Your intrepid heroes test Valley on three Linux powered boxes of business. Did it pass? Let’s find out.
Game: Valley
Webzone: Valley
Devel: Blue Isle Studios
Engine: Unity
Price: £14.99 / US$19.99 / CA$21.99
Wazzat: Explore the vast and beautiful world of Valley using the power of the L.E.A.F. suit: a fierce exoskeleton that grants exceptional speed and agility along with the phenomenal ability to manipulate the life and death of all living things.
Makes with the working
- Thar be spite crashes.
- These happen during level transitions and it bit me twice, HARD.
- I say hard since there is no real save system so it starts you all the way back at the beginning of the previous zone.
- Refuses to launch if Vivaldi or Chromium are running.
- 60/70 @ 1080
- Mid 30’s @ 2160
- Thar be inopportune spite crashes
- Twice after finishing a level, which made me go back and redo it cuz it didn’t finish saving
- That’s a quick way to get jordan to nope
- The only thing that didn’t make with the working for me was the subtitles.
- It’d show the first line and then be stuck there until the audio-tape was over.
Shiny / Sounds
- I like games that prove that Unity can be both performant and pretty.
- Valley does these things in spades.
- Both indoor and outdoor areas are wicked smooth.
- All the environments are coherent.
- I do wish the main baddies were something, different?
- They didn’t seem to fit the world.
- Music is totes outstanding and caught me off guard.
- You don’t normally get that from an indie game.
- Voice acting was passable+ in the sense they didn’t go with the lowest bidder.
- Oh, it’s very pretty
- Look what happens when you don’t use stock unity assets!
- The soundtrack sounds like a Jethro Tull fever dream
- It looks very pretty and the music is frickin’ spot on!
- During the running on the electrified rails sequence, that music alone turned it from just being a bit where you run down a corridor to “OMG!!1! Run faster! Jump! Run fast again! Weeeeeeeeee!”
- I was smiling like a lunatic throughout the whole thing.
- Damn was a good set piece!
Control
- Tried to play it with the Steamy controlla since it seemed like a nice fit.
- Unfortunately there was some jank with camera movement.
- Keyboard and gerbil posed no problems.
- Sometimes you get a little too into it and end up overshooting the fuck out of your jumps
- Really my only gripe with it. Can’t quite tell where you’re gonna land
- It’s a first person running/platforming game.
- Why you’d want to play this with a controller, I don’t know.
- While physics defying jumps may have made me ding this a chair in other games, in this game it fits.
- And this game made me wish I could have more controls than casual jog or superhuman sprint for movement.
FUN?
- That was a little shorter than expected but for $5.00 it was an enjoyable romp.
- If I had paid the iron price ($19.99) I would have been a bit miffed.
- Storytelling and world building is clearly something these motherfu*ckers know how to do.
- I honestly thought they were going to pull a gotcha right up until I jumped out of the final tube.
- I was all “they want me to think the game is over, but it’s not really over”
- …the game was over.
- I Venned my way through it in 4 hours.
- 21 Wet, Sticky Maplebucks is a bit of a big ask for this jolly little jaunt
- The game itself is actually pretty shallow, essentially being 3d straight line platformer
- That said, it’s execution is spot on
- The story is actually pretty decent too, all things considered. Sort of a whodunit
- I usually prefer emergent narratives, but credit where credit is due
- Crashes added another hour onto the gameplay, and there are hidden goodies you can go collect
- The only reason I can’t give it 4 chairs for the fun is because it’s short.
- Criminally short!
- I was having fun! I was having a lot of fun and the game ended.
- It took my fun away from me.
- In all seriousness, this is a game with very simple but refined mechanics.
- They took movement, something you take for granted in all videogames and they improved it.
- They quadrupled down on exploring exactly what it is that can make videogame movement compelling and built a short experience around it.
- And they frickin’ nailed it!
- I can safely say I never had so much fun running and jumping down a corridor for 5 minutes like I did in Valley.
- This I would say is the perfect example of aesthetics and narrative being used solely to further the mechanics… or mechanic, since they really only had the one.
- But goddamn, they did it well!
- If it had come out this year, it’d be a contender for Linux game of the year 2017.