Seasons After Fall

Continuing my hammering of my Xbox One backlog of unplayed games comes Seasons After Fall, a game I added to my wish list, purchased in sale and I have no idea why I did it. Thus has led me to my April spending hiatus where I am refusing to buy any new games, even if they are selling Alien Breed Episode 2 on the marketplace for £0.84.

I actually had an interesting experience with Seasons After Fall. I confess to not really getting the story. You start as some kind of energy-based entity and float to the surface from some underground place. You are guided by yet another obtrusive narrator, although she is a lot less pretentious than the narrator from Hue, and it becomes apparent that the narrator character needs you to wake up some guardians of the forest to break her out of some kind of prison thing. In order to do this, your energy entity possesses a fox who will be completing all of the jumping and puzzling sections of the game.

This is where it got personal. I become quite attached to the fox. Because he is a cute fox who can jump really high and stuff. The narrator uses to fox to try and use the guardian’s energy to escape her prison. In doing so… spoilers… the fox dies. And she doesn’t care. I was all like, what the fuck have you done to my fox! Bitch!

The quest then changes to restore the guardian’s power and stop the narrator from being such a cunt. I’ll call her what I like, she killed my fox.

It’s been a long time since a game has generated an emotive response from me and this came as a relief as I felt I was becoming dead inside. It’s made worse as very time you go back to the starting area, now as ghost-fox, the dead fox is just lying there. Dead.

Gameplay wise, it’s a middle of the road puzzle platformer. You have use buttons to change the season from Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter to do different things in the environment – almost like Hue but with a different skin. The puzzles themselves vary from supremely easy, to slap a dick in your face ridiculous in terms of difficulty. Some of them expect you to be a mind reader where as others just require you to jump on a button.

I found the narrator to have a really annoying voice for the first half of the game but this was my only annoyance in terms of the sound effects. Graphically, it looks good for a 2D environment, doesn’t take any risks and is very cleanly executed.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 21 Achievements

There’s not really a lot to do in terms of achievements and it’s a somewhat forgiving list. You will get 14 of 21 achievements for following the story from start to finish.

There is also another achievement available during the post-game bit for running left into a giant fox but this is connected to another 4 collectible achievements. You have to sleep in four shrines in the four seasonal areas which trigger additional cutscenes to provide some background to the story (not that it made anything clearer for me). Once you’ve done these four, you can do the giant fox bit. The best part about this is that it’s not a missable achievement. You can revisit every area of the game right up to the end.

The last two are the harder ones. There is one for standing still in a specific spot for two minutes to hear some birds but it’s not overly clear where you need to be for this and I never would have found it without a guide. And then there’s the big one for making all of the flowers bloom. You just have to run over them to make them bloom and there are four in every area where there are flowers. These are clearly marked per section so you can check off where you need to go to find any you missed.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Seasons After Fall is an okay puzzle platformer with an emotive storyline – I’m still a bit choked up about the fox. It’s a straight forward completion that can be done in under six hours with the use of a guide.

Fibbage

Fibbage is a party game only available as a standalone title in the US. I got it using some of my American credit a while ago and only got around to playing it last month. It seemed like fun so I actually got some real-life friends to come around and play it to completion.

Fibbage was a unique gaming experience for me. It requires you to use a smart phone, tablet, laptop or computer and go to a website while the Xbox One is running the game. You, and up to seven friends, need to log in to a room and then you play the game on your devices.

The principle of Fibbage is simple. The game will ask you some outrageous questions and you have to enter a deliberately wrong answer that’s as close to be being right as possible in order to trick the other players into going for your answer. If you find the right answer, you get points, and you get points for tricking people with your lies. At the end of the game, the person who has the most points wins. Simple. You play two rounds of multiple questions followed by a final Fibbage with increasing points as you go through the rounds.

After you’ve played a few times, the narrator gets annoying as he explains the rules every single time which is frustrating but understandable as first-time players will need the info.

Also, on our last play, we found that the same questions were coming up frequently so there’s not a lot of variety after about six hours of playing. However this is a double edged sword type of problem when you consider…

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 10 Achievements

With the right set up, 9 of the 10 achievements can be earned in 20 minutes. The trickiest to carry out alone, although I shouldn’t have worried in the end, was for completing a game with 8 players. I actually did this using multiple browsers on a laptop with Firefox and it was easier than a lot of the guidance made out.

A lot of the other achievements are luck based if not playing alone though. The most notable ones are for tricking everyone with a lie in a three plus player game and you also have to enter the same lie as someone else. You have to know the answer to at least one of the questions as there is an achievement for entering the truth for a lie. The game won’t let you enter the actual truth so after you discover the truth through guessing (like I did), you have to enter a lie.

The one that I didn’t get until a few games in was for winning the Thumbs Cup. You can like other people’s lies once you’ve answered the question but I didn’t see this for some reason. You need to get the most likes in a game and then you get the Thumbs Cup. This is also like a post-game thing you can do where instead of playing for points you can play for likes.

As mentioned above, there are surprisingly few questions in the game and the last achievement I unlocked was the pathological liar achievement which is for answering all the questions in the game. The main problem with this is that there are a set amount of subjects and you have to pick from a selection so unless you track all the subjects you’ve picked, this will take a while and even then it’s up to the computer to give you the ones you are missing – which is annoying.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Fibbage was a fun few hours with friends. It’s a shame that the fun was short-lived though. What it could do with is a ‘make your own’ function where you can ask your own questions. That would definitely add to the life of the game. Achievement wise, aside from Pathological Liar, it’s a quick and easy completion and well worth doing if you have some friends who like these sorts of games.

Demetrios - The BIG Cynical Adventure

After several years in the wilderness, it now feels like I am starting to make some headway into clearing out the sizeable backlog of games that’s built up. Just taking one game at a time seems to be working and games like Demetrios provide some light relief from the smashing my head into a brick wall that is Outlast.

Demetrios follows the story of Bjorn Thonen, an antique/junk dealer living in Paris. He is mysteriously robbed one night when someone breaks in to his flat and steals a tablet and all of his money. He then goes on a quest, or adventure, to get his stuff back and find out what’s going on.

Now the first thing to note about the game is the title. ‘Cynical’ implies exactly what the game is like. Bjorn is a fucking twat for the most part. I don’t think I’ve ever been put in the shoes of a more unlikeable protagonist and that’s an opinion shared by most of the supporting cast, despite there being a supposed love interest, who also, quite clearly, doesn’t like him.

The other aspect of the game I didn’t like was the toilet humour. There is an option as the beginning of the game to dial it down but you need the maximum amount of toilet humour to unlock all the achievements and I wasn’t going to do two playthroughs just to see what it was like without it. I don’t find fart jokes or human faeces funny in any way so to see a character get needlessly covered in vomit or wet themselves is just unnecessary and not to my tastes.

I’ve not been left in complete hatred of the game though. Despite the dependence on toilet humour for cheap laughs, there are quite a lot of fourth-wall breaking moments that were quite clever and also funny. My personal favourite is part where you are in the police station and you can get arrested by using the photocopier. You can then come back and pee on a plant which results in another arrest but the policeman remembers your previous indiscretion when he’s not supposed to. This causes Bjorn to say, ‘What?! You’re not supposed to remember that!’ These little bits of humour almost make the game worth playing.

At its core, Demetrios is a point and click adventure game with some puzzle aspects thrown in. You can pick up a wide variety of items, all of which will serve some purpose at some point during the story and some even have more than one use. I found the controls a bit clunky and it doesn’t look very nice – again, this is personal opinion; the cartoon feel didn’t appeal to me in the slightest. Also, along the lines of aesthetics, the music did my head in, in places. It just had that stupid toilet humour sound to it and one specific part of the sound track appears to have someone do a sharp exhale that sounds so stupid and yet somehow has got stuck in my head and annoyed me for the past week.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 36 Achievements

Of the 36 achievements, six of them are earned through completing the six chapters of the main story. The rest are situational where you have to perform a certain action at a certain time. Annoyingly, most of these are secret and don’t protect any part of the game’s story but are most likely made secret to create further annoyance.

There are a lot of collectibles throughout the game too, the two most notable being the cookies and the game overs. In every scene you go to, there are three hidden cookies you must find. Some of these are ridiculously hidden and I couldn’t even see them on the screen some of the time. The other set is for dying in every conceivable way and this is really the main achievement in the game, despite being worth zero points. Thankfully you don’t need to get all of these on one playthough and you can use chapter select to go back and get any you missed. The game is kind enough to let you know which chapters you have missed deaths in as well.

Despite having chapter select, there is one missable achievement. You need to turn on the tap in Bjorn’s flat before leaving Paris causing his flat to flood when he returns. Something so small which is quite easy to miss.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Demetrios is a straightforward completion with a guide but it’s long winded for what it is and collecting all the game overs is an episode in frustration, especially considering it offers zero points. I didn’t find any of the toilet humour funny and it’s definitely for specific tastes. It took me under ten hours to complete, so middle of the road in terms of speed.

Virginia

I remember hearing about Virginia a long time ago in the same sentences as words such as ‘original’, ‘good’, ‘amazing’ and ‘easy Gamerscore.’ I played the game through twice, still didn’t get it, read an internet plot synopsis and still didn’t get it but it turns out someone sort of did. So I realised that Virginia wasn’t to my tastes so if you liked it, take the rest of this review with a pinch of salt.

Virginia is classed as a Point and Click adventure game but it may as well be a visual novel for the level of pointing and clicking you need to do. The story is told through speechless scenes where some kind of overly complex multi-layered story plays out in front of you. You play as Anne Tarver, an FBI agent who is tasked with carrying out an internal investigation on Maria Halperin for no real reason. You partner up with her to try and solve the case of missing child Lucas and then some arbitrary stuff happens like you become friends with Maria, then she finds out about the investigation and falls out with you, then you make up and bin off the FBI… so they throw you in jail? A lot of this would have been easier to understand had they put speech in, but whatever.

The article I read provided some insights into the plot holes but essentially it’s just guess work from someone who liked the game. I’m not sure if the developers had the idea at the outset that their story was so disconnected (and they throw in an unnecessary acid trip at the end) that the players would be expected to make up their own ending and answer the unanswered questions themselves but that’s not why 80% of people watch TV and it’s not why I play games. I’m all for using intelligence to figure stuff out for myself but not to this level. It feels like lazy story telling.

Gameplay wise, all I have to say is that Anne has got zero pace and zero options for faster movement. You have to walk around and click on various things to progress through scenes. There are optional collectibles but even these are bizarre and I’ll cover them below.

Graphically, it doesn’t look good. It’s blocky an unappealing on the eye however some people have praised it so this is clearly personal taste.

In summary, it doesn’t look good, it doesn’t have dialogue and the music it does have is irritating and the story is a clusterfuck of shit followed by an acid trip. I have no idea where the good opinions came from.

Achievement – 1,000 Points – 17 Achievements

Viriginia requires two playthroughs to complete for the simple reason that one of the achievements is for completing it twice. The rest can be gathered in a single two-hour playthrough but you need to know where the collectibles are to do this.

You get one for default by playing the game through for the first time. There are ten feathers and ten flowers to collect throughout the adventure and a load of other random stuff too.

All of the other stuff you have to collect doesn’t actually unlock anything. After you collect them, you need to see said items in situ. An example of this is where you pick up a pair of glasses. These glasses will then appear on another character and you have to see the other character wearing them for an achievement. This is where it gets stupid because, obviously, why can pick up a pair of glasses only for them to appear on the face of another random character?

I used a guide to ensure I didn’t miss anything and some of this stuff didn’t unlock at the same points for all players. Mine were pretty much all delayed until the end of the game. With the collections, once you have all ten flowers and all ten feathers, you then need to view them in your apartment towards the end of the game for the achievements to unlock.

This is a minor point but the achievement names and descriptions don’t tell you anything about what you have to do to unlock them so in effect, they are all secret achievements.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I didn’t enjoy Virginia and if this is 505 Games’ idea of a game, I won’t be playing any more of their titles. It is less than a four-hour completion for achievement hunters but it’s an unengaging, unrewarding, uninteresting completion.

I, Zombie

Another one from my Halloween sale splurge, I, Zombie is the next Xbox One game selected at random for playing. It was during playing this that I started questioning whether I would actually put the time in to finishing Outlast which I must get done soon. I am starting to run out of easy games too but reducing the amount of unplayed games in my collection is going well this month.

I, Zombie is a strategy puzzle game where you have to control a zombie and turn all of the other people in the level into zombies. This is done by walking into them but made complicated by some of them having guns and the ability to see you from a set range. Which is quite far. There are also turrets on some of the later levels which can kill you, adding to the zombie dangers you face.

Most levels award stars for completion based on how many zombies survive when you complete the level. This is main aspect of the game. You control your zombie by using the analogue stick and you can give instructions to your other zombies by using button commands. They can either stand still, follow you or attack enemies. All zombies you have made will follow the commands all at once – you cannot give commands to individual zombies. This removes a large amount of complexity from the puzzles but will also have you screaming bloody murder when the zombies commit mass suicide when you accidentally press the wrong button.

I didn’t play the game for very long but musically, it’s incredibly annoying even without a prolonged play time. I actually had to mute it at one point. It’s plinky-plunky and repetitive – not easy on the ears.

The levels themselves are well done although I kept getting caught on edges which usually led to my death. That’s probably more my bad than the games though. It’s a Steam port but for some reason the levels are slightly different on the Xbox version. They aren’t greatly different though.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 12 Achievements

Achievements wise you basically have to get three stars in every level to get 10 of them, including the miscellaneous ones for dying and turning guys into zombies. Technically you could go through the whole game without dying or losing a zombie but this is so unlikely that it’s not worth considering those two achievements as ‘extra work.’

There are 30 levels in the game with a total of 90 stars to collect. Once you’ve done this there are two speed run achievements, one for doing the first 20 levels in under 15 minutes and another for doing the last ten in under 8 minutes.

This is where the Steam differences come in to play, I used a video to try and speed up some of my level times but some of the levels were different and I couldn’t copy exactly what the other guy was doing. One of the later levels, the guy goes up a narrow path between a wall and a house but this path is not present on the Xbox version. It’s not a big a deal as you can still get decent enough times through trial and error and while they may seem daunting, they aren’t actually that hard.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I, Zombie offers a few hours of frustrating puzzling fun that’s easy enough to get to the end but offers additional challenge via speed runs and maximum stars. It’s pretty good value too and a good game to add to the achievement hunter’s collection.

Knee Deep

The next title in my randomly generated picks is Knee Deep, a game that came with a package of Wales Interactive Games along with the previously reviewed Late Shift.

Knee Deep is a visual novel so just give me a few minutes to find and re-read my Three Fourths Home review… okay done. Knee Deep is somewhat of an improvement over that pile of shite and not just because all of Knee Deep’s achievements unlocked when they were supposed to. It still hasn’t enamoured me to the visual novel genre but did show that Three Fourths Home is a blip even by the genre’s own standards. I wasn’t looking for another visual novel game to play – it was just cheaper to get the other games I wanted in a bundle.

Anyway, Knee Deep is a visual novel game where you are effectively watching a play with actors and you have to make dialogue decisions with three different protagonists – well, technically four but you spend the majority of the game following three of them so we will stick with three.

The story, after having played through the first act three times, is bizarre to the point of stupidity and that’s without going into the dialogue choices. I suppose revealing the end, even if the end makes no sense in its own context, is a spoiler so here is the warning.

What starts out as a murder investigation turns into exposing a political cover up. But in a dramatic twist, it turns out the political cover up is just a front for… bringing the dead back to life. In the form of a half-zombie. And then the town is swallowed by a sink hole. You can’t make this stuff up. Although, Knee Deep’s universe is proof that you actually can.

Turning to the characters themselves and the dialogue options, each of the three characters you control has a dialogue trait that allows you to play the game as a total freak. Romana can just say something strange in response to stuff, Jack can make belligerent comments and KC can make cynical comments. This was actually quite good at first but on multiple playthroughs, it gets exposed.

You are told as the start of the game that you cannot ‘lose’ but your choices change how people react to you. This is true in mini segments. You can be as strange or belligerent towards people as you want but they will inevitably go back to a fixed track dialogue that’s so lazily done, it makes no sense half the time. An example of this is when Romana makes strange comments, some people call her weird whereas others just churn out their pre-determined speech as if saying ‘Pineapple’ for no reason is perfectly normal.

Gameplay wise, there isn’t a lot. There are four, maybe five, bits where you have to do the computer game equivalent of a mini jigsaw puzzle but that’s it. The rest is incessantly clicking through endless, and sometimes pointless dialogue.

The game also had a few glitches when I played. Sometimes a puzzle would start and the game would move on in the background and characters would talk over what was happening. On one of my subsequent playthroughs, when I skipped some dialogue, the character didn’t seem to like this and just carried on talking anyway.

The menus and dialogue selections are very clunky too. It felt like the game wasn’t ready for me to press buttons at certain points and I would have to press a button twice to select a dialogue choice or wiggle the analogue stick a lot to see if the menu was active. And even then, there was no guarantee the cursor would move to where I wanted it to go. It felt a lot like poor design.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 43 Achievements

All of the achievements can be put into three categories. Story Related; Multiple Pathways and continuous selection.

There are 16 achievements for running through the game from start to finish and you will get some of the multiple-choice ones as you do.

Turning to the continuous selection ones, there are 9 achievements here. With your three characters, you have to select strange, cynical or belligerent dialogue options at every opportunity. If you don’t miss any, all 6 will unlock by the end of the second act. There are 2 achievements for each character. The bigger pain in the ass are the other three. You make reports as you play the game that show the public what’s happening in the story and these reports can either be cautious, edgy or inflammatory. You have to continuously select the same style of report to get three separate achievements associated with the styles. Thankfully this only applies to the first act. I think I would have killed myself if I had to play through the full game three times.

The other multiple pathways ones can all be obtained by leaving to the main menu after the first achievement unlocks and reloading. This is only really necessary in Act III since you have to play Act I three times anyway and there are no missables in Act II. The most notable ones for these involve taking an Opto test as both Romana and Jack. There are three outcomes for each character and you have to get all three for six achievements. Jack also has a belligerent response instead of taking the test so this one is actually 4 choices.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Knee Deep was a straight forward game completion that I did actually enjoy for the first couple of hours. It’s funny in places too but the dialogue inconsistencies and pretentious nature of some of the humour somewhat zapped my enjoyment. The last two partial playthroughs were not fun either. Still, for the achievement hunters, it’s an effortless 100%.