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Playing Phoenix Springs feels like being trapped in a gorgeous dream thats steadily becoming a nightmare. Its a point-and-click mystery set in a bleak futuristic world of dramatic shadows and muted primary colors, its scenes connected by streams of anxious static. The game stars Iris Dormer, a technology reporter whos searching for her estranged brother, Leo. Her hunt takes her from the abandoned buildings of a rundown city, to a rich suburb, and finally to Phoenix Springs, a desert oasis bathed in golden light and occupied by a handful of odd, disconnected people. Iris is the heart of Phoenix Springs. She narrates the on-screen action in a stoic, unaffected tone that belies the cutting poetry of her observations. Iris has just three options when interacting with people and items: talk to, look at or use. Relevant concepts and objects are collected in her mental inventory, a simple word cloud of black text on a white background. Open the inventory with a right click and select a word to bring it into the scene, where its combinable with other ideas and with Iris herself, prompting her to remember the clue or provide more details about it. Making Iris remember certain things is a key mechanic throughout the mystery, and its a good move to keep in mind if you ever feel stuck in a point-and-click hole while playing. Iris is the games only voice and she talks directly to the player, sharing unfiltered thoughts as she processes each new set piece. Iris is jaded, dogged and insightful, and her cadence is sedate but sharp. Its the kind of voice that could make a take-out menu sound both sinister and profound, and its a thrill to listen to throughout Phoenix Springs. Iris city is desolate and rife with inequity. The streets are dotted with deserted buildings and barbed wire, and only the richest citizens are allowed to use energy without restriction. Down one alleyway, an intoxicated man is passed out on top of a shipping container, while a mute boy sits nearby, making a plant dance with an electronic box. In an abandoned university, a DJ blasts a thundering playlist for days on end as part of a mass sleep-deprivation experiment, delirious dancers and unconscious bodies piling up on the auditorium floor. The city's shadows are tinged with green, oppressive and sickly. Theres a mid-century edge to the games technology globe lights, push-button intercoms, bulky computer terminals and long train rides which makes the world feel intensely familiar, at least until the stasis pods appear. Make no mistake, Phoenix Springs is hard cyberpunk. Oddly enough, this only becomes clearer once you make your way to the oasis. The lushness of Phoenix Springs is an immediate relief, its flowing waters, red wooden huts and vibrant natural textures highlighting the sterility of the citys metal, glass and wires. Its almost relaxing enough to make you ignore the high strangeness of everything and everyone there. Almost. Calligram Studio On top of combining items to generate new leads about Leos disappearance, its critical to speak with people, bring them relevant ideas from your inventory and listen closely to their answers. The game relies on making common-sense connections and following your intuition, and rarely are solutions provided at face value. At times trial-and-error is a valid way to progress, and in other cases its just a matter of taking a breath and thinking about the problem from a fresh angle. My advice is to have patience and try absolutely everything that comes to mind; if youre paying attention, chances are, youre on the right track. Phoenix Springs occasionally suffers from the most common issue in point-and-click games, where it feels like youve tried every combination and nothing is working, so you just randomly click around until something happens but I encountered only two instances like this in about six hours of playtime. Thankfully, Calligram Studio provides a link to a walkthrough guide in the pause screen, so hope is never truly lost. Calligram Studio The games simple control scheme supports a surprisingly complex narrative that unspools in Iris measured narration. Theres nothing rushed about Phoenix Springs. Iris walks leisurely across expansive wide shots, her light blue silhouette cutting through high grasses and across cold concrete at the same unhurried pace. When she speaks, she gives each thought time to permeate the scene, sentences short and powerful. Haunting choir chords and droning bass lines are eventually replaced by pristine silence and birdsong. Where the environments arent blanketed in shadow, their colors constantly shift like theres a stop-motion river flowing just beneath the screen. Each second of Phoenix Springs demands your attention. In return, the game provides a million moments of intrigue for your eyes, ears and deductive mind. And at the inevitable conclusion, every small detail slides elegantly into place. I want to print out this game, frame by frame, and plaster its hand-drawn neo-noir vistas over every square inch of my office walls. Phoenix Springs is an interactive art installation that happens to use point-and-click game mechanics, and Calligram Studios emphasis on creating something beautiful and then using this canvas to tell a twisted story about biohacking and familial love is clear. Calligram Studio Whats exciting about Phoenix Springs is that it excels as both a piece of art and a detective game. It occupies a similar territory as Kentucky Route Zero, another title that offers depressing social commentary in a visually fascinating package, also made by a small artist collective. In the case of Phoenix Springs, stunning art direction, expert writing, incredible sound design, fabulous voice acting and satisfying mechanics combine to create an unforgettable, utterly unique sci-fi experience. Sure, Phoenix Springs is a game but mostly, its gorgeous. Phoenix Springs is now available on PC, Mac and Linux, developed and published by Calligram Studio. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/phoenix-springs-review-a-dazzling-and-disquieting-sci-fi-mystery-120029156.html?src=rss
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It's been a wait. Apple Intelligence will start rolling out on October 28, according to Bloombergs Mark Gurman. Apple said last month it was targeting October for iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1 which will bring some of the first Apple Intelligence features to iPhone 16 and the rest of the Apple family. The first wave of Apple Intelligence-powered features will include its summarization tool, Writing Tools and smart audio recording and transcriptions for Mail, Notes, Pages and other apps. Ive been testing the beta, and so far, the most useful feature has been the summarization tool, tackling my forest of notifications and messages and parsing them into glanceable summaries. Mat Smith The biggest stories you might have missed Apples revamped Mac mini and iPad mini could be here as soon as November 1 What happens when solar panels die? What to read this weekend: Preventing an asteroid apocalypse, and Cult of the Lambs first arc wraps up Gmails Gemini-powered Q&A feature comes to iOS Legos website was hacked to promote a crypto scam The company said no user accounts were compromised. Lego Scammers hijacked the toy brick makers website last week. They switched its banner and used it for a crypto scam. A banner with illustrated golden coins bearing the companys logo claimed the "Lego coin is now officially out." It even promised secret rewards to those whod buy some. The incident happened overnight at Legos headquarters. The company responded relatively quickly, removing the unauthorized banner and links. Lego told Engadget no user accounts were compromised. Continue reading. New iOS update fixes microphone and password problems These were issues with the iPhone 16 series. A more immediate update from Apple: It has released two new patches, including iOS 18.0.1 for iPhones and iPadOS 18.0.1. The patch fixes recording issues with all the iPhone 16 models in the Messages app. The iPhones microphone would accidentally start recording a few seconds before becoming activated with the orange microphone icon. Continue reading. X lost a court battle after trying to claim Twitter ceased to exist It was the companys attempt to avoid paying a $400,000 fine. X tried to avoid a $400,000 fine by claiming Twitter (its old name) no longer exists. The creative legal argument came amid a more-than-year-long dispute with Australias eSafety Commission. The commission had asked the company to provide details about its handling of child sexual exploitation on the platform last February. X failed to answer several questions and was slapped with a $415,000-plus fine for non-compliance. The argument isnt exactly new: CEO Linda Yaccarino has also repeatedly claimed X is a brand new company in a bid to avoid scrutiny. She repeated the line multiple times earlier this year while testifying at a Senate hearing on child safety issues. Australia federal judge Michael Wheelahan, however, was not having it. Continue reading.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/the-morning-after-the-first-apple-intelligence-features-should-finally-arrive-on-october-28-111544744.html?src=rss
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Off-Planet Dreams gives you everything you need to succeed, if you really want that. Help is just a few button-presses away at (almost) all times. Because of that, it feels uniquely accessible for what it is an invisible puzzle platformer designed to trip you up over and over again until youve learned enough from your mistakes to move forward. Depending on how you approach it, Off-Planet Dreams is either a trial-and-error nightmare loop or a relatively easygoing platform adventure. Or something between the two. I died 274 times in my first playthrough, if thats any indication of how challenging it can be. Off-Planet Dreams presents you (playing as a blob) with a grid and some floating doors, and says, essentially, okay, now find your way out. There are platforms that form a path to each door, but all the platforms are invisible. This is where the games difficulty is what you make of it ethos comes in. You can commit to jumping into the abyss every time and hoping to land on a platform, memorizing each misstep so you know what not to do the next time around if you die, or you can choose one of the three available tools for some guidance. Peek will give you a quick glimpse of any platforms nearby, Paint will highlight any platform youve stepped on, and Show will reveal all of the platforms in that room. Being stubborn, I was determined to get as far as I could without any help. But, I was humbled not too far in when I found myself trapped in Level 2-5 a level with multiple sublevels thatll repeatedly throw you back to its start if you go through the wrong doors. Here, I eventually caved and enabled Show just to give my brain some space to work out what the puzzle was without having to worry about remembering platforms. (When I finally figured it out, it wasnt even that complicated. Sigh). After that point, I bounced between going unaided and using the Paint option as a little treat. The game throws a curveball at you about halfway through when it introduces a new mechanic that requires the crank, which I thought was really clever once I got over the initial frustration of not knowing what the hell was going on. And further on, Off-Planet Dreams undergoes a stylistic shift that transforms it into something else entirely than what it was at the beginning. The developers wrote in the description that Off-Planet Dreams is more than a grid of dots, and they werent kidding. I had a lot of fun with it. You can get it now on the Playdate Catalog for $6.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/off-planet-dreams-is-a-delightfully-tricky-playdate-platformer-with-invisible-puzzles-230024431.html?src=rss
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