Recent reviews by Quitch

A delight from start to finish. It starts out as a simple thing, running capers, and morphs into something much larger, but in such a natural way you barely notice it happen. All the characters are larger than life, and yet you come to love them all.

An attempt is made to inject some gameplay into the novel through the caper ratings, with some capers being better than others at how well you can figure our how to max your rating versus luck into it. However, it's never given much focus, so how much you want to care about it is up to you.

I would have liked to see the characters a bit more involved in the capers themselves, which is partly why Farsight is the best character for me outside Penny and Gibson. But this is a small complaint at best.

I had a good time and would happily recommend this.

A thoroughly engrossing adventure. Seasoned point & click gamers might find it a little heavy on the walk and talk and a little light on the puzzling, but it does this in service to an impeccable atmosphere which beautifully captures a point in time while also being deeply unsettling.

You're going to be miles ahead of the story and the ending feels a little inconsequential, but it really is about the journey. Well worth your time from a publisher that pretty much never misses.

The translation is an abomination.

A exceedingly good game mechanically, with a weak plot and characterisation.

The early game promises intrigue with your memory loss and people telling you different stories. But nothing really happens until near the end of the game, and then at the very end it's all turned into a bit of a nothing burger. It doesn't help that the characters are completely forgettable. It does do a cool thing where your actions matter though, a nice touch, and really that should have been the driver of the ending.

But as a game this is great fun. I wish it had been more of a metroidvania and given me greater freedom in the order I tackled the station, but it does give you a lot of freedom in how to tackle the situations you find yourself in. It's a true immersive sim, and you could easily play through it a second time and have a very different experience.

Highly recommended.

Some my feelings on this game may be due to misaligned expectations. I came in expecting a survival/murder game in the style of Danganronpa, but this game is very much not like that. It has an odd wacky exterior, but a much more banal interior.

The contestants give up on escaping almost immediately, and so the game quickly becomes almost slice of life. This leads to a very slow opening portion with no tension and few stakes. Yet it’s here that you’re making decisions that lead to your end path, you just won’t realise it because it’s not clear which decisions, if any, matter.

When the game does lock you onto one you’ll know because the protagonist will go from blank slate to exhibiting some singular obnoxious personality trait overnight. The bad end I found also runs for far too long, with no decision making and no way to get off the rails. You’re just stuck following a pretty uninteresting plot until suddenly it’s over and you’re left mystified as to how you got onto that track in the first place.

A significant flaw the game has is providing the player a choice with many possible reasons to pick one or the other but deciding that only one of those was why a choice was made. Choose to keep money and not expose a secret? Well, that’s not someone trying to maintain group harmony or respect individual privacy, that’s greed. This is what will lead you onto an ending track with no idea how you got there. This isn’t helped by the protagonist not exhibiting any changes in line with the route you’re heading for until you’re on it.

So many of the games the contestants are subject to are open for easy workarounds for cooperation, yet no one in the game ever brings this up and it’s deeply frustrating. I have no issue with everyone choosing the way of the douche, but either the game rules should enforce it or it should be explored and fail due to characters or the player rejecting it. Instead, the player is simply never being offered the option, which further leads to misinterpretation of player actions.

To offer an example, one individual is being awarded money for completing a challenge. What they don’t know is this money is coming from your pot. If you successfully sabotage them then you get money instead, but it comes from an outside injection of cash. Despite this set-up you are not allowed to intentionally reject sabotaging them, nor are you offered the option to approach them and figure out a deal. These are such readily obvious approaches that it’s frustrating they’re not explored. Things like this led to me disassociating from the main character who was no longer my representative, but just someone I watched like a TV show, and this lowered my investment in the game.Rather than playing as him, sometimes I was playing against him.

It’s a game you need to replay which doesn’t feel designed to be replayed. There’s no timeline or obvious break points, which means a new game from the start and no way of identifying whether you’re on track to hit one of the other paths, or even what those paths are. You could invest many hours only to end up on an ending route you’ve already seen. The three-part structure of each day is also not conducive to replays, with many interruptions to any fast-forwarding.

I might replay it one day, but the thought of doing so currently feels like a slog. The game also needs to commit to either have a protagonist with a clear personality, or providing the player much more direct control over who he is. The idea of creating a character through your actions is good in theory, but the game simply isn’t smart enough to pull it off.

I was really, really torn on this.

STASIS: Bone Totem is a game with great writing and amazing characters. Moses is a triumph, and his relationship with Faran was incredible. There were numerous moments in this game which moved me close to tears. Vocal performances are up to the task and well, and you end up with a beautiful presentation. As a character story this game is a home run.

Sadly, there's still some struggles with the puzzles. There's a hints system designed to help you along, but it's not great, and sometimes not even that accurate. One that stands out is a puzzle around sound where you relate the sounds of the puzzle wheel to the sounds of some pipes. The pipes are several screens away, so if you want to check the sound it's already a slog. If you get stuck the hint will tell you it's a sound puzzle, and then play the sounds back. Nice. Except, no, not nice, because it's not a sound puzzle, the first in the sequence relates to a drawing on a note, which breaks the sounds sequence for.... reasons? Not to mention there's two sets of every note on the wheel and no way to know which to use. This was my most frustrated moment, but the game has a number of them, especially later on.

The game would also benefit from some UI quality of life improvements. Why is the inventory not simply shared at all times? Why can I note combined items by clicking them on one another instead of tediously transferring them into the special combine area? Why did they remove the really great UI feature from STASIS where items would show you whether they could be used with something without any clicking being necessary?

The game is close, so close to being great, but the puzzles just frustrated me enough towards the end that I soured on the experience. Using environmental clues is fine, but they are too many screens away, sometimes buried in far too much noise to stand out, and sometimes just don't seem to make any sense even after you solve them.

Despite all that, I'll probably get the next one, because you can see such a great arc of improvement since STASIS that I believe they will only improve on this.

This is the best game of 2013.

Starfield is a disappointment which seeks to pretend that the last ten years of RPG development didn't happen. The UI is an abomination, and there's all these systems thrown together without thought seemingly because Bethesda could, or has done so before.

Bethesda have never had the tightest designs, but the joy of Fallout 3 and Skyrim was that you could set off in a direction and just discover exciting things to do. Fallout 4 moved away from that and put the emphasis more on the questing, which was never their strength, but it still had a great vibe and a contiguous overworld. Starfield does away with the exploration aspect almost entirely, there's just nothing to find out there, and to find anything you're going out of your way because the world is now nothing but instances divided by loading screens. Space travel is just fast travel, but without any way to walk from one location to the next, and no way to stumble upon anything, with planets being barren wastelands where you hold down W.

It's a soulless game, and while things do improve after the worst opening in an RPG in a long time, it never really justifies why you'd play this in 2023 over the myriad of other options. I'd rather replay Skyrim, because it focused on what Bethesda did well.

I'll almost certainly play more now that I have it, but I wouldn't recommend anyone buy it.

A point & click game which commits the sin of not having very good puzzles. It is inconsistent with its use of both colour and iconography, and at times will leave you adrift as to what it even wants you to do. The atmosphere is impeccable, but that's all the game really has going for it.

The game is in desperate need of the kind of verbal guidance most point & click games have as standard. For example, at one point you try to place a bottle in a container. You're told it doesn't fit. Is it too big? Too small? The wrong shape? No idea. You end up wrapping wire around it which somehow solves the problem.

The game leans heavily on gore for shock value, but the deaths do nothing to enhance the game. In pretty much every scenario it would have been better to avoid the tedium of losing progress and just have the character explain why it wouldn't work. This would have the added benefit of giving you some idea as to what the game expects from you. For some deaths the solution isn't clear from the death itself.

It also commits a pet peeve of mine, which is allowing you to uncover plot via logs which the characters then fail to acknowledge. There's a key bit of info in a log towards the end which makes a total nonsense of all the conversations happening and the goals the main character is expressing. This leads to a very unsatisfying ending which feels rushed. The story also suffers from a plot device that doesn't work: saving the family that you, the player, never knew or bonded with. i do not care about this family.

I was waiting for the game and its story to become more than they appeared, but it never happens. Not worth the time required to complete it.

So much more fun than I expected it to be, to the point that I got halfway through the campaign and restarted on a higher difficulty, and had even more fun the second time.

The tactical combat is fun, but not particularly challenging. This game is less about the battles on the maps and more the logistics between battles. Assigning items, handling promotions, deciding on squad compositions etc. takes as much time as the battles and is really the core gameplay. It's deeply satisfying and allows for a huge variety in expression, with many viable approaches and potential for differentiation across campaigns depending on what mercenaries become available to you.

The interface is a little clunky, and the writing uneven, but it's a delight of a game and I'm totally on-board for the sequel.

Short and sweet. A beautiful game that tells its story well, with just the right level of mechanics, and doesn't overstay its welcome. You can get through the story in 5-6 hours and have a fully satisfying experience from start to end. No bloat.