Recent reviews by Voodoo Pork

"Okami" is a faithful remaster of the classic 2006 adventure game. I've bought this thing 3 times: for PS2, for Wii, and now PC. It's one of the most ambitious, beautiful adventures games you can get and despite some technical flaws and weird design choices. It's a must-play.

Highlights:
- Gorgeous art style and design. Looks like a handpainted watercolor brought to life. Interstitial 2D art is wonderful and sets the mythic tone of the game perfectly.
- Compelling epic story with varied locales
- Celestial Brush mechanics are fantastic, diverse, and a joy to unlock
- Enemy designs are a treat. Truly weird stuff on display, love it.
- Fully orchestrated score is an all-time classic
- Large cast of fun, oddball characters
- One of the best action adventure games ever made, straight up there with the best Zelda titles (its main inspiration)

Issues:
(This sounds like I hate the game but after playing it for almost 20 years, I have a ton of feedback for it)
- Technical limitations. 30 FPS locked and terrible draw distance detract from presentation.
- Camera is one of the worst I've ever had to battle in an adventure game. Genuinely its most obnoxious problem. Camera moves too much, either too close or too far, tracks in weird directions.
- Platforming is not fun. Your character does lots of flourishing while jumping so it's hard to gauge distance. Camera adds to annoyance.
- Game is too talky and packed with overly long, unnecessary filler dialogue. It's not that there's too much dialogue, it's that so much of it is repetitive blabbing or time-wasting banter. Slow text speed adds to this.
- Issun is a Jar Jar Binks tier annoying sidekick. He's a gross little bug pervert that almost never adds anything useful or purposeful to gameplay. He just spoils puzzles, blabs the obvious or makes crude, juvenile sexual innuendos. His schtick gets tiring very fast. The game is amazing IN SPITE of him.
- XP is gathered through a lot of ways that have nothing to do with how good you are at the game. 90% of XP is found from feeding stray animals (that each need a consumable and have a time-wasting cutscene) or B: platforming or laughably easy exploration to find hidden clover plants. I'm mystified as to why this is how you get the vast majority of your XP.

Scorn is a goopy game. It's set in an enigmatic, surreal dreamscape, something out of a Benadryl nightmare. Highly cribbed from the work of H.R. Giger, it's a short but punchy puzzle and exploration game only tied back by its own genre trappings. Feels completely original in terms of tone and feel (even if photocopied from H.R. Giger, seeing this stuff in 3D is a treat). Recommended but not for full price.

Highlights:
- Outstanding art direction and sound design.
- Some of the best goop in the business, genuinely icky gross-out moments.
- Good puzzle design make for some fun headscratchers.
- Weirdly empathetic protagonist, literally says zero lines of dialogue, has no backstory, but first person animations have a lot of personality.

Issues:
- Combat is poor, should really have a passive play option.
- Level design can be very same-y, making navigation a chore. Lack of a map or waypoints makes backtracking a confusing headache.
- Long, unskippable animations that get tedious when you're already lost.
- Introduces some mechanics later on and completely abandons them almost immediately. 4 hour length or so reveals a truncated development time and over reliance on art design.

"The Shore" is another entry into the Lovecraftian, "Amnesia" style horror gameplay that includes, dare I say, nearly every cliche of the genre in near photocopied form. It's a standard issue Lovecraft plot with impressive, if not overly familiar, cosmic horror aesthetics. Gameplay wise, it's kind of a sluggish 2 hour meander through visually impressive environments with some truly obnoxious creature sequences.

I'm not recommending this mainly the visuals are not enough to carry this, and it has very core design and gameplay issues that hinder it.

Highlights:
- It looks really, really good. The developer, Ares Dragonis, seriously flexes on the creature and world design.
- Lovecraftian monster designs are exceptionally well done. They feel gross and squishy in the best worst way.
- I really enjoyed the score by Thanos Zampoukas. Very atmospheric, spooky, immersive.
- Scale of the creatures and world design is quite impressive.
- The voice actor for Andrew is giving it their all, doing a really impeccable job on a thin script.

Issues:
- I don't think the narrative understands what makes cosmic horror compelling, This has the aesthetics of cosmic horror but very little of the underlying existential dread that makes that genre shine. I understand this is essentially a one-person team, but the Elder Gods having thick Greek accents is not terribly effective.
- The relic is basically a laser gun with infinite ammo, removing all tension from enemy encounters.
- Your movement speed is glacial. You really need a sprint toggle.
- The monster chase sequences are universally bad. They move too fast, you basically power walk away from them, and if they catch you (which they will), you just have to wait until you die. "Amnesia" makes this work because you can effectively hide. You know how beat these in this game? You walk backwards and zap the oogie boogie with your infinite ammo laser.
- Sound design is strange at times. You can be walking on stone and it sounds like you're on a plastic tarp in a garage.
- This may be a nitpick, but I've never understood why designers make obstacles in games that an actual person could easily resolve, but the game makes you do some more complicated arbitrary task. I understand it's because it's a game, but it's very frustrating to be hunting around for 15 minutes for a stone tablet to lower a pillar I could literally just walk around. I can literally see over it. Why can't I just climb over these rocks and walk to the boat? BECAUSE GAME.

No pun intended, but game breaking bug in Lawyer's Desk prevents progress. After reconnecting the cable for the certificate printer, the red dial to power up the pressure gauge just endlessly clicks and resets regardless of how fast or slow you turn the dial. Attempted multiple restarts to no effect.

Very disappointing because I was actually enjoying the atmosphere and gameplay. Until fixed, do not recommend.

Lorn's Lure is one of those games that's ALMOST good. So close to the mark it's kind of annoying. It's a BLAME!-inspired parkour game with great controls, a hard-to-follow plot dependent mostly on mood and setting.

Highlights:
- Amazing setting and sense of scale. Often wowed at sheer size of environments. Lots of variety!
- Score is lovely and in-obtrusive.
- Controls are incredibly tight, precise, allowing you to perform fun, fast acrobatic maneuvers.
- New abilities expand moveset in interesting and unique ways.
- Generous checkpoints make a lot more of a puzzler than a parkour game. Appreciated this.

Issues:
- PACING. This game is too long, levels vary wildly in length. Some can take as little as 30 mins to over TWO HOURS to finish. It's about twice as long as it needs to be considering your moveset and what you're doing.
- Wild difficulty spikes. Expecting a thoughtful, relaxing adventure through a strange and exotic world? Sure, sometimes. But then NO. KAIZO MARIO PARKOUR TIME. CS SKATE MAP TIME. Level 5 radically ramps up the difficult in a bad way. Several sections of later levels require pinpoint, practically TAS-level precision to complete.
- Chase levels are awful, but there's a mode to remove them. For Explore Mode, stamina should also be doubled. I would also recommend a magnet ability to stick to metal surfaces and a way to slow a slide to a crawl without jumping.
- You're not battling the environment, you're at war with a 1st person camera requiring you to make blind jumps with no sense of where your body is or where you're going. Half the time you're staring at a stone wall. Blech. A fix for this would be more clear visual indicators that a surface is your intended direction (not as obnoxious and hand-holdy as yellow paint, but many holds blend into background too much)
- An end level traversal tool should have been implemented by mid-game to switch up the tedium.

This is one of those games that people may tell you is a deep, emotional, slowburn. Don't believe them. You'll mostly be confused and kind of annoyed the game keeps its most interesting ideas razor-thin in small, barely interactive segments.

Inmost is a mild, unchallenging mini-Metroidvania drenched in mopey vibes. Very short, about 3 hours with as little as 2.5 hours of actual gameplay. That's about it. No recommended.

Highlights:
- Great sound work and musical score
- Strong sense of art direction and mood

Issues:
- Confusing, melodramatic plot with fragmented gameplay, constantly switching protagonists
- Movement is slow and plodding, platforming either bland or obnoxious
- Easy to not know what to do next, can get obtuse and directionless
- The only mechanically cool character (the knight) is given simple, basic levels. A potential cool boss fight you should be playing is locked to a cutscene! Why is the player not given this cool fight? Why am I watching it?!

One of the most "yes but with some caveats" I've ever recommended.

This game has a lot of style, atmosphere, and a bio-horror aesthetic working wonders in the GZDoom engine. Demands a more expansive sequel.

Highlights:
- Fast, frenetic combat when it happens.
- Open world exploration makes discovery feel natural and fun.
- World design is appropriately gross-out and blech, love it. Wonderfully bizarre art design. There's an intenstine vomit waterfall.
- Shortcuts are exciting and give you the Dark Souls "oh yeah!" moments.
- Story is obtuse yet enthralling, you don't get a lot of it and it raises a lot more tantalizing questions.
- Wish there was more: more combat, more lore, more areas, more abilities. Such a solid jumping off point. Needs a side dodge, a grappling hook and a rocket launcher.

Downsides:
- Not nearly enough combat, lots of open empty areas with nothing to do.
- Map desperately needs fast travel and a legend. Some optional waypoints for suggested places to go would be nice.
- Bosses are circle-strafe bullet sponges. I beat almost every one of them first time.
- Some abilities become obsolete almost immediately, like the freeze bullet on acid water.
- Shotgun feels underpowered. I never used it after getting it.
- Enemies don't respawn but you get infinite healing at checkpoints, trivializing progress at times.
- A particular dark section is annoying to explore because your light trails behind you, creating a stop-go pace that is sluggish.

Is "Nightmare Reaper" a good shooter? Yes. Is it a good rougelike? Not really. The best and worst parts about this game are in fact its main selling point: that levels and loot are random for better or worse in ways that equally rule and suck.

The problem is for every awesome moment of kismet, there's 2 or 3 other insane design choices I truly don't understand. I would like to see a more linear version of this, maybe as a DLC, or perhaps some curated seeded runs.

Pros:
- Weapons feel awesome to shoot, enemies are varied and fun to annihilate, the game moves so fast, it's like it fell out of 1996.
- An absurd, bonkers arsenal that kicks so much ass. There's some truly hall of famers in here. Looking at you Post Driver and Scrap Launcher. Weapon balance is truly messed up, though. I would like the ability to improve a weapon with more deterministic choices, rather than just a random slot machine.
- Lots of level variety, from spooky dungeons to outer space to under da seaaaaaaa. (Not any real cohesion and city levels are bland.)
- Tons of upgrades and minigames to play

Cons:
- Game is extremely punishing and you can die before you even know why. Feels not good sometimes.
- Maps needs improvement. Keys, locks, batteries, teleporters, and special mechanics objects need to be highlighted.
- This game is long as hell. It's 3 times as long as it needs to be. Only needs 1 level per world, not 3.
- Bosses can be some real ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.
- Levels can be either a cakewalk or a maze. Later levels suffer from sometimes needing special keys to progress or just unlock a secret. This needs to be way more clear.
- Random enemy placements, especially in big open arenas, can be a slog.

It's an hour long and you shoot skeleton demon horses with a nailgun. That is my review.

Have you ever asked yourself, "What if Limbo but birds? What if Inside but racism?" That's basically this game, another entry in the "cinematic platformer" genre, a mechanics-light but atmosphere heavy world where you press right a bunch and jump every now and then. "White Shadows" is a gorgeous, moody, wonderfully realized place that I recommend for vibes mostly. This is a triumph of scale and art design.

Unless you were born literally 27 minutes ago, this game is a METAPHOR. And the metaphor is BAD STUFF BAD. It's so glaringly unsubtle that I felt like I was being made fun of at times, or that it's almost a parody of those types of messages? If it's sincere, there's no subtext, it's just text. It's only near the end that you get a perplexing complication on the world's conceits. What is prophecy? What is fate in a mechanical world? What is personal agency when you were born in a machine? Interesting stuff that only get brought up in the last moments, when it should have been the inciting incident.

The game is 2 hours at most, a brief and punchy trek through this bizarre animal factory world. I'd pick it up if you're looking for a moody, depressing evening.