a short and sweet fmv adventure with surprisingly decent production values and acting. two playthroughs are a must, each takes about half an hour (yes, it's that short) and picking opposite choices will give you a vastly different movie and answer some questions. this will still only reveal about 2/3 of the scenes, so I'd recommend further playthroughs with some alternate choices, at least until you get all the endings, as there are a few almost identical scenes that only matter if you want one of the achievements for watching every scene. luckily, the skip function makes short work of further playthroughs, as you can move past stuff you've already seen after playing through the game twice. since you won't be seeing much repetition during the second one, it makes sense. on a few occasions I got some artifacts in the video after using it, but it wasn't too bad. there's a volume slider, windowed mode, english and original russian audio, plus a ton of subtitles. I noticed a few mistakes in the english one (waist instead of waste, etc.) but it's not a huge deal, seeing as it's not the developer's native language, but I would've liked a brightness slider as well. at first I thought you'd be able to re-watch unlocked scenes in the gallery, but it's only for behind the scenes photos and a video, which was a nice bonus, and videos are simple .mp4 files in the game's folder, so you can easily watch them if you want. I think the full price is a bit much, but definitely worth it on sale if you love cheesy fmv as much as I do.
a really charming top-down rpg with pausable real-time combat. not a fan of the latter, prefer turn-based, but on lower difficulties it shouldn't be a problem if you're in it for the story, characters and exploration, like I was. it's not too long and more or less linear with new locations opening up as you progress, but it's very funny and cheerful, we don't get a lot of games like this nowadays. monsters don't respawn, which is always nice, but natural resources for potions and such do over time, you can even plant bushes to grow your own fruit. I would've liked to skip nights by sleeping through them, there are plenty of beds around, but it's not possible. there's mod support, not sure about the amount and quality but it might be worth looking into. not gonna go into more detail, there's a demo to try, should be enough to make your mind up but it's really worth playing, I had a lot of fun. hoping for a sequel one day.
the game's nothing special to begin with, very mobile-friendly (not a compliment), but could be okay for a few hours of turn-based dungeon crawling and loot gathering, except enemies scale to your level, negating every sense of progression. that alone is a dealbreaker, no game ever should have it, or at least it should be optional, but on top of it, most enemies have really annoying behavior: blobs multiplicating endlessly, ice sliding you across the screen even if you're not moving, mobs throwing goo on the screen(!), covering it, and so on. and the icing on this crap cake is a bug connected to the mud on the screen: if you open the inventory while it's still on, your reward is a black screen and if you press esc, there goes your hud/ui (hotbar, health bar, everything), and most likely you'll just die as a consequence. maybe you don't find certain mechanics annoying, but avoid this lazy and broken game, even on sale or in a bundle.
I had a few smaller issues, like unskippable logos, steam popups blocking the tooltips, the fact that you can die which is completely unnecessary in a game like this and only wastes time (at least you don't lose any progress), but these aren't anything major and the game ended up being one of my favorite adventures in recent years. great story and characters, good voice acting, I loved the trance and hacking and all the different personalities you can play around with (I don't mean the multiple playable characters, though that was nice too). if you're into sci-fi and point & click adventures, this should be a blast. there's also a demo if you're unsure, look for it on the publisher's (wadjet eye) website.
soundtracks and hintbooks aren't things I normally pay for, and thankfully on gog the dlc is bundled with the main game. it serves as a prequel to the adventure, but it's not even the story that's worth playing for (you get to find out how the protagonist ended up alone on the spaceship, nothing you couldn't live without) but the game itself, which is 50 more of the main game's circuitry puzzles. I was a big fan of them while adventuring in space and I'm sure if this were sold as a stand-alone puzzler, it would reach more people. it can bug out sometimes (pay attention to the number of available components, you can end up with more or less than you need and won't be able to complete the level) and you have to edit the settings file yourself for basic stuff like audio volumes and windowed mode, but apart from these it's a neat concept and the dlc provides more content than I expected.
two worlds has become one of my favorite games ever, and no one is more surprised than me. first of all, I didn't start playing fantasy rpgs until a few years ago, they always looked too generic and boring, plus I really hated everything, and I mean everything, about the two worlds demo. but thankfully I gave it another shot and had a ton of fun playing it. it's not a perfect game by any means, but also very far from the trainwreck a lot of reviews make it out to be. the graphics still hold up, the viewing distance is really amazing, you can see stuff in the distance from really far away (yet grass seems to grow under your feet, which is one of the very few complaints I have). the music's great too and the voice acting falls into the so-bad-it's-hilarious category. it was grating at first but became entertaining soon, the over the top usage of 'olde english', the protagonist's sarcastic remarks and taunts like 'say hello to death!' or 'they look like my in-laws'. some of the mechanics are pretty interesting too: you can use a bunch of active skills during combat (after you learned them from trainers) and there's a jump back button, which is essential against bigger but slower enemies. there are horses, but I found them only useful as inventory extentions, just park them next to a teleport and you're good. riding on the road is actually fine, but as soon as you go off-road, it's hell. you can probably get the hang of it eventually, but with a generous amount of static teleports and your personal teleport stones you don't really need a mount to get around. sprinting would've been nice though, even if you run faster with your weapons put away. speaking of weapons and gear, you can combine multiple copies of the same items to make them more powerful, which is great, and also makes inventory management easier. there's a crazy amount of loot in the game though, with a lot of variety in everything, so multiple trips to merchants will be necessary to grab and sell everything. I wouldn't have minded a third inventory screen, actually. there's also magic and bows (no need to worry about arrows) and I'd say combat is good enough, you can mix things up, though it can get a bit hectic because aggroing an enemy usually mobilizes their friends as well. but most importantly (for me anyway), the game doesn't have respawning enemies (there's a ghost mechanic though that's explained in the game, but it's only troublesome in the beginning) nor level scaling, which can make for one-hit deaths early on if you run into something far above your level. the alchemy system is pretty good too, you can make temporary and permanent potions and gems from almost everything, plants, monster drops, minerals, and they really make a difference. if you're into exploring and hoarding, you can become so powerful that almost everything will die in a few hits. this might be a problem for some, but you don't have to make potions, obviously, and you don't have to kill every wolf you run into for even more xp. that's what I did though: I can't remember the last game where I wanted to explore absolutely everything and where exploration was so relaxing even with literally thousands of enemies around. I'm not one for farming and grinding, but I killed them all (more than 10.000) while I was at it. I wouldn't say the game world is especially unique, though later on you'll run into some weird creatures and unsettling environments. there are a lot of quests, some of them are pretty basic, some are more involved, and sometimes you have to make a decision, you can't complete everything (though it's possible to have max reputation with all the factions at the same time until you anger them). the main story is nothing to write home about, your sister's missing, go find her, oh, and save the world in the meantime, will you? the game shines in the sidequest department though. there are a few funny ones, some are touching, and they can have unforeseen consequences. you think you're done and did the right thing, but when you go back to the village or npc later, you'll find you actually made things worse. I loved these. I could go on for days about the game but long story short, if you're looking for an open-world fantasy rpg you probably haven't played, check this one out. if you want to do everything, it'll keep you busy for more than 100 hours (or you can just concentrate on questing and be done a lot faster).
arcen is a company that makes unique and mostly underrated games but I'm pretty sure shattered haven is their least known (and appreciated) title, which is sad because it's a really fun game that I'm sure a lot of people own because it's been bundled and sold for real cheap many times. it's a cool spin on the zombie genre (they're called grays here), you control a family of survivors, trying to make your way to, well, a haven, by going through many different areas (forest, swamp, snow, etc.) and completing basically unrelated levels by going through portals, some with more action, some with only puzzles, some mixing both. they're really cool, sometimes easy, sometimes frustrating but also satisfying when you figure them out. the graphics might be a turn-off for some but I like it, except everything's too tiny, the gameplay area doesn't even fill out the screen because there's a huge border around it for some reason. the controls can be tricky sometimes, partly because of the size of everything, but it never got me to rage-quit, which is saying something. the music's really good too. it's not a long game, unless you're going for perfect scores on all the levels (and there are nearly 100 of them), but it's really fun, definitely worth a playthrough (or more if you're into new game+ kinda things).
