Recent reviews by Aemony

--- Early impressions (~14 hours) ---

It's fun, and I'm having a blast. The gameplay, while repetitive, is still engaging and at times challenging (playing on Hard difficulty).

The most egregious I cannot agree on is the asking price, which is a bit too steep for the overall game. But at like $40 I think most buyers would end up enjoying the experience they got out of the game.

Go into it with open eyes while not expecting a masterpiece, and maybe you'll end up finding a few key elements that keeps you playing.

--- Final review (60 hours) ---

The gameplay is good and exploring the world is fun, but I'm quite disappointed at the wasteful use of everyone involved in making it. It feels like it could've been so much better and more, and it's crazy how if you just do the main story line you'd be over and done with the game in around 14 hours and without even exploring or even touching *huge* parts of the world.

It's such a damn waste... Both how the story sorta kicked into high gear all of a sudden completely unexpected, as well as how "the break" basically prevented any sort of secondary hubs out in the world where you could get a ton of quests providing a reason for exploring the various areas.

I had the most fun when I just said "screw it" to the main story and just went off the path and explored every nook and cranny, and while it kept me engaged for some 60 hours at the moment (maybe a little bit more) it still feels ultimately quite useless since, well, there's not much variation in the side activities other than the difficulty of the enemies.

And discovering and beating the most difficult of enemies in the open world ultimately also felt pointless...

Really, the combat, parkour, and world traversal and exploration in general carried the game for me, but everything else feels like such a huge letdown.

I would still recommend it at a lower asking price, and going into it with open eyes, as its core gameplay loop might be engaging all of its own. I enjoyed my time with it, but I can't help but feel that this ended up being quite a letdown as it had the potential to be so much better and larger all around...

A great sequel to the first game, and one that improves upon the first one in various important ways that among other things ends up having the combat of the game not feeling like a complete walk in the park, even with full upgrades.

I am extremely glad this got made, and ended up so great, and hope that we'll see more in this franchise.

It can take awhile to get used to the visual design and quick turns, and until then they can feel disorienting. But what's behind that is a fun little time waster if one just wants to race in a really great reimagining of the classic retro racing style.

<3

Went in expecting a stereotypical hack 'n slash game with some 12-15 hours of gameplay but ended up with a 50+ hours game (completionist) that kept the interest up all throughout.

For smashing so many containers, chests, urns, and what-have-you, and even spending probably an hour or two just sailing around the world, it surprisingly never really got boring.

I did not know what I was going into...

The game hooked me from the start, and I completed the whole game and three out of its four endings (including the canon ending) in one sitting -- some 7 hours or so of playing.

For those wanting a time loop type of game with layers on top of layers, this game is a must to try out!

What I thought was a random and quick meeting turned out to be a game long companion.

Giant Bomb's summary is truly apt:
“Journey stands as a prime example of the truly remarkable things that can be done via this medium.”

Enjoyable short (2-3 hours) story told to the player through the exploration of an empty family house after some time abroad.

No real puzzle or interactive gameplay to speak of, yet despite that I found myself caring about the characters and their individual stories.

Definitely a game worth playing for those just wanting a 2-3 hour experience.

It's... Hmm...

For what it wants to be, and the story it wants to tell, Tacoma achieves it quite well in about 3 hours of play. The main gameplay consists of exploring new sections of an abandoned space station while finding out more and more about its crew and what happened to them. Throughout the game the player listens to interactable recordings of the crew, retrieves past records of their personal devices, and reads their personal messages, letters, etc.

All that said, what the game lacks in is more meaningful player agency. While the story unfolds, there's no way the player can effect meaningful change upon it. Regardless of how the game is "played", at the end it will all be the same regardless.

The story told and its characters are sorta interesting, and what player interaction there were was executed well, though I still cannot help but feel that I would've found it more enjoyable if I could actually affect the outcome in any way, as opposed to just seeing it play out as an invisible observer.

Short (~4 hours or so) puzzle game that's not fully realized and sorta left in the past after the closure of its developer. It's a game for those wanting a first person puzzle time waster for a couple of hours, but will ultimately have its players forget about it after a couple of days/weeks.

At its core this game is a bunch of logic puzzles ranging from simple, which makes up the most of them, to slightly harder ones. The puzzles never gets as challenging as they could be, and even at their most difficult the player is rarely juggling too many balls in the air at the same time. Towards the end the game also switches gear, and abandons the logic puzzles in favor of basic time limited running/jumping. The puzzles are also unsatisfying themselves, and never really left the player with a new realization of the base mechanics.

The story is a simplistic one -- you play as a character of an unknown (and ultimately irrelevant) background that's in a science facility when an explosion rocks the complex and the evacuation leaves you behind. With the help of the CEO of the company, you need to navigate the facility and its puzzles while avoiding dark areas; essentially the unlit floor is lava which when touched results in an instant death that sets you back a couple of seconds. During the progression of the game you will reveal more and more of the situation in the facility and the events that lead up to it.

What looms over the game is its own constant references to a much better and realized game -- Portal. This game cannot stop referencing Portal, whether it's through narration that puts Aperture Science as a competitor to the fictional Lightmatter Technologies, or through props from Portal. It even does this through more obscure references or similarities between the eccentric CEO of Lightmatter Technologies and Cave Johnson of Aperture Science.

Sadly the game is not excelled by the comparisons or "homage" to Portal -- if anything it brings it down a few notches by reminding the player that while they're wasting four or so hours with this game, they could've spent the time playing a much better game: either of the Portal titles.

On top of this the PC version suffers from a critical design oversight/mistake from the developers that will with the closure of the studio forever remain unpatched: the camera updates at a rate of 50 Hz/FPS. Any frame rate above 50 FPS will experience a noticeable stutter when looking around, and the only way to alleviate this is to play the game locked to 50 FPS on a VRR monitor, or V-Synced on a 50 Hz display.

Yet even so, the game suffers from lack of optimization still -- even my RTX 3080 had additional aggressive stutters in some parts of the game even when locked to 50 FPS.