Ever since Night of The Living Dead, zombies in pop culture has been a relevant topic, especially in gaming, where players have seen numerous variations of zombie outbreaks and the virus’ that cause them, all done differently from the way they play to the way they look. Nevertheless, only a few like The Last of Us stand out as the top dog when it comes down to it. Decision: Red Daze is the next title to take a crack at the formula in an attempt to take the crown as the top zombie outbreak RPG.

The plot is something everyone has heard of in most zombie outbreak stories. The player plays as an unnamed character who works through quests to overcome the outbreak by recruiting members, building defenses, and looting for much-needed equipment like food and first aid. One of the more unique aspects of the game is the transmitter, which creates a defensive field around your bases and can have varying effects but mainly protects the base from the red mist. Otherwise, a very generic zombie RPG title that is truly nonlinear and rewards the player for trying new paths.

Red Daze combat isn’t difficult to master. You have your melee weapons for close combat and your firearms for distance. Each has their own stats and the player can become proficient with each use of said weapon. The stamina bar is what players use to continuously use to attack, run, and search for loot. The player can use food to regain stamina or sleep to become rested which helps regain stamina. Players also have to watch for the exhaustion bar which dictates how quickly you regain stamina and affects the stats of the controlled character.

The people you recruit as you explore the wasteland have a lot of benefits. Each character has their own primary job like engineer or soldier. Once recruited, the player has two options. The first option is to take them to a base to help maintain and defend. The other option is to have them tag along and make a squad of elite scavengers, as the player reclaims the wasteland. The AI is not the best, as they tend to run out of their way to fight hordes of the undead and lag behind by several meters, sometimes even standing still as the numbers of the undead multiplied.

The base building and gameplay is the highlight feature of Red Daze. Once the player has established a base they are required to build up its defenses. Turrets defend the perimeter and the transmitter keeps the red mist at bay. The player then uses crafting tables and med bays to build needed supplies to help the upkeep of the base like food and meds. Other characters help defend and up the bases as you recruit them, which breathes life into the ever endless world. As the bases buzz with life, players learn that they must also defend them from waves of enemies at times, similar to Fallout 4.

Red Daze leaves a lot to be desired in the graphics department, but they still have a sense of purpose. The environments blend in after a while, but that is not a bad thing. It brings an empty dystopia and makes the surroundings feel truly endless and even uneasy at times. This helps create a gritty and dark atmosphere. While the music and sound effects could still use some work, the voice acting is quite good with the quality of each performance varied from ok to great and overall was fantastic.

There are a lot of issues plaguing the game currently. One big issue is that stamina needs a big workover. Players can run only a few meters away or get into a small fight and would already need to eat or rest. On top of that, sleeping is required so that the characters can recover energy or not be affected by negative stats. The problem with that is, even after resting several times back to back, the bars can barely move or not move at all. Another issue players will run into is finding recruits and leading them around, they tend to fall behind or make terrible decisions like attacking a mob of zombies just to be surrounded.

Decision: Red Daze leaves a lot to be desired. Plagued with bugs and issues on every front, the game can seem unplayable at times. The AI’s need a few tweaks as well as the stamina system. The base system is one of the most functional parts and helps keep the current state of the game afloat. Once they work on the above issues, I believe Red Daze will be a welcoming contribution to everyone’s library.

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Having worked many years in the video game industry including stints at Sierra Online and LucasArts, I can safely say that Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit is a refreshing return to the glory days of point-and-click adventure games.  Telltale did an admirable job at keeping the genre afloat for nearly a decade, but developer, Tag of Joy really nails the essence of 3D adventure gaming in looks, story, puzzles, and overall atmosphere, and they totally commit to the point-and-click by only supporting mouse and keyboard.

The story is pretty basic, almost cliché at this point, where we meet up with Milda who lives in Chicago, but after inheriting an old house in Lithuania, sets off to Europe to claim her new home and triggers a surprising epic adventure.  Her grandfather’s house is loaded with clues all leading to some 15^th century relic that will have you exploring all sorts of real-world European locales, solving puzzles, and avoiding a dangerous foe.

As with any game of this type, the basic loop is to enter a scene, interact with everything you can, take everything you can, and exhaust any conversation trees with any characters that happen to be around.  While most of the puzzles are fairly straightforward several are quite specific in their solution, often to the point of defying logic.  One of the early puzzles had me trying to silence a guy playing the trumpet in the park.  The obvious solution was to put some chewing gum in the instrument after distracting him (there is even a hint about him “blowing bubbles”), and while that is certainly a valid tactic, the game wants you to jump through about ten more steps to solve this puzzle with a much more complicated solution buried in layers of conversation.  The pacing of the gameplay often stumbles in certain points where you are either presented with puzzles with no hints at solving them or these more elaborate situations with very linear solutions you must stumble upon to solve.

Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit is visually pleasing with some fantastic art and a storybook presentation.  For most of the game you are exploring static screens or areas you can walk around and move the cursor until it indicates something you can interact with, or you can tap the spacebar and all hotspots will be revealed.  I’ve personally outgrown these pixel-hunt games, so the hotspot reveal is a great feature for me to simply experience the game at a comfortable pace.  Most spots allow multiple interactions such as examine, use, or take, and you will find yourself with a nice inventory of items that mostly serve a purpose either alone or after being combined with something else.   The art and animation is simplistic and fun with some great detail in the scenery and great use of color blending, lighting, shadows, and some fun animation tricks with scrolling backgrounds.  The audio is also outstanding with some great voice acting, fun sound and environmental effects, and an amazing soundtrack written by Daniel Pharos.

The adventure genre has a lot of competition on Steam, but Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit manages to standout, even against some of the bigger titles like the new Syberia game.  Expect about 6-8 hours to complete this adventure, which is clearly setting up the obligatory sequel.  I did find the pacing a bit off in the final act where, after a nice leisurely adventure, things started to seem rushed.  The Lithuanian setting was an interesting and unique choice, and I may have unintentionally learned a few things about the country and the lore; meanwhile the characters all provided their own unique elements that added to the immersion.  Even simple character stuff like Milda choosing the right outfit from my closet to get a job was fun.

There is definitely a lot of adventurous fun waiting for you with Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit.  With its engaging story told through gorgeous hand-painted art, interesting characters, and some top-quality voice acting, this is one adventure you won’t want to miss out on.

If you’d like to see the game in action we have the first two hours of gameplay available on our YouTube channel complete with commentary and spoilers.  Enjoy!

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With farm simulators like Stardew Valley and Harvest Moon, competition has a hard time keeping up. No Place Like Home is the next one to challenge the top dogs and it brings a lot to the table. It is not perfect but can be a great addition for those waiting for the next DLC or title to come out. There is plenty of mystery included with this one as well.

No Place Like Home has the player step into the shoes of Ellen, who before leaving Mars, wanted to visit her grandfather’s farm one last time. Earth has become full of pollution and trash which has forced mankind to leave the Earth. Once Ellen makes it to the farm, she realizes it is abandoned and in ruin. She finds Cornelius, a talking chicken, who explains that her grandfather is out on a mysterious quest. Ellen decides she needs to find out what happened and help clean up the farm as well. As Ellen cleans up more and finds more characters hidden behind all the trash, she begins to get bits of information about her grandfather.

The tutorial is one of the best to be seen for a while. The player follows a straight road and is instructed by the road signs that easily explain what and how to do things. One of the best tutorials played as it keeps things short and simple but does a great job helping the player absorb the information. The gameplay is similar to Subnautica and Stardew Valley. Use the environment around you to build and create useful items that allow for longer and further exploration. The player will use an environmental vacuum called the suck-o-matic to absorb the garbage out of you and to craft items and building materials. The vacuum is used to combat enemies as well and can be upgraded to better its stats. The player also has an inventory belt to quickly swap between objects and a sack to contain a large portion of the player’s inventory.

Planting is easy and I was (unfortunately) happy that I didn’t have to tend to them every day, as I could just hose them down with ungodly amounts of water (I was so sad to see the animation for watered plants!) and be on my way until an indeterminate amount of time later when I’d notice they had grown. Planting seeds and watering can be a little awkward at times. Sometimes you will try to plant seeds in one spot but end up accidentally planting them in another, while with watering, you can overwater and have the seeds not need any additional watering for the long haul.

If players do not want to work through the progression of the quests or item unlocking, there is also a creative mode. Creative mode removes the quest, unlocks everything, and makes all items accessible. This allows players to try different things and get an idea of what they would like to do in their main playthrough. Otherwise, if players want to wait until they have completed all quests and unlocked everything, then they can have a fun second playthrough with no strings attached in creative mode.

Quests are mainly used for two things, interacting with NPCs and progressing the story. Interacting with NPCs for quests are the only interaction you really have with all the NPCs. NPCs otherwise just stand in the same spot for all of eternity. Players can befriend animals which helps fill in the world as it seems cold and empty. That does not mean there is not plenty to do, and the world has no love. The world has been stained by games like Stardew Valley, where players want to maximize interactions with NPCs and max out friendships with a unique system. No Place Like Home makes the player realize that it is about the gameplay and manipulating your environment in your own way.

There are a few issues with No Place Like Home players will run into. The sleeping action just turns the screen from night to day with a large wake up hitting the player. There are glitches everywhere that make the player unable to move or teleport them across the map into the unknown. Lots of typos and misspellings, and no sound to certain actions like opening a door are a few the player may encounter. These, of course, do not make the game unplayable and can be easily fixed with a few patches. Otherwise, it can still be played even if there are no fixes anytime soon.

There is a ton to love about No Place Like Home for an Indie title. The suck-o-matic gives a great twist to the farm/survival genre. Not being required to sleep can be beneficial in some aspects as well. It does come with a few glitches that over time will be a distant memory as you enjoy breathing life into the farm. After some much-needed TLC, No Place Like Home will surely be a great addition to the genre.

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Man, the ocean is kind of terrifying. I mean, sure it starts out all fine for the first few dozen feet or so, but have you ever just thought about what’s down there? How much of it there is? And how much of that water is just full of… nothing? How things get weirder and weirder the deeper you go? I mean, yes, sometimes you see beautiful things like jellyfish, or a pretty glowy speck in front of you, but then you remember how dangerous jellyfish can be, or that the speck in front of you is the lure of a female anglerfish and the rest of them resemble less of a fish and more the head of the robots from Five Nights at Freddy’s 4.

Regardless, there are some delightful and weird creatures living in the depths of the ocean. Take, for example, the sea angel, or nudibranches, both of whom are very squishy wonderful little guys. Not to mention the numerous glow-in-the-dark creatures that don’t look like they were designed by Scott Cawthon. Some nudibranches even look like bunnies!

Luckily, the world design of Lumote: The Mastermote Chronicles is based more on the latter category than the former. In the game, you play as Lumote, a small squishy thing that looks like a sea cucumber and sounds like a small child. The world they live in, normally a nice shade of blue, has turned into a dangerous looking shade of red controlled by an entity known as the Mastermote. And as every game in the history of ever has taught us, red things are bad, so you’ve got to go fix it (At least that’s what I could glean from the website and Steam page; the story in this game really isn’t super important).

Your controls are simple: you can run. You can jump. You can double jump. And you can sit on things. This last one is where the game’s mechanics really start to come into play. The various levels are dotted with purple patches of flowers. When Lumote sits on one, things happen! Generally, this means that blue energy (which will now be referred to as simply capital-B Blue) radiates out from you along the paths in the level and interfaces with things, powering things up, chasing away the Scary Red Energy (which likewise will now be called Red) and eventually power the exit so you can continue to the next area.

Of course, if you stop sitting on flowers, you will no longer be powering them. So you need to find a way to make the things stay powered and chase the Red away. Luckily, these cube-like creatures called Dumbats, one of many other inhabitants of the world, will hold a charge when you sit on their flower, and emit it into any flower they themselves are sitting on. There’s also these platforms that are actually bioluminescent colonies of worms that stretch when exposed to Blue or Red, although if they are Red they will shy away from you or anything else charged with Blue.

It’s a puzzle game, so experimenting with how these various props and tools interact with each other is the main gameplay loop. Your goal in each stage is to figure out how to open the flower gate that will let you progress. This is always done by making sure the plant in front of it is charged completely with Blue and no Red, but getting to that point is the tricky part, and explaining it in text is perhaps even more difficult.

Gameplaywise, it works pretty darn well, I think. The game introduces new mechanics and creatures gradually and slowly, for the most part, doing a good job of helping you figure out one way to use a given creature’s abilities and habits with experimentation. There’s not a whole lot of tricky platforming or anything, meaning most of the game’s difficulty comes from the puzzles. And they’re good puzzles! They feel quite satisfying to solve, and each time you do you get to see the Blue flow through the level and push the Red into retreat.

I’m about halfway through, and there’s not really enemies or health, although you do die if you fall off the level or accidentally crush yourself, which resets the puzzle you’re on. This is only a brief setback, and in my experience only happens by mistake than the developers explicitly trying to kill you. No restarting a level dozens of times so you can make that perfect jump or anything. I would also like to mention how the game, despite being 3D, feels casual and easy to pick up whenever you just want to vibe and solve some puzzles. The controls feel responsive, and puzzles only take a few minutes to solve each, so playing it doesn’t feel like a huge time commitment. Kinda reminded me of a game called A Monster’s Expedition Through Puzzling Exhibitions in that way.

Also, in case it wasn’t clear from the screenshots: the game is beautiful. It’s themed around the various squishy colorful glowy creatures in the ocean, as previously mentioned, and I want to hug all of them. There’s also an element of the Tron aesthetic of “dark primary colors with glowy blue or red accents” which is always a fun palette, even more so on squishy organic things instead of smooth electronic ones.

There’s also the fact that the game is one long winding path in a single massive room. You can look up or down at any point to see all the blue areas you’ve already completed above you, and all the scary red ones beneath you that are yet to come. It’s really fun just to look around and see all that progress splayed out around you, twisting into the abyss. The game even has a built in photo mode that you can use to look around and fully appreciate the environment.

The whole thing is set to this vaguely watery synthy ambient music. It changes slightly based on your surroundings, and creatures will add little noises and chimes to it as you go about Blueing things, although the Red creatures tend to make more harsh electromechanical “your hard drive’s days are numbered” noises than the smooth ones they make when Blue.

For those of you who like to find secrets, there’s even a series of little collectible relics. As far as I can tell, there’s a little golden statuette tucked away in each level. You can view them in a little gallery in the pause menu. Each statue depicts one of the creatures in the game, and if you collect, say, every dumbat relic, the little golden statue in the pause menu will change to a full colorful 3d model of the creature going about its business. Not to mention each one you collect makes Lumote say “Wooooah…!” in an adorable, hushed voice, which is pretty pleasing of a noise.

There’s a few little complaints I have about this game though. Nothing too major, for the most part it’s thoroughly enjoyable. But right now, I haven’t seen any method available for going back and collecting missed relics. There could be one later in the game, I suppose, but right now I’m just trying very hard not to miss any. Additionally, relic hunters would do well to find each stage’s relic before going to the work of running around and puzzle solving. Some of them are hidden in out of the way locations under the level, and although relics that you collect will stay collected after you die, doing so will still reset the puzzle, and should that happen it can be a bit annoying.

Now onto the minor nitpicky stuff. I just got to a part where they introduced about three new kinds of creatures at once in a single stage. It took me a good few minutes to figure out that this place was actually a mini hub level of sorts that was also introducing teleporting flowers to lead you to off-routes so you could learn how to use each of the things. It’s not something they introduced before and is a bit jarring compared to the rest of the game’s methods of introducing new mechanics.

Additionally, this area has these three large beams that lead off into the distance that you look like you should be able to walk on. It’s not even a huge problem to jump up to them. However, if you travel very far out you simply encounter a kill trigger and die immediately. Like I said, these two are very minor nitpicky issues. I don’t even know if most people would notice or care about either of them.

I’ve been playing for about 2.5 hours, and I think I’m about halfway through, so I estimate it’d take about 4-6 hours to finish, a bit more if you want to go for all the hidden relics. $20 may seem like a bit of a steep price point, perhaps, but there’s a lot of heart put into this game. The puzzles are fun and pretty and all feel really satisfying to solve. It’s a game that’s easy to pick up and put down again and won’t try to skinnerbox you into continuing to play it. That’s $20 going to indie developers instead of letting some billionaire somewhere buy a third yacht. There’s far, far worse ways to spend that $20.

If any of this sounds interesting, I highly suggest you check out the Steam page for more info. It’s got a demo too, in case you want to try it for yourself. Lumote: the Mastermote Chronicles is an overlooked gem, definitely worth the time and money.

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Let’s face it, blowing stuff up and breaking stuff is fun. Unfortunately, there are tons of laws and stuff that make blowing stuff up IRL pretty hard to do without a lot of licenses, training, permits, etc, which kind of takes all the fun out of it. And most games that let you blow stuff up only really let you blow up the stuff they want you to blow up. Like, if a game says that it has destructible environments, usually that means that there are predetermined types of things that you can blow holes in or destroy. The only games that do allow full destruction are voxel-based games like Minecraft, or Space Engineers, or 7 Days to Die. Even then, though, these destructible environments have their limits and often feel a bit unnatural.

Teardown, as its name implies, set out with the goal of creating an entirely voxel and physics-based game that is completely destructible. Also, unlike the other games listed, the individual voxels in Teardown are about a tenth the size of those in the other games, which creates a much more detailed and granular environment to interact with.

When Teardown was in early access, there was a sandbox mode with different maps that gave you a series of tools and vehicles that you could use to interact with the map in various ways, breaking things, blowing things up, making interesting things happen, but with no real goal other than just to enjoy yourself. Now, with the release of the final version of the game, they’ve added a full campaign mode that adds quests, characters, and a story to the game.

Essentially, you’re an unscrupulous demolition expert that various people reach out to to hire as the guy that gets things done without asking questions. You then have various specific tasks that you need to complete, like destroying a house, or breaking into a building to steal evidence, etc. These quests start off fairly simple and then ramp up in complexity, adding more layers and also alarms that will trigger and give you a countdown until the police arrive. This forces you to look at the map in different ways and figure out optimal paths in order to accomplish all the goals in the very limited amount of time you have once you trigger the alarms.

The destruction mechanics in the game are really smooth and satisfying. When you knock down a support for something, you can watch it bend, break, or collapse the way you would expect for whatever material it is made out of. Wood, metal, brick, etc, all react in different ways and require different tools to maximize the destruction.

Speaking of tools, you begin the game with a sledgehammer, a fire extinguisher, and a spray can. As you go, you will unlock a number of other things, like a blowtorch or a shotgun that will allow you to interact with the world in new and different ways.

The physics system is not just impressive with solid objects, either, but there is smoke and water that will react to the environment in interesting ways too. Like, if you set fire to a house, smoke will accumulate within the building if there’s no way for it to escape, but then if you break a hole in the ceiling, the smoke will billow out through that hole. It’s all very impressive and leads to limitless combinations of how you manipulate the various maps.

The sandbox modes still exist as well, so once you complete the campaign, you can revisit all of the areas and have fun messing with them in whatever way you want. Also, the game fully supports modding and has a pretty active modding community on Steam, which allows you to play even more community designed missions, maps, and other game modes that modders have come up with. Since the game is so fundamentally versatile, it is pretty much up to the modders imagination what types of things they can create with the impressive engine.

The long and short of it is that Tuxedo Labs have really created something impressive with Teardown. It feels like an evolutionary leap from its voxel-based predecessors and would be a welcome addition to anyone’s library who ever had the desire to just watch the world burn.