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‘A Short Hike’ is just that, a short game about a hike. I spent less than 2 hours playing, but I could see a few more given the achievements. While not being a sandbox, it feels distinctly inspired by ‘Animal Crossing’; from picking up sticks, shellfish, and digging up cracks in the ground, to the pixelated shimmer, reminiscent of old gameboy games, and a cast of cute animal characters… This is in its favor, as it gives a lot to do in a rather small open-world, and its distinctive style leaves a lasting impression.

A Short Hike takes a metroidvania approach, with items and quests that can be found/done in non-linear fashion, all contributing to your climb up the mountain. This approach makes the world feel bigger, and puts emphasis on exploration.

To complement exploration, you’ll glide, climb, sprint, and air-dive your way around the map, tracking objects and people below you, giving the game a lot of vertical freedom and making the map approachable from any angle; this is fun and enhances exploration further. A part of traversal is the music, as it changes depending on your action… Gliding through the air? The music becomes more upbeat and prominent. Walking through a dark-rainy area? The music becomes more somber, quiet. The OST is good, and definitely something I’ll listen to outside of the game.

The conversations you’ll have feel very dynamic, and oftentimes NPCs will react to very specific things you’ve done, such as falling in the water while trying to fish. There are also times where conversations had with characters will change dialogue had with other characters, making for very cute and funny moments.

A Short Hike is good, and despite being short, it does a lot with what little it has.

Going into Amnesia: Rebirth, I didn’t have high expectations - from middling reviews, and not much hype around it, I assumed the product was a flop as was the previous title: “A Machine for Pigs”, but despite my lack of enthusiasm for this title, I was pleasantly surprised.


To get the important question out of the way: “is it scarier than ‘The Dark Descent’”... The answer is overwhelmingly “no”. Is it scary? Yes… Kind of… depends on the person. I wouldn’t say I’m terrible at handling horrors, but I wouldn’t say I’m necessarily good at it. I’ve played quite a few horror games, but among the scarier titles like “The Dark Descent” and “Alien: Isolation”, I often found them too overwhelming. I’ve come a long way since then, so maybe I can tolerate it more, but besides a few gut-clenching chases, and one early jump-scare - that actually made me jump - I could easily cope. It’s hard to put my finger on why this is the case; the early area monsters are gangling and horrifying, the sound design is good - but it just lacks. If I had to say why, it probably comes down to a few reasons:

Firstly, the areas you’re put in, mostly containing desert and alien themes - which both have a decent amount of light, and aren’t particularly scary. Not to say these scenarios couldn’t be made scary, and they definitely tried, but compared to a castle or a house, it is definitely harder to immerse the player in something so foreign to them… But even this is a hard argument when ‘Alien: Isolation’ takes place in space - something not many people can relate to. Furthermore, visual fidelity/consistency hurts immersion in these areas, with a stylised-realism environment, mixed with cartoony human models.

It might also be because of how many scripted moments there are, which half the time, when failed, remove the threat on a recurring attempt. Something that’s very different from this and many horror titles is that you aren’t escaping to a hiding point, but more so looping the monsters, making it a game of cat and mouse. Personally this is less scary to me, especially when most of the time you’re running away, making the threat out of your line of sight for most “scary” moments. Confrontation is also not an immediate death, and the long moments of struggling with a monster make the monster less scary, as you get a better look of what you’re facing, and the ability to escape the monster's grasp ruins a lot of tension. Moments of build up and hiding from threats are made lesser with linear escapes built into progression. Creating hiding points could have allowed the developers to ramp up the intensity of these monsters, making it more scary, because now you actually have an escape that’s not progression, or if they didn’t want to rely on a gimmick, instead just make things more intense and have lasting consequences.

Lastly, I wish the fear mechanic would play more auditory and visual hallucinations, and instead of killing you, just ramp up the horror; the amount of ways to remove fear is mostly limited to light, which makes the game rely heavily on management, not because you’re scared of going insane, but because you don’t want to die, misplacing horror with too much planning and thought of conservation.


The lack of horrifying moments should immediately make a horror game bad, but for some this might be a good sign, especially those who are weaker to horror, and mostly avoid it… I can safely say that for those people, if you’ve got the lights out, you’re alone, and it’s late at night, there may be some moments you struggle with, but not so much that you’ll give up, making an almost perfect balance for those new to horror. For people looking for genuine fear, to the point you cannot cope, or just a game that is consistently unsettling, this isn’t it. For me, I don’t necessarily mind. I’ve played many horror games that are elevated by story and gameplay despite not being as scary as others, and I believe this is one of them.

The amount of grandiose moments and reveals, to jaw-dropping scenery and apocalyptic flavour, this game oozes creativity in both story and its design. I read every note I could find just to learn more, something I haven’t done in most games. While the surface level story writing lacks at inciting sadness, despair, fear, happiness, or any extreme emotion, the world building more than makes up for it, accompanied by a story that is good on paper, and executed well enough, that by the end of it, I could utter “this was good”. The interactive-physics-based puzzles were very entertaining, and reminded me a lot of Half-Life, with how intuitive they were to real-life problem-solving. Visuals, while lacking in some places, were stunning in others. For the most part this is a good game, and it doesn’t really fall off in any major way, ranging from decent to great.

Most titles don’t have me engaged enough for me to power through in 2 sessions, and for that, Amnesia: Rebirth deserves a recommendation - however, at this price point, I recommend picking it up on sale.

Pretentious writing meets a comically-ridiculous story.

If you came for anything other than a joke, then you’re in the wrong place. Given that the game is free, you can’t go wrong with giving it a try, but if you value your time, it’s around an hour long.

Lagging, crashing, long loading screens, black screens, poor optimisation; fun game outside of these issues.

This is a short experience; at most I can see about 20 minutes worth of writing to read through. It gave more than what I assumed of it, and was less of a “meme” than I thought. It does what it says, and a little bit more.

I thought 'Ring of Pain' was a card game at first because of the presentation, so I didn't play it for a while. Going into it I didn't know what to expect, but I was pleasantly surprised to find a well-crafted-fast-paced rogue-like.

The game is simple, you have a ring of enemies, items, stat upgrades, chest, etc. You click left or right arrows to “stealth” past enemies, but risk the chance of failing a stealth check and getting hit. You can choose to attack enemies, but if you have low attack speed, they’ll get a hit in before you do. You then have attack, defense, health, clarity, crit, and other various stats that you can improve to make fighting enemies easier. Upon killing an enemy you get souls, and you can use these souls to buy items. Your goal is to get items in a random loot pool that will help you, kill enemies, and get to the exit, but it’s not as easy as it sounds.

The items and mechanics make for some unique interactions, such as explosive enemies following you to detonate, and usually in reaction you'd run away 1 turn before they explode, but if you have knockback you're able to avoid the explosion by attacking. Sometimes running away from an explosive enemy will lead you into a sandwich between two explosive enemies, creating a chain reaction that’s unavoidable (without certain items). Another instance of creative game design is the curse mechanic, where you can sacrifice other key stats through items/upgrades to get "clarity" up, which increases curse resistance, giving you a higher roll on curse potions. This allows you to get extra heals and avoid curse damage, and if you have one of the overheal items, you can permanently increase stats through these potions. Some enemies will block you, other enemies will chase you, some enemies reflect damage, others do long range spits (ranged damage)… There are so many different interactions, and because of how the trade-offs and synergies work with items, it makes for a thought-provoking experience, but once you get familiar with it you’ll be speeding through these interactions, making for very fast-paced gameplay.

The game is incredibly difficult despite its simple design. Similar to the ‘Vampire Survivors’ approach of less is more, with a keen focus to making a game that’s easy to understand/play, but hard to crack. A welcoming addition to what is otherwise an oversaturated market of rogue-likes, filling a niche while at the same time excelling in it.

Brilliant micro-management of a chaotic prison system.

Warning: brings out your inner-sociopathic god-complex.

While I'm recommending this game, there is a lot I dislike about Grim Dawn, and I am going into this review with a captious mindset.

Grim Dawn is at the pinnacle of ARPGs, with it being the successor to the well-loved ‘Titan Quest’. Its character building involves combining two classes, it has the devotion tree to look forward to, with a similar feeling that ‘Path of Exiles’ passive skill tree gives, there is a ton of lore, multiple choice for some quest, armour/weapon modifiers, complex item affixes/suffixes, rifts, cool boss fights, etc. This game does so much right that to give it a negative review would be a disservice, but mentally I’m coming out with a negative mindset despite enjoying the game a lot on my first playthrough.

Grim Dawn in a vacuum is a great game, a great ARPG, but in the context of competition, it falls short in my mind. ‘Diablo 2’, the game that defined ARPGs that followed it, despite being roughly two decades old, still holds up, and in a lot of ways it shines over Grim Dawn. The aesthetic, tone, music, combat (punchier/weighterer), voice acting, itemization, etc. still reign supreme over most games that came after it, and this still in my mind is what makes me not appreciate Grim Dawn as much. Hitting an enemy, such a simple interaction, feels and sounds lackluster in Grim Dawn, and that simple interaction is what defines the whole experience for me. Diablo 2’s animations, sounds, effects, and general interaction makes the combat feel amazing, even when only using 1-2 abilities. It’s not even just the combat, but it’s also the enemies, setting, colours… Nothing feels captivating in Grim Dawn when it comes to visuals, music, sound, and it really hurts my experience with which on paper, is a brilliant game.

It doesn’t end there though… Grim Dawn makes itemization feel tedious. Each item you pick up past a certain point is bloated with 7-8+ (14-19+ on higher rarities) lines of text, and then sometimes big skills descriptions and pet bonuses - it makes comparing items feel like a chore. When thinking about why this is the case, I think the main issue is the 10 different resistances that exist, with no umbrella for any of them, and all of them being important… So important that every item needs to bloat percentages on percentages to even make it worth picking an item up. While the game has a loot filter, it doesn’t have a subtext filter, or anything that can simplify it past equipping the item back and forth to see whether it’s worth taking. I like complexity, which is why I take a liking to runewords and complex crafting in Diablo 2, as well as Path of Exiles passive skill tree, support gems, and copious amounts of systems on systems; the difference is presentation.

With such big descriptions you’d think that higher rarities would feel exciting, but it’s more of the same, unlike Path of Exile and Diablo 2 which feature uniques and modified weapons which not only sell for a lot, but also last a long time throughout a playthrough, and actually feel unique/important through visuals and subtext.

This is a minor point, but the controller is not great on this. For a game that came to Xbox, you’d think teleporting out of combat would be a binded button, or that the control scheme didn’t involve you clicking down the analog stick to switch loadouts, or stop moving to use a quarter of your kit. Path of Exile and Diablo 2: Resurrected are still rough with controllers, but you can at least interact with the entirety of the games outside of typing.

Grim Dawn remains one of the best ARPGs in my honest opinion, but I don’t know if that says a lot about Grim Dawn or a lot about the genre. You can get a good experience with this game, but I heavily recommend waiting for a sale and buying all the DLCs currently available for this game to reach its actual potential, and be worth your time.

Wanted to give this a shot upon hearing that one of the Diablo 2 developers worked on this, but it's currently in a frustrating state.

A lot of the issues aren't even gameplay related, but instead in menus and controller support. First of all, you cannot play this with a controller, even though it says it's partially supported. I couldn't even exit out of a menu I opened, let alone create a character with my controller. Switching to keyboard + mouse I thought I'd be fine, but upon trying to change the volume options I found I couldn't even do it in the pause menu, and instead had to exit to the main menu to change it there, quitting out of the game. Then as I finally got into the game, I forgot which key I had to press to sleep, but again had to exit back to the main menu to find out...

This game needs controller support for my weathered hands, and it needs QoL updates for menus. It would be nice to have the ability to sleep by clicking on the orb for example, or when hovering over maybe seeing the keybind needed. While I could push through the game's limitations, I’ve already lost the initial drive I had to even pick it up. If the game had so little thought put into basic functions, what was the rest of the experience going to be like?

Very fun VR title. Probably the most I've moved in a VR game, let alone life. Ducking, weaving, throwing, shooting, punching, and pulling a few muscles, sums up the gameplay pretty well. If you're trying out VR for the first time, this is definitely the best introduction - as you don't have to have much knowledge on complex mechanics (cocking, holstering, reloading, safety, gun cleaning, etc.), and are mostly stationary.

While it is simple and relatively short, if you can pick this game up on "Humble Bundle", or on a good sale, I'd say it's worth a buy.