Level 5's The Starship Damrey docks on 3DS today

The Starship Damrey, the first Guild02 game from Level-5, is available for download in the 3DS eShop today for $7.99. A sci-fi horror adventure game from Kazuya Asano and Takemaru Abiko, The Starship Damrey awakens players in a mysterious place and tasks them with finding out where they are, and who they are.

Kazuya Asano and Takemaru Abiko are influential writers whose prose can be seen in a multitude of visual novel games and text adventures in Japan. The two are known for leading the charge of the "Sound Novel" genre.

The Guild02 collection was a series of games, bundled together in Japan, featuring several notable contributors. Rather than being bundled, each game will be sold piecemeal in the US. It is worth noting, however, that all of the games from the Guild01 series eventually went on sale at the same time, forming a kind of cheap bundle. If you're patient, you might get lucky.

Gallery: The Starship Damrey

Continue reading Level 5's The Starship Damrey docks on 3DS today

Level 5's The Starship Damrey docks on 3DS today originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 16 May 2013 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Metro Last Light review: Tunnel vision

There is so much suffocating despair in Metro: Last Light. The world is irradiated rubble, blanketed in noxious fumes and trampled by gnarled monstrosities. Humans that remain must huddle underfoot, eking out lives in Moscow's underground railways. But the worst thing, the cruelest twist, the darkest dick move of the apocalypse, is that millions die and the accordion still makes it.

If not its purpose, I have to respect the accordion's presence in Metro: Last Light. You can listen to the instrument's musical wheezing as part of a show put on in a dilapidated theater, one of several populated hubs you'll visit in your trek through the tunnels of Moscow. If you opt out of the game's scavenging and shooting for a few moments, there's an entire show to take in. It has all the awkwardness and earnestness of a production that only needs to be less bleak than its surroundings.

Last Light, much like predecessor Metro 2033, is a feat of obsessive, paradoxical world-building - you believe this as a place that has been demolished, poisoned and forced to retreat into claustrophobic hovels. There are glimmers of recuperating life in these bastions, most of all in Metro's stunning sewer-bound equivalent of Venice. The town layouts are noticeably linear, in part because there isn't much room for subterranean sprawl, and because the game spends all its money on the critical path. To explore is to linger, listen and look; and that's fine.

Gallery: Metro: Last Light (5/13/13)

Continue reading Metro Last Light review: Tunnel vision

Metro Last Light review: Tunnel vision originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 13 May 2013 15:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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