So this was kinda stupid but it was also pretty fun? The short of it is that this is an on-rail zombie shooter kinda like House of the Dead but done entirely in FMV. You're in a jeep, travelling horizontally across a landscape, shooting zombies that are layered very poorly over the background. You basically keep going on the same route towards a fortress four separate times in an attempt to defeat Dr. HELLMAN, broken up by optional sidequests and cutscenes where this rasta guy and this Generic Girl talk to you about how cool you are. It's... not exactly a great gameplay loop by any means — the first 90% of the game is literally just doing the same levels over and over again — but I won't lie, it was kinda fun to shoot zombies and the cutscenes are exactly the right kind of 90s cheese — the actor who plays Winston deserves props for being so consistently entertaining the whole way. I don't exactly feel like there's much reason to play it again, but... it was a nice distraction for 80 minutes and that's all it really needed to be. 6/10.

The tagline for Ridley Scott’s Alien, ‘In space, no one can hear you scream,’ beyond being an indicator of what the movie is about (it’s a horror movie! in space!), also works as an ethos statement for the general genre of sci-fi horror. Having gone through… quite a bit of works in that vein over the past few months, a lot of what the genre tries to evoke is a sense of… wonder fueled by human technological advancement versus a fear of the unknown: humanity breaking through the frontier into a brave new world, only to find something far, far beyond comprehension on the other side — with themes of trying to understand the core of humanity as it faces against an existential threat. Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey is an ode to the sci-fi horror films of the 80s, particularly the works of John Carpenter, and… while it does harken to a lot of familiar tropes from its parent series — the end of the world, the fabled war between the forces of God against their demonic brethren, and a featureless player-insert choosing just how humanity continues on — blends these ideas with those proliferated in sci-fi horror in a way that feels… honestly seamless in how it’s portrayed, a change in tone and presentation that doesn’t sacrifice any of the core ideals that define what Shin Megami Tensei is about.

The story is set in some approximation of the present or the near future. Humanity is booming with unchecked prosperity when one day, a black-hole-esque growth comes out of the south pole and starts rapidly spreading across the surface of the Earth. With all attempts to research or halt it failing, the United Nations decides that they’re actually going to do something about the apocalyptic threat (the most sci-fi thing about this tbh) and send four teams into what they dub ‘The Schwarzwelt,’ each equipped with the most advanced technology humanity can offer. What they find, upon delving in, is a world of demons based on mythology, built off of humanity’s failings and fashioned after their sins. Three of the four teams are annihilated upon attempting to enter. The last — a ship called the Red Sprite — now faces impossible odds, having to push further and further into the Schwarzwelt, commune and battle with the angels and demons inside, and hope, maybe, that there’s a chance for humanity lying at the end of it.

It’s… a simple plot — one that almost feels episodic, in ways, as you solve problems, then find more problems to solve, then solve them, then find more problems — but it works, which is a lot of the game’s ethos with its writing. The crewmates of the Red Sprite… are mostly just one or two personality traits given a face and a name, but they’re written pretty well for that: they’re fun and likable and I always made sure to talk to all of them while I was on the ship just to see if their dialogue updated. What happens outside of the ship… the game doesn’t really hold back. It conveys the feeling of fighting the hopeless fight really well. Every single mission is this relentless push deeper and deeper into the Schwarzwelt, with no guarantee that you’ll reach your goal or make it back. A good amount of the strike team with you are basically red shirts — even if they get names there’s no guarantee whether they’ll make it through or become a demonstration for how dangerous the next area is. A good amount of the time you don’t even get the privilege of trying to advance your goals: some unprecedented disaster will happen to the crew and it’s up to you to prevent total wipeout. There are characters you meet who pretty obviously don’t have your best interests at heart, but you’ve got no option but to go along with them because you don’t have other options to go with. Throughout the game, you don’t even know whether going through the Schwarzwelt will actually save the Earth — your only choice is to try to progress and persevere and try and see if there truly is a way out. It’s simple (and this writeup excises some of the more spoilery things that happen) but it’s effective, and really works to make you feel the odds you’re going against on this mission.

Gameplay is kind of like… the edgy adult Pokemon game all those nerds on Reddit could only dream of. At its core, it's a monster collection RPG: the demons you fight are also the party members you recruit, whether you get them from a conversation minigame or by fusing other demons together. Unlike Pokemon, however, you can’t keep the same team through the whole game — demons can’t learn skills bar certain circumstances, and the exp requirements often make trying to level up your demons seriously grindy past their first few, requiring you to constantly iterate and fuse new demons to keep up with the arms race of the level curve. Shaking up your team is made more worth it by D-Sources — items you get via using a demon enough that lets you add its skills to any one demon you fuse in the future. There are also special fusions you can perform to get bosses or powerful demons unavailable regularly, which creates a fun, if sometimes drudgey hunt for whatever ingredients you need, made worth it by how strong and customisable these demons tend to be at the time you get them.

Team composition is consistently important, if less because of how specific encounters require specific strategies and more because of the game’s type chart. Each demon has its own elemental weaknesses and resistances, and in addition has its own alignment, one out of Law, Neutral, or Chaos. Should you find out what the given weakness of a demon is, and hit it, all demons matching your alignment will also strike it for more damage than they’d all do individually. This creates a challenge in team-building: both to create a crew that covers all elemental bases, but also to keep in mind alignments so that every demon on your team can take advantage of these co-op attacks. It’s simple — and from what I understand a lot more so than most other SMT games — but it's the right kind of grindy: addictive, but with enough depth and requirement for thought that it doesn’t feel shallow at all.

I also loved exploring the Schwarzwelt. It’s a first-person, grid-based set of dungeons, and ones that just seem to get larger and larger the more you explore them. By exploring — whether by progressing the story or by collecting materials off the ground — you gain these little ingredient materials called forma, and with forma you gain Sub-Apps, passive upgrades to yourself, little ways to alter your party, and, most importantly, ways to open gates, get past barriers, and allow you to explore even more of the Schwarzwelt. It almost feels like a metroidvania, in ways — upgrades you get allow you to access hidden parts of earlier areas, often containing their own challenges and giving rewards that… are either obsolete (whoops, should’ve come back here earlier) or give you something absolutely worth coming back for. Across the world, also, are sidequests you can seek out, encouraging you to explore more or do battle — either with tough opponents or tough restrictions. Your rewards are often material, and worth doing the quest for, but a lot of the virtue for me in doing them was just to enjoy the snippets of writing that go along with them — isolated episodes unrelated to the greater plot which often give the game an excuse to have some fun with its regular enemies and one-shot characters, in turn making the world of the Schwarzwelt feel so much more full.

I’d also like to shout out the way this rerelease handles its extra content. Oftentimes, when Atlus ports or updates one of their games, whatever new content is added is usually… contentious — Persona 4 Golden and Catherine Full Body, in particular, getting scrutiny for the way the new content and characters mesh/get in the way of the original narrative. Strange Journey, from what I understand, got that same criticism from gamers (for… some reason), which kind of surprises me because honestly the inclusion of a new dungeon in the Womb of Grief and the new endings felt totally smooth, mostly because of how it… doesn’t really overwrite the original game at all. The new dungeon, and the story content associated with it, is completely optional aside from when it’s initially shown to you (to the point where you can just ignore it and complete the game without touching it), but even beyond that… I honestly liked going through the new content?

Specifically, I kinda like how they used it as a way to iterate and address issues with the original 2009 release. I’m aware that there was pretty major criticism of the way the original release handled your alignment, and I like how the game addressed that with the new endings, both functioning as a continuation of the original game within the rerelease, and as a way to go for Law or Chaos without explicitly getting a bad ending. In addition, a lot of the extra sub-apps that you get from this dungeon seem to be quality-of-life improvements meant to help out with annoyances present in the original game: finding invisible floors or pitfalls, being able to find hidden doors without looking directly at them, etc. I… don’t think these should have been relegated to the bonus content — as that means someone who elects to skip it has a much rougher time with the main game — but it’s neat how this bonus content has been used to help address both story and gameplay concessions. Beyond that, though, even if you’ve never played the original, I still really enjoyed going through the Womb of Grief as a gameplay experience. It’s a dungeon that effectively expands with each new gadget you get in the main story and is host to some fun characters and some fairly tough challenges. I do question how much doing the Womb broke the balance of the main game — it seemed once I started I definitely stayed ahead of the curve level wise — buuuuuut that wasn’t particularly a dealbreaker for me, and I still felt the challenge was pretty appropriate even with the extra content added.

I do have complaints. While I was… surprisingly okay with how mean the game could get with its dungeon design I do wish it varied up in method more: the first teleporter maze was fun and cheeky, but I really started to get annoyed (and not in the intended way) when they appeared in basically every dungeon and eventually every dungeon floor afterwards. For as much emphasis as the game puts on mapping the Schwarzwelt the touchscreen features felt lacking compared to, say, Persona Q: I would’ve liked to draw my own map, especially when certain rooms made the auto-map not work. The previous two problems kind of get combined with some of the metroidvania elements — sometimes you’ll get an upgrade that solves a navigational issue but then… run into that exact same navigational issue and be told you need a better version of the upgrade you just got to get through this particular edition of the problem. Some of the final bosses straight up read your inputs in a way to limit your options and make entirely valid strategies arbitrarily invalid: I noticed one of them liked to open with a full-party magic blast, so I bred up something fast with a magic reflecting spell to get some extra damage in… and then every time I tried the boss decided that actually, they’d just use a different move (or even later, where I got hit with an immediate unavoidable OHKO move for daring to fight the boss a different way). I… okay maybe this one goes under ‘skill issue’ or ‘me problem’ but I also wish the game had an autosave? At multiple points I’d get unlucky, die… and then because I forgot to save manually I lost literal hours of progress in either sidequests or the main story, with getting back to the original point feeling like an utter slog. I get that this is a rerelease of a game in a particular design era for RPGs where autosave isn’t common, but… for a series like SMT where high difficulty and a low tolerance for mistakes, I do feel like actually dying should be more of a slap on the wrist than a major setback.

Other than that, though, I really enjoyed my time with Strange Journey! From a story that manages to blend the tropes of its parent series with that of a completely different genre, and with gameplay that’s… super addictive in how simple yet complex it is, Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey really does a lot with a little, and, with the new content added in the Redux version, does a lot to improve upon the interesting, but flawed game it used to be. 8/10.

So I’ve been working through the Yakuza series over the past couple years, and despite what my… rather slow pace (one game a year, so far) would tell you, I’ve been enjoying my time with them! As a whole, the series has… a pretty undeniable formula attached to it, but one that’s so effective it’s hard to really knock the games down for it: the hybrid beat-em-up with RPG elements makes it really addictive to just style and totally not kill all the thugs that come your way, and the open world cities you get to explore are so expansive, with oodles of sidequests and new game modes and minigames you can discover so long as you’re willing to take the scenic route. Yakuza 0, of the three I’ve played so far, has pretty easily been the highlight so far: with a plot that makes the most of its two protagonists and cities to intertwine into something that I was super invested in by the end, with just an insane amount of content that the 72 hours I played only felt like it was scratching the surface. Yakuza Kiwami, on the other hand, felt like a downgrade. It was still fun to play, but a lot of it just felt… honestly like a way stripped-down version of 0, in terms of the places you could go and the things you could do, and the few iterations that were there felt like straight downgrades. However, when I started playing Kiwami 2, I felt an immediate, immense improvement, and as I continued going through the game, and continued to have… quite a lot more fun than I did with Kiwami 1, I figured ‘hey, I like this series, enough to consider getting 100% for at least one of them, why not this one? It might be fun.’

It wasn’t!

It was kind of a pain, actually!

Like, I’m not one to try and get 100% for games usually, mostly because it’s just not my vibe or the way I play games, but here in particular… getting 100% was kind of rough. The appeal of games as vast as this to me is that you can kind of pick and choose what you want to do: if you find a side thing that’s super addictive, you can pursue it to your heart's content — I can attest to getting obsessed and completing an entire six-hour side-mode in the space of, like, a single night. If there’s something you don’t vibe with, well, then, you don’t have to! You can just ignore it, choose something else, and never have to deal with it… unless you have to for 100%. Anything you only gave a surface-level glance at because you weren’t really into it is now something you have to go into in-depth, and any issues that might have been dealbreakers are now things you have no choice but to deal with in your quest to get that completion list checked off. I wouldn’t really say it made a notable impact on my enjoyment of my overall product — I can recognize that doing this was my mistake and not necessarily an indictment on the game — but… I’d be lying if I said that going for full-game completion made me more aware of things I would’ve been willing to ignore before, and made things that were little problems… quite a bit more pleasant.

The game follows the continued adventures of ex-yakuza Kazuma Kiryu, who… okay I know this review has started out notably negative for something I gave an 8/10 but I could barely follow what was going on this time around. I could kind of get what was going on until chapter 5 or so, but then it just feels like everything gets sidetracked in the midst of exploring the mythology and interfacing with oodles of characters who… precede to either bite it or just never appear beyond this game. It all coalesces into something simple that can essentially be boiled down to ‘these are the bad guys, beat them up,’ but in the midst of everything the billed main antagonist, and the supposed rival Dragon to Kiryu… honestly feels sidelined in his own game, only popping up occasionally to establish that he is, in fact, the antagonist and rival, and that he and Kiryu are finally going to have that showdown even- whoops actually this is all about the Korean mafia actually time to focus on them. Kiwami had similar problems, but I felt like it managed to sidestep them — for as much as it does feel derivative gameplay-wise of 0, having many of the same characters appear in the prequel does give them more of an impact here, and Kiryu’s relationship with many of the major figures (especially with his goddaughter, Haruka, or with his rivalry with Majima) provided a throughline that… even when things felt confusing or convoluted, I still felt connected. Here, there were moments I enjoyed, but as a whole, I tended to put the story on hold because going to do it often felt like I was pulled away from the things I liked just so I could watch cutscenes for half an hour.

At least when I was finally free to explore the city and just do what I want, or when the cutscenes end and I’m allowed to actually do stuff, the gameplay really kicks in. Enemy encounters are simple, but addictive. It’s like a 3D beat-em-up — you’re surrounded by dudes, usually five to one, but those dudes are usually always much weaker than you, and combat often comes down to how much you just want to style on them. You can buy or pick up different weapons which change up your moveset, and should you hit your opponents enough time your heat gauge fills up, allowing you, amongst other options, to perform one of many context-based super moves on your opponent, often just absolutely fucking them up in a way that makes you question if they’re actually able to get up again afterwards. Power — and the vast gulf between Kiryu and the random thugs who fight him on the street — is kind of the name of the game. There are just so many options for items you can get or things you can do to your opponents, like stealing their weapons from them, getting one of your friends or allies to do something nasty to them, or, my favourite: doing a grab on them, and then trying to aim so that when you throw them they sail over a railing, off a bridge, and into the river below. There are a lot of options in just how you can demolish encounters, and part of the appeal is just seeing what you can do.

It’s not all a cakewalk, though, and when you’re up against somebody a bit closer to your level, they let you know. There’s a surprising amount of depth in your defensive options, between your parry and your guard and your quickstep, and while I was… a bit too button mashy of a gamer to really focus on those as opposed to tunnel-visioning on heat moves, it’s nice that they’re there and that they’re things that get used when the game requires you to get good. Boss encounters, in particular, are where the combat of this game can be at its best, and while they can be easy to breeze past with boosted stats if you did a lot of side stuff like I did there’s still a lot to enjoy: the spectacle, the varied movesets the player can try to learn, and all the different arenas that both you and the enemy can use against each other. I especially love the way Kiwami 2 utilizes the heat mechanic in boss battles: when a boss is on their last health bar, the fight stops, and you have to rapidly press a button to gather heat and unleash it: should you do so, you enter a quick time event that allows you to potentially instantly (and brutally) end a fight. It’s an improvement over Kiwami’s attempt at the same system (one where the boss will just rapidly regenerate their health unless you use one of the same three heat moves on them), and it’s a great way of ending a fight and ensuring your victory, bringing your opponent down to the same level as all the common thugs around the city.

But really the appeal to this game is the wealth of things you can do on the side. While Yakuza 1 (and Kiwami) mostly played its interactions with the Japanese underworld straight, 2 finds room instead to get a little more adventurous with things, and it stands out all the more for it. So many of the substories just go in wild directions and it's so entertaining to see Kiryu be the straight man in all these wacky scenarios. I appreciate, also, how much of a period piece this feels. I don’t know whether this was stuff originally in Yakuza 2, or whether Kiwami 2 added this stuff in hindsight, but I love how what was initially intended as a picture of modern-day Japan instead became a period piece, featuring all the innovations of the era that are so obviously outdated today. The sidemodes, too, profess some fairly fun writing: the stories themselves are fairly simple, which allows them to lean fairly hard on their cast of fun and quirky characters, all of which you can spend time with via hangouts and sometimes even sidequests attached to these specific characters. While there were definitely moments I enjoyed during the main story, I think it’s when I trod off the beaten path and explored the side content that I most enjoyed the game’s writing.

Of course, even then, the side content wouldn’t have measured up if it weren’t at least fun to go through, which, luckily, a good portion of it was! I mentioned above in my preamble that one of the benefits of games like these where there’s just a lot of stuff to do is that you can pick and choose what you actually want to go through, and while going for 100% meant I had to do stuff I also thought was kinda lame, I can’t deny that I still really enjoyed a lot of the side content here. Two favourites, in particular, were karaoke and the Cabaret Club Czar, the former being a series staple I frequently returned to even after I’d done everything I needed to do there because I liked trying to get a perfect score and also wanted to see all the special animations with the people you can take there, and the latter, a return from Yakuza 0 (being the minigame mentioned above where I just hyperfocused it over the course of an entire weekend), now considerably less grindy and with little iterations that make the whole experience feel better. While going for 100% does kind of expose you to the… less than stellar bits of side content, it also makes you take a look at stuff you might have overlooked before, and give you a chance to experience and change your mind about it. I’d never gone to the colosseum of bonus bosses in either of the two Yakuza games beforehand (mostly because I think when I unlocked it in 0 I was at the point where I was powering forward to finish the game), but doing it for the first time for 100% this game… actually proved fun, even despite me being a good bit over-levelled for it. There are things here I’d definitely do if I ever see them again in a future game, and I guess I should thank the 100% run for exposing me to it.

One last note, and one maybe less relevant to this game than to the series as a whole: I often feel like these games are low-key really bad at trying to teach the player its concepts? Maybe it’s just due to the way my brain is wired, but oftentimes instead of actually demonstrating or showing how to do something it’ll instead display a giant wall of text and hope the player retains all the things they need to know, no matter how simple or complex the mechanic is. And unless you’re able to retain everything you need to know — or so long as you’re okay with looking it up again and again — you’re just going to approach certain parts of, say, a minigame, and have no clue what to do. And that’s if the manual itself teaches you what you need to know: the tutorial for mahjong, on the last page, goes ‘oh by the way you could have a valid winning deck but it won’t actually count unless it’s yaku’ without ever explaining what yaku is. I had to google it just so I could know what that meant and nothing I found really gave me a conclusive answer. Again, not as bad here as it is in say, 0, but given that this is the third Yakuza game in a row that seems to think that drowning them in text is equal to being able to teach them how to play it… my impression is that this isn’t a problem that’s going to be fixed anytime soon.

But as a whole, and despite how negative parts of this review may seem, I enjoyed my experience with Kiwami 2! I won’t lie in that 100%ing it was kind of a pain, and… definitely not something I’m going to make the mistake of doing again, but between the combat, and the very fun side content, it’s not a decision I think I really minded in the end, and if I’m held at gunpoint and told to 100% another Yakuza game… I don’t think I’d end up having too much of a bad time. 8/10.

Smile For Me is a first-person 3D adventure game where you play as an unnamed florist visiting The Habitat, a weird group home with the mission statement of making you Happy again. However, the owner, a dentist named Dr. Habit, has done a remarkably poor job at actually helping the residents so far, so it falls to you to explore the Habitat, interact with its myriad residents, solve puzzles, and one-by-one, make all the residents smile again.

First off: I’m really into this game’s artstyle. It blends together a bunch of different things: a 3D environment, 2D sprites, analog stock footage cutscenes, and even utilizing Jim Henson-esque puppets, and yet it all feels like a consistent whole — with no area in particular bringing the rest down. And as for what does feel simple as far as gameplay loops go, I think it’s fun! I like how most of the traditional item-collecting and puzzle solving is mostly focused on interacting with the people around you — doing things for them, helping with their problems, which results in them providing you with items or giving you access to new areas as a reward for helping them out. It’s… not something I haven’t seen before in a more modern adventure game, but it’s a nice twist on the traditional formula (where often most of your puzzles/interaction dealt with the environment rather than the people in it) and a nice way of placing focus on what matters most here: the characters and the writing.

You meet a total of 20-25 people during your visit to the Habitat, all distinct and fun in their own unique way, and part of what I enjoyed most was finding out which weird and kooky character I’d meet next, or find out just what happened if I did something or showed them a particular item. Particular favourites, off the top of my head, were the guy who desperately wanted to smell like pickles (and whose puzzle you solve by just smashing him over the head with the jar of pickles he gives you) and the child who up and asked me to punch twenty people. The cast as a whole are fairly strong, and I like the way they’re balanced and kept relevant throughout the whole game — a lot of the earlier people you meet, for example, either can’t be made happy until later in the game, or are in some way involved in somebody else’s quest. There’s a couple people who are less memorable, and there’s a non-zero amount of them who slip through the cracks, but given that it’s a cast of 20+ people I’d still like to say that’s pretty impressive.

I’m also into what this game is doing under the surface with its writing. There’s a notable undercurrent of horror bubbling throughout, and the game does well at handling the balance without going too over the top with it. While there are hints from the beginning that not everything is as it seems, from all the little messages and videos that appear when you dream and just how suddenly foreboding it gets when night starts falling, the game never falls further into that territory until the final act, keeping a sign of what’s to come while never feeling like, say, a creepypasta game, or something that’s explicitly meant to be horror. I’m also interested in some of the stuff it has to say about happiness, and how that gets communicated through gameplay: how there’s no one way every single person can be made ‘happy’, how oftentimes you need to get to know a person before you can get to the heart of what they want, and how sometimes happiness can be fickle — making certain people happy via causing distress to others. It’s subtle, and you have to intuit it through playing the game, but it’s a cool thing to think about, and a neat example of communicating thematic messages through gameplay.

There are… a good amount of double-edged swords in this game, though. While it’s certainly cool to access more parts of the Habitat as you progress through the game — as a reward for and reminder of your progress — I do feel there’s a little bit of a problem with scope, with you receiving items and having no idea what to do with them because there’s so many items and so many places to use them and it’s tricky to figure out the one place you’re meant to use it. There’s a weird, fun logic to puzzles that can make the player feel clever for getting on the game’s wavelength, but it can just as easily kinda leave the player with no clue on what to do or what to interact with — something compounded with the above issue of scope. in addition, the game kinda felt… clunky, at points? Accessing the inventory and using items never felt particularly comfortable, especially as it started to grow and grow, and even by the end of the game I’d often just hold an item in my hands rather than use it like I wanted to. Sometimes I’d do things the game prompted me to do and it just wouldn’t register. In general items and puzzles felt a little finicky to play around, and oftentimes I'd just kind of stumble around without really knowing what it was I could do, and that was something… I pretty consistently felt, throughout the whole game.

But aside from those issues, I had fun with this! I don’t think it particularly breaks the mold of like, adventure games like this, nor do I think this as something I truly haven’t seen before, but I liked it! It’s a short-ish, cute game with some really good art and some pretty good writing and I’d say it’s totally worth your time to check it out yourself. 7/10.

I don’t play many FPSes. Not because of any particular dislike of the genre, or anything like that, more that… I think I’m just generally not predisposed to really go and check them out? I think mostly because my formative memories of gaming were with games often decried by the Call of Duty bros in my cohort as kiddie shit which I needed to grow up so I could play Real Games, and mostly due to most FPSes I heard of at the time being war shooters where the #1 selling point was usually ‘better graphics! it looks so good! by the way your computer won’t be able to run it and also even if you got a better one you won’t be able to run the next one we churn out in a year or so!’ that I was kinda turned off and kept playing the things I preferred to play.

Even today, I don’t really tend to stray into the genre much, even if I don’t exactly feel how I felt about the genre back then. Maybe I’m still subconsciously biased. Maybe it’s because most shooters today are still focused on multiplayer and I’m mostly a single-player kind of guy. Maybe it’s because I’m honestly kinda bad with shooter games — I’m too slow on the draw/too focused on getting a perfect shot in a genre that mostly encourages more fast-paced play, and I’m too tunnel-vision-y/head-empty to try and go for cover/do anything other than stand there and attempt to rush down people. There are FPSes I’ve tried, and liked, over the past few years, but as a whole, the genre is kind of a blind spot for me. I haven’t really played many of the must-play shooters, and as a whole… none of those that I’ve played have really been formative experiences or anything I’d place among my favourites.

Except for this one! This was something I picked up in one of the early Humble Bundles that I bought, and started playing… on my birthday, apparently, in 2014, and… kind of immediately I was captivated. Through the frenetic and at times absolutely brutal gunplay, the simultaneous power trip and achilles heel of your darkness power, a penchant for violence that actually sickened me at the time (which, from the perspective of nine years later: lol), and… enough little touches and moments that got me genuinely into the story. I never played the first game, or read the comics, nor did I particularly care to, but this game, in particular, was one that held into my memory long after I beat it, and was always in my mind as ‘hey I should replay this someday’ for a lonnnnngggggg time coming. I finally got the chance, in early 2023, and having replayed it again… and honestly? I think it still holds up.

You play as Jackie Esticato, the newly appointed don of the Esticato crime family, who has the dubious honour of being the current bearer to The Darkness — a primordial being that jumps from host to host, granting them great power at the cost of eventually driving them insane. Jackie has been able to suppress it for many years, but a hit both forces him to tap into The Darkness again and places him face to face against The Brotherhood, a mysterious cult who intend on taking The Darkness from Jackie and using it from their own ends. In the midst of it all, Jackie keeps getting visions of his past, and of his late flame Jenny, and it soon becomes a battle on multiple fronts: one against The Brotherhood for control of The Darkness, and one against The Darkness for control over himself.

The shooter gameplay, at its core, isn’t too different from what I’ve otherwise seen, though I appreciate the arcadey edge added to it — instead of holding the same guns all game and collecting ammo for them, you can only hold two guns at a time, and you’re encouraged to frequently switch with guns on the floor, often meaning that you never quite know what you’re going to have during the next encounter. What really diversifies gameplay, however, is the presence of The Darkness. Manifesting as two tentacles bursting out of your body, The Darkness immediately makes you a force to be reckoned with, and against the legions of gangsters and cultists fully justifies the ‘one man army’ approach most shooters tend to take with their protagonists. Slashes from your tentacles stun enemies and demolish whatever armour they might have, and if you grab an enemy while they're stunned, you get to pick and choose just how, exactly, you get to tear their body apart. You eat hearts to regain your health. You can grab parts of the environment, like pipes, or car doors, or fans, fling them right at enemies, and if your aim is right you just cut them in half — with bonus upgrade points given for killing people in special ways. These upgrade points (even if the tree itself looks fuckin’ ugly), amongst other things like different executions, then feed into and make your guns stronger: whether it just being straight upgrades, or powers like Swarm — which makes you barf locusts on your enemies from long range and making them unable to fire back — or gun channelling, which lets you temporarily boost your guns, increasing their power and allowing you to hit enemies through walls and armour. With the power of The Darkness, you can walk into a room full of gunmen and make mincemeat of them in a way that doesn’t even feel close, and this feeling of sheer power is an adrenaline rush, each enemy encounter a hit that asks the player how exactly they are going to fuck shit up — in the way that reinforces the idea the story presents of The Darkness as a well of power easy to become addicted to.

But it’s not always a stomp in your favour: specific encounters instead make your Darkness powers a liability instead of a godsend, and relying on them exclusively is a surefire way to get Jackie gunned down. Beyond the lack of range your tentacles have outside of objects you can pick up — functioning more as melee/the coup de grace while your guns pepper enemies from afar — the Darkness possesses one incredibly crippling weakness: light. In addition to just absolutely blinding you whenever you’re in it, you lose access to your darkness powers and your passive health regeneration, leaving you blind, vulnerable to whatever comes your way, and absolutely helpless against it. This makes positioning vitally important in each encounter — finding a place outside of the light where you can jump in and out of the action, looking out for lights and generators to take out so you can run in for the kill. The lights are also used in a way that forms a difficulty curve: early on, when you’re fighting other gangsters, most light is incidental, and oftentimes is easily shot out, but once the game progresses, and you start going up against the brotherhood, light is actively weaponized against you — enemies with giant spotlights, generator setups which bathe the room in light, and oftentimes your first step in these encounters is to figure out how to take out the lights so you can properly fight. There’s one late game area set in a carnival which is just chokepoint after chokepoint of you walking to a spot, hitting a wall, and you needing to use all the tools at your disposal to eventually wear it down — and another one where it’s flat out daylight and you’re in an open room with barely any cover and you just have to keep moving, dodging bullets and taking out enemies while having to avoid the bad spots on the floor. I like the light both as a way to ramp up the difficulty and as a way to reinforce story beats, and sell The Brotherhood as people who know The Darkness and know how to take it down, as opposed to the random gangsters who don’t know what they’re up against and only particularly have numbers on their side. In general I just… really love how The Darkness manages to shake up the gameplay — it would’ve been easy to just give you powers and let you just style on your enemies, but the drawbacks and considerations you increasingly have to grapple with just really manages to bring it to another level.

And even if I think it’s the story that maybe knocks the game down a little, I do appreciate a good deal of what it does. The dialogue draws from the best of its 90s comics influence, having a little bit of edge without drowning every line with it/making all the characters feel homogenous, and the voice acting does a lot to elevate the material (HE WAS THE FIRST MAN TO EVER NOT EXIST is a line that’ll stick in my head forever). There’s also… something I won’t spoil, that occurs throughout the game, and even if the impact was lost on me this second go around knowing where it all goes I respect what it’s trying to do and I respect it for at least making me question what’s going on. What really was a misfire are the hub sections, set in Jackie’s penthouse apartment. I like the important conversations there, but… the game really kind of grinds to a halt as you walk around and are encouraged to like 10 other unimportant background gangsters and there really isn’t much to do. I’ve seen other shooters do this sort of thing before, and better — mainly through lowering the size and adding things to do, like sidequests and optional challenges — but here… it’s too large and too long for what’s mostly people expositing things at you, and having to drudge through it between nearly every story beat got old kinda quickly.

And… that’s enough of a mark to maybe weigh it down and prevent it from being one of my absolute favourites, the game still left as much of an impact on me now as it did back then. From fast, frenetic, and at times brutal shooter gameplay, a core mechanic that cripples you as much as it makes you a force to be reckoned with, a story that does a good job taking risks even if it doesn’t work as well a second time to an artstyle tha- oh man I didn’t even mention how cool this game looks, I love the way the cel-shading makes the game look legitimately out of a comic book — this is still… probably my favourite shooter. Maybe one day I’ll play more of them. 9/10.

I heard that when Resident Evil effectively codified the survival horror genre a lot of its flaws became deliberate inclusions because those limitations were what made RE's atmosphere and gameplay so memorably scary.

And if that doesn't work as a lead-in for Song of Horror I don't know what would. The game has so many ideas that make me go "why" at their inclusion but fuck me if they don't fulfil their purpose of making the game feel legitimately stressful to play. Like, for example, I don't exactly think "maze with walls you can only see via still, oddly angled images right at the beginning of the gauntlet and also if you touch the walls three times you're permakilled" is exactly fair or fun, but it's certainly scary in a way that goes beyond just the story or presentation of the game. If something bad gets included as a method of successfully achieving what the game wants to achieve, does that make that inclusion good, ultimately?

What helps make considering this game a whole lot less complicated, though, is that it's largely pretty good otherwise. The game goes like this: you are trying to solve the mystery of a being hunting you down called 'The Presence,' and trying to find traces of those who have previously encountered it. You and your group of closest confidants and also random people who stumble onto the scene must head into an archetypal horror environment, solve puzzles and achieve your objectives fixed-camera-survival-horror style all while The Presence hunts you down and makes you play minigames, lest the character you play as get killed forever. In this vein, the core gameplay really works. Environments are large and explorable but condensed enough that it's unlikely that you'll find yourself lost or in a room that doesn't serve a greater purpose. The many characters you can choose from are distinct in how they react to the environment — while I really think there could've been room for divergence for how the level changes based on the character you play (why does Erika, for example, need to get the components for a puzzle box which she then needs to solve to get the keys for her own apartment), the differing motivations and reactions of each character give a bit of value to going through episodes multiple times. The minigames themselves really help add tension even to otherwise quiet segments, as the fact that they're effectively randomly deployed means that you're never sure whether you're safe or what's going to happen just around the corner.

There are unconditional problems though, too. Episode 2 as a whole really brings the whole game down. While all the other levels have simple, one-word descriptions which tell you exactly what they are and are good prompts for puzzles endemic to those sorts of biomes, Episode 2 is... an antique shop which is connected to a series of apartments which is also connected to a storage facility which is a fucking labyrinth, and I think that lack of identity really leads into its problems: its more generic puzzles, the huge amount of areas and things that don't do anything and the horrid storage maze that functions as the climax. The game also doesn't do a great job at tutorializing certain mechanics: the stats that define each character never get explained at all (I still don't know what "Stealth" does) and the tutorials the game gives really do not do a good job of indicating what the player has to do — I almost failed the breathing minigame the first time because of this and I never really figured out how exactly the door minigame was actually supposed to work. The jank definitely does contribute to the atmosphere, but I did get frustrated from dying/nearly dying from things I felt could've been avoidable had the game taught me better.

Ultimately, though, the game is complicated... but also good, I think. It falls wayyyyyy short of 'great' given how as a game a lot of its mechanics and setpieces set out to frustrate the player, but as a horror experience, I can't deny that it worked exactly as intended. 7/10. If you wanna try it out for yourself I'm reasonably sure Episode 1 is out there for free so, like, check it out. At the very least, you won't regret it.

This was a fun way to spend 15 minutes. The long and short of it is that you’re a guy in an empty office building tasked with removing all the ‘vermin’: which i.e mostly comes down to the player smashing everything in sight with a sledgehammer until you find and hit all the objects that bleed. There’s an addictive, kinda addictive arcadey feel, and the constraints that get added onto you as you go through each level add a level of complexity that forces you to think your approach on how you’re going to do a level, which is a neat bit of depth in a game that’s mostly “smash everything in sight.” I do think one later level had a gimmick that could’ve been split into two — especially given one achievement is “beat the game while only smashing vermin” — and the ending has the story take this weird, metaphorical beat which, while it’s interesting in how it contextualizes a lot of the game, I was loosely willing to accept the game on a surface level and didn’t think adding more complexity was particularly needed? Other than that, though, this is a neat 15-minute distraction which iirc is totally free. Check it out! 7/10.

This one’s maybe the most likely to a. be replayed and b. potentially move up in the midst of doing so — I’ll confess that maybe my feelings were impacted a bit since this was near the end of a marathon I was doing and I was feeling fairly exhausted. Either way, though, this was decent! I love the Commodore-64 aesthetic and how it combines with more modern techniques (in gaming, at least) like the rotoscoping during cutscenes — it really sells the unnatural feeling of the enemies you go up against and really helps contribute to the horror atmosphere. I also like the kind of… Goldilocks balance they have between committing to the technical limitations/difficulty of the era while not actively making it feel worse than it was back then: a lot of these throwback games tend to miss this balance and make the difficult mechanics of the time feel even worse, so it’s nice to see something that goes for this and feels… accurate, yet not unfair. I did have a major problem with signposting and knowing what I had to do — I needed to be backseated going through the whole thing and felt so aimless and tired when I wasn’t — but aside from that this was solid and decently fun. Maybe now that I know what I’m meant to do and maybe if this doesn’t come off the back of 6+ hours of other games I’ll have a bit of a better time with this when I eventually go to play the other two chapters. 6/10 for now.

I really liked the original ObsCure! It doesn’t exactly push the envelope as far as survival horror goes, and there are… certainly issues (the final boss, for one), but it’s a fun, kind of goofy game that’s… kind of like a more fast-paced, multiplayer Resident Evil with the same sort of tone as a teen horror movie. What I really like about it is the little things it does that feel kind of unique to it. I love the focus around light weakening the monsters/zombies as a gameplay mechanic — it adds a whole new dimension into how you approach weapons and encounters, and that moment where the sun goes down and you can no longer break the windows to trivialize encounters is a really nice ‘oh shit’ moment. Permadeath is present, but totally optional: you can just load a save and the game gives more than you’re ever going to need. Most of all, I really liked the cast — both how they perfectly emulate their high school archetypes without feeling like cardboard cutouts and how each of them brings something gameplay-wise — differing stats, in addition to unique and (mostly) useful talents that make building your team of two a significant decision. Again, it’s… mostly derivative, aside from the little bits and bobs where it differentiates, but it’s fun and charming and it really hits all the right beats enough that as of writing this it honestly contends for being one of my favourite survival horror games.

ObsCure II, on the other hand…

The story follows three of the main characters of the previous game plus, like, four more new characters, as they try to move on from what happened at their high school and transition to college/adult life. However, everybody at college is obsessed with things like sex and smoking hardcore drugs, and when a new flower starts getting smoked around campus, the rampant sexual activity creates a super-STD that, on the night of a frat party, rapidly turns all the college students into bloodthirsty monsters. It becomes up to both the new and old characters to team up, kill some zombies, and… actually things just end there. You just kind of do things and then things happen. It’s one of those kinds of plots.

And I’ll give it credit, a lot of the skeleton that made the first game a blast is still present here. Most of all being that the game can still be played all the way through with a partner via local multiplayer — even if the game was otherwise a slog there’s still something in being there with a friend — but even then the gameplay is still fast, yet also loosely strategic at its core. Weapons all have different purposes and capabilities aside from the usual ranged/melee moniker, and some enemies benefit from taking a different approach to other enemies — broods, for example, requiring quick hits from a baseball bat to avoid getting overwhelmed, while brood mothers often require the prolonged damage of the stun gun or chainsaw to lock them down — and with how quickly you can draw and switch them, combat really does switch up for every encounter you’re in, which is pretty neat. I read on this one Steam guide that this was a deliberate choice so that there was more flow to combat and prevent players from just brute forcing enemies, and while I don’t… think they really got there (I think there’s room to actually make the game harder if they wanted to accommodate that better), it’s interesting to know how much lies beneath the surface in this area.

But while the skeleton’s still present, and kinda fun, all the little kinks it has that really take it up a level are… gone, and replaced with things that really don’t work as well. Permadeath is gone, and so is unlimited saving — replaced by pre-determined save points that only work once, disinclining you from fucking around and potentially making you replay lonnnnnnnng stretches of the game should you be so unfortunate to find out. The emphasis on the enemies being weak to light is… aside from one token room where you can use a searchlight just totally gone — no flashlights, no sunlight (despite you fighting the final boss in broad daylight), no real… anything, in that regard. Everything regarding strategy regarding picking your team has been replaced, too. For the most part, your team of two switches up every so often, and during the sections where you do get to pick… their abilities are now active talents required to solve puzzles, rather than little passive things that make them better at certain things, so if you happened to go all the way with one team and then find a lock you need to pick or a door you need to absorb the mold off, then… whoops, gotta backtrack alllll the way back to the start, and then alllll the way back to where you originally were just because the game mandates that you fight a boss with two specific characters, which… especially low-key sorta sucks, mostly because I remember the first game being really cool with varying cutscenes depending on who you’re playing.

The story is also… kind of yeesh. On one hand, it reads almost like a PSA in terms of how heavy-handed it is about how drugs and sex are BAD and will do bad shit to your body, but on the other hand… it also kind of treats those same subjects in this super leery way? It almost feels like a Friday the 13th movie in how the female characters are kind of shaped by sex appeal, and then it goes the extra mile and frames it like it's on them for being so sexy (like, genuinely, one of the character bios lists them as being ‘responsible for the suspicious stickiness of many a bed-sheet' as if it's her fault they’re jacking off?) and it just feels kind of yucky all around. Even beyond that… it’s just a very stupid plot that could be fun but is undermined by how seriously it expects the player to take it. Like, all these characters get introduced as fratty and vapid college students straight out of a Friday the 13th movie and then… suddenly expects me to feel pathos when they all get brutally killed (especially after one has more of a reaction to his crashed car more than his brutally murdered girlfriend)? You just place so much exposition about the backstory and the mystery and the plot when it’s primarily about what the game calls the ultimate STD? Like, at least a lot of other survival horror games with less amazing plots knew how to play it up and have fun with it, but this kind of plays it straight in such a dour way, which makes it harder to laugh with it rather than laugh at it.

And in the end… it’s at least a little bit sad how hard of a downgrade this game is from the original. Like, the core is still there, and it’s at least passable as a multiplayer zombie shooter, but when you sand off all the little things that made ObsCure feel unique... there really isn’t much left for us here. 5/10.

This... is pretty short (like, 20 minutes at most) but it was a pretty fun time! The short of it is that you're a dude on his bike heading home after picking up a burger on the roadside and finding yourself constantly looping back to the parking lot. The two things I loved most was the artstyle and control scheme, the former — while it's kind of a popular artstyle among indie horror games these days — really making something aesthetically engaging out of what's supposed to pass as PS1 graphics. The control scheme, in addition, does a really good job at simulating what it's like being on a bike: really fun to go fast on, makes you feel like you're cutting through the breeze, but also really hard to control and really easy to crash and burn while attempting to make a quick turn. There's a nice slow escalation of dread that starts from the beginning and lasts to roughly the halfway point, but when that peaks and the next three loops just become chases with some evil force I started tapping out a bit — it leaned into having to deal with the deliberate flaws with the controls and also got a little bit monotonous. It ends strong, after that, but I'd say that whole second act prrrrobably drags the game down a good deal. Still, it's free, only lasts like 20 minutes and the other two acts are a blast, so I'd say check it out if you're interested! 7/10.

Ib is an RPG Maker horror game where you play as a girl named Ib, who tags along with her parents to go to an exhibition showcasing the works of little-known artist and sculptor Weiss Guerterna. However, when a wrong turn places her in a version of the gallery devoid of people, Ib finds herself going deeper and deeper — soon entering the paintings themselves. Now finding herself in a world where Guerterna’s art has seemingly been brought to life, and the inhabitants not quite friendly to outsiders, Ib must solve puzzles, progress further and further down into the gallery, and try to keep herself and the friends she meets across the way safe as they all try to find a way out.

For a game that ostensibly uses exhibition art as a throughline — from the location design still remaining reminiscent of an art gallery the further and further down you go, to the puzzles primarily requiring the player to interact with the artwork of the gallery — I think the visual design is really strong. The game uses… a rather subtle version of pixel art, with soft colours, a lack of outlines, and realistic proportions that blur the line between pixel art and something like a more traditional form of art. This even extends to the character sprites that appear on the side of the screen — it took me a while after beating the game to even realize that they were actually pixel art and not hand drawn, which feels kinda insane to me. I’m also super into whenever this artstyle suddenly gets changed up. It’s hard to really elaborate further given that most examples on that part are spoilers but whether it’s done either subtly or loudly it’s always done for some sort of effect or enhancement, and always with some measure of deliberateness behind it. There’s… one particular portion of the game where I wished they actually leaned harder into what they were doing, but aside from that I was super into how this game looks visually — it looks like it belongs as an RPGMaker horror game, but also not, and it’s really cool to see a game like this with a totally unique visual identity.

I also think… this game does a lot of what it’s doing well. Gameplay-wise, I’m really into a lot of the puzzle design: you effectively go through the gallery one room at a time, and are always completely done with a room by the time you move on to the next one, which always means the options you have are limited to what’s immediately around you and you never suffer from the 90s adventure game problem of having wayyyyyyy too many things you can interact with and having wayyyyyyy too many items you need to juggle and figure out the use for. I’m also into the puzzles themselves: while there are a couple stinkers in there I’m generally into how the game approaches problem-solving. While it does mostly focus on taking items and using them in certain places, the theming of the art gallery and the use of more abstract logic make it feel more like you’re trying to solve riddles that the game designer has prepared for you rather than just getting items to get more items. I also like how… lenient the game is compared to most RPGMaker horror games — your healthbar means that you can actually take a hit when things get actively dangerous/if something catches you off guard, though the limited opportunities to heal do provide a survival-horror sense of resource management, or making sure you avoid damage so that you can take it if need be.

Story-wise… it’s very much an RPGMaker horror game in that it has a story you can’t exactly talk about in distinct terms without spoiling it, but in general, I enjoyed the way the game was written! The characters all were likable or fascinating, and… there’s a low-key undercurrent of black comedy which doesn’t always pop up but generally ends up being pretty fun when it does — the storybook you read early on in the game, for example, really sells its whiplash in a way that crosses from horrifying to incredible. The horror beats generally work very well — there are some particular sections of the game that are very tense and do a good job of making the player feel absolutely helpless. I’m… also really into the way the game handles player choice and multiple endings. The player can make choices that shape the narrative and come back later on, but the endings themselves are determined by particular values and how they mesh together… values that, however, are shown by the choices the player makes. I’m a little sad because you can only see so much of it when you go through the game once (and two endings are locked off until you beat the game for the first time, which is >:( ) but as someone who really likes looking at how player choice shapes the narrative this game has a ton going on under the surface, and it’s really enjoyable to unpack it all and see how all the cogs in the machine work.

All in all… yeah, I definitely enjoyed Ib a lot! I’m not quite sure it quite hits the level of excellent, to me, but it’s a super cool 2-3 hour game that does a lot of cool things with its visual and game design and, in the field of RPGMaker horror games, really does a good job at standing out amongst the crowd, even with so much time passing since it’s release. 8/10.

My thoughts on Gunman Clive 1, in brief, is that it's, like, solid. It's a quick little game where you're a cowboy mega-bustering your way past bandits and bosses to save your wife. You run through levels, you pick up powerups. It's nothing really amazing but it doesn't need to be — it's a nice way to kill an hour or two on your 3DS when you're bored and don't really want to commit to a bigger game.

Gunman Clive 2... tries to be more than that — more mechanics, more spectacle. It... doesn't really work out all that well. The loose way I can describe it is... if it kind of went for quantity over quality. You know (well, you probably don’t, but whatever) how Gunman Clive had that one vehicle level which was a fun little change of pace that still kept consistent with what you'd been doing up until then? Well now a quarter of the entire game are vehicle levels which throw new shit at you and all control like ass. You know how when the first game brought in new mechanics they stuck around often just played a little bit with how you were already doing things? Here there are new mechanics that barge in, completely force you to change the way you play, then disappear right afterwards. It creates a really uneven experience, where you can't actually apply anything you learn because it's rendered moot by future levels. The original Gunman Clive allowed you to become better in order to combat the harder challenges up ahead — this game just keeps you at the same level, which makes the endgame a process of you throwing yourself against the wall trying to break your way through the new mechanics that keep getting introduced there as well.

And it's a shame, because the strengths of the original are still present here — I like the artstyle and music, combat against enemies and bosses remains a highlight, and there's a certain joy in figuring out the path of least resistance as you try a level over and over again... it's just that this time this game's particular flaws magnify the flaws of the original game: getting sent right back to the beginning of a level when you die is extra punishing when a lot of the individual levels are gauntlets — especially with the vehicle levels where you can't go faster than the game allows you to. Controls still aren't amazing, and get even worse when you have to re-learn them on the fly or there's a new fancy gimmick which requires preciseness in jumping the 3DS analogue stick isn't built for and the first game never required from you.

But in general, like, man, I really wanted to see the changes made as an improvement on the first game — I'm all for sequels that experiment rather than just being the same thing again — but given how a lot of the expansion is straight up a downgrade... I think if I wanna kill time for an hour but don't want to commit to anything bigger I'll just stick with Gunman Clive 1. 5/10.

And after the brief change-in-pace that was Pest Control, Nitrome has thrown me right back into the platformer mines. At least this one has a bit more I can say about it. There’s a really fun core mechanic here: using your mouse to pull the platforms like an elastic band to slingshot your guy across the level. It works well: there are a bunch of different platforms that all interact in different ways, a lot of different level types — where the means in how you get to the end is something more than just “use the platforms like slingshots” — and in general the game does great at keeping things fresh as you go through all twenty-five levels. Even the usual Nitrome platformer problem where the levels are extremely long and dying sends you back to the start are… mostly mitigated: while enemies/limited lives/instant death pits exist, a good portion of the game instead measures success on a system… honestly reminiscent of Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy, where while success takes you further into the level… messing a section up has a chance to make you fall backwards, forcing you to do the section you just did as you scramble up to where you just were. It’s so funny whenever it happens, and even if it can be a little frustrating it always feels like there’s a safety net in place, making sure you never lose too much progress, making sure you can easily get back to where you were before… at least for the levels that are like that. The rest… truly, truly suffer for not having checkpoints. Do I really have to go through the first part of the level over and over again just to reach the part where I actually die? Do I really have to do fifteen jumps back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back when messing up even once sends me right back to the beginning? I hate harping on this for every Nitrome game I review but it’s easily one of the weakest parts of all of their platformers: taking a fun concept and then stretching out the runtime by making you replay entire levels upon failure like it’s a NES game. I know these games don’t really stay that way forever — I don’t think it’s particularly long before they eventually do start putting checkpoints in — but as is it is rather sad to consistently see games with a lot going for them get drawn back by their issues. Long levels and no checkpoints are a rough combo, especially when you don’t have any tools to really sidestep it.

So this game is, uh, pretty obviously not great. You gun and stealth your way through levels with absolutely broken gun and stealth play and use the absolutely revolutionary revolver conversation system to randomly select responses to a conversation that run the gamut to "instantly get a game over" to "get caught in a shootout where you're shot multiple times before you can even get your gun over to an enemy." Game overs, mind you, put you back at the very beginning of a level because there aren't any checkpoints, meaning that if you don't quite get that you're supposed to shoot the helicopter to stop the final boss from escaping rather than catch up to it (which is what the game signposts) whoops! You're set back, like, 30 minutes of progress. Wanna figure out how the stealth mechanics work during a dedicated stealth segment and an enemy even so much as looks at you? Better hope you get used to seeing the intro cutscene for the level repeat over and over again. It's wayyyy too punishing and it makes an already broken game worse. The game as a whole isn't completely irredeemable — the core gameplay loop of staying crouched to block 90% of bullets, shooting enemies who can't hit back to dead silence is way more fun than it should be, ironic or not, and its short enough that it doesn't wear out the little welcome it has — but, uh, yeah. Maybe not "the 9/11 of video games" like the founder of Giant Bomb purported it to be, but still pretty bad. 3/10.

Alien: Isolation is rad. I don’t necessarily think it’s my favourite survival horror game but I can’t deny that it at least contends for the title. And this is as someone who… didn’t have a lot of experience with the Alien film series, at least beyond what’s been absorbed into pop culture. I remember reading an interview made to hype up Aliens: Colonial Marines where the devs talk about how painstakingly they attempted to make environments look exactly like they were in the original film all for the purpose of fanservice, and stuff I’ve read up on gives the impression that a lot of effort on that front was made here as well but even without that level of devotion to the series I was easily able to understand most of what was going on, plot-wise. I maybe don’t really have the viewpoint to say whether this game appeals to longtime fans — though from what knowledge I’ve absorbed it most certainly does — as someone new to the Alien franchise myself, I found this as good of an entry point as any.

The story follows Amanda Ripley, an engineer who joined the Weyland-Yutani Corporation in order to search for answers to her mother’s disappearance. When she heads to the space station Sevastopol in order to pursue a lead on the Nostromo, her mother’s ship, she finds the place in ruins and most of the crew dead — and the being that caused the destruction is now on the hunt for her. Now she has to scavenge her way through the desolation, hide from the alien, fight through all the other factions vying for her blood, and try and find a way to get off the ship.

And it works. Really well. In terms of gameplay, the closest thing I’d maybe compare it to would be Resident Evil VII: you explore/puzzle your way through a first-person environment, find quite a bit of lore to read through and figure out, craft items to take down unfriendly humans and androids… and then the Xenomorph comes in. It’s always on your ass. Nothing you do hurts it. If it sees you, and you don’t have the tools to get away from it, you’re dead. When it shows up, which it frequently does, it's like life-or-death hide-and-seek — you’ve got to figure out where to go, you’ve got to figure out where exactly the alien is, and you’ve got to figure out how to get from A to B without the alien seeing you. Even when you start getting tools that make getting caught no longer instant death, the alien never stops being a threat. Fuel and ammo are limited by what you can find, and eventually — if you start using one thing too many times — the alien will stop giving a shit and gun for you anyway. Anything you do is only temporary, and nothing will ever keep the Xenomorph down, from the first moment it appears right up until the very end of the game.

It’s not so oppressive all the time, though, and I think that’s something to the game’s benefit. For every moment, like the Medbay, where the alien is a constant threat and you’ve got to think out your every move, you then proceed to get an area like Seegson Synthetics where the only significant threats are looters and you’re given a lot more room to breathe. And just when you’ve gone through a bunch of low-intensity areas just like it… suddenly the alien’s back and you start to realize that all the shiny new tools you picked up only work to show it down. The game knows that constant tension will only leave the player exhausted, and does a really great job at mixing the intensity up and using its best aspects sparingly. I know that there’s been a lot of criticism about how the story goes longer than deemed necessary, but that was never a problem for me? There was never really a point where I was particularly waiting for the ride to be over, and — rather surprising for a survival horror game — I felt like some of the best (and scariest!) setpieces were located closer to the end of the experience more than anything, which I think speaks to how well the game manages to pace itself out.

Another thing I’d like to shout out is the game’s AI. I think most people already know about the wonders of the Xenomorph AI — such as how the game keeps track of the strategies you use to successfully get away from it and slowly makes the AI smart enough to start counteracting them — but something I’m also really into is how the AI for the looters and other regular humans on the ship plays out. They’re super variable in this flawed and human way, and it's clear even though they oppose you they’re mostly just dudes trapped in the same situation as you are. They’ll stop trying to shoot you the moment they see the alien, and some of the little interactions before they inevitably get gored often see you as unlikely comrades trying to survive against a mutual enemy. I’ve heard friends tell their stories about their experiences playing this game, and all their super memorable interactions with the human NPCs, and while most of mine were them being stupid and/or them getting themselves killed by the alien, I think its rad that just one part of the whole experience can inspire so many different stories.

There are other parts that maybe knock the experience down, though. The music is… obnoxious, honestly. In a game where diegetic sound is so important, and listening out for footsteps is the best way to know where the alien is, having generic orchestra cues blare over nearly everything at the slightest hint of the alien got in the way and felt cheap, especially considering the atmosphere that’d already been built without it. Using manual save stations, while it does really help to create tension… I wouldn’t have minded some auto-checkpoints, especially in some of the more difficult sections — oftentimes those sections would stop giving you save stations as frequently and it slowly became very frustrating to tread ground you’d already trodden over and over again when oftentimes the section you actually ran the risk of dying on was at least two minutes worth of traversal ahead. I… also feel like maybe the game could’ve done a bit more to signpost things to the player? Maybe it could be that I’m the actual problem, but there were… way more points than I could count where I just kind of didn’t know what I was supposed to do, and the tools the game uses to point a direction for the player (the map, the motion tracker) didn’t exactly do much to help.

But in general… man, this was great. Maybe not my favourite survival horror, but definitely at least a contender. I’ll be fascinated to see how exactly this stacks up compared to all the other games I play this September and October. 8/10.