Indie Game: The Movie
Main Feature:
A candid look into indie game development. We follow Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes of Team Meat through uncertain times during the development of Super Meat Boy. From the insane three month crunch to finish their project to Microsoft’s careless handling of their release, it’s a harrowing journey. We also follow Polytron’s Phil Fish and the drama spiral that surrounds him. He struggles to release Fez, his passion project in development for nearly 5 years, despite a bevy of roadblocks. Like him or hate him the film provides an honest look at the personal difficulties and pressures that affected the game’s turbulent development. Fish seems open and vulnerable here, far separated from the man making headlines for inane, egotistical comments. There are also interviews with other indie developers, such as Jonathan Blow (Braid) who provides some unique insight into the indie movement and how developers try to connect meaningfully with their audience.
– Real player with 26.8 hrs in game
Read More: Best Movie Documentary Games.
The struggling artist is a trope that we’re all familiar with, but most of us don’t associate it with video game developers. That is pretty understandable because until 2009 or so the only games we saw were big-budget games being put out by large corporations. With the indie game scene exploding in the last few years, it became much more obvious that there were people making games purely out of passion; people who put their financial stability and reputations on the line to create something beautiful. And that’s art.
– Real player with 10.8 hrs in game
Portal 2 - The Final Hours
I bought this game along with Portal and Portal 2. I read a little bit of it earlier but I really read a lot yesterday (I was on a plane, hence the low playtime,) and even finished it. Portal 2 - The Final Hours covers the development, release and post release of Portal 2 inside of Valve. If you like betas, like the Half-Life 2 beta, this is for you. I also reccomend checking out The Final Hours of Half-Life 2. Look it up online and there is a free version.
What makes this so different, though? For starters, it includes interactive content. The second picture (Destroy Aperture) is my favourite, as you can use the mouse to destroy some areas in Aperture Laboratories! There is also music that you can listen to, like the songs that inspired the soundtrack of Portal 2, and lots of pictures. There are chapters and polls even.
– Real player with 25.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best Movie Documentary Games.
This is my very first interactive e-book. I’m a bit suspect to say anything regarding this e-book (since I’m a crazy lover of the Portal series - and of Valve, their brilliant creators), but I loved this SO MUCH! I was honestly expecting more of a screenshots/pictures showcase and a few gadgets here and there with a little bit of text, but reading about each team and each developer of this game and the problems they’ve faced in this journey was an amazing experience. I always admired Valve products, even before falling in deep love with Portal, and I knew making games as part of such a huge (and world-class famous) company was a tough task, but I REALLY underestimated how complex the process of game creation could be.
– Real player with 6.0 hrs in game
Kessler Effect
It’s a Sci-Fi TV show in VR. On sale it’s worth it. Not on sale, it’s ok. It has good visuals, but everything else is cheesy including the script, but you won’t care.
– Real player with 0.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best Movie Sci-fi Games.
TLDR; While the game has GREAT voice acting, and looks great, the nonsynched facial recognition they boost about, the rushed storyline, the somewhat weird writing, very short, a couple of nausea inducing parts (like really bad, and i have strong vrlegs) and pretty bad performance (50fps with a 1080) makes it hard to recommend.
This is a Mostly a Cinematic experience, with 3 endings, all branches and endings can be seen in ~30min. (you can choose a new branch after finishing the game so you dont need to go through everything again).
– Real player with 0.5 hrs in game
Late Shift
There are a few really good FMV games around but in general there is a drought of this genre so people who love this kind of game just have to take what they are given. Late Shift is good but the lack of a skip function really drags the playtime out and I found myself 100%-ing this game with a grimace on my face towards the end. Don’t get me wrong, the story was good but it wasn’t good enough to keep me engaged and to play through it in fully 9 times. See the full review here
– Real player with 12.4 hrs in game
This looks great, and is surprisingly interesting as a movie. As others have said, it’s probably the most successfully implemented FMV game ever made, which isn’t really that high of a mountain to climb. In fact, it’s probably more successful as a movie than as a game. There’s not much “play” in it, and what there is is fatally undermined by the design.
The theme of the game, spelled out by the protagonist in the opening narration, is that choices define who you are. And more specifically they define who you are internally - your reason for making a certain decision is, in many ways, more important than what the decision actually was.
– Real player with 9.6 hrs in game
The Bunker
Decent story marred by ultra-linear gameplay and lack of basic features
“The Bunker” is a fairly decent post-apocalyptic thriller movie - turned into a deplorably poor game that repeats all the mistakes of the “interactive movies” of the 90s, a time when these products were expected to sell on the basis of their full-motion video alone, and gameplay was an afterthought.
The premise is fairly interesting. After a nuclear strike hit Great Britain, people try to survive in bunkers, and you are the youngest resident in one of these, having been born just when the attack happened. The game starts with all other residents already dead and you being the last survivor, clinging to your daily routine because you don’t know anything else. When a system failure requires you to break out of that routine and enter long abandoned parts of the facility, disturbing memories of your past resurface.
– Real player with 6.3 hrs in game
TLDR
This is an introspective story on a well-explored topic: the Lone Survivor in a dystopic world. It’s done pretty well too, and has a good soundtrack for the presentation, but it’s not a game as the gamer community would define. The Bunker is an interactive story, where choices matter and actions have consequences.
DEETS
First, a few notes about the interactive aspects.
1.) Most of the choices you make will be in regards to finding cookies, as opposed to survival. It’s easy to miss the few minor collectables in the game if you’re not looking for them, and it’s not always intuitive to look where they may appear. Darkened corners, minor minutia of background details, and simple but unannounced puzzles are all a factor in various scenes.
– Real player with 5.5 hrs in game
Systematic Insanity
This is not a game.
If you cannot speed read do NOT buy this!!!!
This is a basic “modern media” project that would be regularly seen in the late 1980’s to the early 2000’s as a “media arts” project requirement in North American universities.
That being said it is visually well done.
however:
a) all interaction is disabled entirely except during “dating game” style dialogues.
this is a major issue since the speed of the dialogues is far to high so even a person like me that can absorb the entire LOTR + The Hobbit in under 25 hours of reading still misses nearly 1/4 of the dialogue
– Real player with 0.5 hrs in game
Vegas Tales
The owner of the fabulous Bellflower Casino Hotel in Las Vegas is terminally ill. Having devoted his life to running his hotel, he never made time for family or friends. With no obvious heir, he’s hired you to help him choose the right person to inherit the Bellflower. He narrowed his list of candidates down to a small group of people who have strong personal connections to the hotel, but whom he knows little else about. They’ve agreed to be interviewed by you under the pretense that you’re writing a book about the Bellflower Hotel. None of them know what’s truly at stake. It’s up to you to get to know these people and determine which of them is most worthy of inheriting the Bellflower. This will be no easy task, as the group contains some unique and memorable characters who will make your decision quite difficult. Be careful though, as there may be more to some than meets the eye.
The Great C
This short adventure cinematic is well-made, though it has some of that “indie” charm to remind that it has been made by a small team of enthusiasts, rather than a heavy-hitter like ILMxLab. Most of the characters' animations are motion-captured performances, though there are plenty of character movements that are stilted and robotic, which were obviously manually-animated. The characters are cartoony, but expressive. And don’t let the character designs fool you… this story is not for young children.
– Real player with 0.8 hrs in game
Not quite long enough to be called a movie and not quite short enough as the Google spotlight shorts. At 38 minutes long it’s almost as long as an episode of most series.
The story is good and the actors are quite believable. Graphically it looks a lot like Telltale (rip) games. Which kinda makes me sad that I’ll never see that studio dive into VR.
VR cinematic experiences are quite new and there is a lot of experimentation involved. Some of it really works, like the building case scene, where trying to follow both characters creates tension, or the final confrontation, where the scale of C really can be appreciated. Some of it doesn’t, like suddenly you feel like an ant watching giants and the next moment a giant watching ants. But that cam be expected in such a new medium.
– Real player with 0.8 hrs in game
The Complex
The Complex is by developer’s Wales Interactive, Good Gate Media, Little Jade Productions and filmed in the UK. Also featuring guest acting performance by Twitch streamer and former Xbox UK presenter, Leah Viathan.
This is a story rich adventure FMV game where choices matter. Most playthroughs for each game are roughly about an hour long with one much shorter. Be forewarned: U do have to make quick, tough decisions/judgement calls that matter and alter the progression of the game depending on your choices. The Pause Choices (timer) can be turned off in the Streaming Options. This was mainly for Streamers with audience participation during live streams. I left my timers on.
– Real player with 13.1 hrs in game
SUMMARY
London is under siege. A major bio-weapon attack casts a heavy shadow. Two experts in the Nanocell Technology find themselves trapped into a laboratory where assassins have just infiltrated and with time and air running out. Their only option is to take some hard decisions. But soon, those decisions will come back to haunt them. An interactive sci-fi thriller movie where you must ponder each and every decisions. A nice piece to kill some time, it is worth buying if on sale (half the price-tag would be decent).
– Real player with 7.7 hrs in game
She Sees Red - Interactive Movie
I liked Late Shift and I bought this game as it’s similar to that game, I finished my first play within 45 minutes and got a good ending don’t know if it’s best, this game has various choices to select like Late Shift but it’s shorter than Late Shift, when I started my play the game mentioned to play it twice to reveal more of the story.
As for the story it’s so fast players will be confused when they start the game as it progress they will get to know what is happening and what was this all about. There are around 15 achievements and I only managed to get 5 on my first time playing the game.
– Real player with 8.7 hrs in game
“She Sees Red” is a short, well-produced interactive movie that can take radically different turns depending on your choices.
The story is standard thriller material with murders in a nightclub, drugs, two detectives on an investigation, and some allusions to organized crime. The narrative is interesting and mysterious, particularly because you play both the detective and the killer. While you take moment-to-moment decisions like “fight or flee”, the motives of these characters remain unknown at first. But as you replay the game and discover more endings, secrets about each main character are revealed, until you understand the full picture.
– Real player with 6.2 hrs in game