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.

The Walking Dead: A New Frontier (2016)

It's pretty much more of the same, but the storytelling is still good, and I still gasp and feel bad when characters die. They mix it up a little by having you play a new character who meets Clem a little way into the story and teams up with her, which is cool. The QTEs haven't been too bad so far, either.
I'm still not a big fan of this latest look that seems to have stuck since the Borderlands game, though - it feels more like 3D with a black outlines filter slapped on, rather than a comic come to life. The first season stuck with brushstroke textures and more stylised backgrounds with thick shadows and silhouettes, and it looked nicer even though it's lower res. The Wolf Among Us stayed stylised, looked great and played in 4K, so I don't know why they didn't go back to that approach for this, especially as the first TWD season iconically introduced that style.  Maybe it takes more work, which takes more time and money, so they decided to stick with this style. Still, this game doesn't look bad and it does still sometimes look good. 

Finished episode 3 of 5. Not much more to say about it, to be honest. There are no tech issues, thankfully. The QTEs are still not too bad, but the fact remains that the only response they ever elicit from me is "oh fuck off, that's bullshit, ugh you're sending me back this far?" The zombie soap opera stuff is still really good, I agonise over choices, I'm never quite sure who to trust and I'm always aware that saying the wrong thing to someone could get someone shot (or at least it feels like it could!). Having said that, I don't know what season 4 is like but if they'd wanting to keep this going for much longer they would have needed to mix it up a lot somehow. Deciding which of your burly bearded grieving friends to side with can only play so many times. Basically, the same problem the comic and the show had!

Finished! Very enjoyable and overall I'm pretty happy with where my choices took me. They added a nice little bit to the intra-credits stats of what percentage of players made the same choices you did, where they tell you what kind of a relationship you had with a bunch of the characters. I am proud to say I converted Clementine from being a loner, so she helped me out in the final battle.
I will say, it was kind of weird having a Brown guy with long hair and a beard called Jesus showing up periodically to rescue me and tell me what a good person I am!
The ending wasn't quite as satisfying as I would have liked, the baddy is just 'whereabouts unknown' and the final shot as well as the post-credits scene was just Clem wandering off to another adventure, but maybe season 4 will come back to these characters and tie things up a bit. Really my only other issue with it was that it is just the same thing again. I suspect I'll be glad by the end of S4 that they didn't get to make any more, but we'll see.

Rating: more of the same but still very good