I can't think of the last time I played a game where I mulled over its themes like this one. I do this all the time for great movies (I did this for The Zone of Interest a couple of months ago), but I don't think I've seen a story come out of a game that fully utilized its medium and was so artistically unique, quite like this one. It throws a LOT at the wall, and while not all of it sticks gameplay-wise, I still recommend people try this out. It's short (almost too short), cheap, and it'll gnaw at your brain hours after beating it.

Don't mistake me. This is a HIGH 7, and don't be surprised if it's bumped up by the end of the year, as I can only see myself appreciating this game more from here.

Is it a game for everyone? I'm not sure. Is it a unique experience? Definitely.

It doesn't say anything about faith that hasn't been said before, but as a narrative-driven game, it's a cinematic experience with good writing and good presentation with its humor. Most importantly, it's a game with character.

I'm not sure if that bit at the end was necessary though, I think it conflicts with the rest of the story.

Indika is a masterful video game, though very frequently not-fun. I need to warn about Indika’s content as a religious horror game.

Towards the end, there’s a scene that addresses sexual coercion. Using the garish fade-to-red film technique to address the dehumanization without having to render the details, there’s a point where this game reaches peak narrative horror. This works with the core theme of a deep desire to crawl out your skin in fucked-up religious sort of prison that includes your own worldview. It’s just… forewarning / skip-ability would be good.

It reminds me of a lot of A24’s more recent horror films: the terror keeps things moving, puts us on the edge of our seat and makes is want for the ick to be defeated., The bad situation is the point. None of what’s happening is okay.

The more chill moments also have this air of discomfort. Yaking selfie screenshots of Indika feels a bit like an invasion of privacy. She looks briefly at the camera when you rotate around to see her face, then immediately looks away, trying to avoid the knowing fact that we’re watching her.

Taking selfies of Indika feels a bit like an invasion of privacy. She looks briefly at the camera when you rotate around to see her face, then immediately looks away, trying to avoid the knowing fact that we’re watching her.

The gameplay itself is mostly about trying to get out of your own personal hell. Indika frequently takes control of nightmarish Industrial Revolution era steam machines to seek out that one very-restrictive pathfinding exit. This makes exploration often feel as oppressive as Indika’s guilt-ridden alienation. The reprieve in all of this is a partnership with a man whose arm is infected with sepsis named Ilya. Their friendship book-ends the game and yields the most narrative surprises. I should go into it more, but for now I think I need to call it.

I have grown more attached to Shadowheart than I have to most people in my actual life and the fact that she's not real depresses me immensely.

Oh, the game? It's great!

The amount of ambition on display from Larian Studios here is absolutely staggering, to the point that it's actually surprising just how much of it pays off. The characters are all incredibly interesting, well-rounded and fantastically written and voice-acted. The gameplay kept me engaged for the most part, and despite my general dislike of turn-based action it was pretty easy for me to get to grips with it.

The story is great and there's enough side-quests off the beaten path that I feel like BG3 is well worth paying full price for. I went through the game at a fairly brisk pace and clocked up 85 hours in the end. If you were willing to explore different ways of playing the game (including the unique Dark Urge path) then you could easily lose hundreds of hours to it.

Sadly a few issues prevented me from giving BG3 full marks. The game's third act can be very overwhelming at first, and it can be difficult to know what to do and where to go without losing certain content. Some side quests feel unfinished, like Larian ran out of time before they could flesh them out properly. That's not to mention that a lot of the stories of your fellow companions, so beautifully developed in the first two acts, tend to fizzle out. Once you complete their personal quests they stop being the fully fleshed out characters they were and end up just being sorta... there.

There were also a few annoying bugs riddled throughout; characters sometimes being unable to jump, textures not loading properly or being stretchy, enemies taking almost a full minute to decide what they wanted to do in a turn. Nothing game-breaking but they added up.

I don't regret any of the time I spent playing this - in fact, as someone with absolutely no prior experience with anything D&D-related this has actually made me want to get into it more, whether that's through other video games or actually playing it with other people. Of course, for that I actually need to find some friends first...

P.S. I don’t care if the ‘Party Limit Begone’ mod is ‘cheating’, nothing feels better than running around the city with my merry band of ten adventurers. The easier combat is secondary to not having to miss out on any companion-specific dialogue with NPCs.

Man, I remember playing this game way back in 2017 and thinking to myself "I don't see what all the hype is about, this is a girly girl game, I can't play this". I did stick with it though and discovered a heartwrenching story that had me hooked and made me tear up. Now I played the remastered version of it six years later and here's what I think:

1. The remastered version improves almost nothing, in fact I had more issues with glitches and what not than the original game.

2. Obviously if you've played these games before some scenes don't hit as hard as they used to. None of the plot twists have any effect anymore but that's not the game's fault.

So while I would have rated the orginal game higher(probs like a nine) I still really enjoyed it cuz fu*k man I still teared up. If you haven't played the first Life is Strange you missing out.

This game is definitely more of a 6 when you look at the mechanics, animations, simple gameplay. I think the skill of the environmental/monster design and sound work pushes it closer to at a 7...I think if you are going to love this game it will be because of the very well modeled world and folklore. A lot of the instant death moments aren't very well signaled and even worse are not even consequential. It's like a walking simulator (game type I actually really enjoy) but you might randomly die and have to do the last 5-10 seconds of walking again. Boss fights are light and easy. Whole game feels like they wanted to design this world and had to find gameplay to fill it with afterward.

Man…. I didn’t like it very much.

To be ABSOLUTELY FAIR, the setting and tone just aren’t really my thing, so I had a feeling I wasn’t gonna vibe with it. But I mean… that’s how I felt about The Walking Dead, and I ended up absolutely loving that game! But this just didn’t have enough to make me like it despite my tastes.

Every episode feels like the same thing to me. Float around in an empty bland space station, maybe occasionally talk to a character. It gets old.

I don’t even think it necessarily does those things BADLY, floating around feels good, but… man I’m over it by episode 3.

The characters aren’t BAD but I feel like you don’t get enough time with them for me to really care about them much. I guess you get a personality out of Khan, but man, I feel like I didn’t feel what the game WANTED me to feel for these guys.

My friend and I were comparing it to New Tales from the Borderlands. That game is awful, much worse as a game than The Expanse is… but I gotta say, I feel like it might be more memorable! They’re all over the place in that game! The Expanse is technically a better game, but it’s just SO dull to me.

Yeah, a shame, but to be honest I wasn’t that interested to begin with, so it’s not like I was that disappointed.

When a studio says they take inspiration from adventure games like Life is Strange, I pay attention. We follow a maid during the late 1950s, working in a hotel for a crass boss. You are basically a snoop and end up getting involved in a mystery of a love triangle, and you take it upon yourself to get co-workers involved, and the entire thing spirals out of control. Is this game a lesson on minding your own business or doing what you think is right?

You play as Ms. Roy. You start out by getting to know your co-workers, learning the game's mechanics, and starting your amateur sleuthing. There's not much to the game's mechanics. You can interact with dozens upon dozens of objects, mostly letters you end up reading, and either throw them away or just inspect them. You spend your time between three floors. The fifth floor, the basement, and the lobby You eventually pick a male or female co-worker to help you dig into other people's business, but you also have a job to do. You need to clean and tidy up each room, and all of your actions have consequences towards the end of the game. I don't want to say what can or can't cause these, as it can really spoil the ending, but just know that picking things up and keeping them is something the game tells you to think about the most.

Inspecting items doesn't really matter as you're putting them back down, but scouring all the drawers, every item, no matter how simple it seems, might give you a clue to figure out what's happening in the love circle you want to so desperately be a part of. Sometimes you need to go to the basement and get items you don't have, and there are a few puzzles thrown in. These aren't difficult either. matching up pieces of paper, deciphering a code, or just finding a few clues here and there. You can hear Roy's inner dialogue to help give you hints, and you can read everything you picked up in your inventory.

Outside of interacting with objects and solving the occasional puzzle, there isn't anything else to do. There's no exploring, character interactions are scripted, and there are only three characters in the entire game. This is a very short game with a runtime of about 3 hours. I do have to give credit to the developers for creating such a tense mystery at that time and actually giving the characters some depth. It's not long enough to really give an entire backstory like other adventure games, but they cut out the nonsense and get to the meat of what they want to do and the story they want to tell. The writing is well done, and the voice acting is pretty excellent too. Your choices also really do matter, but the physical interactions with objects make you realize what you could have done differently as the final moments of the story pass.

The visuals aren't anything impressive, but the game looks period-correct, and it's not ugly. The lip syncing is off, but the characters look good, and they have a unique look and a lot of character in their personalities. Sadly, my biggest complaint is that I wanted to know more about these characters. The game focuses solely on this mystery, but just enough personality in the characters pokes through that this could have been a much longer game. I wanted to know more about Ms. Roy and who she is as a person. That's what made Life is Strange so great. It focused a lot on the characters, who they are as people, and their lives. There's a lot of potential here for something greater, but the end product of an interesting and gripping mystery is done well enough. This makes for a fun evening with choices that really matter, but that's about it.