Half of all video game humor is “What if Mario’s mushrooms were actually drugs”, and the other half is “Can you imagine how people would react to a game protagonist in real life”, so I’m glad Contradiction made at least one of those premises funny for the first time with its live-action goofiness. Obviously, live-action adventure games have been done before, but this one strikes the perfect balance for making it work: it doesn’t play up the inherent silliness to eye rolling levels, but uses just enough to where the goofs of the player feel adequately contextualized. Making that work in an otherwise straight-faced murder mystery seems like a pretty difficult task, but it’s achieved with one of my favorite game protagonists of all time, Detective Jenks. He has a friendly, silly demeanor, but this innocent charm belies a sharp wit that’s ready to capitalize on the slightest slip of the tongue. Even when players are asking the wrong questions, it feels completely natural, as if Jenks is letting people think he’s utterly incompetent to make them drop their guard. Both you and the subject of his questioning may find his behavior hilarious and unusual, but when he points out one of the titular contradictions, it’s just as exciting as a real thriller. That’s what makes this game such a fun experience, it straddles the line between mystery, comedy, and drama in such an entertaining way that there’s really nothing like it. My only complaint is that the ending doesn’t feel like it was originally planned, and the director has made no secret that there was inadequate funding to fully deliver on all the plot threads. While I appreciate how not all the details of the town end up fitting together like a perfect jigsaw puzzle, the ending doesn’t capitalize on even half of what was set up, so it feels like a major missed opportunity. It’s like Spot the Liar is just the first episode of a much greater story, one which will, unfortunately, probably never be told. That is, unless a bunch of people were to suddenly buy this game and spread the word about how cool it is. I don’t know how someone would get the word out like that, especially while admitting its faults at the same time, but with any luck, the message can reach some people of impeccable taste and get the recognition it deserves.

P.S./Fun Fact: The game’s director was Tim Follin, who you might recognize as the composer of the mind blowing title theme of Solstice for NES and the prog trip that is Plok’s beach theme, among many others. The guy is genuinely legendary, just one more reason to check this game out.

This is the 250th review I’ve posted on this site, so I wanted to self-indulgently celebrate by sharing my origin story, which all comes down to this beautiful little game. Well actually, it comes down to a much, much less beautiful one. By the start of 2013, I was feeling like my time with gaming as a hobby was coming to a close, with the flood of Dota clones in full swing, and games like Borderlands 2 getting awards for excellent writing. However, one game was coming out in the Spring which I had high hopes for: Bioshock Infinite. I saw big-budget trailers for it everywhere, I even saw it on the big screen before movies, it seemed so fast paced and aesthetically unique, like this could be the game that reminded me how great games could be.

Sorry for anyone who really loves Infinite, but I found it to be so offensively bad that I was a hair’s breadth from saying I’ve just grown out of video games as a whole. If that’s game-of-the-year material, why should I trust any of the other games to come out this year, or even next year? However, about a week later, a Castlevania let’s-play was suggested on my Youtube feed, and I decided to check it out, since it was a series I recognized as a classic but had never actually seen. It didn’t stand out much when watching the video, but I decided that hey, these modern games look amazing but have no substance to them, this game seems like the opposite, let’s give it a go. Needless to say, I absolutely loved it. There was no nonsense, no pretense, just a straightforward challenge that could be overcome with good planning. I didn’t have to do combos or fast dodges, just pay attention to the enemies and my environment. The stages were difficult enough to where I couldn’t brute force my way through, but short enough to where having to restart the stage felt fair. The music was good, the style was good… really, I loved everything about it. I played it over and over again, and shortly afterwards I discovered speedrunning. I speedran this game for a while, met people I still talk to even all these years later, started the safari through gaming history that I’m still going on, got into game design and analysis after that path brought me to Resident Evil… it all started with this one game. I just imagine how things would have turned out if I picked a different retro game, something like Ikari Warriors, and said bollocks to the entire thing. On the other hand, maybe Bioshock Infinite could have just been good and held back the crisis a bit longer, but honestly, I don’t think there’s any parallel universe where that happens. I’m just happy I got to live in a universe with a game as good as Castlevania.

I’ve never been an AVGN fan, but there’s one quote from his Ninja Gaiden review that rings in my ear whenever I try something difficult: “Unlimited continues means no Game Over. Game is only over when you make it over!”. It doesn’t just pop into my head when playing difficult games, it can be anything; it’s a recurring reminder that sometimes the only thing standing in my way is a lack of commitment. Mistakes are fine, just take a step back, readjust, then move forward again with a renewed sense of determination. As silly as it sounds, it encapsulates a lot about the basic human condition, of coming up against challenges, and surmounting them even when things feel hopeless.

In Atomic Runner, you can’t take a step back. Literally, you have no way of moving left, it’s a shoot ‘em up platformer where you can only run to the right side of the screen, or stay stationary until the screen scrolls you backwards. So, if you take a step too far towards a hazard, you have no way of correcting that mistake and will die every time. There are also limited continues. I don’t want to imply that this is a slap in the face to the human condition itself…

So I won’t say that. I won’t say that the way Atomic Runner structures its challenges stands against the noblest impulses of mankind, because that would be overly dramatic. In fact, a lot of its difficulty is essentially the same as Ninja Gaiden, where the mechanical complexity is minimal, but the requirement to choreograph your path through a stage is high. You need to know where every enemy is going to spawn, where every uniquely-scripted enemy path leads, whether to go under or over certain obstacles, where bosses are going to drop in, and be able to string all that knowledge together flawlessly. Weirdly enough, this is where the game’s generous checkpoint system actually makes things more difficult. Deaths never revert much progress, which seems like a blessing, but it leads to a lot of lucky breaks and situations where the stage is only cleared thanks to chance. After running out of continues and reaching that challenge again, you might as well have never seen it before, since the circumstances were so different and you never had a chance to learn. It’s almost specifically engineered to ensure you don’t grow from each challenge, not letting you stop to analyze the situation and not letting you practice it repeatedly for future runs. All of this might even be fine if the enemies weren’t so tightly scripted, behaving in ways specific to their location within the stage rather than according to their type. Most of the running robot enemies will sprint straight at you, but some are set to jump from the ground to a platform then back down, some ignore platforms altogether… it’s impossible to know until you just see and memorize each specific enemy, unlike the predictability of Ninja Gaiden’s cast. Combining that with the inability to freely move your character, or even turn around without pressing another button first, makes for a painfully stilted challenge that doesn’t even feel that satisfying to finish.

Of course, I did finish this game, even after reading a bunch of people from all over the internet saying they were unable to do so. To any of you reading this, I would like to assure you that really, this game isn’t worth getting too emotionally invested in. If you hit a wall and quit, it’s not because of you, it’s because the challenge is implemented so poorly, in spite of how cool it seems at first. Again, some people might say that it’s even so poor that it feels like it’s designed to smother humanity’s finest instincts to learn and grow in the face of adversity...

...but of course, I would never say that.

Addendum: This was a game added to my suggestions list by user JaxMagnetic, who recommended it on the basis of “so more people can feel my suffering”. Congratulations, you did it, I suffered just like you wanted. But since the game shows as “shelved” on your page, I still formally absolve you of needing to finish it. It might have the fun music and visual charm of early Genesis titles, but… it’s just not worth suffering for. You’re free now, you can now go play some more Alien Soldier instead.

With how often videos are randomly deleted, and how seriously spoilers should be taken, there has to be a pretty good reason to link a cutscene for a review. However, this is a case where trying to convey the game’s tone makes words fail me, even when it seems like a normal horror game at first glance. Watch this scene from the linked time (13:25 if it breaks), until its end at about the 15 minute mark. Don’t worry, it’s from the very start of the game and contains no significant plot details.

If you opened up that link expecting something gory or scary, well, me too. I played this soon after the original Clock Tower, which is one of my favorite Super Nintendo games, and one of the first that comes to mind when I think “kino”. It was a genre-pioneering title that still uniquely shines, so after hearing that Clock Tower 3 was also considered an underappreciated classic, I jumped right in, only to find… that. Whatever the hell that was. It’s not just that single scene either; in comparison to most of the other cutscenes, it’s actually pretty soberly directed. The experience feels like House of the Dead with its excessively energetic campiness, and the horror comes more in theme rather than atmosphere. Sure there are big unstoppable monsters to chase you through each stage, but the end is always a boss fight that can only be described as a magical-girl interlude rather than a desperate showdown. If all you ever wanted was a horror game that flies off the rails so hard that it rockets into space, then it will probably end up being your favorite game of all time, but by the end I was just sitting in my chair wondering what in the world I just witnessed. It wasn’t exactly a horror game, it wasn’t an action game, it was a... questionably-localized horror-themed magical-girl historical family drama? I grasp at straws at how to even wrap this up for recommendation purposes, since it’s certainly not great, the aforementioned boss fights are uniformly terrible and the level design is mediocre at best, but it’s just decent enough and so thoroughly unusual that I hope people keep playing it. We might never see big-budget games get this weird ever again, and I would gladly sacrifice some production value if it meant we could get some more games this hard to describe.

As is obligatory for any open-world game, Rage has sidequests for the player to undertake for optional rewards, with the most common being an infusion of cash. For the promise of $200, players will hop in their car, drive to a hideout, fight bandit buggies along the way, recover an item, and race back to the quest giver while being attacked by even more bandits. After cashing out, players need to take stock of their condition, paying for buggy repairs and armament replenishments, along with crafting and buying ammo to replace what had been used. If players weren’t particularly careful with their driving and selection of rare ammo, they may not profit much at all, even after spending so much time getting the job done.

In the first town, there’s a minigame called Tombstones, where the player takes control of a holographic sheriff surrounded by four attacking mutants. The player rolls four dice, each having a roughly one-in-three chance to kill one of the advancing enemies. If any of them reach the sheriff by the end of the third turn, the game is over. Players can place bets at the start of each game, receiving 10:1 returns on a round-one victory, 4:1 on round two, 1:1 on round three, and 0:1 for a loss. To spare you a lecture on Bayes’ Theorem, this calculates out to an expected return of 0.12, 0.984, 0.348, and 0.0 for each turn respectively. These cumulate to 1.452, meaning that the player has a 45.2% advantage over the house, and an average gain of forty-five cents on every dollar they wager. Notably, this doesn’t require the player to risk their buggy, waste ammo, use resources, or even spend much time. As long as the player has enough cash on hand to withstand strings of bad luck, even someone avoiding save-scumming can be expected to accrue cash in a reliable way. So, as tiny as it may seem, this minigame singlehandedly negates the motivation to do the majority of the sidequests in the entire game.

That’s the Rage experience, having different parts of the game collide in ways that make it seem like the development teams weren’t on speaking terms. It has cute minigames to flesh out the world, and that’s great, but the returns weren’t thoroughly considered and ended up negatively impacting the other content. The open-world formula would feel incomplete without sidequests that let players jump into the core combat, but wrapping them in long driving sections defeats the purpose almost entirely. The cars work decently well, but there’s nowhere interesting to drive them, it just keeps going on and on like this; the entire game was crafted by assembling a ton of random ideas that sounded good without considering how each piece fit with the next. It just ends up just being thoroughly boring, not committing to any of its ideas past the point of basic functionality. At least its technology formed the basis for subsequent id Tech games like The Evil Within, but on its own, it’s just a scattered pile of scrap parts.

This is my second-favorite game in the classic Tomb Raider series. I highly respect the developers for choosing not to rely on the brand name, and for switching to a top-down adventure style, as well as calling the protagonist Kate Walker instead of Lara Croft… ok, so obviously these are unrelated franchises, but Syberia actually does tap into the magic that characterises Tomb Raider, maybe even to a greater degree. What may seem like a straightforward adventure slowly pulls you into a world that has a subtle fantasy to it, as if fairy tales were real, but most people had forgotten to take notice. Our protagonist Kate is the exact sort of person that description would apply to, being a lawyer from New York whose call to adventure was to settle a corporate buyout and act as an estate executor. As that dry description may suggest, this is a game that’s not afraid of a slow pace, and wants to encourage players to take their time, think about what people are saying, and fully take stock of every room before running off unprepared. That’s why, in addition to the similar settings and protagonists, I’m reminded of the classic Tomb Raider games. It would have been easy to let Lara do long jumps from a standstill and instantly grab ledges, or to let Kate sprint from place to place and highlight any useful objects she sees, but these changes would have reduced the satisfying quality that makes these games what they are. Of course, there are times where the slowness can be particularly irritating, and my biggest gripe is how the game loves to hide mission-critical details, but by the end I was thankful for the time I had to ruminate on what was being wordlessly communicated. The message slowly unfolds as the adventure grows to be much more than it was at the start, even if it’s in the quiet sort of way where it never feels like anything’s changed. That to me is what makes a journey feel real, like the sort of growth you experience day by day, only to look back a year later and realize everything’s changed. For a game to capture that feeling makes it something truly special, and an adventure that’s still definitely worth taking.

In my review of Syberia, I pointed out some tenuous similarities between Kate Walker and Lara Croft, and a major reason why is because I had already started playing the sequel. While the first game was a very personal adventure for Kate, this one focuses on the literal journey rather than the personal one. Instead of spending time soaking in the details of a rusting automaton factory at the heart of a town fallen silent, Kate is dealing with ivory poachers as she makes her way to a mythical island in the frozen north. This Tomb Raider-esque plot works well as an adventure game, so the progression is a lot clearer than it ever was before. Even from the first few minutes, it’s also clear that the developers took note of how slowly Kate moved around in the first game, so the locations are more compact and the animations less stilted. If all the narrative context was vacuumed out, this would be the unambiguously better game, but that’s a pretty big “if”. Syberia may be a pain to navigate through, but all the little stories it builds together elevate it into something great, Syberia 2 just extends the main plot while losing sight of the nuanced presentation. While that could be considered a letdown, it heavily depends on the audience’s reaction to the ending of the first game. Some people love to follow a character’s entire journey and relentlessly speculate on narrative gaps, and this is the type of person the sequel caters to. Others enjoy seeing just the critical moments of a character’s personal arc, and in this regard, the first game can stand alone. I suppose this makes Syberia 2 a win for everyone; people who feel like the first game’s ending was perfect can skip it without missing anything, but the people who felt unfulfilled can get the conclusion they were hoping for.

Everyone has their own opinion on how to fix Fallout 3. Even fans of the game will say that the conflict between Enclave and Brotherhood wasn’t fleshed out enough, that morality plays like Megaton’s bomb were just pitiful, and so on. Those less charitable to the game might say it needs a total rework, to be set in an earlier time period and ditch the classic factions to tell a story more in line with series canon. Personally, I’m somewhere in between, because I think that Fallout 3 actually does have the potential for an amazing story, despite the innumerable problems with its writing. The change to make it all work would be shifting the emotional heart of the story from the Lone Wanderer’s father to another character who already exists, who gives you a quest that could also hold up the entirety of the narrative.

Moira Brown.

Yes, the eccentric shopkeeper in Megaton who wants your help writing the Wasteland Survival Guide, and no, I’m not kidding. The way that the quest works in its current state mostly puts you in the path of raiders, mirelurks, and mole rats, but consider how it would look with an expanded scope, with the goal being to catalog not just the major hazards, but factions and politics as well. It would play out similarly to the independent route in New Vegas, where your goal was to make contact with the major regional powers, and either do their quest to make an ally or ignore them altogether. In the case of this hypothetical new Fallout 3, the plan would be the same, to visit raider camps, Brotherhood outposts, the Enclave itself, hear all their perspectives on the world, and try to bargain with them to make life safer for the common wastelander. Just like how the base game allows you to put in a varying level of effort with optional objectives and stat checks, players would have a wide latitude for how involved they want to be. If they want to improve the wasteland by joining one of the factions, they could then choose to write the book in a propagandized, realistic, or disillusioned way, with more useful details coming with more time as a member. It’s a system that would encourage players to genuinely engage with each faction and learn everything they could, on top of exploring different regions and destroying nests of monsters. Just as the player shapes the guide, the writing of the guide comes to shape the wasteland, which has shaped the views of the player. That sort of expressiveness is exactly what an RPG like Fallout really needs to leave a personal impact.

So, where does Moira herself come into it? Well, she’s the embodiment of the question at the heart of a project like this, of how a single person with hardly anything to their name could heal a deeply troubled world. Think of how much we struggle with this question in real life, how so many of us look around and see nothing but collapse and disparity, and don’t know what we can even do about it. Moira represents that spark of action we have within us, even if we aren't sure how to use it, and whether her own efforts are naive, noble, or something in between is up to interpretation. Whichever way she's viewed, the harshness of the world outside enforces just how much it needs people like her, and not more soldiers. Fallout loves to say that war never changes, but a story like this could be the reminder that there's still hope. It’s people like her who can change the world.

Addendum on the DLC (includes spoilers):
If you’ve read my other Bethesda reviews, you know the drill. The date listed for this completion is for a replay, and I had only played the DLC once upon its release, so here’s the DLC for the review. Just like last time, this will be longer than the actual review, and this is where I drop all pretense of being clever and just make fun of the game fairly directly, which for this game, is probably what everyone was hoping for anyway. Also, there are a whoppin’ FIVE expansions to get through this time, so I hope you’re comfy.

Operation Anchorage might just have the strongest premise of any Fallout DLC. It’s a rare glimpse into the past, depicting a significant moment in the lore for the first time, and what makes it doubly intriguing is how it’s presented as a military-produced simulation. It’s the perfect opportunity to present how pre-nuclear culture distorted reality, to satirize the sort of politics that lead America down that path, and mix it with grains of truth that the player has to dig through for the real history. It would be Fallout’s version of the histories of Herodotus, which contain a mix of true historical insight next to biased legends meant to excite the crowd. It could even be combined with an alternate plot of trying to escape the simulation in a way that gels nicely with Fallout’s sci-fi influences, there are so many ways that a writer could run with this that the only possible conclusion is that none were actually involved in this project. The DLC starts with a short linear shooting section, then drops you into a small map with two objectives: blow up two fuel tanks and clear a base full of enemies. Then, another linear shooting section wraps it all up. Did they think Fallout 3’s combat was so fun that the game just needed more? Did they think the base game didn’t have enough already? I genuinely have no idea what happened here. There’s no substance, just a little under an hour of pure shooting. The only benefit to engaging with it at all is how the armor it rewards you with is bugged to have 9,991 times the durability it should. Classic.

The Pitt has a much simpler idea going on: sneak into the industrial hell that Pittsburgh has become, go undercover, and coordinate a resistance with the enslaved people. Having all your stuff taken from you to collect ingots in a factory overrun by mutants, scrounging for every bullet and stimpack, is an effective change of pace for highlighting the desperation of the setting, but that single mission is all there is to it. Afterwards, you fight in the arena, with the first enemies dropping great weapons that you can use to easily blast away the other two fights. Then, you get all your gear back. What happens next is particularly odd: you get called up to meet the boss of the entire operation and are expected to hear him out and maybe reach a compromise. However, knowing he’s a slaver and that I’m wearing 9,991 layers of power armor, I disagreed and chose the dialog option to kill him along with all the other bosses. This broke the DLC. Bethesda must have genuinely thought that the choice between maintaining the systematic enslavement of the entire East coast or killing a handful of slavers would be something I needed to really think about, because it made half the NPC’s dialog shut down. It also made the final quest entirely pointless, being a mission to overrun their base with mutants, even though everyone was already dead. So, The Pitt was a promising little plot for about 20 minutes, but after that, it completely ran out of steam. No interesting rewards or additions here either.

Broken Steel is perhaps the most famous of the bunch, thanks to its rewriting of the original terrible ending, but the new one has almost all the same issues. The Enclave’s overall motivation and their reasons for fighting the Brotherhood were hazy at the best of times, but with the purifier lost, their main base destroyed, their leaders killed, and the enemy in possession of a superweapon, what’s keeping them going? What’s their goal that we’re trying to stop? The closest we get is how their orbital satellite superweapon destroyed our giant robot superweapon, and now we want to get even. What they plan to do with it from that point, or why they didn’t just use it earlier, go largely unaddressed. So, the new finale of the Fallout 3 main quest is blowing up a base you learned of an hour ago, in defense of nothing in particular. I genuinely think this DLC was created just to pull the Lone Wanderer out of the grave that the writers inelegantly shoved them into, and the rest was an afterthought. Here’s a fun fact though: Broken Steel contains the only time in the main completion path where you visit the iconic Pennsylvania Avenue. While most players end up there while searching for Dad, players who did Moira’s quest first probably found Dr. Li in Rivet City, skipping quests from Moriarty’s bar, visiting DC, fighting mutants with the Brotherhood, and running errands for Three Dog. See, I told y’all that Moira was the best, she knows where to go.

If it wasn’t for Bethesda’s trademark lack of awareness, I would think Point Lookout was a parody of the main game. You join up with someone who’s entirely contemptuous of you in order to take down someone who’s essentially the exact same, with no firm reason established. Then, the other side tries to flip your allegiance, all without specifying a reason to do so. You really have no context for anything that’s going on and just dumbly shoot your way to the end, until you’re confronted with a pointless choice and an obligatory locker full of stuff. At the very least, this DLC has a full new map to explore, and I have to give credit for that, but it’s just not what this game needed. It’s like Bethesda asked what we wanted, and we yelled “More roleplaying opportunities!” and they said “Great! More shooting!” and served up Operation Anchorage. Then they asked us again, we yelled for more roleplaying again, and we got The Pitt, which asked us if we would be willing to end the murder of an entire generation if it meant the person running the operation would be really disappointed. Then the lag caught up at Bethesda HQ and they got the message that the ending was terrible, so they changed it to allow for more shooting. After we kept screaming for more roleplaying opportunities, we got a couple more square blocks of green mess to explore in a game that had miles of that already. Maybe the next DLC will finally give us what we want.

It took me an hour and a half to complete Mothership Zeta, I had started with 1,006 microfusion cells in my unique plasma rifle, and I ended with 96. So, firing 910 shots over the course of 90 minutes gives me 10 shots per minute, about once every six seconds. Since none of the enemies drop those cells and I never switched weapons, it’s a fairly reliable measurement. However, keep in mind this includes a couple times where I got lost, and all the time spent looting containers when the game is paused, so it’s more like a shot every 4 seconds. There were no story choices to make, so let’s put that at 0 meaningful roleplay interactions per second. Looks like we didn’t ever get what we wanted, huh. What’s sad is that they actually did have a decent premise in here: there are a bunch of people from different time periods and cultures that you release from cryostasis, and you all have to work together to escape the alien ship. Considering how Fallout is all about warring factions, wouldn’t it be beautiful to end the game’s saga with a story about how people can come together across culture and time to create the perfect team? Instead, it just means you can pick a companion with a shotgun, a rifle, or a revolver to shoot along with you. It blows my mind how a DLC that overtly apes Star Trek and classic sci-fi so thoroughly misses the underlying humanism.

If there’s a theme to all this, it’s how Fallout 3 has some nice little seeds of great ideas, which could have grown with some time and love, that just went nowhere. The Capital Wasteland is criticized for being a big green concrete ruin, but the harshness would have been really compelling if it was tied into a story about pushing forward when all seemed lost. Operation Anchorage’s premise is great, The Pitt is a setting just begging for more development, Broken Steel… shows that Bethesda is willing to listen to feedback, and so on. While I would love to say that the team just had to get their sea legs and would make the next Fallout amazing, we all know that didn’t work out. Fallout 4 was also a story that was basically about nothing, and Fallout 76 was entirely based around being about nothing. With such a storied legacy of nothingness, I don’t even know who I would tell to play Fallout 3 in this day and age. You don’t need to play this to see that New Vegas was good, and there are tons of games out there that are more fun to wander around in, overshadowing the one saving grace this game could be said to have.

Thus ends the Fallout 3 Survival Guide. As Moira said, “That concludes our exceptional expert endeavor. I have to admit, I was worried it would go over some peoples' heads…

...but it should be fine.” Thanks for reading this behemoth of a review, I think every Bethesda game I’ve covered has been the longest I’ve ever done at the time of its writing. Luckily, Fallout 4 only has two expansions.

It’s a little unfair to stack a game up against its iterative sequels, but it’s hard to avoid viewing Penumbra through the lens of Amnesia. It was made by the same people, it follows the same first-person horror style, and the presentation of the narrative is almost the same, so it’s natural to wonder why this game didn’t blow up in the same way its successor eventually would. At first, you’re slowly walking from room to room, keeping your head down and your light off, listening to the horrible creaking and groaning of the walls, it’s everything a horror game should be, at least until you reach the final boss fight. Well, by final boss fight, what I really mean is your very first encounter with a wolf a few minutes after the intro. It’s a real fight too, not the sort of puzzle encounters that have come to characterize these games, you take out a pickaxe and wildly flail around to kill it. The controls are so clunky and the physics so jittery that you might die a couple of times, but after that, you may as well have conquered the game. These wolves are essentially the primary antagonists, spawning all over and being the main obstacles while moving from puzzle to puzzle, and as you get used to fighting them, the tense atmosphere drains almost into nothingness. There are a couple moments that break the mold, but they definitely wouldn’t be enough to justify a recommendation if this was a standalone horror game. However, this series was planned as a trilogy, and this game’s title of “Overture” encapsulates how it’s best understood as a prelude to what comes next, which can be discussed in the following review.

(Continued from my review of Overture)
Black Plague’s story picks up immediately from where Overture’s left off, but surprisingly, that’s just about the only thing that carries over. There aren’t any more wolves to bash, and in fact, there are no enemies to fight at all, combat has been replaced with a total focus on stealth and frantic escape from enemies. The puzzles are more involved than ever, and if you had gotten used to Overture’s blatant problem spaces, it’s easy to get stuck on the new puzzles that are elegantly built into the environment. The story is better, the locations are better, this game is an upgrade to Overture in almost every possible way. The notable exception is how this is the first time Frictional Games would experiment with a character who constantly chats with the protagonist, but it wasn’t particularly effective. Done well, you get memorable characters like System Shock’s SHODAN, but Black Plague’s narrator character sounds like a poor interpretation of Mark Hamill’s Joker, and disrupts the lonely atmosphere rather than adding to it. However, other than that one little problem, this game really is fantastic. Again, it’s not as polished as Amnesia, but all the same good ideas are here, and a few of the bad ideas are notably absent. So, the question is if I think Black Plague is good enough to be worth playing Overture for, and to that I would definitely say yes, at least for the people interested in this style of horror already. It’s a great ending to the story that Overture set up, and I was pleased with how all the details came together in the end. However, didn’t I say this was intended to be a trilogy? Well, let’s get into that in the review of the final entry of the series, the expansion pack called Requiem.

(Continued from my review of Black Plague)
An excerpt from a Rock Paper Shotgun interview with Tom Jubert, the lead writer of the series:
(RPS) Can you explain the confusion over the number of chapters in the Penumbra series? There were to be three, then it was two, and now there's a third again?:

(TJ) Frictional had some problems with the publisher that it's not really my place to go into. Put it this way, if Lexicon Entertainment ever offers you a publishing deal, turn them down, then give the guy a slap.

So, to put it gently, the plans for a Penumbra trilogy got axed due to publisher issues, and the plot had to be finished with an expansion pack. However, the first hour of Requiem will leave you wondering if that closure is really going to happen. Black Plague seemed to wrap up the plot already, and this expansion is just… endless physics puzzles? No monsters, no stealth, no plot? It’s less of a conclusion as it is a set of bonus levels with some extra character details scattered around, but when I discovered this interview, I was at least relieved to see that the developers were up front about that. The interview was published on July 21st, 2008, and Requiem would launch on August 27th, so a quote like “I consider the story to have ended with Black Plague” is of unusual honesty. Unfortunately though, highlighting that the developers didn’t deceive anyone by calling it a narrative step forward is the perfect definition of damning with faint praise, because there isn’t anything else I can compliment it for. It focuses on characters who were developed enough already, the physics puzzles are tedious, there’s almost no horror to this horror game at all, I genuinely can’t think of any reason to play it even if you’re a fan of the previous two games.

So, with all three mini-reviews down, where do I stand on Penumbra as a series? Well, it’s hard for me to say. I really liked Black Plague, but it’s been outdone by its own creators in titles that don’t require playing mediocre prequels, and it’s not so outstanding that I can recommend it outside the context of its successors. I want those ideas to be remembered and iterated upon, but if someone just wanted something to play, I don’t know if Penumbra would be near the top of my recommendations. These games represent a triumph in horror design, but not necessarily of game design, so the audience is always going to be limited. I guess they’ll just remain in the shadow of gaming history, but for a horror series like this, maybe that’s the most fitting way to go.

I had no idea what this game was before I started, and after finishing, I still don’t know. It’s not just me either, it seems like this is a pretty common reaction from people, it’s so unique in every facet of its design that it almost defies categorization. To put it in its simplest terms, imagine a sidescroller where the stage would fit perfectly on the face of a cylinder, you can go up and down to the edges of the screen, but the stage loops on itself as you freely fly from side to side. The goal is to collect 20 blue orbs while accumulating points from picking up items and doing aerial acrobatics. You have to reach a certain point threshold to unlock new levels, but past that, my comprehension fails me. There’s an odd system to breed dream creatures and affect their moods to create new ones, which then affect the music and landscape of the stage you hatched them in, but it’s entirely optional and I didn’t even notice until doing research afterwards, along with many other little hidden mechanics. The deeper you go the weirder it gets, and the bright circus aesthetic can be almost sinister when laid on top of systems and symbolism outside the realm of comprehension. While surrealism is usually pretty concurrent with horror, the game seems to capture a surreal form of joy instead, fitting for a game that focuses on dreams, but I mostly found it off-putting. The gameplay itself is decent enough, the flight has a nice momentum to it and looping around to pick up gems can be satisfying, but this is the first time where I have to dock a game points for feeling uncomfortable. It all works fine, it’s imaginative, but… it just doesn’t feel right. I guess that means I have to give it the points back for effectively using surrealist imagery to speak to the subconscious, and that’s not something I thought I would ever have to say about a Sonic Team game made for kids. Even though it defies traditional description, it can at least be remembered as Sonic Team’s most imaginative attack on my psyche yet.

Darkest Dungeon is essentially about running an assembly line. The tactical dungeon-crawling may make it feel more like an RPG, but the purpose of leveling your characters isn’t to create a balanced squad that can take on any challenge, it’s to make their deaths as cost-efficient as possible. As characters level up, they refuse to go on lower-tier missions, meaning that they’re always moving to higher and higher challenges, which present the opportunity for the greatest rewards. While the increased challenge of these missions will often result in deaths, the resources they feed back into the system expedites the process of getting new recruits to that same level. Once characters reach the top tier, the only place left for them is the titular Darkest Dungeon itself, a multi-stage death trap which will likely wipe more than a few squads of fully-leveled characters, who each took many hours of care to get to that point. To fully ensure that the dungeon chews up your best soldiers, fleeing results in the death of one randomly-selected party member, and the rest will refuse to ever go back. So, the assembly line is a process of building up teams to the max level, feeding them into the dungeon, learning a little bit more each time, and hoping that one is eventually able to break through. However, a lot of players understandably felt frustrated that so much of their time was essentially going to waste, where a bad critical hit at the start could unravel twelve hours worth of effort. The complaints were so loud that a new difficulty mode was added which let higher-level characters join lower-level missions, along with allowing characters to go back into the Darkest Dungeon, and a few other features to expedite progress in general. It sounds like this would solve the problem, but in a way, it means there’s no definitive way to play the game anymore. In this easier Radiant mode, the assembly line has essentially been turned off, the loop of growing new recruits and feeding them to the insatiable maw has been replaced with just grinding the ultimate squad until you’re ready to go. While that’s much less demoralizing, the tactical gameplay isn’t deep enough to stand on its own. The decisions of killing stress or damage dealers, or what ranks of enemies to focus on, essentially remain the same from the first hour to the last, in order to accommodate a wide variety of parties across a hundred hours. If players are able to just stick to the easiest, safest, and most boring dungeons to grind up a perfect squad, that becomes the dominant strategy, and that’s what they’ll do. However, the normal mode has its own problems, since it seems to take joy in not giving players any sense of progress or catharsis at all. Players essentially have to take joy in the misery, which on one hand can be a powerful theme, but after the fifty hour mark it can understandably get extremely tiresome. More than almost any other game I’ve ever played, the difficulty modes feel like entirely different games, and while there are things I love about each one, I wish their strengths could have been balanced into a version that respected players’ time while also preserving the bleak mechanics. Until that ever happens though, I’m forced to give it half the score its aesthetics and ideas should probably merit.

If you would indulge me a moment of self promotion, I made a video with some thoughts tangentially related to this game instead of a written review.
Ok not many people use inline links on backloggd so I'm putting the actual link in here anyway https://youtu.be/t3gKKCRfjgk
Also, here's some bonus content:

Firstly, the nature of the spoilers relates to one of the endings, and some tiny tricks that might make the game easier to start with. However, I tried to avoid spoiling anything that would lessen your first-time experience (you'll notice that there's no footage of any bosses or cutscenes).

Secondly, the developers responded to the video on Twitter with "Thank you, that was an excellent analysis which we'll take on board for XC2 if and when it happens! :) You're right that we could have done more to differentiate the two players, but we wanted to hold a few things back. I think we'd handle the ending differently next time too! ;)". I think they got a lot of the same complaints, so I apologize for piling on, but I would love to see a refined XC2.

Thirdly, I didn't really review the game as much as I just talked about it, but I want to note that Xeno Crisis really is a fun game that I do recommend. At the time of writing, it's available on Game Pass, which is where I discovered it, and that's probably the best way to get your value. I may like the game, but I am value conscious, and I don't think anyone other than retro-enthusiasts would get $20 out of it.

And some bonus trivia:

That "ok maybe I am" at the start that lasts for .5 seconds took a ton of time to implement, since black screens and white text cause compression to go nuts. I kept getting artifacts and weirdness, so it's actually just 1% opacity B-roll footage rolling in the background, which seemed to fix the problem.

You may also wonder if I played through Mega Man 3 for Mega-Man-3 seconds of footage, and the answer is yes.

Finally, the cut between Mega Man 3's end-stage fadout and the cheat menu is my favorite in the video, smooth as butter.

If you watched the video and read all this you're a saint, thank you thank you. Oh also just because I know you're a saint at this point, user LukeGirard also posted a video of his own today, so check that out too: A Positive Perspective on Sonic CD