DeVuego BD

Having played quite a few retro rehashes of late, and finding them all critically lacking, AHNW was a gift. It’s not perfect: besides coming off graphically and sonically unremarkable, it suffers from some bad slowdown in spots, and the pacing of stages 4 and 5 is a bit languid; given the length, somber tone and inevitable countless deaths those levels can be counted on for, some may lose interest there. But for the kind of retro players for which this game is meant, you will embrace the darkness, embrace the grind, and come out on the other side, happy that you did. 

So you’ll start again. Again. Confident that you can do better, that you can read the level a little quicker than last time, that you can react with a little more guile. Then you'll end up swearing at the lumbering uselessness of your sloth-like fleshy thumbs as you eat another death. You let yourself get cornered by a laser spoke under a roof and didn’t have enough time to hop all the beams. That was dumb; there was a power up over there, but the spoke totem had multiple weak points you could have chipped away at first, slowing it down. You didn’t pay enough attention to the totem above you and, when jumping to avoid something on your level, face-planted into a plasma bullet. You let the damn spiral totem get in the middle again, and it caught you through the ground on the top floor. It always does that, and I hate it.

Planetbase does a lot of things right, but its extreme difficulty feels arbitrary and unnecessary. Even the easiest planet will utterly crush you on your first few playthroughs. Let me be clear: I am not against difficult games (I thoroughly enjoyed playing FTL: Faster Than Light and Darkest Dungeon, for example), but I generally dislike games that do not respect my time. Unfortunately, Planetbase is one of them. Spending half a day to build a base only to have it unceremoniously destroyed in the blink of an eye is not my idea of a good time.

So, yeah, it’s fair to say that White Noise Online is more of the same with a few add-ons, but these new features do lend a lot to the experience. I’m not sure I’d be happy to big the game up if it was little more than exact same with the option to explore with others, but the character perks, the new maps, the ghostly resurrections and the futile mapping of your aimless wandering gang up to bolster viability. It’s made the original title, which I really enjoyed for the three months of its applicable life span, completely obsolete. 

It all comes back to the lemur. In a lot of games, the furry half-pint would be used for a quick gag then thrown away. In Runaway he is bought along for the rid and improved upon throughout. The tree-rat seems to embody The Dream of the Turtle; it has a cuddly, non-threatening look, is several times smarter than it would at first appear and charms laughs out of you instead of forces them. And longer you spend in its company, the more you find to enjoy.