Recent reviews by BlueRaja

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A short walking simulator that takes about 30 minutes to beat. It's a decent story reminiscent of "Saw", with a handful of possible endings, but with such a short runtime it's hard to build up any sort of character development or twists.

Still, I think it's overall worth trying, especially for the price.

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Another low-effort Exit 8 clone. Like most other games in the genre, the entire game consists of one room that you walk through over and over again. The game doesn't even attempt to add anything novel to the genre - it's just a direct ripoff of Exit 8, with several of the anomalies being almost exactly the same.

The game doesn't have a title menu, or any options aside from "mouse sensitivity". They also abused the visual sliders in Unreal, leaving the game with a heavy vignetting, motion blur, bloom, and "dynamic range" which causes the screen to go dark when you walk towards a corner, all of which cannot be turned off.

Overall, it feels like a school project more than a finished game. Avoid this one.

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A first person investigative mystery about a murder on an island.

The first three hours of this game were really fun. You explore a town, interrogating the townsfolk and examining clues, both of which unlock new dialog choices. There were tasks such as breaking into a warehouse which could be solved in multiple ways. The game has a pseudo-RPG talent system which determines which dialog choices you can choose and what actions you can take. Though the animations feel about 20 years out of date, the mapping and voice acting make up for it, leaving the game with a creepy but believable atmosphere. The story and writing both seem pretty good.

If this were the entire game, it would be an easy recommendation. However, 3 hours into the game the developers apparently decided to switch gears and turn this into a stealth horror game. Aside from the fact that the overlap of people who enjoy these completely different genres is probably very small, the stealth is just not well done. Enemies spot you very quickly, and once they begin chasing you there's seemingly no way to get away - even if you hide in a closet, they just open the closet, making the entire mechanic pointless. The game provides no stealth-related talents or abilities, aside from a white icon when an enemy first spots you. The entire experience is just frustrating and unfun.

I managed to suffer my way through the long stealth section in Chapter 5, only to immediately be greeted with another one in Chapter 6. At this point I uninstalled the game. Looking at other reviews, I'm not even halfway through the game, and the stealth sections apparently only become more frequent.

I feel bad giving this a thumbs down, as it's well-done for an indie game, and the first three hours of gameplay were fantastic. I only wish they had kept going with that formula, rather than completely changing the genre a third the way through the game.

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If you enjoyed Portal 2, but thought the puzzles were too easy, this is the perfect game for you. Now instead of two portals you have to consider where to place five - two in the present, two in the future, and the shared time portal.

The puzzles were extremely well-made. There's 25 puzzles, and at no point did it feel like they were re-using gimmicks or wasting time with puzzles that solve themselves. There were lots of "aha!" moments, the hallmark of good puzzle design. Some of the puzzles have what (I assume are) alternate solutions - there were a few cases where my solution involved making a tight jump, or throwing a box with some precision, so I don't think I solved those ones correctly.

There were also some multiplayer puzzles, but these were less impressive. Despite having more portals to consider (9!), we found them significantly easier than the single-player puzzles. Several of them seemed like the same puzzle as one of the single-player ones but slightly altered.

Like a lot of first-person puzzlers recently, the game tries to replicate the Glados-narrator thing from the first two games. Unlike most of those games, this one actually does a pretty good job of it.

Overall, I would've recommended this game at DLC-pricing. The fact that it's free is insane.

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Another Portal-adjacent first person puzzlers where you put boxes on buttons.

I only played about an hour of this, but the puzzles were very clever, with lots of "aha!" moments. That's the most important thing for a puzzle game, and is the reason I'm giving this a thumbs up.

However, nearly everything else about the game is mediocre-to-bad. They tried to do the "Portal narrator" thing that a lot of other similar puzzle games have done, and did not do it well. The performance of this game is absolutely abysmal - I have frame stutters even with a 5080. The game does not look great (with the Unity lighting engine doing all of the heavy lifting in the screenshots). The story and writing seem amateurish. The voice acting is not great. The game is pretty buggy.

Still, despite all that, I'd recommend this game to anyone looking for some clever puzzles, as long you've played all the better ones. This one supposedly gets tedious after about 7 hours, but I won't be getting that far.

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An escape room game that, like many others, uses the Escape Room Unity toolkit. If you've played any of the others (there are a ton), this game will feel very familiar.

Overall, I'd say it's above average compared to other games made with the same toolkit. Most of the puzzles are good. However, there were a few that were bad-to-terrible:

• One of the first puzzles is a bunch of directed graphs where each node contains a number, with some of the numbers circled, and some text saying you need to find the "longest increasing subsequence". What you actually need to do is copy the circled numbers from one place to another. The graph, extra numbers, and directions are all red herrings.

• The "safe+dice" puzzle in Act 2 has about a dozen reasonable solutions. The "correct" solution is the worst one of all of them.

• The "compass" puzzle in Act 3 is just complete garbage. It's so vague and underspecified that I can't imagine anyone solving it without using a hint or looking up the solution.

• One of the puzzles requires you to have a good understanding of how poker works. Fortunately I do, but anyone who doesn't will just be stuck with no in-game way to proceed.

• The final puzzle is really hard. It's not bad per-say, but I imagine most people will need to look up the solution.

• The game has hints on some puzzles, but not all of them. The hints are not always good.

Still, despite these complaints, this remains one of the above-average escape room games on Steam.

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A very short game where you wander around a small world, interact with a few things, and then the game says "to be continued". There's not much in the way of story or puzzles. While it was cute, I don't think it's worth playing, at least until the other episodes are out.

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The start of the game was actually interesting, with fragments of a story about a crime scene photographer, where you had to photograph the aftermath of different horrible crimes. However about 15 minutes in the developer apparently decided to pad the runtime with a bunch of lazy, menial copy+paste mazes. Some highlights include:

• Walking slowly through a maze with jagged walls
• Walking slowly down 30 flights of stairs
• Walking slowly through a massive parking garage maze
• Swimming slowly through an even more massive sewer

At this point I stopped, because I had been swimming in circles for 20 minutes. There's supposedly about 15 minutes more of gameplay after this point, if you can avoid getting hopelessly lost, for about an hour's worth of gameplay. There is no save function so you need to do it all in one sitting.

Overall, if you're a huge fan of liminal-space horror like "The Backrooms", you might find some enjoyment in this. But I think everyone else should avoid it.

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This isn't a game so much as a map someone made. You walk around the map and... that's it. There's no gameplay, no explanatory text, no cutscenes, no educational voiceover, nothing. There's not even a UI. They didn't even bother to add guard-rails around the area, allowing you to jump off the edge of the map.

Changing the options doesn't work until you restart the game. The graphics look like they're from the 1990's. Like many bad Unreal Engine games, it opens up Steam VR when you launch it, even though it's not a VR game.

Sorry, but I wouldn't recommend this even if it were free. It's kind of ridiculous that they're charging money for this.

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I run a curator exclusively dedicated to walking simulators. Of the 250 non-puzzle-based walking simulators I've played, the original "Stanley Parable" is my #1 game.

If you've played the original, this version adds several hours of content that's just as good as before. It's done in a really clever way, which I won't say anything more about to avoid spoilers.

If you haven't played the original, it's hard to explain what this game is without ruining anything. It's not exactly story-based; instead, it's a meta-commentary on video games and life, done in a way that no other game has ever been able to replicate. Although the original version is still available for sale, you should pick up this version instead. It contains all the content from the original, plus several hours of new content.

This is one of the few games that I've ranked "10/10 - Everyone Should Play". Pick it up.