AlexaLily
2020
I really like the core idea and would love to see it expanded upon but with this basic game jam version it can be a little frustrating because I had so many rounds that I lost because it came down to a 50/50 guess. When I was able to use the hints to figure out what cards probably were or weren't the vampire it felt great! It just didn't happen often enough to make me want to keep playing.
I don't want to go too hard on this game because a lot of things I ended up disliking about it are because a lot of the things I found frustrating here are due to it being based on D&D which I think is, largely, the antithesis of fun. So, things like THAC0, or the garbage alignment system, or obtuse/unclear stat systems aren't really Icewind Dale's fault. I can, however, call out how the game doesn't really offer any help if you're unfamiliar with those systems. The vast majority of things in the game don't have tooltips or details to read and the manuals (which don't come with the Steam version! I had to find the GOG version's manual!) don't have anything to help with this either. So, in the frequent case that I was confused about something, the solution was to go google it. I guess the expectation was that back in 2000 you'd either have your 2nd Edition rule book laying around and look it up there or you'd know what forum to go to to find your answer. Don't know how to remove "Chaos" or whatever? Well, too bad. Go look it up. Hope you know where to look! They had the option to put a lot of information in the game itself (both in the initial release and in this Enhanced Edition) and chose not to. It made a tedious experience that much more tedious when I had to frequently alt-tab out of the game to look things up for every other encounter (and not even always find an answer because Icewind Dale seems to be not terribly well-documented, especially compared to other notable CRPGs of the era).
So, with that aside... I still didn't like this very much. It's an immensely tedious game that asks you to constantly wrestle with every bit of tedium and clunkiness and if you manage to do all that you're rewarded with an immensely bland and generic narrative. I found large swathes of this game to be actively unenjoyable and unfun.
The way combat is seemingly supposed to work in this game is that you engage a group of enemies, they wipe the floor with you, and you load the game to figure out what the best approach for your particular party is. At first, I was okay with this. Combat was a series of fun puzzles to try and solve and once you get a wide enough array of tools at your disposal, it starts to become easier to deal with all the things the game can throw at you. But after hours and hours of saving and loading for just about every encounter, it really wore me down. It's just a tiresome loop to put up with for the thirty-ish hours it took to get through the game. On top of that, I found a lot of the encounter design to be very lacking. It seemed like there were largely two types of encounters here: a massive mob of simple enemies or a smaller group of enemies that have some more difficult aspect to them (resistances to particular damage types or strong spells, things like that). Occasionally, they throw a third type at you: a large mob of simple enemies that also have some stronger enemies behind them. It is, again, fine at first but becomes pretty boring when maps are just the same couple encounters repeated a dozen or so times.
Something that makes all that worse is that this game is clunky. I like to think that I'm pretty willing to put up with a lot of Old Game Jank and will cut older games a lot of slack when they don't have all the smooth sleek experiences of modern games but Icewind Dale really tested my patience in that regard. It feels like every way this UI/UX could be clunky, it is. Managing your inventory, casting spells, even just moving your characters around. The pathing AI was a pretty major source of frustration for me because it meant that I was constantly pausing in combat to micromanage each party member's movements but it felt like it hardly mattered because sometimes their AI routine would wrest control away from me and go do their own thing or other times they'd get inexplicable stuck on a wall or an ally or on nothing at all and they'd just sort of vibrate in place instead of doing anything useful.
And, hey, speaking of those party members, they were a pretty major disappointment for me too! When I saw that it gives you a full party of six pre-generated characters, I made the assumption that they were Actual Characters with stories and companion quests because that's how the vast majority of CRPGs work. But it turns out that, no, they aren't anything. They're just as empty as your own created character is. They get a little paragraph of backstory but there's no connections to the areas you go to or the people you meet. They don't have any goals or ideals or motivations or anything. This was extra weird to me seeing as the Icewind Dale games are basically a follow-up to the Baldur's Gate games which do a pretty good job of having interesting companion characters. (Side note that, yes, those games are by a different developer but you'd think maybe Black Isle would've taken note of what Baldur's Gate did well and try to put that in their game, y'know?)
And, hey, speaking of disappointing writing, the actual main plot of this game is some of the most empty, vapid, dull, tabletop adventure writing I've ever seen. There are a couple interesting tidbits here or there in this but the vast majority of the narrative is intensely dull. You're a group of adventurers who headed North in search of the vague idea of "adventure" and got caught up in chasing down some evil that plagues a village but the evil is always somewhere else and then, oops! it turns out the evil manipulated you into doing a thing for them and now you have to continue chasing the evil down to have a final confrontation. So much of this feels like they were stretching for time. There's so little actually important events in the story that it feels like they crammed in as much filler as they could to fill out the game.
It's not completely devoid of good ideas but most of what I did have any positive feelings for is buried pretty deep or not really engaged with. I think it's very interesting how this game pretty frequently reminds you that there were lots of people already living in the area before a bunch of humans moved in to start the Ten Towns and that y'all are extremely not welcome here you fuckin' settler scum but then the game doesn't really do anything with that. You can't do much to criticize or push back on the idea that because the Ten Towns exist everyone else just has to be okay with land being stolen out from under them. It almost feels like they stumbled backwards into it on accident and that's why they only sort-of address it. I also liked this small sub-plot about elves and dwarves fighting a war against orc but eventually falling because they were deceived into thinking they were being betrayed by each other. It wasn't anything terribly original or groundbreaking but the way it delivered that narrative by telling you one thing, suggesting the truth via some notes, and then revealing the actual truth later was significantly more interesting than almost anything else in this game.
I found that a lot of this held true for the DLC/expansion Heart of Winter as well. The narrative was nothing special ("hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" except the woman is a dragon) and the encounter design was the same but with ice monsters and yetis and shit. At least that one was short.
The Trials of the Luremaster DLC/expansion though is truly awful. Apparently, they only did this one because people complained that Heart of Winter didn't have enough content to it. And you can tell because a lot of it feels like it was made under duress. So much of the encounter design feels actively hostile to the player and downright mean. Most of the puzzles they ask you to solve are either dead simple things that are barely even puzzles or obtuse bullshit that the game seems to expect you to trial and error your way through. And there's barely any narrative to it, either. I made it about 90% of the way through it before the hard-as-nails encounters wore me down and I quit because absolutely nothing I had seen made me think that last 10% was going to be worth my time. Just some atrocious game design on display here. The only part of this that was remotely amusing was that one character's dialogue is, essentially, saying that adventurers like you are a bunch of greedy assholes who just want to travel to places to loot them for all they're worth.
I didn't particularly enjoy my time with Icewind Dale. I kept expecting to find something about it that I'd like and at least be able to point to and say "the rest of it may be kinda shit but this one part is worth it!" but I never found that.
So, with that aside... I still didn't like this very much. It's an immensely tedious game that asks you to constantly wrestle with every bit of tedium and clunkiness and if you manage to do all that you're rewarded with an immensely bland and generic narrative. I found large swathes of this game to be actively unenjoyable and unfun.
The way combat is seemingly supposed to work in this game is that you engage a group of enemies, they wipe the floor with you, and you load the game to figure out what the best approach for your particular party is. At first, I was okay with this. Combat was a series of fun puzzles to try and solve and once you get a wide enough array of tools at your disposal, it starts to become easier to deal with all the things the game can throw at you. But after hours and hours of saving and loading for just about every encounter, it really wore me down. It's just a tiresome loop to put up with for the thirty-ish hours it took to get through the game. On top of that, I found a lot of the encounter design to be very lacking. It seemed like there were largely two types of encounters here: a massive mob of simple enemies or a smaller group of enemies that have some more difficult aspect to them (resistances to particular damage types or strong spells, things like that). Occasionally, they throw a third type at you: a large mob of simple enemies that also have some stronger enemies behind them. It is, again, fine at first but becomes pretty boring when maps are just the same couple encounters repeated a dozen or so times.
Something that makes all that worse is that this game is clunky. I like to think that I'm pretty willing to put up with a lot of Old Game Jank and will cut older games a lot of slack when they don't have all the smooth sleek experiences of modern games but Icewind Dale really tested my patience in that regard. It feels like every way this UI/UX could be clunky, it is. Managing your inventory, casting spells, even just moving your characters around. The pathing AI was a pretty major source of frustration for me because it meant that I was constantly pausing in combat to micromanage each party member's movements but it felt like it hardly mattered because sometimes their AI routine would wrest control away from me and go do their own thing or other times they'd get inexplicable stuck on a wall or an ally or on nothing at all and they'd just sort of vibrate in place instead of doing anything useful.
And, hey, speaking of those party members, they were a pretty major disappointment for me too! When I saw that it gives you a full party of six pre-generated characters, I made the assumption that they were Actual Characters with stories and companion quests because that's how the vast majority of CRPGs work. But it turns out that, no, they aren't anything. They're just as empty as your own created character is. They get a little paragraph of backstory but there's no connections to the areas you go to or the people you meet. They don't have any goals or ideals or motivations or anything. This was extra weird to me seeing as the Icewind Dale games are basically a follow-up to the Baldur's Gate games which do a pretty good job of having interesting companion characters. (Side note that, yes, those games are by a different developer but you'd think maybe Black Isle would've taken note of what Baldur's Gate did well and try to put that in their game, y'know?)
And, hey, speaking of disappointing writing, the actual main plot of this game is some of the most empty, vapid, dull, tabletop adventure writing I've ever seen. There are a couple interesting tidbits here or there in this but the vast majority of the narrative is intensely dull. You're a group of adventurers who headed North in search of the vague idea of "adventure" and got caught up in chasing down some evil that plagues a village but the evil is always somewhere else and then, oops! it turns out the evil manipulated you into doing a thing for them and now you have to continue chasing the evil down to have a final confrontation. So much of this feels like they were stretching for time. There's so little actually important events in the story that it feels like they crammed in as much filler as they could to fill out the game.
It's not completely devoid of good ideas but most of what I did have any positive feelings for is buried pretty deep or not really engaged with. I think it's very interesting how this game pretty frequently reminds you that there were lots of people already living in the area before a bunch of humans moved in to start the Ten Towns and that y'all are extremely not welcome here you fuckin' settler scum but then the game doesn't really do anything with that. You can't do much to criticize or push back on the idea that because the Ten Towns exist everyone else just has to be okay with land being stolen out from under them. It almost feels like they stumbled backwards into it on accident and that's why they only sort-of address it. I also liked this small sub-plot about elves and dwarves fighting a war against orc but eventually falling because they were deceived into thinking they were being betrayed by each other. It wasn't anything terribly original or groundbreaking but the way it delivered that narrative by telling you one thing, suggesting the truth via some notes, and then revealing the actual truth later was significantly more interesting than almost anything else in this game.
I found that a lot of this held true for the DLC/expansion Heart of Winter as well. The narrative was nothing special ("hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" except the woman is a dragon) and the encounter design was the same but with ice monsters and yetis and shit. At least that one was short.
The Trials of the Luremaster DLC/expansion though is truly awful. Apparently, they only did this one because people complained that Heart of Winter didn't have enough content to it. And you can tell because a lot of it feels like it was made under duress. So much of the encounter design feels actively hostile to the player and downright mean. Most of the puzzles they ask you to solve are either dead simple things that are barely even puzzles or obtuse bullshit that the game seems to expect you to trial and error your way through. And there's barely any narrative to it, either. I made it about 90% of the way through it before the hard-as-nails encounters wore me down and I quit because absolutely nothing I had seen made me think that last 10% was going to be worth my time. Just some atrocious game design on display here. The only part of this that was remotely amusing was that one character's dialogue is, essentially, saying that adventurers like you are a bunch of greedy assholes who just want to travel to places to loot them for all they're worth.
I didn't particularly enjoy my time with Icewind Dale. I kept expecting to find something about it that I'd like and at least be able to point to and say "the rest of it may be kinda shit but this one part is worth it!" but I never found that.
2009
Sure, the game is glitchy and buggy and crashes and the levels are way too long and there's way too many enemies for what your toolset is and the screenshake makes it hard to see anything and it takes way too long to get to the game's gimmick magic spell gauntlet mechanic but damn is it charming. It's the only game I can think of that starts off as a WWI shooter and becomes a crusade into the depths of vampire hell to free the last dragon and fight multiple demon lords and that's gotta count for something.
2020
Great vibes. Great soundtrack. Fun lil time to explore around a weird world. Some fun visual gags in the world to find. Certain parts of the controls don't feel great (climbing and gliding, specifically) which makes trying to complete everything feel way more tedious than it should.
There is a way to look at Operation Anchorage and read it as a scathing satire of the state of first person shooter campaigns circa 2009. The extreme linearity, the way everyone treats you as the biggest badass, the lack of any meaningful lore or side content. You could look at that and see it being Bethesda saying "look how boring other first person games are. Ours is big and open and and so much Content™!" The problem is that the DLC does absolutely nothing to encourage that reading so instead we're left with an incredibly boring shooter campaign. It really seems like they looked at Call of Duty, looked at their dev tools, and said "yeah we can do that too!"
There is one bit of writing in this that I find particularly interesting: before you go into the simulation there is a terminal that suggests that certain elements of the simulation itself may be exaggerated or incorrect because of the person it was based upon. So you go in thinking that it might get weird (or maybe even wacky) but instead there's nothing that wouldn't reasonable exist in the Fallout universe.
In short, this DLC is a massive missed opportunity and a waste of time.
There is one bit of writing in this that I find particularly interesting: before you go into the simulation there is a terminal that suggests that certain elements of the simulation itself may be exaggerated or incorrect because of the person it was based upon. So you go in thinking that it might get weird (or maybe even wacky) but instead there's nothing that wouldn't reasonable exist in the Fallout universe.
In short, this DLC is a massive missed opportunity and a waste of time.
2020
The base idea here is solid. "Eat small things to get bigger so you can eat bigger things" is a tried-and-true idea that has stood the test of time. I just wish I liked anything else about this. I think it feels kinda bad to control, the ui isn't terribly intuitive, it's not always clear where to go, and the ending felt a bit nonsensical. Maybe the most tragic thing is that the art didn't really do anything for me. It's trying to be a little bit gross and weird but it just doesn't land for me. It's not gross in a repulsive way like Binding of Isaac is and it's not gross in an interesting way like Nidhogg 2 is. It somehow manages to be a very bland type of gross. Oh, that fish has a human face? Yeah I played Seaman, that's nothing new.
But all that said: it's free and there's certainly worse ways to spend ten minutes, so maybe just give it a shot anyway.
But all that said: it's free and there's certainly worse ways to spend ten minutes, so maybe just give it a shot anyway.
Right off the bat, I really appreciate that they're tried to have an actual Plot with Characters this time around whereas the last one was just a collection of people doing things until credits rolled. I'm not going to say that any of that narrative work they do here is really impressive but it was a big step up from TR2013.
One of my immediate impressions of this game was seeing how much they had expanded the crafting systems and feeling extremely exhausted. There's just so much stuff. Weapon upgrades and inventory upgrades and like eight types of ammo, and now there's like a dozen different crafting ingredients. The few times I had to seek out specific materials to craft a specific upgrade I wanted was truly miserable. Sometimes doing something simpler is better. Even if the crafting TR2013 was a bit light, I think I prefer that to whatever you want to call what they've done here.
I think it's interesting that instead of doing usual open world "climb a thing to reveal a bunch of icons" they do "find three different things to reveal everything." On the one hand, it's a good idea because it means I can find one map and then go grab those collectibles (or whatever) and it helps to make map clutter more manageable. But on the other hand, it means I was backtracking through places multiple times over which can be very tedious and annoying when it's the more scripted climbing sequences that the main story has you do.
And shoutouts to them for mostly fixing the platforming breaking and killing me. The vast majority of the game was totally fine until I got the finale and suddenly it was doing the same shit again, spinning the camera around right as I jump or Lara just randomly let go of things for no reason and, like, tripled my deathcount in twenty minutes.
I still feel largely ambivalent about the combat here. Shooting people is whatever. I like that they seemed to make stealth a more viable option (even though there's still a lot of forced combat encounters that don't let you stealth). And I do genuinely like doing the stealth in this game! It's very satisfying to do a Death From Above and be some Predator murder machine. That said, it does feel like they made the stealth for it to fail. The way it hides or obscures some information you'd need to be able to stealth through an encounter means that shootouts are nearly inevitable.
Speaking of combat, they expanded the skill tree a bunch and added a lot more skills for dodging and countering and doing finishers and, you know what? No thank you, I don't think I will. I will simply circle strafe around the enemies and dump bullets into them like a normal person.
There's this thing the game does whenever you come upon something that tells you about what people in the past believed about the world. You find artifacts and notes and such that talk about how people encountered something they didn't know how to explain and would turn to spiritualism to try and explain it. For example, late in the game, there is one of the puzzle tombs in a big cavern that a note says must obviously be a pathway to hell and Lara kind of laughs and points out that, no, it's just a big cavern. And then there are notes in the tomb from a woman who was set to be exorcized and she explains that she understands that she isn't possessed and just has Weird Brain Stuff going on but the people around here attribute it to demons. The writing around this stuff makes it feel like the game thinks this sort of thing is quaint? Like, "oh how cute of these centuries-old people try to explain things! But we know better now because we have science!" Which is a really strange attitude to have towards belief in the supernatural when your game has an immortal man and an undying army and a magic crystal in it!! Your game is extremely supernatural, just like the one that came before it!! Maybe don't be so dismissive towards actual beliefs people held when you're going to turn around and say "okay but here's some stuff we made up that is Totally Real and has no scientific explanation!" I think it's weird and kind of hacky writing.
'C' as a default keybind sucks ass, I hate using it and I don't know anyone who likes it. And putting something relatively important on it is bad. PC gaming is so cursed because there's so many options for keybinds and yet game devs love to make terrible choices around them.
Also, while I'm wrapping this up with minor complaints, it sucks that they tied weird bonuses to the outfits. I want to wear the cute outfits and instead I had to wear whatever had the best bonus available. I want to play dress-up, I do not want to have to think.
Overall solid improvement over the first game. Still a great 'no thoughts, head empty' collectathon game for me.
Edit: Realizing a day later that I didn't write anything about the actual story and I have some Thoughts about it so it's getting an addendum on the end. It's a MacGuffin chase as Lara tries to work through her feelings about her dad mixed with a really boring white savior narrative because golly those poor natives just don't know how to defend themselves anymore!! It kinda sucks and lot of the writing is vapid. They do so little to actually convince me that the magic crystal at the end is important for something and until the final cutscene it's not even clear why Lara wants other than "well, dad wanted to find it" so the ending feels like it comes out of nowhere. I think they could've had something with Lara dealing with her relationship to her father (he was never around and she resented him for that for a while, his mother died and he withheld lots of details around that, he was generally very closed off, and then he suddenly killed himself while she watched). It's the only really interesting thing going on here and they devote so little time to it. Hard to keep me interested in the narrative for large swathes of this. They could've at least thrown me a bone and let Lara kiss Sophia or something. The end (plus the Blood Ties DLC) sets up some interesting extended family and conspiracy stuff that I imagine will be what the third game is about so I'm mildly hopeful that there'll be something there but really I should probably lower my expectations.
One of my immediate impressions of this game was seeing how much they had expanded the crafting systems and feeling extremely exhausted. There's just so much stuff. Weapon upgrades and inventory upgrades and like eight types of ammo, and now there's like a dozen different crafting ingredients. The few times I had to seek out specific materials to craft a specific upgrade I wanted was truly miserable. Sometimes doing something simpler is better. Even if the crafting TR2013 was a bit light, I think I prefer that to whatever you want to call what they've done here.
I think it's interesting that instead of doing usual open world "climb a thing to reveal a bunch of icons" they do "find three different things to reveal everything." On the one hand, it's a good idea because it means I can find one map and then go grab those collectibles (or whatever) and it helps to make map clutter more manageable. But on the other hand, it means I was backtracking through places multiple times over which can be very tedious and annoying when it's the more scripted climbing sequences that the main story has you do.
And shoutouts to them for mostly fixing the platforming breaking and killing me. The vast majority of the game was totally fine until I got the finale and suddenly it was doing the same shit again, spinning the camera around right as I jump or Lara just randomly let go of things for no reason and, like, tripled my deathcount in twenty minutes.
I still feel largely ambivalent about the combat here. Shooting people is whatever. I like that they seemed to make stealth a more viable option (even though there's still a lot of forced combat encounters that don't let you stealth). And I do genuinely like doing the stealth in this game! It's very satisfying to do a Death From Above and be some Predator murder machine. That said, it does feel like they made the stealth for it to fail. The way it hides or obscures some information you'd need to be able to stealth through an encounter means that shootouts are nearly inevitable.
Speaking of combat, they expanded the skill tree a bunch and added a lot more skills for dodging and countering and doing finishers and, you know what? No thank you, I don't think I will. I will simply circle strafe around the enemies and dump bullets into them like a normal person.
There's this thing the game does whenever you come upon something that tells you about what people in the past believed about the world. You find artifacts and notes and such that talk about how people encountered something they didn't know how to explain and would turn to spiritualism to try and explain it. For example, late in the game, there is one of the puzzle tombs in a big cavern that a note says must obviously be a pathway to hell and Lara kind of laughs and points out that, no, it's just a big cavern. And then there are notes in the tomb from a woman who was set to be exorcized and she explains that she understands that she isn't possessed and just has Weird Brain Stuff going on but the people around here attribute it to demons. The writing around this stuff makes it feel like the game thinks this sort of thing is quaint? Like, "oh how cute of these centuries-old people try to explain things! But we know better now because we have science!" Which is a really strange attitude to have towards belief in the supernatural when your game has an immortal man and an undying army and a magic crystal in it!! Your game is extremely supernatural, just like the one that came before it!! Maybe don't be so dismissive towards actual beliefs people held when you're going to turn around and say "okay but here's some stuff we made up that is Totally Real and has no scientific explanation!" I think it's weird and kind of hacky writing.
'C' as a default keybind sucks ass, I hate using it and I don't know anyone who likes it. And putting something relatively important on it is bad. PC gaming is so cursed because there's so many options for keybinds and yet game devs love to make terrible choices around them.
Also, while I'm wrapping this up with minor complaints, it sucks that they tied weird bonuses to the outfits. I want to wear the cute outfits and instead I had to wear whatever had the best bonus available. I want to play dress-up, I do not want to have to think.
Overall solid improvement over the first game. Still a great 'no thoughts, head empty' collectathon game for me.
Edit: Realizing a day later that I didn't write anything about the actual story and I have some Thoughts about it so it's getting an addendum on the end. It's a MacGuffin chase as Lara tries to work through her feelings about her dad mixed with a really boring white savior narrative because golly those poor natives just don't know how to defend themselves anymore!! It kinda sucks and lot of the writing is vapid. They do so little to actually convince me that the magic crystal at the end is important for something and until the final cutscene it's not even clear why Lara wants other than "well, dad wanted to find it" so the ending feels like it comes out of nowhere. I think they could've had something with Lara dealing with her relationship to her father (he was never around and she resented him for that for a while, his mother died and he withheld lots of details around that, he was generally very closed off, and then he suddenly killed himself while she watched). It's the only really interesting thing going on here and they devote so little time to it. Hard to keep me interested in the narrative for large swathes of this. They could've at least thrown me a bone and let Lara kiss Sophia or something. The end (plus the Blood Ties DLC) sets up some interesting extended family and conspiracy stuff that I imagine will be what the third game is about so I'm mildly hopeful that there'll be something there but really I should probably lower my expectations.
This game is really cool and interesting than it is actually good. It's mechanically totally serviceable, the writing and voice acting is all generally fine. It's a little light on puzzles with only a handful throughout so most of the game is either wandering around using/combining items or doing some light combat. It's worth a look to any fans of the survival horror genre as an interesting bit of history.
Also, it's very ambitious and clever of the developers to license a big name IP and then attach their own original characters onto it, thus making their previous game Nocturne sort-of canon to the Blair Witch franchise.
Also, it's very ambitious and clever of the developers to license a big name IP and then attach their own original characters onto it, thus making their previous game Nocturne sort-of canon to the Blair Witch franchise.
2015
This game has some really cool ideas and looks gorgeous and I know they won't ever make a sequel but they totally should, dammit. There's enough cool stuff (plus a cliffhanger ending) that it deserves to be given another shot.
2014
This is a totally competent open world game if you like driving around and collecting things and completing objectives but oh my god Aiden Pierce is, by far, the least-likable video game protagonist I have ever seen. Any time I was reminded that I was playing as him it made me want to stop playing. He is terrible and the story written around him is awful. It's so bad that it's to the point that I feel this game is barely worth playing. There are so many other equally-competent open world games that people should play literally anything else before this.
A wonderful game with a charming cast of characters, an amazing story, and some incredible surprises packed away. The puzzles themselves are all fantastically done - challenging enough to keep a veteran interested while still accessible enough for beginners. It's an exquisitely done game and one of the best I've played in quite a while.
2021
Before I get into the actual review, I need to start off with a little PSA: This game is early access. It's not marked as such and, as far as I can tell, they don't actually call it that but this game is unfinished. Yes, you can play through the entire main story of the game but it feels like they simply haven't added large swathes of content. So this entire review is going to have a big asterisk of "maybe check back in in 6-to-12 months and see if it's actually done now".
First off: it's cool that this game draws so much from Roadside Picnic and Stalker. Outside of the actual S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, I feel like they don't come up as influences for games very often so it's neat to see it. And it works really well with this type of Fallout-y game they're going for! And I like that the bolt-throwing mechanic to disable anomalies felt actually meaningful. In my (limited) time with the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, it seemed like throwing bolts was a neat thing to do but ultimately unnecessary because of the visual and audio cues the anomalies caused but in Encased the anomalies are essentially recharging landmines so you have to actually throw bolts at them to be able to move past them to get to objectives or loot or whatever.
One of my favorite parts of any Fallout game are the vaults. They're small dungeons, each with a wholly self-contained short story. So of course I was interested to see what Encased would have as a vault equivalent. Early on, there was a quest to check out four of these research bunkers and I found all four of them to be pretty disappointing. The stories they told weren't particularly interesting and the way they told them wasn't very clever or well done. And then that was it. There weren't any more in the rest of the game.
I need to talk about the main quest because about halfway through the game, that's all there is to do. The actual narrative of it is fine, I suppose. A bad thing happens, you're somehow magically linked to it and you use that link to save everyone or kill everyone. It's nothing special but I never get very attached to the main stories in this sort of game anyway, so your mileage may vary here. My main issue with this is in the actual functional design of the series of quests. You're an extremely important person and yet everyone treats you like a nobody and uses you as a gopher to run errands for them. It's just hours and hours of back-to-back fetch quests. Multiple stages of the story have you running to the various factions to convince them to cooperate on something and having to do favors for them all. Some of the favors include stuff as mundane as putting up some election posters for someone or polling random people about who they're voting for (despite the game never resolving this election plotline! it just fades away and hopes you forget that it ever mattered!). It makes actually advancing the plot feel like a grind when so much of it is Person A sends you to Person B who sends you to Person C who needs a favor and that favor is to kill some zombies or find a macguffin. As much as I don't particularly care for Fallout 1 and 2, I really think they have some exquisitely designed main narratives, especially in the way they reveal what the games are really about and get you into each stage of the story relatively seamlessly.
I gestured at this before but, after a certain point, this game gets empty. During the Prologue and Act 1, there's quite a few side quests available — at one point I had so many that I felt mildly overwhelmed when looking at my quest log because of how much stuff there was to do. But once the game got to Act 2, the side content dried up almost completely. The game finally lets you go visit some of the other factions and when you get to their home bases, you find these big maps full of a ton of NPCs and nothing to do outside of the main quest. You're telling me that The Phalanx (a mercenary band trying to take control of The Dome by force) doesn't have one single thing for me to do? No one in that huge base needs a single favor? To make it worse, there are a lot of locations and characters that have bits of narrative or unique interactions where a quest should be but then nothing is ever there. I constantly had this feeling that I had arrived at a place too early and the quest hadn't unlocked yet, but then I went back just before I finished the game and there still wasn't anything to do. And so that leaves you in the late game with pretty much nothing to do but the absolute grind of a main plot.
For me, the companions are always the most important part of this type of game. I always prefer the smaller-scale and more personal stories of unique characters instead of the bigger main story plot about saving the world or whatever. And in this particular aspect, this game is wildly disappointing. The companions don't have much to say, both in terms of how often they have new dialogue options but also when they actually do talk there's barely more than a sentence or two at a time. And then on top of that, I found the companions to be all varying degrees of dull. They didn't craft interesting characters to talk to! I talked to them anyway in a naive hope that they might suddenly say something compelling but it never happened and I eventually gave up.
On top of all that, they don't have companion quests. You know how normally a game with companions will have quests to resolve their character arc or a loyalty mission or something but these characters don't have any of that. They all have bits of story that point towards having a conflict to resolve with your help but none of them seem to actually do that. For example, the one companion I liked the most was Crump and he talks about how his abusive father is somewhere under the dome and how he wants to find him. But then it doesn't go anywhere. As far as I could tell, you simply can't find Crump's father. And after the finale, when the game lets you talk to the companions one last time, he says that now that everything is settled, he'll go do it himself. It's frustrating and hugely disappointing to me.
And speaking of frustrating and hugely disappointing, I need to talk about Fox. Fox is plural and the writers lean into every old, tired, shitty, trope about plurality that they can cram in. It extremely sucks! At one point, there's even a fortuneteller that hinted that Fox's companion quest (if it actually existed, of course) would be to "help" Fox out by "getting rid" of one personality so you can make her a "normal" person and it sucks! If that's really what they're going to go for, then that sucks and it's better that it's not actually a thing you do in the game. And if you're thinking "well I don't understand why this sucks" please do yourself a favor and read up on plurality some: https://morethanone.info/#
A few last stray thoughts that I just need to get out of my head:
-This game has a tiny bit of talk about the way society treats convicts unfairly even after they've served their sentences but it doesn't really go very far into it and mostly uses it as a tool to make it clear that one particular faction sucks more than the rest. It's like it gestures at having some good politics but then backs away before actually saying anything meaningful.
-This game has one of the most bewildering references I've ever seen where, in a defunct prison, there's a TV showing a cartoon rendition of an Abu Ghraib prisoner being tortured. Why would you put that in a game?? At all?? It's not some biting satire and it's definitely not funny so it just feels completely tasteless. What the fuck!
-Fallout, as a franchise, has an awful lot to say about racism and slavery (even if they try and obfuscate it behind applying it to Ghouls or synthetic people instead of "normal" people or whatever) and this game completely avoids that which is nice because I think the way the Fallouts talk about this stuff is pretty bad.
-It seems like they want to avoid the quest log guiding you too closely to where you need to go and what you need to do but sometimes it gives you a quest to go to the biggest city in the game and talk to Some Guy but gives absolutely no indication where in the city that guy actually is and so I had to run around to every room in the whole place until I found him and it was awful every time. Objective markers are not inherently bad, y'all, sometimes they just save you from doing extremely boring shit!!
-The AI pathing is genuinely terrible. I had multiple instances of my companions (and occasional escort quest NPCs!) walk directly into instant-death environmental hazards because they have absolutely zero sense of self-preservation. You can manually move each character around individually and doing so is very tedious and absolutely required in some locations.
-At first, I thought that the Fops faction (they're liked Fallout's raiders or bandits) were going to be their way of signalling that these are human-shaped goblins that you don't need to feel bad for killing. But then it said they'd be a valid faction for me to talk to and possibly ally with! But then when I got to talk to them it turns out they're just a bunch of crazy cannibals and they're actually just human-shaped goblins that I shouldn't feel bad about killing.
And finally, I want to include some thoughts about the finale but, because it has to be very spoiler-y, I'm going to run it through rot-13. If you don't know what that is, just copy and paste this gibberish into https://rot13.com/ to decode it.
V ernyyl yvxr gur trareny vqrn bs gur svanyr. Lbh svtug lbhe jnl onpx guebhtu Pbapbeq Fgngvba (nxn gur ghgbevny nern), ergenpvat lbhe svefg fgrcf va gur tnzr onpx guebhtu gb gur pragre bs gur Znryfgebz juvpu whfg unccraf gb or jurer lbh tbg bss gur ryringbe nsgre punenpgre perngvba. Nybat gur jnl, lbh unir n pbhcyr rapbhagref gb svtug guebhtu naq jvgu rnpu rapbhagre n srj ACPf sebz gur inevbhf snpgvbaf jvyy qebc va naq, qrcraqvat ba lbhe erchgngvba jvgu gurve nffbpvngrq snpgvba, gurl jvyy rvgure uryc lbh svtug, nggnpx lbh, be yrnir lbh nybar gb svtug gur erny rarzvrf ol lbhefrys. Gur vqrn urer vf svar naq tbbq ohg gurer'f gjb znwbe ceboyrzf jvgu vg. Gur svefg vf gung guvf nern vf fvzcyl abg qrfvtarq gb unir gurfr pbzong rapbhagref. Lbh unir gb jbex guebhtu znal bar gvyr jvqr pubxrcbvagf gb trg gb rnpu svtug naq gur ACPf nofbyhgryl ybir gb trg va gung bar gvyr naq fgnaq gurer, pbzcyrgryl oybpxvat lbh bhg bs gur svtug. Vg znxrf rnpu svtug gnxr zhpu, zhpu ybatre guna vg arrqf gb naq vf zber sehfgengvat naq naablvat gung vg unf nal evtug gb or. Gur frpbaq vffhr vf gung gur snpgvba flfgrz unf nofbyhgryl ab sevpgvba gb vg fb jura V ebyyrq guebhtu, rirel fvatyr snpgvba jnf sevraqyl gb zr naq "urycrq" va gur svtugf. Gurer'f arire n gvzr jura qbvat n dhrfg jvyy vapernfr erchgngvba jvgu bar snpgvba naq qrpernfr vg jvgu nabgure, ab znggre ubj zhpu gur snpgvbaf ungr rnpu bgure. Lbh'q guvax Cunynak be Arj Pbzzvggrr zvtug ungr vg jura V uryc Gur Sbcf ohg nccneragyl gurl pbzcyrgryl qb abg pner! Vg znxrf gur jubyr guvat srry jrveq naq gbb ivqrb tnzr-l jura n ybg bs jung guvf tnzr tbrf sbe vf eryngviryl fvzhyngvbavfg-l. Naq gura gur npghny svany fgrcf bs gur svanyr ner pbby. Gur Zrngtevaqre rapbhagre vf ebgr ohg fgvyy sha gb frr. Vg vf jrveq gung nsgre lbh qrny jvgu gur Znryfgebz vg qhzcf lbh onpx bhgfvqr Pbapbeq fb lbh pna gnyx gb nyy gur snpgvba yrnqref bar ynfg gvzr naq svaq bhg whfg ubj qvfnccbvagrq va lbh zbfg (be nyy) bs gurz ner. Vg qbrfa'g ernyyl unir nal chapu gb vg naq vg gnxrf sberire sbe jung vf bayl bar be gjb fragraprf cre crefba lbh gnyx gb. Vg fubhyq'ir whfg fxvccrq evtug gb gur raq fyvqrfubj vafgrnq bs znxvat zr jnyx nebhaq sbe na rkgen gra be svsgrra zvahgrf.
First off: it's cool that this game draws so much from Roadside Picnic and Stalker. Outside of the actual S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, I feel like they don't come up as influences for games very often so it's neat to see it. And it works really well with this type of Fallout-y game they're going for! And I like that the bolt-throwing mechanic to disable anomalies felt actually meaningful. In my (limited) time with the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, it seemed like throwing bolts was a neat thing to do but ultimately unnecessary because of the visual and audio cues the anomalies caused but in Encased the anomalies are essentially recharging landmines so you have to actually throw bolts at them to be able to move past them to get to objectives or loot or whatever.
One of my favorite parts of any Fallout game are the vaults. They're small dungeons, each with a wholly self-contained short story. So of course I was interested to see what Encased would have as a vault equivalent. Early on, there was a quest to check out four of these research bunkers and I found all four of them to be pretty disappointing. The stories they told weren't particularly interesting and the way they told them wasn't very clever or well done. And then that was it. There weren't any more in the rest of the game.
I need to talk about the main quest because about halfway through the game, that's all there is to do. The actual narrative of it is fine, I suppose. A bad thing happens, you're somehow magically linked to it and you use that link to save everyone or kill everyone. It's nothing special but I never get very attached to the main stories in this sort of game anyway, so your mileage may vary here. My main issue with this is in the actual functional design of the series of quests. You're an extremely important person and yet everyone treats you like a nobody and uses you as a gopher to run errands for them. It's just hours and hours of back-to-back fetch quests. Multiple stages of the story have you running to the various factions to convince them to cooperate on something and having to do favors for them all. Some of the favors include stuff as mundane as putting up some election posters for someone or polling random people about who they're voting for (despite the game never resolving this election plotline! it just fades away and hopes you forget that it ever mattered!). It makes actually advancing the plot feel like a grind when so much of it is Person A sends you to Person B who sends you to Person C who needs a favor and that favor is to kill some zombies or find a macguffin. As much as I don't particularly care for Fallout 1 and 2, I really think they have some exquisitely designed main narratives, especially in the way they reveal what the games are really about and get you into each stage of the story relatively seamlessly.
I gestured at this before but, after a certain point, this game gets empty. During the Prologue and Act 1, there's quite a few side quests available — at one point I had so many that I felt mildly overwhelmed when looking at my quest log because of how much stuff there was to do. But once the game got to Act 2, the side content dried up almost completely. The game finally lets you go visit some of the other factions and when you get to their home bases, you find these big maps full of a ton of NPCs and nothing to do outside of the main quest. You're telling me that The Phalanx (a mercenary band trying to take control of The Dome by force) doesn't have one single thing for me to do? No one in that huge base needs a single favor? To make it worse, there are a lot of locations and characters that have bits of narrative or unique interactions where a quest should be but then nothing is ever there. I constantly had this feeling that I had arrived at a place too early and the quest hadn't unlocked yet, but then I went back just before I finished the game and there still wasn't anything to do. And so that leaves you in the late game with pretty much nothing to do but the absolute grind of a main plot.
For me, the companions are always the most important part of this type of game. I always prefer the smaller-scale and more personal stories of unique characters instead of the bigger main story plot about saving the world or whatever. And in this particular aspect, this game is wildly disappointing. The companions don't have much to say, both in terms of how often they have new dialogue options but also when they actually do talk there's barely more than a sentence or two at a time. And then on top of that, I found the companions to be all varying degrees of dull. They didn't craft interesting characters to talk to! I talked to them anyway in a naive hope that they might suddenly say something compelling but it never happened and I eventually gave up.
On top of all that, they don't have companion quests. You know how normally a game with companions will have quests to resolve their character arc or a loyalty mission or something but these characters don't have any of that. They all have bits of story that point towards having a conflict to resolve with your help but none of them seem to actually do that. For example, the one companion I liked the most was Crump and he talks about how his abusive father is somewhere under the dome and how he wants to find him. But then it doesn't go anywhere. As far as I could tell, you simply can't find Crump's father. And after the finale, when the game lets you talk to the companions one last time, he says that now that everything is settled, he'll go do it himself. It's frustrating and hugely disappointing to me.
And speaking of frustrating and hugely disappointing, I need to talk about Fox. Fox is plural and the writers lean into every old, tired, shitty, trope about plurality that they can cram in. It extremely sucks! At one point, there's even a fortuneteller that hinted that Fox's companion quest (if it actually existed, of course) would be to "help" Fox out by "getting rid" of one personality so you can make her a "normal" person and it sucks! If that's really what they're going to go for, then that sucks and it's better that it's not actually a thing you do in the game. And if you're thinking "well I don't understand why this sucks" please do yourself a favor and read up on plurality some: https://morethanone.info/#
A few last stray thoughts that I just need to get out of my head:
-This game has a tiny bit of talk about the way society treats convicts unfairly even after they've served their sentences but it doesn't really go very far into it and mostly uses it as a tool to make it clear that one particular faction sucks more than the rest. It's like it gestures at having some good politics but then backs away before actually saying anything meaningful.
-This game has one of the most bewildering references I've ever seen where, in a defunct prison, there's a TV showing a cartoon rendition of an Abu Ghraib prisoner being tortured. Why would you put that in a game?? At all?? It's not some biting satire and it's definitely not funny so it just feels completely tasteless. What the fuck!
-Fallout, as a franchise, has an awful lot to say about racism and slavery (even if they try and obfuscate it behind applying it to Ghouls or synthetic people instead of "normal" people or whatever) and this game completely avoids that which is nice because I think the way the Fallouts talk about this stuff is pretty bad.
-It seems like they want to avoid the quest log guiding you too closely to where you need to go and what you need to do but sometimes it gives you a quest to go to the biggest city in the game and talk to Some Guy but gives absolutely no indication where in the city that guy actually is and so I had to run around to every room in the whole place until I found him and it was awful every time. Objective markers are not inherently bad, y'all, sometimes they just save you from doing extremely boring shit!!
-The AI pathing is genuinely terrible. I had multiple instances of my companions (and occasional escort quest NPCs!) walk directly into instant-death environmental hazards because they have absolutely zero sense of self-preservation. You can manually move each character around individually and doing so is very tedious and absolutely required in some locations.
-At first, I thought that the Fops faction (they're liked Fallout's raiders or bandits) were going to be their way of signalling that these are human-shaped goblins that you don't need to feel bad for killing. But then it said they'd be a valid faction for me to talk to and possibly ally with! But then when I got to talk to them it turns out they're just a bunch of crazy cannibals and they're actually just human-shaped goblins that I shouldn't feel bad about killing.
And finally, I want to include some thoughts about the finale but, because it has to be very spoiler-y, I'm going to run it through rot-13. If you don't know what that is, just copy and paste this gibberish into https://rot13.com/ to decode it.
V ernyyl yvxr gur trareny vqrn bs gur svanyr. Lbh svtug lbhe jnl onpx guebhtu Pbapbeq Fgngvba (nxn gur ghgbevny nern), ergenpvat lbhe svefg fgrcf va gur tnzr onpx guebhtu gb gur pragre bs gur Znryfgebz juvpu whfg unccraf gb or jurer lbh tbg bss gur ryringbe nsgre punenpgre perngvba. Nybat gur jnl, lbh unir n pbhcyr rapbhagref gb svtug guebhtu naq jvgu rnpu rapbhagre n srj ACPf sebz gur inevbhf snpgvbaf jvyy qebc va naq, qrcraqvat ba lbhe erchgngvba jvgu gurve nffbpvngrq snpgvba, gurl jvyy rvgure uryc lbh svtug, nggnpx lbh, be yrnir lbh nybar gb svtug gur erny rarzvrf ol lbhefrys. Gur vqrn urer vf svar naq tbbq ohg gurer'f gjb znwbe ceboyrzf jvgu vg. Gur svefg vf gung guvf nern vf fvzcyl abg qrfvtarq gb unir gurfr pbzong rapbhagref. Lbh unir gb jbex guebhtu znal bar gvyr jvqr pubxrcbvagf gb trg gb rnpu svtug naq gur ACPf nofbyhgryl ybir gb trg va gung bar gvyr naq fgnaq gurer, pbzcyrgryl oybpxvat lbh bhg bs gur svtug. Vg znxrf rnpu svtug gnxr zhpu, zhpu ybatre guna vg arrqf gb naq vf zber sehfgengvat naq naablvat gung vg unf nal evtug gb or. Gur frpbaq vffhr vf gung gur snpgvba flfgrz unf nofbyhgryl ab sevpgvba gb vg fb jura V ebyyrq guebhtu, rirel fvatyr snpgvba jnf sevraqyl gb zr naq "urycrq" va gur svtugf. Gurer'f arire n gvzr jura qbvat n dhrfg jvyy vapernfr erchgngvba jvgu bar snpgvba naq qrpernfr vg jvgu nabgure, ab znggre ubj zhpu gur snpgvbaf ungr rnpu bgure. Lbh'q guvax Cunynak be Arj Pbzzvggrr zvtug ungr vg jura V uryc Gur Sbcf ohg nccneragyl gurl pbzcyrgryl qb abg pner! Vg znxrf gur jubyr guvat srry jrveq naq gbb ivqrb tnzr-l jura n ybg bs jung guvf tnzr tbrf sbe vf eryngviryl fvzhyngvbavfg-l. Naq gura gur npghny svany fgrcf bs gur svanyr ner pbby. Gur Zrngtevaqre rapbhagre vf ebgr ohg fgvyy sha gb frr. Vg vf jrveq gung nsgre lbh qrny jvgu gur Znryfgebz vg qhzcf lbh onpx bhgfvqr Pbapbeq fb lbh pna gnyx gb nyy gur snpgvba yrnqref bar ynfg gvzr naq svaq bhg whfg ubj qvfnccbvagrq va lbh zbfg (be nyy) bs gurz ner. Vg qbrfa'g ernyyl unir nal chapu gb vg naq vg gnxrf sberire sbe jung vf bayl bar be gjb fragraprf cre crefba lbh gnyx gb. Vg fubhyq'ir whfg fxvccrq evtug gb gur raq fyvqrfubj vafgrnq bs znxvat zr jnyx nebhaq sbe na rkgen gra be svsgrra zvahgrf.
2009
Bethesda continues the age-old tradition of Fallout games invoking slavery but trying to strip it of any politics and just kind of shrug and be like "it's bad, I guess"
Never in the history of the world has slavery been about a group 'just needing someone to do menial labor that no one wants to do'. It is always 'needing someone to do menial labor and also hating a particular group of people and considering them sub-human'. So to discard that second part is to have a fundamental misunderstanding of slavery and whether that's intentional or not is irrelevant because it makes for borderline irresponsible writing.
And the rest of this DLC is okay I guess. It sure is more Fallout 3.
Never in the history of the world has slavery been about a group 'just needing someone to do menial labor that no one wants to do'. It is always 'needing someone to do menial labor and also hating a particular group of people and considering them sub-human'. So to discard that second part is to have a fundamental misunderstanding of slavery and whether that's intentional or not is irrelevant because it makes for borderline irresponsible writing.
And the rest of this DLC is okay I guess. It sure is more Fallout 3.
2010
Is Deadly Premonition good? No.
Is Deadly Premonition ironically good? Also no.
This game is bad in just about every way it's possible for a game to be bad. It looks bad, it runs bad, the running around feels bad, the driving feels bad, the combat feels bad, the writing is bad, the voice acting is bad, the side quests are tedious and bad, the main character oscillates between 'asshole' and 'idiot' (but never in an endearing or entertaining way). Then, to top it all off, the end of the game gets deeply, deeply transphobic and this is somehow seen as an amazing plot twist. It's astounding to me that this game has somehow tricked so many people into thinking that it's secretly good when it's actually probably one of the worst games ever made.
Is Deadly Premonition ironically good? Also no.
This game is bad in just about every way it's possible for a game to be bad. It looks bad, it runs bad, the running around feels bad, the driving feels bad, the combat feels bad, the writing is bad, the voice acting is bad, the side quests are tedious and bad, the main character oscillates between 'asshole' and 'idiot' (but never in an endearing or entertaining way). Then, to top it all off, the end of the game gets deeply, deeply transphobic and this is somehow seen as an amazing plot twist. It's astounding to me that this game has somehow tricked so many people into thinking that it's secretly good when it's actually probably one of the worst games ever made.
2023
Adorable art, lovely music, charming writing, and overall a very comfy lil picross vn about witches. Only takes about an hour to play, strong recommendation from me!!
An actual criticism about the game: there's a point where it starts to talk about privilege and how it changes what peoples lives are but then shies away from actually saying anything in favor of being Cute™ and Wholesome™ which is a bit disappointing. Like, I dunno, maybe I shouldn't expect a small vn like this to have Big Things to say about life like that but also maybe don't invoke it if you're going to immediately step back from it, y'know.
An actual criticism about the game: there's a point where it starts to talk about privilege and how it changes what peoples lives are but then shies away from actually saying anything in favor of being Cute™ and Wholesome™ which is a bit disappointing. Like, I dunno, maybe I shouldn't expect a small vn like this to have Big Things to say about life like that but also maybe don't invoke it if you're going to immediately step back from it, y'know.