I've been playing this mod for a few years and I must say, is quite hard going back to vanilla Diablo 1 after playing it. It's the same old classic we all know, just with "more". More sidequests, more items, more classes, more content. Item sets and magical properties and even new equipement types are backported from Diablo 2, Item management is improved thanks to a personal chest, and a shareable one among all characters in your PC. Classes now have a few unique skills without being full blown skill trees, and new spells with requisites other than Magic are also available, giving much needed variation. One of the more interesting additions is the restoration of certain sidequests and lore elements initially cut from the game, like the originally planned appearance (and fate) of Izual or the Map of Stars that force you to battle Diablo within 30 minutes, or he'll be massively buffed. If you love both Diablo 1 and 2, you should give this mod a try. Hey, it's free!
As a fan of classic Survival Horrors, I've been postponing playing this game for a long time. Team Silent's swan song does quite a few things right, and a horrifically number of things wrong. PROS: The plot is very interesting, the sound design is as good as ever, and parts of the combat system are great outside of the jank. Puzzles and progression are pretty straightforward with almost no moon-logic puzzles, which can be good to some and bad to others. The hauntings and the feeling that no place is safe, not even your room, gets on your nerves in a good way. CONS: The atmosphere is all over the place, some areas feel great (read: terrifying), while others look and feel ike a bad slasher movie, and not even the sound design can save that. Some areas use some very careful lighting, while others just give up in trying to create some dark ambience and just set the brightness to maximum. Monster design is not bad, but feel very uninspired. And of course, given the year and the studio that made it, the controls and camera are Peak Jank, and not even the OTS mod can save it (but it helps). All in all, I can't say I had a bad time with the game, but not a good time either. I enjoyed the ending, yet I rushed to reach it because I was getting frustrated. You may like it more than me, or you may like it less.
I can't even say I completely understand everything that happened, but I know my heart hurts a little. It is not a long VN, but it has tons of replayability, equal parts funny, scary and sad writing, and one hell of a soundtrack and voice acting. Can't recommend it enough.
Shadows of New York fixed a lot of the problems of Coteries. As in Coteries, the writing is good, the characters are fleshed out, the politics plays are even better, and the atmosphere is way darker; the music and ambient, along the more lively backgrounds and portraits with more expressions really help to deliver the mood. The biggest problem with Coteries is how little your choices mattered. Apart from the characters quests that could be cut short if you pick the wrong options, the ending was always the same. Shadows, on the other hand, have two different endings. Which ending is picked depends on the "traits" you develop by choosing certain options along the game, which helps replayability immensely and really makes you feel like your choices matter. However, and this is a strange bad point, the game still kind of fails as a standard Visual Novel. There's no "auto advance" option, which is completely shocking and one of the most basic features in a genre where you'll be passing page after page of text. I like how the game tries to force you to accept your choices and not letting you load old saves, but it comes as a dirty move and left you incredibly empty when you finish the game and it outright DELETE your savefile. The game is also somewhat short. By itself it would be pretty bad, but seeing the tomfuckery with the savefiles it is also a good thing, since achieving other endings may cost you less time. At the last point of contempt, I can understand why it was sold as an "standalone game", but really, you will get a lot of plot points if you play Coteries first (which is to say, you'll miss them if you don't). In conclusion, I can certainly recommend the game to VtM fans and VN enthusiasts, even if the second group would be just a little disappointed.
Umineko makes you cry, laugh, hate and love. The bizarre but simple murder mystery around an obscenely rich and completely disfunctional family ended being way more than that. The core arcs here reviewed, in particular, is especially hard; when you understand the whydunnit and get a glimpse of Beatrice's heart your perspective about the entire game changes radically. It's truly an experience that you have to live.
