Fun for the first 36 hour long act, but I won't play another 30-something more hours of this to finish up its generic, thin storyline. I think for the entirety of my time playing this, there wasn't a moment where I felt let down by the combat or the breezy quality that you could feel while making progress through levels and storybeats. But I was always wondering--always--how this game in particular could be loved so much yet be so pleasantly boring? I don't get that part of it. But it was nice to play for nearly forty hours, so that says something.

I may have rated this higher had I not played so completionist and bothered with the tacked-on feeling side-quest stuff in Saga's missions, or for the numerous bugs I encountered and the suspicious/impatient attitude they fostered in me during moments where I didn't immediately know what to do. The monotonous stuff in Saga's campaign will always exist, but in the future maybe the bugs won't. So if I ever decide to replay this game (not sure why I would) I would play it differently and probably have a better time. Because, in the end, it's still a pretty good game.

This game's constant revealing of stranger and even stranger esoteric strangeness with every case, the way hitting start you are slammed in the gob by an unexpectedly gnarly tableau, a sinister mise-en-scene with a man burning to death on fire or blasted apart by a canon while wry cultists in various states of masked and undmaskedness make slight comments to say How deserving they were to be killed by us in just that way, oh yes!

Ahhhh! That is all about what I love The Case of the Golden Idol for.

It is 13 deduction puzzles (including the DLC) for you and perhaps a friend on the couch wherein you will become acquainted with a decades long revenge tragedy that tore several families and several kingdoms apart as many people lost there lives in heinous and sometimes magical ways. As you move along the story and investigations grow more complex, which could be a bit fatiguing, especially by the end of the DLC. Though everything here is great, don't mishear me. The art is disgusting. It's visuals and music complete the necessary deranged curious mood to undergird the transmutating tone of a murder-filled horror story into one that equally unnerving as it is subtly hilarious.

This is a game made by some Latvians from Latvia, and maybe, buster, you should just pay them some money and attention.

There isn't an intriguing mystery in the story this game wants to tell, and I think its emphasis on speculative lore is not to its benefit. Who cares about these characters and whether we actually understand their origins and motivations? It's 5 hour game about demonic possession, we will never get answers, and even if we did those answers would not be satisfying. Something else should have driven this trilogy other than a story... it should have remained abstract and mysterious... but as it is, I can only see its obsession with frustrating boss encounters and the incredibly slow pace of its player character as a vehicle and padding for a fuck off story that isn't worth telling.
The visuals and music, and the atmosphere they create are really superb however. And it was fun to see the gameplay expand and get iterated on as the chapters progress. But it all just results in something misguided I think.

Endoparasitic is part of a survival horror renaissance taking place far, farrrrr away from the grotesque, triple-A decadence of the recently released and upcoming remakes of survival horror classics. This is a tactile and sweaty game that captures the elemental tension of what defined this genre in the first place, and it is as refreshing to encounter after such a long period of time as the game is just exhilarating to play. The entirely mouse-based control scheme is charming and fun to play with, albeit maybe inaccessible to some people. It expresses the funny irony that is inherent to all survival horror games, the heightened giddy nervousness of the person who is willfully subjecting themselves to something that they might come to regret. That sinister mood we turn against ourselves feels like it has been captured by the slight storytelling the game does through text documents and brief voice acted cutscenes and narration by its scheming, arrogant scientist protagonist. What an ass he is, and what an ass we might become after placing ourselves into the simulated experience of crawling with one arm through this parasitized mars base. What odds do we really have to survive this? I'm not confident things will go alright, but let's just try it anyhow!

This is pure survival horror through and through, absolute ace work.

Having finished Northern Journey, I can recommend that it is worth puting up with it’s awful combat encounter design to see all the places and things you’ll do on the journey it takes you on. Seriously, there’s so many novel interactions built in between the basic FPS things you expect to be doing in a shooter. It’s constantly surprising you with cool one-off things and visual tricks. I’m extremely impressed with it as a debut despite the horrible combat, and expected roughness, but also just in general. I think a lot of the delightful novelty probably comes from this being the dev’s first game. There is a lot here I could imagine more seasoned devs cutting or working around before, say, implementing a fully controllable hang-glider just for one level as this dev has done.

Another game that has a similar for-the-sake-of-nothing-but-itself, I recommend checking out the 2020 game G-String.