At first glance, Infliction looks like any other game in the stealth/horror-adventure genre. You wander around dark corridors, dodge attacks from a malicious ghost and other monsters, attempt to complete tasks and progress the story all while trying not to get killed, and occasionally solve environmental puzzles with the help of your in-game Polaroid camera. It has all the hallmarks of a good stealth/horror game: It’s tense, the plot is interesting, the story breadcrumbs are easy enough to find but not all laid out in front of the player. It even has an element of exploration, with setting elements changing between areas and levels of the plot and rewarding careful looking through things. It’s all incredibly impressive, especially having been created by a very small team funded through Kickstarter. But at the same time, it marks a possible new route for the spooky corridors genre, one that future game designers would be wise to explore, one where perhaps the main draw is the setting and not the monsters wandering its halls.
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It's been almost a week since FunCom released their fantasy sandbox survival sim, Conan Exiles. And the prognosis is...better than initial launch. The game looks great, and the loop of scavenging and survival is well worth it, sure. It's also the only game with (and this is obligatory since it's been the only news coming out about this game other than the lag info,) an endowment slider so you can choose the size of your character's breasts, or, if you are so inclined, pendulous lower extremities. But while the game has a lot of interesting systems and some absolutely gorgeous graphics, the extreme lack of balance, lag and rubberbanding issues, and just downright uncooperative AI mean that this game will have a lot of polish to deliver before its final release.
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I'm playing The Flock to lose.
The Flock is interesting in this regard, as there is a global endgame condition, and that condition is "lose or make others lose enough times." The count starts at something like three hundred and thirteen million "population." When the population counter reaches zero, the game will no longer be on the market. The more people who play or the more players who die, the more the population counter goes down, and the closer the players get to endgame.
This is actually pretty interesting to me. I'm always interested when something is difficult to find, or permanently out of reach. I kind of find this more interesting than the actual game itself. So I'm playing The Flock to lose.
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