Wednesday, 14 March 2012

Videogame review: Beyond good and evil


A young girl, Jade, tries to protect her orphanage from an alien conspiracy.

It’s really a shame that this game was such a commercial failure. Originally released in 2003 it bombed depriving us of the planned sequels, now it’s been remastered in High Definition for the latest console generation.
The game play clearly comes from a different era. It’s an action/adventure game where we control our main character, Jade, from a third person prospective. We can interact in various ways with the game world to solve puzzles and access different areas. There are various sidekick controlled by the computer, who help in our quest. Every now and then the exploring and puzzle solving is interrupted by fairly easy fight sequences.
What really impress me about this game is how the experience as a whole is organically coherent. Before and after this we had others game world that were free to explore but rarely they’ve been so interesting. Not only the anime inspired artwork is really good, they are really interesting places per se. They not only feel real, they are filled with a thousand tiny interesting details.
A segment of the internet, the “Hardcore” crowd, tends to measure the depth of a game to the amount of stuff that there is to do. They get really excited when a game like “Daggerfall” boast sa game world the size of Great Britain. Now a thousand of the procedurally generated dungeons of that game can’t hold a candle to the five lovingly crafted main missions of “Beyond good and evil”.

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