AltChar's Reviews
Kusan: City of Wolves is a mix of Hotline Miami's one-hit brutality and a neon-soaked, Beastars-flavoured world, bringing a tight but punishing gameplay loop, top-down combat, and beautiful visuals.
Helix: Descent N Ascent is a game that doesn't reinvent the puzzle genre, but its wordless, monochrome approach to discovery is rare enough to be worth your time regardless.
At roughly $20 for people who already own the base game, that's a fair price for something that'll keep you engaged for several playthroughs, shortcomings and all. At full price, it's a tougher sell.
The concept of Lunarium as a small Souls-like is just genius. It's just too bad the game won't be defined by the idea, but rather by loads of bugs and unrealised potential.
Cost of Hope is among the best DLCs to have crossed my path in my gaming career, and I'm genuinely grateful I got the chance to play and review it. An incredible story, new characters that genuinely grew on me, and a choice of paths that was harder to make than I expected; level design that blew me away, real variety in mission design, and plenty more besides make this DLC something people are going to talk about for a long time.
The Sinking City 2 is proof that survival-horror doesn't need to reinvent itself to leave a mark; it only needs a team that cares about what they're building, and Frogwares clearly do. Everything the game does well, it does because someone poured real emotion and real feeling into it: the story of Calvin and Faye is genuinely moving, Arkham is one of the most memorable settings I've walked and rowed through this year, and the atmosphere of dread the developers have created is nothing short of spectacular.
A confident, deeply satisfying Soulslike that stands entirely on its own, Mortal Shell 2 is one of the best the genre has to offer right now.
I’ve spent hours playing this game as the ruler Bretania needed, a fair, generous, and patient sovereign. After finishing the game, I’m already thinking about taking it in the opposite direction for my next playthrough (or at least attempting to), and that’s the highest compliment I can give this game.
Whether you decide to play it one by one, or wait for all three parts of the DLC to drop, The Prisoner is an unsettling but solid start to a story I'm genuinely excited to continue.
Cat Isle is a cosy management sim where you get to run a small island filled with shops for a rotating cast of cute cats. It mixes supply-and-demand gameplay with cute visuals and enough details to win over any cat lover.
Spiritstead is a cosy village-builder where you get to restore harmony between humans and spirits around a village-building loop, which can feel a bit overwhelming at times.
Kynseed asks what it means to actually live a life inside a video game, then backs it up with permanent death and inherited legacy, a premise strange enough that I didn't expect to fall for it as hard as I did.
For newcomers, this is genuinely one of the best entry points the franchise has ever had, and it's a chance to understand why Halo mattered enough to standardise so many console shooter conventions in the first place. For long-time fans, it's a faithful, gorgeous retelling with good bonus missions on top of that.
Great combat, awesome boss designs, and a soundtrack that knows exactly when to go from mournful to metal make Dinoblade some of the most fun I've had with a game in a while.
The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu takes a familiar horror co-op formula and pushes it into stranger territory, creating an eerie experience that thrives on atmosphere, mystery, and a constant sense of unease.
DOOM The Dark Ages - Revelations brings back the brutality, speed, and chaos that all DOOM players love, while at the same time showing us a different side of the character that loves ripping and tearing the most.
The Alters: Last Variable is precisely what a DLC should be, and I mean that as sincere praise and not just an empty compliment. It doesn't chase the "basically a sequel" trend other studios have been leaning into. It takes a loose thread from the base game's ending, builds a smaller, sharper story around it, and hands you back every mechanic you remember, whether you like them or not
The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales is a confident, good-looking swing at something quite different for Square Enix's HD-2D lineup. The combat is satisfying, the visuals are some of the best pixel-inspired work I've seen on PS5, and the performance never got in the way of any of it.
Nearly perfect back then, genuinely perfect now: Black Flag Resynced is proof that Assassin's Creed franchise still has its soul.
The biggest expansion yet for globally popular Dave the Diver trades the Blue Hole for a jungle lake and somehow ends up feeling like a sequel rather than a DLC.