Stress from work is a real issue today. It’s quite common that in Asian cultures this can lead to suicide. Many local legends and myths revolve around overworked women who jump from buildings or hang themselves and then haunt where they work. The Boba Teashop does a great job of building atmosphere and tension in this regard. There is a time management simulator in here that’s actually quite fun, and sadly the game ends so soon. A few other PS1 style horror games of this ilk have done this, such as While We Wait Here. There isn’t much to this game. It’s a very simple game to look at, as you are only inside this single shop. The game is very dark and moody, with it constantly raining outside, and it always seems to be nighttime.
I have to commend the developer for some great scares. These aren’t just cheap jump scares or fake-outs. There’s some serious psychological horror stuff going on. Things will appear in the periphery of your view, and when you turn to look, nothing is there. You can’t make out the object, but you know something was there. There’s a lot of tension building, such as when you are told that an electrician will be working on the system and your lights will flicker. There’s constant fear that something will pop out at you or that one of those lights flickering is something else. The entire workday ends up like this.
The main gameplay loop is greeting customers and getting orders. You start out simple with just boba tea. You pick up your cup and place it under the correct vat of liquid. Eventually you can use chocolate and coffee. You can then add milk from the fridge as well as various fruit. The last station is your boba, and then you must seal the top before handing it over. In the employee room the recipes are on the whiteboard if you get confused. It’s a very simple but addictive loop of taking orders, and you also get repeat customers. Some are rude, some are nice, and some are strange. Orders are displayed on the register, and when you hand the drinks over, the customers will pay and you collect the money. A couple of other people come in who don’t order drinks, but it all adds more tension. You get more and more stressed as the days go on and start seeing things.
I don’t want to spoil the scares and story, as this is such a short game. The visuals play well with this type of game. The low-poly graphics and lack of lighting keep you glued to your screen. In between the gameplay loop of making drinks, the game never lets up. Something is always happening. The game lasts maybe an hour at most, and this feels like a proof of concept or demo for something that could be bigger. I highly encourage those who are fans of horror and PS1 style graphics to buy this and play it. You’re supporting an indie developer, and the game is really inexpensive. Normally, I don’t care for these super short indie games. They are usually fairly disappointing and don’t offer anything memorable, but things come together just right here to warrant a playthrough.
When dealing with mental health or talking about it, there can be many obstacles to overcome. How do you approach it? Do you take it head-on and use a traditional narrative experience where you watch the protagonist spiral out of control, or do you use the approach Luto took and make it an interpretive indirect narrative in which the player experiences the downfall? Luto does an impressive job showing what it can feel like to experience depression, thoughts of suicide, and mental health issues. Never has a game done a similar job since Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice.
What we need to understand is that the developers aren’t approaching in a “sensitive” way but in a way that we can just fully understand. Unless you are experiencing or have experienced any mental health issues or even some sort of trauma that can lead to this, we have no way of knowing. I particularly enjoy how the human mind deals with these things and the artistic interpretation of it. While I have experienced my own sets of trauma through my life, it’s still interesting to see what else is out there. You play as a man who is dealing with the loss and grief of family members. I don’t want to spoil the story, but it’s not the direct tale, but how you experience this interesting grief.
There are some trippy gameplay ideas here that I have yet to see. There is some direct inspiration from the P.T. demo by Hideo Kojima. The nearly sterile lighting and hyperrealistic house that feels lived in yet cold and empty at the same time. The buzzing of lights, ticking of clocks, and just your footsteps are all you hear. The silence can be deafening. There is a cheeky British narrator that talks you through the game, similar to The Stanley Parable or something straight from a Media Molecule game (LittleBigPlanet). However, something seems off with this narrator. As you walk out of your bathroom and complete your day as the narrator intends, you try to break the sequence. This leads to further sequence breaking and then to some meta-narrative ideas without spoiling anything.
Some puzzles involve solving looping hallways and corridor issues. Identifying numbers and observing objects in specific ways are key to solving puzzles. The first example has you trying to get a hammer hanging from a chandelier because you need this to pry wood off a doorway. You can keep walking downstairs only to end up back at the same staircase. You need to find four numbers to enter as a phone number to break the sequence and drop the hammer. You need to be observant and look for breaks in patterns. It’s very reminiscent of P.T. in that sense. These puzzles can be fun, but if you’re not good at finding them, some can be hard to figure out.
As the game moves on, some of the horror elements will pop up, and, while they are subtle, the excellent lighting effects help with this. The game is very surreal and haunting in the sense that nothing makes sense. It can be disorienting and go against the grain of what makes sense. This can be scary on its own rather than jump scares and creepy monsters. There are none in this game. Some scares are very subtle and only exist if you spot them, or the atmosphere alone can just be downright tense. You will expect something to jump up at you or come out of a doorway, but nothing ever does. That’s a fantastic way to create horror. Luto makes the scares seem like they are there, but it’s all in the player’s head. I don’t want to spoil the short game by explaining anything in detail. With a walkthrough, you can complete the game in 4-5 hours.
Overall, Luto is a fantastic psychological horror game. I just wish there were more puzzles and gameplay and some of the puzzles weren’t so obtuse. While I like that the story is interpretive, this is becoming a cliche in indie horror titles and can be tough to pull off with such short lengths. Luto does a better job than most, but it’s still not perfect. While I love the lighting and atmosphere, the game does look kind of generic in spots, such as the hyperrealism of the house and day-to-day objects. Things don’t really start looking much different until more of the surreal stuff starts to pop up.
Max! Max, you’re back! It’s so good to see Max Caulfield again. This time as a grown adult. Our Max is all grown up. Well, that’s what I wanted to say, but a few hours into the game, you will realize that while Max is back, everything surrounding her return isn’t. This is a very forced game that didn’t need to get made. While all of us are curious as to what happened to Max as she grew up, we didn’t want a repeat of the original game. Deck Nine nailed the feeling of the first game. While we’re not in the same time period (late 2000s), we are in modern times, but with new friends and foes. The atmosphere of Life is Strange is here. The surreal soundtrack, being able to interact with various objects and hear Max’s inner monologue, important choices, well-made characters, etc. It’s all here, but in a very basic package to tie it all up.
Here’s the thing: Double Exposure literally tries to repeat the original game and story. It feels very forced and eye-rolling towards the end and isn’t believable one bit. Cloe has been replaced with Safi. She’s a hotheaded character similar to Cloe, but she also has a soft side. She’s goofy and has a good sense of humor, but you can clearly see this is a Cloe replacement or clone. Then you have Lucas, who is a Mark clone, etc. There’s a pattern here. He’s another creepy teacher who has a secret that rocks the whole story. It’s predictable, which is a shame. Instead of putting Max in a new situation with her old powers, she somehow has new powers. The power of Double Exposure. She can now hop timelines. It’s pretty silly and less grounded than the original game. While having powers is silly anyways, the first game being so grounded made it believable rather than a hokey superhero wannabe story. Treading the same ground just feels wrong.
Thankfully, the characters are interesting, but not as memorable as the original cast. They all have character, flaws, good and bad traits, and are not super stereotyped. Gameplay-wise, nothing has really changed. I would go as far as to say there is less gameplay here than in the original game, and that game was already lacking any. The locales are also not very interesting and are constantly repeated. There are too many mundane indoor environments, such as the Turtle bar, the school, Max’s apartment, etc. There aren’t any outdoor locations with sweeping vistas or more interesting indoor areas. You will spend up to 10 hours in these same locations over and over again. Max is now an urbexer (Urban explorer) so why don’t we get to see some cool abandoned buildings like during the intro sequence? The game just jumps straight into Max trying to save the planet, so we don’t get time to be with her and her friends living normal lives for a bit. That’s what made the first game so great.
Gameplay involves switching back and forth between timelines to solve puzzles, but this is just an excuse to extend gameplay. There are set nodes that sparkle, and you can jump between the Dead and Living worlds (one of the characters in the game dies, and you are trying to save her and stop it). You can pulse your power to see objects placed in the other timeline in real time before switching to it, but it doesn’t add anything interesting. There’s of course the usual collectible hunt, but that’s about it. Choices in the game are fewer and don’t have the mega impact that they did in the original. Story-changing sequences don’t come by often. Maybe once a chapter or none in some of them.
At least the visuals are improved. The facial expressions are great, and there’s a lot of detail in everything while still looking like a Life is Strange game. The upgraded visual quality helps go a long way, but sadly this was wasted on so few areas to explore. The ending is also rushed and feels inconclusive and too predictable. When the credits rolled, I just felt like the entire game was just not necessary. It didn’t add any value to the original game. Fans should definitely play, but you do need to play the original to appreciate what is here. Max recaps the original game throughout the story, but not in detail, so a lot is missing. There are a lot of references to the original that new players won’t understand. Some scenes in the ending aren’t explained at all, but are direct references to the original game such as when Mark strapped Max into the chair. For a cheap purchase you will have a fun couple of evening with the game, but don’t expect anything groundbreaking.
Well, we finally made it to another Silent Hill release. This time it’s excellent. I will start off right away with that. After the utter disappointment of Downpour, the last mainline game in the series, everyone thought the series was dead. After the failure of resurrecting the series with the abysmally boring dungeon crawler Book of Memories for Vita and the terrible HD remaster of SH2 and SH3, it felt that Konami was done with the series. Downpour had some good elements, but it was a terrible game to play. With the huge success of the SH2 remake from Bloober Team, it feels like Konami is going full steam ahead with the series once again. For those who don’t know, the “f” moniker at the end means “forte” to contrast the “Silent” part of the title. While it’s not clear if this is a mainline title or not, as this is the first game not set in the titular town on the East Coast of the US.
SHF is set in post-World War II Japan. Hinako Shimizu is your leading lady this time around. A shy high school student who has a disturbing and dysfunctional family and ends up getting trapped in what seems to be monsters and red fungus and spider lilies taking over the town. Hinako relies on red capsules to stave off headaches. As you play through the game, Hinako is seemingly teleporting to a Shrine world, when passing out, and the real world, which is the town of Ebisugaoka. This is a small town, similar to Silent Hill itself, that’s full of lower-class citizens who rely on living off the land. The game strays far from the Western horror we have seen in the series and relies more on Eastern horror and Japanese folklore. It’s hard to get used to, but the themes and Silent Hill DNA are all here. The enemies move like mannequins; they look grotesque and horrific, the music by Akira Yamaoka is absolutely fantastic and takes the usual Silent Hill music we are used to and adds an Eastern flair during the fog world (real world). The music here is somehow darker and scarier than it’s ever been. There’s more emphasis on unease and disturbance. The soundtrack is full of out-of-tune instruments, wailing cries and hymns, and screeching string instruments, all mixed with traditional Japanese folk music. It’s a nice twist on the soundtrack while keeping it sounding familiar. Kensuke Inage composed the Shrine world pieces, and they contrast well with Akira’s music. He is mostly known for composing music for Musou and fighting games of various franchises.
With that said, Hinako controls really well, and she should. She is small and lightweight and can run around with ease. Combat is the best the series has had so far. While it’s simple, it is hard to master. You can dodge in this game, and that’s the hard part. Enemies will flash red, and for a split second you can press the heavy attack button to do a powerful attack and stun them for a perfect dodge. Hinako also has a focus meter that she can charge up, but this uses focus energy. If you get attacked while trying to charge your focus, it will take a portion of the bar away, and you need to use various items to restore this. You also need to manage a stamina meter used for sprinting, dodging, and attacking. If you run out, Hinako will run out of breath and will pause for a few seconds to recover. They took a page from the Silent Hill: Origins book, and weapons now have durability. It works much better here, as you can carry up to 3 weapons and repair them with toolkits. There’s light, medium, and heavy durability. Weapons like kitchen knives are fast, while crowbars and lead pipes are normal speed. Axes are slow and do massive damage. There are no firearms in this game. The combat is raw and visceral, and it feels like Hinako is just doing what she can to survive. She’s not a warrior. You need to manage these systems, heal, and store meters while fighting off enemies, like the series’ staple. Run. Run like hell if you can.
You can upgrade by using money from selling items at save shrines. You can exchange some healing items or find valuables hidden everywhere. You also need an Ema board to upgrade your character. You can upgrade your life, stamina, and focus meter as well as your passive ability size. You can equip up to three Omamori, which are found throughout the game. These add passive abilities like extra health, stamina, easier-to-do perfect dodges, refilling life upon death, allowing you to run a little faster, etc. This is a great way to add some depth to the combat system without it feeling like a full-fledged RPG or something more complicated than it needs to be. If you want an easier time, you are encouraged to explore and find extra keys or go where you might be scared too.
Shrine worlds have specific weapons that don’t have durability. I don’t want to spoil the story, but about halfway through, Hinako gets a very powerful weapon in the Shrine world. However, in the Fog World, she’s very vulnerable, and while enemies are easier to fight, she is weaker. In between fighting, you need to use your map like the traditional way. Blocked doors are scribbled out, open doorways and pathways have arrows, and objectives are circled. It’s a great map system and has worked well throughout the series. You won’t get lost like in older titles, and there are clear objectives. Puzzle difficulty is still here, and they become harder with more vague hints the higher you go. The puzzles are great and require full manipulation of objects and deciphering clues logically. The harder puzzles are in the Shrine world, as well as more combat. In the Fog World, you are trying to avoid combat and get to the next objective as quickly as you can.
The game’s story was written by Ryukishi07, whose pen name is famous for the When They Cry manga series. That series is known for intense drama, pain, and suffering. This clearly is translated into the story of Silent Hill f. While the series continues the tradition of needing some player interpretation, it’s a bit more structured. The series continues to deal with mental health and disturbing moments of human nature. There are some really dark scenes in this game, and as the story crescendos into madness, the player is left to interpret the goings-on more and more, which is fine by me. This is also the longest game in the series. I did a full collectible playthrough, and it took me 22 hours to finish. Even if you blasted through the game, you are still looking at a near 20 hour game. There’s a lot to see here, and the visuals are absolutely stunning. The game does use Unreal Engine 5, so there are some technical hiccups here and there, but on my playthrough they weren’t too noticeable. The game captures the essence of Silent Hill, and we can finally say that AAA survival horror is back.
Stop-motion animation is fantastic. I love it. It was made famous by The Nightmare Before Christmas and Disney, but there’s also a lot of bad stop motion. Robot Chicken was a comedy TV show that did it with a tongue-in-cheek flair. The Midnight Walk is utterly gorgeous to look at. Easily one of the most artistically stunning games released this year. It would be a disservice to call this a “Nightmare Before Christmas clone,” as it has clear inspirations with a Burton flair but also includes the studio’s own touch seen in their last game, Lost in Random. The dark is very dark. So much so that it’s suffocating, but this is intended. The Midnight Walk is a road that creatures travel down trying to reach the light. You are the “Burnt One” who befriends a little creature called Potboy, and with flame in hand, you embark on a journey full of short stories to help those trapped forever walking the midnight walk.
The game is designed with VR in mind, but you can totally enjoy this without it and still get the full experience. The first-person view is really interesting, as you can experience everything up close and in detail. The game is very linear, but I won’t fault the game too much for that. For this art style everything needs to be scripted and tailored in a way to get the most enjoyment. Every creature is hand sculpted and animated by hand. The handmade animations play at a lower frame rate than everything else around them, but it works here. These “lower framed animations” are centerpieces, but don’t overstay their welcome. There’s so much visual eye candy going on here, from incredibly disturbing scenes like The Dark popping up with just two eyes and everything else being pitch black. The effect is incredibly effective and doesn’t just look like a pair of generic eyes. The screen shakes, the eyes blink and move around, and they look menacing. They are larger than you, and you feel the darkness that these eyes represent.
There are many stealth sections in the game, but they aren’t awful. You don’t need to try too hard. There are closets you can hide in as well as other hidey-holes, but once the creature passes, you can just run to the next area. The creatures are frightening. While they still have a cartoony whimsy to them, they are still scary. There aren’t many of them in the game, but they are used sparingly without overstaying their welcome or getting boring. There are four short stories in this game that are sandwiched with a prologue and epilogue episode. The game is narrated by a gravelly British voice that is usually typical with these types of games, but it works. Outside of finding collectibles and solving simple puzzles, there’s not much gameplay, though.
You do get a single “weapon” called a Matchlock. It’s very underutilized. It holds three matches and isn’t used as a weapon. It’s used to solve puzzles similar to the Portal Gun. You can light candles from a distance or other items from a distance, but you can also hold matches by hand and do most of what the Matchlock can do that way. There are unlimited matches when you find a matchbox, which are pretty much everywhere. The fire element in general is just not used enough here, and it’s a fun gameplay element. Potboy also feels a bit underwhelming gameplay-wise. You can order him around to go through pipes, stand on switches, and light things, which also makes holding matches redundant too. There are three different ways to light things, so puzzles feel really simple and bare-bones. It’s the only weak part of the game. The whole fire thing feels like it should be expanded more.
The game is never boring, thankfully. I was entertained the entire time. Even when I felt the puzzles didn’t challenge me and there wasn’t any combat, I was entertained with great storytelling, voice acting, and pure visual eye candy that doesn’t come around very often these days. I wanted to see what was around every corner. The sense of discovery and wonder is done well in this game. The game’s pacing is also perfect. The weaker sections don’t linger too long, and you will be greeted with a new character or enemy fairly frequently. Sadly, the game is really short. You can finish this in about 4 hours, and I wanted to see more. I really hope we get more in this world and setting.
Overall, The Midnight Walk is one of the most artistically stunning games I have ever played. The dark world that never lets up is just fascinating to explore. The creature designs and the mix of stop-motion work masterfully here. The voice acting is top-notch, and Potboy is a cute and wonderful companion full of whimsy and character. I just wish the matchlock gun and the fire elements were better utilized here. With stronger puzzles and maybe some actual combat, a sequel could be even better. Don’t let that stop you from picking this game up. There’s so much here to take in visually that you won’t mind the weaker areas.
2005 was the tail end of Resident Evil clones. This period was just before the emergence of Resident Evil 4 clones. It seemed to never end. Cold Fear has an intriguing premise and a couple of neat gameplay ideas, but they are never fully explored. What we get here is a survival horror title that focuses mostly on action and has little horror to offer. I like the idea of being stuck on a ship during a storm. You feel claustrophobic, and Cold Fear did a decent job portraying this. I experienced a constant sense of urgency, needing to act quickly before the boat overturned or the zombie infection overtook me.
Of course, it’s never that simple. It’s not just a generic zombie virus. Instead, you play as a U.S. Coast Guard agent (neat idea), Tom Hansen. He’s your typical generic blonde-haired action dude with no personality who tries to be amusing but never is. He answers an S.O.S. and tries to rescue those on board. You find out there’s a species called Exocels that is infesting everyone on board. The scenario leads to zombified crew members that wield knives and can sometimes shoot. There are also regular humans, who are the Russians on board trying to kill you. It’s not a very intriguing plot or very deep. The game is only 4-5 hours long, so there’s no room for any plot development. Diaries scattered throughout the game provide the majority of the Exocel DNA exposition. There is only one other character, Anna, who is a Russian daughter of the person you’re rescuing. It’s not important, to be honest. There is a small escort section at the beginning of the game, but after that, you mostly do not see Anna again, at least not with the character you are rescuing.
With the almost neat story out of the way, the game’s main focus is combat. There are quite a few weapons in the game, such as a pistol, shotgun, grenade launcher, flamethrower, crossbow, submachine gun, and AK-47. The pistol and submachine gun have a flashlight attached to them as well as a laser sight. The AK does as well. There aren’t many really dark areas in the game, but the flashlights do come in handy in some situations. The humans and zombies are pretty boring and straightforward enemies. There’s no dodge button, but if you are grabbed, you execute a QTE to do a critical hit. Zombies will only die when their heads explode, which is a neat gameplay mechanic. You can shoot the zombie’s head off or perform a head stomp on them when they are down. If they burn up or experience electrocution, they also die.
There is a lot of environmental damage that can be done, such as shooting barrels, fire extinguishers, and valves on walls and shooting some electrical boxes to electrocute enemies in water. There were even a couple of scenes in which you extend a bridge, and if you think ahead, you can have the zombies fall off by pulling the bridge back. These were fun mechanics, but they aren’t utilized frequently. The very cramped and small rooms are difficult to maneuver and fight in. The camera switches to an over-the-shoulder perspective reminiscent of Resident Evil 4 when aiming, but it snaps back to a pulled-back third-person view and occasionally switches to fixed camera angles. It’s disorienting, and while not game-breaking, it wasn’t ideal for this much action. The later Exocel enemies are more interesting to fight, such as the Exoshade, which is invisible in shadows; there is one that’s invisible all the time, and you must watch for wet footprints, or it will be visible when passing through steam. The Exomass, resembling a bull, stands as the most formidable opponent in the game. The only way to kill it is by shooting its red club-like arm until it explodes. You need to utilize each weapon for each situation, such as the AK for long distance and everything else for close quarters, with the shotgun being the best weapon. Each of the game’s two sections (the ship and the oil rig/research facility) has two restock rooms and a limited medbay. You can’t restock forever.
Sadly, what drags the whole experience down quite a bit is that there is no map, and the labyrinthine maze-like areas will confuse you. Sure, you have objectives, but they mean nothing if you don’t even get a clue as to where to go. You will wander around aimlessly until either an event occurs or you find a sparkling object nearby. Saves are also predetermined before entering certain doors that either trigger a cutscene or just after. They aren’t spread too far apart and were fairly placed. Unfortunately, once you finish the game, there’s no reason to play again. It’s not intriguing enough to. While the game is serviceable, it suffers from frequent frame rate drops too.
Overall, Cold Fear isn’t scary, but tense. The many gameplay ideas are peppered throughout that show promise but are never fully used. Waves can inflict damage, the boat can rock you when you’re on deck, you can swing objects that can strike you, and you can use environmental hazards to combat enemies. The game either disperses these ideas excessively or utilizes them sparingly. Although the combat is decent, it suffers from a sluggish camera, and the game’s overall layout is too constrained to provide intense action. You need a guide to avoid wandering aimlessly without a map. The visuals are pretty decent too, but nothing spectacular. Everything is gray, metallic, and drab with decent lighting effects but suffers from severe frame rate issues. Cold Fear isn’t a fantastic survival horror, especially when most of the horror is missing. It’s short enough to not be offensive, and don’t expect a deep story or intriguing characters.
The idea of robots taking over humans has been an age-long discussion, but what if they were designed to help us instead, no matter the cost? That’s the idea that The Fall presents to players. You play as a pilot who has crash-landed on a planet, but the AI known as A.R.I.D. (autonomous robotic interface device) activates and uses an advanced smart suit to essentially control the pilot’s body while searching for medical attention. The pilot lands on a derelict planet run by an AI called the Caretaker, who is examining and studying ARID for unknown reasons. Excellent writing and voice acting bring the story to life, despite its short length. There is not a single wasted line of dialogue or moment. This is an incredible premise and idea that I want to see more of. The Fall is a Metroidvania-lite, but with its own identity. The genre has seen little of this type of game today, especially with the explosion of indie games being produced.
Despite its simplicity, the game boasts a surprisingly complex control layout. You can walk around in a 2D plane, but jumping and combat are limited. You must use the flashlight on your pistol or light the path ahead, as the game is very dark and is mostly underground. When you shine your light over objects, a context piece of text will appear describing it or allowing you to interact with it. The majority of the game is puzzle-based, relying on an inventory system to combine and interact with the right object. The Caretaker’s testing center is the longest section of the game. Many puzzles are actually quite fun and clever, but a few can take a weird obtuse angle and make little sense in terms of how they are solved.
Combat in The Fall is crunchy and powerful but very limited. Other androids will attempt to attack you, but their actions are very limited and occur only during scripted events. You can hide behind cover and pop out to deliver a headshot. You must switch to the laser sight for better accuracy. You can sneak up behind enemies to kill them, or you can advance on them while they take cover. The shots are impactful and crunchy. The combat doesn’t overstay its welcome and is used at the right times. Of course, you can’t use your gun for the first third of the game, as abilities need to be unlocked, such as faster fire rates, the gun itself, and other suit abilities.
The game is tedious because it has a lot of backtracking, so you’ll often go from one end of a level to the other. I understand that this is part of a Metroidvania, but you aren’t going back to a level once you are upgraded and can access new parts of a level. You often find yourself running back and forth to collect parts of a puzzle, hoping you have the correct piece, only to discover that you either don’t or that it belongs to another puzzle located elsewhere. It’s not game-breaking, but it does get old pretty quickly. Once you have read all the text and discovered every part of the level, the adventure part of the game kind of disappears, and all that’s left is the tedious process of solving puzzles and running around.
The atmosphere and graphics are fantastic even today. The game has a surreal feeling of almost transporting you to the world thanks to its great sound design and visuals. While there is a lot going on in the foreground, most of the atmospheric stuff comes from what’s happening in the background. A lot of the background stuff can give you a visual cue as to what’s going on just from one glance. You can see a massive cave and the exterior of a spaceship through the windows, among other things. The few occasions where there is spoken dialogue are excellent, and the excellent writing keeps you captivated with every word.
Overall, The Fall is a fantastic atmospheric Metroidvania-lite that features great writing and tense gameplay, including gun sections that do not overstay their welcome. ARID is a wonderful character despite being a programmed robot, and the ending of the game is well worth your time. This game was one of the few indie titles that contributed to the “indie revolution” of the early 2010s and played a significant role in establishing the Wii U eShop as a prominent platform for indie games.
I have been longing for a cozy Western RPG. I can immerse myself in the lore, characters, world, and story of these games for weeks at a time. Skyrim, Oblivion, Dragon Age, Fable. These are just a few series that have given me worlds to do this with, and these are harder to come by these days. Avowed looked promising, but after Obsidian’s disappointing The Outer Worlds, I wasn’t so sure about this one. Although it appeared to play similarly to a modernized version of Skyrim, creating a completely new world is a challenging task. It was tried with Kingdoms of Amalur and failed miserably. The game world must captivate players and resemble a distinct character in its own right. For me, gameplay can normally come second to the atmosphere because without something to be invested in, there’s nothing worth playing.
Avowed has a fantastic idea. You are Godlike. You are born in Eora, the same universe set in the Pillars of Eternity series. Specifically, you are in The Living Lands. You assume the role of an Aedyran Envoy for the empire to trek across the land and negotiate ways to have them join the empire. You also need to find a way to stop the Dreamscourge. This is a disease that is turning people into mindless “zombies,” for lack of a better term. You end up gathering four party members along the way while running around four large maps full of side quests, hidden treasures, and new Godlike powers to discover. The flow of the game plays out like most modern Western RPGs. You have a main quest, but you can go to a distant landmark and find a side quest. There are also bounty hunts for extra coin and better gear.
The combat system is similar to that in other first-person Western RPGs like Skyrim. You swing a sword or cast magic, hold down the attack button to do a powerful attack, and can block with a shield or larger weapon. What’s different here are the abilities you can acquire by leveling up and using ability points to unlock them. These can be bound 1-6 or by using a wheel as well as binding your companions’ abilities to order them to do things on the fly. The combat system has weight and can feel useful in the beginning of the game, but it clearly has its flaws and gets old after quite some time. This issue is due to combat happening constantly and enemies being damage sponges. Skyrim and Oblivion worked because combat was over fairly quickly, and it wasn’t too frequent unless you were in a small dungeon. Despite having varied ability upgrades like adding splash damage, poison, or having effects last longer, I never felt powerful enough in this game. The Godlike abilities even feel useless. Even with fully upgraded equipment, I always felt like every enemy was a sponge unless I fought opponents that were at a much lower level than me if I went back to early maps. The situation is worsened by the fact that abilities consume essence, which depletes quickly unless you have potions; however, potions are expensive and cannot be crafted unless you are a Druid. Lame.
This issue is all due to the game using equipment levels instead of player levels, which I absolutely hate in RPGs. This means no matter how many abilities you have, no matter how much you’ve dumped into attribute points, you will never be able to do any damage until your equipment level meets or exceeds the enemies in the area. This means upgrading armor and weapons, and each level has three tiers. Higher tiers and legendary equipment require rare items. The process means hunting these rare materials down either in shops or in drops from enemies or certain chests. This requires looking it up online and constantly halting story progress. You can craft weaker materials or rarer materials, but it’s still a grind. I hate these multi-tiered systems that are there just to add to the grind. You can also use food items to cook food for temporary boosts in battle. Legendary equipment can only be upgraded with specific items . My game was frequently halted because I lacked enough money to purchase a higher-tier weapon needed to progress to the next area. I then had to do things like side quests and bounty hunts and just sell random crap to grind for coins. The economy system in this game is significantly broken, which has led to the creation of many mods that better balance it. Rewards are piddly scraps even for beating large bosses.
On top of that, the equipment system itself is frustrating. Items such as rings and signets provide only minor stat boosts, while armor primarily serves to reduce damage and determine your stamina fatigue rate. You can use the same piece of armor through an entire map as long as you upgrade it. There’s not much fun in that. There are ranged weapons like flintlocks, bows, and rifles, but the reload time is very slow, and I found them useless unless you are specializing in those weapons. There are also elemental “grenades” that can be used to break barriers leading to hidden areas or damage enemies. Sure, it all works, but is this system fun and engaging? No. It felt like schoolwork, trying to balance out my build.
A lot of the open areas have enemy groups, but they never respawn. Once they are dead, that is it for the game, so this requires you to go everywhere in the game and forces you to pretty much complete every quest, which is annoying. There are fast travel points scattered throughout, and the campsites are an isolated instance where you craft and upgrade. Exiting here allows you to change the time of day and choose whether to warp back to the last spot you were in or continue on. Side quests show up as blue exclamation marks on the map, and these are fairly uninteresting. They are just there for enemy fodder and don’t add to the lore like Bethesda games do or even The Witcher. Some games use side quests to expand on lore, such as discovering a folktale in The Witcher or having individual quests explain smaller details of the lore through their missions. These side quests are usually well-crafted and feel significantly different from the main missions; however, in this case, you are merely running around killing enemies and collecting items for others, which results in a tedious dialogue session.
That leads me to the lore, world, and characters themselves. The Living Lands look lovely but aren’t anything special. It’s stuff we have seen numerous times in Western RPGs. The game features a volcanic region, dense forests, enormous mushrooms, medieval settlements, dwarves, and towering trees with intricate roots, among other elements. The game doesn’t have a particularly unique art style and looks like generic European fantasy. It’s not poor at all, just nothing special. The races in the game are the most original part. Outside of dwarves (who don’t look right, by the way), humans, and elves, there are the Orlans, who are a cat-like race, and the Aumaua, who are scaly, amphibian-like creatures. These two races were very intriguing to see, and the NPC companions are really interesting to learn about and talk to. You can get to know them more in camp via a very long dialog tree that you unlock after major story events. Kai is a smart-mouthed Aumaua, Marius is a disgruntled dwarf, Giatta is a proud wizard, and Yatzli is a sassy and frisky Orlan wizard. The other NPCs, including faction leaders, bosses, and various others, are largely forgettable. I never cared to finish out all dialogue options with most characters.
This title is also an Unreal Engine 5 game, so it’s poorly optimized. Despite the impressive visuals and intricate detail, if you don’t have a modern PC, the game will perform poorly and heavily depend on frame generation. Lowering settings won’t give you much room to work with, and like other UE5 games, it is very VRAM dependent, which heavily affects performance. Anything under 8GB is useless. However, if you can use frame generation with AI upscaling or just run at 1080p or lower, the game does smooth out and play fine.
That leads to the overall world and wraps back around to the first question. Does this give me the warm, cozy Western RPG feeling from a game that I can’t wait to get back to? No. I was eager for this game to end, and it felt increasingly prolonged as I played, primarily because I had to constantly upgrade my equipment, which required a lengthy grind for resources. I never looked forward to the next area, as every 50 feet was just another group of damage-sponge enemies. While there are plenty of enemy types, they are forgettable and fall under the same European RPG tropes, such as giant spiders, golems, generic enemies in armor, elementals, bears, etc. None of the enemies really stood out, nor did the bosses. Nothing in this game feels unique. The game simply replicates elements from other games. Even with a more refined first-person combat system, the abilities don’t add much, and you just never feel like you’re getting the edge on enemies. Finding that really cool rare weapon behind a puzzle in the game doesn’t give you an edge. It might just be a weaker unique weapon that you need to upgrade more, which requires grinding for more materials. Occasionally these are worth more in gold than in use. It’s disheartening that the unique story and premise of Avowed were squandered in such an unbalanced and generic game.
The Longest Journey is one of the best adventure titles ever created and one of my personal favorites. It’s so good that even my own mother fell in love with it, and she’s not a gamer. The world, characters, and lore that were built up in The Longest Journey were fascinating. It was well written, and the visuals, for the time, were fantastic. Gameplay-wise it suffered from the usual tropes of adventure games of the time, but Dreamfall is for a next generation of gaming with 3D visuals. The game stars a new protagonist, Zoe Castillo, who awakens in her home in Casablanca and ends up being entangled in a deep corporate conspiracy and needs to find April Ryan.
The game starts out a bit slow. Everything seems just fine, and the game needs to build up this new branch of the story with Zoe. You wake up in your room and talk to your dad, you go outside, you meet a friend at her phone store, and then you end up building towards a relationship with your ex-fling Reza, who is a secret reporter that is on to a big story to bring down the evil corporation WATIcorp, which is known for making AI and robots. April Ryan and Arcadia get involved; I don’t want to spoil how, but she is the second story branch in this game. You do end up in Arcadia for the second third of the game, running around a small town called Marcuria, going back and forth finding objects and talking to people. The last third of the game starts mixing it up, and you go back and forth between Stark (the real world) and Arcadia quite a bit. Familiar faces appear, and then the third story branch of Kian Alvane, an Apostle for a religious sect of Arcadia, sets in.
Gameplay is very minimal. Puzzles aren’t challenging and are very sparse. They consist of glyph matching against a timer and glyph spinners. They appear to have been tacked on at the last moment, a common occurrence in adventure games from this era. You can combine objects to solve puzzles, but this doesn’t happen very often. Objects are obvious and easy to come by, as there aren’t that many interactive objects in the game. Green brackets will appear over everything you can interact with, and most of them just have the character explain what it is. The first two-thirds of the game is more gameplay-heavy with a couple of stealth areas and combat. Yes, combat. It’s atrocious and shouldn’t have been put in. The animations are stiff and slow, and the controls feel like mud. There is a block button, and you can dodge, but the AI is unintelligent and just wails at you or repeats patterns. There is a light and heavy attack, but honestly you just need to mash the heavy attack and you will win. There are only a couple of fights in the game, and any others you won’t win, and you’ll essentially fail a stealth section.
The last third of the game is clearly rushed, and the game obviously wasn’t completed. This section is mostly just cutscenes and dialogue. Kian’s and April’s sections just end with no conclusion, and Zoe’s section is the only branch that feels complete in a way, with a proper cliffhanger for a sequel. I just found it odd that each chapter took nearly two hours to finish, and around chapter 7 I’m finishing them in a matter of minutes, and there are no more puzzles or gameplay. Even for what’s here, 12 hours is quite long for an adventure title. I feel this needed to be 20 to feel fully complete. Thankfully it doesn’t overstay its welcome. The writing is great, the voice acting is decent, and the world and characters are really interesting.
The visuals hold up surprisingly well even today. The large vistas look beautiful with great lighting effects. There’s a lot of detail put into everything from icicles hanging off of the bottom of bridges to detailed ornamentation in walls and stones that didn’t need to be there for a game of this era. Sadly, the PC version has terrible controller support, but this was pre-Games for Windows, so there was no universal controller standard for PC games back then. This game is still easily one of the best adventure titles ever made thanks to the fantastic lore, world-building, and writing. I couldn’t put the game down. I do recommend playing the first game, as this is a direct continuation, but the game does a good job filling you in on everything as the game goes along.
Some of the best storytelling comes from the least expected places. Nobody anticipated that DONTNOD would become a masterclass in storytelling. Square Enix’s publishing of DONTNOD was a risk, and no one anticipated such a feat from a publisher arm of such stature. I played the original back in 2014 and fell in love with its characters, atmosphere, setting, and story. The game is a supernatural tale grounded in modern times in a quiet fictional town of Arcadia Bay in the Pacific Northwest. At the time I lived in Southern California, just 60 miles north of Los Angeles. I had no idea that the place I fell in love with would become my home ten years later.
The story of Max Caulfield and Chloe Price is one of the best told in gaming. The writing is fantastic and portrays feelings and love for these two friends like no other game can. The combination of settings, sound, ambience, and choice-based storytelling creates a perfect setup that is difficult to match or surpass. Life is Strange has some of the deepest decision-making in gaming. These choices have profound repercussions in the game and feel as heavy as real-life choices you would make for yourself. Choosing between siding with an angry stepfather or joining in on the lashing could determine whether you get help when your life is in danger or not later on. The excellent thing about the choices here: You can’t tell what the outcome will be. Max makes a comment after each choice, and if you rewind and choose the other option, you’re just as clueless and worried as to whether you made the correct choice.
Max possesses supernatural powers that enable her to jump through time by focusing on photos and also rewind time. If you make a choice, you can rewind and choose again, but the outcome won’t play out here. You have to go based on pure instinct and forethought. Relationships with game characters and their feelings will bias you. Some characters may feel like you want the worst to happen to them, but is that the best choice for everyone? The game’s time-bending storytelling captivates you as you enter chapter three. Max starts visiting alternate realities, and her irresponsibility with this power comes to fruition… or does it? The cycle of rewinding makes Max’s nose bleed, and she passes out, not remembering what happens. Her irresponsible and rebellious friend, Cloe, is the polar opposite of Max’s own personality, but do you sacrifice their friendship for the better of everyone or selfishly keep your friends?
Given that the original game is already 10 years old, I will disclose some spoilers here. If you don’t want to read about them, then skip ahead. I want to delve deeper into the minor details of Life is Strange’s story and conduct a somewhat psychoanalytic analysis of it. The game’s release sparked controversy because it exposed the vulnerable side of minors. As teenagers, we all experienced awkward moments involving sexuality. There are a few scenes toward the end that show Max and the others kidnapped and tied up. Many people accused DONTNOD of being pedophiles or “creeps,” despite the lack of any explicit sexual content. Of course, we see these teenagers making out and kissing, but there’s nothing inherently sexual about it. DONTNOD’s portrayal of these teenagers, stripped down to their core and shattered with fear like animals, can truly unnerve people. I also find that the lack of explanation as to where Max got these powers is baffling. Where did they come from? Is this all imaginary? Is this part of the entire encompassing process of teenagers pretending or over-exaggerating a lot of what happens in their life? Is Max dreaming all of this? There’s a lot of interpretation left to the player, and to this day no one can explain it much.
Although the writing is engaging, it contains a significant amount of outdated slang. Slang from the 1980s and 90s is no longer relevant today, let alone in 2014. Max will employ phrases such as “Shaka Brah,” and refer to Cloe as “Totally Punk Rock,” a term that is both cringeworthy and outdated. While the voice acting is mostly good, it varies in quality, with some performances being truly bad and some exhibiting strange tones for the portrayed expressions. However, it doesn’t take away the overall theme of childhood nostalgia. And that’s what really sells me on Life is Strange. I never had the opportunity to attend private high school, live in dorms, and experience the adventures these teens have in this game. I always yearned for this experience and romanticized it. I still feel nostalgic and warm from the scenes. Just teens being real teens. Hiding in a junkyard and playing with things they aren’t supposed to. Engaging with unconventional individuals, skipping school, and so on are common practices. It seems weird, but we all had those moments or yearned for them as teens. DONTNOD brings that out in all of us.
The soundtrack is one of the best ever written for a game. Jonathan Morelli’s original music reaches deep into your heart, evoking emotions you may not have known existed. The licensed soundtrack rings with tones of nostalgia, the Dog Days of Summer, and days gone by. The soundtrack evokes memories of a simpler, more innocent era that you long to revisit. Life is Strange’s art style resonates deeply with its use of watercolor and smudges, depicting a past that is often out of focus, much like our own. We can recall the specific details, yet the distance and finer details are consistently blurred.
This is primarily a walking simulator with minimal puzzle elements. There are some rewind puzzles that allow you to get optional photos for achievements or to get better dialogue options to help you along in the story. There isn’t much gameplay here, but you aren’t coming into this for that. The remastered version of this game is quite disappointing, with only minor changes such as increased brightness and slightly improved lighting. This game was very dated when it released and is even more dated today. The lip-syncing remains unimproved, and the facial animations exhibit extreme stiffness. Additionally, the game occasionally introduces bugs, crashes, and glitches, and there is currently no update available for the PS5. The high-resolution mode runs at 30 FPS, and while that’s fine for this type of game, it’s not necessary for the hardware in the PS5.
Overall, Life is Strange Remastered may not entice returning fans, but it’s an excellent option for those who are new to the game. The game is one of the best stories ever told, with some fantastically written characters, an amazing atmosphere and setting, and some of the best music ever composed.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Yep! The fact that I forgot about this game until you made a comment proves that.