The Short Message looks great and the cherry blossom monster design is actually really well done - it looks like a Silent Hill game (despite not being set there at all) and it gives me that grimey feel to the world that the trailers for the upcoming Remake feel like they're cleaned up a bit too much. Sure there are some framerate dips but I'm rarely too fussed by them and they didn't really distract from the experience. It also mostly sounds good - there's another great Yamaoka track in the credits and the intermittent background audio throughout does its absolute best to keep you on edge. It is unfortunately let down a little by less than stellar voicework and an especially unconvincing dub on some live-action cutscenes - not sure if this was meant to be intentionally ethereal but it ended up just looking and sounding bad.

It's major problems come with just about everything else though - the story, script and I guess the Short Message we're getting are eyerollingly blunt and really doesn't tackle any of the themes it mentions with anything more than a puddle's depth of thought. In general, wandering around an abandoned tower block isn't inherently bad but the lack of any kind of tension or real environmental storytelling while you're doing so just makes the experience a bit dull. I think it's trying and I appreciate that, but it just doesn't quite get there in execution.

There are segments with the aforementioned cherry-blossom monster that do give you something to think about, but only fleetingly - you're put through Otherworld maze sections where you're chased until you reach a magical exit door but these sections are mostly pretty linear until the very end where you find yourself wishing they had stayed that way. You're thrown into mazes which are likely meant to disorientate you and ratchet up the tension, they only really succeed in the first point. Chase sequences have been a staple of the first-person horror boom since Amnesia Dark Descent but this feels like another example of something being implemented because it's a genre thing - there's no thought as to how or why this relates the story or characters involved. It's a chase through a maze because that's what horror games do.

It's a very large map and so easy to get lost through doors and hallways that all look very similar, having to collect four items and then an exit all while being chased, with one wrong turn meaning you could run into the monster and need to start again. Less scary and more frustrating, and eventually pretty boring.

Even for free I don't think this is worth your time, even for Silent Hill fans. There are some nods to other games in the series but they're just reminders of better games. I've seen people say you can't be too critical of something that's free but I absolutely disagree - yes, I'm sure a lot of work went into this but it's still a finished product at the end of the day.

There's really no other way to put it. This game (and possibly franchise) is morally and creatively bankrupt. Between the shallow depictions of mental health whether there's dramatic zooms of the protagonist self harming or even going as far to have chapters end with you jumping off a building and the following interludes flash a suicide hotline message until the level loads or the awkward anime dub tier voice acting berate you with insults or commentary on your surroundings because Konami needs to remind you this is in a fact a serious game and they're afraid of leaving things to interpretation, I fail to see how the 2 hours I spent with this tech demo can leave me anticipation of the upcoming Silent Hill 2 remake or "missing the point".

This whole experience ends up feeling like a parody of the thing it's trying to comment and I don't think that's the takeaway someone with diagnosed BPD should be feeling.

You know that bit of Terraria right at the beginning where you shuffle to build a home before nightfall, for you're soon to be assaulted by the unspeakable horrors that prowl in the dark? It's a surprisingly tense moment that never lasts very long, as the next time you come above ground, you're likely to be decked out in at least some plate armor. What if there were an game just about that night? The fine folks at Bippinbits have you covered with their game Dome Keeper.

Dome Keeper puts you in the role of an engineer that opens the game by crash-landing on an unexplored planet, then begins gathering resources and whatever else they can find underground. Encased by the walls of their hi-tech dome, with the only exit being a mine shaft leading deep into the earth, they must make the best of their time to obtain metals to strenghten the base before a wave of monsters strikes. Once that happens, they'll power up the dome's defensive weaponry and hope for the best.

It's a fantastic core loop: mine, bring whatever you can back to the surface, survive the monsters' assault, upgrade everything, rinse and repeat until either the map is beaten or you are. There are only three types of resources, which you'll have to decide on whether to use to make your mining tools more efficient, or your dome, more resilient, an increasingly hard choice as the upgrades become more expensive the further you push into the tree. There are two modes to the game, one which has you hunting for an item somewhere in the underground, and another in which sending resources off-planet gives points, and the goal is to score as high as possible.

A short session length -- it takes 30~60 minutes to reach a victory screen depending on game mode -- combined with atmospheric sound design and gorgeous pixel art make Dome Keeper an excellent game to unwind to, as its frantic pace can take your mind off of anything. Do be warned, however, that you might end up staying for longer than initially intended: as runs are completed, new stages and items are unlocked, which beckon the player to try another run. A large amount of possible upgrades to your gear, some even mutually exclusive, also encourage new attempts with different strategies.

Puzzlingly, however, variety is exactly the game's greatest shortcoming. Most of the unlocks and upgrade paths are strictly worse than their competition no matter the situation, and you're likely to follow the same upgrade path every time. Notably, a second playable character that is completely different from the default was added at one point, was so universally rejected that he earned a rework update, and even then is still not worth picking over the default.

In some cases, this is a consequence of the starting kit being just too solid: the initial release was developed around it, after all, and the rest of the arsenal is an attempt to switch things up. It should be said, however, that there are multiple instances of overtuning in the game, the advantages of an item or upgrade being completely offset by downsides presumably placed there for balance's sakes. Regardless of the cause, it remains a common theme that a new item will have a much higher skill floor and/or demand a larger resource investment to get online while offering worse performance than the old one.

The game has been out for less than a year and is still under active development, with the developers being active on the Steam forums and listening to players' feedback, so it is my hope that these issues will be reduced in time, and I do believe Dome Keeper is worth giving a try regardless, especially if you have a Steam Deck.

fuck it, five stars. not because it's perfect (it certainly isn't), but because in its final hours it totally transcends itself, reaching some towering heights and retroactively improving everything that came before. this is one of the most idiosyncratic, visionary works i've experienced in all my time playing games, absolutely overflowing with ideas (about ideas), the result of someone who evidently did not give a shit about restraint or good sense - an attitude i might as well try to embody in my little review here. this is an impassioned, rousing defense of this medium's artistic worth, inspired, resonant, prophetic, stupid, smart, batshit insane all at once, itself the culmination of its own central thesis; to claw your way through the mud, to overcome yourself, to leave behind a beacon, to engrave in fire "i was here", to affirm yourself and in doing so elevate all others with you. my language is cloudy and more than a little histrionic, no doubt, but how else to discuss this thing but with the shock and awe and breathless grandiosity with which it climaxes with! when faced with that raw impact, it suddenly seems oh so trivial that it's a little uneven, that not all its mechanics are perfectly elaborated on, that some parts lag in comparison to others, that kojima's still not a great dramatist. ultimately, i'd take something this distinctly expressed any day over something that gets closer to whatever my ideal of perfection is. actually, on second thought - imperfection is precisely my ideal of perfection. would you not take a diamond with all its harsh edges over the smoothest, roundest rock?