Recent reviews by Cpunch

Put simply: A genre-bending fourth-wall-breaking doubt-and-paranoia-inducing masterpiece.

I've nominated TOME for the 2020 Labor of Love reward because it's the long-shot up there against the obvious choices of Rockstar's descent into Bethesda-like levels of rehashing and rechurning the same old product again and again with - or PAYDAY2's awkward rising from the grave once they realized they don't know how to make anything else.

TOME is over a decade old - it didn't land on Steam for a while after its inception - and it just keeps getting updated again and again. Sure, some of these are paid expansions to bring new races or classes to the formula - but those are rare compared to the constant and regular drumbeat patches to fix, expand, add, and rework old content. This is what all roguelikes aspire to be: a timeless timesink - where you'll hardly notice the hours flying by due to the sprawling number of possible race/class combinations as well as dynamic game world.

I was skeptical when I heard Risk of Rain 2 was going to take the game into 3D. How could they manage that and still have the bonkers amount of chaos that made the first game the gem it was? Won't that complicate gameplay to an uncomfortable degree? What about characters with skills that don't translate to 3D?

I'm happy to say my skepticism has been met by a proper successor to Risk of Rain. It's got that same feeling of slowly growing into an overpowered nonsense juggernaut before getting killed by an even more ridiculous boss enemy. All while being a tremendous and unique amount of fun.

To be clear, this is the best puzzle game on Steam.

Hellblade is probably one of the best action-narratives to come out in the past few years. I draw the distinction because there are plenty of indie walking simulators and experimental games, but in the action realm, there isn't a lot that tries to realliy do story. I mean oh sure, Call Of Duty for the year will have some high crisis and some exciting sections. There will be plenty of games that pay lip service to a story. But Hellblade manages to actually tell a human story, there's everything here necessary for a film on the big screen, but you get to involve yourself in the action and that bonds you to Senua as a character.

This game is so good my friend plays it one handed.

Ok listen up, son. I'm going to tell you about this here Witcher 2 game. You see, you've got it all backwards and all wrong and you've spent your life in a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cave staring at shadows on the wall and I'm about to show you the ♥♥♥♥ that was casting those shadows and his name is Geralt of Rivia, the White ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Wolf.

You gotta step back and consider the term Role Playing Game for a minute. Now you've got your Skyrim where you're play pretending to be some nordic deathmetal singer screaming micropenis apologist drivel at dragons. They call that a role playing game but the only role you're playing is goofing around. You've got your Mass Effects and Dragon Ages and those are supposed to have roles to play, but really they're just feel good power fantasies that are like PG-rated visual novels interspersed with laserguns and dwarves. You get to choose your pathetic nerd "I read it in a Dungeons and Dragons book" stereotype and stick to it.

You gotta forget all about that, brother, because I'm here to tell you that THE WITCHER 2 frees you from the chains of your own choice. It's still a Role Playing Game but it does away with whatever sick infantile ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ your lonely virgin mind could come up with and unzips and slaps you across the face with a big ol' Polish Dong and that dong belongs to Geralt of Rivia, the White ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Wolf. He's the titular Witcher, if this wasn't clear to you yet. And while your head is spinning from getting hit with that meaty tree trunk you get all Inception up in this ♥♥♥♥ and realize that HOLY ♥♥♥♥ I AM THE OWNER OF THAT DONG. I AM Geralt of Rivia, the White ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Wolf! The game doesn't want to give you a choice of who to be, because it already wants you to be the baddest ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in the genre and once you figure that ♥♥♥♥ out, there's no need to concern yourself with making up your own mind about what role to play because you've already been given the best one possible.

Now it sounds like you're one of those nerds who is averse to conflict and avoids fighting and stern words. You gotta drop all that now, son, because that's not how a Witcher behaves and you're a Witcher now, that's the role you are playing, get your mind right. Witchers are kids abandoned as children to the care of other Witchers. They spend their childhoods training and I don't mean beating each other with foam covered twigs, I mean swinging real ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ edged steel at each other because if young witchers die they just dump the body and replace them. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Spartans would feel a little uncomfortable with how these guys raise kids. If that's not enough, anybody who is still in one piece gets given a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cocktail of crazy ♥♥♥♥ and I'm not talking the Appletinis you order with the rest of the secretarial pool on Fridays, I'm talking the equivalent of Agent Orange laced with Ebola and all these lucky ♥♥♥♥♥ who didn't maim themselves learning to swing a sword probably die as this ♥♥♥♥ rends their very genes apart. But you're Geralt of Rivia, the White ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Wolf and the fact that you're here playing this game means you obviously didn't die. You got turned into this bonkers mutant superhuman with reflexes and strength that would make Shepherd or the Dovakhin need a diaper change. You're now a one man ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ killing machine who makes bank by killing the ♥♥♥♥ those ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ peasants and soldiers and other mercenaries run right away from. Manticores who just slaughtered thirty men ♥♥♥♥ their liony britches when a Witcher comes around. And you're a Witcher, you're the bad ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ who is going to kill that ♥♥♥♥ and get paid.

I think you might be getting the gist of ♥♥♥♥, now, you might be catching on to what I'm trying to illuminate. So I've got some good news and some bad news. The bad news here is that given that you're a terrifying ubermensch, the common plebes don't trust you and kind of don't like you. So they're kind of downright unkind in most cases. This means you ain't really got many friends and you have a whole enormous pile of enemies. But you're good at what you do, and a lot of these bastards will put aside their desire to retch at the sight of you and manipulate you for favors. You're going to have to make some hard choices between bastards and other bastards. The good news is that that potion that stripped the weakness out of you? That ♥♥♥♥ also salted your earth and by that I mean your balls and by that I mean you're ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sterile do I have to spell it out for you? Geralt of Rivia, the White ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Wolf isn't a man who dilly dallies and spends a hundred and thirty hours wooing a masked alien with an autoimmune disorder to get a peck on the cheek. He's suave as ♥♥♥♥ and that means YOU are suave as ♥♥♥♥ and you get to learn about real people relationships now and how real adults behave. I'm going to leave it at that because Ask/Tell is the other way if you need to understand what I'm getting at and your ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ parents should have covered all this with you a long time ago - it's not my responsibility, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

Basically what I'm saying here is that you're playing the baddest ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in one of the best games and don't you dare ruin it by trying to turn him into a hide-in-the-shadows craven fool.

Thank you for this game. It finally helped me realize what I had been doing wrong all these years.

Look, I'm not going to lie, there's a lot of 'teen-isms' in this game.
There's a lot of goofy faux-teen language.
But there's a lot of heart and a lot of feeling here. Sure, like all games, your choices still somewhat flow towards pre-determined events and situations, but there's still a lot of tension a lot of moments worth experiencing.
You know that feeling from The Walking Dead?
-Clementine will remember that-
It's like that. But all over.

This isn't a long game. It doesn't have achievements. It isn't replayable.
But it shatters expectations and deserves to be played.
I spent the first twenty minutes throwing everything I could pick up into the bathroom sink - because I could. I inspected pens and considered whether UPC stickers on boxes of food were important.
Then I realized that by offering so many distractions, Gone Home was almost knowingly putting these timesinks in my path so that I could get it out of my system and then pay attention to the real meat of the game - the brilliant writing.