indigozeal

The paperbox dioramas of Lume are adorable, but they belong in a short film; the creators didn't know how to make them into a game. Lume's message about renewable energy is welcome and its story, about a girl returning power to her grandpa's house, is sweet. The puzzles, though, are poorly executed, with a heck of a lot of aggravating trial and error - a matching game with miniscule differences and no feedback; a mapping puzzle with indistinct directions. I can't see the target elementary-school audience working them out, and I can't see their parents being able to help them, either. (I had to use a walkthrough.) Also, saving depends on having flash cookies enabled, so if you're not cool with Macromedia's tracking, you're gonna have to start from scratch every time. Not that that matters, 'cause the game lasts only an hour.
(Incidentally, this was the second time in one year that I discovered a modern game with broken saving. I'll ask again as I did with Terraria: why are we suddenly intent on breaking this extremely basic feature?)

Hello? Hell...o? is a bunch of intriguing gimmicks in search of a story. An RPG Maker horror title initially about a man whose lover has recently died coming home to a haunted apartment and a creepily ringing smartphone, it starts out as something like the text adventure Aisle, where your game is over with a single move, but instead goes on to ape Virtue's Last Reward, where you're required to find bad endings in order to get the information you need to open up paths to good ones. And then you find out that that's not ultimately the case, either - load up the game again past the apparent ending, and you'll experience events from a different vantage point, whereupon the game will reinvent itself around shifting perspectives. Oh, and the start screen eventually integrates itself into the gameplay. All of this sounds more interesting than Hello? Hell...o? actually is, though: after you unwrap and unwrap the various layers of the game, you discover that there really isn't much in its plot box but a bunch of tissue paper. I mean, I can't emphasize enough: there's really almost absolutely nothing to this story. That's a shame - for all the nifty mechanics, there deserved to be some meat on this bone.

As Kyle said in a Run Button video on this title: "Some at Namco woke up and realized that the part that people like about Pac-Man is eating the ghosts and just made a game around eating as many goddamn ghosts as you possibly can." Pac-Man Championship Edition DX takes the Pac-Man framework and makes an entirely new game out of it with the same satisfactions. You careen around a Pac-Man board that reinvents itself every time you eat all the dots & chomp a fruit and that's littered with sleeping ghosts; go past one, and it'll start trailing you around the course, gradually forming one extraordinarily long spectral conga line behind you. You want that though, so that after the board goes through several iterations and you finally get a power pellet, you can turn around and chomp like 50 ghosts at once. DX becomes a game of finding the shortest route through which you can eat all the dots and attract all the ghosts while being careful not to plow into the ever-lengthening ghost train you're leading as you zoom through the curves & loops at increasingly ridiculous speeds. And I haven't even mentioned the game's neon rainbow dance-floor psychedelia. A terrifically smart & satisfying reinvention of the Pac-Man concept, it's a great "short bursts" game, a pleasure to watch & play, and highly addictive. I just wish it lasted longer!
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