Pros: Lets you experience J-horror from the inside.Sure, little girls seem cute and perky when they’re alive, but just let one die and she becomes a vessel of vicious, unrelenting fury that drags the innocent and guilty alike into an unimaginable nightmare. At least that seems to be the case in Japan, where the angry, stringy-haired ghost girl is a staple of horror movies. Creepy dead girls have also shown up in a few video games, but none have so closely hewn to “J-horror” tropes as the survival horror game The Calling. Calling begins in a chat room that is rumored to allow communication with the dead. The game follows the fortunes of several people who visited the chat room only to pass out and awake in places – a hospital, a school – deserted except for a handful of angry ghosts, who seem themselves to have come into these worlds through the chat room.The ghosts of my childhood had to make due with rattling chains and creaking doors, but Calling’s spirit world is somehow built on technology, entered through the Internet and traversed via cell phone.
The cell phone, in fact, is a central component of the game; calling a phone number transports you to that phone, mysterious photographic clues are often texted to you (the game never explains who sends them) and the phone can be used to record mysterious sounds that play back as significant conversations.While the ghost’s tools are high-tech, the scares are decidedly old-fashioned, involving ghosts jumping in front of you, sudden shadows rushing by and creepy voices coming from the Wii remote’s speaker, which doubles as your phone. This is cheesy yet often effective, and while the game never reaches the level of spooky intensity of a good horror movie, it does have the cheap thrills of a low budget scare-fest.When ghosts attack, you repel them by shaking your remote before you die of fright (a meter tells you how scared you are). You can also presumably “dodge” ghosts by hitting the “A” button at just the right time, but I could never manage this, in spite of finding tips online.
Winning a ghost battle involves escape, survival for a set period of time or, in the game’s worst moment, dialing a phone number really, really quickly while being attacked (this is the first time I’ve ever played a game that required me to commit a phone number to memory).These frenzied moments are a small part of a game that is mainly devoted to exploration and puzzle solving.Exploration is fairly enjoyable. Controls are straightforward: the nunchuk is used for movement and the Wii remote controls your point of view and your flashlight beam. The Z button is held for running or double clicked for a 180-degree turn. Sometimes when I tried to run I accidentally spun around, but since this has the perhaps unintended effect of creating a mild fright, I didn’t mind too much.The game is quietly spooky as you idly play instruments in a high school's dimly lit music room or trail a ghostly soldier through a misty forest, but less enthralling when you repeatedly retrace your steps, especially on one of the game’s way too plentiful flashlight hunts, or open one empty cabinet after another.
Puzzles are generally quite easy, and are more a matter of finding a particular object or memo than of figuring anything out. The player is only occasionally asked to use a little brainpower.One odd thing about Calling is that it is designed to be played through twice. When you reach the game’s rather abrupt end, you are informed you have unlocked a hidden chapter. This turns out to be a whole slew of new chapters in which you play as Makoto Shirae, a character Rin meets who is the only one who has any idea what is going on. The game is designed so you play the new chapters in between replaying the original chapters, but if you’re like me you will choose to skip the chapters you’ve already played, which offer little in the way of replay value (I’ve heard you cannot skip chapters in the original Japanese version, which would be infuriating). The idea of letting you play as Makoto is a good one: it’s nice to learn how he knows what he knows, and to see how his actions dovetail with Rin’s and ultimately change the game’s ending.
Unfortunately, in terms of gameplay, Calling pretty much runs out of steam with these new chapters, and I became so impatient with yet more searching for flashlights in places I’d already explored thoroughly the first time that at times I used a walkthrough to bypass all that wandering and searching.While stringy-haired ghost girls using technology for haunting purposes are a dime a dozen in Asian countries, Calling makes more sense than a lot of similar games and movies, telling a fairly convincing back-story that explains how a cute and perky little girl can become an angry and unreasoning ghost with a chat room obsession. Its slow pace and somewhat anemic gameplay keep Calling from being a great game, but it is still an enjoyable little horror title that offers an experience closer to living a Japanese horror movie than any other game I have played. While you could simply travel to Japan, where it is apparently impossible to avoid attacks by little ghost girls, for the rest of the world that experience is most easily found on the Wii.
Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens is the latest Traveller's Tales Lego game, in a long series of such games, based on the popular Star Wars franchise film The Force Awakens. This sentence will already contain enough information for a lot of you; the Lego games are a bit of a one trick pony. It's a good trick, don't misunderstand me there, but how much mileage you give each successive performance is naturally going to vary. This time around the pony (and for the purposes of this painfully extended metaphor it's a plastic pony) is wearing a spangly new Star Wars costume. Lego TFA does, to its credit, capture the spirit of Star Wars - that swelling feeling of heroism and adventure - really well. It's down in part to smart use of the film's original score, but also to a galaxy map allowing you to travel between worlds and the wide central hubs those worlds have, which are bigger than ever before. They have characters going about their daily lives, and others giving little side quests to carry out in the area.
These are some of the best parts of the entire game, with lots of weird little things to discover that, amazingly, give a genuine sense of exploration. This can also be said of the levels themselves, albeit to a lesser extent. There's a fidelity to the film, but the stages are expanded enough to make it an actual adventure for the player, and the story is fleshed out with bonus levels to unlock and play that add context: rescuing Admiral Ackbar from a Star Destroyer; capturing rathtars with Han and Chewie. Plus, and I don't want to speculate on what Hollywood contracts were signed in whose blood, they managed to get the principal cast to voice their own characters. Imagine my surprise when, impressed by the accuracy of whoever was doing an impression of Han Solo, I discovered that notorious grumpy carpenter and owner of magical oranges Harrison Ford had actually voiced himself. So far, so Star Wars, but in terms of the actual mechanics of the game there are still those grates that only small characters can fit under, still those rope lassos, still those climbing points that need a character with some species of stick.
There are the same collectible items to find, the same terrifyingly large roster of minifigures to unlock. Luckily it's also kept the tradition of working in weird jokes, even if it kept everything else as well, and there are some genuinely funny bits resulting from it. Kylo Ren's bedroom is revealed to be that of a teenage boy having a fan freakout over Darth Vader, a Stormtrooper congratulates her peer for setting a new base record at target practise with 3/10 hits, and Rey's land speeder has a 'BB on board' sticker. There is, of course, the usual nonsense with errant bananas and broomsticks that you expect from one of these games as well. It'll all feel very familiar if you've played a Lego game recently, and although there are some new additions to spice it up, they don't always work. There are boss fights to round off some areas, but half of them boil down to quicktime events with non-specific triggers and are as tedious as watching the Star Wars prequels. In some arenas the cover shooting segments really work, but in others they become janky speed bumps in the middle of an otherwise well-paced level.
It's frustrating when all it would take to fix is a small change in the layout of the level. This kind of 'this could be great if only...' conflict comes up more than you'd hope. The flying sections are fun, but the ship controls like Poe Dameron is swiping wildly through Tinder with one hand. Two-player works well, but the AI in single-player, trying to help you as best it can, can populate your selection wheel with two BB-8's or four different iterations of Rey, and while they may be people's' favourite part of The Force Awakens film it's unsettling. One can't help but imagine them having an existential crisis on a tiny, Danish-made scale. Lego TFA is good if you like anything Star Wars, it's good if you want something kids can play too, and it's good if you just bloody love these Lego games; if you're the intersecting point on the Venn diagram of all three then it's probably your game of the year. For the rest of us it's polished, good looking, and pretty well designed, but ultimately a toy that's becoming formulaic and a lot of us are probably tired with by now.