Retro-style games are booming right now, especially those with PS1-style graphics. Their limited capabilities are excellent for giving a certain vibe and atmosphere and are especially popular with horror games. While We Wait Here isn’t exactly a horror title, it does have a dark tone and theme. This is a story that begins near the conclusion and works its way backwards to tell everyone’s story. You are a couple who owns a diner in a small town in the middle of nowhere out in the Heartland of America. There’s no specific location given, and the entire area is generic, but it feels like somewhere out in the Midwest near Tornado Alley.
You are a couple who are about to move out of town and sell their diner. Lisa’s father owned this diner, and she assisted him in running it as a child. You meet Alex, your husband, while working at the diner as an adult. The game is a strange mix of horror, adventure, walking simulator elements, and restaurant sim similar to Diner Dash. However, the integration of the simulation elements with the rest of the story and game is so compelling that I found it impossible to stop playing. I played the entire game in one sitting. The writing is tight and well done, and the characters are very intriguing. Each character ends up at the diner, and you hear their conversations while cooking and play a 10-15 minute segment about their lives before arrival. The characters include two punk rock best friends who are constantly shushing each other about a secret, a couple with a newborn baby, a workaholic old man, and a peculiar and paranoid local.
Your story with Alex is eventually told, and I can’t really give any other details about the story, as it could spoil it. There is a mystery between the two and the diner itself. There are many first-person interactions with the people, but mostly on the sim side. Each person can order something off of the menu. The menu is accessible with a button that gives instructions on what items go with each order. Once you place a ticket down on the table, you can go about your business. It’s not very complicated, but the animations are detailed, and overhearing the chatter in the back as the story goes on is great. You can grab milk and ice cream to make a milkshake. Put everything in a blender, grab a glass, and prepare it for the customer. Some food dishes require placing a plate in the prepping area, such as hamburgers. Make sure you look at the ticket icon and see whether they want cheese or not. You can grill, make pancakes, give whiskey shots and coffee, and clean and put away the dishes. That includes putting back ingredients like milk and frozen french fries. This isn’t very deep, and only during a few moments will you have many orders, but there’s no rush. There is no time limit on the game.
You will eventually prepare every type of item by the end of the game, but that’s okay. There’s just enough here for the 2- to 3-hour story, and by then I felt like if I had to prepare more, it would become tedious. There are a few other mini-games such as shooting with a gun during a couple of segments and painting a room, but they don’t overstay their welcome and are relevant to the story. I did find one particular area in the game that really drove me nuts. You need to navigate a labyrinthine cave at a snail’s pace, and it took me nearly 30 minutes to find my way out. The story could have greatly benefited from reducing or eliminating this part of the game.
The visuals are great. Despite the PS1 style, the character models surpass the system’s capabilities in detail. The game is always dark, and you always wonder what’s just outside the window. The bizarre storm that’s the centerpiece of the story made me curious. The entire game made me curious, and I wanted it to go on further. The writing is so well done, as is the voice acting and characters. I was eager to delve deeper into these characters’ lives, yet what’s presented here fulfills its intended purpose and accomplishes the task. Both the resolution and each character’s conclusions are satisfying. It is very difficult to have such a good story for this short of a game.
No matter your Warhammer fandom, you’ve probably played or heard of one of the games. The games garnered a stellar reputation with the Dawn of War strategy games in the early 2000s for PC. These games established Relic’s reputation and were regarded as some of the top Real-Time Strategy games of their era. Over two decades later, the franchise is now open to any developer willing to produce a game. One of the few genres the series has touched is action, let alone a third-person shooter. Despite receiving positive reviews, the first Space Marine struggled with its marketing strategy. Some saw it as a Gears of War clone, while the game also had issues with repetition and being somewhat forgettable. Sadly, not much has changed with the sequel.
The original game appears to have taught the developers very little. While it was a solid foundation, work on it feels like it was completely forgotten about. While you do continue the story of Titus, the Ultra Marine from the original game, his backstory isn’t touched upon, and you must have extensive knowledge of the Space Marine faction to truly enjoy this game. The story lacks depth, providing minimal explanation of the events taking place. The game opens up with one of the few scripted scenes as you play as Titus, who is dropped down into a Tyranid-infested planet to deliver a megabomb. This is where the game’s combat is introduced, and sadly, everything the game has to offer.
The combat in Space Marine 2 is really satisfying despite how incredibly repetitive and shallow it is. The animations are great. The weapons are punchy and all have a personality. I actually chose different weapons for different situations that arose. Melee combat is the most satisfying, with Titus using one of four different melee weapons that are unlocked as you progress through the campaign. These weapons include the combat knife, chainsword, power sword, and thunder hammer. Each has different feelings and speed as well as damage dealt. There really is only a three-hit combo with no light or heavy attacks. There is a parry system in which a blue flash appears on an enemy that is about to attack you. If it’s a small enemy, Titus will grab them and instantly kill them. Larger enemies will just deal a lot of damage. When an enemy flashes red, you can perform an instant kill with a brutal attack. Sadly, the same animation repeats for each enemy, so it gets old pretty fast.
In terms of shooting, the camera placement bears a resemblance to Gears of War. However, the game lacks a cover system, a feature it could greatly benefit from, and the sheer number of enemies necessitates constant movement. When you deal enough damage, a red reticle may appear on the enemy, allowing you to press the fire button for an execution shot. The downside is that most weapons are ineffective at close range. There are no shotguns or any close-quarters weapons outside of the flamethrower. There are sniper rifles, which are useful in limited situations. You also have a secondary pistol, which I found nearly useless, as there is plenty of ammo everywhere for your main weapon. There are also throwables, such as regular grenades, sticky grenades, and a bomb that you can detonate at your command. The game really does not give you enough grenades despite their effectiveness in dispersing large crowds. As a result, the weapons don’t feel well-balanced.
The more passive parts of combat include your Ultra ability, which grants you more damage, and you heal as you deal damage. This trait only lasts maybe ten seconds but takes forever to build back up. On two levels, you get to use jump packs, which grant you dash and double jump abilities, as well as being able to charge up a ground pound, which does some nice AOE damage. As you can see, most of the game is spent just aimlessly wailing on hordes of enemies or shooting them when they are far away enough to matter. It’s a shame the gun balancing is so poor, as they feel excellent to use. Instead of throwing masses of enemies at you, I wish they spent more time making the enemies more unique and worthwhile, like in Gears of War, which would enhance the gameplay experience. You also only get two different enemy types. The first half of the game sees the same few Tyranid types, and then the final half is only Chaos enemies, which are essentially just Space Marines. There are some sub-bosses, but they don’t provide much of a challenge, and there is only one for each enemy type. The Tyranid Carnifex and the Chaos Helbrutes. There are a couple of main boss fights, and they are the only real challenge in the game.
The entire game is fairly easy. I rarely died, and while the game itself is well paced, the level design is rather boring and uninspired. You will sprint down the same corridors and hallways just to press a button to open a big door to sprint down more hallways to shoot out in a large open area, which all look the same. Some indoor areas, particularly your main base, are detailed. Despite all of this effort, the actual layout of the levels is just boring. Back at base, you won’t see much change either. You will receive some speeches from the chaplain; you can visit the armory, but there’s nothing really here. You can’t unlock new appearances, and you can only select your loadout based on weapons you have already unlocked. Additionally, the base involves running through hallways and using elevators to navigate between levels. This terminal also allows you to select your co-op missions.
The multiplayer itself won’t last long for most people. Most of the fun in PvE comes from doing the co-op side missions. The PvP features a limited number of maps, each with a rudimentary layout that doesn’t inspire much planning or strategy. With no cover system, players are just running around shooting and whacking at each other, which isn’t very fun. I found myself playing multiplayer for a couple of hours and never had the desire to go back. Once you complete the campaign, there’s also no reason to go back. I really only recommend buying this game on a steep sale.
As it stands, Space Marine 2 didn’t learn much from what people critiqued the first game for. While the combat is crunchy, fluid, and violent, it’s very shallow, leaving you with repetitive gameplay. The same two enemy factions have the same type of enemies, so the entire game just gets boring rapidly. While the weapons feel enjoyable to shoot, they’re not well balanced, and the lack of a cover system makes strategizing your weapons almost meaningless. Despite the game’s impressive visuals and meticulous attention to detail, the level design remains uninteresting. Despite the excellent voice acting, the story lacks depth, and unless you possess a deep understanding of the Space Marine faction, you won’t derive much enjoyment from this game. That includes the passable multiplayer.
Gorogoa is a puzzle game I have avoided for years. All for two reasons: It’s incredibly short, and I thought the game would be so abstract that it would be extremely obtuse and difficult to play. I was mistaken, indeed. Gorogoa only takes 90 minutes to 2 hours to complete depending on how stumped you get. The first two chapters of the game ease you into the concept of the entire thing. The story primarily involves following a boy during wartime as he collects different colored fruit to complete an artistic masterpiece. At least that was my interpretation of the story. There isn’t a single piece of written dialogue in the game, so you must use your imagination to get the story across.
You have four tiles you can move pieces around on. Each tile is a moving picture. An hourglass icon will appear when an animation is playing, indicating that you cannot interact until the animation concludes. You can then click the tile, and blue flashes will appear over the part you can interact with. You can then zoom into the area, and occasionally you can zoom in multiple times, altering the perspective of the tile. Many times you need to find a “frame” to pull out of the tile and put to the side. Usually, another tile lies beneath this frame, requiring you to zoom out to reveal another puzzle piece. Occasionally you can pull multiple “frames” from the same tile and then zoom out and around on the frames as well. This procedure seems confusing in writing, but in practice it works really well. This reminds me of games such as echochrome, which challenge your perspective and encourage unconventional thinking.
Some puzzles will require you to move the boy from one frame to another. You can usually guess which one by matching the surroundings around the boy as he walks down a staircase. A doorframe might be the “frame” you pulled, and you need to zoom in and out of the frame the boy is in to figure out where to put the doorframes so he can continue towards the fruit. There are some puzzles in which you need to have an object interact with multiple frames, such as a box of rocks needing to be turned into a giant boulder to break glass. Perspective comes into play when matching tiles to determine which way the boulder should go. In chapters four and five the scenario gets more complicated with the need to rotate tiles, and you have several areas you can zoom in and out of in a single frame.
You get a lot of Eureka! moments if you just zoom around and fiddle around a bit. A couple of times, I understood the concept or knew the goal, but reaching it was challenging. I won’t blame the game for this, as it could just be my thinking, as these puzzles are very well designed and extremely clever in using perspective. I couldn’t find much to really nitpick at apart from the rotation animations need to fully play out before you can zoom in and out. I wish there was a skip animation button to expedite the tile rotations, enabling me to solve the puzzle before losing my focus. I found that the music stopped a little too frequently, and while it was good, I don’t quite understand why this was the case.
The artwork is fantastic, and the game is one of those games that feels like interactive art. The colors really pop on OLED displays, and I was surprised at how well this game scaled from a small screen to an ultrawide monitor. While the playspace is just a 4:3 box for the four tiles, the space around it has been scaled out to accommodate the empty screen space. The space it utilized resembled a sheet of paper. I was also surprised at how well the controls worked, from a touch screen to a touchpad to a mouse. However, this is a game that will not work with traditional controllers. There’s too much sliding around the tiles, and this would get frustrating quickly.
As it stands, Gorogoa is a gorgeous and clever puzzle game with lovely ambient music and enough puzzles to really make you think; however, basic logic will give you that Eureka moment and give you just enough of a serotonin hit to keep going. Though the game ends too quickly, it’s a great work of art that puzzle fans should play.
There are many games these days trying to bring back the nostalgic feeling of Nintendo 64 adventure titles, and many of them don’t quite pull it off. There’s a reason why we have moved away from collect-a-thon games such as Banjo Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64. While the worlds may be charming, the characters fun, and the visuals cute, the overall gameplay loop can feel tedious and sometimes boring. Tiny Terry tries to bring back that type of game with a large open map and things to discover but ends up feeling like a chore very early on. Unless you specifically like this type of game, then there isn’t anything here for you.
There are modern games that do these tasks well. Games like A Short Hike make the gameplay loop of collecting and finding things appealing and fun. Tiny Terry starts out by just dumping the player into the world with just a couple of objectives. This is also fine, as talking to people can also give you more objectives. The issue lies within traversing the world, the mechanics, controls, and some of the objectives being very obtuse. The overall humor of the game is fine, but nothing noteworthy attempting to emulate a specific style. Terry wants a car only to go to space. Someone built a highway to space, but no one knows why. He goes to an unemployment center where they lend him a car. It’s your job to find enough junk in the world to upgrade Terry’s turbo booster eight times to make it to space.
Objectives are mostly fetch quests. You must bring someone who has stolen a car to earn cash. That cash can be given to someone else to fulfill an objective, which in turn gives you a location on your map to dig up a trash can that has 100 junk in it. Each upgrade costs 150. However, to dig up that trash can, you need the shovel. Do you understand the direction I’m taking with this? There’s a lot of leading on with objectives. You need this object to complete this objective to obtain this amount of an item to finish another objective. The process can get tedious and frustrating. Finding a way to grind out cash to also acquire other items to allow access to different areas can feel like you aren’t accomplishing anything. You’re always fighting between not having enough cash to find more junk and vise versa. You also can’t unlock fast travel until you have upgraded your car seven times. By then, you’ve nearly completed the game.
I found that the vehicle physics are annoying. Cars get stuck effortlessly and will clip into objects, and you can’t get out of it. I found it faster to run through most of the map, but it’s laid out in a very frustrating way. To run or drive, you must follow the road loop around since there are no shortcuts. Elevators can take you higher. Going from one end of the map to another and back again to finish an objective gets very tedious. 8 hours of this is infuriating, and some people might want to quit. Sadly, the game world has nothing to offer. There are only a few key characters to interact with, no mini-games, no varied objectives, and nothing remotely enjoyable to do other than grinding cash and junk in tedious and roundabout ways.
There are a few things you can spend your cash on, like a couple of food items and silly hats, but the cash is in such short supply; why would you waste it on these things? They don’t accomplish anything. There is no health bar, no combat, and you cannot sustain any injuries. You can use the lead pipe to whack NPCs for cash or steal cars. You also have to use it as a double jump by swinging the pipe after jumping to get extra height. Why not implement a traditional double jump? I found the fundamental parts of Tiny Terry to feel frustrating and cumbersome rather than fun and engaging. It felt like the game was always fighting against me.
Overall, Tiny Terry’s fun premise and peculiar sense of humor fall short of its potential. The gameplay loop feels frustrating and tedious, the objectives constantly loop around to nowhere, and the map isn’t fun to explore. The only redeeming value is if you like this exact type of game. Early 3D adventure games can be frustrating and slightly grindy, but in the past, the worlds and characters were enjoyable and engaging. This is a very forgettable game with visuals that don’t feel like anything special. Tiny Terry doesn’t have standout features. It’s fine. Just fine.
The Dread X series is a great idea. Get a bunch of indie developers together to create some short horror experiences and put it all together in some weird hub. Each game is completely different and offers brand new experiences, but I’m starting to see that the series is running out of ideas. The main hub this time around is a kids birthday center called Outpost 3000. It’s space- and alien-themed and full of 90’s cheesy goodness. I appreciate the varied areas you can go into, and the games this time are unlocked by finding 12 different presents and bringing them back to your table. You can then choose one of twelve games to unlock with the present represented as candles on your birthday cake. When you unlock a new area in the center, you get a comic book panel.
Discovering the center is probably the most fun the game has to offer. There are some puzzles, chase sequences, and light exploration, but nothing too crazy. These areas range from a locker room, kitchen, animatronic stage, movie theater, ball pit, and many other birthday play center areas. There’s a monster that chases you through most of it in certain areas, and this doesn’t prove to be much of a challenge. The game controls like any other low-budget asset flip Unity/Unreal Engine FPS game and looks the part too. The graphics are very early 2010s or Unreal Engine 3 era feeling. Lots of shiny surfaces, baked lighting that’s too bright, bloom, etc. While it gives off a cheesy vibe, I would have liked to see this series move a bit further ahead in the tech department.
Of course, I will do mini-reviews for all twelve games. I will give each game a rating out of 5.
Ludomalica—This is a board game where you play in the first person. You are in your bedroom, and there seems to be a family member haunting the house. When you roll the dice and you land on a question mark space, the ghost will appear somewhere in the house. You must have all lights off in all rooms and all doors closed. The game has a limited duration and follows a predetermined script. Eventually the house opens up more with different floors and rooms. The entity must not capture you, or it will send you back to your room. Overall, the atmosphere is really intense, and I felt reluctant to go outside of my room and close all the doors. It gives off the memories of turning on all the lights while going to the bathroom at night as a kid. – 3.5/5
Resver – This is a first-person walking simulator that just doesn’t make any sense. Everything is presented in black and white, and as you move forward, text appears, seemingly attempting to explain a narrative. It honestly made no sense outside of having the moral idea of not doing drugs and the impact they can have on you. It seems this is some sort of drug ring thing. I honestly have no idea. The game is about 20 minutes long, and outside of the visual trip, there’s not much here. – 2/5
We Never Left – This is about a video game developer with psychosis who is inside his own text adventure game. We saw something like this in Stories Untold. The atmosphere and tension here are done really well, except I found the tape hunting to be quite tedious and annoying. The visuals are a bit headache-inducing too. These are PS1-style graphics, but with some sort of filter over them, and they just don’t look that great. I found the story to be pretty intense, and the voiced lines were a plus. 3.5/5
Interim-This is a weird one, but in some ways it’s good. The game features a real-life actor superimposed in front of it, similar to older FMV games of the mid-90s. You are an intern who seems to be on some sort of reality TV episode. It’s really odd, makes no sense, and the visuals are really weird, but not always in a good way. Sometimes it’s confusing where to go, and the game soft-locked on me a couple of times for no reason. It’s over in about 20 minutes, but what’s here is mostly entertaining. However, it doesn’t contain any frightening elements. 2.5/5
Beyond the Curtain – This is a weird walking simulator that is very repetitive and has almost no tension. You are an actor in a play and seem to have some sort of phobia of puppets. You walk around an endless backstage tunnel, and I mean seemingly endless. The scenery never changes, and all you need to do is walk around puppets holding knives so they don’t stab you. There’s a final area with some sort of worm creature, and that’s about it. The puppets are always following you, and you need to make sure you constantly look back at them to gain some distance. The game lacks scariness and is excessively drawn out, leaving no clear sense of purpose. This game is likely to rank among the weakest of its kind. 1.5/5
The Book of Blood – This is by far the best game in the package. This is a full-on stalker game set in a fairground. There is a lot of occult discovery, and you accidentally end up in one and need to get out. You have a book that you need to solve puzzles in. You need to go out and gather supplies to complete the ritual, and every so often a strange masked man will try to kill you. Both trailer doors must be locked at all times, and sometimes the power will go out and obscure the book. Next, you must locate the numbered breakers and reset them. Run around too much, and the masked man will find you. You need to sneak around and get everything turned back on. You can also pop out the two windows to see if the man is near your trailer. Once you hear him knock, you need to quickly check the locks on your doors. This game is really intense and actually quite scary at times. The book puzzles require a significant learning curve to master, but once you do, they can be quite enjoyable. 4/5
KARAO – This game is rather strange, and while one of the most surreal, it just doesn’t make sense. This is a PS1-style horror title in which you run around a linear path trying to find a way to open doors. You get a shotgun and can shoot things, and this is one of the longer games along with The Book of Blood. The path is super linear here, and you need to talk to people and listen to their abstract dialogue to also get codes to open gates and doors. The visuals are more on the interesting side, but this is another game with PS1 graphics and a weird filter on top that doesn’t seem very appealing. 2.5/5
Spirit Guardian – Probably one of my least favorite games. This is a terribly designed first-person haunted school walking simulator. The game is around 15 to 20 minutes long and has a cheesy “Nanny” haunting the school inside. You are following the instructions of a little boy. He tells you to place blocks on a table, play hide and seek, and carefully walk eggs on a spoon. Physics are terrible; the flashlight works well, but if you’re caught, your items are taken and may be in a dark locker where you can’t find them. I found the game just incredibly tedious, difficult to control, and completely uninteresting. 0.5/5
HUNSVOTTI – This is one of the oddest games in here, but also the ugliest and hardest to control. Rather than a PS1 aesthetic, this game goes for an N64 one, and boy, does this look ugly. The polygonal, poorly animated figures and stiff controls certainly bring back memories of some of the worst games on that system. You are a little boy in a Dutch festival called HUNSVOTTI. Every character is in a canned animation, and you must find flowers without bumping into anyone. The more you do, the faster the animations are, and eventually they will all come after you, and you still have to find flowers. After finding all the flowers and dropping them into the well, you become a large demon that can kill the villagers. It’s very odd and not really in a good way. 1/5
Gallerie – This game has one of the coolest concepts, 3D binaural audio, to use ASMR voice lines to add atmosphere for the player, but it just comes across as mostly annoying. While the spoken words are fine, the gibberish later is just the weird clicking and smacking that people do in the ASMR videos, and I can’t stand that. You are tasked with destroying the world, and some girl is angry, and you need to interpret what she is saying to you via a legend. There are three levels here, each more annoying than the next. You must keep away from an entity that stalks you, and when you look at it, similar to Beyond the Curtain, it stops moving for a few minutes. You need to find demon paintings and enter the QTE on screen before it attacks you. The second level is more of the same, but the third is the worst with leapfrogging of batteries that need to be charged. In the meantime, you are backtracking and running around a confusing level. The visuals are weird, but disorienting and not pleasant in the slightest. – 2/5
Vestige – This is another PS1-style game, but you are a kid who is discovering his old PS1 games, but they are haunted. Sadly, you end up playing this game, and it is just a terrible dirt racing game similar to Motocross Madness with terrible controls and physics. You walk around your house trying to advance the plot a bit. Overall, the game isn’t memorable or captivating in the slightest. The atmosphere is a bit tense, but nothing here is worthwhile. 1.5/5
Rotten Stigma – Another poorly implemented PS1-style game with Unreal Engine asset flip vibes. You play as a generic bald-headed man in a green shirt who wanders around what seems to be a recreational center. You get a pistol and a lead pipe as a weapon and have to fend off weird bipedal creatures. You just read notes from Alex to solve a couple of puzzles that aren’t challenging at all. Once you wind your way around the area, collect a few items and keys, and shoot some bad guys, you end up at the end of the story in about 20 minutes. The game is incredibly ugly, clunky, and uninteresting. There’s a bit of atmospheric tension due to the dark lighting and sounds. There’s one particular scene that I enjoyed, but nothing was expanded upon. It involves a crying body bag and a bathroom. The game is obviously inspired by Silent Hill but doesn’t even come close. 1.5/5
Average Score: 2/5
It’s clear that the collection here isn’t quality but quantity. Most of these games are just ideas for what could be larger games, but those ideas still aren’t great. Many of these games are clunky, ugly, have headache-inducing visuals, nauseating cameras, obtuse puzzles, or have atmospheres that are slightly creepy but don’t go very far. The Outpost 3000 hub is more entertaining than any of these games. Many games also have asset flip vibes, don’t have outstanding resolutions, and show up stretched out on higher resolution screens or have visual bugs. Nothing here is fantastic or stands out much. The Book of the Blood is the most solid of these games, and that’s still not saying much. I’m glad most of these games are around 20 minutes long. Any longer, and I will not finish them. Overall, Dread X Collection 5 is the weakest one I have played thus far. This doesn’t feel like a collection of quality at all. Nothing here makes me want to seek out these developers and see what they have to offer, unlike past games. I feel like this series needs to go more on the mini-game route rather than full-on games or be stricter in their quality.
Do you remember the days you were a kid and went on adventures outside? The days you would be outside from dusk to dawn playing too far away from home and weren’t quite sure you’d find your way back, but kept going anyways? That’s the feeling of adventure you get from Röki. The game is much longer than most point-and-click adventures, taking around 8 hours to complete. This allows for a better and deeper story to unfold. While the overarching story isn’t anything super special, the relationship between Tove (the girl) and Lars (her little brother) and their father is rather deep, and you can feel the tight relationship and love this family has.
The game is a more open adventure title. Rather than being completely linear, you can fast-travel between several areas to find objects and solve riddles. The game’s openness necessitates the ability to press the left stick for interactive objects to flash. Just like any adventure title, you need to find objects to advance the story, and due to the openness, some puzzles might take a couple of hours before you eventually get all the parts to solve them. This also leads to the most frustrating thing about the game. If you miss an item for a puzzle, you have to figure out where it is. As the game opens up, this can lead to tedious backtracking and flashing all the objects on the screen and running around until you figure out what you missed. Frequently, this occurred due to the game’s lack of clear instructions or tracking features. The journal is rather useless and holds a map and various optional items you can pick up as collectibles.
Tove can run by holding down a button, and she can interact with objects. Outside of this, there isn’t much to the controls. She can climb walls and ladders, but you’re mostly just interacting with things. I found some of the puzzles quite fun, intuitive, and clever. The game experiments with ideas such as controlling two characters (swapping) and using a couple of different objects to complete puzzles and unlock new areas. There are giant beasts that need to be defeated and tamed. The game is based around Norse mythology, so you will encounter many beasts from this lore.
Despite the game’s lack of voice-acting, the writing conveys the characters’ emotions. Every so often the game will cut to a long scene and then give you control back. There aren’t many cutscenes in the game, but despite the length, the game never felt tedious or boring. I wish there was less need for backtracking. Sure, fast travel is helpful, but you still have to run towards an area, climb, or enter it, and some parts of the game can be really tedious to get to. You can’t skip climbing segments. Climbing dominates some later puzzle areas, leading to frustration. I spent more time waiting for animations to finish than actually solving the puzzle.
The visuals are really nice, but this visual style is something we are seeing a lot of, and I don’t find it the most appealing. The use of paper cut-out/flat texture with solid colors is a common visual style. It works, but I would like to see something more original. The music creates a captivating atmosphere, and certain tracks evoke strong emotions during specific scenes. I found the whimsy of the beasts and monsters to be really charming, and this is where the art style worked the best. The game has a lot of whites and grays (stones) due to the entire thing being set in the winter. There’s not much variation in environments.
Overall, Röki is a surprisingly lengthy but well-built adventure title. There are a lot of puzzles and rooms, and the pacing is great. I didn’t really want to put the game down…until something tedious came up, like missing a single object for a puzzle, and I had to spend 20–30 minutes hunting it down. This happened far too frequently. This phenomenon occurred at least once with each major puzzle. If you love Norse mythology or just want a touching story about family, then this is for you.
Nobody wants to die. That’s a statement that anyone can understand. What if you had the ability to purchase a new body and continuously inject your conscience into a new one? This is the premise of Nobody Wants to Die. A detective noir game set in a dystopian New York in 2239 where flying vehicles exist, we are now in a caste system, and capitalism has won. As suspended detective James Karra, you embark on an investigation into the suspected murder of a large corpo boss. Your partner, Sarah, is in your earpiece.
There isn’t much exploration in this game, and it’s not a first-person shooter. Although the entire game takes place in first person, it remains a pure adventure title. The game masterfully constructs this dystopian future, immersing the entire experience in the art deco Americana of the 1930s. James has a lot of internal problems, and due to being on his fifth body, he has a lot of problems from his 100 years on this planet. The better shape a body is in, the more it costs. However, there’s something dark happening. The game also does a fantastic job explaining how you can recreate crime scenes and explains a person’s ichorite, which is what’s used to transfer a person into a new body.
That’s the majority of the gameplay. The crime scenes are pieced together like mysteries through the Replicator. This allows you to fast forward and rewind scenes as you piece them together. You have to walk around and find the prompts to advance the puzzle to the next piece. There are also other tools like the X-ray wand and UV lamp. You use these to see through objects and then detect fluids. You are always swapping back and forth between the two. However, the puzzles are very linear and don’t require any brain power to solve, but they are still fun. Many of the crime scenes are really interesting to solve, as you can draw your own conclusions and see what the outcome ends up being. There are three main crimes in the game, and they take quite a bit to go through. It’s a lot of fun seeing everything kind of come together and hearing Sarah and James analyze everything to come to a conclusion. When you get back to your apartment, you can put down objects that are in place for clues that you found, and you need to string everything together to come up with a final conclusion. Moreover, it’s a straightforward process.
Outside of the main crime scenes, there are a couple of moments in James’ apartment. It gives you a glimpse of how awful living conditions are in the future. Everyone shares bathrooms and the government logs everything they do. You have to see a psychologist for life after transferring to a new body for the first time. The ads, propaganda, and everything in between are done so well for how little you can explore this game. While the characters aren’t very deep or memorable, they help carry the story along enough to stay interested. I’m sorry, but the story is too short to remember. The setting and world are more interesting. The game also has dialogue choices that determine which ending you get. Some options will have locks on them, meaning you need to have changed your path prior to the current option. The way you respond to Sarah or act at a crime scene (like deciding to steal something for yourself) can get you in trouble if you’re not careful. The execution of the story is commendable, and as the story progressed, I found myself grateful for the choices I made that allowed me to navigate through certain scenes.
The visuals are rather appealing for an indie title. Lighting is great, art deco is beautiful, and vehicle and object designs are fun. The game is at least well paced, and I didn’t want to put it down. The voice acting is outstanding too, and there are just enough little twists and turns to keep you glued to the screen. There isn’t much to hate here outside of easy puzzles and lack of exploration. I honestly wouldn’t mind another game in this world and have the lore expanded upon.
This keyboard features an additional OLED screen. There’s also a premium price tag for this as well as less customizability. I have never owned any SteelSeries products outside of an RGB mouse mat years ago. The packaging was decent, nothing special, and it came with a keycap puller, a USB-C cable, and a USB-C dongle, which was nice. The keyboard also works with Bluetooth, but the software has limitations in this mode. Once I got the keyboard out and the palm rest, I was surprised at how comfortable it was to type on. The biggest gimmick is the screen and their Omnipoint actuation adjustability to change the sensitivity of key presses. No, this isn’t like a DualSense controller in which your key switches get “harder,” but they just become more or less sensitive and register with a stronger keypress or light press. It’s a neat feature, but mostly unnecessary.
The Omnipoint 3.0 switches felt good to type on, and the foam mod at the bottom of the PCB prevents any ping. I did think the switches lacked a more tactile feel than I’d like, but that’s personal preference. The keyboard itself is unremarkable looks-wise. This keyboard appears to be a standard black “gamer” keyboard, complete with RGB illumination. The black and white two-line OLED display is the only feature that will draw your attention. The display is rather primitive for being OLED and honestly doesn’t do much. Outside of showing your actuation meter, PC temp, GIF animations, and a few app integrations like Tidal (not official Spotify support), there’s not much here. I had the most fun with the GIF animations, but the limited display can’t show anything with detail. You need very chunky 8- or 16-bit graphics for anything to show up well. There isn’t a dedicated repository for GIF animations, with the exception of an Imgur album containing approximately 60 animations that someone has created. Any other support requires using their GameSense SDK, which no one has really made anything for. One individual has created a GameSense Essentials app on GitHub, which merely displays Spotify artist and song information along with a clock. The lack of support is really sad.
I did like the power-saving features, such as the OLED and lights turning off after a certain amount of idle time. However, even with this, the battery went down to 50% in just a few hours of use. You’re lucky if you will get 8-10 hours before the battery dies. This was achieved while using the wireless mode, not Bluetooth. Sadly, the SteelSeries Engine app works fine but isn’t as flashy or robust as Logitech or Razer’s offerings, but at least it works. I found making macros and changing the settings of the actuation rather cumbersome due to flipping through so many screens. The OLED screen options are pitiful, and even just navigating the screen is a chore. There’s a tiny scroll wheel and a button. With the limited app support, this screen doesn’t offer much beyond being there just for the sake of it.
Sadly, this keyboard doesn’t support hot-swappable switches. They are soldered on and only support the Omnipoint switches thanks to the actuation and Rapid Trigger gimmick. This also supports only a select few keys. If you need different actuation on switches, you are better off just buying a custom keyboard with the switches you really want in them. Relying on software drive actuation just isn’t the same. It can come off as just unresponsive to some people. I honestly didn’t notice much of a difference outside of the hardest of key presses. There’s not much play in between. Adjusting individual key actuation is useful for WASD keys or harder keys. There is also a feature to prevent nearby keys from being accidentally pressed.
Overall, an underutilized OLED screen and gimmicky, non-replaceable switches contribute to the keyboard’s premium top-tier price. The keyboard’s overall design is a classic black “gamer” keyboard featuring RGB lighting. The software is decent and usable, but the actuation force and rapid triggers feel like gimmicks outside of specific use cases. The keys feel nice, and the sound is dampened, and the palm rest is nice, but overall, you’re better off spending the $270 on a custom keyboard.
I absolutely love how the human mind works. It is fascinating how the human mind can break, repair itself, and affect the body and psyche in ways we still don’t fully understand. The Town of Light explores these ideas with a real-life case. The game is set in a hospital in Tuscany, Italy, called the Ospedale Psichiatrico di Volterra. You play as a woman named Renee who seems to be coming back to this hospital and reliving her experience here. The game’s unsettling ambient audio and flashbacks of dark and disturbing sketches are fantastic to experience.
Sadly, that’s the only enjoyable part of the game. The entire game has an incredibly slow pace and the usual obscure and abstract way of finding your way around and figuring out what to do. There are way too many doors to open, and there are too many spaces to explore with nothing in them. This hospital is two stories and quite large. With the slow walking pace, I just wanted to experience the story and move on. You don’t know you’re heading in the right direction until Renee continues narrating the story or a flashback happens. These flashbacks are either pencil sketches or full-on cutscenes. If you press the back button, some chapters will have Renee tell you where to go; however, everything is in Italian, so unless you pull up a translator or can kind of figure out prefixes and suffixes of words, you might get lost based on the signs.
There are eight diary pages to collect and find. These are highlighted notebooks in certain rooms, and I suggest getting them all. The notebook is an insightful dive into the mind of those that are mentally ill and have various psychological diseases. The sketches are haunting and beautifully done. The best part of the game is the narrations of the various hospital records you must find to advance the story. The entire tale of Renee and her fellow patients is fascinating, haunting, and quite disturbing. It also shows how awful the healthcare, especially mental healthcare, was in the 40s and 50s in not just Europe, but all over the world. I work as a nurse myself in a hospital, and it’s insane to know that our current modern way of doing healthcare (humanely) is very recent. Like the last 25 years, recent.
I also have to give credit to the developers for accurately portraying a decaying asylum. It looks and sounds just like you would find one in real life. I highly recommend watching The Proper People on YouTube, who are the best urban explorers out there. They have visited asylums in Italy, and the building is very reminiscent of how they stand today. The peeling paint, depressing color scheme, abandoned, rusting bed and wheelchairs, and old and mysterious medical equipment that look like torture devices (some were). Despite all of this, however, the game is very boring and ugly to look at. Even for 2016, the game is teetering on the border of asset-flippy territory. It just looks so generic and low-budget despite some decent lighting effects.
The voice acting is very well done, and the overall picture you walk away with is the narrative of mental health in general and how people are taken advantage of back in the day. The game also explores how orderlies raped and molested the women and lied and were believed. The doctors literally got away with murder, and families were lied to and betrayed without ever knowing it. Thankfully, this is all in the past, but the hundreds of thousands of victims who died and suffered under the guise of humane healthcare is a sad story and something worth discussing even today.
I personally love cyberpunk settings. I particularly enjoy cyberpunk settings that delve into the mental states of individuals with cybernetics and explore the workings of such a world. Psychroma explores the idea of secret human experimentation and how it can affect and break the human psyche. The overall story itself is pretty good, but getting there feels like a chore. The story is broken up quite a bit and feels confusing to piece together through most of the game. A lot of backstory is told through computer logs that you must find hidden throughout the house. You play as a cyborg/human experiment named Haze. The atmosphere is quite unsettling. Outside, acid rain falls down from the sky, eating away at the corrugated steel walls and rebar. The mystery of the house and the haunting past is what you’re uncovering.
This is a side-scroller adventure title, so there’s no combat here. You have a limited inventory system and must interact with objects until things happen, hidden passages open, and new doors unlock so you can get that next item to advance through the story again. This is sadly very obtuse and obscure. Many times I ran around all seven floors and clicked on everything only to discover I had to use an altar to go back in the past and unlock something new. Usually info like a passcode you need for a new door. There are three altars in the game, and each one has a part of the house locked off and has isolated memories. You must find cards for housemates and determine their past and role in the experiments.
I don’t want to dwell too much on the story since that will spoil the game, but the fullscreen stills and artwork are fantastically drawn. The haunting horror and torture of the children here and various subjects is gruesome. There’s quite a bit of gore here, but what fascinates me is cyborg gore and how they work medically. I will only say that the premise of the game is that there’s something sinister going on in the house, and a member of it might be a creep. Haze gets suspicious early on, but who it is and why is what you need to discover. There are a couple of plot twists, and the story is good once you can piece it together and make sense of it. I wanted to know a bit more about the character’s past, but the game is only 2-3 hours long, so there’s not a lot of time for character building.
I honestly just didn’t like the aimless wandering, and the objective in the menu screen doesn’t help at all. I was able to figure out a good portion of the game by myself, but I got to a few spots where I felt completely stuck, and the constant backtracking and running around room after room trying to find that one spot I missed drove me nuts. My strategy of turning on the lights in rooms I’d been in didn’t help if I missed an object or didn’t interact with it correctly. If the game had a map system with a flashing blip or something to indicate your floor, it would have been more fun.
As it stands, Psychroma does a great job giving up a disturbing cyberpunk mystery of hospitalization, experimentation, and creepy family values. The game dives into gender identity a bit (that’s going to piss some snowflakes off) and self-discovery. I felt the overall story was pretty good, the artwork was fantastic, and the atmosphere was quite haunting and depressing, but the actual gameplay held everything back some. The constant backtracking and item hunting will put a lot of players off.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Clearly you have been blocking everything you or haven't played the game at all. Maybe pay attention to the story…