Recent reviews by mdwyer

Not quite as expansive and expressive as Townscaper. It teeters uncomfortably between the idea of "wave your mouse and magic happens" and "you have to micromanage everything". For instance, you have to place and resize every mega-building. Every. One. Each one you place will be the smallest version, so you've got to do a second motion to size it up. On the other hand, all the little buildings pop up automatically. Similarly, you can attach decorations to large buildings, but you just kind of paint them on to the lower levels.

So, I want control but also less control. I wish there was a mode that just made a random city like POOF and then did a flythrough of it. I'm not sure the developer understands that the joy I get from their work is not in the building so much as the flying.

I still recommend it, of course, but there's a healthy bit of hope that it continues growing and changing.

The game says I spent about 45 hours in it, while Steam says it was closer to 60. Regardless, this is one of the more tricky to review games. I kinda don't like it. But I found myself coming back to it. Allow me to try to explain.

The game is centered around a mystery. There's a section of the extreme NW of the USA that's been walled off from the rest of the world. You, as The Driver, have somehow gotten through the walls and made friends with some scientists and a station wagon, and now you're off to unravel the mystery. It is your job to repair and upgrade your trusty steed while exploring the alienated world of the Olympic Peninsula after its weird little apocalypse.

I was immediately swamped. The designers seemed to feel like having a mystery as the story was just a start. You also needed to be punished with a mystery of user-interfaces and obscure diagetic exposition. There are indicators on the dashboard of your car that I still can't explain. If you notice something anomalous out in the world, and you're quick enough to step out of the car and scan it, you'll get the basic information -- the name of the anomaly, the type of damage it does, and where you found it -- plus a little snippet of text log that's along the lines of "Joe-bob found one of these in his lunch box last week. Seemed to take a liking to his donuts. We're calling it Tubby."

That's great and all, but ... what? Nowhere does it tell you to hit it with a stick. I understand that might actually be the point. There is some joy in discovery, but I mostly just found it annoying. Even after my 60 hours, I'm still not sure if I'm missing something about these big glowing orange balls. You can scan them, but it doesn't really say anything.

My first couple of hours sucked. The game loop is this: From the garage, pick a location on a map, get hints on what might be there. Go there. Get totally wasted by the environment that hates you, pick up a few resources, then finally push the big button when the environment REALLY starts to hate you. Then, you have to bust ass to the exit point before the environment finally kills you. If you make It back to the garage, you can now use what you collected to repair all the new damage you made.

It wasn't until I was probably 15 hours in before it finally hit me: this is a Rogue-like. You're *supposed* to roll a random experience that is *supposed* to be punishing. But this game seems poorly balanced, and I quickly began to feel put-upon. Everything gets damaged, everything wears out, repairs and upgrades are expensive, and if you can't afford them, you're stuck going out into the world unprotected. It felt a little like Death Stranding in that respect, especially when there's a bout of acid rain going on.

The developers know their game balance is a problem, though, and they put in the ability to set the game into a gentler mode. I took advantage of this, and immediately started to actually enjoy the game. I put in another couple of hours and started exploring deeper into the zone. But before long the lack of resources and the unfortunate timing of required upgrades coupled with a failed run left me softlocked again and I was about to abandon game.

Then, just this month, the developers released MORE difficulty adjustments, and this allowed me to put the game into full baby-mode. This finally allowed me to enjoy some of the exploration, drive into the deepest parts of the zone, and complete the story. Some of the excitement of the game was gone, yes, but it was either that or abandon the game.

The ending was not at all worth it, by the way. I can't say the mystery has been solved, nor has the Zone been fixed. Also, I'm usually very susceptible to games that create analogs of places I've been. I'm currently a resident of the PNW. I can almost see the Olympic Peninsula from my house, and I have literally done the Pacific Drive. But the world the game presents has been so alienated from reality that I have absolutely no feeling of "I CAN SEE MY HOUSE FROM HERE!!" in this game.

So I don't know what to say. There are probably people out there who enjoy this torture. Better, the game now supports a more exploration-focused configuration so people who are not masochists might also be able to enjoy the game. I found it diverting enough for me to come back to, twice. I think if you let yourself use the difficulty configs, you might enjoy your drive.

It's very French.

This is about 8 hours of light platforming with a story that tries to be epic, but mostly just seems opaque. You and your slug-buddy seem to be the only intelligent life left on this world that's suffered a civilization-ending drought. So, you're going to jump, swing, climb, run, to get to The Place where you do The Thing, and if you do The Thing five times, you'll save the world, even though there's nobody left on the world to appreciate it. In the meantime, you'll discover a few notes and letters that suggest that living through the end of civilization isn't great, regardless of how brave a face you put on.

All because you, the great savior, didn't get started in time or something. You slept in, and now everyone's dead. Good on you.

I dunno. It's very French. Honestly, it is very much like Stray in that there's a sort of post-apocalyptic, post-human world and you as the player-character are going to save the world you don't understand because that's the only direction you can go.

And, like Stray, I thought the game very beautiful and enjoyable. Also like Stray I found myself sometimes longing for a better goal indicator when I got lost in winding tunnels. That said, there weren't very many times when I got properly lost. The game is fairly-well designed. In the same way that games like FAR and LIMBO make it pretty clear that you're supposed to go RIGHT, Jusant makes it pretty clear that UP is your goal, and there will be plenty of lighting cues to help show you the way.

Still, I suffered some navigation anxiety. I was afraid if I picked the wrong direction I'd lose progress going backwards. Or I would pick the right direction to advance the plot, but miss more exposition and goodies. Indeed, I reached the end of the game with a pretty paltry record on collectibles. Fortunately, there's no minimum number of collectibles; there are no upgrades to miss. It's completely up to you how thorough you want to be.

The level-design is sometimes problematic. The designers tended towards a LOT of decorative clutter, which you're going to go through if you want collectibles. Unfortunately, the clutter takes up real 3D space, and it was disappointingly common that I'd get hung up behind some tiny little object, and I'd have to keysmash my controller a couple of times before I could get unstuck.

Graphics is nice. There's an aesthetic that is almost cell-shaded. It is very nice, although the aforementioned clutter was sometimes too much of a good thing. There are a LOT of objects on screen, and they kept my 3d card quite busy. It kept the cooling fans cranked up high, but despite that performed perfectly well.

In summary, if you enjoyed Stray and FAR, then you'll probably enjoy this one, too.

There's not a whole lot of *game* in here. Your interaction is mostly just getting minimal choices in instant messenger text that doesn't really seem to have a lot of impact on anything. It is almost frustrating how little the game needs you to be present for it. But that's the whole thing: It's a short animated film cut with music that every once in a while needs you to click a mouse.

But the music is great and the design is wonderful and the hellish depiction of Life In LA for the Youngs is pretty much on-key. It's seems all entirely too realistic, such that the bowlderized brand names like "Twibber" and "Cinamongram" are jarring.

I liked it a lot, but I'd be hard-pressed to recommend it to most people. It's a 6-hour long slice-of-life story about a generation that isn't mine and has both the same problems I had, and also brand new ones. It is kind of touching, but it asks a lot of down-time from you. I recommend you turn off the time limits on interactions so you can do other things while the show is playing without out. It's not a bad way to get some laundry folded or something.

Steam says I spent about 40 hours over two weeks playing this game. I finally got to the point where the game would allow me to reach the end scene and, despite having three more 'spirits' and thus three more stories to yet complete, I took the sweet, sweet release of death, instead.

Well, not literally. The game isn't THAT bad. It's just it isn't that good, and worse, it isn't that fun. The ponderous story is pretty good and pretty deep, but it is strung together with some of the worst skinner-box clicker-like gaming that I've ever had to put up with.

So, the story. The story is about death. Yeah, you knew that already. But it's more about the end of life. The game can be heart-rending. It reflects far too well the experience of caring for aging and dying parents. It digs deep into philosophical questions about if a leopard can truly change its spots, given the opportunity of a deathbed confession. Subtle it is not.

The game lets you skip through dialog. Thankfully. There's a silly nod to fast-travel, sort of. But that's the end of what's skippable, and there is the core of my angst with this game. It is soooo sluggish and non-responsive. It requires you to be constantly doing the silly make-work of watering your plants, for instance. But the hot spots are slow to appear, and if you try to rush it, you're likely to water the wrong place. And when you do, the game will punish you with a lengthy animation of your character watering the already-soggy ground. You cannot interrupt this.

There are a number of skill challenges that essentially come down to knowing how long to hold down a button before releasing it. If you hold it down too long, the game punishes you by locking out your controls for what feels like an eternity.

You need to shear and feed a pair of sheep? Oh, that's gonna cost you. The animation that is amusing the first time, is infuriating the hundredth time when you're literally limited in the number of hours in the day.

The game attempts to balance itself out in its later hours. Your passengers become somewhat less demanding, travels starts getting faster, and a lot of the manufacturing and economy tasks begin to fade from importance. But it's just not enough.

The straw that broke me was when another pair of just-plain-unpleasant passengers showed up on my boat and started making demands. Uggggh. Just kill me now.

And the game let me. Kill me. It let me just die.

And for that, and in the end, I'm grateful to the game.

Weakly recommended, and wait for a sale. Steam says I spent about 42 hours on this game for which I dropped $30. It started at an irrational $60, and can now be picked up at sales for around $20. At its sale price, it's not a bad buy. There are two add-on DLC packages that didn't come with my copy. I have my doubts about their value...

I picked it up on the promise of the Obsidian name -- I expected a new take on Fallout New Vegas. There are vestiges of that, but if we're going to play 'comparative game critic', it is probably closer to Borderlands than Fallout.

There's an extensive faction system, similar to New Vegas's. You can help or hurt the major NPCs in the world, and this will have negligible effects on the finale. Woo.

Before you get there, there's a pile of looter-shooter stuff to go through. Crates all over the world are filled with loot that sort of scales to your level. Crates don't seem to repopulate, but enemies sometimes do.

But I just don't understand the weapon systems at all. There's the usual thing where you hit harder if you match the elemental damage type to the enemy type, but I mostly couldn't be bothered to deal with it, not without a gun caddy to recommend guns and hand me the right ones at the right time. It is nice that the infor screens hi-lite the DPS number more than anything else, since that's really all that matters, right? But the number and range of weapons is pretty limited, really, especially if you do compare it to Borderlands. It appears there might be only two or three levels of weapons, so you can expect to reach the end of game finding that there's no headroom left. You become unable to build or acquire a weapon good enough to match the enemies you're meeting. Yes you can 'tinker' them to boost their stats and apply limited add-ons to subtly change things, but it's mostly fiddly Excel spreadsheet stuff that really just doesn't seem to matter. The armor situation is maybe a little more linear, but still has the same problems as the weapons.

That feeling continues when you deal with your characters' levels, too. You've got the usual level-up dance, where you have to decide on perks and where you want to assign all your points. But the results just sort of feel pointless. I ended up at the end of the game with over a hundred extra points because I couldn't be bothered to assign them. But it allowed me to dump them all into lock picking to get me through a shortcut door to the ending.

I said earlier that it compares to Borderlands, yeah? Well, I didn't say it compared *well* to Borderlands.

There's a stealth component that wants to be a part of this game -- there's long grass you can hide in, and enemies have a detection meter and sight-lines. But, aside from robbing every NPC blind while they're not looking, being sneaky has little use. Your first shot will alert EVERYONE, and you won't be able to effectively re-enter stealth. You can get a silencer-like add-on for your gun that helps, but then you're also going to need to remember to tell your companion NPCs to not go all Leeeeeroy Jenkins on enemies.

Your companions are... ugh ... useless. They exist to host sub-quests. When you pick up a companion, they come with a scaled set of weapons, that later in the game will be better that you will EVER find out in the world. On the other hand, your first companion will be left at home all the time because they're not scaling fast enough. You have six slots on your ship, and there are a total of six companions in the world. There's a way to fire a companion, but there's no replacements out in the world, so why bother?

Which companion set you bring and which factions you befriend seem to be the principle drivers of any variation in replayability of this game. But I just don't feel enough of anything about this game to want to replay it.

So, the teal-deer is that I didn't hate my time here, but I didn't love my time here. It murdered some time. It made me grin a few times. It's alright, I guess. I wish I'd paid less for it.

I wouldn't recommend this to everyone, certainly, but I enjoyed a short, cute, cozy, diversion.

Land of Screens is a 90-minute long point-and-click kind of adventure game, with a half-dozen little social scenarios. You 'solve' each by simply exhausting the conversation options with the half-dozen or so characters in the scene. So, it isn't a complicated game by any measure. Certainly, there's no replay value to speak of, but its full price is only $6, and I bought it on a sale when it was well under the price of a sugar-bombed coffee drink.

The art is cute, the chip-music-style soundtrack is fun. The overarching subject matter is pretty simplistic if a little heavy-handed at times: mobile technology and social media are toxic and there is joy and discovery in disconnecting.

Unfortunately, the event that kicks off the story is the end of a long term relationship. I'm not thrilled with being dragged through the end of someone else's relationship. The cartoony presentation doesn't really do a lot to smooth off those sharp edges. That's largely My Problem and not yours, but still, the game has a strong feeling of after-school special or self-help tool. I found it to be a little bit preachy sometimes.

Regardless, I enjoyed it. It's not a bad one to burn through when you need a distraction on a day off.

The game is one game with /two/ complete stories. There's about thirty hours total of running, jumping, climbing and swinging. There's a few relatively simple puzzles, and some pretty basic and simplistic gun-play. There's a bunch of cinematics, but the game doesn't lean into quick-time events like other cinematic-heavy games. There's only one puzzle that /really/ sucks, and only one 'race'. If anything, the common complaint that the game is just a climbing simulator are kind of fair. There's a lot of the game that you can progress through just by holding the stick in a generally-up direction while pressing jump repeatedly.

The stories are pretty good, if you're willing to do the usual suspension of disbelief required to believe that a mechanism made of wood would still be functional after hundreds of years in a dense jungle. If you're willing to forgive that someone can jump fifty feet down, and catch themselves on a narrow ledge with their fingertips repeatedly, you'll be okay.

The game is weirdly linear, but is artfully designed to hide that. It skates an interesting knife edge. Most often, there's brightly-colored ledges that describe a painfully obvious path up a cliff. But there are other times when if feels like you're allowed to go wandering off in the woods, and yet I've found that even then you're being subtly manipulated to a destination, so that it is actually quite difficult to get lost. Death, too, is generally rare, and is more likely from you misjudging the direction of something more than ... I don't know, skill? The game is pretty good at offering hints about what's grabbable and what isn't. But when it all goes wrong, the auto-save is usually VERY close, and more than fast enough. Death is not expensive, and therefore not to be feared.

Both stories have driving sections, and they're some of the best ever seen in a game that wasn't trying to be an off-road driving simulator.

The voice acting is top-notch, with some of the best voices in the business taking time behind the mic. Fortunately, the writers have given them good things to say, too. You can easily fall in love with all the characters, and there were a few places where I laughed out loud at their wry responses to things. The models are also very good. These came from the PS4 era where they were showing off their ability to do hair, so many characters benefit from a well-grizzled look. Clothing gets wet after a character jumps into water. And, of course, they will often exclaim "Ah! Brisk!" about it.

Oh, and speaking of the PS4, one of the platform features of it was a flaky flashlight. You'd have to shake the DualShock controller to get the light to work again. This is implemented on the XBox360 controller with just wiggling the stick. Otherwise, the port is pretty clean and successful, and other than the flashlight silliness I didn't notice any controller mapping problems at all.

The biggest complaint I have is that the game fails to stream correctly during some of the longer driving scenes. The game will come to a sudden pause, a loading screen will pop up, run for an unpredictable stretch of time. Don't think you can use this time to take a break, though, because it will suddenly unpause and throw you back into the action without any warning. Then, a few seconds later, it happens again! I think this is a defect, and I hope they fix it before you buy it.

It's a fun story with fun characters. It's an easy playthrough and kills time. If you find it on a sale, yeah, sure, pick it up. If you originally played on the PS4, there's not all that much more for you, here, but I still re-bought it during a summer sale and enjoyed both the replay and the DLC

It's about an hour of gameplay with nearly zero replay value. The game, at best, is somewhat comparable to Donut County. Instead of making things disappear falling down an expanding hole, you make things disappear by occluding them from view with a fabric sheet. But the comparison breaks down from there. Where 'Donut' has a story and humor and characters, Hadr only has a weird little poem running the show with little or nothing to do with the action on screen.

It's neat as a tech-demo, and I imagine someone could write a paper on the control scheme -- how do you control a warping, floppy sheet of fabric with nothing more than X, Y, and Z inputs. Where do those input apply to? To all the points of the sheet? Only the middle? Only the edges? Only the nearest corner?? I admit, I never really figured it out, but my brain fizzed a little bit thinking about it while I was trying to unfurl a pesky corner of the sheet.

As an art installation, it's a little bit weak. This is unfortunate, because I think 'art' is really the only place you could go with this. Its spartan nature is the whole point, of course, but it's just a little too sparse. It's not at Superliminal levels, but it's on the same planet. It's somewhat interesting how the design informs the game, though. The game is pretty good at hinting to you. Bright lights are goals, fuzziness is bad, and aim for pillows...? The small number of puzzles are relatively straight-forward. The only time I became trapped was when a sheet I needed to move became trapped in the geometry.

I paid something like $USD 3 for it, and it was worth that. I will likely never play it again, and I can't see myself bringing it out to share with guests, but I think it was worth my time and effort. I feel like I've donated a few bucks towards the next use of this technology, and I'm actually pretty excited about that. This would be an incredible mechanic in a larger game!

There's only about 3 hours of game in here, and I think the best I can say about it is that it ends before it becomes intolerable.

Jazzpunk's the kind of absurdist comedy that probably has a pretty small audience. Which is to say that I sort of enjoyed the game. There were a bunch of laugh-out-loud funny beats, and surprising little twists that gave me the requisite doses of dopamine. I'm just not convinced it is for everyone.

Technically, it is stylistically low-rez, but that means that it performs well enough. So, it is sort of strange how sloppy the controls feel. I spent more than the usual time playing with the mouse speed and smoothing sliders, and still eventually just got used to the feeling like I'm trudging through gravy. The game, by the way, really wants to be played with a controller, and there's a non-zero number of mini-games that are broken if you happen to have a controller plugged in.

Lastly, the pop-culture references on full display in the game trailer -- which is a piece of art on its own -- continue in the game itself, which provides a few additional dopamine hits if you're susceptible to those kinds of things.

I surely can't recommend it at its full $15 price, but it regularly drops to under $5 where it might be worth picking up on a lark as I did. You might even enjoy it somewhat, as I did. But I'm just not going to take the risk of trying to recommend it to you.