Without a doubt the worst narrative focused game I've ever played. The main character is insufferable and the fact that anyone was able to put up with her for a full 10 hours is beyond me. Everything she does is entitled and she makes herself the victim of every social situation. She does nothing to rectify the issues that she creates in her own relationships and expects them to be solved because of the universe or whatever. Mae is a toxic individual on every level and worsens the life of every around her, and then complains and realizes she needs to change, and then doesn't.

There's also very little gameplay to speak of, but games like that are usually cushioned by having a pretty compelling story. I found literally no way to relate to the main character, or any of the characters, and about 8 hours in I gave it up altogether. I hated pretty much every character in this game outright. Guitar mini game was fun and music was good though. Cannot believe the universal praise it received.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is the worst AAA game I have ever experienced.

Xenoblade Chronicles X for the Wii U is my definition of “a flawed masterpiece.” It had all the pieces there to make a near perfect game, but didn’t quite connect them. Still, There’s a special place in my heart for it. The first Xenoblade Chronicles is one of the best JRPG's of all time.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is not that. If you are not familiar with the game, it takes place in another world where all civilizations rest on the backs of titans in the sky, endlessly swimming around the World Tree. Besides that you have pretty typical JRPG fare, like unexplained magic, talking animals, and girls with cat ears. It has a some good points to it, but at the end of the day, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is just a bad game.

Look, I love anime. I’ve seen quite a lot of it. Too much, even, my friends tell me. But there is a line, and maybe I’m the one who’s got to draw it. Pyra’s boobs are literally larger than her head. If you watch a video of Pyra, you’ll see quickly how ridiculous her character is. The proportions of her figure are completely inhuman in any way, shape, or form. JRPGs can get pretty bad with this stuff, but look at this shit. This is the most egregiously over-sexualized depiction of a woman I’ve ever seen. And not just the breasts, but the whole costume ensemble. She’s wearing half a pair of short shorts with a metal bikini top. This character is meant to be the awakened persona of an ancient, powerful weapon, the Aegis. I spent 30 hours trying to take her or this game seriously and was never able to do it. Japan does some fucked up stuff, but when your female characters are this unrealistic I’m unable to suspend my disbelief any further. Any character development done for Pyra is thrown to the wayside as I’m trying to figure out how her back isn’t broken. It’s a damn shame too, because Pyra’s voice actor is excellent and probably the only competent actor in the entire cast. The fact that anyone fetishizes human women to this degree is kind of revolting. This is the horniest game I’ve ever played, and I played Danganronpa.

Unfortunately, for many reasons other than Pyra’s chest size, this game can only be described as an anime garbage cringe fest. This game is everything that the general public thinks anime is: perverted, badly dubbed, full of screaming fights and big explosions, all style and no substance. The over-dramatic reactions to every small line of dialogue, the nonsensical gobbledygook language the characters use when describing ancient wars or distant gods that have no bearing on the present situation, the constant reduction of female characters to sex objects. This is the stuff that people who don’t engage with the medium see when they look at anime, even though it only pertains to a small portion of shows/manga. If you’re not an actual weeaboo in possession of a waifu body pillow and you managed to stomach all this, then I applaud you for your patience. I am a lesser man.

There are gacha mechanics, and your rewards are women. Wow. Don't know how much more on the nose you can be with "women are objects", but there are legitimately loot boxes with big-breasted, bouncing anime girls that are often teenagers or younger. I am not lying.

If you have the stomach for this kind of stuff, congrats! Let’s talk about the game. You’ll take control of Rex, a recently resurrected scavenger with a horrible English voice actor, who sets out to return the aforementioned Pyra to Elysium, which is heaven, I guess. Rex is a “Driver,” which is what we call people that can harness the power of Blades. Blades are humanoid people, of which a disproportionate amount are hot teenage girls with big ole anime tiddies. Pyra is a Blade, and is sort of a manifestation of the power of the Aegis, Rex’s big red sword. So long as Rex holds that sword, he is inexorably linked with Pyra.

Pyra wishes to return to the top of the World Tree, so they join up with a cat girl who is riding a talking tiger and a perverted raccoon with a sex robot. I apologize for the bitterness that is so clearly seeping into my review.

The above scene, while only 5 minutes, kind of sums of the vibe of the whole game nicely. This broke me. I think from this point on I was destined to hate the game, and there probably was no going back. I had to call my mom after this, just to tell her I love her. Poppi is indeed a sex-maid robot built in the image of a 10 year old girl that Tora, the raccoon idiot, built to refer to him as Master. What the fuck, MonolithSoft. I will not sit here and let this be normalized.

The game is composed of several small open worlds that are disconnected, and as you progress through the game more of them open up. You can fast travel between worlds to jump between them, but on each one you’ll find plenty of stuff to do. Some are tiny and others large, but the actual design of the landscapes relative to the mobility of your character is great design. MonolithSoft built the map for Breath of the Wild, so it’s not surprising that the map in their own game is so impressive. Even in the first world, you see rolling hills, arching mountains, bottomless lakes, and vividly colored plant life of all kinds. The art direction of the settings is one of the best parts of the game.

The monsters are, as always, amazing. They are carried over mostly from the previous games, and Xenoblade has always had a knack for making believable looking fauna in the right environments. This is the high point of the game. If you want amazing fantasy animals from a distant planet, there is no better place to find them. Seeing new creatures was the only thing that carried me through 30 hours of this game. The music is solid as well, but honestly I really thought it was a downgrade from XCX.

That was the last good thing I’ve got to say. Combat in this game is convoluted beyond belief. There is no way you could understand anything that’s going on without reading about it online, because there are so many systems layered on top of each other that everything you do during a fight loses all meaning. Despite the fact that there are 5 hours of tutorials at the beginning, you’re not adequately taught how to configure your party to achieve the most powerful combos. With accessories, equipment, party callouts, elemental combinations, skill trees, auto-attack cycles, status effects, weapon types, combat arts, art levels, weapon upgrades, and Blade attachments all working in the background together, it takes more than a few hours of mashing buttons in the dark before you have any sense of what Rex is actually doing. I know it seems like a very simple thing, but there’s a huge disconnect between the player and game when your character doesn’t seem to be responding to the inputs you hit. And it’s not because the game doesn’t work, it’s just such an insane explosion of color, badly dubbed screaming, and ugly UI that you don’t actually feel like you’re doing anything.

The UI for menus needs to be mentioned. It moves really slowly for some reason. It’s ugly, it’s hard to navigate, and totally unintuitive.

The game also runs at 480p undocked, leaving all the tiny onscreen text literally unreadable. Are we meant to scan through three different onscreen menus during fights without being able to even read the text? The game also runs at 30 FPS maximum but is bugged with constant frame rate drops. I don’t think I made it more than 20 minutes in handheld without a single digit frame rate drop. Maybe that’s been fixed by now, you can correct me if it has.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is both a technical and narrative failure. This game absolutely fails its predecessors and has cheapened the brand. While the worlds and monsters are imaginative and beautiful, the cringey anime garbage stuff is enough to turn off most people. If you overlook that, the actual gameplay creates a huge disconnect between the player and Rex. Combat relies on over a dozen different bloated systems and feels like button mashing, even when you do it strategically. The characters are impossible to relate to or care about, even setting aside the unacceptable designs of the female characters. The English voice acting and dubbing is the worst I have seen in a decade. If I have to watch Poppi, the robot sex-slave maid modeled to look like a 10 year old girl, call that alien raccoon “Master” one more time, I will throw up. Do not buy this game.

I have had some serious ups and downs with Hollow Knight. On one hand, it's built on a flawed design document, encouraging free movement and exploration with the story but all the while doing everything it can to stop you from doing the thing the game is supposed to be about. The end result is frustration, slow paced navigation, and a loss of anything that could be considered "exploring". The fact that the map is locked away and even when you get it is nearly unusable is just inexcusable. There's never a way to truly understand where you're going or why you're going that way. It doesn't teach you how to get stronger or leave even a tiny hint as to where to get upgrades. There is no natural pathing; just an eternal labyrinth.

The lack of direction and scarcity of checkpoints are totally unfair and stacked against the player in every way. Most boss fights don't' have a checkpoint anywhere near them, so by the time you get back to the boss you're back to 1 health. It's very easy to loose all your souls and very difficult to collect more. Fast travel is a total joke, and it's so useless and spread out it may as well not even be in the game. Hollow Knight is basically artificially lengthened by the extreme difficulty which is mostly the result of the checkpoint system.

The reward for finding anything in Hollow Knight is typically just death, and losing the items and money you've been so meticulously collecting. However, 20 hours in now and having picked it up again after 3 years I do want to keep playing it. After using a bunch of guides to find all the level ups and get my guy up to snuff, I'm much more confident traversing the underground. I still maintain this is a flawed design because the game didn't guide me to any upgrades or even indicate I should be looking for them.

On the other hand, the little cute bug people almost make it worth it. You're constantly finding weird things which is cool, but it's less cool because everything in this world is trying to kill you. There aren't any moments of silent contemplation and just looking around, but the ones that exist are wonderful. Typically though, If you're not in a resting room you're fucking running from point A to point B. It doesn't leave a lot of room to admire the scenery unless you clear every room as you go, which isn't how i like to play games.

Hollow Knight seems to do everything it can to stop you from enjoying it. Other people clearly like it though, so what do I know. None of the boss fights were fun, as they all resort to insanely fast attacks to get to you that are impossible to block or dodge without hours of practice. And then you're back at a checkpoint halfway across the map, and you're more than likely going to die just walking back to the boss. It suffers from all the same problems the Souls games do, front to back.

I reviewed this game with a free code provided by the publisher.

Excerpt: Valhalla hits almost every note correct and finds a way to hone in on the best elements of its gameplay while downplaying the parts we've grown tired of. The Ancient Order bounties are a replacement for the cult system from Odyssey and are streamlined to feel even easier to pursue. The daily quests return as well, with relatively low prices for some excellent gear. Investigating mysteries is quicker and more rewarding, finding new places feels natural and exciting, and the feeling of going 'a viking is thrilling. I only became more excited to continue playing with each hour that passed - something I can't say about the previous two entries in the series. I recommend all fans of open world RPGs and especially fans of Origins and Odyssey pick up Assassin's Creed Valhalla this fall, especially if you're breaking in a next-generation console.

Read the full review here: https://techraptor.net/gaming/reviews/assassins-creed-valhalla-review

I think all of us have, at some point, had an idea for a game concept and searched high and low only to find it had not yet been done. Yes, I know — go make it yourself. I have actually started working on my first ever video game with a very similar concept to the one that drives Road 96, and I’m delighted to see that the folks at Digixart Games have made it work better than I ever imagined. This game has been a thrill, a validation, and an inspiration.

Road 96 is a pretty high-concept work, and that makes the elevator pitch much harder to conceive. Perhaps the best description is a narrative roguelike, where finishing a run progresses the overall story and players take control of a new character for each run. The story is somewhat procedurally generated, but in such a way that each of the chapters in each run can happen in any order and events will play out slightly differently depending on what your previous characters did on previous runs. No combat here — which way you choose to act branches the story into a road trip that feels completely unique to you (even though it isn't).

The world of Road 96 exists parallel to our own, where an authoritarian president who is an obvious analogue for Trump (they even have the red baseball caps) has ruled the nation of Petria (America) for decades under an iron fist. Our story begins in June 1996, as we quickly approach Election Day in September. Presidential terms have been extended to run for ten years in Petria, so the election of ’96 is the first chance people have to overturn President Tyrak’s reign by electing the liberal candidate, Florres.

Unfortunately, through a mass campaign of years of fake news, radicalization, retraction of voting rights, banning of immigrants, destruction of the lower classes and climate change-induced drought, Petria has reached its apocalypse point. Although it takes place in 1996, Road 96 is in a way a historical fiction piece on what America would look like after 10 years under Trump’s rule.

Tyrak has built his famous wall, but it’s not on the southern border to keep Mexico out — it’s on the northern border to keep Petrians from escaping to the fictional analogue of Canada. The alt-right extremist party in charge has created a veritable nightmare of a nation, and teenagers are fleeing the country en masse as the democratic rights of adults are slowly stripped away — and most people seem to welcome it.

If teenagers are caught trying to escape, however, they are sent to labor camps (The Pits) to work until they die. The scariest part is that most parents welcome the enslavement of their children; after all, if President Tyrak says it’s right, then it’s right. This world shows America in its final death throes, and you may begin to clock more similarities to our current country than differences.

Calling the story of Road 96 totally procedurally generated would be doing it a disservice — probably better to say the structure of the narrative is procedurally generated. Each run, you take first-person control of a nameless, faceless teen that is trying to flee the country. Each run, the overall narrative progresses in accordance to your actions, since they each take place chronologically after the previous one. Your character has a stamina bar as well; consuming food or drink or resting recharges stamina while different activities cost different amounts. You’ll also need to collect money to make purchases, pay for transport or information, or to access new areas with bribes. Riding the bus the next 400 miles may cost 2 stamina and $7, but hitchhiking will cost you 3 stamina even though it’s free.

There are seven main characters that recur in the story (if you count idiot crime brothers Stan & Mitch together), but each time you meet them on a different run you are playing as a different person. In addition, they change dynamically during the story based on what you have done during interactions in previous runs. Meeting each of the wonderfully written characters this way on each run is distinct and different, and calls into stark relief how different we become when around different kinds of people.

For instance, one of my teens didn’t make it, and was killed tragically at the wall in order to save another character, Zoe, in the climax of the run. My character’s death was co-opted by the right wing media in the next run as a terrorist attack by the Black Brigade (the resistance group) while he was actually gunned down by Tyrak’s border patrol. This opened up new avenues, new dialogue, and new relationships with characters I’d met previously. On one run, you’ll know Sonya as a radical alt-right talk show host; the next she’s a drunk party girl seeking validation; the next she’s a broken woman who lives on the edge of suicide due to her inability to save a young girl’s life ten years ago.

Each run is made up of seven chapters, each scripted dynamically so that it changes depending on what your previous characters have done. The way you progress between chapters generates the contents of the next chapter; if you choose to walk alongside the road, the end of the story will be very different than if you were kidnapped by Stan and Mitch again.

This style of presentation allows for no two players to ever experience the same story, but still showcases the excellent writing and character work within each chapter. Uncovering the secrets of how each of the characters are connected to each other, to the terrorist incident at the wall ten years ago that killed hundreds of innocent citizens, and to the upcoming Election Day is exhilarating. It feels scripted and directed, but the beauty is that it is not. It’s your story. No one else gets to live it. It should be noted that in reality, there actually is not much choice involved. Playing that game a second time is basically the exact same as the first time, just with scenarios in a different order. While still great, it's very much an illusion of choice situation.

The music is absolutely top notch in Road 96. The soundtrack is comprised of original music from many different artists, all with their distinct own vibes and styles. My personal favorites are The Road by Cocoon, Chase by Volkor X, and Sonya’s Mind by Xilix, but I assure you it’s bangers all the way down. The sound mixing is incredible; the way Road 96 controls and shifts the tone with its music is impeccable.

One of my very few issues with Road 96 is the mediocre quality of some of the voice actors. The actors playing John and Zoe in particular were obviously inexperienced, and it did take me out of the game a little bit. Some voice acting, like for Stan and Mitch or Sonya, was fantastic. Overall, it’s mostly good voice work with a few standout duds. My other small issue is that textures were constantly clipping, but that can likely be fixed with a patch in the future. Another note I need to make is that I played Road 96 on PC, at 1440p 60 FPS without a single frame rate drop. The Switch version, however, as of this writing, is pretty unplayable. If you don’t have a mid-range or better PC, I’d wait on a patch before getting the Switch version. It’s rough.

I’m not surprised by the 7s and 8s that Road 96 has been receiving — I can understand that this type of game for most people would result in a “hey, that’s pretty cool” reaction. For me, this is the manifestation of my dream game. A set of narrative building blocks that you can keep continually stacking in new ways, but always in a way no one else is doing. You may know my love of the Arkane Studios games like Dishonored and Prey ; my favorite type of video game is the kind that no two people will ever play the exact same way. Coupled with decision making and amazingly written characters similar to Life is Strange or the Telltale Games, and Bethesda-like tools to build a narrative that I (in some capacity) created and still brought tears to my eyes — this is the video game I always dreamed of, and Digixart finally made it. I know this game won’t hit you as hard as it did me, but I think you’ll still find it well worth your while to play.

I reviewed this game with a key provided by the publisher.

About four years ago, I was winding down my first playthrough of Skyrim on PC and was hunting around Nexus Mods for well-rated new questlines. At the top of the list was The Forgotten City, a significant new expansion with rave reviews. I downloaded it and dove into the hole in the ground to visit the cavernous world below. Inside, I found an underground ghost town full of petrified people and a time portal back to the past. Diary entries told me of the Golden Rule, a curse placed on the city. If one person committed a single sin, the entire city would pay the price.

This mod became one of the most popular story expansions of Skyrim, beating out the thousands available on Nexus. Although I didn't finish it back then, I had a great time diving into the mystery of the Forgotten City. I was beyond intrigued when I saw the same modders formed a genuine studio, Modern Storyteller, and created a brand new narrative adventure game based on the mod. I'm pleased to report that this small team of four developers has delivered - sort of.

The player begins by exploring ruins when suddenly they're washed down a river and saved by an explorer. This explorer begs them to find a friend of hers who went missing down a well in the ruins. The player agrees to dive in and proceeds to the Forgotten City. Traveling through time backward roughly 2,000 years, the player finds themself in a huge but brightly lit underground cavern thousands of feet below the surface. 22 Romans are trapped in the tiny Forgotten City with the player.

Through the friendly, Roman tutorial character Galerius and the Magistrate Sentius, the player learns the rules of this world. A mantra called the Golden Rule reigns over the city: "The many shall suffer for the sins of the one." Hundreds of Romans who failed the challenge, now petrified into gold statues, fill the streets. Magistrate Sentius commands that no one will sin, lest the curse turn them to gold. As you know, people can only last without lying, cheating, stealing, or killing for so long. The main quest is to assist Sentius in finding who broke the Golden Rule, condemning them all to death, and then stop them by looping back in time.

The world of The Forgotten City is gorgeous. There's some excellent lighting work that leads to a very directed and controlled atmosphere, and the textures are beautiful. My RTX 2060 Super was overheating, running it at 1440p 60 FPS on ultra graphics, but knocking it down to high graphics settings was a great compromise.

The world is relatively small, so it's not too hard to track down specific characters. Gameplay consists of navigating branching dialogue trees, gaining new information from investigating or talking to other people, and using that information to open up new dialogue paths. The dialogue system is almost identical to DONTNOD's action-adventure narrative Vampyr, and I mean that as a great compliment.

You'll traverse the city, find items, clues, information, do quests, and plan out your next loop. There is very little combat, though there is one dungeon where your player wields a somewhat wonky bow and arrow. When anyone (including your player character) breaks the Golden Rule by sinning, the gold statues awaken. They raise golden bows sent by the goddess Diana and begin to turn everyone in the city into gold statues. Your player can escape back into the Shrine of Proserpina, the goddess of rebirth, and enter a time warp that sends them back to the start with their items intact. It is impossible not to draw a parallel to The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. The greater narrative cannot progress without repeatedly looping, changing things at least a bit each time, and learning a bit more.

My first complaint is that, especially at the beginning of the game, many logic chains are broken. When I first spoke to Sentius, he affirmed my status as a time traveler, but a few sentences later, he didn't believe me when I mentioned I was from the future. I experienced several more instances of this in the first hour. With characters being so angry, they would never speak to me again one moment and then amiable and charming the next once I clicked a dialogue option. Characters would forget information I just told them seconds ago. Logic chains in the dialogue are the entire game of The Forgotten City. It was a bad first impression for a game so focused on speaking.

When this concept works, it is brilliant. I had a half dozen moments of euphoria playing The Forgotten City as my mind clicked the puzzle blocks into place. I found myself rushing down the street to the next task, knowing exactly what to do and being rewarded with simply being correct. I swear I had a Jimmy Neutron Brainblast at one point. Many of the quests feel incomprehensible when you first glance at them but have obvious solutions in retrospect. After the first hour or so, I didn't run into any breaks in the logic chain and began to have fun solving the interpersonal puzzles.

The fleshed-out, three-dimensional characters didn't do much to help me care about their fates. Yet, not caring about them didn't stop me from enjoying prying information and secrets out of them. There was a moment where a character offered me a way out of the city in exchange for a lot of cash, and I remembered not to agree because her equivalent character had successfully duped me back in the Skyrim version.

This leads me to my second negative point: The Forgotten City contains some of the worst voice acting I've ever heard in a video game. I have played through several dozen quest mods for both Skyrim and the Fallout games, and the volunteer voice actors for those mods have been better than the performances here. I was astounded that the developers were comfortable putting the game out like this. Additionally, it sounded as though most of the actors were recording on low-quality microphones. Some voices were much louder than others, and I could hear certain characters like Sentius with their mouth pressed against the mic. On top of the subpar acting abilities of the cast, there was no consistency to accents. Most had a British accent, although they were Roman, except the one Greek character who had a very prominent Greek accent.

The sound mixing was unacceptable. The music was quiet in the overworld, got louder when someone was speaking as if to cover up their words, and then when climactic moments hit and the orchestral sounds swept in, the music got even quieter. The voice reciting the Golden Rule was so loud that my speakers began to shake, even turning my volume down to 1. I was constantly turning the volume up and down to set the levels right, and it never got better. Almost all my issues with the Forgotten City are sound-related, but the audio and voice work here is so shoddy it has nearly ruined the entire game.

Despite this, the gameplay of The Forgotten City works almost too well. I would see this game more as a proof-of-concept than anything. This style of narrative adventure mystery can work, and when it does work, it's ingenious. Tremendous audio and voice issues, many minor bugs, and clunky movement hold The Forgotten City back from being truly great. In the future, with the injection of a larger budget, Modern Storyteller could produce a masterpiece in this fashion. As of now, I recommend this game to all interested parties, if only to see that this kind of high-concept narrative adventure thriller is not only possible but inevitable.

I reviewed this game with a key provided by the publisher.

Back in 2019, a mysterious early access unreal engine project by the name of Bright Memory appeared on steam to wildly positive reception. Though little more than a tech demo at the time, Bright Memory drew eyes for its gorgeous visuals and exciting first person combat. Finally, almost 3 years later, the game is finished. Made by a single man, Zeng Xiancheng, Bright Memory Infinite combines fast paced first person shooting, responsive swordplay, mythological China and near future sci fi to create an incredibly fun, if unpolished, campaign.

Players take control of our no-nonsense protagonist, Shelia, who has been called in by a top secret organization to stop a terrifying phenomenon in the sky. A black hole of sorts has appeared, sucking in whatever and whoever is unlucky enough to be near it. A militia is racing to beat Shelia to the black hole, because inside of it is supposedly an ancient artifact that can reawaken the dead. To reach the black hole , she must travel to the land of Sky, a network of floating islands above the earth which are home to a host of monsters from Chinese Mythology. It’s not much of a narrative to be frank, but this game isn’t about story. Shelia is given a reason to run and shoot, and by god you start running and shooting.

Bright Memory Infinite feels great to play. That’s not an understatement, and I don’t say that lightly. The shooting feels great, and ranks up there with Deathloop and Destiny 2 as some of the smoothest first person gunplay out there. Shelia can sprint, dodge, slide kick, jump, and even double jump - these basic moves aren’t too different from anything you’ve played before. However, Shelia also has a light blade, a sword with the power to send powerful slashes flying at a range to cut enemies down. You also use the sword to counter and parry attacks, both physical and ranged. The countering feels unbelievably good. The feedback is great and the timing window feels exactly fair enough. You can also level up your sword and secondary abilities as you progress through the game to fit your playstyle a bit more.

All of it comes together so easily to produce exciting, varied combat. You simply click on the mouse to aim sights and shoot, but you don’t need to actively switch weapons to the sword. Just hitting or holding E will bring out the sword immediately, so you can swap back and forth smoothly between swords and guns without ever having to think too hard. You can, of course, scroll the mouse wheel to switch between different types of guns and different ammo. It reminds me of a better feeling version of Shadow Warrior 2, although Bright Memory is definitely lacking in personality in comparison.

You can make a judgement for yourself, but Bright Memory Infinite is also one of the nicer looking games I’ve seen recently. There’s excellent lighting work and particle effects going on, as well as the rain effects and a fairly robust physics engine. I love the artwork, and I’ve always said we don’t have enough games that actually showcase Chinese mythology. Well, games that have been translated into English, anyway. I love the monster designs, and there is something reminiscent of Sekiro in the boss fights - of course with a lot more guns. I’m honestly impressed it runs this well, although my PC did begin wheezing a few times when I had multiple monsters on screen. Still, other than a few stutters, it held a very consistent 60 FPS on high settings without ray tracing or DLSS. I gave the ray tracing a try but it wasn’t enough of an improvement to justify the overheating strain on my rig.

While fun, this game could certainly do with a good polishing. There weren’t too many frame rate issues, but there were a lot of enemies and bullets clipping through buildings or other obstacles clearly meant to be solid. It is a bit frustrating to get sniped through 2 walls while crouching behind a wooden building. I had only one crash to desktop, and I still can’t figure out what prompted it. There are a ton of in-game text descriptions that are still in Chinese, as well the subtitles sometimes coming up in Chinese. Speaking of which, this game has pretty bad English voice acting all around. Shelia is barely serviceable and every other major character is flat out not good. The Chinese voice acting sounds better, but I had to soon switch back to English as I couldn’t keep taking my eyes off the action to read the subtitles. It’s a low budget project, so I understand to a degree.

I really enjoyed the variety of music in the game, although it didn’t stand out to me as one of the best soundtracks of the year, I loved the chinese influence and EDM beats underlying the set pieces. It’s nice to hear some softer instruments in the harmonies for a high octane action game.

Overall I really enjoyed my time with Bright Memory Infinite. It wasn’t even really on my radar until I saw it was coming out soon, so it’s been a pleasant surprise. While it’s clearly an indie unreal engine project and comes with a few low-budget qualities, it’s one of the my favorite first person shooter campaigns to come out in the last decade. The story is kind of dumb and Shelia has about as much personality as a bottle of ketchup, but if you’re here purely for gameplay I cannot recommend Bright Memory Infinite enough.

I reviewed the Medium with a key provided by the publisher.

The Medium is Bloober Team's best outing yet, and with more refinement I think their next title could be truly great. It suffers from many shortcomings, namely technical bugs and meandering plot lines. Despite this, it handily excels at controlling atmosphere and directing the player's experience while presenting a compelling protagonist to follow. The Medium is not one the best horror games I've ever played, but it is one of the most unique and ambitious ones. The Medium boasts some features, like the dual reality puzzle solving, that I would like to see iterated on in the future of the genre. And with it coming to Game Pass on day one, I advise all horror fans to dip their toes in to the spirit world and see what's on the other side of the mirror.

Read the full review here: https://techraptor.net/gaming/reviews/medium-review