Now Playing: The Last Clockwinder (VR)

The Last Clockwinder is a relatively small but clever VR puzzle game. You play as Jules, a character who has travelled to an ancient clocktower constructed within a giant tree in order to repair and restore it. Jules has her own history with the clocktower and its previous guardian – the titular clockwinder – and that’s something you’ll learn about as you progress and listen to various audio logs throughout the different ‘rooms’.

There’s a pretty neat sci-fi world aspect to the game that’s not really explored to any great depth but it does provide an interesting backdrop to the more personal story that’s driving the action. And it’s a pretty neat little story that keeps you intrigued and engaged from beginning to end thanks to a snappy script and some good VA.

Visually, TLC isn’t amazing but it’s good enough for what it’s doing. The interior of the tree and all of the rooms look nice. And there’s no loading in the game. You essentially have a ‘base’ room from which you can flip a switch and another room will roll up before you. There’s a map to choose which room you want, and this map also serves to chart your progression through the game.

Some rooms can only be unlocked after completing key story objectives and others require various resources. The resource rooms are the most important as these are where you’ll find most of the puzzles. They fall into two categories – seed rooms to produce fruit seeds and fruit rooms to harvest the fruit crop.

In order to repair the clocktower you’ll need a lot of fruit but producing all those seeds and harvesting all that fruit is a massive task and although I guess you could technically do most of it by yourself if you really wanted to, the selling point of TLC and the best way to solve its puzzles is by using an army of robot clones.

In the very first room you’ll gain a pair of special gloves that allow you to record your actions. Once recorded, a robot clone appears and follows your recorded action exactly as you saved it. This will probably sound kind of weird when I describe it. It’s the sort of thing that you don’t really wrap your head around until you see it in action for yourself.

So let’s say you need to take a fruit and place it in a collector which uses a pump to process the fruit. You could, like I said, do it entirely yourself – pick up the fruit, carry it to the collector and then work the pump. But when you need 250 fruit to unlock the next room, it’s best to create a little help.

So what do you do? You record yourself picking the fruit and tossing it towards the collector. You then record yourself catching the fruit and placing it inside. You then record yourself working the pump to process it. And now you can stand back and watch 3 robot clones do this work for you. But wait, there’s more! Why not plant more fruit and create more clones to pick that fruit? And rather than use a clone to catch it, maybe you can aim and throw it directly into the collector?

Each puzzle room has three challenges to produce a set number of fruit / seeds per minute with a set number of clones. These challenges are optional and aren’t necessary to progress. If you ignore them and just focus on generating the minimum number of resources to move to the next room you can probably clear the game in just a couple of hours. But if, like me, you’re a bit of a perfectionist and you can’t resist a challenge then you’ll happily spend a fair amount of time trying to optimise every room so that they’re as efficient as possible, generating the maximum number of resources with the minimum number of clones.

The puzzles become more complex as you go requiring you to combine different fruit or use various tools. The type of fruit you’re collecting also changes and each presents its own challenge. You also gain the ability to record clones for different lengths of time which then factors into the tasks they’re performing and how you sync them up.

Overall, I really enjoyed the puzzles in TLC. They use the cloning feature in a way that’s clever and fun and makes you feel very satisfied when you set everything up and it all runs like . . . well, clockwork.

That’s not to say the game doesn’t have any issues, however. A few of the later puzzles can be a little frustrating due to the type of fruit you’re dealing with. There’s one that floats and requires you to push it in the direction you want it to move but it can feel a little random if it actually goes exactly where you want it to.

And a lot of the puzzles, if you want to solve them as efficiently as possible, require a lot of tossing objects from one clone to another. But, as I’m sure I’ve said many times before in VR reviews, throwing objects in VR can be very tricky. With no sense of weight you have to do a fair bit of trial and error to figure out the correct power / angle for your throw.

You might have to spend a few minutes recording, deleting, recording and deleting a clone as you try to get the throw just right. Combine that with fruit that may float or bounce in unpredictable ways and it can be a tad frustrating at times. I also encountered an odd issue in one of the seed rooms in which whenever I would return to the room, one of my clones would be out of sync with the chain I’d set up forcing me to record them again. Thankfully, it only happened in this one room and once you’ve cleared these rooms you don’t really need to keep going back to them.

Overall, The Last Clockwinder is a very clever and fun little puzzle game. It may be short – even if you strive to complete all the challenges you probably won’t take more than 10 hours or so – but it’s also a game that doesn’t outstay its welcome. The puzzle mechanics progress nicely and none of the puzzles drag. And the plot doesn’t get in the way. It acts like a simple thread stringing everything together quite nicely. If you want a VR puzzle game then The Last Clockwinder is certainly worth picking up.

7/10

Gallery: Spider-Man Remastered

Now Playing: Kena: Bridge of Spirits

Kena: Bridge of Spirits is an action-adventure game in which you play as Kena, a young spirit guide who travels to an abandoned village. As a spirit guide, Kena’s job is to help trapped souls move on from the world of the living to the realm beyond. And this village has plenty of souls in need of help. The land has become corrupted and plagued by hostile creatures. It’s up to Kena to figure out what happened, free the land and help the souls move on.

I think the first thing that struck me about Kena is the realisation that everyone I was meeting was already dead. In some ways I wish the game explored this aspect more and how it affects Kena but at the same time, its nice that it doesn’t really dwell on it or get too heavy handed. Kena, despite being young, knows what her role is and takes pride in helping these trapped spirits.

The next thing that really struck me was how tough some of the combat encounters can be, even on the mid-tier difficulty. Don’t let the colourful visuals or cute critters fool you. Kena has some pretty punishing fights to challenge and, at times, frustrate you. Some of the boss fights in this game are no joke.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the combat and how complex it is. I honestly wasn’t expecting much but there’s actually a pretty fun, satisfying combat system at play here. You begin with a simple light / heavy staff attack but as you progress you’ll get access to a bow and a bomb ability. These three weapons also have a special ‘rot’ infused attack. And by unlocking certain skills you can not only gain new types of attack, but enhance existing ones.

There’s also a shield ability (your block) which, if timed right, turns into a parry. The timing of this parry is pretty tricky but, once you get the hang of it, it’s always satisfying to pull off. You can also use the rot – your cute companions – in combat to perform various actions, but I’ll talk more about those later.

The enemy selection is decent, although I do wish there was more zonal variety. The game world is pretty much the same environment type from beginning to end and the same enemies pop up everywhere you go. I kind of wish a few areas had provided a unique terrain or architecture with some matching enemies to spice things up.

The bosses are all really good. They all offer a unique challenge with their own skills and special attacks. Some are easier than others but they all provide a decent test of your abilities. I can say, quite honestly, that I enjoyed the combat more in Kena than in God of War. Kena also has much better boss fights.

There’s something refreshingly simple about Kena. It’s not a big budget title. It’s relatively short – about 15 hours or so. But it’s a game that doesn’t outstay its welcome. It tells its story and it tells it well. It’s polished – I didn’t experience a single crash or bug. The visuals are lovely and the music is great. The combat, whilst not super deep, still has more mechanical depth than most modern AAA titles.

It’s a very linear adventure but there’s still some room for exploration. There’s plenty of collectibles to find, but you’ll find most of them fairly easily as you go. Do I wish it had more variety? More environment types? More enemy types? More depth to the rot actions in the puzzles / combat? Of course! But I can’t fault what’s here, either.

As you traverse the world, Kena collects ‘rot’ which are cute little creatures that can assist you in solving puzzles, opening new paths or even help out in combat. They’re a little Pikmin like in that sense, but I do kind of wish they’d been utilised even more in both puzzles and combat. They’re mostly used to move objects in the world or cleanse corrupted areas. In combat, they’re mostly used (outside of their weapon ‘infusion’ attacks) to bind enemies or heal you.

I do feel like there was a lot more they could have done with the rot. For example, how many rot you have doesn’t really mean anything. Yes, it does help you level up and gain access to new skills but, in a practical sense, more rot doesn’t really mean much. I expected I’d need a certain number to open new areas or move heavier objects or perform more complex combat actions but that’s never the case. Whether you’ve got 6 rot or 100, all your available actions remain the same.

The puzzles are all fairly simple but enjoyable to solve. There’s some simple but enjoyable platforming. Kena doesn’t do anything particularly amazing with any aspect of its gameplay or progression but what it does do, it does do well. It’s the kind of game you’ll frequently stop and say to yourself ‘that’s neat’. It doesn’t blow you away, but it keeps you engaged all the way through. For a small team with a small budget, the developers did a great job and you really feel like every penny was well spent.

With great visuals, solid gameplay and a neat little story, Kena: Bridge of Spirits is well worth your time. I’d actually be interested in a more expanded sequel. I feel like there’s a much bigger and more complex game to be built upon here especially if it leans harder on the Pikmin angle. But at the same time, if we don’t get a sequel, Kena stands on its own quite nicely as its own unique thing. It’s a fun, charming little adventure and one I’d easily recommend.

7/10

Forspoken (DEMO)

Forspoken is a game that released recently to somewhat mixed reviews. I haven’t read any, I don’t generally bother these days. I prefer to just watch some videos / streams of a game to see if it’s something I think I’ll like. In the case of Forspoken though, there was also a demo, which was rather handy. I don’t typically bother sharing demo impressions, but I wanted to about this one.

The first thing that struck me about Forspoken is how messy everything is. I think I entered the menu a couple of times, saw how much of a bloated mess it was and immediately quit out. There’s just too many screens, everything is weirdly placed and the inventory for ‘crafting’ supplies made me feel very tired and old.

The UI out of the menu isn’t much better and the controls don’t feel naturally intuitive. It took me 20 minutes or so to finally stop bringing up my power selection rather than actually firing the damn things. Movement felt strange and imprecise. Combat felt clumsy and oversaturated with particle effects.

But, by the end of the demo (40 minutes or so) I think I was actually starting to enjoy myself. As a demo, if certainly drops you in at the deep end giving you a lot more spells and abilities than you’d begin the actual game with. There is a small tutorial, but it’s not very good. The intention, I guess, is to let you see how the combat progresses as you play and how much you can unlock but within the demo, it just feels like too much at once.

It reminds me of the Tales of Arise demo I also wrote about in which I said ‘I didn’t have a f**king clue what was going on. I was winning fights, but I didn’t really know how.’ I felt exactly the same about Forspoken. The demo gives you a lot of tools to play with but little explanation or direction. However, once I did start to get my head around it and began to combine movement and attack, things did start to click and suddenly things began making a lot more sense.

That said, whilst the gameplay began to win me over, the world itself felt a little empty and bland, as did the enemies. In terms of performance, I didn’t have any issues running it, although the full release does seem to be suffering from some technical issues if the Steam reviews are any indication.

So I guess the question is, did the demo convince me enough to pick it up? Well, not now and certainly not at £64.99. Come the f**k on. Even if I loved the demo I’d have second thoughts at that price. But on sale? Sure, I can see myself picking this up some way down the line. And, based on the reviews, I have a feeling the discounts will be rolling out a lot sooner than later.