Recent reviews by SigmaSyndicate

Best of the best, highly recommended for everyone to try, regardless of personal tastes


One of the best atmospheric gothic horror games of all time. Despite how many times it's been imitated, nothing has really ever come close to matching the original. The graphics are dated, and gameplay is somewhat basic, but the game's ambiance and writing are truly one-of-a-kind.

Frictional Games has an innate understanding of what makes horror scary, and as a result the game is tightly designed and extremely well-paced. It's dark, gruesome, and terrifying, and it's a game I would recommend that everyone play at least once, just to experience.

What to expect: Amnesia: The Dark Descent is a first-person gothic horror adventure game from 2010, famously featuring no form of combat or any way to retaliate against enemies. As a result, the majority of the game will be spent solving puzzles, exploring a gloomy Victorian-era Castle, and evading pursuing/patrolling enemies. The game is about 8-10 hours long on a first playthrough, and an additional 2 hours of time will be needed to unlock the rest of the game's secrets.

While the game has not received many updates, there is one additional, high-difficulty campaign: Justine, that will require an additional couple of hours to complete. There is also an extensive modding community and modding tools for the game and many unique individual campaigns available for download.

I DESPISE this game.
You have to do a lot of dumb things to make me *HATE* a game, but this game did all of them like it was running through a checklist.

On paper, this game should be everything I like, hardcore fantasy RPG with interesting mechanics and depth in both story and gameplay. The problem lies in the mechanics themselves, whose mistakes feed on and compound each other until just playing the game is the most infuriating thing I've ever subjected myself to.

There's a good game somewhere in here, but I don't have any interest in torturing myself to find it.

• Only one save slot combined with some of the worst check-pointing I've ever seen. Some games can get away with this, but those games usually don't have branching storylines with unclear permanent consequences.
  
• You can't directly load your last save unless you die. Instead, you have to back out of the game completely, and load your save from the main menu.
  
• Game won't tell you about useful (and sometimes essential) game mechanics because it's too busy telling you that wolves hunt in packs and that swords are pointy and that I should try and avoid dying because dying is bad.
  
• Some quests are time-sensitive, but the game won't tell you which ones, or where a point of no-return may be. Doing what feels like a sidequest may kill other major characters and even lock you out of entire questlines if you haven't done their quests berforehand.
  
• Quests that are available extremely early on (and only available in the early game, see above) will take you through locations that are way higher than your current level, meaning you'll need to find obtuse routes to complete them, or waste time and resources throwing yourself at high-level enemies that barely take any damage from you while dealing instant-death in one or two hits.
  
• Your character moves at the speed of a snail stuck in maple syrup. Dash mitigates this, but your Stamina will run out fairly quickly when doing so.
  
• Inventory management is done per-person. This serves no other function other than adding unnecessary button presses to doing incredibly basic inventory and equipment management. Ordinarily, I wouldn't care, but because this game likes to throw you into incredibly challenging fights without telling you, it means stopping every 10-15 seconds to scarf down healing items, giving healing items to allies, or taking healing items from allies so I can use them.
  
• Encumbrance is so aggressive that having literally nothing but clothes and armor halves my inventory size. Combine this with the inventory management deal above and this means stopping every time you pick something up to give stuff to your pawns so you can carry things. Healing items are incredibly heavy for their relative size and usefulness, so your inventory will likely be 90% healing + stamina items and nothing else.
  
• This could just be me and my skill level, but the hitboxes on enemies seem small relative to their appearance. On multiple occasions, hits that felt like they were spot on seemed to phase through the enemy. As a result, the first hit(s) of your combos can knock the enemy out of range of the rest of the combo.
  
• The combat is well-designed and flows well, but (on Normal difficulty, at least), the enemies are all damage sponges, and enemies love to call in reinforcements or flee into groups of other enemies just when you think you're done, leading to chains of killing entire groups of enemies only for the last one to run away into another group of enemies for you to fight. Even simple strolls across less than a quarter-mile of terrain can result in 30 minute skirmishes where you're forced to clear out the entire area.

TL;DR - I thought I was going to love this game, since fantasy RPGs are usually my jam. Instead, I got a game that's just tedious, frustrating, unrewarding, and has no respect for your time.

So, I'm done with it. Get f*cked, Dragon's Dogma.

This game is less a quirky anime-style comedy JRPG featuring anthropomorphized video game consoles as playable characters and more a playable meme that nobody will ever admit to their friends that they've played. But it is also that first thing.

As far as video games go, it's okay, I guess.

Overall Grade: B+

• Danganronpa is a murder-mystery visual novel series involving a group of high school students trapped somewhere, with the only promise of escape being the command to murder someone without being caught. V3 is the third game in the series... sort of.
  
• Gameplay centers around presenting evidence, refuting arguments and convincing your fellow classmates of who the killer is by literally shooting down their words on screen. It's been polished to a mirror sheen over several games, although ambiguous writing can still make finding the exact solution the game wants from you to be obnoxiously difficult.
  
• Writing quality is probably the worst out of the three games; not awful or anything, but the game's desire to stick to its own tropes works to its detriment here. Characters tend to act in ways that contradict the way their personality was established for the sake of the narrative. Multiple times the game threatens to do something really interesting only to instead cop out and do the very obvious thing instead. Story can hit you with some serious emotional gut punches, though.
  
• The ending. Everyone talks about the ending. Without wishing to spoil, you'll probably just end up pretending it didn't happen, regardless of how you feel about it, or if you thought it was good or not. In my opinion, it retcons the entire series to make the whole thing less interesting. It's the third act equivalent of "It was all a dream", and I don't see how that's a clever subversion as opposed to a major copout
  
• Post-game optional modes are the best in the series. You have the usual dating mode, sans the building projects that were in School Mode and Island Mode of the last two games. In their place, however, you have a surprisingly in depth Ultima-esque RPG and a life sim board game where you can play and assemble a party of literally any character in the series. You run through their 3-years of high school to build the character's skills and stats to then use in the dungeon crawler RPG section, which in turn will give you tickets and gold to unlock more characters (and more powerful versions of ones you already have). It's extremely in depth, and you'll want to check out the board game just to see all different characters from across the entire series interacting with each other.
  
• Maybe not worth buying at full price, but worth checking out if it goes on sale.

Despite it's absolutely absurd premise and having the kind of title and description that would make your family disown you if they ever found out that you liked this sort of thing, I find myself thinking about this game quite a lot even after I've played it to completion.

This is a semi-open world action-adventure title that will let you experience what it might be like to live in 5 square blocks of the Akihabara district in Tokyo, Japan, if Japan were populated entirely by comedy stereotypes and also the weirdest interpretation of "vampires" possibly in the entire history of literature. The story is thus: You are an absolute loser, who falls for a Nigerian-prince-esque scam where you're lured in with the promises of rare merchandise and instead are kidnapped and transformed into a bio-weapon called a "Synthister". Having been rescued by a mysterious girl with similar powers, you join an underground group of vampire hunters to rid Tokyo of this menace once and for all.

As for combat, You don't have a traditional health bar, and instead have clothing that can only be taken off once it has been sufficiently damaged. With high, mid and low attacks, and fighting off entire crowds of enemies at one time, you're expected to get as many articles damaged enough to remove, before chaining them together and stripping them all at once. That might sound like they're playing it for fanservice, but it really isn't; it's played for comedy, and it's hilarious.

Akihabara has been faithfully recreated from the ground up, and you can visit all of these very real locations in real life if you were to ever visit Japan. The environment is fun and interesting to explore, and there's lots of shops and attractions you can visit to augment your abilities, as well as side quests to do. Advertisements play on large LCD billboards, and people of all flavours walk around their daily business. Note that the PC Version, due to licensing issues, plays different ads than the PS3 and PS4 versions. I found that the PC Version has way less ads to work with and would start to get on my nerves after a while.

There's an absolute crap-ton of customization options. Costumes for the main character and each of the 4 heroines/companions, plus one little sister. Stylish outfits, magical girl costumes, goth lolitas, business suits, the kind of coats that would make Devil May Cry send a cease-and-desist letter, maids, butlers, cheongsams, baseball caps, undies, or literally nothing at all, there's an absolute ton to work with here. In addition, a variety of weapon options that include household objects such as umbrellas, boxing gloves, glowsticks, leeks for those Hatsune Miku fans, replica pistols, and demonic swords. There's more than a few different movesets, so you can experiment and take your pick. All clothes and weapons are upgradeable, so you can pick whatever you like and stick with it for the entire game. I decked out my character in a high-end business suit and an expensive pair of headphones, and pummeled my way through the game with a nightstick.

Most of the characters are likeable, and you can take them with you and use them as companions through the story. While the story is nothing special, I found myself playing just to see what would happen next. I guess it shows that you can get away with a weak plot if you have strong characters. There's a lot references to anime, video games, and nerd/otaku culture, so if any of that resonates with you, you might enjoy it here.

You have 4 routes, one for each of the romanceable heroines. 3 of them are basically the same, save for a few missions and epilogue scenes at the end, and a fourth one that completely upends the plot and is also the best one by far.

So yeah. In conclusion, I was expecting absolutely nothing and this game pleasantly surprised me in almost every department. It's obvious that the people making this had fun doing so, and that kind of heart always shows through in the finished product.

The important stuff:
* Persona 4 was a good game in 2008. Persona 4 Golden was a good game in 2012. It's still a good game today.
* The port is pretty good, especially compared to the Catherine port that was Atlus' last attempt to port something to the PC Market. Nothing ground-breaking though. It is however, very stable, with no crashes, a silky smooth framerate, and only minor stutters during All-Out Attacks.
* Framerate is technically capped at 120 FPS, but V-Sync caps it at 60 FPS, which you will want to turn on and keep it on, as otherwise screen-tearing is just awful.
* Resolution is capped at 1080p, and only supports a handful of arbitrary screen sizes.
* However, supersampling is supported, which is an unexpected surprise, but not unwelcome. Definitely makes the game look a lot better.
* No UI Scaling, so everything takes up about 3 times the screen real estate it needs to, because it was designed for the handheld Vita.
* No new additional features compared to the Vita version, but also nothing missing compared to the Vita version.
* Technically works with a mouse and keyboard, in the same way that driving your car into a river technically makes it a submarine. Use a gamepad if you value your sanity.

So, if you were holding out because you wanted to know if it's a good port or not, it is. If you have no idea what this game is and you're wondering if it's worth buying at all, it is. The Persona series is near and dear to my heart, and this game introduced the franchise to me. It's not an exaggeration to say it brought joy to my life when I needed it the most.

Still an absolute classic RPG. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

A great game that no one should ever play more than once.

Summary: Neverwinter Nights was a great game, and really solidified bringing the concept of Tabletop RPGs to the world of gaming. That said, I would struggle to say Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition has actually enhanced much of import. Widescreen and Mod Support are welcome additions, but why is the performance so freaking awful? This is a 20 year old game! My RTX 2060 Super should not be pushing out 20 FPS on this. And the original Diamond Edition didn't have this problem.

For the uninitiated, Neverwinter Nights is a top-down real time tactical RPG set in the Forgotten Realms universe of Dungeons and Dragons. Like in Dungeons and Dragons, you create a character sheet, and play one of several campaigns and modules that come included. Stats, Classes, Feats, Spells, etc. etc., all of the RPG classic tropes you might come to expect. Rather than turn-based combat, NWN opts for a pseudo-real-time system in combat: rolls, moves, and actions are queued up behind the scenes, and executed at timed intervals to give the feeling of real-time combat, but combat can still be paused the queued actions can be changed at will of future turns.

I pumped a ton of hours into this game, and I would consider them well spent. If you like RPGs, this is truly one of the greats. This comes highly recommended. The original campaign is pretty underwhelming, and contains a B movie plot involving your typical Bioware Precursor Race™ and contains very little of the good writing of later modules and expansion packs. Honestly, you could probably just start with Shadows of Undrenide, and skip the main campaign altogether, and lose very little in the way of story.

What does the Enhanced Edition add? Well, beyond just making it accessible on Steam, it adds a few new features, and I'll break those down on whether or not these are good changes or not:

* Improved Display: UI elements are designed to scale properly with Widescreen, HD, and 4K displays. The original game already did this to some extent, but the enhanced edition improves on this somewhat, especially with the text: Text did NOT scale with resolution changes in the retail release of the game.
* Advanced Graphics Options: You'll probably turn most of these off, as they don't function particularly well. Vibrance and DoF, specifically, just make the entire game look janky, although YMMV.
* Backwards Compatibility: Meh. It's still the same game, so all the old stuff still works. At least that makes it better than Warcraft III: Reforged.
* Steam Feature Support: Workshop makes installing mods super easy. I hate Steam Cloud, and I didn't try the multiplayer, mostly because I remember it sucking in the original game. Maybe they fixed it, Idk.
* Restored Multiplayer: Meh. See above.
* Cancelled Modules restored: The DLC available for purchase here were modules under development that were cancelled, or never completed for various reasons. Tyrants of Moonsea, Darkness Over Daggerford, Infinite Dungeons, Kingmaker, and practically everything else on that list is seeing the light of day for the first time ever. Your mileage may vary on the quality of those modules, but a few of them are worth checking out, at least.

Some cons though:
* As mentioned before, there are some serious performance issues that were not at all present in the original game. Intel Processors are especially susceptible. Some crashing will occur, so remember to save.
* Everything clunky about the original game was preserved for posterity. It's still an old game, with old design paradigms.
* Since the cinematics now use WEBM format rather than BINK, any older modules that have cinematics will absolutely refuse to work unless you find a way to convert it. (I haven't.)

Anywho, I still obviously recommend it. I loved playing it, despite it's problems. However, if you've already got Diamond Edition already installed on your computer and it works great, this purchase may not be an added value for you. It's more of a touch-up than a remaster.

Summary: An isometric adventure game in the spirit of Bill Murray's Groundhog Day - Confess Your Love, over, and over, and over again. There are around 20 different endings depending on how long you wait, how you prepare, whether or not you speak to the mysterious other girl in the room, or, of course, you can just leave without even bothering to say anything.

It's a cute idea with a neat execution, and hey, it's free. You can probably finish it in a couple of hours, and you need to get all 20 endings to beat the game. There are a few endings that are pretty unintuitive, and a few surprise horror elements.

There really isn't much to say about it. It's more of an interactive narrative or choose-your-own-adventure than a full game, but it's solid, stable, and works as intended, and made me even feel a few emotions in my cynical, machiavellian heart.

Apparently at some point I played this game to completion, and I don't remember a single thing about it. There you go. There's the review.