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This game isn't for everybody, and I guess I'm one of the people it isn't for.

I spent 18 minutes with unimpressive everything, and then the game was over.

Well, that happened.

I would be very, very interested to know the full details of how The Messenger came to be. It almost seems like there was a simple, classic game here that one team started, then it was handed to another team who finished, polished and improved the final result in every way.

Like its in-game workings, there seems to be a duality in The Messenger as a final product. The actual, canon "lore" of the universe isn't very impressive. Two of the primary characters have names and descriptions that seem to come straight out of an eighth-grade Creative Writing 101 class, and unlike most everything else in the game, the normally cheeky and irreverent writing plays it completely straight-faced. Many of the "collectibles" could well have been added as an afterthought, well after most of the game was in place, and the wink-nudge meta-humor (which is top-notch) could have been added late into production as well.

There's an earnest sincerity to one part of the game that is genuinely charming but not very good, and a sarcastic wit to the other part which is dry but impressively well-done. If one writer is responsible for every bit of text in this game (not counting editing corrections, translations etc.), I would be very, very surprised. The best writing on this game seems very representative of Devolver's overall style.

I wonder.

I wonder if Sabotage had a game on its hands that would have been a strong but rough freshman effort, maybe a 6/10. I wonder if, through the direction, input, and funding of Devolver, this game was refined into a 9/10, and represents a case of a game being massively improved by its publisher (as opposed to worsened, as is often the case with other publishers).

I really don't know. But it is a fantastic game. Recommended.

Some games elicit beauty through their sounds and visuals, others elicit beauty in their subject matter, and still others elicit beauty in the use of their game mechanics. It is very rare that a game manages to do all three.

The Gardens Between is a very impressive, and yes, very beautiful game. It is quite short for the price, and the puzzles aren't very challenging. There are so few variables that you can Chekhov's Gun your way through many of them, often before you even know what the obstacle is supposed to be.

But that also means that this is a PERFECT introduction to the medium for people that have never or rarely played videogames.

Recommended.

Just like I remember it. A graphical update to one of the greatest stealth action games ever made.

That said, complaints about bugs are completely valid. I had multiple instances of alerts logged from stealth kills (without triggering in-level countdowns) and at least one instance of an enemy auto-dying on what was intended to be a pacifist run.

Check the forums before you buy. If Klei continue to release bugfixes, you can feel comfortable purchasing.

American Wilds feels like a spin-off standalone game that was turned into an expansion late in development - and I don't mean that in a negative way.

The rhythm of gameplay is different. Paved roads are everywhere and gas stations are plentiful - fitting, given the setting - but the tradeoff is that very few of your vehicles have proper offroad wheels. Driving your eighteen-wheelers out to lumber scavenging sites is very slow going at best and impossible at worst, so you are more or less forced to rely on specialized lumber grabbing vehicles to bring the logs out to the freeway.

That means using two types of vehicles instead of one for the task at hand, as well as driving a circuitous highway route instead of a direct offroad route. In completing the two maps, I drove about twice as far while burning about half as much fuel. It feels like a different kind of game, and it packs more distinct types of gameplay into the same setting.

American Wilds is a very interesting expansion, and it makes me very intrigued to see where Mudrunner 2 is headed.

Recommended.

PLANET ALPHA feels less like a videogame and more like a high-concept Unreal engine demo.

The visuals? Gorgeous. The music? Fantastic. The story? Makes no sense. The gameplay? Like a poor man's LIMBO.

Many hazards are poorly telegraphed, instant-killing-enemy behavior is inconsistent, jump requirements are fickle and ledge detection is spotty. PLANET ALPHA suffers from what I call "the horror game's dilemma" - rising action is a game cannot be sustained if player deaths repeatedly reset the narrative to an earlier point. You will experience many, many player deaths in this game. Comparatively few of these deaths will feel like unforced errors. Ironically, the game would have been far more exciting and suspenseful if it were simply more forgiving. If a scripted "close call" features an enemy laser just missing you, it feels transparently artificial - because you've experienced their instant-kill accuracy firsthand, just moments prior.

I feel really, really bad giving this game a thumbs-down. But the simple fact is that it's not very fun. I've never understood the appeal of "Let's Play" videos, watching someone else play a game, but PLANET ALPHA honestly made me wish that I could just sit back and admire the art while someone else did the work of actually manning the controller. You know those QTE sequences where you wish you could admire the lovingly-animated combat scenes, but you have to stay laser-focused on the very center of the screen or you'll miss the button prompt? Yeah. It would be enormously hypocritical of me to dump on No Man's Sky because its gameplay is terrible in spite of its great visuals, then turn around and give this game a pass. And so, sadly, I have to give a thumbs-down.

Not recommended.

Volume is a game that would actually benefit from being shorter.

You have about half-an-hour's worth of decent script spread out across several hours of gameplay, and the sense of progression - even with the levels as short as they are - becomes painfully slow. There are many - far too many - points where it's clear the map designer ran out of ideas and chose to simply make something "interesting," which would be fine, except that it breaks the fourth wall along with any sense of urgency in the story.

The story as a whole is quite underwhelming, and the ending is too predictable for the amount of time it takes to arrive. Finally, as a point of personal annoyance for me, there's an achievement for reading every bit of text in the game, and despite my best efforts, it looks like I missed one somewhere in ~7 hours of playtime that I have no desire to repeat.

If you're a big enough fan of stealth that you're interested in this game, you'll probably find the gameplay too shallow to be engaging. If you're a Bithell fan and you're buying it for the story, you'll find there isn't much of one. Overall, this game isn't terrible but is too mediocre for a thumbs-up.

Not recommended.

The Spintires series represents actual innovation in the gaming development sphere - it birthed an entirely new genre (or at least sub-genre) in videogames. It is a high-fidelity game wholly focused on the difficulty of moving large machines across muddy off-road terrain to transport cargo, and while it doesn't simulate this perfectly, it simulates it very admirably.

The range of vehicles in the game is remarkable; when you drive the smallest vehicles, it almost feels as if you are playing an entirely different game than when you drive the large ones. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that some of the Challenge levels in this game could have entirely new games spun off from them, just to explore the different possibilities of the game engine.

There are downsides, of course. Fallen trees have an odd stubbornness to them - driving over them is suprisingly difficult, they cannot be picked up with a crane, and they can be spun around but not moved - as though their middles are anchored in place. Rocks also seem more slippery than it seems they ought to.

But frankly, my biggest gripe with Spintires right now is its community. This is the most toxic type of internet pessimism and negativity that you will find outside of a moba. Practically every announcement by the developer has been met with jeering and venom, even after two free DLC content packs, an upcoming expansion, and a sequel announced. The idea that the Spintires series is somehow getting worse, or that the current(!) publisher is simply looking for a quick buck, is patently ludicrous if you have been paying any attention to the behind-the-scenes hell this game has gone through.

There was a time when I thought Spintires would be the last of its kind - an entire sub-genre, there and then gone before its time. I cannot tell you how glad I am that I was wrong. I have sent an email thanking the publisher - the publisher - for their role in making this game happen.

Mudrunner is not a large-budget, AAA sequel to Spintires, and it isn't priced as one. But it is the first iteration of a successor series to Spintires, one that I think everyone in the gaming community should be glad even exists. It introduces new content and quality-of-life improvements that are glaringly absent from the original game, which now seems wholly abandoned. And it remains the best, if not the only, real game of its kind that has continued support from its developers.

Recommended.

EDIT: For anyone having mouse+keyboard issues when using a controller, I have published a guide that should fix it in Windows 10:
https://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1536205295

EDIT 2: The American Wilds DLC is also quite good. I reviewed it and gave it a thumbs-up.

Distance is a modern iteration of a rarely-seen genre: The Racer-Platformer. Most of your time in the single-player campaigns will consist of driving fast, jumping, and trying to land cleanly on other sections of road. There are obstacles aplenty, gorgeous visuals, and great music.

The biggest problem is, the more you die, the less fun it is. You can really see the developers struggle with this in the first campaign, where there are significant stretches of time with minimal difficulty. The bonus campaign, Return to Echoes, feels much more like the difficulty that veterans of the free prequel, Nitronic Rush, will be expecting. In Return to Echoes, just keeping track of which way is down can be a challenge.

Once you've finished the main campaign, the Steam Workshop compatible Level Editor provides endless additional content. I highly recommend you try at least a few of the most popular tracks. I'm very surprised that there's no Steam Cloud saving yet; it could be in the pipeline.

All in all, this is a solid game with lots of love and lots of polish. Recommended.

If you're like me, you will spend the last third of this game screaming internally.

The Turing Test plays like a poor man's Portal, and yet it's more expensive. The mediocre puzzles continue far past the point of being interesting, the characters are absolutely loathsome, and any time you think the writing is starting to get interesting, it immediately nosedives back into banality.

You will not find the concepts or moral dilemmas in this game interesting unless this is your first time hearing about them, and even then, there is better material - there are even better games - with which to introduce yourself to them.

Not recommended.