Recente recensies door Croaker

Great game. I particularly enjoy the skill mechanics, my favorite example being reading. You start the game as an illiterate peasant. All the books that you encounter in the world have their letters indecipherably jumbled. As you slowly become more literate individual letters are put into their proper place. Before long, you can read as you normally would.

I'm normally not a fan of point and click adventures, but this one was great. The story was well written and the voice acting was superb. Puzzles were just the right difficulty and the interface was intuitive. The game was just the right length.

Good story line, nice game mechanics, no real bugs. One of the things that impressed me most about this game in retrospect was that I never clipped through terrain. Given the complexity of the terrain and the caves I would have taken it as a given. But it never became an issue.

When I was reading the reviews for this game I saw overwhelming positive summaries. Claims of emotional complexity and an unimaginably deep story arc littered with memorable characters. "Sound great!" I thought before clicking the purchase button. Just before completing the checkout I decided to read one negative review. After some digging I found one and was surprised to find that they claimed it only actually had 10 minutes of content. "There must be something they missed" I thought to myself as I completed the checkout. 9 minutes later I concluded that yes, that was all there was. A few minutes after that I double checked the community forum and found all the Youtube sessions of complete playthroughs were less than 20 minutes in length. Bummer.

I've played quite a few puzzle games now, ranging from Myst to Portal and back. Quern is one of the greats. It has a wide variety of puzzles, a compelling storyline, beautiful visuals, and a wonderful soundtrack. My only complaint would be that the single world where the game takes place seems a little repetitive compared to games with a broader variety of biomes like The Talos Principle and The Witness. Despite that shortcoming, Quern is a great puzzle game that I can't recommend enough.

Before No Man's Sky received the Next update it was a decent game. I sank about 20 hours into it and then forgot about it. After the release of Next I reinstalled it and found it to be an almost completely different game. Sure you're still pointing a laser pointer at a rock/tree until it disentegrates about 33% of the time, but the scope of everything you do in that remaining 77% of the time has expanded dramatically.

I bought this game after completing Soma by Frictional Games. Initially the game was so similiar to Soma that I actually thought it was made by the same people. Same search all the drawers and cabinets in the room mechanics, same avoid the monster patrolling around in a set pattern, same puzzle mini-games. It was only when I started to write this review that I found out that Bloober Team (who made >observer_ as well as Layers of Fear) and Frictional Games were two different development studios.

That being said, >observer_ felt a lot like if Soma and Layers of Fear had a baby. Then they took that baby and dropped it on its head. Nothing that affected the look of the kid, mind you. But, you could definitely tell that something was off when you started to talk to them. The moral decisions that you face in Soma felt like they had no consequence. The gradual progression towards madness or remorse in Layers of Fear felt much more abrupt. Overall, >observer_ was just not nearly as well executed as its predecessors, and a dissapointment in general.

This is a pretty good game if you can manage to get it on sale. The base game plus the expansion is about 6-7 hours of decent scares and a fairly compelling storyline. Replayability is somewhat limited, but I did find myself enjoying the subtly different storyline in the DLC based on whether I chose to favor the protagonist's father or mother. The interesting thing about the scares in both the base game and the dlc is that they attempt to exploit the widest array of phobias that I've ever seen attempted by a game. That includes acrophobia, claustraphobia, pediaphobia, aquaphobia, nyctophobia, hemophobia, and a few others that I won't mention to avoid spoiling all the surprises. Overall, as a fan of horror games such as Soma, Alien Isolation, Outlast, and Insomnia, I think this is a pretty good filler game to play while you wait for Outlast 2 to go on sale.

One word: Gwent. Half of my in-game time was spend playing that damnably addictive card-game. I'm not sure what it is that makes it so addicting. Perhaps the "gotta-get-them-all" collectablility of the cards. Perhaps the simplicilty of the mechanices. Whatever it is, Gwent is enough of a game to stand on its own.
The Witcher 3 itself is immense in scope. There've been a couple of false endings now, and I'm pretty eager to finish it now that it's gone on so long.

Some games age well, while others subsist entirely on nostalgia. Unfortunately, for me, I first picked this game up in 2015 and have precious little to motivate me to play any further than I have already. Initially the game was great, but it really bogged down in Vizima, where the game's main quest was to play detective. As detective, you question suspects and collect evidence in the hopes that it will lead you to find the elusive Salamander gang headquarters. This translated into endless hunt-and-fetch quests, crossing and recrossing the same patch of city and its adjoining swamp, and meditating from day to night and back to access different characters and areas that are only available at certain times. On the bright side, it has given me an appreciation for all of the improvements made in the sequel.