Murderworld by Austin Auclair
Flavor: solve puzzles while playing as one of several X-Men characters
Playtime: 2 hours (did not finish, felt there must be at least several more hours)
I’m not hugely knowledgeable about Marvel or the X-Men. Consistent with that, I learned only after the game that Arcade is a canonical Marvel villain known for kidnapping superheroes and putting them in elaborate deathtraps called “murderworlds”! If you knew this already then you could have deduced more than me about the plot of this game. (If the game is canon-accurate, then the deathtraps tend more toward “elaborate and mildly whimsical” and less Saw.)
I found the high point of the game to be the ability to play as multiple characters, and explore how their unique power set would help solve puzzles. For example, I really enjoyed the Nightcrawler puzzle in murderworld, which made good use of his teleportation ability.
This game is also well polished, a lot of tires have been kicked, even in sections with a lot of pathing / patrolling / dependencies, I didn’t notice any behavior that seemed buggy. The game is also pretty big feeling, with a lot of locations and puzzles (for example, the first segment has the option to play as any of 6 heroes, and there presumably are 6 different paths to accommodate this).
I felt the game withheld the goods a bit too much, although ymmv. It took me 58 minutes to get to the actual murderworld section, and I didn’t find the intro area particularly engaging (not enough chances to use cool powers, characters acting so illogically it was difficult to suspend disbelief—really, I can’t even clear rubble until I literally find someone’s foot sticking out of a rubble pile? What kind of disaster response playbook is this?)
There was also number of places where a few more synonyms would have helped, because I tried something hitting on the intended solution, but got no encouragement from the game because I was using the wrong command (e.g., no useful response on “show [broken] golem to Nuwa,” when the correct command is “give [broken] golem to Nuwa”, my many many failed attempts to guess the verb that turned out to be “open floor tile”). I think a lot of these had even been flagged already as potential friction points because I noticed a lot of spots where the character’s internal thoughts would steer me toward the right action, but what I really needed was just a slightly larger vocabulary.
And, let’s check in on the classic comics question—what onomatopoeia to use for various actions:
A+ on that front
Selected quote:
Overall: for me at least, would really have benefited from focusing on delivering the meat of the concept and implementing a few more synonyms.