Vazok
3 reviews liked by Vazok
Alan Wake Remastered
2021
5.5/10
The concept is good: it's a self-reflexive pastiche of many horror imageries (among others I've enjoyed how it re-mediates Twin Peaks) and, at its core, it both justifies most of its game mechanics through its plot and fascinatingly reflects on the link between narratives and pre-determination.
As in Control, btw, Remedy willingly destroys the game's atmosphere, plot, and worldbuilding through dumb, repetetive and continuous action. Except for 2-3 environmental puzzles, from beginning to end you just shoot zombie-like creatures. It's not just action-oriented, it's a pure action game within a horror setting. Fighting waves of enemies soon clashes with plot, character building, atmosphere, rythm. It's ludonarrative dissonance at its best and you just can't ignore no matter if you try. I did my best to focus on the positive aspects of the game but in the end it's just impossible to ignore that you run and shoot at random people from beginning to end, striving to run from location to location to desperately trigger the next cutscene.
Also: differently from Control, here the directing style of the cutscenes is hilariously over the top and hyper-kinetic and it's really hard to take it seriously.
Also: the remaster for Switch is one of the worst things I've ever witnessed and that console should just die.
The concept is good: it's a self-reflexive pastiche of many horror imageries (among others I've enjoyed how it re-mediates Twin Peaks) and, at its core, it both justifies most of its game mechanics through its plot and fascinatingly reflects on the link between narratives and pre-determination.
As in Control, btw, Remedy willingly destroys the game's atmosphere, plot, and worldbuilding through dumb, repetetive and continuous action. Except for 2-3 environmental puzzles, from beginning to end you just shoot zombie-like creatures. It's not just action-oriented, it's a pure action game within a horror setting. Fighting waves of enemies soon clashes with plot, character building, atmosphere, rythm. It's ludonarrative dissonance at its best and you just can't ignore no matter if you try. I did my best to focus on the positive aspects of the game but in the end it's just impossible to ignore that you run and shoot at random people from beginning to end, striving to run from location to location to desperately trigger the next cutscene.
Also: differently from Control, here the directing style of the cutscenes is hilariously over the top and hyper-kinetic and it's really hard to take it seriously.
Also: the remaster for Switch is one of the worst things I've ever witnessed and that console should just die.
Murder House
2020
6/10
Quite fun and creepy. As a hyper nostalgic retro survival horror focused on camera angles, disempowerment and the uncanny I couldn't but love it. At the same time, it's also a quite fascinating reflection on remediation, in a juicy dialogue with the slasher subgenre. Great!
Quite fun and creepy. As a hyper nostalgic retro survival horror focused on camera angles, disempowerment and the uncanny I couldn't but love it. At the same time, it's also a quite fascinating reflection on remediation, in a juicy dialogue with the slasher subgenre. Great!
5/10
The concept may be good (although quite derivative: an inner journey in which you reconstruct your character's traumas and past as you traverse the illogic and threatening spaces of his psyche). Plus, I always love phenomenologically unstable worlds (see Superliminal) and psychological horror. And yet the game is so boring, so uninteresting, so poor and repetitive in its atmospheres, so dumb in its building of suspance, so wrong in certain choices (the unexplicable tv interferences and glitch aesthetics, the random puzzles here and there, the enemies wandering around) I found it very, very hard to finish it.
The concept may be good (although quite derivative: an inner journey in which you reconstruct your character's traumas and past as you traverse the illogic and threatening spaces of his psyche). Plus, I always love phenomenologically unstable worlds (see Superliminal) and psychological horror. And yet the game is so boring, so uninteresting, so poor and repetitive in its atmospheres, so dumb in its building of suspance, so wrong in certain choices (the unexplicable tv interferences and glitch aesthetics, the random puzzles here and there, the enemies wandering around) I found it very, very hard to finish it.