Recent reviews by Xalaputan

Heavily expanding on the concepts of the 2005 student project Narbacular Drop, this game was one of the first puzzles that blew me away and made me fall in love with it. This game was the first ever game I bought from Steam after I made this account back in 2017 (7 years ago......Jesus). At first, the game is a series of test chambers with elaborate puzzles you have to think outside the box to solve, and much like Half-Life 2, there's real physics to objects like the cubes you use to solve the puzzles. But then the game gives you an Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device (Portal Gun for short) which allows you to place 2 different types of portals on any surface that is compatible. These portals allow not only for teleportation to previously unreachable areas, but also to take advantage of the realistic physics and its momentum to fly across the chamber. The Portal Gun was the most bizarre mechanic I had ever seen in a video game and at first melted my brain, but then I started to get used to its mechanics like I had just discovered a nonexistent color. The puzzles themselves felt very clever and well thought out, and there was no moment in which I was like "HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT?!" But then things got very VERY interesting as I managed to escape the testing zone and explore behind the scenes of the chambers I was previously in. It blew my mind to see this as I had never seen a puzzle game that allowed you to go FURTHER BEYOND the puzzles of the game. Then the boss fight was very intense with a limited time to kill the game master, GlaDOS, but it gave me just enough time to figure out how to defeat GlaDOS. So I believe the amount of time I was given was reasonable enough. To this day, I see this as one of my favorite video games of all time, and I would love to play more games like this. If you haven't played this and love puzzle games, I highly recommend this one.

Snake? Snake?! Sake!

Don't. Just don't.

This game is a hard one for me to review. While it looks amazing and some of the gameplay mechanics are pretty good, the game feels a little empty. The light monsters are really slow and have AI that feels off, so stealth doesn't really matter since you can run past the enemies (guaranteed you have enough bandages to heal yourself with which are ridiculously easy to come by). The end chase sequence was very anticlimactic because of the light monsters being way too slow, and throughout the game I felt 0 threat. It felt like this game wanted to be like Penumbra: Overture or something similar, but it just felt like a knock-off version since P:O is better in every way. Again, it's hard for me to put into a lot of words why this game feels off, but it just feels off. If it weren't for the price of the game being $9, I would've given this game a neutral rating, but because of that price, I sadly cannot recommend this one.

This game kept me at the edge of my seat constantly knowing the fact that at any moment a silent but deadly entity, known as the False One, would show up and kill me. Reminded me a lot of the monster you find in certain parts of Outlast 2. This is one of the scariest games I've played by this developer, and I almost didn't even want to finish this game due to how scary it was.

In this game, you play as a depressed psychopath who's way too obsessed with a famous painter. The story itself is very simple yet is a very powerful one, and you are left with a choice to either fulfill your psychopathy by killing a man or let a man out of his cage. WARNING: DEPICTIONS OF SUICIDE

The only game I've ever played where I actually felt bad for a fly

I flew to space on Santa's sleigh wearing a fishbowl full of water playing an electric guitar with a rhino sitting next to me. 10/10 Would definitely do that again

ORIGINAL REVIEW (7/29/2023):

Built on a heavily modified version of the Quake Engine (known as GoldSrc), this game was groundbreaking at the time, and while it was definitely not the first FPS game, it set a new standard for future FPS games that have a huge element of storytelling. It amazes me that this was Valve's first game ever made because this was one of the best FPS games I've ever played. The gunplay feels satisfying, the AI (while not perfect) was pretty decent, and there were only a few bugs I encountered which says a lot due to how long this game is.


UPDATE (12/10/2023):

Just played the Deathmatch gamemode with some friends, and I really enjoyed it plus the 4 new maps that were added in the new 25th Anniversary update.

All you do in this game is click you mouse a bunch of times while some guy says some philosophical dialogue. All the gameplay is reading the dialogue and clicking your mouse. Oh also this costs money by the way.