HIGH A riveting supernatural story with a legendary legacy.

LOW What do you mean the other half is still in production?!

WTF The tonal shifts when encountering a bad ending and reading the cast commenting on your failures.

Frankly speaking, the mere thought of being able to draft a review of the official English-language international release of Tsukihime feels unreal. For nearly 24 years, it seemed like Type-Moon’s legendary visual novel would forever be Japan-exclusive, never to appear in English without the help of fan translations — but it’s here now, and all is well.

To be accurate, the subject of this review is not, strictly speaking, the Tsukihime that I first played a fan translation of in high school. Instead, I’m reviewing Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon-, a remake developed by Type-Moon and released in Japan in 2021. It features a fully rewritten story and new original art from Type-Moon co-founders Kinoko Nasu and Takashi Takeuchi.

Though the story has been rewritten, the core premise hasn’t changed. As before, the narrative is told almost entirely in the first person, experienced through the very special eyes of Shiki Tohno, a young high school student.

Shiki possesses the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception, causing him to see supernatural “lines” drawn all over everything around him. Cutting along those lines instantly kills almost anything… or anyone, unless Shiki wears a pair of special magical glasses that hide the lines from his sight. After years living in exile away from his aristocratic family, Shiki is called back to the massive Tohno mansion following the death of his father. A shockingly violent encounter with a mysterious, beautiful woman named Arcueid kicks off the story proper, drawing Shiki deeper into a mystical world that lies just beneath the surface of the urban ordinary. It’s a world where vampires war in the city streets under cover of night, all the while dodging monster hunters empowered by the church itself, and where seemingly anyone, from the family doctor to one’s own classmates, might be hiding some kind of supernatural secret.

Adventure stories with a horror twist aren’t new, but it’s notable that Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon- is also, at its core, a romance.

Alongside the vividly rendered passages describing magical battles and vampire hunts are meet-cutes straight out of a romantic comedy playbook. In these instances, the writing bubbles with a sweet puppy-love vibe, full of dramatic teenage infatuation rendered in flowery, heartfelt passages. Thanks to an top-class English-language localization, the mood of reckless teenage romance is perfectly captured. It’s even thanks to this localization that segments where Shiki essentially ogles his female conversation partners come across as cutely awkward, rather than creepy — immensely helpful considering the large number of pretty girls that interact with Shiki. That said, the story of Tsukihime does focus on two main narrative branches, each centered around a different heroine.

One of the biggest departures A piece of blue glass moon makes from the original Tsukihime is in the writing of the second branch, which focuses on Ciel, Shiki’s mature, reliable, enigmatic upperclassman.

The original game presented Ciel as an alternative romantic “route,” as is the custom for games in the genre, though the bulk of written material and development was clearly concentrated on Arcueid as the “main” heroine. The result was a Ciel route that felt like a variation of Arcueid’s — an alternative path included less as an equally valid option than a value-add for players seeking replayability.

By comparison, Ciel’s route in Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon– truly feels distinct, with its own plotting, cast of characters, and and exploration of a different side of Tsukihime‘s setting and lore. If Arcueid’s story route largely involves vampires and other supernatural kindred, Ciel’s dips heavily into the holy church, a vaguely Christian organization that defends human society against supernatural threats and violently suppresses the ones that come too close to revealing the magical world’s existence to mankind at large. In their way, the two main routes in Tsukihime‘s remake feel like genuinely equal options, fitting well with Type-Moon’s permissive attitude towards what counts as “canon” in its various properties.

With that in mind, players must read through Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon- multiple times to get the most out of the story. Thankfully, it includes plenty of tools to ease exploration. Players can save and load anytime, and a handy “flowchart” system not unlike the one seen in Vanillaware’s 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim allows players to jump back and forth in the timeline, checking the results of choices at their leisure. The main routes and their endings are also unlocked sequentially, so there’s no danger of making the “wrong” choice and being forced to reload or wait until the next playthrough.

There are even more than a dozen different “bad endings” to acquire for completionist players. Bad endings are very much the “wrong choices,” usually in the sense that picking them results in Shiki’s death, described in gruesome, embarrassing detail. These are usually played for laughs, though, and invariably conclude with a post-credits classroom sequence where the characters discuss what just happened and advise the player on what choices to pick after they reload.

Outside of the occasional typo and an odd bug where a small amount of voiced Japanese-language lines aren’t properly subtitled in other languages, Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon- is larger in scale than the original, polished to a mirror sheen, and convenient almost to a fault. Its writing expands the story in an appealing way that’s conscious of Type-Moon’s status as a company at the top of its field managing its own multiverse of related stories and projects (such as the Fate/Grand Order mobile game and more besides). It doesn’t supplant the scrappy, rough-hewn, original Tsukihime, but rather compliments it, presenting the visual novel equivalent of a breathtakingly costly but inimitably entertaining triple-A blockbuster to contrast with the original’s history as an out-of-nowhere indie hit.

The only wrinkle in this otherwise perfect remake story is that A piece of blue glass moon is just the first entry of the Tsukihime remake project. The two routes contained in this release are just the “Near Side” routes. The original game’s three other “Far Side” routes — routes that were more psychodrama-focused and starred supporting characters like Akiha, Kohaku, and Hisui, are due to be included in another installment, Tsukihime -The other side of red garden-, which is still in production. This isn’t to say that the experience feels incomplete without the additional routes, but it’s an acknowledgement that those who want to know more about certain other characters and see how Type-Moon will address their respective stories may end up waiting a while for the second half of the remake project to release.

Nevertheless, as it is, Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon- remains a superlative visual novel, and a must-read for any fan of Type-Moon’s work, as well as a great potential entry point for those looking to get into visual novels as a medium.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed Type-Moon and published by Aniplex. It is currently available for the Switch and PS4. This review is based on a paid download and reviewed on Switch. A PS4 code provided by the publisher was tested. Approximately 47 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode and acquiring all main endings. There is no multiplayer mode. The game was completed.

Parents: This game is rated M by the ESRB, with content descriptors for Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language, and Suggestive Themes. The rating description is as follows: “This is a visual novel in which players follow the story of a high-school student who encounters vampires and ghouls in Japan. As players progress through the narrative, they view stylized story sequences (mostly still images), some depicting violence and blood: blood splatter; pools of blood; characters killed off camera; a character’s hand repeatedly stabbed. The text includes descriptive details of violent acts (e.g., “I stab, I cut, I slice, I carve. Severing piece after piece until nothing is left…”; “After listening to the weakling beg for its life, she begins her meticulous work…Once the other arm is gone too, she swaps her tools and sets work on its inside.”). Some sequences depict severed limbs and dismembered body parts in large pools of blood. A female vampire is depicted partially nude, with exposed pelvic area (no genitalia), and her arm covering her breasts. The words “f**k” and “sh*t” are heard in the game.”

Colorblind Modes: The game has no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: The gameplay is not reliant on audio cues. All voiced dialogue is represented by on-screen text. There are no options for text size or readability configuration, but detailed options exist to manage text display speed. This game is fully accessible.

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

The post Tsukihime -A Piece Of Blue Glass Moon- Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH A chill, pleasant mood elevated by lovely music and art.

LOW It’s very short, and oddly strict about timing.

WTF It’s oddly bright and upbeat for a game about trying to get some sleep.

When it comes to rhythm games, one persistent (yet understandable) misunderstanding about the genre is that it’s about appreciating music. While the overwhelming majority of rhythm games are framed around music, rhythm play is ultimately about rhythm. Music is just the best mechanical device to build a timing-based set of mechanics around. It’s why so many rhythm titles are still playable in the deafening cacophony of an arcade, or why many rhythm players can still succeed with the music on mute. However, Half Asleep Games’ Melatonin might be one of the few where the music is truly essential.

The concept of Melatonin is heavily informed by genre classic Rhythm Heaven, and like Rhythm Heaven, Melatonin frames its challenges around scenarios set to music. But, where Rhythm Heaven was whimsical, silly, and focused on bizarre, energetic set pieces, Melatonin‘s framing is a more coherent and chill.

As one might expect of a title named after the brain hormone that helps regulate sleep, Melatonin is about a young person trying to get a good night’s rest. Unfortunately, their brain seems to have other ideas, with stages organized into five “Nights”. Each musical piece is centered around a dream subject, such as “Work,” or “Nature,” or “Space”. Melatonin‘s hand-drawn visuals are excellent, with character art and lines reminiscent of modern cartoons and a light, pink-and-pastel color scheme.

The music is a standout, with a number of relaxed pieces produced both by Half Asleep Games and other producers like Gravity Sound and Filippo Vicarelli. Fans of selections found in the “Chill Beats” and “Lo-Fi Girl” corners of YouTube and Spotify will find much to like in Melatonin‘s soundtrack. While consistently of a piece with the dreamy vibe, the songs do vary in tone, with some of the more stressful dream subjects having a darker mood.

Meanwhile, Melatonin varies the interactions with each dream, with the patterns themselves varying throughout the song. For example, a dream about shopping might show players a pattern first, then have them swipe their credit card to match the pattern to buy trinkets. Meanwhile, a dream about time challenges players to wait until the pause in the beat to bat away a flying clock. A dream about exercise has players hitting shoulder buttons to flex their right or left biceps. Melatonin then ups the challenge by speeding up the song, slowing it down and messing with the prompts.

Melatonin‘s strongest Rhythm Heaven influence is in the nature of the these prompts. While most modern titles often use a standardized set of visual cues to tell players the timing of the beat, Melatonin challenges players to listen to the beat for their cue. Most stages vary or even hide the prompts at certain points, forcing a player to pay attention to the audio as much as the visual. Helpfully, the game doesn’t throw a player into the deep end, as there’s a mandatory practice stage for every song and an explanation on the nature of each mechanic.

Melatonin also has assists that may help players with poor timing or those with disabilities. These can consist of adding a metronome beat, or permanently turning on the tutorial-style button prompts, which makes Melatonin a more “traditional” rhythm experience. Personally, I found the scoring assists which widens the “perfect” timing window to be the most helpful. Melatonin doesn’t penalize one for turning on assists either, which I appreciate as someone who was never a fan of the way some devs try to shame players who want to take it easy.

A while it’s a conceptually-perfect perfect love letter to Rhythm Heaven while still offering its own vibe, Melatonin isn’t free of the occasional sleep-disrupting issue. Without assists, play is surprisingly unforgiving on timing. Perhaps it’s just my own lack of skill (or my aging reflexes) but some stages were basically impossible for me to complete without turning on scoring assist. A few of the interactions also rely on an unintuitive understanding of the timing for their cues, as well.

Also, Melatonin is on the shorter side, clocking in at under three hours to get through all available stages. The included custom beatmap options and a personal quest to get a perfect score can add time to that number, but one could theoretically clear Melatonin in the time it takes to have a nice weekend nap.

With all that said, Melatonin never stopped putting a smile on my face. The pitch-perfect sound and visuals, along with the twist on Rhythm Heaven‘s under-imitated style make for a unique and memorable, if brief, experience. Consider it a compliment when I say that my time with Melatonin passed by like a pleasant dream.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Half Asleep Games. It is currently available for the PC, Switch and PS5. This review is based on a code provided by the publisher and reviewed on PS5. Approximately 2 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode. There is no multiplayer mode. The game was completed.

Parents: This game is rated E by the ESRB, with content descriptors for Mild Fantasy Violence. The rating does not have a description, but if it did, it would probably read something like: “This is a story-driven rhythm game in which players control a young person in their dreams over the course of five nights. Players will attempt to hit buttons in time to the music and according to specific patterns in each stage. During the game the protagonist dreams of playing a video game where they shoot cartoon aliens.”

Colorblind Modes: The game has no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: Gameplay relies heavily on using audio cues, and in its default mode will gradually hide visual cues to further challenge the player. Assists are available in the accessibility menu to permanently enable visual timing cues, making the game playable for players that are deaf or hard of hearing. There is no voiced dialog in the game, and all text is rendered onscreen. This game is fully accessible (with the appropriate features turned on.)

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

The post Melatonin 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 A gripping adventure experience that perfectly captures the best parts of Star Trek…

LOW …that’s marred by technical hiccups and a familiar approach to narrative game design.

WTF Why isn’t there a model of the U.S.S. Resolute I can buy for my shelf?

Space may be the final frontier, but videogames based on Star Trek are well-traveled territory. Decades of attempts to channel the ultimate geek franchise into the ultimate geek medium have resulted in an array of titles spanning virtually every genre under the sun. But for all the Star Trek games that have come out over the years, few can be said to have truly felt like a Trek story in every way. I’m happy to say that despite some stumbles, Dramatic Labs’ Star Trek: Resurgence is one of them.

One point where Star Trek: Resurgence sets itself apart from other Trek games is that it tries to make something original out of its familiar framework, both in terms of gameplay and narrative. Rather than basing it on an established TV series, Dramatic Labs opted to center their work around an entirely new ship and cast.

Taking place in the Star Trek: The Next Generation timeline and set sometime after the conclusion of Star Trek: Nemesis, Resurgence follows the Starfleet ship U.S.S. Resolute, a Centaur-class vessel operating at the edge of Federation space. Players are thrust into the uniforms of two original characters — The Resolute’s newly-assigned First Officer, Commander Jara Rydek, and an Engineering department go-getter, Petty Officer Carter Diaz.

The Resolute herself isn’t in the best shape, as the aftermath of a deadly incident prior to the player’s arrival tore a rift in the trust between the crew and their leader, Captain Solano. Looming even larger than this issue is a crisis at the edge of space — two formerly peaceful alien races are on the brink of war, and the Resolute is the only ship available to help them reach a peaceful solution.

The core plot draws from the premise of the TNG episode “The Last Outpost”, and features cameo appearances by Trek alumni William Riker (played by Jonathan Frakes) and Ambassador Spock (played by the strikingly spot-on voice performance of Piotr Michael). But for the most part, Resurgence is a fresh tale that makes its own mark on the larger canon established by the shows.

It’s in this way, and via its focus on two viewpoint characters, that Star Trek: Resurgence‘s storytelling style takes its cues more from newer Trek like Discovery and Picard. Whereas the TV series of old were more ensemble affairs, the Resolute’s mission centers around the activities, choices, and relationships of Jara and Carter. Jara must balance the need to be loyal to Captain Solano while forming bonds with the rest of the senior staff and her duty as a Starfleet officer. Carter is torn between his unenviable tasks doing the ‘dirty jobs’ assigned to the lower decks crew and his ambition to have a greater role in the ship’s operations.

Most of the choices involve making a decision and then seeing its effect on Jara and Carter’s relationships with the people around them, both friend and foe. Resurgence makes this focus quite clear from the outset, and at any time, players can pause and see a detailed description of every character’s reaction to their choices. It’s a user interface feature I wish I had in real life — my interpersonal relationships would be much clearer if I could immediately tell which of my actions enraged people or left them with “mixed feelings.”

The decisions and dialogue are interspersed with more active stretches, usually involving minigames or QTE-style button prompts. The minigames take advantage of Star Trek‘s unique approach to user interfaces, with characters (usually Carter) manipulating LCARS screens to clear interference from a transporter signal or reel a distressed shuttle into the Resolute’s hangar bay. Other sequences have characters scanning anomalies and alien structures with Tricorders, or conducting rudimentary combat and stealth actions. Like the TV shows’ famously soft action chops, these parts of Star Trek: Resurgence aren’t the most exciting examples of cinematic gameplay, but they’re never so awkward or overlong that they damage one’s will to continue.

If this style of game sounds somewhat familiar, that shouldn’t be a surprise — Star Trek: Resurgence is a narrative adventure title in the vein of Telltale Games’ many licensed series adaptations. Dramatic Labs, after all, is made up of former Telltale Games staff who opened a new studio in the wake of Telltale’s sudden 2018 implosion and subsequent mass layoffs. This approach to blending narrative and mechanics, therefore, is well within the team’s wheelhouse. If anything, it appears that they’ve internalized some of the more persistent criticisms of the Telltale game experience. Spelling the impact of choices out more clearly in the pause menu makes things more engaging (and tense) than the anodyne “That character will remember your decision,” indicator which became the, er, telltale sign of a Telltale game.

However, one pitfall of the Telltale style that Dramatic Labs couldn’t quite avoid is the persistent sense that individual choices don’t have as much power as initially suggested. Even fans of Telltale’s titles would express their frustration when they found, upon exploring all the possible branches available in a Telltale piece, that the choices “don’t matter,” with more aggrieved critics calling the design “deceptive.”

I, personally, consider this more an issue with framing rather than false advertising. It’s not so much that Jara and Carter’s choices can drastically alter the plot (though Resurgence does have multiple outcomes that differ significantly by its end) but that their choices help define who Jara and Carter are when faced with their respective challenges. Do players want to play Jara as a sensitive and empathetic officer who pushes back against her commanding officer when necessary, or a hard-nosed authority figure that knows her role on the bridge is to make sure that what the Captain says, goes? Is Carter a team player who sees opportunity as a reward for hard work in the trenches, or is his desire to “be something more” one that he’s willing to risk his safety and the safety of his crewmates to satisfy?

Further, the idealistic nature of the Star Trek universe and the Starfleet ethos does, unlike some Telltale-style games, carry a certain weight. Without spoiling too much, I can say that making decisions counter to the core principles of the Federation and Starfleet can turn the story’s tone noticeably. In other words, it’s not that choices don’t matter, but that they matter in a different way than some may think. Folks that can make their peace with that fact will have the best time with Star Trek: Resurgence. It also helps that while this story feels like the opening arc in a new Trek series, it is a self-contained adventure. I was relieved that it did not end in a cliffhanger or force me to wonder if the game would do well enough to warrant a next episode — a frequent concern in the latter days of Telltale.

Sadly, while I wouldn’t change Dramatic Labs’ decision to pattern Star Trek: Resurgence‘s approach to narrative after Telltale’s output, I do wish they’d had the opportunity to correct for Telltale’s reputation for jank. Technical and performance hiccups were rife in the PC review build I played, to the point that they drained some energy from the otherwise-strong performances and propulsive story. Bugs with subtitles often left some lines un-displayed onscreen. The tuning of the gamepad controls on PC made movement and interaction with QTE and minigame mechanics feel mushy and slow. This had a particularly irritating effect on Carter’s sequences, which are heavier on the minigame aspect. More concerningly, the lack of accessibility options with regard to control and display customization also threatens to make Star Trek: Resurgence less inclusive than its Federation values would suggest.

Nevertheless, these quibbles are things that I found relatively easy to overlook, considering how well the game channels qualities of Star Trek long absent from the franchise’s adaptations. I’d choose instead to hope Dramatic Labs addresses some of these concerns through patches and updates. Those like me, who are able to put aside those complaints, will find a thrilling and refreshing dose of Trek fan service, and perhaps the beginning of a special journey, in Star Trek: Resurgence.

Disclosures: This game is developed by Dramatic Labs and published by Bruner House. It is currently available for the PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. This review of the game is based on a review build provided by the publisher and reviewed on PC. Approximately 14 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode. There is no multiplayer mode. The game was completed.

Parents: This game is rated T by the ESRB, with content descriptors for Blood, Use of Alcohol, and Violence. The description is as follows: “This is an adventure game set in the Star Trek universe. Players assume the roles of two characters, First Officer Jara Rydek and Engineering Crewperson Carter Diaz, as they investigate a mystery surrounding two alien civilizations on the brink of war. Throughout the game, players can make dialogue and action choices that influence the plot. Some action choices lead to violence, such as one scene in which the player can direct another character to break a prisoner’s arm for information. Battles occur several times, with players dodging lasers, shooting phasers at enemies, or struggling to escape. A handful of scenes depict human and alien corpses, some laying in pools of pink blood or with bloodstained faces/clothing. One scene allows players to choose whether to have an alcoholic drink with another officer.”

Colorblind Modes: The game has no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: Voiced dialogue is accompanied by subtitles (see examples below), however, not all lines displayed subtitles, either due to bugs or a discrepancy between the wording of the voiced line and the written subtitle text. There are no text size or presentation options. All gameplay cues are visual. This title is not fully accessible.

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

The post Star Trek: Resurgence Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

It’s a difficult time to be an optimist about space colonization. Even as the possibility of human civilization living beyond Earth’s gravity comes closer, the reality is weighed down by the bleak situation at home. In the end, even optimists must concede that the prospects of living under a distant sun are likely impossible if we can’t solve the problems we have here on Earth — And from the look of things so far, that’s the premise of Iron Tower Studios’ in-development RPG, Colony Ship: A Post-Earth Role-Playing Game.

Though it’s still in Early Access at the time of writing, Colony Ship immediately stands out, both from other classic-style RPGs and even from Iron Tower’s debut, The Age of Decadence. That said, it carries itself with the same air of weary, decayed cynicism. I say that like it’s a bad thing, but in a medium so drunk on heroism, it’s actually refreshing.

The setting of Colony Ship is inspired by the Robert A. Heinlein story Orphans of the Stars. Published in 1941, it gave one of the first fictional depictions of the “generation ship” concept — a spacecraft constructed to take living humans through interstellar space at sublight speeds. To that end, generation ships house their population for that long, with entire generations living and dying within its hull, in the hopes that their distant descendants will arrive at their destination, hundreds or even thousands of years later.

One can already see the potential for a story in Orphans of the Stars, and by extension, Colony Ship. With so much in a human society capable of changing in the span of a single generation, the chances that a generation ship could even remember its original mission seem laughably slim. What group of people, faced with the prospect of living out their entire lives, and the lives of their children and grandchildren aboard an enclosed capsule forever on its way to somewhere else wouldn’t succumb to despair or recklessness?

That’s exactly what happened in Colony Ship. The player’s massive craft has been on its way to distant Proxima Centauri, and things have been off the rails for a long time. The society on board has mutated in ways that nobody could’ve anticipated, and after a violent mutiny, onboard life is riven by factions in an enclosed mimicry of what might happen after an Earthbound apocalypse.

Colony Ship‘s enclosed world is run by three main factions. The Protectors of the Mission are an arch-conservative organization fixated on turning back the clock to before the mutiny broke the former hierarchy. The Brotherhood of Liberty is a fractious democracy descended from the original mutineers, but cracking under the weight of democracy’s impracticalities. The Church of the Elect is a militant religious movement that sees the very journey of the ship to distant Proxima Centauri as a holy ordeal, one that only the chosen will survive.

The three factions (and several more minor ones) drive events as players begin the game in the Pit, an anarchic town belonging to no specific group. It’s here that Iron Tower’s clear love of older, more hardcore RPGs from the days of Fallout comes to the fore. Players are tasked with creating their own character, assigning detailed attributes and skills in a classical “point-buy” system. Like the games of yesteryear, it’s entirely possible to royally mess up a build and render a character unable to accomplish anything, only to then die an embarrassing death from a failed skill check.

Speaking of skill checks, they make up the majority of interesting play in Colony Ship. Old-school challenges like picking locks and dialog challenges are par for the course, and plenty of options are provided for players to work their way through. As a bit of advice for players thinking of jumping in, try not to spec too much for fighting. Perhaps it’s a matter of taste, but I found the turn-based combat system too fiddly and antiquated to hold my interest. Driven by action points and aim checks, I found little joy in trying to empty crude pistols at point-blank range, only to miss and eat a leaded pipe to the face.

With the combat carrying little dramatic weight, I found it more satisfying to play the opening hours as a silver-tongued rogue of sorts. I was capable of talking my way into and out of most situations, and equipped to unlock most doors I came across.

Of course, I folded like origami at the prospect of violence, but that made trying to find alternate routes more satisfying. It also exposed me to more of Colony Ship‘s well-written dialogue and descriptive text. Iron Tower was clearly trying to make an experience in the mold of older RPGs, but perhaps a few hints from newer games like Disco Elysium would help drive home the notion that such combat systems aren’t quite the draw they used to be — at least not playing the way they do in this version of the game.

At the moment Colony Ship isn’t fully complete, but what’s there is well-realized and surprisingly light on technical issues. My one major complaint was a constant skipping I noticed in the background music, which forced me to silence it. Losing the music meant that I could hear every instance where a sound effect was missing or held by some placeholder file, and much of my run felt like I was playing on mute. This is obviously a temporary Early Access issue, and I expect it to be ironed out well before full release.

Colony Ship could be a delightfully gritty RPG experience when it’s complete. Players looking for an old-school, skill-check experience should keep an eye out for its eventual launch.

Disclosures: This game is developed by Iron Tower Studios and published by Nacon. It is currently available for PC. This copy of the game is based on an Early Access preview build provided by the publisher and reviewed on PC. Approximately 15 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode. There is no multiplayer mode.

The post PREVIEW Colony Ship: A Post-Earth Role-Playing Game appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH A detailed, thoughtful translation of Vampire: The Masquerade to a non-combat RPG format…

LOW …that’s bogged down by technical hiccups and development missteps.

WTF Animation jank adds much-needed levity to the hard life of a vampire.

Vampires are probably best known for being evil creatures of the night and drinking blood, but another key factor in their mythology is that they live forever. However, exploring the concept of immortality can sometimes be tough to do in a videogame, and that holds true here in Big Bad Wolf’s new narrative RPG Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong.

Swansong offers three playable characters, all vampires making their home in Boston. Emem Louis looks like a socialite in her 20s, but has been around since World War I. Galeb Bazory, the city’s oldest vampire, once resided in Constantinople, centuries before it became Istanbul. Leysha is a Malkavian with a penchant for prophetic vision and may not be altogether there, mentally, but she and her vampiric “daughter” Halsey have lived in Boston longer than any humans.

Virtually every named vampire in the game has a lengthy, detailed, and evocatively-written biography — some stemming back centuries. It’s intriguing to read, but constant allusions to past events in the dialogue can make the story hard to break into for mere mortals.

More offputting is the barrage of new and unfamiliar jargon players are subjected to from the outset. Unless they’re already steeped in the lore of White Wolf’s Vampire: The Masquerade pen-and-paper RPG, they’ll likely find themselves referring constantly to the detailed in-game glossary just to make sense of a character’s lines.

That said, the crisis that kicks off the story proper is interesting enough to keep players’ attention despite these initially-alienating circumstances. An unknown someone has attacked a party planned by Boston’s Prince (a vampire ruler) to cement an alliance between the locals and a circle of vampiric warlocks. The Prince has drafted her three best agents, Galeb, Emem, and Leysha, into an impromptu investigation team. Their task is to find out what happened, assess the damage, and if necessary, punish those who’d dare attack one of the most powerful vampiric strongholds in North America.

Players control each of the three protagonists in turn, taking on their individual missions and encountering challenges suited to their characters’ past and personalities. This intertwining structure is one of Swansong‘s strongest points, as it weaves a picture of Boston’s supernatural underground as so sprawling and complex that not even a creature as powerful as a vampire can navigate it unchallenged.

This plays out in some interesting ways, as players might view an event from the perspective of one character, then revisit the same event from a different angle as another. For example, early on Emem has a tense conversation with a friend in crisis, and then later on, players have a choice to overhear that same conversation as Leysha.

Unlike most other RPGs and even some other Vampire: The Masquerade games, Swansong reflects its source material’s commitment to narrative-based gameplay. Just like the pen-and-paper game, much of Big Bad Wolf’s design focus is on investigation, exploration, and dialogue. In fact, the game doesn’t even have a combat system — its acts of violence play out in the form of gory cutscenes showing vampiric prowess.

In lieu of combat skills and traits, players allocate their stats across a number of different narratively-driven categories. These are split between Skills and Disciplines. Skills unlock interactions in dialog and investigation sequences. For example, leveling Persuasion helps in conversation, while upping Computer Hacking lets players glean new info from electronic devices. Meanwhile, Disciplines are basically vampire magic. The vamps have unique sets of Disciplines, ranging from detective vision-like Auspex, to powers that make each character’s segment feel and play uniquely.

Emem can call on Celerity to teleport from point to point, making many of her stages about agile traversal, environmental puzzle-solving, and ninja-like exploration. Galeb’s Fortitude and Dominate lets him play the vampiric overlord, controlling mortal minds with a word or taking unholy amounts of damage. Leysha can make herself invisible and trick humans into seeing her as other individuals. Her stages are the most unique, as they’re full of subterfuge and deception which allow her to navigate tight areas crawling with hostiles.

All of these abilities are regulated by Willpower and Hunger. Willpower is limited and can be spent to boost skills. It’s also key to Swansong‘s closest mechanic to actual combat — The Confrontation. These are basically battles in the form of dialogue trees. Emem might use willpower to boost her Persuasion skill to give her the upper hand in a tough negotiation, or Galeb might boost his Intimidate skill to force a suspicious cop not to challenge his authority. Even Disciplines can come into play, as they can block an opponent from boosting their own skills in a Confrontation.

Of course, hungry vampires are hard to control and they can even undermine their own success in their desire for fresh blood. Essentially, overusing one’s Disciplines can cause future attempts to use skills to fail because the vampire is simply too hungry to function effectively.

All these systems coalesce into a novel foundation for an investigation- and narrative-based title that still holds to the statistic- and skills-driven conventions of popular RPGs. If only the narrative and characters built on that foundation really held up…

Frankly, Swansong is a game better admired for what it tries to do than for what it does, and it’s painfully easy to see what Big Bad Wolf was aiming for. In an ideal world, Swansong would be a blockbuster-level cinematic statement that proves a certain vision of what RPGs can be. Instead, it feels stymied by unfulfilled ambition and technical shortcomings.

For example, awkward character and facial animations drain the impact from what should be riveting cinematics. I knew vampires were immortal, but I didn’t expect them to move and talk like zombies in the throes of rigor mortis.

The voice acting also suffers. The cast does what it can, but the delivery lacks direction. It’s as if the actors were reading the lines free of context, which were then rearranged later on. They alternate between yelling and whispering in the same line, in ways wholly inappropriate to the scene being staged. Further, it’s also noticeable that the lines were recorded under varying circumstances, some even sounding like they were pulled from a Zoom call.

I can’t bring myself to be too hard on Big Bad Wolf for these deficiencies since we’re still in the midst of a global pandemic and other crises that surely affected development. That said, it’s impossible not to mention the issues and their effect on the experience.

Further, this lack of quality spills into the campaign itself and its execution on the challenges characters face. Not every line of logic holds up, characters don’t always react convincingly to the choices players make, and there’s also an issue of balance thanks to Swansong‘s miserly distribution of skill points and resources. Each character faces different challenges in their respective path, and not in equal measure. It’s normal that Swansong wouldn’t give a player all the points they’d need to max everything out in order to promote careful choices and build-planning, but without adequate signaling as to the nature of future challenges, leveling up and allocating points feels like a series of blind guesses, which the game then punishes with failure.

These failures don’t mean a “game over”, though — Swansong isn’t that crass, and it’s clear that Big Bad Wolf likes the idea of letting players live with the consequences of their choices (or attempts). The story continues even when one botches a ton of critical skill checks. Even when I got major characters killed outright, and the show went on.

That reactiveness can be impressive, but given that it’s so easy to fail outright, I feel like Swansong could’ve been better about letting players feel like they’ve succeeded, rather than letting them just muddle through. Part of the fantasy of being a vampire is a sense of supernatural power and the gift of experience spanning multiple mortal lifetimes. At the lowest points, my vampires often came across as as feeble and incompetent as I am in real life. It took a full playthrough before I outright “aced” a challenge, and even then it was largely due to foreknowledge of what the game was going to throw at me.

It’s also a big issue that Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong‘s plot feels unfinished. Things hint towards a larger and more persistent threat past the immediate crisis faced by the trio, and then things suddenly accelerate, barreling through a number of concluding sequences and then cutting to text about the aftermath of the incident. While this sudden conclusion wraps the game up at a comfortable 20 hours or so, it feels unsatisfying and unresolved, like cutting things off in the second act of a trilogy. I was surprised there wasn’t a huge “To Be Continued” end card.

And yet, like a ghoul bound by blood to its vampire master, I can’t quite bring myself to condemn Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong. Despite the various flaws and stumbles, it does something few, if any, RPGs even attempt in its ambitious stab at creating a combat-free RPG. Its embrace of the deliciously edgy lore of the Vampire setting also lends an inimitable sense of flavor and style, even if the graphics don’t always do it justice. In the end, while the final experience is two courses short of being a banquet, it’s good eating for fans who are starving for vampire videogames.

Disclosures: This game is developed by Big Bad Wolf and published by Nacon. It is currently available for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S. This copy of the game is based on a retail build provided by the publisher and reviewed on PC. Approximately 33 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode. There is no multiplayer mode. The game was completed.

Parents: This game is rated M by the ESRB, with content descriptors for Blood and Gore, Drug Reference, Intense Violence, Partial Nudity, Sexual Content, and Strong Language. The description is as follows: “This is a narrative role-playing game in which players follow the story of three vampires from different clans. From a third-person perspective, players progress through each character’s storyline, interacting with characters and making action choices. Some selections can result in acts of intense violence: a bound character tortured by a man using various tools (e.g., hot poker, flame torch, hammer); a character’s throat ripped open by a werewolf; characters shot in the head at close range; a mind-controlled character slicing his own throat. Large blood-splatter effects occur as characters are injured and killed; some environments depict mutilated corpses (e.g., exposed entrails, decapitated) and large blood stains on the ground. In some environments, players can view framed photos on the wall, a handful of which depict nude woman with exposed breasts. During one sequence, a character is shown walking through a dreamscape, watching translucent figures engaging in obscured sexual acts (e.g., a figure with its face on a woman’s crotch)–sexual moaning is sometimes heard. Characters sometimes reference drugs in the dialogue (e.g., “He’s totally high”; “Traces of cocaine…I guess it was that kind of party.”). The words “f*k” and “sht” are heard in the game.“

Colorblind Modes: The game has no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: All voiced dialogue is accompanied by subtitles. (See examples above.) There are no text size or presentation options. Some audio cues do not have a visual indicator and can occur behind the player, but these are not essential for gameplay. This title is not fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: This game’s button controls are fully remappable.

The post Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH A vivid, novel, angry depiction of dystopian America…

LOW …that might be a bit too silly to get the message across. Maybe.

WTF Wizards at Mount Rushmore?

Stories about journeys are about as universal as it gets, but there’s something particularly American about the road trip. It’s rooted in the country’s unique geography — it lets storytellers promise the diversity and variation found in trekking across a continent while still keeping it tied together in the notion of a single country and culture. It feeds the American mythos, and Panic Barn taps that — and more — in Not Tonight 2, the sequel to 2020’s Not Tonight.

Whereas Not Tonight tackled the dystopian near-future U.K. ushered in by Brexit, Not Tonight 2 crosses the pond to the United States, only it’s not quite so united anymore as a series of cascading crises has ripped the country apart and brought it to its knees. Two factions rule the collapsing remains: The Alliance, a sclerotic rump state that was once the federal government, and the Martyrs, a psychotic, bigoted far-right fever swamp. Meanwhile, individual cities and territories are left to fend for themselves in the face of the things that broke the union. Los Angeles is a smog-choked ruin, rising sea levels have turned New York into a canal city, and the Midwest creaks under rotating surges of deadly plague.

Players take control of three young people off on a trip from their home in Portland to help a friend who’s been bundled into a black van and renditioned to the Martyr-held “Miami Gulag” for deportation. The party must cross the territory ahead of them in time to bring their kidnapped buddy a set of documents and proof of identity that’ll help them stay in. To do so they’ll travel, taking odd jobs and helping strangers while trying to survive the ravages of a slowly dying nation.

So, yes, Not Tonight 2 isn’t exactly subtle in its leanings.

In fact, it makes the previous game (which posited a future where Brexit had turned non-British residents into little more than serfs) look positively grounded. Panic Barn took advantage of the color and variation to be found in American tourist spots, and added a heavy dose of satirical exaggeration. The results are much, much more colorful, both philosophically and literally.

The pixel art graphics look fantastic, with rich detail and many interesting backgrounds and environments to trundle through on the way from coast to coast. Some clever use of 3D Voxel-based assets also lends more animation to the travel sequences.

Mechanically, players work as bouncers at various locales along their journey, and the game’s core structure takes more than a few pages from Lucas Pope’s classic Papers, Please. As a bouncer, players will check peoples’ IDs while matching them to an escalating number of requirements needed to let customers in while filtering riff-raff out. At first the criteria are simple, like making sure punters are of legal age or not holding a fake ID, but each location adds a little one-off gimmick. In one area, players can filter guests by their compliance with masking requirements. In another, guests need to succeed at a Dungeons & Dragons-style dice roll against assigned stats to get in. Players will check for contraband, offer a choice of sauces, help convert aspirants to a local cult, and so on.

Between locations, players will come across semi-random vignettes that mimic the Choose Your Own Adventure-style “cutscenes” of games like FTL or similar roguelikes. These have an impact on the party’s health and morale, and letting either of those meters zero out means a game over. The logistics of cross-country travel are actually an under-considered part of road trip stories, but these segments are rough patch in Not Tonight 2 as they have a number of unfairly punitive “wrong” options that can leave a run dead in the water.

The gimmicks at each venue and the random choices keep the otherwise repetitive ‘job sim’-style gameplay fresh, and avoid the kind of grinding tedium that made Papers, Please and even the first Not Tonight feel heavy. Unfortunately, that might actually be a problem. That heaviness and boring, workaday routine, is part of what made the tone of those titles stick.

For example, in Papers, Please, players were hapless border control officers making tough, compromised choices to survive. In Not Tonight, players worked the queues, scrambling to assemble enough money to stay ahead of a shady immigration officer. Not Tonight 2 trades that sense of place and time for a straightforward questing structure that often comes across as more wacky than weary. That’s a valid choice, of course, but one that’s buried the messaging in its shift from a dark, tense satire to a mocking parody.

Sacrificing tone on the altar of entertainment has made Not Tonight 2 somewhat less of a “bold, politically charged dark comedy” that publisher No More Robots bills it as, but despite that it remains a beautifully-realized, genuinely enjoyable adventure.

Disclosures: This game is developed by Panic Barn and published by No More Robots. It is currently available for PC. This copy of the game is based on a retail build provided by the publisher and reviewed on PC. Approximately 13 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode. There is no multiplayer mode. The game was completed.

Parents: This game is not rated by the ESRB, but if it were, it would likely rate T, with content descriptors for Drug and Alcohol Reference, Language, Violence, Suggestive Themes, and Use of Tobacco. If I wrote it, a description might read something like “This is an adventure game with job simulation elements. Players take control of a person traveling across the dystopian USA to help a friend who has been unjustly detained. Players work as bouncers, checking the documents of visitors to various locations. They will interact with their friends directly and via text message. There is no combat in the game, though violent behavior is sometimes seen or implied. Characters curse, threaten each other, and use bigoted language.

Colorblind Modes: The game has no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: All voiced dialogue is accompanied by subtitles. (See examples above.) There are no text size or presentation options. Some audio cues do not have a visual indicator and can occur behind the player, but these are not essential for gameplay. This title is not fully accessible.

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

The post Not Tonight 2 Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Three of the wildest visual novel games around in a single bundle…

LOW …but it’s still not complete!

WTF Some of these jokes didn’t age too well.

The most important thing Nintendo Switch owners need to know about Danganronpa Decadence is that they can’t actually buy a game called “Danganronpa Decadence” on the eShop. That title is a physical-exclusive bundle release that unites four Danganronpa games on a single cartridge. Those games are 2010’s Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, 2014’s Dangaronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, 2017’s Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, and a new title: 2021’s Danganronpa S: Ultimate Summer Camp. On the Nintendo eShop, these games are all sold separately.

With the exception of Danganronpa S (a new title) all the games in the collection are essentially identical to their previous incarnations, content-wise. They’re marked as “Anniversary Editions” because they come with a new “gallery” feature that allows players to unlock and view story scenes on demand, but that’s about it.

In light of the omnibus nature of Danganronpa Decadence, this review will offer a different format. Rather than go into detail with each individual title, I’ll focus on spoiler-free, capsule write-ups for each of the games in the series. Readers looking for more in-depth reviews can find them right here on GameCritics. Seek out Andrew’s review of the Danganronpa 1.2 Reload two-pack, Brad’s review of Danganronpa 2, and Michael’s review of Danganronpa V3.

Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc

Things start simply enough. Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc introduces players to the concept of Hope’s Peak Academy, a school for the most gifted and talented youngsters around. These “Ultimates” are gathered at the school to make the most of their prodigious talents, but protagonist Makoto Naegi is the lone “normie” of the bunch — he’s an “Ultimate Lucky Student” admitted as the winner of a lottery draw. Before long the school is locked down, with the students trapped inside and forced to play a “Killing Game” by the villainous two-tone bear Monokuma. Monokuma’s ultimatum? To go free, get away with murder. Students need to kill a classmate, then avoid being found out at the subsequent “Class Trial” to escape the school. Those found guilty are executed in gruesome and physically impossible ways. Deadly hijinks ensue.

Trigger Happy Havoc establishes the structure and pattern that the rest of the entries follow — begin a chapter, follow the narrative, interact with the characters, and continue until someone dies. Once that happens, look for clues, talk some more, and put it all together at the Class Trial, where various minigames and logic puzzles challenge players to solve the mystery. Then (if one’s logic is sound) the killer is executed and the story continues. Each case is held up by a wealth of twists and turns, as well as the outsize personalities of the characters. Some truly wild developments late in the script help cement the narrative here as a step above and beyond the typical, more grounded whodunit.

Be warned, though — some of the content is graphic, and the game contains characterizations and plot developments that were iffy even back then. I think some of this would be absolutely unacceptable today. It’s a black mark on an otherwise stellar narrative.

Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair

When I first played Goodbye Despair, I was openly skeptical of its necessity. I felt, at the time, that Trigger Happy Havoc‘s ending was just about perfect in its ambiguity. Seeing a sequel to that story that (apparently) recreates the same premise and structure of the original with a new cast felt like a sour attempt to “franchise” a great one-and-done title.

I’m glad to say that I was wrong on all counts. Goodbye Despair meaningfully expands on the formula established in Trigger Happy Havoc, while still delivering similar big surprises that build off its revelations. It even provides the same, satisfying “it could be done forever right here, and I’d be fine with that” feeling by the time it closes out.

Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony

The presence of Danganronpa V3 in this package brings me to the second most important thing new Switch players need to know about Danganronpa Decadence. V3 isn’t the third Danganronpa game. In fact, it’s not even a sequel to Danganronpa 2. The actual continuation — and conclusion — of the saga of Hope’s Peak Academy was contained not in a game, but in an anime series titled Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope’s Peak High. That isn’t included in Decadence, and while I am of the opinion that the two games stand well enough on their own that they can be experienced as-is without feeling incomplete, players that go into V3 expecting it to build off of Goodbye Despair are in for a rude awakening.

I emphasize “rude” because while V3 isn’t the sequel to Goodbye Despair, it is very much a ‘main game’ in the franchise. In a way, it’s a coda of sorts for Danganronpa as a whole with a metafictional prickliness worthy of The End of Evangelion. It’s a divisive entry for good reason, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Danganronpa S: Ultimate Summer Vacation

If Danganronpa V3 relied on players having some knowledge of the previous games to make the most impact, Danganronpa S has no impact at all if one hasn’t already been turned into a Danganronpa fan. It’s essentially a fusion of the two extra game modes from V3, fleshed out with content and references to the rest of the series (including characters and games that aren’t included in the Decadence package) and made to stand alone. However, the fact that one can launch and purchase it separately from the other titles doesn’t mean that it should stand alone.

The game modes it grew out of were largely ways to explore interactions with the Danganronpa cast after their relevance to the core narrative had passed. Now, Danganronpa S posits a whole other scenario — Pretty much anyone that’s ever been in a Danganronpa title has been somehow gathered into a virtual simulation of Goodbye Despair‘s Jabberwock island. There, under the care of V3‘s Monokuma Kids, the characters must participate in a “training camp” for their Ultimate Talents.

The twist? No killing!

Danganronpa S is a death-free safe space, concocted expressly for players still enamored of the wacky and memorable characters and seeking a way to get more. To that end, Spike Chunsoft has created loads of new content and event scenes featuring characters interacting with each other across time, space, canonicity, and even common sense. Without spoiling too much, one might even see multiple versions of the same character conversing like they were different people, instead of the same person at different stages of their life.

This is all well and good, but one issue is that S prominently features characters that do not appear in the Decadence bundle. In particular, Komaru, the protagonist of the shooter-style spinoff Ultra Despair Girls (which forms a narrative bridge between Goodbye Despair and the Danganronpa 3 anime) gets prominent billing, but a Switch-only player might not even know who she is.

Danganronpa S plays out like a hybrid of a party-style board game and parody JRPG. Players will take a character across the spaces while playing minigames, reading event scenes, and battling the minions of Monokuma in turn-based combat. Players can acquire new characters (there are dozens, if not hundreds) by feeding in-game currency to the in-game gacha machines. This is where things get unpleasant, as Danganronpa S is supported by microtransactions — players can pay a bit of real-world money to directly unlock characters. The actual costs aren’t high, especially in comparison with the predatory rates of more dedicated gacha games, but it’s a clear attempt to cash in on the affection people have for Danganronpa‘s cast, and this taints the experience.

Even players that can make peace with this monetization will have some caveats to consider when buying the games of Danganronpa Decadence, though.

Performance on the pre-release builds I received was rough. Noticeable frame-rate loss occurred during class trial segments across all three of the older titles, and strange errors in text rendering caused punctuation (or even individual words) to appear as invisible. None of these issues made the games unplayable, but they were concerning in light of the fact that they all work just fine on PC, PS4, and even their native, less powerful PS Vita.

With the exception of the thoroughly unnecessary Danganronpa S, the games of the Danganronpa Decadence package are still a great and unforgettable experience. Though they run better on other platforms, they’re just fine on the Switch, and players who can’t or won’t try them elsewhere won’t feel like they’re getting a worse deal. A more concerning wrinkle is that players who want as complete a Danganronpa experience as possible are better served on those other platforms, thanks to the absence of Ultra Despair Girls. As such, using the word “decadence” in the collective title comes across as a bit presumptuous on Spike Chunsoft’s part — a more accurate title might be “Danganronpa Sufficience“.

Disclosures: This game collection is developed and published by Spike Chunsoft. It is currently available for Nintendo Switch (Alternative editions of the component games are available on PC, PS4, PS Vita, iOS, and Android). This copy of the game is based on a retail build provided by the publisher and reviewed on Nintendo Switch. Approximately 83 hours were devoted to the single-player modes across four titles. There are no multiplayer modes. The games were completed.

Parents: All four games in the compilation are rated M by the ESRB, for Blood, Drug Reference, Intense Violence, Partial Nudity, Sexual Themes, Strong Language, and Simulated Gambling. The official ESRB description for Danganronpa 1 and 2 reads as follows, and this can be generally assumed for the rest: This is a compilation of puzzle-adventure games in which players follow high-school students attempting to escape from a murderous robot bear. As players navigate their environments, they sometimes come across corpses of murdered classmates. Players investigate the various crime scenes, looking for clues and interviewing rival classmates. Finding the killer can trigger “punishment” cutscenes, in which acts of violence are depicted: students killed by a pitching machine, run over by a truck, crushed to death. There are also depictions of characters getting impaled by spikes and knives. Blood is frequently depicted on and around dead bodies. Cutscenes also depict female characters dressed in low-cut outfits and bikinis that expose large amounts of cleavage; these still images occasionally depict characters in provocative poses, with the camera focusing on pelvic areas. Some scenes contain sexual/suggestive dialogue (e.g., “That creep rubbed his ham-hands all over me and called it a body check! More like sexual harassment!” “My loins are still full of poison, and I’d appreciate it if you could suck it out…” and “some even tried to have children with Junko’s dead body”). The words “f**k,” “sh*t,” and “a*shole” appear in the dialogue.

Colorblind Modes: The game has no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: All voiced dialogue is accompanied by subtitles. There are no text size or presentation options. (See examples above.) Some audio “barks” used by characters in place of voice acting are not subtitled, but these are not essential for gameplay. This title is partially accessible.

Remappable Controls: No games in this collection offer remappable buttons. There is no control diagram. The controls are straightforward with the left stick selecting objects and the face buttons selecting/canceling.

The post Danganronpa Decadence Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Endearing characters and a great sci-fi yarn…

LOW …that I kinda wish was playable without VR.

WTF Doc Julie’s hands!

One great thing about trying Virtual Reality titles is finding the moments when what I call “VR Magic” happens. These are the instances when VR immersion hits maximum and the sense of playing a game fades away to be replaced by a brief, vivid impression of a seemingly real world conjured by the technology.

The first such “VR Magic” moment happened quite early in the campaign of Japan-based studio MyDearest’s latest release, Altdeus: Beyond Chronos, a VR-exclusive sci-fi visual novel. It happened as I took aim at an approaching alien, one so large it blotted out the horizon. Encouraged by the songs of an angel standing on what felt like my actual shoulder, I assembled a cannon the size of an airport runway and unleashed hell.

Altdeus is the second entry in its series, following Tokyo Chronos. That said, one wouldn’t know it from playing — the setting and premise are different enough that the commonality feels more about branding than continuity.

Taking place in the 23rd century, Altdeus puts players in an underground settlement, years after mysterious aliens called the Meteora have devastated the Earth’s surface. Humanity cowers in a massive city-size bunker, relying on the bioengineered super-soldiers of Prometheus to defend them from further Meteora attacks. Prometheus accomplishes its mission by way of the Makhia, massive skyscraper-sized battle robots.

Players wear the headset to enter the mind of Lieutenant Chloe, the pilot of the Makhia “Alto”. An ace gunner, Chloe is set on revenge against the Meteora for eating her dearest friend Coco, and will stop at nothing to get it — but when a Meteora appears that looks exactly like the now-dead Coco, Chloe starts to question what she fights for, and what’s actually going on behind the scenes.

“Behind the scenes” takes something of a literal aura in Altdeus. Trapped underground, the human refugees use a ubiquitious and advanced form of Augmented Reality (AR) technology to keep their surroundings livable. Every citizen is equipped with ocular implants that layer virtual scenery and information into their field of view, allowing them to “see” information about everything around them. This AR also provides Noa, an AI-driven assistant that helps Chloe drive her Makhia. She’s the “angel” I mentioned earlier, and she also happens to be the city’s resident pop star, a fusion of Hatsune Miku and Sharon Apple.

This is where the second bit of “VR Magic” I encountered occurred. Annoyed by Noa’s pointed questions, Chloe decides to shut her out by progressively deactivating her ocular implants. First, Noa becomes invisible, and then the ads around the bustling Tokyo-like plaza we were speaking in faded out. Then the trees went, followed by most of the architecture, leaving Chloe seeing the world as it really was — a series of featureless, colorless spaces that resembled nothing so much as the “Whiteboxes” that are the basic building blocks of 3D level design. It’s a great scene, and a very clever use of VR’s inherent immersion to demonstrate the story’s sci-fi chops while selling the reality of Altdeus‘ world to the player, a feat that can’t quite be accomplished by its relatively simple character models.

Altdeus spins an entertaining sci-fi story, heavily tinged with emotional intensity and overtones of a cool mecha anime series. As a visual novel, Chloe’s adventure mainly consists of reading text and listening to voiced lines while moving through different locations. Free movement isn’t really possible, and players will navigate Altdeus‘ spaces by going back and forth between various hotspots. Character interaction is also somewhat limited compared to more cinematic VR titles like Blood & Truth. Characters typically arrange themselves in tableau, moving little as they utter their lines and stiffly transition into different poses.

Makhia battles don’t offer much beyond this same basic level of engagement. Though Altdeus puts players in the cockpit of a massive machine, this is no Mechwarrior 5 or RIGS: Mechanized Combat League. The fighting flows according to the story’s dictates, and at their core, they’re glorified quick-time events using the PSVR’s motion controllers to operate the Makhia’s weapons.

As a visual novel, Altdeus facilitates choices (to an extent) and allows Chloe to choose answers that can influence the path of the story. The AR interface shows how a given choice might affect certain factors, but remains vague as to how they’ll play out. Players will need to repeat the four-to-five hour campaign a few times while making different choices to experience the full breadth of the plot, but a constellation-like path system makes it a bit easier to organize one’s runs and check for missing story paths, though.

While Altdeus was an enjoyable experience and easily a contender for one of the best narrative games to be found in VR, I did encounter some issues related to its implementation on PlayStation VR.

Originally designed for Oculus-based systems, Atldeus‘ interactive portions occasionally run up against the limits of Sony’s less-capable hardware. The PSVR has always had particular trouble dealing with players turning around, as the hardware’s light-based positional tracking isn’t as precise as other systems. Unfortunately, many scenes in Altdeus invite players to look in all directions, and on more than one occasion, the headset tracking freaked out while trying to look at something.

It’s also worth pointing out that experiencing a visual novel-like story in a VR headset can be quite tiring. VR works best with short sessions, and while Altdeus is many hours shorter than a typical visual novel, it’s on the long side for a VR game, especially one that demands this much reading. It was during one of these longer sessions that I wished the game wasn’t VR-exclusive, so I could continue experiencing it in a less physically-demanding way.

Those issues aside, Altdeus: Beyond Chronos is a narrative experience that shouldn’t be missed. MyDearest has made the best case yet for proving that visual novels can work in VR, and it’s strong enough to compete with more traditional non-VR entries in the genre as well. This is one giant robot you’ll want to get into.

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by MyDearest, Inc. It is currently available for PC via Oculus and Steam VR and PS4 via PSVR. This copy of the game is based on retail build provided by the publisher and reviewed on PS4 via PSVR (VR is required for play). Approximately 13 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode. There is no multiplayer mode. The game was completed.

Parents: This game is rated T by the ESRB, for Blood, Partial Nudity and Violence. If I wrote it, a description might read something like “This is a virtual reality adventure game in which players take control of an artificially enhanced soldier fighting a war against aliens in the future. Players will interact with fellow cast members, reading and listening to dialog and watching scenes play out around them. There is combat in the game, though it is displayed through the perspective of piloting a giant robot. Characters curse, threaten each other, and occasionally threaten the player directly, moving into close quarters with a weapon drawn.

Colorblind Modes: The game has no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: All voiced dialogue is accompanied by subtitles. There are no text size or presentation options. Some audio cues do not have a visual indicator and can occur behind the player, but these are not essential for gameplay. This title is partially accessible.

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

The post ALTDEUS: Beyond Chronos Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH A relaxing, chill city-builder…

LOW …that might be a bit too chill for some.

WTF Watching resource gliders consume forests like steampunk locusts.

If there’s one fantasy or sci-fi trope I’m a sucker for, it’s a good old floating sky-city. I just love the notion of getting everything that’s normally seen on the ground — buildings, streets, and urban life — and making it fly.

Unfortunately for me, sky cities are rarely used as positive metaphors. From Xenogears‘ Solaris to Bioshock Infinite‘s Columbia to Zalem in Battle Angel Alita, floating cities are an easy way for creators to depict a class of people who are literally above it all, lording their privileged status over the plebs on the ground.

Color me surprised, then, that Airborne Kingdom chooses to aim a bit higher with its take on skyborne urban environs. In its world, the titular Airborne Kingdom was once a force of unity, able to travel between disparate nations while serving as a hovering nexus of learning, trade, and culture. The plans to build it have been rediscovered, so players must reforge the legend of the Airborne Kingdom, growing it from a simple levitating building to a thriving city among the clouds.

What follows is fairly straightforward city-builder… except in the sky. Players will start with humble, hovering beginnings and lay down walkways, set places for structures, and conduct research to unlock new technologies and options. They’ll also be able to take advantage of the Airborne Kingdom’s mobility, moving from place to place and undertaking quests.

During this expansion, the city’s population will grow and place a growing strain on resources, necessitating further expansion. Despite the somewhat smaller scale compared to city-building titans like SimCity or Anno, Airborne Kingdom resists the urge to include RTS or combat elements and sticks to its genre. There’s no fighting at all here, the only real enemy is gravity.

Keeping the city from crashing plays a key role in Airborne Kingdom. While the city can stay aloft thanks to magical technology, other rules of physics still apply — one such is balance. Players need to build their city in a somewhat planned manner, as building too far in one direction can cause the whole complex to tilt. Tilt too far, and the residents will be annoyed, and the stability of the structure threatened.

In practice, this makes for some entertaining considerations when developing the city’s beautiful, middle-eastern-inspired aesthetic, as one searches for just the right place to put a heavy structure, or when deciding just how far a housing block can extend before the city starts sagging. It’s a unique spin among city-builders, and it’s a pleasant bit of tension.

As they journey through biomes randomly generated at the start of each campaign, players will need to maintain a certain level of resources to keep the city aloft. The availability of resources can constrain players’ actions, but things never get too stressful. Frostpunk this is not, and for better or worse, Airborne Kingdom is dedicated to maintaining a chill, relaxing atmosphere. As someone who doesn’t mind a game that’s willing to step back and let me tinker rather than making me work hard to ‘win’, I can appreciate that.

That said, the relative lack of challenge may be off-putting for some players as the resource pressure isn’t enough to force interesting decisions about where to go and what to do. While it doesn’t need to be harsh, I would have appreciated having to make a hard call or two, or exploring my tech tree from necessity rather than curiosity. Still, Airborne Kingdom isn’t large enough to let ennui settle in, so any boredom that could’ve resulted from the relaxed pace didn’t have a chance to manifest.

Rather than trying to beat the giants at their own game, Airborne Kingdom carefully selects its core tenets and takes flight without getting weighed down by steep difficulty or stressful play. It might not be the kind of city-builder one comes back to again and again, but I enjoyed my time floating above it all.

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by The Wandering Band. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game is based on retail build provided by the publisher and reviewed on PC. Approximately 13 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode. There is no multiplayer mode. The game was completed.

Parents: At the time of writing, this game is unrated by the ESRB, but if it were, it would likely be rated E. The description might read something like This is a strategy game in which players manage and construct a mobile, airborne city. As players explore the world, making connections with land-based kingdoms and expanding their city, they gather resources and conduct research to unlock new structures and technologies. There is no combat in the game, though running out of critical resources may cause the city to fall and be destroyed in the crash.

Colorblind Modes: The game has no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: All voiced dialogue is accompanied by subtitles. There are no text size or presentation options. No audio cues are necessary for successful play, this title is fully accessible.

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

The post Airborne Kingdom Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.