Category: Games

Way back in March the game Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments by Frogwares was given away as part of Microsoft’s Games with Gold program.  I had been meaning to give it try since then, but there have been way too many things to play.  I am happy to report that it is a pretty good modern adventure title, but just be prepared for a lot of loading.  Seriously, you may need to get a book.  A Sherlock Holmes novel perhaps?

Taking its queue from the classic Sir Arthur Conan Doyle novels on which Crimes and Punishments is based, the game is split in to six different cases.  Each one with clues to find and chumps to make look stupid as you bring up things they thought they were hiding.  Also nodding to Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment, when you wrap up a case you can choose whether to imprison the perpetrators or take pity on them and set them free.

Like most games in the adventure genre, Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments involves a lot of walking around and looking at things, touching things, and talking to people.  The more you look and touch, the more options you get when you talk.  To help you look for stuff there is a Holmes vision that turns everything gray, but then highlights things you may have missed in yellow.  Also when you talk to people you get to slow time and check them out all over so you can make those Sherlock Holmes snap deductions, like that they are a poor son of a rich man who now works as a fish cleaner.  That is by far my favorite part.  There are a few little mini-games as well that Frogwares uses to try and break up the monotony of all the looking, touching and talking.  Some are good, and some are not.  Luckily they are all skip-able.

My second favorite thing is the way Crimes and Punishments lets you piece the clues together.  You go in to Holmes’ brain and make deductions, but some decoctions have multiple conclusions you can make, and based on those conclusions you can then make your final judgment.  Once you accept this judgment a very Sherlock Holmes-y cut-scene will take place with him explaining everything.  What is even better is that it saves before this cut-scene, so if you have all the clues you can watch them all.  The downer is that the loading takes so long that you may not have the patience to do so.

If Frogwares could have found a way to cut down on the excessive loading times Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments may have been a must play for fans of the adventure genre.  As it is, it is still pretty good and worth a look since it usually can be found for cheap.  I am enjoying the feeling of being the Master Detective, I just wish that there wasn’t so much down time, but maybe they were just trying to give us more time to think about the case.

Hyper Light Drifter is the latest major Kickstarter game to come out, and after the disaster that was Mighty No. 9, it is exciting to see that good games can still come out of the crowd funding scene, but Hyper Light Drifter is more than just a good game, it is a great one.  I am very happy that I backed this title!

The game takes place in some sort of post apocalyptic future where there are still remnants of old advanced technology, but most of it no longer works, and the old buildings are now filled with monsters.  Your character has some sort of strange illness, but he doesn’t let it deter him from fighting evil.

It is fairly obvious that the folks over at Heart Machine love Zelda.  If you were to replace Hyper Light Drifter’s neon color pallet with Zelda’s signature earthy tones, you might be thinking you were playing a Zelda game from the Super Nintendo era.  One where Link learned to dash forward real fast.  The way they change things up is that they borrow the difficulty from games like Dark Souls.  Thankfully death isn’t as penalizing as in the Dark Souls games, you usually just start again at the beginning of the room.

To progress through the game you will have to build strategies on how to defeat the different monsters you will face.  Like should you hang back and use your gun?  Or should you dash in and out taking a few quick swings each time.  Hyper Light Drifter truly gets hard when it throws tons of different types of monsters at you, and it forces you to be able to use all those strategies at once.  Though it does a good job of making you feel like you are getting better each time you try again.  It is training you to get better.  Not to mention as you go along you will unlock new abilities and powers, so you will not be doing the same thing over and over.

I am on paragraph five and I am just now getting to Hyper Light Drifter’s best feature, the way it looks.  It is captivatingly gorgeous.  I said before that it looked like a neon SNES Zelda, but that doesn’t do it justice.  It might be the best looking game to come out this year.  Everything is well done.  The animations are top notch, they are fluid and smooth in a way that the old consoles that Hyper Light Drifter is paying homage to could never accomplish.  The character and stage designs are amazing.  The game is truly a work of art.

I am kind of gushing, but it is great to see a game come together like this.  If you have $20 to spare it would be hard to find a better way to spend it than on Hyper Light Drifter, and better yet it is out on every major platform (not counting the Wii U of course), so you should have no excuse not to play it.  I am having a blast with this game, and I think you will too.

It has been a while since I have played an old school deep turn based RPG, but the lure of Co-Op, the great reviews, and a decent sale, led me to try Divinity: Original Sin.  For the Co-Op, I dragged The Paladin along with me.  I bought him a copy of the game for his birthday, very self serving of me I know.  I am not very far in to it yet, but I have to say I am liking what I am seeing.

Divinity: Original Sin starts with your main characters off to Cyseal to investigate a murder of a high ranking official to see if the mysterious magic “Source” was involved.  You see you are playing as “Source Hunters”.  A group of people tasked with keeping track of this powerful and dangerous magic.  Things get all timely-wimey after that, but lets just say there are far greater things at stake than some official getting offed.

The gameplay for the most part is standard turn based fare.  Each character gets a set amount of action points, and on their turn they get to spend those points moving, attacking, defending, or helping teammates.  Where things get different is that Larian Studios loves its environmental effects.  Your characters are always wet, hot, oiled, or poisoned, so you get to try and plan your attacks based on what is going on around them.  Is it raining?  Maybe you should freeze everyone.  It will be super effective.  Your team on fire?  Cast a rain spell to douse the flames.  Obviously if you have a good wizard they can bend the environment to best suit your group’s attacks.

Another fun addition is that unlike most Co-Op games in Divinity: Original Sin you and your friends do not need to agree on the dialog.  You see him making a decision that you don’t agree with, you can try and override him.  If you can’t come to an agreement you literally play Paper, Rock, Scissors to come to a conclusion.  It is fun to screw with your teammate every now and then, and possibly destroy a quest tree.  The Paladin had us kill some drunk guards instead of just following them to some guy to prove who we were.  It was pretty funny.

Not everything is peachy keen however.  When playing with your friends you can’t see what they are doing, so there is a lot of down time while you are waiting for their turns in combat.  Movement is kind of slow, so it feels like it takes forever to get anywhere, and most unfortunate of all, there is no quest management system.  I understand that Larian wanted Divinity: Original Sin to be a throw back, so they mostly leave you to solve the quests as best you can, but there should be some way to organize or filter your journal so can try and stay on task instead of randomly milling around in the wilderness.  Also be sure to save.  The game doesn’t auto-save.

Divinity: Original Sin is a fun RPG, and it definitely has the ‘just one more thing’ hook.  Every time I have played with The Paladin three hours seemed to just disappear, and that is the mark of a good game.  Not to mention that I can count the number of good Co-Op RPGs on one hand (not including MMOs of course).  Larian Studios is working on a sequel, if they can speed up the game a little bit, and let folks manage their quests a bit better Divinity: Original Sin 2 will be worth looking out for.