A basic but effective roguelite, that trades the depth and gameplay variety of Emerald Rogue for the QOL of Pokemon Essentials. It is sadly buggy and unfinished; I freaked the game out by tricking a Choice Scarf onto Ferrothorn and PP stalling it. It caused a debug flood every turn, which means the developer probably never coded such an interaction. While I don't blame them for not knowing every nuance of competitive Pokemon, these sorts of fangames are always implicitly relying on such mechanics. You give me a Choice Band and Switcheroo in a game where the difficulty is this high, it's the natural next step.

I also find the balancing a little too on the punishing side, even for normal mode. Healing is very scarce and healing items are prohibitively expensive. In a game like Pokemon, switching is core to manuevering to your win condition- it is thus inevitable to rack up a ton of residual damage. In the context of a ten-floor roguelite involving competitive Pokemon mechanics, this gets pretty difficult. The AI is still quite stupid, but the game splashes just enough random coverage moves, held items and abilities to make it very challenging. Stuff like running into a Mega Gardevoir with Hidden Power Fighting.

The developer seems to have abandoned Battle Woods, which to me is kind of a disappointment. Emerald Rogue is undoubtedly the gold standard for roguelikes based off the main series gameplay (Mystery Dungeon, of course, remains the best crossover between Pokemon and Rogue) but the problem is... it's based on Pokemon Emerald. The battle animations are painfully slow, and having to use a fast forward macro in between actions is very cumbersome. In this regard, I feel Pokemon Essentials titles are far superior to their progenitors. The option to disable animations, among other QOL, vastly improves the formula. Things like ability capsules, EV and IV displays, and much more robust menus really improve the experience. On the other hand, there is just enough changed and things implemented from later generations that I'm not exactly sure what to expect. There aren't many resources on the internet regarding things like movesets and such, so it is very much a coin flip when it comes to match start. A bad lead matchup can mean losing 3+ Pokemon, and in Battle Woods any Pokemon that are fainted are removed at the end of the battle.

The non-battle rooms are well-designed enough, though a bit boring. Move relearners, egg moves, TM shop, a lottery, etc. It works well enough, but it lacks the unique and varied maps offered by Emerald Rogue. You are ensured a new Pokemon, as well as a teamwide heal, at fixed intervals; so you never really feel like you are totally screwed over when it comes to traversal.

The game has a total of 4 stages with something like 11 rooms each. If you play quickly, a run will last an hour to two hours and that's a decent session. Don't feel like I want to sit here obsessively playing again and again, such as I did with Slay the Spire, but only because I am so used to Pokemon. Just battling is great and all, and I love the aspect of building your team composition on the fly thanks to the roguelite mechanics, but its still just Pokemon battling. I have spent hundreds if not thousands hours doing it; in main series games, romhacks, fangames and Pokemon Showdown. So while the roguelite offers a fresh spin on the formula, there's nothing fantastic here. It lacks any story, it uses boring characters from the anime and generation 1 games, and it doesn't particularly innovate on the battling itself.

Overall, the game is a solid effort that would have greatly benefited from further active development. The balancing issues and bugs hold it back from being truly great, and that will remain the case for as long as it is abandoned. It is fun enough to give it a couple runs and try to hunt some achievements, but I don't see it being anything worth heavy time investment.

Dark Souls 2 has to be one of the most unfortunate victims of circumstance in gaming of the modern age.

I wholeheartedly believe most of this game's "negatives" can only be read as such if you're comparing everything about DS2 to its precursor. In any random game, not giving you i-frames for animations like open doors/chests would not make the game 'unplayable', it would simply be a part of the game you have to play around. But, because so much of how people view DS2 has been informed by how people view DS1, it becomes a negative; some runbacks are incredibly frustrating because of this, and you're now unable to just dive into a room, aggro 20 enemies, get a gate open, and expect to make it back to a bonfire. In general, you can't play most of this game like DS1. If you watch a video like Feebleking's 'critique', the constant thing you will find people comparing this game to time and time again is, naturally, Dark Souls 1. A lot of the people that adopt a 'ds2 bad' attitude like Feeble are very eager to blame the 'incompetencies' of DS2 on the b-team devs, which to me reads as a very blatant, hostile and unearned disrespect to the people who made the game.

I just can't buy into the idea that this game is 'bad' because people who didn't know what they were doing took over. Every design choice about this game strikes me as trying to purposefully disrupt almost every tie this game has to the 'Dark Souls' name without severing the core ideology of the franchise. It's not like the devs didn't know about the first game when they were making this. They didn't come into production trying to drum up the best way to make the most divisive game of all time. There's an intent and purpose to the design changes of this game that the prevailing negative lens fails to interrogate. For example, take Lifegems; Lifegems completely disrupt the Estus system of the first game which itself has been gimped dramatically as Estus healing is much slower and more limited, especially in the early game. DS2 is a game that takes place in a world where bonfires are on their way out or forgotten by most; Firekeepers are spoken of as if no one's seen any in years, and the fact that there are three of them living together a five minute walk away from Majula is an absolute oddity. It's the same world of Dark Souls, but it's absolutely nothing like it. This game is not Dark Souls 1, nor can you really play it like Dark Souls 1, which is why I think pointing to Dark Souls 1 as to how DS2 could have 'done it right' is a really flawed idea; It's absolutely trying to not be DS1. But it still is very much a Dark Souls game.

I think about systems in DS2 like Lifegems, ADP, Bonfire Ascetics, and Soul Memory and think 'Dark Souls 2 was made to be broken', which I think a lot of people have overlooked as the years have gone by and DS2 has been relegated to being the 'black sheep' of the series. When I realized Ascetics could be used to re-fight bosses, it wasn't long after I learned how ridiculous the souls drops from The Rotten were on higher NG+ iterations. Then, I learned I could buy a stack of ten from Grandahl (so long as you're part of his covenant), and another ten from Agdayne, and after a few hours I jumped like 150 Soul Levels and got Rotten up to Intensity 19 or something before the returns became ~1.5 levels per clear and I had most stats for my build at their softcaps. I was in shock during the first couple clears, half expecting myself to walk through the fog gate at around Intensity 10 to see like, three Rottens in the arena, or maybe he grows four more arms each with a new weapon; any sort of indication from the game to say "ah, I see what you're doing, you naughty boy. But this is where your fun ends!" but the game just lets you do this. The game just hands you a car, the keys, and enough gas for the US to plan an invasion, and doesn't even try to call to make sure you're still in the state or something (This is also a large part of why ADP just doesn't bug me nearly as hard as it seems to for a lot of other people. I had ADP at 24 for 99 Agility for almost the entire game and I was fine, you absolutely do not need to farm levels to dump into this stat like some people would have you believe). This isn't some strange glitch like menu duping in DS1 or the areas of the Elden Ring map that will give you hundreds of thousands of runes if you jump off them with Torrent that sometimes get patched. You were absolutely intended to do this if you were clever enough and not averse to experimentation and risk. This is also 'the' way Soul Memory becomes a useful tactic for skipping the first half of the game; on NG+0 the Soul Memory required is 1 million, which you can get with <5 Ascetics.

I really hate to just sum up why I'm nowhere near as bothered by the game's shortcomings as most people to a 'skill issue'. Honestly, if you've tried playing this game and can't get past Iron Keep or Shrine of Amana or wherever, that has to suck, and I wish there was more that I or anyone could do to help you besides saying 'sorry, guess you're gonna have to kill everything enough times for the enemies to stop spawning or possibly respec/restart your playthrough after researching tips on builds or what weapons to use on fextralife.'

But let me just be honest having only played the first two Dark Souls games so far: Both of these games are built on mountains of jank. Dark Souls 1 manages to give you a view pretty enough to distract you from what you're standing on, but Dark Souls 2 is just begging you to look down. It wants you to realize what you're walking on, no matter how jagged, abrasive, and clunky it is, is actually not that different from the sky.

It's insane how much they nailed the first fully 3D entry in the Kirby franchise.
Usually when a franchise jumps from 2D to 3D it takes a while to find its footing, but with Forgotten Land they instantly nailed it. It's something extremely rare, but it seems pretty common with Nintendo franchises. Mario 64, Zelda OOT, Metroid Prime.
Anyway, Forgotten Land is a delight. The graphics and artstyle are so charming. The music is magnificent. The Kirby gameplay works perfectly in 3D. The camera is exactly where it's supposed to be and never creates any problem for the player. The way the collectibles work is also brilliant. Each time you finish a stage you can see what you're missing.
Now add the great hub area and the rich post game content and you have a masterpiece.

Superflight has two ideas that I think work directly against one another. The first is the gameplay hook of zooming through tiny gaps and tunnels just barely large enough for you to manoeuvre inside, racking-up huge scores in the process. The second is the colourful, randomly-generated little worlds that you fly through and that keep you playing to see what you'll discover next.

The problem is that these randomly-generated worlds often don't have clear paths through them, so you'll end-up simply circling around the whole island waiting for an opportunity to get to the actual fun and risky gameplay that might never appear. I think this game would require a large list of curated maps or smarter world-generation to actually reach its potential.

BioShock Remastered Review

Introduction

I would like to preface this review by saying that since I've never played the OG BioShock, I will not be reviewing this as a remaster, but just as a standalone product.

I gotta admit, I was a bit hesitant to play this game. One because I don't like horror media and I heard the first BioShock is quite creepy, and two because I actually did play an hour of this a long time ago and found it extremely difficult, promptly making me give up. In hindsight, I have no idea how that happened, but I guess it shows I've gotten better at games (yay!).

Overall, BioShock is a fantastic game with a terrific atmosphere and a genuinely interesting plot that was not what I expected. It feels polished and tight, living up to its legendary status.

Narrative

You are on a flight which suddenly loses control and plunges into the ocean. As you resurface, you see nothing but flaming debris and one single structure, a sort-of lighthouse, in the middle of the literally nowhere. As you enter the building, you board a Bathysphere and are treated to one of the greatest video game introductions of all time.

Seriously, the moment when the dialogue ends and you get treated to a sight of the underwater city of Rapture gave me chills. As you arrive in this beautiful art-deco city, things are immediately off. - you find yourself getting attacked right off the bat by a splicer.

BioShock is your journey through the various parts of Rapture. To tell you any more about the plot would be spoiling you on some details, which I don't want to do, because the story is genuinely good and filled with unexpected turns. If this sounds at all interesting, please play and find out for yourself!

Graphics

As always I play on an iGPU so graphics aren't my main priority. That being said, since this is an older game, the default graphics options ran very smoothly on my device with very few moments of lag, which I greatly appreciated.

The atmosphere of BioShock is simply incredible. The environments has been designed so well to match the unsettling, soul-crushing vibe of an industrial, underwater city. The beautiful art-deco style of the 50s and 60s (when the city was built) is implemented amazingly as well. I have absolutely zero complaints. This game is very high up in my list when it comes to design.

Gameplay

Gameplay as a whole was good, though at a few points I did have some issues with it. Allow me to explain.

BioShock's key mechanic is the plasmid - genetic modifications that grant the user (i.e. you) superpowers. These range from being able to shoot out electricity, fire & ice, hypnotise enemies and much, much more. BioShock also has traditional FPS mechanics, giving you an arsenal of 6 ranged weapons that you gradually unlock over the course of the game.

The weaving of plasmids and gunplay is done well in Bioshock. Most of the time, you can use your Electro Bolt to stun an enemy before unleashing a storm of bullets on them. It feels pretty seamless thanks to a good control scheme, with RMB instantly switching between your gun/wrench and your plasmid.

In addition, each weapon has multiple ammo types, such as regular, armor-piercing or anti-personnel. This adds a little bit extra to gameplay and encourages the player to be more strategic - equipping the right gear before rushing into a firefight.

As much variety as there is, one gripe I had was that I never really felt the need or want to use many different plasmids. The one you start with - Electro Bolt - is so good that you never need anything else. On the other end, the weapons you unlock later on are much more powerful than the early game ones, even if you upgrade them. As a result, guns like the revolver and machine gun felt useless by the end, which is a shame.

To upgrade your plasmids and gain extra buffs called tonics, you'll need ADAM, the resource used for genetic modification. The only way to gain it is through Little Sisters, little girls who collect the scarce resource with the protection of tough Big Daddies. Of course, you need to take out these protectors, which act as mini-bossfights, before you can get the sweet ADAM.

Even then, the game asks you to choose - will you harvest the Little Sisters to gain all their ADAM, hence destroying them in the process, or save them to gain a bit of the ADAM, but exorcising and curing them. This is an interesting moral choice, though one that is quite surface-level. Fortunately, on default difficulty, there is way more than enough ADAM for you to be adequately powered, so feel free to save them.

BioShock is split into several individual levels. Each typically has their own goal, and the game is pretty much linear, so you'll complete the levels in a set order. The levels are reasonably enjoyable and show the diverse environments found in Rapture. The only minor gripe I had was nearer to the end. One segment has you battling randomly given plasmids, which while interesting, gets old and annoying real fast, and the mechanic definitely overstayed its welcome. The final fight was also, in my opinion, far too easy and short. I wish it had more interesting mechanics.

BioShock's gameplay was at its best early on when you are resource-starved. Being extremely low on resources and health while trying to understand the unknown place you're in is a fantastic atmosphere, and got me hooked.

One last point I think deserves getting mentioned is the hacking minigame. Hacking is an integral part of BioShock. Everything from cameras, turrets, drones and even vending machines can be hacked to give you beneficial effects. Nothing wrong with this, but weirdly they decided to make each hack a pipe puzzle minigame, which while fun at first, gets stale given just how often you have to do it.

Overall, BioShock took me just under 13 hours on my first playthrough on Normal difficulty. I thought the difficulty was good early on and felt balanced, but towards the end it got too easy - I was almost always maxed on first aid kits, ammo and money on the last few levels. If you're good at games I would probably recommend playing on Hard. The length felt just right, and in a world of increasingly long games, it's refreshing to see a shorter game still be able to deliver a satisfying and great experience.

Conclusion

BioShock, while not spared from some minor flaws, is overall a terrific package that marries satisfying and fun gunplay with some of the best storytelling and visual style the medium has to offer. It definitely deserves its spot on the hall of fame, and is a must-play. Seeing how old this game is and how well it still plays, I'm willing to call it a timeless classic.

4.5/5

Edit 1: Updated to include sections on the two DLC!

GTA IV Review

Introduction

I've never played a GTA title before this one, mostly because a life of organized crime has never really appealed to me if I'm being honest. I'm too much of a wimp to be a criminal, I'll probably just end up doing office work until I retire.

Anyhow, this series must be doing something right if it's this ingrained in popular culture. In any news about a shooting involving a teenager who's being playing video games, GTA is sure to be mentioned at least once.

With such a beloved, acclaimed and popular series, I figured it was finally time to give it a shot (heh), so I picked up GTA IV and started my adventure.

Narrative

You are Niko Bellic, an illegal immigrant fleeing from war and crime back in your Slavic hometown. The stories your cousin Roman sends you about him living the dream life in Liberty City, USA attracts you to cross the Atlantic and never look back again.

Little did you know, it is never so easy to escape your past. Niko's dream shatters in front of his eyes as he meets Roman, realising that all the exotic cars, amazing penthouses, and of course beautiful woman, were nothing but mere delusions.

In order to make ends meet, Niko soon becomes involved in the dark criminal underbelly of Liberty City, a journey that takes many tumultuous turns and causes much heartbreak.

The game's story is dark and depressing, no doubt about it. It really showcases the dark and gritty mood and atmosphere of Liberty City.

Like I said, I never wanted to be a criminal, but this game does a good job of making me care about the cast. Every character is larger than life, even the various unlikeable, slimy criminals you face have their own distinct vibe.

Death is commonplace in Liberty City and you will be seeing plenty of it, friend or foe.There are actually various points where you can decide between killing someone or sparing them, which is quite neat.

The actual narrative progresses nicely with plenty of strong set pieces, driving the story along and very rarely letting me down. I can definitely see why it is praised as the best amongst the series. I also appreciate that it doesn't overstay its welcome, clocking in at just over 25 hours for my first run through.

Graphics

For a game made in 2008, the graphics are phenomenal. Driving down the streets of Liberty City while listening to Marvin Gaye on the radio for the first time is an absolute vibe.

That being said, the performance of this game needs to be pointed out. It is, to put it nicely, not good. Lag spikes happen for no good reason even outside of combat and this just shouldn't be the case for a game this old. I do think this has to do with my shoddy laptop, but even then I've played more modern games that run far better. Even on 720p low settings I face severe lag spikes!

Gameplay

The moment-to-moment gameplay of GTA IV is stellar. The driving admittedly takes a while to get used to. My initial impressions were that cars felt extremely heavy and sluggish, and were comparable to a boat. However, as the game went on and I got better at drifting round corners, I could better appreciate the heavier feel.

As for the other transport modes, boats felt even more sluggish. Helicopters though, oh dear. Oh dear indeed. To begin, who on earth thinks NUMPAD 2 and NUMPAD 8 are good default controls? I dreaded every single helicopter mission, which is a shame considering they tended to be the most epic.

Gunplay in GTA IV is great. Enemies aren't too spongy so long as you aim for the head, and you have a small array of weapons to choose from. Combat in this game feels more tactical, often requiring you to take cover and slowly pick off enemies when the time is right, which is welcome.

But here's where I have to address the single biggest problem I have with this game. One that greatly frustrated me as I played through it - the lack of checkpoints and saves during missions. I can already hear the cries of "wow you're such a noob", which is fair, but hear me out! I am completely OK with repeating parts of missions. If I die in an intense combat encounter, I deserve to have to repeat it, but what I do not appreciate is how I have to redo entire missions. This is OK early on when most of them are short, but when you get to the longer ones which involve minutes of driving before getting to the combat scene, it is such a chore. Having to get armor and health again adds to the tedium and frustration of repeating entire missions.

Which, by the way, you will be repeating plenty of missions because even tiny things can cause you to need to restart, such as hitting a single wall or shooting someone on accident.

All this adds up, and by the end of the main story I got very frustrated after repeating some missions a handful of time, which is a shame because the missions themselves were good.

Conclusion

I think GTA IV could've been a perfect game, but it stops just shy. Who knows, maybe it's just the age showing, or maybe I'm bad, but either way, I think it could greatly benefit from less tedium and repetition.

All that said, the story and atmosphere is still absolutely superb and well worth enduring the little quips to experience.

4/5

GTA IV DLC Mini-Review

Introduction

I'm not going to go into as much detail about the DLCs, as they share a lot in common with the base game. Instead I'll just highlight what I found to be particularly noteworthy.

GTA IV: The Complete Edition comes with both of the game's DLCs - The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony. Both these DLCs feature different protagonists and take place parallel to the main story. Throughout both of these stories, you will encounter missions that take place concurrently with ones from the main story, the most notable example being the exchange in the museum, which can be played from all 3 perspectives, which is really neat.

Both the DLCs have around 20+ missions and take about 6-8 hours to complete each, which is a pretty hefty amount of content for a DLC. If you are a fan of the base game, the DLC are just more of the same, which is good, but if you weren't already into it I don't think they are going to change that.

The Lost and Damned

The Lost and Damned tells the story of bike gang The Lost MC. You control Johnny Klebitz, the vice-president of the club. You go pick up the president, Billy, from prison, yet despite the two being brothers, tension soon takes hold, leading The Lost down a dark path.

Overall this expansion continues the dark and gritty vibe of the base game. In fact I think they might've gotten a bit carried away as the whole story is played with a grainy filter on.

As expected, most of this DLC is played on bikes, which are fun to control, but also provide far less protection. Weaving in and out of traffic is fun though, so I ain't complaining. New weapons can also be found, though I don't really have much thoughts about them.

A solid experience, if not particularly groundbreaking.

The Ballad of Gay Tony

As expected from the title, this one is far more colourful, with a huge variety of missions and an eclectic cast to match. You are Luis Lopez, a former criminal working under nightclub owner Gay Tony, who took you under his wing. You do work for Tony as well as other various unsavoury characters in an effort to keep the income coming.

The things this DLC makes you do borderlines on terrorism, which leads into some seriously epic missions. A standout is the subway heist where you shoot down helicopters as you await an airlift. Speaking of helis though, this DLC has way too many helicopter missions. Given the horrible controls, I do not appreciate it one bit.

Conclusion

I personally enjoyed The Lost more, but both are solid and any fan of the base game has no reason not to play both DLC.

So I beat the normal endings back when the CoZ patch came out but I just went back and finished all the bonus routes and got the true end so I feel better equipped to do a real review.

This game is an absolute mess, a weird and wild patchwork of edgelord horror tropes, evangelion-level psychobabble, bishoujo stereotypes, and straight up magical girl anime nonsense. It's excessive, and it's kind of embarrassing, like peeking into someone's journal of half finished fanfics. And yeah, I love it to pieces.

What I love about the VN space is that I just can't think of any other genre that could get away with something like this. It is, straight up, a psychological horror game, but it's also a game where a bunch of anime girls are inexplicably drawn to just some fuckin' dude and wield psychic swords borne of their own traumas. For all intents and purposes, this shouldn't work.

But it really, really does, and I think that speaks to level of craft on display here. This game has an impeccable sense of mood and atmosphere, masterfully wielding sound design, tricks of prose, and sudden edits to make the fairly rudimentary silicon graphics presentation utterly envelop the reader. When the game had me, it really fuckin' had me, in a way that few other horror VNs manage as well.

I also think that focusing the story on Takumi allows the story to both comment on its own excesses while giving us the insight to empathize with a genuinely awful dude who, if we're being honest, we at one point had more in common with than we'd like to admit. The fact that most of the early delusions come from a wastoid otaku has the neat effect of making the later story developments actually feel grounded by comparison, and the delusion concept itself allows the story to play with fire without (usually) burning itself.

And the way the game has empathy, but not sympathy, for Takumi is genuinely compelling. He's an awful, selfish, shallow guy, who is also deeply traumatized and dealing with a severe and debilitating anxiety disorder, and the game allows both to exist simultaneously without one overwhelming the other. People are complicated, and you really never know what they're going through, for good and for ill.

That's not to say this game always succeeds. This is the first of the SciADV games and it gives the impression that the writers were afraid they'd never get to do another, because it throws everything at the wall. And, especially with 6 routes added by Noah, not all of it sticks. Sena's route is dull and of interest only for the lore-heads; Nanami's is a complete waste of time; and there are several chapters that, upon revisiting, have that Kojima monologue feeling of "hey, wanna hear something cool I read on wikipedia?"

But that all said, I'm glad I came back and fully finished the game—the extra character development really does add some depth and edge to the game's bishoujo critiques, and Rimi's route is genuinely some of the best written material in the game. The impression I've gotten from the community is that this is thought of as the worst of the series—if so, i'm stoked to see what's next.

Introduction

I've never played Half-Life or Half-Life 2, so I am coming into this with the perspective of a new player to the franchise. I will not be comparing it to HL, and am looking to it as a standalone product. Overall, I found Black Mesa to be a compelling experience from start to finish, with great ambience, cinematic set pieces and gameplay.

Narrative

You are Gordon Freeman, a physics whiz working at Black Mesa, a secretive government research facility in New Mexico. Performing a routine experiment at work, things go awry and lead to an alien invasion of Earth. The game is then spent clawing your way through the now alien-infested Black Mesa facility, with the hopes of finding the scientists that will be your last hope in closing the inter-dimensional portal and ending the calamity. However, you will soon come to find that the aliens aren't all that you have to worry about...

Unlike many modern games, BM relies heavily on gameplay to tell its story. It rarely grabs control away from the player, and pretty much all the cinematic moments of the game happen naturally without any awkward breaks into cutscenes. For this reason, this game feels really immersive and keeps you invested. Both the facility and the alien borderworld of Xen feel lived-in, with a good variety of environments, both cramped corridors and large open areas, that keep it fresh.

The story itself, whilst not particularly deep, has enough solid story beats and twists that allow it to be compelling. By the end of the 15 or so hour journey, I felt pretty amazed at all that Gordon has gone through.

Graphics

I'll keep this part short, since I'm playing on a potato laptop with an iGPU. I played at 720p minimum for the majority of the game (Ch 1 - halfway through Ch 17) and the game still looked good in spite of that. Environmental design is great and feels realistic. However, I ran into some serious issues in Interloper, which resulted in the game repeatedly crashing at one point. From then on until the end I played on 800 x 600, which makes the game look very dated, but ultimately it was tolerable.

Again, the game does a great job of being varied even though it all takes place within a single facility. Each chapter has its own distinct look. Surface Tension is a standout as it brings you into a huge outdoor section for the first time, with dams, military outposts, cliffs and more.

And of course, how can I mention the graphics without talking about Xen? I am aware Source is now a fairly dated engine, but holy cow, the alien borderworld looks stunning. The game isn't afraid to show its graphical muscles, offering a wide variety of vistas that allow the player to stop and admire their surroundings. Xen feels perfect - both familiar and disturbingly dissimilar to our world. Xen (the chapter) does a phenomenal job of introducing the player to the wildlife, landscape and gameplay mechanics of the new environment.

And you'd think spending 5-6 hours in this place would make it lose its charm, but again the devs have managed to keep it varied, thanks to a change in the colors used and the differing environments - you start off in the natural environment of Xen, before moving into its underground caves, and then into the artificial tower of Interloper.

This all comes at a performance cost though, and I found my enjoyment of Xen to be slightly bogged down by low framerates as a result of the immense environment.

Gameplay

At its heart, BM is an FPS game, and a pretty damn good one at that. The arsenal you develop as you progress gives you enough tools to tackle basically every situation thrown at you.

The weapons I found myself using most are the shotgun and SMG. The gun sounds are satisfying and feel reasonably powerful even late in the game. I like how ammo is quite limited in BM, which leads in you having to use the whole of your arsenal instead of only relying on 1 or 2 weapons. That being said, I have not used a single snark or trip mine throughout my playthrough since I never found it necessary.

Puzzles are another key facet of this game. It is inherent in the environment design, and unlike a lot of modern games with quest markers and whatnot, force you to pay attention to your environment. I liked the majority of them, though I have to say that some of them completely flew over my head and I had to resort to watching a YouTube guide. One particular moment for me was in Lambda Core and its teleporter puzzle.

The boss fights in this game, while not many, are incredible. In the Earth levels, they often involve roaming around and setting up a contraption that can take down the powerful alien beings. Meanwhile, on Xen, you take the fight directly to the enemy and shoot them down. The epic fights at the end of Ch 16 and of course Ch 18 are incredible, and paired with fantastic music, made me absolutely fall in love.

I have heard a common complaint of BM is that its Xen chapters overstay their welcome. I do agree that Ch 15 and Ch 17 can be trimmed down, however I don't think they were long enough to ruin my enjoyment of the game. I still liked them, but it may be due to how I played the game, in which I did these chapters over a period of 2 days, so I only played about an hour each time.

Difficulty

I played through the whole game on Normal and it presented a reasonable challenge. Keep in mind, I suck at video games and I was bogged down by low framerates due to potato laptop, so I still died a lot and had to load saves often. However, it was still doable for me and didn't leave me overly frustrated. Enemies seemed balanced, not too tanky, nor too squishy, which was nice.

Veterans of the genre might prefer to play on the more difficult Black Mesa or Hard difficulties instead.

Conclusion

Black Mesa is a brilliant game, and as someone new to the HL franchise, it has inspired me to check out the HL games one day. I picked it up on sale for around 3 USD and for that price this game is an absolute steal. I would dare say it is even worth its retail price of 20 USD. For that, you get a true labour of love. And it's a terrific game to boot.

No, it isn't perfect. Pacing does get a bit wonk at times, and performance can get bad late in Xen, but when this game is good - oh boy is it incredible. I'm glad I experienced this game.

Inmost has amazing sound direction and a visual atmosphere, but with very little underneath.

It's an indie pixel-art puzzle platformer with dark and moody aesthetics that is more focused on storytelling than it is on the gameplay, which I feel is well-worn territory to the point where you likely already know if Inmost will be for you or not.

From chapter to chapter, you swap between three playable characters. A young girl who moves painfully slow and must solve simple puzzles in her house, an older man who moves slightly faster and must solve equally simple puzzles in a semi-Metroidvania-style environment and a swordsman who at least moves at a good pace but has simplistic and unengaging combat mechanics.

You get the occasional cutscene where a narrator will talk about how dark and twisted the world is in a way that I would have lapped up as a teenager but as an adult, it feels shallow and immature. I can't blame the game for this as there's a good chance I'm not the target audience. There are occasional attempts at humour that feel out of place and fall flat.

In all, Inmost takes around 4 to 5 hours to complete which sounds short but can still feel like a slog due to the slow movement and repetitive nature of the gameplay.

It feels as though this game was designed from an art and story perspective first and then had puzzles added to justify itself as a video game. Perhaps if it had fully committed to one direction, either as a mechanics-heavy exploration game or as a purely narrative-focussed adventure, it could have worked.

>A truly epic tale in the forgotten realms with rich character depth
>Endless permutations of choices and consequences in the story
>Simple turn-based combat where creative combos and experiments are fun and have impact
>Beautiful art assets, soundtrack, and level design that heighten the gameplay
>Full controller support
>4 player co-op
>No Paid DLC or MTX Shop
>not a predatory casino full of culdesacs, time-sinks, or gameplay systems designed to "drive engagement"

Larian delivers exactly what consumers used to and should continue to expect from a $60 title