Recent reviews by Sytch

After finishing two routes out of four I can confidently say that the name and poster are the weakest parts of this game. As in, they're quite misleading, at least they were for me. I expected a typical shounen school rom-com with K-On flavor so I wasn't much excited about playing it. Yeah, the music is usually fine in such games/anime but it's not something I'm interested a lot personally.

Instead I got something very different. Yes, there's love, money and rock'n'roll, but they're totally not the main game theme. I'm not gonna spoil what's inside the box, just saying that it's not what it looks like, sounds like and feels like. And it's a good thing! Probably same as the studio's first game, Everlasting Summer (ES), this one manages to subvert expectations and keep the player hooked until the end. And then pull him back to play another route because they tell very different stories (but the main and support characters are mostly the same).

The writing is really good, the characters are deep and interesting, the author's style is easily recognizable if you played ES before. Feels like the protagonist was inspired by the evil pioneer from ES: he's a nihilistic jerk surrounded by cute innocent girls who want to unconditionally love yet another shy stuttering guy (as it always happens in such media). Instead they got... this one. The contrast creates an interesting conflict and dynamic by itself, while the protagonist changes as the story progresses. The heroines are also not as 2D as they look like (heh), every character has a good backstory and a few skeletons in the closet.

The story is ridiculously long (in a good way), it takes about 3 (in-game) weeks and every day is full of events, reflections and dialogs. The first few days are shared among the routes, the rest are unique. You'll probably need about 10-14 real life hours to read just one route, at least it took me that much. Then if the choices were wrong and you got a bad ending, you can fast forward and redo the route until you're satisfied. Most choices are relatively obvious but I got badly stuck in Himitsu route because I couldn't understand what I do wrong to always end up with a bad ending. Getting a good one eventually felt extremely rewarding though! I was on the verge of cheating with a guide if that attempt failed but it succeeded.

Even though the routes are this long, they're not boring in the slightest. The days are packed with conflicts, plot twists, sometimes despair, good and bad time, love and hate and so on. The characters, backgrounds and CGs are animated and everything looks nice. The music is also exceptionally good, I was pleasantly surprised with the OST because it's totally not 100% rock'n'roll despite the name.


Just one issue on Linux: the game always uses my main speakers for some reason even when I play on the TV via HDMI. It's probably a bug in FMOD, it should respect the default sink setting but it doesn't. I made a workaround for it. If you only have one audio sink (speakers/headphones/etc.) it shouldn't be an issue for you.

Unironically GOTY 2023, nothing's even close. And now it's possible to nominate it as such, which I did. In this time and age of galloping cancel culture, self-censorship and avoiding controversial topics this is a breath of fresh air. Some tweetards were unhappy about the game having an incest subplot, the dev doubled down on it with cry_about_it.jpg. Now that's a proper way to handle the bullies!

If you like to explore tabooed and controversial topics without unnecessary forced edginess, I suggest you play this game. The description is truly wild but I swear it will make sense (somewhat...). The writing is stellar, the characters are lively, the plot thickens all the time while you're gently descending into insanity step by step.

The game is a Visual Novel mostly, with some basic quests and puzzles, almost impossible to get stuck as the areas are not big and the number of available items isn't high too. There's no graphical violence or gore, at least no more than what you can get in the games like RimWorld: it's pretty minimal and stylized, blood splatters and such. There's also no nudity, even implied. All that is compensated with just text that creates the drama, horror and incest of course, what did you expect to find here? The character portraits changing with almost every delivered line add a lot to the experience making the writing shine with emotions.

I like this trope where two outcasts with great chemistry between them oppose the entire world, plus there are forbidden topics that aren't that common to find in games. And all that is handled masterfully, even though the game doesn't always take itself seriously.

Currently only two episodes out of four are available. Hopefully the game is gonna be finished some time in 2024, but a ballpark estimate is 6-7 months per episode, and as the story branches further it unavoidably slows down development. Fingers crossed!

Works out of the box on Linux using Proton. No bugs, played from start to finish.

If you're a fan of urban creepy legends and watched tons of "The Backrooms" footage on YouTube (specifically from Kane Pixels who started the recent trend), go and play it. Fantastic graphics, on par with those from the videos. Probably closest to what you can call "photorealistic", partially because of great lighting and postprocessing. It's a relatively short walking simulator (<1 hour, however, there might be more than one ending...) for you to enjoy the liminal space atmosphere. Weird architecture, confusing rooms, strange sounds and constant feel of uneasiness. Best of all, a sequel is on the way with more content, voice acting and so on!

Worked out of the box on Linux with Proton 7. Really GPU bound, my 3090 Ti squeezed out 70-100 FPS.

This is the best space opera out there, hands down. Every part of the trilogy is unique in its own way but all are memorable. Fight different enemies and save the galaxy from an imminent threat while making friends, building alliances and falling in love.

There are many choices to make that will affect the future events, some characters will live, some will die and they might treat you differently depending on what you did to them. However, you might already know that all that doesn't affect the ending in the slightest. Don't let that fact discourage you as it's about the journey, not the destination. And one hell of a journey it is.

The first part doesn't really know what it wants to be. A space RPG? A visual novel? It's a bit rough, the main story line isn't too long and the side quests are quite boring, almost like they're procedurally generated. The galaxy looks vast but feels empty. Still, it's a good start so by all means play it. Completing the side quests would add some minor characters and events in the later games so do them if you want a bit more lore.

The second part is arguably the best as it's essentially a road movie where you travel the galaxy, build a crew of all kinds of weird but powerful fighters and see some familiar faces from the first game. Even though there's still an enemy to defeat you're not in a hurry (in the lore sense) and there are various much more entertaining side missions and stories to uncover. Almost everyone in your crew can die in the final mission so plan it very thoroughly if you care about your companions.

The third part is the most depressing one but the DLCs (that are integrated in this remaster) are the best part. They're long and eventful, can be played in any order but I recommend leaving the Citadel DLC (called "Shore leave") for the dessert, it's very long, packed with content and hilarious. The final mission is "Attack on Cerberus" and if you start it you won't be able to do any other missions until you finish the game (there will be a special confirmation from Hackett so you won't miss it). As soon as you find the Cerberus headquarters go finish all you need first, then go there. Sadly, they dropped multiplayer (co-op, 4 players vs waves of enemies) from ME3, it was a lot of fun and I spent tens of hours in it with my friends.

The remaster is solid, while it almost doesn't change the games gameplay-wise, the lighting and textures were changed for the better. There are no pitch-black shadows anymore and the aggressive color tint is reduced, the environments look more life-like. The game looks and feels like a relatively modern game even though it came out from 9 to 13 years ago. The lack of triangles on the models is noticeable sometimes but not often. Is the price justified? Idk, took me 135 hours from start to finish so probably yes if you never played it (I did but it was so long ago I forgot a lot).

The game works fine on current Proton 6.3-8 as well as Experimental. Origin might be a PITA at first but when it's set up it doesn't interfere. In ME1 I had weird performance drops shortly after launch, I found a workaround: open the Origin overlay with Shift+F1, open settings from there, close the window that pops up, close the overlay. The performance should be good for the session. Also, if there's no sound in ME1 put this to the launch options: WINEDLLOVERRIDES="openal32=b" %command%. This seems to only happen with Proton 6.3-8, in Experimental sound works without any workarounds. Two other games worked fine and I played all three on Linux from start to finish with no crashes/glitches (CPU/GPU: 7700k/1070 GTX).

This is a really good game with a new mechanic: a time portal. It's not really a time travelling device because you can't interact with yourself or create paradoxes, though there are some logical limitations and mechanics that you'll need to always think about. Portal Reloaded has all the usual elements of other Portal games (except gels) but to solve the puzzles you'll use the third portal that connects the current room with its deteriorated copy from the future.

The time portal is identical to the usual blue/orange ones except its exit is always at the same point in space as the entry. It preserves momentum just like the normal portals and this is actually used in several puzzles.

The maps are as detailed as in the original games, there are nice details in the derelict rooms like broken panels, some trash on the floor, missing ceiling and so on. Now that I think about it, there could've been more interesting differences like toxic liquid flooding part of the room or additional/unavailable space. That, however, could've made the puzzles enormously difficult and they're already quite hard. Most of the differences are disabled devices (like jump pads) and force fields or broken glass so that you can do something in one timeline but not in the other.

There's some lore too but I wish there were more. The complexity and difficulty of the puzzles is definitely higher than in P1/P2/Portal Stories: Mel. I had to watch a solution for one level (which I never needed in other games) and even after that I didn't immediately understand how to solve it!

Probably the most frustrating part is that it's not always obvious which copy of the cube (from the present or future) you need to use for a particular task and at the later stages you realize that you should've used the other one which may result in solving the puzzle once again.

I finsihed the game in under 9.5 hours which is quite a lot, especially for a free game. Worked great on Linux with the default Proton (except for some initial stutter due to pipeline compilation I guess).

Very good campaign (I can't play multiplayer anyway), focused and story-rich. So much better than the other games in this series I consider this my favorite and the best one! All negative reviews say it's a "bad halo game" but ironically this is what makes it so good for me. Unlike previous games, it's not a set of missions at random sites, it's a cohesive story with interesting and developing characters and drama. Cortana finally gets her own personality instead of being a hack tool and a cute but shallow sidekick and, even more surprisingly, Chief does too. You might say that all other games also have stories but they're about events, not characters. This is what makes Halo 4 so outstanding. IMO, it's targeted at a more mature audience who's interested in people, their relationships and not history of victory and defeats.

All other typical elements are also there, gunplay feels better, sound and graphics are very good in general. The outdoor areas suffer from bloom cranked up to 11 but it's a known bug and it will hopefully be fixed. The performance is great, I only had one freeze for several seconds (probably map loading) and thought the game crashed/froze but it recovered shortly. Other than that it was smooth.

There's a currently unresolved issue for some players, it happens on Linux and Windows too — "Fatal error!" message on game launch. It's something in UE4 being unable to switch to fullscreen. You can easily fix it using the launch parameter "-windowed" (without quotes), for me there's absolutely no difference at all, the game runs in full screen but if it's different for you, change the setting later in the game to your liking. However, it won't be saved if you leave that launch parameter set (and without it the game doesn't launch).

This feels and plays like the old "Powder Toy" Java game that simulated various substances with pixels of different color. In Noita it's way more cool, all materials have their own properties and can interact with each other, you have the main character and enemies to defeat, various randomly generated weapons and even sort of a story. This is a fun sandbox with pixel-based physics. My main complaint is that it's a "roguelite" so you'll die often and have to start from the beginning. Works out of the box on Linux using Proton.

Halo is probably just as iconic and famous as Half-Life. I can only talk about the campaign, never played multiplayer. I know a lot of people play Halo only for multiplayer but I'm not interested much in it and even if I were it doesn't currently work on Linux due to anticheat.

So, I played Halo: Combat Evolved back in 2003-2004 or so I think. It was a very interesting and fresh game at the time with cool mechanics: smart enemies, alien weapons, vehicles, mountable guns etc. It's not new by now and even as a fan I can tell the game looks and feels dated. No matter the upgraded visuals and sound, it's an old game. But that's not a bad thing, I still have fun playing it. A nice approach would be to not expect much and be (hopefully) positively surprised.

The best feature for me is the music, it's so distinct it might be a new genre itself! No matter what genre and style you like, chances are you'll find some nice tracks for yourself. It feels epic and heroic but not as in "old" symphonic Star Wars soundtrack. It doesn't have a "fantasy" vibe in it (that's common for older space opera movies and games) and it's not just electronic as one might expect for a sci-fi title. All in all, it's not a background melodic noise, it has character and it adds a lot to the scenery.

I'd even go as far as to say that one way to approach the series is to consider it a music jukebox with some FPS action, playing it for the atmosphere alone is worth it. Unfortunately, the anniversary editions of Halo CE and Halo 2 miss some great tracks compared to the original versions so you might want to stick to the originals. In CE it's possible to use the remastered graphics and original sound (can be chosen in mission settings) but in 2 you can only switch both on and off together.

The biggest flaw (which became a feature I guess?) is the map design. Maps and structures are huge and repetitive. So many rooms are exact same copies it's sometimes easy to get lost. And sometimes you'll go back through them for some story-driven reason. The outdoor scenes are decent though but indoors are often like that. It can be explained (kinda) like "real premises are like that too, they're similar and boring because they're not made to entertain technicians working there" but I can't help but see it as lazy map design. Anyway, deal with it. It becomes better in later games but in Halo CE it's like that.

I wouldn't say the story is super good, it's okay and the lore is detailed enough. But it's not as exciting as Mass Effect, for example. Then again, ME came out much later so it's not fair to compare I guess.

In conclusion, go play it! The collection is dirt cheap if you consider the entertainment value (I played 4 games for ~34 hours at this time), and it's such a famous game series that people buy XBox for Halo alone. Well, now you don't need that.

Editing this review because Denuvo Anticheat has been removed. Does it make the game better? Well, at least now it works. But it still sucks.

It's not a good game despite many people saying otherwise. My main disappointment is that you're not just allowed to rip and tear, you're FORCED to do it to play the game. You run out of ammo all the time and have to use the chainsaw to replenish it, perform gore kills to restore hp and so on. Fun thing is, even after these 4 hours I'm still confused by the controls. First time in probably 20 years of my gaming history I can't establish that mental connection between what I want to do and what finger should press a key so I don't do that "manually". And I easily play a game that requires binding a half of keyboard to be efficient as well as I played Q3 at the time with all weapons bound.

You have to track your vitals all the time and perform these kills just to be able to shoot again and survive. Add to that the fact that you can't see what weapon still has ammo in it, there's no indication of that on the HUD. It doesn't always autoswitch to the next weapon with ammo if you run out and if it does it could be a rocket launcher that you kill yourself with if the enemy is too close. Fun.

Add stupid platforming on top of that and the result, while visually and technically impressive, lacks any interesting gameplay. More than that, it's very often frustrating. I even feel bad for all the level designers because you don't have much time to enjoy the views. When you jump around or fight the demons you get that tunnel vision effect and don't pay much attention to the surroundings.

Platforming is especially frustrating because you have to spend quite some time to figure out where to go which kills any dynamic. Or you start jumping and at some point don't see where to go next and the platform you stand on falls down or something else kills you. Start again until you figure it out. It sucks so much in comparison with interesting and appropriate platforming in Tomb Raider, there's no competition at all.

Another problem for me is the lore. It's now much more focused on demons, spirits, hell, religion and so on, it's much less about technology and sci-fi. I liked the balance they struck in Doom 2016, it was really a bit of this, a bit of that and a good story (for the genre) as well. Here, in Eternal, we have a medieval spaceship with stairs made from rock (???), boring ruins instead of cool shiny constructions like there were on Mars in 2016, the story is not interesting, and we can only read it in the books (it's not even voiced), the environments look like something from a dark fantasy game, there's no sci-fi vibe at all. And the gameplay is basically shoot/saw/tear demons in one arena, go to the next, rinse and repeat. I found myself reluctant to even launch the game (partially because it still has issues I described above but I wouldn't mind that if it were captivating) because it's simply not fun. The enemies are still bullet-sponge as before but you become quite fragile and need to constantly rip&tear to get those meds. Kinda like Counter Strike + bullet hell except with health packs and I don't like CS at all (I like Quake-like games, this one is not like them at all).

To be precise, it feels like "state mandated fun" where you do all the cool tricks because otherwise you will be punished pretty soon. I admit, it looks incredibly good when someone else is playing but when you take control it's boring.

I played it a bit more and realized there's another glaring disappointment: the maps don't make sense. They're not alive. It's just a bunch of interconnected lifeless rooms that don't have any purpose except containing demons for you to obliterate. This world is undeniably pretty but also boring as hell (get it? haha!). In the previous installation you had a clear goal and milestones set in different environments that felt like parts of the world. Here it's all absent.

It feels to me like the game was developed by two teams that weren't communicating with each other well enough. One team made the engine, modelled good demons and props, detailed rooms and weapons. The other team worked on music, maps, story, characters, gameplay and balance. The second team did a very poor job effectively nullifying the first team efforts. There's no story (or it begins much later than 4 hours I already spent), the maps are boring, music is almost non-existing (some background noise or such), there are no characters with any motivation at all, I'm not even asking for a plausible one (the main villain and friend in Doom 2016 are miles ahead of what we have here). The gameplay sucks and balance is crap.

tl;dr good graphics, mediocre gameplay and design and high price. Can't believe such a good looking and exciting game turned out to be a boring turd.

One of the easiest recommendations from me. I'm not a hardcore fan of the Half-Life series but I recognise its importance for gaming as a whole and the cultural impact it made more than 20 years ago. The original HL was definitely a revolutionary game for its time but I doubt I'd play it today. I'm too spoiled by the modern graphics and gameplay gimmicks that it lacks. You just can't immerse yourself in that blurry, gnarly low poly world with very few details compared to the modern games. No high res textures can fix it, unfortunately.

Enter Black Mesa. A small team of really hardcore fans remade HL1 from scratch and made it a modern, vibrant game that still is THAT Half-Life with the same (and even improved) atmosphere, story, friends and enemies. Despite it was in the making for 14 years, the visuals still look good. Yes, it's not a fresh pop-a-mole shooter from Activision or something that would put your GPU to its virtual knees, but everything looks good enough to not distract you from the gameplay process. Until Xen. Because if the main part brought back memories from playing HL1 back in 2000s, Xen doesn't. That's why it plays and feels like a sequel to the Earth part, it's so unlike anything you played before it, and absolutely not like the boring floating islands in HL1. The graphic there is totally up to the today standards (at least it's the best the old Source engine can do, the FPS overall is like 4 times lower than in the Earth levels), it's alive, it breathes, it tells a story that connects Black Mesa with Half-Life 2.

If you played HL1 before you'll still have a lot of fun revisiting the familiar locations. They're not copypasted of course and only the most iconic rooms are recreated close to the originals. Everything else is new. In Xen you'll meet only two well known bosses (but the battles with them are completely different) and that part is so long it could easily be a standalone game.

Another important part of the game is music. At times it discords with the scene and suddenly brings unexpected emotions and understanding of what's really happening right now. I won't spoil it but you'll see and feel it I hope. Xen's music organically enhances the intense parts and creates a unique atmosphere that's drastically different from the boring and hostile feeling of HL1's Xen. Here you're like a guest that came not to destroy but to understand this world (and destroy. A bit).

It's really an AAA game for a very low price considering the amount and quality of the content. It doesn't matter that a small team made it, you can't tell if you don't know it. The game is solid, it keeps the good tempo, the difficulty of fights and puzzles is polished, you're never bored. I'd say even HL2, the official Valve game, pales in comparison with Black Mesa. Go play it and you won't be disappointed.

Played the game through on Debian Linux, i7-7700k, 32 Gb RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 1070. There are some broken shaders or textures in the Linux build (black polygons in some areas) and a severe FPS drop in the portal tower (lambda generator) area. FPS drops to 5-10 and since this puzzle requires a good reaction this renders it unplayable. Fortunately, you can play on Proton (force it in the game properties) but you'll need to put -oldgameui to the launch parameters or else you'll have no main menu for some reason. Then DXVK (D9VK) kicks in and you'll have a great performance and hopefully no graphical glitches anywhere. Or you can wait until this is fixed in the native Linux build.