FNG Alex picks a game we hadn’t even covered before. That kid’s got moxie.
The summer — horrible, horrible summer — is finally over. The fickle sun now favours that mysterious other hemisphere and won’t throw its awful unblinking glare onto your iPad screens any longer. Put away your parasols and desert canteens. The outdoors are safe for gaming again.
What games did the PT druid circle choose as their favourites of the summer’s twilight? After the jump, Jacob, Clancy, Kelsey, Owen, and FNG Alex tell you all about their picks.
Matchstick Memories
Rendezvous au Café Liliana
Review: Matchstick Memories
If you’ve ever taken a class which made you think hard in unexpected ways, but which was kind of tedious to sit through, you have a pretty good idea of how I feel about Matchstick Memories. The puzzling isn’t punishment, it’s just bland most of the time. But I’ll remember the moments when it isn’t, because the interplay between the fiction and the puzzling was so original. I may not remember much about Intro Psych, for example, but the selective attention video will stay with me so well and connect to so many other experiences that I’ll never regret the time I spent with it.
–Kelsey Rinella
Fotonica
September belongs to artsy endless runner FOTONICA, whose gentle chromatic aberration washing over clean vector art is export-quality Zen. This first-person rejig on a tired genre shouldn’t be played on swaying public transport, lest you feel the need to chromatically aberrate on a fellow commuter once the motion sickness kicks in. Within the dismal eddy of F2P licensed money-vacuums, this bastard child of Rez and Mirror’s Edge is a cultural victory. While lacking any sort of tactical meat, and possibly incurring a rueful look of suspicion from the PT dukedom, allow me this one month’s indulgence. You’ll get a good ambient soundtrack out of it.
–Alex Connolly
Ascension: Darkness Unleashed
Swing low, sweet mechana.
News: Darkness Unleashed released
There are very, very, very few games with the staying power of Ascension on my iPad. After two-plus years and I-don’t-want-to-know how many hundreds on online matches, the UI is starting to burn into my retinas. Ascension wasn’t about to lose that grip, but September’s new expansion set only tightened it.
The first few Ascension sets were careful, deliberate strategy games about slowly building synergies. By contrast, the latest expansion, Darkness Unleashed, is as subtle as a home run derby. I’ve rarely seen a close finish in DU because once you’ve started to assemble a good positive feedback loop you can’t really stop your hand from going super-critical and nuking your opponent.
With the last two sets enabled, Ascension is closer to Galaxy Trucker than chess now — it’s a game where the appearance of explosive reversals and shocking chain reactions seem to be down to luck as much as skill, but it’s so pyrotechnic that I can’t stop watching it and I don’t know if I ever will.
–Owen Faraday
Down Among the Dead Men
“They should make a Pirates movie where Johnny Depp plays every character, plus all the Care Bears, plus a live-action Jack Skellington, and then at the end we pan back to reveal it’s all being directed by Ed Wood as portrayed by Johnny Depp. $$$” — Clancy
News: Down Among the Dead Men in Out Tonight
Down Among the Dead Men is good fun if you’re looking for that Inkle gamebook experience, but not necessarily the commitment that comes with an act of Sorcery! or a trip ’round the world in 80 Days. This one is a pulpy revenge yarn with a surprisingly diverse range of player characters: alongside the typical swashbuckler are an adventurer well-versed in sea lore, a clever rogue, and a street-smart witch, among others.
Though there is out-and-out magic in it, the game’s world isn’t an overwrought Pirates of the Caribbean with copious hand-wringing about destiny between cameos from bankable piratical figures (Blackbeard, sea-squid Davy Jones, The Monkees’ Davy Jones, et cetera). Rather, most of the time your crew is whining about how, for all your wealth of mystical trinkets, you still can’t conjure up a decent meal or enough money to get the crow’s nest staffed. Like any good pirate tale, Down Among the Dead Men is about desperate men and women strung along by their desire for blood and money. Magic is just another of the means serving that end.
–Sean Clancy
Smarter Than You
News: Smarter Than You releasing Sept 25
It’s been a dismal month for iOS gaming for me, at least until the last few days of September. I’ll throw my vote to Smarter Than You, which throws an interesting twist into the classic Rock Paper Scissors formula. I still haven’t figured out how much of it is based on chance and how much can be controlled by smart (or otherwise) decisions. It feels like luck when you lose, but skill when you win. I have yet to meet M.E.T.I.S., the game’s haughty AI, but I’m very curious to see what happens when she is unleashed.
–Jacob Tierney
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