Recent reviews by Allus

I'll update this review as I play through each episode, and adjust my recommendation accordingly. I'll also try my best not to leave any unmarked spoilers.

I don't know if I (as a 27-year-old male) am not in this game's target audience or what, but I'm finding it really difficult to get into the story. The two main characters seem to speak in what I can only describe as, "what adults think 'millenials these days' sound like," and that really takes me out of it. The classic "rich b***h" character is spot-on though.

You're dropped into a small Oregon town in medias res, which I don't normally take issue with. However, it doesn't seem like a single person in this town isn't optimally screwed up in service to the plot (with the possible exceptions of the science and photography teachers; they seem pretty cool).

The mechanic of being able to rewind time works well to facilitate the game's puzzles, but your resulting ability to redo major decisions does more to hurt than help. I used it maybe twice, discovered that the game's devs go out of their way to make both decisions equally appealing or unappealing, and just decided to go with my gut from then on.

I really didn't enjoy this episode, and I had to force myself to finish it. Whether or not I play the next one largely depends on how well my friend (who recommended this game to me in the first place) can sell me on the game getting better later.

Technical nitpicks

• Subtitles are very badly timed
  
• An attempt is made at syncing the characters' lips to the dialogue, but it's not very good
  
• Facial animation can dip fairly deep into the uncanny valley, especially the principal's

Let's get the things that haven't changed out of the way first. The main character and her friend still speak like a 40-something's idea of what hipster millenials sound like, and the game's major decisions are still rigged to appear to be as evenly split as possible. The puzzles based around the time rewind mechanic still work really well, although there was only one meaty puzzle this time around.

Episode 1 began setting the stage for some epic paranormal craziness and Episode 2...continues setting the stage. It hammers on the drama button like it's going out of style, some consequences of the decisions you made in Episode 1 start to appear, and if it wasn't already obvious from Episode 1, it re-iterates that you're going to have some good, old-fashioned, interpersonal craziness to contend with as well.

What this game continues to fail to do, however, is to make its main character relatable or to make me care about what ultimately happens to them. There are a couple moments in this episode which make it abundantly clear that, despite the player guiding the main character around and dictating their actions, they are still an unreliable narrator, which only makes it more difficult to get emotionally invested in them.

Finally, for these first two episodes, the story has been 90% depressing, 10% inconsequential levity, and no hint as to how any kind of redemption could come out of it. Given the game's direction so far, I'm not confident that the remaining episodes will be anything other than more depressing, and I'm not sure I want to subject myself to that. I play video games, in part, to escape from real life, not to remind myself how terrible and unfair life can be.

Technical stuff

• Subtitle timing is much better
  
• Lip-synching didn't really bother me this time
  
• Principal's facial animation is still pretty weird

Note: This review originally appeared in Volume 35, Issue 9 of Konshuu, a weekly publication of Cal Animage Alpha, UC Berkeley’s anime club. The version you see here contains minor edits from the original draft, and differs from the publication version in that it was not hopelessly mangled by the Konshuu Editor in Chief.

As a gamer, I generally have a good feel for which games I will find fun and which I will wish I had never bought. Any game with a good plot usually falls into the former category for me, regardless of the genre. And while I like FPS games in general, I never bothered with games like Call of Duty, which were, in my opinion, shooting solely for the sake of shooting. So, when someone gifted me Battlefield: Bad Company 2 on Steam, I decided I might as well give it a try.

To begin with, I will give the developers credit for integrating the tutorial with the opening mission, and at the same time, not turning it into a “tutorial mission." Learning the controls was integrated well with the mission, and I didn’t feel like the mission was custom-tailored to teaching me.

The plot however, was exactly as I expected: a mildly-coherent excuse for more shooting. I vaguely remember something about the Russians having some evil doomsday weapon (which sounded like some kind of giant EMP generator) and my squad somehow being the only ones qualified to stop/find/destroy it. And it being excuse for more shooting, the plot must always take the route of greatest enemy contact. I found the weapon once, but of course it was only a fake weapon, and I then had to go to South America and kill some local militia-folk in order to find the real one.

As the plot is usually my principal motivator in FPS games, I quickly grew frustrated with my plot-to-death ratio playing on the Normal difficulty. I had one mission where I had to make my way down a mountain in a blizzard, and not only did I have to avoid bullets and RPGs, but I had to avoid dying of hypothermia by taking shelter in strategically placed small homes. I eventually got to a bridge with scores of Russians on the other side, and I could not, for the life of me, make it across without either dying from being shot too many times or dying from hypothermia by staying in my cover too long. It was at this point that I got fed up and switched to the Easy difficulty. After doing so, the rate at which I was dying became far more tolerable for the relatively ♥♥♥♥♥♥ plot I was being served.

Overall, I don’t know if I can say that Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is a bad game, but I do know that it’s not for me. The plot is completely token, I die way too often, and even on Easy difficulty there’s too much shooting and not enough plot-advancing for my tastes.

P.S.: If you want to hear more about Battlefield: Bad Company 2, along with some of the other gripes I had with it, check out Yahtzee’s Zero Punctuation episode about the game (he’s just about as fed up with realistic cover-based shooters as I am).

For once, we have a visual novel on Steam which can stand on the strength of its story and characters, and not just on the size of its female cast's breasts.

It took me about 10 hours to complete, which is "short" by visual novel standards, but that means that it's not longer than it needs to be, and manages to keep the suspense up throughout.

If you want a good sci-fi thriller, and even if you're not too sure about the visual novel format, I can wholeheartedly recommend this game.

Here is a list of ways I can describe this game, in relation to other games:

• Like Blendo Games' other offerings, but with more structure
  
• Like Portal, but with more planning and more complex puzzles
  
• Like Digital: A Love Story, but hacking the real world instead of the Gibson

If the idea of keying up a batch script to disable an array of lasers in perfect sequence, or using a remote turret to hit a button through a grate in the ceiling, or catapulting yourself from building to building on blasts of air appeals to you, buy this game. If the idea of carefully planning your escape, then executing it flawessly with a single command appeals to you, buy this game.

If you read all this, and you still have no idea what's going on, buy it anyway, and see what you think. If you don't like it, you can always return it.

Charming, but I'd rather have it on mobile.

Was alright at first, but got really repetitive later on and I lost interest. Didn't finish.

I feel bad for anyone discovering Prison Architect these days.

Paradox has taken this game and done the same thing they do to every game they publish: degrade the base-game experience to the point that it's nigh-unplayable without buying the DLC.

Prison Architect was a great prison-building simulator. It isn't anymore.

The only way I know how to play this game is with Dub FX's album "Everythinks a Ripple" on repeat in the background, and if you haven't tried it, then you haven't lived.

A game about exploration and discovery, with some clever puzzles along the way. Best played with a friend over Skype, so you can discover the wonders of MirrorMoon EP together. (Each "season" is its own persistent universe, so make sure you join the same one as anyone you want to play with.)

Side A gave me a sense of discovery and "Oh...Oh!....OHHHH!", as clanmurph put it, that I haven't had since I played the original Portal. Side B, similarly, is all about organically discovering the rules, mechanics, and objectives of the game, but at a much slower pace, and with a much greater emphasis on exploration.

The game took me 10 hours to beat, although YMMV, as it largely depends on what you randomly find as you explore. This was also the first game in a long time that forced me to take down notes with a pen and paper, as well as compulsively screenshot everything.

This game gave me the break I needed from overdosing on Fallout 4, and I can highly recommend it to anyone who wants to be set loose in a world where they have to figure everything out for themselves from the ground up.

Listen to the preview, place the dots that match. 0% challenge, 100% busywork.