Tag: VA-11 HALL-A

2532: Five Games You Should Get in the Steam Sale

Steam’s Winter Sale has rolled around again! As always, there’s a wealth of great games on offer. On the off-chance that you don’t already own some or all of these games, here are five of my favourites that you should check out.

Recettear (£2.59)

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I find it hard to imagine that anyone doesn’t have Recettear yet, but on the offchance you don’t, here’s the pitch.

Recette is a young girl saddled with an enormous debt. Fortunately, she has a shop with which she can attempt to clear said debt by selling items to the local community, as well as through making good use of the assistance of her fairy companion Tear (actually a representative of the bank keeping an eye on her finances) and the local adventurer’s guild.

Recettear is split into two main components. Firstly, there’s running the shop, which involves putting out items for people to buy, correctly answering their requests and haggling over prices. Secondly, there’s a significant roguelike-esque action RPG component in which Recette can hire one of the local adventurer’s guild to go into one of the nearby dungeons to fight monsters and acquire items that she can subsequently craft into more interesting items or simply sell as-is.

The closest comparison is probably Gust’s Atelier series, though there’s much less of a focus on crafting in Recettear and more on the dungeon crawling and customer interaction side of things. It’s one of the most charming games ever created, with a stunning localisation from the original Japanese by Carpe Fulgur, and is well worth your time.

Steam page

Binary Domain (£2.74)

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An absolutely wonderful third-person shooter, Binary Domain takes Gears of War’s po-faced, joyless over the shoulder cover-based shooting and ramps up the adrenaline to make something with a bunch more personality and drama about it, albeit with (arguably) a few more clunky edges to it.

In Binary Domain you spend a lot of time shooting the shit out of robots, all of which shatter into pieces rather satisfyingly. There’s a variety of upgradeable weapons to acquire over the course of your adventure, and some truly entertaining setpieces. The story is good, too, featuring a cast who are all much more interesting than the walking military stereotypes found in shooters that take themselves a bit too seriously, and the whole thing feels like it’s been designed on the understanding that games are supposed to be fun.

Steam page

HuniePop (£1.74)

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One of the absolute best puzzle games to be released in the last few years — hell, one of the only puzzle games to be released in the last few years that isn’t a free-to-play mobile phone-based Bejeweled ripoff — and a game full of endearingly cheeky humour designed by a team who doesn’t give a fuck about political correctness.

HuniePop is ostensibly a dating sim in that you build up your stats in order to attempt to woo the various girls on the cast, but the twist is that in order to have successful dates (or “intimate” encounters) you need to indulge in some mind-bending, highly strategic puzzle-solving using a combination of your pattern-spotting skills and the items you collect throughout the dating sim gameplay.

HuniePop is beautifully presented, highly playable, shamelessly lewd and an absolute pleasure to play.

Steam page

VA-11 HALL-A (£9.34)

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VA-11 HALL-A is a brilliant visual novel-cum-bartending sim in which you take on the role of Jill, a rather ordinary young woman who lives in a cyberpunk future and tends bar in the titular drinking establishment.

VA-11 HALL-A tells its story rather wonderfully through what it doesn’t show you — since the majority of the action unfolds from Jill’s perspective behind the bar, you tend to see the immediate prelude to and aftermath of important events in the game world rather than the events themselves, which allows you to develop a much more personal attachment to them by hearing firsthand accounts from people who were there.

There’s a wonderful cast of characters — effortlessly “diverse”, I might add, and without making a big song and dance about it at any point, unlike its spiritual predecessor Read Only Memories, which very much wanted you to know how progressive it was at every opportunity — and a compelling story to enjoy here, all beautifully presented in the style of an old PC-98-era visual novel from Japan. Except this masterpiece was put together by a couple of dudes from Venezuela over the course of the last couple of years.

Steam page

Assault Android Cactus (£5.49)

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One of the best shoot ’em ups I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing, Assault Android Cactus channels a variety of influences ranging from bullet hell shooters to Rare’s Jet Force Gemini to create a marvelously entertaining and meticulously designed twin-stick shooter for up to four players simultaneously.

Unfolding across some beautiful-looking dynamic levels, Cactus will challenge your shooter skills to the limit if you want to attain the best scores and grades, but the game also remains accessible to newcomers who just want to blast their way through to the end to say they’ve beaten it.

The whole package is capped off with an amazing soundtrack and some brilliant old-school Sega-style “EX options” that can completely change the way the game plays, and is an absolutely essential purchase for anyone who enjoys a bit of quality arcade action.

Steam page

2346: Please Buy VA-11 HALL-A

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I’ve been playing a bunch of VA-11 HALL-A over the last couple of days, and I adore it. You can see some random screenshots and thoughts over on my Pile of Shame microblog.

I also wrote a review on Steam for it earlier, so I figured rather than spending time thinking of a different way to write the same enthusiastic words, I’d simply share it here, too.

I’ve been waiting to play the full version of this for quite some time now, ever since the very early demo enraptured me with its snappy writing, strong characterisation and wonderfully distinctive take on the dystopian future setting. And I’m delighted that the full version has, so far, surpassed all my expectations and hopes.

VA-11 Hall-A is kind of hard to pin down. At heart, it’s basically a visual novel, but rather than making binary choices that filter you off down one of several discrete routes, the choices you make as protagonist Jill when going about her daily life at home and at work affect what happens next in the story, including the characters you encounter, how Jill gets along with her clients and co-workers and how everyone reacts to the events unfolding in the backdrop.

Interestingly, VA-11 Hall-A presents its overarching narrative almost entirely from the perspective of Jill behind the bar and in her apartment. Significant things happen in the world, but you don’t see them directly; instead, you tend to see the people involved immediately before and/or after the events, or read about them on the news web pages and forums the morning after. Sometimes whether or not you dosed them up with alcohol before the event in which they were involved has an effect, too; prepare to feel guilty if that happens!

To give too many examples would be to spoil the experience, so I’ll leave it at this: VA-11 Hall-A does a much better job of almost any visual novel I can name at making its world feel “alive” and like the actions you take actually matter, rather than simply picking a route through the story. There’s nothing wrong with the latter approach, of course, but this way of doing things helps keep the people who expect a bit more in the way of traditional “gameplay” happy as well as those of us who are along for the ride primarily from a narrative perspective.

To sum up: great writing, wonderful characterisation, superb music and a glorious, beautiful PC-88 style aesthetic (with perfect pixel aspect ratio even scaled up to 1920×1080) makes for an absolutely lovely, unconventional and entirely memorable game.

I adore VA-11 Hall-A and pray with all my heart that it sees the success it deserves, both here on Steam and elsewhere on the Internet.

I haven’t yet finished a playthrough, but you better believe when I do there will be some detailed thoughts and feelings about the whole thing going up either here or over on MoeGamer (from which my previous article on the game’s demo is quoted on the Steam store page! Awesome!) — so watch out for those.

This is exactly the sort of highly creative, wonderfully inventive, beautifully presented and sharply written stuff I love to see from the indie scene. And I hope it becomes the sensation it sincerely deserves to be.

Find out more about the game and buy it — please, please, please buy it — on the official site.