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The effort to remaster Telltale’s Sam & Max trilogy comes to a close as Skunkape delivers a spruced-up version of its excellent 2010 finale.

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An international group of passionate writers and veteran reviewers, Summit Reviews aims to deliver thoughtful, professional, and in-depth critique across Steam and beyond.

This year has been quite a rollercoaster for remakes and remasters, hasn't it? I mean, had you told me a couple of years ago that KONAMI still had an interest in anything other than pachinko machines, I'd have been quite surprised—even more had you told me their Silent Hill 2 remake would turn out well.

Less surprising, with it being announced nearly four years ago, is the third and final remaster in Telltale’s Sam & Max trilogy. Maybe it's more surprising than I think it is as, despite a dedicated following, it seems to have gone under a lot of people's radars. Another Telltale title tied to someone else’s intellectual property isn't a reason to get excited nowadays, I guess.

But back in 2010? They were kings of the world, or at the very least about to be. The Walking Dead was still a couple of years away; the title that truly put 'em on the map and cemented their eventual downfall as a studio that spent its later years chasing that next, big, licensed hit to replicate its biggest success, all to no avail. The Devil’s Playhouse launched in simpler times, when the most “high-profile” license in Telltale’s hands turned up a couple of CSI games. Those, however, were critically panned and not that big of a deal. The last season of Sam & Max, on the other hand, was.


Telltale took every opportunity to highlight how important this season was by differentiating it from the previous two. In a series of nods to '50s horror and science fiction, the first episode kicks off with narration from an eccentric British gentleman; a horror in its own right. Though he’s no Vampira, he firmly establishes that what’s about to follow is not only as much an episode of The Twilight Zone as it is another Freelance Police adventure, but a fully cohesive, world-altering, five-part narrative. This shift in tone came with changes to the art style as well; a more muted colour palette, moody lighting, sharper character designs with more cinematic camera work and, for the first time, a control scheme that lets you move around with WASD, like in any big game, as opposed to merely clicking around.

Though it comes with all the standard improvements—increased visual fidelity, fine-tuned animations, and cleaned-up audio—the remaster has sanded off some of that uniqueness in favour of consistency across the seasons. What remains intact is another spectacular OST from Jared Emerson-Johnson (this time around moulding his jazzy approach with electronic instrumentation to complement the game's otherworldly atmosphere), changes to the point-and-click formula the series had been following so far and, believe it or not, a more emotionally mature story.

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The Devil’s Playhouse is the most “Sam and Max” game out of ‘em all. Aside from walking around as Sam, picking up items and storing them in his inventory, you’ll be able to freely switch to Max and make use of his newfound psychic abilities; coming across one of the ancient Toys of Power in the season's first episode, it turns out that Max is a particularly gifted psychic and can project his abilities through these toys, allowing him feats like transforming into objects or reading people's minds.

Anyone familiar with point-and-click adventures will immediately realise how useful of a skill set this is—and the season’s villains have taken special note. Everything in The Devil’s Playhouse revolves around these powers; they create the most mechanically robust gameplay loop I’ve seen to date from a game in the genre, but they’re also the centre of the season’s conflict. Aliens, ancient pharaohs, Lovecraftian deities and other freakshows of B-movie cinema all try to get their paws, claws, and slimy appendages on 'em, putting Max directly in danger, and while it isn’t the first time the Freelance Police have been in dangerous situations, it is the first time they’re directly in the bad guys’ crosshairs. That being said, making the toys so prevalent in gameplay causes some issues.


Each of Max’s powers is tied to a specific toy, which essentially means you have a set of items that carry over from episode to episode, all playing a big part in the puzzles’ solutions. That isn't to say that there isn't variety. The first episode, The Penal Zone, follows a format similar to the previous seasons as the duo track down the various toys across New York. Things turn on their head almost immediately after, however, as the second episode, The Tomb of Sammun-Mak, tells its story out of order, letting the player jump forward and backwards in time, gathering clues to piece the series of events together. The fourth and fifth episodes, while again leaning back on the tested and true formula, are a spectacle to behold and carry, perhaps for the first time in the series, genuinely tangible stakes.

The big outlier here is the third episode, They Stole Max’s Brain!. Its opening is quite interesting; Sam can interrogate suspects and make use of the game’s dialogue wheel in ways that wouldn’t be fleshed out until Telltale’s later titles, with interruptions, threats, and choices that determine how the conversation will turn out. It’s perhaps the grittiest episode of ‘em all, showing a side of Sam we haven't seen before, complete with tongue-in-cheek noir-style narration and some corny yet excellent Dirty Harry-esque one-liners. However, the mechanic quickly makes its exit, never to be seen again, with everything past that refreshing introduction being made up of a copy-pasted puzzle in slightly different contexts, where using the same psychic powers is the solution. It's an awful, phoned-in episode in a season I'd otherwise consider the best. Though that overreliance on these powers persists throughout the season, making it the easiest by far, no episode oversteps as the third did; otherwise, the variety in storytelling remains great and the episodic format utilised to its fullest potential, with each episode appropriately upping the ante for the finale.

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While not the series' funniest, the juxtaposed tone allows the writing to be the most heartfelt it's ever been. It's still as irreverent as before and doesn't shy away from lampooning the previous seasons, yet it knows when to dial it back and play up that sentimentality to get to the player. It’s weird saying this about a Sam & Max game, as they're usually lighthearted and rather absurd affairs where, even in the face of apparent danger, the feelings of levity and adventurous excitement never completely fade. Yet, The Devil's Playhouse gets emotional, it gets dramatic, it plays up the fact that this is a finale and delivers an ending that feels like a sendoff; both to these characters and to what was Telltale at the time. Without that context, careful pacing, and an intimate knowledge of the series, the third season could have fallen flat, coming across as forced or edgy. But it didn't.

Without a doubt, The Devil’s Playhouse stands as some of Telltale’s best and most unique work, built out of years of honing the team's skills and an understanding of the series' two main characters. It is that same sentiment that has allowed Skunkape to so wonderfully preserve that work with this remaster.

Hey, You, Medicine Man

Set me free, but change your ways! Developer Fool’s Theory delivers a clever RPG with an interesting setting and one ridiculously compelling protagonist. Sadly, even when giving it your best to enjoy what it offers, there isn't much else.

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An international group of passionate writers and veteran reviewers, Summit Reviews aims to deliver thoughtful, professional, and in-depth critique across Steam and beyond.

Trying to play The Thaumaturge around its release earlier this year was difficult. From a misguided English dub to distracting performance issues, the game undermined itself at every turn. Had I stubbornly stuck with it, this review would have been much more negative.

Thankfully, life finds a way. The powers that be thought it fitting I trade all my free time over the past couple of months for a chance to experience The Thaumaturge in a much more presentable state—patches and a new Polish voiceover firmly in tow. While all the improvements and the universe at my side made me stick with the game until the end, they revealed that its finer points still require effort to enjoy.

Gone are the NPCs with frequently mismatched voices to their models, the Polish voice actors who sound rather unconvincing speaking English and the non-Polish cast members who stick out like a sore thumb. Following an update back in May, you are no longer forced to use an inconsistent and rather unnatural-sounding English dub. However, while the Polish VO is the better way to experience the game, excruciating pacing issues and a combat system that goes nowhere cast doubt over the whole thing.

Through fervorous attention to detail and an authentic historical setting, The Thaumaturge wears its inspirations on its sleeve. Developed by Polish studio Fool’s Theory (the same one in charge of the Witcher remake), it takes place in early twentieth-century Warsaw, following protagonist Wiktor Szulski as he returns to his birth city to attend his father’s funeral. Mixed in with—you guessed it—fantasy elements, it makes for a fresh take on an RPG dominantly based on Slavic folklore; something we've been getting plenty of in recent years.

As the opening text so handily explains, thaumaturges are miracle workers able to perceive and manipulate emotions in the world around them; effectively being able to read and influence people’s minds. That alone would be a straightforward set of powers, if not for salutors—spiritual entities drawn to powerful human Flaws, who thaumaturges can team up with to further exercise their abilities. Szulski is a thaumaturge, though not a particularly good one, as he is nearly driven insane by a failed attempt to capture his second salutor prior to the events of the game. Thankfully, before he completely loses his mind, he manages to track down a certain Ra-Ra-Russian mystic to help him out and reinvigorate his search for power.

All healed up and buddy-buddy, the two set off for Warsaw, a city Szulski barely recognizes after being away for fifteen years. An outcast and further shunned for being a thaumaturge, he’s forced to navigate family matters, the rising tensions between Polish citizens and the Russian Empire ruling over the country, and the unfulfilled expectations his late father had for him. The Thaumaturge is built upon some great character drama with Szulski as one of the best protagonists in recent memory. How these characters are humanized, without the writing shying away one bit from the less flattering aspects of their personalities, is executed flawlessly. Whether you decide to play up that humanity or feed into Szulski's Flaw of Pride through choices that selfishly grow his power, the story doesn’t lose any depth and reacts to your decisions with surprising nuance. Not many characters will be outright kind, so you’ll come across plenty of situations where the latter makes sense. I swear, never has an evil playthrough felt so motivated.

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The same can't be said of the game's plot. It's not that it doesn't make sense, but rather that it lacks urgency and investment. You're supposed to think where Szulski’s allegiance and place in Warsaw lie, whether he’ll side with a political faction first, his family and friends, or perhaps turn it all around for personal gain. Yet, the conflict between the Russian Empire and the subjugated Polish people isn't that prevalent and doesn’t do much to get you personally attached. Every time you’re swept up in these circumstances, it’s at the behest of someone else, which makes it easy to remain indifferent and solely focused on helping out whoever it is you’re helping out. Szulski is primarily written as a self-centred character whom I could buy doing things for himself or those close to him, but not to achieve the goals of a group. Even the choices you have for the ending are mostly written around specific characters, rather than an ideology you can get behind.

Looking at its gameplay, The Thaumaturge functions as somewhat of a point-and-click with turn-based combat. Interacting with objects lets Szulski read the emotions imprinted on them, which leads to deductions that advance quests and award experience. With him being a bit of a glutton for knowledge and since manipulating emotions makes up the crux of his thaumaturgic powers, it's a great way of tying progression to the narrative.

This carries over into all exploration, as collectables like photographs, sketches, music records, or newspapers and posters with absorbing worldbuilding can be found throughout Warsaw. Levelling up lets you place points into any of the four dimensions of thaumaturgy that each unlock different dialogue options as well as new abilities for their respective salutors, provided you managed to capture one as part of a sidequest.

As thematically thought out as the gameplay is, however, it ends up feeling flat across the board and does little to make the game’s narrative shortcomings easier to stomach. While Warsaw looks great from a technical standpoint and the character models are sharp and detailed, it’s all so very lifeless; partly due to the drab colour palette, a criminally underused soundtrack that leaves many scenes void of atmosphere and blends together otherwise, and the blatantly poor animation. The characters in The Thaumaturge look too good for how little they’re animated, which never lets you get fully immersed and, at worst, threatens to harshly dump you in the middle of uncanny valley on a rainy day. The isometric view as well doesn't do the game any favours.

Both the combat and the search for clues turn into a chore due to a complete lack of challenge. What passes off for enemy variety is laughable and the whole schtick of reading your enemies' actions in advance makes for the easiest turn-based system I've encountered. The salutors' abilities and the different upgrades they provide to Szulski's own moveset, all freely available in any encounter, allow for lots of buildcrafting, yet there's no need to experiment past understanding the basics as you'll brute-force your way through anything that isn't a boss fight.

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While Fool’s Theory tied all the aspects of their game together and made serious strides in some rather expertly, the matter of the overall experience not being that compelling remains. I hope this isn’t the last we see of Szulski, though. If we don’t, I’ll at least take solace in knowing that all those little idiosyncrasies I love about the first Witcher are probably in safe hands.

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A copy of the game was provided to Summit by 11 Bit Studios and Evolve PR for the purposes of this review.

'Til Death Does Its Part

I just wish it had hurried up and gotten it done a little bit sooner! DON’T NOD’s latest bid to marry their acclaimed approach to choice-based storytelling with robust action combat is solid at its core, but too slow and diluted to wholeheartedly recommend.

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I wouldn’t exactly call myself a fan of DON’T NOD’s work. A young-adult-novel approach to storytelling has long been somewhat of a calling card for the studio, but it had never appealed to me despite all the “choices and consequences” thrown into the mix. Still, one can't say that the team is merely content with resting on their laurels, as they've been trying to put out a successful action game since their debut; the ironically underappreciated Remember Me from 2013. The studio is now back for another round with Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden. It is the team’s most solid effort so far when it comes to outfitting a brawler with their writing chops, yet two playable characters, a sizable interconnected world, and numerous skill trees don't save it from coming across as too restrained.

Things start off with ghostbusters Antea Duarte and her lover/apprentice Red MacRaith landing on the shores of freshly colonized North America, and making their way to the titular town of New Eden to help with a dangerous curse. From the opening cinematic alone, no one can deny that Banishers has a knack for realism. Whether you’re exploring its ghost-ridden forests or poking around one of its settlements, the environments have a prevailing sense of depth that just doesn’t let up. Granted, this is one of those games where you can’t walk off a ledge without a dedicated prompt, where the route stays linear save for a couple of forks in the road and the option to backtrack. In exchange for that lack of control, you get a world in which no location feels purposeless, with every unrestrained detail making sense within the story and its setting.

It turns out that what's haunting the town is a Nightmare—a rare and powerful entity capable of malforming the entire region. The sky looks weird, people are dead, and Antea soon breaks more than professional boundaries by following suit, with Red falling off a cliff and ending up on the opposite side of the map, now mentorless and single.

It'd be even more heartbreaking if Antea didn't return in the form of a force ghost mere moments later. Swapping between the two in combat is one of the game’s main draws; whereas Red is, well, a more physical combatant and armed with a flintlock rifle that’ll make short work of almost any opponent, Antea dashes around casting powerful ghostly abilities. Changing characters is a seamless press of a button, and how effectively you combine their powers to exploit your enemies’ weaknesses is what separates a good Banisher from a great one.

There’s a hefty skill tree centred around each ability in Antea’s kit, surrounded by upgrades and alternate moves for both her and Red. You’re invited to experiment to your heart’s content as each ability point can be reallocated at any time—and, believe me, you'll have plenty of time. It’s a game full of combat. Aside from random encounters, scripted arenas, and gargantuan boss fights, there are tons of optional challenges and gauntlets to attempt for more rewards, each with some kind of modifier to force you into changing up your style. Mastering every trick in the Banisher book and being able to rely on it on the fly is satisfying, but I doubt many players will get there because of how the game handles progression.

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See, Banishers is first and foremost a love story, tying its levelling system and ability unlocks to not only the narrative but the emotional heart as well. Combat aside, you’re not just an exterminator, but judge, jury and executioner for anyone whose soul is lingering past the expiration date. There are rules, rituals, investigations to be had! The Nightmare isn’t the sole spirit making life difficult in New Eden and its surrounding areas, so every quest, or Haunting as the game calls them, deals with the dead not staying dead and ends with our half-corporeal duo making the call of whether to punish the hauntee or the ghost for making a problem of the whole thing. There’s also a third option where the ghost is granted a peaceful ascent and everyone else gets to go home with a mere slap on the wrist.

The heart is supposed to come from Red and Antea, who now have more personal stakes in play than just doing their job. Before you’ve even had the chance to do your first case of Wraith Attorney, the game makes you commit to whether you’ll try to resurrect Antea by the end. Banishing or pardoning ghosts will advance her own ascent, while blaming the settlers puts them on the receiving end of a quick soul-ripping ritual, strengthening Antea’s tie to the world of the living until you can reach her body and bring her back to life.

While you’ll make enough of these calls as part of the Hauntings in the main quest, you’re encouraged to get involved with as many as you’d like. For one, it's the only way to level up Antea’s abilities while Red earns his points like any standard RPG hero. Otherwise, the characters you deal with as part of these cases are interesting, and exploring the dilemmas that lead to them being haunted is rarely as straightforward as it may seem. The game is at its best when the Banisher’s code, which treats the whole resurrection and soul-ripping bit as a big no-no, clashes with not only the promise you made, but also what would be the best for these communities. Ghosts are often stubborn pricks, but you could argue some of these people deserve to die for things unrelated to their Hauntings. What if they’re innocent within the Banisher's jurisdiction, but guilty of something else? What if killing them would leave the settlement without a competent leader? And what of that promise? Further than that, there are little details peppered throughout to make every choice feel important; even if it’s a throwaway line down the road, a special reward from a grateful client, or an additional encounter with spirits your judgement angered, it goes a long way, especially when surviving characters have their little parts to play later on.

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It is a shame then that the game is just too big. Traversing the New World is a bit of a bore and the uninspired enemy variety coupled with the slow progression makes for interesting early hours, followed by high peaks of excitement rather than a combat system that steadily opens up the more you play. Hauntings take a while to complete, but not every skill point will lead to equally exciting new abilities. There’s also more of that “young-adult-novel” writing that can kill characters more effectively than any ritual. The tone is rather serious, but the constant feeling of Red and Antea having the weight of the world on their shoulders and speaking nearly every line in these laboured whispers makes the two very hard to relate to. They’re always Romeo and Juliet, even when they need to be Pumpkin and Honey Bunny.

Still, even if your heart is made of stone, how everything comes together is an experience that I think could be worth checking out. Maybe an okay action game with a couple of memorable moments is the stepping stone DON’T NOD needs to achieve the same kind of acclaim it did within the adventure genre.

An international group of passionate writers and veteran reviewers, Summit Reviews aims to deliver thoughtful, professional, and in-depth critique across Steam and beyond.

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A copy of the game was provided to Summit by Focus Entertainment for the purposes of this review.

Released to mixed reviews and carrying on the traumatisation of Metallica’s fanbase, 1997’s Reload landed somewhere between Typhoon Winnie, Heaven’s Gate, and the death of Princess Diana on the list of things from the year that absolutely sucked for everyone involved. Comfortably eclipsed by the irreparable damage inflicted on the world as the first Harry Potter novel passed through the printing press, it’s a harrowing collection of events that's bound to make you pause. Even the stoic reviewer was close to inserting some self-deprecating quip out of guilt for invoking them here; don't I owe Metallica and their poor fanbase that much?

Still, when all’s said and done, it’s clear none had it as bad as Steve Jackson of straightforwardly named Steve Jackson Games.

Back then, ol’ Steve had been living it large for over a decade as the creator of GURPS, a role-playing system meant to fit any setting, and the one the fine folks at Interplay had been intending to use for their upcoming post-nuclear joint. A licensing deal was struck, a whole game had been designed, and then Steve watched a cutscene. As the Galaxy News logo slowly faded out to the howling croon of The Ink Spots’ rendition of Maybe on the screen in front of him, the RPG veteran couldn’t have been prepared for what “our dedicated boys” keeping the peace in newly annexed Canada looked like.

Cutting him some slack, Fallout’s opening cinematic is a lot to take in. Once the news logo gives way to documentary footage, a 7-foot-tall monster of a man in power armour executes a kneeling, tied-up POW struggling with his binds. It’s no clean execution either, but two shots to the back of the head: one at point-blank range, the double-tap following only after the Canadian is already on the ground, right leg involuntarily twitching in what are his final moments. The dithering black-and-white screen and the lyrics to a bittersweet song of unrequited love, masking all other audio except those brief moments when the gun is fired, make for an unsettling grotesque in combination with what's happening, perhaps now more than ever when early 3D models are more akin to children’s Play-Doh.

Then, there’s the epiphany that these aren’t Nvidia PhysX shaking around a ragdoll, nor mere attention to disturbing detail from a team that had no fully fledged animators, but something more sinister and thought out. No pools of blood, no organs or bone getting strewn across the pavement—of which Fallout has plenty—but a sad and unceremonious death followed by mute, hearty laughs and waves to the camera from our dedicated boys who had been unaware of it during the execution.

Peace was indeed kept in newly annexed Canada that day, yet in a concerning loss for what had been internally considered a mere “B-team title” that came close to cancellation several times over the years, ol' Steve nixed Fallout's license to GURPS in reaction to what he saw in that unpleasant cutscene. Thankfully, it was this setback that led the team to creating the SPECIAL ruleset; an irreplaceable part of the series that continues to power its latest entries and whose name many fans use to cheekily refer to the importance the franchise holds today. It was an instrumental step in making Fallout into the catalyst of a cultural reset in the RPG sphere that still holds the genre by the groin almost 30 years later.


Fallout is old; so old it’s near-unrecognisable from what’s so closely associated with it under Bethesda. The “50’s apocalypse” is rather a misinterpreted framing, and the nostalgic radio tunes of last century one might expect are found only at the beginning and end of the game. In fact, Fallout is intentionally unpleasant on your ears, having a soundscape filled out by gunshots, screams, ominous bells and, most dominantly, a soundtrack inspired by the ambient tones of Aphex Twin rather than Frank Sinatra. For players coming from more contemporary titles in the franchise, it presents the familiar wasteland in a completely different light.

It’s as if the essential RPG experience had been left behind here in the series’s infancy: a design philosophy that pushed forward a compelling singleplayer adventure and a believable post-apocalyptic world that embraces its player as an integral part of the structure first and foremost. If it wasn't your first, then playing the game now is akin to unearthing a long-buried childhood memory. With every hallmark RPG of the past 25 years somehow tracing its way back to Fallout, be it through inspiration, spiritual succession, a shared publisher all those years ago, or as a new title from some of its chief creative minds, it’s true that all roads lead to Interplay. On the other side of that coin, the iteration that came from these games has made it age more harshly. You’ll feel it most in a limiting combat system, mundane writing that’s largely straightforward, or when clicking around chunky pixels for dropped loot in the world’s most violent hidden object game.

You play as an unlucky resident of one of the universe’s iconic Vaults, sent out to find a working water purification chip for the underground complex’s dwindling reserves. You pick a portrait, distribute skill points, and emerge from the caves with equipment that may not even be best suited for the character you created. Pushing through an instance filled to the brim with rats is a rough start: other than calculating how all the stats interact to determine what hits and how hard, the combat takes little advantage of this being a video game. The CPU is no doubt having a blast, yet presented to the player is a distilled fight across a flat plane where you and the rodents take turns at percentage-based attacks. After a neat little animation plays on an otherwise terrible UI, you’re faced with a system that limits your agency to swapping between a few alternate attacks or opting to target a specific part of the enemy’s sprite, be it limb or weapon, for a chance of exploiting a weakness at the cost of more action points.

As poorly balanced as it is, the fact that combat is just another facet of the game your character can be terrible at is what’s exciting. It won’t lead to flashy “choice and consequences”, but Fallout genuinely allows you to create a character that’s bad at things. The way your creation is then woven into the world around it is impressive. You won’t be wowed by differing playstyles or a deep morality system, but everything your character does, whether out of consistent roleplaying, build-imposed necessity or just picking the most exciting option at the time will be in earnest. The wasteland is a sensical world, where every location is crafted under an equally hopeful and bleak visual, thematic and narrative heart that makes every choice a plausible one, respected by the game as much as it can. The same goes for its populace: mostly set in their ways, giving you full insight into their character in a few, rarely voiced, lines. Less is more as what could be considered underwritten just enforces the reality of the setting. As appealing as it is to always change someone’s worldview with a compelling speech, would you expect it in a civilization born out of nuclear war?

It’s the cohesive vision coming to life in video game form that should be celebrated here, as opposed to a game where playing the nice guy wielding a blaster is an entirely different experience from a sneaky motherf*cker shooting out of the world’s biggest gun. It's something that all its sequels, spiritual or not, seem to sadly miss, all the while Fallout remains not only special but essential.

An international group of passionate writers and veteran reviewers, Summit Reviews aims to deliver thoughtful, professional, and in-depth critique across Steam and beyond.

And so, my journey through the more relevant entries in Frictional's catalogue is coming to an end—and what a journey it has been! I’ve braved the horrifying halls of Brennenburg Castle, pondered oblivion amidst the waves in SOMA, and snoozed through the soporific occurrences of Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, all in preparation for my descent into the Bunker. But, before I could put it all behind me, Frictional were waiting at the end with a second entry into the series that put them on the map all those years ago: Amnesia: Rebirth.

Something was off, though. Would you believe me if I told you that this is the poorest user-reviewed game on Metacritic that the company has developed? Looking at Steam’s user reviews doesn’t produce a more hopeful result, and the consensus is rather murky even among my friends who have dared to review the game. The positive reviews can’t recommend it without a bit of apprehension. The negative ones do the opposite without hesitation.

So, what's the secret behind Rebirth’s divisive reception? Is it that much worse than what came before? I don't think so. Rather, Rebirth is quite late to the party, trying something new with a formula that was all out of tricks, at a time when everyone was waiting for an encore.


The original Amnesia was released in 2010 to strong reviews and an even stronger footprint in the industry. Horror games didn’t want to be Resident Evil and Silent Hill anymore as neither of those two were themselves at the time. Instead, games wanted to be The Dark Descent, and so many of them tried to. So, many. Oh my god, that’s a lot of horror games!

Rebirth still follows this design philosophy. That is, instead of carefully managing ammo while navigating labyrinthine environments, you manage your sanity and light, with a larger focus on story and puzzles along the way. From the very start, you can tell it’s a game made by Frictional. Just like in the last Amnesia, our adventure starts in Algeria, though a century later and without a getaway to Prussia any time soon. Even with the setting changing from cold medieval dungeons to deserts underneath the scorching African sun, Rebirth has that “WTF is that?” art direction that Frictional have established themselves as the kings of by this point, weaving together creative enemy design and breathtaking architecture that slowly takes over the more mundane locations you’ll find at adventure's start.

Landing herself into supernatural-force-infested waters is Tasi Trianon, an engineering technician whose expedition plane crashes over the Algerian desert. Time passes, Tasi wakes up, and things are stranger than they ought to be. She sets off to find the rest of her crew, and so begins a new kind of dark descent for the modern age.

But, before we continue, here’s a fun little challenge: outside of Outlast, how many games have followed the “Amnesia” formula and did so successfully—if success isn’t exclusively measured by how much money or YouTube Let’s Plays were made? How many of them are critical darlings today? I can’t think of any that fit the bill, and even Outlast II came across as woefully out of touch in 2017, right before Resident Evil 7 “revived” survival horror. It seems to me that the formula, outside very few examples that did its own thing with it, has no staying power. It’s like everyone misunderstood the assignment; if you’re stripping away all mechanical potential to disempower the player and not coming up with a different key design to elevate your game, what exactly are you doing?

And I know that’s hard; it’s why combat is the most common way of doing away with your obstacles in gaming. Building mechanical depth through it is a lot more straightforward than coming up with all these other systems that could potentially prove cumbersome. However, when a game does succeed, it’s frequently a high point in the medium. That is why, in the era of “psychological horror”, a game like Alien: Isolation can come across as “an underrated gem” in retrospect. It dared to give back the player a little bit of power while still not removing the more popular choice to run away.

I think Frictional realised this early. I think that’s why SOMA was so mechanically barren even when compared to The Dark Descent. Merely disempowering the player wasn’t enough on its own; besides, players already knew how to deal with it. They needed something new and found it in marrying environmental storytelling to the horror of the game’s setting, making its mechanics truly psychological, not creating fear from startling the player or having them perform an unwieldy task while tensions are high, but from the way the player thought about what was happening around them. Even the public wisened up to this, in a way—SOMA featuring player death and seaweed automatons chasing you around in primitive psychological horror fashion netted it its harshest criticism.

To that end, Rebirth doesn't try to merely take further the design that made SOMA stand out so much, nor be a pure return to The Dark Descent's more mechanically oriented frights. Instead, it's an attempt to create a mechanically solid survival horror experience, with tighter pacing and SOMA's philosophical edge.

For example, there’s no health to keep track of this time around—it’s all in the sanity—and while your lantern again has oil to burn off of and matches that serve to create a new light source, much like the original’s tinderboxes, it’s a lot more limited and pushed towards increased interactivity. Unlike tinderboxes, matches aren’t a prompt that shows up next to an unlit brazier, but a limited tool you have to manually carry and align with anything flammable before they rapidly burn out. As for what was to be SOMA's holdover, the team again went with a more mature story that seamlessly makes its points through game mechanics, yet an established series praised for its puzzle design proved to be a much less hospitable environment where leaning fully into this design philosophy was never going to fly.

Rebirth is so full of excellent puzzles that they not only get in the way of its storytelling, but the horror as well. They’re probably the best designed, most immersive puzzles Frictional has ever created, in every facet—visuals, mechanics, worldbuilding—and they effectively help this game stand out from what is the slothful mould of a psychological horror game of the 2010s, but it's almost as if they have no place here. Actually, a lot of the game's elements get in front of each other. An unbroken narrative such as SOMA can't work as well when it's split up by elaborate puzzles. Horror sections can't be as expansive and punishing as they were in The Dark Descent when they stand to break the immersion and pacing. Rebirth comes across as an immature experience, pieced together out of the studio's best ideas that suffocate everything else that's also included.

Contrary to its name, that’s what Rebirth is—the tolling bell at the end of an era. A title interested in exploring the uncharted aspects of its predecessors to their limits, more so than reliving the glory days. In its stride, it somewhat ignored the highlights of those titles, resulting in a less cohesive game, taken too far off course for all those who expected another bold new step in the same direction. In the end, it is a fitting bookend to the era and, after putting it off for so long, the reason Henri finally bought a gun.

An international group of passionate writers and veteran reviewers, Summit Reviews aims to deliver thoughtful, professional, and in-depth critique across Steam and beyond. Check us out!

Not all games from the 90s and early 2000s age gracefully, and stealth games—the few there are from that time—are even more prone to spontaneous combustion. Shooting someone with a gun? Yeah, that'll function more or less the same way it did 30 years ago, but enemy AI? All that sneaking? That's a couple of mechanics whose gears couldn't be happier to rust away.

Now, Thief was smart enough to bring enough water arrows to fend off that spontaneous combustion, but that doesn't help with all the rust. At the very least, there is a fix you'll have to download to get the game running on anything that isn't the lowest imaginable resolution. Aside from that, there's an over-abundance of fan-made improvements and QoL additions, but nothing else that should be necessary.

What you're getting into here isn't just any stealth game—you're booting up the first one to use light and sound as game mechanics, the first one to utilise a first-person perspective, arguably the oldest immersive sim to still look like a video game. Its age shows, but while some textures might look a tad too abstract to the modern eye, Thief was a trend setter, and remains an exceptionally well-realised creative vision.

For one, stealth actually works, and is quite precise, thanks to a little gem next to your health bar that tells you how exposed to light you are at any moment. There are rules to learn, however, if you want to be good at it. The year was 1998, so dynamic lighting wasn't quite a thing yet. For Thief, this means that light sources and shadows are mapped directly to the textures, and how visible you are is predetermined based on where you're standing rather than the gem reacting to your environment. It rids the game of those "How the hell did he see me?" moments in favour of less frequent and notably less frustrating "How the hell can he see me?" moments, since total darkness in one area may not count as total total darkness in another. This also works the other way around, to your advantage, so you could be more hidden than it'd make sense.

But what can't be seen could still maybe be heard, so you'll have to be mindful not to make too much noise even when you stick to the shadows. What kind of surface are you walking on, how fast are you moving, are you clumsily bumping into walls and barrels or dropping items? Enemies are naturally noisy, so keeping track of the soundscape isn't just an added challenge but a useful tool that can help with avoiding incoming patrols. It's deep sound design and It all plays a part in the game's stealth system, even when parts of it are quite compressed and unevenly balanced. Doesn't help that the ambient effects that the game heavily relies on for its atmosphere use the same volume slider as the music and the cutscenes, so be prepared to get jumpscared every time your ears get blasted with some industrial rock, recorded and compressed for a game that had to fit on a CD.

Speaking of immersive sims, Thief might not have spells and abilities to learn or diverging build paths, but you can approach situations in different ways based on the equipment you're using, mostly deciding which path through the level you'll take. It's still a stealth game, one in which combat is strongly discouraged; it can be cheesed, maybe even "mastered", but is still quite unresponsive, even if sword fights are surprisingly tense. You've got directional attacks, reactive parries, your weapon can even clash with the enemy's if you both attack at the same time, yet it all feels more sluggish than it needs to. Your weapon doesn't always reach as far as you'd think and small inconsistencies in the terrain can turn into insurmountable mountains when you're wielding a sword. Dynamic lighting may have been in its infancy, but dynamic invisible walls were a well established feature. Thus, fighting more than one enemy will always be a challenge unless you have an ace up your sleeve or a quick escape route. The AI, as predictable as it is, can turn up the heat even further with some neat tactics—some more legitimate than others. They love fighting in groups as much as they love attacking while a part of their model clips through you.

The level design is what brings all these aspects together. For starters, there's a lot of environmental storytelling happening, backed up by some terrific art design. It's a steampunk/fantasy setting, yet the cold medieval architecture makes it look and feel very grounded and gritty. The supernatural elements pop out and the technology carries with it an equal air of otherworldliness. The levels are also generously sized and rather open, making searching for that optimal route a fun challenge in and of itself, and not just when you're looking for secrets and loot to sell in between missions for more gear. Enemies will usually patrol cramped, well-lit corridors, making navigation and staying undetected all the more challenging, with combat an even more uphill battle should you fail.

Still, you'll get better, get used to the game's way of visually guiding you, and make that journey to becoming a master thief and growing more adept at getting around these mansions, tombs, and catacombs. With this newfound agility and perceptiveness, suddenly, old levels start feeling fresh again on a potential replay, as new secrets and bits of storytelling crop up. Higher difficulties even have an extra objective or two for you to complete, which loops back around to encouraging more exploration, which loops back around to discovering even more neat things, and so on.

I think that's why it has aged so well—everything in it is built around this concept of exploring large, creatively designed environments. The combat, your goals, even the story the game has to tell—the level design somehow has a hand in it all. Of course, it's not all great—there's a couple of dull stinkers in the otherwise excelled batch of missions, or ones that push you towards combat a bit too much. Regardless, everything you want to do in Thief, you have to ask yourself what's around you first; and that makes for one strong creative vision that shines through even 25 years later, through all the technical limitations and the jank.

Back in 2018, Kara no Shojo (or is it Shoujo?!) showed up on Steam roughly a decade after its release. Earlier this year, it was highly recommended to me as a newfound fan of visual novels.

Yet, the game wasn't exactly my type. You can probably guess what that entails from the fact that it was published by MangaGamer, the company behind other esteemed titles such as Forbidden Love with My Wife's Sister. The graphic nature of the content, combined with the skewed aspect ratio and the foreign title, created this air of otherness around the game that made it seem like a forbidden piece of lost media that only grizzled types who’ve seen some ♥♥♥♥ could play.

Indeed, on a cursory look, chasing around schoolgirls and solving serial killings doesn’t seem like the most palatable combination, no matter how much noir goodness is on offer. With this ill-thought-out combination being the most common criticism of the game I could find, Kara no Shojo was something I was unlikely to pick up. However, the recommendations kept piling up, and this surprising remaster finally created an opportunity that was too good to pass up.



Despite having quite a different name, The Shell Part I: Inferno is mostly the same game as the one I have been on the fence about. The changes here usually don’t go further than quality-of-life improvements, increased visual fidelity, and a new voice-over for the game’s protagonist. For better or worse, the same content that seemed like such a poor match in the original release was still alive and kicking.

If this new title that makes the game sound like a Tom Hanks joint didn’t give it away, The Shell heavily deals with a string of murders in post-World War II Japan, inspired by none other than Dante’s Divine Comedy. Infiltrating an all-girls Christian high school with the goal of figuring out who’s behind the disappearances of its students, it’ll be up to you, in the role of private detective Tokisaka Reiji, to get to the bottom of it all, while also dealing with Reiji’s private life and an ominous past that’s just waiting around the corner to jump at his throat.

As on the nose as it is, it’s a title that fits the game well, from the apparent inspiration to the more nuanced aspects of both works: their themes, their structure, and even the graphic descriptions that Dante’s Hell is chock full of. The most notable here is the way the game plays around with the representation of women in other classics of the Italian Renaissance, not just Dante—the female form as a prism for Christian virtues and something that has its place somewhere alongside the male-centric triad of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—and using it to draw parallels within more contemporary social commentary. It’s compelling writing, with an impressive level of thematic depth, yet the lines get dangerously blurred amidst trashy tropes.

The Shell suffers from some serious tonal dissonance; as the game sometimes switches to the killer’s POV, the gruesome visuals will be accompanied by descriptions of bodily mutilations of young girls that leave nothing to the imagination. This, on its own, wouldn’t be a problem, if it didn’t go hand in hand with distasteful sex scenes and so many jokes about incest and rape in other parts of the game that I’ve lost count. Is a good incest joke akin to a fart joke in Japan?

For a private ♥♥♥♥, Reiji sure shares his around like it’s in the public domain. Adding further to the confusion is that not not all of the sex scenes were created equal. Some are played up as a joke, while others serve as precursors to bad endings—and both of these can be either consensual or not. He enters Oba Girls’ Academy to protect its students, and the sincerity with which these interactions are written paints him as a guardian figure to all of the characters he meets. That there’s even an option to essentially exploit these relationships by having sex with the girls serves as an absolute betrayal of his character, and makes those relationships where sex would mean genuine intimacy all the more questionable. It’s not just bizarre; it gets quite gross and can’t help but completely sour any kind of legitimate storytelling the game hoped to achieve through these scenes, if it ever did. The Shell shows a lot of maturity and consistency when it comes to handling some of its other themes, yet sex and nudity are used equally carefree for shock, fanservice, and anything in between.

The actual mystery and the plot, where Reiji stands with these characters outside of mere sex, and the prose of the English translation handled by Shiravune, are of a rich quality that makes the game difficult to not see through to the end. It’s all thematically interwoven to the very core and makes for a satisfying catharsis when the threads align. Even the art direction is handled in a specific way, leaving certain scenes with a strong air of sacrament, tying right back to those same ideas. However, when looked at side by side with the missteps that were made, all these great achievements become a lot more difficult to enjoy.


Another common criticism of the original release was how difficult it was to get to the true ending, or rather, how not to end up on a bad one. Both it and the remaster are hybrid visual novels aiming for increased interactivity, primarily through investigation scenes, where you’ll take a break from reading to instead look around a crime scene, and points in the story when you’ll have to choose which place to visit next on an in-game map. Reiji also keeps track of all the evidence and people you’ve come across in his notebook, but the information therein rarely comes in handy and frequently overlaps with one another.

While these sections still aren’t very intuitive, they’ve been made more forgiving in the remaster by the removal of hidden time limits, which makes failure, at the very least, more of a consequence of your own lack of thoroughness rather than the game scoring cheap shots—even if failure still usually becomes apparent only hours down the line.

Yet, while the increased interactivity is definitely appreciated in selling that detective fantasy and making the story a bit more tailored to your personal preference, it remains superficial when it comes to the outcome of your ending. This wouldn’t be so bad if the consequences of your actions, or rather inactions, were convincing, but the differences in these endings hang on technicalities for the most part, and the logic of how one thing leads to another is flimsy at best. At the very least, you’ll almost always come out with some kind of information that could help set you on a better path, or a sex scene to drown your sorrows in.


I wasn’t sure what to make of The Shell at numerous points. As the game raises a certain standard for itself by the nature of the work it so heavily invokes, something would always feel off. While expecting it to come palpably close to that level would be ridiculous, it still shows that it can succeed in achieving a high level of thematic maturity and cohesion; one which it doesn't follow through to the end.

If you squint, maybe you’ll remember it as a solid “B-movie” game, or you could headcanon your way around its most questionable aspects and let its high notes stick with you as much as they deserve. In any case, it’ll be difficult to feel as if you’ve seen one of the genre’s brightest stars.

An international group of passionate writers and veteran reviewers, Summit Reviews aims to deliver ethical, professional, and in-depth critique across Steam and beyond.

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A copy of the game was provided by Shiravune to Summit for the purposes of this review.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent made sure no talk of video game horror could go along without the mention of Frictional Games—the terrible, downright evil studio that not only dared deliver yet another horror game that completely lacked combat, but one that was so good and infectious that its stylings shaped the genre for almost a decade.

While we’ll probably never glimpse the terrible truth and come to an agreement on whether horror needs to opt out of combat entirely to be scary, Frictional’s follow-up title, SOMA, made a compelling argument that its exclusion is sometimes the only way of having your message heard. Unobscured by the whirls of revved-up chainsaws and the flashes of plasma cutters, it can still shine down there, in the quiet and the dark.

For SOMA, however, it’s not just important to hear what it has to say, but also how it says it. For a true barotraumatic dive into its thematic depths, take a look at the full version of this review, written by the ever-curious Drugoja in the Dreaming. Be warned that it will spoil all there is to spoil, so stick with me if you’ve yet to play the game.


“Play one Frictional title, and you’ve played them all!” would probably be the adage, if not for SOMA. As far as mechanical complexity is concerned, it’s as stripped back as Frictional’s ever been, serving as a natural progression and iteration of the team’s formula: take away more and more of the player's ability to outright remove the frights in their path and force them to deal with them without using force. In theory, this creates a feeling of helplessness not found in traditional survival horror and primes the player to engage with what’s on the screen in a different, less rigid, mechanically-minded way. The world becomes this real, unfamiliar place, where interactivity isn’t geared towards stuffing your backpack or blasting away at limbs and heads. Yet, remove one challenge of game development by taking an entirely different approach, and another will present itself—and if there’s something that Frictional didn’t learn from The Dark Descent, then they for sure had a cautionary tale in A Machine for Pigs.

For one, The Dark Descent still had enough resource management to be viewed as nothing more than a clockwork interaction between its mechanics if you were so inclined. It never explicitly got in the way of you tracing back up from and down again into Daniel’s insanity spiral, but the game stopped short of blending the two together. There were glimpses of it, but the need for health bars, depletable light sources, and meters to manage prevailed in the end—this is a video game, after all, a survival horror one, but something tells me Frictional wanted players to look a bit more beyond that.

The Chinese Room realised this and rid their sequel of tinderboxes and laudanum bottles, but instead of having the player use this newly freed-up attention on something important, they thought a separate window with a thesaurus would do just fine.

To that end, SOMA is a horror game with puzzle elements, in which you attempt to escape a haywire, underwater facility on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. Threats lurk about, even if combat is absent. Physical contact between you and these monsters amounts to getting flung across the room and some spooky screen effects should it end fatally. Running, sneaking and puzzling your way out of danger remains the way of getting out of trouble, and an intricate plot backed by heartfelt character drama and eerily genuine voice acting guides you from one setpiece to the next.

It’s a dance Frictional knows well; one that SOMA comes so close to perfecting, were it not for the obvious criticism that’s been repeated since the very beginning with games of its ilk—it’s not scary. Rather, it’s frustrating and distracts from what’s more important. Any point at which whatever’s chasing you manages to remove those last few bits from your health bar is an almost pointless, immersion-breaking yank that pulls you out of the game. Indeed, an element solely there to make the video game more like a video game is what works against it the most.

It's as if horror games are afraid to entirely remove the fear of death. SOMA has a Story difficulty, yet it is a band-aid fix to a fundamental design issue. If a tangible threat is what was needed, why not make the very environment something to be afraid of? If the goal was having interactions that are more inspired by the story and setting, rather than the mechanics, why undermine it? I’m sure making the airlock an enemy, by giving it the ability to crush you to a pulp should you miss the warnings on the wall to your left, would have done wonders for making players pay attention and interact with their surroundings in a more natural way. The bottom of the ocean is a scary place, period, no sci-fi monsters needed. Almost as scary as the idea of beefing up the HPL Engine is to Frictional, I’d imagine, to a point where that kind of interactivity would be possible without squinting at blurry textures.

But, even with engine limitations, Frictional’s art and sound direction are exceptional. It is why SOMA’s rendition of the ocean floor is so inviting to get lost in and explore, even if it’s quite linear and teeters on the edge of falling into the motions of other games like it. But that begs the question: where does SOMA break the mould?


Without having to worry about any kind of resource management, you’re free to direct your attention elsewhere. SOMA’s monster encounters are a necessary evil with the way the game was designed; they suck, but can’t come close to ruining what’s so great about it. The puzzles are still there, of course, but the menial tasks of rerouting the power to the correct junction or finding the proper keycard can’t compare to the puzzle the game has been built around:

SOMA’s key themes, the dash of player choice there is, and the very plot are all interwoven with such great care and subtlety that they’d make a seamstress blush. The closer the game got to anything that’d obstruct it, the bigger my lament. In a roundabout way, It goes so far that it makes the lack of combat in The Dark Descent seem like an oversight—its narrative aspirations were never as grand, so laying even further into traditional survival horror could have had some merit.

The morality of SOMA is in the background, ready to creep up on you while your brain works away at the bits it presents. A "throwaway" line, a note on the wall, or an inconspicuous press of some button—it’s all towards a carefully constructed threefold message: whether ominous, hopeful, or just another pondering of whether androids dream of electric sheep, depends on you. No dialogue wheel, no alignment system, or distracting inventories; just you, some annoying monsters, movable boxes, and a choice that informs a different kind of fear.

Sans those annoying monsters, it’s the otherwise thorough departure from survival horror that allows SOMA to be filled with substance. All the frights—and everything else the game will make you feel—are in its world and the allegory it serves to paint. The psychological horror they’ve been talking about all these years; something a lot of developers have tried. Many may have succeeded, but a lot more missed what the focus should be and the design decisions at play to sharpen it up.

An international group of passionate writers and veteran reviewers, Summit Reviews aims to deliver ethical, professional, and in-depth critique across Steam and beyond.

Imagine being the disappointing sequel to a wildly popular and critically successful title; one that, for better or worse, defined a genre and set many a trend for years to come. No doubt you’d have the entire world against you, were you to fumble the opportunity.

Such was the case with Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs when it first saw the light of day, all the way back in 2013. The eagerly-awaited sequel to Frictional Games’ Amnesia: The Dark Descent was outsourced—where the original’s developers were preoccupied with their next release, fellow studio The Chinese Room stepped in to pick up the slack. However, its differing approach to game design from that of Frictional alienated the series' faithful, and even among those who have managed to push past it, the divide still runs deep.

At the time of writing, A Machine for Pigs is the only game in Frictional’s catalogue to bear a “Mixed” reception on Steam. It doesn’t fare much better on the developer’s Metacritic page either, where it stands as the second lowest-rated title, both in terms of the critics’ aggregate and the user score, edged out only by the expansion pack to one of their earlier releases and the Xbox One port of Amnesia: The Bunker, though, the latter is constructed from a mere six reviews compared to A Machine for Pigs’ whopping 964.

But why the hate? The Dark Descent isn’t a particularly complex title to nail down. On the contrary, it’s a game made up of simple mechanics, strong enough not just to prop up, but elevate and hook you onto an otherwise straightforward tale of morality, mortality, power, vengeance, vanity and, in a subtle yet highly formative way, colonialism and the rise of industry. The game’s themes are plentiful and handled in a mature way that leaves enough space for these mechanics to provide the kind of soul-searching that ultimately lets the player themself paint a horror framing as their own personal hell; something Frictional was only bound to get better at. Lots of room left to breathe (all panicked, of course), lots of things you can add on to, and no small part of why I think the game was as effective as it was.

They’re there to lure you in, try and keep you engaged if the premise has failed to do so, and once you’ve spent enough time under the game’s thumb and succumbed to its rules, that’s when it becomes more than just dragging doors open or picking up papers to read, but a conscious fight to press on against your fears. These mechanics get the heftiness they need to become an important part of the experience: and they wouldn’t even chafe were you to try and fit a tighter narrative around them, as long as you were to leave that all-important luft. I mean, how badly could they mess it up? The blueprint was right there!

To be fair, The Chinese Room didn’t want to follow a blueprint. They set out to make a game with fundamentally different goals. One that would tell the kind of story they wanted to tell. To merely retread familiar ground, albeit with a personal twist, would be to fail; and, along those lines, A Machine for Pigs is the more ambitious title. If you were to go looking for reasons to play it today, other than morbid curiosity, you’d most likely run into its “mature storytelling” and “socially conscious allegory” lauded as the biggest reasons to do so. To your inevitable dismay, the maturity you’ll find is akin to that of a rebellious teenager; one that's had enough of nice sweaters and went to toss out the entire wardrobe in favour of what's cool. And it's not just the clothes, but the attitude as well.

Don’t get me wrong, being a bit rebellious isn’t a terrible idea and it ought to be rather liberating but there’s a reason why a bit of irrepressible embarrassment is attached to the image. And in A Machine for Pigs, that embarrassment is in overly verbose, artificial writing, uninspired voice acting that, for the most part, confuses emotion with intentionally bad audio quality and getting really close to the microphone, further let down by a complete lack of meaningful interactivity. The experience doesn’t just chafe—it ain’t there! And they still somehow found a way to choke it out.


There is one notable advancement that A Machine for Pigs made when it comes to pushing things further from where The Dark Descent left them. It’s in the setting: Prussian castles are now but a distant memory, or a journal entry you find along the way, and nearly all gameplay mechanics have been left behind with it. Both from a narrative and gameplay perspective, the world has moved on.

The maze our new protagonist, Oswald Mandus, must navigate isn’t made of brick, but rather metal—hallways and layers upon layers of pipes, vents, dials and valves. It is a much more sophisticated world, a sterilised one, where fixing machines that shouldn’t be working in the first place (ie. solving puzzles) isn’t done in increasingly creative, jury-rigged ways, but a mere twist of a knob here, or the pull of a lever there, provided it’s all in the proper order.

What’s wrong with these machines is almost always a broken fuse that needs to be replaced. A “one size fits all” solution for each one you’ll come across. The lantern, similarly, is electric now. The damned thing just stays on forever and only lights up what’s directly in front of you, sort of like a spotlight. There’s also no need to manage its oil or, heck, even the batteries. You’ll barely have to turn the damned thing off as most times you encounter the eponymous pigmen (for which this machine has been built!) are times when the game seems to be mostly concerned with hurrying you up; adding a little excitement with which to break up the tepidity of everything else.

It's all built up around the core idea of keeping you going and keeping you focused on the story, with little to no time to take things in. The problem is, while the premise is interesting enough, every other attempt to engage with it in the game’s confines is undercut by some awfully verbose, boring writing and audio logs that seem to be just there because: how else are you going to tell a story in a game where the only other NPCs communicate in ear-bleeding, high-pitched squeals? When the hook succeeds, but there are no mechanics to further ease you in, and a narrative that’s as penetrable as the surface of your desk to your forehead, what else is there? All the advancements made in visual detail and the themes they're supposed to present before you are for nought. Nothing is preventing this world, with some admittedly great and imposing environments, from just degrading to metal hallways, blinking lights and buttons in retrospect.

A mind that is most likely occupied with thinking up ways of improving the game it’s playing, or merely noticing everything that The Dark Descent did better, is a mind that has no time to be afraid. No time to colour in the frights with its own palette of terrifying. With how subjective horror is, player choice, no matter how small, is key. Games that bill themselves as psychological horror strip themselves of most of these in a mechanical sense, but strive for greater narrative heights—and A Machine for Pigs does not reach them.

It fails as a horror game, with writing carved out as if to make you feel bad for not being a native English speaker from a hundred years ago, and a story that doesn't connect further than its title. “The Teeth”; “The Throat”; “The Gut”; the naming convention of its achievements is quite fitting. As indigestible as it is, where else could it end up, other than the pooper?

An international group of passionate writers and veteran reviewers, Summit Reviews aims to deliver ethical, professional, and in-depth critique across Steam and beyond. Check us out!

If you had your interest piqued by The Bookwalker: Thief of Tales, chances are, it was because of its art style and certain UI elements heavily reminding you of Disco Elysium.

That could be one reason. The other, perhaps the very nature of these games—text-heavy and narrative-driven; and what better excuse is there to show off your writing chops and how big of an erudite you are than setting a game in not one, not two, but six (made up) books. These are the reasons why I decided to give the game a chance, and as such, I feel obligated to dispel some misconceptions you may also have, as this is where the similarities end.

Disco, obviously, wasn’t the first game to concern itself with storytelling first while utilizing an isometric view, but that hazy, painterly colour scheme and those character portraits are quite reminiscent of it. The Bookwalker, on the other hand, isn’t nearly as text-heavy, nor is it an RPG. Instead, it plays like a point & click adventure with turn-based combat and, to my greatest surprise, crafting. That might be enough to put some of you eager wishlisters off, but don’t worry—The Bookwalker is still one well-realised idea.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3001290341


Let’s get some technical hiccups out of the way first: if you’re living in the future, where playing at only 60 frames per second is a frightening thought, then maybe hold off on the purchase for now. Something about The Bookwalker makes it hard to work with at high framerates, progressively making mouse movement choppier the higher they are. So, cap it with your preferred method before jumping in—though not even that will save you from some minor, annoying visual glitches during the game’s first-person sections.

That’s right, that gif above isn’t just a fancy menu screen. Starting the game throws you into the shoes and puts you behind the eyes of Etienne Quist, a disgraced writer suffering from writer’s block. Times are tough—many of his personal belongings have been seized and there’s a big ol’ eviction notice plastered on the front door. To make matters worse, the writer’s block is quite literal in this case, I’m afraid. Etienne’s creative juices haven’t just dried up, but he’s been shackled with a special kind of armband, by none other than the Writer’s Police, for a crime he doesn't talk lightly about.

Inside of The Bookwalker’s dystopian setting, it’s not a prison sentence that awaits Etienne but rather forced labour at a publishing house without much input on what goes into his writings. It is a grim fate that not many manage to pull through, and even those that do rarely ever go back to writing. And so, with a promise of his shackles being removed after six odd jobs, Etienne turns to bookwalking—an illegal practice of diving into books, stealing powerful artefacts from their plotlines, and selling them off to other, less imaginative writers who then use them in their own stories.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3001593221

It's such a simple, yet clever idea. It's not a wholly original concept (rarely anything is), but The Bookwalker manages to create a separation between the “mundane”—Etienne’s harsh reality presented through the first-person sequences— and the wondrous settings created for the novels he has to steal from.

Each novel is as subversive as the very start of the game, the difference between the isometric plane of the books you visit and Etienne’s stuffy apartment. Creaky pipes jut out of the walls and all that can be observed through the windows is the brick façade of the factory next door. Take a couple of steps to the study and whoosh!—you find yourself inside a sci-fi rendition of an Arthurian legend or a retelling of Norse mythology with a corporate twist. The Bookwalker takes a sort of post-modernist approach to the classic framings it explores, but it’s more of a fun exploration rather than outright deconstruction. Thankfully, it never comes close to being cynical or irreverent in its observations. In fact, I’d say that the dispelment of irreverence is the crucial theme the game tries to land by the plot’s climax, but its aspirations fall a bit flat due to the underwritten character drama that carries it.

The whole of The Bookwalker is, ironically, underwritten—the regime that keeps artists and their creations as another resource in check isn’t all that explored, the rules of bookwalking are a bit murky, and you shouldn’t be surprised if you don’t find yourself caring as much about its characters when the game so clearly expects you to. Praise multiple-choice dialogue, right? You’ll be able to paint Etienne’s sensibilities somewhat closer to your heart, even if most of the journey is rather linear.


The Bookwalker features a couple of additional mechanics to make the pointing & clicking a bit more engaging as you’re thieving around its tales. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take them far enough to fill up its narrative holes.

The turn-based combat makes sense narratively, even if it’s a game of rock, paper, scissors that’s always in your favour. You’ll be able to see what action the enemies will take on their turn and are then supposed to pick one of your own that’ll do the best job of exploiting their choice. I didn’t get much out of it, but I can’t say it bogged the experience down. It was, at times, even a satisfying resolution to some of the problems Etienne faces. But, the crafting—and the puzzle-solving in general—might as well have had the game play out itself.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3001704286

Where one might expect to find puzzles, additional dialogue, alternate routes, or worldbuilding, The Bookwalker has crafting resources and junk. With crafting resources, you can make lockpicks and crowbars, which are used throughout the books to advance, usually by opening a crate or strongbox that contains the next plot-relevant item.

Junk can be converted to ink, which lets Etienne rewrite something about the book you’re in through a special dialogue option. Ink also fuels all of your combat abilities, so an interesting choice could have presented itself were it not for the fact that you have the free ability to drain ink directly from enemies. The junk in each scenario is so abundant too, that you’ll always have enough for everything you need. I’ve never died in combat and I’ve never missed out on an ink-related dialogue option. It wouldn't have been a problem, were it not a replacement for puzzles and the sole reward for exploration.

All of this, and I’d like to end on a positive note, would spell doom for the title were it not for its presentation and the idea that lies at its core. The whole bookwalking experience, at least on a conceptual level, is so well-realised that I still consider it a worthwhile one, shortcomings included. That visual of literally diving into the pages and the soundtrack bring it together for me, elevating the game when nothing else could.

It’s these rich ambient tones—a serene song, yet with a strong dark undertone, treasuring the moment but also going back to that unfortunate chasm between escapist storytelling and the unromantic real world. The story will, sadly and eventually, end; and we’ll exit, or be tossed out, back into the difficult uphill battle that is the day-to-day struggle, perhaps richer for an experience.

And that’s okay; ultimately what The Bookwalker is about, and the grounds I can recommend it on with no second thoughts.

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