Released a few months after Ultima VI, The Savage Empire uses the same engine with a few updates to tell a more adventure and puzzle rather than combat and RPG focused pulp style story. The Avatar is transported along with two of his friends to a jungle and dinosaur filled environment with many different tribes that might trade, war with, or ignore one another. You begin working to unite the tribes against the violent ant like creatures that attack them all while trying to track down your friends, the woman you were having dreams about, and others from your world that have found themselves trapped in this world. The first of two Worlds of Ultima games that used the Ultima VI engine as somewhat of a filler game before future bigger projects released.

The visual presentation has mostly improved from Ultima VI in the way the engine handles, though some areas have less detail and variety likely due to the reduced budget and development time. Environments and enemies can look a bit more detailed, character portraits are better, when talking to people it brings up a new window that focuses on their portrait and dialogue rather than just having the text come up in the bottom right of the screen under a smaller and less focused portrait. Likely due to the smaller budget and faster production there are some areas where this falls behind, the character models can look less visual distinct and instead of each person being their own model almost every village will have the unique leader, often a unique shaman, maybe one or two other characters, and everyone else is just a repeated male or female villager with the same things to say and same look to them portrait wise and on their character models (sometimes the unique character's models don't look that different either). The look of the interface has been altered to be more in line with the theme. The music is good for a 1990 PC game being clear and having a variety of tracks for different areas and situations, though some are a bit minimalist and can be easy to not notice and the quick shift when nearing a hostile can make it sound like you suddenly entered a horror movie.

The tribes vaguely represent or are said to represent different cultures where an outfit style or the way they look can represent Aztecs, Native Americans, an African or Asian tribe, a tribe of a green lizard like race, Neanderthals, etc. This aspect was less offensive than I assumed it would be without what would typically be more stereotypical or imagined cultural aspects as what the tribes are doing or want aren't really related to anything real, more like System Lord's of the Stargate series where they just want to wear many of the men want to wear some depiction of old cultural clothing and the women want to wear as little as they could get away with. What a combination of the generic pulp idea, less budgets, and small romance plot with the only main female character does lead to is a lack of customization of the Avatar that would start to continue in later games in the series. No more nonbinary hobbits like in Ultima 3, you are a white human man and in this game barely have any control over your character build at all (not that you really need any) and little in the way of choices or ways to deal with other characters and quests. Your goal of uniting the tribe basically amounts to you going to every village (or some caves, etc) and talking to the unique looking characters by asking things like name, job, and about the highlighted words that come up through your first two options (nice feature is you only need to type the first four letters of words for it to recognize what you mean and to just hit enter with nothing typed to end the conversation). Nearly every tribe (one just seems to be nice enough to agree to unite just from you asking) has one or two tasks you need to preform before they agree to unite with the other tribes. These can include overthrowing a power mad Warren Spector who has taken over a tribe after being transported to the setting from your world, finding an item, finding a way to defeat a dinosaur that is endangering the tribe, restoring an idol, saving a leader's daughter from a gorilla, etc.

Your options for party members is somewhat limited if you are going for more story and interaction. Even though the interface looks like it supports 7 (or maybe 6.75) party members space wise you can, sort of, only have a party with four other people. Of those four you are going to want the guy you start with who is the only one who can cast magic from the game's very limited number of spells (only nine cast by using one of three totem types with one of three different ingredients, of which the healing spells tends to be the only one likely to see much use), your professor friend who can make more modern powerful weapons in his lab (that was also transported along with your group) and identify certain materials in the environment, and the reporter who was brought into the world with you who keeps a notebook detailing your objectives and what has been accomplished so far. Both your companions from the modern world also have more interactions with people or events. The final spot is likely to be a more open spot for a variety of characters that don't really do or say anything from what I can tell and are there more for combat and to carry stuff. I say the party is sort of limited to five because once you rescue your love interest she just joins the party and it doesn't check to see if your party is full, so if you have five people when you find her she joins as an additional member, near the end of the game the same thing can happen with a seventh party member. Most characters start at a fairly high level and with combat not being the main focus of the game you don't see level ups happen that often. When they do a dream is described where the character has to chase on of three animals with one increasing strength, one dexterity, and on intelligence. Intelligence apparently effects magic based on what people say but you only have one character who casts magic, the magic isn't really helpful combat wise, and they are a member starting at one of the higher levels so you will basically always be going with strength or dexterity depending on what weapon people are using.

The Ultima VI engine allows you to interact with the world in various ways. You can use your knife to skin creatures whose hides aren't too tough, an axe can cut down a tree to make a path, a bomb can move large boulders, ingredients like tar can be collected to craft bombs as well as finding ways to make gunpowder and to craft simple rifles, a fire extinguisher can be used to cool paths covered in lava, you can use ovens to bake tortillas, etc. Villagers have a place they sleep in towns and you can find areas that a tribe uses for things like food storage or cooking. There are some creatures that you can find fighting one another or that might be passive in your travels.

When it released, I can see this being a lot more interesting. Even the Ultima VI engine that is slow and a bit clunky has a lot of more forward thinking aspects to it with the options in interacting with objects in the world and mouse and keyboard supported eight direction movement. Going back now though, you aren't getting much plot from your interactions with most of the tribes, only two of your companions tend to interact with the narrative, the romance plot could be removed with nothing lost as it just kind of shows up at the opening and when locating her. The more adventure focus tends to have you doing a lot of walking in an engine where you get a lot of ways to interact with things for the time but that doesn't feel as meant for walking back and forth all over a world with half the screen being the party and inventory menu. It was odd that magic wasn't used for puzzles or exploration, even a part of the game where you needed to shine light on something did not accept light from the light spell but from taking a picture with the reporter's camera. The reduced focus on combat tends to make level ups, stats, and magic fairly pointless as even difficult fights can just come down to whether or not you have guns and gunpoweder or not and also reduces the use of your equipment and inventory as you won't be finding magical items, helmets, rings, amulets, boots, etc to equip.

Screenshots: https://x.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1799944027078574145

Good expansion to the original Baldur's Gate that adds some positive features and elements from games that came later but hurts itself with mostly poor main plot and an ending that wants to but can't be continued in BG2.

Covers what happened between the aftermath of Baldur's Gate and your group's capture in the opening of Baldur's Gate 2. Your party from the first game tracks down the remaining allies of your half-brother Sarevok in the prologue before many of your friends and allies go their separate ways while you remain in the city with Imoen as the Hero of Baldur's Gate. One night assassins attack you and Imoen and are found to have been sent by the forces of an army of crusaders lead by an Aasimar who believes she is supported by many of the gods in her attempt to enter hell to free the lost souls of those who died in the recent Dragonspear War. Her army has been destroying villages and forces in her way leading to a massive influx of refugees fleeing to Baldur's Gate.

Good handling of characterization with Khalid, Jaheira, Imoen, and Safona and some funny new lines from Minsc. The main character's dialogue choices feel in line with the original game with your character offing being able to act as a mixture of a good helpful person, mercenary looking out for themselves, over the top villain, or a player acting out his lines in a tabletop RPG that they might be long past the point of being tired of playing in. Helps to tie things into BG2 and ToB, Imoen leaves the group to study magic having her multi class mage build make sense narratively in the next game, fleshes out Bhaal and Cyric a bit more. Has your character get some of the recognition they should be getting from allies and enemies as the hero of Baldur's Gate. Has some positive aspects from games newer than the original such as characters speaking to each other more often as you travel or commenting on areas you enter, a storage chest for equipment that follows your army camp around in between chapters, you can handle some companion quests just by talking to them in camp without needing them in your party just to go acquire items, some quests have multiple ways to solve them or easier ways depending on what companions are in your party, charisma or intelligence stats of the person talking, or talking to someone as a certain class or race might offer unique options. The returning characters have new voice lines for their conversations and new combat barks and react to things with lines that they previously wouldn't like trying to overfill their inventory or critical hits and misses, the exception to this being Jaheira whose voice actress stopped acting around 2002 and has no new voiced lines. At no point were enemy mages casting lightning bolt in tiny dungeon passages and rooms in a way that could kill themselves, their allies, and half your party like they were obsessed with doing in BG1. Some items you can acquire can be brought into the world of BG2 with some of them just being something you might want to use in general and some being helpful or more helpful for a certain class you might be playing like Shaman or Archer. Good music that feels similar to the style of the other IE games.

It wants to do the post Neverwinter Nights Bioware thing with big army battles and endings, and actually does a better job than any of the Dragon Age or Mass Effect games did but with an engine that doesn't really support large combats well with how some spells work and with the engine's pathfinding issues. Antagonist with some sympathetic qualities but a stupid out of place plan for the world that never really shows a good reason why so many would follow her and the generically treacherous advisor hurt the main plot but the terrible rushed feeling ending that can't even be addressed in BG2 since it was made first (outside of a fan mod) really hurts the entire endgame. It would have been nice if the final chapter of the game saw you fighting in hell and dealing with different devils or remaining elements of the crusader army or how your party members take being brought into hell instead of just being a five minute walk before getting to an end boss and meaningless new side character. Depending on classes characters will level up only 1-2 times over the course of this game, though because level ups in the older D&D games don't really come with much or anything in the way of options or new abilities this doesn't really hurt the experience.

Kept the series tradition alive of having you spend almost no time in Baldur's Gate except for the short opening that locks off most of the city.

Screenshots: https://x.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1797334794331996591

Dark Descent is a real time strategy game where you control a squad of 4-5 marines completing a variety of objectives to escape from a planet now overrun by aliens, a cult, experimented on humans, and enemy soldiers while using a damaged troop carrier, the USS Otago, as a base where you can manage your Colonial Marines and research upgrades.

The prologue of the game has you controlling a Weyland Yutani administrator who escapes a station that has been overrun with aliens after she activates a quarantine procedure that destroy an escaping infestation and another ship while heavily damaging and grounding the Otago, a troop carrier whose personnel rescue her. Both her and the marines attempt to quarantine the outbreak while saving as many people on the planet as they can while trying to find a way to escape the planet and bypass the satellites that will shoot down anything that passes low orbit.

Mission have you choosing and equipping between 1-5 marines of five available classes and completing a variety of primary and secondary objectives on locations like derelict ships, space stations, research bases, alien hives, dockyards, corporate offices, destroyed living spaces, etc. While the missions are linear in their progression you can go back to areas you have been to before to gather supplies or find missing datapads, though it should never be necessary. At any point that you are able to reach the vehicle that deploys with your marines you can choose to extract your squad to refill ammo, supplies, and possibly switch out marines if yours have been wounded or traumatized. Stress can build up while under attack or hunted that can raise trauma levels and give each marine a variety of passive penalties until they spend time with a psychologist on the ship, on the normal difficulty this never happened for me. As in most games like this, depending on the amount of damage a marine suffers they will have to spend a certain number of days in the medbay before that can be deployed again. For ever doctor that you start with on staff or rescue during missions or during random end day events you can use one to lower the time needed to recover for a marine by one day, even using multiple on the same character. Certain wounds can also lead to penalties in a mission until healed or might lead to a body part needing a prosthetic, thought I never did have anyone lose a body part. Going on a mission will also cause a marine to become tired, to lose that status they have to sit out the next mission or they will have a penalty to their bravery (stress defense) and accuracy. Going on a mission while tired will cause them to become exhausted which will now force them to rest for two days.

While on a mission your marines constantly move as one group, though depending on where everyone is in their formation you might have only one who is in a position to be spotted by an enemy or who has a line of sight on a target. Once an enemy engages them they will all automatically attack targets but you can set priority targets be clicking on an enemy or engage a target that has not engaged you yet by clicking on them. You can pause or slow time down (depending on the option chosen in the gameplay settings) to bring up a list of commands that allow you to use special abilities or special weapons and gadgets you have equipped at the cost of command points. You get four command points that slowly recharge over time to do things like having a soldier use suppressing fire to slow enemy advance at the chosen angle, use a weapon like a shotgun, flamethrower, or sniper rifle, set a mine up, set up a motion tracker that can be activated to lure enemies in, throw a flare to increase accuracy in its AoE, etc. In addition to command actions you can also order marines use equipped gear like medkits, tools to seal a door or to hack or repair things in the environment, to set up or reload sentry guns, or to use ammo to reload their own guns or to set up explosives to blow up weakened walls. Certain rooms are marked as potential safe areas and completely sealing a room allows you to rest which will lower stress and may have other effects depending on the classes and skills of your marines.

The way that everyone moves as a squad both works very well while also creating problems. On one hand it makes things simple to control most of the time, I never once had anyone get caught or stuck in the environment or running some different path from everyone else, etc. On the other it can make using cover or hiding awkward when suddenly one person isn't quiet able to fit on a cover spot. Formations options to change how people are standing would have been nice as having no control frequently has the person equipped with the tool you need standing in a spot that isn't fitting for the situation. Your marine with the flamethrower and shotgun might be behind everyone, your recon class you typically would want in front is somewhere else, your most wounded character isn't standing near the center where it is safter and keeps moving to the frontline, etc. Interacting with objects will typically have the closest person run over to do it before they rejoin the squad when they are done, this is usually fine but you might have a more combat focused character suddenly trying to open a door, or it just assumes you want your tech guy to drive the power loader or medic to extract samples from an enemy body when they might be one of your most combat effective character or equipped or injured in a way where you don't want them doing that.

There are five classes a marine can become once they hit level three and lose their generic rookie class. The most useful classes that I always had one of was the Sergeant and Recon classes. A Sergeant increases your command points by one, lowers the recovery time of command points, and has an ability that prevents stress from increasing for 30 seconds at the cost of one command point. Having a sergeant meant I never had to worry about stress after the first few missions and always had better access to my most useful abilities. A Recon class makes the squad move a little faster and has a variety of what I found useless gadgets to track enemies on top of the motion sensor you already have, what they also have is the most useful thing in the game which was a silenced sniper rifle that they can use as soon as they become a recon class. Spending a command point to aim an instant and silent kill shot at lone enemies combined with the use of your motion tracking and ability to hide in cover really opens up stealth options that can see you having a much easier time getting through missions in one attempt as you avoid being hunted or increasing alien aggression as those hunts build up. They also allow you to exploit many of the encounters with groups of human enemies where you can just snipe them without engaging in the fairly poor gun battles you can get into. The Gunner could easily be the remaining 2-3 spots in your squad. The gunner has access to the smartgun that holds more ammo, fires faster, and can be set up as it's own sentry on top of the dedicated sentry guns you have while your gunner fights with their secondary weapon. They make the entire squad better at suppression fire for each one in the squad and get a passive bonuses to getting dismembering or critical hits on enemies. Like in most strategy games Medics have a variety of skills for helping you a bad situation that you probably could have avoided if you brought someone along who wasn't a medic. The best thing about them is that this is finally a game where just having one of them on your team can lower after time required to spend in the medbay by 30%, making them much better than XCOMs medics. The final class is the Tecker which the game makes almost useless for some reason. The Tecker has a drone that can learn to seal and unseal doors for you, which is never really useful as it isn't really a game where you want or need to be on the run sealing doors behind you, near the end of the game when they reach level 10 the drone can be equipped with a submachine gun on top of the possibility of it being targeted by enemies which can make them slightly more useful at the very end. The main thing the Tecker does is have the ability to spend a tool to hack and open certain doors that can lead to alternate routes or additional supplies, this would be great accept every other class in the game can do this if you spend a level up on the random perk Smart Ass that allows them to do this exact thing with no penalties to anything like time to hack or requiring more tools to do it.

Each marine isn't necessarily too different from one another though as they all share the same amount of armor, health, bravery, and base 50% accuracy. As they level up they are doing to get their three class skills you unlock and three passive class skills you get automatically but much of what they do comes from the random perks available to them at every level up. At each level a marine can have one of three random perks assigned to them that can range from the extremely useful Unbreakable Will to never become tired or exhausted, Sharpshooter 1-3 that raises accuracy by 5 each time, Smart Ass to make your Tecker obsolete, Team Spirit to increase command points by one for every two in squad that have it, Dead Eye to increases crit and dismember chances (best for Gunners), or you can get fairly useless things like Looter that gives a meaningless increase to supplies gained and Quick Hands to reload faster which tends to not come up in combat as long as you remember to do it manually when they get down to around 15%-25% ammo left. With the right traits and every class getting access to the powerful plasma gun at rank 10 that can do almost as much damage as smartgun your Medic and Tecker can be almost or more effective than your other characters depending on how things played out in the random perks given to you (though you can technically reroll them if you reload the last save before a mission ended and finish it again). This also means that apart from getting Sharpshooter and in some cases unlocking their class at level three and first class ability, characters don't tend to become that much more combat effective as the game naturally goes on except for higher levels giving most classes access to more powerful guns (though you likely still want one person with the base rifle for its grenade launcher ability that is both good against aliens and can be very effective against in cover human enemies).

You can recover certain xenotech in missions that can be researched for passive upgrades that can be activated at the cost of using alien samples you acquire at the start of each mission. Most of these aren't too useful but there are some ones I took each time once I had access to them such as armor nullifying the effects of acid as long as you don't have it all hit or shot off, increasing the amount needed to raise alien aggression levels, increased time needed for aliens to detect you, an extra point of armor for everyone, and an option to remove a facehugger from a marine. Your ship also allows you to spend supplies to unlock new main weapons like the smartgun, stronger pulse rifle without a grenade launcher, and plasma gun, secondary weapons you will never use unless you are a gunner like a revolver and SMG, and special weapons that include the sniper rifle, flamethrower, mine, and rocket launcher. With the addition of the base shotgun, once you unlock the ability to field a fifth squad member halfway through the game you can make use of every special weapon on each mission, with the more direct combat focused ones likely being better on your characters with lower accuracy or without a smartgun.

Each day that passes increases the infestation level of the planet that can lead to higher concentrations of enemies, near the end of the game the current infestation can be reduced by spending a supply type that you acquire from some dead enemies. A few missions into the game a timer will also begin showing how much time is left before the planet is destroyed, the game must be completed within that timeframe. On the normal difficult I still had slightly more than half of the allowed time, as long as you are finishing missions in 1-3 trips it shouldn't become an issue.

Completeing the game gives you a new game plus feature where you can start a campaign in another location with different difficulty settings while keeping your marines levels and skills while increasing the level cap to 15.

There was constant stuttering while moving the camera that would have made the game completely unplayable until I saw someone say to turn off Nvidia's Shadowplay's Instant Replay which fixed the issue. In the current version at least two of the achievements were bugged, the one for collecting all datapads and the one for getting 10 kills with one sentry gun in one set up.

Dark Descent is a fun and atmospheric game with more unique squad control and mission types for a game in this genre that also handles the source material well. Though it can be slow, a bit awkward to control at times, and doesn't offer as much soldier customization and build options as you might want for the genre.

Screenshots: https://x.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1794971666109317596

Overseer was an odd choice for a way to continue Tex's story. It takes place shortly after The Pandora Directive in 2043 and acts as a retelling of the first game Mean Streets now in the FMV format and with many changes to the original narrative and characters. Tex is on a date with Chelsee who has been in the previous two games and worries about him being able to commit to a relationship due to feelings about his ex-wife Sylvia Linsky. So it acts as a minor continuation to the story with them being shown on their date, commenting on the story, and the events at the end leading into the next game but 99% of it is retelling a story that didn't need to be retold with new actors and elements that they could have just done something else with. Sylvia Linsky is barely a part of the first game other than to give you the job and be the generic attractive client Tex is attracted to, has no part or mention in the second game, a recent divorce in the third game is more just a way to bring him back to being down on his luck after she spent all their money and continually cheated on him and she shows up to say a line for a funny ending of the game, and doesn't show up in the fourth game. Sylvia's role is certainly expanded on in Overseer but there's really nothing to their relationship so nothing particularly interesting comes of that change. With the timeline of the game now jumping forward as fast as real life and this now being a story set in the past you now have Chris Jones playing someone he's 15 years older than while talking about how he was a young inexperience kid back then. The overall plot changes and story are entertaining to watch and see how things turn out though going back again also means you aren't going to see the characters you might have enjoyed in the previous two games with the exception of Chelsee.

Chris Jones as Tex and Michael York both do an excellent job and Clint Howard shows up for a short time and though he might not be bringing his Oscar worthy performance like he did in Ice Cream Man but he's always entertaining. Unfortunately, for multiple members of the rest of the cast the acting seems a bit more stilted or, with a few characters, it can sound like they are slowly remembering their lines as they speak. Sylvia Linsky is now played by an unattractive woman making the scenes where she is portrayed as sexy and seductive by camera angles and others warning Tex not to get involved with her one of the more unintentionally funny parts of the game, made even stranger that he frequently meets and more actively flirts with a different woman, also not helped that Rebecca Broussard is one of the worst actors in the game.

The longer length of the game and larger locations have you spending more time exploring. Looking over ever part of an area with you constantly needing to move objects or multiple objects to find other objects hidden behind them. There is a large dull area at one point where you go around trying to find what looks like bricks in the environment hidden in wells, and under buckets, and behind signs, etc. Puzzles can become a low point as over the course of the game there are constant uses of keycards and combining basic items to make some other basic item and frequent uses of trying to decode messages over and over and over.

Overseer seems to be the only Tex Murphy game that will likely have problems running on a modern system, with GOG even listing it as only being made to work with Windows XP while the others support everything. There looking to be a variety of problems solved with things like running the game in compatibility modes, downloading certain versions of old programs, changing a variety of settings, etc. There is a wide variety of things that can go wrong even when/if you do get it working. Looking at Let's Plays and from what I got there seems to be some audio issues where some lines were recorded a little too quietly, way too quietly, or much louder than others. So you might go from questioning someone where you get an answer you can barely hear so you turn up the volume only for them to be nearly shouting the answer to the next question. Music can also drown out the inner dialogue from Tex as you explore areas and examine objects. Though in any of those cases you do have access to the subtitles.

It's a good story while also being very strange that it is the story being told at all, in a mostly ok at best game mechanically with gameplay sections and puzzle types that overstay their welcome.

Screenshots: https://x.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1794162021065507315

Genopanic is a competently made action platformer with music, sound effects, and visuals that give off a good atmosphere, it has responsive controls that a lot of indie platformers can lack, and it changes things up often with the introduction of new abilities and items. But it is also very short, taking me under three hours to finish, it plays a bit more like you are in a tutorial for at least 2/3s of the game, and while some enemies can look cool or add to a somewhat creepy atmosphere they pose no real threat.

You play as a robot tasked with going to a quarantined planet to recover illegally modified creatures called GMOs with the help of your virtual assistant Laik. After you land and take a train to the facility you find it full of mutated creatures of what were formerly scientists, dangerous hazards, an AI that doesn't want you there, and you find that the GMOs have escaped to different sections of the area. Each section of the facility tends to have its own kind of biome from a section that is more covered in green and has some spiderlike enemies, an area with pipes shooting fire and lava rising, an area with water that you need to find valves to raise or lower the water level, ice sections where you can slide on some types of floor, etc. There's not too much of a story to uncover as many of the notes you can find on dead scientists or computers is more of the referential humor or ridiculous messages between characters rather than adding much to an overall plot. The station AI Volga you don't spend much time with and most of your enjoyment there is how much you like busty cat girls. Your doglike assistant Laik is frequently talking and has a few funny lines but better than that are some great expressions he gives in more surprising or dire moments.

The game has a good visual style that both makes you want to see how new locations and enemies look while also highlighting hazards and where you should be heading next effectively. Although the game has an easy to follow map, locations that allow for backtracking, and you find new abilities as you play that are common in metroidvania style games this is primarily a linear game where you will take a path allowed by your current abilities and then move onto the next natural section as you gain a new skill or a plot moment changes something on the map or your current location. Even those areas formerly blocked off for you are typically gotten back to by tacking a roundabout path or a new path found after gaining equipment, this makes it so you are unlikely to do much backtracking.

As you play you will find new weapons and equipment that can be used to access formerly blocked paths. Some of the weapons you find such as a flamethrower allow you to burn through paths formerly blocked by spiders, an ice gun can destroy molten rocks, your main gun can allow you to hit and destroy explosive crates from a safe distance, gadgets like a gravity gun lets you move and launch heavy crates, and gaining gravity boot to slow your fall and the abilities to double jump and to dash left and right at a fast speed that can carry you over cliffs give you new options to navigate your environment. Some weapons are more effective against certain enemy types, being able to kill some almost immediately and possibly while removing hazards created from their deaths. For example, the ice gun can instantly kill flaming enemies while preventing the explosion caused by other weapons. You can quickly swap through your weapons with a controller's shoulder buttons and dash with the right trigger or Y and everything is fast and responsive, though you do have an energy bar that can limit the use of some of your abilities and weapons until you allow the bar to recharge.

One of the main elements of the game is the crumbling infrastructure where you will frequently see walls or run over floors that will break on impact that can open up paths that allow you to bypass hazards or blockages to continue through the area. The idea of this is interesting, but nothing really comes of it. You will just learn that if an area looks like you can't get through it to look for the wall with the visual differences to highlight that you can go through it, a laser is blocking your path you can dash over it and through the next wall. There was likely going to be more to this at one point. When you enter a wall there is kind of a "fog of war" effect in the area where you ability to see the entire section or only sections you have moved through could have been used to hide enemies and hazards. It feels like that probably was the idea at one point as it seems like that would be the thought behind it and the reason from some of the areas with more space to them, but I would imagine it was discovered that running through partially visually blocked off areas and suddenly running into an enemy or instant death hazard isn't actually much fun and probably really frustrating. Running through or into the walls or ceilings just kind of becomes something you do to get around and get used to. It's not good, bad, or something that provides much in the way of unique challenge or interestingly utilized mechanics, it just how you get around. If some games would have stacked some blocks so you could just jump over something, maybe here you fall through the floor to walk under it instead.

The game is quite easy. Your main challenge will come from platforming while avoiding some instant death lasers/fire/etc but even those sections tend to be simpler than a lot of similar and popular games. While there are a variety of enemy types, with some having good designs for the atmosphere, most enemies are far too docile to provide any kind of challenge. The average enemy can be easily avoided, charged and hit with your sword, or just shot from a distance that prevents them from even attacking you. Even some of the stronger enemies can do nothing to you if you hit them first or just wait until they turn around before engaging them as they might not even react to being hit from behind. Even the few bosses, that again look good visually, just aren't good at actually attacking you. Attacking enemies feels fine, there is a bit of weight to your blows and the impact of attacks. There were two or three times in the game, all where I believe I was moving through some series of instant kill laser traps, where I thought that this might be the kind of much longer section you would find in a moderately challenging area of a similar kind of game, only here the sections probably only lasted for the time it took me to have that thought. Because of how quickly you are finding new abilities the first 2/3s of the game can feel almost tutorial like as you run into sections made to get you used to the new item you picked up and are still seeing graffiti on walls with text like dash here or messages from Laik telling you what to do.

If you want a short and fairly relaxing platformer where you can take it easy and enjoy the visuals and music (and Laik's expressions) or are just getting into or getting someone else into the genre and want something simpler then this is a solid title that does the actual movement and ability use well while still making it fun to hit enemies with your attacks. If you want a deep story to uncover, a long or challenging game, or something more unique mechanically then you probably want to hold off.

Screenshots: https://x.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1790559795394777554

(Was given a free key for the game through the Steam curator system)

One of the early FMV games that both plays well and has a story and many comedic moments that work well because of the better acting and writing rather than the more common unintentional humor from incompetence often found in the genre.

Set in 2042, three years after Martian Memorandum, Tex has married and divorced Sylvia from Mean Streets and realizes that he has hit rock bottom and its time to turn his career around. Succesfully catching the criminal and retrieving a stolen item for a local pawn shop gets Tex back on his feet and leads to a larger case the following day that promises Tex a large amount of money but puts him in the path of the doomsday cult the Brotherhood of Purity. Now playing as more of an FMV interactive movie there are frequent FMV scenes with controlling dialogue choices, each character you interact with his voiced and portrayed by an actor, and there is more interaction with objects as you explore areas. Margot Kidder plays a role and James Earl Jones provides voice work as God (or The Big P.I. in the Sky) who decides to become personally involved in Tex's case believing that he will need all the help he can get.

Gameplay has you moving around areas in a first person view and hitting the spacebar to bring up your options for interacting with the environment or talking to people, entering buildings often begins a scene of you talking to someone or with a still shot of the location with Tex and the character interacting until you choose to leave. When you hit the spacebar you can see the top left of your screen while the bottom becomes options for how to interact and for text and subtitles and the right side shows you conversation options, questions to ask, the ability to view your inventory and combine items, a fast travel button, and access to a hint button. Successful actions give you a score like old adventure games while using hints can tell you what to do but lowers your score, the hints themselves can tell you exactly what to do but are often accessed in a step by step form so if you only need the next step but not an entire solution it is often good for that. Everything works really well except for the awkward movement as you control your walking by moving the mouse and look up and down with the arrow keys. It doesn't sound that bad but you don't just move with your mouse movements, as you move the mouse you are setting a constant speed in that direction until you move the opposite way to slow or stop so with a modern mouse a fairly slight movement can send you flying forward or backwards while spinning in constant rapid circles around a room. Moving slowly I was able to control it without even turning my mouse sensitivity down but it takes some getting used to.

The story keeps you interested. The jokes often land and when it becomes more corny it is often as an intentional spoof of the detective genre. Exploring the environments soon shows that Tex has an amusing quip or story about many of the random objects you can interact with. As you often aren't getting the best when a company uses its own employees to play characters, it is surprising that Tex ends up as one of the best portrayed characters while always being played by the game's director and designer and by a founder and the Chief Financial Officer of the company. Puzzles are typically logical and finding what you need to in the environment doesn't devolve into pixel hunting.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1789880623579987975

A unique RPG with good art and music, good moments more fitting for a slice of life style story, interesting mechanics that aren't utilized enough, and incompetently designed but easy and fairly infrequent combat.

The main plot is hurt quite a bit by the fast pacing and somewhat nonsensical opening that bristles against the main more serious plot that it doesn't take the time or have the quality of writing to deal with in any meaningful way. With how quickly you are rushed into the main narrative you have no build up about the state of the world and no time spent working with the people in the army you begin the game being part of or seeing anything that could appear to give them any kind of sensible personalities based on their training and indoctrination.

You are part of an army of soldiers that have been born and raised in an underground high tech facility and trained to be soldiers since birth, all under the orders of a Father General who says their goal is to keep peace throughout the world. You've been trained as a sniper all your life and when the sniper of a more elite unit is injured you are assigned to take his place and join others on what ends up being a false flag operation where you pose as Polish soldiers attacking Russian civilians in small towns in order to start a war because your leader seems to want to be part of an invasion of Poland. Everyone knows you are killing civilians, except your character (mixture of night vision scope, lack of understanding about outside world, indoctrination explaining why he doesn't notice he's shooting unarmed random people in a town I guess), which as the the sniper and by extension the person who should be the most likely to be a psychopathic murderer that raises a lot of strange and never answered questions. Did they suspect you would have some personality flaw towards their goals if so why did they assigned you, why would they keep you as a sniper, did they not train any other snipers, why did they even need a sniper or a particularly talented one in this situation, why is everyone else ok with this when its most of their first assignment when they seem to have similar personalities to you, etc. It doesn't help that all of this seems to be completely contradicted by the shared briefing you had with the other soldiers, some early tutorial like lines in the opening area are also wrong as they reflect former mechanics that were changed over the early access period the game was in. You and another soldier you convince to join you flee the army after your first mission.

When you fight your old army many of them do seem to be portrayed more as the psychopathic characters they should be, but nearly everyone you meet at the start of the game is bumbling anime cliches like, "Can you bring me a gift from the surface," "lol my medical supplies weren't assigned correctly and I was excited and didn't bother to check," "Guard duty is boring can you bring me some cookies and apples?" You have people who should be closer to the Kurt Russell Soldier film and often are when it wants you to fight them, but seem more on the Forrest Gump side for the opening. Your two early characters also have no difficulty interacting with others or personality conflicts from their upbringing other than trying to make amends for being with the army in the opening and some repeated confusion over food. It's kind of like Tales of Arise's plot of, "Ok we freed the people who have been starving worked to death mining slaves for 100s of years...no other issues to deal with from that everything is fine now." 22+ years of indoctrination and it takes about five minutes to go, well everything we've ever been told must be a lie, we had better shoot them.

Combat involves the worst of the genres kind of buffs, debuffs, and lack of information. Each character has four stats and while ATK and DEF are usually pretty obvious you get no information on what AGI (turn order, dodge, hit, multiple attacks, etc?) or LUK (crit, hit, dodge, skill influence, bit of everything, after battle rewards, basically nothing, etc?) do. Combat follows a shown turn order, except when it decides it doesn't want to follow it. Many of the game's skills are worthless. Skills that cost SP may say they do more damage but then do less damage than a basic attacks. Buffs are often the useless kind of, my attack does 80 damage, if I instead use my attack buff skills by spending SP I sacrifice one turn to do 90 damage for my next three turns. Lynn is easily the best combat character in the game because she has more useful skills including one that can damage and blind all enemies and because the second gun you get for her shoots twice and only checks if the attack hits the one time. When you find an upgrade for your first gun it is worse than the second even with the higher damage, when you find her last gun after that it is still worth even with a high attack and agility bonus. The second gun says nothing about attacking twice and with the lower agility bonus compared to the last gun doesn't even make sense that it would attack twice. Keeping this gun has her often doing more damage than your sniper even when he's equipped with the game's most hidden and high attack value weapon. During combat you can aim at different parts of a targets body with torso shots being more accurate but less damaging, arms forgetting to mention an armor value but having a chance to paralyze (so low you have almost no reason to ever aim there), and head shots deal a lot more damage but have a high evasion chance (no idea what that means and since you rarely miss I would suggest never aiming for anything else, unless they have low enough health to finish with a torso shot or it makes sense to try for to paralyze based on turn order). After most battles you can choose a reward of either getting an item or equipment piece or regenerating some SP, the item and equipment is the better choice 95% of the time since most characters don't even have useful skills. Luckily combat isn't a constant focus of the game and it is so easy that it is never a challenge.

The areas where the game does a better job that can make it worth a playthrough is the good visuals with some nice environment details and some good CGs and animated moments. The music is good throughout the game from story tracks, exploration tracks, and battle tracks. The writing as the characters spend time with each other and interact with others is good and makes it fairly obvious that the developer's talent would lie much more in writing and working on a kind of slice of life story or civilians dealing with the situation of being in a war or civil war rather than the main plot dealing with former soldiers and civilians taking up arms against an army trying to gain control of the world and if the combat was replaced by dialogue choices and activities. Based on side quests you complete and your choices in different conversations characters can gain morale and while it can't have too massive of an effect on the game based on the smaller scale of it you can see some different fates for characters in their final scenes, different scenes or lines between characters, and may gain access to a few different quests if morale is high or low enough.

You are going to be spending more time seeing likable characters interact and doing side activities and that does push the game into an area where I can somewhat recommend it in spite of the poor combat and areas that shouldn't have been the focus.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1789401810634973206

-PC Steam Version-

A solid vertical shoot em up with good graphics for the time, six different planes to use, and eight stages with a bit of randomness on the order you can play the first four in and with what bosses and sub bosses can appear on later stages. Each plane has a unique shot type, bomb types, and as they power up they have different subweapons that you can charge up by holding shoot to activate a different temporary attack mode. Bosses often shift from their first mode into some type of mech for their final form. Playing through the game once begins a second more difficult run. No story other than your final score and completed runs altering an ending look at your pilot either in full uniform with no details known to detailing their name and having them in less clothing until they are topless (and covering themselves except for the one male pilot).

The stages don't do too much of interest with the environments. There are some ground targets and at one point effects of enemy planes coming through the clouds but nothing too interesting apart from good visuals. Enemy bullet patterns are often fair as is there spawn locations but certain attacks can cover such a wide area or come at you so much faster than normal enemy shots that you really have to know the game to be able to avoid what is coming at times, even more so in the slower planes. Enemy types themselves never do anything too interesting but there is just enough variety, though the mechs bosses transform into are never very visual interesting or too distinct from one another in style.

The PC version has the typically expected positive inclusions. You can remap the controls, you can make a button auto shoot when held down (so you still need a normal shot to activate your charge attack), you can choose between seven difficulty modes (though only 4 and up have the additional runs after a completion), you can give yourself nine lives instead of the usual three, and can add more or infinite continues (which become disabled when you access a 2nd or 3rd run in the same playthrough), there is a high score mode, co-op is supported, etc.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1787247721482764378

A PSX/CRT visual styled action horror game with tropes and scenes inspired from Italian zombie films from people like Lucio Fulci and Bruno Mattei.

The portals to hell have been opened and you have seven chapters set in various locations to play through as your main character and a group of mostly weirdos and a terrifying maybe child try to survive. You are armed with a revolver and shotgun that you load and aim slowly, can't aim while moving, and need to land hotshots to kill your enemies, whose heads might not always be in the normal place anymore. Knives can be found and act as a defensive item when you are grabbed by an enemy. The combat is slow and weighty and works and feels good enough in a game with this atmosphere. To interact with or pick up objects or open locked doors you need to unequip your weapon, but open doors can often be nudged up as you move into them.

There are some strong creepy moments, though they often don't lead to much when you might have been thinking you were going to get into a situation that might change up the mechanics in an interesting way. Good sound design and some nice haunting visuals in the quiet moments.

Each of the seven chapters is set in a different area and has their own style and feel to them, some better than others from an atmosphere or combat perspective. Its a short entertaining time. Finishing the game unlocks the more comedic focused Booty Creek Cheek Freak episode and a quick and fairly dull oriented episode that opens with a few elements similar to Call of Duty's zombie game mode.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1786992271877079122

Brief horror title done in a grainy PS1 visual style that gives a strong buildup mixed with a strange atmosphere as you interact with the locals but mechanically never really puts you in enough danger which starts to detract from the feeling of being under a current threat.

The main character finds dirty clothes around her apartment as her boyfriend hasn't done the laundry. Needing fresh clothes for a morning interview she finds the apartment's washer broken and is told about an old laundromat that is open 24 hours a day near the edge of town. She decides to take a bus there ignoring the warnings about a serial killer that has been targeting pregnant women. As your clothes wash and dry you are giving time to explore a small area where you can find clues about the past murders and area and talk to some local people often giving off a mixture of a strange or humorous vibe while maybe noticing the same car in the parking lot that you saw when you got on the bus by your apartment.

It's a good environment and visual style that does a lot right but you start to find yourself in situations where in most titles the killer would be stalking you and you would be in active danger and would need to sneak around but as you come to notice that you have no direct threat in these early sections it removes a lot of the possible tension.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1785228111526891669

A bizarre, funny, well acted story in an interesting setting, with some of the best writing in the medium, mechanically and visually feels like playing a mixture of Max Payne and Control except with frequently boring repetitive gameplay and a length that has it stay long past its welcome.

El Paso, Elsewhere is visually similar to a Playstation era title with the movement and controls of the first two Max Payne titles with some of the colors and environment styles that can feel like you are playing Control. The story involves your character entering a motel to stop his ex, the lord of vampires, from destroying the world. He believes his addictions as well as the battles themselves will lead to his death. As you enter an elevator you are transported to the void and are slowly lowered down where floor after floor you must fight through an area while attempting to rescue people who have been captured to be used as sacrifices. As you your journey goes on the environments shift from the motel to areas that were important to your ex's life and some by extension important to your life. Memories of both your lives are discussed with entities you meet, each other, and can be further expanded on by finding projectors in stages themselves. Radios are also scattered around with often humorous stories or references to noir style monologue filled with increasingly ridiculous metaphors. The visual style and writing are the highlights of the game and can make it worth playing on their own merits. Though another issue is that it takes about 1/3 of the game for that writing to go beyond just being entertaining to reaching that next level.

The problems with the game come from the dull enemies that don't fit with the Max Payne bullet time style gameplay. That there are 50 stages and you only start to see more interesting things around 20 stages in. You are only given enough enemy variety for combat to be interesting and a bit varied, if the enemies were even fun to fight (which they typically aren't), around stage 26. Nothing interesting is ever done with the hostages you want to save, they are just sitting around waiting to be saved, there is no threat to them, no timed deaths, no real issue even if they do die from you killing them other than a slightly different ending. Even when the enemy variety is better and the stages become more interesting you are still doing the same thing over and over and with how long it took to get to the second half of the game I was just wanting it to end, keeping the slightly higher quality of the gameplay from making much of a difference at that point. As there can often be points where something narrative wise might only happen over other level it would have felt like a much better experience if about 1/3 of the stages had been cut.

There is a dull weightlessness to the combat where bullets hit enemies until they die and rarely feel like they did anything until that moment, you can take a massive hit that takes off 60+% of your health and not even know you got hit unless you look at your healthbar, the stake melee attacks are powerful damage wise but there is no visceral satisfaction for hitting an enemy with one. The entire Max Payne style gameplay of using a slow-motion toggle, diving, rolling, etc is almost entirely pointless due to the boring melee focused enemies and how you move with where the reticle is in relation to your body always makes aiming a bit awkward. Rolling becomes more useful about 27 stages in when there are some enemies with AoE attacks you can try to roll out of the way off but you never really want to dive into a room in slow motion shooting things because it isn't practical with these kinds of enemies and isn't even fun due to lack of any real response to your shots and lack of things like the killcam Max Payne games had. The only positive thing I can say for the gameplay is that there are great difficulty settings where you can alter anytime you start a new game or continue your current one, you can give yourself infinite ammo and stakes, change the speed, change how much slow motion time you have, change enemy and weapon damage, enemy health, etc and from playing on the base settings for 35 stages when I realized it was never going to become remotely enjoyable and I gave myself infinite stakes and ammo so I at least wouldn't be bothered with picking up supplies or needing to melee objects to try to find more stakes.

It's a game that I am glad that I played and will continue to think of in the future, especially now that the gameplay is over.

Has the annoying frequently found problem in PC titles where it doesn't disable your controller when using a keyboard and has no ability to turn off controller rumble, so if you keep a controller plugged in you will likely want to unplug it.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1784465308822237639

Simple but unique and intuitive mechanics, a story that remains constantly interesting and entertaining, and features vivid locations, expressive personality filled animations, and two of the best pets in the medium.

A puzzle mystery game where you wake up with no memories after having recently been killed only to witness an assassin threatening a woman near your body and discovering that you have developed special powers. These "ghost tricks" allow you jump between and manipulate objects, travel through phone lines to other locations, and to travel back in time four minutes after a person has died to change their fate which also allows you to speak with them in the past and once they are safe in the present. In one night you attempt to keep your potential friends and allies safe from a group of assassins, discover the truth about your powers and others who have gained similar abilities, and learn of a decade old event that ties together your former life, the police, and foreign spies.

Each stage has you using your ghost tricks to manipulate objects in a way that will effect the environment or people in the environment in a way that leads to you completing your goals. This can have you moving and manipulating objects to increase your reach allow you to jump into new things, manipulating lights or sounds to attract or distract people, leading a character through a dark room while avoiding assailants, or timing multiple interactions to create a particular sequence of events that will aid you. There are some new mechanics added over time but little gameplay wise changes over the course of the adventure. This can normally be a bad thing but each area is designed in a way where they are interesting and amusing to explore, the story that remains the highlight is allowed to progress quickly, and none of the events ever become overly cluttered, confusing, or tedious to deal with in a way that would detract from the enjoyment of the game and its strongest elements. The narrative over time explaining why certain thing can't or couldn't be done in a way that fits for the setting and often in ways that make more sense as more elements of the story reveal themselves.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1782596763070976441

A few years after the events of Mean Streets, Tex Murphy is hired by one of the wealthiest men in the world, the founder of the TerraForm Corporation, to track down his missing daughter as well as an item that he doesn't want anyone knowing about. The case takes Tex to locations in San Francisco, the jungles of South America, and to Mars.

Martian Memorandum removes the stranger aspects of the previous game, the side scrolling shooter segments and spending the majority of your time sitting in your speeder as it moves you to a destination, and makes updates common for the genre in the 90s. You no longer have to type in exact names to ask people about and have a list of everything you have discovered that can be clicked through. You now have more control and verb action buttons with different types of interactions as you explore a wider variety of locations, though with these changes now comes some moments of the worst pixel hunting I've seen often due to the grainy style of the environment and models.

Good voice acting, animation, and video clips and character portraits for the time. Dated now but still a decent adventure title.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1779720617178362134

Has the strong tactical gameplay and varied characters similar to Mimimi's previous games, with a new bafflingly terrible mission structure that starts to make the game a chore to complete.

Shadow Gambit takes the gameplay of Shadow Tactics and Desperados 3 to a new setting, this one focused on undead/cursed pirates fighting against a tyrannical order that is trying to destroy them and control the citizens of various islands. As a pirate looking to make a name for herself you free a captured sentient ship from the inquisition with the hope of finding the former Captain's hidden treasure. To do that you have to join forces with the ship, who has the ability to record events and move time back to those former spots, and revive her former crew in order to follow the clues left by the Captain.

In the base game there is a total of eight playable characters with an extra unlockable one if you reach 80% completion by doing different stage and character challenges. Each character has a slow or fast kill/knockout attack with their weapon of choice, a pistol that has one shot per map unless you find ammo, and usually two other abilities with often one of them changing to something else under certain conditions or when something else is in use. One of the more unique characters has the ability to possess other enemies and can then move them within a certain range of where he took over their bodies and he might gain some of their abilities, one character can grow a bush almost anywhere on the map to hide characters or enemy bodies, one has a cannon she can use to launch allies to distant places or that can be used to attack enemies, many characters have a item or animal partner that allows them to distract or lure enemies to a location. The crews various skills can pair together in useful ways and can allow you to handle locations in different ways. The characters are also likable and have their personalities brought out by their banter during gameplay, having some unique dialogue based on who is chosen to go on certain missions, story elements on your ship in between missions, and in the later game a mission or series of missions that focuses on some part of a character's backstory.

You play against the usual types of enemies the the genre has become known for having. You have the generic grunts that are easy to fool with distractions and traps, sentries that won't move or be distracted long from their set locations and line of sight, one that activates an alarm to summon reinforcements, a sniper with a longer and more quick to activate line of sight, a stronger types that requires multiple characters to take down, and in a new more setting unique enemy a pair of two enemies that need to be killed quickly before one revives the other. You have the helpful time stopping planning button found in their previous games that allows you to chain multiple actions together and the always nice to have fast forward button that Desperados 3 had so you aren't needlessly waiting around for enemies to get into certain positions or for alarms and alerts to end.

In this genre Shadow Gambit would be of the same excellent quality of the developers previous games, if not for suffering from one area that those previous games didn't struggle with.

The game unfortunately becomes something of a chore to finish, even more so with the DLC, due to the constant need to replay the same locations with little changes 3-5+ times. Even with the ability to bring a different set of crew members and to start and finish in different locations the repeated visits to the same maps is easily the worst part of this game. It's so bad you might get into a situation where you have to go to the same map 3+ times in a row. In Shadow Tactics and Desperados 3 a map was designed for the mission and characters it was made for (Desperados 3 eventually giving modes where you could try different characters), the maps here are made to play for multiple missions where almost nothing changes except for the minor mission objective targets or the time of day (a much bigger change than just about anything the objectives will do). Many of the missions will focus on you really only needing to complete your objectives around a portion of the total location with you being able to pick from a few starting locations and exit locations once your tasks are complete. The problem with the approach is that it leads to some very short uninteresting missions in the worst times, but there is also the problem that they didn't necessarily spread out how those missions tend to limit themselves. You might play a mission that focus on a third of the map, only to find your next mission focuses on pretty much the same area of the map, then to find you have another mission on the island that now deals with 2/3s or the entire map that again will have you dealing with that same 1/3 all with the same enemy groupings and locations. There being a lot more playable characters and being able to take the 1-3 you want to each time does help to alleviate some of this problem, but it still ends up getting dull as you end up playing a lot more total missions than in Minimi's previous games, less interesting missions, much less challenging missions, and the types of enemies you are facing doesn't really expand as the game goes on.

The challenge badges for each map and crew member are a lazily handled mess where it is needlessly difficult to check your progress or what you have done on the revealed badges, the logbook is a mess that you can't even access for some reason while on the mission planning screen, some badges just don't seem to want to unlock when you complete them, and the challenges aren't all revealed until you complete the game. Because you really want to go back to that one map you just played six times, however many more times to try to hit a ridiculously high 80% badge completion rate to unlock a hidden character so you can play the same maps some more times with them.

Both sets of DLC adds a new character, giving you total of 11 playable characters with the additional unlockable one, one new location that will have three missions on it and three new missions on the older locations. The characters are both fun to use but the new islands tend to only have one mission on them that is actually interesting and the other three missions mean you will be going back to areas you've already played even more than you have to in the base game. If you are really playing the game a lot and see yourself frequently replaying missions or just really like having the varied characters then they are going to be worth getting just for that.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1779332521110691961
Video: https://youtu.be/l2mPhZSk5dc?si=kceIF0gjE0bhbcXe