The Voice of Reason 最近的评测

As a kid, I was introduced to point-and-click games through Humongous Entertainment games like Pajama Sam. One day, I asked my dad if he could get me a scary video game. He bought me Scratches. I was hooked on creepy things after that. I always hoped that the developer of Scratches would make another game using the same style. To my recent surprise, they did with Asylum.

This game firmly falls within a Lovecraftian style of horror. You are investigating an abandoned asylum that you have a past with. If you've ever read Lovecraft, you know his penchant for sophisticated and often technical writing. The writing in this game adheres to that style, and it is done as good as one could ask.

The voice acting is definitely amateurish, but it does the job well enough. It is clear many of the voice actors are non-American putting on American accents, but it sort of adds to the charm. The character models themselves have a sort of an...Innsmouth look.

The environments are intricately detailed. Coupled with the excellent music and ambiance, this game is easy to get immersed in. The Asylum is dingy, wretched, and foreboding. There isn't an inch of the Asylum that isn't covered in some kind of grime, dust, rust, sewage, mud, or blood.

As far as puzzle design, I mostly was able to figure out what I needed to do. I'm not a veteran at point-and-clicks, so there were a couple of points where I had to Google around because I didn't know where to go after I had completed a plot thread. Without spoiling the ending, I will just say that I found it satisfactory. I was left with that sense of not quite grasping what happened, like in many of Lovecraft's stories.

As far as replay value, I suppose there might be some slight variations to some of the puzzles, but it wouldn't vastly change the experience. I don't know if there are secret endings so I'm basing my review on the single ending I attained. The game is probably 6-8 hours long depending on your level of thoroughness and ability to figure out the puzzles.

Overall, it scratched that same itch as Scratches did back when I was a kid and I was completely satisfied with the game.

I really wish I could recommend this game. LOCIS is a first-person survival horror roguelite that is procedurally generated each time you play. It is meant to be played multiple times and features multiple endings. Sadly, I never reached any of these endings as I was not a big fan of the general game play.

LOCIS is a world created after the battle between a big bad demon and a big bad angel. It sits in between the worlds of good and evil and three beings are set over it to judge whether those who pass through LOCIS are worthy of being damned or absolved.

The game play primarily consists of walking down straight hallways while opening doors on either side, searching for ones that lead to a wall of blackness that take you to one of fourteen different environments. Many doors are locked but the ones that are open lead to rooms with a few piece of furniture inside, some of which have drawers that sometimes contains a silver or gold key or a page that contains lore expounding upon the world of LOCIS. The keys can be used to open locked doors. Doors requiring silver keys lead to new zones. Doors requiring gold keys lead to special rooms where you can get power-ups to help you escape the various enemies you'll face through the hallways.

My main problem with the game is the main game play loop isn't very engaging to me. You can run through the same zone forever and not find anything you need to progress and the next time you will find it almost immediately. Some of my deaths I felt were fair and just consequences of learning the enemies, but there were also several deaths that seemed out of nowhere or unavoidable.

I really find the idea of the world of LOCIS to be interesting, primarily because it reminds me of liminal spaces and the backrooms creepypasta, both of which I got heavily into for a while. Weird psychedelic stuff that straddles the line between true religious and spiritual occurrences and hallucination-laced delirium. My enjoyment of the general art, themes, and vibe of the game isn't quite enough to keep me interested in continuing it because of the dull game play.

If you have patience, it might be your cup of tea. It's extremely inexpensive so there isn't much of an investment to play it. I don't know how long you will get out of this game but I expect it to probably be in 3-4 hour range for most of the major endings, probably much more to 100% the game.

I remember seeing a video advertising this game during its crowdfunding campaign. I absolutely loved the art style so I supported it. I am glad to say that this game is absolutely stunning. It combines a stellar art design with the enjoyment of point-and-click adventure games to create a sinister trip into a hellish landscape of a world

Firstly: the art. The art in this game is absolutely stunning. Capturing an H.R. Giger meets death metal feel, this game is like an Ed Repka illustration come to life. Every single scene is jaw-droppingly gorgeous and is probably the greatest strength the game has to offer. It really tickles the beauty-bleak vibe.

Secondly: the game-play. This is a fairly typical point-and-click style adventure game. You pick up things in the environment that will help you solve puzzles. None of the puzzles were particularly challenging providing you look for the clues to solve them. There are a couple that seem unsolvable, but after multiple playthroughs, there are signs in the game that give you the keys (sometimes literally) to the kingdom. Tormentum doesn't shatter the mold when it comes to game-play, but I still enjoyed it as point-and-click games are something I enjoy.

Thirdly: the music. Now, I am not sure if the soundtrack is original or not since it is not available anywhere online as far as I can tell. However, what I can say is that it captures the atmosphere of the game better than many other games out there. One track that stands out to me the most plays in the wastelands. The utter desolate loneliness that the music invokes is palpable.

Fourthly: the story. Now, this is one area where I think the game falls short. Tormentum lies largely on its themes of misery, suffering, death, morality, and loneliness rather than character development or an earth-shattering plot. You won't think back fondly back to the awesome personalities each character has as they are one-note. The rat man who you begin the game with, however, I find absolutely adorable (in a grotesque kind of way). There are multiple endings depending on your choices in the game.

Fifthly: the performance. I never ran any tools to test the frame rate, but it seemed to me like it was locked at 30 FPS. It was a bit framey in some scenes. I tend to criticize a game heavily if the performance is bad, but point-and-click games are one of the few genres in which the frames have little effect on how you play the game. Whereas in an FPS or RPG a lack of frames could mean death due to lag, there is no pressing urgency within Tormentum.

Overall, Tormentum: Dark Sorrow is a game that evokes dread, disgust, despair, and hopelessness. It is a death doom metal album come to life. The world is horrible and you are just trying to survive. The morality is up to you. I can easily recommend this purchase.

I've been on a sci-fi game kick lately. Seeing as I recently played through all the Blackwell games as well as The Shivah and Primordia, I figured playing another Wadjet Eye Games game would fit both of my recent trends. I found Technobabylon to be an extremely satisfying experiences.

The plot revolves around the exploits of two police officers as they attempt to discover the identity of a "mindjacker" (stealing someone's personality through the wired connection in their head). The game is dripping with atmosphere and has the dingy cyberpunk feeling of something like Bladerunner. The story is the primary high point of the game. I found myself more engrossed in this story than any of the other Wadjet Eye Games games.

The one deterrent I always have when it comes to point-and-click games is the occasional puzzle which seems to defy logic. It has been a problem for every single Wadjet Eye Games game I have played so far. Luckily, there are not too many points which made me consult a walkthrough. If you have persistence, you probably won't need a walkthrough.

The only bug I encountered has to do with the engine I believe as it has occurred in other Wadjet Eye Games games. Whenever I tab out or bring up the Steam overlay, I have to quit out of the game because all the dialogue options are rapidly skipped. Overall, this isn't a huge deal since it can be fixed by simply restarting the game.

Overall, Technobabylon is more than worth the money. If you want a story-rich game with an excellent atmosphere, you need look no further.

While I like the visuals of the game and it is for the most part a technically good game, I found the actual game play to be extremely dull. The only thing you will ever do in this game is walk. You wander around several abandoned areas discovering pieces of narration (which was quite good) and notes which vary in quality. On occasion, you will bump into a little cube which gives you one of "Solomon's Notes". These things take a LONG time to read and are probably the equivalent of 10 pages of reading per note (there are seven total). While I don't mind reading, when I play a video game, I want to actually PLAY the game and not read it. The music and atmospheric sounds are incredibly good and create an eerie atmosphere. I'll be honest in saying, I didn't complete the game because I didn't find the story compelling enough to suffer through any more of the slow plodding through this abandoned complex. My only assumption as to why all these walking simulator "games" have such slow movement speed is because you could blast through them in fifteen minutes if you could move at any decent kind of speed. This game will probably run you about two hours if you skip reading Solomon's notes. I made it to chapter 5/7 in about 100 minutes. Exploration is excruciating because of the slow movement speed and really made me weigh whether the little bits of exposition were valuable enough for me suffer through the journey to look around everywhere. The story itself is quite confusing. There are a great many biblical allusions, symbols, and allegories. The names Jonah and Solomon are both used (Jonah being the man swallowed by a giant fish for three days and Solomon being the son of David, one of the great kings of Israel) and Jerusalem and another town (I can't remember the name but recognized it as being mentioned in the bible) are also referred to. There are two groups, one called The Guild, the other's name I've already forgotten. They appear to be at odds. The identity of the character you play was not revealed to me in my experience. The game probably has some pretty cool stuff in it if you feel like reading the novel that was put in Solomon's notes and finding every piece of dialogue and reading every note pinned to the wall. For me, I couldn't justify wasting the time on it to find out. I got this for 75% off at $2.49. I imagine it would be worth it if you like these sort of games but I just couldn't get into it.

Do I recommend this game? Yes, but not at full price.

Introduction:
I'll get some of the more objective stuff out of the way. The game is a linear platformer with some puzzles thrown in for kicks. The term "walking simulator" is a very apt one as that is essentially the core of what you'll be doing in this game. Most of the game involves walking from place to place, discovering message and data pads that slowly reveal what happened to the colony that was previously living on this planet. The only real challenge that comes from this game are the platforming sections where you'll be jumping, frequently with the assistance of a jet pack boost, from rock to rock in an attempt to get to the next location. Puzzles are also a component in this game. They all involve either figuring out how to get a glowing green power core into a monolith or pushing rocks and barrels around to divert liquid or give yourself a higher place from which to jump. There is no combat in this game. The only collectables in the game are the documents which tell you a great deal of the story and samples of rock which allude to volcanic activity on the planet.

The Good:
1. This game has a really good soundtrack. It is a mix of atmospheric, space ambient, and synth. While the soundtrack is very sparsely played, when it gets going, it has a power to it and I found myself standing, admiring the view while it played.
2. There are a ton of beautiful vistas in this game, many of which I took screenshots of an uploaded if you want to see them. While the graphics aren't exactly what I'd call stellar, Stage 2 Studios manage to work with what they have and make an environment that captivates the senses.
3. Atmosphere is one of the game's strengths. This planet truly feels dead. From the scorching deserts and abandoned bunkers to the fiery volcanoes and haunted dead forest, it truly does seem like all life is gone from this world.
4. The story was quite good. You are an astronaut (I never caught a name if he has one) who has just crash landed on a planet which you were told was filled with life. You quickly discover that the other members of your crew have left the crash site and headed out into the wild. You follow and quickly learn that something happened on this planet to cause all life to vanish. Not all is as it seems. I can't go into anything else without spoiling the story. They story is told through both voice acting and documents you find. The main character gives the bulk of the dialogue, only broken up by a man speaking Russian in the documents and a couple of mysterious voices as your character hallucinates.
5. For me, this game was the perfect length. I beat it in about four hours and feel that if it had gone on much longer, it would have gotten tiresome.

The Bad:
1. The camera in this game annoyed me. While running, you can't rotate the camera around your character with turning the character and making the camera spaz out.
2. Character movement is very clunky. This is particularly noticeable during the platforming sections. You essentially can't turn your character in midair and he slips and slides a lot while running, which caused me to slide off the rocks several times.
3. I encountered several bugs while playing though none of them were unfixable. There are multiple times where I fell through the landscape and clipped through terrain to my immediate demise. I encountered a bug during a puzzle during the Ancients chapter where you have to push four stone blocks out of the way so that you can move a semicircle down a little strip to another semicircle. Due to the clunky characters movement, I accidently pushed the semicircle out of the strip so that it was floating in mid-air and I couldn't push it back in. I was able to fix this by quitting out of the game, load back in, and repeat about five minutes of walking.
4. The save system in this game could use a little work. In some areas, it works fine. If you die, you won't have to repeat much to get back to where you were. There are several areas though where I had to repeat ten minute chunks repeatedly because the game didn't have any saves close by.
5. Exploration in this game frequently doesn't lead to any rewards. There are a lot of giant flat areas with paths that seemingly lead somewhere but ultimately end in a dead end. There is nothing which tells you your objective so often you can be left wandering around until you figure out what to do. I found navigation in the Chasm and Inferno levels to be frustrating because I didn't know which direction in which to head.

The Ugly:
1. Some of the textures in this game look like they're from the early '90s. I particularly noticed this during the Chasm chapter. Many of the texture are smeared and stretched so that they are just a giant blur.
2. The framerate frequently dipped below 60 for me. I have 2 GTX 970s, both of which had no problem running poorly optimized games (as of the time of this review) like Arkham Knight at above 60FPS. I noticed the frame drop most prominently in the chapter called Ancients. According to the frame counter that was introduced in a beta client of Steam, I was getting anywhere from 15-40 frames in that section unless I was looking directly at the sky or ground. This shouldn't be much of a deterrent as there are only a few spots like that in the game. Most of the game ran at or around 60 frames per second.

Summary: This game is good little game if not a bit rough around the edges. Most of the negatives can be overlooked and some people may not even have a problem with them. I would definitely buy this when it is on sale, around $10.00. It offers a good little story and some beautiful vistas and some a few interesting platforming sections.

The developers have essentially abandoned the game. After three engine changes and several years of development, the game is perhaps in an almost worse state than when I originally purchased it. Unless you really think this has something to offer that none others have, DON'T buy this game. There are multiple other games that have a similar premise that allow you to do more with less bugs. Try 7 Days to Die or State of Decay.

The Lord of the Rings Online is an overall good game with some flaws that could turn people away. I've played this game for many thousands of hours on the non-Steam client. I've ran every raid in the game and have completed every instance. I've even completed almost every deed and quest on my main character.

My Positive Thoughts:
Levels 1-65 are a blast for me. I found that all the zones up to Mirkwood are amazingly designed and are brimming with detail. I have spent vast portions of time just wandering around to see if I could find something cool. Shard droppers spice up the exploration and make it feel like you've discovered a secret when you happen to find these mini-bosses scattered in the far reaches of the land where few people venture. Most of the raids and instances are very well designed and have unique mechanics. The crowning achievement of the instances in the game for me was the six instances in The Mines of Moria. Each has an interesting mechanic which keeps them from getting boring. To achieve the challenge mode in the instances, you have to do something that makes the instance harder or pushes your fellowship to rush. In The Forges, after killing the first boss, you have to make it to the final boss in less than twenty minutes or you don't get the good loot. In Fil Gashan, you have to dress up in orc costumes and sneak around to avoid pulling vast hordes of enemies (alternatively you can have AOE classes and create a blender of murder that is really fun). The last boss makes you step carefully and avoid traps on the floor while getting the boss to walk into them. The Grand Stairs is a race against the clock. You only have ten minutes to get to the second boss and kill him before failing challenge mode. The Dark Delvings makes you stay in the light or suffer a debuff. The last boss is made more difficult by having to fight him in the darkness while has the ability to essentially one shot you by knocking you off a cliff. The 16th Hall makes you mind your AOEs by giving a ton of 1hp mobs that you can't kill for challenge mode while you DPS the boss down. Skumfil makes you do the instance three times to get challenge mode. You have to clear both the right and left sides on alternate runs to get the key to unlock the boss room. With the key, you have to quickly work your way through the room by killing the spiders that respawn quickly and kill the boss before you are overwhelmed. These are just six of the instances. The raids are excellent. The classes are diverse in the game. I feel as if it takes talent to actually learn how to play each class effectively. Wardens are unique in that they require you to memorize series of skills to unleash an actual attack. Rune-Keepers require you to use less damaging skills to raise attunement so you can unleash really powerful ones. Burgs use stealth to start at the fight with a massive spike of damage or a vicious bleed that drains the foes health over the course of the fight. There is a class for pretty much every play style in the game.

My Negative Thoughts:
This game is a grind. Quests, much like many of WoW's, require you to kill x number of mobs or collect x number of these items. There are a couple standout quests (the epic quests are fun for the most part) but most of them are horrible. It is my opinion that the game got significantly worse after it went free to play. I have a lifetime account so it didn't affect me in a monatary way. Content seems to be more lackluster and monotonous now. New zones look exactly the same as old zones: large fields with a couple buildings. Raids and instances seem to have lost their luster and are just boring. Crafting is horrible. It takes a ridiculous amount of time to gather the materials to master each tier of crafting. Some vocations take significantly longer than others. You can achieve the top tier level of crafting in farming and cooking in a day whereas you will be running around ruins looking for scholar boxes for days if you are a historian. Deeds in the game require you to slay up to 450 enemies to increase a virtue by 1. Each virtue levels up to 16 and you can equip 5 virtues. That's 36,000 enemies for just your virtues (this is if you don't do some of the deeds which are just exploration, I did that for a point). The free to play is constantly shoved down your throat - even if you pay for the game. PvP is pathetic. This game has been running for a long time now and there is only one zone in which to PvP. After six years of playing the game, you will know this zone like the back of your hand. Unfortunately, the area itself is obnoxious. The free people and the monster players both will turtle inside keeps and refuse to come out and actually fight. Only a couple of the servers even have enough people to have epic fights. On the monster player side, if you aren't willing to grind a bunch of repeatable quests over and over again, it can take up to six or seven minutes to return to the fight after death. Everything in this game is grindy.

Conclusion: If you are willing to pay for the game, I would say it is worth it. The exploration of Tolkien's world was enough for me (a great deal of Middle-earth is in the game and they are still releasing almost yearly expansions). It does a good job with lore. If you don't want to spend money, you will be doing nothing but farming enemies over and over again to get Turbine points to get quests packs for the zones.

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings is an example of a video game that was made as a labor of love. The developers of this game have created one of the best RPGs that I've ever played. The combat in this game is a vast improvement over the first game and feels very fluid. The characters are very well thought out and I can relate and connect to many of them. The storyline is one of those that makes me forget about everything else and focus on it with great intensity.