Neue Rezensionen von Rivatonic

I am usually inclined to be nice to small indie games I get for free, but...this game has a £9.99 price tag...so they deserve everything they're gonna get.

At first this game has a nice premise to it: you're on trial for murder in 1894 France and it's entirely up to you how you exonerate yourself... You can lie, frame others, confess or even plead insanity. The possibilities are endless! Except they're really not. In a loading screen (of which there are a frankly criminal quantity) it claims that there are hundreds of combinations you can try to get out of a guilty verdict, but it's absolute rubbish.
There are about ten different pieces of evidence you can find to defend yourself and a total of eight endings (and one extra that doesn't count). Given how a lot of the endings are very similar, you're gonna be using the same bits of evidence multiple times, replaying the exact same scenarios time and again just to get the very slight tweak to the ending summary. Of my four hours played, an hour and a half was my first ending and the other two and a half hours was just mopping up the others. There was no enjoyment or satisfaction to it as it's basically a one-note puzzle game with a built-in 100% guide for when you (very quickly) tire of it. And you can't plead insanity. Seriously. There's no option for it.

I normally don't like just rattling off a list of issues a game has, but given how short and insultingly expensive it is (I had an immeasurably better time in four hours of LiEat for a fifth of the base price) I am going to indulge my more bitter urges to rip this game apart.
First of all, the graphics. Even after finding a way to turn off the omnipresent filter that makes the whole game look washed out, the graphics are still low grade. So far, so indie, but where this game stands out is the human models. There aren't many humans that appear in this game, but those that do vary from waxwork with freakishly-animated eyes to straight up horror movie bad. Sadly for Bohemian Killing, the very worst (by which I mean wet-yourself-terrifying) is the player who is seen in an unskippable cutscene at the start of every single run. I took to holding up a hand to block my view and save myself the nightmares.
The game is also plagued with movement and graphical bugs like bouncing up and down after being hit, black birds that fly through buildings and the floor or randomly explode into a thousand plainly white feathers and clipping through a vent so badly by letting go of the crouch button that I was afraid I'd gotten stuck. Other camera movements are smooth and sudden (in a bad, cheap way) so the whole game feels rushed and made on a tight budget. A fact I'd believe if it wasn't for this next bit...

"The main character of the game is played and dubbed by a world-class film and voice actor". That is a line from the Steam store page. In fact there is an entire section of the store page description devoted to praising this voice actor, along with a bit that looks ripped straight from the guy's CV. What makes it awkward is the voice acting is pretty damn bad. Most line readings are clunky or outright painful and I haven't heard a French accent for a while, but this one sounds distinctly fake. That statement becomes considerably worse when I found out that he is, in fact, French.
Also, cheap shot, but Bohemian Killing isn't on the guy's IMDb page.

In summary, I have nothing positive to say about this game. The premise could have been interesting and unique, but it's handled so poorly that this would be a rip-off at £2, let alone £10. The execution is awful, and I'm not talking about yours when you're inevitably found guilty (obligatory death penalty pun).

I was only peripherally aware of Prey before I unexpectedly got a free key of it from Keymailer. As it had come out only the day before, I was very excited to try it despite it appearing to be a bit horror-y. What followed was a 40 hour journey around Talos-1 fighting aliens and enjoying myself more than I ever expected.

Despite knowing very little about Prey, I was aware that it's by Arkane Studios; developers of my second favourite game of all time, Dishonored. Because of this the stealth mechanics are really polished as they're the core of the Dishonored franchise. Actually, the whole game had a 'Dishonored-but-not' feel to it... From hiding under tables accidentally by crouching too near them to the way the protagonist, Morgan Yu (who can be male or female if you're wondering), handles his (or her) wrench, I recognised a lot of tricks from my time as Corvo (and Emily). This is all good because it allowed me to get to grips with the myriad of mechanics with more ease than perhaps I would have.
I must say, however, that the tutorials and slow incline of new mechanics is brilliantly done; think Half-life 2's progression if you didn't always find the weapons in the same order and this impacted your play-style. The weapons can always be found in the same places, but as the explorable world opens up very wide, very suddenly, it's easy to pick a different direction and thus change how you go.
Add to this the weapon upgrades, plethora of powers and tactical choices from terrain and equipment, and I frequently felt like I could take on anything... And that's just the moment the game unleashed a new monstrosity to send me fleeing and cowering; it's a bit eerie, now that I think about it. Even with hours and hours of side questing and exploring, I never felt overpowered or out of my depth.

I can't say much about the story without ruining the fun, so suffice that it kept me guessing and questioning right until the very last moment. 'Morally grey' is a bit of a theme, but you have no idea how many ways that can be applied until you've played through the whole game.
The game world is dripping with lore and personality, from the character interactions to books and notes, to the way your actions impact it. That's another thing Arkane do so well that they're officially my new favourite developers. You really feel like a person who exists and, more importantly, has existed in this world.

I should address the elephant in the room...or should I say in the isolated environment? No. 'In the room' will do.
This game starts off - and kinda feels - a bit like BioShock. Does this sound familiar? Lost and alone with no real direction, trapped in an isolated environment, guided only by a voice on a radio, wielding a wrench as a melee weapon... If the start of this game isn't a homage to the original BioShock then Valve may want to have a word.
As I am currently in the midst of my first playthrough of the original BioShock, I feel especially-positioned to compare the two. I prefer Prey. By a flaming mile. The horror is less creepy imagery and more environmental, the controls are much smoother (granted it is 10 years younger, but still), the visuals are stunning (again, age difference might come into this) and it does much more interesting things with its setting.
The BioShock similarities faded away quickly, however, as I got more into the game and it developed a unique identity somewhere between BioShock, Dishonored and something metamorphosing into a chair.

Overall it is a phenomenal game that neatly balances all of its mechanics and has a use for almost anything you find; even that one 'joke' weapon that does no damage was useful in its own way. It's unique, great fun and has enough variation to make replaying it an inevitability.

I bought LiEat because I am nothing if not a sucker for interesting aesthetics. And JRPGs. The premise is a young dragon girl who can eat lies; that combined with the art style was enough to convince me it was worth the very small price tag.
This game is broken down into three 'parts'. Essentially, each is a self-contained adventure in a confined space that takes about an hour to play through. I'll be honest...I got stuck quite quickly. They take an odd format and presentation that completely stumped me; it dumps your character in an almost empty town and says to go do stuff. What follows is a very linear series of events that are so loosely connected that I highly recommend following a walkthrough.
This sounds like it should be a negative point, but the fun of the game isn't in working out the next step. Instead this should be seen more as a visual novel with token battles and movement that go a long way to investing you in the story. And it is the writing that gets this game a definite recommendation.
You experience the events - that take the form of a series of 'mysteries' to be solved - both from the eyes of the naive and childlike Efi (the lie-eating dragon girl) and her 'father' Leo (an early twenties conman). This split perspective works very well and lets you see the various characters with whom you interact in differing ways that would have been unavailable if your protagonists didn't act independently.
Efi is endlessly cute and acts very much like an actual child would; playing, exploring and making friends with all the shady people Leo regards with cynicism and weariness. She is initially the focus of the game's attention, but this regrettably shifts to what I hesitate to call the 'over-arching plot' in the last part.

Okay. Cards on the table. This game is very short. Four hours to 100% it on my first run. And that includes leaving it running a couple of times while I got distracted and wandered off. I would have absolutely loved if there had been another three or more of the little 'episodes' even if that doubled the price of the game. As it is, the game peaks with the second part and the third part kinda lost me.
The first part focuses largely on the combat which varies from impossible (if you didn't stumble randomly across better weapons) to trivial (if you happened to find the best ones). The second is a mostly conversation-based little story with less combat where Efi is at her best and the third takes a very 'puzzley' attitude that almost forgets combat exists until the end where you need to grind for a couple of minutes.
As I said, I think this game is best played with a guide open (made easier by the fact the resolution CANNOT be changed from a 480p window), allowing you to find the good weapons and get through the weird sequence of interactions you need. Without the 'gameplay' to slow you down, you can explore everything and talk to everyone. It's the talking to everyone that makes this a fun adventure.

Considering I bought this very cheap based mostly on its aesthetics, I am pleasantly surprised by how much I like it. It is crammed full of a cuteness and charm that appeal greatly to me and smother any ill feelings about the relative lack of gameplay or the short runtime. While the third part is by far the weakest, it does end in such a way that a sequel or expansion is not impossible. If one is ever released, I'm sure I will play it and enjoy it simply if it is more of this.

Oh. And the idea of having all art stills and cutscenes viewable at the end of the 'part' is brilliant. They're pretty if few in number and they're worth that second look at the end.

At first glance this game seems a quirky little shop management game. I first saw it when Sips played it and, while it didn't make me rush to buy it, it looked interesting enough. Fast forward to a few versions later, it's out of early access and shouldn't be.

I'll cover the good bits before I cover all of the bad:
It's easy for passing the time. Think Viscera Cleanup Detail in that it's not hard but takes time and requires about 50% attention. That's how I've been playing it; having it on while watching something. This becomes especially easy once you manage to automate the security and restocking of your shop, but it got to a point when it was boring. Oh wait. Good stuff first.
It can be funny. In places. Some comments, products and NPC names can get a chuckle the first time, but with such a massive overturn of customers and items, they get repetitive VERY fast. I played under 40 days and I was already tired of them.
The cartoony graphics are okay.

So with the good bits done, I can talk about the bad stuff:
This game is awful. As in the gameplay is dull, repetitive and poorly-done. Your job each given day is to restock, protect against thieves, pick up dropped items and fight off barbarians. The actual restocking, security and item picking-up can all be done by helper bots, leaving you with just ordering new items and fighting barbarians... Except both are done to be as awkward and unwieldy as possible.
Barbarians first. After you unlock a certain skill that massively increases the number of customers, it also causes daily barbarian attacks. And I mean once or twice a day, scattering your customers and making you wait for them to approach. You have to let them approach because otherwise you have to walk all over the map cleaning up the dead bodies which reduce customer interest in the shop.
Your magic is the best way to fight them - one blast and they're a skeleton - but it takes too long to recharge to use all the time. Nope, you'll have to use your sword sometimes, lazily swinging at the air in front of you...and hitting any of your own displays that happen to be within a few feet. They're then either damaged or destroyed, coincidentally exactly what the barbarians would have done. If you want this to be a game where you don't have to pay attention all the time just in case your shop is attacked, DON'T buy that skill.

As for restocking, the UI is awful. Like truly terrible. It's very awkward with different buttons used to close it depending on what you're doing exactly; it's hard to explain exactly, but I've previously been stuck looking in a chest because I accidentally opened up another menu while there and it wouldn't let me close either. It's also incredibly easy to misclick and break your automation such as when you're spamming mouse clicks to move items around. Each item has to be individually moved between inventories by clicking it once. Considering there's an achievement for buying 20,000 items, that's some idea of how much you might need to click in this game. There sorely needs to be a button to move all items of one type into the adjacent inventory; lucky this game is still in early access, eh?
But it's not. It's a fully-released game. I've seen this a couple of times when a game 'releases' out of early access and it's just as buggy and unfinished as before. I don't know why they do this, but it means I don't need to give them the benefit of the doubt that they'll fix the bug.
I'm gonna mention the clicking thing again because of how large a portion of the game it is. With a fully-automated shop, I'd still have to buy in items to keep my bots stocked. Say I need 20 health potions because they sell well; I have to open the buy menu, click Health Potion 20 times, receive the order, go to my stock bot, open the bot's inventory and click 20 more times to transfer the stuff. And if I click 21 times, it'll reassign my bot to pick-up duty or something. Now imagine doing that with about 150 items PER DAY.

And that brings me to the repairing. Your displays deteriorate over time and with customer use, so you need to go around with a hammer and repair them with a few clicks. Each. On a daily basis. I had about 50 displays spread out over my shop and it'd take about 10 minutes to go around and fix them all after a single day's shopping. It's busywork without the sense of achievement you get from VCD because it's like cleaning a sewage outlet pipe; there's always more sh*t to deal with.

Last thing I'll complain about (ignoring the vestigial crafting portion of the game) is the reason I finally quit; achievements. I am an avid achievement farmer so I saw this game as a boring, but easily-100%able game. I was wrong. It's impossible to 100%. And I don't mean having to play 365 days when 40 was a colossal chore. I mean that 2 of the achievements are unachievable by new players.
One is described as 'You helped make Shoppe Keep a reality', so I'd guess it's some kind of early backer/kickstarter deal. Nice that they wanted to thank the people who made it possible, but that's not how to do it.
The other is worse... You have to be a developer to get it. As in a developer of Shoppe Keep. They gave themselves their own private achievement. Wow.
I mean I hate the ones that are 'play this game against someone with this achievement' because they give them to the devs and let it radiate outwards like a plague of triumph, but this...this is torture.
When I found out this was what those two achievements are for, I decided not to waste any more of my time with it. If they patch those two 'achievements' out, I might come back and 100% it to add to my Perfect Games list, but it'll be a resentful 100% born of perfectionism and not any love for this poorly-made, unfinished and inefficient game. Go play Viscera Cleanup and Recettear instead. They're much better games and would give the same general feel.

After buying this game on a whim a number of years ago, I finally got round to finishing it. A large portion of what took me this long was I got stuck on the penultimate level and was too stubborn to look up a guide for it. Luckily I have shed such stubbornness (to a degree) and checked out a few bits online.

This is the sort of game I love; as evidenced by my surprising playtime on it. Given that the skilled or the chaotic could easily speedrun this whole thing in a couple of hours, it's testament to the game's credit that you can just as well explore, play about and cause general havoc for scores of hours and be just as happy.
It is, first and foremost, a stealth game where you get additional rewards for completing objectives in complete secrecy. Note that I say 'additional' rewards, because there is no real penalty for blasting your way out of a bad situation or picking off the odd innocent along the way. As long as you complete the objective, you're golden. And that's how this sort of thing SHOULD be. Yeah, there are some consequences on higher difficulties, but if you go for the expert modes you're probably the type to get it done with no collateral.
The sheer variety and genius of the levels is staggering; from a vineyard to a casino to a steamboat, no two levels are similar, each requiring their own unique approaches. By use of disguises (most obtained off the corpses or unconscious bodies of their former owners), you slip into an environment undetected and proceed to get the job done. Whether you set up little accidents or prefer to look them in the eye as you headshot them, there is scope for it all.

Where it gets tricky is some areas require very specific tasks performed before you can proceed; the penultimate level is one such situation. I was unable to work out the specific task and eventually gave up trying. Admittedly almost every single secret in the game can be learned by strategic waiting and watching, but sometimes I just don't have the patience for that; especially as on higher difficulties, death means start from scratch.
While I'm complaining, something that repeatedly bugged me on my latest playthrough was how twitchy the NPCs are. When in disguise, you can logically do anything the similarly-dressed NPCs can... This is not the case. I've been turned away by my fellow bouncers, shot at for being a secret serviceman with a gun and executed then fled from because I took one step too far in a public space. I've heard some things about bugs, but I don't know how many of these were bugs and how many were just the mechanics.
Equally the NPCs can be brainless when it comes to hard evidence. I once walked out of a lift, leaving behind a naked dead body (after donning his clothes as a disguise), and the police outside the door ignored me to check on the dead man. If I'd been in my suit, they'd have shot me on sight. I'm not complaining too much about that sort of thing because, in truth, I'll take any break I can get from the bloodhound AI.
My final ♥♥♥♥♥♥ is with the control scheme. It seems to have been designed for a controller because you have movement controls and then three basic buttons for almost all interaction. This gets infuriating when you're trying to drag a body away from a closed door and one command flits between DRAG and OPEN DOOR. That was certainly awkward for the guard on the other side... A less minimalist control system would have been nice, allowing for more precise actions.

Blood Money is frequently called the best Hitman game in the series and, after finally completing it, I see why. It's fun, gripping, decently well-told and carries many hours of messing about. I remember once I went through each level killing literally everyone; I failed at this in one level because I ran out of bullets for all the civilians. Tragic.
I highly recommend this stealth game with shooter elements as it's one of the best in the genre. Plus the 1st/3rd person toggle is brilliant for precision shooting. Give it a go.

For me, this is a difficult game to review. This is the closest thing I have to a guilty pleasure as the open world is repetitive and dull, the combat is one-sided and stacked against you and the story makes little sense. And here I am with over 80 hours in it and another 20-30 likely to come soon.

I'll start by stating that I have never played a Final Fantasy game that isn't 13, so if that changes the context of this review, so be it. That said, this game makes me want to and I have already bought 13-2.

Before I talk about the problems with this game, I'll try to explain why I've sunk so much time into it. It is stunningly pretty; just ordinary gameplay is beautiful with a nice variety of colours, tones and eye-catching set pieces. While a lot of the enemies are over-designed so you have no idea if what you're looking at is a head or an arm, the lead characters each have their own aesthetics that speak of the fashion of the FFXIII world. As bizarre as JRPG clothing usually is, I really like the design choices that went into the protagonists.
But where the game comes alive is in the pre-rendered cutscenes. Holy crap, they are stunning. I took 701 screenshots over the course of the main story (admittedly that's kinda par for the course for me), but the majority of them were in cutscenes. I cannot really convey how nice to watch these cutscenes are, so go check out the opening cinematic for the game.
The only downside of the cutscenes is that a couple have SO MUCH going on that it's hard to follow; these were the ones where my screenshots caught only blur and semi-obscured characters. They were so desperate to show activity and movement that they don't linger on anything and that's a shame.

The gameplay of FFXIII is split between 'open world' running and the combat. Neither is perfect. By which I mean that both kinda suck. Aside from the rather petty complaint of all the characters having really loud footfalls (actually, the whole sound balancing was off on this port), the main problem with the 'open world' is how linear it is. You have to run down long corridors formed of walkways, tunnels or just convenient debris. You meet enemies who just stand there and wait for you, staring right at you under six feet away and doing nothing until you take that step too close. And you drift.
I assume it's a problem with the port as I don't recall it on the PS3 version (I played the first 15 hours or so on PS3 before getting bored), but if you press forward you drift to the left or right. Running in a straight line, even down straight corridors, is impossible. You can alter whether you drift left or right, but the little dotted line on the minimap showing where you've been will always be a zigzag. It's not game-breaking, but it's bloody annoying.
I've heard it said that "it gets good 20 hours in"; this is when the tight corridors open up into a large area with side quests, but for me that was 40 hours in. By then I knew I was hooked, but the opening doesn't make as big a change as I thought. It's just one big area with a load of corridors coming off it to any other area. The final 2 chapters just go right back to narrow and confined.

The combat also has a lot to answer for. God, I could write a whole essay on why the FFXIII combat is bad, but I'll give you the brief version. It's real time combat with time-based elements. This means that if you sit there and do nothing, the enemy will keep attacking you. The time-based elements are that it takes time to charge up your attacks; any attacks. Each attack is worth a different quantity of 'attack bars' with more powerful attacks requiring more bars and thus more idle time to use.
The problem with this is that you have no time. A massive focus of the combat is winning as quickly as possible; the combat scoring system that affects item drops requires you to win quicker than a set time. This on its own wouldn't be too bad but, given the range of abilities available, the daunting weakness/strength system and the terrible menu-based combat (the kind that fits perfectly in turn-based combat), it's impossible to fight most enemies with anything other than auto-choose attacks. Luckily the auto-choose AI is pretty good; it always calculates the most effective moves and uses them, taking into account damage, weakness, buffs etc.
But there are other elements to the combat...random elements that you have absolutely no way to control. A number of attacks (both yours and the enemies') are proximity-based; some heal the characters near the medic, some deal massive damage to targets directly in front etc. But you have no way to affect where your characters or the enemies stand. Depending on where the mindless AI decides to let your team charge their attacks, you may be excluded from healing, clumped up to receive a powerful AoE attack or simply ignored.
On top of this is the decision to make your party leader all-important. If either of your two companions are killed, drop a revive on them and boom, right back into the fray. If your leader is killed, sorry that's it. Game Over. Retry?
Who thought that was logical? Yeah, I've heard of FF characters forgetting to revive outside of combat (Sorry, Aeris), but not being able to do it in combat, just because the arbitrary leader was downed? Rubbish.
Oh. And having an unskippable animation for switching character roles mid-battle - WHEN THE ENEMY WILL STILL ATTACK DURING IT - is moronic. I've lost more than once because my leader was killed while the medic was posing.

I've already said that the story doesn't make a lot of sense. That's an understatement. You find out nothing until a good ten hours into the game and then it spoon feeds you a tiny bit at a time and gives you the equivalent of a book to read in the 'Datalog'; a menu with paragraphs of information about the characters, places, concepts and...stuff you encounter. This system is poor storytelling because anyone without the patience to read it all will be lost.
Character motivations are rarely fully explained and this may be because of some translation thing, but most likely it's supposed to make everyone seem that little bit mysterious. It's more annoying than anything. Most motivations come through by the end, but vast portions of the plot are driven by characters doing the exact things they said they wouldn't...so...maybe I just didn't understand.
All that said, I couldn't stop playing until I found out how it all ended. Sometimes it's the lure of 100% completion that keeps me going, sometimes it's gripping gameplay. In this case it was the mysteries of the story and a growing wonder about how the characters' stupid actions would somehow save the day.

From everything I've written, you're probably wondering why this is a positive review. Simply because I still want to play more. Yeah, the open world is a lie and the combat is stacked; I didn't even go into how most of the boss fights are just puzzles on unusual ways to use your combination of character roles. But after all of that I want to return to the bits I missed and finish them.
Some part of me really enjoys this game and, while I'm unlikely to replay it any time soon, I still have a full 24 hours' worth of entertainment to get out of it.

I must admit that the premise of this game intrigued me; a Valve-approved sequel to Half-Life: Opposing Force, return to Xen, carefully-integrated to the HL2 timeline, higher resolution models... What a lie. I'll break it down using quotes from the Steam store page

"13 new levels...all carefully integrated into the Half-Life 2 story"
"he's teleported in...to help fight back"
For a start, this game is only loosely connected to Half-Life 2. Yes, it takes place in a couple of HL2 locations and you see the aftermath of Freeman's passing, but you in no way actually help him. I expected a cleverly done story where you cause some of the good fortune that allows Freeman to escape Nova Prospekt in the original game...instead you faff about in the back rooms of the prison, fighting through a progression of open areas and turret-filled corridors that don't work given HL2's gunplay. I'll come back to this point.

"Continues the story of Opposing Force"
I haven't played OF, but I've read the plot and mechanics as I am a big fan of the franchise. I can safely say that the only connection to OF is having Adrian Shephard as the protagonist and an increasingly disruptive series of auditory flashbacks that impede your vision...for some reason. The terrible sound balancing in this game, lack of different sliders for voice and sound effects (like ambience and shooting) and incredibly unreliable dialogue captions mean that it can be hard to hear a good 50% of what's said, if it's even relevant. Most of these seem to just recap OF which, as this is a sequel, shouldn't really need to be done. And that's AFTER a long, slow monologue at the start.

"New music"
Granted, this one is true. There is music that I recognise as new. Unfortunately, it is very loud and THE MUSIC VOLUME CANNOT BE CHANGED. There is a slider for it and it does absolutely nothing. I can only assume that the background music is lumped in with ordinary game sounds and thus can't be changed separately.

"Substantial graphical updates over the original"
This one is a bit harder to pin down. Aside from a different Combine skin (I've played enough HL2 and G-mod to see the difference), I could honestly not tell between the new and old textures. Perhaps that's a testament to how well it's integrated, but I'd say it's more likely that the changes were not needed if they're present at all.

"Return to Xen"
You 'returned to Xen' once for a brief fire fight and then a platforming section. And we're talking basic platforming. That's it. Given how it's one of the selling points, it's shockingly overselling it.

"New AI improvements"
This is another addition of which I can't really tell the difference. This game is filled with so many vast open areas and long range fire fights, populated by so many enemies, that the AI will just sprint at you and fire at point blank range. The HL2 gun system is NOT designed for open areas like that; even the more open levels in HL2 are brilliantly designed so you don't have to shoot across large spaces much and always have an appropriate weapon on hand.
Multiple times I found myself against 5 or 6 Combine, each armed with the SMG or AR2, charging across a courtyard that offered NO cover. They'd get to a close range then shred me. I'd always resort to backtracking to the previous tight corridor and headshotting them one-by-one as they came in.
These are not good fights. When I die three times to one bit in CHAPTER 2, it's not me being bad at the game; it's a case of terrible pacing and a miserable understanding of HL2's mechanics.

"Substantial, highly-polished"
This is the real kicker. While playing through (I'm currently doing a full let's play series on my YouTube channel), I consistently refer to how the game feels unpolished. Aside from the sporadic subtitles and the lack of music volume control, the levels are poorly designed so I am either lost as to where to go next or I am not informed that I am supposed to run instead of fighting.
The quantity of enemies thrown at you (the aforementioned stuck bit is a fight against 16-20 soldiers in a room with no discernible cover) is nothing short of shameless. Those numbers were reserved for when you had the Super Gravity Gun; a weapon that could defeat that many enemies at once by throwing them at each other. Armed with an SMG, shotgun and terrible body armour, you flatly do not stand a chance even on Normal Difficulty.

This game is not polished. This game feels like it was never playtested by anyone but the creator. This is the Dark Souls of Half-Life, but acts like HL2: Episode 2.5.
If you like your games on hardcore mode where the difficulty comes from poor design rather than challenge, play this. If you like Half-Life and just want to experience the world in another way, try Black Mesa or even HL: Opposing Force; the clever variety of weapons makes the latter distinctly different to HL1 and not like a fanmade level pack that should not cost money.
This isn't worth the price tag. There is a reason even games like Portal Stories: Mel are free; even the brilliantly designed ones have flaws that mean they cannot stack up. This one doesn't even come close.

It was inevitable that I'd play (and 100%) this game. I loved Deponia and The Breakout (the prequel to this) was pretty good too. However, this disappointed me. A lot.

In this game is the distinct Daedalic charm; when you laugh at a joke in the tutorial, it bodes well. But the charm didn't carry as far as it did in Deponia or even The Breakout. Maybe it's because Lilli isn't as interesting as Rufus and Edna are, maybe it's because she never says a word, maybe it's because the tone takes a hairpin turn at Dark Street. I'll explain.

Deponia and The Breakout (to be exact it's Edna & Harvey: The Breakout, but I'll just shorten that) have amazing protagonists. Rufus is consistently funny and engaging and is genuinely relatable, while Edna is just loony enough to keep attention. Lilli, on the other hand, never says a word.
Yeah, she emotes a bit with her grunts and gestures, but silent protagonists are fundamentally character-less. Her thoughts are narrated throughout by an amazingly voice-acted male voice, but as she never communicates anything to other characters, they come up with flimsier and flimsier ways to say 'I know what you're gonna say'. It was clever at first, but it wore thin.
This brings me onto another big flaw over Breakout... The voice acting is overall pretty bad. Breakout had one of the best performances I've ever heard for Edna, but even she comes across poorly in this sequel. All the other voices sound silly, faked or are generally hard to listen to. That's pretty damning for a dialogue-heavy adventure game.

Then there's the tone. Jesus. I read that this game comes across as child-friendly. This is barely adult-friendly. Just some of the events that take place which get passed off as background gags are horrific at BEST. I barely laughed throughout the second half of the game because the tone had dropped so dark that it didn't feel right. Child suicide. That's all I'll say.

Another point I should stress is that the puzzles range between discount Sudoku and actually impossible. Seriously. There was a logic puzzle that could not be solved with the information they gave me. Even the walkthrough I had to follow to progress couldn't explain HOW the information it gave was right; just that it was. And then another puzzle kept doing things different to how it said it did...but that one's hard to explain, so I'll just leave at that.

My issue with the achievements in this game may not be relevant to some people, but I thoroughly enjoy 100%ing Steam games. That said, this one was a chore. The non-story achieves are dull as anything; here's a little comparison to Deponia (which came out before this)...
Deponia has you break physics by playing with electronics, meeting a past/future version of yourself and a special one for replaying the entire game with every word (spoken and written) replaced with Droggeljug.
Harvey's New Eyes has you do a slow, drawn-out task 10 times, a different one 15 times, a different one 20+ times and one even 99 times. It has perhaps one or two references that don't feel like a brutal slog, but the rest...
Again, that might not matter to some people, but it contributes to my conclusion:

This doesn't feel like a Daedalic game. This feels like a fan-made game based on a Daedalic game. The underlying sense of humour is definitely there, but the tone is too dark, the characters too flat and the story too...bad. I don't want to spoil it, but it makes the previous game's story feel like it was a waste of time and boils the 'antagonist' down to a generic evil plot. Complete with a maniacal laugh.
It could also be a cheap shot (and a heavily biased one given my great love of the Deponia art style), but the art in this game felt budget. Perhaps they were emulating the art from The Breakout (the first game done by the studio), but I didn't like it.
Along with that there were numerous graphical glitches like the inventory not opening, the protagonist appearing in two places at once and the camera panning to the wrong place or just jumping about.

There were a few more bugs, but the bottom line is this didn't feel like it was done by the same masters of adventure games that made the Deponia Trilogy. Play them instead as they're some of the best of the genre. This is probably one of the worst. And that pains me to say.

This game I bought because the different art styles were all cute and interesting. What followed was a shockingly good experience that I really didn't see coming.

This game is based on RPGs like Final Fantasy and Golden Sun, but where they can be very slow (the former, particularly), this one is incredibly fast paced. I've played a fair amount of FFxiii, but I managed to catch up to my playtime for that game in a much shorter span due to how enveloping this game can be; I've wiled away more than one night by just playing the story of this.

Grinding is possible, but wholly unneeded. It seems most of the enemies have some kind of scaling, but maybe I was just at the perfect level for everything... Not being able to tell which it is is a very positive thing.
It also has a Game+ mode where you just restart the story with all your levels, skills and equipment. This is a nice feature, but I wish it had asked first as I was close to a few end game achieves that reset with the story.

The actual gameplay is, as I said, fast and flowing. A little less dependence on the mouse would have been nice (you need to click to exit combat, for example), but I still love the way this game controls. Although the interface is mind-bogglingly complicated when you first see it, everything has its place and all fits together surprisingly well for a system as detailed as this. There're skill trees, equipment collecting, weapon and armour modifications, 'flair' trinkets, stat boosters, element resistance, buffs/debuffs... You get the point. But by a few hours into the game, I understood the majority of it.

Character balancing was a bit off for me... I dunno if it was bad use of stat items and skills, but my best fighter was also my best healer and had half the max health of my others. Due to the sheer number of options, I found it hard to keep it straight in my head which character should have which (I did consider making some kind of spreadsheet, but decided against it), but I managed to complete the game on normal difficulty without too much hassle. Don't think I ever lost a fight.

Enough about gameplay, what about the story and tone? The tone is brilliant. Spot on. Phenomenal. It'd be worth playing this for the characters' interactions alone. It plays beautifully with RPG and gaming tropes, references are everywhere and as I said at the beginning, the art style is amazing. Cutscenes are done in a felt-style looping animation, battles are anime and overworld travel are chibi things. They all work surprisingly well together and give the game a very lighthearted feel that becomes all the better when the team encounter horrific atrocities.

Also there's a little easter egg that I stumbled upon entirely by accident, but could NOT stop laughing at. I won't spoil it. But damn. It just epitomises the game.

Overall, this is a fantastic light RPG that is deep enough in gameplay to be elevated beyond the flash game it is and become one of my favourites. Resolution options are terrible, mind, and it isn't integrated with steam very well. Still. Amazing game.

This is a bit of an awkward review to write, given its episodic nature, so I'll ignore that and treat it as one big game.

~~ Mild, general plot spoilers ahead ~~

First of all, this is very different to Telltale's stuff. There are no QTEs, you can um and ahh over the decisions a lot more and it is ALL about talking it out with very few actual action bits. That can be good and bad, as it does the talking phenomenally well, but it gets sooo bogged down in it as the game goes on. You could even be forgiven for thinking Episode 5 is just a cutscene with token interactions added to make it a game. Because that is exactly what it feels like.

Continuing the Telltale comparison, the character animations are considerably better at the cost of making the faces and lip syncing beyond terrible. Yeah, the faces are pretty (well...most. Some are just zombies), but as 75%+ of this game is watching characters talk, the lip syncing should have been a hell of a lot better than this.
The game also takes a lot longer than the average Telltale. This is due to long walking scenes (which admittedly set the mood and atmosphere very well) and 10 collectibles per Episode (complete with a collectible mode so you can go back and get the ones you missed), but it’s also because the characters talk so slowly. They say something, then they say it again and then hit it home just once or thrice more just to be sure. As the game is essentially a time travelling detective game, facts are important, but you rarely have to actually remember things as you get prompts and limited dialogue options.

Speaking of the time travel, it is a fantastic mechanic that is usually implemented very well; it allows creative solutions to problems, allows you to redo conversations you messed up and adds a third layer to the ‘consequence’ decisions of other adventure games. It does, however, create colossal plot holes where rewinding at key points would overcome problems a lot easier than the way you HAVE to. These limitations mean you HAVE to do certain things the way they want, despite them being stupid, dangerous or outright impossible within their own canon.
It’s hard to explain what I mean without going into details of the plot, but it’s mouse-breakingly frustrating for characters to ignore obvious solutions in order to follow the dev’s plot.

On the subject of the plot, it seems to be gearing up a nice detective story in the early episodes with characters falling into place to play their roles, but then takes a neck-breaking turn at BioShock Infinite Junction into pretentious reality-hopping pseudo-drama that causes characters to have a calm conversation about their feelings while the world LITERALLY FALLS APART around them.
If a character says ‘I’ve always wanted to be special’ within spitting distance of a natural disaster, something went wrong in the writing department.
As mentioned above, the vast majority of Episode 5 is spent in pointless false realities that have no bearing on the plot and actually detract from the story by hitting you over the head with nightmarish situations that come from nowhere and go nowhere.
Again without giving exact plot spoilers, at one point you go back and change one detail that should only have affected one minute aspect of the world, but instead it undoes literally everything you just spent an hour doing. That was when this solid recommendation began to crumble a bit.

I like time travel. I like time travel stories. I really like these time travel mechanics, but if you establish a canon of how they work, you 100% MUST stick to that. Ignoring, changing or adding new bits to suit the plot is lazy and serves only to make me not care about or believe in the drama.
And there is a lot of drama. The cast are late-teen art college students. Apparently they ARE drama. Wouldn’t have guessed that, having done a writing degree at university, but apparently that is the case.

Overall, this game has some fantastic ideas and sets up a beautiful scene and world with characters you really care about. But the plot’s insistence on being ‘dramay’ and pretentious beyond compare (it actually beats out Infinite, if not just in weirdness) means that you might not even WANT to finish the final Episode.

Through writing this review I’ve been trying to decide if it’s a positive one or a negative one, but I’m gonna go with positive because this kind of interesting, unique mechanic deserves to be played...if only to learn from the plot mistakes.
This is a fun game with deep – if not repetitive – leads and stunning visuals. Seriously. It’s damn pretty.