Sinisa
10 reviews liked by Sinisa
Trek to Yomi
2022
"Leonard Menchiari presents: a Leonard Menchiari game by Leonard Menchiari"
Who is Leonard Menchiari, you ask? I don't know! Apparently he made a couple indie games someone might have heard of. Whether that warrants this sort of masturbatory Kojima-esque self-aggrandizing all over the title sequence of Trek to Yomi, I'll leave up to you to decide. I find it irritating even when famous ones do it, let alone those without any significant pedigree.
As for Trek to Yomi itself, what we are looking at is a fairly mediocre sidescrolling swordfighting game with a grainy black and white aesthetic meant solely to cash in on the popularity of Ghost of Tsushima, which had an optional "Kurosawa mode" which I have to assume nobody used for more than ten minutes.
"Optional" being the operative word there, since many of the games that opt to include a black and white mode and know it can get in the way, the aforementioned Tsushima but also F.E.A.R. creator Craig Hubbard's trippy and experimental Betrayer, tend to leave it up to the player to decide whether to stick with the colorless aesthetic or not. Not so Trek to Yomi, which forces it from start to finish, though it at least allows for the removal of film grain. Someone managed to mod the PC version to restore the color, which makes the game look considerably nicer and resolve many of the visibility issues, but since this is not an official patch and the console versions offer no such possibility, one can't judge the game based on how it looks in color.
And get in the way it does, since, combined with the fixed camera angles during exploration segments (I say exploration but it's more going from one combat encounter to the next) makes the environments irritating to navigate: you will lose sight of your character when the camera changes to a wide angle, something Resident Evil expertly avoided via the use of, well, color. There is a reason Leon and Claire wear such garishly colored clothes in the original RE2. Sometimes your character will blend in with the scenery so much that it will be almost impossible to properly time a parry, leading to great frustration, an issue compounded by the poor placement of some of the checkpoints: while in most cases these are judiciously doled out after a long fight, there are times when they are not, forcing long boring replays of previously cleared enemy encounters just to return to where you were.
Perhaps worst of all, and especially egregious, since the lead designer pretentiously styles himself as an "interactive film director", the game does not look like the black and white samurai movies it purports to homage: Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Throne of Blood (which the game namedrops), the works, none of them look like this game does stylistically. This is a problem that Trek to Yomi shares with Ghost of Tsushima, though, as I said, the optional nature of that mode made it a non issue in the case of Sucker Punch's title, when it's mandatory here.
The game features a number of collectibles, some in the open, some in secret areas barely off the main path: from lore items to scrolls with new moves, health and stamina upgrades, to ammunition for three different ranged weapons. Trouble is, these pickups are virtually invisible in the black and white scenery, requiring the developers to add a shimmer so they won't be passed by unnoticed. Trouble is, it's still impossible to tell what they are most of the time, which is especially vexing when ammo is concerned: sure, the game will tell you "ammo limit reached" but it will neglect to mentioned what ammo you had found. This means you will never get a sense of how rare or common the ammunition for which weapon is, as such it will be difficult to gauge how often you should use it.
The gameplay is where this game really falters though: developed by the Polish studio behind the mediocre (though inexplicably popular) Shadow Warrior reboot series, what we are dealing with is some sort of Bushido Blade-inspired game, with a side-scrolling structure: moving from screen to screen, the protagonist becomes locked into scripted combat encounters against half a dozen different enemy types, from standard swordsmen to spearmen, ranged troops and a few magical type enemies who teleport around. Swordfighting is a less automatic twist on the Assassin's Creed combat system: surrounded by enemies who attack one at a time, you are expected to parry their attacks, creating openings for retaliation. Thing is, it doesn't work all that well: sometimes enemy hitboxes won't correspond with where their blades are, throwing your timing off, or they will ignore your sword slashes, tanking them completely as they become invincible to perform their attack animations. Needless to say, this is not very conducive to any kind of swordfighting simulation. it doesn't help that the game doesn't care about stances or high/mid/low parrying: one size fits all and some of the moves you acquire are so outlandishly overpowered that you'll be hard pressed to use anything else.
Cementing the issue are the difficulty levels: while easy and normal are trivially easy (you will cut down the bosses in less than a minute), hard mode sees fit to double or triple every enemy's hit points, turning them into complete damage sponges (an issue common to the Shadow Warrior games as well), further decreasing the degree of realism. There is a fourth unlockable difficulty, which makes every blade hit lethal, both for the enemies and the player, though with the aforementioned hitbox issues, problematic checkpoints and the boss fights, which tend to be pretty chaotic affairs, that does not sound fun at all. I did not care to play the game again to find out. With all that, there simply isn't a difficulty level that manages to strike a balance between challenge and fun.
The result is that the game feels extremely repetitive and thus overlong, even though it's just the bare minimum three hours in length required for a $20 game. Boredom sets in very quickly and at that point it's a race for what will prevail whether it or frustration, depending on the selected difficulty.
The story follows a young generic samurai, seeking revenge for the massacre of his village by a ravenous warlord. It's very basic stuff until he is slain and has to journey through the underworld to find his killed wife and choose whether to remain in the afterlife with her or forsake her to retun and finish off the warlord, as the bushido code demands. Or, as many players must have done, you can walk by mistake into the bad ending, in which you become the next warlord, which comes completely out of the blue and is neither announced, explained or works narratively in any way.
At the very least, the game offers some quality Japanese voice acting (the English one is mediocre though) and suitably moody traditional music.
Ultimately, Trek to Yomi is a complete disappointment. The combat system is not good enough, nor are the story and characters, and the presentation is mired in derivative pretentiousness.
Skip with no regrets, unless absolutely obsessed with Edo Japan. Leonard Menchiari, we hardly knew ye. Underline "hardly".
Who is Leonard Menchiari, you ask? I don't know! Apparently he made a couple indie games someone might have heard of. Whether that warrants this sort of masturbatory Kojima-esque self-aggrandizing all over the title sequence of Trek to Yomi, I'll leave up to you to decide. I find it irritating even when famous ones do it, let alone those without any significant pedigree.
As for Trek to Yomi itself, what we are looking at is a fairly mediocre sidescrolling swordfighting game with a grainy black and white aesthetic meant solely to cash in on the popularity of Ghost of Tsushima, which had an optional "Kurosawa mode" which I have to assume nobody used for more than ten minutes.
"Optional" being the operative word there, since many of the games that opt to include a black and white mode and know it can get in the way, the aforementioned Tsushima but also F.E.A.R. creator Craig Hubbard's trippy and experimental Betrayer, tend to leave it up to the player to decide whether to stick with the colorless aesthetic or not. Not so Trek to Yomi, which forces it from start to finish, though it at least allows for the removal of film grain. Someone managed to mod the PC version to restore the color, which makes the game look considerably nicer and resolve many of the visibility issues, but since this is not an official patch and the console versions offer no such possibility, one can't judge the game based on how it looks in color.
And get in the way it does, since, combined with the fixed camera angles during exploration segments (I say exploration but it's more going from one combat encounter to the next) makes the environments irritating to navigate: you will lose sight of your character when the camera changes to a wide angle, something Resident Evil expertly avoided via the use of, well, color. There is a reason Leon and Claire wear such garishly colored clothes in the original RE2. Sometimes your character will blend in with the scenery so much that it will be almost impossible to properly time a parry, leading to great frustration, an issue compounded by the poor placement of some of the checkpoints: while in most cases these are judiciously doled out after a long fight, there are times when they are not, forcing long boring replays of previously cleared enemy encounters just to return to where you were.
Perhaps worst of all, and especially egregious, since the lead designer pretentiously styles himself as an "interactive film director", the game does not look like the black and white samurai movies it purports to homage: Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Throne of Blood (which the game namedrops), the works, none of them look like this game does stylistically. This is a problem that Trek to Yomi shares with Ghost of Tsushima, though, as I said, the optional nature of that mode made it a non issue in the case of Sucker Punch's title, when it's mandatory here.
The game features a number of collectibles, some in the open, some in secret areas barely off the main path: from lore items to scrolls with new moves, health and stamina upgrades, to ammunition for three different ranged weapons. Trouble is, these pickups are virtually invisible in the black and white scenery, requiring the developers to add a shimmer so they won't be passed by unnoticed. Trouble is, it's still impossible to tell what they are most of the time, which is especially vexing when ammo is concerned: sure, the game will tell you "ammo limit reached" but it will neglect to mentioned what ammo you had found. This means you will never get a sense of how rare or common the ammunition for which weapon is, as such it will be difficult to gauge how often you should use it.
The gameplay is where this game really falters though: developed by the Polish studio behind the mediocre (though inexplicably popular) Shadow Warrior reboot series, what we are dealing with is some sort of Bushido Blade-inspired game, with a side-scrolling structure: moving from screen to screen, the protagonist becomes locked into scripted combat encounters against half a dozen different enemy types, from standard swordsmen to spearmen, ranged troops and a few magical type enemies who teleport around. Swordfighting is a less automatic twist on the Assassin's Creed combat system: surrounded by enemies who attack one at a time, you are expected to parry their attacks, creating openings for retaliation. Thing is, it doesn't work all that well: sometimes enemy hitboxes won't correspond with where their blades are, throwing your timing off, or they will ignore your sword slashes, tanking them completely as they become invincible to perform their attack animations. Needless to say, this is not very conducive to any kind of swordfighting simulation. it doesn't help that the game doesn't care about stances or high/mid/low parrying: one size fits all and some of the moves you acquire are so outlandishly overpowered that you'll be hard pressed to use anything else.
Cementing the issue are the difficulty levels: while easy and normal are trivially easy (you will cut down the bosses in less than a minute), hard mode sees fit to double or triple every enemy's hit points, turning them into complete damage sponges (an issue common to the Shadow Warrior games as well), further decreasing the degree of realism. There is a fourth unlockable difficulty, which makes every blade hit lethal, both for the enemies and the player, though with the aforementioned hitbox issues, problematic checkpoints and the boss fights, which tend to be pretty chaotic affairs, that does not sound fun at all. I did not care to play the game again to find out. With all that, there simply isn't a difficulty level that manages to strike a balance between challenge and fun.
The result is that the game feels extremely repetitive and thus overlong, even though it's just the bare minimum three hours in length required for a $20 game. Boredom sets in very quickly and at that point it's a race for what will prevail whether it or frustration, depending on the selected difficulty.
The story follows a young generic samurai, seeking revenge for the massacre of his village by a ravenous warlord. It's very basic stuff until he is slain and has to journey through the underworld to find his killed wife and choose whether to remain in the afterlife with her or forsake her to retun and finish off the warlord, as the bushido code demands. Or, as many players must have done, you can walk by mistake into the bad ending, in which you become the next warlord, which comes completely out of the blue and is neither announced, explained or works narratively in any way.
At the very least, the game offers some quality Japanese voice acting (the English one is mediocre though) and suitably moody traditional music.
Ultimately, Trek to Yomi is a complete disappointment. The combat system is not good enough, nor are the story and characters, and the presentation is mired in derivative pretentiousness.
Skip with no regrets, unless absolutely obsessed with Edo Japan. Leonard Menchiari, we hardly knew ye. Underline "hardly".
Kena is a baffling experience: though its childish art style, naif narrative and focus on cosmetic items seem to hint at a product intended for a younger audience, its sudden and absurd difficulty spikes seem to be pandering to the Dark Souls crowd, leaving you to wonder exactly who this game was meant for.
In it we play the role of the eponymous Kena, a young medium tasked with sending restless spirits to a peaceful afterlife. Not a novel concept by any stretch, but at the very least a fine premise for an action game. Unfortunately, the story the game tells is as uninteresting as they come, offering little drama or even any twists to keep the player engaged. If you're really into recent Disney animated features, chances are you will find this more engaging than I did.
Kena's main means of defense is a quarterstaff that doubles as a bow, plus a gaggle of overly cute minions called "rot", who allow her to perform various special attacks and interact with the environment. These creatures are a cowardly lot, so Kena needs to damage enemies in order to make her minions gain courage, symbolized by a filling bar. Muster enough courage and you will earn a charge to spend on whatever action you want, from healing to unleashing super attacks.
Combat seeks to be a blend of Dark Souls and Horizon Zero Dawn, alternating melee combos to slow motion precision archery. Good on paper, but the lock-on system is simply too poor to be useful: not only is its range pitiful, not only does it break constantly, but it also makes your roll direction relative to the targeted enemy, instead of simply focusing the camera on them and leaving you free to evade in any direction. As a result, you will often dodge right into an attack, as opposed to away from it, meaning it's usually far better to skip locking on entirely and keeping your enemy in sight manually.
Some of the bosses are made especially aggravating by this factor, since you might not be able to see their attacks as they are being telegraphed for you to avoid, simply because the lock-on is such a chore to deal with and you might be looking elsewhere whben things are happening.
Concerning bosses, these often present some unreasonable difficulty spikes: there is one in particular that keeps teleporting around firing high damage homing fireballs and spawning low level enemies to harass you. Not content with that, the developers gave it the ability to heal completely without limits when under a certain HP value. Fighting one is annoying enough, but when the game forces you in a main quest fight with two of them at the same time (only they now spawn exploding kamikaze bugs instead), things get really annoying really quickly.
And that's when the game even bothers to explain its mechanics which, despite the overabundance of tutorial messages, it fails to do on more than one occasion, like with the spirit dash skill, which is explained to you as a defensive and traversal ability, but in reality it is also required to be used as an offensive move, which the game never explains in any way. Being crucial to defeating late game enemies, this is a grave omission.
Despite some cool attacks (detonating bombs to debuff and slow down enemies is fun), combat is generally not very good: melee attacks lack oomph, hitboxes are often imprecise and some enemies seem to be missing frames of animation, throwing off your prediction of their patterns. At least archery is entertaining, rewarding timing and precision.
When not following the combat-rich main story, going off the beaten path will present you with the chance for limited exploration with some light platforming, combat challenges and very easy puzzles. The rewards for these activities are usually chests, whose contents range in usefulness from good to absolutely pointless. Specifically, a lot of these contain nothing but hats that you can make your rot minions wear, with no benefit or effect to the gameplay whatsoever: you're simply making your barely visible pokemon a tad more colorful.
What's worse, unlike games like Jedi Fallen Order, whose chests largely contained nothing but cosmetic items, but had the sense of being clearly color coded so you knew that was the case, Kena likes to surprise you with the contents of a chest: it might be a useful rot upgrade that contributes to unlocking more of your skill tree, or a talisman to aid you in combat... or, more often than not, it will be just a pointless hat that does absolutely nothing.
It would have been easy to tie some kind of gameplay system to what hats your minions are wearing, for instance their action bars might have charged faster depending on the pooled rarity score of the hats they are wearing, or the duration and damage of their effects on enemies might have been affected. None of that is here: there is absolutely no purpose to the hats and, as such, to the crystals used to purchase them from the hat store, which you find in great abundance around the world, making even more chests and containers completely pointless.
As you progress through the campaign, a dedicated trial mode becomes available in the main hub, consisting of archery challenges and boss rematches under stricter circumstances (take no damage, do it under the time limit). Each rank presents you with three challenges, offering undisclosed rewards: sometimes they are mildly useful buff charms that complement your playstyle with frankly negligible bonuses; more often though the unlocks are just hats or outfits that change none of your stats or abilities. As a result, it becomes fairly demotivating to deal with these recycled content trials when the rewards are so inconsequential.
There is nothing more disappointing than completing a tough combat challenge (usually by fighting old bosses now fought in pairs or with unfun handicaps applied), only to be awarded with a "rare" hat, which does absolutely nothing the same way a common one does. It only costs more to equip for the same effect, that is to say, bugger all.
Kena Bridge of Spirits is definitely a mixed bag: while on one hand it delivers some passably basic basic combat, exploration and puzzles, on the other the lack of a compelling story and especially the disappointing nature of the loot you find (unless you really, really enjoy playing self-contained dolls dress-up) make it a half-baked product.
It's a decent enough first effort from a new studio, and a budget-priced title at that, but considering some industry veterans worked on it, there are many areas in which they should have known better.
Most of all, the jarring disconnect between its visual presentation and bizarre difficulty spikes makes this difficult to recommend for any of its possible audiences.
In it we play the role of the eponymous Kena, a young medium tasked with sending restless spirits to a peaceful afterlife. Not a novel concept by any stretch, but at the very least a fine premise for an action game. Unfortunately, the story the game tells is as uninteresting as they come, offering little drama or even any twists to keep the player engaged. If you're really into recent Disney animated features, chances are you will find this more engaging than I did.
Kena's main means of defense is a quarterstaff that doubles as a bow, plus a gaggle of overly cute minions called "rot", who allow her to perform various special attacks and interact with the environment. These creatures are a cowardly lot, so Kena needs to damage enemies in order to make her minions gain courage, symbolized by a filling bar. Muster enough courage and you will earn a charge to spend on whatever action you want, from healing to unleashing super attacks.
Combat seeks to be a blend of Dark Souls and Horizon Zero Dawn, alternating melee combos to slow motion precision archery. Good on paper, but the lock-on system is simply too poor to be useful: not only is its range pitiful, not only does it break constantly, but it also makes your roll direction relative to the targeted enemy, instead of simply focusing the camera on them and leaving you free to evade in any direction. As a result, you will often dodge right into an attack, as opposed to away from it, meaning it's usually far better to skip locking on entirely and keeping your enemy in sight manually.
Some of the bosses are made especially aggravating by this factor, since you might not be able to see their attacks as they are being telegraphed for you to avoid, simply because the lock-on is such a chore to deal with and you might be looking elsewhere whben things are happening.
Concerning bosses, these often present some unreasonable difficulty spikes: there is one in particular that keeps teleporting around firing high damage homing fireballs and spawning low level enemies to harass you. Not content with that, the developers gave it the ability to heal completely without limits when under a certain HP value. Fighting one is annoying enough, but when the game forces you in a main quest fight with two of them at the same time (only they now spawn exploding kamikaze bugs instead), things get really annoying really quickly.
And that's when the game even bothers to explain its mechanics which, despite the overabundance of tutorial messages, it fails to do on more than one occasion, like with the spirit dash skill, which is explained to you as a defensive and traversal ability, but in reality it is also required to be used as an offensive move, which the game never explains in any way. Being crucial to defeating late game enemies, this is a grave omission.
Despite some cool attacks (detonating bombs to debuff and slow down enemies is fun), combat is generally not very good: melee attacks lack oomph, hitboxes are often imprecise and some enemies seem to be missing frames of animation, throwing off your prediction of their patterns. At least archery is entertaining, rewarding timing and precision.
When not following the combat-rich main story, going off the beaten path will present you with the chance for limited exploration with some light platforming, combat challenges and very easy puzzles. The rewards for these activities are usually chests, whose contents range in usefulness from good to absolutely pointless. Specifically, a lot of these contain nothing but hats that you can make your rot minions wear, with no benefit or effect to the gameplay whatsoever: you're simply making your barely visible pokemon a tad more colorful.
What's worse, unlike games like Jedi Fallen Order, whose chests largely contained nothing but cosmetic items, but had the sense of being clearly color coded so you knew that was the case, Kena likes to surprise you with the contents of a chest: it might be a useful rot upgrade that contributes to unlocking more of your skill tree, or a talisman to aid you in combat... or, more often than not, it will be just a pointless hat that does absolutely nothing.
It would have been easy to tie some kind of gameplay system to what hats your minions are wearing, for instance their action bars might have charged faster depending on the pooled rarity score of the hats they are wearing, or the duration and damage of their effects on enemies might have been affected. None of that is here: there is absolutely no purpose to the hats and, as such, to the crystals used to purchase them from the hat store, which you find in great abundance around the world, making even more chests and containers completely pointless.
As you progress through the campaign, a dedicated trial mode becomes available in the main hub, consisting of archery challenges and boss rematches under stricter circumstances (take no damage, do it under the time limit). Each rank presents you with three challenges, offering undisclosed rewards: sometimes they are mildly useful buff charms that complement your playstyle with frankly negligible bonuses; more often though the unlocks are just hats or outfits that change none of your stats or abilities. As a result, it becomes fairly demotivating to deal with these recycled content trials when the rewards are so inconsequential.
There is nothing more disappointing than completing a tough combat challenge (usually by fighting old bosses now fought in pairs or with unfun handicaps applied), only to be awarded with a "rare" hat, which does absolutely nothing the same way a common one does. It only costs more to equip for the same effect, that is to say, bugger all.
Kena Bridge of Spirits is definitely a mixed bag: while on one hand it delivers some passably basic basic combat, exploration and puzzles, on the other the lack of a compelling story and especially the disappointing nature of the loot you find (unless you really, really enjoy playing self-contained dolls dress-up) make it a half-baked product.
It's a decent enough first effort from a new studio, and a budget-priced title at that, but considering some industry veterans worked on it, there are many areas in which they should have known better.
Most of all, the jarring disconnect between its visual presentation and bizarre difficulty spikes makes this difficult to recommend for any of its possible audiences.
Untitled Goose Game
2019
If you've ever found yourself wondering what Hitman would look like if the protagonist were a large goose, this is the game for you.
This is a stealth puzzle game in which the eponymous bird needs to go through a village in rural England, causing havoc with an unspecified (though very much present) ultimate agenda.
The general goal is to get from A to B in each of the interconnected areas that compose the neighborhood, causing enough mischief to have a human open the way forward to the next zone, but the goose sees fit to also add further objectives that range from playful to petty to just plain malicious: you might have to steal a woman's vase and bring it to the neighbor's yard, just so he will break it while trying to return it. You might have to move a flower pot so someone accidentally clips the neighbor's prize-winning rose while trimming their hedges, or trick a young boy inside a phone booth to lock him inside, and this after stealing his toy and bringing it to the toy shelf of the general store so he has to buy it back... just because. Simply put, this goose is a real bastard.
It's all very comical, the stylized cel shaded visuals, fluid animation and piano soundtrack that picks up whenever the goose is in trouble or waddling at top speed complement the action perfectly and there is a great sense of accomplishment in figuring out and executing each puzzle.
The attention to detail is phenomenal: there is a completely missable aftermath to the havoc you cause; where most games (often including Hitman itself) might be content with the meat of the action, here you will see the woman glueing the vase together, or the neighbor putting the award-winning rose back on the stem with sticky tape. There is also something incredibly amusing in seeing the humans put up makeshift "no geese allowed" signs after you have exasperated them enough. It's excellent.
That said, a little bit more polish would have done the game a world of good; sometimes it is difficult to achieve the intended result, especially when strict timing is of the essence: the goose gets bounced around like crazy when entering a human's personal space, so things like untying someone's shoelaces, stealing a slipper off their foot or a hat off their head can be unreasonably fiddly.
Humans are also a bit overeager to retrieve their stolen property, and will go almost to the ends of the earth to do so, meaning you will have to find somewhere to hide it where they cannot go, like under a table or inside some shrubbery, or they will negate your progress as you try to move on to the next thing.
This is especially frustrating in the very first area, which should be an introductory section to learn the mechanics but is anything but, explaining nothing at all and expecting you to figure it out. One of the goals there is to bring a variety of objects to a picnic blanket, but the gardener who owns the stuff will all too often make trips to the spot to retrieve what's his, which forced me to hide the items in the reeds of the nearby river bank so he wouldn't find them. All you can do is make sure he never finds out about the picnic blanket, because the second he does, he will pick it clean.
There are also a number of glitches, but they can all be resolved by resetting the current map, which thankfully retains your completed objectives.
There is a lot of fun to be had with Untitled Goose Game, and the time commitment is minimal (2-3 hours at most for the base experience). It's more focused than something like the scatterhead Goat Simulator, and less dispersive and confusing than the overrated Stray so there is no reason not to give this a try, especially if the "play as an animal" genre appeals to you.
There is also a fair bit of replay value, since the aforementioned end game challenge mode is very good and anything but simple to conquer, with far more complex objectives requiring a lot of creative thinking.
With a bit more content and that little bit of extra polish, this could have been even more enjoyable but it's excellent enough as it is.
This is a stealth puzzle game in which the eponymous bird needs to go through a village in rural England, causing havoc with an unspecified (though very much present) ultimate agenda.
The general goal is to get from A to B in each of the interconnected areas that compose the neighborhood, causing enough mischief to have a human open the way forward to the next zone, but the goose sees fit to also add further objectives that range from playful to petty to just plain malicious: you might have to steal a woman's vase and bring it to the neighbor's yard, just so he will break it while trying to return it. You might have to move a flower pot so someone accidentally clips the neighbor's prize-winning rose while trimming their hedges, or trick a young boy inside a phone booth to lock him inside, and this after stealing his toy and bringing it to the toy shelf of the general store so he has to buy it back... just because. Simply put, this goose is a real bastard.
It's all very comical, the stylized cel shaded visuals, fluid animation and piano soundtrack that picks up whenever the goose is in trouble or waddling at top speed complement the action perfectly and there is a great sense of accomplishment in figuring out and executing each puzzle.
The attention to detail is phenomenal: there is a completely missable aftermath to the havoc you cause; where most games (often including Hitman itself) might be content with the meat of the action, here you will see the woman glueing the vase together, or the neighbor putting the award-winning rose back on the stem with sticky tape. There is also something incredibly amusing in seeing the humans put up makeshift "no geese allowed" signs after you have exasperated them enough. It's excellent.
That said, a little bit more polish would have done the game a world of good; sometimes it is difficult to achieve the intended result, especially when strict timing is of the essence: the goose gets bounced around like crazy when entering a human's personal space, so things like untying someone's shoelaces, stealing a slipper off their foot or a hat off their head can be unreasonably fiddly.
Humans are also a bit overeager to retrieve their stolen property, and will go almost to the ends of the earth to do so, meaning you will have to find somewhere to hide it where they cannot go, like under a table or inside some shrubbery, or they will negate your progress as you try to move on to the next thing.
This is especially frustrating in the very first area, which should be an introductory section to learn the mechanics but is anything but, explaining nothing at all and expecting you to figure it out. One of the goals there is to bring a variety of objects to a picnic blanket, but the gardener who owns the stuff will all too often make trips to the spot to retrieve what's his, which forced me to hide the items in the reeds of the nearby river bank so he wouldn't find them. All you can do is make sure he never finds out about the picnic blanket, because the second he does, he will pick it clean.
There are also a number of glitches, but they can all be resolved by resetting the current map, which thankfully retains your completed objectives.
There is a lot of fun to be had with Untitled Goose Game, and the time commitment is minimal (2-3 hours at most for the base experience). It's more focused than something like the scatterhead Goat Simulator, and less dispersive and confusing than the overrated Stray so there is no reason not to give this a try, especially if the "play as an animal" genre appeals to you.
There is also a fair bit of replay value, since the aforementioned end game challenge mode is very good and anything but simple to conquer, with far more complex objectives requiring a lot of creative thinking.
With a bit more content and that little bit of extra polish, this could have been even more enjoyable but it's excellent enough as it is.
One of the coolest games of the early 2000s, and one that really put the Czech game indutry on the map, Mafia was in need of a little freshening up, but not like this.
Made by the people behind the abysmally received (though later improved) Mafia 3, this is a game that obviously updates the visuals compared to the original and also polishes up the writing on top of definitely being better acted, but it's plagued by absolutely wretched gunplay that's even worse than the one found in Mafia 3 four years earlier.
It's one of the worst shooters in recent memory, to the point you will groan whenever a new shootout begins, and for a game that has nothing but shooting and driving to offer with nothing at all in between (remember, this is not a GTA clone, rather a linear shooter with driving in between missions and no side activities around the city), that is a problem.
It's a killer blend of low ammunition, bullet sponge enemies almost without pain states, who keep shooting with perfect accuracy while being riddled with machine gun fire, wobbly inaccurate aiming and a punishing health system incompatible with the hitscan nature of the enemies. When you only have 28 rounds for your pistol and each of the dozens of enemies who'll swarm you takes 5 to down (or 25 for a tommygun out a max of 150), you will quickly resort to cheap exploitative tricks to score easy headshots and try to conserve what little ammo you have.
There is one fun unintentional detail though: the enemies have been programmed to engage in acrobatics when toppling over a piece of cover when killed. Ideally that's supposed to happen when they drop off a rooftop or something similar, like in a bunch of other games, but here it happens anywhere, even from behind an armchair or a barrel. Nothing funnier than seeing an idiot trip over a waist-high object and scream his lungs out as though plummeting off a skyscraper. Hilarious, and it only serves to further stress how unrefined the gameplay is.
The only definitive thing about this game is the recommendation to give it a wide berth.
Fortunately, the same vandalism wasn't applied to Mafia 2, an excellent game that didn't need a remake to begin with. For that one, they limited themselves to a simple remaster, and it's better off for it.
Made by the people behind the abysmally received (though later improved) Mafia 3, this is a game that obviously updates the visuals compared to the original and also polishes up the writing on top of definitely being better acted, but it's plagued by absolutely wretched gunplay that's even worse than the one found in Mafia 3 four years earlier.
It's one of the worst shooters in recent memory, to the point you will groan whenever a new shootout begins, and for a game that has nothing but shooting and driving to offer with nothing at all in between (remember, this is not a GTA clone, rather a linear shooter with driving in between missions and no side activities around the city), that is a problem.
It's a killer blend of low ammunition, bullet sponge enemies almost without pain states, who keep shooting with perfect accuracy while being riddled with machine gun fire, wobbly inaccurate aiming and a punishing health system incompatible with the hitscan nature of the enemies. When you only have 28 rounds for your pistol and each of the dozens of enemies who'll swarm you takes 5 to down (or 25 for a tommygun out a max of 150), you will quickly resort to cheap exploitative tricks to score easy headshots and try to conserve what little ammo you have.
There is one fun unintentional detail though: the enemies have been programmed to engage in acrobatics when toppling over a piece of cover when killed. Ideally that's supposed to happen when they drop off a rooftop or something similar, like in a bunch of other games, but here it happens anywhere, even from behind an armchair or a barrel. Nothing funnier than seeing an idiot trip over a waist-high object and scream his lungs out as though plummeting off a skyscraper. Hilarious, and it only serves to further stress how unrefined the gameplay is.
The only definitive thing about this game is the recommendation to give it a wide berth.
Fortunately, the same vandalism wasn't applied to Mafia 2, an excellent game that didn't need a remake to begin with. For that one, they limited themselves to a simple remaster, and it's better off for it.
A decent Argentinian point & click adventure game, heavily styled after Monkey Island. Good presentation with quality visuals, music and voice acting, although the interpolated animation makes it look better in stills than in motion.
The humor has a few quality moments, though in general it is far too naif to put a dent in the more cynical and mean-spirited classics, and some of its jokes simply do not stick the landing. It is quite humorous, however, to be tasked with getting Sir Isaac Newton to stop wasting time writing Harry Potter fanfiction.
Puzzles range from very simple to reasonably complex, by and large successfully sidestepping moon logic but keeping things abstract enough to not be too obvious. It does however fall in the trap of having the player pick up a dozen items without any rhyme or reason long before a use for them can be found, which can lead to a bit of confusion here and there.
It's not quite as simplistic to be outright dismissed as little Jimmy's first adventure game, but it could very well serve that purpose if you have a kid you want to introduce to the point&click genre, in which case best of luck to you.
The humor has a few quality moments, though in general it is far too naif to put a dent in the more cynical and mean-spirited classics, and some of its jokes simply do not stick the landing. It is quite humorous, however, to be tasked with getting Sir Isaac Newton to stop wasting time writing Harry Potter fanfiction.
Puzzles range from very simple to reasonably complex, by and large successfully sidestepping moon logic but keeping things abstract enough to not be too obvious. It does however fall in the trap of having the player pick up a dozen items without any rhyme or reason long before a use for them can be found, which can lead to a bit of confusion here and there.
It's not quite as simplistic to be outright dismissed as little Jimmy's first adventure game, but it could very well serve that purpose if you have a kid you want to introduce to the point&click genre, in which case best of luck to you.
The Pedestrian
2020
The Pedestrian is a very good puzzle with great audiovisual presentation using street signs as rooms and featuring a plethora of gradually introduced mechanics to increase complexity as the game goes.
Shift signs around and link their exits via connectors to allow the stickman to navigate each set of rooms and reach the end goal. Try to move a connector after the stickman has crossed it and the puzzle resets.
Trampolines, movable boxes, lasers, locked doors, electric wires, time-freezing paint, warp portals, are some of the obstacles and tools at your disposal. One level might require you to stack two signs so that a warp portal can take you to an inaccessible room where you have to swap electric wires between sockets to activate a bridge to retrieve a key, then drop it into another panel which you then time freeze, reset then retrieve it to bounce it up a trampoline to the locked door.
It's often very complex and generally just as rewarding to figure out the solution. The problems you'll be tasked to solve are clever and the mechanics usually self-explanatory, barring one or two that the game doesn't quite make sure to give you a proper learning curve for, resulting in some frustration.
Sometimes the space to move panels around is a bit restrictive, leading to some fiddling around trying to get the connectors to line up. Other times things may not be as logica as they seem, like figuring out that a wire can remain connected through a shut door.
Minor quibbles aside, this is easily recommended without reserve to any puzzle fan.
Shift signs around and link their exits via connectors to allow the stickman to navigate each set of rooms and reach the end goal. Try to move a connector after the stickman has crossed it and the puzzle resets.
Trampolines, movable boxes, lasers, locked doors, electric wires, time-freezing paint, warp portals, are some of the obstacles and tools at your disposal. One level might require you to stack two signs so that a warp portal can take you to an inaccessible room where you have to swap electric wires between sockets to activate a bridge to retrieve a key, then drop it into another panel which you then time freeze, reset then retrieve it to bounce it up a trampoline to the locked door.
It's often very complex and generally just as rewarding to figure out the solution. The problems you'll be tasked to solve are clever and the mechanics usually self-explanatory, barring one or two that the game doesn't quite make sure to give you a proper learning curve for, resulting in some frustration.
Sometimes the space to move panels around is a bit restrictive, leading to some fiddling around trying to get the connectors to line up. Other times things may not be as logica as they seem, like figuring out that a wire can remain connected through a shut door.
Minor quibbles aside, this is easily recommended without reserve to any puzzle fan.
Kena is as charming as it is beautiful.
This little game from Ember labs is the first release for the studio and they did a shockingly great job.
Some might consider Kena a relic of the past, no crafting materials, side quests from NPCs, just a fun journey through a semi linear environment progressing through a story.
Kena is one of the most beautiful games available, from the bright colours to the animated quality of the characters, to the animations themselves, everything is lush and cohesive. It proves you don't need a massive budget to make a beautiful game that rivals AAA productions you just need to work within your means.
The combat is fun and challenging but it is fairly basic. You earn additional moves and attacks as you earn experience through various ways. Eventually when you unlock all the moves the combat opens up and creates a nice flow.
The normal difficulty will provide a nice challenge while hard difficulty is fairly punishing. I played on hard for a single boss and it was very satisfying when I eventually beat him but I lowered the difficulty to medium so I didn't run into long periods of repeating a fight.
The boss fights in this game are the highlight and I was extremely impressed with the amount of them and the variety of the fights themselves. They aren't just about bashing the enemy to death but oftentimes require a gimmick or learning their patterns. By the end when you have your full moveset they really shine as you mix in your defensive abilities with your offensive moves.
The story is light and brisk but it keeps you involved in the narrative and makes you want to continue as the cinematics are a nice payoff that rival big budget animated films.
There are also some hidden secrets to find that are fun and rewarding but I didn't complete them all.
9.0
This little game from Ember labs is the first release for the studio and they did a shockingly great job.
Some might consider Kena a relic of the past, no crafting materials, side quests from NPCs, just a fun journey through a semi linear environment progressing through a story.
Kena is one of the most beautiful games available, from the bright colours to the animated quality of the characters, to the animations themselves, everything is lush and cohesive. It proves you don't need a massive budget to make a beautiful game that rivals AAA productions you just need to work within your means.
The combat is fun and challenging but it is fairly basic. You earn additional moves and attacks as you earn experience through various ways. Eventually when you unlock all the moves the combat opens up and creates a nice flow.
The normal difficulty will provide a nice challenge while hard difficulty is fairly punishing. I played on hard for a single boss and it was very satisfying when I eventually beat him but I lowered the difficulty to medium so I didn't run into long periods of repeating a fight.
The boss fights in this game are the highlight and I was extremely impressed with the amount of them and the variety of the fights themselves. They aren't just about bashing the enemy to death but oftentimes require a gimmick or learning their patterns. By the end when you have your full moveset they really shine as you mix in your defensive abilities with your offensive moves.
The story is light and brisk but it keeps you involved in the narrative and makes you want to continue as the cinematics are a nice payoff that rival big budget animated films.
There are also some hidden secrets to find that are fun and rewarding but I didn't complete them all.
9.0
Lamplight City
2018
A very good murder mystery adventure whose quality visuals, music and voice work bring to life its alternative history world: a killer blend of Victorian London and industrial revolution America, serving as backdrop to protagonist Miles Fordham's quest for sanity. It has however a few problems which keep it from realising its full potential.
The game tries to streamline the adventure formula by doing away with the cumbersome inventory management which gets in the way of progression in many such titles, replacing it with a clue notebook in the vein of Sherlock Holmes games. Also similar to recent Holmes products as well as LA Noire is the case wrapping system, which grants the player freedom to rush to incorrect conclusions by being deceived by one of several deliberately placed misdirections, accusing the wrong suspect as a result. Sadly that works better on paper than it does in practice. For one thing the red herrings meant to throw you off the scent are sometimes so shamelessly coincidental that they feel forced: two unrelated suspects for the same murder might have a connection to completely disconnected elements that are homonymous for no reason whatsoever. Without spoiling anything, imagine if you found a letter mentioning the name "Ophelia" in relation to the killer, and one suspect had a daughter named Ophelia, while the other one had a horse by the same name. Another time the game might try to convince you that something different has taken place by presenting crime scene clues that are revealed to be false and then never explained: again without spoiling anything, a body might be found with what look like ritualistic cuts that turn out to be nothing of the sort, but the game never illustrates why they look like that. Truth of the matter is they are there for no reason other than misdirecting the player, and one is simply not supposed to think about it too hard, which in a detective game kind of defeats the purpose.
As a result of these red herrings you might conceivably be fooled into accusing the wrong guy... only to then never realize you did, since, barring one, the game never follows up on the cases, nor does it provide an immediate review of your conclusions. You will keep expecting your decisions to come back to bite you in the ass or reward you, but that never really happens. Same goes for one major moral decision near the end of the game, which has little consequence and even so you might happen to play it out one way and then immediately load a save and change it, just to avoid a major case of annoyance: the core gimmick of the game (established in the prologue) is in fact that Miles hears the voice of his murdered partner in his head, and the aforementioned moral choice can make him even more annoying than normal.
And annoying he is, since, in an unfortunate design decision, they have decided to voice this character with the thickest "fuggedaboutit" Brooklyn accent imaginable which, combined with his constant dad jokes, make this character very very grating. One could be forgiven for considering abandoning the game early on when it is discovered that not only the annoying guy from the prologue (who you hoped would drop out of the game upon dying) now lives in your head, but he also delivers every single item description in the game with the same snarky goomba accent. That might be a personal pet peeve which may not affect others as much, but it's worth mentioning.
Thankfully the rest of the cast is likable, starting with the protagonist, who is voiced by an actor who sounds shockingly similar to George Stobbart from Broken Sword. Quality writing helps too, and the game delivers on that front, barring a few minor dips.
The game is regrettably very light on puzzles: having no inventory means that solving the cases is a simple matter of clicking on everything until you unlock the conversation topics needed to question the suspects, with very little to tease your brain along the way. The only time you might get stuck is when you've overlooked a clickable spot, like a barely visible storm drain or a drag mark on a floor, as what little puzzles there are are really easily solved once the game gives you the info you need to do so.
All that is what prevents Lamplight City from shining as bright as it might have. Proper consequences to your actions and better puzzle design would really have placed this game among the best. As it stands it's just a very good one.
The game tries to streamline the adventure formula by doing away with the cumbersome inventory management which gets in the way of progression in many such titles, replacing it with a clue notebook in the vein of Sherlock Holmes games. Also similar to recent Holmes products as well as LA Noire is the case wrapping system, which grants the player freedom to rush to incorrect conclusions by being deceived by one of several deliberately placed misdirections, accusing the wrong suspect as a result. Sadly that works better on paper than it does in practice. For one thing the red herrings meant to throw you off the scent are sometimes so shamelessly coincidental that they feel forced: two unrelated suspects for the same murder might have a connection to completely disconnected elements that are homonymous for no reason whatsoever. Without spoiling anything, imagine if you found a letter mentioning the name "Ophelia" in relation to the killer, and one suspect had a daughter named Ophelia, while the other one had a horse by the same name. Another time the game might try to convince you that something different has taken place by presenting crime scene clues that are revealed to be false and then never explained: again without spoiling anything, a body might be found with what look like ritualistic cuts that turn out to be nothing of the sort, but the game never illustrates why they look like that. Truth of the matter is they are there for no reason other than misdirecting the player, and one is simply not supposed to think about it too hard, which in a detective game kind of defeats the purpose.
As a result of these red herrings you might conceivably be fooled into accusing the wrong guy... only to then never realize you did, since, barring one, the game never follows up on the cases, nor does it provide an immediate review of your conclusions. You will keep expecting your decisions to come back to bite you in the ass or reward you, but that never really happens. Same goes for one major moral decision near the end of the game, which has little consequence and even so you might happen to play it out one way and then immediately load a save and change it, just to avoid a major case of annoyance: the core gimmick of the game (established in the prologue) is in fact that Miles hears the voice of his murdered partner in his head, and the aforementioned moral choice can make him even more annoying than normal.
And annoying he is, since, in an unfortunate design decision, they have decided to voice this character with the thickest "fuggedaboutit" Brooklyn accent imaginable which, combined with his constant dad jokes, make this character very very grating. One could be forgiven for considering abandoning the game early on when it is discovered that not only the annoying guy from the prologue (who you hoped would drop out of the game upon dying) now lives in your head, but he also delivers every single item description in the game with the same snarky goomba accent. That might be a personal pet peeve which may not affect others as much, but it's worth mentioning.
Thankfully the rest of the cast is likable, starting with the protagonist, who is voiced by an actor who sounds shockingly similar to George Stobbart from Broken Sword. Quality writing helps too, and the game delivers on that front, barring a few minor dips.
The game is regrettably very light on puzzles: having no inventory means that solving the cases is a simple matter of clicking on everything until you unlock the conversation topics needed to question the suspects, with very little to tease your brain along the way. The only time you might get stuck is when you've overlooked a clickable spot, like a barely visible storm drain or a drag mark on a floor, as what little puzzles there are are really easily solved once the game gives you the info you need to do so.
All that is what prevents Lamplight City from shining as bright as it might have. Proper consequences to your actions and better puzzle design would really have placed this game among the best. As it stands it's just a very good one.
The Fall
2014
This review contains spoilers
The Fall tells a good story but suffers from considerable problems in the gameplay department.
The Good:
Quality science fiction yarn treads familiar ground in a fresh way – Good presentation and voice work
The Bad:
Cumbersome control scheme – Takes pixel hunting in a whole new, still bad, direction – Often problematic puzzles – Overreliant on barely functional combat
----
If you are into science fiction videogames, the odds are good that you are somewhat burned out on the whole “sentient AI” trope: while the concept might have been fairly novel for the medium back in the System Shock era, games dealing with the implications of the Turing test, whether computers are capable of thinking like humans, are a dime a dozen these days, both in the indie and AAA sphere (and Hollywood on top of that), so that you could be excused for not being in any hurry to play any more “are robots people?” products. Fortunately The Fall deals with the trope in a way that, while not original by any stretch, avoids falling into the bog of excessive familiarity. It also comes in a pretty good package, since it loosk and sounds really good, with pretty backgrounds, great animations and quality sound design and voice work.
The game tells the story of an AI-powered combat suit designated A.R.I.D. Mark-7, or Arid for short, which crash lands in mysterios circumstances on the surface of a planet and rebooting inside of a dilapidated underground facility. Running diagnostics reveals the suit occupant, a military colonel, is in critical health conditions, which prompts the on-board AI take over all motory functions to try and locate medical assistance before his death. This is the most interesting aspect of the game: imagine if in Halo Master Chief were unconscious for the vast majority of the game and you played as Cortana instead. Instead of a heavily stylized character, however, Arid is precisely what you would expect a computer to sound and behave like: not snarky or sarcastic but suitably robotic and adherent to procedure. To say much more about the plot would be spoiling it, but suffice to say that it’s worth experiencing: it’s nothing that will blow your mind, but you probably haven’t seen anything quite like this before in a game.
It turns out that the abandoned facility is a testing ground for malfunctioning droids where something has gone horribly, horribly wrong. It isn’t long before Arid meets a talking computer which denies access to medical facilities before the completion of a series of tests designed verify the compliance of domestic droids, which Arid being a combat suit is not programmed for. This is where the puzzle design comes into play and also the problems inherent to the game immediately surface. The Fall is presented as a point and click adventure game with a sidescrolling action control scheme: WASD moves, spacebar jumps and the mouse aims a combination of flashlight and pistol, which can be fired with left click. Using the flashlight reveals interactive hotspots in the environment the way a normal point and click game would do by hovering the mouse cursor on them. It is not dissimilar to what the scanner does in Super Metroid.
This is problematic because interactive elements are very often completely blended in with the background, whereas in most adventure games they would be colored slightly differently to make them stand out from the rest and decrease pixel hunting. The Fall assumes the player will stop and carefully scan every inch of each area for interactive elements, so it makes no effort to differentiate any of them from backgrounds that are already designed to be very dark. You will quickly learn that you need to keep the flashlight on at all times, as it’s all too easy to miss an important spot and get irremediably stuck until you backtrack and comb every area again. It doesn’t help that Arid walks more slowly while holding the flashlight, which makes you want to put it away, knowing you shouldn’t, especially since new elements tend to appear all the time after certain events, and they’re just as invisible as the rest. Also irritating is the fact that you don’t just turn in place: the camera snaps brusquely to the side whenever you rotate the flashlight behind Arid’s back, making scanning rooms unnecessaily cumbersome. The result is a completely new way to do pixel hunting: instead of hovering on every elements that looks potentially interactive, you will have to walk around fanning your flashlight up and down not to miss an important object.
Once you do find something to interact with, you will also realize the game suffers from a bad case of “use everything on everything” and “found the key before the door”. I don’t know when it became a lost art for adventure games to present the problem before offering the tools for the solution, but here we are: you will often pick up items you have no idea what to use them on, instead of finding something you can finally use to solve that problem that’s been nagging you for the past twenty minutes, as it should be. The puzzles are fairly illogical as well; they’re not quite moon logic-bad but you’ll more than once put something together out of trial and error or not knowing exactly what you are doing, arriving at a solution out of chance rather than intuition, and that is never a good thing. Emblematic of all this is an on paper pretty damn good puzzle where you need to get a wooden cutout of an old lady run over by wooden cutouts of cars, and your problem is that the cars don’t move fast enough, so you need to replace a low voltage battery with a stronger one one floor below, but 90% of players will replace the battery before the puzzle even becomes active and learning that the cars are moving too slowly, completely negating the challenge.
The interface isn’t great either: when you find an object you need to highlight it with your flashlight (can’t interact with anything otherwise), press the action key (default E) which opens a popup menu, then press A or D to select the interaction you want (an “interact” option or a barely used “networking” action) and press E again. To use something out of your inventory (inventory you can’t open unless you are interacting with something) you need to press D to select the use icon, then S to scroll down and then A or D to scroll to the item you want, and then E to confirm. Combine that with the trial and error nature of some of the puzzle and you can see how that could be an issue. A mouse interface when the menu is open and during dialog interactions would have worked wonders for the game.
The aforementioned controls become a further problem when combat comes into play: Arid is fairly often set upon by hostile security robots that fight by taking cover behind objects and periodically peeking out to fire blindly. It’s as basic as it comes and further simplified by the fact that you can press the shift key to press against the wall and become invisible and impossible to hit, which begs the question of why they bothered to code cover mechanics, including vaulting over cover, when it’s far more efficient to just stand in place and hold a button. If you played the old Blizzard game Blackthorne, this is exactly how it is: you need to press against a wall and emerge when the enemy is done shooting, then rinse and repeat until you win. Further annoying is that your flashlight turns into a laser pointer every time you fire, meaning you have to switch it back manually by pressing F. Hit detection is also oddly finnicky: often your laser will be aimed directly at a robot’s head and no hit will register, leading to irritation.
With all that, combat is still barely an issue however: you have a generous health bar that regenerates over time and you can even sneak up on unaware enemies for a bit of extra variety, which is good, but when it does get irritating is near the end when you have to fight a ridiculous amount of robots in confined spaces, including bullet spongy kamikaze ones that beeline for you, and you even have one instance when they shoot you full of lead as you’re coming in through a door and have no control until the animation is done. You even have a boss fight to deal with, and considering how clunky the controls are it’s not fun at all, though very easy to deal with nevertheless. A good aspect of the combat is that you gain more skills over the course of the game, which adds a sense of progression which might be artificial, but is always welcome.
The Fall is definitely worth playing for the story; as mentioned it’s nothing mind-boggling but it will please you with what it does. Whether you will be willing to put up with the many small annoyances of the gameplay is up to your individual level of tolerance but I can recommend this game to point and click fans looking for a fix. Those under the impression of having found a Metroid game need to look elsewhere.
The Good:
Quality science fiction yarn treads familiar ground in a fresh way – Good presentation and voice work
The Bad:
Cumbersome control scheme – Takes pixel hunting in a whole new, still bad, direction – Often problematic puzzles – Overreliant on barely functional combat
----
If you are into science fiction videogames, the odds are good that you are somewhat burned out on the whole “sentient AI” trope: while the concept might have been fairly novel for the medium back in the System Shock era, games dealing with the implications of the Turing test, whether computers are capable of thinking like humans, are a dime a dozen these days, both in the indie and AAA sphere (and Hollywood on top of that), so that you could be excused for not being in any hurry to play any more “are robots people?” products. Fortunately The Fall deals with the trope in a way that, while not original by any stretch, avoids falling into the bog of excessive familiarity. It also comes in a pretty good package, since it loosk and sounds really good, with pretty backgrounds, great animations and quality sound design and voice work.
The game tells the story of an AI-powered combat suit designated A.R.I.D. Mark-7, or Arid for short, which crash lands in mysterios circumstances on the surface of a planet and rebooting inside of a dilapidated underground facility. Running diagnostics reveals the suit occupant, a military colonel, is in critical health conditions, which prompts the on-board AI take over all motory functions to try and locate medical assistance before his death. This is the most interesting aspect of the game: imagine if in Halo Master Chief were unconscious for the vast majority of the game and you played as Cortana instead. Instead of a heavily stylized character, however, Arid is precisely what you would expect a computer to sound and behave like: not snarky or sarcastic but suitably robotic and adherent to procedure. To say much more about the plot would be spoiling it, but suffice to say that it’s worth experiencing: it’s nothing that will blow your mind, but you probably haven’t seen anything quite like this before in a game.
It turns out that the abandoned facility is a testing ground for malfunctioning droids where something has gone horribly, horribly wrong. It isn’t long before Arid meets a talking computer which denies access to medical facilities before the completion of a series of tests designed verify the compliance of domestic droids, which Arid being a combat suit is not programmed for. This is where the puzzle design comes into play and also the problems inherent to the game immediately surface. The Fall is presented as a point and click adventure game with a sidescrolling action control scheme: WASD moves, spacebar jumps and the mouse aims a combination of flashlight and pistol, which can be fired with left click. Using the flashlight reveals interactive hotspots in the environment the way a normal point and click game would do by hovering the mouse cursor on them. It is not dissimilar to what the scanner does in Super Metroid.
This is problematic because interactive elements are very often completely blended in with the background, whereas in most adventure games they would be colored slightly differently to make them stand out from the rest and decrease pixel hunting. The Fall assumes the player will stop and carefully scan every inch of each area for interactive elements, so it makes no effort to differentiate any of them from backgrounds that are already designed to be very dark. You will quickly learn that you need to keep the flashlight on at all times, as it’s all too easy to miss an important spot and get irremediably stuck until you backtrack and comb every area again. It doesn’t help that Arid walks more slowly while holding the flashlight, which makes you want to put it away, knowing you shouldn’t, especially since new elements tend to appear all the time after certain events, and they’re just as invisible as the rest. Also irritating is the fact that you don’t just turn in place: the camera snaps brusquely to the side whenever you rotate the flashlight behind Arid’s back, making scanning rooms unnecessaily cumbersome. The result is a completely new way to do pixel hunting: instead of hovering on every elements that looks potentially interactive, you will have to walk around fanning your flashlight up and down not to miss an important object.
Once you do find something to interact with, you will also realize the game suffers from a bad case of “use everything on everything” and “found the key before the door”. I don’t know when it became a lost art for adventure games to present the problem before offering the tools for the solution, but here we are: you will often pick up items you have no idea what to use them on, instead of finding something you can finally use to solve that problem that’s been nagging you for the past twenty minutes, as it should be. The puzzles are fairly illogical as well; they’re not quite moon logic-bad but you’ll more than once put something together out of trial and error or not knowing exactly what you are doing, arriving at a solution out of chance rather than intuition, and that is never a good thing. Emblematic of all this is an on paper pretty damn good puzzle where you need to get a wooden cutout of an old lady run over by wooden cutouts of cars, and your problem is that the cars don’t move fast enough, so you need to replace a low voltage battery with a stronger one one floor below, but 90% of players will replace the battery before the puzzle even becomes active and learning that the cars are moving too slowly, completely negating the challenge.
The interface isn’t great either: when you find an object you need to highlight it with your flashlight (can’t interact with anything otherwise), press the action key (default E) which opens a popup menu, then press A or D to select the interaction you want (an “interact” option or a barely used “networking” action) and press E again. To use something out of your inventory (inventory you can’t open unless you are interacting with something) you need to press D to select the use icon, then S to scroll down and then A or D to scroll to the item you want, and then E to confirm. Combine that with the trial and error nature of some of the puzzle and you can see how that could be an issue. A mouse interface when the menu is open and during dialog interactions would have worked wonders for the game.
The aforementioned controls become a further problem when combat comes into play: Arid is fairly often set upon by hostile security robots that fight by taking cover behind objects and periodically peeking out to fire blindly. It’s as basic as it comes and further simplified by the fact that you can press the shift key to press against the wall and become invisible and impossible to hit, which begs the question of why they bothered to code cover mechanics, including vaulting over cover, when it’s far more efficient to just stand in place and hold a button. If you played the old Blizzard game Blackthorne, this is exactly how it is: you need to press against a wall and emerge when the enemy is done shooting, then rinse and repeat until you win. Further annoying is that your flashlight turns into a laser pointer every time you fire, meaning you have to switch it back manually by pressing F. Hit detection is also oddly finnicky: often your laser will be aimed directly at a robot’s head and no hit will register, leading to irritation.
With all that, combat is still barely an issue however: you have a generous health bar that regenerates over time and you can even sneak up on unaware enemies for a bit of extra variety, which is good, but when it does get irritating is near the end when you have to fight a ridiculous amount of robots in confined spaces, including bullet spongy kamikaze ones that beeline for you, and you even have one instance when they shoot you full of lead as you’re coming in through a door and have no control until the animation is done. You even have a boss fight to deal with, and considering how clunky the controls are it’s not fun at all, though very easy to deal with nevertheless. A good aspect of the combat is that you gain more skills over the course of the game, which adds a sense of progression which might be artificial, but is always welcome.
The Fall is definitely worth playing for the story; as mentioned it’s nothing mind-boggling but it will please you with what it does. Whether you will be willing to put up with the many small annoyances of the gameplay is up to your individual level of tolerance but I can recommend this game to point and click fans looking for a fix. Those under the impression of having found a Metroid game need to look elsewhere.
NecroVisioN
2009
(Review originally written in 2017)
It's like Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Painkiller if they were made by a monkey. Don't play this game.
In detail:
Necrovision is one of the most miserable FPS experiences in recent memory: there is absolutely no redeeming quality, not an ounce of fun to be found in this unpolished chore of a game. None of the weapons are fun to shoot, none of the enemies are fun to kill, you are constantly being shot and swarmed from every direction, to the point the developer decided it was easier to give you a giant regenerating health bar and make you almost immortal than it was to clean up their mess.
The game starts in the trenches of World War 1, where you fight German soldiers before quickly moving on to zombies and demons. This is the better part of the game, though the broken game mechanics (aiming down the sights actually decreases your accuracy) ruin the experience (hilarious sections wearing a gas masks which completely obscures the screen, making you almost blind). About halfway through the game turns into a first-person hack n' slash, which means it throws hordes of infinitely respawning enemies your way, making you opt to sprint past them instead of fighting them half the time.
The story is dreadful, told through interminable cutscenes plagued with the worst writing and voice acting you have heard in an FPS, or via 400-words letters/audiologs that nobody in their right mind will listen to (what with the terribly equalized audio making their hilariously bad fake german accents completely inaudible for how quiet they are compare to the music) let alone read. The very act of moving around is a pain: you are constantly tripping over dead enemies or the rubble scattered around the levels, often finding yourself propelled through the air by the broken physics. The enemies are all bullet sponges that take way too long to kill and half of them possess undodgeable hitscanning attacks, which means you will almost constantly be taking damage.
In order to proceed, the game sometimes expects you to do something that looks like you're breaking the game, like jumping on top of the heads of a group of zombies coming out of a gate that only stays open for a few seconds.
The music feels like it's missing half the time: you'll be fighting a huge (and terrible) boss in complete silence; same goes for many sound effects that are flat out missing. What's not missing are the enemy phrases and your awful douchebag of a character's one-liners, which are so few and repeated so often that will drive you insane.
Avoid this game like the plague.
It's like Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Painkiller if they were made by a monkey. Don't play this game.
In detail:
Necrovision is one of the most miserable FPS experiences in recent memory: there is absolutely no redeeming quality, not an ounce of fun to be found in this unpolished chore of a game. None of the weapons are fun to shoot, none of the enemies are fun to kill, you are constantly being shot and swarmed from every direction, to the point the developer decided it was easier to give you a giant regenerating health bar and make you almost immortal than it was to clean up their mess.
The game starts in the trenches of World War 1, where you fight German soldiers before quickly moving on to zombies and demons. This is the better part of the game, though the broken game mechanics (aiming down the sights actually decreases your accuracy) ruin the experience (hilarious sections wearing a gas masks which completely obscures the screen, making you almost blind). About halfway through the game turns into a first-person hack n' slash, which means it throws hordes of infinitely respawning enemies your way, making you opt to sprint past them instead of fighting them half the time.
The story is dreadful, told through interminable cutscenes plagued with the worst writing and voice acting you have heard in an FPS, or via 400-words letters/audiologs that nobody in their right mind will listen to (what with the terribly equalized audio making their hilariously bad fake german accents completely inaudible for how quiet they are compare to the music) let alone read. The very act of moving around is a pain: you are constantly tripping over dead enemies or the rubble scattered around the levels, often finding yourself propelled through the air by the broken physics. The enemies are all bullet sponges that take way too long to kill and half of them possess undodgeable hitscanning attacks, which means you will almost constantly be taking damage.
In order to proceed, the game sometimes expects you to do something that looks like you're breaking the game, like jumping on top of the heads of a group of zombies coming out of a gate that only stays open for a few seconds.
The music feels like it's missing half the time: you'll be fighting a huge (and terrible) boss in complete silence; same goes for many sound effects that are flat out missing. What's not missing are the enemy phrases and your awful douchebag of a character's one-liners, which are so few and repeated so often that will drive you insane.
Avoid this game like the plague.