So, I finally got my boxed edition of Soul Reaver 1 & 2 Remastered recently. I've been meaning to beat those since forever as I was a huge fan of Blood Omen back in the day and also enjoyed BO2 quite a bit. A review of the remastered collection has reminded me that SR2 builds so heavily on the story of BO1 that you can't really make any sense of it if you don't know what happened there.

I was just gonna read some recap of BO1 but then it turned out that the PS1 version is available on PS4/PS5 and I ended up beating Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain for the first time in about 22 years.

Now, the PS1 version is objectively inferior to the PC version for one simple reason: the load times. It's not a big issue that it takes a couple of seconds to enter a new area but what's pretty jarring is that even opening and closing the inventory screen involves two loading screens and you have to use that one quite a bit in this game. Sometimes you will need a specific weapon just to smash a single obstacle and the whole procedure of equipping and unequipping it will probably take more than half a minute. There are panels for quick access to currently equipped spells and items but nothing for weapons and even those have awkward delays. This stuff is why I abandoned my last attempted playthrough on PS Vita two years ago.

This time I powered through it. It remained annoying but eventually I honestly got used to it. There have been some advantages to beating the game this way, though. For starters, besides having the luxury of the console's rest mode, the emulator also comes with save states and even a rewind feature, both of which have allowed me to actually save some time. And this version of BO1 comes with trophies and I honestly enjoyed collecting those in this case.

Now, about the game itself.

GOG's description of BO1 says "one of the darkest games of all time" and boy, is that appropriate. There have been other dark and graphic games but Blood Omen stands out among those in several ways. This is a game where you play an evil character. Kain's sole motivations are revenge and a lust for blood and power. He is arrogant, opportunistic and devoid of any empathy. But the kicker: his constant inner monologues are delivered so poetically and with such gravitas that he comes of as very intelligent and extremely charismatic.

This is a game where you will regularly pass crying women who are shackled to dungeon walls and your options range from sucking their blood for health to just leaving them there (or killing them for no reason whatsoever). You will walk through a town that was hit by the plague and is now completely covered in rotting bodies and the protagonist is not only completely unphased by this, he will gladly suck the remaining survivors dry. And you find yourself rooting for this guy!

And unlike games like Blood, Postal or even Manhunt, Blood Omen does not defend itself with silliness nor by populating the world exclusively with even worse scum than the protagonist. This is a believable medieval world that is not only populated by monsters and evil sorcerers but also regular folk and their protectors. And Kain's quest is a serious one of epic scale - the fate of the world depends on him.

While the story itself is rather basic and not nearly as clever or impressive as it seemed to me back in the day, all of this stuff is what makes Blood Omen worth playing to this day. It really is a game unlike any other.

Now, in terms of gameplay BO is a Zelda clone. Traverse and explore a huge world that gradually opens up in top-down 2D, kill enemies using melee and some spells or items, gain new skills like shape-shifting that allow overcoming obstacles in already visited areas, solve various puzzles in dungeons.

Some say that the game's combat has aged terribly but that's not true: it was pretty bad all along. Enemies don't have robust patterns with specific counter-strategies. They will often stupidly swing their weapons at you when you're just outside their range or attack in the wrong direction when you approach them at just the right angle. Especially in the early game the combat is just a wonky mess. However, it becomes pretty solid later on as you gain more useful weapons and a surprisingly impressive and functional set of spells.

But more importantly, in my opinion BO's exploration is more enjoyable than Zelda's. In my memory it had a typical Zelda style world structure but actually it does not. The game's critical path is basically just one long winding tunnel with dungeons along the way and you never find yourself rechecking every corner of the world for that one obstacle that will lead you to the next skill. You just follow the path and fight boss after boss. Critical skills and items are virtually impossible to miss.

However, it is riddled with optional corners and entire dungeons and backtracking and exploration are greatly rewarded with lots of health and mana upgrades, tons of consumbales and even a powerful spell or two. I wish there had been a few more meaningful optional rewards, like additional weapons and armor, but honestly, I had a great time as it is.

And this brings me back to the trophies: I've had a great time collecting those. There are or course several trophies for collectables but in either case you have to find only a fraction of all the stuff in the game. The thresholds are set so low that you are driven to explore and do some optional dungeons and puzzles but without it ever becoming a drag.

One trophy stands in that it literally can't be done without a guide as it involves visiting a location that the community only discovered in 2010 via reverse engineering and only in 2020 did it find out how to get there without any hacks. Following a guide it can be reached in like 15 minutes, however. And I think that trophy is a beautiful testament to the series' legendary legacy and its fanatically devoted fandom.

Anyway, long story short: in terms of gameplay Blood Omen is honestly just an okay title but as an experience I appreciate it no less today (and perhaps even a little more) than I did over two decades ago. And boy, what I wouldn't give for a remake.

Carnal Instinct UE5 In Dev (Steam)

Debated about whether this should go here since it's still in dev and getting around 3 or 4 updates a year. Then again, released games these days (like No Mans Sky) still get major updates 7 years after release. The fact is that even in what the devs describe as Pre-Alpha for the UE5 version, it runs and feels better than any AAA UE5 based game I've played so far...and I've played a lot of them.

Anyway, the game is a great idea and has very high production values for what is really just a small developer. It's basically a NSFW open world game...I'd say closest to a Ubisoft Assassin's Creed style of game. The new version is being ported to UE5 and runs and looks great. For a NSFW adult game, the fantasy story and lore and even combat are actually quite good. The main story branches and side quests currently take you to around 15 hours of play time and then leave you on a cliff hanger. Honestly, I doubt it's one of those stories that ever going to finish anyway. It's going to be like the above mentioned No Man's Sky and similar where it is just constantly updated.

This is the first ever In Dev game I've ever played because I just don't trust them. But I was assured that this one was fun and polished even if it stays exactly where it is now, so I picked it up on sale. I don't regret it buying and enjoyed it a lot. I will actually restart and fully replay this when any major additions come.

So I just beat Soul Reaver Remastered on PS5.

I don't think I've ever played Soul Reaver for more than an hour before. I think that as a kid I struggled with navigating its huge and convoluted world, found its core mechanics stressful and failed to find anything particularly appealing or rewarding that would justify the struggle of playing it. It didn't help that I was a PC gamer through and through at the time and had a certain aversion to games with typical console game design and aesthetics.

I gave it another go when it was released on GOG but was immediately put off by the lack of analogue controls in the PC version. I decided that I would eventually give it another go through the Dreamcast version but put that off for as long as it took them to make these remasters.

Today I'm (probably?) a bit wiser and more open-minded than I was as a kid and so I did manage appreciate and beat the game this time. That doesn't change the fact that I'm frankly utterly disappointed by the game, especially given its legendary status and my love for Blood Omen.

I'm aware that it's an extremely early 3D metroidvania and it is mind-blowing how well Crystal Dynamics managed to execute this formula so early. It downright feels like a PS2 game with PS1 graphics. That's impressive. However, I've also had trouble getting particularly excited about anything here, having played so many later titles in the genre which make Soul Reaver seem like little more than a prototype of the genre. Unlocking the ability to swim or to phase through grates is adorably underwhelming after the likes Arkham City and Darksiders. And also its unique mechanic of shifting between two planes which give you two different versions of the same places feels underdeveloped and unimpressive in retrospect.

Anyway, the main appeal of the Legacy of Kain series are the universe and story, so my expectations were very high in this regard. I'll take a wild guess that it's mainly the sequel that is responsible for the series' legendary status because I couldn't find anything particularly brilliant in this area here. In this game Raziel is a simple character on a simple quest (of revenge) in a simple and barren world and simply killing a series of bosses. It basically mimics the pattern of Blood Omen but is even more minimalistic in its execution. There's just a handful of meaningful moments and frankly those feel more like quick recaps of stuff that you actually experienced in Blood Omen and build-up for epic stuff that does not happen in this game.

I presume that most of this is due to the limitations of this being an early open-world 3D action adventure. Soul Reaver is basically set in the post-apocalypse of Blood Omen and the once huge and lively Nosgoth is now just a set of ruins populated by some monsters and a handful human survivors without any purpose whatsoever. I do get why we got this instead of a 3D Blood Omen and for the first couple of hours this actually worked for me and I was genuinely engaged in this whole quest. But the closer I got to the end, the more I felt that the game's world is just a generic set of random early 3D dungeons (I do realize that the developers actually put a ton of thought into the locations and how they relate to the series' bigger universe but I don't think that you will feel that without obsessively analysing the game). And in the absence of Kain's equally psychopathic and poetic inner musings, I failed to find anything particularly clever or impressive about the game's entire story and universe here.

At one point Raziel learns of one unbelievably evil and downright sacrilegious thing that Kain has done. I think it's supposed to be the big twist and key moment of character development in the game that redefines both Raziel and Kain. I was like "that's it? have you met Kain before?". And the kicker: when Raziel tells another character of this secret, they just shrug it off. Seriously, I find it utterly hilarious that someone wrote a twist so underwhelming that their own characters are unimpressed it by it. And Raziel himself goes from wanting to kill his family to still wanting to kill his family. I think that perfectly captures the game's narrative as a whole. After the intro basically nothing happens, not even when you beat the game since you just get an abrupt cliff-hanger ending.

Otherwise: the game is decent. There's surprisingly little combat even though it's very good for a PS1 game. It's kinda cool that (unless you're at full health) you have to use items or the environment to kill enemies. The main optional unlockables are kinda shit because they are all samey ultimate powers that help you with the combat and you really don't need any help with that. And the game is really extremely forgiving. When you run out of health you actually just turn into a spectre and can almost immediately come back, even during boss fights. You can "die", which relocates you to the start of the game but keeps your progress intact otherwise, but I have not actually managed to do that.

It's mostly a game of exploration and solving puzzles and for the most part all of that holds up very well. Trying to get all optional collectables is a pain in the ass without a guide but the main path is mostly fair and fun. It surely helps that in the remastered version the game displays an icon when you're in the range of interactive objects and also the occasional tutorial panel when you have to use a more obscure mechanic. I did have to resort to a walkthrough two times, once because of a mechanic that is not explained and once because I accidentally pulled off some speedrunner shit that breaks the game. The bosses were disappointing because they are all actually simple puzzles as well and don't even involve any actual fighting nor require much skill but I suppose that's better than super frustrating difficulty spikes.

As for the remaster's overall quality: eh. Technically it's extremely robust but it's actually a very humble upgrade in terms of presentation. The single biggest change that keeps the game from looking like a PS1 game are the detailed character models. The world geometry, lighting and draw distance are unchanged and it's amazing how little of a difference you feel when toggling the original graphics on and off. It literally happened that I accidentally turned on the original graphics and didn't even notice for a minute or two. There's a few real-time shadows now but those aren't implemented well and shine through obstacles and sometimes result in random blobs in the game world cast by objects you don't even see. What I found most disappointing is that the audio seems to be untouched and all of it, except for the voice overs, has a muffled 22kHz sound which I find rather uncomfortable.

Oh, and the remaster's developers "restored" a day/night cycle feature that was scrapped early into the original game's development. They botched that one so badly that at night you apparently won't be able to see anything in certain locations, making the game virtually unplayable sometimes. In the remaster's release version there was oddly enough no setting that would allow turning this feature off but luckily they patched that in by the time I got the game.

Anyway, Soul Reaver 2 better knock my socks off after everything the series has been built up to be.

I would probably never buy it, but thanks to feminists action against some game I used opportunity to get some game for free and one of them was Leap of Love. It is really simple adventure intended to be played more times. It is relatively short game and all events can be skipped, so it does not matter if you repeat some parts. I would not consider it inappropriate most of the time, but of course story is a little stupid about girls, but plot and twists are really good. Sometimes there is not so much time to play some game and something short is needed, Leap of Love fits into this situation. I won heart of five different characters and there is still something left, although I have no intention to find out what.

Abyss of Pleasure (Steam)

It's definitely NSFW week at the moment, so I decided to play this one. This is exactly the type of game that my government doesn't want me to play, which is why I should definitely get it and play it. That and it was really cheap and funny.

It's one of those RPG maker games, this time with real time combat instead of turn based like usual. You play as a Witch. It is also one of those games where you do not die when defeated. Instead, whatever defeated you has its evil way with you. You can fight it and stay pure or give in and become corrupted. The first half of the game has you looking for the 4 orbs to allow entry into the Abyss. The second half is the Abyss- a 20 level dungeon where you have to reach the bottom to defeat the great evil one himself...who is more like the South Park version of Satan. It's about 6-7 hours depending on how much grinding (of either type) you need to do to reach the bottom. It was good fun, with much more unique artwork than the usual off the shelf art that most of these have.

DeathComing (Steam)

This is the kind of games that people here loathed. A game produced by a subsidiary of Tencent which commits the sin of in-game telemetry. But they are really upfront about it, and I don't necessarily think the data that they collect are dangerous for my privacy. But I doubt that we'll ever see this game of GOG.

The game best described as a video game version of Final Destination, where you played as a Death Reaper agents planing for humans demise via accidents. The 7 stages are well made, with chained actions that lead one accidents to another. To pass one act is not really difficult, but clearing all the victims and getting that perfect score is because in some cases 1 npc can only killed by one or two specific ways that have limited chances to execute. I personally feels the 5th act is the hardest.

Finished Trek to Yomi.

It is mostly a side-scroller with samurai/sword combat. The art is quite good (no colours, all black/grey/white), voices are in Japanese by default (I personally don't care).

The story is ok. Gameplay-wise I am mixed. It was ok for a good 2/3 of the game but then I was a bit bored and annoyed by a difficult battle (there were already a few ones that I needed to retry 10x). I switched to easy difficulty and it became a walk in the park.
There is a combo system but with no way to practice the combos, it is a bit difficult to learn and master them.

Still, I liked the game.

Full list here

Little Nightmares 2

A bloated sequel. Not that the first game was perfect by any means but I struggle to think what has been improved. It's now longer and bigger but at what cost? There's so much more tedium between memorable setpieces,the platforming is more clunky and the presentation became uninspired to me by the final act-just stuff I've seen in other video games done better. I suppose I could still recommend it to horror fanatics though as these games occupy a rather unique space of just simply being eerie and creepy. No jumpscares,gore and other surface level horror but also no real depth in the imagery either. Mood and atmosphere is the only aim here and these games succeed at it despite shortcomings in gameplay.

Kajko i Kokosz


Not sold here anymore.

Old polish adventure game based on beloved polish comic series.

It's not good whatsoever.

It's very primitive and small. 20 screens only or so. Very limited narration. No text descriptions no comments from characters. Very very basic object interaction.

What game relied on, to increase game time was dead ends. You can get stuck by doing things incorrectly which can lead to complete restart if you don't have save when you made the mistake.

As the game has no dialog mechanics you got to make sure you listen first time when characters actually speak,otherwise you will miss things.

Additionally many puzzles are random so you just have to try everything on everything.

Game is younger than monkey Island 2 and indiana fate of Atlantis.

But glad I got it and finally played it.
Bs4 was so bad. I was done with the game 2h before end and opened walkthrough to beat it.

Bs5 is so much better.

Fetish Locator Week 1 (GOG)

One of the free games that were given away this week. This one is a straightforward VN with just some choices that pretty much don't change the path of the story in any way from I can tell. I played better examples, but it's not bad or anything. Also, it may get better if you play the sequels through as well, maybe someday I will.

Blake Stone: Planet Strike. It's very similar to the first game. You run through levels, cleaning them out as thoroughly as you can, and you unlock the elevator to the next level by blowing up a reactor with a bomb you find somewhere on each level.

It seems to me that it's a bit easier than the first game. I especially remember one enemy that could not only mess you up but would regenerate after being killed, but I only saw one of them in this game and he stayed dead when I shot him. The level design is a bit less diabolical. All in all, I enjoyed running through it quickly. I had an itch for a classic FPS and it did the trick.

Venba (Gog code from Amazon Prime) - 1.5h - 3/5
A short Indian visual game about the difficulties of immigrants in another country and their integration. I've finished so many exotic recipes that I'm hungry...

South of Midnight, Aug 9 (Xbox Game Pass)-Its a solid game. It reminds me of Lost in Random and the Alice games. In fact you could probably call it Alice in the Bayou. It looks and sounds very good with the exception of some jerkiness during cutscenes. There was a very annoying bug at the end of chapter 13 which required a restart. It was a little short and I would have liked a little more depth in the gameplay but it was fun and I can't fault it too much.

Full List

Oh you've got to be kidding me.

Finished Soul Reaver 2 Remastered today. It's almost like Crystal Dynamics got wind of the fact that I was unimpressed by the first game and they made this sequel out of pure spite as some cruel prank on me.

I complained that in SR1 there wasn't much of a story and that Raziel was barely a character and there wasn't much of Kain either. Well, here they overcompensated and now there's both a ton of inner monologue from Raziel and dialogue between both of them and every single line is pretentious crap delivered in the most obnoxious manner possible. It reminds me of Dan Brown's writing where the characters are like an uneducated moron's idea of intelligent educated people, continuously delivering banal nonsense as haughtily as possible.

And there's a ton of Kain this time, again voiced by Simon Templeman, but he's not at all the character he was in Blood Omen anymore (and not just visually). In BO I loved his condescending monologues because he was a ridiculously evil psychopath and opportunist but there's some attempt made here to make him a hero and that makes him almost as obnoxious as Raziel who himself is an idiot who can't stop talking about how great and how much of a freethinker he is, even though he always does exactly what he was supposed to do - he's just literally too dumb to understand that.

The actual story is just every trope about "chosen ones" and whatnot that the original Blood Omen so beautifully subverted. Twists and far too long pretentious conversations are thrown in in an attempt to make it all seem epic and clever and thanks to the excellent voice acting you may get fooled into believing that you're dealing with a well-written game but it's not.

I might be more lenient if everything else about the game were good but it's honestly terrible. The most obvious part is that it's not a metroidvania anymore. I wouldn't mind if it were a regular action adventure, then, but it's not that either. It's this really weird thing where you still have a large world but this time it's just one far too long tunnel that you travel back and forth a couple of times, meeting dozens of enemies along the way, 99% of whom you can just run past (and you should since fighting them is an utter waste of time).

There's no exploration to speak of and even if there were, there wouldn't be a point to it since there's literally nothing to collect in the game. It is still about gaining certain "powers" that unlock new portions of the world but this time you basically just get the ability to interact with certain objects that change the color of the soul reaver which in turn allows using certain other objects. So basically they've replaced all the fun of gaining new powers with... keys. That makes the game's main (and only) unlocks less interesting than even the optional ones in the first one. What makes this particularly bizarre is that it's apparently a feature that was scrapped from the first game. You'd think that giving a dropped feature from an earlier game a second chance would result in something super impressive rather than more underwhelming than everything that made it into the original game.

Again there's a bunch of temples / ruins which present you with a series of puzzles. There's fewer of them than in the first game and they are somehow much worse. This time it's all literally trial temples rather than diverse locations, the puzzles are usually constrained to a single room (of which there's just a few per temple) and they usually depend on this underwhelming colored reaver mechanic and for some reason quite a bit on shooting certain objects in the environment (with the right color). Literally the biggest challenge in the game is to figure out that you're supposed to shoot certain objects even though nothing indicates that you can shoot them. And these temples also suffer from the same issue as the overworld in that all distances seem to be three times as long as they had any right to be. Backtracking is an utter pain.

And no, there's no bosses at the end of the temples. As a matter of fact there's not a single boss in the entire game, which is weird since the first game had a whole bunch of them. In the end you encounter a series of named enemies but they are like the regular enemies and... you're literally invulnerable while fighting them. So they are basically anti-bosses. You do get a whole ton of regular enemies this time but fighting them is ass. Incredibly they've made the combat system worse somehow. The first game's shtick was that enemies are by default immortal and you have to finish them off with weapons or the environment (unless you have full health). That's all gone. Here it's just the same thing over and over again: dodge, hit, dodge, hit, dodge hit. Doesn't matter if you're fighting a regular human enemy or a huge demon. The only variation is the occasional shooting enemy later on in the game, something the first game also had. But the first game also had enemies who can disappear into the ground and pop up behind you and whatnot.

And to top it all off the game has some bizarre technical issues. Sometimes Raziel just refuses to execute actions. He may refuse to dodge or to spread his wings. Sometimes he will get stuck on some barely noticeable irregularity in the ground, as will enemies - though those tend to get stuck even on the most basic level geometry. There's again a lock-on mechanic but strafing is somehow less refined than in the first game. Hitboxes and collisions are also all over the place.

Regarding the presentation: this time even the game's original version looks okay since it was a PS2 game. As a matter of fact the environments looked so fine that the remaster's hi-res textures are almost indistinguishable from the original ones and when they aren't, it's often because the new textures actually lack detail. That's an even bigger issue with the character models. The remaster's character models are noticeably more detailed geometrically and they do have higher res textures but aesthetically I find them far worse. The original models had all sorts of details hand-painted onto them to make up for the basic lighting and they were also more stylized. The new models are really bland by comparison and even have less expressive facial animations during the cutscenes.

And even the audio is somehow worse. The sound effects aren't as muffled anymore but the mix is all over the place and I really don't like the music in this one. Not only does it not have a single signature track like the first one's Ozar Midrashim but generally the compositions and arrangements are really bad by comparison and sometimes even made me cringe. There was maybe one track that I found enjoyable, namely the one in the game's final temple, but that's it.

So, as far as I'm concerned Soul Reaver 2 is ass. So much so that I suddenly appreciate the first game much more.

I guess Blood Omen 2 is next and the sad part is that based on my memories from back in the day, I'm gonna enjoy that one much more than either Soul Reaver game.