You can say a lot of things about the other Alone in the Dark games, many of them negative, but at least they're memorable and creative to a fault. New Nightmare is one of the dullest, least unique games I've ever played. It doesn't have a single original idea, except for maybe the flashlight mechanic, which is completely pointless after the first 15 minutes of Aline's scenario. This would be fine if it executed any of its gameplay or story elements well at all, but it doesn't. A genuinely boring experience with writing and combat that could be mistaken for a sleep aid.

"So first I'd like to mention that since the basic concept of the Persona 3 remake was to remake the Persona 3, we don't have the FES and Portable contents included. We wanted to really genuinely work on recreating the Persona 3 experience."

Can't wait for Persona 3 Reload Reloaded to release at $70 in two years with Kotone added as a bonus party member but you have to buy The Answer for $30 separately again because your DLC purchases don't carry over even though they're completely unchanged and also Yukari is inexplicably redubbed by a different voice actor

It took Resident Evil 16 years to go from innovative survival horror blueprint to cinematic action self-parody. Alone In The Dark did it in 1.

This game is absolutely awful and just miserable to play blind; many parts are still painful even with a guide. The whole thing revolves around guessing what the designer was thinking and avoiding constant softlocks.

That said, once you know exactly what to do, you can beat the whole thing in under 90 minutes and it turns into a comedy masterpiece. Dressing up as Santa to gun down mafia pirate zombies while listening to Donkey Kong Country-ass bops? Hell fucking yeah dude.

Really cute fangame! Has a lot of problems but that's of course due to it being unfinished; iirc even Up Your Arsenal was borderline unplayable until a week before it went gold. The bones are here for something quite special, more or less faithfully recreating the classic R&C DNA. It's unfortunate the full game will never come out, but I totally understand - burning out from working on a project like this without a team or financial backing is probably inevitable. I admire the resolve it took to get even this far, and it makes me respect the relatively consistent quality of Insomniac's games even more.

I have literally thousands of games to catch up on – award-winners, hidden gems, childhood favorites I never finished (and yes, that is unfortunately a correct usage of “literally”). The amount of untouched stuff in my Steam library is genuinely embarrassing. But fuck that, because I’m apparently a contrarian allergic to playing things normal people actually enjoy, it’s time for a healthy dose of slavjank to kick off the new year (I was terribly sick for all of January so it doesn’t count okay).

Sabotain: Break The Rules! is a low-budget attempt at cloning Deus Ex from the same studio responsible for Corkscrew RuLes! (capitalization intentional but inexplicable), a Russian Postal 2 expansion pack where you play as a guy who had his penis stolen. Sabotain was never officially released in English – or maybe it was, online documentation is inconsistent and practically nonexistent – but it was translated and even dubbed, so if you install the full English patch on top of the Italian release, you can experience its beautifully half-assed localization in all its glory. With a word salad backstory section in the manual and at least two voice actors to portray its dozens of characters, seasoned European PC game fans will immediately know they’re in for a great time.

Have you ever been playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and thought, “this is okay, but I wish the designers were addicted to meth while developing it”? That’s Sabotain, baby! Ripping the band-aid off now: this game is awful in every conceivable way (except the music, which slaps); that said, despite its considerable length, I couldn’t put it down, which is more than I can say for most games that are actually good. Playing through Sabotain is truly An Experience, and I wanted to chronicle my journey for all to understand what a delightful time it is.

Sabotain starts off strong with a crusty FMV showing all the cool stuff you can allegedly do, screen-tearing and framerate drops baked in of course; the real star here is the intro song, which is pure mid-00’s electronic Euro cheese, complete with the Russian artist singing in English. It’s so fucking good and I say that without a hint of irony. This game already had me smiling before I even reached the main menu, which is great because the main menu is a travesty. No music or sound effects to speak of, a “Run” function that doesn’t actually exist because it’s not bindable, UI that resembles an even less functional Deus Ex: Invisible War, volume sliders that may or may not work – we’re already in the thick of it and we haven’t even clicked “New Game” yet!

Now it’s time to build our character, and obviously I picked the female class who specializes in stealth (a grave mistake). Her name is Alex (just like the main character of Invisible War, hm), and she’s a huge goober with the voice of a wannabe country-western singer, which as a native Texan I obviously love. During character creation, you allocate points into certain stats and skills, and you get bonuses for the ones your gender specializes in. These are the only things you should invest in, as the returns on any unspecialized attribute are laughable. You also absolutely should not dump all your points into stealth like I did, as it’s unusable 99% of the time. I thought this was supposed to be a Deus Ex knock-off dammit!!!

Sometimes the skill system seems completely pointless, but at other times it’s obnoxiously essential. If you don’t have enough points in a weapon type, good luck killing anything – you can direct hit a normal unarmored human enemy in the face with a rocket launcher, and if you haven’t allocated an arbitrary number of points toward explosives, the guy won’t even break a sweat. Meanwhile, I never put a single point in Gala Boost (Sabotain’s equivalent to bullet time), and it was still able to trivialize nearly every battle I came across. Side note: there’s an unarmed stat, but I don’t think you can actually punch people in this game. Leave a comment below if I’m stupid and you were able to beat the whole game by fisting enemies.

Our adventure begins as the heroic Professional Assassin Alex lands her spaceship in the starport of Miracle City, a sprawling dystopian metropolis under the control of the Galactic Confederation. Alex is an agent for the ominously-named Empire, and has been tasked with destroying the Hungry Bulls food factory for reasons that are hard to discern due to the poorly-localized text log; I think they’re putting a mind control chemical in the food or something? Unable to interact with any of the NPCs bustling about the place, she heads for the transport shuttle at the edge of the plaza, traveling to the Tired Bulls district to meet her informant, Rod.

This is the moment you’ll realize that when I said Miracle City was “sprawling,” what I meant was it is entirely made up of huge, empty zones filled with indistinct streets, random enemies, and friendly NPCs who only spout the same 5-10 canned lines ad nauseum. There are buildings you can enter, but unless they’re marked as a current goal for the main quest, you won’t actually be able to do anything inside them. The official advertising copy claims there are “countless side quests” that, alongside the main missions, “guarantee at least 40 hours of fun-filled enjoyment,” but I did not see a single one during my 25-hour playthrough. I’m the kind of guy who likes to explore every single inch of every single map (which is probably why games take me months if not years to finish), but after the first couple districts I realized there was nothing to find outside of a scant few goodie crates, and just started beelining toward objectives.

On the way to the bar where Rod resides, you will probably notice the car dealership, Miracle City Motors, although unlike all the other important locations there are no street signs pointing toward it. The vehicles here are ungodly expensive given Sabotain’s economy, but they’re practically necessary unless you enjoy spending 10 minutes walking down barren roads four times an hour. If you’re playing legitimately, it will probably take somewhere in the ballpark of 10 hours before you can afford even the cheapest car, but around that same time you’ll be able to get a better one for free anyway. If you aren’t a masochist like I am, you could instead just buy a car from the outset via cheating yourself a bunch of money by pressing [Ctrl] + [Alt] + [:] + [F3] a few times.

The cars do not control particularly well, utilizing the keyboard only with no camera movement, but they also don’t really need to do anything other than get you from point A to B faster, and in that regard they serve their purpose valiantly (except for when they glitch out and become locked to 44 km/h for some reason). The moment you get behind the wheel of one of these bad boys you’ll be mowing down pedestrians like there’s no tomorrow – not on purpose, mind you, it’s just that the streets are really cramped and the NPCs love walking directly in front of your vehicle. It’s okay, though, because ramming someone with your car at full speed does very little damage, and the cops are totally fine with being run over as long as they survive the ordeal. I assume they did this because the AI traffic is incredibly stupid and frequently collides with enemies, so if cars actually killed people you’d never have to do any fighting in the overworld (what a loss that would be). But don’t worry, if a car hits you, you’ll be launched hundreds of feet into the air, and while Sabotain doesn’t otherwise seem to have fall damage, you will most certainly die upon landing (usually outside of the map).

Finally, it’s time to meet the illustrious Rod, owner and proprietor of the Take It Easy bar (logo written in Comic Sans). Rod is your typical large, greasy, wifebeater-wearing Russian quest-giver, but he’s actually one of the game’s more gentlemanly characters, in that he doesn’t immediately hit on Alex the moment she says “hello.” The male voice actor seems slightly less apathetic than usual in this role, but only just. Greeting him, you are given six(!) whole dialogue options:
How are you?
Vodka tonic, please.
What do they call you?
Interesting place. Curious atmosphere.
Maybe you can help me find some information.
I lost my lighter.
Get used to these prompts, because they are the only conversation starters in the game, and outside of the vodka and lighter ones, show up for nearly every NPC you can interact with. Do you even need to ask if they just recycle the exact same line delivery every single time?

Much like the hotel owner JC Denton says “what a shame” to, Rod is worried about his missing daughter. She’s been kidnapped, or maybe not, he isn’t sure, though he knows exactly where she is regardless, which leads Alex to the first of several levels you’d think would play like an immersive sim but don’t. She’s being held in the backrooms (not those ones) by the Voodoo Club’s owner, and in Deus Ex you’d have several options here. Do you sneak in via the rear entrance or sewers? Do you bribe or talk your way past the guards? Do you lockpick the staff door and waltz in directly? Do you just walk through the front door, murder everyone in the building, and shoot the door open? Well, there’s no alternate entrances and you can’t pick locks (even though you get a lockpick later, which seems to do nothing); it’s quite possible that the rampage option would be viable here, but considering how the game later soft-locked me for not talking to the correct NPC the correct way at the correct time, I’m not so sure I’d suggest trying it. You can’t talk your way past the guards or bribe them, but you do need to talk to them, at which point Alex threatens them into letting her in the back. This conversation ends with two dialogue options, one of which seems to imply she’ll kill the guy while the other sounds like she’ll let him live. In the plot twist of the century, both options spare him. Disappointing!

The club’s staff area is one of the few sections where you can actually use stealth. Don’t even bother trying to crouch because it makes you move at a snail’s pace and the enemies will still spot you from a mile away; you must instead use the Sneak command, which turns you invisible for a painfully brief time, and slap them in the face with whatever melee weapon you have at this point. The range is pathetic, so you’ll need to practically be touching them, but that’s okay because they can’t notice you during the 0.5 seconds your cloaking device is active. After navigating the single small hallway to the single small staff room, simply bonk the bad guy on the head to save Rod’s daughter, who is only capable of saying the word “daddy” due to all the drugs she’s taken.

Rod is now your BFF and has some hot goss for you about the food factory, but he also directs you to an ex-employee who has even hotter goss (and a map) to give. This part seems to be optional but I doubt it actually is, so now you must venture to the next district, which is called, I shit you not, “Dirty Cancers.” (At one point, a character refers to it as “Dirty Dancers” in a voice clip, which I can only assume was the intended name. Or maybe they just misspoke in that line!) Our new friend lives in a complex the street sign calls “Dirty Apartments,” and his apartment number is smeared on the door in blood. Despite this, he’s probably the nicest guy in the whole game; he got fired from his job for giving their excess food to the homeless instead of throwing it away, aww. It’s time to ruin his ex-boss’ life by exposing him as a cheater (the sex kind)!

Every NPC in the Scarlet Place district (sometimes called the Red Dust district) is hostile. They will shoot you on sight, there are a lot of them, and they constantly respawn. Half of them couldn’t hit the broad side of an Amazon fulfillment center, but the rest will immediately take you down with pinpoint accuracy from maximum object load distance. Thankfully, you can find a metal chest very close to the entrance with some of the game’s best light armor in it (keep in mind you’ve probably been playing two hours tops at this point) – you’ll most certainly need it here unless you cheated (or grinded I guess) your way to an early car.

Combat in Sabotain consists mostly of shooting enemies in the head with whichever guns you’re proficient in (forget about even trying melee), because it can take up to 50(!) body shots to kill someone. Even then, some enemies will randomly soak up to 10 headshots before going down, and you have to lead them ever so slightly since your bullets are just a hair slower than hitscan for reasons. Ammo is hilariously abundant so at least resource management isn’t an issue, but you might end up emptying a full clip just trying to hit certain enemies even once, because the AI will occasionally decide to start moving in the opposite direction the instant your cursor so much as grazes them. This is the moment you’ll most likely realize just how broken the bullet time ability is. You’ll be pressing that key waaaaay more often here than you ever did in Max Payne or F.E.A.R., believe me.

At the brothel, you hire a prostitute for free (how do they stay in business!?) and she just casually tells you how to gain access to their entire client list with full dox as if you’ve been friends for years. Long story short, you must navigate the hellish streets once again to go to another fucking building to meet some asshole named T. Grey who’s always simping for Alex even though he never looks directly at her because he’s a cool aloof hackerman. He gives you a fake “membership” card, which I guess makes you an honorary prostitute… or maybe pimp??? So you go back to the brothel and the madam completely forgot you were just there 30 minutes ago and apparently doesn’t know who her own employees are so she gives you the full client list like it’s nothing.

You tell the factory manager’s wife he was cheating on her and of course she already hated him but this was the last straw. Dirty Apartment Guy is overjoyed and gives you the hottest goss about the food factory, but for some reason Alex thinks she needs help to pull off the job, so she has to join the Mercenary Guild to find a few partners. To join the guild, you must prove your loyalty to a racist Jamaican(?) caricature by killing a guy while he’s being transported from prison. The dialogue sequence states that he’s a witness for the state and you need to assassinate him to appease a powerful drug kingpin, but the following gameplay scenario and objective screen contradict this by saying he actually is the drug kingpin. Whatever the case, murdering an unarmed man doesn’t prove much challenge, especially when you have two unkillable NPCs with you (just kidding, their poor pathing immediately gets them stuck inside the front gate).

The two mercs, Phantom and Wildcat, also end up being your partners for the food factory job. They warn Alex of the dangers involved in double-crossing the Guild’s boss, droning on about how they’ll need to get approval from her before they can do the job. Alex is adamant that she doesn’t play by anyone’s rules (hence the game’s subtitle), but eventually caves when her new friends aren’t willing to help unless she obeys protocol. Getting approval from the boss takes less time than the aforementioned conversation and then she’s never seen or heard from again.

We still need to obtain explosives powerful enough to demolish a huge steel building, which means making a deal with a corrupt military official who really wants to have sex with you and also Wildcat. The deal falls through because you aren’t willing to raw-dog him right there on his kitchen table, so he has to be eliminated. You cannot leave until you talk to Wildcat after executing him, but if you pick the wrong dialogue option you still can’t leave, or talk to her again, so because I was quick-saving every minute due to the game’s general instability, I ended up soft-locking myself and had to load a manual save from the previous night.

The epic mission we’ve been building up to for hours consists of walking into a factory the size of a school library, shooting maybe eight guards, then planting the bomb in a random spot. Did you really think we’d need partners, a (non-functioning) map, and intel on the location to pull off this job? I long for that kind of innocence.

With what I will generously call Act 1 completed, a new story arc begins – this one involves Alex being tailed by mysterious government agents, though you never actually see her being followed in either cutscene or gameplay. After about an hour of running back and forth trying to deduce who your stalkers are, eventually you “trick them” into “following you” into a secluded warehouse (in actuality you just enter the warehouse and their car is already inside). Kill the feds and retrieve some evidence from their vehicle as the game instructs, by which it of course means their corpses. This reveals the mastermind behind the plan, who you also kill. It’s kind of fuzzy, but I think you then go to their underground headquarters and slaughter everyone there in retaliation. None of this is ever mentioned again, but you do get a free muscle car for your trouble if you can figure out which of the bunker’s 20 identical doors is openable.

Now it’s time to infiltrate the Confederate army. Even though they apparently know Alex is the one who blew up their food factory, not three hours ago sending government spooks after her in return, General Grinders of the Empire believes she is somehow the best candidate to weasel her way into their ranks as a double agent (this goes off without a hitch of course). Unfortunately, she’ll first have to prove herself by entering unsanctioned arena deathmatches! Why does the governing body of Miracle City require potential recruits to fight to the death in an illegal underground coliseum before they can enlist? I dunno man, why did I play this game and decide to write a whole essay about it?

The recruitment arena is probably Sabotain’s low point, which is really saying something. You have to win three matches to progress: a free-for-all, a race, and a team battle. I hope you put points into both light and heavy weapons, because if you didn’t, you’re gonna have a bad time. The race is pretty much impossible to lose – you have 60 seconds to cross a map that you can briskly stroll through in about 25 seconds. The free-for-all is just more of the same from the game’s other combat encounters, only you have to get kills faster than your AI competitors. The team deathmatch though? Oh god. Every enemy and NPC wears armor, but you are naked. The enemies will one-hit you with sniper rifles or quad-barrel shotguns the moment you step out of cover. Your teammates are mostly useless, and while everyone else respawns, if you die, it’s game over. And just when you think you’ve finally scraped by with a hard-earned victory, the game throws another curveball at you.

Upon scoring the final hit, you will immediately be treated to a “You’re Winner!” message and an email announcing your victory. Do not be fooled – you can still get murked and end up forced to restart for the next 15 or so seconds until the game decides to free your soul from its arena-based prison. This is to be expected from any good piece of slavjank and I was prepared for it from the start. What I wasn’t prepared for was my entire team turning hostile the instant the game declared me the winner. If you see that victory message while surrounded by friends, you’re dead. They will immediately turn 180 degrees to surgically snipe you with rocket launchers from across the map, and if you aren’t far enough away from them, you probably won’t even realize they were the murderers. Eventually, I figured out what was going on, and decided to hide in a far corner while praying my teammates would get the last kill – it’s the only way to finish this segment without cheats.

This all brings us back to the advertising copy once again, which promises “Multiplayer support in various game modes via LAN or the Internet.” This is a lie, as Sabotain doesn’t feature multiplayer in any capacity; that said, I do think they intended to have an online mode, and these single-player arena matches are the remnants of that abandoned concept. Now, I’m not sure why you’d want to play an arena shooter with Sabotain mechanics, but Deus Ex is one of my all-time favorite games and I’m not sure why you’d want to play an arena shooter with its mechanics either, so sure, why not. Also, I couldn’t figure out where else to include this observation, but the Underground City (where these battles take place) prominently features a sizable combat arena-looking structure, and it’s never actually used for anything in the game.

Now that you’ve proven yourself, you’ll begin obtaining missions from Colonel Bogg, sometimes referred to as General Bogg. These include such exciting adventures as “kill everyone in drug lab” and “wait until 10:00pm, then kill everyone in drug lab” (yes, Sabotain has a real-time day/night cycle, and yes, there are multiple points where you’re forced to wait 10+ real-world minutes for progression). Several hours of busywork later, General Colonel Bogg commends you for valiantly placing a bomb in a drug dealer’s car while he was out taking a leak in an alley, and then it’s time for Act 2’s head-scratching climax – we’re going to kidnap a doctor. Kinda. It’s complicated.

Dr. Han (no relation) is working on a project involving… nanotechnology? Maybe? Sorry, I for some reason watched both Argylle and Madame Web after finishing this game, and that particular cocktail has caused enough of my braincells to die that I’m rapidly forgetting things I did two weeks ago. Completely unrelated to your work as a double agent, General Grinders tasks you with kidnapping Han; to complete this particular mission, Alex will need to prepare by buying a bunch of stolen industrial-strength flashlights, pumping his daughter for information, and seducing him. Spoiler alert: none of these things factor into the actual kidnapping at all.

Rod’s daughter returns, now capable of normal speech, to help you locate Dr. Han’s daughter at the casino across the street from the university because they’re friends or something. She doesn’t introduce you to her, though; she instead fucks off to play slots while Han’s daughter tells you to get lost. The only way she’ll let you speak with her is if you’re good enough at one of those timed light-stopping machines that reward you with tickets at Chuck E. Cheese. This minigame is, needless to say, fucking horrendous, and ate 22,000 out of the 45,000 credits I had when I started. It’s very loud, very RNG-dependent, and very frustrating. I almost dropped the game here. But I didn’t, which treated me to an amazing 10+-minute conversation in which Alex lies about being in a secret relationship with Dr. Han, causing his daughter to trauma dump about her mom leaving him, or maybe dying, in return. Eventually, she informs us of her father’s home address, information that is never utilized in any way.

Traveling to a dive bar, Alex must now seduce Dr. Han by carefully selecting the correct options in his dialogue tree. Just kidding – there are no options, only a linear set of painful responses to everything he says. Eventually, she invites him out on a date somewhere. This has no correlation to where he gets kidnapped either, and of course the date never actually happens. Instead, you find him chilling in yet another drug lab, and then you’re required to make The Choice. Supposedly, the original plan for Deus Ex would have let the player choose to side with either the Resistance or UNATCO; truly, Avalon Style Entertainment makes Ion Storm look like total amateurs, because you actually do get to choose who you side with in this game!

Let me set the scene: sterile gray floor, walls, and ceiling lie in front of you, and a huge text dump explains that you must now decide whether you want to stay with the Empire or switch sides to the Confederation. This is a tough call, as you have absolutely no fucking idea what each side stands for. I chose the Empire, mostly because they don’t seem to put poison in people’s food, but also because I didn’t want my bestie Rod to be mad at me. :(

The Empire route is easily the most finished of the three (yes, there’s a third – we’ll get to that, don’t worry). While it does have a couple moments where the devs forgot to replace dummy text with actual dialogue, a handful of unvoiced lines, and one mission that just gets skipped because they never actually made it, its issues are less egregious than those of the other two factions; unfortunately, it’s also a bit blander as a result. Kidnapping Dr. Han involves killing all the Confederate soldiers and then escorting him to exit – he actually leads the way for you and doesn’t resist at all, almost like he wants to be taken prisoner! He and his daughter are never seen nor heard from again after this.

A low-res FMV featuring our first proper look at General Grinders, whose visage truly lives up to his name, kicks off Act 3. (There may have also been another scene with him earlier, I’m sorry my memory is hazy.) I don’t actually know what’s being said in this cutscene because it’s in Italian with no subtitles, but I assume it’s about your promotion within the Empire’s ranks. Now you have to go sabotage the Sputnik Control Center so they can nuke Miracle City from orbit, which mostly involves talking to some random lady who works there about her boy problems at a diner. She tells you the name of her favorite movie, which is the password to shut down the forcefield I guess. Then you have to go to a bunch of different labs to learn about the Confederates’ illicit experiments on aliens and mutants; one of them features an unholy amount of suicide bombers who hide behind boxes and instantly kill you unless you’re wearing the game’s second-best heavy armor, which you can conveniently find halfway through this particular lab. You then poison the city’s water supply, cripple its stock market, and execute some guys from a construction(?) company because Grinders is a true psychopath who thinks dropping nukes isn’t enough. Now that I think about it, some of these things might have actually been Alex’s idea.

All this culminates with asking the planet’s singular TV news network to broadcast an anti-Confederation propaganda video, even though you’re going to genocide everyone living there anyway so it can't actually have any effect on the population’s thoughts. Unfortunately, you get tricked into an ambush by your reporter contact, who is secretly working for President Castor; instead, you’ll have to convince the Rebels, a third faction you probably won’t even know exists until 90% completion, to help you put it on the air instead. There was also a bit that involved purchasing a painfully slow car for 20+ grand in there somewhere, but I must have been falling asleep at the time because I can’t remember when that actually happened.

Alex apologizes to Rod and Highspeed (another hackerman she had prior dealings with who wasn’t important enough to mention until now), for potentially killing them alongside all their friends and entire extended families, drives back to her spaceship, and… that’s it. Grinders verbally gives everyone the finger and blows up the city, possibly the whole planet. The end! A nice 30-second Italian-only FMV and no credits, just kicked straight back to the main menu after your successful atomization of hundreds of thousands of civilians. I guess the Imperials really were the bad guys, huh.

Reloading one of my many manual saves (I’m not taking any chances with a game like this), I decided to go ahead and try the Confederation route. This one… also starts with you kidnapping Dr. Han. Or maybe you’re rescuing him this time. It plays out almost exactly the same as the Empire version with some model swaps for enemies/friendlies, but surprisingly this is one of the only segments that isn’t entirely unique to its own path. I genuinely expected the whole thing to just be a palette swap of the Empire route, but it seems Sabotain loves finding new ways to impress me. The Confederate storyline is a little more broken than the previous one, but thankfully also much weirder and less dour. You still never hear from Dr. Han or his daughter again, though.

General Colonel Major Bogg now has a new mission for his best agent: acquire the secret of teleportation from the native Voodoo people. Just as I thought this game was about to get racist on me again, I realized that they were just old Russian guys who wear cloaks and robes instead of armor. Cool. Sometimes you can see them hanging out in the middle of street, but they disappear before you walk close enough to see their faces. But now you get to finally interact with them… how exciting!

It really isn’t exciting at all. A door under the theme park takes you to a giant winding path comprised of old tree trunks, and you better believe it takes 10 minutes to walk across the whole thing… at least, I think it would take that long, because even though this is technically an interior, it still let me spawn my car and zoom through. Eat exhaust fumes, nature!

Inside the Great Voodoo Tree where the three or so clan members live, Alex is told that they’ll only help her if she steals something from a museum that used to belong to them. This heist takes approximately 30 seconds; all you do is walk up to the thing and grab it out of its display case in broad daylight. After that, the Voodoo guys agree to tell her how to teleport the entire Confederate army into the Empire leader’s house. But this isn’t good enough for Master Sergeant Boggs – no, he needs you to slaughter the Rebels in cold blood before he’s willing to go to war against the Empire. So now you become a triple agent, pretending to work for the Rebels while actually working for the Confederation while still pretending to work for the Empire maybe.

The Rebels trick you into helping them break their boss out of prison and then disappear. Then you go looking for them and they capture you. The boss’ son is in love with you despite never having met you before, and he presents you with Another Choice: do you continue working for the Confederation, or flip sides again three hours after you did the first time? My desire to not fuck this guy outweighed my desire to see justice done, so I stuck with the Confederates at first. He still let me out of jail regardless, allowing me to immediately slaughter his cohorts.

For your valor in eradicating the Rebel scourge, Private First Class Corporal Boggs rewards you with the game’s best heavy armor in a cutscene that looks like it was animated using Garry’s Mod. Congratulations, you are now invincible! I guess its armor rating is 100% because you literally cannot take damage while wearing it. Boggs-sensei then informs you that the unhinged Rebel headquarters massacre wasn’t enough – their true leader, the Coordinator, still breathes. Like all other mysteries in Sabotain, Rod knows the top secret steps that must be taken to meet with him. In the interest of avoiding redundancy, I haven’t mentioned the sheer volume of times you ask Rod for information no other character knows. You’re visiting him like every other mission, I swear to God, and he starts flirting with you more and more each time despite being 30+ years your senior and married with a kid. His seeming-omnipotence is foreshadowing, by the way.

Now you have to get genetic modification surgery so you can look like a rebel (with almost exactly the same model as Phantom from earlier), which completely negates that awesome armor you just acquired, then call the Coordinator on a specific frequency using a specific method to hear from him around 5-10 real-world minutes later. Surprise! It’s a trap, and you get arrested by the same faction you’re currently working for because they think you’re a Rebel now and Bogg Bogg won’t vouch for you or whatever. But don’t worry, one of the prison guards helps you escape for some reason, and also gives you evidence to prove your innocence.

Double plot twist time!! Rod is the Coordinator and Colonel Boggs is secretly working for the Empire. The Rod twist makes sense, I guess, but the Boggs shit is completely fucking stupid because if he was actually working for the Empire the whole time why did you have to prove yourself in the arena challenges and betray the Empire to continue working with him? Couldn’t Grinders have just planted you under his command to begin with? I can’t believe this absolute horseshit. If I owned a physical copy of this game I’d take a dump on the disc like I was the angriest gamer you’d ever heard.

You finally get to meet Castor, the Confederate President, for the first time, and he almost immediately believes you when you tell him Rod and Boggie are traitors. After they’re rounded up and arrested/maybe executed off-screen, it’s time to return to the Voodoo Tree so you can actually learn the secret of teleportation for real this time (why couldn’t we get this earlier to use as a fast travel function?????). You then teleport directly into the Empire’s main headquarters to arrest their prime minister/dictator/whatever he is and congratulations, you’ve finished the Confederation route! But we’re not done just yet, are we…

The Rebel route is definitely the “good” one; morally I mean, not in terms of design. I hesitate to call it the “true” route because it’s by far the least finished and functional of the three, but it has the most satisfying ending (by Sabotain standards, of course). All you have to do is agree to snog the weird guy who fell in love with you at first sight while you were imprisoned, and then you can at last get to work properly circumventing authority instead of just choosing between flavors of fascism.

This path largely boils down to planning and executing a huge jailbreak. It’s far less interesting than it sounds. You have to build up a crew for the job, which you do by driving to a person’s house, talking to them, doing a menial task in exchange for their help, then driving back to their house and talking to them again. One of these involves convincing a gang leader to let a guy’s daughter quit the gang, which is only notable because the nightclub she resides in plays the game’s opening song so loud you can’t hear the voice acting. It’s a banger, but I recommend not playing this part with headphones unless you want your ears to be destroyed by someone singing “I REALLY MISS YOU I SUGAR SUGAR MISS YOU” over and over.

Half the dialogue in this part of the game was never correctly implemented, which makes most conversations turn into the following:
Alex: Randomguy01?
Random Guy #1: Yes?
Alex: I’ll come back later.
I won’t go into more detail about this part because the brain damage caused both by watching the aforementioned films and by subsequently replaying Umbrella Chronicles has made me forget most of what happened, but needless to say none of it was at all exciting. It mostly just consisted of running back and forth “talking” to NPCs who spoke via said dummy text.

Now that you’ve assembled the Rebel Avengers – Getaway Driver, Inside Man, and three other people who don’t actually do anything – it’s time to liberate your new friends from the local prison. This consists of walking into the building, descending the huge staircase, shooting 10 or so guards, talking to the prisoners whose cell doors were conveniently left open for you, climbing back up to the entrance, realizing you can’t leave that way for some reason, walking all the way down to the basement, and exiting through the laser tag arena-looking “labyrinth” the prison inexplicably has.

With the Rebel leader and his henchmen free, you get to do the genetic modification and TV broadcast missions again (yay…), and then it’s off to kill President Castor to return control of Miracle City to the people – viva la revolución! He hides in his bunker under the White House, which is floating in midair and wouldn’t have room for a basement, where you get the armor that makes you invincible again and finish the game five minutes later.

The Coordinator is never encountered or even mentioned in this route despite his status as overlord of the Rebels and Alex’s longstanding working relationship with Rod, but don’t worry, at least we get to see her kiss the guy who randomly showed up to save her and then never appeared again until now. At least there’s some sort of personal resolution for the protagonist this time, I guess.

Sabotain doesn’t feature a New Game+ mode, but the max character level is 300 even though you’ll have barely entered the 100’s upon completion of any given route. The only way to obtain experience points outside of missions is by killing enemies, which awards a pittance of EXP assuming you’re lucky enough to get any at all. There are also probably a million credits-worth of “unique” vehicles to buy, so if you hate yourself enough to become the first person to ever go for True 100% in this game, you can easily enjoy over 1,000 hours of Sabotain!

As I approach 6,500 words in this review no one will read for a game no one will play, I start to think about my own mortality in relationship to the lifespan of art. We still read Moby Dick and watch Casablanca, we still listen to Aretha Franklin and play Super Mario Bros., but who is thinking about Sabotain 20 years later? Heck, who was even thinking about it the year it came out? I’m not trying to say this game is some kind of unsung classic that deserved better, but despite its unfinished nature and inherently flawed core, I do believe it came from an earnest team who genuinely put their hearts into it. Or maybe not, considering they also made Corkscrew RuLes, and, well…

But for the sake of argument, let’s pretend I’m right and this game’s badness was a product of inexperience, lacking budget, and/or a terrible publisher. What does that mean for the people who spent multiple years of their lives working on it? Obviously, not everyone is capable of or even really allowed to make timeless art, but the things we create are destined to outgrow and outlive us. When they don’t, it’s one of the most painful feelings imaginable. Once I finally finish something I’m proud of enough to publicly release, I don’t know if anyone outside my own personal sphere will even care. It’s scary to think about the relentless march of time in our relatively short lives; you can never know how long you truly have to left to make even the smallest mark upon our world. And it’s terribly depressing to think that so much sincere art ends up ignored at best or as a video essay/social media punching bag at worst.

To that end, I think it’s valuable to earnestly engage with “bad” art. I’ve ragged on Sabotain a lot in this review, but I went into it with an open mind, and you know what? I enjoyed it! I had a good time! Don’t let the low rating I gave this game fool you, I actually quite liked playing through it and recapping my experience here for y’all. Not in a “so bad it’s good” or “what could have been” way, but just by taking it for what it is – a poorly designed, unfinished mess of great ideas implemented terribly and awful ideas implemented worse. All the backhanded compliments and sarcastic praise may have been mean, but they were unironic; Sabotain’s innumerable flaws made for a memorable, entertaining journey.

I hope the people who worked on this game don’t feel like they wasted the years spent developing it. I hope they’re happy with their lives right now and are proud of accomplishing something, no matter how it turned out. And I hope weirdos like me will continue engaging with their creation, even if only out of morbid curiosity.

Thanks for reading! Writing this inspired me to compile a list of games I’m aware of that don’t seem to be particularly well-known. I can’t guarantee all of them will be good, but I’d love to shine a spotlight on creators who may have fallen under the radar in the past! You can find it here: https://backloggd.com/u/Djungelskog/list/mysterious-unknowable-games/

Thank god no one remembers this game exists, I just know Bethesda execs would salivate upon seeing the procedurally generated maps filled with boxes that take multiple minutes to open and immediately try to do a money pit mobile "remake"

A delightful shitpost to play with friends, not worth taking seriously in the least. No more derivative or janky than any other flavor of the month (year?) early access entry into the open world survival craft genre. I have no idea how people can play games like this alone or happily devote 100's of hours to them (EDITOR'S NOTE: PLEASE IGNORE MY 5 STAR RATING AND STEAM STATISTICS FOR SATISFACTORY), but the fakemon are cute and there's always some new dumb bullshit to laugh at with your pals (the physical human ones). Am I a little sour that it's already sold more copies in 2 days than my entire top 5 and all the other games I'm currently playing combined? Sure. Am I having a good time with it? Yeah.

If you want to play Divinity 2 on modern systems, install this fan patch made by blankname that I found buried in the official Larian Discord server:
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/wuzp6y6c3g8qq/div2

The game ran like absolute shit for me no matter what I did, and after hours of attempting manual fixes and searching the internet I was finally able to dig up this patch that no one seems to know about. Now I can enjoy it with smooth uncapped FPS and no microstutters or fear of crashing.

I hate how Discord servers have effectively replaced forums and made stuff like this impossible to find for people not "in the know." 5-10 years ago this would have been stickied on the official/Steam boards and widely proliferated through sites like Mod DB. But I digress,

A fully 3D world with no mid-game load screens on the PS1 in 1995? The console hadn't even come out overseas yet when it released in Japan?? This was From's second game after exclusively developing office software for years??? I'm obsessed with how ahead of its time King's Field 2 was. An incredible achievement.

The universe Tokyotoon have created in Marco & The Galaxy Dragon is lively and unique; perhaps it's just my overwhelming love of space adventures talking, but I found the first quarter or so where they really focused on that aspect to be incredible. I was disappointed when most of the story ended up taking place on Earth, because I think the level of imagination here suited something more like the prologue. I want to see the main characters hang out with funky aliens like the delightful El Skeleton, not human high-schoolers! Perhaps I'm not exactly the target audience for this visual novel, but good lord do I love El Skeleton I wish he was in it for more than 30 minutes. You can't just have the goodest skeleton boy abandoning his villainous ways to become a chef and barely dedicate any time to that! I do not want to see the human characters go to the beach I want to see the skeleton and his goofy henchman deliver oden to people, how hard is this to understand

The presentation is exceptional. This cannot be overstated. So much unique art was created for this relatively short adventure, and the animated sequences are joyous perfection - the first one in particular had me smiling from ear to ear for its entire runtime. I'm a huge sucker for those exaggerated proportions, stretchy bodies, detachable limbs, and slapstick visual gags! They did such an immaculate job capturing the appeal of both classic cartoon shorts and the sillier side of modern anime, I love it very much. The final battle in that exact same art style also goes surprisingly hard, like if they had Timeless River Mickey Mouse kill Sephiroth at the end of Kingdom Hearts 3 in heated combat (I dunno maybe that does happen, I haven't beaten any of the games after 2). Anyway, if they made a whole film or TV show of Marco in that style I would be there day 1 no questions asked.

The humor has its ups and downs depending on what part of the plot you're reading. The first section is hilarious, and there were many times I laughed throughout afterward, mostly in the animated scenes. Unfortunately, a lot of the jokes in the VN proper can be a little on the loud, grating side of comedy - nothing close to the level of cringe I experienced playing River City Girls 2, but the humor made me groan just as often as it made me laugh. The characters are... fine. Outside of Marco, Arco, and Haqua, they're mostly just archetypes because they don't get any real chance to develop. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, because the story is short and isn't about them, but again, if they're going to have a mostly static supporting cast integral to the plot yet mostly relegated to comedy bits, I would rather have it be lovable aliens like my favorite boy El Skeleton no I'm not letting this go

I've avoided mentioning the story so far because it's the one part I feel negatively about, which is of course a big deal since this is a visual novel. I think my biggest issue with Marco & The Galaxy Dragon is that it feels like a compilation film for a 26-episode anime that doesn't exist. I had no problem with its pacing prior to the OP - it was brisk but in a cohesive and charming way. After that, it speeds up considerably, first feeling ever-so-slightly rushed before veering into SparkNotes territory around the halfway point. Things do slow down considerably near the conclusion, but a lot of the in-between stuff just kind of happens, and the lack of almost any narrative text renders certain scenes nearly incomprehensible. It's extremely, extremely impressive that they created something like 1000 CGs for this VN, and I want to make it clear that I am not knocking the effort put in at all. But there are important moments where they don't use CGs to show you what's happening on screen, meaning you're just left to guess what's going on from the dialogue, because the most you're ever getting narration-wise is "(Marco eats the croquette)." This might be a translation issue more than a writing issue, though, as a lot of the text read awkwardly to me, simultaneously feeling too literal and too localized.

One of the bigger side plots happens about 2/3 of the way through, and it really gave me that feeling of mid-season anime story arc. It involves an alien species called The Love, and has a very interesting concept which leads to some good gags. It also feels incredibly contrived and tries to make a ham-fisted point about the human condition or something I guess, but I have no idea what direction they were trying to take it in because it was so poorly executed. The whole thing just came across as completely inconsequential and, despite tying into the overall themes of the story and being capable of potentially furthering certain characters' arcs, ultimately nothing of note comes from it. I think spending so much time on this pointless diversion made me a lot harsher on the writing than I would have been otherwise; something about it just annoyed me and rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe it was the squandered potential?

In execution, the whole thing reminds me a lot of The Peacekeeper Wars, the miniseries hastily produced to conclude Farscape's story by condensing season 5's planned 22 episodes into 3 hours - in both, I could tell entire story arcs had been haphazardly squished into <10-minute deviations from the main plot, making me wonder why they were even included at all. The biggest difference between the two is that I did not spend 80+ hours with the cast of this game prior to its similarly emotional ending, and thus I didn't really feel anything when the credits rolled. The story and characters simply hadn't been built up enough for me to care about them the way the writers wanted me to, and I think all of that comes from the abrupt pacing.

My feelings about this VN are so conflicted that I very much want to recommend it to everyone but I also feel like I don't want to recommend it to anyone. I'm gonna say buy it if you're at all interested, if only to support the developers for making something so cool and out there. Also, I'm gonna be real with you, if they did like a Steins;Gate Elite thing and remade this using nothing but the cartoon footage? My issues with the writing and pacing would no longer matter because it'd be 10/10 peak art.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and you're gonna need to use RivaTuner to limit the frame rate in this game, because if you don't it'll run at like 1000 FPS and make your graphics card melt

I bought River City Girls 2 day 1 but had to wait 6 months for a patch that made it run at the framerate advertised in the trailers without input lag. This unfortunately was foreshadowing for the overall quality of the game as a whole.

Despite its many issues, my friend and I very much enjoyed playing the first River City Girls game together. Its incredible soundtrack and beautiful pixel art really won us over, enough to look past the mediocre writing and repetitive gameplay. Thankfully, the short length kept it mostly fun and rarely tedious, in general making it a delightful cooperative experience.

RCG2 is more of the same, with "more" meaning "2-3 times longer" and "same" meaning "assets reused 1:1." The actual new content is sparse, failing to justify the sequel's increased length and higher pricetag. You will trudge through the exact same environments from RCG1 again with minimal alterations, then once again when you're saddled with several interminable collectathon side quests, then yet again when the devs decide to further pad out gameplay near the end of the main quest. There are a total of 2.5 new areas this go-round, with the rest being recycled from its predecessor. You better believe that most of the objectives, movesets, and weapons are more or less copy-pasted from the original as well. There are two new playable characters, at least.

So with River City Girls 2 gameplay-wise being a sequel in the same sense Overwatch 2 is a sequel, you're mostly playing this one for the aesthetics and, uh, story. Writing was certainly not RCG1's strong suit, but its script was downright Shakespearean compared to whatever they were going for here. 1 was cringey and a little too mean-spirited but ultimately all it amounted to was harmless, cheesy fun - until the ending, which, in trying to go for an obscure meta joke, managed to be insulting to both the characters and players alike. Everyone hated it, to the point where WayForward eventually patched a new "true" ending in to replace it. So, of course, 2 quintuples down on the miserable meta shit. You can't go 15 minutes without a character breaking the 4th wall to talk about the HUD or wink at the audience about video game tropes they're engaging in. The titular River City Girls (and their boyfriends/girlfriends because the other player characters don't have unique dialogue) no longer feel like people living in a world because there are absolutely no attempts to make their "second adventure" feel organic in-universe. Everything is a joke about how much better this game is than the first one, all plot beats now exist solely as set ups to obvious, obnoxious punchlines. This is further compounded by the new vocal tracks; in the first game, all these insert songs were sung in-universe by Noize, with lyrics relevant to her characterization. Here, they're all sung from the perspective of the bosses, I guess, despite the composition and vocals being exactly like the ones from the original, and Noize still being a famous popstar making music in River City. Again, credibility and believability are sacrificed for the sake of being meta.

The narrative doesn't even try to make sense or have any urgency, but that's okay because it means we get to endure an entire level built around "millennials always on they damn phones" "satire," complete with a head-scratching "social media bad" anthem playing in the background. Meanwhile, there are many, many instances of characters referencing things that either haven't happened yet or never actually happen at all, such as when they complain about their rubber mask disguises being hard to breathe in (they aren't wearing any) or lament helping someone who betrayed(?) them (they haven't even met her yet and she's not part of the main story). I can only assume the script and voice acting were created for an earlier build of the game and were never changed after a project overhaul.

The music is still pretty good, though almost all the best tracks are, of course, taken directly from the first game. That said, it does somehow manage to outdo the original's L33tStr33t Boys-style credits theme with a frown-inducing track that is, of course, about how you just beat a video game and it was a lot of fun wasn't it you really liked the game you just beat didn't you? Maybe that would've been cute in 2007? I dunno.

Anyway, I know it seems like I hated this game, and honestly I kind of did, but it's fine. It's serviceable. It's still fun to play, nice to look at, and pleasant to listen to (the music, anyway). There are a few quality of life improvements (EXP share) but just as many downgrades (loading screens every room). I hate being one of those guys who says things like "this sequel should have been a $15 DLC for the first one," but this sequel should have been a $15 DLC for the first one.

I don't usually play Early Access single-player games, but I've been waiting a really long time for this one, so I just had to try it out immediately. I went through the tutorial case with all waypoints and such turned off, which took me nearly 8 incredible hours. There's a lot of meat to this experience already, and it's one of the most engaging things I've played in a long time. As expected, there are many bugs and optimization issues at the moment, so I'm going to wait until it hits 1.0 to truly dig into it and form my full opinion, but I think if they can iron that stuff out, Shadows of Doubt could be a legitimate game of the generation contender.

Not going to rate this because I only played it for like 30 seconds. I was excited to check out the new episodes and the improved level layouts for Duke It Out In DC, but first I decided to refresh my memory of Duke3D by trying out Episode 1 with one of the new characters.

This is like a parody of modern shooters. I drop into Hollywood Holocaust and am immediately greeted by friendly NPCs running around screaming, giant enemy health bars and a bizarre Halo-esque radar taking up 1/3 of the screen, coins dropping from enemies to use in the in-game cash shop???? I just can't.

Come for the impressively bad performance on powerful machines and poorly thought out camera angles, stay for the Source Filmmaker cutscenes and miserable gameplay. I can't even be offended by The Medium's portrayals of pedophilia and mental illness because that would ascribe more intention to its writing than I believe Bloober Team is capable of - this game does not have themes, characters, or plot in the way a genuine narrative would and simply isn't worth engaging with on any level. I don't think the creators gave a second thought toward what it would mean by presenting Humbert Humbert's internal excuse for why he wants to fuck kids as a literal, tragic event - right down to quoting Lolita's opening line verbatim - nor do I think they understood the potential implications of Lily's... "arc" is probably too strong of a word. At least some of the environments and music are good?

The Go trilogy comprises some of my favorite puzzle games. While not as charming as Hitman Go or as all-around exquisite as Lara Croft Go, the Deus Ex entry is still a lot of fun. Unfortunately, I didn't replay this game now just because I like it.

I've been playing Hitman 2 (2) recently and its stinky always-online DRM requirement to access many features always gives me pause. I understand its purpose and implementation, and there is still a (neutered) offline mode, but I think it's rather unfortunate for any single-player game to include something like that, especially one that costs money. Lo and behold, a few days ago the DX IP's new owners revealed that, as of January 4th, Deus Ex Go will no longer be playable. This is a single-player game that, while usually only around 99 cents, has a purchasing fee. Though it does have online functionality involving community/seasonal missions, there is absolutely no reason for the main story content to be rendered unplayable at any point. But it seems the DRM was baked in so heavily that it cannot function offline, and unlike the other two Go games, this one was never ported to not-phones ("supposedly" there's a PC port on the Microsoft store but I've never seen it available for sale or even piracy), so it will more or less cease to exist in a little over a month.

I am reminded of the endless runner Spider-Man Unlimited, a game I poured untold hours into and even spent a little bit of money on - I don't think it was necessarily anything great, but I played the shit out of it during a difficult time in my life and it holds a special place in my heart. After a certain point, an app I needed for work caused all my phone games to run terribly, so I put it on hold, and when I tried going back to it after getting a new phone, the servers were gone; another single-player game I very much enjoyed that just cannot be played anymore at all. And then there's the one phone game I truly adore - Another Eden - but every time I think about it playing it, I wonder if I'll ever get to experience most of its content and always back off, because despite being a high quality single-player RPG, it needs the internet to work. The lack of permanence in online DRM-enforced titles goes beyond inducing FOMO or being "anti-consumer," it means some of our favorites may be rendered unplayable in the future, only to be forgotten to the point where they may as well have never existed at all, and that's heartbreaking.

A lot of people probably consider Deus Ex Go a throwaway little thing, and it's certainly not as devastating losing it as it would have been to lose one of the series' main entries, but for me it stings all the same. The terms of service for games always states that publishers are giving us permission to play their games, which they can revoke at any time - that's why you can't redownload PT or play it on the PS5, because Konami doesn't want you to, and you implicitly agreed to that by downloading it in the first place. Is that okay? Are our generation's video games trivial enough to not want to share them with future ones? There can be value in fleeting experiences, certainly, but these decisions are made solely out of viewing games as products rather than art, and that makes me very sad.