I feel so sorry for all non-Spanish speakers who will never understand just how funny the name ‘’Señor Chirridos’’ is; like… is not a bad translation of Mr. Scratch by any means, but it’s so fucking funny and it surprises me even more they just didn’t keep the original name… but I’m so glad they didn’t.

If Alan Wake is the main TV series, then American Nightmare feels like a Halloween special, which seems to be exactly what they were going for. Despite the original game having such an open finale and this going directly after it, it doesn’t really build upon the pre-established narrative beyond Alan’s character and his conflict with his doppelgänger, and that’s fine! I’m totally up for a shorter, more fast-paced story in this world, and American Nightmare does have a super interesting premise.

I actually liked how the combat worked in the first game, so expanding on that with more weapons and enemies while using the backdrop of a Night Springs episode and introducing a time-loop is the kind of craziness I can get behind, and AM does succeed at creating more interesting combat encounters than the original game ever did… but doesn’t try to go for more than that despite its many opportunities.

It does show a promising start; the three main areas of Arizona are interesting and fun to go through and a perfect excuse to battle the Taken, getting more manuscript pages, see more of Mr. Scratch and the little interactions with each of the characters, while not as natural as any of the conversations with the fellas of Bright Falls, are pretty neat. With the addition of a couple of weapons and enemies, this feels like the kind of combat sections they wanted to make the first time around; they even took out the driving section! We are freed from this accursed blight!

And we even get to hear how Barry and the Old Gods of Asgard are doing, glad to know they are still putting out pure fire!

It’s a pretty good time, a simple one, but it has some cool moments, I really liked the battles, and overall is just an entertaining time!... and then the second loop begins.

I absolutely love the idea of time-loops as a gameplay system, getting to learn more of the world and levels and using that knowledge to do tasks way faster and m is the best, however, poorly implemented time-loops can turn into doing the exact same thing x amount of times only with a different objective or two and with some new enemies… guess what American Nightmare decides to do. Each time loop is shorter than the last one, but not because you actively take decisions that make things speed up, but because either what were multiple objectives is only one now or because a NPC did the thing way before you. It doesn’t help that the major set-pieces don’t change at all; watching the petrol extractor is a cool sequence, but not one I would have liked to go through three times, and no, putting rock songs, as good as hey sound, doesn’t make it different or better.

Going through the motions the first time was fine, but having to walk through the same rope two other times is a chore, even if gets shorter every time. Worst part is that they really could have given you more openness if they really wanted; the NPCs you encounter also remember the time loops and no matter what, you can only truly win at the end of the last one, so diving you more lenience on how you deal with things wouldn’t have really affected thing at all, and we have here is just an excuse to turn 3 levels into 9.

As the loops go on, more enemies get introduced, and… listen, I really do like the combat way more on here, and some of the new enemies are pretty interesting; the Taken that throws projectiles and explosives and the one that divides each time you shine light on him are super cool ideas from a gameplay-wise and as ideas on their own but the rest of them… in many ways they feel like a waste. The enemies that replace the birds from the original game are faster to deal with but just as annoying, the giants are bullet sponges with no interest move-sets on their own, and the spiders are cool story wise, since they apparently are not part of the Taken perse and instead are part of the Dark Place fauna, but they being just big spiders feels like a wasted opportunity to create something way more cool and alien, and alsoWHY THE FUCK DID THEY HAVE TO BE SPIDERS OH MY GOD-

American Nightmare doesn’t create challenges by throwing enemies with interesting sets of moves, it just throws at you guys that really know how to take damage or a ton of them at the same time, best exemplified on the Arcade mode. I do know and understand that this is a more gameplay-focused entry, but when in the main story you go through the same beats over and over with some minor alterations, and the arcade mode —which by the way, has some unique level themes that I would have preferred to see much more in the main story instead of going through the Observatory three times — is just Wake against waves of enemies and see what score you can get… at a certain point the game loses me, and it doesn’t pull from the creativeness that I know it has and can have to keep me glued to it.

The Taken stay completely silent, and the creepy charm that was found on hearing their grunts and lines amongst the trees is completely gone; the manuscript pages are way less interesting this time around, and the opportunity of this being based around and taking place in a Night Springs episode Alan wrote isn’t taken advantage of at any point, making for a way less interesting story, and use of the reality- bending pages.

In the end, the thing that really kept me more intrigued and wanting to see the game to the finale was, who else, Mr. Scratch himself. I enjoyed most of the villains in the original Alan Wake, but NONE feel like Mr. Scratch; the sound distorting every time Wake says his name, the way he taunts Alan and how he ENJOYS being the worst of him, a true monster all the way through, it’s a disturbing delight every time he’s on screen (literally) and the uneasiness he carries is one I didn’t expected to be done so well. I wished he and Alan had more opportunities to bounce each other, ‘cause every time they did it was a delight, and luckily it seems that American Nightmare isn’t that important to the overall Alan Wake narrative, so hopefully he didn’t kick the bucket, I’d love to see more of him…

There’s still that Alan Wake attention to detail and story in here, but it didn’t go as deep as it could have, and we have is a story that, while fun at times and with some cool extras and secrets, it still is what is: a Halloween special that doesn’t want to be a real successor or groundbreaking, but it also doesn’t take advantage of the potential it itself sets, and it can drag on at times… Still fun and funny at times, tho!

We’ll meet again, Champion of Light

I’ll see you soon, Herald of Darkness

Before I started playing Halo 2, I decided to look up its development history, and I found out some pretty interesting stuff.
The folks over at Bungie wanted to not just improve on what had been established with the 1st game, but also to bring in a lot of new ideas and concepts to the table. To triple everything!
But the devs bit off more than they could chew, and the game went through a bunch of changes during its dev time, with a lack of focus during most of it. The game suffered many delays as a result.

With all of that being said, it's a fucking miracle Halo 2 turned out as great as it did!
Now, it's not free from issues, but I had a lot of fun with this title, and it improves on everything that Halo 1 offered!

The plot tackles many more themes than last time, ranging from politics to religion. We see more of the Covenant alien species this time around, and hear them interact with each other.
And this also adds to the fact that there's a 2nd playable character who's from the Covenant, the Arbiter!

And that leads me into the gameplay. You'll alternate between Master Chief and the Arbiter throughout the game, especially when you pass the first third of the game. They don't play much differently from each other, except Master Chieft has a flashlight, and the Arbiter has a temporary camoflauge system.

The biggest new addition to the game, however, is that you can now dual-wield weapons! Of course, if you wanna use a grenade, you will have to put down your left weapon to throw it, but you can easily pick it back up afterwards. Not all weapons can be dual-wield, but many of them do.
It's crazy how such a simple addition can make a game more fun!

There are also some new weapons like the Spartan Sword, which are really fun to use! And the vehicles are also back, and they control better too! The Warthog didn't feel as slippery as before, and the new vehicles are just fun to use... except the tank, that one was a bit too slow for my liking.
At least you only use it in one level.

The overall level design has also seen a significant boost! I criticized Halo 1 for having a lot of empty space, and Halo 2 fixes that by being very no non-sense.
Sometimes you do have to stop for some enemies to appear, and at the beginning of the game, it was a bit annoying. But as you go through the game, you find less and less of those situations, which I appreciate.
The variety of environments, too, is also a big step up from last time! There's a lot to see and to explore, and there were some part where I found the game to be gorgeous!
And this is from 2004!

On the topic of presentation, this game also very much improves on that. Human character models are way more detailed and expressive, and don't feel as dated as last time. I will say that the Alien character models weren't super great, but I do appreciate some of the detail on their models.
The voice acting is also stellar, with the Arbiter being voiced by Keith David, who does an excellent job!

I do think that the game's lighting system is not the best. Like, most places that have light in them are just fine, but when it's dark, it's really dark. The few times that I did get lost, it was because I couldn't see shit. The Arbiter not having a flashlight made it worse.

Although since I was playing Halo 2: Anniversary, I could temporarily go to the modern graphics, and see that the lighting was better. Then I would switch back to the old graphics, once I found my way, so that the game would run smoother on my PC.

All in all, while Halo 2 is not perfect, it was a really fun first-person shooter, that I'm glad I got to play!

Not sure if I'll be able to play Halo 3, but I want to, one day, finish the fight!

Is this a relaunch or something? Why does Kids feel like it came out 13 years late? I can imagine this game working if it was from idk 2005, like you're browsing around playing some generic flash games then suddenly you find a random weird artsy game, and you're naturally hooked (something similar as to why Samorost worked in that context). But the thing is Kids came out in 2019, and it has no business being from that year. About the game's message... it's about as deep and subtle as a Steve Cutts short. Nothing to see here.

I played this game for Pay or Play 2nd Cycle of 2024 and it was picked for me by La Volpe.

As an operative tasked with fixing corruption in the timeline, you have been sent to the North of England in May 2015, where six people died in a house fire. Prohibited from simply stopping the fire, you must instead manipulate the choices made by the housemates in the week leading up to it so that they all survive the event.

Eternal Threads is a single-player, first-person story-driven puzzle game of time manipulation, choice and consequence. You watch through scenarios to unravel the personal stories of the six people you are tasked to save, while changing their choices along the way to make sure they survive the night of the fire. You can also work through their personal issues while you are at it, which leads to a "perfect ending".

It's definitely an awesome storytelling game that is well written and it combines the ordinary together with the futuristic mundane. It was really hard to just stop playing and I felt like I could have played it from start to finish in one setting if I had the time. The stories of the different characters were very good and really had me hooked. The burned down house was at times creepy and gave a little bit of suspense to the whole game while playing.

The game wasnt too difficult to 100% and I really had a blast while playing it. It's definitely a good game to play if you enjoy choices, time manipulation and a good, well written story. Highly recommended!

Before last year when I played through Konami's Contra collection release I had barely played the series. For the most part they aren't games I'd play again (except for the amazing Contra: Hard Corps.) but they are fun well made titles that do hold up well. Having gone through the collection however I found out that for some reason it was missing the third NES game in the series Contra Force. Having now played it I understand why though, I suspect Konami themselves hope people forget it.

It was originally developed as a totally different game called Arc Hound with no ties to Contra but was cancelled in Japan and never released. I was going to say that I don't know the reason for the cancellation but based on how bad the game is I imagine it's self evident but considering what existing content of the game was rebranded as a Contra title and released in the US anyway? who knows the truth of the matter behind it. By the time it actually came out was after Contra III on the SNES which only really helps to emphasize the low quality here as everything about this is worse than the original Contra released 4 years prior.

Firstly the games performance is awful. The game has constant slowdown even when there isn't much going on. I have played more intensive NES games so know the hardware is more capable than this but even without the slow down the actual game just feels slow and cumbersome moving and firing around, it's like playing in slow motion through treacle. The technical limitations don't stop there though with constant sprite flickering and even the auto scrolling at times just doesn't work leaving your playable character stuck on the very front of the screen. This is just an ugly title to play and feels unfinished which considering the information on it's development history I have managed to find? That may well have been the case.

The issues don't stop there though with Arc Hound's original set up meaning this isn't actually a contra so the enemies and especially the bosses you fight are just so...bland. The first boss for example is just a slightly larger commando that jumps and fires a couple of bullets. There are no aliens, large machinery or anything interesting at any point to engage with. The closest thing is a jet plane but even that somehow when you fight it is somehow kind of boring with no interesting bullet patterns or abilities.

You can choose between four characters to play as with slightly different load outs because the only, and I mean only, interesting thing this game does is to implement another Konami property's weapon upgrade system from Gradius. Instead of new weapons dropped from enemies or locations there are generic suitcases that act as power ups. Each one you collect pushes along a bar of choices that you can then manually select. The issue is most of the weapons are crap, slow demolition, grenades with no range, guns that feel the same and missing classic contra weapons to boot. You can change characters by pressing the start button to go to the menu. From the menu you can even select another character to do an AI attack for you on screen which was kind of neat though I initially thought it would be a permanent companion as going into the laggy menu is also a chore to no ones surprise. Speaking of which to continue feeling like this is an incomplete prototype when going into the menu from a jump and coming back out your character jumps again in mid air meaning in some levels you can by pass huge sections by jumping almost infinitely. It's just broken.

And there you have it, Contra Force. Worth playing for an hour or so only if you are interested in it's historical placement as the odd game in the series Konami doesn't want to acknowledge by repurposing an (I assume) incomplete cancelled project with the Contra branding. It runs terribly, has pretty mediocre bosses and gameplay over it's 5 stage run time and generally isn't a fun title. The Contra Collection I played was missing a lot of titles on it but honestly? this one I understand why at least.

Pints for being possibly the worst game I've played but with the coolest cover art though.

+ Gradius Power up system is an interesting implementation....

- .....though I don't think it really fits the game.
- Technical issues everywhere, slowdown, sprite flickers and broken auto scrolling.
- Levels, bosses and weapons are just unfun.
- It's bad.

The simple black and white world of Toem - a blend of Earthbound and Peppa Pig - presents like an all-age picture book filled with quirks and details that need only to be captured with the photo mechanic. It's a game that encourages the player simply to take it in at the most leisurely pace imaginable - no one is in danger, no one is going to die, nothing. That said, the moments where you find only so many pieces of a photo challenge only to find out there are more in later levels becomes amplified annoyance. But the connectedness and clean presentation brings out the completionist in most players.
Bottom line, its another cutsie zero-risk indie title to relax to and shut out the horrors of our reality.

the moment after taking hundreds of photographs of whatever the fuck was in front of you during this long journey through completely different biomes of the world you finally manage to "experience toem" (more on that later) is probably one of the most powerful moments I've experienced lately in a video game and i wish i was joking

toem is a very strange and alienating game in the sense that even now i dont completely know how I feel about it (currently my neurons are debating whether to put 3.5 or 4 we will see how that will go stay tuned)

the main mechanics of the game all revolve around taking pictures of the most random shit thats there to complete a certain amount of missions that allow you to move on to the next place and then repeat this process for another 5 times or something

if you ask me how exactly these mechanics work id have no clue how to explain this gameplay apart from "umhhhh cute lil boy takes photos of stuff hehe cute" the end like i think its better to just try the game yourself or watch some videos honestly this is difficult stuff me italiano mamma mia i no talk english well excuse

now the way in which i explained these mechanics makes it seem like the game is boring as hell but in reality the missions are so different from one another (albeit still in the "take a pic of X format" duh fucking brand of the game) and the things to photograph are so many that they completely saturate a game that lasts 3 hours no 100% and 5 hours 100% (approximate data of how long it took me at least also considering the DLC although tbh i kind of speed ran it through the last levels dont know why maybe im just too mentally unstable for videogames)

in addition to that the game also shoves in other kinds of mechanics in such a way as to provide you with a varied and never fully soporific experience (not fully because the sometimes unclear requirements for some quests make you wander around the map for a bit and they get frustrating honestly im just not good with this stuff idk why i played this game i got zero brain toem why are you giving me riddles like wtf)

honestly for a game with this premise it can be a bit of a challenge (of patience at that) so its not really just strolling and bird watching

theres also clothes ! if you like that kind of stuff i know you chicory people will like it and also some quest kind of work like the moons in super mario odyssey accessible only if you dress as idk a fucking pole dancer if you know what im talking about

anyhow point is gameplay is fine very fine very innovative very ughhhh other adjectives that im not competent enough to put here like ughhh endowed is this a word whatever

what pulled me into this game was possibly the art style which is majestic even though very minimalistic but honestly minimalistic isnt always a bad thing and somehow they managed to put a wide array of diversity in the world design character design and everything else design

now i will just segue into something that completely bewitched me the atmospheric nature of this game is just astounding i swear every single level has a clear and direct vibe theyre trying to convey and they deliver in that regard beautifully and all into a black and white lense and that will also segue into

the final picture you take took my breath away its such a wonderful little crescendo into something absolutely majestic

mom at the beginning of the game tells you that its finally time for you to experience the magical might of TOEM something that the player and possibly also the little protagonist have no fucking idea what it is

its at the top of kiiruberg mountain region and it should be experienced at least 1 time in the lifespan of a person and so you just journey through the world to get a sight of this magnificent phenomenon

MILD SPOILER IG when you get to the mountain you acknowledge that toem is a fucking parallelepiped ? ok whatever i was weirded out THEN you look at it . the ost keeps going on a steady pace until it stops and toem exposes its mystical colored northern lights and another ost begins and youre just left there gawking at this beautiful sight and honestly ? trying to convey this kind of majestic beauty through a game isnt that easy ive seen a lot of stuff listened to a lot of stuff and sometimes stuff just gets repetitive or you start to not get that amazed at it anymore like you used to

when i actually "experienced toem" it made me feel like i was looking at something out of the ordinary like it was a big deal and in a world where everything is black and white a sight that explodes into a myriad of colors IS a big deal and i was just left there observing this estatic godlike experience like i was actually living in the world of toem i got shivers im not joking i kind of got emotional too im a mess lets just end this review rn

toem is cool you should try it ig

going around just spinning the map is entertaining af how do they do that like i could be spinning the map for an hour straight

can i pet the mysterious figure aka the beavers

every animal in this game MUST be petted or else youre a monster and you shouldnt be living on this planet im sorry thats just the truth

i want to date the rock metal guy who gives bread to the pigeons hes just my type

i dont usually 100% games but this one deserved it

(wrote this one at like 1 am when i was supposed to be sleeping for my first day of uni this is gonna be a fucked up review im so sorry people)

Harold Halibut is a very technically impressive (when its not bugging out or dropping frames) feat, which unfortunately puts its gorgeous claymation style and cinematography in service of an overwritten, overindulgent miserable slog which might have been refreshing were it a fifth of its length instead of the overbearing wank we got instead.

Wank is the operative word here, the game is spiritually similar to jerking off. It takes inspiration from various sources, wes anderson films chief among them, but from what few films I have seen of those, they were much more entertaining and well written. The sheer nothingness of the gameplay even for narrative focused adventure games and amount of dialogue that was 3 lines too long for what it needed to be really fits together when you learn about the game's 10 year development time. This is someone's baby, presumably a labour of love, but thats the thing, sometimes you need to detach yourself emotionally from your work and cut things when they don't actually add anything. The most damning thing of all, after all that, 8 goddamned hours (it felt twice that) I feel nothing. The game is nothing. I am nothing. We're all nothing. And I have 8 fewer hours now before I return to the nothingness of oblivion with little to show for it.

I liked the demo enough during Next Fest but unfortunately Children of the Sun proved to be entirely style over substance. What starts off as a neat little sniper puzzler with a Killer 7-esque aesthetic devolves into trial and error, tedium, and wonky hitboxes. In some levels you aren't even able to see every enemy initially so you straight up gotta trial and error it. The later mechanics the games adds feel more like annoying gimmicks and the last level is just an absolute slog and I just gave up because I couldn't find the last damn enemy in all the visual noise and didn't feel like repeating all that shit over and over again just to find them. Easy skip and I regret I'm probably past the refund window.

Like watching a car crash.

Open Roads had a very rocky development, and it's not hard to tell. Announced about four years ago at The Game Awards and three years after the studio's then-latest release of Tacoma, Open Roads ran into some trouble when it came out that Steve Gaynor was a microtyrant who was forcing employees out of his company. In a true success story for the industry, he'd only been abusing his power over his subordinates to humiliate and demean them (specifically focusing his ire on the women at his company), and not to sexually harass them — please, hold your applause for the man until the end. The news broke that this dipshit and his stupid haircut had been responsible for turning over nearly the entire workforce of Fullbright over the course of just two years, and Gaynor stepped down ahead of the story coming out. He said he was very very sorry for his behavior and that he wouldn't do it again, but also that he wasn’t sorry enough to surrender the company name. Open Roads is now credited to "The Open Roads Team", comprised of the couple of employees who were left in the wake of his reign and whoever else they could bring on to save the project from a shallow grave. The game released just a few days ago to a remarkably small audience and a middling reception, and it isn't difficult to see why.

Open Roads fucking sucks.

It's a game that's very obsessed with detail, yet is remarkably uninterested in its story. When the game let me open up a trash can and pick out every single piece of garbage individually to examine it in a 3D model viewer, I got the feeling that I wasn't going to enjoy this. The models themselves are all very intricate and detailed, each one of them complete with their own bespoke labels, and fine print, and they're all very lovingly put together, and I absolutely would not have noticed nor cared about any of this if a core component of the game wasn't picking up random objects and looking at them. There's a reason that movies don't feature characters picking up every loose object on the set and holding them up to camera, and that's because it's not particularly interesting to do that. I feel like I have to explain this from first principles. What do we gain by doing this? What do we gain from having the player pick up loose items and stare at them? What does that accomplish that just dressing the set with static objects wouldn't? It certainly makes the game last longer, because you need to pick up every piece of random bullshit in the hopes of finding the ones that advance you to the next section, but there's no appeal in doing that. It's busywork. So little worldbuilding actually happens by digging through these items; you'll be picking through erasers and pencils and plates, all such boring, domestic objects that don't have any character to them whatsoever. You can pick up some push pins and look at them. They're normal fucking push pins. You can pick up a fork and look at it. It's a normal fucking fork. You can pick up a comb and look at it. It's a normal fucking comb. What are we doing? Why? Is there something about allowing me to pick these objects up and look at them that does anything that leaving them in the scenery for me to look at wouldn't? Could we at least do something interesting with them? Express some personality through them? Give us a reason to investigate them? Anything, so long as it could give this a point.

Tonally, this is all over the place. Tess being kind of mood swing-y makes sense — she's fifteen, and nobody seems keen on telling her fucking anything on the grounds of it being "too complicated", despite one of the core conflicts of the game being completely resolved in a literal three minute talk at the end — but Opal falls into this pattern as well. Tess will go way, way too far in making an accusation or just trying to come up with something that would hurt her mom, and Opal will respond in kind, and then the pair of them will act like nothing ever happened. One sequence has them blow up on one another, refuse to say another word until the end of the car ride, and then resume quipping and bantering not even thirty seconds later. It takes more time for you to eat the fucking burger that Opal buys you at the motel than it does for the only two principle characters in this story to have a ground-shattering fight and then completely resolve it. The store description boasts that Tess and Opal’s relationship has “never been easy” when it so obviously is. If I had said so much as a fraction of the shit Tess says to my own mom, I would have demolished our relationship. Instead, it’s all glossed over, all just Buffyspeak for the pile. If wry quips were currency, Tess and Opal wouldn't have to sell the house.

The game can't ever decide whether it's time to floor it or slam the brakes, and instead has you constantly whipping back and forth between long segments of doing fucking nothing besides wandering around to rotate ashtrays and then blasting forward with story development that you barely even have time to register as happening before it's over. Your grandfather died, but he wasn't actually your grandfather, but he was a jewel thief, but he was your grandfather, but he might still be alive, but he tried to turn himself in, but who cares, but maybe your professional gambler father can enlighten you, but roll credits. Christ. We spend 90% of the runtime walking around and investigating literal fucking garbage and then cram way too much of this incredibly boring story into not enough time to tell it. This isn't even an Open Roads problem, but Open Roads is a symptom; so many games have fucking atrocious pacing. I've started celebrating anything that can get to credits without rushing or dragging. At least this has the decency to be over in an hour and a half, despite the fact that it does nothing with that time.

Would you believe me if I told you that this controlled badly? For a game this simple, just about every control scheme has something completely broken about it. If you're playing on a gamepad (the optimal way to play), menus are often incredibly sticky and require a few button presses before they actually register that you want to move your cursor up or down. Getting from New Game to Continue on the main menu took four down presses to move the selection box down once. Objects that you can interact with are what I can only describe as "sticky"; moving your reticle near them will drastically decrease your sensitivity and pull your view towards the item like a magnet, ensuring that you can easily pick up the item without having to fiddle with getting the reticle placement just right. This, in theory, is a great idea. In practice, the fact that so many fucking items in the game can be interacted with means that your view is constantly being dragged around, making it feel like you're fighting with the controls when you're trying to look up from a desk to the exit door. You can't move your camera freely unless you're staring off into empty space, because your reticle keeps getting caught on objects and making it incredibly difficult for you to look away from them. It should not be this frustrating simply trying to look around a room.

Doing this on a mouse is where the fun really begins, though. I don't know what happened with my copy of the game, because I can't imagine that this happened to anyone else and they didn't see fit to mention it; it's obviously a bug, but it's also really funny that it made to the final release. Mouselook, for some ungodly reason, is locked to eight directions. It also "snaps" when you move it around, jumping from one point to another rather than smoothly gliding between them. I thought it had something to do with the controller being plugged in, but it persisted through both unplugging the gamepad and restarting the PC. I can't really explain how bad this is through text, so I've graciously provided you with a video so that you won't have to experience it for yourself. Nobody should know these horrors, but I do. You should not be made to carry this burden.

I feel bad giving it this low of a score, because I usually prefer to reserve the half-stars for works that are actively harmful. The kind of thing that does damage. But there is absolutely nothing that I like here. I detest the writing, I detest playing it, I detest the way that it looks, I can't fucking stand it. This game radiates a horrid energy that enters me in waves and saps my will. The writers have almost never worked on anything else in their lives and one of the lead art directors made Dream Daddy. We're not dealing with heavy hitters of the industry, here. These are people who are uniquely underqualified coming in to try and salvage an extant work tainted by employee abuse because throwing out the name and starting over would be bad for brand recognition.

Despite the fact that this is intended as something of a follow-up to Gone Home, there's almost nobody left from that project who's still working on this one. This isn't a successor project so much as it is an imitation, all of the gaps smoothed over with drywall mud from Annapurna helping to pull in nearly three hundred fucking contractors to get this out. What compelled them to go ahead with releasing this? Open Roads is the ship of Theseus. Clearly everybody who knew what they were doing when they were still under the Fullbright banner is gone with no intention of coming back, and the ones with a clue who survived Gaynor's reign don't have enough of a voice under the fucking mountain of outside artists and developers being brought in to push this out the door.

Open Roads is a game that clearly has talented people on board, but is helmed by a team lead (or leads, plural) who have no clue what do to with them. There’s so much wasted potential here. It sucks to see all of these people wriggle out from under the thumb of an abusive manager just to immediately be put beneath the thumb of a new manager who’s incompetent, instead. I can’t write here what I hope happens to Steve Gaynor. I do hope that whoever’s left from Fullbright can leave Annapurna behind and make something better than their oldest work, because I know they’re capable of it. They just need a leader who isn’t a fucking moron.

Hey, mom!

You know, for the big, bad black sheep of the Postal franchise I was expecting something a whole lot worse. Don't get me wrong, I'm not some deluded apologist fan trying to convince you this is actually a misunderstood masterpiece or even a good game at all. I'm just saying it's more a cheap and disappointing product than the unplayable affront it's known as. Honestly, I've played a little over half the property's entries and expansions at this point, and PIII is about par for the course in terms of quality. Sorry, not sorry.

Its biggest problem is budgetary, which has continuously proved to be the only thing that has been more detrimental to the series' reputation and reception than even its controversial content. Running with Scissors passed development of the project off to Akella, the company responsible for publishing their works in Russia, and one of its internal studios fittingly named "Trashmasters" because those guys had deeper pockets. Unfortunately, the country's Great Recession from 08-09 completely mucked up any chances for the potential greatness that you can still catch the occasional glimpses of while playing.

The whole package was built around the idea of replayability, featuring a branching storyline that will lead you to one of three possible endings depending on your choices and behavior. The notion of getting to see entirely new content in the form of different missions and cutscenes is as compelling in this format as it is in your typical Western narrative RPG, although it's more than a bit weird that they decided for outcomes to be determined by a morality system. I mean, actively encouraging players to be upstanding, law-abiding citizens in a Postal game?! What sense does that make?

Ultimately however, I didn't find the gameplay enticing enough to pull me back in to go for another ending, and not simply because I feel I happened to pick the most interesting path of the bunch on that first playthrough either. The financial struggles behind the scenes led to this being nothing more than a generic, linear third-person shooter. Admittedly one that can be mindlessly entertaining due to the fun gore and silly guns, even if some weapons don't seem to work (I'm convinced it's impossible to hit anyone with the fire axe). Might have earned a cautious recommendation were it not for the plethora of technical issues. As if long levels without checkpoints weren't enough, I experienced multiple crashes to desktop and repeated instances of critical doors inexplicably failing to open that forced regular mission restarts.

Never knowing if something was about to go wrong and cause me to have to replay possibly lengthy stretches of a stage if I didn't remember to manually save every few minutes is what really kills this for me. I legitimately enjoyed the return to a more grounded style and tone after Apocalypse Weekend, and found the writing fitfully amusing by virtue of how nasty and vulgar they were willing to be with the shock humor in their blatant efforts to offend. It is perhaps worthier of the Postal name than the vast majority give it credit for. Regardless, while I believe the overall general vitriol this has received over the years is a tad overblown, I wouldn't recommend the curious members of the fanbase check it out. The dev's lack of proper funds led to this being too unstable and lackluster to be a fulfilling use of your time. It may be too early to tell for sure as I've still got quite a few releases left to try, but based on all I've gotten to thus far I'm beginning to suspect this property doesn't have anything consequential to offer after its second outing.

5/10