Games Recommendations

Of all the demos at this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt, Scoutible’s mobile game for replacing the job interview grabbed my attention. Some of the surrounding demos seemed like awesome tech solutions in search of a problem to solve, but, come on, what doesn’t suck about job interviews? Who wouldn’t rather play a game?

Job interviews are already a bit of game, but it’s a terrible game where the interviewee pretends like their biggest weakness is that they just work SO HARD, or pretends that they see themselves in five years in a role that shows you’re ambitious but not so ambitious that you’re going to go after the interviewer’s job. Meanwhile, the interviewer is trying to figure out if this person is actually results-driven and detail oriented, or just read that post about including those words on a CV.  Also, is this person in interview clothes playing the interview game going to get on well with the team, or will they drive all the current employees crazy?

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In Right Click to Necromance the attention span of a player is not sustained by the affirmation of a goal they reach towards. Instead it relies on the fascination of an ever increasing army. Kill some enemies on screen, raise them from the dead, your army is now one third larger than it was before. Now rinse, repeat, and continue because the game never stops, it only becomes more difficult to maintain your mass of rampant infantry.

I thought I would only sit down and play the game for 20 minutes at the most, but an hour later I was still clicking away in hopes that I could somehow make my army larger. There was something about the idea of seeing the number of people I had control over increase on the screen that made me stay longer than I expected, and since the game does not have a goal for players to progress towards, the journey is neverending.

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What does a mail delivery person, olympic swimmer, nurse, and artist all have in common? They all have emotions that can be affected at any point by anyone because they are human. It’s cheesy, I know, but sometimes we need to step back and remember these things. Day-to-day life is so busy and fast paced that it is easy to forget that the person in front of everyone in line at the supermarket has their own lives, their own individual initiative and motivation.

In the visual novel A Chase in Rainsville, the main character never has to sit in a supermarket line, wait hours in a traffic jam, or really deal with humans at all. The citizens of Rainsville are all anthropomorphic animals coexisting with the one human family that happens to live there, which happens to be the protagonist’s home. Despite this missing piece to the theme it still asks players to sit down and be open with their emotions just as humans would.

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There are moments in our lives that we will never forget — stories that will remain in our minds so that we may tell them to the next generation. “I remember where I was when Kennedy was assassinated.” “I remember where I was when Michael Jackson died.” While some events of this type have occurred within my lifetime, there is one memory that may never be passed on. I remember where I was when I learned about the end of the world.

“an ocular sun – a half other red”

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If a game had to be compared to David Lynch’s TV show Twin Peaks, many would say that Swery’s Deadly Premonition was the best product that anyone could have asked for. As it turns out, there was actually another game developed in Japan that directly referenced the show, and strange enough, it was doing a lot of things that games were not doing at the time.

Mizzurna Falls is a game that takes place in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado after the murder of a high school girl named Kathy Flannery disrupts the town’s quiet lifestyle. All of the personalities from the game’s inspiration are here: the smart-ass high schooler, the friendly sheriff, the sheriff’s receptionist. There is even someone named “Wolf.” There is no FBI agent that comes into town, though. There had to be some differences between this game and its inspirational material. Instead the player follows a high schooler named Matthew Williams who seems to have a romantic relationship with the murder victim.

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The signs were clear; everyone tried to warn us. Whether it was our friendly game show host Bob Barker telling us to neuter our pets, or Mickey Rourke telling us to “have the cojones” to fix our dog. Overpopulation of pets has been a problem in the U.S., but in the world of Animal Inspector it is a problem that is easily fixed with a stamp.

Welcome to your first day as an animal inspector! The institution was started for the surveillance of domestic pets in homes because it is much easier to remove animals in an isolated environment. Many of us love pets though, and we would hate to see them taken away. That’s where the new jobs comes into play. As the main character, you have a dog who has been with you through thick and thin, and the only way to make sure your pal isn’t taken away is to slip into the system. So, it becomes your job to rummage through inspection cards and determine if the pets are worthy to continue their loyal lives or if they would be better off in “the cages.”

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Monument Valley. Are you playing this? You probably should be.

This mobile game from ustwo has been out for a while, but the description of it as a casual puzzler kept me expecting yet another underwhelming freemium click-and-wait game. I missed out on months and months I could be playing Princess Ida on her beautiful puzzle path!

In each level, players are tasked with helping Princess Ida through a strange and gorgeous world towards her goal. Over time, she’ll have friends to help her and obstacles to overcome. Ida’s paths have a dreamlike, Escher quality to them, creating such pretty scenes that iam8bit has art prints based on Monument Valley levels, but they also make perfect sense as gameplay.

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