Recent reviews by vfig

Diary: The case file seems inscrutable as I peruse it. Maybe I am holding it wrong. That something lies within is obvious, but meaning is slow to glean. The feeling is of being stuck, mired in a dim mid-century English office, manipulating the electronic dials of a machine not dissimilar to the Voight-Kampff device. I keep reading, eagerly. The demonstration period ended abruptly on the fifth day, but the time passed by almost before I noticed it. It grasped my mind and did not let go until the end. I want to know more.

Unfortunately for my eyesight it occupied just a small portion of my display screen, isntead of the whole; my eyesight would have appreciated an enlargement.

It feels incredibly complete in conception, with depths to pursue among the written words. I only wish it might have employed Nigel Carrington to narrate, instead of requiring my poor verbal performance.

I am enjoying the pieces of what Abermore could have been, but that takes patience, imagination, and a whole lot of forgiveness. This game is much too broken to be released to paying audiences like this. It starts with bad framerates and slows down over the course of a mission to an unplayable slideshow of 5fps. Level geometry is missing walls and ceilings. Clipping out of the level is commonplace. Lights dont work. AIs fail at pathfinding. I had the Y axis of my mouselook go wild and then eventually lock up. The UI is plagued with constant full screen flashes of broken polygons. I havent had a single session that wasnt deeply broken.

But in among all that, and despite the stealth systems being rudimentary to the point of bad, there is something at the core of this game. I am enjoying the light touch weird worldbuilding in the quests and npcs, and in the moments between the game's brokenness I find myself liking what they were going for. Not what they actually produced, mind you, just what I can see in it.

Cultist Simulator starts off really strong: it's mysterious, it's exciting. There's so much going on at once, and so many mechanics to explore and try to understand, and the prose is delicious as expected. All while the music sets the perfect tone. This is the game at its best.

But if you survive beyond that, once you understand the systems that threaten you and learn how to counteract them, it becomes a grind. A really, really long grind. In my case, a seventy-hour grind because, unsatisfied with the "standard Enlightenment ending", I kept searching for the true ending, the path to Glory--which I am now led to believe doesn't even exist in the game at this point. But even before that point, the game requires specific items and actions to advance your character, and does such a poor job of conveying how to do so that you'll either be stuck, frustrated for hours, or you'll have to resort to searching forums.

I had a lot of fun with this game at the start, and by blind luck managed not to die at all. So this seventy-hour run is the only one I've played. I understand there are more character roles that mix up the early game more. I think the game is probably more fun if you fail more, and I wish I had. But I can't recommend it based on the experience I actually got.

It'll only take you about an hour to play through Verde Station, but it's a good hour. You're sole crewmember of an isolated space station that grows trees. Trees grow very slowly and don't need much looking after, so naturally you have a lot of time on your hands. Take your time to look around and interact with everything.

Verde Station is a great little game clearly made with a lot of love.

Mud, mud, glorious mud! There's nothing quite like it for cooling the blood. This is true even when you're winching your thoroughly bogged Kamaz out of a flooded hole in a forest track. Spintires is one of the most relaxing games I know. It's incredibly satisfying to drive trucks around, slowly, for hours.

The game starts off very promising: zero-g movement through the beautiful wreckage of a space station, trying to conserve oxygen for both breathing and propellant.

But it rapidly devolves. The architecture of the space station is incoherent, uninteresting, and repetitive. The few sections that stand out are those that make you clumsily dodge incongrous dangerous moving parts (often instakilling), made worse by the lack of intuitive physics in your movement. Your objective is to go to a distant part of the station, push a button, return to the center and push another button—repeated four times.

There are bits of story—some of it revealed automatically through audio logs, and more scattered through collectible items and computer terminals; but I (appropriately, I thought) was focusing on survival and escape, so missed nearly all of it.

Adr1ft tries to include believable space physics, survival systems, and a compelling story, but fails to scratch more than the basic surface of these aspects. The result is disappointing, tedious, and at times frustrating. But it does look gorgeous. If you have a Rift, it might be worth a purchase just for the space vistas; if not: avoid.

Twenty minutes spent following a narrator through a series of button-pushing exercises that the designers very obviously thought funny, but I found boring.

When I'm too stressed, I put on my headphones and Audiosurf my way through my music library. It really helps.

If you've previously played and enjoyed Dreamfall, and want to know what happens next, get this. If you haven't, I expect this game will feel a little muddled and directionless. Two chapters in out of five, and there's no hook yet—the main reason for me to continue is to see how the cliffhangers from Dreamfall are resolved.

A rather lightweight an uninteresting game. Neither the planetary empire management nor the turn-based spaceship combat provide interesting challenges. Shallow and bland.