Recent reviews by |PeleQ|

This game is a gift that keeps on giving.
The developer has stated publicly many times before "The game will not receive new content from now on" and such, yet we still somehow find ourselves receiving new things every now and then. New story events, new scares and bodies etc. But hey - I ain't complaining! Sign me the f**k up!

The actual game though?
As the title says - you're working in a mortuary, shocker. Except - embalming bodies is sort of a secondary objective, because the scene (or the body, perhaps) is taken by a demon, and your job is to repel it.
The gameplay revolves around you doing the embalming activities, that's sort of your bread and butter, however the main point of it is for you to get preoccupied with doing something mundane, and that's when the scares hit you, and boy - they hit you good!
Along with the embalming of corpses, you will have to do some investigating in order to find not only the haunted body, but also the identity of the demon occupying it.
This is a great mixture for a horror game, with an already unsettling setting (surrounded by dead bodies, essentially) combined with a mundane task that you have to repeat, and the well crafted, fairly scarce paranormal events create this perfect mixture that works in the games favour very well.

I really, really loved the jumpscares in this game because they mostly just happen around you and stick around either behind you or in the corners of your eyes, just watching you until you look at them. Some of them are more on the subtle side and others are more in-your-face and it's very easy to overlook some of them, which i appreciate a lot personally, because it doesn't feel forced at all if the game allows you to miss stuff. God forbid you happen to be recording and watch the footage back to realise that for the longest time there was a demon or a shadow somewhere in the corner just watching you for A WHILE, which adds to the overall creepiness for me personally.

Voice acting is great here, music is fairly scarce with a few exceptions but I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing, sometimes less is more. The general audio here is on a very high level, with all sorts of disturbing sounds happening all around, constantly having you on edge.

One thing worth noting - the cutscenes use Mocap technology which in my opinion look great, but it kinda works against each other, if that makes sense? The game doesn't look bad by any means, however the animations feel a little detached, a little out of place because they look "too good" for their environment, and at that they can look a little janky. I do believe that's the dev's first time using mocap technology, so it can only get better from here.

Loved the game! If you enjoy subtle scares like that - you're going to love it too!

This one's a no from me chief.
I played the demo more than the full game, hated the way it played but I continued playing because I saw some potential here.
In the full game, I noticed not much has changed, noticed the horrendous grind and just gave up.

I'm not new to grinding but there is nothing that would drive me to play this game.
Yes, there is some nice character creation here and the animations are alright but... Idk, it just feels lazy?
First off, going with the theme of character creation - despite that, the viewmodel hands are always the same regardless of your gender or skin - of course.
The maps are fairly nice actually and they have some fun little secrets around them. The jumpscares however? Jesus fu****g Christ... So, there's some solid scares here, like the ball being kicked around in the corridor, or TV suddenly turning on and a scary girl comes out crawling from it WAAAH so scary! Except said ghost events have literally NOTHING to do with the ghost itself. It's like you're hunting for a ghost in a museum of jumpscares. A girl comes out of the TV or some baby cries in the crib, but you're hunting for some elderly dude or some other mutated monster covered in eyes.
The events aren't even organic. Like, it's not the fact that you have an invisible entity walking around the map in real time interacting with this and that, so everything feels authentic, nope - all events are fully scripted and activate around the player, which exactly the opposite of what makes Phasmophobia really creepy.

Oh yes, the grind - imagine spending HOURS upon hours to grind money to unlock new locations, having to replay the same maps over and over again, with the same scripted events playing every time. On top of it, there's a very limited amount of maps anyway.

Lastly, the hunting itself - there is no hiding here. Once the hunt starts, you have to run for your life and hope that you're either far away enough from the ghost, or that you're quicker than it, or at least quicker than your friends are. That is, unless you have an item. Yup, no hiding at all, your survivability is entirely dependent on whether you have an item or not.

Ghost Exorcism INC was a massive turnaround for me!
Initially I took it for another Phasmo-copy, and of course it inspires itself with Phasmo very heavily but that's not always a bad thing.
Initially this game came out in a very different state, and jumping in it for the first time I was actually pretty creeped out, but it quickly came to me that the game is absolutely ruthless and the combination of assets and overall jank made me not want to play.

Eventually a big patch came that changed the game up quite a bit. It's still janky, it's still full of assets but the gameplay wasn't as brutal anymore and it actually became somewhat good - still punishing but not ruthless.
It's absolutely not on the level of Phasmophobia however it's pretty fun in it's own way and definitely fairly creepy.
If you're looking for something a little different and don't mind a little jank, try this game. It has enough content to feel unique but not alien

Cheap af.

There's no tension in this game and everything relies heavily on loud sounds. Constant screaming loud enough to silence my own depression, weird ghost events... Everything here is just SO over exaggerated and loud...
There is no tension, just ACTION ACTION ACTION! It's like a ghost hunting game made in Hollywood, directed by Michael Bay or something. It's like a Kyle on 5 Monster energy drinks cooked up this game with some assets that have nothing to do with each other.
There's some okay looking ghosts here, though judging by the amount of assets I highly doubt they are original. Then, there's this Chernobyl baby in a gas mask, for some reason? I guess gas masks = scary, babies = scary so therefore baby in a gas mask = SCARY with a big fu****g S?

This is a game for youtubers, you know - folk who make a living by exaggerating their emotions, so a loud game like this is perfect.

I have not played this game for a long, long while, only really giving it a try on release, so perhaps things have changed. Idk, this game didn't interest me enough to really bother even checking, with it's lack of any real depth, and considering even youtubers forgot about it after farming clicks on release - I'd say nothing changed, probably.

Oh, the menu music absolutely slaps though!

I can't believe I've never played Visage up until this point! Yes, it's another classic in the genre but it always eluded me somehow. I've had very high expectations going into this, considering all the good I hear about this game - easy way to set myself up for a failure, however I must say that the game delivered and was an absolute blast, even though it tripped hard at the very end for me.

Visage tells a tragic story and doesn't hold itself back from sensitive topics.
The atmosphere here is superb and scares are easily some of the best I've seen to date. I think the last time I had genuine chills going down my arms must have been back in the days when I was just getting into horror, but this game has achieved in delivering this utter horror for me.
I loved the setting for the game - a massive house with randomly generated scares that may or may not happen, all of them really well crafted too, absolutely loved that. Another great thing about the scares here is that they're not overused and the devs clearly knew when to utilise them and when not to, weaponising the tension and your own imagination against you.
The game doesn't hold your hand in terms of the objectives and only gives you some hints via a specific item(s) and I think it's a very clever, creative and really immersive way of doing it because it fits into the game, doesn't feel out of place and always gave me this eerie feeling of "I've seen this place before" and overall it's a very creepy way of doing it, even if there's really nothing creepy about it.

Now, I can't really tell if it's an artistic choice, budget limitations or what - but the cutscenes here, I could never take them seriously. For one reason or another, your character just doesn't have arms, but that's not even the problem for me, because it gets really silly when the protagonist is just waving his head around inspecting every item literally with his face, going around every angle around an item, getting uncomfortably close to items like he's just sniffing them out with his eyes. It's not a big issue but I just found it hilarious and it took me out of the experience a bit, feeling like a parody at times.
Another thing that I found problematic was that in certain chapters there was zero clarity on the danger. Often times I found myself interacting with the "visions" getting close to them as much as the invisible walls allowed me to as soon as I understood that the ghosts don't always have bad intentions and wanted to show me things. Following that logic I walked up to certain creatures just to get instantly killed, with no indication of danger or hostility even. There was no chase, no music, no tension, and I would simply die after I followed a creature into a room. My fault I suppose, but it felt a bit cheap and once again kind of took me out of the experience.
Another small issue I had here was with certain interactions. Usually, everything you do in the game that requires an interaction, would play a cutscene. Up until one point. I think maybe twice in the game you are required to abandon that mindset and just magically know that for those maybe two specific events the game will now require you to interact with things physically. There was a point in the game where you had to move a barricade away, you click a button and a cutscene plays. Then other time, game expects you to physically ram your forehead into a shelf and push it out of the way. Thankfully there is a subtle hint here, but why? It's nothing crazy, but it annoyed me a little bit, because the game teaches you the whole time that whatever you do = cutscene. Suddenly you're just meant to magically come to a different conclusion. Like I said - it's not a tragedy because it's not a huge open world game, so sooner or later you will learn. It was just a weird experience.
Given that your character has no hands, the items you're "holding" happen to float in front of you, nothing terrible, except you need to get used to the fact that they DO in fact actually float around there physically! It wasn't unusual for me to be in the middle of running away from a ghost, wanting to get past a door which was open, obstructing my way, I would hastily close the door and try to run around them without waiting for them to fully close, then having an item I was holding hang onto the door and holding it open, preventing me to go further, almost like your hoodie gets caught on a door in real life. The manly scream I let out that day was truly to die for, and Dolores seemed to agree :)

I mentioned the game tripped for me near the end. That's right, I enjoyed the game a lot, however after finishing up the 3 main chapters, I got thrown back to the house with a gentle nudge in the right direction. So I spent some time investigating, collected some things here and there until I couldn't find more. I came back the next day with a pair of fresh eyes and... Spent 120+ minutes just walking around and looking... Ironically, I kept on discovering fu****g easter eggs but for the life of me I couldn't push the main story further! At that point I got tired of looking, nothing was happening, and only got irritated. I got stuck here and there before but it was never that bad. Had to look up a guide and realised that there's two very small things that I have overlooked. Being stuck is one thing however other thing is the fact that at this point in the game nearly nothing was happening anymore, so it bore me to death.
That's when I realised - and I know I'm just being grumpy at this point, but it felt kind of insulting how I would miss an interaction with a wooden plank because it was a shade darker than the rest, and the developers couldn't make sure to gently grab your attention with a squeaky noise even as you happen to walk over it, but then have me push a button or something, and have the audacity to grab my face and autoaim my eyes over at an object that I knew would very obviously move upon the activation, like I'm playing on console or something.

Despite all this negativity, it was a great game! Very scary and atmospheric. This one is an absolute classic and you should play it if you still have not.

I like this game, I really do.
Texas Chain Saw Massacre has a great foundation, very similar to the beloved Friday the 13th: The Game, with a very unique twist in the asym genre where there is more than one killer actively hunting you, all doing different things and different abilities to utilise, as well as some being better to keep up with in chase than others. Mechanically it plays similar to F13 with a big map and multiple objectives available for victims to do, sprinkled with some RNG.
Graphics and atmosphere here are gorgeous, very well complimented with the animations for both the victims and family members.

All this is even more underlined with a fantastic audio design ranging from immersive, film-like music, various grunts, screaming and other voice lines in the game.
Overall, very immersive experience, that will often feel like a literal TCM movie!

Family gameplay is heavily oriented toward patrolling the few objectives around the massive maps and working together in a chase, because victims are a lot more agile than the family. It's a nice and fun approach.
As victims, for some reason I can't shake off the feeling like I'm playing a PuppetCombo game :D I mean it in a good way. It's a very cinematic, film-like experience. One where you don't always get a good glimpse of the killer, hide around the bush as they walk around taunting you with some blood-chilling lines that fit in their character very well. All this time a chainsaw being constantly revved in the background, mixed with screaming. It's a thing of beauty!

Although, a thing I need to bring up - for some reason whatever GunMedia touches is prone to 2 ailments:
1: Broken a*s voice-chat
(find some player utterly annoying because they keep open-mic or perhaps got some angry russian kid in your team screaming throughout the game, telling you his life-story in his mother-tongue that SURELY the rest of the world can speak fluently? Too bad, because muting people in games touched by Gun's hand is purely cosmetic for some f*****g reason)
2: Those games always die.

In regards to the latter - majority of the time you're just looking for a lobby, or in a lobby waiting for people to join. In the actual game, who's to say you won't happen to die first in the 2 minutes from the start? You may, you may not, and then back to the lobby you go. Issue not really applicable to family members naturally, and just to clarify - it do be like this sometimes, from time to time you will die quick, and that's okay, the issue here is the enormous amount of waiting you have to do, and trust me when I say that people are very quick to take their leave, nothing new for an asym I suppose, just sucks to have a perfectly fine, immersive game be completely ruined by entitled people.
You can really tell they had issues actually getting people into the game, given they were forced to put on restrictions on people for dodging lobbies before games even start. That's sad.

Now, despite F13 having an Offline mode, TCM simply doesn't have it, so there's like NO preservation or future-proofing this game. If servers die one day (just like F13) or you simply get bored of people and would like to just chill out against bots - you can't do that. One day you just won't be able to play this game at all :V

Another BIG thing I wanted to talk about, something that pushed me away HARD from this game, is how competitive it is. In an interview with the developers (or publishers, can't remember) before the game released, we were assured this is not going to have a competitive approach, but apparently that was just a straight up lie?
I played TCM for a while when it released, eventually took a break because I was mentally exhausted from the constant competition due to the nature of the game and the mechanics, and that break lasted for far longer than I anticipated, and I just couldn't bring myself to return despite missing the general theme of the game and it's gameplay.
To give you an example: why the need for global voice-coms? Why the need for removal of proxy-chat? Part of the fun in F13 was the proximity chat, and the devs recognised it, literally saying that they quickly came to realise how much fun the community was having with the proximity chat. Now, they completely removed walkie-talkies, removed proxy-chat so that no victim can talk to a family member (for whatever reason?) and now both sides are just constantly in each others ears. It makes sense for the family I suppose, but victims? It removes a lot of the horror...
Victims (characters) will talk to each other when they come close together, greeting each other and all, almost oblivious to the fact that we can telepathically communicate with each other the whole time. Oh, and you can also communicate just fine with people who either escaped or died just fine too. Like, it's stupid, doesn't make sense and takes away from the experience, as well as takes away from the casual aspect of the game and pushes it toward the more competive side.
It's simply not the experience I was told I was going to get.

Overall, a great game that's sadly going to die :(

Life is Strange: True Colors had me a little mixed.
The general plot here, I found not too interesting. The reason I kept playing was because, well - first of all, the plot wasn't awful by any means, and secondly - I think these had to be some of the best characters in Life Is Strange series to date. Not only did they feel very likeable, the script here was great, conversations were on point, voice acting followed through and - DAMN! The facial animations got a SERIOUS upgrade here! From the very intro of the game, up until the end of the game, along with the DLC - the facial animations and expressions were just superb and it's very easy to see on the first glance. This feature seriously gives life to all the characters, ridding of the more empty expressions that made the characters look very artificial, AND it seriously underlines their beauty. I was never so much in love with Steph before :D

The music here was truly beautiful and, especially after the DLC - I found myself looking up the whole playlist on YouTube.

Despite not really enjoying the general plot of the game, the feels, music and the characters is why I keep playing these games for, and I got the whole packet here. I already discussed both the music and characters. I wanted the feels, and the feels I got.
It's a lovely story, albeit a little bitter-sweet, but that's a beautiful mixture in my humble opinion.
The end of the game was very emotional, a little more on the dramatic side, but I liked it.

This one was a little bit different, because you already know what's going to happen... Yet, it's still very engaging. It's very interesting to get the opportunity to meet the characters that we only ever only heard being talked about before. Going through the memories and all that, finding out their relationships and views, their struggles, sharing their moments... Before the Storm has some very beautiful and touching moments, it was a pleasure getting to experience them.

It's all really bitter-sweet in many ways, firstly - because of course you already know where this all going. Second, getting to know characters from the side you never got to know them from, only knowing them for their bad sides, but here - you meet them before they all turn hostile and spiteful. It's a very weird feeling, but a rather welcome one.

I can't really say much more about this. If you enjoyed the 1st Life is Strange, you're going to like this one too if you'd like to experience some of the things that were previously left to our imagination. It's funny, it's dark, it's sad, it's bitter-sweet, it's touching. It's a piece of story.

I liked this one much more than I anticipated.
I feared the main characters would not be very likeable or interesting but... It was a fun ride, actually.
Sean felt fairly relatable, where Daniel was a bit of a brat at times, but we had our heartfelt moments at the end of the day. Other characters appearing in the game are mostly forgettable but I didn't find them boring in any way or anything, simply just not on the same level as other certain characters in the series. Though, there are some characters that I liked, but won't mention because spoilers :O

The story here and the general adventure was surprisingly engaging and fun, even touching at times. There's a lot of different things going on with very different places, so it's always fun as you're always on the road.
Life is Strange 2 adapts this interesting idea of *not* giving the player any special powers. Instead, you almost feel like a companion for the main character, taking care of them and trying your best to guide them the right direction, trying to make the best decisions with what you have, and saving them from trouble when their plot armour wears thin. It's new, it's interesting.

The game felt reactive to my decisions, like they really mattered, even some of the small things, like when you meet a girl playing guitar, I initially fell in love with the tune and her accompanying singing. I didn't expect her to react if I stood long enough to reach the conclusion, but to my surprise - she did in fact comment on that! and unlike the first game where you get to rewind the time to the complete start of the scene every time, here you only got one chance, so it was a very different experience.

Life is Strange 2 ventures to explore very interesting topic, ones that are close to my heart, like feeling lost as a child, not knowing how to control and direct your emotions, loss, poor parenting, substance abuse, romance... All that, when trying your best to offer a smile and guidance to your little brother.

In regards to music - nothing too crazy here, but there were some solid tracks and singing.

I don't know what else to say here other than the fact I really enjoyed playing through this! I admit that it squeezed a couple of tears out of me, but they're the good kinda tears, the feelings kinda tears :)

I don't really have much to say about this game in all honesty.
I really enjoy DONTNOD's games, and I feel like this one sort of just "happened"? I don't think I've seen anyone talk about this game as loudly as people usually talk about "a new LIS game coming out" and I kinda see why.

I'll start off with saying it was fairly interesting. The general plot for the game had me fairly hooked on but... That was really it. The characters felt uninteresting and lackluster, one of the characters pretty much *heh* spoiled me the game somehow? You know, like when a character in game starts giving you the speech of "When this is all over, me and you are going to do *this* and *that* and it's going to be so great!" and you just instantly know "Ehh... You're gonna die, then" yup - it was pretty much just that, just with different words.
Another thing that irritated me was the main antagonist, who remains unknown for the majority of the game. Once you discover who they are, it just feels... Wrong? Uninspired? Like they just woke up one day and had a change of heart and went "Grrr, I hate the world! I'm going to be bad now, grrr!" With hardly any reason behind it all. It didn't even feel in character at all.
The main protagonist seemed like an interesting character, albeit not very memorable.

Now, either I'm too spoiled with the great music that usually comes with LIS games or Twin Mirror didn't do a good job at all in this department, because I s**t you not - I can't remember a single track from this game, when usually I have to hop on youtube after finishing a LIS game and look for a couple of tracks. Bit of a disappointment, because I figured even if the game itself was mediocre at worst - I probably would find some good music here, but this wasn't the case.

This one was a miss for me chief. Initially it is interesting but, it's just kinda meh. It's not awful by any means, but you're not missing out by avoiding it.