Recent reviews by IJspegel

tl;dr:
7/10 - must buy if you're a fan of the Wizzarding world, wait for a sale if you're not.

The wizzarding world was the constant franchise of early 2000's. For people like me who went to middle school around the time the books and movies were released, it was a pop culture phenomenon. It was everywhere, you read the books, saw the movies, played those early EA video game adaptations back when they were good. And after the 8th movie came out you were around the same age as the characters, you were done with school and heading out into the real world. This franchise means a lot to the 'millennial' generation and I'd say Avalanche has done a great job capturing what made the franchise so special all those years ago, while still taking into account that the target audience isn't twelve anymore.

Fans of the franchise will love this game. Hogwarts has everything you'll recognize from the movies, and even stuff from the books that never made it to the silver screen. The smallest things, like the potion ingredient store closet or the jail cell on the roof they kept Sirius Black in for all of 2 seconds in the third movie. The House Elf kitchens and the ghost ballroom from the books, they're all there for you to discover. It's a nostalgia trip and that alone is worth the price of admission, IF you are a fan.

Avalanche has done everything it can to make this game appeal to all, unfortunately they listened to the twitter side of the internet for what would appeal to them. The response this game has gotten online is nothing short of hilarious, the very people this game is made for are trying all that they can to stop people from playing it. Their whims are being catered to at every turn. From the for 1790's Scotland laughably diverse student body and faculty, merchants and townsfolk, to the sexuality of every side character seemingly being non-straight. You'd think they'd eat this game up, but no. I hope that sends a message to the industry that you can not please these people.

For people less familiar with the source material, or those who never really cared that much, this game must seem a bit mid. When you get out of Hogwarts you are greeted with a massive overworld that is completely littered with useless stuff. Mostly consisting of what are called Merlin trials, which require you to do a tedious little puzzle to trigger an animation. This gets you inventory upgrades, so you'll have to do at least a few, but there a dozens of these menial things everywhere.
As well as the caves, which are all copy pasted from the same handful of templates and get you nothing other than a piece of gear which is always worse than what you already have. You can completely ignore these but they will always clutter up your compass, map and minimap.

Combat is simple and can be trivialized with potions and plants, I finished the whole thing challenge dungeons and all on normal difficulty but it never actually got difficult. Maybe that changes on higher difficulties, but the combat isn't what makes this game worth playing anyway.

This game shines in it's presentation, like I said, if you are a fan of the wizzarding world you will love this game. But it doesn't quite capture the (pardon the phrasing) magic of going to a magic school and having your own adventure. I think most of that is to do with the lack of interaction with your classmates. You do your main adventure mostly on your own being aided only by a professor. Your classmates are relegated to side quests, which I think is a shame. Because what connected the audience to the story of the books and movies was building this bond with new friends and together becoming stronger than any adversary. Here you are the chosen one who could've done it all by themselves.
Portkey games has this phone game 'Hogwarts Mystery' that does that way better. I hope they decide to port that to PC in some from or another now that this is such a rousing success.

Who you are in this game is vague, your origins are not revealed. Who are you? Why are you only joining Hogwarts as a fifth year? Where do you come from? It seems there's a prelude missing and kind of an important one.
The choices you make along the way also don't matter to the story one bit.

Avalanche clearly want you to spend the bulk of your time in Hogwarts. You get a whole room all to yourself for you to interact with animals, build the perfect pen for them. Create your own space decorated to your liking, you can sink hours into just that if you wanted to.

Technically it runs well enough. It runs on the Unreal 4 engine, so there's still pop-in everywhere when you're outside zipping through the map on a broom. It also does a small frame drop every time you charge into a different area of the overworld map. Inside Hogwarts that all goes away. It does have to load a second or two at doors at times still though. So you can see the seams in this seamlessly connected world, but they didn't really bother me.
Enemy AI is single minded and dumb, when you blast someone of a platform or just remove them far enough from their path, they have to run all the way back to where they started. They won't attack you during their little hike until they get there. None of them will ever dodge out of the way.

The amount of content here is nothing to sneeze at, and considering the success of this game I'd be surprised if Warner Bros. didn't come out with some cut content as DLC. There's a screenshot of a dragon on this very storepage that is just not in this game. The made character models fro dementors that are only used in one cutscene for one Hufflepuff specific quest in Azkaban. We only hear about stuff happening in the ministry. Definitely room for expansion.

For fans of franchise this is an absolute must-buy. For everyone else, you should probably wait for a sale. It's a fun romp, but like I said, without the nostalgia trip it loses a lot of it's appeal.

This stuff's like crack, but worse for your sleep schedule.

Superb writing, worth playing for the dialogue alone. A masterclass in ludonarrative storytelling.

This game does a lot of things right. Oozing with atmosphere and and excellent mystery vibe throughout. The writing and dialogue is really well done and the pacing makes you just want to play the whole thing in one go.
There is however not a whole lot for the player to do. You're not actually solving a mystery, so much as you're watching it be unraveled. The puzzles, insofar you can call them that, are really easy with obvious solutions. So there's no challenge to this game.
But like I said, it's so well written you just want to play to the end regardless.
When you do get to the end however, you frustratingly realize that there is NO ending. The game pretends it does, it pretends it has nine. But they're all functionally the same and provide no closure to the story. A shame, because I think if this game were two to four hours longer it could've wrapped everything up nicely. A sequel has apparently been in production for almost a year now, so I suppose we'll see what that'll bring if and when that does come out.
Some technical aspects could also be better. It's best played on a gamepad, as the keyboard controls are kinda weird and there is no mouse support. There's also an option for new game+, but it seemingly doesn't work.
Still, this game has amazing art, great voice acting, and really great writing and atmosphere. And with up to ten hours of story it's well worth it's asking price. Fun for the whole family, play it with your kids on the couch. Or by yourself, if you're looking for some quality entertainment.
The lack of ending is almost frustrating enough for me to say wait for the sequel to be out, but that would be doing a disservice to the quality of this game. It deserves to be played, it deserves to be enjoyed. It has my recommendation.

Despite it's simple premise there are enough challenging puzzles to engage the player for a few hours.
It's artstyle reminiscent of a cross between Puzzle Agent and those Red Bull commercials make for a pleasant pallet and the surprisingly great music make getting stuck on a puzzle and staring at the same screens more than bearable.
Certainly a product for these times, the story takes you on a quest for a simple pilsner in the city of Oslo seemingly overrun with hipsters and craft beer pubs. A task that will seem more and more insurmountable as you progress. The writing is out to make fun of the hipster subculture and I'd say it succeeded in that regard.
It does however have the tendency to break the fourth wall and throw in forced references to classic games of the genre, which I feel detracts from the otherwise stellar writing.
This is clearly a game made by people who love the genre, the classic interface is proof enough of that alone. Throw in some raunchy visual gags and you've got yourself a game for the more adult players who grew up with the genre. And for those people it is a great loveletter to everything they likely enjoy about point 'n click adventure games. I'd also recommend newcomers to try this game, the classic UI may not be as streamlined as the modern standard, but it's still very much worth playing.
The game ends with sequel bait, so you're not getting a satisfactory ending here, but this first game offers enough playtime on it's own.

At the time of writing this review, the price of purchase isn't known to me, but as a casual player you can probably finish this in four hours and I'm assuming the price will reflect that. And I'm sure they'll take the tenet from The Secret of Monkey Island to heart:'Never spend more than $20 on a computergame'.

If this is what's in store for the next game in the series, it does not bode well.
It's baffling to me that this (for all intents and purposes) demo got released in this state. There is no reason for it to boast the system requirements that it does, it is after all a linear game that only requires one room, or hallway to be loaded in at a time. And it can't even pull that off. Every dialogue- or cutscene has missing backgrounds or skyboxes, as if it has to load those things in separately every time the camera changes. You'll be staring into the void for half the game at this rate.
The UI is, again, optimized for consoles which makes playing it with the mouse annoying. It also added QTE's for the most mundane things, because that makes it more engaging and not annoying at all, right? /sarcasm
Other new additions include dialogue options that I doubt will have much effect storywise at all, and time based events, because why would you want to go exploring anyway, right?

The one thing I will give this game is that it started things off with a large automaton display, coupled with a great musical score. Which was a welcome return to form. Too bad half of it was pitch black due to missing skyboxes.

This is not a good advertisement for the next game, if this is anything to go by. It's terribly optimized, it looks broken, textures are muddy, and it doesn't feel good to play due to a UI that prioritizes console players over PC players.
I wouldn't hold my breath for the full game.

I'm going to be a bit biased about this game as I dropped way more money then I should have on the crowdfunding campaign for this one.
But holy hell, is it worth the wait and possibly even the money.

Everything about this game just works. The visuals, the gameplay, the level design, the music. It all works to create an absolute masterpiece.
Igavania is back, and it feels so good. There's an enormous amount of builds to try out because of all the different weapons, gear and shard powers. And they all feel like viable options for your run.
Add to that the different modes, like speedrun and boss rush and of course multiple difficulties, and you can play this game for a long time without gettinng bored of it.
Plus, there's another playable character coming, so you can double all of that.
If here's any negatives it's that the movement speed can feel a bit slow and some enemy's have anoying sound bits when they die, but none of that can offset the amazing time I had, and will continue to have with this game.
I may have dropped too much money on it, but €40 is well worth it.

Absolutely game of the year.

Draugen is an underwhelming experience all in all.
The voice acting is well done and the interaction between the two main characters is very believable.
But it's another one of those choose what you say, but it doesn't really matter games.
It offers up a mystery plot and a psychological angle that makes you question what is real and isn't, but it explores neither thread to a satisfactory degree and leaves you without a sense of great revelation at the end.
There's sequel bait in the credits, so maybe they can explore the potential this game sets up for itself a bit more in a follow up, but as it stands this short title ultimately feels lacking.

6/10 wait for a discount.

This game doesn;t have an ending. It just stops after 3 hours. What a waste of time, you don't get anything out of it.

This is a weird one. It seems the developper wanted to make a standard puzzle game with more diverse puzzles, because you can see the storyboard for these used in the loose story thread, but they ended up using the same one close to a hundred times. So you end up matching the same objects throughout the one hundred levels.
They try and change it up a bit by matching 3 objects, or not having all objects disapear when you find them. Notibly, there's a variation where you have to unstack the objects first, only this doesn't work. The game tells you to drag and drop objects, but the only way these objects move is by clicking on it really fast and even then they only inch upwads. This makes me think the dev lacked the skill they needed to actually make the game they wanted to make and could only manage this match object game.
It is still possible to finish this game, and I have, but it's really dull and repatitive.

Also, this game using screeshots from, and a very similar plot to Dreamscapes: the Nightmares Heir, which is a far more fleshed out game by the same developers. So this might actually be some weird alpha build they pushed out for extra cash.
Just play the Dreamscapes games if you're looking for a casual experience.