Tormented Souls executes tank-control, fixed camera, locked room survival horror with competency and insight of the genre's origins. Environments are beautiful with only the odd asset overused. The game takes place in a mansion - nearly every room and hallway has a distinct character, the structure is interwoven in such a way that navigation opens abound once the applicable keys and latches are mastered, and the soundscape matches the sublocations beautifully. While the game is not without a few issues, the team excelled in a lot of areas : - The audio is top notch. Keeping an ear out is a vital component in surviving the mansion, and the various audio cues and ambient noises have an escalating unnerving element that's just perfect. - The positioning and management of the fixed cameras is nearly ideal. They control the tension in an area, giving time to be paranoid and time to breathe and decompress. - The "Nothing/Something Ratio" is great. Most high tension moments will pass without effect. The instances where "Oh No It's RIGHT HERE" occurs are just frequent enough to never allow the player to totally relax. - Environmental signposting is present and well executed. The most blatant example is a poster about being quiet to avoid annoying hospital patients being prominently displayed when you enter an early room with a sound sensitive monster lurking nearby. - Supplies are limited but sufficient. I never had enough ammo to feel like I could always use the weapon I wanted, so I had to adapt on the fly, but I was never entirely defenseless. Pushes riskier behavior, but isn't unfair. - Voice acting starts beautifully in the intro, then descends into line-read and narm. A real wink-wink tribute to the genre's classics! - Hard but fair puzzles. Why not five stars? - The final bit veers suddenly into Being A Video Game, hard. Lots of illogical bits and a genre shift where the climax of the horror crescendo be. - Three or four moments of seemingly unintentional jank.
Dishonored 2 offers more replayability than D1 by virtue of having two characters to choose from (and allowing dedicated no magic runs), but it fails to live up to the quality of the original. The vaulting/climbing/parkor took a serious downgrade, seemingly from the nuances of the level design. Intuitive vault points frequently just don't work - the character makes no attempt to scramble up over seemingly-viable obstacles. Sometimes small cosmetic protrusions (like a piece of trim board) preclude jumping or standing up at all. The level builders either didn't grok the way the engine works as well as those of D1, or there wasn't enough playtesting. The heart returns, but rarely has any contextual insights. In the first game you could learn a ton about the city by listening to the heart pontificate - here, it says the same few stock phrases over and over. Weird visual effects crop up frequently - stationary hovering birds 'flying'. The hot tip of a burning cigar hanging three inches in midair past the end of the actual cigar. That kind of thing. Level design, again, just isn't up to snuff. NPCs will give Hello/Goodbye statements at a set radius, and a bit of platforming out of their line of sight will clip into their sphere so they'll start hi/bye cycles. Warnings about nearby collectables seem near constant, but are rarely associated to anything the player is actually in a position to acquire - it'll be on another floor or something 90% of the time. Sometimes guards notice you thirty feet in the air, sometimes they can't see you if you're standing on a card table. Finding books, letters, and throwable glassware makes up a huge part of the scrounging around, but the levels are loaded with nonreadable books/letters and glued-to-the-table glasses, so it's like looking for needles in haystacks. If you liked Dishonored, you know what you're getting. Just go in knowing it's a little rougher around the edges. It's fun, but loaded with annoying "Really?" moments.
The Detroit After was, essentially, put together by one guy. And it's pretty good, considering that caveat. It wears it's Hotline Miami inspiration on it's sleeve, but doesn't reach HL's greatness. The action is just a hair too rigid, the resets a moment too slow, the door breaching too delayed, the protagonist too removed, the translation a bit too clunky. Call it a fan mod for HL that is still in need of a few playtest interations. It's certainly not bad, and will keep most action fans busy for a few hours. At the price they're asking (especially when on sale) I think it's worth getting. It's much less of a time commitment than Intravenous, is more fast paced and forgiving than Disjunction, and doesn't have Oxto's terrible permadeath/bullet-sponge-bosses combination. In a world where Hotline Miami didn't exist, another two or three months of fixing the 'juice' would make this a five star game. As it is, if you like top down single character action shooters, The Detroit After is worth a go, and it's author deserves supporting for how close to greatness he was able to get this thing.
Disjunction is a real time puzzle game, and the puzzle is always "How do I get behind these guys / robots one at a time so I can hit them over the head with a stick?" There are three player characters the player alternates between, each with three special moves, four if you count their gun. Level layouts are usually such that you don't need them, but they give the player some wiggle room if they make an error in approach or execution. Enemies of a few different types follow repeating routes until made suspicious, and are just oblivious enough that your actions in one room don't bug the enemies in adjacent ones, so failure cascades don't propagate forward. Theming is pretty strong, both the cyberpunk vibes and the repeated question of "Does this NPC deserve death, mercy, or punishment? How about THIS one? [Etc]" The pixel art looks solid and game elements are clearly presented without ambiguity. It runs a hair longer than it feels like it ought to and gets repetitive towards the end, not really mixing things up in new ways but just spacing out the save points to inflate difficulty. Up to that point it's pretty engaging! I've seen comparisons to Hotline Miami, but I don't think that's an applicable reference - enemies are too predictable, dying has too long a penalty, and survivability is too high. I think it's more like an 'Invisible Inc' action sequel, ported to a modified version of the Intravenous engine, with the difficulty scaled way, way down. A strong entry from the family that put this game together. I paid $2 for it, but I think US$6 to 10 would be fair.
There used to be a genre of games, largely coming out of Germany, that might be called "User Interface As Puzzle". Games where the approach to victory isn't immediately obvious, and actually doing things in the game required puzzling out how the UI worked. You might see some tributes pop up from time to time as short games on sites like Itch, but like Interactive Fiction games it is now largely a dead genre outside of some very niche locales deep in the web being kept alive by die hard fans. Vangers. MadTV. Lula. Is Lula good? No, not really. It gets grindy once you've figured it out, gameplay is pretty simplistic, and the third act is massively underbaked. Is Lula interesting? Yes. It scratches the same itch that gonzo comics used to, hand drawn acid trip inspired insanity, mass produced on the boss's copier the last day before the artist quit his mail room job. It's has a retroactive appeal for the days before managing a game's controls could be solved within thirty seconds of booting it up, when weirdos with no credentials could turn out labors of love that nobody could summerize as "It is [game a] but with some of [game b]'s mechanics/theming and [genre X]'s standard control scheme". MadTV is a better game that fits the same ouvre I've tried describing above, one that stands on its own merit as a 'capital G' Game, but that doesn't render Lula without merit. I think if you go in with less of a desire to "Play a good game" and more of one to "Wrestle with a museum piece and witness the unfolding of an artist's intent" you'll probably have a good time.
I'm a big fan of Wasteland, Fallout, and Fallout 2. I also enjoy open world games. I just played Fallout 3 for the first time. While I didn't hate it I would recommend giving it a pass. The plot is largely a rehashing of plot points from the previous games. The world makes much less sense and has less internal logic than the previous entries, with lots of obvious inconsistencies and headscratchers. The switch to FPS means manually slogging over terrain at a pretty slow 'run' speed to get places instead of the ten second, overhead map travel of previous entries. It allows the player to sequence break, but doesn't adequately adjust for that - people, including the PC, just KNOW things they shouldn't because they would have if The One True Path had been followed. It's stunningly easy. The freely-acquired pet dog can singlehandedly wipe out a nest of ten foot tall deathclaws, the toughest enemies in the game. My sneaky-build character without weapons training handled all comers without breaking a sweat, using whatever weapons happened to be lying around, never bothering to sneak... and this is with me randomly wandering the corners of the map to unlock quicktravel locations so the quests, when I got around to them, would not take hours. The epilogue just mentions your overall karma rating and what happened in the last ~20 minutes of the game. Gone are the town-by-town postscripts, apparently. The later Fallouts have a requtation for bugginess, but plenty were on display here. Windows 11 shut down ~something~ spyware adjacent as soon as the launcher boots up. Characters walk into hovering midair positions. Random crashes every two hours or so. Some endless audio cycling. Exteriors are ugly and repetative, and interiors have a weird filter that grows to be headache inducing after a while. It's subpar for a major studio open world game, and it's subpar for an early Fallout game. It's not awful, but I'd recommend S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or Arcanum instead.
Mother Gunship is a FPS Bullet Hell arena fighter that is reasonably forgiving and has a fun gameplay loop. You launch from your spacestation on a pod, crash-breaching into a massive enemy ship at some random point, then fight robots to the death room by room until you get to the big red "Don't press me, I blow up the ship!" button and press it. Dying means losing the kit you went in with, winning means getting rewarded with new kit. By "kit" in this case I mean "guns and things that bolt on to guns". There's a plot. It doesn't take itself too seriously, but it has just enough "WTF is happening??" going on to keep things interesting, and while not serious it is pretty well paced and internally consistent with things to discover and well structured beats. The characters are ... well, characters, and I enjoyed their banter throughout my playthrough. The major beats of the plot manage to be both ominously sinister and inspirational, building up to a finale that had me laughing and giving a golf clap to the creators for their audacity and how they 'finished' the game. Weapons mostly feel different. A bounching sawblade launcher plays differently than a railgun. The attachments can enhance the weapon's strengths or just make it a different animal. You've got two weapon points - left click fires one, right click the other. Ammo comes in the form of 'energy' which recharges over time, and different weapons and attachments consume varying amounts of juice. This has a pretty solid natural balancing - while many builds are better than others, and some components are more efficient than other otherwise identical components, in general you end up with weaker weapons you can fire all day or stronger ones that burn through your 'magazine' in no time at all. It's a very well designed system that has a lot of variability without requiring min/maxing, but which gives you the opportunity to if you want. Enemies and room turrets can turn the screen into a wall of bullets, but dodging and weaving is fluid, intuitive, and reasonably forgiving. I ~think~ the game even cheats a bit in your favor if you're being shot at from behind. When you're in a flow state it feels great, and the game seems designed so that rooms make it easy for you to slip into that position. Getting hit is pretty forgiving, too - if you're not wildly over your head you can almost always pull through unless you get into a mistake spiral. The game just feels great. Plotwise, you're obviously in over your head and just pushing forward with a blind optimism that feels too stupid to fail, and that remains strangely inspirational until the end. Your mech both feels nimble and captures the Power Armor Fantasy sense of being wrapped in an unkillable steel warframe. The shooting feels powerful, the colors and lighting throughout the levels are fun, and stomping a multi-ton mech on a big dumb self destruct button never gets old. I had quick load times, and I think it crashed once over about ten hours.
I've never played anything like 'McPixel 3'. It took me about six hours, and I don't think there was a moment I wasn't smiling during the entire experience. It is essentially a 90s Point-and-Click game that is entirely comprised of ~20 second QuickTime Events. That SHOULDN'T work, but absolutely does. A 'level' has roughly 8 scenes going on, each of which you get thrown into without exposition or explanation. Mess up, or do nothing, and McPixel / Everyone dies and the next scene loads. When you succeed in figuring out how to survive that 'scene' stops coming up and the game cycles rapidly between the remaining unsolved 'scenes'. Level's done when all scenes are survived. Failure is usually hilarious, is not penalized since you're playing a new event within two seconds, and you get rewarded for dying as long as it's a novel death you haven't had yet. Even setbacks feel like forward progression! The art, humor, and music are all on point. A single developer game entirely made of bespoke scenes, of which there are literally hundreds, has no right to look as beautiful as these do. Pacing is perfect. The jokes constantly caught me off-guard. Difficulty is just right - sometimes I accidentally solved a scene immediately, three times I had to really buckle down and get my brain cranking. Zero crashes with Win 11. I got this on sale for two bucks, but having played it I'm willing to buy this guy's work at full price from here on out. McPixel is a steal at the normal cost.
A mostly competently executed card-management combat-RPG in the Steamworld astetic. Positives : - Like all Steamworld games, the world and characters look great. The sentient junkyard mystique really hums. - Your deck is eight cards for each of three characters. Weak cards grant a metacurrency that strong cards consume. It's fun balancing the risk of not having enough metacurrency vs not being strong enough or giving one character basic moves so another gets their specials. - Elements that complicate the game are introduced thematically and over the first few levels, not too slow but with plenty of time to grok. Negatives : - Pacing. Moment-to-moment game speed is ..tolerable.. if you hold the fast forward button through the whole game. - Pacing. It is an RPG with levels, where your XP-per-battle goes from ~1/3 a level's worth to ~1/50th a level's worth once you're "par" for the environment/stage. At that point you'll reliably win fights, but you're not quickly wiping the floor with the enemies, so the already slow battles become slogs. - PACING! The button to skip a cutscene, doesn't. It cuts character text until the next movement or effect, but then resumes character text. So it takes what feels like a minute of clicking the Skip button to actually get to the end of cutscenes you've already seen. - Nash-esque deck builds. When you've found a deck that works, it's pretty reliable, and the game becomes waiting through predictable combats over and over and over. You *CAN* 'find your fun' and try out different builds to see what is broke and what isn't, but since buying and upgrading cards costs currency you're kind of on a path unless you want to grind ~even more~. - Plot's a bit aimless. Exposition, A to B, find clue for C. Exposition, B to C, find clue for D. I quit a few hours in, halfway through Act 2. You might enjoy it more than I did though, if you don't mind a somewhat slow, low-difficulty grind.
