The title says it all. You are not here for the gameplay. You are here to enjoy watching the hunger games. I honestly don't know why they didn't reduce the ratings of this game to 12+ because yeah there is a good amount of gore, but the subject matter is not in any way bit harder than anything you find from a teens first dark novel series. Wait I know why, because age ratings increase sales the higher they are when it's not being developed for the Nintendo. Does it do what it does well? I say fairly. Graphics is pretty enough for the time, voice acting for all three languages is pretty good. Writing and Story is what you expect, like, come on. Gameplay wise: Stealth is iffy, the sling is painful at times (especially late game, heavens help you). WALKING SIM. 2 stars is what I rate this. It's a playable experience, and for those of you who are new to games, found this site named GOG and decided this is the game for you since the only media that you have ever enjoyed during your time being alive are YA media, than this is a 5 STAR experience! For me however was hoping for something horrific, got teen drama instead.
As others have already stated. this game is an investigation game like the Obra Dinn in that you put names, deaths, locations and so fort in a journal to continue the story. The difference is that the scenarios are chronological in this game compared to Obra Dinns achronologolical order which often means the next scenario you have half of the names of the suspects already filled in before you got a good look on the scene. The game drops you immediately into the gameplay, no introduction whatsoever which is as refreshing as already having newspapers crossword section opened so you can play with the puzzles. The investigations themselves are fairly enjoyable where you find out whoever is at the scene, their motives and their alibis. I found with how chronological it was that again you already know half of what the cast is wanting and doing so there isn't much headwork you half to do when you get to the halfway point of the game. The length itself is very very short, so I wouldn't be able to say in good concious to buy it at 18 euro. but if you're dying of no detective game drought like alot of people I say give it a go.
It's an alright game, it doesn't tell you jack squat of its controls, what to do or where to go but that does add to its charm. It's what an open world game should be. Though I must add this can go a bit too far for sleeping and eating. Like I couldn't tell if eating was a good idea or not since I had to spend like 12 bucks in order to go from starving to full each day even though I had no idea what the mechanic did (except possibly affecting my stats?) and sleeping is well turns out the most important mechanic in the game, in my most honest opinion, where if you didn't sleep for an unspecified amount of hours each day Ringo will just say out of nowhere "Oh I'm about to pass out" skipping everything in that day. It doesn't even tell you when this fainting spell is going to occur no indicator at all. In its defence you're play a teenager and a teenager in real life needs about 8 hours of sleep each day. The gameplay is nothing special though, press "the punch button" to do the majority of things in your life from holding it for studying, holding it for listening in class, holding it for mugging etcetera. The fighting is alright the more kicks, punches and throws you do the better those stats become and also never fight more than one guy at a time unless you know how to kite. Story is alright, writing can be really good and sometimes just pointlessly silly. The characters are okay, like the only ones that I felt were written well were Ringo and Ken, everyone else felt stereotyped. This review may be a bit negative but I gotta say the music is on point. You like Samurai Champloo music or anything from nujabes (or that type of lofi hiphop in general) you will like this soundtrack. Overall it's an alright game, my only real fault with it is the ending.
I just finished Pathologic 2 and I gotta say it's sick how bloody good it is. So for the good. Well the writing sucks you in, the atmosphere is suffocating, the music infects you and the design is perfect. It fixed a lot of problems with the original game though it only contains the route of one of the protagonists from the original(since the other two are going to be added later) and fleshes him plus the characters he's connected to way more. Really play the game for yourself but remember this is a fairly difficult game. Everything you do matters in this game if you stab some passerby you got every man in the area on your tail and the gossip of it ruining your reputation. If you buy a loaf of bread you might not be able to afford that gun that shady fellow by the lake is offering for a seemingly unfair price. If you sold those broken scissors you found you can trade them for those antibiotics from that little girl. If you stand around in the basement of your house for an hour you wasted a bloody hour. It's an experience BUT it's not for everyone like blade runner the game won't engage you. You and the game needs to have a formal meeting discussing your plans, find some time for each other and then maybe you might get engaged. So in conclusion. play it. Come on do it. DO IT. Come on be cool.
CS strikes me oddly, it's made by the team who made fallen London and Sunless Sea yet what those two games did seamlessly, this game felt like it was the first game from their team. Now if you've played either of those games you'd know that their main strengths are lots of choices and atmosphere, this game however gives you nearly the illusion of choice and an attempt at atmosphere. The game starts you out with you losing your job and forced to find work to make ends meet . Suddenly you get a notice that you're in the will of a guy who you met during your past job. The package contains the necessary needs for your journey. From there on you can decide your faith to create cult of passionately devoted followers who would risk it all for you, to walk in the lands of dreams, or to kill yourself....And much more! The best part about all that is that it's told through gameplay. Like for instance, when you lose your job, you don't get a wall of text explaining to you that you lost your job and now you're cultist-man, no, you get your job card, you place it on the work tile, after a couple of seconds you check the tile to find you lost your job card but you got your severance pay, a health card that showed how your formed job affected you and a paragraph of text that simply says, you lost your job. This is a great way how the game presents itself and it works for a while but as I've mentioned before the game doesn't give you many options and the atmosphere weakens after this carefully crafted opening. Now the main issue I had with this game was the illusion of choice, the games options are it's processes (travel,talk,sleep) and what you can do with those process with cards (place of interest,) this is fine until you realize that if you click ok with a card in a process than you can't stop it this is even worse for sending your cult to do jobs and you can't get them to stop unless either all of them or dead or all of their funds are depleted. Decent game needs options.
