South of the Circle Switch NSP Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

State of Play’s South of the Circle walks a tenuous line in terms of providing a truly interactive experience. Aside from frequent text bubbles that allow us to select the exact tone that the game’s protagonist, a British academic named Peter, can take during a conversation, we don’t get a whole lot of agency in how that story plays out. South of the Circle is more of a mildly interactive animated film for most of its roughly two-and-a-half-hour campaign. Yet there’s a huge emotional wallop waiting for us across that stretch of time, where it becomes difficult to imagine the game without its limited interactivity. South of the Circle is a game that asks for a lot of faith from its audience, and it surprisingly earns it. But that’s not an easy ask at the outset. The game does start on a tense, attention-grabbing note. It’s 1964 and Peter, a distinctly nebbish, Hugh Grant type, wakes up in a crashed plane in the middle of the Antarctic wilderness, and next to him is the plane’s pilot, whose leg is utterly mangled. They aren’t far from Britain’s base camp in the frozen wasteland, but as one can imagine, taking an unexpected hike in Antarctica isn’t a fun, springtime stroll. That is, until suddenly it is. Peter copes with his frostbitten trudge for survival by dissociating back to better days, as a climate science lecturer at Cambridge on the verge of a breakthrough with a paper on cloud tracking, and equally on the verge of happiness in a professional and romantic relationship with a fellow lecturer named Clara.TOP/BEST ADULT VIDEO GAMES IN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA)

South of the Circle Switch NSP Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

While the Antarctic sections of the game don’t offer much to look at, how the game transitions between past and present, using an abstract watercolor style to create a swoony dream-like vibe, makes even the most mundane scenes from Peter’s memory feel like rooms in a glorious memory palace. Even more impressive is South of the Circle’s pitch-perfect execution of two gaming fundamentals: voice acting and mocap direction. The cast is full of folks who’ve been around the bend of big productions for years, and their performances lend an enormous amount of weight to what only seems like a simple love story between academics. Think The Imitation Game or Theory of Everything as directed by Richard Linklater in full Waking Life mode and you have an idea of how hypnotic and captivating this game can be at its best, while also hinting at how dry and reserved it can get at its most unsatisfying. There’s a stiff-upper-life quality to South of the Circle that means that its success hinges entirely on it satisfactorily answering one question: Where are we going with all this? Thankfully, right around the point that the game feels as if it’s about to outstay its welcome, it starts tying all of its disparate plot points and minor decision-making scenes together with its distinct timeframe and setting. Peter’s research and his relationship, as it turns out, puts him in the middle of a Cold War standoff between Russia, Norway, and England, as well as a crisis of faith stemming from good old-fashioned misogyny in British academia.

Nuanced emotional choices.

How it all relates to Peter’s present—where the Antarctic camps all appear to be abandoned recently and hurriedly—manages to instill a deep amount of intrigue with so very little plot-wise. The truth about how and why Peter wound up here leads to some smartly executed Eternal Sunshine-style reframing of everything that players have seen, and even though we don’t get to make many choices throughout, those choices do matter in their own way in the end. While its aesthetic showcases no small amount of innovation, South of the Circle’s biggest triumph is in accomplishing so much with the most basic of dramatic tools. If I had to choose between writing a thesis on cloud patterns for Cambridge University or traversing the snowy, desolate landscape of the Antarctic alone, I wouldn’t have been able to pick which one is the worst. Nevertheless, in State of Play’s South of the Circle, you can play as a man who does both. This beautiful narrative takes you on an engaging and immersive journey. Despite its 4 hours of gameplay, it manages to tell an intriguing story, if not for a couple of plot holes here and there. The aesthetic style is exquisite, almost like a vintage graphic style with no outlines and wonderful use of colours and light. Some scenes are bright and vivid when you, for instance, observe a car from the outside as it drives through the English countryside; in others, you only see dark silhouettes where the focal point is the only thing that is illuminated.VEREDA Escape Room Adventure Switch NSP

South of the Circle Switch NSP Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

South of the Circle is cinematically and visually gorgeous, and its vintage graphic style goes well with the historical time and setting. Set during the Cold War in the 60s, you play Peter, a timid and introverted Cambridge academic who studies cloud patterns and is writing, or at least trying to write, a paper on the topic. The game consists of two plot lines that run parallel with each other. The first plot line, as already mentioned, is with Cambridge and Peter’s attempt at an academic career. The second and primary plot line concerns Peter and his colleague, Floyd, as they crash their airplane while flying over the Antarctic. Floyd, the pilot of the plane, is injured, and it is up to Peter to go and get help. Oh, did I mention that they crashed in the Antarctic? Yeah. Not much help to get there. As Peter struggles through the South Pole, the past and the present shift elegantly in and out along the way. You are walking through endless snowy landscapes in one moment, only to have it beautifully shift to the streets of Cambridge in another. South of the Circle does a brilliant job weaving in Peter’s back story, with scenes from his childhood and his trying to build an academic career, leading to why he is in the Antarctic. Back in Cambridge, Peter meets Clara, a fellow academic, who helps him to write his thesis, and their relationship evolves into something more than just study buddies.

Environmental storytelling woven through the narrative.

The story is set in the early ’60s when women weren’t well respected in the academic world. Soon Peter is forced to choose between his loyalty and love for Clara or his future career at Cambridge. The game is mainly driven forward by exploration and dialogue instead of puzzles. There is a large focus on the dialogue, but instead of directly choosing what Peter says in conversations, you choose an emotional response with different symbols representing them. You can choose from five different “moods” or “responses”: shy, enthusiastic, concerned, assertive, and caring. I had to draw up all the different responses and their respective symbols in the beginning, as I couldn’t remember which symbol represented the emotional response. There is a section in the settings where they are explained, but I couldn’t be bothered to tab out to the menu each time there was a conversation response to be made. This way of steering the conversation is original, but it only gives you the illusion of choosing the story’s path. Unfortunately, no matter how you have Peter react and choose, it doesn’t impact the outcome of the game. South of the Circle is an emotional narrative experience with a deep multi-layered cinematic story. The main plot asks questions about the consequences of paths taken in life and how they have influenced our career and true love through the lens of the past and the future.60 Seconds!

South of the Circle Switch NSP Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

You play Peter, a Cambridge academic who crashlands in Cold War Antarctica. As he searches for help, his past unwinds before him, revealing how the pressures of power and his own aspirations have led him into this crisis he must somehow escape. A love story between him and fellow academic Clara develops, and Peter learns the weight of all the things he has promised. Like memories from childhood, some promises stay with us forever. Created by BAFTA winners State of Play, the game’s beautiful aesthetic and nuanced writing underlines its sweeping cinematic scope, further enhanced by actors drawn from “Bohemian Rhapsody” (Gwilym Lee), “The Woman in White” (Olivia Vinall), “The Crown” (Richard Goulding), “Game of Thrones” (Anton Lesser), “Chernobyl” (Adrian Rawlins) and “Downton Abbey” (Michael Fox). Even though you can’t impact how the story goes, it doesn’t make it less riveting. Almost immediately after the game started, I got pulled in by the story, and I got the sense that there was a mystery somewhere to be solved. When Peter fights his way through the unwelcoming landscape of the Antarctic, he discovers abandoned research stations and eerie grave marks outside of settlements, and the uncanny feeling that something is not quite right is prevalent throughout the entire game. Combined with the paranoia of the Cold War, not to mention the mental and physical strain of being stranded in literally nowhere, the story builds and evolves as you can feel Peter’s desperation in trying to get to safety.

Compelling and immersive narrative with a unique sense of time and place.

Since the game focuses more on narrative, there aren’t any puzzles to solve. You don’t have an inventory, and other than moving forward and steering conversations, the game experience is quite unchallenging. The voice acting and soundtrack, not to mention excellent writing, weigh up for the lack of puzzles and challenges. The music is well composed and spans from mellow background music to intense orchestral works that help make some scenes overwhelming and extraordinary. I must admit that the ending didn’t make sense to me at first. I was a bit underwhelmed and even confused, to be honest. Such a great story should have a great ending, but unfortunately, there were too many plot holes and loose threads. Maybe it’s just me, and I understand it is supposed to be an open ending, obviously open to interpretation. However, it didn’t produce the perfect punctuation mark that the rest of the story deserves. Some parts of the story suddenly flew by without much explanation. Even though I understand that when you have a short game of around 4 hours, you can’t elaborate on everything, some aspects were just suddenly cut off or not explained in a way that made much sense, whereas, in other scenes, things are carefully described. Peter is a guy with his head in the clouds. Literally. Well, sort of. A climate science lecturer at Cambridge University, Peter’s great passion in life is cloud research.

All he wants to do is study clouds: their different formations, their flight paths, their properties, everything. He finds them so fascinating that they’re the subject of his 100-page PhD thesis. It’s a poetic subject and one that matches his temperament as a boyish and awkward researcher. But around him the world is spiralling from the political tensions of the Cold War, and as much as Peter wishes to escape to in the clouds, current events are keeping him firmly tethered to the realities of an impending war. It’s this tension that makes South Of The Circle such an engrossing story. With player choices that subtly tug the game’s narrative needle in ways you might not expect, it’s clear skies and fair winds for the game’s three-hour journey. But with an abrupt ending after a calculated slow-burn drama, it’s a rough landing. When we first meet Peter he’s not in a good way. He’s sitting in the passenger seat next to an unconscious pilot in a plane that’s just crashed in the middle of an icy tundra in Antarctica. With the plane completely out of action and the pilot’s leg broken, Peter needs to leave the safety of the aircraft and walk through the wind-chilled snow to find help. The frost-bitten winds of Antarctica are far from a Cambridge academic’s natural habitat (an office stacked with piles of paper, towers of books, and empty cups of tea comes to mind) so the game switches between Peter’s present and past, showing us exactly how he got into this dangerous situation and how he’ll escape.

South of the Circle Switch NSP Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

This intercutting between past and present is one of the best elements of the game. One moment you’ll be guiding Peter through an icy storm, only for a particularly thick gust of wind to wipe away the tundra and suddenly you’re guiding Peter through a picturesque train station in sunny Cambridge. Peter might knock on a door to an Antarctic outpost, but as he walks through it the scene match cuts to him entering his professor’s office. Each time you’re bounced back and forth, there’s always a transition. It’s a great way of joining past to present and makes everything very visually slick. There are also times when you’ll be exploring environments, picking stuff up, messing with radio signals, and poking around. They’re few are far between, but together with the South Of The Circle’s colourful and minimalistic art style making every scene look like the gorgeous WPA travel posters of the 1930s, the creative direction is top-notch. Throughout Peter’s life, both in the present and in the past, you’re given a number of small but life-altering decisions to make in conversations with characters. Developers State Of Play have not gone for your usual conversational system, and instead of dialogue options South Of The Circle presents a number of emotional responses that you can pick to decide Peter’s reaction. These appear as little QTE bubbles above Peter’s, head meaning you’ll need to decide quickly how you want Peter to respond in certain situations. If you don’t choose an option in time, the game will pick one for you and move right along, which feels like you’re playing an interactive movie rather than a branching narrative story.60 Parsecs!

ADD ONS/PATCHES AND DLC’S: South of the Circle Switch NSP Eighty Two Nineteen