I'll begin by saying the less you know the better. Go into it blind, don't even read this review just go play it!

The first hour of this game feels similar to those grim, pre-2000s children's films you watch and get mildly scarred for life by. They all have that one scene that evokes a 'wtf were they they thinking' response: Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory's boat scene; that poor horse in The Never Ending Story; yeah basically the entirety of Return to Oz like wtf.
Bramble starts you off making friends with giants and frog kings and gets you playing hide and seek with cute little gnomes but then you'll be hit with an abrupt plunge into a world of rotting corpses and maggots. On my first boss (some horrific butcher monster thing) I almost had heart palpitations when my cutesie fairytale Hansel-looking kid protagonist got sliced into photorealistic chunks of gore!

What's kind of brilliant is how the stylistic clash of fantasy caricatures and a realistic world design - especially the forest - captures the earthiness of folk horror, the mythical monstrosities lying beneath the beautiful and the mundane. I can't stress enough the power of that magnificently jarring 180° tonal shift.

And the rest of the game is great too, even if it becomes episodic in structure, as you encounter different monsters in newer, less inviting places. It has that clunkiness of a book full of short Nordic myths, tied together by narration that doesn’t always work - the voice acting is stronger elsewhere, notably a segment involving witchcraft. A significant peak later in the game involves a Silent-Hill-2-esque boat ride and a sinister figure in the form of the mythical plague maiden Pesta. This nightmarish boss fight, and other moments in the game, can be frustratingly trial-and-error in places but the generous checkpoints keep the pace afresh.

Elsewhere, the gameplay consists of light platforming, undemanding puzzles, one or two chase sequences and some use of a magic light wielded by our hero. It’s certainly nothing groundbreaking - even the story and tone borrow from Limbo - but it’s done well. The simple gameplay gives attention to the game’s other strengths: consistently evocative sound design, inspired use of dynamic lighting and overall impeccable game direction. I pretty much wept at the moment, just after escaping the clutches of a fiendish troll, when you ride a little hedgehog across a pond to the soundtrack’s gorgeous folk song ‘Blomstertid’ - Death Stranding levels of sublime!

Overall, a pleasant surprise! I have confidence that the devs at Dimfrost are capable of greatness in their next outings. Until then, please don’t overlook this absolute gem.

It's probably my fault for over-hyping this game, thinking it was gonna be a new instant classic along the lines of Outer Wilds and Inscryption. Sadly, I've played maybe 7 hours on the week of its release and have been hesitant to open it since then.

Outside of its gorgeous presentation and intriguing atmosphere, I found the experience extremely tedious. The selling point of the game and its core mechanic, the car, ended up feeling like a burden instead of being a tool of experimentation and freedom. The reason being that you need to get out of your car every minute to pick up items and to explore buildings. The "drive 30 seconds, park, loot, drive 30 seconds" loop gets tired real fast.

It might still click for some enjoyers of looter/exploration game! I'll give it props for trying something new at least.

I'm just so glad that a studio out there took such clear inspiration from the Half-Life franchise, and yet it's almost like a curse upon this game. I just couldn't stop making comparisons in my head and wishing I was playing Half-Life 2 again instead.

Not the be too harsh with this either, it's actually quite impressive what such a small team was able to achieve, especially as a first project. There's a lot to appreciate here. Some environments and set pieces are simply gorgeous, the gunplay is relatively fun and there's some great artistic/dreamy sequences sprinkled throughout the game.

On the other hand, the pacing is way off. You unlock almost all of your weapons in a 20 minutes timeframe, making you go from "guy with an axe" to "fully geared up army man". Since the game lets you know how many empty weapon slots you have left, it's clear that there's not much waiting for you in term of progression pass the 1 hour mark.

The fight encounters are also weirdly balanced. Sometimes you'll be fighting 2-3 enemies at once, and sometimes the game will throw 25 enemies at you, seemingly out of nowhere. There should be nothing wrong with this, but it's just not satisfying. You don't have a gravity gun or any other creative tool/skill to make each encounter unique. So you'll just spam your guns and alternate between them when they are out of ammo. There's some explosive barrels here and there so the devs clearly thought of some other ways to approach the fight, but it's just not enough.

The story, I'm sorry to say, is not really griping and the ending will leave you with more question than answers. Things also seemed to have been rushed in the last 20 minutes unfortunately.

The music is passable, even pretty at times on its own, but I felt like it rarely meshed well with the game itself. It's a weird feeling, like I just re-listened to some of the songs on Spotify and liked a lot of them, but never felt like they enhanced the experience while I was playing.

There's other thing floating in my mind but I'll stop there. Still glad I tried it, I'm wishing for more stuff with similar inspirations and references in the future. Also saw that the devs of this game are teasing something new on Twitter so I'll surely be on the lookout for whatever project they'll release in the future.

A fairly traditional horror experience in terms of objectives and gameplay. You've all been there: the door is locked, go find the right key, maybe find a lost letter with some tidbits of lore, make sure not to be spotted by the monster in the meantime.

But Mundaun still manages to stick out from the crowd by nailing 3 elements. First, it is grounded and based in the folklore and myths of rural Switzerland which makes the whole thing uniquely fresh and captivating.

Secondly, its visual style, consisting of entirely hand drawn textures paired with a vintage, sepia-toned filter makes everything much more dreamy and surreal.

Lastly, the sound design in this is great and you'll truly feel isolated on a mountain in a precise time and place. Oh, and every painting has a little story to tell. I won't say more.

Seriously, it's because of game like Mundaun, Iron Lung and No One Lives Under the Lighthouse, that I'm still on the lookout for modern entries in such an over-saturated genre.

A super compelling puzzle game that plays to its strengths without overstaying its welcome. Sweet, short, straight to the point!

The presentation is sublime and evocative. We are thrust into an alien world that plays by its own rules and constantly subvert our expectations. The score is also such a great match with the universe the game takes place in. Spacy and synthy all the way through.

The puzzles themselves are well balanced and you'll never be stuck on one of them for more than 5-10 minutes. And yet they feel rewarding and compelling.

I'm seriously charmed by what I just played and cannot wait to see what these devs will cook next.

I haven't played the first game (American McGee's Alice) so I can't compare the two or comment on how it holds up as a sequel. But as its own thing, Alice: Madness Returns is, sadly, quite mediocre.

It's your typical, drab, third-person platformer with "puzzles" and combat. The only unconventional thing about it is its whole twist on the Alice in Wonderland story. It does a great job at isolating key elements and characters from the source material and giving it a new nightmarish aesthetic.

The rest just feels so dry, the camera is clunky and I've experienced 2 crashes in only a couple hours. I know I would've eaten this as a kid, but as things stand right now, I don't see myself playing A:MR for 7 more hours.

Silent Hill: The Short Message kind of stumbles to its point, and the acting and gameplay are really a distraction from what it gets right.

The acting is pretty atrocious, it took me out of it literally every time it popped up, which sucks because it happens A LOT. The Live Action scenes also just clash with the rest of the game. This is not a meta Alan Wake narrative, I dont even know why it was done, other than them just not wanting to do one extra character model. Considering how bad the main character looks, I can't say I'm surprised.

The chases are literally everything wrong with this "chase horror" survival horror genre that all these walking simulator horror games have done for a decade now. You start the game, unnerved. You are afraid to see the monster, this begins the building of tension at seeing the monster/getting a jumpscare. You walk through the game world until you encounter it finally, and now the first chase is a heart pounding experience where you don't want to be caught. The second you do get caught in any of these games though, the illusion is broken. You watch the canned, one hit/grab kill animation, you're sent back to the last checkpoint, and you start the chase again. Every subsequent time you repeat this, the scariness and threat of the monster is depleted, and the chase becomes more repetitive. Eventually the action of getting caught and dying becomes an annoyance, and resetting to start the chase over and over again brings the player to hate the monster. Not scared of it, hate it. Hate playing the game they are playing. This style of horror game SUCKS. The game also runs like ass during a couple of these moments.

It did have a couple things I think are really good. The music is great, it makes you feel like you're in a classic Silent Hill game, and it carries the tone a lot of scenes, despite the bad acting. The look of the building is great, and the monster is also very well designed. It looks creepy as it walks, and it makes you wonder, "what am I looking at?"

Problems aside, I can't get into people saying they shouldn't have even tried with this subject matter. Really? I'd so much rather them try and stumble to do something different than have the same SH2 twist that they've been doing over and over again since Homecoming to decreasing effectiveness each time. Yeah the acting sucked and we shouldnt hear our protagonist voice their thoughts so much to the player (This is a game, *I* am supposed to be the one getting scared. It's impossible to do when the character won't shut up!), but there is a message here. And I found myself thinking about my own situations I found similar to the story's.

All in all, the parts are here for something good, but it doesn't live up to its full potential. Still, I feel like I can't give this a bad rating. It's not even like they charged for it and we got ripped off. It could have been much better, but it could have been much worse. And Silent Hill fans have experienced much worse than The Short Message.

I wish I loved Cruelty Squad, but I just don't. All of its parts are great, but the game as a whole just isn't clicking with me like I'd hoped. I'll likely return to Cruelty Squad, as I think my opinion on it is likely to change, and I didn't get far into it. It's worth checking out if you have the opportunity.

EDIT: I did return to Cruelty Squad after a short break, and my opinion on it has become a lot more positive. I don't know what changed, but it finally clicked with me. It's a unique yet flawed experience. In all honesty, I'd probably give it 5 stars if it weren't for the final mission, which seems to have been made to piss the player off.