Where/When/Why? Aquaria was one of the six games that came in the first ever Humble Indie Bundle back in May 2010, making it a nice bit of history. Apparently in all the excitement for this concept, I spent a cool $25 on the bundle (averaging out to $4.17 per game), a fact that seems scarcely believable to me now.

What/who? Aquaria was released in 2007, making it something of a forerunner for this glorious epoch of internet-distributed indies. It is a sidescrolling action-adventure game set in a world of sprawling underwater caverns. It was made by “Bit Blot”, a company consisting of two people whose website suggests just made Aquaria then parted ways. One of the guys from Bit Blot is part of a three-person team working on Night in the Woods which looks like it will be a good time and also might get released this year.

First install Yep, despite having had Aquaria in my library for...

Like Aquanox, the first, Aquanox 2: Revelation ended up in my steam library via the Humble Nordic 2 Bundle. It came out in 2003, apparently. Having already dumped more time on it’s predecessor than was sensible, I was never likely to give Revelation much of a go. As it turned out, I’ve clocked up a whopping seventy minutes, a whole ten minutes over the self-imposed acceptable threshold, conveniently not calculating here the number of minutes spent alt-tabbed or menu-idling. Here’s what I learned.

• Much like it’s predecessor, Revelation begins with a hilariously long intro video. The mood is much more sombre, which is a shame because one of the saving graces of Aquanox was that I never felt it wanted me to take it too seriously.

• The visuals are, incredibly, even less appealing. Or as my girlfriend observed “they’ve changed the tint from green to brown”.

• The voice-acting is more...

Play Aquanox if it came to you via a weekly humble bundle in October 2014, the “Nordic 2” bundle. Play Aquanox if you have to play it because you’re doing this blog thing where you play all your games in your steam library in the hope of making the most of the things you’ve already paid for - you’re looking to be more adventurous but not in a way that actually takes you out of the house or makes you a better person. Play Aquanox for hours longer than you should because you don’t want to give up too soon “in case it gets better”. Then when you realise it isn’t going to get better, play Aquanox because you are stubborn and “just want to finish the game, okay?” Play Aquanox.

Play Aquanox if you want to play a game from the indeterminable past that has aged badly due to myriad design decisions (you can research it later and find out it was released in 2001 although it feels like a...

It’s hot here. It was hot when I was trying to play Antichamber, and it’s hot again now that I’m finishing this write-up of it. Here are the facts and figures:

Antichamber is a first-person view puzzle game, akin to eg. Portal. It is the tenth game that I’ve attempted for this A-Z project. Hooray for me! Apparently I also spent $12 USD on it, which makes it the most expensive game so far. I spent like four or five hours on it, and it is also the first game that I am pulling the plug on well before finishing the game, even though such a task seemed achievable.

So what’s going on here? I really wanted to like Antichamber, and I definitely went into the game with the expectation that I was going to, or that I should like it. I vaguely remembered reading a few positive things about it over the years, and from a very quick trial install when I bought it, I’d surmised that this would be...

Right. I finished Anodyne. From the get go this was An Interesting Experience. As a rule for this project I try to do as little research as possible prior to finishing the game, in order to avoid a) absorbing other people’s opinions in to my own and b) ruining surprises. I usually also hold off on checking my records to see when and how I bought the game because, well I don’t know why, but for some reason I was curious about this the whole time while playing it and didn’t think to check until the end. In this case I could neither remember reading about it nor consciously buying it, and it turned out to have come to me via Humble for PC & Android 7 in October 2013, go figure, which I probably bought mainly so I could play Ticket to Ride on my phone. It was a strange time in my life. Anyway, Anodyne. It’s self-described in Steam as a “surreal Zelda-like”, which is all I had to go on, and...

I’d thought that once I cleared the horror woods of Alan Wake -> Amnesia that the next few would fall quick and easy, but progress remains slower than anticipated. Between increased work hours and summertime induced sadness I felt my enthusiasm for this project severely dip this week, amongst a peaking awareness of the ultimate futility of the exercise in terms of, well, feeling like I am a productive human being who achieves things - surely the feeling that drives us all, deep down, that I should be nurturing yada ya. To compound matters, A.Y.I.M. took a good while to get into, probably no thanks to the dryness of the colour pallete at the start and a fairly pitiful audio track (seriously who makes a puzzle platformer devoid of music?), not to mention that control-wise it’s a pretty jarring game to play, at first. The player navigates the puzzles/platforms both by moving the avatar is...

Where/when/why/who I bought Analogue during the 14/15 Steam sales for US$4.00ish. I’d played Christine Love’s earlier, free game Digital: A Love Story and enjoyed it, so this one had been on my to-do list since it’s release back in 2012.

What It’s a visual novel-type game. The player takes on the role of an investigator in the space mega future excavating the historical records of a long-dead colony space-ship. For an extra kick, the historical records are based strongly on the medieval Korean Josean dynasty. The game is navigated by engaging in dialogue of sorts with the ships AI, using a simple command prompt, and reading historical documents for story-related clues/enjoyment. Especially the reading.

First insall? Yes!

Play time/completion Lauren and I played it for 2-3 hours, which was enough to read all the documents we could find and successfully reach an ending. Apparently...

Where/when/why This one entered the library via Humble Indie Bundle V, which I shamelessly purchased for US$5 in mid-2012 at less than a dollar a game. At that point Amnesia was probably the only game on that roster I wasn’t particularly interested in, although that would change a few months later as the game’s popularity spread due to the proliferation of LP vods of people freaking the fuck out, or something. A friend told me I totally had to play it; conveniently I already had it.

What/who Yep, so Amnesia: The Dark Descent is a first-person survival/horror. It’s set in a large, sprawling, not-quite-coherently-put-together castle in the 1800s. It has a lot of supernatural shit and progress is generally made by exploring and completing environmental puzzles. Oh and I guess the premise of the game is that you play as a guy called Daniel who wakes up having forgotten everything (Amensia...

Where/when/why? This one came in a Halloween-themed Humble Indie Bundle around this time last year (Oct 2014 for those playing along at home). I paid around $7 for the whole thing, which got me 8 games, none of which I’d played before, so I guess that works out to a bit less than a dollar per game? I am generally a sucker for Humble Bundles, particularly when they are made up mainly of games I don’t already possess. In this instance Machine for Pigs was probably the biggest drawcard anyway, as I’d had a bit of fun with it’s predecessor/older-cousin The Dark Descent (next on the list, not coincidentally) and had planned to get hold of it at some point anyway.

What/who? Machine for Pigs is a FPV exploration/horror game with some puzzles. It came out in September 2013. The project was helmed by UK indies The Chinese Room (responsible for Dear Esther), and published by Frictional...