Resident Evil Revelations does exactly whats it sets out to do and actually manages to be a better game than RE5 and RE6.

It's definitely not the series' best effort and it feels too much like these two previous titles, but it surprisingly works.

The first thing that I have to say here is that it felt good having Jill Valentine back as a protagonist. Especially when you join with Chris later on. Jill's a very strong character for the franchise and I hope Capcom uses her (and a few others often ignored) better.

With that said, I also have to give credit to Revelations' new characters. I'm pretty sure that they'll never ever show up again, but Jessica, Parker and Raymond had their own strong personalities and motivations, aiding the plot to move forward with Jill and Chris.

Speaking of plot, the interconnected story in Revelations is good. It's Not amazing, but it got me interested. The whole FBC/Terragrigia revelation didn't make any sense to me, which kinda weirds things a little, but it works for the most part. Sure, the writing is still VERY cheesy, like a 'B-Movie', but that's part of RE's classic charm at this point.

The only problem is that it is very inconsistent in its constat change of characters and that problem leaks to the gameplay.

Jill's campaign is great and the game should've just been that. Exploring the ship carries a bit of RE4's taste and the level design, although not perfect, is decent. But when you go back and forward in time, with different characters, in different places, it slowly breaks the pace and atmosphere that the game itself builds up.

I mean, you go from elegantly doing puzzles and running away from Rachel with Jill, to completely changing your weapon loadout to play as two bland new characters (Quint and Keith) fighting hordes of hunters or an on-rails shooting moment with Chris, facing a giant worm monster, in a totally different map...

Add this to a few gameplay setbacks and Revelations starts losing a lot of its steam. The dodging mechanic sucks and it feels mandatory sometimes, using the Genesis isn't always fun or useful, movement is a bit clunky, inventory management is nonexistent, backtracking decelerate things and the final boss is the worst in the franchise.

And this is a shame because everything else in the gameplay DOES work. The atmosphere, shooting mechanics, Raid mode, cool unlockables, gruesome enemies (Rachel scares me), nice exploration and even SOLID water levels.

I am not sure how to accurately rate Resident Evil Revelations. I liked it a lot, but when I think too much about it, I can see its cracks. And there are plenty. Maybe the game just works better on a 3DS, but I played it on the Switch, so I can't tell.

But it's a grower. Short and sweet, like a Resident Evil should be. But despite its mishaps, I definitely recommend it.

Man this really blows! (Not really)

Really mixed feelings on this game if I'm being honest. It's split into a few different routes that mostly converge to tell a complete story, following Jill and Parker as they arrive on the Queen Zenobia cruise ship, Chris and Jessica as they conduct their own investigation and two guys I refuse to acknowledge as anything but 'the Morons' contributing to the plot in a way that's far more significant than their behaviour would have them deserve.

Jill's sections of the campaign I actually really enjoyed, especially early on. The ship is no Spencer Mansion, but the area designs and overall atmosphere of it where exactly what I want out of a ship-based Resident Evil game. Most of the off-ship areas suffer from being kind of bland for the most part, but given the way the story is told and the order it's told in I'm not too upset by these extra levels.

Chris' route was also pretty interesting I thought, and the overall plot of the game - while nothing absolutely mindblowing - kept me engaged or curious for most of the runtime, and had me casting a suspicious eye on some of the many new characters, which is always fun in any sort of mystery media.
(Worth noting too that while the mass of new characters was offputting at first in the usual 'why should I care' sense, I did find myself liking them at least well enough by the end. It'll be a shame if we don't see these folks again but I'm hoping that Revelations 2 brings them back if nothing else.)

The Morons are easily, far and away, the worst part of the game. Their gameplay sections are honestly not that bad considering they play quite similarly to the surprisingly fun multiplayer Raid mode; seeing you fight off enemies while running through an area normally just to find a key piece of information, that wouldn't make sense to be found by the other 2 teams. But my god are they annoying. I don't know who wrote these guys but the one you play as says about 30 variations of "this blows" despite only being in the game for maybe 2 of the 26 chapters, with a total screentime of maybe 20 minutes. His companion, meanwhile, is a comically over the top geeky dweeb, and I'm really pissed that he actually made me laugh that 1(one) time because the VA for him sold a line so well.

That aside, this game actually really surprised me. For some reason for years now I've expected it to be kinda mid - maybe even bad - but despite my current score of a (high) 3.5 I do think it's a genuinely good entry in the series. My biggest complaint aside from the Morons honestly is just the bosses. Half the boss rooms have a weapons box in the arena which seemed really weird until it became clear that they're huge bullet sponges and it's sometimes necessary to bring out old guns from reserve or swap damage buffs around when you run out of ammo.

I'm not sure if/when I'll do a second playthrough because the trophy list is awful, but if I do or even just by the time I beat all the Raid stages it's possible this may climb to a low 4.

Thanks for reading this quick word vomit of my overall thoughts, hope you're all having a wonderful week 🙏

it is heavily flawed as hell, but jesus i had a great time with it. something about the setting of the oldest house makes this stand out from other video game settings. the brutalist architecture mixed with 50's aesthetics and technologies worked for me immensely. the story and lore surrounding the fbc brought me in as well. i love remedy's use of live action footage and how they blend it in seamlessly into the game world and in this it's incredible, for example when seeing trench talk over the hotline and actually seeing him in the world.

that ashtray maze sequence man holy shit.

Coming to this after growing up on Pikmin 2 and 3 was harrowing - Pikmin AI is borderline nonfunctional, their capacity to take any initiative without your direct babysitting is obscene. Every enemy encounter is ruthless, something as mundane as a Bulburb can rinse 9-15 of your troops if you do anything less than completely dogpiling it. There's very specific quirks and annoyances that don't even feel like the result of its time, but intentional choices to make the world feel more hostile and out of your control.

But I liked it for that really. You gotta corral the pikmin around as if they were dawdling ankle-biters and you're a begrudging parental figure. Olimar says as much in one of the travel logs. And as any responsible father should, I took immense pride when my dumb idiot gremlins somehow completed their menial labor without falling in a lake.

The Children Yearn For The Mines.

I don't want to dissuade people from playing this game because there is a lot of quality here. But despite its appearance as a highly polished portal game/mod, the actual puzzling out feels a little half-baked. A lot of the solutions have to do with rethinking your understanding of cube replacement/respawning, not to mention the lack of a real game changing new mechanic. The closest things were the power switch and the new laser cubes. These both were very good additions, but there weren't enough puzzles concerning them where I could feasibly feel tested by their mechanics. There is a pretty high difficulty spike midgame punctuated by really long walking sections, which is the worst when considering the last, unfortunately easy, test chambers. The story is generally lackluster, and feels like a retread of a lot of what made Portal 2 so interesting. It ends really abruptly, which also sours my experience a little bit. For a (free!) fangame, I can recognize the work and quality that was put in, but I did not gel with a lot of this game. I may have been spoiled by Portal Reloaded to be honest.

It's truly baffling to me that you can make a game about dreams and perception of reality and have such a huge proportion of it be just making the player walk down bland hallways, the same uninspired motifs plastered everywhere over and over, whilst the player desperately hovers their cursor over everything they come across to find whichever object the game arbitrarily deems interactable.

It feels like so many developers misunderstood what made Portal great, thinking that it was just the light spatial and physics puzzles accompanied by silly, fun voiceovers, when actually it was the fact that that game pushed into territory that felt legitimately experimental, surprising and exciting in the context of mainstream videogames fifteen years ago. There are a handful of cool moments in Superliminal, more than my rating really implies, but it genuinely left my imagination feeling sapped from the experience as I longed for it to stop telling me to think outside the box until such a point as it had actually done so itself.