Recent reviews by Ravenize > *

If you've played the other games in the series - To the Moon, A Bird Story, Finding Paradise - then you know what to expect here. That includes an incredible soundtrack that augments exactly what's happening on the screen. Playing this game without music would be missing out on half the game. And if you haven't played those other games then stop reading this and start playing To the Moon immediately!

There's not quite as much experimentation with the mechanics as last time, which I consider an improvement, but the story, and really the narrative structure are somewhat more experimental here than before. Repetition is a very purposeful motif, used effectively.

Impostor Factory asks big, bold questions. What should your priorities be? Is it ok to be a little selfish? And ultimately, how does one live a good, meaningful life?

The craziest thing here is that the game actually manages to answer those questions, and answer them well, while still leaving some wiggle room for interpretation.

And the real strength is that there's also room for you, for injecting yourself into the characters and thinking about how you would react in their situation. Once again, just like with To the Moon, this game generated countless discussions for me in real life, because the scenarios it brought to my mind were worth talking to other people about. More than that: I had to talk through those ideas.

Parents, be warned, you will be hit far harder here than anyone who has never had kids.

I get why this game took so long now. It's not that the graphics or the engine are doing spectacularly complicated things. It's that the experience had to be finely crafted so that you arrive at the right place in the emotional arc for what was going to happen next. And it works marvelously.

I still think To the Moon is the better game. Maybe just because I played it first. But this came closer than anything else has to achieving that same journey.

It's a masterpiece of story telling.

I don't have a ton to say about Stories Untold. It's mostly a text-based adventure game, where you're discovering the story and interacting through a computer terminal, with the occasional bit of exploration and hunts for hidden objects thrown in.

What's most surprising is that the game actually tells a somewhat compelling story (it's really four short stories, but I digress). Some of the puzzles are a bit obtuse for my taste, as the game will often be very strict about the interpretation of your instructions. This can make progressing more frustrating than it really has to be.

I hope that the developers can improve upon this concept in future games. There's a solid core at the center here. My advice to them is to streamline everything a bit more: sand down the rough edges so the whole game flows more smoothly and you'll attract a wider audience.

While Stories Untold is not an amazing game, there are also many very similar yet far, far worse games out there.

It's probably a crime somewhere that I haven't reviewed Civ V yet, and it's been years since I've even played it, but hey, better late than never.

Civilization has a 30 year history at this point. It's THE 4x game, being largely responsible for creating that sub-genre of turn-based strategy games, and even popularizing turn-based strategy games to begin with. There's a lot we could dive into looking at those things, but I'm more interested in this particular installment, the fifth entry, V.

For me, V is the best in the series. Its systems are slightly more complex than IV, while being slightly simpler than VI. That makes it just complicated enough to remain interesting for an entire playthrough, while still being able to wrap your head around everything. I also feel that in some of the earlier games it was maybe too easy to achieve the state of "this victory is inevitable but I wait 50 more turns to see it through." There is some of that in V, to be sure, but it's not as bad as it could be.

V also has a wealth of content not related to the normal mode - there are rigged scenarios, replaying historical conflicts, and a ton of little things to discover. This game is a complete package.

My biggest complaint is technical: this game will peg your CPU at 100% for minutes at a time during games with a large number of AIs. It got so bad that my computer would regularly do an emergency shut off to avoid overheating. Literally no other app had ever caused that to happen, before or since. And it was doing this all on one core even though 8 were available. I eventually installed a new heat sync in order to get through those games, so I can only imagine what other players went through trying to troubleshoot this behavior.

The multiplayer interface and save/load mechanism could also use some work. Getting through long games with friends - even when dedicated to the process - was way more of a headache than it needed to be.

Civ V is the best of the best when it comes to building your own civilization. It's fun and deep, and will keep you coming back to play as new characters or try out new strategies. You'll inevitably lose some sleep due to playing well into the night.

Just. One. More. Turn...

What looks from the outside like a hidden object adventure game is really just a comedy in one act.

You won't spend more than half an hour on your first play through.

The voice acting is great.

It's free.

So why not try it out?

Hostil is a short 2D point-and-click adventure game, reminiscent of The Dig and many other similar LucasArts games from the 90's. It won't go down as a classic like some of those games did, but if you're a fan of the genre it's worth picking up and spending an hour or two experiencing the story.

The Search appears to be a 90's style adventure puzzle game where you're in a world that's seen and navigated through via 2D pre-rendered backgrounds. In a word: Myst.

For most of this short experience it felt like there wasn't much new or noteworthy here. It's light on narrative, and the gameplay is very much the traditional adventure game experience: you can pick up items to add to your inventory, and then you can combine those items and use them later to get past obstacles that impede your progress. If you've played Myst, Riven, or anything like them before then you know exactly what to expect.

Thankfully, the progression makes sense for the most part, and there aren't that many frustrating areas where it's not obvious what to do next. This makes the game somewhat predictable; as you begin to recognize patterns you'll be able to guess how a puzzle ends after only seeing the first piece. But that's much better than the slow, confusing alternative.

The ending is where this game really shines. I won't spoil it, so suffice to say that it is very, very cool. It turns the whole game from something run-of-the-mill to something special. If you like the genre then you owe it to yourself to play The Search all the way through to experience that for yourself.

Florence is the best kind of indie game - there's a lot of care put into crafting a tight experience here. It's filled with nice visuals and music, and most importantly: it has something to say.

The gameplay has some truly cool moments, although I think they could've been refined to be even better, and although they're interesting and unique the first time by the second or third encounter with some of these mechanics they start to feel repetitive.

My only major complaint is that your choices and performance don't matter. I would've preferred to replay this a few times to get different endings, but nothing changes drastically based on what you do.

Florence may be short, but that doesn't mean it's without value; to the contrary - this is a journey worth taking, and it doesn't have to be long or drawn out to be impactful.

Gorogoa is a beautiful hand drawn and painted experiment come to life. It's a comic book puzzle game wtihout any words, and despite the lack of dialogue - or maybe because of it - the game becomes something more than memorable: it's special.

I really don't want to say too much more. The best parts of the game are when it surprises you, or maybe when you surprise yourself by figuring out a tough puzzle you're stuck on. This is a master class in deep learning game design, on par with The Witness. Here's my suggestion: don't look at much about this game, certainly don't watch videos or look anything up. But if you get stuck then take a break; let your subconscious work on the problem and come back after some sleep or a workout. I think you'll arrive at an answer more often than you expect.

The game's biggest problem is when a few of the screens rely on a more hidden object approach, and you can't see a solution simply because you don't think something is interactable. Watch out for that, and try to click on everything. Luckily these moments are relatively rare.

The music is also great. I'm a huge fan in general. If you like indie games or puzzle games then yes, please, do yourself a favor and play Gorogoa.

While I don't think anything can capture the magic of what it was like to play the first Banner Saga game the first time, this third entry comes closer than the second did. It removes a lot of the uncertainty and randomness from the campaign while simultaneously telling a focused and epic story, even if it's somewhat predictable at this point.

There's a lot of pros and cons to the design. It's cool that you get to import your save file as it provides a nice sense of continuity, but it also locks you in to a bunch of earlier decisions and the group of characters you have to play with. This can be very limiting and make the game much harder if you had a tough run in a previous game.

The abilities, gameplay, and leveling system are familiar at this point, but that also makes them feel repetitive and somewhat boring. The most excitement you'll probably get is when finding a new item that really changes how a character might play, and admittedly, some of those are really neat additions.

The graphics are the same as before, which means they're good, but the style loses its impact by the third time around. The music is solid, but it's not as memorable as the first time you hear the themes in the first game.

And once again, just like the second game, a huge amount of the focus is not on the campaign, but on the arena/challenge/survival mode(s), an area where I have no interest because there's no motivating story.

I wonder if the concept would've been better served by adding something like major, branching side quests - could you temporarily leave a hub city to go on a multi battle mission to rescue a new character? Or find a mythical relic? The big problem with anything like that is the time aspect of course. Focusing so much on the days counting down to a game over severely constrained the directions they could go with the overall macro game design. And for what? Increasing tension? It felt somewhat novel in the first game, but by the third I find it exhausting to be worrying about micro managing how much virtual time my actions will take up in a video game. Constraints can foster creativity, but too adhering too tightly to them can also stifle it.

The Banner Saga 3 can be fun and emotional and epic. But all too often I also found it repetitive and rote, both within itself and in relation to the overall series. It's a well-balanced conclusion to the trilogy, weighing in with more good than bad. And you should certainly play it if you've played the first two. Even though it feels more inevitable than original at this point.

While I appreciate what the creator is trying to do here, it's not my cup of tea. There's not a lot of nuance or depth. It just drives the point home with the force of a semi truck.

And for something so short, the way to succeed can still be confusing. I never really connected to the protagonist though, so when I failed it felt like it didn't matter.

There are a couple legitimately funny moments, but I don't think it's worth going through everything else just to experience them.