Pure kino. It really makes you FEEL like a piece of shit war criminal mercenary. I wish the campaign was a little bit longer.
Neo Scavenger starts strong and has a fun earlygame but once you actually reach the city the game is already halfway over. The game has a total of like 3 whole missions, one of which can be skipped entirely by passing a skillcheck. The game desperately needs some more stuff to do to make the price even remotely worthwhile. As it is it feels like an abandoned beta build that the developer just decided to give up on and sell. If it happens to be on sale then sure, go ahead and get it. You'll have fun for a good few hours or so. Just don't expect it to go anywhere.
You're really going to have to learn to play this game like an instrument if you want to see the end. Every time the game went up in difficulty I had to completely revise my entire strategy. I would probably recommend you play this game with prior knowledge of what the bosses can do, as characters can take quite a while to be ready for action and their death means you'll have to start over again with a fresh one, potentially losing hours of progress. This fear of losing progress often keeps you from attempting new bosses, which I found were usually not nearly as difficult as I'd imagined. So depending on how recklessly you decide to play this game can vary wildly in length.
Very much a downgrade mechanically from the first game, however after finishing it I suppose it did enough interesting stuff with it's presentation and story that I would still recommend it. The puzzle elements are streamlined as there is no inventory, the sanity meter is absent and the game is crushingly linear where the first game allowed for some more open-ended exploration as the levels were structured around hub rooms connecting various side-areas. However despite the immense streamlining in service of the story, the story itself is engaging enough that I wanted to keep playing just to know how weird things were going to get, even if the constant and unending use of pig metaphors in the game's dialog bordered on cringe-inducing. Where the first game's plot was straight Lovecraft, A Machine for Pigs seems like it wanted to be more SAW-meets-Charles Dickens-meets-The Island of Dr Moreau. The writing and style of narration reminds me a lot of Dear Esther, which is hardly surprising since this is by the same people. I would compare it to Marmite; you're either going to love it or hate it. I liked it despite the fact that it's nothing like the first game. You might not, depending on your tolerance for linearity and story taking precedence over gameplay. I'd say give it a go if you see it cheap. it's not very long and I managed to finish it in single night.
Going into this I was worried that it was going to be less scary than their previous game Amnesia: the Dark Descent. However after the first underwater segment the tension really starts to ramp up with every new location. The monster AI is much improved since the last game, where there were only three enemy types (with two being more-or-less identical to each other). now each creature has it's own special quirks, like being blind but hypersensitive to sound, or only attacking if you look directly at it. The detail put into the underwater segments is also pretty impressive. It's not quite on the level of Subnautica but it's pretty damn close. The abyss stood out as especially atmospheric and spooky. The story is pretty hard to talk about without spoiling anything, but I can say that it's some especially depressing stuff and will probably leave you feeling depressed if you care about the plight of the main characters even slightly. As far as negatives go, the game does a remarkably poor job of communicating how each monster is different. however the stealth gameplay is simple enough that you'll probably just figure it out after some short trial-and-error. also, while playing the game on Linux I ran into a glitch about 70% into the game where a specific handle on an essential machine failed to spawn for some reason, halting my progress. after looking at various walkthroughs to make sure it wasn't an item I missed i decided to restart from the last checkpoint and while the lever was missing it was now mysteriously set to the right value so I was able to continue playing. These gripes aside, I would absolutely recommend this game to anyone who likes a good story-focused horror game. Fans of more traditional resource-based survival horror might not be totally satisfied, but as far as the "run away from the unkillable monster" subgenre goes it's right up there with it's predecessor Amnesia and Alien: Isolation as the best there is.
To put it shortly, if you like first-person adventure games without any people and with a stronger focus on puzzles (eg, Myst) then you'll most likely appreciate Dark Fall. With the exception of one particularly finicky puzzle I managed to beat this game without any guides. be aware that unlike Myst, where most of the clues to puzzles are visual, Dark Fall hides most of its clues in in large amounts of reading materials. you can expect to do a lot of reading and re-reading books and letters if you plan on discovering the solutions to many of the puzzles. also, one of the most important pieces of advice i can give you before starting the game is to keep a pen and paper handy, as most if not all of the puzzles (such as locks) reset after you've finished them. Much like Myst the game presents its final puzzle relatively early and dedicates the rest of the game to presenting you the clues to it in small, scattered pieces. If none of these points scare you away then you can expect a fun, challenging puzzle game that will probably take you around ten or so hours (least that's how long I took to finish it).
