Lilly Looking Through - Quick Review (PC game)

Initially I was looking forward to playing this game due to its charming appearance but all I was met with was a short, shallow and extremely simplistic game more suited to young children than adventure gamers. 

Developer: Geeta Games

Genre: Puzzle adventure

Release date: November 1st 2013

Platforms: PC and Mac

ESRB: E - Everyone
For a game that looks and sounds so beautiful it’s quite simply just not up to par and should be avoided by anybody wanting a game with even a smidgen of substance. There's very little character development, which is a shame, and the story itself is in no way complex or fleshed out. There are no conversations, very little speech and generally the game consists of solving puzzles with Lilly and, sometimes, Row to advance through the game. ‘Lilly Looking Through’ is supposedly a point and click adventure game, meaning it will have some puzzles to be solved that may be inventory based as is typical of the genre but for me it failed to live up to the genre.

To begin with, there’s no inventory, much to my disappointment as it meant they’d be no finding and collecting items for later item combination. The puzzles are instead performed by clicking on a very limited set of locations on the screen before watching Lilly solve the obtuse puzzle herself. In that sense, that you click on things, it's a point and click in the very literal understanding of the phrase but it lacks what makes point and clicks interesting; storyline and substance. There are only a few things you can click on and very few areas in the game leading to what is a very easy and very short game. The solutions to the puzzles tended to be obscure in nature rather than challenging and there were times where, even after finding the solution to the area, I was completely taken aback by the actions that Lilly proceeded to perform. Worse still, the puzzles are extremely repetitive with one particular colour puzzle being repeated three times which results in an increasing frustration of having to repeat the same, mostly guessed, puzzle combination you completed just twenty minutes ago. 

In case everything is just too damn confusing for you there's also a hint system you can use to highlight objects in the area that tell you what else you can click on. The game itself is incredibly short and the ending is little more than an unsatisfying cliffhanger that I would care more about if I’d found the story interesting, which I did not. Disappointingly, despite the game starting to show potential it felt as though I'd paid for half of a game rather than a full one and that its potential to get better was prematurely cut short. After a brief and unexplained appearance from another character all you'll be left with is confusion over whether the game is now over, and then a credits scene that confirms you just wasted a couple of hours of your life.

Maybe if the developers had spent more time on fleshing out the gameplay rather than focusing on the pretty pictures and ethereal soundtrack then maybe I’d be more interested, but despite raising double what they asked for on Kickstarter it’s clear that for this game beauty is only skin deep. The animations of Lilly are very well done, the environments are varied and beautifully illustrated with real attention to detail and the music is a lovely, mystical and much grander than the game itself. It’s such a shame to say this but this is quite simply not a very good game and I’m actually disappointed that I was fooled into buying it due to positive reviews and deceptive screenshots. You’ll get about an hour or two out of this game depending on how well you are at guessing your way through the puzzles but, despite there being the essence of something greater, I doubt it will be a very enjoyable couple of hours for you. On a positive note, this is a game that young children will love to play provided you are there to help them through some of the more confusing puzzles.

The Good:

• Looks fantastic.
• Very charming.
• Storyline is pleasant.
• Perfect for children.

The Bad:

• Far too easy, just plain weird rather than difficult in places.  
• Few environments.
• Repetitive puzzles.
• Extremely short game.

The Score: 4/10 

Last thoughts: "Disappointing, it didn't feel at all like a real point and click but I guess it's alright for children."

If you don’t mind short and shallow romps through lovely environments, pick up the game for $10/£7 from the developers website here or on Steam here.

Outlast DLC: Whistleblower - Full Review (+ Trailer) (PS4, Xbox One and PC game)

I thought that Outlast was already as bone-chilling, nightmare fuelling, panic inducing scary as it could get; I was wrong, I was so, so wrong. Outlast’s DLC ‘Whistleblower’ is more than just your standard DLC; it’s not one of those enjoyable but ineffectual additions that rides in on the back of an already successful game, oh no, ‘Whistleblower’ is by and large a whole new chapter in Red Barrel’s manifesto of fear.

Developer: Red Barrels

Genre: Survival Horror
Release date: September 4, 2013 (PC), Feburary 5th 2014 (PS4), June 18th 2014 (Xbox one)
Platforms: PC, Playstation 4, Xbox One

ESRB: M - Mature

Outlast is a game that sets out to test how far it can push the boundaries of the horror genre with some incredibly disturbing scenes that may have bypassed some due to the hidden nature. ‘Whistleblower’ hides nothing and just in case you haven’t yet realized how twisted Mount Massive Asylum has become then you’ll be reminded that immature descriptions like ‘scary’ and ‘gore’ have no place here, this is true, uncensored horror.  

Warning: The game contains M rated blood, gore, nudity and sexual content. As such, the screenshots below also contain such themes though with minimal spoilers and without representing the worst that this game has to offer.

‘Whistleblower’ has you step into the shoes of Waylon Park, a software developer for Mount Massive Asylum who, uncomfortable with the practices at the asylum, has been leaking information to outside sources one of whom is Miles Upshurr, the protagonist of the original game. Poor Waylon doesn’t get away with it for long however as, just as he sends the anonymous tip off to Miles, he’s caught and locked away in the asylum he was so desperately trying to draw attention to. I originally thought ‘Whistleblower’ was a prequel but as it turns out it’s much more than that. The experiences of Waylon Parks are wrapped snugly around the original storyline, taking place before, during and after the events of Outlast though in an entirely different region of the hospital.

Gameplay and environment

My previous complaints of a world that felt too linear and enemies whose AI was predictable and easy to outwit have been abolished leaving nowhere else to hide but plenty of places to run to in the blood drenched institute. Whilst the familiar sight of locked doors that progressively abolish any hope you have of escaping are still present there are now vast areas with interconnecting passageways and tiny rooms that leave you running in circles whilst a maniac relentlessly tracks you down. The enemies in this game are faster and even after sprinting for some time I would often turn to see them almost on top of me, leaving me no other option but to keep on running in the hope of losing them behind the next door, the next turn, the next table. The hiding spots too have been severely cut down and whilst the previous game had an abundance of beds and lockers to take refuge in I had a hard time finding anywhere to hide for the majority of the game. More often than not I’d simply crouch in a corner of a dark room, barely concealed by a table or a chair, and hope that they didn’t move close enough to spot me. Rather than a continual shifting of enemies to run from ‘Whistleblower’ essentially has one main threat but there are still approximately five different characters who will, at some point, try to kill you with a couple of them being familiar faces from the first game.

What makes this game so brilliant is how much emotion it draws out of you. I felt vulnerable at every step and, whereas previously wandering outside was a welcome breath of fresh air to be out of the corpse strewn halls, in ‘Whistleblower’ I was instead beset by further waves of anxiety as fog completely obscured my senses. This feeling of vulnerability that is essential to the survival horror atmosphere is completely accentuated when, at one point, you are left physically limping. As you can imagine, this does not work in your favour when trying to not be captured and killed. If you are spotted then there is quite simply no possible way of outrunning your pursuers so you just have to accept the inevitable reload as you blunder desperately on through the darkness.

The environments are thankfully different from the base game and though you do revisit certain locations it’s not in the least bit repetitive. Whilst ‘Outlast’ simply dipped its toes into exploring the grounds of the hospital ‘Whistleblower ’is more than happy to let you stretch your legs outside and, rather than confine you to rooms and corridors, frequently invites you to blunder about outside. As though it were any safer out there. Now and then you’ll find yourself bursting out through a window or a door to find yourself surrounded by the thick, impenetrable fog of the gardens or venturing through the maze of chain link fences that border the basketball courts. The worst thing about being outside is that there is quite literally no way of telling where your hunters are lurking as the fog is so thick you can barely see where you’re going, never mind whether somebody is hiding within it or not. Whilst the puzzles remain unchallenging the sheer pressure of completing them under duress is enough to make you have to replay certain portions of the game as it is inevitable you’ll get caught at least once. This is one of those games that is incredibly hard to play all in one playthrough without descending into a full blown panic attack. Unless, of course, you’re one of those people who are extremely desensitized to fear and carnage and play games like this to top up your macho-nerves-of-steel persona, if this is the case, what on Earth have you been doing to have become so unflinching? I shudder to think. 

 
Conclusion

I’m not sure how they managed it but ‘Whistleblower’ is arguably scarier than 'Outlast' though significantly shorter due to it being a DLC, not a standalone game. The shortage of batteries, lack of hiding places, twisting nature of the environments and extreme nature of the carnage encountered is the perfect recipe to foster a paranoid terror known only by the deeply immersed. ‘Whistleblower’ is a solid addition to 'Outlast' and it is quite simply an incredibly haunting game that looks, sounds and plays as brilliantly as the original. ‘Whistleblower’ has achieved what it set out to do and that is to terrify the living daylights out of you. It not only manages to do that but it does so brutal confidence; slapping you about the face with its controversial scenes without apology and without remorse. With its open ending there is also great room for a sequel and I can only hope, and dread, that Red Barrels continues to make such amazing survival horror games. I can only warn you now though, that there are things in this game you can never be unseen.

The Good:

• Very controversial
• Some brilliant twists
• Terrifying and disturbing
• Solid continuation of a fantastic game
• Strong characters, likeable protagonist
• Fantastic voice acting
• Storyline builds suspense very well
• Good length for a DLC
• The Groom.

The Bad

• Would have preferred varied antagonists
• NPCs have a tendency to all look the same
• The Groom.

The Score: 9/10 

Last thoughts: "Oh... My... Good... God. That was messed up."

Not played the original yet? Check out my review for Outlast here.

Theme Hospital - Full Review (PC and PS1 game)

Theme Hospital is a comical and witty game that is quite arguably one of the best simulation games of all time and most certainly the best hospital simulator ever created. A successor to the deeply enjoyable ‘Theme Park’, Theme Hospital takes the boring job of hospital management and turns it into something incredibly addictive and with bucket loads of playability.

Developer: Bullfrog Productions (PC) and Krisalis Software (PS)
Genre: Hospital management
Release date: February 4, 1997 (PC), February 1998 (PS1)
Platforms: PS1 and PC (MS-DOS and Windows)
ESRB: E - Everyone

The game was released for the PC and PlayStation 1 though aside from some minor differences like graphical quality and no background music for the PS1 version they are exactly the same game. You’ll play across twelve different hospitals with the task of designing and managing them to success whilst fending off patients with all sorts of strange illnesses and complaints. Theme Hospital is by no means a serious game and in fact it’s a highly original game that doesn’t take itself too seriously. To get you started, here’s the intro to the game.

 

Gameplay and game content

There are twelve hospitals that you will take charge of where you are given nothing but an empty floor plan and the money to start building rooms and hiring staff. You’re given a short amount of time to build the basics of your hospital such as a reception desk and diagnosis rooms like a GPs office and a hospital ward before the time runs out, the hospital opens and patients start visiting. The staff you need to hire consist of doctors, nurses, caretakers and one or two receptionists all of whom will have a short bio such as ‘heckles poor comedians, smells faintly of cabbage, possible liability’ along with their level of skill represented by a green bar. Doctors can have specializations and as you progress through the game you’ll need additional rooms and the doctors with the skill to work in those rooms such as surgeons, researchers and psychiatrists. Consultant doctors can also train their junior counterparts to have their specializations as well as increasing their overall level of skill. Depending on how good they are, their personality and the quality of their room including its size and contents staff may move faster or slower and perform worse and better than their colleagues. 

The game starts out simple and you won’t need many different clinics or rooms as the patients that will be visiting you will only have one of a handful of illnesses though it’s when the patients start showing up that you notice the humour of the game. ‘King Complex’ patients dressed as Elvis are in desperate need of a psychiatrist, patients ailing from ‘The Squits’ from eating pizza found under the oven are sent hurrying over to the pharmacy whilst patients with elongated tongues drooping comically from their mouths are pointed in the direction of a Slack Tongue Clinic; a glorified guillotine crossed with a clothes press. Each new condition or illness you encounter will pop up at the bottom of the screen, along with any other alerts, containing a description of the cause of the illness, the symptoms and the cure and these fact sheets always make me genuinely laugh. The conditions get more and more ludicrous and obscure as time goes by and soon you’ll have patients suffering from hair all over their bodies, radiating a garish and toxic looking green glow and aliens who were once humans and who need a trip to the ‘DNA converter’. 

Your success in this game largely depends a lot on how well you can design your hospital and micro-manage your staff as in later levels you will be absolutely flooded with patients who all require immediate attention. At first the game is quite simplistic and to win the level you simply need to meet certain criteria including number of patients cured, the overall worth of the hospital, a certain bank balance, reputation of the hospital and having to treat a variable percentage of the number of visitors to your hospital. You’ll frequently encounter ‘emergencies’ where a lot of patients with the same condition will all be flown via a helicopter to your hospital and if you don’t cure them by the time the time limit runs out, they all die. This can be fairly simple to manage if it’s something like a quick visit to a pharmacy but when you’ve got eight or nine patients all requiring major surgery you’re going to have a tough time squeezing them all in before their time runs out. Then there’s epidemics to contend with where you can either admit your hospital is infected, pay a fine and take a reputation hit or try to cover it up and cure them all before anybody discovers what’s happened. If you manage to cure them all and cover up the epidemic you’ll get a comfortable compensation bonus for the ‘wrongful’ accusations. There’s always this underlying sense that the hospitals you’re running aren’t exactly trustworthy as there are many unusual methods at dealing with patients and, even more disturbing, an ‘auto-autopsy’ machine in the research department where you can send patients whose condition you don’t understand due to lack of research. The thing is, once the patient is slid into the machine, CAT scan style, don’t ever seem to come back out again, hmm… 

For every new level there’s new challenges and new problems to deal with from earthquakes to vomit waves and the constant changing up of what’s going on in the hospital adds for some really interesting gameplay. A problem with the game is the unpredictable AI of your staff who sometimes struggle to go where they’re supposed to be going, leaving handymen ignoring overflowing bins and puddles of vomit and doctors wandering the corridors whilst a queue of sick patients stacks up outside the GPs office. You really do need to keep an eye on everybody at all times by dragging your doctors, nurses and handymen to where they need to be. Fail to keep on top of things and alongside a dirty hospital you’ll have your patients deteriorating health to worry about. A face above each patient’s head as they get more and more unhappy gradually deteriorates into a ghastly skull which means they’re about to drop dead on the hospital floor only to then float to heaven or be ushered into Hell by Mr Death himself. Thankfully the AI is not always frustrating and usually staff will be on their way to where they’re needed before the announcement woman calls out that a doctor or nurse is required in whichever room. 

Your ability to manage your hospital is fine-tuned to the smallest details and you can place everything where you want to be including radiators, plants, drinks machines and benches in the corridors as well as items and machinary in the hospital rooms themselves such as the desks, bookcases and bins. You can manage your bank account by taking out a loan, paying interest of course, and even decide how much to spend on the heating of your hospital and whether or not to give your staff a raise or a monetary bonus. Not only this, you can decide how much patients pay for each treatment or diagnosis attempt such as a stay in the hospital ward or a visit to the ‘Hair Restoration’ clinic. Despite this fine-tuned managing of the books everything is very simple to use and easy to understand and it won’t take much clicking around and reading of the in-game material to figure out how to do everything. As one of those people who doesn’t like reading a whole load of facts, figures and percentages I tend to bypass the many charts in the game and still can get through it quite happily. 

Graphics and audio

Graphically the PC edition of this game is superior to the PlayStation 1 port but that’s not to say either game looks bad. The screenshots used here are from the PC version but below you can see a screenshot of the PS1 edition, just for comparison's sake. Overall the graphics are really quite decent and very clear cut. Everything is colourful, very well detailed and a bit quirky with its own sense of identity in the whole design of the game. It’s a huge step up from the slightly blurry, fuzzy graphical appearance of ‘Theme Park’ and for a 90s game it really is impressive. The voice acting mostly consisting of a female announcement voice which is both funny and good quality as she apologizes to the patients about the amount of litter and chides ‘mad patients’ for being too loud in the corridors. Staff and patients don’t ever talk and tend to communicate with you through alerts at the bottom of the screen and symbols above their head, for example if they’re confused or if they’ve just discovered a new illness or researched/improved a new piece of equipment. Everything is very clearly communicated to you via the graphics however and the camera is very flexible and not at all awkward to use.

For the PC version the music is fantastic; nostalgic and catchy it has upbeat tunes that change track as you play the game so it doesn’t become irritating after a long period of time. Whenever a patient is cured you’ll hear a cheer from an unseen crowd and boo’ing when a patient dies, leaves the hospital or is sent home which adds to the light-hearted and interactive feel of the whole game. 

Overall

This is one of my childhood games that is still so addictive, challenging and fun to play now and, even after completing it, there’s still great satisfaction in starting all over again and pouring hours upon hours of my time into it. It’s just the right level of challenging and even if you find it too easy there’s three levels of difficulty so you can always crank it up a notch and struggle with the demands of the hardest ‘Consultant’ difficulty level. I love the humour in this game and it’s not an overpowering attempt to be funny, it’s just witty here and there from the diseases, to the announcements to the weird things you find becoming commonplace like excessively decorated staff rooms and questionable healthcare practices. The customization options are brilliant, it looks and sounds fantastic and overall it’s just so playable and so memorable that I can’t help but rank this as one of my favourite PC games.

The Good:

• Witty, intelligent humour that also borders on the silly
• Hours upon hours of gameplay
• Addictive, almost worryingly fun
• Nice level of difficulty and can be very challenging
• Lots of different rooms and illnesses keeps things interesting
• Very defined appearance makes it instantly recognizeable
• Memorable music that's really upbeat and not at all annoying

The Bad:

• Patients are always freezing.
• Staff AI can be a little dodgy
• More hospitals would have been good, but only because I want to continue playing

The Score: 9/10 

Last thoughts: "So addictive, even now in 2014 this is so much fun to play and is one of the few micro-management games I play religiously."
Note: If you’re interested I have a list of cheats and codes that will allow you to do extra things like play whichever level you want to play, for both PS1 and PC editions, and some extra bits for the PC edition such as unlocking all research and getting extra money. You can find my cheat guide here.

Playing Theme Hospital on new OS systems:

The PlayStation 1 version of the game is very easily obtained on sites such as Ebay and Amazon but the PC version will give you more trouble on newer systems, that said, it’s not impossible. By using an emulator such as DOSbox you can happily play the game as intended or, alternatively, you can use an open source ‘clone of the game called CorsixTH. This clone still requires you to purchase the original disk but it allows you to play the game on OS’s such as Vista and Windows 7. You can download CorsixTH here. 

Theme Hospital - Cheat codes (PC and PS1)

 

Note: Below are a list of cheats and codes from the PS1 and PC version of Theme Hospital. Though I have verified all of the PC cheats, and removed the ones which I could not get to work (I.e.: F12 to win the game, Ctrl+1 for a new patient) that are found on other sites, I am unable to verify the PS1 cheats so... let me know if they're wrong. Lastly, if you're interested you can also find my full review of the game here. So without further ado, cheats!

 

PC cheats:

In the lower left corner, during gameplay, you will sometimes get a notice with a green question mark icon. When clicking on this you will open up a fax machine page with some info on it, you can use this fax machine to enable cheats. Whilst on the fax machine page enter in “24328” before pressing the large blue button on the top right, this will enable cheat mode. Return to the game and then use any of the following key combinations to enable that cheat. All of these cheats have been verified.

Select any level: After completing a level, whilst on the board game press C and click which hospital you want to play.

Rat shoot level: Type in 7827 on the fax machine, after winning the level you’ll go to this secret level.

Skip to the end of the month: Ctrl-M

Skip to the end of the year: Ctrl-Y

Have all items: Shift+Ctrl+C

$2000 (hold for more money): Shift-C


All research completed: Ctrl-C

PS1 Cheats:

Clean hospital: Save the game when the hospital is full and reload, all rubbish and patients will disappear essentially allowing you a fresh start.

No rats: Put plant pots in front of rat holes to stop them from entering/exiting that hole.

Level passwords:


Level 1: , , , ,,, , .
Level 2: , ,, , , , , .
Level 3: , ,,, , , , .
Level 4: , ,,, , , ,.
Level 5: , ,,, , , ,.

Level 6: , ,,, , , ,.
Level 7: , ,,, , , ,.
Level 8: , ,,, ,,..
Level 9: , ,., ,,,. 
Level 10:,,,., ,,,.
Level 11:,,,,,,,.
Level 12:,,,,,,..