Shadows of Doubt Early Access Review

---

Shadows of Doubt
Developer: Cole-Powered Games
Publisher: Fireshine Games
Platforms: PC
Release Date: April 24, 2023 (Early access, information on the Steam page claims “about six months”)
MSRP: 19.99 USD

---

By now, Shadows of Doubt is a well-established title in what looks to be a fabulous summer of immersive sims and shooters. Its six-month early access period shows it growing by leaps and bounds (part of the reason for this review being a little late is that I wanted to give it a bit of time to cook, so to speak), 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. Unfortunately, as wonderful as Shadows of Doubt is, it’s worth waiting for a full release rather than snapping it up in early access. The high number of moving parts and that same unorthodox approach to things means it should take all the time it can to shine.

You are a former police detective in a dystopian island city, laid off by the Starch Kola Enforcers Program, a corporate-run police force installed by the corporate-owned government. In the middle of a night of troubled sleep, you awake to the ring of your phone. Upon answering, you’re greeted by silence on the other end of the line and a note shoved under your door urging you to investigate someone’s apartment. You arrive on the scene, finding a corpse. There’s been a murder. The Enforcers are on their way and react to trespassers with lethal force. A conspiracy is brewing. The same strange video tapes and cryptic notes show up at crime scenes and in suspects’ apartments. You’re down on your luck, recently evicted, and have to dodge both enforcers and the criminals who are on to you as you attempt to solve crimes and take odd jobs. Good luck. You’ll need it.

Shadows of Doubt is best described as a “detective/crime immersive sim.” You take cases from various notice boards around the city, gaining money and social credit for everything from petty theft to corporate hatchet-jobs. In the process, you get embroiled in conspiracies, murders, and a shadowy “paradise” people retire to when they have enough social credit. As you grow in both reputation and skillset, you unlock upgrades called “sync-discs,” have an easier time getting information, and get ever closer to finally leaving the rain-soaked concrete pilings you call a home. From a first-person perspective, you chase down leads, manage your time and needs, and try to figure out your cases in a procedurally generated city. You also get to customize your own character, apart from their backstory.

The password to a secret gun store Credit: The Gamer’s Lounge/Screenshot

It’s remarkable how much detail and how many moving parts go into Shadows of Doubt. The game procedurally generates the entire city from the “new game” screen, complete with citizens, schedules, buildings, and a whole ton of relationships. Over the course of one case, I practically traversed the city (and if you don’t play on the largest city size, well, you’re missing out) and met a ton of potential suspects and leads, all chasing the same single thread. You can break into places, bribe informants, sneak into the Enforcer offices to steal files and weapons, crawl through vents, and even confront a suspect, arrest them, rob their safe, and then sell it all for a tidy profit. It’s wildly open in a very guided way, supporting a number of chaotic and careful play styles. The first time I turned off the lights in a room and the cameras stopped paying attention to me, I was hooked. You don’t normally see that level of detail in a game, where even minimal changes to the environment yield greater results, and knowing more about the city means you solve cases easier. Helping everything, a lot of your legwork is player generated, meaning you have to follow the leads and draw conclusions, even if you make the wrong ones.

Foggy day in post-global warming Tokyo Credit: The Gamer’s Lounge/Screenshot

It also looks great. The style, blocky voxels making up a neon and rain-soaked hellscape of a city, works perfectly with the retro-futuristic cyberpunk tone the game tries to strike. While the streets look a little similar at times (par for the course with a procedurally generated game), you get awesome neon signs standing out of the fog, and characters have an impressive level of distinction, with everything from styles of dress and cybernetic limbs on display. You can even learn a lot from what any given person has in their apartment or workplace— everything from medical issues to coworker relations are represented by items, emails, and a number of subtle details. There’s a lot going on, and the style never once gets in the way. It’s a fantastic presentation.

Fog billows up through a room Credit: The Gamer’s Lounge/Screenshot

The issues with Shadows of Doubt come down to polish. There are points where the game just doesn’t click right, whether it’s accidentally soft-locking yourself out of a murder case because you went to City Hall and grabbed yourself a case sheet before following the vague instructions to investigate a murder on a random street, or getting turned around because following an address waypoint leads to the wrong building. It’s frustrating, in a way, but that’s the reason the game’s in early access. It still needs a little more time to cook, to work out that polish and smooth out some of the rough edges. This isn’t a nitpick so much as a statement of fact. Even the most polished of games sometimes just needs a little time to cook. A little chaos is fine, in fact, it’s built into the game, but I’d wait until this one hits 1.0. It’s a great game, but when a great game has a crack, that crack’s all the more visible.

If you’re enticed enough and can weather the lack of polish, Shadows of Doubt is a fantastic game, an instant indie classic for fans of immersive sims, film noir, and weird dystopian adventures. While that’s the case, the game’s improved almost weekly in leaps and bounds, so it’s definitely worth the (relatively short at this point) early access cycle and hopping on with 1.0. Either way, check this out, especially as the unpolished version is a beautiful, impressive, and chaotic affair well worth your time.

The Good
- Brilliant dystopian-noir setting
- Unique voxel-graphic style
- Huge level of detail and freedom in the open world
- Large number of player options and open-ended gameplay

The Bad
- Literally the only bad thing about this is that it’s still in early access and could still use a little more polish

Final Score:

Deadlink - Early Access Review

The following review is based on an early-access build of the game. The final experience may change from the time this review goes out.

Deadlink
Release Date: Oct. 18, 2022 (Early Access release)
Developer: Gruby Entertainment
Publisher: SuperGG
Platform: PC
MSRP: 19.99

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.

Deadlink’s plot is revealed mostly through its in-game encyclopedia, but here are the broad strokes: You are an agent of the Corporate Security Agency sometime in the far future, tasked with policing various megacorporations. In your capacity as an agent, you are uploaded into a cyborg body via an interface known as a “Deadlink,” ready to dole out justice. But before the Deadlink can be put into wide use, it needs to go through exhaustive simulation. That’s where you come in. Over the course of three campaigns, one for each megacorporation the CSA is supposed to take down, you will shoot, explode, and generally reduce to rubble everything in your path. And maybe, if you’re good enough at the simulation, you can do it for real.

The core loop Deadlink sets up throws you into a first-person arena shooter with roguelite elements. Every run, you upload into the simulation and throw yourself against the armies of the three megacorps, all with their own unique units and theme. In between missions, you talk with the two scientists who serve as your handlers, one of whom offers advice and the other offering insulting but helpful tips about how to take down your enemies on the next run. Each run, you earn experience points and unlock rewards, everything from stat upgrades to new loadouts for your existing shells, descending again and again into the underbelly of the city to do battle once more.

The roguelite elements do a great job of maintaining this loop, too. You’re never too far from a restart point, you can very easily get back into the action once you’ve ended a run, and the upgrades can be genuinely helpful, especially the shield, health, and ammo capacity upgrades. The game also pushes you to use abilities other than just basic shooting, as each (temporary) upgrade you get in the combat sections is tied to a specific action— weapon-switching, one of the two “skill” powers, or breaking the “c-balls” full of ammo around the arena. Using these abilities and your grenades also mark enemies, which causes them to explode into showers of shield recharge energy when killed. You can get into a good rhythm of moving around the arena, taking out opponents with a variety of tools at your disposal, and all of it feels deeply satisfying, like you’re the video-game equivalent of John Wick. Few shooters manage their gunplay/skill interactions this well (looking at you, Doom Eternal), but Deadlink allows you to pick up the basics and settle into a rhythm that works.

The game’s setting is similarly brilliant and allows you to sink into it. Even without the codex, the game has a mood and feel that infiltrates every corner of its world, from the Blade Runner-inspired alleys and sleaze, to the bright colors of your weaponry, to even the threatening-looking robotic skeleton that serves as your player character. As you level up your exoskeleton and weapons, the mods even appear as cosmetics, further driving home the idea that you’re upgrading yourself. It even strikes a nice balance with the graphics, hearkening back to cyberpunk shooters like System Shock (dig the red and blue color palette and the way the game even starts you off in a backalley doctor’s office), Cyberpunk (the thumping, undulating dynamic bass soundtrack that kicks in and grows more intense as the battles do), and an intense feel to the gunplay that fits right alongside the modern “boomer shooter” revival currently taking the FPS-playing world by storm.

But it goes without saying that the game could use a bunch of polish. There’s some definite balance issues between the two loadouts, with the “Soldier” shell favoring up close and personal interactions but being outfitted with an AOE that tends to hit maybe one enemy at best and a clunky shotgun among others, and the “Hunter” allowing for a lot more range of movement, a higher rate of fire, and not really much of a downside. The game presents itself as fast-paced and movement based, so having the beginner loadout be a slower, clunkier one doesn’t make as much sense. Especially because it feels like the Soldier loadout is basically just something to push through so you can get to the Hunter loadout.

The game is also pretty stingy on health, something that’s a definite issue in the later levels when you get swarmed by enemies, leading to a situation where, if you get the wrong set of rooms, you can pretty much die just from being trapped and getting shredded without a clear exit in sight. It could also use a little more indication of progress, as there’s no way to tell how close or far away you are from the boss room, which kind of makes the game feel a bit grindy at times. There were also moments where I clipped into the scenery, clipped into enemies, and clipped through the stage, leaving me looking up at where I was supposed to go through a skybox.

These are all kinks to be expected, however, in an early access title. These shouldn’t by any means deter you from playing one of the most exciting cyberpunk shooters of the 2020s (okay, not a huge category, but this and 2077 do kind of stand out above much blander titles like The Ascent), and one with style, mood, and kinetic action in spades. It’s definitely going to be interesting seeing where Deadlink goes as it continues its early-access journey, and well worth getting in on the ground floor.

The Good:
- Fast, kinetic action with easy skill use and a good rhythm
- Excellent mood, atmosphere, and world design
- Gorgeous graphics
- An adrenaline rush of roguelite FPS action

The Bad:
- In the very early stages of its early access journey, so be prepared for some bugs
- Balance issues in the loadouts

Final Score:

A game with a few flaws, but I haven’t been able to stop playing it for four days straight.

Destiny's Sword - Early Access Look

Destiny’s Sword
Release Date: Early Access as of 9/28/2022
Developer: 2Dogs Games
Publisher: Bonus Stage
Platforms: PC
MSRP: TBD

THE FOLLOWING REVIEW IS FOR AN EARLY ACCESS GAME. IT DOES NOT REFLECT THE FINISHED PRODUCT, BUT REFLECTS THE PRODUCT AS IT WAS GIVEN TO US TO REVIEW.

I shouldn’t have to do this. In a perfect world, I wouldn’t have to. But we don’t live in a perfect world, and sometimes things like this happen:

Do not under any circumstances pick up Destiny’s Sword. 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.

Destiny’s Sword puts you in the commander’s chair of the Stellara, a vessel full of cadets thrust into the center of a three-way conflict on the planet Cypris. On one side, the Protectorate, a galactic government tasked with keeping the populace safe and mining the mineral known as Lucidium. On the other, the Consortium, a group of megacorporations who want Cypris and the Lucidium mining for their own purposes, brutally putting down any opposition from the local populace. In the midst of all this, a group of rebels tries to take back their planet from the Consortium and the Protectorate by any means necessary. You and your team will have to bring peace to Cypris and discover a solution to the complex political situation, whether that means violent “pacification,” or more gentle means. But the situation is more complicated than it seems, and good and evil are rarely as clear-cut as they first look.

Destiny’s Sword itself plays out as kind of a traditional visual novel. You navigate through the Stellara, click on text where appropriate, and make decisions when it comes to a branching choice. In between the main “episodes,” you can talk to your crew, tend to wounded in the medbay, check equipment, and do a variety of other tasks. The game claims an advanced personality and background system, where different facets of your squad members’ personalities offer them different kinds of interactions during combat and different ways you have to manage their emotional state, as well as a multilayered branching narrative.

Not much of this is true.

For one thing, the choices the game gives you are somewhat limited and opaque at that. There’s no way to tell if someone has an ability or who’s even making an ability check, so you just have to make a few random choices and hope the right thing happens. There’s not really a lot of direction or transparency, so the whole thing feels weightless, like the game is going to do whatever it wants and you just sit there and click choices to make it advance. While occasionally a skill bar will pop up, or a progress bar for specific tasks, it just seems like they’re there more to provide the idea of any risk than actual risk itself. After all, you have very little connection to what’s going on onscreen, even with the ability to occasionally make a choice to do something. At the end, a commander (and do not get me started on the fact that your character is referred to as “commander” and there’s also a guy who’s your commander and referred to as “Commander” and how confusing that is) or the ship’s AI tells you how you did, or gives you further mission objectives.

That disconnectedness also extends to the crew, those people you’re supposed to be managing the emotional states of. While the game is in early access and some bugs can be expected, there were times where they repeated conversations from the previous chapter, or just didn’t have much to say at all. I was astonished to find out five chapters into the game’s first episode that the guy I’d thought was squad leader was actually the team’s medic, that my team had medical capabilities that weren’t even listed, and that at least one of them hated me, despite no conversational indication we’d ever had anything but a neutral reaction. It also didn’t help that the game doesn’t even teach you half the dialogue system until the end of the first chapter, which means that you essentially don’t even know half the options you have. While the dialogue system does open up, it once again forces you into a series of weightless choices as various values like “TRUST +3” and “DISGUST -6” flash across the screen, seemingly meaning something while not really explaining anything.

Which connects into the larger opacity. When you have a game where choices matter, those choices have to feel like they matter to the player. They have to have weight, consideration, and be something other than a weighted coinflip between several choices you don’t even really know you’re making. When you’re supposed to care about the characters and story, it helps if those characters and that story are understandable quantities you can care about. Unfortunately, Destiny’s Sword doesn’t appear to be quite there yet. There’s too little information, the narrative tries to get you involved in the larger conflict but just feels disjointed, and while you can learn a little about your squad, there’s not a lot of information easily accessible to make you feel like you’re learning anything at all.

Speaking of things that aren’t easily accessible, for a game that’s supposedly “feature complete,” it’s upsettingly easy to get soft-locked. The first time it happened, I was stuck on the medbay screen waiting for an event to fire while it never did. The second time was a little more obvious, with the next chapter’s cinematic being played twice and then the story refusing to progress whatsoever despite having completed all the chapter tasks. This wouldn’t be so bad if the game didn’t autosave constantly, meaning that any soft-locked game has to be started over from the beginning. This also means (much like with the dialogue sections) that you see a lot of repeated content over and over again, hoping that this time, things will actually allow you to progress the story. This is only compounded by a large number of typos throughout the text, things that should be fixed by the time your steam page is boasting that it’s “feature complete” and has text by a New York Times bestselling author. “It’s Early Access” is an excuse that only gets one so far, and when you are claiming a game is “mostly done” on your Early Access page, that confers a certain responsibility. Destiny’s Sword shirks that responsibility.

It’s a shame, because the game’s fairly flashy and the art is excellent, using painted backgrounds and portraits that do tend to change as you talk to people. It’s kind of cool the first time you see the skill bars or progress bars, even if they tend to mean less and less the further you get into the game. Even if a game is sparse, that doesn’t mean it has to be shallow, and I wish a game with this much flash had much more substance and transparency and much less bugs and typos.

But I have to play the game I get, not the game I wanted. Maybe in the future Destiny’s Sword will be worth more of a look. But in the already impressive field of narrative games, and with early access titles that had much less of a pedigree and staff but came out much more finished, this one’s an unfortunate swing and a miss.

The Good:
- Intriguing systems where you manage the crew of your starship and take on away missions
- Fantastic artwork

The Bad
- Bugs mean you end up caught in loops of conversations
- The game can soft-lock you at random, forcing you to start from scratch due to autosaves
- Opaque systems mean choices might as well be random or a coin toss
- A lot of flash, but seemingly little substance

Final Score:

It’s so raw. It’s just so raw. Please make this game better.

Sweet Transit - An Early Access Review

Platform: PC
Developer: Ernestas Norvaišas
Publisher: Team17
Release Date: Early Access as of July 28, 2022

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. There’s a bluesy americana soundtrack by Ely Robbins, a Western-style aesthetic with its laborers and “beginning of the rail era” atmosphere, and the idea of building trains to connect cities and unlock further buildings and advancements is kind of a cool one. You’re set loose on a gorgeous map to build your first centers of industry, and from there, to slowly conquer the New World by connecting it up with trains.

It’s at the point somewhere around building your first train that 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. Sweet Transit is, you see, a systems-based game, in the sense that you have to work out logistics, gates, and kind of puzzle out where the bugs are in your transit system. Some of this is covered by the tutorials. Some of it remains obtuse, always just tantalizingly out of reach. It’s a game with a rather steep learning curve, and one that remains sweetly deceptive even as you bash your head against yet another logistics problem for the fourth time. It’s satisfying, brain-melting, and somehow intriguing in one bizarre package.

Sweet Transit begins with you procedurally generating a map. From there, you place your first warehouse, first village center, and your first industries before finally connecting it all up with railways. As you fulfill more objectives, you slowly open up more options— successfully building a coal plant means you get access to your first train, because you now have a source of fuel, bringing enough people to your village means you open up a market— and connecting the world through a network of rails and signal gates. As nothing moves without a rail network, it places the emphasis on building trains, routes, learning how to set up if/then statements to get your trains to move along those routes, and building signals to control the flow of rail traffic.

So right off the bat, the game is gorgeous. The areas are lush, the colors are vibrant, and even the deserts look like they’re alive. The trains are usually brightly colored in a way that makes the player feel nostalgic for old-style locomotive engines. Between the graphical style and instrumentals, it evokes feelings of the older Sid Meier series Railroad Tycoon, which ran on a similar premise of connecting supply centers with trains in a huge logistical network. With the bluesy Americana of the soundtrack, it makes everything feel of a piece. It’s an excellent presentation.

It’s also satisfying to watch things work, to slowly build up your villages and watch them bustle around as you slowly build the town, then the first industry (usually a fishing dock) and then move on to mines and your first train line. Buildings are grouped by use, you can simply click on any part of the environment, and it’ll bring up a menu about the thing you clicked, with the list of building options and extensions right there. It’s very easy in those first few moments to get a jump-start on building. Then you fall off the difficulty cliff, and the game decides to show you what it’s really like.

Building railroads is…complex. It’s also very easy to get stuck with something that doesn’t work, requiring you to plot things out in advance. While the game does come with an extensive tutorial that shows you how to build and chain together signal blocks, set up the basic if/then statements for your train routes, and connect your first villages, it is also very obtuse. This is not a game for those who are just getting into strategy of this type, it’s essentially a ‘90s sim builder game given modern graphics and a mildly easier to understand interface. Even with the tutorials, it’s got a steeper learning curve, requiring you to really know what you’re doing before you lay those first tracks. But the good news is, after the first few tries, suddenly it starts to hum along, and you’re juggling routes, finding more efficient ways to lay rail, and it all starts to come together.

But to get to that point, there’s a lot of trial and error. While the tutorials do give some guidance, and there are help messages, they seem a little obtuse at times. It took me three tries to get my first functioning railroad, with at least one complete restart. When I finally did get things running, it took me a while to experiment with signals until the trains I had would actually move on the tracks, and in one case, a train I sent to load up supplies would just…pass the station completely rather than loading, for reasons still unclear even with the (somewhat overzealous) message system pointing out any errors in logistics. This is after going through the tutorials. Similarly, a bug in the logistics can stall everything, frustrating the player and requiring them to check exactly what happened.

Furthermore, if you botch a building placement, there’s no real way to move it or correct that mistake once it’s down without deleting everything attached to it and moving it to the correct place. This can get annoying, especially with train routes, since then the trains now have specific instructions they cannot carry out and things will have to be re-added to the route. Further frustrating the placement issues are some bizarre pathing errors when laying train tracks, where trying to construct a simple curve will result in esoteric, looping patterns unless you use the “precise movement” option to build tracks incrementally. It’s kind of an unforgiving system, even as it does so many things right.

All of this could actually be fixed with a more integrated tutorial. The tutorial section is very well done and informative, though as it’s not actually connected to starting up a game, it becomes an exercise where one can get very good at learning the tutorials, but a little fuzzier on applying that knowledge. If there was some way to take you through the early steps of the game, it would do a lot for newer players, allowing them to get a grip on systems in a more practical and applied way. It’s a game with some great ideas and some interesting systems that actually has a kind of coding aspect to it, setting up if/then statements and building with more complexity from there.

But for right now, if you’re a hardcore simulation fan, then this will be a definite delight, a pleasing and cozy-looking game with a lot of interlocking systems that require prior planning and full knowledge of how things work to get everything moving just right. It’s the perfect game for those who know what they’re doing.

It could, however, use a little more polish if you’re still new to the genre.

The Good:
- Easy and intuitive interface
- Lush, pleasant visual style
- Deep and complex logistical mechanics
- Excellent map variety
- A relaxing game with just enough challenge for hardcore building sim fans

The Bad:
- Huge difficulty curve for newcomers
- Frustrating pathing for a game entirely about building transit paths
- Making a wrong move can sometimes erase tons of work.
- Tutorials separate from the main game cause difficulty applying the knowledge to in-game scenarios

In its current early access state, it’s a delight for hardcore sim fans and a nightmare to those just getting into things.

Thy Creature Review

---

Platform: PC
Developer: MazM
Publisher: Growing Seeds Corporation
Release Date: Early Access as of February 19, 2022

---

I want to talk about the difference between “obtuse” and “cryptic.”

It’s a difference few people consider in their storytelling. Most people think one is basically the pretentious version of the other, but that’s where they’re wrong, and not just because “pretentious” is the silliest possible insult for someone attempting something ambitious. No, “cryptic” is a mystery that definitely has something to it. Questions get answered, things are weird, but you know where you stand, more or less. It can be frustrating, but it can also be thrilling and odd and compelling. Carnivale is cryptic. Dark Souls is cryptic. Hell, Myst is cryptic. Every puzzle has a solution, questions have answers, and you only learn enough for a sense of accomplishment and to drive you forward into further knowledge. Cryptic is interesting. Cryptic goes somewhere.

Thy Creature is obtuse.

Obtuse can be a good thing sometimes, when you want to invoke the surreal or have things be weird or add difficulty. Sometimes “opaque” can be even better, just look at most adventure games from the 1990s— a dreamlike feeling, you have no idea what’s going on, but clearly you’re along for the ride. But other times, obtuse is just exhausting, like with Thy Creature. Questions are answered, but it never feels like those answers are satisfying. Progress is made, but it still feels like you’re standing still. It’s clear the game wants you to think something is going on, but it never feels like you make any progression in figuring out what that is. Which is a shame, because there’s the potential to be a really good adventure game here, if it didn’t fall into all the worst pitfalls.

Thy Creature stars The Creature, a patchwork abomination of body parts who is run out of a village and severely wounded by humans. The creature takes refuge in an unusual and ancient tower, one that haunts his memories. Once inside, he finds himself attacked by monsters and accosted by the tower’s trapped inhabitants, who have their own difficulties with memories, all of them looking for the tower’s owner, Victor Frankenstein. To climb the tower and unlock his own memories and experiences, the Creature will have to fight the mysterious monsters known as Nepes, rescue the memories of the tower’s other inhabitants, and eventually reach the top, all while confronting a variety of mysteries and puzzles along his path.

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. The journal promises secrets to uncover about your new friends in the tower and a variety of interesting collectibles to track down, and it has all the makings of an interesting game with a lot of heart behind it.

The game even starts incredibly well, with a fully animated music video welcoming you to the world and showing the Creature’s journey to the mysterious tower, having burned his former home and trudged across the desolate landscape until he finally reaches his destination, the song full of emotion, the strings lush. The tower’s music is creepily atmospheric, and the opening hallways full of defaced and demonic paintings leading into “the fiesta,” a creepy birthday party with a noticeable shift in color scheme, is really effective. Noah’s suitably mysterious, and his guarded behavior combined with you finding his memories makes for an awesome introduction to what should be a compelling mystery adventure game.

Which it would be, if it weren’t so frustrating. Quickly, the core gameplay loop is established: Get insulted by Noah, seemingly your only companion in the place, do some switch puzzles to open up some areas, fight some monsters, grab more memories, then open the exit to the sub-area at which point you get insulted by Noah again, he tells you how to get to the next sub-area, rinse, repeat. This wouldn’t be so bad— each area has its own unique form of “nepe,” the monsters that siphon and hoard memories, putting them in little crystals— but when you realize that for the third time you’ll have to backtrack in and out of rooms, only for your reward to be minimal progress, it gets exhausting.

It also doesn’t help that while each area has its own unique look, the rooms within that area tend to get repetitive and patience with the puzzles tends to run a little thin. Especially when the puzzles get more complicated, meaning you have to move backwards and forwards, opening up pathways, grumbling as I have to essentially perform the same task over and over again, but more difficult this time. It feels padded, like they needed to make up the length of the game by artificially extending things, putting more obstacles and barriers between you and the story.

Which brings us to the battles. Battles in Thy Creature take the form of bullet hell maze sequences. You run around the maze path, dodging bullet patterns until a group of dark crystals appears, then pick up the crystals to damage the creatures. It’s novel, and there’s a sense of urgency at times, with bullets flying from every direction but limited movement keeping things tense. Combined with some interesting creature designs, this makes a lot of the earlier battles in a chapter seem really interesting.

But this, too, falls short. Bullet hell derives its name from the way it fills the screen with projectiles, forcing players to find their way through a seemingly impenetrable wall of light and color. It lives and dies on figuring out how to thread the needle with your hitboxes, to move through the onslaught and come out the other side. Thy Creature by comparison has an awkward hitbox, the limited movement also means you can get easily boxed in and slammed by that awkward hitbox placement, and while there’s some clever darting from cover to cover represented by environmental puzzles in the later battles, it gets frustrating when something representing a stuffed doll but evil shrieks and charges you at warp speed, rapid-firing clusters of bullets over and over again. The repetitive enemy design also doesn’t help, with there being maybe one enemy type for a whole area until the boss.

What’s most frustrating, though, is that it doesn’t always do this. When the boss battles come out, when the story actually progresses, when characters have tender moments together or the Creature tries to learn more about being human— when it’s the parts of the game you can tell the developers worked really hard on, it shines. The clouds part and suddenly you’re playing a game you’re invested in again. There’s a really cool boss battle against a monstrous mutated stuffed bunny that feels tense and epic, but then you remember it’s in Thy Creature or get hit weird because you forgot which switch dissolved which piece of cover, or because your hitbox didn’t cover things this time, and suddenly you’re brought shrieking down to Earth.

The game is still in Early Access, so it’s entirely possible that it’s just lacking in a little polish. Maybe if the pacing were a little faster, if the hitboxes on The Creature were a little clearer, if the regular enemy music wasn’t the same grinding drone, if there wasn’t as much wandering around trying to figure out the solution to a switch puzzle, this could be a stone cold classic. It’s frustrating, because I can see the game they wanted to make. I want to play that game. Hell, I still want to figure out more of what’s going on in this game and see if the story takes a turn. It felt like it was going to.

But it’s not cryptic. it’s not intriguing. It’s a game with a ton of frustratingly good elements that then repeats them over and over until you get tired of them.

And that’s just exhausting

The good:
- Interesting atmosphere
- Unique art style blending anime-esque visuals with gothic horror
- Unusual plot centered around unlocking memories and secrets in a mansion
- Gorgeous soundtrack
- Some interesting depth in discovering journal entries, collectibles, and memories

The bad:
- Frustrating, repetitive puzzles and combat
- Depth gives way to shallowness as the game moves along
- Glacial pacing makes all the rough patches that more obvious

The Last Door Season 2 Review

So 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. 

With that said, 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. 

The Last Door: Season 2 follows Dr. Wakefield, whose patient, Jeremiah Devitt, vanished under mysterious circumstances. With his mentor and colleague Doctor Kaufmann, Wakefield investigates the disappearance, which leads him through an upsetting mental asylum, a strange mansion filled with puzzles, and into the heart of a deep conspiracy involving an otherworldly presence trapped behind a "curtain" between our world and the next.  As Wakefield is drawn further and further into dealings with the sinister masked cabal that call themselves The Playwright, he will be called upon to make a choice, one that will change the course of his world forever. 

The Last Door is a game that trades mainly on an all-encompassing atmosphere brought together by the pixelated visuals, mind-screwy plot, and excellent sound design. As you explore the various levels, the ambient noise creeps in slowly, cluing you in to a variety of goings-on just out of sight, be they cats bricked up in the walls or a vaguely unsettling room full off birds. The pixel graphics are good enough you can usually discern what's going on, but obscure enough that your imagination will easily fill in the blanks. And then the plot, which includes an entire level in a space between worlds, and a surrealistic homage to The Wicker Man, keeps the player convincingly unnerved. 

The episodic length also helps immensely. I took a break after each chapter and played one a day, personally, because doing so allowed for a break and the chapters stayed fresh. Had I just played straight through, I'd imagine I'd have been more fatigued, but as it was, the puzzles were less aggravating when I played the game one chapter at a time instead of taking it in as a full story. 

About those puzzles: They're frustrating. It was frequently difficult to tell where I was supposed to go, and at least two puzzles relied heavily on backtracking, memory, and constant trial and error. I actually put the game down for a while after Episode 2, because the puzzles in that section were much more traditional and thus involved an incredibly frustrating bit of trial and error where you have to move from a series of switches indoors to the outdoor garden, either utilizing an attic window or having to go outside the house entire. A memory/note-taking puzzle also occurs in the last part, where you have to find your way through a forest. Neither is particularly a lot of fun. 

But despite the few puzzles, the game is a masterpiece. There are some genuinely scary scenes, and despite the trial and error, the puzzles are mostly logical and aid with the atmosphere. There's an awesome moment in the last chapter that I don't dare spoil where others games have definitely stumbled, but The Last Door manages to knock it out of the park. 

As one final note, I cannot suggest enough that you play this game through headphones. A huge chunk of the game is sound design, and it has to be experienced to be believed. It plays just fine anyway, but there's just something about dampening the extraneous noise and immersing yourself in The Last Door's soundscape that makes it so much better. 

If you're in the mood for a deep, atmospheric, episodic adventure game, you owe it to yourself to pick this one up. The first season is free, so not being caught up isn't even a good excuse. It may take you a few nights, but the visuals will stay with you forever. 

Full disclosure: The author of this review received the collector's edition of The Last Door Season 2 for this review. They had previously played season one online.

Final score: 4/5

Zombasite Preview

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. 

Zombasite is an isometric action RPG similar to Soldak's earlier game, Depths of Peril. In it, you control a clan in a small settlement. You and other clans are fighting for control of a world on the brink of total collapse, thanks to a twisted necrotic parasite known as the "Zombasite." While you attempt to keep control of your clan and stop the various members from killing each other whenever they get bored or angry enough, a bar at the bottom slowly rises, showing the growth and infection rate of the parasites.

And so, a desperate struggle emerges between you and the various forces. While clans will try to raid you and your enemies below and above ground will send gruesome monsters to attack you, you also have to protect your clan from zombies and research ways to slow down or stop the parasite. You will find yourself focusing on a billion different systems and subsystems in an attempt to keep your clan from collapsing. Even at the lower difficulty levels, I can tell you it is going to be an uphill battle to keep that from happening. I have put several hours into the game, and trying to do everything at once is going to leave you wandering the wasteland and wondering just how your illustrious clan wound up being two people in a fort with no doors. 

But that isn't to say the barrier of entry is all that high. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Zombasite provides its players with many more ways to win than to lose: simply killing all the opposing clans (military victory), having an alliance with the remaining clans left on the map (diplomacy), to completing all the quests on the map. The game also tracks your knowledge and lore about the parasite, making the zombies and infection more manageable as you discover more things about the world. Most enemies are fairly easy to kill early on provided you know what you're doing, while giving you a game experience with a very slow difficulty curve, to its benefit. 

The world is also dynamic and persistent. You can start a new game in an already-generated world, with all that would entail, and as you go along, the world will change. Sometimes people will kill your targets before you can get to them. Clans are constantly shifting in alliance and loyalty between each other, and will go out on raids. Your own clanmates have specific weapon and armor preferences, all of which impact how well they'll be able to fend off invasion and join you on raids. Clans may leave you alone, or they might rush full-on towards you, or spawn demon gates, or any number of things. When  you pop someone into a new instance of the world, they take up a new region, but use the same lore and other features of the older space.

But while the game is in good form currently, it still has a long way to go before it's out of early access. The systems are a little obtuse, and while the help system is helpful, it's also a row of icons along the bottom of the screen that are easy to miss and don't always contain the most useful of information. The sound design also sometimes borders on oppressive, especially in larger battles. When coupled with a skill system that's obtuse even at the best of times, this can make things incredibly frustrating as enemies skill upward. 

Overall, though, I'm looking forward to seeing what Zombasite gets with a full version. It's original, unique, and very complex in spite of its basic trappings, and with a few kinks worked out, should be a new classic. 

The Reviewer was given a copy of the game in exchange for this review. The game is still in early access and is subject to change.

The Culling Early Access Review

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.

The Culling is a game that functions on a simple premise: You have signed up (or maybe been coerced) into the internet's leading game show, a deathmatch where you are packed up in a crate and dropped on a tropical island to murder complete strangers with a variety of implements, most of which you will have to make yourself. When you are murdered, you are out. No respawn, no "back to start," you can spectate, or you can bounce. 

So that's pretty much it. Simple. Run around, kill other people, don't get killed. 

But what makes The Culling interesting is how it deals with those details. First, everything involves an in-game currency called FUNC. Want to craft something? You need FUNC. Want to heal? FUNC. Access the higher-level airdrops you can call in? More FUNC. It kind of allows for prioritizing your sources for the most part-- it might be better to save up and get the airdrop rather than opening the crate near the center of the arena, or even better still to roll your own weapons and avoid using much of the currency at all, saving it to heal. The ability to craft weapons also adds some strategy, allowing for both ranged and melee options.

And melee is actually now a huge part of the game. The Culling does away with the usual run-n-gun in exchange for tense melee fights between you and your opponents, with the optimal tactic seeming to be a "hit  and run" approach where one swings wildly at their opponent, or turtles while waiting for an opening, constantly moving in and out and in and out in an attempt to gain the other hand. It's a marked change from bunny-hopping and circle strafing (though people who have tried that met the business end of my taser pretty quickly).

Also, the sound design is amazing. This may be one of the few FPS's I play with headphones on, because sound matters that much. You can hear the direction your opponents are coming from, the whirr of nearby cameras, and just about everything else. It's also direction-dependent, with sounds popping up in the proper location, allowing you to plan or run away when someone gets too close. It feels like the noise has reason and body, which adds another dimension over the usual run-n-guns. 

And finally, the game actually has a good sense of humor. While the callouts might get annoying and repetitive, there are some amusing moments, and the tutorial doesn't actually make me want to rush through it immediately. Overall, it's not bad.

I'm looking forward to seeing the finished product when all is said and done. There are some good ideas here, and while the single arena offers no real variety, it's nice to have something familiar and figure out the ins and outs of where you find yourself. The game definitely could benefit from more models and better options, but in its current form, it's beyond solid. 

This game was early access. The reviewer was provided with a release code.

Victor Vran Preview

    Victor 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. 

      What sets Victor Vran apart from the other games mentioned above is the ability to jump over walls, wall-bounce to hard-to-reach points, and otherwise navigate the battlefield in a wholly different way. It adds an element of platforming to the game, as well as a level of tactical control-- Why get swarmed by a horde of spiders when you can get to higher ground above them, or stand on a nearby hedge to avoid their attacks? Why not leap over your enemies and get the drop on them from another angle? 

View fullsize

Victor faces down a horde of the undead.

        While the game is still in early access and so there's placeholder art and enemy variety is a little low, the game's combat system is completely functional at this point, and many of the levels are finished, so you can go tearing through castle gardens, crypts, and caves with a variety of swords, scythes, hammers, guns, and demonic powers. Adding some variety to things,  there are a series of challenges for each mission, urging players to consider exploring all of an area to hunt down secrets, chests, and bonus bosses to defeat. 

Two area of effect attacks clash

           I'm excited to see how Victor Vran develops into a full-fledged game, and while I know there's definitely some missing pieces right now, what they have already is reason enough to keep watching this.