Season finales are undeniably difficult to pull off: they need to pull the disparate plots of the story together in a way that feels satisfying but not hackneyed, while still maintaining a sense of self-contained narrative. A serialized game like Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space carries the added weight of presenting us with the highest expression of the puzzles and mechanics its introduced thus far.

I've come to realize that the second half of Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space -- say, starting with "Night of the Raving Dead," [$4.99] and continuing through the finale, "What's New Beelzebub?" [$4.99] -- are funnier and generally better than the first two episodes. This is largely because the last three episodes are more tightly connected, with each cliffhanger transitioning smoothly into the next episode. They feel cohesive, and that makes me feel invested.

But it's also because, in contrast to the procedural feel of the first two entries in the series "Ice Station Santa" and "Moai Better Blues," these latter episodes are a perfect fit for the point-and-click adventure genre.

(more...)

"Chariots of the Dogs," [$4.99] the fourth episode in the Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space series is easily the best one so far. The Sam & Max series has always been tightly written and designed, but "Chariots" does two things remarkably well: it matches its narrative hook to its mechanics, and it unifies the entire series.

If nothing else, "Chariots" is remarkable for the way it brings almost all of the big questions from the first three episodes and ties them together: the Bosco and Stinky subplots are advanced, and previously off-screen bit roles come forward as major players in the series. This feels satisfying and rewarding for longtime devotees, and Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space's episodic structure lends itself to weaving these disparate narrative threads together. Even the intro sequence feels tighter and more cinematic, suggesting a series that is maturing with each episode.

Episodes one, two, and three were generally self-contained, but "Chariots" provides the most solid narrative link in the series thus far: it picks up the immediate aftermath of "Night of the Raving Dead" [$4.99] and ends on a cliffhanger that propels the story into episode five [$4.99]

The Sam & Max series has always been, at its heart, based on inventory items, but Beyond Time and Space seems dedicated to refining and twisting that formula as much as possible: "Moai Better Blues" [$4.99] used portals to great effect; the previously mentioned "Raving Dead" included several dialogue trees and ambient aural puzzles. Without spoiling anything, "Chariots of the Dogs" focuses on time travel.

Incidentally, the time travel mechanic was first introduced in episode one, "Ice Station Santa," [$4.99] when Sam and Max have to appease the Ghosts of Christmases Past, Present and Future. (The Ghost of Christmas Future section actually foreshadows the end of "Chariots," if you're paying attention.)

The beauty of "Chariots" isn't just that it's an adventure game with a time-travel story; the time travel conceit shapes and informs every puzzle, becoming the tentpole mechanic in its own right. A lazier game would use time travel as a plot device and build a standard inventory game around it. "Chariots of the Dogs" focuses not just on matching certain items with certain solutions, but in exploring their effects through time. Like its predecessors, "Chariots" does a good job matching its story hooks with its mechanics, which makes each relatively short episode feel distinctive and full-featured.

The logic employed in "Chariots" is relatively straightforward: the Freelance Police can move forward in time to gather clues, which in turn allows them to travel backward in time and solve puzzles, which in turn affect the future. There's a nice gameplay loop there, and the game as a whole feels holistic and natural, each puzzle mechanic and story arc syncing perfectly.

It's no surprise, then, that "Chariots" feels intuitive and fun throughout. Making its players feel smart has always been one of Sam & Max's strong suits, but every episode until now has had puzzles that feel arbitrary or unfair. Generally speaking, the broad strokes of each puzzle or story arc are easy to grasp in "Chariots," even if the step-by-step puzzle solution requires some tinkering and mental elasticity. For my money, this installment strikes the right balance of deductive reasoning and old-fashioned observation.

This is, I'm assuming, another of episodic game development's bounties: after four games (not counting Sam & Max Save the World, the previous series of episodic Telltale games), the writers and developers of Sam & Max Beyond Time & Space are zeroing in on smart, intuitive puzzle design.

"Chariots of the Dogs"  is smoothly and tightly paced, and nothing feels misplaced or kludged together. It's a charming, warm, and funny game, and it's the best episode in an increasingly good series.

The third episode of Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space was originally released in 2008, on the cusp of the videogame industry's zombie renaissance. Four years and three Dead Risings later the iOS port of "Night of the Raving Dead" [$4.99] may feel -- to steal a quote from the game's antagonist, the vampire Jurgen -- "played, yo." Still, Steve Purcell's brand of silly humor gives "Raving Dead" life, even for those tired of zombies and vampires.

This season of episodic Sam & Max games comes into its own in "Raving Dead," particularly if players have been keeping up since the first episode "Ice Station Santa" : we can start to see how the central town and its inhabitants are changing over time. We now have access to Sybil's shop, but Bosco's Inconvenience has been shuttered since he went missing in the second episode, "Moai Better Blues" ; Flint Paper takes a more active role in "Raving Dead," and Sam and Max have all but stopped giving Stinky the benefit of the doubt in the mysterious death of her grandfather. This is one of the strengths of episodic gaming, and it's nice to see Telltale Games' writing come to fruition.

(more...)

The description for Ziggurat [$.99] calls it "the end of a much longer story -- a story which ends with The Last Human On Earth standing atop a stratosphere-high stone pyramid." Incoboto [$3.99] could have been described similarly: "Incoboto is the end of a much longer story -- a story which ends with The Last Human in the Galaxy trying to survive the heat death of the universe."

It's a uniquely lonely and melancholy game, and almost every visual and design tweak reinforces that. Inco, the protagonist and player-character, is tiny and feels insignificant next to the immense contraptions he has to manipulate to find new energy sources for his dying solar system; if you zoom the map out far enough, he disappears from sight completely.

Incoboto's elegant one-finger touch controls keep developer Fluttermind from having to implement a cluttered user interface, keeping players' focus on only a few things at a time. The relative abundance of inky black sky only reinforces the idea that Inco is thoroughly alone. In fact, the only communication he receives are from outdated corporate memos and the fragmented death rattles of the dead and dying inhabitants of the Milky Way.

Well ... that's not entirely true. (more...)

The first time I booted up ZiGGURAT [$0.99], I was lying in bed, in the dark. I was hoping for something relatively simple  to unwind with, but the pulsing music and unending creep of monoptic aliens made that impossible. Just playing Ziggurat felt clunky the first time I tried it, forcing me to sit upright in bed.

There's no pause button in Ziggurat, which speaks volumes about its design. Ziggurat demands attention.

Tim Rogers -- a game designer under the Action Button Entertainment moniker and professional Kotaku.com word-puker -- also demands attention, or at least an attention span. His reputation is for sharp criticism (his own reviews site is particularly brutal) buried under sprawling, maximalist writing, but Ziggurat is beautiful in its simplicity. In its own way, it reinforces all of the fundamental, paradoxical truth of the "endless" genre: infinite potential married to inevitable failure.

(more...)

Buying an episodic game is equal parts gambling and Kickstarting. "Moai Better Blues [$4.99]," the second game in Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space, takes place right after the delightful "Ice Station Santa [$4.99]," which means the entire series is meant to be taken as a whole. Telltale is banking on its audience's willingness to buy every episode, hoping that they feel invested enough in the series' overarching framework to not skip episode two, even though it's weaker than the first.

"Moai Better Blues" is still a good iOS port, and the presentation, stability, and touch implementation that made the first episode so successful are still featured. Unfortunately, the clunky, tepid mini-games from "Ice Station Santa" also return to the fold.

(more...)

I didn't really mean to play Eufloria [$4.99] and Mass Effect at the same time during the last few days, but accidentally playing two games on opposite ends of the science fiction spectrum has been fruitful. On the one hand, Mass Effect seems absurdly violent at first glance, sporting photorealistic visuals and third-person shooting. Your character can, quite literally, be a renegade. On the other, Eufloria is relaxed and ambient, full of soft lines and leisure. It's a game about growing flowers.

But Mass Effect is about saving lives as much as ending them. And, beneath the surface, Eufloria is a killing ground: no quarter for your enemies as your troops get sent again and again into the breach. That same incongruity between mechanics and presentation infects the rest of the game.

(more...)

Telltale's offerings have been received rather frigidly of late, especially after we called Jurassic Park "technically messy" and "poorly optimized." I'm happy to report, then, that "Ice Station Santa" -- the first of five episodes in Sam & Max Beyond Time & Space [$4.99] -- is a solid iOS port of the 2007 point-and-click.

To wit: in the four or so hours it takes to beat the game, I didn't experience any crashes, frame rate drops, or audio stutters. "Ice Station Santa" runs smoothly and stably, and Telltale's newfound technical prowess is matched with a great touch interface.

Unlike, say, the Hector series, Sam & Max Beyond Time & Space is in three dimensions, and Sam is controlled with a virtual analog stick. A two-finger pinch highlights all the click-able objects in a given area, and the game's touch implementation is remarkably precise, even when there are dozens of items on the screen to interact with.

(more...)

I like to imagine there's an Oberlin burnout somewhere who's made a living getting bent on ayahuasca and pitching music-history based games to different companies. My hypothetical game designer, wide-eyed and euphoric, is responsible for games like Boom Boom Rocket, Eternal Sonata, Jazz: Trump's Journey [$2.99], and now Frederic --Resurrection of Music [$1.99/HD/Lite], by Forever Entertainment S.A.

In the first scene, set in present-day Paris, Fryderyk Chopin climbs out of his grave, speaks with the Muses, and rap-battles a French DJ with dual-wield keyboards and a jetpack. After this, he rides a horse-and-carriage to Jamaica and gets high with a reggae artist named Rob. Amazing.

(more...)

An episodic JRPG seems like a hard sell – how do you cut a genre built on the backs of immense sagas and marathon weekend play sessions into bite-sized chunks? Apparently by writing cliffhangers into each narrative focal point and developing for iOS, where mobile users might appreciate a light-weight, turn-based trek through RPG Maker heaven.

Armed with a built-in audience, a new publishing deal with Konami, and a multi-tiered business model, Ash II: Shadows [$2.99 Silver Edition / $4.99 Gold Edition] should have been a sure thing for SRRN Games. The UI is cleaner, the sprites more detailed, and random encounters replaced with on-screen enemies – Konami cash put to good use. I have the lasting impression, though, that SRRN's business concerns have impacted – if  not downright dictated – some of its design choices.

(more...)

Games like Monkey Quest: Thunderbow [$0.99/HD] disrupt the feel-good media narrative we like to tell about the App Store. It's a low-risk way to capitalize on experimental games like Sword & Sworcery [$4.99], a place where Andreas Illiger, the one-man dev team behind Tiny Wings [$0.99], can sell thousands of copies. It's also where a giant corporation like Nickelodeon can sell us an Angry Birds [$0.99] clone to advertise its kid-friendly MMO, Monkey Quest.

It would be easier to find Thunderbow distasteful if it weren't so radical, born out of the same  mid-90s fever dream that brought us anthropomorphic turtles who were also ninjas. The hero of the game is a nameless monkey who carries a bow-and-arrow. After you beat the 30 available levels -- more are, supposedly, coming soon -- you can play a few bonus rounds with a girl-monkey who shoots lightning bolts out of her electric guitar-bow. It's incredible.

(more...)

To steal a line from Jon Irwin, "The platforming genre, once dominant, has now been relegated to counterprogramming." Which is to say that the two-dimensional platformer has overtaken, like kudzu, much of the niche and indie landscape that isn't dominated by games that involve shooting things in the face. For mobile gaming, that idea is more or less maintained  if you swap face-shooting for physics-puzzling or colored-block-sliding. But that kind of reductive generalization doesn't leave room for nuance, and nuance is exactly what you need to talk about Terra Noctis.

At first blush, Terra Noctis [$.99] seems pretty derivative: the pits are inexplicably endless, the physics are rudimentary, and the enemies -- pumped in straight from the Mushroom Kingdom -- die if something lands on their heads. Even the narrative introduction seems particularly on the nose: Allen is a nightmare who isn't scary enough to pass his monster exams. Desperate, he sneaks out of school to find a way to get scarier. The idea is never revisited.

(more...)

There's not much to say about the Hector series -- rushing headlong to its conclusion in Beyond Reasonable Doom [$4.99 /$6.99] -- that hasn't been said before. We've noted its sharp writing; its high production values; and, most importantly, the way it continually tweaks and revises the traditional adventure genre.

Straandlooper have achieved this by making each episode in the series structurally unique. Ep1 gave Hector three discrete objectives to complete while Ep2 led him through a long and meandering investigation. Episode 3, though, is very clear cut in its goals: Hector most stop a terrorist from using biochemical weapons on the Clappers Wreake fair.

(more...)

Machinarium [$4.99] is a treasure, judiciously and efficiently designed, with not a single pencil-drawn sprite out of place.

It was worthing playing on the PC two years ago, it will be worth playing on the PlayStation 3 later this year, and it's worthing playing on your iPad 2 right now.

The "story" of Machinarium -- Amanita Design's first full-length effort -- is unobtrusive and elegant, told entirely through the unnamed protagonist-bot's thought bubbles and context clues. There is no human speech to parse, no dialogue trees to navigate, no lengthy exposition to ignore -- Jakub Dvorsky and his team have a laser-sighted focus on puzzle design.

(more...)

What I like about the Hector: Badge of Carnage games is how comparatively different from one another they are. The gap between We Negotiate With Terrorists and its follow-up Senseless Acts of Justice [$4.99 / $6.99] highlights not only the breadth and scope of the adventure genre, but also Straandlooper’s willingness to use episodic content as an avenue for experimentation and iteration.

There are some technical improvements to note -- Straandlooper have added helpful on-screen cues to show players precisely where they’re tapping, and Senseless Acts of Justice is significantly longer than its predecessor -- but Hector’s cirrhotic core remains largely unchanged: it's still a competent adventure, smartly written and well-designed.

(more...)