trippinhobbit
I bought this game just before the turn of the new year, only to sit on it for a month in backlog, but damn, I'm glad I got around it. The Talos Principle was pretty good, had some fun armchair philosophy, good puzzles, generally smooth solving; Talos Principle 2 really elevates the core themes of the first game to something that doesn't just feel like armchair philosophy, while delivering puzzles that have buttery smooth solving paths with some great twists, and upgraded to some immaculate graphical fidelity and art design.
The puzzle design is engaging. Most puzzles have a great time curve, the longest probably took me around 30 minutes (one of the golden door puzzles), I'd say otherwise my average solve time runs somewhere in the 5-10 minute range. A good mix of puzzle solving and ambulatory gameplay, interspersed with interacting with the main cast, reading notes, listening to the logs. It took me just over 30 hours total to finish the game to 100% completion (I only cheated on finding 3 stars, but frankly, I feel justified). This game isn't particularly designed to be too daunting, and while sometimes I found some area's puzzles to be, well, a bit underwhelming in challenge, there is a very solid mix here. Its actually quite impressive how many mechanics they force you to use, and then rethink how each device works. Overall the pacing is fantastic, and I think fits a great middle ground for stubborn puzzle blasters like me and casual solvers alike, there's even a (quite limited) in game puzzle skip system! It's no Stephen's Sausage Roll, but it's really for the best. Its very rare IMO to find a puzzle game this well balanced, and it pushes you to think without overloading your frustration. As an aside, the thought of even trying to playing more Void Stranger is making me ill.
The environments are really well crafted. Some areas are a bit understated, but its a beautiful game, and the design of the buildings, and puzzle rooms, and architecture were a joy to experience. The music is superb too. I was watching my partner play through some of TP1 recently and the switch from Serious Engine to UE really raised the bar on what Croteam could achieve with their art.
All that said, what shines brightest to me is the writing and the voice acting. The characters are so fresh, and real, and engaging, and the choices you make and the things you say to them have weight. The game does lots of little things to show you that the characters actually remember what you say to them in later dialogues, and the castings were so great. I especially love Yaqut. Best boy(?). I really loved the Straton and Lifthrasir audio logs. I mean this game was unironically making me think in new ways about philosophical topics I've tread many times in new and actually nuanced ways. I think so much of it really resonated with me, but I think that it could resonate with anyone that engages with it seriously.
This is a gold standard of what I'd want to see in a well budgeted puzzle game. Here's hoping we get a challenge DLC. Some of the new mechanics deserve some harder puzzles.
The puzzle design is engaging. Most puzzles have a great time curve, the longest probably took me around 30 minutes (one of the golden door puzzles), I'd say otherwise my average solve time runs somewhere in the 5-10 minute range. A good mix of puzzle solving and ambulatory gameplay, interspersed with interacting with the main cast, reading notes, listening to the logs. It took me just over 30 hours total to finish the game to 100% completion (I only cheated on finding 3 stars, but frankly, I feel justified). This game isn't particularly designed to be too daunting, and while sometimes I found some area's puzzles to be, well, a bit underwhelming in challenge, there is a very solid mix here. Its actually quite impressive how many mechanics they force you to use, and then rethink how each device works. Overall the pacing is fantastic, and I think fits a great middle ground for stubborn puzzle blasters like me and casual solvers alike, there's even a (quite limited) in game puzzle skip system! It's no Stephen's Sausage Roll, but it's really for the best. Its very rare IMO to find a puzzle game this well balanced, and it pushes you to think without overloading your frustration. As an aside, the thought of even trying to playing more Void Stranger is making me ill.
The environments are really well crafted. Some areas are a bit understated, but its a beautiful game, and the design of the buildings, and puzzle rooms, and architecture were a joy to experience. The music is superb too. I was watching my partner play through some of TP1 recently and the switch from Serious Engine to UE really raised the bar on what Croteam could achieve with their art.
All that said, what shines brightest to me is the writing and the voice acting. The characters are so fresh, and real, and engaging, and the choices you make and the things you say to them have weight. The game does lots of little things to show you that the characters actually remember what you say to them in later dialogues, and the castings were so great. I especially love Yaqut. Best boy(?). I really loved the Straton and Lifthrasir audio logs. I mean this game was unironically making me think in new ways about philosophical topics I've tread many times in new and actually nuanced ways. I think so much of it really resonated with me, but I think that it could resonate with anyone that engages with it seriously.
This is a gold standard of what I'd want to see in a well budgeted puzzle game. Here's hoping we get a challenge DLC. Some of the new mechanics deserve some harder puzzles.
2023
I wasn't going to write a review for this one, but I guess what I'd have to say is that its cool, but fucking boring. Next time design a puzzle mechanic where most of the time spent playing is actually solving puzzles and not moving balls around.
2023
Kinda boring, but I love rock climbing and it was pretty, the music was good too. I would describe this as something like a voiceless Ghibli film but its a video game and around 3-4 hours. Take that for what you will, but you'd probably get the same experience playing this game if you just watched Howl's Moving Castle or Ponyo with an Xbox controller in hand, and alternated holding the left and right triggers for the duration of the movie. Truthfully, I'm just jealous that the main character climbs V18 and on sights 5.16a without breaking a sweat.
2021
Kind of awkward mechanics, puzzles mainly reliant on observation, short, mostly downtime walking. Ehhhh. Coming off the back of playing Viewfinder (and hating it), I feel softer on this game despite not really being that invested in the narrative. That said, I appreciate the artistic vision the director had for this game and I actually do think the Maquette as a set piece is really interesting, and overall was this neat sort of unfolding thing with each element symbolizing evolving parts of the main character's relationship.
While a sort of basic tale about the nature of relationships and self growth (read, shallow but not offensively, just blandly relatable), parts were well delivered, and some of the visual art on display was really fantastic. I'm not sure if all the music was original for this game, but it was pretty good too. I think if you have gamepass and would play something that looks like this have a go; though, I think in retrospect I'd say its kind of middling.
Biggest issues are that objects are clunky and its not much of a puzzle game, more like a "Whoa you gotta like, look at things a different way bro." But the gimmick is you are literally doing this in the game as the main character has to look at things differently in his life. Its a short narrative driven walking sim masquerading as a puzzle game. I think its cute, but unfortunately cute only gets you so far. 50% cute 50% boring af.
While a sort of basic tale about the nature of relationships and self growth (read, shallow but not offensively, just blandly relatable), parts were well delivered, and some of the visual art on display was really fantastic. I'm not sure if all the music was original for this game, but it was pretty good too. I think if you have gamepass and would play something that looks like this have a go; though, I think in retrospect I'd say its kind of middling.
Biggest issues are that objects are clunky and its not much of a puzzle game, more like a "Whoa you gotta like, look at things a different way bro." But the gimmick is you are literally doing this in the game as the main character has to look at things differently in his life. Its a short narrative driven walking sim masquerading as a puzzle game. I think its cute, but unfortunately cute only gets you so far. 50% cute 50% boring af.
2023
Putting my thoughts into a log because I want to see more people giving this game an honest chance. To begin with, I don't think I ever would have downloaded this game if it wasn't on gamepass (as I'm sure is true for the vast majority of the playerbase) but I've been really charmed with the experience overall and at worst I would consider this game an (partially) unpolished gem, whose issues mostly stem to how progression and matchmaking work.
As it stands this is the most fun I've had with a multiplayer shooter in a while and despite being difficult to describe exactly what kind of game it is, I'm simply going to argue that it's the freshest take on the hero shooter genre of any release in the last decade. Where Overwatch or any of its derivative copycats cashing in on the craze failed to pique my interest, this one actually feels unique. I don't know if I would have played it so much already if not for wanting to see simply where they take it because its such an odd blend of genres.
The mechanic feel of the game is great, it runs fantastic, and when it pushes your team's cooperative abilities it is such a blast. When the game is throwing dinosaurs at you left and right, and giving you pvp missions that force skirmishes against the enemy team often, you gotta focus and get sweaty to win. I think at their highest level both pve and pvp gameplay is super challenging, tight, and well designed. Point capture, and a unique gamemode where you defeat dino's to charge a hammer to smash a pylon while the other team is in the same area doing the same, are my favorite. Even payload, the first pvp mode any new account has access to is really fun on later maps where there are more opportunities to attack the other team. I think the the addition of savage gauntlet at the end of this month and the first set of exosuit variants in august are really going to round out and a lot to that high end gameplay.
I won't ignore the problems though. This game has a terrible introductory period where it forces you to do the same boring pvp payload or pve missions over and over and over while you unlock the game's story via audio logs that drop with player level increases. The most engaging and varied and enjoyable parts of gameplay - variant dinosaurs, 10 man pve raids, point capture, energy capture, power hammer pvp missions - they are all locked behind a significant time investment. Even then, after you have unlocked all of these things, the matchmaking doesn't discriminate and will - with some relatively regular frequency - put you in the game with much lower level players than you, and force you to do the low level payload or pve missions, and it sucks. I think they didn't want low level player's experiences to just be bots, but something really needs to change with the matchmaking algorithm, or maybe it'll get better over time as more players graduate to a higher level.
If you can stick with it, I promise there is a very worthwhile experience waiting for you beyond the grind in the first 10-20 hours, but that's a big ask. If you like multiplayer shooters and are itching for something fresh (and in my opinion, has a bright future), I give this one a hearty recommendation. If you have gamepass it's a no brainer.
As it stands this is the most fun I've had with a multiplayer shooter in a while and despite being difficult to describe exactly what kind of game it is, I'm simply going to argue that it's the freshest take on the hero shooter genre of any release in the last decade. Where Overwatch or any of its derivative copycats cashing in on the craze failed to pique my interest, this one actually feels unique. I don't know if I would have played it so much already if not for wanting to see simply where they take it because its such an odd blend of genres.
The mechanic feel of the game is great, it runs fantastic, and when it pushes your team's cooperative abilities it is such a blast. When the game is throwing dinosaurs at you left and right, and giving you pvp missions that force skirmishes against the enemy team often, you gotta focus and get sweaty to win. I think at their highest level both pve and pvp gameplay is super challenging, tight, and well designed. Point capture, and a unique gamemode where you defeat dino's to charge a hammer to smash a pylon while the other team is in the same area doing the same, are my favorite. Even payload, the first pvp mode any new account has access to is really fun on later maps where there are more opportunities to attack the other team. I think the the addition of savage gauntlet at the end of this month and the first set of exosuit variants in august are really going to round out and a lot to that high end gameplay.
I won't ignore the problems though. This game has a terrible introductory period where it forces you to do the same boring pvp payload or pve missions over and over and over while you unlock the game's story via audio logs that drop with player level increases. The most engaging and varied and enjoyable parts of gameplay - variant dinosaurs, 10 man pve raids, point capture, energy capture, power hammer pvp missions - they are all locked behind a significant time investment. Even then, after you have unlocked all of these things, the matchmaking doesn't discriminate and will - with some relatively regular frequency - put you in the game with much lower level players than you, and force you to do the low level payload or pve missions, and it sucks. I think they didn't want low level player's experiences to just be bots, but something really needs to change with the matchmaking algorithm, or maybe it'll get better over time as more players graduate to a higher level.
If you can stick with it, I promise there is a very worthwhile experience waiting for you beyond the grind in the first 10-20 hours, but that's a big ask. If you like multiplayer shooters and are itching for something fresh (and in my opinion, has a bright future), I give this one a hearty recommendation. If you have gamepass it's a no brainer.
2023
Another year, another high art indie piece that teases me with interesting puzzle mechanics, but never actually pushes them to any limit. Maybe if the story was worth my time I could forgive how offensively short and easy this game is, but the writing is frankly shallower than a petri dish. What the player sees and hears feels so half baked and unremarkable in every sense of the word. I could craft a more cohesive story stringing together bits of conversations from random people walking around my local walmart. It gave me a strong feeling like the developer had no idea how to justify the mechanic in a way that integrates to the story, but they are really trying to appeal to some cross section of people who love Portal and Outer Wilds. So they just HAD to hamfist some enviromental science psychobabble of a story in audio dialogs where characters only relay to you hints of events happening between them, while never telling you what any of those events were. The environmental story telling doesn't really carry much weight to fill in any actual details either. I'd say a solid hour of my playtime was spent making sure I listened to each log and read all the little notes spread here and there, but man, there was just no payoff. I still have no idea who these characters were or what they doing besides "Science?!"
As it stands this is a prototype for a good (in theory) puzzle game that won't be made. Even at a $25 price point, this game feels so half assed. Having a great foundational and nearly limitless concept, the designers of this game have only managed to polish their ideas into little more than gimmicks. Such a shame. So many puzzles they could just take the plunge and start raising the complexity on! Even if this boring ass story wasn't carrying me through, I could be challenged. Every time they introduced a new concept that actually took a leap to wrap myself around it would just get thrown away in the next 30 minutes to introduce another disposable mechanic. I can't recommend this buy.
As it stands this is a prototype for a good (in theory) puzzle game that won't be made. Even at a $25 price point, this game feels so half assed. Having a great foundational and nearly limitless concept, the designers of this game have only managed to polish their ideas into little more than gimmicks. Such a shame. So many puzzles they could just take the plunge and start raising the complexity on! Even if this boring ass story wasn't carrying me through, I could be challenged. Every time they introduced a new concept that actually took a leap to wrap myself around it would just get thrown away in the next 30 minutes to introduce another disposable mechanic. I can't recommend this buy.
2022
As a game, 3 stars. As a parody, 5 stars.
2022
I may or may not finish it to completion. I think what I'd have to say, especially coming off the back of Blasphemous, that the game doesn't feel so bad to play, but that I can't recommend it unless you are very sad and bored.
Every part of the experience feels slow even after you have the majority of your movement options unlocked. The dialogue with the characters, if you choose to engage with it, the traveling between locations, the accruement of currency, the long stretches of empty hallways and bland corridors. I feel like this game has a lot of good ideas but there's just so much nothing despite every path leading to some sort of reward. Despite having things to go and collect that improve your character incrementally, I can't help but fall asleep while I dash through needlessly long corridors with at most one or two enemy types. Why can't we fast travel to all of the save points? Maybe that dev thought that would make the game too fun. If you want to backtrack for exploration you have to WORK for it; and by work I mean tediously manage your stamina gauge to run and dash at peak efficiency while literally nothing else is happening 80% of the time. The atmosphere is so... mild. The music is nice and moody, but it never really stands out, or becomes more than that. The world just feels so barren. A shame really, I enjoy the visuals.
Mechanically its all there, you got a dash, you got a wall jump, you got a double jump. But man, moving around just feels so, sluggish, I'm not sure why, when you play Super Metroid it always feels like Samus is just trucking it, but here the rooms are just so wide and full of empty space. The main goal of the game is going out and collecting these ship parts, but while you have the parts you can't fast travel (which doesn't matter anyways because there are very, very few fast travel nodes, this just makes it take very little more time for story? reasons, I don't know), and these green skull things attack you. Of course, the parts range from, ehhh sort of close, to VERY far from the delivery point. It's all just so tedious. Why? I have been trying to wrap my head around what the developers thought the return sequences added to the game. Its not really like tense or anything. Its just a boring walk and climb through the same hallways as before, maybe with a few more enemies.
I wish to not be so mean. I hope the developer learned a lot from shipping this game. Apparently its been in development from kickstarter for just under a decade. Looking at past beta footage, I feel like I don't understand how the game artistically arrived where it did. It feels like the devs played Hollow Knight and were like "whoa dude, this is way better than what we're working on" and then preceded to rip the design asunder into something bland and lacking its own identity. Ernestly, why would I play this over Hollow Knight, or Super Metroid, or Metroid Dread, or anything else in the genre. Because its new? Those are some REAL contenders; for sure, we stand on the shoulders of giants, but this one has no innovations for me to applaud, and the story and characters are just not captivating enough for me to not want to just grab my switch and replay Dread.
Every part of the experience feels slow even after you have the majority of your movement options unlocked. The dialogue with the characters, if you choose to engage with it, the traveling between locations, the accruement of currency, the long stretches of empty hallways and bland corridors. I feel like this game has a lot of good ideas but there's just so much nothing despite every path leading to some sort of reward. Despite having things to go and collect that improve your character incrementally, I can't help but fall asleep while I dash through needlessly long corridors with at most one or two enemy types. Why can't we fast travel to all of the save points? Maybe that dev thought that would make the game too fun. If you want to backtrack for exploration you have to WORK for it; and by work I mean tediously manage your stamina gauge to run and dash at peak efficiency while literally nothing else is happening 80% of the time. The atmosphere is so... mild. The music is nice and moody, but it never really stands out, or becomes more than that. The world just feels so barren. A shame really, I enjoy the visuals.
Mechanically its all there, you got a dash, you got a wall jump, you got a double jump. But man, moving around just feels so, sluggish, I'm not sure why, when you play Super Metroid it always feels like Samus is just trucking it, but here the rooms are just so wide and full of empty space. The main goal of the game is going out and collecting these ship parts, but while you have the parts you can't fast travel (which doesn't matter anyways because there are very, very few fast travel nodes, this just makes it take very little more time for story? reasons, I don't know), and these green skull things attack you. Of course, the parts range from, ehhh sort of close, to VERY far from the delivery point. It's all just so tedious. Why? I have been trying to wrap my head around what the developers thought the return sequences added to the game. Its not really like tense or anything. Its just a boring walk and climb through the same hallways as before, maybe with a few more enemies.
I wish to not be so mean. I hope the developer learned a lot from shipping this game. Apparently its been in development from kickstarter for just under a decade. Looking at past beta footage, I feel like I don't understand how the game artistically arrived where it did. It feels like the devs played Hollow Knight and were like "whoa dude, this is way better than what we're working on" and then preceded to rip the design asunder into something bland and lacking its own identity. Ernestly, why would I play this over Hollow Knight, or Super Metroid, or Metroid Dread, or anything else in the genre. Because its new? Those are some REAL contenders; for sure, we stand on the shoulders of giants, but this one has no innovations for me to applaud, and the story and characters are just not captivating enough for me to not want to just grab my switch and replay Dread.
If you enjoy deductive reasoning games then this is your jam. Anyone who's played Obra Dinn would love this game, and it comes as no surprise that Lucas Pope himself gave this one a hearty recommendation on his twitter. It takes the death vignettes of Obra Dinn and word magnet mad libs, and slaps them together to create a short, engaging, and unique experience.
The gameplay is really a shine here. Each chapter gets more and more complex, adding new characters to the overarching plotline, involving more word 'types,' and just generally increasing the number of clues and words necessary to deduce the happenings of the events taking place.
Personally, I found the narrative to be a bit silly but for the purposes of the game, well used. The world building didn't give me the feel of being very fleshed out, but I'm not sure it needed to be. Probably, too much world building information would have interceded the large number of clues particularly dedicated to solving each chapter, in which there are already many red herrings. Id say the experience of the story feels very theatrical, and the pace of the story is quite well balanced in terms of the intensity. The music does a great job at enhancing the atmosphere as well.
My main criticism would be that I'm a very stubborn person so I didn't want to use the hint system - and in turn ended up needing to rely heavily on the "Two or less correct" message to clean up some of my mad libs panels. A few times its easy to get some small details just barely wrong and it becomes a little trial and error-ry (if you refuse to use hints). I will say I do appreciate the little help screen that comes up when you press the hint button that reminds you of some deductive reasoning skills before you commit to actually reading any of the hints. At the very least, for any of the mad libs solving, 80-90% is going to be good perception and reading comprehension. Furthermore, even Obra Dinn suffers for a bit of that trial and errory-ness too, so I don't judge it too harshly. Until someone proves otherwise, as creators try to make more games like this, I think it is just going to be a pitfall of games of this type.
The gameplay is really a shine here. Each chapter gets more and more complex, adding new characters to the overarching plotline, involving more word 'types,' and just generally increasing the number of clues and words necessary to deduce the happenings of the events taking place.
Personally, I found the narrative to be a bit silly but for the purposes of the game, well used. The world building didn't give me the feel of being very fleshed out, but I'm not sure it needed to be. Probably, too much world building information would have interceded the large number of clues particularly dedicated to solving each chapter, in which there are already many red herrings. Id say the experience of the story feels very theatrical, and the pace of the story is quite well balanced in terms of the intensity. The music does a great job at enhancing the atmosphere as well.
My main criticism would be that I'm a very stubborn person so I didn't want to use the hint system - and in turn ended up needing to rely heavily on the "Two or less correct" message to clean up some of my mad libs panels. A few times its easy to get some small details just barely wrong and it becomes a little trial and error-ry (if you refuse to use hints). I will say I do appreciate the little help screen that comes up when you press the hint button that reminds you of some deductive reasoning skills before you commit to actually reading any of the hints. At the very least, for any of the mad libs solving, 80-90% is going to be good perception and reading comprehension. Furthermore, even Obra Dinn suffers for a bit of that trial and errory-ness too, so I don't judge it too harshly. Until someone proves otherwise, as creators try to make more games like this, I think it is just going to be a pitfall of games of this type.
2022
Pretty fun puzzle game, if lacking obvious substance beyond puzzles. Despite my love for The Witness, this one is a bit too imitative without the same kind of auteur flourish that JB brings to his works. Overall difficulty is quite approachable for this one but there were a good number of manageable noggin busters, and the tutorial panels lead you well to understand each mechanic, so if you want a ~10-15 hour narrative free (but visually distinct and lovely) puzzle experience, this one isn't so bad.
2022
It is a cute and competent game, but a bit thin on the actual game. This one is quite short - maybe not to its own detriment - with honestly some great art direction going for it. Ultimately I think I can only recommend this as an aesthetic experience alone. Be prepared though, playing for 100% took me only just under 6 hours at a quite leisurely pace.
2020
Paradise Killer is a murder mystery investigation game that wears its spikechun and suda51 influences on its sleeve proudly. It has an excessive and unrelenting vapor wave style, that to be completely honest, is a bit of a trend that I'm not partial to, especially because even with the excellent art direction that this game has, vaporwave just generally (and this game is no exception) hurts to look at. That said PK takes this aesthetic and dangronpa-esque style and mashes it up with a lot of creative flare.
However, I'll stop the comparisons with "esque." Unlike DR, PK just has one major mystery, with numerous scenes to investigate and one large island to explore. The cast is smaller too, yet not wanting for more detail. The characters in this game are really unique and interesting, and I mean it. Each one of them is uniquely extreme in their own way, with their own motivations, feelings about the other major players on the island, the murders at the center of the mystery. I would say a lot of them are really superbly written, and have different dialogue trees for just about any evidence you find. The core loop of this game being primarily, free form exploration where you stumble upon things, asking characters for alibis, clues, tip offs for the existence of clues, but also lies and misinformation. This is a solid loop, but not without its faults.
While exploring the island is a fun task, players who aren't particularly thorough will, or at least could miss out on relatively plot critical details. The game does have a bit of an open ended finale where the information you ultimately know by the end, and who you choose to convict of murder is largely up to you, and if you wanted to you could end the game immediately. But thinking critically, if I wasn't hopping around like a maniac collecting the random vapor wave trinket trash that liters the island - the high octane gaming for which my brain was naturally designed - there are some clues that are pretty hidden which I'm not sure had hints towards their existence. For some that may leave holes. Occasionally, jumping around between characters can be kind of annoying or lead to lost time. There is a fast travel mechanic that I didn't use enough of though (although I'm also not sure why it costs a resource), so to be fair that's on me also. While I'm not necessarily upset about how much you have to go back to speak with a character again (which is something you'd expect to have to do as you learn new things), there's quite a bit of retreading.
The collectibles are well, pretty moot, they just sort of feel like they are there and there's really no reward or meaning to them besides a funny name and a blurb. At times the game's humor just didn't really land for me. Sometimes finding something that you know exists can be a bit of a chore when you have to look at perpetual vapor wave. The mystery itself is also not that mysterious after a certain point, though understanding what the motivations of each character could be or would be or are is more where the game puts the focus. and in those places I think it succeeds well.
The thing I must praise most in this game is the world building. While everything is extremely hard to look at, the environmental story telling, and the actual story telling really make up for the complete eye bleed. Paradise Killer takes place in what I can only imagine is something like a post-post-post-apocalyptic world. I'm talking like Warhammer 40k elder space god vibes. the writing really does a good job of world building this crazy universe, there's basically enough here to write your own RPG scenario. I'm not going to go into details so you can experience it for yourself. The island, game universe, and how each of your potential suspects fit into it actually does make the choice you make at the end of the game for who to convict actually pretty interesting.
Which moves onto my biggest complaint - I want more things written in this universe. Its fuckin cool man. To be frank I don't think the payoff for the ending feels that satisfying and once you've peeled away the layers of the mystery on your own the game doesn't have a vehicle for rewarding you because there's not any real final correct "answer." This frustrates me, but it put me into the mindset of the characters. PK doesn't ask you who to convict so much as who's cause do you support the most, and the 'causes' of the characters that the game builds up in this very strange post-post-post-apocalyptic world really excite me to see if the devs will continue to use this universe.
My eyes melted but it was hella.
However, I'll stop the comparisons with "esque." Unlike DR, PK just has one major mystery, with numerous scenes to investigate and one large island to explore. The cast is smaller too, yet not wanting for more detail. The characters in this game are really unique and interesting, and I mean it. Each one of them is uniquely extreme in their own way, with their own motivations, feelings about the other major players on the island, the murders at the center of the mystery. I would say a lot of them are really superbly written, and have different dialogue trees for just about any evidence you find. The core loop of this game being primarily, free form exploration where you stumble upon things, asking characters for alibis, clues, tip offs for the existence of clues, but also lies and misinformation. This is a solid loop, but not without its faults.
While exploring the island is a fun task, players who aren't particularly thorough will, or at least could miss out on relatively plot critical details. The game does have a bit of an open ended finale where the information you ultimately know by the end, and who you choose to convict of murder is largely up to you, and if you wanted to you could end the game immediately. But thinking critically, if I wasn't hopping around like a maniac collecting the random vapor wave trinket trash that liters the island - the high octane gaming for which my brain was naturally designed - there are some clues that are pretty hidden which I'm not sure had hints towards their existence. For some that may leave holes. Occasionally, jumping around between characters can be kind of annoying or lead to lost time. There is a fast travel mechanic that I didn't use enough of though (although I'm also not sure why it costs a resource), so to be fair that's on me also. While I'm not necessarily upset about how much you have to go back to speak with a character again (which is something you'd expect to have to do as you learn new things), there's quite a bit of retreading.
The collectibles are well, pretty moot, they just sort of feel like they are there and there's really no reward or meaning to them besides a funny name and a blurb. At times the game's humor just didn't really land for me. Sometimes finding something that you know exists can be a bit of a chore when you have to look at perpetual vapor wave. The mystery itself is also not that mysterious after a certain point, though understanding what the motivations of each character could be or would be or are is more where the game puts the focus. and in those places I think it succeeds well.
The thing I must praise most in this game is the world building. While everything is extremely hard to look at, the environmental story telling, and the actual story telling really make up for the complete eye bleed. Paradise Killer takes place in what I can only imagine is something like a post-post-post-apocalyptic world. I'm talking like Warhammer 40k elder space god vibes. the writing really does a good job of world building this crazy universe, there's basically enough here to write your own RPG scenario. I'm not going to go into details so you can experience it for yourself. The island, game universe, and how each of your potential suspects fit into it actually does make the choice you make at the end of the game for who to convict actually pretty interesting.
Which moves onto my biggest complaint - I want more things written in this universe. Its fuckin cool man. To be frank I don't think the payoff for the ending feels that satisfying and once you've peeled away the layers of the mystery on your own the game doesn't have a vehicle for rewarding you because there's not any real final correct "answer." This frustrates me, but it put me into the mindset of the characters. PK doesn't ask you who to convict so much as who's cause do you support the most, and the 'causes' of the characters that the game builds up in this very strange post-post-post-apocalyptic world really excite me to see if the devs will continue to use this universe.
My eyes melted but it was hella.
2021
This review contains spoilers
Worst game I've played in a while, which is shocking to say about a game that features Willem DaFoe so strongly.
It's hard to even start with this game, so I'll just begin with what its like to play it:
On a technical level, this game feels like crap to play. There's just this ever slight delay in your characters actions when you click on something, and often if say, your wife is in the middle of an animation, you have to just wait until the animation finishes before you can interact in the way you want to. These two things combined make doing certain things you have to do really wonky. Especially when you have to repeat them over, and over, and over.
I had a friend watching my playthrough who had already beaten the game and thank goodness I did because if I had to playthrough doing the same shit monotonously for like the 8-10 hour average playtime length this game has without his occasional input to speed things up I'd probably be giving this game a half star less. Even in the 4 hours of my playthrough setting up the situation to drug my wife for like 2 hours of that wore thin after 30 minutes and if I didn't get that guidance, I could easily have needed to do that for another 2 or 3 hours; all the while, unaware that I needed to progress the story differently, trial and erroring my way through the game. There was one point my friend was watching me play, and I did the correct thing, but due to the aforementioned weirdness in character action timing, I just barely missed the window to complete the action, the cop left, loop ended, and I had to restart. The fucked up thing is this I knew to do without his guidance, but when he saw it happen he felt like he had to tell me that I did actually do the right thing but the timing was wrong. If he was not there to tell me that, I wouldn't have known to try again.
The gameplay itself is normal time loop rigmarole at this point. The loop starts fresh each time with the only differences being knowledge that your PC has obtained from previous loops, played out point and click adventure style. The apartment is actually interesting and well designed and there's a shockingly large number of interactable items or things that your character will comment on. Honestly the apartment is the most interesting character in the game, and certainly the only good one. The problem with the gameplay however is that while occasionally, it will drop hints about what you need to do with your character's monologuing, is that often how to advance the story is just extremely unclear at points. Once you do figure out how to continue after repeating the same set of actions ad nauseum via, as previously mentioned, trial and erroring your way through, you are rewarded with a story not only surreal, but confusing, pretentious, and one that has left me with more questions than answers, and I mean that in the pejorative sense. This story is harder to follow than my run on sentences and meandering writing style.
To begin with, no characters in this story have names, there's you (the husband), there's your wife (Wife), there's Willem Dafoe (Cop), and then there's the Cop's daughter, who you only know by the nickname Bumblebee. There's a reason for why there are no names. But to be frank, I think there's only one good explanation for why, yet I cannot for the life of me wrap my head around this bizarre choice in the writing. I hate these characters. To even call these nameless husks characters seems to beget what they actually are in the context of the ending, which is facsimile in both the literary sense and the actual narrative sense.
Heavy spoilers start here, so if you want to play this pile of dogshit before reading this review stop now. As far as I can tell, this game actually takes place in 10+2 minutes. Basically the first 10 minutes take place in an imaginary world dreamt up by your character followed by two minutes in a study room being scolded by the person that the cop is in reality, your father. Indeed, everything that actually happens over the course of the game is really just your character having a wild and violent fantasy of the future (?) dependent upon the outcome of the conversation that takes place in the 2 minutes of the ending with your father.
The way the story plays is so convoluted that it almost leaves me with the feeling that the author of said story just had a weird concept that they really wanted to implement, but didn't have any better ideas to tell in an actually engaging way besides just creating some shocking Cagian or Shyamalanian twist. I'm not really sure what feeling the author wanted to leave me with especially when I, (and a third spectator with me who had NOT played the game) predicted the truth of the relationship between the husband and the wife - one so stupid that I couldn't possibly suspend my disbelief for the events taking place in the apartment. When the truly terrible detail that the husband has been shagging his sister (wife) this whole time unbeknownst to her, as plot hole after plot hole dots every part of the complete insanity driving the first 10 minutes of the loop, my jaw dropped in awe as I realized the game expected me to accept this crap as a troubled man's looney internal reflection.
The ending is so bad. Mind-numbingly bad. First off, in the context of what your character is doing to your wife - which is primarily being psychopathic and inarguably evil - throughout the game, the curtain being peeled back on what was actually occurring is one of the most offensive hand waves I've seen in any medium. If you've seen it, the ending to The Happening where some news caster on tv basically just says "something happened lol" was easier to swallow. There are so many holes and inconsistencies in the story fabricated for the first ten minutes that I feel like the author wants me to say to myself "ohhhhh that's why there's a hole there because its all in the mind whoooooaaaaaa." It falls flat on its face.
In the last two hours or so the most fun I had was killing my wife in stupid ways to really just see how far the game would let me go, and also seeing how ridiculous the character responses were to these situations. I love when the cop busts in and grabs your wife and she just can't stop making the same AWAWAWA noise over and over again. Really the highlight of the game for me.
Anyways I want my money back but unfortunately steam refunds end at 2 hours and I didn't realize it was on gamepass. I didn't feel comfortable after finishing this game till I passed my first load the next morning. What a shame for an Annapurna title that I was highly anticipating.
It's hard to even start with this game, so I'll just begin with what its like to play it:
On a technical level, this game feels like crap to play. There's just this ever slight delay in your characters actions when you click on something, and often if say, your wife is in the middle of an animation, you have to just wait until the animation finishes before you can interact in the way you want to. These two things combined make doing certain things you have to do really wonky. Especially when you have to repeat them over, and over, and over.
I had a friend watching my playthrough who had already beaten the game and thank goodness I did because if I had to playthrough doing the same shit monotonously for like the 8-10 hour average playtime length this game has without his occasional input to speed things up I'd probably be giving this game a half star less. Even in the 4 hours of my playthrough setting up the situation to drug my wife for like 2 hours of that wore thin after 30 minutes and if I didn't get that guidance, I could easily have needed to do that for another 2 or 3 hours; all the while, unaware that I needed to progress the story differently, trial and erroring my way through the game. There was one point my friend was watching me play, and I did the correct thing, but due to the aforementioned weirdness in character action timing, I just barely missed the window to complete the action, the cop left, loop ended, and I had to restart. The fucked up thing is this I knew to do without his guidance, but when he saw it happen he felt like he had to tell me that I did actually do the right thing but the timing was wrong. If he was not there to tell me that, I wouldn't have known to try again.
The gameplay itself is normal time loop rigmarole at this point. The loop starts fresh each time with the only differences being knowledge that your PC has obtained from previous loops, played out point and click adventure style. The apartment is actually interesting and well designed and there's a shockingly large number of interactable items or things that your character will comment on. Honestly the apartment is the most interesting character in the game, and certainly the only good one. The problem with the gameplay however is that while occasionally, it will drop hints about what you need to do with your character's monologuing, is that often how to advance the story is just extremely unclear at points. Once you do figure out how to continue after repeating the same set of actions ad nauseum via, as previously mentioned, trial and erroring your way through, you are rewarded with a story not only surreal, but confusing, pretentious, and one that has left me with more questions than answers, and I mean that in the pejorative sense. This story is harder to follow than my run on sentences and meandering writing style.
To begin with, no characters in this story have names, there's you (the husband), there's your wife (Wife), there's Willem Dafoe (Cop), and then there's the Cop's daughter, who you only know by the nickname Bumblebee. There's a reason for why there are no names. But to be frank, I think there's only one good explanation for why, yet I cannot for the life of me wrap my head around this bizarre choice in the writing. I hate these characters. To even call these nameless husks characters seems to beget what they actually are in the context of the ending, which is facsimile in both the literary sense and the actual narrative sense.
Heavy spoilers start here, so if you want to play this pile of dogshit before reading this review stop now. As far as I can tell, this game actually takes place in 10+2 minutes. Basically the first 10 minutes take place in an imaginary world dreamt up by your character followed by two minutes in a study room being scolded by the person that the cop is in reality, your father. Indeed, everything that actually happens over the course of the game is really just your character having a wild and violent fantasy of the future (?) dependent upon the outcome of the conversation that takes place in the 2 minutes of the ending with your father.
The way the story plays is so convoluted that it almost leaves me with the feeling that the author of said story just had a weird concept that they really wanted to implement, but didn't have any better ideas to tell in an actually engaging way besides just creating some shocking Cagian or Shyamalanian twist. I'm not really sure what feeling the author wanted to leave me with especially when I, (and a third spectator with me who had NOT played the game) predicted the truth of the relationship between the husband and the wife - one so stupid that I couldn't possibly suspend my disbelief for the events taking place in the apartment. When the truly terrible detail that the husband has been shagging his sister (wife) this whole time unbeknownst to her, as plot hole after plot hole dots every part of the complete insanity driving the first 10 minutes of the loop, my jaw dropped in awe as I realized the game expected me to accept this crap as a troubled man's looney internal reflection.
The ending is so bad. Mind-numbingly bad. First off, in the context of what your character is doing to your wife - which is primarily being psychopathic and inarguably evil - throughout the game, the curtain being peeled back on what was actually occurring is one of the most offensive hand waves I've seen in any medium. If you've seen it, the ending to The Happening where some news caster on tv basically just says "something happened lol" was easier to swallow. There are so many holes and inconsistencies in the story fabricated for the first ten minutes that I feel like the author wants me to say to myself "ohhhhh that's why there's a hole there because its all in the mind whoooooaaaaaa." It falls flat on its face.
In the last two hours or so the most fun I had was killing my wife in stupid ways to really just see how far the game would let me go, and also seeing how ridiculous the character responses were to these situations. I love when the cop busts in and grabs your wife and she just can't stop making the same AWAWAWA noise over and over again. Really the highlight of the game for me.
Anyways I want my money back but unfortunately steam refunds end at 2 hours and I didn't realize it was on gamepass. I didn't feel comfortable after finishing this game till I passed my first load the next morning. What a shame for an Annapurna title that I was highly anticipating.
2013
I love this game. I love the mythology, I love the directing, I love the characters, but above all I love the thoughts that it left me with. For me KRZ succeeds wholly as interactive fiction. It has themes that touch upon the most crucial aspects of what it means to live, to be free, and to die, while weaving a really well thought out vehicle for the conveyance of these things in the writing. KRZ advances the medium in the context of interactive story telling, and in a way that can only be done uniquely as digital art, and this would be the first thing I'd recommend to someone who enjoys reading but might not understand or respect video games.
I'll probably update this review with more thoughts at a later point, but for me this is a must play. Or must read, if you will.
I'll probably update this review with more thoughts at a later point, but for me this is a must play. Or must read, if you will.
2020
Honestly, I actually really enjoyed my time with this game but there's a lot to say about it as an experience. I played on PC with a 'mostly' (ish, lmao) bug free experience, and managed to avoid most game breaking things (though I was forced to take a week break while waiting for them to patch a main quest back into functionality on my save file).
I think the core of my problems with this game really revolve around not being sure what it wants to be, particularly in how it was put forth in previews and what it seemed like the intent of the developers was. People, especially early critics, suggested that this game was going to be a real hard hitting RPG experience with emphasis on the R, and in some ways there is some pay off with the choices you make through the game with the end credits, but honestly, its mostly just a story about Johnny Silverhand and the vessel that carries him in the player just doesn't really feel like you're carving some sort of role playing niche in the narrative at all.
IMO, Keanu is both the best and worst part of the game. His performance is frankly stellar, and the character is engrossing, but is also entirely engulfs and overshadows the PC. For example, take the fact that even though there's a plethora of gangs and corps and organizations, the game doesn't even have a reputation system - mindboggling honestly. If you go in with low or no expectations as I did, I think that this is still a fine experience. However, you really can feel the wasted potential of this game.
Despite the copy pasted NPCs, the world felt alive to me, with funny and interesting and unique conversations on the street (legit over a 70 hour playthrough, I never heard a conversation between two random characters repeated). The atmosphere of the city is great. The music is actually extremely good, and they really commissioned an impressive amount of artists spanning a gamut of genres. Its such a shame to me how the poorly thought out NPC foot traffic, and actual traffic, particularly in the AI department, really screws with the feel of the environment when you decide to look to close.
The gameplay is just average in my opinion, and honestly to the point where I'm not even that interested in talking about it.
This game leaves me with a lot of mixed feelings: I can't recommend playing it. On the other hand, I do think there's many things to talk about with cyberpunk, and if you want to take part in the discourse over its lost potential, disastrous launch, and the things that it did get right, I think that it is an interesting experience at the very least. Depending on what type of gamer you are, this might be something you wouldn't want to miss out on for the phenomenon alone.
I think the core of my problems with this game really revolve around not being sure what it wants to be, particularly in how it was put forth in previews and what it seemed like the intent of the developers was. People, especially early critics, suggested that this game was going to be a real hard hitting RPG experience with emphasis on the R, and in some ways there is some pay off with the choices you make through the game with the end credits, but honestly, its mostly just a story about Johnny Silverhand and the vessel that carries him in the player just doesn't really feel like you're carving some sort of role playing niche in the narrative at all.
IMO, Keanu is both the best and worst part of the game. His performance is frankly stellar, and the character is engrossing, but is also entirely engulfs and overshadows the PC. For example, take the fact that even though there's a plethora of gangs and corps and organizations, the game doesn't even have a reputation system - mindboggling honestly. If you go in with low or no expectations as I did, I think that this is still a fine experience. However, you really can feel the wasted potential of this game.
Despite the copy pasted NPCs, the world felt alive to me, with funny and interesting and unique conversations on the street (legit over a 70 hour playthrough, I never heard a conversation between two random characters repeated). The atmosphere of the city is great. The music is actually extremely good, and they really commissioned an impressive amount of artists spanning a gamut of genres. Its such a shame to me how the poorly thought out NPC foot traffic, and actual traffic, particularly in the AI department, really screws with the feel of the environment when you decide to look to close.
The gameplay is just average in my opinion, and honestly to the point where I'm not even that interested in talking about it.
This game leaves me with a lot of mixed feelings: I can't recommend playing it. On the other hand, I do think there's many things to talk about with cyberpunk, and if you want to take part in the discourse over its lost potential, disastrous launch, and the things that it did get right, I think that it is an interesting experience at the very least. Depending on what type of gamer you are, this might be something you wouldn't want to miss out on for the phenomenon alone.