Look at Antichamber

I can't say that I've played many first person puzzle games in the vein of portal recently, mostly because they often encompass some elements of first person platforming and I'm not a big fan of that concept, but probably because I love my puzzles more in the Layton sense, removed in some way from the flow of the game in self-contained bits and chunks. Antichamber is doing the first person puzzle thing greatly with many surprises and fairly impressive technical tricks.

The style of Antichamber is something entirely
Through the magic of - my guess - loading big chunks of levels at the same time and the judicious use of portal-like mechanics, antichamber features what it calls "non-euclidean geometry". Basically, the level layout doesn't make physical sense. You might be going up stairs forever or running around the same corner over and over or looking at a thing from different directions with radically different results. It is probably extremely interesting on how this is done, I can only speculate here but the seamlessness is stylishly impressive.

These stairs all bring you back to the same spot forever.

Would the game work without that kind of element? Would Antichamber stand on its own without it's minimalist style with bright colors thrown here and there and weird hint-like pictures that could also be taken as deep life lessons? I'm not too sure. The way everything connects almost perfectly (I've spotted some areas where part of the levels 'bled' into each other) encourages the player to progress and unlock more things throughout the game.

At any time, you can go back to any room you've been to before

But some of the puzzles can be frustrating
There is no story in Antichamber. No funny narrator to tell you what to do or what's going on. In fact, nothing is going on, I'm sure. You progress in the labyrinth-like map, find new tools with special abilities (some of which that aren't explained well, which stumped me for a while) and discover puzzles here and there that you might or might not be able to solve. And if you can't solve a puzzle, you might try for any length of time to do it, the same thing goes if you can solve the puzzle - i.e. if you have all the tools required to do so - you might fail repeatedly and conclude that no, you can't solve the puzzle.

I spent quite some time on this puzzle and had to look it up on the Internet.

This is exacerbated by the fact that a few puzzle take some time and precision to setup, placing blocks around to trigger chain reactions for example can be a time-consuming process where you need to precisely align things together. Trying that a few time and failing lead me to go to the Internet to find the solution, or sometimes just figure it out by random luck and never think about it again, happy to have proceeded. Some puzzle might also involve light platforming - if I did them correctly - and it is not the most precise thing ever.

You're not very helpful, Antichamber.

In any case, the lack of story hurts a little bit the game in this way because there is no voice over to tell you that you can't solve a puzzle and should come back later, there is no hint anywhere except in cryptic messages that could maybe help you but most of the time they make sense after you've solved the puzzle. The only hint you get about most of the game is that hitting the ESC key brings you back to the main room and then you can go back anywhere you want from there.

How I would fix this
Since one of the most frustrating things is to not know if you can solve a puzzle, adding some kind of code near the puzzles so you know what you need to successfully navigate through them would be helpful. Maybe explaining the functions of the tools better too? I had some trouble figuring one of them out and until I saw what it could do on the Internet, I couldn't proceed.

One other thing that I didn't like about Antichamber is the controls for some of the features of the tools you get. Middle mouse button + right click is perfectly fine, but middle mouse button + left click? Having to move my hand in a weird way to solve some of the puzzles wasn't the most comfortable thing. Maybe binding that to the ctrl key or something else would've helped in that case.

All you need to know, when you start up the game maybe.

Housekeeping

Sorry folks, I've been doing crazy overtime this weekend, no review!

Look at Mark of the Ninja

I'm terrible at stealth games. In metal gear solid, I constantly have to shoot my way out of failed sneaking operations, and I don't feel bad because even tho it was ridiculously tough to win such encounters in the old MGS games, the recent ones - such as peace walker - left you with good options and choices in case you knew you had to fight at one point or another. I've heard many good things about Mark of the Ninja and decided to give it a shot.

No amount of fine tuning will fix bad players
This game plays great, the controls are spot-on and will allow you to do pretty much whatever you want - with some exceptions when contextual menus get out of hand and you can't do a specific thing because you're too close to another, dropping guards in vents comes to mind - the character moves precisely where you want to and you get tons of informations from the world.

You know the radius of the sounds you're making, you know if you're hidden or not with simple visual cues, all of the possible information that you could need to pull of successful stealth missions is readily available. Vision cones, being able to peek out of doors and vents, contextual menus for everything... That being said, I didn't have a great time playing it because I seem to be terrible at it. Jumping behind a guard only to have him turn around and shoot me, or simply miss the assassination prompt - terrible with a mouse/keyboard, but I'm not holding that against the game - and punch at the air instead of being a stealthy ninja. I'm not going to blame the game if I'm terrible at it, of course, but not being able to play it in any satisfactory way is kind of a bummer for me.

Woops

How I would fix this
Add more combat-oriented options to the game so you can get out of sticky situations easily. Maybe some difficulty level toggle to be able to play through the game with easier stealth scenarios and more dispatchable enemies. Or some kind of Ez-Gun like in metal gear solid where you become harder to detect and regenerate life at all times to make the game more easy. Why not allow you to stab with your ninja sword instead of punching? After being spotted 20 times by a guy I had to follow, trying to complete challenges, I decided Mark of the Ninja was too tough for me.

Get points!
You get score for everything you do in MotN, sneaking past an enemy undetected, killing him after, to finally be hiding his body. Secret items hidden in the levels also net you points, so do some challenges where you need to get to a specific point without triggering some manner of traps. You also lose score when you raise alarms - which is a disapointing because your total score is bummed and at this point you're better to just die anyways and restart. Points are used for leaderboard purposes, which I do not care about and to unlock new abilities and item powers, which I do care about.

Challenges and point totals you need to get

You have a few objectives in each stages, one is to get a certain number of points, that unlocks some upgrade points, you also need to do objectives such as breaking a certain number of lights or not being spotted at one point in a mission. Maybe doing these objectives was what I did wrong in the missions I struggled. For example, the mission where I was spotted 20 times it was because I had to hide enemies in dumpsters and doing so placed me in obvious disadvantages. You also need to find three scrolls per level, each with a little poem or story on them.

How I would 'fix' this
Add another difficulty level untied to leaderboards where you don't lose points for raising the alarm - thus removing the apparent need to restart the level each time you mess up.

The upgrades are nice but not earthbreaking
You have a few items in MotN, darts that make noise and attract enemies, smoke grenades to run away of tight spots or block laser beam, spike traps that impale anyone stepping on them, bugs that noisily eat enemies alive - or dispose of corpses. You also get new takedown moves such as hanging from the ceiling or through grates or from the ground. I'm not sure if I'm entirely at fault here but it happened to me a few times where I didn't know which move I had and tried to attack an enemy from a location where I couldn't do anything. All and all, my problem is that I'm not seeing anything here that would change how I tackle the core gameplay, and that's what's important.

It's not really customisation, it's just adding things to your arsenal and you mostly will use them all anyways, adding more uses to the flashbang or a bigger radius to the smoke grenade won't change how I play the game.

I usually associate screens like this with deep character customisation, but not really in this case.

How I would fix this
Add more variation to the moves and different items that would change how you play the game, anything to make the game easier for different kinds of players, maybe stealth enhancing  techniques or straightup fighting  upgrades.

Look at Puzzle Chronicles

Puzzle Chronicles is a nice switch on the classic puzzle fighter genre that got popular with Puzzle Quest and games like it. I'll state upfront that videogame titles haven't got better with times since you can notice how similar both of them are. Usually, puzzle fighters are turn-based grid fighting games where you match gems and skulls and wildcards, often you get experience and gold to find yourself equipped with skills and items that affect the flow of the game in some way, fighting against an array of enemies also empowered with special abilities. Sometimes, mini-games will allow you to do different things to increase your choices.

The core experience of Puzzle Chronicles is subpar
The main battle system is a mess. Basically, you need to match skulls with star gems so they break and that gives you rage, which in turns attack your enemy and that gives you more of the board to play with. You also match wildcards to any colors of gems and match regular gems with multipliers to gain energy to use skills. If you have items equipped and match a square of the item's color, you'll activate its power. Gems fall from left to right and you can rotate them and make them fall faster if you want.

That being said, it's never clear what the goal of the battle system is. While you're winning if the board is mostly yours and losing if the enemy is pushing the line your way, how exactly you can be victorious is vague at best. Consider the following picture.

In the upper half of that screenshot, I won the fight at that moment (you can see the gold and experience gems start to fill up, an interesting system to say the least, when you finish a fight you gain gold in proportion to the surface of the board that is empty and experience in proportion with the filled part) and there is still a good quarter of the board available to my opponent. In the lower half of my picture, I was still fighting (you can see my red gem effect activating) even tho there's only one column left for my enemy.

The problem is obvious, do you win based on your position on the board? Does the character and enemies have hidden HP totals that go down whenever you get attacked or attack? Another glaring flaw is how quickly and weirdly a battle can go and it's often unsure on how you can turn the tide.

These cobras are the worst because they can do a lot of stuff, all of which I'm not exactly sure what are the consequences, but they make me lose a lot.

How I would fix this
Surface more information, that's obvious, if you need to deal some number of damage to win, show that number (and show the damage you're dealing), if the line needs to be at some specific threshold for you to be victorious, show that threshold. If the enemies do special abilities, add markers and icons on the screen so you know when they're active and when they're gone. Also show some text explaining what the abilities do! "Poison: Deals damage" is pretty useless because as far as I know, there is no life total in this game, only a bar that moves back and forth.

The map is stylish but useless
Moving around in Puzzle Chronicles is a bit slow for reasons not useful to gameplay. You move your cursor on a 2d map and then watch your character walk very slowly to your destination. Some specific things such as training your pet or shopping are located on certain areas of the map that you need to walk all the way back to. This drags a bit and cuts between the fights and especially because some minigames are in specific areas of the world map, this makes going back to train or shop not perticulary interesting.

There's some style to this game but walking very slowly isn't good.

How I would fix this
Either you map all the important things (pet training, shop, mini dungeons and other mini-games) to some menu item, or you make movement faster (or instantaneous), that would help the flow of the game.

There's enough variety in the game's systems to keep interest



Otherwise, Puzzle Chronicles is fine, there's enough to do that will keep me from playing it to completion, you get stats, gear and puzzles that allow you to train your pet or discsover new items. It seems like there's a fair choice of equipment too, even tho I'm focusing on certain aspects of the fighting system such as generating rage and the like, because I often win that way.