With the benefits of time, money and experience, most video game series improve over time. Adding new game mechanics, scrapping the bad ideas and especially boosting graphics quality all keep a franchise alive. In a very strange move, one particular game, Penny Arcade: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 3, bucks the trend.
Call me a cheapskate if you want, but I haven’t paid full price for a PC video game in at least a year. At the same time, I have well over a hundred games in my Steam library, and at least a dozen more from other digital download services. What’s strange, however, is that at least a quarter of them I’ve never played; of those, I bet at least half of them I never will. Yet I scope out new game deals nearly every day, and fight the temptation to add the increasingly backlogged catalog of games. Do I have a problem? Probably. I’m working on it.
Indie video games often fall into roughly two categories: those that experiment with a novel core game mechanic and those that pay homage to tried-and-true tropes of classic gaming while turning them on their head. Recently released and catching my attention, Anodyne, a top-down Legend of Zelda-inspired adventure game, resides firmly within the latter category. I felt like I was taking a (tiny) chance buying this little indie game I’d yet to hear anything about, but I trusted the retro 16-bit surreal art style to deliver, at the very least, a quirky distraction.
