Recent reviews by FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper

A very short review for a game that you can spend a short amount of time on.

This isn't so much a "game", as it is a story with minigames. Does that make it an entire game? I'm not sure.

The graphics and animations are pretty cute, and the sounds are decent as well (if not a little bit loud, be prepared to turn the volume down significantly.)

It's a fun story, and this is honestly probably something you could sit a kid in front of and they might have fun with it. There are only a few adult-ish themes (nothing that is controversial, but you may need a conversation about some of it) but overall it's family friendly.

I'd probably recommend this when it goes on sale, but if it tosses any money to the developers and to Neil Cicierega then it's probably worth the coin spent.

It's a small production but well done. I think it works perfectly for the target audience.

This is going to be a bit of a long review, but I'll provide a TL;DR at the bottom.

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I haven't played a Cyan game since Riven was released way back in 1997. I did play a little bit of Myst, so I'm familiar with the type of game that this studio releases.

I was a part of the "cryptic adventure game generation" that saw these kinds of huge, monolithic releases in a time where computer games were a little locked into the types of games you could get. Cyan was certainly at the top of their game having solid millions of copies of Myst and their follow-ups. Fast forward to 2024 and I'm a little bit late to Firmament but since the game has seen a massive update recently and I just completed it, it's time for this review.

The first version I played in VR had awful, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ performance. I didn't love that while the graphics and the worlds looked great the navigation and operation/smoothness of the world presentation was really awful. It made me not want to continue the game and the small amount I played I did so begrudgingly. I had purchased the game through a bundle, so I wasn't too upset that the game ran awfully on my decent hardware. I didn't feel like it was a monumentous loss out of my pocket. Thankfully, the game received an update to Unreal Engine 5.x as of November 2024 and the performance is so much better that it was finally worth playing through and finishing. Good on Cyan for continuing to support the game after release.

Some of the design decisions in terms of graphics optimization are a little visually bewildering and upsetting, especially in VR. There seems to be some kind of dynamic/static LOD geometry reduction/enhancement that happens and it's really off-putting for a game bent on presenting something beautiful. There may have been some good faith thought put into this tech but it is massively jarring to see it happen to objects that are nearby to you. Many of the game interfaces go from chunky to slightly less chunky to a final presentation and frankly it makes objects look ugly. It may have been tested and implemented for (reasons), but the tech doesn't look like it was paid attention to in the QA process. It's unfortunate that it works as it does.

The other thing that isn't great is that the 2D controller interfaces are super janky in VR. They often don't travel well with the player and sometimes get left behind during movement altogether.

In terms of puzzle design and solvability, I guess the challenges in Firmament are mostly fine. There are some huge exceptions though and you can tell that Cyan tried to give a little bit of a hint to the player on how to get through them. Unfortunately they fell victim to their own formula again and some of the things you have to do are kind of non sequitors or "how was I supposed to know to do that next?" moments. I'm glad that people have published walkthroughs on this game because in some instances I would just have not been able to figure out where to go. If the goal of Firmament was to convince players already not familiar with the Cyan formula to keep playing to the end, then they've done a bad job of making players want to. If it was a nostalgia development (likely because of it being fundraised through kickstarter) then to me it's still a little disappointing.

One thing that the world and puzzle designers excelled at was doing their best to make sure that you couldn't get soft-locked. If you forgot to do something to get somewhere else, there's usually another way to your original destination and I'm very glad for that. It feels like an obvious design intent and it's commendable.

I can't write a review about the puzzles without discussing how much back-and-forth there is. There is an INCREDIBLE amount of it in Firmament. I thought Myst and Riven both suffered from this badly, but no improvements were made to this formula. This is one of the major things that makes this game not fun. It's not the 1990s or 2000s anymore, and I wish they hadn't defaulted to this mechanism. Don't do this to players, please. In VR, it's even worse because the amount of backtracking feels more real. It doesn't matter that you've included a "running" mode form of travel.

The story... feels disconnected to the player. In Myst and Riven, the times the plot interfaces with you tries to make you feel involved, that you're contributing to the outcome and that your choices matter (which they do, if you know you know.) In Firmament, it feels like there are just no stakes by solving the puzzles. Did Cyan write the story after developing all of the worlds and the mechanics? Maybe. The plot is kind of dictated to you while you're interfacing with the world and it feels like too much telling and not enough showing. Aside from wanting to just get through the game, I didn't care about why the game is like how it is. The story telling is bland and the voice narration isn't dynamic enough to be interesting. The character you interface with just isn't emotionally available to you. Is that supposed to be the point? Is it because of bad writing and or voice acting? Was the voice actor AI? Is that why it's so bad?

Is Firmament fun? Not really. Many of the puzzles feel like a job, especially in VR. I don't even want to imagine or to try playing it on desktop. Some of the world interaction mechanisms are interesting. The places where they tried to make it less like "click and then click some more" and more like "clicking on the controls actually makes a machine happen" were pretty good and I liked doing that a lot. There just isn't enough of that in the game. The interactivity in VR is incredibly low and I'm not sure why they even pursued a VR port. If you're going to make your game for both desktop and for VR, you have to put in more elements to make being in VR worth it. What's the point otherwise?

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I guess if you absolutely love Cyan releases, and want to be able to be "in" their worlds and feel like you're able to look around and explore every detail, then maybe Firmament is for you. They certainly maintained an art and design style/aesthetic and it's appreciable. If I hadn't received this game at a steep discount, and knew where the flaws were, I would have never played it and probably watched a walkthrough/let's play instead just to see how it wraps up.

TL;DR:

* Puzzles? They exist, and they're generally fine. Too much back-and-forth. In VR it feels like walking way too much. I wish the game kept track of "steps."
* Performance? It got way better because of the Patch to UE 5.x in Nov 2024. It had awful performance before in 4.x and it's decent now, even in VR. I have been seeing some videos of development analysts looking at how bad UE is in terms of optimization and I almost hope that Cyan doesn't implement nanite or lumen in this game. It would be a disaster.
* Story? It has "a story." It's pretty emotionless and doesn't feel like there are any stakes. If you find that you hate the game and stop playing, there might not be enough FOMO for you to keep going to the end.
* Style/Design/Architecture/Art? Looks great. Consistent themes. Nice looking environments. Hurt by the weird geometry LOD steps that happen right in front of you, especially in VR.
* Cyan Nostalgia? Sure, and maybe they drank a little too much of their own kool aid. One-dimensional innovation and if you love that formula this might be the game for you.
* Updates? Yes, Cyan updated the game in a big way to handle issues and performance so they did great from this standpoint. They didn't have to but clearly they have a sense of pride about what the final product is so good on them.
* Is it Fun? I don't think so, and I've played these kinds of games before. I remember when they were new and there was the "Wow!" factor, but it's almost 30 years later and nothing was learned.

If the game goes on sale, and you're curious about it, go for it. Otherwise it's a hard sell, even for a game that supports VR.

I really wanted to love this game.

I think I hyped myself up too much for what this turned out to be, but my feelings about it are more complex than that.

Scorn is beautiful, and unusual, and twisted. I love the atmosphere, the textures, the ambient soundtrack... there's a lot of visual appeal to enjoy. Granted, Scorn isn't going to be for everyone. Some people are going to be upset by the imagery, and that's okay. Some people are going to play it just for the "weird tourism" factor, in the same way that people went and watched David Lynch's "Eraserhead" for the first and only time when it released theatrically.

Scorn reminds me a lot of Cronenberg's 1999 movie "Existenz" that already draws influence from other media (as others have mentioned, Hans Ruedi Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński.) This game uses very wet orifices to transfer "data," or in this case, abilities.

You can tell that the team who put this together spent a lot (A LOT) of time on details and contextual world-building. Graphically and aurally Everything feels intentional and nothing feels frivolous. If Steam let you put scores for games in several areas, including visuals and audio I would give both of those sections the max score, 5/5, 10/10 whatever.

However.

The game suffers in playability a lot. It makes me wonder how the game was developed. Was all the ambiance developed first, and then they had to shoehorn gameplay into it? Was it developed as a game first? Most of the game elements feel either like an afterthought, or from people who don't play a lot of games. It has the same vibe as weirdo games from the 90s and 2000s that also have bad gameplay mechanics, like all the creative energy went into all of the art and the people who were responsible for making the game work *as a game* just had no idea of how games are supposed to be fun.

Many times I had to take a break because of the level of frustration I was experiencing. The core mechanics were not good enough to enable my high interest hyperfocus. It's hard to say that the game mechanics were "adequate." Playing this game was a struggle, but I doubt that was the intent or the point that the developers wanted to elicit. I definitely played the game through to the end because I wanted to see how it played out. I *had* to finish it.

There's a lot to think about what's going on here, but all good art is subjective to the person experiencing it. I think as an art game, Scorn gets a 10/10. As a game to play and enjoy by virtue of being a game, 5/10. I've seen at least one person rate this game at a 7/10, and that feels about right. If they had intended to make the game challenging due to the overall short duration, there were other ways they could have done it besides just making the mechanics the way that they are (checkpoints, weapon changing animations, unusual firing modes, restrictions on the basic weapon, enemies feeling "cheap".)

I always feel like any game design shouldn't punish the player.

The TL;DR I guess is, is Scorn with your money? If it's on a deep sale, yes. I don't think this is a $40 dollar game. Just know what you're getting when you choose to buy it. I think the art is worth the struggle, but only at a price you feel like you can endure.

I really wanted to love this game, but unfortunately I didn't find out certain technical details about the controls until I was at the very end. For the sake of this review and for everyone else who wants to play this game, I'll lay it out first:

1. Go into your controller bindings and turn off "Flip" for 'Thumbstick Down/South' behavior by setting it bound to "None". This was a weird decision by the developers to have this as a default option. Nobody does this in any game. It should have been a configurable option within the menus. It really ♥♥♥♥♥ with the control scheme, especially if you're a "VR Snap Turner" as I am.

2. Set your thumbstick deadzone way up to 50% in Steam to play the game. The snap turning detection in the game isn't great and sometimes you'll get turned left when you meant to turn right.

Setting these right away will lead to a better gameplay experience.

With that out of the way, "Another Fisherman's Tale" is one of those 'must play' VR Experiences. The first game was a recursive VR experience as a gimmick, but the sequel takes different gimmick approaches throughout that are unusual and interesting. If you're looking for variable hand/controller experiences in VR, this will not disappoint.

Some of the gameplay implementation can be a little bit frustrating, especially since there are parts where the excessive arm movement requires you to move around certain motion limits that often include into your own body. Some of the puzzling is a little bit rough in this way (without giving away spoilers), but they're manageable.

The graphics and story I feel are consistently good across both games, with the details ramped up in this one versus the previous. The developers have definitely fell into a stride with the Fisherman's Tale games, and I hope that they continue to build on the brand.

This game isn't a super long experience; you can probably wrap it up in a day if you're really fast. Probably two to three days if you're playing casually. I don't think that this takes anything from the value of the game.

Overall I think I'd like to see another game from this studio and have them explore even more varieties of VR gestures in a future title. I think that's the biggest thing that a lot of VR Games are lacking right now. Alyx was such a big hit because of the graphics, sound, characters, voice acting, but there was a lot of things to do with your hands and I want more VR Games to do that. Find legitimate gameplay reasons to have to do common gestures to advance the plot. Opening doors, looking through drawers, tinkering with objects, using fingers... VR gamers want all of that. There are certainly places in the market for shooters and platformers and games with generic actions, but if you want a title to stand out then go the distance and make players have to consider gestures to solve puzzles and do actions.

7.5/10.

I think the first thing to say about Amid Evil VR is that if you're looking for a retro-style Quake-like experience in VR, you can certainly have it with this game.

Everything about Amid Evil VR is shooting for a medieval grungy-OG Quake look and feel and I think it delivers in that regard. Textures, level design, enemies, sounds, platforming, music... this game mostly has it.

There are a few really good things that Amid Evil/VR does:
- Level design really gets better and better throughout the game
- Enemies are more interesting as the game goes on
- Environmental ambiance in some levels is absolutely amazing

But there's some crusty/not so good stuff about the game that I think makes it a little flat, and maybe that's because it was trying to encapsulate a specific genre that is kind of already lost. Quake and Doom clones had their heyday, and anything else that tries to slot itself next to them retroactively can't really capture the original magic that was shoved into the bottle way back in the 90s. I think the teams did their best to make a game that fit within the genre, and they definitely succeeded. But did they make a good game? Was it eventually worth the time and energy? Was this more of a passion project that ultimately had a limited scope? Hard to know for sure.

I think everybody involved with Amid Evil (especially the VR version) wanted to make a game that they wanted to play. I think that especially with modern tech/graphics/sound that the game could have been a little more rich in design, maybe even widening the scope to make sure that this game sets itself apart from other games that are trying to also fill a slot in the retro Quake genre. I think aspirations were high, but constraints forced the team to deliver what we got.

So this is the ugly:
- You can pretty much play the entire game with only two weapons. Maybe three.
- Easy mode is way too easy. It is a breeze.
- The very last three stages are absurd in design. The rest of the game didn't take inspiration from Neon Genesis Evangelion or RWBY, so the direction that the stages took was a little thematically weird.
- There are basically antlions in the game. I was a little disappointed to essentially see Half-Life creatures in it.
- Weapons are limited with not very much depth. I wish there had been things like, chain lighting, electrocuting the water, spreading fire, variable splash damage... things to make using the weapons more interesting.
- AI is bad/gets stuck in places.

**The TL;DR of this review:
- Does everyone involved with Amid Evil/Amid Evil VR deserve your money? If this is the kind of action you're looking for, yes.
- Don't expect more than what is being delivered. The game isn't that deep.
- VR has some nice features. I played it like a VR shooting game, so I missed out on all of the swinging and fun movement elements because I just didn't want to get worn out.
- Level design is overall pretty awesome, but starts out rough.
- Decent game length.
- 6.5/10.

Caveat:
- Performance can be iffy. I have a decent laptop for VR and in some places performace suffered. I don't think this was a limitation of what my device was capable of, especially since I can play The 7th Guest with no issues.

I played the original 7th Guest way back in the 90s when Full Motion Video games were kind of the rage, and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ was it the most punishing puzzle game on the PC ever to exist at the time. I still loved everything about it, and played it a few times to really get as much as I could out of it.

Fast forward to now and Vertigo Games probably made the best love-letter to The 7th Guest possible, while also again trying to push the limit of media technology and show what a platform is capable of. The OG 7th Guest came on a few CDs and had really demanding CDROM specs in order to even get it to play well enough to enjoy. This one requires a little bit of a good PC and headset to get the best graphical fidelity out of, but even with reduced settings I still think Vertigo Games knocked it out of the park.

Tonally the acting and video graphics absolutely matched the vibe of what a modern take on T7G would look an feel like. The design of the house and the game mechanisms within are also extremely appropriate. The team really did the best job they could and you can tell they respected the source material a lot.

My only complaints are that some of the puzzles are too easy, and sometimes you have to force your character to clip into the environment to operate the puzzles--especially if you're playing seated.

I think they wanted a wide range of appeal and to also appease fans of the original game, so in that regard it's a success. There's no reason not to play it. I hope they're selling lots of copies because this should be a title that helps sell VR and especially PCVR.

This is one of the best VR games I have played in 2024 (even if it came out in 2023.) I hope they also work on a modern remake of The 11th Hour, because I never really got to experience that game and I've always heard the story was a little weird.

10/10

Consider this as an early access review (for archival reasons)

I played this in October of 2023, and so far it's both simultaneously rough and polished at the same time.

Some of the features are amazing, and others are just mind-boggling frustrating.

Examples of great features:
- being able to have different sessions across different worlds and have them loaded at the same time
- moving faster with both sticks pointing in the same direction
- being able to change the time of day in any world

Examples of Not-so-great features:
- having to set permissions for everywhere you go
- having worlds "construct themselves" in real time as you wait for them to load. This is ultra-janky.
- The avatar import system is not intuitive at all.

Right now in Resonite there are thousands of worlds. A lot of people are working very hard to bring a lot of content in the world very quickly, but the world operates like a developer's sandbox. There are too many options for too many things and I don't doubt that there is a lot of freedom to make things as you see fit on the fly. However from a pure user experience, for someone who might just want to get going and start going places and adding contacts, right now I would say to give it a solid pass.

I think the developers should consider allowing users to determine their own level of exposure to settings and features. Let there be different settings for different visibility of functionality at the beginning, because even as a moderate power user I felt extremely overwhelmed and confused by the presentation. If part of the goal is to let users create an account and get running, the average person doesn't want to do all of the things the engine allows them to do.

If the goal is to remain as a development sandbox VR world, then I guess change nothing about the experience. I would definitely clean up the interface a lot and improve the UI so some things aren't so hard to do with lots of clicks.

Since Steam only allows you to either recommend or not recommend, I'm going to not recommend with this caveat:

First, I want to say that it feels like the developers intended to provide an Unreal-Tournament-Like experience in VR, and I think they succeeded. If competitive FPS arena style games are your thing, and you have been looking for that experience in VR, then absolutely play Grapple Tournament.

That said, the game is just a little rough around the edges, but I can see how over time it would be a totally polished product. Some of the things that are great about the game:

- VR Grappling is pretty awesome and mostly feels right (more on that later)
- The weapons are varied and definitely have UT inspirations. They generally feel right.
- The bow and arrow free weapon is a little awkward to use, but I can see how someone might be really proficient with it.
- The maps are definitely interesting enough and are fun to play

Things that I think make it a little rough:

- VR Grappling needs to be faster. Faster deployment of the grapple, and faster reeling in. If it would become a motion sickness problem for some VR users, then having the ability to do a vignetting during the action would be a nice setting. Relative to this, it feels like you can't "save yourself" during a fall into a death void (say, water.) It just doesn't move fast enough and falling into water feels punishing even if you try to recover.
- Relative to the grappling, where is the ability to grapple to a wall and hang out there for a little bit? I don't love that the grapple isn't permanent until you release. Please make this a map option or something that people can vote on. I want the ability to shoot from a wall and move when *I* feel like it.
- Some of the maps need work. I don't love their layout and they're a little clunky. If Grappling is a primary move in the game, you have to shift your thinking of what a grapple map would look like. More platforms, more unusual designs that give grappling a tactical mobility advantage, and not just high ceilings or places to attach to. Maybe a user submitted map review feature could be something down the line. User made maps would be amazing.
- The aiming reticle could be a little more obvious. Sometimes it seems like it gets lost during high movement a little.
- I haven't seen an option to be able to mute microphone input, but maybe it's there. If I drop an f-bomb because I screwed up a jump or a grapple, I'd like to be able to play without having other people hear my embarrassment.
- EDIT: I would also love the ability to grapple a player. Is that a thing that's been done before?

I think the game has a lot of potential for depth and great gameplay, even though as it is now is still pretty fun. If you're into these games, definitely give it a shot. More players would make this a blast.

This is a pretty short and basic experience, but I recommend going through it anyway.

There are some good storytelling elements and gameplay features. It seems like a developer's first VR game, and for what it is, it's fine. I like the mystery elements and wish it had gone further.

Good for killing an hour or two. Young audiences may appreciate some of the basic mechanics.

The final stage is a little unclear, as it feels like there should be a goal, but I couldn't find it.

This game is pretty special, and I mean that in a kind of existential-perspective way.

The puzzles are pretty challenging, and the transitions between levels are pretty awesome. The game looks and plays pretty beautifully, and I admit I only looked up other peoples' solutions a few times because I got stuck; not because a puzzle is broken, it's really that I lacked imagination to get the solution on my own, which is saying something about the depth of the gameplay.

There are some places where I feel like geometry is actually *too big*, and some of what you are meant to do isn't obvious (it's very easy to get lost if you aren't focused), but I believe that the game is 1000% worth your time.

Definitely play this game even if you aren't into puzzle games or games where time-space-warping is a main feature. Even if you don't make it all the way through, I think the visual exposure is kind of it's own reward.