Reviews Rate the game you finished/retired

[Mivey]

Finished Layers of Fear 2

So on its head, it might be strange to touch this game in 2025, when a remaster of both games is out, but from what I understand, the 2024 game is less a remaster and more a reimagining and conclusion to both games, then a just a full copy of both titles (as I aim to find out), so I also wanted to give LoF2 a try. These are short games, so that also helps.

Similar to the first game, we play an artist struggling with their work. In this case it's an actor, who is forced by their kinda crazy director to go through a sort of soul searching to "built the character" they need to their next film. As part of this, he also digs deep into our past, and it turn out our protagonist has some rather traumatic stuff to deal with.
I won't give away the big dramatic reveal, but it is ultimately a question of identity, with our choices essentially determining who we truly are in the end. There is also plenty of supernatural shenangians, plus an interesting cameo from the first game.

The setting is on a boat, with strong Titanic vibes. As with the first game, it takes places in interior locations only, though they get crazier and zanier as the story goes on, with locations that might as well be underground caves, or the ocean or abstract horror landscapes of various kinds. The actual "gameplay" is pretty much nonexistent, you just walk, open doors and click on things. Though this time Bloober made things more interesting by chase sections where a monster can kill you if you fail. They are mostly incredibly simple, but they do serve to keep things spooky.

Overall, a pretty decent horror title, though mostly psychological horror. If you want horror that is more visceral, then perhaps not the best choice.

 

[Mivey]

I finished Observer System Redux

Finished another horror game by Bloober Team, continuing my recent streak of playing their back catalogue (mostly in preparation for Cronos)

Perhaps unsurprising, but this is another psychological horror game, in first person. The big difference to their other projects is the setting. Observer takes place in a cyberpunk setting, in the 2084, after a "great war between East and West" (so basically WW3), which left a lot of the world in ruins, allowing in the case of Poland for a corporation to take it over and establish a new republic, though this time one that is a corporatist dictatorship, essentially. We play as a cop, though basically half-retired and used as a so-called "Observer". Special cybernetic units that are isolated from the regular grid to protect from being taken over by adverseries, whose main purpose is, well, to observe, allowing the other rest of the cops to come in and their cop stuff (presumably harrasing minorities and anyone else they come across).
Our particular Observer is really looking for his missing son, who worked for the company but had to go into hiding for an explained reason.

Most of the horror parts come from the exploration of other people's minds, where our Observer can literally "plug into" their brain. You can see the influence of Layers of Fear very strongly in those sections. Lots of super impressive visuals, overbearing symbolism, you get the picture.

Visually quite stunning, especially from a small team from Poland (I believe at the time made by around 30 people, a far cry from the 250 people Bloober is employing in 2025). It's a relatively short game, it took me 10 hours, despite wasting a lot of time by looking at every little detail and playing its silly minigames. Probably something one can finish in half the time, if one sticks to the critical path.

 

[lashman]

which left a lot of the world in ruins

no, no, that's just how poland looks in general

 

[Mivey]

Finished Lunar: Silver Star Story



I started playing this one years ago on an emulator the first time, but never finished it. The remaster adds some nice features like a turbo mode for battles (not sure if this one wasn't added already by a previous version), which greatly helps make this game less tedious.

The actual game is a very traditional turn-based JRPG, that is overall pretty light in terms of difficulty, but also doesn't add much to the genre that other games didn't have. Lunar mostly shines due to its story, which is basically a straight-up love story between the heroes Alex and Luna, and secondary love stories between the other four characters. What is also pretty unique for JRPGs is the setting. We play on a moon, kept verdant and liveable by some kind of magic, and the "blue star" that everyone talks about is clearly some kind of blue planet, looking a bit like Earth (though the continents don't line up, so very likely not actually Earth). That part of the setting is not explored in Lunar 1, though I suspect it will play a bigger role in Lunar 2.

In Lunar 1, we are instead on a relatively simple story to save the world from a big bad guy who wants to conquer the world. This does get a little more complexity, once we understand a bit the motivations of the villain, but honestly, it doesn't add that much. Ultimately, Ghaleon is just a power hungery asshole who doesn't have much intrinstic motivation beyond being kinda jealous and being power hungry.

It helps that Lunar is pretty short by RPG standards, it took me about 22 hours to beat the first game.

I think I'll put in a longer break before I return to this world to play the sequel.

 

[MegaApple]

Finished Assassin's Creed Revelations on Steam (last week)



Beginning, ending and the Altair segments seemed made by the excellent Brotherhood team, and the middle story by a b-team (not a bad part, just doesn't fit a trilogy finale).
This game is only for those who want to see the conclusion of the trilogy story.
Even with this taking in mind, there are a lot of flaws. Less flaws, rather than underbaked stuff.

• Progress is lopsided, you can get the best weapon and armor by doing some random sidequests.
• Bomb system is "great to have" but ultimately, you only use it one type of bomb (unless its doing optional objective)
• Hookblade is genius, but very little ways to utilize it

You can feel like the original director of AC2 and Brotherhood leaving Ubisoft (plus 1 year dev period) affected it a lot.

That said. HOLY HELL is the ending so good as fan of Ezio story.



Rating - 2.5/5

 

[Mivey]

Finished Blair Witch.




The connections of this game to the source material seem fairly loose, and sadly there isn't nearly as much supernatural stuff as the "witch" title implies. That said, this is overall still a pretty good horror game. I remember playing this in 2019 on gamepass, and being super impressed by its graphics. It doesn't quite hold up in 2025, mostly since I end up comparing it to titles like Alan Wake 2, which isn't fair but the super static foliage just looks a bit basic and super fake once you have seen the kind of mesh shader based magic that Remedy can pull off.
The actual horror elements are handled quite well, though the fact that you basically never see another characer, excpet for your dog, kinda hurts the game. It's hard to tell an interesting story if all you do is hear them from a phone or a walkie talkie. It's clearly a budget thing, as Bloober back then simply didn't have the resource to put many people in their games. It also helps that the game is very short. Took me 7 hours to beat it,

Can recommend it to any fan of horror games, but one should keep their expectations in check.

 

[Virtual Ruminant]

Finished What Lies in the Multiverse (Studio Voyager, IguanaBee / Untold Tales, 2022)

A story-heavy pixel-art puzzle platformer centered around a mechanic that lets the player instantly swap back and forth with an alternate version of the level (this is where the multiverse angle comes in), where different mechanics and physics apply. On top of that there's a bunch of mechanics that Celeste players will immediately recognize, like the Space Jam / Dream Blocks. The sound design is a bit reminiscent of Fez. So, good ingredients, and the resulting game is good as well.

The story is a bit odd - it starts off as pure comedy and is pretty funny, too, but little by little sneaks in darker tones and by the end turns into full-blown drama. Somewhat unfortunately, the dramatic parts did not really do it for me, too overwrought and heavy-handed. But it didn't really take away my enjoyment of the game either.


7/10

 

[Virtual Ruminant]

Also finished It Takes Two (Hazelight / Electronic Arts, 2021)

It's quite simply one of the best 3D platformers ever made, wrapped in a story that looks and feels like a Dreamworks animation movie for the big screen. And it is all that while also being a co-op only game, and being accessible enough for casual gamers to have just as much fun with it as seasoned veterans.

Any gamer who doesn't outright hate platformers needs to rope in someone/anyone to play this game with at some point.


10/10

 

[Virtual Ruminant]

Also finished Season - A Letter to the Future (Scavengers Studio, 2023)

The game's own description "third-person meditative exploration game" is spot-on, so the average gamer will probably be bored out of their mind - however, for anybody who really enjoyed Kentucky Route 0 (as I did), this is probably the game that comes closest to KR0 in terms of mood, artistic accomplishment and pace - with slightly less literary ambition, but considerably more eye-candy.


9/10

 

[fantomena]

Finished



Well sorta a replay, but first time I played it earlier this year via PC game pass when I had that for 3 months on my older my PC where the game ran terrible. This time I played the enhanced edition maxed out and it rean beautifully.

Game is gorgeus and story is interesting, but gameplay is worse than the original and the original had my curiousity more.

Score: 7.8/10

Finished



Short (like 1.5 hours), but interesting game with a curious concept. Didn't care for the story much as Im not interested in football and it's a football-story driven game, but I enjoyed everything around that.

Score: 8/10

Finished



Very good pont and click game, with great voice acting and an interesting story. Story did go a bit too offrail towards the end and some parts of the story I didn't like, but otherwise a great game.

Score: 8.2/10

 

[Virtual Ruminant]

Finished Tomb Raider Underworld (Crystal Dynamics / Eidos Interactive, 2008)

Played on PC (main campaign) and Xbox One (DLC missions).

The last game of the first Crystal Dynamics trilogy is an unfortunate return to the level of Tomb Raider: Legend, albeit not quite as bad. The game engine in this one is was upgraded and the graphics (on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3) are a visible step up from those of Tomb Raider: Anniversary Edition, mostly with regards to lighting. The whole game is a bit of a late 00s graphics showcase - the bombastic intro animation (which also served as the game's teaser trailer) set to Mozart's Requiem in D Minor is still a looker even today.

The level design however cannot keep the promises that the nice looking graphics are making - the levels are riddled with awkward traversal, glitches, outright game-breaking bugs and terrible ideas - yes, the motorcycle from Tomb Raider: Legend returns, twice, but stripped of its Ducati-branding.

Taking things from bad to worse is the fact that this game came out during the peak Balmer-brained era of Microsoft, where Microsoft did its best to cannibalize the Windows gaming market in order to boost Xbox market share, and thus there are two DLC missions that are, to this day, exclusive to the Xbox 360. One of them, "Beneath the Ashes", also happens to be the best level of the game - a nice, classic tomb, located right underneath Croft Manor, a solid four hours of exploring, puzzling and the occasional fight - just right. But it's the only 7/10 bit of the game, the rest - including the ambitious, but severely flawed other DLC, "Lara's Shadow", is a thoroughly meh

6/10

Oh, and the conclusion of the Lara vs. Natla story arc isn't worth it either, but let's be honest, the protagonist has always been the bigger pull for Tomb Raider games compared to the story.

So.

Question: How does Lara look in this one? - Answer: The best she ever looked during the 00s, and there's costumes to dress her up with aplenty, most of them being free DLC - oh no, I hear you moan, you don't mean - yes, free DLC exclusive to Xbox 360. The tight and bright wet-suits, and the skimpy bikini outfits - all Xbox only. And on Xbox, the game doesn't even render in native 720p - all that improved lighting comes at a cost - and the cost is all those extra pixels of Lara's exposed skin being - well, pixelated. Just one final fail in this collection of failure.

 

[LEANIJA]

Finished Tomb Raider Underworld (Crystal Dynamics / Eidos Interactive, 2008)

Played on PC (main campaign) and Xbox One (DLC missions).

The last game of the first Crystal Dynamics trilogy is an unfortunate return to the level of Tomb Raider: Legend, albeit not quite as bad. The game engine in this one is was upgraded and the graphics (on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3) are a visible step up from those of Tomb Raider: Anniversary Edition, mostly with regards to lighting. The whole game is a bit of a late 00s graphics showcase - the bombastic intro animation (which also served as the game's teaser trailer) set to Mozart's Requiem in D Minor is still a looker even today.

The level design however cannot keep the promises that the nice looking graphics are making - the levels are riddled with awkward traversal, glitches, outright game-breaking bugs and terrible ideas - yes, the motorcycle from Tomb Raider: Legend returns, twice, but stripped of its Ducati-branding.

Taking things from bad to worse is the fact that this game came out during the peak Balmer-brained era of Microsoft, where Microsoft did its best to cannibalize the Windows gaming market in order to boost Xbox market share, and thus there are two DLC missions that are, to this day, exclusive to the Xbox 360. One of them, "Beneath the Ashes", also happens to be the best level of the game - a nice, classic tomb, located right underneath Croft Manor, a solid four hours of exploring, puzzling and the occasional fight - just right. But it's the only 7/10 bit of the game, the rest - including the ambitious, but severely flawed other DLC, "Lara's Shadow", is a thoroughly meh

6/10

Oh, and the conclusion of the Lara vs. Natla story arc isn't worth it either, but let's be honest, the protagonist has always been the bigger pull for Tomb Raider games compared to the story.

So.

Question: How does Lara look in this one? - Answer: The best she ever looked during the 00s, and there's costumes to dress her up with aplenty, most of them being free DLC - oh no, I hear you moan, you don't mean - yes, free DLC exclusive to Xbox 360. The tight and bright wet-suits, and the skimpy bikini outfits - all Xbox only. And on Xbox, the game doesn't even render in native 720p - all that improved lighting comes at a cost - and the cost is all those extra pixels of Lara's exposed skin being - well, pixelated. Just one final fail in this collection of failure.

I quite liked Underworld, the worst part of that game was the camera
The DLC costumes are available as mods: https://www.nexusmods.com/games/tombraiderunderworld
Didnt see the story missions there, tho.

 

[Ge0force]

I have decided to stop playing Silksong. My frustration grew stronger than the enjoyment I got from playing this game.

Agreed, it looks and plays amazing, with a huge world filled with secrets, tons of unique enemies and very well-designed boss fights. But on the other hand, some poor design choices turned the game from "a good challenge I want to beat" into pure frustration.

Most significant issue for me is the lack of save points near boss fights or after challenging platform sections. I don't think any of the bosses I've played so far were too difficult, I really enjoyed learning their attack patterns and openings to hit them. But by doing so I died A LOT, which means I had to play the same sections over and over and over again to retry the boss fights. This isn't fun for me. It's useless, a waste of time and extremely frustrating.

Second issue is that you loose your shards and rosaries each time you die and can't reach the point of death. Without shards, you can't use your tools, and without tools, many sections with flying enemies and boss fights are extremely hard and/or frustrating. Same for the rosaries: you need a lot of them to buy upgrades - and even worse - to unlock certain save points. It's such a waste of time to farm for shards and rosaries, especially if you need to backtrack to do so.

The latter actually made me stop playing Silksong when I couldn't save after a very difficult platform sequence in Mount Fray, because I wasn't carrying enough rosaries to unlock the save point. I really love challenging games and I'm happy to take my time to "git good" but this just felt unfair to me.

 

[LEANIJA]

I have decided to stop playing Silksong. My frustration grew stronger than the enjoyment I got from playing this game.

Agreed, it looks and plays amazing, with a huge world filled with secrets, tons of unique enemies and very well-designed boss fights. But on the other hand, some poor design choices turned the game from "a good challenge I want to beat" into pure frustration.

Most significant issue for me is the lack of save points near boss fights or after challenging platform sections. I don't think any of the bosses I've played so far were too difficult, I really enjoyed learning their attack patterns and openings to hit them. But by doing so I died A LOT, which means I had to play the same sections over and over and over again to retry the boss fights. This isn't fun for me. It's useless, a waste of time and extremely frustrating.

Second issue is that you loose your shards and rosaries each time you die and can't reach the point of death. Without shards, you can't use your tools, and without tools, many sections with flying enemies and boss fights are extremely hard and/or frustrating. Same for the rosaries: you need a lot of them to buy upgrades - and even worse - to unlock certain save points. It's such a waste of time to farm for shards and rosaries, especially if you need to backtrack to do so.

The latter actually made me stop playing Silksong when I couldn't save after a very difficult platform sequence in Mount Fray, because I wasn't carrying enough rosaries to unlock the save point. I really love challenging games and I'm happy to take my time to "git good" but this just felt unfair to me.

I ran into a similar situation and decided to use mods to balance the difficulty more to my liking/skill. That way I played it longer than I otherwise would've,

There's mods for keeping rosaries upon death, limiting enemy damage to one mask, removing getting damaged by merely slightly touching enemies; mods for showing boss health bars, mods that let you retry bosses instantly upon death... etc etc – in my opinion, these (and others) are things that maybe should be part of the game as optional difficulty settings. (I know a lot of people would disagree with that notion)

 

[Ge0force]

I'm curious how many of these "git good' people used these mods.

 

[Virtual Ruminant]

Finished Watch Dogs Legion, including Watch Dogs Legion: Bloodline (Ubisoft, 2020)

Technically the most accomplished game in the series and the virtual London in it is one of Ubisoft's finest works to date, rivaled only by the virtual Paris of Assassin's Creed Unity (which, make no mistake, is a terrible video game, with a fantastic map). The NPC AI is still very glitchy, but at least, unlike in the first two games in the series, the aggressiveness has been dialed back a lot, so the pretty common phenomenon in the first two games of the AI chasing you around the whole game map for ten minutes because of some random glitch thankfully is no more.

The main campaign tries something new and has no fixed player protagonist - instead, you build up DedSec London from scratch, using the citizens of London itself, every single one of which you can potentially recruit into your crew, with all their unique character traits, buffs and de-buffs and sometimes unique weapons and tools. It kind of works and doesn't work at the same time, relying on former DedSec London's hacked AI (which is called "Bagley", a thinly veiled reference to Samsung's "Bixby" AI assistant) to structure the story and keeping you on track. The story itself is the usual meandering Ubisoft affair that is primarily designed to lead the player past all the side-content and collectible busy work, like the main road through an amusement park - it's fine, but if you're like me, you won't remember the beginning by the time you get to the ending. The most memorable stuff - typically Ubisoft again - are a few select missions and side-quests. Mechanically it's quite similar to Watch Dogs 2 and actually simplifies a few things compared to that game.

The story DLC campaign "Bloodline" is a lot shorter, more tightly focused, featuring only a minimal amount of side-quests and almost no collectibles, and also brings back real player character protagonists: Aiden Pearce, from the first Watch Dogs game, as well as one of the more memorable characters from Watch Dogs 2, Reggie "Wrench" Blechmann. This one is really well written and even takes care to not spoil the main campaign, so it can be played before or after it (chronologically, it is set before the main campaign). Apart from a quite horrendous final boss fight, this campaign is the highlight of the entire game and also does a nice job of neatly tidying up the greater arc of the Watch Dogs story - if this ends up being the last Watch Dogs game ever made, at least Ubisoft did not leave loose threads dangling for once.

The virtual London and the great immersion is what kept me going back to the game, but I took long breaks - really long breaks: I started the game in 2022. But some 108 hours later, I ended up doing a quite complete playthrough of it, omitting only the more ridiculous collectible hunts. By the time I finished it, I also had the hardware to run the game on maximum details with ray-traced reflections and 200% LOD (in 1080p) and it's quite a looker that way, too.


7/10

 

[fantomena]

Finished



Still a very good game (replay, played it first when it launched some years ago), played it more throughly this time and also played a bit of the Valhalla DLC (will play that more later). Very long game (took me almost 60 hours), but played a lot of side missions/exploration too. Some bad pacing at times (like the Iron Wood section) and the Ragnarok part at the end went too quickly. Still a fun game, beautiful looking game (like Iron Wood looks great), good music, decent story (despite the pacing and the end going too quickly).

Score: 8.7/10

Finished



Decent soulslike, fun 1 hour, but then it got quite boring/bland. Lots of cool loot and different abilities with different weapons, interesting world and lore, but with somewhat mid-to-mediocre level design, some levels were too long for it's own good. Took me nearly 20 hours, but the devs could have cut some sections down.

Score: 7/10

 

[Mivey]

I finished Star Wars Jedi Survivor a while ago, but didn't write up my thoughts about it before.

The one with the infamously bad PC port, and indeed pretty much the only way to get anything resembling a stable frame time is to lock it at around 40 FPS, regardless of your PC. Then you can use FG on top of that to still get somewhat smooth framerates, but of course with added input lag. This isn't a huge issue, I found combat to be super easy, once you understand the super obvious parry system, but it is not ideal to say the least, and it's insane that this game shipped in the state it did.

But the performance woes aside, the actual meat of this game is so good. It's basically everything I liked about Fallen Order, but bigger and better. Instead of 4 smaller words, it basically focuses on one humongous area, Koboh, and then a couple smaller wolds you visit to spice things up, and I think this worked pretty well. Exploration on Koboh felt great and the other planets, like Jedah and Coruscant felt nice too.

As for the story, I was impressed how well this game addresses the main flaw of any prequel game: that our hero cannot change anything meaningful. The game takes this insight, and poses it as a challenge back to our hero: what do you do, when you can't defeat the Empire? Continue fighting fruitlessly, accept defeat? In the end, Cal Kestis settles in trying to survive, to find another path to preserve the ones he loves and other who need protection from the Empire, until such time that the Empire will fall.

Actual elements of the plot are a bit convoluted, but overall don't take up too much of your time, so I'm fine to overlook this.

I was stunned with how amazing this game looks on a 4K screen. Absolutely stunning visuals. It's nice to see that Star Wars can also be a colourful universe, not just desert planets everywhere.

I think for anyone who can overlook the performance (and for example, turn on FG and lock the game to 80 FPS on a driver level (hence ensuring an effective 40 fps lock before 2x FG), this is something you shouldn't miss out on. I'm super curios how this great series will end, and I hope the last game in the series won't run much worse than this one. I'm not expecting any improvements, Respawn has shown themselves to be incompetent beyond doubt when it comes to PC ports.

 

[Mivey]

I finished The Medium.,



My final Bloober game, before I can catch up to Cronos.

Definitively the strangest game of theirs so far. That's not to say that their previous games were generic in their content, but the presentation was nothing super new. Layers of Fear was a basic walking sim and even Observer didn't delve too far away from that basic formula. The Medium is a third person game, where the core premise is that our heroine is a spirit medium who can actually experience being in the "spirit world" at the same time as being in the material world. So you get sequences like these where the game is using split screen, usually a mechanic from local multiplayer games, except you control the same character.

The setting is Poland in the 90s, I believe 1998 or so, and the events we explore took place in the last years of communist rule, in the mid to late 80s. Naturally the game tackles with lots of history and themes from that ero, like the Warsaw Uprising, Communist repression, etc. I kinda wish that the game would delve a bit deeper into these themes, it feels more like background lore that gives context but can be easily ignored , presumably to target an international audience.

In terms of production values, the Medium is clearly a big step up for Bloober. Lots of cutscenes, with voice acting, motion capture and complex cinematography. In addition to lots of unique set pieces and gameplay moments. More on those in a moment. I can kinda see how they used this game to pitch to Konami that they are the right studio to remake Silent Hill 2. They even got Akira Yamaoka, the composer of the Silent HIll series, to work as a co-composer here, providing the soundtrack for the material world.

The only thing that's kinda mid is the gameplay, sad to say. I don't mind the exploration sequences, and would have been happy if that's all the game had, but clearly Bloober wanted to "spice things up", so we get chase sequences and pretty annoying stealth sequences. While all of these are relatively short and simple, I still feel they ultimately make the experience less enjoyable. Kinda wish they had just canned all that nonsense and left it as cutscenes.

So overall a nice experience, and some impressive horror vibes in the music and artstyle, but sadly a bit unremarkable as a game.