Batman : Arkham Asylum

I'm a big fan of Batman. He is by far and away my favourite superhero. I have serious man-boners for him. Primarily, this is because his main "super-power" is nothing more than spite-filled, acidic determination with the willpower to melt steel.

Bear with me here while we take a non sequitur detour - At one point in the recent comics, Batman has been captured by agents of Darkseid, an immortal and utterly evil demi-God. He is strapped into a chair with a mind-control device placed over his head, connecting his brain to rows and rows of duplicate Batman clones. The evil scientists are of course trying to clone an army of evil Batmen to do their no doubt 'evil bidding' (one day I hope to use this phrase in a managerial capacity), by stealing his thoughts and memories and programming the clone army. So far, so classic.

Gordon has been hitting the gym - and the HGH

Of course, using his immense mental strength, he breaks through their mind control illusion, and the powers that drive him are SO INTENSE that they actually cause all of the clones to go mad and melt. A telling line from one of the panic-stricken evil scientists is "My God . . . what kind of man can use his mind like a weapon?"

ANYWAY, It's only the first paragraph and I've already gone way off course. You're not here to listen about my man-boners. Or so I imagine.

Shut up and kiss me, you fool.

Essentially though, that is what the game is about – not man-boners of course, but the pure, bloody minded determination of one man. Here is a man who has forsaken using firearms and all other forms of lethal weaponry in his pursuit of justice. And although you've observed this for years in both the comics and the movies, it is really only when playing that you begin to understand why. Deep down, it's not out of some non-killing moral code. It's that killing is too easy. It is simply not enough of a punishment. 

This man is about to soil his undergarments

 

The sheer amount of pure physical violence that this one man can inflict is terrifying. In any other concept he would be labelled insane, and in fact, that is a recurring theme in the Batman mythos, that he is merely a flip side to Gotham's many villains, somehow worse than them, yet working on the side of normal people.

Batman finishes 2nd in the annual Arkham breakdancing competition

Playing batman, you truly understand the sense of satisfaction that comes from pounding two-fisted justice into evil doers. These are bad man you are facing. Even the ordinary goons are no doubt murderers, drug dealers, rapists or violent armed robbers. There is a sheer, healthy satisfaction in cracking bones. You are positively encouraged to go to town on them. You will find yourself reloading checkpoints just to see how efficiently you can dispatch the group of proles who dare to smash up the Batmobile. 

What is about to occur? A beating so brutal it would put LA police officers to shame.

  

Batman doesn't just knock people out with punches so that they can be arrested later. Batman doesn't even try to tie anyone up. This to me is clearly because he wants them to wake up later and try again. He gives them the option. You mow down countless henchmen in the game and who's to say if some of them aren't the same ones from earlier? In fact they clearly are not, as they are all walking upright and with no facial disfigurements or internal haemorrhaging.

Killer Croc provides some genuinely threatening moments. And a great set-up for a Joker gag.

 

Batman destroys his foes, both physically and mentally. To wake up after a beating from Batman must truly be an awful fate. He breaks bones. He twists limbs until cartilage and sinew snap. He hits people with such force that there is no doubt brain damage could be inflicted. He punches people on the top of the skull, in the base of the neck, or jumps on them with his knees and pounds their heads against a granite floor. As Churchill once said "We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm"

'Nope, can't smell anything, your shoes are clean'

 

So the very essence of this game is inflicting a vast amount of violence upon already violent men. Sure, occasionally you have to save some boob who has got himself tied up or captured. But these are merely distractions from the punching. And very admirable punching it is too. This is a thoroughly excellent game with a great cast, sound, free-flowing gameplay and combat. I eagerly await Batman : Arkham City.

Batman Arkham Asylum scores - BatCat

Football Manager 2011

Playing this game brings into question the metaphysical reality of living as a human being. We supposedly exist as rational beings, driven by two main things; firstly, the base, primal urges such as the need for food, sleep, sex, and so on. Secondly, the higher, society-based conformaties, like social company, interaction with other humans, rule of law, having a job, being productive and so forth.

This game provides an enjoyment which has no apparent connection to either of these two factors, and it remains a profund condundrum. Why do so many hundreds of thousands of people gain pleasure from playing what is essentially a spreadsheet?

Looking at other games, I can understand why my human mind enjoys and craves them. Fast-twitch action games provide a primal satisafction, sometimes of violence, sometimes of danger or fear, and sometimes just satisfying beep or boop sounds accompanied by flashing lights - rewarding me with squirts of dopamine for my button pushing efforts like some hairless Pavlovian dog.

Tactics - YOU pass the ball to HIM, and then YOU score a GOAL

Strategy and roleplay games provide escape, imagination and depth. MMOs provide interaction and goal-sharing - and the insulting of random people while drunk, safe in the knowledge they cannot punch you through trade chat.

So – here we have a game which is essentially a vast amount of minimalist pages containing numbers, graphs and occasionally, photos of gurning deliquents. There are also the matches themselves, where you have no real control over what happens. Any changes you make are lost to the infinite mysteries of the match engine, with human interaction reduced to making such simple commands as "substitute the tired man" or "try and score a goal by attacking".

The sadly unrealistic match engine missing a.) diving b.) spitting and c.) childish histrionics when easy chances are missed

Yet this game draws you in, almost like no other. Perhaps it is the fact you DO see the game as an unfolding story, that you transform the stats and the virtual players into a soap opera in your mind. Perhaps it is also the divergant aspect of history that occurs, whereby Fulham lead the premier league, Rooney goes to play for Swansea and Beckham scores a hat-trick in the world cup final.

Trying to explain the appeal of this game to someone who has never experienced it is nigh impossible. You would be branded mad by any court of law, a danger to society. You would be locked up, confined to a solitary cell, scrawling tactics and training plans on the walls with a piece of chalk you had obtained in exchange for giving a guard a hand-job.

YOU'RE ALL IDIOTS! Only 1 up against fucking LINCOLN?! The shiek is going to have my fucking head for this!

Essentially, one plays this game as a sort of librarian, or dusty archvist, shifting through endless tomes of information, scouring the spreadsheets for the right numbers. It is truly bizarre, yet compellingly addictive, beyond what a sane man should experience. Does that mean all who enjoy the game are mad - or does it just mean that everyone else is? Sadly, it's a question that cannot be answered - as I am still hunting for a decent left-back.

Football Manager 2011 scores – Rabid Hyena

Gemini Rue

There was a time, aeons past, now only viewable through rose-tinted lenses, when cartoons were violent and hairstyles were large, when clothes were bad and Michael Bay had not yet sodomized our transforming childhood heroes. It was that most tumultuous of times– the late 80s and early 90s. It was a time when lone men worked up a sweat in their bedrooms, creating things of beauty and delight. These hardy souls wielded their minds and their fingers upon that modern day anvil, the computer, and they forged things of wonder and beauty - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eY2gK1MPgh8. And also many, many things of crapness.

It was the era of the bedroom coder, when gaming was in its infancy and brave pioneers surged ahead with their creations single-handed, conjuring up graphics and code and plot and sound. It was a time when you could walk into WH Smiths, pick up a Dizzy cassette and still have enough change for copy of Commodore Format. However, like any species, the bedroom coder reached its zenith, then began to wither and die. Indeed, for a long time, he was considered an extinct breed, driven away by powerhouse publishers and the increasing graphical complexity of games. It was proclaimed that no longer could a single man create anything worth playing.

Despite these howlings of doom, indie gaming has been the resurrection of the home coder, and now offers a new path to tread for the bedroom wonderkids. And this brings us neatly to Gemini Rue, a point-and-click adventure – traditional yes, but polished until it positively gleams.

The graphics immediately harken you back to this golden era, one you now only see through sepia-toned memories, when 16mb was a lot of RAM and Doom was causing waves of panic throughout the readership of the Daily Mail. The pixellated excellence recalls the golden age of adventure gaming, stirring memories of everything from Legend of Kyrandia to Beneath a Steel Sky, but carrying it's own modern visual depth and flavour. The opening scene gives us an iconic theme of the dark, perpetually rainy metropolis clearly inspired from Blade Runner and film noir, but no less impressive for that.

Buses remain unreliable in the future

The plot involves the familiar staples of memory loss, detective work, oppresive governments, secret facilities and brooding intensity, but presented with perfection. The top notch sounds and music draw you in, and the gritty voice acting, especially of the main protagonist, a man who sounds like he chews sandpaper, harks back to the grizzled gum shoes of the 1950s.

The atmosphere of the game achieves that great goal of all, immersion. Lights flicker, rain spatters onto the sidewalk, you feel the heavy, rotten burden upon your characters shoulder's. The quest for answers and the dual problem of untrustworthy memory span across two main characters, who's link drives the plot forward.

Alleyway - check. Rain - check. Replicants? Not sure.

What is truly remarkable is the effort and skill that has gone into fashioning this game. The production values are crystal perfect and to be told that the entire thing was constructed (save the music) by a single man is wonderful – the impressively-named Joshua Nuernberger http://twitter.com/#!/thejburger

Sim Dentist 2011

There are various attempts by the author to freshen up the genre – control of dual characters, some shooting and combat sequences and some detective work – all of which provide pleasant little morsels of gaming satisfaction, but the real meat and gristle still lies within the pointing and the clicking. It is not a terribly difficult game, and neither is it a particularly long one, but when one goes to a fine restaurant, one does not stuff one's face with all-you-can-eat food – you savour the taste and subtle flavour of the exquisitely crafted dishes placed in front of you. So it is also with Gemini Rue.

Gemini Rue scores – Sophisticated Fox 

Civilisation 5

The Civilisation series does of course have a long and distinctive history, like some aged and hallowed relic handed down through the generations and talked about in hushed tones. Civ is indeed a grand old gentleman, with a twirly grey moustache and a gleam in his eye. He has seen countless pretenders come and go, but still sits there, confident in his pedigree.

Honeycombed beauty - although the hexes are optional

I cut my teeth on Civ as a teenager, and spent many, many hours secretly preparing swarms of tanks to surround enemy cities before sneak-attacking an entire country into rubble. In another society, perhaps spending countless evenings plotting the downfall of empires and culling inumerable civilians with nuclear aggression would be a hallmark of concern, but happily my parents failed to ever check up on my megalomaniacal leanings.

Since then, I have dabbled with Civ 4 for a while, but haven't properly played one of the Civ progeny until Civ 5 was birthed unto the world. It's the usual score – you lead a civilisation from prehistoric times until the future age with a variety of ways to win. The traditional “crush all beneath your jackboot” style world domination, the spaceship launching science victory, the rather boring method of just scoring the most points by the end of the game, or the equally dull diplomatic victory, which essentially just consists of bribing vast numbers of city-states to vote you in as a World President-For-Life.

'No, of course I'm not going to attack you." Lying through your teeth to the A.I. remains a Civ staple

The most interesting is the cultural victory, where your civilisation's arts and culture become so ubiquitous to the people of earth that they cannot imagine life without them – interesting because cultural advances become increasingly difficult and expensive to acquire the larger the empire you own, promoting the use of a small, tightly organised Civ instead, and denying you the use of the typical Civ mega-army to crush all. However, you may very well try and win peacefully, but of course we all know that what you really want to do is grind that smug A.I.'s face into the ashes of his capital city until he chokes - so war is often waged for fun as much as it is for strategic or political reasons.

A mention has to be made of the new hex-based movement and the fact units cannot stack – which makes combat a little more tactical than it used to be. Units are now more expensive and can level up, rewarding you for holding on to them and using them carefully, and bringing your trusted spear-men all the way through to the modern era as mechanized infantry is possible with careful management.

The introduction of strategic resources such as oil, iron and uranium is a very nice touch, especially as they are not revealed on the map until you discover the relevant technology. This brings the intriguing possibility of a previously weak civilsation becoming a major player upon discovery of a vast horde of oil within his borders, or a sudden power-grab by yourself in order to secure some precious uranium to construct your nuclear, ahem, 'deterrent.'

Work faster you fools! I said gold, I wanted gold! The city management screen is where you tweak your solvenly citizens into perfection

The A.I. as usual has some gaping flaws – its use of its navies is laughably poor, and its ground forces will often put themselves in hopeless positions from which you can pick them off, but it is not overly terrible – its higher grand strategy often proves threatening, even though it has still not learnt how to successfully manage empires across more than one continent or island.

The political machinations are equally one-dimensional, and are limited mostly to trading resources and the constant requests for open borders that the A.I. seems obsessed with.

It is a good game – very addictive, in the same way popcorn, or indeed, crack cocaine is quite more-ish. Just one more, you say to yourself. Just one more turn. I'll just capture this city. I'll just defeat this opponent. I'll just wake up next morning with a throbbing head from a 4am bedtime and get fired from my job for turning up late again. The risks are high with this game.

Population and city management is key as ever. Rushing to expand too fast will result in a vast amount of unhappiness, potentially crippling your growing Civ and making you easy pickings for hostile A.I. All things in moderation, slow and deliberate expansion is the key. The cultural “talent trees” are a nice touch, allowing you to modify your Civ's internal characteristics as you gain more and more culture – another benefit that the smaller, more focused Civ can acquire faster than the its ugly, larger cousin.

Gandhi once again tries to crush the world

The map screen is beautiful and smooth – trees rustle, cows moo, units shuffle around – it gives a real sense of being alive, and the landscape changes over the millennia as you modify it.

Like any Hollywood vixen however, when viewed in the cold light of day with no make-up, there are plenty of flaws to pick up on. There is a vast and terrible slowdown in graphics loading as the map opens up and becomes larger, which is utterly baffling considering how uncomplicated the graphics really are. The loading times for saved games are truly criminal for the 21^st century and remind me of my Commodore 64 days.

There also comes a point in the game where you find yourself doing very little except clicking on the 'next turn' button, and the lack of tangible reward from the game when you finally win victory is rather galling. In Civ 2, for example, when you launched your colony spaceship, you were treated to a rather epic video and thumping classical soundtrack (which can be seen here – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y47nxo_uvA), in Civ 5 however you are “rewarded” with a single still screenshot and a scoreboard. I know it is more about the journey than the destination with a Civ game, but still, throw us a frickin' bone here.

So in the end, a very good, achingly additive game which will suck time away from your life – but after all that, rather empty in a hollow, soulless way, and actually a lot more simplistic and lacking depth than a simulation of the world's civilisations should be – in many ways, it feels like a step back from earlier games.

Lovable, fun, but slightly simple at the core, Civ 5 scores -Sleepy Pug

SpaceChem

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why one keeps returning to this game. It is not exactly unpleasant, merely very taxing on the brain. Indeed, describing Spacechem as ‘fun’ may be pushing the use of the word to the very limit. It is more akin to the satisfaction one gains from solving a particularly complicated maths puzzle, or successfully hoiking out an errant breadcrumb from your keyboard using a modified paper-clip fashioned into a complex grabbing tool.

The blue and red widgets, showing the layout of two simple atoms paths - confused yet?

This game is difficult. It may well be a cliché, but it is fiendishly difficult, in that one might imagine an actual fiend, one of the demons from the nine circles of hell, rubbing his scaly hands together in glee and drooling unspeakable drool at the thought of unleashing this creation upon unsuspecting humanity.

The objective of this so called ‘game’ is to manipulate and control atoms and molecules within a graphical representation of a chemical factory. One is given various tasks along the lines of creating certain types of bonds, or molecules, then delivering them out of the reactor. Atoms are moved around using a ‘widget’, which is essentially a type of railway which can travel in only one direction. The player must place this ‘railway’ in a certain way so as to guide the atoms and molecules around the screen in the correct orientation to ensure the right reactions take place. And fuck me, that sounds boring when I write it, but makes for very engaging puzzle shenanigans.

This is as exciting as the screenshots get I'm afraid

Being a science graduate I was mildly pleased to see the correct types of bonds and molecules that are formed – all in line with what is actually possible in the real world. Expert planning is required to send the atoms around your railway track with the right timing – various tools such as synchronised gates help with this.

The game starts out merely difficult at first, but rapidly rises through the ranks, reaching brain-teasing, confounding, puzzling and nigh-impossible in a very short space of time. You will frequently shut the game down in disgust, swearing under your breath, only to cogitate the answer subconsciously, while asleep, or in the bath, or have it spring into your mind like the theory of gravity to Newton, before leaping back to the monitor and completing the puzzle with a satisfactory smirk. It is a fool’s errand however – the only reward that awaits is an even more difficult puzzle beyond. Such is mans folly in his own knowledge.

This 3rd one is totally off the hook

Eventually one graduates to using multiple reactors at once to create larger and larger molecules. You will soon find yourself staring at the screen with the same sort of empty, confounded expression that a young boy from the countryside might have after being introduced to some artwork of Escher by a creepy old uncle.

In conclusion, this game is one of the most mentally challenging I have ever played, and while not to everyone’s taste, if you consider yourself a human of above-average intelligence, it will provide a worthy challenge. If you consider yourself a human of only average intelligence, then the warm grey slop that drips out of your ears while you try this game is in fact liquified brain.

Spacechem scores – Alarmed Goat

Airborne Assault - Highway To The Reich

This game is a guilty pleasure. It is drinking alone on a Friday night in your flat. It is stuffing your big fat face with profiterole after profiterole until your lips are smeared in chocolate and cream and shame. It is the slightly chubby girl you took back home after the club and who did unspeakable things to you.

You do not boast to your friends about this game. You do not shout its praises from the rooftops. Instead, you close your curtains, lock your door, turn down the lights and bask in its utterly evil joy.

And why the curious silence regarding how good this game is? Because it is a tactical real-time war game simulation. I feel dirty for even typing those words. That’s right. A full-on, hard-core, nerd-boner simulation, with objectives and waypoints and all manner of geekish delights.

SIMULATE ME 'TILL I SQUIRT!

The above screenshot illustrates a typical engagement - a battalion of American Paratroopers (green units) have landed in Holland and are attempting to storm a German hill position. One gains an idea of the size and scale of this game when told that each grid represents 1 square km, and each icon represents a unit of 100 men or more.

The setting is September 1944, during the Allied airborne invasion of Holland – a truly remarkable operation involving over 30,000 airborne troops, the largest operation of its type ever attempted. The plan was for three divisions to grab vital bridges deep behind German lines, quickly followed by a massive armoured thrust up through Holland along a single road, over the bridges, and into the industrial heart of Germany. The operation failed, for a variety of reasons, but it makes for a classic and inspiring basis for a game. (For an excellent read, I recommend Cornelius Ryan’s outstanding work, ‘A Bridge Too Far’)

Not for you the pretty graphics and sounds from any game of the last ten or fifteen years, oh no. You get a top-down 2D map-like view. Your soldiers? Square blocks of inanimate colour that move around like migrating jellyfish. That is the key selling point of this wonderful game – the real time movement. The game play is completely different to any hex/turn-based wargame you’ve previously played. You can pause the action of course, but a critical component is forward planning. There is a punishing, realistic orders delay on any command you issue. Sending your paratroop battalion forward into assault positions can take an hour or two (of game time), and there is no way to instantly stop them should a group of panzers appear out of the nearby woods – you scrabble to issue defence orders, but it takes time for the instructions to get through.

Planning a complex set of maneuvers to flank the enemy gives me nerd-boners

The sounds? There's no music, no ambient noises, but who cares? That stuff just gets in the way. You get the crack of rifles, the thunk of AT rounds, the explosion of artillery and the thump of mortars, and that's about it. Even gunfire is portrayed only with simple red and yellow lines. Despite this childish simplicity, it is perversely satisfying to watch the enemy stumble blindly into your ambush, watching the beautiful thick red lines of anti-tank fire smash his precious vehicles, then seeing their status change first to yellow, then to red, as their retreat turns to a chaotic rout.

The in-game menus are almost neo-artistic in their minimilism. They are bare, basic, unanimated, stripped down to simple graphics and plain text. But it doesn't matter. Because this game is so smooth you would rub your naked belly on it.

The brave British boys in red rush a bridge, before dastardly Jerry can blow it up

Planning for the hours and days ahead is crucial – how long will it take your forces to march to the next town? When will reinforcements arrive? Will I get there before nightfall and how far will the enemy have advanced in that time? The tactical and strategic depths of questions that you must pose yourself are outstanding in their realism - you must hold roads for your tanks, and high ground for your artillery, and decent excuses for why you are not going out on a Friday night. Explaining the joys of WWII war-gaming simulation does not always cut the mustard.

In the wide variety of missions (of which you choose to play either the Allies or the Germans) you will command a great deal of troops. The smaller missions will have you in charge of a battalion or two (1000-1500 men) while the larger scenarios will place you in charge of whole divisions (10,000 plus!). The smallest unit represented by the game is generally the ‘company’, 100 to 150 soldiers strong. With this is mind, how on earth would the budding armchair general control so many forces in real time?

An enormous map, featuring a bowel-busting 26,000 allied troops

The answer is with the amazing A.I. and command structure. Without going in to too much detail, you do not have to dally at all in the dirty, lower aspects of your troops unless you wish to. You delegate a lot of the mundane tasks to your A.I. Captains and Majors. You can merely issue orders to HQ sections, who then interpret them in their own way, and carry out the missions assigned to them. For example, you direct a whole battalion consisting of 3 companies, an HQ and 2 mortar platoons to attack a town by issuing a single order to its Headquarters. This HQ unit will then direct and control the entire operation – it will put the troops in formation, assign jobs, locate the best firing positions for the mortars, and even hold some troops in reserve should an emergency occur. However, should you wish to get involved in the nitty gritty, you can directly command each company yourself.

Each unit is subordinate to a higher HQ – so should you wish, you can move every single unit on a map by issuing only a single order to your divisional HQ, who will then conduct the entire task for you.

An attack order is issued for the brave meat-heads of the American 82nd Division

The attack hammers home, sending Germans scattering. That yellow line of gun-fire is about as special as the effects get.

The maps themselves can be huge, up to 100km², and the missions can run from hours to weeks. The scale of some missions is enormous and requires detailed planning. The units themselves, despite appearing as simple coloured blocks, are fully simulated and alive, each with their own characteristics of morale, aggression, commander skill and so forth. Weapons, ammo and men are tracked, right down to the last bullet – a critical factor to know. Should your AT guns run out of ammo or your machine gun section fire its last round, their effectiveness is going to be severely reduced until they get resupplied during the day/night cycle. I have yet to play a more 'hard-core' war simulation game in this respect.

The game accurately models terrain, line of sight and cover, providing you with tools to judge any situation. But the best innovation in the game? It is the fiendishly clever enemy A.I. It will mercilessly crush you to begin with, it will appear from unexpected directions, flank your carefully planned defences, and laugh as your attack is brutally bombarded by artillery strikes before you even get into assault range.

This game is wonderful, satisfying, deep and challenging. If you can overcome the initial learning curve, you will spend many quiet, precious hours planning your invasion of the Reich.

Final Verdict – Cute & Curious Owl

Spelunky

Spelunky is amazing. Fact. There. Review over. Go home to your wife and tell her you had a good time. Why is it good? You want me to explain? Jesus. Ok then.

Spelunky is a 2D Indiana Jones themed oldschool platformer, created by a guy called Derek Yu, on his own, and released as freeware. This is incredible in itself – the polish that’s gone into this title is heart-warming, and the game is a slick joy to play compared to the vast swathes of dross that a PC gamer normally has to suffer.

Your goal is simple – get through the underground cave system alive, defeat the final boss, and grab as much loot on your way through as you can.

What lurks in the depths below?

Let’s start with the graphics. They project a warmth of a cosier era, a rose-tinted view of the past, where strange bearded men sat in their bedrooms and composed games on floppy disks.

I love the graphics. They are bright, clear, simple and flow amazingly well. The smoothness of your spelunker as he jumps to his death never gets old. The sounds are solid, beeps and boops, with an 8-bit music background, again adding to the retro-ambiance, yet never grating or annoying. They take you back to a simpler time, a happier time, when 8mb was a lot of RAM and people hadn’t heard of circle-strafing.

I am also in love with Spelunky because it is so hard and utterly unforgiving. Gone is the spoon-feeding, nampy pampy gameplay of a generation of cry babies who don’t know the meaning of the words ‘instant death’. You start with four lives, and once they’re gone, it’s game over. There’s no save game feature, no checkpoints (although by saving up enough gold, you can eventually pay for tunnel shortcuts to later levels). You live and die by your wits and your skills. As you progress deeper into the caves, your palms begin to sweat. What was once an easy jump over a spike pit now becomes a yawning chasm threatening to suck your spelunker to his doom. If you die, it’s all over. You know you can’t afford to fail. It’s even worse when you are down to your final life. Every second you spend onscreen could bring imminent death - quite literally, as an unseen clock ticks constantly down, sending an unstoppable ghost to kill you should you dally too long in each level.

A rare shop - no refunds

You can get shot with arrows, devoured by man-eating plants, squashed by boulders and thrown by yetis, among dozens of other ways to die. And you will die. A lot. It took me well over a hundred deaths before I recorded my first victory and finished the final level. And the levels get progressively harder, as deadlier traps and nastier creatures are introduced in the differing zones.

Secrets abound throughout the game, requiring you to experiment and learn. What is this key for? Why do I need the Udjet eye? What does that beeping sound mean and how do I get to the mysterious City of Gold? All these need to be discovered yourself.

The mysterious ice caves. Full of yetis. And, um, ice.

One of the key facets of the game is that the levels are randomly generated, yet always present a perfect challenge and never trap you unless you are careless. You have access to a limited number of bombs and ropes, and may even get your hands on more exotic goodies as you progress. A warm feeling spreads through you when you discover a weapon in a crate, or find a shopkeeper willing to sell climbing gloves or a jetpack. Only being able to carry a single item in your hands makes for some tense moments, as you juggle a damsel in distress, a golden idol and your expensively acquired digging tool, all the way to the exit.

A damsel. Stereotypes abound.

 

But it’s also about the choices – the choices! Example. You’ve rescued a trapped damsel (who handily restore lives via a kiss if you get them to the level exit), but you’re faced with a proximity arrow-trap blocking the only exit. You have no bombs left and nothing nearby to trick the trap into activating. You know getting hit will kill you, and you need to get past. The answer? Lob the damsel – she takes the hit from the arrow and you can proceed. If she’s lucky, she may even survive. The budding spelunker faces many such moral grey areas as he proceeds through his adventure.

The game sucks you in. You want to play. Again and again. It reaches that perfect point of being easy to play yet fiendishly difficult to master, confoundingly frustrating in its brutality, but yet possessing a goal of achievement which is worth all the deaths. The primal thrill of reaching a new level zone drives you onwards – although it is often followed by the crushing defeat of being instantly murdered by a previously unencountered foe.

Speaking as a simple human being to another simple human being, I beg you – give this game a try. It would be criminal not to.

Final Score – Amazingly Happy Dog