to hit enough of the genuine game’s notes without being the same game, which is noteworthy. At the same time, it’s also a bit buggy, and it doesn’t exactly do the source material any favors.
You’re probably looking for a bit more, huh?
Demo Driver 8: Don Bradman Cricket 14 (#126)
Cricket, the last great mystery of our age.
Ladies and gentlemen, when I rolled this game, I knew I was in for a treat right from the beginning.
I do not know much of anything about cricket. I know that it is a game that is enjoyed in the UK and several points directly related, but if asked at gunpoint to name three distinct positions in cricket I would be reduced to vague guessing and prayer. I know absolutely nothing about the rules of the game. And if that weren’t enough reason to be smiling about this game, there’s the simple fact that it also requires a controller, thereby suggesting a level of precision and expectations for play that I had no way of living up to.
So why did I know I was in for a treat? Because either I would be in for an unexpected blast or I’d be reduced to playing a Very Serious Sports Game as something between Grand Theft Auto and NBA Jam due to total unfamiliarity. I can’t say it’ll provide a good evaluation of the game compared to other cricket titles, but you know, I was going to have a lot of fun on the ride there.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 