The late Benoit Sokal’s vision is something I have yet to experience. Syberia is considered one of the best point-and-click adventures of all time despite its flaws. Like other games in the genre, such as Sanitarium and The Longest Journey, Syberia gave PC gamers beautiful visuals, intriguing characters, and rich worlds to explore. This remastered classic does just that by giving new gamers a fresh take on an older classic, flaws and all. The series is now a four-part saga that starts here with its humble beginnings.
You play as an American attorney. Kate Walker is tasked by her agency to get an automaton factory signed over to a new toy company. You must seek out its owner, and this leads you on an epic journey through various towns with interesting people. Kate eventually awakens an automaton engineer who is able to drive a wind-up train to where she needs to go. The train needs constant winding, so it conveniently stops in these towns. The towns usually have mini mysteries to solve or predicaments to correct so Kate can move on with her journey. She either needs more info on where to find Hans Voralberg, who is the living descendant of the factory owner. There’s a lot of humanity in this game. From the strange university with its weird Stoker council to the obsessed automaton in the mines who wants to desperately reimagine an opera he saw long ago. The dystopian Soviet Russia vibes also add to the atmosphere here. The game feels sterile and falsely joyful. Remnants of this sadness litter the environment, akin to soldiers dispatched to abandoned facilities to await their demise.
Syberia does a fantastic job feeling like an actual adventure. However, the puzzles are few and far between, and a couple can be rather obtuse, while the majority have no challenge. There’s a lot of backtracking in the main “hub” areas of each town and just a lot of walking. Talking consists of selecting questions, and that’s it. The pre-rendered cutscenes were not redone, looking incredibly dated. These are in full widescreen with a proper aspect ratio but should have been redone or just done in engine. The remade visuals look fantastic with beautiful sweeping vistas, great lighting, and good-looking textures. There are some quirks left over from the era, such as needing to have animations finish before doing something else, some graphics glitches, and object hunting. Most objects will have a circle appear over them if you get close, but these can be missed sometimes, leading to a lot of wandering around.
You can platinum this game in one go, and it can be finished in about 4-5 hours with a guide. Once you complete the game, there’s no reason to really revisit unless you have nostalgia for the original. The remaster adds some interesting DualSense features, like having Kate’s phone conversation play through the controller speaker, but there’s not much else to this game. If you love adventure games, then give this a try. Here’s to hoping the second game will get remade as well.
Indie horror games are not always great. In fact, most are pretty bad. There appears to be a trend of focusing on going viral instead of earning positive word-of-mouth through genuine quality. Either relying on tropes such as the “meme monster,” like Poppy Playtime, or having convoluted lore, like with the SCP series. The Inn-Sanity tries to be a self-contained horror title only trying to be good. It’s one of the better “Unreal Jank” horror titles I have played with the, probably by now, overused PS1 graphics aesthetic that mostly misses the point of them. You play as someone who visits an Inn (Sanity Inn…get it? Ha, ha). During the night there seems to be a Cthulhu mythos-style end-of-the-world scenario. You end up meeting a goth girl, who has the only voiced lines in the game, as you both try to survive the hotel and get to the roof while working with a security guard who is always hiding in the security room in the lobby. You only get phone calls from him. There’s also a monster lurking in the hotel, murdering everyone.
It’s a pretty cool setup, and the pacing of the story is surprisingly good. I played the game all the way through in one sitting because I wanted to see it to the end. The monster is pretty cool and scary-looking, and the scenarios you are put in are easy to deal with but still intense. There’s also a mad murdering priest wandering the hotel, killing anyone who he thinks is infected and not “pure.” The stealth sections involving the monster aren’t hard. The AI is pretty dumb, and one scene had me gathering gas in the parking garage, but the monster wound up always staying at the opposite end where there aren’t any cars. It was a breeze. Every mission will require you to go out into the halls and either up or down stairs to find someone or a supply. One puzzle has you following colored pipes to their proper PSI number to turn on the water to the hotel. It was a fun puzzle and had some intense moments.
There are some intriguing elements thrown in, like being able to call various numbers on the hotel room phone to get some lore in the game. You can turn on the radio every day and hear what’s going on with the outside world. Small things like this that could be expanded upon make for a great way to make a small enclosed area more interesting. We want to know what’s going on outside and how other people are doing too. There’s enough of a world built here to convince you to investigate more, and that’s really hard to pull off in such a short run time. The girl’s voice acting is spotty. It follows the typical “cutesy anime girl” voice trope and I honestly do not like that at all. Some may be okay with it. Some lines are delivered pretty well while others are completely off in tone and intensity. She is supposed to be a beacon of light and the only human thing in this entire world and she just doesn’t feel serious enough for this.
Once you get back to your room, you are advancing the story between the girl and yourself. You keep passing out and waking up in the bathroom, not knowing why. You have strange dreams, and some choices will affect what ending you get with the girl. The story is always moving and changing, and you never get bored or feel stuck anywhere. There are some downsides to this game being very low budget. The animations are pretty bad; everything is a weird mix of high and low poly, so it has an inconsistent look. The game is also rather short, ending at around 3 hours. While I enjoyed my time with the game, I feel that these good puzzles, branching dialogue trees, and choices could be put to more use. The developers are talented and know how to make a great horror game. With a bigger budget I feel they could do something really great. This is easily one of the better super cheap indie horror titles on Steam and will get you genuine scares and entertain you the entire way through.
Short stories in the Silent Hill universe aren’t unheard of. Many people are unaware of their existence, except for the most dedicated fans. The comics and graphic novels on Game Boy Advance and PSP are not quite there, but they are interesting side stories. Silent Hill is more than just a town. It’s an experience. This version is set in Germany. You play as a teen named Anita who is inside an abandoned apartment complex exploring her past and trying to find her friend Maya. Silent Hill games usually explore the real world and then the “Otherworld.” In this game, if you can even call it that, there are clear inspirations taken from Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. This is the first SH game to be set in first person and the second to use a smartphone as a main gameplay device.
Your phone is used for its flashlight. It’s not as extensive as Shattered Memories with apps and features. Every so often your friends will text you, and you just press X to reply. The game is incredibly linear with only one clear path forward. The apartment complex is dark and dirty and does a good job of creating a horror atmosphere, but this isn’t Silent Hill. The series is never stuck inside of a building through the entire game. In fact, the only “outside” you encounter is going onto the roof and balcony a few times. This is by far the least interactive game in the series outside of the graphic novels. You will walk around examining objects, triggering cut scenes, and then entering the “Otherworld” apartment complex, which involves an annoying chase sequence from a monster. The only way you would know that the game is connected to Silent Hill is the monster track in the background and the orange hellish metal design everywhere during the chase scenes, and a single mention of the game in a note on a table. You need to run through a maze of doors and hallways to escape. They aren’t fun and have no combat.
There are a couple of puzzles in the game that are actually pretty good, but it’s the only gameplay in the entire game that’s interactive. The most jarring element here is the inconsistent visual design. Anita’s model is incredibly rough and ugly. She looks worse than the rest of the game, and then there are the live-action cut scenes of a Japanese girl (Maya) talking to you in flashbacks. Sadly, the scenes were obviously shot in Japanese, but there’s only an English dub available. The actual story and message of suicide and bullying are interesting. There’s something here. Anita will walk through rooms full of sticky notes everywhere that have hateful words. We get flashbacks of her cutting her wrists, etc. These darker elements are what make Silent Hill so great. The exploration of the darkest parts of the human psyche, but instead of going with that, The Short Message drops the ball every time it picks it up. Exploring the apartment complex doesn’t bring about any scares. Lights turn off, bulbs pop, there’s weird noises, and that’s about it. The monster chasing you is the only monster in the entire game and you rarely get to see it.
What’s left is a three-hour slog through what feels like a tech demo or proof of concept. Clearly Konami didn’t like it enough to make it into a full game. Hexadrive has some good ideas here, and I wouldn’t mind seeing that they could do with a full Silent Hill game. With the series making a full return, we need more developers on board now that Team Silent has been disbanded. I recommend playing this only if you’re a Silent Hill completionist and hardcore fan, but otherwise there’s not much here for anyone else.
War. War never changes. Oh wait, wrong game. Clears throat Is a man entitled to the sweat on his brow? A famous quote from Andrew Ryan. The creator of Rapture. An underground utopia, or dystopia, that’s a playground for the rich. Using Adam and Eve to alter your genes and add power like fire, ice, shock, and bees. You arrive serendipitously via plane crash over the Atlantic ocean. You work your way through Rapture while being guided by a man named Atlas. There are Little Sisters, children who harvest Adam from dead Splicers, and Big Daddies that protect them. There’s quite a bit going on, and while this is a spiritual successor to System Shock, it was revolutionary for its time. Sadly, many younger gamers, like myself, had never heard of System Shock as it wasn’t a blockbuster seller.
Sadly, the remaster does the bare minimum. Only making the game playable exactly as is, just in a higher resolution and frame rate. 2K Games took the PC version with the updated DirectX 10 lighting and shadows and threw it on consoles. We get developer commentary and some combat trials, but the age of the game is also present. A full remake would have been better. While the story is well known amongst gamers of the HD era, the gameplay hasn’t aged quite as well. There are many quality of life improvements that could have been made. For example, the combat isn’t the best. The reticle is a massive circle, and while guns feel pretty decent, the Plasmids are frustrating to aim. Plasmids like Shock Bolt and Incinerate converge on a pinpoint, and you waste so much Eve trying to hit enemies. There are also an awful lot of passive and combat tonics that feel mostly useless for such a short game.
While the 17 year old me didn’t really notice any of this when I played it on launch day for my Xbox 360 at the time, the game’s near perfection at the time is showing some cracks. The levels are cramped and incredibly linear, making combat hard. Many of the areas are way too dark, making it hard to see enemies and hit them at the speed they move at. It’s not the worst ever, but it’s annoying, and a remake could have remedied this. You get six guns in the game, but not all of them are useful. The Napalm launcher is something I rarely used, and the same goes for the grenade launcher. The areas are too cramped for these destructive weapons, and you end up taking a lot of damage. You will switch between the shotgun, revolver, and Tommy gun the most as your main weapons. The crossbow is the closest to a sniper rifle that you will get. Each weapon has three different ammo types. There are explosive, shock, anti-personnel (good against humans), and armor-piercing (used against Big Daddies). The combat system is fine but pretty flawed. You can upgrade each weapon twice to add things like damage and recoil reduction.
You can change your equipped plasmids and tonics at Gene Banks. You use Adam taken from Little Sisters at Adam machines to buy these. There are just too many. I used the Research one for taking photos of enemies to increase damage dealt to them. Once I get everyone researched, this tonic is useless to me. There are tonics to reduce security timers, making hacking easier, reducing the cost of vendors, etc. You can only get five slots for each track. Then there are up to three levels for each tonic. There’s too much. I felt for the short length maybe half the amount of plasmids and tonics would have been fine. You will find your favorites and pretty much stick with those through the entire game. You can finish the game in about 6 hours or less. Other vendors are for ammo and items for healing and such. There are many different healing items, from snacks to first aid kits and seemingly useless alcohol. Hey, there’s a tonic to reduce the drunkeness effect of those as they restore Eve. It’s an excuse to look around. Every container has something. Eventually you will unlock crafting at the U-Invent station to make ammo and some tonics that can’t be bought or found. Looting can be fun, but it distracts from the main story and gameplay loop.
There are just too many systems at play here for such a short game. These are all good ideas, and they work fine, but do we need five plasmid tracks (you can equip up to 15 passive tonics and five for combat) and a crafting ability? Ammo is scarce and becomes a pain to find on harder difficulties. You will need to loot every enemy and container to scrounge. This is fine, but is this now a survival horror game? The best parts of the game are the scripted events. There are few boss fights outside of the disappointing one at the end. The Big Daddys act as mini bosses themselves. They won’t attack you until you attack first. There are Bouncer and Rosie types, each with different types of attacks. Finding the 122 audiotapes throughout the game gives you backstory and fills in lore since there’s a lack of NPCs to talk to. These are logs of residents from before the city fell apart. Each level is themed after someone who ran that area, such as Cohen, who is all about theater. There’s the casino, the outdoors simulation area of Arcadia, the central core area of Hephaestus, etc. The areas are all distinct and interesting to look at despite being very cramped and their design feeling more like a video game than an actual city. It’s obvious no one could actually live in this place; it just doesn’t make any sense.
Despite not being ported over to a new Unreal Engine, the UE3 assets hold up surprisingly well thanks to the fantastic Art Deco style the game went for and have become iconic. The visuals were state of the art at release, but just increasing the resolution doesn’t do much here. The hacking mini-game gets old fast (assemble pipes) and could have been changed or removed. The enemies and characters are also well designed and iconic, but the game has definitely aged. Some areas are not so graceful, such as the combat, level design, and RPG elements. Enjoy the game for a fun evening that’s a great roller coaster ride and explore. Don’t focus too much on collecting, and just enjoy this as a stylish shooter.
Paul McCarthy. To some that name means nothing, but his art pieces are some of the most shocking and horrifying pieces of medium to ever be put into reality. They aren’t meant to just shock and awe people but to convey a statement. They are created to start a narrative to get people to open up about uncomfortable things. When you think of some of the oddest games, you can think of something like Dog’s Life, or Doshin the Giant might pop into your head. Maybe something a bit more strange like LSD: Dream Emulator or Irritating Stick. You might even start thinking more artsy with games like Vib Ribbon or echochrome. These games all have something in common. They are games with really interesting art designs or gameplay mechanics. One game that no one will be thinking of 10 years down the road is Horses, and that’s not a knock to the game. This is something that is so far removed from a mainstream or “hidden gem” curiosity that it will be only circulating around the most niche horror circles. Horses is one of the most deranged and avant-garde games I have played in years. Played is also a stretch, as Horses is a walking simulator with brief interactions.
You play as a teenage boy, Anselmo. You are sent to a farm by your parents to get your head out of the clouds and learn. The game right off the bat goes against the grain of even the quirkiest games out there. There’s almost no audio, the game is purposefully in a 4:3 aspect ratio, and the entire game is in black and white. There’s mostly just a film reel sound playing in the background with an occasional music track and odd sound effect. This is kind of nuts, as this would be considered “lazy” even by the lowest budget standards, but it’s all part of the style and imagery the developers are trying to get across. This sensory deprivation helps you focus on the visuals and scenes happening in front of you. You are totally sucked in and have no choice but to pay attention. It’s almost like you are being brainwashed similar to the horses in the actual game.
The game starts out simple enough by introducing the farmer and why you are here, putting your things down, and eating a meal. You are then introduced to a task list that requires you to do things like feed the dog…and various other things. The game takes place over 2 weeks, and each day gets more depraved as time goes on. Once you are introduced to the “horses,” things take a turn for the weird. The buildup is fantastic. Andrea Borlera did an amazing job building up and keeping me shocked throughout the entire game. Anyone who has delved into the darker parts of the internet or the deep web (not to be confused with the illegal dark web) may not be quite as shocked, but those who don’t follow any of those circles may either close the game or keep playing out of sheer fascination or abject disgust. I loved the psychological shift that the developers put onto the player rather than having you experience the protagonist’s shock through their own view.
I don’t want to spoil the story too much, but I have to talk about some of the actual shock that comes from the various scenes in the game. The warnings when you boot up the game are not to be taken lightly. This isn’t some PR or HR department giving you a silly little warning. You will be partaking in torture, cutting off genitals, whipping, burning, branding, and riding these “horses.” You’ve seen the game trailer and know these are people, not actual horses. It’s more than just shock value, but we are diving into the mind and dark past of this farmer. This is a story about abuse, being a victim of it as a child, and not being able to escape that. Unchecked mental health issues going rampant are something that is a major problem in our world, and this game really shows that. Nobody is talking about this game outside of mainstream articles about the ban because it makes you uncomfortable. Those who aren’t uncomfortable by this don’t talk about it because they don’t want to be judged. This is a piece of media that everyone knows or hears about, but acts like it’s not in the room with us.
There are certain amounts of censorship in the game, but it’s deliberate, or at least I think it is. Not in the common sense of censorship to appease various people, but for the story. The genitals and breasts of the “horses” are pixelated, and I think this is important to talk about. When you are traumatized by something, you tend to see things differently or block them out of your mind. Certain torture scenes are blacked out, or the camera is positioned in a certain way to not show everything, but done in a clever way to still know what’s going on. It’s crude but very effective, and all done purposefully to give the player a certain feeling or emotion. There are also stock footage clips of close-ups from real life, like when you drink milk, it’s a close-up of a throat gulping, and a crude sound effect plays. The opening menu is stock footage of a flower with music playing in the background, similar to some analog horror games we have seen.
The game is also very crude and terrible to look at, but I want to think this was also intentional. This looks like a very low-budget PS2 game, and Dog’s Life, which I mentioned earlier, was constantly going through my head when I was playing this. The animations are awful, the textures are flat, there’s clipping and glitches, and the character feels like mud to control, but I feel like this is on purpose to remove all distractions from the player and help deliver that crude and raw feeling. If this was a AAA budget title made in Unreal 5, I feel it wouldn’t have the same effect. While the game isn’t downright scary with monsters and weird visual effects, the game is scary in that people really do this stuff. There are serial killers and cult leaders who have done things like this to real people, and it proves that fact can be far scarier than fiction. The lack of voice acting and cuts to title cards like in a silent movie help add to more of that raw tension. You don’t get anything in this game. No rewards. You must endure the raw journey of the human mind with crude visuals, minimal sound effects, and no voices. It’s a sensory nightmare that helps add to the game that even the biggest horror games tend to forget. Without spoiling too much, one scene towards the end has those title cards constantly flash on screen while you walk around trying to figure out what to do. There’s no sound effects. These title cards relentlessly block your view until you find the item to stop it. It drove me nuts, but it was effective.
With that said, Horses is something I will never forget, but many will focus on the wrong things. The banning on Steam and the fact that this will never be able to make it to consoles is a shame. Many others are spewing hyperbole and spouting incorrect facts about this game. Things like it’s a murder simulator and trainer and is only for perverts, etc. These tired hyperbolic terms drive me crazy, as they take away from what the developers are actually trying to talk about. This isn’t a bestiality simulator; this isn’t a “gooner” game for certain extremist crowds who think Santa Ragione or Andrea has finally “broken through the shackles of society and the snowflakes.” This is an art piece. Santa Ragione are the Paul McCarthy of the video game circle. Real-life art can churn your stomach and make you think. So do just that. Think while playing Horses.
When Sony releases a new exclusive title, it’s an event for me. They don’t release games at the frequency they used to. We might get one or two a year. Ghost of Tsushima is an all-time classic. While I don’t remember much about the story or characters, I do remember the game being a beautiful exploration of Japan with great combat and the world itself being fun to explore. Yotei is no different. Atsu is a much more memorable character, and while the story seems to follow the modern trend of “Sony Revenge Stories” Atsu changes throughout the story, and she shows growth instead of constant anger or doing anything to get this revenge, even if that means losing everything. Atsu had her parents murdered as a child by a Samurai named Saito. His companions are all masked during the murder, and Atsu soon remembers the Yotei Six. These six masked demons must be murdered to exact revenge for the death of her family. There are excellent plot twists and changes throughout the story to keep you hooked. However, I spent most of my time exploring the world of Yotei.
Combat in Yotei is simple to understand but can be hard to master when facing many opponents or the tougher bosses. Atsu has many things at her disposal. Five different weapons she can switch between for starters. This seems like an absurd amount, but certain weapons are stronger against others. The Odachi is a massive sword that’s best against large characters and clearing the area. The katana is best against a single katana, while the yari (spear) is great against kusarigama (sickle and chain), and vice versa. The dual katanas are best against yaris. It’s important to flip between weapons depending on the enemies’ weapons. This keeps you on your toes and adds a level of challenge and depth to the combat. Atsu will eventually acquire multiple quick-fire weapons such as the matchlock pistol, kunai, smoke bomb, fire bomb, oni flame (lights your weapons on fire), and many others. These can also be used outside of combat during stealth or to clear groups of enemies.
One-on-one fights are the toughest, and these require mastering the parry and dodge techniques. When the enemies’ weapon flashes blue, you can press the block button to parry. Red glints must be dodged, and this opens them up to attack. Yellow glints mean they are doing a disarm move, and you either need to dodge or hold down the heavy attack button to disarm them on the parry. If you get disarmed, you must find your weapon or switch to something else. There are also environmental elements to combat, such as grabbing throwable weapons, which can do instant kills, as well as finding sake jars to stun enemies and shooting barrels. You will always need to be on your toes and look for environmental weapons or use what you can to knock everyone down. There are also some other combat elements, like mounted horse combat by slashing at enemies or jumping from the horse. You can also unlock an ability to ram the horse through enemies. There’s even an armor that allows you to parry bullets, which is neat.
There’s little sprinkles over the main dish of combat. This includes stealth combat. You can assassinate an enemy from behind in the beginning. This includes drop-down assassinations. Eventually you can chain assassinate or have a partner help you. When you get the kusarigama, you can pull enemies towards you for stealth kills. Stealth isn’t required in most of the game, but it can be better than fighting two dozen enemies. You can hide in tall grass, disappear into tents, climb watchtowers, or pick off enemies with a bow (you have a longbow and shortbow as well as various arrows), or you have the choice to stand off with the entire group before you’re seen. This gives you an opportunity to duel enemies by holding the heavy attack button and letting go when they launch. Eventually you can chain these together and end it with a pistol shot. Then there’s the Onryo’s Howl and Ghost Stance abilities you can use when you get enough parries or kills chained together. This allows for invincibility and plowing through a few enemies with ease. You can sometimes even scare enemies into fleeing altogether.
As you can see, there’s a lot to the combat system. There’s so much here that’s slowly introduced to the character. During the story missions, players find masters of these weapons and receive training to wield them effectively. Same goes for most of the throwables and quickfire weapons. They are all given throughout the story so as not to overwhelm the players. Most of the story missions appear to consist of similar gameplay elements. The exploration, which includes climbing, fighting, stealth, and more climbing, is where the core of the game lies. You should aim to find all the optional armors, masks, and hats, as well as collect more dyes to create cool-looking gear. This game has some fantastic-looking gear. You can kit yourself out to be an all-black shinobi or a massive samurai with crazy armor. There are a few puzzle elements thrown in, but none of them are very challenging and are some of the weakest parts of the game. Spin a few statues to match symbols on walls, etc. There are also some puzzle boxes you can find, but these offer no challenge either.
There are various side activities you can partake in, such as finding shrines similar to Tsushima, bounties, vanity gear hunts, fox dens, wolf dens, and many others. There are nearly 30 hours of just side content here, and it’s all a lot of fun. It’s done quick, it’s easy to find, and it allows you to explore this beautiful world. The wind guide is one of my favorite gameplay ideas of all time. You can swipe up on the touchpad, and the wind will help steer you in the right direction of where your marked spot on the map is. This makes finding gear and various other items a breeze. Getting to them is the challenging part. You may need to climb something, blow open a hole, or tear down a wall. There are also bamboo strikes in which you press a combo of buttons to slice bamboo to increase your spirit. You can upgrade your health by finding hot springs. There are dozens of charms throughout the world, and these are used to give you passive boosts to various stats or abilities. You can equip up to six, and this allows you to create your favorite build. Want to boost stealth or ranged combat? There are charms and armor combos for that. You can also find shrines to upgrade various abilities, but I honestly felt the upgrade tree just slowly unlocked abilities and felt a little tacked on. You have to pretty much unlock everything in a row so you can focus on one thing or the other.
The game world is stunning, and Yotei is one of the best-looking games ever made. On the PS5 Pro with ray-tracing and VRR the game can hit 60 FPS, which is fantastic to see. The bright colors pop with HDR and the various areas all have their own color palettes. The game doesn’t focus on seasons, but each area has a different weather pattern. One area might have yellows and greens, while the next area is all snow. Snowstorms can cause your health to slowly freeze unless you find a fire and will temporarily limit your health. The game is just a dream to look at, and the load times are instant. You can fast travel anywhere, and you’re playing in about 1 second or less. Sucker Punch really utilized all of the PS5 hardware to make this game beautiful and play wonderfully. The DualSense controller is well used here with great vibration implementation, and the triggers are used well. It’s a very immersive game, but there are a few issues I haven’t talked about yet.
While the combat has all of these little elements sprinkled in that make a much larger combat system, it can get rather repetitive. The only challenge ends up coming from timing parries and dodges, especially in boss fights. Most of the combat is held back by the heavy attack armor breakdown. You have to break down every enemy’s white bar to even start to attack them. Tougher enemies will regenerate one or two of these before you can kill them. This also goes for boss fights. They have a large armor bar above their health bar, and you have to heavy attack them, dodge, and parry to whittle this down just to attack. A lot of attacking and time is wasted on this feature, and I wish it wasn’t there. I can understand large enemies or enemies with tougher armor, but every single enemy has this to some degree.
I also found that the structure of the main story missions consists of a repetitive mix of similar activities. Climb a bunch, run around, fight a bunch, do a stealth area, open a door, climb a bunch, and repeat. The gameplay primarily consists of a combination of these three or four distinct types. You usually have a boss fight at the end of each mission with not much else to do. This was my issue with Tsushima as well. While all of these are more refined here, some may not like this type of gameplay loop. I found it worked well during exploration and finding all of the gear and upgrades, but the main story should have some other things thrown in. A scripted horseback ride doesn’t really count. There are a few occasions in which you get to equip a cannon, but these are later in the game and only happen a couple of times.
I also found the story, while entertaining, didn’t have the greatest dialogue. It’s very dry in spots and doesn’t get very exciting often. There’s a lot of standing around and talking with little else. Most of the side content cutscenes are skippable and not memorable at all. Sadly, there are very few memorable characters here outside of Atsu and a couple of the main characters. I do appreciate the new game plus mode and various filters to make the game look like older Japanese films. I found the music good, but nothing worth listening to outside of the game, as it works well within the context of what’s happening on screen.
Overall, Ghost of Yotei is a fantastic game with a lot of content to offer despite being wrapped around a few of the same gameplay loops. The story is entertaining, and Atsu is a great new character to add to the PlayStation roster, but most of the dialogue is dry, uninteresting, or nothing special. There aren’t a lot of well-written characters, and this issue was clearly never resolved from Tsushima. The main story missions are a mixed bag of the same gameplay loops as well, with nothing super exciting or anything that really stands out. I spent most of my time enjoying the exploration of the world and finding all of its secrets. If you loved Tsushima, you will love this, but those who don’t care for open-world action games will find that this game won’t change your mind.
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.
H.P. Lovecraft’s stories are difficult to translate into game form, and very few are successful. It’s almost like a curse in and of itself. Many games based off of his short stories are adventure titles, and I have played many of them, with almost none being good. The Nameless City has some good ideas. It nails the atmosphere and the setting and has an interesting gameplay mechanic, but this game feels like a glorified demo of what could be.
The game starts you out at a campsite outside of some ruins in a desert. The lone adventurer narrates the game with a subtle and almost depressing tone. He is quoting lines from Lovecraft’s short story of the same title. A mysterious being is said to live in these ruins, and people will hear the call in their dreams. As you make your way through the ruins, you will come across runes. These can be learned to help open up pathways further in. As night falls, however, you will lose all of your sanity and have to start back at the last checkpoint. This isn’t all that bad, as the game is so short. There are only three runes you use in the game. You can use one rune for casting and another for dispelling or casting a barrier. These spells are just for barriers, and that’s it. There are strange open holes that blow wind across a chasm that you need to navigate. These will blow you off the mountain, so you need to crouch under some.
Once you get into the cave system, it’s pretty boring. You can eventually use a spell to cast light on strange crystals as your sanity depletes in the darkness quickly. Once you get through the cave system and back out, the game is pretty much over. I did hate the maze puzzle. This entire level will take up most of your 90 minute playtime. It’s an endless maze that repeats forever. You need to use this to your advantage to activate crystals to stop a beam from blocking your path. It took me nearly 45 minutes to figure this puzzle out, and it was not fun at all. That means there’s only 45 minutes of actual gameplay outside of this awful level.
With that said, there isn’t much to say for the game even if I wanted to. The visuals use the PS1 style graphics and look appealing. The atmosphere and ominous sound effects do a good job, and the end monster is a little goofy looking. The game is very affordable and can provide a spooky experience for an evening playthrough, but don’t expect too much from it.
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.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Yeah, it's pretty damn awful. Notoriously one of the worst games on the PSP. A 4 was actually being generous.…