JHJ
2021
Something weirdly addicting about the format and the promise of bizarre interactions, but there are so many rough edges and unbelievable character arcs that I find it very hard to recommend.
2021
See it’s games like this that make rating games as an art form so damn confusing. They can be artful stories, difficult challenges, group activities and even weird meditative relaxation tools for people who exists in both clinical and anecdotal states of OCD. All I can say is that in that final category this is a gold standard.
2022
A great bite sized game that brings plot and larger scale fantasy to the world of escape rooms. However that very limitation with puzzles that echo their real life counterpart left me wanting to do an escape room and stop playing a digital one. Wasn’t that the whole point of escape rooms in the first place? To bring fantasy into reality. This feels like a backward step. Good practice though if you are that kind of nerd.
2022
I stormed through this cute Pikmin inspired platformer. It is a lot of fun but can become quite repetitive even within the already short playtime.
Far more effective than Violet/Scarlet at creating believable open-world Pokémon. There is a sort of risk reward in sneaking around and catching Pokémon and the different mounts require the occasional bit of thought rather than just flying about on your all powerful lizard bike. However both games suffer from a low budget lifeless quality and can be pretty mindless.
2022
Such a vibe. I don’t really understand the limited space as you have an infinite ender chest which just means finding something you need and then backtracking to dump some bullets then back-backtracking to get a key that unlocks a room with some bullets in it and another key. By the time I got to ‘Nowhere’ I just didn’t bother carrying anything other than the torch and ran around till I filled my inventory with keys then just used them all, rinse repeat. I didn’t find that this increased my terror only my tedium. Having said all that, the propaganda poster which explained this mechanic was 10/10 brilliant.
2021
Everything felt quite incongruous. I’d explore only to find dead ends then just randomly find myself in a different biome that didn’t gel with anything around it. The portals that pixelate the games also feel completely pointless. Where the previous game pastiched to the point I didn’t really feel the need for it, Axiom Verge 2 spins it’s wheels trying to be something new yet old.
2022
Though it is bafflingly low budget, once I had become the master of my lizard bike, zooming around this simultaneously messy and empty world was a fun power trip. I also actually caught them all, thanks Reddit.
The Xbox game pass has opened a strange world of c-tier indie games which are trying to evoke some cherished cult classic with some ironic internet humor or some really overblown teen angst drama. I both love and hate this new chapter of my video gaming life but rainbow billy is trying some really nice things. It’s mostly harmless with some moments that felt smart and others that were so tedious I was confused why they’d made their small teams life harder for something so needless. Ultimately I fell into a nice and comfortable gameplay rhythm but found that although there is the illusion of deep social mechanics you can storm through the game treating every character exactly the same (one fun exception being an enemy who is upset if you do to well in a fight)
I’d really rather not do all this backtracking and there is an awful lot of filler but then you remember that some kid in the back of the car in 2004 got to spend hours with this game and ignore all of the tedium around them. So yeah not amazing but for a portable Zelda time killer pretty great.
2023
Maybe I thought about this one too much but the idea that the “dark arts” which just insta-kill enemies are for some reason 10000x worse than a spell which turns your enemies into explosive barrels which you can throw at the other bad guys so they both cease to exist, really ruined all my immersion. The world is kinda beautiful and the child in me is just happy to see 4K hogwarts but to be perfectly clear, this is a game that requires brain deletion to truly love everything that is going on
2020
It’s a big old beautiful bit of box-ticking and collecting which feels surprisingly characterless considering how seriously it takes itself
Pushing through tedium is rewarded in is considered sequel which manages to feel less relentlessly bleak and yet still spectacularly miserable. The pace can be quite erratic and I’m always frustrated by games that punish you for breaking stealth/killing as a story beat. I tried for hours to complete one section without killing anyone only to realise it was intentionally impossible. This isn’t a problem unique to Plague Tale, it’s an issue which seems to affect every game that attempts to be both action packed and morally story driven.
2023
Did you ever play Bioshock and think “I wish this protagonist was duke nukem”? Well do I have the game for you.
At one point the dialogue and the main character made my eyes roll back so far into my head that I couldn’t see anymore so I had to stop playing.
At one point the dialogue and the main character made my eyes roll back so far into my head that I couldn’t see anymore so I had to stop playing.
2023
I’ve spent a weird amount of time playing this terrible iPhone game. Apple really just doesn’t give a shit about games.