Chandler Wood's Reviews
Anamorphine is a good experience hiding inside of a rough package.
Salary Man Escape is an interesting idea for a puzzle game, but its execution ends up being more along the lines of the very drudgery that it tries to parody, rather than the escape that video games promise. It relies a little bit too heavily in its physics, which creates object collision issues in the more complex later levels. Fortunately, the driving '80s Japanese pop soundtrack helped to drive away the feelings of frustration and boredom that threatened to overwhelm the Salary Man. When object collision isn't getting in the way, Salary Man Escape is an interesting VR puzzler, but like finding moments of respite in the nine to five, those moments are all too rare.
Past Cure is an odd mash of Max Payne, The Evil Within, Heavy Rain, and a bit of Inception, without ever fully realizing any of those influences—compartmentalizing each section instead of creating a unique blend. Ideas teased early on never come into play, with nightmares and the real world staying largely separate from one another until the script calls on them not to be. An intriguing narrative is interrupted by long bouts of boring wave-based shooting against generic enemies in dull locations. I can't help but think of the early moments in Ian's house, seeing ceramic horrors in reflections and being excited for a cinematic psychological-horror action game that would never come to be.
Beholder is an interesting management sim with brilliant morally ambiguous themes taking center stage, however it suffers from imbalanced execution.
Stifled is an exercise in taking a great idea and applying it to a worn out genre. The indie horror tropes bleed through, despite a unique initial premise. Mumbling under my breath to be able to see barely plays into the narrative, and no scare ever got me to scream out loud, so it didn't quite have the intended effect, seeming more like a gimmick by the end. The tired horror ideas became quickly obvious when VR and mic audio are not used. Gimmicks are the only legs that Stifled has to stand on, and when the novelty of them wears out, there's only a tried and dull horror experience underneath.
At its core, I understand what AER: Memories of Old was trying to do. AER has a deep story to tell and it has a beautiful way that it wants to do it, but it never manages to marry those ideas. Wanton exploration with little-to-no real payoff becomes a chore—a beautiful chore sure, but a chore nonetheless. There are only so many times I can shift back and forth between bird and human midair before I need something else to drive my engagement. Telling the story through environment, providing better direction, and rewarding extensive exploration are just a few things that could have really helped AER to escape the high res, low poly shell that it is, but AER: Memories of Old is simply too empty to feel like anything more.
Lethal VR fails to dial up the phasers from stun to kill, a decidedly less lethal experience on PlayStation VR than its original Vive counterpart. It has a really fun arcadey core that could make for some great quick VR shooting gallery moments, but is hamstrung on PSVR by a tightened field of action and piss-poor accuracy using the Move controllers. Lack of any real stats outside of local high scores limits replayability and I was happy to delete it off of my PS4 after only an hour and a 100% trophy list, feeling no real desire to revisit the range. I’m a huge supporter of VR, but Lethal VR on PlayStation VR feels like the kind of rushed and gimmicky experience that could end up doing more harm to the medium than good.
If rumors are true that we’ll see the conclusion of King’s Quest before the end of the year, I’m concerned that it will be rushed out too quickly for its own good. Or maybe it’s just the odd numbered chapters that are the knockouts, offering great story and puzzles. Time will tell how the story concludes, but Snow Place Like Home is the weak link in the King’s Quest chain, with weak environments, terrible puzzles, and a lack of any real immersion in the narrative choices as Chapter Four gives players the cold shoulder.
Lost Sea harbors (see what I did there?) a good idea and bright visuals with flawed execution. Although roguelikes are inherently designed to be somewhat repetitive, each one often has a hook that helps it to be more than just its basic design. Lost Sea never expands on its primary structure to give players much incentive to return and try to make it further. Add in having to manage the life of the crew — which could have been a good hook, given better risk/reward and AI — and Lost Sea seems more chore than challenge; a tightly locked coffer filled with possibilities. But what good is a treasure chest if the seal remains shut, even if it does look really good?
Impressively updated graphical prowess for a unique visual styling isn’t enough to save it from a myriad of cheaply laid gameplay issues. Deadlight’s problem was never its graphics. Its issues are more inherent to the four-year old gameplay design that doesn’t allow the player to feel responsible for getting themselves killed. Handing the player an axe that barely does a thing. Launching them into spike pits they don’t know they need to leap over. And technical issues with platforming that either stick players to walls or drop them into the waiting hungry hordes. Deadlight could have been a good game, and maybe four years ago I would have thought that it was, but players today expect a little bit more intelligent core game design in which death is a teaching moment rather than a cheap trick.
From a conceptual standpoint, The Solus Project is fascinating. The sense of scale is amplified in VR, especially the fantastic skyboxes that cycle between day and night, massive planets in rotation around you, and the ferocity of the elements. That feeling of being stranded in an alien landscape, needing to survive, and needing to explore to complete your mission are a heavy weight from the drop. Where The Solus Project fails is in gameplay mechanics and puzzle psychology. Overly ambiguous controls and solutions meant that most of my playtime was a campaign of frustration and overcoming meaningless obstacles. The Solus Project is a game that I wanted to like, but every time it did something redeeming, I could be certain that another gameplay frustration was just around the corner.
Candlelight is a lot of great and fun ideas that feel more disjointed than cohesive. Rather than teach the player or provide a challenge, it throws things at you as if to say “hey, check this cool thing out,” without utilizing that mechanic as a lesson to overcome future challenges, instead getting redundant by often falling back on very basic platforming in the later levels. A bit more thought out design could have made Candlelight shine its own candle as an indie gem, but as it stands, the enjoyment waxes and wanes as little more than a testament to a bunch of pretty cool ideas that the developer had.
Goat Simulator is unapologetically absurd but fails to meaningfully give players anything to do beyond the occasional ridiculous party trick. It was a fun ride for an evening or two, but the novelty quickly wore off as I found myself fighting with poor mechanics that add nothing to the rapidly repetitive zany nature of the game. Don't get me wrong, it has its funny moments — I mean, you're a physics-centric goat that kinda, sorta wrecks some stuff and can turn into a whale — but the moments fizzle out all too quickly. It's not that it's bad. It's just really not all that good.
I wanted so much for Thief to be fun, and in the beginning I did have a lot of fun with it. But, due to no sense of impact in the story and its unrewarding gameplay, it degraded into a chore well before the final act. While playing Thief I couldn't help but feel like I'd done this all before, and often in a better setting. Thief may be a throwback to the early days of stealth games, but this reboot really feels aged and dated. While there is some fun to be had, you will have to sift through a mess of problems to find it. Now, this is the part where I insert the obligatory "Thief didn't manage to steal my heart" line, right?
There's a small shimmer of something fun and interesting under the 13 years of rust that coats Cel Damage HD. While certain areas show potential, others show the age of the game. If you're itching for local multiplayer car combat, Cel Damage HD may whet your appetite. This isn't a game that I absolutely don't want to play at all, but it's not going to be anywhere close to the top of the list of things I decide to pull out and play, especially given the massive selection out there. Cel Damage HD is like re releasing a mediocre car from a decade ago and only giving it a fresh coat of paint. Without any significantly new content added to this year's model, consider this a 13 year late mixed review of the original.
While I loved getting that classic RPG nostalgia, much of the game found certain levels of tedium that quickly drove the experience of Pier Solar from nostalgia to a chore. Whether it was finding the correct path to take, healing after battles, or finding myself fighting the same set of enemies repeatedly, the lacking narrative and characters did little to drive me through the overly tedious moments. Pier Solar HD has a lot of potential, and fans of the classic 16-bit RPG may find a lot to love in a game that abandons a lot of the more modern day conventions that we see in games, but don't be surprised if you find that classic feeling starting to hide behind all of the little problems that litter the playing field.
The Escapists holds the methodical tedium of a prison life simulator with some escape mechanics built in, rather than a thrilling game in which you plan your escape. More focus on teaching the intricacies of the mechanics in-game would have done wonders for The Escapists and actually hatching and carrying out a master plan for escaping confinement, because at its core The Escapists is a thrilling concept. Instead we get stuck going through the motions like it's The Sims: Prison Life as we realize we're two months into our sentence and no closer to being on the other side of those bars than the day we got thrown into the joint. Time to hit the showers, boys!
Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl is a great Smash clone that painfully underutilizes its Nickelodeon license, to its own detriment. Lacking some of Nick's biggest characters, franchises, and environments, absolutely no voice lines whatsoever, and all wrapped up in a rather unimpressive package, Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl is a good concept, and one of the best Smash-alikes to come along in the last 20 years. But it really needs a stronger presentation and more thorough use of its namesake license to earn a better foothold as a mainstay character brawler.
A Juggler's Tale is enjoyable for what it is, but it doesn't quite reach the particularly memorable nature of similar indie games it so obviously takes inspiration from. There's a great introspective narrative with some brilliant themes regarding personal freedoms and cutting the strings of toxic relationships throughout, but a short runtime and occasionally obtuse puzzles and mechanics leave it feeling a bit more tangled up than it should by the end.
Golf Club: Wasteland has a great vibe for its somber and solemn story about the end of the Earth, and I loved the concept behind its world. But it's burdened by a golf game that is simply not all that fun (granted, perhaps it shouldn't be fun to golf on the headstone of humanity). Occasional moments that seemed to portend exciting new golf puzzle mechanics were quickly followed by more lobbing to almost out of reach platforms, made intolerable by frustratingly simple mechanics that seem to have an air of randomness and luck. But while I won't be subjecting myself to Iron Mode, I did thoroughly enjoy the story, art, and music throughout as it plainly commented on the state of the world, making at least one round of golf on this post-apocalyptic world very cathartic indeed.