Recent reviews by Eulerian

Strangeland is a surrealistic point-and-click (PnC) adventure game with horror elements. There's a lot that I liked, and some things that I think could be improved upon. I'll mention some quick points first before getting into the story (the big one).

Graphics: The graphics are quite souped-up and impressive relative to your typical PnC. It uses this sort of purple and gold color palette, which I thought was an interesting choice. It's not a style you see very often, but it works really well here due to Strangeland being a dreamlike, nightmarish construct. There is an unsettling sense of dread throughout the game -- you'll encounter lots of odd characters and disturbing visual sequences that are quite visceral and macabre in nature. They really nail the atmosphere on this one.

Music/Sound: I wish the music stood out a little more, but it's very fitting nonetheless. Ambient, creepy, and foreboding. I liked the sound design, and thought the voice acting was very good, too. They did a great job on all those fronts. Even as I type this, I can still hear all those crazy sounds from the Dark Thing ringing in my head, haha.

Puzzles: In general, the puzzles are mostly fair. There isn't too much of the crazy try-everything-everywhere logic that you may associate with certain games in the PnC genre. Things have a reasonably logical flow to them. If you get stuck, you can walk over to the in-game telephone booth, dial 0, and get a hint for what to do next. Great idea! That being said, there are a couple lateral-thinking style puzzles that I thought were cool, but felt out of place in a game like this. One puzzle in particular (the missing telephone number) might be very frustrating for people who don't speak English natively.

There are a number of old PnC games where certain puzzles had multiple solutions, which is always fun -- and I was excited to find a shooting gallery puzzle early on that had multiple ways to tackle it. However, it seemed like a one-time deal, as there weren't any more multi-solution puzzles after that, as far as I could recall (either that or I simply missed the alternative solutions to certain things). There is a Tarot card puzzle that sorta-kinda introduces an element of choice, but it's not really a puzzle and there's no real penalty for "getting it wrong", nor any reason to get it right either (though there is a Steam achievement for it).

Edit: As per the developer response below, I was incorrect about there not being more multi-solution puzzles. I simply missed the other solutions!

Game Mechanics: I found the base game mechanics very fluid and easy. In addition to the usual inventory screen, you can use your mouse's scroll wheel to cycle through inventory items for quick use, which is super convenient. You can also double-click to fast travel, press escape to bypass cutscenes, etc - I like that the devs respect the player's time by giving them the option to speed things up if they want. Too many games force unskippable cutscenes and dialogue (which drives me up the wall), so I greatly appreciate that they get it right here.

Story: This game is jam-packed with references - it's absolutely bursting at the seams. Some aspects are quite on-the-nose, while others are so subtle and esoteric that I was surprised to find them in a video game. It's sort of like trying to read Shakespeare for the first time in high school, where you'll either blitz right through and overlook 95% of the details, or slow down and get overwhelmed by everything that's actually going on. There's probably plenty that I missed - but even still, I noticed tons of easter eggs and shoutouts to famous works of literature, books, stories, movies, poems, plays, quotes, religious texts, mythologies, and even other video games. To elaborate here would take up several paragraphs - maybe pages - to get into it all, simply due to sheer volume. I cannot believe how many references and throwbacks were tucked away in here. I wouldn't say it's all necessary in order to understand the game, but the associated context can be useful.

In most PnCs, the dialogue tends to be a little more expository, so you can move through it quickly without missing much - but that's definitely not the case here. The game may alienate some players who go through a dialogue sequence or cutscene too briskly, not knowing what the hell just happened. That sort of thing can lead to detachment from the story if the confusion lingers on for too long. While I enjoyed all these details for the most part, it's a bit heavy-handed, and might benefit from a little more coherence and focus in order to better keep the player grounded. Hard to do in a surreal setting for sure, but I think it's needed from time to time so people don't lose their way.

Plot-wise, everything is one giant metaphor for the struggles of processing grief and learning how to find yourself. Various characters seem to represent different aspects of this process -- whether it's throwing oneself into work as a means of robotic dehumanization and trying not to feel, or using dark gallows humor as a coping mechanism, or invoking willful self-delusion and avoidance to forget painful memories altogether. The game does a good job of conveying the accompanying trauma, the total sense of aimlessness and helplessness, the ever-present threat of darkness, the pressure of maintaining memory and how it can evolve into nightmare, the horror of seeing someone you love reduced to something unrecognizable, the constant interjections of self-doubt, the ongoing feelings of guilt and regret, the difficulty of acceptance, and the maddening futility of trying to solve the unsolvable. As someone who has dealt with great loss myself, I found a lot of this game sadly relatable.

Despite all this attention to detail, the protagonist ("The Stranger") is a bland bowl of oatmeal, comparatively speaking. This poor dude is caught in a whirlwind of ♥♥♥♥, and yet we never get much sense that he's actually suffering or frustrated with anything that's happening. Not a knock on the voice acting, but rather his characterization. My ability to relate to this game largely stemmed from my own experiences as a sort of stand-in for what was happening on-screen - but if I didn't have those experiences, I would probably have a hard time empathizing because The Stranger doesn't give you much to latch onto. Most of the interesting bits come from all the wacky and zany creatures you encounter.

Endings: I do think the game drops the ball somewhat when it comes to its four endings. Three endings are (depressingly) bleak albeit realistic, and one ending is feel-good Hollywood stuff. Oddly enough, the good ending is the most unrealistic part of this surrealistic game and completely lost me. I think the writer wanted to offer some kind of hopeful outcome to a dismal situation, but for me (and most others I know who've dealt with similar traumas), it doesn't usually work out like that. You learn how to live with the darkness instead -- it never goes away fully. Trying to beat it is what ends up causing the most pain, since it's actually an unstoppable juggernaut, and all you can do is grapple with it, wrestle it, rechannel it, integrate it, draw power from it, etc -- that sort of thing. Games like Celeste deal with this notion so perfectly that it left me teary-eyed, and it's a good example of how to put a positive and realistic spin on a depressing subject -- and I wish Strangeland offered something similar here because there was a ripe opportunity for it.

Overall: Strangeland is a very well-polished point-and-click adventure game with lots to chew on. I don't think it's for everyone, since some people will be turned off by the endless stream of metaphors, but I think if you're looking for something surreal and abstract, this is a good game to check out.

Wow, Shredder's Revenge was so much fun. Not only does it successfully recapture the magic of those old arcade beat-em-ups, but it matches or even exceeds games like Turtles in Time, widely hailed as one of the better titles on the SNES. No easy feat!

Pros:

-16 stages in total, where each one takes a few minutes to clear on average. Perfect!

-The visuals stay true to the pixel art style of the 90's, while also feeling fresh with lots of color, animation, and detail.

-The music is catchy and fits each stage nicely, with modern remixes of memorable TMNT tunes.

-Multiplayer is a lot of fun and really takes you back to the 90's arcade experience, and it's easy to join ongoing games through the lobby system.

-The game also plays wonderfully on the Steam Deck - zero issues encountered on that front.

-The difficulty is about right. The easy mode is spam-to-win, medium is good for a default playthrough, and hard is actually pretty tough since it only takes a few hits to lose a life.

-I also loved all the throwbacks to the older games, and the ongoing gags like the Foot Clan soldiers trying to blend into the background before ditching the charade.

-All the major villains are here.

Cons:

-The achievements are mostly things you'll unlock naturally, but "No Need for Mutagen" is quite grindy, as it requires you to level every character up to 10 (all four turtles plus April, Splinter, and Casey) -- basically seven playthroughs, or at the very least one playthrough and then six grindfests. Other achievements such as "Classic Couch Memories" or "Master of One Quarter" should probably be harder, since you can cheese them by joining someone else's multiplayer game during the final boss fight. You're still technically winning the game without using a continue... but you're also skipping most of the game in the process.

-The taunt system breaks the difficulty somewhat. If you wanted to go full-cheese here, you can always clear a room, do a taunt to refill your power gauge, use a Super Attack to clear out most of the next room, then rinse and repeat.

-The full price point of $25 may be a touch high for someone who only plans on beating the game once, since you'll be done in a couple hours.

Overall:

This game is certainly worth a pickup if you were ever into the arcade scene or enjoyed SNES games like Turtles in Time.

A chill 2D co-op puzzle platformer game. Single-player is apparently an option too, but I never tried it. It's more fun to play this one with a partner anyway.

You control two characters who possess different powers, separated by a magic barrier that splits the screen at all times. Ember is the "fiery" one who can swim through water and light lanterns (triggering various platforms and machines), and Rime is the "icy" one who can freeze water and make it walkable. Each character's half of the screen has these powers applied to the environment automatically, so your positioning is very important.

There's a central hub of sorts (the Castle), from which you can access other worlds to solve puzzles and collect scarves (thereby giving you access to other worlds once you've collected enough).

The puzzles themselves are pretty fun. In each world, you get an extra set of world-specific powers that adds a nice variety to the mechanics. A couple puzzles stumped us for a good while (specifically, one in World 2), but most of them were straightforward and logical. Lots of well-executed and clever designs in there, too. It was always satisfying to come across a new puzzle that looked impossible, only to find that there was indeed a way to leverage that world's new mechanics to solve it. A few of the weaker puzzles were a little janky or awkward, but they were relatively infrequent and not a big issue.

Achievement hunters, rejoice -- nothing in this game is missable. Even if you accidentally stumble into the ending world ("The Solution") prematurely, you'll end up back in the Castle once you finish and reload the game. There is also a handy tracking guide in each world (viewable through fast-travel checkpoints) showing which scarves you've collected and which ones you've missed.

The graphics are decent and the environmental art is well-done, but there is room for improvement: Various ropes and foreground barriers are sometimes hard to see and/or hard to distinguish from background decorations. Hot air vents are also tough to spot when they're not active, and could benefit from being made a little more obvious. The tracking guides are helpful, but sometimes hard to see because the black indicators for uncollected scarves can blend into the dark background. It would also be convenient to better see which door in the Castle led where.

The music is soothing and ambient, and the narration is professional-sounding - though I admit I mostly tuned it out. There's a story in this game, told in the form of background narration, but I couldn't tell you what any of it was about. Something about a love story? There's a dragon in there, too. Maybe the barrier is a metaphor? Or maybe it's literal? I have no idea, but hey, the story is there if you want one!

If you enjoy puzzle platformers and co-op games, this is a good one to try.

I was not expecting such a wholesome game, lol. Every character is somehow terrifying, adorable, and polite at the same time - it's fantastic.

Going into it, I was concerned that the controls might be awkward - but in no time at all I was swinging through levels like Spider-Man or something. I really enjoyed how fluid it all felt.

The game is on the easier/shorter side but there are a decent number of collectibles to hunt down if you're a completionist. I also appreciated that the in-game map had trackers letting you know if you found everything within a given level.

Oh yeah you can also dance and shoot lasers.

I'm posting this review during the Steam summer sale, so to any of you out there looking for a game to pick up right now, I'd say consider this one for sure.

I can't recommend this game because it's not even really a game. It's basically three movies that eventually intertwine.

You do have dialogue choices, but none of it impacts anything, and the options often say the same thing anyway. For example "Come on!" / "Tell me!" / "I wanna know!" Why go to all the trouble of having the player make decisions if there's no net change to the story? What's also strange is that sometimes you'll pick an option and the character says something completely different anyway.

Cutscenes are interrupted at random by sections where you need to control the character to walk across the screen to progress to the next cutscene, but there's no consistency to when these scenes take place, and sometimes it's not always clear where you need to walk. Camera angles will often change between sections and result in complete disorientation. These walking bits don't enhance anything about the gameplay experience and only serve as distracting busywork, often breaking up the flow of a scene.

Occasionally you have sections where you have to do things like outrun a train or outrun guards or go jogging, where you press some buttons to go faster - but there's no need to ever press anything because you always succeed by default.

The story was interesting at first, especially the first half - but things start to suffer in the late-game. Chapters start to drag and feel like filler, as very little changes from one chapter to the next. And then we have Chapter 7 where everything converges, but conceptually it's very rushed and much is left unanswered. The endings are perhaps the only real choices you have in the game (2 options per character), but they're all pretty depressing.

If you want to watch some movies with occasional interactive elements, this might be up your alley. But to me this simply isn't a game, so I can't recommend it.

I'm a sucker for time-travel - I had fun with this game, though it's not perfect. It's like an isometric-view chrono-Metroidvania, in that with every murder you prevent, you gain a new ability that gets you access to places you couldn't visit previously. As your abilities grow, you can locate more collectibles, find secret passages, and gather a lot more information.

I thought the game overall had a fantastic art style and lots of great visuals to admire. It's maybe the strongest point of this game - just how polished everything looks.

The story is neat and has some nice twists in there too.

However, gameplay-wise, I wish that there was a little more at stake. Even though nobody can actually see you as you roam the halls, the masks of the guest/staff will stop time and attack you - but they're slow and do so little damage that you can thwart them by simply running past them to another room.

The puzzles could also benefit from a little more complexity and less restriction. There's only one way to save each guest, and you have to save the guests in a fixed order. Also, some doors are blocked off for 95% of the game and force you to go around the long way - which I don't quite understand. If I am able to access both sides of a door, seems like it should be unlocked going forward.

Overall though, I enjoyed the ride. Check it out if you're into murder mysteries or time travel games.

This is awesome, lol. A bunch of funny/entertaining choose-your-own-adventure style games where most of the choices result in death. The stories are also packed with video game references and other tropes -- really enjoyed it all.

This is a decent game, but a mixed bag as well:

-The graphics are terrific, and the music is very fitting. Unfortunately the game crashes from time to time, especially with RTX on.

-The levels are neat, but there are only a few of them in total, and they mostly look similar due to being in the same locale.

-In terms of game length, the main campaign is about 1.5 - 2 hours or so. While it's certainly longer than the original demo, it still feels like a demo unto itself. I was expecting a much longer game.

-It's great fun to take down enemies in a variety of ways. You can use guns, grenades, blade specials, counter-parries, projectile reflections, rocket punches, quake punches, tractor beams, EMP, etc. There's a bit of a learning curve to the controls, and in the end it all makes sense - but since the game is so short, and because it takes time to actually unlock stuff, you only have so many opportunities to learn and use everything. The skill tree is completely unnecessary here. Besides, you can get through the game without most of the techniques anyway.

-Similar issues as the first game in terms of underutilized techniques. I remember things like crouching and flashlights were introduced but then promptly forgotten. This time around, you have a neat tutorial sequence where you learn how to wall-run, turn, and jump outward to climb up a ledge - but to my memory you never do anything like that again for the rest of the game.

-There are occasional sub-segments where you do unique things that deviate from typical gameplay. The section where you're grappling your way through huge rocks suspended in the gravity of a black hole - I thought that was kinda cool. Meanwhile, there's a stealth section early on in the game where most of the enemies are already facing away from you, so there's no challenge. Another section has you fighting enemies on top of an airplane, but the experience is over in seconds. The car chase scene I could have done without entirely... the windshield is tiny and you can barely see anything, and you can't aim the turret independently. Considering that the SRO apparently has the technology to fit your plane with a warp drive, they sure cheaped out on that car. But it has neon rims so maybe that makes up for it, I dunno.

-There's a story, but a very minimal one. I couldn't tell you much more than that because there's really nothing to it.

I think a lot of issues ultimately stem from the game being so short. A longer game would permit more level variety, more enemy types, more opportunities to learn and use a variety of techniques, longer sub-segments, and the potential for a more fleshed out story. All in all, it's a fun gameplay experience, but a lot of potential is being left on the table.

A short, difficult swarm-style FPS where you survive as long as you can. A direct hit from any enemy will kill you, so you need to be fast and accurate.

The difficulty ramping is a little uneven, in that after the tutorial (the first 60 seconds or so), the game throws you straight into the woodchipper. If you can survive for a few minutes, you will see everything the game has to offer. But getting there is not easy!

Some tips: Rocket-launch those nest/tree things as soon as possible (should only take one hit if you aim for their eye). Otherwise they will bog you down in bats, occupy your focus, and leave you vulnerable to other attacks. Keep in constant motion, always take a quick second to look behind you, use the shotgun/spread blast for the wolves and shockwave pounders, and save your Q attack for when you're about to get killed.

I bought this game for a dollar on sale (still going on now at the time of this review) and got a few hours of challenge out of it -- well worth it, I think! Rage-inducing but fun all the same.

This game was a blast!

You get seven stages of secret-agent-style escape-room goodness with all sorts of interesting locales, cheeky dialogue, and fun puzzles. One minute you're driving a car out of a plane, the next you're thwarting assassination attempts in a train car, and eventually you find yourself in space taking on a giant death laser.

The speedruns are reasonably challenging - you'll need to be fast and not make any mistakes to hit the the designated times.

If you enjoy escape rooms and you have a VR headset at your disposal, I'd say this is a must-buy. One of the better VR games I've played to date.