Seneste anmeldelser af adam1224

Chains of Satinav was a mixed bag, I would describe it as indecisive and confused. In my experience so far seems to describe many, if not most of (the older) Daedalic games.

It has an interesting setup and a fascinating world with unique lore, unlikeable protagonists who lack a proper character, and shockingly awful voice acting. The characters just speak slower when they are sad. And speak "stronger" or a bit faster when angry, but there is no tone change, it'a a mockery of voice acting.

The story itself is I think what an RPG would be, if it would be forced to be a point and click adventure game. You "live in the present". You have so little foresight, you're always chasing the next carrot on stick, getting into subplot after subplot but there is no overarching main plot, really, just plot connecting one chapter to the next. And this is all achieved by pretty in-depth point and click gameplay that acts like a massive speedbump on the story.
By this, I mean that you start the game with finding ornamental leaves to win a contest, to get an audience of the king, to catch birds, to get sent on getting a fairy, to getting to a fairy... and you're about 1/4 of the game where the endgame is closely linked to fairies. But the game just can't handle that much infodump as the game would need between the silly puzzles about getting pigs drunk, understanding mumbling fisherman and discussing time-management tips with a blind peacock.

The lore races past the player, while the gameplay makes you slow dow, like you're making some intricate artifact. It's not horrible, but it's clashing for sure, and the constant reveals just mean that you play chapter by chapter, flopping forward, waiting for the next thing that makes even more "puzzles".

The game is cheap on sales, that are plenty, so it's easy to grab it at -90% or so. Do it only if you don't mind being dragged into an adventure by a guy who sounds super non-caring, and has no idea what is he doing.

Virginia was a confusing, disorienting, and at times physically sickening experience, a real fever dream.
The story is told without words, and I think it is told in a nonlinear fashion, and also features UFOs and LSD.The dark scenes in the game are looking like they are viewed in a burnt-out LCD monitor, no brightness change can help finding items because of this blurry-blue effect.

There is massive headbob that can't be turned off. You constantly lose control in the game, when you just flicker to a new place or instantly refocuses your view. These events, coupled with headbobbing, and the slight perspective change (fish-eye effect) when you are unable to move, compared to the normal movement and view are one of the most horrible design choices in a first person game I have ever seen. There isn't even a blinking effect or something, you just suddenly at a different place. view janked to the side... I'm not sensitive to motion sickness, but this game was a real struggle to get through.
Unfun to play, sickening to look at, and confusingly "artsy" this game was a waste of time.

Uninteresting, unfun, unresponsible.
The weapons actually attack in different ways, but offer no alternative. A bat attacking from above you will mean a lot of issues if you have a sword. Clubs are slow but least they attack in a wide arc. But all of this matters little because the level "design" and enemies make it unenjoyable.
You see, you basically don't have knockback, it's ridiculously low. Yet as you progress, enemies get enough health to land a hit or two, slowly wearing you down, because the level "design" is so random that it often leaves no place to actually fighting back. Like if there is a zombie in a tunnel coming to you, and attacking with a dash, you can only hope to kill it faster because you can't go back up, nor dodge to the other side of the enemy.
It's really clear that the developer's pride, the procedural generation doesn't really work. Rooms started repeating as soon as level 2 and 3. One room had a secret crevice with a mana boost that was also repeated - this is the level of rooms being re-used.
That's just the extra that the game started out by having the steamcommunity popups being mostly out of my screen. And when I tried to fix, the game claimed it is running at my native resolution, while having thick black bars around the screen.

The game tries to be Castlevania so hard that it physically hurts. Backdash that is faster than walking, crashing lanterns... the tryhard attitude is coupled up with the stock enemies, uninteresting and bad combat, and unoriginal premise and design.. all of this showing that copying just looks without understanding what makes a game fun does not work.

Gameplay was simple and straightforward, with nice graphics. Story is not the game's strongest point, it's full of holes.

My review seems to be the 2366th on Steam, and the 98th negative one, as the game sits at a whopping 96% positive review rate. As far as math and meme reviews go, it should be outstanding. And for whatever reason I really, really doesn’t feel like that. And I feel so weird about this that I have to write it out of myself. So please, treat this as a very subjective, very personal rambling of “wtf and why”, not a proper review to really rely on.

Everhood is a game where you walk around and talk to people/monsters, and if it’s needed, fight them by defeating them in reverse-guitarhero.
I have two things of note about the combat: why there are no rebindable controls? The game uses 4 directions, E and escape on the map, and the 4 directions in fight. Even the classic NES had 4+2+2 buttons, why are we stuck to hardcoded 4 in combat? It’s so weird to dodge/attack with movement buttons in a quite chaotic manner.

Second: what is up with the pacing? At the beginning you have no idea where you are, who you are, you are thrown into 2-3 fights in mere minutes, then barely anything follows it up throughout the game, until the point where the game turns into almost only constan fighting.

With that aside - I liked the story, but it felt so little and so insignificant in the hours that I spent playing the game. The characters are flat and one-dimensional, there is no real time to build them up, which makes the ending feel incredibly flat. I liked the conclusion, but I genuinely dislike how badly and ineffectively everything led up to it.

From the goal that you get when you get your arm back, to the endgame “plot twist” all I could think about was:
“I understand the implications, but why should I care?”

I don’t want to spoil much about the story as it's best experienced firsthand. Let’s just say how should I feel the weight of changing something that was unchanged for eons, if I’m just thrown into it and a few hours later I’m told to do it, with no other options? I can understand it, but I can’t sympathize, especially that the game made it pretty clear at many points that this world does not think, or work the same as ours.
So I just pushed through the game, then the big reveal was that X is actually Y who was mentioned maybe twice in the whole game. You knowthe idiim, walk a mile in someone's shoe before judging them? The game's world is an alien with no feet, and I had walked in their "shoe" just a few steps.


I genuinely don’t know what to think of this game. It may be the biggest rouse about emotions fading from an eons-old world, and making every character flat, every reveal weightless, and as a result me not caring is the biggest meta-achievement a game ever done... or it just sucks and was made to be pseudo-deep for a demographic that is hungry for something whacky like Undertale was... I’m not sure. It has stuff like achievements for superhard no-hit fights, grind 150 000 jump rolls or “troll” achievements for walking for hours in a corridor. I don’t think a game is focusing on multi-level hidden messages with such arbitrary goals, that are exactly the other way as thinking about the game's message would be.

I frankly disliked the game and felt relieved to finally finish it. Can’t think of it as maybe two paragraph’s worth of fortune cookie-wisdom, with lots of subpar and unfun gameplay slapped to it, but judging from the reviews I’m in vast minority with it. So go, look around a bit, read more reviews because there are a lot of people who liked the game a lot more than I did.
I hope you will, too.

Spiritfarer is a huge game - howlongtobeat lists it as 23-36 hours long depending on completion, but can be a lot more. For me it was 48 hours spent with the game running, and likely 43ish hours playing it. And at some points during that 43 hours, I would have written a different review. It surely has its ups and downs.
For starters, the game begins extremely fast. You’re dropped into an unknown world and get your “job” in maybe 3 minutes. Then you’re gradually presented more options, more locations, more resources, more upgrades, new spirits, as the game goes on, in a loop, until the end.
Some things I wish I knew sooner:
Progress: The game is only as big as the currently unlocked map if you don’t follow the spirits quests. There are three milestones to get past: ice, rocks and fog. Game gets really nice after the ice, and stunning after the rocks, with many options and goals.
“Economy” don’t try to “break the economy” by pushing yourself farming resources or money at the beginning, the game will only give you more as it progresses, and it’s vastly better to collect whatever you can compared to buying.

With those out of the picture: I was miserable at the beginning of the game. So little to do, so few places to go, the ship stops at night. You see, I love my game mechanics, and there were barely anything to do. And while the spirits have stories, they only drop 4-5 blocks of story after progressing their quests, outside of it they are mostly there to demand food.

Then after I started focusing on the character stories, the game started opening up, which made it a lot better in many ways. New abilities are granted quite rarely (also linked to spirits’ stories) but new resources, buildings, resource-collecting minigames get unlocked. The game starts acting like a game with stuff to do, and I started to enjoy it a LOT more.

But as the game progressed, it became clear that it has some issues with storytelling. It’s not entirely sure if you have some adventuring done between story “segments”, or you get some story between adventuring. Many, if not most spirits don’t have a personality, they only have things that they say.. They still have a quite well laid out character, but they don’t really act it, because they have so few non-storydump dialogues. And what they have, most of that is linked to food.
Also an interesting issue of mine - the game’s narrative is like a reverse Murdered: Soul Suspect. In M:S.S. you are collecting info and memories that the main character knows but you don’t, and it breaks immersion. In Spiritfarer everyone treats Stella as they know her, which builds connection, but you have no idea who they are, and it comes off like you’re amnesiac and it’s kind of weird, it surely made me distanced from many characters. I want to like them for what they do now, not what they tell me about what they did. Game is somewhat lacking in the “show, don’t tell” thing in the characters department.

Overall, after the bad start and getting the game known better, it became quite a solid one, I ended up enjoying the second half a lot better than I expected from the start. Would give it a 7 or 7.5 / 10. It was great looking and pleasant -I liked to sit down and continue the game, but wasn’t thrilled to do so.

Shadows on the Vatican Act I: Greed is a short point and click adventure game - the game has an achievement for a sub-2 hour run (I made it to 50 minutes with mistakes), and Howlongtobeat lists the game as 2.5 hours long - it's not a major title.


First and foremost:
- the game's animation is lacking

- the protagonist's (James') English voice acting is excellent for most of the game, but supporting character's VO is like a rollercoaster. Mario is great, the nun's mixed, Silvia's flat and it sounds like the voice actress just didn't even care.

- The story is loosely based on the 1984 book of David A. Yallop: In God's Name. It's like the first (few?) chapters of any Dan Brown book, but the programming is not so tight and there's surprisingly little gameplay/puzzle in the game.

I genuinely liked the game because it has character and I found it charming even with the silly animation style, and I found the story interested. So my review is positive, but as I mentioned the problems - it's not a flashed out and fancy game. Being at the current 68% review rate with mixed category is fitting for its overall quality, there are glaring issues that need to be overlooked to fully enjoy it.

On-rails arcade game, where you type in word and phrase prompts to kill zombies. 9 levels, with cutscenes about 5-6 hours long. There are additional DLCs for word packs, but the game supports custom dictionaries as well - add your own set of words, or import some from the workshop.

The story is grindhouse trash, the good kind. Samuel L Jackson levels of motherf**kers dropped, with weird, ugly, obscene, disgusting imaginary or all of them. Not counting the animation style, because that's also pretty horrible. But it works so, so well.
It's trash, but it's made to be a trash story of an imaginary 80s horror action flick with BBC (Badass Black Cop), the smoothtalking white newbie cop who goes by the book. A stripper who has personal motivation in the story, and obviously picks up a motorcycle, some big guns and a bad swearing habit and a sister-in-trouble whom we like for her looks, not her brains. All chasing the Big Evil Papa Caesar who is so evil that he doesn't even need a motivation at the start of the game.
It's like a mix of Pulp Fiction, Sin City, Planet Terror and Grindhouse. Pulpy, sweary, innuendo-y, but self-aware.

The sub-game House of the Dead is a classic rail-shooter that I can't really recommend. There are no settings in the game whatsoever, and it became clean in just minutes, how inaccurate and unwieldy the mouse controls are. One could play it with a controller as well, but I rather not try that. Some people mentioned lightgun support on the forums, if that is your jam, you may need to delve deep to find info, but for other than that niche, I don't recommend buying the game only for the "shooter" mode. (But check out Blue Estate, it's an excellent rail-shooter for mouse)

This game was a blast!
If you happened to be on the officially unofficial discord around the time when I played / finished it, I barely could stop talking about the game. It's "Japanese-crazy" with all of its ups and downs.
Slightly tone-deaf in some parts, going into Bioware-buttshot levels of ogling on the eyecandy sniper girl.
Having huge bossfights with crazy designs and action pieces that are up in the MGS WTF levels. Like giant snake-like transformer road robot that shoots missiles at you while you're escaping with a futuristic garbage truck.
Again, Bioware-level of awkward romance/sex scene
Again-again, Bioware-like "who comes with me" missions where you can earn your teammates trust to unlock scenes, story options and make them perform better.
Joke aside, the game really smells like what if Bioware made a shooter that is barely an RPG (use nanomachines (son!) and upgrade your gun) and it works weirdly - really well.

It's weird to see in a shooter, but the team members actually have personality. Some a bit too overtuned and meme-worthy, but everyone likes Big Bo. But the game also has recurring jokes, and making jokes of the jokes, like how a character is usually grumpy about "only I know what a covert operation means?" then blows up a manhole in the middle of a café when escaping the sewers, and then suddenly nobody cares. And I don't know if this is deliberately written in this way, or just gets awkward, but makes the game have super strong Alpha Protocol vibes.

The characters just doesn't care and go full absurd - and this was another huge surprise, that the game is absolutely outstanding and setting up, and delivering timing based comedy, along with some crazy dialogues. (Sadly it went Fallout 4 before Fallout 4, you communicate through picking short prompts and then saying nothing, just waiting for the reply. It's weird as the protagonist is super talkative in the cutscenes)

Attention to detail is remarkable: the manhole gets cordoned off after you exit it, the lights light up when you stand to a urinal that is not even on the main path, the location uses Japanese and/or English text at various locations, depending on the location's function - Café for foreigners, international labs, or local undercity.

The combat felt great as well. By blowing up limbs of the robots you can disarm them, make them crawl around, or by removing their heads they shoot eachother. The last one is great, as you can "flank" robots who carry riot shields with this trick, opening them up for an attack.
This feature, coupled with the special personal weapon of yours with a stun/shockwave option, the ability to fire from cover, and commanding your team makes a pretty tactical, and proactive shooter.

They okayest okay game that ever okayed, and it took me 29 disappointing hours in two gos (played once and stopped halfway because of boredom). I'm kind of upset that they made it only okay, with the great ideas they were working with.
Jokes aside, it's a lukewarm game made out of a great idea, but it misses the mark in basically every single aspect so much that it's a perfect 6/10 game.
The basic issue with the game that they try to do everything with collectibles (There are 242 collectibles). To tell you creepypasta/camp fire stories, to solve investigations, to uncover ghost graffities because ghost kids gonna be ghost kids, and also to get information about your beloved past wife, the love of your life...wait what?
Jokes aside the game really is tone-deaf. Opens up with a super badass intro about the past literally scarring a person, then constantly talks about redemption (of a past criminal, to a detective), the love of Julie that made it possible. One of the main goals of the game is to get closure, so you can move to the afterlife and reunite with her. And while you're doing that, you have to collect 50-something "notes" to get memories of her. Talk about ludo narrative dissonance, the game is actively breaking immersion as the troubled Ronan collects stuff so the Player could know the stories. And you also need to stop playing and go to a menu to check them out.

The whole game cries "B studio". There are great ideas in the game, and the cutscenes look and play good, but everything else is just not so good. There are NPCs walking around with rigid backs, acting if they were humans. People straight out of the Uncanny Valley are hugging each other with dead faces, looping in animation. 90% of the NPCs don't move from their spot, and all of them have 2 thoughts. Do you feel lucky to have mindreading instead of talking? Are you happy that the protagonist being a ghost is how actively being used to deliver unique presentation and narrative?
The NPCs are blatantly copypasted, like out of three cops two are clones of each other, having the same thoughts. At least 5 random passerby has the same quotes. Did they run out of money? Couldn't get 5 more people, or just 10-15 new lines with the actors slightly changing their voices? You can poltergeist electronic items to lead/distract NPCs, but they only react to that when the game tells you to do so. You can cover the police HQ in printer paper, they won't notice until you need to do that to cover up a jailbreak.

And it gets weirder. They made a fridge to be unique by having kid drawings and photos on it. Then copypasted in the Apartmans location's every flat. They made special post-it notes to hide small jokes and ideas - then copied it over the police HQ, the museum, and a few other places. They made genuinely funny books instead of just coloured blocks to show on a bookshelf - then copied the same group of 4-5 books THREE TIMES ON THE SAME SHELF.
I just don't get this game, it's... just baffling. Such a mix of attention to detail, and cutting corners to an incredible level at the same time. And I think there are unfinished content too - you can use ghost residue solely to hide from demons, and half of the game is filled with the ghost-spots, but no demons. And as there are 2D pictures(???) of ghosts being around and disappearing as you get closer (and a few real ghosts) you wouldn't need the ghost residue to show you that you aren't the only one "alive". Also in the Quarantine Hospital area there is a super talkative ghost, someone who needs help, and a lot of items to examine - as with the other ghost quests, but this one is just there... both of these smells like abruptly cut content.

All in all, I guess hurried release / development hell / lack of funds is the culprit here. It's a pity, genuinely.
So many things could have been used - if the game sticks with the use of many NPCs, they could have just have interesting or funny thoughts, like normal people have (Like the little notes of random people in Watch Dogs). What to eat, oh-so-hating Jeff, wondering if they left the oven on... not 5 people thinking in the same 2 sentences, and 3 asylum patients sharing the same ideas.
Or just have fewer, but more interesting NPCs (VtM Bloodlines did it really well).
FFS, you can walk through cars, walls and closed doors - call me shallow, but nowhere a funny easter egg, an interesting world detail, just collectibles and copy-pasted assets. Such a lack of creativity, nothing to do with the ghost powers but follow the script and collect collectibles.
Oh, and the ending has a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ amazing plot twist that should have happened at least an hour earlier. Then it could have any effect on the player, not just finishing the game in a cutscene and maybe in a QTE-like sequence, not even really leaving them time to process it.

It's a game not made to be interesting, but to have X amounts of hours for the player. It's serviceable, it works well, but it could have been so, so much more.