Outland

Developed by Housemarque

Published by Ubisoft

2011

Outland is a 2D platform game on the PlayStation Network. You play as a man who has recently been having visions and strange dreams seemingly of the past. He tries taking medicine to stop his visions but nothing happens. He then decides to seek a wise man or shaman who can help him with his problem. The shaman tells him what the dreams mean and how he can stop them. He tells the man that he is the reincarnation of the hero who stopped the two sister goddesses 30,000 years ago. The two sisters have escaped from their prison and now he must stop them. So he sets out on his journey to save the world.

You visit various temples along the way each time gaining some kind of new power, these usually signify the end of a level and some are guarded by boss fights. There are also different creatures along the way that you must face.

The unique feature of this game is the light and dark aspects to the game play, as the hero you can channel light and dark energy that you can switch between at any time. The two different energies are represented with different colours, light being blue and dark being red. In the game there are enemies of a certain colour that you can only encounter and defeat when you are switched to the opposite colour. The same applies to different colours of energy that may be being fired about the levels; to pass safely through them you need to be the same colour as the energy. The game is all about timing and fast thinking is needed making this game very challenging at times.

One of the main aspects of the game that I focussed on was the art style and how atmospheric it is. Everything in the foreground is a silhouette then the background is layered up behind it. The background themselves are beautiful to look at and it gives the game an overall dramatic feel to it.