Trap (2024)

It was goofy fun but closer to a The Visit or Old than Sixth Sense or Split in terms of quality. One of those ones that feels like it should be an "M Night Shyamalan presents" rather than one directed by him. I really liked Josh Hartnett, his kid and Allison Pill, and Senya Shyamalan was alright (good singer-songwriter, okay actor). The concept of the structure being successive cat and mouse games getting tighter and tighter was cool, but it did lead to a lot of stuff feeling contrived or disjointed. If you go in expecting silly genre thrills you'll probably enjoy it.

Rating: throwaway fun

Dream Scenario (2023)

SPOILERS BELOW

A solid execution, but the allegory for internet fame was so close that they may as well have not bothered with the dream stuff and just had it be about a milkshake ducked guy. It felt like a semi-Kaufman. And when they do finally commit to the concept for a few minutes at the end, it conflicts with the rest of the movie which had up till then kept it ambiguous at best as to whether anything metaphysical had happened (and in fact seemed to be leaning towards it being coincidence until the internet article at which point it became mass suggestion).

Rating: intriguing but timid

Anna's Quest (2015)

It's produced by Daedalic but not developed by them so I thought I'd give it a shot. So far, I'm not really enjoying it. It's incredibly twee and bland, from the artstyle through the voice acting to even the font (which is either Comic Sans or very close to it). The VO also goes at a snail's pace and contains fairly regular misreads. The storytelling isn't up to much either, starting with a pointless prologue then the inciting incident told via storybook cutscene (terrible decision) and gameplay kicking in with you stuck in a small room and doing some rote puzzles. It's in the Daedelic engine, so it does also have a few of their standard problems like the characters moving too fast for their walk animation so they look like they're sliding around, and the tacky adverts on the menu screen. Also, there are no custom animations for any interactions which, as I think I've said previously (probably with a Daedalic game), you can't really get away with at high resolution. And even Monkey Island etc would have a few of them! It just feels really cheap. At least that Daedalic guy didn't insist on singing a song at the start, I guess.
Anyway, I just got stuck (which I maintain should not really happen at this early stage of an adventure), and looked up a walkthrough and the solution is nonsense. Basically, you've got to get the collar off a tired but grumpy cat, so you need a bed for it so it'll go to sleep. I got the lumpy pillow and put some toy stuffing in it to make it comfy, but it's still "not appealing enough". That's all the hints I get. Apparently the solution is to use the scissors to cut a bit off the curtains and use that on the pillow. I have no idea why this is the case.
So I'm going to give this a tiny bit more of a chance but I doubt I'll be spending long on it. 

Re. the curtains puzzle, if you try to use them, she does mention that they're soft. So I suppose that if you've guessed that the problem with the pillow is that it's not soft enough yet, then you might decide to try to cut a strip of curtain off and just lay it on top of the pillow, but it's a hell of a reach, especially when the player character Anna is giving you the solution to a bunch of other puzzles before you get to complete them.
Another classic Daedalic issue at play is the ever-present question "is this bad writing or a bad translation or both?" If the lead character didn't say "oh" or "pardon?" or "sorry?" every other line the game would be half as long and a lot more bearable.
So, I got out of the witch's cottage by gathering the ingredients of a spell, then went to a village with a tavern and a blacksmiths and a church and yawwwwwn. My quest is to cure my sick uncle so I go see a wizard and find out my big mission is to... gather the ingredients of a spell! Nope. Along with a new character whose VO is so bad I can only assume they were a backer or something (the main feature of the extras is what seems to be fan art of the game, so they were crowd-sourcing at least some stuff), this is the last straw. I had hoped it would get a little more exciting once I escaped the cottage but it went the other way if anything. So I'm done with it.

Rating: twee, rote and bland with infuriating VO.

Technobabylon (2015)

Started on Technobabylon, a Wadjet Eye produced (but not developed) game. Like Blackwell Epiphany, it's got Ben Chandler doing art in a 640x400 resolution, and again it looks as gorgeous as pixel art at this res is ever going to (I'll be interested to see how their upcoming game Old Skies ends up looking, as it's Ben doing HD art!). Also, it has the massive portraits like Epiphany, and the inability to turn off subtitles like Primordia had until a very recent patch (that came along shortly after I tweeted them to ask if it was possible, so I suspect that was thanks to me!). As far as I can tell, though - no egg-timer! Hooray!

So far, it's pretty cool. It's a cyberpunk story with lots of structural playfulness - multiple POV characters, flashbacks - and lots of cool world-building. It starts off with you stuck in your shitty welfare apartment because the internet has gone down and so your door won't open. Potentially a dull start to a game, but here you're using wetware goop to hack into stuff, giving viruses to your home appliances and pitting their digital mascots against each other, so it's good fun. The juxtaposition between the cyberspace with its floating anime heads and glowy icons, and your scuzzy apartment full of dirty clothes and dripping food is really effective. The writing is strong as well.

There are some minor issues - the UI isn't quite as slick as it should be (too many steps and mouse journeys to everything), sometimes the worldbuilding is subtle enough that it obfuscates puzzle logic, and the voice acting is sometimes a little off (line misreads, or a bit stagey) - but overall so far it's very engaging. 

Played a bit more of this. It switched to the detective co-protagonist and the game got a little less interesting, a little more clunky. The dialogue is a bit more wrought and contrived, and some of the puzzles are a bit wonkier. Also, it's got that Wadjet Eye feel to the VO where everyone's dour and grumbly and it's just a bit wearing after a while. (Also, Dave tries his hand at a Texan religous zealot this time round!) Production values are still impressive, though, and I like the second detective on the case, Lao (who happens to be trans, which is nice to see included - and I think it only gets mentioned on an optional dialogue thread, which is cool, though Ed Fear would call this second wave rep and want to see more focus on it!). It's just brought the timelines of the two player-characters together and reveal how one was affecting the other, which was fun, so I'm hoping it perks up again. 

I finished Technobabylon. It's gorgeous throughout, really nicely presented, and the VO is all great, no clunkers. But puzzles and dialogue wise it ended up feeling like a bit of a slog. There's clearly been a lot of work put into the background lore, but instead of hinting towards it, every conversation, every dialogue tree is twice as long as it needs to be, it's all incredibly didactic, and the writer seems aware of it because the player characters are mainly there to listen to a long diatribe and then reply "so you're saying [five word down-to-earth summary]".

The plot is overly-complex too, I found myself not really following or caring about all the many evil scientists and politicians and what have you and their various schemes. 

And there were some fun puzzles where you're taking out evil soldiers and stuff, but also a lot of looking through files and replacing cannisters with other cannisters and interacting with UIs. Even the 'fun action-scene' puzzles felt fiddly and drawn out, there was never any change in pace. And frustration was added on top when the way that future stuff works wasn't explained properly, so after finally figuring something out (or brute forcing it or using a walkthrough) my reaction was too often 'oh, that's how that thing works' rather than 'oh, I should have got that, what a clever puzzle'. That, combined with a few regular puzzles that just had poor signposting or bullshit pixel-hunts, made for a pretty bumpy experience.

Bulletstorm (2013)

Played a little under an hour, so far it's... okay. I maybe had my expectations set too high, or I had it combined with Titanfall 2 in my mind, but I was expecting something a little more fun and inventive. The first half hour or so is mostly cheesy meatheaded cutscenes, QTEs and tutorial stuff. It's all really bland and feels like it was written by a 14 year old who plays a lot of Gears Of War and Duke Nukem Forever. It looks fine, but the art direction isn't particularly imaginative either, Gears Of War but with some Rage thrown in. I got to the start of the gameplay and while it's got some fun mechanics (the kick, the lasso, the points for kill types) it all feels really loose, like I'm just mashing my way through it. It doesn't have that feeling of precision tactics that Doom (93 and 16), Juarez Gunslinger or Shadow Warrior do. Maybe it's not supposed to and I should be barrelling through having fun killing people in different ways. The only problem is that that's getting a little stale already - you can only whip and kick someone to death so many times before it gets dull. It feels a little like I'm playing a single-player campaign that was only really designed to teach me how to play a multiplayer game or a wave shooter or something. Hopefully I'm still in the opening stages and it'll get more involved as I go.

I've now played for a few more hours. It might be because I'm coming from the fairly rubbish and po-faced Crysis 3, but I felt a lot more positive about this game as I went on. The settings get a lot more attractive - sci-fi cities and big double moons and the like - and lots of fun setpieces like getting chased by a gigantic threshing wheel thing or dropping a train on an angry dragon beast (though I had to drop the difficulty down to very easy for the former - why do devs always make turret sections insanely hard?). And most of the team have fucked off so there's less meathead marine swearing and grunting to put up with. Now I've unlocked some weapons and alt-fire modes and stuff, the combat has livened up a bit too, though it can still feel a little loose and a little repetitive. I'd really like a slo-mo power-up to get in some nice trick shots. Also, I understand the thinking behind it - to encourage players to have fun - but having checklists of complicated ways to kill enemies in order to unlock stuff can make doing stuff like killing punk-thugs by kicking them into cacti feel like grinding.

Okay, finished. The story and writing continued to be painfully bad - the most generic stuff possible covered with rude words masquerading as jokes or bigotry masquerading as characterisation. Apparently they were inspired by Firefly but they must not have actually watched the show if this is what they ended up with. And they have the gall to end it on a cliffhanger.
Otherwise, when it's fun and pretty, it's really fun and pretty, but there were too many bullet-sponge mini-bosses and interminable boss fights and zombies and what have you, and not enough variety of locations (turns out the partially-collapsed leisure mega-complex one is basically the only exterior you get, and while it looks nice, seeing it yet again after another section of corridors isn't really enough), for it to sustain that for any period of time. Probably the most irritating thing was that you are only allowed to hold three weapons at a time, and you can only swap them out when you come across an in-world terminal - the whole game is based around finding fun ways to kill enemies, why would they restrain the player like that? Even more frustrating is that when you finish the campaign they unlock the ability to hold all your weapons at once on a replay. Let me do that the first time, you idiots!

Rating: can be fun, but often held back by irritating design and bad writing

A Fisherman's Tale (2019)

Really nice presentation, and some cool basic puzzles to get started. I did have to check a walkthrough really early on because due to some bad lighting design I thought something was a glitch. Weirdly, I couldn't find a single text walkthrough, so I had to quit out, watch a video and then come back in (and redo a bunch of stuff because of the lack of checkpoints).
I really like the choice of a French narrator, it works really well. But the radio VO is clearly just one of the devs and it really lets the whole thing down, I don't understand why they'd do that. At least get a mate who can do a solid sea captain yarrrr voice instead of having it sound like an IT helpdesk. There's some other clunkiness to it, but overall pretty cool and I'm looking forward to going back to it.

Finished A Fisherman's Tale, it was quite nice but fairly limited in various ways - there's not a lot of world interaction, the puzzles are mostly 'you need a thing, either find it in a drawer or find a too small/big version of it and resize it', and it's pretty short with only three main puzzles that have a few elements each to them.

Rating: lovely presentation, but short and shallow gameplay.

Crysis 3 (2013)

Well, I've played through the cyberspace tutorial and hopefully remembered most of the myriad controls. I've put all the settings to high and it seems to be running fine, but it still seems to have weird visuals, where you get bright white pixels on the edges of surfaces. I'm hoping it because I'm out in the rain and once I get indoors it'll go away...
Anyway, the game isn't particularly fun so far! I don't feel like I'm getting a chance to sneak around and come up with tactics. I'm in an action bubble of sorts but it's not the open spaces of Crysis 1 or Far Cry 1, it's all walls and stairs, so it feels like I may as well be in a corridor shooter anyway. This is just the first level, hopefully it'll get to some nice daytime post-apocalyptic open spaces soon.

I had to put it down to the easiest setting because it really does not give you an inch on the very first level. Really bad way to start the game, especially as I tended to coast through the rest of it. Anyway, generally it's fairly terrible. The white pixels thing went away after that first level, and the visuals are technically impressive (especially in the outside bits) but rather soulless - I got more of a thrill from the setting of Far Cry 1 in a recent replay because it's so well directed. The gameplay doesn't help either, because as with Crysis 2 they've basically abandoned the original loop of staking out an area, tagging the enemies and oh-so-slowly creeping your way around the place taking them out one by one (then maniacally rushing the last few and blowing a bunch of stuff up), so you don't get to sit there enjoying your surroundings, you're basically just sprinting past them the whole time. You can tag enemies and all that, but you're basically just play-acting as you just get a group of three enemies or so to take out from behind a crate before you trundle down the one path you need to take to get to the next glowy thing and watch as your control is taken away and some more stuff blows up. That's if you're not following Psycho through another five minutes of actual corridors as he bleats on about some plot point. (The story, incidentally, is absolutely abominable - clunkily told, interminably long and utterly boring.)

And the weird thing is it keeps getting worse as it goes. They just keep throwing more turret sections and boss battles and confusing cave sections and stuff at you. It's really bizarre how much this franchise misunderstands its own original strengths. I gave it six hours or so but gave up once I got to a boss battle with no checkpoints, just endlessly shooting a bit metal thing.

Rating: technically impressive visuals but no fun