Reviews

Early in Fantasy Life i, a character tells me that I stink. It's the stench of idleness, he says, and the only solution is to get a job. This happens after I've washed ashore on a beautiful tropical island where my first instinct is to enjoy the sunshine or, more prudently, find the means to urgently save the friends I last saw stranded at sea upon a sinking ship. Rescue can wait, apparently, because first I need to prove my worth by seeking out a career. "How are you going to help people without a job?" I am asked.

I started playing Fantasy Life i last year almost immediately after giving notice at my job of twelve years. "Friend," I wanted to say, "simply having a job doesn't keep the stink off."

Fantasy Life calls its 14 different careers "Lives" - no I will not write an entire essay about this - and the unifying fantasy offered by each one is that your work is a mutually beneficial transaction that helps everybody, makes the world a better place, and rewards you with both personal satisfaction and upward mobility. You perform this work for always-grateful townspeople around a colourful and familiar

I feel like my brain is broken. Sci-fi mystery puzzler TR-49 is the exact sort of clue-hunting solve 'em up I normally love. But somewhere in its thorny forest of fictional author names and twentieth century dates I got lost, hacking my way through more with frustration than curiosity. 

It's packaged as a codebreaking game, but really it's a "database game". Imagine Her Story in an alternate history. You type codes into an odd machine to reveal snippets from books or journals. You're here to find a particular book. But the texts you discover are mostly the jumbled notes from previous users of the machine. Sounds intriguing, and many scribbles display a great range of writing styles. But I found slowly constructing my understanding of the plot and its many characters more cumbersome than rewarding. Putting its cryptic story together felt like building a cathedral out of SQL.  

Some basics. You're Abbi, and you're stuck in a dank cellar with the strange machine. A voice comes over the radio, a bloke called Liam, who asks you to start toying with the levers and dials on this weird old codebreaker.

A popular stereotype of surfers is that they're attractive airheads. A fit waverider doesn't have time for big thoughts, beyond explaining that the moon is, like, totally in league with the whales, man. This is a lame stereotype, and yet a helpful image when it comes to explaining how I feel about dashing surf 'em up Sword Of The Sea. (We don't mind reviewing 5-month old games here at Jank). This game is beautiful, toned, ripped, fashionable, athletic, and it has a great ear for music. It also has the conversational skills of a post-huff stoner, and its visual similarity to Journey only invites an unflattering comparison.

The game itself is an approachable ride. You swoop along in smooth arcs and can leap into the air, double-jumping for extra trick time, cruising through ultimately linear sandy levels that coax you toward lanterns and bells that turn sand into seawater and unlock the way to the next area. It only lasts about 3 hours too, meaning it can glide in and out of your life with unobnoxious merit. If you've got a subscription service that includes the game, there are worse ways to spend an evening.