Just dropping wee thoughts about these as I go.

HUNSVOTTI
A cool wee Finnish folk tale thing where you play as a bullied boy in a small village who just wants to find his true love. It's just collecting flowers and avoiding NPCs, but the payoff is nice. It all goes well for him.

Gallerie
An insane surreal trip through an art gallery where something is definitely off. Could it be the artwork made of literal people? Maybe it's the gigantic creature in a portrait graveyard where you have to figure out an imaginary language to communicate with it and keep it calm to avoid being utterly destroyed? This thing is really cool. Some great concepts, and I love that finishing it gives access to some behind the scenes info from the dev.

Karao
God damn.

Book of Blood
I'm a big idiot most of the time, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out the puzzle in this. You're supposed to use a lens to figure out a key that tells you which symbol to scan pages with. God knows how it works, but I just brute forced the thing, and seemingly so did everyone else. I looked up five different videos to see if anyone else got it, and they were all doing the same as me. Due to this, it feels like I missed out on a cool element because of my shit brain. Game was still pretty good though, despite the "OMG HE SMILING SO SCARY" enemy design.

Rotten Stigma
Babby's first Silent Hill. Just so generic and shite.

Spirit Guardian
I'm done hiding in lockers, man. Let me punch a ghost.

We Never Left
Damn fine mix of text adventure and small house horror. I think I feel some Stories Untold inspiration here. When you can make someone feel tense with just text on a screen then you've done a fantastic job.

Vestige
Man there are a lot of misses in this compilation. It feels like the kind of game your wee brother thinks is the scariest thing of all time. I'm afraid a skeleton doing Crazy Taxi on a bike cannae save this basic and tired story.

Resver
An insanely stylistic beating from something that feels designed to kill those with photo-sensitive epilepsy. This rules.

Ludomalica
A cool idea where you need to satisfy the rules of a board game to keep playing, but the overall idea is too shallow to be interesting longer than a couple of minutes. Quickly descends into classic running away from a shadow creature.

Behind The Curtain
"Please only sprint when necessary"
Why? So I don't realise the game is a 4 minute jog down a linear path where sometimes a puppet tries to stab me? Fuck, I say it a lot about fans of horror films, but I think it applies to most fans of all horror. They lap up any old shite.

Interim
Lots of trippy visuals ultimately resulting in nothing of interest. Feels like trying to be weird for the sake of it. I'm still not sure if I was interacting with things in order to progress or the game was just happening to me.


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Five compilations deep, and I'm once again coming away feeling deflated despite some great ones in here. It's a pattern with the Dread X stuff, and at this point I wish they demanded more of themselves and who they get on board. There's never been a consistently good collection. This I why I wait until they cost a fiver.

I only just remembered that I didnae talk about the hub area this time and I cannae be bothered going into detail. It's Chuck E. Cheese with aliens and you collect comic book pages. It screen tears like fuck and v-sync makes no difference.

They did a great job making what is basically moving a wee dot around so atmospheric and tense, and I'm a sucker for this kind of heavily involved UI so that ticked all the right boxes. But the story itself just left me feeling a bit deflated. It builds and builds then just kinda ends without ending.

It's barely ambiguous. I don't know, it just fell really flat for me.


EDIT: I've just read that there's an epilogue in the artbook that costs £8.50. Away ye go.

Really interesting and cool concept, but god damn does it make me feel like the world's greatest fool. A one million year old idiot with wet cake for a brain.

I looked up solutions for maybe 90% of the puzzles, and not one of them gave me an "Ah, of course!" moment. Each time was like watching a new idea born before me in a language I would never understand.

The last straw was a level fittingly called Existential Crisis, that even looking up the solution didn't help because the puzzle was updated at some point and there are no guides for the new version.

Baba Is Fuckin' At It.

A lovely wee thing that gives a glimpse into a culture I never knew existed. A place named after my own country no less.

Tchia lets you just kinda mess about. Possess a bird and fly over villages. Make it do a shit. Play your uke to summon a plant that bounces you into the air, or a bubble helmet that gives you infinite breath for deep diving. Take out a camp of creatures made from fabric by controlling a plank of wood to roll through a fire and burn them all to unlock some cool sunglasses. Do the palm tree thing from Beverly Hills Ninja. It's a bit of a simple wee playground, but the playground is big.

The story surprised me because despite not being anything incredible, it's quite dark and got me a few times while also being humorous in places. You can just tell there's a lot of love here. It oozes throughout.

I understand the BOTW chat at a glance, but please don't go in expecting that. The elements it does borrow are very light indeed, and we need to stop comparing everything with grass fields and a glider to it. The "collectathon" chat can be taken with a grain of salt too, because that's completely optional, and while there are a ton of map markers, you maybe only have to search out 20 of them unless you like just exploring.

In the nicest way possible, just chill out, switch your brain off, and take control of a chicken that lays explosive eggs.