Recent reviews by Farryn

When the game is working it's kind of like playing through a tedious bad dream. Pointless, boring, and derivative of a genre of "trippy" games that trap you in a single location that repeats ad nauseum, which have already been copied into oblivion (P.T., Superliminal, Layers of Fear, etc.) For a 10-15 minute game I really encountered a lot of frustrating technical problems. The object of the game is apparently to answer this incessantly ringing cell phone that shows up multiple times and clicking on it did nothing, so I couldn't complete the game at first. It took me way too long to figure out that you have to click the perfect pixel on the green answer button, which was surprisingly hard to do. The game has poor performance even though it isn't graphically intense, and I also encountered visual effects that I thought were a graphical glitch because of how headache-inducing it looked, but it's possible that it looked like that intentionally (I'm referring to the section right before getting in the elevator).

This is a really approachable rhythm game that really gives you a lot for the low price of entry. You only need to press two buttons giving it a low skill floor; that said, don't expect to be able to play the highest difficulty if you're older than in your twenties. I'm thirty and my elderly hands physically cannot press the buttons fast enough to do level 9+ stages. It's simply not going to happen. The game doesn't require you to perfect the higher difficulties though, and will let you unlock all the characters and minions in the base game playing on standard difficulty.

It has a cute aesthetic and I really like how colorful some of the stages and enemies are. The music is quite a mixed bag. I like the tracks that really lean into the Jpop whereas some of the "metal" and hard rock sounding tracks have bizarre auto-tuned vocals that make them kind of unpleasant to listen to. I'd say there are more good tracks than bad ones in the mix.

The DLC needed to get the complete track list is quite expensive and never gets a good discount, but the base game often has generous sales. I think I got this game for less than 2 dollars and it's given me hours of enjoyment.

As a rule I tend not to like mobile games, pvp card games, or Marvel Studios movies... and yet I've found myself deeply addicted to playing this Marvel-themed card game on my phone, where I've racked up dozens of hours of playtime in the past couple of months. The card art is really great, the cards are all unique and interesting, and most importantly well-balanced. You can have a chance in a battle with any deck, as long as your cards complement each other. For a collectible card game it feels refreshingly skill-based.

This is a really high quality mobile game, but make no mistake, it's really designed for a phone with touch controls and not for playing on a PC with mouse and keyboard. Matches are short (typically 3-5 minutes) and thus perfect for playing on-the-go. I also appreciate that the monetized aspect of the game is not pay-to-win and you can still get a great experience while playing for free.

Although this game is quite generous with cards and you can absolutely play this without paying a dime, the game does give you the option to buy in-app scrip at wildly inflated prices. It will prompt you to pay $99.99 for in-game currency with a single tap, or sometimes to buy a single card bundle for $69.99. Simply having that functionality in the app is taking advantage of people with poor impulse control and gambling problems, not to mention children with access to a parent's credit card. Most people will be able to refrain from clicking those buttons, but some people should stay away from this game. That said, this might still be the least predatory mobile game I've spent time with, which still doesn't excuse the tactics it uses, but does tip my review over into a qualified "recommend".

Dagon is a playable visual accompaniment to H.P. Lovecraft's short story by the same name. It features light scavenger hunt gameplay that functions as footnotes to the main text, offering historical context to the plot. Although not a fully-playable game in the traditional sense, I found that Dagon captures the dense atmosphere of creeping dread that suffuses Lovecraft's work better than most video games that try to adapt him, even those with more fully fleshed out gameplay. The nature of this game means it can be more directed, with the ability to give the player the perfect camera angles for the mood that most perfectly matches the story.

This game is a great argument for companies to realize the power of having the work of a real writer in their game, instead of trying to get around it by loosely adapting the author and losing a bit of the spirit of their work in the process. Having Lovecraft's work itself front-and-center goes a long way to making this better than any other Lovecraft adaption, with the notable exception of Fromsoftware's Bloodborne, which also captured the correct atmosphere while making use of artistic license to elevate the material instead of holding it back.

And the game is free!

The Coma is a 2D horror game clearly inspired by Silent Hill, but with a Korean anime flavor which adds a lot of charm through the main character's animation and the high school setting. You will spend the entire 3-4 hour game exploring an alternate dimension in your high school while being hunted by a creepy version of your teacher. There's no enemy variety and you are only able to run, dodge roll, or hide in cupboards. The thin gameplay is made up for by the overall aesthetic of the game, and the music is creepy with cool lo-fi vibes.

The biggest downside is the last hour of the game, which I felt was very unbalanced. Generally in a horror game you don't want to make the player die so much that they get frustrated rather than scared. I also would have liked there to be a bit more story, so I'm looking forward to seeing what happens in the sequel.

This is the kind of resource I wish I'd had access to when I was first on the initial hurdle of learning hiragana. If you are just starting out learning Japanese and you're finding hiragana to be a barrier, you can't do much better than this game which turns something daunting into something fun.

However, if you already know hiragana, I can only recommend this game with some reservations. I'm at the intermediate level, so for me it was far too basic to be educational. That said, it's a charming game with calming music and nostalgic pixel-art visuals similar to early Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest. It's not as mechanically good as those games though. The battle system is really clunky, and the encounter rate is ridiculously high, to the point where I began escaping from most of the battles. Playing this way caused me to complete the game in just under 7 hours.

I do wish the game had ramped up the language-learning elements much more significantly. For example, it could have taught a lot more vocabulary and changed the dialogue entirely to Japanese when you get to Japan, which would have made sense thematically and been more educational. I also wish it hadn't taught words in hiragana that should be in katakana, since that could instill some bad habits in first time learners.

If you can get past those issues, I can wholeheartedly recommend this game for absolute beginners to Japanese.

This is a really great free taste of an intriguing game. It's a sci-fi police procedural taking after the style of Phillip K. ♥♥♥♥ novels. Your investigator has a cool voiceover reminiscent of film noir. I like the music and the pixel art ambiance. The only problem for me was that the movie played at the end to advertise the full game was stuttery and came close to crashing my computer, which made me wary of purchasing the full product. That's the only problem with performance I had through the whole experience though.

Edit: Cute that Steam has censored the name of a decorated Science Fiction author in my review...

I've been really disappointed with the direction this series has headed in since after "Curse of Blackmoor Manor", which I consider to be the last good Nancy Drew game. Shadow at the Water's Edge seemed to have an intriguing setting (Kyoto, Japan) but it's not enough to save it from mediocrity.

Your time in this game isn't really spent doing detective work, but wandering around being nosy, asking strangely personal questions to the employees of the ryokan where Nancy is staying even while there doesn't even seem to be any mystery worth investigating at that point. The girl from "Ringu" shows up but it seems so disconnected from everything else in the game. I just felt no sense of intrigue as I played pointless games of Pachinko and Sudoku to try and advance the plot.

Typically in a Nancy Drew game it's at least interesting chatting with the suspects, but I was never interested in finding out more about these characters, and worse, their dialogue is often quite obnoxious.

As an aside, I have to mention how intensely I cringed each time Nancy pronounced the word ryokan. For some reason she says the word over and over, and pronounces it "ree-oh-kan" each time. I don't understand why Nancy's voice actor so adamantly mispronounces most Japanese words in the game while she's talking to Japanese characters who are pronouncing the same words correctly in the same discussion.

Moving on... I have played each Nancy Drew game on Senior difficulty and have been able to complete them, but the puzzles in this game are so infuriating that I had to begin again on the lower difficulty, and then just gave up because I didn't want to re-do everything again. I am specifically thinking of a puzzle where you have to untangle strings on the back of a portrait in order to see what is hidden inside the frame. The puzzle doesn't even earn its difficulty with an interesting plot reason for it. It's completely illogical that Nancy would need to untangle strings in order to pull the hidden item out of the broken frame; the arbitrariness of the puzzle combined with its impossibility led to this being the first Nancy Drew game I have decided to walk away from without completing it.

I should also warn anyone who is playing on Mac not to buy the game, because it won't work despite what it says on steam. I had to use a PC emulator in order to run it.

A sedate virtual art installation that uses surrealism to help you appreciate familiar places (an escalator, a waiting room, an airport baggage carousel) in a new way. Recommended to the architecturally curious and to those who frequent the subreddit r/liminalspace.

You have to know what you're getting into with this game if you aren't going to be disappointed like I was. Based on reviews, I had been expecting a detective game inspired by the works of David Lynch. Instead, it was a 2 hour, gameplay-free surrealist interactive film without any dialogue. That's not a bad thing, but don't go in expecting something else.

The game attempts to use film techniques to create a cinematic experience. For example, you'll be walking down a hallway and the game will abruptly cut to the room you were walking to. This works well in a film, but in a game it's a jarring removal of your sense of autonomy. Eventually I played the game by holding forward endlessly and didn't even try to explore or investigate the scenes, because the game teaches you that there is nothing there anyway. I take no issue with linearity as long as it's made use of to tell a compelling story, but I don't think it paid off. The ending is really silly, and the game culminates in an extended drug trip that I found really tedious. Drug trips are really overdone in games as it is, but in Virginia it doesn't even fill the usual purpose of breaking up gameplay, because it plays the exact same way as the rest of the game.

Virginia asks a lot of the player when it comes to piecing together its totally ambiguous plot. Unfortunately the game doesn't set up an intriguing enough premise to earn this close attention, and the pervading confusion lasting throughout the experience doesn't pay off. I see a lot of people making comparison to Lynch's "Mulholland Drive", but the comparison isn't warranted aside from the fact that the game is confusing. It has none of the power of its symbolism or the dark pull of its dream-logic.

I couldn't recommend it to anyone unless you have really niche tastes, and if you're in the right frame of mind for the experience.