Recent reviews by stechyo

Not as ambitious or great as Pathologic or The Void, Know by Heart starts on a cringeworthy note, playing as someone who cannot seem to let go of the past and would prefer to linger in his small Russian hometown and wallow in nostalgia while most of his childhood friends have left, still obsessed about his crush at school. Once you get past the rough beginning, however, things start to go wrong in this small town, and the story unravels into one of the most heart-wrenching in the medium, only doing so because you've been through the admittedly weak start. For an Ice-Pick Lodge game, it's not really challenging and it's not pushing the medium that much to tell its story (it should be noted that this game was directed by a different person than previous IPL games), but it's still a very good and emotionally charged short novel that works best as a game.

Fun game, but I still prefer the first. While there are more tracks in this one, each location has sections that get reused for each track, which makes the three tracks per location blend together and feel a lot more samey, and it often tricks your muscle memory (at some points you're meant to turn left on one track, but if you're in a different track on the exact same spot you have to turn right). Levels feel a lot denser visually, and since parts of different tracks are on screen at the same time it's sometimes confusing to figure out where you need to go in a split-second - this is especially bad on certain flight sections, the game will often throw you off of ramps and it will take a couple dozen runs per track until you remember where you're supposed to be flying to. The campaign is much longer, which together with the less distinct tracks makes the game overstay its welcome by quite a fair bit. The amazing sense of speed is still there, but I won't be doing all Platinum trophies in this one unlike in Redout 1, and I'd recommend that one over the sequel provided you haven't played either.

I really wish Steam had a "mixed" rating sometimes. Not a bad game, but not worth buying except on a deep sale. Also, I have likely 10-15 hours more than my Steam playtime.

The opening of Deathloop taunts you with one message repeated some dozens of times: "YOU KNOW THE CODE". I kept walking through these, convinced that I indeed know the code. At least I've played enough of these games to know that it's going to be 0451. Typing the code, business as usual, into the first lock in the game, made the protagonist say something about "old habits" and got me an achievement.

Fun detail, but after playing the game it felt like a declaration by Arkane that they're done making that kind of game, by either lack of will from the devs or from the fact that their games have been repeated flops, a trend which continues with this game and likely will with their next, seeing as it looks dreadful. Deathloop, with it's much larger arsenal of firearms compared to previous Arkane games, and its loss of emphasis on stealth, feels a lot more like a straight-up shooter. Any sort of resource management is gone, as even the most basic resources (ammo+health) are littered around levels with so much abundance (and the game is so easy) that you'll never run out.

The 60s setting is fun, but it looks like that's where all the creativity went. In a game with powers copied from Dishonored (and the least original ones at that), turrets from Prey, roguelite mechanics from Mooncrash (and simplified, Mooncrash's random changes where a level may be filled with radiation or under a total blackout are much more interesting and varied than Deathloop's time-of-day permutations), invasion mechanics from Dark Souls, a kick from Dark Messiah... what does Deathloop have left that isn't a rehash from everything else? Well, the player has to figure out how to kill seven targets in a day, manipulating each of these characters in order to find a sort of "perfect run". I mean, that's what I got from the promotion for this game, but once you've figured out the only way in which each character can be manipulated, the game tells you the exact order of things you must do in order to do that "perfect run" and end the game. I'm sorry, but this is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ pathetic.

I've been ping-ponging around the Yes/No buttons for recommending this game while I write the review. As I said, I have pretty mixed feelings. Buy it or don't based on what you've read above, I suppose.

Echoes of the Eye feels like a complete misunderstanding of what makes Outer Wilds fun. Flying around with your spaceship, exploring an entire solar system with your jetpack and creative tools, that's fun. Sadly, most of it gets taken away in what seems to be some terrible Amnesia clone. Maybe Mobius got lucky and stuck gold with the base game, but it's looking like they're not able to follow up on it.

(This review is... kind of spoilery. Maybe don't read it if you haven't played the game. For a quick recommendation, The Witness is very fun, and I'd say there's much more to it than what you'd find in a simple tablet game where you draw a line around a board.)

The most enjoyable puzzles in The Witness, at least for me, are the ones where I really have to take my time to get to a solution. After an initial few minutes where I quickly understand that "this one is not going to be easy", there's a much longer time where my brain's fuming trying to get to the answer. And then, suddenly, everything clicks and I sort of hit this zen state where it feels like someone else is using my mouse, and they calmly but firmly input the correct answer. It feels like the solution was always there, and I just wasn't seeing it the right way until that point.

This theme of perspective, of seeing things in a specific way, is everywhere in the game. From the very mechanical need in each puzzle to look at it the correct way in order to solve it, to the many different puzzles that rely on a more physical kind of perspective (being in the right spot, looking at the right thing, to be able to understand how to solve these puzzles), to how so many things throughout the island can look like something concrete when you look at them from the right point of view, and on a narrative level. While the game doesn't exactly have what you could call a plot, and narrative elements are extremely sparse, the game presents different points of view on science and art, and completing all these puzzles made me think of how we look at the world, trying to find some pattern (like the dots and lines of the puzzle screens) to existence (such as the laws of physics, for example), much like playing this game will have you instinctively seek out anything that looks like a puzzle pattern everywhere you go to, and it also made me think of how art is an expression of how the artist views the world, an expression of his perspective if you will. Even though there's not a lot of narrative in the game, what is there is quite interesting.

As for the rest of the game, I think I initially dismissed it when it came out because it looked like one of those free games on the Play Store where you draw a line around a board in specific ways. Actually playing it was quite a pleasant surprise in this regard; sure, there are a lot of puzzles that could just be on the level select screen of one of these basic tablet games, but I think Jonathan Blow really explores everything that you could think of (I struggle to think of something that's missing myself) when it comes to this framework of puzzle design. I finished around five hundred puzzles, and the game was entertaining the whole way through. The highlight of the game, in my... perspective, is the Challenge. The game violently swings from a very calm zen-like experience where you can do puzzles in whatever order you like and at your own pace into this adrenaline-pumping time trial where you have to complete a whole set of them in a few minutes without pausing. Seeing the music pause after one of the final shrieking notes in Hall of the Mountain King made me take a few seconds to understand that I'd completed the challenge, followed by just... dumb laughter at the release of tension.

The Witness is a very enjoyable game with extremely sparse but interesting narrative. I really enjoyed my time exploring this lonely island with its hundreds of mind-bending puzzles.

Hideo Kojima is probably the most well-known auteur in gaming. Like his games or not, when you play them you just know that they couldn't have come from any other person on Earth. Death Stranding seems to be the auteur's dream, piles of cash and not a single utterance of the word "no" during production. I'm not actually sure if that's true, but from the game I played, it seems pretty close to that. This is pure, unfiltered Kojima, for better or worse.

The gameplay itself is actually great. The game got a very mixed reception for being a walking simulator, and... yeah, it is a walking simulator. Not the derogatory term that we've come to use for two-hour games with barely any interactivity, but an actual simulator of walking, and it's really good. The game revolves around connecting the US by delivering packages, and that's all. You accept an order, strap the package on your back and go into the wild to deliver it. Outside some cities that you will never see (only their distribution centers), the world is pretty much empty land to walk through on your way to delivering something.

This sounds really boring, but Death Stranding's core gameplay is the act of walking itself. Aside from having to carry at least dozens of kilograms of cargo at any given time, the world's terrain is gamified to make any trip a constant challenge. It's not that hard to walk around even if you have some weight on your back, but what if you're carrying a stack of boxes your own height, having to go through rocky plains, mountains and rivers? Well, that becomes a challenge. There are also camps full of enemies that try to steal your packages, and areas full of "ghosts" that you have to avoid lest you get pulled into some pathetic excuse of a boss fight which you easily run away from, but the main and best part is walking.

Any delivery in Death Stranding has you planning a route and trying to get through it without damaging cargo too much, and you're given an immense variety of tools to do so. There are vehicles, but if you're going to complain you keep bumping into rocks because you brought one into a mountain or a particularly rocky plain then it's your own fault. You can equip several mechanized legs for different functions (pure speed, carrying more or having an easier way through tough terrain), have floating carriers follow you, and use ladders and ropes to get around rivers and cliffs. The game gives you all these tools and expects you to have the wit to use them properly.

Of course, the standout mechanic of the game is easily the chiral network. As you deliver packages around the US on your trip from East Coast to West (similar to how the US itself started with thirteen colonies on the East Coast and expanded westward), you connect each isolated city to the chiral network, a sort of sci-fi internet. Not only are cities connected between themselves, you connect to other players. Apart from all the tools that I've described so far, you can also build several structures such as bridges to cross rivers or generators to recharge your vehicles. When you build something or leave ladders or vehicles on the world, the game will make them appear on other players' worlds.

This means that you are forced to help others on their way. The most cooperative of these structures are the highways: it's a huge grind to build them all by yourself, but every player chips in what they can, and together you can rebuild these roads spanning the entire map and making it much easier to traverse it. Personally, it felt great to get in the game and see that dozens of people used my roads, my generators and my routes. It's really something else to see people that you don't know being grateful that you helped them along, just as other people have helped me in my trips. The game's story deals a lot with connecting people, and the way it communicates these themes through gameplay is great. Especially because the "actual" story of the game is complete, embarassing garbage.

Quoting MGS2 translator Agness Kaku, "[Kojima] wouldn't last a morning in a network TV writer's room". MGS2 is probably my favourite Kojima game, but despite the very interesting ideas and themes the game tackles, it's not exactly well-written most of the time. I think even Christopher Nolan would blush at the amount of dry exposition and plot overexplaining Kojima can do. Metal Gear Solid 1 through 3 had a co-writer, and after he left the subsequent games became a true mess (which may be a coincidence, but who knows). MGS4 is bloated with cutscenes and, besides the fact that the whole game shouldn't even exist as it's unnecessary, most of the cutscenes could almost not be there. MGS5 is the exact opposite, where basically nothing happens and it feels like everyone who worked on the story (or even the entire game) was just kind of bored and disinterested. Death Stranding manages to be... both of these actually.

After the start of the game where characters explain things to the protagonist that he obviously knows (with insightful information such as "by the way the president's your mother"), and zero subtlety is employed in anything (the way you connect to the chiral network is through... a pair of handcuffs), the game just lets you play it. Unlike MGS5 where everything is tedious and you're doing the same thing in the same boring map over and over again, Death Stranding is an actually good game all the way through so I can't complain much. Some cutscenes happen to move the plot along minimally, but it's not much, just bland scenes of characters telling you things.

These are.. only very badly written. Characters will tell you their backstory for no reason completely out of the blue, there's endless awful wordplay (supposedly it's a Japanese thing) and completely moronic ideas such as HEARTMAN literally having a "heart"-shaped heart or DEADMAN being literally made out of dead people that seem to be played straight by the actors, implying like you're supposed to take this dumb schlock seriously. Occasionally there's a shooter-focused segment with some pretty enjoyable cutscenes with little dialogue and lots of surreal imagery, but the shooting itself is awful. Of course, this is all nothing compared to the final act of the game where it becomes MGS4.

After you've gone through the entirety of the main map, gameplay becomes much more sparse. There's only one good mission in the gameplay side (Going back to the East Coast with nothing besides what you're carrying and whatever other players leave in your world). The rest is more sleep-inducing shooting segments and (mostly) sleep-inducing bosses. This is where the story gets incredibly stupid. Frankly, if you reach a point where you think "alright, I think we've reached the peak of this plot's stupidity" and the credits haven't rolled yet, then you're probably wrong.

It keeps becoming more and more of a mess, the characters keep saying more and more moronic garbage full of pseudoscience and wordplay allegories that only the most faithful of Kojima cultists would bother to unravel. I think there's some interesting ideas in this setting and some interesting themes are tackled, but I'd prefer Kojima to get an actual writer and just limit himself to making the cool game and cool cutscenes. Sadly, I don't think a man who can put his name eight separate times in the final credits can have the shred of humility necessary to be aware of his failings.

Is Death Stranding good? Depends on what you look for in a game. Personally I liked its deep and complex gameplay and innovative social systems, but I cannot stand what is the most unbearable story that Hideo Kojima's written. It's an alright game overall. I'd rather play an Ice-Pick Lodge game any day of the week since there's good storytelling to think about while you walk, but Death Stranding's gameplay is much, much better.

If Superhot is an interesting gimmick that can barely be stretched into a two-hour campaign, Mind Control Delete is stretching that out even more with one of the most effective tools in the indie developer's pocket: randomized levels and bonuses. I don't like using the term "lazy" as making games takes a lot of work and it feels disrespectful, but I simply cannot stand when someone feels like any semblance of actual level design can be replaced by a slapped-together randomiser. The narrative takes a small step back, but it's still quite pretentious fourth-wall breakage that is incredibly tired by now. The game kept asking why I kept playing it, and so did I. Since I have some amount of self-control, I just uninstalled after less than an hour. If I wanted Superhot's gimmick (and only interesting bit of... anything), I'd just play Dusk with the Superhot mode cheat.

Cargo! is just not good. It's a bizarre game with some janky vehicle creation and little else. While there are minuscule hints of it being made by the creators of Pathologic and The Void, it's honestly too little to bother with. I can't see any reason to keep playing this or recommend it to someone else.

Spec Ops: The Line has excessively generic gameplay from one of the worst genres in gaming. However, it's somewhat saved by a good story (that has some flaws in how it relates to being a video game, but it's still quite good). I'm not the kind of person that plays these military shooters all the time and just wants to shoot people without thinking, but if you do, you must absolutely play this game without looking up anything on it, as it was made for you.

I've already played this game on an... "acquired" copy, planning to instantly buy it when it launched on a platform I actually use and... like.

Outer Wilds is pure exploration. There's no combat and no abilities to find: what you start the game with is what you'll end up with. This may sound like a bad thing, but this game is an amazing journey of constant discovery. You have a solar system to explore in 22 minutes, at the end of which the game resets and you go back to where you started. This means that everything in the game is open to you as long as you know how to access it, so if you feel stuck somewhere there's always somewhere else you and your rinky-dink duct-taped together little spaceship can go to. Each planet is totally different from each other, full of incredibly creative and interesting things to find. This game has many jaw-dropping moments without any of them feeling scripted, and the whole experience is one of the best I've had playing a game. If anything I talked about sounded interesting, buy this game, avoid reading anything about it and experience it for the first time. I really, really, really envy you.