Played in early access between 07.13.2023 and 07.15.2023

I picked this up because after playing the System Shock remake I've been on an immersive sim kick. The game was designed to be an intentionally clunky old school immersive sim, right down to needing to reload your weapon manually when you are out of ammo, along with having limited slots in your quick access bar, and limited inventory so be prepared to stockpile your loot somewhere near a trader. You're only allowed two weapon slots; the first can fit all weapons, the second allows only the knife, pistol, and weapons of similar sizes. You also have three accessory slots for healing items along with Molotovs and drinks that give you specific bonuses.

The aggro system is odd. Enemies are able to hear your footsteps and see you if you are in their line of sight. They cannot however hear your gunshots. Once you aggro one enemy, every single one within several meters of it will be aggroed as well, so you will be ambushed the moment you are spotted. The enemies will chase you until they can no longer see or hear you, and they are able to follow you eons away from their placements. The gunners will always lead their shots, so you have to be mindful to change direction after you hear them fire or you will run into the bullet's path.

The basic ammo have almost no punch aside from getting headshots. The enemies in the second map are spongy as all hell, able to soak up to about four bullets from the upgraded revolver I got from the first map, and about three non-headshots from the double barrel shotgun. Headshots are pretty much mandatory to kill. I don't know if the guns' ironsights don't line up to the center of the screen or I'm just bad at aiming, but I've had an easier time getting headshots from the crossbow than any other weapon since the aiming reticle doesn't disappear when I ADS. I've had better luck with the knife in the first map which has a surprisingly long reach and has even the headshot function if you knife the opposition in the head.

Keep in mind you'll be facing more than three enemies at a time if you aggro any one of them in the crowd so it's absolutely not advisable to start a firefight, which is odd since the steam page advertised that it is an option for progression. The game throws a lot of different enemies at you when you aggro them, and you are left to basically shimmy through a maze of lead on bullet fire while trying to headshot the running melee rushers. With the limited HP you have, you are brought down in about a total of four hits from enemy fire unless you upgrade your HP, then it's maybe five.

Death in the game is incredibly punishing. When you die, you will suffer a penalty towards one of your attributes unless you have a trinket that protects you. Die three times and the penalty becomes a curse that penalizes you further. You could have less max HP or make more noise when you sneak, or various other things. You are able to heal the curses through drinking a specific potion, or by doing a task that the totem in the respawn point gives you if your penalty becomes a curse after three deaths.

I would have been fine with how the curses worked, but the game punishes you further with how far some of the respawn points are. In the second map, there are very strong and spongy enemies that ambush you if you aren't stealthy, and I was only able to find one respawn point, which is the one you start at when starting the map. So not only will you suffer curses, but you will have to traverse back all the way from your respawn point to where you wanted to go with all of the enemies you've killed along the way respawned. You are put at a further disadvantage each time because you are spending money to keep yourself stocked with ammo along with the trinket to protect you from the curses. Eventually you may run out of those resources effectively making the game needlessly more difficult and tedious to get through, forcing you to grind to kill the respawned enemies to gather up the money needed to remove the curses and keep you healthy.

Mechanically the immersive sim portions work pretty well and the game has an interesting world to explore, especially the second map. The issue is that the game is brutal and expects you to take a lot of punishment. However instead of designing it in a way where you learn from your mistakes, it punishes you further with a very questionable enemy design where you are effectively playing a lead on bullet hell with far away spawn points. It tested my patience so much that I essentially save scummed to circumvent its mechanics rather than to use them as intended, because after awhile, trying to get through an area's long slouches of walking from point A to B without dying to bulletfire had stopped being fun.

Another point I should make is that the game has no real way to save either. You're only given two options to save your progress; either at a respawn point or you can quit the game through the pause menu and it will save at the exact location you're standing at. Your progress will be overwritten the moment you respawn, so the way to circumvent its long and tedious grinding is to force quit the game between the time you die and the moment you respawn. That way you are able to resume the game without losing progress if you've saved through quitting the game through the pause menu.

With the way the save system is designed, it's very likely that the devs do not want you to create your own checkpoints and quicksaves, hence why I'm a lot harsher with my criticism of the game. However the choice is your's. Either you waste time to manually save the game then resume, then alt+f4 and resume the game quickly after dying, or waste likely more time to grind to get back what you've lost and find your way back to where you've died.

As this game is still in early access, I'm hoping the devs will iron out and balance some of the shortcomings to make this game worthwhile to return to when chapter 3 rolls around in December.

ok first off its incredible how 2 people (mainly) created this game, i just wish that it was far more cohesive
this is a game that is best described as the opposite of innovative, everything here is something u have seen before and its done in a sort of middling way.. it feels like a lot of the mechanics and ideas were cobbled together without any regard to how they flow. "we should add a railgun" "what about a minigun" theres nothing special here, very little flare is to be found in the environments; the characters suck so bad and the entire game ur being commanded around by a dude (okay well its not technically a dude but u catch the vibe, bro is named father) and u never get to see SEVEN (THE MAIN CHARACTER WHO IS A GIRL AND POSSIBLY TRANS .. canonically) in anything except for the cover. the most egregious attribute to be found here is the weapon balancing, theres just no purpose to using the smg or railgun or minigun whenever u can just stick to the grenade launcher pistols and shotgun, especially when the shotgun is fucking broken

one gigantic huge complaint i have is the writing, it sounds like something a middle schooler cobbled together and its filled with dialogue u would find in a modern marvel movie where they cast doubt on themselves after saying something silly
I WANT CHEESY DIALOGUE, just not like this,,, this is an example of a b-movie game; its alright.

i do like seven's design though its cute i wish she was in the game

The Talos Principle 2 is a game which begs you to abandon cynicism. It desperately wants you to take a chance and believe in humanity and what we can do when we work together. While its story is much more one-sided in its presentation than the first Talos Principle, ought it not to be? It's only through cooperation and trust in others that this game, let alone our great technologies and cities came to be.
Though I was disappointed by the dearth of easter eggs in this game and thought the puzzles trended easier than the first game, I still had a great time playing through it and taking in the magnificent, digital vistas of the island while engaging in conversation with the superbly voice-acted members of my expedition & New Jerusalem.

While I don't think The Talos Principle 2 achieves the greatness of the first game, it is still a wonderful experience which urges the player to truly think about the themes, situation, and argument at play, and I love it for that reason. While many of The Talos Principle 1's debates were extremely well-realized in the form of text messages with Milton, in this game, I found myself repeatedly arguing with myself, even when not playing the game, about what it was that I believed and which way I should direct the future when the critical moment came to pass. I think that speaks volumes about how much The Talos Principle 2 gets you to ponder about "the big questions" if you engage with it, and I really appreciate it for that.

Alan Wake 2 is not perfect, but I do not care. The craftmanship put into its plotting and characters as well as the presentation is out of this world. I have rarely been this engrossed into a story and gameworld, if at all. I devoured all of the ingame lore, which I have never done for any other game, ever. I've seen this game's story described a "page turner" again and again. Beyond that being quite the pun with the literal turning of manuscript pages once you pick them up, I cannot think of a better way to describe the progression of storybeats.

There's a few occasions of the game's pacing failing to keep up during some of the longer chapters, which are always redeemed by the fantastic plot progression and songs bookending every chapter. The game shows a remarkable ability to have its characters figure out things at a similar pace to the player's as well as just generally both answering questions as well as leaving more questions in the player's path in a way that keeps the player engaged. Though I definitely think that this aspect of the story was much more refined on Saga's part of the story.

Saga is a great addition to the franchise who only got better as time went on. While I don't think that reports of Alan's and Saga's stories being the same length were, I must have spent at least 5 more hours playing Saga, probably more, I didn't really mind that fact by the end. Alan is much more than a character in the story, he is a presence that could be felt over its entire duration. Though a part of me wishes for him to take center stage more in a potential sequel, I trust Sam Lake to continue his (and Saga's) story in a way that will satisfy me.

I've already had a love/hate relationship to this game's predecessor, a game with a similarly engrossing presentation and storytelling but with terrible gameplay and a generally a bit too surreal story that was harder to follow that I personally would like it to.

Alan Wake II improves on both of these fronts. The gameplay is alot better, if not something worth talking about. Limiting the amount of combat encounters, adding some more enemy types and making it more survival based was the simple solution this type of game needed.

But it is very apparent that Remedy needed more time. This was one of the buggiest games I have ever played in my entire life. I can't count the amount of times collectibles didn't count toward my progression, items didn't appear, voice lines didn't get played or similar stuff that gated me from continuing. While most of these problems could be fixed with reloading the latest save, not all of them were. Add to that the artifacty presentation on consoles and common animations errors or just bad animations in themselves and you can notice where Remedy bit off more than they could chew.

The atmosphere and overall uniqueness of Remedy games just cannot be matched. I feel like they've been improving with every single game (since Alan Wake) and this is their definitive peak for now. The writing inherent to these games is nothing short of amazing and I really hope that the two DLC and the NG+ mode can elaborate on the story here in a satisfying way that makes the presumed 6+ year wait for another entry more easy to swallow. With Control 2 and the Max Payne remakes being conformed to be in development, it will definitely take a while longer till we see the spiral ascend.

I found this game to be serviceable but nothing special. First off, the puzzles aren't great. It's a lot of situations where you use everything in your inventory with everything else until something happens because you often have no logical reason to think to use or combine things in the ways the game requires you to. In addition to that, a lot of the gameplay ignores the ways the genre has modernized which results in a lot of deaths from walking into rooms or using an item incorrectly (neither of which you'd have any way of knowing how to avoid dying until after you've died once).

The horror aspects of the game are mostly jump scares and gore. The game is never really particularly scary (or really even creepy). The gore in particular starts to feel gratuitous to the point of being eye-rollingly edgy. Some of the 'creepy/spooky' sound design is quite good though, so I'll give them that. It's unfortunate that that alone isn't enough to salvage the game though.

The vast majority of the writing in the game is nothing to write home about. It does have some good bits here and there, mostly scattered throughout the PDAs that function as diaries for characters in the months leading up to their deaths. Little stories of who these people were, their role on the ship, their relationships with other crewmembers, and hints at their eventual deaths.

The art of the game isn't bad, per se, but I didn't find the vast majority of it to be particularly interesting. It probably doesn't help that game is so damn dark all the time.

Overall not a point and click I'd ever actively recommend but it's far from the worst one of the genre I've ever played. So you could do worse, I suppose.