I really enjoyed this one, it's like playing a really good horror movie with a Norse mythology subplot. Creepy atmosphere with a familiar story, where you have to find out what happened to the crazy science base and how you fit in. Good balance of feeling helpless and alone in the dark, contrasted to when you finally get some abilities to do something about it. The sound design is incredible. Very atmospheric, and using your "sight" ability also tunes in your ears to hear audio cues to find logs, powerups, and secret collectibles. There is also secret writing everywhere you can decipher if you figure out the runes (it's a simple letter substitution). Has an interesting choice at the end and a new game plus mode for the completionists, so I will definitely run through it again to try and get all the collectibles and see how the alternative ending plays out. Excellent game from a small team, incredibly polished, I only encountered one bug (a flickering texture). Highly recommended if you enjoyed games such as "Soma" or "Vanishing of Ethan Carter."
I love the puzzle mechanics of this game, which caught my attention because they function like a board game I have and enjoy, Khet, based on reflecting lasers around a board. This game adds in several new mechanics, and the way they are introduced is perfect. You have to earn them by mastering the basics and collecting enough "tetrominos" before getting access to new devices. By the end, you will be a master of using lasers, fans, platforms and hopefully the recorder. The story is compelling, and is what kept me going through some of the more frustrating parts. There is a lot of text to read, but it is all interesting and available in small snippets at a time. There are also branching dialog choices you can make which influence your experience of the game, but not the outcome. I had a bit of trouble wrapping my head around puzzles with the recorder, but the solutions all made sense once I solved them. I got an immense sense of satisfaction from trying something weird and having it work. There are multiple solutions to some of the trickier puzzles, which made it a lot of fun. Some of the solutions to get the bonus stars are obscure and a bit stupid, but hey, they're bonus stars. There are three different endings, you can experience them all on the same playthrough by using the "Restore a Backup" feature if you want. ***SPOILER*** There appears to be an in-world connection with the game "Soma," which is referenced several times in the texts you find in this game. I loved Soma as well, and the stories are similar. Conclusion: If you liked Portal and Soma, you will like this. Say hi to Milton for me!
I really enjoyed this game, as a fan of Myst from the olden times. It has that same spirit, with a good story that keeps you pushing forward and puzzles that do not hold your hand and let you really mess things up if you keep clicking and pressing buttons without knowing what they might do. This is a game where you need to take your time, read everything you find, consider your options before pressing buttons willy-nilly. That said, I clicked furiously and really broke some puzzles before I knew what was happening. Human nature. Example: The sphere with the motorbike at the bottom. Don't click the button until you have an idea what it is for! ***SPOILERS*** There are some flaws. The dependence on the control pads with the Villein tech is a big one. Base-4 is a red herring. These puzzles suck. I hate them and you will too. Games that make you scramble for a real-life pen and paper annoy me in this day and age. Give me some kind of in-game log. Plus, the pixel-hunting to disengage the "connections" in these control pads is inane. Terrible, and should have been way more obvious and less pixel-hunty! That said, I liked the "Gauntlet" maze near the end, it was not that hard. The stupid Base-4 puzzles can go to the abyss, however. This game's biggest flaw is the running back and forth. As the AVGN would say, this is one of those "where TF do I go" kind of games. That's fine, but there should have been some more clues to prevent the player from getting frustrated. CW is a unhelpful jerk. Maybe that was the point? Anyway, I really liked the story, the world(s) and the atmosphere. Worth grabbing on sale.
I played SC1 and 2 on a Tandy, and this is a wonderful successor. Origins is a great follow-up and alternative universe prequel to SC2 and pokes a bit of fun at the not-that-bad SC3. Ignore whatever you heard about this, the original creators are never coming out with a game despite what they claim. Too much Skylanders money in their pockets to ever bother revisiting this property. If they actually release the game they claimed they were working on while trying to sue Stardock, I will print off the code for Origins and eat it. Suck it, Paul and Fred. Stardock did a great job, it's a fun galaxy explorer with some RPG and adventure elements. It is relaxing to explore a planet searching for resources, and the sense of humour that made the originals more fun than Master of Orion is still intact. Good story, fun single player, and the best part, two-player spaceship battles, is better than ever! Grab a friend and another controller and blow stuff up. I liked the addition of powerups to make the battles more interesting. CONS: No VUX.
This game almost convinced me to buy a Sega Saturn back in the day. Now I can play it on my PC in higher resolution graphics and I love it. Simple mechanics, relaxing and lovely soundtrack, and an interesting story you can piece together by observing the fantastical landscape and characters as you play. Works great with my XBox controller.
Enough has been said about the game's first year of existence, as Playstation woes polluted the entire dialogue and a pandemic-bored media seized on this non-North American game to savage for hate clicks. Forget all that. I preordered the game several years before launch, played it on launch on a middle-of-the-road PC, and was satisfied. It's a masterpiece. Every sidequest has an interesting or funny story. The city is loaded with details. The NPCs are colourful and as annoying as real city pedestrians. There are so many things to do a player will never have a problem levelling up or finding better gear. If you like Witcher 3's method of combat, storytelling, sidequests, and inventory management, you will find this familiar and enjoyable, as it is the same but in a first person perspective. The game engine has some peculiar issues with how it spawns NPCs and cars sometimes (look forward, look back, new NPCs and cars have magically appeared, what?!) but most of those seem to have been ironed out over the last two yeard of patching. Like Witcher 3, you can get lost doing sidequests. You DO NOT have to do every police scanner mission, every kill or fed-ex quest, there are way too many! They are in the game to help you level up. If you are a completionist, this game will keep you busy for months. The combat is deceptively deep. You can rush around flailing your gorilla arms wildly, but thoughtfully planning your approach and picking your way through your enemies with a variety of hacking, stealth, melee and heavy weeaponry is so much more fun. Plus, the game rewards exploration and clever decisions with XP. In terms of "cyberpunk" this game had a lot to live up to, especially with the genre going mainstream while this was in development, but the game lovingly captures the original 1980s visionary aesthetic and tells a good, but stock, story. The game shines by letting you live out the story from multiple perspectives and explore its moral dimensions.
You will always be one step ahead of death in this game. Your characters will be wounded almost all the time. You will lose characters after investing time into unlocking their stories and levelling their skills. You will wonder if your decisions on the overmap are right or wrong, as you are trying to beat the clock to get to the Tower and every day you waste helping others could mean your death. Grid and turn-based card-type combat, apparently a "copy cat" of other games but it's my first of this type so IDK. All I can say is that combat is like "King's Bounty" but a lot harder. Again, prepare to lose characters, take wounds, and deliberate over who will get your supply of precious strixes to survive the day. I LOVE the art srtle, music, story and the atmosphere, this is a hopeless world in ruin and you must control two different groups in two storylines which will intersect on their way to the climax. The combat seeds can seem a little hokey -- the computer seems to roll better than me consistently, but that's not unusual I guess -- and sometimes you may have to "cheese" the opponent with cheap tactics but in this world, anything goes. Level up those healers and archers ASAP!
E V E R Y T H I N G. You want a game that lets you destroy the whole environment? This is it. Roguelike where you try to get as far into the dungeon as you can without dying. Highly entertaining, once you figure out how to pull off combinations with your growing arsenal and the different environments. Not really a story or campaign here, grab it on sale and enjoy the kabooms!
Great roleplaying experience with good, challenging combat, but the pacing is glacial, the save system is needlessly immersion-breaking, and the lockpicking will have you save-scumming or just avoiding it altogether. Worth getting on sale, if you can get past the first 10-20 hours of gameplay without giving up out of boredom and frustration.
This is a unique masterpiece of an RPG in the sense that you really feel like you are Henry, the son of a Bavarian blacksmith who (spoiler alert!) loses his family before the first act begins in an act of violence that drives the rest of the plot forward. However, it's also an incredibly frustrating game. PROS: Detailed environments, historically accurate plot, beautiful graphics, fun to ride the horse around and explore a medieval countryside. Could be used in history classes if adapted. One of the first quests (optional) involves you and your gang of friends "painting" the German neighbor's house with manure. Doesn't get more "Dirty Peasant" than that, Strong Bad would approve. CONS: Euro-jank controls, horrid lockpicking minigame which barely works on mouse and keyboard as the developers intended and only half-works on a gamepad. Worst lockpicking in any game I have ever played, breaks rather than increases immersion it's so bad. Too hard in the first 10-20 hours to level up without save scumming with awkward "Saviour Schnapps" save system. Artificially limiting saving, especially in this game where auto save points are few and far between, and usually book-ended by cutscenes that get annoying after 20 reloads, is immersion-breaking. OVERALL: Great historical RPG with fun combat, but a ton of jankiness you may or may not enjoy. Well worth grabbing on sale, full price only for hard core fans.
