Recent reviews by Witch of the Western Sea

This was only the second game in its series - and as such, they tried something completely new - let every character do whatever you want them to, give them XP for what they're doing. There was no real clue was to how to proceed, what your overarcing goals were, nothing. It's definitely a miss.

This is the latest in a long-running franchise with many branches over its course, going back to the original game back in 1997, one of the very first games I ever owned on Steam. It has come so far since then. It's amazingly immersive. The inventory system is simple and functional - a necessity when playing a game in VR. But the texture of the place, the sights and sounds and environments, the breathtaking detail, the abandoned and overtaken spaces - the few people Alyx speaks to or interacts with; This is a game for this century, not a mindless shooter or a beautiful but ultimately pointless environmental sandbox. You get to see hear and experience the world, through Alyx's eyes - mostly through her hands, as it happens.

Wake up, Ms. Vance.
Wake up and smell the ashes.

So. I had anticipated playing this game since first seeing demos and introductory vids for it. It was one of the motivations for an upgrade to my system - it is very much a game of 2023/2024, and it will wallop your VRAM, hard drive speeds, system RAM - you do need a beefy system, suffices to say. Beyond the technical specs, I count this as one of the Soviet simulator games. Singularity and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. seem far more adjacent to this than Metro 2033. It very much feels like Bioshock Infinite, but from a Soviet world.

I was prepared to enjoy this, play it right through to an audience, but it has glaring stumbles.
1. How much arguing and dialogue goes on that adds very little beyond annoyance to the game for me.
2. How little actual commentary there is on Soviet Communism there is, despite the game taking place in what amounts to Floating Soviet Utopia.
3. You're expected to sneak around at least some of the time - but the difficulty of enemies outdistances your weapons fast and early - and you will get into boss fights that will seriously turn you into goop, no matter how upgraded your weapons are. Dodging really does not work how it should.
4. You're going to be shooting robots. And plant zombies and monsters. That's about what you're going to be doing.
5. QUICKTIME EVENTS.
6. The amount of Reddit-diving you have to do to understand how to change in-game language settings without changing the entire UI language too.

I wanted so much for this title, from the bottom of my heart, and it fell far short, far far short. Play Singularity, Metro or S.T.A.L.K.E.R if you're wanting that Soviet shooter feel. This title is very gorgeous, but ultimately is just a shiny Soviet box around late 90s FPS stealth gameplay with some crafting/upgrading stuff in.

From beginning to end, characters, story, design, creativity. This has become the standard by which isometric RPGs are judged by for its time. You are given so much creative freedom for your character. You must build your story, gather your allies, overcome your enemies and immerse yourself in an adventure. No story is simple. No character is without thoughts or motives of their own. Gorgeous landscapes and a whole group of supporting cast. Mighty magic and a throughline worthy of the best fantasy novels.

I admit, I really wanted to like this game, I just immersed myself in it, dug deep - but it reached a point where progression for me just wasn't possible, measurements were sometimes in increments that could not be done accurately and there is a long list of equipment that is simply never explained or demonstrated. Add to this, the fact that if you ever use a pump, the sound will persist until you close the game, no matter which pump or how many pumps you use. It happens every time. I kept trying and trying, diving into it for hours, but the bugs and lack of documentation hold back what could be a real gem.

I was looking forward to this game for years. My excitement has been palpable, as it was just a fingertip's reach out of my financial reach for a long time. I finally did acquire it - to find that it would not run on my machine. It stuttered and stuttered and crashed. Maybe a far more expensive and powerful machine than my own will run it, but is it worth thousands of dollars to play a game of thirty dollars? I played its predecessors, but this I will probably never play again. It is a long time and a longer journey from the Dark Descent to this. I am disappointed and underwhelmed.

An overall chilling and thrilling shoot and sneak game from Sweden. A visually breathtaking game taking place over and across an absolutely massive map of small towns, villages and rural landscapes - populated by you and many different kinds of robots. You must survive from the beginning onwards using the materials and weapons you find, equipping no more than three to your quick equip buttons, but more than once I found this overall very limiting. The weapons are the usual AR/SMG/Sniper/Shotgun/RPG stuff in slots 1 and 2 and pistols/melee in slot 3. I speant almost the entire game in crouchwalking stealth mode for a simple reason - robot patrols spawn almost everywhere. The two largest are easiest to tell, because they are very loud and the largest literally causes impact tremors when it walks. The shooting mechanics were straightforward, you get a bit of ballistics, but it's largely just point and shoot. You get a pile of other items of variable usefulness, but overall I found that I got far less medic packs than I needed. Frequent patrols and ammunition drops not being quite what they should be meant I spent more time avoiding combat, which was the point. Sadly, the thin plot of finding bunkers seems to end very abruptly and drops you right back onto the main map - I mean if you want to shoot more robots, sure, but it felt very unfulfilling. There were many other islands that clearly had structures on them, but were inaccessible - water more than thigh deep was an invisible wall. The Final Count for this game is 6/10. It was enjoyable, but lacked variety and depth, and far too much of what you found was dur to RNG, and you frequently got the same weapons and oft-unused items over and over.

A sequel to an amazing game. It drowned the original amazing and wonderfully dark premise under shooter mechanics, mob spam and overall, it felt like and was the same four chapters over and over again. The first effect I felt of this was that I stopped reading the pages, stopped caring at all about the story and stopped being invested at all in any of the characters. The repetition and difficulty in making progress utterly smothered my enthusiasm and ultimately, smothered any fun I was trying to have. It felt lazily written and created. Why a story about a loop in time? Why make it so that you had to get pages for upgrades? Why just throw mobs and mobs and mobs at every turn? I gave up. I stopped believing there was any end to it all. I found myself counting the seconds to being utterly overrun by endless mob spam and returned to whatever save point I had shambled over to. Final Score: 3/10. They introduced a small handful of new characters that never developed and never felt like anything other than talking cardboard. It ground my love of the series into fine paste.

This stands as the finest inheritor of the Metroidvania 16-bit world I've ever played. The pulsing synthwave soundtrack, the wonderful visuals and interesting mechanics and weapons will keep you working and exploring for hours. I am sure once you've discovered all this place has to offer, you could speed run it, but why? Immerse yourself in the action and breathtaking designs - you will feel that you must earn access to your savepoints. Bring your mind for strategy and be mobile and adaptive at all times - for this wonderful place will smash the unwary!

This is the first of the trilogy of atmospheric horror games, though on release, Black Plague was made the final game, until it wasn't and Requiem was released. The hard lessons about gameplay, physics, combat were learned by the time they made Amnesia some years later, but you can clearly see the clunkiness and the often very poor direction that made the Penumbra series so skin-peelingly irritating and annoying to play. I could not finish them. I could barely even get anywhere in them, which saddens me. This was Frictional Games' first release - and that is what must be understood, and for my own part, avoided.