gliding through nyxquest

been playing a lot of fluff, but i did finish my first steam download, nyxquest. i’d heard about the game when it was first released, on wiiware, and where it garnered fairly positive reviews (see the reviews at nintendolife and nintendo-gamer.net, although the review at ninendojo is less complimentary). since then it’s been ported to PC and mac and ipad. i opted for the steam version since it was on sale and i’m hoarding my wii points.

the consensus seems to be that the game is enjoyable, atmospheric, and looks great, but is on the short side. although i agree that the game is stylish and successfully depicts a barren wasteland setting, i personally found it to be fairly weak as far as platformers go. the game starts off focusing on jumping and gliding but soon shifts to more motion-controlled (or in this case, mouse-controlled) gameplay involving picking up and moving objects and, later in the game, drawing paths with the pointer. all familiar territory for people who have been playing wii and DS for years, and in general the gameplay offers very little in the way of surprises. as you progress the game’s look evolves nicely as the day turns to night (although it doesn’t give rise to any change in gameplay and i agree that the darkness makes platforms unnecessarily hard to see), but there’s not a lot of enemy variety and despite acquiring powers from the gods during the course of the game, the powers themselves don’t lend themselves to many unique gameplay ideas. also, i find mouse-and-keyboard controls to be a bit awkward in general, and i suspect that the game would play more naturally on wii or even the ipad.

not much more to say. the developers, over the top games, from spain, certainly deserve to be commended for the level of polish in their work, but in the end the core experience wasn’t unique enough to keep me engaged. hopefully they’re still continuing to develop games, though, and i’m definitely interested in seeing what they come up with next.

glide past these nyxquest links:
– official site
– postmortem with the developers, at gamasutra
– entry at wikipedia
– forum page for the game at steam
– entry for the wiiware version at nintendo.com

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