Recent reviews by Swyter

Fun, fair and with the heart in the right place.

I'm not the biggest rhythm, combo-collect-a-thon fan, but the humor is spot on. Sometimes acidic and grounded, with the overarching criticism of ruthless corporate life and tropes but packaged in a wholesome and optimistic way.

• Platforming is okay, and when interleaved with combat sections the levels flow with a familiar cadence.
  
  
• Boss encounters pack a ton of fun twists and surprises, so they don't get stale. I think there's a missing chunk of content between the final two bosses, so they probably ran out of time. The game suddenly enters the final phase.
  
  
• Design-wise this game is going to age well. It oozes so much personality and good nature that the dialogs and quips overshadow any of the weaker level design, box-crushing-pickup-so-number-go-up mechanics or repeated enemies.

Props to the Spanish from Spain localization team and most of the voice actors. They did a great job adapting the jokes.

The Witness, for all its great puzzle goodness, does end up being pretty pretentious with the triple-puzzle movie theater screen video clips, its new age ethos, save-deletion-autoclosing, and the enigmatic voice overs that leave you scratching your head but are just a cheap way of conveying a story, then there is Jon Blow's self-referential final twist, which while novel I always found a bit eye-rolling after all the days of doing lines that it took to get there. But it's okay.

This short game covers all that, even the real ending, but at the same time standing on its own with its own well-implemented mechanics and real puzzles, and it can end up being pretty challenging. Other than minor problems where the pixelated scribbling doesn't actually connect well, getting stuck when the voice asked for what seemed like different colors while filling the book, or clicking that causes unwanted unfocusing during frenetic minigames, I don't really have a lot to complain about this being free and absolutely on point.

The unexpected stuff and mechanical cross-overs were fun. I was expecting the scary parts to be a bit worse, but thankfully there are no jump-scares. It's a charming game.

Still needs a bit of polishing in a few places (I managed to link past and future via normal portals early on), and the story and humor that connects everything together falls a bit flat in certain points, but it's a fantastic map pack for veteran Portal 2 fans that want to experiment with more and harder mechanics.

There are a few examples, but Chamber 17 is the one that suffers more from uneven difficulty, I think. I was stuck there thinking about many other ways that could theorically work, but didn't. And the final solution was a bit anticlimatic. I thought we were limited to using a time portal in the small cubicle instead of finding a way of removing the limitation itself.

Tried so many things that forgot about the initial instructions for green/orange barrier fields.

Would be neat if we could have various ways of solving it. Like using the small cubicle as relay to pass the cube and keep momentum from one dimension to another instead of the momentum being killed no matter how high in the walls you put your portals. Multiple solutions have always been a good thing about the original games.

Graphics-wise. The flat, crossing light shaft polygons in the first maps are a bit distracting, I'd find a way of making them look more volumetric by hiding/fading them out when they (and their normals) are perpendicular to the camera view with a custom pixel shader.

There's some minor clipping and z-fighting in some exterior parts of the levels. The final pre-rendered video was a good throwback to the original, I'd add more curves to the animation keyframes, right at the end it looked like both the camera and hand movement seemed to use linear interpolation. Not sure if intentional.

I like the music tracks in the latter levels, the melodies are relaxing and very catchy. Props for that.

Great mod, thanks for creating it, well worth anyone's time. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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PS: The self-aligning cube in the last chamber was kind of funny, I don't know if there's a subtler/less sudden way of nudging it. But I'm just nitpicking at this point. Small tweaks.

Less is more.

Portal is a game based on a highly focused mechanic that has been refined again and again. Portal knows its limitations and how to take advantage of them. The story and setting are there as an afterthought and purely to complement gameplay, not the other way around.

What was originally bundled as an experimental Valve project with two other more established games is now considered one of the best games ever made and precursor of a new genre; non-violent 3D spatial puzzles.

Portal 2 delivered a more fleshed out storyline and extra mechanics, but the first one still holds up reasonably well in the artistic department. Short and sweet. Well worth playing.

Probably inspired by Portal and Braid. Pairing the tetrominos and brainy story of the last, and the tool-assisted, chamber-based 3D puzzles with a mysterious voiceover of the first.

• Well-optimized engine with an impressive amount of customization.
  
• One of the first few Vulkan games. Excellent multi-platform port.
  
• Well-designed puzzles, reasonably difficult, recombining previous challenges and forcing you to try new solutions. I found some puzzles and stars from «Area A» more confusing than «Area B», probably due to the more cluttered level design of the former (due to the setting). While I didn't get stuck anywhere for long there were a few confusing points that required additional thinking/experiments.
  
• Several gameplay layers with various meta-games and hidden challenges (and easter eggs) that will invite you to revisit them and come back later if you want to unlock harder challenges, story pieces and endings.
  
• Built-in mod integration and access to the scene editor/Lua scripting layer in plain text. Adding extra content through Workshop and expanding its life once the main game is finished.

• While it has excellent graphics the art style and design is not as good, with assets that get reused all the time. Even with that, the natural landscapes are breathtaking and relaxing. But lacks some conceptual polishing.
  
• Sometimes I solved challenges unorthodoxly by abusing the box/barrier physics and auto-jump, and glitched my way out of the map. But maybe that's a feature.
  
• The story feels a bit contrived and tacked-in sometimes. Breaking the aura of mysticism and mechanical religiosity.
  
• The text localization was sub-par and sometimes full of spelling mistakes, while the voice actors did a really good and believable work with the lines they were given I was cringing sometimes due to the unpolished and unnatural script they had to work with. Probably needed another pass of QA to trim some rough edges.

I played in Linux x86_64, in Spanish from Spain.

Would play again.