Recent reviews by TheTitaniumDragon

This is a very cute "horror game", though I think calling it that is a bit misleading.

This is actually mostly a very linear walking simulator of you entering into and "exploring" (on a guided, pre-chosen path) a ruined amusement park, the titular Indigo Park, while being led by the "AI" Rambley Raccoon, who is, like all such games, actually all pre-scripted. Rambley is a very cute raccoon, with some nice voice acting, and the experience as a whole is surprisingly wholesome for being a "mascot horror" game. It does have a few jump scares, and one (highly linear) chase sequence, but it's mostly just walking around and exploring and looking at stuff, with very little "gameplay" to speak of - at most, you solve a very simple puzzle.

Overall, it's very much one of those "the creative team is tiny" sort of things, and is VERY small (the entire game is perhaps an hour long as-is, and then, only if you explore everything) and is very toyetic.

If the trailer looks interesting to you, this is free and it is pretty cute. The mascot characters are well designed and the whole thing was an enjoyable enough experience. It even has a song at the end of it that is quite cute!

Overall, I am hopeful for this project going forward.

This game features an adorable sheep exploring a dark ruined facility where some sort of experiment took place. The whole thing is a bit abstract, with what exactly was going on there left intentionally vague. The sheep is cute enough but the platforming is pretty meh – you are, very deliberately, not very agile for most of the game, and only at the end of it do you really “solve” that problem, by which point the game is rapidly approaching its conclusion – and even then, it still doesn’t feel great to control Sheepy.

As a platformer game, this didn’t really sell me on it; the music and art was decent enough, but the core gameplay was meh and I really didn’t feel like I had much reason to play it. I ended up beating the whole thing because it is (fortunately) pretty short – maybe an hour and a half long if you go secret-hunting – but in the end it didn’t leave much of an impression on me, and was pretty forgettable.

Palworld is a base-building, creature-catching open-world action RPG. It is like a combination of Pokemon, an early access survival-crafting game like Ark: Survival Evolved or Valheim, and Breath of the Wild. Or, as some people joked, it is like playing all of the early access games on Steam at the same time.

Interestingly, the game actually works as a cohesive whole, and it is because of the core gameplay loop.

You need resources to build up the next tier on the tech tree that lets you make better weapons and better base stuff.

You go out and capture Pals and gather resources to build that stuff.

Doing this causes you to gain experience, eventually causing you to level up and unlock the next tier on the tech tree.

On top of this, there is a significant base automation component, where you build a better base, but you need better Pals to man it and produce things at a reasonable rate of speed. As such, you want to go out and capture pals to make your base better, which ties into the above gameplay loop.

There is, in addition to all this, the core actual combat, where you use your Pals in addition to your own weaponry to defeat Pals to capture them. As you level up, you start to fight bosses, more powerful Pals which are tougher to fight but give you special resources (and tech points). Pals also have special abilities that you can (usually) activate, allowing you to do things like have your Pal heal you, brandish your Pal like a weapon, or ride your Pal around – allowing you to not just gallop, but also swim and fly around the map. Some of the ridable Pals even have weapons you can craft that you mount on them, allowing you to launch rockets or grenades from the back of your Pal.

All of this allows you to explore even more of the world and defeat ever more threatening foes – Alpha Pals, very powerful Pals that are around the overworld map and in what are basically Evergaols, and the five tower bosses, who are the main obstacle in the current version of the game.

All these systems all tie together to create a fairly compelling gameplay loop.

However, this is still an early access title, and it shows.

Pals will sometimes get stuck or wander off and fail to do the thing they were supposed to in your base. This can lead to them starving to unconsciousness.

They will sometimes teleport around and end up outside of your base, which gets them locked in place and you have to rescue them. This has been getting better, but it is still a problem.

There's a limited number of Pals you can store at once. You can circumvent this with a structure, but the game doesn't tell you this at any point, and the structure is a bit annoying to make use of.

The game has a very bare-bones, minimal story - if it can even be called that at all.

And the game’s breeding system is really weird – it makes little sense from an outside point of view, and while it does allow you to produce Pals you’ve never seen before, it is just a weird system.

Finally, the core combat gameplay just isn’t that great. You can roll and dodge, and use your Pals, but none of the enemies are particularly interesting to fight – this is not Monster Hunter or Elden Ring, where the bosses are really cool. The bosses here have a ten minute timer so they’re basically DPS checks, to see if you can kill them fast enough (and avoid dying yourself – and yes, they can kill you if you’re careless).

All in all, this is a fairly decent game, but it isn’t a great one. Everything about it is just a little bit janky – the combat, the basebuilding, even the Pal pathfinding. The Pals are cute, though, and have some fun animations, and the way that all the game systems combine is interesting and a pretty unique, novel experience. Even though no part of this game is particularly original, the game, as a whole, doesn’t really feel much like anything else you’ve played.

While this game is crushingly popular, the game isn't actually SUPER amazing as a game - but it is good enough to be worth your time if you are into this sort of thing. It’s best in class at what it actually is, unlike all too many survival/crafting games it is PvE rather than PVP focused, and the game manages to push enough of the right buttons to inspire people to play, and to KEEP playing.

I beat the early access version of this game within a few weeks of its release; the main game is, depending on what you do, somewhere in the realm of 80-120 hours in length to beat everything and capture all the Pals.

Cocoon is a simplistic puzzle game with very vague stakes. You play as some sort of humanoid insect person, and you are solving puzzles. The central conceit of the game is that you are jumping between worlds, with each world contained in an orb. Place these orbs on certain places, and you can jump into the world inside of them; there are bouncy platforms in each world which will launch you out of the world back to the main world.

This is a one-button game; you have directional controls, and you have an action button, which lets you pick up a sphere, place it on a designated position (you can’t drop them wherever you want, you have to put them on stands), activate things in the environment, and activate your currently carried sphere’s special power once you unlock it.

While this seems very simple – and it is – the game manages to do a number of quite clever things with it, leading to increasingly clever puzzles as you unlock more and more of the spheres. As you get more of them, you have to do ever more elaborate puzzles involving jumping between spheres and manipulating them to get across obstacles, and by the end of it, it has added some additional ways of getting between spheres that further increases the game’s ability to use these simple mechanics and push them to their limit.

The game’s puzzles are actually quite clever overall, and I think that the game did some interesting things with them – this is one of the best games that involves nothing more complicated than moving things around, and the visuals of jumping between worlds are quite cool.

However, while the game’s puzzles are pretty clever overall, it’s not Portal; this is a pretty mechanically simple game, and while it ends up making the puzzles work pretty well, I honestly don’t know why this game is so hyped up. It’s definitely a decent puzzle game, but I didn’t feel like the puzzles were as clever as they were in, say, The Talos Principle 2; the game’s puzzles are all pretty simple and straightforward, and while there are some clever bits in there, you’re unlikely to ever get stuck, as the game is very deliberate in limiting the number of options, which helps you to find the solution as there’s only a small possibility space.

That said, if you do like puzzles, it’s certainly clever enough.

The game, rather unexpectedly, has boss fights as well; there’s not a huge number of them, but they work well enough, and they help mix things up and add a bit of action-based excitement. If you get caught by the boss, you get chucked up out of the sphere you’re inside, allowing you to go back in and go fight the boss again, and none of them are overly difficult or long. It works pretty well, and once you figure out that there are bosses, you have something to look forward to, as beating them is what unlocks the sphere’s special powers, leading to some new puzzles.

Overall, the gameplay works well enough, and I thought it was quite decent; the game also knew it didn’t have TOO many ideas, so it kept things short, with a 100% play time of under 6 hours – in fact, it was likely under 5 hours, as I spent some time chatting to friends while playing.

On the other hand, story wise, this game is very, very weak indeed. You are some sort of humanoid insect, but what your agenda is – what your purpose in doing the things you’re doing – is never really made clear, and this isn’t the kind of game that has audio logs or any sort of text descriptions in it. There’s honestly very little if any story to speak of, and while I think that the creators had some ideas in this regard, the game does a poor job of communicating them. As such, if you are a more narrative-focused player, you will find literally nothing here – go play Portal or The Talos Principle.

Overall, this is a very decent puzzle game, and worth playing if you like the genre – but I feel like the 88 metacritic score makes this seem like a really amazing game, but I thought it was merely quite decent for what it was, but nothing that I think you’re missing out if you never play it. I liked my time with this game well enough, and if you like puzzle games, you probably will too – but it’s a good game, not a great one. Go in with that expectation in mind, and you’ll probably come away satisfied; go in expecting this to be the puzzle game of the year, though, and you probably won’t find it to quite reach those heights.

Viewfinder is a puzzle game with a unique mechanic – you can place photographs (and other, similar things, like paintings) into the environment and have the photograph become part of the environment. This is a really neat core mechanic, and much like how Portal got you “thinking with Portals”, Viewfinder gets you thinking with photographs.

In some levels, these images are present in the level already; in others, you have a camera you carry around that you can take pictures with, allowing you to transpose parts of the environment into other parts of it. The game has a few other puzzles here and there, where you have to do things like run through portals that contain filters, but mostly, it is the core mechanic, plus or minus some switch-flipping and battery (i.e. crate) dropping on plates, with some added ways to take photographs towards the end that put some added twists on what you were doing.

The game is reasonably clever, and the creators clearly had a set of ideas they wanted to explore with it. The fact that you can superimpose your photographs over key parts of the level means that you have to be careful about where you place them, though fortunately, the game is generous and includes a built-in “rewind” function so if you do make a mistake, you can undo/fix it. They keep on adding in new mechanics and new twists as you go forward through the game, keeping things fresh over the game’s roughly 8 hour run time to 100% it.

The actual story of the game is merely OK, though; after some future climate disaster, a group of people retreated to a virtual world to run experiments. You are someone who is coming along some time later, trying to find the results of said experiments to see if you can fix the world with them. Accompanying you on the journey is CAIT, an AI talking cat who is clearly lonely, having been abandoned in that virtual world by his creators. As you go through the game, you find journals and audio logs from the people who were there before, talking about their triumphs, failures, and interpersonal drama. Overall, it is an OK frame story, but it wasn’t anything really special in that regard, merely a serviceable excuse plot.

On the whole, this was a solid game that knew it had a finite amount of space to work in, filled that space up, then ended while it was still feeling fresh. While the final level was slightly frustrating, as unlike every other level in the game it is timed and if you run out of time, you have to start over (and the rewind function critically does NOT rewind that clock), which meant I had to run through it three times to actually complete it.

If you’re a fan of puzzle games, this is a game I’d recommend – the mechanic is unique and fun, and while it doesn’t go quite as far as I was hoping, it still manages to do a number of clever things.

(the) Gnorp Apologue is a fairly decent "idle" game with a little bit of strategy involved. The core of the game is similar to most idle games – your goal is to collect a resource via idling with the game on, you progress in the game by using said resource to gather resources faster. The “twist” here is that you are doing so by using Gnorps, cute little things that you build various buildings for.

U most of these sorts of games, which are fundamentally designed such that it is just a matter of resetting enough times until you get it to work and yours building are limited by how much income you get, in (the) Gnorp Apologue there's a "population" limit on how much stuff you can build – you have to build housing for the Gnorps, and they get more expensive as you build more of them. You employ the Gnorps doing various things to hit a rock. When you knock enough material off the rock (your damage to the rock exceeds your collection rate), the rock will suck all the material back onto it in a “compression event”, which increases your collection rate, but also increases the rate at which it will passively do so – which can cause you to become stuck as the rock’s draw-back rate exceeds your damage + collection rate (or at least slows it to the point where further progress is not feasible).

As a result, the game is basically a puzzle about how to create a feedback loop that allows you to deal enough damage to complete the game without the game's feedback mechanism (compression, where stuff goes back onto the rock) exceeding your damage or without having to idle for exceedingly long periods of time to make progress.

Like most such games, each time you reset your progress, you gain some advantage – in this case, talent points, which let you figure out a synergistic build to enhance your ability to damage the stone/collect resources. This unlocks new abilities and synergies that are not otherwise available.

Like most games of this genre, you won't be able to succeed until you've reset it several times to level up your abilities; if you do level up the right ones, you can beat it at as low as 14 talent (and possibly less; I've beaten it at 14). The game does actually have an end-point – once you make the rock undergo 10 compression events, you gain the ability to put an end to things and win. Once you do that, you unlock a time trial mode, in which you are encouraged to beat the game as fast as possible with 20 unlockable talents.

It is still very much an idle game, even if there is a little puzzle attached, so if you aren't into that particular genre, this game isn't for you. If you do like it, it is a pretty nifty little way of making a game like this, and I managed to beat it in a day or so; it’s a significant improvement over most idle games in that it actually encourages you to think about what you’re doing beyond “when should I reset?”, and that’s a nice thing to see.

The Finals is a team-based, objective-based FPS with highly destructible terrain. You play as a group of contestants who are competing in a virtual world for money, with your goal being to collect “vaults” and then take them to points to “cash out”. To cash out, you must defend the point until the cash out goes through, meaning that the other players can (and will) try and steal it, in which case they win the points (money) instead.

As a F2P game, this is one of those things which leans into a repetitive gameplay loop to keep people playing. You play in a match, you gain XP to level up, then you want to go into another match to level up more. You unlock cosmetic items by levelling, but you also unlock new weapons and abilities as well for the three “classes” in the game (light, medium, and heavy).

Unfortunately, the game is somewhat lacking in character; your characters are very generic, and as such, all the characterization is provided by the over the top announcers, who make a bunch of fun little jokes but who, sadly, cannot hold the game up on their own. As a result, after playing a few dozen rounds, it was pretty obvious I’d already seen everything there was to see, and while the game has okay mechanics with climbing up over buildings, using ziplines to get around, blowing holes in buildings to make it easier to assault them, etc. the problem is ultimately there’s only so much there before it starts feeling increasingly repetitive.

In the end, it’s okay, but it’s hard for me to see myself playing it for any significant amount of time; the F2P FOMO is there, of course, but it’s kind of transparent at this point, and the fact that many weapons are locked behind levelling up means you can’t mix things up in the limited ways that the game does allow all that much. I’ve played Overwatch, and this wore thin far faster than Overwatch did, and has less colorful characters, though it’s F2P monetization is not as obnoxious as Overwatch 2’s is.

All in all, it’s okay to mess around with for a little bit, and as a free game, it’s hard to say that the price is wrong. But while it is OK, it is not really anything beyond that in the end.

Unpacking is a casual game where you unpack boxes and put items from them into rooms in houses. It is a very basic puzzle game, insofar that you have to put the items in logical places and make sure they all fit in there, but the game is pretty much trivial in terms of difficulty – if you complete unpacking a house and have items in the wrong places, the game will tell you which items are in the wrong places, and you can easily just move them around and put them in the right places. You start out with one room, but some of the later levels have far more than that, with the final level being an entire, full-sized house.

The game is very simplistic, and almost all of the satisfaction you’ll get out of it is from this act of unpacking the boxes and seeing what the person has with them at this chapter in their life.

The game uses environmental storytelling to tell a story, about a child who grows up to be an adult and starts their own life. Each chapter in the game represents a significant change in their life, and as you go through, you learn the person’s interests, as well as see what they’re going through at that point in their life.

It’s fairly cute, and well-done, but it isn’t really enough if you aren’t into the core gameplay of unpacking and arranging things – and honestly, it’s not that interesting of a core mechanic, as it is very simplistic and it is mostly just kind of mindless and a little bit tedious.

Fortunately, the game is quite short (less than 5 hours long to 100%), so you won’t be stuck playing it for overly long.

All in all, it’s hard to recommend this game; it is kind of mediocre, and the clever environmental storytelling isn’t worth unpacking all eight levels of the game.

Uncharted 4 is a 17 hour long action movie, made of thrilling chases and collapsing buildings, deadly puzzle-traps and betrayal. But it’s also a 17 hour action movie of climbing (oh so much climbing) and mediocre cover-based gunfights with generic bad guys with guns.

Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End concludes the story of Nathan Drake, the world’s best – and worst – treasure hunter. He is the best because he has found multiple lost, legendary cities and their treasures by following a series of clues left behind by long-dead historical figures who did not die when or how history popularly described – long-dead lost cities which had surprisingly sophisticated technology for the early 1700s, especially, as in the case of this game, where a city was built by a bunch of pirates.

And yet, he is living a middle-class existence because every time he finds some rare treasure, it ends up getting destroyed or otherwise blown up by a pesky band of bad guys – in this case, Shoreline PMC, a multinational mercenary force working for one Rafe Adler and led by Nadine Ross, a ruthless woman who repeatedly beats the snot out of Nathan Drake, but never actually kills him.

Assisting him in his adventures are his wife, Elena Fisher, his best friend, Victor Sullivan, and his brother, Sam Drake, the man who drew Nathan into treasure hunting in the first place before being shot and “killed” in a Panamanian prison 15 years ago while working with Rafe Adler.

Needless to say, given his position on the list, Sam is alive and well, and the game is kicked off by a desperate need to find the treasure of one Captain Avery, an eccentric pirate captain who loved building death traps used to test those who would “join him in paradise”, which, over the course of the game, you come to learn contains a great deal of pirate treasure indeed (assuming, of course, it wasn’t all spent or sunk on the bottom of the ocean somewhere). Sam was busted out of the prison he’d been stuck in by a notorious, ruthless Panamanian criminal, and it is up to you to find the treasure so that said criminal can be given the 50% of the Avery treasure that he demands, in exchange for freeing (and not murdering) Sam Drake.

Thus is launched a whirlwind adventure that takes you fom Panama, through Europe and Britain, and eventually to the tropics. You travel across a variety of different landscapes and settings, all in search of this lost treasure, the treasure always in the next place, just ahead, with Rafe, Nadine, and an army of PMC goons either hot on your trail, or already there ahead of you trying to find the treasure only for you to sneak in under their noses.

The game works quite well, with a plotline full of lies, betrayal, tests of people’s bonds (both of friends and family), and of course, a lot of bloodshed. You end up gunning down a small army of goons, though, somewhat amusingly (and unusually for the genre), depicting it as actually having an effect on them by the end – by the final chapter, the bad guy is down to only a handful of mercenaries, with the rest having been killed by our heroes, or dying horribly to insane pirate booby-traps.

Because everything is ancient, stuff is crumbling around you all the time, leading to a bunch of sequences where you jump on stuff, grab on, only for it to break, and you going on some crazy little adventure where you only barely cling on and survive or run along collapsing wreckage. And when the ruins themselves aren’t busy collapsing on their own, Shoreline is more than happy to blow it up for you to generate these sequences. These are the coolest action sequences in the game, and lead to a bunch of crazy-looking events – but it also can feel a little wearing at times, because after you’ve seen it happen a half-dozen times, it’s no longer actually *surprising* when it does so yet again – indeed, the game is so eager to do this, it happens multiple times per chapter in most of the game.

The game does a pretty good job of keeping things moving; the game switches between moving through and exploring environments, gunfights, and action sequences fairly well, giving you a pretty good variety of environments to fight across and to solve puzzles in.

What the game does not do a good job on is combat. The game is a very basic cover-based shooter, and the combat encounters are just not that good. The enemies are just “guys with guns”, and while they try to mix up the environments, in the end you’re just fighting while ducking behind waist high walls and around corners in a very standard cover-based shooter format, with no special powers and pretty bland “realistic” guns. The final boss fight at the end of the game at least tries to mix things up with a unique swordfighting minigame, and it’s only OK (though it is better than having yet another samey shootout, I suppose).

The game is also extremely linear, and while this is not a “bad thing” per se, it is palpable – you do not have much of a sense of agency in this game, it is more like experiencing a long action movie with quick time events than it is actually being the hero. And sometimes, like some of the climbing sections, it feels like the mechanics are just there because it is obligatory – climbing around, while it gives you some nice views, is a bit repetitive.

Overall, this is a good game in many ways, but is held back from true greatness by its mediocre core game mechanics and sometimes-repetitive action sequences. While the game does a very good job of being cinematic and feeling like an action movie, it doesn’t do quite as good a job of actually being a game with good gameplay. I’d still recommend this game, but with the caveat that it’s more of a strong experience with a mediocre game attached to it than the other way around.

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Uncharted: The Lost Legacy is the DLC/Expansion to Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End. Much like Uncharted 4, the game is designed as an action movie in many parts, but unlike Uncharted 4, there’s actually a big open world area in the middle part of the story (chapter 4) that feels very standard video game.

Unfortunately, I feel like it is to its detriment, as for all the polish that Uncharted has, the actual core gameplay is not exactly great.

Featuring Chloe Frazer as the main character, she is, from what I can tell, a character who was featured in the previous games, but wasn’t in Uncharted 4 at all. A former love interest of Nathan Drake, she feels like an off-brand Lara Croft – probably because she is. Unfortunately, as they ported only the Uncharted 4 collection to Steam, I have no background in her character, no prior attachment, and unlike Uncharted 4, The Lost Legacy does not do much to make me care about her as a person.

She teams up with Nadine Ross, one of the villains from the main Uncharted 4 campaigns, who has lost her private military company and now is hiring herself out to a treasure hunter (i.e. a thief).

The game’s primary villain is an Indian nationalist who wants to start a civil war; he is quite sociopathic, but he doesn’t really feel much like a person; he’s evil and we never really get much notion of how he thinks.

The goal of the game is to acquire the Horn of Ganesh, a bejeweled artifact in a lost city. Naturally, the group has to find said lost city and make its way past traps and bands of armed goons to finally get the thing.

Alas, this game feels like a rehash of Uncharted 4; it has many of the same plot beats, but the characters aren’t as developed, so it feels like “Uncharted 4, but worse” a lot of the time. You also end up undergoing many of the same sequences as in Uncharted 4, just in a new environment; as a result, it doesn’t feel like it is really something that has enough of an identity of its own as it ends up repeating too many beats and kind of ends up feeling like a knock off – which in all fairness, it is.

Additionally, having played Uncharted 4, the combat in this felt like it wore thin – Uncharted 4 did more to mix up the environments

Baldur's Gate 3 is arguably the greatest video game RPG of all time. With a cast of fun and distinctive characters, a huge amount of things to do, and major improvements to the 5E ruleset to make it work as a video game (and a better game overall), this is a really well-made game that has solid graphics and excellent storytelling.

If it has a flaw, it is that it has a deep love of sticking interactive objects in the environment, most of which are pointless, but some of which contain cool items, resulting in you clicking on every single one of them in the entire game and hurts the pacing when you are going through some areas.

Nevertheless, it's a great game, and a fun experience. I highly recommend it.