Recent reviews by Fivegears

I know I'm not the first to draw the comparison, but Clam Man is absolutely flavored with Disco Elysium but I'd say it's better for your heart. While there weren't any immediate opportunities to wander into the public in just your underwear to be verbally abused by a sociopath who refers to himself in the first person, this is more than made up for by the fact that you are a clam.

An employed clam.

It's not nearly as deep as Disco, but it doesn't need to be. Because you are a clam. I don't hear any other clams ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ about a game not having as many mechanics as another game, do you?

no but fr do you

I achieved victory by standing, triumphantly, in a trash barrel in a subway while my opponents dragged each other in front of the B-line train to Deadsville. I feel as if my victory was deserved.

The best John Woo Film If The Main Characters Were Muppet-Esque Sociopaths simulator, ever.

Preface: Some of my artwork is featured in the game; this could be seen to be bias in a review, and maybe it is. If that doesn’t bother you, read on. If it does, also read on, don’t make a big deal out of it, c’mon now.

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Occupy White Walls just a curiosity for me, at first. A free game where you build and curate your own gallery absolutely caught my eye - art curation is on my short-list of dream jobs. As that dream-job hadn’t quite manifested yet, I figured a little self-indulgent virtual museum-building might at least scratch that particular itch.

When I started the game, I landed in a minimalist’s dreamworld. A few slabs of concrete floor and the titular white walls. A short tutorial gave me the basics, then I was off to find some pieces for my sparse gallery that was located, apparently, somewhere in the astral plane.

I was expecting art that was pretty much standard fare when it came to art stuff - you know, a copy of the Mona Lisa, the Campbell’s can by Warhol, Van Gogh’s “The Scream”. Stuff you see on TV and in movies all over the place. But the actual library of art ran the gamut from 15th century to contemporary living artists. I stumbled across living artists that I immediately hunted down online to see more of their stuff. Their works hung proudly as centerpieces in my growing gallery.

The in-game chat was filled with a fun mix of cerebral pontification, geeky egg-heading and conversations about, just, the dumbest things. But the community was pretty much hard-coded to get along. There seems to be a lot of overlap in the venn diagram that includes building gamers and art nerds.

Pretty soon I lost hours to the game, building increasingly absurd structures to expand my gallery, inviting people to pop in, give me some constructive criticism or just outright mock my work openly. Whatever works. I found myself venturing into random galleries to find others building wildly different galleries, from classical art-houses to nigh-impossible to navigate mazes of neon and chairs.

In the process I also discovered art in other people’s galleries I had not seen before. I hated Monet before this game. He’s still not my favorite, but my vitriol has subsided. I fell in love with periods of art that I had little exposure to in the past. I gave myself anxiety about how much Paul Klee was in the game and how small his works were and they’re really hard to line up and KLEEEEE.

As I immersed myself more into the community, I found a place to share my art (their Discord is a fantastic place to talk shop). Eventually, I found myself invited to add some of my own works. As an artist, this is a game-changer. Art is meant to be seen, and this gave me an opportunity to get my stuff in front of active eyeballs.
I found my works being influenced by what I discovered in-game, both by the masters and contemporary artists. I found myself creating furiously, both in game building gallery wings for artists I admired. I found myself making new art because of the infusion of new inspiration. The game made me make, and I’m indescribably thankful for that.

Summary: play this if you want to have a relaxing experience building your own little (or eventually, entirely too big) space and get some culture in your skull at the same time. That or fill a room with all the classical paintings of naked ladies. Live your dream, right?

While still in development, Kenshi shows a ton of promise for those that are interested in games with emergent storytelling.

Establishing a small trading-post among a vein of iron ore deep in uncivilized territory, my band of 5 quickly grew into a bustling town. They fought off groups of bandits and feral creatures as they established themselves as a fairly affluent frontier colony, using the ore to both forge weapons to defend themselves and to trade for valuable resources with travelers and nearby towns.

Then, one day, the bandits organized themselves into nothing short of a war-band. The only one to survive was one of my runners, off on a trading expidition when the town fell. This lone trader wasn't some helpless pack-mule, however, having started as a bodyguard in the original group that founded the now-fallen outpost. She set out to find a new life for herself, far away from bandits and outcasts.

She was killed by a beak-thing the next day.

SUPERHOT is kind of like Quantum Leap, where you are suddenly put into a scenerio where everyone wants you dead. You're in an elevator when three men draw their guns on you. You find yourself in front of a speeding car. Instead of having a hologram of an aging playboy and his Lego-built pocket computer to help you, you instead have the ability to start and stop time - time only moves when you do.

The whole thing plays like a first-person puzzler, the puzzle being "how do I kill everyone in the room before they kill me?" Thanks to time only moving as you do, you can dodge bullets, catch disarmed weapons in mid-air and spin around to perforate the Red Guy behind you with the gun you just liberated from another enemy.

After you finish a run, the game replays your actions in real time, which often plays out like a choreographed action scene in the best of situations, and at its worst it looks more like someone who's running an aimhack program in an FPS. But where the replays can be hit-or-miss, the mechanics are consistently solid.

The main storyline is short, maybe a few hours of gameplay at best, but the addition of endless modes, challenge runs and such give the game a life far beyond the main game. The graphics are deliberately minimalistic, which serves the mechanics well. Where these two elements (game length, graphics) have been at the center of complaints for people, I think that the story is succint, the graphics suit the premise perfectly.

The only thing on my wishlist is a level editor - I'd love to see other action movie scenerios set up, and be given the opportunity to Jason Bourne my way out of them.

This is a fantastic RPG/bullet-hell mashup, and the decisions probably matter more here than they do in most AAA titles.

After crashing on an unknown planet, Nurse Deena Ratchet and genetically engineered warrior Hikensha began working their way through the ship to hope for an escape. Along the way they recruited a young burglar named Golgy Phurtiver who, incidentally, thinks she's a spider of some sort.

Things were going relatively well - Nurse Ratchet discovered a woman in stasis, who was revealed to be a bounty hunter named Sara Numas. They did not know that they were effectively recruiting Hikensha's replacement, however, who died tried to defend another survivor from the alien natives.

The party marched upwards, exploring for every resource they could. Another survivor was revived from stasis, but the mercenary (who dubbed himself "Butcher") was eviscerated by what can only presumed to be giant mutant slugs when making casual conversation with a merchant.

The three survivors, Deena, Golgy and Sara saved the merchant from the rampaging aliens, and quickly cleaned him out of his wares in exchange for the Dust they were using to power their various defenses, just before they moved on up to a new level of what was beginning to feel like a dungeon.

For real though, Dungeon of the Endless does a lot of things right for a... roguelike, resource management 4X, RPG, platypus of a game. And as they're apparently working on multiplayer, I could see this becoming a Thing.

Starbound brings all the joy of Terraria into space, with seemingly infinite numbers of worlds to explore on a whim. While I'm writing this during the first phase of the Beta, and there are bugs to be expected, it's in really good condition for a Beta - tons of content, and more coming, seemlingly, every couple of days. The devs have been really good about listening to the community, adding things on the fly as they're needed (within reason) and yet more things coming down the line in weeks to come.

The only downside is that of any Beta - the game is not fully "complete" yet, but, considering it's still in its infancy, it's hard not to love it, warts and all.

This isn't so much a game as it is a piece of interactive art, telling you a story as you solve relatively simple puzzles. It keeps you engaged with the story of Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh with its surreal art. You "help" the doctor plod along his path to his inevitable fate and in doing so may feel as if you are either betraying him or punishing him. That depends on your politics.

If you're an art and history fan, I'd give it a play.