Recent reviews by Samio

As someone with a near religious worship of Ion Storm's 2000 magnum opus, Deus Ex, I do not say the following words lightly.

It's an action-brawler immersive sim with the same level of detail and a brilliant level design. There are difficult but wonderfully logical puzzles, the combat is brutal, beefy and just plain fun. You can charge through each level like a bull and punch out all the goons. You can take to rooftops and catwalks and sneak by everything. You can get some secrets, sample your battles and engage in extremely satisfying and VERY lethal gunplay.

There are no level-up systems or dialogue trees like in Deus Ex. But the fantastic level design and multiple-approach systems in Fallen Aces can match and beat some of the best in the imm-sim genre.

The aesthetic is nailed down perfectly, seeing a goon's face of shock before you hear Gianni Matragrano howling in pain will never get old. And boy did New Blood milk Gianni good this time, goons have SO MUCH BANTER. Very much a needed since you're gonna be beating off goons constantly. All the voice acting is just wonderful, really.

It's a great game. If you like Thief or Deus Ex, I'd call this a must-buy. If you like videogames in general, it's still absurdly cheap for the kind of quality and fun you can get from this. New Blood keeps piling on the successes.

Get this game. It's as good as nonna's cooking.

Encased: A Sci-Fi Post-Apocalyptic RPG made me sad.

Encased is one of several recent computer RPGs made by fans of old school Fallout games from a former soviet bloc state. There are plenty of direct references and tropes in the game to back this. And like many fans who become creators, they try to do a copy of the game, so what you end up with is not a game that talks about core experiences and original ideas, but a retread of the developer's favourite parts of playing Fallout. Wasteland and Fallout were games about the post-apocalypse, Encased is a game about a game. This isn't inherently bad, but it helps explain the problems one will encounter in Encased.

Encased starts out strong. The introduction chapter is dense, the writing is rich and varied, and there's plenty of chances for your character to find a voice. If all of the game were like that first chapter, Encased would easily be amongst the all-time classics in the computer RPG genre. But it's not. One of the main flaws of Encased is that it starts very strong, and just goes downhill from there. One can feel how the developers ran out of time, money and energy as the game goes on. Dialogue choices become sparse and mechanical, typos abound, quests become little more than "Go to this location, talk to this person, come back" and many padding shortcuts show up. The ending is as flaccid as they get, there's no challenge or climax, or even a clarification of what was the main antagonising force.

The game's mechanics are standard computer RPG fare, with skill checks, levelling up, perks and so on. They do not really make sense intradiegetically, and strain or break immersion. You can become so good at sneaking you can punch people several times and walk away with the victim noticing, and some attacks were placed for the sake of pop culture references. The combat is fairly decent at first, you have to think strategically, squeeze every bit of resources you have and use the terrain to your advantage... until you find out enemies scale with your level. And their scaling is just bigger numbers, which just makes monsters big sponges of outrageous hitpoints and resistances. The scaling works in such a way that you don't really feel stronger, or that you're learning how to fight better. Just the opposite, once you pass a certain power curve, combat is just clicking at enemies until they die. Unless you find a way to truly break combat, it eventually becomes a slog which basically means you are penalised for competing quests and leveling up, as the combat becomes more tedious and less rewarding. What at first glance seems like a complex and interesting character building system deflates once you find out how the scaling works. It seems the game is somewhat aware of this, as there's a welcomed fast-forward keybind to speed up combat.

The game has some basic game design flaws, which can be explained by this being Dark Crystal's first (and only) game. But they make for a frustrating game experience. Some areas are just huge and mostly empty, so you click where your character wants to go, and then wait several minutes for the walking to play out. This will happen constantly if you want to do all or even most quests. The colour palette and lightness levels of the game blur many characters and while containers and interactibles can be highlighted with the ALT key (something that the game would be unplayable without), sometimes finding NPCs is so difficult one has to look for a guide on where to find them. Transitioning between areas is so common at least two hours of my playthrough have to be loading screens. All of the above start grinding on you and half-way through the game quests feel like a chore and not a fun opportunity to explore.

All of this can be overlooked and forgiven if the game were to deliver on the main course of a computer roleplaying game: Quality writing and a good story. But once again, we're teased with that at the beginning, then the game flops. At first you're introduced to a game that wears an interesting 70's cassette sci-fi aesthetic (which is what drew me at first), classics of 20th century sci-fi paperbacks are dropped left and right and the setting tempts us with both a deeper high-concept mystery and nuanced social commentary. And like before, it drops all of this once the game passes the first act. The social commentary becomes "This person is bad because she's a corrupt dictator" and there's just so little to actually play or experience that in-game. By the end of the game your character becomes devoid of personality, instead of talking the game uses dialog prompts such as "You tell X person what happened" or "You convince them of X" without... it actually being written.

And for the premise of a Science Fiction game, well, I have to disagree. There is no science fiction, only a science fiction coat of paint. In order for something to qualify as science fiction, one has to actually participate with the science. There is usually a big "What If..." and then there's an attempt to explain how this would change our world, or our understanding of it. The game's "What If..." is "what if there were the remnants of a super advanced civilization in Earth and a big international effort came together to study it?". But the exploration is unsatisfying because the superadvanced technology is reduced to technobabble to justify laser guns and anachronistic supercomputers. It's just there. And there's no change in political or philosophical perspective, nobody has an answer as to who the forefathers were, or how their technology works, or what this means to understanding of reality and science. The science is never talked about, just used as a prop for Cool Ideas and Cool Weapons.

I guess I'm being very harsh for the first game of a company. But the nature of the game, with its stellar first act and subsequent disappointment shows that there's room for improvement. As for buying the game, I'd pass, or maybe wait for a particularly big sale if you're a die-hard fan of the genre.

Games are usually fun activities. People are presented with challenges, given a set of tools, the promise of a winning state (or several) and through the use of those tools the player is expected to reach that win state. This process may be hard or easy, complex or simple, but it's bound by explicit rules and the player is expected to have a fair shot at victory. Also, it's expected that though the process might imply some frustration, the overall experience is pleasant and fun.

That's the usual fare for videogames.

Gods Will Be Watching is not like those videogames.

Not all human art is pleasant. Some is unpleasant due to a lack of skill, it's just bad art. But some art has as its goal to be unpleasant. Example: horror movies produce fear (...or camp), so do horror games. Or, say, Lars von Trier movies also tend to involve the darker, unwelcome parts of the emotional range. And some people like those experiences. Not all people, but some do. And while movies that seek to explore the emotional range of paranoia, fear, shame, etc., are not for everyone, it is good that those subjects are explored. And just like some of those movies try from design to produce unpleasant emotions, Gods Will Be Watching has as its intended artistic goal to make the player experience anguish, stress, frustration and despair.

Gods Will Be Watching [GWBW from now on] is not a game everyone should play. But GWBW is a good game. GWBW takes a hard bet, it sets out to evoke emotions of futility and frustration on the player, through the unique aesthetic channel of videogames: interaction. GWBW's original (and intended) mode will sometimes force you into unwinnable scenarios. It has internal randomness. It is arbitrary. It is unfair. It is cold and uncaring. It will make you feel like you just wasted hours of your life in a task that, in the end, you didn't have any choice in overcoming.

But that's exactly what GWBW sets out to do. It's the aesthetic and moral lesson of the game. If this is not something you want to experience, skip GWBW. But if you have an appreciation for existentialism and think Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus was not hardcore enough, GWBW is exactly the experience you're looking for.


The pixel art helps soothe what would be an unbearable experience. It's beautiful and well animated. Every character is given a unique presence. Given the constraints of the game, it does a lot with very little. I can't see the game presenting its style through anything other than these pixel visuals. Less and it'd take away from the visual cues, more complexity and the game would suffer from it.


Goodness, the game's music is amazing. Given the strong role of emotions in this game, music had to have a strong presence and it pays off perfectly. The soundtrack is closest to space ambient, it's always dark, alien and melancholy. Some tracks are plain oppressive, some more intense and some carry a feeling of keeping a small ember of hope against a hostile reality. Fingerspit does an excellent job. Experiencing the soundtrack along with the game's narrative is worth the game's price alone.


While the interface may seem like a more traditional point and click adventure game, there are no item oriented puzzles or riddles. The gameplay centers around survival and resource management. It involves calculation, experimentation and trial-and-error. Failure is part of this game's narrative. You are expected to be overwhelmed by choices with no clear indication of their results, fail, learn from that failure and eventually overcome what's essentially an economical challenge - one that involves incredibly cruel moral dilemmas.

Again, from the overview, this is not for everyone. But what it plans out to do, it does so spectacularly.


Another stellar feature of this game. The game has very little text or dialogue, but what little it has is presented with maximum efficiency. The story of the game, including the DLC Chapter, is very rich and will leave you thinking for a long time. Philosophers, mathematicians and fans of science-fiction especially will get a lot from this game.


Gods Will Be Watching is everything the mainstream gaming market is not. It's audacious, creative, does not pander to fans. It springs from an artistic need to express and explore emotions not everyone wants to consider. GWBW is cruel, unforgiving, many times frustrating - it does not provide escapism, it does not massage the ego of the player through power-fantasies. Its demographics are small and it has angered a lot of people (just see other reviews for this game).

And because of this, it deserves the mountains of praise I am giving it. It's not what everyone needs or wants, GWBW is everything videogames need right now. Videogames as a whole are better off by having GWBW exist.

This is not a game.

This is a very, very, very shallow choose your own adventure book. With some pictures.

While I have no qualms with "playing" visual novels, or other game mediums where interactivity is minimal, those experiences at least make up with a very large amount of narration, music or other aesthetic devices. The Yawhg is not like those things. The Yawhg is closest to a board game, not a visual novel, but as a board game it offers no real interactivity. Your choices are reduced to spending time in a small amount of locations, for a small amount of turns. What you do can only affect others through accidental results, so there's no strategy involved. Your choices only affect a small slide of endings, which are a very small range from totally failing to fix a town, to... fixing a town completely.

After your second or third playthrough, you'll realize there's no game to speak of. You tally small amounts of arbitrary points and once you know which location benefits which points, you've figured out all there is to the game. Whether you repair the town or not depends entirely on the whims of individual players, as players can't affect the choices of others in any planned way. At the end, all those arbitrary stat points are "added" in an effective or ineffective way, and if the points cross a certain threshold, you get a specific ending.

And... that's it. Even tic-tac-toe or checkers offers more interactivity.

This is not a multiplayer game. The basic aspect of strategic reasoning is that the choices of others affect yours. This does not happen here, at least not on account of a player's agency. There is no reason to return to The Yawhg once you figure out how it works. And I believe even small children can figure that out in less than an hour.

Avoid this "game". It's not even worth playing it for free. It's a completely shallow experience. It's only grace is that it serves as a great example of something that -looks- like a game, but is not. In that, it's a great lesson in game design: what -not- to do.

Ossuary might be the most fun religious game I've ever played since the Shin Megami Tensei series. Ossuary is basically Bible Adventures but for Discordianism - and actually fun to play.

But what's Discordianism, you ask? Well, in the late 1960s, a small group of american counterculture theorists, magicians and writers decided to sketch out a parody of all religion - which turned out to be a completely valid religion in its own right. This religion has as its "main" texts several editions of The Principia Discordia. These editions laid out the contradictory, absurd, non-foundation for a religion that has somehow stuck in culture.

Discordianism, the world's first open source religion, is basically a collage of Zen Buddhism, western philosophy, parodies of ceremonial magic and a healthy dose of drugs. And you're one of its Popes.

Ossuary is a clever way to express the views of the Principia Discordia in game form. The world of Ossuary is an allegory of what is called the Aneristic Delusion and the Curse of Grayface: the current "fallen" state of humanity. It's a world where people take themselves too seriously with ridiculous results. What the Principia presents as metaphorical, Ossuary represents as literal. All of the factions in Ossuary come from the Principia Discordia. Your quest in this game is to collect Sins and share that corruption with others, hopefully helping them chill out a bit.

Ossuary is only very slightly a "game", it has minimal interaction. But it's an excellent way to immerse yourself in Discordianist thought. It's a way to interact with the tenets of a religion.

If you care for useless philosophical navel-gazing, enjoy paradoxes or are in any way attracted to any occult tradition, I strongly recommend Ossuary. If you're a serious person who wants serious action-packed games, you might want to skip this. Or better yet, open your pineal gland and try something outside your comfort zone.