I've been excited to play Neverending Nightmares since I first heard about it, and finally made time to pull it out of my backlog here in 2017. I hoping I'd be affected by it in some fashion, as it seems to have personal meaning for the developer-something I'm always thrilled to see in and medium, particularly in games. Unfortunately I personally didn't find any great meaning to it-it wasn't personally affecting for me. Even still, it's a very solid survival horror game. It looks at least as good in action as it does in screen shots. It's a very pretty game with a hand drawn, pen and ink style look to it that's unique and consistent. (Mostly black and white with plashes of color thrown in for effect and often to indicate things in the game world that can be interacted with.) The sound design is also strong, though once I had the music cut out and restart multiple times until I exited the game. Movement is intentionally plodding, but works fine. The game is fairly short, and like in a lot of survival horror games you're attempting to avoid what "monsters" there are in it, rather than confronting them directly. There are a handful of "types" that you learn to deal with in different fashion. Level design is solid, and often relies on a dream-like aesthetic of areas changing after you've gone through them. There are-thankfully-frequent points you restart from if you die-usually you wake from a bed, which happens to be near where you died (it's also a sort of dream-like element to the design). Like in other survival horror games it can be sometimes a bit frustrating, but it doesn't make you replay too much, and isn't too "cheap". You can save and exit the game basically anywhere too, which is nice. I did have to to "cheat", looking up how to get through an area about halfway through the game-which ended up being straight forward, though a number of other people got stuck in the same area. It's not my favorite survival horror game-I like the re-imagined version of Silent Hill for Wii/PSP, the Resident Evil games, Eternal Darkness, and especially Deadly Premonition better, but I'm glad I played it, and glad it got made!
I played this on PS3 a few years ago, and bought this the second I saw GOG had it. To me, Dead Space feels similar to Resident Evil 4-which I mean as a complement. This is very much an extremely well done modern Resident Evil-esque "survival horror" game. The settings reminds me a bit of System Shock 2 also. There's basically nothing I don't love about it. It looks and sounds amazing. The control is great. The weapons are interesting. The gameplay's excellent. The story's suitably creepy. The atmosphere's excellent. (The graphics for the time were astonishingly good (and I'm quite certain hold up fine). I still remember disembarking on this ship for the first time, stepping through a door, and having the lights slowly flicker to life, illuminating dust floating through the air. ) Honestly the biggest "problem" I have with the game is just that we don't get things like this more often!
This was The Collective's follow up to their awesome Buffy game, and also used that game's Slayer engine, which was pretty awesome circa 2003, and as you can see, doesn't make your eyes bleed today. Unfortunately Buffy never got ported to PC... Indy is, as you'd probably expect, quite a bit like Tomb Raider, but was MUCH easier to play than the Tomb Raider games were up to that point. It's also got some solid fighting mechanics in it (if less solid/fun than Buffy's were). Of course since this we've had a reboot with Tomb Raider Legend, and then another reboot with Tomb Raider, both of which made Tomb Raider much more playable. And of course we've had Uncharted doing the same thing on Playstations. As such, this probably isn't quite the experience it was a decade ago, but it should still be a solid title and worth it, particularly considering the price, if you like...well, Indiana Jones/modern Tomb Raider/Uncharted-esque games. Oh, worth noting too that The Collective somehow got amazing sound-alikes. The guy playing Indy is actually quite good at it. In Buffy they had most of the cast, but not Buffy, but her soundalike there was fantastic too (and probably aided by having a ton of interaction with Willow, played by Willow). (Possibly worth noting I found the old TR games frustrating even though I loved the concept. I loved Tomb Raider Legend, but then hated the psesudo follow up, Underworld, which seemed to re-break Legend, necessitating ANOTHER reboot. I also wasn't really a fan of the first Uncharted which was almost just a third person shooter, and not a very good one at that. I loved Uncharted 2 though that I thought paid off more on being an Indiana Jones-esque experience, and the jaw dropping visuals didn't hurt).
A year or two before Unreal finally released, we were being told it played something like Metroid. The idea sounded incredible (and bear in mind this was years before the more successful than not Metroid Prime series). Unfortunately, the finished game was a bog standard circa mid/90s FPS. It looked INCREDIBLE for the time (with the proper hardware), and has aged remarkably well. The audio is pretty great too, and it controls fine... But ultimately the game is WAAAAY too long (I never did finish it) the level design seemingly more about quantity than anything else. I'd have to say I had more fun with some of the ID games of that era than Unreal. I feel like it squandered its potential. It starts off pretty great, but then goes nowhere really...just endless firefights in endless environments. None of the original ambition makes it through, and there's really no storytelling past the first few moments. It's kind of odd/amusing that Unreal 1 still looks much better than many Unreal 2.0 based games that ran on PSP and PS2 and systems of that ilk! I don't mean to scare anyone off it. It's dirt cheap, still looks fine, and there's fun to be extracted from it, but Unreal 2 is going to hold up much better...or virtually any modern FPS...or games that are more than just FPS like System Shock 2 (also on GOG!) or Bioshock, etc. Just thought I'd give another perspective on it given all the super positive reviews. Maybe at the time I'd have given it 3/5, or maybe even 4/5, and it's not terrible or anything, but is just unnecessary in a genre that's hardly been underrepresented in the past 16 or so years.
