In Valley, the first-person adventure from Blue Isle Studios, the world around you is deeply connected with your preservation. With many open-world adventures, the game aims to preserve the life of your central character with scant regard for the terrain around you. Explosions, fire, gunshots or scuffles, the ground beneath you is your last concern.
The aim of Valley the first-person action-adventure single-player video game is to explore a futuristic mountain range with several navigations and geographical problems that need solving. To do so, you wear a L.E.A.F (Leap Effortlessly though Air Functionality) suit, a product of WWII experimentation and a get-up that would be stopped at the door of any nightclub.
The L.E.A.F. suit allows you to give or take life from anything organic in the game, but not without side effects. In addition to that miraculous capability, you can run faster than Usain Bolt and leap like you’ve been stung by a giant bee. You’re like a soldier from the Tom Cruise movie Edge of Tomorrow as part human, the part surrounding robot skin. But while you can travel at pace and with great power, the weight of massive responsibility keeps weighing you down.
The Valley of the game’s title is replete with forests, ancient ruins and mystical beasts who prefer shooting fire at you rather than asking you where you got that neat leather jacket. Messing with morality and physics, you can fly around racetracks, swing through the jungle or defend Bambi and her friends around you on the forest floor. The only downside is that the more death you experience, the more the Valley around you suffers. To a large degree, you are responsible not only for yourself but also for the entire environment.
Manipulate life and death: the L.E.A.F. suit can be upgraded throughout the game, allowing Valley to introduce new mechanics and advanced playing techniques gradually, allowing the player to become immersed in the world created by Petar Markovich, who designed and programmed the game.
Blue Isle Studios, the developers behind the horror-tastic effort Slender: The Arrival, completely changed pace with Valley. Presented alongside such bloodthirsty slaughter, Valley feels like an antidote to more excruciating action, with more focus on design, stunning artwork and a wholly more thought-out narrative. Much credit must go to Selcuk Bor for creating a soundtrack that genuinely invites anyone who plays into an utterly absorbing world.
One criticism could be the game’s lack of pace sporadically suffers from. The game’s mechanics allow you to move at incredible speed, yet some problems take too long to conquer. It wasn’t that I found them challenging. Moreover that however tricky or not they might be, the length of time taken to play out each logistical puzzle was a little too long.
With plenty of fans, you can make your mind up yourself by heading to the official Valley website or watching the launch trailer. If you want to look at a more detailed exploration of Valley’s gameplay, you can head here.
If you want to take a trip deep into the Valley, you can purchase the game for just $19.99 on Xbox One and PlayStation 4, which is available on Steam now. Valley has garnered a 72% score on Metacritic in the two years since its release but still divides opinion on whether it is a world that gamers love to explore or a world that could have done with more expansion before it welcomed any visitors.
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