Atk reviews video games

A Plague Tale: Requiem 🔗

TL;DR: 👍
Available on: Steam, GOG
Reading time: ~8 minutes
Review published on: 2024/10/13

A Plague Tale: Requiem is an excellent sequel to A Plague Tale: Innocence that continues to follow the plight of the de Rune family, expanding on the gameplay to bolster its strengths and address some of its predecessor’s shortcomings. The story answers a lot of outstanding questions you may have had from the previous game by delving into the history of the Macula, you get new companions that help Amicia & Hugo grow as individuals while creating new gameplay opportunities, and everything comes to a head in the quest for a solution to Hugo’s suffering.

One unfortunate thing to get out of the way quickly was the awkward transition of character appearances and voice actors coming from the first game. Of the four returning characters – Amicia, Hugo, Beatrice, and Lucas – Hugo & Amicia look noticeably altered, and Beatrice & Lucas got new English voice actors. This isn’t quite the same level of jarring as Grindelwald’s unexplained makeover in Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, but it was still unwelcome, especially considering how small the returning cast is. Once you get used to it though there’s nothing to complain about: the graphics are an upgrade, and the voice actors are by no means inferior to the originals.

Speaking of things that aren’t inferior, A Plague Tale: Requiem hits it out the park again with its gorgeous visuals, whether you’re looking at a lush vista or crawling through a forgotten crypt. The main improvement I wanted to see coming from the prequel was a greater variety of environments, with an increased number of ‘happy’ ones (something you basically don’t see following the second chapter). The game hits the nail on the head here, with grand castles, expansive vineyards, lively towns in festival, and intricately ornamented places of worship. It’s truly a sight to behold, and there are some wonderful landscapes for the make-your-own wallpaper enthusiasts (and the game once again includes a photo mode to facilitate this). If you don’t mind some minor out-of-context spoilers, Flurdeh has an excellent YouTube channel for capturing the artistry of video games, and I think you’ll agree with my claims if you watch their entry for A Plague Tale: Requiem: youtu.be/gzPrxW0MM-I.

The story is a direct continuation set only a few months after the first game, opening as the characters draw near to their new safe haven. What I appreciated throughout the game’s runtime was that while their overarching goal was clear: find a cure for Hugo and prevent him from reaching the final threshold, the means to the end are simply hopeful guesswork. This feels both organic and makes the story harder to predict, as it could dramatically pivot depending on what lies in store at the end of each expedition. The narrative also has some pursuits that lead to a dead end, again leaving the player not feeling like there’s an ethereal hand guiding the story. Contrast this to Tomb Raider or Uncharted: the bad guys and the treasure are explained early on, and you consistently make direct progress towards the protagonist’s well-defined goal. Here the goal is trying to follow a vision Hugo has, and the characters are grasping at straws trying to find anything vaguely reminiscent to pursue.

The integration of the companions for the core cast is a returning feature that A Plague Tale: Requiem does far more with than its predecessor. Unlike in Innocence where Melie and Rodrick merely follow you around and have obvious points where you’re meant to use their abilities, Arnaud and Sophia have skills that apply to more situations or let you switch up playstyle, plus their outgoing dialogue really brightens up the mood. They also serve to remind you how disturbed and strange the De Rune family is when they recoil upon seeing Hugo influencing rats, or gawk seeing Alicia not bat an eyelid at killing soldiers. They’re excellent grounding anchors as well as surrogate parents that push forward Amicia & Hugo’s character growth.

The biggest change to gameplay made by the sequel was massively opening up stealth sections with a variety of routes and playstyles. Where I called A Plague Tale: Innocence more of a puzzle-oriented stealth game, Requiem breaks open the formula with a far greater extent of player expression, enabled in part by the more open environments. The game reinforces the player’s preferred playstyle by providing them with skills that are (mostly) relevant to the approach they choose. For example, taking a ‘true stealth’ approach (leaving everyone alive and interfering as little as possible) will unlock faster crouch walking and the ability to throw items further. One improvement I would have liked to see is a clearer indication of which actions count towards Prudence, Aggressive, or Opportunism. The terms are broad and open to interpretation, so having the feedback loop be clearer would have helped me work towards the perks I wanted. I respect the game’s dedication to an immersive/minimal HUD, but I still think this is doable even if it was just Lucas commenting on your actions when the system is first introduced in chapter two.

Having mentioned it, I would like to mention one caveat with true stealth I noticed. The playstyle makes it very impractical to get to a lot of the chests scattered throughout levels, which will accumulate to a significant amount of important resources you’re missing out on. I don’t have an immediate solution in mind for this: in my playthrough I just used Cheat Engine to award myself approximately as much scrap as would have been in the chests I saw, but wasn’t able to loot. I think any stealth game that offers or encourages a pure stealth approach should find a way to compensate the player for any opportunity cost of doing so.

To cover some other gameplay/combat changes, one deliberate omission from A Plague Tale: Innocence is Devorantis (the helmet remover). This functionality simply doesn’t exist in Requiem, forcing you to find more interesting means to kill armoured enemies, or just avoid them. This is a good change in my opinion, as Devorantis always felt very ‘video game-y’ – needing to exist to solve a gameplay problem, instead of having a place in the world – and its removal encourages you to improvise with more involved murder techniques using alchemy and/or rats. You do eventually get a crossbow which can be seen as the ‘one button’ solution to helmeted enemies, but ammo for it is scarce. Speaking of ammo supplies, a welcome quality of life change is that you no longer need to collect rocks, as Amicia always has them to hand if you need them. Pots can now be thrown with alchemical contents, so pot + Ignifer = incendiary grenade, which provides a temporary light source to repel rats, or can kill a guard or two. Close quarters combat has been added in a very fair way: Amicia can only kill unarmoured enemies outright, otherwise finishing someone off requires a rare consumable. You can still engage regular helmeted enemies with melee, however this only serves to temporarily stun them, instead of being a kill. Neither are a particularly viable stealth option as the ensuing kerfuffle makes a lot of noise and takes an uncomfortable amount of time – entirely reasonable considering you’re asking a teenage girl to overpower a grown-ass man. This keeps the game focussed around throwables and alchemical opportunism, which is its core identity after all.

Giving Hugo more rat-related abilities made complete sense for the sequel and were a welcome fun addition, but to me they felt underutilised. Apart from the set pieces that require using him, the only time I really made use of my rat powers was during chapter six when x-ray vision is first introduced, as the quarry is brutally hard to get through in true stealth even with that advantage. Maybe this was because I generally tried to stick to a pacifist approach, and therefore wasn’t looking for opportunities to use the rats, or perhaps there really weren’t many places you can use them. Either way, I would have liked to see them used more, and it would have been especially cool if Asobo found a way to incorporate them into puzzle sections. Similarly, the stress meter felt irrelevant except when it was used as a story mechanism once.

One area where A Plague Tale: Requiem let me down was in having more exciting and unique enemy design. The first chapter has you causing mayhem among a suspiciously cult-like group of beekeepers, and they look awesome. With woven masks obscuring their faces while they chase you down shouting and swinging axes, they are scary & intimidating, but more importantly new. I was so hyped for this novel design, but from the second chapter onwards I was playing against the same guards as the previous game. Yes, there are a couple new enemy variants which add to gameplay, but their appearance is still relatively plain and uninteresting, and every guard of a given type is essentially identical. I appreciate the game isn’t so far detached from reality we can have all manner of Eldritch horrors for enemies, but more variety would have been welcome. There are city guards, private mercenaries, a cult, and human traffickers, but if you take away the story, they’re all barely distinguishable recolours of the same models with different voicelines.

One gameplay change Asobo made to the sequel’s detriment is the unification of upgrade crafting materials into a single resource, scrap. I liked A Plague Tale: Innocence’s system with numerous separate resources that you needed to find relatively small quantities of. It was immersive and had the side effect of having you work towards multiple upgrades at once, since different upgrades would use different combinations of materials. Ditching all this in favour of small sacks that contain five or ten scrap is an objective regression in realism, and to me makes resource hunting less engaging. Scrap sacks placed out in the world now feel more like video game secrets than items that would have naturally been there that Amicia is taking advantage of. The recycling mechanic was an interesting idea (if you couldn’t carry more pots/knives, you can turn them into scrap), but the quantity of scrap returned is a fucking joke. The rarest resources in the game converting into (literally!) one or two scrap is absurd and barely worth doing, especially when this is a perk you had to invest in to unlock. As I said in my Eternights review, in singleplayer games developers should err on the side of things being overpowered, as even if they are that’s usually more fun than an underpowered mechanic. Give me thirty scrap for a crafting tool, and fifteen for pots & knives. It’s not going to break the game, and actually feels like a reward for players that manage to conserve these incredibly useful consumables. Looking beyond the recycling mechanic, a lot of the tier one/two upgrades don’t feel impactful, instead just serving as a stepping stone towards the third tier upgrade you actually want (e.g. being able to retrieve crossbow bolts, a super impactful and desirable upgrade).

I feel as though pacing has always been a challenge for Asobo, but in this game moreso than the last I definitely felt like the progress was sluggish at times. Both games feature a fair amount of “you see that landmark on the horizon? Yeah, you’re going there” which is fine, however there are times when these sections outstay their welcome, or you’ll arrive at the destination and nothing exciting happens, the story barely progresses, and now you need to get to another-more-different waypoint. Chapter 7 is a good example of this in my opinion – it’s a lot of gameplay with a miniscule amount of story progress until the chapter concludes. This having been said, the game breaks its own mould by having an open world section in Chapter 9! This is a fun change of pace, letting you control your party’s destination for a change, with lots of places for Amicia, Hugo, and Sophia to explore and loot. There’s an optional large-scale puzzle/mystery in this play space as well which is separate to progressing the story, for those that enjoy an unguided treasure hunt. Still on the subject of pacing, A Plague Tale: Requiem did catch me off guard with how quickly it ended. The story hits critical mass during Chapter 12 and then very rapidly rattles through the remainder of its numbers, up to the seventeen total (the same as the previous game). No one’s expecting all the chapters to take the same amount of time to complete, but I did not start my final day with this game thinking I was going to complete it. Then next thing I know I’m post-credits, having completed five chapters in under three hours and still mentally lagging behind how fast the story moved.

Overall then, A Plague Tale: Requiem is an easily worthwhile sequel for anyone who enjoyed the first game and wants more. It features better side characters and more open-ended gameplay through a wide variety of breathtaking environments, while elaborating on the history of the Macula and how it controls the de Rune family’s destiny. As gamers, we need to keep supporting AA studios like Asobo: they’re producing the quality of games we expect (but aren’t getting) from AAA giants, and that’s without any microtransactions, lootboxes, or subscription models. The game is well worth the asking price it hits while on sale, and frankly it’s not overpriced without a discount label either. (But of course this is Steam and sales exist, so why would you ever pay full price for something that’s not newly released?)

Eternights 🔗

TL;DR: 👍
Available on: Steam
Review published on: 2024/10/01

Eternights is the loveable awkward cousin of the Persona franchise that provides a downright outstanding experience considering the game was masterminded by only three people. It’s a far cry from perfect, absolutely, but if you love the social side of Persona games and maybe aren’t such a fan of JRPGs (hi hello, it’s me) then Eternights can absolutely scratch an itch for you, if only for a short while.

What immediately bowled me over playing the demo for Eternights was the level of cinematography being used to deliver the story dialogue. Eternights puts Persona’s static room shots to shame, taking full advantage of its 3D environments to pan, zoom, or crop in, plus using a variety of angles to keep things feeling engaging. And this doesn’t even come at the cost of proper cutscenes – the game still has those too! There are multiple animated cutscenes(!) and several in-engine ones as well. The frequency of these is definitely frontloaded to cement a good first impression, but regardless the creativity exercised by this three-person team exceeds that of a AAA studio here; Atlus had better be taking notes.

The main change moving from Persona to Eternights is the gameplay of the dungeon crawling sections. Persona games are classic JRPG turn-based weakness-exploiting battles, which Eternights entirely does away with in favour of being a hack ‘n’ slash (and no, it’s not similar to Persona 5 Strikers). You have a dodge roll (with a perfect timing mechanic), a sword with two different forms/movesets, four distinct abilities, a QTE-fest ultimate, and you also can request your allies to use their abilities to aid you in combat (e.g. healing, AoE crowd control, or damage). This is the sort of combat in games I really enjoy, however the implementation here is… subpar. The genre swap was what drew me to play this game before picking up Persona 3 Reload, but unfortunately combat is the weakest aspect of Eternights. Allow me to explain.

Dodging an enemy attack is dependent on you timing a button press with a prompt (warning noise + flash), instead of being i-frame or hitbox based. What this means is that if you press the roll button before or after the warning prompt such that your character visibly evades the attack, you will still get hit. What. I’m going to go as far as to say this is straight-up wrong and is never the correct choice for any game, and I like to think it’s self-explanatory as to why. You can get used to it, but this in combination with the usage of such blatant cues reduces the skill ceiling of Eternights dramatically. I understand not everyone wants a Souls-like – personally I think this game could do well as one – but I do think the difficulty here has been excessively diluted regardless.

Further to combat, the perk tree of Eternights is decidedly uninspired. There’s little meaningful choice as no mutually exclusive options/branches exist, and the majority of upgrades are just incremental improvements to abilities you already have. None of the options beyond the initial unlock of a skill altered how I played the game, and the numbers changes are so small they were hard to notice. In a singleplayer PvE experience I would always expect developers to err on the side of making perks or abilities too strong as this is often more fun than the opposite, but that’s not the approach Studio Sai took. I hope in the next game there are impactful playstyle-specific choices to be made, along with better balancing in general.

The final two issues with combat feed into each other: every enemy can be dealt with in moreorless the same way, and there isn’t a great amount of enemy variety. Winning a fight requires timing a single dodge roll, then you spam basic attacks until the enemy recovers, then use all your special moves that they can’t block, and then you wait for the next dodge opening to repeat. There’s no risk/reward consideration whether to go for an extra attack: either you’ve set yourself up correctly and have enough time, or you don’t. It doesn’t feel like enemies have any agency like they did in Lies of P; they never take charge of the fight – even bosses just take their punishment once you’ve dodged correctly (meanwhile Laxasia has a full combo after you stagger her). I think the critical mistake here was having a single perfectly timed dodge guarantee you a full combo – in Souls-likes you’d need to dodge multiple times to avoid the enemy’s complete combo to find an opening, or in other hack ‘n’ slashes the dodge doesn’t guarantee anything beyond you not taking damage.

Moving on from grilling the game’s combat then, I’ll briefly air a couple qualms I had with the story. It’s far from water-tight; if you wanted to critically analyse it would hold as much water as a sieve. I’m not saying it’s not enjoyable, but you just have to let it happen and not think too deeply about it. That having been said, some events really need more justification: when Sia magically appears and joins your party, no one really questions her or her motives, where she came from, how she survived until now, et. cetera. The other bit I didn’t like was the ending. The game very explicitly gets you to make a choice, and if you answer truthfully, you will probably also not enjoy the ending. Asking who your favourite girl is to then kill them felt spiteful and uncalled for. Either the game should select the girl you spent the most time with without asking you, or instead get you to pick who gets sacrificed (some story adjustments would be required to make that fit of course). Either would give far more impact to the ending, instead of being left feeling like the game is intentionally giving the finger to you. I’m not sure what Studio Sai were going for with the scannable QR code post-ending either, like why not include the video in the game? Instead, I got a real life quick time event to pull my phone out and scan the thing before it disappeared.

There’s a lot of tough love in this review (and I left out a fair number of more minor gripes), so I want to re-emphasise that how closely Eternights manages to capture the Persona series’ core values in spite of its diminutive team size is nothing short of a marvel, and Studio Sai should be immensely proud of what they’ve made here. With an increased focus on combat feel in the next entry, and hopefully the budget for a more fleshed out story, I am excited to see what comes next! For now though, Eternights is a comfortable recommendation from me if you like the dating sim half of Persona games and having hack ‘n’ slash mixed in with that sounds like a good time, and you’re willing to look past the rough edges. In my eyes, on sale the game is absolutely worth it for what it offers, not to mention supporting such a promising developer.

We Were Here Forever 🔗

TL;DR: 👎
Available on: Steam
Review published on: 2024/09/13

To me, We Were Here Forever solidifies Total Mayhem Games’ move towards making this series more casual and “for everyone”. Compared to the original We Were Here, We Were Here Forever is a relaxing jaunt through some environments that try to be creepy, coupled with a loose overarching narrative. The puzzle solving can almost always be taken at your own pace, instead of pressing you for time with prevalent horror elements.

What Total Mayhem Games excel at is coming up with well-themed unique-feeling puzzles that involve a healthy mix of logical reasoning, player communication & coordination, and a bit of trial & error. You will be able to see similarities in puzzle structure to their previous games, or other puzzle games in general, but the presentation is novel and within the game itself there is no idea re-use. I would go as far as to say that all the puzzles in this game were good, and there was one that felt truly inspired (conversing with the octopus).

While the puzzles were up to their usual high standard, I felt a conscious intent from the developers to try and increase the duration of their game through less enjoyable means as well. Gameplay & story are king; increasing your game’s run time through backtracking and painfully slow ski lifts is lazy and very unwelcome. I know the narrative fits the need to backtrack with the telescope pieces, but this could have absolutely been written or implemented differently: the pieces could have been smaller, or you could have returned with everything at once. In a fantasy land such as Castle Rock, the story can be written to fit the gameplay as there’s a low level of realism, making adjustments such as these easy to iron out during development.

What I really felt was missing from We Were Here Forever was the element of fear that they used in the first two games. The walkie-talkie stands out to me as a clearly obsolete feature leftover from the bygone era of being a puzzle horror game – the fact that only one player can talk at once is a feature if and only if there is time pressure involved. This plays out fantastically in We Were Here and We Were Here Too: while some form of impending doom draws ever nearer, each player is frantically trying to convey what they see to their partner so that they can attempt to solve the puzzle. As death’s door slowly creaks open, one frantically begs the other to think faster and save their life – in turn making it harder for the puzzle solver to think, and also preventing them from instructing their friend even if they do think they know the solution. In We Were Here Forever, there’s only one puzzle I can recall that directly puts one player under threat of death with a time limit (the underwater maze with the breathing tubes), but it still isn’t scary as the timer is directly shown with a ‘diegetic’ indicator, making it easy to plan around.

All in all, I’m sad to see the We Were here franchise depart from its roots, and as a result it’s lost my interest in future releases from the developers. I’ll go back and replay the original two games every so often when I’ve sufficiently forgotten them, but the stress of frantic teamwork has all but faded entirely with the newer entries, and my type two fun along with it. I will quickly mention though that I do appreciate price point of the We Were Here games: they’re cheap at full price and even moreso on sale, which makes them easier to convince a friend to buy so that you have someone to play with. If asymmetric co-op puzzle games are your jam, you’ll definitely find some fun here, but it’s not all I was after when I purchased my copy.

Neon White 🔗

TL;DR: 👍
Available on: Steam
Review published on: 2024/08/26

Neon White is an absolute rush. It’s fast, furious, and depending on your sense of humour, downright hilarious. What makes it unique is that it’s the most welcoming game in a niche and inherently try-hard genre: speedrunning first-person shooter. The game is a highly refined stimulant, pumping you full of “gotta go fast” and “the next attempt is the one”, but respects the fact that not everyone is a god gamer and doesn’t exclude its more casual fans.

I have plenty of general praise to hand out to Neon White. The game nails its fundamentals – which it kind of has to in order to be a speedrunning game – gunplay is good, movement is fast and responsive, and the game should easily hit your monitor’s refresh rate on all but the most anaemic systems. It introduces new mechanics at a good pace, every chapter will have a new toy for you to play with, and they’re all pretty distinct (minus some overlap between Godspeed and Fireball), giving you a new fun toy to bomb around with, while also having you puzzle over how you can (ab)use it to optimise levels for better times. And then for the grand finale the game throws its own rulebook out of the water and gives you such overpowered mobility you’re mostly slowed down by how fast your brain can process your surroundings, instead of having time spent running to route plan. It’s the perfect climax to the game and will draw out an infectious grin from anyone that had been enjoying themselves up until that point, and absolutely exhaust you mentally by the end of a play session – at least it did for me.

The story’s writing is by far the most controversial aspect of this game, with many limp-wristed reviewers going so far as to recommend anyone who tries Neon White to blindly skip it. The game does allow this, and while it’s considerate of the developers to include the option, I would argue that the story writing was on point, achieving exactly what it set out to: dangerously high levels of degenerate cringe comedy. In fact, I think it could have gone harder throughout most of its runtime. It feels like the majority of the creative writing went into the first couple of chapters to hit players with an unforgettable first impression, and it then tails off relatively early on into far less embellished dialogue that’s mainly just getting the story across, without trying to make you simultaneously laugh and retch. I hope if there’s ever another game with a similar writing style from Angel Matrix that they stick to their guns and maintain the stellar level of comedy throughout their entire narrative.

Something that impresses me about Neon White is that it’s not snobby: there’s no gatekeeping based on player skill. Unlocking the next chapter of the story does require a certain number of gold (or better) medals, similar to mobile games of old where you had to get enough stars to unlock the next level pack. And while gold times may be a challenge for some players, with practice they are absolutely attainable, especially with the insight system helping you find a shortcut if you put enough attempts in. In any case, you’ll be putting time into rerunning courses anyway, as all of the optional story content on Neon White is based on hidden collectibles that you can only find after your first successful clear. These secret puzzles can also help teach you how to maximise the use out of your cards within the level, indirectly giving you pointers towards improving your time in a subsequent clock-watching attempt. The end result of these gameplay mechanics is that both proficient and novice players play the game the same way: redoing your favourite levels to whittle down your best times. Medal thresholds are also adjusted on console editions of the game, so that players using the less precise aiming input aren’t disadvantaged for progression.

All in all, Neon White blasts you start to finish with pure, unadulterated gaming that you’ll thoroughly enjoy your time with if the genre sounds at all of interest to you. Also, a special mention has to be given to Neon White’s soundtrack. I hadn’t heard of Machine Girl before I played Neon White, but her music is a perfect match to the genre and is an absolute jam to listen to even when you’re not playing the game. I would strongly recommend buying the game with its OST, it’s only a little bit extra for those lovely DRM-free tracks. For more thoughts on Neon White, take a look at the review from yakkocmn that originally convinced me to buy the game: youtu.be/21qpvwv7kY8.

Horizon Zero Dawn 🔗

TL;DR: 👍
Available on: Steam, GOG
Reading time: ~8 minutes
Review published on: 2024/08/01

Horizon Zero Dawn was one of many AAA open world action-adventure RPGs when it released, but managed to set itself apart to me by having a rich, densely populated world that told an intriguing story. Couple that with a novel approach to enemy design and game balance that places a strong emphasis on stealth and improvised ambushes, and I was in for the long haul. I don’t want to oversell Horizon Zero Dawn though, so I shall follow its own practice of frontloading the mediocre content. In truth, the majority of Horizon Zero Dawn is nothing special.

To be able to get anywhere in the game you have to get around, so it’s a shame that platforming feels incredibly inconsistent throughout. In sections where it’s intended it looks and feels better than any other climbing-heavy game franchise I’ve played (Tomb Raider, Uncharted, Assassin’s Creed), however what makes it fall apart is Aloy’s complete inability to deal with any slight terrain inconvenience that doesn’t have designated yellow climbing holds. In the open world, trying to skirt a group of machines can often lead to Skyrim-style ‘mountain goating’, with you hammering the jump key as every rock, stone, and undulation turns into a nail. This is immersion breaking and utterly exasperating to deal with when you can’t help but notice the stark contrast in Aloy’s competence the second she jumps on a Brave Trail.

Given every AAA RPG game is apparently cut from the same cloth, it’s no surprise then that Horizon Zero Dawn subjects its players to typical lazy difficulty levels: enemy health pools scale to vast oceans as they casually dish out life-threatening amounts of damage, resulting in ever-increasing encounter durations where a single mistake means death. I played the game on hard difficulty to try and strike a balance of enemies doing realistic-feeling damage to me, plus requiring myself to put some effort into hitting weak points. Despite human enemies being almost entirely unarmoured in the majority of cases, only having simple wooden masks for head protection, a fully drawn arrow to the skull is not a one shot with every bow, and it takes a considerable number of body shots to bring someone down. I’m not complaining about this from the perspective of difficulty – I chose a non-default difficulty to swing the odds out of my favour – but this is silly and unrealistic for the sake of that. There are better ways to do difficulty than this.

However, no one’s playing Horizon Zero Dawn for the combat against humans, what’s it like fighting machines? It’s good, like a major redeeming quality of the game good. There’s a wide variety of machine designs, and each features multiple weaknesses to exploit: horns that can be broken off, a mounted weapon you can detach, a petrol reserve that can be detonated with fire, you get the idea. Your classical protagonist sixth sense (actually explained by lore, take that Tomb Raider) highlights enemy weak points for you and tells you which tool in your arsenal you need to use to take advantage of it – a particular elemental damage type, a concussive blast to knock it loose, or do you just need to deal enough damage to break it? Remember, this is on a per-component level of detail, not per machine, leading to an emphasis on care and precision when approaching combat. This is video game meat & potatoes, and is thoughtfully implemented here. Knocking off or destroying a machine component not only meaningfully chunks the machine’s total health, but it can also stop the machine from using some of its attacks altogether, which will let you run circles around early-game enemies, but becomes damn near required to be able to survive in the general proximity of late game metal monstrosities. Plus, you can pick up any parts you knock off as crafting resources to use for upgrades or sell for metal shards (the game’s currency).

So, if there’s a clear success strategy provided to you for each hostile machine in the game, how is the combat challenging? The answer lies in the difference between hunting a machine, and being thrust into open combat. Hunting a single machine in Horizon Zero Dawn is (depending on the machine of course) relatively easy. You can use the plentiful stealth cover to make an approach, then from your hiding spot you fire off a couple well-placed ‘sniper’ arrows to do a good chunk of damage and disable some of the machine’s scariest features before it’s even worked out where you are. By the time it has seen you and gets close enough to you for you to need to think about dodging, you’re probably half or even three quarters of the way to victory, and with some well-timed rolls you can defeat even the strongest machine unscathed with a well-executed methodical approach. On the other hand, if for any number of reasons you happen to fuck up the process, and some behemoth is charging you before you’ve biased the fight in your favour, you’d better strap in. When unaware, or even investigating where they think you are, machines (and to a lesser extent, humans) move slowly and methodically, with an even gait that’s easy to track and account for when aiming an arrow. In combat, all peace and tranquillity has been yote out the window. There is a metal bull in a china shop running you down, thrashing its head about, whipping its tail, and shooting you with the plasma rifle mounted on its back. Every body part is in motion, there’s a ton of jerky movements which you can’t anticipate, and because nearly all machines close distance to you, you now have to thrash your mouse around to try and begin aiming. Oh, and you now need to time dodge rolls and use healing, because no machine’s melee damage is casual, and they absolutely have attack sequences/combos that can one-shot you if you eat the whole lot. All this is to say, hitting a weak point becomes borderline impossible once stealth is out of the window, so you really want to have done the majority of the work beforehand. There is a time dilation ability that you can unlock fairly early which helps with this, but it by no means guarantees you’ll be able to draw and release an arrow into weak spot in the heat of the moment, and the ability has a very slow recharge time.

The whole “I see you goofed up your stealthy approach” side to combat is so challenging I’m inclined to believe it’s because the game was designed around console players using aim assist. Some enemy movements are frankly unfair for you to be expected to compensate your aim for (human enemies doing that head bob infuriates me), and so what I end up feeling like is that Sony never considered this because aim assist would smooth over these issues, magically redirecting arrows to hit their intended target despite your opponent doing the Mexican wave. I’m not sure if there’s some way PC players can opt into this ‘arrow assist’, but it could go a long way here honestly. That having been said, my momma didn’t raise a quitter; I eat my vegetables and I accepted the game’s challenge. To an extent, I think it helps with immersion too: it’s realistic that hitting a Coke can off a galloping antelope would be insanely hard. It makes me far more inclined to run away from a botched stealth approach than to just brute force through, if only because I don’t want to have to re-gather all the medicinal herbs I’d use to survive the fight.

Speaking of medicinal herbs, I hope you love immersively picking up resources to craft ammo/heals everywhere you go. Let’s roast the game’s inventory and crafting system. It immediately reminded me of Far Cry 3, where you have no space for anything until you craft upgrades. And yet, it didn’t grate half as much in Far Cry as it did in this game. I think my main gripe is the fact that there is item rarity and corresponding drop rates. In Far Cry 3, if you needed three bear skins, you kill three bears, and you get three skins. In Horizon Zero Dawn, you kill twenty boars and hope that you get three skins. It’s hard to make consistent progress and feel good about it when you’re just running through bushes and grass cursing the surprisingly nimble fuckers while hoping they’ll give you the drop you need. There are also so many different upgrades to get: each weapon class has a separate ammo capacity upgrade, unlike in Far Cry 3 where’s there’s a significant amount of consolidation. It all sums to more work for less reward.

The whole AAA four rarity everything also rears its ugly head again for weapon & armour upgrades, and makes me wonder if it inspired Genshin Impact’s notorious artifact stats slot machine. The rarity of the modification is random, the stats it upgrades are random, the amounts it increases those stats by are random (impacted by overall rarity of mod), and the number of stats it increases is random (but is capped by overall rarity). What this results in is a lot of trash to sift through to try and find something half decent. Note: you can’t bulk recycle/sell modifications, you have to individually do a press-and-hold for each. Amazingly, there’s no microtransaction store to get guaranteed good loot or anything, but you can spend your in-game money on loot boxes if your frontal lobe isn’t fully intact. Thankfully, being an offline singleplayer game means you can cheat if you want, and there are mods that improve loot generation & drop rates.

The biggest let-down of Horizon Zero Dawn is its Bethesda-inspired dialogue delivery. Fixed distance static camera shots that jump to the person talking, featuring automated lip syncing and zero facial expression except for a select handful of characters. The voice actors also didn’t try and do justice for most of the lesser NPCs, leading to me skipping all the dialogue for the side quests I did. The audacity the game has to give you the option to ask more questions before the end of most conversations is absurd, and I would love to see telemetry data on how few people decided they wanted to spend more time voluntarily staring at these lifeless husks. The only dialogue sin the game avoids is having choices that don’t matter. Most of the time it’s clear that your choice affects the tone of Aloy’s delivery, as opposed to the point she’s getting across. The few real choices there are, such as sparing/killing a side character, are respected.

I’m adding a quick note about side quests because they’re boring, but quite well presented. Ignoring any issues with dialogue delivery in this game, NPCs sending you on side quests always have a decent justification for it and there’s a good variety of problems for you to solve. (NieR Replicant was caught weeping in a corner as I wrote this.) However, when it comes to gameplay this nearly always ends up boiling down to fetch quests, following trails, or “go here kill thing”. Oh, and the rewards are comically bad. Side quests give no unique loot, and their monetary & experience incentives are pitiful compared to progressing the main story.

The single aspect of the game that made it stand out to me as a noteworthy game is the story. Although, what I forgot when embarking on this second playthrough was how long it takes for the story to get good. That’s not to say the first half is useless or unnecessary – it’s good for building up Aloy as a character, establishing the culture she’s immersed in, and seeds her motivation to explore the wider world. However, it is all astronomically boring compared to uncovering the mystery of how the world ended up as we know it, the causes of machine proliferation, Project Zero Dawn’s race against time, and why Aloy is the centrepiece of everything. It is a fantastic story that is well told, literally walking you through the key locations with exposition organically pieced together by Aloy & Sylens as you uncover more of the truth. I’m not the type of person to try and 100% tiny collectibles or read any (let alone all) item descriptions, but the voice notes here are plentiful and easy to find during key story missions, providing glimpses into the past and anecdotes from characters you’ll never meet, but come to recognise the voice of. These are delivered with compelling voice acting that’s straight up better than all of the physically present characters, and really fleshes out the story, investing you in the plight of the unsung heroes that came before you. But when I said the first half is boring, I wasn’t exaggerating. It took me about fourteen hours to get to Maker’s End where the good stuff begins, which is damn near half of my thirty-hour playthrough.

So that’s my take on Horizon Zero Dawn. The game is by no means perfect, but it had enough good ideas to separate it from hordes of similar games coming out at the time, with its complex ecosystem of machines for you to hunt & be hunted by, eventually leading to you unearthing an exciting and well thought-out plot that more than adequately explains the game’s world and how it came to be from life as you and I know it.

Uncharted 4: A Thief's End 🔗

TL;DR: 👎
Available on: Steam
Review published on: 2024/06/26

Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End tells a mediocre & predictable story glued together with a bland, repetitive gameplay loop. As someone that plays exclusively PC games, this is my first experience with the Uncharted series, and I have zero interest in exploring them further now that I’ve finally completed this game.

I’ve always been more of a video games person than a movie person, because I think actively participating in the story is more interesting and engaging. Uncharted 4 is the first game to challenge that philosophy of mine, leaving me wishing that the game had been a ninety minute action-comedy instead of a thirteen hour drag.

Gameplay comes in three flavours: exploration, traversal, and combat; none of which are enjoyable. Traversal is this game’s bread and butter – you can see where your destination is, and you’ve got to run, jump, rock climb, and grapple hook your way there. This is much akin to traversal in Tomb Raider or Assassin’s Creed games, however there it’s the glue between the rest, whereas in Uncharted 4 it is the rest. This makes an otherwise reasonable implementation of free climbing get repetitive and tedious. What’s nice is that despite the linear level design, there are often multiple routes to approach your destination, which gives you some extra agency but ultimately doesn’t detract from the sheer amount of time you’re going to be spending watching Nathan clamber around rock faces.

Exploration is like traversal, but usually in a more open-ended environment: you’re driving a car and have a destination in mind, but you could get out and explore some tiny unimportant distractions if you so wished. I never found a motivating reason to do so, unless you care for small collectibles these are an easy pass. The best part about driving is the ability to run things over, and the reactions you get from your passengers when you do something stupid.

Combat could have been this game’s redeeming quality, but it falls flat on its face by having such awful gunplay. Every common weapon in this game operates with a cone of fire, even when aiming down sights. All you can do is put an enemy roughly in the middle of your screen and wait for enough bullets to hit them, watching your cone of fire worsen the longer you get unlucky for. There’s no mechanical interest let alone mastery in a system like this, and while I could understand it better for a casual console experience, I would like to have seen this reworked into a recoil system for the PC release, so there’s actually some fun to be had and skill involved. There are a select few weapons that don’t operate with a cone of fire: the sniper, the grenade launcher, and the RPG. However, the game won’t let you pick up and run with one of these more engaging weapons: when you find them they only have two magazines of ammo (and the RPG is single-use), and the only way to get more is from looting enemy corpses. However, there are never going to be enough snipers to kill to get enough ammo to exclusively use sniper rifles – you will inevitably run out of ammo and have to settle for something else that the majority of enemies will drop you ammo for. Oh and did I mention this is one of those boring cover shooters where if you get hit a couple times you have to wait and do nothing for your health to come back? Urgh.

The game also features inane puzzles at each poignant location you rock up at. They’re not a big enough portion of the game to be a selling point, but the recur often enough that you’ll come to resent them. The reason for this is twofold: the puzzles are relatively simple to solve but finnicky to provide the solution (e.g. moving interconnected pieces to get shapes on them to line up), and after completing each one the story will reveal that (shockingly) the treasure you seek isn’t here, it’s actually in next place. The puzzles are too easy for you to get dopamine for working them out, and the story predictably always disappoints you afterwards, what’s not to love?

The story is predictable, forgettable, and also subscribes to a pet peeve trope of mine: adults being incapable of communicating. Why can’t Nathan just tell his wife what he’s up to? Why can’t Sam just tell Nathan the truth: that he’s working for Rafe? There are also some worthwhile entries for CinemaSins here, such as unarmoured people shrugging off bullets (Rafe completely forgets he’s been shot in the foot), and things that definitely should kill people not killing them. Cherry on top, the main antagonist has a really bad motive (not evil bad, like stupid bad). The story also sticks around for a really long time after it’s ended. I’m all for tying up a story in a nice little bow, but Uncharted goes above & beyond, flashing forward to Nathan & Elena’s kid and having a playable section where as the kid, you rummage around and uncover your parents’ historical treasure hunting antics (i.e. the story you just played through). This was too much in my opinion and I wished the game had just rolled credits instead of flashing forward like this, especially since the kid isn’t even the protagonist of the sequel or anything for this to serve as some kind of a segue. The game did a really good job of providing a conclusion for each of the main characters before this weird section, so I’m not sure why more was needed.

So yeah, this game isn’t getting a glowing recommendation from me. Just watch a movie with a similar “treasure hunting race” plot and save yourself the hours of scaling rock faces accompanied by Nathan’s quips & witticisms. The movie might have the quips still, but at least it won’t drag on for so long.

Lies of P 🔗

TL;DR: 👍
Available on: Steam
Reading time: ~15 minutes
Review published on: 2024/06/14

Lies of P stands out as the pinnacle of From Software Souls-likes despite made by a completely different studio. The pace of combat, game feel, atmosphere, even the interface all contribute to this unshakeable FromSoft-like feeling to the game, which captured my attention within the first few minutes of play. Even better though, throughout the entire thirty to forty hour run time you can benefit from a continual stream of refinements and improvements that have been built on top of the shoulders of giants. To be absolutely clear though, this isn’t a rip-off game. Lies of P forges its own identity through its unique universe and exudes a level of quality unheard of in clone games.

What caught the world’s eye when Lies of P was announced was its setting & story (and pretty boy protagonist, but I digress). It’s an inspired take on the tale of Pinocchio, with expansive environments bursting with intricate detail that show you what the city of Krat once was, and what it’s now become. I’m no Pinocchio expert to comment on how faithful the adaptation is from Carlo Collodi’s original work, but from what I’ve seen of other reviews there is a level of accuracy and diligence here that is seldom seen in adaptations when moving between forms of media. The story is also one of the main ways Lies of P quickly differentiates itself from the From Software recipe – as opposed to telling a cryptic tale that can be pieced together through item descriptions and infrequent dialogue, here the story is more explicit. NPCs explain the world around you with voiced dialogue, and your companion Gemini fleshes out their explanations with further context. This really helped me to understand Pinocchio’s motivations, and how certain bosses tied into the narrative at a far deeper level than just “the main aim of the game is to kill the five Lords of Cinder”. Further to the overt main plot, NPC quest lines in this game are similarly told thoughtful additions that elaborate on side characters’ backstories, and helps you get to know them better. Plus, you don’t need to rely on a wiki in the same way I felt about Elden Ring’s quest lines, because the game itself will hint to you where you need to go to progress someone’s quest by showing their portrait next to a particular Stargazer (site of grace) when you’re looking at the fast travel menu. For those that enjoy testing their world knowledge, there are also Cryptic Vessels, which will provide a written/photograph clue to a treasure, with no further hints as to where it is. They’re a fun optional challenge that reminded me of the treasure album from Unsighted.

Moving onto exploration, Lies of P opts for the semi-linear approach that Dark Souls players will be familiar with – a central hub area with off-shooting areas that feature a series of classic “The door does not open from this side” shortcuts to shorten your run back should you be bested by the local vagrants before finding the next Stargazer. There are plenty of places your masochism can flourish – ambushes, traps, ranged enemies the wrong side of a narrow walkway, enemies falling from the ceiling onto your head, you know the drill. Especially in the Elysion Boulevard (the second main area), there is a gratuitous helping of “the developers are laughing right now” level design & enemy placement that is designed to frustrate you (in an affectionate way, I’m sure). Because of these well-crafted level layouts and solid basic enemy design, the game will keep you on your toes whenever you’re exploring Krat.

Speaking of the wildlife then, let’s talk more about Lies of P’s enemies. There are three main ‘types’ of enemy, each with their own characteristic features but distinct appearance. The enemy variety in the exploration zones is impressive, on par with Dark Souls 3. Reasonable re-use where it makes sense, but always new foes to discover in new areas that present a fresh challenge with their own move sets and attacks. There are also a perhaps-concerning number of bigger brutes too, non-casual encounters where the enemy won’t die in three hits, but absolutely could clobber you in that many. Sure, some of these are one-time Beefcake Enemies™ that won’t respawn, but there were definitely times where I was really hoping an enemy wouldn’t respawn and it offered me a warm embrace later on. All in all, an excellent job on from the level & enemy designers, hats off to them.

Of course, combat in a game can only be as good as the adversaries and your tools to deal with them; you can’t just have one and not the other. Fortunately for gamers all around the globe, Lies of P nails a home run in combat mechanics too, leaning heavily on Sekiro for its inspiration. It’s established early that you should learn the rhythm of enemy combos in order to execute perfect guards. Dodging is an option but is definitely not how the developer wants you to play, and will lead to a miserable experience if you try and force it early into the game. Annoyingly, the amount you can panic dodge/roll and actually get away with it seems to increase later into the game (Champion Victor and the Door Guardian being prime examples of this). However, regardless as to its viability, guarding should always be the player’s preferred option in most scenarios as blocking has more benefits than just nullifying damage. While there’s no visible posture bar like in Sekiro, all enemies & bosses in Lies of P do have posture, which is damaged by attacks (heavy attacks moreso) or perfect blocks. Once an enemy’s healthbar border turns bright white, landing a fully charged heavy attack will stagger them, in turn presenting the opportunity for a ‘fatal attack’ (more akin to a riposte really). If you don’t manage to trigger the stagger in time, their ‘groggy’ status resets and your opportunity is lost. This leads to incredibly tense moments where you notice the boss is vulnerable, followed immediately by them launching into a long combo or you taking a hit – anything to make it harder for you to find the window of time you need. The amount of damage you will miss out on is not to be sneezed at, not to mention the psychological pain.

Continuing on about the game’s combat systems, let’s talk about grey health, aka ‘guard regain’. In every other game I’ve played, you see grey health as a temporary brief visual reference for how much you got hit for. In Lies of P, you only get the grey health when you block a hit without perfect timing, and it sticks around for a fair while before slowly starting to decay. What this signifies is an opportunity to lifesteal back your mistake: any hits you get in on enemies while you have grey health will exchange some of it for ‘proper’ health. Furthermore, perfect guards will completely restore your grey health. This is such a cool mechanic, providing a middle ground between responding perfectly or incorrectly; it encourages you to get back in the rhythm, or just play aggressively – doing either successfully can completely nullify imperfect play.

On top of this, blocking has another trick up its sleeve, and it’s even more satisfying to execute than a fatal attack: weapon breaking! Lots of enemies (and bosses!) have breakable weapons, which can be exploited by pulling off the required number of perfect guards. The weapon then snaps dramatically, massively reducing its damage (and I believe even its reach in more extreme cases). It won’t happen often with bosses unless you’re fighting them for a long time, but it being such a rare occurrence makes it all the more dopamine-inducing when you hear the snap and the boss recoils, the power dynamic in the arena shifting in an instant.

Thanks to the introduction of weapon breaking – which by the way, you are not immune to – weapon durability is far less forgettable in Lies of P than it is in any other From Software game, and it can become a heavy focus in boss fights due to a status effect some use that will continually drain weapon durability: decay. The game gives you a grinder as part of your prosthetic arm (which looks absolutely badass to use) that allows you to press & hold to repair your weapon while walking. This becomes another resource to manage and keep on top of, both while exploring the streets of Krat and during boss fights – unlike in From Software titles, where I just completely forgot weapon durability existed and never broke anything. Having a status effect that inflicts damage to your weapon can force the issue in combat, as if your weapon’s durability completely runs out it will break and cannot be repaired with the grinder, instead requiring the use of an uncommon consumable item. This pressures you to find the time to repair in combat, which takes longer the more durability you need to recover (with a slow wind-up to repair speed,) and is all-around significantly more time-consuming than you’d like mid-encounter. Keeping your weapon as well as yourself away from the brink of death is an awesome way to revitalise a long-forgotten game mechanic and give it meaningful gameplay value.

Another addition to Lies of P that I welcomed is grindstones. These serve to provide temporary elemental weapon buffs, similar to resins in Dark Souls 3 and greases in Elden Ring, but with a key difference that’ll change the lives of consumable hoarders: grindstones replenish when you rest at a Stargazer. For us hoarders out there, that’s the difference between never using the mechanic, and feeling at liberty to use it whenever a worthwhile opportunity presents itself. My only qualm with the buffing system is that it’s not often clear if you’re using the most effective buff against a given enemy. A visible reaction, icon, or some other indication would be welcome here, as I ended up just looking up each boss on a wiki to make sure I was using the best grindstone for their weakness. The rest of the time I’d use fire because it looks the coolest. 😎

While we’re on the topic of inflicting status ailments, what I appreciated in Lies of P was how distinct each one felt. In Elden Ring in particular, it felt like there were multiple status effects that did the same thing when the bar filled: one big instance of damage, or damage over time. In Lies of P, each status effect has a unique affliction: Electric Shock slightly reduces stamina regeneration and causes fable charge to decay; Overheat (from fire) causes rapid damage over time, but spamming dodge reduces the duration of the burn (I guess we’re playing Enter the Gungeon now); Decay causes slow damage over time to both you and your weapon; Shock (bad name) nukes your stamina regen; and Disruption is the lame one that kills you instantly if the bar fills. That’s not all of them, but you get the idea. The game’s usage of status ailments is well-considered; there’s no sprawling swamp area where poison is practically unavoidable (thank you Dark Souls), and you’ll typically find that all enemies within an area will inflict the same status ailment. This lets you swap your cartridge (a passive defence item) to be the one that specialises in mitigating the particular ailment you keep coming across. Defence equipment optimisation in Lies of P is simple – the stats are easy to understand and none of the options impact your character’s appearance – outfits are kept entirely separate, so you can keep it classy while also best dealing with the special of the day ailment. A simple tweak, but a welcome one as ever.

To serve as an interlude to the incessant discussion of the game’s combat systems (which will be continuing), I’d like to touch on Lies of P’s graphics. They’re breathtaking, to the extent whereby I’d probably use this game as the definitive showcase for the apex of PC video game graphics. The environmental detail & density are there, the lighting is phenomenal, character & weapon designs are intricate and sharp, hair & fur look good, and particle/attack/buff effects are flashy but not overly distracting. There’s nothing I can fault the game for, even moreso because it somehow manages to be performant! With a modern CPU and an RTX 3080 you can run the game maxed out (without any DLSS or other upscaling trickery) and rarely dip below 100 FPS at 1440p. This isn’t just a rich gamer’s game though, because those upscaler options are there and the settings can absolutely be turned down: the game ran at a smooth 50-60 FPS out-of-the-box on the Steam Deck when I tried it, while still managing to look eye-catching. What this should tell you is that Lies of P can accommodate a generous range of system specs and run well, and it’s not unreasonably demanding to experience the best it can offer (Cities Skylines 2 in shambles). Insane kudos to the artists and to Unreal Engine for this absolute feat of eye-candy and engineering.

To resume our regularly scheduled programming, let’s talk about weapon customisation options. Elden Ring gamers had to hold their flask when From Software let them change the weapon art of their weapon, and now in comes Neowiz letting us literally crack weapons in half and duct tape them back together as we see fit! Instead of having abstract Ashes of War, in Lies of P the weapon blade and handle each have their associated fable art (weapon art), which can be put together in any combination you like… for zero cost. This doesn’t replace ability to change a weapon’s scaling either, with cranks serving a similar role to gem infusions from Dark Souls. This really lets you play your way and feel like your build & loadout are unique. I also love the inclusion of goofy weapon options, much like how Death’s Door has the umbrella, Lies of P has giant wrenches and shovels. Should I mention that the shovel’s shaft extends when you use its weapon art? Fellas, what more is there to say – this is the upgrade you’ve been looking for. Never again will your reach feel a couple inches too short. I will say though, if you’re wondering where the negative content is in this review, I was disappointed by the lack of variety in weapon move sets. There’s only a few, despite the many different shapes & sizes of weapons, and they’re quite recognisable when looking at fatal attack animations, which makes this all the more apparent.

One choice Lies of P made that may disappoint some From Software enjoyers is the removal of magic in its entirety. Instead, the substitute comes in two halves: the pair of fable arts you get for each weapon, and your prosthetic arm. Usage of fable arts is earnt by dealing damage and nailing perfect guards, charging your fable slots in a similar way to Hollow Knight’s soul. Your prosthetic arm, called Legion Arm by the game, is another offensive tool in your arsenal. There are a healthy number of options here: a grapple hook (the first arm you get), a flamethrower, a rudimentary gun/cannon, and three more. Plus, each of them can be further invested into to unlock more functionality. For example, the grapple hook unlocks the option for you to travel to the enemy you struck, instead of pulling them to you, and at the final upgrade level it gives you a sick anime combo attack you can launch into after grappling to someone. The upgrades are well designed: they’re not just stat upgrades for the most part, instead improving versatility or adding new features, which are far more exciting to look forward to.

What I didn’t expect Lies of P to introduce from other genres was a perk tree. It definitely raised an eyebrow at first, but has since proven that it’s well thought-out. Each upgrade costs one quartz, a rare resource found in chests or dropped by some Beefcake Enemies. With that quartz, you can get a perk that’s related to either offence, defence, utility, or resources. The game forces a relatively even distribution across the categories, which I have no issue with. Then, every few perks you unlock, you get another bigger one that you’ve been working towards. This could be getting an extra Pulse Cell (Estus flask) use, a new amulet slot, or an adjustment to the guard regain system to make it more forgiving. Regardless as to your build and playstyle, there should always be something interesting to work towards. By the end of the game, I was chanting for quartz every time I saw a chest, as after you’ve fully reinforced your weapon, they’re the most impactful upgrades you can get. You do not get enough quartz in a single playthrough to unlock everything either, so you can’t just pick lackadaisically knowing you’ll get everything eventually. I do have two minor gripes with the perk system though, the first being that I wish we were given hard numbers for the upgrades. Tooltips will say “faster weapon durability recovery when using grindstone”, whereas I’d like “20% faster weapon durability recovery when using grindstone”. The second is probably a localisation issue, but the tooltips can be phrased poorly. The terms the game uses surrounding the grey health system are awkward and can make it hard to understand the outcome of the upgrade: does “increase guard regain” mean I get a higher limit on the amount of grey health I can have, or does it mean my attacks lifesteal more? Hopefully now that the game has been so successful, subsequent instalments can invest more care here and provide a better experience for non-Korean languages.

Just because Lies of P adds some new mechanics that make the game more forgiving (like grey health), I don’t think this by any means makes the game casual or easy. I believe the direction developers wanted to take things in was allowing for players to more easily recover from setbacks, and they absolutely achieve that. Another new mechanic in this category that’s definitely not present in From Software games is the recovery of your final Pulse Cell charge. Once you’ve expended all your heals, the final usage can be recharged by damaging enemies and timing perfect guards (once again similar to soul in Hollow Knight). This change isn’t making the game easier for Souls-like elitists, just encouraging persistence from those forced onto their back foot. In all From Software games I’ve played the fun ends when you’re out of healing. Lies of P instead offers you a lifeline: “play perfectly for a while and you can earn back your margin for error”. This subtle change is really meaningful, and the obvious audio cue when your final Pulse Cell charge comes back allows you to focus up without needing half an eye on your HUD.

Another mechanic in Dark Souls & Elden Ring that can be absolutely devastating to the struggling player is losing everything when you die before recovering your previous life’s souls/runes. I’ve always resented this mechanic – I understand its value for applying pressure and making death meaningful – but it hurts the novice players the most, which is unfair and could conceivably put off people the genre entirely. Lies of P completely reworks running back to your Ergo in a way that preserves the stress and importance of recovering it, without being as punishing. When you have Ergo on the ground awaiting your return, you lose (I believe) thirty percent of your on-ground Ergo per full healthbar of damage you take, but dying doesn’t make everything disappear. So, if you don’t use your Pulse Cell, you can only lose thirty percent of your dropped Ergo per subsequent death, instead of all of it. Furthermore, if you kill the enemy that hit you, your dropped Ergo is replenished. This once again plays into Lies of P’s “play better and we’ll let you off” approach, as getting hit is completely inconsequential if you clap the enemy back. There are also consumables and quartz upgrades that further reduce the amount of Ergo lost upon taking damage, for players wanting an even more forgiving experience. On a related note, Lies of P makes the simple change of having your Ergo be dropped outside boss arenas, instead of making you run around to try and grab them while the boss is warming up. This saves some stress and frustrating cheese before the fight properly starts.

Since we’re familiar with how dying works now, let’s talk about the bosses in Lies of P. In short, they’re phenomenal. Art direction is on point, each boss has a clear identity and is visually striking. What I noticed early on into Lies of P’s bosses is that they’re not all considerate of the player. Some bosses possess what I have dubbed ‘protagonist energy’ – where it feels like you’re in their world and just trying to not die in it. Combos can be relentless and plentiful, with genuinely zero breaks to get an attack or heal in. The White Lady is a prime example of this, featuring maybe a third of the way through the game. She seemingly never runs out of stamina, attacks near-constantly, and has an incredible knack for blocking or parrying your attacks. If you’re like me and using a relatively slow weapon, you are in for an absolute ride. It would be an understatement to say it was infuriating trying to time block after block with no time slot to dish out vengeance. During that fight, the White Lady is the protagonist and you’re the slow & cumbersome enemy trying to keep up with her. She’s not unkillable of course, but the fight is scrappy & rough, requiring a fair amount of hit trading, at least for my build. Despite resenting her life philosophy, it was a completely novel experience coming from the typical back & forth From Software boss fights, and an interesting twist on the old formula.

In my opinion, there are only two poorly designed bosses in the game, and unfortunately one of them is the final boss*. Fuck you Simon Manus, nobody likes you or your Elden Beast-inspired magic shenanigans. The other bad boss is a gimmick fight, with a weak point around the back of the boss. (If you beat Door Guardian without working this out, I’m so sorry.) They’re incredibly slow, but all of their attacks inflict Shock, which cripples stamina regeneration to the point where you can’t even afford to sprint around behind them to strike the weak point. Shock’s effect kicks in immediately, not once the build-up is fully stacked, so taking any hits (note: imperfect blocks still build up the status ailment) turn this boss into an absolute chore. Any other status ailment and I would have been fine with this goon. They also have the second worst run back if you die – a litany of enemies and environmental hazards to evade, where most bosses have short run backs which are typically easy to do hitless.

Lies of P also tries its hand at the many-versus-one boss fight, and actually pulls it off really well, to the point where it’s my favourite boss fight in the game (the first time around). The main boss has three sidekicks who are each called in every quarter HP they lose. Sidekicks deal appreciably low damage and are designed to be impractical to ignore – lots of gap closing potential or ranged attacks, and a substantial proportion of their attacks will interrupt you. The boss actively takes the back seat, typically attacking only if you get too close or try to keep hitting them, instead letting their sidekick take centre stage. The fight sequences feel good because the enemies come across as being coordinated, unlike in From Software’s games where two-at-once bosses feel like they attack on their own terms, and as a result far more frequently put you in a position where damage is unavoidable. This can happen in Lies of P, but can be almost entirely mitigated with good positioning and keeping half an eye on the main boss to make sure you’re not pissing them off.

There is one silly goofy mechanic that I miss from From Software games: the messages on the floor. “Be wary of dog” and “Try finger, then hole” et al. contribute such a welcome splash of humour in otherwise serious games, along with some maybe-useful, maybe-troll tips. The limited word & phrase selection is the cherry on top that really seals the deal, not to mention saving the developers the burden of moderation. I hope Neowiz consider adding a message system to Lies of P’s sequel, or if they really want to make headlines, bring us an immersive seamless co-op experience – trounce From Software at their own game. Full-fat co-op would be phenomenal (like Remnant 2 or Elden Ring’s Seamless Co-op mod), but that’s a lot of work and I get that. I’d settle for just these stupid messages! To me, they are a huge part of the From Software experience and really bring a community vibe to a usually singleplayer adventure.

To give the same level of emphasis as the developers did, I’ve left talking about keyboard and mouse controls until last (and because most people are smart and don’t use them). As much as one could dream, Lies of P is not breaking any new ground here. The controls are maybe slightly saner than From Software (no modifier keys plus scroll wheel to change weapon/spells), but still aren’t amazing (hold E and after the delay a number key to use an extra bag item). Consumables require Helldivers 2 stratagem-style inputs to navigate to, instead of just being having keys bindable to each slot. Vertical mouse sensitivity is also notably lower than horizontal (though apparently there’s a mod for this).

This review is insanely long, just because there was so much about this game I thought had been done well and needed to be appreciated! Once again, insane kudos to the developers, the game is stellar, and if it wasn’t clear already, I recommend Lies of P to anyone interested in a From Software-like experience, or someone that wants to try their first “git gud” Souls-like. This is without a doubt my favourite in the genre, and I am extremely excited to see what Neowiz does with this franchise going forward.

NieR Automata 🔗

TL;DR: 👎
Available on: Steam
Reading time: ~7 minutes
Review published on: 2024/04/18

NieR Automata is the more approachable NieR game that trades in the amazing personalities in NieR Replicant for some minor quality of life improvements (and even more side quests!). It’s a lukewarm entry in a series I don’t think deserves to be so critically acclaimed.

While NieR Automata is strictly the sequel to NieR Replicant, you could absolutely play the games in either order, as they’re only very loosely tied. If you only want to play one game, it’s honestly a toss-up. NieR Automata has fewer extremes of good and bad compared to Replicant, and is maybe slightly nicer to play overall. That having been said, in hindsight I think Replicant is my favourite of the two, because the character design & voicing (aside from the protagonist) are stellar. If you expect to play both anyway then naturally you should play Replicant first, as that’s correct chronologically, plus if you can make it through its 45+ hours of main endings, NieR Automata’s <30 hours for the main endings will feel relatively fast & refreshing.

Before I settle into full reviewer mode; a couple of useful knowledge nuggets to improve your gameplay experience.

For us Steam gamers, I’d strongly recommend leveraging Steam Input in this game in order to change the shoulder buttons (for pod fire & abilities) into toggles. It’s such a simple usability change, and while it can mess you around if you open the menu with a toggle on, the lack of hand contortions during gameplay is absolutely worth it. It blows my mind that they’re not toggles in-game by default. There is a preset available if you don’t know how to edit the control scheme yourself.

Also, the modding scene is pretty good for this game – there’s a good range graphical improvements (some of which should not need to exist, but hey ho), and outfit/model/weapon swaps, which can add some fun/flavour when you’re playing the game with an attractive protagonist. Oh, and there are memes, for when grinding endings is getting stale and you want Among Us & Shrek robots to fight. The game doesn’t officially have modding support though, so getting everything set up and working can take some time investment and requires more experience poking around in game files than, say, a Bethesda game. There is a community-made mod manager which may help you, but I didn’t use it myself so I can’t comment on it.

Kicking off the review properly then, combat in this game is 💃stylish💃. That’s not to say it’s challenging – this game is definitely a hack ‘n’ slash unless you choose to make it a Souls-like – but it feels suitably cinematic and juicy. Animations all around are clean; well-timed evasions have a sick cartwheel animation with a slow-motion effect that lets you get extra damage in, and you have enough different attacking moves and short combos for things to not start feeling too same-y too quickly. (Being realistic, I think anyone that pushes themselves to 100% this game will be sick of almost all of it by the time they get there.) Another strength of combat comes from the chip customisation system – although never explained/tutorialised by the game – which allows you to choose how to approach fights and suit things to your play style, which makes things more satisfying and damage number go up. The counter chip was a serious missed opportunity for a super-cool animation with gratuitous hit-pause, but it does add the option of a high-risk high-reward playstyle if you want to get your blood pumping (basically everything can be parried with this, and as a result it’s often the best strategy for pure damage output). Personally, I’m not a huge fan of JRPG-style levelling and progression (though there is almost no enemy scaling), but if you want to scale better and kill enemies faster you can use chips that boost experience or damage, or alternatively – because this is a single player game and it’s morally acceptable to make games more fun for yourself – cheat (for instance, with a stronger damage/experience multiplier than the game otherwise provides). One fortunate upside of this JPRG-style progression is that because character level and chips matter far more than weapon stats, weapons become far more of an aesthetic & playstyle decision, whereas in NieR Replicant you’re just clamouring for the highest damage stat. NieR Automata also far better caters to combat enthusiasts than the previous game, thanks to the addition of colosseums. There are three of these to discover, each providing escalating challenges to complete that test different facets of the game’s combat.

Minor spoiler warning from here. I want to be able to talk about the game’s themes and how it shows the characters’ perspectives, but without spoiling the plot. If you want to go in completely blind, stop reading here.

The big overarching theme of the NieR games is, as far as I can tell, existentialism: trying to address what it means to be you and/or what it means to be human. However, NieR Automata falls short of realising this goal in my opinion by having a large portion of the cast with a limited emotional range (2B, A2, the Commander, 21O – 9S’ operator), and not giving the characters any breathing room between story beats to discuss or air their feelings. Whenever 9S starts to question the orders him & 2B have been given by YoRHa, 2B’s response is robotic and pre-programmed. This makes sense to start with – androids are obedient by default, 2B being no exception – but the fact that this never changes as the plot progresses causes the game’s execution of its core theme to be lacklustre. Players aren’t going to think about the bigger picture in half as much depth without the space and prompting to do so; the game must facilitate this through its narrative. As another example, at one point 9S makes a bombshell discovery, but is never given the time to discuss this with 2B, and subsequently buries his own feelings & doubts to better aid her in the present moment, skipping another chance to crack their world views wide open. NieR Replicant doesn’t handle this particularly well either: it crams the character’s discovery of these same main themes into the endings, but it still feels more explored than what little Automata manages to achieve.

I also feel that NieR Automata struggled to develop its characters, and what personal/relational progression there is in the game came off as awkward or abrupt. The obvious citation to reach for is the relationship between 2B and 9S: they’re the canon couple the game ships, but without persistently reading between the lines, I think one could reasonably interpret the pair as nothing more than good friends/comrades by the end of the game. There is one single instance I can think of where 2B says anything approaching familiar/flirty to 9S, and as 9S portrays the awkward kid with a crush, he struggles to articulate how he feels. It’s only once you play 9S’ own arc in route B that you see how deeply invested he is in 2B, at which point I just started feeling frustrated that despite how much time I’m spending running around with both of them doing inane side quests, these characters can’t find the proper time to speak talk about their feelings. I could see this maybe being intentional to an extent, in order to allow the player to ship themselves with 2B, but if that’s why this is so poorly handled, I think it’s a detriment to the game regardless. A2 arguably has the strongest and most noticeable progression arc of the main cast, but sadly is introduced to the player (outside of a brief drive-by) very late, and never does anything to push the other characters out of their comfort zone. Hell, the pods go through more relationship progression than 2B and 9S once you’re getting into route C/D.

The remainder of this review is going to be dedicated to comparing NieR Automata to Replicant, mainly discussing the improvements made in the new game. Without the context of at least my Replicant review, or ideally having played the game, this commentary mightn’t be the most useful to you. Spoilers are fair game from here on out.

The most valuable improvement NieR Automata makes over Replicant is misusing the ending system. Both games have five main endings/routes, however NieR Replicant tells the same story (excluding the ending) four times and the fifth diverges. NieR Automata, by contrast, only makes you repeat the main story once, and yet in doing so manages to cover far more new ground than NieR Replicant does in its three re-runs: changing the character you play as (giving you their perspective in the process), adding a gameplay major mechanic (hacking), and using the character change to smoothly transition into the – gasps – direct story continuation for the third route! The euphoria that hit me not having to repeat more of the game just exemplifies how poorly this mechanic suits the games’ stories. My next question is, why not take it further? Entirely ditch the ‘endings’ paradigm and tell the story entirely linearly from the get-go. Merge routes A & B (weaving between 2B and 9S’ perspectives, the existing route C/D demonstrates the game can do this sort of thing well already), and then after getting ending C or D, just give the option to go back and make the other choice for the rest of the plot (since E automatically follows once you have both C & D). And yes, I know there are 21 hidden ‘endings’, keep those in, sure, but I would 100% make the main story linear; I think it would benefit the game’s pacing and the delivery of its character development.

One of the most immediately noticeable upgrades you get in NieR Automata is waypoints, quest markers, and a mini-map. This is a huge quality of life upgrade for questing, helping you more easily find the people you need to talk to, and making it easier to optimise your pathing to hit as many objectives as possible on runs to and fro. That having been said, it’s not an amazing quality mini-map, as it’s not very detailed and doesn’t clearly contain height information (except by unhelpfully hiding markers that are at a significantly different height to you). It also doesn’t convey what terrain is traversable, or where ladders/entrances/exits are (e.g. to the underground tunnel system in the desert). Better than nothing, but easy to improve upon.

Healing has two major changes compared to NieR Replicant. The good is that choosing your healing item no longer pauses the game, the bad is that the healing itself is still instant once selected, and the ugly is that you can carry up to 99 of each healing item on you. Coming from the country famous for its National Health Service, I thought the 19x healing in Replicant was ridiculous, and yet now we are out here with up to 198x healing (depending on the depth of your pockets) – really illustrating the power of privatised healthcare. Overall though, I do think the improvement outweighs the healthcare joke; finding the time and concentration to open the menu and select your healing item might not be anything compared to Helldivers 2’s stratagems, but it’s a darn-sight tougher to pull off in the heat of battle while you still need be evading than having the game pause for you to do so. This actually led me to value the auto-healing chip quite highly, and while this is definitely a skill issue on my part because I suck at using a controller, even the chip isn’t foolproof: it’s not instant to respond so multiple quick hits can down you still, and if an enemy can just blast you for over 40% of your health in a single attack (definitely not unheard of), you might be dead before the chip even knows you’re in trouble.

The fast travel you get about two thirds through the game is also far more flexible than that of its predecessor, actually putting you close to where you need to be, instead of just cutting a chunk out of your marathon. There are only a couple of locations in the game which will take over a minute to get to after fast travelling.

Final revenge parting shot: NieR Replicant’s music was better. There’s beauty in the score of Automata, but it definitely fades into the background during play, whereas for me, the vocals in Replicant’s soundtrack really helps it stay present and remain a core part of the game ‘experience’.

Not Tonight 2 🔗

TL;DR: 👍
Available on: Steam
Review published on: 2024/04/06

An all-around inferior sequel to Not Tonight that still manages to be engaging enough to be worth playing.

A nice fresh cast of well-written characters with some contrived usage of old favourites from Not Tonight. The way the story is told works well, with the three story-arcs for each character each being interesting and unique. The ending gives you that warm fuzzy feeling from saving all your friends, but ultimately doesn't feel dramatic or impactful to me.

The wide variety of mini-games kept the game feeling fresh all the way through, and made the game feel more varied than it was challenging (compared to say, Papers Please, where there's little variety but the level of challenge just keeps going up). I don't consider myself particularly good at this genre of game, but on the default medium difficulty I got bonus 2 every single night, and only got fined for mistakes once.

The main let-down of some of these mini-games was that they were entirely luck-based and counted against your performance for the night, and the side quests, which is a monumentally stupid design decision that fortunately doesn't matter unless you're trying to go for all achievements.

Speaking of the side quests, they were a welcome addition, though to me it feels stupid that you're not told explicitly what you have to do for a given quest, then either have to redo a given area if you didn't accidentally get everything, or just try and luck out enough times to get the A grades necessary for the good ending of the game. Personally, I just used a guide to tell me what I needed to do to pass the quests, as I found it frustrating to be given low grades for making ambiguous dialogue choices or outfit decisions incorrectly.

Following a guide also had the added benefit that I wouldn't mess up dialogue choices that could lead to a game over and repeating a night. As far as I can tell, the only way to work out the right choices is through trial and error in a couple of sections (e.g. picking which oxygen tanks to huff when Taelore confronts Mari).

I miss the money pressure of Not Tonight and the drug selling & bribing mechanics that you could opt into to get more money for the higher risk.

So yeah, overall, an interesting twist on Not Tonight that I don't think worked out that well in the end, but I was still happy to support the developers and put in the relatively short number of hours required to beat this game.

Portal Revolution 🔗

TL;DR: 👍
Available on: Steam
Review published on: 2024/01/25

An excellent quality Portal story with fun new mechanics, and well voiced likeable characters. An easy recommendation to anyone that wants more Portal.

The achievements in this game were fun and engaging, however going back to get them is a pain because you can't pick specific chambers to go back to, the chapter select screen (why is this under the New Game option?) often gives zero indication what chamber you'll end up in. If I want to get back to 4-9 for an achievement, I have to basically binary search all the chapter 4 resume points until I find the closest one.

My final thing that felt more awkward in this game than any of the other Portal games I've tried (official or not) was having a silent protagonist. There were multiple points in Revolution's story where it felt the writing was really having to sidestep the issue (e.g. when you first meet Emilia and she's trying to work out what's going on; who's trying to re-build the facility, the fact they 'tricked' you into helping them, and whose side you're on). There's also what arguably could have been a moral dilemma (which would have been really cool if there was a choice!), but without a voiced protagonist it's very unclear what 'your' opinion is until gameplay forces you to pick a side.

Oh, and thank you for making lasers no longer hurt the player; 10/10 quality of life improvement.

For those wanting even more Portal to play now, check out Portal Stories: Mel and Portal Reloaded if you haven't already!

Moonlighter: Between Dimensions (DLC) 🔗

TL;DR: 👎
Available on: Steam, GOG
Review published on: 2024/01/21

Equivalently NG+ bolted onto the end of the game. It features brand new loot to collect, new weapons and armour, adds a bartering mechanic, a new shop NPC, two new boss fights, some new enemies, and takes about as much time (or more) than the base game to complete. What's not to love then?

The 'numbers game' aspect of Moonlighter is taken to the extreme; clearing rooms becomes an absolute grind if you're under-geared because you have to hit every enemy 10+ times but would die in 2-4 of their attacks. The game does not get harder because the enemies are more complex and challenging, it gets harder because the floors scale more quickly, meaning your sword feels like a foam pool noodle if it's a single floor out of its depth. The resources you want can be difficult to collect, only dropping from certain enemies that aren't guaranteed to spawn. The pool of potential enemies is huge as any base game enemy can appear in a given room, meaning you can quite easily experience a total drought of useful items to progress upgrades, and you'll be forced to replay the same 2-3 floors on loop until you get better RNG, or the item comes available for barter at the new shop NPC. The amount of boss re-use is egregiously lazy, no new or exciting bosses that you haven't seen in the base game until you get right towards the end of the DLC.

Oh and another quick note, while new gear might have been added, all five tiers of said gear look the same, and there aren't two different flavours of each weapon any more. A very lazy set of upgrades all around.

The DLC does nothing to fix any grievances I had with the base game, and exaggerates aspects I already didn't enjoy. If you really loved Moonlighter, you might enjoy this, but my advice in the majority of cases would be to just avoid this DLC entirely, as it's not rewarding/fun enough.

Steelrising 🔗

TL;DR: 👍
Available on: Steam, GOG
Review published on: 2023/09/03

Disclaimer: this review was written before the release of Lies of P! Stop reading this and go play that first – it garners an overwhelming recommendation from me (which you can read here), whereas Steelrising is far more tepid. Anyway, on with the show.

Steelrising is what you reach for when you run out of Elden Ring & Dark Souls 3. It’s the game I’ve come across that feels closest to these From Software legends, however unfortunately it falls short in a number of aspects. All in all, it feels like trying to manage an opiates addiction with cigarettes.

Why is Steelrising the next best thing to Elden Ring & Dark Souls 3? It has a healing flask you can only refill at ‘bonfires’, no map to aid exploration, you instead have to learn the environment yourself. There’s a lot of ‘the door doesn’t open from this side’ and as you explore a level you unlock more shortcuts to get back to where you were more easily if you die. The flow/pace of combat is very similar, though Steelrising doesn’t have i-frame dodge rolls, just a backstep. Steelrising also has some interesting and creative weapon designs (though the secondary abilities tend to be pretty bland,) which have distinct move sets and are fun to use.

The above similarities to From Software Souls-like games and the awesome choice of setting for Steelrising was enough for me to want to play through the whole game, even though by the end I wasn’t really enjoying it much. That was because…

The story is boring and hard to follow. There are a lot of very similar looking & sounding characters, and a lot of convoluted names for people & places to try and keep track of. Steelrising tries to take players through the story where From Software instead let the player decide if they want to try and find the story, but it’s not an improvement here. By the middle of the game, I’d given up caring for the characters’ backstories, and by the end I was scarcely following the main plot line.

The enemy variety is a joke. There are probably about seven original non-boss enemy types in the game, and if you include the bosses that get recycled as enemies, there’s maybe a dozen enemies you see on a regular basis. Some enemy variety padding is done by changing an enemy’s elemental damage type, and some enemies get slightly souped-up versions later into the game, but the lack of variety becomes noticeable worryingly quickly into a fifteen hour game. There are a lot of ‘official’ boss fights which are either a bigger version of a regular enemy, or a bigger version of what’s about to be the most commonly occurring regular enemy for the next 30 minutes.

Enemy move sets are simple. This applies to bosses also, which appear to have approximately the same number of moves as regular enemies. This makes a lot of bosses easy to kill in one or two tries, since learning their move set is trivial and only the final boss has a second phase.

Encounters with multiple enemies at once, in a word, suck. As the game progresses, because it has so few enemies to make encounters with, it chooses to ramp up the difficulty by making you fight enemies in pairs, eventually groups of three or four. Their AI clearly doesn’t have any special programming for this to make the situation manageable for the player, so you often either have to kite and poke until there’s one enemy left, or try and kill one before the rest of the gang catches up. When your camera is unlocked however, landing attacks on enemies becomes a legitimate challenge, because the game gives you little-no magnetism for your attacks like From Software games do, and most skills (parry, critical hit from a stagger, and the two combat abilities you unlock) can’t be used without being locked on. Switching between lock-on targets with keyboard & mouse uses the scroll wheel and is incredibly inconsistent. Your camera can also whirl around jarringly when locking or unlocking the camera, making for an all-around awful gank fight experience.

There isn’t a huge amount of environment variety. You’ve got city, garden, sewer (very small), and underground mine.

The metroidvania-style abilities unlocking new paths that you couldn’t previously go down are... okay. The platforming is super inconsistent though, which is a shame because a lot of it is compulsory. You can use these abilities in combat, but I rarely saw a reason to.

Keyboard & mouse controls are a second-class citizen. If you’re used to playing Dark Souls 3 and Elden Ring with them, you’ll feel right at home in this game. Yay. This is especially annoying here because your oil burette (estus flask) does not have a dedicated hotkey, it shares the active item slot hotkey which you have to also use for other consumables (or the compass for quest markers). Cycling through a hotbar in a fight is tedious, risky, and completely unnecessary with I have the full row of number keys completely unused.

The game gives you a “point of no return” warning while there is still roughly three hours of gameplay left! Upon being told that I was about to cross this threshold, I expected just a walk up to a final boss fight, some cutscenes and story clean-up, and I’d be done. Nope! Two new boss fights, each in their own respective new area you have to explore. Ordinarily I wouldn’t be mad about a game having more content than expected, but my aforementioned gripes meant my patience was wearing thin, leaving me excited to be able to finish the game soon. The fact that there was so much still to do thus quickly became a negative as I just wanted to find the ending, only to find myself going through more garden mazes, more platforming, more three-at-a-time encounters, etc.. This definitely could have been communicated better, e.g. “By proceeding beyond this point the following side quests cannot be completed: blah blah blah”.

I think those are all my major gripes. The other aspects of the game range of decent to okay. This review is largely a critique, but I do genuinely recommend the game for people who want more Dark Souls 3 / Elden Ring but in a different game. Just go in with managed expectations :)

Inside 🔗

TL;DR: 👎
Available on: Steam, GOG
Review published on: 2022/09/28

I can understand why this game gets such overwhelmingly positive reviews, but to me the atmosphere is lost to the poorly handled puzzle aspects of the game. This is my spoiler-free critique of Inside.

Inside is the story of survival of a young boy against all odds: physical barriers, dogs, people, and other such adversaries in the game. The gameplay against this narrative comes in three flavours, which the game rotates through as you play: escaping adversity, puzzle solving, and spectacle.

Spectacle I have no aversion to – the game nails its art style & atmosphere, and has thoroughly enjoyable eye candy. Sometimes the sections felt a little long to me, but I typically play more action intensive games, so this isn't a huge surprise.

Both escaping adversity and puzzle solving are entirely mechanically devoid – that is to say that the challenge isn't knowing what to do and struggling to do it, it's not knowing what to do, but once you work it out it should be trivial to pull off. There's nothing wrong with this, it just means the game places its difficulty/challenge in finding the solution, which will be important to consider later when I discuss my thoughts on the puzzles.

The character’s animations come across rather out of place in a lot of the escaping adversity sections of the game, where the boy moves at a comfortable jog or light run, despite having a ferocious dog running full pelt behind you with clear intent to kill. This can feel frustrating, because if you don't quite have the solution to the puzzle in time, it feels like you probably could have survived if the protagonist just put a liiiiittle bit more effort in. This bring me onto the main thing I disliked about these escaping adversity sections in general: they require trial & fatal error to overcome. In my opinion, putting a time limit on puzzles with your life is at stake is not fun, and it's the core mechanic of these parts of the game. It damages immersion in my opinion and makes solving the problems feel unrewarding when you consider how many deaths it took you to get there.

To talk more generally about the puzzles – regardless as to whether you’re being hunted down during them – they are not designed to facilitate first time or improvised success. Timing windows are narrow where present, and the game does nothing to help or guide the player. In dedicated puzzle sections where there is no imminent threat of death, performing the necessary experimentation ends up being time consuming and slow, primarily due to the size of the environments and how slow your character moves.

The final nit I'll pick with Inside is the size of the environments. Especially frequent during the spectacle sections, you can end up without a clear indication of where you need to go, and thus simply have to run in one direction until you find a wall, and then turn around. The game's achievements lead me to believe there are more secrets hidden throughout the levels, however more often than not I found myself having explored the ‘wrong’ way intentionally to no reward other than the boring return journey. Maybe I’m just bad at finding secrets, but it felt like the game was actively trying to disincentivise this ‘explore the other way first’ style of play.

To conclude, I did complete the game and enjoy its ending. I didn't feel overly compelled by the story due to its obscurity, and I was more than ready to be done with the puzzles by the time I got to the end – and that's for a short three and a half hour game.