I haven’t been playing a whole lot of games lately. Over the past year I finished two titles on my PlayStation 4. The first was the narrative walking adventure Firewatch, and the second was the relaxing turn-based puzzle game Hitman Go. To finish things out, I took a trip down memory lane and played the raunchy 1990s classic Leisure Suit Larry 6: Shape Up or Slip Out! using ScummVM on Linux. It was a good mix of relaxing and engaging games with varying degrees of puzzles and story.

Firewatch

In the deep wilderness of Wyoming, you play Hank, a hipster who’s taken a job in a fire tower. The game begins with a series of text choices where you build out Hank’s backstory. Between this text adventure, you are also given scenes of hiking deeper into the woods. When the backstory completes, you’re in a fire observation tower, talking to your supervisor, whose tower you can see in the distance. The game is a narrative walking simulator with a lot of exploration and mystery, but it’s not intense with puzzles. It’s an engaging, yet short and relaxing, game.

Your character talks to himself very little and has no inner monologue. All the details of the story are expressed by talking to your supervisor over a radio. She is usually giving you instructions or making conversation from a distant fire tower. Throughout the game, you’ll find notes, clipboards and pieces of story. Several odd occurrences lead to a creepy mystery, which occupies much of the game’s plot.

There are very few other character interactions throughout the adventure. The writers really try to push the beautiful nature of being alone in the wilderness and wrestling with one’s inner dilemmas. There are themes of escape, conflicts, guilt and a journey of coming to terms with difficult life situations. When the story is all said and done, it does appear to tell a complete and compelling story with major growth arcs. When you further scrutinize the narration, there are a couple of issues and holes throughout, and some of the themes feel a bit heavy-handed. Many of the conversation decisions likely lead to the same place, and the story is fairly linear. Still, it feels about the right length and is generally well-rounded.

I realize this is an independent title, but I still feel where the game really suffers is the visuals. The game designers try to build a fairly large world. Finding tools helps open up paths that are carefully arranged to be unlocked as the story progresses. There is a map, which you have to manually bring up, but it does thankfully have a convenient dot indicating your location (even though the story takes place in the 80s, long before cellphones and GPS technology were generally accessible). The developers could have added a hard mode where there is no visual indication of your position on the map, forcing the player to use visual cues and signs. However, I don’t think that would have worked well.

There are some generally pretty scenes in this game, but overall the scenes don’t have a high level of detail or fidelity. The game pushes exploration and enjoying the beauty of the world, but it hardly has the artwork for the immersion I feel the game designers wanted. Where the game really shines is the dialogue and character building. The focus on the protagonist and his supervisor, and the challenges they overcome, is really well-developed storytelling. The underlying mystery is a good plot driver, but honestly doesn’t feel as well constructed.

Overall, I enjoyed this relatively short walking simulator. It doesn’t really have any major puzzles, with most of the game advancement based around figuring out transversal. The 3D world is a coaster for the story and narrative. It’s not a great story, but it is a decent mystery with excellent human elements and enjoyable voice acting.

Hitman Go

Hitman Go has the same main character as the classic first-person stealth combat game, but with a very different format. This game is a puzzler, where the player must guide an assassin, move-by-move, through dozens of scenarios to eventually assassinate a target. It’s a much slower and more casual counterpart to its namesake. The puzzles are challenging, the artwork is creative, the settings are well constructed and the overall game is a fun little companion for anyone who loves classic puzzles with board game mechanics.

I really like the level design of Hitman Go. All the art is designed to make this video game feel like a board game. Each level is like an intricate chessboard. All the enemies are portrayed as figures that automatically move around on each turn. Each level has three goals, presented as a set of cards. Several of the goals are mutually exclusive, so the levels must be played multiple times to meet every challenge. There is no dialog or explicit story, but each scene is beautifully crafted to the point where the player can easily create their own narrative for the various levels.

Each set of levels is portrayed as a board game box. Completing enough challenges unlocks different sets of levels. I’m usually not a fan of games that require a certain amount of challenge points to unlock further stages, like Sackboy: A Big Adventure. However, few of the additional challenges are that difficult once you’ve already made it through a level. I never found myself feeling stuck, having to go back and replay several scenarios just to open up new areas.

The puzzles themselves can get pretty challenging, yet none of them felt insurmountable. Most of the time, if I got stuck, I could just come back after a few hours or a day and easily find a solution. There is a built-in hint system, but I only used it three or four times out of the dozens of stages I played.

Hitman Go is a great, relaxing puzzle game. The design is creative, the mechanics are interesting and the game increases difficulty at a reasonable pace. Most of the challenges follow a straightforward logical progression. The music and sound add an excellent ambiance to a very complex, assassination-style chess game. There were some frustrating moments, but overall this is a well balanced, casual puzzle game.

Leisure Suit Larry 6: Shape Up or Slip Out!

Leisure Suit Larry 6 was the first installment of the series to have full voice acting on CD-ROM. I was probably too young when I played this game, and the jokes certainly hit way different now that I’m older. It has the same problems as many classic point-n-click adventure titles, but LSL6 still has some creatively absurd art and whimsical music. I don’t think it’s quite as funny as the original creator/writer envisioned, but it still has a weird and raunchy adorableness as your creepy protagonist from a bygone era attempts to make it with a woman way too young for him in a health spa prison.

The introduction has our protagonist, Larry Laffer, compete in an embarrassing 90s era dating show called Stallions. His participation wins him a visit to the La Costa Lotta resort, where the entire game takes place. The graphics have the haphazard art-deco style that’s been present since the first remake of LSL1. The music is cute and whimsical for the era. The story revolves around Larry trying to make it (often failing) with several of the women at the resort, ultimately building up to the climax of the one woman he’s able to successfully woo under his spell. It’s pretty silly, but still a good laugh.

Unlike other Sierra games, the toolbar is always present. The ability to pick up items versus using items has been separated into two different actions, and the inventory is always visible. Other than that, it suffers the same way all adventure games of this era did: requiring the user to click everything on everything until finally giving up and looking up the answer on a pre-Internet bulletin board or ordering a hint book. Replaying these games is fun because you can see how much you remember before getting stuck. I scored over 600 points before I broke down and looked up hints. I only needed hints for two puzzles and finished the game with over 900 points.

Honestly, a lot of the jokes from this game weren’t that funny when they came out. Although there are only a few hotel room doors you can enter, you can knock on several of the resort suites and hear funny little bits. Most of them are lame, but some are really quite funny or have references to long-forgotten cultural events from the 90s. There are some really great moments that honestly couldn’t be replicated at all due to modern cultural norms, such as the reveal with Shablee. Ultimately, this game revolves around fetching items or solving puzzles for each of the women you encounter, leading to the ultimate goal of a woman in a penthouse suit. Its emphasis is on sexual conquest, with each woman moving Larry closer to the endgame. It’s a classic girl-in-the-tower idea with a softcore-pornographic theme, wrapped in a game that’s not very different from LSL1 or any other game in its genre.

I really enjoyed the trip down memory lane with this game, both in trying to remember all the puzzles, and also in all the little aspects of life from this era. The gags aren’t great, but there are some that are hilarious and amazing in the sense they couldn’t be replicated in video games today. The music is catchy, the artwork is weird but still fun and unique. Larry is a creepy dude who is somehow able to score women way above his status. It’s a fun adventure that might have screwed me up a bit as a teenager, but it certainly hits a bit too hard today. It was fairly short and definitely worth the modern-day replay.