Recent reviews by sjdswanlund

The best sokaban game I've played. Period. Also, the hardest.

Don't let the 10,000+ puzzles selling point fool you, as almost all of the game's puzzle types aren't logic-based, or even puzzles at all. Many fall into simple categories like coming across an invisible object or chasing an orb before it disappears. That isn't to say that the logic-based puzzles are bad, just that there isn't enough of them. It also has the bane of my existence: music puzzles.

I'm not really sure what this game is trying to be. I'm not even sure the developers know. There's lore bits sporadically scattered throughout the world, detailing what I don't know. And I don't care to piece it all together, simply because I'm not sure there's any overarching stories of the world to discover. I never felt like there was. The multiplayer is a needless addition, serving no real value, and an argument can be made for it making the game worse due to latency-related issues. Accidental deaths are common when your character teleports all over the place.

This really isn't a puzzle game. It's a collectathon. Mileage is going to vary depending on how much one enjoys that sort of thing. Even I, who love that particular sort of thing, probably won't see this game to completion. I probably won't get close. Especially when there are much better games that do the things found within Islands of Insight, such as Supraland and The Talos Principle games.

It pains me to write this review. Literally. My arthritis is so much worse after this game. I love it. 10/10

I played a Picross game for 5 hours straight. What does that tell you?

It's as cute and charming as it is short and simple. It may not be technically impressive on the graphics or even have a vsync mode to fix bad screen tearing, but it controls so well I didn't care. You'll finish this game in an hour or two, but no more, and that was a perfect length for me.

I would have loved this game when it originally came out. I'm still impressed by what it was doing in the early 2000s. Unfortunately, despite it's scale and ambitions, it has aged very poorly. The unique spellcasting system is straight up jank when playing on modern PCs, a lot of this due to how it's connected to framerate and gpus. If you really want to give it a try, I"d recommend trying the console version if you can get it, which might work better for that. But as is, this is only recommended to those who can put in so much time to become experts at even the hardest to control systems. For all others, try one of Arkane's later titles.

This game sucks. It's not that it's just a blatant rip-off of the Submachine series but one that doesn't execute anything from those games well at all. Finding the right places to click is glitchy and obtuse. Don't bother.

I'm not even sure what's the point of reviewing this on the Steam Store at this point. But for those who bought it ages ago, but just now got interested in playing it, and by some miracle notice this review, let me you stop you in your tracks. This game just doesn't know what it wants to be and it doesn't know how to do anything it tries with success. It went so far as to hire Nolan North to voice the protagonist, just so it's very Uncharted aspects would come through. But everything about those elements are atrocious: the janky shooting, the dialogue, etc. The story has an interesting premise, but that's it. As for the other elements, such as flying with a Jetpack, I guess it feels like Star Fox? Except picking inverted or non-inverted will not fix how many times you accidentally crash into the ground when you take off. And there are so many times when you aim at angles that the framerate will chug down into the 10s.

Just stay away, this game sucks.

I've always been fascinated with how much fans can change a game through modding. For a long time I would play pretty much anything that caught my eye, until I realized most didn't understand good game design. As I became more critical, I became only interested in total conversion mods or the kind that simply made outdated games more playable for the current generation.

Enderal: Forgotten Stories is a full conversion mod that doesn't feel outdated, despite the base game being quite old now. In fact, I prefer it over the original, both in story and unique mechanics. It goes back to the old Elder Scrolls days of consequences having weight. The way you plan to build your character matters, enemies do not scale to your level so you need to know what is a place you can attempt. The world seems as large as the base game too.

If you want a totally new experience, but also want a modernized version of how the older games played with consequences, this is the perfect game for you. Probably the best mod I've ever encountered.

I love the Darksiders franchise. I've played through the first three times to completion, the second twice to completion, and the third I got up to NG+ 5 or 6. For a while I thought the first one was my favorite, but after playing it on the hardest setting for the second time, the faults really shine through. Unfortunately, the remastered version didn't alleviate these issues.

I'll start with a positive. It's a unique take on the Zelda franchise. Many criticize it for being derivative of Zelda, God of War, and Portal. But that's a dumb thing to say, as most games take mechanics from all sorts of games. There can't be only one Zelda. Darksiders stands on it's own from those other games. By blending certain inspirations, it feels like it's own thing. It liberally takes from Biblical and apocryphal texts and legends of angels and demons, so anybody with an affinity for the material will love the story. The visuals still hold up due to the vibrant artwork, which works well in a dark themed game. The voice acting is great, having Liam O'Brien as War and Mark Hamill as the Watcher. Most of the dungeons are decent, though they don't come close to comparing to what you would see in a Zelda game, despite being large and some interesting puzzles.

Where the game really falls apart is the combat and specific game design issues. If you get a checkpoint at full health, then die, you start at half health. This can really be aggravating during boss checkpoints. You get three main weapons in the game, and your main sword is always going to be your go to. The other weapons are mostly support, and will level up so slow as to not be worth it. The other issue is having the block and dash abilities on the same button. You block / parry with R1, but you dash when you push it and move. This leads to so many instances of dashing when you want to parry.

Despite having a lot of praiseworthy things to say about the game, I cannot really recommend this game. Everything feels so much smoother in the sequel, and is just much easier to control. This felt much more like a test run for a new studio. I really hope they release another remaster or remake at some point, to fix all the issues I mentioned.