Cozy and Critical
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Shadows of Doubt has had a six-month early access period shows it growing by leaps and bound and its unorthodox focus and procedural story-generation engine make it stand out even among the high number of narrative-generation games coming out these days. An instant indie classic for fans of immersive sims, film noir, and weird dystopian adventures.
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There’s a key to difficulty in games, and it’s often hard to work out. It’s a fine line to walk between frustration and satisfaction, between the relief of pulling off a difficult fight (and the knowledge of actual consequence), and making that difficult fight still easy enough that the player wants to keep fighting, rather than logging off to play something more relaxing. It’s a balance not every game can strike, as seen from the number of people who give up on Fromsoft titles. Deadlink, on the other hand, manages it pretty easily. The fights are difficult and the arena setting can turn into an absolute meatgrinder, but every time you squeak out a win, every time you pull that luck and skill together, you feel like a cybernetic neon god. It’s the best feeling in the world, and I can’t wait to see how they expand upon it from here.
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Having received a free copy of the game, I feel like I was overcharged for the privilege. While there are some moments where the ambition of the premise shines through, it’s a severely broken game, so broken that I couldn’t even get an hour into it without the game soft-locking me within its opaque, typo-ridden purgatory. I’m sorry that I have to write this— I hate writing bad reviews, especially for games that seem relatively ambitious— but I need to remain true to my experiences.
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Sweet Transit, a new rail simulator/citybuilder currently in early access, is a deceptively frustrating game. From the start, it presents itself as something of a pleasant, relaxing, folksy builder game, with a bluesy americana soundtrack by Ely Robbins, a Western-style aesthetic with its laborers and “beginning of the rail era” atmosphere, and soon you’re set loose on a gorgeous map to build your first centers of industry, and, from there, slowly conquer the New World by connecting it up with trains. However, somewhere around building your first train you find yourself somewhat in error, and this was the point that I began to have flashbacks to when I used to try programming in Python.
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From the start, Thy Creature has a lot going for it. A gothic atmosphere, lovely music, a plot full of mysteries, and a rather unique art style and control scheme. It feels like a scaled-up RPG Maker game - one of those ones with a lot of places to explore, people to meet, and a story to gradually uncover as you do. It has all the makings of an interesting game with a lot of heart behind it, but frustratingly so.
Read MoreSo first, a disclaimer. Because of the episodic nature of the game, and because this is The Last Door: Season 2, I strongly suggest you go to either the website or Kongregate and play The Last Door: Season 1. It's not the most necessary thing in the world, but it'll fill in the blanks as to Devitt, the weird eye motif, the Four Witnesses, and the secret society known as The Playwright. While the prologue chapter can answer one or two of the questions, a lot of them will be answered by just playing season 1.
But with that out of the way, if you're looking for a surreal horror game with a ton of atmosphere and a lo-fi aesthetic that manages to play perfectly with the player's imagination and delivers old-school adventure without all the pointless death, you need look no further
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Zombasite, currently in beta from Soldak Entertainment, is the most fun you will have not knowing what it is you're doing.
And before that sounds too much like faint praise, allow me to explain, it is a lot of fun.
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There's not much to say about The Culling, really. It's the kind of game that, if you like arena-based deathmatch shooters, you will probably like. If you don't like multiplayer arena-based deathmatch shooters, you will not like it. That's pretty much the delineation.
Granted, as far as arena-based deathmatch shooters go, I like it a lot more than most, but it's going to be pretty clear when I describe the mechanics whether or not this is your kind of thing.
Read MoreVictor Vran , the new game from Tropico developer Haemimont Games, is an ARPG like Diablo or The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing. It's set in a crumbling castle somewhere in Europe, filled with all manner of creepy and crawly creatures. While many people have noted similarities to other ARPGs out there, Victor Vran adds a new element to action-RPGs that most other games have ignored: Height.
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