Recent reviews by DreamCarver

Fun romp through not-Mario 64 as a cool rabbit-goat lady with a humongous... sword. Jumping and dashing and kicking off of walls flow together very nicely, the music is chill as needed and intense when it counts, and it's just... it's a nice vibe, yknow? Exploring big room environments that don't particularly care if they actually resemble a castle, with an expanding number of tricks and skills to gain height and distance over gaps and around corners. Sybil and all the other characters/enemies in the game run at this deliciously crunchy low FPS, making each frame stand out, and making some generic sword-wielding guys really pop as they wind up their attacks like stop-motion.

The only gripe I have is that combat is not particularly interesting, but it functions perfectly fine for what it is, and has its own set of cool tricks. I wish enemies reacted more to my strikes, had a stun mechanic, but then this would become more Devil May Cry than Mario. Which would be awesome, I want to bounce off of walls and Sundowner into an enemy and then pogo up to smack something flying. But in the end this game isn't trying to be anything enormous. It's a game jam project polished up, the bones of some even grander project. But they are beautiful bones, that I will return to and cherish as I speedrun through collecting each powerup on my way to that tower in the sky.

I bounced off of Puyo Puyo when I tried it on the Switch. The setups, the chains, the way you gotta stack things just so, so you can pull off a humongous combo and utterly break your opponent in two... It's beyond me. My game brain grew up with tetris. It built itself around tetris. We like simple, here.

Lumines manages to fit itself very comfortably in the "simple" category. Make squares, don't let the board fill up, easy. And yet, that chain and stack that threw me off of Puyo makes an appearance here as well, with two key differences: there's only two colors (simple!) and more importantly, the blocks don't vanish right away. The magic eraser cursor is tied to the tempo of the song you're currently listening to, meaning you can stack up a massive shape of squares upon squares before they're actually removed, which then ALSO lets you plan out how the blocks above THOSE will fall and slot nicely next to the OTHER blocks, and oh my god, this game is really, REALLY good. My thumbs hurt typing this because of how much I've been abusing my D-pad trying to clear the time trials and CPU vs modes (which are both BS hard by the way, and the VS mode is a bit unbalanced by nature, but it's fine).

Given its origins as a Vita game, this is very much an easy hop-in-for-a-while experience... Although, if you're going to try and clear the classic challenge, that's probably going to take you over an hour. The Vita version, I imagine, had the benefit of being able to be paused as you were getting off your train, and picked back up after dinner, or whatever, but here on PC, I imagine it might be a bit of a slog for some among you to sit there and play JUST the puzzle rhythm game for upwards of an hour. You can pause it and leave it, sure, but... I dunno, just a thought.

By the way, this game is making me have to define what a "rhythm game" really means. Does it mean you're performing inputs to the beat? Because this isn't that. There's a key game mechanic ATTACHED to the tempo of the song that is currently playing (that magic eraser cursor that slides from left to right), so one can argue that the music DOES have an effect on gameplay, but each song is more like a skin for the game than a brand new stage. I dunno. In my brain, you gotta be bobbing your head to each button push for it to count as a "real" rhythm game, but that's just me.

Anyway. Lumines is good simple fun. Fresh concepts are always great to find in puzzle games, and there's just enough interesting ideas here to make something special.

You'll wish you'd stayed in that coffin you call home.

My first five to ten hours of GTFO were a fantastic horror experience. Duckwalking through misty industrial corridors, listening to the back-of-the-throat creaking of the monsters, hearing the scared breathing of my character as they're pulled out of calm oblivion and thrust into the catapult that drops you a thousand meters down into that horrible hole. I had a crew of friends who were equally new to the game, and they were good company for appreciating each new unknown. Each new horrible addition to the enemies we were to make a stand against.

We made it through the top deck together. A proud accomplishment. But their interest waned, and I was forced to join the Discord to drum up new comrades, because god knows you're not getting through this game alone. It is 100% tuned for a Full Team Of Four. Initially I was put off by the lack of caution, the lack of respect for the dangers that live down in the dark. It was frankly jarring, going from a horror game to an action squad game. But that's what this game becomes, once the unknowns start to become familiar. The fear is held up by not knowing enemy behavior, spawn patterns, map layout, but with time and understanding, the levels become problems to solve.

Which isn't to say the problems are easy, or that they all can be solved neatly. Far from it. I've cleaned out A and B deck with a bit of effort, but from C deck and beyond, you are given no quarter. Mistakes add up fast down in the Complex. More angry monsters means more damage on you and your teammates, and less bullets for when you really need them. And when you need bullets, you REALLY need bullets. The objectives are rather straightforward on paper, but when you add keycards and generators and poisonous fog into the mix, you start to realize just how much these levels are crafted to screw you over. A friend commented that the devs probably chuckle while putting all the pieces into place, saying "yeah, this is gonna suck". And I think he's right.

This game is hard, man. I try to hit headshots. I try to save ammo by kiting with my hammer. I use all my knowledge of spawning rules and pathing to set up on certain doors. And I die. Nine times out of ten, I die. The revive mechanics are rather forgiving, but team wipes can happen really, REALLY fast. You're gonna fail a lot. Everyone who's played this game for more than three hours knows this. And sometimes you're in these missions for over an hour. Which makes falling on your face at the finish line a bummer.

But I do like this game. It's hard, but there's a rewarding feeling when your plan comes together. When the defense holds. When you and your fellow prisoners gun down a horde of sprinting naked hellspawn. I like it.

Speed dating for white-haired demon babes in SUITS. Kick a skeleton, win over the girl, don't fall into eternal damnation.

The amount of raw honesty and "that's my FAVORITE THING" on display here is incredibly admirable to me. None of this waffling around trying to make the girl like you for hours of everyday encounters, NO. We are at the bar and there's no time to lose. Pick the correct binary option that won't leave you with a torn out throat.

No cost too great. Best girl is a tossup between Malina and Modeus. It's quick, it's simple, it's cute.

Sci-fi House of Leaves In Space.

Let it be known, for now and always, that I am a huge mark for superstructures. I’m talking about artificial planets, geodomes, and colony ships, that kind of impossibly huge and resource-guzzling project that exists to put wonder into my heart and make me understand just what level of technology I’m dealing with.

Let it also be known that one of my favorite dreams is the one with the infinite hallways and doors and staircases. A house without people. Existing only for you to walk through it and get lost in it. Rich with the thrill of eternal exploration and mapping.

So when you add a damn interesting AI mechanic and gorgeous environments to those two things, and then put them into a videogame, of course I’ll like it.

And so I like ECHO. It’s got faults, of course. The ploddingly slow opening sequence. The way additional enemies will patiently wait until you’ve broken free of your current assailant to grab you and kill you. The multiple objectives which must be completed within a single save state, and if you mess up you’re back to square one. The fact that sometimes Unreal Engine just doesn’t agree with my PC and I crash to desktop. I don’t like those bits.

Jumping back to the opening sequence though, I do have to give ECHO big props for the method of its characterization and storytelling. Player character En and her comms companion London are both acquaintances of a man named Foster, and much like when two friends of a friend meet in real life without the joining link, they REALLY don’t like each other. This leads to a pretty interesting dynamic as you push downwards into the planet’s core: both of you arguing over who actually knew the guy you’re attempting to resurrect: the AI companion that spent years as the systems manager onboard Foster’s spaceship, or the Perfect Prodigy who can see through any mask a person puts up. All the worldbuilding is done via casual remarks during conversation, none of which feel forced like one expects from that sort of thing.

The flow of gameplay is extremely structured: there’s rules here in the Palace. You are outnumbered by your Echoes. They will learn from your actions. Be careful what you teach them. Wait for the moment when the lights are off, when the Palace isn’t watching. Then you can go full force, whip out your cool railgun pistol, jump a table, disturb the water. Sometimes you’re forced to teach them while the lights are on. Make note of what you did. You’ll have to deal with it in the next cycle.

It all leads to an interesting playstyle of not quite stealth, not quite action. It makes you feel clever, even if all you did was fast-walk away and kick your pursuers down the stairs. It makes you really think it through before you pull the trigger, has you weigh the benefits now against the costs later.

ECHO isn’t the best magician. It knows its act isn’t polished to perfection, and that it doesn’t have a bunch of tricks to keep the act going and going. So once it pulls the last pigeon out of its hat (a pigeon that makes your life hell, by the way), it makes a deep bow, and wraps things up. It did its best, and the audience claps politely, and then it exits stage right. Nine hours playtime to completion. An enjoyable if sometimes frustrating time.

... I've mentioned in the past that I don't like coming off of games with hot feelings. I like to let my opinions cool down, let time distill my thoughts into a more analytical form. But even saying that... Even with so much time since letting the story of this ravaged world into my heart... those feelings remain. Cooled though they are, they're still roiling in the reaches of my heart. And I can't discount them. But let's get to everything in due course.

The gameplay is action RPG, as undertaken by PlatinumGames. It's cool but not nearly as flashy as their other titles, and that makes perfect sense for our darling androids. You can dodge out of anything, through anything (mostly), and combos are easy stuff. You have your weapon upgrades, your chip slots instead of equipment (which is a cool system, do this more often everyone), your fishing minigames... Yknow. A Japanese Action RPG.

The worldmap is small, but well-traveled. Very efficiently used. The music... Well, I'm not even going to try. Even without emotional context for each track they're still amazing. Go listen to some ambient stuff and maybe a boss fight. Seriously, do it. And of course, because no review of this game would be complete without it: 2B's butt. It's a good butt.

Speaking frankly, I like A2 (and her butt) more, but that's because I'm not a basic fool like most of you, apparently.

But all of this is simply a vehicle for story. And the story is what keeps you going. It's why you're here. Through every pulling back of the curtain, every reveal, every horrible truth, every despair that digs into your heart with a spoon and somehow pulls out more emotional jelly despite you being very certain there was nothing left. Even abandoning the main questline gets you no further from the main themes of repeating your failure over and over again, as you encounter various sidequest folks who are going through their own horrible depressions. Yoko Taro has drunk deep of my tears, and may he grow strong from them.

A friend of mine on Discord offered to me this tiny snippet as I allcaps'd my reactions to events into the chat, and I think it sums up the general feeling pretty well: "There is always more, and it is always worse." And I'm going to tell you to play it. It's a slog if you're going for 100%, but stick to the beaten path (and maybe google what sidequests are the best ones) and you're in for a deliciously bitter treat. From beginning to crushing end.

I come from a Tolkien household; I say that in the same way that one might say their family is Pagan. My mother is a devoted lore nerd to the Lord of the Rings, and knows elf-speak to a degree that puts most to shame and awe. My childhood revolved a fair bit around the original film trilogy, book reports on The Hobbit were written, and I dressed as the ring-bearer Frodo for one halloween.

All of this to say that I think I know what made me love those stories, and what drew my mother to them, was not what this game contains. There's none of the magic here. Oh, it tries. It tries to FEEL like the movies, like the things you love, but in its trying it shows itself to be a giant poser, with its breathy pauses and grand posturing and manufactured discord between the characters.

So I don't consider this piece of software to be part of that golden portion of my life. And you know what? That's fine! Because this is a videogame, and videogames are very often over the top and not to be taken so very seriously. As this one is. So I won't take it seriously.

It's a fine videogame. The gameplay loop of hunting captains and warchiefs and getting into stupidly large brawls with the Uruk has kept me going for hours upon hours. Combat might get repetitive for some, but there's something about flurry-striking an orc using your Elf afterimage and making his head explode that hasn't gotten old for me. Figuring out the ideal way to take apart a tough enemy makes you feel clever, and getting your revenge on the one shield-toting vault-blocking jerk that keeps putting you into the grave is so very sweet. Upon writing this review, I think I'm finally reaching the limit of what this game can give back to me, though, so... it won't last forever. But while it did, it was fun.

Burn through the story missions, get a taste of greatness as you lead your army head-to-head with the elite forces of the Dark Lord (really, that moment is over too fast, hope that the "giant battlefield full of infighting with you spearheading the charge against the enemy captains" is expanded upon in Shadow of War), and you're looking at... fifteen, twenty hours. Go deep on the completionism, and it's more like forty-fifty. It's your money, so you make the call. Do buy the DLC, though. The Bright Lord campaign is pretty damn cool.

... In conclusion. This game is just what happens when someone says, "Man, Aragorn is REALLY cool. Let's give him a Stand and a vendetta and have him go to town on a bunch of orcs forever." Also Gollum is here, because they couldn't not use the brand power of the little creep.

Damn.

Dubai is beautiful, even by today's graphics standards. Things control nice, gameplay makes sense. It's very Gears of War. This game, as a game, is perfectly fine. But you probably know that's not why you play this game. If you didn't know that, then, well...

What follows does not contain spoilers of events, but the emotional beats that the events caused in me. You are warned.

March into a city drowned in sand. You're the hero. You're gonna make it right. This all makes sense. Shoot the enemy. Move forward in cover. Have your sniper take out a window and blind the enemy. It makes sense.

Things aren't what they seem. They don't trust you. Things are a lot worse than you thought. But still, you're gonna do what's right. Because you're the hero.

You see things. You learn things. You feel boiling rage at what has happened. A smell fills the air, a man in body armor strides out of the smoke, and you actually roar as you hold the trigger down on his head. When that fight ends, you know what you're doing is right. You will be the hero.

You do something you have to. It is awful. But you had to do it. Right? They were the enemy. Your enemy. You are right and they are wrong and... that's the way it is... right?

It gets worse. But you keep fighting. Keep pushing. You're going to help. What you are doing has to help. But it doesn't.

Heroes make mistakes, right? Heroes are forgiven, right?

It gets worse. But you keep fighting for what you think is right. Because you're the hero. You have to be. Because if you're not the hero, what are you?

In memory of Pilot NOUPH, first to reach the elusive Sector 7.

I think I stumbled across this one entirely by accident while searching the market for N++ trading cards. The name caught me, the concept sounded pretty neat, and when I plugged in to have a go, I had a grand old time. Arcade as a business may have faded from the spotlight, but there's always gonna be some remnant of what those machines gave us. In Switch's case, it's simple controls and a difficulty curve that starts cool, then ramps to red hot. Your single button casual tapping becomes a series of frantic clicks as you try to keep your cool while dancing right next to a bio-laser and the suddenly firey side of the screen. Then you die and your constant hype-man and weird face maker of a commander reads a single-line obituary commending your efforts. Slam another quarter in! You'll get further next time.

It's good stuff. I glance over my library from time to time, look at my collection, and when I see Switch I nod in approval. I hear it's got an Android port as well, so if you're looking for something portable, go for it. Not much else to say. This one's a "buy" from me.

LACONIC: Boy in red, running from the hunters, running to his fate. Atmospheric science fiction terror adventure from the fellows who gave you LIMBO. Wonderfully crafted. Definitely a game to witness, if not buy.

MORE WORDS: I read the reviews of the games I try to write up, sometimes. And all too often I find myself questioning what it is other people look for in experiences like these. There's a camp that calls the journey to the finish line "nothing", "boring", while another camp praises the "minimalist" nature and how "dark" it is. And all I can feel is that those words are inadequate. Words are inadequate. The old saying about picture to word ratios is amplified thousandfold here, and INSIDE reminds me that "games as stories" is a realm we have yet to fully drown ourselves in.

Maybe you're looking for difficult puzzle and platforming sections, like in its predecessor LIMBO? Unfortunately, that's not really part of the package. My mom was able to beat this game. She's used a controller for 3 hours tops in her entire life. (She loved it, by the way, thank you for asking.) No, the puzzles and perils are less of a hard brick wall to climb over as they are brambly bushes for you to push through. Your forward momentum is an almost guaranteed thing.

Are you looking for a timesink? Then do move on. This is going to take at most 4 hours. A single dedicated evening. Or two to three working adult afternoon chill sessions. There's not a lot to see here in terms of quantity.

That being said, the quality? The craftsmanship? The amount of care the team who worked on this put in? It's amazing. A good sixth of it just flows right by you as you focus on not getting your throat torn out by dogs or choked out by masked turtleneck men, but the slower segments are where things really shine. There's two areas in quick succession that I adore (those who have played, I will simply say 19 and hope you understand) that I like to boot up to see again, just because I want to. Admittedly, that's a me thing, you probably won't draw as much enjoyment out of this as me, but still, it's a good indicator of quality to me when I like something that much.

I don't like that this review is becoming sections of critique, so I'm going to start wrapping up, but I have to mention the sound design. I can't tell you in words. Words, as I said before, are inadequate. I do not feel qualified as a sensory being to tell you about these sounds. All I can say is that they are very creepy and very, very effective. For further information and a view into the mad genius behind the wavelengths, there's an article on Gamasutra which details the involvement of an actual human skull for the recording process.

Final thoughts... It's expensive. I get it. But think of it like a quality steak dinner. Delicious. Maybe not worth it for all of us. Maybe you don't like steak. Maybe you don't like being the hunted, crouched low behind a broken pod as two men with flashlights quietly approach your hiding spot, shutting blast doors behind you to ward off the water creature that once was human, hiding in the shadows as the lights which mean a fate worse than death scroll across the floor. Maybe you don't like a story of control, of fear, of dark science, all told wonderfully without a single written word...

That's okay. I don't hold it against you. Watch a Let's Play or longplay or something. But if you're willing to dive in, certainly do.