Recent reviews by atrus

It's a little on the short side, but really enjoyable. The parallels to Zelda games with a little VR overseer are strong. And Quill? I might die for Quill after getting those high-fives in.

Half Life games are almost always a demonstration of what's possible with new tech.

Alyx is a great demonstration of how a story-driven VR experience can be engaging, exciting, and fun.

Walkabout Mini Golf feels like a distillation of what a great casual VR gaming experience can be like. It's easy to learn, it feels extremely natural, and the physics feel accurate and real.

At the same time, it walks back and forth on the line between realism and fantasy. Some of the first few courses could almost exist on a very high-end luxury mini-golf course. As you go further, you find courses that bend the rules, providing courses that couldn't exist in reality, but still play on the basic expectations you'd get from any mini golf course.

It also offers neat mechanics for people who want to be good at this game, and people who just want to play around. You can unlock content EITHER by playing better golf, OR by exploring the course looking for secrets tucked away all over the place.

And if you're really looking to perfect your game, there's lots of content to play over and over refining your skill, and finding ways of using what's on the course to your advantage.

If you're looking for high-polygon-count realism, don't expect to find it here. While the courses are beautifully designed, they express that design through pretty low-detail models. That's not a slight -- there's a whimsical quality to the way those low-polygon models are done.

Multiplayer is also really rewarding, and simple. You get to play a course taking turns with other folks, while talking (verbally!) about the course, about yourselves, about anything at all. It can feel a lot like the shooting-the-breeze experience you'd get wandering around a golf course, or maybe a disc-golf course.

Worth the wait. Xen is really something else.

Manages to be prettier than the original Myst or RealMyst, but still capturing more of an authentic Myst feeling than the first RealMyst. Lovely. Great touches on a classic.

Pretty damn cute.

I may have missed a few panels, as there seemed to be something in my eye...

As a huge fan of To The Moon, I was pretty nervous about playing Finding Paradise, and about whether or not it would live up to its predecessor.

As it turns out, it's a bit more of an apples-to-oranges comparison than I anticipated, in a way I really enjoyed.

- Yes, I cried. Mission Accomplished Kan ;)
- It's a very different story about a very different set of characters. The core cast of Eva and Neil are back, and we have another elderly patient providing memories for them to trudge through, but that's about where the similarities end.
- While To The Moon felt like a puzzle to be figured out, Finding Paradise was an adventure to experience. Yeah, there were some layered mysteries involved, but it felt to me more about seeing it unfold than explaining everything away.

I'm also super-pleased to see the SCU (Sigmund Cinematic Universe) develop more depth. I enjoyed the universe Kan Reives Goa built for us in To The Moon. Seeing it grow with more primary AND secondary stories is great. The lightweight connective tissue that bridges A Bird Story in (lightweight in that if you missed it, it's not a huge issue -- but it'll enhance your experience, I expect) was much appreciated.

Rakuen is a lovely interactive adventure story. Gameplay is very light, very casual. Younger players will have no trouble, and they'll enjoy the themes, while older players will get more out of the story, which is deep, and emotionally engaging.

Wonderful soundtrack, gorgeous 16-bit-ish art styles.

Great for fans of To The Moon, as well as Tell-Tale-style adventures that focus on the story more than the gaming mechanics.

There's no game quite as challenging as this that's still so rewarding.

Saves are frequent, so if you die, you're not losing a lot of progress. That's important, because you're going to die. A lot. Like, maybe a couple hundred times on the hardest challenge of the game. And I know what you're thinking: that sounds like a bad thing. It's not, because every one of those hundred deaths makes it that much more important that you try again, and that much more explosively rewarding when you finally get it.

Terry Cavanagh is a mad genius, and I will basically give him my money for anything he makes.