I’ve been trying to imagine the elevator pitch for EightyEight Games’ fine new puzzler, You Must Build A Boat. The best, most succinct description I can come up with is: “imagine if Candy Crush was any good.”
Welcome to Newton, 2087. In this dystopic cityscape of neon lights, seedy underbellies and scientific industry, the overwhelming influences of genetic engineering, CCTV, AI and techno-terrorists are running rampant over the lives of its troubled inhabitants. The only means of escape is in the Trance, a digital world of obsolete physics, where any computer programme can be made manifest and interacted with on a human level. It’s now the norm to have wetware implanted in your brain so that you can phase in and out of Trance whenever you like.
1972, a South American revolution, seen through the eyes of a cleaner. Sunset neatly side-steps the usual banana republic videogame clichés by shifting focus. You are neither the Generalissimo lording it over a strategy game, nor the first-person soldier running through the jungles. You're a cleaner.
In short, Game Of Thrones the videogame. The Witcher 3 sees this epic role-playing fantasy series truly rival its key competitor, the Elder Scrolls series. The Witcher 3 particularly scores on delivering a huge, credible and complex world with incredible granularity – it's real go anywhere, do loads of things stuff.
Shiny cars, going fast. In real life, obsessing over gravel-crunching oversteer or the downforce your rear spoiler exerts is one for Jeremy Clarkson fans or pimply youths in suburban retail car parks, late at night. But there's something about the mix of sheer muscularity and precision strategy that appeals when racing is on TV or in videogame form. It's a spectacle, meant partly in the situationist sense.
Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam, and the deer and the antelope play... and corrupt oil prospectors shoot you as soon as look at you, and ankle-biting rattlesnakes lurk under the sand dunes, and abandoned gold mines are teeming with bandits.
The typical episode of the Game of Thrones TV show has been memorably compared to Twitter: there are 140 characters and something terrible always happens. The first episode of Telltale Games' story-driven take on the franchise came close, introducing four of our five playable characters alongside a large cast of non-playables before pulling a very Thrones move and murdering one of our would-be heroes while we looked on, helpless. The message, as in the show, was clear – nobody is safe.
Normally if you throw together three genres of videogame, the result is a mess. The Quest Keeper however, is a curious mashup of endless runner (think Temple Run), roguelike dungeon crawl and - of all things - free to play, time-eating Frogger clone, Crossy Road that works.
I've got blood in my eyes… no, hang on a second, it's OK, it's not blood – it's brains and a bit of severed spinal column! Mortal Kombat X is one of the most gleefully violent and bloody videogames ever.
It may not technically offer the best in fast-paced tactical combat (or kombat even). Nor does it feature the best visuals. And it certainly doesn't offer a smooth learning curve for novices. But for sheer bloodlust, Mortal Kombat X sticks true to the series' roots and carves itself a niche, with a serrated military knife, in the body of classic fighting games.
"Just one more thing…" What is it about great detective fiction in film and books that defies replication in videogames? You'd think that videogames would be ideal for whodunits. But the best mysteries in games (see Grim Fandango) roam far from simple murder. And the games that most closely ape the policier – like L.A. Noire – tend to take an unhappy tumble into the "uncanny valley".