I’m a big fan of games tackling the motives of madness, mental illness, shifting perceptions of reality and uncertainty about what’s real and what’s not. I’m also a fan of dark imagery. Fran Bow is a classic point-and-click adventure game in which you take on the role of Fran, a ten year old girl with a very active imagination and a very tragic backstory. After some horrible stuff happens, you are landed in a psychiatric hospital and have to escape and reunite with your beloved kitty, Mr. Midnight, and also learn the truth behind said horrible stuff that happened to you. Overall, Fran Bow does generally deliver on the “dark imagery” front – you experience horrible visions of an alternate reality that’s full of blood, gore and shadowy figures. But it wouldn’t be anything else than an exploitative shock horror for shock horror’s sake without an engaging story to perk it up. And I’m happy to say that I think Fran Bow delivers on that front as well – it’s pretty engaging to try to decipher “what it means”, as the story, to my mind, can be read in several different ways, including or excluding actual supernatural elements, depending on how you interpret it. It was really fun for me to try and understand what certain elements mean, what they relate to in Fran’s life and her lived experiences, and how the story overall ties together. Now, I said Fran Bow is a point and click adventure game, so you probably would like to know how it holds up in that regard. And I would say... okay? Please note, that I’m very much a newcomer to the genre of point-and-clicks, so my point of entry is probably lower than many of you. And Fran Bow’s puzzles are generally forgiving – there’s no egregious pixel hunting, the puzzles generally do make sense. If you want to see how it played to see if it would interest you, you might want to check a bit of my let’s play on the youtube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgU2KkzBB3o&list=PLp4TpsJ7HUWVEpFqnEuIA7pyIuKD4VwV9
When thinking about the series, I am sort of baffled by the fact that all of those games (barring maybe BO1) had some... pretty annoying flaws. Mostly having to do with the camera and controls, but sometimes also the overabundance of combat. But you know what? The beautiful thing is that the story and the characters were good enough and engaging enough that I wanted to play more of those games anyway. The combat was... eeeeh. Kinda enjoyable at first – nice, flashy animations, a lot of jumping around and stabbery. But it quickly got rather tiresome – and to be honest, that’s my criticism about EVERY SINGLE GAME IN THE SERIES. I think there could be less combat. I guess I should at least give Defiance credit for giving you experience and new combos for defeating enemies, but it’s hard for me to appreciate because I absolutely sucked at executing those combos and mostly just did them by accident. xD At first, right after finishing Defiance, I felt it wasn’t really... that great as a final game. But then I got it. It’s THE EXACT POINT. This is a game about Fate and about fighting Fate – and I guess Defiance can be understood as making particular points on those subjects that are actually kinda interesting. The character creation of Kain is brilliant overall. In fact, I’d say the whole series was maybe worth playing JUST FOR HIM. I loved his haughtiness, his flowery turns of the phrase as he derided peasants or waxed poetically about torture and death. He seemed to me an almost shakespearean character, reciting his lines with a charisma and emphasis worthy of a stage play. Overall, I’d say my final ranking of the games would be: Blood Omen 1 > Soul Reaver 2 > Defiance > Soul Reaver 1 > Blood Omen 2 If you'd be interested in seeing how I tackled Defiance blind, you can see a playthrough on my youtube channel, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YL7Ci5v-RMY&list=PLp4TpsJ7HUWVBj2WiWSK-4Jtg_xUCz4RG
If there ever was a game that would have been made four times better by being made four times SHORTER, it would be this one. Blood Omen 2 just DRAGGED ON a lot. There’s tons of combat and tons of just walking around. The puzzles most of the time were not even puzzles, they just required you to mindlessly flip switches. Go to a door. Flip a switch. Follow a cable. Flip a switch. Go through a door. Flip a switch. And so on. The biggest draw of the game remains probably Kain himself – his voiceacting is still top-notch and a pleasure to listen to. That being said, the WRITING itself seemed weaker than in the previous entries. Kain’s dialogue was less elaborate, less flowery and colorful. The problem I have with Blood Omen 2, apart from it DRAGGING ON soooo much, is that I don’t really know why it EVEN EXISTS in the first place and what it brings to the series. That’s mostly because it’s made very clear by some characters being alive and by certain other inconsistencies that Blood Omen 2 takes place in an alternate timeline to BO1, SR1 and SR2. So it almost feels like a spinoff and whatever happens in the game feels like it has little relation and little importance to whatever happens and was established in the previous games. Even if we took BO2 as setup for a certain race of antagonists, it ultimately reveals surprisingly little about them and what it does reveal is not particularly fascinating anyway, as far as otherwordly races of supposedly great power go. I guess even with all of the flaws I could have enjoyed Blood Omen 2 to a degree – if, as I said, it was four times shorter. But as is, it made me very very tired by the time I finished it. If you would be interested in seeing me go through the game for the first time (or maybe me playing the previous games), you can do so on my youtube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRlK78huftw&list=PLp4TpsJ7HUWWo4Nrl8vVpW7N1IbDIeiqo&index=1&ab_channel=LittleDwarf
I absolutely loved Blood Omen 1, and I was a little bit soured by Soul Reaver 1 but I was still cautiously optimistic about Soul Reaver 2 and hoping it would improve on it’s predecessor. And I’m glad to say that, at least in my opinion, Soul Reaver 2 was better than Soul Reaver 1. The combat is... rather tedious and not particularly fun, at least for me. It mostly comes down to the fact that it’s actually POINTLESS. You gain nothing by defeating enemies, no experience, no gold, no loot. The puzzles were generally an improvement over Soul Reaver 2 – gone are the repetative blocks, you mostly deal with thinking about how to traverse the enviroment and remove obstacles using the different elemental Reaver powers. But what elevates Soul Reaver 2 over SR1 in my opinion is that it seems to have a significantly better ratio of story/lore/dialogue to combat/puzzles than SR1 in favor of the former. There’s still a bit of backtracking, but you can skip most of combat with no consequence and the puzzles are generally more engaging than in SR1. And the story is quite interesting, with lots of twists and turns, and lots of recontextualizing previous events, casting them in a new light. It seems to contain some retcons, although that might just be misremembering things from SR1 and BO1. Generally even if they are retcons they weren’t that obtrusive, and the story answered a couple of questions. It also brought up many new ones, and while the game ended on a kind of sequel bait again it was less aggrovating than in SR1. The voiceacting is still very good. While I find Raziel himself not that compelling, Kain’s and the Elder God’s voiceacting is pure audio gold and I savoured every one of their lines. If you think you’d enjoy watching a frist timer going thorugh the game blind and trying to decipher what is it about, you can see it here on my channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mr4KYNThOk&list=PLp4TpsJ7HUWWZeilRSU5S8aWhI9TuOTUz
I’ve never played any of the Legacy of Kain games until very recently. But I randomly stumbled upon a video of Blood Omen and heard Kain, the main character, speak. And I instantly fell in love. So – I hastened to play Blood Omen just to listen to MORE OF KAIN. And I did recently finish it and it was pretty awesome. Now, playing Blood Omen is easily worth it in my mind just to experience the glory of Kain, the progatonist. He’s wonderfully acted and written. He speaks as if he was a character in a Shakespearan play, his words full of gravitas, arrogance and majesty. He’s a vain noble who seems to disdain all other denizens of Nosgoth, be they peasantry, other nobles or kings. He waxes poetic about torture and fantasizes whimsically about rape and pillage. And he does all of that in a wonderfully voiced performance. That being said, the story in itself was also not that bad – that vain noble reborn as an even more vain vampire with a bloodlust boosted by dark powers, and his journey through the dark, gloomy lands of Nosgoth to hunt down crazed magicans... And the exploration was top notch – there is a hundred secrets in the game, and I really did try to look for them and explore around, but I only found about half. So I’m pretty sure that to find all 100 would require significant effort and time. Overall, I feel that Blood Omen was a wonderful introduction to the series and well worth a play even in 2021. I had a blast and will definitely be checking the rest of the series. If you think you would enjoy someone exploring Blood Omen and learning about the franchise for hte first time, you can watch a blind playthrough on my youtube channel, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7hbxUFHzl0&list=PLp4TpsJ7HUWXjTgmKObR8rrlneDQTL0Eq
I’ve recently been browsing some older gaming magazines I inherited from my older brother, and happened across a review of an older game that caught my attention. The game was the 1996 Realms of the Haunting – a rather daring combination of a classic adventure game and an fps (!) of all things, promising a dark atmoshpere and an opportunity to explore otherworldy realms. Now, I mentioned the game is a pretty strange marriage between an adventure game and an FPS. And in my mind (but please note that I am by no means a veteran of EITHER of those genres) it works quite well. You explore the mansion, read documents and solve puzzles as you would in an adventure game, but you also get several weapons – a pistol, a shotgun, a magical staff shooting projectiles, an exploding blunderbuss and a magic sword, and use them to battle an assortment of demons and monsters. And I feel like it works quite well by providing you other obstacles than just the puzzles, and other activities to engage in other than just walking around and exploration. That isn’t to say the combat is super engaging or groundbreaking, in fact, shooting at enemies seems a bit “flat”, I never really felt that much strength behind the things I was shooting. The game also contains plenty of cutscenes with live actors. The actors, by the way, were most likely the developers themselves, because their “acting” is wonderfully cringy most of the time, to the point of being actively hillarious in a couple of crucial story moments. Overall, it’s not like Realms of the Haunting was a masterpiece, but it was a pleasant surprise to me and an overall enjoyable experience with an interesting approach to merging two very different types of gameplay. If you want to see how it plays before you decide whether you’re interested you can check my blind lets play on my youtube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ov4GhENC9Cw&list=PLp4TpsJ7HUWWb0xEa59RGj4Bk8l2G8AfV&index=1&ab_channel=LittleDwarf
I’ve heard conflicting things about Fallout 2. Some people said it’s significantly better than 1, and others said it kinda loses the spirit of the original. And while I myself sit in the former camp – that is, I enjoyed Fallout 2 more than 1 – I can also kinda see what the later group means. Generally speaking, Fallout 2 is certainly more grand than Fallout 1. It took more more than twice as long to finish, and while random encounter trash fights were a not-insignificant part of it (more on it later), there were certainly many pretty interesting quests to do in a variety of cities and villages. But on the other hand – Fallout 2 is a lot more „wacky” than Fallout 1, to the point where it may interfere with your enjoyment of it, because at points it’s difficult to take it seriously. Anyway, the main reason I preferred Fallout 2 to Fallout 1 – albeit slightly – was that in the end I found there to be more interesting side-content in 2. There were a variety of interesting sidequests. The area that I found to be the most interesting in terms of it’s worldbuilding and atmosphere implications was probably Vault City. Vault City is a walled community of fiercely independent Vault Citizens, disdainful and mistrustful of the ones they call „outworlders” beyond their walls. From the technical standpoint the game was quite a bit improved – especially in the way companions handled. Given you could actually give them armor to equip this time, and freely force them to carry your burdens without the need to BUY it back, a „party” approach was fully viable and actually kinda enjoyable this time. Anyway – if you want to see a newcomer handle Fallout 2 blind for hte first time, taking an inquisitive, epxlorative attitude and talking often at length about the plotpoints and ideas he found interesting while playing, you can check out my blind playthrough here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-qZ5_hL3jQ&list=PLp4TpsJ7HUWXZ8R3HJw7azXPLueDseIel&ab_channel=LittleDwarf
What is Anachronox? It is a 2001 sci-fi rpg with a comedic bent. While the actual story of the game is perhaps nothing that surprising or groundbreaking, I felt that the actual characters and their interactions were rather fun. Maybe not in a “constant roaring laughter” kinda way, but I chuckled more than once when playing the game, and generally I’d say I was rather consistently... amused, at least at a basic level. Because you do gather quite a team - a grumpy old man literally called Grumpos (whose superpower is yammering in annoyance!), a robot seravnt with a budding sense of independence, a literal comic book superhero, and even a shurnken down planet! There’s a lot to do in Anachronox – it is a rather long game that could easily take you 30-40 hours if you want to talk to everyone and check everything. That being said – a lot of that time is going to be spent in combat. And I didn’t really like combat in Anachronox. And the more I played, the less I liked it. It has really grinded me down. The worst thing about Anachronox’s combat system is that the attack animations of both you and your enemies just take SO DAMN LONG, and you are going to see them over and over and over again, hundreds of times. Some attacks can take a dozen seconds. By halfpoint of the game I was really, really tired of it. The characters are rather limited in their combat skill selection, so you tend to gravitate to using the same ones over and over again anyway. That being said, I still had fun with Anachronox. It is a very light hearted adventure worth a chuckle or two, but it also has some pretty weird (but interesting!) dark undertones here and there. If you want to see how it plays, or if you would enjoy seeing how someone discovers it for the first time, you can see my blind playthrough on my youtube channel, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLaXlByHU7w&list=PLp4TpsJ7HUWW-RnvtkTqZ-ao-kooxUP3O
It seems to me that if you disregard all context, especially Fallout 1’s release date and the fact that it was the first Fallout, and just treat it as „a game” playing it in 2021 it really isn’t that mindblowing or memorable. It’s not bad by any stretch. It’s still pretty good and perfectly playable. But it does not stand out to me as a masterpiece of any kind to last through the ages. Because here’s the thing – from my perspective, unironically, Fallout New Vegas seems to be a better Fallout than Fallout 1. It does more interesting things with it’s base concepts. I would say Fallout 1’s story is competent enough, but really, nothing breathtaking. In fact, I found the resolution of the antagonist’s story to be… a little bit silly? The flaw in his „master plan” was just so glaringly obvious that it stretches my suspension if disbelief that HE himself never considered it. I think Fallout 1 is not particularly breathtaking even compared to other 90s isometric cRPGs. Planescape Torment is what, 2 years younger? And I think it’s not even a contest when comparing the storytelling of the two games. There are many moments I still remember, years later. And Planescape just offers so much food for thought, whereas Fallout 1 does not really seem to do that. It was fun, sure. But it didn’t feel like a „masterpiece”. Overall – I did enjoy Fallout 1 well enough, I guess. But I can’t say I’ve fallen in love with it. Which I guess opens up a big question – should Fallout 1 get retroactive kudos for being the first one, even if I think New Vegas is ultimately kinda better? I think it should. So – thank you, Fallout. I didn’t love you, but I do respect you a lot. If you wish to see how a newcomer handles Fallout 1, I made a blind playthrough on my channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQPGOC9Pm9I&list=PLp4TpsJ7HUWUADgQpn_ejXFaM3PMHqKX_&ab_channel=LittleDwarf
I enjoyed the game well enough for a time - it had nice atmosphere and seemed engaging enough on the story front. Unfortunately, about 10h in I happened across a game breaking bug in the main story, and the game uses a single overriding autosave with no manual saving allowed. I've searched online and it seems the bug (failure to loot a body in the "Rat in the Hospital" quest) has been around SINCE LANUCH and the only "solution" given was to restart the game from the beginning. I liked the game, but not enough to replay TEN HOURS OF IT. So overall - I can't recommend this game on the basis of me not being able to continue or finish it.
