I love the original Beneath a Steel Sky, and I was pretty excited to play a new game in this setting. How would they cleverly pitch a new story with old characters and the same city? And that's what kills this game really: they didn't. The story pretense is absolutely nonsensical and lacking any agenda from Foster. I will avoid the spoilers, but the story just happens and the main character just enjoys the ride of subsequent set pieces the developers prepared for him. The reimagined city is hard to accept, given the massive shift it suffered from the hands of Joey. Old characters' are exploited for cheap nostalgia factor, and treated as extremely important figures for some reason, while in the original game they were all just accidental obstacles and/or helping hands of Foster. The Museum of Joey is abhorrent. New characters are way too comical and don't really fit with the others. The story climax is rushed and inconsequential, really. There's no weight to anything. Important issues are brought up by the game - once, and they are repeated in the most basic fashion at the end. An attempt to give some commentary, or presenting both sides of the argument, falls short and dishonest. Yes, it does comment on social media and intertwining it with real life, but nobody needed the Beyond a Steel Sky game to reiterate the same old things again to undefined audience and from undefined standpoint. The game even ironically remarks that it's plain worse than the original and there's no real point of it existing - yep, it does say that - but it doesn't change the fact that's the case, actually. The switch to 3D is suprisingly successful. The city transition (especially the upper levels) is nice, and it's enjoyable to walk around familiar environments. The gameplay is severely lacking. You're on a ride, and barely need to solve some simple puzzles. There's a neat hacking mechanic, but it's criminally underused and relies too much on stumbling on things by chance.
Frostpunk nails presentation perfectly, and the narrative side of the game is pretty fun. The game pulls you in into its world and tries its best to keep you in. Some general gameplay loops are good (scouts and overarching story), while others are - or would be - fine, if the game was devoid of the city builder layer. Frostpunk is a really bad city builder, and if you're looking for your fix, you won't find it here. It's more of a "choose your story" type of adventure, where 99% of decisions and options presented to you equal to a Sierra style death sequence and restarting the main mission which effectively is the only campaign/scenario/mission there is in the base game. If you pick a "wrong" option, its game ending consequence will be only visible dozen minutes later in the game. To complete the game, you need to solve the puzzle the developers thought of, and if you guess one step wrong - tough luck, try again. This is to detriment of the city builder part of the game, because by default the gameplay should offer multiple different paths to success, not funnel you down a narrow game of guessing "do I press A or B now". The city builder layer is extremely basic and highly unsatisfactory on its own. Random events do give you short term goals, but sometimes a certain sequence of subsequent events will contradict each other or require to stretch your human resources too thin (so you need to ignore one to not lose completely). And this sequence can accumulate. If you guess wrong what the future requires from you - tough luck. The temperature management is cool at first, but quickly overstays its welcome, since it requires a ton of micromanagement and prioritizing certain research options first in certain (not telegraphed) moments. If you're looking for certain spin on visual novel with resource management, this can be highly enjoyable and recommendable. If you're looking for a classic building experience only - better avoid. It's not fun.
The core loop is fun and engaging, combat is serviceable, but Death's Gambit tries its best to take you away from the meat of the game for the longest periods of time and in the most unfitting moments. 1/3 of the time I've spent in the game was on listening to bloated and incoherent dialogue and expositions at first, and then skipping it. Death's Door is really stoked on selling its story and characters to you, and will bug you like a stereotypical comedic merchant straight from a Monty Python sketch. This is to its detriment, because constant exposition and taking you away from playing made me stop playing it and uninstalling. The game is basically a soulslike in 2D, which works fine at its basic level. However, the setting and visuals are mediocre at best even on the surface, and pulling the Player into it isn't the best idea. The tone is all over the place, a comedic relief follows a comedic relief all the time, and the bits we're supposed to take seriously fall short and embarrasing. One of the strengths of Dark Souls and its setting/story was that it wasn't invasive and on the nose. You could enjoy it and read into it, but it never stood in the way of the gameplay and didn't require any time from the Player if they didn't want to spend time on it. Death's Door is a complete opposite of that. It's so aggressive in selling itself to you, that it takes you away from respawning and reclaiming your corpse (which is 100% you're focused on after dying in a soulslike and shouldn't be bothered) to a retrospective cutscene that takes a couple of minutes to complete. This is pure obliviousness to the design this kind of game should adhere to. The actual gameplay is fun, really. But it's not worth of the hassle of digging through all the noise that developers want to share with the Player and doesn't enhance the game in any way - quite the contrary.
