Recent reviews by ETPC

game is really cool and fun and feels great to play but the devs should be giving vektroid/macintosh plus a cut of the sales

playing this in 2024 really highlights how ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ far we've come in terms of boom shoots. we used to have to settle for map design that fell out of OBLIGE with the most juiceless movement imaginable and horrible feeling guns with the worst damage feedback i've played in a high-profile shooter (this *was* very high profile!). if the idea of procgen level design dosen't excite you, there's basically no reason to play this unless you adore roguelikes. it might have been great back in it's day but...damn.

daylight has the feeling of a tech demo gone wrong. this isn't to say it's not graphically impressive for the time, but that it was allowed to be something *other* then a tech demo.

the game part of daylight feels woefully low-effort. i don't enjoy ascribing intentionality that hasn't been mentioned elsewhere to hard working developers, but it's hard to escape the fact that this was designed to cash in on the still-huge market of horror game streamers and little else. there's a story here, yes, but it's barely noticeable until the very end.

the game also relies entirely on procedural generation for its maps and everything feels completely artificial as a result. good horror takes a *ton* of care and attention and hand tweaking specific moments to maximise the fear and daylight has none of that. it's just identi-kit hallways, separated by doors. there are no memorable moments like the water monster in Amnesia or being captured and tortured in Outlast. it's just moving forward and clicking, stopping to get out a flare or glowstick.

progression is gated by metaphysical keys that represent the memories of the people that once inhabited the hospital and the surrounding island, but it's incredibly simple. here's the loop: you enter into a play area (as opposed to a story area), a spooky sound happens. you then find four diary entries, then find the key and proceed past the gate. that's it. i understand that games like Slenderman popularized this style, but honestly? those games did it *far* better. they understood pacing, and setup. also, Slendy was a terrifying foe. the enemies in Daylight can be defeated by holding up flares or.....by just not looking at them. VERY SPOOKY.

daylight is reluctant to step outside of the mold and the procgen structure is also likely is the reason for the incredibly thin story as mentioned above, which is primarily told through a doctor narrating your actions and diary entries/readables. is it possible it could have been anything more? who knows. the structure of the game really forces the story to be easily replicable across a possibly infinite number of hallways. but wow, it's so generic. spooky hospital with a secret. spooky prison with a secret. spooky woods with a secret. the ending is not worth the journey either. what's interesting is i remember coverage at the time talking about Jessica Chobot's (IGN) involvement as a writer, but if this is her best work then i can see why she hasn't written any games since.

the audio is also Fine I guess, with no real noticeable aesthetic other then "spooky noises" and voice acting i would describe as Fine. the real money went into the visuals, and the game does have some nice effects here and there and as one of the first games to use UE4 back in the day, it was extremely notable for it's visuals. but in 2023, the graphical power is let down by the sameness of the environments. also, the UI is incredibly small at 4k but i won't blame the devs for that.

should you play Daylight? no. in 2023, there are infinitely better horror games releasing *each day* on steam, itch or other platforms. you can do sooooo much better then this now. it's not even worth a curiosity.

originally released in 2010, bioshock 2 had a very tough act to follow. how can you possibly improve on a game that rose to such critical heights that it became an argument for games as an art form (as tired as that argument is)? well, you double down on what worked, throw out what didn't and improve heavily on things that needed polish. but even that was not enough for bioshock 2 to be seen as anything more then "the game that ken levine wasen't part of". however, in 2023? bioshock 2 blows bioshock out of the water, honestly. the combat gets an incredible upgrade with the ability to dual wield plasmids and guns, which makes every combat encounter SO much more fluid and dynamic. the levels are *significantly* improved in terms of scale, which avoids the sometimes 'huge, but small' feeling that permated so much of BS1 for me. the story is also much more interesting, though YMMV on this one. i just felt a lot more connection to everyone in BS2 owing to it's subject matter and how it's handled in very interesting ways. Subject Delta is a shockingly compelling character, more so then Jack in BS1. and i thought Sofia Lamb was a much more interesting antagonist then Fontaine. one of the new gimmicks that BS2 brings to the table is the way little sisters work now, wherein if you want the most ADAM you need to protect them. and at first glance, this seems like it would be super boring. but with the intense nature of the combat it's genuinely thrilling to set up an elaborate defense grid to protect your little sister and fight to the last bullet and drop of EVE to get your ADAM. on top of the base game, the remaster includes the Protector Trials, which is a very fun challenge mode that rewards you with concept art and animatics, which is neat. it also includes the incredible and emotionally charged Minerva's Den, which was famously designed by the people who would go on to make Gone Home. sadly, the remaster of BS2 has a lot of issues just like BS1 and i feel bad for Blind Squirrel clearly not having the resources to treat these games the way they should be treated. i encountered a few crashes in the late game and needed to do some INI tweaking and play around in nVidia Inspector to get it to work. the remaster also dosen't include the really well done narrative-focused multiplayer, though you do get it in the original release which is bundled. if you can't tell, i'm one of those people who thinks that Bioshock 2 is secretly the best game in the series. it's incredibly fun to play and explore, the story is far more interesting and it builds upon an already impressive skeleton in fantastic ways. if you haven't played bioshock 2 for whatever reason, you absolutely should. it's utterly fantastic.

delisting and killing the master servers of unreal, ut99 and ut2k4 and choosing to re-release the worst, least liked UT in the series is like salt in the wound. go to hell, tim.

i wish there was an option between yes/no for bioshock. because it's an important game. but my god, it's aged so badly. while the art direction still holds up, it's not the looker it once was, and the remaster does butcher some aspects. the combat feels so floaty and imprecise and mushy. none of the guns or plasmids feel great. the story is.....rapture both goes deep on subjects you wouldn't expect for the time, but it never goes deep enough (a recurring trend with AAA storytelling tbh) and all that is really memorable is the Twist. and the twist is fine, i guess? like, yeah. you did some meta-commentary. congratulations. the levels themselves can sometimes be really great in their theming but i wish there was more of a sense of the day-to-day in rapture. i can't escape the feeling that bioshock needed to happen so we could get past it and onto better things (like real immersive sims such as dishonored). i will say, the challenge room stuff (formerly ps3 exclusive) is really fun and i did enjoy the psudeo-director's commentary, even though ken levine comes across as a clueless idiot at times (he is). i really don't know if you need to play bioshock. there are better games. but if you must, it's not the worst thing in the world, i guess.

some games have rough openings. you know, takes a while to get started, holds your hand too much, dosen't get to the good stuff. we've all played games like that. system shock has an opening that feels like it requires going to grad school and getting your PhD to complete. it has taken me multiple decades to get past the extremely rough opening where you are bombarded with so much information, a UI that was clearly designed by MIT grads, extremely labyrinthe levels, and a control scheme that feels like you need a second person with you to hit the right keys. it is a textbook example of what not to do in the first half hour-hour of a video game, and everyone learned from it. i remember trying it out as a kid and lasting all of 2 minutes before i ran screaming back to doom. then i tried it out as a teen, who had played some old janky PC games and console games (including FINISHING system shock 2 and deus ex!), and i lasted about 15 minutes. tried again in my 20's with the new SS Portable 'port', lasted 10 minutes. even when the night dive EE came out, i briefly looked at it for 5 minutes, chuckled to myself, and then closed the game.

despite loving immersive sims, and deeply respecting everyone at looking glass and what they did for games (along with origin), i had consigned myself to never playing system shock 1. i simply do not have the patience for it.

then, last year, a bunch of my friends selected system shock as our monthly book club game. everyone started playing, and some of us never got past that opening. but others did, and i streamed myself playing the opening with them. eventually i got past Medical. it was painful. i was dying to everything, had no idea what i was doing, some of these friends were even night dive employees who worked on this (hey max!) and they were instrumental to me just getting past that first hour.

i wish i could say the next couple of hours were any easier, if anything they were *more* frustrating. after a couple of days of getting killed over and over again and forgetting to save, i called it quits on the reactor floor.

then last week i picked it back up again. i've been on an origin kick and recently finished playing every game in the wing commander franchise (took me four years!) and thought "you know what, i'm going to finish system shock. for good. and before the remake comes out (at the time of this writing it is not out)."

and it was painful that first hour back, relearning everything and trying to figure out what i was doing when i stopped. but i kept going. and i learned how the game plays. i learned how the movement works, how the weapons work, how the items and hardware works. and, when you learn all that, system shock owns so hard. i started having so much fun, noticing how much of the immersive sim blueprint was present and accounted for all the way back in 1994, noticing how *good* those guns feel when you are dumping a fully automatic SMG into a cyborg and the recoil makes you hit the floor.

moments ago, i finally finished system shock. and i absolutely love it.

it's cyberpunk story holds up, SHODAN is an all time great villian, Citadel Station is a wonderful, terrifying dungeon to explore, it's audio is *amazing* (seriously they NAILED audio logs in a way games *today* in 2022 still mess up!), the soundtrack bangs so hard (especially with VirtualMidiSynth and Timbres of Heaven), it's a brilliant masterpiece of a game that no one played back in its day except for the people who had the patience for it.

and if you have the patience for it, i cannot recommend system shock enough. citadel station awaits, but be sure to read the manual first! and don't be afraid to use those strategy guides!

donut county is a wonderfully charming and extremely funny little puzzle game, primarily developed by ben esposito (of Giant Sparrow and other teams). best described as a sort of reverse katamari damacy, the goal is to suck up all the trash into your big hole (lol. lmao.) so you can get a cool quadcopter. the aesthetics are honestly rad as hell, with great music complimenting an art style that works 100% for this sort of game. the story and writing, aside from it's comedic value (of which it often nails the extremely online/dril vibe far more often then it dosen't), is also quite good! following BK's journey of realizing that maybe people *like* their trash is honestly very compelling. and damn, this is only a 2-3 hour game! all killer, no filler! highly recommended!

at first, fran bow gave me serious edgy 00's newground flash game vibes. i don't mean this in a bad way, but it definitely leaned *REAL* hard on the child trauma, mental asylums and blood. however, shortly after that, it changed. then it changed again. and again. and again. and by the end of fran bow, i was extremely pleased with what i played. with the point n click style of something like Sanitarium (or any other lucasarts-style no death adventure game) mixed with the Hot Topic-y, Burton-esque, American McGee's Alice-like blood-soaked european fairy-tale storybook aesthetic, fran bow becomes it's own thing by the end, telling it's own tale of multiple realities, mental illness and trauma. the characters in fran bow are fantastic, with my favourite being a cross between Mr. Midnight (the cat in the banner) and Itward (who i will not spoil), but the game is full of fantastic writing, with fran presenting herself constantly as inquisitive and delighted in the face of extreme darkness in a very charming way. the puzzles in fran bow weren't super hard and often could be solved by just thinking a little longer about things, but there were a couple that required looking at a guide by the end. however, this did not impact my enjoyment of the game in any way. i also want to give special mention to the wonderful soundtrack that mixes gothic symphonies, wind-up toys, radio static, and other sounds, as well as much warmer and softer background music in the happier parts. the sound design is excellent too, and i imagine recording all the different sound effects for all the violent actions was a great time. fran bow comes highly recommended, just maybe take a peek at content warnings if you are sensitive to the themes in the game.

i really wanted to like this and tried really hard to meet it half way but the completely unforgiving nature of it and the unpredictable and unreliable controls soured me on the whole thing. i stopped at the 6th boss. maybe i'll come back to it some day but i likely won't.

edit: i finished the game out of spite. wasen't worth it. controls never felt good or reliable, aside from the parrying. story was whatever. music was probably good in 2016 but *every* game sounds like this now. maybe you'll love it. i didn't.