Tyler Fischer's Reviews
With its debut project, Fourattic has serviceably captured and recreated a period, with nostalgia and passion bursting through every seam.
Like many branching narrative games with ample replayability, The Red Strings Club is more about the journey than the destination. But across my four hours with it, I was too often not concerned with either.
Observer is a strange experience, punctuated by many "what the" moments. It's a game you have to talk to somebody about, that will make you reflect, and assault your saneness.
Last Day of June is a personal and emotional journey that brings you to the most beautiful corners of love and the darkest and most painful corners of loss at the same time. It's a compelling journey, with relatable characters within a beautiful world, brought to life with a sensational score. But ultimately, it's uninspired, core ground-hog day gameplay loop hinders and undermines everything that has been built around it.
Like its predecessor, I'm unlikely ever to forget Emily is Away Too. What developer Kyle Seeley has created is a great reminder that excellent immersive storytelling is reliant on only two things: an unique idea, and the vision and passion to see that idea materialize.
Prey often feels like mash-up of some of the best sci-fi survival horror games of yesteryear and Arkane's previous work. And it is. But it also a title with some wildly unique ideas, an incredibly thick and unnerving atmosphere, and an exemplary soundtrack.
Little Nightmares is a genuinely unnerving and eerie experience that never cheaply earns its thrills and scares. Despite an anti-climactic ending and some maladroit platforming sequences, Tarsier Studios successfully delivers a unique, memorable, and incredibly tense experience.
David Jaffe and co. have created something wildly novel, moderately fun, and slightly frustrating with Drawn to Death. In the finished product lies a blueprint for a great game, but mediocre shooting mechanics and a slightly shallow level of content holds back Drawn to Death in the end.
Alas, Old Time Hockey by and large was a disappointing experience. On paper, it had potential to be a good game. But as a finished product it is disappointingly held back by wads of jank and unpolish, and a few too many half-baked features.
How Night in the Woods manages to capture the anxieties of being stuck in the gap between adult and childhood, how it tackles serious topics like depression, and how it brilliantly understands and recreates the hardships of rural America, is worthy of admiration. Put more simply, Night in the Woods is a unique breath of fresh air, and an experience I’m likely to not forget for a long time.
In single, isolated moments, Sniper Elite 4 is a great game. However, mediocre AI, a throw away story, and a lack of polish in some key places, prevent it, as an entire package, from being a great game.
Divide has the potential to be a decent game, but it’s over ambitiousness in the face of its low-budget ultimately nets a forgettable, half-baked sci-fi game. If Exploding Tuba Studios dumped the twin stick gameplay, and instead fully-embraced the adventure genre, I would be interested in seeing it take another stab with a new game. But more Divide? No thanks.
The Dwarves has a lot of potential. If it was made on a AAA budget, I believe it could have been one of the best games this year. But it wasn’t. I thoroughly enjoyed my 15 hours with it, but I’m also well aware of its numerous, easily identifiable, shortcomings. If your a dwarf connoisseur, then I can recommend this game. If you enjoy fantasy RPGs, and don’t mind tactical (though it’s hardly that) combat, then I can also recommend this game. But if you don’t particularly love either of these things, then The Dwarves from KING Art Games, may not be the dwarves for you.
As someone who has ADD, it's difficult for me to concentrate on a game for even 30 minutes — yet, Small Radios Big Televisions plucked me out of reality and dropped me into its world for two hours. I never once looked away when playing it — something that has only happened to me one other time. It was upon that realization, that I knew Fire Face had created something unique and special in an industry deprived of originality.