Recent reviews by Case

Road 96 tells the stories of 8 main characters in the fictional but very much US-inspired autocratic country of Petria in 1996. Media is censored, a border wall has been built to the north and young people protesting for change are being imprisoned in labour camps. The past and present lives of the characters (a truck driver, a cop, a TV presenter, a serial killer, two bank robbers, a teenage runaway and a young computer genius) intersect in a multitude of ways that they might not be aware of (think "Crash" or "Magnolia").

In a reversal of traditional storytelling, where you play as the protagonist of the story, in Road 96 you play several run-throughs of unnamed teenagers making a run for the border, trying to escape the country. The characters you play are not important. They might live and make it across or die trying. However, along the way, you encounter most of the 8 main characters in different scenarios and can influence their story. How and when you meet them is randomized, but also depends on how you choose to travel from scenario to scenario: If you hitchhike, you might get picked up by the truck driver. If you steal a car, you might get pulled over by the cop. No matter if you succeed or die in a run-through, each time you leave a small mark upon the world and the central characters depending on the choices you make in conversing and interacting. You can influence peoples' politics to support violent rebellion or trying to affect change through voting. It all builds up towards a big finale on election day in Petria and the choices you have made during your seven run-throughs will (slightly) influence which ending you get.

A lot here will feel very familiar to Life Is Strange players: There's beautiful scenery to look at, an amazing soundtrack that you can collect as cassette tapes for your walkman and sprinkled throughout are multiple mini-games that offer some fun distraction from the dark overtones of the story. The advertised procedural generation does not add anything meaningful to the game and more work could have been put into making your choices matter more. That said, I found this to be a well-told, suspenseful story worth experiencing!

Hardcore ten-finger typing action battles against hordes of insects, superb game mechanics, breathaking origami-style graphics, some light puzzle elements, nice soundtrack. Drew me in and I could not stop playing. You must play this for yourself, letsplays or reviews cannot convey just how fun the typing battle mechanic is. Will make you feel like an epic keyboard cowboy.

Tense, well-acted heist thriller with good acting and cinematography making the best out of the gorgeous London locations.

As for gameplay, this is an interactive movie where quick time events let you choose how the story should proceed. Not sure why it is so heavily avertised as an FMV game, the FMV games of yore were still proper adventure games with puzzle solving, just that they had exceptionally badly acted greenscreen footage of people against static backdrops. Late Shift is different, modern and professionally acted and directed but there's also no gameplay aside from the QTEs. Curiously the mobile app version of the game seems to have a bit more interactivity according to the trailer. For example, in a sequence in which the main character types in a pin code the Steam version lets you decide between "type in correct code" or "type in incorrect code" whereas you get to type the code in yourself in the app version.

I've played through the story twice so far and got a very different run through the second time around with lots of completely new content. Looking forward to play it a third time, however scene skipping or save functionality would be much appreciated in order to be able to experience all seven different endings in a reasonable timeframe.

For an interactive movie I appreciate the price point this is being released in, a few bucks more than a movie ticket which is more than fair given how much work goes into shooting all the different plot variations.

Nothing like coming home after a day spent in meetings looking at graphs and charts, putting your feet up and... playing a game about graphs and charts. Seriously though, this is a unique platformer with some interesting mechanics and cool minimalist visual style.

One Night Stand Morning After Simulator. Navigate branching decision trees into many different ways she will throw you out of her house (with clothes, sans clothes, ...). Very realistic in its unpredictability, even when doing your best to be kind and considerate she might react hurtful in return. There is only one "good" ending and it's so hard to get after an hour of trying I had to use a walkthrough. Rotoscoping art style is on point. I enjoyed it.

Utterly charming visual novel (not an adventure!) about bright young minds in turn-of-the-century Vienna. Each episode covers a different character, Ep. 1 a composer secretly in love with her mentor, Ep. 2 a portrait painter struggling to capture all facets of his subjects, Ep. 3 a mathematician who needs to disguise herself as a man to be taken seriously. Each character is shown to perceive a hidden reality, be it sounds, images or ideas where they draw their inspiration from. Along the way you encounter famous Viennese such as Sigmund Freud and Gustav Klimt. It's really beautiful, artistic, grown-up stuff - just be prepared that there is almost zero interactivity, only four or five different choices you can take per episode.

Cibele consists of a fake computer desktop, much like a hacking game, except you play a 19 year old geek girl addicted to an MMO. Gameplay is essentially multitasking through the short and strictly linear story being told. You play the MMO which is simplified to just clicking on enemies, listen to voice chats your character is having with an online crush, read incoming emails and chat, check new Instagram posts and browse your character's harddrive. Using her computer really immerses you into the girl's character and her story. I just wish there was more content. Particularly the ending is very abrupt with no explanation whatsoever.

Overall a very unique concept that I think should be expanded upon in a future game.

A funny short adventure game where you get to look at beautiful classical paintings while solving easy but fulfilling puzzles. It really benefits from super-high-res scans of the artworks, it just looks gorgeous on the big screen. The music selection fits perfectly. Of course, a voice track would have really brought out the humour but it's understandable that that's hard to achieve on a small budget. Loved this and I'm hoping for a sequel!

FEZ is, along with Braid, the indie darling of the jump-and-run platformer. Both have revolutionary new mechanics: FEZ levels are 2D but mapped on four sides of a three-dimensional cube, allowing you to rotate the view of the level. Braid plays with the "fourth" dimension, allowing you to reverse time.

FEZ really connected with me storywise since it follows in the spirit of E. Abbott's novella "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions", in which a square living in Flatland (2D) gets a visit from a sphere and discovers the third dimension. In FEZ, you are given a magical fez by an old, one-eyed adventurer. It gives you the power to see and use the third dimension. A small cube follows you around to give hints and introduce new gameplay mechanics when you encounter them. It manages to be less of a nuisance than Microsoft's clippy.

The graphics are supercutesy pixelated retro 8bit which looks really quite beautiful. The barely-audible soundtrack is some weird chiptune I could not warm up to, I usually play with the sound off. There's a day-and-night cycle and different weather. Puzzles are fairly easy and dying respawns you instantly at the exact position you were at. This allows you to progress at a good pace and have fun without getting frustrated. Unfortuantely towards the end you will have to backtrack a bit to navigate to remaining unsolved levels which is a bit of a nuisance.

Once you beat the game, there's a whole optional second game of cryptography and linguistic code breaking you can go on to explore. The ancient civilization depicted in FEZ's levels has an alphabet and a number system that can be decoded. The very last FEZ challenge was so hard and obscure that gamers teamed up to bruteforce the combinations instead of solving it.

No matter if you just play FEZ as a pure platformer until 100% completion or go on to solve its crypto-puzzles for a total of 209.4% competion, it is an absolute must-play.

The first thing you will notice when playing this game is that it is HARD. While you can kill or incapacitate people with the press of a button, getting away with it is a very daunting task indeed. Your first, second, third try you will fail and fail hard. Instead of giving you the powers of a hitman, the game actually teaches and challenges you to learn to be one. It's the antithesis of shooters where you can kill with impunity and go crouch in a corner for 30 seconds after which all is forgiven and forgotten.

HITMAN is a very unique type of sandbox with just 6 main maps of relatively small size. However, they are perfectly tuned intricate machines with a huge amount of details to discover. Many NPCs lead their own lives, there are multiple obvious and hidden pathways to most locations and there are interconnected events that, with the right timing, allow you to perform some spectacular kills. The easy way through a level is to follow a selection of pre-scripted "opportunities" where you just fulfill some requirements which trigger an animation. They allow for fun kills, usually making it look like an accident, but require no creativity on the player's part. Beyond that, there is plenty to explore for OCD minds. You will want to repeat the level over and over, learning the routines and timing of NPCs, discovering secrets, trying out different disguises, unlocking new starting locations and new gear that allow for different strategies. It's a testament to the superb level design that this is fun and addictive. Some levels are better than others and you will find plenty of rankings in the discussion forum. It's a valid question since you are offered to buy single levels but be careful, the pricing shows the idea is to get you hooked and make you overspend. To me, Sapienza, Paris and Hokkaido are the standout ones.

Graphics are top-notch, just don't expect to see anything of the city you are in. You are always confined to a single location like a hotel. Well, you're there for business, not pleasure Agent 47. Excellent voice acting really adds to the immersion. You will learn to love the voice of Jane Perry as your handler DIana, welcoming you to exotic locations and briefing you on your mission. The choice to have all NPCs in non-English speaking countries speak (accent-free) English is unfortunate but understandable from a marketing point of view (subtitles would turn away some customers). Less understandable (read: ♥♥♥♥ that ♥♥♥♥) is the forced online mode for a single-player game.

One of my favourite games of 2016.