Arkham Horror: Mother's Embrace

Only played the first few scenarios, but had to restart twice because of game-breaking hard locks. -the settings reset every time you start the game -the very high settings turns everything to very low -the game is default capped at 30 fps with v-sync -Icons become unclickable 6 times, and I had to restart the last checkpoint. This is excluding the two times my entire scenario progress was erased. -You can't even find out what the effect of traumas are in between scenarios (where the whole point is that you're supposed to let investigators rest so they can recover from traumas - making it a guessing game). This is not a detective game. It's basically a resource management game, with turnbased combat and a few rpg elements that serve more as an annoyance than anything else. You try to balance your sanity with your hp, and if your santity reaches 0 your investigator gets a trauma. If you interact with environment poorly (like, try to open a box the wrong way) or take too long in combat the mythos gauge advances. The mythos mechanic is varies from gamebreaking to unimportant - "you move slightly slower in this specific fight" vs. "you lose every sanity check in this scenario". I played it through, but should have just restarted. The story is slightly engaging, but is standard lovecraft fare. They tout the "choose your protagonist" bit but it doesn't matter at all. The investigators barely interact with eachother, and they never comment on character specific things. It makes them feel like a It's a linear narrative, with no choices to make. It has snappy pacing, though. In its current state, it's more of a 2-star game, but there's potential here. It moves briskly, has a bit of fun humour and when the combat works, it can be engaging. It just needs a whole lot more polish and bug fixes.

If you're into Arkham games you'll probably like this, but on it's own it's pretty mediocre and way too short. It's a $9 category game at best. The combat is fun and challenging. What kept me going was I always found some new gadget/weapon that I couldn't wait to try out in the next battle. Combat becomes way too easy though with gunsligners (Ranged: Strong). The last few scenarios were a cakewalk with 2 shooters (Jenny and Roland) and a healer/buffer (Marie). Some of the puzzles actually require you to think, which was a pleasant surprise. Controls are a bit wonky but you can get used to it, it's possible to play the game comfortably with the left hand only at the keyboard. You can pretty much forget about the mouse. Characters walk agonizingly slowly, but since the maps are tiny, and there's not that much backtracking, it's not a big issue. The animations of the investigators are quite bland/generic, I didn't really feel emotionally attached to any character. The story is "meh", a random Lovecraftian short story, feels as if you're playing a single board game session. I have only encountered one deadlock bug, the UI froze in some inconsistent state during combat where I couldn't do anything, had to restart from the latest checkpoint. Some patches could make it a slightly better experience Probably worth waiting for a sale. 3/5 overall.

I bought this title blindly. I watched the trailer and was sold. I'm a simple man, I see a Lovecraftian Murder Mystery; I buy. Arkham Horror tells a story and encourages you to explore and read into the lore over anything else. It is 80% Exploration and about 20% Turned-Based Tactical RPG. If you're expecting a deep gameplay experience, this ain't it. The combat is far from difficult (My playthrough that took around 7.5 hours resulted in one game over). Just position your team on the field and heal them when necessary. There is very little thought needed. Ranged Weapons take out every foe before they become even remotely a threat and you're given such a surplus of items, it's rare that there is pressure to play to tactical perfection. For some, this probably sounds terrible. For me who just wanted to enjoy a story? Everything I could have hoped for. Combat ties the game together, but it's not a focus. Throughout the game you'll need to have good intuition when searching areas because if you approach gathering items or searching for clues incorrectly you will gradually make a Mythos Clock advance and when that happens your characters obtain debuffs that will be an issue. It's a neat little gimmick. Fail a bunch? There goes some sanity and now your character is more prone to damage at half health. The only way to lose these debuffs is to leave them off the field for a full chapter. It really helps encourage bringing other characters into your party! I really dug this and wanted to bring it up. The GOG character limit is about to hit, so I'll just bring up the bugs. Yes, there are a few. Characters walking endlessly, animation jank, enemies sometimes don't attack and riveting text like "item03.jpg/description" pop up on a rare occasion. Never once did it cause an issue with progression for me. Overall, I really enjoyed this game. It was a fun story with laid back combat that left me feeling engaged but never overwhelmed. Well worth the price of admission.

Ok, these initial impressons are coming from someone who has never played the board game, but has played the hell out of Elder Sign: Omens (digital). The point is that even though I can't say how this game measures up to the original, I do have some basic idea what's going on from playing a different Lovecraftian game from Fantasy Flight. That said, I'm not exactly sure what's going on in this game :) It bills itself as a detective game, and starts off by throwing some rote clue-finding at you, but there's no challenge to it other than trying to avoid advancing the Mythos meter (which itself seems a bit arbitrary, since it wasn't clear to me why I shouldn't, for example, try to break open a chest I couldn't unlock). After that, the detecting seems to move to the backseat, at least at the start. The overwhelming initial impression is that this is some kind of turn-based combat game. I've had several battles so far, which combine the AP system of X-COM with the non-grid-based movement of, say, Baldur's Gate. This is not an ideal marriage, imho, as it is anything but clear where I need to station my investigators so as to block the enemy's movement, or how many AP I will expend to move from A to B until I actually do it, etc. I would call it semi-clunky. Another weirdness is the way the dead lady speaks in tandem with the investigators investigating her death. It starts happening immediately, with no explanation. It took me a second to realize what was going on. Also, the UI also has some console quirks that will drive PC users batty until they figure them out. The method for dragging and dropping inventory items is non-standard, for example, and difficult to figure out even after having it explained in the tutorial. The rest--graphics, sound, music, etc.--are all perfectly fine (there's a "Very High" graphics setting in the Options that basically turns everything off instead of on, though. "High" is the one you're looking for). Right now I'm going with 3.5 stars.