Pep's Detective Deep Dive - Game 2
An FMV interactive movie with lots of style but very little substance, The Isle Tide Hotel describes itself as "A British Twin Peaks" on it's Steam page.

I have to ask... how exactly is this similar in any way to Twin Peaks? Twin Peaks has a charismatic lead actor, this does not. Twin Peaks has an intriguing, twisting plot, this does not. A show/film with "weird" characters doesn't automatically make it "Lynchian", and it's pretty insulting to David Lynch that The Isle Tide Hotel would describe itself in this way.

The basic plot of the game has you play a father who is requested to visit a hotel by a private detective, to save his estranged daughter from a cult. Given the "choose-your-own-adventure" narrative that most of Wales Interactive's FMV games follow, what happens to the main character once you arrive at the hotel is largely up to you. To the game's credit, there seems to be quite a few different paths you can take and endings you can unlock, but I wasn't impressed enough with it to go beyond the one ending I got.

Some positives; the sets, costumes and cinematography were pretty nice, and I definitely got Eyes Wide Shut vibes from the use of masks. Like most FMV games, the acting is a bit all over the place. Jemima Rooper does her best as Price, but I feel like Michael Xavier sleepwalks his way through the central role. And the fact that they cast Richard Brake but only give him around 3 minutes of screen time is borderline criminal. The rest of the cast are varying degrees of "okay" - the entire production still gives me "student film with a budget" vibes.

!!SPOILERS AHEAD!! My biggest issue with the game (and bear with me since I only did one ending) is that the overall plot is pretty flimsy: it's not really established what the cult's overall goal is or what they want with Eleanor. You hear words like "term" and "core", the cult's leader waxes poetic and "body-swapping" is mentioned at one point. The fact that I got through an intended ending of the game knowing little about the actual cult is a criticism in itself.

Yes, I realise that this isn't really a detective game and I Pony Island'd myself again. But for a mystery game there's not much atmosphere or intrigue, and for an FMV game there's no real sense of fun. There's better mystery games and interactive movies out there.

When your character crashes crashes his car in the game's opening, he misses two squirrels who scurry off and make a... monkey sound?! I think this perfectly summarises Deadly Premonition, in all its stengths and weaknesses.
Considered by many to be the 'best worst game of all time' and Guiness record holder of 'Most Critically Polarizing Survival Horror,' Deadly Premonition might be the gaming equivalent of the 2003 cult movie The Room. They have plenty in common, mainly that every creative decision feels so incredibly wrongfooted that you question how it was even greenlit.
Any development team would hear those monkey squirrels and scratch their heads, as much as every gamer has subsequently. This game might have a fabulous team behind it, but, creatively, this is evidently the work of an individual.
Just as Deadly Premonition is gaming's answer to The Room, Hidetaka "SWERY" Suehiro might be its answer to Tommy Wiseau: an eccentric and intellectually contentious visionaire whose name is planted everywhere in the opening credits.
I think the game's cult status comes from that distinct personality, as much as the game's obvious inspirations (it's basically Twin Peaks with the gameplay of Shenmue without either's subtlety). Yes, the characters are dumb, the story is nonsensical, the sound is jarring, the music is annoying, the world design is derivative, the gameplay is clunky, the enemies are grating and the sexual politics are questionable - I could go on and on, almost as long as some of the cutscenes - but all of these things do one thing right, that is they form a wholistic sense of place, a unique atmosphere and a singular vision of its world, though a strange one. If all of these things were the culmination of a group effort, rather than an individual, it would show and immediately be less compelling. When you watch The Room, you never doubt that literally no one but Wiseau is at the wheel, it is the same here.
There are actually some aspects worthy of standard merit here. I am surprised to admit that some moments in this game are downright creepy and the plot becomes somehow even more unhinged in the final third - the game is at its best here because it eventually ditches the pretentions of being a Twin Peaks game and finds its two left feet placed firmly in the realm of Japanese weirdness.
Ultimately, it's not a 'good' game in the traditional sense, but instead a fascinating work of art... for all the wrong reasons.

i think this game just isn't for me

it's obviously inspired by pokemon but copies way too much from breath of the wild in what i feel is a clumsy way

you have a stamina meter for sprinting that's absurdly low, and you get a glide ability early on

at that point it's trivial to accidentally go to countless areas where enemies will absolutely destroy you

the whole game structure seems to be based around obtaining quests from NPCs and doing them in any order you want

basically every battle i did was either way under or way above my level

you can barely hold any healing items

the music is not doing it for me... i find it just dull

THE PIXEL ART IS FANTASTIC AND SO WELL ANIMATED

i'm giving this game a 2/5 for incredible pixel art and cute monster designs, but unfortunately playing it just feels like a chore to me

Silly little time-waster browser game I could see kids playing while stuck in computer lab or something. It's not the most exciting experience in the world from a gameplay standpoint as all you're doing is just dragging little boxes of text on top of each other to see what new words the AI systems running in the background will concoct as you do. So instead, the amusement comes from seeing exactly what kind of crazy things you can "create" for a cheap laugh with your dumb friends, and maybe the serotonin of the game congratulating you on being the first person to uncover some crazy new combination.

While personally none of that is enough to ever bring me back again for more, I can definitely still see this being super addictive for the right person. Plus, it is legitimately impressive the massive library of objects, creatures, concepts, celebrity names, fictional entities, and much more you can amass from the mere four classical elements you start off with. The fact that there's a mobile-friendly version of the site so that you can play on your phone whenever you have internet access, although not the ideal method due to the amount of scrolling you'll eventually have to do, is also a nice touch. All in all, not quite for me, but I think this succeeds pretty well at everything it sets out to do and is reasonably commendable regardless as a result.

7/10

This was just such a fun time all the way through, this game's world and especially the characters are so fun. The levels are so well designed and really feel like a fever dream someone would have in their head. Also the combat was honestly not to bad either with a lot of variety on how you tackle enemies surprisingly. The concept and execution of the story really make you feel like you're experiencing an animated kids' film. It's also just really funny. I am a huge fan of this game and cant wait to play the sequel! (9/10)

I've always heard of Beyond Good & Evil as something of a cult classic; critically acclaimed, but not the system seller or series seller that Ubisoft's later works Prince of Persia: Sands of Time or Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory would become, and as a result Beyond Good & Evil got swept to the side, never to really be heard from again while Assassin's Creed got a million sequels. And it's such a damn shame that happened, because Beyond Good & Evil is so fucking good.

I don't think it's the most polished game out there; there are occasional moments of jank where your AI companion might take a little bit longer to get to your position (and for me, got stuck in the doorway once) and how corner hit detection during races and the goddamn pellet game messed me up multiple times. And the combat is servicable, not amazing; you can get by just hack and slashing most of the time, and this could have used a bit more depth. And yet I will choose to overlook these minor moments, because this is one of the coolest games I've played, and also one of the most thoughtful games I've played. It's just long enough to hide many snug little secrets around the world and make you put in the effort, but short enough to where it doesn't outstay its welcome. The plot is somehow interesting without becoming super convoluted, and it's just dark enough to take itself seriously and stay earnest without sounding overly gloomy or edgy. There aren't a ton of main characters, but the main cast has a lot of personality spread out through the game's relatively short run length. And the puzzles are simple enough to where you can easily figure them out on your own, but still manage to give you a real sense of satisfaction and excitement over how you just managed to piece that on your own. And all the collectibles are spaced apart well enough to where you're naturally encouraged to explore the whole world, with the tools necessary if you need that extra helping hand. Speaking of which, this is probably the first game where I genuinely enjoyed the stealth segments, which I honestly cannot say of any other game I've played up to this point. It's just clean, stylized, stealth that isn't punishing if you mess up yet gives off the feeling that you're being a sneaky secret agent fighting against dirty corporate overlords and seeking justice for those who have been wronged.

In conclusion, while I don't think Beyond Good & Evil looks like or plays like an exceptional game necessarily (it is a product of its age, after all), it's such a damn well thought out cohesive experience and was the Goldilocks of the action-adventure genre that I never knew I needed. Who would have guessed that combining photography with the Legend of Zelda model and throwing in effective stealth sequences would have done it for me? I lament that the game has been mostly forgotten by Ubisoft due to how difficult it was to finagle a working copy (ex: the PC copy has screwy camera scroll speed, the GameCube copy is letterboxed, and the HD Remaster on PS3 can't be bought on the store anymore to be played on PS4/PS5), because it is such a fun and satisfying title to go through. I'm glad though, that audiences are finally giving it the credit it deserves, and I'll happily join the crowd of dozens that are praying for Beyond Good and Evil 2 outside of development hell.

Beyond Good & Evil there is simply the truth.

This game is famous among quite a few of the game community though sadly for all the wrong reasons. It isn't known for unbelievable graphics, breaking selling records or innovation, no BG&E is simply known for being an amazing critically acclaimed game that nobody bought.

This game doesn't do anything special to push itself above the crowd, what it does have is personality, and one that makes you feel as if you are right there with it. The game is brimming with emotion and imagination that just immerses you into the universe that Ubisoft created, and few games have I played that can make them feel so personal.

The game focus's on a female reporter called Jade. She is a reporter struggling to get by in a war between her planet Hillys and an alien invader known as the DomZ that are tearing her planet apart. Taking a job to fund herself Jade gets taken into a bizarre series of events that lead her working for the IRIS network, a resistance of sorts that fight beyond sides, beyond good & evil, they fight for...the truth.

The story and characters to this game are wonderful, not to mention unique, full of emotion and humor to accompany Jade on her journey. I mean where else can you fight a pig with rocket powered flatulence boots?

The gameplay is similarly well crafted with just as much variation. The game for the most part plays like a 3rd person action adventure game. Jade can sneak, and hide behind walls to avoid unwanted attention in Metal Gear stealth like sections, but she can also fight using her staff should it come to that with some basic combos and a charge attack.

Jade and whoever happens to be with her as part of the story have a life bar of hearts that can be increased or decreased upon finding items up for the task, these items must be held by the character to be in effect. This includes gaining her life back as everyone knows eating nachos mid battle heals all your wounds :P

What kind of a reporter would she be if she didn't take pictures? So of course there are plenty of sections in the game requiring pictures to be taken, as well as plenty of optional photos in registering the planets wildlife for a lab which I thought was a really nice touch, and a lucrative one as there are camera upgrades and items to be gained for finding them.

The planet Hillys is formed of many islands over a sea so traveling on foot between areas is not an option. Instead for most of the game Jade and her pig uncle Pej will use a hovercraft. This vehicle is however quite versatile as it can jump as well as fire weapons outside of it's obvious "point A to point B" design.

These abilities allow for some of the games more thrilling events such as fighting a huge DomZ alien leviathan creature as well as some optional fast space pirate cave chases, the variation of things to do in this game never allow for a dull moment.

Throughout the game there are plenty of mini games to take part in from hovercraft racing to air hockey all of which can get you rewards such as pearls or money which allow Jade to buy a bigger life bar, healing items, one use speed boosters and hovercraft upgrades to get her though her story. The game is chocked full of various gameplay mechanics and despite this the controls are always simple and comfortable to play with no matter what the situation which impressed me greatly.

Graphically BG&E is a pretty good looking game for it's time though it won't blow anyone away. However the character and wildlife design are fantastic with all types of cat people, bull people, shark people as well as birds, penguins, space whales and plants to look at on Jades adventure.

Once again the sound is great with some terrific voice acting that really brings the characters to life, especially Pej the pig (have I mentioned he's awesome? XD ). The sound effects and music are also excellent though I admit outside of one great battle theme they don't really stand out either.

There are so many generic games that just don't aspire to be more then they are now days and Ubisoft have long stopped making games like this or taking risks. If you are reading this, buy this game and give it a whirl, this is a game that everyone can enjoy, and should.

+ Interesting characters.
+ Nice variety of gameplay mechanics.
+ Nice art design.

Given the touchy subject matter I find it hard to review this game without having proper experience. But it is worth the try. There is room in this for a dialogue to ensue, at length, about mental illness and the role social networks play in how the youth comes up. This is pertinent, it affects us all to varying degrees. We all have our own problems, and the fair share of us can probably relate to having friends or loved ones who’ve gone through so much. Contact information and resources for the suicide prevention lifeline are provided, in the event anyone plans to play this and happens to need it or know someone who does.

As for the game, I’m on the fence about it. On one hand, it is novel, and the fact that there is no entry fee is admirable. It has a strong sense of direction, at least in its artistic intent. The pair in Akira Yamaoka and Masahiro Ito returned and they worked it hard here. The cherry blossom motif that pervades the game is stark and lends to the rest of it, thematically and aesthetically. In the end credits sequence we get to hear “My Heroine,” which is an excellent bookend to the game.

On the other hand, there are parts of this game that actively bring it down. It doesn't try to be subtle about anything it brings up and honestly, it is poorly written at times. I don't know if this is a lost in translation sort of thing, but maybe that wouldn't make much of a difference. Summing it up, this game is worth playing. It may not resonate, it may even make you uncomfortable, but it is an earnest game, it was made with the best intentions in mind and there is enough here that someone out there can take something positive away from it.

7 Days to Die; o jogo em eterno Early Access.
Minha primeira expêriencia, jogando com amigos, foi divertidíssima, a experiência de Sobrevivência + Tower Defense + Construção de bases é coisa de outro mundo, o que torna ainda mais infeliz o fato de ser um jogo com um incrível potencial desperdiçado por desenvolvedores incompetentes e acomodados.
Mais de DEZ anos em Early Access, com uma otimização horrível que parece só piorar com o passar do tempo, além de você precisar de um PC da NASA pra rodar liso, seus amigos também precisam ter, o que torna MUITO difícil achar amigos pra jogar junto.
A jogabilidade nos servers é muito divertida, pelo menos, se você gosta de construir bases incríveis com ajuda da comunidade, mas é péssima se você também tiver interesse em construir "Bases Anti-Hordas de Zumbis" porquê... bem.... não tem zumbis nos servidores, wut.
Ao contrário das noites de lua sangrenta nos servidores solo ou multiplayer com amigos, os servidores públicos/da comunidade não aguentam mandar mais de 1 ou 2 zumbis pra cada jogador se defender na noite de lua sangrenta porque como a otimização é um lixo total há mais de 10 anos, é impossível ter muitos zumbis atacando ao mesmo tempo sem o servidor EXPLODIR.
Passei um bom tempo jogando os dois modos de jogo: servidor pessoal com os amigos, defendendo nossas humildes bases contra hordas de zumbis, e também jogando em servidores públicos brincando de construir cidades, castelos e a porra toda com gringos de tudo quanto é canto do mundo.
Resumo; Um jogo muito divertido com grande potencial desperdiçado devido aos maus cuidados dos devs, principalmente com a terrível otimização.
Tempo de jogo: 572 horas