Player Preview - Subaeria

 Title: Subaeria
Developer: Studio Illogika
Status: Early Access
Release Date: 2016

Official Site: http://bit.ly/1NGMidI
Steam Page: http://bit.ly/1l05olG

Hey what’s up, Serpentine here taking a look at the rouge-lite puzzle action game, Subaeria, developed by studio Illogika, primarily a mobile developer this will be their first original PC title. In a somewhat near future, post-apocalyptic setting where the world as we know it has completely flooded, you play a young girl called Styx who has recently become bankrupt or credless as it’s called in the game after taking out numerous loans from the big two companies of the world, Soma and Amos, to feed her virtual reality addiction. Unfortunately in Subaeria your bank account determines which areas of the underwater labyrinth you are allowed to enter and entering a restricted zone can end poorly.

In every zone of Subaeria, robots controlled by Soma and Amos known as cleaners patrol the area for any citizens found where they shouldn’t be. If any are found, they will be met with deadly force as the cleaners will aim only to kill with their sawblades, laser rifles, missiles and other weaponry. While these Cleaners are deadly killing machines, they also come with one major flaw in that if a cleaner controlled by the Soma Company comes into contact with the Amos company cleaners they will destroy themselves. A pretty big flaw considering that both companies’ cleaners patrol the same areas and are conveniently colour coded for you to take full advantage of. There are outlier Cleaners with no company association though that you will have to be aware of. To be able to move freely through zones and areas you will have to clear out each room by tricking these robots into colliding with each other or with other elements like laser walls or explosive barrels. There are multiple puzzle elements to help you eliminate the Cleaners like pressure plates that change the colour of laser walls, motherboards that need to be activated and more. You won’t be able to leave a room until there is only one Cleaner left at which point it will shut down and open the doors for you to proceed on your journey. Every zone is procedurally generated with the key areas being shuffled around requiring you to do a little bit of exploring to get where you need to be, plus each new run will spawn different programs and sniffs to use providing a somewhat unique experience with each new run.

 

Using the collision method of eliminating the cleaners is really the only way to do it as you have no weapons that can deal with them directly. However you do have a little droid that follows you around and is capable of loading up 2 programs that can help you out including things like changing a Cleaners company owner, Placing a decoy to attract Cleaners away from your position and a healing program. Many of these programs will require your drone to get up close and personal with the target and it can only go about an arm’s length distance away from you so you do have to play the risk and reward game when attempting to use one of these programs. The programs also work off of a charge system that when depleted will render that program useless and drop it from your droids ability list. Programs aren’t too rare though with you easily finding a new one by the time you have depleted the equipped ones charges. There are also passive upgrades for your character called sniffs that can be found around Subaeria just like programs can. These sniffs give bonuses like reduced damage from lasers and a distance increase that your droid can travel away from you. Both programs and sniffs while being obtainable for free out in the world can also be purchased with creds that you can find randomly around the world or by destroying Cleaners however they can be a bit pricey.

As you travel through the different zones of Subaeria you’ll meet other people with their own little story’s and snippets of information about the world. To expand upon that there are also text logs that can be found around the world or just sent to your droid that can contain important story elements as well as some other information like emails from Soma and Amos about your financial status. The main overarching story to the world has the people of Subaeria separated into certain zones depending on their financial standing, the zones borders being patrolled by homicidal machines called Cleaners. Most of the poor people are addicted to an extremely popular virtual reality game called The Eden Experience that simulates Subaeria and its people, something that you later find to be more then it seems.

Other features of the game include multiple endings for each character with 5 endings currently in the game for Styx. There will be a total of 4 characters in the game at release ranging from the poorest in Subaeria to those in power.

Altogether Subaeria provides a really cool world and setting to explore with puzzles that will require you to think and act extremely quickly. Hearing one of the steel blades activate puts you into an instant panic especially as they somewhat camouflage into the background and suddenly appear. The puzzle variation is a little limited at the moment but that should fix itself overtime as the game is in early access. With the addition of the other 3 characters Subaeria will have a ton of replay ability especially if you aim to unlock every characters multiple endings. If you like puzzle games that aren’t exactly hard to solve but require you to act quickly and you enjoy the 1 game 1 life gameplay of Rouge-lites then Subaeria is defiantly worth a look.

Anyway, that’s been my player preview for Subaeria. The game will be officially releasing sometime in 2016 but is currently available on Early Access for $13 or your regional equivalent. If you want to find out more about the game check out the links below. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you guys next time.

Player Preview - Feist

Title: Feist

Developer: Bits and Beasts

Release Date: 27/July/2015

Official Site: http://bit.ly/1MrqJ0U

Steam Page: http://bit.ly/1ULMpYD

Hey what’s up, Serpentine here taking a look at the 2D puzzle platformer, Feist, the first game developed by the independent studio Bits and Beasts. You take on the role of small fur ball creature that was imprisoned by larger rat like beasts of the forest now escaping and attempting to rescue its companion being carted away by the rat beasts. The wilderness is an unfriendly place though full of hostile creatures and rough terrain so it’s not going to be easy.

Feist centres its gameplay around physics based puzzles that you will have to solve to progress. Almost every level of the game will introduce a new mechanic for you to work with and while the basic controls are explained there are some elements that you will just have to find out on your own for example these weird fluffy balls stick to surface but you don’t get told that, you’re just given slight visual hints via them suddenly appearing in the trees around the puzzle. There are some rather inventive sections of the game as well were you have to think somewhat outside of the box to progress but I won’t spoil that for those of you that end up picking up the game.

You aren’t completely incapable of protecting yourself from the wildlife as you can wield sticks as one use weapons, logs and rocks as throwing devices and you can even wield some of the wildlife as weapons like the fly, using its needle attack to your advantage. In many of the levels you will come across a new boss fight against a new rat beast creature that will have different mechanics both in their attacks and the way to defeat them. These guys are faster and stronger then you but hitting them with sticks, logs and stones will slow them down a bit however in doing so you also give them something to throw at you so be prepared to dodge.

There is one enemy in the game that can be a little annoying at first in the form of this burning yellow orb, it’s main function is to speed up the game and make you feel under pressure. While this enemy is something that looks somewhat broken on outside but once you grow accustom to it you can actually use it to your advantage much like every other enemy in the game. The orb tracks to your position and can easily ruin your platforming run by hitting you off the platforms to fall all the way back down to the bottom or just trapping you against the terrain inevitably killing you. Some levels require an almost perfect run due to this plus the swarming of enemies to your position making it very hard to recover from a mistake and it’s actually this that made me think how great this game would be for speed running although due to its physics based nature the game isn’t quite predictable enough for precise runs so there would be some RnG to contest with.

 Feists atmosphere produced from its artstyle, base story and soundtrack is very easy to lose yourself in as you become invested in trying to save your companion from their imprisonment. The artstyle as you have probably already noticed has a very similar graphical style to its fellow game in the genre Limbo, a simplistic shadowy look with most of the foreground coloured black. Although Limbo maintained the grayscale colour tone throughout, feist instead has opted to throw some colours around here and there, the background taking on the most colour with a forest colour palate and some enemies glowing red as they attack. As for the soundtrack it completely matches the games feeling of being in the wild alone with strange almost animal like sounds while also being quite relaxing and atmospheric to play alongside.

Altogether Feist is a very atmospheric game that provides difficult puzzles and plat forming elements together with dangerous wildlife that will keep you on your toes. The game feels like a good fit within the speed running community and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we see it start popping up at events sooner rather than later. If you like platformers with a relaxing atmosphere but still requires you to think through puzzles without holding your hand then Feist is definitely a game you should look into.

Anyway, that’s been my player preview for Feist. The game officially released on numerous store fronts on the 23^rd of July and is currently available to purchase for $15 or your regional equivalent. If you want to find out more about the game check out the links below. Thanks for watching and I’ll see you guys next time.

Player Preview - Poly Bridge

Title: Poly Bridge

Developer: Dry Cactus

Status: Early Access

Official Site: http://bit.ly/1LGXGqa

Steam Page:  http://bit.ly/1RUMUMC

Hey what’s up, Serpentine here taking a look at the physics based bridge building game, Poly Bridge, where the aim is to get vehicles safely across your bridges and structures.

The game is a pretty chilled out experience, there are no timers so you can build at your own speed and the games music provides for a very mellow atmosphere. The tools you are given to build your bridge will depend on what is available for each mission with some materials being unavailable in some circumstances to make it a little bit more difficult. The constant will always be road pieces as they are the only element of the bridge that vehicles will be able to drive on. Obviously just building a road over a ravine won’t be enough to support itself let alone a vehicle traveling across it so you have a bunch of support materials that you can use to help that. Wood is your most basic support material being cheap but not all that strong and is best used to create this kind of criss-cross pattern that is almost a requirement for every bridge that you will create. Steel supports will help support bridges with heavier loads travelling across them or help support landing impact from some of the stunt jump levels. Cable is the final form of support for overhanging structures that have no available base support options.

A big aspect of many of the games levels is creating splits in the bridge to allow boats to travel underneath. You can mechanize the split with pistons that will raise or lower the split joint in your bridge to allow both land and sea vehicles to travel over and under your bridge. Some of the later levels though this mechanic somewhat breaks. The mission will ask for a split in the bridge to allow for the boat crossing but you can just build your bridge up and over the boats crossing which is not only easier to construct but also a lot cheaper allowing you stay way under budget. This could be enforced however with the addition of a road height limit that prevents you building over the obstacle rather than actually building the split. The game already has levels that restricts the amount of road tiles available to you so it could maybe even take advantage of that system in these kinds of circumstances.

The jumping levels I found in Poly Bridge to be the most entertaining and required a little more thought to be put in to support the on landing impact. The monster Truck level in particular had me stuck for a while and not the bad kind of stuck were you feel you have exhausted all options, more like being stuck but still having a bunch of different elements you can still play around with. Eventually I managed to get the supports somewhat working and by somewhat I mean that bridge was definitely a one use only structure that fell into the water just behind the truck, but it got the job done.

Apart from the predetermined 60+ levels that you can play through the campaign or main game, Poly Bridge also has Steam Workshop implemented so you can download and play other players creations or even create your own through the sandbox level editor. If you ever have a moment in the game that you want to save, whether it be funny, ridiculous or plane stupid you can create a short animated GIF straight from the game that you can choose to upload to the games gallery, a place where you can go to watch other players saved GIF’s, or even upload it to social media. While it is a rather odd feature it’s still pretty cool non the less and can help capture some of those really awesome moments in the game.

Other features of the game include a simulation speed slider that allows you speed up or slow down the simulation for better analysis particularly to see what breaks first on your bridge so you can fix it. There is also a stress overlay option that will show you the parts of the bridge taking the most stress colourized from green to red.

Altogether Poly Bridge is a nice relaxing game that although laid back will still require some advanced problem solving to succeed on some levels. The mechanics do become a little repetitive once you’ve played a lot of levels and is one aspect of the game that may struggle on the official level side of things however I imagine that the workshop levels will fill the gap here with more crazy level ideas. If you like physics based puzzle games, Poly Bridge is definitely worth a look and if you ever want to just sit back, relax but still be engaged, Poly Bridge offers that too.

Anyway, that’s been my player preview for Poly Bridge, the game is currently available via Steam Early Access. If you want to find out more about the game check out the links below. Thanks for reading, I’ll see you guys next time.