Recent reviews by jacobkosh

Possibly the first ever tearjerker video game. It grabs a hold of your heartstrings and won't let go, and it gleefully uses every dirty trick in the book. If you're human at all, you *will* cry, and probably many times.

But it's not just empty calories and feels. The game has a lot to say about life and the end of life, about leaving behind a good legacy, and especially about how important it is to make real connections with other people. It's a very heartfelt and kind game that loves people but also a really angry game that hates the cruel and unfair systems that hold people down.

You also get to fight adult baby perverts in diapers and collect homeless people like Pokemon. This one really has it all.

So far, I can say that the videogame Does The Thing; it delivers what you'd want to see from a 40K RPG. You can make a huge variety of main characters and they can come from different backgrounds and jobs and you can tell their job by their various outrageous hats (obviously, this is very important).

Combat employs the by-now-very-familiar turn-based grid with action points and powers setup. As you might expect, there's more emphasis on ranged attacks and cover than in something like Baldur's Gate, though melee is very much a viable path, especially for characters built for it. Characters who rack up injuries diminish in effectiveness, so treating wounds (or better yet, avoiding them) is a larger priority than in many similar RPGs.

The story seems fine so far - though 4 hours in, I'm still working my way through the initial incident/tutorial, so no bold promises yet - and the dialogue is hitting the right notes of florid-but-literate.

Environments are ok so far, animations are kind of stiff and whatever; it's not a game that zooms in on character models for glory kills, and for good reason. The art for character portraits and so on is quite nice, and the soundtrack seems solid as well - it reminds me of Mechanicus and I'm wondering if it's the same composer. Voice acting is good too; it's not fully-voiced like a BG3 but more like the original BG1+2 or Pillars of Eternity, where important characters voice the first paragraph or whatever of a conversation before transitioning to text, but you get more than enough to convey a character's personality and vibe.

So: pretty good stuff so far, no regrets, cautious optimism!

- Very lush presentation, especially for HBS, who used to make Kickstarter games on a tight budget. A jazz soundtrack that seems like it was recorded live, a nice animated intro menu that sets the tone, and animated story cinematics. Lots of voice acting. The UI and fonts have a period-flavored vibe but are mostly crisp and minimalist.

- The gameplay is a straight shot of Shadowrun with a little chaser of Commandos or Shadow Tactics. You've got a team of specialized agents, each with their own skills; you move them around a 3-D gameworld in real time, where they cut wires or unlock doors or lay traps for patrolling guards. When you get caught and combat starts, it switches to turn-based tactics on a square grid with characters who have unique powers and 2AP each turn with which to use them. You know the drill.

- I really can't emphasize enough how much this game feels like a 2023 update and improvement of the Shadowrun games, gameplay-wise. If you just picture Dragonfall but the world is fully 3-D so you can rotate the camera, the view is more zoomed-in to better see the character models, the models themselves are more stylish, the UI is de-janked, etc, you're like 85% of the way there. It seems like using this engine to remake the Shadowruns would be a really easy layup.

- One place where the game is unfortunately similar to Shadowrun (and a step back from BATTLETECH) is the combat animations. They're about as impactful as a sponge. Punches look kinda weightless, gunshots feel anemic. It's not a dealbreaker but it's kind of a bummer and feels like a notable miss after 2022-2023 where we had Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters and Midnight Suns.

- The tone and story so far are very charming. The vibe is very...all-ages, semi-lighthearted adventure. Do you remember the Disney movie Atlantis: The Lost Empire? It's like that. Absolute kryptonite for level 9 edgelords but I recommend it to everyone else who enjoys wholesome adventure and beating up Nazis.

- The only technical issue I've experienced is a bit of stuttering, mostly when using the recon view (a higher-up overhead view of the map). It'd be a problem in an FPS but in a turn-based tactics game it's barely even worth mentioning.

You see a gate, you baldur the gate. You see a gate, you baldur the gate. A timeless, iconic gameplay loop, but it's never been done better than here.

Just rolled credits an hour or two ago, so I'm posting while the iron is hot. I got the "good" ending, anyway, which judging from the achievement is also the secret ending; though for what it's worth, I came across it organically and didn't go out looking for it or Google anything. I did not get the main ending, and am probably gonna wait on that a minute, for reasons I'll get to.

So first things first, it's a very good game; atmospheric, moody, but also oddly calm and relaxing. To a degree, you can choose your level of engagement with the horror elements and just...not go blasting around at night and instead pass a good 5-10 hours in a very chill loop of fish -> sell -> upgrade boat -> fish better. The fishing minigames are simple to grok, slightly challenging without being frustrating, and crucially, remain fun for most of the length of the game (at which point, if you still need income, you'll have multiple options for passive cash generation).

The game controls and UI are all pleasantly "chunky," intuitive, and easy to use. I liked the environmental graphics, which had a subtle but effective paper cut-out or pop-up book vibe to them, though the character art wasn't to my taste; it felt like Mike Mignola by way of CalArts, with designs that were too simple (and blobby) for all the ink and cross-hatching piled on them. The music, like a lot of modern game music, does the job but isn't particularly memorable or hummable, dissipating from your mind like morning dew about 3 seconds after hitting "exit." I do approve of the way it leans into the general unspoken consensus that boat games need a lot of accordion.

The story is entertaining moment-to-moment, although the writing is weirdly sparse, which always strikes me as an odd choice in an indie; words are the cheapest thing around! Ultimately, though, while there were little characters and moments I thought were cute, it mostly ends up being kinda there. Someone on Steam said something like "it's Generic Indie Game Plot #1" and, unfortunately, they're exactly right; if you've played enough scrappy little narrative games or walking sims in the 2010s, your mind'll probably start racing ahead of the plot about a quarter of the way in, and odds are you'll be right.

A bigger issue is that I'd had the impression you'd be, y'know, kinda wandering around, going from town to town, getting involved in little local dramas as you quested and sailed between islands. You know, kind of a Privateer or Freelancer or Sunless situation? But in truth, there's really only the one town and a tiny handful of other characters scattered across the map. Town-like services (repair, fish-buying, etc) are provided in 4/5ths of the map by a "traveling merchant" character who's conveniently parked next to all the most dangerous and exotic destinations, immediately deflating a lot of the potential tension of voyaging out of bounds and into the spooky unknown. She also sells the rare crafting materials and upgrade kits you normally have to salvage for or get as quest rewards, meaning you...don't have to engage with almost any of the content in the game, barring the main quest or a couple very well-hidden special items that have abilities or power levels inaccessible through regular upgrades.

My sense of things, which is based on nothing external to the game (I haven't read any tweets or dev diaries or anything), is that the merchant character is a band-aid added to a game that maybe had grander initial ambitions but had to scale back. Like, if there were more towns, more characters, and more stories, there'd be that many more quest rewards and that much less need for a character to sell you them. As it stands, using the merchant feels kinda like cheating - in the sense that you feel the slow leak of tension and excitement from the game like air from a tire that's gonna be flat tomorrow - but not using the merchant means you're signing up for a whole lotta RNG as you sift through random ocean flotsam.

The devs have already added content to the game post-launch, like a photographer lady who has some quests and gives you a camera and the photo mode to go with it, so my hope is that they're aware of this and are gonna gradually address it over time, adding more places to go and things to do until it's more possible to progress without doing rote chores. So I'm setting the game down for now with the idea that in six months or whatever I can come back, scoop up whatever new stuff has been added, and get that other ending.

But like, to be clear...I wouldn't be saying that if I didn't enjoy the game. Which I did. It was absolutely worth the twenty clams or whatever and I absolutely recommend it to anyone who thinks it looks like fun.

Let's get the important caveat out of the way first. Valheim is a survival crafting game - like ARK, Rust, Conan Exiles, etc - and if you didn't like any of those games then I wouldn't want to guarantee that you'll like Valheim. But it does do a few key things a bit differently for the genre:

1) it's not PvP-focused. PvP is an option on some servers but it's not the default option and it's underdeveloped and vestigial compared to those other games. Valheim is balanced around groups of friendly players cooperating to explore a hostile world. Instead of "man is the real monster," the monsters are the real monster. And the monsters are often a lot of fun! There's some cool, huge creatures roaming the world that are interesting and fun to fight.

2) The game is fairer. Weapons, armor, and items decay, but fixing them is free and only requires a crafting bench; you aren't on the treadmill of constantly needing more resources just to stay where you are. The survival gameplay is balanced around long-lasting buffs rather than a set of constantly ticking doom timers, so eating good food, being rested, warm etc makes you stronger for ten or twenty minutes, but being hungry and naked and cold just means your guy is just a bit whiffy and ineffectual rather than thirty seconds from dead. You don't have those ♥♥♥♥♥♥ situations where you get really into building your house and arranging the walls and suddenly drop dead because you forgot to exit the crafting menu and make your guy eat something, or where your guy dies of exposure because you got up for a minute to take a whiz.

3) Things are simplified and streamlined. Characters have simple numerical stats and recipes aren't excruciatingly elaborate. The game is less menu and timer-driven and instead uses more simple, clean interactions out in the world. Like, to keep a fire going, you go up to the fire and press the interact key to dump wood into it, rather than opening up the fire's inventory and dragging wood over from your backpack. When the smelter is done turning ore into bars of finished metal, it spits the bars out onto the ground for you to pick up by walking over, instead of the finished product piling up in some obnoxious inventory screen with 3 slots. You tend to spend a greater proportion of your time actually out in the world doing things than in menus watching timers click down or doing inventory Tetris.

4) The world is genuinely huge and vehicles (boats and longships) are a big part of it. The experience of getting together with six or eight friends and piling into a longship to sail off into the horizon for ten, twenty, or even thirty minutes to find new continents and new resources is genuinely exhilarating and an experience I haven't really gotten to have in other games in general or even other survival games. It's genuinely adventurous.

After everything that happened with Paradox, I was incredibly skeptical of anything with the VtM brand on it, and after the Zak S. fiasco, I was especially wary of the idea of a VtM visual novel or CYOA. So this wasn't even on my radar at all. But a trusted friend was the canary in a coal mine on this, and he came back up chirping of wonders.

First off, it's huge. I'm not an expert on visual novels/CYOAs and I don't regularly consume them, so I can't pretend to have a definitive overview here, but it has way more options at each choice point than I've been accustomed to in similar games. You have a full character sheet with the dots and everything, and your choices pass or fail based on hidden stat checks happening in the background. And your clan/background/approach choices feel significantly deeper than simple cosmetics, or adding a line here and there. For instance, apparently characters with Animalism get a wolf or coyote companion who becomes a significant part of the narrative for players who go that way; several thousand words of content that I, as a Ventrue, just will not see.

Secondly, it's well-written. And not just "well-written for video games." There's strong prose and good characterization and a very...William Gibsonish eye for the telling consumerist or subculture-y detail. Gibson comes to mind in particular because, in an endearing tic, your character is hyper-aware of wristwatch brands, and selects their own (depending on what outfit options you choose) with care, and notes what other people are wearing. (There's an in-story explanation that the pressure of the Second Inquisition has driven many vampires to go analog, but the level of care and research that went into the god-knows-how-many branding options is well beyond some random other writer's "the Prince sports a Rolex" or whatever.)

Thirdly, although I haven't finished the game, it is refreshingly and - so far as I can tell - entirely free of alt-right-y or Gamergater-y dogwhistles, of feeling like it's trying to bait "SJWs", or of any tedious edgelordism. The tone is darkly nostalgic (it's clearly hugely influenced by the movie Drive and its skewed, funhouse-mirror take on 80s pop aesthetics, and by synthwave music, and - in my opinion - by Knight Rider and other 80s shows about loner heroes wandering the Southwest), wry, and humane. There's a lot of attention paid to the impact of your actions on ordinary people, and your character can choose to lean into that and try to minimize the harm they cause, and without spoilers, you are given the option to fulfill one or two...topical fantasies some of us might be having.

The game is horror in the sense that it's a World of Darkness game so there's a certain baseline of like, awful things being done to bodies and souls, but instead of kind of pornographically lingering on that stuff, or rubbing your face in it, I'd describe the game's prevailing atmosphere as kind of...taut, atmospheric tension. Like a night drive, in fact. There's a sense that events are swirling around your character on a level they only get glimpses of, like distant lights on the horizon, and that surprises can appear in your headlights without warning. For some VtM folks, that might not be what they're looking for, they might prefer more out-and-out horror, or more LARP-style politicking, but for me, this kind of...thrumming, wind-whipping-through-your-hair tension, this sense of continually hurtling forward into unknown territory, is perfect.

The downside is: it's big, and you can't save your game and try out different choices without being a little tryhardy about it and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ around inside of game directories. I get wanting you to own your consequences but, again, it's big, and it seems like you can actually-for-real die, and as much as I'm looking forward to doing future replays I do not relish the prospect of making a bad choice, eating ♥♥♥♥, and then reliving several hours of choices to get a similar character back to nearly where I was before to try something different.

But that's basically the only real downside I've seen so far. Oh, that and I've encountered one (1) typo.

I give this my strongest possible recommendation. If you don't mind the idea of graphic-less, music-less reading, this is ten bucks well spent.

Hello, everyone. I have descended from the sky to tell you that Unavowed is great and you should play it if you like point and click adventures, urban horror, mysteries, or pixel retro indie things at all.

This is a game by Wadjet Eye, an indie studio that's been around since ~2006, well before the current indie and digital-distribution boom, making adventure games using Adventure Game Studio - most notably the mystery The Shivah and the excellent supernatural adventure The Blackwell Legacy and its four sequels.

Wadjet Eye games are characterized by good writing that blends genre material with sensitive, slice-of-life realism, lovely pixel art, and clever, not-too-frustrating puzzles. On the downside, as a tiny indie studio with limited resources, they sometimes have somewhat low-fi production values; AGS is a kinda janky program that makes kinda janky games that crash sometimes, and the voice acting tends to be done by enthusiastic NYC-area amateurs recorded on a Blue Yeti in someone's living room. But if you're hungry for terrific writing and good adventure gameplay, Wadjet games like The Blackwell series, The Shivah, and Gemini Rue are where it's at.

Unavowed is where they kick it up a notch.

This is their biggest and best game yet. It's got double the resolution, streamlined gameplay, a cleaned-up interface, and is sprawling and generous, full of locations to explore and characters to meet.

It takes place in the same supernatural NYC as the Blackwell series, but where the Blackwell games used a kind of Sixth-Sense-ish gimmick (you can see ghosts and have to help them move on) to tell small, realistic little stories about ordinary life in the city, Unavowed feels more like a big-budget supernatural action movie, hitting you right from the beginning with big stakes and frantic action (as frantic as adventure game puzzles can be, anyway).

In a way, it's almost a hybrid adventure game/Bioware-style RPG. Segments of the game are divided into missions, and you choose your two partners from a selection of possible characters. Your party members have different skills (one is super-strong, one can see ghosts, etc) and your choice of partner influences how the game plays out and how you solve the puzzles you'll face. It's such a simple yet innovative concept and it works excellently.

But although it's bigger and higher-stakes than Wadjet's previous games, it's no less intelligent. The characters are written sensitively, with interesting and rich backstories, and the world is chock-full of interesting dude-who-lives-in-NYC detail; you go to real street corners and real bars, you meet real-feeling people who talk about how the Village used to look and the last time the K train ran. Good writing and plotting makes Unavowed's NYC every bit as immersive as the latest ray-traced mip-mapped whatevers.

As you can see from my playtime, I like Conan Exiles pretty okay. if that's what you were curious to hear, everything after this point is just details. But if you'd like to know more, read on.

THE PROS
- I sometimes find builders difficult to get into. My imagination doesn't always spark that way, and even when it does, I feel like the games are either too constricting or too free. Minecraft, for instance, is too open: one person makes a little village with farms and then their buddy is off to the side making a replica of the World Trade Center with a little flaming plane sticking out of it. it's too much, it's too random and whimsical for me. Something like ARK or Rust, by contrast, is like - well, everything I make is going to look kind of Mad Max-y. Conan hits my Goldilicks spot where there are plenty of options (do I want a stepped pyramid, a Greek agora, an onion-domed pleasure dome, etc) but they're all pulling in the same thematic direction and it's easy for me to tap into that vibe.

- A genuinely huge play area with a lot of geographic diversity. You start off in a very like, black deserts of Kemet kind of vibe, then move to an idyllic Nile-like river, which you can follow east to a full-on jungle and a vast lake, or you can head north through a more...rocky, Israel/Jordan-like desert of canyons and mesas that give way to veldt and then to temperate forests and then to boreal forests and fjords and Scandinavian-style mountains. And it's all dotted with dungeons and tombs and pyramids and etc etc - and unlike a lot of open-world games, you actually have compelling reasons to travel and explore, because different regions have different ♥♥♥♥ in different quantities, and certain rare items and materials can only be found in scary tombs and whatnot. it doesn't have that..."well, I could go there, but why?" anomie that afflicts me in some other games. I actually want to see what lies over the next hill.

- Related to this, there's also some narrative content. I wouldn't go so far as to call it a story, but it's not just some tabula rasa. There's an actual objective to the game (learn the secrets of the ancient builders so you can break your magical slave collar and escape) which helps me feel more engaged and less aimless. There's also a lot of lore and worldbuilding to discover, and actual NPCs to talk to and interact with (not as deeply as an RPG, but many have more to say than just a generic bark, which was a pleasant surprise). This is one of these things that might be meaningless to someone else but is invaluable to me; I like an element of narrative glue to fix me into a setting. There are fun mysteries and story strands to pick up and that gives me a reason to engage with the game systems.

- Of course, that wouldn't matter if I didn't enjoy the game systems, but I do! Resource gathering is fast and painless, and the crafting options are varied and involve a bit of cruft and figuring-stuff-out but, crucially, not too much. By way of comparison, I found ARK overwhelming. This is pitched at a level of complexity I can get behind. The combat is also pretty good, with several different weapon types (one- and two-handed swords, shields, knives, spears, javelins, bows, clubs, hatchets, axes) that work differently and confer different advantages. Swords are great in personal combat but a spear really is a godsend when you're trying to keep a 15-foot-tall spider away from you. Combat's not going to win any awards, it's not lovingly hand-crafted like a character action game or whatever, but I'd say it's certainly more rewardingly tactile than, say, a traditional MMO.

- I need to give a shout out to the climbing mechanic, which I love. Instead of bunny hopping up 85-degree terrain, you just..hit the jump button (spacebar) and your character adheres to a wall like Spider-Man, and you can begin climbing up it, or laterally, or even downward. But the instant you start climbing, your stamina begins to drop precipitously, so every climb is a race to get to the summit before you become too worn out to hang on. It's simple and dramatic. Also, if you jump or fall and are near a cliff or wall, you can whack the spacebar and your guy will grab the wall with his bare hands and skid downward to a stop. it's incredibly satisfying and I'm going to be mildly frustrated with most other climbing systems in open-world games going forward.

THE CONS
- The netcode is not supremely optimized. Lag spikes, rubberbanding, etc are just a fact of life sometimes.

- The UI is lackluster and sometimes opaque. Finding out how to make something often involves navigating between a couple of menus and doing a text search. That's easy for me on a keyboard, but would be cumbersome on a console or controller setup.

- There's jank. There just is, above and beyond lag issues - it's present even in single player. Enemy mobs or your AI companions sometimes behave weirdly, warping around to their spawn or getting in the way of your strikes or blocking a door or what-have-you. You have to manually repopulate your hotbar every time you die. Interactibles in the world, particularly lore journals, are often not called out as such, or have a pixel-wide window where mousing over them yields any appreciable result.

CONCLUSION
When this game came out, it seemed like a very obvious, cobbled-together cash-in on the builder game boom, but I tried it and found a couple elements - such as the crafting - interesting enough to not seek a refund.

Now that I've had more time with it, and now that the game has crucially had another couple years of active development, I see now that for all its issues, a hasty cash-in is the very last thing it is. The love for the Conan source material shines through in every aspect of the game, and the combination of experiences it gives me - building AND exploration AND dungeon delving AND engaging in a fantasy narrative with an actual story - is one no other game has quite managed. For that alone, Conan Exiles is worth it for me.

There are elements of TTS that are a little clunky or unintuitive, but those generally pale in comparison to all the things it gets right, and more importantly, what it makes possible in terms of a new way to socialize with my friends online.