I just beat all three of the Max Payne games over the course of a couple weeks, so I feel prepared to evaluate all three of them as individual entities, while also seeing how each may falter compared to a hypothetical "perfect" Max Payne game.

Max Payne 1 gets the whole thing started off with a bang, with a pretty easy, cut and dry motivator for much of the series - your wife and child are murdered by home invaders. Using this fuel, Max descends into a world of scum, villainy and other such shenanigans. By virtue of the games presentation and what the story is ultimately about, you would think that this game would be extremely self-serious, but there's a element of irreverence that makes you go "oh yeah this game is kind of ridiculous." Instead of undermining the tone, however, this makes it charming. The camp is a cherry on top so that you don't think remedy has a stick up its ass.

The gameplay here is great, although I do raise an eyebrow when people say this is the best the series got. Sure, the shootdodge is more fun here than in the others, but there are a few elements the others cleaned up. There are some enemies that are ridiculous bullet sponges (looking at you Frankie, dumped multiple smg clips into his head and I still died), and the amount of enemies that would essentially appear out of thin air and instant kill you was frustrating to say the least.

Don't have this discourage you from playing the game though, as there is so much to love with the package provided.

lethal company is easily a 5 star rating and is probably the best co-op game since left for dead 2 and I am not joking. this game has an astoundingly well done blend of horrific dread and absurdly slapstick comedy.

I am fortunate enough to have a friend group that can take the game seriously enough to progress, but also laugh at funny shit, aka the best people to play it with. the monsters and world of lethal company are perfect, some of the creature designs are fantastic and I am dreading/ looking forward to encountering them in my own matches.

lethal company is straight forward and makes it obvious what your goal is and what tools you need, but it really feels like you and your friends are making it happen. my favorite role to play is mission control, the coward that sits in the ship and never faces any real danger. it should be boring, but keeping your team alive and maximizing profit feels so satisfying.

the game is also, hilarious, I can't leave that out. seeing your friend fall down a cliff or get dragged away by a spider almost always gets a nervous laugh out of me. everyone feels so fragile and the game's fucking stellar proximity chat is such a huge part of why it works so well. talking to your friend and they go totally quiet is such an immediately worrying feeling and it's a sense of dread no other game has ever elicited from me this strongly.

this game is the best balance of funny and scary I've seen in a very long time. I can't wait to play some more and see what other fucked up shit happens to me and my friends.

Orbital Companion

The perfect game to play right before moving, this nonverbal rumbly treat is all about using unique orbs as portals to transport between spaces to unlock doors and find more orbs. Most of the game is spent doing albeit simple puzzles involving the diferrent colored orbs and the worlds they are attached to. For instance the first orb is orange which you use to activate switches and walk across invisible bridges. Much of the mid game is spent trying to juggle these various orbs and the portals you activate with them in order to make progress and while only a few moments will have you truly stuck, the moment of realization of what to do is always pleasing and satisfying.

The lead level designer behind Cocoon, Jeppe Carlsen, has also worked on Limbo and Inside. Two other nonverbal puzzling oddities, that focus on visual spendlor and the satisfaction of solving a puzzle towards the ominous unknown with far less focus on complexity. This makes sense because in some ways a difficult puzzle can actually halt the entire momentum of the aciton and the world. I would refer to most the puzzles in Cocoon more as 'fidget puzzles' than full fledged head scratchers, wherein a lot of it is backtracking for the item that you need. You play as this cute little bug creature so you can only carry one orb at a time and for whatever reason you're forced to place them down in specific sockets. Dont want to lose them by accident! So a lot of it ends up being pick up ball A move it to the new location, go back, and do the same with ball B. Again, this can be tedious but it's also meditative, helped by the soothing electric ambient score that unlike in other games in this genre (Gris etc) compliment the visuals rather than call out to themselves.

The real bite here is the visuals, unfortunately, the website I'm posting through doesnt have image/gif support, but it must be said how vitally well done this is. There is no other game where opening a door has felt this good. This is due in part to the immaculate sound design, the clinking and clattering of mechanical parts whirling help set the atmosphere and, while often mixed a little too loudly for my tastes, are almost always densely developed and done well. It's hard to talk about the visuals and my hesitations, I think that the plasticene world aesthetic looks nice, but is a bit too 'silicone valley sci fi' in its approach to the cleanliness of everything. For instance the staircases work in the context of the spidery bug world we are in, but you can see stairs that have a similar spindliness in a few gaudy megamansions from time to time. More importantly, the world of Cocoon lacks ecological 'dirt'. The world is in many ways too clean, theres no grime over anything so it ends up having the same textureless shine to the objects. On the other hand, monumental changes in environment or large objects look gorgeous.

I think the biggest problem with Cocoon is that there's no dash button. The way the game is set up, you have a radial walk and a single input button, sometimes you hold that input. The issue is, your bug buddy walks a bit on the slower side so you find yourself sauntering wishes you could make a rumble/dash happen. On the other hand maybe that would make the experience too fidgety, but since the puzzles lack difficulty or depth, it does end up being a lot of monotonous gliding from space to space. It can feel hollow sometimes but, in my case at least, this actually helped the experience. I am moving, and I couldn't help but think of how equally hollow preparing and carry stuff from one location to another is. I'm as meager as this bug is, and while my own 'orbs' are just as meaningful as its, there's this quiet solemness that this isn't quite fun or boring. You can't dash in real life either, transport and movement...it just has this quality of ennui and melancholy attached to it, and I think Cocoon is at its best when it does have this sense of monotony. You know how to solve the puzzle, you figured it out a minute ago but now you have to go through the portal animation and pick the orb up and go place it somewhere.

There are also, strangely enough, puzzle bosses! They are functional! Most of them focusing on positioning over anything else. If you get hit it just resets the fight, no harm done. Most of them are spectacle boss fights so you dont have to worry about getting skill tested. With that said, I do feel weird killing them! It gives me a very shadow of the collusus conundrum to be killing giant monsters in this barren wasteland for my own gain. This sort of reflects the ultimate shallowness of Cocoon wherein the focus is so spent on you feeling like you 'have something to do' that there's no taking anything in or just feeling out an ecological space. Like, I'm almost sad this is a puzzle game because this aesthetic would be amazing for a walking simulator and even teases at that idea towards the end. The world lacks life and you end up robbing it anyways for your opaque goals.

Due to the non verbalness and lack of dialogue plot, this goal stays opaque until the very end, but it just ends up giving the experience a sort of moral numbness. I don't feel like I was even supposed to think about the giant spider I killed so much as that I bested it and now I get the nice orb. Time is not even spent on dwelling on its death. If we flash back to Limbo...this is sort of a disappointment by comparison! In that game we had this big gnarly spider chase us down and slaughter us dozens of times, but then when we amputate and kill it, its not 'well done' its gorey and gross, you feel uncomfortable and even a little lost. By comparison Cocoon doesnt stray into this territory, but because of how cosmicly indulgent the world is, and how everything is a puzzle room, you end up just thinking about whats beyond what you're seeing in a remorseful 'I wish the game went there' sort of way.

It's weird though, I'm not sure I can reccomend whether other people would get anything out of it. It's one of those games that looks good and knows how to plot a beat and keep puzzle momentum, but at the same time its a whole game of just very beautiful busywork with little to offer underneath. I think maybe the best way to tell would be to consider how you feel about school animation short films. For instance MILK DUST is a visual treat focusing on a grand inspirational world, but the moment its over it sort of hums to the back of your mind, buzzing there only to be pulled out randomly as a humored annoyance or 'oh yeah I remember'. Much like moving itself, I think this business but shallowness when you're not is sort of core to the feeling of moving and transportation generally. Like as an experience, Cocoon handles the core aspects of moving, that being the transportational tedium, effectively. Contrast that with the approach of say Unpacking which focuses on organizational coping as a form of zen. That being said, I can only say this from the perspective of extreme bias. I think its neat enough to give a try if you're in the mood for a more light and breezy eye candy take on the mechanics found in Inside or if you liked the scale of the similarly non verbal Tunic or Hyper Light Drifter. Regardless of how much it appeals to you, I certainly wouldn't say its something you need to get to right away.

Really neat mystery/horror VN that condenses a good story into something that never gets boring - yet never rushes things at all-, so the pacing is very solid for its medium (although it already has quite some elements and mechanics outside of the traditional VN format).

In terms of ambience and setting, it's strikingly good. The soundtrack is quite nice and did its job well, and even if I didn't grow too attached to any particular melody or tune, the jazz style the investigation music had going on for the detectives' section got me really enjoying every second of it.

The visuals and aesthetics are very nicely done as well, and are the cherry on top of the whole thing, helping cement the whole "urban legends and the darkness surrounding the streets and people of 80's Japan" setting's vibe.
The artstyle is really good, both cute and horrifing at times. The characters' sprites are very expressive and really got to me, and the game's more unconventional use of angles, camerawork and character positioning managed to make dialogues very dynamic and fresh, effortlessly making not many sprites to be used in a wide arrange of situations without it being too repetitive.

And while the characters may not stand out much at first sight, they end up making their way into your heart in one way or another. Richter may be the best example: even if at first he may look real shady or a pathetic joke character at best, he became my favorite in no time.
This is all thanks to the quality of the writing and the dialogues between characters, which felt very compelling.

The story itself is very nicely put together, and surprisingly for its genre and medium it actually ties everything up in a very solid way. The ties between every little aspect and character of the story had me constantly glued to the screen needing to unravel more.
The only complaint I have is that some times the narrative kind of relied on the reader not having picked up on some twist for quite a while which I had already seen coming, but then kind of throwing you the answer to another which I didn't even have time to dwell on and resolve. But nothing major to undermine the experience.

I feel the horror was very nicely done, adding a modern understanding of gameplay to deliver the scares, which felt clever and not just cheap, loud jumpscares. If anything, its more 'quiet' jumpscares were the most bone-chilling part for me.

Overall it's a very solid game with a lot of neat and clever tidbits and a really good atmosphere that completely sets you in its mood, and is very much worth its time.

Dead dove, do not eat.

I’d like to believe that I’ve been living in my own personal Silent Hill the last few years. It would explain a lot, really. Konami has done a wonderful job of threading puppet strings through the arteries of Silent Hill and making the corpse dance, turning it into all manner of pachislot machines and skateboard decks, but they seem like they’re really trying to bring the franchise back this time. No more minor entries. We’re handing out the license and making some real goddamned Games this time. We’ve got a Ryukishi07 Silent Hill on the way, something we don't know much about called Townfall, and Bloober Team are even sticking their dirty, dirty fingers in the pie with a Silent Hill 2 remake. Silent Hill is finally back. But those are all coming later. We’re getting the first taste of the revitalized Silent Hill now, and it’s here in the form of Silent Hill: Ascension. Get hyped. This is the first marker being driven into fresh, virginal earth. This is Silent Hill from here on out.

This is the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.

Genuinely, I mean that. I want to be funnier about it, but I can’t. It’s the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played. I wish I could say that I’ve played anything worse than this, but I haven’t. It is the worst fucking thing I have ever played in my stupid goddamned life. Sorry. Every time I try typing something else, my brain just shuts itself off and my fingers move on the keyboard of their own volition to produce the phrase “this is the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life”. This is the first cognitohazard ever put to market.

IGDB was trying to protect me from writing about this any further. I appreciate them doing that, now. When I first made a page for Silent Hill: Ascension, they rejected it on the grounds of this “not being a game”. Naturally, I kicked my feet and made a fuss about it in the email appeals — we’ve got RPG Maker and Polybius and Spell Checker and Calculator on here, and I know those definitely fucking aren’t games — and the admin staff eventually relented. But they were only trying to help, I think. I should have just accepted their ruling and let this slip into the ether. Now we’ve got a Backloggd page for it, which means that now I have to think about this again, and it’s still the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.

This is the kind of bad that’s hard to explain without experiencing it yourself. It’s like childbirth, or the smell of rotting meat. You don’t want anyone else to have to deal with it, but how could they know what it’s like without going through it? You can show them the season pass being sold for $22.99, you can show them the “It’s Trauma!” sticker, you can show them the wholly unmoderated chat bar where you can’t say “Playboy Carti” but you can say the n-word, but none of that is the same as experiencing it. They’re visible symptoms of the disease running through Silent Hill: Ascension’s blood, but the pain of another doesn’t exist unless you feel it yourself. It’s ethereal. I’ve got a sore on my lip right now, but you don’t feel it, do you? You understand that it hurts, and you can empathize with that, but it doesn’t actually exist to you. If I stopped talking about it, you’d assume I was fine, and nothing would change for you. Meanwhile, I’m still over here suffering through this shit, and it’s the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.

The game is streamed live every night at 9 PM EST, and you can show up to vote on what’s going to happen to the characters. The choices themselves are very clearly labelled with the outcomes; you’ve got Salvation, Suffering, and Damnation choices, helpfully color-coded as blue, white, and red respectively, just so you can still know which one is the “good” choice and which one is “bad” in the event that you forgot how to read. Mass Effect's Paragon, Neutral, and Renegade system lives on, strong and proud. This, of course, means that every single fucking choice made thus far has been heavily in favor of Salvation, because it’s clearly the good option. If you don’t like that, you can vote for something else. In an especially impressive bit of social commentary, however, the only votes that matter come from those rich and stupid enough to buy them.

To vote, you need to wager a set amount of Influence Points, or IP. I haven’t found a way to cast a vote for anything less than 200 IP, so either that’s the minimum spend needed to vote, or the UI is just so badly designed that I can’t fucking find the free vote option. You can buy IP in one of three differently-priced bundles, each one more expensive than the last; one of the IP packs is about twenty-five bucks for 26,400 IP, and the second decision of the game is currently for "Salvation" by roughly twenty-five million points. If you really want a choice to go a certain way, then you had better get to spending. By my math, you’ll be out a little over $23,650 if you decide that you’re going to stick it to those Salvation voters. Of course, with the audience shrinking every night after they see how fucking stupid this whole thing is, it’ll only get easier and easier to sway the vote with less money invested. If you’re as much of a moron as I am and you decide to stick around past your first watch just to see where this goes, then you’ll have a decent opportunity to roleplay as a real government lobbyist soon enough.

But buying IP for real money isn’t the only way to get it. Lucky enough for the impoverished, filthy masses, you can earn IP at a massively reduced rate simply by playing minigames. You don’t get much — maybe a thousand or two per day, resetting every twenty-four hours — but it’s enough to cast a couple votes. Doing your daily and weekly quests certainly helps to boost your IP gains, and if you just felt something cold run down your back after you read the phrase “daily and weekly quests” in a Silent Hill game, don’t worry. That just means you’re still alive. Unfortunately, though, the minigames are on a set rotation; you get one puzzle and one “mindfulness” game per day, each awarding a small pittance of IP if you manage to successfully complete them.

By the way, I’m glad you’re curious about what the minigames actually are. I’m really excited to talk about them, so knowing that you’re enthusiastic to hear more really encourages me to do my best in explaining them to you. They’re the worst fucking things I’ve ever played in my stupid fucking life. Most egregious of the lot is the rhythm minigame, which doesn't require you to have any rhythm nor timing whatsoever. There's no penalty for hitting wrong notes (the game even encourages you to "just jam along" should you feel like it), every note needs to be individually clicked, and every click produces a sound from what I think is a literal Garageband guitar VST. Since there's no warning for when the notes are going to show up or leave, you have to click them all as fast as possible, resulting in a complete cacophony of instruments playing over each other if you want to guarantee a good score. Worst of all is the fact that the selection of songs is exclusively limited to Akira Yamaoka's more famous works, meaning you get to listen to some of the greatest video game music ever composed get completely butchered in one of the worst minigames you've ever played, in service of gaining points to vote on what happens next in the dumbest narrative ever written. I think if you're a killer or kidnapper or whatever in life, this is what you have to do forever after you die as punishment.

Here's a video of me getting the highest rank possible on the theme of Silent Hill. I want to stress that this is optimal play.

Anyway, this is all in service of giving you votes for the completely fucking incomprehensible story. It's hard to call it a narrative. There's some old lady who sucks, and then she dies, and her family kind of cares about it, but not really. There's a girl who gets initiated into some cult called The Foundation that seems to worship the Otherworld monsters, and she dies, and a couple people seem a little bothered by it. There's some drunk guy who really hates that the girl is dead and she's also haunting him and calling him a fuckup. The grandson of the old lady who sucked and died speaks entirely in the spooky child language that only exists in bad horror movies where he talks about how he plays pretend with "the man in the fog". I've long said that stories should strive to be more than events happening in sequence. This is more like events. They're not really happening in any given order, they're just kind of shown to the player and then quietly shuffled off so another event can happen.

At the end of the show proper is a canned animation of a character getting lost in the Otherworld, and the live viewers do QTEs that don't actually do anything. If they collectively fail, you get the message that the character "failed to endure" and they lose hope, but I don't know what losing hope actually entails. If you collectively pass, which happened for the first time during tonight's November 2nd show, the game bugs out and assumes that you failed anyway. The CEO of the company has gone out of his way to specify that the QTE sequences are for live viewers only and, as such, don't actually do anything because it wouldn't be fair to people who watch the VODs. Imagine a Jerma Dollhouse stream where the commands didn't work because it wouldn't have been fair to people who watched the whole thing on YouTube later. You're the one insisting on a livestream and you're not going to fucking use it? Why? Seriously, why? What reason does this have to be live at all?

And speaking of the CEO, Weatherby is absolutely correct that the best part of all of this is the aftershow. For whatever fucking reason, Jacob Navok feels an incredible need to come out on his shitty laptop camera (you can tell it's a laptop camera because it keeps shaking while he passionately swings his arms around) and rant about how they're definitely not scamming people. You can tell you've got a good product when the actual episode is about eight minutes long and the CEO takes half an hour in the post-show to complain about how unfair everyone is being towards one of the shittiest fucking things ever made. It's bordering on performance art.

I cannot fucking wait to watch more of this. It's the most excited I've been for a recent release in years.

It's cute, but overall lacking. It falls for many of the same pitfalls that many English VN's and smaller games that try and approach philosophy normally fall into, and then adds a few more, but it covers the ideas with a nice layer of style.

It's clear that Slay the Princess wants to say... something. Whether that's about how we as people owe much of how we interact with the world to other people, or about change in general, or... other things, it's hard to say. But it wants to. How do I know? Because the game won't stop bringing it up.

The problem is that all it really does is... talk about it. The core premise of the game is there, of course, but all it largely serves to do is act as the introduction to the idea. And then the rest of the game is... just bringing it up over and over again. Metaphor after metaphor, paragraph after paragraph. The dialogue becomes college-level philosophy papers but in prose.

And beyond just how messy and imbalanced TELLING of the idea is, the end result is a game that lands on the same point that many other indie game/VN's land on; 'hey, did you know life has meaning?' and 'existence is cool, you should try it'. I wanna see one of these meta-games do something else besides existentialism for once.

I did like the voice acting, and I did enjoy the overall style of the game, but now after sitting on it, all I'm left with is, harsh to say, a bit of a nothingburger. It's a great-looking and great-sounding burger, but unfortunately, there's nothing there.

Artistically, this is one of the coolest games I've ever played. It's clearly a passion project of some very talented people. I am definitely going to be watching out for future stuff by them. The illustrations, voice acting, and music all do an excellent job of selling the characters, story, and atmosphere.

The story itself is interesting, but may not stick with me as strongly as some other game stories I've experienced recently. It came across as cryptic and intriguing, but not necessarily cohesive in the end. Maybe I just didn't quite follow all the information it was throwing my way, but when trying to explain the story to a friend, I wasn't ever actually fully confident of the explanation I was giving.

Game and structure-wise, this was 'good'. It feels like, in the end, kind of a gimmicky setup, but it doesn't really feel like it needs to be much more than that. It was a short and sweet experience, but it's also extremely cool knowing how many other branching paths and stories I never saw there are packed into this game. I can't say I have too much of an urge to see them all, since they began to feel a bit same-y, but this was a treat regardless. I'm glad to have experienced this one despite some slightly mixed feelings in some areas. Certainly worth a simple first playthrough just to witness the artistry here.

Pros:
+ Illustrations, voice acting, music
+ Overall tone and atmosphere

Cons:
- A touch repetitive, even when facing different paths/conflicts
- Tough to fully understand the story in one playthrough

Inescapable: No Rules, No Rescue is the worst game I have played this year for a one major reason: it has no idea what it is trying to do. The writers have no consistency in themes, storytelling, or even basic dialogue interactions. I'm kind of impressed that they wrote these many lines, because it is tens of thousands, and almost all of them are so, so bad. I hated every one of the characters more and more as the game progressed, especially my own character, and having no agency over him as he became a misogynistic human dumpster fire was frustrating to say the least. Having full voice acting that ranges from catastrophically bad at worst to passable at best does not help in any way, and the game insisting at the end that it was so frustratingly bad on purpose the whole time was insulting. I do not recommend Inescapable to anyone under any circumstances.

1 Pq o jogo deixa ligado o filtro "astigmatismo"?
2. Que história chata
3. O final era pra ser climático? 70% das pessoas se livraram daquele personagem e o jogo continuava insistindo "nossa você sente pena desse personagem né" e eu apenas "Não"
4. Os personagens novos não tem um pingo do carisma dos anteriores, tirando o jacob eu não consegui gostar de nenhum, ou eles eram insuportavelmente chatos/babacas ou eles estavam falando por um rádio (OCASIONALMENTE)
5. Parece uma jornada qualquer pra justificar uma sequencia que não chega nenhum pouco perto do original
6. 100 reais por isso? Pessoal sem vergonha na cara

Dreamfall, the 2006 follow-up to 1999's The Longest Journey, has all the charm and nostalgia of a mid-2000s Xbox game. It's a charm that's hard to articulate, but suffice it to say that the vibes throughout Dreamfall are immaculate. Unfortunately, though, the gameplay can leave a lot to be desired.

With a story that's arguably just as strong as its predecessor, Dreamfall propels you back into its setting a decade into the future. Such a significant time jump is jarring at first, but gradually being reintroduced to all of the legacy characters and seeing how they've changed and grown (if at all) in the past 10 years was really compelling.

The new protagonist this time around is Zoë Castillo, a truly charming and oh-so-relatable character. Having recently graduated from college and trapped in a listless routine with nothing to do or aspire towards, Zoë soon finds herself wrapped up in an all-too-familiar worldwide and inter-dimensional conspiracy that threatens the fate of the twin worlds.

There are also two other characters whose perspectives you switch to every now and then: April and Kian. While their stories are important to the proceedings (albeit in a lesser capacity), this is still very much Zoë's adventure. Switching between this trio was a neat excuse to switch up the dynamics of the story every now and then, but ultimately, April and Kian's arcs didn't add as much to the overall narrative as I would have liked.

At least, not yet. Thankfully, there's a third entry in this series awaiting me; otherwise, the wait for closure to this game's multiple cliffhangers would have been exhausting.

With all that being said, where the game is largely lacking is in its gameplay mechanics and systems. Namely, combat and stealth. Both of these add nothing more than frustrating distractions with absolutely no depth and barely, if any, challenge to them. They mostly serve to make the game feel less like a simple, by-the-books adventure where you interact with objects and talk to people. Honestly, though, if they just stuck to that, I really believe Dreamfall would have been better off for it.

Despite this, Dreamfall: The Longest Journey still manages to be a very solid entry into the series, let down by its deeply flawed gameplay but propped up by another great adventure filled with solid writing, compelling characters, and intriguing mysteries. Not to mention the soundtrack being really great and worth putting on your playlist(s).

7.5/10