D: The Game
As a fan of the late Kenji Eno (R.I.P) and the now defunct WARP Studios games, I was really happy to see that D (WARP’s first game to be released outside of Japan) is now easily accessible on Steam.
D was originally made for the short lived 3DO in 1995 and was ported to the Sega Staurn, PS1, and MS DOS (which is this version). The gameplay is akin to 1993’s Myst, with the entire game being an fmv. Yet, unlike Myst, everything is fully animated. So if you want to get somewhere, you are going to have to walk there using a pre-set path. It’s kinda slow, but it really helps build the atmosphere.
– Real player with 4.8 hrs in game
Read More: Best Cult Classic Female Protagonist Games.
I own this game on Playstation, 3DO, Saturn and now on Steam, and I don’t regret paying for it again, even though it hasn’t aged well, and even though this is a fairly mediocre DOSBox port.
D is an on-rails horror-suspense game from the 90s. You play as Laura Harris, daughter of Dr. Richter Harris, a famous physician who, for some reason, has suddenly decided to murder everyone in his hospital and disappear inside the building. You have two hours (in real time) to figure out why, with no saving, interactive movie-style.
– Real player with 4.1 hrs in game
Transpose
A challenging and rewarding VR puzzler, this is a beautiful game that runs on the Vive as well as the Pimax 5k+ with no issues. It allows smooth (controller-based) locomotion as well as teleport.
I’d compare it with the Talos Principle and Portal (but without the narrative) in that each puzzle exists as a separate room that you must move around in to complete a physical task. Each room is a large 3 dimensional space where you play with switches to change the direction of gravity, move platforms, etc. The main challenge is the time switching and interacting with past versions of yourself. There are 4 main sections with a different theme and each has around 10 puzzles. As a whole, everything feels connected and not a just a jumble of random puzzles. The puzzles are quite varied in complexity and often can be solved in more than one way. Some are pretty straight forwards while others took me multiple attempts and sometimes required you to think outside the box. It never felt repetitive and it took me 27 hours to beat the game.
– Real player with 27.8 hrs in game
Read More: Best Cult Classic Exploration Games.
I just finished playing through the whole game. As someone who prefers VR platforming and puzzle games rather than shooters, I enjoyed the experience for the most part, and would say this as a pretty good game with some flaws. I would have happily paid for it, and recommend it to anyone who enjoys room scale VR and problem solving.
The good
The game is designed around a time manipulation and replay premise, like you might have seen in Braid or The Talos Principle. Each level contains one or more starting locations and one or more slots in which you want to insert cubes. You pick a starting point, step out of it, do stuff, and then choose to either keep or discard your run. Kept runs all play in parallel, so you can do such things as throw cubes to your future self, or steal them from your past self, as well as manipulate platforms for your other selves. Later, different simultaneous gravity orientations are introduced depending on the starting location. These puzzle elements work well together and the levels are creative and interesting.
– Real player with 12.2 hrs in game