Silent Hill: The Room has some of the greatest highs and lowest lows of the original Team Silent quadrilogy. Any self-respecting horror gamer should experience it, but you should brace yourself for some questionable design choices. The setup is one of the best in any horror story, period. You, Henry Townshend, one day wake up in your room and find your door locked from the inside. There's no key. You can look outside through windows, but you can't open them. The only way out is through a huge hole in your bathroom. I get goosebumps just talking about it! This hole will lead you to nightmarish alternate realities and back to the relative safety of your apartment. You don't actually visit the titular town, but the game's story is still strongly tied to it, so don't listen to the purists saying it's not a "real" SH game. Creature design is great for the most part, especially the twins which make your skin crawl even the 50th time you see them pointing at you. The story is not told as elegantly as SH 2 and 3, but it's got some very creepy themes and uses the serial killer concept to its full potential. Now for the bad stuff. The combat was never the strong point of the franchise, but here it can get frustrating because of the insanely unreliable aiming. You can't really change target lock, so whenever fighting multiple enemies, you just have to hope that Henry won't aim at the furthest enemy like an absolute imbecile. Still, it's not much trouble on normal difficulty. The real problem is the last third of the game, which takes you through the exact same levels again, most of which already had backtracking. So you can go through a location 3-6 times. It's neither fun nor scary, just a very annoying way to stretch the game. You're sent on boring fetch quests at a point that should be the most climactic. I'd much rather see a game 2h shorter with better pacing. Fortunately, the ending itself is pretty solid and saves the experience. Now let's hope for SH 2+3 on GOG.
Elex is basically what would happen if you took Gothic 1 and stretched it out to 5x its size and length. Sounds great at first, until you actually try playing it. The steep learning curve and vulnerability of Gothic worked well because there was a steady progression throughout the game. You knew that some areas and monsters posed minor danger, while others meant sure death. You also knew that if something was out of reach, all you had to do was work for it for a couple of hours. It was clunky, but it made sense. In Elex, that progression is gone. Everything is spread too thin. It took me over 30 hours before I visited all 3 factions, and you need to choose one of these to get decent gear. You spend the first 15-20h as a total pushover. What's worse, there's no rhyme or reason in balancing when it comes to quests and open world. You can find harmless creatures 20m from one-hit-kill beasts. Early quests require you to travel across the entire map. Challenge is fun if it can be overcome in a reasonable time. If it can't, it only causes frustration. Combat is very clunky, often unresponsive. The good thing is it allows you to exploit enemies' braindead AI and large hitboxes, which is often the only way to win a fight early on. Once you get the good gear, the game switches from the punishing difficulty to a walk in the park for most enemies. It only shows how unbalanced it is. This means there's only a short period where combat is somewhat fun. The story and lore are easily the best parts of the game. A mix of sci-fi and fantasy where no faction has all the answers. Even some quests can be fun and offer insight into philosophical and ethical conflicts throughout Magalan. It's too bad they're presented in such a flawed execution. I hope PB will improve one day, but they haven't in 15 years and I'm tired of giving them a free pass. Imagine if Cyberpunk 2077 looked like The Witcher 1 or if Arkane Studios didn't improve their formula since Arx Fatalis. That's PB for you.
Mafia 2's greatest problem is that it's nowhere near the masterpiece it could've been. As a huge fan of the original, I've been anxiously awaiting the release of Mafia 2 for several years, closely following its development and watching every video. Unfortunately, all those talks of working for competing mob families, rising through the ranks, using corruption to your benefit and just living the gangster life remained as unfulfilled promises with only remnants of their design carried over to the final product, which often results in some awkward or useless mechanics. Everything from bars to robberies to car tuning is highly detailed, but serves little purpose in the campaign, where the linear story progress often clashes with your ingame progress. Why buy a large arsenal when the next mission might skip weeks to the future? And when that narrative jump does happen, it rarely feels justified. There's a part where you go to jail, which could open great gameplay possibilities, but the game never fully utilizes the environment. Then when our (anti)heroes start selling coke, instead of having many smaller missions to flash out their business, the entire episode is skipped with a 3-minute cutscene montage. Let me play the game, goddammit! Mafia 2 obviously had a lot of content cut out, which was confirmed by modders who later found out names of multiple campaign missions set in Sicily, as well as many detailed interiors spread throughout the map, but never used. But even playing the game gives off a sense of a rushed, incomplete story. The campaign can be finished in 10 hours, a very short time for an open-world game with no freeroaming and little replay value, and ends on an unsatisfying cliffhanger with that makes you feel like there was much more to tell. Overall, despite having some fantastic moments, rich atmosphere and its trademark attention to detail, Mafia 2 seems like a missed opportunity and merely a shadow of the unique gem we could've had.
