Recent reviews by DarkChaplain

A true gem I still look back to fondly. Contradiction is a cult classic for good reason.

It's astounding how the writing manages to swing between reprehensibly morbid and surprisingly wholesome. The protagonists manage to be both deranged yet also oddly lovable. Their chemistry is apparent from the first minutes on, and the spritework underlines every bit of snark perfectly.

Yes, it's a highly abusive sibling relationship. Yes, they do horrible things. Yes, Ashley is clearly psychotic. But damn me if the way she's written doesn't make her appealing, funny and even cute, despite also being terrifying. It's a testament to the author's skill that dialog never feels cringe, either.

An excellent showcase of how difficult solving the climate catastrophe becomes when you leave everything to the last minute, putting solutions we already have right now off in favor of hypothetical future solutions.

Balancing resources without overstretching and quick reactions to events are key to success here, lest the ramping-up difficulty spiral out of control. More than anything, however, I consider this an educational experience which not only illustrates the devastating effects of climate tipping points, but also the wealth of available options of tackling the carbon emission problem right here and now - every bit counts, there is no simple one-step solution.

I finally got around to sitting down and playing A Short Hike last night, and before I knew it I was halfway through it. Not because it's all that short of a trip, but because it pulled me in, letting me forget time and stress.

Gaming has been a tough proposition for me lately. Between stress, loud neighbors driving me to insomnia again this past month and a general sense of uneasiness preventing me from just starting up a new game, it's been difficult for me to simply sit down and enjoy what's coming for me.
That's the situation I was in for a long while with this game: Keeping it installed for months, but never feeling in the right mindset to properly appreciate what has been widely regarded as a great, earnest indie title.

Booting it up was more on a whim than any conscious decision on my part. I just happened to do it. And then I didn't quit for ages, something few games these days achieve. And even when I reached a point where I thought I had enough for the time being.... it didn't last. I went out to get a cup of hot chocolate, go to the bathroom, and when I got back to the PC, I found myself just booting the game back up.

Even when I found myself getting frustrated on being two seconds over the required boat race time for an achievement (and knowing it was my own silly mistake that cost me that victory!) I only shut it down for maybe half an hour, watching a brief video on Youtube, before going back to the island and trying again. And succeeding.

I finished the entire game in a single night, sans a PC clock-dependent achievement I unlocked just a bit ago, putting the game officially at 100% completion. And I feel myself both happy at the short, unhurried, relaxing experience, and wishing there had been another adventure to bring me back right now.

Turns out I was wrong. You don't need the perfect mindset to go into A Short Hike. You just need to bring yourself to attend - the game does the rest. It'll put you in that bright mindset through its own charms, its character writing, the atmosphere of the island and its lack of intrinsic pressures. It'll go at your pace, instead of demanding you make that effort yourself. It'll leave you to wander and explore, to meet characters that turn out to be lovable, quirky people that - at the end of the day - mean nobody any harm. There are no debbie downers - even characters you may instinctively dislike (scalping is bad, yo) turn out to have valid, personal reasons for doing what they're doing... and when you offer them kindness instead of bitterness, you both win.

I think that's my biggest takeaway from A Short Hike: The kindness within every single person you meet. No matter how competitive they might be, they're never malicious. They'll support their rivals instead of wallowing in Schadenfreude. They'll reflect on their own actions and choices, their own preconceptions. They'll overcome self-doubt with the help of a little bit of encouragement from the player-character Claire.

Claire herself may start out feeling a little snarky and disinterested in her surroundings - you could even say cynical - but once she steps out of the house and goes on her hike, she starts to see the island and the people inhabiting it the way it actually is: Beautiful and harmonious.
I was lucky enough to share both that sense of trepidation going into the game, and that sense of wonder inherent in its exploration. And reaching the top of the mountain, I felt kinship with Claire - we made this hike a success! It was only then that I recalled the reason for it all when Claire's phone rang, right there at the peak - the only point with cellphone reception on the island.

And I cried over the dialogue that followed.

It was a sort of fulfillment that made the experience all the more worthwhile. It explained Claire's initial frustration, while framing it not as rooted in boredom or a rejection of the island, but instead in her kind heart. It made all the friends made along the way feel even more meaningful in hindsight.

But the game didn't end there. With the climb achieved, I felt like the island opened up to me even more than before - when really, it hadn't changed, outside of character dialogue advancing here and there. I'd achieved Claire's own, personal goal... but there were still others who hadn't fulfilled their own. And I got to help them getting there now.

By the end of the adventure, Claire has the chance to talk to her aunt back at their cabin. She tells her of this and that adventure, all things you could achieve throughout the game. She's gushing about what a great time she had. And both Claire and myself could've gone on for far longer than she actually did in those lines of dialogue.
Because there were more little things not explicitly mentioned, more meaningful moments, treasures, people, experiences that I was happy I had made that night I beat A Short Hike on a whim.

Perfectly suitable port of a gorgeous game that refined the series' formula while adding its own spins.

At last, they've decided to require an additional layer of account-based DRM starting with Season 6: EGS. This was sadly inevitable after the development studio was purchased by Epic a while back, after their explosive hit launch.

So Fall Guys is firmly going the way of the dodo, requiring an off-site account, changing the TOS over a year after launch, and as a result, I will not even be able to play the product I originally purchased, as I will not be sharing my personal & analytical data with Epic Games. A pity that a refund will not be forthcoming, same as it wasn't when Rocket League pulled this same stunt a few years back.

Menu bloat, thy name is Honkai Impact 3rd.
If you've never experienced how nightmarish some mobile gacha games can be in terms of navigating menus, multitudes of shop interfaces, upgrade screens, missions, activities and the likes, THIS is the game to check out, because oh boy, does it bring its A-Game when it comes to confusing new players.

I've tried to play HI3 on multiple occasions over the years, both on tablet, emulator with gamepad, native PC client and now the Steam release of said client, but while the Steam version does not allow account linking, resetting everyone to the very beginning without any of their previously rolled characters, my experience of the game is built on multiple chances I gave the game since a friend bothered me enough to give it a shake or three. As a result, my playtime on Steam will not properly reflect my overall experience, just how my Steam-linked account does not reflect my ownership of super-limited Evangelion-crossover character Asuka. A pity.
In other words: This review is targeted at interested newcomers more so than veterans, as I assume those will not want to give up on their existing accounts to play here anyway.

The amount of different shop currencies, parallel mission lists, barely-explained tokens and yes, indeed, the gacha banner lists, are staggering. While it starts "simple" enough for first time players, the training gloves are truly off after the first story chapter. If you struggle at all with Choice Paralysis, I doubt you'll make it far into the game before giving up on it.
Considering that the Steam release is also merely the standalone PC client in the up-to-date game version, with all the recent content, banners and promo events that entails, the amount of things a new player needs to quickly wrap their head around after leaving the bare-bones tutorial - which, honestly, isn't even over at that point, it just claims it is - is simply overwhelming.

The missions, too, seem very much designed to feed into instant gratification for newcomers. No matter what you do, chances are, you'll have dozens of achievements unlocked within the first two hours, constantly chasing the next orange "click here! something updated!-dot on UI elements. Raised a character's level? Here's some reward. Equipped a new weapon? Go and upgrade it, here's some cashback for doing so. Rolled a character? Here's an achievement.

This wouldn't be such a big issue if it didn't on one hand detract from the actual gameplay by making you navigate endless menus, but the rewards themselves tend to be extremely lackluster, not to say stingy. miHoYo manages to, on the surface, shower the player with bling, but at the end of the day you'll actually have gained very little - or worse, stuff you don't even know the point of, or shop tokens that you cannot spend until you've raised your player level to one or other arbitrary milestone - and there are plenty of those. And suddenly some new banner unlocks because you reached player level x or beat story stage y, and it turns out, hey, what you might have already spent rolling may have been better-served going into that banner instead.

Skill-unlocking, too, is nightmare fuel for UX designers. It's overly complex for what it is, and not fun.

To put it plainly, Honkai Impact 3rd is hellish to navigate. Half the menus I was trying to get to had to be accessed through yet different menus, some places I still don't know where I would find them outside of "Go Here" buttons on missions, and it feels more like Playing Menus than a pseudo-spectacle fighter.

Now, as for the proper gameplay, I have to caution that this is a mobile game. It's not going to play like Bayonetta, Devil May Cry, Metal Gear Rising or Darksiders. It certainly tries to, but it has three very big problems in achieving it:

1. The movement and camera controls. They're floaty, not properly adapted for gamepad, let alone mouse and keyboard controls. The camera in particular is a nightmare to get used to. It doesn't work as a full free movement camera you control with your right stick, but instead has more digital movement than analog. It's frequently getting in the way of the action, and while you can tweak it somewhat, it'll never be as smooth an experience as native non-mobile games designed with thumbsticks in mind. Movement is in a similar boat, especially with auto-targeting enabled.

2. Combat itself is pretty damn spammy. Once again, the mobile nature of the game rears its ugly head, as all attacks and evades are basically taps on the screen. While they do have dedicated buttons assigned for each action, they're not as responsive as you'd like them to be, making the game feel like it has severe input lag at times - and for all I can tell, it has that, anyway. Instead of having the typical light/heavy attacks and maybe a special, the usual character has one basic attack which you'll find yourself mashing a lot - or sometimes holding for a special move. There's an evade action, which can be timed properly for extra effects like slowdowns and special attacks, a special and an ultimate, both of which cost SP to use and recharge slow enough to not be used much in the story stages overall. While different characters may mix it up in their specifics, this is about it. The range of actions is severely limited, and especially non-challenge arena battles are easily beaten just pressing B over and over, adding X or Y when off-cooldown and flashing their buttons. If you want to get fancy, you switch in your active character, resulting in a combo attack, but then you go back to the same formula. Especially in the early game, combat feels not at all rewarding.

3. Stages, especially story and event ones, are extremely short. I mean it. If the stage has a bonus star requirement to beat it within 240 seconds, or maybe even 300, you can be sure that you'll have no trouble first-timing it in less than half that time. Story missions in particular keep. interrupting. you. You go a few steps, maybe trigger a trash fight, then have somebody try to tell you something, interrupting the flow of the stage. If you're lucky, you may experience this two or three times in a stage before it's over, you end with a cutscene / victory screen and move on to the next cutscene followed by a 30-60 second stage. You'll seriously have done more tutorialized menu navigating than actual fighting by the time you've cleared the first story chapter. The moment you get in the rhythm of fighting enemies, you'll be interrupted - often for "press this button now" tutorials, which can even mess up your combo or cause you to get hit as they interrupt your dodge.
While this isn't a problem for longer-lasting difficult high-end content like arena wave battles, you cannot access that stuff until you've gotten further into the story and raised your player level - so for new players, this will be a nuisance.

There's yet another point I'll mention as being a problem in some way, which is the visual presentation. While - my god - the animation and model work for most characters is godlike (have you SEEN some of these designs?!), with easily some of the prettiest characters in Gachaland, battle animations are frequently over-animated and full of particle effects that make keeping track of what's going on, especially dodge-cues, a challenge harder than the enemies themselves.

A lot of the fun you'll have in combat is also directly related to who you enjoy playing as, and how you design your team. miHoYo is pretty hot on this style of game, as Genshin Impact attests to, but the inherent problem with this is that while you get a few basic choices early on, the vast bulk of playable characters need to be rolled for in the gacha - and the rates are anything but good, and currency is sparse and expensive.

I'd speak on more if I had more room, but I hit the character limit already. My bad.

I honestly like this way of visualizing the story. It's atmospheric, and considering a lot of people struggle with HPL's writing on the page, this style might just be the trick to getting folks to actually diving into the stories as they are.

The trivia bits are a great touch, too. I love that the team has obviously spent time researching HPL's life and literature, and references other third party literature on him.

Lovecraft, in my opinion, gets a really bad reputation in the modern times because of how much of his writing and themes get taken out of context - or not even that, just how ignorant most people today are of the state of the times when he told his stories. His body of work spans decades, and many changes can be observed throughout, often related to changes in his personal life and environments.

Having these trivia bits really helps giving the player an insight into the wider socio-political state of the world and the author's perspective. It's a great choice.

I'd be confident in calling this game a "Virtual Installation", a term TotalBiscuit tried to coin way back in the day when games like Dear Esther and Gone Home were rising up. It's kind of like a guided museum tour - and in this case, I'm all for it. Illustrating these stories and conveying their atmosphere is one of the major points I look for in Mythos adaptations, and often, arbitrary gameplay loops just get in the way of the tension.

It won't work for everyone - but that is to be expected. Hells, Lovecraft's stories don't work for everyone either. On the flipside, the short duration of the narrative should lend itself well towards catching the interest of new readers, without losing them halfway. Dagon is easily "beatable" (as silly as the term is in this instance) in under an hour, even at a leisurely pace. And since the title is free (as is the bulk of HPL's work; you can read most of his stories on Wikisource, for example), there's honestly no reason not to dive in.

I will, however, present this caveat: You need to be in the right mindset to absorb the narrative and atmosphere. Rushing through it, or outside distractions, might take you out of the experience. Make sure to set aside a quiet hour, preferably in the evening or night when things quiet down outside, put on some headphones and lean back in your chair. Best to also turn off any secondary displays. Tunnel-vision on the experience for the greatest mileage, and maybe put aside the Trivia achievement hunt for a second playthrough, so as not to interrupt the story's flow too much by way of searching the environment.

Either way, though, I'm glad Dagon exists in this format, and hope the developers will find a worthwhile niche in this style of narrative experience - I'd certainly love to see more of this!

Extremely predatory in terms of monetization, with punishing matchmaking and solo play.

It's like the worst trends of yesteryear's mobile loot games combined. A massive shop, hard to come by / randomly awarded currencies, level-locked high-rarity drops and so forth.

Rewards for winning matches? Sure. But unless you pay with premium currency, you'll be waiting 3-8 hours for your pack with a few cards to actually be available for opening. And that is after you've manually clicked it to start the opening countdown - and you'll need to do this for each following pack, too. Heck, you cannot even have more than 4 packs in the opening queue at a time, so any further wins will only grant you kill points towards global twice? a day free packs... which you'll also have to login for or miss out on. Chances are, you'll already have the next such "box" earned by the time you've won your 4th match and thus booster, rendering further wins outside of ranked pointless.

Ranked, meanwhile, only unlocks at player level 10. Getting there will be a slog, especially once you are currency-starved. The three daily missions reward you with some player exp, but the bulk of your leveling early on will be happening through upgrading cards by using duplicates.... which costs Gold as well as the duplicates you've painstakingly earned in the first place. At some point you'll be glad about getting a pittance of Gold coins from pack openings so you can at least buff your rares to stay relevant.

The matchmaking - even in casual mode - meanwhile, has no qualms about throwing a, say, level 6 player with a points limit of a little over 100 and low-statted cards into a battle against folks that run easily double the points, with more hitpoints on their leader, or sometimes even elites, than your entire 5-card deck combined - because of course, even your deck slots are level-gated, limiting viable deck builds especially for newer players who can neither field a few very strong, competitive units, nor a horde of middling ones.

Let me be clear: This game was designed for mobile devices, with all that entails. I honestly thought this level of predatory monetization had long since fallen out of favor even on smartphones, but I guess I was mistaken. Considering that Combat Cards actually was a simple throwaway top trumps-like card set Games Workshop put out a few backs for a tenner, you'd be surprised just how much money these developers would like you to spend just to be able to actually play the damned thing for more than 20 minutes two or three times a day.

But don't worry, they'll make sure to show you just how much better your experience could be if only you had higher-level cards (read: increasingly greater amounts of dupe-pulls and Gold), or any of the countless boxes and decks from the shop. The CPU battles may give you a few bonus levels on your cards when playing the mode, but don't worry - the difficulty will ramp up quickly, making sure the AI has both the numerical advantage as well as the qualitative. Gotta love those 200 HP elites with 100 point damage values smoking your entire board!

There could be a really fun game here, but I'm afraid the monetization model and pseudo-competitive design, playing wallet vs wallet, really do their damndest to discourage any sort of dabbling. I'd go so far as to say that even if you were masochistically inclined, this is not an experience you'll be able to enjoy for much longer than the early tutorial-ish sections. Even as a hardcore fan of the franchise, with far too many models and novels decorating the apartment, and a desire for decent card game engagement, the game fails to keep me playing - both through its non-conducive reward mechanics as well as its haywire monetization.

When The Past Was Around has been one of my most-anticipated titles over the past year.
Ever since Mojiken published the game's prologue/demo for the first(?) Steam Game Festival, I've wanted to see, play, hear and learn more about it.

When it finally released, I jumped at it, and beat it in one sitting. It's a short game, but one that delivers enough artistry and emotional impact to prove worth the price of admission. Every scene is well-crafted, stunningly drawn and heartfelt. The soundtrack perfectly accompanies the wordless narrative, be it through moments of intense grief, whimsical dates or hopeful melancholy.

While I am certain that the game and what it offers will hardly be for everyone, I firmly believe that it presents a labor of love of a timeless quality that is well-worth experiencing for anyone with a taste for bittersweet stories, or struggling with the loss of a loved one. It may just help them starting to heal.