Recent reviews by Slug Camargo

BULLET POINTS

Pros:

• Gorgeous art
  
• Immersive, beautifully bleak atmosphere
  
• Cleverly interconnected world
  
• Responsive, satisfyingly hefty controls
  
• Meaty combat with an interesting touch of strategy
  
• Maybe the best NG+ ever

Cons:

• Oddly arbitrary ability gating, that can be needlessly confusing
  
• Shared resources hamper the usability of tools
  
• Boss fights are too simplistic

THE SHORT OF IT
Play the demo[redo99.itch.io] and finish it. It can take a while to understand the mechanics -specifically the rhythm of the combat-, but once you do, and once you get to use the first couple tools, you'll know.


THE LONG OF IT
When I first played the REDO! demo I was torn. On the one hand, I was instantly enamoured with the setting, the colour palette, the character design and her animations; and the subtle yet effective soundtrack worked wonders to convey a sense of isolation and decay that immediately reminded me of Silent Hill 2, of all things. But then I just couldn't get on with the combat: The controls were fine, but there was something about the enemies' attack patterns that I just couldn't wrap my head around, and two fights after the first checkpoint would see me coming out in a miserable shape.

I gave up on the demo three times. But I liked the atmosphere so much that I'd think about it a lot, and so I'd always come back to give it another try. And, eventually, it clicked.

There's a slow and deliberate rhythm to the combat that you need to understand and, once you do, it just flows, in its own particular way. That gif up there is about the best illustration of the whole thing that I can think of.

Soon you'll be getting a handful of tools for both offense and defense -including your regular action game weapons, but also more interesting stuff like a riot shield that stops creatures on their tracks and a blade that bounces projectiles back- and things will turn very interesting very quickly.

The combat has an unexpected depth to it: Enemies have indicators for health and stamina. Blunt force attacks will deplete their health and eventually destroy them, rewarding you with blue energy points (a shared resource for your tools, more on this later). On the other hand, attacking with energy weapons will drain enemies' stamina. Once their stamina depletes, the enemy is staggered for a short while. If you finish them at this point, instead of blue energy points you'll get green health points. Going for the stamina is usually more dangerous than going straight for the kill, but it might be your best opportunity to get a heal (the other way to heal is saving at a checkpoint, but that makes enemies respawn). Add to this that enemies' own attacks also drain their stamina, which you can learn to exploit to your advantage, but also that some enemies have a failsafe mechanism that makes them even more dangerous once they're staggered; and suddenly the combat has a lot of factors to play with.

Unfortunately, as unexpectedly clever as the combat is, it has a few glaring issues. Chief among them, perhaps, is the fact that every tool feeds from the same pool of energy --a universal ammo system, as it were. I can't think of a game where universal ammo was a good idea, and in this one it isn't either. And it's not just how silly it looks that, say, a rocket launcher uses the same ammo as a tazer; but even using shields will drain that same energy. I can imagine that if the shields didn't have some kind of degradation mechanic they could be easily abused; but I feel that, at the very least, defensive and offensive tools should use separate resources.

Added to that, as much as I enjoyed fighting regular enemies, the bosses are massively underwhelming. They're visually imposing and genuinely scary, mind, but there's basically no strategy to fighting them: They spam you with bullets and you'll be trying to switch back and forth between shields and whatever weapon you have that deals the most damage, in what amounts to little more than a dps race. Usually, getting into melee range of a boss is borderline impossible too, so if you run out of energy you're as good as dead; which can get really frustrating.

Surprisingly enough for a metroidvania, there's no map to speak of. Perhaps more surprisingly, there really isn't a need for one. The world feels sufficiently large with several distinct areas; but it's beautifully, expertly laid out in such a way that it's much smaller that it'll have you believe, and you won't be walking for too long before you open yet another shortcut looping back to familiar ground. I live for a cleverly designed, interconnected world, and REDO! -small though it is- is easily among my favourite ones.

There is a problem with the map, though. Rather, with its metroidvania aspect: The map is fairly open from the beginning, but there are some areas that you can't access unless you have the ability to pass through a certain type of obstacle. I'm not gonna spoil things here, but in one case this "ability" you need is of a destructive nature, and a ridiculously specific one at that. Once you realize what is that you need to do, I guarantee that your first thought will be: "Why on Earth can I only do that with *BLANK*, when I have a perfectly good *BLANK* that should do the same job --if not an even better one?". In my case, this oddly arbitrary requirement had me wandering for a good while, not a clue of how to progress, and finding out the solution completely by accident. Not ideal.

The story is told via the tried-and-true system of journal entries left by victims of the apocalypse that had the foresight to scatter the pages across the world in a way that you'd think they intended to feed into a deliberately paced story. This is the kind of story that will have you hunt down every bit of lore, and even then require some interpretation on your end. Plus, you'll definitely want to beat the game twice to even make sense of the ending.

And here we arrive to arguably REDO!'s best feature: Completing the game will have you gawking at a perplexingly ambiguous sequence, watch the credits, and then back at the menu; where you'll see a "New Game +" option.

"NG+" is not quite an accurate name, though. In fact, I'm at a loss as to why the dev didn't just call it "REDO!". Whatever the case, in "NG+" "REDO! Mode" you'll start the game in the same situation as you did the first time (no keys, no tools, no weapons), but everything in the world is different: Paths that were locked are now open, paths that were open are now locked (some irreversibly so!), the location of tools and weapon is shuffled to the point that progression through the campaign will change dramatically, enemies are more dangerous, enemies that belonged to later areas are now in earlier ones, and a few new enemies are introduced.

On the plus side, you'll get a handful of more helpfully explanatory journal entries and dialogues; and two conclusive, fulfilling endings to choose from.


CLOSING THOUGHTS
REDO! is the perfectly balanced bite-size treat: It doesn't aim to do more than it realistically can, and so everything it delivers is as tight and finely tuned as you can ask. But then, it goes and tweaks the formula slightly, to keep the more trivial and formulaic aspects more interesting. And then, it REDO!es the entire game, to effectively double its use life while basically using tools it already has at hand.

The fact that this is the work of a single person across 3 years is nothing short of impressive. It's hands down my favourite game of 2019, it has a comfortable spot in my top 10 for the entire decade, and frankly it's borderline criminal that it's not more widely known.

I was skeptical about the remaster up until the very release date.

Things already started somewhat sour after eating up fextralife's nonsense about a full-on remake hook, line and sinker; and then falling for a mistranslated press kit that basically turned out lying its ass off about gameplay changes. That was not From's fault, it's true; but then I got super suspicious about an external studio doing the job, and more so about the complete radio silence regarding the game's progress throughout the months (all while merrily cashing in on preorders left and right); and then about that preview code that oh-so-conveniently only showed areas that already played fine in the original.

Then, Eurogamer -finally!- came up with that feature benchmarking Blighttown, and things started looking up... BUT THEN! early Steam user reviews talked about the game's logic being tied to framerate and how any slight dip in performance would throw everything into slow motion, and how that was even worse than regular stuttering; and I was suspicious again.

I eventually broke down and bought the thing, because at the end of the day I'm still a massive From fanboy, and worst case scenario I could just refund.

About a week and 4 characters in, not only can I gladly report that I have very little to complain about the remaster (and what little I can say is all in the realm of the extreme nitpicking), but I have to honestly apologize to and congratulate QLOC for their technical prowess. My PC is good enough to run anything out there with fairly decent framerates, but it's still a cheap enough tin can to barely deserve registering in the annals of the master race; and even I have been getting a rock solid 60 fps with constant, smooth pacing; all the way up to (and including) Blighttown. No amount of geometry, characters, action or particles have made even a dent in the performance so far. Considering the mess that was the original code -which (even after all the awesome, awesome work of Durante, Clément Barnier, cmoyano and Nwks) showed frame pacing issues in even the beefiest PCs in certain areas-, whatever QLOC did with this version is nothing short of impressive.

I have always liked Blighttown. Even at its worst, it's clever and gorgeous in terms of design and it's arguably the best way to put your skills to test. Finally playing it at a constant 60 fps is a thing of beauty that no one should miss on. Don't take the shortcut, don't be such a pansy.


Of course I would've liked a more extensive work -if nothing else, some level of reworking of Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith was in order-, and I can understand the complaints about being charged for what is essentially what should've come in the box back in 2012; but the game was undeniably, massively improved; I'm really enjoying what I've got; and I think it was worth what I paid for. Some degree of magic has clearly been done here and these people deserve being recognized for that.


Plus the game is alive like I have never seen it before; not in the original release, not in the yearly Return to Lordran events -never. Almost 6 years later, it still warms my heart hearing all those bells.

Dark Souls is the perfect mix of old-school Japanese game design with Western RPG mechanics.

It's a love letter to a time when games challenged you, demanded you to make a damned effort; and then rewarded you handsomely with an overwhelming, addictive sense of accomplishment.

It's a no-nonsense, pure gameplay game. There are barely any cutscenes. The story (which is rather deep and nicely layered) is told in minute pieces you need to pick up and put together on your own. There are a handful of spoken lines and there's not even any form of lipsynch --every resource was devoted to the *game* part of the game.

In a time when everyone goes for the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink school of game design, Dark Souls takes a theme and a gameplay mechanic, and decides to just focus on that. Instead of trying to implement 15 different kinds of games at once and half-assing them all (at best), Dark Souls simply aims to be a game about hitting skeletons with a sword --but then it sets out to be the deepest, most complex title on the subject.

The world is large, interconnected, it offers a myriad of ways to go about it, it holds gigantic secret areas, and it just drips with atmosphere. In a whole bunch on non-trivial ways, Dark Souls might just be the one true metroidvania of the 21st century.

Dark Souls is one of those things that will be talked about in gaming history books.

Do I recommend this game? There is no "thumbs up" big enough \[T]/

Lone Survivor is an incredibly immersive game, one that captures the whole "survival" aspect of survival/horror like no other game ever managed to, and in terms of atmosphere -and I do realize it's gonna sound a bit too much, but try the demo out if you don't believe it- Lone Survivor is more of a Silent Hill game than any Silent Hill has been since the second.

So there.

Amnesia is the kind of games that put all other games in perspective. The first thing that hits you after playing this is the realization that there hasn't been any game so true to the horror genre in its more pure form since the first Silent Hill.

As I say all the time, developer Frictional Games might just be the freshest, most interesting group of minds to grace gaming in a good while. Reading about their thoughts and ideas in their blog is the kind of experience that brings back the hope in gaming.

And it's not just words: Watching the progression made from Penumbra: Overture to Penumbra: Black Plague and then to Amnesia is akin to watching a firmly, steadily ascending curve of game design.

Finally, the success in sales and reviews that Amnesia achieved (along with that of Minecraft) sends out a strong message to other indie developers about being true to your ideas and never compromising.

You're gonna read a lot of horror stories about how this game sucks and their mean mean developers are harrassing poor victim game critics around.

On the other hand, I found the game to be fun enough (and surprisingly high quality, considering the price tag), and if you hit the Steam forums you're gonna find out that at least one of the developers is not only as polite and nice as they come, they will also hear your every complaint/request and strive to attend them right away.

Make of that what you will. Me, I think the game is good enough for the money, and from my personal experience the developer really deserves being supported.