Recent reviews by Blenderhead

An unexpected but excellent mashup of Ultima and Typing of the Dead, wrapped in the aesthetics of Young Frankenstein.

The real strength of this game is its writing. It nails the Shrek style of lampooning old stories without ever *quite* reaching the level of self-referential irony that a lot of media going for this presentation falls for. It always uses just enough restraint to make a game that is very funny also feel internally cohesive. The combat is chaotic and the minigames are fun, but it's the overall *style* of Cryptmaster that puts it over the top.

Note: I played this game extensively on Steam Deck, but I used a Bluetooth keyboard. I can't speak to the effectiveness of the controller experience.

A compelling premise ruined by a terrible control scheme.

The gimmick is that you're searching videos via words in their subtitles. The problem is, there is no button to go to the front of the clip. You have to manually rewind it at a maximum of 3x speed. But there's more! These are local copies of Skype calls, meaning you'll need to piece videos together based on their overlap to get the whole conversation. Which means you will spend roughly 50% of your in-game time watching videos rewind at 3x speed.

There is allegedly a mod that adds a few controls, but it's not on ModDB or NexusMods. After 45 minutes, I gave up.

Skip this one. Her Story and Immortality are both better.

This game spends 6 hours getting you to love these poor, doomed kids and 1 saying goodbye.

Pretty far outside my usual wheelhouse, I was drawn in by the very Millennial feeling that your life is ending in a time when everyone told you it would be beginning for real. This game is charming all the way through, and the production values are much higher than I expected (barring a section that's done like a visual novel for artistic reasons, the whole game is fully animated and voice-acted). The rhythm game mechanics are probably the weakest aspect, but they're perfectly serviceable.

One caveat. If you've ever sworn off a game for being too woke or too progressive, skip this one.

A little bit of God of War 2018 mixed up with a little bit of The Witcher 3.

This is my pick for most underrated game of 2024. Combat feels good and the story feels better. It has a, "wide linear," style world a la GoW. Combat is soulslite (rechargeable flasks, lock on, light and heavy attacks, parries, dodgerolls, but no stamina bar or dropping souls on death), but you can hot-swap between two characters with a different array of abilities. The story is a supernatural mystery about why an extremely powerful and *extremely angry* ghost seeks to destroy the New England town of New Eden in the late 17th century. The writing is quite good, especially the side quests that revolve around determining who is haunting the villagers of New Eden, why, and how to put them to rest.

Minor content warning: the first few hours of the story deal pretty brutally with the sudden death of a spouse. Just something to keep in mind if that's too heavy a topic.

This game is boring. It's a watered-down version of Dawn of War 2, in the less interesting Warhammer setting. Gameplay mostly revolves around the AI sneaking around your defenses to capture territory behind your front line, forcing you to split up your army to manage their disruption instead of doing the stuff that's actually fun in RTS.

Make peace with the idea that you're going to have to use a guide. I think that the Shadow Realm blessings were meant to encourage exploration, but they do the opposite in practice; if you miss any, you're going to get crushed by the next boss you run into, so just use a guide to make sure you find them all. The best example I can give is that I found myself hard stuck on Rellena upon discovering that she had a combo that could zero me and took less time to execute than the animation for the Blasphemous Blade's skill. Meaning that using it could kill me instantly. The end result is a mechanic that makes the game *difficult* but not *challenging.* It's not demanding you to be skillful, everything just has really big numbers. The map is constructed in such a way that trying to explore it organically *will* leave you stuck, unable to figure out how to reach the next biome.

With that caveat, Shadow of the Erdtree is more Elden Ring. From seems to have taken criticisms of the base game to heart. Boss quantity is down and quality is up, so there's no more encountering a boss you've killed twice already every hour or so. Things that were present in the Dark Souls games but curiously absent from Elden Ring, like a Talisman that slowly recharges your FP and a catalyst that works for either kind of magic, appear here.

Elden Ring is a game I've replayed several times and plan to do so again. Shadow of the Erdtree is one of the DLCs that you progress far enough to get the items you want, then head back to the base game. It's *almost* good, but the Original Sin of the Shadow Realm blessings infect many of the expansions' systems and make it considerably worse than it could have been.

This game is too preoccupied with being difficult to be fun. A few maps in, you'll hit a hard wall. This wouldn't be a problem, except the insistence that everything be Iron Man (single save) all the time, makes even a single mistake punishingly difficult. Dark Souls was hard, but Dark Souls didn't make me redo 45 minutes to take another go at the boss.

The combination of high default difficulty, roguelike structure, and permanent Iron Man multiply each flaw into a package that's worse than the sum of its parts.

On the plus side, I'm not usually a video game soundtracks guy, but this one absolutely *rules.*

The perfect mix of deduction and RNG.

And I've gotta assume Daniel Mullens had a moment when he saw the credits.

The very definition of a C.

Mechanically, this game doesn't feel like a Soulslike. It feels like an extremely safe clone of Dark Souls 3. There are a handful of unique flourishes, but they're all minor. If Elden Ring hadn't come out, that might have been enough. The problem is that Elden Ring pushed the envelope a lot; not just by switching to an open world design, but by increasing player mobility. Pinocchio can't jump vertically, move faster than a jog, or run longer than his stamina bar says so. It makes combat and exploration feel very dated.

The setting suffers from having come out a year after Steelrising, another Soulslike with a virtually identical plot and setting: Revolutionary France/Victorian England has achieved a Golden Age on the backs of magitek robots, but they've rebelled and slaughtered the citizenry; the most human-like of the robots must now save mankind from its hubris. The Pinocchio angle feels like a subtraction from Steelrising's take, replacing a unique aspect of the story with a retread of a classic story. The Gepetto character being named....Gepetto reinforces the feeling of cold, corporate regurgitation that isn't helped by the CEO stating that they chose Pinocchio specifically because it's a story that's well known in the West.

The whole package just winds up feeling boring, like it's going through the motions. What unique quirks exist wind up sidelined before a game that looks and plays exactly like games I've played before. At least games like Code Vein made me feel like there was *something* going on, even if I didn't understand it. There's no art here, no feeling.

With the year we just had, there's not a lot of reasons to try out a game that is so determined to be competent and nothing more. Lies of P isn't a bad game, but it isn't a good one, either.

I love this game, but its insistence on being all Iron Man, all the time holds it back. The first thing you should do after installing is go into the options and make sure Local Alerts is enabled; the game is *punishingly* difficult with it off. TL;DR: this determines whether the game will ping you because a zombie deals damage if it's on the screen you're currently looking at. Towns get pretty busy, and not realizing that one guy is slapping a house until it explodes into a dozen more zombies is usually game over.

The campaign is a delight, mixing up gimmick maps and Hero missions that are a love letter to the Installation missions in StarCraft 1.

I enjoy the game, but it would have been a better one if there was an option for manual saving and loading instead of killing the process in task manager.