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I fell in love with this game, in a totally not weird way of course. It's a real mash-up of genres and ideas, but one which I think works brilliantly together. A "whole greater than the sum of its parts" kind of deal. There's a little bit of System Shock / Bioshock in there, searching ships for parts and resources while using direct and indirect tactics against its mutated citizens; a bit of Cryptark where you're navigating a network of ship types with different layouts, rooms with specific roles, and randomised elements; a bit of Cargo Commander where you're collecting junk and crafting / upgrading weapons, armour and other tools. Add on top a cool comic-book aesthetic with 2D enemy sprites, a rocking electro soundtrack, and some great atmospheric ambient sounds on the ships, and you have Void Bastards.

What makes this game compelling and highly addictive is harder to pin down. At first it seems quite basic, running around ships shooting enemies with an inadequate pistol, trying to hide with a rather basic stealth mechanic, dying and losing your ammo and resources, but retaining the gear you've crafted. Its charm and overall slickness kept me going through this early stage, worried that it would soon get repetitive. But then I started to explore lower depths of the nebula (there are 5 levels in total, and you can move between them fairly easily) and complexity started to become more apparent. Before long I was juggling all kinds of interesting decisions. Another factor is the crafting, this comes easily at first and after nearly every ship you'll be able to improve some aspect of your inventory or arsenal, so there's very little unnecessary grind unless you want to take it slow and scour every inch of every ship. There's a time limit to exploration through your limited oxygen supply, but it's fairly generous at first and you can extend it through various means, so it's a good balance between having a bit of urgency but also the freedom to explore.

Your AI guide is the same guy who narrates The Stanley Parable, and a similar sense of dry humour is applied to Void Bastards. The citizens are a little more crass, mostly various British archetypes, where the swearing and insults are more funny than they are offensive. But it's all the little things that push it over the edge, the way the doors swoosh open in such a satisfying way, the way citizens splash everywhere when you kill them, the little descriptive floating text that indicates their presence on the other side of a door, the way you can hack turrets and sit back and watch the fireworks, the heavy metal music of the pirates that gets louder as they approach, the soothing void whale that devours you whole, etc.

You know when you finish a game and you're disappointed that it's over, that you want to keep playing or start over? I'm adding Void Bastards to the list.

Ahahahaha... perfect.

At first sight this is essentially a steampunk version of Legend of Grimrock - that is, a tile-based dungeon crawler with real-time combat. Everything moves with clockwork precision from square to square. It's a genre unto itself, a call-back to games like Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder. However, unlike Grimrock, Vaporum has a game-changing mechanic - a stop-time mode where everything advances by 1 second every time you take an action in a similar way to SUPERHOT. Remarkably enough this wasn't part of the original release, but instead patched in later to address complaints that the game moved too quickly. You'd never know it though - it really feels integral to the way Vaporum works. Combat is now no longer a case of just square-dancing around enemies (although if you want to do that, knock yourself out) but rather a chess-like tactical puzzle of knowing your enemy, awareness of your surroundings, knowing when to shift position, when to fire, and when to activate gadgets (Vaporum's "spell" system). It's highly effective when you have multiple enemies in a room, turning potentially frustrating encounters into enjoyable matches of position and counter-position. Of course, you can also just tank up and blast things in the face if you have the right build, and ignoring stop-time mode certainly ups the challenge. Builds are determined mostly by the gear you wear, a choice presented near the start but one you're able to change at any time by simply swapping suits, weapons, armour and gadgets. Of course your inventory is limited so you're going to have to make a decision at some point, although some degree of hybrid classes are possible. Circuit upgrades are your skill points, and they're limited to force you to choose specialisations. I settled on a pistol specialist with a freakin' large warhammer and a touch of "magic" (gadgets that you activate with a cooldown). The degree of customisation together with several difficulty levels makes second playthroughs viable, even though there's no NG+ or variation in content.

This genre is well-known for its judicious use of grid-like restrictions to come up with some fiendish puzzles. Vaporum has several on each level, most are pretty straightforward, but there are a few very clever ones. There are a couple that would be rather annoying without the stop-time feature (you need to act fast and/or memorize patterns) but on the whole they gave up their eureka moment before any frustration set in.

The rest of the game is just gravy. Detailed environments and mostly subtle graphical effects create the best looking game of its type, highly atmospheric if a little on the dark side (you can adjust gamma) but with distinct character to most of the levels through lighting, room design and tile sets. The audio is also excellent, plenty of fantastic atmospheric sounds, hisses, clanks and groans, and the enemies all have very distinctive mechanical or biological sounds. Secret buttons (a genre staple) can be very hard to spot unless you take the time to look carefully and/or crank up the gamma - there are no ridiculously obvious misaligned bricks here, but slightly different shaped screws on a wall panel shrouded in darkness - it's a bit much, to be honest, but once I knew what to look for I found most of them. The story is well written if somewhat cliché, although it's elevated by some nice voice work by the main protagonist (the rest of the cast speak through audio logs, and they're serviceable). Audio and text logs flesh out story details and people's lives, but it's mostly optional. Other downsides? There are a few "lock you in a room with a handful of monster" traps later in the game, which would be enormously painful if you had to play it real-time, but the stop-time mode merely makes them challenging. The final boss encounter is pretty well done, although I imagine it's a real bullet sponge at higher difficulties.

I've played a lot of these real-time, grid-based dungeon crawlers, and until Vaporum came along I'd not found one that came close to the Grimrock games. I still consider Grimrock 2 to be a masterclass in the genre, but I'm putting Vaporum in second place due to its tactical combat, better RPG elements and more variety than Grimrock 1.

Wow, this was completely unexpected to be honest. Artifex Mundi is a name I associate with highly polished if somewhat formulaic HOG games with suitably dodgy voice acting, but with My Brother Rabbit they have finally stepped outside of the box they built for themselves. The result is by far the best game they've ever produced. Disregard everything you think you know about HOG games, because this is a beautiful evolution of the genre which at its core is about finding things hidden in a scene. What makes My Brother Rabbit different is the approach; there is no dialog, so no scope for utterly dire voice acting, the artwork is a mixture of coloured sketching that tells the story between chapters, and an exaggerated, whimsical cartoon style where the main game takes place. Each scene is packed full of details and humour, clicking on various things produces irreverent animations and sound effects. It reminds me of something that Amanita Design might make, with a touch of Monty Python's mad contraptions.

Each chapter involves finding a succession of objects of a specific type to solve a particular puzzle, taking place over a handful of screens that slowly open up as you solve more puzzles. It neatly avoids the tiresome HOG convention of constantly having your progress barred by yet another half-broken object to fix by using a neat mechanic which indicates which scenes have a piece that you're looking for (either in plain view, or hidden behind another puzzle). It helps that it doesn't take itself remotely seriously. I mean it's not really a HOG game at all, but you can see its ancestry.

The story is a simple one, but the music, animation and overall style sells it with just the right tone. The ending is perhaps a little brief, and I was sad when the journey was over, but that's perhaps the best compliment. There are also a few bonus achievements for playing along with the world.

First up, this game is not Ultima Underworld 3. It plays more like a fantasy version of Thief, at least the first hour that I've played. I haven't experienced the technical issues that some have, the game runs ok although it hitches constantly when new audio plays which is very much a Unity thing, and there are various glitches here and that that will probably be patched up.

I like the game's atmosphere, and I think I'd probably really enjoy it despite it not being what I had hoped for. However, the save game system is currently a disaster - it saves your inventory, and plonks you back at the start of the level, with everything else in the level reset. Made it halfway through the map after an hour's play but had to save for the night? Tough titties, you need to replay everything back to that point the next day. Until this is addressed and improved, I can't recommend the game, which is a pity because it deserves better. I'm sure patches are coming, and perhaps this will be addressed, so maybe check back in a week or two.

This is a highly atmospheric exploration game, the central mechanic being that you're in complete darkness and only have a VR-like scanner to find your way around. As you aim and "fire" the scanner it paints the walls and objects with sparkling points of light, eventually building up a personalised picture of your surroundings that you can navigate by. At first I wasn't sure how far they could take this concept, neat though it was, but it's not long before the designers try out some interesting ideas as the world - and story - starts to unfold around you. You'll also pick up "upgrades" to your scanner which give you some fairly obvious but welcome abilities.

There I was happily painting my way around the world, and then it took a turn for the dark, and suddenly the world seemed a lot less friendly. One section in particular is quite tense, and I thought they might play more with this dynamic, but then you move onto other things.

I admit I was quite getting into the whole thing, and then... well, it ended. The story - while not particularly original - does resolve itself nicely enough, and the ending sequence is worth seeing, but I felt the game still had some ideas left unexplored. Still, for what it is, Scanner Sombre is unique and definitely worth a playthrough. Special mention also to the soundtrack which is excellent enough to listen to separately. More of this kind of thing, please.

I played Dead Space on release, and for many years I've considered it the greatest sci-fi horror game out there. So for its tenth anniversary I thought it was time for a replay. I can happily report that Dead Space remains a masterpiece of tension, fear and - at times - sheer terror. It holds up on account of its level design, atmosphere, unique enemies and remarkable sound design.

It's worth noting, however, that there are some bugs in this PC port that were never fixed. They're easy to resolve with some minor tweaking, but it's annoying. First off, the in-game vsync creates a nasty lag on the mouse which makes it difficult to aim. Disable it in-game, and enable it using your GPU control panel - it then plays beautifully with a mouse and keyboard (and far more precise than using the controller). Secondly, if you play on fullscreen (which is the default setting) then the in-game brightness becomes way too high. Turn it down to minimum in the in-game settings, and the game looks as dark and moody as intended.

Ok, so that took 5 minutes to resolve. Back to the game. Dead Space takes place almost entirely on the Ishimura, a gothic mining vessel that's a logically-designed place full of interconnections that's almost reminiscent of Dark Souls had Dead Space not come first. Chapter level loads slightly impair this feeling of the Ishimura being a single, cohesive design, but it works in terms of having discretely functional areas. There's a real sense of claustrophobia not only in the place, but in your control of Isaac, a largely silent (he grunts and screams, but never talks) engineer wearing a protective and bulky rig. The feeling that you're alone is overwhelming for much of the time. Isaac's rig is an iconic piece of kit, almost as unwieldy as a mech as you clump around, smashing things underfoot with a visceral (pun intended) crunch and grunt. It feels a little restrictive, but then it's meant to be. Dead Space 2 improved mobility and control which worked better as an action game, but as a horror game the control system here is more effective.

The enemies are straight out of John Carpenter sci-fi horror, human flesh splitting and sprouting a mixture of crab-like appendages, teeth and tentacles. These body horror monstrosities are accompanied by some extremely effective sound design, and their ability to rip you apart in short order makes them genuinely scary. In fact, sound design overall is exceptional. The entire ship feels alive with menace, positional audio making you constantly on edge. Several times I found I had to dial down the tension by turning the volume down, that's how effective it is. If you want the full experience, Dead Space is not a game to play while watching TV or listening to a podcast. Equally effective is the pacing, with scattered "havens" giving you a brief sense of relief before you have to open a door and head into another area full of horrors. The designers do a smart job of slowly ramping up the stakes, keeping each new encounter interesting, and throwing in regular set-pieces and the occasional environmental puzzle.

Even if you didn't find the atmosphere particularly frightening (in which case my hat is off to your strong constitution), the gameplay stands on its own. Combat is impactful, slicing off limbs to visibly alter the appearance and behaviour of enemies, controlling where the threat is coming from (particularly later in the game) using your abilities and different weapons. Each unique enemy type has its own personality and approach to dealing with it, and later encounters really try to put you into challenging situations trying to deal with them all. Even though the game is set in a space ship, the designers do a good job trying to make each area feel unique and functional. There are places you visit that you'll never want to see again... until you realise that you have to. Admittedly the chase from one task to another, where each problem solved immediately leads to another, can wear a little thin (even the in-game dialogue alludes to this!) but I never felt a sense of fatigue for its entire duration.

RPG elements come into play through the use of power nodes, which can be spent upgrading a variety of weapons and abilities. Power nodes are of course in limited supply and you can't level up everything in a single playthrough, so there are choices to be made. This time I challenged myself to beat the game using only the plasma cutter, the starting weapon. Levelled up this thing is lethal and satisfying, but sadly you don't get an achievement for it in the Steam version.

There's no doubt my love for this kind of sci-fi horror strongly influences my feelings towards this game, but there's little doubt this is a classic. The sequel definitely made a lot of improvements to the formula, and many prefer it, but for me the original Dead Space is still the best.

What a fascinating game this turned out to be, and I say that because at first I wasn't really feeling it. The characters all seemed to be highly annoying, walking around is glacially slow, and it didn't seem to be heading anywhere particularly interesting. But despite myself I kept going, the natural conversation (and really, the voice acting is great, and the conversation flows in an organic way that you don't often experience with games) drew me further in, and when things start getting interesting it's hard to stop. Suddenly the characters start to make sense, your opinions start to change, and by the end you make choices that you'd probably never have seen coming. The game really changed my relationship with it.

And when it was over, and I realised that the choices I'd made had consequence, I found myself starting it over again. I'm glad I did, because it surprised me once again. Such a cleverly-constructed game, if you can get past the slow start and put up with slow pace of getting around, you'll be richly rewarded.

I reviewed this a few days ago, quite negatively, but later discovered that there's a bug in the game that forces it to use your integrated graphics card. I decided to try it again and use nvidia control panel to force it to use my 1060, and it made a huge different to performance. I thought the game deserved another chance, so here's how that went...

Retrovirus is a 6dof game, which brings up immediate comparisons with Descent. But this is not Descent; it's quite a different game, although that doesn't excuse it of its sins. Descent thrives on a responsive flight model and kinetic combat. Retrovirus has none of this. It feels like you're sliding around on rails, even if you tweak the control settings somewhat to add some momentum (which I recommend). The combat feels weak, weapons aren't terribly exciting and enemies pop like engorged ticks rather than with any kind of satisfying explosion. Retrovirus is at its worst when it's trying to be Descent, and occasionally it "goes there".

But this is a slower game, one where you're exploring narrow tunnels and hiding from enemy fire. Most of the enemies are of the "hitscan" variety, so trying to dodge and weave to avoid them isn't very effective. Others are of the "teleport into your face" variety, so overall you tend to sneak into view, blast a few criters, and then hide again. The devs know this, and eventually introduce a magnetic enemy that pulls you right into the thick of trouble. Really, this is a masterclass in really effing annoying enemy design. I can see what they were going for, but I found it really frustrating.

For example, corrupted enemies can be cleansed by reducing their health bars to nil, but they can be re-corrupted by other enemies that might be hiding out of view. Seconds later, they're back to their former selves, so in a room comprising half a dozne or more of these corrupted enemies, it can be an exercise in frustration trying to get rid of them all before they reinfect each other. The organic enemies are no better, because they usually infinitely spawn from egg sacs, so you need to fly into the thick of things, dispatch the spawners, and get out of there before you're killed. Either that or try and cheese it by sneaking around corners to find the right angle to snipe them from behind cover.

I mean this does have its moments, but the game really doesn't know when to quit. It goes on, and on, and on with the same repetitive elements. For example, there's a series of web browser levels where you're traveling through train tunnels. This means having to wait for trains to pass lest they turn you into paste. The devs milk every last drop out of this concept, to the point of intense frustration ("I know, let's have two trains coming at each other with a tiny gap in the middle, and then a door on the side that you have to shoot open and try and snipe enemies in there while not getting splattered... and there can also be a magnetic enemy in there to pull you into the train! Woohoo!")

Later in the game, and I've no idea how close to the end I got, the scenery finally changed to a beautiful "outdoor" area. It was a great change of pace. Sadly, you're thrown back into the tunnels quickly enough, and with the added bonus of having hitscan laser turrets that make extremely short work of you. Except this time you have a cloaking device, but sadly it only lasts for a few seconds, draining the limited pool of energy that you also need to fire weapons. This is the point at which I quit the game. I get that energy management and using the right weapons at the right time is a cool bit of gameplay, but constantly punishing the player and removing their ability to manage it effectively was the last straw for me.

You might get more mileage out of this than I did, but good luck with it. I have to say I did enjoy the game for several hours early on. The slower paced exploration and satisfying popping of the viral nodes was quite compelling for a while there, but it would have been a far better and tighter game if it had been 1/3 of its length. It's not an easy game to pick up at first either, it's confusing and cluttered, and you really have to want to persevere to get past this hard, outer shell.

I'm giving this a Not Recommended not because it's necessarily bad, but because ultimately I just didn't feel satisfied by it. Give it a shot by all means, especially if it's on sale, but temper your expectations.

I enjoyed this game immensely, but I suspect it's not for everyone. I might describe it as a more contemplative FPS game, but even that's not really accurate. You begin by hacking into a Surveyor robot on the ground, from one of three factions (as you'll learn) who are on the planet for various reasons. The early game is one of gradual exploration. You won't see any combat at first, with a deliberately slow pace that sets the lonely scene. What's overwhelmingly well done is the atmosphere, sense of place and scale, with some truly massive structures that you can reach. The day/night cycle not only looks great, but has gameplay implications, and there are plenty of incidental details, great sound design and snatches of haunting music that sell the experience. There's a real sense of achievement when you find things (there's a secondary mode for detecting energy signatures that you'll be using a lot), and if you're into that kind of gameplay you'll probably love this. Finding data nodes provides some quite readable lore to study, and it's soon clear that something strange is going on.

Not too far into the game things change a bit. Outside of the normal upgrades for weapons, shields and the like, you'll gain the ability to control a small squad. This changes the focus of the gameplay, and strangely this reminds me a lot of Darwinia. The glitchy presentation (you're hacking into a robot, after all) reinforces this impression. It's not exactly an RTS, but you will find yourself controlling and defending points of interest. The other two factions don't just sit around, there's a sense of a dynamic world out there. You'll often stumble across battles happening in the distance, the glow of laser rifles and the distant report of gunshots are quite atmospheric (some compare this game to Stalker in that regard). Being caught in the middle of a three-way firefight can be thrilling, so there's no lack of action at times. The combat is effective, the weapons feel potent and killing robots is always satisfying. Admittedly there's not a lot of variety in that combat, a few different enemy types (some larger than others), but despite this it never gets boring. And exploration remains the focus for the majority of the game. There are even a few surprises to be found, places that will hone your exploration skills.

There are some flaws, certainly. Trudging back to where you were killed from the nearest spawn point can take a while, control of your squad is best described as "herding cats", and there's a certain degree of repetition built into the design, but I think it succeeds as a whole. In fact I'm impressed at what this small dev team has achieved here. It does feel like a game from the mid 90s - and I say that as a compliment. Terra Nova comes to mind, even though it's really not, but there are clues of inspiration scattered throughout. The free "Polar Regions" campaign extends the game by another 4-5 hours and, although it's essentially more of the same, it continues the story nicely and hints at more to come.