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Slay the Princess weaves loops into loops into loops, each more darkly fascinating than the last. Imagine: You are standing in a room. In the next room, there is an imprisoned princess. Someone hands you a knife and tells you to kill her, because if you don’t, she will end the world. You make a decision. Complications ensue, the situation resolves itself—and then it starts over. Again and again and again. At least to me, that dry little summary already holds a lot of fascination. But the incredible riches of drama, horror, and highly emotional storytelling that the two-person developer studio Black Tabby Games crafts out of this morally complex setup beggar belief. Slay the Princess is a visual novel, so choosing actions and navigating a decision tree is all you do—but it may be the best of its kind I have ever played. There are so many paths to find, and they all spin out in wildly different yet fascinating and often existentially terrifying directions. A single playthrough takes about three hours, yet I have spent 53 hours with this game. It’s the different meta-levels of the narration that kept me enthralled for so long. Every playthrough reveals something new about the nature of both the princess and the player character—who is very much his own entity—and the world they find themselves in. Each traversal of these loops within loops draws the core of the characters in more detail. The female lead kept me especially hooked. Over time, I felt like I really knew her and greeted every version of her with joy, no matter how mean she was to me—or how cruel I chose to be to her. There is a lot of cruelty, because this is a love story, and love hurts sometimes. The production values certainly do their utmost to support the vibe. The visuals consist of the starkest, most evocative collection of horror art I have ever seen. The palette is limited to black, white, grey, and the occasional bright, oh-so-vivid splash of red (I leave it to the reader to imagine the most likely source). The images gain an unsettling intensity from background lines that vibrate ever so slightly—an effect that might bother some people, but which, for me, supports the eerie atmosphere very effectively. It is the voice work that elevates this game from pretty excellent to genuine GOAT candidate. Nicole Goodnight and Jonathan Sims—both of whom I had never heard before—craft complex, effortlessly charming, sometimes chilling but always enthralling characters out of the formidable script, supported by a sparse but unbelievably effective soundscape. The soundtrack is hauntingly beautiful: every major route through the game has its own track, each one better than the last. Once you’re done being wowed by the aesthetics and the performances, you’re probably approaching the finale of your first playthrough—and that’s when the excellent script hits you with a shovel of existential dread, leaving you with a head full of very big thoughts and a finger itching to start the next run immediately. You can probably tell that I am a big fan. I have spent so much time with the princess and her murderer-rescuer, and I miss them both dearly. If you haven’t yet, I strongly recommend that you get to know them right away. TL;DR: This is a love story for the ages. It is a gothic horror story for the ages. It will fill you with deep thoughts, existential dread, strange tenderness, sweet love — and leave you fascinated and well satisfied. I strongly recommend Slay the Princess.

The Office and The Avengers meet at a bar. Nine months later: Dispatch. Telltale games are a very specific kind of adventure game: A step above Walking Simulator because they let players shape the story around the edges, a step below classic point-and-click adventures because they rarely bother with puzzles or much challenge at all, and miles ahead of both when it comes to cultural impact. There was a time when Life is Strange and The Walking Dead seemed to drag adventure games back into the mainstream. And then Telltale jumped the shark—and, soon after, died. But that’s not where the story ends: A few years later a bunch of the surviving developers regrouped, pulled in some absurdly talented voice actors (and a few YouTubers), and dared to ask: "What if we mix the Telltale formula with The Office and The Avengers?” Thus Dispatch was born, and the Telltale-style model got another life. Because Dispatch is good! Great, even! The visuals are on par with any premium animated series you can name. The soundscape ranges from great (music and effects) to spectacular (the cast, especially Aaron Paul, Erin Yvette, and the undisputed queen of my personal voice-actor pantheon, Laura Bailey). But a Telltale-style game lives or dies by its story—and this one gets full marks: The script is really funny, punchy, foul-mouthed enough to make sure that the adults in the room feel seen but never edgy enough to feel forced. The characters are believable and a joy to watch, from the leads to the bit players, and the ending actually lands with me! That’s rare enough these days to deserve a callout. But, incredibly, I’m not through yet! Because AdHoc Studio have done something special here. They added a second pillar to this game: Actual gameplay! It starts humbly with a few quick-time events, which usually get a bad rap, so they’re optional. This time they genuinely add to the momentum. They are only used during highly kinetic action scenes and sync nicely with the action beats and the soundtrack. I tried the Episode 1 combat sequence with them both on and off, and to my complete surprise, preferred leaving them on. More interesting is the mini simulation of dispatch work in the form of a little mini-game: You stare at a map, calls with emergencies come in, you dispatch one or more of your heroes to deal with them. So far, so simple, but your charges have strengths, weaknesses, and bad matchups. Things can go wrong, choices must be made, and sometimes you simply don’t have anybody available and that damnable cat will have to sleep in the tree, ma’am! Did I mention you can level up your heroes, too? Seriously, I had a lot of fun navigating the drudgery of a day at the office. I don’t want to overstate things: This gameplay loop would need a lot of work to sustain a game on its own, but as a generous dollop of cream on top of the cake that is the Telltale game, this is superb. And even in these sequences, the writing is both plentiful and excellent, doling out background details and even story development right during gameplay in a manner reminiscent of the Hades games. This game is one of the great events in the Gaming Year of Our Lord 2025, and rightly so. Excellent story, surprisingly fun gameplay, superbly charming production values: Dispatch is 10 lean, mean hours of high quality entertainment nobody should miss. TLDR: This is at least the third time the Telltale model has produced a game of stellar quality. Skip this at your own peril: the water cooler can be a very lonely place for people not in the know.

Life is Strange: Double Exposure proved one thing to me: I love Max Caulfield. Since the spectacular cultural and financial impact of Max Caulfield's debut title, the Life is Strange franchise has been on a bit of a downward spiral. So it didn’t come as too much of a surprise that Dontnod pulled our favorite Amateur photographer slash mistress of time out of retirement. But was that a good idea? First impressions of Double Exposure are favourable: The excellent face capture first seen in True Colors is back and allows Max to communicate her insecurities, trauma and quiet resolve much more subtly than before, even though a few expressions now spill over into the uncanny valley. Hannah Telle hasn’t lost the knack of bringing Max to sparkling life, and the rest of the cast do an admirable job of giving her characters to bounce off of, even if there sadly is no new Ashly Burch among them. The setting is a success, though: A classically gothic New England college buried under mountains of pristine, gleaming snow, rendered in flawless artistry and punchy colors: Chef’s Kiss. The expected list of indie music is both varied and atmospheric. There’s even a meaningful bit of innovation: At the call to adventure moment, Max, whom the plot has roped into investigating the murder of her best friend on campus, develops the ability to traverse between two realities: Her “home” one and another where the murder never happened. So no more rewind powers unless the plot demands them, two versions of almost every NPC to talk to, and a handful of clever puzzles built around the traversal mechanic. Just a handful, though. We all know Life is Strange games don’t exactly lean on challenge. So, on paper, all the ingredients for a triumphant return are there. Unfortunately, problems pile up as the game goes on, especially in the one area that matters most: the story. The game tries hard to throw a couple of convincing red herrings at the player, but because we are forced to chase all of them, focus slips away from the plot line that actually works. Then the story heads to the exact place I suspected from the start it would go and writes itself into a corner. To get out of that corner, it starts tossing both its own themes and some of the original game’s themes out the window, and then it ends with some of the most blatant sequel bait I’ve ever seen. So many threads are left dangling that calling it an “ending” barely feels accurate. By all rights, this should have soured me on the game. Yet it didn’t—because I was just so damn happy to see my girl Max again. To soak up every detail of who she’s become: how she’s been, what she’s done between games, how she’s grown. In my humble opinion, this is the part they nailed. And it’s almost all they needed to keep me engaged—to make me swallow that undercooked mess of a finale and go right back to the chef to ask, “Sir, might I have another?” I might be a special case, though. I’m firmly in the “Bay” camp, and I can imagine Double Exposure is a much harder pill to swallow for the “Bae” crowd. And of course, for the overwhelming majority of players who have never even heard of either faction. So, is Double Exposure a good game? I don’t think so. The high production values can’t distract from the fact that the plot loses coherence as it goes and can’t be bothered to deliver a real ending. Without prior emotional attachment to Max, I wouldn’t blame you for shutting it down well before the credits. But I’m still glad I got to experience one more Caulfield adventure. I’m just that much of a fan. TLDR: If you don’t know or care about Max—or if you’re a Pricefield shipper—go find better stories in better games. The rest of you have probably already bought this one anyway.

Lost Records: Bloom and Rage wants to be “Stand by Me” for teenage girls — but loses itself in the weeds. With Lost Records: Bloom and Rage, Publisher Don’t Nod adds another entry to its growing catalogue of “teenage girl slice of life with a tinge of the supernatural” games, still trying to bottle another dose of the Life is Strange lightning. This time, the gimmick is a dual timeline plot structure and an aspiring filmmaker protagonist. The game begins with Swann Holloway — a forty-something aspiring novelist — psyching herself up for a reunion with an old friend in a bar deep in the woods. This is the current timeline, in which we drive Swann through the world in the first person perspective, observe things and talk with people. One of these people is our old friend, who has received a rather ominous package whose wrapping makes oblique references to the summer of 1995 and begs us to remember what happened back then. So we start to remember, and the game’s point of view falls down the rabbit hole into the past and into the third person perspective that the original Life is Strange and the Walking Dead games made so popular. Gameplay feels familiar: Swann explores, makes dialog choices and solves simple puzzles. Locations can be searched for collectibles, which take the form of little movie snippets filmed with Swann’s ever present camcorder. There is even a rudimentary editing menu implemented, but ultimately, this gameplay system is of little consequence if you don’t aim for 100% achievement completion. Since the gameplay pillar of engagement is thus rather slight, the game has to lean on its story and presentation to make a case for itself. The art direction stands out for its commitment to realism — faces and bodies look like real people, not stylized archetypes. I found this rather charming: The characters with their all too human flaws and blemishes leave a strong expression, especially their adult versions in the present. The constant need to cram as many visual representations of 90s nostalgia as possible into every frame landed rather less well with me: I found it cloying, even desperate at times, and ultimately unnecessary, but to each his own. When the environments open up into more natural scenery, the lighting very effectively sets the mood and successfully evokes the feeling of golden childhood summers, full marks there. The performances aim for a natural vibe as well, which means that none of the characters here exude the charisma of, say, Ashly Burch as Chloe Price in the Life is Strange series (I’m sorry that I bring LiS up as often as i have, but you just can’t get past the 800-pound-gorilla when talking about this genre), but come over much more as realistic people, a goal Lost Records goes after with all it has. The score supports each scene’s mood well enough, but none of it lingers afterward. The support by the art direction is there, what about the story? The plot starts off rather well with the threat of the ominous box, but has a hard time getting rolling once we travel back in time. It regains momentum when the band of friends comes together for their golden summer adventures. Some of the scenes are quite effective and stand up beautifully on their own. But in the end, it wants to say too much about too many things, loses its focus and finally is so much in a hurry to tie up its loose ends that most of them peter out in less than satisfying, predictable conclusions. Lost Records: Bloom and Rage earns a merely passable grade from me. I liked the characters and was glad to get to know them, but the adventure they went on deserved a stronger script. There are better games with much better stories out there: Play those first. TLDR: A typical LiS-Clone with a charming ensemble of characters, an admirable commitment to artistic honesty but weighed down by a terminal case of ‘90s nostalgia and a script that runs out of steam. I’d advise skipping it.

Life is Strange: True Colors reclaims the franchise’s strength, but its weaknesses, too. First off, I need to declare my bias: I regard the original Life is Strange as one of the best, most memorable gaming experiences in my life. I liked the prequel “Before the Storm” well enough, mostly because it gave me more of one of my favorite characters. Life is Strange 2, however, left me cold. So when I say that True Colors felt like a return to form for me, that is high praise. This slice of life story around another teen with with supernatural abilities (supernatural empathy instead of time manipulation) making their home in a small community inhabited by quirky, well realized character (Colorado mining town instead of Oregon coastal village) is just as engrossing, charming and gripping as the tale of Chloe and Max was. Alex Chen, an orphan grown up in the system and our protagonist, has had a hard life, but things are looking up for her. Upon invitation by her estranged but loving brother, she moves to the small mining town of Haven Springs, and right then and there the game won me over: This very first scene is incredibly bucolic, full of life, color and golden sunlight. You can practically smell the fresh mountain air. That was the first hook that got me. The second hit home only minutes after, when I witnessed the awkward reunion between Alex and her brother. Both of them didn’t quite know how to deal with each other and the situation, and I could read every conflicting emotion, not only in the excellent voice performances, but in their expressions and body language, too, and it all felt so true, so emotionally resonant that I couldn’t help falling in love with these two lovable, damaged humans trying clumsily to connect to each other, the captured facial animations were that good. These two things, colorful, joyful art direction and charming, emotionally resonant characters are the great strengths of this game, and they made playing through it a joy. Together, they convincingly create the idyllic atmosphere of a tight-knit community living in the ideal small town. Or would, if the actual plot didn’t complicate things. There is actually quite a bit of socio-political commentary to be found, if you’re open for that kind of thing. The plot itself meanders a bit at times, but still creates room for a few incredibly moving scenes, the odd successful twist and ultimately a finale that for all its understated subtlety packs an incredible punch. Unfortunately there are a few mediocre valleys between these peaks of engagement, and a lot of them have to do with the implementation of Alex’s superpower. While the idea of Super Empathy is fascinating and is used very well during the high points of the narrative, Deck Nine struggled to create meaningful everyday applications of it. But they couldn’t let it lie either, thus Alex has to empath her way through way too many two sentence dialog sequences with no import and no emotional resonance. As a controller-based adventure game, there are few gameplay systems to be had, and the riddles here barely deserve the name. There are precious few things to be discovered away from the beaten path. Innovation is scarce, after you’re over the incredibly improved character animations. If you are not here for the characters, the vibes and the story, you might not have a good time. But if you are, if you want to see Alex through her journey, smile with her, commiserate with her tears, you will find it incredibly easy to fall in love with her, and with Haven Springs. TLDR: True Colors is a return to form for the Life is Strange franchise. While it might be just one step above a walking simulator, this game will nevertheless charm you with its characters and atmosphere.

Elden Ring brings so much to the table that the table almost breaks. Elden Ring, the seventh scion of the noble Soulsborne house, has quite a legacy to live up to. As the popular siblings tend to do, it surpasses all these expectations with seeming ease and looks splendid doing it, too.That is not a metaphor. The production values of this game are through the roof, as everyone stepping even one foot into the Lands Between will attest. The Great Outdoors greets its intrepid explorers with incredibly lush vegetation, a masterpiece of a sky box, majestic mountains, foreboding castles and a golden haze of light beatifying everything. Where earlier Soulsborne titles used to trap their players in incredibly intricate labyrinths, Elden Ring sets you loose in a gigantic open world and tells you to go nuts. Every single place you can see on the horizon you can set a food in, and in a few other places you would never suspect are there besides. Just take note of the golden knight over there. He will in all probability cut you down a few times, just to start things off on the right foot. Whether you make your first experience in combat with him or the much softer targets beyond him, combat feels very familiar to a Dark Souls 3 veteran. A couple of things have been added: A jump button complete with jump attacks, a horse to get around on and engage in mounted combat, and probably the most consequential addition: Spirit summons, the ability to conjure up an NPC to fight with you in certain situations, e. g. boss fights. When encountering this feature, the brows of an experienced Dark Souls player furrow. Won’t this mess with the hallowed Difficulty, make things way too easy? To my mind, it does only a little. Elden Ring is an appropriately harsh game: If you play it like a traditional Souls game, it will send you to the death screen quite often. But it is the kind of dominatrix that really is in it mainly for your enjoyment: The kind who always makes sure that the straps have cushy insides, who always sets down a pillow under the pillory, who always listens an extra second for your safe word before proceeding. Whether it is a particularly difficult constellation of regular enemies or one of the dozens of stunning and exciting boss fights that have you stumped, somewhere out there is a spell, a weapon or a spirit companion that will help you jump that hurdle and still feel like a bad-ass for having done so. Or you can do it the old-fashioned way and just bang your head against the wall until the wall is reduced to rubble. You do you. Just one problem: If you do want that vintage Dark Souls experience, you have to resist the siren call of the spirit summons, not just once, but every time a boss has struck you down with only one percent of health remaining. That might be a tall order. But all this quibbling about difficulty aside, combat is still an eternal font of enjoyment. Squaring off against a Cleanrot Knight is just as enjoyable in hour 200 as fighting a lowly foot soldier was in hour 1. The core gameplay loop of Elden Ring is second to none. One area where there has been remarkable progress in the Soulsborne franchise is the story telling. That doesn’t mean that the plot told is any less cryptic than before, but it is told in considerably less impenetrable fashion. There are quest chains that one might even be able to solve without resorting to the wiki! Some of them are quite engaging too, even if most of them end up on the grimdark side of the spectrum. So the plot department hasn't exactly delivered a diamond of storytelling, but they have polished their part of the grand opus a lot more than they used to do. Still, the story isn’t the draw of a Soulsborne game, and Elden Ring is no exception. Fighting for your life in spectacular yet grounded fashion in high stakes high difficulty duels with superbly animated foes in front of spectacularly beautiful vistas is. In these regards, Elden Ring delivers in spades. So much so in fact that it was almost too much for me. The Lands Between are vast, and if you truly mean to see and do everything, you are looking at a 200 hour time commitment, at least. That amount of time can be hard to come by, and sustaining sufficient amounts of enthusiasm for this long a time can be a challenge, no matter how enticing the game might be. But whatever amount of time you choose to let Elden Ring embrace you, you will have an excellent experience full of wonder, existential dread, mortal danger, frustration, elation, and always a new thing to discover right around the corner. Every session of Elden Ring truly feels like an adventure. TLDR: Elden Ring is the pinnacle of polish in the Soulslike genre: welcoming to all players, appropriately harsh to the fans. Almost too much ****, maybe, but an excellent experience for whatever amount of time you choose to give it.

The Riftbreaker tries to marry Diablo and AnnoThe Riftbreaker swims in the wake of Factorio, borrowing both the isometric perspective and the main gameplay pillars from that game. Its supposed selling point is a quite highly produced storyline and an emphasis on the personal involvement of the main character in the defense against thousands of bloodthirsty **** player steps into the shoes of Ashley, a lonely explorer on an alien world full of unspoiled natural riches and slavering beasts, her only companion a combat and construction suit driven by an AI core, able to conjure whole production lines of resource gathering buildings as well as an entire arsenal of automatic defense systems from thin air. The suit also comes with two weapon slots and a bunch of special combat abilities. We look down on our unequal pair and the planet’s alien landscape from a zoomed-out isometric perspective. Sometimes, the screen is also filled with truly gigantic masses of slavering beasts. Ashley is guided over this map via button inputs, a construction mode allowing the placement of buildings and the drawing of walls and pipes via mouse can be activated at a keystroke. There are menu screens for two quite extensive tech trees, inventory management, region jumping and weapon manufacture, and that’s all you get to attempt your mission: Strip mining the planet until you have enough resources to construct an interplanetary portal, so that the rest of humanity can come over and do the same more. The first mines are easily placed over resource clusters sprinkled all over the map, power comes from a few wind farms, and just like that, we watch the materials roll in. That‘s about the time a few locals try to tear our precious installations to bits and attempt to chomp down on Ashley herself. She is quite attached to her limbs and opens fire in a serviceable emulation of the Twin Stick Shooter genre. Thus we became acquainted with the second gameplay pillar. We also plonk down a few defense turrets to teach these uppity mongrels never to try something like this again. Unfortunately we now lack energy, so we plop down a few more wind farms, but those are terribly inefficient, so we build a laboratory to research the much more effective technology known as „burning **** to power stuff“. Just like that we have entered full immersion state into the primary gameplay loop. It’s quite engrossing in the beginning: Tech is unlocked in steady clip, new resource nodes need to be cleared of offensive fauna, fortified and then exploited. While we wait, we can always polish off a few secondary objectives, almost always „Go here, shoot everything that attacks and pick up a reward“. Occasionally a whole flood of aliens tries to overwhelm your defenses, necessitating you taking care of business yourself. Then you look up, and another afternoon is over. But at some point, the game runs out of momentum. Not because it runs out of things to show you, the problem is the shallowness of the primary gameplay systems. The Anno part of the game rarely has production chains longer than three steps, and the only needs you need to satisfy is your own hunger for construction materials and your facilities‘ need for power. There are no prestige buildings to unlock and build, and every base you build looks the same: utilitarian. You can individualize things a bit with some elements of fluff, like freely placable lighting elements - but that’s it. The twin-stick shooter element has similar problems: the weapons feel samey, and at higher tech levels they are all equally effective, even if some critters have element resistances. The critters themselves vary in look—some even biome-specific—but fighting them feels the same. The perspective doesn’t help: from that zoomed-out angle, lava aliens and metallic ones behave and explode similarly. Things get hectic, but I never felt threatened on Ashley’s behalf, even when she got snacked on and had to respawn. The story isn’t up to task either: while Ashley and her AI companion share some charming dialogue, there are few emotional beats, and the stakes never hit **** final hours felt like a chore: I had fortified all my strip mines to absurd levels, and all that was left to do was wait until I had enough resources to build the Game-Endotron and ask myself if I really wanted to play through another variant of “Go to this special map, uncover 40 percent, and build a functioning base that complies with arbitrary mission constraints.” It felt **** the end, all the systems of The Riftbreaker felt lackluster, and the prevailing feeling I was left with was “Meh. Could have been worse, I guess.” So not a good ROI on my invested time. TLDR: A promising mashup of base-building and twin-stick shooting that’s ultimately too shallow and repetitive to sustain long-term engagement.

A remake more excellent than it has any right to be When I remember the original Final Fantasy 7, the screen becomes flooded with the golden light of childhood memories, of whole days of summer vacation invested in raising chocobos and beating my head against the Emerald Weapon fight. It is one of the first games I remember having a lasting impact on me. I also remember a game struggling mightily against the hardware limitations of its time: It wanted to tell a sprawling story full of high drama, tragedy and triumph, yet all it had to work with were stick figures with painted on googly eyes and an english translations that buckled under the whiplash-inducing mood shifts and the sheer enormity of some of the stuff implied or actually happening on screen. Gameplay was mostly fine, but the grind got quite grindy over time. So when I booted up the Remake after it finally made its way to the PC, it was with a bit of trepidation. Would the magic be there, or would the ballast win out? And then the bridge of “Midgar, City of Mako” reached down through my ears, pulled my heart right out of my chest and promised that everything would be fine. And so it was, all the way through the first bombing mission. The art on display has gotten an incredible upgrade, thanks to both the technology of today and what I’m sure are scores of talented artists, but the faithfully recreated Mako Reactor 1 remains less than bucolic. The new combat system allows for real time attacks and dodges while you wait for your turn to activate special attacks, but just like back then, there isn’t a lot of variety to fighting in the beginning. Barrett was even more of a blustery windbag with a savior complex and Cloud himself was just as emotionally stunted a piece of wood as before, but with much better hair and quite believable delivery. When **** finally blew up and Cloud had to slow-walk through a crowd of traumatized survivors while the sky darkened with the smoke clouds of the burning reactor, it became clear that FF7 Remake was just as interested in the grey tones as the original was, but it was working with a much richer color palette. Still, I was mostly whelmed at this point. The game sank its fangs fully into me only after the first step into Seventh Heaven, because that’s where I met Tifa. Warm, spunky, charming, troubled, beautiful Tifa, looking and sounding as if she had stepped right out of my imagination and yet surpassing all my expectations. A few hours later I reunited with Aerith and the same thing happened again. The two women were like old friends who grew into their ideal selves and were living their best lives. It was pure, eye-watering joy meeting them again. I can’t stress enough how much the two female leads are carrying the experience for me. They steal every scene they are in, they make Cloud a better person before our very eyes, they drive the plot all the way from the nostalgia-wrapped beginning to the explosive, if a little unfocussed finale. They bring fun, they bring the power, the smiles and the tears. They are the cherished heart of this game. Further along, the combat picks up variety and challenge as well, until at the end and during the obligatory second playthrough on hard mode, it was incredible fun bombarding super-tough enemies with a blizzard of special attacks, counters, magic spells and super moves. The game also keeps throwing mini-games at you now and then: Some of them are downright brilliant, most offer a nice break of pace. Almost none of them overstay their welcome. All the while the story picks up drama and nuance, heart break, goofiness, scene chewing bad guys and heartwarming moments of friendship and intimacy. The tone might whip around all over the place, but it still all holds together surprisingly well until almost the finish line. Which means we are in the tough love section of this review. The actual ending is a bit of a mess, feels tacked on and very poorly set up. A few of the mini-games are both tedious and challenging, a very unfortunate combination, as are a few of the boss fights. But that’s it, really, everything else is a fantastic right from emotional high point to exhilarating challenge to heartwarming moments of friendship to the occasional devastating gut punch into the feels. Over all of this game wafts the golden promise of so much more to come. Even so, this game manages to be the whole package and promises way north of 100 hours of supreme entertainment. It even made me like Yuffie, for crying out loud! TLDR: Whether you want to relive your glory days with a remake that manages to be the game nostalgia makes us remember instead of the game that actually was, or you are new here and on the prowl for an excellent exemplar of a JRPG, Final Fantasy Remake has got you covered.

Doom Eternal knows exactly what it wants to be and goes for it guns blazing. The 2016 reboot dragged the shooter genre kicking and screaming away from its cover filled comfort zone and sparked the return of the Boomer Shooter. We had forgotten what it felt like to feed a demon two shotgun barrels and let rip, and in a glorious shower of blood and guts, Doom 2026 made us remember. But this Doom Eternal, a sequel that needs to justify its existence on its own merits. Can it be more than More of the Same while still being true to the spirit of its predecessor? First impressions skew to the “More of the Same” diagnosis: You still use gun on demon until the satanic cows come home to be disembowelled. You still got your trusty chainsaw with it’s uncanny ability to turn any foe into an ammo-filled pinata, as well as your health-restoring glory kills. The first few levels feel very familiar, and then you notice something: A) the game keeps chucking gameplay systems at you, and b) your muscle memory doesn’t quite manage to keep you alive as much as it did in the predecessor. The demons are coming for you quite a bit harder, no matter what difficulty level you’re using, and if you don’t avail yourself to ALL the methods the game gives you to survive, you ain’t gonna. This means a hefty amount of multitasking: You need to choose the right weapons and trick shots to take out certain high priority targets quicker and with less damage to the Doom guy. You need to keep an eye on at least four different cool downs and charging special attacks. You need to always be on your toes and always have an eye on the entire battle. All of this while the hordes of hell are gunning for you. It’s stressful, almost like going through this for realsies would be. Which makes the triumphs very sweet. Certain battles though… I’ve never come as close to chucking my mouse out of the window. Outside of combat, traversal has added another string to it’s bow with the introduction **** hook bolted onto the super shotgun, a feature that a certain breed of Doom players can perform feats of pure magic with, but which still feels pretty awesome if you’re only swinging from arena to arena. There are secrets galore to find, most of them designed right at the sweet spot between easy to spot and hard to reach, especially since the map marks their general location. The main campaign also has a hub area where only traversal occurs, but that thing should have been cut: We are not here to take a look at Doom Guy’s record collection, we are here to rip and tear and look good doing it. And looking good this game does. The environments are the kind of ridiculously machismo Heavy Metal album covers are, executed flawlessly and with vision. The soundscape is sublime, from the clear and punchy weapon effects to the easily readible enemy audio cues to the driving, pulsing beats that will whip you into frenzies you don’t know you had in you. Only the enemy design has experienced a slight downgrade when compared to Doom 2016, from sublime to merely excellent. On the other hand, now you can see traces of your ministrations on their tender flesh, so… that’s cool. There is a story, too, for those that want one, and at times it actually claims the limelight, but there really isn’t much meat on that bone: It never rises above the level of Heavy Metal album cover flavour text, and we’re no here to learn the back story of hell anyway, we’re here to write the final chapter. But at least write it we do: The main campaign plus the two DLC campaigns in one find a very satisfying ending, even for those of us who didn’t quite read through the reams of lore dumps the game buries us in now and again. So let us return to the primary gameplay loop, which is as fun as ever, but to my mind it has slightly evolved: Where Doom 2016 was a pure power fantasy even on the higher difficulty levels, Doom Eternal serves a meaner, crueler experience, adjacent to Survival Horror on speed almost. Yes, you are the almost immortal Doom Guy, god of the shotgun, scourge of demon kind, but the horned team has been training and there are an awful lot of them. Keep that in mind when deciding whether to let Doom Eternal into your life: If you have the stomach for it, it will show you a good time. If not, it will chew you up and spit you out. TLDR: Doom Eternal is Doom 2016 cranked up to eleven: A lot more demons, a lot more ways to rip and tear, and for some reason, quite a bit more lore. Enough to make for a great, if not revolutionary, Doom game.

Midnight Suns dares to ask if a deck builder, a turn-based tactics game and a dating sim go well together. The existence of Midnight Suns is a small miracle in itself. I mean, both turn-based tactics and conversation-heavy dating sims are not exactly gameplay types one associates with the biggest superhero franchise, yet thanks to the good folks at Firaxis, that’s exactly what we got, plus elements of a deck building card battler. Midnight Suns really is a strange beast. One might even call it… innovative. The turn-based tactics part is a very strong foundation, which is not surprising considering the Firaxis pedigree. The player picks three heroes from a roster of Marvel characters ranging from A-Listers like Iron Man to relative unknowns like Niko Minoru, plus the player-designed protagonist, who can, but doesn’t have to go on the mission, too. These three then battle their way across a smallish map against a collection of enemies. Quite a few things are different, though: Cover is not a thing, the villains almost always go last, the map is revealed in its entirety from the get-go and the entire team shares an action and movement pool. And then there are the cards. Every round the player is handed a hand of cards and gets to play at least three of them. These cards represent hero specific actions, and every hero has his own pool of 8 specific cards. The differences between characters are quite significant: There are enabler heroes like Dr. Strange whose cards may draw more cards, allow for more plays or confer status effects upon friend or enemy. Tanks like Captain America have cards that focus on giving armor to characters and taunting opponents. Finally there are glass cannons like Blade and Iron Man. The cards on hand define the actions the player can take, and since chance decides which cards are available, no round plays the same and doing your best with what you get is the name of the game. The tactics part can get pretty complex, too, what with different kinds of card synergy, a heroism meter that has to be filled by certain card plays before it can be used to play the more powerful cards, environmental dangers that are both a problem and a chance to knock enemies out that much quicker, special enemies, mission objectives and so much more. New gameplay systems are added during campaign progression, too, so things never get stale. It’s a lot of fun and a great turn-based tactics game. Strategic planning isn’t quite off the table, either, because there is a second gameplay loop between missions. What was base management in XCOM here is a kind of platonic dating sim cum deck crafting and a diminutive open world tacked on. During missions the protagonist character I forgot to mention until now gets to wander the grounds of an old abbey church and the surrounding mountain valley, craft cards for the combat decks and engage into a metric ton of dialogues with the assorted marvel heroes to level up a hero-specific friendship stat, which unlocks quite profound buffs for the heroes, and also drive along the actual plot. This isn’t a rough outlines and emergent storytelling plot like the XCOM games, oh no. Midnight Suns has a middling to good comic yarn to spin. I figured out where it was going a bit before it wanted me to, but it brought me along for the ride just fine, and some of the writing did wring the odd chuckle or genuine emotion from me. The rest gets by on the raw charm of the voice actors, who range from good to excellent. The tactical combat and the team management cum visual novel are pretty fun on their own, but in combination they create a virtuous cycle of engagement that really **** me in. Every mission I looked forward to the new conversations I’d get to have afterwards and the new cards I'd get to draft. Every open world section I was looking forward to the next mission so that I could try out my new abilities. There is so much stuff in this game that it actually gets overwhelming at times. And sometimes the game doesn't quite manage to get out of its own way: Some elements of the gameplay are way to cumbersome to access, for example. So small parts of the ride are a bit rough, but the whole experience is utterly unique: A weird genre chimera with genuinely innovative gameplay and at least double A production values, an above average Superhero story with a metric ton of pretty good dialogue and a rock solid primary gameplay loop. In a genre that is not spoiled with entries, Midnight Suns is top of the class. TLDR: Midnights Suns’ unique combination of turn-based tactics combat, deck builder mechanics and dating sim storytelling comes with the occasional rough edge and a hint of mechanics bloat, but these blemishes do not detract overly much from this very enjoyable game. Genre fans will absolutely have a good time.

The Last of Us defines Polish, or at least it should. The Last of Us is not for the faint of heart. It takes a premise that should sound silly, namely mushroom zombies, and spins such an immersive story of societal collapse that the first 20 minutes of it are fully capable of traumatizing folks, then spends 20 hours of running time building them back up, only to have them tumble into the very heart of darkness in a way that only video games can. It’s an incredible, an outstanding game. Even if it does rest on some quite conventional foundations. Don’t get me wrong, the gameplay basics are more than solid, but stalking mushroom zombies and savage ex-office workers doesn’t feel that different from, say, Aloy sneaking up on a pack of robo-dinosaurs, when it comes to the pushing of the buttons. The foraging of resources, the crafting of tools, the actual combat, all these gameplay mechanics are nothing new, they are well implemented examples of their trope and nothing more. What makes the difference is the metric ton of polish and verisimilitude Naughty Dog smeared all over them, until they feel like something completely **** entire production smells like a billion well-invested dollars. The environmental design is so alarmingly life-like that wandering through a fictional college campus devastated by the collapse of all civilization made me deeply nostalgic for my own time in college. The sound scape made me turn away from the monitor to check whether the steps came from the actual room I was in more than once. The score is dominated by guitar strums positively dripping with atmosphere. Crafting a molotov cocktail out of a bottle, a dish rag and some alcohol dregs doesn’t feel like getting a nice tool to finish off the next boss, it feels like pulling something desperate together with sweaty, shaking hands so that it just might rescue you from a gruesome, horrible death, the goddamn enemy design is that well done. The level design is completely devoid of artificial contrivances like chest-high walls and yet creates incredibly engaging encounters and an almost perfect sequence of action-packed peaks, tranquil troughs full of quietly tragic environmental storytelling and the very occasional funny bit that knows just when to cut the tension before it becomes traumatizing. It all adds up to this world feeling completely, effortlessly real. Into this boiling cauldron of excellence Neil Druckman then stirs the warmth and charisma of Troy Baker, the spunk and energy of Ashley Johnson, and his script. Baker and the script made Joel, who on paper is a pretty **** guy, a character I could actually understand and sympathize with. Ashley not only made a life-long fan out of me with her portrayal of Ellie, the story gave her a wonderful, uplifting, compelling character arc. All future teen sidekicks will forever fail to live up to Ellie’s legacy. And then the script. It turned me into a blubbering, tearful mess, made me scream in rage for all the right reasons, shocked me into stunned silence and finally left me in that kind of thoughtful, lingering sadness that only really good, complex depression media can engender. The kind that makes you hit play again immediately after experiencing its ending. I have only one substantial criticism: At times the player is free to hurt his own immersion through gameplay decisions. It happened to me once and pulled me out of the experience for a bit. Also, crafting an entire comic series to explore and then not letting the player read more than the blurb is anything but fair. But that’s all I have, really. So I raise my tiny voice in the overwhelming chorus of LoU1-Fans and declare that for me, this game is a 10/10. TLDR: The Last Of Us Part 1 defines “Putting an unbelievable amount of energy into appearing effortlessly perfect”, and then it keeps you up multiple nights with the incredible stories it has to tell. DO NOT MISS OUT ON THIS GAME!

Larger, prettier, more forgiving: Ori and the Will of the Wisp is a worthy successor Ori and the Blind Forest combined the charme of a Rayman game with the cruelty of Dark Souls. Ori and the Will of the Wisp makes no bones about its heritage, but attempts to bring meaningful improvement to the weaker aspects of its predecessor. The core game is unchanged: Ori, a small woodland spirit who might as well hail from a Studio Ghibli film, jumps, runs and fights his way through a collection of landscapes organized as a 2D metroidvania game. All the core movement mechanics and combat skills are still here and just as delightful to employ as ever. The Wisps brought Ori a few more combat moves, which is nice of them, but we have to pick and choose which three of them we want mapped to the upper three action button (the lowest as ever triggers the jump). This is an unwelcome change from the Blind Forest, where the entire move roster was accessible at all times, but I do get that when you add more moves to a character whose move set already made use of every feasible button combination, something has to give. What else has changed? The art has improved quite a bit, which is high praise since the Blind Forest already was a stunner ****. There are a lot more detailed animations bringing the environments to life, and the regions are much more varied now, as are the enemies. The difficulty curve has been flattened a bit, mostly because Ori doesn’t die at the merest touch of a hostile bit of environment any more. A few bona fide boss fights as well as chase scenes brought over from the Blind Forest make for satisfying region climaxes. There is quite a bit more real estate to explore. A few NPCs handing out exposition and quests are a welcome addition. The script isn’t exactly stellar, but I was surprised how much drama and pathos can be wrung out of utilitarian writing in a children’s story that is uncompromising enough to go to some surprisingly dark and fascinating places. This game tells the kind of children’s tale that doesn’t talk down to its audience and does include the odd scare now and then. All in all, the Will of the Wisp is a kinder, gentler, prettier Ori. It only occasionally tries to prove a rage quit from you, except for the final fight, which, it might be argued, is allowed to be unfair at times. And now and then it even lobs a surprisingly good story beat at you. All of this makes Ori and the Will of the Wisps an excellent Metroidvania. TLDR: Come for the pretty, stay for the challenge. Or the satisfying movement. Or the joy and tears the story will bring. There are many reasons.

Ori and the Blind Forest hides a fist of steel in an emerald satin glove The first thing Ori and the Blind Forest hits you with is water colored beauty frosted with golden morning light. I spent at least a minute gazing in wonder at the title screen. Yes, really. A click on the “Start new game” button later, Ori and the Blind Forest tells the tale of Ori himself in a semi-interactive intro sequence that gives even the first ten minutes of “Up” a run for its poignancy money. Just a few minutes after that, odds are that the game will kill you for the first time. Because while Ori and the Blind Forest might look like a children’s game, when it comes to challenge, it does not screw around. The likely killer isn’t even one of the cutely corrupted forest animals opposing Ori’s progression, it’s Mother Nature itself with its drowning floods, burning fires, endless chasms and especially its thrice-damned brambles and thorn bushes that pop Ori like he’s a balloon. You will die when a jump is too short. You will die when a jump is too high. You will die when after a harrowing sequence of flawlessly executed actions the very last button hit came a bit too late or too early. These are the deaths that result in teeth marks left in the controller. And yet, despite the high level of death-related frustration, I never felt any inclination to walk away from this 2D metroidvania. Partly because the titular Blind Forest is so jaw-droppingly gorgeous, with its greens and purples and violets, with its moody shadows and glorious sunlight, with all those lovingly crafted little animations and artistic touches. Partly because I was invested in helping Ori through his hero arc. But mostly because playing was so much fun mostly because one primary feeling the game inspires: momentum. When Ori isn’t busy bleeding out on another bloody thorn, the slightest button prompt makes him glide through the level like a leaf on an especially cineastic breeze. Double jump, dash and glide allow for movement chains that don’t touch the ground for 10 seconds or more. Playing Ori is simply delightful. Not every moment I spent with the game was quite as wonderful. There are a few brutal difficulty spikes that surpassed even the already high base level of PC mortality. The lack of enemy variety hurts the game a bit, as does the strange checkpoint system that allows the player himself to determine where he would like a checkpoint to be. The problem is that you pay for the position of a checkpoint with a resource you might run out of, which allows the player to completely screw himself, especially since Ori’s stronger attacks consume the same resource. Next time, please take that particular freedom away from me again. As I got better at the game and Ori got his paws on quite a few life bar extensions, the engagement curve smoothed out and the rage-inducing instakills became quite rare. Ori is the rare game where the last third is actually the most fun. The story wraps itself up in a bittersweet finale with a hopeful denouement, and then you are free to fly through the entire map like lightning, hovering up the last collectibles to your heart’s content and finally, leave the game and immediately install its sequel. Ori and the Blind Forest might be a harsh mistress, but she has a lot of joy to give. TLDR: A charismatic metroidvania with beautiful art, a world class movement system and a charmingly simple and evocative story. Just be aware that it will kill you. A lot.

Very little blood, a lot of sweat, a manageable amount of tears and a paradise playground as the final reward The place: A desolate planet of Mars make and model. A poor little human, having just crashed here in a dinky little capsule, stares gloomily through the dusty visor of his orange space suit at the desolate desert in front of him. All our little PC has to his name is a bargain bin version of the Star Trek replicator, a mining laser with infinite energy, and a dumb phone with a single message on it. So compared to an average human in our time he’s unimaginably rich, but it doesn’t quite feel like it, because, as the aforementioned message explains, he’s marooned here for some unmentioned crime and the only way he gets to leave this deadly wasteland if he terraforms THE ENTIRE PLANET. The task is just as breathtaking as the poisonous atmosphere around here. At least the place is beautiful in a desolate kind of way, if you don’t factor in the lack of food and water. In ambition, the game has a lot of its survival crafting sim peers beat. As for the primary gameplay loop, the day to day business of planet crafting feels a lot like the genre tropes, sci-fi variant: You shoot resources out of the ground, then materialize buildings out of thin air which produce resources and increase a meter, Said meter is called Terraformation Index and unlocks other buildings and more advanced equipment as it rises. The tech progression feels really satisfying for about three quarters of the game, the last quarter has too few consequential unlocks and thus feels like a thankless grind and in need of some patching. The difference is that most of these buildings don’t just serve your continued existence, they slowly transform your entire environment. It’s awesome! The first time I noticed that I had turned the sky blue during the day I got really choked up gazing at the beautiful color I had made. Once I reached the end game I didn’t even want to leave. Planet Crafter really really lets you do what it says on the tin. Another axis you’re progressing in is the slow unlocking of further game systems: Movement progresses from walking to running to really cool jetpack, systems to automate the production of resources are introduced that in the late game allow you to play a simplified version of Satisfactory, and, of course, quite a few decorative options for the mechanically useless yet so satisfying luxury loft you’ll inevitably be building for yourself in one of the most idyllic landscapes terraforming has ever produced. What the Planet Crafter doesn’t have is any kind of combat. This is more of a relaxed interpretation of the genre, and you’ll be busy enough keeping your water, food and oxygen meters topped, while mining, building and exploring. Yes, you’ll be exploring quite a bit, too: Certain resources you can at first only find in the wrecks of quite a few crashed space ships and the abandoned bases of other unfortunate souls who died attempting the very thing you’re trying to do. It is a bit of a slog because the floor plan of the the wrecks and bases look like they were designed by a mad man, or a procedural generation algorithm, and navigating them has been known to engender headaches later in the game, when the really big ships show up. That is one of the few areas where the treasured player might encounter an instance of wonk, but not the only one. I got stuck in the floor once or twice and accidentally deconstructed quite a few of my buildings. The elfin sprinklings of story one stumbles across through thorough exploration could have used a bit more effort, too, even though I appreciate the capitalism critique wrapped in biting gallows humor hidden in the bitter posthumous rants of an earlier Planet Crafter. These sometimes quite sizable problems don’t manage to detract much from the magnificence of what The Planet Crafter asks of and allows you to do, and that’s mostly due to the wonderful art and beautiful score presenting the results of your effort. The landscape is as enchantingly handcrafted as the haunting melodies that accompany them. The animals that show up in the end game could use a redesign, maybe, but everything else is just wonderful. All in all, Planet Crafter is a competently designed survival crafting sim with a bit of wonk elevated by its central conceit and it’s beautiful presentation, elevated all the way to being an excellent time at the controller. Oh, did I mention it has flawless co-op? TLDR: Alone or in co-op, Planet Crafter will let you craft an entire planet. What fan of survival, crafting and simulation could resist?

Watson, I fear we as a culture haven’t figured out how to make a Sherlock Holmes game yet. A bold statement maybe, given that there exist at least a dozen video game adaptations of the material already. Is Crimes and Punishments the irrefutable evidence to the contrary? The game is basically an old school point and click adventure pressed into the mold of a third person perspective. The mix has its advantages: No more pixel hunting, you just drive Sherlock near a clearly labeled point of interest, you hit the interaction button, and Sherlock picks up or talks with whatever you had in your sights. He might even combine something with something else he just happens to hold in his hands at the time. There are a bunch of specialized gameplay systems to handle specific situations: Atrocious QTEs to handle the odd fisticuffs (thank God the game allows you to skip them). A kind of On-Rails-Shooter on tranquilizers to simulate Sherlock’s powers of observation, which works rather well. A bare bones implementation of the mind palace concept, where you combine facts to unlock deductions which are basically switches labeled with theories about the case. When you’ve unlocked and set enough of those switches, you unlock one possible solution to the case. Importantly, the game doesn’t tell you if the solution you’ve unlocked is correct until you’ve completed the test, which is an act of artistic courage I salute. Otherwise the mind palace thing is just ok. All in all I would call the gameplay serviceable. It’s fine. Crimes and Punishment earns its highest marks in presentation. Frogware crafted a wonderfully immersive version of 19th century England here. The city is a smoke-filled nightmare, the countryside is rustic, the people are unbelievably stuffy or old-timey uncouth, it’s great! Unfortunately, the voice work can’t quite keep up, and we’re in the valley of just fine again. I was especially let down by Sherlock, but that might be a me thing. I enjoy Sherlock’s modern interpretations as a manic coke fiend and high functioning sociopath a lot, which to my mind is definitely present in Doyle’s original texts, but the Holmes of Crimes and Punishments is more akin to the 20th century TV adaptations. Not my kettle of tea, as it were. But what about the cases?! Aren’t those the main thing? Yes they are, and this is where Crimes and Punishment, as well as every video game adaptation of the Great Detective, takes on an impossible task and inevitably falls down. You see, for me the appeal in a Sherlock Holmes story rests a lot on that final moment of revelation where Mr. Holmes trumpets the solution into the world and then takes the audience on a wild ride along the chain of evidence, taking all the leaps and curves along it with grace and aplomb, and leaves them agasp with wonder yet fully satisfied with the conclusion. That is a moment that videogames are incapable of reproducing. You see, as long as they insist on having us play the Master Sleuth himself, we with our average smarts have to be able to figure things out ourselves for the game to progress. So the cases can’t be the kind of brain teasers that are Sherlock’s drug of choice, and the triumphant summation is bereft of all its thunder, because the audience knows everything beforehand. But if we were to play someone else, then the NPC version of Homes would take up so much real estate in the script that the PC would be reduced to being the sidekick in the story we are playing, and that’s just not fun! An impossible conundrum, dear Watson. Crimes and Punishment mostly chooses to serve us average case work yet have all the people Sherlock interacts with be complete dolts who can’t add two and two together. Poor Lestrade. During two cases, they try to pull a fast one, though: Suddenly Sherlock does pull a few details of the case out of his hat during the conclusion that hadn’t been mentioned at all during the detective work before. But instead of being amazed, I was catapulted out of the experience completely. Where do you get off, game, keeping these things from me but letting my avatar in on them? That wasn’t in the contract! I’m sorry, but Sherlock Holmes doesn’t work as an unreliable narrator, and even if he did, the implementation was way too clumsy to work. The conclusion, dear Watson? The game has its moments, but can’t find a solution to the contradiction between Sherlock Holmes and Interactive fiction. In my humble opinion, you would be better off revisiting the Sherlock Holmes version of your choice in book and/or film. TDLR: Nice period piece, but Mr. Holmes just isn’t cut out to be a PC. He’s too much of an egotistical genius to share.

Stray Gods is is a successful prototype, even if the odd cog goes twang now and then. Stray Gods bills itself as a role playing musical. This might be a bit misleading to the more avid gamer. It is a musical, of that there can be no doubt, but some of us have a very specific collection of gameplay systems and tropes in mind when they hear the word role playing, and Stray Gods doesn’t quite manage to meet these expectations. You do play a role, that’s for sure, specifically the role of Grace, a charming college dropout and singing talent, who feels a bit lost at the moment, but will be pushed into a world of hidden gods, intrigue and music about 15 minutes in. The problem with the role play tag is that you don’t really get to tell the game who Grace is, it’s more like you can mix a certain flavor of protagonist into her, and then you make about 5 crucial decisions during the course of the story, and that’s it. Here’s how this works: During the many musical numbers (this is a musical, remember), occasionally the Bioware Dialogue Wheel(TM) pops up and allows you to choose the emotional direction the song will take. Unfortunately, at quite a few junctions the label and the color of the choice do a poor job telegraphing the consequences of the choice. Most paths through the game are worth taking, so the damage from unintended consequences is small, but still irksome at times. That is all the gameplay there is. Sure, there are a few dialog trees to climb, and a few choices outside of the songs exist as well, but at its core Stray Gods is interactive fiction, which means it mostly has to rely on the art and the story to mine engagement from the player. The art is strong. The character designs are very charming, nary a dud among them. Grace especially leaps from the still images, charisma and energy dripping from every crease of her leather jacket. The environments, though, are nothing to write home about: Sparse on details and color, they evoke the feeling of a set without committing fully to that vibe. But of most importance for a musical must surely be the cast, and here Stray Gods scores quite a few points. The main cast performs admirably. Honorable mentions go to Troy Baker and Mary Elizabeth McGlynn, but for me, Stray Gods is the Laura Bailey show. She carries the game with so much warmth and spunk and verve that the occasional bit player with less than great voice work is completely eclipsed. The story, unfortunately, wobbles a bit at times. It starts strong and finds a satisfying ending, but a few parts in the middle sag a bit, a few story beats loose with twists I can’t quite relate to and setups that can’t quite land the pay-off. As for the script: The dialog is sharp and witty, and all songs are at least inoffensive, with a few absolute bangers strewn in-between. Fortunately I was so invested in Grace’s story that the occasional story weakness failed to stop me. Stray Gods is a fascinating prototype for a new genre: It has quite a few warts and falls short of its full potential, but it is something new and fresh, unique and captivating. Fans of musical theater should not miss this, everybody else still can probably have fun with this game. TLDR: If the tag line “The first interactive musical” sounds intriguing to you, you will have a good time.

God of War: A captivating journey, the best combat system I have ever experienced, and an unbelievable amount of polish As a PC-Gamer, I came to the God of War-Franchise with a serious drawback: I had never played Kratos’ earlier adventures. I knew by cultural osmosis that I was tugging on the strings of a man who had murdered an entire pantheon, but I had not seen. That God of War still made me feel the soul-crushing weight of this unseen past, and Kratos’ anxiety about this past somehow infecting his son shows how superbly strong the writing and the performances on display are. The script is not the only aspect of this game soaring to such sterling levels of quality. From the very first scene, the art on display is dazzling. Majestic mountains crowned with eternal snow, winter-kissed woods, every environment is both unbelievably realistic and infused with fantastic, epic exaggeration, creating a land infused with magic. Kratos is a giant of a man, every muscle ever discovered chiseled to perfection, yet the play of emotions on his face is always perfectly relatable, as is everybody else’s. And the animations! Combat feels kinetic and weighty, yet blindingly fast at times, out of combat every step taken, every climb looks and feels real. I mean, I’ve missed the quiet confidence with which Kratos beaches his rowboat when playing other games, for crying out loud. The soundscape is just as stellar: Effects are distinct, clear and punchy, the score plays on the player’s emotions in the background at one time only to sweep him up in epic swells the next, and the voice cast sells every line on the page and every emotion in the margins as if their life depended on it. The script is, what lets them do that and I have already spoiled my opinion, yet let me reiterate: It’s wonderful. The game is essentially a road trip of a father and his estranged son with pretty much all the associated tropes, yet rendered so splendidly that I get misty eyes just remembering. Folded within this are a greek tragedy and the first act of an apocalyptic epic: There is so much narrative meat here, and all of it prime cuts. As for the dialogue: It sparkles, it inspires, it elicits emotions, it brings forth tears and laughter, it made me love the characters. I know no higher praise. Some sections might be a bit rushed at times, but that’s the only blemish I can see. And so we come, finally, to the gameplay: As befitting for the God of War, the main thing Kratos does is fight, and the gameplay system governing said fighting is, to my mind, the best of its kind bar none. It’s like you took the combat system of Dark Souls and dialed up both the impact of attacks and the speed up to eleven. Every button on the gamepad is relevant to combat, some of them even do double duty, giving the player a dizzying amount of options to act on and react to the encounters the game throws at him. On the higher difficulties, which I recommend to everyone up for their challenge, the game will make you make use of every one of these options, until combat feels like an intricate dance of slaughter. Sometimes, though, Kratos has to explore the areas he has just depopulated, or even solve a riddle or two. These systems are much less uniquely excellent, but they don’t need to be. Exploration just works except for traveling by boat, which is the best of it’s kind in my experience. The riddles are hilariously limited in scope: The vast majority asks the player to figure out which part of the landscape to hit with which weapon, as if Kratos can’t help but interface with everything around him edge first. Yet it is impressive how much variety the puzzle designers wring out of this sparse instrument case. Both gameplay modes work well in providing a bit of variety and downtime between skirmishes and thus do their part in elevating the experience to dizzying heights. Is God of War the Perfect Game, then? No. That’s not the kind of world we’re living in. The gear progression system is finicky and opaque, the optional grind fest Niflheim wasn’t fun for me, the map is less than helpful, and the highest difficulty, which mostly sits in the right side of Painfully Challenging, has a few insane difficulty spikes. I’m sure I could find a few more nits to pick, but they all fade away in an instant in front of one unshakable fact: God of War 2018 is the best third person brawler I have ever played. TLDR: This high octane spectacle fighter is controller-breakingly awesome. If you want to know how good a game strong fundamentals and an incredible amount of polish can make, play this.

Anno 1800 was almost too much game for me, but it is too fun a game to let go. What do you think of when you see a pristine collection of temperate to tropical islands, complete with picturesque Waterfalls and bright beaches framed by lazily rolling azure waves? If you think “This is where the deep water port goes, the steelworks go over there and right here is where I will build my palace!”, then, oh boy, do I have a game for you! Anno 1800 starts small. The interface is polished to a mirror shine, and soon the first island is settled, a bunch of ruggedly handsome huts house a bunch of rugged, presumably handsome farmers who work in the lumber mill, drink in the nearby pub and want nothing more from life and, more importantly, from their government than their daily fish ration and always enough schnaps for everyone. Then the game entices you to level up one of your farm houses for the first time.Suddenly the farmers have become workers, and they demand bread. And cured meats. And beer, which is a problem because beer is made of hops, which doesn’t grow on our island, and we don’t even have a shipyard yet! A few hours later the workers call themselves artisans now, and now it’s no longer schnapps they want to drown their sorrows in, but rum, which needs this weird plant named sugar cane that doesn’t grow anywhere near here, but supposedly there’s great plantations growing the stuff somewhere across the oceans. So suddenly you’re no longer only administrator of a damp little island somewhere in the Old World, but viceroy of a promising collection of palm trees and banana fields, and also manager of a trans-oceanic logistics network. No slavery here, though: Our colonial workers are all paid very well, which you’ll know because they get pissy if there’s not enough ponchos and rum and fried banana stew and sewing machines for them to buy. So the primary gameplay loop is a vicious cycle of escalating citizen demands and ever more complex production chains constructed to satisfy these demands. If you know how, you can control the speed of your descent into madness, but chances are that the first time around, you’ll go crazy. And then you’ll go **** all of it is just so… picturesque. I couldn’t help returning to my main city again and again, just to take it all in, pride swelling in my breast. Even the industrial wasteland I installed one island over just looks so damn cute and functional and capitalistic! Pretty enough that it doesn’t even seem that weird that the game occasionally gives you a quest to make a glamor shot of a certain industrial site.That is not the only kind of quest in this industrial revolution simulation. Someone at Blue Byte must have noticed that there are occasional lulls in the action when the ship with cotton and rum is late again, and sprinkled a haze of storylets over the whole experience. Some of them go to pretty epic places, too. And there are just so many systems to master! I haven’t even touched on expeditions, electrification, treasure hunts, and so much more. So my advice is: Go deep. Trigger a certain subsystem and then explore it fully until you’re done with it, and only then go back to the well of complexity. This way you won’t get overwhelmed and Anno 1800 and its metric tons of DLC will keep you gleefully managing and experimenting for a long, long time. Just don’t look for a triumphant ending, though. This is an endless game, which means that a playthrough either goes down in flames because you’ve gotten yourself into a death spiral or fizzles out when you lose interest in adding another production chain to your already stupendous Rube Goldberg machine. But when a single run can bring you over 120 hours of engagement, maybe that’s ok. TLDR: If you ever wanted to be a Charles **** Villain, turning the Great Unwashed into an army of loyal employees and gleeful consumers, transforming beautiful islands into a glamoured version of 19th century London and laughing maniacally as you watch your bank account balance shoot past the stratosphere, Anno 1800 has your back. Hold onto your sanity, though: Managing a robber baron’s wet dream is not for the faint of heart.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is an embarrassment of riches for everyone who can at least tolerate turn-based combat and the isometric perspective I started up the game and spent the next hour in the warm embrace of the incredibly powerful character creator, clicking through a host of classes, subclasses, traits and spells as well as trying on a smorgasboard of faces, skin tones and other anatomical options, I was soothed, delighted and a bit ashamed of my lack of faith. Larian have proven their credentials as master craftsmen of the genre at least twice, I knew this game was my jam. Yet only when I finally dove head first into Act I and resurfaced at the end of Act III about 130 hours later, I truly understood how astonishing a game this is. Baldur’s Gate 3 is an epic level CRPG +5. Wherever you go, you are surrounded by excellence. The very first master stroke I noticed was the incredibly detailed implementation of the D&D ruleset with its many, many complexities. Larian went incredibly far to make sure that, just like in an actual roleplay session, you can use all these skills and traits in almost all kinds of ways to solve all kinds of problems the game throws at you. Whatever kind of character you play, you can find a way to succeed in most situations, and even your failures feel unique. During the third act, this very depth of simulation makes your avatar feel terrifyingly powerful and the escalating level of challenge increasingly scary. There are builds out there that completely break the game, of course, but in my experience, BG3 walks the edge between character growth and challenge escalation really well and with unprecedented variety. Next I noticed beauty. BG3 is not flashy: The isometric perspective doesn’t lend itself to spectacular vistas and the most cinematic it gets are simple shot-reverse shot compositions during millions of conversation scenes. But every inch of scenery on screen drips with detail work and atmosphere. The character designs, oh, those are just wonderful, oozing charisma and vision from every pore. It’s a feast for the eyes, while the ears languish in an epic score and truly inspired voice performances. The main cast is world class, but even the bit players execute their lines with warmth and emotion. This game knows how to wow the senses. The plot takes a bit more time to make its worth known. The hook is truly bonkers, but then things slow down a bit and the world-ending conspiracy on the horizon is crowded out by more immediate concerns and stories appropriate for newbie player characters. This feels like a letdown at first, but soon I found myself sinking into the spirit of languorous adventuring and things were just fun. The script is excellent, and the starting area held a lot of low stakes drama and locally sourced excitement. All the while, the game slowly, slowly ratcheted up the tension, until all through Act II, the pedal hit the metal for real. Act 3 shifted gears with an audible clunk. The high octane ramp up of Act 2 was replaced with another open world, do anything until the final door opens for you kind of narrative structure. This noticeably relaxed the tension and was quite unwelcome at first. It took me a while to recover the sense of directionless adventuring that was so helpful during Act I, but when I was over that hump, I noticed something wonderful: So many people and stories I had met during my way to the big city had followed me here. So many tales were braided into mine, so many fates were intertwined with that of my characters. And none of it felt forced or tacked on! It’s a marvel of story crafting, and it does result in a grand, no holds barred crescendo complete with heroic speechifying, gathering of the troops, grand gestures, grander battles, and a very satisfying ending. The denouement could use a bit more polish, though. So much praise and I haven’t even mentioned the main draw of the game for me: The few, the happy few, this band of brothers and sisters, the party. Six excellently written characters full of charm, wit, flaws and secrets, all with their own epic quest line which grows along and intertwined with the main quest line, all with sympathies, antipathies, deeply held convictions. I have my favorites, but if none of them melt your heart then it must be made of stone. These are the people giving you the opportunity to play the role you chose for your protagonist, and they are wonderful collaborators. This, for me, is the core of the bottomless enjoyment BG3 has for me: That all its wonders are braided together to paint a marvelous stage for me to write an extraordinary fate upon. Do I have quibbles? Yes, I do, most of them having to do with a few interface weaknesses. None of them matter, though: I’m already knee-deep in concepts for further playthroughs. TLDR: Do you like RPGs and the words “turn”, “based” and “combat” don’t send you running? Play this game. There is none better.

Dishonored - Death of the Outsider tries to answer Dishonored’s biggest open question, with middling success. It is probably fair to call Death of the Outsider a DLC pack for Dishonored 2 thater than the Stand-Alone-Expansion it is. The engine is the same, the art direction and soundscape are similarly excellent, at least one of the maps in Dishonored 2 is blatantly reused… It’s only in its finale that DotO steps out of the shadow of its predecessor for a bit. When it comes to the game mechanics, innovation is similarly hard to come by, which to my mind is a point against the title. Billie Lurk, ascended from bit player to deuteragonist to player character over the course of the franchise, has gotten the eldritch power economy package: A new flavor of Blink, an Impersonate power and astral projection. Every one of these feel powerful and necessary, something that couldn’t always be said of all the powers of the main game, but this less definitely doesn’t feel like more. The more mundane game systems are unchanged. The one thing that is added is a more formal system for side quest acquisition: They are actual contracts you get handed at the local blackmarket. These side quests provide quite a bit of engagement, as does the primary gameplay loop, even if it’s mostly just more of the same. The maps are very open-ended and allow for even more player expression than Dishonored 2 did, but in the end my impression boils down to: More of the same, with added polish. The one card that DotO has to play to entice is, of course, the main plot. Which, for me, fell flat. It started strong, with a harrowing discovery, a reunion with an old franchise mainstay character and ever stronger Lovecraft influences, but the second act pushes these horror influences to the side for too long and the end is crushed under the weight of expectations. I didn’t really connect with Billy Lurk as my protagonist either. She didn’t really have an arc, and she’s mostly alone during the game, so she can’t even bounce off other characters in interesting ways, either. So when it comes to story and characters, DotO isn’t bad, but it is stuck in meh territory. I did enjoy myself with the game enough to see it through to the end, but after two main titles and three expansions, the Dishonored franchise really is ripe for a general overhaul. Death of the Outsider is a fine video game, but it is missing originality. TLDR: This expansion has some of the finest levels in the Dishonored franchise, and plays just as well as Dishonored 2. If you want more Dishonored 2, then, you won’t regret picking it up. If you crave something fresh with the Dishonored vibe, look elsewhere.

Dishonored 2 is one of the few truly great immersive sims. Those are rare enough. The immersive sim genre is a very shallow pool. Within this pool Arkane Studios is one of the few big fish around and the Dishonored franchise is one of its shiniest scales. There are years of youtube footage documenting the glorious chaos the first game lets an inventive player get away with. That doesn’t even mention the weird and original setting, the peerless environmental storytelling, the unique artstyle… Am I gushing? So I am a fan. But I inhabit a very strange corner of the fandom: The ghosting explorer. He is the weird guy who enjoys gliding through the levels leaving as little trace as possible yet can’t resist sticking his nose into every document and voice log lying around and this gets discovered time and again. So, coming from that corner, how does Dishonored 2 measure up to its illustrious ancestor? After a single playthrough with one of two protagonists, I have to say: Pretty well. As Emily Kaldwell, one of two possible protagonists, I found sneaking towards eventual revenge and redemption great fun. Dishonored 2 has made quite few changes besides introducing Emily. The art style has made great strides towards photorealism. Especially the environmental art and the textures are an embarrassment of riches. The wood textures on the furniture have to be seen in 4k to be believed. The level design has lost nothing of its allure. Granted, Serkonos is a very different place with a very different vibe than Dunwall, but the level architecture is just as considered, just as evocative, just as open. And it’s bigger. Generously, wonderfully bigger. Great halls really look grand and lofty. Sunny plazas and grand avenues present daunting challenges to exiled empresses trying to stay invisible. Some of the maps even introduce new mechanics that are never seen again. Those are frequently the highlights of the game, but even the less inspired maps are splendid playgrounds full of guards and challenges. It’s a good thing then that Emily has been gifted with a set of supernatural abilities. The gameplay has evolved quite a bit, even if the core of it stays the same: Blink is still there, if a bit nerfed for Emily, there is a suite of very fun-looking powers to sow chaos and perpetrate bloodshed, choking and slitting throats from behind still works… but so does knocking people out by falling on then, as well as choking them out during a pitched fencing duel and that makes a big difference for all the Emilys out there who do not want to become cold-blooded mass murderers and damning their empire to an age of disease ridden darkness. Back in Corvo’s days, you had to get behind every fool you wanted to grant a good night’s sleep and when one of the guards did spot you, it was either kill or take a quick trip to the loading screen. By giving Emily a non-lethal option for the most dynamic moves of the game, the high karma route of the game is so much more action-packed and enjoyable. You might have picked up on the fact that the karma system from the first game is still there. So. The act of playing is more fun than before, and the art direction has been hit with the beauty stick a few hundred times, but what about the story? Dishonored 1 had wonderful world building, but the plot was actually kind of anemic and left some of the more interesting characters quickly by the wayside. I would argue that Dishonored 2 does a better job of telling an actual tale, and it does a better job of making its characters actual characters. There are more interactions with the antagonists, their motivations are much better explored, and the motley crew of supporters around Emily are more fleshed out and charming as well. It still isn’t one of the great stories of video gaming, but it’s an engaging yarn and does a good job of providing additional motivation to see Emily’s crusade for revenge through. A few criticisms remain: The bone charm crafting system seemed a bit useless, even on the highest difficulty. Some of the secondary objectives seemed a bit obscure. The NPCs had the occasional unexplained freak-out. Little things. All in all, Dishonored 2 is a successful evolution of Dishonored in every aspect, and can thus be recommended with no reservation whatsoever. TLDR: All the things Dishonored did, Dishonored 2 does better. If you are a fan of the immersive sim genre, or just curious about it, this game is well worth your time.

The Banner Saga Three weaves a grand finale, but struggles to tie up loose ends. Seen in context with the prior two installments, it seems to me that the Banner Saga is less a series of three games and more one game chopped up into three parts. While it’s true that all three games find a definite climax to end on, in every aspect but the story, the Banner Saga games are almost identical. That isn’t a bad thing when it comes to the production values: The art is its evocative self, switching between the haunting woodcut-like rendering of the lands and detailed and expressive depictions of the characters during combat and conversation, the former sporting impressive animations, the latter owing a lot to the style of the hand-drawn early disney movies. The music beguiles with haunting horns and overall excellence. The dialogue is sharp and yet relatable, which is a hard needle to thread. Less welcome is the lack of evolution of the game systems. There are a few more options for character growth, but in the end those just add additional options to increase the very same attributes and hit chances. There is a new class of enemy, but they basically behave the same as the other enemies. The involved numbers become greater, but the game experience stays the same. Especially now that all three installments are easily accessible, it really feels like the Banner Saga is one whole. So is it worth sticking around through the whole saga? That question hinges on the story sticking the landing. Has the landing stuck? Mostly yes in my opinion. The End of the World is addressed, how well is dependent on your performance and decisions. The great mystery of how the Apocalypse started is explained. I’m not exactly happy with a few of the turns the story takes, but overall, the finale is well worth witnessing. Only… a few of the crucial details of the plot remain frustratingly vague, and not in an intentional way. To me it feels like the writers had lost sight of these details at some point. It’s a bit of a shame, because some of these details were very intriguing. Especially the last race entering the ranks of playable characters remains quite underdeveloped. Still, if you have made it this far, you’ll want to get to the end, to see all the sights the saga has to show you. They are well worth the modest time investment the game asks of you. TLDR: If you’ve played and enjoyed the first and second Banner Saga, you owe it to yourself to experience the finale. Everybody else should start at the beginning or walk away.

Welcome to the Banner Saga 2. You must have played this much Banner Saga 1 to enter. Banner Saga 2 picks up right after the satisfying but definitely open-ended finale of Banner Saga 1. That goes for every aspect of the production: story, gameplay, production values, everything fits neatly into the holes of the first part of the trilogy. So, if you haven’t played the first part yet and are interested in playing this one, go do that. It won’t take that long, we’ll wait. So now that you won’t get lost when we talk about world-swallowing darkness, giant snakes and shifty menders, we can answer the pertinent questions: If you enjoyed the first part, will The Banner Saga 2 entertain? And if you didn’t, might this middle installment of the series change your mind? The answers are, to my mind, yes and no. The Banner Saga 2 does an excellent job continuing the story, raising the narrative stakes and catching us up with our favorite characters and introducing great new dramatis personae. It maintains the evocative art style and contains some of my favorite god stones. All these things are good things. But this sequel only does an ok job expanding the gameplay. A whole new category of characters is introduced. There is a new category of skill you can invest your level points into, which gives you percentages to inflict critical damage or completely avoid incoming damage. A bunch of new artifacts are there. The classes can now learn more than one special ability. And that’s it. Everything else about the tactical combat and the VN style travel mechanic is the same. Should you make the commitment to the whole trilogy then? To my mind, that entirely depends on your engagement level with the story. If you want to find out what happens to our plucky collection of horned giants, psychotic vikings and shady Gandalf wannabes, The Banner Saga 2 will happily tell you the Dark Middle Chapter, and do a good, at times even great, job of it. If you are here for gameplay experience that expands upon the first game in interesting and engaging ways, you might have to switch franchises. TLDR: If you remember your time with The Banner Saga 1 with affection, do not miss this one. If you didn’t, don’t bother. If you haven’t played Part 1 and are interested in Part 2, start at the beginning like a normal person.

The Banner Saga tells an epic tale with charming simplicity. In a land where the gods have died a long time ago, where a giant race called the Varl and a tribe of humans have settled into an uneasy peace and concentrate on carving a living out of the icy mountains and snow capped forests, the sun has stopped moving across the sky. The end time is near. If when reading the prior paragraph you feel like a flood of long-ships, mead and horned helmets has crashed right into your brain, you have an idea what starting up The Banner Saga feels like. Every pixel on screen, every mournful note out of the speakers oozes that specific Scandinavian kind of epicness. This game could only be more Viking if it smelled of mead and threatened to burn my house down. I was intrigued. And so The Banner Saga took me by the hand and introduced me to my two protagonists, human hunter Rook and Varl warrior Hakon, their friends and their two caravans making their way through these end times in hope of somehow staying alive. The game uses two modes to do this: Caravan mode and Turn-Based Tactics Combat mode. The first mode shows your collection of heavily armed men and giants traversing the 2D landscape, eating up supplies and depending on morale to keep going. Both these things and the number of followers you have are tracked by numbers you need to keep above zero by buying, finding or “borrowing” supplies, recruiting people you meet on the road, or throwing a feast or two. The chance to do these things are presented by pop-ups that tell of the things happening on the trail in terse but atmospheric prose and then give you a few options to react, and these reactions then change the numbers. Important story events are told by gorgeous anime style slides showing our protagonists and other important people conversing. There is no voice work, but the epic saga being told has no problems communicating itself through the excellent prose and the stunning art direction. Sometimes, talking isn’t enough, though, and for these times, The Banner Saga has brought a second gameplay mode: Turn-Based tactical combat. When it’s time to solve differences with violence, the game places six named characters in your caravan and of our choice on a flat grid, where the have the typical two action points. One is always used for moving, the other can be used to attack, using a special ability (which is mostly a special kind of attack), or rest. So far so rote for the genre. The Banner Saga’s claim to innovations is based on the fact that everybody on the battlefield has two kinds of health, which must be targeted separately: Armor and Strength. This quite unusual game system communicates itself quite intuitively on the battlefield and seems quite complex at first. You want characters with high armor rates to soak up the damage the enemies dish out, and high strength characters to then take apart the opposition. There are archers and support characters to complicate the matter and allow for quite complex strategies. On the higher difficulty, the game is quite brutal as well. Unfortunately, there is a dominant strategy. It isn’t completely mindless to pull off, but doesn’t require the use of special abilities at all. And because the battles are almost too hard to beat without it, even on the lower difficulties, most players will not make use of most of the tools the battle system gives you. What everybody will use is the levelling system. Your warriors earn both kill counts and renown, and both are needed to level up our characters, which means you are incentivized to allow all your characters the occasional killing blow. The system is simple, but the sweet dopamine hit of watching your favourite characters grow stronger never disappoints. Combat is fun for a while, but there are only two enemy factions and over time, the battles start to become samey and rote. Luckily, the game is short enough to hit its very satisfying ending before it overstays its welcome. Is it fun overall, then? For me it was, but my enjoyment mostly comes from the captivating plot and the very charismatic characters and less from the primary gameplay loops. Those have been done better elsewhere, very few games have told as epic a saga as The Banner Saga. TLDR: Do you yearn to earn your place in Valhalla by making it as far as you can through Fimbulwinter? Then don’t sleep on this very charismatic yarn ****. Do you crave a deep and satisfying implementation of turn based tactics? You might want to look elsewhere instead.

The Executioner is uniquely atmospheric and uniquely unfinished. The Executioner wears its mission on its sleeve: It’s a visual novel that seems grimly determined to immerse the player into the stark realities of the Dark Ages. These are not the Dark Ages from the King Arthur novels, oh no. These are the Dark Ages where even the king led a miserable life and everybody else basically drowns in misery, **** and disease. Lives are cheap, death comes quick and the poor semblance of justice that can be had is found at the sharp edge of the tools of the royal executioner. Which is you. The game sells the relentless bleakness hard. A lot of this is the job the player has: Not only are you the man that swings the axe, you are also the man that tortures the confession out of the suspects that justifies swinging the axe. Also also, you’ll be the one cleaning up the bodies. If that doesn’t sound like fun to you, I hear you. I actually bounced off the game at first, and hard. But I just couldn’t stop thinking about it. And then I realised: This game is selling a very unique kind of fantasy: Being a righteous man in a terrible time. It presumably also allows you to be a complete monster and revel in the depravity of your profession, but at least in my playthrough, it never quite stepped over the line into edgelord territory. The game isn’t completely dark, either. It will make you work for it, but it does serve up a few kernels of purpose and fulfillment which feel deliciously bittersweet. Still, it’s a hard game to get through, emotionally, and that’s mostly because the game isn’t a pure visual novel. The most horrifying part of the job, the actual torture, is implemented as a minigame. It’s… a lot. “The Executioner” is very good at making the player feel complicit in the horror it depicts. The very few woodcut-like illustrations in here don’t help either: Their depiction of hopelessness and atrocity is very effective. Combat is also a minigame, and the protagonist even has an inventory and a skill tree, even though both seem largely inconsequential. Which brings us to the main problem I had with the game: “The Executioner” is woefully unfinished. The plot of the game only covers one chapter and it is painfully obvious that the developers intended to have many more chapters after that. There are several story arcs and all but one just peter out without any kind of resolution. The main plot of this chapter does find a satisfying end but even there the characters clearly haven’t completed their arc yet. The same can be said about all the gameplay systems. Bugs abound, inconsistencies too, the inventory seems completely useless. And yet, the prose the game serves is so evocative, challenging and engaging that I can not regret the 3-4 hours and bucks I spent on the game. I can’t say that I have ever played something alike, and that’s… something. TLDR: IF you are looking to challenge your narrative consuming self and you’ve already finished Spec Ops: The Line, you will find something unique here. Just don’t expect a fun time, or a finished product.

Telling Lies tries to bottle lighting a second time “Telling Lies” is the second game in the genre that Sam Barlow seems to have established as his own playground, and it hews pretty close to the trail blazed by “Her Story”. Since I am a big fan of “Her Story”, I was looking forward to “Telling Lies” quite a bit. The gameplay loop is almost unchanged: You have a database of video files which you can query with a search string that is matched against the spoken dialogue within the videos. These videos tell a story, and the player is tasked with puzzling this story together. The difficulty comes twofold: The number of search results is limited to five and ordered by date, so the later videos that contain most of the dramatic plot developments tend to be excluded, just as it was in “Her Story”. Also, almost all these videos are recordings of one side of conversations over the web, so to get the full picture, you need to find the recording of the other side. This actually is a meaningful step forward from “Her Story”, where only one side of the conversation was recorded. The game provides you with a few tools to help you keep track of the developments you uncovered: A notes tool, which is bare bones but absolutely sufficient, a search term history, the ability to set bookmarks and to mark and search for terms from the current dialogue. This leads to the immersive gameplay loop known from “Her Story” and provides quite a bit of fun. For a while. But then things started to drag a bit for me. I think this is not inherent to the gameplay systems, but to the story “Telling Lies” wants to tell. It is an engaging yarn with quite a few plot twists and some very clever and important things on its mind, but it is a bit too long. The game contains almost 10 hours of video content, and not all of it is engaging. Also, the plot of “Telling Lies” is not as well matched to its medium as the plot of “Her Story” was. That game has a few twists that work uniquely well in the interactive medium of computer games, and “Telling Lies” struggles to provide similar peaks of engagement. It is not a problem of the production values: The images and sound are crips, the performances are all at least adequate. In the end I think this might be a case of diminishing returns. Barlow’s unique style of game wowed me the first time, but the second time around, the wow factor was gone and what engagement remained wasn’t enough to overcome the bloat of the story. TLDR: If this is your first Sam Barlow Interactive Video Detective game, you should have a lot of fun: “Telling Lies” is the superior product. But if you’ve played “Her Story” or “Immortality”, “Telling Lies” might lose you before it reaches its conclusion.

I wasn’t impressed when I started up the game more than two years after it came out. I was mildly entertained when the game spewed forth its premise: My protagonist, Miriam, is a special girl who is really good at fighting demons because she is able to crystalize and absorb the souls of demons she slays and thus gain power or something, and thus she is tasked to clear out the current demon invasion that the only other person with the same ability as her has arranged for reasons of his own. Miriam can jump, run and attack people, and with those abilities, she gets let loose on the 2D castle the demons come from. You can probably tell the story felt somewhat cookie-cutter to me. So do the environments: A few rooms are very beautiful, a few levels play clever tricks on the perceived two-dimensionality of the camera perspective, but most feel more like an arrangement of platforms and monsters than an actual place. The monster designs are inventive and plentiful, but not overwhelming. The characters feel flat, both in script and presentation. It’s a decent effort in all regards, nothing really stands out, but nothing fails to hold up its end either. It’s all here to serve king Gameplay. Long may he reign. At first I wasn’t impressed with it, either: Miriam can jump, attack with her current weapon, trigger three different magic spells, slide, jump back and that’s it. At first, the control scheme felt a bit sticky, but I got used to it, and the platforming demanded of Miriam is never so exacting that this became an issue. With these simple ingredients, Bloodstained crafts a satisfying, ever evolving primary gameplay loop. I mapped four distinct phases out for myself. At the beginning you get used to everything and the game takes it easy on you. Enemies die quick and barely scratch your life bar. Life's a breeze, jumping and striking become ingrained into the muscle memory, magic is rarely a factor, because your mana pool is very limited and you don’t have a lot of spells yet. It’s fun, but nothing special. The second phase starts when you hit the first difficulty spike, which was the second boss for me. Suddenly it’s no longer enough to spam attack and try the occasional dodge. So I butted my head against this boss until I improved my gameplay enough to get past him. I even used a few magic spells to beat him and thus finally engaged with the fourth button. Afterwards, the game tightened the screws quite a bit: Healing is limited and even common monsters suddenly hit like trucks. This phase lasts pretty much two thirds of the game, and it kept hitting me with difficulty spikes that forced me to engage with even more of its subsystems, like the crafting system and the permanent buffs you get from cooking dishes out of the strange stuff the monsters drop on occasion. Not all of these stopgaps are bosses either: Sometimes the challenge is getting from one save and respawn point to the next. The third phase I call the revenge phase: One has quite a bit of work ahead to enter it: At one point the cumulative stat boosts and upgraded equipment finally break the difficulty curve: Enemies die in one hit and can no longer keep up with your healing spells. At this point you also have all the traversal powers unlocked, and your travels through the castle transform from a harrowing crusade to a mop up operation. The challenge now is finding all the little nooks and crannies the game had kept hidden from you before you wrap up the gameplay. That is usually the end for games like this. But Bloodstained has a little surprise left for the dedicated gamer. There are two items only available in the endgame that dramatically increase Miriam’s movement speed and jump range and no joke transformed the entire primary gameplay loop for me, from a Jump and Slash kind of game to a form of parkour simulation: I glide and float through the rooms at amazing speed and hammer out the rhythm the room imposes on me to keep moving: run, slash, run jump slash jump jump slash dive run. It is hypnotic and fantastically flow-inducing. I had not been expecting it. All four phases, with the exception of the early part of phase one, were great fun to play through. The craftsmanship that went into optimising everything to support gameplay is astounding, too. The vast amount of weapons and equipment you can find or craft, and the dozens of magic spells you can get from the monsters make sure boredom will never be a problem. The layout of the map is excellent, too. Just one example: Every boss has a respawn point that is at most two rooms away. Everything bends over backwards to challenge and swaddle the player in sweet sweet endorphins at the same time. So that’s Bloodstained: Not the greatest looker, not an engrossing storyteller, but if you give it a chance, it’ll take you on a wonderful ride.

I made the jump from Total War Warhammer 2 to 3 more out of curiosity than necessity. 2 is a very fine game I have sunk over a hundred hours in, and wasn’t really looking for change. But, when Immortal Empires was released I thought it was time to start the Wood Elves playthrough I always wanted to do and the new hotness was too hard to resist. And now I can never go back. It’s not just the gigantic new map with the eight new and all the old factions to fight. It’s definitely not the campaign I haven’t even started yet and that I hear so much bad things about. It’s all the little and not so little gameplay improvements that were added, all of them belonging to the category “I didn’t know I needed this, but now I can never give it up”. The reworked diplomacy system finally clearly communicates why certain offers are always going to be denied. The ally system allows for an even greater variety in army composition without changing the character of the faction armies too much. The millions of little changes to the battle systems make it so much easier to navigate the great battles and pull off some really stunning reversals at times. The late game crisis events that have the potential to shake up the end game grind. And, yes, the metric tons of new content helps a lot, too. Meanwhile the core gameplay loop is the same addictive power fantasy it always was. The production values are as atmospheric as before. Hopefully the commitment to the game by the studio will be as exemplary as it has been in the past, too. With one very substantial DLC pack already out, it sure looks that way. This game is a substantial improvement over Warhammer 2, without losing any of its essence. If you liked that one, absolutely go get this one.

The final game in the Devil Came Through Here trilogy deftly avoids the pitfalls its predecessor tumbled into, but doesn’t quite manage to live its best life Lorelai is the third game springing from the feather and code of R. Michalski, and also the nickname of its protagonist Laura Woods, a charming young woman whose life is a heartbreaking mixture of domestic horror and a few glimpses of hope and sweetness. Fortunately, she’s almost free of said life. Unfortunately, she is the protagonist of a horror adventure game, so things will soon take a turn for the worst. Lorelai is the first game in the trilogy made with the Unity engine, and the increase in production values shows: The art is sharper, more detailed and richer in colour, the soundscape is crisp. I am happy to report that the engine change has not cramped the developer’s style: Many weird and unsettling sights await the player, haunting tunes immerse in terrible and unfortunate things, and the rare yet effective splashes of crimson are as startling and vibrant as ever. The gameplay, too, hasn’t changed much: Laura follows the arrow keys on a two-dimensional plane, triggers interaction points, picks up things and rubs them against other things. There is a run button now. Again the puzzles are mainly there to propel the plot and increase player buy-in, so the solutions are well telegraphed and free of moon logic. So, as before, the story and the characters are the main selling point. So how is the story? And what are the characters like? I am happy to report that Lorelai, unlike Downfall, does not drown in an endless sea of misery. Don’t get me wrong, **** gets very, very dark and the horror reaches a depth of depravity not yet seen in the trilogy, but Lorelai is about dealing with the horror instead of slowly succumbing to it. It suffers a bit from diminishing returns, though, because Lorelai’s arc feels a bit too similar to Susan’s in The Cat Lady. There is another piece of the script that does retread familiar grounds without suffering for it: Once again, Michalski has found a way to make an utterly mundane slice of life chapter a very engaging experience. This time he’s actually done it twice, and in these two chapters Lorelai reaches its peaks of excellence. As for the characters: Laura is a warm summer rain of charm and likability after the sinister Joe Davis. She seems to innately possess an inner strength and determination, yet she does have a mean streak that keeps her from Mary Sue territory. The bit players, too, come over as grounded, realistic and engaging. The secondary antagonist is a bit flat, but at least the main villain retains an atmosphere of cosmic horror and ambiguity that make her a very engrossing presence. Michalski and his collaborators have also once again had a very lucky hand in casting. The returning actors are as great as ever, and the newcomers all deliver wonderful performances, especially Maisy Kay as Laura and Elsie Lovelock as a spunky sidekick character. Unfortunately, one specific character, whose art design and role in the story are very endearing, is in the final analysis little more than a macguffin and a cheap ploy to gather unearned player sympathy. It’s an manipulative and unfortunate shortcut to take for an otherwise very well written script. Is Lorelai a good time at the controllers, then? I’d say so. Following Laura through her ordeal and out the other end is an unnerving, emotional and ultimately uplifting experience that fans of the franchise or aficionados of intelligent horror should not miss. TLDR: Lorelai finds its way back to the strengths of The Cat Lady and even expands on them. Fans of the trilogy and those that enjoy slow burn terror tales should not sleep on this game.

This dark middle chapter packs a punch, but falls down on a few important tasks The second game in the The Devil Came Through Here trilogy exhibits a lot of the strengths that made R. Michalski's first ouvre “The Cat Lady” such an engrossing game, but in its effort to be darker and edgier, it doesn’t quite hit the mark in some important areas. Much of the technical framework is the same as before: The artwork is as strange and evocative as before, keeping up with and at times even surpassing what came before. The soundscape is unsettling and studded with great atmospheric music. The gameplay is again the perspective and control scheme of a 2D platformer married to the inventory, puzzles and focus on dialogue for exposition and storytelling purposes of a point-and-click-adventure. The difference is the kind of story this game has to tell. The title is a hint that our protagonist, returning character Joe Davis, probably won’t get himself a happy ending. As the story goes along, I got the impression that he actually doesn’t deserve one, either. To be fair, his lot is tragic, and he has moments of grace, if the player so chooses. But he is a deeply troubled individual, and he is not the only one in this story: Every character in this tale is either evil or disturbed, and they all are headed for terrible fates. Downfall is relentlessly wallowing in bleak despair, beginning to end, which made it hard for me to emotionally buy into the story. Soon my engagement was more riven by curiosity: How dark, how depressing would this get? Pretty dark and very depressing, it turns out. This relentless drift to darkness isn’t the only weakness of this game, though: A few moon logic puzzles snuck in, and the plot leaves a lot of vague threads dangling in the end. That vagueness is probably intentional, but it leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Also, Michalski again touches on a very real and thorny issue here, but this time his take on it to my mind isn’t quite as successful as his addressing of depression in The Cat Lady. Also, while Joe wasn’t really my cup of tea as beloved characters go, I found someone in here I did very much bond with, and when her final fate was revealed, I got pretty choked up. But this time it’s only one. The bit players around here are strange, surface level and unreal, no humanity on display. I’ll say this, though: I wasn’t bored. For fans of The Cat Lady like me this game is probably a net positive experience. It’s not the lightning in the bottle that the first game was, but it still is an effective slow burn horror game that wouldn’t be caught dead relying on jump scares, and that’s something. TLDR: Play The Cat Lady first, then, if you’re hooked, you’ll pick this up without prompt. If not, skip this one.

The Cat Lady: Clunky catnip for horror fans The Cat Lady, almost a one-man-project, is not everybody’s cup of tea. There is an easy test. google a screenshot of the game: If the very distinctive style awakens at least a little bit of curiosity in you, you should give the game a try. Don’t be discouraged by the do-it-yourself clunk of the menus or the keyboard-only controls: If you’ve got a taste for weird, horrifying yet uplifting stories, The Cat Lady will be a gaming experience that will stick with you. Just don’t expect a smooth ride. The art can be almost confrontationally ugly at times, the soundscape is rudimentary and low quality, the plot has a few startling dips in quality and coherence, some of them completely unnecessary. All very forgivable sins, especially for a hardcore indie title. Enough grousing, let’s talk about the interesting things The Cat Lady does. For one, while the point-and-click-adventure seems to fit best for the game, there is no pointing or clicking here. The main character is controlled almost as if she were a 2D-platform mascot: She can go left or right, and when she happens to stand at an interaction point, the label of the thing or person she stands near to will be hovering above her head, giving her the opportunity to use it, talk to it, pick it up or rub something out of her inventory against it. That means there is no pixel hunt, no weird positioning hangups. There are also no moon logic puzzles here. To be fair, there are almost no headscratchers, either. The Cat Lady is not a difficult game. Now it’s time for praise: The plot, despite what I’ve written above, is excellent. It’s a lean, mean horror yarn that will have you on the edge of your seat for the entire run time of the game. It tackles some very difficult subjects with astounding grace and success, it will shock you, scare you, make your heart ache and in the end it will hand you a gem of hope that will lift you up like a glorious sunrise after a terrible nightmare. The next thing I need to gush about is the cast. These are clearly not professionals, but they voice their characters with such passion and conviction, that through some awkwardness in the dialogue, the low quality of the recording and some questionable choices the performances gain an authenticity and charm that left me invested in the characters almost immediately and to a profound degree and elevate the whole game to an incredible degree. These are the parts, but the whole is more than their sum. The whole game breathes this flair of grindhouse low budget production, that fits exceedingly well together. The stark and crass imagery, the scratchy, awkward, heartfelt sound and performance, the weird gameplay are maybe just right for a story about a glimmer of hope surviving in an all to real hellscape. TLDR: The Cat Lady is the equivalent of a mean, smart, hard-hitting low budget horror film. For some, it’s a tragedy to miss one of these. You know if you are one of us. Act accordingly.

Excellent Dinosaur Hunting with a hefty helping of Scenery Porn: Horizon Zero Dawn is at its best when the plot gets out of the way. Exploration and combat are, I think, the main selling points of Horizon Zero Dawn. Its open world is a wonderful place to explore and drink in the beauty of painstakingly crafted nature. It is also a great place to hunt robo-sabertooth tigers and cyberized T-Rexes with a very satisfying collection of bow and arrow sets, traps, slings and unfortunately just one spear you can’t even hurl at your enemies. My whole first playthrough, 100+ hours, I wasn’t seduced by the well implemented fast travel system once, it is that much fun to just roam here. Maybe I should say a few words about the plot? Because Horizon Zero Dawn definitely has one, and it cares a great deal about it. Unfortunately, I don’t care as much. It didn’t start out that way, though. A lot of the plot is front-loaded and in the beginning, the story of Aloy, the foundling protagonist, and Rost, her adoptive father, is incredibly compelling. But then the world opens up to Aloy and Rost is left behind and a curious thing happens that demonstrates very well the problems of trying to tell a story in an open world game: The plot gets interrupted by long stretches of the player traversing and screwing around with the side content, and during that time, the emotional engagement with the plot flags. The characters have the same problem. Aloy starts off characterized very well while interacting with Rost, but when the show gets on the road, she spends most of her time alone or interacting with a cavalcade of strangers, each one foisting his one side quest onto her and then being incredibly impressed when she reports the job as done. That leaves the narrative little opportunity to reveal Aloy’s character, let alone a character arc, and limits all the NPCs to cardboard cutout shallowness. I don’t mean to say that the plot is bad. It deals with some very big ideas and weaves a wide tapestry across the entire game world, pulling all the different tribes into a grand saga. It’s just that these 90 minutes of plot are spread out across 100+ hours of gaming, and that none of the characters in it are interesting. The two main villains have not more than 10 minutes of screen time, combined! Seen like this, it’s no wonder the plot doesn’t have much impact on the playthrough. The plot does a bit better within the Frozen Wilds Expansion, which takes place in a much smaller area and doles out its plot critical mission in a much smaller time frame. The characters are better written, one or two of them even have an arc, and the hunting up there is exhilarating. Still, the plot does do one job right: It provides enough direction for the player that there is always a goal to work towards, a reason to explore the splendid landscape and to engage in glorious combat with the hordes of hostile robots and **** villains. Which is where you can find almost endless amounts of fun. The art direction and production values contribute a lot to this: Environmental Design is jaw-dropping, enemy design is clever and rewarding, the soundscape is unbelievably immersive. The music keeps to the background, but there are a few atmospheric pieces that resonate wonderfully with the quieter moments of exploration. Most vocal performances are fine, with Ashly Burch and Lance **** at the forefront of the pack, but character faces can seem a bit stiff and a bit uncanny. Also, if your frustration tolerance has been honed by the From Software oeuvre, I suggest you do choose the ultra hard difficulty for your first playthrough and only reduce it when tackling the hunting grounds. Ultra hard makes travelling from place to place a real challenge, just like all the NPCs always contend. All in all, Horizon Zero Dawn is an excellent open world game where you can spend hours upon exhilarating hours hiking through the wonders of nature and hunting challenging foes. And if you ever need a direction to give your adventuring purpose, just look up the current plot quest in the menu. TLDR: Top notch exploration, top notch third person combat, gorgeous landscapes, somewhat good story hampered by the open world design of the game. Horizon Zero Dawn is one of the best open world games on the PC right now.

Deus Ex Mankind Divided had to satisfy a lot of expectations. So it’s a bit of a curve ball that instead of escalating things, it actually tries to shrink the scope of the experience a bit: Where the stakes used to be global and somewhat apocalyptic, Mankind Divided chooses to settle protagonist and most cyber cyborg of all Adam Jensen down in cyberpunkified Prague, complete with a somewhat regular job as a detective at Interpol. The story starts with a bombing which, true to franchise tradition, leads to quite an elaborate conspiracy plot whose twists and turns aren’t always completely successful. But in contrast to earlier entries in the franchise, the action almost always stays confined to that one city. As a consequence, Mankind Divided does feel a little bit like the straight to DVD sequel to Human Revolution. Taken on it's own, the plot is serviceable to good: The good guys are mostly charming and quite complex at times, the bad guys are sufficiently **** and they too have a few inches of depth under their belt, even if the genre conventions don't allow the player to get to know them that much. But the game can’t help itself referencing that Big Thing that happened at the end of Human Revolution, and thus the player is never allowed to forget how much more bombastic the last game was. The core gameplay loop of Deus Ex is almost unchanged: There are hub areas that basically function as roleplay playgrounds: Adam walks around, he talks to people, does a bit of shopping, consults his quest log for main and side objectives. These sequences were very enjoyable to me, mostly because of the high production values: The writing is sharp, the voice acting on point and the city itself is breathtakingly immersive. Seriously: I’ve been to the exact section of Prague they try to emulate, and it’s very believable. While I do miss the bold black and gold style of Mankind Divided, the slightly more realistic tone has its advantages. When you wander into somewhere you’re not wanted, the game shifts gears with an audible clunk: The first person stealth shooter makes its presence known and the player must make a choice: Shall it be shooting or stealth? To me, it is always stealth in these games, not the least because the believability of the world kind of breaks for me if the protagonist is a mass murderer. And stealth… is fine. It’s almost unchanged from Human Revolution, and it’s fine. The systems work, and almost all the levels are designed with multiple sneaky routes, most of them are very enjoyable to find and traverse. Sometimes Adam can even indulge in a few light instances of social hacking. The hostile conversation system is also back, and it works fine here, but there is a problem: Back in Human Revolution, it was used in these incredible conversational battles between two philosophies, two ideas for progress: Adam got to exchange arguments and convince people that their ideas are wrong, or dangerous. Not so here. The conversations mostly involve Adam wanting some physical thing and him stroking the ego of his opponent the right way to get it: Still fun, but not quite as profound. Hacking is back and basically unchanged. There are quite a few new augmentations, almost all of them useless for a stealth playthrough because most of them are just an alternate way to kill people or render them unconscious, and there are more than enough other options for that. Add to that the fact that until the last third of the game, you can’t even access the new augmentations without being penalised, and the new augmentations were pretty much without consequence for my playthrough. So the game is good, great sometimes. Unfortunately it comes with some iffy parts, namely that the game entices you to pay for praxis points to unlock more augmentations. You absolutely can get through the game without buying a single praxis point… if you plan your upgrades right. I didn’t. I went all in on the hacking augmentations early and didn’t have enough points left to get some of the movement augmentation. As it turns out, these are very important for a sneak playthrough. And that’s how they got a bit more of my money. All in all, I enjoyed my time with Adam Jensen, even if there was little new gameplay-wise and the story didn‘t quite live up to my expectations. My lingering investment into the plight of Adam Jensen saw me through the game just fine with spikes of enjoyment occurring often enough to not regret my purchase. TLDR: This is a pretty good game. If you have a craving for Deus Ex, or an immersive sim, go get it. They don’t make many of those any more.

If you are a fan of this franchise, play it, all that you love is here, with additional polish and a few wonderful tastes of player freedom. If you are a fan of immersive shooters, play it, both the shooting and the immersion are second to none. Just be aware that some things might work a little bit differently here than you’re used to.

Mechanicus is a good turn based tactics foray into a rarely heard-of corner of the 40k universe, but it has a slight problem with the difficulty curve The game lets you play as a Magus, a ship commander of the Adeptus Mechanicus, the A. I.-worshiping religion existing within the Imperium of Man in the grim dark of the far future, where there is only war. If this sentence was complete **** to you, be prepared to do some googling before you fire up Mechanicus, because the game expects you to be familiar with the 40k Universe. Be warned, though: that particular rabbit hole is without end. Assuming you know what you’re about, the day-to-day of a Magus are not that complicated: having just arrived over a Necron Grave World (basically a world where Skynet won and all the Terminators went into hibernation), you send a cohort of two to Six tech priests to explore grave complexes on the surface of that world to fight alien robots and steal all their juicy tech. The exploration is done on a pretty simple map of the grave, where every room you enter lets you make a decision that might hurt or help you, or it let’s you fight the aforementioned Necrons. The fighting is done via turn-based tactics combat, but with a few wrinkles. Your characters share an action pool. That sounds constricting but actually it’s not, because there are dozens of ways to fill that pool: You get points for killing enemies, points for touching stuff on the map, some skills reward you with points… It’s a points bonanza out there. The constricting factor is that every skill has a cool-down and can be used at most once per turn. This means that, for example, one of your characters can move across the entire map, fire off four attacks, heal himself and an ally, and maybe buff the entire team. Also, remember the rage-inducing attack misses the Xcom franchise is famous for? They are not here. The cyborg of the Adeptus Mechanicus hit what they aim at. Between missions you get to level up your Tech Priests and kit them out with all manner of gear you borrowed from the Necrons. Most of the skills and guns are kind of meh and do little to change the fighting experience, but they do add up. Boy, do they ever. So what do the Necrons have to stop you? Well, when exploring a tomb, you’re working under a timer: The more time you spend exploring rooms and fighting Necrons, the more Necron buffs accumulate. The counter increases incurred during an expedition also get transferred to a global percentage counter, and if that one ever reaches a certain threshold, your forces get overwhelmed and your missions fails. I say a certain threshold because I never even got close to it, and now we've finally arrived at the main problem this game has: Challenge, the lack of it (on normal difficulty, with the Heretek DLC in effect). Things were moderately dangerous in the beginning, but in the second third, with a couple of level ups, the difficulty curve started to droop. In the last third, it broke like a twig. I cleared out whole maps on the very first turn, without the enemy ever firing a shot, and my builds were pretty far from optimized. In fact, that's what kept my interest during that last third: How much can I own this army of eldritch merciless killing machines, this supposedly galactic threat? The answer: I killed their grand overlord in two turns. They are my mop now. Mechanicus made me understand and appreciate, yes, appreciate why XCom made my guys miss occasionally. With the challenge gone out of the game so completely, I don't even think a higher difficulty would make much of a difference. Maybe deactivating the Heretek DLC might have helped, but losing the story additions and missions in there would have hurt the game, too. There is one other thing that held my interest: The characters. The story is solid b movie plot material, which is good enough, but the characters are very interesting. Production values are a bit uneven. Sound production is fine, the score is more than fine, but the art direction is a bit muddled, and I'm not sure how but somehow they make the whole picture seem grimy and dusty. There is little variance in both enemy and level design, and even little variance in the design of your own troops. So it's serviceable, for an indie game like this, it's even fine. But don't expect to be wowed by Mechanicus' graphics. So who is this for: 40k enthusiasts and people interested in dipping a toe in a very fringe area of the lore. For those, I recommend Mechanicus. Fans of turn-based tactics games will be turned off by the lack of challenge. TLDR: This is a fine AA game with one fatal flaw. Get this if you are a 40k lore hound or you desperately need to scratch the turn-based tactics itch and have exhausted the market, but in this case, crank the difficulty up to eleven. Everybody else should enlist with XCOM first.

Simulacra 2 is more of Simulacra 1: More data to search, more people to hack, more cringe to endure. Another stranger’s phone. Another story tinged with horror and sci fi elements. Another trip into the uncomfortable territory of violating simulated people’s privacy for a good cause. This sequel sticks pretty close to the footsteps of its predecessor. This time, the justification is justice, because the owner of the phone is quite dead, and you might be a cop, or a cop's little journalist helper. That makes the whole endeavour a bit less creepy, even though the characters of the story and the protagonist himself express a whole lot of disapproval of the invasion of privacy aspect of the proceedings. Gameplay-wise, things have been improved and deepened quite a lot. There is now a mechanic where you can store facts that you have discovered as a kind of file on the phone, and use them to confront people with them via chat. The simulations of social hacking have been implemented more gracefully and more challenging. The FMV production values have gone up, the inevitable creepy pasta is quite a bit creepier. So if Simulacra 2 is a whole lot more of Simulacra, and I found Simulacra quite compelling and mostly fun to play, then I must have enjoyed playing Simulacra 2, right? Unfortunately, no, I didn’t. There were a few minor snags: Some of the riddles you have to puzzle out were very obscure, and, to my mind, there was way too much dross to sift through to find the few nuggets of usable information within the timelines of the various social media apps on the phone. But the main reason I felt little enjoyment while playing were the characters. The game’s main four characters are influencers, and as a consequence, they are a bunch of miserable, , morally compromised people. That's not my framing, that is the inescapable implication of the script. I can’t find a single ounce of sympathy with any of these people even though their life is in danger and the plot tries, unsuccesfully, to redeem them in the end. There is no self-reflection, nothing is learned. Seriously, if I ever want to warn someone away from this career path, I'll have him or her play this game. The cringe is that intense. I admit this might be a me thing, because I look with deepening horror at this business of turning your own life into a product. But I do believe that you can not play this game without developing a distaste for an Influencer's existence. Staring into an abyss can be compelling or even fun, eyeballing these particular depths was not fun for me. Only play this if misery porn is your thing. TLDR: An OK horror story combined with an honest look into one of the creepiest and extensively miserable facets of online existence. This is an acquired taste, and I have failed acquiring it.

Simulacra is a found phone simulator. Apparently that's a genre now. On a phone, the premise of Simulacra is something special: What if your phone turned into someone else's phone, and you could hack into it to snoop out all the little things about our life that we entrust to our phones these days. And because said phone gives you complete access to the online persona of the owner of that phone, you also get to moonlight as an online predator. It still works well enough on the PC, although the immersion is somewhat diminished. But hey, it's OK, because Anna, the owner of the phone, is in trouble and you are the only one with access to enough information to maybe help her. And also… this is just a game. If I sound like I'm down on the game for the icky things it expects you to do, I'm actually not. The game never shies away from pointing out how questionable the means you employ are, and if you want it, you can go about things in the most ethical way possible. You won't get the best ending, though. The actual means by which the game let's you morally compromise yourself are quite simple. Some light social hacking, catfishing, actual hacking, two simple mini-games. The rest of the time you read dialogue or watch a few videos with above average novice actors, and thus follow along a nifty little horror story whose ending felt very rushed but still packed quite a punch. The game is a bit railroady, though. The main thing you do is converse with Anna's contacts via multiple choice chat, and oftentimes the few options you have are very obviously pushing the story in the direction it wants to go. Thanks to the brevity of the game, this never gets too grating, though. The main freight of meaning and engagement this game transported for me was the fun and glee you can actually get out of pretending to be a terrible person with access to someone else's phone, and thinking about what that actually means for the hellscape we are all constructing for ourselves. There is no way around it: If you have no moral compass, being a troll is a very good time. Good thing then that in Simulacra, the moral justification comes with the box. TLDR: Interesting little title whose premise and insinuations become more horrifying the longer you think about it. Bit on the short side, but well worth experiencing.

80 Days is a string of pearls. But it requires a bit of patience to get from one pearl to the next. At its core, 80 days is a collection of vignettes and novellas, wrapped into the bare bones of the plot of the well-known Jules Verne novel, with the steampunk elements and colonialism criticism dialed up to eleven. It’s main gameplay loop is quite simple: depart from a city, read the novella occurring during travel, arrive at the next city, read the short story occurring in that city, procure funds via the market or the bank, plan your next trip, take it. And over it all the famous challenge: make it across the world in 90 days. There is a little challenge in planning the trip, because you' always have to keep the time limit in mind and procuring funds is an issue that actually has to be addressed now and then, but you have to want it pretty bad to actually fail the game. It's hardly engaging on its own. There is a lot of towns you can visit during your travels: Every city I ever heard of and quite a few I never heard of are here, all of them with their unique splash screens and stories, but while the art style is striking and different, the vistas aren't exactly breathtaking, and while every scene is filled with lots of little details, over time the different cities start to blend into each other. Same with the splash screens symbolizing the different means of travel. The soundscape is sparse, but appropriate. The music does it's very best to evoke the atmosphere of the Jules Verne books and mostly succeeds, but the production values don't supply a stand-alone reason to play this game either. The main reason to engage with the game is the writing then. And there is quality writing here: Some of it is delightfully playful, surprising, touching, some of it even delivers biting social commentary. But everything is bite-sized: As soon as a scenario presents itself, it is resolved, and we move on. As soon as we get to know and like a character, we leave him or her back in the dust of the road. The through-line of the challenge to circumvent the globe in 80 days is barely addressed, let alone developed. The only characters that stay with us are Sir Fogg and Passepartout, and only the latter gets any kind of development. I must stress this: Even Phineas Fogg, the deuteragonist of the story, remains a shadowy ill-defined figure during the story. That's a problem. All in all, this game is a book with music and a soundtrack and some pretty, if same-ish pictures, and it is designed to have it's chapters read out of order so there are almost no proper arcs. A few storylets have multiple chapters, but even those only add up to a quite short short story. The quality of these tiny pieces of prose is good enough to keep me engaged for two playthroughs, but in the end, I would recommend this only to hardcore Jules Verne fans who won't play anything that doesn't have a link to Victorian Adventure. There is writing just as good in better games out there. TLDR: If you have 5 minutes now and then and you want to read about a short adventure of Phineas Fogg and Passepartout, get this game. Everybody else, look elsewhere.

Journey is as deep or as shallow as you want it to be, and yet it is always its unique self. Journey is one of the games you get funny looks for missing out on, it made that big a splash upon release. I jumped on the bandwagon very late because I refuse to touch anything console related and Journey took the long way round to get to the PC, but now it's here and I made the time. We're only talking 90 minutes per playthrough, after all. According to a casual survey of The Discourse, Journey is a lot of things to a lot of people: A tale of transcendence, a religious allegory… For me, during the first two thirds of my first play through, Journey was one thing: Flow: The Game. Do you know that state of mind you can almost only reach during a video game, when you direct the game with almost no mental effort, yet somehow also achieve peak precision and speed? That mix of total relaxation and complete engagement. That, to me, and to a lot of others, is flow. Usually, that state of mind isn't easy to reach, even **** is designed to facilitate it, but Journey is a master class in enabling flow. Your modes of interaction are very limited: You can walk, jump, do the animated coat version of flapping your wings, and chirp at things, that's it. Yet these interactions transition into each other so gracefully and without friction that, if the player is just a bit mindful of the timing, the player character just, ahem, flows across the levels. It's beautiful to behold, and while it isn't that hard to master, it feels very rewarding to get right. This marvelous experience is the reason I played through Journey thrice, back to back. The level design and art direction support this experience with all their worth: The desert the first half of the game takes places also flows languidly and with aching beauty under a grandiose sky. Every smooth rise and exhilarating fall of the dunes invites you into the joy of moving forward. The occasional music haunts and elevates your steps, and sand hisses it's approval under your feet. The production values are excellent, is what I'm saying. Then the game takes a very noticeable turn. The level design changes abruptly, so does mood and environmental design. The game takes being a metaphor for actual journeys seriously, so, like the third act of an actual journey, things get a bit taxing, then a bit more, until every step forward is a hardship. So the feeling of flow was gone, and so was most of the fun I was having, but not, I stress, the engagement. Journey is very good at making me feel that there are actual stakes for this trip, that I am truly moving towards something great, something like transcendence, and you don’t reach that kind of goal without paying a price for it. So in the second half, the I hesitate to name it plot had successfully drawn me in, despite staying completely vague and allegorical. And while the overall trudge through the third act really was no fun, it wasn’t all horrible: The moment of revelation just before the final test was a beautiful experience of revelation and elation, and great for supplying enough motivation for the final slog. Then there is a very short but so very sweet moment of triumph. And then the main menu asks you if you’d like to go on the Journey again. I recommend you do. At least three times. TLDR: Journey is in the business of creating uncomplicated joy, stirring powerful emotions and then letting you fall into the intellectual rabbit hole of your own interpretation of itself. It’s a short but unique experience, and definitely worth the asking price twice over.

Ever wanted to prove that you can punch bad guys better than Batman? Here is your chance. The common fighting game is a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and all of these people can have very different opinions about the quality of a specific title. Therefore, an explicit declaration of bias is in order. When it comes to fighting games, I am a very odd duck indeed: I usually play games for the story, and while my skills are sophisticated enough to reliably reproduce special moves and the simpler combos, I don't go near advanced concepts like zoning, move interruption or even blocking. So what I usually do in these games is: I play the campaign and the story mode for every character, and then I move on. So how well does Injustice 2 with a fringe of the bell curve customer like me? Exceedingly well, mainly because the main gameplay loop ist so goddamn enjoyable. The fighting against the AI is a great time at the fisticuffs: Speedy bouts that can turn on a dime, fought on highly interactive stages, spiced up with introductions, the occasional barks and super moves that can take up to a minute to watch, in all of which the scenery is chewed with reckless, enchanting abandon. The animations are a delight to behold, the control scheme is tight as a drum, most of the moves are pretty easy to pull of. The roster includes 38(!) characters, and while there are some I just didn't connect with, the overwhelming majority of them are a lot of fun to step into the ring with. When it comes to the story of the campaign mode, I agree with the majority opinion: This is the best fighting game story so far. That is, admittedly, a low bar to clear and Injustice 2 doesn't clear it by much: Planescape Torment this is not. But it is average-to-good comic book fare, directed with excellence and bombast, and you get to direct the action scenes yourself. That is a very enjoyable way to consume such a plot. One or two simplistic yet charming character arcs are in here, and a few scenes might even provoke a case of deeper thinking. As for the story modes, the character specific epilogues are just something to show you that you reached the stopping point **** character. Again, what makes this game fun is the primary gameplay loop. The production levels are top notch: The voice cast is excellent, not a dud among them, the graphics are stunning, the sound is punchy and orchestral. I didn't like Supergirl's hair much (Nether Realms, listen: Next time, please get the licence for Melissa Benoist's likeness, please please Please!), but that is all the criticism I can level. Seriously. That's about all I can talk about. Now, Injustice 2 is so much more: There is a loot system, there's guilds, arguably I haven' t even encountered the meat of the game when I completely snubbed the multiple multiplayer modes. But I think that's a praise in itself: When by engaging in less than half of the game I purchased I feel that I got more than my money's worth, can there be a stronger recommendation to buy? TLDR: If your predilections concerning fighting games match mine, go get Injustice 2. If not, I still suspect you might want this, if you have any interest in fighting games at all.

Shadow Tactics is Commandos with ninjas. That’s a good thing, by the way. Very few games swim in the same genre pool as Shadow Tactics. There was the Commandos series, and the Desperados games, and that’s basically it. So all Shadow Tactics has to do is take the “shepherd 2-5 killers during their sneak-and-murder spree across a bunch of maps” to Edo period Japan to feel fresh and original. This means that there is only one question to ask if you want to know if Shadow Tactics is worth your time: Would you like to play more Commandos, or Desperados? For me the answer was “It’s complicated”. I played Commandos way back when. I liked the gameplay at first: Sneaking across the map littered with guards until you find the one unfortunate soul not covered by his colleagues and murder the bejeesus out of him, then moving on the guy whose back he was watching, and so on, pulling on the thread of the guard sweater until only a frayed collar remains… It’s like a beautiful puzzle that drips blood for every piece you set down. But the difficulty spikes were brutal, and at times the precision and speed with which a kill was only possible took so many tries for me to get right that I got frustrated and finally gave up on Commandos. These frustrating moments and difficulty spikes are in here, too, but Shadow Tactics does just enough to mitigate the frustrations that I stuck it out. The excellent quicksave system is one factor: not only does it remind you how long it’s been since your last save, it automatically rotates three slots so that when you save in a situation you don’t yet know is beyond saving, you can revert to an earlier save. The adding of banter between the characters is helpful, too. The story might be kind of rote and have a giant plot hole at the center of it, but the characters are well fleshed out, for the genre, and the dialogue script as well as the voice work elevate the game quite a bit. And yes, it helps that I sneak around ancient japanese fortresses and abduct the son **** from a Sento instead of traipsing around european battefields and assassinating **** commanders, again. Success in Shadow Tactics relies on split second timing at times. That can only work if the controls of the game are excellent, and luckily, they are: Switching between characters and ordering them to do stuff is effortless. The art is serviceable to good: Clearly legible, beautiful at times, but lacking any true wow moments. The sound is sparse but well done, the music unobtrusive and pleasing. The voice work is, as mentioned, well above average for this type of game. This game is for veterans of the genre with a taste for more, spiced with a bit of variation. Complete newcomers interested in the genre might as well start here: They might still bounce off Shadow Tactics, but in a genre with very few members, this is as forgiving as it gets. TLDR: Shadow Tactics is a great stealth real time tactics game. If that’s your jam, it has you covered.

Unavowed spins an excellent plot, interrupted by enough puzzles to make the gamer feel smart. A good premise is an excellent way to hook a player at the beginning of the game, and Unavowed has one of the best, in my humble opinion. It begins with an exorcism on Player One, and once that’s done, the successful exorcists explain that you have been possessed for a year and that the demon wearing your flesh has been cutting a bloody swath across New York. Worse, the slaughter served some unknown agenda. Luckily your erstwhile rescuers are professional hunters of the supernatural, and they’ll have your back across six missions plus the finale. And it’s up to you to follow your own trail of corpses and clean up the mess. Thus begins The Unavowed. I was immediately hooked, and that engagement didn’t let up until the credits rolled, and it only slightly tempered off until they rolled a second time. The Unavowed is a great plot told in an adventure game fascinating between competent and excellent. With regards to gameplay, there is little to be said. The Unavowed is an unapologetic adventure game, with long conversations and a lot of inventory puzzles. A twist is proved by your companions: Every chapter you can pick two out of four companion characters to go with you. They provide background chatter, but into your conversations and serve as inventory items to rub against parts of the game world to unlock progress. As fantastical as the plot gets, the puzzles and riddles are all based on sound logic. They make you feel clever without you necessarily having to be clever. Also, whenever you get stumped, which usually happened to me when I solved a puzzle and wasn’t quite sure where to go next, you can ask your companions, and that would usually help me along just fine. With regards to the plot and the script, they are what helps The Unavowed become an excellent game. The story is cleverly structured into chapters, each about a game session long and providing a satisfying arc and an antagonist to defeat, and each chapter tightly connected to the central mystery of what your demonic squatter is actually up to. Add to that a Sixth Sense level twist at the eleventh hour and a very satisfying conclusion, and the judgement can only be: Dave Gilbert’s script is excellent. The dialogue is also excellent, not only because of the word, but because of the cast. Logan Cunningham brings his unbelievably sexy timbre to bear, but everybody really brings their A game. The score is just as great: Excellent mood pieces, effective stingers… What more can you ask for? The visual side of things is where your mileage may vary. The Unavowed is an Indie game, and here is where it shows: The lovingly crafted pixel art that unfortunately looks worse and worse the bigger your monitor is. I hear some people are fans of this art style, but my proclivities go more in the direction of Control, so I merely tolerate it. It may still mark it as excellent among its peers that the game nevertheless got me to care for the mass of pixels I was piloting. Still, even I was wowed by some of the Hopper-esque backgrounds. All of this adds up to a great time at the Keyboard. Highly recommended. TLDR: If you like the classic or even Telltale school of adventure games, do not sleep on this. If you are a fan of Urban Fantasy, don’t sleep on this. There is little here for the Follower of the Twitch Reflex, but everybody else should not miss out on this excellent yarn.

Buy it, play it. Control is drop dead gorgeous, sounds great and is always fascinating. The ride won’t always be buttery smooth, but you’ll never use more than the edge of your seat.

Ever wanted to micromanage the **** out of a frozen hellhole? The Frostlands are always hiring. I’d like to share two experiences I’ve had playing Frostpunk. The first happened through my first, almost disastrous playthrough. I had done all I could do, the end game was upon us, and it all went terribly. I could do nothing more, no actions were possible for at least 10 minutes, and yet I was on the edge of my seat the whole time, fascinated and horrified by the Darwinian nightmare my actions earlier had unleashed. The second, as if intended, happened during my sixth, and final, playthrough. Again I had nothing to do, but this time, because I had exhausted the game: Nothing to research, nothing to build, no more preparations to be made, tons of resources stored. There was triumph, but also a distinct feeling of “meh”. Some context is required: The first playthrough mentioned was on normal. The second one was played on easy. Between them, to my mind, they demonstrate both the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of Frostpunk. Let’s establish Frostpunk’s central premise: The world has basically frozen solid, and most of humanity has perished. A few dozen survivors huddle around a gigantic oven on top of a coal mine, which might produce enough heat to bring them through this terrible terrible winter, but only if they get their **** together enough to keep it going and keep from starving to death. You, dear player, are the one tasked with gathering aforementioned **** up and forging it into a somewhat functional society. To do this, you can do six things. Ordering constructions Sending people to work Direct research Write laws Manage the heating infrastructure Order scouts to scour the surrounding ice sheet for resources and additional survivors. The primary gameplay loop consists of deciding on executing a few of the listed actions and then observing their effect. Occasionally, the game feeds you a few very intriguing scraps of story, sometimes with a demand or a decision attached, but that’s frosting. The main thing is you trying to make the best out of what you have, while the environment shows you just how little that accomplishes. Is that fun? It’s complicated, at least for me. When things go too well (which they almost can’t help on easy), things become routine. When things go poorly, things are very engaging, but you might make a wrong decision at some point and only realize an hour later that you’re screwed, and that’s frustrating. But when you’re just **** by, that’s the sweet spot, and it’s very sweet. It’s just hard to know where that spot is. It’s not exactly the fault of the game, the difficulty settings it supplies are extensive, but you only really find out what they mean while playing. Still, the game has a lot going for it. The world building sprinkled through is excellent and puts a very unique spin on a couple of steampunk tropes. The art direction is great: The city and the encompassing ice are rendered in exquisite detail, and the splash screens telling the story of the different scenarios feature some very evocative art. The sound scape is sparse, but very appropriate and very well realized. The UI is mostly excellent, with a couple of minor flaws. When you have a really big city, some specific buildings might be hard to find. I also really wished for a popup warning when a given production facility has exhausted its resource supply. Since I’ve started griping already, I wanted to have a bit more variety within the look of the city, maybe even with the ability to put my own flair on it. As it is, all well run cities look very similar to each other. Also, the city doesn’t change much when things are getting dire: No dilapidated workplaces or burning buildings. The social unrest only takes place within the splash screens and the mind of the gamer. The main thing for me is that the game runs out of things to do very quickly. The scenarios do a good job of changing things up, but there is little variety when it comes to strategy: There is a way to do things, and if you deviate, the coming winter storms will eat you alive, especially from normal difficulty on upwards. So who is this game for? People who enjoy making decisions under pressure and optimizing the crap out processes. And if they like a bit of great apocalyptic storytelling and social experimentation, all the better. TLDR: Great city management fun during the early playthroughs, but enjoyment drops quite a bit on repeat runs for lack of variety. Brutally difficult in a very specific, management sim way on the higher difficulties. The unique setting and great world building adds extra value.

If you ever wanted to vacation in Victorian Era London and see for yourself what Old Charles **** was going on about, you can now slip into the boots of Jonathan Reid, famous surgeon, and recently awakened vampire. And when I say recently awakened, I mean seconds ago: During the amazing first scene of the game, Jonathan crawls out of a mass grave and wanders around incoherently until he stumbles into his first kill. The game puts an incredibly strong first food foot forward. Can the game keep that spectacular level of engagement up throughout? Not quite, but it keeps it going for quite a while, and certain aspects stay strong all the way. First thing to mention is the amazing environmental design. The color palette with its grays and browns and only the occasional splash of crimson oozes atmosphere. The mood and sense of place that the environment evokes are second to none. The people living in this splendidly rendered hellscape of a city are just as amazing. Almost all of them are well-written, deep characters. Some of them are tragic, some despicable, most of them have a few skeletons in the closet, and almost all of them are so very compellingly human. Some of them have a bad case of the uncanny valley face, and generally, the character design isn’t as strong as the environmental one, but still: These people feel alive and real and tragic and pitiful… It’s great! Gameplay-wise, the game has two modes: Walking simulator and combat. Combat copies a lot from Dark Souls: There is a stamina meter governing the amount of attacking and dodging you can do, there are a bunch of vampiric talents, even the most exotic of these have a grounded feeling that fits well with the established grounded and realistic mood. Still, it’s not all sunshine and violence: The hit detection isn’t quite as precise as it could be, some NPC attacks are barely telegraphed and the controls could stand to be quite a bit tighter. Still, the system is robust enough to allow skilled players to win fights with more than ten levels of experience disparity. You don’t need to do that, though, you can always eat more people. I’m getting to that. In safe quarters, conversation is king. Every person you meet has an opinion on the general situation, a personal story to divulge and 3 to 5 secrets to uncover. These hidden truths can be uncovered by eavesdropping on folks (an easy matter of lurking in the shadows until people behave shady and then finding the one highlighted spot where they can be observed) or by confronting them with secrets already discovered and then picking the right conversation choice. This system is usually quite forgiving, but it is possible to fail. The writing is great in these section: Almost all of these people were compelling characters, and the more I got to know them, the more I sympathized with most of them. This is of course what the game wants, because, as a vampire, Jonathan Reid has the option to snack on any one of them and get himself a huge boost of XP, the more secrets he has discovered, the bigger. There is crafting in this game, It’s not just weapons you can tape together. Jonathan is also a doctor, and with that trait on his character sheet comes the responsibility to keep the population healthy, at least if Jonathan doesn’t want his collection of blood bags to degrade in quality. He does that with self-made medicine, and it’s another way to earn XP, besides combat, snooping, pursuing the main story and eating people. I enjoyed that part of the game quite a bit, at first. The game sells the fantasy of being a Victorian doctor making the rounds in a plague-ridden cesspool hard. But there comes a point where everybody is healthy and every secret has been ferreted out, and then this part of the game just… stops. You can’t do anything with the information you uncover. The only thing you can do to effect change is kill people, and there’s only one or two cases where that would affect positive change. Also, the game judges you for it. This means that the morally correct course according to Vampyr is inaction: To simply let the sometimes quite severe tragedies you’ve uncovered continue. The main plot, meanwhile, does a good job structuring the traversal of the open world. When it comes to story, I would describe it as uneven. Some scenes are greatly engaging. Other times the script does a disservice to the plot, with uninspired dialogue. Some of the most interesting parts of the tale get too short a shrift, other times mistimed exposition dumps deflate the tension. It held together well enough to keep me engaged to the end As mentioned before: The technical aspects are serviceable to spectacular: Environmental design is great, lighting is great, character design is mostly fine, the score is unobtrusive, most vocal performances are fine, and I never had any problem with stability. All in all, I recommend this game.

Resident Evil 7 is probably most famous for being the Resident Evil game that made the jump from third to first person perspective, and for being the title that redeemed the franchise after the disaster that was RE6. For both things, it is, I think, rightly praised. But there is plenty more cause for admiration here. When the game starts, you are Ethan Winters, on a mission to find your long lost wife, who apparently turned up in a dilapidated mansion in the Louisiana swamp after three years of being missing. That’s all you’ll learn of his back story, and that’s all you need to know. Ethan is the protagonist, but he is not the star of the show. The main gameplay loop is familiar: you explore the various properties of the Baker family, scavenging for weapons, ammunition and items, all the while being in danger from the murderous denizens of the location, which you have to evade or fight off. Occasionally, the game throws an environmental puzzle at you, to spice things up. Combat is a sluggish, uncomfortable affair. Aiming your various guns feels slow and imprecise. Ethan is so slow on his feet that evading your enemies’ attacks is almost impossible. Melee attacks are possible but almost completely ineffective. This is not a detriment to the experience. RE7 is a horror tale, the protagonist is not expected to come out of the mayhem unscathed, and while there is plenty of harm inflicted upon Ethan during cutscenes, it’s quite hard not to get bled during the regular engagements, as well. There is never enough ammunition to actually feel confident during engagements, but usually there is enough to never actually run out. The whole system is balanced really well: It engenders terror, but never frustration. Full marks. Exploration is also great, and this is mostly a credit to the art direction. I usually take a lot of screenshots to memorize the beautiful moments within a game, but while playing RE7, I rarely ever felt the need to make a screenshot. This is a compliment: The locations here are so lovingly crafted examples of irredeemable rot and dirt and dilapidation that I felt the constant urge to wipe my monitor instead. Every surface feels soiled and moist. The soundscape wraps you in squelches and screams and blubbering and so many other disturbing **** environment is so scary and oppressive that I breathed a sigh of relief every time I entered a safe room. Those are just as expertly crafted to feel comforting as the rest of the game is to terrorize you, without them feeling out of place. The puzzles are fine. There are no real head scratchers, nothing to get stuck on. They serve to structure the route Ethan takes through the game, and although some of them stretch the limits of suspension of disbelief, none of them broke it for me. The plot is great, I think. A lean tale, mostly unburdened by the convoluted Resident Evil mythos, laser focussed on the struggle between a murderous family of degenerates and their would be victims. The characters are great for what they are. None of them feel really developed, but they don’t have to be: they are great implementations of their tropes, the enemies feel menacing. The few allies you have you build a connection with simply by being in the same horrible situation, and they are likable enough that you feel it when horrible things happen to them. The main villain has a somewhat sympathetic back story, but I hated her with a passion anyway, which made the truly bonkers final confrontation quite cathartic for me. The game is also very well paced. The locations are spacious, but not overly so. There is no filler, every room has a purpose, both within the game world and with regards to the story. You get just enough time within each location to get familiar with them, but before that familiarity can breed feelings of security, you move on. Since we are in an imperfect world, there are a few marks against the game. While the main antagonists are unique and memorable and well designed, at some point the game introduces a couple of rank and file monsters, and those designs, while memorable when first encountered, are very samey. There are three main types, which is too few, and they look very similar. Also, the most impactful moments of the story are front-loaded, so the engagement levels drop a bit during the middle chapters, until the revelations of the final third of the game ratchet things up again. Finally, a word about the DLC: There’s, like, a ton of it, and I only played the story-based one’s but those are excellent additions to the game. They give you more time with the Baker family and, at their best, equal the first hours of the main game in excellence. Well worth your time and money. TLDR: If you ever wanted to to the protagonist of a really good horror movie is scary even if you avoid all the idiotic decisions the people in the movies keep making, spend your time and money here.

X-Com Chimera Squad tries to inject a bit of RPG into X-COM, but it goes too far and not far enough X-Com 2 is a great game and one of its greatest strengths is its ability to generate emergent stories within the mind of the player. I suspect that someone at Firaxis had this idea to push the envelope on this aspect of the game, and thus X-COM Chimera Squad was born. The place is City 31, Earth. The time: A few years after X-COM won the war against the Elders. Humans and leftover aliens have tried to build a new society together, and Chimera Squad is a fully integrated SWAT team tasked with supporting the local police. Naturally, as soon as our team of up to eight plucky special forces rides into the city, the excrement hits the ventilator, and Chimera Squad has to swing the mop. The gameplay framework is basically the one from X-COM: There are tactical battles you have to win with a squad of four. Between battles you manage the squad itself, use the three resources you earn to improve the team’s gear and reduce the value of the doom counter, this time called “City Anarchy”, and, given the chance, level up your troops. So far so familiar for the X-COM franchise. Unfortunately, all these familiar mechanics are but a shadow of their former selves. The battles take place in smallish, mostly interior maps against almost exclusively humanoid enemies, who are all immediately visible. No more sneaking up on clumps of opposition. There are only two classes of weapons, standard and unique, and the latter ones don’t show until the last third of the game. Class talent trees have lost a level and only offer options on two of those levels. There is no base building. There is no permadeath. No more randomized looks for your troops. What’s new is that your troops are no longer voiceless randos wandering in from the street. Each of the eleven agents you can recruit are a fully formed character with voiced lines, a backstory and an individual look. They banter with each other, have unique reaction lines, unique talent trees… all good things. Is that enough to make up for the complexity that was lost? Not even close, in my opinion. None of these characters have an arc. Chimera Squad as a whole doesn’t have one, either. So all these interactions are inconsequential fluff. Their individual back stories never come into play. The individual looks are way less distinct than what was possible in the past. On top of that, the overarching plot also feels half-assed. Earlier X-COM-Titles offered far more intriguing mysteries. All Chimera Squad has to offer is the classic whodunnit. It doesn’t even offer much of a twist. So gameplay is rather lackluster and the story is meh, but I have one more bee in my bonnet I have to excise: Graphics. Past Firaxis X-COM games were grim affairs, but they were colorful: Crimson and emerald rays melted green and violet alien flesh, while gorgeous explosions athed the darkened landscapes in gorgeous shades of yellow and orange. So why was someone allowed to dump a metric ton of pink dust over everything. Suddenly the main color scheme is pastel! Who thought that was a good idea? I don’t have much more to say. Chimera Squad tried to be an RPG with defined characters and a directed plot while still being X-COM, but it didn’t go far enough, and gave up way too much of it’s X-COM heritage. Skip this one. TLDR: Not worth it. Instead of playing this dumbed-down boring derivative, go play X-COM 2 War of the Chosen.

Subnautica is splendid isolation, warts and all I never had much patience for the open world crafting simulators before. Narrative games are my jam, and most of that genre, have little story. But at some point I stumbled over a trailer for Subnautica, and it stuck with me. That endless, light-flooded ocean was just so… beautiful. So after years of hesitation, I took the plunge. Subnautica casts you in the role of the sole survivor of a spaceship crash occurring on a water world. Your task is to manage your oxygen, hunger and thirst meters, and make use of your star trek tech level replicator, digital blueprints and abandoned resources you find all over the handcrafted map to build yourself a rocket and fly home. The primary gameplay loop is you scrounging for things in ever more extreme environments. Food, resources, tech tree advances, all have to be picked up by hand, and fed into the replicator. There is a metroidvania like structure to it, because parts of the hand-crafted map are simply not accessible to you until you craft certain items or vehicles (oh yes, you don’t stay swimmer forever). Occasionally you might build a base, a process that is almost painless (the game engine sometimes is a bit picky about placements) and can be quite engrossing. I usually don’t get into this kind of thing, but I couldn’t resist plopping down a three story underwater dream house with a sun-flooded bedroom just because I could. It’s also useful to have small outposts at a few key locations in the game, and it gives a great feeling of accomplishment to slowly fill the map with little summer houses here and there. The secondary gameplay loop is all about exploring the map. Certain things you need to find are telegraphed, but at some point the game just takes the training wheels off and expects you to go adventuring on your own. On a third level of play, you have an actual plot, a rarity in this genre. It’s a little thin on the ground, more a seasoning and less the backbone of the game, but the writing is decent and even shows a sparkling wit now and then. All these modes of play are helped immensely by how pretty this game is and how excellent and immersive the traversal mechanics are. I have never seen a more convincing and entrancing simulation of diving and underwater exploration. The lighting is great, the flora and fauna are strange and fascinating, and getting around in it is a joy, whether you are swimming, driving a submarine or stomping around in a giant robot suit. It also bears mentioning that for me at least, the game had a very satisfying ending. That’s not nothing these days. Not everything works as well, though: Some fauna are supposed to be dangerous, but overtime their threat diminishes. The ocean surface looks terrible when seen from a distance, which, coincidentally, isn’t possible all that much. A few locations look a little goofy or sparse, which leaves a few scratches on the immersion. And then there are the poor optimization and the bugs: Texture Pop In was a pretty consistent and pretty annoying problem in some regions of the map. On occasion, the game suddenly thought I was on dry land when I was actually swimming in the ocean. Once, that actually left me stranded in a place I could only get out of with the help of the developer console. This didn’t destroy my enjoyment of the game, but it wrung a few sighs of exasperation from me. The production values are mostly very high: I already mentioned the strong art direction, but it bears repeating: the world the player moves through is a beautiful work of art. The soundscape is appropriately sparse and very immersive. There is even voiced dialogue on occasion, and the voice work... It’s fine. Nothing special, but it does the job. All in all it’s just a joy to exist, survive, scavenge and build in this world. Having a concrete goal to work towards is great, but that’s not the main attraction of this game. Having this gorgeous little world all to yourself is. TLDR: The ultimate Robinson Crusoe experience, despite minor and more than minor blemishes. If this sounds good to you, I recommend you play this game.

Hades squares the circles ... of Hell What is Hades? Hades is the story of Zagreus, a Teenager who “can’t even” with his dad and decides to run away and smash as much stuff as he can on his way out, a plan that is complicated a bit by him being the son of Hades and the house he tries to leave is the Underworld. Hades is a roguelike whose isometric look look and combat mechanics owe a debt to Diablo, but instead of an endless climb up the equipment ladder, it feeds you precious story morsels to keep you motivated. Hades is a Supergiant Games title, a pedigree that signifies incredible art direction, excellent writing and experimental storytelling. Hades is the roguelike I’ve played for 150 hours straight during the last month. Why, you ask? Let me count the reasons: The combat is excellent: Zagreus, the protagonist, has two attack types, a dash, a spell and one to two ults, all of them easy to pull off, but only studious application of each will see you succeed. He starts each run with one of six very different weapons, and picks up powerups along the way that can alter the gameplay significantly. The system is easy to pick up but has a lot of hidden depth, the action is spectacular at times but almost always legible, each of the four biomes Zagreus can cross have their own, completely unique collection of foes and It. Just. Never. Gets. Old. I grew weary of Diablo combat, and Dead Cells combat. I never grew tired of Hades combat. The plot and the writing are top notch, the best Supergiant Games has produced yet, and that’s saying something. The characters in here are now the definite interpretation of the Greek Pantheon for me (did I mention the setting of Hades is the Greek Pantheon?). All the characters consist only of a few still images and a ginormous amount of recorded lines, but they all come across as so human and deep and charming and likable… Ok, Ares comes across as the well-meaning but weird uncle who doesn’t get left alone with the kids much, and Zeus is a bit of a buffoon, but still, you just have to be charmed by even them. They are family. A very dysfunctional family, sure, and the stuff they all go through goes to some pretty dark places at times, but it all finds a heartwarming, hopeful finale. Well, ok, Theseus is a ****. But what’s really surprising, and what really feels like squaring the circle, is how tightly interwoven combat and story are. Little pieces of plot are dispensed throughout every run, and every death nets you a double dose, when Zagreus returns to the house of Dad and gets to talk to all his friends (and Hades). The action delightfully informs the plot, and the plot provides delicious context for the action. The pacing is excellent: Talky time provides the occasional breather during the high octane action, but it never overstays its welcome. It sounds like a contradiction, but they did pull it off: Hades really is a great roguelike with an excellent story. The production values are through the roof: The art is creative, highly detailed, vibrant, wonderful. The soundtrack grabs you and never lets go. Logan Cunningham is the god of sexy voices, but all the other voice actors bring their A game, too. Are there quibbles? Well,the poisonous enemies in the final realm can go die in a fire. And I’m a bit resentful that I had to activate Easy Mode to push through a certain difficulty spike. But that’s my personal failing. TLDR: Supergiant Games did it again. Buy this game, play this game. And say Hi to my gal Artemis for me.