Brothers - A Tale of Two Sons

A nice short little adventure with easy achievements. Really enjoyed it, although there are some minor things that bothered me, which makes the universal praise a bit confusing to me.

First off the positive aspects though. The mechanic of controlling each brother individually was definitely unique and entertaining. Sometimes I had to figure out who's who, so I always preferred having the older brother on the left and the younger one on the right, so that they align with the analog sticks they're controlled with, but once you get used to the controls it's somewhat fascinating to play two characters at once. It's somewhat surreal to look at the screen and see them move so naturally and despite being in control it disconnects you from what's happening. I felt like I'm watching a movie or something. That's not a bad thing, it only underlines how idiosyncratic the feature is.

What I didn't like was the gibberish language they were talking. Growing up in a multicultural area, and being a son of migrants myself, most words sounded familiar, but didn't make sense at all. So it really took a lot of immersion away from the game when they just sounded completely ridiculous in, what supposed to be, moving scenes.

It also felt a bit incoherent, because this game got really, really fucking dark all of a sudden. At first it was a beautiful hike through the woods, but then it was all about death, halucinations and what not. You could argue the sudden change is an artistic tool to add more weight to the events, but it just felt out of place.

Still an enjoyable experience and alone the gameplay mechanics make it worth being played.

Masochisia

I've won this game from Aurorable as part of a little event she made for people who played more than 50% of their wins from Steamgifts. Well, technically I won, but I was the only entry, so you can consider this a direct gift and despite not being part of the birthday batch I wanted to play it as soon as possible.

I don't want to say much about this game, because I feel like going into it without any knowledge is the best way to enjoy it. All I want to say is that it's an experience worth being played. That obviously also depends if you're into the stuff that Masochisia presents, because trust me, it's not for the faint of heart, but even if you don't like dark, disturbing topics and overall psychology then it's still worth it. It has a lot of elements which are rather experimental and I've never seen them used in a game before.

The store page is probably giving you enough information to tell you what to expect without spoiling any of it.

And I somehow wanted to subtly link my review of the game, but I forgot to work that in. I'm lazy and uncreative.

Superhot

By now everyone knows what this title is all about, so I won't have to tell you anything about the fun time-beding mechanic, right?

The story of the game is rather short, taking maybe 2 hours to complete, depending on how fast you clear the levels. It's trying really hard to be meta and deep, which isn't a bad thing, but it has been done before, maybe even better. So the philosophical tone is a bit overused, but it's just something that ties together each level. So I still appreciate the effort. After all it's about the gameplay here, not a story.

So is it worth the money playing a 2 hour campaign? Probably not, but you get a ridiculous amount of challenges, endless modes and other unlockables after that, which adds a lot of replayability. It also gets crazy difficult, so my initial goal to 100% Superhot isn't as easy as I thought it would be.

What I absolutely love about the game are the visuals though. It's rare to find titles that try to be visually appealing, beyond pixel art and your usual videogame realism. Everything about this is perfectly designed. From the logo to the levels. I don't say I know shit about graphic design, but I bet anyone that does will highly appreciate the looks of this game.

That's why I took a shitload of screenshots. Thumbs up pl0x.

System Shock: Enhanced Edition

I absolutely love to catch up on older games, some of which I have never properly played or only watched my cousin play when I was a wee lad. Back then I treated games as arcade titles and ignored story content. Input some cheat and wreak havoc! It's a mix of nostalgia as well as making up leeway.

And in some cases I never actually played them as a kid, never even knew of their existence. I like to get a little education on important videogame culture if you will.

And System Shock is one of them, hearing loads of praise for being a game ahead of its time and an important influence on later videogames, but the thing is that they never age that well. When I heard about the Enhanced Edition I thought it was time to catch up and luckily Quisty provided the chance for that.

Unfortunately it's not that much enhanced, really. The user interface is still confusing as fuck, the level architecture is the same labyrinth it was before and objectives are still transferred through lengthy audio logs. Don't get me wrong, it's a good game, but it's just hard to navigate through and I can't play it for more than an hour. If you die for some weird reason and have to do an hour worth of progress all over, you rather quit the game than to try again. I've put over 2 hours into it and I'd really wish to finish it, but I think I will spread a few short game sessions over the coming weeks, to make it more enjoyable for myself, rather than rushing though to the end of it.

That's why it's currently unfinished and will probably stay that way for a little while. I just feel really, really bad that I don't enjoy it as much as I expected, especially since it was a gift.

The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth

During all of my recent backlog beating I've played Isaac every now and then and some decent progress. I am only missing 3 endings and the list of acquired items is getting fuller with each run. I don't know if I'm going after all the achievements, but I definitely want to get all endings so I can at least consider it beaten. Playing with characters like Samson and Azazel definitely helps, since they are so overpowered. At least I think they are. I'm a noob!

Speedrunners

Not knowing what to play next I picked up Speedrunners again, which has recently left Early Access. It added a whole lot of new content and achievements, so that was worth checking out. It has a completely new campaign to play and I must say that it's fucking shite, at least when you compare it to the earlier story mode this game had and apparently cut from the 1.0 version. Before you had a story told through comic panel sequences and timed levels, some boss levels even á la Super Meat Boy. Now you have simple races against the AI on the multiplayer maps you already know. Really, really awefully cheap dialogues at the beginning of each race, which propably are supposed to tell you about the mechanics of the game, but are just completely unnecessary. Even when you play on the toughest difficulty it just feels like racing against other players online. So that was a disappointment.

The Purge

No, not the movie. The purge is something I planned to do the coming weeks.

I remove games from my library every now and then. You know, bundle trash and freebies. Usually I would watch a random gameplay video on YouTube, see what it plays and looks like and decide if I want to keep a game or not, but this time I compiled a list of games that are on the edge of being removed permanently and I will play them myself to see if I remove them or not. Maybe get hooked on the game in the process or just play it for 30 minutes and deinstall it.

And because I will actually play the games this time around I even picked some games that might be good, considering the reviews they've got, because I will judge first hand if they are worth keeping.

I thought I'd list all the games here, but I'm lazy and if I play them anyway it would be worthless trying to convince me. So having a list here has no purpose really. Sorry, not sorry.

xoxo