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Everyone loves games crafted from the mind of Luca Redwood and EightyEight Games. If you don’t, then you either haven’t played them or are a big ol’ doody-head. I mean, who couldn’t love You Must Build a Boat? There’s no option of building a boat, you MUST build it. Gold. Also, 1000000 which is a game I can never remember how many zeroes to add to it. Sure, they look like match-3 games, but delve into them and you’ll find they’re chock-full of deeper gameplay that belies their Bejeweled aesthetic.
On Wednesday, we’ll get to see his latest foray into our collective gamespace when EightyEight Games releases Photographs, a game most definitely unlike the previous two.
First of all, Photographs isn’t just one game, it’s actually five puzzle games all tied together with the theme of seemingly insignificant photos that end up marking important points in our characters’ lives. The game asks you to take a snap of a scene and then transitions to a puzzle that needs solving before the story continues via another Polaroid.
Unlike his previous games, Luca has decided to make the story the centerpiece here. Each vignette tells another tale and the puzzles themselves seem secondary to the world Luca’s put together. Eventually, all the disparate stories will coalesce into one, or so he tells us.
The game is divided into five distinct stories, set in five different times and locations, A player will learn how to solve progressively difficult puzzles in one story, and then move to the next story which has completely different gameplay.
That’s important because Photograph’s other big secret is that it’s not a puzzle game, it’s a narrative game. The dioramas, the photographs, the sound, the voices, and the puzzles, come together to create a cohesive narrative experience that tells that specific story.
I’ve been playing Photographs a bit over the weekend and hope to have my full review up on Wednesday right after it launches.
After finishing the first story my reaction is it’s interesting, but theme might be too dark for kids of a certain age. Parental guidance recommended.
Maybe others will think differently, but after finishing the game the my opinion is meh, puzzles were bleh, art was eh, stories were huh.
I finished the game this morning, and I’m kind of on the same page. I’ll disagree on the art–I thought it looked pretty good, especially for pixel art, which I don’t always like.
I found the puzzles frustrating. Most of them required little thought, with one or two in each group being more difficult. By the time the difficulty ramped up, that section was over.
The stories weren’t anything to write home about, either. Often predictable, usually dull, relentlessly depressing.
I’m glad I knew right up front this was a narrative game and each section would only take about 1/2 hour. I would have been more disappointed otherwise. The disappointment I do feel is mostly that this game isn’t my cup of tea. I enjoyed Redwood’s previous efforts. This game doesn’t feel like you’re meant to enjoy it, and that’s fine. I just don’t think it’s anywhere near as profound as he hopes it to be.
Guess I’m a big ol’ doody-head, since I thought YMBAB was lousy.
Eh, we’ve all got our different tastes. I remember on the PT forums there were a couple of users I consistently disagreed with–if they raved about a game, I knew it wasn’t for me.
That’s pretty valuable, actually. You have to know your own tastes. I bought Superbrothers Sword and Sworcery against my better judgment and thought the hype was vastly overstated.
Glad I wasn’t the only one.
Me too! I hated that game and uninstalled it after maybe 20 minutes of gameplay.
I’m right there with you al on Superbrothers. I think it came out at the right time (for it) when an indie game with unique pixel graphics and an interesting soundtrack was something new and special and it therefore got way overhyped. I think if it came out today it would be completely overlooked. I do want to try it again sometime and maybe give it a little more of a chance, but I was not impressed when I last tried it.
I finished Superbrothers around when it came it, and thought it was ok. I don’t think I will ever revisit it. There are definitely better adventure games out there. I think @Mirefox is right that it benefited greatly from really good timing for what it was.
As far as indies that received major hype I vastly preferred Monument Valley.