GRcade

Glass Masquerade - 8/10

+ Looks nice
+ Just the right level of challenge
+ Good music
+ Addictive

- Music could've had more variety

Nice puzzle game this, would've happily played through plenty more puzzles. What you get is a decent number though, and while it never gets that challenging, some of them can have you pondering for a bit. Don't think it costs all that much, nice distraction for the price.

Stacking on PS3. I rather enjoyed this, the open ended puzzles were just the right side of logical that I never felt like an idiot or need to look up solutions which I find happens often with graphic adventures. Surprisingly for a game where more than one puzzle solution involved lighting farts on fire there was a pretty clever story about the evils of child labour.

8/10 it loses marks partly for the camera angle in the game making feel a little queasy.

Just finished the true pacifist ending for undertale. That game is crazy and overfilled with ideas. Well written, hilarious and touching.

Now to kill everyone.

Lotus wrote:Glass Masquerade - 8/10

+ Looks nice
+ Just the right level of challenge
+ Good music
+ Addictive

- Music could've had more variety

Nice puzzle game this, would've happily played through plenty more puzzles. What you get is a decent number though, and while it never gets that challenging, some of them can have you pondering for a bit. Don't think it costs all that much, nice distraction for the price.

Saw it on sale on Steam on my wishlist, gonna pick it up I reckon.

Dark Souls 3

Definitely better than DS2. As for DS1, I'm not sure, I think they about even. It certainly is better in a lot of aspects, a more consistent difficult curve, more consistent in quality. But the lack of a truly interconnected and interesting world drags the whole experience down. It's not as linear as DS2, but it doesn't have that whole Metroidvania thing that I loved about the first game.

It's a great game despite that. Apart from the Princes boss. That is bullshit.

The Surge on PS4. This was pretty much a sci-fi Dark Souls. It was pretty good save for a few frustrations particularly the bosses and the late game enemies... oh and the random crashes they were a nuisance too.

7/10

Flatout 4 - Total Insanity - PC

Tl;dr - more like Total Inanity amirite

I have a weird soft spot for b-tier racing games, the ones which don't grab the limelight but can have interesting ideas or novel approaches to genre staples. This kind of falls into those categories, but with numeroud weird flaws.

The history of Flatout is a chequered one - two decent first games (i still think the first one is the best) and a remake for the 360 followed by some licensing intrigue and an utter abomination of a game shat out by third-rate developers while the game's creators have gone on to make wreckfest; flatout in all but name but stuck in early access hell for literally years. Now flatout 4 undoes some of that damage but comes across as a slightly misguided fan-made total conversion.

Firstly there is some weird frame-pacing issues which aren't solved through forcing vsync in the usual way so i played the whole thing at 50fps. Secondly don't bother picking the lighter cars because they clip and spin when driving over unavoidable terrain which is strawberry floating annoying every time.

The tracks are uninspiring and the career mode is a fairly linear series of races with little variation. I can't recommend this in any real context; there are better arcade racing games on every platform and for less than this costs at full price. I only got this because it was a few pounds.

6/10

I thought Atlas was the best character in Bioshock.

The Witcher: Enhanced Edition - PC

Wow, what a journey this was. I picked up the third game in a sale and remembered I had the second, then not long after gog.com just gave away the first game in a one-day promotion so I thought it was an auspicious time to start from the beginning.

First of all I played through on easy, so any concept of how hard the game is or not isn't really a factor, but it was one hell of an adventure, one that presented moral choices without clear benefits or costs for doing so, with their end outcomes neither immediate or necessarily clear. The actual combat is both weird and well-done, with different combat stances for fighting big, fast or small groups of enemies, however it has a timing system that is a bit fiddly to get to grips with.

It definitely shows its 10-year age in terms of character animation and the limited number of NPC models, but it is well worth a look to see where it all began. I did have a few crash bugs but they weren't very often.

I ended up taking the neutral path - I didn't like the Order of the Flaming Rose or the Scoi'atel, one were religious fanatics and the other terrorists, neither of which made a particularly strong case. Saying that I did not feel a sense of ludo-narrative dissonance in terms of the decisions my interpretation of Geralt made and the outcome. To the game's credit it made that choice a valid one based on the narrative, rather than the usual approach to morality in games where you have to go full saint or full bastard to get the best unlocks/abilities.

Also it was nice to play something that wasn't bloated with microtransactions, achievements or a mess of different currencies and unlocks designed to siphon your money to shorten the experience to your own detriment.

I'm looking forward to diving into The Witcher 2 at some point, perhaps with a bit of a break to some shorter and less monolithic games first.

8/10

Little Nightmares - 9/10

Absolutely loved this, the core game play is nothing new but the game absolutely shines in its atmosphere and presentation, really unsettling and creepy throughout and an absolute joy to play through. Loses a mark because it's a bit too short.

FF XII The Zodiac Age

That wasn't just good it was bloody brilliant. I really need to replay VII and IX but, as it stands, I wouldn't feel comfortable placing XII below any of the other FF games I've played. And there's tonnes of stuff I left unfinished (trials, spells, bounties, hunts, weapons and gear, etc) so will definitely return to it at some point.

Oxenfree - 6/10

Not really a fan of these sorts of games, because they tend to lack in gameplay (to be expected of the genre). The story was alright in this. The voice acting was pretty good, although the protag never shut up, I did like the characters enough. Looked great and had a very creepy atmosphere at points.

Hotline Miami - 8/10

Loved the moment by moment gameplay in this. It's challenging, but if you die, it's generally your own fault. Very good soundtrack in places. Not a big fan of the boss fights, those kind of suck in all honesty, but they never really are around too long. The story was interesting, I liked that the main character is kinda losing his mind towards the end of the game. I'll have to get the second one.

Squinty wrote:Hotline Miami - 8/10 ... I'll have to get the second one.

Stop while you're ahead

OrangeRakoon wrote:

Squinty wrote:Hotline Miami - 8/10 ... I'll have to get the second one.

Stop while you're ahead

I've heard it's kinda mixed. Some people love it, others hate it.

Gone Home - 5/10

An hour of walking around a house, looking through drawers, listening to a lesbian love story. I'm not sure it was worth it.

IDGI basically.

Squinty wrote:I've heard it's kinda mixed. Some people love it, others hate it.

Mechanically great, level design ruins it. Gone are the tightly designed maps of the first game. Instead you get sprawling open areas where you routinely get shot from off-screen and have to rely on extended gunplay rather than the dynamic mix of melee and gunplay that made the first game so brutally fun.

Soundtrack is still brilliant

OrangeRakoon wrote:

Squinty wrote:I've heard it's kinda mixed. Some people love it, others hate it.

Mechanically great, level design ruins it. Gone are the tightly designed maps of the first game. Instead you get sprawling open areas where you routinely get shot from off-screen and have to rely on extended gunplay rather than the dynamic mix of melee and gunplay that made the first game so brutally fun.

Soundtrack is still brilliant

Yeah, I hate those kind of spaces in the first game. They don't really work, given the confines of the perspective.

Trelliz wrote:Secondly don't bother picking the lighter cars because they clip and spin when driving over unavoidable terrain which is strawberry floating annoying every time.

[emoji3]
I find this with most of the the cars, drive over a railway track and shoot into the air. I bet this was tested for ages and fine tuned for our maximum enjoyment.

Death's Head wrote:

Trelliz wrote:Secondly don't bother picking the lighter cars because they clip and spin when driving over unavoidable terrain which is strawberry floating annoying every time.

[emoji3]
I find this with most of the the cars, drive over a railway track and shoot into the air. I bet this was tested for ages and fine tuned for our maximum enjoyment.

I'm sure it was; like how i golded every event in the career and at least half of the cars were still locked - presumably you unlock them in flatout mode or something, but what's the point? I've finished the career mode completely and have zero reason to go back to it.

I don't know why i care so much about a not very good game, but the light cars are basically hard mode; always come off worse in crashes, aren't stable enough for going fast in time trials and too flimsy for the arena modes. Plus for pc they released a custom skin creation tool which a) nobody will ever use and b) they called "the workshop" and it doesn't integrate with the actual steam workshop leading to some confusion.

Oh well, i'm done with it now, i've farmed the cards and put it in the steam hidden folder/oubliette to be forgotten about in time.

Dishonored - Death of the Outsider

Very good overall. Played it as stealth first of all, now I'm playing it like it's a murder simulation. It's very rare that I replay a game again immediately after going through it. Took me about 7 hours to beat the 5 chapters.

The level design has some annoying choke points in places, and the game kinda feels a little bit abrupt to me, but it's more Dishonored and we likely aren't getting anymore. I cannot complain too much. Billie Lurk has some really fun powers, particularly displace and the ghost one when used in conjunction.

8/10