AliPMcG

Witcher 3 has many problems, yet I've still somehow played it for over 200 hours and gone through the story twice. It looks nice, even on Switch with the frequent framerate drops, and the world feels alive. The combat can be quite satisfying and elegant, especially against human foes, but it can also be incredibly annoying, with occasional insta-kill hits apparently coming out of nowhere. The story is long but very melodramatic and average, and really just provides padding for the boss fights. There are some amusing 'romance' (i.e. sex) scenes which are triggered by you choosing the right dialogue options, but it was often hard to know what was the right thing to say. At one point I 'achieved' a sex scene with a female character, then immediately afterwards said the wrong thing and triggered a fight to the death with her, lol. The main thrust of the story is that witcher Geralt is searching for Ciri, a young witcher with magical powers whom The Wild Hunt want to kidnap or kill. For some short parts of the game you play as Ciri, during which you don't have any of the potions or abilities that you've collected as Geralt, and these Ciri sections feel clumsy, unbalanced and unfinished. Sometimes Ciri can slice through enemies like a hot knife through butter, sometimes not. Sometimes her magic amulet ability works, sometimes not. When Ciri loses health, the only way to get it back is to wait for the health bar to refill, which is painfully slow. There are some boss fights as Ciri that are made incredibly hard by the fact you haven't really had a chance to learn how to play as her, and every time you die you are subjected to interminable loading screens. The autosave system seemed to break at some point, and there are long sections in which you can't save, so I had to tediously replay some parts of the game a few times because I would get to a Ciri section and just die from accidentally rushing off a roof or from one of those unexpected insta-kills. There are some plain unfair fights in which you take control after a cutscene, only to be hit with an overpowered attack that will take most of your health and which you can't avoid, and then it's back to the loading screen. The game also suffers from random crashes which make regular saving essential. Witcher 3 is brain-off fantasy fun in the manner of low-budget Game of Thrones, and the combat is repetitive but mostly good enough to keep you coming back. Don't expect to get invested in the story, and be prepared to yell at the screen in frustration now and then.

HoPiKo is a fun little 'hardcore-casual' game with great music, in which you blast through stages (or 'Runs') very quickly, precision and timing being the key. The Runs are broken down into 5 levels apiece, and to progress to the next Run you have to get through all 5 levels without dying. Unfortunately it's let down by a baffling design choice that makes it harder than it needs to be, and sometimes makes success feel more down to luck than skill. Your character can only jump from platform to platform, which he can do either perpendicularly (with a button press), or at an angle that you set with the analogue stick. To perform an angled jump, you point the stick where you want him to jump, and to trigger the jump, you release the stick. In practice, it is virtually impossible not to change the angle of the stick slightly as you lift your finger off it, so you lose all precision. I cannot understand why the angled jump isn't simply triggered by a button press - did no one find this infuriating during testing? To get to the 5th level in a Run and then die because you didn't go exactly where you were pointing, is controller-smashingly maddening.

For the price I paid for this game (approx $1) I think it's great. The puzzles are satisfying, the minimalist design is simple and the sound design is very nice. It's overall quite a soothing experience, if a fairly short one. My only criticism would be that there is no level-select screen; you have to step back one at a time through the puzzles you've completed.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is not terrible, but it's definitely only worth buying at a heavy discount. The cover-based combat is challenging and plentiful, and some of the levels are very atmospheric, but there are also constant irritations. Sneaking around knocking out guards one by one and hiding their bodies in the ventilation ducts is fun, as is watching enemies through the walls with your augmented vision and then popping out from behind cover to shoot them in the head. Alas, you have to trudge through lots and lots of tedious exposition to get to the fun bits. The protagonist, Adam Jensen, is humourless and unlikeable, as are all the other characters in the game, so it's hard to care about their interminable story. Although some of the voice acting is good, some of the writing is really quite bad and sometimes sounds suspiciously like it's been translated from another language, like when Jensen says that an incompetent gangster "can barely tie his own shoelaces without tripping all over himself". Characters are introduced with whom Jensen supposedly has a long history, but since we weren't there for that history, they all just come across as catty. There are some boss fights, but the bosses get no more than a cursory introduction, and most of the fights with them feel like a slog. The ending is very weak: choose one of 4 boring videos made up of cheap stock footage to watch, then credits. Character animations look good during combat, but up close all the character models resemble shiny plastic puppets and constantly flail their limbs unnervingly. Watching the death of one character (who we only met an hour previously, but who we're supposed to care about) was unintentionally hilarious, like a deleted scene from Team America. The technology of the game's world is strangely anachronistic. This game came out in 2011, but smartphones don't seem to feature in its vision of 2027. People are getting their bodies augmented and Jensen even has a constant audiovisual feed to his employers (although sometimes they sort of forget about this) but everyone, including Jensen, has to go to their desktop PC to read their emails, and lots of people don't bother locking their computers. People carry 'pocket secretaries' that are basically pagers and which hold a maximum of 4 messages on them, and everyone is constantly sending each other passwords and keycodes. There are old-timey news stands, but they dispense newspapers on LCD screens so... newspapers are like single-use iPads now? Homes and offices have computers that you can either hack into, or log into with passwords found on other computers or on those 'pocket secretaries'. These provide some backstory, but I soon stopped caring what was in them apart from door codes, which save you from having to hack locked doors. The hacking minigame is terrible, your success being far too heavily reliant on luck. The occasional 'Conversation' mini-game is also dull and confusing, and it's hard to know how much your choices actually affect the story, if at all. I've only played through DXHR once (which was enough), but I doubt that any of my choices could have made any difference to the overarching plot, driven as it is by decisions that Jensen makes with no input from the player. Sometimes it feels like the game is just messing with you. If you try using a takedown move on a boss, the boss will overpower and kill you. One cutscene clearly shows your aircraft's parachute fail to deploy and the aircraft crash into the sea, but you start the next section on the helipad anyway, with no mention of how you got out of the sea. You can drag unconscious guards around, contorting their ragdoll bodies to fit into ventilation ducts, and they won't wake up - but if one of their buddies comes and shakes them by the shoulder, they get right back up into the fray as if nothing happened, even if your non-lethal takedown clearly broke their arm. These ventilation ducts offer shortcuts around levels, which NPCs can neither enter nor comprehend; they will watch you go into one, fire at the vent you went into and then just assume you've gone, until you pop up at another vent and the peekaboo process starts again. Some things about the game just seem poorly implemented. For instance, it took me a while to realise that the (controller-only) quick-selection wheel highlights a primary weapon, a secondary weapon AND a consumable as you go round it, rather than just the one you end on - and accidentally drinking an alcoholic drink that temporarily blurs your vision can easily get you killed. Dead and unconscious bodies remain searchable even after you have looted them, meaning that if you take down a group of enemies their bodies can cover up weapons that they drop, preventing you from picking the weapons up without laboriously rearranging the bodies. It's strange design choices like that, that make the game feel rushed and untested, even 10 years after its release.

The MC Escher-esque artwork in The Bridge is very pretty, and the idea of setting a puzzle game inside his drawings is awesome, so it's a shame that playing The Bridge can be so soporific and unrewarding. The game suffers from absurdly long loading screens, the protagonist ambles everywhere at an infuriatingly leisurely pace, and the screen rotation mechanic is incredibly slow. There is a time-reversal mechanic that you use to fix death like in Braid, but it also feels slow. Puzzles start out promising, but get confusing once the game starts introducing complicated new mechanics without sufficiently explaining them (e.g. getting behind a curtain allows you to alter the direction of gravity for certain objects in the level or... something?). Puzzles are made very hard and frustrating by the slowness of everything. There is possibly some sort of story going on, but it's not clear what it is. I gave up on what I think was the last level, because I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to do, and it was taking forever to try out new solutions. I've gone back and tried again once or twice since then, but it's just too frustrating and I have no investment in the story.

I love Downwell, how it hits the perfect balance of simplicity, randomness and extreme difficulty to make it brutally punishing, but also really addictive. I'd had it on Steam for a couple of years before I got it on Switch, and I finally completed it on Switch after well over 100 hours of play across both platforms. It is a very hard game to beat, but I loved it even more when I discovered that the prize for beating it is that you unlock Hard Mode. Also I love the fact that the Switch version has a TATE mode. To be honest I don't understand how people can complain that this is a mobile game, when it feels to me like a textbook old-school arcade game. I wouldn't even want to play this with touchscreen controls - this game is worth buying a Nintendo Switch and a Flip Grip for!

Oxenfree could be described as a story-driven walking simulator, one that revolves around snappy dialogue, of which there is a lot. It's a very nice-looking game, with gorgeous background art and excellent animation of the 3D character models, and the voice acting is good, but there is no real gameplay to speak of, apart from making dialogue choices and tuning your radio to the right frequency in the right place. It's still engaging though, and does a good job of using jumpscares to illustrate to you (the player) what Alex (the protagonist) is experiencing. The game feels more like an interactive movie than a game, in that there is a story that unfolds linearly, and your contribution to this story amounts to walking to the next place and clicking on something. There's nothing wrong with that per se, and the game uses the time it takes you to walk to the next plot point to initiate conversations with the other characters. The problem comes when you want to go off-story to explore the island or look for the hidden radio signals that flesh out the plot, when it becomes painfully apparent just how slowly you navigate the circuitous environment. Some sort of fast-travel system would have been very welcome. It reminded me of a Joss Whedon teen movie with supernatural horror elements, right down to teenage characters being played by actors in their twenties or thirties. The characters all talk like sarcastic smartasses basically all the time, which makes sense at the start but which starts to grate, and which I thought undermined the disturbing life-and-death story. Your dialogue choices change how the other characters talk to you, but not the plot, except for the ending. I know this because I am on my third playthrough; without wanting to spoil it, the plot cleverly allows for replays to continue the story in a way that gives the player insights that the characters don't have. I found it quite frustrating how some dialogue choices you make seem to have much more significance than others - at the end there are summaries of the decisions you made, and some of these were choices I was not aware I'd made. Despite these complaints it's still a fun, short experience (3-4 hours if you just follow the plot), and I still enjoyed it enough to play all the way through it twice.

Bulb Boy is a beautiful and nauseating 2D point and click adventure game, from the Newgrounds/Flash school of adventure gaming. The game consists of a string of puzzles, passing each one progresses the story to the next, and there's no backtracking or inventory. Visually it's strongly reminiscent of South Park and Adventure Time, with The Binding of Isaac's orifice-fixated sensibilities. Its story is told without any dialogue, which can be quite powerful but also quite confusing. It's not really a 'horror' game beyond the first 15 minutes or so, although Bulb Boy looks terrified most of the time. The puzzles are all pretty straightforward but require trial and error, and this game has punishingly long reloading times. It takes up to 10 seconds between dying and restarting, and there are points where you can die easily within a few seconds over and over again, while you figure out what you're supposed to be doing. The final boss and the 'teeth' sections were infuriating for this. Puzzles essentially consist of going to a place and clicking on a thing, with some obstacles thrown in. The game doesn't give you much guidance, and there was one point where it took me a long time to realise that I needed to use the right stick, which I don't think was used again thereafter. At another point a puzzle broke, but I didn't know it was broken until I watched a walkthrough and saw what was supposed to be happening, so I had to quit and restart from the last checkpoint - that was annoying. Worth playing if it's really cheap and you don't mind cartoon turds.

Evoland 2 is a French JRPG with nice graphics, excellent music, an intensely uninteresting story about demons and time travel, and a lot of minigames to make it not look like a JRPG. Evoland 1 is really just a proof of concept with a flimsy story wrapped around it, so in a sense playing Evoland 1 takes some of the novelty out of Evoland 2. I found there to be way too much walking around talking to everyone to find the action to trigger the next bit of story, but this is a JRPG after all. I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to be doing a lot of the time to advance the story, and there's no way to replay dialogue or get a hint from your crew, so you can just end up wandering around for ages until you get frustrated and check a walkthrough. The minigames throughout Evoland 2 are of wildly different styles, and some of them work very well, but some of them really don't, and all of them would benefit from more on-screen prompts to let you know what is going on. There are countless bits that introduce a fun new mechanic out of nowhere, only to take it away just as you're starting to get the hang of it. The game loves to throw a new style at you and immediately test your ability to learn it with no introduction, sometimes forcing you to endure a cutscene over and over as you struggle to figure out what you are supposed to be doing. The majority of the minigames in Evoland 2 are only used at their specific point in the story. You can return to some side-scrolling sections, but they play exactly the same after completion - and once you restart one, you have to finish it again to get back to RPG mode. Some of the minigames feel unbalanced or even unfinished, like the Street Fighter and Double Dragon sections, which are best completed by mashing the same special attacks over and over again. I thought it was a shame that some of the better minigames (like the bullet-hell shooters and the XCOM section) weren't available as procedurally-generated games to come back to, to give Evoland 2 some replay value; it seems like a bit of a waste of all the work creating the content for each of these short sections. The game can be fun in certain parts, I just wish it had been at most half as long as it was, and only included the good parts. I also wish the writers had chosen a consistent tone and hadn't tried to be funny, because the dialogue is all over the place and the attempts at humour can be very jarring. Maybe it's a JRPG thing, but I found all the characters completely forgettable and annoying, and I was relieved when their interminable story was over. Another big mark against this game is its instability. I played this on Nintendo Switch and it crashed to the Home screen a few times due to getting confused about save files. Each time I was able to remedy it with some Google searches, but this really should not be happening on a Switch game.

Toby: The Secret Mine is obviously heavily 'inspired' by Limbo (same big-head art style, same puzzles, same lack of narrative), and if it was simply more of the same with a wider colour palette then that might have been OK, but unfortunately for Toby it doesn't stand up well next to Limbo. The puzzles aren't as intuitive as the ones it's apeing, and the movement feels sluggish in comparison. Toby: The Secret Mine has some nice parallax background art, but in the foreground it often doesn't distinguish sufficiently between solid barriers and decoration. Triggers for traps are also often practically invisible, which combined with the unclear terrain turns some levels into slogs of trial and error. Hit detection for arrows is broken in places. At one point an invisible trigger triggers some arrows to fire at me, and they kill me even if I am hiding behind a rock and none of them hit me. I eventually checked a Youtube walkthrough to see what I should do and I was doing the right thing, but this bug is apparently exclusive to the Switch port. Although the game looks pretty nice at times, it can't escape having a cartoony feel that doesn't suit the dark tone it's aiming for. The final boss battle attempts to have a heavy moral-choice conclusion, but there has been no characterisation up to this point, and the lack of dialogue just makes the endings appear comical rather than meaningful, like a bunch of adorable little teddy bears re-enacting the Salem witch trials. In short, if you've played Limbo then you'll notice all the bits that Toby copied from it, and if you haven't played Limbo then you should play Limbo instead of this.