Friday, April 26, 2024

Children of the Sun & Harold Halibut Reviews

 

 
Children of the Sun 
Out Now on Steam
$14.99 as of writing this.
 
Stylish is it is wicked, Children of the Sun is a moderately priced puzzle game of sorts. Is that a psychic bullet in your pocket or are you packing carrot nubs? You play as "The Girl" slighted by a cult in many ways as you find out in cut scenes in between kills. How do you kill?

Welcome to game-play as you are a sniper, but after you fire the first bullet you telekinetically take control it and make it wiz through cult members heads. Or, maybe make something explode. It becomes a puzzle about being able to hit other enemies without obstructions, how fast you can do it and making sure you've taken out all targets. So, really you have one bullet take out multiple targets. It's a fun premise to have you figure out where to go next as a bullet goes through brain.

The look is what the game might make quite memorable to you. A sort of combination, maybe kids drawings, thermal and night vision makes colors and outlines of people look wrong, but still an easier way for you to identify what to look out for and who to take out.

We could easily see this becoming a cult classic. Props to the whole idea. I've loved many a game where I was a soldier with psychic powers. This stream lines it into a total indie puzzle solving experience that's hard to put down as you just want to figure out the order of your head shots.
 
 

Everybody Hates Harold, I mean 
 
Harold Halibut
Out Now on
 
Why does everybody hate my friend Harold. He seems helpful enough, but it's very hard getting through the start of the game with everyone just taking jabs at him.
 
Did you know many play video games to escape and do things they normally wouldn't? 
 
I don't want to be so negative, but the game sure is. I'll stop, but have a calming drink with you for the
start of the game.

Set in the future and on another planet you play as Harold Halibut, he's essentially the forever intern for a professor at a laboratory under the sea. Oh, and everything is under the sea. The ship your ancestors were on crash-landed on the planet with no land masses. So, you'll be looking at sea life mostly.
 
What the game does have is simply stunning Wallace and Gromit, clay-mation look as every character, item and background was hand-made and then 3D scanned and digitally inserted into the game. This game took ten years to make and it show it.

I'm amazed the game isn't from England, it's so British in humor and voice acting and bureaucracy. It's actually from Germany, which many people don't consider the most fun or having much of a voice in entertainment.

When characters aren't taking Harold down verbally or the ones who are oddly nice to him, it's a fun point 'n click adventure ...where you can easily use a controller. Exploring and puzzle soling this underwater world does take hold if you know what you're getting into, which is an older point 'n click game.

Perhaps, there's been a patch since last I played, but really oddly the game has to reset Harold to a sort of starting position to talk with anyone that's just annoying to deal with.
 
I could not take the abuse for so long, but will eventually finish what looks like a dystopian British bureaucratic sci-fi story, which I am fond of.

Games provided by publishers for review purposes