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There are times when games can be called experiences and this is one of them. What Remains of Edith Finch has one of the best stories of recent memory for me as well as one of the best imagined worlds I have every seen. At it’s core this is a walking simulator where you explore a house to find out the history of various family members. That doesn’t do this game justice though. Each family member has it’s own type of game to it when you are experiencing their final moments. For instance for Barbara you are literally in the comic book you are reading and watch things unfold on the page. For Lewis you are working at a canning plant and have to keep up with chopping fish as you explore his invented world he is getting lost in. There are others I could mention but will stop there to just say that the variety and inventiveness of the flashbacks blew me away. This is what walking sims can be and should strive to be. The game doesn’t point you where to go next but at the same time makes it apparent. The graphics were well done and made good use of colour. The detail on plants; objects; and water were great. The voice acting was superb throughout as was the music. I played What Remains of Edith Finch on Linux using Wine. It never crashed on me and I didn’t notice any bugs or glitches. There was a v-sync toggle; four AA settings; and six other graphics options. Alt-Tab didn’t work. The game saves automatically at various points. A manual save system would have been nice but the spacing between auto saves wasn’t terrible. Performance was overall very good. There were some drops in frame rate but they only lasted a second or two and otherwise was well above 60. The game does seem to have a frame rate cap of 120 FPS but that is better than some games using the Unreal engine that have a cap of 60.
The Prologue to Song of Farca does it’s job well of introducing you to the mechanics and main character. There is just enough to make you want more. The game explains why you can’t leave your house and also does a good job of having tasks you can do remotely to find clues. It is a little simplistic in hacking and accessing systems but to be honest simplicity sometimes is the best way to go. I don’t know if I would have enjoyed it as much had it been as complex as Hacknet. One thing I thought could have been handled better was when you fail dialogue challenges. If you pick the wrong piece of evidence or draw the wrong conclusion then you have to restart the conversation and try from almost the start. Not right from the beginning but still having to sit through the same sentences a few times was annoying. I would have preferred if it just said I was wrong and allowed me to try a different path without ending the conversation. Would that have been any more unrealistic than calling the same person back six times in a row and them repeating the same dialogue ? The art had a great style and felt very “comfy”. I also liked where the story was going. There was a little bit of cringe dialogue due to with identity politics but some of the twists near the end went in a darker route I hadn’t expected. I didn’t feel like I had much choices to make, which for a game that advertises “deal with consequences of your decisions in one of several outcomes” I didn’t get that feeling. Maybe it was more for the full game. I also wasn’t a fan of the note riddle but wouldn’t call it a poor puzzle as much as I would say I just wasn’t a fan of that type of puzzle. I played the Prologue on Linux using Proton. It never crashed on me but I did notice one video that didn’t play properly, it had coloured lines rather than a video. I don’t expect this issue in the full version as it has a Linux version. The game seems to auto save on exit but I’m not sure as it never says when it’s saving.
Lacuna: Prologue basically serves as a demo to the full Lacuna game offering you the initial case and a look at the game’s lore and world. It is at it’s core a point and click puzzle game but it does a great job at not following the same patterns and trends of that genre. You have a lot of dialogue choices to make and the puzzle aspect of it is more about keeping an eye on what people say to give you clues than it is about combining inventory items into a nonsensical device. It was this that made me enjoy it more than I otherwise would have. That and the world is fantastic. The story; characters; lore; all have a great depth to them and you can tell there is a lot of effort put into back story. The music was also well done. The graphics I won’t delve into much, if you don’t mind pixel art games you will find them fine but if you don’t you will hate them. Lacuna doesn’t really seem all that different looking to other pixel art games but at the same time it’s difficult to put a lot of detail into this art style. I really liked the main screen where you can view all of the sub menus such as conversation logs; clues; sheets; and objectives. It was well laid out and while there is tutorials to get used to it I found they weren’t needed as it was very easy to navigate. If I could have added one feature it would have been a map. While the levels weren’t huge it would have been nice to have a better indication of where to go from time to time. I will also say that the sheet system for puzzles was interesting. It made puzzles into multiple choice tests. You look at the info you have accumulated to see what the correct answers are and choose accordingly. This seemed like a fresh approach to me. My only concern was that with the murder case you investigate that I didn’t feel like I was very sure of my answer based on the info given. I was correct but more concrete evidence would have been nice. The voice acting was decent when it was used.
I was a huge fan of the original Superhot so when I got Mind Control Delete free as a gift I was looking forward to it. The game play itself is very similar to Superhot and is still a lot of fun. Sadly outside of the game play Mind Control Delete has found several ways to annoy me to the point that I was happy to be done with the game. Even on it’s last few minutes it was finding ways to not respect my time and introduce ways to sap any enjoyment I had left. The first thing the game did that I loathed was introduce enemies that couldn’t be killed. They spawn randomly, sometimes not at all, and when they do all you can do is try to avoid them. I have always hated enemies I had to run from and in this genre it is inexcusable. The worst part was that they get introduced after you get granted certain powers and later in the game they stop appearing after you are forced to give the powers back. I never used any of these powers, if I had the option to give them back right away and save myself some anger I would have. Later in the game on the very last level you are also forced to give up. You can try to keep battling through the levels but you are forced to give up everything including the ability to move and look around. You are meant to give up until you are past it. Then you are forced to press the “E” button over and over for about 1-2 minutes to manually trigger the “super hot” voice that is usually automatic. There is no reason to force the player to do this but you are forced regardless. After that you have to manually move the cursor up along the code to spell out messages. I should add that even hitting Escape didn’t bring up the main menu, I had to Alt-F4 in order to close the game at this point as I had enough. I have heard that the game even forced people to sit through a 2 and a half hour wait unless you wanted to edit a file to skip it. I don’t know whose idea that all of this garbage was but they should be fired as they ruined the game.
I have seen a lot of people online saying how they liked Fran Bow but didn’t like Little Misfortune due to the lack of puzzles. I can understand that because I have the opposite reaction for the same reasons. Fran Bow was a puzzle game that had a fantastic narrative while Little Misfortune is just a narrative game without the puzzles. I disliked the puzzles in Fran Bow so Little Misfortune was basically giving me what I enjoyed from Fran Bow and leaving out what I didn’t. The art style is great and carries onto the credits which is a unique one. The voice acting is fantastic. Both Misfortune and The Voice. There are moments which are sad, funny and in between and they nail all of them. Misfortune has a interesting accent and way of speaking which is a mix of child and adult. There are a lot of points which are pretty macabre, to the point where I surprised the developers took it as far as they did but was glad they did. The nightclub full of hamsters comes to mind. I don’t think the game would have grabbed a hold of me the way it did if they had of held back. The music was also very interesting as it made me think of an Eastern European disco and a cyberpunk synth type of vibe. There isn’t much in terms of “game play” here. Most of the game is you making choices and interacting with the environment to proceed. I don’t say this as a slight against the game because the story was great. Had the story been bad then the game would have fallen apart because there was nothing else to hold it together but luckily it was good. In regards to choices when The Voice says that there are no good or bad choices, just consequences, they mean it, the Voice will find a way to turn your choice bad regardless and I have to say that was a sadly realistic take on things from the developers. I was left with some questions such as just how Morgo was defeated; who was responsible for what happened to Misfortune; but overall enjoyed myself.
1979 does some things very well and others not so much. It does a great job of presenting a relatively unbiased portrait of history, at least my research couldn’t find many holes. The QTE game play works well for the most part aside from one section. For all but one part you are having to pick options while on a timer but for that other part you must be patient and wait for the right moment. Not a huge issue but the game conditions you to act one way only to swap it on you for one section which made it annoying for me. The game also did a great job of explaining people; events and culture for those who may not be familiar with Iran or much of it’s history. You are placed at various points of history as a photographer and the photos you take populate a menu going into detail about them. I thought the voice acting was fairly strong overall and enjoyed the dialogue choices. I will say that there was at least one faux choice early on. You can choose to not repeat your captor’s name to him but if you choose not to more than a couple times he kills you. While realistic it also made me have to redo the whole part which was annoying. It could have been just as good as a cut scene rather than a faux choice. The graphics weren’t bad but also not mind blowing. Everything from object detail to clothing to faces to buildings were serviceable but not fantastic. My main gripe was with the end part. The game ends very abruptly with little in the way of closure to the story. It just didn’t feel right. There were also other types of game play such as having to work on injured NPC’s. Having to remove glass; shrapnel and then bandage them. It was a nice way to break up the QTE’s and dialogue choices but was also clunky and looked crude. The gentleman whose wound I bandaged probably should have died from my poor quality work. AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 21.0.3 | Linux Mint 20.3 | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 5.4.0-96-generic | Wine 7.0 7/10
Season 1 of Being a Dik was perhaps the best visual novel I have played so Season 2 had big shoes to fill. It did a very good job of it. The overall story arc was satisfying. Some characters got more screen time and some less but it worked well. I really felt like my choices had some impact. For starters not being able to date everybody. Some games allow you to play the field which, while fun, feels like a cop out. By the end of Season 2 I really only had two choices for routes and it made sense and even then forced me to pick one. Other times I found the game referencing things I had done earlier, things I had not given much thought to at the time and having it shut me out of certain paths. Once again I liked this because it made sense to me. That being said sometimes there were a few choices where whether it was received positively depended on whether you were a Dik or Chick and when it’s something as little as a compliment towards someone I am already friendly with it seems like a weird distinction to make. The art and animations were once again top notch . Even the few models I could say I wasn’t a fan of were far better than many others in the genre. The animations were done very well and there was good variety in them. I will say though that even if you take out the lewd scenes, which I loved, you would still be left with a great game and that says a lot. I did find that there were a lot more free roam portions in Season 2 than 1 and some will like that but I don’t love them. I don’t hate them, I just find that sometimes they get like fetch quests. That being said the developers do their best to make them enjoyable. There are fast travel so you don’t have to navigate the whole building; you can play a multitude of built in games on your phone if you want, etc. The new mini games added were enjoyable. They weren’t night and day different from the first season but were still fun and served their purpose to add variety. The music was once again fantastic.
I have seen a lot of praise for the story for To The Moon. This is one time where the praise was due. What I saw of the story was very well done. The problem I had was that most everything else, aside from an awesome soundtrack, was not. Had this been a kinetic visual novel I would have enjoyed it much more. Had it had better thought out puzzles, such as Rakuen, I would have enjoyed it much more. Sadly what I was left with was a quality story that to enjoy I had to wade through input issues; low frame rates; and poor puzzles. The input issues were such that when I clicked on a location for my character to move they sometimes would go there. Other times they would go part way and stop. The same would happen when I clicked on objects to investigate, sometimes they would go right to it and others only a bit and stop. The puzzles mostly consisted of mini games of “preparing” mementos to go further back in Johnny’s memories. To do this you had to clear away white blocks on a picture by pressing buttons that correspond to columns and rows. In doing so you would create white blocks elsewhere. You had to anticipate where they would form (there is a pattern) and you could them clear them all. I found this pretty annoying. Even the basic puzzles of finding keys had issues at times. I was supposed to read this passage of a book to find a key hidden there but it wasn’t until the third time I read the passage that my character found the key. I played To The Moon on Linux. It never crashed on me once. There are no graphics options at all. Alt-Tab doesn’t work. It uses a total of 223MB of disk space. It uses the RPG Maker XP engine. The game allows you to manually save at any time outside of dialogue and has 3 save slots. There is also an auto save feature for those who prefer that. During play my GPU usage was 3-7%; my VRAM usage was 537-594MB; my CPU usage was 0-3%; my RAM usage was 2.6-3GB and my frame rate was a constant 40 FPS. Why it was stuck at 40 I have no idea.
Rainswept is a great mystery game. The story kept me interested all the way through. It has some decent twists and turns and good character development. It is fairly linear though. There are dialogue options but they aren’t optional in the sense of choosing a response. You don’t choose which questions to ask for instance, you just ask all of them. You get to choose in which order to question people but that doesn’t change the course of events. You have some point and click bits where you have to find certain items but nothing that is really hard or a puzzle. Basically there isn’t much game play to Rainswept. It is more of a point and click kinetic visual novel. That being said the quality of the story makes it worthwhile. The graphics is not quite pixel graphics but a similar style. There was good detail on things like plants; gore; objects; furniture; etc. There is a nice seaside vista as well. One thing that was weird was the legs of all the people looked really thin. The music was well done but there were a few stretches when the game was in total silence and they felt out of place as the rest of the game has at least some ambient noise to it. One issue I did have was that the boxes that show up when you can interact with something would only show up when you stand in a certain spot. You could be one inch too close or too far and they wouldn’t be able to be clicked on. Also there was one moment where a fire fighter finds a cigarette but and proclaims this proves arson. I’m no arson expert but generally that proves nothing and if anything leans more towards an accidental fire. One logic flaw I also saw was that in order to have you walking all over town your car finds itself in needs of repair. My issue with this is simply that it makes no sense. Are you telling me this police force has no cars to spare ? I get that you’re supposed to explore the town and having a car would defeat that but it is a flimsy excuse.