Recent reviews by Wirdjos

True to its name, Vermintide 2 sends a veritable tide of vermin against you. I can only assume it was the same in the previous title, as this was my entry into the series. I wouldn't say I felt lost, having missed how the adventure began, but that's likely due to the game's story consisting of rather self-contained missions and how distractedly you're encouraged to travel though them. If you're not currently under siege by an impossible number of rat- and/or north-men, you're likely using the rare breather to look for supplies or a safe corner from which to face the next wave rather than listening to your companions banter.

That's a real shame considering the hard hitting scenes the game's set up and so carefully blocked for you. I passed over most of these moments the first, second, even fifth run-through of the respective stage, lost in the frenzy of it all. It takes an unnaturally relaxed and quiet group or relying completely on bots to find the space to notice such things. In the absence of the former, the latter can be built into quite the formidable force, but they'll always need a deliberate caretaker to soften some of their more... interesting habits, such as charging directly into every stream of warpfire and hail of warpstone they come across.

How ever you do choose to approach it, nothing dulls the joy of mowing down the hordes of angry gits constantly pouring down upon you. It's a dirty task, clouded by rat blood as your vision will be mid-stream, but one that needs doing and it's hard to deny the simple pleasure in that. No matter how many times I found myself loading up the same level, that never did get old.

As the world's clumsiest movers, clear out various haunted mansions for a mysterious UI that speaks only in emojis. This is the Retrieve, Extract, and Profit Operation, R.E.P.O. for short.

These little guys were not built for this. Putting aside how many valuables end up damaged by their low-intensity tractor beams, they pop apart at the slightest provocation. What they are, however, is cute. In fact, everything about the world of R.E.P.O. is cute. Even the monsters look like Sesame Street's trying to put on their version of horror's greatest hits.

Adorableness aside, I wish the game would focus less on the fragility of our googly-eyed avatars than on the valuables they were created to scoop up. The most fun I've had with R.E.P.O. is puzzling out how to get a grandfather clock, which was realistically too heavy for two of these little dudes, up a set of stairs while dollar signs flew off it at every wrong move. That was tension enough for me without the risk of turning a corner and getting one-shotted by a laser beam from some absurd sad clown/anglerfish hybrid.

As it is now(we are talking about an Early Access title here), the enjoyment I did find in R.E.P.O. was only alongside friends, calling out the threats as they were destroyed and watching the sole survivor carry their heads to the extract.

Welcome! To Mordheim... City of the Damned. And, sadly, also the City of Unfulfilled Potential.

The gameplay loop is genuinely fun. How quickly you could lose everything to a handful of bad rolls fills the slow inching forward of the matches themselves with a heavy blanket of foreboding. I enjoy every second of it... until I look down at the end of the mission and realize I've spent three hours on about as many experience points.

Progression is so slow. That is the one thing I wish hadn't been taken from the tabletop game. You spend so long getting your warband where you want it only for it all to be dashed out by a single, disastrous mistake. And knowing that makes you play even slower, which again, is fun, until you realize how much is ahead of you and how little your effort's built.

Mobility is another way Mordheim keeps things dragging. The campaign maps in particular are too large for a regular unit to move from one objective to the next in less than three turns. And this is after you've cleared out the initial warband and are only dealing with the randomly placed reinforcements spawning in every turn. The handful of objectives being placed at all corners of these huge maps could almost fool you into splitting up your warband. But I wouldn't do that unless you'd like to risk a surprise Bloodletter or Demoness and the restart, in worse standing mind you, that will likely result from such a discovery.

The video game just does not have the narrative to support this slow play. You likely don't have your mates with you, making up stories along with you, and the game doesn't do enough with character customization or campaign mission introductions to facilitate that even if you did.

One of the many missed opportunities was having the stories cross over, having a canon sequence of events that the game shows you after you've seen every mission with every warband. Instead, it's more the like non-campaign missions: the same maps remixed with different enemies and different objectives. Sometimes the names stay the same between different warband's compaigns, this is true, but those too are rearranged in such a way that implies you're learning no more about these people or artifacts.

That is the tragic upshot here: with a little bit of polish, a little more care, maybe a few more warbands or models pulled from still fertile lists of the tabletop game, every action taking forever to execute would build that great, nail biting feeling over a particular outcome or what might be hiding around the corner, instead of the mind-numbing task of tiptoeing from one side of the map to the other only to earn the right to do it again later.

Much like the short film released alongside it, The Mr. Rabbit Magic Show is more about celebrating 10 years of Rusty Lake than adding to its mysteries. There are a couple of familiar faces, but most are faces you might not have seen before as they're usually hidden behind screens of text and code. This game, again like the short film, is a look behind the scenes at the people that have brought us a decade of unsettling wonder. And isn't that what, or who, we're really celebrating?

That said, The Mr. Rabbit Magic Show does still feature all the absurd and comically macabre puzzles that made Rusty Lake, and Cube Escape before it, so popular. If you enjoyed those games, even if you're not one for nostalgically looking back over them, I expect you'll still enjoy the show this time.

Some games wear everything they have to offer on their sleeves. The Headliners in one such game. You can learn everything you need to know without scrolling past the logo and the blurb: There's deadly creatures, you are recklessly unprepared to deal with them, and hopefully you'll get a sweet shot before you die.

And you will die. Often. Suddenly. Spectacularly.

The Headliners is still in Early Access. As such, there are a ton of bugs. But considering how much the game relies on creating absurd situations for its journalists to - let's face it - not survive, I wouldn't expect all or any of them to be fixed by release. The game would lose something if they were.

As laughing over your own misfortune alone isn't quite as fun as laughing with your friends, this is one I'd suggest coming into with a team of like-minded, would-be journalists in tow. One of Headliners' great joys is chasing after a fallen friend's camera so as not to lose the incredible shot that killed them. That's just doesn't hit the same when you don't know what name to put on the combination byline/tombstone.

You're shown every challenge the game has for you from the start and, by the end of that first run, it all seems impossible. But after a handful of delicious failures, you'll have so many power-ups available nothing could stop your spree. Sadly, that means going back to your original state now feels like wading through sweet, but sticky molasses.

Delightfully, the pure, cackling glee of an opossum pilfering all manner of assorted treats from a town's worth of clueless dogs is infectious and soothes any bellyache. If that laugh was all Pizza Possum had going for it, that would be enough for the recommendation. Thankfully, it does everything else right too.

Despite all the (intentional)graphical glitches and wild time skips, Mouthwashing has a strong clarity of vision. It seeks to explore a single idea and leaves everything else lying in the periphery, indistinct and implied. There's not many actual decisions to make once things start rolling, but that suits the theme just fine. After all, once big enough events are set in motion, there's nothing left to do but accept the consequences.

No one speaks during the entire runtime of Virginia. All you have to go off of is a scant few documents and whatever else you can pick up along the way. It's fitting then, that the only choice in front of you is where you look.... when the game grants you that much control as you're never far from having even that little bit yanked out of your hands, either by a traditional cinematic moment or one of the many smash cuts you'll be flung between.

The story's told from behind Agent Anne Tarver's eyes and you won't be changing her course from there. This also means a significant amount of headbob and a good chance of motion sickness. But, after changing a couple of visual settings and escaping the especially egregious intro, I was able to make it to the ending without too much discomfort.

And what an ending it was! Virginia isn't particularly concerned with what's real or what really happened, much less spelling it all out for you. Three times through and I still have no idea whether the last bit was showing two divergent sets of possible outcomes, a series of hallucinations, or if it all fit together in one unified timeline somehow. But, as frustrating as being dragged along half-blindfolded is, I do feel like I got more out of knowing less. I might not be able to give you a coherent plot summary, but I feel connected to each of these characters despite spending a little under two hours with the lot of them and never hearing a single one of their voices.

It's often the case that you only get out what you put into an experience. This goes double for The First Tree.

When you're focused on the adorable fox trotting around dreamy landscapes and swaying to the melancholy soundtrack, the game's stories strike a cord and are affecting. But the second your mind drifts from the emotion at hand, it gets pretty difficult to ignore just how out of sync the two narratives are and how barren the levels you've been traveling through have become. At that point, The First Tree has lost you and won't be getting you back under its spell by its own power.

The game is clearly heartfelt. You can sense an earnest, single set of hands on the whole thing. But in the end, it simply expresses grief and stops there with nothing new to say about it.

Steam says my first playthrough lasted three hours, but that doesn't account for the lifetime that seems to have passed since I selected New Game. That's not an insult. But what... what was that? I thought I was experiencing one story, then - no, it was another - wait, no it's about this now - back to that - but that can't have been real... can it?

I think - emphasis on the word 'think' - that I know what all happened by the end, but connecting A to B doesn't mean you know how it all fits together. Combining nebulous future-tech with psychedelics can do that to you.

Just remember: if you're lost, check your pockets. A constant stream of bright, flashing lights and revelations will have you forgetting any crucial bobbles you may been carrying around.