Lone Sails was an interesting puzzle adventure game that took place on a 2D plane. You micro-managed various things on your vessel while acquiring upgrades to pass new obstacles. Changing Tides is exactly the same thing but on a boat instead.

There is no store or character building at all and that really sucks. I can tell the world in Far is sad and clearly post-apocalyptic, but the game gives me no reason to care about it other than the puzzles. You start out swimming this time and learning the basics. Jumping, climbing ladders, moving objects, and picking them up. You then acquire your ship and learn how to manage your fuel, sails, filling with air or water for submarine controls, cool your engine, and use your boost power. You acquire these over the course of the game, but fuel management is key. Don't use fuel unless you don't have wind which was the mistake I made. I wound up with tons of fuel at one point without realizing that's the most I would ever get and that was 2/3 through the game.

Gathering fuel is done by collecting junk laying around. This isn't often and sometimes you will hit a buoy and below these are caches of fuel. Don't get lazy and skip them, but sadly the game never tells you to look out for these either. Each upgrade requires a giant puzzle of a level and they were never hard or complicated. Mostly it's pushing a lever to drop an object to place into a machine. They're fun, but not hard. While you're sailing there will be long stretches of nothing. Sometimes not even music. This can get quite boring as the micromanagement of the ship gets tiresome after a while. It was fun at first, but I felt like this was the main gameplay loop and not the puzzles. Overall there are only four upgrades to get so about 4-5 puzzles in total. You spend at least 2-3 hours just sailing and micromanaging your fuel and sails.

Once in a while, there are cinematic platforming moments in which you just follow a linear path which was neat because it's the only action in the game. I just can't care a lot about this series without some kind of back story or context. Games like Limbo, Inside, and Little Nightmares do this well with storytelling from your envirnment. There's not much to tell in open oceans with just wasted buildings. Even the puzzle areas had murals that supposedly told a story, but it really didn't mean anything. There's only one neat moment at the very end of the game before the credits roll and that was it.

The platforming itself is fine if not slippery. I constantly found myself wanting to twitch jump around the ship and I would constantly fall down holes, get stuck on ladders, or not get to where I wanted because of the slippery jumping and physics. It's also a bit too floaty. The puzzles are the most enjoyable part of the game and it's a shame the boating is so tedious and boring most of the time with nothing going on. If it were cinematic or more interesting of a management system I would really like this idea. I didn't care for it in Lone Sails and it was doubled down on here.

Overall, Changing Tides looks good for what it is and has a nice art style, but you will quickly forget this game. It's about 3-4 hours long and I can't stress enough that there's way too much boating and not enough puzzle-solving or platforming.

Video games that are considered moving art are rare and don't happen as often as they used to. Games like Shadow of the Colossus, Okami, Journey, Monument Valley, Echochrome, and various games from large to the small budget would be among that crowd. Lost in Random takes visual and character design inspiration from the likes of Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, Alice: Madness Returns, and Psychonauts. Now, I don't know if those are exact inspirations, but it sure does feel like it. I feel like I'm playing a Tim Burton cartoon.

You play as a girl named Even. The world-building in Lost in Random is very well done. By the end of the game, I completely understood this world and the horrible things people have to go through. There is an evil queen who rules a black die. When she rolls a die it determines where a child gets sent to. There are six realms in the world of Random. You, are, of course, starting out at the bottom and have to work your way up to Sixtopia where the evil queen resides. Children are used for something and the queen also takes your sister Odd back to Sixtopia with her. The people of Random used to have their own dice and the evil queen didn't like this so she took them all away and only she can decide anyone's fate.

Each realm is very well done. They all look different and each realm plays an important role in serving the queen. One realm makes the cards, one realm offers the garbage to create the evil robots, and so on. As you climb through the realms you meet the people and can do side quests which surprisingly aren't that annoying. You mostly finish them all just by completing the main quests in each area and I rarely felt any made me go out of my way. Exploring is one of two major parts of the game and it's quite enjoyable, in fact, I enjoyed it more than the combat which there is more of. I loved seeing the beautifully crafted areas, talking to the crazy NPCs, and learning how each realm is dealing with everyday life. This kind of detail isn't put into games as much these days unless they're a strict RPG.

As you explore the realms you can shoot down pots to earn coins to buy cards. Cards are used in combat, but it's not like Hearthstone or anything like that. This is real-time combat with cards that give you what you need in the battle. You can carry a deck of 15 cards and there are around 30 or so in the game in total. You can carry usually 2-3 of each one in your inventory. The deck is varied and broken down into categories. Weapons, traps, hazards, assists, and so on. The problem is that because the combat is in real-time it can drag on and take a while to get any battles over with. You start out with just you and your die. You only get to roll a one at the beginning and as you climb realms you get more sides. This is an issue because until you get at least four sides you can't roll very high. You must run around the arena shooting crystals off of enemies to build up your hand. I find this whole process tedious and really dampens the combat a lot and nearly kills the fun. Once you gathered enough crystals you can roll your die and that determines the spending points you get. Each card has a number from 0-3. The strategy is picking the right cards for the situation and making sure you have a varied deck. You don't want to be caught without a melee weapon or health for example.

Once you play your hand you have to shoot crystals all over again or "blink" through enemy attacks. An important card is Blink Attack which damages enemies as you dodge because without a melee card you're weaponless. This also drags out combat as I wish the slingshot would automatically do some damage. You're stuck just running around shooting crystals and hoping a hazard or weapon card comes up so you can attack and do some damage. This also makes for cheap deaths, especially in the board game areas as there are no checkpoints there. Board games have various rules in which a game piece is moved around and your roll determines the moves. There are hazards, enemies, traps, and obstacles to overcome and I absolutely hated these. They dragged out the already dragged out combat and if you died towards the end it was another 20 minutes to fight your way back to the end.

As you can see, the combat has some great ideas like the real-time combat mixed with card battling, but getting to that sweet spot is a chore. There is also so much combat in this game. Once you left a town you just went into one arena after another and it felt like it would never end. The only reprieve in combat was the boss fights as they changed things up. The same five enemies repeat throughout the entire game and then after a while, it just becomes a game of survival rather than strategy. You already know how to kill these enemies after the 50th time so the strategy is gone early in the game. I wound up just equipping the cards that did the most damage, dropped my spending requirements down, gave me more spending points, and required fewer crystals to get to the cards. I stuck with melee weapons, bombs, healing, blink attack, poison, and that was about it. Most other cards end up becoming useless as the game gets harder.

Overall, the game also overstays its welcome. The combat isn't interesting enough to last 10 hours. As you battle your way through six worlds each with multiple bosses, quests, side quests, and cards to buy the game grows tiresome towards the end. I just wanted to explore the beautiful worlds and enjoy the scripted events towards the halfway point. Every time another board game came up or another arena I groaned. That's not a good thing. I liked the mix of combat types, but getting to that point with the crystal shooting is just such a chore and slows the whole game down. What's here though is a wonderful story, great characters, fantastic voice acting, and a beautiful world to explore.

Adventure games that both have shock value and a good story are rare and hard to come by, sadly, Martha is Dead is not one of those. You would mistakenly think this is some sort of horror game with monsters and demons, but it's barely even that. This is a ghost story, a story about battling mental illness, and a story about surviving WWII in Axis Italy. You play Guilia who is Martha's twin sister. This is a detective game more than anything with plot twists and an interesting vintage camera system.

The game starts out simple enough. Introducing controls, the plot, character building, the whole nine yards that adventure games typically put you through. Martha is Dead's best feature is the camera system. While you can take photos anywhere (I don't know why you would) you need it for specific plot points. Guilia is trying to talk to The White Lady of the lake and find out why her sister died. This is kind of the first half of the story as it jumps around so much. The game is very plodding, slow, and constantly leads you on for little payoff. Taking photos for objectives is simple enough. Just get the focus and distance right and snap the photo. You then get to develop the photo, but instead of taking you through the entire complicated process, the game explains to you what that is and says it cut 90% out for better gameplay. Why? You just focus and position the negative for exposure and then develop it in liquid but the point you stop it is the same for every photo. A pretty lame "mini-game" if you ask me with tons of lost potential.

With the camera feature out of the way, there are other small gameplay things you do such as a morse code mini-game which I actually enjoyed. I had to look up a morse code chart online and decipher it myself. That was actually well done and made me think, but that's the only part that did. 75% of the game is spent in Guilia's house or the wood's winding paths. There are a few scenes where you control a motorboat, but it's just to get to the other side of the lake. You are mostly wandering around at a slow pace going from point A to B and interacting with objects. Go check out the graveyard, go back to the house and develop the photo, go back to the lake and find an underground bunker, go back to the house and put up a flag. The constant backtracking is tiring and clearly used for filler.

Then the last hour of the game is zero gameplay. It consists of long puppet shows recapping the entire story like you already didn't know what happened. The story thinks it's more complicated than it is. Honestly, the puppet shows are cool-looking, but they didn't advance the story. The story here gets recapped numerous times in various forms which are really annoying and make the player feel dumb. After the puppet show stuff you just walk around interesting scenes with narration and that's it. The best parts of the game are the gory death scenes which are pretty nutty. They would make Mortal Kombat fans blush. But in total, this is maybe five minutes of the entire game. There's a bike you can ride, but the control is terrible and it's only used to ride around the house and surrounding path, so what's the point with that?

Then there are the visuals. Yes, the game looks damn good. Crazy detailed textures, amazing lighting effects, and models, and it just looks like a AAA title, but at what cost? The game runs horribly on even my RTX 2080 that's overclocked. There is ray tracing in the game, but I couldn't tell the difference between that and ultra graphics settings. I feel this was put in more for next-gen consoles for a subtle effect. The game has constant stutters, frame drops, weird frame rates with ray tracing on, and even DLSS set to ultra-performance. At 3440x1440 I had scenes that ran at above 60FPS with ray tracing on and then I would turn around and the frames would drop by over half. Without DLSS? Forget it. The game would drop into single digits one second and then inside the house it would be 90FPS. Super terrible optimization all around here and even with DLSS set to ultra-performance without ray tracing I still saw dips under 60FPS. Totally unacceptable. DLSS shouldn't be used as a crutch.

Overall, Martha is Dead mostly relies on shock value for the few scenes that have it. It's neither a horror game nor a puzzle game. It's just an adventure game with various story elements tossed together with boring backtracking and little gameplay to keep you interested. The photo mode is ambitious but purposefully handicapped when it could have been as robust as real-life photography back in WWII. It's a missed opportunity. The game spoils itself constantly with frequent story recaps and in the end, there's a final plot twist. The story runs its course about two-thirds of the way through and you're left with a giant recap scene with no crazy finale that most adventure games have.

I always come back to Alan Wake every few years because it’s just such a good game. Great combat, storytelling, varied gameplay, well-written characters, and overall solid experience. Almost a decade after the original release I went ahead and played through the PC version again and it’s helped up surprisingly well. Despite its graphical age, it feels like it could have been released yesterday.

You play as Alan Wake who is a writer that takes a vacation to the Pacific Northwest in Washington and stays at a cabin in Cauldron Lake. Alan has a scuffle with his wife and wakes up not really himself or anything around him for the matter. Without spoiling too much, the story revolves around darkness and always wondering whether what’s happening to Alan is real or it’s all in his head as you will see major story landings in which this question comes up. Even at the end of the game this is never really answered, and maybe it’s best to leave the player guessing a little.

The story is well told and might take a couple of playthroughs to get everything, but it does keep you pushing through the 6-hour story until the end. Characters such as Barry, Alice, Sherriff Wheeler, and even the doctors and radio station host are all just so well written and memorable. Other story tidbits include finding manuscript pages, watching live-action episodes of “Night Springs” clearly inspired by “The Twilight Zone” and radio station bits by finding radios. It’s nice to see the story unfold outside of cutscenes and it really gives you an insight to what’s going out in Bright Falls outside of what Alan is doing. The whole premise of Alan Wake feels special to me as I originally played this living in Southern California and not really caring where it was set. Almost ten years later I now live in the PNW just outside Snoqualiamie, WA where the setting was inspired. It’s awesome to personally experience this setting and then coming back to the game, I appreciated it so much more.

The main gameplay element here is your flashlight and guns. Light is a huge role in this game as the story is centered around it and your flashlight is a weapon. You can boost the flashlights beam and a circle will get smaller on enemies and once the circle is gone, and you beamed away from the darkness, they become vulnerable and can be shot with the gun. There are easy and hard enemies, a few fast ones, and inanimate objects become enemies later on in the game such as boss fights with harvesters, cranes, trucks, and barrels. It’s interesting how the combat is designed and you have to be afraid of everything around you, even birds! The use of the flashlight and guns is just so well done with great controls and the guns feel satisfying to shoot. You always have to be on your toes and every gunfight is never the same with limited ammo, no flashlight, and then some times tons of ammo to make you feel powerful. There are even lights in the environment you can use to take the Taken down such as spotlights, floodlights, and headlights on cars in the few driving sequences.

The game, however, is extremely linear and you rarely get to stray off the beaten path. These are only seen in the car sequences where you can stop at a house or two to find collectibles and then continue on. Despite this, the heavily scripted events are fun and there’s so much variety and the pacing is spot on. Going from chaotic dark forests to a New York apartment and then the psych ward and even a cafe is a nice touch. It let you breathe.

Overall, Alan Wake is one of the best games during the Xbox 360 generation with fantastic character dialogue, an interesting story, and fun gunplay with variety in level design and great pacing. The PC version adds DirectX 10 lighting and features such as ultra-widescreen support, FOV slider, slightly better textures, and character models. Overall though, the textures still look really muddy, even during its release, and there’s obvious LOD and draw distance issues with pop in that the PC didn’t need to experience.