Beyond familiar echoes to Silent Hill, Killer 7 is the most obvious touchstone for the combat system and generally flamboyant aesthetic. But Sorry We’re Closed defies the purely imitative qualities of so much indie horror. For whatever mechanical shortcomings it may have, the game exhibits the most confident grasp of its own artistic sensibility this side of Paradise Killer.
Perhaps by its very nature as a sequel, Rise of the Golden Idol was never going to be the revelation that the original was. But by playing to the strengths of the first game’s concept through even more intricate puzzle design, it offers a worthy follow-up in a spirited new setting.
The sharp, imperfect edges of that art become vital, rejecting the seamlessness of higher-budgeted works that obscures the effort that went into their creation. As stop-motion is a jerky and imperfect approximation of motion that’s nevertheless bursting with character, everything about Judero’s construction is nothing short of evidence of its humanity.
Luckily, though, you’ll spend much of Tactical Breach Wizards in the heat of battle, and that’s where it functions best. Few of the scenarios are difficult, and intentionally so; the game is less about raw challenge than having you experiment in pursuit of efficiency and style. Many of the optional, more difficult objectives encourage you to squeeze 15 actions into a single turn or complete a map without letting the enemy ever fire a shot, which means constantly refreshing your actions and movements several times per turn. Even when the characters are patiently waiting their turn, there’s always a remarkable sense of speed to Tactical Breach Wizards.
Yet even these rough edges work in concert toward something singular and idiosyncratic. Indeed, the story becomes hard to pin down in the lead-up to a truly audacious ending, and the occasional abandonment of combat fortifies the horror undertones far more effectively than simply killing everything in your way. Skald may be easy to distill to its overt influences, but its best moments use those touchstones to build something new.
Given the sheer amount of hints and instructional text plastered all over its environments, Crow Country is tuned to be approachable and readily digestible. You’ll never find yourself desperate for resources or racking your brain over a fiendish puzzle. Even the old-school tank controls are optional, mapped to the D-pad just in case any players feel compelled to experiment before going back to the analog stick. These decisions are hardly out of step with the pleasantly nostalgic presentation, but they also ensure that the game succeeds far more as a puzzle object than as a horror freak-out. For better and for worse, Crow Country goes down smoothly.
Coupled with the rest of the game’s failings, it becomes apparent that whatever more complex aspirations Alone in the Dark might have wanted to realize, it didn’t have the resources to achieve them. Its greatest achievement is that, rather than releasing in some broken and clearly unfinished state, it has managed to reach the level of being merely bad instead.
Solium Infernum already has its fans, but more so than the original, it feels as if this remake, given its extremely specific brand of prolonged negotiations and conniving, will live and die by whether it grows that dedicated audience. Perhaps the greatest compliment I can pay Solium Infernum is that I very much hope it finds one so I can play more of it.
Perhaps the greatest compliment that one can pay to A Highland Song is that—unlike any number of games that mark traversable areas in, say, white splotches or yellow paint—it doesn’t feel obviously designed. There are areas in the game that you’ll never reach on a single run, forcing you to make decisions if you want to make it to Uncle Hamish’s lighthouse on time. A Highland Song’s rendition of the Scottish Highlands scans more as a natural space than as a bespoke puzzle, a world instead of a playground. Here, the hills are alive.
That’s how so much of Thirsty Suitors feels to play: stylish to look at and perhaps pleasurable in the moment yet ultimately quite shallow. As a whole, it’s a bundle of middling mechanics carried by strong writing. The story may be about Jala coming to terms with her past while she figures herself out, but the game itself never settles on a cohesive vision of what it should be.
Once we stop sharing in Yasna’s discoveries, the storytelling never quite clicks. Apart from a few stiff flashbacks, players simply don’t get to know enough about Yasna’s fellow researchers to get invested in how their fate drives her search for answers. Yasna’s quest feels detached rather than desperate, with all the game’s themes coldly laid out in dialogue choices. The Invincible does remain reasonably engrossing through to the end, but it never recaptures the interactive vigor of its first half, eventually becoming a bout of scientific calculus on autopilot.
But all that feels incongruent with the game’s source material. Perhaps it’s a bit naïve to hope that any social commentary can survive decades of franchising, but Rogue City’s handling of RoboCop leaves hardly a trace of his origins as a commentary on police violence and militarization. All the time you spend clomping around the faithfully rendered interior of the police station is in service of selling the cops as a force for good, with RoboCop’s actions emphatically meant to make the world a better place. There’s even a dialogue option to call the police a “family,” now totally decoupled from standard sci-fi corporate malfeasance. Rogue City has clearly put a lot of thought and effort into replicating the world of this character, but it does so within a mechanical and narrative framework that never quite fits.
That El Paso, Elsewhere works at all as a drama is a huge achievement. It tackles weighty topics with a maturity that’s rare in gaming, and which is all the more impressive given that it does so within the framework of a shooter that suggests a Halloween attraction as curated by John Woo. It’s emblematic of the game as a whole—a bizarre amalgamation of parts that shouldn’t work yet manages to form something cohesive, soulful, weird, and deeply personal.
Trepang2’s default control scheme even neglects to map the crucial slide maneuver to any button, only triggering when you crouch while sprinting. This can be changed in the options menu, but the oversight speaks to how the game, which launched on PC back in June, hasn’t been rebalanced particularly well for its console release. As frustrations mount with the final level’s poor autosave and maddening boss fight, it becomes clearer than ever that a console is far from the ideal venue to experience this flawed yet inspired shooter.
But the non-linear nature of The Cursed Crew does have its virtues. There are some magnificent moments of discovery where you feel as though you’ve circumvented the level design by maneuvering the right character into the right position to bypass certain guard setups or parts of the terrain. Simply by spending so much time with the characters, you’ll hit upon certain combinations of abilities independently, fine-tuning new strategies all the way up to the end. It’s in these moments that you see what the developers are aiming for, and they suggest that The Cursed Crew could be a tentative step in an exciting new direction for the studio, even if those elements are more notable for how they might be refined in a subsequent release.
Only toward the end does Venba hit upon a cohesive solution for both its story and its puzzles. The perspective shifts from Venba to Kavin, whose complicated relationship with his parents’ culture reframes the friction inherent to the game’s cooking segments: He has difficulty because he hasn’t prepared these dishes before and hasn’t cared to pay attention. Furthermore, his grasp on the Tamil language is rusty, so while he can refer to instructions at the top of the screen, they’ll be inaccurately translated and require the player to experiment while surmising their true meaning. This late change allows the game to finish strong, though the irritation of its earliest puzzles never quite dissipates, like a lingering taste from a dish whose flavors don’t fully cohere.
As for the MFN offices, they’re full of detailed memorabilia like posters, props, and episode scripts, to the point where simply taking it all in is perhaps the game’s main appeal. There’s a tangible love and care that has gone into making the game’s equivalent of Sesame Street studios feel plausible, as well as a clear delight in warping our memory of a show that opened up a world of imagination for generations of children into something darker.
Other UI irritations abound, serving only to further complicate an experience at odds with itself for how much information it wants to communicate at a given moment. On the whole, Jagged Alliance 3 lays some strong groundwork for the franchise’s resurgence, but it often feels like a series of individual victories that fail to work in concert for something greater.
Experimenting will more often reveal methods that do not work rather than validating the loading screen’s impossibly lofty claim to player freedom. Further, the resource scarcity that drives the game is hardly conducive to experimentation, doing more to keep you strictly on the path of least resistance. What motive is there to waste a precious gas can on some hare-brained scheme when you know for sure that it will work just fine in the generator? Certainly the more restrictive means of progression in The Bunker has its own pleasures even within a more open framework, but the game insists on calling a shot that it has no hope of making.
Nothing we see here matters because it’s all been made up for puzzle-solving. As such, the weirdness of the game’s mystery and its visuals is practically obliterated. It’s good, then, that The Tartarus Key squeaks by on the strength of its puzzles alone, because the connective tissue between them seems determined to strip the game of narrative intrigue before our very eyes.