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I’m not a huge fan of Shelter, but I adore Paws and have hundreds of hours in Meadow. I pretty much bought this game solely so I could have the elephant calf in Meadow, but I played it, and whined every minute of it (the whole 80 of them).

It’s pretty, but stale. Your herd doesn’t really matter. As far as I can tell, they complain when your food bar is low, so eat all the fruit yourself, and they’ll be happy. As others have mentioned, the ‘dangers’ are just something you wait out—like Frogger…only at an elephant’s pace. You can’t explore because walking is too irritating, and you’ll die if you leave the path of food. Though, I suppose you could just stand there grazing and survive, but, yeah. That’s fun.

Your reward for surviving starvation and boredom each chapter is watching the same slow cutscene over and over. The choices you’re given are which path to take, I assume because the designers knew that if we had to take every path, we'd fall asleep at the keyboard.

The only thing I enjoyed about this game, because I was feeling rebellious, was trampling forests, which I suppose is what elephants enjoy too. There are a handful of cute animations which, I suppose, are your main motivation, but ain’t nobody got time for that when you’re dying.

What I initially appreciated about the Shelter series was its focus on animal stewardship. Experiencing how animals survive, interact with their environment, and create a healthy food web is an excellent learning tool and animal ambassadorial program. However, I learned nothing about elephants here that Tarzan didn’t teach me. The other animals in the game were window dressing and nothing more. When I walked through a crash of gazelle-sized rhinos who didn’t mind my herd clipping through them, I knew that Might and Delight had no interest in ecology or education any longer. They hoped only to get at my feels once again, but no amount of heart-spamming was enough to save the predicable ending this time.

The music, however, was wonderful.

I'm sorry for this unpleasant review. I am happy with my elephant calf in Meadow.

This game answers that one important question: are you a leader or a follower or the goat that runs around screaming at mushrooms.

My first impression, like everyone else I imagine, was that Meadow is utterly pointless: I am a badger. What is my motivation? Oh, a flower!

But I soon found that I was giggling and gaffawing and bounding around through flowers like an idiot puppy fresh out of its crate. And after realizing that I had been playing the game for two hours and my cheeks were sore because I had not stopped grinning the entire time, I decided I should probably like this game.

By my third hour, I was talking to the other animals in a baby voice. That’s when I decided I should stop. But I didn’t.

I should mention that I played Shelter 2 (a singleplayer predecessor), and though it had a great deal more point to it, I still found it rather dull—sweet, yes—but monotonous. I’m not really one to run around pretending to be a mommy. Nor am I one to share pics of cuddly bunnies on Facebook. I enjoy blowing up aliens and slicing up griffins as much as the next gamer, and confess to a deep-seated fear of furries. And yet I found myself dancing pirouettes with a row of rabbits all the same—like long eared hippies high on catnip. And at least three times in one day I said the phrase, “so cute!!” which is just not something I say….ever. But you just try swimming alongside a hedgehog doing the backstroke who then looks over and grins at you and not say, “so cute!” –To yourself. Because you can’t actually talk. Just smile.

In simplest terms, Meadow can be described as a jolly game of follow the leader. I felt as though I should be whistling Peter and the Wolf in my procession of friendly fauna bounding pointlessly from one hill to the next. But you really do feel like an animal playing with everything you find, romping through the mud, and running familiar paths through the woods with your tribe for little reason more than the sheer joy you get from running through the woods.

My first friend was a lynx who led me through the moonlight to a secret lagoon and showed my imbecilic badger self how to open an obelisk. He fell asleep under a tree so I wandered the lakes by myself until a frog found me and taught me how to climb mountains. My froggie friend and I sang to stars until he left me too.

The following day I made a new bunny friend. Together we explored a crystal cave. We were happy bunnies. We played in the pools of amethyst. But there were no flowers: we were sad bunnies. After we left the cave, my bunny friend had to go. It was a tearful goodbye because we had no goodbye emote.

Soon an altruistic eagle discovered me, and he led me through the wilderness like a spirit guide, getting no reward for his effort aside from smiles and chirrups from my frenetic bunny self.

You can take part in a lazy jaunt through the woods (on American servers), or a tornadic gust of howling animals stretched across the plains (on the more gregarious European servers). But I have also seen groups as well organized as a parade of ants: a slow and confident leader with their lynx lieutenant at their side and one step behind, making sure everyone recognizes who the true leader is (it’s usually not the goat galloping and screaming up the mountain). Then there’s a loner pheasant out on recon, a traffic-directing fox dropping orange cones on the easiest path up the hill, and finally a mama bear taking up drag to make sure no bunny gets left behind. Then all the giggling from the tiny ones in between. The game seems designed for this, with food staging areas to keep the group together.

Along with accepting that there must always be a leader—and there can be only one—, this is a game about group dynamics, mood lifting, and language learning. At first I thought there just wouldn’t be much need for all those emoticons. But no. There is some kind of complicated hieroglyphic language that I really do recommend learning in the guides, because though it is possible to assume that every baby badger screaming “Food! Puzzles!” is an idiot, that’s profiling and it isn’t nice.

Niceness is ubiquitous, and kindness abounds in this gregarian society like I’ve never seen in any MMO: overwhelmingly happy love-everybody politeness. There’s even a player apology thread if bawling out your regrets for rudely eating a flower too soon doesn’t soothe your conscience. There are some social expectations you must learn quickly. You will suffer group shaming if you fail to wait for the bebehs, you monster. Incessant chirping, chuffing, and meowling will also get you muted—so meow responsibly please.

Though you will meet some naughty kittens, there is no place for trolls. A fearful billygoat gruff is not needed to defend his digital menagerie because they have already implemented the perfect defense: absolute boredom for anyone who comes with the intent to injure or harass the animals. To my knowledge, it’s just not possible. There are no words to insult anyone with. There is no health bar. You can’t steal flowers or trap cubs in corners. The ark reeks of so much cute and adorablness and happy hippie peace-loving fill-my-hair-with-flowers that the very best a troll could do is jump up and down to be annoying—which is what everyone does anyway—and everyone loves it and will just spam your screen with smiles regardless of what you do. The rudest animal I met was a deer that belched everywhere he went, and he couldn’t help it.

As any social experiment, it’s not without its drama however—and, as humans, our herd mentality is a bit deficient. Unintentional party splits happen within seconds, mostly over something shiny, but the drama trauma lasts about as long, generally ending in a poignantly spoken derp face. But it really doesn’t take long to become best friends with a frog named … and then you feel inseparable until your tearful goodbyes.

That’s not to say the game is entirely without annoyances either. With the occasional hyperactive lynx babies, demanding goats, cats in heat, distractible cubs, and overprotective mammas that keep screaming WAIT FOR THE BEBEHS! (but seriously, do), you’ll have ample opportunities to want to cull the herd.

This is a game for achievers. With (currently) 93 Steam achievements and a gabizillion skins to unlock, the only point in this game—other than socializing in a permanent setting of awkward silence—is to find stuff so that your socializing can be better dressed and better expressed.

There is apparently a healthy roleplay community in Meadow as well, and dedicated rp servers provided them, but I’ve never been brave enough to enter those groves because it sounds….complicated.

The music is fantastic, borrowing songs from the other Might and Delight games, meaning the soundtrack grows with every game you buy (along with new skins and emotes). The music is a mix of smooth jazz with a hint of Russian brooding. Perfect for treks through the woods….somehow. The art is unique and a bit disorienting, but it works, and it works by using very little ram, looking as simple as a paper diorama and yet strikingly beautiful all the same. You’re perfectly convinced you’re running through an autumn forest or a rainy desert or a snow field. The biomes themselves are lovely and varied and asking to be explored with little dens and trees to climb. And new content is still being added.

The character models and their personalities too are fantastic with jolly hedgehogs, cheeky foxes, sleepy bears, and wolves with enough moxie to make Aesop proud.

If you feel that bleats are enough to swear your enduring friendship and that a gallop across a foggy moor to howl at the moon is better than a night on the town, then you will be very welcome among the woodland creatures of Meadow.

I'd recommend this as a visual novel more than an action game. You do spend 90% of the game swimming laps around other ships and 9% of the game running through empty jungle (if you get the Jade expansion), but the 1% of the time you spend reading the story is amazing. Someone with a really bright imagination and love of sailing lore invested a lot of their talent into the short paragraphs of adventuring text. The rest of the game carries off the feel of a sailing adventure rather well, but turns tedious quickly due to repetitiveness, buggy movement, and unrefined programming. But if you find sailing laps while poisoning crews to be relaxing, it's an easy game to set aside and come back to when you need a little piracy refresher course.

Pros:
- excellent world crafting
- excellent writing
- good ambience
- fun music
- proper pirate adventure feel
- epic seamonsters
- excellent art
- runs on low-end computers

Cons:
- random deaths without proper warning
- tedium during battle
- rep-based quest grinding
- pointlessly grindy achievements
- deadly spawning oopses
- terrible melee mechanics
- quest progression requires waiting (a lot)
- faceless factions (cool back story, but dunno who's who)
- poor quest directions
- quest marker overload

Beginner Recommendations:
- always sail with the Order flag
- get your Poison Asp buff first
- get your Pirate rep to 100 first
- don't spawn in the middle of crab quests
- don't spawn in the middle of fort quests

We are the sum of our experiences. But what if you don’t remember them? Are we the sum of our memories, actions,…choices? Are we more than the sum of our parts? Abilities? Usefulness to society? In the mode of classic science fiction, Gemini Rue makes us question the two-fold nature of man and the role volition plays in who we are.

“Call Rekall for the memory of a lifetime.”

You’ll begin standing in a rainy, washed out street with the mood of something between Philip K. Dick and Philip Marlowe. The desaturated city, lacking the glamour we’ve come to expect from the future, feels more like an imploded waiting room for those destitute who missed their off-world opportunities in Anno 2220. But you’ll end up in a post-Heinlein space center with the dystopic feel of a 1980s psychological horror gone wrong. With amusing Easter eggs a ’plenty, the game is certainly aimed to appease veterans of the sci-fi genre. And yet the Orwellian world-crafting absolutely succeeds in creating its uncomfortable atmosphere of angst and mistrust without having to constantly reference invented historical events and incomprehensible technologies outside of our interest. You can research your environment only if you want to—though I found it interesting.

You chiefly play the character of an ex-assassin who’s done questionable things, though it took me a while to realize (or accept) that he really was an assassin-turned-cop. He looks more like a run-down PI wandering the refuse-ridden streets of some techno-noir New New York. And though the game tries hard to convince you of an ethnically homogenized city-scape with the oriental flare we’ve grown to anticipate—including a prominent role from Japanese organized crime—still, everyone looks and sounds…not Japanese.

"Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!"

The personalities surrounding you are interesting if a little emotionally stunted. But it suits the situation as everyone waits their turn to go to the Island, so to speak. Baldur, who feels like he escaped from the cuckoo’s nest, was by far my favorite.

The dialogue itself feels a bit canned and the actors can’t quite pull it off (and the cheap mics don’t help). They do alright, but it ends up sounding like an old, cheesy radio drama—which actually gives it a genuine preachy sci-fi feel in the end. But this is a story about a concept rather than characters—though the shifty characters play their parts well enough.

What sets this apart and bring us back to the classic days of science fiction is the story’s exploration of humanness overshadowed by the oppression of the state. Is memory and identity solely guided by access consciousness, and therefore made vulnerable to the machinations of the powerful? And can you truly rehabilitate the soul?

It does get a bit verbose at the end as it slips into some Asimov moralizing. I did have a, "yah, I don’t care what you have to say, just die" reaction to the final monologue—which was the right reaction, apparently.

“It seems you feel our work is not a benefit to the public.”

I have somewhat mixed feelings about the art. It’s good to note that the art’s important because they chose it for the purpose of slipping us back into an older era. While I like the washed out, trash-heap-of-life mood that it presents, sometimes the art just looks muddy and lazy. The backdrops don’t have the crisp, high contrast, drawn-one-click-at-a-time love of traditional pixel art, but are more like what would happen if you were to throw all the pixels into a wet dumpster and let them sit for a few millennia. It kind of looks like someone took a nice picture, rendered it into a pixelator, and didn’t bother with the color count. It’s got jaggies and mushy edges and blurry beams of anti-aliasing. But I suppose it gives it that run-down, nobody really cares look. The character art however is certainly done by hand, and looks nice. No comments on the creepy Steam art or why they didn’t just use art from the game.

Side note: a shaking screen does not improve the drama—it just motivates me to end the scene sooner before I throw up. Just saying.

But after all that criticism, I have to say that I loved the setting and the mood-dampening colors of the backdrops. The vision for them is classy and engaging and absolutely reminiscent of angles from classic space operas. The ship details especially made me feel at home.


The soundtrack by Nathan Allen Pinard was perfect for this story. I instantly knew the time, location, and mood of the entire game within just the opening sequence. I do wish it wasn’t quite so midi-esque; I would love to hear this with a real orchestra. But the bluesy synthesized feel is a deeply felt homage to Vangelis with some sounds taken straight from Blade Runner. Sayuri’s theme also harkens back to River’s themes in Firefly: moving, simple, and beautiful. It really was the music that set the melancholy space-trance mood better than any other part of the game, and I will definitely be listening to it outside the game.


Kick stuff. Kick everything. This is not the only gaming habit you’ll have to recondition. Your walking expectations will need to devolve as well. With my low FPS system, doors are a familiar bane to me—but I didn’t expect them to be such an obstacle in a point and click adventure. The unnecessary over-clicking was a perpetual irritant for me. Your character really cannot move for himself. But you can skip walking animations—thank goodness. Until they take it away from you.

“You know the first rule of combat? Shoot them before they shoot you.”

Combat is plain irritating—with unresponsive and obnoxious hotkeys—but not necessarily challenging. I never quite figured out the timing, but random clicking seemed to work too, even on ‘hard’. With autosaves, however, there’s no real threat.

The inventory is confusing at best. Several times I thought I had exhausted my clicking options, but no. You must click that a different way. But the UI is traditional and clear.

The puzzles are a bit repetitive, but mostly a fit the right object to the right thing experience. They are familiar, but also a bit more practical than we’ve grown used to. And if you ever get really frustrated, remember that shooting stuff is a perfectly viable option.

“We're police officers! We're not trained to handle this kind of violence!”

This story really could have excelled in a 3D environment, and I absolutely believe it deserved that kind of funding. But as it is, the art relays the proper atmosphere and helps take us back into the past so we can experience the future the way we used to….

If you are one of those confused-by-emotions sort of people who care more about the story than the drama, and would enjoy a short (about nine hour) pulp science fiction on people-uses, I highly recommend this psychological exploration to all space cowboys and neo-noire detectives.

They say there are no survivors in war. The people that experience war, soldiers or otherwise, never fully heal and certainly will never be who they once were. I kind of feel that this game is trying to prove just that to us.

This War of Mine aims to show that war is not kind, but the men who choose wars are not the only victims. This is not the glorified experience of a super soldier wielding more guns than the average man can carry. It’s the plight and suffering of the common man who is a victim of circumstances entirely outside of your control. You are not meant to enjoy this game or in any way feel that you have the tools to succeed. But it will certainly push you to try nevertheless—obsessively so—likely because it is so terribly difficult and depressing when you inevitably die…slowly, one day at a time. And remember, this was created by the company whose reasoning goes, “Not sad enough? Let’s add children. Let’s add children with PTSD.”

My first experience, years ago, ended with Bruno crying on the ground. Katia was too wounded to get out of bed, Pavle had been killed trying to get us food, and now all Bruno had to do was boil some water so we could finally eat. But he was too broken to get up anymore. He sat there, weeping, until he froze to death on the ground.

That’s kind of how I felt.

At least we do have second chances in this game. There’s no reloads or retries while the game is still going—unless you’re quick on the ol’ alt+F4. But you can start over. So people saying that this game is exactly like war are not entirely honest. You still get to sit in your comfy chair when winter comes. But you’ll get pretty close to understanding just how soul-wounding it is to be an unwilling tenant of ‘conflict areas.’


You can pretty much assume you’re going to fail your first scenario. Not just because the game is hard—but because it’s hard due to the fact that you have no idea what you’re doing. The game doesn’t really have an assist for this (despite the clear and elegant interface). Protection against predators is important—but how? You figure these things out through failure. And then through the Wiki. Eventually you will learn the things you should know: who runs like a pregnant yak, what’s a teddy for, where do I find an axe, when do I take the medicine, why would I give food to starving children when I am starving myself, how many people do I leave to guard, and just how essential is a chair? Don’t axe the chair.

This becomes a lesson of priorities. Namely, don’t die. Don’t charge people with your fists. Remember you basic needs: shelter, water, food—and about in that order—closely followed by anti-depressants, which in this case means cigarettes and booze. Also, take notes. You’ll be sad when you can’t remember where you left that stack of components because your bags were too full of wood and they didn’t seem needful at the time.

But even after mastering the mysteries, there’s still plenty of challenges to keep veterans occupied, for instance: Marko Solo runs, and ending on a ‘content’ note rather than just alive-but-not-quite-standing.


One criticism is that this is not a fast game. You move at the pace of a sickly, wounded, sufferer of depression. And yet, I’ll still get sweaty palms when creeping around a neighbor’s house—slowly—wondering if I’ll get a shotgun to the face. This is the only game where I’m afraid of rats because you just don’t know if they’re rats. It’s also the only game where I’m afraid of parishioners and homeless people. Tension and dismay abound with only brief respite when you have too few materials to do anything but sit and play a melancholy guitar as you starve. But watching your characters sleep for five hours somehow seems to build anxiety when you know you have yet to barricade the windows before the raiders return, and they are coming tonight. But there’s no fast-forward either; just slow, stifling, patience as you’re bleeding out.

A second criticism is how easy it is to die a death of panicked clicking. For example, 'I had a gun, so why did I run up and try to punch this guy’s face to death? Err…to my death.' Yes, learning to kill appropriately (and quietly) is definitely a basic need. And yes, going on a murderous rampage through the neighborhood is the easiest path to victory (so long as you’re equipped with a couple sociopaths), and yet it is not the optimal route, as Zleta will tell you. But I do recommend YouTubing the proper use of crowbars nevertheless.

Crafting also seems a little off to me, being difficult to make a profit off hard work—but then, that’s probably intentional.


There isn’t much in the way of story other than: you’re in a war-zone. But there is plenty of mood and ambience to convince you of this despair from the gloomy, ashy colors to the skyline on fire. It’s a modern setting but often feels like a black and white docudrama directed by Spielberg; it’s hard to believe that people do actually live like this.

The characters however are believable: ugly, troubled, but realistic with mundane backstories. I never feel particularly happy with them, or that I relate well to them. I have no special hero. They’re just people. There’s a slight disconnect, though I’m not sure if that was intentional—perhaps because of the multi-character managing view, or because there’s a kind of emotional self-preservational sense of detachment, the way you’d feel about someone else’s diseased and discarded puppy that you’re pretty sure is going to die.

But, beyond the war-zone, there is a deep realism that’s more than “if I don’t have enough kindling, I can’t make clean water.” It’s “if I don’t stash the booze, Roman might get drunk and start beating up his housemates.” I think it is that attention to the details and ultra-realism that makes hacking a person to death with a hatchet absolutely hair-raising. Especially since they were probably your neighbor. Especially since you’re probably killing them over a can of corned beef. It’s brutal.

After four years of surviving this war, I was equipped with Roman, the one man army, who had pretty much single handedly brought the war to a close and cleaned the streets. His entire household was warm and content, thanks to him, thriving in cigarette-rolled capitalism. It was going to be my first perfect run. One night Roman went snooping in what I thought was an innocent household. He wasn’t going to steal anything—didn’t need it. He tried to sneak past a sleeping woman, but she woke up and came at him with a knife. The door to escape was barred. He had a weapon; he could have easily killed her. But she was just a civilian. He tried to punch her to frighten her off, but she stabbed him in the ribs. Roman never saw the end of the war that came two days later.

It’s a good game if you’re depressed—or if you want to be depressed—or just be grateful for things like…tomatoes. If you want a game with a challenge, I recommend it. But more philosophically, if you don’t want to forget what kind of world you really live in, this one will make you grateful, but also horrified that charities like War Child are still needed today.

The Last Broadcast DLC brings to life a victim of war—truth—and what we used to think was a motif used only in black and white war films and far away, despotic kingdoms. But propaganda, censorship of the facts, and painting a story in the color of our party seem to have become contemporary fears. The Last Broadcast is bold enough to ask us what exactly the value of truth is, how many lives is it worth, and does desperation justify its slow death.

In the base game, you’re more worried about self-preservation and the lives of one over another rather than the far-reaching consequences presented in this route. But you’ll still be struggling for that one carrot and enough water to boil it in. Luckily, you’ll get to bypass some of those basic needs in favor of the story. It’s nice getting to start off with some goods and essentials, so there’s no immediate sense of urgency over things like a heater. Even so, it takes about one minute to realize that you’re screwed. We’re still playing the same game, after all, and the writers just wanted to remind you that they’re not here to make it easy on you, emotionally or otherwise.

But the focus is less about surviving and more about finding reasons to go out and endanger yourself beyond just gathering food. It’s now become your emotional livelihood. So don’t for a moment believe that your feels can be stashed away safely for when the raiders come. In fact, you don’t even get an option to board up in this game. So don’t worry; you’re screwed. You also don’t get a radio to keep you happy. You’re responsible for your own happiness now—and that of the whole city. No pressure. Even so, in retrospect, this scenario seemed a little easier than the base game, despite the handicap.

I felt far more connected to the characters in this household than in Father’s Promise—though I think the disconnect in the first was intentional. Despite the side-scrolling view, you do latch on to one particular character in this scenario, and make decisions chiefly from their point of view. It lacks the group dynamic of the base game, but allows for a deeper investment in one character’s feelings and gives more of a Rear Window viewpoint rather than the estranging party management we’re used to. You also have quite a bit more control over the ending than in either the base game or the previous DLC with several different endings available.

The two chief characters are a bit more traditional to storytelling than in the previous versions, but allow for better story being so. Malik is a bit one-dimensional, summed up by one word: obstinate. It’s impossible to make him happy unless you do what he wants—and if he doesn’t get what he wants right now, he whines like a pouty baby. And when you’re running around doing everything to make him happy and keep him safe and fed, it’s kind of hard to like him. He’s easy to relate to, but hard to like, even though you’re supposed to admire and respect him. This is a game mechanic, as depression management is your chief gauge of progress, but unfortunately I think it hurts the story. Esma, however, is wholly likable and relatable. She is one tough mamma, and I’m pretty sure she could take on the whole army with a pick-axe if she wanted to. Her moral dilemmas and relationship with characters are what feed the story, and I think it is beautifully and simply done in a way that’s very natural to relate to and feel responsible for. The characters also talk to each other more, and since they have a pre-determined relationship, they feel far more fleshed-out and realistically connected than is possible in the base game—which then of course leads to the highly emotional denouement of their story.

Your new house is lovey, warm (visually), and interesting. It is also huge, so it’s very slow moving about it in ways that are both tedious and restricting. As always, the game requires some patience and acceptance of disappointments. The new environments however are all visually engaging and less generic than in the base game. They look quite a bit less like a dollhouse and more like a carefully crafted environment with gripping atmosphere and mood. Unfortunately, they nor the characters transfer to the base game. In fact, there is nothing added to the base game, so if you are hoping for new content beyond the story, you will be disappointed.

The story ups the ante a bit since you are no longer responsible for a single household, but now you have all of Pogoren depending on you. And rather than a sick child clinging to your leg, you now have to nurture, shelter, and feed something as fragile as truth in a world at your throat. Unlike the base game where every character is a nobody, this story requires champions of uncommon bravery to advance it to the best ending, creating something of a predictable conclusion but predictable in the spirit of a 1940’s war-noir sort of way. We know the ending, but I was still satisfied with the poetics of it: not quite as hopeless, not quite as depressing as the first, but certainly more disturbing.

True to the mission of This War of Mine, this is a conscience-driven drama. But I did notice in the achievements that less than “0%” of the community has gotten the “bad” route, which isn’t surprising since, unlike in the base game where self-preservation is a legitimate decision, you do get a bit of a slap on the wrist if you decide to look out for yourself in this story.

It took me 32 days to complete my first run which could have gone faster, but I wandered around needlessly looking for a certain component (it helps to pay attention). My second run was 22 days, so you can progress quite quickly, but you cannot skip through dialogue and cutscenes, so replayability is low.

I appreciate the disheartening but potent message that This War of Mine provides. I think they have taken it a step farther in The Last Broadcast so that it feels a little didactic, but it absolutely succeeds in helping the audience understand and feel the life-and-death dilemma that those responsible for broadcasting the news in war must face. I believe it does a beautiful job of championing the people that risk their lives to defend justice—without superpowers or swords—in a believable setting because it is real and it is current. It certainly made me ask, if we truly believe we are obstinate enough to defend the truth when lives are the cost, how does one justify burying the truth or fabricating facts when something as trivial as political pride is at stake? We quickly reproach soldiers and regimes that are without accountability; so how do we so easily forgive news without accountability when it runs rampant in our modern media?

I coveted this game for a single reason: the shiny background in the Steam Marketplace. Behold the shiny background:

Pirate Cove

Unfortunately, when actually run up the old profile it is, alas, disappointing. So, let’s review the actual game.

At first I was enthusiastic about this voyage into the blue. I remembered liking Microsoft Solitaire…when I was ten…until I graduated to Freecell. And now, finding I need a reprieve from the doldrums of the empty multiplayer of the highly addictive (and highly recommended) KoiKoi, I thought it would be a worthwhile investment for a shiny new background. Plus pirates.

Immediately I was drawn in by the brightwork: the art being vibrant and thematic and gorgeous. The menu is trim and runs handsomely even on my dilapidated system. A smooth and easy tutorial helped me get my bearings on this new version of Solitaire. And then I was presented with my very own pirate ship.

If you’re a hoarder like all good games have trained you to be, this will be the deciding factor. Once you’re on the account, you get a ship and a pirate kingdom to build and expand. Each upgrade also gives you a perk that makes liberating gold a little easier—for more upgrades—for more gold—for more upgrades. It also helps with the occasional chance and timing minigames.

You can then sail your little ship around the map, accompanied by journal entries that recount your personal odyssey, including sirens and cyclopes and old hermits—it sounds like the wrong genre but it really does include just about every pirate cliché you can fathom, along with a few infamous pirates of history that you easily best with your inherent awesomeness. It’s rather more of a Captain’s Courageous than a Captain Bligh tale, and my enthusiasm for the paragraph-long shore-leave from card-flipping was quickly dowsed by the juvenile presentation. This is unfortunate since I found it to be one of the only motivations for continuing to play.

For you Solitaire shellbacks, you no doubt already know the ropes. But if you’re barely an able seaman, it will take barely a minute to learn. The game is a TriPeaks variation of Solitaire with a motley mess of cards placed in whatever direction they so please (not a standard deck). Claiming cards requires a bit of tacking and jibing to reach a longer run for scoring combos—this is necessary if you actually want a worthy bounty—but there’s no penalty for failure.

However, amongst the mermaids and monkeys you will be given obstacles to overcome that prevent such runs. While it might initially seem like a sea-worthy challenge, this is actually an impediment to intelligent playing. The only part of the game that requires any savvy is planning ahead for your next move—when there are options. However, when two columns are blocked off by a sandbar, and another cluster is boarded off by planks, you are left with very few options and sit there instead plinking off, one card at a time, whatever happens to turn up in your deck. There have been occasions when I had only two open columns provided, which, if you do the math, adds up to tedium. And though you can purchase upgrades to see beyond the top card in the column, the number is often obscured, and the number of cards in the pile is often obscured, so again, there is no opportunity for true strategy. Random acts of chance also remove or add half of the gold and much-coveted cannonballs (wildcards) that you have accrued. And with no way to bail out of a game when your luck runs rotten, this quickly becomes dull and frustrating for anybody desiring something of a challenge more than find-the-next-number. But, if you are ten, or if you just want to idly pass time without using your brain-pan, maybe that is enough.

One thing I can say is that it is a very calming game. It includes some lovely background ambience with waves and birds and creaking timbers—none of that violent pirate stuff. I turned the ambience (♫) up and the annoying systems sounds (🔈) off and was able to enjoy some very relaxing shipboard downtime (bringing along ASMR Captain Jamro for added enjoyability). However, I really missed the soothing sorting of classic Klondike Solitaire. In this version, your cards just sink into the depths of the discard pile; there’s no stash of triumph for the cards to come gleefully spilling down from.

I have not been able to finish the game, but at fourteen hours I have completed fifteen stages, which I reason to be about halfway through. I have no interest in playing longer than this so I cannot tell if you if the story improves.

While I was initially quite impressed with the surface features of the game, with time my interest was replaced with frustration and boredom. There simply is not enough challenge to the game—which might make it attractive to, perhaps, children, along with the colorful art and easy-to-read story. But I can’t imagine it holding their attention for very long either. A young pirate enthusiast would be far more entertained and learn far more practical buccaneer basics from a game like Sid Meier’s Pirates. For those who would prefer a little more exercise for their brains and enjoy hunting for cutthroat opponents, I invite you to join me in KoiKoi Japan as an alternative. Unfortunately the only people I can recommend this game to are those diehard Solitaire collectors who merely play the game to turn off the brain.

”Welcome to Arcadia Bay, where the choices are made up and the points don’t matter.”

What if? What if you could rewind and go back in time to your High School years to re-experience the awkward moments, cliques, doomed friendships, and boring lectures with all the horror of Pretty in Pink? Yeah, not me. I visit it enough in my nightmares. That’s why, for years, I’ve avoided this game like I avoided my math teacher during a month of late homework. But after reading yet another emotional review in a parade of overwhelmingly positive (and slightly creepy) reviews, I figured I had better give it a chance—especially since it actually runs on my defunct computer. So, here I am, the late-blooming poseur, adding one more to the pile.

But to those of you who, like me, have no interest in watching a socially awkward High School romance or in looking back regretfully on friendships that died the moment of your years-old graduation, I’d like to offer some hope. Life is Strange has all the mood, drama, and atmosphere of a Telltale Game. With consequences-no-matter-what moral dilemmas, suspense, backstabbing, party-building tactics, group survival skills, crowbars, corpses, and conversations with random drunk people you run into on the street, this isn’t really a story about a quiet school in some quaint but forgotten all-American town. This is in fact a prequel to the Walking Dead--where all the zombies have been replaced by stoned High Schoolers. Good luck representative kindly but chubby minority kid, you’ll be the first to be thrown under the bus. Welcome to the end of your senior year.

”You’re my best friend, but if the High Schoolers are after us, I’m tripping you.”

Most people talk about how peaceful and emotional this journey through life lessons is. I never really felt that way. Maybe the antisocial shot of adrenaline from walking down a crowded High School hall ruined it for me. But the story certainly makes a bully effort to beat your emotional self-control to a pulp…and is successful. Perhaps because it starts off so sentimentally sweet in the amber hues of nostalgia, smelling slightly of fresh three-ring binders and pot. But then it stuffs you into a locker full of guns, paranoia, and cyberbullying. With a few hair-raising moments of sordid creepiness, dark and mature revelations, and the unending task of walking back and forth to get people to stop arguing, the writers have done an excellent job of manipulating our impressions of the world—only using shock factor rather than jump scares. But on the whole, it’s not all that new or unpredictable a story, given the genres. They’ve simply done it well, with plenty of mystery, questions, and suspense. I particularly appreciated the themes, foreshadowing, and motifs laced throughout that made me feel safer in knowing that the writers knew what they were doing and had a plan—which can be iffy in episodic adventures like this.

The voice acting is excellent, with the slurred speech of teens carried off very convincingly. But I admit that my first reaction was definitely, ‘do High Schoolers really talk like this?” I kind of feel like they were trying too hard—but then I guess High Schoolers are the definition of trying too hard, so I guess it works. The main character is well written and likeable, generic enough to be relatable and customizable, but interesting enough to be memorable even in her undeveloped sense of identity. She’s observant for a reason and your snoopiness is well-explained. The entire cast brings a lot of life to the story with telling gestures and attention to clothing, painting a candid portrait of High School archetypes, but in a way that you can enjoy their depth through simple vignettes. Chloe and Warren are especially vivacious and enjoyable to interact with.

The camera motif is an ingenious addition to both the story and presentation of the art, and to me the best aspect of this game. Every scene and landscape looks as though you are viewing it through a lens, and it forces you as the player to view the story and characters differently and take the time to enjoy the photomontage to a sleepy, but grimy, town in the country. And the game gives you ample time to relax and enjoy the familiar hyperrealism of the environment, from flies over the recycle bin to blackbird murmerations over the neighborhood. I think it’s a poignant testimony that you don’t need high quality graphics to produce high quality art. In addition, the hipster music is perfectly suited to the atmosphere and mood, peaceful with just a tinge of regret and hope.

It took me about 16 hours to complete the game (but I didn’t bother with achievements). I never used a walkthrough, so anyone as intelligent as the average High Schooler should have no problem—just pay attention. They’re simple stealth and physics puzzles with a couple find-the-matching-data sessions. These just aren’t the focus since the game is more of a walking novel using fetch quests as an excuse to venture through the detailed environments. But I imagine you could use a walkthrough if you want to get the achievements the first time through since there are a lot of hidden elements.

I’m afraid that I have to make an aside to mention how much I disliked the final chapter and its predictable ending where, it seems, both the programmers and writers went on strike (or something). From the unrealistic, soul-dumping dialogue to the dead-eyed “We’re too lazy to animate anymore,” it seemed oddly terrible. Even the story, which had up until then been horrifically believable, suddenly seemed so over-dramatized, unconvincing, and long-winded that I gave up on caring, and my emotional investment dried up.

The game is very obviously aimed at teens, the chief characters being eighteen, but the content is pretty rough and mature with violence, drugs, and sexual themes. It has more language than HBO. And while you won’t find anything more explicit than the typical graffiti scrawled into a H.S. boy’s bathroom, sexual scenes and images are implied.

While I am recommending this game for its story and art, that comes with a caveat: I do not recommend this game to my Christian friends. Aside from the pervasive language, the story itself is not friendly to Christians. It makes a point of being offensive, which should not be surprising given that its liberal agenda is overt, but is surprising considering the equally overt moral message it is trying to give.

“and the moral of the story, children, is….”

Life is Strange won the Games for Change award for 2016. That should tell you that this game began with a mission, and I think they picked a beautifully creative medium to present several important messages that students should be made aware of. However, I think this moral dilemma drama could have had a bigger impact if it had been given a more oblique presentation. The final chapters especially lost a lot of the engagement of the story because they were too busy campaigning, and the important warnings, the things that haunt the dreams of teachers and parents, that should have been treated a little more respectfully, got swamped in surrealism and far-fetched dramatics. There are people who do these terrible things without the excuse of being insane or special—that is the real horror. I wish the writers had done a better job of presenting that difficult balance between paranoia and passivity.

Despite the flaws however, I cannot deny that this is a beautifully crafted story with dynamic characters and a poignant, but disturbing, portrayal of the loss of youth and the importance of claiming responsibility for your future. But, unfortunately, no zombies.

The Shadowrun mythos is an edgy, magic-infused cyberpunk dystopia that stepped off the neo-noir streets of Seattle this run into the fluorescent, neon light of a noodle shop. Of all the Shadowrun games, I think Hong Kong inundates you the most thoroughly in mood and environment. It’s like walking onto the set of Bladerunner with all its mixed-ethnic, cultural richness and rain-coat dripping, depressive atmosphere; the setting is both gorgeous and miserable.

I avoided Shadowrun for a long time because I’m just no fan of isometric games. They take away what is, for me, the most important feature of storyline gaming: that first-person point of view escapism. A top-down, god’s view of the world is a big wall when I want to feel immersed in an environment and persona. But the Shadowrun cult-following has been so widely celebrated, I overlooked that when I bought and binge-played this trilogy. And I’m so glad I did.

The ungainly view and archaic graphics didn’t get in the way at all though: the background sounds and un-finished sense of the environment actually helped my imagination fill in the blanks into a far more lurid picture. With that and one of the best game soundtracks I have ever heard (that I routinely listen to when I feel like being depressed) by Jon Everist (Dragonfall, Battletech, Necropolis), I had no problem feeling like I had personally stepped into the neo-futurism glow of the triad underground.

The cyber-engineered story is a dim sum cart of mythology, occultism, low fantasy, and Chinese tales of horror, but still consisting of darkly relevant themes of socio-economic dilemmas that somehow pull everything together and make it feel real in the portentous medium of science fiction.

Though definitely heavy on the language and rather more mature themes, Hong Kong is likely the least gritty of the Shadowrun stories—but still one of the most mood deflating, full of slums and gangs and wageslaves. I still have painted vividly in my mind standing in the rain with one of the merchants being thoroughly depressed when he showed me his true face. Whether it was actually raining or not, I can’t say. Still it does seem a tad more optimistic than the spiraling-the-drain denouement of the others. And you can generally go to sleep at night not believing you accidently murdered a civilization and might have caused the end of humanity. (Mind you, I consider all these things to be positives.)

I felt throughout that the story kept up a quiet sense of urgency and impending doom living in the gutter and on the run with plenty of “we’re all gonna die” surprises. And yet, the narrative itself often became an impediment to the pacing. Since none of the characters are voiced, and much of the game is strict exposition, it often felt more like a visual novel than a turn-based game. And long. Very, very long.

If you like the emersion of reading the details and crafting the world through your imagination, then great! Some of the best emersion is in the reading, especially in the Shadowlands. Everybody’s got a story—and I do mean everybody. Even if you meet someone just once, and they have absolutely no more purpose than to be street decor, they’ll volunteer their backstory like an overeager GM that doesn’t know when to shut down their imagination. But the stories are engaging and the storytellers are all complicated and multi-layered characters that feel rough and well-traveled. I wish some bigger name games had companion characters with as much character as NPC#48. The most boring character in the game is, unfortunately, you—the not so important face in the throng of destitutes with whom you do actually need to talk to for the skill points, companion bonuses, and (almost) ideal ending.

Your fellow rats in the mostly-not-sinking ship don’t create quite the same sense of comradery as the companions in the previous games—more a motley crew of socially battered rejects. But it certainly adds to the mood and frustration of the story. Get used to being contradicted and condescended to. The characters are a tad more complicated, capricious, and hard to get along with. It took me a long time to feel wanted by my own team—which is nice in that you really have to work for it, but frustrating too since they didn’t all immediately worship me as team-members typically do in the gaming world. I particularly enjoyed teasing Duncan and Gobbet, but Is0bel was less pleasant, and I really didn’t look forward to having yet another long conversation with her. The other NPCs, especially Kindly Cheng, are fantastic and full of life. However, I can see how the characters are really a personal preference thing. Some people (men) may really dislike Duncan, for example. Others, like me, may find the resident sociopath a tad uncomfortable. And, sorry, but there’s no compulsory hot chick for the guys to ogle.

The blocky polygons of the character models are, in general, unpleasant to look at; the human female for instance is bulkier than in vanilla WoW. And the stiff-legged deckers really belong in the arcade-era. Their costumes too were unflattering at best and their wardrobe extremely limited. However, the 2D character portraits are fantastic and vibrant with a look of gritty unrealism. Don’t expect to be playing a beauty (though there are a few), but bonus tip, it’s super easy to import a personalized pic into the files.

I started as a chi street samurai, which I do not recommend unless you feel confident in your understanding of the game’s mechanics. I had a rather rough start of it, though by the end things were far easier. There is plenty of room to play whatever you want though; you do not have to play a decker—in fact I don’t really recommend it. But on the whole, the challenge was far less than Dragonfall.

The combat of turn based games like these has always been slow and tedious for me—and this is no different. The time-wasting minigames in the matrix break the pace of combat even further. But the conversational workarounds and mechanics of the story kept me more than engaged and looking forward to the next step.

The biggest issue is the bugs. The order of events often break, and it requires reloading and reading “help me I’m stuck” requests in the Steam discussions—and there are a lot of those. Luckily there are also a lot of helpful people. The UI is also irritating and boggy. When you can’t figure out how to change your clothes or equip your decker with already-purchased skills, there’s a definite problem. And not being able to compare your equipped items with what you’re thinking to buy is an absolutely terrible decision. Then there’s the crashing saves, ticklish hotspots, disinclined side-scrolling, AI running in circles, and blacked out textures that won’t load without a reboot. It’s a programming mess.

And yet, the bad ratings Hong Kong’s received are, I think, mostly from disappointed Shadowrun fans who expected a little more than what we were given by the programmers, and who are a bit spoiled by the likewise fantastic Dragonfall. On the whole though, I absolutely believe this to be an excellent game and the one I keep returning to in the Shadowrun series, loaded with MSG flavor—so much bad, but tasting oh so good.

I would call this less of a story and more of a virtual walking tour of Matsue (a real city) in Japan. I wouldn’t particularly have minded this (I’m all for discovering culture and am particularly fond of Japan’s), but it would have been nice if it had been advertised as such. Instead, I felt like I was getting spammed with food and travel advertisements through a thinly veiled excuse of a good story.

It’s also advertised as “an intense murder mystery!” – Eh, not really. In fact, intense is the last word I would use to describe this story. Quaint, peaceful, a tad dull…but not intense. In the beginning, I was quite enthusiastic about the game. The story’s premise is traditional and classy, I got to pretend to eat a lot of interesting food and see some very accurate scenes of modern Japanese life, and, best of all, the music has this nostalgic feel to it that reminded me of the charm of the first Syberia game. But after wandering around a bit at a tourist’s pace and then getting slapped in the face with casino-esque minigames and the typically loud silliness of a Japanese variety show, the atmosphere got a little confusing.

In fact, just about everything the game’s advertised to have I would disagree with. For example:

Hmm, pleasant, relaxing, detailed, but not exactly stunning. The character models have lots of personality and aren’t all bishies though, which is a welcome change. When I first saw this on Steam, I thought it looked like yet another rushed, indie VN. But the quality is much better than the picture previews relay, with a professional interface, realistic backgrounds, and even animation.
Max Mode is a minigame you play during interrogations, which to me feels completely random. You have to guess the most manipulative phrase in order to break your victim. Perhaps it’s the translation, but most of these are indistinguishable. But don’t worry. There’s no consequence for being wrong. What these elements have increased from, I’m not sure.
This just means that there’s the occasional hidden object game. You have a “check” ability that allows you to look at things in the scene, which is 95% a waste of time (e.g. “it’s a stone wall.” “There’s a poster but it has nothing to do with you.”). The game will prompt you when you actually need to find something—and finding something before being prompted doesn’t register.
Well, sure, you can. But you’ll be stuck standing there talking to yourself if you don’t go exactly where you are told to. I never felt a sense that I was free to go where I wanted to (or where it made the most sense), but was rather led about by the nose. And that is fine because we do want the game to progress quickly. But there are times when the game forces you to go to one place—but the person you are looking for is not there. Then it forces you to go somewhere else looking for them—but they aren’t there either. At that point, it really does feel like the railroad god is just wasting your time.
More like one choice and we’ll tell you what it is ahead of time. You also have a “think” option which the game tells you is for scenarios where you feel stuck. That’s not true. Even if you have the ability to think for yourself, this will not do. If you choose an inventory item or question (even at the right moment) it will not count unless you first “think” about it and wait for the game to tell you what to do. In other words, you get punished for thinking for yourself. There is absolutely zero challenge to this game.
Actually, I do agree with this—well, at least the main theme is in fact fantastic. Other songs could more realistically be called abrasive.

The main character does have personality, which is a positive. The negative, however, is his personality. He’s hard to relate to: rude, brutish, manipulative, immature, and yet strangely fond of the word “cute.” The characters you are searching for are a tad more likable. But there are a handful of side characters (like gramps and Tomoko) that are considerably more lively, and yet I didn’t feel particularly attached to anyone. Maybe Monkey. Everything is fully voiced, which is nice (except for the bonus Gallery side-quests), but I wasn’t particularly impressed by any of the actors.

All of the lead characters are in their thirties, and their art and stories are a little more realistic than the typical VN, so I’m guessing the target audience is college students or bored high schoolers wondering what to do with their gap year (visit Shimane!). The events are likely to feel a little immature for anyone older than that, but perhaps nostalgic.

The story itself was clearly written to be nothing more than a billboard for travel information (which, again, is a great tourism scheme if your audience actually wants to learn about Shimane Prefecture). Even so, it’s a good story—just a little thin—like reading a serial in a magazine packed abruptly between bloated advertisements. The translation is stiff, but clear and understandable.

There are different routes that change the ending quite a bit, each choosing a different flavor of traditional Japanese drama. These routes are determined by your choice of reply in letters (choosing the first reply option the most frequently will get you to the first route; choosing the second will get you the second route, etc.). You can also skip chapters through the phone’s menu to quickly advance other routes later. It took me about seven hours to complete my first route. I quickly lost interest after that—or before that, actually.

Ultimately, I don’t feel that √Letter really deserves a negative rating, but then I wouldn’t really recommend it to anyone either. On a scale of 1 to 10, I’d give it a meh. It’s probably worth the current price on Steam, but I’m not sure it’s worth the time to play. I found it simply too tedious to hold my attention longer than a couple hours.

If you want to learn Japanese culture, then this is far more interesting than Go! Go! Nippon, and I can definitely recommend it as an Explorer’s Guild resource. But if what attracted you was the promise of a serene environment and charming plot, then I’d suggest playing Syberia instead. Or, if it’s an intriguing anime murder mystery with mini-game bombardments that enticed you, then definitely play Danganranpa instead.