Harold Halibut is an outstanding technical achievement. It's not, however, a compelling game.

Harold Halibut is an adventure game that looks just like a stop motion movie. And my god do they ever do a great job at that. The game is downright gorgeous and the stop motion continuously impressed me. I really wish this tech was used in service of a better narrative.

I found it very difficult to care about the characters and plot in this world. The voice acting is excellent but the dialogue is so dull. Very rarely do characters have anything remotely interesting to say. And although some personalities shine through (namely Harold and his surrogate mother Mareaux), most of it is forgettable. This is especially true in the first 10 hours of the game which is very slice of life. The plot gets a bit more interesting by the end, but it's too late by then.

I appreciate the themes they're going for. I really like how they approached an autistic coded main character with Harold for instance. There's something so pure about how he deals with problems. I'm sure this game is for someone. Just not for me.

EVOLAND 1

An interesting game dev experiment that doesn't really hold it's own.

I liked how Evoland was constantly changing the core gameplay up, especially in the early game. There's something inherently exciting about opening a chest and getting an upgrade for "better graphics". Evoland eventually reaches a point where a good chunk of the game is dumbed down FF7 turn based battles mixed in with mediocre Link to the Past copycat dungeons.

Again, it's a fun idea but it ultimately just reminded me of better games I could be playing instead.

The SoLA dlc has probably the best biome of the entire Dead Island 2 package. The Coachella vibes are great and the map is really unlike anything I have ever played in a game like this. It feels fresh and looks phenomenal visually.

From a gameplay POV, this DLC adds two new enemy types and is hellbent on throwing them at you at every possible instant. In general, the SoLA just throws all the enemy types at you and it's absolutely exhausting. I get it, you want to challenge your players. But god damn. The amount of times an enemy would trigger my character's tumbling down animation is insane. This was an issue in the main game as well but it happened to me so frequently in SoLA that I felt like a good chuck of my playthrough was spent watching the tumbling down animation play out only to then die by from environmental damage. It blows. Like Haus, this DLC also does nothing to the level cap, which is a bummer since there's loot everywhere and all of it is useless because anyone who played the DI2 story has been max leveled for a long time now.

The last boss of the DLC is great and one of the most creative bosses of Dead Island 2. I liked that. But yeah, this DLC ended up accentuating issues I already had with Dead Island 2 and soured me a bit on it. It's not bad. It's an impressive package. Just not one I enjoyed all that much.

Bit of an experience with this one. This is the game I was in the middle of when I was hospitalized years ago. After that I kinda stopped gaming for a few months and my PC died so I didn't have a way to play. Now I do again and fortunately I had forgotten enough after three years to fully enjoy the deduction based gameplay despite having to replay half of it.

So what is this? Well it's a game from the Papers, Please creator Lucas Pope who seems to have a knack for making a captivating experience out of an otherwise dull occupation. Return of the Obra Dinn has you fill the shoes of an insurance agent tasked to investigate the titular ship that found its way back to English waters with no crew remaining and find out why that happened.

The core gameplay is a beautiful thing and can really make you feel smart. Basically what you do is you search around the ship from a first person perspective in a 3D space and find the remains of the crew. You're armed with a book that has the ship manifest with simple descriptions of characters, two images from an artist on the ship depicting the whole crew through both, a layout of each of the ship's decks, and a glossary to help you define some seafaring terms like what a midshipman is or the various decks.

The book also has a plethora of blank pages you need to fill out by learning what happened. You do this with the OTHER object in your possession, a magic pocket watch that allows you to see the final moments of a live of whoever's remains you observe. Basically you activate the watch and it plays audio similar to a radio play where you hear the person's final moments and then it shows you the moment of their death frozen in time. You're then free to look around it and note to yourself who all is involved and what's happening. You can focus on people in the scene and it'll show you their face in the mentioned artist's images in the book and it's also worth really looking around for all sorts of details that could help you identify other people the scene isn't even about. Through these scenes you can find other bodies to investigate and the ship will open up more after completing scenes.

It was really a fantastic experience. There were a lot of times I was able to just look around and piece answers together with what was shown in the various scenes but I also encountered times where I just didn't know an answer and would google stuff to help me out. Like with one instance the game shows you a guy with like tribal body tattoos and I was like "ok most people here are from places that don't usually do that kind of thing in the 1800s" so I googled "tribal body tattoo" + [whatever country in the origin list I didn't know much about] and ended up being pretty sure I knew where the guy in the game was from and thus could match his name to his face. It's a wonderful feeling. There's a lot of similar things to that too where you gotta have a sharp eye like if someone is wearing a wedding ring or even keeping track where they sleep and what shoes they have on. Hell there's even some fates you discover on the outer fringes of a scene that doesn't even prominently feature the characters!

It's all expertly woven together. All the fates intertwine and it tells a most compelling story. It's brought together in a nice little package of atmosphere with various songs to set the mood of each scene. Also the sound design coupled with the
radio play descriptors of a scene make for a super immersive experience. I mean, I don't know for sure what a man being torn apart by a fantasy beast sounds like but it feels like Pope does with all this. Oh also the game is entirely 1-bit color palette so it give the feel of playing something like Oregon Trail in a way. The whole thing together just works so well.

SO yeah this is a pretty excellent game. It made me feel smart and really compelled me to do all the everything just by being masterfully atmospheric and presenting a tale that keeps on giving. I'm reminded of The Outer Wilds or Myst in how it felt to play but the way it's presented and how you explore the story in chapters give it enough of its own feeling to call it a pretty unique experience. I know some would argue that detective type gameplay can only be enjoyed fully once since you know everything on subsequent playthroughs but I think since it has enough style Obra Dinn could still be worth Returning to (lol) the same way one might revisit a good book. Definitely recommend to anyone to give a chance but those who like figuring stuff out will be who enjoys it the most.