For a genre that has given rise to the creation of so many great games, it can often be difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to the puzzle platformer. This is doubly true when games under its umbrella are heavily evocative of one another in certain visual or mechanical elements,
As one of gaming’s oldest genres, puzzle games are a dime a dozen. Despite that, I find myself excited when a new one is released. The reason being that because there are so many to choose from, developers are forced to either get extremely creative with their presentation or risk falling into obscurity.
Having grown up during the halcyon days of the original PlayStation yet totally separate from the hype that surrounded the library it sported was kind of weird. I had my eyes set on a Saturn being the rabid SEGA fan that I was in the ’90s, though that never came to pass until well after
The sheer amount of text in my favorite games was always the excuse that I gave to my parents that video games were actually good for me. “Look at all the reading I’m doing! It’s educational!” There really is a lot of text in games, when you think about it. Even in games with little-to-no
Oddworld – a relatively popular franchise that was pumping out relatively well-received games in the late 90s and early 00s. A franchise that I’d never really had any experience with, but seemed to have some decent popularity in the gaming sphere.
So I was actually playing today’s game, Deleveled, 15 years ago. I played it every time my friends and I tried to kill Absolute Virtue. Oh wait, this game is new? And it’s a puzzle game, not an MMORPG? Oh right, that was Final Fantasy XI, easy mistake to make…
It’s become a bit of a running joke amongst some in how often indie developers and teams opt for pixel-style art in their games. It’s reached the point where whenever a new game with this aesthetic is announced, there’s some group that will complain, “Oh, look, another indie dev using pixels again, how original.”