Recent reviews by Katosepe

They nailed the tone of what an Indiana Jones story should feel like. Everything from the somewhat cheesy, somewhat serious line delivery to the exciting action scenes where nobody can seem to hold onto whatever artifact they're fighting over for more than a couple of seconds... it all just feels correct. They even managed to modernize certain elements of the character without it ever feeling forced or out of nowhere.

The combat has gunplay but there's a very heavy emphasis on stealth and melee combat, both of which are done adequately, if not uniquely. This is one of the few games where I actually recommend upping the difficulty a little bit just to give the stealth a little more consequence, since the normal difficulty will have you fairly easily wiping out entire brigades of nazi's without any real trouble. If you just want a fairly painless experience going through what could have been a lost Indiana Jones movie though, Normal or Easy difficulty will get the job done.

It isn't perfect. There has been some occasional jank in the gameplay, particularly with puzzles that require precise solutions, even if something else seems like it should work. Some of the plot elements, particularly one involving Indy learning to read and translate an entire language on the spot, seem to stretch the bounds of what even pulp aficionados can realistically believe, but the story moves quickly enough and the gameplay issues are infrequent enough that they rarely stay an issue for very long.

Otherwise, I do recommend being careful of the specs for the game. Even with an RTX 3080 8GB, I'm on the low end of what this game requires to run and even with settings all turned down, it's choppy. Not enough to be game-breaking but enough to be constantly noticeable. The last patch improved this chop and fingers crossed that it will improve even more as time goes on. The upside for this is that even on low settings, the game looks amazing. You won't feel like you're missing out at all and I look forward to playing this again on high settings a few years and a PC upgrade later.

If you don't have a ton of time for gaming, this game is very friendly towards players who need to run through the story mode pretty quickly. It separates quests into required, optional but recommended, and diversions so you know what's important at a glance and what you can reasonably skip. While you'll miss out on some character upgrades by rushing through, you likely won't miss them much as they only offer fairly minor upgrades anyway. They're fun enough for completionists to get but story mode gamers will be just fine without them. The story can be completed in probably a dozen or so hours or completionists can find at least 30-40 hours combing through the open areas for collectables, most of which have rewards and/or story beats tied to them.

Before this came out, I had thought that Indy may just be an aged icon that just doesn't work in the modern era anymore. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle proved me wrong and I fervently hope they get the chance to make a sequel in the future.

Hoop is all there is and Hoop is all there ever was. We are the Hoop and the Hoop is us. From Hoop we were made and to Hoop we shall return. I am one with the Hoop now. You are Hoop too, but you may not know it yet. Accept the Hoop. Be the Hoop. Live the Hoop.

Dread Delusion has a lot of narrative chops but the lack of resources clearly got the better of this team. The towns are unreasonably small, rarely containing more than 6-10 interactable NPCs, combat is brainless, exploration is a simple matter of having the correct stat high enough to open the door, and the unadjustable draw distance causes horrible problems when navigating the airship later in the game, something that should be a high point for the game.

If you buy this, you'll probably have fun with it for a while and the dialogue/worldbuilding won't often disappoint but in the end, Dread Delusion feels like a shadow of Morrowind. I really do hope this team is able to get more resources and make a sequel in the future that lives up to their lofty ambitions because that is a game I'll definitely want to play. As it stands though, I just can't recommend Dread Delusion.

Wonderful game that should absolutely be tried by fans of puzzle games like Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, Return of the Obra Dinn, the Golden Idol games, The Witness, or Heaven's Vault. The conceit here is that you wake up on a tower without any knowledge of the languages spoken by the inhabitants. You must use context clues to interpret the languages of the people and climb the tower to discover the stories of the cultures that live there. If that sounds daunting, you'll be surprised what you are able to figure out with nothing more than context clues and every word learned and interpreted is immensely satisfying as you can now understand the people around you that much better.

Chants of Sennaar is a gorgeous game with several distinct environments that reflect the cultures of the people that live there. The audio throughout the game is subtle but adds immense character to these peoples as well. It's impressive how everything comes together so well to paint a distinct picture while keeping things relatively simple.

The one place the game falters a bit is in some of the more esoteric interpretations that the game requires and the rigidity that the game sometimes demands. While you can write interpretations for the words at any time, the only way to confirm a word's definition is to fill out pages in your notebook. These give you images that you then attach the words to and if you get all of them right, it locks them in for you. The vast majority of these pages are clear enough but every once in a while, a picture is wildly unclear and you can find yourself guessing not to figure out what a word means but to figure out what the game wants from you. Even worse are the few times that the game requires a very specific trigger in order to even open up a page in the notebook at all. I had to backtrack to the first two floors and hunt around to find the specific triggers the game wanted from me just to get the notebook pages to unlock. I already had every word and was certain of their meanings, I just couldn't figure out how to get the game to let me take its test without looking it up online.

These moments are frustrating but they are extremely few and far between and they are only a slight blemish on what is otherwise a solid experience. The language puzzles here are something I will remember well for a long time.

It may not reach the heights of its predecessor, but The Rise of the Golden Idol is still one of the best detective games on the market today.

If you played the original (and I do recommend that game first), you know the basic formula here. Each case gives you a few relatively static screens filled to the brim with information you can use to figure out what's going on. Usually this has you solve a murder but not always. In fact, many of Rise's most memorable cases don't involve any death at all which is a welcome change of pace. One case in particular that stands out to me is one at a drive-in theater that I enjoyed a lot. Another at a TV studio was also a lot of fun.

The new art style is fantastic and unobtrusive. It keeps that distinctive surrealist feel that Golden Idol is known for but with a new painted style that effectively rewrote my memories of what the first game looked like. When I went back and looked at the scenes from the original, I was surprised at how old they looked by comparison. I don't mean this to bash the original game, simply to congratulate the team on the stylistic improvements in Rise.

While I personally found the revamped UI to be a bit clunky, I can also see the benefits in the windowed system which allows you to move certain windows around the screen. This can let you see certain parts of the scene while still filling in key words on the windows. Where I found this to be lacking, however, is that you only seem to be able to move the answer windows and never the zoomed in elements of the scene. So while you can move your word bank around the screen, you can't move the character's dialogue box showing the things they're holding. This sometimes makes the more complicated scenes more tedious than they needed to be. It's not a big gripe and I believe most will find it better than Case's full screen "Thinking screen vs Exploring screen" system but the clunkiness stood out to me more in Rise.

The place that Rise really falls short, however, is the story. Case's story, while a bit convoluted at times, all came together pretty nicely by the end. Rise, on the other hand, leaves an enormous amount of plot threads dangling by its conclusion, presumably for use in the 4 planned DLC packs, but then again, maybe not. Who knows? Several characters had no real purpose in the story, despite being setup early on as main characters, and the conclusion doesn't conclude much of anything if you think about it. If you'll allow me a very brief and early-game spoiler that I believe will improve your experience with the game, nearly all of the prologue and Chapter 1 is superfluous to the rest of the storyline, tricking you into thinking the story will be about one thing when it's actually something else entirely. Almost none of the characters or organizations mentioned in Chapter 1 ever come back again and of those few characters that do, only one of them is actually consequential.

This story uncertainty and the dangling plot threads contribute towards making the final couple of cases more frustrating than they needed to be. Let me be clear, most of the cases throughout this game are a joy to complete and they reward careful observation and deductive reasoning. Even when I got some of the early cases wrong, I was excited to realize what I had missed. The final two cases though seem to have a significant number of logical leaps that either require a complete guess or accepting a logical contradiction. On a micro level, in the penultimate case, I'd love to know why two of the characters in the group of four have identical key rings. On a more macro level, can anyone explain how Hunter was doing what he was doing in the warehouse without a certain machine being there? At what point exactly does a certain knighted individual come into contact with the machine? As far as I can tell, there's no real explanation for these very key questions, not to mention several others central to the game's story.

The titular Golden Idol confused me a bit too, as it seems to be notably different than the idol in the original game, and yet people speak about it as though it is the same idol when they refer to how it was used in the past. I don't mind the powers being different, I just would have liked some acknowledgement by the game that this was the case and perhaps an explanation that there were two idols all along or something like that. Instead I spent a good portion of the game thinking that they were trying to artificially recreate the powers of the original Golden Idol, which honestly might have been a cool story.

Overall, The Rise of the Golden Idol is still a great game that I recommend trying. I was disappointed by the unsatisfying conclusion but the vast majority of individual cases were still a joy to complete. I do recommend playing Case of the Golden Idol first, not because the plot is vital to understanding this one, but just because I personally feel that is the slightly better game and you'll get a bit more from the references if you're familiar with that games' story.

I really wanted to recommend Little Hope because I do think there is a lot that is done well in this game, but the myriad story, gameplay, and technical issues hold it back even in this "upgraded" version.

Little Hope continues the tradition of The Dark Pictures Anthology in telling more bite-sized stories in the same vein as Until Dawn and The Quarry but with a greater emphasis on replayability. Unfortunately, much like the other Dark Picture games, Little Hope's focus on replayability robs it of the satisfaction players should feel at the end of the game. Instead, we're left with confusion and dangling plot threads.

I played through Little Hope multiple times to try and see everything. I found every secret, every picture, read both comics, and played through both the Theatrical Cut and the Curator Cut to really try to piece the story together. I will say, many of the lingering questions after a first playthrough are answered but a large number also remain unclear even with all that effort. It's disappointing to have that effort left unrewarded considering how much time it actually took to 100% the game.

Despite the focus being on replayability, the scene selection, and the supposedly increased walk speed offered by the upgraded version, cleaning up missed collectibles still takes way longer than most will have patience for due to how slow the game generally moves. I missed a single collectible near the start of a scene which I thought would be simple to quickly grab. Instead, I had to wait through literally 15 minutes of unskippable cutscene just to then walk into a room and grab the collectible, which took less than 20 seconds.

Little Hope also just isn't scary, plain and simple. It takes place at night and occasionally has dead figures grab you and scream in your face but these cheap jump scares weren't enough to even make me flinch. I love horror primarily because I am easily scared. I'm maybe not the most frightened of viewers but I'm far from some hardened horror savant. Even still, playing the game literally by candlelight at night, Little Hope never scared me in the slightest.

One of the big reasons for this is that glitches and harsh cuts permeate the entire game, making it difficult to become invested. I'm playing on an Nvidia 3080 with 2K resolution on High settings (as opposed to Ultra) and the game would occasionally freeze up during cutscenes, with audio going but the video either playing in ultra slow motion or not at all. Several scenes are cut in such a way as to be nearly incomprehensible, Daniel and Taylor's run down the street and the factory scene particularly standing out in this regard. One scene involves Daniel, Taylor, and Angela helping each other down a rocky incline with some QTEs and isn't particularly notable in the story. In fact, in wouldn't be notable at all except the first two times I played through this scene, the camera alternated between showing only fog or only darkness. I know that the game was running correctly because the QTEs functioned normally. I just had no idea what I was doing QTEs for. It wasn't until the third time when I replayed this scene for collectibles that it actually displayed correctly and I saw, for the first time, what the scene was actually supposed to be.

This isn't to say that all Little Hope does is bad. The acting is decent, even if some of the character dialogue is jarring. The story is neat, even if there are some significant plot holes, and I enjoyed the theming. Little Hope doesn't do anything particularly groundbreaking with its witchcraft storyline but what is there is done adequately. Depending on how thorough you are looking for secrets and if you manage to pick the right path, Little Hope can give you a fun 4-5 hour horror jaunt for your money. All the better if you have a friend to play through it with you.

For most players though, Little Hope still suffers too many of the same problems the rest of the Dark Pictures Anthology has. Not enough game for the price, a lower quality product than Supermassive's full scale offerings, tedious completion requirements, and an ultimately unsatisfying story.

An absolutely incredible accomplishment from these devs. They didn't just make 50 retro-styled games for us (although that would have been an achievement in and of itself), they created a chronology of a fictional publishing studio and crafted a personality for this console that they invented.

At its core, this game is a compilation of 50 games made by some of the best indie devs in the business. The games are retro in aesthetic and mechanics but you'll notice right away that they are lacking the brutal difficulty baked into most real retro games. That's not to say that they aren't hard games, just that they clearly aren't operating under any Blockbuster clauses in their publishing contracts. Games are tough but fair. Games also reflect a massive variety of mechanics and genres, several of which would have been massively ahead of their time for the 80's.

It's doubtful that you'll like every game in this collection. In fact, I'd say its for a foregone conclusion that you won't. The opposite is also true though, in that I think you'd be hard pressed to not enjoy anything this collection has to offer. There is a ton to discover here, including a number of secrets for those interested and determined enough to find them,

I feel very comfortable saying that there has never been anything like UFO 50. The game has been a long time coming and it lives up to every expectation and more. I cannot recommend this enough.

I have a hard time believing this game is fun in standard mode but in VR, it is easily my favorite game in the FNAF franchise and probably the best full game I've played in VR. The mini-games are simple but the atmosphere is terrifying. Each game offers new things to do and there are just a lot of games to play. Even if you aren't very into FNAF, if you want a horror game in VR that isn't purely about being as scary as possible, but also wants to be a solid game in its own right, FNAF Help Wanted 2 may be your game.

Orwell is simple but entertaining. The storyline can be completed in a few hours total and while there are choices you can make to alter the course of the story, you can also figure out the overall premise on a single playthrough pretty easily. I appreciated this since I didn't really want to skip through dialogue for several hours just to discover what was actually going on.

The theme is strong but surprisingly not preachy. You have to imagine, based on the name and the premise, that the writers are pretty pro-privacy but the game never feels like it's going out of its way to punish you if you play in a different way. The writing is strong enough that the logical conclusion of your actions will force you to consider your morality and I consider that to be a major strength of the game's story.

Orwell won't likely blow your mind and it doesn't quite go hard enough into the free form investigation that I personally craved but it's a fun 5 hours that will give you some fun puzzles to solve and some moral issues to consider.

This feels like a great proof of concept more than anything else. I got 100% of the achievements in the game in just over 2 hours and while some of the puzzles were fun, the game still wound up feeling really repetitive at times. The story seems cool but it's more of a setup than a fully complete storyline. Even as theory-bait, there just isn't a lot here to feel satisfying and while there is a second game coming, as of this review, it's been 18 months and it's not out yet. I don't say this to rush the developers. In fact, I hope they take their time and make a game that feels like a complete story or at least a complete arc of a story, so that this game can be rebranded as a prologue chapter.

I really wish the developers well and I hope to see more in the future but even for the low price, as things are right now, I just can't recommend this game to your average gamer since there isn't really any conclusion.