I wonder how this game would've been if it came out after outer wilds.

But at the same time one minute is so short that you can't really design interesting puzzles to be solved in that amount of time. I felt the whole game like I was just brute forcing everything. I couldn't bring myself to stand still for even a second and think about what I am doing because of how stressful the time limitations are. Once I realized that the progress in this game comes from picking up items I had no reason to even use my brain, just find all the items as fast as possible. This game clearly prioritizes speed running over thinking.

My clear favorite puzzle was the one with the bulldozer opening up a shortcut into the factory. For three specific reasons:
1. you don't need to first find an otherwise useless Metroidvania type item to solve the puzzle.
2. Everywhere in that vicinity are those robot arms for the player to interact and get familiar with so when you see the bulldozer you kinda already know what to do.
3. It opens up a short cut

The old school Zelda combat felt dull, I just ran past every enemy. The obligatory boss fight at the end felt like they ran out of ideas and just stuck to video game clichés.
The fact that they had to use multiple starting points makes it painfully obvious that one minute is to short.

The gimmick was the selling point, but damn it got old fast.

Fetch quests and "press x to jump up here" BUT as a cat.

The fact that they didn't realize how much potential they had to tell a story completely without words is honestly baffling. The whole story with the robots felt like somebody didn't want to give up on an old idea so they mashed it together with somewhat interesting cat mechanics and then they structured the whole game around that instead of the cats. I really wouldn't be surprised if this were once two different student projects.

Can't be bothered to finish all the fetch quests in midtown while searching for the right windowsill to jump on. Imma have to drop this one. Thanks tho ps extra

Every design decision has to delete a whole world of possibilities to exist.

This game is an exercise in and a comment on exploring these worlds of possibilities.
The act of deckbuilding itself is a mirror to this creative process.
Choosing which cards to build the deck around is like choosing which iteration of an idea you want to build on. This is where inscription captivated me the most, as a beautiful work of art about reconceptualization. Don't leave anything on the cutting table, try the half baked stuff, but in a meta context that actually works because of it's sincerity.

I also loved when a stoner friend of mine told me to immediately delete the game after seeing his user name and picture on my enemies card. Lmao

I had a best friend like Chloe growing up, a narcissistic rebel who's self-confidence and ability to truly not give a fuck I looked up to. But whenever i tried calling them out for their selfish asshole behaviour, they would gaslight me into thinking, me criticising them is actually worse and what they did is just what best friends do or not that big of a deal.

The game's casual normalisation of this kind of behaviour made me reflect on that constantly, but it never really questioned it. You can't not engage with chloe or really disagree with her actions if you want the story to progress. Trust me, I've tried getting caught, going back to max's room or what ever seemed like an alternative, but nothing is possible. If this inescapable dread of a guilt tripped toxic 'friendship' would be on purpose i think i could appreciate it, but it's not. The game views those scenes as Max having a fun night out with her besty.

I wanted to play this, because i was for a long time under the assumption that Life is strange is a pro LGBTQ+ game, but it utilises a mechanic known in the industry as 'gay button'. A bigoted homophone can play the entire game without ever being confronted with anything explicitly queer. It's all hidden behind optional button prompts and up to interpretation, like the boys or girls locker room decision or kissing chloe. The game just wears some of the aesthetics of being progressive nothing more.

It also kind of seemed from the very beginning to me like kate was a problem to solve for the player, before she was real character, which left a sour taste in my mouth up untill the point where i choose the wrong dialog a second time. I feel the game using her suicide as this shock factor knowlege-check climax to the episode, outways whatever they attempted to say about bullying or mental health and kind of game-ifys trauma.

When episode three strarted i had to think about the scene with kate, but before i could properly start reflecting max's voice actress said: "I really have to think about kate"
There is a constant discussion in film director circles about how much you should really think for the viewer. Beyond obvious stuff like 'show don't tell' there exists this inability in mainstream art to just let the receptor think and let them engage in their own thoughts about the art. I don't even mean having a different interpretation, i mean letting the receptor interpretate period.
Life is strange, constantly does this, it does the thinking for you. Max just tells you how or what to think. How to solve the puzzle. What to do. How to feel.
I really don't get why this is so normalized and even often appreciated in gaming.

For something more positive, i liked the artstyle and the general vibe of the town.

I played this with a friend who is usually very on edge during any kind of horror media. He fell asleep.

I could stop my review right here, on this tongue and cheek, but also completely sincere remark of my experience, because it hammers my main point of contempt home. That these games are utterly boring and uninteresting.
Even external things like a drinking game with the homie can't upgrade the experience. The game has a fucking catch phrase (used in the drinking game by us) it constantly spouts in desperation for relatability and as a lacklustre faux identity. The instagram motivational content classic you see at the bottom of your local gym bros workout pics "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger". The game tries to evoke Nietzsche, but can't even reach Kelly Clarkson.

I know there is a subset of narrow minded people in high up positions who actively want games to just be interactive films, but it seems to me like no matter how many A's these studios have their attempts fail even at B-Movie level. Made up of mostly cutscenens plagued by over done horror clichés and a term coined millenial writing. The second half consisting of tension robbing quick time events, fixed camera angles that learned nothing beyond superficiality from the original resident evils and choices the game just can't help but remind the player of, right after they were made.

That last one is something that I will never get. How unconfident in the player's ability to understand that they just made a choice is the game? Can they expect me to take it serious if it doesn't take me and the limited opinions of interactivity as such and therefore itself serious? Why try to immerse the player with 'agency' if you then immediately televise to them that this is just a game? Just put it in the logs without the pop up notification. At the same time revealing their cards like this let's the player notice whenever their choices actually meant nothing instead of leaving it out or god forbid up to interpretation. The path I choose was to shelve this game.

Before my friend fell asleep he said something that hit the nail on it's head "if this was a film I would have already closed it."
He is right. Games have this excuse. The novelty of interactivity alone carries way to often completely unoriginal and boring stories. How long till this novelty wears off?

To cleanse my soul and to keep my guilt conscious from feeling the need to review and find the right words for the games I actually love, for at least a little longer, I'll have to give credit where its due.
The scene with the narcissistic girl in which she walks the pier alone while talking to her phone. No other character would be able to have scene like this, but her behaviour up untill this point of the game makes it completely believable that she would just talk to her phone camera and half ironically pretend like she is talking to her followers. But i think the interesting part happens at the end of the scene. Idk if this is optional, but she does some verbal introspection about her actions towards the guy she likes and it humanises her. It was the first and only time i said "damn, this wasn't even bad writing" to my friend who was already asleep, but not yet snoring. Mere seconds later she enters a cabin at the end of her walk and gets killed by one of the things. The game humanised her right before killing her off. They robbed the viewer of the 'satisfaction' from seeing the unlikeable character killed and turned my indifference into sympathy and as result the moment almost into horror in the last second. I say almost, because the scene was still goofy af.

Also graphics so good they'll make you say "thats that dude from the netflix show they cancelled after one season." I don't know why netfilx is catching strays now, but i especially don't know how to end rev

The notion of Black and white photography communicates a way bigger interest in artsy shit than the game actually wants (you) to explore. Taking selfies gets the same priority as the zoom function out here. You get a tripod, not for any further calibrations like a hight adjustment or angling the camera a bit, but to insert the player character and by extension yourself into any scene (and for a puzzle solution that kept being reused). After getting the ability to use filters I took a really depressing photo of a crying kid and then showed it to the npc who gave me the filters, their reaction was: "hahaha ha filters make everything so funny".
Now don't misunderstand me, this isn't me criticising the npc reaction from the standpoint of "I showed him sad thing not funny thing, game wrong" and more like this is just how the game views photography.. as just funny toy to f around with (or as a checklist of challenges with the photo club npcs). If there was at least one npc with a more interesting perspective on photography in this game this wouldn't even be a problem to me, but there isn't. The dialog in this game is so 'going through the motions' filler, sometimes reduced to just the gesture towards a common trope, that they didn't even credit anyone for the writing.

The main reason I picked this up was because I thought it would give me the same comfiness and freedom of artistic expression, a wholesome little world like "Chicory" gave me, but it sadly didn't.
In Chicory nobody ever tells you how or what to draw. In Toem you almost exclusively have to take photos for checklists with descriptions that first seem like they are open for interpretation, but are actually just light puzzles with one specific solution. Photograph the tiniest army means photograph the ants, not a group of boy scouts in uniform, or the other 'can be mistaken as the tiniest army, thing they purposely put in the level which I forgot rn. Like, imagine if it wasn't: take a very specific photo for me with this loose description. And instead all of the purposely placed Red Herings are possible solutions, making it more about the relationship of interpretation and description than about a dumb fetch quest. But that would mean writing thoughtful dialog which..this game..doesn't

Chicory gets more colourful with each player input, a move that seems like a no-brainer in a black-and-white game about an entire artistic medium. Tbh, I believe they only left toem in b/w because color coding is really hard and It's easier to make a pictures look good that way.
The game is still a relaxing affair and losing yourself while taking photos works for me no matter how basic it and disappointing all of the rest is.

Trying to recall the exact events of a play session in Yume Nikki feels to an uncanny degree like trying to recall the exact events of a dream right after waking up.
Those kinds of dreams where it kinda felt like you had a nightmare, but you aren't quite sure if it actually was one. You can't remember how you got from one place to the next, if it was a single dream or multiple and even less what any of it meant.

It's also the kind of modern art that is so simple in concept and execution, yet nails its premise so effortlessly, that I can't help but hate that I didn't come up with it first lol. I can see how a similar thought process and admiration, shared among indie devs in the mid-2000s, inevitably led Yume Nikki to spawn its own sub-genre.

If you are insufferable like me and occasionally try to get people outside of the medium into video games then this might be the best one to get them genuinely interested.
Solving a well-thought-out 17th-century murder case by gathering evidence, understanding contextual clues, and identifying suspects, all behind the accessible comfort of using only a mouse, makes true-crime jennys giddy.

The way some of these vignettes tell a story, pieces scattered across the scene with the right amount of context missing is brilliantly executed, rewarding to put together and sometimes genuinely beautiful.
The pixilated art style toes the perfect line between readable and crude, almost mad magazine-esque adult cartoon. The pixels look like they all stink.

Tbh while playing I wasn't sure if the ending and the main plot are trying to say something specific because the only message I got felt pretty dumb. So I kinda just chalked it up to gameplay ideas informing the story. Then after finishing the game, I read Epiglottis review who said it better than I ever could when they called the place the story ends up in "soft-brained 'tyranny of forced equality' territory". And yea, I got the same vibe.

One of the things Obra Dinn undeniably has above the golden idol is its interesting use of audio and sound design (hearing the victim's last moment). You can play the golden idol with the sound muted and it wouldn't make a difference (except atmospherically of course). That felt a bit disappointing to me, but I also have to admit that I don't see a good possibility to further implement sound without just ripping off obra dinn ideas or changing how the game feels in general. So maybe it's good they didn't.

Next time you want to get your adult friends or family members into video games pull out this one and play a chapter with them.

I have been falling for so long I have forgotten what the ground looks like.
This was a digital euphoria I genuinely needed to help me float, at least for a short while.

An audio-visual feast, bite sized tabs of purple acid for my way too sober mind, hungry for a meaningful stimulation. Loose, soothing and forgiving.

I'll have to admit, the synth pop OST was hit or miss for me. I caught myself nodding along only three seperate times, but maybe I was just too enthralled in the whole experience to notice all the other times and nothing overstayed it's welcome anyway. It also reminded me that Debussy fucks hard.

Also crazy they got Queen Latifah in this to tell me I got a bronze rank.

Play this if you want a short but warm hug from a person rubbing some LSD onto your skin.

Yes I know of a band named Fugazi. Thanks for asking strange, cute and scary game.

I am definitely gonna keep playing this series, especially because this was very short with no wet fat.

100% worth 15 minutes of your time just for the atmosphere. And it's way more than that one silly Pop-culture reference i kinda reduced it to.

This game is more movie than game in it's story telling. In a weird way though it is almost fitting that a pseudo mindbending video game about a horror novel author's manuscript was actually a film the entire time.

I am exaggerating, there are obviously the obligatory zombie-, but not actually a zombie, okay maybe they are just a zombie, but with an extra shield mechanic -shooter sections. There are also some decent, often optional "walking sim" parts with additional world building, lore or foreshadowing of the story. The game is serviceable just not for me, I am hating a bit, because I am honestly always disappointed when I choose to play a Video Game instead of watching a Film or a TV Show and then I feel like I would have gotten the same x10 out of rewatching a Lynch (or Nolan, he might unironically enjoy this) flick while playing a mindless zombie shooter on the side.
Like, my favourite part in the first chapter was some silly and short Twilight Zone -eseque video you can watch on a TV in the game. Why am I even playing a game at that that point I have to ask myself?

Starting off with the nod: "Stephen King once wrote that 'Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there's little fun to be had in explanations; they're antithetical to the poetry of fear." and after that immediately tutorialising how to break and defeat the first "Nightmare" you encounter, and thereby lessening the potential fear of the unknown a player could experience and contradictong that corny opening monologue is baffeling to me.
The animations, sound design and fx alone convey perfectly well that the lamp has an effect on the enemy, figuring that out by yourself would work perfectly fine in a nightmare mystery setting. Why are games this inconfindent in themselves and the player that tjey feel the need to take this small and kind of intriguing revelation away?

"For a moment the repressive feeling from the nightmare I had on the ferry returns" a near comical jumpscare flashes for half a second. The shortness, randomness and how on the nose the attempt at connecting Alan's narrated thoughts to the players emotions were, made this moment kinda silly to me. These Jumpscares keep coming throughout the game and keep getting longer, showing the player more information. And idk, to me that is honestly, at least in theory, an interesting concept to excuse the use of jumpscares, by the nature of the scare getting longer the jump would slowly cease to exist. But they don't really, there is still epileptic ass editing in those moments to compensate for the length I guess. So, to me at least, this minor recurring flash of imagery, which I'm wasting way too much time on in this review, is only an annoying, tension wasting horror gimmick that is halting the gameplay instead of the intriguing, itself slowly revealing narrative exposition it could have been.

Alan Wake gives me confidence to be a writer myself, a profession not even included in the top five artistic delusions I have, but this game bumped it up a bit. The writing in Alan's manuscripts is mediocre at best, there is no way this guy is such a legend that a small town has a life-sized cardboard cutout of him in a Bar.
Damn, is he supposed to be a mediocre cardboard cut out of an author and that is a blatan admission of that? But man self-awareness wouldn't make it any better.
In one of the manuscripts it says "..to describe the dark presence as intelligent would have implied human qualities on something decidedly inhuman" all this sentence is giving me is the implications that intelligence is a quality exclusive to humans. And thats just arrogant human exceptionalism in my book.

I dropped this game after like six+, kinda slogging hours and turned on Twin Peaks instead. If there is some plot-twist that nullifies my complaints about the story related stuff or the game somehow gets way more interesting, I honestly don't really care enough to sit through even a playthrough of it to find out and I did genuinely try that a couple days after, but then again choose to watch something else instead. [Played like a month ago, but I'll log it with todays date for visibility or some shit, idk if that is how it works]