Recent reviews by McNoguff

Risk of Rain is a game you could easily miss loving. The first five or six times you play(and die) it will seem like a frustrating mess.

Stick with it, dude. You're gonna love it, I promise.

As you make incremental progress in your skillset, you unlock dozens of usable items that make the game not only more approachable, but more fun. Have a character that's usually balanced for kiting and explosives, but picks up items that heal when he does damage and does damage when he's near and jumps on enemies?

Suddenly that character is a spastic Mario.

In addition to having a playstyle as dynamic as its thousands of item combinations, Risk of Rain is an amazing local and online multiplayer experience. You can all play as one character type and just tank the heck outta the badies, or have support characters in a class-based, strategic setup akin to a MOBA or Team Fortress.

It's also got crazy good music. Don't miss this one.

This game is a delightful mindf*ck. It breaks a number of rules games are supposed to follow and it does so in fun and interesting ways. It's never quite shocking or terrifying, but instead nerve wracking and, surprisingly, bittersweet. To say too much is to spoil the experience, so here's some very basics: It's played in first person, the graphics are an extremely-pixelated throwback to the raycasting era, and if you manage to see all of its endings it will unnerve you in ways games have rarely managed.

Fantastic little morsel of a game. The screenshots don't do it justice, when everything is moving the graphics are actually quite lovely, there's water effects and lots of good, evocative animation.

You'll be done with this game in under a half hour. On sale, you'll likely get it for under a dollar. That sounds exactly right to me; Cheap, gone quickly, but awesome while it lasts. Like soul food from a street vendor.

Just open it, experience it, be better for it.

Elegant and intuitive. The game has no menus, no text, no pause function. If you want to wait before taking your next move, just stop where you are. Go make a sandwich. 140 is a series of system introductions that reminds us what gaming has lost -- remember when there was no tutorial, and no one read the manual? But we didn't need either, the game taught us by letting us make mistakes, letting us explore. Here we have a rhythm-oriented platformer that begs the question "Why did we stray?" Screw twelve hour tutorial mission sets. If you don't learn the rules, you die, and try again, until you do.

This game is graphically simplistic, but beautiful. The soundtrack is the same thumping piece for the most part, and yet you never mind. Nothing feels repetitive, and you always want "one more try." I haven't beaten the three permadeath levels yet, but I haven't stopped trying, and I likely won't stop trying until I've 100%ed this thing, even if it takes me a dozen hours. It's that sensation-- "oh! I know what to do next time!"-- that defines some of the best games ever. When you fail, but don't regret it.

Fun, simple, elegant, recommended.

The folks that made Painkiller, Bulletstorm and Hard Reset get together and make the most fun I've had with a sword in a video game? Truly surprising. A B-list retro franchise that was a slightly fun Duke riff with Asian stereotype flavor gets an update that is more fun, more explosive, and less offensive than its forebear. This is what Duke Nukem Forever should have been.

The viscera is hilarious, the limb-explosions frequent, and the dance of all the crazy slash/dodge/shoot violence ascends to actual balletic grace. You will feel like a badass. You will laugh out loud. You will kill demons by ripping out the still-beating heart of their comrade and squishing it in their faces. Then they explode. This game wants to be fun, and it is. If only more games understood that. Buy this and remind yourself that shooters can still be adrenaline-fueled stress-relief of the highest, most perfect order.

The boss battles are sh*t, though. I guess you can't have everything.

Hide, craft, survive in a claustrophobic space station. This game is the second or third best entry in the Alien canon, hands down. Against all odds and after decades of terrible licensed games and inferior films, the Xenomorph is scary again.

This stunning piece of work has a couple of fairly insignificant slumps- a spacewalk might run too long, or a sequence might feel slightly repetitive. But these weak points play like the highlights from some inferior AAA games. Play it on its hardest setting, turn the lights down low, and get ready to feel a constantly mounting sense of dread peppered with the occasional ♥♥♥♥ YEAH moment of Molotov-Cocktail fueled catharsis.

A well-written, well-acted, beautifully rendered game. Share it with someone you don't mind seeing you bark expletives at your(likely frequent) deaths.

This might be my most recommended game of 2014.

It's stunning. Absolutely jaw-dropping gorgeous. The story might follow the same beats as a number of other pieces of "weird" fiction, but to call it cliche(as I've heard many do) is kind of nuts. The template is there, sure, but in that template are fairly well-acted and interesting characters. If you're the completionist sort, the kind that wanders around and finds everything, then this game is exactly for you. If you tend to rush from story point to story point, I'd advise caution, as there are wonderful tucked away set pieces that, sadly, you'll have to backtrack for if you don't find them the first time.

But seriously: Gorgeous. One to show off your graphics card/have your friends oooh and aaah at. It really shows what the UDK can push out when it's not hampered by iOS or last-gen console compatibility.

An INSANELY charming QWOPish exercise with beautiful art and soothing music. You're made of various assortments of limbs and you can either flex or relax the muscles barely holding them on. That's is. So legs and other appendages just go circling around in sometimes unpredictable ways. It's marvelous.

First of all, this game is a steal. I've seen it as low as sixty nine cents, sure, but even at twelve bucks for this and its sequel it's a heck of a value. Charming, pretty easy, and short.

But it does have a heavy dose of adventure game logic. The fact that the game goes to great lengths to poke fun at adventure game logic("I hate puzzles!" exclaims the main character) does nothing to ameliorate the fact that it relies on some goofy leaps of logic. That said, it's otherwise well written, well performed, and beautifully scored. The aesthetic is especially interesting, raster backgrounds digitally painted over free hand sketches with characters rendered in a heavily subdived prerendered 15FPS 3D meant to imply stop motion animation. However, it often falls short of this ambition and just looks like early CG. But when it works it's actually extremely lovely.

Obviously, if you really want stop motion animation in your point and click adventure game, go grab Dream Machine. The Journey Down is a unique voice in games. I found its characters goofily endearing, and enjoyed my time with them.

Well, damn. This game. Exceeded every possible expectation I had, especially after the abysmal "The Cartel," may we never speak of it again. This game is about an old drunk telling tall tales, some of which just so happen to be true. They are all damn good fun to play, with arcade-ish shooting that, existence of cover and regenerating health notwithstanding, brings back fond memories of a time when FPS wasn't synonymous with grimdark or playable cutscene. Just a damn fine experience, and often, a rather pretty one, too.