50 Best Games of 2016: #4 – Valley

Valley game
Valley

Our 50 best games of the year countdown isn’t in any order, we’re just going through fifty of the finest the year has given us. Find out more here.

When you’re known for scaring gamers, what do you do as a developer for your next game? You go the opposite way and create something meant to delight.

With Valley, Blue Isle Studios successfully shrugged off the Slender shackles and produced something that offers you the chance to just sit back and take it all in. The mainstream media might not have been friendly with it, but bully for them – Valley is superb.

Opening up as an explorer washed up in a strange land, Valley wastes no time in introducing you to its main selling point: the L.E.A.F suit. Once this is equipped, venturing around the secluded and secretive environments is as relaxing an experience as you were likely to find in 2016. Leaping around the large world is simple and straightforward, though never boring. It does a great job of keeping things varied.

It doesn’t hurt that travelling downhill at speed is like a steampunk vision of Sonic the Hedgehog, your avatar’s arms and legs working overtime as what sounds like Enya fills the air. The soundtrack, almost always hopeful and befitting of a guy with robotic legs travelling through a fantasy land, adds to Valley in a palpable way. You’ll find it hard to resist a smile.

The story, too, is one worth digging around info for. Without spoiling much, let’s just say that our hero wasn’t the first on the scene, which opens up a whole tonne of mysteries that will keep you intrigued beyond “can I jump on that?” And the answer, by the way, is yes. Once you’re equipped to the brim with upgrades, Valley makes jumping across great distances a doddle.

There’s one element of Valley that I never thought received enough credit: it’s all about ethics. While its story deals heavily in the dangers of science on nature, the mechanics of staying alive say much more. To keep yourself energised, you need to capture essence, which can either come from orbs scattered around the world or from the living inhabitants of the valley.

At an early point, the game asked me to drain a deer for energy, an offer I refused. When the going gets tough, though, it’s hard to resist. Likewise, death comes with an added danger – you’re brought back through a technology in your suit that drains the life around you as an expense. Coming back to see death around you is an on the nose metaphor for the damage we humans are doing to the planet, but it’s damn effective.

Thanks to tinges of Bioshock, a sublime score, and a subtly fascinating story, Valley has to go down as one of the 2016’s best and also one of its most underrated. Oh, and there are these really adorable little creatures called daemons that probably deserve to be turned into plushies.

You know what to do, Blue Isle.

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