Reviews Rate the game you finished/retired

[Kvik]

Not sure how I would rate this in comparison to other games. It's better than Ayesha since it's clearer how to progress the story, but the actual story is less interesting than Ayesha.

I've completed both Escha and Logy routes, including their unique endings, and I have to say the overall experience is underwhelming. You have the standard endings where they went to become adventurers and what nots, but the true ending hardly touches on the subject of the world itself. Ayesha ended in a promising note, but instead of continuing where she left off, Eschatology is mainly about personal growth rather than discovery/fixing the state of the world, which I feel like a missed opportunity. Ayesha herself is entirely missing from the game as well.

I didn't have the time to play Atelier Shallie this year, but I'll try to play that soon because I'm curious how they will expand the story.

 

[Mivey]

I've completed both Escha and Logy routes, including their unique endings, and I have to say the overall experience is underwhelming. You have the standard endings where they went to become adventurers and what nots, but the true ending hardly touches on the subject of the world itself. Ayesha ended in a promising note, but instead of continuing where she left off, Eschatology is mainly about personal growth rather than discovery/fixing the state of the world, which I feel like a missed opportunity. Ayesha herself is entirely missing from the game as well.

I didn't have the time to play Atelier Shallie this year, but I'll try to play that soon because I'm curious how they will expand the story.

one funny detail: the name "Escha & Logy" is pronounced "escha to logy" in Japanese. Eschatology is a name for the expectation that the world will end (in some form or other, and do so soon-ish). Despite this reference, the game just isn't really willing to really deal with that topic, front and center. Sure, things get a bit harder out in the frontier, but you never get a true "end of days" feeling. It's way too cheery and happy for that to ever hit you.

 

[STHX]

Have you ever wandered about what would happen if we could peek into alternate timelines? What if a movie that never came out actually released? What if a famous book was never made? What if Harmony Gold never existed and SRW was now a world renowed series with 25 years of western releases? Well, during these last weeks I felt like I traveled into a different timeline, and saw the result of a completely different evolution of a long running JRPG series spanning 20+ years. Except this series isn't japanese, didn't release on consoles for most of those years, and obviously was never translated outside of its native language. Let's enter this mysterious new world, the world of the Sword of the Xuan-Yuan (軒轅劍)

In today's age it has never been easier to have access to "exotic" videogames. Platforms like Steam, more standardized OS, an increased interest in global sales all allow users to buy and experience titles which would have been impossible to even install, if not play in the past. Hell, even series like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy are in our memories because they released on popular consoles sold worldwide. But 30 years of videogames is a long time, and the world is vast and who know how many series escaped our grasps. 2 "sister" series share this history, The Legend of Sword and Fairy and Xuan-Yuan Sword, and today we'll focus on the latter. Developed by DOMO Studio, a taiwanese dev team, this series started on pc only, chinese only, and more than 20 years ago. This isn't a retrospective and it's not like I even have the knowledge to talk about it, but 20 years are a long time and during this time the series evolved in the same way other similar RPGs changed: from sprite based top down 2D 16-bit games, to the age of pre-rendered backgrounds and more colorful and detailed sprites, to the early low poly 3D models, and up to the high definition era. By some mysterious force one day the "gaiden" chapter of the sixth game in the series (and 12th game in the series total) ended up on Steam Greenlight, passed, and then was released with an english translation (which eventually made slowly made its way to consoles too) and thus the series was available to us outside of china. And this is the game I'll talk about today
The Gate of Firmament feels like a lost PS3 era JRPG. It's a familiar yet different title. The Xuan-Yuan Sword titles are historical fantasy rpgs, set into the real world in different time period, but featuring fantastical/mythological elements. Story wise this game is set in the actual chinese age of myths. The story focuses on the aftermath of the Juedi Tiantong, originally a religious reform in 2000 BC china which in the game world is taken more literally (Severance of Heaven and Earth). The heavenly kingdom of Huaxu sacrificed their lives to seal away the Celestial Gate forever (that allowed anyone to reach the realm of the gods in hope of receiving divine powers, in exchange of informations on the location of the Jade Emperor's daugher which was said to have escaped to the human realm) in order to bring order to the realms. Thus with the gods gone from the affairs of the world, the age of man started. But as hundreds of years pass the world succumbed to turmoil. The Xia dynasty was said to have inherited the gods blodline (and so had the "mandate of heaven"), but eventually fell into tiranny and so the dynasty was overthrown. This market the beginning of the Shang dynasty. But during this reign the land fell victim to natural disasters, such as great floods or famine, and as the years passed many questioned if the Shang were the ones "responsible" for this, as they lacked the "mandate" unlike the Xia. With the country in turmoil many tribes became nomads, and rebellions were common. The actual story starts in one of these nomadic tribes. We are in the 1200 BC period and the protagonist of the story is Sikong Yu, a young inventor/engineer which spends most of the time coming up with traps (mostly to protect the village from potential invasions by barbaric tribes). But on a faithful day to save her adopted sister and dear friend, who was kidnapped by a local tribe to be used as a sacrifice, he infiltrates their hideout and, together with his sister, meets and rescues a mysterious young woman. This woman helps in repelling the enemy tribe with her mystical powers, but Sikong Yu is blamed for the barbarian's attack and so he is forced to leave the village as its relocated to a new, more secure place. The chief decides to give him a chance and will allow him to return only after he escorted their mysterious saviour, Mu Yue, back to her kingdom. And so this "true RPG" journey starts. Sikong Yu is soon joined by Feng Yu (based on a real historical figure), a "high ranking officer of the Shang" (who is totally not the prince of Shang searching for a way to stop the rebellions), and Zi Qiao (also based on a historical figure), a preistesses traveling the land while searching for her future husband by reading the stars. The 3 (and a piglet mascot character named Aqi) so end up accompanying Mu Yue, who is not very subtly eventually revealed to be a survivor from Huaxu (so a celestial being), on this journey to find a way back home, while step by step discovering the true force bringing turmoil to the land and their role (or destiny) which awaits each of them. And obviously the titular Celestial Gate will end up being the focal point of it
The story is without a doubt the strongest point of the game. As it's deeply based on chinese mythology it feels very novel to the "western" mind, but even outside of this the story is well written, with twists, a good lenght and pace, love, mysteries and goodbyes. A true positive is how every town the party visits in the game ends up "important" to the overall journey. While some areas are obviously fillers, the actual towns all have a reason to exist in the story pace, and not many RPGs nail this part. Unfortunately the translation isn't that great but maybe because I'm not a native english speaker I somehow still managed to understand what I was reading. Typos are still common, as are obviously wrong subtitles (the same exact line repeated multiple times even as the character speaking changes, for example) and often the game flip flops on how to write character names or on the terminology. I also found the soundtrack to be quite good, with many tracks all fitting the "ancient china" period. A negative point is with the presentation however: the models are good but outside of the protagonists everyone else lacks any expressivity with the face (and it's not like the protagonists have that many facial animations either). This is one of the most obvious things in the game: its nature as a pc first game means the game looks clean, with textures large enough to not appear blurry and detailed models, but the actual geometry is lacking. The game looks like a weird inbetween of ps3 and ps4 era JRPGs: not enough "graphics" to look as good as its ps4 siblings, but also not bad enough to look like the older ones. Another issue with the story are the simple repeated animations, which will eventually be very noticeable, as well as the various pauses which oftem make the dialogues take too long. An overall "slowness" is also very common gameplay wise. And speaking of slowness, I can't believe the game pretends some of the twists in the story are some sort fo mystery that needs to be delayed for so long, like Feng Yu's identity which was obvious from the moment he started speaking
The game, outside of battles, plays very similar to the PS3 era Tales game: there is no overworld, and every area is made of "corridors" outside of towns which are more open. But instead of connecting the world each "field" is a separate area, with the player travelling between them from a menu based map. Thus exploration is very limited. There is basically no difference between a "field" or a "dungeon", and the only reason to explore is to find treasure chests. The story is completely linear and so the "journey" also ends up like this: every new area, being a town or a new field, is unlocked after seeing all events in the previous one. And this is very literal: usually a new field features multiple events, starting near the entrance and ending near the exit (usually with a boss fight), but the player doesn't really need to "exit" from the exit since as soon as the last event is done the next area is already available, and I tested it by walking back to the entrance and "exiting" from there once and behold, the next area was there. This small thing really makes the "exploration" feels like a "checklist" instead of a journey, and it doesn't help the whole game only has 2 fields which are truly optional (not needed for the main story progression), the DOMO Studio (which is a dev room/museum where you meet the dev avatars and can see artworks and models from the series) and the Realm of Thoughs (which is accessible after finishing all of Sikong Yu's sidequests and it's used to unlock the true ending). As I used the word "side quest" it's important to point out that while the story is very linear, the game is filled with side quests. Most of this side quests are simple "speak with guy, go somewhere else/speak with another, come back" for some extra items, but some have much better rewards, and/or have more involved cutscenes which expands on the cast or the world. The 4 (well 5 including Aqi) protagonist all have a full side "questlines" made of various quests which is used to learn more about them and unlock their best equipments. But these sidequests can have very strict timing and a small distraction can cause the player to miss them. Unfortunately the game does require a guide (or the player always checking every available quest) to avoid missing something. Also the characters move so slow... A simple dash button or a faster move speed would make such a massive difference since there is no "fast travel" for fields: you always enter from the entrance and any side quest that forces you to go to an already explored field (so most of them) will force the player to walk all the way back there, and while there are no random encouters there is no way to actually avoid the enemies since as soon as one of them spots your player characters they immediately rush there, and avoiding them is basically impossible
And speaking of enemies, the battles are uh... a mix of real time but still pretty relaxed? The player controls 1 character while the others are AI controlled kinda like Tales, but it's not full "action" like Tales: positioning doesn't matter, and attacks are limited by cooldowns, but these cooldowns feel more like a "there is no reason to spam the button" cooldown since they mostly end as soon as the attack animation ends. Your character can use light attacks (which can be comboed to a mxaimum of 3), heavy attacks (which can end a combo and can hit multiple targets) and 4 equippable magic skills. It's... not a very original battle system but also not very common, but it's also way too simple since you only have those options + using an item and it doesn end pretty spammy, especially on hard difficulty (which does nothing but making the enemies stronger so it's useless). The game is also very grindy with materials to grind to craft items and equipment aside from the standard experience levels. There is also an option to "capture" monsters but, again, it's not like you use the monsters to fight, you simply turn them into crafting materials to create new monsters or to power up some special accessories by "feeding" monsters to them. Captured monsters are needed to fully unlock their encyclopedia page so you have to do it for the achievements, but that's it. Each playable character also has a way to "interact" with the roaming enemies, like Sikong Yu can hit them (they start the battle stunned) and Mu Yue can turn invisible for 9 seconds (the only way to truly avoid roaming enemies)
The annoyances with the slow, pointless exploration and the repetitive battles become even more noticeable if the player is going for the 100% completition, because aside from the game requiring a careful playthrough to not miss anything the final achievement/encyclopedia entry requires new game+, as the last item needed to get the last entry (and so the last achievement) is obtained past the point of no return, but the "quest" that needs it is actually before that point. It's kinda bullshit honestly, an actual fuck you type bullshit. Which is a shame because there is a good core, it's just the game also suffers from all those "PS3 JRPG" problems that make them not that liked compared to their predecessors (or more modern ones), and the overall slugginess really doesn't help, and for this reason it's not a game you can fully recommend without understanding its problems
But the game can be bought for very cheap at this point, and I enjoyed peeking into an up to that point unknown reality. Without this game (and Sword and Fairy 6) who knows if all these chinese titles would be available on Steam in english for us to enjoy

 

[fantomena]

Finished



Enjoyed it a lot more than the first game which never truly clicked for me. Great art style (beautiful game), great environments, interesting story, great gameplay, overall a very good game. Shorter than I expected though from the years in development.

Score: 8.9/10

Finished



The campaign. It was better than I expected, had fun with it, short though, but decent fun.

Score: 7.5/10

Finished



Enjoyed it a lot. Lengthy game (10+ hours), fun story, fun world, interesting store and world building, cool gameplay, great art and art style. Some frustrating jank though and sometimes the got got a bit repetive. The way all the mechanics works could have been explained better.

Score: 8.5/19

Finished



Well, somewhat finished, did complete the last level, but there's more stuff to do. Enjoyed it, but I guess not as much as everyone else, mainly felt that when the balls and different stuff hit the enemy could have been made to feel better, felt like hitting paper or something. Other than that, it was fun, but every "round" in the game felt too logn even with the shorer round option and faster round option added.

Score: 8/10

Finished



Fun game. Great looking graphics, beautiful for the most part. Fun gameplay, but too many bullet sponge enemies and all the enemies on-shot kills you too far often and that breaks up the pacing of the game (the game is very fast-paced). Interesting world and the story is interesting, but goes downhill towards the end.

Score: 7.5/10

Finished



Very fun, good looking and smart puzzle plattformer. Short, but has nice endgame content after.

Score: 8.7/10

 

[Mivey]

I finished The Outer World 2



Loking back at my original thoughts about the first game, I was pretty negative on the whole thing. Not because I didn't see the potential, but because it just didn't live up to that potential.

I am surprised how much TOW2 improves on that formula, without really turning it on its head. I think the biggest change is just the game isn't quite so anaemic as the first one. You get more areas, that are much larger. The plot runs for a bit longer and you get moe time to flesh out the companions. It moves from a game that's basically done in 40 hours, to one that gives you maybe 60 hours (not counting completionist types). The quality of writing is also so much better. I particually enjoyed reading up on the terminals: you get so much context and a lot of time finding some info will unlock options in the story you wouldn't have otherwise.


The game does a decent job to make sure whatever skills or background or abilities you have are rewarded by allowing only people with those abilities to do certain things. You gotta give up the idea to see everything in one playthrough, though the stuff that's optional is usually just things like weapons and money, so nothing story critical.
Exploration is also rewarded quite well, with tons of secret access points to find and small puzzles and secrets scattered around the world.

Combat was good too. I deliberaly played as a "sickly" character with a focus on speech and observation and low focus on combat and it made the early bits of the game rather tough, forcing the use of stealth to thin out the enemies before. Of course, by the end of the game you are still pretty OP, but it actually takes a decent bit of time to get there in this game, as opposed to the first one.

The story is .. ok. It's nothing grand, and I wish the game had made all three groups into factions you can be friends with (at the cost of working with others). Instead, the largest group is always hostile, and there is no way to really compromise with them. Clearly a budget thing and it does lead to some silly situations, like how your companion from the Protectorate is A-ok with you mowing down his pals. There's one brief scene where he brings this up, but then it's just forgotten.
The other factions are Auntie's Choice, who harken back to the first game and represent the "evil corporation" trope of this series and the "Order of Science something something", who are the nominal good guys, though too obsessed with math and science to really be effective. They are both fun to interact with and it's nice that this time it's not just all corporations.
The evil groups, the Protectorate are a dig against authoritarian, fascist ideologies, just as Auntie's Choice is against hyper capitalism.

One thing you shouldn't expect from this game is truly interesting political commentary. It's all too shallow to really explore its subject matter. I'd blame Microsoft for this, but this was already a thing in the first game. Obsidian just isn't interesting in truly sharp writing, sadly.

Overall, if you like Obsidian games, then this should be an entertaining experience. Don't expect Fallout New Vegas levels of quality, and you should be good.

 

[fantomena]

Finished



Pretty fun side scroller action beat'em up with great pixel art graphics and interesting story, Gameplay is decent fun, but very basic. Wish there was more to do with the combat and very much the same enemies to defeat.

Score: 8/10

Finished



Very odd game in an odd world. Interesting graphic style. You go around and you cook different things the people you meet (they say if they are hungry or not) and you have to be careful not to destroy the food or have the food "leave" the plate. Fun concept and fun game all around.

Score: 8.2/10

Finished



Very interesting and cool detective game in a future cyberpunk society where you have different tools to help solve murders, like rewinding time in certain places. Great looking game for the most part. However the detective gameplay does get kinda stale and dragged on many times and the story kinda felt downhill towards the end.

Score: 7.7/10

Finished



Super intriguing game with a weird, but cool graphic style. Good gameplay, the way you have to look at enemies in first person and see their "hearts" to kill them was cool. Great world building and good story. It's like an indie Resident Evil x Silent Hill.

Score: 8.4/10

Finished



Decent game, curious story, nice graphics style and decent gameplay. It is a very much exploration focused game where you often have to go around and find different things and a certain amount of them, use them to build new tools to progress the story, too much focus on that which broke the pacing of the game for me, but the story itself, the world building and graphic style helt it apart for most of the time.

Score: 7/10

 

[STHX]

It is said that years ago, in Tunghai University in Taichung, a boy and a girl were in love, but her parents disagreed of her fiancee because the boy was considered too poor. The 2 lovers decided to elope and live together somewhere else. They were supposed to meet up on the bridge near their campus over the next night, but the boy never came, and the girl threw herself in the lake
Even now it's said if you walk over that bridge at midnight, you can hear a young woman's voice asking what time it is, and the ones who fail to answer disappear to the bottom of the lake
Well, everyone heard a story like in their life, right? Probably every school, campus, park, mountain, beach, lake in the world has a story like this. But one day someone decided to make a movie out of this story (with some liberties of course). 2 years later, the Taiwanese based Softstar Entertainment (which curiously, are also behind the previous title I reviewed, Xuan-Yuan Sword, and the artbook even has a comment about how they usually make RPGs so horror is a first for them) decided to make a game based on that movie, and this is where we are

The Bridge Curse: Road to Salvation is an interesting title, with issues but still interesting. It does feel like a "first time a non-horror dev makes a horror game", and while the scenes are well directed and motion captured it does feel a bit budget considering the amount of explorable areas and assets (but the game is cheap enough on Steam so who am I to argue)
The story is not that different from the movie one so the trailer above says everything that needs to be said, so let's talk about the gameplay first. Horror as a genre has so many variations, and Bridge Curse fits into the "first-person, powerless protagonist, escape from creature, puzzle" type of horror. Well, the game is obviously horror but to me the gameplay feels closer to a point and click game, but in first person: most of the time you make the character you're controlling walk somewhere specific to collect an item, or talk to someone, or read something, or solve a puzzle, or solve a puzzle with an item you collected and so on. The game is set on the campus of Tunghu University, and the map is detailed and obviously based on the real life one, but it's also too big considering how many places actually serve a purpose. You will walk, and walk, and walk, and the player character is so slow. And boy if you ever get lost or somehow didn't get where you're supposed to go you better have a video walkthrough at hand otherwise you, the player, is the one who will go crazy with all the walking on this gloomy campus. In the very beginning part of the game there is a part where you have to find a specific item to progress and I somehow walked straight over it at least 3 times before I finally saw it on the ground (and you have to look at the ground for the pick up icon to appear). The improvement in graphics, details and resolution can still cause a form of "pixel hunting" even now. Luckily I did quickly figure out the game actually expects the player to usually move forward linearly (a combination of opened doors versus closed doors, hints written on walls etc) and exploring is basically a trap to waste your time (although there are some extra details in the areas you walk through referencing other urban legends or having optional documents to find). Regardless there is still too much walking, one time you even have to walk all the way to the opposite side of the map simply to get an item so you can open a door on the other side. The game is separated in short chapter where the player controls different characters, so there is also no real "continuity" in the inventory: each item you can get must be used there in some way. The worst part is the lack of a map of any kind, which makes it easy for the player to get lost until they memorize where each place is. The puzzles range from the old "place the correct item in the correct slot" to some variations of "figure the password from the environment" to straight up puzzles, there aren't many but they at least break the monotony of walking. I do think the game looks really good, with lots of details in the environments, with good atmosphere
But beyond the normal gameplay, the game also features "monster" segments where the player is supposed to escape a ghost creature. If the creature of the chapter catches you it's an instant game over (with a convenient retry from checkpoint option so it's not that bad). The character you're controlling has no weapons and no way to defend themself, you can only escape. This part is however quite janky and, very well made, and also very obviously scripted. It's clear the player is expected to hide in specific places, walk in specific directions, and behave in a certain way because experimenting always ends in a dead end followed by the current creature catching up with you. Some of the creature animations especially when searching for the current character can be quite goofy, a symptom of first time horror makers for sure. The death animations are also quite simple and in some cases more funny than scary, with the creature grabbing the camera and screaming or scratching the screen. The game has a warning at the start to not play the game if you suffer from heart diseases but really, I don't think a monster punching the screen with a goofy SDONG sound effect is going to give anyone a heart attack
Music is almost non existent, but sound effects are plenty, from the usual ones you expect in horror titles to the ones used to figure out where or how close the current creature is. The scenes are obviously motion captured and well made and even the face movement and lip synching fit perfectly with the chinese voice acting (apparently the console version also features an english dub, but Steam surely doesn't). but I sure hope you like hearing people scream because oh boy these 6 kids really like screaming. I also think the story, while overall having an interesting mystery, has some pacing issues and weird things that don't really resolve in interesting or satisfying ways. The continues protagonist swapping doesn't help either since it makes the story feel more disjointed, especially since the writers do nothing with the fact different characters see, or "percieve" the apparitions differently from each other, and I think this one part could have been interesting if developed more. But it's just an excuse to not have to explain why one character is suddenly trapped in some other place while the others don't realize it
Overall it feels like a pretty cliche asian horror story, with cliche horror game monster designs. There is nothing original and boy the walking is endless, but I still knocked it out in 2 evenings without feeling the need to force myself to finish it or to unistall it. As far as the horror part goes however it leaves a lot to be desired as a game. Annoying, sure. Scary, absolutely not. But the game still ran like butter while looking good (the night atmosphere most likely help in hiding some of the simpliest models or textures), had zero crashes, no issues with progression and it's cheap. It also seems the sequel title i a marked improvement over this one, but that's a story for another playthrough
And, as I often say, I like devs that make things based on their culture/folklore, ancient or modern

 

[Ge0force]

Finally finished Elden Ring.

Playing dual wield with occult katanas + blood damage + mimic ashes makes the game A LOT easier compared to my previous STR build. I managed to beat most of the bosses within 3 tries, including Malenia. The dual gargoyles and the final boss are the only bosses I summoned co-op players to help me.

The game is a masterpiece as you all know, but it's hard for me to spend so many hours in a single game when my backlog is so huge. This is the main reason why I won't buy the DLC (the other is that I accidently started new game+ after finishing the game ). Perhaps I'll replay the game using a magic build one day.

No perfect score because of the absurd quest system and the enemy/bosses recycling in the 2nd half of the game, but Elden Ring definitely comes close to perfection.

Score: 9.8/10

 

[Mivey]

I finished Singularity

A game from Raven, back before they become a full-time support studio for the Call Of Duy mines (and surprisngly, Microsoft hasn't laid them off yet, maybe they forgot they exist? )

I think the fairest description of this game is "Temu Half Life 2" (except that back in 2010 Temu didn't exist yet). There's the puzzles that involve a specific gun you get, the scripted sequences with NPCs walking around and speaking at you, and the dystopian Sci-Fi world. Of course, it's nowhere near as good or polished as a Valve game and the gameplay is pretty much just a linear shooter with few interesting set pieces.

If this description doesn't completely turn you off and you are in the mood for a simple shooter, then I think Singularity is still quite enjoyable. The time travel plot is also fun, but sadly the g ame doesn't really do all that much with it.

On a technical level, the port is incredibly barebones. None of the UE3 options are really exposed and to support resolutions that aren't in 16:9 ratio, you have to open up the registry. The engine supports ultrawide, without distorting the UI even, but the fact that they couldn't even expose it using .ini files is just wild. At least it supports xinput properly, which wasn't something you could take for granted back then.

 

[spiel]

Dropped The Knight Witch

I finally unlock a dash ability, and the game takes it away in the next stage set underwater where movement is constrained, the dash is gone, you can only shoot horizontally, AND the game drops you into arena rooms that are far too small with bullet hell.

I rage quit. It felt like banging my head on the wall and not even in a good way like Silksong where at least the combat feels snappy, or One Step From Eden where it's fast-paced.

It upset me so much that I...

... Played Nubby's Number Factory

Instant gratification, the game. It didn't last long in my rotation but I can see why it went viral. Amazing aesthetic.

Completed Linelith

A nice short puzzle fix for The Witness lovers out there. Bonus points for having non-annoying sokoban mechanics. I picked this up in the Bite-Sized Puzzle Exploration bundle and I'm looking forward to playing the other games.

 

[Virtual Ruminant]

Finished Mercury Abbey ( YiTi Games / Gamirror Games, 2024)

A visual novel with light puzzling, and a few side-scrolling platforming and top-down action sequences, with the look of a retro pixel-art point-and-click adventure. The game was successfully crowdfunded with a Kickstarter campaign that raised 1,502,241 Yuan in 2022.

Clearly this is a game for furry fans made by (Chinese) furry fans, but the presentation is as high-end as you can get with retro pixel-art, and that includes the animations. The game also uses modern shaders to add effects and lighting to the pixel-art that would not have been possible back in the 1990s, making this a real feast for the eyes (even for non furry fans). Supported by a subtle but vibey soundtrack, the game just oozes cozyness right from the title screen. There is no voice-acting.

Despite looking like a 2D side-scrolling puzzle adventure, it's really a visual novel though - reading dialogue is the main activity in the game and therein lies also the game's biggest flaw, a sub-par English translation that, even a year after release and with more translations apparently in development, desperately needs an editor to fix all sorts of awkward phrasing and outright typos. The story suffers somewhat from initial slow pacing - the game spends two of its five chapters trying a bit too hard to establish a lighthearted cozy vibe to make the inevitable twist and subversion more effective, but ends up coming very close to being outright boring and tedious at times during those first two chapters.

I found this game through a Steam Next Fest demo in 2022 which already showed all of these exact strengths and weaknesses and knew I was going to play this regardless, and I'm happy to report that the last three chapters actually make for interesting reading (despite the weak translation) and the occasional puzzles and mini-games, while not challenging, are a welcome distraction from a pure VN experience.

For people who do not care about the art style (or the furry/anthro factor), this game is probably a 6/10 at best, but for me, it's a solid

7/10 (and if the English translation ever gets properly edited, I would even bump that to an 8)

 

[STHX]

Milestone is one of the biggest videogame companies in italy, having nearly 300 employes and reaching 30 years of age this year (although technically it's slightly older as it had a different name, Graffiti, between 1994 and 1996). Since the beginning they focused on racing games, and slowly made their way year after year, from publisher to publisher, eventually specializing in bike games, which makes sense as italians do love their 2 wheels. From the official Superbike games, to official MotoGP games (and also some car games like official WRC games for a while), even dipping their toes into motocross with offical MXGP titles. But to fully mature eventually a big developer needs to stand on their feet, and work on something that can be considered "by them". Milestone always had an impressive release schedule thanks to most of their titles using the same graphical engine (and probably more), so when looking back at their history they decided to make their own bike game, combining all thei knowledge and code made so far. And so they made Ride, a game "by bike enthusiast for bike enthusiast" not linked to any specific license but featuring multiple types of bikes to digitally collect and events to try digitally try them
But today I'm not talking about that game, but the sequel, Ride 2

Released a few years after the first, Ride 2 is a bike focused racing title featuring many bikes (with all dlcs, according to the in-game list, it should be exactly 240) from well known manufacturers (Aprilia, Suzuki, Ducati, KTM, Kawasaki, Bimota, Yamaha etc) across different categories (from Naked bikes, to Sports, Superbikes, 2, 3 or 4 cylinders etc). The game has a similar progression system to titles like Gran Turismo with the player earning credits by winning races, which are then used to buy new bikes, or upgrade existing ones. As soon as you start the game you create your rider which has some limited customization options, pick your starting free bike, and then can immediately race
The main mode is called World Tour. There is no story in the game (I guess the closest thing to a story is your character being part of a riding club with fellow bike enthusiasts and you race for fame and money or something). World Tour is separated into separate modes with the first one being simply called Events. The events mode is separated into 4 categories (Urban Style, Street Icons, Hyper Sport, Pro Racing) each one focused on specific bike categories. Each one of these categories has 3 subcategories (Amateur, Rookie, Expert) with Amateur being the only one available at first and the other 2 requiring 5 and 10 victories in the same category to unlock. Inside a subcategory we finally find the real meat, the actual events: each event is made of a series of separate challenges (from 3 to 6) which the player can tackle as they want. Some (most) are single races (just be first in a race on a specific track with specific weather), others can be things like Time Attack (beat a certain lap time), Perfect Trajectory (beat a certain time but you must drive between specific track cones without hitting them otherwise your final time gets penalized), Drag Races (win on a straight race by pushing the bike to max speed with manual gears changing), Track Day (pass a certain amount of other riders in a limited time), duels (pass a certain opponent in a certain amount of time), endurance (last one standing) and so on. Each event has set limits that allow only certain types of bikes, usually a specific "powerlevel" (which is calculated using PP, or Performance Points, with better and faster bikes having higher ones), but can also be only bikes from certain years, or bikes from certain manufactures, or bikes belonging to specific categories, with some events even limiting the player to 2 specific bikes. Bikes in your garage can be improved with credits by buffing their engine, or having better brakes, suspensions, wheels, anything you can expect from these type of tuning, and I like the changes are also visible on the bike 3D models. Obviously tuning your bike changes their PP, with some reaching too many PP to be used in some events (but most can be fully maxed and still be used with most events PP limits) with a small number of bikes also changing category if fully modded (turned into proper racing superbikes)
Outside of the main events, there are 3 other type of challenges. First are invitationl events: every 8 normal events completed the player can take part of an invitational which is basically a single race with specific conditions, which rewards the player a bike (between 2) on the first clear. The bike you don't pick gets added to the in-game shop regardless (together with the one you pick), and after winning an invitational it unlocks permanently (but you won't get another bike by winning it again). Next you have the Championships,which are multi-race torunaments. You unlock a championship every time you win at least 2/3 of the total events in a category (like 2/3 of the Urban Style Amateur races) and like invitationals you earn and unlock new bikes for winning them. Laslty there is the Team Challenge, in which the player and 3 other members of its club challenge 4 other riders from a competing club (and again, unlock new bikes for each win). The amount of rival lcubs you can challenge depends on the player "reputation" which is earned by winning events together with credits. You can argue the main objective of the game is reaching the top spot of the reputation rankings, which you could see as your rider being recognized as the number 1 bike enthusiast in the Ride world or something
Obviously we must talk about the race tracks. The tracks are nice and there is a good variation between actual race tracks (based on real world race tracks), city tracks (set into real world cities) and others set in more rural areas. The tracks come from around the world (Italy, Japan, Germany, USA, Greece, etc) and each city and rural track clearly follows the architectural style of its country of origin in the background. The tracks are well made and look good graphically but considering the amount of events the game has they're simply not enough: even in the first category the player will see many tracks multiple times. It's good tracks have variations (short, long, complete, western side, eastern side etc) but again, it's not enough. Doesn't help the soundtrack is basically non-existant... well there should be some generic sounding music but the bike engine basically covers it all, and obviously removing the engine sound effect to listen to generic sounding music in a bike game makes no sense. Talking about bikes, the bike models are very good and obviously based on the real life versions. Each bike is unique, with it's own sounds, speedometers (seen when racing in first person), design, and each one also features a small history lesson on the bike (when it was created, who designed it, if that type of bike won something, its specs) which will most likely be of interest for bike fans. Manufacturers also have their own history lesson
As far as the actual racing element is, well the game features many options to make the game harder (more simulation) or easier (less simulation), but I'm not really an expert on this front so I can't give a real opinion. Apparently the simulation aspect is decent but not fully realistic even if the player goes all in on removing any helper option. Like most Milestone games however the player has the power of "Rewind", which allows the player to rewind the last seconds in case of mistakes, crashing, or just because they want. Rewinds spend a dedicated bar which recharges as the race goes on, and as long as you don't spam it you should always have some rewind charge in case of need. Difficulty wise the game is, eh, unbalanced. There are many difficulty options from very easy to "realistic", but it's obvious the AI never really changes and instead on easier difficulties the opponents simply stop pushing their bikes after reaching certain speeds. But this also creates the actual imbalance: because the opponents push their bikes to certain values (depending on difficulty) then unless your bike can pass that threeshold winning is basically impossible, especially on Realistic since opponents never crash (unless you intentionally ride into them, but everyone gets teleported back on track after a crash regardless). Similarly difficulty only works on the opponents, for time attack or perfect trajectory events difficulty changes nothing, and some of these can be quite hard to an "Easy" difficulty player because of this. The devs must have known this because well wouldn't you know each category always has at least 2/3 of the events be normal races, enough to unlock all championships without having to beat the non-standard events. How curious
Ultimately, clearing every event will mostly depend on how much you'll get bored by racing in the same tracks but with a slightly different bike. Even the achievement list doesn't require the player to win all events (you just need to win all team challenges, get first place reputation ranking, and win one type of each event once), but this game can still be of interest for fans of bikes, especially on pc where there aren't many options, and the game is usually cheap during sales. In the end, this is a game for bike enthusiasts, and if you are you will most likely enjoy VROOM VROOMing for a few hours

Oh, right, why did I skip straight to Ride 2 instead of the original? Well, because honestly Ride 2 is Ride 1 but better: more bikes, more events, more tracks, runs better (the first Ride has a nasty bug whoich can corrupt your save file). As I said most Milestone games are clearly built on the same codebase and are very similar, and the same goes for the first 2 Ride. So you might as well play the sequel (or one of the licensed ones if you want to play as a professional MotoGP or MXGP racer). After Ride 2 and MotoGP 17 Milestone would retire their old engine and move to Unreal 4, so Ride 2 is, for all intent and purpose, the final sendoff for their engine and their style of games up to that point, which makes it a good test run to see if you like their type games

 

[TrishaKit]

Its been ages since I posted here, but I beat the Atelier Dusk trilogy last year and I gotta say, while Ayesha was fantastic, and Escha & Logy was a huge leap in graphical fidelity (and imo the best battle system in the series of the ones I've played), I was really underwhelmed by Shallie. This is not to say that I didn't enjoy it, but I saw the birth of a lot of things I don't like about Sophie in that game. Time limits being fully removed is the most obvious one - one I don't care for, as I feel they keep you focused on progression and completing goals and made the earlier games (the Arland games in particular) feel more, well, gamey. The way you progress the story also at times felt a bit busy work-y and sometimes things the game would reward you for doing or wanted you to do were vague. This isn't to say that I disliked Shallie overall; the above posts by Kvik regarding Escha & Logy are addressed in that trying to solve the problem of the Dusk is a major aspect of the game's story, and this means a lot of characters from Ayesha return including my fave best boy Keithgriff. It also seemingly has the most English dubbed lines of the PS3/Vita Ateliers, based on my experience.

Anyways
Ayesha - 8/10
Escha & Logy - 7.5/10
Shallie - 6.5/10

 

[TrishaKit]

one funny detail: the name "Escha & Logy" is pronounced "escha to logy" in Japanese. Eschatology is a name for the expectation that the world will end (in some form or other, and do so soon-ish). Despite this reference, the game just isn't really willing to really deal with that topic, front and center. Sure, things get a bit harder out in the frontier, but you never get a true "end of days" feeling. It's way too cheery and happy for that to ever hit you.

You do see a town become deserted due to running out of water, fwiw.

 

[Mivey]

You do see a town become deserted due to running out of water, fwiw.

that's what I mean with "things getting harder". Sure, it hints at the danger, but it's only a small subplot.
I'm playing Atelier Shallie right now, and this game actually spells out the danger much clearer, right from the start, with the "Dusk Sea", the ever increasing desert that threatens to swallow the whole world if nothing is done.

 

[Virtual Ruminant]

Finished Wavetale ( Zoink! / Thunderful, 2022)

A "story-driven action-adventure" (as described by the publisher, but more accurately described as a "relaxploration 3d platformer") set in a post-apocalyptic archipelago (not too dissimilar from the Submerged games, but with a much more stylized art direction and a clearly fictional world).

The gameplay is zooming around on the water and the occasional bits of land by surfing, jumping, gliding and grappling. Every once in a while the player also needs to whack and whale on enemies that never pose any appreciable threat throughout the entire game, including the final boss fight. The game's art direction is pleasant and interesting and looks good both in screenshots and in motion. The dynamic soundtrack is also very pleasant and changes seamlessly from area to area. There is some voice-acting, but the game also has lots of dialogue that is presented in a visual novel style with N64-style pseudo-talking noises.

I found this game through a Steam Next Fest demo a long time ago - and rarely have I been so disappointed by the gap between the impression the demo left and the experience of the final product. The demo features the first 45 minutes of the game - essentially the game's tutorial, and it features all the game's strenghts: Music, artwork, smooth and fast traversal, and combat that is unchallenging, but you could reasonably assume will get more challenging later on. The level design also promises some fun collectathons and the story seems pretty standard, but made interesting by the scenario.

The full game however reveals that the combat remains unchallenging and uninteresting throughout the entire game, there are no interesting collectathons whatsoever and the story accomplishes nothing but a 200% score on the Bechdel test - it's way too bare-bones and trope-ridden to be interesting for adults, but too confusing and infused with dark themes to be appropriate for young children (who probably would not mind the unchallenging and repetitive gameplay).

Even though the game does nothing egregiously wrong, it's ultimately just incredibly boring - and while that may be welcome for some - since the game does not explicitly advertise itself as relaxploration, the audience looking for such a game will probably never find it.


5/10

 

[Mivey]

In preparation for Metroid Prime 4 Beyond, I revisited Metroid Prime 2 and 3 via PrimeHack on PC. While my opinions on the games (in particular 2) are mixed, PrimeHack is an amazing way to experience these consoles games on PC. It feels so much like a standard PC FPS games that I would often hit ESC by accident (which triggers the emulator to prompt for quitting the game), since it feels so at home to play it with KBM.
That out of the way, here my thoughts on the two games.


Metroid Prime 2: Echoes

This game starts out very strong. Samus is on a new planet, the Space Pirates are doing something bad (as they always do) and the Federation called you in to help them. But then you encounter something new: a shadowy enemy that is revealed to be a copy of you. Dark Samus, who was teased at the end of MP1. This new planet, Aether, is revealed to be infected with mass amounts of Phazon and it seems Dark Samus is drawn to it, in order to absorb it and become stronger. As if that w asn't enough, the planet also has a "dark copy", like a dimenonsional twin that is invading the "light" version. Samus gets pulled in to it, and barely escapes, but with most of her equipment gone.
So it's the usual Metroid thing where you then need to go on a big journey to get all your powers back and fight bosses at the end of each new area. The story is in many ways a carbon copy of Metroid Prime 1. Ancient civilisation that is struggling with the attack from the Phazon, the Space Pirates are idiots who seek power and the Phazon, but make everything worse, and this time there's your dark twin that adds a bit of variety to it. There is also the whole "Dark Planet" thing, but I didn't really like the sequences where you need to go there that much. Ultimately, it just feels like filler: virtually every map is copied but made "darker". While this is effective in the first hours, it just becomes super tiring by the end.
Ultimately, MP2 just feels way to derivative of MP1. I get why people like it, and in many ways it is a more polished experience, but in sticking so close to the original, it just highlights how it doesn't have the same magic. It's bigger and more complex, but doesn't add much new to the table that you haven't already seen.


Metroid Prime 3: Corruption

I understand that in the general view, MP3 is the least liked of the bunch, but to me, this was far more enjoyable than MP2. The simpler level structure meant that you didn't need to backtrack as much, which made progression much clearer. There are other solutions to this, like having effective quick travel functions, but in lieu of that, I just like the streamlined approach of MP3.
It's also nice to actually get more info on how the Galactic Federation works, and not just spend 100% of your time on dead planets and ruins. It's fine that MP1 went for a more basic, hands off approach, but I don't want every game to just be a copy of that one.
The others hunters that you encounter in the story of MP3 also add so much needed world buildling to Metroid Prime series. It's nice to know that Samus isn't the only private agent the federation employs, there are others and they all know Samus and have their own relationship with heir, either as heated rivals or pals who respect each others abilities. Which then makes the more effective when you need to deal with the fact that the Phazon infection turns them into mindless monsters.
The actual Phazon stuff is probably story-wise the least interesting stuff, but then it doesn't need to be. Samus is here to fight the super bad things and save the day. The "corruption" angle, where Samus gets super strong but has to constantly worry about being in the "hyper" state too long makes for an effective mechanic. It adds something genuinely new to the table that Metroid Prime 2 never did. It's a bit gimmicky, but then, what's the issue with that?


So overall, I'd rate MP3 quite a bit above MP2. Not because MP2 is a bad game, just that I found it to be less interesting. And for context, it's been a couple years that I played MP1, it's not like I was "burned out". It's just that I don't see the point of a game that copies so much from its predecessor,

 

[Virtual Ruminant]

Finished Backfirewall_ (Naraven Games / All In! Games, 2023)

A fully narrated first-person puzzle-adventure - think The Stanley Parable or Dear Esther, but with considerably more actual gameplay.

The game takes place in the world of an anthropomorphized mobile phone, where the operating system, apps and processes are all characters and the player character is the Update Assistant app, launched by the phone's user to replace the current operating system. The operating system isn't very thrilled about that prospect and points out to the player that going through with the update also means that the update assistant (and thus the player) will be deleted in the process, along with the old operating system. And so starts a wild caper all over the phone, with the player trying to disrupt as many operations as possible (guided by the old operating system, who serves as the game's main narrator), in order to trigger a system reboot that would eventually cancel the update.

The game is lavishly produced for a such a small indie title - tons of superb voice acting for key characters (and text-only dialogue for the rest), considerable runtime if you interact with everything (9 hours for me), graphics are on the somewhat simpler side, but fit in with the inside-a-phone theme and the animations are well done, too. There are some performance / optimization issues - despite being a Unity game, and the playable demo through which I discovered this game back in 2022 (you guessed it, once again during a Steam Next Fest) is no longer available, so giving it a quick test play after buying to see if it works fine for you or if it's time to refund is advised.

I really really enjoyed this game, it completely delivered on what the demo promised. It's very funny in a tragicomic way, the writing is up there with The Stanley Parable, albeit a little less absurd and self-referential - most of the gags and plot points are very cleverly built around the concept of the phone (and its user) going through the usual problems encountered with aging smartphones.

What's really tragic (without much comedy to it) is the criminally low amount of reviews on this game, indicating less than stellar sales figures.

This may be a case of a game being somewhat behind the times - for the gags to land, the story to make sense (and to solve some puzzles, although through most of the game, plenty of in-game help and hints for the puzzles are available), the game assumes some knowledge about how software and computers work - everything is built around that. Barely any pop-culture references, no quips, no zany comedic relief characters ... if this game had come out around 15 years ago (i.e. as a contemporary of Dear Esther and The Stanley Parable)), it genuinely might have been the biggest hit of the three - because back then, a large fraction of PC gamers were tech-people or at least tech-hobbyists.

But times have moved on, gamers on average are less technically minded and knowledgeable than ever, and at this point in time this game might simply sail way over the heads of most of its potential buyers.

The game is not without some actual flaws - towards the end, there is a somewhat lengthy 3D puzzle platforming section that is a bit dodgy to control - and even worse, comes without any of the plentiful hints the game is so happy to give out earlier - I actually got stuck there for a couple minutes and had to look up a video walkthrough to get unstuck.

But all in all, this is a real gem and a new personal favorite of mine.


8/10

 

[DrShrapnel]

Finished:

For the first time in years I wasn’t going through the motions with a straight face. Streets of Rage 4 was very entertaining for me and I can’t quite put my finger on why this hit the mark for me while others failed. All I can say is if you enjoy this old genre, I think you’ll find SoR4 to be among the top of the class.
I wouldn’t be against Sega bringing Golden Axe back with this team at the helm,

I’d give it an 8.5/10

 

[undu]

I wouldn’t be against Sega bringing Golden Axe back with this team at the helm

Good news, they made the game, just not with the license

 

[TrishaKit]

Atelier Sophie is a bad game
Finally beat it after owning it since its original release on Steam and
Why do they make it so hard to tell what needs to be done to progress? You might need to make an item that requires an ingredient that you can only get from a location you don't have unlocked, and you won't know its that location you need unless you look online, and triggering that location to be unlocked might be something like "get through this side character's story quests" but you won't really know that without looking it up and the trigger conditions for even getting all the cutscenes from that story quest are vague. That's my problem with the system of unlocking new recipes and places in the game in general - its all too vague and you'll spend a lot of time trial and erroring random things to try and unlock progression. Its such a time waster.
The lack of a time limit or any stakes also makes it hard to feel motivated to complete tasks when its so hard to trigger what needs to be done to do them. Most of the characters aren't very interesting either.
It hurts saying this after loving to liking the six games before it but

5/10
Liela Xea is an excellent final boss theme, however.

 

[Virtual Ruminant]

Finished The Forgotten City (Modern Storyteller / Dear Villagers, 2021)

A first-person dialogue-heavy adventure game with occasional action elements. The game has (this is not a joke or an exaggeration) a note to "content creators" to please give out spoiler warnings for this game right on the main menu, so I won't even go into the story in detail, except to say: I do not have the faintest clue how this game has garnered so much critical praise.

The game is an Unreal Engine stand-alone remaster/remake of a Skyrim mod of the same name from 2015 and it still mostly looks, feels and sounds like a Skyrim DLC, including the jank factor. The story is part lazy retreading of ancient history / mythology (of the greco-roman-egyptian-sumerian variety), part trope-fest, mostly told through dialogue that covers the whole range from cringe to boring. The fact that it's all very competently voice-acted couldn't prevent me from skipping through most of it.

The gameplay is part classic Bethesda follow-the-quest-marker, part clicking through the same dialogue trees over and over, like in a bad point and click adventure. There are multiple endings, one of them being the good / canonical ending, and somehow that ending ends up being the worst of them all, in terms of the writing.

Very glad Epic Tim Sweeney paid for this game instead of me (got it for free on EGS years ago), cannot recommend.


5/10


Previously reviewed in this thread [here], [here], [here], [here] and [here].

 

[fantomena]

Finished



Very interesting, fun and well-written game in the same "Telltale" games way. A lot of adult language and some serious and humouristic dialogue. Liked it a lot, but I thought the game was kinda short and it lacked in the gameplay department, wish there was more gameplay to it.

Score: 8.4/10

Finished



Okay game, just above mediocre. The worst of the bunch. It has some gross and curious moments, but otherwise, nothing I haven't seen before and it didn't give me the creepy eerie feelings the 2 first games did. Somewhat boring and monotonous gameplay and easy puzzles. Plattforming could have been better (less janky).

Score: 6.6/10

 

[Ge0force]

Retired Total War Warhammer 3

I'm very disappointed with this game, especially since TW Warhammer 2 is my most played game ever on Steam. But the Chaos Rift campaign is really, really bad imo. You need to enter rifts that appear on random places on the map. It always took me several turns to reach the nearest rift, so the AI was usually faster to enter a right than me. The objectives inside the rift are boring and not fun at all, and when you try to complete them anyway, the game suddenly kicks you out of the rift because the AI reached the objective faster than you did. I have no idea why CA thought this would be fun, but I'm not wasting anymore time with this game.


Finished Metal Slug Tactics

Turn-based rogue-like with excellent Metal Slug graphics. The gameplay has a few promising ideas: your team mates help you attack when you position them correctly, and your ability to do special attacks and your dodge chance increases the more distance you move each turn, The latter makes the way you play quite different from other turn-based games, but it also makes the game more unpredictable and harder to plan ahead. There's not much space for trial and error, since it's a rogue-like and you loose the campaign when all your characters die. Still, it was fun to play for a few hours, but I don't feel the urge to unlock other characters and special attacks. A decent 7/10 game.

Score: 7/10 (duh)

 

[Virtual Ruminant]

Finished Road 96 (DigiXart / THQ Nordic, 2021)

A first-person adventure game with a semi-randomized narrative. The game's story unfolds over the course of 6 - 10 "episodes", in which the player controls an anonymous teenager running away from home and trying to cross the border to a neighboring country through an average of 5 scenes. These scenes feature a cast of recurring characters, all of which relate to the game's story arc and to each other.

The order and the content of these scenes is partially randomized and partially influenced by player decisions, the stats of the teenager the player inhabits in each episode, a short questionnaire at the start of the game and, in New Game+, by player decisions from previous playthroughs. At the end of each scene, there's a variety of ways to continue the journey, some of which will or will not be available depending on player choices during the scene. The moods of the scenes range from dramatic to comedic, some also feature mini-games. The semi-randomization takes care of presenting a diverse mix of scene-moods for each episode.

Multiple playthroughs (i.e. New Game+) are required to experience all possible scenes, and there are multiple endings to the story with additional variations within the endings itself, a single playthrough is enough however to hit all the main story points and understand the game's world-building.

This narrative system works brilliantly and it is brought to life by a somewhat simple but vibrant art style, a fantastic soundtrack by various indie electronica artists (fairly synthwave-heavy, but with calm, ambient moods as well) and great voice-acting (the player characters are not voiced, but every NPC is). There's even a collectible hunt (built around the game's soundtrack, which can be collected track by track as cassette tapes found in various scenes).

The technical accomplishment of this game is 10/10, I do not know of any other adventure game that has implemented a procedural story-telling system so successfully. The story and dialogue however aren't quite as strong - the scenario and world-building of the game is quite dark, bleak even, but the writing shies away from really committing to that and instead mixes in a lot of comic relief by exaggerating most of the story-relevant NPCs to various degrees, sometimes to the point of caricature - probably in a bid to prevent the game from becoming a serious bummer and thus to appeal to a broader audience. Only at the very end does the story (in some endings at least) come close to doing the scenario real justice.

Despite that (or possibly because of that), the game was still very entertaining - this is a game I really do want to see everything of and 100% eventually. My initial rating (having played through it once) is a strong

7/10

but there's a good chance some of the scenes and endings I haven't experienced yet could bump this up to an 8. Will try and remember to update this post once I get there.

Previously reviewed in this thread [here], [here] and [here].

 

[spiel]

Completed TR-49

If you loved scurrying around the archives of Type Help, it scratches the same itch. Some of the meta progression unfurls in a similar manner.

What makes it special is the writing. Inkle has a reputation for great narrative, but I've only ever played a few of their titles, and this finally cemented that awareness. I can't stop thinking about TR-49 in the past 3 days. It's a different sort of horror from Type Help. Feeding words into a machine you don't quite understand. The power of words to twist perception. Rewriting history. It's all very topical.

I think the game fumbles the plot a bit before the ending, but it's a small flaw in a very unique experience.

Score: 9.5/10

 

[STHX]

This game is more than 10 years old at this point and has thousands and thousands of reviews, so I'll just write a few things after my first full playthrough
Coming to this game after playing BG3 really highlights how much this game was the backbone of that title. It was very familiar since the beginning: the way you can interact with almost all containers, the way quests work, the writing style, the limited amount of total exp you can get in a single playthrough, the way the ground/traps can be altered with other elements, barrelmancy. All of these things started here. The game is quite good, and as far as the options provided by the devs, or we could call them the Dungeon Masters considering the tabletop rpg nature of the game, there are many options for roleplaying and lots of ways to progress and things to do during the adventure (although the vast majority of the content is "go there, speak/fight someone/get thing, come back for reward" ). Obviously the co-op focus feels like an interesting concept and I'm sure it's a good idea for the genre. However the game is not without issues. For example I think the battles are simply bad, casting magic takes way too much and ranged attacks are way too convenient (well, outside of crushing everything with barrels and chests). Cyseal, the first area, is very open and filled with chances for questing/exping up, but the rest of the areas feels way smaller and have way less things to do, especially outside of the "main quest". The dungeon masters did a good job but ultimately there is a limit to how much you can do when you have to voice everything, and many options simply aren't taken into consideration by the game, like almost no one reacts to some other important npc being dead by your hands. Speaking about killing npcs, the only real consequence with it is losing on quests (and so rewards and EXP) and on reputation, and this last bit is also not implemented very well: every npc has a player/PC reputation which I suppose works like "if it gets very high (90+ to make the npc name go blue) the npc will help you in battle if it's close while if it's very low it attacks you on sight" but the game simply doesn't let you know because almost all battles start away from npcs, and aggroing someone in a settlement (by stealing, breaking something or breaking in some place) also aggroes everyone else regardless of reputation. And speaking about reputations and rewards, the game has lots of content but also has a very obvious "intended path" in the main "Source Hunter Journey" and you can even see some "script errors" if you deviate too much from it (or speedrun the game by skipping as much content as you can). Lastly, some of the later puzzles were way too boring and there was too much walking, which was made worse by the overall lack of quests in the endgame + every enemy already being dead (they never respawn), and so I had to watch as the main party slowly walked everywhere with nothing to do. oh, and obviously the annoying endless npc chatter when inside settlements
But the game still has lots good points, and most of all a good base worth of iterating instead of being abandoned for something different. And they did iterate it looking at BG3 as the current iteration. I will eventually play OS2 to see how much it improved over the first

 

[Ge0force]

Retired Etrian Odyssey HD.

It's a good dungeon crawler, but like most Atlus games, way too long and repetitive. There's no real story to speak of, and I don't get new skills anymore when levelling up to keep the combat fresh. Of course I can still upgrade my skills when I level up, but since enemies are getting stronger as well, that doesn't feel like progression. Still, I had many hours of fun with this game and the HD remaster is well done. But it's time for something else now.

 

[Mivey]

I finished Resident Evil 4 Remake (and Seperate Ways)



A pretty good game, and also one that I don't really have much to say about, since it's pretty much just what it says on the tin: Resident Evil 4 with shinier graphics and carefully modernised controls. It feels so much nicer to move around in and it's crazy how effective the knife in this one as both melee and a universal block move. But except for a few set pieces, this game follows the original game to a T, and it works pretty well.

I will say that I am not a huge fan of Resident Evil 4, in that I like my survival horror to be slow and to emphasise the "horror" part. RE4 is a great game, but it's a bit too indulgent in the action. RE7 is to me clearly the best game in the series, not that I think it's a perfect title and Resident Evil Village the best combination of that title's horror credentials with action.


This was the first time I have played Separate Ways, and it's neat to see how Ada's path and Leon's are intertwined, where it's basically Ada that is constantly saving Leon's butt, even when he's not noticing it, like with the church bell in the prologue. She also generally makes Leon look pretty bad, pretty much the only time she gets into any trouble is because she's trying to save Leon.

The game basically ends up a big teaser for an RE5 remake, though that's probably a number of years out, what with RE9 coming this year and a Code Veronica remake next year.

 

[Ge0force]

Retired Aliens Dark Descent.

I'm sad I don't like the game, because the atmosphere and level design is excellent. But the gameplay is too frustrating for me: aliens are running towards you very fast from all sides in dark environments, and your marines are extremely vulnarable and die very fast. Instead of playing it tactical, it's more about remembering the scripted events to predict where the aliens will come from. I didn't enjoy this so I quit.

 

[Virtual Ruminant]

Finished Deliver Us Mars (KeokeN Interactive / Frontier Foundry, 2023)

The sequel to Deliver Us The Moon tries to improve on its foundation in every way and unfortunately also fails to do so in every way:

Characters have faces now and they all hail from Uncanny Valley.

There is more action gameplay now, but it's mostly a thoroughly miserable climbing mechanic that looks and plays like a very bad copy of the climbing mechanic from the Tomb Raider 2013 and sequels games and the rest is equally half-baked 3D platforming,

The "immersive astronaut experience" is the occasional floating in Zero G, an EVA segment, and flipping switches in a cockpit, all of which has been done much better in games like Adr1ft and Observation.

The level design boasts huge and impressive looking outdoor areas, but they are effectively an empty set that the player can run around (and sometimes drive around) in uselessly, if they wish, but to actually play the game, most of the area can be safely ignored.

The story is a mixed bag - it's meandering and full of plot holes, but there are flashes of brilliance in some scenes - and those flashes are augmented by the cast of voice actors who really go above and beyond to breathe life and personality into characters that don't come with much depth as far as the script goes.

The game's beam-connecting puzzle gameplay mechanic, clearly inspired by The Talos Principle, works better than the action parts, but suffers from poor puzzle design - and there frankly just isn't enough of it in the game to be memorable.

This unfortunately is a game where ambition was consistently ahead of ability on the developers' part and it's not very enjoyable as a result - even less so than its predecessor.


6/10

 

[DrShrapnel]

Finished; Banishers Ghosts of New Eden

I just want to say I enjoyed this quite a bit. I really like the concept of being a Banisher that’s looking into situations where a ghost isn’t resting, and is for various reasons haunting someone. The choice of Banishing them to hell or Ascending them to heaven, or depending on your end game goal - killing the person who’s haunted. I’m not normally one to get wrapped up in dialogue or story, but this was one game where I was interested in it.
Besides investigating hauntings, you’ll find Voids that you can enter that reward you with new gear/materials, as well as nests where you can conjure up some nasty spirits. Destroying nests will also give you a boost to your attributes as well as materials needed to level your gear.
If you’re up for a somewhat open world (some areas are unreachable until you gain new abilities) action/adventure with light rpg elements I do recommend checking it out.
Special mention to the environmental artists who did a tremendous job with the environments. Some of the most beautiful rocky environments I’ve ever seen.
My only real knocks against this would be the lack of enemy variety. Theres really not many spirit types or physical characters for them to possess. You also can’t avoid fights, which can sometimes be a little annoying as sometimes you just want to get from A to B without interruption. I’d rate it a 7.5/10

 

[fantomena]

Finished



Good game, not as good or intriguing as the first one, but still a very enjoyable good game. Story is interesting, characters are interesting and the devs expanded on the universe.

Score: 8/10

 

[bobnowhere]

Finished:



It was a stylish and decent Vampire Survivors like game but it was short, not that difficult and ran out of stuff to do once the story was done. 3/5

 

[Durante]

I just finished FF7 Rebirth.

I'm a bit conflicted about this one. The presentation is obviously fantastic, and I felt like the combat was a huge improvement over Remake, and is now a really solid attempt at creating a party-based JRPG combat system that successfully bridges action- and menu-based combat. That's not a small feat and one which has ended in failure very often, so I applaud them for that.

The main story locations, dungeons and battles are also very good for the most part. In fact, I even enjoyed the open world "grind" for large parts of the game -- but in the end, there is just a bit too much of it. Of course, to some extent I always feel like this is not something games can be blamed for exclusively, since one could always make the decision to just skip all of that, but that's something I have a hard time with (and the decision basically boils down to either being bored by doing it or being annoyed by not doing it, both of which distract from the enjoyment).

In terms of story, I'll somewhat reluctantly give them the benefit of the doubt until the final part is released. They really piled up a lot of stuff that can go either way depending on how they resolve it. But I lean towards thinking that they already did too much to be able to provide a really satisfactory conclusion.

There are a ton of minigames and general gameplay variety throughout, which is something I generally appreciate a lot in these types of games. Some of them are really good, and many others are nice diversions and don't overstay their welcome. What I disliked is that the (optional, but still) final gold saucer sidequest requires you to play hard modes of all the games featured in it. Personally, I hate the "fighting" minigame, and really couldn't be bothered to complete that for this quest. But yeah, other than that, if you have the budget I think having all those little gameplay diversions is a good thing overall, especially in such a long game.

Oh, and it would be nice if the PC version was better. It's silly not to support different aspect ratios, and the draw distance and lighting quality and several other settings don't go high enough (even though ini edits show just how simple that would be to offer).

 

[Crayon]

Finally got through Horizon FW.

Damn I thought a bigger, badder sequel to horizon had tons of potential. But really, additions to the core game were superficial, and the main problems remained.

Gameplay: this basically works, and is good by western standards, but it is so messy. Examples:
-Spamming roll. The incentive is to use the i-frames of the roll, and not necessarily take advantage of it for mobility/spacing. In a lot of cases, you'd just as well roll into a wall. This is so played out, and seems to be included in so many game as some obligatory mechanic.

-The arrows are still weirdly... bendy. They can do that weird arc thing depending on how you're moving when you release them. This could be interesting if it could be used to your advantage, but I never figured out a way to do that.

- Weapons are sort of there just to be there. No incentive to use them all, and some aren't terribly fun. Similar to ratchet and clank, a lot of weapon switching is incentivized by simply running out of ammo for one and switching to another.

- Other stuff that is going to stick out more that some people than others.

Characters and writing: They greatly improved the facial animations, buuut....

- Holy shit are these people boring. Aloy herself is inoffensive at best. Those the npc's though.... Lord it's like a bunch of randoms from about the office dressed up at a halloween party.

- There is just no edge at all to their writing.

- They all talk the same, and there is really no indication of different cultures among the tribes. They just dress and paint their faces different. No accents, no weird customs, no different mixes of ethnicity, no religions. Yeesh. Again, seems like just people from around the office.

- The story in the first game was only holding my attention in regards to finding out the mystery of why the world is populated by robot dinosaurs. Without that, I had nothing to hold onto, here. With the


That's a lot of critique, but the game is almost greatness in so many ways. The quality is undeniable, and as a demo of hardware or a tv, it's top notch. I played all the way through (in starts and stops like I do with all long games), so I liked it. I don't force myself to finish games. But these minor dings to gameplay and major dings to story and characters keep the game from being great.

I'm using my favorite rating system, the old Next-Generation mag 1-5 stars. That is with 4 being excellent and 5 transcending genre preference. ie: even if you don't like VN's, you should play this)

3/5: Good and worth playing if you seek out these type of aaa action-adventure games.

 

[Joe Spangle]

Reached the top of the mountain in...



Loved it! Great game. Very nice art style. Has a nice zen feel to it. There is a bit of a story for the main character as you progress up the mountain which was intriguing enough for me. Really liked the climb mechanics, even if you do get a bit tangled up on occasion. Was a little bit frustrating at the end but overall I really enjoyed it, so much so I started a new climb straight after i'd finished it to see different paths.
Well worth the price,

 

[fantomena]

Finished



Amazing game. Great level design, fantastic enemy and world design, maybe the best example of cosmic horror I have seen in a video game. Interesting story, quite often unpredictable. Combat got a little stale after a while and music a bit repetive, but other than than, it is an amazing game made in game maker by 1 (?) person.

Score: 9/10

Finished



Extremely beautiful game, fantastic level and world design, longer than I expected and well-paced. A bit slow start though.

Score: 9/10

Finished



Very odd, weird and charming game whee you play as a boy who always has his arms stretched out making him look like a T (there's story reasons for this). There's a town you an explore where you can talk to other people and pick up coins you can use in shops to buy other clothes. There's multiple chapters in the game and the story is okay. I liked the characters, enjoyed the town despite not reallyt being much you can do there, liked the story in the first part, but got a bit meh after a while. Hated the camera perspective when walking around in the town, was hard to see where I was. Took me around 8-9 hours to play through. I wish they gave the town and the people there more backstory and more things to do in the town. Camera perspective needed to be better nad some slow pacing at times making it a drag to play through.

Score: 7/10

Finished



Short game (1 hour), like an interactive visual novel. Didn't feel as emotional as many others who has played it, but I enjoyed it. Story heavy game, so not gonna spoil anything else-

Score: 8.5/10

 

[Joe Spangle]

Slithered my way to the end of MGS:Snake Eater



Great game, nice to re-visit this with some modern updates. Was a lot of fun, typical MGS nuttyness, These games are terrific, from the gameplay to the mad story and cutscenes. Been a long while since i'd played the original, back when it launched so it was fun going through it again, nostalgia probably played a part in my enjoyment but i still think its a quality game in series that has a lot of quality games.
On sale now and there was an extra discount as i had the MGS bundle.

 

[d00d3n]

I just got all the achievements in Code Vein II in about 60 hours (plus 8 additional hours of idling).

As far as I know, this is the first true Elden Ring-style open world soulslike, featuring an expansive world to explore, intricate soulslike mazes scattered throughout, and soulslike action RPG gameplay. If there are any real contenders for that title, I can't imagine their production values coming close to those of Elden Ring or Code Vein II. Nioh 3 shares some similarities with Elden Ring in certain ways, but I haven't played it yet to confirm, and it released after Code Vein II anyway.

So, if you really liked Elden Ring, there were basically no high-quality clones available — until now. We finally have one with high production values, fun anime character designs, great music, a somewhat intriguing post-apocalyptic vampire setting, a solid combat system, character progression systems with complexity on par with Elden Ring, and a decent main plot centered on changing the fate of characters and societies through time travel.

The Steam reviews seem pretty harsh overall. Yes, there are technical issues like enemy model pop-in, flickering shadows, and flickering hair. Some players report performance issues too, but it ran smoothly on my overpowered system. The lack of co-op could be a deal-breaker if you love playing soulslikes with friends, but if difficulty is your main hang-up, the game has a solid companion system with AI-controlled partners that distract bosses and tough enemies effectively.

Some complaints focus on enemy design variety, and there's some truth to that — but it might also stem from not understanding the game's structure. The "present day" world is on the brink of destruction and packed with powerful bullet-sponge enemies, which can make open world exploration feel repetitive and frustrating in that era. However, once you unlock time travel back to the "free exploration era," combat in the open world becomes much more enjoyable. Additionally, if you spec as a mage, you can melt through enemies and bosses with powerful synergies, making even those bullet sponges manageable when you have to deal with them in the present.

A valid criticism is that the gameplay systems and overall structure aren't intuitive and are explained poorly through the constant tutorial pop-ups in the initial open world slice. For example, the "free exploration era" only unlocks after significant main story progress, so early on it might seem like the game intends for you to constantly fight overpowered enemies in the present-day open world. There's a subtle help button you can press for explanations of character progression and item stats, which helps a bit to mitigate these issues.

In conclusion, the game is good and feels somewhat underrated. You will probably enjoy it a lot if you were a fan of Elden Ring.

 

[AHA-Lambda]

Going to crosspost from the Console thread my impressions for Metroid Prime 1 Remastered:

I'm very lttp on this but I'm playing Metroid Prime Remastered at the moment, almost finished it and very much enjoying it
I'm not the biggest Nintendo fan tbh but Metroid has frequently been a hit for me when I have played them.

I can see why people priase this so highly as it must have been mindblowing back when it first came out, plus even now there aren't really all that many 3D metroidvanias.

It's got a great sense of exploration and atmosphere, good music, and the sense of place is palpable (you'll become very familiar with the map as you traverse it back and forth in so many ways for each thing you find yourself doing).

Minor criticisms of my playthrough:

• the artifact hunt is indeed very dumb padding, I'm unashamed to say I'm using a walkthrough to just get it over with (in fact I@m not sure how you get some of these without one)
• By about the 60% mark the game does feel to me to have quite a noticeable difficulty jump once you reach the Phazon Mines area. There are much fewer save points, more enemies who are themselves harder hitting and bullet spongey
• it's a foible of the genre but there have been a few times I've had to check what to do online (I had no idea what to do next with the boost ball powerup the tutorial for that was useless, the x ray visor also had a similar "how was I supposed to know that" quality in a couple of areas, and the aforementioned artifact hunting)
• oh, and this is probably sacriligeous I expect somehow but the whole scanning mechanic feels like complete fluff to me
• Likely a symptom of the time of release but no fast travel whatsoever (not even between some fixed points of the map) can really add to the backtracking

Since that post I've now completed the game this morning, although those last couple of bosses were a bit rough

8/10

 

[spiel]

Making my way through the Bite-Sized Puzzle Exploration bundle

Completed Linelith

A delightful little The Witness-like. Bonus points for having the least annoying sokoban mechanics I've ever encountered.

Score: 8/10

Completed Öoo (I think?)

I would call this a metroidbrainia-lite because you're mostly moving forward through rooms. I was really impressed by the puzzle design. It has a really elegant learning curve. The difficulty does ramp up nicely too – I got stuck at a few levels in the last third of the game and resorted to the official walkthrough/Steam forum hints.

Score: 9/10

Just Leap Year left, which I've heard great things about.

 

[Ge0force]

Finished The Bureau: XCOM Declassified

This game is a lot better than I expected. The devs did a great job turning the XCOM games we know into a cover-based 3rd person shooter. Giving orders to team mates works well enough and adds a tactical touch to the combat. Definitely worth playing!

Score: 8.0/10

 

[fantomena]

Finished



Great game, but coming from the other games in the series I expected nothing less. Interesting story, great gameplay with Leon and Grace, great world bulilding, nice callsbacks from previous games, great level design. Path tracing and HDR making the game stunning.

Not much more to say about it. Well, kinda wish it was even longer and explored different parts of the city (the regular living city) even more. Doesn't do anything new gameplay wise, but it works.

Score: 8.9/10

Finished



Very good game, really cool, odd and weird graphic style and your character that is a skater is made by glass, sho when you fail, you shatter. 9 levels or so you progess through and you learn different tricks to progress and there are these somewhat "open" areas you skate in in most levels where you can skate around and do different "challenges" to gain points that you can use in thepoints shop to get stickers.

Somewhat odd pacing and a bit difficulty to understand what to do and where to go during the later levels.

Score: 8.7/10

Finished



Very beautiful game, stunning visuals, lovely surfing gameplay, curious story and world. You can do different trings and challenges that gives you points to buy more advanced tricks/abilities from a shop. A bit too short, wanted more.

Score: 8.9/10

 

[Joe Spangle]

Replayed MGS V...



Great gameplay, very smooth. Loads of options for playing the core loop which is infiltrating bases and stealing resources/people.

Story is mad, typical MGS stuff. Characters are weird, you will get ashamed by your words and deeds.

Overall really enjoyed it, interesting playing it through again 10 years later (crikey, has it been 10 years!)

MG is probably in my top 5 game series of all time and this is a top entry in that series.

 

[DrShrapnel]

Finished: The Plucky Squire



Plucky Squire impressed the hell out me. You’re the hero of a children’s book, who always saves the day against the evil wizard Humgrump. Humgrump grows sick of this shit and decides he’s going change the ending.
So you and your friends go on an adventure to restore the ending and defeat Humgrump. This adventure will have you on the 2D pages of the books’s world but there will be a lot of times where you must jump out of the book and into the real world to solve some pretty cleverly designed puzzles. Switching between worlds brings a different more realistic look to the art style, because y’know, you’re in a realistic depiction of the desk of the author. Even within the real world you’ll find points where you can hop back into a flat 2D space. It’s a simple combat scheme of swinging or throwing your sword as well as rolling to avoid attacks. Standard fare, but boss fights change things up and you’ll find yourself in a “Punchout “ style fight or rhythm game battle. One of my favorite stages happens late game and reminded me of Section Z, except it took place on a big cylindrical object. Seriously, this game is Nintendo level shit. It’s that damn good.

I played this entirely on Steam Deck where it ran beautifully. 10/10.

 

[Joe Spangle]

Finished RE:R....



Yep great. Definitely a Resi Evil game. Good mix of spoopy atmosphere/shooty kick kick action.

The start section was particularly good. The whole game leans into the nostalgia of the series which, as an old fan, is nice. Leon is cool, Grace is a good new character.

Overall enjoyed it a lot. Didn't really get into 7 or 8 but this one clicked.

 

[DrShrapnel]

Mutation Nation - Arcade/ Neo Geo AES

I remember when this hit arcades, but never got around to playing it. Fired it up in the Pi last night. Before SNK went head first into fighting games, side scrolling beat ‘em ups were all the rage.
The game contains six fairly lengthy stages that are broken into sections with mini bosses and main bosses. The grunts you pound on along the way are pretty cool looking mutated characters. If you’ve played Double Dragon and dislike the slow as molasses attack animations you’ll like this. Your character throws punches with speed. Animation and graphics are pretty decent, although some bosses look goofy.
I’m a little bummed about the drawbacks though. You can only play as one character in a single player game. No character selection here. There’s also no breakable objects to be found or weapons to pick up. Despite the Neo Geo having four buttons it only makes use of two. Your big attack has to be charged with the punch button. By the time the meter is close to filling up to unleash it, you’ll likely take a hit. Why they didn’t just assign it to its own button is beyond me. There also isn’t a grapple mechanic where you can grab hold of an enemy to land some shots in or throw. I don’t know if the developers ever played a beat ‘em before developing this, because it’s just missing so many things that have been apart of the genre since its inception.

I can see why this received such middling reviews back then. I guess they were hoping to get by on the large character sprites. Not something I’d recommend to someone looking to play a side scrolling beat ‘em up. Even back then there were far better options.

4/10

 

[STHX]

Recently I realized I don't actually have a big history with Sony's 1st party offerings. I had (well, still have but not plugged) a PS1, 2, 3, PSP and Vita from Sony, but mostly used them for 3rd party titles, and eventually moved on to PC. I did play some Sony titles but by skipping the PS4 I also skipped on their "modern" single player titles. With all the talks about them in recent years I though it's time to fill the blanks, and what better game to start than the one which started these years of Steam releases (I excluded the ones which were published by other publishers on Steam, like DS1, or Quantic Dreams games etc.)

Horizon Zero Dawn came out in 2017, and 3 years later in 2020 made its way on PC together with its expansion Frozen Wilds packaged in a Complete Edition. A game that clearly shows lots of effort with its gorgeous enviroments, packed content, and an overall high quality. For me this is how "high budget" games should be: the game came before everything else, no tie-in CG movie, no multiple novels set in the same world releasing a year before the game, no "we must set up a super extended universe to milk forever" with tv series, feature length movies, animated adaptations all coming out the same year as the game. No, the game took all the budget, and that's why it looks, plays and sounds how it does. Great, colorful graphics, distinct character and machine design, well made dub (well, I played with the italian one so I can't comment on the more known EN one), runs perfectly on my pc, no bugsm crashes or glitches during my playthrough. Indeed, I like how high budget it feels, Horizon is a good example of an AAA budget game that feels AAA to play, but while playing I found multiple parts where I could do nothing more than ask myself "why?" at some of the choices the game had
The game is an "open world adventure", of the type that lately get referred to "checklist simulators" to reference their similarity to modern Ubisoft offerings (mostly AC). But honestly, I don't actually get the dislike of the "checklist". The moment save files became common many games could be reduced to checklist simulators: GTA3 was a checklist simulator for example, hell we could go earlier and consider Super Mario World's 96 exits or Super Mario 64's 120 Stars a checklist too. I guess the checklist comment mostly comes from the fact the checklist is "visible" all the time on the in-game map in these AC inspired games. But how does Horizon's checklist feels? Pretty good honestly: the map is big but not extremely big (running from one side to the other doesn't take too much time), there are many points of interests (collectables, activities, settlements) close enough to always have something to find or do, but at the same time there isn't an excessive amount of them. It would be easy to go overboard an have tens of bandit camps, machine factories, as well as hundreds of collectibles but Horizon shows restraints, and the game benefits a lot from this. The map design also allows the user to slowly explore and fill the checklist while reducing backtracking a lot with the way the map is designed (as long as you have the collectables visible on your map by buying their maps from merchants). Tackling the checklist was quick and practical, a plus in this age of bloated and empty open worlds
But how does the actually gameplay feels like? First, on the exploration side, Aloy is honestly quite clunky. She can run everywhere she wants, but somehow she can only climb special "yellow painted" cliffs or ropes. This "scripted" climbing also doesn't feel very good: she clearly has some sort of "magnetism" which always let her grab the next correct "step", and this makes this climbing very boring. Every time I was trying to reach the top of a cliff to get a Metal Flower or reach a Vantage point I had to run around the cliff until I found the "paint", and then climb it. And I kept asking myself: why? Why not just use AC's climb everywhere system? There is no place tall enough that would require some sort of stamina system to avoid Aloy going somewhere she shouldn't, but even in this case the devs could make some surfaces unclimbable (like shiny metallic surfaces used in old world buildings). There is also the issue since most of the unclimbable mountains and cliffs still have "solid hitboxes" so a lot of the times I just skipped the "intended" path by simply jumping from one rock to the other, reducing the tedioum of the slow climb. So again why not just let Aloy climb everywhere
The other main activity is combat. Combat is, well, depends on the player. You have many options depending on the weapon and its ammo, including some limited stealth ones, but there is an issue to talk about before tackling combat: the "rpg" elements. One of my biggest whys: why even having levels in this game? Excluding the leveless tutorial Aloy starts at level 3 with 3 unspent skill points and 200 something HP, and at level 60 she ends up with 57 additional skill points and 800 HP, and that's it. HP is the only "stat" that increases, leveling has no impact on offense, defense, or any movement option. Even skills have no real impact on stats (outside of the insanely useful stealth kill one every player should rush to, followed by the "slow-mo snipe" one, and lastly the other special kill ones) and most of them simply offer some extra passives (can carry more HP herbs, can carry more loot, can repair friendly machines, more chances to break parts, more chances to get better loot), which the player will eventually unlocksiply because there are more than enough skill points in the game to unlock all skills before doing everything. So leveling aloy doesn't actually make her perform better. And it's even more obvious when focus scanning enemies and seeing their "level" since that one also serves no purpose. Watchers are level 5, but being level 10, or 20 doesn't actually makes them "weaker", nor makes them run away against a max level Aloy. You cause the same damage to them from level 3 to 60. So why even have levels, just have skill points spread through the world map (something that, btw, actually happens in the game). The only thing that impact damage is the weapon used, and the only meaningful increase is when you move to a better rarity one or put a good damage coil/mod on it
So, in the end, what about the combat? As said above the real difficulty is only based on the weapons and armors you have. The player can change difficulty anytime they want, from Story to Ultra-Hard, but when you get a Shadow Carja Bow with good mods combat is over. No matter the enemy you can just pelt them with tens of arrows before they even get a chance to approach, and ammo is never an issue because wood is everywhere and machine parts and metal fragmets are dropped by most enemy types (so you'll never really run out of arrows). Same for armor. Let's look at stealth: stealth is terrible, you can only hide in tall grass, outside of the grass enemies see you from across the map (especially the flying machines), but if you can get an enemy near the tall grass with a whistle then killing them is no issue, well unless they're anything above the smallest machines since the bigger ones can never be one shotted by a single attack. So why even have stealth? Oh, yeah, because as soon as you equip the strongest stealth armor with your best stealth mods suddenly you can literally run in the middle of a machine herd with no issue. You can just swap armor when you want and cover all possible dangers to your health without issues
Speaking about armors and weapons, why even have them all (well, almost them all) sold by merchant for fragments and machine parts? It's obvious there are 8 main weapons types (+ a few others obtained after certain quests), and each of those 8 types has 3 rarities, with each becoming better as the rarity increases. Not only the main stats improve but they also gain an extra ammo type, adding more options. Traps of various elements, bombs of various elements, specialized bows. All nice and dandy, but all of them hidden behind an incredibly boring material hunt. Same for armors. Honestly, instead of having limited weapon/armor slots (which you can increase with another, even more terrible small animal hunt) why not just have weapons be something you unlock as you progress the story, and then increasingly evolve/improve by completing sidequests, or finding metal flowers or ancient containers, or doing open world things in general
I love the machines. I love their design, I love their sounds, I love their movements. Each feels unique with their own way of attacking and weakness. And a special note on their italian names, all very clever and on point. Truly great (even if maxed weapons still melt them in seconds). So why there is so much focus on human enemies in the main quest (and even in other activities like bandit camps)? The human enemies are so boring, so samey, the most basic "cultist" or "bandit" you can come up with, all weak as shit but somehow always in groups of ten or more, making battles against them way too long. Seriously
The world itself and the game story is interesting. The tutorial with child Aloy is actually a good hint at the game will be: child Aloy is terrible at climbing, you explore "predecessor" ruins and find audio/text logs from their times, you solve a small puzzle and learn how to use the focus, then move to the machines and helping other npcs solve their issues. Well, except the part where Rost goes "some machines run away after seeing you, you don't have to always kill them". Sorry Rost, but this is bullshit. I don't care you give me a story reason before the main game opens up as to why machines suddenly became aggressive, from a gameplay perspective this sentence should have never been said because machines will always hunt down Aloy at any chance. Talking about the entire story would take too long, so let's focus on certain parts: the game has a serious issue with the balance of logs during the main quest, like in the Faro headquarters there were various rooms filled with so many audio log I had to sit there and do nothing if I wanted to listen to them, otherwise Aloy or Sylens would just talk above them. And this happens way too frequently. Those logs should have been spaced better, maybe spaced among more places. There is also an insane use of the focus "detective vision" to solve quests (both main and side). Dude I got so bored with having to follow the holographic tracks to get where you switch to another holographic track you then follow to the actual progression marker
Overall the various interwined stories were good. The Meridian one, the hunt for the assassins, discovering the truth about the Eclipse/Hades, the many sidequests dealing with how these humans live with or tries to exploit machines, exploring ancient ruins, eventually saving the world from the resurrected military machines that caused the apocalypse, the truth behind it. But is it really original? A new generations of humans lives in a post-apoc world as hunter-gatherers, the past they can't understand becomes something mystic, religious, with the protagonist having a direct connection to the old ones forced to get into the politics of this new world and meeting/helping kings and other tribes. Like, just add animal ears and tails to these new humans and you have Utawarerumono. I like Horizon's world, but original it isn't
Let's instead talk about my biggest issue with the game, covering main and side quests, as well as the open world activities: the game is incredibly scripted. I can't say linear because the game is open world, but even with its openess the actual ways to solve quests, or explore anything is always linear, scripted, with no other option but to follow the devs instructions. This is true for everything, maybe outside of bandit camps (but most always end up in a free for all between Aloy, and sometime Nil, versus the bandits) and the hunting challenges since they actually require the player to use their tools well enough. Everything else, every quest, every cauldron, every bunker, main quest areas like the military command base, or GAIA Prime. All have some scripted climbing sequence, all have one corridor to move in followed by another corridor, or an enemy arena, or another climbing sequence, one quest marker after the other, and the only puzzle is the same one you did in the tutorial with the moving locks. The biggest disappontment was with the Cauldrons: amazing spectacle, moving parts everywhere, incredible color and design, and yet, all 4 of them were so incredibly linear. Zero gameplay depth, zero actual exploration. Complete this basic, but very good looking platforming challenge and you get a new override. There is so much they could have done with them, especially for something behind the Override, one of the game's main mechanic, but alas
Speaking about the Override, for something so central in the game story and for Aloy, there is so little effort in explaiing what it does or how it works. Thinking about that one sidequest where a merchant tricks Aloy while trying to steal her "special" lance, my mind ocntinued to say: why? What makes that lance special. It's a piece of wood with a metal point. Somehow aloy figures out what's the piece that lets the first Corruptor control other machines and sticks it into a piece of wood, and bam, it works. I hate having to write such an annoying nerdy thing but... how? Honestly I think this is a problem Aloy herself as a character has. I don't understand what the writers where trying to do with her. Her life changes when she gets her focus as a child. Thanks to her focus the way she "sees" the world is completely different from all of the other Nora (or other tribes). She understand machines and how the old world works better than most humans, and considering her origin it makes sense for her to also be very smart. Yet for the entire game she is just a... huntress. She kills machines loots their innards, but then never tries tinkering with them and simply sells them to merchants for new weapons. She moves away from the Nora grounds to avenge Rost and the other young Noras, but then she easily gets distracted by her obsession of finding her mother Elizabeth Sobeck, the player has options to have her be aggressive, or smart, or compassionate during certain parts, but the nshe feels so dependant on another human, especially Sylens. I couldn't believe the night before the final battle where the fate of the entire world is at hand she actually utters the words "Hey Sylens, are you there?". Oh, you know, the incredibly suspicious guy who admitted to be the reason Hades was capable of doing everything he wanted and so is indirectly behind everything bad happening in your life, the same guy who admitted he would do anything in his search for new technology and in understanding the predecessors, the guy that admitted in spying Aloy since she got out of the Nora grounds? This is the guy you want to talk with before going to sleep? Is aloy actually indipendet as a characters, or is she someone who ultimately wants to be recognized by her "dad/mom"? It feels even the writers aren't sure about her
It feels like mechanically and writing wise there are multiple Aloys, but all of this would have been "united" if instead of being a huntress (and this doesn't mean making her weak or something similar) she was a "tinkerer". Think about it, she finds a focus, she starts to understand machines, then she spends the next years training with Rost and assembling things with machine parts, understanding how they work and becoming more and more curious about the old world and how it ended. Then with this idea you can rewrite her lance into beingsomething she specifically assemblemd using still working machine parts (so that makes it special), and this is why the override piece manages to perfectly fit in her lance, and this would explain her connection to Sylens, probably the only other guy obsessed with the old world as much as her, and why not, maybe she is the one inventing and upgrading her weapons and armors instad of having random mods and buying them from merchants. Also, let's look at her weapons: bomb throwers to throw bombs to break cracked walls/boulders, freeze bombs to freeze water surfaces, electric rope traps to connect circuitry, fire arrows to burn old vegetations, "sound" arrows to make wall parts fall down. Many of the weapons could very easily have been repurposed into something to both interact with the world and use in battle, but most of all if modified in this way the amount of puzzle types or things to do during "dungeons" instead of simply following the platforming/climbing script would increase exponentially
Oh, I used that word, dungeons. I guess it's inevitable, I tried to avoid making this comparison because, well, I know about the past history between these 2 games, but at this point it's inevitable. All those issues, all those things I wrote, all of them could be solved by making Horizon Zero Dawn a...

Zelda clone

That's right. And I don't mean change the entire game, just turn the Cauldrons into proper "Zelda Dungeons" with a new item hidden in them and puzzles to use this new item (or upgrade), a boss at the end, and the override as a reward. Make them part of the main story (maybe the ending to each region main quest). Make obtaining the override something more impactful like have a 50% chance machines you have the override for spawn friendly in completed regions (especially since it's not you can do much with overridden mahcines since they just stand there, if they don't get immediately killed by the other enemies), and obviously reduce the need to hunt them for materials. And it's not like the cauldrons should be the only dungeons. Faro HQ, the Eclipse base, GAIA Prime, the All-Mother. The absurd thing is the setting itselfs works perfectly with the game being a Zelda-like. Zelda doesn't work in a "realistic" setting because its dungeons are unrealistic, they're "level design first", but a 1000 years old structure has every justification in being "unrealistic" with decading corridors, broken walls, and overgrown vegetations, and considering their origins Cauldrons also have a perfect reason to have weird geometry. Add more enviromental puzzles, and bam, Sony would have their own Zelda, a more mature Zelda they had full control over. But I guess making everything scripted is more "commercial", and an easier sell. Or maybe they didn't want the game to drew comparisons with Zelda considering the upcoming BotW. But I refuse to think no one during development didn't make the connection, and you know why?
Because Frozen Wilds addressed all (well, maybe not all, but most) or my complaints I wrote above!
Obtaining new weapons and their upgrades by completing quests? Check
Giving a bigger reason to gather the open world collectables? Check, you can buy more powerful weapons and armors with Bluegleam, and the animal statues/pigments also give better rewards
Better spreading of audio and text logs? Check
Explorable ruins have a more "dungeon" design and even feature extra types of puzzles? Check, look at the Dam or the Shaman's Path. Although they're still "simple", but it's a start
Aloy is more focused on understanding the mystery of the "Spirit" and the "Daemon", and shows more interest in how the old world worked? Check
Less human enemies, more machine enemies? Check
And guess what, the ending of the Frozen Wilds main quest is Cauldron Epsilon, and you get the Epsilon Override for clearing it. And Epsilon is spectacular compared to everything else in the game. I mean it still has a strict progression but compared to how scripted every other "dungeon" was Epsilon is like on a different planet. This means the devs 1) are perfectly capable of making the game more Zelda like and 2) realized the game works as a Zelda like. But, alas, I guess Sony wanted something that can sell even better, something more cinematic. Hell this game couldn't even bother having a real final boss, with the final opponent being just a slightly bigger Deathbringer (same for Frozen Wilds final boss being a variation of another FW enemy). A true shame
And it's a shame because the game could have been something much greater, instead, it's just "good". I absolutely got my money's worth, I enjoyed the game, but if I would rate it I would give it a 8/10, or a 8.5/10 for the machines. A perfectly fine rating. But remove all the budget, the "bombastic" graphics, the dub and the translation, and then the issues I had with it wouldn't be more obvious? Without Sony's money would the game still be an 8/10?