Recent reviews by leavedavidalone

A diamond padded in filler BS. Power through it and you will be grateful.

Am I playing the same game as others? "Better than Orwell"?

Sure. If you like repetetive gameplay loops. Bad translations that ruins the entire game, atrocious minigames, bad voice acting that you just wanna skip over and a mediocre predictable story featuring an edgelord hacker that literally is a dark void under a hood.

Easily worth the price!

This short game really captures the feeling of Paper's Please, while showcasing it's own interesting war-torn mouse-universe.

With some polish the "squeakuel" could be a real hit!

Painstakingly created over the last five years by Lucas Pope of "Papers, Please" fame. Return of the Obra Dinn is just as much of a one-of-a-kind indie game. I would even argue that Obra Dinn is even more groundbreaking.

Resuming the trend of having a seemingly ordinary job turn extraordinary, the player assumes the role of an early 19th century insurance adjuster for the East India Company. Your job is to board a merchant ship having mysteriously drifted, empty, into port and figure out what the hell happened to 60 men and women who were aboard. To help you with this you have a book containing maps, a crew manifest and sketches of the crew, and a pocketwatch that helps you relive each corpse's last moments.

Many others are saying that they think it's best to go into this experience blind and I echo that, so I won't go into it much further but instead give it my most enthusiastic recommendation for anyone who likes to think and piece things together.

It's incredible how Pope comes up with these extremely unique and interesting concepts and then spends half a decade refining them into the fantastic games they deserve. He's truly one of a kind.

I can't wait for 2023.

Life is Strange and its prequel: LIS: Before the Storm, are a couple of my favorite games ever, this is, I believe, in large part because of their very unique formula: All the tropes of teen dramas: the awkwardness, the bullies, the jocks, nerds, and hipsters, the high school life and the romance, meets a well written high-stakes fantasy adventure. There are tons of deep characters, each a stereotype at a glance but with a deep personality once you get to know them.

It's a fusion of the everyday teenage life that we've all more or less lived, with mysticism, magic and world-altering events.

Life is Strange 2 starts out in a very familiar way: There's Sean, our protagonist, a teenage boy, there's this girl he likes, and Lyla, his best friend who tries to set them up. (Seriously, Lyla is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ awesome)

There's awkward teenage dialogue (THIRSTY), theres a party to attend, beer to steal and weed to acquire. F*ck yeah, now we just need some magic powers and a natural disaster and we'll be rolling.

BAM, the game does a complete 180. After the (completely forced and unrealistic) "inciting incident" of the game. Any semblance of a normal life for our main character gets left behind and the game suddenly becomes an overly serious road movie, a story of the relationship between our teenage hero and his impressionable and innocent little brother, Daniel.

The graphics are awesome, the music is pretty good, the writing is fine and so on.. But there is no high school drama, no normal life to be balanced with a dark secret or magical abilities. Side characters are encountered, their stories are told, and then they're left behind.

This feels more like Telltale's The Walking Dead or The Last of Us than Life is Strange.

However instead of the zombies and survivors of the other two titles, in LIS2 the only "enemy" seems to be.. the irrationally acting murder-police.. and supporters of a certain American president.

Yeah.. this game is probably the most hamfisted political commentary I've ever seen in virtual media.

Our main character and his family.. are mexican immigrants, and with mexican immigrants I mean the literal embodiment of the "American dream" as every gun-slinging small town Reagan republican imagines it when they touch themselves while reciting the pledge of allegiance. Perfectly Intergrated, god-fearing, America-loving, baseball-playing, car-fixing, hard-working, with angelized names and not the slightest trace of an accent.

But Oh No! the game is set in late October / early November 2016, and a mean orange man is running for president. But he's not gonna be president is he? IS HE? Find out in Episode 3 or 4. (Seriously I can't imagine what it will be like when they portray election night in the game?)

Look, I get it. It's an issue of our time, one that would definitely impact the lives of Hispanic-Americans in one way or another. There might well be predjudiced, xenophobic people to be encountered, a uneasy feeling of not feeling welcome anymore in the only land you've ever lived in. It would be COMPLETELY FINE if the creators of the game wanted to denounce every single part of the unnamed orange mans agenda. Please do tell a story of young Americans who feel dehumanized and alieanated by that movement!

BUT THIS IS NOT THE WAY TO DO IT.

Not even a few minute passes before the apparently extremely hateful climate of... Seattle. Is made clear. Emboldened by the rise of he-who-must-not-be-named, an ancient evil stirs.. Racist neighbours and extremely trigger-happy policemen completely destroy the cozy suburban lives of our protagonist family.

..and as soon as our shade-darker-than-white heroes venture a few miles into.. bum Bum BUM.. FLYOVER COUNTRY. There's nuttin’ but’ truckin' hicks with suspicious stares, and unkind words. Before you know wtf is going on, downright racist violence ensues.

"YOU F*CKING SP*C, THIS IS WHY WE SHOULD BUILD THE WALL, I'M GONNA CALL ICE!"

Small town America, the way only Europeans could write it.

Luckily for you, a man who is the archetype of a left-wing-hippie-buzzfeed writer, and also the most lovable, perfect angel in the world, saves your ass, preaches the virtues of tolerance, explaining to you that "EVERYTHING IS POLITICAL" before speeding off.

I couldn't believe my eyes.

When you think about it, the first two Life Is Strange games clearly had tons of liberal political commentary: the capitalist Prescotts putting people out of jobs, the formerly hippie Vortex club having turned into the heart of darkness of elitism and snobbery, the inclusion and normalization of gay romance. etc etc.

However this was never a problem, those issues can and should definitely be brought up in media (as should the ones in LIS2) But the adversaries of those games aren't portrayed as cartoonishly evil and neither are your philosophical allies portrayed cartoonishly good. Nothing is black and white. When you create a cultural critique, you have to add some nuance.

A perfect example of nuanced political commentary in the first game is Chloe's stepdad and Blackwell security guard David Madsen, a gun-toting sexist macho-man. A paranoid control freak, he goes too far in his survelleince, spying and bullying the students and even driving one of them to attempted suicide but even though his methods and his philosophy is clearly considered by the game writers to be misguided and straight up wrong, he is portrayed as a human too, a man scarred by his military service, who loves and would do anything for his wife and step-daughter and who clearly cares about the students at Blackwell.

LIS2 instead, at least so far, actually casts the American president, his supporters and the impact they have on regular Americans as the big, lurking, cartoonish one-sided evil. That's really, really tiresome, and lazy writing.

(Sidenote: TIllamook County, where the real life equivalent of Arcadia Bay is, voted for Trump.)

So far, this game is nothing like the previous ones, it's a generic road movie-game packed to the brim with lazy and pandering attempts at political commentary. Maybe it can still be made up for in the following episodes, maybe the archetypes will turn into actual people, maybe the political commentary will become more nuanced or at least less hamfisted, maybe the boys will turn back to Seattle and go hang out with Lyla some more.

I once had a friend named Max, I had known Max since I was 2 years old, today, me and Max played Duck Game together, we are not friends anymore. ♥♥♥♥ this ♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥ game.

It's the Citizen Kane of games, the apex of strategy, the embodiment of glorious map clicking with RPG elements. The award winner for most DLC's released. This game is alpha and omega, the beginning and the end. The best game that ever was or ever will be.