Recent reviews by [λG] Dλvid Lambdageneration

i like it.

Kudos to the asset makers, insane level of detail! I could zoom into props and look at all of the minute details all day. The 3D artists at Orbifold are extremely talented!

Path tracing looks great most of the time, the volumetric effects on lights in Ravenholm gave it a really cool dusty/misty feel that I didn't get from the original HL2.

Some areas of Ravenholm feel incorrectly colored, sometimes an area is too bright, or too dark, a lot of areas have too cold or too warm a color compared to the original ravenholm vibe. It feels a little oversaturated at times.
In certain conditions movement can cause temporal glitches and some objects like fences or thin electric poles can become a blurry mess with lots of ghosting artifacts, stemming from the extreme reliance on generative AI to achieve playable framerates.
I'm sure that AI models can and will be improved, but I would love to play it one day rendered with real full-resolution frames with no interpolation.

1440p runs okay on RTX 3090 Ti, i9-14900K, 48GB RAM. Playable framerates, no issues with input lag or anything. DLSS set to Balanced. Ray Reconstruction and all the other bells and whistles turned on.

A short but fun puzzle game set in a corpo-world dystopia with a charming aesthetic. The puzzles are heist-style and aren't difficult to solve, but they make you think just hard enough to feel satisfaction in solving them.
If you play through it, definitely check out the few fan-made levels on the workshop as well.

The game can be finished in about 5 hours, 3 if you're quick. It is a niche game and if you feel that $20 is a little steep for that - grab it for 50% off during the steam sales.

This is a sci-fi driving survival adventure with a rich story that feels like a love letter to Stalker's Zone with a heavy dose of Americana. It is the late 90s and find yourself in an alternate timeline sucked into a messed up walled-off exclusion zone in the Olympic Peninsula where nature itself is turned upside down, the laws of physics don't apply anymore, you're trying to make sense of it while you're surrounded by all sorts of nightmarish anomalies that will constantly mess with you and your car - they'll irradiate you, launch you into 100ft into the air, mess with electronics, "steal" chunks of your car or maybe even sometimes help you by dropping some valuable resources and befriending you.

Your car is your survival ark, it will shield you (as much as a station wagon possessed by novel sci-fi technology can) from all of these outside horrors, it will serve as a tool for navigating this wasteland, it will be your communication station through which you experience much of the story and it will take you back to the safety of your garage when you're done with each expedition - all provided that you take good care of it and constantly improve and install new upgrades as you unlock new things to craft.

The game mechanics are well done, well balanced and keep the exploration/looting both equally interesting and dangerous at the same time. The story and the acting are well done and keep you digging further, it never felt like the story is cliche and it keeps a good sense of intrigue. There's some tasteful comic reliefs that make it feel more grounded. Driving and maintaining the car feels satisfying and it plays well with the narrative that you and the car are permanently bonded through an anomalous phenomenon, the car really does feel like your home-on-wheels and an adventure companion.

The tools at your disposal will let you dismantle, break into and loot countless abandoned buildings and vehicles left behind when the zone was evacuated, you'll constantly fill your backpack, your car and your garage with crafting materials and yet there's always more to craft, always more to upgrade. The upgradability and crafting tree stretches well into the late game and potentially slightly beyond, making the grinding feel neither too harsh nor too straightforward. It's "just right" and plays well with the story.

All-in-all, it's great.

As it happens to most games, this one has some blemishes that are worthy of being pointed out:

• The "mid-zone" area of the game feels a little skipped over. The unlocks that require resources from that area feel rather easy to get and it felt that I spent 50% of the game in the outer zone unlocking all of my basic upgrades, 35% of the game in the inner zone and only 15% of it was the mid-zone. Felt like it could use a little more screen time instead of it being just a speed bump in between the early-game and the late-game.
  
• Speaking of the mid-zone, the game presents it as a walled-off area that you have to cross in at a very specific point, and yet you quickly find out that you can later cross into it at pretty much any point of the map without any borders or walls... what? I think that the player is expected to imagine that they've crossed the wall in between the loading screens, and there are a few more similar inconsistencies between the story and the game in practice that happen throughout, clearly this was done in favor of making the gameplay smooth but it does break the believably for a brief moment.
  
• The first ever upgrade you install on your car is the Handbrake, and yet it is an utterly useless upgrade. This handbrake can only be held up, never toggled to actually make your car stationary, so that would suggest it's probably made for drifting right? Nope, if you pull the handbrake on a tight corner your car just stops like a brick, no drifting fun with it. Never found myself using it even once throughout the entire game after trying it out.
  
• The game has some nice customization options for your car that you unlock early on, yet the moment you unlock the sticker/trinket station you are bombarded with an obnoxious heap of overtly political stickers of various 2020s identity politics that feel completely out-of-place and clutter the stickers UI in what seems like two dozen distasteful identity statements (before you find any regular stickers and far outnumbering them in a regular 40hr playthrough). I want to ask the developer - Is this immersive singleplayer 1990s sci-fi universe really the best place for this? It felt like a sudden breach (no pun intended) of the 4th wall that leaves a sour taste. You've included so many settings and gameplay customization features to accommodate all sorts of player preferences, maybe at least add a toggle to turn the politics nonsense off for those of us who value the immersion.
  
• The water shader is really bad, no other way to say this. The water is a weird opaque and pixelated mess that doesn't look like any liquid I've ever seen, not even in the context of a pastel/minimalist artstyle. It looks so bad that I thought my shaders or graphics were messed up, until I googled screenshots of the game and realized that it looks the same for everyone. This really is the only graphical imperfection on an otherwise beautiful eye-candy environment.
  
• In the starting moments of the game I completely missed the wheels of the car that I was supposed to install, and I just kept on walking down the trail hoping to find whatever car parts I needed to start driving, In a moment of stupidity I just kept walking until I passed the checkpoint and I fell through the ground and had to restart the game... that felt like there should be some sort of gameplay guardrails or hint that would make the introduction of the car more foolproof. The developer clearly missed the possibility of this scenario in testing.

Excellent. You drive, you craft, you survive, you repair, you upgrade and you dive deep into a great story.
A great 9.0/10
Absolutely play this with a controller, it is best enjoyed with a PS5 controller because the game makes heavy use of adaptive triggers which make it feel ever more satisfying to interact with the car and tools.

It's been a long time since I've played a story-rich indie with the presentation quality of a big studio - this game is it!

This is a psychological thriller that will keep you digging for 15-20 hours, exploring themes of sanity, paranoia and psychology while keeping you engaged with first-person shooter action and some puzzle solving. It's a refreshing break from heaps of repetitive titles full of bad voice acting, asset flips and gameplay where you grind the same menial task over and over ad nauseum. No moment feels boring, dull or pointless. The gameplay feels solid, the music, sounds, environment and graphics all feel very solid too, There's not an iota of jank.

My only nitpick is that while the story is well put together and is presented masterfully, the final parts of the story feel a little bit rushed and a little cliche, in the sense that in the last hour or two a big revelation is dropped on you with massive implications, yet it is not really explored much deeper before you beat the game and the credits roll. So rather instead of a "to be continued" suspense it creates a bit of frustration or a slight disbelief. It feels like the final revelation in the story deserved some more time to explore before closure.

This is a solid 9.5/10 and well worth the money if you're looking for a 15-20 hour psychological thriller adventure. For the best experience go into this game blind. There is also some hidden things to find and see for completionists. There's a cat that you can pet.

An early game with a solid foundation that combines elements from Lethal Company and Kletka, I'm excited to see where this goes!

If you're looking to play something you've never played before, this is the one.

Bonus points if you like solving murder mysteries while modifying your body like it's Deus Ex in a post-apocalyptica that blends the 1970s with elements of cyberpunk.

The only downside is that this will give your computer a fair workout, not sure how well this would run on something like a Steam Deck, but if you try - feel free to tell me how it is.

A fun indie which in its core follows the same formula as Papers Please - you spend the majority of the game being presented a person in a border control post trying to enter your glorious communist country, you have to compare the paperwork, their car and their cargo against the current entry regulations dictated by the government and make a decision on whether the person is allowed or denied entry, or arrest them if you find illegal contraband and send em off to the hard labor camp, rinse and repeat until the day is over, make too many mistakes and you'll go broke.

Outside of this core gameplay loop the game also expands by letting you upgrade your border checkpoint, drive vehicles outside to visit shops and do missions to earn money, some with choices that advance the campaign story. These missions almost always involve shootouts against hordes of NPCs.

Criticisms:
- The shootout events feel like they could use more work still, specifically, when your border post gets attacked you are presented with a timer and enemy NPCs will keep spawning infinitely until the timer runs out. I found that the best strategy to preserve my ammo and patience is to just let the border guards slowly chew at the horde in a controlled way until the timer runs out, only with me occassionally peeking out of cover if an enemy NPC gets a little too close.
In the mission where you have to dig contraband in a graveyard, enemy NPCs will keep infinitely spawning right outside of your field of vision, kinda like cops in Cyberpunk 1.0, every time you kill a group of enemy NPCs they will keep spawning in new groups until you dig up all of the contraband. There is no spawn cooldown either, so this means you have to dig while getting inevitably shot at, awkwardly juggling digging and taking cover, this feels very janky. I found that the easiest way to beat this mission is to leave one enemy NPC alive with a pistol to prevent the next enemy group from spawning and just ignore them and focus on digging while he's slowly chipping at your health with his pea shooter.


Bottom line: 8/10, fun gameplay loop, fun campaign, but NPC hordes in shootouts need more work.

It only took me 5 heart attacks to finish this.

10/10

Fun narrative and characters, some elements appear to be heavily inspired by Portal
Excited to see this developed further!