บทวิจารณ์ล่าสุดโดย Tablis

It is early access, but the game at the current state it is already well worth the price, published act 1 has 9 levels, and those are long, most take more than an hour to finish.

It is a grim retro shooter with quick gameplay and a lot of weapons. You also can use magic and weapons at the same time with some weapons having special ammo too, there is a lot of flexibility here. Its unique aspect is that you are undead and you can eat the dead (mobs you killed included) which is an important part of gameplay. You need to decide if you use the bodies for HP or mana and have restraint when using explosive weapons if you want the resources. It introduces fitting and climatic strategic aspect to the shooting.

It is worth playing for visual art and music alone. Very atmospheric and emotional. The gameplay is also engaging, at times developers even show a few clever tricks.

That being said, I actually prefer Gris. The previous game had symbolism in it which elevated both the art and overall mood. Here I feel like this is just a simple (but nice!) story, there is nothing more to it, you get what you see. The ending is also needlessly confusing. Everything else is completely straightforward, but for this one scene it is quite easy to get it wrong. When watching I got it wrong, near the end of the scene I got it half right, and only after a while I got it completely right. Alas, most of the emotional impact was lost in the process.

What a strange thing. Both gameplay and the narration are just bizarre. Especially the latter is hard to comprehend: everyone speaks like they are terminally online and switch between talking about weather and philosophical ruminations in span of single sentences. I like it!

I got in love with this game. The atmosphere. The vistas. This unique feeling that this world does not want you, that you manage to transverse it just barely. Superb stuff.

And then level 3 happens. The exploration is gone, the whole level is one long tunnel. What you do instead is a series of pixel-perfect manoeuvres which at times feel like you are abusing level geometry and the physics engine. The checkpoints are dense, so for huge swaths of this level you essentially try 20 times, move a few metres to the next checkpoint, only to start the next 20 times again. This soured my mood, but was not yet too bad.

Then instead of going straight to the next goal I snooped around, went to some tunnel and ended half level before, with no way back and all the worst parts again in front of me. I lost around an hour of progress for the sin of exploring and being curious. At this point this is not the game world being cruel, this is the game creator having a laugh and I am definitely not entertained.

Would I wish I was the end, but no, the end of the level is a chase sequence. It is balanced such that one mistake and you must start from the beginning. This is in the game that for the few last hours was all about being deliberate and having as many tries as you want, it even has it written in the Steam description! In the first 10 seconds it has a bizarre geometry-abusing jump which I never learned how to do consistently. Then, after a series of sections which also can kill you quite easily, at the end it has a corridor that deliberately misleads you. Like, you go to the end to just then learn you must turn back because the route is blocked. What you actually need to do is to jump up over a sequence of platforms which are literally 10 cm wide. In a first person platformer, which are famous for being really challenging for precise movements.

I did finish this chase, it took like 1.5 h, but there is no sense to continue the game. All the immersion is gone. I guess if it was clearly explained that this is an ultra-hard, precision kind of game, it would be fine. Some people like this stuff. But this is not what is advertised.

This game is unmistakably unique and very dense. It’s about art, creation, passion, madness. It’s fantastic and can be read in many different ways, both literally and symbolically. It gives you something to think about. The mood is also superb, this mixture of vintage with high concept art, occult and even retro cyberpunk.

I also liked that puzzles require lateral thinking. You need to join information from distinct sources and be creative in noticing and interpreting patterns.

What I didn’t like is kind of baked into the formula - it is easy to get stuck, even one single puzzle can make you unable to finish the game. (Fortunately, walkthroughs are available). 95% of puzzles are great, the remaining 5% somewhat soured my taste at the end, but I guess this is somewhat subjective. Let me complain a little:
- One item is hidden in a screen you have no reason to expect even exists, I mean Forest map.
- One puzzle I didn’t get because of the atrocious font no one writes the letter Φ like they did.
- One puzzle I actually did solve myself, but the answer was so stupid I felt like it didn’t count, you are supposed to put into doors just the roman numerals which were examples in the document? It felt like putting there random nonsense which was just mentioned elsewhere in the game.
- Some of the optional door puzzles feel like they operate on rather obtuse logic.
- One puzzle got me confused because I was actually too good at seeing patterns, you are supposed to see shapes of letters inside the apartment project, the problem was I saw there a few more possible letters than the creators deemed to be the right ones.

Overall not a big deal, the rest of the game more than makes up for that. I've never played a game which as a whole would feel so much like a maze.

I played basically everything there is in the stealth tactics genre and let me say - this one is quite good! It has interesting balance compared to other such games, most of the characters would be considered quite overpowered in them, but here it is countered by harder alignments of mobs. The game felt quite fresh due to that.

It is also more of a shorter and linear game, which I feel is fine too. I had fun, the game did not overwelcome its stay. The thing I have the most mixed feelings about is the plot. It tries to present Indiana Jones like an action flick, but I didn’t feel it succeeded. It felt mostly bland. Not a big deal though.

After playing this game I finally realised that The Chinese Room makes games about places. This is true for all their works and they are getting better and better at it. I really felt like a worker who gets to know all the ins and outs of an oil ring in 1975. And, also observe how it horrifyingly transforms as this is also a love letter to movies like Virus or The Thing.

The only thing I have mixed feelings about is this game's linearity. Feeling lost and uncertain is a big aspect of fear which is somewhat undermined when developers put you on rails this much. It also kind of breaks immersion of being a guy who needs to improvise in order to survive. This stops me from calling this a horror masterpiece, but it does not change the fact I had a great time!

Fascinating lore, great characters, eye-catching and original art style. One of the best metroidvanias I’ve played, and I am sort of a genre connoisseur. It is more on the linear than open side of this genre, but if a game is designed this well it is fine by me. I also enjoy many smart choices made by the developers. For example the boss introductions are done by comics. This is cheaper than making cutscenes, but they are also so dynamic and full of emotion they make a better impression than movies in many much higher budget games.

One small irritating thing is the game was often forgetting some of the settings I’ve modified. Strange, but not a big deal.

One important thing I have mixed feelings about is the last boss. The difficulty spike it represents is rather… insane. After having very little progress in dealing with it for 3 hours I’ve decided to switch to story mode (it is a regulated difficulty mode) and lower its damage by 50%. This way at least I’d be able to learn its attack patterns without being killed in a few seconds after it changes phases. I thought if it goes well I could always turn the damage back, but even after having it halved it still was by far the hardest boss in the game! At least with struggle I managed it with a self-imposed challenge not to lower the difficulty further…

It’s great the story mode was available, but still it’d prefer a smoother difficulty curve with such spikes kept optional.

A great epilogue to a great BL VN. Creators have talent for natural and entertaining dialogue and it shows. Sex scenes are also full of character and illustrated beautifully. Must play for anyone who liked the original.

Strange as advertised, indeed. But not without a reason. This game is very, very harsh on christianity and shows it as a disaster on both personal and societal level, for which a XIX century Russia-inspired world is certainly a suitable illustration. Lofty ideals often look pathetic in practice, which is essentially this game in its entirety. Of course, this is far from being a novel insight, but here it is presented with class and entertaining at the same time.