A bit unfortunate, isn't it. Even though you won't be fazed by its pretty standard fantasy world and story, the basis of collecting stronger items and abilities and zooming through earlier areas without many problems is solid. The main problem is the level design, and it unfortunately affects everything.

The foundation is good: you got multiple large and visually distinct levels, a few hubs, a few teleports, lots of opportunities. But it's all so awkwardly placed that you spend a lot of time traversing the same areas. Even worse, all the areas within a level look the same. I couldn't for the life of me recall any routes or locations which makes navigation actually terrible. This is then aggravated by a bunch of quests that have you revisit old locations to collect or activate things which would be okay in any other game, but here you really turn your brain off; especially because the goals often aren't interesting - open a chest to get a key to access an area to get an even better key to access something we're actually interested in, but you then need to activate three more things (one of which needs four more things to be activated).

It made me think about fantasy as a genre though, because I thought it wasn't my favorite genre anyway, and when Blue Fire started in a castle, with gods, some evil shadowy corruption, magicians, 'you're the chosen one' etc etc, I prepared myself for something thematically uninteresting. I thought that was unfair (it is), but now that I think about it, I don't dislike fantasy as a genre - it's just not an interesting starting point for me. It can certainly be good: either by including more unconventional elements (Bastion, Hades, Wandersong, Everhood) or just having a solid thematic basis apart from it (Final Fantasy, Dreamfall, Everhood again). Blue Fire has neither. Root of the problem is the inconsistent tone, where the main story is about corrupted gods and the death of the entire land, while the inhabitants seem to be mostly just fine, maybe a bit bothered by the monsters. It's so whimsical, but not in a controlled manner like in A Hat in Time. It feels like the world you're traversing has always been this way and it's alright how it is, and your quests are totally separate.

Even if we ignore the lack of thematic depth and level design issues, at its best it would just be a mediocre game about things you've already seen with gameplay you've already experienced. Just play A Hat in Time or Supraland instead.

Even though I've never played a game this short, Milk Inside a Bag of Milk still finds meaningful ways to mess with the mind. The fourth-wall-breaking nature and writing are both great, weaving different meta together to portray realistic themes and emotions. The art style, while minimal, achieves a general otherworldly, desolate and empty feel to it. It helped me enter and understand the mind of the character much more while relating to and unraveling the world piece by piece. I do think the length of the project makes it somewhat hard to leave an impression, (at least for me), something I feel will change after playing the sequel. I'm always happy to support smaller devs like this either way, so check this one out.

It's kind of bonkers to me how this game isn't massively popular considering it's one of the absolute best immersive sims out there right now. It's certainly the clearest example of the genre to me, with all the signature mechanics that make it fun. The monumental amount of ambition and finesse the devs achieved here is truly breathtaking, making for one of the freshest and most unique gaming worlds I've ever had the pleasure of playing through. The Steam page touts the game as "Prey 2017 meets Portal," and quite honestly I'd have a hard time coming up with a better selling point for the game myself. The level/environmental design here (like portal) is immensely detailed and puzzling, giving the player complete and utter freedom on how to approach it. Each level essentially acts as a giant sandbox of possibilities, complete with a full arsenal of upgradable tools to create some of the most insane chaos imaginable, it's glorious. Not to mention the traversal and movement are perfect for navigating the levels in a way that feels right to you. I seriously love how every approach to this game is the correct approach, letting the player craft the game through their own meaningful lens, SO cool. I however won't discuss the story or specific gameplay mechanics, as it's something best experienced blind, british quirks and all. If you love puzzle games with emphasized freedom, exploration and amazingly janky combat/controls, play. this. game. And if you don't, play it anyway, it rules.

You play as the last fox on Earth. At least until you escape a forest fire and give birth to four little cubs into a world that is rapidly crumbling. One cub is stolen away in the night, and now it's up to you to find your missing cub while keeping the others safe.

I have never cried so hard at any video game ever. Or probably any piece of media.

Visuals

Endling is done in a low-poly style, which really works for this desolate world. The world might be dying, but it doesn't look empty. There are lots of little details to tell you about what is happening here, like the bags of trash strewn about, the falling towers, and derelict buildings. The color palette is quite drab as everything is falling apart and rusted and dirty, and you always play at night. The fox is the main source of color being bright red.


Sound Effects + Music

The music and sound effects in Endling are quite minimal, but when they are more noticeable they really add to the stress and emotion of the game. The mournful yips when the cubs lose their mother, her injured cry, the dramatic doom music when a human catches her. It's not pleasant, but it is impactful. And when you hear some familiar sounds at the end, you know what's coming...

Gameplay + Controls

Endling is the most stressful game I have ever played. It's not because the mechanics are terribly difficult, it just feels like too much is at stake if you mess up. You control the mama fox as she works her way through this desolate world. The layout of the areas are kind of maze-like, since you're stuck in a 2D plane, despite the world being 3D. You can only change directions at specific points, which can make it a little hard to find outself around. Luckily, there's a map.

The main, and most important, game mechanic is finding food for the cubs. You can sniff to find a scent trail. and then you have various ways of actually obtaining the food. Things like apples and berries, just require interacting with the bush or tress. Live prey requires some stealth and good timing to catch it. But no matter what, you must keep those babies fed. If the fullness bar bottoms out, they will die.

Each night you have a limited amount of time to explore, find food, and complete events before you must be back in the den. Of course, prioritize food! But the more nights that pass the more areas unlock, providing more opportunities for food. Also more opportunities to get killed by roaming humans.

In addition to expanding the map and feeding the cubs, you also need to be looking for the taken cub. Every three nights, a scent trail will appear which shows brief glimpses of what happened to the kidnapped baby. Follow it to learn more, and to head in the correct direction.


Replayability

I would absolutely never replay this game. It's too emotionally stressful. There are missable achievements, and no chapter selection or save states, so you'd have to start from the beginning to get those. My version doesn't have achievements, but even if it did, I wouldn't worry about getting them. This game had too much of an impact on my emotions.

Overall

I absolutely cannot recommend Endling. It's too cruel. To go through all of this, and with the highest hopes, since I not only had all four of my babies, but a baby badger, only to be met with that ending? I know it's the most realistic outcome for these animals, but I wanted to keep at least a shred of hope.

[ played via steam deck ]

So, I've had a load of games I've wanted to get through in the beginning of 2024. I've played a pretty good spread of genres and qualities and got hit with both a blessing and curse: a two-day long, still ongoing power outage. I got sick of playing the things I've been getting through so I took a break with this one. Sitting in the pitch dark, I wasn't sure what to expect, but I... enjoyed my time with it, I think? Although I felt very underwhelmed once I realize how shallow the world, the systems, and the characters were.

It's weird to say, and it sounds a bit pretentious, but have you ever played a game and been struck by the realization that you are not the target audience? Not because the game doesn't appeal to you in themes or genre, but because it feels like its targeting players unfamiliar with what its trying to be? Thats what Citizen Sleeper has felt like to me. I don't like saying it, but it's true, and it boggles my mind ever so slightly because resource management simulators in the way CS presents itself are not new-gamer familiar. Despite this, you are given very long, hand hold-y dumping menus the first time you interact with people, with systems that seem to serve no.. real purpose? After only an hour or two, I had gamed the system well enough to not feel any of its difficulty. Despite the many paths in its story, I never felt pressured or had the fear I couldn't feasibly complete the content available to me. I don't think every game HAS to be difficult or lock me out of content and require many playthroughs (i honestly hate it when games do this), but CS's world would have been the most perfecf place for this and it rarely comes up. You can encounter different endings, yes, but it is entirely possible to accidentally stumble into every piece of content even if you don't fully understand the systems. I was very confused on the condition/energy system for a solid 2+ hours and still managed to complete every time gated prompt with ease thanks to the generous leveling systems and time windows.

In fact, the entire class system is pointless. All it did was ensure that when I finished the game, the stat I had a debuff for was the only one that ended at a +2 bonus rather than a +3. If the stats were fixed or more scarce or even impacted by the choices you made in the story, it would have felt more rewarding to pick and choose what risks you made. Instead, I just chose "what do I have perks for", which often was a +1 or +2 to a critical dice roll, with the option to reroll my dice if they were low costs. There was consistently no stakes present, and the one part of the game (the 3 part DLC? after stories) that stressed how intense and difficult the window of time would be... I completed it in half the allotted time.

I am not a game designer. I don't have a perfect recommendation on how to fix this in a neat way, but removing the outright stat bonuses to dice and only having perks or only providing bonuses as a result of your choices would help increase the pressure and difficulty a little bit, while still feeling satisfying and not changing the core mechanics so much. There were other issues I had with balancing (by the end of the game I had an overflow of 700 coins, and could effectively buy any of the balancing resources necessary without thinking), but this was probably the most game-breaking. It removed any hint of strategy I faced, and I felt really disappointed by this aspect of the game. I hoped that the story and overall world-building would suffice in picking up this slack, but...

The premise at CS's core was great. I loved the idea of our emulated Sleeper robot self finding their place, seeking refuge and their place in the world. It was fun to meet characters and find new places constantly that made the Eye feel alive, but unfortunately the writing, aside from a few select characters, felt so bland. It is well written for the most part in its prose and when it has things it wants to say, but the actual time we spend with most characters to get to know them is short.

One character I really liked was Tala, a bartender who you meet after facing discrimination for being a Sleeper, and eventually befriend and work for. Unfortunately, you talk to her for a few minutes, do some fetch-dice-quests, and then suddenly you speak in another visual novel-esque sequence and you are already good friends. None of the build up is actually there, on screen, and while I still liked the relationship the MC and Tala have and the things I learn about her, it still feels like I'm not even experiencing this in my own story. It happens without me, and this occurs multiple times with other NPCs. The after stories fix this and is genuinely the better part of Citizen Sleeper's entire campaign, but it happens so late. You're given brief impressions of characters and asked to invest in them, and you do and you can, but I wish that 75% of them had been expanded on whatsoever. Feng was wonderful, as well as Peake and Riko, but they are also the few characters who have long and sprawling storylines that interweave with the Eye's political turmoil and each other's struggles at least tangentially.

Even the big political factions are only brief mentions with little impact on the story until the absolute end (and it still feels tacked on). You can choose to provide intel and complete stories where you side with conflicting political factions and rise in their ranks but it never reflects elsewhere.

Citizen Sleeper takes itself seriously, but feels too shy to commit fully to anything. It doesnt want to give you complex narratives, maybe because it doesn't have faith that the dice mechanics are capable of supplementing the decision-making systems, I dont know. But there is a really strong foundation that it fails to capitalize on. I think it's a good game regardless, but that almost makes it worse because I can see so clearly how it could have been great.

I still recommend you pick it up as I enjoyed my time with it, but I dont know... I see they're making a sequel and I hope that when they do, they aren't afraid to be more in-depth with the mechanics and storytelling at hand.

A blindingly bright sun sharpens and softens the silhouette of a cityscape. Short trips under the surface show its inner workings, illuminated artificially and by sunlight piercing through perforations in the hull. It does feel like a walk around the city during a cold clear winter day, the infinite blue sky replaced by a brightness your eyes can't adjust to, the details of the structures so bright and detailed they become abstract.

I'm not very familiar with Oliver Shore's work - I've been introduced to it by NaissanceE and some shared ideas are certainly present here, but it feels less mysterious and oppressive, more playful even, more intimate and person-scaled. Interesting is the use of transparent, organic and sometimes living shapes that seem to be an important motif in the author's work, but I frankly don't know enough about it.

It obviously is very abstract and short - and inspirational. I'll think about how it's using the sun, shadows and most surprisingly aliasing - the very low resolution forcing jagged edges, broken lines and moire effects on you; an unwanted artifact with hundreds of man-hours spent on researching and eliminating it given a new role. Why not give the unwanted another chance - let's take a walk beneath the highway in the sky.

"i'm good at typing, i don't need prove anything." so i decided to get this on switch. but if you're good at typing it's all the more reason to play this on a keyboard because the waves of enemies can get very chaotic very fast and suddenly you're mashing ABXY and wishing you just had listened to the warnings, dug out your usb converter from the closet, and connected it to the damn keyboard. also the switch screen is damn SMALL and you'll be squinting and crying and you can't see the words through your tears. good game otherwise

there are two kinds of reading-heavy crpgs: the novel kind and the taxes kind. disco elysium and dragon age are the novel kind. pillars of eternity is both. bg3 is strictly the taxes kind. if you enjoy micromanaging everything down to who farted in which direction on tuesday and how that affects your spell direction in today’s wind current, you will love this. if you don't enjoy doing that, like me, then you may struggle a bit to just get through it for the story, which is ultimately kind of mediocre and convoluted if you are also, like me, not familiar with dnd lore. but the characters are a lot of fun, and despite the overwhelming amount of content (sometimes less is more, devs, please), if you've been missing fenris and miranda lawson and dorian pavus since bioware's last "succesful" rpg in 2014, well, this definitely fills that hole.

Being someone who loves the practice and execution of photography, this game scratched an itch that most games can't. The idea of a photography game in this specific style, taking place in the shitty future on the verge of impending doom, absolutely ROCKS. Even with no dialogue, the game conveys its message and atmosphere strongly through effective world-building and interesting imagery. Every corner has something new to see, making for some incredibly cool pictures in the process. The amount of familiar camera add-ons makes for great variety in your pictures, along with every single useful editing tool to give them that extra flair. I will say that the camera did bug out for me at times, refusing to switch lenses after activating the flash, but other than that the UI is super easy and intuitive for beginners and seasoned photographers.

For me, photography has always been important in capturing specific moments, memorable moments that you will look back on and happily cherish for the rest of your life. This game is easily the closest thing to replicate this feeling, as the more I capture Umurangi, the more and more I fall in love with it. I couldn't recommend this enough.