Bit of an experience with this one. This is the game I was in the middle of when I was hospitalized years ago. After that I kinda stopped gaming for a few months and my PC died so I didn't have a way to play. Now I do again and fortunately I had forgotten enough after three years to fully enjoy the deduction based gameplay despite having to replay half of it.

So what is this? Well it's a game from the Papers, Please creator Lucas Pope who seems to have a knack for making a captivating experience out of an otherwise dull occupation. Return of the Obra Dinn has you fill the shoes of an insurance agent tasked to investigate the titular ship that found its way back to English waters with no crew remaining and find out why that happened.

The core gameplay is a beautiful thing and can really make you feel smart. Basically what you do is you search around the ship from a first person perspective in a 3D space and find the remains of the crew. You're armed with a book that has the ship manifest with simple descriptions of characters, two images from an artist on the ship depicting the whole crew through both, a layout of each of the ship's decks, and a glossary to help you define some seafaring terms like what a midshipman is or the various decks.

The book also has a plethora of blank pages you need to fill out by learning what happened. You do this with the OTHER object in your possession, a magic pocket watch that allows you to see the final moments of a live of whoever's remains you observe. Basically you activate the watch and it plays audio similar to a radio play where you hear the person's final moments and then it shows you the moment of their death frozen in time. You're then free to look around it and note to yourself who all is involved and what's happening. You can focus on people in the scene and it'll show you their face in the mentioned artist's images in the book and it's also worth really looking around for all sorts of details that could help you identify other people the scene isn't even about. Through these scenes you can find other bodies to investigate and the ship will open up more after completing scenes.

It was really a fantastic experience. There were a lot of times I was able to just look around and piece answers together with what was shown in the various scenes but I also encountered times where I just didn't know an answer and would google stuff to help me out. Like with one instance the game shows you a guy with like tribal body tattoos and I was like "ok most people here are from places that don't usually do that kind of thing in the 1800s" so I googled "tribal body tattoo" + [whatever country in the origin list I didn't know much about] and ended up being pretty sure I knew where the guy in the game was from and thus could match his name to his face. It's a wonderful feeling. There's a lot of similar things to that too where you gotta have a sharp eye like if someone is wearing a wedding ring or even keeping track where they sleep and what shoes they have on. Hell there's even some fates you discover on the outer fringes of a scene that doesn't even prominently feature the characters!

It's all expertly woven together. All the fates intertwine and it tells a most compelling story. It's brought together in a nice little package of atmosphere with various songs to set the mood of each scene. Also the sound design coupled with the
radio play descriptors of a scene make for a super immersive experience. I mean, I don't know for sure what a man being torn apart by a fantasy beast sounds like but it feels like Pope does with all this. Oh also the game is entirely 1-bit color palette so it give the feel of playing something like Oregon Trail in a way. The whole thing together just works so well.

SO yeah this is a pretty excellent game. It made me feel smart and really compelled me to do all the everything just by being masterfully atmospheric and presenting a tale that keeps on giving. I'm reminded of The Outer Wilds or Myst in how it felt to play but the way it's presented and how you explore the story in chapters give it enough of its own feeling to call it a pretty unique experience. I know some would argue that detective type gameplay can only be enjoyed fully once since you know everything on subsequent playthroughs but I think since it has enough style Obra Dinn could still be worth Returning to (lol) the same way one might revisit a good book. Definitely recommend to anyone to give a chance but those who like figuring stuff out will be who enjoys it the most.

I'm as split on this game as the dual protagonists. I can't remember the last time a game simultaneously frustrated and fascinated me. There's some really interesting stuff in this but there's an equal amount of maddening stuff.

So to start there's something happening for the story. Stars or something are clashing, blue and orange, and resulting in one dominating the other. You play as one of these star beings and roam around a sorta-metroidvania map. I say sorta because it doesn't really feel like metroidvania much to me but maybe it's just a bad one? Anyway you roam around and encounter both orange and blue star beings and engage in a combat.

Here's where they fascinating gameplay is. You can simply defeat them but to truly progress you need to beat them in such a way that you absorb them completely. Battles are all turn based and you have a myriad of techniques at your disposal as you progress. Basically what you need to do is fill a meter that makes the opponent susceptible to absorption without killing them. This gets progressively more difficult as enemies will have shields you have to break but doing that wrong will lead to you killing them quicker or they have ways of ending the battle in X amount of turns so you need to do it quick. It's a system that can be satisfying when you figure it out and succeed.

The frustration here is how, despite the game inundating you with tutorials at the start, just won't tell you that suddenly there are new mechanics when dealing with certain types of enemies which is an annoying inconsistency when earlier they stop you mid combat to explain the details of breaking blocks. The other annoyance is back to the multitude of moves at your disposal you can't see while actually IN combat. Even offline single player modes in fighting games will let you pause to check your set list so for a TURN BASED game to not have something like that even when on your turn
feels like a blatant misstep.

The other side of the game here is platforming. As I said, it's sort of metroidvania? There's only like four items you get to access areas you can't get to and you just sorta stumble on them. It never had the feeling of like "oh neat I got this thing after beating a boss/finding a hidden area" because it just presents itself awkwardly. All the enemies in the game feel the same level of threat for the most part and if they don't it's because you found them in a weird order. There's only like arguably four fights that really scream "boss fight" and those don't bestow you means of traversal. It just feels awkward.

On top of that, the movement just feels a bit too rigid. I appreciate what they're going for with swapping characters who only have certain abilities each but it's not snappy enough to really flow that well. I had a few times where a toggle just didn't register and I would fall to somewhere I didn't want to be. The game is designed well enough that it doesn't feel like too much of a slog if you mess up but it does get annoying at times.

There's not really any hazards either so a lot of the core gameplay loop is just kinda basic platforming from one encounter to the next in an empty world. Makes you wonder why it had to be a metroidvania at all. There are at least collectibles to find. One set will increase your time to attack and another your health. There's a third one that unlocks like the "challenge" area but that ended up being my breaking point.

You go through the mostly empty map with backgrounds like mid 2000s Windows screensavers and collect all the green triangles. Your reward is the final part of the map, an optional challenge area. The first part of this area is a platforming gauntlet that isn't even that difficult but the switching mechanic was so finnicky for me that after like 15 failed attempts or so I just said "fuck it" and went to the final boss and finished the game. Shame too because what I do like, the combat system. would probably shine against the secret super boss that laid ahead of said platforming gauntlet but I just couldn't be arsed to do it. Doesn't give you anything special or change the ending anyway so whatever.

So then you get to the final boss and WOW they just fall on their face by having the final boss be an interactive cutscene that is just total nonsense like Somerville or something you have to dive DEEP to know the literal meaning. I just didn't care at that point. The story was boring and the lore was uninteresting. I just was done and that was it.

I suppose this means frustration won out in the end. There's elements of a really neat game in here but I had just enough little frustrations to be done with it when I got near the end. I don't think I'd recommend it to anyone but it could be worth checking out anyway., Maybe you'll click with it sooner than me or have less issues with the platforming. I'm glad I got to experience it but I'm also happy its over lol.

Bit of a trip, this game. You play as a flying eyeball with a tail? Like a one eye snake that flies around? I dunno. Change color when you change directions too. You can speed up and slow down and blink and that's about it. Touch pad also makes the body like glitch out almost and go static-y. It's neat to just fly around and watch colors change and make basic shapes with the trail of your snake body.

The actual game is pretty neat. You go to different areas/worlds/levels and interact with things their in the way the space dictates. One level has you swim through water and interact with fish, one has you in like a theme park where people ride you and you can put them in rides and make those work, hell one is even like a series of grids where you can only move in 90 degree angles and have to do various tasks in that way. Each area feels pretty unique in terms of looks or how you move or what goes on and it's always fun to see what the next one has in store.

The core point of this game too is to find 16 other one eye snake guys like you. Each one has their own level but not all levels have one I think? Anyway the whole game is like "the friends we made along the way" meme but real. Each snake friend is directly related to the world its in and it's really fun to find them after solving whatever problem the world throws at you. Each friend is also accompanied by a short motion comic type thing that shows how they ended up where you find them.

Hohokum is a charming feel good game to play. It's a bit weird at first but it quickly becomes just fun to roam around and find things out. There's a bunch of little extras to reward people who explore and play with thing just for the sake of it. Also each level has it's own banger song so the whole game is like playing a really good record. Definitely recommend to anyone. A short enjoyable trip with some light puzzle solving.