another sandbox that's smoke and mirrors. you can experience everything it has to meaningfully offer on floor 1 w/ remainder of playtime spent convincing yourself clicking the door this way instead of clicking it that way is freedom of choice & endless experimental gameplay and not just redundant fluff to hide there's like two level layouts and five mission types and you'll have to willingly gimp yourself to make them interesting. writing and general presentation is that lame insecure indie dev shit where it's all an i can has cheeseburger joke, more flimflam

Even though Roguelikes are right up my alley, this one has far too much text, which slows the game down tremendously. The idea is fun, but it does not compare to other Roguelikes such as The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth at all. Roguelikes should be and feel straightforward, showing you exactly what to and what you're doing in just a few words and graphical elements. When finding/buying/using items, I should not have to read through a paragraph of text that tells me what the item does, cluttered up by "funny" videogame references or quirky remarks. And even when I get an item I have seen before, the undetailed sprites do not convey what the item is exactly, meaning they are less memorable.

I do recognise I only played this game for a little bit, and the content seems to be stacked, but I just could not get into this one.

Sometimes I go out of my way to try games that, at surface level, are not at all my cup of tea. And sometimes it goes pretty well; Stardew Valley ended up being a great fit, for example, and Undertale ended up being one of my favourites of all time. But A Short Hike did a good job of reminding me that some games really just aren't for me at all...

The music in this game is great, the art style is fine, and the world is well-realised. A Short Hike definitely has a vibe to it... but not much more? Long story short, I found this game aggressively boring. The main gameplay loop seems to be bumbling around until you find some person who needs help, then you bumble around until you find the solution. The game has a heavy focus on exploration, but the quasi-top-down camera angle and lack of a map makes remembering where landmarks are an absolute chore, and a huge portion of the game becomes just aimlessly wandering to where you think a point of reference was that you want to revisit.

I found the controls pretty janky too. Claire has a habit of pinging off into the distance if you dare to climb any surface with the slightest curve to it, and mapping Jump and Action to the same button caused me quite a few problems (not least during one of the races, when an NPC had positioned themself next to a rock I had to jump over, and accidentally speaking to them cost me the race more than once). The boat in particular controls like complete arse as well.

But do I think a Short Hike is a bad game? No. It's well made and a lot of thought and love has gone into it. The attention to detail is pretty great; I enjoyed little touches like digging up bones if you use the shovel in the cemetery. But it has been a long while since I have played something that I found as cripplingly uninteresting as this. If you get on with slow-paced, deliberately aimless, zero-stakes adventures then I'm sure you'd get on with this fine. But it turns out I don't.

From what I can tell, next to nobody agrees with me on this, but I think this game is kind of a disaster.

As a big MAX PAYNE guy and a fan of horror games, I snapped this up when it came out and played through it dutifully. In the end, I was left pretty cold by it, and over the next decade I’ve constantly thought about doing a revisit because I’ve always felt like I must have missed something. Well, thanks to the remaster, I finally got around to it, and I think that what I missed is that it just plain sucks. This run through was actively painful, and for close to the entire time, I wished I was doing anything else.

- First and foremost, I capital-h hate the combat. Hate it. After being so famously empowered by Remedy in MAX PAYNE, this game's thrilling new mechanic of having to fill out a fucking application in triplicate to ask each enemy individually if, oh please sir, may I shoot you now? feels like absolute shit. The dodge is the jankiest thing ever. Having no reticle sucks ass. The enemies taking the same amount of damage from every bullet every time makes shooting feel like homework. The overall combat design makes every encounter feel math-based, resource-based. You spend X bullets and Y items because there are Z amount of enemies. You can make some savings by exploiting the environment if you look around. Maybe that’s a deliberate choice and maybe that’s fun for people, but I like shooters to be spontaneous and surprising – I like reacting in the moment. This very much feels like the opposite of that. I Hate it.

- Moving, running, jumping – all feel like crap. Wake drives like a boat. And the camera is placed terribly.

- The enemies are bad. You’ve got a less-interesting, less-scary version of the DEADLY PREMONITION zombies, and that’s it. Seriously. Don’t talk to me about bear traps or goo puddles or flying ‘poltergeist’ physics objects or fucking BIRDS because, wow, that stuff is embarrassing. Literally make a second enemy type.

- The story is stupid, and very badly told. Hey, what if Stephen King went to Twin Peaks? (It would suck, is the answer.) I hate to be reductive and bring up those two points of reference that are quoted so, so much when it comes to this game (and so many others) but the narrative really is just those two things, and the most clumsy, unadorned, surface-level takes on them, combined to make something incredibly boring and unoriginal. From that instantly tiresome starting point (and I do mean ‘starting point’ - the words “Stephen King” are, incredibly, the first things spoken in this game) we have the sloppiest patchwork of levels and cutscenes stitched together that don’t dare slow down for a single second to analyze any particular point or let any moment breathe lest it become abundantly clear how little any single aspect OR the greater whole make sense. At times you might think they’re going for a SILENT HILL/Jacob’s Ladder type dream logic thing where there are levels of reality and individual scenes don’t necessarily connect in a logical way, but they’re not! It’s supposed to fit together and make sense! And God, it gets so King/Mike Flanagan dopey at the end (with a stunningly dumb finale), which is appropriate I guess, but still not good!

- It’s never scary, not once. Not even close, not even close to close. Not even the jumpscares. It is heroically, subversively unscary. Both MAX PAYNES are scarier, easily. Which is part of why this is so disappointing! I thought that Remedy would have had a great horror game in them.

- The woods are soooooooo fuuuckiiiiing borrrriinnnnggggg oh my goddddddddddddd

- The pacing is apocalyptically bad. Every chapter and the game in total feel impossibly, crushingly long. They deploy appropriate and fairly well-done TV show-style “Previously on Alan Wake …” interstitials, but hey guys, guess what? Episodes of Twin Peaks weren’t two and a half hours long.

- The game’s only, only move to shake things up is to take all your guns and power-ups away. It happens multiple times per chapter and has the most hilarious of justifications in the story (or just none at all, sometimes). You have to re-upgrade your flashlight and find a new revolver, like, literally ten times apiece. It feels. Like SHIT.

Are there positives? Sure, a couple. The collectible manuscript pages are a great idea and help flesh out supporting characters and unseen events in a cool, in-universe way that the main narrative definitely doesn’t have the time or confidence for. They are still by their nature the opposite of “show-don’t-tell”, but I’ll take it. What else … uh … James “Voice of Max Payne” McCaffrey shows up in a brief role and is great, but that mostly just makes me want to play MAX PAYNE 3 again. And then there’s … um …

Anyway, this has been good for me. I feel like I’m finally getting closure on this. I finally understand my relationship with this game: I really don’t like it, and I find it super disappointing! And yet a big part of me is still excited about a sequel because in my mind, this game should have been a slam dunk and I feel like Remedy can still get a horror game right. I’m pulling for them! But this sucks, man.

I feel like I got to this party a bit late. I'm an avid fan of the roguelike genre and Nuclear Throne does have a very solid minimalist design, but I can't help feeling it's a bit limited even by the standards of its day feeling more like something suited to the gameboy.

NT is one of the earlier twin stick roguelikes containing the skeleton of the genre. The gunplay is fast paced, tough, and simple. Upgrades come in the form of mutations which vary by character, and each level is a minimal, tiny, blocky arena that can be expanded via explosions.

Gameplay is centred around the guns and character specific gimmicks. Survival is achieved by learning how to wield the different weapons without killing yourself and familiarising yourself with the different enemies, how they react to being shot, and how to dodge their projectiles. The small resolution and tight spaces combined with large explosions and enemy attacks provide most of the difficulty here.

It has a lot of charm in it's simplicity but the gameplay lacks nuance so it becomes repetitive fast. I can see why people might grind this one for hours at a time but it's not substantial enough for my taste.