Recent reviews by Carth

It is initially creepy and scary, surprisingly so in fact. There's something about paying attention to differences in a totally still scene that makes it really creepy. When you don't know what you're looking for and every cabin is different, it can make you really on edge, and there are a few brown pants moments.

However, there are only 30-something different cabins, and once you've solved them there isn't anything else other than doing them again, but you already know the answers and it can't be scary any more. It's a shame really, they could have made a longer game with more of a story or some payoff or proper ending.

But for the price, if you want a quick scare for an hour it's worth a play.

Will write full review later.

I liked it, but I really hate that the developer added achievements to a 9 year old game 1 week after I completed it and spent ages finding all secrets. It's a difficult game with a lot of repetition through areas and not something I want to repeat for years, if ever. Could have at least said you were adding achievements, why keep it a secret if you knew you were working on it...

Edit: STOP putting clowns on my review. It's not funny. Imagine how you would feel if this happened to you.

DUSK is awesome. It's a must-play it if you like old-school shooters similar to Quake. They've really perfected the genre.

The 2nd and 3rd episodes are where it has some really inventive level design. The weapons are great and fun to use. It's fast-paced and has lots of secrets to find.

Also the developers recently released a free HD texture pack.

I had a lot of fun playing this. The gameplay is enjoyable and rewarding, the controls and mechanics are perfect. It's a twin stick 2D platform shooter. I played with keyboard and mouse.

There is a big variety of weapons and items, as well as upgrading of your character. The upgrades are permanent, whereas the weapons, items and companions you find are not, which makes each play through slightly different.

If you play it as a roguelike (which you should) then when you die you have to start again from the first level. But each run you'll get different stuff and the levels themselves are partially randomised - each room is taken from a pool of possible rooms and connected together.

The soundtrack is good and the retro graphics are gorgeous. I like the dystopian future setting. The dialogue and humour won't be to everyone's taste because it references present day political matters and takes them to extremes, but it does not hide it so you would know almost immediately if it's not your cup of tea.

The difficulty is just about right, with a good learning curve. I died a few times in my first play throughs, but each time I got a little bit stronger, as well as learning how to defeat the enemies and bosses. They all have their own moves and particular types of bullet hell, which after a while you learn. There is a double jump and a dash (during which you are invulnerable) and these are very satisfying to use, particularly after being upgraded.

After completing the game, the new game+ takes the form of keeping all your upgrades and playing again, but on the hardest difficulty.

Sadly, after completing on nightmare difficulty all you can do is do it again. I felt that there wasn't quite enough variety in the levels to make me want to keep doing it. It needs achievements, or unlocks, or secrets to find, or some reason to keep replaying. Or just more levels, maybe some DLC. The core gameplay is good, so more content would be welcome.

Overall I enjoyed playing it.

Visually beautiful, but not really a game. Not even a good walking simulator, because it was very laggy for me and almost vomit-inducing with the input delay and motion blur. I think it was designed for XBox, even the menus took me a while to figure out. I couldn't get the mouse input to work in the puzzles, and there is no instruction, just a picture of a D-pad. Maybe I was doing it wrong, but it just seems very clunky and poorly optimised.

I watched a bit of a video of someone else playing instead, and don't feel like I missed out. It seems like the developers had an artistic idea about visuals and atmosphere, but no idea how to make a game.

The controls are clunky. Panning around frequently will randomly zoom in on something that you didn't mean to. Turning cogs and opening draws often doesn't work right, and you can miss things because you thought you'd tried something but it turns out it hadn't turned or opened all the way. Clicking on an object in the environment will sometimes pick up a different object or randomly jump to another zoomed in location.

The hints are frustrating and annoying. It's like having a sarcastic person standing behind you while you play. Almost every hint is something painfully obvious that I've already been looking for or trying to do for the previous few minutes, such as "I just found <object>, I wonder where that can go".

The ending of each puzzle is anticlimactic. It just shows a little menu saying "chapter complete" with a 'continue game' button. Each puzzle is isolated without much continuity. It feels like a game on rails. Nothing can be done out of order, you just need to find an item, find the hole it goes in, repeat.

I think this game is basically like a walking simulator, but without walking. It practically plays itself and you have little control over what happens, besides waiting until you find the next thing that has to be done in order. Each thing you do opens something on the box, which gives you a new key or item, which can be inserted into a hole you have to find, which opens something on the box... repeat. Pretty much everything you find is basically a key, even if it's some other object, ultimately it will be inserted somewhere and trigger another animation that opens something else, and gives you another item to use elsewhere.

Ultimately it's just a port of a simple mobile game and poorly optimised. A lot of the puzzles you can tell might have worked better with a touch interface or tilting of a mobile device.

I did not complete the game because it kept crashing, and eventually it crashed so catastrophically that I could not use my computer, I couldn't even Ctrl+Alt+Del or force close it with task manager. The Room forced itself to be the top window above all others (with a black screen). Windows itself after being told to restart was unable to, and so eventually I had to use the physical restart computer button which I haven't had to use for over 15 years.

Designed for a controller, not very good controls in the menus etc (sometimes you can use the mouse but not for everything). Controlling the gun on the dome also feels awkward. Maybe it gets better with power ups but I had no desire to go further because it just felt boring.

The gameplay is very simplistic without much depth to it. Just the same thing over and over. I was expecting more from it. It's a shame because it's very nicely presented, I like the graphics, but not worth the price. I can't see myself wanting to play it for very long.

I wish the dome part had been more like a traditional tower defence game with strategical placement of different units, without the user having to control them directly. If I was just mining and upgrading the base and the mining was more engaging then this might have been better.

Very nice pixel artwork and atmosphere and interesting themes of loss, depression etc.

As a point and click game it's good. You can never get yourself properly stuck, and the answer can usually be deduced. It is possible to miss some achievements since some parts of the game permanently change, which is why I needed to play through a second time.

I played with the annotations on the second time, which basically tells you what all the references are in the dialogue. I basically hadn't understood the story at all, although it dropped some hints, it was never clear to me. Almost all of the dialogue is allegorical and referencing Norse mythology, Biblical mythology, Hebrew mythology, ancient poems or plays, Greek and Roman works, Edgar Allen Poe, plus all manner of obscure references.

Nothing is ever said to you in plain English, so from the point of view of the player it's like every character spews random words for no reason. A lot of the allusions and references are very indirect and made in a way that you basically would have to be told what is being referenced, even if you knew the source material. The author seems to think the more references the better, as every line in this game is a reference to something.

Nonetheless, I did still like the game, even if the narrative exposition was a bit lacking. If it had been better, then I would have cared more about the woman and my own fate.

This is a not a good game. Most of the it is a walking simulator with some long unskippable cut scenes. The walking and running speed is far too slow for something that demands you backtrack repeatedly through large environments. It gets mind-numbingly dull after a while, despite the beautiful scenery.

In between walking sections are incredibly boring fight sections. The mechanics are easy to pick up and unchallenging, yet the enemies have so much health and just keep spawning. It would have been better if the fighting was faster and more dynamic, instead of expecting you to spend ages repeatedly hitting an enemy only for another identical enemy to spawn. The combat honestly ruins the game. It's pure filler and I wanted to skip it. It didn't feel rewarding it just slows things down even more.

There were some sections later on where I had to fight 30+ enemies of increasing difficulty, often 3 at a time. I don't know if this was a bug with the auto-difficulty scaling, but it was so boring. I just wanted it to end so that I could continue with the walking simulator. Eventually I got backed into a corner and wasn't able to dodge any more and couldn't see because the scenery obscured my view, and died, so I had to repeat the entire fight section.

The boss battles aren't much better. The Fenrir fight looked really cool, and was an interesting idea with the darkness and mental imagery preventing you from seeing anything, but... I couldn't see anything. It was frustrating. I got so bored of seeing Senua's gormless expression in the one death animation. The fight itself had only two mechanics: dodge and use heavy attacks. But often the dodge didn't work. Every now and again you become completely unable to see anything. If you don't have your focus available then it is guaranteed death, and the only way to get is to land some hits, which you can't do when you can't see, nor can you dodge. It's guaranteed death.

The only other aspect are the puzzles, which are poorly designed and require you to walk around the environment and standing in certain locations and looking at things. It's a nice idea, but very quickly gets old.

It's a shame because I like the setting, but the story is poorly told with barely any exposition. It's told in such a way that they do not tell you anything, but it's not a mystery that makes you want to find out what happens, since you have no idea what is going on or why anything is happening. It's only about 80% of the way through the game that you start to realise what the story is about, although even by the end I was still confused. I get the impression that the creators of this game thought they were geniuses, but the end result is something that is a bad game and a bad story, and not even a very good depiction of psychosis.

The game's gimmick is that while playing you continuously hear different girl's voices saying silly things like "you won't succeed" or "don't go in there" or just inaudible whispering. All of the dialogue is incredibly cringey. It's like it was written by a 14 year old trying to be deep.

The game has secrets that you can find, which are just someone telling Norse stories. Unfortunately, they stop playing if you walk too far away. So you either have to stand still listening to a story, or run in silence to the next area (with the very slow running speed). Or sometimes one of the voices in your head will talk over it so you don't get to hear it.

The game never tells you how to do anything. You have to look up the controls for yourself and guess what you are supposed to do at every point. Sometimes it's really obscure, such as going to a certain location and looking somewhere, causing stairs to magically appear. That was never a gameplay mechanic up to that point and there was no reason to think of it. The fact you can charge up your heavy attack, I had no idea about until I read it on the forum, because the game itself never tells you how to play it or what you can do.

What the game gets right is the voice acting, sound design, character animations and visuals. It looks stunning, and the facial animations are very realistic. Although the protagonist has been purposefully made as ugly and androgynous as possible for some reason.

In conclusion, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is one of the most boring and repetitive games I've ever played. It fails as a game and as a walking sim. If you paid full price for this game then you got ripped off. If you can get it at 75% off then it's still not worth it. It's not fun to play and is a waste of time.