Chants of Sennaar is an excellent game, but I'm a nobody on the internet so you don't need my recommendation.

I'll just tell you what cost it 1/2 a star from me:
- Sometimes the game is certain it has given you enough context to match words to symbols when it has not, encouraging you to simply guess rather than think.
- The final language translation should be a culmination of every technique you've learned. Instead you do 4 basic puzzles and the whole thing is translated. Very disappointing.

These two issues aside, it's a rewarding experience with a simple message on the importance of communication.

2 AM - Olympic Exclusion Zone - Outer Zone

I kill the engine, close my eyes and sit back in my car seat. The wind and rain batters the protective outer shell of my car, threatening to lift it off the ground and toss it down a ravine at any moment.

“There’s no such thing as a ‘Cursed Wheel’” I tell myself; and I believe it, I really do. It must have been my judicious use of the handbrake or driving a little too fast over a small pile of stones or a little too close to the Hot Dust 200 yards back. That’s why my front left wheel is loose for the fourth time on this excursion. It’s not Cursed.

I believe this despite being frequently pursued by semi-sentient balls of possessed trash and flying robots that want to steal my car. I believe this despite the existence of the Friendly Dumpster and the enigmatic-but-useful Pacemaker. I believe this despite every single piece of evidence to the contrary. There is no such thing as a Cursed Wheel.

Leaving it is an option. I can drive for miles without tending to it, I might even make it home if the conditions are perfect. Conditions are never perfect. A rogue squall could drift across at any moment and I could be left trying to repair so many more issues under a battering of acid rain or a confusing storm of Bollards and Shakers throwing my car and my self around like toys. Best to deal with it while the weather is only pre-apocalyptic.

I slide out into the maelstrom and tighten the wheel. It’s literally a moment’s work, even with my tools haphazardly thrown into a side-storage container. I even check around the car for any signs of weakness in the vehicles doors and panels, it’s the kind of thing that can save your life in the Olympic Exclusion Zone. All good, I slide back into the driver’s seat, soaked but satisfied. It’s time to head home.

I pick an exit point (why do they have to be so far away?) and all hell breaks loose. The real storm is coming and I am going. Fast. Tearing across the terrain in the near pitch-black at 100, 120, 140 km/h, squinting through the pouring rain. While my back was turned, exploding Tourists have drifted into the road causing me to veer into a ditch and mow down two dozen saplings before colliding with a tree. I check the dashboard console, no serious damage but the hold-up means that the initial storm has overtaken me and the worst is still to come.

Pulling back onto the road and flooring it, I can feel the true nightmare breathing down my neck, my exit point so near and yet not-near-enough. It’s a damn good job I dealt with that wheel.

An alert chimes on my dashboard.

There is No Such Thing as a Cursed Wheel

They're asking £20 for this? Christ above.

Cute bordering on insipid at times and the humour seems to go down the "A Dog's Life" route with animals who are too anthropomorphic in their mannerisms (including a beetle that runs the social media campaign for a famous cat....wat?) and CANNOT shut up yammering.

Platforming is somehow extremely clunky with too many cluttered ledges getting in the way of some precision jumping sections.

I'll admit I kind of ran through this pretty briskly but aside from getting to the end of the game there's VERY little else going on here unless you're achievement hunting.

It's nice I guess but I didn't really enjoy my time in this game.

What order did I play the Resident Evil games in? I’m glad you asked!

RE 4 “(2005)” - wow yes nice but so weird
RE “HD” - retro, I like it. Scary af in places
RE 7 - FPP in a classic Evil Residence setting chef’s kiss
RE 5 - trying to blend in too much cover shooter bullshit
RE 6 - see RE 5 except it outstays its welcome about 3x over

So here we are, the RE2make? REmake 2? Resident Evil 2 HD? whatever.

It’s good, like really good. Classic survival horror vibe in that you’re essentially just solving puzzles in a building full of dickheads who want to bite you. Losing the fixed camera in lieu of an over-the-shoulder-view hasn’t lessened the feeling of dread as you squeak open a door, hoping the Licker in the next corridor is on coffee break, Mr. X’s footsteps pant-shittingly close.

Leading me into one of my nitpicks, sometimes the AI doesn’t really play fair. Mr. X occasionally just haunts the corridors immediately outside the safe room you’re in which can be flow breaking when you’re just trying to get shit done. He also seems to haul ass to corral me into rooms with Lickers in. I don’t know if this is on purpose but it is very annoying.

The story is kind of a non-point, it’s barely coherent enough to support most of the characters' motives but I’ll take a good game with a bad plot over the opposite. Playing the game twice with maybe 10% different content and story beats just to get to the “True Ending” felt a little jarring to me. I touched on RE 6 outstaying its welcome and R2make really cut it close for me.

Ultimately I had fun with Resident Remake 2: Evil; controls are tight and predictable, enemy variety is enough for a game of this size and boss encounters are usually reasonable (even if they only seem to appear when you’re least prepared). Do I want to soak up all the extra content? Not immediately and I think that is telling enough.

Voidigo feels like a labour of love. One of those games that “didn’t come out til it was ready” and definitely reaps the benefits. Combat is fluid, there’s enough variety in environments and enemies to prevent the experience getting stale, there’s a wide range of weapons and powerups.

Which leads me to my only (minor) criticism: there’s too many weapons and powerups. By the time I finished the game (beaten all bosses, completed a run with every character and upgraded/used enough powerups/weapons), I’d only scratched the surface of the range of powerups and weapons on offer; and the lack of significant postgame/NG+ content doesn’t inspire me to push for that 100% completion.

That being said, this is an extremely accomplished roguelike in the vein of Nuclear Throne, the main content of which kept me interested for 30 hours of which I enjoyed almost every minute.

Constant backtracking around unlit, labyrinthian locales looking for the One Object that progresses the story. Maybe it's in a previously visited room, you can't know because, while the map is lousy with batteries and "spare parts", key items are often squirreled away from your prying eyes.

Speaking of eyes and their prying; I haven't a CLUE what (detective?) Carl Faubert is doing here and the game is not interested in telling me. No clear end goal for the player results in a game loop of "just doing shit 'til the game is over".

In the end I got tired of spending 50% of my playtime wandering aimlessly and circuitously through samey corridors because I couldn't magically intuit the right way to go with zero hints.

It's fine, seems to be getting a lot more traction than similarly basic 3D puzzle games do which is what it is.

Pick up clues, grow odd magical plants, get a key to unlock the next area, repeat.

Lost a star because at least 50% of play time was me running backwards and forwards to recheck clues because you can't check them from the journal??? Or if you can the game kept that secret from me.

Not the worst way to fill an afternoon but pretty unsubstantial.

Is there something wrong with me? I found this game to be weirdly stressful. There are collectathon aspects here but seemingly no way to tell how much progress you have made towards completion. The environment is quite visually noisy and samey with the lack of a map leading to a sense of feeling lost rather than a sense of adventure.

The story and style seemed to be unsure which generation it was trying to appeal to; millennial nostalgia, GenZ’s cool indifference or the screen-first experiences of Gen Alpha. The vibe is family friendly but I don’t know if this is a game for kids?

Whatever, it’s fine. The whole experience just made me uneasy and it shouldn’t have.

avery! seemed like a fun lil guy tho.

It's a fun little roguelite-lite-lite, compared with Tax Evasion there's a bigger focus on gameplay rather than story which I do feel is somewhat to the game's detriment.

Weirdly disappointed in Turnip Boy's transition from "Chaotic Neutral Little Bastard" to "Guy who does what he's told" but idk if that's even a valid complaint.

Short, sweet, stupid, fun.

Honestly..not strictly a bad game but there's just something not quite there.

The devs clearly acknowledged that the game would benefit from having certain parts cut or altered; yet there were things left in that just aren't great game design. Almost every instance of platforming was kept or even extended for no sensible reason. Especially considering how much poetic license was taken with Xen; so much could have been tweaked throughout the game but was instead repeated verbatim.

All in all a fine remake but it's hard to overlook the repeating of crap 90s design choices in a game made in the 2010s.

I hate to rag on this game when I'm (at present) the only review here but I picked this up based on the previous Immortal Mantis game which was a reasonably fun experience if a little basic.

This one however? I had to grab a pen and paper for the first puzzle, no big deal, you can't expect to always be spoon fed answers. The second puzzle however? First a bunch of wire-matching where the hint is on a separate screen (back to the pen and paper) and then I have to pick the right video tape based on a VERY ambiguous clue. I have to guess how the developer meant me to interpret it.

I chose wrong.

Instant failure; back to the start of the scene. The wire puzzle solution is scrambled meaning it's back to the pen and paper.

Not a pretty start to a game and if that's how it presents itself at the outset, I'm not interested in continuing.

In Just Cause 3 you blew up a red building and the game said "YES GOD YES DESTRUCTION LET'S GOOOO".
In JC4 it's more like "Hm? Oh yeah uh..good job buddy?"

Somehow managed to remove the cathartic chaos from a franchise that sold itself on cathartic chaos.

Just play JC3 again, trust me.

Could have been better. The developer clearly tried to go highbrow deep concept but without any real foundation on which to build the concept it felt like a whole buncha words dotted around a spooky house and a climax that felt like "more random stuff to do".

Steam description mentions the "aftermath" of a cult? but there's seemingly no mention of said cult within the game which is bad narrative.

Very walking sim. Very unspooky. Very 30 minutes I won't get back.

A fictitious nature documentary about whales on an alien planet not dissimilar from Earth, told through a series of beautiful images. I thought the art was really good and the narrative of the documentary (including the various asides) was believable and compelling in a way that sci-fi often fails to be without being clinical and boring.

What let South Scrimshaw down a little for me is the AI narration. At points it was glaringly obvious, different voices having different pronunciations of the same word and the main narrator slipped from a British accent into an Australian one on a few rare occasions that made it clear I was not listening to a human. I feel like it shouldn't have been that hard to find people willing to lend their voices to this.

When this game is good, it is so good.

I was addicted to Super House of Dead Ninjas in 2018, a game that prioritises moving fast as hell and smashing up dudes with a completely empty head. Sometimes Dead Cells reaches these heights; in fact, the time-sensitive aspect of some bonuses and powerups suggests that this is in the design brief for the game. Getting the right combo of weapons makes the experience almost transcendental as you annihilate all comers with dexterity and poise.

When this game is bad, it is so bad.

The above being said; after Dead Cells has taught you to go in Fast and Hard (heheheheh), leaning into momentum and combo-stacking, the brakes are pumped. Enemies that will punish rushing in become more numerous. Combinations of enemies packed into a tight space that you simply cannot clear without taking a lot of damage become more frequent. You will unlock weapons whose high damage does NOT justify their huge vulnerability window.

When this game is much, it is so much.

My first stint with Dead Cells was in early 2020 and there was a shedload of content even then. Now in 2024 with all the DLCs and collabs and tie-ins it is bursting at the seams with content. Too much. It's too much. Thematically random areas. Weapons upon weapons upon weapons that makes it hard to create a cohesive build. Runs that take well over an hour. Exhausting.

Dead Cells is great; but is it good?