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The main menu of Virginia says “Press Enter to Take a Trip”. That is about as perfect a way to describe the game as I can: “A Trip”. This is like if David Lynch made a game. The whole thing feels like an acid trip of sorts. There is no dialogue at all so the game depends on facial reactions; music; and visual clues to make sure you can figure out what is going on. Luckily for Virginia those three things were the game’s strong points. The music was especially fantastic throughout the game. The graphics stunning but had a very simplistic quality that managed to be more detailed than I expected in it’s own way. I won’t pretend I understood the whole game but I understood enough to appreciate the story and the ability of the developers to intertwine various stories to all flow together without using voice acting. Gameplay wise it is mostly a walking sim as you are finding what objects to interact with. I played Virginia on Linux. It never crashed on me and I didn’t notice any glitches. The game only has options for resolution; motion blur and a toggle for AA. There is a frame limiter but it only had options for 30 and 60 FPS. I would have preferred a Vsync option. I left it at unlimited rather than 30 or 60. The game has an auto save system but it never tells you exactly when it’s saving so the one time I exited the game and reloaded my game I was further back then expected. I would have preferred a manual save system. Alt-Tab Works. Disk Space Used: 4.04 GB Input Used: Keyboard + Mouse Details Used: 1080P; AA on; Motion Blur Off GPU Usage: 77-100 % VRAM Usage: 1498-2053 MB CPU Usage: 35-60 % RAM Usage: 3.1-3.6 GB Frame Rate: 79-228 FPS
So right now if you look on the main store page for this game it advertises that "where your decisions in its dark and gritty storyline shape the world of tomorrow", yeah that's a lie. My entire first playthrough I had exactly one choice to make. One. I have one more issue with it in that the final boss came out of left field. There seemed to be no logical reason for them to suddenly become homicidal and need to be fought. Had the game revealed that they had taken a bad hit of acid and had gone insane I would have accepted that because it would have made more sense than the explanation I had been given. Now that aside the game was great. The combat is classic JRPG goodness. The game never crashed on me. The story overall is good and worth it. It's not too long or too short. I beat my first playthrough on normal in about 6 hours. Overall I would recommend it to fans of the genre. Just don't expect it to have huge branching storylines ala Mass Effect or Tyranny, it is very linear. That's not a slight against the game, linear is fine by me, I just wished they had advertised it that way.
The Park showcases what a walking sim can be. If you boil it down you really don’t do much but it is a great experience. You wander through the park and as you get to certain places and ride certain rides while looking for your son more of the backstory to Lorraine as well as the park is revealed. So while you don’t get much actual gameplay you get one of the finest stories I have seen in games as well as a fantastic atmosphere that allows the game to be very creepy while not having more than a couple actual jump scares. The Park uses lights; shadows; music; as well as the mind of an unstable character to manifest a feeling of dread and uncertainty. The voice acting was top notch as well. The graphics were above average as a whole. The water detail was awesome and the foliage detail was good. The fire; lighting; and object detail was decent but not as impressive as the others mentioned. The mechanic where you can call out for your son was a neat one as it not only can be used to show Lorraine’s state but it will also highlight where to go if you’re stuck. That being said the game was very straightforward about where to go. Graphics Settings Used: 6x AA; motion blur off; Ultra detail; v-sync on; 80 FOV GPU Usage: 70-100 % VRAM Usage: 1908-3265 MB CPU Usage: 11-25 % RAM Usage: 2.5-3.6 GB Frame Rate: 46-144 FPS AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 21.3.7 | Manjaro Mate | Kernel 5.16.14-1-MANJARO | Wine 7.4 | DXVK v1.10L
Kona is the kind of survival game I can enjoy. It has a lot of similar features as other survival games but it doesn't take them to a masochistic level. You have to manage inventory weight, cold, stress, and health but at no time was I pulling my hair out dealing with them. The story is very well done although I do think it could have done a bit better of explaining it near the end. Despite that I really liked the direction the story took. I think that the fact the game doesn't have a stated goal is good and bad. The game usually did a good job at letting you know what things need to be done without listing it on the screen or having a quest marker. I found the journal to be fairly useless at keeping track of things though. The map was great although it would have been nice if it listed which places you had visited. The graphics were decent but not spectacular. Nothing from object detail to clothes, faces, etc were mind blowing but they were not an eye sore either. I will give a shout to to the fact that your footprints in the snow stay a while. Many games don't go through the trouble to even have footprints in the snow. The sound effects were very well done. Everything from the sounds of feet crunching on snow to the sounds of doors, the truck, the snowmobile, etc were all great. The music was decent but repetitive. The game did employ invisible walls a couple times which is a cheap way to block your path. Other times they properly find good reason why you can't go somewhere so not sure why they didn't other times. I found it a tad weird that you can't view the map while driving the snowmobile while you can in the truck. I've never driven a snowmobile before so maybe this is realistic. My System: Intel i5-12600K | 32GB DDR4-3200 CL16 | Gigabyte RX 7800 XT 16GB | Western Digital Black SN850X 2TB | Artix | Dasharo 1.1.1 | Mate 1.28.2 | Kernel 6.10.10-artix1-1 | Mesa 24.2.2-arch1.1 | MSI G2730QPF 2560*1440 @ 165Hz
Tacoma feels like a bigger more sci-fi version of Gone Home. I mean that as a compliment. The idea is the same, you’re going around finding out what happened but this time you are doing so by finding logged recordings of events that took place. You can also go through various crew members offices and personal spaces to get to know the people better as well as provide context to some events. The overall story is well done and the only thing I would have changed is one plot point I wished I had an option to do the right thing or go evil on. The characters are fleshed out well and you feel like you get to know about them by the end. The few puzzles in the game are in the form of finding out what passwords are and I liked that many of them could be found through simply exploring. They were often neither too easy or too hard to come by although other times they just flat out give them to you. Part of me wants to criticize the game for not having a list of objectives but to be fair the game didn’t really need one. You go to each area, set up the transfer module to copy AI data and while that copies you explore the area to find logged events and learn more. If you’re taking the time to actually watch the events the transfer will be done long before you’re through. If you’re not exploring then well you’re missing out. The graphics had a clean style to them that made think a little of 70’s or 80’s sci-fi movies. They weren’t mind blowing in detail but they weren’t bad either. The game does have music for some of the events but it was background music that the characters were listening to, there isn’t much of a sound track to the game itself. The silence kind of works for it giving the game a peaceful vibe. I played Tacoma on Linux. It never crashed and I didn’t notice any bugs. Performance was overall very good but there were a few times where it dropped into very low frame rates. Tacoma used a lot of VRAM and GPU usage which the graphical detail didn’t warrant. 9/10