The simple black and white world of Toem - a blend of Earthbound and Peppa Pig - presents like an all-age picture book filled with quirks and details that need only to be captured with the photo mechanic. It's a game that encourages the player simply to take it in at the most leisurely pace imaginable - no one is in danger, no one is going to die, nothing. That said, the moments where you find only so many pieces of a photo challenge only to find out there are more in later levels becomes amplified annoyance. But the connectedness and clean presentation brings out the completionist in most players.
Bottom line, its another cutsie zero-risk indie title to relax to and shut out the horrors of our reality.

the moment after taking hundreds of photographs of whatever the fuck was in front of you during this long journey through completely different biomes of the world you finally manage to "experience toem" (more on that later) is probably one of the most powerful moments I've experienced lately in a video game and i wish i was joking

toem is a very strange and alienating game in the sense that even now i dont completely know how I feel about it (currently my neurons are debating whether to put 3.5 or 4 we will see how that will go stay tuned)

the main mechanics of the game all revolve around taking pictures of the most random shit thats there to complete a certain amount of missions that allow you to move on to the next place and then repeat this process for another 5 times or something

if you ask me how exactly these mechanics work id have no clue how to explain this gameplay apart from "umhhhh cute lil boy takes photos of stuff hehe cute" the end like i think its better to just try the game yourself or watch some videos honestly this is difficult stuff me italiano mamma mia i no talk english well excuse

now the way in which i explained these mechanics makes it seem like the game is boring as hell but in reality the missions are so different from one another (albeit still in the "take a pic of X format" duh fucking brand of the game) and the things to photograph are so many that they completely saturate a game that lasts 3 hours no 100% and 5 hours 100% (approximate data of how long it took me at least also considering the DLC although tbh i kind of speed ran it through the last levels dont know why maybe im just too mentally unstable for videogames)

in addition to that the game also shoves in other kinds of mechanics in such a way as to provide you with a varied and never fully soporific experience (not fully because the sometimes unclear requirements for some quests make you wander around the map for a bit and they get frustrating honestly im just not good with this stuff idk why i played this game i got zero brain toem why are you giving me riddles like wtf)

honestly for a game with this premise it can be a bit of a challenge (of patience at that) so its not really just strolling and bird watching

theres also clothes ! if you like that kind of stuff i know you chicory people will like it and also some quest kind of work like the moons in super mario odyssey accessible only if you dress as idk a fucking pole dancer if you know what im talking about

anyhow point is gameplay is fine very fine very innovative very ughhhh other adjectives that im not competent enough to put here like ughhh endowed is this a word whatever

what pulled me into this game was possibly the art style which is majestic even though very minimalistic but honestly minimalistic isnt always a bad thing and somehow they managed to put a wide array of diversity in the world design character design and everything else design

now i will just segue into something that completely bewitched me the atmospheric nature of this game is just astounding i swear every single level has a clear and direct vibe theyre trying to convey and they deliver in that regard beautifully and all into a black and white lense and that will also segue into

the final picture you take took my breath away its such a wonderful little crescendo into something absolutely majestic

mom at the beginning of the game tells you that its finally time for you to experience the magical might of TOEM something that the player and possibly also the little protagonist have no fucking idea what it is

its at the top of kiiruberg mountain region and it should be experienced at least 1 time in the lifespan of a person and so you just journey through the world to get a sight of this magnificent phenomenon

MILD SPOILER IG when you get to the mountain you acknowledge that toem is a fucking parallelepiped ? ok whatever i was weirded out THEN you look at it . the ost keeps going on a steady pace until it stops and toem exposes its mystical colored northern lights and another ost begins and youre just left there gawking at this beautiful sight and honestly ? trying to convey this kind of majestic beauty through a game isnt that easy ive seen a lot of stuff listened to a lot of stuff and sometimes stuff just gets repetitive or you start to not get that amazed at it anymore like you used to

when i actually "experienced toem" it made me feel like i was looking at something out of the ordinary like it was a big deal and in a world where everything is black and white a sight that explodes into a myriad of colors IS a big deal and i was just left there observing this estatic godlike experience like i was actually living in the world of toem i got shivers im not joking i kind of got emotional too im a mess lets just end this review rn

toem is cool you should try it ig

going around just spinning the map is entertaining af how do they do that like i could be spinning the map for an hour straight

can i pet the mysterious figure aka the beavers

every animal in this game MUST be petted or else youre a monster and you shouldnt be living on this planet im sorry thats just the truth

i want to date the rock metal guy who gives bread to the pigeons hes just my type

i dont usually 100% games but this one deserved it

(wrote this one at like 1 am when i was supposed to be sleeping for my first day of uni this is gonna be a fucked up review im so sorry people)

Harold Halibut is a very technically impressive (when its not bugging out or dropping frames) feat, which unfortunately puts its gorgeous claymation style and cinematography in service of an overwritten, overindulgent miserable slog which might have been refreshing were it a fifth of its length instead of the overbearing wank we got instead.

Wank is the operative word here, the game is spiritually similar to jerking off. It takes inspiration from various sources, wes anderson films chief among them, but from what few films I have seen of those, they were much more entertaining and well written. The sheer nothingness of the gameplay even for narrative focused adventure games and amount of dialogue that was 3 lines too long for what it needed to be really fits together when you learn about the game's 10 year development time. This is someone's baby, presumably a labour of love, but thats the thing, sometimes you need to detach yourself emotionally from your work and cut things when they don't actually add anything. The most damning thing of all, after all that, 8 goddamned hours (it felt twice that) I feel nothing. The game is nothing. I am nothing. We're all nothing. And I have 8 fewer hours now before I return to the nothingness of oblivion with little to show for it.

I liked the demo enough during Next Fest but unfortunately Children of the Sun proved to be entirely style over substance. What starts off as a neat little sniper puzzler with a Killer 7-esque aesthetic devolves into trial and error, tedium, and wonky hitboxes. In some levels you aren't even able to see every enemy initially so you straight up gotta trial and error it. The later mechanics the games adds feel more like annoying gimmicks and the last level is just an absolute slog and I just gave up because I couldn't find the last damn enemy in all the visual noise and didn't feel like repeating all that shit over and over again just to find them. Easy skip and I regret I'm probably past the refund window.

Like watching a car crash.

Open Roads had a very rocky development, and it's not hard to tell. Announced about four years ago at The Game Awards and three years after the studio's then-latest release of Tacoma, Open Roads ran into some trouble when it came out that Steve Gaynor was a microtyrant who was forcing employees out of his company. In a true success story for the industry, he'd only been abusing his power over his subordinates to humiliate and demean them (specifically focusing his ire on the women at his company), and not to sexually harass them — please, hold your applause for the man until the end. The news broke that this dipshit and his stupid haircut had been responsible for turning over nearly the entire workforce of Fullbright over the course of just two years, and Gaynor stepped down ahead of the story coming out. He said he was very very sorry for his behavior and that he wouldn't do it again, but also that he wasn’t sorry enough to surrender the company name. Open Roads is now credited to "The Open Roads Team", comprised of the couple of employees who were left in the wake of his reign and whoever else they could bring on to save the project from a shallow grave. The game released just a few days ago to a remarkably small audience and a middling reception, and it isn't difficult to see why.

Open Roads fucking sucks.

It's a game that's very obsessed with detail, yet is remarkably uninterested in its story. When the game let me open up a trash can and pick out every single piece of garbage individually to examine it in a 3D model viewer, I got the feeling that I wasn't going to enjoy this. The models themselves are all very intricate and detailed, each one of them complete with their own bespoke labels, and fine print, and they're all very lovingly put together, and I absolutely would not have noticed nor cared about any of this if a core component of the game wasn't picking up random objects and looking at them. There's a reason that movies don't feature characters picking up every loose object on the set and holding them up to camera, and that's because it's not particularly interesting to do that. I feel like I have to explain this from first principles. What do we gain by doing this? What do we gain from having the player pick up loose items and stare at them? What does that accomplish that just dressing the set with static objects wouldn't? It certainly makes the game last longer, because you need to pick up every piece of random bullshit in the hopes of finding the ones that advance you to the next section, but there's no appeal in doing that. It's busywork. So little worldbuilding actually happens by digging through these items; you'll be picking through erasers and pencils and plates, all such boring, domestic objects that don't have any character to them whatsoever. You can pick up some push pins and look at them. They're normal fucking push pins. You can pick up a fork and look at it. It's a normal fucking fork. You can pick up a comb and look at it. It's a normal fucking comb. What are we doing? Why? Is there something about allowing me to pick these objects up and look at them that does anything that leaving them in the scenery for me to look at wouldn't? Could we at least do something interesting with them? Express some personality through them? Give us a reason to investigate them? Anything, so long as it could give this a point.

Tonally, this is all over the place. Tess being kind of mood swing-y makes sense — she's fifteen, and nobody seems keen on telling her fucking anything on the grounds of it being "too complicated", despite one of the core conflicts of the game being completely resolved in a literal three minute talk at the end — but Opal falls into this pattern as well. Tess will go way, way too far in making an accusation or just trying to come up with something that would hurt her mom, and Opal will respond in kind, and then the pair of them will act like nothing ever happened. One sequence has them blow up on one another, refuse to say another word until the end of the car ride, and then resume quipping and bantering not even thirty seconds later. It takes more time for you to eat the fucking burger that Opal buys you at the motel than it does for the only two principle characters in this story to have a ground-shattering fight and then completely resolve it. The store description boasts that Tess and Opal’s relationship has “never been easy” when it so obviously is. If I had said so much as a fraction of the shit Tess says to my own mom, I would have demolished our relationship. Instead, it’s all glossed over, all just Buffyspeak for the pile. If wry quips were currency, Tess and Opal wouldn't have to sell the house.

The game can't ever decide whether it's time to floor it or slam the brakes, and instead has you constantly whipping back and forth between long segments of doing fucking nothing besides wandering around to rotate ashtrays and then blasting forward with story development that you barely even have time to register as happening before it's over. Your grandfather died, but he wasn't actually your grandfather, but he was a jewel thief, but he was your grandfather, but he might still be alive, but he tried to turn himself in, but who cares, but maybe your professional gambler father can enlighten you, but roll credits. Christ. We spend 90% of the runtime walking around and investigating literal fucking garbage and then cram way too much of this incredibly boring story into not enough time to tell it. This isn't even an Open Roads problem, but Open Roads is a symptom; so many games have fucking atrocious pacing. I've started celebrating anything that can get to credits without rushing or dragging. At least this has the decency to be over in an hour and a half, despite the fact that it does nothing with that time.

Would you believe me if I told you that this controlled badly? For a game this simple, just about every control scheme has something completely broken about it. If you're playing on a gamepad (the optimal way to play), menus are often incredibly sticky and require a few button presses before they actually register that you want to move your cursor up or down. Getting from New Game to Continue on the main menu took four down presses to move the selection box down once. Objects that you can interact with are what I can only describe as "sticky"; moving your reticle near them will drastically decrease your sensitivity and pull your view towards the item like a magnet, ensuring that you can easily pick up the item without having to fiddle with getting the reticle placement just right. This, in theory, is a great idea. In practice, the fact that so many fucking items in the game can be interacted with means that your view is constantly being dragged around, making it feel like you're fighting with the controls when you're trying to look up from a desk to the exit door. You can't move your camera freely unless you're staring off into empty space, because your reticle keeps getting caught on objects and making it incredibly difficult for you to look away from them. It should not be this frustrating simply trying to look around a room.

Doing this on a mouse is where the fun really begins, though. I don't know what happened with my copy of the game, because I can't imagine that this happened to anyone else and they didn't see fit to mention it; it's obviously a bug, but it's also really funny that it made to the final release. Mouselook, for some ungodly reason, is locked to eight directions. It also "snaps" when you move it around, jumping from one point to another rather than smoothly gliding between them. I thought it had something to do with the controller being plugged in, but it persisted through both unplugging the gamepad and restarting the PC. I can't really explain how bad this is through text, so I've graciously provided you with a video so that you won't have to experience it for yourself. Nobody should know these horrors, but I do. You should not be made to carry this burden.

I feel bad giving it this low of a score, because I usually prefer to reserve the half-stars for works that are actively harmful. The kind of thing that does damage. But there is absolutely nothing that I like here. I detest the writing, I detest playing it, I detest the way that it looks, I can't fucking stand it. This game radiates a horrid energy that enters me in waves and saps my will. The writers have almost never worked on anything else in their lives and one of the lead art directors made Dream Daddy. We're not dealing with heavy hitters of the industry, here. These are people who are uniquely underqualified coming in to try and salvage an extant work tainted by employee abuse because throwing out the name and starting over would be bad for brand recognition.

Despite the fact that this is intended as something of a follow-up to Gone Home, there's almost nobody left from that project who's still working on this one. This isn't a successor project so much as it is an imitation, all of the gaps smoothed over with drywall mud from Annapurna helping to pull in nearly three hundred fucking contractors to get this out. What compelled them to go ahead with releasing this? Open Roads is the ship of Theseus. Clearly everybody who knew what they were doing when they were still under the Fullbright banner is gone with no intention of coming back, and the ones with a clue who survived Gaynor's reign don't have enough of a voice under the fucking mountain of outside artists and developers being brought in to push this out the door.

Open Roads is a game that clearly has talented people on board, but is helmed by a team lead (or leads, plural) who have no clue what do to with them. There’s so much wasted potential here. It sucks to see all of these people wriggle out from under the thumb of an abusive manager just to immediately be put beneath the thumb of a new manager who’s incompetent, instead. I can’t write here what I hope happens to Steve Gaynor. I do hope that whoever’s left from Fullbright can leave Annapurna behind and make something better than their oldest work, because I know they’re capable of it. They just need a leader who isn’t a fucking moron.

Hey, mom!

You know, for the big, bad black sheep of the Postal franchise I was expecting something a whole lot worse. Don't get me wrong, I'm not some deluded apologist fan trying to convince you this actually a misunderstood masterpiece or even a good game at all. I'm just saying it's more a cheap and disappointing product than the unplayable affront it's known as. Honestly, I've played a little over half the property's entries and expansions at this point, and PIII is about par for the course in terms of quality. Sorry, not sorry.

Its biggest problem is budgetary, which has continuously proved to be the only thing that has been more detrimental to the series' reputation and reception than even its controversial content. Running with Scissors passed development of the project off to Akella, the company responsible for publishing their works in Russia, and one of its internal studios fittingly named "Trashmasters" because those guys had deeper pockets. Unfortunately, the country's Great Recession from 08-09 completely mucked up any chances for the potential greatness that you can still catch the occasional glimpses of while playing.

The whole package was built around the idea of replayability, featuring a branching storyline that will lead you to one of three possible endings depending on your choices and behavior. The notion of getting to see entirely new content in the form of different missions and cutscenes is as compelling in this format as it is in your typical Western narrative RPG, although it's more than a bit weird that they decided for outcomes to be determined by a morality system. I mean, actively encouraging players to be upstanding, law-abiding citizens in a Postal game?! What sense does that make?

Ultimately however, I didn't find the gameplay enticing enough to pull me back in to go for another ending, and not simply because I feel I happened to pick the most interesting path of the bunch on that first playthrough either. The financial struggles behind the scenes led to this being nothing more than a generic, linear third-person shooter. Admittedly one that can be mindlessly entertaining due to the fun gore and silly guns, even if some weapons don't seem to work (I'm convinced it's impossible to hit anyone with the fire axe). Might have earned a cautious recommendation were it not for the plethora of technical issues. As if long levels without checkpoints weren't enough, I experienced multiple crashes to desktop and repeated instances of critical doors inexplicably failing to open that forced regular mission restarts.

Never knowing if something was about to go wrong and cause me to have to replay possibly lengthy stretches of a stage if I didn't remember to manually save every few minutes is what really kills this for me. I legitimately enjoyed the return to a more grounded style and tone after Apocalypse Weekend, and found the writing fitfully amusing by virtue of how nasty and vulgar they were willing to be with the shock humor in their blatant efforts to offend. It is perhaps worthier of the Postal name than the vast majority give it credit for. Regardless, while I believe the overall general vitriol this has received over the years is a tad overblown, I wouldn't recommend the curious members of the fanbase check it out. The dev's lack of proper funds led to this being too unstable and lackluster to be a fulfilling use of your time. It may be too early to tell for sure as I've still got quite a few releases left to try, but based on all I've gotten to thus far I'm beginning to suspect this property doesn't have anything consequential to offer after its second outing.

5/10

the ambiance is awesome. The gameplay is quite logical and unmerciful. The vague storytelling and theme of despair reminded me a bit of Dark Souls and I liked it. However, the game has some major problems. The game is extremely dark and colorless. And this is how it goes from start to finish. Sometimes I could not see the object or the chest at my bottom even though I passed it many times. As if it wasn't enough that the environment was so dark, the fact that we could only see where your character was looking at made me feel overwhelmed. In the game, you want to explore the world and immerse yourself in the game, but night comes extremely fast and you have to rush to your shelter quickly, even if you are at the very corner of the map. during the day should have been at least 3 times longer than the game time. There is no opportunity to live the game without trying to survive! Although Darkwood managed to be interesting and admirable to a certain extent, at some point it started to bore me. and when I realized that I couldn't enjoy it, I started to see the mistakes of the game. Both the isometric camera angle, the dark and colorless world, and the extremely short daytime times are a bit too slow for this game.