Review: Costume Quest

It's Hallowe'en! Time to wrap up your children in black bin bags, toilet roll tubes and tin foil and send them off into the pitch darkness to visit the homes of complete strangers and beg for candy! While they're out getting molested by clowns hiding in the bushes and ingesting class A drugs that were carefully disguised - you can stay home, lock the door and eat all the candy you bought for the kids while you enjoy a suitably seasonal themed gaming session.

Costume Quest is a 2010 game developed by Double Fine Productions, released on PC, the Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation Network. Set in and around a suburb and a shopping mall at Hallowe'en, you assume the role of either Reynold or Wren, one of a set of fraternal twins and a group of their misfit friends all clad in homemade Hallowe'en costumes. The game is a mixture of sandbox exploration and RPG - quests and side quests mixed in with random battles and scripted boss fights - in both of which the Hallowe'en costumes play a role.

The town has been overtaken  by Dorsilla the Witch and the Grubbins - a group of green-skinned ogres who are hell bent on enslaving the trick-or-treating children and stealing their candy hauls. The children aim to put a stop to their plans by capturing all of the candy for themselves - by trick-or-treating all of the local homes and shops and collecting new costumes, items and battle stamps to defeat the area bosses.

Like most RPGs, there are a host of collectible items and sidequests to fill out your journal with - these include collecting trading cards of bizarre candies and treats (and trading your doubles with NPCs to acquire rare ones), battle stamps, which provide new skills and abilities in battle and secret costumes, which provide new abilities in both the field and during battle.

Naturally, as it's Hallowe'en - there will be plenty of tricks to go along with your treats and plenty of fun themed challenges and sidequests to compete in - such as best costume competition, bobbing for apples, hide and seek and gatecrashing private parties in costumed disguise.

The game’s currency is candy - which is obviously stored in your characters’ trick or treat pails - which can be upgraded over time to larger ones with bigger capacities. Candy can be earned from winning battles, completing side quests, trick or treating at the correct houses or can just be picked up off the ground or found inside breakable objects.

The game is family friendly and has simple controls and limited options in battle to be accessible to younger players - but also includes several more high-brow jokes and references that only adults would understand, in addition to optional battles and tasks that are more difficult.

Each costume provides different effects in battle and in the field - the battle effects will be categorised as melee (large damage dealing attacks), defense (defensive spells), special (spells with unique effects) and support (healing spells). The field effects include shields to pass through areas with falling rocks, roller skates to jump ramps into new areas and a light up sword to illuminate dark sections.

Instead of relying on complicated stats, weapons and armor like a traditional RPG, Costume Quest relies solely on your experience and level and matching different costume abilities to certain battle situations. This also makes the game simpler for children but still retains somewhat of a challenge for the more obtuse bosses and their awkward attacks. Both attacking and defending involve matching a button sequence or quick time event too - instead of the standard turn-based trope of sitting around and waiting. This makes the relatively short battles more involved and fun.

In addition to the main storyline, there is a DLC world, Grubbins on Ice which turns the story on its head and allows the children to join forces with the Grubbins to defeat Araxia and Big Bones - who have kidnapped your friend Lucy. This DLC continues on from your main story progress and you retain your previous levels, costumes, battle stamps etc but also provides you with the opportunity to unlock DLC specific costumes and items as well as raise your levels to match the new higher levelled enemies and bosses.

My main complaint with Costume Quest is its length. It's far too short! I enjoyed a good 6-8 hours of the main quest and DLC and was sadly left wanting more. It's like I'd only been given fun size Milky Ways in my trick or treat bag from the grouchy old man across the street, knowing full well he had king sized ones in his pantry. I would have loved some post-game sidequests, another DLC world or the opportunity for a new game plus with stronger enemies - after I'd collected literally every item in the game, completed all of the sidequests and maxed out all of my characters - I was still hungry, damn it! I have a massive sweet tooth for RPGs, after all.

So if you're looking for a fun little game this Hallowe'en and are tired of the predictable jump scares of horror games or the absurd plot twists of the psychological thriller games - or if you're looking for a family friendly title you can play with your kids, I recommend Costume Quest wholeheartedly. But I can't promise you won’t be left craving something a bit more after you've finished chowing down...

Review: Dead Block

Are you like me? Are you tired of the unrealistic zombie apocalypse survival games that allow you to subsist totally on coffee creamer and mow down thousands of zombies with a chainsaw? Fed up of the ridiculous implausible cast of characters like office workers, children and overweight middle aged men? Bored of the sheer nonsensical storylines involving viruses and infections that somehow escape containment at top secret labs?

Well it's time to put an end to all of these zombie survival game tropes once and for all! Behold, Dead Block! 

A zombie survival game set in the 1950s that allows you to build explosive door traps from broken shelves and nuts…? An all new all-star cast of a construction worker… a boy scout and a sexy police officer…? A zombie invasion that was caused by the sheer unholy abomination sweeping across America known as ROCK N ROLL MUSIC?! ...Oh for fuck’s sake. It's hopeless isn't it? Zombie apocalypse games are as realistic as unicorns and living comfortably on minimum wage.

So… While we're here… Dead Block is a 2011 arcade-style safehouse defense game by Candygun Games - released on the Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network and Microsoft Windows. 

You assume the role of one of three playable characters, Jack Foster, a construction worker sporting a handlebar moustache, Mike Bacon, a resourceful boy scout and Foxy Jones, a police officer with an impressive afro and mini skirt. Some levels require you alternate control between two or all of the characters whilst allowing the CPU to control the inactive characters. There is also a split-screen co-op mode that supports up to 4 local players, but unfortunately doesn't include any online modes.

The game is broken up into different levels based around classic Americana - such as garages, diners, high schools and motels - you are then faced with the task of barricading yourself in safely by blocking up the doors and windows and setting traps to immobilise or kill any zombies who manage to creep through. You gather the main resources, wood and nuts by smashing up objects such as shelves, beds and tables and rummaging through toolboxes, cupboards and piggy banks. Wood is used to construct barricades and nuts are used to set traps.

Jack, Foxy and Mike can all build barricades but all come equipped with their own unique traps, weapons and skills. For example, Jack can smash items the fastest and build the strongest barricades. Mike can search objects the fastest and build the deadliest and most innovative traps. Foxy is the best at hand-to-hand combat and can later utilise weapons from her police arsenal like tasers and shotguns.

You can also electrocute zombies by placing a piece of meat to lure them over to a heating unit. Fixing broken TVs will distract zombies and gather them in a single area as they are dazzled by the flashing lights. Any coins you find can be used in the vending machines to refill your health with Fatty Cola or used in the jukebox for a special attack that causes all on-screen zombies to rock out and dance until they die, literally.

The primary objective of each area is to find a guitar, amplifier and effects deck that will set the stage for you to blast out an electric solo that kills all of the zombies infesting the area. Other levels will also require you to rescue your friends who are held captive somewhere within the level or kill a set number of zombies. There are also optional medals to be earned - which involve smashing a set amount of objects, killing enough zombies and ensuring you and your partners don't get eaten. Your high scores and clear times can also be uploaded to the respective format’s leaderboards for bragging rights.

Both the single player and co-op modes feature their own unique bunch of levels and there is even a DLC level pack - More Dead To Block that comes with more. You can play on either easy, medium or hard - and you're encouraged to work your way up to hard, as that's the only way to earn the elusive gold medals! 

As you progress through the game you will also be able to find stronger weapons for your characters, more complicated trap schematics and upgrades to their special ability. For example, Mike Bacon can throw out a tasty cheeseburger to distract zombies. This can later be upgraded to a brain burger with cheese that attracts more zombies and eventually into a brain burger stuffed with dynamite - which makes short work of the greedy horde.

The main problem with Dead Block is that it's very repetitive. Whether you're in a diner, a high school or a Turkish bath house - you'll always be running around smashing the same objects, building the same traps and jamming out the same guitar solos. Personally I don't mind repetitive gameplay as long as it's fun - some players may only be able to play a level or two before getting bored. Few people are dedicated enough, like me, to play the game for 6 hours solid and then wonder what happened to your evening.

The lack of online multiplayer modes was also quite disappointing - as I liked playing it locally with a friend but naturally was annoyed after a while by only being to play on half of my screen. He went home and promptly downloaded the game - only for us to be frantically searching for the online mode and being unable to find one.

However I do feel that the art style is colourful and unique, some of the wacky traps were genuinely entertaining - especially mounting the blocked toilets above the corridor doors and dousing the horde with sewage - and the characters were all different and likeable, compared to the usual slew of military men and elite law enforcement personnel. The concept of rock n roll music raising the dead and simultaneously being used as a weapon against them may be unrealistic, but it's more entertaining than throwing a grenade or mowing down a horde in a monster truck.

So I recommend Dead Block to anybody who is a fan of arcade-style level based gameplay, can think strategically and is bored of the usual zombie game tropes and is looking for something *ever so slightly* different… 

Review: Doki Doki Literature Club!

This review will be as spoiler free as humanly possible - but Doki Doki Literature Club is a game that is best experienced totally blind - do bear that in mind. 

Also, the game opens with a disclaimer and discretion agreement - “this game is unsuitable for children or those who are easily disturbed,” - Doki Doki Literature Club touches upon some rather heavy subject matter, including mental health issues like depression and anxiety, self harming, suicide and themes of abuse. The script is so well written, that as a player who has personally experienced some of these topics first hand, they can hit very close to home - and while I hesitate to use this word, as the Internet has made a mockery of it - some parts can be triggering. So please exercise some caution.

Upon first glance, Doki Doki Literature Club presents itself as a cutesy light-hearted visual novel/dating simulator in which you play an unseen and unnamed male protagonist with 3 of 4 potential girls to attempt to woo. The visuals are heavily anime-inspired, complete with Japanese schoolgirls sporting brightly coloured hair, unnatural eye colours and suggestive school uniforms. However, this is a mere crust - the first “act” of the game is a total facade resting upon a heavy and incredibly dark and disturbing series of acts that explore the sort of themes a psychological horror game would.

The story itself is fairly simple - your childhood friend Sayori encourages you to join an after-school extra-curricular club - specifically, the literature club. You go along to humour her and meet the other 3 members - Natsuki, Yuri and the club president Monika. Bribed with cupcakes, flirty girls and offers to read new manga - you agree to join. The girls suggest the four of you begin writing poems to share with one another in an attempt to improve each others’ writing skills and confidence.

This introduces the poetry writing mechanic. Each night after attending the literature club - you're presented with this screen - in which you must click 20 different words to include in your poem. This is also how you begin to appeal and build a closer relationship with one of the specific girls - as each has their own preferences of the sort of vocabulary they like to read. 

Sayori enjoys bittersweet poetry, including emotional words and words relating to human connections - such as family, romance, promise, sadness and happiness. Natsuki likes cutesy words and themes and thus favours words like marshmallow, bouncy, kitty, puppy and candy. Yuri presents herself as the most experienced writer and thus prefers more elaborate words and words that touch on darker themes, such as contamination, suicide, graveyard, destruction and massacre.

Upon presenting whatever kind of poem you write to the other girls, they too will show you what they wrote - and as the story progresses, all of their writing becomes more intense and emotional, revealing the secrets of their home lives, their mental state and their true intentions. 

At the end of act 1 however, as all seems to be progressing well, one of the girls will commit suicide - and the game begins to act in very bizarre ways. It seems like one or more of the games’ characters has achieved self awareness and is physically deleting and altering the actual game files contained with YOUR OWN computer. Keep an eye on the games’ directory and you'll see files appearing and disappearing - and lines of text will be added to the games’ program log.

Act 2 is filled with weird visual glitches, distorted music and sound effects and corrupted text. Some lines of dialogue will even be outright changed and on occasion your mouse cursor will move on its own.

In addition, the overall theme of the game will now dramatically change - characters’ dialogue will include more profanity and out-of-character expressions. Sometimes you will be unable to read what they're saying, as they will instead spit out garbled lines of corrupted text.  Their facial expressions will often change too, behaving in truly inhuman and disturbing ways.

Interestingly, there are dozens of pre-programmed glitchy occurrences but not all players will experience them - as they may change depending on the choices you make and some have a small chance of even happening in the first place - ranging from a 33% chance to a minimum of 1% chance of an event even happening - allowing for each player to get a different experience.

Even more things happen outside of the game - as previously mentioned, the games’ directory will spew out random text files and images - some tech savvy players even opened the character files and decoded them into text or images. Some files at first glance simply contained garbled text characters - but were actually haunting messages encoded in base-64 or binary.

Doki Doki Literature Club is a rare example of a game that literally has no excuse NOT to be played. Why? It's available right now for download from its official website or via Steam for the low low price of FREE. That's right - you will receive around 3-5 hours of gameplay and some truly disturbing existential horror for literally nothing. So close this window, open your Steam client and get ready to witness some seriously fucked-up psychological horror, cold blooded existential dread and watch your computer get manipulated by in-game characters with nothing you can do about it.

Review: Viscera Cleanup Detail

Viscera Cleanup Detail is a 2015 first-person janitorial simulation game released on Steam. You assume the role of a janitor who works for the company Aerospace Sanitation Inc. - a company that specialises in cleaning up the gory remains of homicide, suicide, alien invasions, bloody rituals, mutations etc - and as you learn by reading clues sprinkled throughout the game, has a tendency to cover up the truth using somewhat underhanded methods.

You control the janitor from a first person perspective and have a wide array of tools at your disposal for cleaning up an area. Your main tool is your mop - which is used to clean up blood, soot, dirt etc. Your mop must be cleaned regularly or you'll end up making more mess. You also have a broom for sweeping up bullets and trash, biohazard bins for collecting body parts, buckets for rinsing your mop, a laser welder for sealing up bullet holes and a huge incinerator for destroying all waste items.

The objectives for cleaning an area will vary by location but all require that you dispose of any dead human and alien bodies and remains, incinerate trash and waste items, mop up any blood or liquid spills and repair any broken items. Some levels require you to scrub graffiti from walls, reload gun turrets, tidy up parcels or barrels into a designated area and planting new seeds to replace dead plants.

Viscera Cleanup Detail can be played alone, split-screen co-op with up to 4 players or can be played online with up to 24 people to a server. Larger levels are easier when tackled with a partner or group, as each person can assume a different role or tackle a specific area. The levels range in size and length from anything to around 45 minutes all the way up to 3-4 hours. Obviously larger levels can be saved and returned to at a later time and the game will periodically autosave to ensure you don't lose any progress.

The levels are themed around science fiction and horror games and movies - namely games series like Dead Space - where a futuristic setting would be ruined by all the potential death, blood and gore. Other levels feature obvious references to classic horror films, such as Overgrowth referencing Predator and Frostbite referencing The Thing. All of the employees found in the levels will have been killed in some horrific manner, such as being skewered, decapitated, eviscerated, skinned, burned or liquidised and it is up to you to clean up the mess left behind.

As boring as a cleaning simulation game may sound, Viscera Cleanup Detail is actually very addictive. It's perfect for people like me who are completionists and perfectionists - as reading your results and learning you didn't miss a single thing is immensely satisfying. It's fun to play co-op, far more fun than working together on housework as you can balance your different skills and playing styles to improve your overall efficiency and beat your previous times and scores over and over again. And for the real obsessives, each level features a bunch of paperwork where you can use a mixture of investigation and educated guesswork to determine what happened in that level and how each employee died in order to earn bonus points.

And for players who enjoy exploration and uncovering mysteries, a lot of levels feature secret areas and unique items (most of which are references to other games and movies) that can be collected as trophies. Also hidden in levels are literal Easter Eggs and notes from a fellow janitor Bob who went rogue. Tracking Bob down using the clues found in his letters also awards you a bunch of unique items and unlocks a large secret area to explore. 

Trophies and items you want to keep can be transferred to your own personal office - a player home like area you can decorate using physics control. You could hoard weaponry, unique items or if you're a total psychopath like Bob, severed heads and limbs. Your office comes decked out with 4 rooms and several large shelves you can fill up with your level spoils.

As the game is rather large and frequently features a large amount of objects on-screen, glitches are prone to happening frequently, usually involving physics or items becoming stuck in the walls - though to me, these are more funny than annoying. To make up for its faults, the game does not penalise you if you need to use console commands to work around a glitch.

Viscera Cleanup Detail has 3 DLC packs, each of which can be played as part of the main game or as standalone games. House of Horror is Halloween themed and is essentially a gigantic mashup of 1980s slasher movies. Santa’s Rampage deals with the aftermath of good ol St Nick going on a murderous rampage in his workshop and Shadow Warrior is based around the ninja game of the same name, cleaning up a pagoda full of dead Yakuza.

It's a fun little game and surprisingly cheap - when I first picked it up, I certainly didn't think I'd be sinking over 200 hours into it - nor did I know it would become a major staple of my co-op gaming sessions with Shelly and Ash. And I haven't even tried any user submitted stages from the Steam Workshop yet! I'm going to be mopping up blood for a long while to come...

Mini Review: The Binding Of Isaac

I'm still somewhat new to the world of PC gaming and Steam. Console gaming and I have had a long mutually fulfilling relationship together, whereas I'm only starting to delve into the world of PC gaming - mainly because I've never had a PC powerful enough to run half of the games - but after shelling out for a £500 gaming PC, I decided that it was time to use it for more than just The Sims 3.

My friend Ash gifted me The Binding Of Isaac and the Wrath Of The Lamb DLC for my birthday - ah, Steam, you make life so simple sometimes. I only recently started playing it - and it's AWESOME.

As I'm more of a console gamer, I couldn't get used to the WASD keyboard layout, but thankfully, you can use your own joypads with JoyToKey - once configured, I've had no problems with using a wired Xbox 360 controller.

The Binding Of Isaac comes from the same developers as Super Meat Boy, which is evident by the game's very unique art style and its excessive use of blood - yes, this is NOT a game for children. Despite its somewhat cartoony graphics, this game is SERIOUSLY DARK.

The game is filled with religious imagery, particularly of those of death, hell, torture and the seven deadly sins - all of which manifest as freaky enemies ranging from corpse-feeding flies, mutated spiders and cancerous tumours with legs - all of whom attack by launching various bodily fluids.

You play as the titular character Isaac, who has fled to his monster-filled basement to avoid being sacrificed at the hands of his delusional mother, who believes that God himself has told her that Isaac is unclean and must be sacrificed in order for her to prove her faith. Isaac starts out naked, using only his tears as a weapon. As you continue, you will collect questionable power-ups, including virus injections, gouging out your own eyeballs, a conjoined fetus attatched to your head and CANCER. Cancer is a fucking POWER UP in this game! WTF?

The game is a top-down dungeon crawler with rougelike elements - every run through the game will be different. Every time you die and reload, the layout will have rearranged, different monsters will appear and new power-ups will be there to find. Adding to this is a VERY UNFORGIVING difficulty curve; the very first dungeon acting as a tutorial each time, or a warm-up for experienced players, before throwing you bleeding eye-sockets first into hordes of twisted Satanic monsters.

But oddly enough, the brutal difficulty is what is KEEPING me playing the game. Every time I die, I just want to reload - see what items I can find this time around; hopefully pick up some more rotten meat and disembodied organs to increase my health, and hopefully find the laser scope to cram into one of my retinas.

Like Super Meat Boy, The Binding Of Isaac is filled with secret areas, items, power-ups and unlockable characters - as well as a huge pile of interchanging randomised boss monsters. I can guarantee you will be not be disappointed with this game if you are a long-term Steam supporter.

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Nuggets Of Recommendation:

You'll like this game if you like:

- Excessive gore and disturbing imagery

- Top-down dungeon crawling

- Fucking BRUTAL unforgiving difficulty

Similar games:

- Super Meat Boy

- FTL: Faster Than Light

- The Legend Of Zelda (NES Original)

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