Recent reviews by Helmet Hair

Such potential. Shame the studio was killed.

Life finds a way

Really damn good game so far. However, you have to treat it like a campaign for Star Trek the Next Generation, instead of a sandbox game like the original Stellaris. Now, these games share gameplay, but the pace of the game, and the smaller scale I think fit the theme so much better. I find it much more enjoyable than just playing a random Stellaris star race since you know what your role in the universe is - especially if you like Star Trek and know stuff about the lore.

Otherwise, I think the art & music is great, and increases the immersion of being there controlling one of the four different factions. This is probably Paradox's best release in years, to be honest, so hats off to the devs (Nimble Giant Entertainment). Can't wait for what they cook in the form of DLC.

Another day, another Lovecraft-inspired game. However, the difference from other games that tries similar things, is that Dreams in the Witch House actually succeeds at what it tries to do. It got a nice atmosphere that feels like it could be part of Lovecraft mythos, and it got interesting gameplay to boot – beyond the traditional point & click stuff. I played the demo last year and was impressed with the game then already, so it makes me happy the full title retains the feeling I got from the demo. Atom Brain Games created something truly special here, and now we can only hope that they continue on this track for the future. But enough of that, what about the story, and how does it play?

You play Walter Gilman, a student of Miskatonic University with an interest in the occult. The location is of course Arkham, which is an infamous city when it comes to Lovecraft lore. It’s a place where strange powers manifest more easily than other areas – in other words, a great spot for the occult! Your aunt and benefactor have rented an apartment in the “Witch house”, and each week she will send you an allowance of 10 dollars so you can live and study. The game revolves around Walter’s life as a student, and it’s quite possible to ignore the occult and focus on your studies. But as these things go, the mystery of the city will eventually seek you out, and it’s a hard thing to ignore if you are like me and have a love for a good mystery. The risk of this is that you open something that will be hard to close once opened, and the further you get into this riddle of the dark arts, the risks get bigger with Walter’s life at a stake. Yes, you can die in the game! Not going to spoil anything here, but the story is great, and the way it’s told is good as well. It’s slowly being told in segments spliced between more of the mundane moments of student life, and often it’s dependent on your investigations which adds a feeling of you having to actively seek out the truth. This is a superb addition to the game since it rests the narrative progress on the shoulders of the player. I should add that this is a tale based on one of Lovecraft’s writings that goes under the same name. If you know the plot since before, you will know what is to come since it follows the same story beats, however, the narrative in the game is not set in stone which allows you to dictate how it ends through your actions.

What makes Dreams in the Witch House stand out, beyond the story, is that the game has actual gameplay more than clicking and combining items as most classic adventure games, even if that is a thing too. Right from the start you will come to the knowledge that student life in Arkham is arduous and dangerous, especially if you take the plunge into the occult. You will have to balance money, time, what to study, what to eat, and try to maintain your sanity. It’s a survival game in the middle of your typical adventure, and I found it highly immersive. For example, to survive night terrors you might have to buy sleeping pills for your precious few dollars, otherwise, your lack of sleep might spiral out of control into insanity or worse. Do you eat, or do you waste dollars meant for food just for one good night’s rest?

The best part is that the game lets you plan it out by yourself, and gives you no help past the tutorial screen. In my first playthrough, lots of things went wrong, I starved, I got sick, missed classes, and got haunted by visions beyond what my mind could sustain. And when it comes to looking up information for historical events and other things to proceed with your investigations, you will have to go through lots of “indexes” to search for clues, and at times it feels really involved and often it leads to interesting events. Walter also has stats, like health and sanity, but there are also occult and math. I would say the occult skill is the most important if you want to take part in the mystery. It lets you read old tomes, and decipher standing stones filled with mysterious texts which leads to cool stuff for the narrative. Probably more so than the other stuff, but since it’s all a balancing act, other academic work will suffer which in the end will affect how much money you earn. It depends on how rounded, or “normal” you want Walter to be. Roleplaying at its finest, at least when it comes to point & click. I should also add that there are puzzles to solve in the traditional sense when it comes to adventure games, and most of these puzzles are randomized from playthrough to playthrough to add to the replay value.

The visuals are nice, it’s pixel art in style, as is typical for adventure games, however, it’s well-made and looks beautiful beyond what the quality of the price suggests. It’s cheap (around 10 euros) and got graphics past what is required. Lots of things are animated, like movement, interaction with items, and so on. It helps with the mood, and certain scenes do truly stand out, like the dream sequences of the alien planet. There is no voice acting (not that it is missing), and the sound for effects is okay. The music was good at times, specifically the one tune that plays when something sinister is going on. The reason this one stood out to me is that reminded me of X-com TFTD. Very similar in the tone of the music, as in ominous. You can tell something bad is going to happen when that tune plays. There are a few other pieces, but they do repeat a lot and sadly get a little obnoxious, so I would say the music is the weakest part of the game. Not saying it’s irredeemable bad, but it probably could have been better.

One surprising aspect of Dreams in the Witch House is the price, as mentioned earlier. I got it for around 10 euros here on Steam, and from what you get, it is quite remarkable. You can not go wrong by investing in this game. It is well-written, entertaining, and suspenseful providing a lot of different endings that are dependent on what you do ingame. It also maintains the style of Lovecraft, which is something many “inspired” games fail to emulate. A top-notch game, for a top-notch price, recommended!

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Find more reviews here: https://tomsgaming.com/

Lovely game ruined by faction mages that send increasingly bigger and bigger doom stacks to defeat you. And there is no way to avoid it since the game is designed around it. It turns into a brutal grind that is just boring. The meta seems to either rush the enemy towers or avoid doing main quests because that will eventually trigger the scripted attacks. How fun. A real shame, because otherwise the game is quite pleasant to play, and got some interesting ideas.

Been playing this version of Dwarf Fortress for about twenty hours now, and I think I got enough time under my belt to give some quick impressions. First off, I want to praise the new UI, in general at least, and the new graphics. It’s way more detailed than any visual pack I have used for the free version of the game. While I didn’t think the keyboard controls were that painful – just a bit archaic, I do appreciate the new mouse controls. It feels a bit more casual, and it requires less from you, which at least lets me focus on something else while playing – like listening to a good audiobook or watching a show on the second monitor.

However, there are some serious issues with the game, which makes me feel it has been dumbed down for a new audience. It’s mostly about hidden stats or detail that for some reason in this version is not easily accessed. Like a big one is announcements and the combat log. They exist, but only when something happens in form of a pop-up icon. So when something important goes down, like a battle, you can click on that icon and get the report. When you exit that report though, the information is gone forever, and there is no way to enter the report system and look at that information at will. It’s mind-boggling because this is one of the most crucial aspects of Dwarf Fortress in my opinion. With that I mean – it’s how you create a story for your dwarves and your fortress. How are you supposed to follow the story of someone, if you can’t see how, when, and why things happened to him or her? You are at the mercy of the incident when it happens – miss it, or ignore it at the time, and it’s gone forever.

Another problem with announcements is that the game does not pause when stuff happens, not even when important things like when battles occur. If you miss the icon, your favorite dwarf might be dead when you notice it on your screen. Another issue with the report system for combat is that the report screen pauses the game, so you can never follow the battles in real-time, which I think is a major missed opportunity. It’s something that should have been fixed for this version. Since now, the report is not a full-screen UI element, which could have been made so you could watch the action happen while you read the detailed description of the battle. It was stuff like this I was expecting to get improved upon if I’m being honest. Yet, nothing was done to change this, and it’s a real shame.

Other problems are that a lot of small detail has been hidden away, stuff that was available before in the free version. Inspecting items, like armor and weapons while being carried around has been removed. You can get the basic information, but you can’t take part in interesting things – how many kills that legendary sword has, and so on. This gets replicated in other parts of the UI too, for example when looking for item detail while trading. There is no icon for inspection at all here, which is another baffling decision. You might want to know what you are trading away!

Now, I’m not going to list every issue I have with the game so far here, I just want to put through that this version is less than the freemium edition at this point. However, there is one more major issue I have to mention, but I’m unsure if this was part of Dwarf Fortress vanilla or something that was enchanted by Dwarf Therapist (a third-party program). And that is how the renaming of your dwarves works now, something I always do, and the issue is that the names do not stick for item descriptions. So if one of the dwarves that you have named makes an impressive statue, the art for the description will revert to the original name of the dwarf. It makes it hard as hell to know who has done what, and in my case, it makes it much harder to connect with your population since there is nothing to differentiate your dwarves from outside ones. Have fun learning all those obscure and weird fantasy names!

I was hoping nothing would get lost in this update, but apparently, I was wrong. I don’t want to put all my money on that it’s being dumbed down deliberately, yet, it sure feels like it. Why would some of these things be changed otherwise? It must have been playtested, right? Any veteran of the game would notice these things already after a few hours! This gets me thinking that stuff was decided to be cut or removed because I can’t believe it was purely missed in the testing. I do hope I get proven wrong, of course, otherwise, I have just wasted thirty euros on a lesser experience.

Right now I can’t recommend Dwarf Fortress. The visuals are much better, which makes it a lot easier on the eyes, but as stated, it’s less of a game. That makes paying for this version a stupid decision at the current time.

Biggest disappointment since Rome 2. I was stoked about it. Bought it in early access, and expected great things. But what I got was a bag of failure. It's better looking than Warband for sure, and the combat I think works a bit better. However, everything else is the same, or worse. It's just so plain and boring, with zero effort put into it after its early access release. Where did all that sweet early access money go?

Oh right, Taleworlds are building a new HQ instead of investing it into the game.

Maybe a mod will save it, but currently that seems way off. RIP.

Evil Genius 2 is like the original Evil Genius except everything is streamlined, with features removed and mechanics dumbed down to the point it feels like you are playing a mobile game with fancy graphics.

While it looks good, the game is pretty darn boring and it got nothing on the first game which I found to be good and fun to play, even now in modern times. So in other words; it's a sequel, but instead of improving and expanding on the fun stuff - the game has regressed to an absolute minimum of a viable product without any challenge so that everyone can play it with zero effort required.

Me smash review with crush stick. It come out good. Me like.

Not the biggest fan of tribal/alien factions in RTS games, so I was a bit hesitant going into this game. But considering how good Spellforce 3 and its expansion was - I had to make the jump. And I'm glad I did. It's a fantastic game. It has a wonderful, funny, and somber story of survival. I liked every moment of it. The gameplay and graphics are good as usual too. The Spellforce 3 and its expansions are a treat to look at and play.

Highly recommended!

Siege those dungeons!

Update:

Come on, siege them!