FirstUtterance 最近的评测

I will admit this isn't my favorite of the "FromSouls" games, it might rank on the lower end maybe for a number of reasons but what it does well, it does spectacularly well.

The very recent change of having atmospheric music for the environments themselves is actually one of my favorite aspects as minor as it may seem. Common in most games but not in Miyazaki/Tanimura outputs until Sekiro. The music in general, some seeing it as the weak point of this game, is one of my favorite things about it. Tracks are highly varied, you have your usual orchestral melancholy and orchestral grandiosity ("Godskin Noble" being one of their best songs of this type), but also detours from that like the beautiful, mystical "Ancestor Spirit" (also among the "easy" boss fights of the series that hits the mark), and "Naturalborn of the Void" which both in music and encounter throws back to Bloodborne's alien encounters. The ambient environmental tracks from the calming uncertainty of Limgrave, the unsettling, dissonant background appropriate for Caelid, the simple but effective loops of the mineshaft areas (areas in their totality made me think a lot of Hollow Knight, which in that game made me think of similar areas in Donkey Kong Country - a solid lineup of great games with great music I'll say!) and the mournful Farum Azula... I could go on about all the tracks but to review the actual game, as this isn't supposed to be for the soundtrack itself:

As has been said a number of times probably, if you liked the Dark Souls games you'll be right at home here. It's still a good formula that FromSoft is still the best at executing as far as general feel is concerned. There are a lot of weapons, some familiar to people who've been playing the games for a long time, and different other sets with fun movesets and "weapon skills," in addition to spells divided into just two categories this time, sorcery and incantations. Incantations have all the variety, sorcery is what you'd expect from what you got in the Dark Souls titles more or less. Being an open world, if you know where to go you can obtain many good items and levelups early on (at the risk of breaking some quests possibly, more on that). The sound and impact you get from breaking an enemy's posture is always very satisfying, as is the big orange glow that opens up for a riposte for the bigger enemies. Environmental design and detail is beautiful as always, and the "legacy dungeons" intricate in design. The addition of spirit summons adds another dimension of enjoyability if you choose to use them. For many boss fights or taking down protected camps the chaos you can add to the mix can be fun (certain summons can be very strong, bordering on unbalanced, which may, when other options don't work out are among the few options you have to not hurt your head anymore, more on that later).

The DEEP LORE that everyone comes here for is as extensive as ever, mainly focused on the machinations of various gods and demigods and their complicated family trees and contentions with one another. As well as the effects of the "Golden Order" has had on the lands and that maybe something about it isn't as golden as its adherents say, a typical theme of the flaws and darker,
corrupt undercurrents of massive religious orders that have been in all the games since Demon's Souls. Great cast of NPCs and voice actors here, great designs for many of them, maybe nothing as iconic as Solaire or Siegmeyer but some are certain to be memorable and some you'll want to see through they end with a good fate if at all possible (as usual many quests in this game end tragically for the characters in question though not necessarily meaninglessly unless you make the wrong choices).

There is a lot to love, and a lot to not love. The boss fights, for one. Not so much early in the game, with "testing ground" bosses like Margit being very good, but as you get later in the game. Everything about them is amazing except for the part of fighting them. Your character moves about as sluggishly as in the early Dark Souls titles but up against foes suited for the faster, more hectically paced later titles. You have ways around this, some very strong ones, to the point where it almost breaks the game. You're either smashing your head against a concrete wall over and over or you level it completely with dynamite. The in-between option of maybe "take a hammer to it" doesn't always feel like it's there. Build up enough callous scar tissue on your noggin and endure that pain of breaking your head open I suppose. Just as well, regular field enemy encounters are also very obnoxious, and becomes very much apparent in areas like the Concentrated Snowfield (a hidden optional area but still the worst example that comes to mind).

The open world setting is highly endearing at first, and finding cool items in your exploration always a great reward, but by necessity of being a massive open world there is plenty of repetition, in boss encounters, mini dungeons and general landmarks. This is mostly fine at first but for second playthroughs, it's much harder to feel as enthusiastic about it. Traversing so much terrain remembering where exactly useful items are as opposed to common crafting items or miscellaneous items pickups are harder to distinguish than in previous games with the open landmass going in all directions here.

Questlines are a bit more complicated in how interconnected they are, and also the vagueness of direction you must go to see them through. You might find yourself having to return to areas you've already been to without ever knowing why you have to go to those specific locations (Millicent comes to mind as being egregious in this regard). Break out a guide if you're trying to follow someone and you don't want to miss them or accidentally break the quest altogether.

I'll just end on remarks about Torrent. Awesome to use at first and good for running past swarms of enemies in the open to get back somewhere you might have died to gather yourself where you left off. Combat on Torrent is not very good though. You awkwardly swipe your weapon as you move around to your left or your right and connecting never feels right. In addition Torrent is needed for reaching across big gaps in platforming, not only able to leap greater distances but double jump as well. When it comes to landing on smaller ledges though your horse is very slippery and landing just to push forward a bit and fall isn't uncommon. Good for cheesing terrain when you can and reaching higher areas than you're meant to (something that keeps getting patched out more and more). Platforming in general, more of a presence thanks to the jump button, can be a pain. An issue is that determining what is a safe drop, a damaging drop or outright death can be pretty arbitrary or too subtle for my liking. Something as minor as a slight ramp on a pillar can be the difference between safe landing or outright death.

Going into greater detail is something I could do if I wanted this to go on for an extra eternity or two but I'll conclude here, that there's a lot of good and lot of not-very-good. You'll definitely get a lot out of a playthrough of this, and if you go without a guide if you don't care about missing on things (probably something you shouldn't on first playthroughs) it'll make the surprises all the greater. There are frustrations, annoyances and tedium exceeding moments in the previous games but that's the price you pay with more game in general. Anyway hopefully there will be DLC, and if so I'm sure it'll be top-tier as it always has been (the only time it hasn't in my opinion was Ashes of Ariandel, and even that introduced some cool weapons with interesting movesets to Dark Souls 3, a game that needed the weapon variety).

Good, creepy fun.

It's a game vaguely in the style of the old "MacVenture" titles like Uninvited, Deja Vu, etc. with music that reminds me of games like Waxworks, in that it manages to be eerie and tense but also quite catchy and melodious too (Waxworks is an old, quite difficult but interesting and also spooky sort of dungeon crawler/adventure hybrid with varied locales and time periods and pretty good horror elements, though good luck with that one without a guide). It plays out like a very light tabletop RPG with stats to manage, skill checks on various random encounters, turn-based combat with a number of bizarre monstrosities from masked killers, mannequins, undead, eldritch horrors and even sometimes a regular street thug who'll throw molotovs at you (inflicting severe burns, one of a number of status effects you can accrue).

The art style is great, making the most out of very little. Normal human characters are well-defined, the encounters with people meant to be subtly (or not so much) "off" are very much so, and the out-and-out horror creatures very much radiate as less-than-pleasant things to have to encounter.

It definitely wears its influences on its sleeve, as stated so in the store description, Junji Ito and the Cthulhu mythos. The unusual, ghoulish characters and weird, unsettling mysteries you encounter around town in a fictional Japanese setting takes from Ito, and on top all of these events are said to be influenced by whichever elder god you choose to start your game with (or which one the game chooses for you if going for a preset adventure). Each elder god has a certain status effect on the overall game (inability to run from combat, resting raising your doom meter by a good number, doom being a percentage that goes up as you advance the game, fail certain checks, do side events that uses up time, and if it hits 100% it's game over. Considering you need to finish five randomly chosen mysteries and a final trek through a lighthouse per playthrough you need to manage your in-game time carefully, especially on difficulties above "Sceptic." Certain events and completions of mysteries can also lower your doom too though so not all is hopeless).

The more you play, the more you unlock, be it game items, characters or even game modes. There are a number of encounters, different endings to mysteries you'll do, enemies to fight, "achievements" and endings in general that you'll find more and more of the more of the game you play. Runs of the game aren't very long, whether you fail or win. Every new game is a pretty quickly paced affair, throwing you right into the heart of the weirdness with events, enemy encounters, and progression of its concisely worded mini-plots for mysteries to resolve. As of this writing, the ability to save mid-game is disabled due to bugginess with its implementation before but anything new encountered or accomplished during playthroughs is saved which is more important in my opinion. Runs of the game are not long enough that you would need mid-game saves. Everything is procedurally generated from a vast pool of different elements, some that you might encounter repeatedly, plenty others brand new. It works fine as it is for me personally.

And this is all still in Early Access. The game as it is now is already quite solid, I can't wait to see what new things the devs will bring to the game leading up to its official release.

Although I can't say I'm fond of all the circumstances around this game's release, be it the removal of Prepare to Die Edition altogether, them implementing their still-shoddy anti-cheat in this game that once again fails to punish actual cheaters but rather their victims (and making this version the least mod-friendly compared to PtDE), PvP that's still as broken as before, only possibly more so now that dead angling is gone (because that was such a horrible game-breaking feature that needed to be eliminated and not y'know, chain backstabs), with co-op being the only improvement over the original, now that you not only have password matchmaking but the wait time for summoning players is actually faster than the AOL dial-up modem times from before. Gravelording also seems to work better, but it's hard to say for certain since I didn't spend too much time online with PtDE.

Having the option to change HUD size, rebind jump to L3/left analog stick press, warpable Vamos bonfire (much-memed but nonetheless a nice convenience I suppose), swapping/joining covenants at bonfires, the option to use multiple souls and humanity at once, along with 1080p, non-broken 60fps (no colliding through the environment for sliding down ladders or having gimped jump/roll distances) out of the box without the need for a third-party mod are all niceties for certain (not so much that the game goes into slo-mo if you drop frames, a thankfully rare if nonexistent problem for me but I know it's there and has affected others) but in the end it begs asking if these were worth removing an existent game from the store just to have these? In my opinion, not at all. Some of the QOL improvements are undeniable but they are relatively minor compared to what we have in the end, which is the same base game as before with tweaks here and there, some for better, some for worse (the "worse" largely being on the PvP end - not that Dark Souls 1 ever had great PvP to begin with but the things they decided to change or "fix" - the Dark Souls 3 problem of going up against a host with three potential phantom helpers instead of just two, the questionable match-making system where beloved PvP environments like the forest invasions took the biggest hit, the anti-cheat, selectively fixing some "broken" things but not other, worse ones...well, the fact that the player base took a nosedive after launch shows that nobody knew what the hell they were doing).

Another controversy is the graphical update. Besides bonfires going from their abstract form to more literal "bonfires" aside, particles, textures, lighting, all that jazz have been given some slight tinkering. Particles are the best improvement to the game by far. The furnaces emanating from the mouths of the fire-breathing bug creatures in Blighttown for instance, look awesome. Less so is the lava effects, which weren't even good in the non-remastered version, still look bad here, like in Lost Izalith aka the land of melted cheesy lasagna grease run-off. Oftentimes there's a shininess to the environmental textures, with a tint of metallic blue, even off of things that aren't supposed to be metal when looked at in a certain light, that just look odd. Lighting is fine for the most part, they seemed to opt for darkening many areas - the study where you find Logan after rescuing him in Duke's Archives is almost pitch black.

So considering all my reservations about this game with a praise here and there, do I recommend it? If you don't own Dark Souls already, then a definite yes from me. Garbage anti-cheat aside, it is all things considered a better port of this game than PtDE was, and in some ways is better than just PtDE + Durante's patch (framerate is more stable with none of the physics glitches that caused collision problems with ladders and issues with jumping distances when set to 60fps) and while the inability to purchase PtDE is a sour note, you are still getting essentially the same game as the original, which still holds up as a great gaming experience to this day, so if you still don't own it, this version is as good to go with as any other available version. It's Dark Souls, what more is there to say?

Dark Souls III, the main game, was a solid but somewhat disappointing experience. A completely polished experience that also felt derivative with few surprises for a Souls fan like myself. It excelled in some areas, like the boss fights, but mostly it was merely "decent" with the occasional "REALLY good" moment and sometimes a "meh" or "wow Izalith 2.0 is almost as bad as the original Izalith was!" feeling too.

Ashes of Ariandel stands today as perhaps the worst of the "Soulsborne" DLCs to date. The one area it comprises was largely uninteresting in design, the worst placement/use of bonfires by far (overly abundant, in between brief but tiring segments consisting of annoying enemy gauntlets, just generally weird overall), the new spells sucked and personally I didn't like either boss. You won't find much disagreement regarding how weak the Champions boss fight was, but I still see people raving about how amazing the other fight was, when to me it was an overkill dodge-spam-fest that was unnecessarily long and became a chore after a while. The one good thing that came from it was the new weapons, which were fun and varied, offering new and interesting weapon arts or at least interesting variants on existing weapon arts.

So then comes The Ringed City, and how does it fare? If you ask me it raises my estimation of Dark Souls III a great deal. It's a DLC that can stand proudly alongside Artorias of the Abyss and the three Dark Souls 2 DLCs (The Old Hunters is probably the best of all the "Soulsborne" DLCs to me though). Well-designed environments, a great setting, and FOUR bosses that are all solid in their own way. The very last one is the most spectacular, the arena you fight in which is a major change-up from other boss fight areas, the fight itself and who you actually fight. Without giving anything away there is something poignant about it, in how it is a duel against someone that is your opposite but in many ways very much the same as you. More new weapons here that are great, whether the ultimate "spin-to-win" weapon the Splitleaf Greatsword (not a greatsword btw) or the bizarre Crucifix of the Mad King, the favorite for dark builds, it continues off from the one truly great thing AoA offered. The new magic is also much better with a couple of spells introducing mechanics that I wish had been in these games a lot earlier: the Lightning Arrow and Old Moonlight, which can be held before releasing, whether the Arrow for aiming, as you would any bow and arrows in these games, or Old Moonlight that charges up to release a powerful blast when at full.

While not my absolute favorite of all Souls content out there, it ranks highly with me and overall offers as good a close to the series as could be offered. Some might have contentions about lore matter (I don't pay as much mind to this as others), which this does convolute to an even more head-scratching degree, others might find the final fight anti-climactic even (I don't agree myself but I can understand why some would see it that way) and the fact that the very last thing you can do, which is offer the item you get from the last boss to a certain character, does absolutely nothing but offer some dialogue that promises something that is never fulfilled, others will and have taken issue with (I wish it did more than just new dialogue that doesn't really matter). Besides that though there is very little to outright complain about here. It is something I can finally say unironically that works as intended. And works it does.

This is the kind of game that makes me question if I should continue to bother with video games or not. Am I just wasting my time? Are these games that've been hyped to heaven with almost no backlash just bald-faced lies spitting in my face? I have come to this point after wasting so much of my life, throwing myself over 20 hours closer to my death, playing this repetitive, poorly balanced, poorly made-in-general piece of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ garbage. Yes, I despise this game. I have finally come to terms with that conclusion. I tried giving it one more chance after my first (also negative) review that's now deleted, unlocked a few more wagons and modes, but nothing changed for me except the growing hatred for this game, my grown distrust for popular consensus and for sources of game coverage I thought were reliable, and the weariness this has brought upon my life in general. I really, really hate this game.

OK to start: what it looks like: an absurdist, tongue-in-cheek parody of Oregon Trail (obviously), like the video game equivalent of a Mel Brooks or an old Zucker/Abrahams movie. And that description is accurate to some extent. This is a game full of zany, random occurrences, ridiculous humor, and gameplay that, to put it one way, bears little resemblance to the original Oregon Trail. This is all just window dressing though. Strip it aside and what you have instead is a really awful vertical shmup mixed in with awful twin-stick shooter segments with a factor of randomization added to try to give it variation but they bungled it up so badly that it makes already badly done mechanics more frustrating.

If there is a singular goal in this game, it's to unlock all the wagons, since doing so requires accomplishing pretty much every possible task in the game. One wagon requires you not only unlock all five levels in survival mode, but get three full stars in all of them (which means surviving three or more minutes), another requires unlocking "shuffle mode" where you must survive as many randomly ordered scenes from the main game in a row (to get the wagon you need to survive 50), and unlocking the final wagon means completing the main adventure with ALL the wagons. Most of the wagons are unlocked by stumbling upon and surviving random scenarios, some rarer than others, in the game.

The main adventure allows you to ride a wagon with three attendants, which you can customize to some degree by gender, hair style, hair color, manner and color of dress, skin color, eyes, and facial hair (reserved for the men only). This is probably the most fun part of the game, not that it's necessarily interesting in itself, even if it is amusing, but because it's the one and only thing in this game that doesn't cause immense suffering. Then you pick your wagon which you only have one to start with and, if I'm being perfectly honest, is probably better than the majority of wagons I've tried so far. It sucks, but it sucks less so than some of the other crap you get. Now the concepts for the wagons sound fun but actually playing with them? No. The magic wagon has probably the worst default weapon of everything in the game, firing spread "magic" shots in wide angles, too wide actually, and disintegrates things when it kill them meaning you can't collect precious animal hides with it (better get a power-up!), and it fires slowly at that. The invisible wagon starts you off with 1 health for everyone, no joke, as a compromise for how small and easily maneuverable it is. If you survive the first areas and can grab full health for everyone it's great, otherwise, good luck. The space shuttle starts you all off with TWO health, has an even larger hit box than the other wagons (which are too big as it is, making the NES Silver Surfer's seem like a pixel by comparison), has only the same regular attack as the main wagon, and is faster, meaning, harder to control when you're faced by a barrage of enemies and herds of buffalo who will most assuredly kill you much faster. I could go on about how annoying and unfun some other wagons are but really it's the game itself that's out to get you more than the crappiness of your wagons (though that doesn't help).

OK like I said the game is randomized, but not to the extent a roguelike or even some roguelites would take it. It's more like a Tower of Guns roguelite where there is a small amount of randomization but with mostly clear-cut, set paths, level designs and so forth, the difference being that Tower of Guns was actually not a terrible game (I gave up on some of its frustrating challenges eventually but for the most part had a good time with it). The game begins the same way every single time - you kill animals for fur, run into some bandits, seek either wild berries (or if the game wants to ♥♥♥♥ you over, shrooms, though surviving that once does unlock a wagon - but after that, it grows tiresome), then you come to a river crossing, where you can either jump or ford it. Most of the wagons are too slow, clunky and big to bother fording, so I always jumped (which sometimes landed me in the river anyway, getting me hit by boulders coming downriver). There is one set of boulders where you must wait for them to come down, with a space opening up to go through but I swear unless you have a fast-moving wagon this is literally impossible to get through without getting hit. And it goes on and on and on. The game itself is not that long, but you will be assuredly killed repeatedly due to the crappiness of the mechanics and the random events which will screw you over big time.

Sometimes the game asks if you want to investigate something, like distant gunfire (which is either a bank or train robbery), but a lot of times it forces you into situations that you don't want to go into. Like, no, I don't want to save the injured falcon or get the poison gun for the billionth time, especially if I'm at the brink of death and have a perfectly capable gun already at my disposal. But it will anyway and you have no choice but to go along with it. Some situations you may as well quit your game since you will get bent if you encounter them. Like having to travel to a distant trader for a new wheel with the falcon with coyotes all over you. These segments are long and the falcon really sucks at taking down large numbers of fast-moving enemies at once. Then you die and you must repeat the process with one of the other surviving characters and you die again. And if you're forced to meet a woman in a red dress and she turns into a bandit, just... quit right there. After that you will be assaulted by bandits you have no chance of winning against. Oh, and buffalo. I don't know how you're supposed to survive the large herds of buffalo with a large wagon without a decent weapon, and if your characters (idiotically) decide they're "bored" and speed through the herd, you're dead, and frankly they deserve it for being so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ stupid as to speed through buffalo to be trampled to death by them and your poorly handled vehicle. Oh yeah there are "twin stick" segments where you might be alone on foot and fight enemies without your wagon or compadres. Your hitbox is more reasonable, but movement never felt "right" nor did the mouse aiming. There are too many fast-moving, tiny enemies hard to hit with your puny weapons with you being too slow to outrun them and eventually you'll be circled and killed. That's actually more a complaint of the survival mode than of the main game but it can happen.

But no matter where you die, whether by buffalo, by wolves on a mountain, or river boulders, the game always feels so inanely repetitive. You will encounter every scenario, of which there are very few, so many times trying to complete the game with one of your many crappy wagons and failing that it becomes a mentally numbing experience. I don't want to hunt more wildlife, bandits, berries, or choose to cross or ford rivers ever again. This is sheer endurance, not fun.

I would like to be among the voices of positive dissent and say that this game has been given an unfair shake by many people here. You'd think by the "Mostly Negative" reception it's a broken, unplayable mess or something. No, the fact of the matter is that it's just a really short campaign (that could be said to be just a glorified map pack) using the same weapons and enemies as usual from Half-Life and with a hilariously tossed-together end boss fight. So, in short, it's Blue Shift all over again, only it's his much younger, shorter bastard cousin (though Blue Shift didn't have a boss fight) we're dealing with here. I did like Blue Shift though, and in general after playing through the honestly exhausting campaigns that were the original Half-Life, the great Opposing Force and even Blue Shift to some degree it's nice to play a small chaser like this that focuses on its action from the getgo without fussing over length or annoying platforming sections.

So the game is intended as a fan's interpretation as to how the yellow crystal that caused the Black Mesa disaster was obtained in the first place. It's been found on a cargo ship of sorts when it's taken over by the Xen aliens killing everyone, Now it's up to you, another mute, hazard suit-bearing superscientist badass named Andrew Winner (so literally you can say "YOU'RE WINNER!" in this case) to be teleported to the ship and retrieve the "artifact" in question. The moment you start a headcrab attacks you, with an assault rifle over a corpse behind you to take care of it. And from then on, it's Zombies, Vortigaunts, one part with three annoying turrets (when aren't they annoying?), Houndeyes, Bullsquids, all your favorites, before you face tougher foes like the Alien Grunts and Alien Controllers (which can be safely ignored really) getting in your way. One part has a bunch of snarks busting out of a vent shaft which is an instant death trap if you don't get back on the ladder that got you there to begin with (I don't know if it's triggered by going near it or by defeating the other enemies in the room first). Oh, yes, you face off against some... military guys. All four of them They use Marine skins but they don't seem to be Marines. I don't know who they are or why they want you dead. Are they some special ops team tasked with retrieving the artifact for their own gain, destroying it, etc.? Like I said this is before we even get to the Black Mesa debacle so hostile human presence doesn't make sense here, story-wise.

Anyway, the entire game is a relatively small, extremely linear cargo ship whose structure is going from point A to B and then A again where you face off against the boss, end game. You have to get to the captain who's holed himself up in a room at the top of the ship and get him to open up the cargo hold under the ship where the yellow crystal is. Then it's another firefight against your more deadly opponents until you face off against... "Genome" Blah-blah Number-Such-and-such aka "Nihilanth with a Barnacle for a mouth." It's one of the silliest boss fights ever. First you drop down the cargo bay, where you recover some of your health somehow, and also lose all your weapons, which you have to run around the arena to retrieve again(?). The boss has no animation to it whatsoever, it's like a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade float of Nihilanth chasing you around with a long tongue dangling on the ground (avoid the tongue or it's instant death). Where's the yellow crystal? He comes right in the bay in a cinematic and... swallows it up with his tongue. Why? Just... because. All you do really is circle-strafe non-stop firing up at him as he floats around trying to get you with his tongue. It doesn't take long to finish him off really. I filled him with some magnum bullets, a few bullets from an assault rifle, a grenade shot and he exploded instantly... exactly like a balloon would. Oh yeah there's Alien Controllers above trying to fire at you but they're of no consequence since you're moving around so much they can't exactly hit you so they're not worth the bother. You get a cutscene where we see Gordon Freeman walk into a room where the yellow crystal is, and we know the happy fun times that comes afterwards.

So, why do I recommend this game besides being short and free (which isn't really a reason to recommend anything, plenty of bad things are short and free)? Well, it's still Half-Life, it plays as such, and so it still fun and plays well. I like the tighter action focus here, a good break from Half-Life and its expansions' labyrinths, platforms and fetch quests. The action makes for a good coffee break on Medium difficulty, and somewhat challenging on Hard (this is the only Half-Life anything I've bothered with on Hard only because of the length - the other games were exhausting enough on Medium in my opinion), and though I did die a decent number of times most of those were from the turrets, the one REAL pain the ass on Hard (everything else is either just a minor inconvenience or something you can easily plow through, like the slow-moving Zombies). I like the sharper textures of the graphics and generally smoother, faster animation (it says to use the "Half-Life 1.8" engine, whatever that is) and little things like the new model and animation for the pistol. And the music too. The Half-Life games offered plenty of quiet moments in between its brief bits of moody music, here it offers more thumping electronic music that doesn't let up. It starts off with a catchy mid-paced track and for a brief time some nice techno/d'n'b for the section fighting the military dudes (too bad that doesn't last too long). The level design isn't the most amazing, it's just a stretched-out corridor essentially but for a cargo ship it gets the job done.

I'd say if you're a Half-Life fan, haven't played this and wondering if you should bother I'd say yes, go ahead and form your own opinion on it. Like I said if nothing else it's short, free and very much playable with no bugs or game-breaking glitches that I could see. So now that you know that, what you think of the rest of the game is up to you.

Yeah I'm just repeating what everyone else is saying, it's Contra, but lame. Unlike the majority of people I really disliked Contra 4 but I might just have to reassess that game after playing this. Hell you'll probably have a better time playing Contra Force than this (even though to this game's credit it ran smoothly whereas CF is notorious for its slowdown). Contra Force is the game where it seems to take most of its inspiration actually, with its more "down-to-earth" military theme instead of aliens, mutants and robots you'd normally fight. Here, it's mainly tanks, airplanes, trucks, with only a couple of robot-ish things to battle. It's probably better than Legacy of War and C: The Contra Adventure... maybe, so there's that.

Let me talk about the options menu first. You have two difficulties, easy and normal. No hard available at all, which I'm not complaining about, as the game is irritating enough on its default difficulty, but it just looks odd, especially for a game like this. Also, resolution settings - rather than select from a list like a normal game, when you select it it'll immediately switch to the next resolution up and automatically adjust your screen accordingly. This didn't cause me any problems but it did for others apparently, as in crashes and such. Well I flicked through the resolution options until I came across one that didn't look like everything was stretched across the screen like latex before moving on.

So, as said, the game is Contra. Except the levels look more widely spaced as afforded by the higher resolutions not available on the older consoles. And the one-hit deaths/continue system has been replaced by a health bar and checkpoints. It does make the game seem easier than most Contras, theoretically but because of certain design decisions it feels much more frustrating to play. You have a health bar but it can drop down very easily when getting hit by various things around you, taking anywhere from 2 to 4 hits off your life bar. Levels are short, and you have at least one checkpoint in between, but that's where things get interesting (actually the only interesting thing about this game). The levels are set on a five-minute timer, and if you die after a checkpoint, the timer doesn't stop, so die often enough, you may come back with only 16 worthless seconds left and then it's time to redo the whole level again.

Otherwise it sticks to Contra very closely, sometimes almost blatantly ripping off levels from the series wholesale (such as the first level in the first Contra stuck somewhere in the middle of the game). Sprites are similar, and are competently drawn, but lack color and the art design in general is dull. There is some nice-looking parallax scrolling, most noticeable in the biker stage, and it runs smoothly, but it is totally uninspired. It's a game that copies the dull tones and browns of your average modern military shooter but "retro" style. Same with the music. Yeah they sound "8-bit" but none of it is catchy, memorable, well-composed or does anything - whether to pump you up, ratchet up tension, no, none of that - except sound "8-bit." It's as faceless as the protagonist and the tacked-on story about playing a game of nuclear missile hot potato with whoever the villains are. You'll probably find a more fleshed-out story in any of the other Contra games ever made than here, and better endings too.

Now the experience of playing the game itself... it feels slow and dull, with mediocre level design, broadly spaced-out enemies and traps, and really, really crappy weapons. Your default gun is probably what you'll be using most of the game as power-ups are few and far between, and what power-ups you get you'll lose pretty quickly from dying (that you carry over what health you had from the last level to the next doesn't help). Don't worry, because most of those are boring too, except for the homing missiles, and they managed to find a way to bork those as well, as I found many instances of the missiles just circling around enemies or bypassing them and not even hitting their appropriate target unless you're like, standing right next to them.

There's been talk of the controls being poor and indeed there are issues I have with them. You have eight-directional shooting, and shooting diagonally means having to run in that direction. This might have been how a bunch of Contra games also were designed but I don't recall them being as irritating as they are here. Because of how widely open/empty the levels are, the puniness of your pea shooter (which would be an apt description for any weapon you get), the tiny enemies on screen with equally tiny bullets coming from different directions you can't see, how slow your character feels and responds compared to any character in any Contra game, and some questionable hit box detection (I've fired right through a dude's head and it did nothing - there also were missiles firing straight at a platform below me and at one point I just arbitrarily took damage, standing there), makes for an unpleasant concoction of annoyances that as the game goes on and gets harder become more visible and make you want to throw the keyboard across the table.

And I've saved the worst for last - the bike-riding stage, the penultimate level of the game. I thought at first "oh nice a bit of variety for once" but nope these frustrations manifest even more horribly here. I still don't know what sense to make of this level. First one of the biggest dangers of the level, isn't the bullets, isn't missiles, but barrels. Yes, a truck appears at the beginning and end and throws barrels at you that take away three hit points as opposed to two from bullets. They appear to be empty barrels too. It throws three of them at you at a time and there's no logical perception as to where these things actually bounce toward. Even if you move out of the way after they're thrown, they seem to hit you anyway. Homing barrels? Oh and the same rules apply here as they do with the regular stages but you're on a constantly moving bike, making diagonal firing, a necessity when the annoying helicopter/invincible barrel truck combo come along, more of a pain. Before that though you have to weave through traffic by... shooting down pedestrian vehicles? Some of who will just try to ram into you? What drunk idiot designed this level? Oh and the boss fight. Getting a hit in is almost impossible without getting hit yourself, he crams you in with his bullet fire so much, and moves back and forth in patterns that make no sense and will certainly kill you. By the time you get to the second stage of the fight, where it's "BULLETS BULLETS BULLETSSS!" you will be low enough on health that you'll die the moment it starts. Here is where I said "Screw this bull****" and just set it to easy, where the barrels destroy as normal empty wooden barrels would with a high-powered gun, and where I could proceed to the final level (where I switched back to normal) and be done with this stupid game for good. Oh, the last level isn't very good either and exemplifies "diagonal shooting" with its final boss at its worst but at least it's not the biker stage.

The low price and Contra-looking aesthetics and gameplay may be tempting but really, don't bother. It's a game made by Contra fans who grew bored of their project the moment they started it, yet somehow finished it. Maybe if this was 75% off (which would make it about $0.99 in my currency), OK. Plus there's local co-op, which I haven't tried as someone with no friends, let alone ones who would be willing enough to share the boredom with me, but if you do, I guess that might be an incentive to part ways with one of your Washingtons, but for everyone else, stick with your emulators or cartridges of the older Contra games, if you're lucky enough to have them (my rec: Contra: Hard Corps for the Genesis, an amazing game and the polar opposite of this sad little thing.

I don't normally go for straight-up puzzle games, but this game was recommended to me by Steam (thanks Steam!) and I was struck by the aesthetic, the mechanics displayed and the generous price tag. I got it and, yes, indeed this is a great puzzle game indeed. As you can see, the objectives are simple - line up each colored square or triangle along their respective paths by dragging the mouse to create the paths to their ends. Obviously this gets far more complicated the farther you move on, as not only different colors are mixed together, but another kind of shape, these neutral octagon shapes with holes in them that allow for more than one colored path to pass through. Obviously though you can't cross through the same path as another shape has taken, and your path cannot cross any other lines made, including any of its own, but you have seven other directions to choose from, sometimes, so it's a matter of figuring out the right configuration.

Each set contains 25 puzzles, some you can breeze through, others requiring a lot more thought. The difficulty of each set is ranked by how many triangles are below it. The first few sets are one triangle long each, and therefore are easy, straightforward warm-ups. Then they increase and things become trickier and trickier. What I've noticed is that the puzzles don't seem to be arranged by order of difficulty, as there have been some that have stumped me, only for me to skip it to the next puzzle and finish that one up quickly. It is highly recommended that as you get into more difficult territory that if you're on a puzzle that has you stuck for a long time, to just skip it for the time being, head to the next one, and any other ones you can finish, before heading back to the unfinished ones. It's remarkable how some puzzles I got stuck on for what must have been nearly an hour each I managed to breeze through once I got back to them.

The number of triangles doesn't just indicate difficulty, but also how much "currency" in the form of, well, triangles you'll receive upon finishing a set. Soooo... a set with a challenge of three will net you three triangles and so forth. These unlock different background color palettes, I'm not sure if they do anything else yet. I will say though, the darker the background, the better. Some of the lighter colors can make viewing the game an eyesore once you've switched over to a darker color where text is easier to read due to better contrasts.

Another thing you have that I have mixed feelings for are the dailies. Each day, basically, you will receive randomly(?) generated sets of varying difficulty. What's cool is that if you don't feel like playing the main, pre-made game you can look at these for a breather, or perhaps an even bigger brain strain depending on what it is, but the thing is you have to complete the set(s) in that day or they'll be gone forever. Yep. One day I received a "demanding set" and had finished roughly half of it. When I came back later a little sometime after midnight it was gone to be replaced by the next day's sets, which were three random sets of varying difficulty. Taking away a set that you did not look at, play or generate is one thing, but if you've already started and are in the middle of finishing one of them, it feels like a slap in the face to take it away like that as if "ohhh not smart enough to finish it in time, eh? Well too bad! Here's your basic puzzles." I didn't like that at all. That aside, with the dailies it means this game is pretty much infinitely replayable even long after you've finished the main game (which I'm in the process of).

Did I mention the game's aesthetics are very nice? Whatever palette you choose, it has a nice, smooth, soothing look to it, gentle gleaming sound effects upon connecting shapes, a minimal ambient soundtrack that comes and goes as it pleases, and of course the satisfaction upon seeing your entire set go stark white, the sign of successfully completing a puzzle. That said, when it gets hard, even that can barely keep down the mental stress levels of trying to crack the more complicated levels. After finishing a set or two I need a break from this game sometimes to clear my head.

If you despise puzzle games then, well, what are you doing here anyway? Anyone else who doesn't yet own this game, it comes highly recommended from me, especially at its bargain of a price you certainly don't need to wait for a Steam sale for to get.

I backed this thing on Kickstarter (the $15 tier) and speaking for myself I don't regret it as it was a solid experience and am glad to see that it got made. HOWEVER, speaking for everyone else, be warned that this is a VERY short game. that 1-point-some hours you see there? That was just from one playthrough of this game. From what it looks like there are branching paths leading to other endings (which I suspected since dying at several points led me back to completely different areas), but otherwise in addition to its shortness it is also a very simple game. You can walk, run, and interact, and what interaction there is is minimal and pretty much spelled out for you. Does it have color? Chances are you can either look at it or pick it up (for the most part you can only look at things, which consist of paintings of people we never meet or objects like a bloody meat grinder or a bloody sink with a few teeth, or most anything else with blood). The only real interactive objects you'll find in the game are doors, candles and occasionally an axe (sadly the only use you have for this is to break down a barricaded stairway, no combat for you!).

There are no actual puzzles to speak of. Mostly it's dodging the game's grotesque display of enemies, however few there are. One enemy is big, dumb and ugly, patrols back and forth and is bypassed by hiding in cabinets rented out from Amnesia as they clumsily stumble by while you walk over to the next cabinet. The other enemy can be annoying, a blind zombie-type thing with enhanced senses in every other area. Unless you are very far away from them, if they sense you, you can't outrun them. It's a matter of walking around them or using distraction tactics (actually only one time you get to take advantage of this) to bypass them when bypassing them otherwise proves impossible. The other kind of enemy is... RUUUUUUN! Axe-wielding crazy, but not just ANY kind of axe-wielding crazy. I won't spoil that bit.

So the game basically consists of navigating pseudo-labyrinthine environments, some areas with more than one doorway (some leading to just dead end rooms), the environments changing on a whim (well, this is dream logic after all), and admiring the beautiful, pastoral scenery (as confusing as it may look sometimes it's still very linear and not too hard to find your way around). But seriously though, the aesthetics are the game's strong suit, and I'm sure anyone playing wouldn't disagree with that. It's not just the pen-and-ink style but the details and the way they're drawn. Darkness and shadows are conveyed by pen scratches that get increasingly thicker and layered on one another the darker it gets. Color contrasts, though used in an obvious way (whether to tell you which items you can interact with or to tell you BLUUUGGGGHHHD!) look really neat. And the environments in general, with all sorts of creepy objects and decay piled on top of one another and a series of questionable-looking paintings, add up to a real looker of a game that doesn't require a high-end computer to admire.

The game's story is... uncertain. Like I said, there seems to be multiple endings, and until you reach one such ending throughout the whole game the only thing you can seem to ascertain is you play as someone who's murdered your sister supposedly and are continually haunted by layers on layers of nightmares about this and other terrible, gory things (when your character rips out a vein from your own arm before "waking up" was the one moment I cringed, but then I was reminded of Riki-Oh and relaxed again). Jumping from variations of what is seemingly your home, a large house in the 18th-19th century, to a psych ward, with repeating visual motifs, from dolls, toy soldiers, paintings of people unknown, and, well, stuff you'd find in a psych ward/hospital around the time period (like a tincture of opium and a bottle of cocaine/alcohol mixture! I think this fellow could use some of that here). One picture that seemed "off" is at the very beginning, a portrait you can examine of someone in what looks like a 1970s swinger get-up. It made me question when this game REALLY took place through the whole game from that point on despite their being no other indications besides that. Voice acting, what little there is of it, is adequate, if not extraordinary. The actor for the protagonist does frightened, confused and occasionally grieving OK, and the voice actor for your sister (remember, nightmare land, you're gonna jump around a lot) is given more than a few things to do and pulls off most of those decently as well. Overall though, there's not much to take away from the story besides this mise en abyme of gory, dark and monstrous imagery that relates seemingly to the death of your sister, until, as I said, the very ending, where the dev's attempt to recreate the actual anxiety of OCD and not the Hollywood/common societal definition of it comes into play (at least the ending I got, though I don't doubt the other endings get the same message across).

They say a horror game's best asset is its sound, and it's no more true here. This has some of the best use of positional sound in an indie horror game I've played, so there are more scares focused on the sounds of approaching footsteps and other noises from the distance reaching ever closer and less from jumpscares (there are a couple of orchestral stingers meets monster-thingy flying across your point of view, none of which I found effective - when Monsieur Axe Murderer started appearing out of nowhere is when I freaked out the most), which is definitely a good thing. The soundtrack is noteworthy too, and while not the best dark ambient I've heard it still works well here. There's your usual droney rumblings and creepy voices to synths that sound like Tangerine Dream gone to hell toward the end.

So besides the high price to length ratio (or short length to price ratio, I don't know my ratios), what's the biggest problem with this game? I'd say the fact that a lot of the horror depicted here is too familiar and relies heavily on gore for its atmosphere. Blood stains, blood pools, blood blood blood... and the gallons only increase as you move along. Creepy-looking dolls, some with heads with cracks on them, and empty eye sockets? You get those. A decrepit insane asylum with creepy abandoned wheelchairs and general lack of proper sanitation? Check. A dark, spooky gothic mansion? Checkeroo. Speaking of blood, you also get repeated phrases written in scraggly letters on the walls in blood, from "WAKE UP" to "Everything is a lie" and other insightful comments. Dead bodies can be found, sometimes even of other species, and they're not dead in the nice way either!

So, look, I am unsure of what the dev's actual headspace was when suffering from OCD at its worst. He mentioned that it's often violent and suicidal thoughts. There are moments in the game where a dream ends by you killing yourself, or discovering the dead body of your sister, and those moments are by far the most potent (the vein ripping from earlier I mentioned...). And I admit, despite the use of some overused horror imagery they are done well for the most part. I was expecting it to change up a bit more as I was going, but what we got is still sufficient. And while violent imagery and suicide I can understand being something he'd be suffering from, where some of the more... banal things really part of it? The wheelchairs, dolls and stuff? He has mentioned using elements of other horror games as an inspiration, perhaps to fill in the gaps, you know, Silent Hill, Amnesia, what you'd expect, and these influences definitely stick out, for better or worse.

But, despite whatever cliches it may fall back on, the anxiety that its title would suggest, is successfully conceived and I do recommend this to horror fans, again with the caveat that it is SHORT. During a Steam sale though, I'd say this is an insta-buy, no doubt.

Raise and train your newly adopted goat into adolescence and into adulthood. Tend for its needs, feed it the right foods, keep its pen clean and cultivate land where it can roam once it becomes fully grown. Among things to have for your land are 1) rich soil 2) grass 3) occupied houses 4) explosives 5) the lives of frightened innocent civilians. A perfect game for people who love goats, simulators, and goat simulators. Baa baa baa!