Sort of a precursor to today's Itch.io horror microgames. Too slight to leave much impact despite being a cool idea that's theoretically well-suited to its short runtime, and includes one of the worst, most esoteric puzzles I've encountered in a while. The moral choices, supposed to be a test of character, are so obtuse it's hard to even parse them as choices on the first run let alone for them to feel meaningful.

On the other hand frantically opening a door and then locking it again while something closes in on you is the best part of these games and there's an extended, multi-room instance of that in here which is further heightened by the permadeath. Worth a spin if you have the collection.

Sublime indie platforming. Beautifully crunchy "Wind Waker if he PS1" aesthetics, excellent game feel and some ingeniously simple mechanics, with your main collectible also doubling as a permanent buff to your maneuverability. Movement and exploration are continually the method, the goal and the reward.

Also very pleasantly chill. There's enough moments to get the noggin' joggin' and minimum reused concepts keep it fresh, but the whole thing is framed with perpetually minimal stakes to keep it relaxed. Sure I may have felt the blood pressure kick in momentarily with that volleyball game and the boat challenge but they turned out to only require a couple tries each. Dudism's tenet of "take it easy, man" was evidently a design principle on here.

Only problem I found is that navigating the island as a whole, rather than a specific area of it, is a bit of a nightmare. The fixed yet continually rotating camera is mad disorienting. Though I'm not sure I'd change it as this also makes the game world feel far bigger than it really is and makes seamless areas feel more like distinct levels than you usually get in a 3D collecty platformer. That, and some of these characters (though the writing is unusually tolerable for this "whatever bro" indie vibe, even got a few laughs from me) are a bit overly verbose and the jump/fly button is also the talk button - many, many times I tried to move away from a character only to get locked into their entire life story. Also the absurd amount of fish needed for the fishing achievement, I wont chalk that up as a flaw but the all-consuming obsession game designers have with implementing fishing continues to mystify me.

I won't say it's too short but it's the first game in a while that I 100%'d and then wished there was more to do, after I'd finished I spent a while just flying around enjoying the feel of it. The more I think about it the harder it is to fault. Something like the platonic ideal of a game pass game, too, though I can see myself buying it just to support the dev further.

The game that launched a dozen millionaire YouTuber careers, helped usher the golden/cursed age of the let's play and marked a watershed moment in horror game design. Yet when The Dark Descent was busy being extolled as the scariest game evar I was that faint, squeaky "nuh-uh!" at the back of the congregation.

Despite being an avid fan of both horror and adventure games and, as a result, being an early fan of Frictional Games via the Penumbra series, I'd always been lukewarm on Amnesia and somewhat baffled by its monumental mainstream success. Besides not being scary (as I'd claim back then) it was just annoying to play through, with its sanity bar, incessant distortion effects, constant voiceover monologues that make you walk through molasses while listening, endless flashes to bright white in a game expected to be played in the dark, oil that burns out in 30 seconds and a character deathly allergic to any room with lighting below 2,000 lumens. I felt the horror gameplay was not only overly basic but bogged down with all this useless annoyance, as if they saw Far Cry 2’s infamous perpetually jamming guns and thought that’s what our whole game should be.

Well 14 years later, removed from the hype and coming off a newfound (or perhaps rediscovered) respect for this team off the back of SOMA and The Bunker I can see I was for the most part missing the forest for the trees on this. Those white screen flashes and molasses-walk voiceovers can still buzz off and the scripted distortions do drag on a bit now and then but mostly I was just too familiar with Penumbra and had grown bored with Frictional's tricks at precisely the same moment the internet got obsessed with them. With Penumbra now fading from my old man memory I can see now there’s a lot of good here that I'd been taking for granted.

A sanity bar still irks me a bit in principle because it feels like the game trying to tell me my own reaction, but not being able to look directly at enemies and mechanically making the player actually afraid of the dark itself are both genius, and having to balance two competing stats in trying not to go crazy and trying not to die adds a perceived weight to one's moment-to-moment decision making throughout. The lantern oil is particularly stingy at first but if you're even a little conservative you'll soon have more oil than you'll need, so that it's not annoying, yet very rarely have enough at once to feel comfortable. Not to mention trying in vain to keep a dwindling flame alive in the depths of darkness is a powerful visual motif in line with the sanity theme and the writing's Lovecraftian ambitions.

An organically induced fear of the dark and the management of light were near-perfected in last year's brilliant and relentlessly oppressive Amnesia: The Bunker, but we have to walk before we can run and The Dark Descent lays a solid groundwork before they were brave enough to really get sadistic on a gamer. Perhaps more notably it's Amnesia's first sequel, A Machine For Pigs, that made me rethink the light management most, in that one you can use your light indefinitely with no consequence and ironically that abundance makes it feel like something is sorely missing. In that game you never feel like you're in real danger, where here (and even far moreso in The Bunker) it never feels like you're really safe. For immersive horror that's nothing short of a triumph.

Most of all though I realize now that I was wrong about one thing above all else, and now I'm no longer too cool to admit the truth: The Dark Descent is scary. Hugging a wall, moving slowly through the dark, thinking you're really going to make it, hearing that music cue, making a break for it and frantically trying to open a door, close it again and block it on the other side is still some of the most exhilarating moments any game can offer. Frictional's beautifully wonky physics engine ensures that opening drawers never gets old and that doors will always max out your heart rate during a chase. When you're a bit fatigued with no-combat 'pursuer' enemy designs it's good to return to the masters and be reminded why it got so popular in the first place.

Puzzles mostly strike a good balance in turning your brain on enough to get the dopamine flowing without being likely to get you stuck (though I did once resort to the patented adventure game tradition of just trying every item on every other item - a jar on a string, of course, why didn't I think of that? Also that pipe wall puzzle was fucking stupid), the writing is pretty good throughout - enough to make me actually eager to be picking up another note - and the villain has possibly the most epic voice evar.

There's an abundance of muddy dungeon maze environments but somehow there's still enough variance and novelty in the puzzles and monster encounters to keep this descent compelling even 14 years, many sequels and countless imitators later. My return to Castle Brennenburg was a fruitful one beyond my expectations. It turns out sometimes it's not everyone else who was wrong, sometimes it just takes another 500 games in the log to begin to understand the genius you'd previously dismissed.

This game is a total disappointment, a very good shooter with very good graphics, mechanics and action, which is precisely what it has the least. It feels like a Netflix series, but a bad one, it focuses much more on its boring and uninteresting story than on the action, it also has many slow and boring parts or very poorly done platforming parts. The best thing about the game are the shootouts and this is precisely what it has the least, however, and they also have a strange level of difficulty, not only these but the platforming parts, which have the worst checkpoints I have ever seen in my life. , since they don't make any kind of sense. The cinematics are the worst thing about the game, they decided to use live action scenes, slow, boring, with a bad plot, poorly acted and with very poor photography, they take away all the freneticism of the game and do not contribute anything, in addition to the fact that they decided to make it part of streaming or something like that, so you can't see them playing offline (??? it doesn't make any kind of sense. There are also parts of the game that have a lot of sound problems and so on. It's very poor, too much wasted potential, if they had focused only in the action and the shootings, and if they had made the game shorter, it could easily be five stars...

A beautiful puzzle adventure about linguistics, culture, and the benefits of understanding one another, inspired by The Tower of Babel.

Chants of Sennaar does a fantastic job with its ludonarrative; The goal is to decipher the languages of different civilizations, achieved by analysing environments and conversations. All the while, we learn about their ways of life and what led them to the current day and the lives they live. This dual purpose really resonated with me, and I personally think it struck an absolutely perfect balance between gameplay depth and narrative substance.

I adored the use of different linguistic mechanics that make you turn your head a little when it comes to certain puzzles (as well as the different script styles inspired by existing languages). It may not be as intricate as it could have been, but it’s enough to make you go “ahhh! cool!” when you notice certain things for the first time.
Thinking about it from the opposite perspective, it was clear that a lot of care was taken into simplifying certain aspects to make sure the puzzle solving felt smooth, accessible and rewarding. An example of how this is done is the removal of many “less interesting” words in the glyphs given to you, such as “the”, and “a”. We only have to focus on the parts that are meaningful to the purpose of the game and its world. The translation experience is finely crafted for that of a game player, and not that of a PhD student, which is what keeps it fun!

Many reviews complain about the stealth sections breaking up the pacing, I disagree with this, possibly due to me being a huge sucker for the narrative. I just found that these sections blended in with the journey so well, added in a unique feeling throughout the exploration that otherwise wouldn't have been felt, and did way more good than any harm they may have done by taking you away from puzzles. They don’t take up that much of the game anyway, and some of them had dialogue to analyse throughout! Keeps the brain thinking in both ways.

Great presentation, with an especially amazing soundtrack. Even though a fair bit of the game had me slowly backtracking, it was just too striking of a world to get very upset about it.

This is definitely up there as one of my favourite puzzle games and I recommend it to anyone who thinks it sounds remotely fun. The morals told are reflected greatly within the gameplay, which is also executed extremely well.

Exquisite grand guignol steampunk vibes withstanding, this game’s departure from the bare-bones survivalist elements of the first game into something a little more patient was quite refreshing for a while. Unfortunately that means that all the enemy encounters that DO occur are so awkwardly stitched into this atmospheric and anti-capitalist narrative that they sort of negate the questions of empathy that are posed by the narrator (one of the strangest attempts at a redemption arc if you ask me). I found myself more haunted by the demonizing portrayal of the pig-human atrocities and wondered how much of this is meant to be read as actual thoughtful social critique versus the occasionally goofy and simplistic trashy exploitation that it ends up being. If anything it feels more like empty fan-service to have these monsters loom over every second of the gameplay.. echoing pig squeals and earth shattering booms clouding up much of time you spend navigating the factories, sewers, muggy streets and reading clumsily littered journal entries explaining everything to the player. Per usual, The Chinese Room craft something quite luscious to look at and listen to (Dear Esther and EGTTR are both masterful) but it’s hard to shake the lack of clarity when it comes to the cumulative vision here. It felt most apparent in the chaotic climax when the camera would frequently and violently shake, making the muddy colors of the interiors bleed together into unintelligible masses for periods at a time, or when our “protagonist” would slowly slip into a dark area to hear the fiftieth voiceover monologue and for some reason the game takes away your lamp to make it SpoOkY, or when I fell through the map and bugged out of game’s space for the third time. It’s a beautiful mess I don’t regret playing, but TCR is capable of making bigger and better things than what felt like little more than a franchise sell-out here.

I love it when you establish that a society is brutally racist and that black people are an underclass who live in abject poverty, and then having a black woman decide to fight against that society before having white characters (one of whom was at WOUNDED KNEEE), start moralising about how awful this woman is for wanting her freedom and then comparing her to the racist leader of the very city that oppresses her as "basically the same." This is such a normal thing to do and definitely not racist. I love it when your white character who literally did a genocide is given more moral complexity than the one black character who is a freedom fighter who just becomes willing to kill a child out of absolutely nowhere just so you can justify having another white character kill her. Also that character is both a daughter figure for the MC and also a love interest for the player because how else can men interact with women right.
This game isn't actually half a star, there are some okay parts and also some good parts, mainly the Lutece twins who are fantastic. Also that scene where songbird dies in rapture. The dlc gives Elizabeth actual autonomy which is nice and booker isn't even in the second chapter which is great.
Look the reason i hate this game so much is because the writers probably thought they were being politically progressive, dealing with themes of christian fundamentalism and the bloody history of America. They essentially start the game by giving you to throw a baseball at an interracial couple. The developers are screaming at you that this is going to be a serious game, and all that build up ends up them scolding the one black character in the story for daring to stand up to a society that hates her, all under the guise of some faux liberal progressivism. This ends up with a game thats political message that is completely soulless. The one conclusion you can draw is that fighting racism is just as bad as being racist, and if that isn't the most cowardly thing I've ever heard then I don't know what is.

Mehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

I have not played the original RE3. Throughout my playthrough I could do nothing but compare this to Resident Evil 2 Remake. In doing so, my thoughts on this game can probably be explained pretty well. This game was released just 15 months after RE2 came out. It’s clear that RE3 relies heavily on the systems and assets that were used in its predecessor, this shouldn’t be a problem as long as it feels like it’s doing something new with such systems, but it doesn’t really, and I think that’s the underlying theme of how this game generally feels incredibly mediocre, uninteresting or unmemorable to me.

I would say about 30-40% of the game was actually really good, it had tension and interesting interconnecting level design. The rest, while still somewhat engaging in terms of gameplay, felt lacking in any sort of real survival horror excitement.

The story felt very barebones (yes, even for an RE game), Jill and Carlos did not take my interest very much at all. If the game was longer this certainly could have been different.

I give the game credit, a couple parts gave me some good challenges, more so than RE2 did, which was fun. I died a total of 17 times, although a few of those definitely felt unfair and frustrated me a bit, setting me back quite a bit, having to redo some of the more boring sections in the game.

And then there’s Nemesis. From what I have heard they really shafted it compared to the original, totally believable. Most of the sections involving it feel so scripted to the point of blandness. The actual boss fights are okay.

I realise this review is quite vague. I can’t really articulate too well why I was not resonating with RE3. It simply is a case of the vibes didn’t feel right ¯\(ツ)/¯.

Kinda disappointed with this one honestly.
It's alright, but it's not great - which is kinda what I was expecting after the glorious RE2 Remake. It's way too short, with no incentive to do multiple playthroughs as I got everything in the first run-through anyway - and it took just over 5 hours.
I will say, the story and set pieces are bombastic and the gameplay is mostly fun, although Nemesis is more of a bullet sponge that blocks progress for a few minutes, than an actually credible threat that makes your ass clench up when he shows up like Mr X was the previous game.
You also spend such a little time with the characters in this that there's not a lot of time to let them grow. I don't know who the fuck Carlos even is because he has never shown up anywhere else in the mythos. I at least have some kind of attachment to Jill coz she's one of the OG's, but even here there's very little personality to her at all besides some snarky comebacks. There are also no iconic areas, like the RCPD in 2, the Baker House or the titular Village in VIII, just because you go through every environment really quickly, with no real substantial back-tracking or puzzle-solving at all. The lack of convoluted RE puzzles is probably my most missed part of the game.
I haven't played the original, just because I was too young to be even cognizant of its existence when it came out, but I know there was some cut content in this one that fans were not happy about, especially considering 2 was such a faithful remake of the original. I don't know what happened here though, perhaps they were putting more eggs into the VIII basket and just let this one slip. Overall very disappointing, but I have no other way to experience this story right now so I guess it'll have to do.

Don’t like it quite as much as the original but still a fantastic remake. Gameplay manages to feel just like classic RE despite all the changes, which is pretty impressive. This is mostly due to resource and enemy balancing which is spot on. Was a bit worried about the removal of ink ribbons on standard difficulty but this didn’t seem to make much of a difference in terms of tension or strategic gameplay.

Storytelling gets an upgrade in a lot of ways which makes this feel less like a schlocky b movie and more like a James Cameron film. I still enjoyed the story and appreciated the game going for a different tone but I imagine this might be a turn off to some.

Overall enjoyed it a lot and think it’s really cool capcom was able to largely replicate the gameplay experience of the original despite changing so much.