Ostatnie recenzje napisane przez użytkownika Sigmar's Sausage

This game is an excellent example of how indie games, while far from perfect, don’t have to change their vision for a publisher. This is a one man job and if you can overlook some of the gameplay mechanics, what you have here is a solid adult-themed horror game. Pinhead would give it a torn soul out of 10.

+ “This isn't for your eyes!” There are some great jumpscares (which are rare thankfully) and some really freaky body horror moments in the game. I felt like the developer really gave it everything he had to bring us some proper NSFW content rather than just some cheap scares and gore.

+ Old School. I honestly enjoyed the 80s style horror story and Point and Click inventory puzzle gaming.

+ music. The developer also did all the music and it’s honestly pretty good.

+ price. I got it on sale for about 5 bucks and I think that’s a decent asking price.

+ left me wanting more. I really need to see how the story fits together. I am awaiting the sequel or next installment of the game.

- It has already been mentioned so many times in every review but it is a big problem. Pixel Hunting. Finding the items you need or the places you need to use them is practically impossible unless this is the only game you own and you are going to spend 400 hours mousing over every part of the screen. But in all honesty, I didn’t feel bad when I had to use a guide because the story enticed me so much that I just wanted to see what happened next. Seriously, just use a guide the minute you get stuck. Save yourself the frustration. Even with a guide the game still took me a few hours and I felt like I got my money’s worth.

- iffy voice acting. I get it. It is expensive to hire voice actors.

- lots of unanswered questions. The dev seems to have run out of time or patience with the game and just cuts it short with a quite unsatisfactory ending for me. Don’t get me wrong, the ending was lengthy and cinematic but it just didn’t answer any questions. Rather, it left me with more questions.

- clunky controls. The game will require patience as you move. It is slow and you will hit a few invisible walls, there will be parts of the screen you can’t walk to and you eventually realise, oh, there is a transition screen bit that I need to click on that is only 3 pixels wide.

I don’t want to tell too much about the story because A) if you want that you can read other reviews and B) when you are going through it with a guide handy, the story is really the only thing you’ve got to keep you hooked.

If you like your games smooth and flawless then this game isn’t for you. If you can forego a few creature comforts and grit your teeth through a few of the more broken bits of this game then you will probably have a decent time with this Hellraiser.

Ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight?



Take control of an artist who is offered a deal to escape the madness of war and live for 6 hours inside his paintings. He has to navigate his creations and reach the end before midnight or be trapped forever.



FULL DISCLAIMER: I was provided a free Steam key by the developer ahead of launch but I had already completed this game by receiving it in the May Humble Choice first. So I won’t be labelling this review as ‘Got this game for free’.

+ Vincent would be proud. The low poly look of the game reminds me of The Witness. The way the wind blows through the grass is beautiful and overall the art design is one of the game’s greatest wins. Things look real but only quite real enough to be in a painting. If you want to really go all in on the painterly graphics you can use the slider to max it out and really take a stroll through a van Gogh.

+ The hills are alive with the sound of madness. The music of the game and the accompanying sounds have really been a top priority. I have always maintained how music and ambient sound can make or break a game experience and here the aural experience works really well.

+ paint me a puzzle. Overall the puzzles in the game are a dash of everything. There is some exploration to do, levers to pull and things to rotate. But there are also some really hard order of operation puzzles and thinking way out of the box to do too. There is no real theme to the puzzles (like for instance in Portal or The Witness) and its rather like a mashup of a bunch of different types of puzzles.

+ pace. I don’t think I have ever listed ‘pace’ as a pro or con before. Let me explain. Summertime Madness is a game that might take you 10 or 20 hours to 100% if you try and find all the secrets by yourself. But it is a game you can quite comfortably complete in about 3 hours or less. Once you do that it might become a game that you can complete in 1 hour. Good news is there is a cheevo for that. There are many ways to delve into madness. It is up to you. You can tackle the game at your own pace and then ramp it up as you see fit.

+ price. For an indie title of this quality I would have expected to pay a bit more than 10 bucks. I am a cheap gamer but this is a very fair price.

- hint? What hint? The hint system is well intentioned but often falls short of utility. By the time you are ready to take a hint, the hint you are given is usually 3 steps behind what you have already done. There are some points where the hint works out in your favour but in general they are quite vague and there is only 1 hint per level.

I was very surprised to find Summertime Madness as part of Humble Bundle’s DRM free choice for the month. A whole month before the Steam launch too. The Steam version definitely has all the usual benefits such as cheevos and the ability to take screenshots though.



If you like indie puzzle games then Summertime Madness will give you a good few hours of entertainment and you will take some excellent screenshots along the way.



Pick it up and support your indie devs.
Interview with the developer
Video Review

“I know my apprehensions might never be allayed, and so I close, realizing that perhaps the ending has not yet been written.” - Atrus

And thank the great Guildmasters of The Art because this series went on to produce many other excellent games, Riven being the height of exceptionalism.

In a time before the internet I played this game and I remember being so frustrated at points. Rather than Google, we had friends who would hang out together and connect their brain processing power to try and find solutions to the puzzles. There really was nothing like this in the history of computers. This hypercard, photoreal, puzzle game with live action cutscenes and fully immersive worlds. It was jawdropping back then. If you are new to the game it may lack the punch it had from 30 years ago but it is still an incredible game today and while I understand the graphics weren’t up to a lot of people’s expectations in this remastered edition, I found the game to be very much at home as a first person free roamer on the Unity Engine. If you are a puzzle lover you will soon understand why the game is referenced so much and you will see how modern puzzle games have adapted the levels, environments, puzzles etc for use today in games like The Witness, Quern, The Room and ASA.

+ Story. Before we can even take control of the character we are given a little cutscene of a man falling through space. He vanishes and a book falls to the ground in this black void. We have so many questions and we haven’t even had a chance to move around. The only option we have is to open the book in front of us and inside is something so magical that it can’t be understood. We place our hand on the moving image on the paper and are transported to that exact location. Here we begin our journey. Myst has so much to give story wise that it spawned 3 books and hopefully a TV show in 2022. There is an entire book written about all the events that led to Atrus jumping into the fissure that we see at the start of Myst. And the story in the game isn’t just all laid out for you, it is slowly pieced together from what you discover as you journey through the different Ages.

+ Deceptive simplicity. At its core, Myst is a game that you can speed run. Once you have your notebook with puzzle hints and solutions that you have written down along the way (yes its one of those games) it will be very easy for you to go back through any Age and mop up your missed achievements, if you are into that kind of stuff. This doesn’t mean that the puzzles are easy. It just means that they are totally logical and once you understand the solution, you might be doing a bit of forehead slapping.

+ The world. When you hit the Channelwood Age in Myst, you will see where games like The Witness drew inspiration for its treetop area. The same goes for Aporia: Beyond the Valley. Channelwood is a great example of where the point and click part of the game is much better served by freeroaming. It makes this whole level much easier on the eyes, brain and sanity. But honestly, this whole world is just magical. Physics and engineering shouldn’t work this way but yet it has a very grounded and real feel to it.

+ Welcome to the machine. An iconic part of the Myst games, more so later on in the series though, are the weird contraptions that you have zero tutorial on how to use and the puzzle you need to solve is a) how do I switch this on? And b) what do I do with this now that it’s switched on? Leading finally to c) what does this even do?! I will never get tired of these kinds of puzzles, which is why games like The Room and Quern are so intriguing. (The developers may have took it a little bit too far though in later sequels).

+ Robyn Miller. Yeah Rand is awesome, his portrayal of Atrus is great and makes it hard to believe he also played Achenar but let’s not forget Sirrus, played by Robyn Miller. Robyn also wrote and recorded the whole Myst score. At first they weren’t going to include music but they changed their minds. And of course I’m not saying that music wouldn’t exist in puzzle games today but they definitely set the trend for these types of games and walking sims.

- controls. The mouse will clip off-screen on freeroam mode and will click on your destop. It is sometimes finnicky to get your hand cursor onto an object in this mode too.

- Rime. I’m sorry but this age adds nothing to the game. I get it. You felt like maybe you owed us some new puzzles or a new environment but this new Age was so badly thought out that it just made the game worse and will definitely make the game more confusing for new players. After you have got all your different endings you are free to stay on Myst and that’s how the original ended. But rather than an ending and then free range a la Skyrim or whatever, you get this new age now. Which you solve and are waiting for the punchline before you realise……”oh……oh that’s it…..hmmmm.” My advice to you is upon solving the crystals you immediately install and play Riven.

There is no doubt Myst is the Grand-daddy of a whole genre and I really loved playing the realMYST edition. So many puzzles were like muscle memory and I found myself doing things that I didn’t exactly know why I was doing them until a few minutes later. A seriously iconic game that has not lost its edge over time. If you have endured my gushing fanboying so far then I think this game might be for you.

But what about Riven? Where are Riven’s updates? The remasters? The realRIVEN? Is there a Riven TV show too? This might be an unpopular opinion but Riven is Star-Fissure groundshakingly better than Myst. Don’t get me wrong….. I LOVE Myst. So imagine my utter joy playing Riven. The rest of the franchise is downhill from these two games but are still playable.

Please check out Ars Technica on how Myst broke CD ROM to become the ‘killer app’

And why not pick up a Myst tie? [www.zazzle.com]

That's gonna be a big yawn from me dawg.

Death is but a door. Time is but a window, I’ll be back

It is a bittersweet experience to play Ghostbusters in 2021 after waiting so long for the sequel to 2, a messy fight between Harold Ramis and Bill Murry and the tragic loss of Harold in 2014. I don’t exactly know how they managed to convince Bill Murray to come to the table. Maybe the idea of replacing him with Ben Stiller (true story) was the reason. Regardless, what we got in Dan Aykroyd’s own words was Ghostbusters 3 and damn what a fun 10 hours I had. It’s a shame that we didn’t get everyone back for their roles, such as Rick Moranis (understandably) and Sigourney Weaver (who initially turned down the role when asked but then expressed interest when she found out Bill Murray was in but by that point the game was already written and she had no part).

This game allows you to play as the 5th Ghostbuster and if you are a Ghostbusters fan then this game is your loveletter from the team.

+ The boys are back in town. Aykroyd, Hudson, Murray and Ramis are all together and the game is wonderfully voiced. Voicing a game doesn’t always translate from actual movie actors but I guess the effort they put into the script and story really drove that and it shows. If I had to point a finger and say who the weakest link was then it would easily be Murray for me. He’s still good but he phones it in on a few occasions.

+ You gotta try this pole! The game is stuffed with great nostalgia and new original one-liners but it doesn’t beat you over the head with it. I grinned when I saw the names of the cheevos that I popped and the dialogue had me laughing out loud in parts.

+ Since I joined these men I’ve seen ♥♥♥♥ that’ll turn you white. This game has a lot of great story and some creepy moments. Ramis and Aykroyd really got a chance to delve into Gozer and the history there. We also get to meet our favourite librarian and find out more about her. We can cross dimensions and get to interact with some zany ghosts and to be honest some pretty creepy ones too.

+ Don’t cross the streams! The trapping and wrangling of ghosts is so fluid and works incredibly well once you get the hang of the controls. The arc of the proton stream is right out of the movie and placed in your hands. I really enjoyed this part of the game. But that’s not to say all the controls are great….see below.

- He slimed me. The movement controls, ESPECIALLY the running, can be sluggish at times when you need them to be more reactive. The running is like trying to sprint in Death Stranding with a mountain of packages stacked up on your back. It is wooden and takes a 90 degree turn like an airplane in a holding pattern. Also, the jump button. This is one of those games where a jump button has been included but no jumping is required in the game. There is a delay on the jump and you prance like a ballerina when you do it. It is just weird.

WE GOT ONE!!!! We got a videogame based on a movie that doesn’t suck! It doesn’t happen often but when it does, it is so satisfying. Especially when it’s a movie as seminal as Ghostbusters. Get it for the nostalgia but stay for the great story, original dialogue and decent gameplay. It’s not perfect but as the only active voicework in a game for Dr. Egon Spengler and not just archive for some other games, I hope that Ramis was proud of his creation and I feel like I got some closure to the franchise after all these years.

I have not been a fan of Star Wars since Disney got their hands on the rights to it. I am not a fan of EA either. So imagine my surprise when I finished Jedi: Fallen Order and was like “well slap my face and call me a womp rat, that was really good.” Yes of course it isn’t perfect. Nothing ever is and here is my take on the game.

+ “Who’s scruffy-looking?” – Han Solo. This game is straight up amazing to look at. Each world is unique looking and all have some really big, dominating set pieces. The enemies look really good and are all Empire-shiny and the fauna is well animated and has variety in size and appearance. You have everything from your little bugs right up to your giant trolls.

+ “The sound and music are 50% of the entertainment in a movie.” - George Lucas. I couldn’t agree more with this and if the aural experience is good or lacking I usually include a note about it in a review. You have your John Williams-esque score done excellently by Gordy Haab and Steven Barton, who are no strangers to the Star Wars game universe. The soundboard of lightsabres and blasters and the general ambiance of the worlds is really well done too. Very immersive.

+ “I’m just a simple man trying to make my way in the universe.” — Jango Fett. Some are disappointed at the lack of side content and we have been so conditioned to expect side content, which many times is lackluster and is nothing but game padding. Fallen Order has no side quests. It is a simple game at heart. There are things you can explore (I would recommend doing this later though, see the cons below) but generally you have an objective and you linearly move through the game to get to that checkpoint. I like it for this title because it makes it more of a cinematic experience. It keeps driving the plot and doesn’t let you get bogged down in grinding out more Force skills or searching for worthless cosmetics. If you want a space epic full of side quests then we already have the Mass Effect trilogy and you should go and play that instead.

+ “Adventure. Excitement. A Jedi craves not these things.” Silent Bob. But WE do crave these things and the story in Fallen Order is great. Not overly complicated but it did something I haven’t seen with a movie franchise game in quite a while….it actually uses lore well and references source material. I can’t really tell you much about it because of spoilers but you will get a bigger feel for the Star Wars Universe in general. There are tons of cinematic zones to really make you feel like you are a real life Jedi or at the very least inside a Star Wars movie.

+ “The circle is now complete. When I left you, I was but the learner; now I am the master.” - Darth Vader. You really feel powerful in the game. Deflecting blaster lasers never got old for me, there are a bunch of moves, counters and dodge-counters you can perform. You can Force push enemies off the edge of cliffs or pull them towards you and bury your lightsabre in their chest. Cutting enemies literally in half is extremely satisfying.

- “Just for once, let me look on you with my own eyes.” — Anakin Skywalker. Camera angles in the game can sometimes really limit you. When free running its fine but in combat the camera can get a bit sticky.

- “Powerups are the path to the dark side. Powerups lead to anger; anger leads to hate; hate leads to suffering. I sense many powerups needed.” – Yoda. Sure I’m paraphrasing with this one. The game hints that it is open world exploration right at the start but as I foolishly set off for a planet that was not the primary mission I soon discovered that you can get up to a certain point and then it is gated off. There is so much off the world that is gated. Want to get in there? Can’t do that yet, you need a power up that you can’t find on your own. Later on in the game you start to notice there are places that you just cannot access yet and it frustrates me for exactly the same reason the Tomb Raider games annoy me as well. I am not a fan of this oh, lets come back to this area later with a powerup just so you can open that door over there and find a worthless collectible. This is why I recommend just following the main story and don’t worry about side-looting. Save that for the end in your New Game+ so you can cheevo hunt your little heart out.

Yes this is Tomb Raider with lightsabres but it works so well. Strange creatures, magic, weird cultures, macguffins to find, faceless enemies to murder by the thousands, it has all the hallmarks of a good adventure game. I don’t play a lot of AAA titles but as a Star Wars fan and a fan of adventure games, Fallen Order is a game I could recommend on a sale. If you are an exploration nut who wants to find ALLS THE LOOTS then you might even be justified at buying in at full price….however…….Right now (January 2021), EA Play is a dollar. It will be a dollar until about March for your first month and then 5 bucks thereafter. I just played Jedi: Fallen Order for a dollar and that my friends is a good deal. I don’t intend on switching to the 5 dollar tier and will most likely just dip after this trial is over.

May the force be with you, always.

It is only once in a blue moon that something like ZoF comes along. Not only is the game an absolutely stunning indie developed first person puzzler but it is also brought to you by a developer who is the real deal and has a love for The Talos Principle and of course the grandfather of this genre, Myst. ZoF is stripped back in the story department and only focuses on puzzles. All have sound logic and you might find yourself kicking yourself at overlooking the simplicity of some of them. And for me when something is so deceptively simple yet makes me feel like a genius for solving it, this is the hallmark of a special puzzle. ZoF is full of these types of puzzles.

Myst fans, gather round. Rand Miller, take note.

+ variety and general weirdness. Because ZoF doesn’t really have a story, it is free to say, “oh, you were solving a hedgemaze before…..ok next level….you are on a space station working with droids.” You will get bounced around a lot in this game. But because of the lack of story the game doesn’t suffer for it. You will suddenly find yourself in a land of toy houses made of gingerbread and it won’t matter. Why won’t it matter? Puzzles.

+ puzzles. They say variety is the spice of life. In that case ZoF is life. Variety is ZoF’s spice. There are so many kinds of puzzles to solve in this game. But they are not puzzles in the traditional sense. They are more asking you to find the rule and then solve x,y and z using that rule. So every single level will require some kind of attention to detail and that you explore the environments to make sure you have found all the things to push, pull and turn.

+ visuals. ZoF checks a lot of boxes when it comes to art style. There is a futuristic space station, a low poly desert, a Talos Principle type of maze and a toy village that reminded me of Supraland. The graphics really kept me hooked and not because they were amazing but because of the unreal environment surrounding them.

- interaction with levers and wheels. I found it a bit hard to mouse over and get levers to prompt me to move them or turn them in the direction I wanted. Pushing buttons works just fine but things that turn or slide caused a bit of a problem for me. Not a huge problem but certainly something that bothered me at times.

I loved ZoF. I had so much fun playing it. It was basically like playing a Greatest Hits album of all the puzzles from the Myst games. But then that made me realize that wow, I really do wish there was a story here. The developer does have plans for a ZoF 2 (at some point in the distant future) and I really hope he weaves a story into it because a game like this deserves it. Oh and music too. This game could be elevated so much higher with the right soundtrack.

Seriously. If you love Myst or puzzles where you have to figure out the game logic first then you cannot go wrong here.

It’s a strange coincidence that Cyan funded a game called ZED but actually they were two letters wrong. They game they should have actually funded was ZoF….like I said, Rand, take note.

On one hand Vane is an indie gem which is a short, incredible puzzle adventure. On the other, Vane is a bit of a buggy, bad camera angle, overpriced, controlling nightmare. Your patience and forgiveness is key to this title because I can see a lot of people just refunding before the 2 hour mark or shelving it shortly after. I am on the forgiving side of the fence and my thumbs up comes with a few caveats….read on.

+ evolving. Vane constantly changes and hits you with new scenes, mechanics, music and environments. For me the game started out very slow and then snowballed into this kind of very fast-paced game where a lot of it was intuitive and it flowed very well.

+ sound. This game has a very cool synth soundtrack which normally wouldn’t work with this kind of game but it really does with Vane. It is hard to explain. The in game sounds and music elevate this to another level. Never underestimate the power of a good aural experience.

+ story. Some will say that Vane doesn’t have enough story but I think it does really good in telling a story without words. I really walked in the main character’s shoes and by the end I was well into my roleplay of my character.

+ ending. Wow. What an end run. The graphics are so amazing they look unnatural. It looks like claymation in some points. I just wish the whole game was polished to the level of detail the team obviously dedicated to the end game.

- just going to get this one out the way first. Price. Vane is far too overpriced. It costs more than the games that it is quite blatantly borrowing from. Get this on a sale. It is a good game but the asking price is far too steep considering all its flaws.

- camera and controls. You will clip through things, you will find yourself inside the body of the character you are controlling. The hitboxes for knowing when you have to climb on top of things are functional at best. Flying is great when it works in large open spaces but feels very tight and constricted in smaller areas.

- exploration. Normally I would be championing exploring a game world. But in Vane exploration is bad for two reasons. One is you often think a path is a path but it isn’t. This just leads to dead ends, darkness and/or confusion. The slow movement in the game and lack of a sprint button just ends up punishing you for exploration when you find out most of the map just leads to dead ends. Yes there are cheevos for exploring but I don’t care about that. I want story. I want an item. I want a switch to pull that leads to an Easter Egg. I want something important to the game, not just important to my Steam profile.

No handholding, no tutorial works well in longer games where you are rewarded for your perseverance but Vane is too short for that and I feel like the no hand holding was to lengthen an already very pricey and very short game. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed Vane, which is why I am here now saying you should play it. It will definitely only appeal to a very niche group of people though.

If games like Rime, AER, Journey, INSIDE and other moody, sans dialogue games float your boat then you should board the HMS Vane. Just be aware that the ticket you bought is more of an Economy Class seat and it will be a bit of a bumpy ride.

Do yourself a favour and steer clear of this dog turd of a game. I’m reviewing this because I was forced at gunpoint to play this for 60 minutes and I don’t want anyone getting the wrong idea and picking this up based on my playtime.

+ that feeling of relief when you exit out of the game. Playing Zombie Golf is nothing short of torture. That exit game option made me feel all warm and tingly.

+ this is someone’s work. Look. I couldn’t even make this and someone did. So they are already a more qualified programmer than me and I applaud the effort it must take to learn a skill like coding. Also it’s a free market and you can decide to put something out for nothing or to charge for it. If this game was free and it was someone’s first attempt and making a game and they wanted to test it out on Steam then I wouldn’t be here. But it costs money and it says it’s in EA and it hasn’t been updated in a year. This game is going nowhere.

- golfing surgeon simulator. The controls are so bad for this game its laughable. But its not funny in a Surgeon Sim or Ampu-tea way. The angle on the ball makes no sense, you can hit it at the same angle and same power 3 times in a row and it will go in 3 different directions. The cursor will go off the screen making it impossible to aim and generally you are just in for a bad time all round trying to take these balls.

- sound. There is virtually no noise in this game. A zombie will groan if you hit it. A red barrel will go boom if you hit it. The ball bounces and makes a tapping sound. But other than the terrible title screen music, the game has pretty much been audibly sterilized.

- lack of levels. It might be a little bit more worth it if there were more levels and perhaps a level selector if by some miracle you found a level you enjoyed playing but as it stands there are only 4 levels and they all suck.

- general boredom and frustration. There is not a single thing redeeming about this game. At least if there were some cards or some cheevos for say, landing a ball in the back of a pickup truck. Or hitting the ball into 2 zombies, you know….like some sort of challenge? The only challenge is to not gnaw your own fingers off in despair while playing this.

Take a mulligan on this game back to before you even hit the play button. There is nothing to see here. I can’t even say this game is rough round the edges and could be saved with some work. It would require a full overhaul and I just don’t see that happening.

My Steam Awards VR game of the year 2020 that I'm forced to vote for even though I don't have VR!