Tongue-in-cheek comedies about the Cold War are something I quite enjoy. Movies like Austin Powers that make fun of the time period can be downright hilarious. CounterSpy tries this with the player working for an unknown neutral agency called C.O.U.N.T.E.R., and everything they do and their plans are all spelled this way with no actual meaning. You play either the Americans or Russians' bases to steal sets of plans to stop nuclear weapons from destroying the moon. The goal is to keep the DEFCON level as low as possible (5), and if it reaches zero during a level, a one-minute countdown starts, and you need to find the computer to finish the level to stop it. Thankfully, if it does reach zero, the level ends, and you start from DEFCON 1 again.

The only way to lower the DEFCON level is through passive items or getting officers dressed in white to surrendy by pointing your gun at them. This can make having to repeatedly repeat levels very difficult. The levels are randomly generated each time, but that doesn't mean the difficulty doesn't increase. You will need to search more rooms while plans for weapons and items are hidden better. More guards will appear and there will be more open areas. These can be the most difficult to navigate, especially when security cameras come into play. The green ones can be shot down with weapons, but the orange-armored ones can only be taken down with explosives. You can dodge and roll your way through a camera's cone of vision, but you need to be fast. I found the randomness of levels to be frustrating, as a lot of guard patrols just don't line up to be able to be stealthy. A lot of times, you will need to mow down every guard, and some levels can be multi-tiered. Thankfully, the alertness only lasts for that section of the level. Once you go through the door to the next section, the guards don't know you're there.

Cover is your best friend in this game. Yellow arrows on the cover will tell you which way you will face, and lining up your shot is important. The longer you pop out of cover to aim, the quicker guards will notice you. Guards are pretty dumb, and cameras won't even notice dead bodies, so shoot them out to your heart's content. This is the only saving grace for the randomness of these levels. If this was a more realistic stealth game, it would feel impossible to finish. However, I still wound up getting each side to DEFCON 1, so I had to constantly restart a level once the countdown timer started. It's futile to try to run to the exit in 60 seconds unless you're already close. If you quit the mission, you just restart back to where you were prior to that level.

Once you do get all the launch plans, you can continue to play either side to get more weapons and item plans and lower the DEFCON level as much as possible. The final mission will start on the side with the highest level, so this can lead to a lot of frustration unless you really want all of those weapons. I honestly felt the game got pretty tedious towards the end and just wanted to get the game over with. I didn't feel the need to continue playing, as the randomness kind of ruins the fun gameplay elements with poor guard patrol patterns, making it impossible for really perfect stealth runs. The Vita version suffers from frequent slowdowns when the action starts. The game will pause for a split second, causing accuracy issues when shooting.

Overall, CounterSpy has all of the elements of a fun arcade-like action stealth game, but the randomness of the levels makes it hard to get that perfect run, which can discourage the player from wanting to collect all the weapons. The tongue-in-cheek humor does the job just fine, and the controls are well thought out. Just be prepared for some frequent restarts.

Analog horror is a huge fascination for me. After exploring this idea on YouTube and seeing Local 58 and Gemini Home Entertainment, I became hooked. It's a mix of 90's nostalgia, analog media, and that feeling of older technology being unclear and playing tricks on your senses. Home Safety Hotline tries its best to be the next analog horror viral sensation, but it doesn't quite hit the nail on the head like the above-mentioned videos. While this is a video game and not a series of videos, I will say that it captures the atmosphere well.

You are an employee, plopped down in front of a 90's beige box, and you are presented with a desktop. You will see exclamation marks on items that have new information. There are videos you can watch on the desktop as well as check your email, and then the main program is where you will spend most of your time. Once you launch this program, you clock in and are presented with a series of informational links. You are answering calls and have to prescribe the correct Home Safety Hotline information package to the caller regarding their problem. Entries are locked until you progress through the days of the week and give the correct answers.

It's incredibly important to read every single entry thoroughly and actually remember it. You want to remember the symptoms and signs these things cause people. At the beginning, you get basic information about things like ants, bats, moles, and flies. As the days move on, the analog horror part starts to come into play. Stranger and stranger entries for things like Spriggans, Hobbs, Cellar Grottos, and Reanimations. The artwork is superb and accompanies these entires as well as some audio entires. It's creepy for sure, but never quite the same. Turn on the lights and get goosebumps vibes. There's some cheese added to this game that takes away from the realism factor. Analog horror is so great because it seems like it could be real. Some of the drawings, while good, don't look like they were captured on video or with a crappy digital camera. They look drawn-in. The videos on the desktop are some of the best parts of the game that capture that analog horror atmosphere.

This is a riddle or puzzle game, so you have to guess the correct answers or get fired and have to restart the day. After each call, there is a ten-second pause until the phone rings again, but when you put the caller on hold, there is no time limit or penalty. You can take your time, read all of the entries, and make your decision. Some calls are obvious, while others are vague, and they can get quite tricky towards the end. There are anamalies and disturbances that accompany analog horror, such as weird phone calls, network interruptions, and strange messages. While I would have liked more of this, what's here is fine for a short horror game.

Overall, Home Safety Hotline starts out pretty disturbing and odd, but slowly evolves into cheese, and it kind of ruins the whole vibe. Being an employee at a mysterious hotline is fun, and there is a lot of potential for a sequel or something more. Solving the riddles is fun, and the artwork and entries created give a slow trickle of "what the hell is going on here?" vibes, but it never quite peaks like some of the classics in the genre.

Dead to Right: Retribution was a surprising sleeper hit. The series never got the backing it deserved and is, sadly, another dead franchise lost to time that will probably never be revived again. Reckoning tried to take Retribution and squeeze it down to a handheld form factor, but it just didn't quite work out. That's not to say Dead to Rights couldn't make a good portable game, but this wasn't it. It's a quick, cheap cash grab with no thought or effort put into it.

There is zero voice acting in this game, so the "story," if you can even call it that, is narrated by a few lines of text and a cutscene. I will describe one level, and then you can copy and paste that about a dozen times, and there's the game. You run around using the lock-on feature to kill enemies in boring, drab, and cramped levels and just blast them with whatever you have. It doesn't matter what you use, as the game automatically switches weapons once you run out of ammo. Ducking behind cover is pointless, as you can't shoot out from it, so your best bet is to run around like a madman and mow down everything in your path. That could be fun, but here it's not. The camera swings around every which way, so cycling enemies is pointless as you will also cycle through explosive objects like cars and barrels, which are handy for large crowds.

This just continues forever. Some areas have fewer enemies than others, but once you shoot your way through, you kick down a door and move on to the next boring area to continue this process. Weapons range from silenced pistols, machine guns, and even a heavy.50 caliber machine gun, but who cares? Dual-wielding is always the way to go for one-handed weapons. You want to do the most destruction as quickly as possible. Enemies chew through your health with larger weapons, and life and armor pickups aren't very common. There are no throwables like grenades, which would have come in handy as well.

There's one gameplay feature in the console version, and that's bullet-time. You can dodge and slow-mo your way through enemies, but I found this pointless as the environments are too cramped for this. You can send your dog Shadow out to get a one-hit kill, but the bar needs to refill. I saved this for large groups of enemies. Every so often, a boss will be thrown at you, but they all play and act the same. Just mow them down until they die. The entire game can be finished in under two hours as well, and then there's a multiplayer mode that you can even subject your friends to.

Overall, Reckoning suffers from the same issues many PSP games did. A lack of a second analog nub means no camera control, and no one wanted to write a smart camera that could follow the player or change the controls around to work better. The game looks incredibly ugly, probably one of the worst-looking games on the system, and it's repetitive, boring, and plays nothing like the console version.

Simulator games that mimic mundane, everyday jobs can be surprisingly cathartic and relaxing. The zen-like repetitive tasks that give you the seratonin boost of progress over time, orgainzation, or customization flood Steam and are eeking out onto consoles if they become popular enough. Sadly, most aren't done very well and either have janky mechanics, a very low budget, or feel like copy and paste or an asset flip. Very few do it well, with Powerwash Simulator, Truch Simulator, Cooking Simulator, and PC Building Simulator being some of the top kings that do it right. House Flipper was one of those, and it felt janky but had so much potential. It was almost there, and I feel they got there with House Flipper 2, but there's still tons of room for improvement.

The first thing you will notice are the much improved graphics. Better lighting, effects, higher resolution textures, and an overall better-feeling game. It feels less low-budget and more like how it really should be. There's also a lot more variety, and the game's new grid-based placement system completely rewrites how the game plays. Forget everything you knew from the first game. That game feels essentially like the foundation for this new vision the developers have. The game now has a story mode, which is of course unimportant and pretty much filler, but there is some voiced dialogue and you can answer phone calls. Your email map that you take jobs from is sectioned into different types of neighborhoods. Rich, suburbs, oceanside, rural, etc. Once you accept a job, the game starts very slowly. Just simple cleaning, washing windows, picking up trash, and selling items. That's about it for a good while. The perk system still exists but feels more useful. As you do each type of job, you will be able to make it faster, better, and more efficient for much larger jobs.

Just the simple tasks of trash pickup and cleaning are much better. You eventually get spray that can turn all the dirt soapy, it's easier to wipe up, and things go faster. Trash pickup eventually expands your pickup grid, so it goes faster. Vacuuming is better and looks nicer. Leaves, coffee beans, rice, marbles, and many other forms of dirt are new and present, so it doesn't feel so repetitive. Stains range from paint to foot prints now as well and can be on any surface. When you start demolishing, building, painting, and surfacing, some of the most repetitive and boring tasks from the first game are more fun now. The entire game is based on a 1x1 block grid system, so these tasks let you fill out a grid on a wall or floor and fill that in more efficiently. Demolishing lets you hold the button back and fill out a grid. As you get more perks, this grid fills. Painting now lets you select a border, and you can just fill it with your brush. Eventually, your brush gets bigger, and you use less paint.

The same goes for surfacing and building. You can select borders for the building and fill in the bricks this way. Everything just goes faster, feels more satisfying, and feels less like a chore. When you buy objects from the quest list, you can place them easier thanks to this 1x1 block system. You can place any item anywhere, even stack items, as long as it fits. There are so many more items to choose from, and they look better as well. Just the effects of paint trying and demolishing walls crumbling better add to a much better overall experience. I also like how assembly is now stripped away from building and left as a mini-game. There are only a dozen objects you can assemble, and it's time-based. These were done in your workshop and are much more detailed. They come together like IKEA furniture, where you drill holes, hammer wooden pegs, and attach every screw. This makes remodeling homes less tedious, and your assembly score gives you discounts in the store. Now you can just place radiators, tubs, showers, etc. without having to assemble every single one.

When you finish the story, you can still complete jobs, build homes from the ground up, and just have fun in sandbox mode. There isn't a lot of story content—about 15-20 hours—but you will blow through it due to how much fun you are going to have. This is one of the best job simulator games next to Powerwash Simulator, and I can't wait for the third game to see where the developers will go with it. My only real complaint is that the requested furniture doesn't have the required layout, which would have been nice. You can just throw it all in the middle of the floor, and it counts as complete. This makes buying furniture pretty boring unless you just want to make these homes look nice without any type of reward. As it stands, House Flipper 2 is a night-and-day improvement over the original and is heading in the right direction.

Telltale is mostly known for licensed adventure games such as The Wolf Among Us and The Walking Dead. They shut down and started back up, and now they probably don't have the money to license these franchises anymore. I actually prefer this. Telltale has created their first original IP in years, and it has so much potential. The biggest takeaway from this game is the usual Telltale style of storytelling and choice-making. You think you know what you're going to choose ahead of time and how it will pan out in your head, but things always make a left turn and change on you, and you're left speechless. They are also, sadly, known for having almost no gameplay and very dated visuals.

Gameplay is more frequent in this game, but you just control your character in a walking simulator situation, walking or gliding down long hallways. There are a couple of elementary puzzles thrown in, and that's your lot for gameplay. It's fine, as I go into Telltale games for the story and characters and not much else. You can use zero-G movement in some areas and move around that way. You can also optionally scan a few items here and there for collectibles, but it's very limited and linear in scope.

The best part about the game is the atmosphere, characters, and overall story. While this game is the beginning of a larger story arc that will give us more lore and behind-the-scenes politics on the goings-on of this world, this game solely focuses on establishing Captain Drummer as a brand new protagonist, and I love her so much. She has a lot of charisma and is a dark and brooding character without being cringy and formulaic. Her voice actress does a fantastic job portraying this. The other characters are written in your typical telltale manner, which allows you to constantly hate or like a character and then suddenly doubt everything in the end. The cast is small, but the game has a fantastic pace that keeps things interesting.

You're essentially scrappers, and there is an established order of inners: people who live inside the astroid belt and those who love outside of the astroid belt. There are pirates involved, and there is a secret treasure that everyone is fighting over. I don't want to go too much into the story, but the game's atmosphere is dark and haunting, but there's no horror. The monster here is the human element and just how brutal we can be to each other in a split second. I found the ending very satisfying, and it opens up for a clear sequel that hopefully expands this entire universe that Telltale has created.

The visuals are a huge improvement over their past games. While they aren't ground-breaking and are required to run on previous generation hardware, the stylized visuals look great, and the blacks, whites, and grays really make you feel alone and claustrophobic all the time. The voice acting is top-notch, as always, and the only thing I left with was wanting more from this series. I also wanted more gameplay, as quick-time events are incredibly dated and there are other things you can do for adventure titles other than these dated gameplay elements. More side quests, an actual gameplay loop, and more side dialogue would be nice to be able to expand upon everything. As it is, the game takes 6-7 hours to finish, but it's incredibly enjoyable, and I couldn't put the game down.

Kingdom Hearts has a special place in my heart. I remember when the first game came out, and it was talked about by a lot of people on the school grounds. I was in junior high when it was released, but I didn't get it until it was a Greatest Hits release at $20. I found it hard at the time and never finished it. When the second game came out, I rented it from GameFly and actually cried at the ending. It was so memorable and engrossing for me as a teen.

Here we are, almost 15 years later, with the third installment in the mainline series. I was insanely excited and didn't follow any previews or reviews for the game leading up to actually getting around to buying this game. I played the first area of Hercules (again?) and got to Toy Box (Toy Story!) and lost interest. Yeah, the game hasn't really evolved all that much. My biggest problem with Kingdom Hearts III is the lack of imaginative level design and the use of mostly modern Pixar movies. The best part about a new Kingdom Hearts game is discovering what the next Disney movie will be that you get to explore. It's like a surprise each time, and I loved that with previous entries. This was the first time I was praying it wasn't another modern Pixar movie.

While Hercules was very cinematic, scripted, and looked great, it's an overused Disney movie in the series. Toy Story was exciting, especially when we were in Andy's room, but we wound up in a generic boring mall? It was such a boring level to get through, and I didn't feel anything like the movie. We then move on to Repunzel. Why? Another issue with this game is playing each movie scene by scene around the second act. We're stuck at a generic forest level here. After this, we get into Monsters Inc., which is actually pretty cool, but it's a generic monster factory. Then it's...FROZEN?! Why Frozen? We even get a literal, scene-by-scene, shot-by-shot rendition of the "Let It Go" song. If I wanted that, I would just watch the movie. A generic snow level awaits us here.

Then we go back to Pirates of the Caribbean, of all movies. I appreciate that the visuals are improved enough to give us realistic versions of this movie and not the cartoony one we got last time, but I didn't care as the original voice cast wasn't present again. And it's based off of the third film for some reason. I liked the fact that you get to sail an open ship and go find crabs to upgrade your ship, but I skipped all of this. The ship steers like a hot-wheeled car, and the generic seaside town and ship battles weren't very interesting. Then we finally arrive at Big Hero 6, which is also pretty cool, but it's a generic large map of San Francisco, and it is incredibly boring. That's it. No more worlds, and you are stuck in the last level for about 10 hours doing boss rushes like every other RPG has done, and this seriously needs to stop to just bloat game time.

Even if you like or dislike these Pixar movies, the fact is that the levels are incredibly boring, and each one plays out the same way. You get through several mini-bosses, fight waves of enemies, collect some stuff, and fight the movie's main antagonist. Every world is a generic feeling with no life from the movie injected into it. The reliance on playing through scenes of these movies isn't what I want in a Kingdom Hearts game. I want a unique experience at each level that makes me feel like I'm part of that world. Not just some character who crashed the movie in the middle of its runtime.

I can go on and on about how much I hated the uninspired level design and repetitive nature of each world, but then there's the Gummi Ships. I hated these in the first game, and I really don't like them here. I like that the Gummi Ship part is a large open map that you can explore freely between worlds, but there's nothing interesting here. You fly around collecting parts, Munni, and you can find shooter waves flying around that have levels and stars attached to them. Upgrading your ship but being able to buy parts to put together blueprints is a staple of the series, but I just don't find it interesting. A new alpha Gummi part can be attached now to help fight in battle. It's essentially a satellite ship flying around yours. There are speed tunnels all over the place, asteroids, and various obstacles, but I just wanted to get to the next world.

Finally, there's the combat itself. I never really cared for Kingdom Hearts' combat. It works, it's fine, and it can be fast-paced, but you fight the same Heartless over and over again, and the game is heavily reliant on keyblade transformations. Actual attacking and magic have taken a back seat. I rarely touched magic, and it felt useless. I was just attacking until I got my three pips and I could transform my keyblade into a more powerful weapon and execute its finishing move. This does the most damage and is a must for bosses, or you won't survive at all. The final act of the game pits you against around a dozen bosses, one after another, and it's a frustrating chore. You can still use Link commands, but they aren't that great this time around, and I felt like they hindered battle more than anything. The goal was to attack and get a few combos in, transform my keyblade, execute attractions that put you on famous Disney park rides that do damage, and just rinse and repeat. Items are useful for sure, and it's important to keep abilities tagged, as adding combos and modifiers to combat really gives you an edge. However, this all gets so repetitive, and you just stop caring before you get to the third world.

Then there's the story, which I haven't even touched on yet. It makes zero sense, even to people who have played the series up until now. My main interest was in the little stories inside each world. I never cared for the overarching Kingdom Hearts story. It's a bloated, overcomplicated mess involving Organization XIII, and Final Fantasy isn't even a part of this story anymore. Xehanort was the X-Blade. Aqua is trapped in a world, I think, where there are multiple versions of everyone. Yeah, I don't know. Go watch a comprehensive timeline explanation on YouTube instead. Sadly, each world is just a retelling of each movie, which I could just go watch if I wanted to. At least the visuals are really good, and everything is bright, colorful, and full of life.

The voice acting is also hit-and-miss, but mostly terrible. Haley Joel Osment as Sora again was a bad choice; he's just not a good voice actor. Outside of some of the mainline Disney characters, the voice acting is just wooden and awkward. Most Disney films don't retrain their original voice actors. Especially in Pirates of the Caribbean…again. What's worse is the writing. The script feels like it was written by a grammar school student. It's just the most basic lines, replies, and banter. It's just enough to get through each scene. There's a lot of nothing being said by most of these characters. Shouting each other's names a lot, and a lot of "You will never stop us!" or "I will defeat you!" over and over again. Yawn.

So, there's a lot I don't like here. The lack of older Disney movies, the complete absceneness of Final Fantasy stuff, and the fact that each movie is just a scene-by-scene replay of the original movie are boring. The levels feel generic, uninspired, and repetitive, and the combat, while flashy, uses an overreliance on keyblade transformations, attraction attacks, and links and magic. Enemies repeat far too often, and the final act is nothing but a frustrating slog of a boss rush. The story is insanely and wildly confusing and unnecessarily complicated, but at least the visuals are a nice treat. If you didn't like previous games in the series, this does nothing that will convince you to like it now.

Side note: I was incredibly disappointed by Utada Hikaru's song with Skrillex on this one. Both Simple and Clean and Passion/Sanctuary are classics and some of Utada's best work. This song was terrible and wasn't a good start to the game for me.

P.T. started the trend of subtle horror games. No scary music, looping hallways and rooms, or needing to notice any changes to move on. Exit 8 is exactly this. A single white hallway in a subway tunnel has a couple of turns, and it loops endlessly unless you notice changes. There is no story, no background, and no character development. Just this single white hallway, and you need to get to exit 8.

Your only sign of progress is the yellow exit sign, which increases in number as you make your fourth turn. If that sign goes back to zero, you missed an anomaly. When you see it, you are supposed to turn around and go back the other way. Anomalies can be really obvious, like lights being turned off, open doors, or a single man walking towards you doing something different. Other subtle ones can be the floor tiles, a security camera light, or a poster changing. You might get really frustrated at first, but keep going. Memorization is the key to getting the job done. Once you know exactly where everything is supposed to be—how many doors, posters, etc.—you will finish in under an hour.

The horror elements are subtle and not forced. A moving object, no music, and just the hum of the lights and footstops. Maybe a creaking door might make you jump. You can stop, take your time, and check the main hallway for changes. Running full force all the way through will make you miss things. You have to turn around to see a few anomalies anyway. If there aren't any changes, you keep moving on, and sometimes this can really make you feel like quitting. You will think time after time that the hallway is fine, but then you will notice something new and just keep moving on. Don't let that sign resetting to zero keep discouraging you.

The graphics use Unreal Engine 5 and are nothing special, but the atmosphere of the sterile white hallway makes it creepy. A lack of music and most sound effects makes you feel on edge all the time. The single-footed man makes you very uneasy every time you pass him. All you want to do is get to exit 8, and the intensity might make you miss things as you become more and more anxious to get out. This single-looping hallway might drive some people nuts.

Overall, The Exit 8 is a fun game that lasts a couple of hours at the most. There are only two achievements, and once you see all the anomalies, there is nothing left to do except maybe do self-timed speed runs. Some may find this a simple tech demo, but I think more horror games need to go this route. It's only a few dollars, and possibly getting some friends around to help spot things can make this a fun party game as well.

You play as Kai. A girl is sent away to a strange village in a post-apocalyptic world to re-connect with her extended family. You spend the entire game walking around to the various dozen or so screens, collecting seeds, planting gardens, and learning more about your past and the ties between the village and your family.

I have to give credit to the developers for their tight and well-written dialogue. The characters have, well, character. For the short time you spend in the games (under 4 hours), you really get to know these people, and the dialogue is written in a way that feels organic and like you're listening in on a conversation. Talk of relationship issues, depression, carelessness, death, suicide, and many other emotions that we face in ourselves and amongst our own families. There's an atmosphere that's both uncomfortable and familiar. You will plant your own life in this game and strategize relating to certain characters or hating them. It's just so well done.

As for the rest of the game, there's something to be desired. As you walk around the screens, you will see a hand icon over anything you can pick up. These are usually plants, and you need the seeds to plant gardens to advance the story. There are eye icons for objects that Kai will comment on and a clock icon for an interaction that will advance the story. You never really get lost. Kai's journal gives hints on who to talk to and what area you need to be in. Using a little common sense and learning the screens and where everyone resides helps a lot. As you pick up seeds, you learn songs that help you grow the garden. Each seed grows based on its song, so it's recommended to plant seeds of that type. You can place the seeds with an outline of the plant that will tell you if there's enough space for it. Sing the song a few times, plant enough seeds, and your garden grows. You can then harvest the plant for what you need to advance the story.

Don't get this confused with something akin to Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley. This isn't a farming simulator at all. The planting and gardening are rudimentary at best and mostly uninteresting. I just threw seeds around until I filled up the meter, spammed the correct song, harvested, and off I went. I was more interested in the characters and the story. There's a mystery behind the village that I couldn't wait to unravel, and unfortunately, gardening got in the way. I did love the music; it's amazing and good enough to listen to outside of the game.

The art style is well done. It's bright and colorful, but it can be really dark when needed. The characters have unique humanoid designs that seem familiar but are still alien, and the paper cut-out look just fits so well. I just wish the story was a bit longer, as I wanted to get to know the characters more. I can't really complain about gameplay, as you do move around constantly and patterns change and mix up, so it never really gets boring. This is a great little adventure game that can kill an evening, and you might have a new favorite OST.

First-person shooters were new to me when Red Faction launched in 2001. I didn't have a gaming PC growing up, so games like Doom, Wolfenstein, and Quake were nearly foreign to me. Red Faction was an overhyped game full of development issues and overpromised ambition. The "Gen-Mod" destruction model is half-baked and barely there. The visuals are dull and boring (even for the time), and the story doesn't go anywhere at all. Not to mention zero character development. I rented this game and got bored with it maybe an hour in, and I can see why.

Sure, the game looks much better on PC, but there's not much to really look at. Even for the time level, the design in shooters was fairly dull. Very few had interesting things to look at, such as Half-Life or Halo. Red Faction is just browns and reds with boring caves and industrial buildings. You are on Mars, by the way. You are part of a rebellion group called the Red Faction, who are miners uprising against the overbearing government. You are trying to fight your way to the top and stop a deadly plague that's killing the miners. This story starts and stops here. It doesn't go anywhere; there's nothing to spoil. You end up finding the cure, and that's really it. The voice acting is actually really good for the time, but the only thing that kept me playing was pure curiosity to finally see this game through to the end.

There are quite a few weapons in this game, but most aren't found until the last third of the game. You have your standard array of guns. Submachine, assault, precision, sniper, pistol, rocket launcher, and rail driver There's also a heavy machine gun and grenades. It's a standard list of weapons we've used in so many shooters, and Red Faction doesn't do anything interesting or fun with them. The shooting in this game feels pretty good and holds up well today, but the enemy AI is terrible, so don't expect much of a fight. There are vehicles you can pilot in this game, but they aren't anything fun or interesting. They shoot bullets or rockets, and a lot of the time I would end up stuck in weird physics glitches.

The game isn't very long. You can finish it in under 4 hours, and thankfully there's a quick save feature, which I suggest using often. Enemies are run-of-the mill faceless military dudes, and there's an occasional weird creature thing to mow down in the caves. Environmental detail is what you can expect from this era. Rooms are equipped with an occasional table, chair, or monitor. Nothing stands out or looks interesting in this game. Destruction is boiled down to blowing open a wall to get to a button (there's a lot of button pressing in this game), and that's about it. The occasional chunk of wall breaks off, but this is far from what Volition was touting back in the day.

Red Faction is at least a solid shooter. It's fun while it lasts, and the last act throws new enemies and weapons at you, and there are two whole boss fights in this game. Vehicles don't feel great to pilot, destruction is minimal, the story has a strong premise but goes nowhere, and the visuals are pretty bland. I did find the stealth section of the game pretty fun. Trying to find your way around without being spotted is like a giant puzzle, but that's all there is that changes things up. In the end, if you never play this game, you aren't missing out on gaming history.

2D walking simulators seem to be a whole new genre of their own, are more interesting, and tend to be better than fully 3D ones. Games like Limbo, Little Nightmares, and Inside are perfect examples of this. There is some light platforming, some puzzle solving thrown in, and maybe a little bit of stealth. While none of those had stories that blew me away, they did make up for it in atmosphere and character. Shady Part of Me sadly doesn't accomplish any of those things. The only thing going for it is the dual-character puzzles, and that's about it. There really isn't even a story to speak of. Yourself, your shadow, and some disembodied voice narrate the entire game with cryptic dialogue that really is either open for translation to the player or is entirely meaningless.

This game reminds me a lot of Limbo and Lost in Shadow. You play as a little girl in a white dress who is afraid of light, and her shadow (always on the wall) is afraid of darkness. You switch between both to help each other advance. Puzzles involve pushing boxes and pulling switches, and in later levels, your shadow can defy gravity and even take over puppet bodies. Most of the puzzles have that "Aha!" moment, which can be satisfying, but there were a few that really stumped me and took a lot of time just fiddling around until something changed. Most puzzles have you manipulating objects in front of lights to make new shadows, move them, or make them grow or shrink. The real girl can't jump, but your shadow can. This means there is light platforming in the shadow, but nothing complicated.

I did find the aspect of two characters to be a bit tedious. Some areas just have you running to the right to stop in the circle to advance to the next area. You then have to switch to the other character and run that full length again. It's not a major problem, but it happens too frequently. I also found the rewind feature to be really handy. This prevents constant deaths and restarts. You can rewind as long as you want, so I have to applaud the developers for making this a frustrating mess. A lot of times your shadow will die or you will get caught in light, and it stops the game, but rewinding allows you to see the error you made and correct it. If you fully died every time and went back to a checkpoint, this game would be unbearably frustrating.

Overall, the visuals are great. The sketchbook look and early 20th-century aesthetics are fun, but they're also nothing memorable. We've seen this kind of art style before in other games. That's the biggest takeaway from Shady Part of Me. It does what it does fine. Nothing more, nothing less. It doesn't leave a lasting impression like the above mentioned games. Limbo was gruesome and had a memorable atmosphere. Little Nightmares' ghoulish monsters stood out, and Inside's dystopian world put you on edge. You will spend around five hours in this game and mostly forget about it the next day.

One of the scariest things to me is being alone on a planet. I've had a recent fascination with this, especially after reading The Martian by Andy Weir. It's a different form of psychological horror. The human mind is a vast pit of emotions and an endless imagination. The fear of the unknown and the human mind running rampant combined is a scary combination that very few media tackle. The Invincible is one such story, and it's done well.

First and foremost, this is a walking simulator, but with a bit more freedom. There's really no gameplay, but you can interact with objects and control a vehicle a couple of times, but that's about it. It does what walking simulators are supposed to do well, and that's provide good characters with great writing and a story that keeps you hooked. The Invincible starts out slow and may come off as a typical space adventure with pretty colors and nothing more, but the story just gets darker and darker as you move along. The length is a couple of hours longer than a typical game of its kind, and it helps. There is more character development, more explanation of what is going on, and more of this planet, Regis III.

It's a desert planet similar to Mars, but with an ocean. You play as Yansa, one of a small crew of scientists scouting out a possible Earth-like planet. You learn about two warring factions known as the Alliance and the Commonwealth. The space race to find a planet of paradise is very apparent. I don't want to talk too much about the story, as I can easily spoil something. I will just say the story keeps going when you think it ends and gets darker and deeper, and the theories behind what is going on are very fascinating. There seem to be some choices you can make in the game, but I'm not sure if they impact the ending or not. Most of the dialogue is between Yansa and another crew member on her ship, the Dragonfly. The story has so many ups and downs, emotion-wise, as your fight for survival takes a back seat to a larger plot point, and the excellent voice acting helps suck you into this void.

You spend most of the game climbing ledges, dropping down ledges, and examining objects. There are a few large open maps, but you have a linear path you need to follow thanks to the well-designed map system. The interactions are always changing, and the pace is great after the first opening sequence, and things pick up. There is always something new happening, and I love that about this game. You aren't just walking in a straight line in a borefest like Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, and it's not a jump-scare-induced horror roller coaster like Layers of Fear. The terror of survival, death, and being alone is omnipresent in The Invincible. Just seeing a robot can make you feel less alone. The atmosphere is so well done in this game.

I usually start complaining about a lack of gameplay or that the story is so short that there's no time for anything interesting to happen, but The Invincible does what walking simulators haven't really done in a long time: make you want to walk through something and keep going. Between the 50's art deco-style designs of the ships and equipment, the immersive first-person view, and the excellent voice acting, there's so much to take in. Sure, the visuals aren't impressive on a technical scale. There is also no ultrawide screen support, which is a real bummer, but it's not enough to knock this game down. The Invincible makes you think and talk about the story to your friends because you want to theorize, and it entices you to think about life on other planets, which might make you go read a book or watch a movie like Apollo 13 or The Martian to continue experiencing this fear of being alone on a planet. Walking simulators aren't this good very often. Enjoy it while it lasts.

When a studio says they take inspiration from adventure games like Life is Strange, I pay attention. We follow a maid during the late 1950s, working in a hotel for a crass boss. You are basically a snoop and end up getting involved in a mystery of a love triangle, and you take it upon yourself to get co-workers involved, and the entire thing spirals out of control. Is this game a lesson on minding your own business or doing what you think is right?

You play as Ms. Roy. You start out by getting to know your co-workers, learning the game's mechanics, and starting your amateur sleuthing. There's not much to the game's mechanics. You can interact with dozens upon dozens of objects, mostly letters you end up reading, and either throw them away or just inspect them. You spend your time between three floors. The fifth floor, the basement, and the lobby You eventually pick a male or female co-worker to help you dig into other people's business, but you also have a job to do. You need to clean and tidy up each room, and all of your actions have consequences towards the end of the game. I don't want to say what can or can't cause these, as it can really spoil the ending, but just know that picking things up and keeping them is something the game tells you to think about the most.

Inspecting items doesn't really matter as you're putting them back down, but scouring all the drawers, every item, no matter how simple it seems, might give you a clue to figure out what's happening in the love circle you want to so desperately be a part of. Sometimes you need to go to the basement and get items you don't have, and there are a few puzzles thrown in. These aren't difficult either. matching up pieces of paper, deciphering a code, or just finding a few clues here and there. You can hear Roy's inner dialogue to help give you hints, and you can read everything you picked up in your inventory.

Outside of interacting with objects and solving the occasional puzzle, there isn't anything else to do. There's no exploring, character interactions are scripted, and there are only three characters in the entire game. This is a very short game with a runtime of about 3 hours. I do have to give credit to the developers for creating such a tense mystery at that time and actually giving the characters some depth. It's not long enough to really give an entire backstory like other adventure games, but they cut out the nonsense and get to the meat of what they want to do and the story they want to tell. The writing is well done, and the voice acting is pretty excellent too. Your choices also really do matter, but the physical interactions with objects make you realize what you could have done differently as the final moments of the story pass.

The visuals aren't anything impressive, but the game looks period-correct, and it's not ugly. The lip syncing is off, but the characters look good, and they have a unique look and a lot of character in their personalities. Sadly, my biggest complaint is that I wanted to know more about these characters. The game focuses solely on this mystery, but just enough personality in the characters pokes through that this could have been a much longer game. I wanted to know more about Ms. Roy and who she is as a person. That's what made Life is Strange so great. It focused a lot on the characters, who they are as people, and their lives. There's a lot of potential here for something greater, but the end product of an interesting and gripping mystery is done well enough. This makes for a fun evening with choices that really matter, but that's about it.

A lot of games tell the lives of soldiers during WWII, but not many talk about civilian life. Specifically, the lives of the Japanese and Russian civilians who were dragged into the war against their will, and many didn't support what their governments were doing. Torn Away tells the life of a Russian child whose village was destroyed and all residents were dragged into labor camps by the Nazis. Our protagonist, Ansya, wound up in a women's labor camp with her mother, and you follow her as she escapes and deals with loss after loss, trying to make it to more relatives in another village.

The game starts inside a house, and you learn to interact with objects, complete small and simple mini-games, and gather various objects. Ansya likes to talk to her dolls, and she ends up having her inner dialogue narrated by her mitten, Comrade Mitten, through the journey. As most know, children like talking to dolls and objects that they get attached to. Sometimes this can be a coping or comfort measure, especially after severe trauma. The game changes the pace constantly, going from side-scrolling platforming sections to first-person walking sections and sections in which you are finding objects in small houses. It changes up the gameplay quite a bit, and the game never gets dull. The original Russian voice acting is great, and the overall tone nails the atmosphere of dread during the war.

A lot of the sadness is portrayed by the visuals. A beautiful style of water colors and washed-out lines. It's almost like a child's blurry memory. There are a lot of foreground and background objects similar to other side scrollers like Limbo or Inside. This can give a sense of scale for a small child in a big adult world as well. Every area was different and felt unique, and there was always a sense of foreboding danger. The second Ansya felt safe, something would happen, and she would be on the run again. The story never gets gut-wrenchingly sad or depressing, as the story isn't long enough to portray this. There was a lot of focus on gameplay, unlike most walking simulators, so the story isn't the sole focus here.

Gameplay-wise, the platforming is the worst part of the game. The animations and speed are slow and sluggish, and I constantly died trying to hop over objects. There's no momentum, and Ansya just kind of hops like you're picking her up and setting her down. There are occasions where you can solve a really simple puzzle, like dragging boxes around to climb up onto a ledge or gathering objects to create something in a certain order, but nothing that will strain your brain cells. There are stealth sections thrown in where you have to avoid spotlights and flashlights by running between boxes. It's nothing challenging, but the constant change in pace helps keep your interest in an otherwise bloated genre of boring walking simulators.

With that said, Torn Away is a fun evening time killer, and the story is just sad enough to keep you hooked, but there is nothing memorable here in the end. This isn't something like Valiant Hearts that will sear its story and traumatic events into your brain. What's here is better than most walking simulators, as it offers some great gameplay and an entertainingly sad story with great visuals.

The Cold War was a rough time, and you really feel it in the South of the Circle. You play Peter, a British scientist struggling between love, his career, and being stranded in the Antarctic during one of the most strenuous times with Russia. Peter is a climantologist and ends up meeting a Scottish woman, Clara, who is protesting the war. He ends up torn between her companionship, his career, and the present times of him stranded at a remote research station trying to find rescue.

I don't want to spoil the story because that's all that South of the Circle has going for it and is the only reason to keep playing. There is almost zero gameplay outside of pressing buttons for dialogue choices. These come in the form of emotion bubbles that range from neutral, scared, sad, happy, and so on. I don't quite know if this effects the overall story path, as my choices almost seemed to not matter. As Peter is talking to people, a bouncing red ball means a scared response. A blue ball hanging low means a sad response. A sun icon will make Peter respond joyfully, etc. These come up pretty frequently, so you're always pressing something. Occasionally, you can move Peter around and interact with the rare object here and there, but that's all there is to it. There are no puzzles or anything like that.

You follow this linear path of Peter trying to find people at this station while seeing flashbacks. You start in the middle, and as you move forward in the story, the flashbacks start from the beginning. It's very entertaining, and I was interested in the story until the end thanks to the well-written dialogue and fantastic voice work. The visuals are striking in the sense that they almost look rotoscoped. There is motion capture for this minimalistic style of art, and it's quite captivating.

The entire game is a linearly scripted adventure and lasts less than four hours. It's a bit longer than most super-short story-driven walking simulators, and the excellent writing will keep you hooked. All of the characters have depth, and you actually have feelings for certain characters, despite some having only a short time on screen. Scenes can get intense and emotional, and you can feel the dread that Peter is facing in his struggle for survival. It's just so well done, and it's sad there isn't more gameplay attached to it. It's one of the better walking simulator stories I've finished in recent years.

Overall, South of the Circle provides an entertaining, well-acted, and well-written story and script, but the lack of gameplay makes you question whether this is just enough here to be an excuse for a game. The art is fantastic, and the motion capture is enticing. I wish the dialogue choices were a little more obvious about what they did or if they changed anything at all.

Walking simulators can be really great or really terrible. There is usually no in-between, but somehow Kona manages to accomplish this unremarkable achievement. You follow Carl Faulbert, a private investigator, who arrives in a remote other Candaian town to discover something is lurking around and killing its residents. The plot itself is mostly uninteresting, and details are really only explained in found notes. There is a narrator who explains things throughout, but he mostly just asks questions and never answers anything for us.

The game starts out fairly simple, and it's an illusion of how the rest of the game is. You walk around in first-person view, interact with objects, and drive your truck. You can pull out your map in the truck to figure out where to go. You have an inventory system and can pick up objects to store, such as duck tape, hardware, flares, matches, etc., but most of these items are useless, and you don't ever use half of the consumables. The game isn't open-world, but there is a giant area to explore. You can wander off the beaten path or main road to find campfires to light, objects to pick up, documents to read, and various other things, but this is purely for achievements only. Wandering around the town is a chore due to the slow walking speed and short sprint speed. You have heat, sanity, and health; however, the heat meter helps drag the game down further. Yes, this is a remote area in the cold, but needing to find a specific object to obtain a jacket from a person you may never find without a walkthrough is pretty annoying. Once you get the jacket, your heat meter never becomes an issue. There are wolves spread out in the wilderness off the main road, and these can harm you. Hit them with a hammer or hatchet, or shoot them with a gun, and they're gone. There's an option to throw steaks at them if you want to hunt for achievements too.

The game always feels clunky in some way. Having to constantly pull out your map to check your surroundings gets tiresome, and never knowing exactly where to go will make people quit early on as well. You just wander into each house marked on the map and hopefully figure out how to make your way north until you reach the end of the game, which isn't satisfying and doesn't make me excited for a sequel. You can only save at campfires, and if you don't have matches, a firestarter, or a log, you can't save. Your inventory space is limited, so you must drag your items around in the back of your truck, and then if you need something, it's a hike back.

You have a camera and can take photos, but again, this is mostly for achievements. Achievement hunters would love this game, but outside of that, the gameplay is mostly repetitive or pointless. The visuals are great and hold up well even today, but you are mostly seeing just white and log cabins. There isn't anything artistic or unique about this game, which makes it a very boring game to look at. The narrator does a good job, but what's the point if he doesn't help progress the story? I only kept pushing forward to see if the story got more interesting or had a really awesome ending that made all of the mind-numbing walking worthwhile.

Overall, Kona has its place for a certain crowd. I love walking simulators, but many often waste my time with forgettable stories, boring settings, or mind-numbing gameplay. Kona has more gameplay than any other walking simulator has a right to, but if you cut all of it out and only let the player drive down the main road, that effort put into all the extra exploration stuff could have been put into a better story. As it stands, Kona doesn't do any one thing particularly well.