Flawed, but insanely ambitious by PS1 standards and admirably varied, Overblood 2 almost entirely forgoes the survival horror-esque atmosphere and gameplay of the first in favor of a crazy 3D platformer action-RPG immersive sim-type thing clearly aping Final Fantasy VII in many ways. The game feels like a hodgepodge of unfocused ideas, sure- and it doesn't run very nice for a PS1 game and the story isn't going to captivate you despite its grand scope, but damn if this isn't a fun PS1 curio that surprised me with what it had to offer.

This is a 30+ hour RPG that was mostly developed entirely by one person, which is very impressive for the amount of content it has. Though I wouldn’t say I loved it quite as much as some other RPGMaker games I’ve played as I felt the combat brought it down a bit. An interesting system with the numerous forms Jimmy can turn into and clearly meant to be more difficult than the norm, but the frequent enemy encounters literally every few seconds and heavy grinding needed for bosses was excessive, it dragged the game on longer than it probably needed to be. The characters (Jimmy’s family and occasional others that join the party temporarily) were all pretty bland to me also which was an issue when the game’s so heavily focused on them in the story

But aside for those issues it’s still quite good and clearly made with a lot of heart. Has a creative world with plenty of varied islands/continents and a meaningful amount of optional areas to explore. Given the kind of games this is obviously inspired by, its mix of light hearted and horror aspects was well done, and while the characters were a weak point for me the story it tells was intriguing nonetheless. The music’s great too! Lot of unique tracks all over the place and I never got tired of listening to the overworld theme

Onrush, a descent into vehicular purgatory where the only escape is the repetitive loop of hitting opponents at the exact same speed. The game, akin to a prison, forces players to endure the pointlessness of endless redundancy. The futile attempts at achieving objectives only lead to perpetual failure via automobile accidents, trapping players in a never-ending cycle. The chaotic music transitions, ranging from screamo to dubstep, create an auditory nightmare that complements the visual madness of the game.

In Onrush, every collision with fake cars feels like a purposeful obstruction, crumbling the player's will to dust. Boosts, initially promising hope, reveal themselves as irrelevant in the face of constant competition. The game, with its disjointed experience and relentless repetition, becomes a psychological tormentor, exploiting moments of hope to intensify the ensuing despair. It's an exercise in nihilism, where playing Onrush feels more pointless than Kairi's contribution to the Kingdom Hearts story.

Score: 1/10

I want to be clear that I’ve already lied to you by the time you’ve read this, because this game isn’t worthy of four stars. However, it is one of the most interesting and unusual games I’ve played in a long time, so I wanted to get the word out. If janky, mediocre PS1 games which fly off the rails are your thing, then go play it. Otherwise, I’ll just talk about its weirdness, spoiling things as I go.

So, the plot starts off in a Ghost-in-the-Shell cyber future, with your three protagonists entering the stage via the obligatory cyber helicopter. The first one you control is Hana, a slick super-spy who fits the mold of her time, essentially being Lara Croft by way of Motoko Kusanagi. Then, you have Glas, whose five o’ clock shadow and bright blue hoodie signify that he’s a hard-boiled detective undercover as a fifth grader. Finally, you have Deke, a potentially fake Australian who says “bloody” and “sheila” while wearing an unflattering turtleneck. The mission of this little mercenary band is to sneak into a yakuza hideout, and get information from their inside-man about the leader’s missing daughter. Sneak in, get the info, go out and find the girl, turn her in for a massive reward, easy. But of course, the job goes bad, the informant dies, the boss discovers what the mercs are up to, and they’re on the run. Now they have to get the girl as a bargaining chip for their own lives, and the race is on.

Please change the disc.

This game’s backgrounds are all pre-rendered videos, and it’s extremely central to this game’s identity. I may complain about how you have to juggle four discs to play a five hour game and laugh at the low resolution, but I can’t help but love how this game looks. I mean, it looks rough, but it’s the sheer commitment I respect. They didn’t want a rectangle with a circle on top as their helicopter; they created a fully-detailed model to be used in a pre-rendered video alongside other real-time effects. They wanted vents fogging up a rooftop with steam, not flat concrete walls. MGS-style head wiggling for talking wasn't good enough, they wanted animated faces with expressions and mouth flaps. They wanted an interactive animated feature within the limitations of the PlayStation, and that ambition really impresses me. I’ve played a ton of games which call back to this era, but they never replicate that ambitious attitude. They never capture the feeling of pushing the system to its breaking point, or of solving technical challenges with creativity. I mean, analog flaws are cool and all, but it feels like throwback games often miss the point by celebrating limitations for their own sake rather than for the creativity they engendered.

Please close the lid. Loading.

The second mission has you catching up to the missing girl, who’s in a town overrun by what seem to be zombies. She’s a little vague on the details, but she tells you that she “didn’t know that blood was the catalyst”. It’s a bit of a jump from the straight cyberpunk we started with, but sci-fi mixes with any genre pretty well, so it’s all good. She agrees to return to her father, as long as she gets to see a woman known as Madame Chen first, since she can explain things. But of course, Chen’s working with the yakuza, and the girl’s captured as soon as Glas brings her in the door. This third mission has you switching between characters in Madame Chen’s restaurant-slash-brothel: escaping capture as Glas, sneaking in as Hana, and kicking in the door as Deke.

This is an abrupt stop, but I’m about to drop a significant spoiler for the exact moment that shit flies off the rails. If this has piqued your interest at all, stop at the end of this sentence and go play it. This is the big reveal.

Ok, now change the disc again.

Glas and Deke are ambushed. They die, and their souls go to hell. The madame turns out to be a demon queen, and Hana kills her. Her blood melts a hole into the underworld. Hana descends the melted blood hell pit to go kill Satan.

That’s not an exaggeration. Not a joke. That’s what happens. You've spent the majority of the game as these two characters, and now they're bloody scraps. As hard of a tonal pivot as it is though, this is the exact moment where I totally fell in love with this clunky old game. With such an unsafe move, it achieved something that Resident Evil was never able to: the establishment of vulnerability when players are at their strongest. It’s a Predator-esque pivot where a lone action hero has to come to the realization they’re actually in a horror movie. You used to worry about normal soldiers shooting at you, and suddenly you’re facing demons with scythe hands. Maybe the zombies in the second chapter should have struck me more than they did, but I was expecting them to be explained away. I thought it would be revealed that the yakuza girl was genetically engineered to work with next-generation nanomachines or something, and that the nanobots in her blood were lethal to anyone else. I mean, the zombies in the games which inspired Fear Effect were the result of an engineered virus, and I don’t expect Jill Valentine to go kick Satan’s ass until RE10 at the earliest.

One last disc change.

That’s as far as I’ll spoil the plot, since I think it’s enough to convey why I have four-star love for this mediocre game. It’s just so wholeheartedly bold. Even to this day we get lazy rearrangements of Resident Evil and Silent Hill, but Fear Effect showed how to use the format while fearlessly establishing its own identity way back in 2000. It fought every technical limitation, ignored standard practices, and did its own thing. Being just as good as the other games out there wasn’t the goal at all, it had to blow people away. It probably shocked you at least once just in this summary, and I didn’t even include some of the cooler things it does towards the very end. So, I’m fine with it having a shit inventory system. I’m fine with a broken lock-on. I’m fine with all the flaws, because, as cheesy as it is to say, this game was never trying to be good, it was trying to be awesome.

It's a rare thing to be able to talk about a game and say that there is nothing quite like it, without it being some kind of hyperbolic statement, and few words are as abused and misused in the world of gaming as "unique". Not so for Project EDEN, Core Design's escape plan from EIDOS' Tomb Raider mines, before being dragged back in kicking and screaming for Angel of Darkness, which sank the studio.

All you need to know about Project EDEN is that it's a 3D action adventure version of Blizzard's The Lost Vikings and Sierra's Gobliiins, set in a dystopian future with a generous helping of John Carpenter body horror.

For those unfamiliar with the games mentioned above, think of a puzzle adventure in which you control multiple characters, each with their particular skills, which must be used in the right context and in synergy with each other in order to progress.

That Project EDEN is something special becomes immediately evident from the CG intro, which establishes the game's universe without need of a single word, through the clever use of a child's teddy bear, which is accidentally dropped from a terrace in a white utopian future city and slowly plummets down and down into increasingly dark and degraded layers of past urban developments and the humanity who lives there in the dark, until it lands at the very bottom, where it's picked up by the hand of what is implied to be a horribly disfigured mutant. It's brilliant averbal storytelling that gives you all the context you need without any kind of exposition dump. From there we follow our team of four police operatives in their descent into the underworld in search of two missing engineers, which quickly spirals into something much more sinister.

The levels are essentially massive puzzle boxes in the vein of Core's own Tomb Raider, except far more complex, since you have to use four people to solve them instead of one. You might have to send your robot through toxic gas to open a door so your engineer can repair a fuse box so the hacker can maneuver a platform around to ferry the team leader across a chasm to open a door and let everyone through, or you might have to drive a remote controlled car into maintenance ducts to fix a broken circuit so a bridge can be extended. It's very in-depth, so much so it can get confusing at times.

It's not all puzzle solving, as there is quite a lot of action too: cultists and mutants threaten the team at every turn. To fight them off, the game gradually unlocks about a dozen weapons, each with its own alternate fire: rapid or charge laser pistols, rockets launchers, proximity bombs, deployable auto turrets, even a stasis field to slow down time. There is a lot of variety in the way you can face the abominations you will meet in the lower strata of the city. It may not be the smoothest combat ever, but if you know Core Design, you already know the shooting was never their forte, and it doesn't significantly harm the experience. Furthermore, dying is only a temporary setback in Project EDEN, as the developers saw fit to remove the frustration factor by allowing the player to respawn each dead operative at set regeneration points, rather than going back to a checkpoint. A wise decision, since the puzzle-solving aspect is the main course of the game, and too much emphasis on action would have gotten in the way.

If you're looking for a lengthy and deep action puzzle experience that doesn't hold your hand at all and provides a huge sense of accomplishment when things click together to find the solution, this overlooked gem is exactly the game for you. I can't recommend it enough.

absolutely fuckin' schasty game that does not hold back with its visuals in the slightest. some of the best atmosphere in any game ive ever played that does its best to make the player uncomfortable at every turn. that being said, the story was a little hard to follow, which i think was intentional, but it made it hard to know where to go or what to do. im pretty used to point and clicks having obtuse solutions and all that, but with how far apart places can be in this game, and the clock mechanic meaning certain things are only accessible at certain times, it somewhat discourages experimentation. i recall having to look up a speedrun near the end to figure out what to do to finish the game. that being said, you should absolutely still check this game out, its totally worth it

I feel insane because I don't understand how this game was nominated for GOTY, and why its rated so highly.

I'm a big Remedy fan, having played all their games (except Quantum Break...). I loved the original Alan Wake and was looking forward to this, but I just couldn't get into it.

I was hooked at the start, with the atmosphere and the premise and the visuals, but I ended up losing interest a few hours in and then started to realize just how boring the gameplay loop is.

Overall,
+ Amazing visuals. I played on PS5 and it looked amazing, I can only imagine what it looks like on a beefed-up PC
+ Incredible sound design. Felt great playing this with a 5.1 surround system
+ Unique, compelling atmosphere. The "vibe" of this game, of Bright Falls, of the Dark Place, is impeccable.

All that being said, the game itself is SO INCREDIBLY BORING. Its a walking simulator 90% of the time, and the combat (whatever little there is) feels like a chore every single time. I dreaded playing this game for more than 30 minutes at a time. It's just not fun.

I'm all for cinematic games, but they have to be games at the end of the day. They need to have engaging gameplay elements and give players some agency in their actions. There was none of that here. Even the really cool Mind Place concept is nothing more than the illusion of control - the game doesn't let you actually deduce anything, you just point and click at all the options until something sticks.

I'll watch any movie or tv show directed by Sam Lake, but please stop trying to turn video games into something they're not. Blending things together is great (see recent Naughty Dog games for example), but not like this.

Alan Wake 2 could have been a fantastic 2 hour movie instead of a tedious 20 hour game.

This is your brain on capitalism.

GARAGE is the kind of experience that'll stick with me forever. An immersive, overwhelming, one-of-a-kind world full of suffering, charm, grit, and love. At its simplest, it's a game about a stranger in a small town full of quirky characters not unlike Twin Peaks, but with your only mission being to escape. The layers which reflect capitalism, industrialization, misogyny, and the body, all come after. It's got a pretty heavy third act with thoughtful and harrowing emotional and psychological threads, all tangled up like pipes and wires - no matter which ending you land on.

I can totally picture myself wanting to recommend this to people, but ultimately I kinda think I can't - just because of how totally obtuse, cryptic, and kind of impossible it is to play without the assistance of the very welcoming discord community.

Great game for me. But I dunno who else it's for.