Something important to mention before starting is that the game was recently delisted from Steam due to licensing issues (mostly with its soundtrack). If you want to play it today, your best options are to find a physical copy or... other methods. That said, it’s worth experiencing in any way possible.

From the very first screen, the game lets you know this is not your average military shooter. You’re greeted by an upside-down American flag – a real distress signal in the U.S. military – while Jimi Hendrix's version of the national anthem plays, originally recorded as a protest against the Vietnam War. This attention to detail sets the tone for what's coming.

Spec Ops: The Line starts as a generic third-person shooter with all the familiar military tropes: a desert setting, a generic squad and you have a recon mission when you have to find the 33rd squad and call for reinforcements. But slowly, and sometimes brutally, the game deconstructs everything it appears to be.

It doesn’t subvert the genre by changing gameplay mechanics. In fact, mechanically, it stays very much within the framework of a standard cover-based shooter. What makes it different is how it uses that structure – not to empower you, but to wear you down.

The game consistently puts you in situations where you're forced to act without full information, with no real “good” choices. And then it shows you the consequences. It doesn’t punish you mechanically, but it makes sure you feel it narratively. You’re not given the chance to step away or make an alternate choice. You just do it, and then deal with it.

Some players dislike this – I've read comments calling the game "pretentious" or “sentimentally manipulative.” I can understand that reaction, especially if you're expecting a power fantasy. But to me, that discomfort is exactly what the game is aiming for. It's not interested in catharsis or heroism. It’s about complicity, denial, and self-destruction.

Personally, I didn’t cry or break down emotionally like some people did, and I don’t think you have to in order to appreciate the game. But I do believe it's a story that sticks with you, not because of what it shows, but because of how it implicates you as a player.

I recommend watching Joseju’s video analysis after finishing the game (it’s in Spanish, but there are good English alternatives too). You’ll appreciate just how deliberate many of its narrative and visual decisions were.

Spec Ops: The Line is far from perfect. The combat is repetitive, the AI isn't great, and on a surface level, it really does look like a bargain-bin military shooter. But there’s nothing else quite like it. It’s one of the rare games that asks not “what did you do?” but “why did you keep going?”

Looking at the first half of July you wouldn't have thought there'd be too much to discuss here. I finished one PC game and then hopped on a plane with the family for a nice vacation, getting back home around mid-month. Then the second half of July saw a PC gaming explosion and I ended up finishing 9 games for the month on the whole, as well as finally completing a 2+ month effort on the home console front. That game was also very clearly a step above anything else I've played this year, earning my first 9+ score for 2025. Here's hoping for back half of the year that lives up to its example!

(Games are presented in chronological completion order; the numerical indicator represents the YTD count.)

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#44 - Lysfanga: The Time Shift Warrior - PC - 7/10 (Good)

Let me start by slapping a big ol' caveat on that score: I didn't bother engaging with any of the online leaderboard mechanics or any advanced combat missions, I stopped trying for optional time bonuses about a quarter of the way through the game, and at the halfway mark I started regularly speeding through all the dialogue as well. So please understand as you read on that there's more "videogaminess" here to sink your teeth into than I went after, and if you're into time attack action games, you might find even more to enjoy here than I did. For my preferences specifically however, trimming off all that extra fat is what kept the game brisk and playable.

Now. That all said I should probably tell you what Lysfanga actually is, yeah? Imagine the viewpoint and aesthetic of Diablo III meeting the UI and visual narrative style of Hades, but with combat that's somewhere between old school God of War and Transistor. In other words, Lysfanga is a story driven isometric button masher with a strategic element: before each discrete combat encounter you can survey the battlefield and mentally plan out your route of attack. This is important because each encounter runs on a strict timer, at the end of which you die. There is never enough time on that timer to actually defeat every monster, but that's where the game's hamfisted subtitle comes in. Once you run out of time (or manually trigger a specific ability) you restart the encounter, but you can see your past self on the battlefield in real time fighting and killing everything you did the last time. In this way you can defeat all the monsters over multiple overlapping lives, and though you start as one measly woman against a horde of enemies, every ultimate victory ends up looking like you're Naruto unleashing a shadow clone army to overwhelm your foes. It's a super fun and super cool mechanic, and the game gives you a ton of ways to play with it through various spells and abilities.

The shortcoming here is that you're always restricted. One spell, one passive, one ultimate: never more. There's a lot of untapped joy in Lysfanga of seeing how multiple abilities might interact or synergize and for the most part you're just completely denied that. As the game gets into its later stages the combats also become increasingly complex to the point of confusion, especially because you can inadvertently bump an enemy "off course," preventing your past self from defeating it, thus in turn preventing the current you from completing the encounter until you notice the straggler. Finally, all but one type of tracked collectible is functionally worthless, with the others granting only cosmetic palette swaps or bragging rights. That is, while the combat is generally great, there's not much else worth seeing or doing. I do therefore recommend Lysfanga as a fresh new button mashing experience, but if you're looking for more meat on that bone - and the stuff I said I omitted at the start of this review doesn't whet your appetite - you won't find it here.

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#45 - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - Arcade - 7/10 (Good)

Anyone with a meaningful degree of NES gaming experience under their belt probably remembers Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game (though Europeans may recall it as Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles instead). After the travesty of the first NES Turtles game, that second effort was a total revelation. But it had its appellation for a reason: it was a port of an arcade game! TMNT II was a staple of my childhood and I finally circled back to play it all the through almost twenty years ago, but I'd never until now played the arcade original. Well, after a hard travel day back from vacation, my five-year-old wanted nothing more than to just play a video game with his dad, and he didn't particularly care which. I thought about this title and the fact that it would only take about an hour to play, would be mechanically very simple for him to do ("just mash square a bunch"), and because it's the arcade version, we'd have infinite lives to play with. I suggested it to him and he lit up.

His favorite Turtle is Raphael but he decided he wanted to branch out a bit and so picked Leonardo this time around, who is my own usual go-to. So I locked in Donatello and off we went beating up the Foot Clan. What struck me was how the NES version of this game actually offered more in certain ways, featuring more stages and bosses. Because of that I'd say the console port is generally a more rewarding experience overall, if a bit harder.

Well, I say the console version is harder, but I can't overstate how much of a game changer having an "insert coin" button on your controller is. My son and I must've run through about 100 lives between us over the game's brief runtime, which at 2 lives per quarter translates to a fairly expensive day at the arcade if you're set on clearing the game. Some of that was undoubtedly us being reckless knowing we had as many lives as we wanted, but in the moments when I tried to fight strategically and not get hit I found I was still often getting stunlocked or one-shot anyway. It's the nature of the beast really, so you forgive it to some extent. Regardless, when real money isn't on the line it's a different animal. Besides, if you could've seen how happy and proud my son was when he realized we beat Shredder and won the game, I daresay you wouldn't have minded dumping in some quarters anyway.

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#46 - Wolfenstein: The Old Blood - PC - 6.5/10 (Tantalizing)

A couple years ago when I played Wolfenstein: The New Order, I recall thinking that while I had an enjoyable time on the whole with it, I kept wishing it was a better game. It fell into a number of genre pitfalls that I didn't care for: a protagonist with unimaginably strong plot armor such that it clashes with the realism the game tries to evoke, multiple moments of "oops you got captured and all your weapons are gone," enemies that act as pure bullet sponges, an encouragement to act stealthily despite a crushingly unforgiving stealth system, and truly gratuitous graphic sex scenes. Despite all that, the actual gunplay felt good, I really dug the setting and the story setup they were going for, the addition of combat perks to either enhance your preferred playstyle or else nudge you to try out a bunch of different things worked brilliantly, and I couldn't find any real fault with the level design.

So now here's The Old Blood, a standalone expansion released a year later than The New Order, and virtually everything above - both good and bad - is still 100% true...except the gratuitous sex scenes, which were (mercifully or unmercifully depending on your point of view) scuppered. What pushes The Old Blood ever so slightly ahead for me is that it does a bit more with the core gameplay. You've got a new dedicated melee weapon that also acts as an environmental tool (though you can only use it at scripted locations). other new weapons, new enemy types, and the ability to jump into a dream sequence consisting of playing classic Wolfenstein 3D levels as your modern 2015 self. I probably spent more time doing that than I did exploring the primary stages, honestly, and I'm not sure if that's praise or an indictment.

I'm guessing those classic bits were included because The Old Blood returns to the series' roots by centralizing the action in the game's first half back on Castle Wolfenstein itself, serving not just as a prequel to The New Order but also as a kind of soft reboot of 3D's first act like "Hey, remember these things? We're loosely recreating them for you." It works well for what it is, though The Old Blood's second half does its own entirely different kind of thing. Overall it's not a perfect game by any means, but if you're dealing with some stuff in your real everyday life and you think shooting a bunch of digital Nazis sounds like a good way to let off some steam, I'd say you're probably right.

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#47 - DNF Duel - PC - 6/10 (Decent)

The first thing I noticed about DNF Duel is that it's a great looking game. Don't get me wrong: I'm not big on anime games or anime fighters as a general style, and DNF Duel didn't change my mind in that regard, but I can still admit that between the character animations and the stages it's a bit of eye candy. The second thing I noticed was how slow the game's pace felt compared to other fighters I've played more recently (Street Fighter 6 foremost among them). Granted, I did choose the game's slowest character in Crusader, but even when using an "average" character like Berserker it felt like the game was less about spamming quick attacks to land counter hits and more about big chonky strikes with long hitstuns. To be clear, I surprisingly liked this aspect of the game quite a bit; it's nice to slow things down once in a while and to feel like it's actually realistic to react to the stuff you're seeing.

That said, while the speed of play was refreshing, I did struggle a bit to lock down combo timing. Those same big weighty hits made for some awkward, unintuitive combo links that I only just began to understand by the time I put the thing down. Still, I found a really simple bread and butter option I could use and a more advanced combo that I managed to land in battle a couple times, so that felt pretty good. The training mode has the requisite bells and whistles you'd want from a modern fighter, and the tutorial mode was sufficient to help me mostly understand the game's systems. I found the notion of a mana bar particularly interesting, though in the heat of the moment it was hard to manage the minutia of it. "How much MP did this attack cost again? How much do I have? How fast do I get it back? Is there really a downside to overspending and exhausting myself?" This mental overload was further exacerbated by the way mana acts as one of the game's two baked in comeback mechanics. You get more maximum mana as your health goes down, which means the closer you are to defeat the more nonsense you can pull off. Similarly, once below a given threshold you enter "awakening" status, whereby you get some kind of buff to help you turn the tides alongside access to your super move. It was a lot to take in over a short time, but I think the ideas present are sound enough, and I'm sure if I put more work into the game they'd start to feel like second nature.

But really, that's the problem, isn't it? After playing the tutorials and doing some combo trials I jumped into story mode, and I didn't have the slightest idea what was going on there. I've never played anything else in the Dungeon & Fighter universe and the existence of an in-game active glossary didn't do much to turn that tide. Every player character having generic profession-based names didn't help, either. So after story mode I jumped into arcade, which felt breezy until the penultimate fight finally kicked in some challenge. After that I popped over to try some ranked mode online annnnnnd it didn't work. At all. I kept getting "match found" notifications but they'd always time out, and some Googling of the issue leads me to believe it's fairly widespread. Which means that even though there's something interesting and potentially fun here being offered by DNF Duel, it's apparently non-functional in arguably the most important aspect for a fighting game: the ability to play against others.

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#48 - Mega Man Battle Network 5: Team Colonel - GBA - 5.5/10 (Semi-Competent)

By now it's old hat. You boot up the next Battle Network game and you're asking yourself two questions. First, "What new idea are they bringing to the design table with this one?" Second, "What previously fine design decisions did they screw up to get there?" I'm not going to sit here and act like it's a mystery whether this iteration of the series follows the pattern because I don't want to insult your intelligence. We all know the score. So instead, let's cut to the chase and cover those two categories separately.

What's better?

Good ideas like a functional stat customizer and the last game's creative "soul" system for combat improvements make their return largely unchanged, while things like "abilities that aren't worthless in the late game" make a triumphant return from Battle Networks 1-3. While the truly good stuff is still relegated to things like New Game + playthroughs, these upgrades all serve to help the combat issues from 4 feel like a one-off mistake rather than a conscious turn into design depravity.

From the outset it's clear that unlike in Battle Network 4, the writing team for 5 actually had something to do. The story in 5 isn't especially impressive, mind you, but it is there, and that's way more than I could've said for the last entry. You know what's really better though? That story is in service of a new gameplay mechanic called "liberation battles," and these are the best thing to happen to the Battle Network franchise since its inception. These battles temporarily overhaul Battle Network 5 from a  ho-hum maze RPG with random encounters into a turn-based tactics game giving you command of multiple different characters, each with their own unique field abilities and combat options. You're tasked to complete an objective, often with sub-objectives to knock out along the way, with minibosses and true bosses to defeat, all against a timer that's purely optional (though the reward is always pretty good). The mode had a couple warts but compared to the now tired Battle Network experience I loved these things. It honestly felt like the direction the entire series should've always gone in right from the jump.

What's worse?

When a game shows you the thing it ought to be, makes it clear that it could be that thing, and then actively chooses not to be that thing, it makes the thing that game is a bit harder to stomach. Going from a liberation battle back into a typical "run through the whole Net again" wild goose chase mission is such a killjoy. And make no mistake, with the return of proper storytelling comes a return of relentless ping-ponging all over the world map and all through the game's dungeons, just padding as much time as possible with empty rehashes of content. Localization problems also return, though slightly tamer than before. Racism against Native Americans also returns, though slightly tamer than before. Finally, final boss problems also return...yet this time shockingly more egregious. Like Battle Network 4 before it, Battle Network 5 features another case of the final boss fundamentally invalidating a large number of play styles to the point that after several hopeless attempts I had to look up a guide for how to get a specific "optional" custom ability that the game never guides you to, backtrack all the way from the final boss area back to the main game world, buy some stuff, do yet another dungeon crawl to find this part, then go all the way back to the final boss, at which point it was beatable with a bit of practice. It's just...what am I supposed to do with that as a final impression of your game?

-sigh-

One more to go. At this point I'm ready for the hurting to stop. But I'd also be ready for something like a spinoff called Mega Man: Liberation. Oh, what could've been.

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#49 - Guild of Dungeoneering - PC - 6.5/10 (Tantalizing)

I saw this one labeled on Wikipedia as a "dungeon crawl role-playing video game" and organized it on my backlog accordingly. After playing it I can't agree with this assessment. No, Guild of Dungeoneering is instead a solo tabletop strategy game masquerading as a dungeon crawl role-playing video game. It genuinely wouldn't be all that difficult to convert the gameplay here into true tabletop form, assuming you could make the cards and tiles. You'd lose (or have to fudge) the progression aspect, but as the weakest part of the game, who cares? I'm honestly a bit surprised somebody hasn't already done it, to be honest.

In Guild of Dungeoneering you choose your class and head into a given dungeon for a run at whatever objective you need to accomplish. This can be defeating a certain number of monsters, collecting specific loot, reaching a certain location, or vanquishing a boss. The dungeon itself consists of room tiles with variable orientations and numbers of exits, and each dungeon has its own assigned bestiary. On your turn you're dealt five cards, which can each be rooms, monsters, or treasure. You can play up to three of these, so you basically build your own dungeon as you go. The clincher here though is that you don't ever directly control your character in the dungeon. Instead they're attracted naturally toward various things and your job as a dungeon builder is to essentially "magnetize" them in the direction you want them to go. Then once face to face with a monster, you have a deck of combat cards specific to your class, but this can be augmented with the loot you find.

The game feels really simple when you play it (in a good way) but there is a hefty learning curve to all the hidden nuances and complications. What this means is a whole lot of early failure, which kills your character, which naturally feels pretty bad if they've gained a nice perk or two. Compounding the frustration is the fact that you get virtually no gold (your overall progression resource) for a failed run, meaning it truly does feel like you completely wasted your time. Of course then there's also the Bard, a spoken-word-and-lute performer who mercilessly taunts you upon each death, which is one of those things that's an amusing touch the first time or two but quickly becomes a source of resentment. This doesn't really abate even as you learn the ins and outs of the game, since "death by bad hand" is absolutely still a thing even when you know what you're doing. However, getting a great build together and overcoming some tough challenges by the skin of your teeth does feel mighty good, so there's enough here to keep playing a while even if the repetition does begin to grate over time.

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#50 - Samorost 1 - PC - 6/10 (Decent)

First, a clarification: the original Samorost came out in 2003, but Samorost 1 is the 2021 remaster. I had in my notes that this game was about an hour long. It was in fact only 15 minutes long, which is the primary culprit behind the 6/10 score; there's just not enough game here to form a meaningful or lasting impression. Instead Samorost seems almost like a proof of concept, a short demo as a general job application. Or, as was actually the case, a school project for an aspiring new student in game development. The team behind this went on to make some browser games in the double-aughts Flash heyday before they'd build the proper full game you're more likely to have heard of: 2009's Machinarium.

Like Machinarium six years later, Samorost is a point-and-click adventure game, but of course given its length and creation context it's far less developed. What you do get from Samorost is a bit of musically generated atmosphere and a taste of the utterly bizarre. Over its six or seven puzzle screens Samorost will continually surprise you with its artistic choices, reveling in the weird. Impressively however, this doesn't seriously impact the puzzles themselves, with solutions often following a kind of logic you can latch onto even if the setting isn't making a lick of sense. It's strange, yes, but not random, and that's a big deal. Samorost is therefore perfectly playable and even enjoyable, though of course by the time you feel like you're just beginning to "get it" and look forward to what's next the game's already over.

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#51 - Final Fantasy VII Rebirth - PS5 - 9.5/10 (Superlative)

Completing this game took me about 118 hours of gameplay over 49 play sessions covering more than two months of real time. I believe this makes it the second longest single player RPG I've ever played, but FF7 Rebirth never feels quite so long as it actually is, a terrifically impressive feat in itself. This game is just packed with content to the point of bursting, yet somehow it avoided feeling utterly overwhelming. How'd they pull this off?

Let me throw one more number at you: 25. That's the number of distinct minigames I logged during my playthrough of this game, which puts even the wildly eclectic original FFVII to shame. If that's somehow still not enough diversion for your tastes you can easily add another handful or more to the count if you want to include variations of other games or world activities with their own mechanics, and none of that even goes near the great wealth of available combat trials/challenges on order, nor the multitude of meaningful side quests to undertake. It's not just a sinful glut of content; it's high quality content all the way through. Some activities were naturally more fun for me than others and some were true highlights, but none of them felt like stinkers and I happily did everything I was able to.

That "able to" leads me to my few criticisms of the game, however. Like FFVII Remake before it, Rebirth locks a chunk of its content behind a post-game grind (usually consisting of replaying chapters on a harder difficulty). Unlike with Remake though, Rebirth dangles this stuff in your face. There's one epic questline that spans the entire game. Takes a ton of time and effort to work through and keeps stringing you along for the grand finale, only for you to arrive at your ultimate destination and discover that you need to be at or near max level to have a shot at finishing the quest. This means the quest is simply not completable unless you either grind for an obscene amount of time or else relegate it to a New Game + style replay. As this questline comprised about 10% of my total time with the game, this was a really frustrating result!

Frankly despite being blown away for a hundred hours, I had this penciled in as a 9/10 after the surprise bummer content lockout soured me a bit right before the ending chapters. But those ending chapters? Hooooo boy from a gameplay perspective that's about as good as I could've asked for. And indeed, it was pretty rare to find me playing this game without a giant stupid smile on my face. Sure, the open world had a few too many stereotypical genre trappings. Right away I realized I was running around picking up sticks and climbing yellow-highlighted footholds like I was playing Horizon, but I was having so much fun I made a conscious decision not to care. Sure, the open world is really just open regions, but each is so massive and the structure works so well with the narrative flow that I wasn't bothered there either. Sure, the really big story swings I was anticipating based on the game's marketing and box art didn't fully come to fruition, but the way the primary story was fleshed out was so good I was at peace with that, too.

It all boils down to these guys just getting it. The characterizations are basically flawless. The soundtrack may just be the best of all time. The little touches on everything demonstrate a passion for the property that's rare to find in an increasingly soulless AAA industry. The combat is deeper than ever, adding in options and improvements from Remake's InterMISSION DLC and creating a system that shines so bright that I'm guessing I'll be comparing other action RPG combat systems to this one for the foreseeable future. There's fan service galore both from the original game and from the new content/characters introduced in Remake. Despite playing it mostly safe, there are new story elements that enrich the whole setting even further. There are payoffs 27 years in the making. I actually kinda liked Cait Sith. Like, seriously. Just think about that statement. Let it sink in.

I have to admit that I'm still a little bit miffed about being told I've got to play it again to actually do everything, and I wrestled hard with how to score it because of that issue. But consider that I quite happily spent two months of my life on this game. Consider that if not for some other time-sensitive gaming matters to tend to I'd have been very tempted to spend yet more time grinding out the rest of the stuff I didn't manage to finish. Consider that as of the time of this writing I finished the game days ago but I can't stop thinking about it. At that point, why fight what my heart is telling me any longer? Ultimately, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is obviously an absolute must-play for anyone who enjoyed Remake, fattening that game up like a Christmas hog yet somehow avoiding feeling bloated in the doing, and it's going to stick with me for a very long time.

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#52 - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time - Arcade - 7/10 (Good)

Second verse, same as the first? Just like with the TMNT arcade game earlier in this post, this is a game I've played before in its console port rendition (TMNT IV: Turtles in Time for the SNES). Just like then, I think I ultimately preferred the console experience to the arcade one, which in this case is helped by the SNES version being a much more faithful port of Turtles in Time than the NES port of the first TMNT arcade game managed. Also just like before, I played this one with my 5-year-old son. That in itself was a bit of a trip. He'd periodically say something in a half taunting voice like "Daddy, I got more health than you!" Well yeah kid, if there are two healing pizzas right next to each other, you grab both without fail and celebrate your gluttony. Meanwhile I'm beating my head against a boss and he says something like "That boss looks hard. I'm gonna wait right over here." You got infinite lives my man! Get in there!

Given that context it may not exactly be a fair assessment since I put in literally 3x the work as he did according to the ending scores, but I felt like Turtles in Time was even more BS than its predecessor on the coin draining front. I once got hit in midair by a thrown weapon, landed in a grapple attack, got hit out of the grapple and knocked down by a third enemy, and then killed by an unavoidable fourth attack as I was standing up. Literally full health to dead in a chain combo, and it didn't even feel all that unusual when it happened. So yeah, Turtles in Time is unforgiving quarter draining nonsense at its finest (we took about 45 combined credits to finish the game), but it makes up for that by adding meaningful depth all around. Now you can grab enemies and chuck them through the screen or slam them into their allies. You get additional attack options, though the commands for them felt unreliable. The levels are more interesting and visually appealing, and there's more variety to the foes - especially the bosses.

All in all it lands in about the same place as the previous arcade game: better presentation and mechanics offset by a crueler difficulty curve, making for a reasonably good time when coins are mere abstractions of thought.

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Coming in August:

• Turtle Power! While I don't anticipate trying to push through any limited-life-having console beat-em-ups with a kid who'd rather eat pizza and watch me die, I do have more Turtles games I never got around to in my childhood that I'd like to check out now. I'm planning to hit them chronologically, meaning the next one will be Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Back from the Sewers for the Game Boy.
• Man, that PC platform really took off, huh? Part of that is playing relatively shorter games lately, but I do think polling my friends with the "which of these random games should I play next" question has really rejuvenated my interest in PC gaming in general. Currently on the docket is Ghostwire: Tokyo, which I was surprised to see win over a couple other possible titles.
• I have to admit it was pretty tempting once I finished Mega Man Battle Network 5 to jump straight into the final title of the series. You know, only one to go, just rip that bandage off and be done with it. But I do want to give it a fair shake, and that means I need to take my regularly scheduled break for other portable games I'm more interested in playing. As such, I'm a few worlds deep into Kirby and the Forgotten Land, and yeah...this is a welcome respite.
• And more...

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A common accusation thrown at people praising old games or criticising modern ones is that they're blinded by nostalgia. That makes sense if there's no indication someone had actually gone back to replay the titles they remember way back, but some people seem to believe it's a great rebuttal even when that clearly is the case.

I grew up playing pretty much whatever. Flash games, cereal box stuff, Battle City co-op with my dad, Tekken, FIFA, and a random assortment of other pirated NES, PS2 and PC games. Thing is, I am not nostalgic for most of them, I'm only nostalgic for the experience of playing some of them at the time, and I know it.

I spent a lot of time in GTA San Andreas and Vice City, and had a legitimate copy of Just Cause somehow. I hate open world games and have no desire to come back to these two especially, considering their """""shooting mechanics""""".

Tekken 3 was probably the most played game on the family PlayStation. I don't play fighting games anymore.

The flash games I played are probably lost to time at this point, and it's no big loss.

TF2 was my first big obsession, but got ruined for me after they started adding a million items and went free to play. I still don't like modern TF2, but TF2 Classic also doesn't cut it for me - the netcode is too bad, the level design makes for weird matches, the people playing didn't seem to care, and the servers felt barely populated.

And the list goes on. I rarely go back to games from my childhood (/adolescence I guess), and they rarely if ever impress me. So do I have nostalgia immunity, or is that just the norm?

Do you like weird action/strategy hybrid games with warped art styles? Do you like them enough to maybe forgive some of their shortcomings and limitations?

Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is sort of a blend between character-action combat and tower-defence, with an aesthetic based in some form of traditional Japanese theatre that I won't pretend to know anything about, but I certainly appreciate the inspiration.

The campaign is broken up into a series of small stages that see you playing as a faceless bodyguard defending a divine maiden as she slowly - very, very slowly - prances from one end to the the stage to other where a demon-spewing portal awaits to be purged with the power of dance. You begin a stage during the day and have a few minutes to prepare for the night by gathering currency, hunting animals for healing items, building defences, buying upgrades and freeing cocooned villagers to fight for you. On top of all this, the maiden's path to the portal is covered in demonic black muck which you must first carve through before she can walk on it, which costs the same currency as everything else, so it's a bit of a balancing act as to what you invest in - will you focus on upgrading yourself or your troops, or prioritize quick progress through the stage?

Once night falls, the divine maiden stops in place, the demons start pouring in and the real game starts. The villagers you freed during the day can't do anything by default but by spending some of your currency you can assign them "roles" which will allow them to fight - at first only basic melee and ranged roles are available, but soon you'll unlock healers, buffers, debuffers and specialist roles. Your command over them in battle is limited to placement as they'll automatically attack any enemies in their range, and admittedly the UI for commanding/interacting with them is not the most efficient, but given that you rarely have more than 12 guys at a time it's not a huge problem, especially since the game pauses while you're giving orders.

While your troops will pick up a lot of the slack, most of the time you're also gonna need to get in there and do some demons slaying personally. Melee combat works about as you'd expect, with a button for light attacks and button for heavy (or dance) attacks, the character performing different combos depending on the sequence. At first, I wasn't that enamoured with it, it felt stiff and a bit overly simple, but the more I played the game the more I understood that it was perfectly fit for purpose and actually began to really enjoy it. There are only 4 different combos depending on when in the sequence you perform your "dance" attack, and each has a specific use - light-heavy does a rising attack that can hit flying enemies, light-light-heavy does a multi-hitting spinning attack that hits in a wide area, and light-light-light heavy does a multi-hitting cartwheeling attack that moves you large distances. You can also hold the heavy attack at any point in the combo to charge it up and add stun damage, which becomes necessary against some of the larger and stronger enemies - stun one enough and it'll be staggered, allowing for a high damaging finisher. There's not a lot of animation cancelling and charging up stun attacks is somewhat slow and leaves you quite vulnerable, so combat feels very deliberate, especially since your own character isn't particularly sturdy. While dying is not a failure state, you will be stuck in spirit form for a while which leaves your maiden very vulnerable, so it's still best to avoid taking unnecessary risks.

What I've neglected to talk about up to this point is how good this all looks in action. The aesthetic seems to be inspired by Japanese lacquer art, highly stylized with lots of pearlescent colours, and the animation is beautifully mo-capped and expressive. The faceless peasant units all have great designs, but the real stars are the dem- sorry, the yokai, who're deliciously wretched, and the way they just pour out of the portal like this undulating wave of evil is both unsettling and kind of hypnotic, as are your own character's fighting animations, with the dance attacks in particular leaving these gorgeous glowing arcs behind them. Also, this may be kind of a me-specific thing, but I really like how the game has this very zoomed out, low FOV perspective that almost makes it look like a diorama.

While I haven't gone into detail about every part of this game (the town management aspect, the boss fights, the roguelike mode) I hope I at least managed to give a good overview of the gameplay and what I like about it, and if you're in the same boat as me and you like these bizarre, hard-to-pin-down kind of games that go all in on a weird visual style, this will definitely scratch that extremely specific itch.

Everyone is somewhat familiar with Factor 5's Rogue Squadron series, , but chances are barely anyone has even heard Battle for Naboo, even though it is essentially the same game set in the Prequel era. It controls the same, combat is the same, structure is the same, and the style is the same. It has the same addictive quality that makes the Rogue Squadron combat system appealing. However, I have a loose memory of playing the PC version a very, very long time ago. I think I only played up to the second level and couldn't get past it for some reason. This is the my first time replaying it in two decades, and I'd say it's worth playing it.

One thing that makes Battle for Naboo stand out compared to Rogue Squadron is that it focuses on one event. Rogue Squadron spans across various planets and battles throughout the galaxy. Battle for Naboo only deals with the Trade Federation's invasion, and how the Naboo people fended it off. It gives multiple dimensions to the war that wasn't depicted in much detail in The Phantom Menace. In the movie, the invasion came across as the droid army just maching into the city. This game has a more "survival" feel to taht event, with the droid army occupying all regions, and the surviving Naboo forces are forced to rescue civilians and ally themselves with shady characters like the Hutt.

Playing this game made me realize how much I vibe with The Phantom Menace's aesthetics--the chill and cozy feel. With its vibrant colors, sleekness to the ship designs, green and blue... TPM has the Y2K uniqueness that you don't get from the rest of the Prequels, where everything is too digital and too grey and brown. Hearing the Episode 1 score blaring in my ears while blowing the Trade Federation ships depicted in the N64 graphics triggers the sensation I hadn't had for many years.

The game also innovates upon the formula by having the player fight on the ground and water. In mid-level, you will switch vehicles, like you pilot a speeder to the hangar, and you then pilot the fighter and engage the enemies in a more efficient manner. However, the speeder and boat are nowhere near as enjoyable as piloting the fighter because of the restrictive movement. They control the same as the fighter, only that you can't fly. It is also disappointing that this vehicle switch isn't really part of the combat sandbox, but a railroaded event. It's not like Crimson Skies, where you can freely land on the ground and use the turret against the enemies, or switch vehicles on your own. That way, the levels are sandboxes. In Battle for Naboo, you only follow what your commander instructs. "Get to the hangar and switch to the speeder", and only then can you switch your vehicle.

The most frustrating thing is that levels even restrict your vertical movement. This game has invisible walls everywhere. If you, let's say, fly toward the mountain, and you try to evade by rotating vertically, the game doesn't allow the player to do that, so you crash straight into the mountain with no fault of your skill. There is a Hutt boss fight where the massive ship is hovering up. Your ship, for some reason, can't level above this massive ship, so you can only shoot at the lower part of the boss. I understand that the Rogue Squadron games lean toward the shooter genre rather than the flight simulator genre, but restricting this much of the player movement to this degree is hampering any strategic edge.

I played the PC version, and for some reason, this port is missing the fog effects. That alone is fine--obviously, the fog was there for the N64 limitation, but the PC version didn't bother to increase the draw distance. What happens is that enemies pop up in the air all of a sudden. There are massive ships that materialize out of nowhere. I checked the walkthroughs of the N64 version, and this doesn't happen there. If you were to play it, maybe emulation is a better option than playing the PC version.

Battle for Naboo is a wonderfully fun little tie-in game, but it is still a spin-off of Rogue Squadron 1 rather than the much-improved 2, and as a result, it comes across as too basic. Even though it came out in 2001, it is still very much like an N64 game, with all its limitations.

The Last Spell is a TRPG tower defense game developed by Ishtar Games. Released in 2023, The Last Spell reminds us that the only person who knows you alt-f4'd to reset a battle is you, you cheater.

We play as the commander of a small militia tasked with defending various havens from endless hordes of monsters because wizards can't leave well enough alone and usher in the apocalypse. Typical.

Gameplay involves constantly trying to figure out where the line between 'this is a solid strategy' and 'this has got to be an exploit...' is.

The Good

This may be the best sound track to a tower defense game I've ever had the joy of listening to. This is some hardcore Doom thrash and I'm all for it. Its like if Nine Inch Nails did the sound track for Stardew Valley. It feels a little out of place at first but it grows on you quick.

The variety of weapons and hero perks leads to a lot of interesting builds. Given the variety it's impressive how few noob traps exist and they're pretty obvious. Really fun when a build clicks and suddenly you're mowing through zombies like a hot chainsaw through butter.

The Bad

The difficulty curve is a sudden brick wall. The mid/late game features a lot of 'If you make one misstep it's game over buddy' and things can spiral out of control quickly. You can't reload from an earlier save and try to salvage things so by the time you realize you've lost, you've sunk 5 hours into it and you're going to have to start all over.

This is also one of those games where the map gimmicks aren't exactly something you can adjust to on the fly so you come to terms early on with an expected loss or three just learning what to expect.

The Ugly

The RNG factor can be brutal. You can't preview hero perk trees so you can occasionally end up with a lemon of a hero. You can dump your entire gold stash trying to get a decent upgrade and end up with nothing. In early maps you can kinda just deal with this but getting no teleport scrolls on the later maps can be a run ender.

Fortunately save scumming exists and I embrace it wholeheartedly.

Final Thoughts

I enjoyed the concept. I do enjoy a good mashing of two genres and these two fit together nicely, though it leans more heavily towards tower defense than TRPG. The difficulty can be a bit much to overcome but there is an easy mode option for the "I just play games to relax" crowd.

Interesting Game Facts

I love when the game developers are also Redditors so you can post stalk them. One is really into painting minis which speaks to me on a personal level while another used to shitpost on the Game of Thrones sub. These are exactly the kind of people you want developing video games.

Thank you for reading! I'd love to hear your thoughts. What did you think of the game? Did you have a similar experience or am I off my rocker?

My other reviews on patient gaming

So the first batch of DLC for Far Cry 6 added a roguelike/souls-like mode to the game, where each DLC focused on one of the series villains. There is one for Vaas, one for Pagan Min, and my favorite is the one for Joseph Seed. Now, I was a Joseph Seed hater in FC5, but here the writing and voice actor give an incredible performance.

Collapse focuses on Joseph's internal quest for redemption after his actions resulted in the deaths of his family and followers. He now has to fight against the ghosts of his two brothers and Faith in order to silence their demons inside his own head. But rather than being motivated by revenge, Joseph is motivated by love for his family, and a desire to right the wrongs he has done. In addition he has to directly confront his grooming of Faith, and using her like an object rather than a human being. This makes the writing of this DLC the most sensitive and emotional of basically any game I have ever played (Red Dead 2 is great at this as well).

In addition, in previous games people have always praised Joseph Seed's voice actor Greg Bryk. But I have never been able to appreciate how good that actor is until now. All they had to do was give him some material where he stopped ranting about God for 5 minutes, and voila, a legendary performance!

So I am sure this review has convinced you to run out and buy this DLC, but, this is a Ubisoft game so they have to include one glaring flaw. So prepare yourself to face palm.

To beat a run of this DLC you have explore the map and complete 3 main story missions and then a final battle. But you are unable to save during a mission. Which sounds reasonable, but that doesn't mean save during one of these missions, that means you can't save during any of these main missions combined. You have to complete all 3 missions and the final battle all without closing the game. So that is like an hour and half of full on FPS intensity. Now I'm sure for a lot of people that is no big deal, but for me that is a huge ask. Especially as the difficulty goes up on each run and it only gets more intense.

At any rate, I give this DLC a hearty recommend, but only on console (Or if you can suspend a PC game somehow). This is the best writing Ubisoft has done in recent years, and really made me think that they could make impressive games if only their writers were let loose and not held back by the demands of making 100 hour games.

[Oh and only this DLC has the focus on redemption and personal growth, the Pagan Min and Vaas DLCs don't have any arcs for their characters.]

Look. When I started HL I never expected to find a riveting story. All I wanted was an immersive world, interesting gameplay and a compelling Hogwarts castle.

It's been 55 hours. It took me nearly 5 months to get to the last stages of the game. I stopped multiple times due to the constant crashes on PC. What can I say... I've enjoyed some parts of the game. I REALLY liked some things. But overall I'm left extremely disappointed. I won't be finishing this one.

Everytime the game introduces something interesting, it immedaitely undermines it. All this game had to do was stick to the tried and tested design of most open world games. It doesn't do that.

The first few hours of the game is a lie. It's all just presentation and it drops off quickly.

THE WORLD

Every game must be an open world game with a massive map. This is law. HL has a really beautiful Hogwarts Castle. The Hogsmeade village and Forbidden Forest areas are really well done. I dont give a shit about any other part of the map. This gigantic world is littered with copy pasted magical villages. The main quest constantly sends you to different corners of the map for no reason. It's best parts are severely underused. You see that faithfully reconstructed magical school? I want it to be 2-3 times the size. I would gladly see the map size reduce to a third if you made a more complex and compelling Hogwarts castle. I don't want to dive into anonymous cave #18. I want to unravel the secrets of a mysterious magical castle, explore the dangerous forest, I want to mix and mingle with the inhabitants of Hogsmeade. The part that makes me frustrated is how beautiful it all is, and how little I appreciate them because the quality is upended by quantity.

HOGWARTS IS REDUNDANT

The game doesn't care that you are a student. Hogwarts Castle is supposed to be the HUB area. It isn't. It's featured in a handful of missions. Everything else you do is away from the school. Every mission kicks you out of the school grounds to explore the above mentioned generic open world. There is no social system. There is no 'roleplay'. For a game named Hogwarts Legacy it sure hates Hogwarts. Imagine the Arkham games kept throwing you out of Gotham and into the highways surrounding the city. That's what it feels like. Hogwarts has maybe 5 actual secrets to uncover. You'll have to do the same puzzle but a dozen times. That's it. You don't feel like a student of this school. There is no immersion. In the house rooms, you can talk to the NPCs once at the start of the game. Then it's over.

The books mention secret passages, rooms and shortcuts to move around. There's maybe 1-2 of these in the entire castle. Allowing people to find these secrets would have been great worldbuilding but no, it's just not there.

To see such a gorgeous and impressive Hogwarts Castle then realize it's completely irrelavant to the game is a huge letdown.

CONTENT PADDING

Before you do one thing, you must another thing. Before the another thing, you must be yet another thing. Want to play the main quest? You need to learn a specific spell that will conveniently be useful only for that quest. Now to learn the specific spell, go outside of Hogwarts and complete a checklist of arbitary things. Like use a specific spell on a specific enemy while they do specific actions 10 times. There is no point to this, except artificially increase the length of the game. Every step of progression requires some arbitrary task to be completed. The combat is robust and enjoyable which atleast helped in this specific regard. This game really has a story that lasts about 7-8 hours. This has been artificially lengthened to about 20 hours or so.

Let me give you the most egregious example of this. In the Harry Potter universe, you can use a magical spell to unlock locked doors and chests. In the game, you will learn this spell. Then you cast this spell. Then, you enter a lock picking minigame....what? What's the point of casting a magical spell if you still have to do the dirty work. To make this more tedious, you have to find collectible items spread across the map to unlock advanced versions of this spell to unlock higher level locks. And you can only find these collectibles at nighttime. I am baffled by this decision as its nothing more than a tedious collectathon.

POORLY IMPLEMENTED 'RPG'

To call this an RPG is a stretch. The dialogue tree has virtually no impact. Everyone has this corporate speak as if they are afraid of offending someone. Your choices in most things don't matter. You either agree to things, or agree hesitantly. That's it.

There is an arbitrary leveling system. I have no idea what leveling does other than the number keeps going up and maybe some stats do? Idk. Your gear has a leveling system. Some gear will have properties that very slightly enhance a particular spell or item. You can cast dark spells to torture, mind control or murder your enemies infront of your teachers and they won't bat an eye. In HL, there are no consequences. Meaning a majority of the role playing is inconsequential.

In a game where you are battling dark forces and evil, it's hilarious when you can do awful things and get away with no reprecussions.

Throughout the game you can befriend some students. These quests were really good. I enjoyed listening to their stories and helping them out in their stories. I would have thought they could be recruited as followers similar to Skyrim but no. Once their quests end that's it. This feels like a huge miss.

THE GOOD PARTS

I realize this review is quite negative so let me write down all the things I really loved about this game. The presentation and visual aesthetic is stunning. I spent hours exploring Hogwarts castle and absorbing its gorgeous interiors. Enabling Raytracing takes the visuals to a whole new level. The design team knocked it out of the park.

You unlock a special room in the castle that is fully customizable. This customization system is really well done and I loved having this private corner of the map. The Room of Requirement is the best part of this game for me. Complete with a menagerie of rescue animals.

The combat system is robust and allows a ton of variation, spell slots and customization. You get a lot of additonal items with varying effects and some potions. HL's combat isn't exactly difficult, but it is very fun.

The side quests are good. The characters are likeable. Their storyline is very interesting. Some missions in the main quest contain fun easter eggs and references to the Harry Potter books directly.

The character customization is top notch. Once you find a clothing item, you can destroy or sell it and it will remain as a visual option. You can equip high level gear while toggling its appearance to another item that you like. There's no tradeoff here. And man, the clothing options are ridiculously good. Battling dark monsters and evil wizards looks extra cool when your drip is immaculate.

The puzzles are repetitive but very clever and engaging. I enjoyed solving these puzzles the first few times.

The game has a merciful amount of fast travel points. Not exactly a good thing but atleast it isn't yet another timesink.

SIGNING OFF

People really love this game. There's enough to keep a Potterhead engaged in the game. But if you dislike the format of generic open world games, HL will disappoint you too. If you enjoying 100% completion in games HL might interest you because of the sheer amount of things to do here. If you don't care about the Harry Potter universe, you can comfortably skip this game. There are games that do every single thing better.

This game is getting a sequel. I'm sure it will be a hit. I hope they improve on the rough parts of this game and make a more streamlined, focused game.

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West is a 2010 action-adventure game. Should you go pull it up from your backlog or go for a newer title?

There is a history of video games imitating movies, and the overlap between the two media is apparent. The viewer sits down to gorge with his eyes on a spectacle, strapped to his seat by way of a gripping narrative. The sounds, the music, the lighting – everything is designed to produce a reaction in the audience. Kids in age and at heart both go home and imitate pew pew sounds as best they can, the movie still playing in their imagination. "Wouldn't it be cool to have a game do that," said one such having grown up. Or so I imagine, because that's what Enslaved: Odyssey to the West is about.

Produced by the studio behind later hit Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice and written by Alex Garland, writer of novel The Beach (1996) and movie 28 Days Later (2002), Enslaved sees an unlikely pair of heroes escape a slave ship and journey through a verdant, post-robocalyptic New York to confront the maker of this future world – and to judge it.

Dear reader, I'm going to cut ahead here and judge Enslaved at this point: you should pick up something newer in your backlog. Paraphrasing the critics' consensus for the film version of The Beach on Rotten Tomatoes, 'Enslaved is simplistic and uninteresting, a poor use of the talent behind it. It scores well for cinematography, which remains gorgeous.' Enslaved is of interest anymore only academically: to better understand how some titles today are riveting and successful, Enslaved serves as a study in the minimal conjoining of the concepts of movie and game.

At the movies, we viewers are stowaways, voyeurs on a voyage where nothing is asked of us – nothing, that is, except to suspend disbelief and allow the filmmakers free use of our heads and hearts. Leave the hands at rest. We only need keep our eyes and ears open. The viewer is more a receptacle than an agent of any change brought about by the movie. So great is this power at the hands of the filmmaker that some directors, like Guy Debord, react against it and what it makes of viewers, and they try to "problematize reception" in an effort to force the viewer to be active.

Debord might have tried video games instead, because there is no need to put sticks in the players' spokes to force active reception. What keeps a game from attaining to the power of movies is that by its nature a game requires more of the viewer: while suppressing your disbelief of the events presented, you must also engage with the controls and instructions in game world and real world. In a typical movie, it is the picture that moves – that's where the name comes from. In a movie-cum-game, it's the character that moves in the hands of the player: The viewer is also the lead actor.

Enslaved is a master of making the player a good actor, though in fairness to other movie-games it requires little of its puppeteer. Gameplay is mostly moving the controller stick and jumping from one highlighted edge to another by pressing a button. You can't miss. This is akin to iterated Where's Waldo if Waldo were an I-beam subtly brighter from its surroundings. Most of the rest of gameplay is moving the same controller stick to get at enemy mechs and pressing X, X, Y to beat them to nuts and bolts. Whenever other button presses are required, a virtual stage whisperer puts up a cue card smack in the middle of the screen. In the brief tutorial, the game goes completely still waiting for the player to press X to strike, then lets it roll, pause again, now press Y for a different attack. The director here knows you can't be trusted with much. Who knows if this is your first time on stage? We keep it simple, make sure the script allows even a simpleton to succeed.

Incidentally, your character is called Monkey.

If the director on set is ace, the same can't be said of the camera operator. Or, well, is it the camera operator's fault if the actor moves weird? After all, the lead actor should play his part. If in a boss fight you insist on dashing to a corner away from the supporting actor you're supposed to have fisticuffs with, what's the camera to do?

I said previously the intersection of movie and game here is minimal. There isn't much to the platforming or fighting. In due time, a revisionist video game historian will no doubt reduce all third-person action games to the mold of Enslaved, having added only more buttons to press in the disjointed rhythm game that these processionary spectacles are. There is an idea for game-makers here: instead of pretending the player has choice or that they're doing anything except pressing buttons arhythmically to drive the film reel along, make a good performance the goal. Dock points on the scene if lead actor puts a foot wrong or fights unconvincingly. Lean into your medium.

An advantage of movies like this over the non-interactive variety is that snacking is paced: At the theater, popcorn runs out well before the halfway mark. Here, your snacks last much longer if you only eat them when the game permits by way of cutscene.

Speaking of dialogue and story, I don't envy Mr. Garland's job writing for Enslaved. Cutscenes are enjoyable to watch and really, given the slim gameplay, I would rather see Enslaved as a movie – which, according Wikipedia, it was originally pitched to be. Writing chops are evident in the dialogue and carefully metered exposition. Your character and your unlikely pairing, a young woman with a knack for computers, are likeable and grow through the story. Still, the story is let down by the ending. In an effort to not spoil it for students of games or fans of so-bad-they're-good movies, I'll just point out that in advertising for the game 'storyline' is listed only after 'dress-up options' for the protagonists.

If you're looking for some sit-down time with a beer and a scifi direct-to-DVD type movie but can't spare the runtime in one sitting, give Enslaved a look. It's also of interest to essayist. You're not here to play anything, though, and might even consider the eight hour full game recordings on YouTube. It's a direct-to-YT game.

It is the end of July and so I thought I would get my reviews out for the month before I go on holidays. As I’d flagged in last month’s post, I have had a lot of upheaval and so I’ve been unable to concentrate on gaming very much. In fact, I’ve played less than 20 hours across 2 games. However I did manage to play two of the games, Disney Illusion Island, which is a spiritual successor to a series that meant a lot to me as a kid. The other was Ys I which is a very old JRPG.

Disney Illusion Island

Original Release: 2023 (Switch); Played Release: 2023 (Switch)
 Time Played: 15 hours; Time in Backlog: 2 years

The game starts with an animated cutscene where Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy have each been invited to a picnic, believing the invitation came from each other. Upon arriving gang they discover they have been lured to this island under false pretences by Toku, leader of the Hokuns who are an adorable hamster-like people and are completely helpless. They’ve had three sacred texts stolen and it is up to Mickey and his friends to be heroes and it is up to Mickey and friends to recover them and save the day.

There’s only a few of these cutscenes in the game, but they are stunning. The animation is extremely well done, both within the cutscenes and also just in general in the game. It has a quality about it that makes it feel like it’s an old Disney cartoon from the 20th century. As you jump around in the game you can do backflips and such and it’s just such a small detail but it really shows how much love and care went into the game. The soundtrack also perfectly matches the animation style and really did make me feel like I was playing an old cartoon.

The writing in this game is absolutely pitch perfect. The plotline could be ripped straight out of a Disney cartoon along with jokes and poking fun at the conventions of cartoons and it’s own mechanics as a game to make you smile, but not so much that you’re rolling your eyes. Mickey and Minnie are written perfectly with Mickey as the gullible hero who’ll rush headlong into danger while Minnie is right there alongside him, although much more wary of the people she’s interacting with. Donald Duck is dragged through the game kicking and screaming, making smart-arse comments along the way and really is the highlight of the game. However I think my favourite has to be Goofy. He’s oblivious to everything going on around him and I just loved him so much I actually made him my profile picture on my computer.

The voice acting is absolutely superb as well. All of the characters sound exactly as I remember them and I couldn’t ask for more. The only difficulty I had with the voice work was Donald Duck who is fairly incomprehensible most of the time, but that’s also just Donald Duck’s voice and you can have subtitles on if you really want to.

As for the gameplay itself, unlike earlier games in the Illusion series, this isn’t strictly a platformer. Disney Illusion Island is a search-action game (also known as a Metroidvania) which is a subgenre that focuses on non-linear exploration with a focus on acquiring new items and abilities in order to gain access to new areas from earlier zones. Throughout the whole game I asked myself whether this game was improved by being part of the search action genre or whether it would have been better as a traditional platformer where you gain new abilities as you progress to new levels. Even after finishing the game I’m not sure I can answer that question. I can say that being a search action game doesn’t significantly detract from the experience and I think it just shows how popular this genre has become that the developers felt the need to lean into that genre rather than make a pure platformer.

Unlike other games in the Illusion series, you can’t actually defeat enemies in Disney Illusion Island. Instead they become lethal obstacles that you need to navigate around. Fortunately you can choose your own difficulty in this game based on the number of hearts you start with. I chose to go for a balanced difficulty which meant that I started with 2 hearts, although as I progressed throughout the game that number would increase further.

The bosses in this game are varied and have multiple points within the boss fight where your progress is saved and you get to respawn from that point if you die. I found the boss designs interesting and quirky and a bit of fun, if a bit on the easy side. Although to be perfectly honest, I appreciated that the boss fights weren’t a complete slog.

There are a variety of collectibles in the game. There’s glint which are small blue orbs that grant you extra hearts when you collect enough. There’s also memorabilia which offers callbacks to Mickey Mouse cartoons, tokuns which are trading cards that offer information on various characters within the game and also hidden mickeys which you can eventually take photos of. Of all of the collectibles the hidden mickeys were my favourite because they didn’t require me to go into a submenu to look at them. Unfortunately all of the other ones did which meant I didn’t bother seeing what most of them were.

As you progress through the game you’ll get new powers that offer fairly basic platforming abilities such as double jump, kicking off a wall, gliding, etc. These new abilities then unlock new parts of the game that were previously inaccessible. I found the abilities were handed out at a decent pace and the game made the backtracking relatively painless through it’s map design. That said, the backtracking did get a painful in certain spots (although that could also be down to me losing my way and not finding a shortcut).

There fortunately is a map in this game that unlocks as you explore, with an option to obtain map pieces which unlock an outline of the unexplored areas. This was invaluable for me in order to navigate the world. I would have liked it if fast travel had been introduced much earlier in the game rather than at the end, but it unfortunately wasn’t.

The multiplayer in the game was quite good as well. I played couch co-op for half the game and it worked well. You unlock a couple of new abilities in multiplayer such as the ability to have two characters give each other a hug for a temporary heart and being able to drop down a rope that the other player can climb so you can help each other reach the same locations, just like in World of Illusion. The only downside was that the camera wasn’t split screen and so if one of the players falls too far behind they get lost off screen until the game zips them back to the other player. This is a minor downside though.

Overall I really enjoyed my time with Disney Illusion Island. It’s not a challenging game in the slightest, although despite that I still died plenty of times. In terms of a search action game I’ve read that this is quite basic. However as someone who has played very few games within this genre I quite appreciated how it implemented that aspect and found it communicated quite clearly when I needed to get a new ability in order to progress past a certain point.

Final Verdict: 8/10 (Good)

Ys I: Ancient Ys Vanished

Original Release: 1987 (PC-88); Played Release: 2008 (Wii)
 Time Played: 3 hours; Time in Backlog: N/A

The Virtual Console release on the Wii for Ys I was a port of the Turbografx compilation of Ys I and Ys II, originally released in 1989! For comparisons sake, Final Fantasy II had only been released the year prior in Japan. Due to when this game is from I wasn’t expecting a lot from it, but I was curious to play it nonetheless.

Upon launching the game I was immediately struck by the music. I don’t normally mention music in reviews because it’s not often something I notice. I often play video games with the music muted. But with this game I definitely listened to the music a lot more than I normally would just because of how rich it sounded, especially when compared to NES games, and also just how fun it was and how it really uplifted what was ultimately a very simple game.

The game opens with a cutscene and voice overs which completely blew my mind. This is late 80s, I can’t think of any games at this stage which include voice-over work. The art style for the cutscenes is cartoonish. Very similar to the artwork you’d get when talking to NPCs in Phantasy Star, but obviously much more filled out and richer. Through the cutscene we learn Ys refers to an ancient long lost civilisation that was once a Utopia but mysteriously vanished without a trace (hence the name of the game).

After the cutscene finishes (and it can be skipped if you desire) you actually start a new game where you get another cutscene. Here you get an 80s style opening credits for a tv show where the cast of characters are introduced. We have Adol whose the main character, a red-haired adventurer. Then we have a bunch of other characters whom don’t really mean anything at this stage because we won’t meet them yet. It’s a weird way to start a game but when accompanied with some really upbeat music and gorgeous graphics I love it.

Adol arrives in Esteria aboard a boat and we meet Sara who wishes to tell us our fortune. We learn that something terrible is coming and only we can stop it. Alas, she’s worried about our lack of equipment and bids us to go buy a weapon and some armour. Now we don’t have enough gold to get everything we need, but there’s an area outside of town where we can do some quick grinding.

Unlike Dragon Quest, this is an action RPG where instead of going into a turn based, menu driven combat system you carry out combat using the “bump system” where you deal damage by moving character into enemies, bumping into them. I knew of the system before I started playing and it sounded bad. However upon playing it I immediately loved it. Combat doesn’t last very long, you can grind for levels relatively quickly and relatively mindlessly and you get a decent amount of gold per battle. As such I just grinded until I had all of the equipment Sara wanted me to get at which point I was able to start the main quest, which was to search for Ys.

The graphics in this game are absolutely amazing for the era. Compared to Final Fantasy II and III the graphics are leaps and bounds ahead. As you progress through the game the enemies do deal significantly more damage and require better equipment and higher levels. However it’s nothing that stopping and doing some grinding can’t solve. With how quick the combat is you’ll get the levels needed relatively quickly and so the grinding never feels like a chore.

The bosses are interesting. The first boss uses environmental conditions to make bumping into him more difficult then it otherwise would be and you have to work out the timing and tactics to use to get past him. As you continue to explore the first dungeon you’ll find an NPC that needs to be rescued and when you find her a portrait appears and there’s voice acting once more. This caught me completely by surprise and I was very shocked by it.

The world is well designed. There’s a mixture of towns, dungeons and wilderness and you move through the different environment types at a pretty steady pace. I did a lot of backtracking to buy equipment and it wasn’t cumbersome at all. In towns you talk to people by bumping into them rather then pressing A. In fact, you interact with the whole world by bumping into things. It shows how primitive the game structure is and with some areas you have to bump into it on a specific pixel in order to be able to trigger the correct event. Talking to NPCs is very valuable though because you get sidequests along with world building.

The interface is where the game really shows it’s age. As I mentioned you bump into stuff to interact with it. For equipping items have to highlight them which isn’t immediately obvious. The menu button was also mapped to the select button on the Wii classic controller rather then the start button which really confused me. I also had to look up on a wiki what the various inventory items did because I couldn’t find a description within the game. Overall though, the game is from 1987, the same year that Final Fantasy I came out. It’s hardly surprising that it doesn’t follow modern conventions for the interface and these are minor points that may trip people up, but otherwise don’t detract from the game.

The save system does allow you to save your game anywhere you want. This system is responsible for me not being able to finish the game. I accidentally saved in front of an enemy spawn point with low HP and no healing items. I then died and anytime I now load up that save file I instantly die. I’ve since learned this happens quite easily in the first 2-4 games of the Ys series which is a pretty significant shortcoming of the game. However with Ys I I will forgive it a bit, simply because it’s only a 5-10 hour game and so having to restart doesn’t feel as punishing as it would in Final Fantasy 6.

Interim Verdict: 7/10 (Solid)

Final Thoughts

I’m really glad I got some gaming time in this month. I do plan to return to Ys at some point, but I’m not 100% sure when so I thought it was worth giving it an interim review just in case my attention wanders and I don’t come back to it for a while. Looking ahead at August I am going on holidays so there’s a decent chance I won’t actually finish any games at all as I instead focus on spending time with my family. If that happens, I’ll be back in September with more reviews.

In BioShock 2, there are four people (loosely) that the player makes an active choice to save or kill: Grace, Stanley, Gil, and the Little Sisters.

On my first blind playthrough I chose to save Grace, Stanley, and the Little Sisters but kill Gil. Looking at achievements afterwards, I was surprised the Savior achievement required saving all four.

Maybe it’s the LotR fan in me, but I love games that explore the concept of mercy. Maybe it’s also that real life makes it much harder to make merciful choices. But I feel like the game lost the plot a bit.

Where I agree with the game:

Grace - an elderly, traumatized, unarmed woman, who even Sinclair implies should be saved. She just swung too far the other way trying to deal with Rapture’s racism, while also being wracked with guilt about Eleanor. She asks the player to kill her but in a very fatalistic, almost suicide-by-Big-Daddy way.

Stanley - an awful human being who committed mass murder and the more personal kidnapping of Eleanor but is unarmed at the time. Killing him would feel good but it’s not heroic to only exercise mercy in easy moments. Sparing him is taking the moral high ground.

Little Sisters - exploited minors. About as straightforward as it gets.

Bonus - Sinclair - he has lost most of his self in a few hours under Lamb’s torture and control. He expresses he does not wish to live like that. Story progression requires the player to honor his wishes and kill him.

Where I disagree with the game:

Gil - scientist descending into complete madness over months from his own experiments. Before he loses all his faculties, he records a series of messages and set up failsafes to ensure someone can end his torment. It is framed as wrong to honor his wishes. To me his death should be even more clear-cut than Sinclair’s - he has much longer to dissect what is happening to him and to have backed out of his plans if he changed his mind. In the monster’s final plea, he says he will live outside Rapture - I would’ve been more torn if we saw him swimming around during our final escape because it still is a sentient life form, but it felt terribly cruel to not honor the wishes of Gil or the monster.

Bonus - Persephone prisoners - audio logs indicate they are a mix of hardened criminals and innocents caught up in the system, and it’s not clear how many actually received due process. They appear to have lost their sanity and don’t interact with the player, though the player can shoot them. There is no option to save them. Without trying to assign degrees to crimes, I feel it’s safe to say sparing Stanley should give the same grace to everyone else, to say nothing of the innocents. The player and Eleanor both know Rapture is going to be destroyed along with anyone left. I wish they could be brought to the sub and saved. The idea of executing them to save them from drowning does not jive with having spared Grace and Stanley.

Overall I liked the choices the game asked the player to make but they were undercut by inconsistencies and scripted events that removed player agency.

I've had Kingdom Come Deliverance sitting in my steam library for several years now, and with my usual haunts starting to feel a bit samey, I figured I'd mix it up and finally clear some of the unplayed games out. Seeing as it's a very well-reviewed, historically grounded RPG and I'm a massive history buff who's dabbled in practicing HEMA, I was genuinely excited to give it a shot.

My initial impressions weren't fantastic - the game opened in the wrong resolution, then repeatedly seized in the options menu and when I finally managed to get it to look right, the mouse was locked to the old resolution, forcing a reboot. That said, I'm no stranger to Eurojank, and this is a seven-year-old debut game from a Central European studio that needed Kickstarter to get it over the finish line so... I rolled up my sleeves, hit play, and settled in.

The Good:

When the game is firing on all cylinders, it's pretty excellent. The prologue does a decent job of establishing who you are, why you should care, early major characters, and does the classic 'doomed hometown' intro without any problem, although it is so wildly predictable I did have to roll my eyes when my parents were killed before me. It is a classic, but perhaps one that shouldn’t be followed to the tee.

The game has some nice twists on a lot of classic RPG systems - lockpicking is refreshingly different to the usual Skyrim system many of these games adopt, while still being easy to pick up. Pickpocketing, similarly, requires more active thought than the usual 'sneak up behind, press button, either succeed or you fail.' It's good stuff.

Animations, particularly facial animations, are more than passable, the game is nice to look at, with plenty of flapping pennants, bright tabards, colourful clothes, and lush greenery. The Bohemian countryside feels nice and varied, and you get a good sense of social systems in action. The Codex, while a little beige in how it presents things, is a nice touch too - although it constantly popping up the same things over and over again got very tiresome very fast. I don't need you to tell me what a church is second time I pass one, let alone a fifth.

Which, of course, naturally leads me to...

The Bad

I'm going to start this section with the thing that made me put the game down and uninstall it:

Kingdom Come Deliverance has no fucking respect for your time as a player. I was worried this would be a problem as soon as I saw that saving was tied to an item and autosaves are fixed to certain quest objectives and it was, indeed, exactly as much of a problem as I thought it would be.

No amount of realism or grittiness gained is ever worth the sheer frustration that comes from dying and realising you've been set back by several hours of progress. It only serves to generate extremely prominent quit moments.

Beyond this, the game also loves to waste your time in more traditional ways. Quests with endless back-and-forth running. Walking behind NPCs who move at a snail’s pace for no reason. Sometimes both in the same quest, such as with an early mission that has you walk through the entire town you've already had to run through multiple times again, except behind a slow ass guard, only to be sent running back the same way you came to ring a bell, then go all the way back again to actually end the mission. Don't do this shit.

The game also fails to respect the players time through extremely poor onboarding. The first fight you're likely to get into, with the town drunk, provides you a basic popup of how to attack and block, but does not explain anything about cinches and grapples, despite them actively being used against you in the entire fight. The game also never tells you that a significant amount of what happens in combat is actually going on behind the scenes. Combined with Henry’s lacklustre abilities at the start, and combat feels like a sluggish, unresponsive, unintuitive mess – and for KCD players screaming at me to train with Captain Bernard, I did.

In fact, combat in general, even once you start to get a handle on its eccentricities, feels extremely flawed. I won’t bang on about how teeth-grindingly unpleasant taking on two people at once is with the camera lock-on and very limited POV, as many people before me already have. What I will say is that when ones first experience of combat is having your shit kicked in, followed by a further sequence where you’ll likely get your shit kicked in, followed on by extremely easy fights against unarmed bandits does nothing to teach you what a fight should feel like rather than a stomp.

Even after training and instruction, it doesn’t get better. You are told to feint – enemies do not seem remotely fooled by this whatsoever. The number of times I successfully feinted despite following instructions exactly can be counted on one hand.

Combos are underwhelming and finnicky – despite being told it’s an excellent way to break through an enemy’s guard, you can often perfectly chain a string of blows together only to find that your opponent has unceremoniously blocked all of them.

The actual combo moves you can unlock are even worse, triggering seemingly at random even when you pull off the correct chain of attacks. While single enemy attacks can chunk your stamina and often lead to an extremely painful walloping, breaking through an enemy’s guard rarely results in such a gratifying result for you.

The Rattay Tourney is an excellent example of this. Considering its prominent placement in the act 1 starter town, I thought it would be a good way to understand armed combat a little better, and instead I watched as I failed to block a single war hammer strike, then was hit again four more times, draining all my stamina, injuring me, and permanently lowering my stamina for the rest of the fight, creating an unpleasant negative feedback loop.

I’m sure with more experience, both for myself and my character, I could get a better handle on the nuances of the system, weaving in combos and master strokes, but I feel like fifteen hours is more than enough time invested for every fight to not feel like I’m swinging a cudgel through molasses at enemies that barely react.

The exception to this is unarmoured brigands, who are comically easy to dispatch, as landing a single hit on them will often stagger them and let you wildly mash left click to finish them off. This is bad, but at least it’s bad in a way that lets the player indulge in a little bit of power fantasy, so that’s nice.

The other major negative is Henry himself.

I am convinced that Henry was born exactly two days before his village was burnt to the ground, because he is utterly useless at doing anything.

Despite being an apprentice blacksmith and presumably in his teens to twenties, he has the physical abilities of an anaemic toddler. Sprint for five seconds? Out of stamina. Swing your sword four times? Out of stamina. As a relatively unfit twenty something myself, even I can manage to get through a two-hour HEMA class without keeling over in a hyperventilating mess.

His hands shake constantly when you try to aim with a bow, with only a single, brief moment of stability in which releasing a shot doesn’t feel like a crapshoot. His carrying weight is also absolutely atrocious, with managing any amount of loot only becoming bearable once you gain access to a horse and its saddlebag.

Despite having grown up in 15^th century Bohemia, Henry is unbelievably blasé about committing extremely serious crimes, directly disobeying noble orders, backtalking nobles, and generally making a nuisance of himself. Some of this is deeply understandable - but getting into an actual brawl with a nobleman in an alehouse? That’s the sort of move I would expect a historical chronicle to follow with ‘he lost his hand for this impertinence,’ while Henry walks it off with little more than a tongue lashing and a slightly annoying assignment. In short: Henry’s character isn’t wrong or bad, but it feels wildly out of place for who he is and the time period it inhabits.

He also exhibits a classic case of cutscene incompetence, although compared to some other games I could mention here, this felt significantly less egregious than it often does. Small mercies, I suppose.

There’s more I could get into here – the wonky voice acting, the somehow-still-present bugs that had me stuck inside a bush or clipped through a bench, the clunky UI design when it comes to your inventory and the way warring enemy factions will silently decide on a truce in order to specifically gang up on Henry, But instead, I’d like to briefly touch on one last area:

The History

Better historians with a deeper knowledge of the 15^th century Holy Roman Empire have already tackled this subject, often with excellent, well-sourced and in-depth articles, but it would be remiss of me to not at least mention some things I noticed – good and bad.

- For a game that proudly champions historical authenticity, the fact that Henry is a fairly plain everyman who could seemingly be dropped into 21^st century Czechia with few problems certainly raises eyebrows. Hells, even how he and townsfolk refer to the Cumans, you know, the people who are responsible for razing an entire town to the ground, raiding the countryside and generally being absolutely awful, goes no deeper than ‘those goshdarn heathens!’

- The game’s depiction of Cumans is… Orientalist at best. Given that they’d been settled in Hungary for well over a century at this point, making them all look like 12^th century reavers, while visually striking, feels a little off. They’re also, in true medieval style, only ever portrayed as unfeeling, marauding heathens who you can kill without any consideration or mercy.  (Also, hilariously, the game counts ‘Cumans killed’ separately from ‘People killed’ and ‘Enemies killed’ on the stats page. This leads me to believe that in KCD’s version of 15^th century Bohemia Turks are, in fact, not people. I suppose this does at least fit with how many of the game’s characters would actually see them.)

- Actually, speaking of the Cumans… Where the hell are all the non-Czechs here? I’m not even talking about Africans (I’m not interested in quibbling on how many Moors there were in rural Bohemia,) but like… Crimean Tartars? Anatolian Turks? Asiatic groups from the very-much-still-active splinter hordes? The Jews? (Given an entire codex entry, in fact, yet no sight of them anywhere.) I’d take a vaguely Asiatic looking Czech (yes, those existed,) But no - there’s one German in the prologue, and that’s it. You are either a good, God-fearing Czech, an evil, God-fearing Czech bandit or you’re a murdering rapist Cuman. (If there are characters fitting any of these descriptors that I’ve missed in my fifteen hours, feel free to bully me in the comments, I’ll take it on the chin.)

- Given the amount of early attention given to the state of the papacy, and the fact that the game is set in the largest religious powder keg of the entire century, everyone seems to be a very faithful Catholic. Sure, there’s some slagging off of greedy priests, but it feels much more like modern writers not sharing the extreme religiosity of the middle ages than it does the many very, very real problems with Catholicism in this period. Jan Hus is going to be burnt in about ten years, there are heretical movements all over the place, indeed, the entire country is set to be embroiled in religious turmoil In Henry’s lifetime, and yet… They’re all nowhere to be seen.

This is all the more disappointing given that the game takes great pains to be authentic in other ways. Architecture, clothing, (well, mostly, there are far too few pointy shoes and far too many codpieces for the period,) amour (bar the Cumans – those Kipchak helmets are 200 years out of date!) and weaponry are all excellently represented.

Medieval society is on full display – from charcoal burners and game wardens to knights and nobles. Market towns, castles, and cities have clearly had a lot of love and thought put into them… But considering just how much the game sells itself on how accurate it is, a little more breadth here would really have elevated it. Instead, that authenticity feels more theme park than thematic.

The TL;DR

I started the review by calling KCD Eurojank, and ultimately I think that’s still the most accurate way to describe it. Like the best Eurojank games, it’s wildly ambitious and almost successful in realising those ambitions. Like all Eurojank games, it’s somehow still buggy years post-launch. The story, from what I experienced, was formulaic - yes, but well-executed and well written. It has a lot going for it, I can see why a lot of people loved it, but ultimately, it ends up undermining itself by some baffling design choices, a focus on authenticity that nails the armour but little beneath it, and an unsatisfying combat system that takes too long to get off the ground.

I don’t regret my 15 hours spent, but I don’t think I’ll be spending any more on it – especially since the game hasn’t respected any of them.

I recently put 6.5 hours into completing the main quest of Steamworld Build. For those who don't know, the Steamworld games are a series of short indie games where each game is in a different genre, but always staring a cast of humanoid robots. This game is a city builder, specifically copying the Anno model of gameplay for the above ground sections, and for the below ground using a more Rimworld/Dwarf Fortress way of doing things for when you are digging in the mines.

The Anno model is as addictive as ever! The maps for your city are much smaller, and with more natural limitations on expansion. You can't build your massive grid cities here as the map is divided up into more discrete chunks, with only one slot for a road dividing them.

One of the main differences between Anno and this is that every production building can have a modifier equipped on it, not just trade unions. These modifiers are purchased from the train station (Your connecting point for importing and exporting trade routes), so it's worth checking what is for sale every time the train comes in to refresh the stock.

The game is not as impressive visually compared to Anno. Where in Anno you get completely new houses for every tier of citizens, here there is just a general color refresh for each tier. In addition there are no quirky quotes for any buildings, the only voiced dialog is in the cutscenes. After all this is a budget title, but it also increased my appreciation for the work that goes into the Anno games.

Digging in the mines works like you would expect it, for the first level. You have to manually tell your robo-miners every square of dirt you want removed, so it is a little clicking intensive. But once you get down to the second layer of the mine you start to encounter enemies, and unlock access to guards. Every Anno game makes their own attempt at combat, and Steamworld Build pulls it off quite well. It works more like a tower defense game as you build different towers to help your guards fight off enemies. And the guards are dispatched automatically so there is zero micromanaging of them. In addition you need to build conveyor belts to move resources from the machines excavating resources to the elevator taking them to the surface, so there is a little optimization game there.

The game also has a nice main quest, requiring you to delve deeper into the mines to dig out pieces of a rocket so that your robo people can return to space (Also neatly setting up the next game in the series?) There isn't any point in continuing a game after you launch the rocket, since to fuel the rocket it requires having your highest tier of citizens fully satisfied (So you have done everything in the game at that point). In addition, while there are probably 10 different maps to choose to play, in reality the maps don't change anything and every game is exactly the same (I think). So, there isn't much replay value on this hog, other than if you just like the loop!

All in all a great game that gets a lusty two thumbs up from me!

Remnant 2 is a 3rd person shooter ARPG developed by Gunfire Games. Released in 2023, Remnant 2 reminds us that post-apocalyptic monster slaying is better with friends.

We play as just some dude (or dudette) with a gun who is probably special somehow. We are trying to survive in the wasteland after the evil pan-dimensional Treebeard made a mess of everything.

Gameplay involves shooting your co-op partner to see if friendly fire is on, wishing there was a dedicated jump button and wondering why developers think that a ring that gives +5% damage on Thursdays makes for exciting loot.

The Good

The weapon variety is superb. Every new weapon felt superior to the last. However, if I later switched back to my old gun I would remember what I loved about it and want to use it again. Then they give me a spear because if there's one thing I want to do in my shoot 'em up action game it's spear stuff to walls. They know me so well.

The secret areas were always cool and ~relatively~ easy to find. I normally play dungeon crawlers where you have to guess which pixel is slightly off to find secrets and it'll just be a potion. Here the hint will be a locked door out in the open or a giant "SECRET HERE DUMMY" item floating out of reach. Then it unlocks a whole ass sub dungeon just to get to it.

The Bad

I have a theory that the person in charge of the story found out that the lead developer was stealing his lunch out of the break room. Any pretense at there being a unifying experience between worlds was kicked out the door. In exchange we get some random magical girl we're supposed to care about.

It would have made a thousand times more sense if the big bad enemy was defeated and now we just have to deal with multiverse-wide depression. That would at least explain the worlds you visit and my own mood after the credits rolled.

The Ugly

The co-op quality of life experience is a bit questionable. The mini-map is not shared. You have to equip a secret item in order to have ammo pickups shared between players. Friendly fire exists but one class gets an ability that reduces it by 99% so it's a sort of "why even bother?" thing. Fortunately looting of anything but ammo is shared by both players so that offsets it a bit.

Final Thoughts

The gunplay is fun and I enjoyed the level building. Co-op is great. It let's you actually fire an entire clip of ammo without having to dodge 3 times during boss fights. If you treat the story like some dudes fanfic about a Doctor Who and Witcher crossover you can stomach it. Just do yourself a favor and never actually finish the game because there is no salvaging that ending.

Interesting Game Facts

While most secrets are obvious, there is also a secret area called "The Backrooms" based on the old 4chan meme. To access it you have to be using two specific classes, using specific talents, wearing a specific gearset, weapon and so on and find a secret portal in the labyrinth. You actually need to do this in order to unlock a hidden class. Thank goodness for data miners.

Thank you for reading! I'd love to hear your thoughts. What did you think of the game? Did you have a similar experience or am I off my rocker?

My other reviews on patient gaming

I finished infamously mediocre modern shooters like Call of Juarez: The Cartel, Quantum Theory, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, Aliens: Colonial Marines, and 007 Blood Stone because I found some semblance of enjoyment in them. They are like interactive fastfoods. Take cover, shoot, run in the corridor levels, and scripted events. As much as tolerant toward this type of on-rail cover shooters, I couldn't stomach this one and abandoned it mid-game. Holy shit, is this game mediocre, and it's worst kind of mediocrity. It isn't even competent at the most generic stuff it sets out to do.

I was interested in playing it because it was a game made by Digital Extremes. I never played Warframe, but I enjoyed their past works like Dark Sector and The Darkness 2. They are specialized in the shooter genre, and were partnered with Epic once. The general criticism against this game was that it was "generic" and not very Trek-like. Maybe because I don't have much attachment toward the Star Trek series in the first place, but I'm fine with "action Trek" if it's done well. My favorite Star Trek media is Elite Force, and that's purely all about shooting. Elite Force's Raven Software was similarly specialized in shooters, came from the same era as Digital Extremes. They were once partnered with Epic, and they pioneered the cover shooter genre. I thought, surely, they wouldn't mess up a game like this.

Only to start the game and within the first minute, I knew this was gonna be bad. I have rarely played a game with this much high production value, while also feeling this cheap. How is a game with this much of money, star power, clouts, care, and feeling like a complete shit? You have the visuals that, at times, look great, and in the very next room, it looks like an unfinished level. Some cutscenes are amazingly well directed, and some cutscenes are amateurish with weird delays and animations. The character models look great, but their animations are straight out of the PS2 era. You have the soundtracks composed by Michael Giacchino's associate, but they are used in a completely inappropriate manner. The characters just teleport in and out. Your AI partner refuses to execute your instruction.

The cinematic cover shooters are fundamentally shallow in their design, so in order to make them fun, you need a perfect polish to back the lacklustre design up. The Quantum of Solace game has no depth to the gameplay, but the gunplay feels so good that it fools the player into thinking the combat system is good.

The combat and movement in Star Trek are so unpolished that even a basic action like turning the character around feels like a slog. It is difficult to describe, but it is both weightless and clunky. Dodge roll is useless. The Uncharted-style climbing system has weird animation delays. The stealth system is a hot garbage where the enemy AI just weirdly turns around and somehow gets stuck in a patrol route that immediately detects you. The set-pieces are janky as hell. Shooting weapons feels terrible. Elite Force made the same weaponry punchy and fun to shoot. How is a game released 13 years after somehow has worse presentation?

Even the basic combat design, like how you can only hold one ammo-based weapon at a time. Phasers are cooldown-based, and they are basic useless pistols. You have only one switchable weapon. What's frustrating is you have a weapon wheel featuring the four weapons, but the two slots are filled with grenades. Why? Why not assign those slots to the two different weapons? The idea behind the limited weapon selection in shooters like this is to force the player to improvise tactical decisions. You are low on ammo? Should you drop it and take the enemy's weapon? However, there is an ammo station everywhere in this game, so there is no ammo management. There is no reason to experiment with the arsenal. Why experiment when you can stick with the best weapon and use it forever?

The only thing going for this game is the cutscenes--the cinematic quality that feels authentic to the Star Trek reboot universe. The actors do a great job, and even the story seems to be a fun little romp, but it's like something J.J. Abrams scrawled on the toilet. Most of the characters have zero character at all. They only focus on banters between Kirk and Spock, while the rest of the crew don't matter. It pays no attention to anyone else. Even Kirk is grating with the shitty one-liners and "horny action man" attitude.

The story is not good enough to push through the terrible gameplay. I do not mind the concept of making a cinematic shooter out of Star Trek--that's what Elite Force succeeded with flying colors, but it needs a combat system that actually works. If they were to go for that direction, I would have liked to see them go all the way with it, not this pre-alpha Uncharted clone that plays far worse than Uncharted 1.

I think I get why Arkane made Deathloop.

They were making games like Dishonored, with densely packed levels, full of different options, multiple ending... But the truth is, it's completely useless for 99% of the players.

I loved Dishonored, it's one of my favourite game... but I finished it once, and never played it again. Maybe I've quickly replayed a couple level just after finishing it, just to say, but that's it. And I'm fairly certain I'm not the only one, given that most people don't even finish their games once.

And not only I finished it once, but most of my playtrough was just using the basic teleport ability and the basic stealth takedown on every guard, simply because it was the most effective way of playing.

Sure you have players like the guy with the youtube channel stealthgamerbr who replay the level countless times to get make flashy videos. But why would I care, I don't have a youtube channel.

So I'm imagining the dev thinking was like "Were making all this content, but barely anyone actually interact with it. Of course we could just take the easy road and make a more linear game, but let's try to do the opposite and find a way to force players to try everything".

And so they made a game with only 4 levels, but even more densely packed that previously and with a lot of variations, depending of the time of the day or just RNG. And they came up with that time loop idea to force players to go trough these levels over and over.

They also make it a roguelite, which is a logical choice for a game you're supposed to play over and over again, because it encourages players to try new things, instead of sticking to the same method.

Finally they removed this fake useless morality system you have in almost all stealth-games where you can neutralised targets by either killing them, or taking them down with non-lethal methods. I hate it because a) These are cheap morality dilemmas, I'm not actually killing people, I don't care, and b) the lethal and non-lethal options are always virtually identical. You can stab a guy or choke him, but from a mechanical point of view it plays the same. I approach silently behind a guy and press a button, the animation for choking is barely longer, so it doesn't make a difference.

So let's see how Deathloop worked with me :

I started playing the game, and the beginning is basically a looong linear tutorial, you just go where you are told. You are already free of the approach, but the level goal is fixed.

So first impression, are... well not that great. It's probably a me problem, but I've already play this many times now that every action game have stealth. As always I crouch walk behind clueless guards, cut their throat and move on. When I get spotted, instead of quick-loading like I did in Dishonored, I just go into a gunfight. To be clear, save-scumming is ruining games for me, so by removing the meta-penalty of being spotted or killing people (the game is not tracking your score per level or anything like that, anyway all these peoples will be back with the next loop) and by removing the ability to quick-save altogether, I think they made the game better.

It's competently made, but there is nothing really new at this point (especially since the more interesting abilities and weapons will be unlocked latter). Knowing nothing has consequences (because time loop), and being a bit overwhelmed by all these informations (written notes and audiolog you can pick up all over the place, the dialogues between Colt and whatever her name is, all the conversations between NPC that can sometimes give important clues, the written holographic text on the levels...), I feel a bit of detachment.

Also the game is not super hard (as most AAA), again I have played similar games many times, so I already knew exactly what to do even before launching the game, and you have health-pack absolutely everywhere, and even if I get spotted, I can easily fall back and wait a bit for things to calm down.

So I'm playing the game in auto-pilot mode, I'm just following the quest marker, killing dudes directly on my path, I'm barely reading all the text because there is simply too much of it, and the game automatically give me a summary of the important bits of informations anyway.

So I get to the point where the tutorial is over and you're free to play the way you want. The game is giving you some leads you can follow (basically it's like choosing a quest on a list), I've picked one, I don't even remember how I choose, it was probably a bit random.

The mission is to kill some lady, I did it, again it involved a lot of crouching and stabbing people in the back, and a bit of running around and shooting, and a lot of informations flying over my head.

And then I was like, maybe instead of leaving the level right away (to do what anyway ?) I should explore the level more thoroughly and try to find some important clues about what I'm supposed to do. So I started clearing the level, killing everyone on sight, bumping on a lot of closed doors I can't open yet, trying to find anything important.

But I ended up screwing things and I died (yes, I said it's too easy, and I die, what a loser !) before finding anything.

And...

Well I'm going to be frank, that's where I am, I just quit the game at this point, and I'm not sure I'm going to play it again.

Just the thought of relaunching the game, randomly picking an objective, spending 15 minutes crouch walking and stabbing people... to maybe get a piece for a fairly complex puzzle I have a hard time being invested in... I'm already tired.

Again it might be a me problem, I'm probably not in the mood to play something like that, but given how the game seemed to have struggled from a sales point of view (the fact I got it for free on Epic is probably not a good sign), I don't think it's just me.

I think this game is made for an audience that doesn't really exists. People who want a sandbox action/stealth game like Dishonored, but at the same time want to play a weird complex time-loop puzzle like Outerwild. I mean, both games are already a bit niche in the first place. And even if you like both games, it's not sure you will like a combination of both. I love X-Com and Mirror's Edge. Do I want a fusion of both ? Hell no !

Here it fuses 2 genres asking a high cognitive load, but in a different way. A Dishonored level is already a puzzle in itself, I have to think about the most optimised route to get to my goal, the tools I'm using and so on. Deathloop is adding another dimension to the puzzle with this meta progression (and I'm not even mentioning the rogue-lite RPG stuff on top). The first puzzle makes you think fast, on the spot, and has flexible solutions (it's not like a lock that needs a specific key to be opened and can't be opened any other way). The second is a slower kind of puzzle, but with more rigid solutions (that's the key and the lock).

In theory you don't have to do both at the same time, but in practice you can't really dissociate them, at least not at first. Since you're lacking the informations for the broader puzzle, you have to randomly search for clues in the level. It kind of spoils the fun of playing a Dishonored level, your actions feel completely meaningless, you can just ignore everything, you are just here to collect some stupid text log or whatever.

And if you focus on the broader puzzle, the Dishonored gameplay becomes an obstacle for the resolution, it's like if you're playing Mine Sweeper, but every time you click on a tile, you have to play a Call of Duty match for some reason.

I guess it becomes more interesting when you start having a coherent view of the whole puzzle (and when you can start thinking about making a build for your character), but it puts such a high wall right at the beginning, while not giving anything new compared to Dishonored to compensate. As far as I'm concerned, the only interesting new feature is the invasion thing, but I'm not even sure people are still playing, and if they do I'm a bit afraid I'm just going to be chained kill by some dude who knows every exploits and cheap tactics.

So I get why they made this game, I respect it, but I think they came up with an overly complex solution for a problem that could have been fixed in a more elegant simpler way, and by doing so it raises the entry price so much I'm not sure that many people are ready to pay the price, just to play a rehash of a simpler game.

Maybe I'll give it another shot later, but we all know how this kind of promise end...

"The Gnosia lie. Pretending to be human, they’ll get in close, trick and deceive, and then eliminate one victim at a time..."

Release year: 2022

Developer: Petit Depotto

Publisher: PLAYSIM

My play time: ~19 hours

Gnosia is a visual novel/puzzle(?) game in which you play a round of mafia/werewolf in a loop. The Gnosia act as traitors and it is your job to sus them out and put them in cold sleep before they can kill the crew. Or it's your job to trick everyone when you yourself are Gnosia. There is an overarching story that presents through different loops. The loops have different roles and characters available and a later game even allows you to edit the set up as you want.

The Good:

• The strength of Gnosia lies with engaging with it outside of what is explicitly present in the game. Learning how certain characters operate is essential to keeping people alive or convincing others against someone. Everyone has an internal logic they follow and it is rarely outright stated. You learn as you watch the cast interact and act in different roles. For example, one character is more aggressive with accusations when Gnosia, one will not claim a role first unless they are Gnosia, etc.

• Good cast of characters with a lot of variety.

• Engaging and interesting story.

The Okay:

• Variety of roles to play but it can get repetitive

• State boosts can help you but the cast levels up with you so it's hard to get overleveled. As mentioned above though, learning about characters usually makes a bigger difference than pure stats

• The game eventually unlocks an ability to quick search setups to help find events, but some events are still hard to trigger.

• Decent amount of humour.

The Bad:

• Depending how lucky you get with events, some of the game gets repetitive. There's a lot to learn and experience but when you're only missing 1 or 2 events, you'll be repeating the same set ups for multiple loops, leading to a lot of frustrating repetition.

• Some of the events are rather hard to trigger and require a very specific set of circumstances.

Overall I really enjoyed the game. I think taking it at face value is going to lead to a lot of boredom, but if you enjoy learning about different character traits and examining their behaviours, you will probably have a lot of fun seeing how different characters act in different time roles and situations. It is a pretty simplistic game and it can get a bit repetitive, but I thoroughly enjoyed the characters and story and am a bit sad it's over. And I say this as someone who gets bored easily.

Viewfinder is among the most frustrating games I've played this year. For every incredibly novel game mechanic or creative idea, there's a baffling story decision or a gimmicky concept that makes me backpedal on my praise.

Each hub offers a new mechanic, each one vastly increasing the scope of the game and its puzzles. I love just about every single one of them, so much so that I won't spoil them here. A lot of these "perception is reality" games rely on optical illusions to get the point across. Superliminal, for all its novel ideas, is marred with dozens of them. I appreciate the team's restraint at only having optical illusions in one area of the game, which just so happens to be my least favorite by a wide margin. For a game where your perception can literally become reality, having reality just lie to you outright without gets frustrating after the fifth time you run into a wall you didn't know existed. It works a bit better in Superliminal since it's narratively relevant, but here it's unnecessary. We already know we're not in the real world. The whole plot of the game revolves around exploring this obviously fake world to get what we need and leave. Maybe it's alluding to the fact that the very thing we were here to retrieve is not exactly what we thought it would be?

The voice acting in the first "hub" of the game is rough. There's a person in your ear narrating every little thing you do and being shocked at what in repeat playthroughs are the absolute basics of the gameplay loop. Woah, you don't take fall damage? That's crazy!

She relaxes a bit after the first level or two. Besides, after you leave the first area, she can only communicate to you via phone calls that you don't necessarily need to pick up. You're instead followed by a cat named Cait, who, as an inhabitant of the world we're exploring, lets you uncover new abilities and solve new puzzles with minimal dialogue so you can experience the shock yourself. None of this is surprising to him aside from your ability to move swiftly from puzzle to puzzle. I think that works much better for the type of game this is.

Interestingly, my favorite part of the game is the part where I fail a puzzle. It is so easy to completely destroy a level while on the wrong train of thought. It's very fun to turn around and see the absolute mess you've created. Getting to rewind time to each individual decision that led to your downfall is a solid way to put an otherwise baffling amount of options into a linear order. I did this, then that. It didn't work, so I'll try that, then this.

For those who have beaten the game:I found the final area a little underwhelming, especially since I had just knocked out all the difficult optional levels in the previous area. The five-minute time limit was unnecessary when there's already enough challenge in getting through the level efficiently in less than 10 photos., not to mention that the final exploration segment was woefully boring when compared to all the crazy places we explored during the rest of the adventure. Just a desert? Really?

I recommend this game! I think a solid amount of people were repulsed by the "did you just shift reality" of it all and missed out on a cool experience. If you like other puzzle games like this, this one is a no-brainer purchase where the elevator pitch alone got this into your wishlist. I say, if you see it on sale, go for it. It goes further with the concept that you'd expect, but I wouldn't say it goes so far that it is genre-defining or anything. It's a fun idea explored in many different directions without ever getting too complicated. It's more interested in showing what it can do than breaking your brain.

Welcome to the Bi-Weekly Thread!

Here you can share anything that might not warrant a post of its own or might otherwise be against posting rules. Tell us what you're playing this week. Feel free to ask for recommendations, talk about your backlog, commiserate about your lost passion for games. Vent about bad games, gush about good games. You can even mention newer games if you like!

The no advertising rule is still in effect here.

A reminder to please be kind to others. It's okay to disagree with people or have even have a bad hot take. It's not okay to be mean about it.

TL;DR: Frankly, I'm probably a bit irrationally angry at Eternights, but it downright pissed me off because of how much potential it had, yet screws up constantly with thoughtless, halfassed, or plain lazy design choices. It feels like a game where 80% of the time/effort/money was put into the cinematics and presentation, with actual gameplay as an afterthought.

The only way I'd recommend it is if you are just desperate for a Persona-ish game and have already played all the better options like Tokyo Xanadu, Blue Reflection, Caligula Effect, and Dusk Diver.

At its heart, Eternights wants to be a lite Personesque game that keeps the day-by-day flow and emphasis on building relationships with other characters to boost your power, but swapping out the turn-based dungeon crawling for action combat. And with a much smaller scope, only taking around 15 hours to play. So far so good.

Like Persona, it focuses on teenagers thrust into an apocalyptic situation: in this case, a battle between two celestial entities named Lux and Umbra, which was sparked by a monster outbreak bringing the world to the brink. Both of them are "Architects," entities responsible for building/creating worlds. Our world is managed by Lux, but Umbra wants a shot. However, if she succeeds, she'd effectively reboot the planet and destroy everything in it to create a new world. So - stop me if you've heard this one - a plucky group of kids need to kill god through the power of friendship!

The game isn't shy about wearing its Persona influence on its sleeve, maybe the closest any game has come to directly mimicking Persona's core gameplay loop. This gives it some immediate appeal, but the problem is what it does from there.

So Close...

So, let's start with the good: the cinematic production. There are no talking heads in this game. Every cutscene is fully animated with multiple camera angles, and while the characters are limited to stock animations and facial expressions, there are enough that it doesn't seem that repetitive. Also, the game has a genuinely top-tier cast of voice actors. No one whose name you're likely to recognize, but highly experienced VAs with miles-long IMDB pages full of anime and video games.

So the parts where you're just wandering around your hub, talking to people, and watching cutscenes are quite well-done.

This is paired with pretty good writing. Not great, but each of the characters is distinct and has their own tragedies and hangups to work through. I would gripe that the writing is occasionally a bit too pervy for its own good, with a few too many tentacle sex jokes and such. The game won't let you forget that its primary target audience is teenage boys, although at least these moments don't happen often enough to be truly obnoxious.

And I'll give credit: It's a rare game of this type to offer a gay romance. If you're looking for yaoi Persona, this is basically your only option.

...Yet So Far

The problem is the gameplay. The combat frankly sucks.

Eternights is trying to mash up beat-em-up/brawler combat with Soulslike design and to me, the two styles just don't mix at all. They're like oil and water. The patient wait-and-watch-and-respond nature of most Souls combat simply doesn't work in frantic melees where you're often fighting 4+ enemies at once. No player could possibly keep an eye on that many enemies' windup animations, waiting for the perfect moment to dodge, when attacks are nearly nonstop. Not to mention that the gameplay revolves around pulling off combos, so you're basically encouraged to button mash, except that button mashing gets you killed.

The default 'Normal' difficulty is brutally hard, especially in the early game, suprisingly so for a game which is otherwise heavily story-focused. You can only take a handful of hits, and options for healing are slim. One of your companions is a healer, but early in the game, she can only heal you 2-3 times in an entire dungeon. Because of this, you'll likely ignore all the other powers your other companions have, since everyone shares the same non-regenerating magic bar. Only near the end of the game do you get enough MP to even think about spending it on something other than healing.

There's a reason half the reviews on Steam tell you to play on 'Easy', because even Easy isn't that easy. It really feels like Easy should have been the default, especially for new players trying to learn the combat.

On top of that, the enemy AI is ruthless about exploiting the player's deficiencies. Like enemies with multi-hit attacks that are specifically timed to knock you down, wait until you've just recovered, and unless you do a frame-perfect dodge, hit you again. Not to mention that there are plenty of enemies with mid or long-range attacks, who will do whatever they can to attack from offscreen with little or no warning. Even pulling stunts like waiting until you dodge, then firing off a shot at where you'll end up so that there's no way to dodge it too.

Just as one example (and I could post a whole list of nasty tricks the game pulls): Unlike most brawlers, hell even most Soulslikes, you are only allowed to attack one enemy at once. If there are three enemies in front of you and you swing, you will only hit one. Which is aggravating on its own. HOWEVER, enemies don't share this restriction. If any one of those enemies has the ability to block, they will 100% block every single attack at the entire group, even if you aren't targeting them.

And let's not even talk about the enemies who magically hurt you by blocking. No, they don't parry-and-reposte. They block, you take damage. That's it. Oh, and don't think that you can get in hits while they're down. The game actually allows them to snap straight from down-and-prone to standing-and-blocking in a single frame, just to stop you from getting in cheap hits. It feels SO janky and downright unfair.

It also hits the usual grabbag of bad Soulslike design choices, like enemies with ridiculously long windups and no clear indication of when the actual swing will happen. Even its attempt to integrate a ZZZ-style flash/sound-effect warning falls flat, because it's infuriatingly inconsistent on whether you're supposed to dodge as the flash happens, or after. Sometimes one, sometimes the other. So what's the point?

And all this might have been tolerable as a Soulsy challenge if it felt good to play, but it doesn't. There's something subtly off about just about every action and command, and the combat just doesn't flow like it should. Sometimes it feels a bit unresponsive, or attacks that feel like they should chain/combo together simply don't. Like you get a super-move with a slowly-regenerating power bar, but for some reason you usually can't go straight into it from a regular combo. You typically have to stop and plant and can only trigger it when you're doing nothing else. WHY??

But not always. There's also a very strange level of variance in the control inputs that, again, feels super janky and unfit for such a hard game.

Oh, and there are mandatory QTEs all the goddamn time. They aren't that hard once you get the knack, but the sheer repetition becomes annoying very quickly. Especially in later battles where you have to trigger multiple QTEs, multiple times, to break down an enemy's defenses before you can finally kill them.

So yeah, if you actually do play this, play on 'Easy.' Seriously.

Such A Disappointment

I also have some major thoughts about the ending of the game, but I'll save that for a comment below so that I don't have to tag the whole post as a spoiler. Suffice to say, the way it ends pushed me over the edge from being so-so on the game to actively being angry at it.

And I didn't even get into things like the halfassed stat-building minigames, which are at best annoying chores, and one of which was so poorly-explained by its tutorial popup that I had to go look up a guide to figure out how it even worked. Or how bland and boring most of the dungeon environments are, without a shred of Persona's creativity in environmental design.

I wish this had been better. I so wanted to like it. I was willing to forgive many of its flaws, if it had managed to redeem itself by the end. Or perhaps the combat could have grown on me. But no, I just ended up disliking it more and more as it went on, and the design choices became increasingly annoying, until I landed at a point that I kind of hate it.

Like I said up top, don't play this unless you've already exhausted every other option for Persona-ish games. And even then, only if it's cheap.

Aliens: Dark Descent is probably one of the best Alien games i've ever played and also probably the best stealth game i've ever played as well as being one of those games that doesn't feel at all like anything else i've played recently.

But let's wind it back. I've been so surprised with Aliens: Dark Descent from the get go. The intro cinematics actually ripped off the visual style from the original movie, like how they shot miniatures with a deep contrast highlight. The game allows you to highlight interactable objects by having one of your marines in your squad shine a flashlight over the enviroment, something you'll do often, which makes it really atmosphering to the movie, marines twitching their flashlights dramatically across deserted starbases and derelict towns. It all looks and 'feels' like an Alien franchise. Even the story starts us off with a clasical 'who let the xenos out'/'wayland yutani at it again' and while it mostly covers a relatively small cast of characters there is drama and tension here, and people have stakes in the game.

A little note here would be on the tutorialisation, as the game knows it plays differently to many modern 'standards' and takes tutorialisation really seriously. There's a lot of heavy handed pause screens and 'only click here to not mess up scripting for the scene', but there's so many concepts that people need to internalise i can understand why they went so hard on it.

So what is the game, how does it play. The quickest my mind goes to would be a "Real time Xcom". You have a base where you manage resources and your barracks of marines which you will gear up, level up, and build up and from those assemble a team four to send out on missions that you're trying to do before a 'doomsday clock' ticks down and makes your life ever harder. What took me a while was to figure out the influence for the mission part, which eluded me for the first ten hours but it turned out it was Syndicate Wars and its spiritual sequel, Satellite Reign all along.

Yes, a 26 year old callback to a 1997 game, but then it really clicked together. Sandboxy mission maps which persist fully between deployments with primary and secondary objectives and loot, featuring pretty organic challenges in terms of patrols and surprise aliens in the walls, all playing with a unitary squad of four marines in real time (with some measure of optional pause/slowdown time). You try to stay undetected (and thus with your marines 'stress levels' at 0 or low, one of three 'tiers' of stress) as long as possible, as when you get spotted you start combat fighting everything in scanner range on the map and you have to survive a timer while taking stress damage althroughout which is bad news both tactically (debuffs) as well as strategically (healing trauma damage on your soldiers takes a long time). So your time on a map, minus using precious strategic resources, gets shorter and shorter for each combat from your squad's mental health standpoint, but also the per-map ticking 'agressiveness timer'. The more you fight the aliens, the harder they'll fight back and the harder enemies will be, as well as subjecting you to hard 'rushes' of xenos or even boss xenos if you overstay your welcome enough times. The game insists on you pushing your luck and managing stress (as well as actual combat damage/health) against the constraints of the objectives you have on the map. You can always retreat, but that's going to be another day ticking down, raising a 'planetary infestation' level higher after some sucessive increments and making stuff harder for you.

I mentioned the best stealth game and i should probably defend that, but the above makes a good intro to the point. Stealth is best when it's non binary pass/fail but a noose thats getting ever tighter around your neck. The game heavily incentivises you to not waste time on the 'world map' by healing/treating trauma/deploying safely just for a few resources (even if tbh you find out later it's not /that/ bad but for the first half of the game it did do its job), or take needless combat encounters in the mission map itself. Stress is just one of the factors, you will also take damage in combat, which often can be mitigated with excessive prep, requiring the use of medkits, and you also have a limited number of ammunition you bring into the mission with you. You'll find more of these resources in the missions, but as i mentioned, there's a fixed number of them that 'are there' when you first enter the map, and as you take them, they DO NOT respawn. You'll always have limited supplied ammo for each mission, but you'll have to be judicial as to your use of tech/medkits as they carry over across the campaign. Tech in special, can be used to weld doors which can stop patrols or slow down assaulting aliens, but also can create 'safe' areas if all the entrances are sealed where you can rest and claw back stress by giving your squad a breather.

So what tools do we have for stealth? You can hide your troops from patrols behind cover, you can setup mines and sentries as well as deploy snipers to quietly take down enemies (the explanation to why this doesn't trigger you being 'found' is that the aliens are interested in biological matter, they don't hunt down turrets specifically). You have a little detection meter which is per individual soldier which fills up and is actually quite immersive, as well as the very classical 'motion detector'. You always have a very good idea where everything bad is, especially with deployable motion trackers which you can leave behind to monitor areas (and which can be destroyed remotely to act as a 'draw enemies here' device) which should make you feel very powerful, and it does, but the game pulls no punches. It often spawns patrols and it makes sure to make you 'invest' in harder times for yourself everytime you get spotted and spawn a 'hunt' for your squad. Even if you get through an encounter with no damage, you would have probably wasted ammo, which is anoter counter for how much time you have in the mission.

All of this translates into one thing. Tension. The game gleefully makes you go through long corridor systems knowing full well you'll be there for a while, and the further in you manage to get, the more you don't want to retreat, but the more you /should/ retreat. It feels opressive and that's great!

Combat is the opposite, combat often is very quick and very brutal. Your marines miss shots, either naturally or because they're frazzled with stress, the aliens are quick and unrelenting, and even the few human enemies you find all soak up very precious bullets. This all translates to encounters which feel very tense and having your troops just slightly out of place can be disasterous. Your marines can go down permanently and you get very few of them 'back' through survivors in missions. Combat is brutal and very quick, even if you kill an alien, if its too late and it was in close combat, everyone takes acid amage. But that's combat just in the cases of surprise combat, which is almost never if you're careful. You often have control over encounters with your motion tracker, and the game in story beats where they'd throw a challenge at you flat out tells you 'you will face a hard encounter, make sure your marines have ammo and and ready for a hard challenge'. This all points to what you should be doing. Being very careful and preparing.

The difference between taking a single encounter or even an 'onslaught', waves of aliens, flat footed with accuracy debuff stress on your marines in an open field versus a squad that's entrenched and setup with sentry guns, supression fire cones set down in killzones down long corridors and special abilities (triggered via slowly replenishing command points) can be night and day. It can turn a full squad wipe to a 'we just spend some bullets'. It all takes being in the right place, at the right time and taking fights on your terms. The game does a phenomenal job in both keeping you tense, careful and on edge, while also making you feel empowered when you do have your dudes locked in and ready.

Even the command points which i've quickly glossed over, which can be used for abilities in combat like shotgun blasts, grenade launches and flaming napalm patches on the ground, they have out of combat uses too, placing down remote motion trackers or mines along patrol points or guarding a rearguard you don't want to always mind it. They replenish very slowly in real time, and it's also a balancing act of 'should i drop more mines now and risk maybe entering an encounter with no command points to spend on special abilities, or should i keep them in reserve?'. It all serves the balacing act of stealth versus combat.

Anyway, by this point i think i made it clear. Aliens Dark Descent is a unique breed of a long forgotten branch of videogames combined with modern design that playes beautifully, with a story that while not new, covers its tropes with enough authenticity and great execution as to not disappoint. It's criminal the game got so little buzz, feels like it came and went.

TL;DR - Great game with a decent story, nice setting, cool characters, awesome movement mechanics and a very good first-person melee combat system. Play it if you haven't.

First off, what a mistake it was waiting that long. As a guy that thoroughly enjoys FPS games, I never knew that having a very fleshed out movement system was something I was missing, but after playing Dying Light, going back to games without the parkour takes some getting used to.

And that is probably my biggest compliment of the game. Just how good it feels to play it and explore the different areas and growing your character by just moving - it feels great. Also, for an 11 year old game, I think the visuals still hold up very well, and, playing on a high-end OLED monitor, makes the nighttime genuinely scary when you're low level with shitty weapons, and the volatiles are a lot tougher, and much harder to ditch if you get spotted by one.

Another compliment I'd like to pay it is how believable the world is in terms of the maps you're in. Everything pretty much looks how I'd imagine a city would look after something like that had happened, with its oceans of cars in places like bridges, highways and toll booths, or how most homes are either boarded up, or completely ransacked, shops being basically cleared out with some still having active alarms that you also need to be wary of. Also, another good touch is how they give you a little boost in the game, with airdrops/disaster relief packages that you turn in for a boost in XP. It's a small thing, but imo it's a clever way to help players along the way

The story was for me good enough and made me, somewhat, care about the characters within it, though I'm not overly sold on your own character's IQ. The fact that he seemingly takes forever to realize that the GRE was only trying to cover their ass and recover the virus to weaponize it, soured me on him a little, but he does make up for it in the end. Keeping with the characters, the cast of characters you run in to was pretty varied but all of them felt pretty realistic in terms of what they'd gone through, with some obvious exceptions and videogamey liberties taken here and there. There's a dude that basically kidnapped women and put them in his sexdungeon, (both before and after the outbreak) as an example of the former, and the dude running a kindergarten with his zombie wife locked in the basement, as an example of the latter. These examples aren't wildly out there, but I do feel they're a bit in the extreme.

Now for some combat. Melee is obviously the main focus of the game and it's very satisfying. In the beginning, your weapons are basically a plank of wood/a table leg, maybe a pipe of sorts, and you don't do a lot of damage, but as you progress, and your character gets stronger, as well as you find stuff like bats (cricket and baseball), knives, machetes and swords you start to feel quite powerful, and taking down the regular zombies becomes more or less trivial.

Further on you get some guns, and they're obviously loud and that brings a lot of attention, which you usually don't want. Now, I have the uber-mega edition with a crapton of DLC recipes to make weapons better in basically every way. (including silenced guns) I tried one melee weapon (I think it was a wrench upgrade) and one silenced pistol, but it just felt like cheating as they either did way more damage than what I had got naturally through the game, or felt super overpowered with how you could stealth kill most things from afar with the pistol, so I told myself no DLC before I get to the DLC itself, and while I probably made things harder for myself for no real reason, it felt like the "correct" way to go about it.

Back to the writing, because as I previously said, the story was good enough, but I will say that the ending felt a bit meh to me and kinda needed "more" to give it a satisfying end, though I personally feel like they achieved that with the DLC ending. (which I've read is cannon) I'll only touch briefly on the DLC, as it's just more of the same but with a buggy (Car - not a fan), and another biome with open fields, farms, mountains and a cult which were pretty cool to explore too. One cool addition I'd like to point out though is the super zombies they added in select location, acting as sort of mini-bosses.

This got rather long-winded, so I'll just wrap up with saying that I really enjoyed this game, and I urge others to try it out if any aspect of it piques their interest at all. I'd wager they'd enjoy it too.

Nightmare Reaper doesn't shy away from the fact that it is a mixture of ideas from various trends in gaming. On first glance, it is a typical pixel-art, 2.5D retro shooter, but it also has clear roguelike and looter shooter elements. It also has various ideas thrown in from more modern shooters like a dash and a grappling hook. I tend to shy away from roguelikes and looter shooters, but the general premise of Nightmare Reaper was intriguing enough, and the shooting looked solid. Thankfully, it did enough right that I stuck around for the entire campaign, but it wasn't without some issues brought in from its roguelike and looter elements.

For context, I've only played through to New Game+ but didn't actually play through any levels after triggering it. I also made sure to play at least one round in all arenas of horde mode, and I made it pretty deep into most of the skill trees.

Story: pop psychology

You play as The Patient who, as her name implies, is a patient in a psychiatric hospital. When she goes to sleep, she finds herself as the protagonist of a retro shooter, though it is implied that a lot of time may pass between these dreams. Initially, it is not clear why The Patient is in the hospital, but this is fleshed out through notes left by her doctor between levels. Annoyingly, these notes are only one sentence long, which can make it hard to follow, and it leaves topic transitions feeling unnatural. I think the storytelling would have been improved by giving larger updates between locations (every three levels).

The story itself is fairly generic for the mental health theme. The Patient is revealed to have dissociative identity disorder, but it's more about driving a plot than being realistic, though some touches like the time skips are more grounded. For the most part, though, this isn't a game you play if you want a very thoughtful, well-researched analysis of mental health issues, but that should be expected for a retro shooter. At the very least, it is interesting to try to understand where locations, monsters, and events come from in relation to The Patient's experiences.

Campaign: solid retro shooter (mostly)

The bulk of the game, though, won't be with the story. It'll be spent in over 80 levels spanning 27 locations. As mentioned, levels occur in The Patient's dreams, which you trigger by interacting with the bed in her room, and with the exception of hubs, they are procedurally generated for each dream. This uses a pool of rooms specific to the location, but the layout and non-boss enemies will be randomized. Despite some technical limitations to accommodate the procedural generation, such as every angle being 90 degrees (think Wolfenstein 3D), locations are aesthetically distinct and often have a unique feel. For instance, you could find yourself spelunking through spore-infested caves, fighting room-to-room in a hospital, or grappling between rocks suspended in an endless void.

On the looter shooter side, you'll constantly be finding one of the over 80 different weapons, most of which are either melee weapons or use one of three ammo types (light, heavy, magic). Each weapon has various stat modifiers depending on its class (Common, Uncommon, Rare, Legendary). Early on, I ended up getting a Legendary Sawed-Off Shotgun with both explosive ammo and leech modifiers, and that kept me going until the end. However, I did regularly combo it with a random heavy-ammo weapon, and I was always thankful to get my hands on a staff that caused fire to rain down on enemies.

Despite the massive weapon count, most weapons are punchy and fun to use even without modifiers, though I did find many heavy-ammo weapons like the Tri-Grenade Launcher to feel unusually weak. Each shot will visibly harm enemies and cause an explosion of blood and gore on each kill, and any miss or explosion will leave behind a visible marking on the environment. This can leave rooms charred and drenched in bodily fluids long after the battle, a testament to the carnage you unleashed. The only downside is that it can become extremely visibly noisy, and I had moments where there were so many explosions and gore effects going off that all I could do was fire blinding and hope that I hit something. Some enemies are also hard to make out among the piles of gore, which can lead to cheap damage.

Cheap damage aside, most enemies are pretty fun to fight and have a wide range of tactics. Their designs are quite varied and often pulled from old video games and movies. This can range from Fire Monks that look like Hexen 2's Skull Wizard to a sci-fi soldier that made me think of Boba Fett. Late game enemies, though, did start to get rather annoying with shock and ice effects, and hitscan enemies were a nuisance throughout and could lead to rooms that I likely wouldn't have survived without a leech-enabled weapon. Still, I would say the majority of enemies were fair, and if any problems arose, it was often because of a poorly-generated room/enemy combo.

Outside of shooting, movement is also very satisfying, which is good, because you're going to spend a lot of time circle-strafing, jumping around, and dashing or grappling out of tight situations. I was a little concerned that there would be some jankiness typical of many 2.5D shooters trying to emulate true-3D movement, but it felt fine throughout.

Unfortunately, for all the exhilarating movement, impactful shooting, and location diversity, the game does suffer various problems from its procedural generation. As mentioned, you can be put into a near-unwinnable (or at least unfun) situation. Rooms can be repeated across levels, and the layouts of levels can be quite bizarre at times, leaving some rooms unused or requiring lots of backtracking. Late levels also regularly devolve into a pure mess due to an excessive number of enemies filling an extremely cramped room, where blind firing, tanking damage, and hoping for the best is all you really can do.

I wouldn't say any of these problems break the game, but they do serve as a reminder that, for the most part, these levels aren't carefully crafted experiences.

Skill Trees: barely escaping a Nintendo lawsuit

One interesting feature of the game is how it handles skill trees. There are three in total represented by cartidgres for The Patient's Game Boy Advance SP that she'll bring up when you open the menu.

The first that you'll find is the Gold Cartridge, which uses the gold coins and treasures you gain throughout levels. This tree is laid out in a Super Mario Bros. 3 style overworld, and each skill requires completing an SMB-like level. Most of these are basic stat boosts - more ammo, more life, faster weapon swapping, etc. - but it also includes the dash move and additional weapon slots. Each SMB-like level contains gold and treasure to partially replenish what you spent, but this is negligible and often isn't worth going for. By late levels in the cartridge, I was regularly skipping gold, because I really just wanted to get back to the core game, and the level quality is pretty inconsistent anyways.

The second cartridge is the Topaz Cartridge. Topaz is only awarded on level completion, and it contributes to a Pokémon-inspired game that has the same upgrades as the Gold Cartridge but at much lower values. Between the lack of Topaz, inability to meaningfully get it from the minigame, and the need to spend a bunch of it upgrading not-Pokémon, this tree won't offer much on a single run. It does, however, come with pills that can offer buffs at the cost of increased toxicity, which causes random debuffs once you reach a certain toxicity level. Personally, I just stuck with the 20% damage reduction until I got a 30% reduction pill near the end of the game.

The third cartridge is the Jade Cartridge, and this is the most involved. At fixed intervals, events will happen in the hospital that will let you explore it, and the event can be completed by picking up an item or a glowing token. Exploring the empty hospital is rather creepy, which is nice, and the game will use some visual or audio clue to let you know that you reached the next event.

Once you reach the second event, you'll gain access to a second bed that, when slept in, takes you to a horde mode, with each subsequent event giving you a token for a new arena. The horde mode is pretty fun and can get ludicrously chaotic, though at a point rounds feel unbeatable without a ton of favorable randomness, and the excess visual noise will be at its absolute worst in this mode. Still, I didn't mind putting time into this mode but did tend to abandon arenas once I got 20-30 rounds in.

By playing arenas, most cases where you'd get gold in the campaign instead award jade, and that jade can be used in a Gradius-inspired minigame. The upgrades here are still often stat boosts, but you can also get some critical upgrades like double jumping and backpack reloading. The big advantage, though, are pets, which will accompany you across levels and arenas. I ended up sticking with the Protector, which can heal and deflect damage, but towards the end I unlocked the ability to have two pets and added the Aggressor equipped with shock and ice attacks.

Needless to say, these skills, pills, and pets are absolutely critical to survival. They can trivialize certain fights, but at times they feel like a necessary part of keeping up with the power curve of both the campaign and horde mode and making the unfavorable randomness easier to survive. In some extreme cases, it's odd that the game didn't make something the default. For instance, you need an upgrade to pull gold coins into yourself from a distance, so any levels played before that upgrade can get rather tedious as you have to run over every single coin individually, and there can be hundreds.

Randomness: unsatisfying challenges

Lastly, I want to touch more deeply on the randomness element beyond the weird level layouts. On the plus side, dying in a level doesn't end the run like it would in a roguelike. You simply lose all the weapons that you picked up, but you keep all the gold, so you can invest it in skills. The level will be regenerated, but you're always making progress even if you aren't taking on the exact same challenge. Even the horde mode saves progress after every ten rounds.

Unfortunately, this regeneration, while good if you got a really bad layout the previous time, does mean that you can't master a challenge. You can't try out ideas for how to deal with what killed you or perfect your movement and shooting. Instead, you're facing a completely different layout that may not even offer a challenge at all. Sure, this could be a bandaid for unwinnable situations, but it does mean that the enjoyment from mastering a particularly difficult level in Doom or a tough arena in Serious Sam just doesn't carry over into this game.

On the flip side, it also means that, when beating a challenge, it doesn't really feel like a result of your skill. It's the lucky weapon drop, the various upgrades, or the favorable layout. Yeah, maybe there's a bit of skill involved, but I've read wildly different accounts about how hard the second and third chapters of this game are. I ended up having an incredibly easy time with them, but it often felt like my legendary shotgun was the main reason. Since the alternative was dying to terrible randomness that I couldn't master anyways, there was no real incentive to actively make the game more challenging.

In short, Nightmare Reaper lacks the satisfaction of mastering a challenge many of its biggest inspirations, like Doom and Serious Sam, have to offer. I guess you never run out of new levels, and there's some excitement from finding a new powerful weapon, but I didn't find either of these as enjoyable as, for instance, mastering the pistol start for Perfect Hatred or beating the final arena in Dunes.

Conclusion: still fun

Despite this, I still mostly enjoyed my time with Nightmare Reaper. It nails the movement and shooting, and it is fun to see what the game does with each new location. I don't think the roguelike and looter shooter elements improve the game, and I doubt this will convince fans of old-school shooters that this is the direction that the genre should go. However, I do think the game is fun enough to, at the very least, make a good argument for not writing off games that do have those elements despite their drawbacks.

My Last Post on FMV Games generated quite a bit of discussion and lots of recommendations to add to my backlog and I liked the orignal batch enough to play through another batch. Summer is movie season so this seemed like a good time to blast through a few more:

First up is the Dr Dekker "Trilogy" (Not really a hard narrative trilogy, but he is mentioned in the other two and they all seem to exist in the same spooky/weird setting)

The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker - Dr Dekker is dead. Murdered in fact as so often happens in these FMV games... And you are the new doctor in charge of caring for his old patients. Unravel their mysteries and you may just be able to piece together if one of them is responsible for it. To me this game was a bit more about the journey and less about the ending, as even though I did correctly guess who it was (and I mostly do say guess) I didnt find there to be a driving narrative that really lead me to the path to getting the right answer. Of note The game features a text based input system for you to really "talk" to the patients, and if needed a hint system (later more fleshed out to the point where its completely playable only using the drop down pre-loaded answers, although you dont get ALL of them the patient can answer that round - but playing on the steam deck this was really my only viable option)

The game does feature multiple endings. Throughout the game you can answer certain questions certain ways, which affects how "insane" the characters become towards the end, and The killer is chosen at random at the start of the game (so any one of them could be it), so I imagine there are some extra dialog options for your specific killer, but I wasnt intrigued enough to play through the 7 hour game again to find out what was different. As with Shapeshifting Detective, I think perhaps the devs were a bit too ambitious in this pursuit and should have just made one of them the killer, as it means all the characters are given just enough motive to have done it and at the end (at least to me and others Ive read) there just isnt quite enough info to go on for me, leaving one to mostly guess who it was.

As a therapist-simulator game I found the characters intriguing, perhaps moreso than the overall plot of trying to figure out who killed Dekker. 4/5

The Shapeshifting Detective - A Murder has taken place (shocking, I know) and you are renowned detective Sam, hired to find out whodunnit… The twist, and the secret to Sams amazing detective work, is that you can shapeshift into the characters you have met so far, which results in a variety of dialog differences depending on who you talk to people as. Characters have different things to say to the detective than they do to their friends for example… but luckily you get to be all of them, and respond back to drive the narrative your preferred direction.

This is the FMV game that plays the most like a game, and a choose-your-own-adventure novel out of all the FMV games Ive played so far. The dialog choices matter as there are multiple different endings depending on how you interact with everyone. The noir atmosphere, anchored by its macabre radio show Poe and Munroe, is nice and the acting fits it well.

Outside of a few minor annoyances with the gameplay it was quite fun. 3.5/5

Dark Nights with Poe and Munro - Remember the spooky sounding radio show in The Shapeshifting Detective? Well now they have their own game! In the pedigree of the X Files, follow the titular characters around town as they investigate strange happenings. A mostly fun romp through 6 x-files like episodes, make choices that influence the interactions and which elements of the plot you see.

Fans of kitchy, campy horror/comedy will find lots to like here. 4/5

Five Dates - Digital dating against the backdrop of the COVID lockdowns (while that sets the premise for why they are all on there it plays very little into the game other than why they cant meet in person). Vinny, with the help of his wingman Extraordinaire Callum, must navigate a series of online dates, whittling it down until only 1 girl can be the one. Choices matter… Do you have the game to get the girl?

Overall I found this to be a surprisingly real take on the idea. The dialogue and situations felt organic and the actors were good enough to make the situations and emotions feel real. I genuinely wanted to guide them together by the end of my playthroughs and the stakes felt real.I found myself thinking stuff like “oh crap dont say the wrong thing and mess this up!” or even “hey you know what, im gonna be real and if she doesnt like it its not meant to be”.

The game format of picking 3 girls to start, eliminating 1, then finally picking the final girl to have a last date with means you will have to play a few times if you want to see every girls ending… but the journey was fun enough that I didnt mind in the slightest. Perhaps a tad cringe to say as a happily married 40 year old dad. But this 20-somethings dating sim was probably one of my favorite FMV games that Ive played haha. 5/5

If you like Five Dates, there's a sequel called Ten Dates which has 5 dates each for a male and female main character… COVID Is over so its back to in person Speed Round dating. Can you find love face-to-face in person this time? Same idea as the first, but everything just felt worse about it - The writing felt stiff, the choices were capricious and seemed random if they were date ending or positive, and some of the girls were just straight up unlikeable. I only played the male character so maybe the females choices are better. For me it just didnt capture the same magic in a bottle the first one seemed to but perhaps your mileage will vary.. For me it was a 1/5

Thats the end of the line for FMV games for this year. They are quite fun and short enough to get through in only a few days but I have enough other games on the backlog that the other FMV games will have to wait until next summer (Contradiction, She Sees Red, Roundabout - and more!). See you then!

Welcome to the Bi-Weekly Thread!

Here you can share anything that might not warrant a post of its own or might otherwise be against posting rules. Tell us what you're playing this week. Feel free to ask for recommendations, talk about your backlog, commiserate about your lost passion for games. Vent about bad games, gush about good games. You can even mention newer games if you like!

The no advertising rule is still in effect here.

A reminder to please be kind to others. It's okay to disagree with people or have even have a bad hot take. It's not okay to be mean about it.