Year Walk

Genre: Adventure, Point and click

Developer: Simogo

Released: 6. March 2014

In the old days man tried to catch a glimpse of the future in the strangest of ways. Enter the world of the horrifying Swedish folklore world in this great indie game.

The Yawhg

 

Genre: RPG, Adventure

Developer: Damian Sommer, Emily Carroll

The good:

- beautiful artwork and soundtrack

- replayable

- many varieties in the adventures and outcomes

 

The bad:

- short

 

The mysterious Yawhg is coming. Your chosen heroes have 6 weeks to prepare for the arrival. Can you save the town?

This is a one-to-four player game. There are several locations in the city, where your heroes can do activities, like chopping wood in the forest, or tending the sick in the hospital.While doing these activities, they gain skill points, magic for meditating, persistency for fighting in the arena, etc. Plus every time you make an activity, a special scenario appears, and if you choose well your character gains additional points, or if you make the wrong decision you lose points. All your decisions are influencing the final outcome, the fate of your characters and the town. Although don't expect a 100% happy ending even if you think you did everything right.

It is a fairly short game, but can be replayed many times. One playthrough is around 10 minutes, even if you read everything carefully. The scenarios that come up are varied, and even if the same one comes up multiple times, the outcome depends on your already gathered skill points. When I finished first, I wanted more and more. I replayed many times, tried many variants of the activities, and every time I was surprised and excited about the ending. It can be played as a single player, or multiplayer. Both types can give a great experience, but with more people the game is more convincing, and you can imagine you are really there waiting in tension for the unknown.

The game is like a beautiful drawing, and you get involved in the fantastical town's life, choose leader for talking rats, become a werewolf, or if you are lucky dance through the night with a druid. Emily Carroll did a great job with the artwork. The soundtrack is gorgeous, after I stopped playing I couldn't stop listening to Halina Heron's song.

 
All together, the music, the illustrations give a special, fantastical mood, which just draws in the player into this magical world.

Final Score:

9/10

Plague Inc.: Evolved (Early Access)

 

Genre: Strategy, simulation

Developer: Ndemic Creations

Release Date: 20. Feb. 2014

EXTERMINATE!!!EXTERMINATE!!!EXTERMINATE!!!

Who wouldn't dream about destroying humanity? Who isn't affraid that someday a new virus appears that wipes us out? Well in this game you can create your own pathogen, mutate it and spread it so it kills everyone on Earth.

This game was developed from the earlier mobile game, Plague Inc, and adds a couple new features. Create a pandemic that started from a single little bacteria or fungus or virus, choose whatever you would like and mutate it into a serial killer. One person doesn't wash hands, next one already infected and so on. It's a simple simulation, if not played on harder difficulties it's not too challangeing.
WARNING! The games content is not full, still early access, but it is stable, and they are planning in the next weeks to add multiplayer.

The overall look is beautiful and detailed, 3D models of the viruses, pretty pictures of cities, many diagrams ad graphs, nice color scheme. So name your epidemic and the apocalypse can begin.

There are three ways you can customize it, collecting evolution points and using them to mutate symptoms, resistances and other aspects which help you make it spread faster, make it more lethal and slow down the cure. Yor only "enemy" is the CDC, where they are developing the cure. It is your job to be faster than them if you don't want any nasty remaining humans to survive.Spread it continentally, through water and air, infect those rats and flies.

I think it will be worth to wait for all the components, just hope a Unicorn virus doesn't attack us till then.

Final Score:

6/10

Journal

Genre: interactive adventure game

Developer: Locked Door Puzzle

Release Date: 17. Feb 2014

This isn't a game for masses, not a first person shooter with high quality graphics. It isn't a whole world of role-playing with monsters, weapons and magic. This isn't a strategy game with huge armies to control. If you only play games because of these, then back away slowly from this game. This is just a simple story about a young girl, and how she struggles with some events in her life.

With all the Telltale Games (Walking Dead and Wolf Among Us) interactive stories are becoming more and more and more popular. This game is not that great neither with story, neither with gameplay, neither with graphics, but it crawls into your heart. In it's 1-2 hour gameplay, you control a girl and have to rebuild her somehow-erased journal, walking through the sketchy, but beautiful hand-drawn pages of the journal. I have to admit the surroundings and 3D elements could have been made better, but the journal parts were weird in a lovely way and the narrating circus parts were just magnificent.

I think indie game maker, Richard Perrin, did a great job with this game's story. You are in a fog the whole game, you don't know the most important thing, and it is seldomly mentioned. The game focuses on speaking to other character, and deciding how the girl should behave. There are a couple of bigger decisions, but you can't change the major storyline. Because you are a little girl nobody wants to tell you anything, your parents don't want to tell you why they separated, plus you have troubles at school, struggling with anxiety, and depending on how you behave with your friends will decide how they treat you in the end. Just like in real life. The story deals with these things, which might seem difficult even for an adult, but how these things are even more difficult for a child. Meanwhile there is another storyline with shadow figurines, which at first might seem like it has nothing to do with our young girl, but in the end integrates slowly into her life.

I highly recommend this game, although as I mentioned it before, not for anyone who can't appreciate a simple but makes-you-think story.

Final Score:

8/10