Sunday, 3 August 2014

First Person Indie Wanderfests

You know, I don't seem to post very often. This particular one I've actually been meaning to do for quite a while; I started back in mid-June. I even finished writing it a week ago, but I just have had trouble making the time to post it. I actually have some 15 posts in various stages of completion right now, but I just cant seem to get around to finishing any of them up. Ah well. If you're reading this, that means that this one actually got posted, so I suppose that's a win for me.

So there was a Steam sale recently, and I decided to take that opportunity to pick up a couple of games that I had been meaning to for a while: Gone Home and The Stanley Parable. Well, I actually picked up Gone Home during a Humble Store sale, but let's not worry about the details...

As you may be aware, I absolutely love story-driven games (see Alan Wake), and one of the places that you can find an abundance of stories is in the indie game sphere (see To the Moon). A while ago, I heard rumblings in the video games community about this game called Dear Esther, and decided that it was the exact sort of game that was right up my alley. I picked it up, gave it a playthrough, and enjoyed it for what it was. A little while later, I heard about a Source mod called The Stanley Parable, which seemed like it fit into the same general category, so I downloaded that and ended up enjoying it immensely.

Now, a year or so after finishing those games, I've been hearing about Gone Home, another similar game (which I've now played). I've decided to label this style of game as a First Person Indie Wanderfest, because this is basically what the whole game is like: it's from a first person perspective, and as you walk around the carefully crafted environments, a narrator talks based on where you are and what you're looking at. That's... really all there is to it. I figured that this would be a good time to give my thoughts of these games, going through them in the order that I played them.