Recent reviews by JLaw

I think the initial promo videos/snippets I saw of this game didn't really communicate how many systems, places, and characters eventually come together to make something quite substantial. But not too big or overwhelming -- even at its most open-world-rpg-ish, it still has the look/feel of a cute interactive clockwork diorama.

It took me about 16 hours to play, not being completionist. Any game more than a few hours long tends to start generating "life is short" thoughts for me these days, but I don't regret this one. The last few hours were a compelling ride to the end. The theme helps a lot -- from the characters to the music to the locations, not much of the aesthetic here has been run into the ground yet by other games. And of course the pixel art is top shelf.

FWIW I played this on the Steam Deck. _Almost_ perfect there. One game crash when I did something weird/unintended with the user interface, and one place in a long battle where the music flaked out and made glitchy sounds.

Beautiful, bleak/creepy, super-polished, inventive, and just long enough. Mildly challenging in a way that I guess I was in the mood for. An interesting and satisfying evolution past what they accomplished with Limbo.

Overall it was a great experience and I was kind of dumb to wait this long before playing it!

Not a carbon copy of the original, but a great sequel. Do you want an FPS to feature weapons that aren't just bullet-hoses, enemies that aren't just foreign-dude-with-rifle, and environments that aren't just beautiful corridors? Then you want DOOM.

I guess I might as well make the inevitable comparisons to Bastion first. It doesn't (and couldn't) have the "amazing thing out of nowhere" quality of Bastion. But the art direction, narration, and setting of Transistor are more to my taste.

The story has a cryptic in medias res presentation and requires a lot of digging to uncover and properly arrange what is actually going on, but that was OK with me.

I also was happy trying out tons of different loadouts and combinations of the combat powers -- the motivation of unlocking story/background bits, and tackling the different challenge rooms, was enough to push me into that experimental approach. And I think that made for a more enjoyable playthrough. Transistor strikes me as being a little analogous to Bioshock in that way; it's tempting to just wrench and electrobolt your way through Bioshock, and you couldn't really be blamed for doing that, but you might have had more fun intentionally trying other weapons/plasmids.

Transistor definitely is flawed as a combat-heavy game with nuanced but poorly tutorialized mechanics that are also hard to visually "read", so I imagine many people will bounce off of it. For various reasons I stuck with it though and ended up having a very good time. I even fired up NG+ immediately and played about halfway through it again. It's a beautiful game that attempts some interesting things, and I'm glad I played it.

Gunpoint is a short and easy game… which I'm not sure should be seen as strikes against it, since it's also charming, full of snappy dialogue, and driven by mechanics that are tailored to make you feel smug and clever. I think I do wish that the complexity/difficulty had ramped up faster (without making the game longer), but it was a really pleasant way to burn a few hours.

This was fun! It doesn't do as much with "non-Euclidean space" as you might expect from the buzz, so if that's what you demand then you might be disappointed. But the system of tools that Antichamber gradually introduces to apply to its puzzles is cool.

The quasi-open-world layout of the play area lets you find multiple puzzle areas at once, and revisit them or solve them in the order you like. Mostly I appreciated that; it feeds my exploring and map-filling compulsion. Although sometimes you run across puzzles that you can't yet solve (or can't solve as easily as you can later), which may or may not be obvious; you just have to keep that possibility in mind.

Antichamber doesn't have a story per se, but it does have a … personality … and certainly enough of a sequence of weird surprises to keep me going. The puzzles were difficult enough to be satisfying, but it felt like most of the frustrating ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ "gotchas" that could plague a hard puzzle game have been polished and playtested away without getting hand-holdy. It's well-paced and nicely tutorialized or signposted only where it needs to be.

If you want a first-person puzzler to stretch your spatial reasoning, this is one of the best.

If you love filling in blank spaces on a map, scavenger-hunting map icons, humping the spacebar to climb hills... this is your game.

It won't dazzle you with a lot of different mechanics, but what it does provide is unique. As far as I (suburban dude) can tell, it's an eye-opening wilderness hiking simulator, where you experientially learn how it's a seriously bad idea to set off on a trip without lots of daylight, a clear goal, a good map, and plenty of water.

To be clear: the game doesn't lecture you about survival and navigation. Instead you get certain reflexes drilled into you after you stay out too late, run out of daylight, get lost and dehydrated, fall down a hill, stumble into a lake and drown. Since you can only save your game at certain locations, well, drowning after a day-long expedition is bad.

The orienteering and cartography mechanics are just plain neat (and well-described elsewhere). The game provides a layer of goals and some mysterious opposition to deal with, but those aspects just add context to the exploration. It's nicely atmospheric and very zen at times. And occasionally scary.

Keep in mind that this is an "indie game by 2 guys", but more often than not it's a better-designed package than you might expect from that. It's still a niche-audience thing, but outstanding if you're in that audience.

So good. I just finished playing this for the second time, and I'm actually kinda sad now that I don't have more Psychonauts to play when I come home from work.

The most stand-out thing about this game is just that it makes me smile. Like a real, physical grin, not just an internal chuckle.

Unfortunately the conventional wisdom about the platforming is still kinda true too. It's not universally terrible, but it fights you just a little too much in key spots. But in the end, it's all good. Deus Ex has goofy voice acting, Thief has bad animations, Psychonauts has glitchy platforming. (Although probably above-average for 3D platformers.) It's still an all-time classic.

Looks pretty great on the PC too, and the PC version works well with my 360 pad. One note: if you're playing with a 360 pad and notice any issues with the button icons, you could try applying this fix: http://www.doublefine.com/forums/viewthread/4952/

Darwinia isn't an RTS, because there's not a lot of "strategy" to it. There's no tech tree, and you only directly control a few units or squads at a time. It's mostly "action tactics": player skill is applied in unit positioning/movement/targetting on 3D terrain, and in switching your focus around.

Darwinia is also mostly about its theme, if a game is allowed to have two mostlys. It's a Tron-like journey into a retro cyberspace. The goals of each mission are set in varied and beautiful techno landscapes sparsely populated by artifical life, friendly and otherwise.

So it's a sequence of setpieces really, with a small-scale hands-on feel. It's not too frantic. Compared to a traditional RTS like StarCraft 2 it is downright leisurely. Which is fine with me; I like to be able to take a few seconds occasionally to watch an Engineer cruising across a digital seascape with a string of glowing souls in tow.

The demo is a good sampling of the game's content & mechanics. Try it!

Deadly Shadows initially got a lot of stick for "consolization" and technical issues. These days, on a fast system and with some tweaks, many of those issues are moot. And some of the differences between DS and Thief 2 are easier to accept now as design changes rather than blasphemy.

Its environments are fun to explore and often atmospheric, but it doesn't have as many wide-open or weird levels as previous Thief games. The lack of rope arrows is also unfortunate. But it's a strong Thief experience that you're not likely to get elsewhere, and its story nicely concludes the trilogy. It also adds to the Thief recipe with a bit of sandboxy-ness in the City that joins missions together.

My major gripe is that blackjacking can solve almost all situations, at least on Normal. I didn't play Expert because the high loot requirement can get tedious, but maybe on Expert you'd have more need to use other tools.

A few basic setup tips: http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=118325427