"SUPERHOT" demonstrates that Steam needs more than just a "Yes" and "No" to the question, "Do I recommend this game?" Somewhere inbetween the absolutes of "Yes" and "No" there is a third option, "Meh." SUPERHOT is amazingly cool for about 3-4 hours. Then you're kind of done. The endless challenge modes you can unlock aren't really all that satisfying. The developers shot themselves in the foot, and then in the leg several times and probably another few places as well by deciding during development to use a proprietary lighting engine which requires each level to be baked in a secret process which the community won't be able to duplicate, which means no user generated content. That was the dumbest decision I've ever heard of a game developer making since John Romero's Daikatana / Ion Storm debacle. Skyrim should have taught us that MODS SELL GAMES! SUPERHOT was absolutely the game which could have benefited most from user generated content ... and didn't. This lighting was completely frivolous and unnecessary. The prototype they released for their crowdfunding campaign didn't have this lighting and it looked fine! The gaming press praised it for it's simplistic visuals. There was no need to sacrifice such a fundamentally important feature for a minor aesthetic tweak that hardly anyone will even notice. Overall, that prototype was better in many ways than the final product. It's limitation of only pistols and melee as combat options actually made the gameplay feel strategic, while the shotgun you can't dodge and the necessity of using whatever weapon happens to be in front of you at the moment makes the full game of SUPERHOT feel more arcadey. Still, it's a pretty fun game for that initial 3-4 hours despite these problems. So I can still recommend, but in a more laid back "Meh" kind of way rather than with the full enthusiasm I felt when I backed SUPERHOT on kickstarter.
The Witness has pretty scenery but is strictly for hardcore puzzle loving Myst addicts. Playing it feels way too much like work. There is crap you can unlock which presents you with various half-baked philosophy ideas but they won't challenge you much. You'll either simply agree or simply disagree. But the Talos Principle is much better in this area: it actually tries to get you to really engage with the ideas it presents rather than having them float past you as a passive observer. I think this comment I made on Reddit pretty much sums up my thoughts on this game: "The Witness is not made for instant gratification. Neither were 19th century novels. The difference is that when you get to the end of a 19th century novel, you've got something intellectually substantive and thought provoking you've completed, while when you get to the end of The Witness, you've done several hundred trivial puzzles involving lines and dots."
Titanic: Adventure Out of Time is almost certainly the greatest CD-ROM adventure game of all time (Better than Myst. Better than Journeyman Project.) and it presents the most complete, hisotrically accurate computer model of the Titanic ever made. If you are a fan of Titanic history then you must play this because this is the definitive interactive Titanic experience. If you are a fan of the Myst series or the Journeyman Project series then you must play this because this is the same genre as those games done with the same super high level of quality they represented. If you like spy and time travel games then you must play this because it has a wonderful time travelling spy narrative full of intruige and suspense. If you are a fan of the romance from the 1997 James Cameron film, then you'll be disappointed, because this is not a romance game. This is a much cooler spy game which came out a year before the film. It has a much better soundtrack and a much more interesting narrative. I played this game before I saw the film, and I knew exactly how to get to every location shown in the film after having been all over the ship from playing this, but the film still disappointed me because the game is better. Skip the movies and just play this! By the way, to anyone who is complaining about the low graphics quality: This is a game from 1996. I'd love to see a remake for modern resolutions but we're super lucky that NightDive Studios has managed to even get it to run on modern systems at all, so the original graphics are all we've got. If you can't stand playing games from 1996 then you are just a terrible person.
GNOG is a wonderful 2 hours of seated VR puzzles with nice music. It has the quality you'd expect from having played other Double Fine titles. Double Fine needs to make Brutal Legend 2.
"A Short Hike" is a small scale 3D open world collect-a-thon with graphics intentionally reminiscent of the Gameboy Advance. Fun simple gameplay and very easy, suitable for small children and even game journalists to play. The soundtrack is also quite nice. It reminded me of Michael Giacchino's score for Pixar's Up. You'll finish the main game in about an hour I'd estimate, although 100% completionists will have many more things left to do. That's the good news. The bad news is that A Short Hike has a problem which the vast majority of 3D third person collect-a-thons have, which is that the camera doesn't always show an angle conducive to the action. This game handles that problem better than most I've seen but the issue is still present and noticable. Still, you can't fault a little indie game like this for failing to solve a problem that has plagued its entire genre for a quarter century.
The Talos Principle borrows heavily from Portal for it's puzzles, despite not having a central innovative game mechanic. Story-wise, it goes into hardcore philosophy concepts in a surprisingly legit way for the developers of Serious Sam. So if you ever wanted to stop shooting things in a Serious Sam game and instead wander around admiring the architecture and the pretty skybox while listening to a deep voiced God actor reading lines written by a pretentious philosophy major, then The Talos Principle is definitely for you. Are there people in that category? The game would claim that you are asking the wrong question. The right question would be: are there such things as people at all?
This game is so bad that I do not understand how anyone could be OK with it, let alone recommend it. MegaRace 2 and 3 are like crimes against humanity except scaled down to a video game production budget. Do not let any positive impression you have of MegaRace 1 influence your decision about this unless, like me, you were just morbidly curious and had to know for yourself.
First, the GOG version is not patched to remove the copy protection, so you're going to need to flip through the included PDF manual every single time you start the program to answer one of their stupid copy-protection questions. That inconvenience is actually a good indicator of what lies in store within the actual game because from what I remember of playing it on the real hardware back in the day, Stunt Island is a very powerful tool, but only worked for those willing to really put in the time to master its subtleties. That means it has a very niche audience. It isn't for everyone, that's for sure. But for the dedicated, its 45 planes and wide variety of locations together with its powerful editing tools make it way more than just a game. It's more like a religion. Also, it is still missing the Sea Duck from Disney's Talespin and that's a bug which sadly still hasn't been fixed 30 years later.
No Man's Sky was not worth the full $60 launch price at launch unless you are in the very specific niche audience the core game was designed for: which is 1. If you really, really love survival crafting games or 2. if you're a programmer who's just absolutely got to satisfy their curiosity about how the various graphical tricks were pulled off. If you aren't in one of those two groups, then wait for a price drop and/or a sale. But is the game fun? Yes, it is a fun game. You get to explore some alien planets, which are procedurally generated which means that they will of course feel samey after a while. But you get to mine stuff and shoot stuff and fly a space ship. It's not perfect, but it's also not bad.
