Recent reviews by SkeletonBow

This is a shorter game than games like The House of DaVinci, and quite a bit simpler. The puzzles were mostly fairly easy in comparison, nothing that will stump you for too long. It was ok but nothing amazing.

Those of you who miss super difficult brain teaser puzzle games from the 1990s like Myst, and Riven and other games in the series will particularly appreciate the intricate brain teasers in this game. The game is at times easy to figure out, and other times incredibly difficult with those 1990s sensibilities. It is not just about solving puzzles of differing levels of difficulty, but also very very carefully observing the environment around the puzzles with a very careful eye, looking for things that look out of place such as scuff marks or which could be a hidden mechanism or similar. I played through the game with the hint system disabled, and managed to figure it out in 8:05:46 of gameplay without guides etc. I can say that if you're like me and appreciate a difficult challenge, this game has some real brain crushing puzzles to solve within it that really make you think. Not for those looking for easy times for sure! Although the game does have a hint system for people looking for more casual experience I suppose, but I didn't use it so I'm not sure how much that might help.

All in all it was a very enjoyable game and I am looking forward to playing the sequels some time in the future.

Everything in this game is designed to steer you psychologically towards spending money on microtransactions in order to grow forward faster than the brutally slow way of getting it for free through grinding. Dozens of different in game currencies that all are geared towards this, and strongly encourage you to buy a bundle of coin rather than wait minutes to hours to do something slowly. It's just a coercive manipulative money making machine. I'm just playing it 100% Free2Play as a curiosity about just how bad predatory micro-transaction practices are in the gaming market and... well.. wow... just wow. :)

Great game, wide variety of weapons, decent story, and unique graphical style.

Pretty good hack n slash ARPG that has made a solid footing for itself.

A fun and also sometimes frustrating group survival game. Takes some time to really learn how to play, and the game is somewhat unforgiving at first. It is a game that grows on you the more you play it, and learn its intricacies.

The classic Max Payne game, this is where it all started. Dark story, great plot, fun action, what's not to love here. The original gaming Bullettime mechanic. Really enjoyed it!

This game is a fantastic remake of Half-Life, staying relatively true to the original story, feel and vibe, while presenting it in a somewhat improved overall design. It retains 1990's old-school retro sensibilities, not hand-holding you or pointing you in the right direction, leaving you to figure things out on your own, something lost over the years in game development. The dialogue is humourous and seems quite fresh, with the original voice actors I presume as they mostly sound the same. The graphics are significantly improved but retail just enough retro aesthetic to remind you where the game came from, rather than being a complete rewash with modern GPU accoutrements which would be rather unnecessary for a title of this nature. I'm writing this while at level 12 out of 20, so I haven't seen the whole game yet, but what I have played so far has been quite enjoyable, and brings back those fond memories of the Black Mesa Research Facility back in the late 1990s.

Submerged was a fun little diversion I picked up yesterday for $1.99 CAD on sale as I liked the game's art and the concept of the story sounded interesting to me. Overall it was a fun game which I played right through to completion and 100% achievements just for the heck of it as I wanted to see the whole story unfold, which is told in the form of pictographs you discover in game as secret items.

This is very much an exploration game with light puzzle solving in terms of how you go about climbing the buildings to find all of the secret items and the survival cache to progress the story. It was an enjoyable game, but does involve a lot of climbing which some have suggested can get a bit repetitive. My only complaint was once you find a survival cache on the top of a building, if you open it you are instantly taken to a cut scene and returned back to the central home base in the game, so if you didn't find all of the secret items on that building you have to go back to it and climb the building a second time. I'd recommend not activating the survival caches until you're absolutely sure you cleared the rest of a building unless you don't mind coming back later.

I do kind of wish the game had some under water exploration as well, but sadly it didn't. It was a short game but a nice relaxing filler game where you don't have to worry about dying or ammunition etc.

Rating 70/100

The very slow moving highly linear nature of this game made it rather tedious. The story is delivered through a combination of short visual flashback videos, and a voice that comes over a loudspeaker. What's quite frustrating is that whenever a cut scene or loudspeaker narrative is on the game takes over control of your mouse and does not give you back control until a good 15-20 seconds AFTER the scene ends, opting instead to do a completely unnecessary and seemingly random very slow camera pan as if it adds some kind of artistic value or something. It doesn't, it just makes you scream GIVE ME BACK CONTROL!

The majority of the puzzles are mediocre at best, and often far over complicated than necessary, requiring you to do things that are very non-intuitive to say the least. Near the end of the story it becomes increasingly difficult to remotely guess what the next thing is that you need to do, and it leaves you criss-crossing back and forth across the underground bunker the game takes place in, basically like a sort of unnecessary fetch quest.

The rooms in the bunker are shaped in such a way that they would overlap each other in real 3D space if you were to try to construct the bunker in real life. I take it that each room was designed individually and not part of a real structure, since the game teleports you from one room to the next rather than the real time movement mechanics of a first person shooter for example. This has an immersion breaking feel to me when moving between the hallway to the conference room to the office for example. Suspension of disbelief like this is necessary in many areas of the game. It's common in fictional works such as games or TV/movies, but when it's completely unnecessary and just due to carelessness it shows.

I like games with challenging and even difficult puzzles, and I've solved such games as Myst, Riven entirely and without using any walkthroughs, hints or cheats. Those games were difficult but fun, even when it took days to solve a puzzle in them. This game just isn't very fun however, it's just tedious and boring.