Recent reviews by The Centipede

I grew up on point-and-click adventure games, particularly the old Sierra ones. This reminded me of 'em and so I got it on the cheap since I've also got Proteus and Waking Mars.

This is more like Proteus than Waking Mars; it's about wandering, having no real point or distinct rhyme or reason. Everything is presented without explanation; you're stranded on a planet with no background and get to walk (slowly) through alien vistas to visit robotic temples without explanation. The artwork is nice, yes, as is the music, but none of it is groundbreaking, /especially/ if you're over a certain age and remember EGA and VGA adventure games of the late 1980s and early 1990s at all.

The problem here isn't so much the lack of explanation. This is definitely aiming towards minimalist 'art' and encouraging user interpretation (though I once had an argument with a collage artist that, since art is a form of communication, /something/ must be intended by all artistic design choices--if the artist completely abrogates the work of interpretation to the observer, then the artist is not communicating and could be doing absolutely /anything/).

The problem is the pacing.

This is quite possibly intentional.

Your little astronaut walks slowly. All the screens have to be backtracked. In one playthrough, there just isn't that much to see. In my playthrough, I wandered through all the available screens three times over to be rewarded with... well... let's just say a game over that had as little explanation as anything else, though in hindsight it was a good game over since it illuminated just a little bit more of the world the developers created.

Are there different endings? I don't know, and that's where the problem comes in. The manual encourages leaving the game alone and waiting for things to happen; something about how actions are static but the world is dynamic or something. That's fine, but even then the amount of time it takes for your character to walk from one side of the screen to the other is an investment that doesn't have much payoff. Is there any guarantee that if you leave it running for an hour and then come back and wait the one or two minutes it takes to change screens that you'll get something different? No.

I don't want to sound like an anti-art game philistine, so I have to compare this to other works. Proteus, which is equivalently aimless, rewards running around and backtracking by being immediately interactive. Starseed Pilgrim encourages exploration by hiding the backstory in rhyme. The Swapper gives you new things to look at, backstory, and moral dilemma without relying on kinetics or speed. The Endless Forest at the very least interacts with you, and its artistic bent is /anti-kinetic/. The Graveyard had you moving very slowly, but every step added to the story (and it didn't suggest that there was replay value in an attempt to become a time sink).

Stranded offers none of these things, and certainly does nothing to suggest that it has more to it. It almost seems to be given away by the tagline: "Do you know what it is to die alone, and so far from home?"

Seems like it is to shuffle around a bit and then, well, die alone in a godless universe and out of shake-n'-vac.

Play it.

This seems to be one of those where people go "oh it's got a message and an artistic style--SO SUBLIME" or "oh it has limited game mechanics--SO OVERPRICED." Here's my take: it does have a message, but if you've already played World of Goo, you've already heard it. Their messages are about as subtle as a strategic nuclear weapon, and they of course satirize culture, industrialization, and so forth. One gets the feeling that these fellows would use the word "sheeple" in conversation without irony.

So grading it on what it intends to be, it does well. The gameplay is casual and roughly amusing, and their sense of humor is bitingly sharp. If you're right of center and sensitive, it'll probably tick you off. Me, being the pinko that I am, find myself agreeing with its theses but not its attitude. It's more than happy to point out flaws everyone knows about, but offers no solutions (nor does it really suggest that anything can be solved). It's the "Folk Song Army" of message-driven computer games: well-intentioned and sweet-tongued but generally ineffectual and not particularly helpful.

I haven't had this much fun playing a video game for a very long time. You almost expect Mike and the Bots to hang around the lower right-hand corner ragging on it, and that's absolutely intentional.

A writer at Kotaku puts it better than I can: "weapons-grade joy."

Simple but wonderfully in-depth mechanics for an explorer/platformer, with enough rooms to let you try something else should you get stuck. It does suffer from the oldschool "is the 100% completion ending really worth it?" question and the final boss can get really repetitive... especially if you don't get him the first time and have to start again.

It's oldschool hardcore hard, not Assassin's Creed "the game will take your control input into consideration" hard. It gets frustratingly so near the end, but that makes beating it pay off just that much more.

Plus, it has a dry, dark sense of humor! What more could you want?

I've been playing this since launch and so I think I've got a pretty good sense of perspective regarding it. The game is now stable and certainly worth a bit of free-to-play effort should anyone have a hankering for Trek. Note that the space combat is basically Starfleet Command Lite and the ground combat is standard fantasy MMO fare with emphasis on ranged weaponry--nothing to write home about, but it'll do for something to while away the time.

Definitely creepy and atmospheric--plus, it has the advantage of not being still another zombie game, with the psychological subtext.

TRAUMA is a very atmospheric, very thoughtful... experience. It seems incorrect to call it a game, since that's not the point. It's also not a story, in the sense that there is no particular narrative. What's described in the store blurb is more like a frame tale for symbolic musing on life and its meaning.