Reviews Rate the game you finished/retired

[Mivey]

I finished the Until Dawn remake on Steam

Structurally, there are few actual mechanics in the game. The idea is to walk around, and make choices at key moments and hope you did the rights ones to allow as many people to survive. Supermassive Games knew that this could feel pretty passive, so they spiced things up by lots of small interactions that require a little too many button presses and quick times events and so on. I can see how they make things more exciting, but something that just focuses on choices and branching paths would have been a bit cleaner.

Visually, I found the remake to be quite stunning at times. The longer you play and experience animations, the clearer it becomes that this is still a PS4 game in its models and animation quality, but I suppose redoing all of that would have been simply out of scope. It is impressive how much they carried over to Unreal Engine 5 and have it work. Speaking of "work", the port is pretty rough and does a lot of dumb things too, like syncing game configs along game saves and lots of small bugs. I hope the irons those out, but the port is also not a complete crapshoot. Performance is fine and DLSS3 and FG support work very well.

The story was very good. The final few chapters were a bit weaker, once you knew what was going on and it was just surviving the last few hours to dawn. Great horror game, not too long, not too short and I think I will check out Supermassive's other games too.

The game end's on a new sequel hook, which I understand wasn't there in the original. So it seems Sony is planning to make "Until Dawn" into a franchise. Of course, the remake doesn't seem to be performing well sales-wise so who knows whether that tease will actually go anywhere.

 

[leonokarin]

Stardew Valley

this game is dangerous i would recommend not playing it unless you want to be completely incapacitated for the first 2 weeks you own it

10/10 incredibily realistic game.

 

[Joe Spangle]

Finished Animal Well


Lovely little game, lots of very clever touches. Has a retro graphic style. Difficulty was about right for me, some bits were tough but not unfair. Sometimes it was a little frustrating having to back track but there are a few mechanics in place to help with that. Love the way it utilised the ds4 controller.
Overall very good game
9/10

 

[MegaApple]

Finished : Iron Meat

Probably one of the best run-n-gun 2D scroller I've played in a while; probably the best retro throwback game of 2024.

7 years of development was well worth it, very tight Contra-like run-n-gun.
Impressed by how well paced, tightly designed this is. Nothing to mention of the amazing pixel art.

This is also the best beginner run-n-gun. Contra too hard? Play this.

RATING = A tier

 

[Virtual Ruminant]

Finished OMORI (OMOCAT LLC, 2020)

An alt-JRPG framed by a psychological horror plot with plenty of surrealist / dreamlike scenarios and story-telling.

It's one of those games best enjoyed with as little prior information as possible, so I will not summarize the plot here at all - the descriptions on the game's website or store pages should give anybody enough of an idea about what to generally expect.

The visuals and core mechanics of the game are pretty typical RPG Maker fare, but the game's copious hand-drawn cutscene and battle animations are very good and done in a quite unique and distinctive style. The soundtrack has pastiches of 16-bit classics without trying to emulate a retro-sound and has a lot of very catchy melodies that I will probably keep humming for a quite a while even after having finished the game.

I played this game due to a lot of enthusiastic recommendations from friends that I trust, even though turn-based battles and JRPG-style grind are usually hard passes for me. The game starts out very strong and intriguing, but then indeed has a middle-part that will take some 25-30 hours of playtime on a first playthrough and does indeed require a bit of level-grinding on encounter battles in order to be able to get past the story-critical boss fights and eventually beat the game.

I did not enjoy this overly long second act very much and could only get through it by essentially playing the game while watching videos in another window. This might be my anti-JRPG bias talking, but I do think the game would ultimately be stronger and have an even bigger impact if the middle of the game were at least a third shorter.

The game's last act (and last 3-4 hours) however made me forget and did make up for the preceding tedium and is just as strong as pretty much every fan of the game describes it and is very, very memorable indeed. Multiple endings and a good number of optional side-quests as well as a few entirely optional areas in the game world of the second act provide plenty of replay value, but the game only provides 6 savegame slots which makes it quite hard to keep savegames at critical junctions for such replays.



3.5/5

Previously reviewed in this thread [here].

 

[Virtual Ruminant]

Finished Beacon Pines (Hiding Spot / Fellow Traveller, 2022)

A visual novel/choose-your-own-adventure game that tells the story of young cartoon deer orphan Luka and his home town of Beacon Pines, which has recently fallen on hard times. As he and his liger friend Rolo look for things to do at the start of summer, they stumble head-first into a mystery that will eventually decide not just their fates, but that of the whole town.

It's a very strange coincidence that I ended up playing this game right after OMORI, as they are almost inverted mirror images of each other - made by teams of a similar (tiny) size following successful Kickstarter campaigns, touching on similar themes, but where OMORI goes lo-fi, this game goes glossy, where OMORI goes manga, this game goes story-book-anthropomorphic-animals, and where OMORI goes monochrome and morose, this game goes bright and optimistic (at least on the surface).

The big difference of course is that Beacon Pines is not an RPG and therefore also has barely a quarter of the playtime, but thanks to its system of branching story paths (visualized as a literal tree in the game's central narration device, a book named "The Chronicle"), it has a lot of different endings, more endings than OMORI in fact, and most of them are bad endings, too. If you are looking for a game where a choice can actually lead to a radically different outcome, here is one.

The art is all around lovely, from the backgrounds to the characters, it really looks like straight from the pages of a really good story book. There is a voice-acted narrator reading from The Chronicle, but the dialogue between the characters uses PS1-style talking noises over text-boxes.

This game is a new all-time favorite of mine - the only reason it's a 4/5 instead of a 5/5 is that the the small team size (the bulk of the game was made by three people) has put a noticeable limit on the animation budget and some of the key scenes of the game really could have had a lot more impact with proper animated cutscenes.



4/5

Previously reviewed in this thread [here].

 

[Virtual Ruminant]

Finished Somerville (Jumpship, 2022)

An atmospheric mystery side-scrolling ... honestly? - a side-scrolling walking simulator. It does have puzzles and a couple of chase-sequences (which will end in a game over if you get caught), but most of the time it's a lot of walking and minimal interaction.

What you get for that however is an exceptionally good looking and well directed game. It starts with an incredibly slick and movie-like intro sequence, which segues right into a very tense beginning that had me on the edge of my seat immediately. Throughout the game you get some truly cinematic moments, with great virtual camera work and fantastic scenes. The soundtrack, albeit there isn't very much of one (around 30 minutes worth of music in total, not counting loops) is super high-quality and supercharges the somber mood of the game even more.

The gameplay is straightforward for the most part - the mechanics are simple and there are few them. However, I got stuck exactly two times during the game due the physics-based puzzle solution being finicky and obscure and each time it pulled me out of the immersion hard. Two times for a whole game might not sound so bad - but the game is only 5 hours long (if you take it very slowly) and immersion is pretty much the only thing this game is going for, so it actually is kind of bad.

There are multiple endings and it is at the end where the game tries to do a magic trick and pull a rabbit out of the hat. Two of the five endings are only accessible to the player by either paying superhuman attention to detail and having a photographic memory to match, or by replaying the game (multiple times in all probability) to look for clues and then think long and hard about those clues to understand their meaning in the context of the ending.

The payoff? Two additional post-credits sequences of approximately 15-20 seconds in length each, which aren't even that much different from the those of the other endings.

So it turns out the game is in fact not so straightforward after all, and technically, it's not that short either. But I feel it's safe to say that most people who will take on the challenge and figure it all out by themselves will come away from the exercise with the feeling of having wasted their time. And those people who choose to skip all of that and just look at a guide, will feel that the additional endings do not really add much to the game or the story.

I feel conflicted about this game. As a mood piece, it's 5/5 - I'd rate it even above Inside or Planet of Lana, purely based on vibes. But as a game (and that includes the story, at least once you know it in its entirety) it's barely a 3/5.


Previously reviewed in this thread [here] and [here].

 

[Virtual Ruminant]

Finished Star Trek: Resurgence (Dramatic Labs / Bruner House, 2023)

A choose-your-own-adventure game with puzzle and action elements in the style and the fictional timeline of millenium-era Star Trek. The story takes place in the year 2380, which is one year after the events of Star Trek Nemesis. The game absolutely nails the look and sound of Star Trek TV shows and feature films of that period and every fan should feel right at home immediately. The faithfulness does not end on the surface either - the story and characters also completely match that era. The game's writers and producers clearly aimed for the player to feel like they were playing through a whole season of a show from that time, and they have succeeded from start to finish - nothing feels off or out of place.

What prevents this game from being an easy no-brainer 5/5 for every Star Trek fan and at least a 4/5 for everybody who likes both SciFi and Telltale-style adventure games are various technical flaws.

The game is made in Unreal Engine and when it works well, it's a joy to play - fantastic visuals that mimic the visual style of the Star Trek shows of the era down to every detail (the fact that 90s Star Trek shows also were still mostly shot on hand-built sets with not very much CGI involved and thus have a pretty simple look to them of course helps a lot here).

But unfortunately that's only the case roughly 50% of the time. The other 50% there are inconsistencies in frame-rate, even on powerful PCs, that very effectively kill the immersion. In particular the game seems to constantly switch back and forth from high frame-rate interactive scenes to fixed low frame-rate non-interactive scenes, which is a real tragedy since the whole game is designed to seamlessly go from interactive to cutscene to interactive again - but the frame-rate changes make for very noticeable seams. But even between the interactive parts there are wild inconsistencies - some scenes are clearly not or shoddily optimized, while others run perfectly.

It also seems like the game has been already largely abandoned by the developer and publisher - the web-based "deep-dive" feature that lets players compare and analyze their decisions vs. those of other players, a feature well known from Telltale games of the past, went offline a couple of weeks before I started playing and has not come back since. Similarly, the forums on the game's website have been shut down and now redirect to the Steam community, but posts from the developers or the publisher are few and far between. So unfortunately, it does not seem like the technical problems will be fixed any time soon.

I still enjoyed the game immensely, but I am a fan of this era of Star Trek, so appreciation comes easily for me here. It really is a perfect throwback to a time I thought was over for good. Not only are there 10-12 hours worth of top-tier Star Trek to enjoy, but there is also a good chunk of replay value through the usual variations based on the player's choices, which do not change the story too radically (although some characters, including pretty central ones, can end up dead through player choices).

For the average player who just wants a good SciFi choose-your-own-adventure game, I'd say this is a 3/5 to 3.5/5, depending on how irritating they feel the performance issues are.

For me (aging 90s Star Trek fan) however, it's a


4/5

 

[Virtual Ruminant]

Finished Deadlight Director's Cut (Tequila Works / Deep Silver, 2017)

A re-release of the 2012 game Deadlight, a cinematic platformer set in a zombie apocalypse scenario in urban Seattle.

I got this game for cheap because I was curious about Tequila Works' back-catalog of games. Unfortunately the version that is on Steam right now is effectively broken: It does not reliably save the game when run normally - you have to run the executable as admin to work around that problem. But when you do that, Steam achievements no longer unlock. Also the controls felt finicky, so I found myself a cheap key for the Xbox One release instead. That version looks slightly worse due to nonexistent anti-aliasing and the controls are just as annoying, but at least it saves the game and unlocks achievements like you would expect.

The game has a really great look and strong atmosphere, but that's really all it has going for it. The voice acting feels disjointed, there's issues with the relative audio levels and sometimes the voice-overs get cut off randomly, the controls are messy and the story is just your typical run-of-the-mill The Walking Dead clone with a weak attempt at a twist ending.

Would not recommend.


2.5/5

 

[Virtual Ruminant]

Finished Happy Game (Amanita Design, 2021)

Amanita's tried and true mini point-and-click puzzle formula, but this time with a horror slant. Think Chuchel, but with the gags replaced with all kinds of disturbing images. Was pretty much exactly what I hoped for, but could have been a little longer.


4/5

Previously reviewed in this thread [here].



Also finished Maid of Sker (Wales Interactive, 2020)

First-person survival horror game. On standard difficulty level it starts out as a walking simulator, then progresses to a stealth game and ends like a Frictional Games style escape-the-monsters game. However, if you play on "Safe" difficulty, it's a walking simulator the whole way through where no enemies spawn and if you play on "Hard", it's running from the monsters from start to finish (and with only ten opportunities for saving available for a whole playthrough).

Quite good looking game with good atmosphere, although the color palette was a little too washed out into grey and blue for my taste. Music is good and plentiful, but oddly, it takes away from the scary atmosphere - the game is at its most frightening when it's just ambient sound effects.

The story is serviceable for a horror game and tries hard to avoid well-known tropes, but ultimately did not really capture my imagination much.

I got annoyed with the game-play once it became all about escaping the monsters towards the end. After finishing the main campaign, the game unlocks a couple of challenge levels, but I have not tried those.


3/5

Previously reviewed in this thread [here] and [here].

 

[Mivey]

Earlier this week I finished my Playthrough of Metaphor: ReFantazio.

Took me around 9o something hours (Steam shows 90, but I also played a couple hours on the demo, which carries over into the main game).

My experience so far with Atlus games, are Persona 2 (both Innocent Sin and Eternal Punishment), Persona 3 Portable and Persona 4 and Metaphor felt like a very different game, ultimately. It borrows most heavily from Persona in how the game is structured time-wise. A strict calendar system, each day is split into Afternoon and Evening and you can take exactly one activity on each day, unless you go to a dungeon, which takes up both time slots. You are given the freedom to either go to dungeons, spent time on various activities, with your companions and to walk around an ever growing map. It is this focus on freedom, where the game more effectively conveys the feeling of a journey and exploring a world that it differs the most from modern Persona. Less so from older Persona, bu those were super linear titles, whereas Metaphor is a bit closer to western RPGs in the way you can pick quests and solve them on your own, in between the big story bits.

I also really loved the Archetype system. This is not a copy of Personas, which are just Pokemon you collect and train (though to be fair here, SMT did this years and years earlier than Pokemon, but that's how unfair things are, Pokemon is the better known title than old SMT). Archetypes are simply roles. You can also level them up, but the real charm is in the synergies you unlock with other archetype and which give the game its great diversity: the same exact encounter can feel very different if you have a different Archetype layout. And later on in the game, it's super important to switch between them before big encounters. Kinda crucial that you cannot switch them on the fly too, I think. Combined with the press turn system, itself from older SMT titles, and you get a very cool, new mix. I also liked how snappy the game feels for a turn-based game. You can skip very quickly to the next action, no need to wait for the animations if you are impatient.

Which leads to the other amazing thing about Metaphor: it's great animations. I understand that Atlus already did something similar with Persona 5 here, but I haven't played that, so for me this hits quite strongly. Everything is so massive, in your face, overly stylish and just unafraid to look weird. And strangely, it still end ups being pretty legible too. It can't be captured in words how much this elevates the experience, but it really does. The art style is at times really quite beautiful. The only downside here is the uneven art quality. There are so many assets that feel like something that has been designed with the Switch in mind and it's sad the game did not get more polish to allow a more uniform asset quality across the game.

Finally, on PC it is also worth mentioning that the actual port is incredibly bare bones and aliasing in particular is a big problem. I played the game with a mod that injects TAA, but it does so with slight artefacts, so it's not a perfect experience. It's a shame ATLUS can't be bothered to invest in their tools and modernise them to keep up with modern rendering techniques.

As a last point, I also greatly enjoyed the cast. So many unforgettable, well written and designed characters. Some might not like that the party is overall very "harmonious" in the sense that there are not big confrontations or disagreements, but given the plot and its singular focus, it kinda makes sense that everyone is on board to do the same thing. These aren't a bunch of teenagers, who are confused on what to do and get into fights, and I really enjoyed that.
The plot itself is very on-the-nose and obvious, but it covers so many topics that we rarely see handled well in games, like discrimination, how to work towards a better society, the role of religion in all this, how the weak and downtrodden are treated, and so on, and it confronts the question about how one can pursue highminded ideas without losing a connection to the gritty reality quite well. The final message is probably nothing super surprising, but the journey to get there is still quite well handled, and I liked the villain, Louis, quite a bit. Great character, great writing and he acts as an amazing foil to our heroes, and the values they pursue.

So overall, pretty good game.

 

[Joe Spangle]

Put down Grounded...


This is a very good survival adventure game. You are a shrunken little person in a back garden a la Honey I shrunk the Kids. There is a story to follow as you adventure around the different parts of the garden and you can base build and collect stuff to create better stuff. Its really well thought out, has a lot of charm and is well polished. It can be pretty scary at times, big spiders etc but overall it was a great game to explore around and discover.

8/10

 

[Ge0force]

Finished The Gunk


Excellent adventure game about a scavanger exploring a planet stuffed with beautiful nature. Soon she discovers that there's tons of "gunk" spreading troughout this world, destroying everything that lives in it's path. It's up to you to find out what causes this gunk and to save this planet from doom.

The game offers a mix of exploration platforming and casual environment puzzles. It's never becoming really hard and combat is rather limited, but the level design is so incredibly well done that you'll want to keep playing till the very end.

I'm a huge fan of Image & Forms Steamworld games, but I'm glad they decided to try something completely different with this game. Definitely recommended!

Score: 8.0/10

 

[fantomena]

Finished


Very good horror game, main negative is that the combat could have been better and some places feels too long to play through.

Score: 8.6/10

Finished


Pretty good Stardew Valley like with quests, explicit story line, XP points and great pixel graphics. Doesn't hold the longevity of Stardew Valley though.

Score: 8/10

Finished


Not as good as Persona, but a really great fantasy JRPG noneless. Felt the story could have been better though.

Score: 8.5/10

 

[Joe Spangle]

Finished RDR..


Great going back to this game. Enjoyed playing it again. All worked well for me, no crashes etc. Looked good enough. Could've used some quality of life improvements like controller remapping. Also i don't know why you cant select which controller you are using for the button icons. Seems like an easy thing to put in.
Overall a good trip down memory lane. Paid a bit more attention to the story this time as it had been so long since playing it. All the while I had my mind on RDR2 and on completing this i've started a new game of 2. RDR2 is vastly superior but this was fun for the 18 or so hours that i spent blasting through the story.

7/10

 

[Virtual Ruminant]

Finished Layers of Fear (2016) + Inheritance DLC (Bloober Team / Aspyr, 2016)

I still remember when I played this game (its first hour to be precise) for the first time - it was in November of 2015 on an Xbox One, because the game had been pre-released as one of the first titles (possibly the first) in the Xbox Game Preview program, an attempt by Microsoft to bring early access games to the platform.

I also remember my impressions from back then: Gone Home meets P.T., and the result is greatly diminished from both influences. I was also floored that the game's publisher agreed to the Game Preview release on Xbox One at all, as the game ran at (and I am not exaggerating here) 20-25 frames per second. Now that I've finally played the game completely (on PC), that first impression is completely confirmed for me.

The game oscillates between open-every-drawer walking simulator and jump-scare ghost train ride (but the cheap kind that you have to walk through yourself) and every time it manages to build a little atmosphere, it is soon smashed to bits by over-acted and anachronistic (relative to the game's setting) voice-acting. The over-use of P.T.-style impossible topography with endless corridors and rooms that change behind the player camera's back gets pretty comical after a while. Every once in a while the game pulls out some genuinely impressive visual effects, but most of the time it's all pretty silly looking stuff that every itch,io indie horror game has these days.

Layers of Fear also foreshadows one of my favorite pet-peeves with the current indie horror craze: Using digital glitch effects for jump-scares in retro scenarios, where digital technology is barely around. Bloober Team to this day cannot lay off of this either (people who have played the Silent Hill 2 remake might remember the scene where the old juke box breaks and the broken record for some reason starts to sound like a corrupt mp3 file).

There's multiple endings and the game deliberately obscures the mechanics on how to obtain them in a bid for replay value - but who really wants to puzzle out which interaction is significant for changing the ending between annoying LOUD NOISE FLASHING SCREEN jump scares? Certainly not me.

The Inheritance DLC adds another hour or two of content with a new perspective on the story from the point of view of the main game's protagonist's daughter and has similarly obscured multiple endings as well.



3/5

Previously reviewed in this thread [here].

 

[spiel]

Dropped Minute of Islands

This one's on me, I didn't realise it was a "narrative puzzle platformer". I loved The Inner World point-n-clicks from the developers and was expecting something more mechanically involved in the gameplay. 1 hour in and it's mostly slow, cinematic platforming constantly halted by camera panning and narration, and I don't think it's going to significantly add much for the next 5-6 hours.

Gameplay aside, the art is gorgeous, every screen could be framed and printed.

---

Completed Paws of Coal

It's on sale for a dollar, and at that price it's a satisfying little investigation game despite the slightly finicky controls. Would love to see a sequel that's bigger in scope with more QoL improvements.

 

[fantomena]

Finished


Short, but sweet talking sim with beatiful environmens, sorta "meh" story, nice music.

Score: 7/10

Finished


Quite dissapointed, expected more, super short and "meh" story, good voice acting and good graphics.

Score: 6/10

Finished


Very "okay" soulslike that feels like Nioh, but worse. Very badly optimized, but somewhat okay gameplay. Ugly game in many areas though.

Score: 7/10

Finished


Okay story, interesting characters, very cool art style, too slow paced and story could have been more interesting.

Score: 8.2/10

 

[xinek]

My review is pretty mixed.

Pros: Beautiful art direction and environments. Great voice acting. Varied enemies that never got old to fight.
I didn't realize this was such a boss heavy game. Generally, i hate bosses. You're going along, enjoying the game, having fun, exploring, in your flow state, and then some fat asshole busts in to interrupt. I just don't enjoy them and never have. Even so, the bosses, with a few exceptions, don't have any tedious multiple phase bullcrap. The bosses also don't have a ridiculous amount of health, which is something I really hate. Once I leveled up a bit, I took out probably 90+ percent of the bosses on the first try. It was so enjoyable that I beat every one (I think), up until the final level.

Cons:
I never really found out or understood how or even whether this game does input queuing. It seems to constantly discard inputs. I''d find myself fighting a boss, then furiously tapping the heal button maybe 8 times to get it to work ASAP reliably. This was my eventual reaction to my character NOT HEALING after pushing the button and getting me killed over and over again.
The animations are so, so tedious. Running, opening, doing literally anything is just a momentum killer. They looked nice at least.
The level design is a bit shit. Multiple branching paths, with no indication which is the main story. I wanted to do everything and not get locked out of content, so I had to eventually use a guide to follow and see which way I should turn for max exploration. Not fun.
Most of this wouldn't be a huge deal except for the fact that the game is SO LONG. I honestly think it was probably 50% too long.
The final level. Ugh. When you're so sick and tired of slow, tedious running and just want to be done, they introduce the most asinine, awkward, miserable traversal mechanic ever conceived of in the game industry. This is the only place i skipped optional bosses.
Trash optimization. So lucky I happened to build a new PC just before playing this, and I still had to turn settings way down.

If I could send a message to game devs, it would be that I'm playing your game because I enjoy it. You don't have to keep escalating with lava, poison, mobs, or any other crap to keep me engaged. Especially if you're going to give me, for example, great poison resistant gear at the end of the poison level. Sigh.

I got to the final boss just pissed. I died to it a couple of times before saying fuck this and installing wemod. Let's take a moment and ponder again how great PC gaming is!

Idk if I'll play NG+. The last 15% left such a bad impression that it's hard to remember how enjoyable most of it actually was.

I'd give it a 7/10, I guess?