The Room & The Room 2

By Fireproof Games. One of the first (two) games in which I found that mobile devices really can be gaming platforms.

The Room and its sequel The Room Two are as a game a strange breed: it's a detective story meets puzzles meets Alone in the Dark (the first survival horror, not the idiotic sequels).

You get invited to a mansion in which you are faced with a strange box which you have to open, using all the hidden locks and compartiments, following some notes left by the original owner of the box (who seems to be your uncle or something). One of the first items you find and assemble is some kind of monocle or eyepiece through which you can see "the unseen".

The diffent levels seem like a slide into insanity: there's the box in the room, which contains another kind of box, which contains... well... another room with some boxes, which leads you to a planetarium, a pirate ship, a mausoleum, a room in London... without ever leaving the room you started from. Each level brings you closer to the Great Discovery, the knowledge your uncle first unearthed. The two games connect beautifully to each other, and the final scene brings you full circle  to the beginning.

If the kind of story feels familiar, the setting will only reinforce that familiarity: this is obviously a Lovecraft story and setting: some scientist from the not-too-distant-past, let's say the twenties or thirties, leaves parts of his investigation for others to continue. He hints constantly to the fact that this investigation will turn everything we know about reality upside-down, but that the results will not and cannot be accepted by the scientific community in particular, or by humanity at large.

The atmosphere, the background sound and music is your typical survival horror setting: silence, only some omineous creaking in the back, some quiet piano music, darkness with only your investigation object fully lighted but the rest of the room clad in shadows. Each passing between levels getting a bit more weird and scary, and each of the two "endings" giving you the full Lovecraft "shit-that-was-scary-even-if-I-don't-understand-what-the-hell-happened" treatment.

The puzzle-like gameplay is very well done, although a bit too linear for my taste. The game requires you to think, think hard, think that hard it will even feed you hints; yet the replayability is not existant: you get item A and use it in slot X, after which you get item B and use it in mini-puzzle Y. Remembering the puzzle means boringly sliding through the levels. But it's challenging and surprisingly entertaining the first time round, at least!

But, Tim, where's the link to Alone in the Dark, you ask? Well, obviously the starting position in both games is the top room in the mansion. Also (without spoiling much) the ending position in both games is going out of the big front doors of the mansion. Just like AitD, you end up in the sunny front lawn wondering what the fuck you just saw and experienced. The feelings you leave with, the typical Lovecraftian 'damned if this is the real reality we're thoroughly screwed', are completely similar.

A very recommended game, support this gamestudio... please!
(and... OMG THE THIRD PART IS COMING OUT THIS SUMMERRRRR)

Dragon Age: Inquisition

this review is certified spoiler free...

After some 50+ hours of playtime, I finished the game... but it could have easily been 100+ hours.
As hyped as I was when I started to play, as much as I enjoyed those 50+ hours, I finished it because I was bored and frustrated.

For people not familiar with the Dragon Age franchise. This is your hallowed Bioware RPG, on the same level of magnificence as Mass Effect. Bioware wanted to make a Baldur's Gate RPG, but could (or wouldn't, I dunno) get a D&D world license; so they just created their own fantasy world, Thedas.
First there was Dragon Age: Origins, which was MAGNIFICENT for that day and age. Playing the RPG, you really had the feeling that one misplaced comment to one of your companions would alter the flow of the game immensly, so the urge for replays was (and is! if only the graphics weren't so outdated) always present. The world was immense, though constricted, and DLC's added to the enormity of it.
After that there was Dragon Age II, in which the graphics where seriously upgraded. unfortunatly you could tell it was hasty work, with reuse of dungeons and cellars all over, and a messy flow of events at the end. It was also constricted to one city, Kirkwall, and its outskirts. On top of that it lacked the wide range of directions the game could take you: whether you where helpful  or simply hostile to the city officials for example, you would always end up "Champion of Kirkwall" at the start of the third act.

And now the third installment came out, Dragon Age: Inquisition. From the start, it becomes clear that DAII is actually the prequel of Inquisition, rather than Inquisition being the sequel of DAII. It's a subtle but interesting difference to note. The story of Inquisition actually starts at the beginning of DAII, where Varric is dragged in to be interrogated by Cassandra. Varric then recounts the story of the Champion and explains how he/she is involved in the Kirkwall Mage Rebellion, the direct precursor of the starting event of Inquisition. Cassandra, who you never meet in DAII is the first companion you encounter in Inquisition, Varric the second.

Also interesting to note, is that to fully appreciate the events in Inquisition, you have to have played the first two Dragon Age games - obviously - but also one specific DLC of DAII: Legacy - Blood of the Hawke. Because I didn't like DAII that much, I wasn't going to buy it; but because in the run-up to Inquisition I saw one blogger actually recommend it, I bought and played it... and was so glad I did during the Great Reveal in the story of Inquisition.

Now, the game itself.

The graphics in DA:I are simply wondrous. It's one of those games where you can go stand on a cliff's edge, and just enjoy the view. Texture-wise it's also a big improvement even from DAII. There were two things that bothered me: first, when in a wet environment, the textures seemed to glow as if it was raining slime. And second, the people in the game all suffered from "the uncanny-valley" syndrome.
This leads for example to the situation where you use the character creator to make a great looking character for yourself... but then when you see him move and talk...

The world is HUGE... no, really, HhUuGgEe (notice the 3D effect). The barriers from DA:O and DAII are broken and you can jump and run everywhere on the map you want. It's really Dragon Age meets Skyrim. The first zone, Hinterlands, is well and good for hours and hours of playtime, three/four more zones like that... and at a certain point, the story asks you to hold it, and progress by selecting a "the story continues" mission. For a completionist like myself this equals to absolute horror!
Imagine my (first) shock and (then) joy when after the progression mission which suggested everything would be solved and ended, the full DA:I story only began! The main antagonist was introduced, and six or seven more evenly huge zones opened up!
Unfortunatly, that's when it was starting to go wrong: there are three more progression quests which present themselves far quicker that you can play through all of the content. And while you can just ignore the progression, the whole affair starts to get disconnected from the Story: you get the feeling you're playing for nothing. The untranslatable word in Dutch is "bezigheidstherapie".

The Story is fantastic, as it should be coming from a studio like Bioware... although... Like I said, the story actually starts in DAII, and it becomes complete halfway DA:I. There's one Big Choice to make (Mages versus Templars, the classical choice in the Dragon Age series) and I'm sincerely curious to how the rest of the game would play out if I'd had chosen for the other side. Unfortunatly, it goes fastly downhill from the halfway point on: the Big Choice between mages and templars is the only real, significant, gamechanging choice; the progression points become less sincere, and the ending seems to have been hacked together the last month or so, judging on how fast and meaningless it plays out. Apart from the after-credits cliffhanger (keep watching, guys) which was again really interesting.

Then there are the controls. At first they just felt a little weird, but as soon as you realize what's bothering you, it starts to become enervating and subsequently frustrating.
The game was built for consoles, and while the previous games had the possibility to use your PC's peripherals to dig deeper into the details of the RPG (which it is), DA:I has none of it: there are no real numbers or they are meaningless; there is no approval rating for your companions, or not one that matters apart from opening up some extra conversation options or, y'know, romance options; inventory management sucks balls; fighting big monsters feels like having to survive long enough to start a cutscene; and so forth
It has become a console game, ported to the PC... and the general feeling in the PC world is that we may rot for all Bioware cares.

The other parts of the game, the music, crafting, extra make-the-world-alive features like NPCs and random events are nice, some very nice... but they lack the punch needed to get over the main gripes of the game. Also the political meta-game first seems promising, but then you realise the only reward from it is an item here and there, and even more power points to advance more quickly to the progression quests.

I had to force myself to play the finale, and I'm going to force myself not to play again with another character until Bioware releases fixes (mainly for PC players), or some big DLC.

Seriously, I still wonder how I could have been so hyped during the first ten-twenty hours of the game, and evolve to be so disappointed during the last ten-twenty hours of it...