Did-

Oh my Science. This game is amazing. The context, the environments, the physics, the story, the music, the graphical style, the level design, the game design, the freedom it gives. I loved everything. This game lets you explore the world how you want it. The initial objective is very quickly attained: land on the Moon. Then, you are on your own and you can go anywhere you want, and whatever your decision, you'll find something of interest and learn something new. In any case, you'll always have to go back and forth between planets to understand how they work and unveil their mysteries. Speaking of learning, it's the point of the game: to learn how it works, and what's the story behind it and its previous species. Everything is taught through the environment and text pieces from older civilizations. There are no upgrades or keys, only your knowledge will unlock new paths. Technically speaking, it's amazing. The whole solar system is one physics simulation, constantly running, wherever you are, whatever you do. All planets, every physics objects, is following the same principal physics rules. Even the Moon has a small effect on the Planet it’s orbiting around, and can even make you jump higher if it's above your. I got some rare freezes here and there, but otherwise everything runs smoothly. The world is satisfying to explore, times and times again, and I loved driving my ship and be able to land it anywhere I want. I left this solar system with the same feeling of awe I originally felt the first time I took off my native planet. This is one of the 10 best games I've ever played in my entire life, and I've played quite a bunch, over 750 games. This game is why I continue to play daily, to be amazed when one of those inspiring experiences pop up.

What if you could see where the enemies are going to hit before deciding your movements and actions in your favorite tactical-RPG? That’s the twist Into the Breach added to the tactical realm, and it’s brilliant. All enemy attacks are foreshadowed, and the goal is not to kill the enemy team as efficiently as possible, but more so being able to counteract their plans. Each turn is a small dynamic chess-like problem. You need to carefully study the environment, and where the enemies are targeting their attack. Then, respond accordingly, to minimise or preferably prevent their damages. Sometimes, it may seem impossible to prevent all damages, and when you finally see a possible solutions, you get a really cool epiphany or Eureka moment. Other times, you’re just dead, due of past choices. Because attacks are foreshadowed and everything during your turn is deterministic, there’s not much randomness in battles. Don’t get me wrong, there are still a lot of random elements, but most of them are not game-changing, it’s not a matter of a probability to hit and kill an enemy or miss and be killed, it’s more a way to add variability in the battles. Once you’ve finished the game with the first squad of mechs, which is a pretty straightforward squad of offensive mechs, you can try 7 other squads, each focusing on other aspects of the game, such as a squad putting everything on fire, a squad that move enemies around, and one that freezes the enemies to prevent them to act. Every squad plays differently and provides a new way to solve problems. These squads are bought using coins gained by earning achievements, which I always love to see in games. They’re not just useless trophies but are actually a meta-game mechanics. Most of them are not complicated to unlock, but they encourage you to try to play differently. The main problem I have with this game, is that I will be way more demanding of any other Tactical-RPG I might play in the future. The bar is high.

One man. Eight years. One game: Iconoclasts. I cannot fathom how this is even possible. There is so much in this game! There are many environments and they are all pretty detailed. There are a lot of different NPCs, and each have a set of unique animations, and each animation is so fluid I don’t even want to know how many different animation frames the developer had drawn for this game (actually, I’d really like to know). The other aspects are also pretty amazing. There’s one I didn’t expect: The story, and the characters. It has a really interesting plot line and tackles serious subjects in a depressing pre-apocalyptic environment. Even though the game looks cute, the situations can turn bad very quickly, someone can get his head squashed in the ground when you expect him to be just taken into custody, it really reflects the mood of the world and is not trying to be politically correct. The level design oscillates between greatness and frustration. Sometimes, it innovates with interesting layouts and situations, and other times, it’s really difficult to read and understand where to go or what to do, or just boring to traverse. After the game was over, I wasn’t interested in finding all the hidden items, something I usually like, but here, the rewards are close to useless, it’s always the same thing: materials to craft items, and these items are not really useful. The bosses are well-designed and present good challenges (at least in hard mode). Except one, who is horrible because it’s so hard to understand how he works. Aside this one, all have interesting patterns and sometimes also stage layout with them. All in all, it’s a good Metroidvania game, but the fact that it has been made by a single person (game design, graphics, development, music, sound, level design, everything!) makes it incredible. A pure work of art.

You’re a huge fan of Pinball, and played “3D Pinball Space Cadet” for hours and hours, but since Windows Vista you feel empty? Oh, and you also love this kind of beetles that push dung balls around all day? Wow, then, I just got THE game for you! Yoku’s Island Express is about a bug pushing a ball around trying to save the island from a mischievous God. Although it can push the ball around, there are pinball paddles everywhere on the island, and a small tap on LT or RT will send the ball flying, dragging our small helpless Yoku through mazes. I really liked the idea of adding pinball mechanics inside a platformer game, it’s novative and creates interesting levels. But it quickly can become boring, when some parts are too difficult and you just rage about why your ball is not going where you want to (but maybe that’s what pinball is all about?). Nevertheless, the game can get especially boring when you have to go through an area again to find collectibles or just move to the next destination. Like in a Metroidvania, you gain different powers as you explore, but those are most of the time used to reach new zones, and don’t help much traversing old zones, so you often have to redo some parts over and over again while more shortcuts would have been appreciated. There is a fast travel though. You can go to a beehive and be thrown from beehive to beehive until your destination, making some kind of zipline. It’s totally integrated inside the lore, and the bee music is amazing! But you can only get into these beehives from certain locations, and I feel there are too few of those spots. I spent a lot of time planning routes to the closest beehive, and ending pushing my ball longer than was really needed. Nevertheless, this game’s really cute, the graphics are amazing, especially given the small size of the game studio. The music also adds a lot to the beautiful scenery the game offers. (Oh, and the devs attached me to a huge boulder and put me on a big paddle, so I shouldn’t say too many bad things... Oh dung, I think they heard meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee *)

Such a wonderful space is the zone between frustration and awe, and such a difficult zone to pinpoint. But Dark Souls III found it and manages most of the time to stay inside its boundaries. The formula didn’t change since the first game, you die a lot. And it’s pleasant. I must admit I missed it, this difficulty which asks of me a perpetual concentration and self-control. Each enemy may be the end of your precious life, even though you slew already a dozen of those same enemies before without difficulty. “Be wary of recklessness or Time for death.” Overall, the level design is great, it’s a pleasure to explore new zones. That may be my favorite part of the game, with a quality relative to the one from Dark Souls. The levels are huge and full of secrets, traps and passageways. It's such a joy to find a shortcut or a bonfire after a difficult passage. “Could this be a shortcut? Only hope!” Each battle against a boss is like a dance. A difficult dance in which your partner can crush your bones if you don’t follow his steps carefully. But you don’t know the orders of the steps and your partner may change the current verse anytime. One misstep, and it’s a sword in your belly. “Skill required ahead, therefore try backstepping.” But even though 7 years passed between Demon Souls and Dark Souls III, I still find the user interface terrible. It’s not clear, there are too many numbers, and it’s still impossible to compare two pieces of equipment together. The camera has to be fully manned, and in combats, it can take obnoxious positions, especially against giant enemies. With a controller on PC, the right stick emulates the mouse cursor, so it’s possible on a multi-screen setup to “click” outside the game in the middle of a fight if by mistake you want to control the camera while in menus, which makes you go back to your desktop for a few, but dangerous, seconds. “Aaaah... Despair!” The game design is sometimes too obscure, notably when crafting equipments. I’d like to be able to understand the global crafting system without the need to go on the web. One can argue that it’s a design choice, and it’s consistent with the game environment, obscure and cryptic. But if I were the character in Dark Souls, I would simply ask Andre the Blacksmith how the crafting works, and he would tell me because it’s his job and he knows this stuff. “Losing sanity, If only I had a hint…” Even though it still has a lot of issues that would mean a simple rage-quit in a lot of other games, Dark Souls III has so much to offer it’d be a mistake to ignore it for these simple reasons. The game designers, especially Miyazaki Hidetaka, decided to follow an odd path with these games, and respected this path until the end, despite what the industry thought to be bankable. And in the end, they changed the said industry. Thanks for that, From Software. “Good luck, and then Praise the Sun!”

Did you ever wanted to sort a sequence of numbers in a assembly language with parallel nodes? Oh? Really? Huh, ok. Then I guess TIS-100 is made for you. I wasn’t ready, sorry, usually people prefer games with guns or cars, you know. Anyway, TIS-100 is an emulator for an imaginary machine, on which you code with a set of 13 simple instructions on up to 12 parallel nodes, each having a space for only 15 different instructions. Program space quickly becomes an issue and asks of you to be clever to make your program fit. Compared to classic assembly instruction sets like x86, TIS-100 is really simple, and does not offer much. You can move values, add and subtract, do conditional jumps, but not multiply, divide, do logical operations nor bits operation. And more importantly, each node has only access to two registers, but only one can be accessed directly, the other acting more like a distant memory. This makes the coding tedious at times, and forces you to think differently to create programs. And the later problems in the games ask you for example to determine the prime factors of a number up to 99, in ascending order (e.g. 86 would result in “2, 2, 3, 7”). When finally, after hours of thinking and programming, your program finally goes through all the numbers successfully, a feeling of proudness arises. And if solving the problems is not enough for you, you can still try to optimize your programs so they execute faster, or take less space in number of nodes or instructions. My personal objectives was always to go for the fastest program, but sometimes it’s really impossible to match some internet records. I started playing this game years ago, and stopped playing thrice for multiple months before going back to it, but I finally beat all the problems of this game and am ready to test my mind onto another of Zachtronics game. Story of my life.

I always loved watching machines work, it has a mesmerizing effect on me to see all these arms, presses, conveyor belts, all doing a very simple task and working together asynchronously to create a product. Opus Magnum is about that. Creating a machine with many parts to create “molecules”. And when my machine is complete, I always take some time just watching my creation do the same thing over and over, satisfied. In a way, Opus Magnum is very similar to other Zachtronics game, you are presented a problem you can solve in many different ways, you find a solution and you can optimize it. But is also really different, because compared to games like Spacechem or TIS-100, something has changed: there is no space or component constraint. At first, it can seem to be nothing, but it changes everything. In Opus Magnum, you can solve all the problems without worrying about space or money, so virtually anyone can finish the game without difficulty. Then, if you need challenge, you can push yourself and try to climb the histogram leaderboard, by either optimizing space, cost or cycles. I personally go for cycles and tried for all the puzzles to be at least better than average, trying to go as close as possible to the world record. And this was sometimes really difficult. Oh, and there are some bonus levels which have space limitation. I liked the fact that these levels are accessible after you finished the game, so you really have a mastery of the game components, and you are ready to face this challenge. At first, it looks really hard (and it is), but it was interesting for me to then try to optimize space and cost instead of cycles for these puzzles. If I had to find things I don’t like in this game, I’d say the story didn’t interest me. I read at first, then I was bored of it. The writing seems good, but I had no interest in it. Also, I would have loved to see interesting achievements like in TIS-100, in which you had to solve some problems with hard constraints, forcing you to explore new areas and think about another solution. And it was awesome. But Opus Magnum didn’t do that, even though everything was there. Something like “Complete puzzle X with only 2 arms” or “in less than Y instructions” or even “using only 1 input regent”. A missed opportunity, but anyway, this game didn’t need to fix that to be good, and I still love coming back to my old machines and trying to optimize them even more.

You’re inside a room. Inside a painting, a doorway. You enter a cupboard. You drag the painting on top of the cupboard. You exit the doorway. You’re now in the painting. Like Portal, this game asks you to think outside the box. The world does not work as usual, and you have to tame it to traverse it. But this game often requires the player to click everywhere until something happens, like some point’n’click games, which can sometimes break the connection between the player and the world. It is also very linear, but it’s by design, and the progression feels really natural, even though you travel through time and space in a never-seen-before way. The linearity however permits the telling **** story, entirely told without words, and offers beautiful scenery to explore. This game can be really clever at times, and is really beautiful. Some puzzles are really smart. The only complaint I’d give is that there are not enough great puzzles. A lot of them are quite easy and do not require thinking ahead. I’d love to see a sequel with harder puzzles. You’re reading a review. Inside, words claiming the elegance ****. You enter a round window. You drag the review on top of the window. You exit through the letter O, this letter. You’re now in the review.

Full Metal Furies is an online 4-player cooperative brawler, offered by the developers of Rogue Legacy. The game is really fun to play, each class is specific, so the players are not all just flying around an enemy to slash him. There’s one sniper (the best hero by far), and then three other furies that are less useful but still cool to have around sometimes when you need to be revived: a tank, a close-range damage dealer, and an engineer who always toys around with turrets. Ok, I have to admit, those furies rock too! Some enemies are protected by a barrier the color of a hero, and only this hero can damage it. This forces the players to move around the battlefield to quickly take care of their enemies, otherwise you quickly get overrun by enemies. Some maps also give a specific challenge to the player, by bringing a specific mechanics for this level, like a stealth level, or one with a huge laser firing at regular interval on the screen, preventing players to be in a big part of the screen while the laser is fired. Bosses have also a good design, and can require a lot of skill and teamwork to beat. Oh, and there are hidden enigmas in the game. They’re so hidden developers said a lot of players didn’t see there were in the game. But they’re actually a big part of the game, and solving the puzzles with friends feels really good! We had a shared document with all the clues and enigmas, we wrote theories and possible solutions that we could try on the next game session. Some puzzles are way too complicated and there are too few indices, but overall, they were cool. Some are really clever and ask the players to think outside the box. If you like to play with friends, I highly encourage you to play this one with them. This game is not well known because the developers didn’t publicize the game, hoping the success of Rogue Legacy would create the hype, but nope. Sad. Don’t do that, they tried for you. Special Xoxo to my furies Bam, Gop & Lothy!

This is the funniest game I’ve played in ages! Unfortunately, it’s not because the game is by itself funny, more so because it’s so bad it’s funny. This is supposed to be an immersive coop narrative game, in which you play two convicts trying to escape a prison, then looking for revenge on a common enemy. What we expected was a great story, good graphics and an immersive environment. [Contains mid-game spoilers] Story-wise, all characters are stupid and make poor decisions, starting with the protagonists themselves: “Ok, here’s the plan. I talk to the two guards and say that I need to talk to them in this corner over there, so you can sneak through the door. I don’t see why they’d refuse!” -- They didn’t. They even fell for the “There’s a fight over there, you should both go!” trap, leaving the door unlocked, open and unguarded. “Let’s use this wooden boat to escape the cops, I’m sure we’re going to be faster by rowing on this river than them with their cars!” -- It worked. Maybe the cops went upstream. “My wife just gave birth. I know we’re known criminals with our face on every newspaper, but I don’t think cops will go to the hospital, right?” -- Cops were there. So unpredictable. The game is filled with these unrealistic decisions and NPC reactions. It’s also reusing all movies tropes you can find in any prison escape movie, they’re just missing the file in the cake, that’s all. Well, the story is bad. How about the other aspects? Graphics are not great, but not too bad. Some animations on the other hand are so bad they’re hilarious, which is really hard to understand knowing they used motion capture for the game. The different gameplay phases are poorly done, it sent me back in the early days of 3D gaming when driving games had ridiculous physics and broken collisions. At first I was nitpicky about some unrealistic things, because I thought the game was serious. Like how can the toilets be moved so easily in the cell, aren’t they connected to the plumbings? But after a while, I understood the developers just didn’t care about immersion… Or did they? The ending unfortunately confirms their intention on doing a good immersive game with a good story, which is not. That’s kind of sad for them. Ok, I’ll drop here some cool things. First, the split-screen is interesting to follow both sides when the characters are not in the same place. Also, some camera transitions are cool and really gives the impression we’re watching a movie. There we go! A Way Out is a true nanar, a game so bad that it’s good. Still, 3/10.

Tiny Metal is a love letter to the Advance Wars series, a turn-based tactical game centered around building units and gaining map control against the opponent. The game features colorful characters and a lot of balanced units, different terrains, cities creating money when you capture them… Tiny Metal proposes all of this, and not much more. It doesn’t seem the developer ever tried to hide the affiliation to their mentor, the units and mechanics are so close I took more pleasure finding the differences between the two than playing the actual game. It even took the “bad” things Advance Wars has. The story parts take forever, the characters are caricatural and kinda dumb. When units fight each other, the camera zooms in to show the units firing, and in Advance Wars, that’s something I disable after 1 or 2 hours of game. It’s cool to have, but I’d have preferred them to not implement this and improve the game in other ways instead. The camera is shifted a bit on the Y axis, which is really disturbing for a top-down tactical game. The unit designs are too similar, it’s hard to recognize a recon jeep from a tank at a glance, which is bad when you have a lot of units on the battlefield. And when moving your cursor to move a unit, which is something you do most of the time, the tiles highlighted to see where you can go are not visible enough, so sometimes I’m not sure where my unit can go, and there is a sound -- a buzz sound like when you are doing something wrong -- but it’s playing every time you move the cursor to move a unit. Obnoxious. The game’s not bad, but it’s so close to Advance Wars that I’d just recommend playing the latter instead of this indie title. This game hasn’t enough for itself to justify playing it.

Cui-Cui-CUI-Cui-Cui-Cui, Stomp, Stomp, Cui-Cui, Stomp, CUI, Stomp, CUI ! Basically, that’s all the game right here. Toki Tori 2+ is a cute puzzle game in which you can only move in a 2D space, chirp and stomp. The beauty of this game is that you don’t unlock powers or gates as you go, you can potentially go anywhere you want from the start of the game, but what you lack is knowledge. Knowledge is the key in this game, and if you retrace your steps after a few hours of play, you’ll find new areas you don’t even know existed! And everything in the game is taught without words. The game presents situations, and you have to try chirping or stomping to see what this action does in these situations. Then, you know how you can interact with the world and how the world elements interact together. It’s very clever. In the end, despite the cute graphics, Toki Tori 2+ can be really hard, with puzzles asking you to plan a complex solution before executing it carefully step by step. It sometimes is too punitive, a simple misstep and you have to redo the whole puzzle. But it’s very satisfying when you finally manage to complete a difficult puzzle. The graphics are one of the downside of the game. They’re beautiful, but they are dissonant with the game type. You can’t guess a game like would be a clever puzzle-game and moreover a difficult one. However, if you like this kind of game, I strongly encourage you to try it, otherwise you might miss a really clever game. Cui-cui.

I have seen this pun certainly too many times, but I still love it. The Fractured but Whole is a game for the fans, there’s no denying it, but they didn’t just take the licence and put a generic video game on top, this game has a soul, unlike gingers (oh, by the way, sorry for not being politically correct, I spent too much time with Cartman). Graphically, the game is beautiful. It’s so close to the cartoon that the engine they used could be use to create episodes without anyone noticing. The animations are great, and there are many, many of them, with a lot of dialog for a lot of situations (for example, if Craig gets frozen while Tweek is in the battlefield, a quick dialog between them may happen). The world is stuffed with references everywhere to please the fanboy (or gerbil) inside. Concerning battles, you won’t find here the tactical-RPG of the year, but it’s really pleasant to play and diverse enough. I was quickly bored by the battle system in “The Stick of Truth”, but here, I still enjoy hitting 6th graders and crab people even after dozens of hours. The boss battles are especially great, because they’re scenarized (unlike a Terrence Malick movie) and always have jokes and references as well. Something I personally love in a game is when I see traces of developer love - not semen (It’s Seaman!) - something that wasn’t decided by the producer or another high-placed guy, but more probably by the developers themselves. For instance, there are a lot of details in the game which are great but weren’t mandatory, like when an enemy is down in battle, it’s actually faking to be dead, and will sometimes discreetly look up to see if the battle is still going. Also, at some random moments in the game, a car will drive through the road, and the battle will stop momentarily with everyone moving on the sidewalk, before resuming the battle again. The game has some downsides as well. First, there are too many fart jokes, all other the place. It’s fun at first, but quickly becomes obnoxious. South Park may have had its fart-joke period in the first seasons, but it has changed since, and became more subtle and political, with still some farting humour, but way less. On the contrary, this game went too far on this level. Speaking of levels, I hope you like progress bars because they are everywhere. Everything in the game is a pretext to have a progress bar. Beat X raisins girls, Collect Y costumes, Crap in Z toilets… It’s overwhelming, like mexicans. Now screw you guys, I’m going home.

Shoot an imp, fill a flying demon with lead, launch rockets into a creature from Hell, and dash towards him to tear off its horn and stab it in its neck. WOW, that felt good! That’s DOOM. This game’s cool, it lets you go berserk and ravage every creature you find without reason. Oh, what? There is a story, a lore and a lot of backstory? I so don’t care! Let me kill demons, I don’t need no reason! The main interesting mechanic from DOOM, as stated by Mark Brown (GMTK), is the fact that you can recover energy by finishing enemies at close-range with your fists when they’re low on health. First, it feels really good, there’s so much juice in each animation it’s really enjoyable to do it even after hundreds of these “glory kills”. But the main point is to make the player always in the center of the action, never sniping from far away, but instead go all in, especially when at low health. High risk, high reward. The worst thing in this game is the sound design. Enemies that are below you appear to be right next to you. Sometimes I could hear enemies all around me, but when I looked, noone was there. They were all in another room below or above me. This is so bad to hear this in a game from 2016. While talking about the sound design, the metal-electro-indus music will engage you into the fight when there are enemies… but won’t stop until you find the last enemy in the zone, which is sometimes hidden or far away. So you run around, without anyone in view, but still listening to an hardcore music. Disturbing. While playing, you’ll have a lot of possible challenges to complete, like killing 4 demons in a single gatling charge, or kill a big monster only with your sidearm. They change the way you play, making you try new weapons, new tactics, new ways to slaughter. But there may be too many challenges, and I found myself distracted a lot by these (because I wanted them all), which broke the flow. But when finally I unlocked all challenges, I was free to play the game any way I wanted, and I enjoyed it again at full potential, going as fast as possible, using the powerful arsenal given to me. The game also has a lot of secret areas, so if you want to find them all, you can’t just go from a killing spree into another, but you have to carefully inspect each room, and use the map in the pause menu to detect secret zones, which also break the flow. At first, I finished the levels normally, then went back to find the secrets. I really appreciated that I could do that. But at a certain point in the game, I wasn’t able to backtrack anymore, so I had to stop this technique and examine the rooms after each massacre, breaking the flow each time. Too bad they didn’t design the later levels like the first ones.

When reviewing a game, I usually try to understand why a game is good or bad, and what feels wrong in a game. But sometimes, nothing feels wrong. Therefore, should I feel wrong for not finding anything to say that has not already been said? “Ori and the Blind Forest” is beautiful, both aesthetically and graphically. The scenery is gorgeous, the character animation is smooth, the lighting and colorimetry is great, and the music goes perfectly on top of this. The character is enjoyable to control, it’s fun to move him around the forest, and each new ability permits more traversability, so revisiting old worlds doesn’t feel tedious. Some zones are even accessible using these new powers, like in Super Metroid. If I had to find a flaw, it would be the escape sequences. During these, you have a single life, and if you fail, you start from the beginning, and learning is mostly trial-and-error, not my favorite game design pattern. But still, they were interesting to play in the end. All in all, one of the greatest Metroidvania games you can find. They even put bonus content directly inside the game, with early footage from the first prototypes and concept arts. It was really interesting to see how much they spent on player movement and abilities in the early development, surely that’s how they managed to make this game so good and that’s something more game developers should do.

It's over, I cooked my last sausage. I feel complete. I feel empty. Stephen doesn't care about the game design best practices. No tutorial here, no gradual learning curve, you're thrown into an unknown world, with the first puzzles already being hard. You're a stranger to this world, don't expect it to be easy and welcoming. I left my first play session with a bitter taste in my mouth, hesitating to come back. This game is more expensive than it appears to be worth, and I just spent a precious time of my life cooking sausages with a ridiculously hard to control character. But I went back, passed the first island, and discovered a new game mechanic. But this mechanic wasn't brought by a new item to obtain, no, it was here all along, but the environment was just not exposing it. I feel there are other mechanics, hidden, just waiting for me to discover them. I continue, eager to explore to find these mechanics, and there are a lot, and the puzzles are ingeniously crafted to extract the last bit of juice each mechanic can offer. And when you think you're finished, Stephen reveals yet another mechanic, pulling it from the bottom of the sea right to your face, promising you more hours of frustrating puzzles. But no, the end is near, you feel it, and you must prove to yourself you're better than these sausages, you're alive, and you must complete this game. And I finished it, I waited so long for the end to come, I wanted to say "I did it!", but now I feel empty. These puzzles were mind-bending, always pushing me to the limits, forcing me to explore new ideas, making me go further, extending my brain capacity to think outside of the box. And this is it, every sausage is cooked, and I won't benefit from another brilliant sausage-based puzzle until the day I'll be cooked myself.

It's fun to play, there are a handful of good ideas, but the realisation overall looks like the developers had zombie-verse assets and got their hands on a VR gear and said "Why not, it might work.". The models are pretty poor, the zombie animations are very repetitive (for example when you aim at them, they stumble to the side, and it happens A LOT), and the environment objects all look the same (cars, furnitures, fences, ...). The zombie theme is pretty useless, it doesn't feel like a zombie apocalypse, more like a shooting range. You always can teleport yourself out of danger, so if you see a zombie running toward you, you can simply teleport a few meters away immediately, the zombie continuing his course to his doom. You never feel pressured, anxious, lost, afraid. It's even the contrary. Because it's difficult to aim at long range, it's often a good idea to just teleport just next to the enemies to put a bullet in their head, then teleport to the next, and so on. There's a lot of frustration coming with the world interactivity. Being in VR, I wanted to interact with everything, throw objects, try swinging, turning stuff, but there are actually a lot of grounded objects you cannot interact with. And when you find something that looks suitable for a melee weapon, like a shovel or an axe, don't even bother trying swinging it to the face of the zombies, it doesn't work. the weapon goes right through the body, and you look like an idiot in the process. Just throw the weapon, dealing approximately no damage (if you managed to hit the enemy), and unsheathe your shotgun. This game might get some attention today, but in a few years, I'm sure there'll be a lot of better games with better mechanics and level design.

Did you ever wanted to feel like Neo in the Matrix? Ok, buy. This is exactly the feeling you get when playing Superhot in VR. You control time, you can watch bullets flying by, you can grab a pistol passing by and kill a guy with it during the same second. Awesome. The game is quite short, but it wouldn't have done much good to have more levels without adding new mechanics, but this game doesn't need more. One problem in SuperHot is the difficulty to throw things. Many VR games have this problem, but some have not this problem. Take The Lab by Valve for example, in which throwing the stick to the dog is so easy you didn't even have to think about how to do it. In SuperHot, you have to guess how it is implemented to throw something correctly. Another problem is the environment geometry, which does not correspond to the colliders, and it can be really frustrating, when a bullet I shot gets stopped in mid-air because of bad collision meshes. I would also have loved to have a replay capacity, to show in real-time how I killed the red dudes like in a John Woo movie. Oh, and be careful that there are no Ming vases or flat screens lying around. You could be sad after playing an immersive session of the game.

This game has the potential to be a great puzzler, with a unique mechanic, but it fails. The concept itself is interesting, it provides a new way to think about space, like in Portal makes you re-think the 3D world with portals. It makes the player think about the environment before doing something: "Where should I go to be able to reach this cube?". Or at least, that's what he'd like you to do. Instead, the game simply provides super-easy puzzles that can almost be beaten by brute-forcing them. I only had to stop and think for around 5 puzzles, on the 50 this game offers. All the others, I tried to go right. Nothing there? Ok, go left. A branch? I go right, if it doesn't lead to anything interesting, I'll go left next time. This strategy will carry you through most of the puzzles. One of the hardest points of the game are the controls. When the character is upside-down, you still have to press left for him to go to his left, meaning to the right of the screen. I would have preferred controls based on the screen space, not the character's. I'd love to recommend it, because of its interesting mechanic, but the level design is just dull, and it feels like the concept has been wasted and could have given so much more than this.

Mini-Metro is that kind of game you go to when you want to relax a bit. But... Is it a really good idea? At first, it's really relaxing, the adaptive music by Richard Vreeland is great, the animation of the trains going from station to station is mesmerizing. New stations pop, travellers too, everything's going smoothly... Until all hell breaks loose! Then, you'll be moving trains from a line to the next, to prevent an unavoidable game over by reducing the crowdness of a station, just to notice that by moving this train, you just prevented it to pick passengers from another crowded station, increasing their stress. So you micro-manage, again and again, until everything's out of control and it's over... Do you feel relaxed now? The game is pretty simple, the rules are easy to understand, and everything is so pure it's as interesting to watch the flow than to control it. Disasterpeace did a great work on the sound design, adaptively generating a captivating tune binding your mind to the game. There are some game design decisions I'd have done differently, like the possibility to easily teleport trains from line to line, or create lines out of nowhere in an instant. These possibilities transform the goal of creating a flow into a micro-managing arcade game. But still, the game is good like it is, and it's just a 'pro' way to play when you already spent too many hours on this.

After one of the best narrative games in history, geniously handling story, great lighting, good camera, and an interesting gameplay mechanic, comes a prequel which is well… barely ok. I’ve got difficulties to understand how it’s possible to mess something up with such a good starting material that is Life is Strange. The game looks bland, the textures low-def, some models low-poly, and some animations uncanny. Why did Deck Nine change the game engine from Unreal to Unity? Don’t Nod had a perfect ready-to-use engine with good lighting, colorimetry, and models. In Before the Storm, sometimes the camera shows an awful texture at close-range. Why? Why would the developers want to show us the ugly parts of the game with bad camera angles? One of the force of Life is Strange was its characters. They were often caricatural, but they always had multiple facets. Here, they’re caricatural, period. And sometimes, they are even behaving inconsistently with what the caricature depicts. It’s like the game does not want to be consistent with itself, and wants us out of the flow. The tropes used to create the twists are either really visible, or sometimes come from nowhere without reasons only to advance the plot. Many situations are not believable and characters behave differently only to create a fake tension. But it’s not all bad. There were some good moments, especially between Chloe and Rachel. This teenage nostalgia feeling is still there, but the realisation looks more like a 2012 Telltale game than what Life is Strange brought us. It’s just ok.

This game has exactly the difficulty and combat mechanics I wanted to see in an RPG for a looong time. Most RPGs follow this simple pattern: explore a dungeon, encounter random enemies that you crush without real difficulty, until you get to the boss and there you may find a challenge. But Dark Souls changed this way of designing, making every encounter potentially your last. Any mob you slew “easily” before may actually kill you pretty quickly the next time you encounter it if you’re not attentive enough. Why do I talk about Dark Souls? Because Darkest Dungeon went exactly the same way with its encounters. Every encounter can be your last, it can be because you were too eager to close the battle, not well prepared, or just because you had bad luck and didn’t know how to handle it. And the best way to lose a battle is because of overconfidence. Like the awesome narrator voice say multiple times in the run, “Overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer”. And yes, I died multiple times because I was overconfident, and the game sometimes reminded me that I was not the boss around here, bullying every mob I find. He was, the game was the boss. There are a lot of people writing negative comments blaming the randomness of the game for their failures. Sure, the game has a lot of randomness, but it’s manageable, and when you die, it’s not because of “too much bad RNG”, it’s more like you were not well prepared for this fight. Every battle I lost was because of careless planning or overconfidence. And the game has not difficult battles just for the sake of difficulty, it has a really refreshing game system, with an interesting 1D positioning system, with attacks that can be launched only when you’re at a certain position in the line, and can only target enemies at certain positions on their line. The stress system is interesting too, adding a “long run” health bar, that’s harder to refill than the classical HP pool. And a quick note about the game aesthetics, which transposes greatly the horror, sadness and despair of this lovecraftian town. Even though, the game has some flaws. First, there are anti-achievements, such as “Lose 4 heroes to a boss”, or “get slain by creature X”. For my point of view, achievements should be rewarding of player successes, not rewarding failures. And overall, the game is too long. I loved it for around 40 to 50 hours, then used most more time (around 30 hours) not discovering anything new but instead grinding and waiting for the bosses to appear. Nevertheless, this problem may have found its solution recently, as the game developers introduced the radiant mode, which is kind of a quicker mode, which gets rid of the grinding and all. I think I’d recommend this mode for new players.

This game is incredible, it’s awesome to see how much such a small team managed to do! There’s so much content, the levels are quite big and filled with details, there are a lot of different voice actors, and pretty good musics. The main inspiration of this game is without any doubt Super Mario Sunshine. The level opening is basically copied and pasted from this game, and the Time Rifts are directly referencing the schemes of Sunshine secret levels. Another inspiration is Banjo-Kazooie, and it’s amazing to see that the main theme has been composed by its original composer, Grant Kirkhope himself. But… I don’t recommend this game. Even though there has been a lot of effort put into it, it’s missing an element which is essential to 3D platformers: the character controls and the ability to traverse the world. In both its main inspirations, the characters were enjoyable to control, especially the master of all: Mario. Take any 3D Mario game, even Mario 64 back in 1996, and just move him around, make him jump, triple-jump, backward somersault, ground-pound, fly… Even without any objective, it’s still fun to play around with this character and explore the worlds. Then remove all objectives from A Hat in Time. Would Hat Kid still be fun to control? Well… No. First, the moveset is too small. You don’t have many choices on how to control the character, basically move, jump, air-jump and dive. The “Bonk” when hitting a wall by diving into it is really punitive, and because some platforming phases are not clear enough whether it can be reached by jumping, it can get frustrative really fast when you have to redo a platforming phase just because it wasn’t clear this platform wasn’t reachable. Also, the homing attack à la Sonic is quite odd to use. It only activates when you’re near enough an enemy, and won’t do anything at all if you’re a bit too far. But while Sonic has a clear visual cue to show when you can attack, Hat Kid is just too slow, so you often can’t afford to wait for this cue to show, so you must guess, and sometimes is doesn’t work and your character just does nothing. And finally, the different powers of Hat Kid are not available at all times, you have to switch hat to switch powers and get other abilities, either by using a menu, or using a quick-switch button. This is tedious and breaks the flow. It’s too bad they didn’t copy Banjo-Kazooie for this issue, because this game has a lot of different moves, but every move is accessible with 1 or 2 buttons (e.g. Z+C-right). It’s a really important thing to be able to enjoy a game even if you remove all the objectives, especially in a platform game. Jesse Schell in his book “The Art of Game Design”, says: “A game has to be a toy before being a game.”. Unfortunately, this game lacks the enjoyment of controlling the character in the world. Add to that some odd camera controls, which you cannot move up and down, and some really too long boss fights, and you have a game that’s not engaging enough to play through. Everything’s not bad though. I’m not a big fan of the overall humour, but I must admit there were some funny scenes, like the “Murder on Owl Express”, or the interactions with Mustache Girl. I must also point out that the config screen is marvelous, with a great user interface, and great options for colorblind people and speedrunners. More games should be configurable like this one. But the game developer saw too big, and wants to give too much content, not polishing enough what has already been made. And it seems to continue on this path, with a new multiplayer mode coming. I really wanted to give a thumb up to such a great project, but I just can’t enjoy it without seeing flaws in what should be the core of the game. I’m still happy though that this game found its public and has a lot of fans, they still deserve it for the hard work they have put into this. But for me, A Hat In Time is not A HIT.