Red Matter (2018)

Gave it a little try. If it weren't VR, it'd be the most boring game ever - deserted space station, spooky whispers, snarky AI, you have to go around finding fuses - but it is still cool to be hanging out in a high fidelity sci-fi setting. It's still not as good as Alyx, obvs. One thing a lot of VR games just don't seem to twig to is how important world and object interaction is. You want to go peer at things, pick things up, throw things around etc. Your inputs are your eyes and your hands, that's what you want to be using all the time. And a - if not the - big selling point of VR is immersion.

Finished. It was bad enough that I don't know if I'll bother with the sequel, which is a shame considering I've already purchased it. I'll have to be more wary of the review 'VR bump' in future!

Basically, it's cool coasting around big well-rendered spaces in VR, but otherwise this is a fairly empty game with not much interaction and the only actual mechanics being a few simple logic puzzles. Movement is slow, and there are a couple of UI choices that mean everything takes more steps than it should. It feels like these choices were made to pad the game out tbh. Also, the story is pretty generic and then there's an abrupt twist ending which manages to simultaneously be nigh-incomprehensible and tired.

Rating: pretty but empty.

Furiosa (2024)

MILD SPOILERS BELOW

This movie makes all the mistakes I was hoping it wouldn't.

As a Mad Max movie, it's too long - the longest by a full half hour. It's over-reliant on CG - there are big chunks of action sequences where it feels entirely CG or at best actors against a greenscreen, giving it that dreaded 'video game feel', and there's a lot of de-aging and actor-merging so a lot of characters have a digital feel to their faces. It uses all the same visual iconography as a previous entry, bringing nothing new to the table. (The only new thing it brings, really, is Dementus, in that it's a prostheticed-up performance at Oldman in Fifth Element or Depp in Tusk levels of silliness that the series has never gone to before. Not that this is a good thing.) It has a romance subplot (could a female-led Wasteland movie really not just get by without one?). It actually slows down towards the end, retreating into montages, lore-and-exposition narration and self-indulgent monologues about human suffering and 'we're not so different, you and I'. I often felt myself zoning out, bored and even losing track of the story, which are very odd things to happen during a Mad Max movie.

It walks into all the usual prequel traps, too. It defangs and demystifies existing villains (Immortan Joe is now some guy who hangs out in his office bartering over exchange rates, almost on the same level as the other warlords and no longer Furiosa's great nemesis). It needlessly and prosaically explains things from the original (hey, did you want to know how the doctor came to work for Immortan Joe? He was part of a barter deal!). It crams cameos from existing characters in, coming up with contrived ways to avoid contradicting established events. It feels the need to link up directly to the start of the original, even though it's not a satisfying ending. It recontextualises little things in odd, slightly less satisfying ways (the other towns have the same skull-on-steering-wheel emblem as Immortan Joe which, while not directly contradicting anything in Fury Road, makes the three warlords of the wasteland feel more like a regimented structure rather than separate unstable elements who sometimes form uneasy alliances). It doesn't manage to overcome the viewer's knowledge of future events to create a feeling of jeopardy.

Fury Road surprised everyone with its freshness and vitality. Furiosa has none of that. File it alongside Prometheus and Crystal Skull under 'directors returning to their series and dashing high hopes by producing what feels like a legacy sequel that provides a superficially close facsimile of the source material while not actually understanding it'.

Rating: a disappointing slog.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024)

Never funny, exciting, cool, interesting or scary. The script is an overstuffed mess of pointless cameos and fan-service, jokes that are barely there never mind actually amusing, story beats that don't go anywhere (you could probably lift half of the scenes out of this movie and still have it make sense), lines that make no sense, and too many characters. There are so many things wrong with this movie that watching it made me feel like a Cinema Sins video except every one of my points was fair and accurate.

Rating: terrible

Ghostbusters (2016)

A passable Scooby Doo movie at best. An unfunny mess of a movie, seemingly aimed at 6 year olds.

Life Is Strange (2015)

Just played chapter 1. Really enjoyed it. Such a breath of fresh air after Borderlands to have something where I'm in control most of the time, there's actually some sort of mechanic there, and I actually give a shit about what's happening. I'm already totally invested in the characters and the mystery. It's a little clunky in places, painfully sincere and hipsterish, but that fits perfectly with these 18 year old art students. The writing is fairly subtle, and where it isn't then it still feels like it's the 18 year olds being cringey or the tone being slightly heightened and Twin Peaksy. And seeing a montage that felt more like Magnolia than Smokin' Aces was, again, very gratifying.
Only a couple of small negatives for me.
Firstly, it could do with more detailed and expressive character models - they give the whole thing a bit of a painterly look which helps cover stuff up but the faces are all pretty low-res and static, and no hair physics, which is all a real shame when it's such an emotioncentric story and you spend so much of it looking at people's faces. I'd love to see a very subtle remaster of this that just fixes these issues. (Oof, just took a look and found out that there actually was a remaster done a couple of years ago, and it looks terrible. Glad I didn't get forced by corporate fuckery to play that version.)
Secondly, the time-rewind puzzles can be a little fiddly. A lot of the time they're really satisfying and fun, but a couple of times I was irritated, especially when there was an aspect of it that didn't get tutorialised till later but I kind of needed to understand at that point, or the boundaries weren't communicated completely clearly.
I'm not convinced right now that it branches any more than a Telltale game (although there were some decisions that I totally bypassed because I didn't bother to look in a certain spot, which is quite cool - apparently I failed to save a bird's life, no idea where that was!), but perhaps stuff will snowball later. I'm hoping the town setting with its reusable settings and cast will help there - easier to spend budget on branching that way.
Really, the best review I can give is that I want to play the second episode right away.

Okay, finished it. On the whole I really enjoyed this. It does enough to hide the fact that it's basically just a fancy visual novel, the time puzzles are often fun and cool, the story is perfect Twin Peaks/Donnie Darko pastiche, the branching has at least some heft to it (a few big options and lots of little ones, plus puzzles with multiple solutions), and I cared about the characters. I found myself laughing along with them when they poked fun at each other, rather than laughing with the writers.
There were a few flaws aside from the stuff I mentioned previously. Though most characters looked fairly different three of the teen girls had very similar, almost bland faces. The clothing and hair has to do a lot of heavy lifting (plus, to be fair, the writing and acting). There is the occasional lack of polish - how soon you get a hint, or how far back you have to keep rewinding, or dialogue playing just as you're about to do something and getting cut off - though nothing major. And the ending was a little bit of a let down - the murder mystery gets solved around the end of 4/start of 5 and then it pretty much moves on to dealing with the time travel stuff and gets trippy, which is a good choice, but it indulgently goes on too long (a real shame, the sequence would have been super-effective if every moment was cut in half), it has an annoying stealth section which, even though you can save-scum through it using your powers, is exactly what I don't want to be doing at the climax of this game, and it eventually gives in and does that 'vignettes on floating platforms in an empty space' thing from every game dream sequence ever.
And then the story ends too ambiguously and, though this may be due to branching stuff, abruptly for my tastes. They don't explain or resolve the time power stuff and they never address the possible romance between Max and Chloe which seemed to me like the third pillar of the story! By the end of it, I was starting to wonder if I'd imagined that element, especially as apparently a large majority of players got Max to kiss some boy near the end of it.
It wasn't awful or anything, it just didn't measure up to the highs of the rest of the game. And, hey, maybe the sequels will solve this stuff. Much like with TWD, I'd gladly play more, and if I get through this backlog and they show up on sale I'll likely grab them.

Rating: clunky in places, but wonderful

Tales From the Borderlands (2014-15)

Okay, played episode 1. I'd actually played this one before but not got any further. It looks pretty nice, slickly presented, the writing is pretty good. It's basically a two-hour-long QTE, where they've all but given up on puzzles and (the illusion of) branching choices, but it's a fun one. The writing is a little more try-hard than I'd remembered, like everything is wacky or a quip or a stylistic flourish, and they put lots of swearing in the text descriptions except they f@#!ing censor themselves (if you have to do that, just don't swear - it doesn't automatically make you cool or clever, anyway). Buuut it's energetic, there's lots going on, and even if it's not incredibly original it's done well. Really, the only question is, is half-playing this interactive animated show as good as just watching an episode of Rick & Morty or whatever. And I think my answer is "not reeeeally, but it's close enough that I'll play at least the next episode".

I finished episode 3 and can't be bothered to play any further. Non-TWD nu-Telltale is not quite on the 'don't even bother trying these' pile with Deponia, Lost Horizon, Syberia etc, but I'll be dropping Batman very quickly if I sense it's got all the same issues.

Basically, this game comes down to cutscenes, QTEs and branching narrative. (They pretend to have currency and inventory systems but they're fake.)
The cutscenes are fine, but it's all got that 'hey, this video game writing is almost as good as something you'd see in a movie!' vibe. Like, it mimics the Guardians Of The Galaxy movie style well enough to get you from gameplay chunk to gameplay chunk (or just wholesale steals from Spaced), but it's not strong enough to carry the whole thing, and it regularly slips into cringily try-hard.
The QTEs are just that, and often very annoying, and I don't know if it's because they frontloaded with a great climax for the first one or if I just stopped being impressed by the production values, but the action scenes felt like they got less impressive as they went. None of them were as good as the Wallace & Gromit ones, frankly.
The narrative doesn't really branch, and it doesn't get away with it as much as TWD.

Also, a continuing Telltale irritant is that either they're using the same models for a bunch of primary characters, or they're so unimaginative in their designs that it just looks like they are. Every man is the same white guy with pointy chin and ruffled hair in some shade of brown. Every woman looks the same as each other and all the ones from TWAU. What makes it worse, is they keep introducing plots in these games where one person is disguised as or haunted by another, and it's incredibly confusing because you can't tell how alike they're supposed to now look in this storyline seeing as they all look the same anyway. Again, TWD mostly avoids this, and if a character looks like Lee, he only shows up years after Lee died and you can be confident that they've done it intentionally to let you know Clem is thinking the same thing. 

It boils down to the fact that I don't care about any of these characters or storylines enough to do another two hours of QTEs. My not knowing the Borderlands lore at all may have factored in, but the writers just haven't got me invested at all.

Rating: slick but slight and soulless