If the books look half as stylish and vivid as the game, it’ll go down as one of the smarter physical media tie-ins. If in the end it feels a bit like rollicking through a children’s book, that’s also intentional: there’s a physical artifact hook, whereby each unique play-through that’s stored by the game in a library of sorts can be referenced to preorder a fully-illustrated hardcover version of the adventure (shipping later this fall, says Brain&Brain). Never mind that you’re also a glorified page-turner, Burly Men at Sea offers stories worth absorbing and sweetly animated absurdities that had me chuckling. It’s as if you’re a distant spy honed in on the action, but with telepathic powers of motivation and conduction. On occasion a sequence asks you to engage in binary ways to for instance slow or speed an object, or shrink or enlarge another. The men are viewed through a movable rondel, like a telescopic sight you can extend parabolically left or right by sliding your finger (on a mobile device) or a mouse (on PC). And in Brain&Brain’s Burly Men at Sea, a folktale mashup out for mobile devices and PC on September 29, it’s the artful interplay of visual minimalism, waggish writing and hilarious but also haunting sound effects generated by gorgeous a cappella voices.Īll of that’s framed by an interface as designer-simple as the game’s visually Scandinavian pastiches. In Virginia, it’s the absence of spoken words and smash cuts that elide otherwise dull peregrination. In Night School Studio’s Oxenfree, it’s the organically overlapping banter of a lively Scooby Gang in lieu of “I go, you go” dialogue. That’s put the burden of invention on audiovisual novelty. I don't want to spoil what's out there if I don't have to because finding the. An early encounter suggests that you get back into your boat and set about filling said chart in with what you find. In the end, it’s not so different from how you operate a motion comic or a visual novel. Burly Men At Sea has you direct the exploits of the Brothers Beard a trio of bearded blokes who have discovered a blank sea chart stuffed in a bottle. But in all cases they involved me watching some things happen, clicking a button, then watching some more things happen. I have nothing against stories you play, though they’re currently shelved with video games only because we privilege unreliable terms like “interactivity.” I was meh on this year’s Buried and Firewatch, more in accord with Oxenfree, and awed by Virginia.
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