A tight top-down adventure/exploration game with a good focus on combat, which gets all the elements right. The controls are tidy, the level of challenge is reasonable, and the graphics, sound, and story hit all the right notes. The interconnected world is certainly contrived (this is definitely a video game) but is reasonable to traverse, and fun to unlock. There's certainly metroidvania elements here in how the world opens up. Certainly leaves a positive impression, and with a reasonable run-time there's few reasons not to pick up and play this one.
This is a wonderful comfort game: a light metroidvania with delightful graphics, design, and a short playtime that feels perfect for what it has to offer. The dry, uninterested main character is a delight, and the writing is just funny enough to amuse: you won't laugh out loud, but it's absolutely not trying to make you do that either. I feel like this is the sort of short platforming adventure that anyone could enjoy, and it's a great distraction in between larger, more epic games. Highly recommended.
This was a strange one; everything about this game feels off: the story, the controls, the gameplay. You can tell it's competent, but it almost feels like it comes from a lineage you didn't experience: as if there were an entire parallel universe of video games that you didn't play, and this was the current generation product of it. Unfortunately that doesn't make it interesting, it just makes it sort of unenjoyable. It has a bewildering story that's poorly presented and impossible to care about, with a cyberpunk skin. Absolutely no world building. Nearly zero actual sense in its progression, with a lot of completely unexplained sci-fi word salad for color, I guess. The difficulty is wildly inconsistent; most battles you can cheese except when you can't, and then it's either a cakewalk or a completely unrewarding grind: nothing in between. The shame of it all is that you can tell a lot of work went into this, although it feels like the polish to the engine went to all the wrong places. Clearly the designers wanted it to do things it couldn't, and despite there being a shocking number of systems in place, they still manage to cobble together experiences that feel ill-suited to what they've built. The graphics are pretty unique though, that was a positive.
It's maybe a little silly to leave a review for a 5 year old game, but if you enjoy first-person RPGs like System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Fallout: do not sleep on Prey. It's a game that's an obvious love letter to the already mentioned System Shock 2, but the real star of this game is the space station on which it takes place: it's amazingly well realized, built like a real structure and not a video game level, but is still an absolute blast to explore. Its small, isolated setting also allows the writers to build up relationships in the crew: as you explore, you get little windows into the people that inhabit the station, how they felt about each other, and their histories. I've read other reviews claiming the story is bland, and I guess if you summarize it that's true, but the story here is more about the telling than the arc as a whole, and it's told just extremely well. Gameplay-wise—and I feel this is often true of Arkane's games—starts out a little punishing until you get the hang of it. Then the sandbox opens up and you really get to play it your way. A lot of the objectives have more than one way of solving them, and it's fun to realize other possible solutions even after you've completed one. The rest of the mechanics are challenging to discuss without spoilers, but suffice to say you end up unlocking some very unique powers, and there are many interesting ways to build up your character. The way you construct items is also the best application of a resource collection and crafting mechanic I've seen in this sort of game, just absolutely wacky, satisfying, and delightful. Something about this game that I haven't seen discussed often but deserves special mention: the UI/UX is so incredibly fantastic. The menus are thoughtful, inventory management works great, the whole thing just plays so smoothly. Whoever worked on it should be immensely proud. I can't believe this didn't make a larger splash when it first came out; had it not been free on Epic Games I'm not sure I would've ever noticed it. Play this game, spend some hours with it before you judge it, and I think you'll have a wonderful time.
Stray was a good game, but not one that fully embraced its concept. A cat simulator this is not: while you might happen to be controlling a creature that looks like one, this is clearly a cat with human purpose and motivations. That's disappointing: I had hoped for more cleverness in the puzzle solving, and more unique mechanics because of the character. However it becomes very clear early on that this is just a puzzle/exploration game where you happen to have the ability to go where others can't reach easily. It's challenging to say more without spoilers, but it's a shame they didn't make the game more unique to the character. It was never going to be perfect—you are a human controlling a cat avatar after all—but this feels like it didn't even make an attempt. Still on the good side of things: the game plays well, is presented well, and is fun to play. The story it tells is good and engaging. The length is extremely appropriate for this type of game, and it never felt like a slog in any regard. I'd still recommend it, but certainly temper your expectations.
An extraordinarily good puzzle/exploration game that's bogged down by clumsy combat, and difficulty ramps that will make you want to give up. It's a shame, this could have been one of the all-time great indies were it not for the combat. A few things out of the way first: the graphics, music, and aesthetic are fantastic. There's a very miniature/tilt-shift look to everything, and it's almost too cute. As the game progresses and you get deeper into the world, it does a great job of bringing you along with it. This game says very little to you, but still tells its story very well. It is clearly trying to drum up nostalgia for NES-era adventure games, and it nails it without being too on-the-nose. How it reveals things to you—both in story and in gameplay—is expertly done. This games puzzles aren't really puzzles in the traditional sense. It reveals things to you over time, but leaves it to you to realize that they have been revealed, and how to use what you've learned effectively. Its solutions are well hidden but not obtuse; I was able to complete the game with its "true" ending, and find many of its secrets without the use of any guides. The only cheating I did was to look up some things that would've required me writing down the solution myself, which would've been tedious but extremely on brand for the feeling the game was trying to evoke. Progression, puzzle-wise, this game is incredibly fair. What is less fair is the combat, which felt sluggish at best and infuriating at worst. While I feel most of what it required of the player was clear, actually accomplishing it meant grinding against enemies far too often, only winning due to what felt not like better execution but a better roll of the RNG. The difficulty didn't ramp linearly, but instead at steep cliffs requiring you to grind past them. A few times, it caused me to put the game down and I wasn't sure I was coming back. The combat is tedious in a different way from the puzzles: you need to sit through somewhat lengthy battles, and a few mistakes mean "start over". Any attempt to move through them faster will result in failure. None of this would necessarily be bad if it was fun, but there's nothing fun about it, again given the tedium plus feeling you won because of a lucky sequence of attacks. The combat would maybe even be fine, if they didn't unnecessarily stretch it out. There's a late-in-the-game "rush" you have to do against several waves of enemies, and it's incredibly unforgiving. This feels completely detached from the story, and feels like nothing more than an attempt to squeeze out some extra time out of the game. Up until that point I was willing to go along with it, but that made me just put the game into "no fail" mode to move forward. They could've skipped this and it would've made zero difference. Outside of combat, navigating the overworld was pretty unintuitive and takes way too long to become straightforward. Yet, you have to do it a lot. I wasted a significant amount of time just playing the "how do I get back to that spot" game, which isn't very fun nor interesting. Overall this game is really difficult to recommend to anyone: the extraordinarily punishing combat will alienate people looking for the excellent puzzle/exploration mechanics, yet the combat itself doesn't feel tidy, deep, nor interesting enough to make the more hardcore want to stick with it. The developers would've been better off scaling the combat back to let the great parts of the game really shine, but as it stands it's a game with too narrow of an audience. Huge bummer, really.
