HIGH The quiet beauty of its digital world. 

LOW Some slightly simplistic puzzles.

WTF Don’t forget to find all the ducks! 

Botany Manor is solitary experience. Throughout the course of its fairly modest runtime, the protagonist is roaming a large manor alone, and they’ll never see another living human. The only time they indirectly interact with others is when they receive mail at the manor’s gatehouse — and in those instances, the sender is always gone by the time the player reaches the gate. 

In a soothing way — rather than creepy or melancholy — the intense isolation gives the impression that the player is literally walking within, and taking stock of, their personal history and inner desires. This approach feels delightfully congruent with Botany Manor’s abstracted mechanics and slightly minimalistic visuals, and overall Botany Manor feels strange in a way that is truly unique to videogames. I may have some issues with a few specific elements, but I can’t deny that the experience was breezy and deeply satisfying. 

The year is 1890. The player assumes the role of Lady Arabella, a botanist returning to her sprawling Victorian manor after a trip away. She immediately sets out to finish a herbarium for a publishing house, to be titled ‘Forgotten Flora.’ In order to complete the book, she needs to grow a list of exotic flowers, and growing these flowers is the goal of nearly all of Botany Manor’s puzzles. 

The herbarium itself functions as a sort of diegetic UI element — it contains a map of the manor that slowly fills out as the player explores, as well as two-page ‘bios’ on each of the flowers the player needs to grow.

To deduce how to grow the flowers, the player must search their environment for clues and successfully match those clues they to the correct flower. These clues can take any form — a newspaper article, a poster, a hot water faucet and more. The fact that nearly any object capable of being examined is also capable of being a crucial clue encourages a certain calm, inquisitive attitude towards Botany Manor’s spacious environments. I began to regard the manor itself with the same sort of wonder and care that Arabella herself must feel, a process made even easier by Botany Manor’s bright, beautiful, painterly visuals. No offense to the puzzles, but the baseline feeling of navigation — of just existing in that digital world — was my favorite part! 

In fact, while I realize that Botany Manor is a puzzler, I almost would have preferred it to have ‘cluttered’ the environment a little more, perhaps offering a few more interactable objects that weren’t clues, a bit more written material to add texture to Arabella’s world, and so on.

These things do exist to a certain degree, of course–in particular, there is a running narrative thread throughout Botany Manor related to Arabella’s position as a woman in male-dominated society and the struggles to have her scientific contributions acknowledged as hers, an extension of herself and her perspective. Other subsidiary elements of this thread (such as Arabella’s written correspondences and household possessions related to her married sister Elizabeth) further highlight Arabella’s desire for independence and a space of her own, away from the masculine establishment that insists on dismissing or co-opting her work.

Botany Manor’s chosen theme can make the isolated game environment feel even more isolated and stifling–as one explores more and more of the manor, one almost feels adrift and drowning alongside her, robbed of the ability to communicate with the outside world. However, this makes solving the puzzles and making the flowers bloom even more satisfying. With the additional narrative context, solving puzzles feels like a work of art and an act of defiance all at once.

So yeah, even more narrative context surrounding the puzzles would have been nice! As it stands, the clues for the puzzles feel a little obvious and not fully integrated into the world. These clues and their connections to each other often feel conspicuous in a way that robs the puzzles of potential challenge.

For instance, the player might come across a book on Morse Code, a newspaper article veering into a digression about Morse Code, and a portable telegraph machine in fairly close proximity, all standing out among the minimal set decoration. In these sorts of cases, it’s quite easy to begin the process of fusing these clues into a solution. In fact, at times the puzzles feel less like puzzles and more like scavenger hunts. That isn’t necessarily a problem if the vibes are on point — and they usually are — but really, if my dumb brain can consistently solve these puzzles without too much trouble, the difficulty might need to be bumped up just a bit. 

On the other hand, it could be argued that the ability to solve each puzzle without gathering every clue (which I did a few times) acts as its own sort of modular difficulty slider. A truly enterprising player could challenge themselves to solve each plant’s growth using the smallesy amount of clues. And, even if I was underwhelmed by the puzzle design at times, I admit that the flower blooming in seconds at the end of nearly every puzzle more than makes up for any quibble I could bring up — this fantastical flora leads to moments of beauty, wonder, and pause.

At the very beginning of Botany Manor, the player needs to grow a flower capable of filtering air pollution. Prior to growing the flower, the area they’re cooped up in is shaded dull brown. But then the flower blooms, a beautiful color palette seeps into the scene, and it all seems so perfect for the briefest of moments. Even if I wasn’t a fan of every design decision Botany Manor made, it was all worth it just for these glimpses of transcendent beauty.

I would’ve gladly stayed in that manor for longer, if I could have. 

Rating: 7 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Balloon Studios and published by Whitehorn Games. It is currently available on Switch, PC, and XBO/X/S. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 4 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes. 

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated E. This game contains no objectionable content that I can think of. It seems completely suitable for children of all ages.

Colorblind modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game does not offer subtitles. From what I can tell, all of the clues and instructions are delivered through text and visuals. There is one puzzle that incorporates audio to a certain degree, but I believe that it is solvable without sound. I believe this game is fully accessible.

Remappable controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable.

The post Botany Manor Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH A gripping, expertly-framed first-person sci-fi adventure.

LOW Polish issues and rough edges in the climax and finale make for an awkward landing.

WTF How did this story come out in 1964 and manage to still feel as timely as it does?

The key art for Starward Industries’ The Invincible shows an unfortunate astronaut buried up to their neck in sand on a desolate desert planet, skin and tissues rotted away to reveal the skull underneath. Looking at this art without any prior knowledge of the game or its inspirations, one might think The Invincible is a science fiction-themed horror title, or even a harsh survival simulator set on a distant world. Luckily for me, The Invincible is neither. Instead, it’s a rather compact, engrossing, and almost perfectly delivered first-person sci-fi adventure.

The Invincible is based on Polish author StanisÅ‚aw Lem’s 1964 novel of the same name, but it isn’t a direct adaptation. Where the original tale focused on the titular vessel — a heavily-armed military spaceship — Starward Industries opts to reframe the story on a more personal scale. In Starward’s version of the story, the protagonist, Yasna, is a biologist instead of a soldier, part of a small, six-person research crew. She wakes up on the surface of a barren, foreboding planet with gaps in her memory and her journal to fill the blanks. Yasna must find the rest of her crew and reestablish contact with Novik, the mission commander in orbit onboard their mother ship. During this journey she’ll uncover why she and the crew were separated, and how their troubles relate to the planet and its mysterious, dangerous ecosystem.

Players will go about solving that mystery in the manner of a first-person exploration game — the kind some jokingly call “walking simulators”. In its opening moments, The Invincible gestures convincingly to the minutiae of survival simulators by having Yasna check her spacesuit for damage, carefully doing an inventory of her backpack, and perusal of her mission log, giving herself (and the player) an initial set of objectives. However, these actions are less an introduction to a set of gameplay systems (such as maintaining hunger or oxygen supplies) than a way to establish Starward Industries’ expertise at first-person navigation and immersive presentation. Other than a few small HUD elements to help players orient themselves, almost all functions are represented diegetically by using objects or mechanisms in the world of the game rather than abstractions.

Need to navigate? Yasna will open up her log, turning the pages to represent different sectors on the map grid. Need to find landmarks to pinpoint a landing zone for the mother ship’s evacuation capsule? Yasna’s telescope has separate “dials” for distance and zoom. Notes and waymarkers appear marked in bright yellow pencil on the map. All of this is couched in a sublimely appealing retro-futuristic visual style inspired by the Cold War-era space race art and concepts from the Soviet side of the divide. There’s a chunky, weighty physicality to every object and animation that matches or exceeds even the likes of triple-A behemoths like Cyberpunk 2077 in making a player feel like they’re inhabiting the viewpoint character. If you’re like me and love to look at vintage appliances or appreciate consoles covered in old LEDs and switches, knobs, and dials, The Invincible‘s chunky, grounded aesthetic sense is as intoxicating as catnip.

Starward Industries knows what it’s doing when it comes to looks and sounds, too. The synth-heavy soundtrack puts a haunting CRT TV hum behind every vista, and every vista looks like the cover of a weathered sci-fi paperback novel, not to mention the fact that the Soviet-era origins of both the story and the style are fresh and new compared to the endlessly reiterated versions of American retro-futurism envisioned by the likes of Fallout and old sci-fi TV reruns. The Invincible genuinely feels like a vision of an alternative future grown from different roots than the “typical” titles one might encounter growing up in the English-language gaming scene.

Where The Invincible is heavy on style, it’s deliberately light on gameplay systems. Rather than distract from the story by having to maintain vitality meters or batteries, Yasna’s main jobs are to explore each area, uncovering clues and slowly moving along with the pace of the narrative. While I won’t reveal specific plot points, the script does feel a little quaint. Starward Industries’ take on the original The Invincible‘s themes of robotic advancement, artificial evolution, and the relationship of humanity to future alien environments is well-executed, but doesn’t fundamentally challenge or alter them significantly, making the beats come across as a bit easy to predict, even without having read the source material.

That said, the alternative framing does a fantastic job of making the experience of those predictable beats land close to home. With players never leaving Yasna’s viewpoint, it’s good that she’s a personable and engaging lead, and the solitude of being marooned on an alien world is alleviated by Novik, a radio voice in Yasna’s ear. As Yasna travels the planet in search of her crew and and some answers, she can discuss various topics with him while players are usually given agency in deciding Yasna’s attitude. Yasna isn’t a blank slate protagonist, and the writing works to make her a convincing driver for much The Invincible‘s ten- to fifteen-hour runtime.

I say “much”, because things hit rougher patches in the last couple of hours of the journey, unfortunately.

As the story closes out, I couldn’t help but wonder if Starward Industries was forced to compromise on scenes or gameplay sequences that could’ve formed useful connective bridges for some of the logical leaps Yasna takes as the tale reaches its climax.

As things begin to draw near their conclusion, Yasna becomes something of an exposition device, spouting long, awkward monologues full of expertise outside the field of a biologist — or worse, calling on knowledge or speculations that she didn’t seem to know or encounter earlier. If the first three quarters of The Invincible come across as a well-paced sci-fi yarn, its last quarter feels haunted by the ghost of a producer telling the rest of the team to wrap it up. This abruptness wouldn’t be so bad if the rest wasn’t so good at delivering its slow-burn story in every other instance, but it’s disappointing to see the story stumble in the last few paces before the finish line.

An undercooked ending doesn’t capsize the rest of the experience, though, which is ultimately a perfectly calibrated sci-fi adventure with an inimitable aesthetic sense. As a game, The Invincible may not be entirely unassailable, but its credentials are as solid as one could ask for.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Starward Industries and published by 11 Bit Studios. It is currently available for the PS5, XBS/X and PC. This review of the game is based on a review build provided by the publisher and reviewed on PS5. Approximately 11 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, discovering multiple endings. There is no multiplayer mode. The game was completed.

Parents: This game is rated M by the ESRB, with content descriptors for Strong Language and Violence. The description is as follows: “This is a story-driven adventure game in which players assume the role of a scientist searching for her missing crew. From a first-person perspective, players traverse an alien terrain, engage in radio chatter, and interact with robots and drones to uncover mysterious events. Some interactions with robots can lead to instances of violence: a robot destroyed by a cannon blast; a character nearly crushed by a walking tank. Comic-style prints also depict violent imagery: humans getting shot by lasers; robot blasts melting through flesh; a surrendering character disintegrated by energy beams. The word “f**k” is heard in the game.”

Colorblind Modes: The game has no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: Voiced dialogue is accompanied by subtitles (see examples below), however, some subtitles showed discrepancies between the wording of the voiced line in English and the written text onscreen. The game features text size options, and highlights handwritten text and notes in computer font for readability. All gameplay cues are visual. Fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: This game’s button controls are not remappable.

The post The Invincible Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH The potential for sophisticated form and narrative.

LOW …not acting on this potential of its own accord.

WTF There were multiple endings?

I haven’t been playing much new for a while now. The prospect of starting the notoriously popular (and vast!) Elden Ring has weighed down (rather than encouraged) a swift return, but a relatively short, intense ‘walking simulator’ kind of experience usually rekindles my flame. Just what the doctor ordered, Ghost on the Shore proved to be a welcome, intriguing experience that got me back in the mood.

Ghost on the Shore, as a walking simulator, offers little in terms of mechanics aside from first-person exploring in a linearly-crafted 3D world with the odd dialogue choice. The genre has become a mainstay in the industry, and while I’m eager to try them out (especially after my recent hiatus), the type has become somewhat stale, as I highlighted in an earlier review. What makes walking simulators great is when they are either revolutionary in form (art style, mechanics), or have a phenomenal story backing up the limited gameplay. Fortunately, Ghost of the Shore shows good potential in both areas.

The main character is Riley, a British woman and an implied animal rights activist. She retreats from society because she is “not good with people”, and ventures with her boat along the Northern Isles of Great Britain until a storm crashes her into the fictional, deserted ‘Rogue Islands’.

After the storm, she discovers that a mysterious ghost identifying himself as a deceased inhabitant of the island named Josh now resides in her mind, invisible, but someone with whom Riley converses throughout her explorations, in both serious tone and casual jest.

It’s soon revealed that an aristocratic family ruled the island in the early nineteenth century. As the story progresses, Riley learns more about the history of the island’s culture, the inhabitants’ disappearance, and Josh’s part in past events. She brings with her a notebook in which she collects all the embedded info she encounters and uses it to construct character portraits, but also to make sketches of the scenery she admires. Most of the entries’ appearance in the book are determined by the player’s desire to explore the island’s abandoned houses and locations.

As she makes her way around, Riley will also collect artifacts such as letters, valuables and — particularly — different instances of alcohol. These give the most straightforward look into the old society, and also provide great clues towards understanding the complicated relations Josh experienced while alive. This is especially relevant since Josh struggles with amnesia, and the mention of some items evoke his memories.

While stacking the collected clues, it was great to unfolding the island’s mysteries while trying to reconstruct the past, and this is where the potential of Ghost on the Shore lies — its intriguing, historical society can be reconstructed through a somewhat impressionistic sketching of encountered artifacts, while supernatural events advance the plot and its leads. Both the story itself, and the manner in which its narrative ties are knotted are praiseworthy.

At about two-thirds through the game, things rapidly accelerate to a conclusion with a multitude of revelations. Both the pace and the contents of this drive to the end frustrated me because all of the detective work I had done, both in Riley’s journal and in my own mind, felt ill-treated as everything resolved itself with a bunch of tense moments, and not thanks to my own ideas determining or informing the ending.

Adding insult to injury, the final revelation is also quite anticlimactic — without spoiling anything, I can say that the character motivations are banal, and while I appreciate the ‘victim of circumstance’ motif, its application here felt terribly forced. If the complex connections and ties carefully and artistically sketched throughout the journey felt like playing detective in a museum, the ending was the equivalent of an extended bar fight.

In spite of this criticism, I still recommend a playthrough of Ghost on the Store. It’s an intense experience easily played in a single (or very few) sittings that delivers with an engaging story via fascinating narrative progression. I do feel the overall quality of the game was compromised by the lackluster ending, but the thrill of the promise has enough momentum to carry a player to the end.

Disclosures: This game is developed by Like Charlie and published by Application Systems Heidelberg. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 3 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: Ghost on the Shore has no ESRB rating, nor an equivalent enlisted rating. I think this game only works for a somewhat mature audience as it features mature themes of death, heartbreak, manipulation, family disorder and trauma, murder, decay, and identity crises. It also features curse words and foul, aggressive language.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. The subtitles can be altered and/or resized, from a standard of 100% up to 150% size. All clues are visually advertised, and all dialogue is subtitled. This game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable. It’s WASD to walk, (hold) SHIFT to walk faster/run, left mouse button to accept a (dialogue) option, to interact with objects. ESC to pause and present menu options.

The post Ghost On The Shore Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH The inspired idea to merge Norse mythology and science fiction.

LOW Some save points are too far apart.

WTF How ridiculously dark it is.

It’s safe to say that there’s recently been increased interest in Norse mythology. This can be seen in the Marvel cinematic universe with Thor or with the God of War series moving from a Greek to a Norse mythology setting. It’s even been used to explore less obvious themes, such as mental illness in Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. Hellblade also incorporated horror (as have a few others) but I haven’t seen many take the Norse foundation and marry it to a futuristic setting — not since the infamous Too Human, at least. Apsulov: End of Gods does this now.

Apsulov, developed by Angry Demon Studio, is played from a first-person perspective and at times seems to fit into the genre of a narrative-driven adventure (otherwise known as a “walking simulator”). There are some key differences though, with the inclusion of shooting and horror elements. However, like those narrative-driven adventures, Aspulov has a heavy focus on story, which begins with the well-worn trope of the player character not remembering who they are. The main character wakes up in a dark research base full of crazed enemies, with no idea what’s happened or why they are there.

As the tropey setup suggests, Apsulov is pretty derivative. This becomes clearer as the player finds and listens to the various audio tapes (another worn-out trope) and learns that discoveries were made and scientists messed with things they shouldn’t be messing with, echoing countless games like Doom 3 and Dead Space.

There isn’t anything particularly new in the gameplay either. The elements that push Apsulov away from being a typical walking simulator — namely, the horror and the shooting – are lackluster, especially when considered on their own. For example, the shooting is slow and cumbersome, relying on a charge mechanic powered with very limited resources. 

Apsulov is also not an especially scary experience. Enemies boast basic and unimaginative character models, contributing to a lack of terror despite how quickly the player character can die. Rather, gameplay leads to situations that frustrate more than terrify, such as one instance in a corridor filled with enemies, which I was obviously supposed to sneak through. After many frustrating deaths and all sense of tension evaporated, I ended up just blindly running through the area. Blindly is an apt word – Apsulov is a very dark game.

This can give it a heavy sense of atmosphere and lend a striking appearance in places, such as one instance where the piercing glow of a giant axe cuts through the darkness. However, it can also make Apsulov an absolute chore to play. There is an augmented vision mode, that helps in some areas, but in others it doesn’t make anything much clearer. Indeed, Apsulov became nigh-impossible to play due to screen glare on a sunny day, here I found myself stumbling around in the dark, dying because I just couldn’t see. What’s worse is the spacing of the save points — sometimes too far apart, and dying between saves only added to my irritation.

While what I’ve written so far may make it sound like I didn’t enjoy Apsulov, I actually enjoyed my time with it overall.

It’s true that the elements of Apsulov ’s gameplay don’t stand out when considered on their own, but the variety did help to keep the game fresh, and this was further aided by a welcome game length of around 6 hours. Despite my frustrations with the darkness and how it combined with other factors to make it a chore, I found myself eagerly continuing to play due to the story which truly brings it all together and makes it stronger than the sum of its parts.

This may seem in contradiction to my description of the setup as derivative, but ultimately, I found the combination of science fiction and Norse mythology to move beyond surface-level integration, with a surprising level of faithfulness to the source material. This allows the story to go in an interesting direction that I won’t spoil here, and although some of this is well-telegraphed ahead of time, I still got a kick out of it. 

There is no question that Apsulov is a flawed work that can sometimes be incredibly frustrating to play, but by fully committing to marrying science fiction and Norse mythology, it ends up in a good place. I can be forgiving of gameplay faults if the overall experience is as enjoyable as it is in Apsulov and it is safe to say that I thoroughly enjoyed the ride.

Disclosures: This game is developed by Angry Demon Studio and published by Digerati Distribution. It is currently available on XBO, XBX/S, PS4, PS5, Switch and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher download and reviewed on the PS4.  Approximately 6 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed.  There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated M and contains Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language. The site reads: This is a survival horror game in which players assume the role of an amnesiac woman who finds herself in a facility overrun by monsters. From a first-person perspective, players explore the facility, interact with characters, solve puzzles, and attempt to avoid monsters. Some encounters with monsters can result in players getting slashed and bitten; one sequence depicts monsters dismembering a character’s arm. Additional instances of intense violence include an impaled character’s neck getting snapped and a character drilled in the face. As players explore dark environments, they can encounter large blood stains and dismembered/mutilated corpses with exposed organs/viscera. The words “f**k” and “sh*t” are heard in the game.

Colorblind Modes:  There are no colorblind modes available. 

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. The subtitles cannot be altered or resized. Due to Apsoluv‘s reliance on darkness, sound cues with no visual component are frequently used to reveal enemy positions. As a result, this game is not fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: Certain functions are remappable.

The post Apsulov: End Of Gods appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Metal detecting is strangely satisfying.  

LOW The plot is far lower stakes than advertised. 

WTF The walkie talkie seems to recharge itself.

Playing a slow-paced, story-driven game is a wonderful way to break up the monotony of constant combat in other genres. The Magnificent Trufflepigs offers no gunplay, but instead a leisurely experience revolving around using a metal detector and digging up rare trinkets. Though it offers a heartfelt story, I was expecting to unearth a narrative jewel. Instead, my excavation left me with only a bit of tin.

Trufflepigs’s story centers around Beth, a woman returning to her childhood farm to recover a long-lost earring. The player takes first-person control of Adam, Beth’s ex-boyfriend, and scours the countryside for the earring using a metal detector. As Adam unearths buried items from Beth’s past, the player learns more about their relationship, why it failed, and what their future might bring.

The presentation in Trufflepigs is solid. The rolling countryside fields are a sight to behold, as are the intricate details of the excavated artifacts. The music, though scarce, perfectly sets the mood. Though the grass and trees are untextured when under a magnifying glass, that lack of detail was not enough to ruin the strong ambience.

Metal detecting, though at times slow and monotonous, is strangely satisfying. While roaming the fields, the detector will beep faster and in a higher pitch when approaching a buried knickknack, coupled with a meter which will grow increasingly red. Adam is also provided with a map to note his findings, which is immensely helpful, though he can’t hold the map and the detector simultaneously — disappointing. Adam’s walk speed is sluggish (sometimes to a frustrating degree) so it’s confusing as to why the player must go through the additional step of putting away the detector to open the map.

Every item recovered triggers a text or walkie-talkie conversation between Adam and Beth. Discovering the particulars of their relationship — mostly Beth’s side of things — via stellar voice acting performances is engrossing. However, I didn’t get to know much about Adam outside of this. Most of the time he simply plays ‘therapist’ for Beth, and I wish we got to know him more as his own person, rather than through the lens of their past.

The farm’s fields are quite spacious, and there are many items to uncover. However, Adam’s metal detector does run out of batteries after a time, which automatically progresses the story. Weirdly, there were multiple occasions where I still had plenty of ground to cover but was forced to move on to the next field, leaving unrecovered trinkets behind. Though recovering every item is not necessary, it’s possible to miss out on factoids that flesh the duo out. Since I was invested in them, it was disappointing to know that there story points I didn’t get to see, though it does add some potential replay value.

While it’s enjoyable enough, my biggest qualm with Trufflepigs is the arc of its story. Though it starts modestly with Beth and Adam’s relationship, there are signs the player is onto something much more terrifying. Early in the experience, Beth offhandedly mentions a murderer who used to roam the area. As the plot progresses, the topic is discussed more frequently, evidence connecting the farm to the killer is discovered, and Adam grows increasingly perturbed about what he might dig up. The payoff, however, is nonexistent.

Both the trailers and the plot’s escalation led me to believe I might dig up something grotesque, and Trufflepigs would mutate from a romance story to a detective-based thriller. However, this plotline is simply abandoned, and the script’s conclusion arrives abruptly. I’m fine with leaving some things up to the player’s conjecture, but the elements surrounding the killer felt too integral to both the plot and the marketing to simply be abandoned like it is. It is immensely disappointing and feels like false advertisement.

Though Trufflepigs is not the game I was expecting, it’s still a generally pleasant and engaging experience. I loved getting to know Beth and Adam, but the plot is incredibly uneven and feels unfinished. Had I gone into the game thinking it was centered only around Beth and Adam, I would have enjoyed it far more. Sadly, the missed opportunities of the heavily-advertised ‘murderer’ plotline left a sour taste in my mouth.

Disclosures: This game is developed by Thunkd and published by AMC Games. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher. 2 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: At the time of review, this game is not rated. Aside from some light discussion about a serial killer who used to roam the area, there are no adult themes discussed, making this game appropriate for all ages.         

 Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: All the game’s dialogue is game is subtitled, which can be resized. When metal detecting, the detector starts beeping when close to an item, but there is also a colored meter to determine proximity, making audio cues not necessary for progression. This game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: Yes, this game’s controls are remappable.

The post The Magnificent Trufflepigs Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Impressive environmental storytelling and attention to detail.

LOW Persistent graphical glitches undermine the scenery.

WTF The snail-like walking speed.

Though not a pleasant subject to ponder, the fact is that the Nazi movement wasn’t the result of iron rule imposed by a single madman. No, there were millions behind him, and as the accounts of the Nuremberg trials revealed, not all of them were warmongers at heart.

With this in mind, Paradise Lost presents an alternate timeline in which the fuhrer succeeded in developing atomic weapons of mass destruction. However, the game doesn’t present that event as the winning ace for Nazi Germany. The adventure is set in a barren wasteland somewhere in Poland, and it’s implied that the whole continent is like that, too — whatever happened, it wasn’t a triumphant outcome for anyone. Through the eyes of a 12-year-old Polish boy named Szymon, we stumble upon a bunker in this rubble.

The first-person gameplay consists of walking through beautifully-detailed rooms, corridors and open environments, while the footsteps of the lonely protagonist echo all around. Aside from occasional déjà vu moments which prompt a short memory to play out in Szymon’s head, the story is told via interacting with (i.e. reading) the many notes and manifests that are scattered all around. As the narrative progresses, so does the importance of the unassuming main character, transforming his role from a mere spectator into something more.

Szymon’s tale is told in only 3-4 hours, but I was amazed at how much I’d experienced when the credits rolled, courtesy of the many successfully-executed tonal shifts. The bunker is a place where people with opposing ideologies co-existed at the time, and everywhere we look, we find remnants of inner-circle conflicts. It’s a wonderfully gripping setting, but one thing holding it back is the glacial pace at which Szymon walks. I know for a fact that 12-year-old boys can move move a lot faster than this!

Aside from that frustrating walking speed, Paradise Lost needs more polish. I ended up encountering dozens of visual glitches repeating on reflective surfaces, glass and other apparently-troublesome textures. I also experienced two hard crashes, and one occasion when a very important document didn’t render in-game, but Szymon managed to ‘flip through’ its pages nonetheless.

Regarding the story itself, without spoiling anything I can confirm that it does convey its points well with a focus on themes like paranoia, religious zealotry, and more. However, I have to point out that the very last stretch felt detached from the rest. While exploring, we find many texts written by prominent real-life Nazi figures such as Goebbels, Goehring and even Heinrich Himmler discussing conditions in the bunker. However, once the final act starts, Paradise Lost somewhat abruptly forgoes such references despite many in-game documents hinting at specific things.

Paradise Lost’s biggest strength is its ability to communicate two very different sensations — freedom and dread — deep into the player’s mind at the same time. It’s one thing to discover the knowledge hidden behind a puzzle, but it’s something else entirely to witness what else might be revealed by the same knowledge.

— Konstantin Koteski

Disclosures: This game is developed by PolyAmorous and published by All In! Games. It is currently available on XBO, PS4, and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS4 Pro. Approximately 4 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game has received and “M” rating by the ESRB and contains Blood, Sexual Themes, Strong Language, and Violence. I can report that the topics Paradise Lost explores are extreme and controversial — there’s constant Nazi imagery and propaganda, pagan symbolism, a few F-bombs in the sound recordings, and almost everything the character experiences is in the aftermath of some disturbing and violent event.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles, but they are not able to be altered or resized in any way. Sound is completely unimportant for finishing this game, so I would say this is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable. This game does not offer a controller map diagram, but besides the analog sticks, only the “X” and “R2” buttons are used.

The post Paradise Lost Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH The suspense and narrative tension.

LOW Slow exploration between plot points.

WTF Playing a quarantine game while actually in quarantine.

The Suicide of Rachel Foster takes place in Montana during the year 1993. The player controls Nicole, a girl who’s returning to the state after leaving with her mother several years before. She visits with the intention of selling a hotel inherited from her deceased father, but upon arrival, a seemingly eternal snowstorm hits and a sequence of clichéd events follows…

Rachel‘s story mainly focuses on family drama. Nicole’s dad cheated on her mother with the titular Rachel – a 16-year-old who became pregnant and (apparently) killed herself in the hotel. Nicole hasn’t been back since it happened, but the plan is to sell the property and offer a good amount of the profits to Rachel’s surviving family as a way of freeing herself from the past.  

First-person exploration and narrative titles such as Rachel have been described as walking simulators. I’m not a fan of the term, but I can’t think of a game more closely fitting the phrase. Two borrowed gimmicks drive the experience here.

The first is that Nicole uses her cellphone to repeatedly call a FEMA agent who guides her through the hotel to necessary food, energy and entertainment. Their relationship develops from mistrustful to flirting. The second gimmick is the use of scares. During Nicole’s time at the hotel, the eerie atmosphere in dimly lit rooms and matching sound effects keep her (and the player) on their toes.

This feeling of impending horror is underscored by clues that leave the player speculating about Rachel, whose suicide is… questionable. As Nicole starts experiencing nightmares, things steer into darker storytelling and build towards a revelation.

The suspense created by this direction is the absolute highlight of Rachel. The player is aware of many questions relating to Rachel’s suicide, and I was feeling quite tense in several situations where I wasn’t sure what might be waiting for me behind the next door. It’s a shame, however, that the underwhelming visuals limit the fright — lighting effects are decent at best, and environmental props lack both detail and depth.

Apart from the unimpressive graphics, other shortcomings drag the experience down. For example, Nicole’s movement is spectacularly slow. As she explores the hotel, calling it a chore to get around is an understatement.

The hotel itself consists of three floors and a basement with multiple rooms, hallways and hidden staircases, but only a fraction of it is actually explorable or relevant. Many scattered items can be interacted with, but are useless – books don’t offer text or images, electronics don’t work, and most story items are single-use only.

Objective signposting isn’t great. There’s no clear map of the hotel, and the next goal is usually evident only from dialogue between Nicole and the FEMA agent. Not understanding what they meant or missing part of the dialogue for any reason results in endless searching, or even reloading a save to re-watch the scene.

After all was said and done, The Suicide of Rachel Foster remains an intriguing story exploration game with great suspense, and I felt that the conclusion justified the journey. However, despite being captivating at times, I did wish the truth revealed would’ve conveyed more of a message and less of a story.

Disclosures: The Suicide of Rachel Foster was developed by ONE-O-ONE GAMES and published by Daedalic Entertainment. It’s currently available for PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and played on PC. Approximately 4 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: The Suicide of Rachel Foster has no ESRB rating. The game touches on mature subject matter — blood is visible in multiple scenes. Violence is on display at times, and also implied. Scenarios can imply horror. The developers note that this is not a game for those struggling with personal issues, and I’d add that this is also not a kid’s game.

Colorblind modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: Subtitles are on by default, although they’re not resizable. Dialogue is the main tool to instruct the player, and all voiceovers are subtitled, but there’s little readable content.

Remappable Controls: There are no remappable controls.

The post The Suicide of Rachel Foster Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Blast Off!

LOW Oof, did that multi-cable puzzle get annoying, and fast.

WTF Those are some weirdly punishing QTEs.

Deliver Us The Moon: Fortuna is not complete as of the time this review was written — it’s important to note this up front because the game doesn’t bring it up until the very ‘end’. The devs have stated that a free DLC which promises to wrap up the story is on its way, but as of now there’s no anticipated release date. Please keep this in mind when considering a purchase.

Now, the review!

Deliver Us The Moon is set in the near future when Earth’s environmental condition has deteriorated so badly that the human race is facing the possibility of extinction. People have been able to cling to civilization only due to the efforts of technicians on the moon who’ve built a fusion reactor that beams clean energy back to Earth. Unfortunately, the reactor went offline five years ago, and all contact was cut off shortly after.

Players take on the role of an astronaut sent on a single-person mission to reach the dormant moonbase, to contact any survivors, and hopefully get the reactor back online to save the lives of everyone on earth. It’s a tall order.

This mission opens with one of the most compelling introductions I’ve seen in an adventure game — a dust storm has spun up, and the launch window for the player’s shuttle is rapidly closing. This forces them to race through a disused rocket facility in the middle of the desert, completing the final launch checklist and then finally climbing into the cockpit and blasting off.

The entire sequence is heart-stoppingly tense, with the authentic-seeming facility transformed into a forbidding maze by time constraints, and the shuttle’s launch being transformed into a first-person ‘puzzle’ is a brilliant choice. The player feels like they’re in control of a marvel of high-technology, and completing the launch sequence feels like an incredible accomplishment.

One of Fortuna’s great assets is the way it constantly mixes up playstyles over its 4+ hours of running time. After the player makes it off-planet, the perspective shifts from third-person to first as they begin exploring a space elevator while floating in zero-gravity. Then they’ll work their way through a broken down hub station, fixing systems and putting things online until they’re able to use a series of trains to move to different facilities. From there they’ll have to climb into a huge truck and speed around the surface of the moon! These constant shifts keep players on their toes, never knowing what’s coming next, and never getting a chance to become overly familiar with any given task.

The locations are impressively realized. The large-scale moon facilities are impressive in scope and feel functional in their design. Every part of the world, from the launch facility to the surface of the moon just drips with real-ish authenticity, and features some of the most breathtaking locations I’ve seen in a while. As the player heads through various stations and modules, they’ll gradually learn bits and pieces of the truth of what happened via log entries and holographic replays, but it’s more likely they’ll be blown away by the spectacle of the journey.

…Which is why it’s such a pity that the credits roll just as it’s getting interesting.

For the duration of the adventure, the silent protagonist goes unnamed – it’s only in the final seconds that their identity and place within the overall story is revealed. It frustrates more than it satisfies since it opens up a whole set of story possibilities just as the current content is coming to a close.

It’s entirely possible that the promised free DLC will provide satisfying closure to the story, but at the moment, Fortuna is just half a game. It’s a great half to be sure, but until that DLC appears and sticks the landing, I can’t recommend it without caveat. Rating: 7 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by KeokeN Interactive. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 4 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game was not rated by the ESRB, but should be considered a light T. There’s a little bit of violence, no swearing, and a couple of mature themes. Part of the game’s backstory involves a dead parent, a custody battle and a child in peril, but that’s the only part keeping me from saying that everyone should be able to play this game.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: I played much of the game without audio and had no difficulties. There are subtitles, but they cannot be resized. I would say that it’s fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable.

The post Deliver Us The Moon: Fortuna Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH The view from the glass-floored space station lounge.

LOW The way the game cheats to hide its big secret.

WTF I guessed the ending roughly 90 seconds into the opening movie.

In this walking sim/casual puzzler, a space station has run into some technical difficulties and it’s up to the player to figure out just what happened, and whether or not the mission can be salvaged. This is accomplished via means common to the genre like listening to audio logs and rifling through personal belongings like a nosy party guest left alone in a bedroom.

The Station takes place in the future, when the titular spacecraft is surveilling a warlike planet to determine whether the inhabitants are ready for first contact. It’s a game of modest aspirations and scope — the station has just two levels and a handful of rooms. There are also only three crew members, so keeping track of the relationships is incredibly easy.

While The Station‘s tale is well-told and simple to process, the whole thing feels much smaller in scale than it ought to be.

For example, the trip the characters are on never makes much sense – an entire world is being assessed, but they plan to be home in three weeks? And the crew is made up of an engineer charged with keeping the station functioning, a captain, and a single researcher who’s presumably in charge of surveying every single aspect of the planet, from geology to biology to language and culture?

During the course of the story the player gets a few glimpses of the research that’s been completed, and it’s absurd to think that one person has managed so much in the two weeks that the station has been in service. There’s no reason that the characters couldn’t have been in orbit, gradually going a little stir crazy for weeks or even months before the crisis that triggers the plot arose – the constricted timeline just makes the whole thing seem preposterous for no real plot effect.

The Station could also serve as a perfect example of how not to create a twist-based story. I won’t spoil the big reveal since it only comes into play in the last few minutes, but it’s telegraphed so obviously that I can’t imagine many people being surprised. The script is filled with the kind of writing that, with a deft hand, could become more meaningful once the secret is out, but the devs make their pretentious observations with such thudding frankness that it’s impossible to miss what they’re getting at. This then makes the wait for the actual reveal interminable — and the game is only 90 minutes long!

Aside from storytelling issues, the other elements in The Station work well enough and the puzzles all make sense by being doors to unlock or machines to repair using believable futuristic technology. However, some doors are locked because the player hasn’t found an access card, and some because the player hasn’t repaired the correct subsystem — the game isn’t always great at explaining which is which. In my first trip through, I missed a number of audio logs because the game didn’t mention that a bunch of access doors had been unlocked when I repaired the engines.

As a moody sci-fi walking sim, The Station is a minor success. The environments look great and the puzzles offer just enough interaction to keep the player engaged while moving through the world. Sadly, the story just can’t manage to hold up its end. Between the odd timeline issues, the poor job the devs do of keeping their twist under wraps, and an ending that raises far more questions than it answers, the plot squanders some very interesting ideas. Rating: 5.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by The Station. It is currently available on PC, PS4, and Xbox One. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS4. Approximately 3 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game completed multiple times.

Parents: At the time this review was written, no ESRB rating information was available. The game contains some mild swearing, a few deaths, some blood, and a romantic relationship gone wrong. There a few bodies, but almost no blood and gore, and even younger teens should be largely fine with the content.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: The game offers subtitles for all dialogue and shakes the screen when there’s an explosion somewhere on the station, so it’s largely accessible. Unfortunately, the developers neglected to provide subtitles for the ship’s computer, so hearing-impaired players will miss out on specific information about what parts of the ship have been damaged or have become accessible. Be prepared to check the map frequently for visual updates on which areas are locked and unlocked.

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options.

The post The Station Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH The beautifully rendered worlds.

LOW A third of the game is loading screens.

WTF Why can’t I move faster!?

Obduction follows in the footsteps of games like Myst and Riven as an open-world, environmental puzzle game that requires an attention to detail and a saint’s patience from its audience. Yet while this new release from Cyan Worlds might respect the intellect of its players, it does not respect their time.

After being abducted by aliens in the opening sequence, players find themselves on a strange world nearly devoid of life, but brimming with tiny buttons to push and switches to flip. The first hour of the adventure features decent pacing, builds a sense of intrigue, and delivers puzzles in a fairly clear manner. Cyan Worlds makes use of old-school full motion video and real actors as NPCs to help deliver the premise. However, this sense of immersion, storytelling, and discovery doesn’t last long.

Obduction attempts to tell a story about people from across time being abducted and forming a community on these alien worlds. The devs provide a lot of lore, but most of it comes through notebooks and journals. Yet this narrative doesn’t compliment the gameplay in any way — it’s ancillary rather than additive. It’s also all but impossible to read on a TV screen that’s not parked right next to the player’s eyeballs. Not optimizing the display text for a console release is perplexing and speaks to the sloppy nature of the game in general.

For instance, the controls don’t work well on a PS4 controller. Players will struggle to maneuver a tiny reticle over small objects in order to activate switches or pull levers. With the precision of a mouse it’s not terribly difficult, but it manages to be obnoxious using a DualShock 4.

Another example of this sloppiness comes through in the excessive loadtimes. The loading screen is visually arresting as players witness reality fracturing into millions of tiny elements that gyrate and envelop the player, but after sitting through this same 30-second sequence over and over and over again, this image will come to haunt and annoy.

Past the loading, Obduction quickly nosedives into long, long walks between points of interest, more excruciating loading screens, and baffling obstacles that I hesitate to even call puzzles. Whereas a game like The Witness didn’t explain much of its world to the player, exploration was almost always rewarded with new knowledge and its line puzzles were engaging in and of themselves. In contrast, Obduction requires the player to wander around with little knowledge or learning while looking for the next object to manipulate in the hopes of progressing. Obduction quickly becomes an exercise in tedium.

In my view, a good puzzle provides players with everything they need within a confined area and tests their situational thinking, rather than their memory or their ability to withstand long slogs across the map to flip a switch or recover a crucial piece of information seen hours ago. Some may remember this approach from days of old and appreciate it, but for people who have a life, responsibilities, or a small mountain of other games to play, this can be the kiss of death.

Other puzzles involve an alien language composed of connecting blue dots that can be solved by simply exhausting a limited number of possibilities — both a godsend and a major problem. On one hand, it helps frustrated players move forward with a little experimentation. On the other, it does not adequately communicate the basic logic it wants players to acquire.

Another central mechanic of Obduction involves transportation machines that warp the player and chunks of the environment in order to cross gaps or create paths forward. This means having to sit through a lot of loading screens. This is at its worst in the third area of the adventure and the game’s final puzzle, which is cleverly designed but mired in loading screen after loading screen while players transport back and forth between worlds.

Spanning three large areas across different planets (a fourth is more-or-less stapled on) the main thing players do in Obduction is walk for long periods of time. While discovering the world for the first time, the walking is enjoyable. But, once the game devolves into backtracking, it’s monotonous. Movement in general is slow and cumbersome even when using ‘run’ mode, and in a title that requires walking for virtual miles between puzzle elements, this is simply unacceptable.

Despite featuring a gorgeous and carefully-designed world, Obduction fails to execute on its central identity as a puzzle game. And, when three quarters of the experience consists of walking from one point to another and sitting through loading screens, it’s difficult to imagine that Cyan Worlds respects the time of Obduction’s players. Returning the favor, I ended up having very little respect for their game. Rating: 5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Cyan Worlds and published by Cyan Worlds. It is currently available on PC, macOS, and PlayStation 4. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on a PS4 Pro. Approximately 16 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated E for and contains Fantasy Violence and Mild Language. The violence is just environmental destruction using lasers and, in one climactic instance, an explosive. There are only a handful of non-player characters, and none of their language is inappropriate for children.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: The game does not require audio. It features subtitles for dialogue and mostly depends on environmental cues for puzzle solving. It is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options.

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