Stasis Bone Totem surpassed all of my expectations. The superb voice acting had me fully invested in the cast and their plight from the beginning. The pacing and mystery kept me playing for long stretches of time, which I rarely experience. And the puzzles and logs never reached the levels of frustration or tedium I was fearing going into my second point-and-click title. Better still, the game refused to rely on jump scares to generate its horror, and instead made great use of suspense, gruesome visuals, and thought-provoking concepts. All in all, Stasis Bone Totem is an engrossing experience you won’t want to put down, and its most dreadful set pieces will stay with you long after you reach the finale.
Partisans 1941 is an easy recommendation for fans of the genre. The game features a lengthy and occasionally challenging campaign, a large roster of playable characters with unique skills to unlock, and a clean visual style with an elegant user interface. In my many hours spent completing the game, I didn’t encounter any show-stopping bugs or moments of intense frustration. And by the end, my experience was generally a pleasant one. Having said that, below are some aspects of Partisans 1941 I found less pleasant and which could’ve been improved: • The game could’ve used a little more map variety and more memorable locations • The base of operations became an unnecessary distraction after looting and playing stealthily, as food, ammo and weapons were in full supply by the second half of the campaign • The context icons, for picking up corpses or loot for instance, were a little finicky to interact with when overlapping one another • The mission statistics screen presented at the end of every level was bare-bones. I would’ve loved to see how many resources in total can be collected on each map, how many alerts I raised, what weapons and how many bullets I used, which characters, and more • The game could’ve used another patch. I still encountered obvious bugs like corpses occasionally floating some distance away from my character when picked up or my inventory seemingly getting cleared during loadout. Especially annoying was a supposed dual-monitor bug with UE4 which allowed my mouse cursor to move beyond the edges of my primary screen despite being in full-screen mode
