The Den by Ben Jackson
Playtime: 1 hour 14 minutes
The one where: teens piece together their unusual upbringing
I really enjoyed this one! It caught me up and I felt very compelled to keep playing until I got to the end. Has a very action/thriller feeling.
This has an engrossing plot. Using environmental storytelling to assembles clues about the sinister backstory . . . encountering ominous messages left by your dead predecessors, these are plot beats that I’m always going to be excited about.
I didn’t save any quotes but that may have more to do with me getting so distracted that I forgot to save any. The teenagers had some nice realistic character notes in the writing. I enjoyed the overall arc, especially the beats for the Father character in the last third or so. And the ending animation / sound I found very affecting.
The game did a really impressive job steering the player along the path to completion. I’m not sure there was a time in the entire game that I felt like I didn’t know where to do or what to be working on. Ymmv, but I’m a big fan of the way the game, for example, just makes you stay in a certain area if that’s the area with the next puzzle (and required reagents) sometimes. And as @DeusIrae noted, there are a fair amount of hints in the dialogue, but I think better too many than too few.
I liked the UI, especially the way travel was simplified once you had access to all of the rooms (and the automatic tracking of which terminals you had unlocked).
The pacing also just felt really great, like there was a steady delivery of points of interest. And the sequencing of the ending action sequences was really well done—I felt like I was being challenged to coordinate them, but very achievably, and I suspect that was difficult to arrange on the back end.
I encountered some bugginess: mostly minor (continuity issues: Aiden unscrewing the vent cover every time he goes through it, Vee kicking out the vent cover every time she encounters it) and one more major (at one point while Vee was in the area with the recharging room and the main vents the game stopped letting me switch back and forth between the PCs, even though Aiden needed to progress—like it thought it was switching and I would see the new name appear, but I would keep getting Vee’s description text. I had to reload a save to fix this).
This game also delivered a small amount of the “oh, it’s cool to be on a team” feeling. I like being on teams! The division of tasks between the two PCs was fun. But the effect was somewhat limited by the fact that I am, ultimately, both of them. I have zero suspense about if they should trust each other because I know the broad who’s playing both of them and she’s highly trustworthy.
And this led me to the half-formed thought, probably really not advisable . . . whispers: but what if it was two player? That must be incredibly difficult (and I mildly expressed last year that I thought to one multiplayer entry didn’t do enough with the concept) but this would be so great with a Portal 2 like experience. Anyhow, forgive my extremely aspirational brainstorming.
Oh and I wish I knew how to get that last 3% survivability rating . . .
| Front matter | ||
|---|---|---|
| Could better set the table for the game | Successfully sets the table for the game | Successfully sets the table for the game PLUS |
Overall, I thought an extraordinarily well-paced cinematic sci-fi experience
Gameplay tips / typos
- in a description of the classroom: “dissobeyed”