E3 2019 round-up

Ary and the Secret of Seasons

Created by Belgian developer Exiin Studio, Ary and the Secret of Seasons is an action-adventure game heavily inspired by Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda franchise, both in look and gameplay, but featuring an all-original world to explore. Here something has happened to upset the balance of the four seasons and their Guardians, and young Ary must restore that balance and take the place of her father, the Guardian of Winter.

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One of Ary’s major objectives is the destruction of corruptive crystals around the world. To do this she must travel to the four temples of seasons, brave their challenges, and emerge victorious against bosses that carry within them artifacts needed to complete her quest. But she isn’t entirely helpless, either. Ary is able to cast seasonal spheres that bestow certain elemental properties on the area they affect. For example, casting a sphere of summer on a frozen lake creates a globe of warmth that melts the ice in one particular area, letting Ary swim down into the otherwise inaccessible waters.

Combat takes advantage of this ability too, and it is here that the demo kicked in. Exiin’s Alex walked me through the protagonist’s struggle against a large flying bird boss named Frozen Ashes, who casts a perpetual sphere of winter around himself (enemies can take advantage of the same magic Ary possesses to turn the tide back in their favor). In this way, boss battles have a certain puzzle-like quality, requiring a good bit of thought be put into using abilities wisely.

Being a very mobile enemy, this boss covered quite a bit of real estate. As the giant bird flew across the sky, the wintry sphere surrounding it generated icy platforms into being, which Ary could use to keep up, albeit at a necessarily quick pace. Once the bird became somewhat more stationary, it was time to counteract its frigid state with a sphere of spring, which melted some of its icy armor where touched, opening it up for some damage. Various phases of this boss require different strategies to proceed, but a generous checkpoint system ensures never having to start too far back in case of death.

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After Frozen Ashes was vanquished and its artifact claimed, the corrupted crystal could be destroyed and the land set one step closer to recovery. While Alex was understandably tight-lipped about much of the game’s story, she did share that Ary will gain more seasonal powers as she completes dungeons and defeats their bosses. Though Ary used a sword to battle in the demo, other weapons will make appearances, such as a slingshot that lets Ary cast her spheres from a distance. All enemies, not just bosses, have certain seasonal strengths and weaknesses, and it’s up to players to figure out the best approach to defeating each one. In the spirit of exploration, gaining new abilities will also enable Ary to reach previously inaccessible locations.

Though I wasn’t able to play the game myself, the third-person controls looked smooth, and the opportunities for creative play using the seasons seemed like an inviting prospect. The development team isn’t announcing a solid release date yet beyond simply sometime early in 2020 when Ary and the Secret of Seasons heads to PC and all major consoles.

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The Great Perhaps

Even though Caligari Games’ The Great Perhaps is a narrative puzzle game at heart, it represents a meld between a traditional point-and-click adventure and side-scrolling exploration game. It’s one of those games that front-loads a quick setup, then leaves the player to piece together the whos and whys behind it. The “big thing” has already happened when the game begins, and now it’s up to you to learn more about it. Daedalic’s Jonas Hüsges was on hand to help me do just that.

The game sets up its mystery in an opening cinematic. A Russian astronaut, in orbit aboard a space station, overhears an enigmatic order from his planet-side commanding officer directing the station’s AI to immediately put him into cryosleep. Before it can take effect, the astronaut bears witness to the first few flashes of light coming from Earth, signaling the impending nuclear apocalypse taking place many miles below him. The next thing he knows, he awakes from cryo one hundred years later, looking down from his observation window at a destroyed, radioactive planet.

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If that doesn’t sound like a sobering enough premise for a game, then the astronaut’s next decision – to jump into a shuttle and seek out life and any sign of what happened to his loved ones on the planet’s surface – surely is. And so begins what promises to be a very harrowing drama on a post-apocalyptic world.

Earth has been ravaged and made radioactive, but there is life left here, as the astronaut’s readings show – what form this life may have taken on, however, is a different question altogether. Still dressed in his protective space suit, he begins the slow and arduous trek to find survivors. The places he passes tell their own silent story for you to pick up on; here a home abandoned in a hurry, there an arena that many people perhaps once took shelter in. An occasional puzzle requires some light inventory use, though what the astronaut can use is always restricted by what he is able to carry in his hands at the moment, rather than a full-fledged inventory.

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An unexpected gameplay twist comes soon after his arrival back on the surface when the astronaut comes across a lamp that lets him look back into the past. When activated, everything in a cone in front of you is shown as it was before the end of the world, including the occasional bodily remains of some unfortunate person or another. This is pretty handy when it comes to puzzle-solving, but the game goes one better: a quick button press activates the lamp, while a long button press actually lets you physically time travel to the past and back again. This is a great way to get around locked doors, for instance, though it’s a power best used away from unsuspecting eyes as people in the past don’t take too kindly to spacemen materializing right in front of their eyes.

It’s not all locked doors and broken machinery, though; sometimes more acute dangers need to be dealt with. Traversing a subway tunnel requires a delicately-timed dance between past and present. In the astronaut’s time, a mutated two-headed rat creature is blocking the tunnel and will wake to give chase if you come too close. Switching to the past, however, will put you squarely into danger of being struck by oncoming trains. Through careful use of the lamp, both obstacles can be avoided, but probably not before suffering at least a few grisly setbacks.

Jonas estimates the finished game should yield approximately six hours of gameplay when The Great Perhaps lands on PC before the end of this year.

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Grave Shadows

Grave Shadows is a school project created for, and chosen as a finalist for, the E3 College Game Competition by a team of six students at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. It features former-detective-turned-private-eye Colton Graves, who, while on a job investigating a local crime syndicate, got too close to the truth. Having become a liability, the Family struck back, costing Colton’s partner his life and accidentally granting Colton the ability to meld into shadows. Now Colton is on a quest to figure out who sold him out and get revenge for his partner.

The core gameplay is puzzle-based, having to work out ways to maneuver environments and collect evidence without being detected, using light sources (and the absence thereof) to take advantage of Colton’s shadow-meld ability. Presented entirely in a 3D black-and-white noir style, complete with trenchcoat and fedora for the protagonist, the game presently takes about an hour-and-a-half for a single runthrough. Evidence locations and the identity of the traitor are completely randomized from a list of five suspects, and between scenes Colton must take the collected evidence to his pin board to start narrowing down his choices.

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The game in its current state is available for free on itch.io, though the team is working on refining and expanding a finished retail version that they hope to have ready for a summer 2020 release on Steam.

Half Past Fate

Speaking to Zhenghua Yang (or “Z” as he introduced himself), the man behind development studio Serenity Forge, I first learned of Half Past Fate, which is essentially an interactive romantic comedy styled as a cross between visual novel and point-and-click adventure. It’s the story of six people who meet in various ways and become involved in relationships with each other. Rather than look at the dramatic side of romance, however, it’s a game that focuses on how people meet and such stories begin.

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Half Past Fate has a charming pixel art style with quite a bit of detail bringing the environments to life. The scene I was able to see in the demo featured a character at a coffee shop doing what he could to convince other patrons ahead of him to give up their spots in line so he could impress the cute barista. Little did he know that while he was destined to meet his soulmate that very day, it wouldn’t be the woman he originally had his eyes on.

The game takes a decidedly lighthearted approach to its storytelling, and quite a bit of effort has gone into designing the various locations and characters, to the point that NPCs encountered in one story will pop up in other stories as well – this world is a small one, and everybody knows each other. There are multiple chapters to each story, and the game cycles from one tale to the next and eventually back again in twelve separate chapters.

Final release is planned for Windows PC sometime in 2019, though no particular launch date has yet been set.

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