• Saints Row: Gat out of Hell
  

  14 hours playtime

  20 of 45 achievements

• Stories Untold
  

  3 hours playtime

  13 of 13 achievements

Saints Row: Gat out of Hell was my first Saints Row game, and was a lot of fun - a ridiculous super-powered game built on the GTA framework. Rather than going for realism, the game went the complete opposite direction, starting you out with super speed and wings, and piling additional super powers on top. It seemed the developers wanted to pile on the absurdity too, with delightful results - from the stated goal of punching Satan in the face, to a mid-game cutscene that had me grinning with joy.

There are very few story missions, relying instead on completing activities in the open world. However, you’re free to do just the activities that interest you, and nothing is locked off, so it’s pretty pleasant overall and the meter fills before you know it. All in all a delightfully silly and over-the-top super-powered romp.

The one downside, however, was that it was rather unstable on my i5 / RX 480 system. Sometimes it ran fine for hours, and other times it would freeze and crash to desktop 2-3 times an hour. It almost always crashed when I was just exploring and fighting in the city, rather than doing one of the activities, and it automatically restarted the game after a crash (and also caused the Origin client to crash if it was open in the background). Closing all background tasks and applications seemed to help improve stability.

Stories Untold is a delightful little suspense game. Very retro in design and execution, it evokes an ’80s aesthetic in everything from the audio and visual design to using a text parser for some of the gameplay. The individual stories are interesting and varied, and are at times really clever. They build on each other, employing things you learn in the first story in the second, and so on. While the first story starts out with an initially intimidating text parser, it was easy and simple to play through, and later stories use more mouse-based interaction.

I enjoyed playing through the individual stories, but it’s the fourth story that really made me think, “Wow, this game is great!” It’s really clever and smartly done, and was an excellent conclusion that elevated the entire game.

I would characterize Stories Untold more as suspense rather than horror, because it builds and instills a feeling of dread throughout rather than utilizing jump scares, or body horror, or being chased by a monster. As someone who doesn’t like horror games (or movies) because they’re too scary, I had no problems playing Stories Untold.