Recent reviews by JSNLV

Genre defining. Have you somehow not played this yet? Unless you have a visual impairment (or the game's photosensitivity warning applies to your situation), you are depriving yourself without reason.

Remember Into The Breach? This is that game again, except this time, you're ex-military wizards shooting each other out of windows. So far, there's less emphasis on randomized maps or roguelike elements, but Tactical Breach Wizards makes up for any initial appearance of lower replayability with better writing, art that evokes Kentucky Route Zero pretending to be Call of Duty: Black Ops with magical accoutrements, and more inventive puzzle-solving tools.

If I'm being honest with myself, this is what I wanted Invisible, Inc. to be: a tactics game with perfect information and the ability to rewind without guilt, as many times as you need. I cannot wait to put more time into it.

I purchased and recommended this game before I knew more about the creator, and after further investigation, I no longer recommend this game.

To get the most out of Paradise Killer, you should first ask yourself a question.

Would you rather:

• play a game about solving a mystery, or
  
• play a game about exploring a landscape for items to collect?

Paradise Killer can reward either approach, but pursuing one experience will undermine the other. If you're interested in solving the mystery, searching every inch of the island for clues and collectibles is a laborious brute-force approach that robs you of the opportunity to pursue specific leads and investigate hunches. You can't deduce the most logical place to search for clues and shout "Eureka!" as your hunches pay off if you've already scoured the map for everything that wasn't nailed down in pursuit of 100% collection completion.

On the flip side, the path of justice is a winding one. Following the chain of evidence will send you back and forth as you revisit suspects so that they can corroborate or contradict each others' alibis. The Island is bigger than you might expect, so you'll want to use fast travel to accelerate this process—except that most trips costs money, and money spent on fast travel can't be used to buy secrets, or to buy drinks, or to unlock new fast travel points, or to pray at shrines. It would be a lot more efficient to just search for currency first so you won't lack for money when an opportunity to spend presents itself, but that means you're back to brute-forcing the game.

It's a hard balance to strike.

Other flaws: despite the aesthetic charm of building vaporwave silhouettes out of tiles, the hacking mini-game feels unnecessary and repetitive. Likewise repetitive are the voiced character quips, although I did enjoy whenever it would sync up with the character's dialogue. Speaking of which, dialogue text could use a few more commas; a semi-colon wouldn't go amiss.

None of these issues were sufficient to blunt my recommendation for this game. This is an impressive landscape and an impressive world in which that landscape is situated. If I wanted more out of the trial and the ending, then that is just a testament to how invested I became in this mystery and in these characters. I hope we see more from these creators.

Pyre is three games in one.

First, it's the Rites, which are basically 3-on-3 fantasy basketball matches. Simple enough; pretty fun, if a bit awkward at first.

The second game is the team management exercise in support of the Rites. As players participate, they're gaining Enlightment and unlocking a choice of Masteries. Each player operates a little differently, and the Masteries let you emphasize their strengths or minimze their weaknesses. Similarly, you can equip and upgrade Talismans to provide further customization options. Events between the Rites can bestow additional benefits.

The third game—and, in some ways, the true game—is that of deciding whom to Liberate. You are all Exiles of the Commonwealth, and each season the Rites permit one anointed player to prove themselves worthy of forgiveness and transport back to the world above, never again to see those still Exiled. You must balance your players’ stated desires for Liberation, your teams’ abilities to perform in the Rites, and your own preferences for which characters you’ll continue to interact with and learn more about as the game continues... and, perhaps, other factors.

I highly recommend playing through the entirety of this game at least once before reading its Community page or in-depth guides in any detail.

Eversion plays quick and pretends to be innocuous, but don't be lulled by its innocent look: this is one mean puzzle-platformer. The game's seeming simplicity makes the mechanics by which its world works immediately apparent, but the levels become demanding faster than you'd expect. First you'll find yourself working out the logic by which many of the more out-of-reach gems can be collected, but as you gain proficiency with Eversion's particular style of platforming, you'll soon find yourself tested on your ability to execute precise leaps and on your persistence in the face of intense opposition. This game is pretty difficult to master, but play through to the end at least once and you'll see why it's one of the all-time classics.

People are calling this game poorly executed. So was the diary I started at the age of 13—and I only need to look at that for a few seconds to feel far more powerful horrified regret than I'd get from hours with the latest roguelike Minecraft/DayZ variant. Similar forces lurk within Cibele.

Let me acknowledge: I follow this author on social media. We've never met, nor (I think) exchanged direct communication. Casual observation suggests that our lives don't intersect. We care about different things, we operate in different ways, and we're moving in different directions.

Cibele made me doubt that dissimilarity: perhaps we're more alike than I thought. Perhaps far more alike. I might believe this because I once occupied a role in a story that echoes the one she tells here, but it might just be that her story hides truth and universality behind its minute details.

Graphics: a photo of your crush / 10
Story: a long blog post you wrote ten years ago / 10
Replayability: your first kiss / 10
Overall: I once made the girl who liked me sit through the "Eyes On Me" cutscene from Final Fantasy VIII, and I can never undo that / 10

In conclusion: Cibele is all the voyeuristic truth I craved in adolescence steeped in all the self-reflection I've come to dread as an adult. Highly recommended.

I gave "Why Am I Dead At Sea" every opportunity to disappoint me. The art felt derivative and simple; the chiptune soundtrack suggested a by-the-numbers approach to game design. I am relieved to report that these initial doubts fell by the wayside after only a little play, and surface concerns of this sort disappeared entirely once I submerged myself in the mystery.

The central conceit is that you're the spirit of someone recently killed, and you can inhabit the bodies of people you know to access their abilities and research the circumstances of your death. If you learn enough about your host, you can take full control, doing things that they wouldn't normally or discussing subjects of which they know nothing. This didn't seem very original in my initial (uncharitable) assessment—Double Fine's "Stacking" treads similar ground. However: "Stacking" is a high-concept artpiece puzzler that I couldn't bring myself to finish. "Why Am I Dead At Sea" is a thriller. It has suspense. It has characters that appear to inhabit straightforward archetypes—and then it challenges you to figure out whether those characters have contradictory depths, or complementary depths, or no depth whatsoever.

I played through it twice in eight hours.

Highly recommended.

A slick-looking heist simulator! Classes with different abilities! I thought it was going to be really deep, and while I imagine there are depths to be found for players with greater skill than mine, in actual play the game is less about an intricate plan tailored to your character's strengths than it is a madcap scramble to recover after the mission inevitably goes awry. In other words, make sure you play this with a friend or two, and make sure their level of incompetence matches your own.