This was actually one of the first games that I played on the Vita, having received it so long ago that off of the top of my mind, I’m not exactly sure what holiday I received it for… that’s how long the Vita’s been around for (and how many games that we have for the Vita, although I don’t intend on saying anything bad about the Vita when I say that, having already made mention in a previous post to how the Vita is one of our favorite consoles for a number of reasons). It was also one that I played with Bub, that he enjoyed as well.
It managed to combine so many parts of our favorite game mechanics and genres into one without making it seem like it was forcing anything in, and I do have to point that out almost from the start of this review. It’s an action-adventure game (you’re scaling a tower, and fighting enemies as you do so), a classic who-done-it (because you’re scaling the tower with complete strangers, and some of them are enemies working with the game’s final boss against you, and you have to figure out who those are and vote them out one at a time on each floor of the tower based on the clues that you obtain), and it has maximum replayability because the game’s “traitors” are chosen at random at the start of each playthrough, meaning that you have to do the work of finding out all over again who the traitors are with each playthrough. And because each of your teammates have special powers, sometimes this means that the traitor you have to sacrifice at each floor’s pit stop might be someone with a particularly advantageous power that would otherwise make the subsequent floors easier to get through, but… you have to do what you have to do. The character that you control has the ability to “read minds” — that’s the easiest way that I can word it without spoiling too much of the game’s actual plot mechanics — and this is how he is able to “read people” and figure out their true intentions, and figure out whether or not they are traitors. It involves a clever mini-game that you can play to figure out their intentions, and one that I strongly encourage playing as often as possible to confirm things.
Over the course of our first playthrough, we ambled through it with the intention of picking it back up at some point and getting it right, and we only managed to get two wrong, which should really say something. If you get any of them “wrong” (don’t manage to eliminate traitors before you get to the top of the tower), you have to fight them in addition to the final boss), which does make the final boss more difficult, but not entirely impossible if you’ve managed to gear up properly. This is in comparison to other difficult final bosses.
All in all, I would recommend this game to anyone who is looking for an action-adventure “who done it?”.
Soon enough, Bub will get the psychiatric evaluation that is required to start the behavioral therapy that he was referred to. This just appears to be something that his insurance, and most insurances, require. Whatever they can get from him that they can use in this therapy to help him better manage his emotions, learn to convey overwhelming ones to caregivers so that they can get him help, and start to recognize (and act on) the beginnings of meltdowns so that he remains safe and those around him remain safe, I am all for. These were the reasons that he was referred for behavioral therapy anyway, although they are also things that I would really like him to work on as well. It’s just a matter of finding days that are available for the behavioral health… team, I guess, taking those, and then utilizing them, which I have done. We’re waiting on appointments to come.