Various games

The Swapper Of the various puzzle games I've recently purchased, The Swapper is the most playable.  It's a relaxed pace platform puzzler (my preference since I don't like the ones where you have to constantly run) and starts with you, an identityless, voiceless figure in a spacesuit, wandering about in the aftermath of a disaster that has left a mining installation abandoned.

The plot is mildly interesting, but the strength of this one is the puzzles, which involve getting into difficult places by creating a clone of yourself, transporting your consciousness into the new copy, and abandoning the old body (or positioning it strategically on switches).  The atmosphere is also nicely spooky, and I've been working my way steadily toward the end.

Never Alone Never Alone is both similar and virtually the opposite of Swapper.  It's another puzzle platformer (with some required running, but not constant momentum).  Again it's very atmospheric, and relies on working together to get through, but the puzzles so far are not as compulsive, and the main draw is the sheer cuteness of your arctic fox companion, and the slow discovery of Alaska Native culture.

It doesn't have the same forward drive as Swapper, but I'll continue it on and off to the end.

The Unfinished Swan The Unfinished Swan combines a fairytale story book narration with a mechanic that involves throwing blobs of paint in all directions to reveal the location of walls/floor/objects.

This is very cool for the first couple of rooms, but then begins to pall a little and even though they mix up the paint-throwing mechanism later, there's no real narrative or puzzle interest to pull me through.

I may finished it.  Maybe.

Resident Evil: Revelations 2 I've played a lot of different Resident Evils.  This one takes Claire Redfield, pairs her with a less kick-ass girl, and gratuitously kidnaps them to some sort of experimental facility where someone appears to be channeling GLaDOS, but without the entertaining passive-aggressive snark.

I'm only at the beginning of the first episode of this, and not sure I'll buy any more.  [One advantage of these chapter by chapter game releases is you save money when you discover you don't find a game interesting.]

Final Fantasy: Type 0 A pity Final Fantasy: Type 0 hadn't been released on a chapter by chapter basis!  This is a remastered PSP port, so I expected low-rent graphics (and got them).

You sure do get a lot of different characters to play with - you're an entire elite classroom, named for a deck of cards.

Unfortunately the gameplay is entirely uninteresting, and the story not much better.  I doubt I'll play more than I have.

Final Fantasy XV (Boyband): Episode DuscaeType 0, however, came with a demo of FF XV, set in a region called Duscae.  XV has been in development for something like six years, and was long considered vaporware until the past year or so, when new trailers and now this demo have been released.  And, from the demo at least, it's a solid step forward in the franchise, leaving behind the turn based gameplay for a quicker, smoother experience.  Timefillers like the way FF combat traditionally started and ended have been removed, and the process of finding and embarking on quests is much more fluid.  And there's some funny additions, too, like cooking for buffs.

The game is also unutterably beautiful.

Of course, being Final Fantasy, there's some inevitable negatives.  I call this "Boy Band" for a reason - all the known playable characters are male (breaking a long tradition of having at least a female healer character) and during the demo the only female given any time on screen might be a mechanic, but she's a mechanic in Daisy Dukes, suffering from camera angles focused on her hips and cleavage.



 However, at least one promo image suggests there are two important female characters in the game, and while one is the typical FF ingenue, the plot outline suggests that she's an ingenue that can match the main character in battle.  [Inevitably to be defeated, of course.]

Anyway, I was already interested in playing FF XV.  I've now moved it to the top of my list of games I'm looking forward to.  The demo was that good.