Amnesia & Indie Games

Ever wanted to feel your adrenaline rush while you play a game? ever wanted to have infinite replayability on a game? ever wanted it t be cheap? Then, without thinking it twice get your hands on Amnesia: the dark descent!
For some reason this indie game caught my attention while I talked to someone. She told me about her favourite youtube channel, Cry (chaoticmonki), which I totally recommend you check out, and while watching his videos I just kept finding Amnesia content. It was quite strange, with it being a singleplayer game it had appeared almost 1/2 times I checked a video, and that made me wonder if it was either a long game or just a RPG game he was just replaying over and over again, and so I proceeded to watch some videos and learn about this game, and for some reason I fell in love with instantly. Not only it was a horror game (which is, still today, a minor genre) but it had user-created content, and that made it replayable!
Now for some reason indie games weren’t my favourite, and I’m still a bit scared of what I might find when I buy them. It always came to my head that indie games where those 2D arcade games which consisted basically on boring levels you had to compete to achieve nothing, but amnesia looked different, it was an indie game, yes, but it didn’t look like what I had imagined an indie game would be. So right when the Steam Holiday Sale event came I was lucky enough to have a friend (Kit//Kitman1973 on youtube) buy it for me. And so I started playing…
For some reason i kept trying to be aware of jumpscares, which made me even jump at my own parent’s voices and feel tense all the time. It wasn’t an enjoyable feeling, but I still loved it, knowing that anything could happen at any time was scary, but the ambient the game creates is even more scary, when you know light sources aren’t unlimited, and there’s no way to defeat monsters but by running away from them it all sums up to make it the game it is. ow custom stories are another different world, while in the main story you could find a really worked out “story” as what it should be, some custom stories didn’t provide them and just went directly into the “scary part”. now why does that happen? Well, first of all, custom stories are in someway easy to create, even I’m working on one myself, but I do realize making up stories isn’t at all easy, most of the people just wanna scare others, and writing down stories isn’t at all easy since not only you have to place the notes and diaries for the player to read, but you do have to make every event match with the story you are trying to tell. Now this makes the game receive a lot of user-created content, which gives players a chance to pick what they are most interested in and creators the chance to publish their work.
So far I’ve just played a couple of custom stories, but I found appropriate to share my opinion on them. “wake” was the first one I played, it was quite easy, had a tense ambient and a couple of puzzles, but didn’t deliver an interesting story or ending. “pewdiepie’s brother” came next, the story was nonexistent, it delivered a lot of fun (since pewdiepie is a youtuber himself, quite famous for playing horror games) and many jumpscares, scary ambient aswell and overall a short story which took me arround 5 minutes to complete. Finally “other” which i just released a video on did deliver an intense story, a really good ambient and little jumpscares. It was the shortest story I’ve ever played, but probably the best.

My conclusion: Big game, a lot of stories to be discovered and spine-chilling ambient

Why I stopped playing Call of Duty games

Lately I’ve been talking to my old xbox friends and after talking a bit with them they all seemed to say the same: “mw3 is awesome” and I was shocked to hear that. How could a game cause such an impression to people without even trying? what made Call of duty better than any game out there? I really had no idea, I stopped buying CoD games almost a year ago, since I lost interest on all the games but CoD4. So I did some “research”, which consisted basically in hanging out with some of my friends and play this games, and this are my conclusions:

First of all, no matter how bad CoD games are now, no one can deny  CoD4 was a complete success. But other than that the rest of the games started to look too similar, with little innovations, just adding some rpg aspects to the game and a couple of maps. But even after that they did know what they where doing, they had set ideas, they worked before releasing the games. But that just lasted untill Black Ops was released, a death sentence for any other company, but a complete sales success for the franchise. weird? no, of course not, call of duty was and is one of the biggest gaming communities ever, just because they worked hard when they started and because they brought good games to people, but they relaxed, released games just for the sales and no longer for the gamers and that’s mostly why i stopped playing their games. Now whats the problem with mw3? it’s been released like Black Ops, with no idea of what they where doing and with one thing in mind, money.

So, my point is, didn’t we love playing our childhood games? didn’t we find having fun way better than getting killed by campers or leveling up to finally prestige and achieve nothing? What would a kid answer if we ask them what counter strike is? he would probably think its some sort of CoD perk and that is, in my opinion, sad.

So untill a Call of Duty game doesn’t provide me those I’m not getting any other title.

And that’s why.

My thoughts on Bethesda’s (relatively) new game

Ever since I heard of Oblivion, I was curious to try it. I had always loved the way Fallout 3 combined both RPG and shooting, and how the story itself was fascinating and had so many turns during your experience. But I never did try that game. Why? Because I had never really found interest in what I used to call ”medieval” games. I was more of a ”modern games” lover. And it wasn’t until I finally decided to try something else and ignore the so-called best games did I realize what I was missing.

So, recently I decided to buy The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim from Steam and I found this genre to be surprisingly pleasant and unknown at the same time. Skyrim was way beyond Fallout, it didn’t just have its basic story and some random, more brief ones, but it was a huge world with many stories to tell, and that was probably what made it so attractive. It felt like you really were in the game, and that was something I had never felt while playing games. On another hand, Skyrim offers a huge variety of choices when picking your allies and friends, which make the story take one role or another and that makes the game less linear and makes its already big replayability even larger. But if we leave the story aside and focus on the gameplay for a second we can find a large variety of ”weapons” and I don’t just mean swords, daggers and bows, but also the addition of magic and spells which you can combine to get some of the best results ever, and that’s been one of the major changes the game got from its predecessor, along with dragons.

Technically the game isn’t the best, its true that its quality has improved over Oblivion, but it’s also true that this game isn’t looking after the best looks ever, but just the necessary ones to make the player’s experience both enjoyable, but not focused on what he sees but on what he experiences.

Finally I’d like to point out the overall good sound quality and soundtrack, which sometimes isn’t what gamers look for when they buy a game, but who doesn’t remember “I don’t want to set the world on fire…” from Fallout 3 itself? Its music that makes us feel safe when we enter a simple town in-game and the same one that makes us nervous when we enter a ruin full of bandits.

So, if you are looking for that game that’s different from the others and In some way better, I  totally recommend this game for you!

Hello

Hey there,

Kian a.k.a. Kraaws here! and i’m here to present myself to you! I’m just a PC gamer who’s been reading articles himself, built his own opinions on stuff and now wants to write them for people on this blog!