Quarantine Circular, while lacking the same focus as Subsurface Circular, is another engaging untangling of science fiction concepts with interesting characters, and it leaves you waiting for the next instalment.
Vampyr serves delicious ladles of angst and drama with a hearty slice of excellent, morally grey choice system that will genuinely surprise you, all wrapped up in a wonderfully gloomy London. It's just a shame the combat turns a bit sour.
Starman isn't big or brash, but sometimes you just need to sit quietly for a couple of hours and focus on something nice.
The final, pivotal choice in the game wasn’t that difficult for me, because I’d run out of all reasons to care.
All Bad North needs, really, is a little bit more consistency within the random, because currently it’s an experience that I want to go back to, yet am frustrated by.
I’m sort of cross with it! But also want to play it again! Because it might be the most stunning game I have ever seen! Argh!
When you reach a milestone you get a moment of pure, unadulterated glory, but it’s fleeting, like craving a cigarette and quickly realising that nicotine is a chemical lie and cigarettes are shit. Progress feels so gradual as to be nonexistent, and can be instantly wiped out — but not in a calculated way like the difficulty of Dark Souls. In a sort of hopeless way. Each warrior is a tiny Sisyphus.
I want to want to spend more time with it, because there are bits of it I really enjoy. But it needs more than the world map to change a bit, or have seasons, or better social interaction. It needs changes to how it actually works, which is a lot to ask. But the biggest fight I’ve had with Anthem so far is against Anthem.
If nothing else, this is a game where you, a gorilla, can punch a man so hard that he crumbles into his constituent parts, and then pick up his arse and hoof it at one of his mates. I don’t know what else to tell you.
The best bit of The Occupation is creeping around and scrabbling through paperwork, and that bit is bloody brilliant.
Trüberbrook isn’t bad, but it feels like a wedding cake with a couple of tiers missing. Beautiful icing, great craftsmanship on show, but somehow not all there.
The thing is, the problems are there. I don’t know if I can recommend this to someone who isn’t a word nerd. But at the same time, what Inkle have achieved in Heaven’s Vault is tremendous. I don’t know what to compare it to, because there isn’t anything.
I wish my adventure on the Helios hadn’t ended so abruptly and I feel a wee bit short changed, but I’d still be really pleased if they announced an add-on
I’ve been very positive about A Plague Tale so far, and it is indeed a good game.
Draugen does a lot of tropes very well, but it does others in a tired way that garners side eye from me.
Goodness, I was very interested in The Sinking City. I really wanted to love it. But I’m afraid rain may have stopped play this time.
At the heart of Sea Of Solitude is the idea that all emotions can have a positive or negative form — love can be twisted to be something unhealthy or saddening, for example, just as being alone can be quiet solitude or debilitating loneliness.
So, it’s a game with two key strands that feel forced together when they don’t really work in tandem. I like both ingredients in theory, but they don’t coalesce successfully, like how a vinaigrette salad dressing will separate into oil and vinegar until you shake it up again.
The main thing preventing me from enjoying A Place For The Unwilling is that currently there are dozens of little things that don’t work quite the way they’re supposed to, and while they don’t exactly stop you from playing the game, they’re still bloody annoying.
The question of whether Telling Lies is voyeuristic or not doesn’t necessarily have a bearing on the quality of the game — I do, in fact, think it’s good and enjoyed it. But the idea that it isn’t voyeuristic is some laugh.