Between 19 our unnamed narrator makes a number of house moves, and the player has to help her unpack in each new location. All of these emotions are beautifully and wordlessly explored in Unpacking. Sometimes you find things you thought were long lost, sometimes painful memories are exhumed in the process. Often there are difficult choices about what to leave behind. Nothing forces you to assess the events of your life, and the effects they’ve had on you, more than packing everything you own into boxes and then trying to find new places for them on the other side. Just like the comics that inspired it, Web of Wyrd is sadly paper-thin.Moving home is such an intense and often melancholic experience. But there’s just not enough game to fill the gaps in the story, none of the mechanical depth to reward diving back into the same old Wyrd again and again and again. Hellboy fans - and I count myself all too deep among them - will doubtless enjoy exploring Mignola’s art made interactive, and the one-two of Lance Reddick and a sharp script keep Web of Wyrd trundling along. The game doesn’t have a whole lot to say, but the story’s twists and turns are well thought through, and the writers have clearly had fun playing with the looping narrative - always just enough to seem self-aware, and never so much as to slip into wink-wink-nudge-nudge territory. Developed in conjunction with comics publisher Dark Horse, Web of Wyrd uses its roguelike structure smartly, sending you on loops through the four worlds that deepen each time, unpacking layers of the Wyrd and eventually revealing the game’s real villains - a surprisingly deep cut reference to the ‘Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.’ spin-off series.Įach world has its own sub-story, darting from deals with the devil to otherworldly fae, told through the bosses’ mid-fight barks and a smattering of lore entries dotted around to be read at your leisure in the Butterfly House. Where there are still surprises to be found is the story. This might have been helped by a more gradual drip feed of the available weapons and charms, but players get the full set almost off the bat, and then there’s not much left to look forward to. The numbers go up, but the game never really changes. You can add a little to Hellboy’s Health and Toughness or make his guns - a choice of pistol, shotgun, or grenade launcher - a little more punchy, but upgrades are hard-earned and infrequently impactful. It doesn’t help that character progression outside each Wyrd run is pretty barebones too. The game simply ran out of ways to surprise me, and did so within the first hour. There aren’t many of those either though, and all too quickly I settled into a repetitive rhythm, knowing exactly which power-ups I’d pick from the small pool available, with no real incentive to ever mix it up. Given that the scraps themselves are so similar, the main variation comes down to which buffs and currency drops the game throws your way each run. In true roguelike fashion each trip into the Wyrd is procedurally generated, stitching together a slightly different layout of big spaces for fights and narrow passageways to get you to fights. The overwhelming majority of them are simply big lads with bigger swords (or fists), and fights swiftly feel entirely interchangeable. This isn’t helped by an embarrassingly limited range of enemies - until you reach the game’s final stages you’ll only find two or three variants of Big Bad in each area, and not much difference between them. Once you get the hang of the combat, it doesn’t change much from the game’s first fight through to its hundredth. Enemy attacks can be blocked or dodged, and you can also equip one of three Charms that can either repel enemies, create a one-hit shield, or deal a small hit of instant damage that penetrates an enemy’s Toughness and goes straight to their health bar. There’s a light punch, there’s a heavy punch, there’s a gun. Unfortunately, Hellboy’s moveset is a little too comics-accurate, meaning there’s not a whole lot of variation to what he does. The Big Bads pop up one or two at a time and require more of a pummelling to take down. You can’t deny that Web of Wyrd looks the part. (Image credit: Good Shepherd Entertainment)Įxploring the best recreation of Mignola’s distinctive aesthetic yet, with shadows so deep you worry Hellboy might get lost in them.
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