Recent reviews by LegoRobot

What a fantastic experience. Everything I could ask for from a horror game. My only minor gripes are that you can't turn on vsync, and the crawling giant baby boss gives no indication that weapons now harm him during the second fight, where you must trap him beneath the door. Having his heart exposed or something while he is struggling to hold the door up would have conveyed that you can now harm him with weapons.

Enemy designs and variety were excellent. I think I noticed some Zdzislaw Beksinski influence in one of them. By the time an enemy type became less scary, there was already a new one appearing. This never tapered off as it does in most games, it kept introducing new enemy types up to the very end.

Anyways, many games ape the aesthetic of Silent Hill. Organ Quarter for example. But few of them go beyond that and are polished, excellent games on their own merits. This one had some really creative scripted scares, tension building moments and fakeouts which were much more effective than the standard jumpscare. It really got me a couple times and that's hard to do. I wanted this game to genuinely frighten me, and it did.

One thing I'd like to see in a future title would be less formulaic progression. Twice in the game I had to seek out three switches, or three emblems, to proceed. I can imagine more story appropriate, less "game-like" tasks to complete. Frictional's puzzles typically fit the world they're in and are the sort of barriers which you might really expect to encounter, and have to overcome, in that situation.

I left a needlessly harsh review once on Spooky's Jumpscare Mansion because it didn't allow the use of Touch controllers as a gamepad substitute as well as lacking some menu options I wanted. I still regret that and now I see the developer was headed for bigger and better things. There were many elements in Lost in Vivo which struck me as prettier, more polished sections of Spooky's Jumpscare Mansion, but not overly so. Recognizably the two share some DNA but Lost in Vivo is in all ways a more developed and complete effort.

If I compare it to the Silent Hill games, it fixes most of the common gripes. First person instead of third. More comprehensible puzzles and reasonable difficulty. More straightforward story, but similar themes of mental torment manifesting horrors. That's an unfair comparison though as Silent Hill pioneered the qualities which we now see copied in many other games. It's like holding Lovecraft up to the standard of all the later horror authors he inspired.

I am thoroughly pleased and satisfied with this game. It was well worth what I paid for it and I excitedly look forward to future games from this dev.

What troubles me is that the six armed creature you fight in the mines shows at one point that it can shapeshift to imitate your dog. How do we know the dog waiting at the top of the ladder in the good ending is the real one?

I like the game, but it forces you to watch the unskippable intro cutscene every single time you start it up. That grated on me quickly.

I'm writing this mostly to address the top negative review. I completely disagree with it. This is classic Llamasoft. The control is less precise than 2000 but feels as if the intent was to emulate a rotary dial. This is the only version we can realistically hope will have VR support at some point and has features and quirks characteristic of Llamasoft titles not found in any imitators.

I tried Typhoon 2001 before writing this and it's apparently quite old. It is not receiving updates and I couldn't get the gamepad support to work. This is the kind of ♥♥♥♥ you pay to not have to deal with when you buy a legitimate game. Saying the real McCoy feels like an indie knockoff compared to Typhoon 2001 is a bad joke.

It looks, sounds, controls and feels like 2000 as it would've been made if the hardware were better. It has the funny classic touches you'd expect in a Llamasoft game. It just came out, so there are some issues that could do with patching, but it's got authenticity in spades.

It's been 2 years, I decided to revisit this game. All the bugs I identified in the prior review have been fixed. It is now completely playable without any jank. If it still falls short in any area it's the level design. The maps are geometrically less complex than many original Quake 1 levels. Very basic 3D solids smooshed together.

I think the most egregious example of this is the fusion of two wooden walkways at a 15 degree angle in the subterranean section where the power core/gate lifting puzzle is. No effort was made to joint them believably. They just kind of phase into each other at the tips. The caves and tunnels themselves also look very..."Quake engine"-ish. Big angular faceted surfaces with repeated textures rather than organic shapes.

It is less of a problem in the city environment or park, or hospital exterior. But the interior environments in this game are extremely basic. They look like a a first attempt at level design from somebody just beginning to learn the engine. The doorknobs aren't even properly modeled. They are faceted cylinders on top of smaller faceted cylinders.

There's a security camera in a hallway in the nightclub that's just an extruded hexagon, and the stairs are often just an orthogonal zigzag construction of rectilinear solids with the same parallax mapped grating texture applied, no alpha channel, just opaque black "holes". This is weird given how cool looking some of the assets are (like the meat television, character models, bosses, furniture and weapons).

Mechanically speaking this game has advanced by leaps and bounds. I'm now able to play all the way through without softlocking anywhere or encountering any blatant bugs. It just looks really rough in some indoor spots, and as before, it takes forever to load. I sense from your replies that you're stretched thin working on "Guilt". But a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

i.e. It's well worth the time it would take to polish up the game you already published before trying to knock out a new one. A big part of how people decide what games to buy is the reputation of the developer and their experiences with past games from that dev. Spending the time to remaster Organ Quarter with more polished, less slapdash level design would put it over the top from "pretty good for a VR game" to "objectively great, regardless of platform".

Now for the spoonful of sugar which may help the medicine go down: Some environments, like the lobby of the Cronen theater, look excellent. Lore is dispensed in a very concise, organic way which doesn't bore or confuse the player. The monster design is vastly more creative than the norm, where most horror games just have the same generic pale, veiny, nude old man with a monster face over and over (I call this cliche horror game monster the "spoopyman"). The bosses are intuitive and fun to fight, on top of being creatively designed from a visual standpoint.

The puzzles are very well designed & engaging, especially the backstage peephole puzzle & sliding rod puzzles where you navigate a meat maze. I'd even have been down to do that once more on a much larger scale than the prior few. I also greatly enjoyed how carefully hidden bonus ammo and health is throughout the environment. "Treasure hunting" is a non-trivial component of my enjoyment of this game, and locking health/ammo you'll need late game behind the crusty coating which must be removed with acid was a very clever way to ensure item availability towards the end.

Very promising! Does not support the Rift analog sticks, so teleportation was my only option. I also could not turn using the right thumbstick for the aforementioned reason, so I had to turn in place, wrapping the cable up around myself.

Proper Oculus support is needed, as well as an artificial locomotion mode with smooth turning that uses the Touch thumbsticks. Some sort of extended grabbing mechanic like in Wilson's Heart, where stuff you can't quite reach will nevertheless zip into your hand if it's highlighted, would help with grabbing objects uncomfortably close to the floor.

Many of us do not have a 10ft by 10ft VR play space. Some consideration for the variety of VR setups out there would be appreciated and make the game feel more polished.

As for the content itself, good looking aesthetic. Very "Silent Hill". Cool monster designs. I had fun with what little I played before the control issues made me give up in frustration.

Fantastic fun! Only a small gripe: This would be an obvious fit for VR support. Ideally it would offer some way to output to actual FPV goggles but for those of us who don't have a pair, Oculus and Vive support would be a good approximation, especially with an option to limit the field of view within the headset to more or less what fpv goggles offer.

I really, really want to like this. It can still be improved. But even after the most recent update, very basic, glaring problems remain unfixed. Perhaps it's because the Vive is the platform they have prioritized? I play it on my Rift CV1 and there are ugly pixellated white visual artifacts around the edges of my field of view. Not in the opening area with the neon grid and palm trees, only once I am in the actual arcade.

The other big problem is that the scale of many objects has been changed. The gameboys are now too small. They look like keychain toys. The cassette tapes have also shrunk for some reason since the demo. Correct scale is one of the things VR does very well and what sells you on the realism of it. Why did you change it for the worse between the demo and this version?

I don't want to just ♥♥♥♥ on it, so I will include some praise. Many additions are extremely good ideas. Skeeball, the little robot, functional 80s electronic toys, VHS tapes, etc. Contrary to some of the criticism, putting SNES games on a realistic period TV is an improvement over the big screen from the demo, although a pull down overhead projector screen would be a nice option.

I'd also appreciate being able to change what console it is. What if I want it to be a Genesis? Or a Turbo GrafX 16? A room with more than one console would be cool. I'd also like to be able to eat the food, and have a simulated drunkenness effect if I drink the beers. Actual playable Virtual Boy instead of just using it to visualize where your head is would also be cool. The light gun games are probably the most crucial and brilliant addition, well done.

That said, those visual artifacts and tiny itty bitty cassettes and Gameboys need fixing asap. The old demo was smoother, more natural and had more accurate scale than this. Even just fixing those two issues will change my vote to a thumbs up. Please vindicate the faith I have placed in you as a developer. I had very high hopes after the demo.