Recent reviews by Rastrelly

As expected - bloated mess. Some areas look good, some look meh, and this all consumes so much space and resources, I'm afraid to think of final release.

Deathloop is a very self-contradictory game in many aspects, and that is dragging it down. It makes a lot of promises, and breaks too many of them. It kinda dangles a Great Murder Puzzle before you just to swap it with a spelled-out solution. It promises a possibility to do the imsim stuff and play how you want - but, reasonably, unless you want a couple of specific achievements, the story gives you no reason to stay quiet, remain clean-handed or avoid confrontation, because everything you do is rolled back anyway at the end of a loop.

Add in the story - again, if you drag yourself through insufferable self-aware writing, you get an interesting concept with okay set of villains and sort of a conundrum at the end, but it's all put back by being set in stone immovable structure, in which you do not really have a say, despite the entire story suggesting that the entire point of it is for you to finally have.

As for how it plays - well, it's Dishonored. it plays like Dishonored, it looks like Dishonored, it is a stealth sequel to Dishonored, but you need to replay levels a bunch of times, learn many patterns and do a set of quests to gather a proper arsenal and progress the main quest. There are some really well made side-puzzles, some nice built-in environmental storytelling, and levels themselves are constructed pretty fine.

Edit: Ah, yes, the crown dish of Juliana invasions... Well, it is really undercooked as well. If the servers are okay, you are guaranteed to be invaded by a player. Said player is either better than you and will pillage your backdoor, or he will be inept like a blind toad, and will get pillaged by you. In theory there is a space for fun cat-and-mouse PvP gameplay, but in reality it almost never happens. Not to mention that servers are often not really doing their job, or, better yet, you are fighting lag instead of your opponent because of P2P match connection. As for AI-invasions analog, Juliana under control of AI is as dangerous as any other NPC in the game and unless you cannot aim at all, will go down in seconds after you see her.

/edit

Design-wise the game overrelies on its stylized 60-es-ish look with round cars and houses, acidic posters, "funny" fonts and so on. Why "over"? Because when everything is like this, nothing is not like this. There is some variation in environments, but it's not enough to make the areas memorable enough. As a result, while the game is not ugly and has a style, there's not much to remember afterwards except for several key landmarks.

Overall - Deathloop can be an enjoyable game, but it is aggressively shooting itself in the foot on all levels. It's too self-aware-comedic to be taken seriously, but at certain point it expects you to. It's too linear despite being built around nonlinear progression.

I'd say the good outweighs the bad, but it's all very subjective. This game, at least, has something behind it.

So, I have completed a first playthrough of the game and all I can say is that my expectations were beaten. That would be a bold triumphant moment, but said expectations were extremely low, so beating them is not much of an achievement. Nevertheless, I must say that the game is surprisingly good and - what is important - clearly made by people who understood the original very well and had their own vision.

Technically speaking, changes-wise, the remake is very tame, and of the key elements they made significant changes to two characters (Maria and Eddie) and added several narrative scenes crystallizing certain traits of the players in this drama. Some changes are positive - say, it is much easier now to take Eddie's line more seriously, however endearing the original was.

Visually, we have insanely good work with surroundings - area design, deterioration in Otherworld, mud, dirt, rust, "normal" areas, all done incredibly well and are at the same time recognizable and authentic. Monsters also shine - not only they are true to the original, Bloober actually found a way to expand the original roster without actually expanding it. Line Figures come in three options now instead of 2, Mannikins and Nurses also have a variant with different moveset, Mandarins previously present in a single scene (edit: I do need to replay the original, maybe they actually were encountered twice), now got a full compensation and rule at least three significant sections of the game, playing slightly different roles in each. Plus, modified combat mechanics and behaviour lead to developers being able to actively combine mobs, requiring the player to do the doom thing and think what tools to use at which enemy.

Combat-wise there are many questionable things. First, the combat is almost unavoidable now. You will have to kill most enemies. You technically can run past many of them, and if you clearly know what you are doing, you can reduce your fighting by half, but there still clearly are some situations that are built around assuming you go in and kill everyone. Melee combat is context-based. You auto-lock to an opponent and attack that opponent. You can dodge at any point, even attack cancel, and if you want to preserve ammo, and you do want to preserve ammo, you'll need to learn attack patterns of the mobs, which can actually get quite complicated. If you get the system, melee becomes basically easy. But it is often of use to utilise firearms in combination with melee to optimize fighting. Some mobs are better suited to be dealt with a specific weapons. Line Figures are easily headshotted with a pistol, Nurses can be one-tapped with shotgun headshots, and so on.

Stomping is also back, you can still hit the mobs when they fall, or else they can get up immediately, though it also is contextual, which sometimes leads to funny results, like not being able to break a window near a lying enemy, or stomping air instead of enemy, or stomping the wrong guy. Also killed mobs can just get up because they like you that much - it seems their getting up is sometimes scripted, sometimes timed.

Another moment is that all areas are now more structurally formulaic. In each main area you have a Main Puzzle, usually covered with some rug to make the discovery more epic, I guess. It usually is a classic or modified classic recognizable puzzle or locked object, like the coin puzzle or multi-locked box. The entire area now circles around with a few routed sections during which you gather elements needed to solve or unlock the object. This is a functional approach, but it makes overall progression more predictable and formulaic, which is not a good thing for a horror experience. Luckily, this is compensated by diversity in structures and areas, with sub-puzzles, different monster compositions, and so on.

Returning to visuals, character modeling is the weakest part of the game. Not only some characters are weirdly disproportionate (especially Maria), their meshes seem to be in the need of an additional retouch to complete them. Angela's face seems to change from scene to scene, for example. Eddie is so grotesque, it seems he was made by the guys who worked on monsters, so he's pretty great. Laura looks like an overly eager potato, though. I won't say these character meshes are bad, they are perfectly serviceable, but the original and later SH3 were benchmarks of character modeling back at their time. SH2 original models did not stay as fresh as those in SH3, though.

Finally, overall playtime seems to be around 16 to 20 hours for an average playthrough, while the original was roughly half as long, and I'd say the remake would actually be better from cutting something like a quarter of it, probably creating some optional areas to inspect if you want, like police station in SH1. Game does drag a bit. I personally wasn't affected by it much, as usually all areas did pay off. But to each his own.

The game presented the thick, overwhelming atmosphere, slowly dawning on you to later give a slight release and roll back in full yet again. Foggy, dark, rusted, grated, fleshy and concrete, quiet and abandoned, the voyage is very true to the spirit of classic Silent Hill.

As for performance - I was among the lucky unaffected by stutters or crashes. No, I'm lying - it did crash once for me, and I also got stuck on level geometry once. That's the main technical issues I've got.

I can say that this is a good remake, made by people who knew what they were doing and actually did care about the original. However it is deeply flawed and has some fundamental problems. But the good points clearly far outweigh the negatives, Though the global asking price of $70 is clearly far too high.

I did enjoy the game tremendously, but it gave me essentially what I wanted. Results may vary for others.

Weak project lacking any form of its own identity. Uninspired designs, relentless copycatting of Starcraft and Warcraft whether it's good or not, horrifying writing and character designs. MP-wise it is literally SCII but worse. Absolutely no reason to touch this. Needs complete rework from ground up.

Greatly enjoyed the experience, though, I must say, slightly less then previous series entry- Reverie. I would not say the game is significantly worse or anything like that, it was a hugely great experience, but it sometimes felt the devs were at their limits and slightly overextended on many fronts. As a result, the game had less creative bosses, uneven difficulty (and by uneven I mean it was for the most part far too easy with several significant spikes here and there).

However, I would not want my words to distract from the fact of this game being extremely enjoyable. Movement was done beautifully well, with the only gripe I can think of - far to sensitive walljumps, often leading to Momo doublejumping instead of walljumping.

Toolkit works really good and all the main tools we get throughout the world are used frequently, but, yet again, I feel like I'm repeating myself, the progression felt a bit too guided, with few possibilities to wander off to where the dragons live. On the other hand, after ending the main campaign you get a lot of post-end content, with possibilities to fight a bit more, including an unexpected harder-than-final boss, as well as a challenge mode and additional play modes for the campaign.

Artwork is very similar to previous game - it is intentionally flat, which makes for memorable style, with cute sprites of all characters and enemies.

Overall - categorically recommending, good stuff.

A very nice, albeit a bit too short metroidvania. Artwork is gorgeous for the most part, and the game plays, as in movement, different attack types, most combat interactions,-almost flawlessly. I also enjoyed the worldbuilding and character writing a lot. While nothing fancy or eye-opening, the cast was likable, three-dimentional and fitting the narrative.

The game overall, though, is really on the easier side. After vacuuming through most of the map my Aletheia was an unstoppable weapon of destruction that tanked everything final boss could throw at her while putting in obscene and unholy amounts of damage. The game really needs a harder difficulty option and additional modes to boost its replayabiliy and longevity.

Other issue is linearity. The world of the game is huge, but it really lacks the possibility to wander around just a bit. Scale of the map does not really convert into any kind of open-ended progression. It is always a good idea to let the players "slip through thecracks" of intended path to make the game feel much wider and deeper.

On the other hand there are a lot of very well done platforming sections, some devilish enough to rival those Ori jump puzzles. Also there's a nice chace sequence and a train level :3 And some nice light puzzling, though nothing that much out of ordinary. But overall the mix does not get stale at any point.

So, overall, while I enjoyed the trip, the crew and the overall feeling of the journey, the game really needs some more work to become the gem it can actually be. In any case I do hope to see the sequel of this story ('cause the game does end abruptly with some uncertainty for several points of the story), as well as improvement on its current iteration.

So this year I happened upon my GOTY because someone said something in the kind of “Hey look, this game you have here reminds me of that thing I tried back in 2015” or something like that.

Crosscode holds upon three pillars in no particular order:
1) Extremely good writing
2) Excellent combat
3) Insane puzzles

I am not implying that the story in Crosscode is some kind of a breakthrough that has reconstituted the genre of cyberpunk and has shaken Philip K. ♥♥♥♥ to become less of a Philip K. However, this is not necessary. The writer who understands what he’s doing and who does it good is infinitely better than an overly ambitious cretin who tries to be a new Dostoyevsky while displaying the ability of an overly compressed jackal.

This is one of those stories that go best with your inner child or teenager – it is simple, easily digestible, but boasts creative and interesting characters put in circumstances that boost their likeability even in cases when one might think that this specific one simply has to be irredeemable.

Overall it’s a light sci-fi/cyberpunk story focused on friendship and humanity - full of butterflies, unicorns and killer bunnies, all that a gentleman needs in these harsh times to relax for at a fireplace.

Crosscode is set in Crossworlds, a sort of MMO/ARG where players use neurointerfaces and VR to remotely control avatars made of dedigitized information to play the game both like-in-real-life but with limitations appropriate to an MMO. The play area is set on a distant moon bought out by a megacorp, and uses cutting edge tech to make it all run – FTL communication, digital matter, advanced neural AI etc. Unsurprisingly, in such a complex system incidents occur, as we play an amnesiac girl called Lea, who tries to engage this game to overcome her amnesia while being handicapped by voice module malfunctions, rendering her effectively mute.

The story successfully avoids trying to go Deus Ex route or being overly political at all, focusing on what it does best - characters, technology, mystery, twists and, of course, memes, the DNA of the soul.

Considering we as Lea engage in an MMO, gameplay revolves around level progression, getting better gear, making your build. Core mechanics of the game are those of a twin stick shooter: you can fire BALLS at enemies, charging them or DDOSing with a bunch of weak attacks, or engaging in melee. You can block, dash, shoot and charge, and each of these actions has a pair of swappable supers attached to them, some of which can be upgraded to level 3, allowing to make quite an apocalyptic performance with appropriately impressive damage numbers. The game progressively introduces element skill trees, allowing for EVEN MORE customization, increasing ability count to… Wait… Something like 48, I guess… Yeah. And each of those has the best and the worst uses requiring to take into account enemy weaknesses and resists, movement patterns and timings. In addition to that, quite a lot of enemies are almost invulnerable unless you find a way to fill their break meter and put them in Break state, in which you are free to pummel them full of crits. Oh, and ALSO you need to track which attacks are blockable, which need timed parrying, which need dodging, and which need dodging in specific direction or pattern.

And all of that is not a suggestion, the game will MAKE you make use of all you have in your arsenal, ‘cause you don’t have too much opportunities to go overlevel and therefore bosses will nuke you in seconds if you don’t know what you’re doing. On the other hand, if you DO know what you are doing, even the final boss of DLC, which took me like good 15 minutes to beat (I mean the length of a successful attempt, mind you, overall, the bastard took like 6 hours of attempts), can go down in less than 2 without any cheesing, just using the most proper tools.

You are free to lower the difficulty, of course, you weakling scrub you are.

And finally, we have puzzles. The game is full of those, and most of them are actually simple navigation or operation puzzles solvable in seconds, often deeply dependent on proper timing of precise shots or hits at interactable multi-functional objects, like freezing or evaporating water by shooting ice or fire at it.

While simple, I did get completely dumbfounded several times needing to sail the google seas to find out what I was missing, and every time it came down to forgetting the elementary side-effects of elemental attacks, like fire-induced metaballs being able to ricochet from walls stronger than the others.

One might say that puzzle sections of dungeons can go for a bit too long, but, on the other hand, it’s entirely a matter of taste and mood (which, as one should know, is for cattle and making love).

But, of course, puzzles are not limited to dungeons – basically every single area in the game, with a few exceptions mostly in narrative-centric one-time zones, contains at least an element of a puzzle, some requiring you to wander several screens – or, like, ten, - to get to a chest with goodies or some unique flora item you crave to hit (yeah, that’s a thing too).

Another mechanic that might be a bit too much is item trading. You see, the game has packed the traditional MMO quests of “gather 10 bunny ears and give them to a lawyer” into its trade/craft mechanics. You want a hard carrot to beat enemies with? Get 8 carrot mob drops, 15 water drops, 3 earth samples and 2 special stones you also need to trade, plus a sum of money, of course. Crafting trees can get long and quite tedious to go through, especially when overall resulting performance of what you were grinding for might be disappointing in the end.

All in all this game is just too adorable to criticize it and too cozy to feel any criticism is truly deserved. It is a wonderful experiemce I am quite glad I got into, and now I’m going to do some NG+ stuff because I finally have a moral right to do so after beating the game and the DLC (which is – A New Home that is – is a necessity for actually getting the full story).

Bye!

So, I played a Signalis once. That was quite a signal, so I played it twice. I survived playing a Signalis twice, and as such I am !(uniquely qualified) to signal my opinion on a Signalis I played twice out.

In Signalis we play the meat droid-chan on the bloody path to get the girl. We are not sure which girl we are after, cause there are at the least two of those, one of which is literally a Web 2.0 concept, and the other one may or may not be, so therefore we are abiding by the rules of ultrasocialist Space East Germany at war with the less ultrasocialist Space West Germany for the recipe of psychic hamburgers I must assume.

In this bold retelling of the Resident Hill fable written by Jillian Howtdogg in 1861 AD we are to carry the grand six of all there is, and therefore what we do is achullie play Death Stranding on the service of postal missions between Ye Reddeth Boxen and Ye Questeth Enteteth. Scarce ammunition due to production shortages compels to use the sharp feetsies of yours for more than just casual strolls along the meaty inner parts of The Base Named After The Triangle Man.

There are at least 512 reasons to like the game, but yet there are also at leats 512 reasons to like it not, and 512 + 512 = ACHTUNG ACHTUNG, so all is fine.

I'd tear my arms apart trying to dig deeper, and maybe I even did, but John Carmack has thrown me to the main menu of reality, and there I was, lookin' eye to eye with the eye.

As the Renaissance painter Joseph Phillip'Kaydick Loves-Craft once told: we dug the yellow from inside beneath the royalty, and those ought to pull were taught to push.

But I make a promise here: and mark my word I'll keep it! - I make a promise... Ah, heck. What was that? What am I doing here again? I'm radiation sick of you at this point! Go to the shores of oblivion, you.. You... [REDACTED]

I had lost hope for Obsidian after Outer Worlds. Pillars of Eternity was far too busy with snooping its own writing to be enjoyable for me. "Oh, I'm a ghost of a TERRIBLE fate, I got killed VIOLENTLISTLY by the UNPROFOUND RAPSCALLIANS of the Uuuguran Imperial Counsulate and forevermore hereby I am hitherto haunt the precipice dislodged from reality with disemboveled heads of the three children of mine hanging everlastingly from plantlife around”. Tyranny was better, but clearly not thought out through enough, and unfinished. Then Outer Worlds happened, and it was to me a miserable game lacking any originality, trying too hard to be both Borderlands and New Vegas. Outgrown (or however it’s called) is a game I’m not interested in at all, so I have no opinion on it, except that it was further indication of Obsidian moving away from what made their work so good to begin with.

So, I actually ignored Pentiment altogether, expecting it to be either another overly pretentious graphomanic piece, or another style-over-substance festival of insanity. Add in modern trends of character building and ignoring historical reality and good taste to fit political quotas, and Pentiment looked as grim as it could on arrival.

I was pleasantly surprised. Not just pleasantly – by the end I was overjoyed, Pentiment was one of the bright spots on the rather miserable landscape of your humble servant’s “today”.

The game is a narrative-centric point-and-click adventure with light roleplaying elements. It allows for some possibilities to influence the flow of the narrative, and for certain nonlinearity in that you cannot perform all possible actions within given timeframe, so you inevitably miss certain bits and pieces that could potentially change your opinion on some characters or events. But the main frame of the story is static, and general events are unavoidable and will happen no matter what the player does.

I’d say this game has even less mechanics than Disco Elysium does, and it’s even more compact, and even slower, so one needs to get really into it to properly enjoy, but that’s the nature of games as an art form.
Even the “quota” stuff I’ve mentioned earlier is well-woven into the story. There is a black guy in an alpine monastery in 1515. An improbable occurrence, but the way it is presented – not impossible. There are two gay characters, but they act the way gay people of the era would actually act – hide the fact.

The game plays well from the customs and ways of the era. it gets a bit to preachy about how hard the woman’s fate at the time was, but never too much to get distracting. Also, the game allows itself a bit too much modern lexicon, I think it’d work better with allowing for more “ye olde englyshe” to get, especially for the characters of more classic upbringing, just like they did with the font system representing levels of education of the characters.

But not everything is perfect. There are flaws, some – significant. With the amounts of backtracking you need to perform while investigating the area (which consist of a city, two farms, abbey and a small forest) at least a couple of fast travel points would help tremendously. Their implementation would require some playing with the several events that need to happen on the way from point A to point B, but those could just interrupt the fast travel, for example.

The way the game skips time sometimes leads to odd interaction, say some events are discussed after a month has passed as if those’ve occurred yesterday. In some cases, you cannot make some actions despite literally meeting with the characters you need to meet with to achieve those actions because the time system implies you’ve missed the opportunity, while you clearly haven’t.

But overall, I’m really impressed and I do hope Obsidian will take note that small projects of this scale can be a good opportunity to realize actual artistic vision instead of trying to follow some modern trends and dip into mediocrity.

Okay, so there’s a good tradition to visit bosses and die sometimes. And it can be fun traditions, but at certain moments of your life you might want to move the tradition aside a bit, you know?

The game under review is actually very good. It’s as far from perfect as it’s also traditional for the series. It has as many awesome points, as it has points of frustration, and some of those points are clearly intentional, while some are not.

Basically, for each “good” of this game I have almost equally (or even more) massive “bad”. And the most strange thing is – I cannot understand how game can even feel that good with so many massive “bads”, but it does. That’s probably a part of that mystique of well-done soulsborne.

At this point I don’t really see the reason to explain the basics. It’s Dark Souls IV with openworld and horse. Horseback combat is undercooked, but fun. Plus, the increased moveability allows for some insane platforming and secret locations. You can horse around the main openworld, but not dungeons. There are several huge megadungeons, several lesser dungeons, and a bunch of Breath of the Wild-inspired similar-to-each-other minidungeons with certain quirks or puzzles.

Also, you can now attach special abilities to shields and weapons, double-wield powerstances are back, and plunge attack is no more. Oh, and they added an ability to summon special creatures in certain areas, that will help in battle. Those vary from cute jellyfishes to spirits of dead heroes and warriors, to edgy OP assassins.

All and all – it’s Dark Souls IV, with all the main tickpoints one would expect, now with a big overworld to roam around.

Now to the weird stuff.

First, I need to point out that my ability to react to stuff is as low as it gets, so I usually understand someone’s hitting me right around the moment a hit arrives. Second one, that is. So, in all Souls game the only “comfortable” mode of play I can allow myself is a shielded slow turtle with a greatsword. So, most of my comments are made from this turtle point of view.

Issue 1: weird balance of risks and rewards. A huge dog that can oneshot you and has more HP than most earlygame bosses? 300 souls. A small dude that hits hard but can be one or twoshot at early-midgame? 1000 souls. Crucible Knight that can raid your lands, pillage your settlements and take away your women? 3000 souls. A squishy caster dude with a bunch of tools to negate him to nothing? 100 000 souls. It’s just odd. Same goes to HP and damage scaling in different areas. Some mobs are laughably easy at lategame areas, but some remain barely scratchable by level 150 and will onehot overvigored knöghts in fullplate. This makes flow of some areas really janky, as If some stuff was not balanced by the end, as if NG+ tables were used for NG areas.

Issue 2: boss readability often suffers. Special thanks to Fire Giant’s ankle.

Issue 3: boss aggression (also applies to some mobs). Many bosses like to do the I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you oh, a pause, I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you I hit you thing. Too many. I know it’s a result of metaprogression of difficulty, as otherwise some players wouldn’t even feel the boss is even there, but for those there’s another thing –

Issue (or observation) 4: boss lingering attacks (also applies to some mobs). In this game the devs decided to troll the roll crowd as they made some insanely delayed grabs and powerstrikes. The boss raises their weapon menacingly and walks towards you… And walks… And walks… Awkward moment. You start panicking, you roll, BLAMO-KABLAM!!!1111111 – 1500 HP LOL U FAIL.

Issue 5: the level vistas vary from OHMYGAWD IT’S SO GORGUUUUUUZ I WUV ID <3 to LETS STAMP EVERY CASTLE ASSET WE HAVE TO THE BACKGROUND AT ONCE!!!111

Issue 6: internal asset reuse overdrive. I saw exactly the same dungeon blocks far too many times. I don’t think doubling dungeon decoration asset and wall sets amount would be THAT time-consuming for a project that took, what, 5 years to make. And, yes, many bosses tend to reappear up to 10-15 times in different areas (I’m looking at you, dragons) with barely any significant tweaks but type of attacks (fire, ice, poison, rot etc.) and HP pool.

I’m not even saying anything of it needs to change, as I said, I thoroughly enjoyed the game, except for some bosses, where I just gave up and summoned dem humans to help (and yes, I used ashen summons A LOT :D).

Story-wise this is the most accessible Souls game. It allows to mostly clearly see what are you doing and why by the midgame, it has some touching moments you don’t even need to look up on wiki to find, you just need to search for clues and listen to what they say. Most big questlines even allow you to resume them if you miss a part of their progression path, with some NPCs reacting to you differently.

Overall – a great game I totally recommend.

PS Most of performance issues came past me for some reason, while people with better rigs had insane FPS drops. So kinda weird here as well.