Recent reviews by Tale

A very good game stretched way too thin.

This game wears it's inspirations on it sleeves. Roguelites, survival crafting, driving, extraction. And it does it mostly well. The problem comes from the grind, the pacing, and the resulting stress. It has all the hardships of its inspirations, it has loss on death, everything has pitiful durability, there's timers everywhere you go. And revisiting an area you've been too recently just makes that area harder.

What I'm left with is feeling like every trip has only a smidge of progress. Or a serious risk of catastrophic backslide. I had to plan a trip to the far end of the map just for a single rare resource I need a ton of. I spend 30 minutes just getting there, have 5-10 minutes to find and grab what I need, everything on my car broke from the drive this far, and everything finishes falling apart when I have to make the mad dash home.

I want to see what's next, but I'm just too burnt out.

A walking sim elevated by good writing and being in the largely underserved genre of underwater horror. If that description interests you, grab it. Doubly so if you see it on sale.

Ship building can be fun. It can also be intensely frustrating for no reason.

That might be the end of the list of positives. Starfield is a game that tries to do a lot, but doesn't try to do any of it well. Exploration, storytelling, worldbuilding, buildcrafting, crafting, and characters are all things that are weaker than many contemporaries in gaming, but also weaker than in other Bethesda games of the past.

The main quest line is just a thin excuse to push you into New Game +. The world doesn't do anything or appreciate what few complexities it does have. The exploration is completely pointless as their is no reward or gameplay loop to incentivize any of it. It doesn't even have a log of things scanned for the completionist. Crafting might as well not even exist. And there's just nothing engaging in the moment to moment play. We're still doing very basic shooting with some dragon shouts that may as well have been pulled over unchanged from Skyrim.

But maybe you have a shipbuilding addiction like me.

The only downside is the wait for more.

One of the greatest horror VNs ever made. Excellently paced with a terrific cast of characters to get to know (and flirt with). So far there seems to be a new mystery and some fresh horror in every episode. If they tie it all together, which I do not doubt they will given all they've done so far, it'll be an instant classic.

The Letter is a VN that I fully believe has an interesting story to tell, yet refuses to actually tell the interesting part. Multiple characters each telling you a slice of the story from a different perspective. But then once one of those storylines starts to get interesting, it drops what it's doing to restart with a different character. I had to give up on it because 15 hours in and all I feel like I'm doing is running in circles and not getting anywhere.

Truly great puzzle design. The kind that have you walking away feeling just a smidge cocky and never calling BS.

It's not Portal, but it's maybe the best attempt at being a replacement so far. The writing leans on the charm of its co-lead characters almost entirely. There's some interesting and funny bits to be found on terminals through the game, but that won't be what keeps you coming back until you finish. It'll be the puzzles.

Charming and fun, albeit brief.

A singleplayer game of Werewolf/Mafia dolled up as a VN. The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Unlike those other mystery killer timeloop games, this one plays the Werewolf/Mafia game pretty seriously. You'll spend a lot of time setting up games to then play through trying to figure out who the killers are. Or figuring out how to kill them all.

And along the way you'll get to know an endearing cast of misfits who might be enough to get over any reservations you have about playing a party game in singleplayer.

A fun diversion a little too in love with open world tedium.

There's a lot of good here. The shark is fun, the narrator and his dialogue is engaging, and the RPG elements help mix things up. All of that's enough for me to recommend it if you can get past that pretty much all you have to do is open world busywork and collectathons.

Go here, eat 12 fish, go there eat 10 people, jump to bite the license plate, find a point of interest, fight waves of boats. Rinse, repeat, that's the entire game.

If that's fine by you, then you should check this game out.

This is one of those games I want a sideways thumb on.

If "solid sci-fi point and click adventure" doesn't sell you on it, then I won't either. It's good enough that I'll definitely look into what else this developer does and has done. They have talent and ability. But it's not good enough to recommend unless you're looking for exactly this sort of thing.