Vasilis is a hand-drawned adventure game, where the player has to overcome a difficult path in order to find the husband of the main character, Peter, lost in the burning and rebellious city. The city has been experiencing revolutionary events for several months already.
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UK copy played on a PlayStation Vita OLED model.
I hate games like this - passion projects that clearly have a lot of meaning to the developers and are a deeply personal bearing of their souls that are completely marred by a poor presentation.
Vasilis could have been a good game, not a great one mind you but that's more up for personal debate and dependant on where your tastes lie. It has a great and subtle art style and sound design, relayed to you in simplistic animations and eerie soundscapes. The narrative is very unclear at times - I followed everything up until the half way point and then I got quite confused trying to tell what was literal and what was symbolic - but it is interesting and does manage to be unique given the subject matter and setting.
The game design is where things start to fall apart however. On its own, a simple exploratory, task-driven adventure game set in an isolated environment should be a fairly simple thing to get right, but the slow walking speed, coupled with the lengthy load times between scenes and the constant stuttering when you're just walking ultimately served to distract and detract from the overall experience. It was quite frustrating at times, knowing a task that could easily have taken a minute to do was dragged out with multiple 10 second loading screens and being confused as to where you are because the in-game map simply isn't clear enough.
Maybe the PC and home console versions are better but playing this game on the Vita was a terrible experience and I think I've seen enough after playing to the end once.
I hate games like this - passion projects that clearly have a lot of meaning to the developers and are a deeply personal bearing of their souls that are completely marred by a poor presentation.
Vasilis could have been a good game, not a great one mind you but that's more up for personal debate and dependant on where your tastes lie. It has a great and subtle art style and sound design, relayed to you in simplistic animations and eerie soundscapes. The narrative is very unclear at times - I followed everything up until the half way point and then I got quite confused trying to tell what was literal and what was symbolic - but it is interesting and does manage to be unique given the subject matter and setting.
The game design is where things start to fall apart however. On its own, a simple exploratory, task-driven adventure game set in an isolated environment should be a fairly simple thing to get right, but the slow walking speed, coupled with the lengthy load times between scenes and the constant stuttering when you're just walking ultimately served to distract and detract from the overall experience. It was quite frustrating at times, knowing a task that could easily have taken a minute to do was dragged out with multiple 10 second loading screens and being confused as to where you are because the in-game map simply isn't clear enough.
Maybe the PC and home console versions are better but playing this game on the Vita was a terrible experience and I think I've seen enough after playing to the end once.