The original Alan Wake DLC wasn’t anything special. It felt forced, with more questions than answers. I was hoping the original game would let us play episodes of Night Springs. This is a fictional TV show that plays on TVs in the game and is reminiscent of The Twilight Zone. Night Springs takes Alan’s writing and adds a silly or strange twist. This is a three-part mini-episodic DLC, with each episode taking less than an hour to complete. Mr. Door hosts the series, the only live-action component of the DLC, and that’s fine.
In the episode, you play the cheery waitress working at the Oh Dear Diner. This is an action-oriented episode where you’re blowing enemies left and right. You get a rifle, a shotgun, and seemingly unlimited ammo, but that’s okay. These episodes are all about having fun over being serious and focusing on survival. You are chasing down Alan’s fictional brother in this story, and I won’t get into any more details. This episode is entertaining and doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s a fantastic way to open the DLC.
In the second episode, you play Jesse from Control. If you haven’t played Alan Wake II before, there’s a connection between the two games, though I won’t reveal how. This is more horror-focused, with a small stealth section in Coffee World. It’s entertaining, but not quite as much as the first episode. It’s pleasing to see more of the two game worlds connecting, however. There are a couple of thought-provoking puzzles that require math and may upset some people, but they really do make you think.
The third episode is a fictional superhero parody in which you play the role of Sheriff Breaker. Here, the game breaks the fourth wall, and you are talking to the game director himself, Sam Lake, who has become a bit of a celebrity lately. This is the most “Alan Wake“-type episode of time travel and dimensional shifting. It’s the most thought-provoking episode, but it does consist of a single puzzle that I found completely confusing and difficult to understand, but not as challenging as episode 2’s puzzles.
Night Springs is both a fun distraction and an intriguing dive back into the game. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, and we finally get to play an episode of the TV show. I would have preferred a slightly longer duration for each episode. Consider extending each episode to 2-3 hours, incorporating more action and shooting. What’s here is a lot of fun, but only those who really love the world and story of Alan Wake II will find interest.
Back in the mid-2000s, there were many God of War clones, and that trend continues with the 2018 reboot. Banishers is essentially a God of War clone, almost to a T, barrowing many elements such as combat, exploration, storytelling, and the upgrade system. However, there’s a hint of “Eurojank” present that I just can’t shake. While the story, setting, and lore are interesting enough (the key word is “enough”), the game never excels to the heights of the game it’s trying to become.
You play Red Mac, Raith, and Antea Duarte. Lovers who are now separated by the plane of the dead. Banishers are people who go around removing hauntings from people, places, and objects, but they can also pass judgment and execute the living for doing wrong to those who previously lived. It’s an interesting concept, but sadly, the game never goes into more detail about it. How can these people just kill the living based on what the dead say? What are the laws and rules surrounding this? The game also doesn’t go into the background or history of the Banishers. This is something that God of War did well. We need a lot of backstory if we’re going to spend 25+ hours in a game like this. The entire game is just pretty “good,” but never memorable or amazing. It always just falls below that mark. While I found the world and atmosphere of New Eden fascinating, the way the story and world are unfolded to the player are boring, mundane, or just not interesting. Reading material is pointless and doesn’t add to anything.
Let’s just start with the combat. Heavy and light attacks make up the basis of combos, but you can switch to Antea in the ghost plane, who has more powerful attacks. Her bar isn’t HP, but an energy meter. Hit decrease this as well as using your attack powers. You can refill this bar by fighting as Red in the real world, but he doesn’t have any special attacks, and this really kept me from creating a strategy or learning how to beat enemies. Red just light and heavy attacks enemies (with a heavy charge attack), and the game tells you Red does more damage to ghosts and Antea does more damage to possessed bodies, but it never really seemed to be effective. You can parry attacks, which the game heavily relies on for more damage, and Red has a gun that you get about 1/4th through the game; it’s a one-shot rifle that requires a reload. This can sometimes do a lot of damage, but the enemies are so boring and uninteresting that there’s no distinguishable feature or stat to build strategies in your head. Ghosts are pretty easy, while anything else can damage sponges. I just couldn’t combo or create a meaningful pattern for defeating enemies, and it made combat one of the least enjoyable parts of the game. It also just feels slightly clunky and sluggish.
The upgrade system feels almost as useless. You get experience for Red and Antea by completing side quests (called hauntings), which grant you additional damage for certain attacks, but I never really got to unlock any new combos or powers. Antea’s three powers are found during the story, so the upgrade tree is just boring, and I never felt powerful enough and couldn’t even use skills to become more powerful. This also bleeds over into the equipment system. Red can equip rifles, blades, outfits, and potion bottles, which increase attributes, but no matter how high they were, I always felt just too weak to really get an edge over the enemies. Antea can equip various accessories to help her attributes, but nothing felt powerful or meaningful.
This leads to the exploration and hunting gameplay loop that’s identical to God of War, but without the enjoyment. Why do I want to hunt chests and haunted objects, fast travel back, and open new paths with new powers if all this equipment feels useless and haunting cases only give me a single esence for the skill tree when it also feels pointless? They are fun at first, and the haunting cases are like mini-murder mysteries you can solve, but they also play out the same way. Some lead to small boss fights, some are just item gathering quests, and they all add to the main story choice (I won’t spoil it) for the ending, but they are all optional. There is a lot of side content here, but I gave up about halfway through because I just didn’t feel any of the rewards were worth it.
With that said, the game looks pretty good for an Unreal Engine 4 game. There is a lot of detail in the environments; they are varied, and the atmosphere is thick and heavy, but everything just teeters on not quite being enough on every front. The ability to even upgrade equipment doesn’t help make you feel like you’re growing as a player or character. I felt just as weak from the beginning of the game to the end and wound up dying quite a bit. Some side content, like the void walking dungeons, is tedious and boring, and the only redeeming value is exploring the world and picking up all these items and chests. I just wish the rewards were better.
Overall, Banishers has a lot of interesting concepts going for it, and the voice acting is good (the facial animations are very dated). I wanted to know more about this world, but the game just doesn’t give it up. The side content is questionable, the combat is too clunky, and there’s no strategy or really good combo system implemented to make it stand out from the crowd. There aren’t really any puzzles, and the story is predictable towards the end, making you feel like your choices are almost meaningless. I feel like if DONTNOD had another go, they could get a lot more right. As it stands, this feels like a “Eurojank” God of War.
Final Fantasy VII is one of the most influential video game and pop culture icons of all time. It was revolutionary in its day in storytelling, graphics, and scope. I never got around to playing the original PS1 game. When the game came out, I just wasn’t into JRPGs and would never have had the patience to finish the game or even remotely understand the story. I was 7 at the time. Fast forward nearly three decades, and out comes the remake. The Final Fantasy VII projects have been in the making for nearly two decades. I remember the Advent Children being released. I rented it and watched it with my parents, and I had no idea what was going on. There was a mobile game exclusive to Japan at the time, and Crisis Core had just been released. I also had no idea what was going on in that game. I couldn’t appreciate these FF7 projects as I hadn’t played the original title.
That has all changed. Square Enix did a great job bringing the game up to par with modern audiences and video game standards. Not only is the story well told and easy to follow, but it’s still complex and full of interesting and lovable characters. While this game is only what the first disc from the original offered, there are 30+ hours of content here to explore. While the game isn’t perfect, there is more to love than to hate, and I was surprised at how great this game was. I didn’t want to put it down. From the well-done English voice-acting (which was a shocker) to the well-paced and fast-moving story, the game never got stale (at least during the story moments).
The basic structure of this game is very linear. This is a dated design choice that transferred over, but some think this game has been in development since the tech demo for the PS3 reveal was shown in 2006. If that were the case, then this linear design would have been considered mostly modern at the time. There are large towns to explore, but these still have linear paths, and the story mode is a single path you follow, and there’s no way to branch off. This is both fine for a scripted story but also feels cramped in some aspects. Despite how large Midgar feels, with sweeping vistas and massive backdrops, you can explore very little of it. There’s a large sense of scale, but what you can explore just feels so claustrophobic in comparison. Many thought this would be an open-world game, but to follow the story the way Square Enix’s wants, that wouldn’t be possible, and I can see why they chose this path.
Exploring the game (and even the menu system) is similar to most modern Final Fantasy games. You run around towards a goal, fight bosses, run into enemies, do some mini-games, complete side quests, and try to get the best accessories, armor, and weapons in the game. This is all slowly introduced to you, but let’s start with the combat, as that’s the bulk of the game. Combat is not turn-based, but you can pause the action to give commands. The controls are intuitively designed to allow this to be done with minimal effort. You have regular attacks, a special attack, a block, and a dodge button. When enemies have red exclamations over their heads with the attack name, you know it can’t be blocked but must be dodged. Cloud’s alternate special attack is actually a stance called Punisher Mode, and while you block him, he will auto-parry incoming attacks. This comes in handy all the time.
You can issue commands, such as using ababilities. These are obtained by changing weapons. Materia can be equipped to give you commands that use MP. Things like magic, offense, defense, and even passive Materia can be slotted. Different weapons and equipment determine your slot count. It’s important that you learn this system well and balance your team. You can only have three active party members at a time, but you never change your party. It’s all based on the story. You will go through multiple chapters with a missing party member, but you can still upgrade and equip them all the time, even when they aren’t with you. Powering up weapons is also a must. Each weapon has strengths and weaknesses. Some focus on sheer power, some on magic, and some on defensive skills. You acquire SP through combat and can use it across all weapons. Each weapon gets the same pool of SP separately. If you have 90 SP, you can use that separately on each weapon, which is really nice. As you level up, you unlock new SP pools.
Combat is fast-paced, fun, and exciting. Each character can be controlled by the player in combat only. During exploration, you’re mostly stuck as Cloud or another character, as the story deems fit. Cloud is an all-rounder; Aerith mostly focuses on magic and distance combat; Tifa is a fast-paced melee fighter; and Barret uses a mid- to long-range gun, which is great for aerial enemies. He also has a ton of HP and defensive points. You can issue commands to other characters with the triggers that pause combat. You all have two AP gauges that fill up slowly over time or quicker as you do damage. These are needed to even use items in combat. These guides are the center of your strategy because, without them, you will die. You have limit breaks, which really can only be filled during longer battles (mostly bosses) and summons that deal massive damage, but the battle needs to be long enough to fill these guages.
Summons are mostly acquired optically through the VR training. You only get two during the story mode automatically. These are the keys to strategizing battles and winning as quickly as possible. I found the combat rarely frustrating. Only during long boss battles with multiple phases did I find it annoying that these cut-scenes were not skippable. You need to watch them all over again if you die. This didn’t become an issue until towards the end of the game. You can run away from battle by running away and fleeing, and thankfully enemies regenerate until you leave the entire area and come back. The boss battles are all unique and imaginative, and no one is the same. The smaller enemies are also unique and different, and they require you to learn their attacks and know what is weak against what type of attack. There is a lot more strategy in the combat system than a simple hack-and-slash setup.
While combat is the bulk of the game, you will spend a lot of time outside of combat. There are a few simple puzzles inside some dungeons, but the hub areas or towns you explore allow you to rest, buy items, materia, armor, and weapons, and that’s about it. The side quests and mini-games are some of the weakest parts of this game. While not every side- question is bad, Some offer challenging boss fights and good rewards; some just don’t offer much story-wise. I completed almost all of them anyway for more XP, SP, and the items they offered, but fetch quests are just not fun here. Not to mention, the mini-games are incredibly tedious and boring and not well thought out. There’s an okay darts mini-game. Beating the highest score and achievement. But there’s a box-breaking mini-game that requires you to run around breaking different-sized boxes. This was incredibly tedious and not fun. There are combat VR simulators that net you material. Most of which you can acquire elsewhere. Then there’s the optional summons, which can be incredibly difficult to acquire early on as you need to beat them, and you need three party members to even have a fair chance. There’s also a pretty stupid dancing rhythm mini-game. It’s just, overall, a bit lame.
Some other annoying niggles come from dated design decisions, like treating the player like they’re stupid. For decades, games would have you flip a switch, cut the camera away, show you that a gate in front of you opened, and then give you control. I’m pretty sure most people can figure out that the switch opened the only gate on the only path you can go down. I also got annoyed by how animations would have to line up to whatever script they were tied to, do the animation, re-align, change animations, flip the switch, then go back. It just slowed things down a lot.
Outside of the mostly optional and passable annoyances, the visuals are fantastic. Character models look amazing, the pre-rendered cutscenes are some of the best in the industry, and the story and overall character designs are some of the best you will ever come across. The story is deep and full of political intrigue, and I want to know more about this world, the characters, and see things move on. It’s sad that Square Enix takes so long to make sequels, but what are we going to do? With the fantastic combat system that adds just enough strategy and depth to the large swath of enemies, bosses, environments, and perfect pacing, FF7 Remake is fantastic. The additional Intermission DLC is also wonderful, and playing as Yuffie is a blast. The short, 4-hour story DLC still has more of the same lame mini-games and annoyances as the main game, but the story is just so well done. There’s nothing quite like it out there.
The original Alan Wake is one of my favorite horror games of all time. Its gameplay may not hold up well today, but overall, the game is still solid. The atmosphere really pulled me in when the game was released, and here I am now, 13 years later, living in the PNW near where the first game was inspired. The story was full of mystery and suspense and always saw-sawed between being confusing and then suddenly making sense—always being a mystery. The story of light vs. dark and the definition of insanity play a big role in the world of Alan Wake, and that goes even further in the sequel.
Alan Wake II is pretty much an entire reboot on the surface. Taking some design questions from Remedy’s previous entries, like Quantum Break and Control, they have integrated the series into their “Remedyverse” (you can borrow that one if you want!). The story has an entirely new way of being told via live-action cutscenes and in real-time. The new playable character, Saga Anderson, is introduced as an FBI agent who is investigating cult murders in the town of Bright Falls. She gets sucked into the story of Alan as he tries to write his way out of his own madness and destroy the main antagonist from the first game, Scratch. The story continues that constant teetering of not making much sense and then wrapping around multiple times to have it all click, but I highly recommend playing the first game (there’s a remastered version out now) before playing this one, as there are many references. I also recommend playing Control first as well, as the stories are intertwined.
The game starts out so much different than the first game. Instead of a long, drawn-out, time-ccut scene of sunshine and beauty, you are tossed straight into something straight out of Silent Hill. You’re a naked, bloated man running from cultists. It’s a crazy way to start a game, and it shows the cinematic quality and effort put into this game. However, you control Saga first, and this is where the first half of the game starts. You jump between Alan and Saga, but their levels are unique on their own. Saga’s side is more action-oriented and collectible hunting. There are three main large areas in the game. Watery, Bright Falls, and Cauldron Lake. Bright Falls is a main hub town that you can walk around in and also find collectibles. These range from cult stashes, breaking open locks with a screwdriver or boltcutters (found later in the game), Alex Casey lunchboxes, and nursery rhymes. These are all fun to find, and they all reward you with different things. The lunchboxes give you manuscript scraps used to unlock weapon perks; the rhymes unlock charms; and the cult stashes have various usable items in them.
The combat itself is familiar from the original game, but it’s more refined and feels like a solid third-person shooter. You still blast the darkness from vulnerabilities to make them vulnerable to your gunfire, but it’s less frequent. Alan Wake felt like an action title and less like a survival horror due to so many enemies thrown at you at once. Like any survival horror game with guns, the best ones are locked away and require puzzle-solving skills to acquire them. Usually it’s a three-digit code, and you need to figure out the clues in the room you are in. It’s usually not super hard, and the answer is right in front of you. You just need to be observant. Weapons feel good to shoot, and while there aren’t many, they feel unique. The pistol, shotgun (sawed-off, double-barelled, and pump variety), crossbow, revolver, and hunting rifle make up the majority of your weapons, but Saga and Alan’s sides play differently even with combat.
Alan isn’t a fighter. He has much more limited ammo than Saga gets and usually only has the revolver and flare gun through most of the game. The shadows usually won’t attack you if you side-step them, but in some cases, they require you to fight. He has less health than Saga, and his levels are mostly backtracking puzzle-solving-style affairs. This leads me to talk about the Mind Place. This is essentially an interactive pause screen that would normally be a menu with flipping pages. It’s a room that loads instantly, and you advance the story here. Saga’s Mind Place is more complicated and involved. She has cases on the wall, and as you discover things, you can place evidence on said wall, and when you find everything for that chapter, the case will be solved. However, solving these cases isn’t required. You just need to place the main ones to advance the story. She also has a profiling section in which she can talk to characters in her mind. This gives her ideas when she is stuck and needs to move on further. There are also areas to listen to radio programs you found, TV shows, and manuscripts.
Alan’s Writer’s Room is similar, but you use it less often. Instead of profiling and cases to solve, Alan can switch scenes he finds through echos found throughout the levels. These are black-and-white orbs that shimmer, and you must align them with the camera to activate the scene. This is where a lot of the puzzle-solving comes in, and honestly, it is the weakest part of the game. Switching between scenes can become frustrating because you don’t know which one you need to be in to access a certain area. When you switch scenes, rooms get closed off and new ones open. This also doubles down on the light-holding feature. Alan can absorb certain bright lights that open up a new path in that room. Some areas have up to three or four lights that need to be absorbed or put back in a certain order, and it can cause frustration. I didn’t like this part of Alan’s story. You can switch between Saga and Alan at any time with portals in certain levels and play any chapter in any order. Alan’s side is mostly cinematic adventure stuff with a lot more storytelling than Saga’s. Saga has larger areas to explore (three whole large maps), and Alan is mostly confined to one small area and kept inside various buildings in a more urban setting.
Outside of the Writer’s Room scene switching and the confusing mess some of the levels can be, the game is solid with a 15-20 hour play time. There is so much content in this game that it’s hard to hate it. The visuals are state-of-the-art and push PCs and consoles to their absolute limits and beyond. On PC, Alan Wake II sports the latest ray-tracing and path-tracing tech and mesh shaders, which have been crippling the highest end of hardware. Unless you have a 4xxx series RTX card that can utilize the DLSS Frame Generation, you’re going to struggle with ray-tracing. Even with DLSS on balanced and ray-tracing set to medium (and other settings optimized through guides online), I would dip below 60FPS at 1440p. Without ray-tracing, the game runs much better, but this is one of the few games where RTX actually makes the game a different experience.
The game’s horror elements are full of haunting atmospheres and fewer jump scares. There are a few, but they were done well and got me good. The monster designs are well done, but not overdone and made to be unbelievable. The game straddles reality and fiction just right to make this seem like it could really happen. The story really does a good job of making Saga and Alan worthwhile and memorable characters and delves deep into their backstory and psyche. Very few AAA games can do this right. Alan Wake II is not just one of the best games of 2023, but of all time. This is how you can do a sequel without making it a full-on reboot or changing very little. The entire game rides the middle ground on every level, which makes it nearly perfect.
World War I was a horrific time in the world. The creation of mustard gas and the deaths of 20 million people are just a couple of things that came from that war. You play Paul von Schmidt, a German man who returned from the war. Paul and his brother Johannes are raised by their father, who is a wartime cripple. Over the course of the game, you explore Paul’s mind and how he feels and represents the events of his childhood and the trauma from the war. Sadly, most of this is only pieced together by letters found throughout the game, as the cut scenes themselves explain little and just muddle the otherwise generic feeling of the story.
The game is broken up into two gameplay styles. An adventure/walking simulator-style mansion exploration where you solve puzzles. This part of the game is rather dull and uninteresting. Many other games do house explorations better (Layers of Fear, Gone Home, What Remains of Edith Finch) as the game slowly opens the house to you, but the key is to find objects to solve puzzles and find something that triggers a dive into Paul’s mind and thoughts. Each chapter (there are three) consists of one of his family members represented as a horrific monster. You can either choose to kill them or let them live to get different endings. Most of these “boss fights” require you to flip switches and run away for the most part, but they are rather intense, so I didn’t mind them.
The second part of the game is the trenches gameplay, in which the horror part sets in. You need to run around solving the occasional puzzle while also hiding from enemies. There is no combat in this game, so you have to sneak around and find your way through the dark in various environments. The creature designs are awesome, but this is probably the most exciting part of the game. It was intense sneaking past enemies, and thankfully there’s only one small section in each chapter, but the horror elements that are actually good can be counted on one hand. There are moments in which each main monster is introduced, and these scenes are fairly creepy, and outside of weird sound effects and haunting ambience, there’s not much else here. The game does portray the gruesome horrors of the war, with bodies spread everywhere, the barbaric medical practices, and the overall brutal nature of everything people endured during that time.
With the game being as linear as it is, there isn’t a lot of room for exploration outside of finding dog tags, and this only grants an achievement. There are a few extra gameplay items you can find, such as a pickaxe to break down walls, a dynamo flashlight, a gas mask, and wire cutters to cut down barbed wire, which is actually quite annoying. The barbed wire moves and is related to the story (I won’t spoil why), and you have to cut the non-moving wire or it will grab you, and that will trigger a quick-time event. This could have been done better. To be completely honest, all of these items don’t really add anything to the game. The gas mask is used a few times to get through corridors with some gas, and it lasts a few seconds. The flashlight is annoying to use, as it only lights up for a few seconds before needing to be charged again.
The game overall isn’t very exciting. The horror elements fall flat, and the walking simulator-style gameplay is void of almost any gameplay. The story itself is convoluted and difficult to figure out if you don’t read the papers spread throughout the game. The visuals are at least good, if not necessarily unique or interesting, because of the monster designs. There are nice lighting effects, but the character models are something to be desired. The mansion areas are also a chore to play through, and it just feels like mindless wandering through rooms to find objects.
Overall, Ad Infinitum doesn’t do anything particularly well or is interesting enough to not be forgettable. There are some good horror moments, but they aren’t anything special, and the game overall lacks a cohesive story or a way to tell it. There are many games out there that are similar and do a better job of everything listed.
Simulator games that mimic mundane, everyday jobs can be surprisingly cathartic and relaxing. The zen-like repetitive tasks that give you the serotonin boost of progress over time, organization, or customization flood Steam and are eeking out onto consoles if they become popular enough. Sadly, most aren’t done very well and either have janky mechanics, a very low budget, or feel like copy and paste or an asset flip. Very few do it well, with PowerWash Simulator, Truck Simulator, Cooking Simulator, and PC Building Simulator being some of the top kings that do it right. House Flipper was one of those, and it felt janky but had so much potential. It was almost there, and I feel they got there with House Flipper 2, but there’s still tons of room for improvement.
The first thing you will notice are the much improved graphics. Better lighting, effects, higher resolution textures, and an overall better-feeling game. It feels less low-budget and more like how it really should be. There’s also a lot more variety, and the game’s new grid-based placement system completely rewrites how the game plays. Forget everything you knew from the first game. That game feels essentially like the foundation for this new vision the developers have. The game now has a story mode, which is of course unimportant and pretty much filler, but there is some voiced dialogue and you can answer phone calls. Your email map that you take jobs from is sectioned into different types of neighborhoods. Rich, suburbs, oceanside, rural, etc. Once you accept a job, the game starts very slowly. Just simple cleaning, washing windows, picking up trash, and selling items. That’s about it for a good while. The perk system still exists but feels more useful. As you do each type of job, you will be able to make it faster, better, and more efficient for much larger jobs.
Just the simple tasks of trash pickup and cleaning are much better. You eventually get spray that can turn all the dirt soapy, it’s easier to wipe up, and things go faster. Trash pickup eventually expands your pickup grid, so it goes faster. Vacuuming is better and looks nicer. Leaves, coffee beans, rice, marbles, and many other forms of dirt are new and present, so it doesn’t feel so repetitive. Stains range from paint to foot prints now as well and can be on any surface. When you start demolishing, building, painting, and surfacing, some of the most repetitive and boring tasks from the first game are more fun now. The entire game is based on a 1×1 block grid system, so these tasks let you fill out a grid on a wall or floor and fill that in more efficiently. Demolishing lets you hold the button back and fill out a grid. As you get more perks, this grid fills. Painting now lets you select a border, and you can just fill it with your brush. Eventually, your brush gets bigger, and you use less paint.
The same goes for surfacing and building. You can select borders for the building and fill in the bricks this way. Everything just goes faster, feels more satisfying, and feels less like a chore. When you buy objects from the quest list, you can place them easier thanks to this 1×1 block system. You can place any item anywhere, even stack items, as long as it fits. There are so many more items to choose from, and they look better as well. Just the effects of paint trying and demolishing walls crumbling better add to a much better overall experience. I also like how assembly is now stripped away from building and left as a mini-game. There are only a dozen objects you can assemble, and it’s time-based. These were done in your workshop and are much more detailed. They come together like IKEA furniture, where you drill holes, hammer wooden pegs, and attach every screw. This makes remodeling homes less tedious, and your assembly score gives you discounts in the store. Now you can just place radiators, tubs, showers, etc. without having to assemble every single one.
When you finish the story, you can still complete jobs, build homes from the ground up, and just have fun in sandbox mode. There isn’t a lot of story content—about 15-20 hours—but you will blow through it due to how much fun you are going to have. This is one of the best job simulator games next to PowerWash Simulator, and I can’t wait for the third game to see where the developers will go with it. My only real complaint is that the requested furniture doesn’t have the required layout, which would have been nice. You can just throw it all in the middle of the floor, and it counts as complete. This makes buying furniture pretty boring unless you just want to make these homes look nice without any type of reward. As it stands, House Flipper 2 is a night-and-day improvement over the original and is heading in the right direction.
Telltale is mostly known for licensed adventure games such as The Wolf Among Us and The Walking Dead. They shut down and started back up, and now they probably don’t have the money to license these franchises anymore. I actually prefer this. Telltale has created their first original IP in years, and it has so much potential. The biggest takeaway from this game is the usual Telltale style of storytelling and choice-making. You think you know what you’re going to choose ahead of time and how it will pan out in your head, but things always make a left turn and change on you, and you’re left speechless. They are also, sadly, known for having almost no gameplay and very dated visuals.
Gameplay is more frequent in this game, but you just control your character in a walking simulator situation, walking or gliding down long hallways. There are a couple of elementary puzzles thrown in, and that’s your lot for gameplay. It’s fine, as I go into Telltale games for the story and characters and not much else. You can use zero-G movement in some areas and move around that way. You can also optionally scan a few items here and there for collectibles, but it’s very limited and linear in scope.
The best part about the game is the atmosphere, characters, and overall story. While this game is the beginning of a larger story arc that will give us more lore and behind-the-scenes politics on the goings-on of this world, this game solely focuses on establishing Captain Drummer as a brand new protagonist, and I love her so much. She has a lot of charisma and is a dark and brooding character without being cringy and formulaic. Her voice actress does a fantastic job portraying this. The other characters are written in your typical telltale manner, which allows you to constantly hate or like a character and then suddenly doubt everything in the end. The cast is small, but the game has a fantastic pace that keeps things interesting.
You’re essentially scrappers, and there is an established order of inners: people who live inside the astroid belt and those who love outside of the astroid belt. There are pirates involved, and there is a secret treasure that everyone is fighting over. I don’t want to go too much into the story, but the game’s atmosphere is dark and haunting, but there’s no horror. The monster here is the human element and just how brutal we can be to each other in a split second. I found the ending very satisfying, and it opens up for a clear sequel that hopefully expands this entire universe that Telltale has created.
The visuals are a huge improvement over their past games. While they aren’t ground-breaking and are required to run on previous generation hardware, the stylized visuals look great, and the blacks, whites, and grays really make you feel alone and claustrophobic all the time. The voice acting is top-notch, as always, and the only thing I left with was wanting more from this series. I also wanted more gameplay, as quick-time events are incredibly dated and there are other things you can do for adventure titles other than these dated gameplay elements. More side quests, an actual gameplay loop, and more side dialogue would be nice to be able to expand upon everything. As it is, the game takes 6-7 hours to finish, but it’s incredibly enjoyable, and I couldn’t put the game down.
One of the scariest things to me is being alone on a planet. I’ve had a recent fascination with this, especially after reading The Martian by Andy Weir. It’s a different form of psychological horror. The human mind is a vast pit of emotions and an endless imagination. The fear of the unknown and the human mind running rampant combined is a scary combination that very few media tackle. The Invincible is one such story, and it’s done well.
First and foremost, this is a walking simulator, but with a bit more freedom. There’s really no gameplay, but you can interact with objects and control a vehicle a couple of times, but that’s about it. It does what walking simulators are supposed to do well, and that’s provide good characters with great writing and a story that keeps you hooked. The Invincible starts out slow and may come off as a typical space adventure with pretty colors and nothing more, but the story just gets darker and darker as you move along. The length is a couple of hours longer than a typical game of its kind, and it helps. There is more character development, more explanation of what is going on, and more of this planet, Regis III.
It’s a desert planet similar to Mars, but with an ocean. You play as Yansa, one of a small crew of scientists scouting out a possible Earth-like planet. You learn about two warring factions known as the Alliance and the Commonwealth. The space race to find a planet of paradise is very apparent. I don’t want to talk too much about the story, as I can easily spoil something. I will just say the story keeps going when you think it ends and gets darker and deeper, and the theories behind what is going on are very fascinating. There seem to be some choices you can make in the game, but I’m not sure if they impact the ending or not. Most of the dialogue is between Yansa and another crew member on her ship, the Dragonfly. The story has so many ups and downs, emotion-wise, as your fight for survival takes a back seat to a larger plot point, and the excellent voice acting helps suck you into this void.
You spend most of the game climbing ledges, dropping down ledges, and examining objects. There are a few large open maps, but you have a linear path you need to follow thanks to the well-designed map system. The interactions are always changing, and the pace is great after the first opening sequence, and things pick up. There is always something new happening, and I love that about this game. You aren’t just walking in a straight line in a borefest like Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, and it’s not a jump-scare-induced horror roller coaster like Layers of Fear. The terror of survival, death, and being alone is omnipresent in The Invincible. Just seeing a robot can make you feel less alone. The atmosphere is so well done in this game.
I usually start complaining about a lack of gameplay or that the story is so short that there’s no time for anything interesting to happen, but The Invincible does what walking simulators haven’t really done in a long time: make you want to walk through something and keep going. Between the 50’s art deco-style designs of the ships and equipment, the immersive first-person view, and the excellent voice acting, there’s so much to take in. Sure, the visuals aren’t impressive on a technical scale. There is also no ultrawide screen support, which is a real bummer, but it’s not enough to knock this game down. The Invincible makes you think and talk about the story to your friends because you want to theorize, and it entices you to think about life on other planets, which might make you go read a book or watch a movie like Apollo 13 or The Martian to continue experiencing this fear of being alone on a planet. Walking simulators aren’t this good very often. Enjoy it while it lasts.
When a studio says they take inspiration from adventure games like Life is Strange, I pay attention. We follow a maid during the late 1950s, working in a hotel for a crass boss. You are basically a snoop and end up getting involved in a mystery of a love triangle, and you take it upon yourself to get co-workers involved, and the entire thing spirals out of control. Is this game a lesson on minding your own business or doing what you think is right?
You play as Ms. Roy. You start out by getting to know your co-workers, learning the game’s mechanics, and starting your amateur sleuthing. There’s not much to the game’s mechanics. You can interact with dozens upon dozens of objects, mostly letters you end up reading, and either throw them away or just inspect them. You spend your time between three floors. The fifth floor, the basement, and the lobby You eventually pick a male or female co-worker to help you dig into other people’s business, but you also have a job to do. You need to clean and tidy up each room, and all of your actions have consequences towards the end of the game. I don’t want to say what can or can’t cause these, as it can really spoil the ending, but just know that picking things up and keeping them is something the game tells you to think about the most.
Inspecting items doesn’t really matter as you’re putting them back down, but scouring all the drawers, every item, no matter how simple it seems, might give you a clue to figure out what’s happening in the love circle you want to so desperately be a part of. Sometimes you need to go to the basement and get items you don’t have, and there are a few puzzles thrown in. These aren’t difficult either. matching up pieces of paper, deciphering a code, or just finding a few clues here and there. You can hear Roy’s inner dialogue to help give you hints, and you can read everything you picked up in your inventory.
Outside of interacting with objects and solving the occasional puzzle, there isn’t anything else to do. There’s no exploring, character interactions are scripted, and there are only three characters in the entire game. This is a very short game with a runtime of about 3 hours. I do have to give credit to the developers for creating such a tense mystery at that time and actually giving the characters some depth. It’s not long enough to really give an entire backstory like other adventure games, but they cut out the nonsense and get to the meat of what they want to do and the story they want to tell. The writing is well done, and the voice acting is pretty excellent too. Your choices also really do matter, but the physical interactions with objects make you realize what you could have done differently as the final moments of the story pass.
The visuals aren’t anything impressive, but the game looks period-correct, and it’s not ugly. The lip syncing is off, but the characters look good, and they have a unique look and a lot of character in their personalities. Sadly, my biggest complaint is that I wanted to know more about these characters. The game focuses solely on this mystery, but just enough personality in the characters pokes through that this could have been a much longer game. I wanted to know more about Ms. Roy and who she is as a person. That’s what made Life is Strange so great. It focused a lot on the characters, who they are as people, and their lives. There’s a lot of potential here for something greater, but the end product of an interesting and gripping mystery is done well enough. This makes for a fun evening with choices that really matter, but that’s about it.
The Cold War was a rough time, and you really feel it in the South of the Circle. You play Peter, a British scientist struggling between love, his career, and being stranded in the Antarctic during one of the most strenuous times with Russia. Peter is a climatologist and ends up meeting a Scottish woman, Clara, who is protesting the war. He ends up torn between her companionship, his career, and the present times of him stranded at a remote research station trying to find rescue.
I don’t want to spoil the story because that’s all that South of the Circle has going for it and is the only reason to keep playing. There is almost zero gameplay outside of pressing buttons for dialogue choices. These come in the form of emotion bubbles that range from neutral, scared, sad, happy, and so on. I don’t quite know if this effects the overall story path, as my choices almost seemed to not matter. As Peter is talking to people, a bouncing red ball means a scared response. A blue ball hanging low means a sad response. A sun icon will make Peter respond joyfully, etc. These come up pretty frequently, so you’re always pressing something. Occasionally, you can move Peter around and interact with the rare object here and there, but that’s all there is to it. There are no puzzles or anything like that.
You follow this linear path of Peter trying to find people at this station while seeing flashbacks. You start in the middle, and as you move forward in the story, the flashbacks start from the beginning. It’s very entertaining, and I was interested in the story until the end thanks to the well-written dialogue and fantastic voice work. The visuals are striking in the sense that they almost look rotoscoped. There is motion capture for this minimalistic style of art, and it’s quite captivating.
The entire game is a linearly scripted adventure and lasts less than four hours. It’s a bit longer than most super-short story-driven walking simulators, and the excellent writing will keep you hooked. All of the characters have depth, and you actually have feelings for certain characters, despite some having only a short time on screen. Scenes can get intense and emotional, and you can feel the dread that Peter is facing in his struggle for survival. It’s just so well done, and it’s sad there isn’t more gameplay attached to it. It’s one of the better walking simulator stories I’ve finished in recent years.
Overall, South of the Circle provides an entertaining, well-acted, and well-written story and script, but the lack of gameplay makes you question whether this is just enough here to be an excuse for a game. The art is fantastic, and the motion capture is enticing. I wish the dialogue choices were a little more obvious about what they did or if they changed anything at all.
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