Trüberbrook (2019)

I've heard mixed things about the gameplay but it looks real nice!

Okay, I think I've been combining this in my head with Harold Halibut. I thought the whole thing was going to feel very stop-motiony, but it turns out that it's 3D modelled characters on photographed diorama backgrounds, which unfortunately means it just ends up looking like a slightly crisper 2010 Telltale game. I think this one is supposed to have more actual puzzling in it, whereas HH is just a conversation-em-up, but also I read that the puzzles are very simple. We'll see. I've played a tiny bit so far, and it's... okay. It's not grabbing me. The tutorial prologue is a woman mucking about with fuses and wires at an abandoned petrol station to get her motorbike running again, and then the game opens proper with a man arriving in a Twin Peaksy town (yawn) with the goal of going to his hotel (yawn). BUT a ghostly guy just appeared in my hotel room so maybe NOT yawn after all?

Okay, this game is terrible. Gave up after finishing chapter one.
Firstly, the translation is awful (one very simple example is "knock the door loud and clearly" - how would even an amateur translator think that was okay?) and the actors misread almost every line as well.
Secondly, the puzzles and inventory system are a bizarre mix of inscrutable and hand-holdy. The only way you can interact with your inventory is via the 'use inventory on' option in your verb coin, which picks one or two options for you from all your objects. So the only thing you have to do is wander around picking everything up and then clicking 'use inventory' on everything and using the thing the game tells you to use. And yet, somehow, it's still difficult to get through because it does shit like forcing you to click through four incredibly boring backstory dialogue branches before giving you the one that you need to progress (so you have to ask the hotel manager five different things about the ownership history of the local mines before you have the option to order a beer - and there are no clues that she would possibly have beer to serve, btw, it's all totally random. Or putting a hotspot of one piece of food on a buffet table right next to the hotspot for all the rest of the food on the table, with no reason to look at that piece anyway (turns out it has a maggot on it, which you can then pick up).
Meanwhile, the inventory puzzles would be completely impossible if they weren't essentially auto-solved. At one point you need to retrieve a guy's pet fox. Initially it's on top of a hut, but at some point it moves across to a tree branch (I have no idea what triggers this), and so the solution is to put a blanket over a nearby rowboat then use the cheese on the cocktail stick and the schnapps and the hollow reed on the fox. This acts as a blowdart which makes it drunk enough to fall off the branch over onto the blanket which somehow is taut enough to act as a trampoline so the fox lands safely and runs off to the next bit of the puzzle. Another goal is to fix some broken live wiring. The thought process that I (or the user interface, I guess) was apparently supposed to go through was "I need to tie those back together by hand without getting electrocuted, the suit of armour in the town square got struck by lightning last night so it definitely doesn't conduct electricity so I should wear it and that will make me safe (??), in order to do so I need to smash it into pieces by throwing a can opener at it, the best place to find a can opener is in the lake, so I should get a fishing rod and some bait (even though I'm not trying to get a fish), for the bait one particular piece of old food on the buffet might have a maggot on it even though the rest doesn't and I can't see any maggots, there are fishing rods behind the hotel desk and the concierge wants me to give her 'a pawn' so I guess I'll give her the massage wand". It's all such egregious puzzle design that I can't even guess where I should be focusing my mindless clicking to get through it quicker.

Most reviews gave this an average score, tending to acknowledge the bad writing and acting and design but excusing it because the game looks so nice. Except it doesn't, it looks like the Land Of The Living section from Grim Fandango! They've clearly all just been bamboozled by the press releases about how they made the art, because the first two paragraphs almost without fail warble on about hand-made dioramas and photogrammetry and LED lights and all that. One review was raving about the very first screen saying it was the stand out of the entire game, seemingly wowed that they put some stars in the sky and a flashing neon light on the garage roof which, apart from being incredibly basic things to be impressed by, as far as I can tell weren't even part of the physical dioramas. Utterly bizarre.

Rating: terrible.

The Walking Dead: The Final Season (2018)

Played the first episode. Only 4 eps this time. Weirdly, I had to tell it what decisions I'd made in the first two seasons - isn't that supposed to be this series' whole thing, remembering my choices? I could barely recall them, why am I having to do it? Anyway, it's pretty much the same thing as always. It picks up a while after the ending of S3 - I can understand why they didn't want to pick up with Clem collecting baby AJ from a ranch, though it was a little odd to have that thread dropped - and you find yourself in a community of kids holed up at their old school. I quite liked this idea, it's got scope for things to be a little different with Clem surrounded by peers and perhaps even being the most grown-up one there. The game also lets you pick up collectibles and decorate your room with them, which I instinctively rolled my eyes at but realised later is quite a clever way to use game mechanics to signal to the player 'this is somewhere Clem is thinking about settling down, at least for a while'. So I was a little disappointed that by the end of the first episode we were already hitting the old 'there's a gang of troublemakers outside the walls, the community has dark secrets, the leader turns out to be an arsehole' standards. I was actually kind of hoping for a while that they were going to do a bit of a sandbox thing, let me tend to the greenhouse, shore up defences, that kind of thing.
All the glitchy, clunky stuff is still in there too, but still at a low enough level that I can just about ignore it. Still bewilders me that some of this got past QA and playtesting, though, especially in the first episode when theoretically they're at their least rushed.

Played the second episode, and my overwhelming feeling is anger at the devs for fucking the whole thing up so badly with their stupid QTEs and action sequences. There are now these rubbish over-the-shoulder bits where you have to 'use tactics' by kicking zombies in the knee and backing away until they're spread out enough that you have time to kill each one, and also some bow and arrow bits, along with the usual abysmal QTEs. The camera is shit, the controls are unresponsive, it's often unclear whether you've got control, and prompt graphics blend in with the background. Why is it that in the menus and dialogue select UI I can whip my mouse across the whole screen with one swipe, but in life or death action sequences it takes four swipes to get the camera to look behind Clem? The most infuriating moment was when someone got killed because I was trying to be smart and shoot out a sniper but it turned out all the game wanted me to do was move the cursor into the target like a good little monkey. This is a siege, I want to be deciding when to set bombs off and where to focus the archers, not basing everything on whether I can scrape the cursor across the screen in 0.3 seconds. Also, Clem keeps on making stupid fucking decisions on her own, which is particularly irritating when this is a game that constantly harps on about how I shape the narrative. It's been a long time since I've been so annoyed at devs for ruining all the good stuff in their own game with a bunch of brain-meltingly bad decisions (possibly Fate Of Atlantis?). How have they got worse and worse at this as the series has gone on?!
Also really annoying is when I google it to see if there are ways to get through it all a bit easier, and there's a bunch of threads of people saying how shit these QTEs are but there's always at least one 'git gud' dickhead in there. Yet again, I find myself losing all sympathy for Telltale going under.
Also, the 'here's how characters feel about you' summary (which is always weirdly unreflective of my actions and the characters' responses) said that the dog was sad I ignored her WHICH I DIDN'T, SHE NEVER EVEN APPROACHED ME, so fuck you Telltale. Clem very bravely made friends with that dog last episode :'( 

Finished. Not much more to say. It was a nice ending. Shame they were fucking up their game with bullshit QTEs and action gameplay right to the last moment. I can't remember if they had introduced 'shift+Q' and 'shift+E' prompts previous to this season, but they're an awful idea that exacerbate the whole thing. It's like an executive decided that because Arkham Asylum was popular they should put that combat system in this game, oh and also the kids all love archery now because of The Hunger Games so put that in too, and the dev team just had to struggle to cram all this shit in there. Though I suspect it was just the dev team making bad decisions all on their own. Hilariously, minutes before the end of the game, the old 'you have to hold down W to walk forward but you're at a slightly different angle to the path so you have to do a little strafe every few seconds' problem showed up again, it was like they wanted to make us nostalgic for season 1's bad design decisions! Amazing that no one said 'you know what, this is one of the most important moments of the entire four seasons, and this is killing the mood, let's move the path a little bit'.

Oh well. Overall, I'd probably recommend people play seasons 1 and 2 and then just head-canon a happy ending.

Rating: more of the same, which is fine but a shame, and the QTEs and action scenes are at their most infuriating.

Unavowed (2018)

Interested to see how much RPG Dave put in his adventure and how many Blackwell references there are. 

Okay, played through the opening and the first mission. There's some cool stuff in here - it looks great as always, the music is good if you like New York jazz, and the voice acting is solid too. Also, the opening is nice and dramatic, starting with you waking up to find yourself having a demon exorcised and then flashing back to when you got possessed and killed a bunch of your friends. Then you help the exorcists (the Unavowed, a league of supernatural do-gooders) defeat a Void Realm creature and join their team. After that, you're off on your first mission to investigate some Void activity, figure out what happened and help people if possible - quite a Blackwelly set-up. There are some effectively creepy and shocking moments in there. RPG stuff is pretty light, just making a few decisions about how to deal with various beings, and conversation choices that may or may not do very much. And there's already been some ghost lore talk with an oblique reference to Rosa! Probably smart to get that done early so Wadjet nerds can relax and enjoy the game.
There is some clunkiness, though. Portraits still flicker in and out between dialogue lines and have odd placement at times - even aside from that, they're even less necessary with the increased resolution, imo, they just block the drama and spectacle. The separate sound levels of VO, music and sound effects vary quite a bit from scene to scene (or conversation to conversation) and so I had to lower the latter two down to 10% and keep VO at 100% just to make sure I could always hear dialogue. Plus there's still the occasional pop or blowout. And some little UI quirks like how when characters are doing background dialogue, subtitles come up even though I've turned them off, and when a character pauses between lines, a little "..." comes up in a text window. And the game doesn't always keep track of what characters already know. Walk animations are slow and stiff and characters do some very unnatural synchronised pathfinding, all suddenly walking at the exact same pace in the exact same direction at the exact same time!
Puzzle-wise, there's a lot of the Blackwells here too - lots of finding passwords on sticky notes, replacing broken fuses and swinging back and forth between dialogue trees. You defeat the void creature by rummaging through bins and putting cloths up drainpipes while he and the Unavowed stand in an infinite pre-battle shit-talk loop. Hopefully I get to do some magic soon! I do at least have my teammates, a djinn (who uses her sword to open doors) and a mage (who handles fire to provide light and melt stuff), so I can indirectly do some stuff there, though mission 1 was a bit of a milk run. 

Played through a couple more missions. My main takeaway is that this is, essentially, more Blackwell. I had got the impression (probably from a mix of interviews and critical reactions) that the RPG elements were mechanically more deep than they are, that there would be turn-based combat and what have you. I wasn't sure I'd like it, but I was curious how it would work. In reality, it seems that the only things that change are incidental lines of dialogue and some puzzle paths. So, say you choose at the start to be a female actor rather than a male cop, when you need to persuade an NPC to let you do something, your dialogue option is 'pretend to be a journalist' rather than 'say you're a cop'. You can choose two team members per mission (though you make everyone get on the metro before picking where you're going to go or whom you're going to take, for some reason, which is pretty funny!) and if, say, you pick the fire mage rather than the ghost whisperer, when you need to find the keypad combo to get in somewhere then you ignore the ghost hovering next to it and instead read the memory of the burnt piece of paper. You also get variations on conversations depending on which characters are there, of course. But yeah, otherwise, it's 'show up to a New York street and try to figure out what happened by wandering around unlocking dialogue tree branches and finding an anniversary date to unlock a door' or whatever.
In his review for RPS, John Walker said that the puzzles pick up a bit later, but I'm not confident I'd agree. Honestly, I'm a bit burnt out on these after having played five of them, so I'm giving up on this, at least for now, Maybe some day I'll come back to it.

The Darkside Detective (2017)

Played through three of the cases (out of six, or nine depending on if the bonus ones unlock for free). It's funny and charming, and has some nice atmosphere, but also there's not a lot going on here. Like, it's similar to Joe Richardson's games in many ways, but I just am not finding it as interesting because everything's a bit too cute and seen-it-before. The graphics are a microcosm of the whole game - they're cute and charming but there's not a lot of character to them and I'm a little bored of that aesthetic now. Also, some minor irritants like putting a mini-game in each episode (fucking tile-sliding puzzle again) and a fair amount of backtracking once the levels get a little larger. Unless it makes any major missteps, I suspect my final verdict will be 'it's a nice idle-point-and-clicker to play one 20-minute episode of per day to chill out and get a few chuckles but that's as far as it goes'. 

Okay, finished the main six cases and tried one of the bonus ones. Them being labelled bonus gives me a nice excuse to not bother with them, but I suspect I actually would have given up at this point if not even earlier if there had just been 9 main cases. It really is just a case of walking through each scene, clicking the interact button on every object, and then looking at the handful of items you've ended up with in your inventory and which one needs to be applied to which obstacle. There is the occasional slightly more complicated puzzle, but mostly 'complexity' is added by increasing the number of screens/objects rather than puzzle layers. Combined with the single-click interface, paucity of dialogue trees, and lack of animations, it all makes it feel very mechanical and unimmersive. The more elements you strip away from adventure games, the more the inner workings are laid bare and it all feels like rote grinding. FPSes and what have you can afford to just say 'collect the colour-coded keys for the colour-coded doors'; adventures can't, because they don't have another central gameplay element to rely on (no matter how many of them try with dreadful minigames!). And the animations thing is another big thing that adventures get wrong - I know that it can be a budget/skill challenge to include them, but they're a big part of the immersion and reward system, and it's better to have crappy walk cycles and special one-off anims than it is to fade down and up every time something happens and to have your character standing stock still the entire game not even walking into a scene as it opens.

(I'm always glad that we made TGP, because it combines with BTDT to make a game that starts off with pretty simple structure and puzzles and then unfurls into something more complex. But as simple as it is, BTDT still has the verbs, the dialogue trees, the animations, all the dressing that pulls you into the game.)

Rating: charming, but overly-simplistic

Nightbitch (2024)

Amy Adams is great, of course, and there's the basis for a great angry vibrant drama about the first years of motherhood here, with some strong moments, but the 'nightbitch' elements distract without really adding anything and then both sides just fizzle out for an unearned happy ending. The film just constantly feels like it's about to get started and never does, as if it's the tamest elevated horror movie ever. A plethora of True Lies extreme violence/rudeness fake-outs doesn't really cut it. The whole thing can be summed up by the scene where the mother finally goes through her transformation and turns into a lovely glossy huskie which may as well be a teddy bear.

Rating: disappointingly non-committal

Four Last Things (2017)

Played through in a single sitting, really enjoyed it. It's very funny, it looks lovely (obviously the classical art helps, but it's all well chosen and composed and animated) and the puzzle difficulty is well-pitched. It's just a nice fun hour or two wandering around a rambunctious medieval town and getting up to mischief. The storytelling is, as with his previous game, really on point.
The only negative I had was that I had to check a walkthrough due to a couple of poorly signposted elements (there's not hotspot highlighter and the density of the art means that occasionally you can miss that a door or person is interactive) and a couple of irritating timed puzzles. I definitely recommend the game, but I also recommend checking a walkthrough (or a hint guide if you can find one) if you've been stuck for more than a few minutes! Depending on your view of game pricing, though, you may want to wait for a sale as it's £8 and fairly short.

Rating: fun and funny, with only some minor niggles

Syberia 3 (2017)

Pretty abysmal so far. Starts with a cutscene that doesn't really explain anything that's happened so far, Kate is in a combo of bra and vest that somehow contrives to still show off a load of side boob, the lip sync is distractingly bad and the translation is wonky. Looks-wise it's okay but Kate's model is ugly and bland. I struggled with an incredibly basic puzzle because it turns out the game wanted me to actually turn a screwdriver by moving my mouse in a circle about thirty times, which was annoying enough on its own but it took me like five minutes to realise it was needed because there were no prompts or UI clues or anything in the settings to suggest this was a thing. I didn't think QTEs could get worse than the Telltale ones, but they've managed it.
Anyway, that was about five minutes' worth and I'm putting it down for tonight. Will probably give it another ten minutes or so tomorrow then bin it..! 

Okay, yeah, I got to the village of offensive indigenous stereotypes and gave up. (Not because of that specifically, just because the game is as awful as advertised.) Puzzles are a combination of checking everything again to see which character has woken up or fallen asleep now, and shitty Myst type dial puzzles. But the main challenge is struggling with the UI, controls camera and pathfinding to actually achieve anything. It clearly was not put in front of any playtesters, just changing the hotspot icon to something other than a tiny white dot would have been a big help. Every aspect of this game is painfully amateurish, in fact; it's staggeringly clumsy. The only good thing I could say about it is that there's some nice character design and certain shots look quite nice.

Rating: terrible

The Preposterous Awesomeness of Everything (2016)

Very funny, I really enjoyed the Orwellian allegory and the presentation was really striking and full of fun details. It's basically a Garden Of Eden type set-up where people quickly start wearing clothes and voting between two near-identical candidates for a PM (Project Manager) to build them a rocket to escape their planet. I will say, it is a bit of a shame that it's all a little clunky UI-wise and while the puzzles aren't really meant to be challenging (which works fine here) a couple of them are a bit shitty. You do have a hint character for most of the time, though, so I never got bogged down. It's also a shame that big blocks of text in pop-up windows are used for most of the satire and that there's no speech, as delivering more of the satire via dialogue would have helped, I think. But overall I laughed a lot, and it reminded me a lot of my Twine/Cwine game 'The Often-Ending Story' in that it's a satire where you have no idea where it's going to go next or when you're going to get a funny death (and then plonked back to a reasonable restart point), or when it's going to contrive to loop back to the beginning of the story and start again.

Ugh, apparently this featured a cameo by PewDiePie (I suppose a mangled up photo as one character's face and maybe a couple of grunts). This was released in 2016, which I feel like was probably at a point when PDP's awfulness was broadly known and Richardson should have known better, but maybe I'm wrong on that. Plus apparently once he saw the game PDP stopped returning Richardson's emails, so that's pretty funny.

Rating: sharp, surprising, funny, and mostly survives its clunkiness.

Adventures of Bertram Fiddle 1: A Dreadly Business (2014)

Got through it in a single session as it's quite a short game and very easy. It looks lovely, though there's the occasional little fidelity mismatch (possibly exacerbated by playing on a massive telly in 4K, which Unity does provide as a native setting but may not have been considered a likely setup in 2014) and the backgrounds can sometimes get a bit close to Daedelic's Edna games for my tastes. Plus the cursor doesn't hide during cutscenes, grrrr! The character designs and animations are lovely. Voice acting is great too. The dialogue is fine, though far too dependent on puns. The main issue with the game is the puzzle design - even though I barely stopped the whole way through, I often had no idea why I was solving things, why my solutions worked and sometimes how I was even solving them. Why did using the cork on the street cleaning machine fix it? No idea, but of the few interactive items across the whole map, they were the two that seemed like they might do something, so I tried it and it worked. The game feels very much designed for mobile, with no examine, dialogue trees, hotspot highlight or verbs, and typically puts you in a space of three rooms at a time with an item or so in each of them so it almost feels like an infinite runner, just sliding through and clicking on things as you see them. (Speaking of which, the game also has a couple of action sequences where you press up and down to dodge incoming obstacles, which are mildly irritating and far too long but thankfully are very forgiving.)

Apparently the second episode wraps things up and is a lot longer with better puzzle design (though very buggy, at least on release), co-developed with a more seasoned adventure dev. It would have been nice to play a version of this with the design issues ironed out, but unfortunately I don't own it!

Rating: Pretty, but shallow and some spotty design

The Substance (2024)

SPOILERS BELOW

Great overall, Moore and Qualley are incredible and Quaid is good fun, and loads of great ideas and imagery. Only issues with it were that there's a section in the middle that could have lost ten minutes easy and threatened to lose all momentum, and the whole movie is fairly on the nose which I don't mind but there are a few moments where it felt like they lost control of it and it starts to feel like a student film or a PETA advert, and unfortunately they were mostly near the end (I'm particularly thinking of the NYE Special and the glitter on the star) so, for me, if it did manage to stick the ending then it did so in a very wobbly fashion.

Thimbleweed Park (2017)

I think this is supposed to be old-school difficulty levels, so I may find it as frustrating as Maniac Mansion!

Okay, I got a little bit into this and wow. It is intentionally daunting and rough around the edges. You've got characters to swap between but who are in the same location a lot of the time, it makes you walk a long way down a highway or pathways to get where you want to go (and if you want to try out an idea for opening the tomb at the end of the cemetery you'd better be confident because it takes a good half minute and several clicks to walk there from the front gate with no hotspots in between), I've already had to draw out a little map of the town so I can remember where all the different shops and stuff are to avoid wandering around for ages every time I have an idea, there's junk lying by the side of the road like empty bottles and Atari cartridges that you can pick up but are useless, it uses the old-school SCUMM verb bar with 9 verbs ever-present at the bottom of the screen and the help screen doesn't even tell you the keyboard shortcuts instead just advising you to find them yourself. Add to that the presentation, with the prettied up Maniac Mansion graphics and the idiosyncratic VO (stilted Dragnet voices, strong German accents, characters who put '-ino' at the end of their words a lot), it's a game that isn't trying to give you a smooth experience. It wants to poke and prod at you, in a very old-school Ron Gilbert way.
Having said that, it does put effort into not unintentionally annoying you - with right clicks and shortcuts, the verb UI isn't too bad, there are an impressive amount of responses to player actions, and the game will often move a following character around when it's clearly the most logical thing to happen, or remind you that a certain action is available again.
It's also incredibly nostalgia-driven - lots of jokes about Lucasfilm and callbacks to old games (I've already found a chainsaw and some chainsaw fuel located in such a way they can never be used together, and there's a mansion that is very reminiscent of the Maniac one) and a lot of the set-up immediately takes you back, like when you get to a row of arcade games and there's a token dispensing machine that seems to exist wholly to get your hopes up before telling you it's empty.
On the whole, I'm really enjoying it so far, in a way I didn't think I would from the initial abrasive nature of it. I've done lots of stuff and not got stuck yet, the way the mysteries of the story unfold are really great - needling little bits of information from people, suddenly getting thrown into playable flashbacks from the middle of dialogue trees - and there have been a few clever puzzles and very funny moments. And it feels very densely packed in a good way. A bit of a shame that multiple characters will often give the same lines when interacting with stuff, but overall lots of pleasing detail. I suspect that as soon as I hit a dead end with all my puzzles then it will immediately be the most frustrating game ever, but we'll see. There is at least an in-game hint system, but you need a working phone for it and I'm not sure if I've actually found one of those outside the flashbacks yet.
Speaking of which, I'm kind of surprised that there's not only a hint system but a to do list, both of which don't seem to tally with the old-school vibe of the game. I personally feel that if you need to put an actual hint system in your game, that's a sign that you haven't done your signposting properly; at the very least you could disguise it by having characters you can ask for advice (like a Dan or a Dead Ted Edison). And I generally don't like To Do lists, especially in this type of game where you can always go back and ask the characters to repeat their vital information; they always break the magic for me, reduce everything to abstract keys and locks. At least this one doesn't have any sounds and graphics come up when it updates (god I hate that pencil scribble sfx) and makes you look at your notepad from your inventory for it so it all feels a bit more diegetic.
I can see the reasoning behind them with modern adventure games - people can look at an online walkthrough in seconds anyway, and people have so many games to play and so little time that they'll often take longer breaks between play sessions of any given game and more easily forget all the puzzle threads. But they're often used unnecessarily, I think.

Still really enjoying this! It keeps on opening up - a map gets you more locations, and now I've got five playable characters each with their own to do list, one of whom is in the ghost realm version of the locations - and I haven't got stuck yet but I always feel like my adventure gamer brain is getting a workout. This may jinx it but I really feel like I'm attuned to the game's puzzle design. Not sure how far through I am, but currently the game feels pleasingly big, like it's going to be Grim Fandango size.
Speaking of the to do lists, I can see now that they were a bit more necessary than usual seeing as each character has their own objectives. Plus, they don't get really granular like with, say, the Deponia games where every objective and sub-objective is laid out in a big diagram so you feel like you're just progressing through a design flowchart. One slight niggle with them is that as I get new characters, they come ready with to do items that I don't understand the motivation for, which feels a bit cheaty. But perhaps I'll learn the motivations as I start to look around and it'll be a nice storytelling technique, we'll see...

Finished. It got a tiny bit frustrating when I was stuck on a puzzle and the game had narrowed down enough that I was bottlenecked - at that point you're having to wander around a lot to see if anything inspires you. Thanks to Ron Gilbert's penchant for having to use different characters in different ways, and no way to instantly transfer items or jump to locations, this can involve a LOT of clicking down long streets and winding map roads and manoeuvring characters and items around just to see if one particular combination works. That didn't happen much, though - there were only two puzzles that I needed  the hint guide for and which I actually had the correct solution in mind but were a little unfair imo (one due to a location unlocking in the very short time since I last checked it, and one where I assumed ghosts wouldn't be able to use phones themselves as they can't pick up the receivers).
It got really exciting towards the end, getting all the characters to work together on a single puzzle (could have done with more of that, actually) and getting into the big factory that's been taken over by an AI.
Unfortunately, it then grinds to a halt with an incredibly frustrating ending - Dolores' uncle reveals that he found out you're all characters in an adventure game, gives you all the items you need to finish your storylines, and tells you to go to the Kickstarter demo version and kill the machine there so that the game is wiped and the Thimbleweed Park devs can't reset and make you all start again. You just walk each one to an NPC, give them an item and get a ten second wrap-up, then Dolores goes into a placeholder art version of the game and you flip eight switches on the evil machine and the credits immediately roll. Then an unseen dev uses a C64 interface to reload the game and you go back to the menu screen. And that's it. "Ha ha, all the stuff you cared about either doesn't get resolved or gets resolved in an intentionally rushed manner and then the game ends because the game ends." I don't really find that satisfying or clever or funny. It's the same thing that annoyed me about the She-Hulk tv show ending - I'd rather they just did the actual ending than a post-modern thumbing of the nose to the dreary concept of satisfying storytelling. (Movies like Wayne's World or Labyrinth are smart enough to manage both, which is great.) And even the 'logic' of the post-modern stuff didn't really make sense.
Just a massive letdown and if I were marking out of ten it would knock the game down a point or even two.

Rating: a (mostly intentionally) rough diamond, with a terrible ending

Alien Romulus (2024)

SPOILERS BELOW

Turns out hurrying between remixes of moments from six previous movies makes your story utterly uninvolving - I didn't care about the characters, wasn't scared by the various monsters, could only vaguely follow where everyone was and which ship was crashing into what at any given moment. It looked fine, in that they ripped off the first one well enough and spent enough money on the CG for nothing to look tacky (except the uncanny valley of Rook - what a terrible, pointless choice to make instead of just getting a good new actor in), but it's not like it was anywhere close to the iconic, inventive, horrifying beautiful imagery of the first and to a certain extent second movie. At least 3 & 4 had their own vibes. Alverez seems content to just lift shots and moments from the rest of the franchise - that side-on shot of the alien and Ripley from 3, Ripley wide-eyed and head tilted back behind a perspiration-covered space helmet, Hicks showing Ripley how to use a pulse rifle, a weird albino hybrid thing getting sucked out of a hole in the side of the ship until it gets shredded, on and on it goes.

And there's this weird dissonance of not wanting to do anything new with the franchise at all and yet simultaneously disintegrating its integrity - now you only need five minutes of facehugging, another five minutes of gestation to chestburster and then another five minutes to full-grown alien; you can walk past facehuggers and they won't attack you if you stay calm, but when they do attack you they will be so shit at it that dozens of them aren't really a threat; the black stuff from Prometheus is extractable so we can just throw a weird vaguely related monster in whenever we want; the human characters no longer get taken out for half the movie because a carry case fell on their head, say - they can now fall thirty feet onto solid metal and shake it off (no genetic engineering here, just the Flubberisation of action movies). Also some minor nerdy irritations like breaking the alphabetical order of synthetics' names with Rook, and deciding that the blue laser field from Alien is actually something the xenomorphs generate somehow (and here for no particular reason that I could tell). Kudos to them for sticking their neck out and explicitly showing the pupal stage between chestburster and fully-grown, but the size and complexity of it felt a little silly to me - again, rushing to get to the next thing made it less effective. They could have slowed the whole thing down and made the chestburster an active threat as it's caught in close quarters with them and trying to get more food wherever it can so it's got enough energy to build up its cocoon. That could have been up there with the 'holy shit, facehuggers can run around and jump?!' moment of Aliens, and no other movie in the franchise has done it yet, but no, they needed to keep moving so they could get to their mash-up of the Newborn and the Prometheus dudes.

It reminds me of the later Indiana Jones movies - Crystal Skull was a bad Indiana Jones movie but it was an Indiana Jones movie, that was also trying out new stuff; Dial Of Destiny just felt like any 2010s action movie with a passable synthesis of all the past Indy movies stretched over the top of it. Same with this versus 3, 4, even Prometheus. (I think Covenant starts as one and then has the other bolted on as the third act.) Like, if Dial Of Destiny or Romulus were a video game I'd be like "yeah, they did really well to emulate the movies' vibes", but for a new movie in the series it's just not enough.

Also, just some really bad basic writing. Like, fuck me, yet another recent movie that thinks 'tells dad jokes' is a rounded personality. The first three lines of dialogue in this Alien movie are shit puns. "How should I show that this other character gets on with them? I know, I'll make him tell shit jokes too!" COPY-PASTING TWEETS IS NOT WRITING, YOU ARE ALL BAD AND LAZY AND SHOULD NEVER BE ALLOWED TO WRITE A MOVIE AGAIN. Watching modern blockbusters has the same energy as listening to a wedding speech and realising ten seconds in that they just googled 'funny wedding speech' and printed the first result. And then the usual crappy exposition like someone referring to their brother as "my brother" rather than by his name. Or the moment where one person says "we don't have enough cryo power, this will only last us for three years" and another replies "We need enough for nine years!", which everyone in that room knows and the audience does not need to because they got all they needed from the first line. And the dialogue is not free from the clunking fan service, copying lines verbatim from Ash, Bishop, Ripley. You could kind of justify synthetics saying the exact same things, though it still feels tacky, but when someone is shouting "get away from her you bitch" in a context that doesn't really make much sense, it's hugely cringey.

Verdict: Rubbish.