I think I heard of this game like twice in the 2000's and never looked into it, but there's an awful lot of emphasis on this rerelease and I mostly hear good things, so I took a stab at it. Before anything else, I feel it prudent to warn anyone as uninitiated as myself: Check all the keybinds before starting a game, and maybe do some remapping. It can easily be up to an hour before you find the first save point as you're getting to grips with the game, there are no tutorial prompts for controls, GOG does not provide a manual (in fact if there ever was one for the PC release it seems to be lost media), and the options menu is inaccessible ingame. How do you sprint? Spacebar. How do you reload? RMB + F. Melee is RMB+E. Yyyeah. Don't get caught out like I did and have to spend 10 minutes trying literally every key and key+mouse combo to figure things out. There is controller support, but it feels utterly horrendous, like it's using some Joy2Key wrapper. That out of the way, I guess this launched the same year as Resident Evil 4 and I find myself wondering who peeked at whose homework or if there was just some odd convergence at play piggybacking off the established tropes of survival horror at the time. Lone wolf protagonist who clearly isn't getting paid enough for this crap gets sent to remote location populated by [Russians/Spaniards] who are dealing with a deliberately engineered parasitic not-zombie outbreak and hurls himself into danger to rescue a tomboyish damsel. Parasites burst from the popped heads of infected, more "flesh hell" adjacent mutations show up as the game progresses, corpses rapidly dissolve with a bubbly effect, there's an over-the-shoulder aiming system with laser-pointer-enabled guns, both protagonist and rescuee end up infected and have to find a cure, and B-movie tropes are absolutely abound. I'll lead with what's impressive here: Cold Fear combines the classic horror game fixed camera angles system with the ability to switch to over-the-shoulder aiming at any time. It works surprisingly well, except when the game tries to present you with a horror sting it had lying in wait which doesn't really land because you were walking around fully anticipating it and able to peek at what would have been obscured by the fixed camera. Then there are a couple sequences where it's critical to be able to just run in a straight line but that's rendered far more difficult than it should be by the sudden camera cuts. I don't mean to complain, in fact I kind of wish more games had tried this dual setup, but I understand why they didn't. It just ends up interfering with itself. The first third or so of the game also takes place aboard a rickety whaling ship being tossed violently in a storm, and whether you're on or belowdecks the rocking of the ship is a major focal point of the physics systems. Your character's feet remain planted as his body pitches sharply with the ship, throwing off your aim a bit, loose items are thrashing about hazardously in the wind, there are intricate water physics at play, it's something I've never seen any other game do, it works well and is impressively novel. Then things start going a bit downhill as the remaining two-thirds of the game take place in another location and the sweet sweet physics tech is largely ditched as the game drowns most of its remaining novelty in ridiculously, hilariously awful and nonsensical B-movie plot beats that sadly aren't rescued by any sort of self-awareness, every room in the game getting reused about three times over to save on budget as you're funneled back through them repeatedly while events develop, culminating in possibly the worst final boss ever committed to the survival horror genre which ultimately got me to just uninstall and watch the ending on YouTube; an ending that's about on par with "I have to go now. My planet needs me," leaving one of the most vital plot developments completely unaddressed in the most catastrophically nonsensical manner possible. I will say, for what it's worth, that it managed to hold my attention (almost) all the way to the end, and I can certainly see how the physics of the rocking ship would have left a lasting impression, especially back in 2005. It even has a leg up on RE4 in that it's a less janky PC port than RE4 was, you get proper mouse aim with your weapons here, the gunplay in general was surprisingly solid, and there's the unique meld of camera systems. The ammo economy was decently balanced, it took me about 6 hours all told, but between the completely scattershod (even by B-movie or horror game standards) plot, the back half of the game being far less inspired, and that utterly godawful boss... it's just, you know, fine, I guess. Memorable and disappointing all in one. 7/10, not enough water.
I've seen Terra Nil billed as a "reverse city builder", which isn't entirely on the money. It's more of a loosey-goosey procedural puzzle game that unfolds in phases; windmills generate electricity but can only be placed on rock tiles, they in turn power other machines which have this or that effect on the terrain, some grow grass on dirt, others carve riverbeds but raze surrounding terrain, one generates new rock tiles on riverbanks, etc. It's an interesting balancing act to poke around with and you always need to be wary of your limited currency. There's difficulty settings for a more hardcore challenge or alternatively to turn it into a chill, pretty landscaping toy. Good stuff. Restoring the ecosystem gives way to optimizing habitats for the wildlife, you snap a few photos, and when you're all done you pack everything up in an airship and leave. At least, that's how it's supposed to work. Along the way you may well encounter regular, significant performance hitches, to the tune of the game grinding to a halt during more intensive moments like the "controlled burn" phase. And then, all the animals happy, all the chaff recycled and the airship set for launch... the game might just fail to register that the level is complete. If you back out to the menu and resume in an attempt to jar the missed progression flag loose, it may just magically delete the airship, leaving you with a 100% complete level that will never be able to register as complete. This may even happen on the very first level, as it in fact has for me, barring me from the entire rest of the game. This game launched two and a half years ago and is still so broken that I can't actually play it. What exactly am I supposed to say to that? It's a neat little game for sure, but this is absolutely inexcusable, and from what I gather the Switch and mobile ports are even more egregiously broken. It hurts not to recommend it, but I sincerely can't.
As the game opens and you have your initial few encounters with The Monster, the atmosphere in this is fantastic. And for as long as The Monster exists primarily as an indeterminate threat to police and punish your general noise pollution, it's a perfectly decent threat factor with which to throttle your forward progress and set an oppressive mood. The issue is that the further you get into the game, the more readily it begins to spawn in for no particular rhyme or reason, at which point your options are basically to hide somewhere and cross your fingers that you don't run afoul of the dice roll that determines if The Monster idly decides to just completely destroy your hiding place or not. A physical encounter with it will seemingly 4 out of 5 times lock you into an instadeath animation, while there's the odd instance where you might be able to get away with just one bad laceration if you're nimble enough. There are wonderfully tense encounters with this thing... spaced out amidst another half-dozen encounters where I just die instantly or twiddle my thumbs in the corner for 5 minutes waiting for it to despawn because it's untenable to waste the resources that are required to manually drive it off, and attempting to accomplish anything while it's present is tantamount to suicide with how abruptly it can relocate itself from point A to point B. It's the classic problem of overexposure. The threat of death and lost progress is scary. Actually dying and losing progress over and over, or alternatively cowering in the dark motionless for several minutes at a time, is not. I spend more time doing either of those than actually making forward progress. I get why it's happening; the map is remarkably small and the game would probably be over inside of an hour or two if The Monster didn't make such a constant insufferable nuisance of itself. The best part of the game is ironically right before the endgame where you're suddenly able to briefly visit a new setpiece free of your usual antagonist's omnipresent bother. It's still a fairly novel gameplay loop. It was an interesting experiment. I just don't think it worked very well.
Here we are seven years on, and I can fully believe that that entire time was spent immaculately crafting this game to Team Cherry's dream specification. The music, presentation, atmosphere, art, my GOD the art. It's Hollow Knight again and polished to even more of a mirror sheen this time. I love all the environments and silly little bugs milling around, there's so much I love about its presentation. Regrettably it's also quite easy to believe that this is a game that three people spent seven years practicing and tuning in private. You'll be able to get into the game, sure, but did you beat all the superbosses and finish all the pantheons back in Godhome? Because that seems to be the difficulty FLOOR for Silksong. Everything starts doing 2 damage so the 1 health upgrade you can get before the second act is useless, most of the bosses just plain take too long even on a successful run with massive health pools and occupy half the screen while dealing 2 damage even on contact. The REALLY bad ones also summon trash mobs endlessly... and most often it'll take at least twice as long to run back from the nearest bench as it will to die again to the boss that facestomped you the last 30 times. The farther you get into the game the more frustrating it gets. The never-ending biomes with the worst omnipresent poison mechanic ever devised that play more like something a trashpost game parodying Dark Souls would make as a joke. The tools that are limited per-use between save points, but also consume a secondary currency which exists purely as a solution in search of a problem. Every bench, every fast travel, every THING costs massive chunks of a currency that only some enemies drop and you'll always be skint on until quite a bit later into the game. Half the arenas are just endurance runs against 5 waves of the also-overtuned standard mobs including plenty of evasive, back-dashing, projectile-spamming flyers that don't even drop currency now just to ensure the encounter is a COMPLETE waste of your time. I *almost* managed to finish Godhome back in the day, I just ended up losing my patience with the worst boss (Uumuu). I finally hit my stopping point in Silksong around 30 hours in when an endurance room lasted for about 12 consecutive rounds including throwing three bosses into the mix. There's a constant stream of "gotchas" here that exist purely to spite the player, seemingly because it's thematically suitable that you're exploring a living world that actively wants you dead as opposed to a dead world that just lashes out in passive reflex to any living presence. I could keep putting myself through this but I haven't been having fun since the 8 hour mark and it's only getting worse. Silksong has been overtuned to hell and back and it's the kind of punishing that even fans of the original might not be able to stomach. It's the kind of punishing that even some Souls players, and half the people who manage to enjoy and finish this game, will still openly admit is "excessive". The only possible circumstance in which it is "a good jumping-on point for new players", as it was allegedly intended, is maybe specifically if you're a Bloodborne fan or you dropped Hollow Knight because you were bored with your exploration NOT being broken up by two-thirds of all trash mobs having the balancing of a miniboss encounter. I can barely call this a metroidvania anymore with how you have to buy your way forward at every step of the way, and every single enemy demands absolute locked-in focus just to survive basic traversal. I'd call it a soulslike but even most of the Souls audience seems to disavow the comparison. I'm not sure what to call it other than a very pretty, very deliberately crafted test of one's patience.
There are about a zillion mods out there for OG Doom 1+2 at this point; new mechanics, weapons, enemies, levels, entire campaigns, and even a surprising number of total conversions. Having said that, Ashes is probably somewhere in the top 10 for most people - like, encompassing everything, not even just campaigns or TC's. I won't claim it's some kind of revelatory or expectation-defying experience; it's not a Russian Overkill, Guncaster, Reelism, or Abort. It's just a really well made TC campaign, up there with Adventures of Square, The Golden Souls, or the rare commercial offshoot like Hedon though I'd say it gives even those a run for their money. Mad Max-adjacent worldbuilding, weapons feel punchy, levels have really solid design. Give it a try.
Look, I respect the glow-up this game has gone through as much as the next guy. It FUNCTIONS now. ...mostly. It finally fulfills most of the promises it made on launch. And while there's a hundred and one new things you can work towards, the issue is that half of those things barely work as advertised if at all, and the core gameplay loop never really graduates from "go here, hoover up eight tons of resources by clicking on them, and use them to make more and fancier stuff". I enjoy plenty of grindy games, but the grind needs to feed back into the game's other systems and vice-versa in a meaningful way. NMS is notably lacking in that department, so no matter how much cool junk I unlock it always just ends up feeling hollow and performative. The game not crashing to desktop every 20 minutes is about the only improvement made since launch that actually affects how much enjoyment I'm able to get out of it.
