Recent reviews by Mikel

A great and worthy follow up to Hades. Mechanically, the systems of the first game are well-built-on and deeper. The content is also already significantly bigger than the first game, and the story is interesting.

I do find myself preferring the characters and the art style of the first game, but this is probably mostly personal preference.

[Reviewed in Early Access 03/25]

Unfortunately, a disappointing LiS entry. It's still an alright game, but falls below the standard of the other games. It really feels like less work went into this than any previous game, which makes it hard to justify the price tag. I would get it on a deep sale.

- The main and fundamental issue here is the story. The characters are not very well developed, which makes it hard to feel for them, and the pacing is all off. While the murder mystery has decent components, too much of it hides behind unexplained powers (and the eventual resolution is 100% hand-wavey nonsense). A very unsatisfying conclusion, feeling like a last minute job,
- The map/environment is surprisingly small and uninspiring compared to what we're used to, with many re-used environments.
- Performance is quite poor, even on high-end systems (especially when compared against graphical fidelity). The game looks great, but not sufficiently improved on previous games to justify such a big compute bump.

It's a 20x reduction in performance for not a huge improvement over what can be achieved with rasterisation.

Being unable to save during levels means that crashes wipe out an hour+ of progress, very frustrating

The level of immersion in this game has no equal.

Amazing game, but missing actual saving - which is a necessity when this game can cause motion sickness (or randomly crash when you're 1 hour into a level, meaning you need to restart the whole thing)

EDIT: Save games have been added.

An incredible, beautiful, gripping experience. Amazing art, amazing story, and amazing music. Game of the decade 10/10

There is only one downside: the game is somewhat buggy on PC and requires a mod (FAR) to play well, as well as a controller. It's a bit of a joke that Square haven't released any updates to it since release. But the gameplay makes it far more than worth it.

What Remains of Edith Finch is a short but stunning walking simulator. It follows the story of Edith Finch exploring her old home to find out more about her family line - it is almost like a collection of short stories about each member of the family. Each story is told with different original mechanics, which makes the game always feel interesting (I found my self often thinking 'this is genius'). One thing I can say about this game is that the art is absolutely beautiful and so is the storytelling that goes along with it.

Overall, the story is good but it isn't amazing (it's also pretty grim and dark). What more than makes up for that is the way the story is told, which exceeded my greatest expectations. The biggest downside of this game is it's length - it'll take you 2-3 hours to complete it and there is no replayability, so keep that in mind before you drop £15 on it. In addition, there is no FOV slider, so if you are prone to motion sickness then that's something to consider, although I had no issues with the low FOV personally.

AID have done it again - a fantastic kinetic novel that builds on the story of the first installment. There is much more art in this one, which removes my gripe with the first game of reusing the same art too many times. Music is once again perfect, and helps to set the scene. This game has some really epic scenes, but I won't spoil anything.

However, the story was a little frustrating - most of the game is spent on a (nevertheless excellent) 'side story', which leaves the main plot on a cliffhanger. It gets dragged out a little longer than I would have liked, which is annoying since the game is relatively short. That being said, I still think the story was awesome. Highly recommended.

This game explores some unique mechanics, and it pulls that off extremely well. You are able to rewind time short-term, which gives you the false impression that you can choose the 'correct' choice by observing people's reactions to each one, but you later realise that your power is less of a gift than you expected. Your choices completely change the course of the game, and they have true substance - you'll find yourself genuinely putting a lot of thought into the choices, and feeling a lot of regret.

If you play games for the story, this is for you. If you play games for puzzles and gameplay, it's not. The puzzles that are in the game are pretty awful, but what makes it great is the fantastic story, fantasic characters, beautiful art and beautiful music.

Controller highly recommended, and I say that as someone who uses KBM for everything.

10/10 Get some tissues ready.