the first half of this game conducts it's atmosphere with a deft hand, managing to hit a shockingly good crescendo at it's climax. it's hardly a surprise when it fumbles it, losing steam and turning the game into a tedious sort of "hot spot hunt", where standing in places will trigger a new scare for you to jump at. it certainly over stays it's welcome, and i found the scares near the end more than a little cheap, but it's a fun indie romp and probably a blast to play with your friend who gets a little more scared than you do.

it's a clunky mess with a confusing storyline that requires exploration and time, but i truly do love the soundtrack and atmosphere. stroboskop is a one man developer who clearly has a passion for the human aspect of hauntings, and a sense of loneliness permeates sylvio, and it feels like a nail trailing down your spine. i never quite feel completely alone in the world when i open this one, but i know i'm the only person there.

that said the ending beefs it in a way where i'm still trying to grapple with the game over five years later

the path is a video game in which you assume the role of little red riding hood on her way to grandmother's house in the forest. it is a shockingly vibrant game, with an art style rooted in modern pop art and the uncanny valley nature of playstation 2 models, which makes the long trek to grandma's house a blindingly bright experience. it is pure white, ketchup red and vomit green with inspired, whimsical character designs laser-focused on communicating character personality and nothing else. upon reaching your goal, you shuffle uncomfortably through grandma's empty, foreboding house with a sense of unease, and then your character's model settles on the bed next to the corpse-like image of her grandmother, and you get the news. you were ranked with a "failure."

as a walking simulator, the path is equal parts game and art experience. it is a horror tinted vision where the goal is to encourage you to think and relate to the game in your own way. playing the path felt like holding a microscope up to my own recollection of childhood memories, picking out the moments that seemed to echo the path. it is primarily interested in the dissection of childhood and what it feels like to grow up in a world that you're still learning about. each of the little red riding hoods has her own personality, storyline and wolf to encounter in the woods, adding to this feeling of growing up as you play. proceeding from youngest to oldest is a stark experience of growing up from a young girl to a teenager and then burgeoning young woman; it echoed my own life experiences in a haunting way, but perhaps it wouldn't be as such for every other person out there.

decorated with a unique artstyle that indulges in the doll-like appearance of ps2 models, the path also sounds lovely with an ambience that has not be replicated in games since it. it is handcrafted to feel like a fairytale that is held together with wire, drapes and shadows, never quite revealing what it's end game is until you decide you've had enough and want to digest it on your own. it has a vested interest in leading you through an emotionally uncomfortable experience, allowing each player to have a unique take on what they interpreted the game to be about. the closest thing to it is looking at a painting and talking to other people about it: everyone notices and feels something different, so robust conversation that gives you peeks into one another as human beings feels like a component that has been baked into the path.

it is a bug-laden mess that is a pain and a half to get running these days, and when you get it to, there's still hoops to jump through. still, getting it to play feels like hitting a coffin after digging into the earth for hours. it feels like a skeleton you shouldn't be looking at, like the past is haunting you as you play.

it's worth noting that there is simply no user interface to this game. in fact, it probably is one of the earliest examples of a modern game completely forgoing a UI to hammer in the experience of it's stage. it expects you to learn to walk on your own, taking the game at your own pace and exploring as you wish, alongside the red riding hood of your choice. in this day and age, this doesn't quite achieve the effect it did almost fifteen years ago, but i'm sure that it added to the sense of disorientation back then. it just felt like something worth mentioning: there are multiple instances where things feel dated. the intuitive ui is one example, but the writing can be another. overwrought at times with a desperate need to sound like a page out of a fairytale, it can miss the mark when it really cannot afford to.

i don't think this is a game for everyone and i would hesitate to recommend it even to close friends. if you like stuff like night in the woods or what remains of edith finch, this #ArtGame might be for you. it's a masterclass in atmosphere, topped with some of the most uncomfortable gaming experiences i've ever had that were completely on purpose. the path is also arguably the best of tale of tales' gaming catalogue, and the development team's thumbprint is still pressed into the silicon form of gaming today.

this feels like a departure from chilla's art's game catalogue.

it's impressive for that alone, but i can't say anything about it scares-wise stuck out to me. i think that if you like the slow build of dread that seems perfected in j-horror, you'll like this one especially. it's a little tongue-in-cheek: you play as a young person investigating the sudden death of their brother, who hosted a radio show where he read ghost stories. the location works and gives the impression of an abandoned town in the mountains, removed from anyone who could help you. chilla's art is a devteam staffed by two brothers, who focus on making horror games. i get the sense they wanted to have a little ghoulish fun with this one. it worked, for the most part: i had fun with it, too.

the most obvious departure from previous games by this dev is that getting around features driving from point A to point B, then back and again. it feels awful by my own standards, but it's not time wasted. they use it for two effective jumpscares.

the less obvious departure is the more abstract progression. when i play a chilla's art game, even though there are multiple endings, it feels very streamlined and natural. my playthroughs never give the impression of sudden, pointless endings or superficial differences. they feel precisely like the ending that playthrough worked toward. in this one, that feeling doesn't quite settle in. i knew immediately that there were other endings. maybe this was intentional, but it was a disappointment for me. this is largely done through how abstract progression is: i got the impression that i was jumping from point A to point D at times, getting ahead of myself and the story. while this openness might be appreciated by others, it mostly left me wondering what in the world i was supposed to be doing.

i did like the ghost stories that masaki told on the tapes. i found that genuinely enjoyable and i wanted to hear more of them; it was marginally disappointing when the #CursedLetter stuff began happening and i was expected to piece together a code. the attempt was nice, but it could maybe be handled in a way that doesn't detract from the experience.

overall, it's fine. in fact, the ambiance, the plotline, and ghoulish tone all worked for me. the issues i had just simply stuck out like a sore thumb. it's not a new favorite and i won't be returning to it if i'm in the mood for a chilla's art game, but i like that they're trying new things on and hope the trend continues.

a huge part of my upbringing was yu-gi-oh!, and i think it left a bigger mark on me than other media i consumed as a child. i watched digimon, and i liked sailor moon, but i just cannot disentangle ygo from my childhood and even teenhood. as such, i have a fondness for the macabre (yugi was very obviously Goth Lite by his school's standards), and easy card games (since the anime made the rules of the actual game much easier to watch and digest in 22 minute episodes) . inscryption, as such, scratches an itch i didn't know i had: my favorite gameboy advance game was yu-gi-oh!: the eternal duelist soul, which i played and beat multiple times over several years until my advance suffered a horrible water related accident.

inscryption has a way with atmosphere that is no shock to anyone who played any of daniel mullins' games. pony island in particular made a splash in the horror indie scene, so you may know of him through that. mullins, for the uninitiated, has a sort of on-going universe his games take place in. they are thick with atmosphere and fourth wall breaking, often to the point that the game can continue beyond the game file itself. so, it wasn't any surprise to me when there was more beyond the surface of this one. pony island established the lore, and the hex introduced the ARG element into it, and inscryption takes it, and runs with it— for better or worse.

i think that the atmosphere being so thick and engaging, with a surprisingly interesting story, makes the initial coat of paint you're shown almost too good. i found myself missing it when the Reveal happened. for obvious reasons, there was a palpable sense of nostalgia turning in my gut when the shift happened, but it overstayed it's welcome. i think it could be cut down significantly, and not much would be lost— truth be told, i wish mullins' had done what he did with the hex. progressing the story in hex meant you had to actually close the game and engage with the ARG which would lead you to another way to progress in the .exe file. i think this game had the better set up for that.

that said, the ending was worth the time spent, and i really did enjoy myself with this one. there's a few hiccups, and it's not at all a surprise to say that this enjoyed a small blip on the streaming sites with it's first few hours. it was deserved, the card game is simple and fun, so it's easy for people to enjoy even when they don't like card games.

i can't give this full marks, but it's very enjoyable and i appreciate what mullins is trying with his work. it's good at what it does, introduces it's mechanics and gives you everything you need in order to progress quickly while never being too easy. i think it's more for people who don't play card games, truthfully: it's a horror game at it's heart, and i think it does the horror well enough. mullins obviously has a fondness for the genre and haunted software stories, which helps the game carry a lot of heart.

i like it :)

i made a whole-hearted attempt to revisit this for halloween '21. my first pass of this game was noteworthy for how quickly my opinion of it dropped; i cannot say that a second play through changed that. if anything, it solidified what a disappointment i found amnesia: rebirth to be.

it's worth noting that, i think, the biggest problems with rebirth are it's genre (cosmic horror) and the lack of, to be frank, scares. i have some personal gripes with it, but at it's heart, rebirth is a true gothic horror story. there's only one monster that poses any kind of threat to you through out the game: the ghost of grief. it's a somber walk through tasi's memories, unraveling her trauma and loss. after a while, it felt exploitative at best. i get it, something very sad happened to her and salim. this, combined with how the game shows it's cards early and disappoints on delivering it's scares, served me a slice of frustration pie very quickly. there's a few segments that feel like the dark descent, but twice as many that feel like imitators released on steam for $1.99.

it's a polished game with a lot of love in it. i admit that much. i appreciate the bold choices in it, too. i think the setting was a lovely, unique place to take survival horror. the pregnancy related mechanic was an interesting way to update the sanity meter. i just don't think this had any business being a mainline amnesia title. i have to wonder how it would have looked as a standalone title, allowed to breathe in it's own space.

i feel like some of this content should have been in the 2.0 update to the base game as opposed to dlc only. the furniture store, for example, feels kind of egregious since people have been asking about a nook's cranny update or gracie's return since launch.

it's fun. a little over-priced, and slightly too long, but the charm is all there and i had a big, goofy smile on my face when i saw what they did for the credits. designing facilities in particular was very, very fun. i wish we could do that on our main island, but i get the limitations with that.

the aesthetic island tours would be lit beyond belief tho

many years ago, every friday my family and i went to blockbuster. i was allowed to pick out one game. i spotted doa xtreme beach volleyball one night while perusing the shelves, and immediately looked away, as if anyone would care to notice little ol' me, at the tender age of ten, glancing at scantily clad video game women. for weeks straight when i wandered past the shelf this game was left on, i shyly kept my gaze trained to the gummy, navy carpeting. it ultimately took me months to work up the courage to grab it, and even MORE time to ask for it up front. for several weekends, i would put it back, too worried about what people would think.

turns out i'm bisexual. thanks, team ninja!

replayed because rebirth made me question whether i actually would enjoy amnesia in this day and age. not only did i enjoy this, it made me remember being like, 15 and sleeping on the floor of the living room with all the lights i could find on, because i was too scared to sleep in my bedroom. lmao

the expected issues persist (gameplay and puzzles in particular can be frustrating or just plain boring) but the genuine terror i felt is still there. a remarkable feat for something so short-- this feels like what every steam horror game in early access with no hope is trying to be.

outlast if it happened in chuck e cheese and was rushed out for the holiday season so parents would buy their tweens and early teens the new fnaf game at launch

hilariously glitch-drunk and determined to ruin it's own atmosphere, fnaf: security breach seems to be held together by hopes, dreams, and maybe a little bit of chewing gum as a back up. controls are too sensitive or too unresponsive. you can break the AI, or use it to break the game. security breach regularly interrupts itself, freezing cutscenes to deliver information in an obtrusive manner. it feels like watching someone argue with themselves, and thoroughly disrupts any attempt at atmosphere. i haven't touched a fnanf game in literal years, and seeing the animatronics move around and talk like people saps all the unease out of their presence. they are, more often than not, comical to witness. it's consistently bizarre, if nothing else.

the real kicker is that it's not scary, nor is it particularly clever. even if it had been complete upon release, every detail fine-tuned to perfection, it would have drifted somewhere toward mediocre at best. there is nothing about this that sticks out other than the fact it's a tried and true mess.

anyway, i laughed so hard when roxy cried about not being able to catch a 12 year old on foot that i slapped myself

the video game equivalent of reaching into a bowl of candy and discovering it's a 50/50 mix of skittles and m&ms.

there's parts of this game i abhor, and there's parts of it that i love. i absolutely adore the drama, and there's definitely the patented Kojima Cool Factor dripping off venom snake's adventure. but also: quiet and paz did not deserve that. what the hell.

there's this nagging feeling through out that there's something more, and the status of mgsv has been debated for years. mystified, even. it feels like people have been chasing the idea of a complete mgsv since it dropped. despite being a technical marvel, it lacks in heart more often than not. maybe if the relationship between kojima and konami had been more amicable, this would have been a much different game. in the years following it's release, though, it's become abundantly clear that this is just how it is, and how it was always meant to be. the leaked scripts confirming that the game always just kind of looked like this rubs salt into the open wound.

it's not really bad. it's just lacking, and with this being the "end" of metal gear, it feels like mgs itself will always be lacking, now. it's okay, though, at least we got some sick memes out of it