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It's a pretty run-of-the-mill Metroidvania that won't win any awards or make it to any "Best Games" probably ever, but is good fun if you're into Metroidvanias.

The best-looking part of the game are the cutscenes, but they are anime-style so if you don't like that aesthetic, you won't like them. The game itself doesn't look bad, but animations are a bit stiff, there's not a lot of variety in the enemies, and locations look different but feel same-y -- it's not immediately easy to tell where you are just by looking at a screenshot. That said, it has a level of polish so I won't be too harsh on it.

The music is mostly good, but doesn't really connect to the levels in any meaningful way. So yeah, I enjoyed it while I played, but I'll hardly listen to the OST afterwards and besides one or two earworms, I already forgot most of the rest.

Gameplay-wise, there are a lot of rough edges. Movement is generally slow and your upgrades don't improve it a lot -- it just got good once I got the light armor, because then you'll be cruising through rooms with extra air, extra speed, and some contact damage to obliterabe mobs. Combat is generally fine -- I like the options you have with melee and projectiles, and the different specials you can unlock with each armor. The armor system, with elemental weaknesses for enemies, is also pretty interesting, and elemental navigation is generally okay (particularly for water and fire, not so much for earth as it's pretty boring and uninteresting). My main issue with the armor system is that you need to cycle through them sequentially using the shoulder buttons, which can be a hassle in intense combat situations. A selector wheel with action slowdown effects would have been a much better choice here. You'll be fighting a lot of bosses, sometimes every 15 or 20 minutes, and these fights tend to be fast, snappy, and fun. You'll die the first time learning their patterns, and then usually crush them the second time (the easier ones) or just persevere many times over (the harder ones), but generally feels fair and manageable. There is a plot, it kind of sucks, it doesn't matter.

What really is lacking is on upgrades, as there are very few, you unlock them pretty slowly, and they hardly make that much of a difference individually. The quests are also pretty meh - find a NPC, defeat a boss, talk to the NPC again, mission accomplished. The map doesn't have markers and you cannot add your own, so make sure you always loot every room you enter the first time, otherwise you'll have no idea what you're missing at the end of the game. And my absolute least favorite part of the game is the light bar -- it doubles as a shield meter but also as a projectile 'ammo' meter. Having dual use is not such a big issue by itself, but some bad design choices compound it.

First, some bosses require their shields to be broken by the use of projectiles, but they usually have some round of attacks before exposing their shields for a short duration. If you're in one of your transformed forms (siren, serpent or phoenix) and you're out of energy (because you got hit before or used the projectile for self-defense), you're left with no way to recharge your light bar, hence, without a way to break the boss weakness, hence, forced to survive another round of attack just to have the chance to hit its shield the next time. Some bosses also punish you if you don't break their shield when you can with attacks that are unavoidable (like the Gryphon boss). And that just sucks! I don't think it's fair that the game forces you to use a tool to break the boss stance when that tool is consumed in myriad ways and can't easily be rechargeable. If you're not getting hit or not using projectiles offensively you're probably fine, but it's very hard to not get hit here.

Second, and related - spike damage. If you fall into a pit, your light bar is immediately drained. Meaning you either get out of there quickly, find a platform, defeat any nearby enemies, and then recharge the light bar, or risk losing important health points in quick succession if you don't fix it. Once your light bar depletes you have the option of immediately filling it by completing a quick-reload mechanic, but it's really, really, really hard to get it right even if you know it's coming, and it's a big distraction. Gears of War pulled it effectively because you usually had a good heads-up when the quick reload would show up and you could focus on it without being distracted by the action around you. 9YOS forces you to pretty much rely on it if you want to stay alive, but makes it very hard to accomplish it, which is just frustrating.

Overall, it does a lot of good things, but so many poor design choices prevent me from recommending this to everyone. For Metroidvania lovers like me, it will be fine. Maybe even good. But for the general public, it'll mostly be a frustrating and disappointing experience.

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Imagine GNOG, but with way fewer contraptions to interact with and lots and lots of forced, heavy-handed 'plot' supposed to be an emotional roller-coaster where the protagonist fixes people's lives by fixing their objects.

It's not a bad game per se, and technically there's very little to fault, but I would be prepared to pay more money for this game if it had way less dialogue and 'story' (honestly, I could survive if it had none) and instead had more objects to repair.

One of the best walking simulators I had the pleasure of playing. For a game where you barely do anything more than walking left and right and interacting with NPCs and certain objects, this keep me hooked more than it had any right to.

What makes Night In The Woods from a good to a great game its the quality of the writing. All characters are multi-layered and believable, and their interactions always go a layer deeper than you would expect. Not only that, but everyone has some pathos, including the setting i.e. the city of Possum Springs. Trauma is everywhere, like it or not. What changes is how people react to it and deal with it. And our protagonist, Mae Borowski, is really flawed, which just gives a lot of room to create these situations where emotionally unstable folks just clash and have to deal with the fallout later. It's great.

The production values are also pretty high. The UI is clean and allow you to focus and take in the environment. Animations are fluid and every scene is shock-full of detail and props that enhance the believability. The soundtrack, man, is glorious. And don't get me started on the journal, so shock-full of personality just through doodles. The game sprinkles minigames every now and then to switch things up, and it really helps. Things like band practice, miracle babies feeding time, eating pizza, opening windows, etc. It didn't need to do that, but I'm glad it does.

All in all, it's one of those games that refuses to be explained. When you put all cards on the table, it sounds boring or subpar. When you play it, it's a vibe and works much better than you would expect. It has to be played slowly, maybe one day at a time, so there's enough time for all the themes to sink in. I highly, highly recommend it for anyone who has the minimal interest on walking sims and just human nature and the tragedy of human condition.

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Chernobylite is a hesitant thumbs up for me. TL;DR it is a game with great production values, a solid plot (hard to follow at times and with a poor twist at the end), and a really well-developed universe to explore and live in, but that is marred by poor pacing and repetitive gameplay. At 30 bucks, if will be worth if you buy it, but you'll have to endure some repetitive stuff to see the credits roll. Buyer beware.

Now, let's dive a bit deeper. The absolute highlight of this game is the universe you'll be playing in. Combine real-world locations that were scanned for the game with great visual effects and texture work, and you will feel like you're in Chornobyl, period. The soundtrack, the fog, the rain, everything contributes to that aura and atmosphere so thick you can cut with a knife. The first time you enter each map is particularly exhilarating, as you never know what to expect, or where. Each area has a ton of landmarks that allow you to navigate effectively without the map, and I had a lot of fun just being in that world. At least at first. Some of the earlier cracks I noticed in the game was the fact that every character (NPC or enemy) in the game wears a mask, clearly done to avoid animating faces, and the poor optimization (I had to tune every setting to the minimum and still could barely crack 30 FPS, whereas I played Elden Ring and RDR2 in higher settings with better performance).

So graphics and music/sound effects are good, but what about gameplay? Here things start to get iffy. Chernobylite alternates between a stealth game and an action shooter, with emphasis on stealth particularly early on, before you have enough resources to spend them on full-on combat encounters. As a stealth game, it works but it's not great - enemies are kind of stupid, they see you but then you hide behind a small bush and they pretend you were gone and never there. You can bait enemies by staying long enough in their vision cone that they decide to investigate, which allows for easy pickings. I used a crossbow early in my game, which is supposed to be a silent weapon, and half the times it would be silent, the other half it would alert the whole camp of my presence immediately, and it was never clear when or where that would happen. If you can tolerate the slow patrol cycles of your enemies, you can usually clear enemy camps without being noticed, at least early in the game before your enemies start wearing body armor and helmets. And this is an efficient way of saving resources, but very boring, repetitive, and unengaging gameplay loop, which is a terrible combination. Stealth is also problematic in an open-world game like this one (each map is a small open-world, with you having a lot of freedom on how to move around) since it's easy to just avoid combat and go somewhere else if you want, as the game area is usually mostly open fields. This is great if you want to evade patrols, but terrible if they spot you since being detected means 4-5 enemies immediately converging to your position, with little defensive cover, and them having perfect accuracy. Remember the small bush that made you invisible before? Now you're exposed butt-naked even behind it.

Well, eventually you'll have to forfeit stealth and go into combat mode. Before you get a fully upgraded weapon of choice (I alternated between a rifle and the railgun), you'll be handicapped. Weapons can only be shot when aiming down sights (shooting without ADS executes a melee attack), and the shooting is tactical in the sense there's a lot of sway and recoil. In places with cover, tactical shooting is incredible, but in an open field with enemies flanking you from all sides, arcade shooting would have been more appropriate. At some point you'll be forced into combat because enemies start getting helmets, which prevents you from one-shotting them with a silent weapon such as a crossbow, and body armor which prevents you from stealth melee-killing them. Once I had my fully upgraded rifle, those combat encounters became laughable because you can choose to initiate most encounters, and since it's more tactical than arcade-y, having better ground will usually leave you on the upper hand. With a fully upgraded rifle, for instance, it's not hard to clear a full encampment with 5-6 heavily armored dudes without taking a hit, simply choosing where to initiate combat from and letting them charge into you.

Which is to say that the enemy encounters go from dull and boring (early game) to easy and unengaging once you have your arsenal upgraded. It's a weird progression and while it's satisfying to clear a level killing everyone without taking a hit, it makes me confused if this is a stealth or tactical combat game.

Early on you'll rely a lot on exploration and resource-gathering, and this is a very fun part of the game. You have to craft structures at your base to improve life for your allies, and also craft consumables to use in missions, including ammo. Early on everything is hard to come by and you'll be scrapping to craft anything. By the halfway mark, I had all structures built, all weapons fully upgraded, and a lot of field structures in place to use throughout missions, so the survival pressure was entirely off. At that point, I started rushing through the maps, since I didn't need resources anymore and I had seen everything on each map, even though the game still forced me to re-visit them frequently for the story missions.

And here's the game biggest flaw - the pacing. Structurally, you have 25-30 story missions, taking place on a selection of 6-7 maps. Meaning you'll be revisiting each map 5-6 times at least. It might not sound bad, but the third time you go into a map, you know it already. You probably already cleared each corner, and there's very little surprise. Still, you're forced to trek 5-10 minutes from one end to the other of this mostly empty map with a lot of resources you don't need and enemies you can either completely overpower or ignore. And this is when I really thought about abandoning the game - I was already 15 hours in and felt I had seen and done everything I wanted, and yet, had barely touched half the story missions. The story itself is interesting (even thou the final twist is crap) and has some good choices to be made throughout (which also are mostly irrelevant since they can be changed at any time, they clearly signal to you if they were good or bad the moment you make them, and they don't truly affect the ending), so it feels like they stuck a half-finished choices made onto a good story, added some padding and hoped you would continue playing long after the game stopped being fun.

All in all, it's not a bad game. But I think it would be such a superior game if it was half as long, and made you only visit each map once or twice. As I said in the beginning -- not a bad game, but buyer beware.

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The Darkside Detective is one of those games that, technically, do not do anything wrong, but that are so mid and unoriginal and unfun that I think I would be doing you, the reader, a disservice by recomending it.

Gameplay wise, this is as basic as a point and click gets. It reminds me a lot of point and click games I got on CD-ROMs bough with magazines in the mid-90s. Absolutely run of the mill. Drag an object to another object, either in the inventory or on your screen, and advance. Do that enough times and you beat the game. While I like the minigames, it's hard to justify a purchase just for them.

Graphically, this is what I call lazy pixel art, since the pixels are so big that one would be better off working with vector graphics at this point. For a 2017 game, either you go for detailed pixel art, or you abandon the pretense and work with vector graphics. Blocky pixels like this are just lazy. The screens are usually either static or have small animations that make the lazy label even more warranted.

There's music, but little to nothing SFX and no VA, so yeah, what else did you except?

I could live with all these limitations if dialogue was solid and the game was fun and well-written. But guess what, I saved the worst for last. The dialogue is literally the weakest link in this experience. Like RESTLESS SOUL, The Darkside Detective is one of these games where every interaction prompts a dialogue, and every dialogue tries to be fun. When you're bombarded with your ninth joke in the span of 60 seconds, things stop being funny and start being grating. I literally played the first two chapters normally (I considered writing "enjoyed the first two chapters", but that would be a stretch), then kind of rushed through chapters 3 and 4, and literally speedrun chapter 5 and 6 with a guide because at that point I was so sick of the dialogue that I just wanted to see credits roll, uninstall it and never look back. This is the level of bad writing we're presented here.

And sure, a lot of people could argue that no individual aspect of this game is bad enough to warrant a thumbs down, but I argue that writing is. And even if it wasn't, the other legs of this stool are wobbly enough to make the whole thing crumble.

Is this a bad game or the worst game of the year? No. But in an universe where we have Wadjet Eye P&C games, and literally thousands of other games, recommending this one feels morally wrong

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I don't have anything new to say about this game that haven't been said by many reviewers and game critics before, so I'll stick to my experience.

I first played RE1 in the PSX in 1996 with my brother and my neighbor. I was six at the time, my brother nine and my neighbor 11. They held the controller, I watched from the sidelines. We never made it too far into the game - we played at night, and I clearly remember the first zombie scene, trying to flee the mansion, and the corridor with dogs. I think we dropped the game shortly after because I can't remember anything else from that time, and I was absolutely terrified of it. That was the beginning of the end for me when it came to horror games, I just felt I couldn't handle them.

Fast forward some 25 or almost 30 years later, and I'm playing games again, now as an adult. Recently tackled some scarier games like FEAR, SIGNALIS (abandoned, couldn't handle it), Hellblade (does that count?), Little Nightmares, and some unsettling but lighter games such as Daniel Mullin's The Hex and Pony Island, Fatum Betula, Limbo, System Shock 2, The Last of Us, etc. Then I finally felt ready to return to this game. Got this remake and booted it up, hoping for the best.

The experience I had was incredible. The game looks really, really good. Textures, models, pre-rendered backgrounds, the lightning, the sounds of footsteps, the growls, moans, and screams, it's a whole vibe. For the first two-thirds of the game, while I was still getting me bearings around the mansion and unsure of what was to come or where or when, I felt EXTREME pressure. It was unrelenting. And I feel that's what makes the first Resident Evil so special, to the point it coded and established the survival horror genre. You're never sure if now is the right time to save, because you might run out of ink ribbons when you need them the most. You're never sure if this is the zombie it's worth burning or even shooting, because you don't know if you'll be returning to that room or not, or where's the next ammo cache or fuel canister. Also, can you spare the inventory for that green herb? A first, blind playthrough of RE is marvelous in that sense, you're always on the edge and always second-guessing your decisions at every turn. I had some cheap deaths throughout my play, but luckily never really ran out of resources (showing I was over-conservative with them)

Voice acting and cutscenes are a bit cheesy, soapy and melodramatic, but I feel that's what they were going for and it lands. I think I would prefer a more serious style, it would blend better with the atmosphere, but what's on display there is not too bad.

And there you have it - my take on this great game, and the perfect way to cultivate a new Resident Evil fan, and someone who might one day pick SIGNALIS again and this time not suck entirely hahaha

Bounced off PRETTY hard. Think Baba is You meets Into The Breach. The problem is that Baba is You haunts me and my brain is not wired for that, and while I haven't played Into The Breach, I played FTL from Subset Games and that's another game I bounced off pretty hard. So yeah, bounce + bounce = Mobile Suit Baba, which is insta-bounce for me. Was fun for the first 12 minutes before I hit a rockwall and threw my computer off the window

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Uhhhhhh I agonized for a long time whether to give it a thumbs up or down, but the verdict is down. Consider this a rant, since I'm still playing the game, but very frustrated at this point and there's still so much game left.

Aeterna Noctis has SO MUCH POTENTIAL, but I feel it was squandered by trying to be too much for too long. If you know nothng about the game, imagine Hollow Knight meets Celeste but not as good as any of the inspirations. It prides itself in being a precision platformer Metroidvania, but the platforming is not as good as Celeste, and the combat is not as good as Hollow Knight. It tries to do both, and to a certain extent it succeeds, but it lacks the grace and expressiveness that each of its inspirations show in their respective subgenres.

Platforming here is not great because you don't have the same level of midair control or wall control that Madeleine has, and you frequently don't have visibility over your platforms. Screens here are huge, both vertically and horizontally, and while that's great for an exploration-based metroidvania, it's awful for one where you're suposed to land precisely on platforms that disappear after one second. So, so many of the puzzles require projectile control, which is also awful. I don't mind the idea behind the arrow and the teleport arrow, but they are not smooth to aim and to use, particularly when you have to use them repeatedly in the same platforming challenge. In Celeste, you could always see your whole screen so it was effortless to mentally map your route and execute it. Here you only see chunks of the challenge, have to pray that you'll land where you want with little mid-air control, and if you get it wrong enough times, you're sent back. Also, late game time trials are available and splinkered throughout the world, which makes extremely frustrating when you can't get a single bronze medal in any of them. Gate those things for NG+ or for late game, for Aeterna's sake, since this is not part of the main path which is already long enough as it is. Add the fact that Temple Trials are not only extremely punishing, but they are also required since many critical-path skills are locked behind them, and you have a game that's super punishing even in the easiest difficulty and even before getting to the optional content.

Platforming is so hard and punishing that I was pretty much forced to always have the gem that prevents you from losing souls when you die and the one that slows down time when shooting arrows, because without these two, progress is effectively impossible. Even with the souls gem, levelling up was incredibly, incredibly slow, gaining less than one skill point per hour usually, and with good upgrades locked behind 20 or 30 skill points. When you're forced to waste two of your gem slots just to stay alive and be able to cope with the normal platforming challenges, you're left with very little room to experiment with the remaining gems.

Then there's combat. It's not …. bad. It's just also not good. The dash doesn't truly connect, your jump usually is too short to avoid threats, the weapons you acquire throughout the game are mostly gimmicks, and your base damage after 20 hours of game is mostly the same as when you started …. it's just weird. Enemies become progressively more spongy and come in bigger packs with more tricky attack patterns, but it feels you don't become more skilled or more apt to deal with them, you just become more tanky and able to soak damage while trying to outdamage them. Hollow Knight excelled at boss fights. Boss fights here are, at best, good (never great), usually boring (basically outcompeting DPS), at worse grating like the Phoenix or the Underground Fortress AI, one of the most grating combat encounters I can remember facing on a Metroidvania.

And my last complaint is that the game refuses to end. It just can't take no for an answer. I'm 21 hours into the game, and at that point I was already on the final stretch of Hollow Knight and was already deep into Chapter 9 of Celeste. Here I'm barely over 50%, and I can clearly see there are huge areas in the map completely unexplored. Every area is bigger than it has to be, and require more backtracking than you would like. Fast travel is limited and usually forces you to keep redoing the same stretches over and over and over and over. Mapping is a chore - if you miss the cartographer when you arrive at an area (highly likely as most areas have multiple entry points and branching paths very early on), then you're navigating blind for a good hour or so until you find him, if not more.

And everything I said is such a shame, because if the game just was a bit tighter, shorter, with faster progress through the upgrade tree, more of these platforming gauntlets placed after the credits roll or on optional late-game areas, this could potentially be one of the best metroidvanias I had every played. For my first 5 or 10 hours I thought this looked better, sounded better, was more interesting and more fun to play than Ori, for instance. The visuals are incredible, with beautiful areas, a lot of parallax, variety in the environments and enemies, and lots and lots of good visual effects. The piano track is haunting like the world we inhabit, but each area has its own energy and pace. The plot truly is interesting and go to some wild places when you less expect. It's a hauntind and beautiful world with intriguing lore.

But unfortunately, by trying to be too much for too long and failing to land its main hooks (combat and platforming), Aeterna becomes a chore that refuses to end, but also refuses to let you reach the ending through punishing platforming and unexpressive combat. Buyer beware.