Never thought I'd see the day where Alpha Protocol would escape rights hell and reemerge available to legally obtain once more. I already had an old Steam copy long before the delisting happened, but I was quick to double-dip on GOG to show my support once I heard the news and it also gave me a good reason to replay the game after my last one quite some time ago. AP still holds up for me as one of my favorite games, flaws and all, though said flaws definitely are rather over-exaggerated I feel; it really isn’t that especially janky or buggy when it comes to ambitious WRPGs.

When I first completed AP more than a decade ago I was a bit lukewarm on it, I enjoyed it enough but some of the fights frustrated me, having not fully understood how to best utilize the builds and how to break the combat. Replaying the game not long after transformed it into one of my favorite games, because through that replay I realized how genuinely reactive AP was and how unrivaled it was and still is in this regard, nearly fifteen years on. While Bioware at the time was touting how Mass Effect was going to take all your choices into account, which they would inevitably flounder on that promise in the end, Obsidian quietly fulfilled that promise in reactivity with AP. ME was obviously a much taller order, being a trilogy and all, but Obsidian did the smart thing of just having AP be a standalone game which allowed easier and greater reactivity; and boy does this game have layers. There's so much to uncover depending how much you explore and your relationships with the characters. Finding dossiers on characters and factions have real tangible effects on the game. This information could also lead to very different outcomes and even a unique mission or two. Alpha Protocol’s dialogue system is a more fleshed out expansion of Mass Effect’s Paragon/Renegade dialogue system with three personality styles based off popular spy characters; Professional (Jason Bourne, this one being the more heroic one on average, as much as a black ops fed agent can be anyway), Suave, (James Bond, though like the biggest dudebro version of Bond ever who has got all the smarm and verbal sexual harassment but none of the class) and Aggressive. (Jack Bauer, complete aggro asshole who shoots first and asks questions never) There is some more nuance to these personalities so they don’t always adhere to that mold strictly and characters respond differently to which approach you take with them and the game encourages a varied approach because of that. The dialogue system is also a precursor to the Telltale formula, as you are timed in your responses unlike in Bioware RPGs of the time. The dialogue system is the best part of the game mechanically, really mastering what Bioware was working on at the time. Being able to use information you gleaned from dossiers in dialogue is also real cool and characters will even compliment on how prepared you are.

The gameplay outside dialogue is kinda jank though, but honestly isn't notably so compared to other WRPGs of the era. Like the pre-EA buyout Bioware games of the 2000’s and Mass Effect 1 didn't have great combat either, for example. And if people can forgive the sheer mess of Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines (I'm among them) AP can be forgiven too. The biggest FYIs I'd give when it comes to the combat is that the game demands that you need to wait for the reticle of the guns to tighten up in order to consistently hit enemies and that stealth is primarily used as a combat option, a very good one as you level it up more, but not as a means to ghost through the game. You can avoid combat with stealth but the game still throws a bunch of fights at you that you can't avoid, namely the boss fights. Stealth in AP is more meant to be used to become an invisible punch-ghost who throat chops everyone in the room. Combat can be rather fun though, mainly in that most of the stat branches are busted once you start getting midway through the tree. Pistols are the biggest example as Chain Shot is an amazing ability that practically deletes every boss in the game with just the second upgrade of it. Martial Arts is also a fun ability as you can give enemies a flying knee to the face to knock them on their ass and finish them off with a stomp. Also you should put like two points into Sabotage so it makes the hacking mini-games easier or you can just bypass them with EMPs, they get rather rough as the game goes on, though hitting alarms isn’t that big of a deal as the only penalty is that enemies in the area are alerted to you, its not like MGS where they can spawn in.

Narratively, I do think the game is quite good with more depth than you would initially think. AP's tone is actually kind of all over the place, but I think it still works despite any hiccups; it actually ends up being this odd combination of genuine spy thriller that dabbles in some rather bold political themes for a mainstream video game, mainly it how the game has such as an utterly dim view of American empire and the military industrial complex, but it’s also essentially an almost parodic pastiche of the genre, letting you be a big juvenile power fantasy fairly straight most of the time where you can bang most of the female cast while making snarky one-liners and fight a Russian mobster and full time Tony Montana cosplayer who gets superpowers from snorting coke. The game can be quite funny too, manly with how Thorton is just such a big asshole; though it definitely falls into some cringe outdated 2000’s jokes at times, mainly when it comes to Suave Thorton being a creep. When it comes to the serious themes, in contrast, one example is how the Islamic terrorist leader set up as the initial antagonist is actually a man who honors his word; he has a whole bunch of innocent blood on his hands but he's still a lesser evil compared to, as well as being a mere pawn to, the grand web of global capital and American empire. American intelligence, the so called "good guys" are actually a den of sociopaths who number crunch death tolls to determine acceptable losses for American interests, dipshit nepo babies, and patriotic dupes unwittingly giving their service to a military industrial machine that will easy discard them without a second thought. The corporations are the actual masters of the American state and they use global politics as their playground just to make Number go up. Even though I really wouldn't call the game leftist, that's more for the Obsidian games Josh Sawyer directed, the game still has a rather keen awareness of American imperial megalomania for a 2010 video game and one of my favorite examples of this is a dossier that reveals that one of the previous names for Alpha Protocol was Deus Vult.

When it comes to the cast I think AP’s is neat. They aren’t as fleshed out as say, the Mass Effect crew, and they can be rather standard spy story clichés like SIE for example, who’s the big German femme fatale who likes violence and Thorton being aggro with her, but there’s always usually something more about them beneath the surface that you can uncover and figuring out what response they’d approve of is fun. You can also totally just piss them off too and the game even rewards you for it just like it would if they liked you. One of my favorites among the cast is Conrad Marburg, who I think is one of the best video game antagonists because he is still the only video game villain who actually takes into account how you've played the game up until the point you first meet him and he will know if you’re just trying to manipulate him by getting under his skin. Speaking of villains, AP also has my favorite evil ending in a game because you can just win over all the people working under the main villain and just take his place, to do so requires some thought and not going the standard stupid evil path of just killing everyone, though you can actually kill pretty much the entirety of the named cast if you want! That’s why this game’s the GOAT, it is truly is one of the most reactive games I have ever played.

In conclusion if you have any interest in game reactivity and player choice and don’t mind a bit of WRPG jank I really do recommend playing AP as it is still one of the shining stars, even over a decade later. It sucks we never got a sequel or spiritual successor that ironed out the game’s flaws but I’m just real glad people can experience this game again because it still holds up.

The best Metroidvania I've played that's not either namesake of the genre (I count Bloodstained as a Castlevania) Lost Crown manages to nail pretty much everything about getting the genre down right. The combat flows so well and as someone who usually doesn't like parrying in games the parry window was forgiving enough where I actually enjoyed doing it (Not to mention that you’re not forced to use it to actually beat bosses; this game and how great it is really me reminded me of how much I hated Metroid Dread). The movement and platforming is fast, responsive, and smooth. Moving around the world feels great and there’s enough well-placed warps where backtracking never feels like a problem. Exploration is rewarding with useful upgrades and items to discover and collect. The moves you gain also feel good too and have all that growing power and variety a quality Metroidvania should have. The game also manages to make you feel powerful as you progress through the game but still demands a good engagement with the mechanics on Normal, i.e. bosses are a great mix of requiring you to know how to play but never feeling like a slog. The main antagonist especially, who is clearly Vergil, Judgement Cut and all, is a great example of this. I’m also real glad that the only thing this game cribbed from Dark Souls was the estus flask system because man I am really sick of so many indie Metroidvanias shoehorning in Souls mechanics when they don’t really work all that well with the genre; I liked Hollow Knight in spite of that, but Lost Crown doesn’t have that problem at all. A few of the side-missions are a pain in the ass though so I didn’t bother with them, but overall I did most of them and they were real fun. Ubisoft Montpellier really proving they’re like the only part of Ubi making fantastic passion projects like this instead off AAA slop anymore. Lost Crown definitely going to be one of the must play games of this year and it’s already one of my favorites.

Another quality installment in Digital Eclipse's series and a neat historical look at the UK computer scene of the 80's through Jeff Minter's experiences, especially for me as an American who had little knowledge of it; but man just like with Karateka I just don't like the vast majority of Jeff Minter's games in this collection. A good chunk of them are obnoxious sensory overload that go way too fast and/or are overly complex to a trollish degree. Also didn't change my opinion that Commodore games just sucked. Tempest 2000 is cool though and I definitely can see why it was the only reason to get a Jaguar. Funny thing is I felt Jeff's visualizer programs were more of an interesting topic when it came to his games because even if I wasn't totally into them Jeff had a clear passion for them as well as an ambition that was ahead of his time with them. Just as with Karateka, Llamasoft is a great historical piece but I just wish they could cover games that are mostly fun to play. Regardless I'm completely locked into with this series and definitely will be Day 1 once again for the next installment.

Real fun monster collector RPG that while clearly emulating Pokemon in style feels more like Mega Ten mechanically in some ways. The game starts off rather slow in how your MC doesn't have great movement but once you get the ability from the fire bullet beast you start moving around at a good clip. The game is also pretty open too allowing you to battle gym leaders and boss monsters in almost any order you can choose around the world map. Most beasts seem pretty viable too and I had fun collecting most of them. Overall just had a great time with it.

I liked the demo enough during Next Fest but unfortunately Children of the Sun proved to be entirely style over substance. What starts off as a neat little sniper puzzler with a Killer 7-esque aesthetic devolves into trial and error, tedium, and wonky hitboxes. In some levels you aren't even able to see every enemy initially so you straight up gotta trial and error it. The later mechanics the games adds feel more like annoying gimmicks and the last level is just an absolute slog and I just gave up because I couldn't find the last damn enemy in all the visual noise and didn't feel like repeating all that shit over and over again just to find them. Easy skip and I regret I'm probably past the refund window.

A short, sweet, solid adventure game about solving puzzles to make plants grow. The vibes are nice and the puzzles are logical and while clues aren't actually recorded in your in-game journal they usually aren't far away from each other. The game's not super plot-driven, its mainly the protag dealing with stuffy British eggheads not taking her seriously because she is a woman doing science ala Mary Anning, and this carries the game enough and it even has a nice ending. Overall just a chill game worth checking out.

I liked the demo enough when I played it months back to get this now that Episode 1 is done in EA. Overall Wizordum is a solid enough fantasy boomer shooter currently, though its going to need some more sauce to rival fellow Heretic/Hexen inspired indie shooters such as AMID EVIL and Hedon. The weapons are good and I used mostly all of them but they're not really exciting so far, mainly just variations of standard boomer shooter arsenals, i.e. the ice wand is essentially a machine gun that freezes, the blunderbuss is essentially your shotgun. The level design is solid; levels are rather big but your next objective is always indicated on your map so you won't get lost and the secrets are mostly pretty fair if you're paying attention to breakable walls and you only need to hit your face against more conspicuous objects on the walls. It mostly starts off as essentially fantasy Wolfenstein in level design though it seems like the later levels in Episode 1 start shaking that up. There's a good variation in the levels so far too, ranging from a fantasy town, sewers and dungeons, a graveyard, docks, and moving around the wreckage of the part of town on fire. The soundtrack is actually nice too, embracing the heroic fantasy atmosphere in contrast to its dark fantasy shooter predecessors and contemporaries. Hoping this game keeps improving, but even if it just maintains this current level of quality I'd be cool with it.

I’m an American so I didn’t grow up with The Moomins but I know enough about the series and I’ve been reading some of the comics so I decided to get this after playing the demo months ago.

Overall it’s a chill adventure game where you play as Snufkin as he wages battle against the cops and NIMBYs trying to gentrify Moominvalley. Puzzles are rather easy but it’s fun exploring and the stealth segments against the cops add nice variety. The art and music are wonderful, really capturing the whimsical fairy tale vibes the series has. The writing is fun with a good chunk of the game having Snufkin and Little My bouncing off each other. You can tell this is a love letter to the series so fans will definitely get a kick out of it but I think even you don’t know anything about Moomins you’ll still have a fun time, because it’s just a quality game all around.

The game that's come closest to bringing back all those childhood memories of playing Zoo Tycoon 1. A great mix of simplicity and complexity, as its easy to get the hang of it yet it demands you be able to meet the requirements of the fish as well as giving you side missions to complete so its always giving you enough to do. The devs have been supporting this game with quality expansions for years and I've spent nearly 200 hours with it over the years and have gotten every achievement. Just a fantastic tycoon game.

Death Stranding aka Norman Reedus and the Funky Fetus is a sort of mixed bag of highs and lows, though with enough strengths to make it a solid game that I enjoyed. The game strongly ties in its unorthodox for the AAA scene game mechanics of delivering packages with its narrative themes. Having other players help you through their structures they built and you in turn paying them back through your own creations is a great feature that ties into the game’s themes of community so well. Going around delivering packages is also nice though I wish the bike controlled a bit better and there was slightly less rocks, it’s sometimes a bit of a janky pain to maneuver. The combat and the BTs drag the game down though as they’re just sort of a slog to deal with and the game initially loves just throwing them at you in chokepoints where you can’t just maneuver around them. And it’s even more annoying in endgame when a couple of giant BTs will just spawn out of thin air at you so you have to slowly run away from them. Combat with bandits is okay, but one boss fight just sucks and feels really jank. This game is definite proof to me that Kojima needs an editor or the like to reign him in though because he genuinely does have a good grasp of integrating themes with the gameplay as I said, but man is this game’s narrative rather bogged down in goofy technobabble and mostly adhering to the Garth Marenghi’s school of subtlety. On the other hand though it does have some genuine narrative highs and manages to nail the moments that really matter.

I think the ending is the best example of the dichotomy of the game’s hill and valleys as it’s paced like shit and really needed a second pass, but it also has some of the best parts of the game. The first half is just a total slog with you primarily trudging along a wasteland as the credits slowly go by interspersed with some exposition cutscenes; it’s something that desperately needed to get cut because it just an absolute waste of time. But then the second half kicks in and there you start really learning the truth of what happened and this is where the game pulls off its best narrative moments with genuine emotional gravitas. I’ve seen people mention it before I played this and I have to agree, Tommie Earl Jenkins goes hard, holy shit.

Overall a flawed, yet interesting game that manages to nail the parts that matter to make a worthwhile experience. I’m up for Norman Reedus and the Funky Fetus 2: Electric Boogaloo.

A game clearly made by a bunch of artists and writers who utterly lack the game design skill to actually pull off what they wanted to do. As a lover of adventure games I’m not a stranger to encountering adventure games like this, ones that add mechanics that just drag the experience down because the devs just did not have a good grasp of them at all or were too afraid that their work is not “gamey” enough so they felt the need to shoehorn them in. Little Goody Two Shoes is a life-sim/yuri VN frankensteined together poorly with an RPGmaker horror game and those elements are at complete odds with each other. The aesthetics and atmosphere are phenomenal, merging 90’s shoujo and Grimms’ fairy tales wonderfully. The writing is solid enough too as the main cast of ladies are likable and the mystery is engaging enough. The life sim elements are mostly fine, most of the job mini-games are alright though I’m not a fan of the rat one. The game does a bit of a bad job of pushing the player to overly fear raising suspicion though as it’s usually not hard to avoid or at least drop it down; I can easily see someone screwing themselves if they invested too much stamina and money in bringing Rozenmarine to work with them at all because it’s just not worth it, the villagers can be easily assuaged with the right responses. The night time horror segments is where the game completely goes to shit though.

This game really shows how it’s essentially a bad 2000’s RPGmaker horror game just with an actual budget as the nighttime segments are jank as hell with puzzles mostly relying on trial and error. One night has you run away from a boss who will instantly kill you and the game can’t really handle the chase sequence that well; spike blocks will fall too fast to dodge within a fair window unless you know they’re coming and the second segment seems like sometimes you’ll just get randomly killed even when you’re running full speed. The puzzles gets worse as the game goes on as Thursday has you play floor is lava with phantoms that are attracted to sound, but the camera tends to be too zoomed in to see them effectively at times so you’re probably going to walk your ass into a few of them because the game gives you very little visual or audio cues that they’re coming. Apparently some of the segments were even more obtuse and bullshit before they patched them and that’s just galling to me. The breaking point for me was on Friday where you had to go in complete darkness because turning on your lantern gets you instantly killed by statues. It’s absolutely abysmal puzzle design to the point where I’m baffled the devs thought it was a good idea. It’s not clever or challenging like good adventure game puzzles should, it genuinely feels like a troll. Thankfully somebody on Steam told me the solution so I went back and beat it but man did it still suck. The endings are also unsatisfying because they seem kind of at odds with each other and don’t really give a true conclusion if you take them into account. Just a wet fart of an ending to top off a game that was unraveling as it went along.

This game just utterly frustrates me because this game could have been great but its dogshit design decisions prevent it from being such. The game isn’t completely unsalvageable, a couple patches and overhauling the Friday puzzle to not be so awful and it’d be at a decent enough quality. Gonna be blunt and say they really need to hire a person who actually knows good adventure game design if they want to make keeping games like this. This is definitely the kind of game that you should probably watch an LP of. I’m usually the kind of guy who will readily defend games that have merely serviceable gameplay but great everything else, but Little Goody Two Shoe’s gameplay is too annoying for me to heartily endorse experiencing yourself.

Nice little free DLC combining the two best fishing games of 2023. There's no real new story content but the aberrant fish from Dredge are faithfully recreated here and hunting them during the foggy nights is extremely lucrative as the cloaked figures will pay you top dollar to eat some of the big ones and the Dredge Merchant will also pay you good money when you sell the leftovers to her, because the Aberrant fish are only good for that night. You also got a new gun too. I don't really plan on getting all the aberrants because I already beat the game and completed all the main sidequests, including beating the super boss, so I don't feel like waiting until the next foggy nights to do it. Just overall a solid free addition that gives you a great avenue for more in-game revenue.

Starts off super strong with fantastic art design and genuinely engaging language mechanics. I was thinking that this is what I wanted Heaven's Vault to be. For most of the game I was having a blast doing the language puzzles and I didn't even mind some of the gameplay deviations like the stealth segments. The game unfortunately falls apart at the leadup to the final area with an extremely tedious math puzzle as well as the final area where if you don’t want to get the completely nothing basic ending you have to do obscene amounts of backtracking through the massive levels with no map if you want to actually get the real ending. It’s just super deflating how hard the game just fell flat on its ass right at the end. I just came off of this game feeling disappointed and I think its utter praise its getting is kind of unwarranted. Really kind of reminds me of how I ended up feeling about Norco last year. Still I think it’s worth playing, just set your expectations accordingly.