Recent reviews by Winder

Short, cool game with a little bit of mechanics and a desolate atmosphere (but not desolate environments). Ran out of water once, shot some people for their water, now an innocent life is in my conscience.

Turboing through enemies with the chainsaw leg with the armor power-up is pretty... overkill

Backed it on Kickstarter (I'm even in the credits if you looked!), played it, abandoned it for a few years, and then finally finished it, doesn't mean it's a boring game, hear me out.

Need to Know came from the era of Orwell - which I've also played, loved and reviewed - basically pattern matching gameplay laid on top of a "visual" novel (only without boobs). The gameplay, while has to be involved and brain-teasing, needs to tells a story.

Orwell excelled with being a more aggressively ramped-up authoritarian nightmare. A seemingly more far-fetched future. A story where an outsider can help control information, narratives, and through that, the truth and history.

(Mild spoilers ahead, skip next paragraph if you don't wanna know anything)

Need to Know, on the other hand, writes a story in a near future - where we may be right now, or in a few years. You play as a US citizen, whose sole power is to prosecute, to "just follow orders", and meanwhile trying to survive a personal political hell. You play yourself into becoming a regular crimer, a warcrimer, and a national terrorist. You see repercussion of your own actions in the story. You may justify yourself into believing you're fighting for "the truth"; yet the information you are given keeps getting worse, and it makes you wonder if you're becoming a eugenicist and a fascist. At that point, the only winning move may just be not to play, or yeet yourself into prison.

(Spoiler over)

If you choose to play on, the gameplay is more involved than Orwell - while Orwell only makes you marks single pieces of evidence, Need to Know makes you show the link between different pieces of seemingly unrelated information - only becoming related because you are given inside knowledge of what they may have been doing. Messages, tweets, locations, bank statements, satellite images, heartbeats - all the data we give willingly these days - can and will be used against them. You request more data, you use that data to find incriminating evidence, and you string them together to prosecute them. Everyday is like a mini-Sherlock Holmes mind palace minigame, only it keeps getting more complicated. It can get repetitive, but being engaged to the story and the new data types will help mitigate it a little bit.

The game represents a possible future, and you are a judge, jury, and executioner. Have fun doing war crimes.

It's like first-person Spider-Man 2

Severed Steel? More like sever my ♥♥♥♥ because I don't need that to have sexual satisfaction anymore

Meadow is a strange game.

On the surface, Meadow is a walking simulator, you may come across a few other animals, wandering the meadows much like yourself. The only game factor is a collectathon where you find flowers, gems and monoliths to get more emotes, skins, and animals.

But life, uh, finds a way. Underneath the collectathon is the innate ability of human friendliness and form communities. In a world without words, signs becomes the only language. And through this common language all borders are broken - you never know if they are on the other side of the world or close to you, you have not a clue of their accents or language abilities. The only thing you know is that we are all papercraft-looking animals with the ability to jump, call out, and emote.

At the core we are the same thing, and with that all animals naturally band together, group by group, and go on hours-long adventures in search for pretty gems. You swim and you climb mountains and you jump off cliffs. And at the end of the day you wish for all animals you encounter to walk together, because wolves howl, stags jump high, birds fly, and hedgehogs floats carefree through water on their backs. Everyone is your friend, and you feel peace in a chaotic world.

Meadow is like a hiking trip where everyone walks silently, feeling the breeze. It is a strange game indeed.

I don't know why I haven't wrote a review yet but this game has the best space drifting arcade-y optional 6DoF spaceflight plus 3D chess tactics gameplay I've ever played. A small feature set polished to basically perfection. Makes me wish there's more combat like this in bigger space games ever since

I don't play enough to give it a good judgement

The last true classic Assassin's Creed game.

Since the original AC my focus on a good "AC" game has always been about parkour, stealth and assassinations. While it lacks more advanced skills like animation cancelling, catch ledge and sidehops, it has a fluid parkour system and a nice mix of simple controls and advanced user inputs. The basics is a simplification of AC-AC:R - instead of having to choose a climbing destination precisely with your movement stick, you can simply hold parkour up/down to climb. It however is different than AC3/4 in that the map is cluttered with enough buildings that the parkour doesn't feel that much on rails and not simply let you hold one button and climb anything like AC:O onward.

Stealth is superb yet extraordinarily broken, if you don't want to use smoke bombs you can take it very slowly and wait for your target to come to you, yet even with smoke bombs it only serves to accelerate the stealth and decrease the amount of time you have to wait, it's easy to learn, hard to master - you can disguise and walk into the middle of a group before throwing a smoke, you can throw at your feet and then shoot your enemies before relocating, or smoke your enemies, run in and assassinate, and then escape all within ten seconds. It's a tool that requires skill to be broken, and that is a good thing.

Co-op is surprisingly still alive even after 6 years, although you may need to just wait for a mission of a level instead of a specific one, but watching someone ♥♥♥♥ up in one location while being sneaky smooth does make you feel superior, if they die it'll even make you feel fast. If you have friends (which I don't) you can even actually work together and do double assassinations and it is truly satisfying while saving smoke bombs and phantom blades.

If you love AC-AC:R, you will probably like this game a lot more now than when it first launched, I know I do.
If you like AC4 / AC:O, then perhaps you're not a classic fanatic and should roam the seven seas for a copy before deciding if you want to buy it.
If you like Odyssey, why

I lost all my saves.
Good game!