Silent Hill 2 Remake Isn't Very Good

 

I finally did it, I finally slogged through the Silent Hill 2 Remake and saw the ending.  I got Leave if anyone is curious.  I thought I'd share some of my thoughts on the game but overall I'm pretty negative on it.  There's a couple of things here and there that were done decently but overall it's an annoying and boring version of the original with a bunch of the sublety removed and a final act that seems to just not understand how good storytelling works at all.

First of all, I want to address the gameplay because that part of the game is at least OK.  Silent Hill 2 Remake plays basically the same as every other 3rd person over the shoulder horror game that you've ever played.  Resident Evil 4, 5, 6, remakes, The Evil Within, Silent Hill Downpour, Dead Space, all that shit.  It plays just like those and therefore there isn't really much to say, if you have played any modern horror game since 2005, you've played a game just like Silent Hill 2 Remake.  What is kind of cool about the gameplay of Silent Hill 2 Remake is the exploration and the remixed areas that James has to explore on his quest to find his dead wife.  When I bought the game for 60 quid I was worried that I was going to blast through the game in a couple hours because I'm pretty familiar with the original and can blast through it in an hour or two.  The areas of 2R have been expanded quite a bit though with new puzzles to solve or expansions on old ones.  For example the coin puzzle in Ashfield Apartments has been carried over from the original game only this time the coins have two sides that you have to contend with and solving the puzzle comes in the form of a 3 part poem with different coin arrangements for each part.  There are certain sections of the game where the expansions to these areas feel like padding such as in the prison, labryinth and one absolutely unforgivable puzzle segment in the hotel but overall the changes to the areas and exploration are decent.  Not better, not worse, just different and for a game that I'm extremely familiar with, I welcome the effort.

Another positive thing I want to touch on are the changes to the boss fights.  The bosses in original Silent Hill 2 are kind of wank.  For a town that's trying to punish James with monsters from his own pscyhe, it's not trying very fucking hard.  In the remake though, from a gameplay standpoint, I like the bossfights.  The change I liked the most is the Eddie fight in the meat locker.  In the original the AI would run at you, get stuck in a loop punching a piece of meat and then die in a couple of hits.  In the remake he's running all over the arena, shooting at you, trying to confuse you by fogging the place up.  At one point the hanging meat starts moving around and so if you're trying to gun him down then that's another thing you have to be managing while you shoot at him and avoid his revolver.  It's cool shit.  The fight with the double pyramid heads at the end of the game is also significantly more intense and while it's not difficult in any regard thanks to James having Dark Souls-eqsue i-frames when dodging, the sheer spectacle of fighting these two hulking fuckers with spears is very cool.

There is some stuff that's absolute dogwank though.  The game learned one trick very early on that was to hide its sentient pairs of legs around corners and have them ambush you and instead of just letting that be a one time or a couple-time thing, it's spamming that nonsense for the ENTIRE GAME.  Even when nightmares start intersecting with each other and James is supposed to be seeing Angela's monsters in the hotel, the remake decides to not do that and instead just fill the hotel with MORE FUCKING LEGS.  Legs and Pukey Boiz, that's all you fuckin' get for like 15 hours.  Maybe a nurse if the game is feeling generous but you fight them in the exact same way you fight the legs so what's the fucking point?

But that's all gameplay stuff.  Admittedly, the game part of the video game is alrite, solid, even if it does run like shit and crashed on me once in the hotel.  But the game isn't the real reason we're here is it? or at least it shouldn't be.  The story is what counts in Silent Hill 2, an absolutely masterfully written supernatural tragedy and how did Bloober handle it?  Well they fucked it up in nearly every single cutscene.  It was so bad that I started to dread getting to the end of segments because I knew something was going to piss me off royally as soon as the characters started flapping their gums.

There's too much to go through in a simple blog post, maybe I'll do a video on it one day, but the general gist of why it all annoys me so much is the complete removal of subtlety from the story.  Everything that was hinted at or implied through imagry or line delivery is gone and instead replaced with obvious statements made by Hollywood-ass sounding voice actors.  Angela doesn't sound weird and stilted like she's supposed to, Eddie is overly pathetic, the letter read at the end of the game from Mary sounds like a weird dollar store version of the original.  Granted, for most of the game it's only mildly annoying, stuff that me and my friend were saying "yeah it's OK but they fumbled it a little bit, I guess".  But then you watch the video tape in the hotel and everything, narratively speaking, goes to complete shit to the point where I wanted to take a plane to the Bloober offices and just punch every "writer" they have it that place right in the fucking jaw.  The game was made for them, all they had to do was copy it and yet they made all these weird changes to the sequence that aren't just different and a bit crap, but actively ruin the effect that the original was trying to produce.  

I understand that Bloober is a team of not very talented people and the fact that SH2R is as acceptable as it turned out is an christmas fucking miracle but what they did to the ending segment of the hotel is nothing short of art vandalism and I'm already sort of swerving into spoiler town enough with this post so again, another post for another day or maybe even a 14 hour video about why it sucks if I ever find the time to produce such a thing. 

Overall, Silent Hill 2 Remake is a medicore experience that teeters very close the being just flat out bad more often than not.  A few good decisions here and there but, quite frankly, it would be better if this game had never been made.

Hollowbody

 Spoiler alert, I'm going to say some rather unkind things about this game.  However, apparently, it's a game made by a single guy so before I take a big shit on it I want to at least acknowledge that the fact that this game exists at all is worthy of at least some praise.  I'm slowly trying to get into making games myself and even just learning how to make a knock-off ZX Spectrum lookin' ass game is proving to be quite the undertaking so despite Hollowbody's myriad problems, the effort to put it out is worthy of a pat on the head.

Anyway, nice things over, this game fucking sucks shit.

Hollowbody is a classic style survival horror game about a chick going into an abandoned British city in order to look for some other chick.  At time of writing it's been a little over a month since I finished Hollowbody and the plot is so forgetable that it's pretty much all I can remember of its story.  It's poorly presented and completely uninteresting and while I do remember the ending I don't want to go that far into spoiler territory for this post but it's unsatisfying and not worth it.

So if we ignore the plot, what are we left with? A sub-standard Silent Hill 2 clone with muddy graphics and shit level design.  Really it's copying the broad strokes of big titles from the entire genre but I single out Silent Hill 2 specifically because the first major area you go to is an apartment building that basically amounts to a dollar store version of the Ashfield apartments.  Each area you go to is also rife with some of the most boring and easy puzzles I have ever seen in a game of this type where any challenge that arises comes from poor signposting of key elements rather than devious challenge from the developer.  One example of this is when you need to light a trashcan fire to set off a fire alarm but the trash can asset is strewn all over the building that you're in and the existence of the fire alarm isn't obvious because it's a glowing red cube that clips into a wall.  When it's not being annoyingly obtuse in that regard the puzzles are just flat out obnoxious.  A stand out example of this type of puzzle was where you're tasked with trudging around a large graveyard examining sparsely layed out tombstones for a code.  I took one look at the puzzle, one look at the size of the area and immdiately went to the internet for the solution because Hollowbody is not worthy of me trudging through empty environments for clues.

But puzzles aren't the only thing this game has, there's also (sort of) combat.  Almost no strategy needed and no need to worry about the "survival" aspect of this survival horror game because most of the enemies you encounter can be smacked to death with a big stick and will basically put up zero effort to try and kill you thanks to the stunlocking effect of said stick.  By the time the game does start throwing some bigger baddies at you, you're so ammoed up with no risk of ever running out that you can mindlessly just blast anything blocking your way (which the enemies rarely ever do anyway, just run around em') and proceed to the end of the game unharmed and unbothered.

There is also a disgusting lack of polish that plagues the game at every turn.  Character models look weird with animations that are distractingly bad.  Voice acting is stilted in the inept way rather than the SH2 creepy way and I encountered a handful of bugs when playing.  My personal favorite of these bugs was a "puzzle" where you have to run around a sewer collecting still beating hearts to put on this fucking machine.  When you examine the machine, the character is like "there are creepy hands reaching out for something" or some shit but my game looked like this 

Insane indeed.  Here's a pic I clipped from some dudes lets play so you can see what its supposed to look like 

Hollowbody being apparently developed by one guy makes me want to be charitable towards it, if true, that's cool as fuck.  But on the flip side, you charged me 15 quid for a sub standard, derivitive and forgettable product that looks like jank and runs like shit.  So sorry not sorry, Hollowbody can fuck off forever.  One for the acid pit, don't buy it

Remnant: From The Ashes

Remnant: From The Ashes is a game from 2019 that I have just finished in 2024 thanks to the Epic Games Store giving it to me for free.  I remember when it came out and it had a bit of a buzz around it for being essentially "Dark Souls with Guns" but while also having a solid multiplayer com.  Well I didn't try the multiplayer component and let me tell you, Remnant: From The Ashes is the worse than bad, it's fucking boring.

The game is set in some kind of post apocolypse where you are tasked with getting to some island that's protected by a big storm in order to stop The Root, tree people that seem to enjoy human murder.  What follows is, a shameless Dark Souls clone with the twist being that the game focuses on ranged combat which, at first, starts out somewhat interesting.  For the first few areas of the game there's some degree of intensity to the gameplay.  The enemies are dangerous and resources are scarce so exploring the environments for healing items and ammo boxes so that you can free up your currency for upgrades is fun.  But then, after a boss or two, things start to go downhill extremely quickly.

As you kill enemies and gain experience you gain "trait points" which you can put into a variety of skills in your menu.  The most obvious thing to do is max out HP and stamina because having more numbers to get hit and dodge with in a game where damage values are so high is pretty valuable.  Once you do this, however, and max those values a lot of things in the game become trivial and when the challenge starts to die in a game like this, it's the beginning of the end.

What then makes things even worse is that after the initial area of levels set on Earth, you are transported to different, alien worlds on your quest to stop the Root and it's when you get to these areas that a lot of shit in Remnant is re-used.  In the desert area known as Rhom I think I went through the same dilapidated set of corridors about 6 times.  Not as backtracking during exploration, I mean that on the foward path, en route to new areas, the same indoor environment had been copy pasted that many times but just with the enemies shifted around slightly.  It was in this world, the second of 4, that I basically vowed to stop exploring anything because having to endure the same area over and over again was just mind numbing.  

Not that the vow I made meant anything in the end because not only is area re-use up the wazoo but after the first area things get extremely linear.  Like, Final Fantasy 13 levels of linear.  By the end of the game I was rushing through every zone just so I could get to the final boss as fast as possible and I STILL managed to find a ton of rings and trinkets that I basically had no use for because there are two very good rings and then a bunch of trash which will just take up space in your inventory.  

What makes the game completely unbearable though is how, after a certain boss in the second world, the game becomes COMPLETELY braindead.  One of the bosses grants you a beam rifle weapon that is so significantly better than every other weapon that you get your hands on that regular enemies won't even have a chance to get near you, let alone hit you with anything.  It also makes bosses a completely joke because you just aim and hold down fire which allows you to dedicate 100% of your brainpower to dodging the incredibly easy to avoid and heavily broadcasted attacks that they do.  By the end of the game, between trait points making everything a joke, overpowered weapons and boss design that felt like the devs just gave up, you're playing Remnant in a sort of mindless haze that fails to engage or entertain in any way at all.

There is a heavily emphasized multiplayer component that I didn't touch because who the fuck is playing Remnant: From the Ashes in 2024, really? but I can't image that having an extra person in my game would make things any more fun.  It would just be a second drone to mindlessly beam down all the enemies with and, if anything, would make procedings even easier.

So in closing, I fucking hate Remnant.  I always say that bad games have value because at least in getting mad about them or finding them funny in some way you are getting something out of it.  But Remnant is boring.  A game that you will play, finish, feel nothing while playing it and then never think about it again after the credits roll and that is way, WAY worse.  A truly miserable game made by truly soulless people to ride an action RPG wave they didn't understand.  Sad and embarassing

The Windows Are Gone

 

On my stream I like to do a little segment that I call "free game dumpster diving" which, I know, is a strange thing to call it considering that a lot of the things I do play end up being quite good but I started with that and I'm not about to change it now.  One of the things I played recently on that segment was a little thing called The Windows Are Gone which I found moderately impressive so I want to do a little post about it and shine some light on it.

The Window Are Gone starts out with a character moving into a new house as a way of getting a fresh start after experiencing some kind of horrible event.  It starts out quite simple with you just having to carry your boxes of stuff into the house but before too long things start to get a little creepy with a next door neighbor coming to say hi and things going bump in the....day.  Things going bump in the day I think is a smidge creepier because the day is when things aren't supposed to go bump.  Bump in the night? no problem, deal with that shit all the time, bump in the day? that's just fuckin wrong.

Anyway the story is extremely short and I want you, the reader, to actually go and play it so without getting into any spoilers things escalate pretty quickly and a decent horror experience ensues.  The story is pretty predictable and you can KIND of guess whats going on as early as the first little text message you get on your phone from another character but what the game lacks in originality it makes up for with absolute SPADES of atmosphere.  Come cool sound design couple with the not-quite PS1 visuals and some funky tricks with timers and triggers was able to actually get a little bit of a spook out of me and when considering that most AAA huge budget large studio bullshit horror games can't get that out of me, that's impressive.  

What Mr or Mrs ScaryCube has managed to show here is restraint, which I feel is a bit of a lost art in the genre in recent memory.  While a lot of horror games want to hit you with dark corridors, lound banging and BOO! CREEPY FUCKIN MONSTER! as quickly as possible The Windows Are Gone knows how to use its short run time to allow itself to build up properly.  Start with something mundane, get comfortable, get a little cozy even and then slowly IV Drip that spooky shit until the climax.  I've always thought that short stories are probably the best delivery method for horror literature and I'm starting to think that short, bite-sized games like this might be a more advantagous method of delivering horror games as well.  A solid 1-4 hour experience is proabably more conducive to making something truly scary rather than an 8 hour gory screamfest that you become desensitized to by hour 3 (Dead Space, you unscary fuck).  

Finally, the game allows you to actually open up the boxes and decorate the house which, in my opinion, was a way more entertaining part of the game than I ever thought something like that could be.  Move over Unpacking, The Windows Are Gone has got your fuckin number.

This post could be longer but I really don't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't played it before and didn't see it on my stream.  It costs literally 0 money and is short as fuck so don't make any excuses, go try it now.

MDK: Flaws becoming Vibes

 

I just recently finished MDK on PC for the first time.  Despite the game being moderately well known and despite the fact that I played the demo for MDK 2 on Dreamcaste and loved it, it has taken me this long to finally play one of them to completion and I'm glad I did.

The game was released in 1997 by Shiny Entertainment who are the people also responsible for Earthworm Jim and they certainly did have a bit of a talent for making uniquely strange stuff.  The game is about some dude called Kurt who is wearing what is probably the strangest space suit I've ever seen.  A dude with a gun arm and a hand vaccum for a head if there's one thing Shiny were good at it was designing interesting looking main characters.  Kurt must venture into a number of Land Crawlers, giant alien space ships that are destroying parts of the earth and shoot them up until they aren't doing that any more.  There may be more to the plot than that, but I'll address that later.

Gameplay is a pretty basic run and gun type affair.  Run through the level until you see something moving, hold down the mouse until it isn't moving and then move on.  Each stage is basically just a number of arenas that are broken up by corridors with an occasional puzzle haphazardly slapped in there to try and vary things up but the puzzles usually get no more complicated than "shoot the thing wot we hid".  My favorite stage in the game was the one where the monotony gets broken up by surfboarding segments where you drop cows on gun turrets and the soundtrack plays a knock off James Bond theme, it was a lot of fun.   Also the powerup for dropping the cows was an Earthworm Jim head so that was a nice little nod to their previous work. 

I think though, that if I had played MDK around the time it was new I would have become bored with it very quickly.  The game isn't overly long but every level is the same thing of just rooms of enemies connected by corridors.  The visual designs of the rooms are varied and can throw you for a loop sometimes but that doesn't prevent the gameplay from feeling a little stale by the end.  Yet, playing MDK in 2023 I didn't get that sense of boredom I might have done playing it at time of release.  PC gaming of that era has such a vibe to it, a feeling I can't quite articulate properly but you can FEEL it when you play these games.  Unreal Tournament has it, Thief has it, Deus Ex has it and MDK certainly has it.  I think it has something to do with early 3D combined with the way games were designed back then, the only way I can describe it is as "a vibe". 

I did discover after actually finishing the game though that I had been playing kind of a gimped version of the game.  Like with a lot of games from this era there are issues of compatibility and MDK was no different.  When you fire up the game on Steam you are given the choice between the regular version and the "Glide" version.  Instead of looking up what that was I just went ahead and played regular but apparently the regular version is missing cutscenes and things like that.  I realized something was wrong when I killed the final boss and the game just abruptly cut to main menu.  No ending, no credits roll or anything but by that point I was already done and not about to go back.  I have a quad digit backlog over here, if I care that much I'll go watch it on YouTube.

Anyway, nostalgia is one hell of a drug.  Not a drug that usually works on me usually, I've found that my opinion on the N64 has soured dramatically over the years, for example, but it certainly got me real good with MDK.  Worth a play if you haven't already but might be worth just playing the console version if you can't be bothered wrestling with the keyboard bindings like I had to.

The Strange Grandstanding of Evo/Wave

 

Every so often on the stream (www.twitch.tv/taurinensis) we do a little segment that I have dubbed the Free Game Dive.  It involves going on Steam or websites like Itch, downloading free to play indie games and playing them through.  I've found some real cool little titles over the course of doing this segment so it's generally a lot of fun.

Recently, one of the games I finished as part of this segment was something on Steam called Evo/Wave, a short collectathon platformer in the same vein of something like Banjo Kazooie or similar titles.  The story is about an old AI called MagnaVex (get it?) drestroying some kind of computer core that causes the world to get all screwed up.  You, playing as a little robot dude, have to go into 3 worlds, collect some shit and reverse the damage that MagnaVex has done. 

According to Alexandre Isidorio, the guy who designed the UI, the game was made as a student project for a university course and as far as the game itself goes it's actually pretty good.  Having just finished Yooka Laylee and absolutely hating it playing a game like this which actually seemed to have a bit of thought and effort put into it was nice.  The final stage as well where you fight MagnaVex in a series of platforming challenges was particularly fun and did a good job of testing your skills with the games various power-ups, worth a shot if you have a couple hours to kill one day for sure.

But there's something weird going on with the games story, what little there is of it.  When you collect all the parts in the games three levels and are about to enter the final encounter with MagnaVex, a cutscene plays where he makes a bit of a speech about the current state of the industry, about how games have become unimaginative, constant installs and updates are annoying and companies are nickle and diming using at every turn and it's done in this sort of "old man yells at cloud" tone and yet, is he wrong though?

The constant installs and updates ARE annoying.  It's not something I've ever been too bothered by because I'm more than happy to just play or do something else while it goes on but the fact that the days of being able to just buy a game, slam it in my machine and just play right away are long gone IS annoying.  The fact that every time I fire up Xenoblade Chronicles on my Switch and it asks me to do a software update on a game made THIRTEEN fucking years ago is cause for minor irritation.

The nickle and diming of the industry as well is also a well documented and often complained about side of things.  Battle passes, microtransactions and bullshit DLC featuring content that should have just been in the initial purchase are rampant not to mention the constant remaking of safe bet, classic games in a thinly veiled attempt to get you to open your wallet for that nostalgia hit

But it's the criticism of people that feel that the creativity has been largely sucked out of games in exchange for varients of the same thing that really rubs the wrong way.  I'm not one to say that ALL of gaming has become stagnant, I'm far too widely versed in the deepest, most obscure realms to honestly think that but I do feel that generally speaking gaming, at least the mainstream stuff, has sacrified being interesting in exchange for being mostly OK.  What I mean by this is that if you look that the libraries of anything from back in the day, take the PS1 for example, the games are widely varied, even within the same genre.  There's a lot of experimentation going on with style, mechanics and presentation and while it makes the sysem interesting there are quite a lot of just flat out stinkers on that system.  Nowadays I feel that everything is sort of made from a template, usually something that worked well in the past and while that means that truly, honest to goodness fucking AWFUL games aren't really all that common anymore the creativity within the medium has suffered greatly as a result.  

It's been a thing in the AAA scene forever but even the indie scene hasn't avoided falling into this trap.  At time of writing there are two big indie games that I am told are very good.  Lies of P and Sea of Stars.  I have yet to play either of these and people who's opinions I don't immdiately disregard have told me that they are good games and they sure as shit look pretty cool but Lies of P is just Bloodborne and Sea of Stars is just Chrono Triggter (it even has Yasunori Mitsuda doing the music, for fucks sake).  I'm always glad to have more of a good thing, sure, but it doesn't make me a cranky old boomer, like Evo/Wave suggests that I sigh a little at all the safe bets and appeals to nostalgia.

Still, Evo/Wave is an pretty good Free2Play thingie if you have some free time and nothing better to do.  The dev might have his head up his own arse on the state of the industry but this is a game that fucking NO ONE gives a fuck about so collect the shiny objects then turn it off and ignore his crap opinions going forward.

Bioshock Infinite Is a Bad Game

 

Recently I did a stream where I finished Bioshock Infinite in a single session so I wanted to spend a post talking about it a little bit because while I didn't have an awful time with it, it's a pretty shitty game.

Bioshock Infinite was released in 2013 and follows the story of a dude called Booker DeWitt as he travels to Columbia, the city in the sky, where he is tasked with saving a girl called Elizibeth from some evil bloke called Comstock.  Elizibeth is no ordinary girl though as she has the power to open holes in space time so the two of them meet up and then go on a shooty, multi-dimensional journey to escape fantasy turbo-racist sky America.

As a game in it's own right, Bioshock Infinite isn't a bad game.  The gunplay is just fine, the Vigors (formerly known as Plasmids) make a return and give a few extra options to things when fighting and also there are set places where Elizibeth can open some space time holes for you that grant you access to guns, robots to shoot for you, movement options or cover.  By itself, Bioshock infinite is FINE, a good old turn off your brain and shoot bang the bad men until they go away and do it in the admittedly quite pretty backdrop of a sky city.

However Bioshock Infinite is not an original IP that we can judge entirely on its own merits, it's the third entry in a series and when you start to make those comparisons Bioshock Infinite becomes a incredibly dumbed down boredom-fest that is nothing more than a shell of what it once was.  Bioshock 1 and 2 didn't quite have the depth to be called a full on "immersive sim" but there was still a quite cerebral element to play.  For example you had lots of choices with what guns you used, you could carry all of them at once, pick a few to suit your play style for upgrading purposes and then attempt to tailor your approach to a situation based on that.  For example, if you were the kind of guy that favored getting in there with a shotgun you might use the ice plasmid for your human foes and the electro bolt to disable mechanical ones and go apeshit in a group of enemies.  If you prefered to be a bit more sneaky you might want to use the grenade launcher alt-ammo to lay down traps, equip plasmids that turn enemies on each other and try and avoid the fray.  There were a lot of options for play style and there were a lot of chances for you to use the environment to your advantage.  Another example might be that enemies were prone to running to a healing station in a level if they were low on health.  If you werent good at hacking or couldn't be bothered (the mini game did kind of suck in Bio 1) then you'd have to drop what you were doing to go deal with the fleeing enemy.  If you DID like hacking though, you could hack the healing station so that when an enemy tried to use it they would take damage instead, meaning that a fleeing foe is something you don't have to worry about during a heated shoot out.

These are just some very basic examples of stuff from previous games that you could do but Bioshock Infinite has NONE of that.  You only get 2 guns at a time, so there's no emergent play style because you aren't using guns you like or guns that are good for a situation, you're using whatever is lying around so that you have ammo for it.  The Vigors in this game are absolute dogshit and barely do anything most of the time.  I only really used 2 vigors the entire game which was possesion and shock jockey.  Possession was particularly broken because once upgraded it basically becomes a "delete a guy" button except before deletion he will fight for you.  I got a whole bunch of things that all kind of did the same thing, boiling down to nothing more than "click to do thing, hold and release to drop a trap for that thing".  Even the environmental stuff was bullshit because every area is just a shooting arena with a couple of rips in space time for you to abuse.  I didn't have to think about if I wanted to use the gun turret rip in space time, I just did it because why the fuck would I NOT want a robot gun helping me save ammo?  There's not even anything clever with the health system because they turned that into fucking Halo of all things.  Get hit, lose a shield and then suck your thumb behind a wall until it comes back, rinse and repeat until the fight is over.

They had made TWO games, even more if you include the System Shock games that worked and were fun and cool and instead of building upon the ideas layed down in all those games, they ripped it all out so you could play Call of Duty: Wizard Edition.  I'm not going to spoil anything in this review but clearly all the efforts at being "clever" went into the plot which involves time travel and multi-verse type bullshit but it's all just a bunch of pretentious nonsense and once you get to the end it's just as unsatisfying and the gameplay 

If there's one thing I cannot stand its the dumbing down of games.  If you want to make an original that's about a shooty person making heads explode then fine, do that, I'm sure it'll be a good time.  What you shouldn't do is take a game series that already exists and is interesting and rip all of the interesting aspects of that series out to chase lowest common denominator bullshit.  That just makes you an asshole

I finished it on hard, I might go back to check out the DLC chapters that were set in Rapture but I have no intention of ever playing the sorry excuse for a campaign ever again.  Fuck this game

Free Indie Game Roundup

 Recently I did a event on my stream that I titled "Free Indie Game Dumpster Diving" and despite the word dumpster in the title, most of the games I played during that stream were actually really good.  Here's a quite roundup of those games 

1) Gun Devil 

Gun Devil, avaliable for free on Steam, is a 2D side scrolling platformer.  It starts with a story sequence about your characters wife being kidnapped and its full of semi-edgy early Newgrounds tier writing that's a little bit cringeworthy but once the game gets going its a rather enjoyable experience.  It has tight controls, some very nice pixel art and despite being a quite a short game has some replay value after you are finished because you can get these giant coins at the end of each stage for doing it no hit and killing all the enemies.  I would have happily paid a few bucks for this one but you can play it right now, for free. 

2) The Backrooms: Lost and Found

The Backrooms are some creepy-pasta thing that I dont fully understand but there seems to be a lot of media surrounding it.  This game involves navigating through the backrooms looking for wooden giraffes while you are on the hunt for an exit.  Depending on how much you explore you can get one of SEVEN endings which I have to admit is quite a lot for a free game.  However, the game has a really stupid stamina system that makes running around sort of tedious and after the first run I can't really see myself ever going back to see what those other 6 endings were.  Not terrible by any means but you can do a lot better in terms of free indie horror

3) Freight Hopper

There was a game that came out a while ago on Steam that cost money called Clustertruck (I think) that involved free running across the tops of trucks as they sped down the stages.  It's the kind of game that's made for speedrunning with its emphasis on clearly levels quickly and movement mechanics.  Well this is just a free version of that.  Not many levels and the controls are sort of floaty and weird but once I got used to them I had a pretty good time.  If you liked Clustertruck and you need some more of it in your life, play this one I guess.

4) Workaholic

A first person shooter about shooting your co-workers in the face with finger guns.  There isn't really much more to it than that, you just blast your way through 4 stages that have sort of random layouts and then your done.  The art is cool and the gameplay is fast but its way too short and is just begging for some kind of endless mode which I don't think would have been too hard to implement given that the levels are procedurally generated anyway.  There's a fairly impressive selection of weapons for you to find which is cool but picking up a life steal, super kick or dual weild powerup puts a weird filter over the graphics that make it borderline unplayble.  Pretty good as long as you avoid those items, would play again .

5) Ghost Trap 

Very basic precision platformer that doesn't go too crazy with the difficulty.  My only real complaint is that there's a lot of waiting around for the games 2 bosses that make them quite annoying.  Comes with a cool speedrun mode which lets you play all the levels back to back without having to go through the annoying menu every time.  

6) Resonance of the Ocean 

Some kind of art game about a person on a island trying to communicate with someone by copying strange noises that come from another nearby island.  You have to go around picking up and combining items to make the right sound and then take them to a big megaphone to end the stage.  Very basic, very easy and very much has its head shoved up its own ass.  Nice art though

7) The Night that Speaks

When someone in my chat told me about this game they described it as "a game where you fight monsters by giving them the finger" which got me very excited.  Upon playing it though it's just a bland and boring horror game and giving the baddie the finger to make it go away isn't awesome like I thought it would be and it isn't even really all that funny.  Also the game was made to look like it was on Game Boy, which sounds cool but it just makes all the graphics murky and its hard to make anything out.  I got it for free and felt ripped off

8) Self

A interesting platformer where instead of jumping you sort of expand a big rubber band and use it to flick yourself around the level.  Not much more to it than that but its short, sweet and has some really good music.  Comes with some bonus challenge levels that are actually really hard and its very satisfying to clear them after some practice

10) Grippy

A Pico-8 game where you play as a piece of chewing gum that has to grab its way around a bunch of stages.  Its interesting because you play it by using the arrow keys to direct your fists and then you have to hold and release either Z or X for each hand in order to swing around.  Takes a while to get used to but really fun once you get the hang of it.  Also has multiple routes through each section with the harder ones being shorter so the more skilled player can get a faster clear time, which is a nice touch.  Will probably play again some time to get my time down.  

11) 13 Gates

A very basic first person platforming game.  You play the 13 levels, have a sort of good time and then never play it again 

12) Guardian Sphere

The game I chose for this posts header image because it was EASILY the best one I played in the entire 14 hour stream.  A top down shooter that has the cool gimmick of your life points also being your shot power AND a form of currency.  There are 5 stages and each stage has a couple of shops in them where you can spend your HP for various upgrades creating a sort of risk/reward system that can be really satisfying when you gamble all your HP for a sick upgrade and then survive long enough to collect a few more hit points again.  The game also has 8 playable characters to choose from each with there own shot type and 3 difficulty settings.  I did a 1cc run of the game on my first try on normal but that's because I'm an actual shmup God rather than the game being overly easy, I think for your average player this game may be kind tough depending on how lucky you are with the RNG shops.  You coulda put that on Steam for $10 and I woulda been happy but giving it away for free on Itch is just Godlike  

13) Plead with the Mountain God

A PS1-like platforming game which rips off the story of Shadow of the Collossus almost enitirely.  Only instead of having epic battles with giant monsters, you're very clunkily jumping up a tower.  Gameplay gets very dull very fast, has no music and at once point I glitched through the floor but not an awful experience by any stretch.  A forgettable game

14) Ashes 2063

A full, stand alone Doom conversion that I didnt finish during the marathon but happily added to my "now playing" list as it was a ton of fun.  Adds a bunch of stuff that base Doom doesn't have like towns, dialouge and shopping.  Quite challenging as well but there's a chance that I thought that because I was 12 hours deep when I started it.  Will post more about it in the future

15) Mini-Doom

A Doom fan game that I played for about 20 minutes but that seems really good.  A 2D platforming version of Doom that has a Mario 3 style world map and elements of a Metroidvania.  Didn't play enough to form a proper opinion but at a glance it seems very interesting indeed

That was all the games I played during the marathon and overall I had a damn good time.  If we get enough channel points via the stream at www.twitch.tv/taurinensis then we'll do another one!

Amnesia Rebirth: A Good Idea Left Unimplemented

 

At time of writing I have just finished Amnesia Rebirth, provided to me for free by the Epic Game Store.  I am also maybe the most frustrated I have ever been with a horror game in my life.

I'm not really here to write a review or anything but I'll quickly cover my thoughts on my playthrough.  Amnesia Rebirth is a game I was expecting very little out of based on the previous entry in the series called A Machine For Pigs.  The first game, The Dark Descent was greatly entertaining but Machine For Pigs was no more than a walking simulator spook-house made by a group of devs so devoid of talent that you could have probably made a better game by giving a new born baby a 1970s IBM and a big stick to hit it with.  Luckily Amnesia Rebirth is a bit more of an actual game and tells the story of a woman called Tasi as she gets stranded in the desert in a plane crash as she goes through caves and some alternate dimension in an attempt to escape and save not just her life, but the life of her unborn child as well.

Gameplay involves exploring areas, solving puzzles and occasionally hiding/running away from a monster.  The sanity management thing from Dark Descent is back where spending too much time in the dark or looking directly at the creature will cause you to freak out and die so managing things like your supply of matches and latern oil is something the game tries to convince you is important.  However Rebirth is also incredibly easy with pathetically easy puzzles and no punishment for failing encounters with the creatures, but I'll talk about that later.  That said though, it was just entertaining enough to keep me playing to the end without getting too angry with it so as far as "run and hide" horror games go you could in fact do a lot worse.  

So why am I so frustrated with it?  Well one of the main things in the game is the main character "controlling her fear" and "not succumbing to anger" and all that bullshit.  It's pretty clear, pretty early on unless you have some kind of brain problem that the events of the game are somehow her fault and she's actually retracing her steps finding out what happned to her and the crew of the plane that went down at the start.  As you play you encounter a monster that will, in certain areas, attempt to chase you down and get you, only if and when it does get you, you don't actually die or game over.  The game throws you a mini cutscene of the main character running through a couple of previous explored areas and then waking up either just before or sometimes just after the area you were just in.  

What I thought was going on was that every time the creature caught you, that was her "succumbing to her fear" and so each failed creature encounter would somehow affect the ending in some way.  What compounded my impression of that happening was the fact that after you are caught and get back to the monster area, the monster is gone from that zone.  Like you are now free to progress the game monster free at the cost of the ending.  Not failing any monster encounters would mean that she managed to stay mentally strong during the whole ordeal and you would get the best ending and failing all or nearly all of them would give you the worst one, maybe with some other factors thrown in as well.  

However none of this actually happened.  As soon as I hit the final cutscene and was given a "do X or Y" choice the rug was pulled from underneath me and I realized that all of that hiding and running away that I did barely mattered at all.  The only monster encounters that actually matter are the spoopy ghosts with the lanterns near the end because they dont actually despawn when you fail but, and I'd have to test thing, they lose the ability to "kill" you after the first time.  

The other reason I thought this was the case is because when you start the game you are given a choice between "normal mode" and "adventure mode".  Adventure mode basically just turns off the monsters and the sanity mechanic and lets you just explore and puzzle solve and is described by the game as "for people that don't want to deal with horror".  

There are two things wrong with this

One is that, like I said before, getting caught by the monster just deletes it from the area anyway so even if you're the worst hide and seek player of ALL TIME you still only need to suffer one minor failiure before you are allowed to progress.  Two is what the fuck do you mean by "dont want to deal with horror"?!  Why in the name of bloody fuck would you buy the THIRD GAME IN A SERIES OF HORROR GAMES if you didn't like horror?  That would be like me going to see a movie called "Love Actually 3" and then getting pissed off at the fact its a romance movie and not a supernatural thiller, what a stupid fucking mode to have in your game.

So what could have been a cool mechanic that encourages repeat playthroughs just wasn't used at all and now if I want to see the other endings all I have to do is load my save and pick the other other thing.  "Push a button on the Ending-tron 3000" is the shittiest, laziest most bullshit way a developer can implement multiple endings and anyone who's used that method deserves to have an entire day spent in wet socks, you're a disgrace.

Despite my griping though, Rebirth is still SIGNIFICANTLY better than A Machine for Pigs which granted, is not a very high bar to pass, but at least there is an attempt at an actual game here.  The most 5/10 horror game you'll ever play in your life

Martha is Dead Censorship

A few days ago I came across a news story about some horror game I hadn't heard of until that point called Martha is Dead that was apparently being censored on Playstation and left alone on PC and X Box.  I then made an offhand tweet about some silliness I saw in the discourse surrounding the game only to find it getting flooded with likes, retweets and a couple of absolutely brainrotten comments from people who cannot read.  So I thought I'd take a little bit of time to say a few things on the issue here.

First of all the censorship itself seems stupid but at this point it's something I have come to expect from Sony.  The clip that is circling around social media is a scene of the game where the player is holding a severed head of some woman and the player character proceeds to use a razor to make cuts in the side of the head and then pull off the face (complete with button prompts!) and then they wear it or something. Sure, the scene in question is sort of shocking but it's no worse than anything else that comes out of other titles in the genre and even out of the genre of horror.  Severing limbs and DIY eye surgery in Dead Space, Lara Croft getting brutalized in the reboot games, Fatality animations in Mortal Kombat, no one seems to give a shit when this kind of thing is going on from huge studios but a small indie group make a face-ripping scene and suddenly its all "ooooh this is absolutely disgusting how could anyone possibly make this?!"

At least for me in Japan, Sony censoring violence is nothing new.  I have talked at length both on the blog and on stream about how parts of Until Dawn were censored so heavily that if affected the story.  Resident Evil is also very heavily censored when it comes to violence even in it's more expensive "Z-Versions".  The story I have heard (Im not sure how true this is, keep in mind) is that in 1997 is that some 14 year old kid abducted and beheaded a couple of Elementary school children and left their severed heads on the school gate for people to see.  The kid was caught and after all was said and done a politician called Shizuka Kamei put the blame squarely on "violent and cruel movies" and so acts of extreme violence in mutilation in films and games have been censored or not really done since then.  

So while the censorship is stupid and shouldn't be done, it at least makes some degree of sense that one of the biggest companies in the entire country wouldn't want to get on the bad side of those rules.  Nintendo, as far as I know, doesn't really have any games in their library that would require that kind of censorship and Microsoft is an American company that doesn't need to give a shit, which is why you probably don't see this kind of thing happening on those platforms.  

But I'll be honest, I stopped giving a shit about Sony censorship a long time ago, thems just the breaks, what my tweet was actually about was the individual user response about the content itself.  Most people responded with outrage at the censorship and that it should be left alone and if that kind of extreme violence in a piece of media makes you uncomfortable to the point of "literally shaking and crying" then just don't play it, something I agree with quite strongly.  What people need to realize is that while "video games are for everyone" is a nice fluffy statement that lets you pretend to be a good person on social media, the truth is that while games are for everyone, not ALL games are for everyone.  If you don't like violent, grotesque acts in your games, don't play horror.  If you don't like difficult gameplay, don't play Dark Souls or Cuphead.  I don't like endless boring life-sim bullshit like Animal Crossing but instead of moaning about it I can very easily accept its just not for me and then not buy it, it's really that easy.

Where I get my back up is when I was scrolling through the tweets and I saw someone describe the developers as "irresponsible" for "releasing the games without trigger warnings".  What this is doing is attempting to villify the creators of Martha is Dead for hiding the nature of the content in the game and acting as if the violence and adult themes are some kind of surprise.  Except that's not true is it?  The game is rated M and has all the relevent warnings and even if it didn't have that, the literal FIRST THING you see when going to the Steam page is this.

It's RIGHT THERE, before you can ever access the game description or the button to buy, you have to accept this warning.  Do not try and pass off your inability to read or lack of attention span on the developers as if it's their fault.  Just because it's not written with the words "TRIGGER WARNING" at the top of the page and is written as a paragraph full of vapid social media buzzwords doesn't mean it's not there.  

Anyway, I had no idea what the game was before this controversy and now I'm excited to pick it up for myself, possibly to play in some kind of October Horror Playlist on stream later this year.  So while the censorship is bad and the controversy stupid, at least I found an interesting game out of it.

Detention Quick Review

 

Detention is a game I've had my eye on for a long time and now I have finally got around to playing and finishing the game so I want to spend just a little time sharing some of my thoughts on it. 

The game starts out with you playing as a high school student called Wei who, during a storm, finds himself trapped in the school with a girl, Rey.  They interact for a while and then Wei ends up hung upside down in the school assembly hall dead and the story then focuses on Rey as she explores the school to try and escape.  I dont want to go into too much of the story after this point because Detention is very much a one and done kind of game where things are best experienced for yourself.  The story isn't anything incredible but its well executed and interesting enough to hold your attention for its fairly short play time

Gameplay is done entirely on a 2D plane using the mouse.  If your familiar with old point and click adventure type games then that's the kind of style it has.  You walk around the environments finding various odd items for various odd puzzles which you solve for various interpretations of keys for various interpretations of doors.  It's actually quite a good job that the story for Detention is interesting because as a game, it's a bit shit.  The puzzles are insultingly easy at pretty much every stage of the game with usually the thing you need to solve a puzzle being either in the room of the puzzle itself or just every so slightly down a hall with few exceptions.  The only time I got "stuck" in Detention was during a puzzle sequence involving tuning a radio to change rooms and I was only stumped because the shadows of one of the rooms was hiding a door.  I fired up a guide, saw the sentence "exit the door on the right" and then closed the guide and did the rest of the game no problem.  The only other element to the gameplay is the "enemies" that occasionally stalk you in the corridors.  They come in two flavors and both are thwarted by pressing the right mouse button to hold your breath.  If for some reason you are killed by one, the game makes you walk up a mountain path for 15 seconds and then drops you off at a checkpoint.  

While Detention sort of sucks shit in the gameplay department it does much MUCH better with it's horror.  Games that look like they could have been made in FlashMX 2004 usually piss me off but the old Newgrounds-y style art coupled with some decent sound design make for a rather unnerving atmosphere.  There was one moment where I had to pause the game and go do something downstairs and the weird noises coming from my room were enough to make me trot back upstairs and close the door to shut them out because they were sort of making me uneasy.  Also, one thing I cannot praise this game for enough is the TOTAL lack of jumpscares.  Not a single one.  A lot of horror games/movies rely heavily one loud noises coupled with an orchestra sting to force a scare out of you but Detention does not do this EVEN ONCE and for that it must be highly commended.  A lot of the fear in Detention comes from its strange, nightmareish visuals and it does this nice thing of occasionally flashing something weird at you for just a frame or two and then never bringing it up again.

Minor spoiler here so if you dont wanna hear it skip the next paragraph 

One of the puzzles involves finding a box cutter and slitting the throat of the strung up body of Wei in the second chapter.  When you do this and get the item or whatever it was you get for the puzzle, as you click out off the screen, Wei opens his eyes for just a moment as the screen fades to black and fades back into the main game.  If you click him again, his eyes are closed, it never happens again.  It's a fantastic way to unnerve a player and it uses this technique sparingly enough to keep you guessing at every turn.

Spoilers over

It's nice to see a horror game take a more subtle approach to scaring the player than the usual loud noises, monsters made of bacon and chase sequences that we've come to know all to often today.  Sure, Detention isn't particuarly great as a game but it's trying to tell you a nice, creepy little tale with some nice creepy imagry and at that it succeeds very well.  If you dont want to take my word for it then consider that it was good enough at what it did to have a movie made of it, which I will be checking out myself at the first possible opportunity.  It's extremely cheap on Steam so go pick it up and give it ago, you proably won't regret it

The Steam Discovery Queue Is Just Depressing

 

Every so often when I have a couple of minutes to kill or if I'm procrastinating something I'll fire up Steam and take a look at the discovery queue.  At first, the discovery queue seems like a good idea because it apparently looks at games you play and then suggests you things based on that but at this point I'm sure that's bullshit because the Steam discovery queue is equal parts depressing and anger inducing and I don't know why I keep clicking through it

I'll start by saying that it's not a totally useless feature, I do occasionally come across a title in that list of games that I'll either buy right away or at least put on the wish list for later because it looks interesting but titles that do that are few and far between.

One thing that discovery queue has done for me is given me a fair bit of contempt for the indie game scene as a whole. I thought that indie games were cool because they were free of things like investors breathing down their necks to make a certain amount of cash and therefore could be a bit more creative and experimental except that's not what is going on at all.  Zelda-Clone, Soulslike, pixel graphic boomer shooter, low poly 3d horror walking simulator, Slay the Spire rip-off or the worst offender, action roguelite.  Just a constant barrage of samey, uninspired dross made by tossers that lack a single creative bone in their body trying to cash-in on whatever is the indie trend at the time.  I used to love roguelike games, but then 2011 came around, The Binding of Isaac came out and was really good but then the store flooded and is still flooded with rougelikes and now nothing will get me to hit that next button faster than seeing that tag.  Take some notes from Dennaton Games or Lucas Pope and try and make something at least a smidge original, will ya?

But it gets worse than that

The reason I think that the claim that discovery queue suggests stuff based on what you play is because every so often I'll get suggested a game that looks something akin to a low effort platformer than you might have found on Newgrounds around my middle school age.  Keep in mind that games on Newgrounds back then.  I got suggested one piece of shit looking game called Bok which looks EXACTLY like some piece of shit game some idiot would have made when trying to learn FlashMX.  The difference now is that it's some piece of shit trying to learn Unity or Godot or some such crap and they want money for it

 

Yeah it's only 2 quid but I'd rather stand in Siberian winter and have someone pull my ear lobes than give you money for that sack of shit.  Purplexingly it fed me that one because of Cuphead and......Bendy?  Whatever algoritihm they got for game suggestions is pretty drunk

But Bok isn't even the worst offender.  I did a couple of queues back to back and found this one guy who had made the same game 3 or 4 times, re-skinned them and jigged the levels around a bit and was selling each game for like 5 bucks each.  If I ever find them again I'll put them on twitter but the lack of quality for those games was absolutely shameless.

While I'm at it, let me also touch on the "Adult Only" games that occasionally pop up in the feed as well.  Why is it that almost every adult game on Steam is the ugliest looking piece of shit I've ever seen.  I've played A LOT of hentai games in my time and if there's one thing a Japanese ero-ge developer will put a lot of time into it's the art, because that is what is pulling in most of it's userbase.  Adult games on steam though all seem to use the exact same ugly looking 3D models with godawful animations and some of the worst "erotic" voice acting I've ever heard.  If there is anyone out there getting off to steam adult only games that aren't a translation of some Japanese thing, let me know because I'm convinced these people do not exist.

It makes me wonder if Steam has anything akin to quality control since the store is just HEAVING with garbage.  A sad state of affairs but luckily there are accounts on places like Twitter and YouTube that will filter through the bullshit better than any discovery queue ever could so tell that queue to go fuck itself and go there instead

Was Tomb Raider Ever Good?

 

Obscenely late to the party once again thanks to my insanely large backlog, I picked up a cheap copy of the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot on Steam and finally started playing it not too long ago.  It's a painful "OK" game, competently made and fun to fiddle about with for 30 minutes to an hour at a time but nothing special.  It's the gaming equivalent of eating a piece of plain bread or a bowl of plain, unseasoned rice with no side dish.  Not terrible enough to really complain about but not something you'd want to consume regularly.

The one thing that keeps going through my mind as I'm playing it is "why does this exist? we already have Uncharted".  Everything that set Tomb Raider apart back in the day when Lara had a lot more polygons and significantly stiffer movement is completely gone in favor of making it just Uncharted if it was a semi open-world game.  The problem with it being so similar to Uncharted is that it sucks at being Uncharted and it sucks at being a semi open world game.  The Japanese island that Lara runs around on in this game just isn't an interesting location and I find myself sort of glazing over as I'm playing.  The only real interesting thing about the game is how much effort went into the animations for Lara getting beaten up and killed and quite frankly I don't get that much enjoyment from watching game over screens and Saw-Lite levels of gore.

But here's the spicy hot take from the title, was Tomb Raider ever really good? 

I know there are plenty of people that claim to like it, it was a hugely popular franchise for a while and triangular tittied Lara Croft was and still is a video game icon but the games are just So. Fucking. Boring. I remember when I first got my Sega Saturn that had a playable demo of the first Tomb Raider game and I fired that thing up and prompty put it down.  At first I chalked it up just to being too young to "get" it, so when I was older I gave the classic Tomb Raider games another shot and gave up a few stages deep because I was so painfully bored.  The sequels I also gave a fair shake too but didn't fair any better and then as the series moved to the PS2 I feel everyone came to their senses with Angel of Darkness because I've never seen anyone defend that game. 

Then the reboot comes along with is bombastic cinematics and modern gameplay but still sufferes from being just painfully fucking boring.  Only this time instead of stiff movement and boring levels it's generic gunplay and boring semi-open environments I'm expected to scour for trinkets.  At time of writing this post I stand by the idea that Tomb Raider is, by far, one of the most boring franchises to ever exist in the history of the medium.

Granted I've not finished Tomb Raider 2013 and what it does have going over the original games is that I do feel at least somewhat motivated to at least get to the end, which is a huge step up from the original games.  Also I'm not sure how far into 2013 I am, I'm trying to fix a fuse box on a radio tower or some shit and maybe in a few hours more the game will get really good and my opinion will completely change.  The other thing I'm willing to consider is that maybe I'll have a lot more fun with the later games in the reboot series, Shadow and Rise of the Tomb Raider.  Maybe I'll come back after playing those games and have a completely differernt opinion and gush endlessly about what a masterpiece of gaming they are....

But I fucking doubt it

Bendy and the Ink Machine

 

With horror being easily one of my favorite genres of game, I'm always on the lookout for good horror games to sink my teeth into and with all the rave reviews I saw about Bendy and the Ink Machine, I expected this to be pretty good.  To my dismay, however, it's a collosal piece of garbage.

The game follows some dude whos name I can't remember as he goes back to an old animation studio he used to work for only to find the place in complete disrepair.  He throws a switch, turns on an ink machine and everything goes to shit as he gets stalked and chased by all manner of horrors from the studios past.

The game is your standard modern horror fare where you walk around solving some basic puzzles, finding notes and audio logs and hiding from the enemies.  The big problem with the game play in Bendy is that there is no depth to ANY of it and after about the 2 hour mark the whole thing becomes extremely dull.  The puzzles are extremely simple and usually just involve wandering around an area in order to find an item or push a button.  When it does try something more complex than that it's laughably easy, like one section where you have to fill pressure valves or something but you just hold the E key until the little water level touches the line, the kind of puzzle your children might enjoy when waiting in the dentists office.  The combat is super simple where you just walk up to things and left click until the cease to be.  There are some boss fights that try to give some variety to the combat but they are just a case of slowly strafe around enemy until they become hittable.  The stealth also only comes in two flavors of run away or throw a can for a distraction and the sections are always very short and very easy.  The complete lack of challenge or creativity found in this game means that playing it through to the end feels like an absolute chore.

But boring, cliche and unscary horror games are dime-a-dozen on Steam.  If I was to get mad about every game like that I'd be raging longer than the expected life of the universe, but what really sets Bendy apart is that it also just doesn't fucking work.  The game is EXTREMELY buggy with things constantly not working right.  The one that really sticks out in my mind is where the game completely halted my progression because it wanted me to take an elevator.  What is supposed to happen is there's a cutscene where some woman talks to you, the elevator comes down and then you get it to go to the next bit of the game.  In my game, the elevator was already there and if I pushed the elevator button nothing happened.  I even went to every floor in the level and pushed the call button there too to see if that would fix it but nope, I was just stuck.  I had to quit the game, reload, listen to the cutscene again and THEN it worked.

But that's a minor annoyance compared to the fact that the games save system just doesn't fucking work.  If you aren't planning on finishing Bendy in a single session then don't bother.  I had an issue where I was losing a couple of hours of progress at a time because something would screw up with the auto saving system and then when I loaded my game it would just set me back a whole bunch.  I noticed it was possible to tell when the bug kicked in because the save icon would stay perpetually in the corner but it happened A LOT and I was constantly quitting and reloading in order to not potentially lose an hour or two of progress to a shoddily put together game.

Bendy and the Ink Machine is an embarassing example of game design, an embarassing example of horror and an embarassing example of coding ability.  A bad game is one thing, a bad game that doesn't work and wastes the players time is another.  Do not buy it, you can have the same experience with any free to play Unity build student project for free somewhere else

Super Benbo Quest Turbo Deluxe

 

Every so often a game (or a film etc.) comes along that falls into the category of "so bad it's good".  An example of these in gaming would be something like Deadly Premonition (although I just think it's good, but whatever) and in film, The Room.  These are the kind of games that people know kind of suck for a plethroa of reasons and yet playing/watching them brings the person great joy.  So people see how favorably these films and games are spoken about and then they try to make something similar but attempts at this kind of film and game making almost always fall flat

Which is what Super Benbo Quest Turbo Deluxe is.  Someone trying to make a game that's "so bad that it's awesome" except it fails at the entire second half of that phrase and ends up just being bad.  The game is about a little blue girl fighting an army of skeletons and she does this by running, jumping and punching her way through 7 or 8 stages.  The dialogue is full of needless cursing and very obviously done on purpose spelling mistakes to try and be all eDgY and while it's going for humor the only thing it achieves is eye rolls.

The gameplay, while not awful is generally not very good and is sort of a chore to play.  Benbo, which I assume is the girls name, is somehow both too floaty while also feeling extremely stiff which makes platforming and absolute pain in the ass.  It's fine in early stages but the last few levels actually require some precision and it's hard to achieve that level of precision when you feel like a cinderblock on an ice rink.  Occasionally you'll have to punch an enemy or two and most enemies die in one hit but the real shittiness comes out in the bossfights which all boil down to running up to the enemy and mashing the attack button until you win.  Sometimes you might die, sometimes the boss will die in the blink of an eye, just keep restarting until the game lets you through.  I think the best way to describe the way Super Benbo Quest plays is just painfully boring.

I thought at first it was trying to emulate the kind of humor you'd find in the early days of sites like Newgrounds but that's sort of an insult to those creators.  Sure, there was plenty of edgy stuff on Newgrounds back in the day but it wasn't edgy just for the sake of being edgy in most cases, there was some sense in a lot of those old animations that the person making it did at least care a little bit about the project they were working on.  Super Benbo Quest feels like it had no effort put into it because it's purposefully trying to go for the "so bad it's good" appeal so anything shitty is just going to be part of the games "charm"

Here's the thing, if you strive to make something good and it turns out shit, people may still fall in love with it because they recognise the vision, the hard work and the passion behind the project.  When you strive to make something shit, the only thing it can possibly be is shit and boy howdy is Super Benbo a pile of shit.

Don't play it

Zombie Night Terror

 Lemmings is a name that may not be some commonly recognisable with some of today's younger gamers won't remember which is sort of a shame but when the only thing that series has come out with is a crappy mobile game that no one plays, it's sort of to be expected.  Well the lads over at NoClip have us covered with Zombie Night Terror, a game that has clearly taken a lot of inspiration from Lemmings but added it's own post apocolyptic twist.  

In most zombie games you play as survivors trying to fend off the hordes of the undead but Zombie Night Terror flips that around and instead puts you in charge of a horde of zombies that you must command through various levels and tasks the player in most cases with infecting a certain number of people or getting the zombies from point A to point B so the outbreak can continue.  There's more to it than just that but in a nutshell that makes up most of what you'll be doing.

If you're not sure why I mentioned Lemmings at the top of this post it's because gameplay wise it's basically the same thing.  For those that haven't seen Lemmings I'll take a moment to explain.  You don't actually control the zombie horde directly, instead they are dropped in in to the stage and in most cases will just aimlessly walk from left to right with no regard for anything that might stop them or kill them.  Your job is to direct them around the map with little arrows on staircases, for example, or mutate them into diffent zombie forms to help them avoid or get through an obstacle.  For example you may be faced with a situation where your zombies will mindlessly walk themselves off a cliff so you must mutate the first zombie in the line into an overlord, which will turn the zombies around and prevent them falling to their doom.  Aside from mutations you get a number of skills which a zombie can perform such a run to get past falling objects or close the gap on their prey or a jump to well.....jump.

What makes the game interesting is that you can combine the mutations and skills to come up with pretty clever solutions for various puzzles.  For example the basic one is to turn a zombie into a direction altering overlord and then using the jump skill on it which will permenantly change the overlord into a sort of catapult so you can lob zombies into hard to reach places.  Another example is using the tank mutation with the scream skill.  Scream on a regular zombie will make it scream either scaring nearby humans or waking up zombies that aren't currently part of your horde, mainly used for paralyzing guys with guns so you can bite them.  If you use the tank mutation to turn a regular zombie into a big strong lad though, scream will send targets in front of the tank flying away from it allowing you to cross gaps or send smaller lads towards their targets much faster.

The regular levels are pretty fun to work out and get through but there's a number of stages where the game starts to get cute with it's design and I don't mean that in a good way.  One bad example of this is an auto scrolling platforming stage where you have to use mutations and skills to get away from a vehicle that kills your zombies on touch.  At the start it's fine but you end up losing a great deal of guys and ending up in an unwinnable position because you got fucked by some trap you had no idea was coming and had way too little time to react to.  That's only a mild annoyance in comparison to the dark levels.  Long stages in pitch black where the only way to see is one radioactive zombie and the rest are just 2 blinking eyes in the darkness.  Somewhat maze like and full of pitfalls you can't see until you've already thrown a few zombies down there they are hair-pullinglly annoying and whoever decided to include these in the game deserves a slap hard enough to maybe cause a tooth to go flying.

Thankfully though, those levels are few and far between and overall Zombie Night Terror is a fun little puzzle game that will leave you feeling pretty satisfied when you eventually solve a level.  So if you're a puzzle game fan looking to scratch an itch then maybe check this one out and if you're an old school Lemmings fan looking for a similar kind of game then absolutely check this one out.

Atomic Heart Hype

 

This is going to be a pretty short post but it's pretty rare for me to get hyped by an upcoming game so when I do I feel like I have to mention it.

Actually if I'm honest, Atomic Heart is a game I saw a couple of years ago via a trailer on YouTube and then forgot about.  Someone in my stream mentioned it and I just had to go and seek it out again.

 Game play wise it looks like pretty standard stuff, a Bioshock or Fallout type affair and since I really enjoy the first Bioshock, taking that game and giving it a Russian twist is more than welcome.  But what really got me interested was the striking visual style.  The overall setting looks like standard post-apocalypse but the things that inhabit the landscape and the indoor environments in that trailer look like some kind of abstract painting come to life.  Even if the game releases and ends up being bland open world bullshit, I'll probably enjoy exploring the world at the very least.

It reminds me of when I was younger and the I saw that Bioshock trailer for the first time

I suppose it's pretty clear that the developers of Atomic Heart are trying to imitate these old trailers with theirs and that's a good thing.  Hopefully their game will be just as interested as the first Bioshock was

Unfortunately though, there is no release date for Atomic Heart as far as I know.  It has a steam page with a big TBA on it but I'm OK with this.  I'd rather it take a long time and be a good game rather than have them rush it out and have another buggy mess on my hands.  I will be watching very carefully

VR Exclusive Games Tick Me Off

 

As I was playing through the Half Life series on stream someone asked me if I was going to play Half Life Alyx.  I sure as fuck would have LIKED to have played Half Life Alyx but I can't because I don't have a headset and I'm not about to drop that much dosh on one and that got me thinking about how much these VR exclusive games piss me off a little bit.

This post is not, however, a VR hate post.  VR looks really interesting and offers a way to play and interact with our games, if I was a rich man with a large house I probably wouldn't be making this post at all.  But I'm not a rich man and I don't have a big house so I'm going to be slightly grumpy for a bit.  The first problem with VR is the price where it seems to range from about 40,000 yen to 100,000 yen.  That's A LOT of fuckin' money right there, I could get a PS5 for around that price and at least then I'd be able to just hook that up and play it on my couch.  Probably get some free games with PS+ as well.  But even if I was willing to spend that kind of money I don't have the space in my house to use the damn thing.  It has all these sensors and controllers and shit that need setting up and I just don't have an adequate play space for it.

But these are all "me" problems.  I can save money, I can move house and when I do the above paragraph becomes invalid but that doesn't change the fact that there just aren't all that many games that stand out.  Without looking at Steam, just off the top of my head there is Half Life: Alyx and and Beat Saber that I want to play.  Everything I know about VR after that are just samey looking shooters or shitty attempts at horror games.  After taking a quick look at Steam after writing that last sentence, my opinion hasn't changed.  

But again, that's not my main problem with VR.  VR might have a bit of a crap library but it's a new thing, it's still sort of finding its feet.  My main problem is that a lot of the games on VR don't need to be EXCLUSIVELY VR.  I looked some game play footage of Alyx and yes I'm sure it's all very immersive with that headset on but it's not doing anything that couldn't be done with a mouse and keyboard.  Being locked out of an genuinely interesting looking experience because I'm not willing to drop $400 on a piece of hardware that I still see as sort of gimmicky to play games that aren't that different from standard PC games seems a bit stupid.  The one exception to this rule seems to be Beat Saber.  That's a unique take on the rhythm genre that basically needs to be in VR and wouldn't really work the same with standard button inputs or...mouse controls?

I'm not really mad at VR per se, I just wish that I just had access to the more interesting titles in the lineup.  Just another version of the same game but it allows me to sit in a chair and push buttons instead of making me stand up and flail around.  One day, probably after everyone's lost interesting and the hardware is cheap as fuck, I'll play these games, but for now, I'm gonna be sitting here with my peasant-ass controller looking grumpy

The Textorcist: The Story of Ray Bibbia

 

This game may go down as one of my favorite games ever, so prepare for a bit of a gush.

Some people may be aware of the Typing of the Dead games.  For those that aren't they are remakes of The House of the Dead, a series of arcade rail shooters, but repurposed as a typing tutor.  Zombies appear on screen with words underneath them and you have to type the words to "shoot" them.  It may sound a bit dull if you haven't seen it before but trust me, they are real good.

Trying to teach people how to type by turning it into some kind of game isn't exactly a new thing.  Most typing tutors I've seen have come with some sort of "game" mode where you are timed or tested on accuracy or something but it always feels like you're using some kind of corporate "Edutainment" bullshit.  Even Typing of the Dead, despite being awesome, feels more typing tutor than video game, something about the overall presentation I guess.  But then comes The Textorcist which is, despite being a game about typing, isn't really a typing tutor and is actually a full on game.  Not only is it focused on being a game, the developers decided to mash typing with bullet hell shooting of all fucking things and the result is awesome.

The story is kind of bare bones but it's about a priest called Ray who is an outcast from the Vatican going around doing exorcisms.  In doing this he stumbles on a conspiracy involving the Vatican actually being evil and summoning demons to wipe people off the face of the Earth for sinning too much or something.  It's not the deepest thing in the world but it's full of humor and serves as a nice little intro and outro to each stage.  Between stages you actually have to do some light investigating which involves searching a fake google or going through your files so it's a nice bit of flavor.

But forget plots, demon exorcisms is what we're all really here for so lets talk about how that works.  In each level an enemy will be at the top of the screen and you'll be at the bottom.  At the bottom of the screen there will be bible verses that you have to type, the current word of which will appear above your head.  While you are trying to type your Bible verses the enemy will, of course, be shooting shit at you.  So while you dodge with the arrow keys you have to type with the letter keys and at the start of the game it's very easy to dodge, and then use both hands to type a verse real quick but by the end you'll be frantically dodging while trying to type with one hand and it's all very frantic.  If you are hit, you drop your book and you have to run to go pick it up.  If you take too long to pick it up though Ray forgets his place and you have to restart the verse.  If you get hit while you are not carrying the book, you take a point of damage and after 3 hits you die.  It's a forgiving system but the game still manages to be quite challenging.  

There are items that you get at the end of each stage with various effects that modify your score depending on what it does.  For example you can get a bookmark which increases the amount of time you have to pick the book up if you get hit but it lowers your score by 20%.  You can also get a spiked collar for example, which gives you less health but increases your score by 20%.  There's also a monocle that you get at the end of the game which activates a "hard mode" where enemies do a weird glitch effect and you only have 1hp.  Wearing it gives you a +666% score modifier AND killing a boss in this mode gets you a piece of rock and if you get all of them something happens but I'm not sure because I haven't done it yet.

 I only really have 2 complaints about the game.  The first is that I kept encountering a bug during a demon change mechanic where my bible verses would overlap over the magic words I had to type.  Not a huge problem since the magic words are the same every time but it's annoying to look at.  The other is that the third to last boss that you fight is just WAYYYYY fucking harder than every other enemy in the game.  I spent the better part of 2 hours fighting that boss only to move on and do the last 2 first try.  It feels like something got mixed up somewhere.

Basically, the Textorcist is like someone took Mavis Bacon Teaches Typing, Donpachi, Hotline Miami and Christian conspiracy theories and put them in a big blender.  The result is a fun, challenging and extremely replayable little game that should keep you entertained for hours or until your hand starts to cramp up