Friday 2 November 2012

Foam - PC


Over the last few days, I've ploughed around five frustrating hours into Assassin's Creed III. I'm not sure why I bothered. At this stage, it just feels like a re-skinned version of what has gone before and although my Twitter chums tell me it takes anywhere between 6-10 hours for things to open up, I'm really not sure I have the time, patience or inclination to bother going any further.

The antithesis to Ubisoft's big budget trudge is Foam - a quirky little indie game by Stwelin, which has more fun wrapped up in its first 30 minutes than those five wasted hours with Assassin's Creed III.

While Ubisoft's blockbuster has revealed worryingly familiar tasks such as leaping from the top of high places into tiny bales of hay, Foam's colourful world has seen me turn into a one-eyed spiky purple mushroom, interact with strange looking characters, crawl through a tree's interior and receive a telling off for not being able to swim.

It's initially unclear what your objectives are but it only takes a couple of minutes to discover the game is all about exploration and experimenting with objects and items squirreled away in Foam's eerie isometric world.

Objects stumbled upon change the lead character into a range of new guises, which allows the player to explore previously inaccessible areas of the world. It's this gameplay quirk which makes playing Foam so interesting - despite some rather fiddly controls.

I'll say no more for fear of spoilers, but it really is a magical and thoroughly absorbing little game and it's also free, so why not give it a try? Download it here


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