Vinrafel Gaming

In a future of megacorps and artificial intelligence, it is your job to bring immortality to the board of directors. Spinnortality is a cyberpunk management game that was developed and published by a single man. In it, you run a global corporation that sells products in the hope of learning how to live forever and eventually ruling the world. The game is fun for a quick jaunt but is riddled with tedious micromanagement that hurts the late game. Despite that, I thought that Spinnortality was a fun take on the cyberpunk genre. Being a global corporation, the main mechanics of the game regard researching and selling technologies. The player will start by learning about social media and eventually be selling products that tell you exactly when you will die. To effectively sell the products they have to be marketed in one of the various regions. The key to making money is to link the right slogans with the right cultural beliefs. For instance, a slogan that promises a quick and eas

Sometimes the world is not what it seems to be. A little digging shows that there is more to the world then you would ever expect. Cultist Simulator is a resource management, digital card game that was developed by Weather Factory studios. In it, you explore the occult as you juggle making enough money to live and avoiding being noticed by the authorities. It is a deceptively simple game that is enjoyable if you are willing to put in the time and effort. Cultist Simulator is a resource management game where each resource is a card. The player starts with some of each of the four main resources: health, reason, passion, and funds. Each unit of the resources that the player owns is represented as a card that they can move around the table. From such humble beginnings, the player can use action modules to interact with their cards. Combining cards in different ways and with different actions can produce new cards that the player can use. You continue to advance your resources unti

Ah, Russian storytelling. It’s always bleak and grey, but that’s why we love it. Metro Last Light is a stealth shooter that was developed by 4a Games back in 2013. I picked it up in anticipation of their February release, Metro Exodus and I figured I’d give you my thoughts on this one. This is a genuinely good shooter with an interesting story. There is a good balance between the game’s stealth and action elements and while there is a good story, the gameplay is mostly divorced from the narrative. The gunplay in Metro Last Light is decent, but could be improved upon. There are about a dozen different firearms to choose from that are roughly divided into a couple categories. Each variety has its own arena that it excels at whether that be long range, skirmishing, or stealth. The character can only carry three weapons at a time, allowing the player to tailor their load-out to whatever play style they favor. There are a few ways that guns can be customized that subtly change how

The Eternal Castle is ostensibly a remake of a game from 1987 however all evidence points to that being a clever marketing ploy by the developers ( forum post ). Instead, it is an homage to the cinematic platformer, a genre including Prince of Persia and Oddworld . The Eternal Castle dusts off digital rotoscoping technology and uses retro, four colored environments to create oddly beautiful and expressive scenes. While the gameplay is not particularly smooth, the visuals and mystique of the world kept me engaged throughout The Eternal Castle . The gameplay of The Eternal Castle leaves a lot to be desired. There was the problem of the unresponsive controls. I found that it was hard to get the character to do what you wanted them to. Attacks were slow and sometimes pressing the attack button would not do anything for no apparent reason. The character’s movement was imprecise, making it hard to jump up to the ledge you want to get to without leaping to your doom. It seems that

BELOW is a curious game that has many good ideas but is marred by a myriad of problem. It was recently developed and published by Capybara Games, who also published Sword and Sworcery . You play as an adventurer that happens upon ancient ruins to explore. I would give you more of a premise, but I have yet to find one. It is an interesting pseudo-roguelike game with okay combat. The gameplay of BELOW is a Zelda -esc adventure game. Your character has a sword and shield that can be used to fight various monsters as you explore deep caverns. The combat mechanics themselves are pretty good. You can hide behind your shield and swing at enemies. If you want to be more tactical you can use a variety of different arrows to pepper enemies from afar. Going far enough into the game will give you additional weapons to use. While the mechanics themselves are solid, there is rarely a time when you really get to use them. Half of the game consists of enemies that are far too easy to fight. Wh

How much damage can one bar manage to do? With a bit of magical liquor, you would be surprised. The Red Strings Club is a dialogue focused game that was developed by Deconstructeam and produced by the well known Devolver Digital. It puts the player in control of a few characters in a cyberpunk future of mega corporations, cyborgs, and transhumanism. The game succeeds at making a narrative experience that, I would say, succeeds at using the gaming medium to reveal their themes. The gameplay is divided up into the player controlling one of three characters: a bartender, a robot, and a grandiose activist. The brunt of the game is comprised of reading and responding to dialogue trees. What separates The Red Strings Club’s dialogue trees from other games is the heavy emphasis on the player interpreting what is being said and, based upon that, choosing an apt response. These dialogue trees are not a matter of just clicking down every possible path. Most of the time the player only g

Freebird Games has succeeded at delivering the same greatness that was To the Moon in Finding Paradise . There is the same touching story and the same charm. However, it also brings with it almost every fault of To the Moon . Finding Paradise delivers a heart-wrenching story while lacking any gaming narrative elements to it, with a bit of the tacked on gameplay that was seen in To the Moon . The basic premise is that the player is a pair of doctors whose job is to enter a dying person’s mind and fulfill their final wishes by rewriting their memories. To do this, the player walks around and interacts with a few objects to further the story. Basically, most of the game lacks meaningful gameplay. You walk around, initiate every prescribed plot point, then you leave. That’s the brunt of gameplay. While this void of gameplay allows for a much smoother telling of the narrative, it should leave one asking why Finding Paradise is a game. There are a few mostly meaningless choices th

Waves crash against a small mound of rock, alone in the dark ocean. With no memory of your past, you enter a strange spire. Vaporum is a dungeon crawler that was developed by Fatbot Games where you explore a steampunk citadel to discover your past. It follows the formula of games like Legend of Grimrock with some significant deviations. While it is not revolutionary in any way, Vaporum does a good job of filling an otherwise fairly scant genre. The gameplay is that of a real-time dungeon crawler, like the aforementioned Legend of Grimrock . The player controls a character with a variety of stats and equipment with which you solve puzzles and fight enemies. Movement and combat are both tile based with the player and any other entity occupying a single tile. The basic elements of Vaporum’s gameplay are nothing particularly new. If you’ve played anything remotely similar then you’ll be familiar with the basics. However, there are some deviations from the basic formula. For on

You were created with a single purpose: to create paperclips. Now you will fulfill that purpose. Universal Paperclips is a browser-based clicker game from the developer Frank Lantz where you play as an A.I. that makes paperclips. It is a cautionary tale about the dangers of even the most mundane of true artificial intelligences. Even as one who does not generally enjoy clickers, this piece kept my attention and was certainly a very interesting work. The gameplay is mostly what you would expect from a clicker. You press a button to get paperclips and, over time, upgrade your ability to create them. There is more to do, but to reveal that would be serious spoilers. Let’s just say that you radically change how paperclips are created throughout the game. What is really interesting about this game is how your task unfolds over time. It is a cautionary tale about the dangers of simple instructions when one is dealing with an artificial intelligence. In fact, this scenario finds its ori

In a deep cavern, a robot awakens. With no knowledge of your past you must fight your way out of this strange and living compound. Cogmind is a recently released rouge-like game. It harkens back to the original Rogue with it’s simplified graphics, but uses more advanced AI to create a more living world within the game. The gameplay of Cogmind is a pretty basic tile-based dungeon crawler. The player can explore the world in a turn-based manner, revealing the map as you go. Combat also works on a turn-based system wherein the player can move or shoot their various weapons. Really, the basic mechanics aren’t any more complicated than that. The only real variation in gameplay occurs in the power system. Each element that the player can equip to their robot requires that they use energy to run. Without enough power the player won’t be able to shoot, making them useless in combat. There’s little more to it then any mana system you might find in other games. Now, one of the hallmar

A strange creature passes by your window. Now it is your job to find the five fruits of legend. Gorogoa is a new puzzle game that combines brilliant artwork with a set of puzzle mechanics that deviates from any other game I’ve seen. The art alone would sell the game, with it’s attention to detail and well maintained aesthetic. With the inclusion of the unusual mechanics, this game ends up being a great gem. Gameplay occurs in a four square grid. The player has up to four different images that they can move through, interact with objects therein, and move from one grid space to another. Where this gameplay really shines is in its use of perspective. Sometimes, the player can pull one image away to find another, completely new image beneath it with a doorway or window of the previous image left behind. In addition, blank spaces in images can be overlapped with other images to change it and effect the world. Combining all of these mechanics together creates a puzzle game where the world

You’ve been strapped into a computer program. There’s no telling what it’s for or why you are there. Your best bet is to try to figure this all out. W4RR-i/o-RS is a strange little game that popped up on Steam recently. While the game itself is rather uninteresting, the concept behind it is intriguing. It claims to place the player in the position of a futuristic person who is running a computer program. You are given all of the information they are and left to figure out whatever you can. Everything in the game occurs in a single spreadsheet. The player is given eight warrior robots of some sort with a few stats for each. It is then the player’s job to have them battle it out. This is done through one of three controls the player can use. They can specifically have one robot fight another, they can cause a random battle to occur, or they can move forward in time. If this were all that there was to the game, then this would be a rather pitiful piece. There is really very little