Recent reviews by Dreadjaws

Disregard my shown playtime. I played this game through completion in GamePass.

The Callisto Protocol, much like Mighty No. 9, sold itself as a spiritual successor of an existing IP made by some of the original creators while the IP owners seemingly forgot about it. The appeal of this sort of thing is immediately apparent: as long as your attachment to the franchise isn't relegated to existent characters and story and it's more about gameplay, atmosphere and tone then you'll be happy to move on to a new IP that promises all those things, and the fact that it comes from the original creators means they know what they're doing.

Unfortunately, just like for Mighty No. 9, the creators have oversold their level of participation in the original, and the resulting product, while similar enough to the original (sometimes to a fault), is a major downgrade in every aspect.

Lets get the positive out of the way first: the game's visuals are very good. The likeness to the actors who play the main roles here is astonishing, and unlike in other games, where they look good while static but feel awkarwd in motion, they always look great here, to the point where you'd be excused for thinking some cutscenes are in live action.

Sadly, that's pretty much it for the positives. Everything else ranges from mediocre to terrible.

I resist to call this game a "spiritual successor" to Dead Space because "blatant ripoff" fits it much better. Yes, it comes from some of the original creators, but it feels like it doesn't even try to innovate. The movement feels the same, the in-game UI is similar, the visuals, the pacing and structure are all the same. There's even a dedicated “stomp” button, with the same function. There's not even an attempt to evolve or improve those systems over the onees they're aping. They're either identical or worse.

In the few instances where the game deviates from Dead Space it's always notably for the worse. While in DS you could explore the place mostly at your leisure this one is strictly linear. Exploration is limited to the occasional extra hallway with some loot at the end. And God forbid you pick the path that advances the story first, because then that loot is gone forever, as the game won't let you go back.

The combat is now inexplicably focused on melee, You only have one melee weapon and one strategy to defeat foes, so every fight feels the same. You have a few guns to pick up, but their usage is so situational and their power so low that outside of the very last boss battle you're better off ignoring them altogether. Enemy variety is already ridiculously low, but the fact that you fight them all the same way doesn't help.

The game also puts too much focus into being cinematic and realistic. This means you'll be constantly fighting the camera that insists on putting the attention far from where you need it, and extensive and uninterruptible animations will get you killed more than once. Attempts at drama get so constant and over the top that it borders on parody. If you see your character following another one through a walkway expect it to break down and make you fall through a long tunnel every single time.

Of course, a major issue with the game is that it labels itself as horror but all it ever tries to do is jump scares. And by God, it abuses the hell out of them. There are dozens, maybe even hundreds of them, not one of them is even the slightest bit effective, and It reaches a point where they become so predictable that again it all borders on parody. I feel like I'm a Scary Movie skit where the killer is trying to scare the protagonists and they never react.

Don't expect the story and characters to save this. The story is as bland and predictable as they come, and the characters would need to have an extra 50 hours of development before I felt generous enough to call them one-dimensional. Just to rub salt in the wound, the actual ending is paywalled, which is marred even further by the fact that it's painfully unsatisfying anyway.

I cannot in good conscience recommend anyone to play this when any Dead Space game out there (save perhaps for the third one) is an improvement in every way. Even with PS3-style graphics the atmosphere and art direction of the first two games is considerably better, and the remake of the first game blows them all out of the water.

Spilled! is a very, very short game, but it's absolutely a worthy experience. It's fun and relaxing and the short playtime means it doesn't overstay its welcome. The gameplay is very simple, but very chill. You control a boat and you have to use it to clean up the pollution in the water. As you clean up you get paid, and you can use that money to upgrade your boat to make the cleaning process easier and faster, and as the areas advance you get a few more things to do in each one.

It's, again, very simple and that's the beauty of it. It's not meant to be challenging, just relaxing, and does it to near perfection (trying to catch some stray bottles can get a bit on your nerves). It is also extraordinarily beautiful. The art style is gorgeous and colorful and the soundtrack is calm and joyful. It's very easy to control (at least with a gamepad).

Maybe the one negative point I can give it is that it lacks in visual options. The only thing you can do is to change the quality of the shadows and switch between fullscreen and windowed mode, but if there's any way to change the resolution or any other basic option I couldn't find it. The game runs perfectly fine in my integrated graphics card, though, so it's not much of an issue, but still worth mentioning.

Overall, for the price it's a very nice experience and good value. While playing through completion will take you one hour or so it's the kind of game you can be back to once in a while just for how relaxing it is.

Really good Bullet Heaven game, at least so far. In case you're not aware, a Bullet Heaven game is the opposite of a Bullet Hell. While in the latter it's you trying to survive against an increasing amount of projectiles in the former you are the one trying to get as many projectiles of your own against an increasing number of enemies. Popular examples are the likes of Vampire Survivors or Brotato.

As expected for this sort of game, you pick a character and then you have to survive waves of enemies while gathering resources and XP. After each wave is done you get to improve your character before continuing, getting a choice of a few random improvements every time. Each character has different starting skills and specs, and combined with the random nature of the rewards there are nearly limitless different ways in which your character can progress.

This particular game has the premise that you are a boss in an MMO and you have to survive hordes of players trying to kill you. There's a lot of humor in the game, particularly coming from the player dialogue. Visually the game has a colorful and cute character design, and a nice soundtrack to go with it.

The nature of this sort of game means that it's very easy to pick up and figure out if you're gonna like it just by trying a few rounds. I fully recommend you try this demo and wishlist the full game.

It was a few months ago when this game suddenly exploded out of nowhere. I kept looking at pictures of it and didn't seem like my thing. I kept hearing nothing but good things about it, but I resisted to try it. Then the game came out on Apple Arcade (a Netflix-like subscription service but for games) and as I recently had acquired an iPad and had three months of that service for free I decided to give it a try.

So I installed it. And played it. And played it. And PLAYED IT. And played nothing else for nearly three months, entirely ignoring all the other games in the service that I had already installed. Then the free months were gone and I had the choice to renovate the service, buy the game or neither. I chose neither, thinking I finally might be free. It didn't last. I bought the game a couple weeks later and started all over (as Apple Arcade progress doesn't translate to bought games). I don't regret it. How could I? It was the right choice. This was by far my game of the year in 2024.

It was a joy to unlock everything again. So, of course, at the first chance I bought it on another platform. See, this game is not just addictive. It's genuinely incredibly fun. So complex yet so simple. So overwhelming yet so user-friendly. So random yet so skill based. It's the perfect kind of game. Easy to learn, hard to master, still as fun on the 100th day as in the first one.

You might look at some screenshots and be fooled into thinking it's just poker with a few flairs. But no. Poker here is just a means to an end. Poker is a game of chance. Balatro is a game of skill. Yes, randomness is at the order of the day, but you are constantly given tools to beat luck at its own game. It's just so satisfying to enter a world of pure chaos and use your skill to turn it to your advantage. And the more you play, the more you learn. The more the game throws at you the more prepared you become.

I really don't want to discuss the rules of the game here. That is pointless. You can't just read about the game and expect to understand it. You need to play it, and then you'll see. Then you'll finally get it.

I'm a sucker for games that reward exploration, and in that regard Caravan SandWitch seems tailor made for me. No combat, no chance of death and puzzles are deceptively simple, but everything works in favor of exploring a surprisingly vast world and feeling an immense sense of satisfaction when you finally get to reach a place you spotted from far away and you weren't sure it was even possible to get to.

As the game progresses you unlock a few more tools that help you reach previously closed areas, but also the game is designed in a way where you can simply use ingenuity to reach certain places without those tools, which feels incredibly rewarding, especially when there's some collectible item to find. It's a relaxing experience in general, but you can still find a few tense moments by trying to pull off some tricky platforming.

There are a bunch of items to collect, and the majority of them have some sort of purpose so you don't feel you're collecting just for the sake of it.

From a technical perspective the game is fantastic. It looks gorgeous with a cartoonish, somewhat cel-shaded art style and colorful environments. Music is calm and relaxing, and fits the world very well.

The story is simple and I'm only a few hours in but so far not particularly original, but works well enough to setup the main gameplay loop, and the worldbuilding gets more interesting as you progress. Characters fare a bit better, since they're varied and colorful and their sidequests tend to help build up and deepen the world more than the main story does.

While I'm still not finished with the game so far the experience hasn't gotten old and since the purpose of the game is to be relaxing I'd say it does its job perfectly. It's a full recommendation from me, particularly if you're into exploration and you don't mind games with no combat.

I have owned and played all of the SteamWorld games. I have liked some of them, loved others (never disliked one), but the original SteamWorld Heist is by far my favorite. I've bought that game in every platform I own that it's available for. So, when the sequel was announced, I was beyond excited and bought it on day one. I'm only a few hours in, but I'm glad to announce that so far it's at least just as fun as the previous one, possibly more.

If you've played the first one, you know the basic gist. This is sort of a 2D X-Com style tactical game. You have a group of different characters with different abilities and you pick from them to enter a stage, in which battles are turn-based and turns are faction-based. And there are lots and lots of hats. If you haven't played the first game, go and do that now. It's the better starting point.

Leaving aside the story and characters, the gameplay is largely the same (a good thing, of course), with a few notable differences. For one, instead of the map being a board-game style set path it's now fully explorable, with fog of war even, which is very welcome. There's also some light naval combat, which is very simple but works well. Your ship is as customizable as your characters now, with weapons, armor and other upgrades you can set and freely change.

From a character standpoint, there's now a job system. While in the previous game each character came with a set archetype (such as sniper or brawler) you can now freely give any of your characters any of the available jobs from the start, even mix and matching some of their unlockable abilities, very reminiscent of something like Final Fantasy V. It's a considerably more engaging system.

I haven't played enough of the game to know how many more new things it brings, but I have played enough to know it's an instant classic. When I'm not playing it all I want to do is come back to it, just like it happened with the first one. I will update the review when I'm done with the campaign, but I find myself comfortable already giving a recommendation. It's really that fun.

This is the sort of game I'd glance at when it launched and think "Well, this looks visually neat, but I don't think it's for me". I didn't think the odd marriage of underwater exploration and restaurant management would be something I'd find appealing, and I confess I recoil a bit these days whenever I read "rogue-like elements" in a game's description.

But for one reason or another it ended up showing up in recommendations, so I gave it a go. And by God is this game amazing. I don't know how they did it, but just like the sushi chef does in the game somehow they managed to find the perfect recipe to unite all of these disparage ingredients in an amazing product and convert a skeptic like me into a fan.

So yeah, the basic gameplay loop consists of hunting for seafood in the day and then serve that food in a sushi restaurant at night, but you'd be foolish to think this is all there is. A mobile game this is not, and it's appropriately as deep as the sea you spend so much time into.

There used to be a time where underwater levels were the bane of videogames. Between poor controls and uninteresting mechanics coupled with time/oxygen management they used to be not just less fun than regular levels but actually annoying or infuriating. This has changed quite a bit in the last few years, with games like Abzu and Subnautica making underwater exploration more fun and interesting. Dave the Diver is no exception and realizes that if you're going to make a game where you spend most of the time diving then you better make it fun.

The underwater portion of the game is composed of two main mechanics: exploration and combat/hunting. Exploration has you scour the sea for food to hunt and items to gather, both for the restaurant and other missions. While fish and other sea life are aplenty sometimes looking for specific ones isn't as simple. You might have to come at a certain time of the day, explore at a particular depth, remove obstacles and once you're there you might have to fight, sometimes to survive.

There's a variety of items and weapons at your disposal to make traversal and combat easier. Oxygen tanks, mines, harpoons, nets, elemental guns, etc. You can unlock more equipment as you explore more. You can also spend money and resources to upgrade your equipment so you can explore further, carry more weight and have better chances of survival. The rogue-like elements are a strength here, as every time you dive the map is mostly different, so exploration is highly encouraged and rewarded.

All of this wouldn't mean much if the game was a pain to control, but thankfully it's not. Movement is (no pun intended) fluid and the controls responsive. Combat is easy to figure out but though to master, which keeps it interesting. And, of course, you have tools to streamline it (some permanent, some temporary).

For the sushi management part you get to learn recipes, choose the menu every day, serve customers (some ways are more involved than others) and hire staff to help you out. You don't actually do the cooking, but it gets pretty frantic anyway.

But the thing is: this is (again, no pun intended) only the surface. The more you play the more stuff the game throws at you. You'll start growing your own food, improving your restaurant, trying to please hard customers, fighting literal monsters, meeting increasingly oddbal characters, finding a lost civilization, obtaining minigames, helping with the ecology, opening new places to explore and more. Every time you think you have the game figured out it gives you more to do and puts a new spin in the old stuff.

Then there's the technical aspect. The game looks gorgeous. Underwater exploration mixes 2D and 3D pixel-art style graphics just as well as gameplay styles. Every once in a while you get some very well animated cutscenes. Sound and music are very nice. There's no voice acting, but it's not needed or missed. And the game keeps a stylish sense of humor. There are more than a few references to pop culture, but they don't feel out of place and they're mostly satirical while also serving a purpose rather than being there for the sake of it.

I really just can't recommend this enough and I should stop or I'll be writing a novel at this point. The game is addictive for all the right reasons. Get it now and I promise you won't regret it.

Crow Country is a fantastic entry in the survival horror genre. As the genre itself was coined in the Playstation 1 era it's very fitting that this game is inspired by games from the time. While the visual style and music brings to mind the original Final Fantasy VII the gameplay, story and enemy design borrow more from the likes of Resident Evil and Silent Hill.

You play as Agent Mara Forest, who's investigating a derelict theme park called Crow Country in search of his owner, who's gone into hiding after a series of lawsuits. As you progress the park starts being invaded by hostile, inexplicable creatures. What started as a simple search is now a quest for survival, as you try to avoid these monsters and find your suspect while piecing together the real reason for why the park had to be abandoned.

In classic survival horror fare the game mixes combat with puzzle solving. Rather than being mere box pushing or color matching puzzles are a bit more interesting here, and quite varied. Combat is, as it pertains for this sort of game, deliberately clunky but satisfying. Don't expect a natural progression in firepower, though. You'll have to work hard if you want thougher weapons. Outside of your starting handgun, all other guns are well hidden and require good puzzle-solving skills to find, which is quite refreshing.

From a technical perspective the game excels. Its visual style deliberately apes that of classic PSX games without being constrained by its limitations. Screenshots of the game will have you think the backgrounds are prerendered like in Resident Evil, but you can actually fully rotate the camera 360 degrees. There's no voice acting, but the audio is foreboding and creepy.

The story is intriguing and, like Resident Evil, rooted in sci-fi rather than anything supernatural. It's generally well told through the use of files and occasional conversations with other characters, though there is one bit I think it's supposed to be a plot twist but I found it to be rather obvious. Still, one reveal near the end is more than a bit creepy and puts an interesting perspective on the events up until then.

From a replay value perspective, the game has a few different difficulty settings, whether you're interested in simple puzzle solving or you want a challenge, and if you're hunting for achievements you're likely to need more than one playthrough anyway. In normal difficulty the game takes around 6-7 hours to be completed, give or take depending on your exploration habits. More than well worth its launch price.

A definite recommendation for every fan of the genre. You can't go wrong with this game.

Duck Detective: TSS is a cute investigation game where you as the titular character are hired to solve a small mystery and end up being pulled into solving a larger one.

The first thing that jumps at the player is the appealing visuals. With a very colorful cartoonish style and characters that deliberately look and move as if they were cut out of paper that give the game a very distinct style. The game is also surprisingly fully voiced.

The gameplay is not just regular point and click adventure fare. As you talk with characters and examine objects you gather information, which you can then use to solve clues. The game automatically gathers these, and then it's your job to figure out how to properly place them.

The flip side to this is that despite the game gathering all the info for you and keeping it stored in your notebook it still expects you to pay attention. As you move around looking at stuff and talking to characters you might forget the context in which certain clues were acquired. This will undoubtedly cause some players not to fully understand how the protagonist reaches some conclusions. But the game isn't cheating, all the info is there if you're observant. Thankfully, the game allows you to properly look at the clues in their original context and interrogate characters more than once, which I suggest you do if you feel stuck rather than trying to brute-force the solutions.

The one slight against the game is that it's a bit too short. It's only about 2 hours long, give or take, and it only has one ending (albeit with a couple of variations). But considering the production values and the price I think it's pretty fair. I'd still like to see more cases, whether in DLC or a sequel, because it's a fun experience.

Once in a while, a little gem of a game comes that you start playing and cannot put down until you finish. American Arcadia is such a game. Combining an interesting premise with engaging, imaginative gameplay, good writing and a beautiful visual style, this game will keep you glued to your seat from beginning to end.

No spoilers here, as you learn all of this in the first few minutes of the game: Trevor is a boring, uninteresting man. His whole life is routine, he never amounts to anything... until he finds out his entire life has been a lie. He, like most other inhabitants of his city, form part of a "Truman Show"-style reality show and their entire purpose is to entertain an audience. The problem is, Trevor isn't entertaining anyone, and those who fail to entertain must be excised. Ironically, it is now Trevor's most exciting day of his life, as he must find a way to escape the city before he's made to disappear for good.

This is the basic premise, but the story goes much, much deeper. American Arcadia is a story-heavy game, and while the gameplay is fun on its own it's really the story and characters that carry it. As the story progresses and you become attached to the characters you will see many twists and turns that will keep you invested until the very end. Don't take anything for granted here. Writing in general is quite good, and the worldbuilding makes the place feel real.

From a gameplay perspective, there's two main kinds of gameplay: puzzle platformer and first person exploration. In the first one you control Trevor as you make your escape, while in the second one you control Angela, who's helping him escape, as she works behind the scenes to make sure he succeds. But ocassionally you get to control both characters at the same time, and it's quite an interesting experience. Both styles also ocassionally welcome several variations that keep the gameplay fresh and engaging.

From a visual standpoint, the game excels. The art style is beautiful and colorful, and perfectly fits the setting. Voice acting is pretty good and helps sell the story much better. Audio does a great job in general, though it tends to be one of those "if it's doing its job, you won't notice it's there" things, except for a few times where paying attention to the sound is necessary.

The game really does excel in most areas. Sadly, there is one where its job is less than adequate and that is performance. While in general the game runs well there are a few occasions where it has suffered from slowdowns, some of them very severe to the point of nearly freezing the game, and they come and go with no rhyme or reason (you can be in the same area where nothing changes visually and the framerate will suddenly go up or down). I've managed to solve this by turning v-sync off and capping the fps, but this is an inelegant solution and you still get the framerate to drop in certain scenery-heavy scenes. Besides that, I got a crash near the end for no discernible reason. I can run the Resident Evil remakes perfectly fine, so I doubt it's a problem on my end.

It really is a shame about the performance issues, because it is otherwise an excellent game. These problems don't make it unplayable (at least if you do the frame cap thing) but they are noticeable. They were present for me in the demo as well, so you can probably use that to gauge if your PC will have these issues or not before going for the full game.

I still recommend the game, of course. Provided you tinker with the settings, the issues with the framerate are light enough to not get in the way (and hopefully they can be patched out in the near future), and it is a game that must be experienced. Just keep it in mind.