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Vampire: The Masquerade - Coteries of New York does a fantastic job of using the Masquerade universe and lore to center the story around. It will be easy enough for newcomers to grasp as it has a glossary for terms but still has enough for those who know more already. The characters were well done and I was enjoying the story up until the end. The game does a good job of giving you choices over when to feed or not; when to use violence or not and who to befriend or not. It could have been better in some ways though. The ending itself was too sudden and left too many unanswered questions. It also made most of the middle part of the game, which is forming your own coterie, kind of pointless as you never get to interact with these new friends much. The music was pretty good aside from one weird part where there was silence. The art and backgrounds was fantastic and possibly the only time I have seen a visual novel use dynamic backgrounds. I played Coteries of New York on Linux. It never crashed on me and I didn’t notice any spelling errors. The game uses the Unity engine. The game auto saves on every page and overwrites the one save. You can have up to 3 save games going at once but you can’t use more than the one slot for any one play through. This makes it near impossible to see where certain choices go as you would have to replay the whole game to try things out. I played version 1.06F1 of the game. VRAM Usage: 1971-2022 MB CPU Usage: 3-7 % RAM Usage: 2.6-3 GB Overall even with the poor save system and the rushed ending the game is still a lot of fun and does a great job with characters and atmosphere. I finished my first play through in 4 hours 20 minutes. I paid $22.79 CAD for it and feel that is a fair price. If you enjoy visual novels, and especially if you enjoy the Masquerade universe, give Coteries of New York a try. AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 | RX 5700 XT 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 20.0.5 | Manjaro 19.0.2 | Mate 1.24 | Kernel 5.6.7-1
Layers of Fear is a great game. One that is genuinely creepy and has a great story to explore. Most of it’s negative quirks are not huge and the positives outweigh it. The graphics are overall well done. The lighting and shadows are great and the art direction serves the creepy vibe well. The game is mainly an exploration and puzzle solving game. I still consider it a horror game but by no means a survival horror game. You don’t have to manage your health or ammo and don’t have to worry about dying. The game still managed to put me on edge the further you descend into the protagonist's madness. You are going to want to explore as much as you can as the story is told through items you find such as drawings and mementos which bring flashbacks and memories to you. The game ran really well although it needs a beefy CPU to be able to do that. On my old FX-9590 I was only getting about 40 FPS but with my Ryzen 2600X I was usually 100-144 FPS with the game on highest settings. The game did have a lot of technical issues though. Many times the game would crash at launch. This would happen on multiple versions of the game, different distros, different kernels and different GPU drivers. I was able to finish the game but every time I went to start the game I had to worry if it would launch. The game never crashed if it did load though. The game had a decent number of features and options. There is an FOV slider, two AA levels, a toggle for AF, Vsync, two settings for ambient occlusion and 5 other graphics options. There is support for frame rates above 60 so owners of high refresh monitors can put them to use. The game does use an auto save system instead of manual saves. It saves the game after each room you go through but my issue was that it doesn’t tell you that. I found that out on a forum post from the developer. Some sort of indication the game was saving would have been nice. ALT-Tab didn’t work for me.
I think the only reason that Mosaic wasn’t named “The Depression Simulator” is that there is already a game with that title. The game is told without any dialogue so you have to figure out the story through context alone. I can only say that this seems to be the story of a depressed man with no joy in his life who is trying to change that. Maybe the game was just making me depressed playing it, I don’t know. You start each day waking up with messages from work berating you and your progress; then you fix your hair and brush your teeth (seriously no shower ?); then you make your way to work. Along the way to work you encounter various bits of colour in an otherwise grey looking world. These bits of colour seem to awaken something in the main character if just for a moment. You then go to work and have to complete this resource gathering mini game before going home and doing it all over again. I detested this mini game but a part of me feels like I was meant to. I also didn’t like the many frequent camera angle changes while moving around the world, it made me think of the old school tank controls of 90’s horror games and I didn’t like that then or now. You also can’t move freely, you have to hold down the left mouse button to move in the direction you placed the arrow. If the goal was to make a bleak world the game succeeded. It is filled with ads for ways to increase productivity; a colourless world; and people who look away if you look at them. The backdrops; objects and water were well done. The music was great as well and reminded me of Off-Peak. I in some ways enjoyed the story that unfolded but hated the game play required to advance it. The aforementioned mini game was annoying; there were also a conveyor belt puzzle that was frustrating due to the camera angles. I played Mosaic on Linux. It never crashed on me. I did notice some flickering textures a few times throughout the game such as windows or the characters tie.
Death and Taxes is certainly a quirky game that is distinct in the visual novel genre. It is also a management sim akin to Papers Please in that you have to choose who lives and dies based on rules given to you where in papers Please you had to choose who to allow into the country. The big difference to me was that Death and Taxes was a lot more lax with the rules in that you could choose to not follow them and the story branched into a different path rather than end with you and your family dead. You make more money by following the rules but to be honest there wasn’t anything to spend it on that affected the game. You can get trinkets for your desk but nothing that is needed. You also need money to drink at the bar on weekends but to be fair even if you don’t drink there you can talk to the bartender and patrons to learn more about the background of the reaper business. The art is great and you can make your Grim Reaper look different enough that most people should be satisfied. I will say there was a couple times where they had white text on a white background that was hard to read. The voice acting was largely fantastic aside from a couple characters. I will single out Cerri the bartender and Fate for the best voice acting. I also loved the character of Lady Pawdington, Fate’s cat and your boss in his absence. Whoever made that character must have cats because they nailed their attitude. The end of the game seemed a bit flat for it’s lead up. I expected more to happen or to be revealed but it was much simpler than expected. The end credits was also unique as you get to decide the fate of each of the team while learning who did what. The game lasts for twenty eight in game days of decisions. I played Death and Taxes on Linux. It never crashed on me; and I didn’t notice any glitches or spelling mistakes. The game would save on exit and there was just the one save file.
I had heard that Acting Lessons could be a darker visual novel and luckily it lived up to it’s reputation. I had some feelings during it that some bad things were coming my way but I didn’t see the twist come near the end and was taken by surprise. It has some great characters worth caring about and a decent story. You get to make a pretty great selection of choices. My one issue with that was that part of the story revolves around picking between two friends who you want to be with but to be fair I was never interested in one of them and have to listen to her get angry with me over stringing her along but the game never gave me an option to date the other one. Overall though there is drama; love; sex; friendship; murder and more. I played Acting Lessons on Linux. It never crashed on me and I didn’t notice any spelling errors. The game uses version 6.99.14.3.3147 of the Ren’Py engine. It uses the OpenGL API. I played version 1.02 of the game. It uses up 3534 MB of disk space. It allows for manual saving any time and has 54 save slots. Alt-tab works just fine. The game does open on the wrong monitor but that’s a known bug with the Ren’Py engine not the game. During game play my GPU usage was 0-13%; my VRAM usage was 582-907 MB; my CPU usage was 1-5% and my RAM usage was 2.6-4.7GB. If you enjoy games like Being a Dik or Depraved Awakening this has a lot to offer. I paid $11.49 CAD for it and finished my first play through in 4 hours 40 minutes. That is great value, I’d say the game is even worth $20. Dr Pink Cake continues to impress me with their visual novels. My Score: 9.5/10 My System: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 5700 XT 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 20.0.4 | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB | Manjaro 19.0.2 | Mate 1.24 | Kernel 5.6.3-2-MANJARO
First person platformers can be hit and miss but A Story About My Uncle was highly enjoyable for the most part. It had some annoying bits near the end but this was a minor nuisance. My issue near the end was that it became difficult to determine what chunks of ground and rock one could grapple to. I didn’t seem to have this issue before the ice caves level for whatever reason but it meant a lot more deaths than normal. The windmills earlier were also quite finicky. Overall I liked the grappling system as it made me try to plan out a route before taking the first jump. There are also a decent amount of augments you get such as extra grapples; rocket boots; super jumps; and cores that recharge your grapple mid flight. All of this makes you strategize when to use them so you don’t run out mid flight. The story was at times basic but had some promise. You are searching for your missing uncle and need to explore this strange world to find him. My only complaint was that you don’t learn more about the frog people and their history. For instance you get a companion who deciphers glyphs for you but they don’t stick around long and there are plenty of glyphs after that point that I would have liked to know what they meant. The voice acting was very good. There wasn’t much music in the game to judge. The graphics were decent overall. It was never a stunner but had some good art direction. The only bits that I thought looked weak, even for 2014, was the fire; hair and the frog people’s feet. There were also some awkward transitions in the game where it loaded the next section of the game but only had a blank black screen. These transitions only took a couple seconds on my SSD but the first couple made me think maybe the game had frozen. I think adding a “loading” message would have been better. The ending seemed to be a bit flat and weak but I suggest waiting for after the credits when there is a post credits scene which ties things up nicer.