Find and photograph cryptids in 2D adventure Lone Pine

A young woman with a camera is loomed at by a cryptid — (Image credit: Bang Bang Interactive)

You can keep "jump", the best verb in videogames is "examine". When an adventure game like Lone Pine lets me examine a campfire and also a bin, then has the protagonist comment on them in a way that says something about her as well as about the object she's looking at, I know I'm in good hands.

Lone Pine is an adventure game about exploring a national park with only your wits and a backpack you can fill with items that might then be combined with each other to solve puzzles. Oh, and a camera for taking photos of cryptids with.

The one thing that gave me pause was a puzzle that I got stuck on because I couldn't match two drawings of a dog's head. One was just a touch too abstract for me to figure out what it was. A friend of mine playing the demo had the exact same problem. It's funny how a puzzle can be stalled by how we interpret images—it's been fascinating to see how many people get stuck on the puzzles in Silent Hill F that assume you'll be able to figure out what a character's pose implies about their emotional state or, like, which of a group of foxes is a thief.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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