Recent reviews by Avocado Diaboli

https://youtu.be/KIQCkz_kLTo

This review is a truncated version based on the upper character limit for Steam reviews. For the full version, watch the video.

It’s hard to define what exactly a story-driven game is. Isn’t every game that tells a story in some sense story-driven? After all, the story determines what you have to do next to progress, it puts what happens into context and, you know, tells you the story the game is intending to tell. In less abstract, more practical terms, story-driven usually means that it’s light on gameplay with more of a focus on dialogue. And I feel Cloudpunk fits this description.

You get to experience the city of Nivalis through the eyes of Rania. She comes to Nivalis after the typical dystopian cyberpunk debt police threaten to arrest her to find work and earn some money, so it’s a classic setup where the protagonist serves as the audience surrogate to learn about the world they inhabit. She takes up a job with the eponymous Cloudpunk, a delivery company focused on discretion. They never ask what’s in the package and they deliver everything. The game takes place over her first night on the job as a delivery driver.

And that’s mostly what you end up doing in the game, driving around town in your hovercar, picking up packages and sometimes even people and delivering them somewhere. The gameplay interactions are fairly minimal. Flying around the city isn’t that much of a challenge and most of the deliveries aren’t timed or anything. At best it’s the same thing you’re doing in every open world game where you’re taking a commute between triggers that advance the story in some way. It’s not a bad experience, there’s a nice sense of exploration when driving around. And if you treat it like the RPG it wants to be, you’re incentivized to not just head from objective to objective but instead also take the time to have a look around.

You can also get out of your hovercar and explore quite a few sections of the city on foot. There are many landing spots with these little self-contained island in the city. Seeing the city from this perspective was great, I loved walking around these little neighborhoods. The mood the game paints with its visual aesthetic certainly manages to create a feeling that made me want to spend time in this place, at least after I turned off the rather excessive bloom.

Unfortunately, that’s also the only thing that did. For one, even though I like the game’s aesthetic, the voxel graphics mean that there’s not a lot of detail to be found. It’s all just general hints at what a cyberpunk city is supposed to be. And the non-trivial amount of copypasted content means that a lot of the time your surroundings don’t seem to have that strong of a visual theme that would make them contrast with each other. I never managed to generate a strong mental map of the city. The game suffers from the same problem a lot of open world games are afflicted with and that’s that the minimap is just too damn convenient and pretty much a necessity to ever take your eyes from it. As such, I was never really soaking in my surroundings while doing missions, I was looking at my objective markers all the time. So the game ultimately doesn’t manage to make use of a lot of environmental storytelling. This lack of environmental storytelling also extends to the on-foot portion as well. The spaces you can walk around in are littered with the typical markers found in most other open world games. And what’s there to find seems half-hearted at best.

Now what I will say is that I generally liked the little interactions with the characters you can talk to. Quite a few of them serve as fairly obvious parables for real-life topics and this is where the writing shines the most.

During your exploration of the city, you can also find a bunch of items, though most of those serve no purpose whatsoever. There are a few quests surrounding items you can find and bring to specific NPCs, like the vintage game collector or the lengthy collectathon where you have to scour the city for punch cards to restore an android’s memories. I’ll be honest here, I hate these collectathon missions. In general I tend to avoid them like the plague, because they’re patently busywork intended to drag out the runtime of your game.

While I personally didn’t much care for the gameplay, the writing is generally mostly enjoyable. It does have a tendency to drag on sometimes by outstaying its welcome during certain conversations, but it also has quite humanizing touches for some of the characters you get to talk to. The one exception here and probably the worst one this could’ve happened to though is our protagonist Rania. Some of her lines and behavior are almost schizophrenic with how contradictory they are and quite a few turns of the narrative made me wish for a possibility to just reach through the screen and slap her i.e., for this to be more of an RPG where I get to play a character the way I intend to.

For a game centered around an illicit delivery company, you also seem to never get into any trouble with the debt collectors Rania is ostensibly trying to hide from, or the ever-present private police forces, whose only method of investigation seems to be directly asking suspects if they work for Cloudpunk and taking said suspects at their word with no further inquiry. I think the game stumbles a bit with this aspect, where the horrible state of the world is more communicated by characters telling us about their suffering instead of the player experiencing the hardships themselves, i.e., telling instead of showing.

One feature a lot of story-driven games have is that they like to give players choices to make. And Cloudpunk too has a few missions that present you with a choice, such as disposing of certain packages or delivering them to their intended destination or bringing certain characters to one place or another that somehow informs their later fate. Most of these choices don’t really seem to have that much of a consequence after you made them. Even the big finale of the game hands you a choice to make that doesn’t seem to change much about the status quo. And the fact that they don’t seems to be deliberate. I can’t fathom a story-focused game presenting you with these choices and actively downplaying any significance they might have could happen by accident. And I get the impetus behind this. After all, why would a lowly down on their luck delivery driver be in a position to change the world? That would be entirely antithetical to the theme that this is a cyberpunk dystopia shaped by millennia of unresolved problems.

Now I reiterate, the game is pretty to look at and in general has an absorbing atmosphere and I like a lot of the little narrative touches. But unfortunately, the barebones and not particularly challenging gameplay coupled with the generally unlikable protagonist doesn’t fill me with confidence in recommending the game. To me, Cloudpunk represents a lot of unfulfilled potential. The gameplay could’ve used a shot of adrenaline by implementing an actual challenge. There are a few later missions where you’re given a generous timer that you have to actively try to fail, but that’s about it. And on foot there’s nothing to do but run from A to B, turning the whole game into a walking simulator. It’s a game that’s to be liked more in terms of what it’s gesturing towards with its narrative ambitions rather than what its interactivity has to offer. And that’s a shame, because like I said, I enjoyed the vignettes that gave me glimpses into a variety of different lives, even though admittedly, the narrative is clearly written with an intended message and a corresponding bias. But I’m not sure if that can outweigh the downside of generally lackluster back and forth on foot or in your hovercar.

https://youtu.be/Xu3ncURO7kI

This is a game that elevates the typical formula of the walking simulator and really manages to tell an engaging story. I’d be hard pressed to end the review right here, because I think the less you know about the game going into it, the better. So if you decide to heed my advice and check the game out for yourselves, stop reading now and go do so. For everybody else, here’s the rest of my review. I’ll try to be as light on the spoilers as I can be regardless.

The game centers around the eponymous Edith Finch returning to where she grew up. Well sort of, once you finish the game, you’ll notice that this isn’t quite the entire story, but again, since I think you should totally play this game, I won’t spoil it. Anyway, said home is located on Orcas Island. And right off the bat when you approach the house, you’ll notice that something’s off. While the bottom two stories look like any regular home, the house seems to have these peculiar additions everywhere.

Once you get there, you’ll explore the house in a rather linear fashion. However, most of the rooms you encounter are completely sealed off. You only have little peep holes in the doors through which you can look inside. In order to get around the house, you’ll need to find a variety of hidden passages between the rooms.

While you’re exploring, you’ll hear Edith’s commentary on what you’re seeing both as narration as well as text floating within the scene. I like how the text draws attention to the things Edith is talking about, it ensures that players won’t miss these details.

Now the reason each room is locked off from the outside is because every family member who has passed away gets their room sealed off as a sort of time capsule. It’s amazing how much environmental storytelling the developers managed to cram into these rooms, to give the characters inhabiting them a unique personality expressed through their possessions and decorations. Each room also contains a piece of writing you can read which transports you to a little magical realist vignette from the life of each person in the house. And this is where the game really shines. Seeing these glimpses into the lives of these characters was enthralling, especially against the background that each segment chronicles each character’s final moments, each with their own ironic twist at the end.

That’s not to say that it treats its characters’ deaths frivolously. The tragedy of their loss is not glossed over. What clearly shines through here is that these characters exude humanity in all their facets and that even though individually, they’re all extremely different characters, it’s clear that they were all part of the same kinda quirky family.

Now as said above, it’s still a walking simulator. Sure, the vignettes offer some more “gameplay” in the sense that you get to do more than walk around, but there aren’t any specific mechanics, puzzles or challenges other than following the way ahead. If you’re cool with that and want to see the best thing the genre of walking simulator has to offer, What Remains of Edith Finch is absolutely worth checking out.

https://youtu.be/Xu3ncURO7kI

It’s basically Gone Home meets The Shining.

Ok, let me be a bit more verbose. Still, that single sentence pretty much sums up the game in terms of what you experience. In a similar vein to Gone Home, The Suicide of Rachel Foster is about a young woman, Nicole, returning to her abandoned home and exploring it. Only this time, it’s a hotel way up in the mountains that gets cut off from the rest of the world by a snowstorm. That, as well as its possibly haunted nature give rise to my comparison to the Shining.

Mechanically it too is a walking simulator. There are certain objects you can pick up that you can use elsewhere, but I’d hardly call any of these instances “puzzles”. It’s a fairly rigidly directed experience, given that in this game you have another character called Irving to talk to who gives you clues as well as telling you how to solve some of the problems that crop up in the hotel. And similar to Gone Home, The Suicide of Rachel Foster features a bewildering number of objects you can pick up and inspect that serve no purpose whatsoever. Is this a stipulation in your 3D and texture artists contracts, that they get to design a guaranteed number of objects and that players get to inspect in great detail?

Anyway, as you might have guessed from the title of the game, the story centers around the death of a girl called Rachel Foster. The reason Nicole returns to the hotel is because both her parents have passed away and she inherited it. She used to live there when she was younger, but her father’s romantic engagement to a then 16-year-old Rachel, whom he tutored, caused her mother to file for divorce and she and Nicole ended up moving away. The aim of the story is to uncover the events that eventually led to Rachel’s demise.

Now I’ve read some criticism that the game portrays the relationship between Nicole’s father and Rachel in a way that seems to condone ephebophilia. I personally can’t really come to the same conclusion. Sure, the game doesn’t seem to dwell on it and whenever Nicole discusses her father with Irving, the fact that this was a relationship between an adult and a minor is not often brought up. But honestly, that’s how you talk about family. I doubt every family member of a murderer constantly discusses their crimes whenever the topic of the convict is brought up. So no, I don’t believe that just because the characters don’t end every interaction with “Furthermore, I consider that Carthage must be destroyed” does it logically follow that either the game or its creators condone grooming of minors. I think mature media deserves the benefit of the doubt that it can present you with challenging subject matter without spelling out what you’re supposed to feel at every step.

That’s not to say that the game does this subject, or even the secondary theme of suicide any justices. Because once the twists of the game are revealed, the presence of Irving and his actions become less believable by the minute. Given that the game deals with these fairly heavy topics, I feel that the indications that the hotel might be haunted are a bit off message. As with the Shining, it’s never made clear what actually happens there and if all you get to see is real, the lines are purposely blurry. But the narrative of this game isn’t enhanced by this, and it actively detracts from the real human drama.

Ultimately, I found the experience average at best. It suffers from the typical problems of walking simulators in that there’s no gameplay there to enhance the story. And the story, while intriguing at first, is also completely unfocused and seems to be more interested in setting up a mystery and its subsequent plot twist at the end, rather than exploring the heavy topics it decided to tackle with any grace or intelligence. They seem included more for the shock value than anything else.

https://youtu.be/Xu3ncURO7kI

The Almost Gone feels like a game that ran out of something. Maybe it was time, money or just the will to continue. But let’s back up a bit.

Gameplaywise The Almost Gone is a classic point-and-click adventure game. That means you’re scouring the levels for items to solve a variety of puzzles while a lot of the story is told through monologues by the main character. Crucially though for a point-and-click adventure, she’s never actually on screen. This is where the main visual draw of the game comes into play. The levels are all rendered in this cute isometric diorama aesthetic. All of the rooms are broken down into little cube sections that you can freely rotate and explore. This obviously implies that perspective plays a crucial part in the game, which is certainly the case. A few of the puzzles require you to use multiple chunks of the levels to solve, which sometimes require spatial awareness. However, these puzzles are in a clear minority over those that can be solved with traditional inventory items.

I have to say that, while I like the puzzles that require you to rotate the dioramas to figure out solutions to the puzzles, it carries with it the downside that you have to rotate each room repeatedly to make sure you’ve found everything. And since a majority of segments don’t benefit at all from this rotation, I can at best attest mild praise for the mechanic. Given that the levels are divided into these cubic chunks, you’ll end up traversing all these segments multiple times, especially whenever you’ve missed a detail and are stuck with a puzzle.

But adventure games are always part puzzle and part story. And I have to say, the story of The Almost Gone is what absolutely drew me in and also ultimately made me question whether I should recommend it at all. The story is told in five chapters in non-chronological order. The implication, I think, is that our protagonist Emily isn’t really exploring these spaces. It’s heavily implied that something bad has happened to her and that what we’re seeing is some kind of glimpse into the afterlife, given that one of the chapters takes place in the future while others happen decades earlier. The narrative touches upon a lot of themes surrounding familial troubles and in general revolves around Emily trying to make sense of these troubles to overcome some trauma. Emily tells of frequent fights, of being reprimanded by her parents and of substance abuse. Her mother suffered from depression and is later revealed to have been institutionalized. Meanwhile, her father seems to be a victim of his own parents’ shortcomings when raising him, while said grandparents had to fight with their own demons and failures in life. It’s all fairly heavy stuff and I generally like the juxtaposition of the early, pastel-colored levels that sink into ever increasing darkness as the backstory unfolds. There’s some pretty fascinating and effective character building going on, even though our Emily’s monologue is supremely cynical, which can be a tough pill to swallow for some people.

But then, the game just kind of stops. It’s not even that the game has a downer ending or anything, it just seems, as I mentioned at the start, that the game reaches the final rooms you get to explore, and then the designers stopped making the game. There doesn’t seem to be a thesis statement that would attempt to try and tie the narrative together, to put all these topics I’ve mentioned into proper context. There are plenty of hints that point towards a bigger picture, but overall, it’s a bit insubstantial.

https://youtu.be/fx5gxhsB9kY

This review is a truncated version based on the upper character limit for Steam reviews. For the full version, watch the video.

Industria probably comes as close to Half-Life 2 in terms of tone and feel as I’ve ever experienced. I know this sounds like a weird way of opening a review, but this was honestly one of the most standout aspects of the game to me. And it’s all the more surprising that this kind of experience isn’t more common, since Half-Life 2 is such a landmark title in gaming that it’s weird how it never got that many imitators. Or maybe it did get a lot of imitators that all just don’t register as such because of what they’re missing. But Industria really manages to pull off one of the things that I so greatly enjoyed about Half-Life 2 and that’s quiet time.

Industria might be billed as a first person-shooter, but it feels like the shooting isn’t the main focal point of the game. No, what I think is the most important aspect of the game is the sense of atmosphere you get when playing it. I’m not sure if this is something that I can properly bring across in video review form but playing through this game carried across a profound sense of loneliness with it.

The game’s setting is a bit ambiguous. It starts off in 1989 in East Berlin on the eve when the Berlin wall fell. From there it quickly moves over into an alternate reality though. Hakavik, the city you get to explore in this alternate reality, for the most part looks and feels identical to any old European city: Dense urban environments mostly focused on foot traffic interspersed with more open plazas and water fronts along its river. But the obvious elephant in the room are these weird looking glowing spheres and cables all around that give the game an otherworldly feel. This too is why I’m reminded of Half-Life 2. City 17 also had a distinctly European look to it that got overlaid by the starkly contrasting Combine technology everywhere. Hakavik looks familiar and completely alien at the same time, and its deserted streets and buildings really come together to form a very atmospheric setting. And if you pay attention to the notes you can find, you might notice that time doesn’t seem to be running at the same rate in Hakavik as it does in East Berlin.

Like I mentioned earlier, Industria is billed as a first-person shooter, so there is some of that going on as well. But unlike a lot of shooters, Industria has a quite economical approach to firefights, which is a bit at odds with the narrative, since the reason for the city being deserted stems from the fact that it was overrun by these machine enemies. However, level design does a fantastic job in communicating what to expect from upcoming sections. And I like that the game gives attentive players and edge by letting them snipe targets they’ve noticed from afar. That doesn’t mean you can get rid of all the enemies before they can get close to you, not by a long shot. The game often deliberately pits you against enemies in tight, enclosed spaces. And while some of the early enemies tend to be on the slower, lumbering side, later enemies have a nasty habit of running up to you and love nothing more than exploding in your face if you can’t manage to take them out in time.

All the enemies in the game are mechanical in nature. This obviously also ties into the narrative of the game. The rise of machines is the whole reason why Hakavik is entirely deserted, save for a single friendly voice that keeps you company and overall directs your progress through the game. Early in the game you encounter the character Brent, who serves as a vessel for exposition. He tells you why Hakavik looks the way it does and generally acts as an unseen ally in helping you get to where you intend to go. Though he’s not just a glorified tour guide. I really liked the interactions between him and our protagonist Nora, there are some nice humanizing touches in their dialogues. However, for a self-proclaimed narrative focused game, Industria seems to not have much of a story, at least on the surface. The general gist of the story is that Nora is trying to find her partner Walter who has crossed over to Hakavik before her. The game heavily relies on notes you can find lying around the place to clue you into what happened in Hakavik in the time between Walter’s and Nora’s arrival, which as alluded to lies about 20 years apart, even though they both departed East Berlin within minutes of each other. And this is where I feel the game stumbles a bit. Sure, the notes manage to paint an evocative picture of what happened in Hakavik and what the point of Walter’s research that led to his travel to Hakavik was. But it’s all just indistinct silhouettes. The game is content with leaving most of the mysteries it raises completely unresolved.

As mentioned before, a lot of the time the game uses Brent, the voice at the other end of your phone line, as a means to tell you where to go next. But what I love is that it never outright specifies how you would get there. Now the level design is fairly linear, you’re not bound to get lost on your way there. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t any puzzles to solve that hinder your progress. Modern games typically highlight everything for you, where you need to go, what you need to pick up and where you have to use or place what you’ve picked up. Industria does none of that. It harkens back to a time when you had to actually explore the spaces you were presented with. It makes you pay attention to your surroundings, it sears into your mind the layout of the levels you’re in. You’re not constantly looking at a minimap or following a floating marker to your next objective. While fundamentally you’re still just doing what you’re being told, the lack of UI helpers means that there’s a certain amount of mental legwork you have to do in order to find your way around these spaces.

This deliberate lack of creature comforts is extended in the way ammo and health pickups are treated. For one, there’s no regenerating health. Just as in the good old days, you have to make do with medkits. Healing in a shooter like this has always been part of your resource management, something you had to pay attention to. And given that healing takes a few seconds and leaves you vulnerable to enemy attacks, there are tactical considerations to healing during combat.

Overall I have to say I really enjoyed playing Industria. If there’s one complaint I can lodge at it that isn’t related to a few technical inadequacies - the game is fairly resource heavy and I encountered a few bugs and glitches - it’s that there’s not enough of it. As it stands it’s barely 4 hours long. Now don’t get me wrong, those are some pretty damn great 4 hours you get to spend here, but at the end of the day, Industria feels more like a proof of concept or a short demo of what the actual final game should be. It’s clear that the story isn’t over yet, given the rather abrupt ending and lack of resolution to some of the more pressing questions. And I appreciate that a game made by a handful of people that favorably compares to a title like Half-Life 2 while looking and sounding as good as it does wouldn’t clock in at 20 hours or something like that, I’m not faulting the developers for aiming high and coming up short on the length of the game. What I’m trying to express here is that you should go out and play this game. Give these guys the money they deserve so they eventually get to make that expanded version of what they’ve envisioned with this lovely, atmospheric gem of a game.

https://youtu.be/4hxSBThNjMA

If you search for Lovecraftian games on Steam, you’ll find a ton of games on offer. But one thing that seems almost near universal is that most of these games tend to fall into the horror category in some fashion. And I don’t blame them, Lovecraft’s stories did most often deal with existential dread, so it’s hard to imagine something Lovecraftian that would deviate from that. So imagine my curiosity when I stumbled across Call of the Sea.

It's obviously inspired by the stories of Lovecraft, particularly those relating to the fish-god Dagon. But unlike many of the aforementioned Lovecraftian games, Call of the Sea is not an overt horror experience. It draws more inspiration from pulpy early 20th century adventure stories. And while Lovecraft’s narratives were more about the bigger picture of humanity’s insignificance in the face of overwhelming cosmic terror, Call of the Sea is a very character focused piece.

The setup is that you play as Norah Everhart. Norah suffers from an unspecified disease. And since this is a pulpy adventure tale, the obvious route to deal with it was for her husband Harry to set out into the wide-open world to find a cure. To that end he organized an expedition to a remote island near Tahiti. Now at this point, you can already guess how that went, because whenever you hear the term “expedition” in a piece of media, you know that things didn’t turn out well by the end. At some later point, Norah receives a package containing some instructions to also head to that island, which is where the actual gameplay happens.

The game is mostly exploration based, meaning that you have to walk around this island a lot. Though fear not, this isn’t just another one of the plethora of walking simulators. For one, you’re given a much-needed run button, which I’m very grateful for. But more importantly, you also have to solve a bunch of puzzles to beat the game. What I like about the puzzles is that they strike a perfect balance between challenging but not impossible. Each puzzle section is completely isolated, there’s no inventory management to figure out where the few things you can pick up are required and in general, the environment along with Norah’s narration and her notes in her notebook give you enough hints to tell you what you’re supposed to do. Overall there’s a decent variety of puzzles on display, though I have to say the final stretch of the game felt a bit too repetitive by being asked to solve the same puzzle 5 times but slightly differently. And the game has a bit of a habit of sending you all over any given puzzle’s map to find clues on what to do next, which probably eats up more time than would be strictly necessary.

As is typical with these pulpy adventure stories, most of the puzzles are ancient contraptions built by some kind of long-dead civilization. As such it did strain my suspension of disbelief a bit, but I guess if you want to experience this type of entertainment, it’s part of the price of admission. You just have to accept that these old mechanisms still work and that they somehow rearrange themselves after opening a path forward so the next person to come along finds it in its original state. Because I can’t imagine Harry resetting all these contraptions for Norah to find later on, they don’t serve an inherent purpose in the narrative.

Said narrative is told in two parts. On the one hand it’s Norah’s internal monolog that accompanies everything you do on the island. Every object, letter or photograph you examine elicits a reaction from her. Sometimes this can be a bit overbearing, since whatever she’s saying is at times just clarifying what you’re seeing or reading yourself, so that wouldn’t have been necessary. The second half of the story is told by Harry through letters strewn about as well as the various scenes you can encounter at the campsites where you find the aforementioned letters.

It's in those letters and scenes where you get to experience most of the Lovecraftian horror influence as the group of explorers start breaking down over time and losing their sanity.

But Norah’s story is refreshingly different from that, in that it’s mostly about self-discovery. As you can tell, I’m trying to not get into too many details regarding the story because that would spoil it. And given that I want to recommend this game, I’m hesitant to put spoilers in here and instead urge you to go and play the game yourselves.

But what I will say is that you shouldn’t expect grand cosmic horror here, like I said, it’s very much character focused. And that’s a positive standout feature of the narrative. The way the narrative gets unfolded and how the eventual conclusion unravels had me pausing for a moment at the finale when it’s time to choose an ending. What I like about the choice you get to make is that It’s not a good vs. bad ending sort of thing. Both endings make thematic sense and both endings are positive and negative in some sense. It’s not a moral choice you get to make here, it’s a human choice, in the sense that you have to decide the fate of two lovers and how they’ll spend the rest of their lives.

What helps make this choice very powerful is the strong characterization of the two leads. By the way Norah talks about her unseen partner and the way Harry talks to her through his letters, you get a sense of their strong emotional bond. Harry risks his life and sanity to find a cure for his ill wife, which is a grand gesture if there was ever one, but his choice to save Norah through a far greater personal sacrifice is what really elevates the emotional tone of the game.

Now while I would recommend the game based on the neat puzzles and the strong narrative alone, the beautiful aesthetics of the game are a neat bonus. Walking around the islands many gorgeous vistas is an absolute treat. And once you make your way deeper into the realm of the ancient inhabitants it takes on a fittingly ominous and dreamlike tone.

But as I said, the Lovecraftian feel is only there to give you a sense of otherworldliness. And that’s what I really like about the game. It feels like over the years, Lovecraft has become such a strong influence in a lot of modern horror entertainment that people have forgotten how to do anything other than the same things Lovecraft already did with his works. Call of the Sea puts a refreshing new spin on things and manages to tell a gripping emotional story about its characters, instead of just focusing on the doom and gloom of our cosmic insignificance. It’s a compelling tale that takes just enough from the Cthulhu mythos to add some flavor without letting it overpower everything else.

https://youtu.be/ALJ2bYKGKmI

This review is a truncated version based on the upper character limit for Steam reviews. For the full version, watch the video.

Alien: Isolation takes place 15 years after the first movie and you’re put into the role of Amanda Ripley, Ellen Ripley’s daughter. She gets notified that a flight recorder of her mother’s ship has been discovered and is offered a spot on the salvage team. And because this a 70s inspired retro-futuristic setting, they obviously can’t beam the information contained on that flight recorder back to wherever Amanda is. No, she has to go there in person and have a look at it. And that’s basically all the setup you get. Don’t worry, there is a reason why it seems to be more time and cost effective to fly three people out to retrieve a flight recorder instead of just having it brought back, and in typical Alien fashion it’s because Weyland-Yutani still wants to capture the bugger in question. In general, I like that the narrative is rather straightforward in setting up the adventure, but I do feel that overall it’s a bit threadbare.

The game takes place on the space station Sevastopol, which, as you’ll come to learn, is winding down operation. At least you’ll learn that if you diligently read all the computer terminal entries and listen to all the audio logs. It evokes Bioshock here in many respects with its apparent former bustling nature, given the many shops you can find on board. Although the Alien universe is decidedly different in its reason for having people in its isolated society. While Bioshock shows us the downfall of objectivism and free market capitalism from an idealistic standpoint, Alien is more concerned with showing us the drawbacks of free market capitalism from a humanist standpoint. It’s something that often gets glossed over, but the big bad villain of the Alien franchise isn’t the Xenomorph, it’s the large megacorporation Weyland-Yutani. It's a bit of a shame that this aspect never really gets expanded upon in the Alien franchise. The Xenomorph itself isn’t some kind of exaggerated metaphor for the plans of Weyland-Yutani, even though they continuously want to capture a Xenomorph specimen.

But I guess capitalism can’t be our prime antagonist here, so in true Alien form, the game is mostly about avoiding getting killed by the shiny black penis on legs. To that end the Sevastopol has also been infected by the buggers which have wreaked havoc on the station before you get there.

And this is where one of my criticisms comes into play: The narrative that happens over the course of the game is incredibly marginal if not even outright absent. Most of the game is designed around someone telling you where your next objective is. You’re usually sent somewhere alone to either push a button or retrieve something, usually at the far end of winding hallways and air vents, while your main form of interaction is evading enemies with simple stealth mechanics that mostly rely on crouch-walking from place to place, hiding in lockers and under desks whenever you’re spotted or to distract enemies to open a path. And I have to say that I’m not a massive fan of the stealth implementation. I typically enjoy stealth gameplay more if there are concrete indicators of visibility. Alien: Isolation feels like a bit of a crapshoot when trying to determine if someone can really see or hear you.

Now, even though I’m not a huge fan of the stealth implementation, what I will say is that it’s undoubtedly effective in making this feel like a true Alien experience. Making the saves take a few seconds to go through was a stroke of genius that adds an ever so slight bit of tension even to something that typically serves as a point of respite in many horror games. And the save spot even lets you know that there are enemies nearby to make it ever so much more tense. Similarly, the many instances where your view is locked onto a computer terminal, your hacking device or even just being locked to a corpse or cabinet you’re trying to loot are great. These instances make you feel vulnerable and serve as a risk-reward scenario where you have to gauge if the coast is clear to inspect something or not.

And where the game absolutely hit it out of the park is with the visuals. The aesthetic of the game captures the look and feel of the original perfectly. If you look at certain parts of the station side by side with the corresponding section of the film, you can tell a lot of effort has gone into recreating these spaces and making them look familiar to any fan of the franchise. And even though the game is close to a decade old, it still looks utterly fantastic because of the phenomenal lighting and the strong unified aesthetic. Though I do have to say that sometimes the game appears to try to hit every visual point the movie had in an attempt to make players realize they’re in a space recreated from the movie. It’s certainly not subtle about its fanservice.

Now, with regards to the horror aspect, I have to say here that I honestly didn’t feel that Alien: Isolation was all that scary. Sure, it does its best by constantly keeping you on your toes. Even if the Xenomorph isn’t around, the ship consistently produces noises that make you feel like you’re not alone. The game also employs a few jump scares. While I typically despise them and often see them used as simple ways to score a cheap startle, I have to commend Alien: Isolation for the way they’re crafted. They feel earned and aren’t just loud stings that immediately dissipate after you’ve noticed that nothing scary is actually going on.

But my overall criticism of why the game isn’t scary is that running and hiding from an unkillable monster is only scary right up until the first time you get spotted and killed by it. After that, the tension is somewhat broken, because you’ve already been killed once. And every subsequent death means lost progress that you have to retrace. So the stealthy horror aspect devolves into bothersome trial-and-error, especially given the dynamic nature of the Xenomorph’s behavior.

It also doesn’t help that the game seems a tad overlong. And I know, this criticism has been levied against the game by many other people, but I have to agree with them. The game could’ve been streamlined a lot. And the fact that you’re encouraged to take things slowly, to move deliberately and not cause unnecessary confrontations means that you’ll be traversing these spaces at a much slower pace than most other games. The game’s length definitely made it feel less scary and more of a chore by the end.

Mechanically the game also does few things to differentiate itself from most other games. It has your by now typical crafting system, where you’re constantly scouring the place for raw materials to turn into grenades, noisemakers, or med kits. There is at least some justification for why you’re able to do this since Amanda is an engineer after all. But at this point I’ve played enough games that offer some kind of light crafting system like this that it feels like less of a feature that enhances the game’s design than an obligation.

Outside of that, the game follows typical first-person shooter convention to a T. While there’s certainly a strong incentive to not use noisy weapons, during the stretch where there’s no threat from the Xenomorph, the game does offer a somewhat more action-heavy experience, which isn’t entirely unwelcome, since at that point you’re a dozen hours into the experience and in dire need of some variety.

I think Alien: Isolation succeeds spectacularly at being an Alien experience. However, that doesn’t mean that I think it’s a spectacular game. It’s not a bad experience, but I can’t say that by the end I was particularly enamored by it either. Call it an above average experience, with the caveat that you’ll eventually start noticing the stretch marks.

https://youtu.be/X8PhGY2yolU

This review is a truncated version based on the upper character limit for reviews. For the full version watch the video.

Phantasmagoria was probably the largest project ever undertaken by Sierra, since it focused on integrating full motion video into its cutscenes and interactive spaces, where previous games mostly focused on your typical computer-generated imagery. It might seem quaint these days, where every random YouTuber and Twitch streamer can hang up a greenscreen in their bedroom and chromakey themselves in real-time, but back then this was quite a technological hurdle to tackle for such a game and a lot of video games branded themselves as interactive movies. And you can see that it only really works halfway decently in Phantasmagoria. For one, the low resolution of the viewport meant that a lot of artifacts from the chromakey isolation had to be kept around, otherwise it would look like half the actor’s faces were missing if a pixel too much was removed. The more pressing issue however was the compositing. In order to insert a person convincingly into a CGI space, you have to make sure that the lighting and shading of the actors are consistent with the artificial lighting and shading of the scene you intend to put them in, which gets achieved with mixed results.

But it’s not just these compositing issues that make the visual spectacle of the game rather underwhelming by modern standards. While most of the animated stuff happening during these scenes is mostly contained to the actors themselves, there are also a ton of backgrounds for these actors to move in front of. And apparently, Phantasmagoria was also decidedly extravagant in that regard with the number of backgrounds reaching over a 1000 bespoke background images. Now while that might sound impressive, sheer quantity isn’t all that important if what you get to see isn’t up to snuff. And while I can excuse some of the aspects of the early 3D pre-rendered backgrounds, I do have to say that much of it not only hasn’t stood the test of time, it also must have looked equally goofy back in the day.

All in all, the visual portion of the game might have been a strong selling point back in the day, but as is so often the case, visuals fidelity has a limited shelf-life. And I’m not sure if Sierra’s big investments into film production were that great of an idea since games were never lacking in decent storytelling capabilities and the inclusion of live-action footage does nothing to enhance that.

Phantasmagoria follows Adrienne as she and her husband Don move into a manor that used to belong to a famous 19th century magician. She’s a writer of popular literature who intends to get some inspiration from the mansion while he’s a photographer. Soon after moving in, she’s plagued by nightmares and her waking up from one is where the game starts. There’s not much of a setup for the story, you’re basically just dumped into it and have to figure out yourself where it’ll eventually lead. In fact, there’s not much cluing you in as to what’s going on or what you’re supposed to do. Some of the chapters feel like they just start off and you’re not given any inidcation as to what you’re supposed to be doing. I’m glad the game offers a hint system with this little skull on the bottom left of the screen. He doesn’t outright tell you what to do, but he certainly gives you pointers, so you don’t waste your time travelling across all of the 1000 screens the game has to offer. But it’s inclusion also hints at a general problem of the narrative not being able to convey what you’re supposed to do next.

Anyway, once Adrienne is done exploring the manor, she finds a hidden chapel that’s located behind a bricked up fireplace for some reason. She unwittingly releases an ancient demon that was already the cause of the magician’s demise a century earlier. Said demon now possesses her husband Don, who grows increasingly abusive and violent towards Adrienne. He even ends up raping here at some point in a rather tasteless scene that seems to imply that her initial unwillingness turns into a consenting sexual encounter before becoming actual abuse. Though the unconvincing and hammy acting turns what should be a traumatic event into a farce. I can’t tell if it’s the actor’s fault or the shoddy direction, but a shocking number of scenes just seem barely above amateur dramatics level. It doesn’t help that many of the sequences drag on forever, especially those that don’t feature any interaction or dialogue between characters and are simply limited to Adrienne reacting to something. Tons of these scenes just consist of her looking at something, making a face and then awkwardly shuffling back into position to where her interactive counterpart would stand to make the transition between video and gameplay land look smooth. And every second of that process is on full excruciating display.

While the game does offer a means to skip these sections, I was never quite sure if it’s a great idea to do so, because as I said, the scenes go on forever and I was never certain if what I saw on a repeated click on an object or location would result in the same footage being played again or if something new was happening that was worth paying attention to. It took me barely 6 hours to get through the game according to Steam’s time tracker and if you’d cut out all the needless padding I’d call it criminally short.

But you might be asking yourself now “Wait a second, this is a point and click adventure game. Aren’t there any puzzles to solve to complement the narrative?” Well, yes there are. It’s just that in most of these instances, “puzzle” is a very generous term. Most of the time when you get an inventory item, it’s immediately obvious where you’re supposed to use it. Thankfully, Phantasmagoria doesn’t employ the kind of moon logic that many of its adventure game ilk suffered from. But it goes a bit too far in the other direction and makes even the actual puzzles there are too easy. But I guess I shouldn’t complain, since the fact that each chapter gives next to no exposition as to what’s going on, the core puzzle of the game is figuring out what to do next, since the story doesn’t really have any direction it wants to go into.

Once Adrienne releases that demon, not much happens besides Don being an increasingly abusive ♥♥♥♥ towards her. But there’s not a lot of back and forth between the two until the final act. The rest of the time you’re just going through the motions without much direction, and you just happen to get to see visions from the past, when that aforementioned possessed magician murders his wives in increasingly gruesome ways. They come entirely out of nowhere and don’t really integrate with the rest of the game.

It seems as if the designers wanted the game to mostly stand on its “shocking” and “gruesome” content, but to any seasoned horror fan it looks categorically quaint. See, using shock value and explicit content in lieu of a compelling and sensible narrative only works if you’re not also trying to make a serious piece. And while there are a few goofy sequences in there like Adrienne dealing with two bumbling transients who live on her property, it’s just too sparse and inconsistent to be taken as a farce and more an inept attempt to insert levity into a story that’s more intended to be horrifying than anything else.

I can’t really recommend the game; it feels too meandering and directionless to serve as a good vessel to tell a story and the gameplay is deliberately kept as simplistic as possible. The FMV nature, which typically adds a campy charm to the games that employ it, is its biggest weakness because of its glacial pacing. And to cap it off, it’s really just not that scary, since it never managed to actually draw me into the story its struggling to tell.

https://youtu.be/VW37q-5qHko

This review is a heavily truncated version based on the upper character limit for Steam reviews. For the full version, watch the video.

I don’t always start off reviews with the conclusion, but I’ll take a page from the David Cage opus I’ll be discussing today and start the review at the end by stating that Beyond: Two Souls is fucking terrible. Now that might be harsh and may also lead you to believe that I don’t recommend you play the game. But honestly, Beyond: Two Souls is one of those rare games I’ve played that cross over into shlocky b-movie territory of being so bad it’s good. For me, the appeal of this game is seeing the spectacle of millions of dollars being spent on a game that at the time of release was a cutting edge, boundary pushing production in terms of visuals, animation and motion capture that all serve an end product whose story is utter trash and its gameplay largely nonexistent.

It mostly consists of walking around a bunch of levels to find objects or people you can interact with in some way. It achieves this with a very subdued interface that mostly just highlights interactable objects with a white dot, which you can activate by pointing your right analog stick towards it. Now what I find funny about this minimalist interface is how the developers boast about it in the behind the scenes making-of videos. They describe how they didn’t want to clutter the UI with stuff and especially during the quick-time event sections they wanted to offer a more intuitive way of giving players prompts of what to do instead of just showing buttons. And instead of implementing actual gameplay and just not doing the quick-time-events at all, the game slows down to bullet time, and you’re supposed to point your analog stick in the direction the action is happening. Honestly, it doesn’t work that great.

Not that it really matters if you nail the quick-time-events or not. I actually went out of my way to fail at every possible stage, mindful of the fact that David Cage is on record that he believes failure states in games are bad design. And I can somewhat follow the logic, in the sense that failure in a game ideally shouldn’t lead to the game ending, it should lead to a different place than success. But you know by now that David Cage isn’t a real game designer, so the consequences of failure in Beyond: Two Souls are almost identical to success. And I know that for a fact since I went through the game twice; Once where I put down the controller for all these segments and just let the movie play out for a bit and a second time where I played it the way Cage intended. And I absolutely urge you that if you decide to play this game eventually to do the former.

But to get back to that behind-the-scenes bit, the developers claim that their goal with this interface was for you to forget you were holding your controller. And I find this notion hilarious, because never have I been less immersed in a game. You are constantly aware that you’re holding a controller, because you’re constantly reminded to wrestle with the analog sticks to point into a specific, exact location the game wants from you, as well as the frequent button combinations you have to press that always remind you of the fact that you’re just pressing buttons. You’re not presented with an interactive world where you intuitively execute actions based on what you want to do, you’re just there to press the required input to make the game continue. Because at the end of the day, that’s really what it comes down to with the interactivity of this interactive drama. Most of the time, the game is content to just pause the narrative and wait for you to find the right trigger the move the story along.

But that in itself wouldn’t be enough for me to label the game “so bad it’s good”. Now, see, the appeal of shlock media, for me at least, is that the developers earnestly tried to create something good and failed. Everybody can come up with something intentionally crappy and make that, but to be actually enjoyable so bad it’s good, you have to be completely oblivious to the fact that you’re making crap. And nothing highlights this more than seeing glimpses of potential of what the game could’ve been if it had only had somebody more competent in the driver’s seat than David Cage.

There’s this one segment on a ranch that comes dangerously close to being an open world sandbox experience. And while much of the chapter is marred by the shitty movement controls and quick-time event nonsense, it’s also an example of how Quantic Dream could tackle a large scale production if they were willing to put those 200 employees to work on an actual game instead of an interactive narrative, because it shows off a visual scope that I don’t think I’ve seen that often in a video game before. Unfortunately, that cinematic feel is also very much applied in a way that detracts from the gameplay.

While controlling the protagonist Jodie, the camera stubbornly remains at certain angles that the game dictates instead of letting you look around freely like all the other sensibly designed games do. It’s incredibly hard to get a good look at your surroundings. Not that it matters, because the movement controls are very stiff, and Jodie’s overall walking speed needlessly pads out the runtime.

Now this is somewhat alleviated by the fact that you also get to control Jodie’s spectral companion Aiden. This is where most of the “gameplay” happens since Aiden can freely move around the levels and even phase through walls in order to explore all the nooks and crannies of these levels. And it’s fun to do so. So Quantic Dream aren’t incompetent when it comes to designing enjoyable movement mechanics, they just actively chose to not give them to you when you’re forced to control Jodie.

Aiden has a few abilities he can employ, such as doing the ghostly haunted house shtick of breaking mirrors and throwing around random objects, which gets old pretty quickly. Sometimes these abilities are also used to open up a path for Jodie either by opening up doors from the other side. Aiden can also directly interfere with other humans, either by strangling them to death in a few select instances or by possessing them so you can act in the skin of hostile enemies.

As I said in the beginning, I think Beyond: Two Souls is utter trash. It’s a boring and endlessly padded slog through a narrative that doesn’t know what it wants to be about. It tries to be varied, but most of the time, it’s a movie that gets paused every couple of minutes and demands of you to find the trigger to continue the story with no meaningful actual gameplay happening in between which is just so damn boring.

Would I recommend Beyond: Two Souls? Well, as I mentioned earlier, I have a fondness for stuff like this, media that is intended to be good but turns out terribly for one reason or another, or as in this games’ case, for many reasons that like roads leading to Rome, all lead back to David Cage and his fundamental misunderstanding of the appeal of video games to their audience. I’d say that if you want to play the game, you should treat it in an adversarial manner like I did for my initial playthrough, that way you get to test the limits of its interactivity. But if you intend to play it the way it was designed to be played, you’re mostly in for a fairly railroaded experience through endless boring dialogues and underwhelming and completely unchallenging gameplay, if you can very charitably call it that.

https://youtu.be/JUR0ZjbUn6I

This is a truncated review based on Steam’s character limit. For the full review, watch the video.

Portal. Portal, Portal, Portal, Portal. There, now I’ve got it out of my system. I’m tired of constantly mentioning Portal whenever I talk about first-person puzzle games. It reminds me of the time when every first-person shooter was called a Doom-clone. But the thing is that shooters eventually branched out and became their own thing that didn’t primarily resemble Doom anymore, so it made sense to call them something else.

Unfortunately, Portal has cast such a long shadow that even years later there are games stuck in it that I’d rather call Portal-clones than simply first-person puzzle games. So let’s ditch the complain train about the lack of innovation in the first-person puzzle genre and talk about Magnetic based on its own merits. I’ll try to keep comparisons to other games to a minimum, but spoiler alert: I’ll very much fail at that, the reason for which will become clear shortly.

The game is mostly broken up into individual test chambers that you have to solve with the power of magnetism. To that end you can manipulate the all too familiar cubes, which must be mandated by law or something, given that they always make an appearance in Portal-clones. You can also attract or repel yourself from specific magnetic walls to jump around these levels to avoid a variety of hazards. And that’s pretty much it.

The levels are fairly straightforward obstacle courses where the challenge comes mainly from figuring out in which order you have to do things, sometimes augmented by specific means of traversal to avoid the hazards, which means first-person platforming. I feel like the magnetic interactions are a bit underdeveloped. It’s mostly about putting boxes onto switches to open up new paths on your way to the exit of the test chamber. The game could’ve benefited of more interactions that shake up the core formula, since it gets a bit stale after doing the same thing over and over again.

It seems to me like the developers must have noticed that it gets repetitive fairly quickly. Which is why each chapter gets capped off by a decision you get to make. The game tries really hard to convince you that these decisions have consequences for later stages, but they rarely do. Some of them do have an impact on which ending you get, but for that to matter, you have to actually tell a story that benefits from branching endings. Otherwise, you’re just making the player replay the same damn levels over and over again to uncover all the endings and make them realize that none of them are particularly satisfying. But before I get to the endings, we’ll first have to tackle what the game is actually about.

Magnetic starts off with an underground train ride. And already we see it copying from another landmark title, which is Half-Life. Though thankfully it’s a rather brief ride, since it’s mostly just used as an exposition dump and there’s not a lot there to fill you in on. You’re a death row convict slated for execution for an unspecified crime, but you’re getting a second chance by agreeing to partake in a weapons testing program. I mean, you can choose not to partake by refusing to leave your chamber at the start, but then you’ll just get gassed to death and have to start over again, which incidentally is one of the endings you have to see to get the achievement for having found all of them.

Not much of the backstory gets revealed here. In fact, there’s not a lot of story going on in the game at all. As is typical for these first-person puzzle games, you get talked at by unseen people every time you enter a chamber. But most of the time it’s just inconsequential fluff or strict instructions on how to proceed. The game doesn’t really have a story to tell or a point to make. It’s never revealed what kind of weapons testing you’re doing here beyond being given the magnet gun. And there’s not enough depth to either of the two characters talking at you to make listening to them worthwhile. GLaDOS, despite her artificial nature, had a sense of humor that juxtaposed well with the dark implications of the scribbles on the test chambers’ walls in Portal. And Cave Johnson was a commanding presence in Portal 2, always good for a laugh but also revealing a lot about the backstory of Aperture Science. And it’s clear that these two characters are integral parts of their respective games and how players experience them. Because the absence of any of the levity and wit they bring to their stories is sorely felt in Magnetic.

But let’s get back to the endings you can get. First off, I just played the game once and looked up all the other endings on YouTube and I suggest you do the same if you intend to play this game, so if you want to do that, you can just stop reading now since I’ll be spoiling the endings. Though I don’t really recommend playing the game and there’s not that much to spoil either way.

Now I can already disqualify four of the endings since they just end up unceremoniously killing you, which really isn’t worth playing the entire game from the top again. Four other endings have you exit the prison to live out the rest of your days with nothing much bookending the respective endings or the choices you’ve made to reach them. So in total, all these eight endings can be boiled down to two actual endings: one where you die and one where you get to leave the facility. It was at this point where I was really happy that I didn’t waste my time replaying the game 8 more times just to figure this out and I feel sorry for the poor bastards who did to upload the endings to YouTube.

There is also a ninth ending that reveals that the warden who has been taunting you over the course of the game is actually a former inmate. One path allows you to exact revenge upon your tormentor and that’s the path the current warden has taken. As a consequence, you’re offered his job as a reward for getting him killed. Functionally, there’s not much of a difference to the endings where you leave the facility alive, since there’s no post-ending content where you get to play as the warden and the game just fades out the second you enter his office to take over his duties. So it's a twist that doesn’t really recontextualize anything and thus is entirely wasted.

I have to wonder what the developers were thinking when they came up with the idea of these different endings and what point they should serve. As it stands, the story and setting are just too underdeveloped to justify the many endings you can reach, and it just smacks of hubris to think that players would feel satisfied after playing the same damn levels seven or eight times to get to see all these endings. Never mind the fact that the developers obstinately refused to put in a proper save system so you can’t even just reload the game at the appropriate choice moments to see all the endings in quick succession. Was it really too much to ask for a bit of quality-of-life improvement? Because after the first time through, you know all the solutions to the puzzles, so it’s not that there’s some added challenge to be found; you do it once to figure out the puzzles and the other seven times it’s just rote execution. Where’s the fun in that?

Now I’d be lying if I were to tell you that I didn’t have fun with the game at all. The puzzles that are there are well-designed, and I liked the idea of using attraction and repulsion to propel myself through the levels and fly over hazards. But the game just wastes too much time between puzzles with the silly choices that don’t end up mattering as well as the lengthy transitions between levels. In the end I don’t recommend playing Magnetic: Cage Closed. Even among Portal-clones there are better games out there and this game does little to improve or deviate from the core formula and in fact removes quite a few things that made Portal great.