Review: Luxuria Superbia (iPad)

Review by Matt S. 

Tale of Tales continues to prove that it is the preeminent developer of games that are not just artistic by accident; they're developed specifically to be art. And they're an eclectic team to say the least; after such dark projects as The Path and The Graveyard, Luxuria Superbia couldn't be more of a thematic foil. This game is positively filled with colour.

It's also a not-so subtle metaphor for the act of pleasuring a women. In Luxuria Superbia your job is to delve into the depths of a flower and stimulate it by rubbing on buds as they appear on the screen. The more stimulated the flower is the more colourful it becomes. In practice it's a little like a scrolling shooter, and points are accumulated by keeping the flower simulated. The twist is that if you oversimulate it the flower will climax and its game over.

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Review: Flowmo (iPad)

Review by Matt S. 

Flowmo lasts for around 30 minutes and in that time there's not a second of the experience that fits a conventional description of what constitutes a game. There's no definable characters, there's no linear narrative. It's abstracted in the extreme.

And it's wonderful.

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DDNet's Games of the Year 2013: Arthouse Game of the Year

A couple of months ago we asked you to vote on your favourite games of the year (up to the end of October, except for the blockbuster of the year award, which is still running now on the site). You've voted and now, in the coming weeks, we will unveil the results.

The process: Earlier in the year we asked you, our readers, to rank nine different games per category in order of preference (or how interested you are in a game, if you haven't played it before). We have taken those rankings, averaged them up, and the resulting list below are the top four games - three runners up and the winner.

Games that make you think. Games that inspire you. Games that make you wish you could study games at university; arthouse games are a topic dear to the hearts of many of us here at Digitally Downloaded, and the below four games are the finest examples that we've seen this year.

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Review: Contrast (PS3)

Review by Matt S. 

Until I played Contrast I wasn't interested in it. That changed about three minutes after I started playing. This is a deeply intelligent game, and yet another example of a wonderfully emerging class of games that maintain artistic credibility while also offering genuine production values. Rain, Shelter, Papo & Yo and now Contrast; it has been a good year for serious gamers indeed.

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Review: Proteus (Vita)

Review by Matt S.

I sat in the middle of a ring of stones, on the top of an icy mountain. Roughly humanoid in shape these menhirs told no story of their own, and so I was left to sit there and puzzle over them. And so I sat, with nothing but the freezing wind to keep me company.

At length I decided to descend from my perch to explore the world beneath me. I approached a tree, and the noise started. At first it was one note, but as I made my way into a thick forest of pink leaves that one note became a cocophony, somehow jarring and at the same time serene. This soundscape was my own; I created it through my own movement, and that sensation of ownership connected me to the unique soundtrack that only I would ever hear.

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Review: Deadly Premonition: The Director's Cut Ultimate Edition (PS3)

Review by Shaan J.

On paper, Deadly Premonition might seem like an awful game, and a majority of gamers and critics would have agreed with that sentiment back in 2010, when the game launched on the Xbox 360. Unfortunately, that’s the inherent issue with arthouse games; while there are certainly exceptions that buck the trend, a majority of ‘art’ games put an emphasis on leaving a lasting emotional mark on the player, rather than providing an "entertaining" experience.

As is the same for the art in general. Arthouse cinema bores people whose idea of film starts and stops at The Avengers. Many people would rather read Harry Potter than the kinds of books that float around literature circles. This is all fine, but it's unfortunate that in the games industry there is the expectation that art games also appeal to the blockbuster fans. Else those games get slaughtered on Metacritic. Enter Deadly Premonition.

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Review: Rain (PS3)

Review by Matt S.

Melancholia can make for an oddly beautiful theme when done right. We've seen it work for poets such as T.S Eliot ("By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown/ Till human voices wake us, and we drown" - The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is truly a masterpiece), we've seen it work to great effect in paintings, in music, in film. For instance, if you haven't yet seen Mirrormask then I urge you to do so. It's spectacular.

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Review: Puppeteer (PS3)

Review by Matt S. 

I am really worried that many of the people that will play Puppeteer will not realise just how incredible it truly is. A simultaneous homage and parody to the kind of "high art" theatre that has driven opera, ballet and the like for hundreds of years (and, of course, classical puppet shows), Puppeteer shines at its brightest when you as the player have experienced enough of these live performance types to fully appreciate how the narrative ticks on behind the scenes.

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Review: Irritum (PC)

Sometimes one, single, interesting mechanic can be the reason to play a game. Without its bullet-absorption mechanic, Ikaruga is another unremarkable Japanese 2D shooter. Without its dimension-flipping mechanic, Fez is a pretty but mostly unremarkable 2D puzzle-platformer. Without puck manipulation, Scatter is a breakout clone that is successful at cloning frustration.

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Review: The Life Of A Pacifist Is Often Fraught With Conflict (Ouya)

If the name alone of this short little freeware visual novel does not automatically cue you in that this is not a major production title, feel free to stop reading this review right now. Standing against violence in video games is something that hardly any major publisher would ever dream of doing, as it would be railing against their own business models, after all.

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Preview: Shelter (PC)

Shelter is a game that’s going to be hard to put a score on. An artsy exploration title which to my hands plays as more of a tech demo than an actual game (not dissimilar to the likes of Dear Esther) means some people will find themselves loving it just for being that little bit different to your average game. And by the same virtue others will find themselves simply not being able to click with it, and so come the time to review it a finite score is bound to polarise opinions. Luckily for me, however, this is a preview, so I don’t have to stamp a score on it.

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Review: Art Academy SketchPad (Wii U)

It surprises me that it took Nintendo so long to do this; from the day that the Wii U was announced I thought that an Art Academy game would be the perfect way to show off the console's unique features.

And I was right. Unlike Nintendo's other heavy-hitter Wii U games so far; New Super Mario Bros. and Pikmin 3, Art Academy SketchPad would not be possible on any other device except the 3DS, and completely uniquely for Nintendo, it's also a game that the Wii U does fundamentally better than anything Nintendo has produced for the 3DS.

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