What represents to you the most valuable part of survival horror as a genre of video game? Most modern games have decided it's the action, with tense gunplay and over the shoulder cameras. Some, most notably rose-engine with the recent Signalis, have emphasized the exploration aspects, creating a sort of miniature Metroid style of play with tense inventory management, looping environments, and limited resources. Chilean developer Dual Effect decided that their horror game, Tormented Souls, is a puzzle game first and foremost.

This game has no limited inventory, and the fixed camera means old school lock-on is utilized for gunplay. It commits hard to these old school tropes, with beautiful backgrounds that closely resemble GameCube era Resident Evil, inventory reloading, and a nearly useless map. But committing to these things showed me, at least, that these are not gimmicks - they hold up even today, and still make for an enjoyable game. Some of the puzzles are far too obtuse to be easily solved, but most of them can be accomplished without a guide with a bit of head scratching. If anything, I just wish the map marked when you had everything in a room, like the RE2 remake - this would help signpost when you had everything you needed to solve a puzzle. Other things I hope they fix in any future games would be the excessive backtracking (a few more shortcuts would have made this perfect!) and maybe a sortable inventory. Also, this is my own fault, but I didn't realize you could equip a crowbar as a melee weapon until a significant way through the game, and I weep for the ammo I lost finishing off floored enemies - a ground stomp or some sort of heads up about the crowbar would have been excellent.

In some ways, I like this a lot more than other modern attempts at survival horror. It is a very flawed game, so my score is being heavily impacted by "reviewer's tilt" - basically, I like this way more than I should on paper.

Also, the story is terrible, which I guess you could see as a problem, but I personally adored. It's survival horror, a terrible story with bad voice acting is perfect - I had a great time with it. What's less good is the main characters model and outfit, which I found to be exploitative in a lame and unfun way, and not really matching with other aspects of the game. There was apparently a patch to add a new outfit to the game, so this was partly resolved. Sexy is fine and all, that's not my complaint, it just looked really weird when placed inside the beautifully rendered environments with their The Suffering-esque enemies.

Anyway, I think I've been more negative than I actually feel about the game. For fans of classic Resident Evil, play this! It's absolutely worth the entry fee, and the brisk 7 - 10 hour playthrough doesn't drag.

An expertly crafted survival horror game which leans heavily on atmosphere over outright scares. Signalis flaunts its own influences proudly, with direct homages to Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Kairo, Evangelion, and more. While this was charming at first, it sometimes took me out of the game, only for the next big cutscene or story beat to draw me all the way back in.

The inventory management is strict - stricter than Resident Evil, even, but this creates an incredibly satisfying tension during exploration. I don't want to say too much, but this game evokes the best aspects of old school survival horror gameplay. I think there was a sentiment that this style of game was out of date or died with Resident Evil 4, but Signalis proves otherwise. In fact, I think this may be my favourite gameplay loop of 2022.

I will be watching rose-engine closely for whatever they decide to make next. For now, fans of survival horror games should do themselves a favor and play Signalis. I only hope this marks a larger comeback for the genre, as Signalis has reignited my appetite for this style of horror.

This is a perfect Weekend Game. A responsive and surprisingly flexible puzzle platformer where every corner of each room features loads of things to collect and small objectives to complete. A successful revitalization of the old n64-era collectathon infused with very light Pikmin-esque minion mechanics.

Please note that this is explicitly not a Pikmin game, as the Tinykin largely function as tools rather than units. There is no combat in this game, so the emphasis is on puzzle platforming here. Unbelievably satisfying to slowly clean up every corner of the Honey I Shrunk the Kids-esque world this takes place in. Cute dialog, with a strange lore crunch in the ending, but that's not what we're here for.

This is worth the money, but on Game Pass, it's an easy recommend to anyone who enjoys platforming.

Really weird! It's still Front Mission, but all of the additions feel pointless or unnecessary, where a lot of things that could really use some cleaning up (like what they've done with Tactics Ogre Reborn) don't receive any attention. This is not published by Square Enix, but by Forever Entertainment, who also did the Panzer Dragoon and House of the Dead remakes. I'm a bit concerned for the Front Mission 2 and 3 remakes, as those are some of the best games in this series.

I think this is worth playing if you've never played Front Mission, but my genuine advice is to play on easy (or normal if you must) and just blaze through this. The harder difficulties aren't really worth it with this port, as they just add flat % health and damage modifiers to a game that already has a lot of RNG.

Front Mission has always been cool, and maybe one day we will see it come back. Perhaps if Armored Core 6 brings about a new age of hard scifi mech war stories. I bought this because I want to see future Front Mission games, but I don't think I would tell someone not previously initiated to pick this up.

I spend a lot of my weekends on the horror streaming service Shudder. The Quarry is an interactive Shudder movie - like most of Supermassive's output, but with a better balance of humors than a lot of their work. I have one complaint, and that is I felt like the ending wasn't sufficiently explosive enough. I figured it must have just been how our playthrough unfolded, but I wasn't able to find a route with the kind of chaos I desired. In contrast, I made it to the end of Until Dawn with only one death, and then lost nearly everyone all at once. I think the actual climax of this game occurs a bit before the ending, and that causes the remainder of the game to feel a bit lackluster. Oh well! Loved all these kids, had a great time!

The depiction of mental illness here is not good and gets in the way of a lot of the aesthetic stuff that is good. This is not a game that is empathetic to mental illness, it is one that gawks at it, as you can best see with the decision to lie about your save file being at risk. Tricks like this and the 3D voices are here to simulate sensations, not to induce empathy. A stellar performance from the lead actress and incredible art design save this from being an outright wreck, but this could be so much more if the writer leaned into what it does right and away from what they think is an "educational" psychosis simulator. I felt even worse about this after watching the included documentary.