The original Alan Wake DLC wasn’t anything special. It felt forced, with more questions than answers. I was hoping the original game would let us play episodes of Night Springs. This is a fictional TV show that plays on TVs in the game and is reminiscent of The Twilight Zone. Night Springs takes Alan’s writing and adds a silly or strange twist. This is a three-part mini-episodic DLC, with each episode taking less than an hour to complete. Mr. Door hosts the series, the only live-action component of the DLC, and that’s fine.
In the episode, you play the cheery waitress working at the Oh Dear Diner. This is an action-oriented episode where you’re blowing enemies left and right. You get a rifle, a shotgun, and seemingly unlimited ammo, but that’s okay. These episodes are all about having fun over being serious and focusing on survival. You are chasing down Alan’s fictional brother in this story, and I won’t get into any more details. This episode is entertaining and doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s a fantastic way to open the DLC.
In the second episode, you play Jesse from Control. If you haven’t played Alan Wake II before, there’s a connection between the two games, though I won’t reveal how. This is more horror-focused, with a small stealth section in Coffee World. It’s entertaining, but not quite as much as the first episode. It’s pleasing to see more of the two game worlds connecting, however. There are a couple of thought-provoking puzzles that require math and may upset some people, but they really do make you think.
The third episode is a fictional superhero parody in which you play the role of Sheriff Breaker. Here, the game breaks the fourth wall, and you are talking to the game director himself, Sam Lake, who has become a bit of a celebrity lately. This is the most “Alan Wake“-type episode of time travel and dimensional shifting. It’s the most thought-provoking episode, but it does consist of a single puzzle that I found completely confusing and difficult to understand, but not as challenging as episode 2’s puzzles.
Night Springs is both a fun distraction and an intriguing dive back into the game. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, and we finally get to play an episode of the TV show. I would have preferred a slightly longer duration for each episode. Consider extending each episode to 2-3 hours, incorporating more action and shooting. What’s here is a lot of fun, but only those who really love the world and story of Alan Wake II will find interest.
Back in the mid-2000s, there were many God of War clones, and that trend continues with the 2018 reboot. Banishers is essentially a God of War clone, almost to a T, barrowing many elements such as combat, exploration, storytelling, and the upgrade system. However, there’s a hint of “Eurojank” present that I just can’t shake. While the story, setting, and lore are interesting enough (the key word is “enough”), the game never excels to the heights of the game it’s trying to become.
You play Red Mac, Raith, and Antea Duarte. Lovers who are now separated by the plane of the dead. Banishers are people who go around removing hauntings from people, places, and objects, but they can also pass judgment and execute the living for doing wrong to those who previously lived. It’s an interesting concept, but sadly, the game never goes into more detail about it. How can these people just kill the living based on what the dead say? What are the laws and rules surrounding this? The game also doesn’t go into the background or history of the Banishers. This is something that God of War did well. We need a lot of backstory if we’re going to spend 25+ hours in a game like this. The entire game is just pretty “good,” but never memorable or amazing. It always just falls below that mark. While I found the world and atmosphere of New Eden fascinating, the way the story and world are unfolded to the player are boring, mundane, or just not interesting. Reading material is pointless and doesn’t add to anything.
Let’s just start with the combat. Heavy and light attacks make up the basis of combos, but you can switch to Antea in the ghost plane, who has more powerful attacks. Her bar isn’t HP, but an energy meter. Hit decrease this as well as using your attack powers. You can refill this bar by fighting as Red in the real world, but he doesn’t have any special attacks, and this really kept me from creating a strategy or learning how to beat enemies. Red just light and heavy attacks enemies (with a heavy charge attack), and the game tells you Red does more damage to ghosts and Antea does more damage to possessed bodies, but it never really seemed to be effective. You can parry attacks, which the game heavily relies on for more damage, and Red has a gun that you get about 1/4th through the game; it’s a one-shot rifle that requires a reload. This can sometimes do a lot of damage, but the enemies are so boring and uninteresting that there’s no distinguishable feature or stat to build strategies in your head. Ghosts are pretty easy, while anything else can damage sponges. I just couldn’t combo or create a meaningful pattern for defeating enemies, and it made combat one of the least enjoyable parts of the game. It also just feels slightly clunky and sluggish.
The upgrade system feels almost as useless. You get experience for Red and Antea by completing side quests (called hauntings), which grant you additional damage for certain attacks, but I never really got to unlock any new combos or powers. Antea’s three powers are found during the story, so the upgrade tree is just boring, and I never felt powerful enough and couldn’t even use skills to become more powerful. This also bleeds over into the equipment system. Red can equip rifles, blades, outfits, and potion bottles, which increase attributes, but no matter how high they were, I always felt just too weak to really get an edge over the enemies. Antea can equip various accessories to help her attributes, but nothing felt powerful or meaningful.
This leads to the exploration and hunting gameplay loop that’s identical to God of War, but without the enjoyment. Why do I want to hunt chests and haunted objects, fast travel back, and open new paths with new powers if all this equipment feels useless and haunting cases only give me a single esence for the skill tree when it also feels pointless? They are fun at first, and the haunting cases are like mini-murder mysteries you can solve, but they also play out the same way. Some lead to small boss fights, some are just item gathering quests, and they all add to the main story choice (I won’t spoil it) for the ending, but they are all optional. There is a lot of side content here, but I gave up about halfway through because I just didn’t feel any of the rewards were worth it.
With that said, the game looks pretty good for an Unreal Engine 4 game. There is a lot of detail in the environments; they are varied, and the atmosphere is thick and heavy, but everything just teeters on not quite being enough on every front. The ability to even upgrade equipment doesn’t help make you feel like you’re growing as a player or character. I felt just as weak from the beginning of the game to the end and wound up dying quite a bit. Some side content, like the void walking dungeons, is tedious and boring, and the only redeeming value is exploring the world and picking up all these items and chests. I just wish the rewards were better.
Overall, Banishers has a lot of interesting concepts going for it, and the voice acting is good (the facial animations are very dated). I wanted to know more about this world, but the game just doesn’t give it up. The side content is questionable, the combat is too clunky, and there’s no strategy or really good combo system implemented to make it stand out from the crowd. There aren’t really any puzzles, and the story is predictable towards the end, making you feel like your choices are almost meaningless. I feel like if DONTNOD had another go, they could get a lot more right. As it stands, this feels like a “Eurojank” God of War.
The original Alan Wake is one of my favorite horror games of all time. Its gameplay may not hold up well today, but overall, the game is still solid. The atmosphere really pulled me in when the game was released, and here I am now, 13 years later, living in the PNW near where the first game was inspired. The story was full of mystery and suspense and always saw-sawed between being confusing and then suddenly making sense—always being a mystery. The story of light vs. dark and the definition of insanity play a big role in the world of Alan Wake, and that goes even further in the sequel.
Alan Wake II is pretty much an entire reboot on the surface. Taking some design questions from Remedy’s previous entries, like Quantum Break and Control, they have integrated the series into their “Remedyverse” (you can borrow that one if you want!). The story has an entirely new way of being told via live-action cutscenes and in real-time. The new playable character, Saga Anderson, is introduced as an FBI agent who is investigating cult murders in the town of Bright Falls. She gets sucked into the story of Alan as he tries to write his way out of his own madness and destroy the main antagonist from the first game, Scratch. The story continues that constant teetering of not making much sense and then wrapping around multiple times to have it all click, but I highly recommend playing the first game (there’s a remastered version out now) before playing this one, as there are many references. I also recommend playing Control first as well, as the stories are intertwined.
The game starts out so much different than the first game. Instead of a long, drawn-out, time-ccut scene of sunshine and beauty, you are tossed straight into something straight out of Silent Hill. You’re a naked, bloated man running from cultists. It’s a crazy way to start a game, and it shows the cinematic quality and effort put into this game. However, you control Saga first, and this is where the first half of the game starts. You jump between Alan and Saga, but their levels are unique on their own. Saga’s side is more action-oriented and collectible hunting. There are three main large areas in the game. Watery, Bright Falls, and Cauldron Lake. Bright Falls is a main hub town that you can walk around in and also find collectibles. These range from cult stashes, breaking open locks with a screwdriver or boltcutters (found later in the game), Alex Casey lunchboxes, and nursery rhymes. These are all fun to find, and they all reward you with different things. The lunchboxes give you manuscript scraps used to unlock weapon perks; the rhymes unlock charms; and the cult stashes have various usable items in them.
The combat itself is familiar from the original game, but it’s more refined and feels like a solid third-person shooter. You still blast the darkness from vulnerabilities to make them vulnerable to your gunfire, but it’s less frequent. Alan Wake felt like an action title and less like a survival horror due to so many enemies thrown at you at once. Like any survival horror game with guns, the best ones are locked away and require puzzle-solving skills to acquire them. Usually it’s a three-digit code, and you need to figure out the clues in the room you are in. It’s usually not super hard, and the answer is right in front of you. You just need to be observant. Weapons feel good to shoot, and while there aren’t many, they feel unique. The pistol, shotgun (sawed-off, double-barelled, and pump variety), crossbow, revolver, and hunting rifle make up the majority of your weapons, but Saga and Alan’s sides play differently even with combat.
Alan isn’t a fighter. He has much more limited ammo than Saga gets and usually only has the revolver and flare gun through most of the game. The shadows usually won’t attack you if you side-step them, but in some cases, they require you to fight. He has less health than Saga, and his levels are mostly backtracking puzzle-solving-style affairs. This leads me to talk about the Mind Place. This is essentially an interactive pause screen that would normally be a menu with flipping pages. It’s a room that loads instantly, and you advance the story here. Saga’s Mind Place is more complicated and involved. She has cases on the wall, and as you discover things, you can place evidence on said wall, and when you find everything for that chapter, the case will be solved. However, solving these cases isn’t required. You just need to place the main ones to advance the story. She also has a profiling section in which she can talk to characters in her mind. This gives her ideas when she is stuck and needs to move on further. There are also areas to listen to radio programs you found, TV shows, and manuscripts.
Alan’s Writer’s Room is similar, but you use it less often. Instead of profiling and cases to solve, Alan can switch scenes he finds through echos found throughout the levels. These are black-and-white orbs that shimmer, and you must align them with the camera to activate the scene. This is where a lot of the puzzle-solving comes in, and honestly, it is the weakest part of the game. Switching between scenes can become frustrating because you don’t know which one you need to be in to access a certain area. When you switch scenes, rooms get closed off and new ones open. This also doubles down on the light-holding feature. Alan can absorb certain bright lights that open up a new path in that room. Some areas have up to three or four lights that need to be absorbed or put back in a certain order, and it can cause frustration. I didn’t like this part of Alan’s story. You can switch between Saga and Alan at any time with portals in certain levels and play any chapter in any order. Alan’s side is mostly cinematic adventure stuff with a lot more storytelling than Saga’s. Saga has larger areas to explore (three whole large maps), and Alan is mostly confined to one small area and kept inside various buildings in a more urban setting.
Outside of the Writer’s Room scene switching and the confusing mess some of the levels can be, the game is solid with a 15-20 hour play time. There is so much content in this game that it’s hard to hate it. The visuals are state-of-the-art and push PCs and consoles to their absolute limits and beyond. On PC, Alan Wake II sports the latest ray-tracing and path-tracing tech and mesh shaders, which have been crippling the highest end of hardware. Unless you have a 4xxx series RTX card that can utilize the DLSS Frame Generation, you’re going to struggle with ray-tracing. Even with DLSS on balanced and ray-tracing set to medium (and other settings optimized through guides online), I would dip below 60FPS at 1440p. Without ray-tracing, the game runs much better, but this is one of the few games where RTX actually makes the game a different experience.
The game’s horror elements are full of haunting atmospheres and fewer jump scares. There are a few, but they were done well and got me good. The monster designs are well done, but not overdone and made to be unbelievable. The game straddles reality and fiction just right to make this seem like it could really happen. The story really does a good job of making Saga and Alan worthwhile and memorable characters and delves deep into their backstory and psyche. Very few AAA games can do this right. Alan Wake II is not just one of the best games of 2023, but of all time. This is how you can do a sequel without making it a full-on reboot or changing very little. The entire game rides the middle ground on every level, which makes it nearly perfect.
World War I was a horrific time in the world. The creation of mustard gas and the deaths of 20 million people are just a couple of things that came from that war. You play Paul von Schmidt, a German man who returned from the war. Paul and his brother Johannes are raised by their father, who is a wartime cripple. Over the course of the game, you explore Paul’s mind and how he feels and represents the events of his childhood and the trauma from the war. Sadly, most of this is only pieced together by letters found throughout the game, as the cut scenes themselves explain little and just muddle the otherwise generic feeling of the story.
The game is broken up into two gameplay styles. An adventure/walking simulator-style mansion exploration where you solve puzzles. This part of the game is rather dull and uninteresting. Many other games do house explorations better (Layers of Fear, Gone Home, What Remains of Edith Finch) as the game slowly opens the house to you, but the key is to find objects to solve puzzles and find something that triggers a dive into Paul’s mind and thoughts. Each chapter (there are three) consists of one of his family members represented as a horrific monster. You can either choose to kill them or let them live to get different endings. Most of these “boss fights” require you to flip switches and run away for the most part, but they are rather intense, so I didn’t mind them.
The second part of the game is the trenches gameplay, in which the horror part sets in. You need to run around solving the occasional puzzle while also hiding from enemies. There is no combat in this game, so you have to sneak around and find your way through the dark in various environments. The creature designs are awesome, but this is probably the most exciting part of the game. It was intense sneaking past enemies, and thankfully there’s only one small section in each chapter, but the horror elements that are actually good can be counted on one hand. There are moments in which each main monster is introduced, and these scenes are fairly creepy, and outside of weird sound effects and haunting ambience, there’s not much else here. The game does portray the gruesome horrors of the war, with bodies spread everywhere, the barbaric medical practices, and the overall brutal nature of everything people endured during that time.
With the game being as linear as it is, there isn’t a lot of room for exploration outside of finding dog tags, and this only grants an achievement. There are a few extra gameplay items you can find, such as a pickaxe to break down walls, a dynamo flashlight, a gas mask, and wire cutters to cut down barbed wire, which is actually quite annoying. The barbed wire moves and is related to the story (I won’t spoil why), and you have to cut the non-moving wire or it will grab you, and that will trigger a quick-time event. This could have been done better. To be completely honest, all of these items don’t really add anything to the game. The gas mask is used a few times to get through corridors with some gas, and it lasts a few seconds. The flashlight is annoying to use, as it only lights up for a few seconds before needing to be charged again.
The game overall isn’t very exciting. The horror elements fall flat, and the walking simulator-style gameplay is void of almost any gameplay. The story itself is convoluted and difficult to figure out if you don’t read the papers spread throughout the game. The visuals are at least good, if not necessarily unique or interesting, because of the monster designs. There are nice lighting effects, but the character models are something to be desired. The mansion areas are also a chore to play through, and it just feels like mindless wandering through rooms to find objects.
Overall, Ad Infinitum doesn’t do anything particularly well or is interesting enough to not be forgettable. There are some good horror moments, but they aren’t anything special, and the game overall lacks a cohesive story or a way to tell it. There are many games out there that are similar and do a better job of everything listed.
Minimalistic, story-driven games can be quite memorable and fantastic. The lack of gameplay requires you to have a laser focus on the story and characters, and the subtle gameplay can bring a visual element that no other medium can provide. Three Fourths Home isn’t one of these, sadly. While the visuals are striking and minimal, the story and writing have so much potential, but they are let down by a short and disappointing ending.
You play a teenage girl named Kelly who is driving home in a violent storm in rural Nebraska while talking to her family on the phone. Gameplay consists only of holding down a button to continue driving and choosing a few dialogue options. Holding down a single button for the entirety of the game is a really dumb idea. It introduces hand cramps and constantly breaks your focus on the story. You can honk your horn and turn off your lights, which is entirely pointless, and you can’t move the car at all. You can also choose to turn the radio on and off. There is no spoken dialogue in the game, but this requires you to make up voices and visuals for the game in your head. This may sound really dumb to most people, and some might argue that you should just read a book, and in this specific context, this would be a better medium for this story.
Choices in dialogue don’t seem important at first, but your response to your family plays into how they react to you on the phone. I guess multiple playthroughs could be worth it as there are a couple of different endings, but with how mundane the gameplay is, no one will want to sit through the hand cramps to make it worthwhile. I had issues with the controls, causing me to choose the wrong option as well. You need to skip through dialogue with a button to advance each line while holding down another to keep driving, and some times you wouldn’t know that a dialogue option would be coming up and you would just advance forward.
See, with minimal games like this, you need some sort of gameplay hook to keep it interesting enough. Three Fourths doesn’t do this at all. The mom, dad, and brother are all interesting characters, and you slowly learn about this family dynamic through this phone call. You learn about why you “ran away,” what kind of person the dad is, whether or not this is a broken home, etc. The dialogue is tight and interesting enough to keep you glued until the end, that is, if the hand cramps don’t send you packing first. I also wish more was going on visually. Occasionally, a background object will be brought up in the conversation, but it’s just black-and-white visuals without any type of payoff. The visuals, gameplay, and everything else are just an excuse to call this interactive story a game, and it does the bare minimum to qualify as that.
Most games like this have a story that ends in sudden tragedy to flip the entire thing on its head and stun the player, but this one doesn’t really do that either. If it did and the pay-off was incredible, all of this could be worth it, and there are plenty of games similar to this that pull that off. As it stands, Three Fourths Home is a well-written story in a terrible game with an even worse gameplay mechanic.
Simulator games that mimic mundane, everyday jobs can be surprisingly cathartic and relaxing. The zen-like repetitive tasks that give you the serotonin boost of progress over time, organization, or customization flood Steam and are eeking out onto consoles if they become popular enough. Sadly, most aren’t done very well and either have janky mechanics, a very low budget, or feel like copy and paste or an asset flip. Very few do it well, with PowerWash Simulator, Truck Simulator, Cooking Simulator, and PC Building Simulator being some of the top kings that do it right. House Flipper was one of those, and it felt janky but had so much potential. It was almost there, and I feel they got there with House Flipper 2, but there’s still tons of room for improvement.
The first thing you will notice are the much improved graphics. Better lighting, effects, higher resolution textures, and an overall better-feeling game. It feels less low-budget and more like how it really should be. There’s also a lot more variety, and the game’s new grid-based placement system completely rewrites how the game plays. Forget everything you knew from the first game. That game feels essentially like the foundation for this new vision the developers have. The game now has a story mode, which is of course unimportant and pretty much filler, but there is some voiced dialogue and you can answer phone calls. Your email map that you take jobs from is sectioned into different types of neighborhoods. Rich, suburbs, oceanside, rural, etc. Once you accept a job, the game starts very slowly. Just simple cleaning, washing windows, picking up trash, and selling items. That’s about it for a good while. The perk system still exists but feels more useful. As you do each type of job, you will be able to make it faster, better, and more efficient for much larger jobs.
Just the simple tasks of trash pickup and cleaning are much better. You eventually get spray that can turn all the dirt soapy, it’s easier to wipe up, and things go faster. Trash pickup eventually expands your pickup grid, so it goes faster. Vacuuming is better and looks nicer. Leaves, coffee beans, rice, marbles, and many other forms of dirt are new and present, so it doesn’t feel so repetitive. Stains range from paint to foot prints now as well and can be on any surface. When you start demolishing, building, painting, and surfacing, some of the most repetitive and boring tasks from the first game are more fun now. The entire game is based on a 1×1 block grid system, so these tasks let you fill out a grid on a wall or floor and fill that in more efficiently. Demolishing lets you hold the button back and fill out a grid. As you get more perks, this grid fills. Painting now lets you select a border, and you can just fill it with your brush. Eventually, your brush gets bigger, and you use less paint.
The same goes for surfacing and building. You can select borders for the building and fill in the bricks this way. Everything just goes faster, feels more satisfying, and feels less like a chore. When you buy objects from the quest list, you can place them easier thanks to this 1×1 block system. You can place any item anywhere, even stack items, as long as it fits. There are so many more items to choose from, and they look better as well. Just the effects of paint trying and demolishing walls crumbling better add to a much better overall experience. I also like how assembly is now stripped away from building and left as a mini-game. There are only a dozen objects you can assemble, and it’s time-based. These were done in your workshop and are much more detailed. They come together like IKEA furniture, where you drill holes, hammer wooden pegs, and attach every screw. This makes remodeling homes less tedious, and your assembly score gives you discounts in the store. Now you can just place radiators, tubs, showers, etc. without having to assemble every single one.
When you finish the story, you can still complete jobs, build homes from the ground up, and just have fun in sandbox mode. There isn’t a lot of story content—about 15-20 hours—but you will blow through it due to how much fun you are going to have. This is one of the best job simulator games next to PowerWash Simulator, and I can’t wait for the third game to see where the developers will go with it. My only real complaint is that the requested furniture doesn’t have the required layout, which would have been nice. You can just throw it all in the middle of the floor, and it counts as complete. This makes buying furniture pretty boring unless you just want to make these homes look nice without any type of reward. As it stands, House Flipper 2 is a night-and-day improvement over the original and is heading in the right direction.
Telltale is mostly known for licensed adventure games such as The Wolf Among Us and The Walking Dead. They shut down and started back up, and now they probably don’t have the money to license these franchises anymore. I actually prefer this. Telltale has created their first original IP in years, and it has so much potential. The biggest takeaway from this game is the usual Telltale style of storytelling and choice-making. You think you know what you’re going to choose ahead of time and how it will pan out in your head, but things always make a left turn and change on you, and you’re left speechless. They are also, sadly, known for having almost no gameplay and very dated visuals.
Gameplay is more frequent in this game, but you just control your character in a walking simulator situation, walking or gliding down long hallways. There are a couple of elementary puzzles thrown in, and that’s your lot for gameplay. It’s fine, as I go into Telltale games for the story and characters and not much else. You can use zero-G movement in some areas and move around that way. You can also optionally scan a few items here and there for collectibles, but it’s very limited and linear in scope.
The best part about the game is the atmosphere, characters, and overall story. While this game is the beginning of a larger story arc that will give us more lore and behind-the-scenes politics on the goings-on of this world, this game solely focuses on establishing Captain Drummer as a brand new protagonist, and I love her so much. She has a lot of charisma and is a dark and brooding character without being cringy and formulaic. Her voice actress does a fantastic job portraying this. The other characters are written in your typical telltale manner, which allows you to constantly hate or like a character and then suddenly doubt everything in the end. The cast is small, but the game has a fantastic pace that keeps things interesting.
You’re essentially scrappers, and there is an established order of inners: people who live inside the astroid belt and those who love outside of the astroid belt. There are pirates involved, and there is a secret treasure that everyone is fighting over. I don’t want to go too much into the story, but the game’s atmosphere is dark and haunting, but there’s no horror. The monster here is the human element and just how brutal we can be to each other in a split second. I found the ending very satisfying, and it opens up for a clear sequel that hopefully expands this entire universe that Telltale has created.
The visuals are a huge improvement over their past games. While they aren’t ground-breaking and are required to run on previous generation hardware, the stylized visuals look great, and the blacks, whites, and grays really make you feel alone and claustrophobic all the time. The voice acting is top-notch, as always, and the only thing I left with was wanting more from this series. I also wanted more gameplay, as quick-time events are incredibly dated and there are other things you can do for adventure titles other than these dated gameplay elements. More side quests, an actual gameplay loop, and more side dialogue would be nice to be able to expand upon everything. As it is, the game takes 6-7 hours to finish, but it’s incredibly enjoyable, and I couldn’t put the game down.
Kingdom Hearts has a special place in my heart. I remember when the first game came out, and it was talked about by a lot of people on the school grounds. I was in junior high when it was released, but I didn’t get it until it was a Greatest Hits release at $20. I found it hard at the time and never finished it. When the second game came out, I rented it from GameFly and actually cried at the ending. It was so memorable and engrossing for me as a teen.
Here we are, almost 15 years later, with the third installment in the mainline series. I was insanely excited and didn’t follow any previews or reviews for the game leading up to actually getting around to buying this game. I played the first area of Hercules (again?) and got to Toy Box (Toy Story!) and lost interest. Yeah, the game hasn’t really evolved all that much. My biggest problem with Kingdom Hearts III is the lack of imaginative level design and the use of mostly modern Pixar movies. The best part about a new Kingdom Hearts game is discovering what the next Disney movie will be that you get to explore. It’s like a surprise each time, and I loved that with previous entries. This was the first time I was praying it wasn’t another modern Pixar movie.
While Hercules was very cinematic, scripted, and looked great, it’s an overused Disney movie in the series. Toy Story was exciting, especially when we were in Andy’s room, but we wound up in a generic boring mall? It was such a boring level to get through, and I didn’t feel anything like the movie. We then move on to Repunzel. Why? Another issue with this game is playing each movie scene by scene around the second act. We’re stuck at a generic forest level here. After this, we get into Monsters Inc., which is actually pretty cool, but it’s a generic monster factory. Then it’s…FROZEN?! Why Frozen? We even get a literal, scene-by-scene, shot-by-shot rendition of the “Let It Go” song. If I wanted that, I would just watch the movie. A generic snow level awaits us here.
Then we go back to Pirates of the Caribbean, of all movies. I appreciate that the visuals are improved enough to give us realistic versions of this movie and not the cartoony one we got last time, but I didn’t care as the original voice cast wasn’t present again. And it’s based off of the third film for some reason. I liked the fact that you get to sail an open ship and go find crabs to upgrade your ship, but I skipped all of this. The ship steers like a hot-wheeled car, and the generic seaside town and ship battles weren’t very interesting. Then we finally arrive at Big Hero 6, which is also pretty cool, but it’s a generic large map of San Francisco, and it is incredibly boring. That’s it. No more worlds, and you are stuck in the last level for about 10 hours doing boss rushes like every other RPG has done, and this seriously needs to stop to just bloat game time.
Even if you like or dislike these Pixar movies, the fact is that the levels are incredibly boring, and each one plays out the same way. You get through several mini-bosses, fight waves of enemies, collect some stuff, and fight the movie’s main antagonist. Every world is a generic feeling with no life from the movie injected into it. The reliance on playing through scenes of these movies isn’t what I want in a Kingdom Hearts game. I want a unique experience at each level that makes me feel like I’m part of that world. Not just some character who crashed the movie in the middle of its runtime.
I can go on and on about how much I hated the uninspired level design and repetitive nature of each world, but then there’s the Gummi Ships. I hated these in the first game, and I really don’t like them here. I like that the Gummi Ship part is a large open map that you can explore freely between worlds, but there’s nothing interesting here. You fly around collecting parts, Munni, and you can find shooter waves flying around that have levels and stars attached to them. Upgrading your ship but being able to buy parts to put together blueprints is a staple of the series, but I just don’t find it interesting. A new alpha Gummi part can be attached now to help fight in battle. It’s essentially a satellite ship flying around yours. There are speed tunnels all over the place, asteroids, and various obstacles, but I just wanted to get to the next world.
Finally, there’s the combat itself. I never really cared for Kingdom Hearts‘ combat. It works, it’s fine, and it can be fast-paced, but you fight the same Heartless over and over again, and the game is heavily reliant on keyblade transformations. Actual attacking and magic have taken a back seat. I rarely touched magic, and it felt useless. I was just attacking until I got my three pips and I could transform my keyblade into a more powerful weapon and execute its finishing move. This does the most damage and is a must for bosses, or you won’t survive at all. The final act of the game pits you against around a dozen bosses, one after another, and it’s a frustrating chore. You can still use Link commands, but they aren’t that great this time around, and I felt like they hindered battle more than anything. The goal was to attack and get a few combos in, transform my keyblade, execute attractions that put you on famous Disney park rides that do damage, and just rinse and repeat. Items are useful for sure, and it’s important to keep abilities tagged, as adding combos and modifiers to combat really gives you an edge. However, this all gets so repetitive, and you just stop caring before you get to the third world.
Then there’s the story, which I haven’t even touched on yet. It makes zero sense, even to people who have played the series up until now. My main interest was in the little stories inside each world. I never cared for the overarching Kingdom Hearts story. It’s a bloated, overcomplicated mess involving Organization XIII, and Final Fantasy isn’t even a part of this story anymore. Xehanort was the X-Blade. Aqua is trapped in a world, I think, where there are multiple versions of everyone. Yeah, I don’t know. Go watch a comprehensive timeline explanation on YouTube instead. Sadly, each world is just a retelling of each movie, which I could just go watch if I wanted to. At least the visuals are really good, and everything is bright, colorful, and full of life.
The voice acting is also hit-and-miss, but mostly terrible. Haley Joel Osment as Sora again was a bad choice; he’s just not a good voice actor. Outside of some of the mainline Disney characters, the voice acting is just wooden and awkward. Most Disney films don’t retrain their original voice actors. Especially in Pirates of the Caribbean…again. What’s worse is the writing. The script feels like it was written by a grammar school student. It’s just the most basic lines, replies, and banter. It’s just enough to get through each scene. There’s a lot of nothing being said by most of these characters. Shouting each other’s names a lot, and a lot of “You will never stop us!” or “I will defeat you!” over and over again. Yawn.
So, there’s a lot I don’t like here. The lack of older Disney movies, the complete absceneness of Final Fantasy stuff, and the fact that each movie is just a scene-by-scene replay of the original movie are boring. The levels feel generic, uninspired, and repetitive, and the combat, while flashy, uses an overreliance on keyblade transformations, attraction attacks, and links and magic. Enemies repeat far too often, and the final act is nothing but a frustrating slog of a boss rush. The story is insanely and wildly confusing and unnecessarily complicated, but at least the visuals are a nice treat. If you didn’t like previous games in the series, this does nothing that will convince you to like it now.
Side note: I was incredibly disappointed by Utada Hikaru’s song with Skrillex on this one. Both Simple and Clean and Passion/Sanctuary are classics and some of Utada’s best work. This song was terrible and wasn’t a good start to the game for me.
You play as Kai. A girl is sent away to a strange village in a post-apocalyptic world to re-connect with her extended family. You spend the entire game walking around to the various dozen or so screens, collecting seeds, planting gardens, and learning more about your past and the ties between the village and your family.
I have to give credit to the developers for their tight and well-written dialogue. The characters have, well, character. For the short time you spend in the games (under 4 hours), you really get to know these people, and the dialogue is written in a way that feels organic and like you’re listening in on a conversation. Talk of relationship issues, depression, carelessness, death, suicide, and many other emotions that we face in ourselves and amongst our own families. There’s an atmosphere that’s both uncomfortable and familiar. You will plant your own life in this game and strategize relating to certain characters or hating them. It’s just so well done.
As for the rest of the game, there’s something to be desired. As you walk around the screens, you will see a hand icon over anything you can pick up. These are usually plants, and you need the seeds to plant gardens to advance the story. There are eye icons for objects that Kai will comment on and a clock icon for an interaction that will advance the story. You never really get lost. Kai’s journal gives hints on who to talk to and what area you need to be in. Using a little common sense and learning the screens and where everyone resides helps a lot. As you pick up seeds, you learn songs that help you grow the garden. Each seed grows based on its song, so it’s recommended to plant seeds of that type. You can place the seeds with an outline of the plant that will tell you if there’s enough space for it. Sing the song a few times, plant enough seeds, and your garden grows. You can then harvest the plant for what you need to advance the story.
Don’t get this confused with something akin to Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley. This isn’t a farming simulator at all. The planting and gardening are rudimentary at best and mostly uninteresting. I just threw seeds around until I filled up the meter, spammed the correct song, harvested, and off I went. I was more interested in the characters and the story. There’s a mystery behind the village that I couldn’t wait to unravel, and unfortunately, gardening got in the way. I did love the music; it’s amazing and good enough to listen to outside of the game.
The art style is well done. It’s bright and colorful, but it can be really dark when needed. The characters have unique humanoid designs that seem familiar but are still alien, and the paper cut-out look just fits so well. I just wish the story was a bit longer, as I wanted to get to know the characters more. I can’t really complain about gameplay, as you do move around constantly and patterns change and mix up, so it never really gets boring. This is a great little adventure game that can kill an evening, and you might have a new favorite OST.
2D walking simulators seem to be a whole new genre of their own, are more interesting, and tend to be better than fully 3D ones. Games like Limbo, Little Nightmares, and Inside are perfect examples of this. There is some light platforming, some puzzle solving thrown in, and maybe a little bit of stealth. While none of those had stories that blew me away, they did make up for it in atmosphere and character. Shady Part of Me sadly doesn’t accomplish any of those things. The only thing going for it is the dual-character puzzles, and that’s about it. There really isn’t even a story to speak of. Yourself, your shadow, and some disembodied voice narrate the entire game with cryptic dialogue that really is either open for translation to the player or is entirely meaningless.
This game reminds me a lot of Limbo and Lost in Shadow. You play as a little girl in a white dress who is afraid of light, and her shadow (always on the wall) is afraid of darkness. You switch between both to help each other advance. Puzzles involve pushing boxes and pulling switches, and in later levels, your shadow can defy gravity and even take over puppet bodies. Most of the puzzles have that “Aha!” moment, which can be satisfying, but there were a few that really stumped me and took a lot of time just fiddling around until something changed. Most puzzles have you manipulating objects in front of lights to make new shadows, move them, or make them grow or shrink. The real girl can’t jump, but your shadow can. This means there is light platforming in the shadow, but nothing complicated.
I did find the aspect of two characters to be a bit tedious. Some areas just have you running to the right to stop in the circle to advance to the next area. You then have to switch to the other character and run that full length again. It’s not a major problem, but it happens too frequently. I also found the rewind feature to be really handy. This prevents constant deaths and restarts. You can rewind as long as you want, so I have to applaud the developers for making this a frustrating mess. A lot of times your shadow will die or you will get caught in light, and it stops the game, but rewinding allows you to see the error you made and correct it. If you fully died every time and went back to a checkpoint, this game would be unbearably frustrating.
Overall, the visuals are great. The sketchbook look and early 20th-century aesthetics are fun, but they’re also nothing memorable. We’ve seen this kind of art style before in other games. That’s the biggest takeaway from Shady Part of Me. It does what it does fine. Nothing more, nothing less. It doesn’t leave a lasting impression like the above mentioned games. Limbo was gruesome and had a memorable atmosphere. Little Nightmares’ ghoulish monsters stood out, and Inside’s dystopian world put you on edge. You will spend around five hours in this game and mostly forget about it the next day.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Yeah, it's pretty damn awful. Notoriously one of the worst games on the PSP. A 4 was actually being generous.…