There are many games these days trying to bring back the nostalgic feeling of Nintendo 64 adventure titles, and many of them don’t quite pull it off. There’s a reason why we have moved away from collect-a-thon games such as Banjo Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64. While the worlds may be charming, the characters fun, and the visuals cute, the overall gameplay loop can feel tedious and sometimes boring. Tiny Terry tries to bring back that type of game with a large open map and things to discover but ends up feeling like a chore very early on. Unless you specifically like this type of game, then there isn’t anything here for you.
There are modern games that do these tasks well. Games like A Short Hike make the gameplay loop of collecting and finding things appealing and fun. Tiny Terry starts out by just dumping the player into the world with just a couple of objectives. This is also fine, as talking to people can also give you more objectives. The issue lies within traversing the world, the mechanics, controls, and some of the objectives being very obtuse. The overall humor of the game is fine, but nothing noteworthy attempting to emulate a specific style. Terry wants a car only to go to space. Someone built a highway to space, but no one knows why. He goes to an unemployment center where they lend him a car. It’s your job to find enough junk in the world to upgrade Terry’s turbo booster eight times to make it to space.
Objectives are mostly fetch quests. You must bring someone who has stolen a car to earn cash. That cash can be given to someone else to fulfill an objective, which in turn gives you a location on your map to dig up a trash can that has 100 junk in it. Each upgrade costs 150. However, to dig up that trash can, you need the shovel. Do you understand the direction I’m taking with this? There’s a lot of leading on with objectives. You need this object to complete this objective to obtain this amount of an item to finish another objective. The process can get tedious and frustrating. Finding a way to grind out cash to also acquire other items to allow access to different areas can feel like you aren’t accomplishing anything. You’re always fighting between not having enough cash to find more junk and vise versa. You also can’t unlock fast travel until you have upgraded your car seven times. By then, you’ve nearly completed the game.
I found that the vehicle physics are annoying. Cars get stuck effortlessly and will clip into objects, and you can’t get out of it. I found it faster to run through most of the map, but it’s laid out in a very frustrating way. To run or drive, you must follow the road loop around since there are no shortcuts. Elevators can take you higher. Going from one end of the map to another and back again to finish an objective gets very tedious. 8 hours of this is infuriating, and some people might want to quit. Sadly, the game world has nothing to offer. There are only a few key characters to interact with, no mini-games, no varied objectives, and nothing remotely enjoyable to do other than grinding cash and junk in tedious and roundabout ways.
There are a few things you can spend your cash on, like a couple of food items and silly hats, but the cash is in such short supply; why would you waste it on these things? They don’t accomplish anything. There is no health bar, no combat, and you cannot sustain any injuries. You can use the lead pipe to whack NPCs for cash or steal cars. You also have to use it as a double jump by swinging the pipe after jumping to get extra height. Why not implement a traditional double jump? I found the fundamental parts of Tiny Terry to feel frustrating and cumbersome rather than fun and engaging. It felt like the game was always fighting against me.
Overall, Tiny Terry’s fun premise and peculiar sense of humor fall short of its potential. The gameplay loop feels frustrating and tedious, the objectives constantly loop around to nowhere, and the map isn’t fun to explore. The only redeeming value is if you like this exact type of game. Early 3D adventure games can be frustrating and slightly grindy, but in the past, the worlds and characters were enjoyable and engaging. This is a very forgettable game with visuals that don’t feel like anything special. Tiny Terry doesn’t have standout features. It’s fine. Just fine.
The Dread X series is a great idea. Get a bunch of indie developers together to create some short horror experiences and put it all together in some weird hub. Each game is completely different and offers brand new experiences, but I’m starting to see that the series is running out of ideas. The main hub this time around is a kids birthday center called Outpost 3000. It’s space- and alien-themed and full of 90’s cheesy goodness. I appreciate the varied areas you can go into, and the games this time are unlocked by finding 12 different presents and bringing them back to your table. You can then choose one of twelve games to unlock with the present represented as candles on your birthday cake. When you unlock a new area in the center, you get a comic book panel.
Discovering the center is probably the most fun the game has to offer. There are some puzzles, chase sequences, and light exploration, but nothing too crazy. These areas range from a locker room, kitchen, animatronic stage, movie theater, ball pit, and many other birthday play center areas. There’s a monster that chases you through most of it in certain areas, and this doesn’t prove to be much of a challenge. The game controls like any other low-budget asset flip Unity/Unreal Engine FPS game and looks the part too. The graphics are very early 2010s or Unreal Engine 3 era feeling. Lots of shiny surfaces, baked lighting that’s too bright, bloom, etc. While it gives off a cheesy vibe, I would have liked to see this series move a bit further ahead in the tech department.
Of course, I will do mini-reviews for all twelve games. I will give each game a rating out of 5.
Ludomalica—This is a board game where you play in the first person. You are in your bedroom, and there seems to be a family member haunting the house. When you roll the dice and you land on a question mark space, the ghost will appear somewhere in the house. You must have all lights off in all rooms and all doors closed. The game has a limited duration and follows a predetermined script. Eventually the house opens up more with different floors and rooms. The entity must not capture you, or it will send you back to your room. Overall, the atmosphere is really intense, and I felt reluctant to go outside of my room and close all the doors. It gives off the memories of turning on all the lights while going to the bathroom at night as a kid. – 3.5/5
Resver – This is a first-person walking simulator that just doesn’t make any sense. Everything is presented in black and white, and as you move forward, text appears, seemingly attempting to explain a narrative. It honestly made no sense outside of having the moral idea of not doing drugs and the impact they can have on you. It seems this is some sort of drug ring thing. I honestly have no idea. The game is about 20 minutes long, and outside of the visual trip, there’s not much here. – 2/5
We Never Left – This is about a video game developer with psychosis who is inside his own text adventure game. We saw something like this in Stories Untold. The atmosphere and tension here are done really well, except I found the tape hunting to be quite tedious and annoying. The visuals are a bit headache-inducing too. These are PS1-style graphics, but with some sort of filter over them, and they just don’t look that great. I found the story to be pretty intense, and the voiced lines were a plus. 3.5/5
Interim-This is a weird one, but in some ways it’s good. The game features a real-life actor superimposed in front of it, similar to older FMV games of the mid-90s. You are an intern who seems to be on some sort of reality TV episode. It’s really odd, makes no sense, and the visuals are really weird, but not always in a good way. Sometimes it’s confusing where to go, and the game soft-locked on me a couple of times for no reason. It’s over in about 20 minutes, but what’s here is mostly entertaining. However, it doesn’t contain any frightening elements. 2.5/5
Beyond the Curtain – This is a weird walking simulator that is very repetitive and has almost no tension. You are an actor in a play and seem to have some sort of phobia of puppets. You walk around an endless backstage tunnel, and I mean seemingly endless. The scenery never changes, and all you need to do is walk around puppets holding knives so they don’t stab you. There’s a final area with some sort of worm creature, and that’s about it. The puppets are always following you, and you need to make sure you constantly look back at them to gain some distance. The game lacks scariness and is excessively drawn out, leaving no clear sense of purpose. This game is likely to rank among the weakest of its kind. 1.5/5
The Book of Blood – This is by far the best game in the package. This is a full-on stalker game set in a fairground. There is a lot of occult discovery, and you accidentally end up in one and need to get out. You have a book that you need to solve puzzles in. You need to go out and gather supplies to complete the ritual, and every so often a strange masked man will try to kill you. Both trailer doors must be locked at all times, and sometimes the power will go out and obscure the book. Next, you must locate the numbered breakers and reset them. Run around too much, and the masked man will find you. You need to sneak around and get everything turned back on. You can also pop out the two windows to see if the man is near your trailer. Once you hear him knock, you need to quickly check the locks on your doors. This game is really intense and actually quite scary at times. The book puzzles require a significant learning curve to master, but once you do, they can be quite enjoyable. 4/5
KARAO – This game is rather strange, and while one of the most surreal, it just doesn’t make sense. This is a PS1-style horror title in which you run around a linear path trying to find a way to open doors. You get a shotgun and can shoot things, and this is one of the longer games along with The Book of Blood. The path is super linear here, and you need to talk to people and listen to their abstract dialogue to also get codes to open gates and doors. The visuals are more on the interesting side, but this is another game with PS1 graphics and a weird filter on top that doesn’t seem very appealing. 2.5/5
Spirit Guardian – Probably one of my least favorite games. This is a terribly designed first-person haunted school walking simulator. The game is around 15 to 20 minutes long and has a cheesy “Nanny” haunting the school inside. You are following the instructions of a little boy. He tells you to place blocks on a table, play hide and seek, and carefully walk eggs on a spoon. Physics are terrible; the flashlight works well, but if you’re caught, your items are taken and may be in a dark locker where you can’t find them. I found the game just incredibly tedious, difficult to control, and completely uninteresting. 0.5/5
HUNSVOTTI – This is one of the oddest games in here, but also the ugliest and hardest to control. Rather than a PS1 aesthetic, this game goes for an N64 one, and boy, does this look ugly. The polygonal, poorly animated figures and stiff controls certainly bring back memories of some of the worst games on that system. You are a little boy in a Dutch festival called HUNSVOTTI. Every character is in a canned animation, and you must find flowers without bumping into anyone. The more you do, the faster the animations are, and eventually they will all come after you, and you still have to find flowers. After finding all the flowers and dropping them into the well, you become a large demon that can kill the villagers. It’s very odd and not really in a good way. 1/5
Gallerie – This game has one of the coolest concepts, 3D binaural audio, to use ASMR voice lines to add atmosphere for the player, but it just comes across as mostly annoying. While the spoken words are fine, the gibberish later is just the weird clicking and smacking that people do in the ASMR videos, and I can’t stand that. You are tasked with destroying the world, and some girl is angry, and you need to interpret what she is saying to you via a legend. There are three levels here, each more annoying than the next. You must keep away from an entity that stalks you, and when you look at it, similar to Beyond the Curtain, it stops moving for a few minutes. You need to find demon paintings and enter the QTE on screen before it attacks you. The second level is more of the same, but the third is the worst with leapfrogging of batteries that need to be charged. In the meantime, you are backtracking and running around a confusing level. The visuals are weird, but disorienting and not pleasant in the slightest. – 2/5
Vestige – This is another PS1-style game, but you are a kid who is discovering his old PS1 games, but they are haunted. Sadly, you end up playing this game, and it is just a terrible dirt racing game similar to Motocross Madness with terrible controls and physics. You walk around your house trying to advance the plot a bit. Overall, the game isn’t memorable or captivating in the slightest. The atmosphere is a bit tense, but nothing here is worthwhile. 1.5/5
Rotten Stigma – Another poorly implemented PS1-style game with Unreal Engine asset flip vibes. You play as a generic bald-headed man in a green shirt who wanders around what seems to be a recreational center. You get a pistol and a lead pipe as a weapon and have to fend off weird bipedal creatures. You just read notes from Alex to solve a couple of puzzles that aren’t challenging at all. Once you wind your way around the area, collect a few items and keys, and shoot some bad guys, you end up at the end of the story in about 20 minutes. The game is incredibly ugly, clunky, and uninteresting. There’s a bit of atmospheric tension due to the dark lighting and sounds. There’s one particular scene that I enjoyed, but nothing was expanded upon. It involves a crying body bag and a bathroom. The game is obviously inspired by Silent Hill but doesn’t even come close. 1.5/5
Average Score: 2/5
It’s clear that the collection here isn’t quality but quantity. Most of these games are just ideas for what could be larger games, but those ideas still aren’t great. Many of these games are clunky, ugly, have headache-inducing visuals, nauseating cameras, obtuse puzzles, or have atmospheres that are slightly creepy but don’t go very far. The Outpost 3000 hub is more entertaining than any of these games. Many games also have asset flip vibes, don’t have outstanding resolutions, and show up stretched out on higher resolution screens or have visual bugs. Nothing here is fantastic or stands out much. The Book of the Blood is the most solid of these games, and that’s still not saying much. I’m glad most of these games are around 20 minutes long. Any longer, and I will not finish them. Overall, Dread X Collection 5 is the weakest one I have played thus far. This doesn’t feel like a collection of quality at all. Nothing here makes me want to seek out these developers and see what they have to offer, unlike past games. I feel like this series needs to go more on the mini-game route rather than full-on games or be stricter in their quality.
Do you remember the days you were a kid and went on adventures outside? The days you would be outside from dusk to dawn playing too far away from home and weren’t quite sure you’d find your way back, but kept going anyways? That’s the feeling of adventure you get from Röki. The game is much longer than most point-and-click adventures, taking around 8 hours to complete. This allows for a better and deeper story to unfold. While the overarching story isn’t anything super special, the relationship between Tove (the girl) and Lars (her little brother) and their father is rather deep, and you can feel the tight relationship and love this family has.
The game is a more open adventure title. Rather than being completely linear, you can fast-travel between several areas to find objects and solve riddles. The game’s openness necessitates the ability to press the left stick for interactive objects to flash. Just like any adventure title, you need to find objects to advance the story, and due to the openness, some puzzles might take a couple of hours before you eventually get all the parts to solve them. This also leads to the most frustrating thing about the game. If you miss an item for a puzzle, you have to figure out where it is. As the game opens up, this can lead to tedious backtracking and flashing all the objects on the screen and running around until you figure out what you missed. Frequently, this occurred due to the game’s lack of clear instructions or tracking features. The journal is rather useless and holds a map and various optional items you can pick up as collectibles.
Tove can run by holding down a button, and she can interact with objects. Outside of this, there isn’t much to the controls. She can climb walls and ladders, but you’re mostly just interacting with things. I found some of the puzzles quite fun, intuitive, and clever. The game experiments with ideas such as controlling two characters (swapping) and using a couple of different objects to complete puzzles and unlock new areas. There are giant beasts that need to be defeated and tamed. The game is based around Norse mythology, so you will encounter many beasts from this lore.
Despite the game’s lack of voice-acting, the writing conveys the characters’ emotions. Every so often the game will cut to a long scene and then give you control back. There aren’t many cutscenes in the game, but despite the length, the game never felt tedious or boring. I wish there was less need for backtracking. Sure, fast travel is helpful, but you still have to run towards an area, climb, or enter it, and some parts of the game can be really tedious to get to. You can’t skip climbing segments. Climbing dominates some later puzzle areas, leading to frustration. I spent more time waiting for animations to finish than actually solving the puzzle.
The visuals are really nice, but this visual style is something we are seeing a lot of, and I don’t find it the most appealing. The use of paper cut-out/flat texture with solid colors is a common visual style. It works, but I would like to see something more original. The music creates a captivating atmosphere, and certain tracks evoke strong emotions during specific scenes. I found the whimsy of the beasts and monsters to be really charming, and this is where the art style worked the best. The game has a lot of whites and grays (stones) due to the entire thing being set in the winter. There’s not much variation in environments.
Overall, Röki is a surprisingly lengthy but well-built adventure title. There are a lot of puzzles and rooms, and the pacing is great. I didn’t really want to put the game down…until something tedious came up, like missing a single object for a puzzle, and I had to spend 20–30 minutes hunting it down. This happened far too frequently. This phenomenon occurred at least once with each major puzzle. If you love Norse mythology or just want a touching story about family, then this is for you.
Nobody wants to die. That’s a statement that anyone can understand. What if you had the ability to purchase a new body and continuously inject your conscience into a new one? This is the premise of Nobody Wants to Die. A detective noir game set in a dystopian New York in 2239 where flying vehicles exist, we are now in a caste system, and capitalism has won. As suspended detective James Karra, you embark on an investigation into the suspected murder of a large corpo boss. Your partner, Sarah, is in your earpiece.
There isn’t much exploration in this game, and it’s not a first-person shooter. Although the entire game takes place in first person, it remains a pure adventure title. The game masterfully constructs this dystopian future, immersing the entire experience in the art deco Americana of the 1930s. James has a lot of internal problems, and due to being on his fifth body, he has a lot of problems from his 100 years on this planet. The better shape a body is in, the more it costs. However, there’s something dark happening. The game also does a fantastic job explaining how you can recreate crime scenes and explains a person’s ichorite, which is what’s used to transfer a person into a new body.
That’s the majority of the gameplay. The crime scenes are pieced together like mysteries through the Replicator. This allows you to fast forward and rewind scenes as you piece them together. You have to walk around and find the prompts to advance the puzzle to the next piece. There are also other tools like the X-ray wand and UV lamp. You use these to see through objects and then detect fluids. You are always swapping back and forth between the two. However, the puzzles are very linear and don’t require any brain power to solve, but they are still fun. Many of the crime scenes are really interesting to solve, as you can draw your own conclusions and see what the outcome ends up being. There are three main crimes in the game, and they take quite a bit to go through. It’s a lot of fun seeing everything kind of come together and hearing Sarah and James analyze everything to come to a conclusion. When you get back to your apartment, you can put down objects that are in place for clues that you found, and you need to string everything together to come up with a final conclusion. Moreover, it’s a straightforward process.
Outside of the main crime scenes, there are a couple of moments in James’ apartment. It gives you a glimpse of how awful living conditions are in the future. Everyone shares bathrooms and the government logs everything they do. You have to see a psychologist for life after transferring to a new body for the first time. The ads, propaganda, and everything in between are done so well for how little you can explore this game. While the characters aren’t very deep or memorable, they help carry the story along enough to stay interested. I’m sorry, but the story is too short to remember. The setting and world are more interesting. The game also has dialogue choices that determine which ending you get. Some options will have locks on them, meaning you need to have changed your path prior to the current option. The way you respond to Sarah or act at a crime scene (like deciding to steal something for yourself) can get you in trouble if you’re not careful. The execution of the story is commendable, and as the story progressed, I found myself grateful for the choices I made that allowed me to navigate through certain scenes.
The visuals are rather appealing for an indie title. Lighting is great, art deco is beautiful, and vehicle and object designs are fun. The game is at least well paced, and I didn’t want to put it down. The voice acting is outstanding too, and there are just enough little twists and turns to keep you glued to the screen. There isn’t much to hate here outside of easy puzzles and lack of exploration. I honestly wouldn’t mind another game in this world and have the lore expanded upon.
Horns of Fear is a short horror adventure game with a handful of puzzles and a creepy manor to explore. You are Jim Sonrimor. You are a journalist who is grappling with a challenging relationship or marriage. You receive a call from an old woman to investigate her manor. Upon waking from drugs and pizza, you somberly visit the manor and notice something is wrong from the start.
The game has a 2D isometric art style similar to point-and-click adventures of the early 90s. Indeed, this game would be perfectly suited on a vintage gaming shelf. Your inventory is small, and the game is short enough to never fill it. You can save at computer terminals, of which there are only a few. The game is tiny and short that you can easily play the entire thing without needing to save. The puzzles are captivating and surprisingly well designed. I rarely needed a walkthrough. Most developers treat players like idiots or make puzzles too difficult, but not so much here.
Once you complete a puzzle, you will usually see a small cutscene. There isn’t any combat in this game outside of the final boss. There are a couple of quicktime events, but for the most part, the game is mostly about atmosphere and storytelling. I was surprised at how complete the story felt despite the 90-minute run time. Without giving anything away, the ending took a surprising turn and provided a highly entertaining experience. The scares themselves are more jump scares. The sound of a screeching violin accompanies a shadow moving across the screen. The cutscenes have a few gory and gruesome shots that are super cool. The death scenes are also really gory. The music itself was just okay. The music lacked originality and bore a somewhat cliched feel. The theme was reminiscent of a haunted house, rather than being unique to this particular game.
With that said, though, don’t expect anything incredibly unique or something with a lot of staying power. Horns of Fear is a decent short horror adventure and nothing more. While the puzzles are entertaining, you can’t really get lost due to the incredibly linear path you take, and there’s not really any character building. You’re mostly playing for a fun, short train ride rather than a full-on 3-day tour. While the visuals themselves aren’t particularly noteworthy, they provide just enough elements to make your play worthwhile. The trippy cutscenes, strange ending, and ease of play are enough to invite more horror fans over.
Whether you like Tarot, believe in it, don’t, or are somewhere in between, it’s an interesting topic for a game. The Cosmic Wheel’s main gameplay loop is focused around creating Tarot cards and using them to change the fate of those around you. You play as Fortuna, an exiled witch who is imprisoned for over 200 years (when the player steps in), and in the meantime the entire witching cosmos is being told through visitors that come to your window. You can sit these visitors down and converse with them as well as tell most their fortune.
The story is incredibly detailed and diverse, and I have never played a game in my life in which the choices I made during it mattered so much. So many things I did wound up deciding so many minute twists and turns in the plot, both large and small. You can create cards by choosing the background and the art itself. Every background carries a corresponding fortune. These also cost energy. There are four colors you collect after each Tarot reading, and you spend these points on creating the cards. You can collect art and backgrounds from visitors. You can customize the art on the card by dragging and dropping pieces down, flipping, rotating, scaling, etc. It’s fairly basic, but it’s enough for just Tarot cards. You can create your own unique deck this way, and it truly feels unique to you.
If you don’t like a card, you can dispel it in your cauldron to gain the points back, and when you aren’t talking to visitors or creating cards, you can study, read interactive fiction (to gain small amounts of points), or sleep until the next day. You have a main Behemoth that you summoned (which is forbidden and illegal, by the way) named Abramar, who keeps you company and is trying to help you find ways to escape. As the plot unfolds, you keep talking to people, and how you respond to them matters. Picking any answer won’t do. Make sure you think about how you talk to people. You can gain friends and allies or create new enemies. The game’s lore explains itself surprisingly well, with witches from all government factions visiting you. They visit you either as friends or as new witches seeking guidance, among many other motives. You eventually head toward a political race, and it’s up to you to either run yourself or just support friends who are running.
As each chapter unfolds, you learn more about your past, your friends’ past, and the overall cycle of the witches and their entire existence. I was surprised that the game was able to convey an entire universe of magic and explain it all in a cohesive way without mass dumping codex pages on me or subjecting me to reading insane amounts of text. Talking to people naturally teaches you the lore and universe, which you gradually piece together in your mind. The storytelling and writing are phenomenal. These are some of the best storytelling and writing I’ve ever encountered in a video game. To truly show you an entire universe of lore from the confines of a single home isn’t an effortless task. There isn’t any exploration here. The entire game confines you to this single home, interspersed with sporadic cutscenes depicting your life on Earth in the past.
Having said that, every decision you make, whether it’s a dialogue or deciding whether to read someone’s fortune, has a significant impact in the future. There were choices I made in chapter one that I regretted five chapters down the road and didn’t realize it would have mattered. This is a game that requires multiple playthroughs to feel like you can truly master the choice-based system; however, I really wish there were more locales. While the dialogue is a constant stream of entertainment and you always feel like things are moving along, I wanted to see more of this world. In other worlds, the witches homes and see more of their past. The developers did a fantastic job of keeping you entertained in a single area for 10 hours.
With that said, the pixel art is fantastic, the characters have a lot of personality in their outfits and designs, and when the game ended, I had real attachments to these characters. I wanted more from them, and I didn’t forget about them by the next day. The Cosmic Wheel is a special type of game that can balance excellent storytelling, keep it well paced, and confine the players to a single playfield while making every choice matter. Games like this don’t come around often. Give this game a try if you enjoy story-based games.
I absolutely love how the human mind works. It is fascinating how the human mind can break, repair itself, and affect the body and psyche in ways we still don’t fully understand. The Town of Light explores these ideas with a real-life case. The game is set in a hospital in Tuscany, Italy, called the Ospedale Psichiatrico di Volterra. You play as a woman named Renee who seems to be coming back to this hospital and reliving her experience here. The game’s unsettling ambient audio and flashbacks of dark and disturbing sketches are fantastic to experience.
Sadly, that’s the only enjoyable part of the game. The entire game has an incredibly slow pace and the usual obscure and abstract way of finding your way around and figuring out what to do. There are way too many doors to open, and there are too many spaces to explore with nothing in them. This hospital is two stories and quite large. With the slow walking pace, I just wanted to experience the story and move on. You don’t know you’re heading in the right direction until Renee continues narrating the story or a flashback happens. These flashbacks are either pencil sketches or full-on cutscenes. If you press the back button, some chapters will have Renee tell you where to go; however, everything is in Italian, so unless you pull up a translator or can kind of figure out prefixes and suffixes of words, you might get lost based on the signs.
There are eight diary pages to collect and find. These are highlighted notebooks in certain rooms, and I suggest getting them all. The notebook is an insightful dive into the mind of those that are mentally ill and have various psychological diseases. The sketches are haunting and beautifully done. The best part of the game is the narrations of the various hospital records you must find to advance the story. The entire tale of Renee and her fellow patients is fascinating, haunting, and quite disturbing. It also shows how awful the healthcare, especially mental healthcare, was in the 40s and 50s in not just Europe, but all over the world. I work as a nurse myself in a hospital, and it’s insane to know that our current modern way of doing healthcare (humanely) is very recent. Like the last 25 years, recent.
I also have to give credit to the developers for accurately portraying a decaying asylum. It looks and sounds just like you would find one in real life. I highly recommend watching The Proper People on YouTube, who are the best urban explorers out there. They have visited asylums in Italy, and the building is very reminiscent of how they stand today. The peeling paint, depressing color scheme, abandoned, rusting bed and wheelchairs, and old and mysterious medical equipment that look like torture devices (some were). Despite all of this, however, the game is very boring and ugly to look at. Even for 2016, the game is teetering on the border of asset-flippy territory. It just looks so generic and low-budget despite some decent lighting effects.
The voice acting is very well done, and the overall picture you walk away with is the narrative of mental health in general and how people are taken advantage of back in the day. The game also explores how orderlies raped and molested the women and lied and were believed. The doctors literally got away with murder, and families were lied to and betrayed without ever knowing it. Thankfully, this is all in the past, but the hundreds of thousands of victims who died and suffered under the guise of humane healthcare is a sad story and something worth discussing even today.
I personally love cyberpunk settings. I particularly enjoy cyberpunk settings that delve into the mental states of individuals with cybernetics and explore the workings of such a world. Psychroma explores the idea of secret human experimentation and how it can affect and break the human psyche. The overall story itself is pretty good, but getting there feels like a chore. The story is broken up quite a bit and feels confusing to piece together through most of the game. A lot of backstory is told through computer logs that you must find hidden throughout the house. You play as a cyborg/human experiment named Haze. The atmosphere is quite unsettling. Outside, acid rain falls down from the sky, eating away at the corrugated steel walls and rebar. The mystery of the house and the haunting past is what you’re uncovering.
This is a side-scroller adventure title, so there’s no combat here. You have a limited inventory system and must interact with objects until things happen, hidden passages open, and new doors unlock so you can get that next item to advance through the story again. This is sadly very obtuse and obscure. Many times I ran around all seven floors and clicked on everything only to discover I had to use an altar to go back in the past and unlock something new. Usually info like a passcode you need for a new door. There are three altars in the game, and each one has a part of the house locked off and has isolated memories. You must find cards for housemates and determine their past and role in the experiments.
I don’t want to dwell too much on the story since that will spoil the game, but the fullscreen stills and artwork are fantastically drawn. The haunting horror and torture of the children here and various subjects is gruesome. There’s quite a bit of gore here, but what fascinates me is cyborg gore and how they work medically. I will only say that the premise of the game is that there’s something sinister going on in the house, and a member of it might be a creep. Haze gets suspicious early on, but who it is and why is what you need to discover. There are a couple of plot twists, and the story is good once you can piece it together and make sense of it. I wanted to know a bit more about the character’s past, but the game is only 2-3 hours long, so there’s not a lot of time for character building.
I honestly just didn’t like the aimless wandering, and the objective in the menu screen doesn’t help at all. I was able to figure out a good portion of the game by myself, but I got to a few spots where I felt completely stuck, and the constant backtracking and running around room after room trying to find that one spot I missed drove me nuts. My strategy of turning on the lights in rooms I’d been in didn’t help if I missed an object or didn’t interact with it correctly. If the game had a map system with a flashing blip or something to indicate your floor, it would have been more fun.
As it stands, Psychroma does a great job giving up a disturbing cyberpunk mystery of hospitalization, experimentation, and creepy family values. The game dives into gender identity a bit (that’s going to piss some snowflakes off) and self-discovery. I felt the overall story was pretty good, the artwork was fantastic, and the atmosphere was quite haunting and depressing, but the actual gameplay held everything back some. The constant backtracking and item hunting will put a lot of players off.
The idea of DLC for Mortal Kombat was an exciting prospect when it started with Mortal Kombat (2011). You paid $5 for a new character, and this felt fine. Mortal Kombat X introduced the character pass system, which was also well liked. You paid $20 for four new characters that were spread out over a few months. Mortal Kombat 11 introduced a terrible monetization feature that required too much grinding for unlockables and customization items. This trend sadly got worse with Mortal Kombat 1, with entire outfits and sets being stuck behind a paywall. One of my favorite features of any MK game was the alternate outfits, and being able to customize them was a dream come true, but Neatherrealm went the evil route and locked most of it away.
The same appears to be the case for single-player content. While I don’t mind paying a few dollars for more of the fantastic story mode and more characters, make sure to make it worthwhile. The Aftermath expansion for MK11 was awesome and was a great ending to that story. This epilogue has a lot of problems with it, mostly being the terribly written dialogue. Everyone is angry, growly, and so much “GRRR!!!” in their voice that it is laughable. Everyone seems to be delivering one-liners rather than cohesive dialogue. Trying to throw in bits of story exposition into single lines of dialogue is so stupid and elementary. The main campaign had pretty good writing with some characters delivering full speeches and emotional depth. This just feels like a 5th grader reading a bad comic out loud. The entire Khaos realm invading the current timeline is a cool concept, and Titan Havik makes for a great villain, but it’s just so badly written, and the fights are monotonous and boring. You get four more chapters, but each fight is just a recycled and uninteresting Khaos version of other characters. These seem to have some sort of Mad Max vibe to them, but it just looks like a group of terribly dressed punk rock fans.
Let’s talk about some truly awful characters. Sektor and Cyrax seriously suck. Not because they are gender-swapped. Oh no, no, no. They are no longer cyborgs, which means their uniqueness is gone. Netherrealm could have made these female cyborgs, and it would have been awesome still. Even if these were human males, they both would have been lame. I don’t understand the push to humanize Cyrax and Sektor lately. This means their cool moves and deadliness feel off. We don’t need them to have in-depth dialogue and feelings. They are killing machines and reminded me a lot of the Predator. Because these are lame exo-suits, you no longer get the cool gadgets like the Cyrax’s chest blade or net, and Sektor’s missiles just don’t look cool. The missile launcher is a giant, oversized shoulder pack that just doesn’t look right. The characters are also poorly written and feel generic, so there was no saving them there either.
Then that brings us to the DLC characters, which at this time of writing, T-1000 and Conan are not available yet. Ghostface is one of three guest characters, and he looks great with these flowing robes, having great physics effects, and the goofiness from the series as well is fine. I don’t enjoy his power moves, which just have him use various knife moves. His fatality is funny, so there’s that, but his animality is weird. Noob Saibot is the only character here that I enjoyed playing. He looks cool, and his backstory actually makes sense in the epilogue. Noob Saibot is the only saving grace for the entire package, but it still doesn’t justify the price tag.
And honestly, these guest characters are getting old. It was cool back in MK (2011) with Freddy Krueger and Alien, but it’s becoming too much. Spend the money on the licensing to bring back characters people love or create new ones. There are also no Kameo characters this time around either, which is a real shock. We could have at least gotten a few more of those. That also doesn’t help justify the price tag. $40 for a 2-hour, terribly written epilogue and three new characters. At launch, Ghostface was not available at all. The only redeeming part of the game at launch was Noob Saibot. What is Netherrealm Studios thinking? They aren’t.
And that brings me to the fact that this is my favorite game series of all time, and it’s becoming live-service garbage. The entire series needs to take a few years off, reboot, and come back with what fans loved. More content, less grinding, and more unique characters with fewer guest ones. As it stands, Khaos Reigns is worth maybe a $10-15 purchase on sale, but that’s it.
When you think of Tomb Raider, Uncharted, or most treasure hunters, you think of Indiana Jones. Harrison Ford’s iconic character is considered the grandfather of all video-game spelunkers. It’s only puzzling when you realize nearly every Indiana Jones game was mediocre to terrible at best, and none got the fancy high-budget treatment that his copycats did. Thanks to MachineGames, who are masterclasses; with their pedigree being in the recent Wolfenstein reboots, there’s no one else more qualified for a WWII-set adventure title in the first person.
The Great Circle focuses on major monument sites like the Sphinx and Machu Picchu that hold a stone that, when combined with the rest, can allow instantaneous travel. This seems a bit far-fetched for a series so grounded in reality, but MachineGames pulled it off. The game starts out very serious and realistic in tone. You get to play the opening sequence based on one of the scenes from an Indy movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark. This is your basic tutorial on how to play the game and what to expect gameplay-wise. This platforming and climbing is mostly played in first person, but it’s used sparingly and works well for the character. The titular action hero is also voiced and acted by Troy Baker, of Joel from The Last of Us fame, and you would swear Indy’s voice is actually Ford’s or some sort of AI. He does a fantastic job getting all of Ford’s mannerisms and quips just right. MachineGames, in turn, did a stand-up job with his facial animations and expressions. The digital form embodies the essence of Indy.
I greatly appreciate the gameplay loop here, as it breaks up quite a bit and never feels stale. The first two “maps” of the game are large and open and give you side quests on top of the main adventure. You can ignore these, but they provide you with Adventure Points, which you can use to unlock abilities from the Travel Books you acquire. They also hold a lot of fun adventuring, great scripted events, and puzzles. Running around the map can unlock fast travel points, but don’t worry. These maps are significantly smaller than those found in games like Grand Theft Auto or Assassin’s Creed. You can easily run from one side to the other in a couple of minutes. The challenge here is that the Nazis have camps and barricades set up all over the maps. As long as you maintain your disguise, you can access some restricted areas and avoid others. Usually the disguise is similar to the local flavor of the working class. Indy will auto-equip disguises as needed, such as his iconic leather jacket, hat, and trousers, when you get to a tomb. You can easily get away with a lot, and thankfully the enemy AI can’t detect you from miles away. The yellow alert symbol above their heads is fairly generous and gives players plenty of time to hide and move out of the way.
Most restricted areas are fairly large and open, and your objective has multiple ways of entry. Either go in bashing everyone down or shoot your way through, but realize that some early areas don’t really have guns, and you will run out of bullets quickly. Sometimes it’s better to not be seen, as you can be greatly outnumbered. The main combat mechanic here is melee weapons of everyday use that you can pick up, such as brooms, tire irons, bottles, brushes, batons, frying pans, or anything else you fancy. These have degradation bars and can only be used a few times. Sneaking up behind an enemy and whacking them will get an instant knockout. Guns can also be turned around and used as melee weapons if you want to go a more pacifist route.
If you break your main revolver, you can use repair kits, but bullets are very rare. It’s not recommended to go in guns blazing until later levels when you can pick up a shotgun, sten gun, or other pistols. These also have a single clip, and then you have to discard the weapon. You also can’t carry any weapons up ladders. If you climb out of an area, the weapon stays behind. While you do at least get your revolver at all times as a backup, I rarely used guns. I must commend MachineGames for effectively dissuading players from using guns, despite their potential convenience. I always searched for a melee weapon and sometimes avoided combat in entire areas thanks to the many ways to get to an objective.
I did find navigating the areas a bit annoying, as the menu and inventory system are kind of a mess. All of Indy’s notes are in a notebook, and you hold this in real-time; the navigation icons only appear when the book is out. I had to run around with a book in my hand to see my player icon move in real time on the map. I would have liked an optional compass on the HUD. I also found flipping around to notes for solving puzzles to be a nuisance. The overall design of the menu system is subpar, resulting in a cumbersome experience. Some optional puzzles require you to snap photos for hints, and these documents and photos need to be referenced a lot, so flipping through multiple pages each time is a chore.
Adventuring itself feels grounded and used sparingly, so it feels like a real Indy adventure. You use your whip to pull things down, swing across gaps, and disarm enemies in combat. The whip is slow, and you can’t just run full tilt down a hallway and expect Indy to whip beams and fly across the levels Prince of Persia style. You have to stop and aim at the beam; Indy then whips it, and then you swing across, but Indy’s speed isn’t that of a superhuman adventurer. It feels real and believable. Indy doesn’t climb up his whip against walls quickly either. There’s a weight to his movements ; he’s struggling just a bit and always on the brink of exhaustion. To be honest, it’s a refreshing shift in pace. My favorite parts of the game are the final tombs you explore before the final bosses, as they are full of fun puzzles and scripted events. MachineGames broke up the game by adding three heavily scripted linear levels after the first two open maps. It’s so well paced, and I couldn’t put the game down.
The RPG system seemed a bit forced and unnecessary to me. The Adventure Points rack up, and you will end up with more than you need, but buying more books requires medicine bottles, which must be hunted and searched for in the level. You can use your camera to snap photos when an icon appears for some quick Adventure Points. Then you have coins, which you mostly use to buy the three main gadgets you use throughout the entire game. These gadgets include a camera, a lighter, and a re-breather. These are quite expensive and will require you to go finish side missions and scrounge for money in chests and on shelves. Travel books help you gain stamina, health, and damage while knocking out enemies faster. All three currencies are underutilized. You can also eat pastries to increase your “armor,” use bandages to heal, and eat fruit to increase your stamina “armor,” which just allows your stamina to reduce at a slower rate. Stamina is vital to combat, as fisticuffs is so heavily relied upon.
The game itself looks absolutely gorgeous. It is undeniably one of the most visually stunning games to date. The game boasts an extensive range of diverse locales, including a desert, dense jungle, the Vatican, a college, and a snow level. The game is constantly changing things up, and it just never feels boring. The story, while elementary, is captivating enough to keep me going, but the characters feel like they almost stand out but still feel a bit too cliché. The main antagonist, Dr. Voss, has a wonderful personality that you really despise, but there’s something about him that makes him forgettable, as well as your female companion Gina. The overall adventure itself is memorable, however, and I had a blast with the 20 hours I put into this game. I don’t feel the urge to find all the hidden collectibles, as this part of the game felt like a chore. I preferred the scripted events that made me feel like Indy rather than sneaking around collecting things like a Thief game. Overall, I believe this is the finest Indiana Jonesgame ever created, and I look forward to future releases.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Yeah, it's pretty damn awful. Notoriously one of the worst games on the PSP. A 4 was actually being generous.…