PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series XS, Xbox One; Red Thread Games; Spotlight by Quantic
Dream
Dustborn tries to be more than just another narrative travel game, but its
half-baked focus on serious topics weighs down great dialogue and beautiful
character writing
The story begins on the road, miles out from a state border in an alternative
US. The stakes are clear, even when nothing else is: Pax, the player character,
is a Black woman in her 30s, who has just completed a heist with her friends.
The border means freedom. The police car telling you to pull over means trouble.
Pax and co are Anomals, people who wield manipulative vocal abilities called
vox. Pax can bend people to her will by making them feel bad, using abilities
named “trigger” or “cancel”. Her ex-partner, Noam, can soothe people with an
ability known as “gaslighting”. Dustborn certainly isn’t subtle in what it’s
trying to say. Soon you encounter people who get infected by weaponised
disinformation.
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Tag - PlayStation
This cutesy and surprisingly intuitive brain teaser pushes the idea of the
sliding-block puzzle to the very limits
For Jemma, her whole life feels like a puzzle. Left on a stranger’s doorstep as
a baby, she has never felt as if she fitted in, and is desperate to see what the
world looks like outside her small town, which nobody ever leaves. More
pertinently, whenever she moves, the whole world moves along with her – like
sliding tiles, like a series of conveyor belts. It really is a puzzle getting
her from A to B.
Each scene in Arranger: A Role Puzzling Adventure is its own sliding-block
puzzle, where you must think two or three steps ahead to move Jemma and the
objects around her in the right directions. Some things, such as rocks and robot
birds covered in purple static, don’t move alongside her, but everything else
does. So you have to transport swords towards monsters that stand in the way,
keys towards doors, bananas towards shy orangutans. Unless her way is blocked,
when Jemma hits the end of a vertical or horizontal row she rematerialises at
the other end, adding another layer of spatial logic.
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PlayStation 4/5, Xbox, PC; Hollow Ponds/Annapurna Interactive
Filling a field guide is the simple goal of this endearingly strange game, in
which you float on a giant bird, collect gently surreal sea life, and shave
sheep
You might expect from the name that this would be a game about herding sheep,
but it is significantly weirder than that. There are sheep, but they are fluffy
flying sheep that float around after you as you ride the back of a giant,
colourful bird. Now and then you shear them for wool with which to knit new
jumpers and hats with pompoms, making the sheep look like naked purple
hover-sausages with eyes. But the bulk of your flock is actually made up of sky
fish. Or are they fish? Some are sinuous like eels, others squawk like chickens,
others are feathered whales. As mentioned, it’s quite weird.
Your job in Flock is to fill out a field guide full of these wide-eyed flying
fishlike creatures, spotting them in the wild and then identifying them from
short, variably obvious written clues (“floppy proboscis”, “vertical stripes”,
“often mistaken for a loud radish”). They all resemble sea life through a gently
surreal pop-art filter, but they’re so well-drawn that I developed a sense for
the differences between a Cosmet and a Bewl, Thrips and Rustics. Some camouflage
themselves among weeds or leaves, some flee your approach, some just sit there
basking on rocks and clucking at you. You find whistles that teach your bird a
song, and then you can collect them Pied-Piper-style into a cloud of creatures
that trails in your wake.
Flock is out on Wednesday; £15.99
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