Nothing interesting to say about this one unfortunately. I know this is supposed to be the "Appetizer" to El Paso, Elsewhere's "Main Course," but it leaves a lot to be desired.

Unsatisfying. Not worth the price of admission I'm afraid.

[EDIT 12/17/23] I've finished El Paso, Elsewhere and this game specifically remains an anomaly to me. I don't think I would've had such an adverse reaction if any of this game capitalized on the strengths of Elsewhere, but since it doesn't, what you're left with is a pretty bland, boring, and short wave survival FPS. Definitely feel like if the gameplay was closer to Elsewhere, this would at least be a shoo-in. Still can't recommend this one.

Been looking forward to playing this for a while. Followed the dev on Twitter when it was still an unnamed prototype and it was really cool to see the trailer for Viewfinder and realize, “Ah, it’s that game!”

However, Viewfinder was always going to be disappointing because the idea was, unfortunately, a little too good; it captures the imagination a little too much. It’s such a dazzling concept that its implementation was always going to be a letdown no matter how well it worked.

I finished Viewfinder in one go, and it was exhilarating and fun, and I also don’t know if it’s a game I’ll come back to anytime soon.

I imagine people might compare Viewfinder to Portal, but that’s an expected misunderstanding. Viewfinder is almost the total inverse of Portal. If Portal is a game about creating passageways through space, Viewfinder is a game about creating space.

It’s unfortunate then, that no matter how compelling the idea was and is, Viewfinder’s camera can only be used as a copy + paste button. The only instances where Viewfinder plays with object size and perspective is when players are given photos to use, instead of taking the photos themselves. I’ve never played Superliminal, so I have to guess that maybe there was a conscious effort to avoid overt comparisons to that game? I don’t want to speculate but it still feels like a missed opportunity.

That’s not to say that there aren’t any other fun or interesting ideas here. There’s plenty to choose from, and the gimmicks give the game a lot of personality. There’s a few levels where players have to figure out optical illusions to progress, which is great; the idea is sprinkled intermittently throughout later levels, but never to the extent that I was frustrated or annoyed by optical illusions being included in a puzzle.

Really, on a macro-scale, the main complaint I’ve seen many others repeat (and I’ll repeat it here) is that the game is too easy. Balancing difficulty is not something I wish upon my worst enemies, doubly so in a puzzle game of all things. Still, the hardest puzzle I grappled with in my playtime [puzzle spoilers I guess??] involved a watermelon. The challenge was to clone a watermelon to place on a scale without giving players a camera of their own. There’s one stationary camera available but it’s directly facing a slope, and the area surrounding it is infected by “violet” (which means it doesn’t appear in pictures taken). I must’ve been stumped for like ten minutes until I realized the solution was to take a blank picture, use it to “cut” the watermelon in half so it’s flat on one side, and then use the slope/camera to take pictures of the halved watermelon.

So, in summary, the solution was to cut the watermelon.

And, I don’t know about you, but there’s a universe where a puzzle as deviously simple as this would be considered very clever and memorable, but to me it really underlined the game’s biggest flaw: Viewfinder wants players to think outside the box, but the box is very small, and most players are already thinking far outside of the box to begin with. The game can’t account for players’ wild imaginations, let alone tap the potential of its own spectacular promises.

Another thing I suppose I’ll draw attention to was the Vinesauce clip circulating Twitter following the game’s release, which sparked a very annoying week or so of “discourse” about Marvel/Whedonesque dialogue in video games or whatever. The conversation was a pointless retread of Forspoken’s critical reception earlier this year, a game which was subsequently derided for its writing and protagonist’s line delivery.

Let’s rip this band-aid off right now: “MCU dialogue” as a criticism has lost all applicable meaning. There was, at some point in time, a set of behaviors or similar lines that people could reasonably identify as Marvel or Whedonesque dialogue, but now terminally online denizens have co-opted the phrase to mean, “dialogue that I find annoying”.

Make no mistake: I also find the dialogue from this one character in Viewfinder annoying! The weirdest part is that she plays such a diminutive role in the game overall? This character (ironically I believe she’s credited as “Best Friend” in the credits) talks nonstop for the first 20-30 minutes of the game, like a parody of the worst handhold-y game dialogue ever conceived, a Hyper-Navi that exists only to point out the extremely obvious.

Then, she just…. disappears for 99% of the game? I really have to wonder what the meaning behind this character was, because it feels intentional to start the game with her, and then have her be relegated to optional phone conversations for the remainder of the story. I have to wonder what the point was? Was it supposed to be funny? Were players supposed to breathe a collective sigh of relief as they realized their game would no longer be interrupted by incongruous character dialogue? I don’t know!

Vinny even went on to praise Viewfinder and called it "one of the better puzzle games [he’s] played." Still, I can’t help but think this one Twitch clip did irreparable damage to the game during its launch window. It’s a little sad and unfair imo!

It’s a fun game! It’s not the most satisfying or fulfilling puzzle game I’ve ever played but it’s short and sweet and warping reality with pictures never gets old. Won’t change your life but likely not an experience you’ll regret either.

Such an impressive title, but I don’t know if it dethrones the original.

Max Payne 2 acts as a “mirror” of the first game. Max Payne 1 and 2 both begin at the very end of their respective stories, the events of the game are told in past tense. Max Payne 1 and 2’s inciting incidents begin with a woman being killed, something Max even comments on the second time. Max finds himself in the middle of a gang war between the Punchinello Crime Family and the Russian Mob again. Look anywhere for this parallelism and you’ll find it.

It’s a remarkably short game, clocking in at just under 6 hours on a first playthrough and less than 5 hours on a second.

I thought, “Man, this game is still missing something, like a horde mode! That would’ve added a good amount of replayability.”

Then, I found the horde mode. Did you know Max Payne 2 has a horde mode? I played it for like 30 minutes and it was fine. The difficulty ramps up way too quick to be anything substantial, but if you want a little more Max Payne 2, it’s there.

However, I’ve already put in two full playthroughs, and I think it’s just a little too easy? The game really wants you to take advantage of bullet time in this one, but I think it drastically overcompensates by making bullet time wayyy too powerful. I thought the shoot dodge mechanic in Max Payne 1 was perfect: it gives players a leg up on enemies, but it’s not a crutch – you can still take damage, but you can’t die. Max Payne 1 still rewards skillful play, but players could also feasibly survive encounters by taking advantage of the “you can still take damage, but you can’t die” stipulation.

Max Payne 1 had a regular bullet time (RMB standing still instead of moving) but it wasn’t great. Everything moved in slow motion, including Max, but it was a limited resource. Using it liberally might eventually lead to a deficit if you weren’t killing enemies fast enough.

ENTER MAX PAYNE 2. Bullet time no longer slows down Max – in fact, he seems to move even faster in bullet time? He can even reload weapons faster!

It’s all too easy to enter a firefight, slow down time, kill every single enemy within moments, and still have plenty of bullet time juice left over. I really only took damage if I didn’t enter bullet time fast enough. I hardly used shoot dodge at all during my second playthrough.

There’s enough small QoL improvements and technical steps forward that the combat almost feels secondary. More weapons, ragdoll physics, a more tightly-paced story, higher quality graphic novel illustrations, well animated cutscenes and character models, trippy visuals, fun level ideas… and yet, it’s still missing something.

I think the best example I can give is RagnaRock, which was this grimy, sordid nightclub that punctuates the end of Max Payne: Part One. It’s absolutely dripping with atmosphere. Everything from the booming club music, to the occult backroom decorations, to the blizzardy rooftops, and finally the big confrontation with Jack Lupino in this cathedral-esque attic space; in Max Payne 2, Vlad has all but gouged out the soul of RagnaRock and converted it into a fancy upscale restaurant. The layout may seem familiar at some points, but it’s missing that original spark…

Max Payne 2 is still endlessly dazzling, effortlessly cool and stylish – but after so much polish, it’s easy to forget the original’s grungy roots, something that would’ve elevated the sequel’s aesthetics and mechanics to even greater heights.

A little rough around the edges but it’s aged better than most third person shooters from 20+ years ago!

I’ve said it before, but I grew up on Alan Wake and I’ve only recently started playing through the rest of Remedy’s catalog. I liked Quantum Break and Control just fine, but I’d never actually played the Max Payne series proper. Mainly I was afraid of running into game-breaking bugs/glitches on modern hardware, but Steam user darkje was kind enough to compile a bundle of fixes for known issues, which made the experience 100% smooth from start to finish.

(Side-tangent: companies should really be thankful fans put so much effort into ensuring their titles are compatible on modern hardware. The fact that so many legal entities interpret modification/emulation of software as some kind of infringement is ridiculous, especially when regular people do more for software preservation than most companies ever will.)

Max Payne is exactly what it says on the tin. It’s gritty and goofy. Yin and yang, somehow in perfect balance. It starts grim, a pitch black murder scene that leaves Max bereaved of his entire family in a New York minute; you also spend half of the game killing dudes doing the silliest Italian mafioso voices imaginable. It somehow works.

You’ll be forgiven for thinking Max Payne is being tongue-in-cheek about it all. It is being tongue-in-cheek about it all. It’s also NOT being tongue-in-cheek about it, at all. It’s all fun and games until you gotta lock in and slaughter a clown car’s worth of cutthroat mobsters with nothing but pistols akimbo, a bottle of pills, and the John Woo slo-mo button. It somehow works.

Max Payne has aged like a fine wine. You’ll hear this anywhere. It’s almost a universally agreed-upon sentiment: Max Payne f’in owns. Every sommelier parrots the same opinion, and I’m sure at some point you’ll probably think to yourself, “Tch, these people are delusional – no way it’s actually that good…” and then you take a sip, swish it around, savor it… you’ll find the flavor is rich, aromatic, complex; you’re not even really drinking the wine, you’re smelling it through your mouth, breathing the fumes; it hits you like a bullet, and it lingers like a kiss.

To call Max Payne a beautiful game would be an understatement. To appreciate Max Payne’s pre-9/11 rendition of “Noir York City” is to submerse oneself in the fallout of the millennium prior. Unmistakably comic booky, yet players are greeted frequently by the photorealistic visage of Sam Lake, the game’s writer, as the eponymous hero – the immediately iconic grimace rendered timeless yet ancient, the lossy compression of the countenance caked both in rust and patina. One must immerse themselves, not solely in the world of Max Payne, but in the cultural moment whence it was born.

A few of my friends have confided in me that they intend to “wait for the remakes,” and to that, I may have momentarily flown off the proverbial handlebars and into an animal frenzy. Let’s ignore the fact that the remakes are likely (at the very least) another three or four years out from now. DO NOT wait to play the Max Payne remakes, man. Get the originals on Steam, download the patches^, and PLAY. THE. GAMES. This is not a recommendation, this is a REQUIREMENT.

^Do not download the 4K AI-upres textures though, they’re bad.

You’re doing yourself a disservice, in fact, by blue-ballsing yourself into Max Payne abstinence. I am so deathly serious about this. I think you’re genuinely sick in the head if you’re waiting for the remakes.

Let me just cut to the heart of Max Payne right now, okay? YES, the bullet time mechanic is the game’s claim to fame, and YES, it is the best part of the game, and it’s a dopamine rush every time, and it never gets old. You might spend half of your first playthrough using shoot dodge for fun, even if it puts you at a disadvantage – I did the same thing! On my second playthrough, I even made a conscious effort to take my foot off the gas pedal, to save the shoot dodge for context-appropriate situations only. I spent half of that playthrough using shoot dodge anyways, because I realized it’s just that good!

Pro-tip: when you shoot dodge, the weapon in your hand is reloaded automatically; you also CAN’T DIE if you’re using the shoot dodge (you can still take damage, but you can’t drop below 1HP during the animation). This knowledge busts the whole game wide open. You’re never outright rewarded for being aggressive, but you ARE rewarded for being a scrappy lil’ troublemaker and cheating death at every turn. I think that’s basically the same thing?

Also, this is one of those games where you need to be quicksaving all the time. Some people say you don’t need to quicksave, but those people are liars. Quicksave ALWAYS. Quicksave before you walk into a room. Quicksave after a firefight. Quicksave before a firefight. Quicksave if you haven’t quicksaved in the last sixty seconds.

It’s not as clear cut as, say, Hotline Miami – which wouldn’t enter the arena until over a decade later – in how its levels are segmented into distinct floors, each floor another checkpoint. Death is swift in Hotline Miami, players and enemies alike die from a single bullet, or a blunt/sharp object to the head, or what have you. The challenge remains in the choreography: the bloody tango from one floor to the next, each movement, each enemy, each bullet punctuated with austere intentionality. Simple and elegant. Max Payne, by contrast, has all the pieces of a Hotline Miami, but leaves players to assemble these pieces of their own volition.

I wouldn’t call Max Payne’s laissez-faire stance on quicksaving a good or bad thing. Almost every game back then was pretty lax when it came to letting players quicksave. Still, I can’t help but feel as though Max Payne could be released today, and still be regarded as a modern classic, if only there were more actual autosave checkpoints.

It’s because Max Payne’s bullet time + shoot dodge is such a wonderfully simple and gratifying mechanical combo that every other mechanic of the game feels noticeably less because of it. In fact, I’d argue the game pretty much coasts on bullet time + shoot dodge for most of its duration.

I feel like it’s probably unfair to criticize a 20yr+ old game because it wasn’t “forward-thinking” enough or whatever, so I’m gonna stop rambling about this now lmao. GTA3 was released months after Max Payne and the shooting in that game sucks dude. I played GTA3 for like five hours and thought, “Ew, did all third person shooters feel like this back then?” So you can imagine my surprise when I played Max Payne and realized, oh, okay, so they’d already figured out how to make third person shooters work, GTA3 is just Like That for some reason. My point is, Max Payne still feels good. It was good for its time, and it’s good now, and I think it’s okay to admit there was still definite room for improvement.

Ultimately, the best Max Payne review has already been written: Woodaba’s review nails the essentials, especially when it comes to the game’s story. Keep in mind, I’d played every other Remedy game (Death Rally and Alan Wake 2 notwithstanding) before Max Payne, and even I was surprised by how deep this game’s writing gets.

One thing I mentioned in my Alan Wake review is its “surprising amount of restraint” given that the story is literally dealing with fiction transforming reality, but I might have to eat my own words here, because after reading Woodaba’s review, I have to concede that Max Payne exhibits truly Spartan restraint and nuance in regards to its storytelling.

“A superhero with a baseball bat climbs out of a comic strip and into the head of a mob torturer who is a fan of the comic. The apocalyptic snowstorm that blankets the city of New York, and the pervasive Norse Mythology references that litter the game, crawl out of a book about Ragnarok being read by someone in the club Ragna Rock… On every level of its construction, Max Payne is a game about stories insinuating themselves, loudly and quietly, into the real, and it's surprising to find the DNA that runs through Alan Wake, Quantum Break, and Control already fully-formed [and] arguably more deftly and charismatically than any of those later works would manage. The strength of Max Payne is that… all of this is left to crawl around the periphery, only bubbling up very occasionally, allowing the player to put together the disparate images in their head, like a detective attempting to solve a mystery by staring at connected pins on a bulletin board.” Source (Woodaba's review again... dummy)

The last bit reads as almost prophetic now, as Saga’s mind place in Alan Wake 2 literally asks players to solve a mystery by staring at connected pins on a bulletin board.

And honestly? I understand why people would be turned off by Remedy’s sudden veer from Max Payne to Alan Wake. That’s not to say it wasn’t an interesting direction, but that game’s insistence on bald-faced horror tropes and random jumpscares definitely feels at odds with Max Payne’s understated dread and clandestine mysteries.

I once created a “Dynamic Collection” in my Steam library which separates games by genre, or features, or user-generated tags. For some reason, Max Payne ended up in “Horror”. After playing through it twice now, I think I understand why.

There’s this pervasive mood and unease behind each encounter. When you’re left to your own devices, just navigating from one end of a level to another, this odd disquiet fills the space between. This unearthly ambience creeps in. Ghostly wails and retches in earshot echo from nowhere in particular, their origin left ambiguous. The criminal underworld of Max Payne isn’t just the seedy underbelly of a comic book New York wasteland, but a haunted concrete graveyard, the fog rolling in slowly as the living dead shuffle into line with guns and grenades, ready to die again.

The comic book influence leaks into Max Payne through Valkyr, a green mystery substance that remains the center of the game’s conspiratorial narrative. You’ll find numerous references to it around New York, through graffiti, through backroom drug deals waiting to happen and, eventually, through the main plot.

“The flesh of fallen angels,” is a common recurring phrase throughout Max Payne, heard in TV shows, in non-sequitur enemy dialogue, and in hallucinations; players will specifically hear Max Payne’s doppelganger repeat the phrase in the second nightmare. These words are intrinsically linked with Valkyr, and “fallen angels” likely refers to demons, in a mythological sense. I almost wonder if the line is meant to refer to the game’s original concept of Valkyr turning people into mutants, or “freaking zombie demons from outer space”.

The story makes sweeping allusions to these bizarre ideas: you might believe Jack Lupino’s lunacy during your first excursion to RagnaRock; or you could believe that Max Payne’s nightmares express some repressed trauma, and maybe he actually was the one who killed his wife and child in the first place; or maybe, this entire thing really is a computer game?

There’s ultimately no apotheosis here, no mind-blowing plot twist or fourth wall break that completely recontextualizes the metanarrative (well, there is that one, but it’s more of a gag than a revelation) but that’s the beauty of it, yeah? Max Payne doesn’t need to be a game with some earth-shattering eldritch truth at its center; I mean, yeah, there’s more than a few moments where Sam Lake leans over and whispers into the player’s ear, “Okay, but wouldn’t it be messed up if it was…?” but it doesn’t lead to anything, and it doesn’t need to lead to anything. It remains firmly situated in its crime noir revenge plot and is arguably all the better for it.

Max Payne earned its legendary status for a reason. You don’t get this kind of cult following on a bluff.

DO NOT WAIT FOR THE REMAKES!!!!!! PLAY THE ORIGINALS!!!!!!

This was my first Kirby game and I liked it a lot!

It feels right at home on the original Gameboy. The 30min playtime is perfect for a bus ride or a quick playthrough right before falling asleep. I truly believe the Gameboy was meant for short-form, miniature experiences like this.

Although I know it lacks a lot of the series staples (namely Kirby’s copy ability), it’s still really fun to shoot enemies as projectiles. The bosses are short and sweet and easy to read. The final boss rush feels like an appropriate challenge without going overboard.

The Extra Game is kinda ridiculous though!! I only played up until the midpoint of the fourth level and gave up. I Game Overed twice. It’s nice that it only makes you replay the level if you lose all your lives though. Maybe one day I’ll beat the Extra Game but it’s just kinda too crazy for me right now. A lot of onscreen projectile spam, evil enemy patterns, and you take twice as much damage – it’s a lot to handle.

Still, I don’t think you can go wrong with the main game. Very fun.

OFF THE CUFF I have not played a single gosh darn Feverdream Johnny game until today but man, this game is tight! Really fun playing this right after Pseudoregalia and being able to experience the schmoovement variety.

Levels are super loose but I think this benefits the game in the long run, the pacing is nuts. There’s no wondering how to get to one side of the map or another. If you see the place you want to get to, you’re already there.

Launch yourself into the sun at 3000mph rocket man. MW2 Intervention yourself into a human meteorite. Heck yeah.

I also don’t want to ramble / spoil too much here, but I loved the secrets in this. Finding the hidden collectables was a real treat.

I finished in over an hour but I was also doing something new every 10 seconds so I think it’s awesome for its length. Like I want a rollercoaster to be paced like a music video, not a movie, you know what I’m saying? Still, maybe could have been a few levels longer or incorporated different enemies or platforming challenges to round things out a lil. It does have a Steam Workshop available with custom levels so maybe I’ll check those out eventually!

Quintessential fake game come to life. Admirable for what it attempts but not much else. There’s little strategy outside of always choosing the Dragon upgrade + Pet Count x2 when you beat the “final boss”. On the other hand, it will likely take most people a few hours to earn every achievement.

Additionally, it’s completely free. No freemium BS or shoehorned advertisements. Just pure arcade gauntlet.

Sadly, it never outgrows its inspirations. It’s as barebones as you might expect. No room for skill or improvement. Ultimately boils down to a novelty and not much else.

Let me preface this by saying that I don’t like giving games 5 stars unless I believe they’re genuinely flawless or exemplary. A game really has to wrestle and claw its way to 5 stars.

Let me also preface this by saying that I didn’t even love Resident Evil 1. I played the remake on PC to dip my toes into “the world of survival horror,” and I enjoyed it fine. It didn’t blow me away. I’ve outlined my experience with survival horror as a genre in my Signalis review previously – and I liked Signalis too! – but my impressions were also colored by the fact that I was still earning my stripes, so to speak. I was still trying to “understand” survival horror.

With Resident Evil 2, I feel like I not only “understand” survival horror now, but I’ve also been endowed with the Goddess Athena’s gift of divine wisdom or something. I don’t know what the hell they were doing at Capcom in 1998 but I firmly believe that Shinji Mikami and Hideki Kamiya both obtained forbidden knowledge and decided to channel that knowledge into crafting a survival horror masterclass. If I was a university professor teaching survival horror game design, I would tell my students to pick up Resident Evil 2 and play both Leon and Claire’s A/B routes. That’s it. No written assignments or anything. Just finish the game.

The obtuse, puzzle-heavy labyrinth of the first game’s iconic Spencer Mansion is condensed into the sequel’s Police Station. This is one of RE2’s many examples of less being more. Whereas RE1 had a lot of backtracking, even well into its latter half, once you’re finished with the Police Station, that’s it – the chess plug puzzle (or the painting puzzle) is the only thing standing between players and the latter half of the game, which is then a mostly linear rollercoaster from there until the finish line.

Resident Evil 2 is a lot like Sonic the Hedgehog in that you can’t fully appreciate the game after one simple playthrough, and the game reinforces this in two ways: most obvious are the two protagonists, as well as their respective A/B routes; additionally, the “ranking system” which encourages players to save less, heal less, and be quick about it.

I thought that having two characters in the first Resident Evil wasn’t groundbreaking. I mean, if you want more Resident Evil, sure, there you go; Jill and Chris’ stories aren’t awfully dissimilar. Personally, I didn’t feel like finishing Chris’ story after Jill’s enriched my experience at all – it was just the same game, again, but with less inventory space, and a few key differences in puzzles and story beats. The A/B routes work much better in Resident Evil 2, as they complement each other and are sufficiently short as well. Specifically, the B route for both characters boasts much beefier bosses, new enemy locations, and even Mr. X (he’s intimidating at first, but once you learn his behavior, he’s just a fun lil set piece).

After your first A/B run, I strongly encourage another A/B run (LeonA/ClaireB or vice versa). My second A/B run was also when I started trying for rankings, and that’s when it got really fun. Experiencing the different variations in story beats and encounters made each route unique and engaging in their own ways. Really though, the ranking system does what any good ranking system should do (imo), and pushes players towards the most interesting and rewarding playstyles. The game wants players to play conservatively, but it also wants players to take risks. Once players understand the general sequence of events, that’s when they’re able to predict, plan ahead, and be bold in their decision making. That’s when interesting play emerges.

It’s also remarkable in how economic its levels are, the sewers are like maybe five or ten minutes (not counting cutscenes) as long as you’re not backtracking; there’s maybe like an hour between when you fight the second boss and the final boss. Surprisingly, it also never feels like it’s sprinting towards the finish line, either.

So tightly-packed with razor sharp survival horror game design that it’s basically the genre’s Super Mario Bros. 3 for all I care. Maybe it didn’t write the book on survival horror, and maybe it wasn’t the first worth reading – but it was the first one I read that I not only loved, but one that left me with a deeper appreciation for the works I’d read already.

Soma’s been in my backlog for a while now. I have a vivid memory of hearing my university ethics professor talk about Soma during a lecture once, which I promptly zoned out during (he was talking spoilers). More recently, my coworker Dan (who I mentioned in a previous review on here) mentioned Soma. The reason I played Soma last week was because of a section at the end of the last Nexpo Petscop video. I figured I’d finally sit down and try it out.

This was my first Frictional Games game. I’ve never played Penumbra or Amnesia. I knew going into Soma that it would be a horror game, but I was also a little disappointed to find out that Soma is a “run and hide” horror game. I haven’t played very many “run and hide” horror games but I was surprised at how lenient it ended up being? Apparently the “Safe” difficulty wasn’t even in the game originally, but the normal difficulty is also just not that hard? I think I only died once during a scripted chase sequence (I say “think,” because that was the only time I saw a screen saying “You Died”... there was one instance where a monster “caught” me, and I “respawned” after a loading screen, but I’m not sure if it counted as dying or not).

Personally, Safe mode makes Soma an easy recommendation – if horror games aren’t your jam, but you still want to experience the atmosphere and vibes of Soma, definitely try Safe mode. Inversely, I think the Normal difficulty at least gives players some kind of challenge, but not an especially good or memorable challenge.

This is where I’m most conflicted about Soma, because on one hand I think the game is fantastic, its story is excellent, the puzzles aren’t too easy or too hard, the atmosphere is appropriately dreadful, the horror is there; but then, the encounters themselves aren’t really all that interesting or noteworthy. Again, granted, I’ve not played many “run and hide” games, and I’ve never really loved stealth mechanics unless we’re talking about Metal Gear Solid or something. At least stealth is a main focus in Metal Gear Solid. I’ve noticed plenty of games implement half-baked stealth mechanics into their gameplay loops and it’s always very obvious that it’s never the main focus. There’s a few forced stealth sections in the Modern Warfare 2 (2022) campaign, and it’s really obvious it’s taking a page out of the Last of Us, but in a pejorative sense, without regard for how the dynamics of encounters change, or how the fundamentals don’t jell with traditional stealth mechanics at all.

All that’s to say that Soma doesn’t really feel like a stealth game first, it’s very clearly a first-person adventure game with monsters roaming its halls every now and again, but the game actually only expects you to stay out of their way. Every time I heard a monster nearby, my first instinct was to find a hiding place – my main criticism with Soma, I think, is that while its environments are good for an adventure game, they’re wholly unfitting for a stealth game. I can’t count how many times I wanted to hide under a desk, or how many times I wanted to jump over a railing, only for the game to seal its cracks with yet another nefarious invisible wall. The game is perfectly immersive, if not for when it feigns danger.

It never becomes frustrating, however, as being attacked gives players some contextual/diegetic “i-frames,” where the monster runs away and lets you reorient yourself so the chase can begin again. It’s not the most graceful solution to balancing difficulty, but hey! It’s necessary to keep the ball rolling, so to speak. Still, it’s a shame that any deeper systems aren’t allowed to emerge from a combination of these stealth and horror game mechanics.

It never becomes frustrating because the pacing is so brisk. I’d say less than 10% of my total playtime was dedicated to skirting these enemy encounters, and although that sounds like a compliment, I can tell you it definitely isn’t. Just because it’s a negligible fraction of the gametime, doesn’t mean it’s fine by default; it’s disappointing because the bones of a great experience are there, but that experience runs contrary to the rest of Soma, which is elevated above a simple stealth/horror experience entirely.

My favorite encounters occurred towards the end, in the dark ocean trenches where sea monsters lurked in the suffocating darkness. It’s no coincidence that these segments were the most scripted, only requiring players to stay the course and run forward to proceed.

I’m not saying I would prefer the game to be harder, I’m saying I would vastly prefer if the game’s systems could support being a stealth game in addition to everything else it attempts. Basically, I would have enjoyed the game a lot more if the stealth was better.

All that probably sounds especially negative, but I really liked Soma overall! The story was engaging and it was paced well. I always wanted to keep playing even if I wasn’t always looking forward to the next enemy encounter – I suppose that dread of confronting another monster worked mechanically as well as narratively, but maybe not quite how the devs intended.

The story weaves a lot of philosophical and moral quandaries into its seams as well, a lot of player choice – although it doesn’t seem to change the narrative – is incorporated organically into the experience, invisible decisions that feel more like personal expressions. I won’t spoil them here, but I wish more games let players make smaller, personal decisions without resorting to Paragon/Renegade options by default, you know? When the player character feels like a natural extension of the player themselves, I think that’s a monumental success in itself. Soma succeeds here.

The two leads, Simon and Catherine, are very compelling characters elevated by an exceptional voice cast. It’s hard to overstate how magnetic these two are. Again, I won’t spoil anything, but I think it speaks to the quality of the writing and the story that the “twist” comes early but keeps players invested enough to follow the plot through to its natural conclusion. I wanted to see these characters succeed! I wanted them to be happy!

Ultimately, a lot of the praise I could give here would be redundant. Soma is an exceptional story, and I think it would be a disservice not to experience it at least once; I also think it’s mechanically rough around the edges, and not nearly fleshed out enough to be anything besides serviceable stealth/horror at best.

I played the first Alan Wake when it was released in 2010. I was 13 years old.

I played Alan Wake’s American Nightmare in 2012. I was 14 years old.

I eagerly awaited the next chapter in Alan Wake’s journey through the night. I bought a Playstation 4 instead of an Xbox One. I did not play Quantum Break at release. In 2019, I lived in Portland, Oregon, and barely touched any video games. I did not play Control at release.

When I moved back in with my parents in 2020 at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, I heard about Control’s AWE expansion incorporating Alan Wake into its story. At that point, I hadn’t even heard of “the Remedy Connected Universe,” and, in my mind, I assumed that if they were incorporating Alan Wake into their latest game, that it was likely non-canon; a healthy spoonful of fanservice, a celebration of Remedy’s past, an acknowledgement of Alan Wake as an IP.

It wasn’t until the 2021 Game Awards that I experienced a sudden shock, a galvanic defibrillator jolt; I couldn’t believe my eyes, and I didn’t believe it was his voice, either – not until I saw the title drop.

Alan Wake 2 was, and has always been, an impossible dream. The first Alan Wake I’ve written about already. It was one of my favorite video games growing up, a highlight of my adolescence. It was one of the first horror games I’d ever played. It was a cult classic. I’ve mentioned this in my Alan Wake review as well, but I’d since seen the canceled prototype of the original Alan Wake 2, and thus the idea of a sequel to Alan Wake was dead to me.

Now, here I am, having played Alan Wake 2 – the true Alan Wake 2 – in full.

Not only is Alan Wake 2 one of Remedy’s best games, it’s one of the best games this year. It’s a masterpiece… with a few extremely important caveats.

Let’s get the obvious ones out of the way: the game looks incredible, the in-game lighting (without RTX) and the Pacific Northwest environments are a dream. There was a big hubbub about the game’s PC requirements leading up to the release, and my overall experience/performance fluctuated over time. For reference, I’m running this on a 3080 Ti at 4K. In my first few hours, I found that Performance DLSS on all low settings kept me around 60fps with minimal frame drops. Further into the game, I had to drop to Ultra Performance DLSS (which, for those uninitiated, means 720p upscaled to 4K) which kept me around 60fps, again; eventually, however, even after messing with internal resolution and dropping to 1440p and testing DLSS, I could never get comfortable with any settings for too long before running into massive frame drops. After some time, I decided to settle for 4K Ultra Performance. There were still some stretches where I would experience crazy, inexplicable frame drops – I have to chalk this up to a memory leak, or something with my hardware. Rebooting the game from desktop from time to time seemed to fix a lot of performance issues, but it’s still weird that it occurred so frequently. Subsequently, I’ve seen a lot of people complain about this happening, so this issue isn’t exclusive to me.

Secondly, the load times for this game are insane. This was a consistent problem for me throughout. I’ve installed this game on an SSD and I still had to wait a good minute or two for loading to finish constantly. This was super annoying when I died and had to wait for everything to reload. However, this also occurred frequently during Alan’s sections, which require environments to change at a moment’s notice – there were times where I would “change a scene” in the writer’s room, only to have everything in the environment disappear for anywhere from ten to twenty seconds, leaving me in this bizarrely empty liminal space as I waited for the new scene to load. It’s especially frustrating having to change scenes multiple times in an area, constantly loading in new assets and having to wait in these halfways zones for the game to load. Especially towards the end, with interactive elements taking longer to load in than the environments themselves.

Lastly, but not least, are the game-breaking bugs. If I ran into these once or twice, I wouldn’t’ve cared, but these were so frequent (along with the aforementioned technical/performance issues) that this really hampered my experience with the game overall. I only ran into this problem once playing as Saga (got stuck in her Mind Place somehow), but as Alan, if I was running up or down a staircase, there was a 50/50 chance I ended up clipping out of the game world itself. There was a particularly nasty case where I ended up falling through the world and ended up in the Oceanview Hotel a couple hours early. Just amazingly egregious stuff. I figured out that these glitches were likely triggered by the game not being able to load in levels fast enough – I would habitually approach doors slowly, and wait a few seconds to keep walking forward after opening them, just because I was scared of the falling into the abyss because the world wasn’t keeping up.

All that aside, yes, the technical issues did have an effect on my experience of this game. It’s a shame, too, because I am playing this during the launch window period, so the chances all this stuff is patched out in a week or two is more than likely. Still, I can only speak for myself. Maybe I’ll revisit this in a few months and all this will be water under the bridge.

As for the actual game? Oh my God. This is basically everything I could’ve wanted from a sequel to Alan Wake… again, with a few caveats.

Leaning harder into the genre by going full survival horror was genius. I know that many people have made comparisons to the Resident Evil remakes, although personally I can’t validate if they’re all that similar (I’m playing through the original RE2 right now though). At a glance, sure! I guess it’s like the Resident Evil remakes.

Putting less emphasis on the combat and more emphasis on inventory management and puzzles keeps Alan Wake 2 interesting in its own way. Situations feel more tense instead of Alan Wake 1’s “intense,” if you get what I mean. Combat encounters always are so few and far between that they always feel like events.

Still, it’s a shame that a lot of the DNA from Alan Wake 1’s gameplay doesn’t carry over to Alan Wake 2. No flashlight reticule. No automatically recharging batteries. No shrinking halo around enemies. I was gutted. Inversely, I believe it absolutely fits the mold of survival horror better.

Alan Wake 1’s item economy was very generous, distributing ammo and other resources liberally. Alan Wake 2’s item economy is built to keep resources low – however, there were moments where I definitely noticed the game doling out resources I was low on, to make sure I always had ammo or batteries. I think this is generally fine, but it’s an unfortunate band-aid solution that arises from the way everything in AW2 fits together. For example, in a regular survival horror game (like Resident Evil 1 or 2), there’s a set amount of enemies, and every ammo pickup is placed deliberately to accommodate for players needing to make progress by getting rid of certain enemies. Every consumable has a purpose. Alan Wake 2 has scripted encounters, but it also has a lot of random encounters as well, meaning that the game can’t account for every possible scenario, meaning that a certain amount of dynamic resource allotment must be made. In other words, the game can’t be designed with each and every combat scenario in mind.

I feel like they could fix this by just giving players a melee weapon instead. It frees up the need to spawn in so much ammo all the time, and it incentivizes players to be risky by conserving ammo as well. They could also get rid of batteries entirely and make the flashlight fully rechargeable over time. I mean, why risk players entering combat encounters and not being able to do any damage? Or what if they need to burn away a poltergeist object to progress but they don’t have any batteries left? This never happened to me, but I can’t help but imagine how frustrating it would be to get soft-locked because these situations weren’t accounted for.

At its best, however, Alan Wake 2 forces players into much more desperate situations than the first game, with multiple enemy types that were much more engaging than the original. Of course, the classic hatchet-throwing dudes make a return (love them!) alongside giants, and even splitters from American Nightmare. New enemies on the roster include wolves (super aggressive and love to flank you (I also love them!)), these freakin’ water / lake mirror enemy that’s standing on its hands (I don’t know what to call them, and I can’t find an image of them, but here’s a clip of the first time you encounter them), and my favorite, the fadeout. I could never quite pin down a strategy to suss out a decoy shadow from a real one, and this made encounters with them extremely nerve-wracking. A simple beeline from Point A to Point B through a crowd of fadeout could be the easiest thing in the world, or an ambush – and I’d never know until one of them was on top of me. I’d say that 90% of these guys are decoys which makes that last 10% of them springing to life that much more frightening. The fact that I could never identify a discernible ruleset for them is a net positive for me, personally.

Remedy has kinda struggled making well-rounded enemy rosters since Max Payne, I’d argue. Although they had a lot of enemies in Control, most of them felt like variations on regular soldier-type enemies; and the ones that weren’t regular soldier-type enemies felt half-baked. Alan Wake 2’s enemy roster feels well-rounded, and I think this is the first Remedy game I can confidently say that about.

Having the story be broken into two disparate parts was an interesting choice. I think it fits well with Alan Wake’s themes of balance/mirrors/etc. Survival horror games having multiple routes is nothing new, but in something like Resident Evil 1 or 2 (can you tell I’ve played very few survival horror games?) these “routes” are usually the same game, with maybe a few divergences in terms of gameplay or puzzles. In Alan Wake 2, Saga and Alan’s stories are vastly different, and happen concurrently to one another. The game also lets you play through them in whichever order you want.

Saga’s story is the much meatier, more comprehensive A route to Alan’s supplementary B route. I would even argue that Alan’s story feels unnecessary, but it complements Saga’s well and makes the entire game feel much more substantial overall. I usually switched characters between chapters, although Alan’s chapters were oftentimes much shorter, so I sometimes played two chapters before returning to Saga.

Subsequently, Alan’s story also contains the most lore revelations, the most live action stuff, and the best sequence in the entire game (iykyk). It’s hard not to enjoy Alan’s story when there’s so much to like.

Also, I really liked Saga as our new protagonist! She is immediately likable, smart, and proactive. Spending time with her and Casey was always a joy. Anyone calling her a Mary Sue needs to get their heads checked. I’m sure there’s an Alan Woke joke in there somewhere. Melanie Liburd puts on a great performance, filled with love, joy, anger, sadness – but more than all that, determination. There’s one scene towards the end of the game I won’t spoil, but it cements Saga as the single most steadfast character in this story, and I’m excited to see her return in a future installment.

I think the main draw of Alan Wake 2 is the story, and yeah, Alan wasn’t kidding when he said this thing’s a monster.

At once, much more compelling than the first game, a much slower burn, with an atmosphere that can be as serene as it is oppressive. Gorgeous forest vistas give way to foggy backwater marshes. These environments are crafted with love and care, and they’re perfect for a horror story.

I loved how the game doesn’t throw you into combat until after like an hour of walking and talking and sightseeing. Some people might call these non-combat stretches similar to “walking sims” or whatever, but honestly? I love them. Letting players spend time in the world to soak in everything were my favorite parts of the original Alan Wake as well. Plus, I think the slower pace coupled with fewer enemy encounters is a welcome change of pace from Control’s all-too-frequent combat encounters.

Although, it does highlight a glaring oversight: that being no chapter selection, and no additional content outside of the main story. I know that American Nightmare tried an arcade mode (to little fanfare), but I would’ve loved a Mercenaries-style mode for this game. Maybe in a DLC?

I also think the game would greatly benefit from lifting the ranking system from the Resident Evil series wholesale, as I think it would add a lot of replay value (maybe that one’s just me).

I absolutely loved the game’s insistence on having American Nightmare make sense in context. That game’s themes of cycles/loops and forcing stories to come true (via “rituals”) are brought into much clearer focus here.

There’s like a hundred things I’d love to say about the story here, but I’ll keep it brief and avoid spoilers – especially because it’s such a dense game, and a lot of the broad strokes are widely open to interpretation.

What I will say is that it’s the closest Remedy has come to gamifying House of Leaves, that recursive metanarrative masterpiece that’s seeped neatly into almost every crevice of Alan Wake’s foundation, in a sense. Its questions are many, and most of its answers aren’t answers.

Let’s be honest: most video games don’t inject a 15 minute short film that contains far-reaching implications concerning the central mysteries of your story, and then make it easily missable to boot. Alan Wake 2 has vision and a strong sense of artistry behind it.

Everything leading up to its release painted Alan Wake 2 as more of a collaborative art project than a video game. Its vocal performances, live action actors and actresses, musical artists (including Poe!), and of course, Sam Lake being Sam Lake – his presence so elemental in Remedy’s works now that his appearance as himself in Alan Wake’s astral talkshow is hardly a surprise.

Indeed, that central idea of art as collaboration runs deep in Alan Wake 2 as well, everything from its dual protagonists to the Koskela Brothers’ business endeavors being a two-man show, to Rose and Mandy May leaving lunch boxes around Bright Falls; even collaboration between Thomas Zane and Alan Wake and, more literally, the collaboration between writers Sam Lake and Clay Murphy, and Ilkka Villi and Matthew Porretta as the eponymous Alan Wake – one provides the face, the other a voice – and, in concert, they transcend themselves to deliver one singular, next level performance. The quality of the live action performances are Remedy firing on all cylinders. Even Quantum Break’s live action TV segments (which themselves are elevated by a few noteworthy performances) come nowhere close to the whimsical, surreal, and horrific performances of Alan Wake 2’s live action cutscenes.

That, and one of the most supremely effective (and earned!) cliffhangers in any game ever, with a final line that perfectly mirrors/echoes the original’s “It’s not a lake, it’s an ocean”... with something new, something exciting.

Many have described Alan Wake 2 as “confident” and, playing through this game for the first time, I can definitely understand that ascription. Alan Wake 2 feels profoundly original even as it draws from an infinite wellspring of prior successes and genre staples. Remedy’s secret sauce remains its unflinching storytelling, intertextuality, and commitment to creating fully realized virtual worlds.

Alan Wake 2 is profound, spellbinding, terrifying, beautiful, playful, and poignant. It’s also marred by disappointing technical issues, and some mechanical missteps. If you’re already a Remedy fan, I strongly recommend this one.

Yeah I can’t bring myself to finish this one.

Really, really loved the original Legend of Zelda when I played it a few years ago but this one doesn’t do anything for me. It took a few hours and one palace before I started getting into the groove of things, but it’s just so punishing and unforgiving that it really started to drag.

Kudos to anyone that can/has beat this without save states. I accepted death gracefully for a while but honestly the death mountain maze broke me. It’s like the least fun version of the lost woods maze ever conceived, the trial and error made all the more frustrating by the ridiculous combat.

For some reason, each enemy feels as though they’re conveniently one or two pixels out of Link’s reach – but Link is, somehow, ALWAYS one or two pixels within an enemy’s reach. No matter how many times I pushed forward it never felt like I could consistently hit some enemies. Couple that with the overwhelming amount of enemies on screen at any given time, and it becomes impossible to prioritize or react to enemy attacks unless you’re playing in the most methodical, boring way possible, or cheesing hardcore.

There’s like ten other reviews that put this into better words than I could.

I don’t think I’m coming back to this unfortunately. Genuinely unpleasant experience.