We all remember how Cyberpunk 2077 launched. The dunking videos. The bro reviews with the screaming clickbait thumbnails. The stories about troubled development, crunch. The feeling that we had waited so long since that tantalising first reveal trailer, and for... this? Now at patch 2.2 and with the Phantom Liberty expansion added, it's safe to say that CP2077 is one of the most vivid and memorable games you'll play. Multiple starting lifepaths and multiple endings. Characters you'll grow fond of, and characters you'll hate. A world full of amazing beauty and hideous ugliness, overshadowed by greed and cruelty but sometimes redeemed by acts of mercy and grace. Options and choices, It turned out not to be the RPG some were expecting, but your role in shaping the story of street mercenary V is one you won't forget.
I first played through Sinking City on the PS4, and having played Lovecraft(ian) games since Shadow Of The Comet and Prisoner of Ice, through memorable titles like Dark Corners Of The Earth, less memorable ones like Transient and so on, I have to say this is one of my favourites. The atmosphere is spot on, the detective elements are fun - the same developer also made Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened which brings the Mythos to 221B Baker Street - and there's multiple endings. Yes it's kind of a shame that the city isn't more interactive, but this is FrogWares not Rockstar - frankly what they achieved with their budget and team is commendable, and it's great they've finally got out from under their difficulties with their publisher. Also you get to shoot the KKK. 5/5
Yup, it's a mix of Dear Esther, Wolfenstein The New Order, and Bioshock. In that it's a non-combat exploration experience (aka 'walking simulator') set in a hidden sealed away fallen utopia built by the Nazis but with retrofuturist technology. At times waaaay too dark to make anything out even with your gamma cranked way up (annoying - where was the zippo used in the first area as a way to make light?), a *very* slow walking pace which I can understand is to make you look around and find the story clues rather than just rush through like someone swapped your Ritalin for caffeine tablets, some annoying glitches (reloading from a checkpoint and being stuck on some stairs unable to move, requiring a restart of the chapter), and no option to replay chapters from the main menu, only a New Game... but I still wouldn't say I didn't like Paradise Lost. I've had far worse times with far bigger games. You can pretty much see the plot beats coming a mile off but it's got the kind of captivating bleakness that works well with a story like this, and visually it's very impressive for a project of its nature. Framing the chapters with the names of the Kubler-Ross 'Five Stages of Grief' model felt like an unwise attempt to add gravitas (especially as it skips 'Bargaining') - come on, you're dealing with a nuclear winter and a Nazi gotterdamerung project, that's already plenty heavy enough! From the ending I reached it wasn't really very clear what the outcome of my choice was, and I missed a couple of areas due to one-way transitions, but I suspect I'm going to play through again just to make other choices and find out.
Being old enough to remember when pixel art was the cutting edge of game graphics instead of just a retro stylistic affectation, I was initially a little skeptical even though the premise had my attention from the get-go (think 'Demon's Souls meets Roman Catholicism in 2D during the Black Death'). I mean, we've seen sooo much faux-old skool pseudo-16/32 bit era stuff by now that most attempts to twang my nostalgia nerve just put my back up, however big a flame still burns in my heart for The Sacred Armour of Antiriad on the C64 PLEASE GOD SOMEBODY DO A REMAKE I'LL SELL A KIDNEY TO FUND YOUR KICKSTARTER Ahem. How wrong I was. This game is an absolute belter. The combat is less twitchy reflex test than a test of how well you can suppress your reflex and wait/watch for the moment to strike. The enemies and settings are mournful and melancholic, and combined with the tone-perfect music evoke an atmosphere drenched in dread and doom, your character moving through a landscape of suffering and despair like a beacon of merciless purpose. The lore is intriguing and I genuinely want to find everything. (Rather disappointed there's no option for Spanish audio language. Not that I'm Spanish or even speak more than a few words of the language: just that the shadow of the Inquisition looms heavy over 'Blasphemous' and it would add even more resonance to the experience. Also some of the English voiceovers are pretty damn terrible, sadly, so it's 'Voice Volume' slider down to zero for me, and I'll read the subtitles in my inner monologue rather than listen to the office tea boy deliver weirdly-emoted maulings of the genuinely intriguing script. Shame as some of the acting is good, but there you go. I'll never understand how devs can take so much care over all other aspects of their craft but seem to have a "Yeah that'll do" attitude to voice acting, as there's few things that break immersion like someone delivering a line reading like the understudy in a school play. Oh well)
Candleman is a delightful little puzzle platformer with a neat light-based mechanic and English voice "acting" so utterly lifeless you'll wonder why they didn't just use a text-to-speech program. The little two-line poems that separate each level are translated from the original Chinese with... questionable... results, but they could still have worked if spoken by a human capable of emoting. Instead what you actually get sounds like a woman whose bloodstream is at least 80% sedatives narrating the story with all the emotional investment of a brain-injured hospital patient reading the side of a cereal box . This kind of magical fable needs breathless wonder in the narration, not bored disinterest. If there was a way to switch on the Chinese voiceover and the English subtitles at the same time I'd have paid to do it, rather than listen to Miss Monotone squash any wonder out of the charming story of the little candle that could.
This game is a delight. Your character is the most adorable one I've seen in a videogame since A Boy And His Blob, but it's not all about the gorgeous graphics. Stealth, puzzles and well-written lore and dialogue make this a must buy. Seriously, I'm not writing a long dull review because I don't want to spoil anything. Watch the trailer, then buy. And don't worry that the characters are animals if you're repelled by all things Furry - the cast of this game are as far from cartoony anthropomorphic abominations as you can get. Just buy it!!
