Crisol: Theater of Idols

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 05/03/2026
Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 5, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Unsupported, Steam Deck Verification, Xbox Series X|S. Leave a comment

Publisher: Blumhouse Games

Developer: Vermila Studios

Release Date: 02/10/2026

Available On

Have you ever been afraid of the Sun? In Crisol you should be. You are Gabriel Escudero. A warrior sent by the Sun god to set things straight on the twisted island of Tormentosa. The story is very disjointed, difficult to follow, and overall not very interesting. It has some neat ideas peppered throughout, but the game is so spread out that the story elements are lost on the player. The main hook in Crisol is the blood weapons. You get five different weapons that share ammo with your health. This makes the game a survival-horror light, as the horror elements aren’t really explored much and just lightly tossed in. You must fight living puppets, which are neat and interesting-looking enemies, but the same few repeat often. In fact, there are only four types in the entire game. The types of enemies include melee puppets, crossbolt puppets, stalker types, and flying puppets. It gets old really fast, but it’s not the only thing that gets worn out in the game.

There are a lot of balancing issues in this game. For starters, you only get five weapons in the game. Your starter weapon is a pistol. You get a double-barrel shotgun a bit later, but weapons are spread pretty far apart, and you don’t get the final weapon until the last level. The main gameplay element here in combat is balancing health and ammo, as they are one and the same. You reload by pressing the spikes on the gun against your hand, and this draws blood out to fill your ammo. Of course this makes the game harder, as you are now scrounging for health stims and dead animals to absorb their blood. This is the only way to heal. Combat is, sadly, a bit janky-feeling. Animations are very slow, and you can’t quickly get out of animations. For example, if you are reloading, Gabriel looks at his hand before you can shoot. Another example is there’s a delay with the melee attack to parry, and this never feels right. Most of the enemies in the game are melee enemies, and they can swarm you. I never felt like I had a good arsenal to deal with these enemies. The pistol is really weak until halfway through the game, where you can get enough upgrades. The shotgun uses way too much health to reload, so you only use it to get out of a tight situation, which isn’t what the shotgun should be for. I mostly used the pistol through the entire game.

This really makes the game boring and repetitive. Once you fight the first few puppets and the weird and creepy tone sets in, you are over it. You later get a sniper rifle, which is very slow to reload and feels mostly useless as most of the combat is close quarters. The last weapon you get is a sub-machine gun, but it is incredibly slow to reload without any upgrades and is hard to keep stable and does little damage. This arsenal just never felt good to use or felt balanced. On top of all that, you need gasoline cans to sharpen your knife as it dulls with each attack. These survival-horror-type elements just don’t feel good here. There are a couple of boss fights, and the final boss is an unfair chore to fight. There is also an automaton named Dolores that roams certain areas and can grab you. These areas require you to sneak around and solve simple puzzles, and I felt these were annoying more than anything. Many times her AI would glitch out, and she would stop right in front of a hiding spot and never move, requiring me to run and risk getting hit.

Most of the game is running around finding keys and solving elaborate puzzles that can be fun or annoying depending on who you are. The clues are pretty useless, and I resorted to guides for most of them. Each main area has a central hub you come back to that has a save point and an upgrade station, and most of the game repeats like this. Run around various hallways shooting enemies, solve a puzzle, find a key, and repeat. Most of the game felt like a chore to play, as there was no variation in between. There were no scripted events, no opportunities for exploration, and nothing else to engage with. Just run around hoping you’re not getting turned around just to do it again later.

There’s clear inspiration from BioShock and Resident Evil here. From the various types of puzzles and main menu unlocks (gallery and models) from RE to the art deco style of BioShock. It looks great for a budget title. I felt that there was way too much pointless clutter everywhere, and the game is incredibly linear but hard to navigate. The map is mostly useless, as there’s no arrow or flashing icon of where to go next. Some levels were mazes of doors, hallways, ladders, and unlocking shortcuts. There are secrets in the game that give you chests, health upgrades, and more silver bulls to spend for upgrades. You need crow relics to buy passive abilities which I felt just didn’t do much. Many of these felt useless. What you really need are the silver bulls for weapon upgrades, and these are essential for survival. Without maxing out most of your weapons by the end, you won’t really get far.

The game suffers from a lot of FPS drops and dips down into the teens frequently. There were also multiple crashes when reloading from death, and the overall feeling of the game isn’t exactly polished. The game just feels like random hallways and rooms put together to make a level. There’s no cohesive flow to anything visually or mechanically. The entire game feels like a video game level from 2012 rather than a believable world. I applaud the small team for trying to do something different, but they bit off more than they could chew here, and it shows. The game is entertaining for those desperate for an early 10s FPS or something similar to Resident Evil or BioShock. The unique weapon mechanic isn’t balanced well enough to really pull you in, and the story is so disjointed and confusing that you won’t really care. There’s also the awful voice acting from everyone but Gabriel. The voice acting was so bad in some spots that it really pulled me out of the game. The story isn’t strong enough to save the game and the art style only goes so far. For the $20 price tag there’s some good value here, but don’t come in expecting greatness like the game it’s inspired by.

Reviewed On

5.1 Surround Sound

Mouse: P.I. for Hire

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 05/03/2026
Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, Nintendo Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 5, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Verification, Steam Deck Verified, Switch 2, Xbox Series X|S. Leave a comment

Publisher: PlaySide Studios

Developer: Fumi Games

Release Date: 04/16/2026

Available On

1940s cartoons have slowly grown in popularity, but especially their art style due to copyrights running out mostly from Disney. This had led to many horror projects or inspirations from these shows (Bendy, Cuphead). Mostly stemming from Steamboat Willy and his ilk, Mouse: P.I. for Hire doesn’t just take inspirations from the cartoon era it replicates but also other first-person games like Doom. Mouse is a first-person shooter that is very similar to the first two Doom games with some obvious elements of the newer reboots. First and foremost, P.I. for Hire is a fantastic game to look at. It’s not easy to make a black-and-white game due to the lack of colours that are used to give visual clues to gamers. Clearly the developers used white on black contrast to deliver basic video game language to players, and that’s quite tricky.

While I would love to say that Mouse is a fantastic Doom clone and is basically Doom: Steamboat Willy Edition, there are some glaring issues that kept this game from greatness. While the shooting mechanics feel really good and every gun has it’s own purpose and style there are some balancing issues with Mouse. You start out with the Mouser (haha), which is a semi-automatic pistol, and that’s totally fine. However, you get stuck with this single weapon for way too long. In fact, the weapons are spread so far apart it makes you want to stick with just a single gun. Like the newer Doom reboots, there are tons of pickups in every area. You rarely run out of ammo, so this doesn’t encourage mixing things up. That goes hand in hand with enemy design. Doom has a very distincft design that forces you to switch weapons for different enemies and their distance. Mouse desperately wants to be a close-quarters arena-style shooter, but these areas just aren’t big enough. There also isn’t enough multi-layering to give you breathing room or strategies. Most levels all play out exactly the same, which is multiple corridors bookended by an area with monster closets and almost no verticality. Some act as hubs, and as you come back around throughout the level, more monster closets will open, but this becomes very tedious.

There is a main hub that has your office where you pin clues you find in each level. You can also upgrade weapons with found blueprints and buy ammo and collectibles as well as play a baseball card-style poker game, which I didn’t find very interesting or fun to play. Maybe because I’m not a baseball fan. Money is accumulated incredibly slowly, so you have to be mindful about what you buy. If you don’t care about collectibles, you only use it to buy ammo so you’re stocked up before each mission. I wish there were more uses for money; again, this is part of the balancing issues in this game. When you upgrade weapons (up to three times), you get a cool visual added to the weapon but also a secondary fire option which harkens back to Resistance or Ratchet & Clank, but they aren’t as clever. The shotgun lets you charge up a double shot; the double-barrel shotgun lets you fire both barrels; the James Gun lets you shoot a burst of ammo; the mouser lets you do 3-round bursts. It’s not very diversified, and despite the amount of weapons you get, there are still more balancing problems with these. The pump-action shotgun and double barrel are mostly repetitive. The double-barrel is slow to reload and doesn’t let you carry much (12 rounds), and there are no long-distance weapons. Everything is short- to medium-range, but there are no long-range areas. There is only one explosive weapon (cannon) and one throwable (TNT), which make another pair of weapons repetitive. The brain gun is fun but doesn’t do much outside of exploding heads but requires constant contact. There’s a freeze gun, which I didn’t find useful, as it only freezes one enemy at a time and takes too long. I can go on.

I mostly stuck to the pump-action shotgun and the James gun, as those two complemented each other. Close-quarters damage and being able to shoot many enemies at once. I rarely touched the Mouser after unlocking those two. There’s a paint gun that does a bit more damage, but what I wanted were weapons that do splash damage or another type of fast-firing weapon. The enemies also always repeat. There are enemies with shields, melee enemies, big melee guys that take a lot of damage, and flying enemies, and that’s about it. This gets old really fast as there are nearly 15 levels in the game. Many levels look the same, with several set in swamps, warehouses, movie lots, etc. With everything being black and white, I wanted to see more diversity in scenery. You can unlock passive abilities like hovering, double jump, wall run and climb, but these are rarely used and felt like afterthoughts. There are no puzzles in the game either. The only puzzle is technically tail-picking, which is a nice change from The Elder Scrolls style of lock-picking. This consists of pins and a maze-style lock. You have to push the pins while moving through the maze. Some are timed and some have hazards, while others have limited moves. The problem is that once you do a few, they are all the same with zero challenge. This compels you to skip optional safes and doors in order to progress.

That’s what you will do through most of Mouse. Moving forward just to get to the next thing. The story is mildly interesting, but poorly told. It feels very disjointed, and half of the time I don’t know what was going on. There are multiple cases going on at once, and a lot of them cross over. There are typical noir-type stereotypes in the game, and they just were not clever or interesting. The voice acting is good, and I like some of the mouse-related puns, like ‘fondue’ being alcohol and ‘cheese powder’ being drugs. The boss fights are probably more interesting, but the final boss fight is an absolute pain due to the cramped arena with not enough room to move around. Despite all of this, the game is fast-paced, and I did enjoy just shooting everything in sight. That feeling from Doom does come across in the game, but the only truly interesting area was the “hallucination” level in which you jump around a fantasy area and go to hell and find the chainsaw. Most of Mouse’s problem is that it takes itself way too seriously.

The rubber hose animations and art style are fantastic to look at, and the game feels good to play. The weapons are great to shoot, but the levels feel way too similar to each other, and many of the game types of areas repeat. There’s no deviation in design, and the same few enemies repeat forever. There are no puzzles, and tail-picking becomes easy way too quickly. Passive abilities aren’t used much, and the weapons are poorly balanced with both alt-fire modes and overall use against enemies. Many weapons serve the same function, causing you to stick to the same few throughout. That doesn’t make the game unenjoyable, just repetitive, and many players may quit early on. The story isn’t very interesting and the characters are dull, but it’s still a great shooter at its heart, and I kept blasting my way through the game, having fun despite how serious the game took itself.

Reviewed On

Quality Preset
5.1 Surround Sound

The Shore: Enhanced Edition

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 04/30/2026
Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 5, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Verification, Steam Deck Verified, Xbox Series X|S. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a comment

Publisher: Iphigames

Developer: Ares Dragonis

Release Date: 04/30/2026

Available On

There are not a lot of good Lovecraft-based games. It seems that there is a curse in the video game industry where Lovecraft-based games tend to excel in one aspect but fail in others. This trend extends from the point-and-click adventure titles for IBM PC compatibles all the way to today. Most of these games were only memorable for their visuals, monsters, or the challenges they faced during development. The games include Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, Call of Cthulhu (2018), and The Sinking City. These all had interesting elements to them but weren’t great games on their own, often suffering from issues such as poor gameplay mechanics, lacklustre storytelling, or technical problems that hindered the overall experience. The Shore is, sadly, no different, but it does have a striking art style with some fun and memorable moments.

The Shore was already dated on PC back in 2021. It felt like a walking simulator from 2012. It’s very slow, plodding, there’s not much dialogue, and it’s mostly about exploration and soaking up the atmosphere. The new updated version for consoles has improved visuals, combat, and a different opening sequence, making it more engaging and appealing to both new players and fans of the genre. The game starts out similar to other dreamy walking simulators that were a staple of the 2010s. Games like Dear Esther, The game draws inspiration from other dreamy walking simulators, including Among the Sleep, What Remains of Edith Finch, The Suicide of Rachel Foster, and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. These games defined that genre, and even before that, The Path from 2008 helped drive intriguing story concepts on a lower budget. The Shore has that look and type of voice acting. On an island with a lighthouse, you are a part of a shipwreck. You can wander around collecting items such as notes in bottles that tell what happened to the crew. You must also collect items to progress, which is where the genre’s tropes come in.

There’s no map or any clues as to where to go for the first half of the game. You can come across some fantastic objects that are from another world. The game features a strange ritual pit, a weird reflective orb, several obelisks and monoliths, as well as various Old Gods, including Azathoth, Shub-Niggurath, Nyarlathotep, Dagon, and Cthulhu himself, among others. Some of these sightings are optional and require specific items or just wandering around thoroughly, such as collecting ancient artefacts or completing certain quests to unlock them. These emerging beasts are fantastic. The sheer size is daunting, and I was awestruck at how awesome they looked despite how dated the overall graphics are. As the game moves on, the visuals get weirder and more otherworldly. You end up wandering through intestines, cosmic walkways, and Giger-inspired caverns. The art style is fantastic, and you can see clear inspiration from Giger and his artwork. The biomechanical nature is subtly emerging in various architectural designs while remaining true to the Cthulhu mythos.

The inclusion of combat in this game is unusual, and it does not function effectively. I mean, it does what it needs to, but the game isn’t an FPS at all. You get a strange pyramid object that shoots a beam out that can stop various monsters in their path. There are a couple of chase scenes as well, but later levels are a bit labyrinthine and difficult to navigate, which took some of the fun out of the exploring and sightseeing. After you leave the island, the 2010s-inspired walking simulator vanishes, and you are in the depths of cosmic horror, solving simple puzzles and lasering Under Gods. The game is incredibly short, clocking in at less than 2 hours with a guide. This may not justify the cost of the game to many unless you are a hardcore Lovecraft fan or love weird indie adventure titles. Any fans of the above-mentioned games will have a good time.

In the end, that’s what The Shore is. The Shore offers a delightful experience with stunning monsters to admire. The first part of the game is a bit dry and dull, but thereafter, it picks up. The Old Gods, with their insane level of detail, are a captivating sight, and the constantly changing trippy visuals keep you engaged and push you forward. If you can endure the initial 30-45 minutes, the game gains momentum and becomes quite entertaining. I wish the game were longer. I wanted to see more of these Gods and insanely giant monsters. What’s here is worth a fun afternoon, but it would be difficult to convince those outside of the target audience.

*Review code provided by publisher

Reviewed On

5.1 Surround Sound

Doom Guy: Life in First Person

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 04/29/2026
Posted in: Book Reviews. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a comment

For anyone who watches long-form YouTube documentaries about video game history and facts. This is for you. For anyone who just loves tech. This is not for you. For those who just love playing Doom. This also isn’t for you. I don’t read auto biographies very often, and in fact, I can’t remember the last one I even read. However, I do know that a lot of authors of auto biographies sometimes aren’t the best tellers of their own story. I am personally fascinated with game design and peeking behind the curtains about the lives of the developers, what made them want to do this, and what makes games tick. This book is an autopsy of Doom, Doom II, and Quake, and even Daikatana. There’s also a lot of backstory about how John Romero grew up poor and had an abusive, dysfunctional family.

Before the book even gets into the development of Doom, there’s a lot of backstory that most of us don’t know who don’t watch or read every single interview John has done. He mentions quite a bit about what’s never been said or talked about when it comes to his childhood. This gives us a great lead-up to what a lot of us are buying this book for. The turmoil that is any game that John Romero touches. I walked away from this book both respecting John as a technical mastermind of coding and game design and less so as an actual person. John had no business being in charge of teams, and it seems he never learned his lessons, and he even says so in hindsight, yet this story keeps repeating even today. While John made many 8-bit titles along with Commander Keen, his fame started with Doom. The story of him and John Carmack is one of camaraderie and friendship but also lets us see the capitalist vampire that the US has pushed into all of us. Going from a humble startup to a mega-corporation almost overnight and all the problems that come from that.

John clearly always bit off more than he could chew. Refusing to get help unless it was mandatory and doing 10 jobs at once (literally in some cases). There are many names thrown around the book without much context as to who these people are on a personal level. They feel like action figures standing in for John’s conversation with us. Tom this, Adrian that, and so on. We don’t get to know any of these other people outside of a conversational context. That’s exactly what Life in First Person is. A very long and in-depth interview. There’s a lot of talk about the technical side of computers, coding, and game design which will interest those who are and bore to death those who aren’t. John also likes to repeat himself quite often and just rephrase multiple events in different ways. Some chapters just dragged because he either wouldn’t get to the point or would go off track too many times just to loop back around many pages later.

Doom Guy feels like a lot of what most have already known publicly. This book felt a lot like someone who is getting up in age and wants to tell a publicly known story his way. It felt like a conscience-clearing conversation to help John feel better about going to be at night. After Daikatana in 2001 John never made another successful game outside of the mobile and Facebook game trend stuff that most of his audience hated in the late 00’s to mid 10’s. The disaster that was Ion Storm only had a single fruit, and that wasn’t even John’s game. It was Warren Spectre’s Deus Ex. The millions upon millions of dollars that John got his hands on throughout his career only bore fruit for three successful games. Doom, Doom II, and Quake. There’s not much talk about John’s later career, including his more unsuccessful bombs from his Romero Games company. Just recently, Microsoft cancelled John’s latest FPS that he talks about towards the end of his book. Most likely because he still can not manage a team.

Overall, Doom Guy is a great read for those who like Doom or Quake and love game design and behind-the-scenes stuff. Most others will find this book dry and dull. It feels and reads like an insanely long interview, and that’s not quite what I expected. I wanted to know more about John’s later years AFTER Ion Storm, as we don’t really know much about this. A house flood, meeting Brenda, remaking Doom maps, and an awful Kickstarter that couldn’t promise anything. My takeaway from this book is that John is a great person in some ways. He loves his family, his culture, and games. That can’t be denied. However, making the same mistakes over and over again without learning and not having a single successful new game in 25 years says something. John is the common denominator, not the people around him. This book is the Rise and Fall of John Romero as he’s never reached the same heights since.

Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II – Enhanced

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 04/25/2026
Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 5, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Verification, Steam Deck Verified, Xbox Series X|S. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a comment

Publisher: Microsoft Corporation

Developer: Ninja Theory

Release Date: 08/12/2025

Available On

The first Hellblade was an interesting experiment by Ninja Theory. Using mental health as a storytelling element by manifesting them as gameplay and visual effects on screen. Senua is back in a game with a much larger budget and higher production values than even before. This is a fantastic-looking game, but does it have more than looks? Senua is a trapped prisoner on a Norse slave trade ship when it wrecks at sea by an unknown force. Senua fights off her slavers and meets the lead slaver. Without spoiling much, he becomes one of three other companions who accompany Senua on her new saga to fight her demons of her past and help those around her. Again, most of what Senua goes through are visual hallucinations, but she does have more control of her psychosis than before. The game gameplay loop from the previous game is present. Some combat, puzzles, and walking with storytelling dialog. Sadly, this is almost exactly the same without much improvement. The only things that set this game apart are the inclusion of new characters, a deeper narrative, and higher production values.

Combat is exactly the same as the previous game; in fact, it’s a bit more dumbed down. Gone are the kick buttons and the ability to run and attack. You can still do the heavy, light, and parry/block attacks, but Ninja Theory tried to make up for a lack of expansion by increasing the scripted feeling of the fights. The animations are better, and the combat feels more brutal. It looks cooler with Senua getting her sword stuck in enemies and blood spurting out everywhere, but at what cost? There are still no upgrades or new abilities learned. You get your focus mirror very early on, and this is used as a last-ditch effort right before you die to give you a leg up. I didn’t die a single time in this game; it’s so easy. In fact, even the dark rot feature is now gone. As you fight enemies, you will have other villagers run in between and interact with the fight; various animation loops play out, but by the end of the game, the excitement is gone, and it’s just a simple combat system. Thankfully, there is a lot less of it in this game, with maybe half a dozen combat arenas thrown in. The game mostly focuses on puzzles, which are still just as easy.

You still have illusion puzzles that use the environment, but now this is advanced with magic balls you can focus on to make geometry appear and disappear. This means they need to be activated in a certain order, but this doesn’t really make anything more difficult. There’s less emphasis on finding symbols, and some ball-on-pedestal puzzles are tossed in. These won’t keep you very invested, sadly, but they are more spread out as well. Most of the game is scripted storytelling like you see in a lot of first-party PlayStation games. A couple of scenes have you running from cover to cover, avoiding ocean waves and volcano blasts. There’s a lot of visual effects tricking the player into scripted gameplay. A lot of climbing and animations that involve that. This game is well acted, and the story is entertaining, but anyone thinking this is more action-heavy will be disappointed. If you didn’t like the first game, you will like this one even less despite its higher production values.

Senua’s story makes a bit more sense here and is less poetic and metaphorical of her past. There are the same collectibles here, just fewer of them, and at least there’s some incentive to play again. There is a Dark Rot mode, which is the perma-death mode of the first game; developer commentary; and narration from the other three characters, which adds a new perspective to the story. Is the game worth playing four times or more? Probably not. I personally liked this series, and playing them back to back is an entertaining day of gaming, but I really wish there was more to this game. It could have been longer, as it feels the story is truncated. The three new characters are interesting, and I wanted to know more about them. They just show up to help Senua in the current circumstance, and we have no reason to care for them outside of Thorgestr, as he is the first companion from the very beginning. Norse mythology is pulled back a bit and focuses more on the giants but less on the realms.

Overall, Hellblade II is a great game for an entertaining afternoon. The story is good, the characters are fun, and the production values make this one of the best-looking games of this generation. On the PS5 Pro the visuals are great, and using Dolby Atmos on a 5.1 surround system is a treat. The thunderstorm and rain are heard all around and sound awesome. When you fight helmeted vikings their muffled voices are heard in the rear speakers, and villagers can be heard running around. It may not be the best game, but it’s a great piece of entertainment, especially if you have the correct setup.

Reviewed On

Quality Mode | PSSR

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 04/20/2026
Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, Nintendo Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Verification, Steam Deck Verified, Switch, Xbox One. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a comment

Publisher: Microsoft Corporation

Developer: Ninja Theory

Release Date: 08/12/25

Available On

The coverage of mental health in games is growing both in respect of the disease process and the way it affects everyday lives. This would have been laughed at 20 years ago (and still kind of is in a small sect of a specific gaming crowd), but seeing it take an art form is very interesting here. Hellblade was well known for depicting different forms of psychosis in a character and projecting that onto a game. Schizophrenia, visual and auditory hallucinations, multiple personality disorder, and many others. Hellblade takes Norse mythology and grounds it with real-world mental health issues. Senua is the main protagonist you play as. Her trauma manifests into these hallucinations, turning what you are seeing into visual symbols of her past. As you play along and solve puzzles, you can also find hidden faces and totems to learn about the Norse mythology by a man named Druth.

Hellblade is mostly a walking simulator mixed with some simple combat and geometry illusion puzzles. This sequence is the main gameplay loop. Solve puzzles, do some combat, walk a bunch, and listen to dialog. It’s a fine loop that many games do right, and Hellblade is no exception, but it’s the pacing of this loop that wears thin really fast. The combat is the weakest aspect of the game despite looking cool. Senua isn’t a strong character, but she is fast. You can kick, run, and do heavy and light attacks. You can also block and parry. Sadly, these are attached to an almost quick-time event-feeling game with canned animations. This is a challenge of timing rather than pure skill. Enemies repeat often with just a few types. Heavy hitters with two-handed axes and spears, some with shields, and lighter enemies with a single sword or axe. They will spawn in on you until the fight is over. Sometimes this can be overbearing with 5-6 enemies on top of you. Thankfully, you have a focus mirror that stores energy with every successful parry and attack. This slows down time and allows you to whack away at enemies.

Sadly, the combat crescendos into much more whack-a-mole by the end. Some combat sequences throwing two dozen enemies at you. It gets tiring as there’s no change to it. No leveling up, no new moves learned, no nothing. It would have been nice to spread these out more, but with the short play time, it wears things pretty fast. The puzzles are the only things breaking up that monotony of combat. You will get blocked by a door and have to find symbols hidden in the environment. This requires you to see highlighted objects at a certain angle and line them up by climbing or moving around to a new area. These are mostly fun but rarely offer any type of challenge. Some players may actually get bored with how simple the game can be, especially on easier difficulties. There’s one caveat to the entire game, and that’s the fact that Senua has a darkness climbing up her arm. Every time you do, it gets closer to her face. If you die too many times, it’s game over, and you have to start the game over again. I don’t quite understand why this is here. The game is already easy enough, and the game’s not short enough for this to not be a problem. This is easily a 4-6 hour game. You have to repeat many scripted events and dialog, and anyone who does die will easily just throw the towel in and move on.

With that out of the way, the game’s main attraction is the story and the visual effects. This was one of the best-looking games of the previous generation, and with new graphical enhancements that have been added over time, such as ray tracing, it looks fantastic. The production values are very high here, and you can see some of Ninja Theory’s other projects influencing the game here. The animations are fantastic, and the voice acting is superb. Sadly, many gamers will mistake this game for a God of War-style game, not realizing it’s mostly an adventure game with light combat and easy puzzles. Thankfully, the environments are varied and change all the time, with some great-looking vistas and monuments. I had this game installed on my PC for years and never got around to actually getting very far into the game. You need to be in the right mindset to play this game. It’s very dark and heavy emotionally and can be a lot to take in but can be finished in a single sitting.

Hellblade’s new graphical features are worth the price of entry on PS5 Pro and PC alone. This game is very unique, and there’s nothing else quite like it. There may be other games that do what Helblade does better when it’s broken down to its core, but don’t let that steer you away from this game. Go in not expecting much outside of a good story and entertaining production values and you won’t be disappointed.

Reviewed On

Enriched Visuals | PSSR On
5.1 Surround

A Twisted Place

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 04/15/2026
Posted in: PC Reviews, Steam Deck Unknown, Steam Deck Verification. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a comment

Publisher: Wraithen Studio

Developer: Wraithen Studio

Release Date: 09/11/2025



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I’m still on the search for a horror game that will truly scare me, and I mean a new horror game. Something that’s not mainstream with a large budget. A Twisted Place came pretty close. If it wasn’t for the janky controls, annoying stealth, and lack of puzzles, I think this game was really on to something. You play as a generic bald dude holding a lantern, only your glowing eyes really showing in the dark. You walk around a strange and haunted house, going into weird rooms and solving simple puzzles. Most of the puzzles are object hunting that have you clicking on things to open them and find keys. The few puzzles feel like guessing games, as there are no hints around to figure them out. Most of the game consists of walking from either left to right and occasionally into the screen to navigate maze-like hallways and avoid monsters.

The ambience is the best part of A Twisted Place. The game grows into a more surreal Eldritch like horror. Going from a quiet house to a desolate basement, an abandoned hospital, and eventually some sort of cosmic desert and ancient city. There’s no voice acting or much to read, really. You move along somber hallways listening to the groans of the dead muddle by only to get caught and have to start at the nearest checkpoint. Thankfully, any progress you made is remembered. There is a specific maze of hallways towards the end that requires four hidden switches to be flipped, but getting around the monsters in a specific pattern is incredibly frustrating. While the levels themselves look great, the design is pretty poor for gameplay.

There are some rooms you can enter that put you in a first-person view. These are really neat and ratchet up the tension to skin-crawling levels as you click on items and open cabinets, hoping nothing jumps out at you. The scares are really well done here with a lot of moments and scenes that are impossible to fully digest during the brief moment you encounter them. These new levels are what kept me going. The haunting ambient noises. There’s no real soundtrack here, just sounds of the dead and unknown stirring quietly in the background, waiting to be discovered or forgotten.

The game doesn’t overstay its welcome. Only a couple of hours long, but the later maze-like levels may frustrate players into a refund. Unless you love the aesthetic and gore that the game provides, there isn’t anything else worth looking into. With that said, the game also deals with suicide and mental illness in some interesting ways. This isn’t the game I’m looking for, but it’s kind of close. For the small entry fee you’re looking at an entertaining afternoon.

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Life is Strange: Reunion

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 04/09/2026
Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 5, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Playable, Steam Deck Verification, Xbox Series X|S. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a comment

Publisher: Square Enix

Developer: Deck Nine Games

Release Date: 03/26/2026



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We are at the end of a saga. Life is Strange isn’t just one of the best modern adventure series to date, but one that I grew up with in my early adulthood. 11 years ago the first game touched me personally in a way that a lot of games can’t. DONTNOD captured lightning in a bottle. Nostalgic lightning in a bottle, to be specific. They had a way to drag you back to your younger years and make you feel like a teen and kid again. The rural Oregon town, hanging out in abandoned places like junk yards and going to parties you aren’t allowed to. It wasn’t just the physical locations but the personal connections and weird happenings that occurred in those spots. Sitting around outside on a warm summer day, birds chirping, a slight breeze. Sitting on top of some junk, talking to friends about hobbies and interests. Walking for miles down a train track or abandoned road is your “regular spot.” Some people grew up with friends and did this routine for years. That was the magic that Life is Strange captured. The game had the superpower twist, but it was grounded and felt believable. Almost like when you always imagined going back in time and changing things, but that daydream became a reality.

While the reins were handed off to Deck Nine games the best were made by DONTNOD. Life is Strange 2 was a new take in the series but captured that same magic. I personally feel like Deck Nine did a decent job but couldn’t find that same magic that DONTNOD had. The series continued with Before the Storm, a prequel focusing on Cloe, whose events are completely ignored in the series, then onto another spin-off with True Colors, which was Deck Nine’s best work. Reunion is a direct sequel to Double Exposure, and I honestly feel like these two games should have been made into one. Double Exposure had a lot missing from what made Life is Strange truly great. Reunion finally captures some of that DONTNOD era magic and brings us a fantastic and touching conclusion to the end of the Max and Chloe saga.

The game starts out great just like all the games do. You are thrown into the life of Max and what she’s doing right at that moment. Sadly, you must play Double Exposure to even care about what’s going on here. All of the characters from that game are here, but the game plays like you already know what happened. There’s a short recap of the entire trilogy at the beginning, and you can make choices. This is great based on how you played these games all these years. I still remember the major choices I made from the original game 11 years ago, as it was that impactful to me. To newcomers, these choices don’t mean anything. As you play the game, you will get a lot of the same feelings from the original game. There’s more of a slice-of-life, personal level of intrigue to Max’s life. Double Exposure completely ignored these small everyday details and focused on too many characters and too grand of a plot. It was too fast-moving to feel like the original game. Reunion really tightens the reins and focuses on core characters, mostly Max and Cloe. With a lot of the introductions of the newer characters done in the previous game, Reunion can focus on moving forward. Max ends up in another time-manipulating conundrum. It starts to feel forced at first, but it’s another natural problem that she gets herself into without even knowing it. The school from the previous game is set on fire, and as you run around this initial scene, you glance at clues as to what could have caused this fire. A lot of students die and so do Max’s friends. The music here is also fantastic as ever. Both licensed and original music just feel like “Life is Strange“. The music gives you that feeling of longing for something in the past. A distant fun moment that makes you feel warm inside and makes you smile.

Max takes a selfie, and her double exposure power from the last game allows her to go into the photo and try to stop the fire. As usual, fate takes hold, and Max has the ultimate moral battle with whether or not her powers are actually being used for the good of others or just herself. There’s a lot of turmoil between Max and Cloe about this, and they talk a lot about the events of past games. This really feels like the climax to a long-running trilogy. Sadly, not much else has evolved outside of a slight visual bump. Gameplay is minimal, puzzles are almost nonexistent, and the game is reduced to object hunting, but that’s kind of par for the course for adventure games. They are either puzzle-heavy or object-hunting heavy. Dialogue choices are the main impact in this game, like it is with the entire series, and there are still many choices that don’t have immediate effects. The game displays the famous “This choice will have consequences” with the usual lovely chime. I wish there were more minute choices like in the original game that didn’t seem obvious at all. That’s one of the reasons why that game was so impactful. There are fewer major choices here rather than many small ones. However, despite this, the choices are very impactful and are great. There are a couple of scenes that a small sect of fandom seems upset with. Being able to kiss Cloe two different times. First off, this reaches back to the original game with you being able to romance Cloe or not. Second, it’s a choice. You don’t have to. Some feel just having the option is feeding into “Pricefield shipping,” but I feel this is a reach. Homophobia was a huge issue when the first game launched thanks to Gamer Gate, and it’s no different today. Cloe and Max have a very deep and beautiful relationship. There’s context leading up to these points. It’s not out of place or out of nowhere.

The game does a great job with worldbuilding by having you exmaine objects and listen to Max’s internal monologue. This was unique to Life is Strange and helped you connect with the small details of the world. Various media that characters like, art, school happenings, things like lunch menus. It’s all optional, but helps pull you in. With that said, Reunion is a fantastic ending to the trilogy. Not the groundbreaking finale I wanted, but Deck Nine did a great job. Despite how long it took them to get up to speed with DONTNOD’s storytelling quality, what’s here is great. We grew up with Max and Cloe and finally can see the end of their saga. There are many moments like in the original game with parties, school issues, and more adult issues that break away from the childhood antics of the original game. Life is Strange does something that a lot of games struggle to do. Make their characters feel human and personal.

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The House of the Dead 2: Remake

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 04/05/2026
Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, Nintendo Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Verification, Steam Deck Verified, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a comment

Publisher: Forever Entertainment

Developer: MegaPixel Studio

Release Date: 08/07/2025

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The House of the Dead is one of the kings of the arcades. This co-op light gun game is a classic with great gameplay, cool monsters, and cutting-edge visuals for the time. The House of the Dead 2 is considered one of the best and was one of the first games in the series to be ported to consoles. There was also a typing version of this game for Dreamcast and PC that is considered great as well. With the original assets being lost, Forever Entertainment had to recreate the game from the ground up, and they did a pretty decent job. It’s not perfect, but it does the game justice and, with some patches, could be even better. The content is bare bones, there’s little extra, and there are some bugs and issues with the camera here and there, but it can be fixed or patched in.

Just like the original, you can play as either James or Gary (different paths) and use your trusty pistol to fight off zombies. There are a good amount in the game, with some ranging from animals to sea creatures. This is a light rail game, so you don’t move the camera, only the reticle on screen. Using the PS5 DualSense is the best way to go, as you can use the motion sensor to aim, and the trigger effect is great for recreating the feeling of the light guns in the arcade. You can customize the controls and use the sticks or switch between the two. Circle is used to reload. This allows for quick action and speed that this game needs. Even on Very Easy, I died quite a bit towards the end. Each level lasts about 10 minutes. The goal is to shoot everything before it hits you. Enemies will melee attack or throw items. Some enemies take more hits than others. You can shoot red barrels to blow some up, but there is little environmental interaction, and I would have liked to have seen more with this remake. You can shoot random items to find hidden secrets such as weapons, bullet types, or passive upgrades like double points, health, credits, etc. You can save citizens and get health kits, weapons, and other items as well, but you need to act fast.

I found an issue with shooting enemies or containers in some scenes. The camera doesn’t linger long enough or doesn’t pan in a way that you can hit these items or enemies. I knew something was there, but I didn’t have nanosecond reflexes to grab the item. This really needs to be patched and fixed. I also found most of the bosses pretty lame to kill. For example, the hydra boss is just a game of wack-a-mole with no real challenge. Bosses have weak spots, and you need to either fire on them constantly or wait for an opening. This can make boss battles drag on as they only have a few attack patterns and are bullet sponges. I understand this was made for the arcade, but this could have been improved in the remake. The levels themselves vary and look really cool, and there’s a lot of detail in the monsters, and the cheese from the original carried over. The new voice acting is bad, but in a good way. The line delivery can be pretty funny, and the story is absolutely bonkers and makes no sense. A man named Goldman is somehow letting a deity take over the world. But what does this have to do with zombies? Where do they come from? It’s never explained and doesn’t need to be. There are only six levels, and you can breeze through them in less than an hour.

Of course, the game is easier with a friend and a blast to play. There a secret lab area in the main menu where you can see what you unlocked, but there’s nothing extra here. Just a modern classic mode and an arcade mode. For the asking price there’s not a lot of content here, and unless you are a huge light gun or The House of the Dead fan, most won’t find much value in this game. I ran into some bugs with water textures being purple, slowdown, and the aforementioned camera issues, but it’s not a terrible experience; it’s just the bare minimum.

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Dead Letter Dept.

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 03/30/2026
Posted in: Linux, PC Reviews, Steam Deck Playable, Steam Deck Verification. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a comment

Publisher: Belief Engine

Developer: Mike Monroe

Release Date: 01/30/2025

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Working a mundane job, thinking something new will make things better, can just sometimes make things worse. We have all been there at least once. You start a new job in a new town trying to restart your life, run away from something, etc. The job ends up crushing your soul; you want to cry every time you wake up to go. Bills start piling up, you end up chasing due dates, and you’re always in the red at the end of everything. Denied time off, denied overtime, and you can’t catch any breaks. Dead Letter Dept. sees this loop as a game. You play as someone who is running away from someone or trying to start a new life and rents a single-bedroom apartment in a random city in the US as a data entry person. The game spirals into something sinister at the department, and the game turns into a detective-style typing game with horror elements.

Honestly, this is another indie horror title that ends up spiraling into trippy visuals and effects that don’t really mean anything. This seems to be a trend and has been for over a decade, and I don’t get why. The game does a great job soaking us in atmosphere with a depressing sky, not being able to look out the window, commentary on the bed, bills piling up, the fridge, and so on. Then you exit your apartment and go down long hallways out to the public transit. The sad part about this is that this sequence repeats after every single day and gets old fast. Nothing really happens during this sequence outside of flickering lights and an occasional shadow. After a few days it would have been nice to just skip the job after exiting the apartment if there was nothing meaningful to tell here.

Once you sit down, the meat of the game is the typing. You are presented with letters, postcards, and various crumpled-up pieces of mail. Your job is to translate what is highlighted in yellow. Once you start typing an address, the autocomplete will pop up and can suggest addresses, but it’s mostly useless. You can assign shortcut keys to flip the mail over and zoom in. There are many different types of mail, from typing in entire passages to small greetings. You get a feel of snippets from people’s lives based on what the envelope says or the postcard. As the days move on, you can forward some stuff to different addresses to get different endings, but like most horror games, the different endings don’t really matter and aren’t interesting enough. Once you play as intended, unless you want to achievement hunt, there’s no reason to play again.

As you would expect, the game starts playing with your senses over time. Shutting power down, making you hallucinate, and various other trippy effects, but there’s no narrative here. Everything is abstract and open for whatever interpretation the player wants. You get strange messages sent to you throughout the game, but there’s no cohesive narrative. It all feels a bit random and obtuse. I still enjoyed it, though, as the game is tense and haunting and you don’t really know what’s going to happen next. There are a few parts in which you wander around through empty hallways. I felt this distracted from the overall core game and didn’t add any value to anything. I just wanted to see the dialog in the apartment, as your character’s internal thoughts are some of the most disturbing in the game. Less is sometimes more.

Overall, Dead Letter Dept. is a fun evening of typing and managing mail but doesn’t tell the best horror story. The atmosphere and happenings in the apartment are great, and what little is there tells quite a lot. The story of struggle and being alone in the world is something the developers should have held on to rather than go off onto this weird, haunted-house, trippy-effect direction. What’s here is good, and there are some frights, but there’s too much here to make it something it’s not.

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