Recent reviews by Penguinwizzard

This is one of the best Ace Attorney games. It has good character writing and is in general a treat. I highly recommend it to fans of the AA series.

Chants of Sennaar is a pretty fun puzzle game; it has consistent art direction, and a lot of puzzles that make you feel clever for figuring them out. The puzzles scale well from very easy at the beginning to fairly complex towards the end. I think it's a good game at 6.5 hours for a "true ending" run for me, but it'd have been a great game at 5 hours. There's a lot of bits that slow down the gameplay that don't really build on the strength of its core language puzzling.

Pros:
* Fun puzzle mechanic. Figuring out languages from context clues, including weird grammatical constructions, is neat.
* Consistent and good art direction.
* Good difficulty scaling.

Cons:
* Pointless forced stealth sections that detract from the experience. If the focus is puzzle gameplay, I'm not sure why these were included at all. It'd have been more fun/consistent with this removed. I'd have liked to instead see more puzzles where figuring out some language usage was required - formulating the correct response to a question posed by an npc, or the correct instructions to give them to direct them through some solution, for example.
* Repeated transit through unnecessarily long corridors can be expected while playing the game. Although part of the world for the game is a massive tower, it doesn't need to be expressed by wasting minutes during backtrack sequences on just holding a direction while your character manages to run there. Some of this is in going back through sections that previously had forced stealth after the stealth requirement gets removed; without the stealth gameplay, there's not much purpose to these bits, but you need to go back through them if you want to reference a conversation that happened there for the purposes of deciphering language. Some of them are just sequences where the developers want to show off some setpiece or environment art, but they start to wear when repeated. Generally, I think that most of the "worlds" in the game could have been shrunk by maybe half without losing much if any of the content.
* Every set of pages you complete in your notebook by associating glyphs to pictures tells you the _intended_ meaning for each glyph. This was often not quite aligned with what I had down as the meaning for the glyph, so it felt like the game was pushing a bit too hard here. I understand that this was probably because it caused frustration for testers who persisted on using incorrect translations for various glyphs as the challenges got tougher later.

This isn't really a game too worth reviewing, largely because it's a sequel well-targeted towards fans of the first game, which really should only be played after playing the first game. Thus:

1) Have you played through AI: The Somnium Files?
If no, consider that first.
2) Did you enjoy AI: The Somnium Files?
If so, you'll probably enjoy this.
If not, look elsewhere.

This is largely an incremental step up in the complexity and depth of the mechanics and overall mystery from the first game. As such, it works fairly well as a sequel; fans of the first one can enjoy a few good steps up. There's still a good amount of weirdness (albeit with less of Date perving), and a few touching moments scattered about.

Since I've been comparing it to the first game so far, let's move on to what the first game does better. This game is significantly less focused than the first game. Part of this is a pretty broad active cast, part of it is due to the nature of the overarching mystery, and part of it is due to the multiple protagonists. It's a bigger game, and it's hard to point out any one thing that should have been cut, but it does still suffer from the downsides of a larger scope.

Other negatives of this game are largely negatives of the first game, and I recommend going to that one first anyway, so I'm not going to go into much detail here. It's a visual novel, and not one with too much in the way of agency; be ready to read a lot of text or listen to a lot of (fairly well-voiced) dialogue.

A true masterpiece.

Play The Witness first - it's also a very solid game, with extremely clever puzzles. The Looker is a parody of The Witness that touches upon a lot of the same themes, has a few clever puzzles of its own, and generally treats the subject matter with much more levity. It's a pretty short addendum that just lasts long enough to make its points.

Now go play those games - Spoilers ahead!

I really like how The Looker structured itself. It deliberately takes roughly the opposite tone in writing to make almost the same points. Ultimately, there's no real purpose for what you're doing in The Witness or The Looker - there's not an explanation for the events or setting of the game, no real value generated in solving the puzzles other than your own satisfaction for having done them, and not a lot of permanence or meaning to the whole thing. While The Witness takes the more artsy/fancy route towards this, interpreting the lack of impact as peaceful, The Looker takes it as freeing and allowing for less seriousness around the whole experience.

In terms of puzzles, there's a couple of clever ones in The Looker, and some neat environmental interaction, but it's not the focus, generally - they're more there to adjust the pacing between the various jokes. It's easier to subvert expectations if you take some time building them up, of course.

All-in-all, while it doesn't have a ton of replay value, I'm very happy with the experience of this game - and for a free game, it's surprisingly well-thought-out and filled with content.

Elden Ring is very fun, and is probably the best open-world game since Breath of the Wild. Too commonly stated, but for a good reason; it's very content to back off and let you experience the world, without constantly bombarding you with quest markers, reminder text, and other decidedly superfluous UI elements. You inherently need to interact a lot more with the world to get your information, which meshes well with the game's themes of exploration and mystery. If nothing else, I'd recommend playing it just because it's a good measuring stick against which a lot of games will be measured in the next few years.

Pros:
* REALLY big world, especially for a souls game, but it doesn't feel stretched; there's largely non-repeated content over the whole thing, and all of the terrain feels like it has a deliberate touch. There's a lot of diverse boss fights, and there's optional refights (with additional skills/enemies/modifiers and rewards) hidden throughout the world.
* The musical score has some really strong songs, and generally fits well with the game.
* The art direction is on-point from start to finish, with _one_ exception.
* Beeg weapon go bonk
* Combat is largely the (very fun) tried-and-true Dark Souls formula with a pretty well-integrated addition of mounted combat (in the overworld, and only if you're not in multiplayer) and summonable spirits (only in designated areas, and also not in multiplayer). The additions make things a little easier, and allow for a lot more design freedom - some of the open-world enemies can quickly disengage quite a distance away, since the developers can assume that you'll be able to give chase on horseback. Spirits allow a bit more variety in boss design without as many sudden difficulty spikes or pits for certain builds - if needed, different spirits can provide ranged dps, dodge/blink/thick tanks, support healers, etc, which provides a nice bit of versatility.
* Having an actual jump button makes the jumping puzzles significantly less awful than previous soulsbournedietwice-like games.
* There's a _ton_ of interesting spells/incantations.
* Miyazaki added hidden walls that take multiple hits to reveal.

Cons:
* NPCs can be hard to spot, and if you're really invested in finishing a particular NPC's quest you'll most likely need to look it up to ensure you avoid breaking the quest accidentally. NPCs change location, sometimes to relatively random locations in the wilderness, without necessarily giving good indicators as to where they'll go next, and it can be a bit obtuse as to what might trigger a quest to become uncompleteable.
* I'm not sure that the invasion system really works out all that well. Invaders can (typically) invade you only if you're playing co-op already, which means that all things equal they're typically playing at a disadvantage. This leads to two outcomes when they try to even the odds: meta build adherence and camping tough fights. The first is that you'll see a _lot_ of certain builds... moonveil is way too popular. The second is probably worse - if you want to clear a tough open-world boss with the help of a friend, you'll often get an invader who just sits behind the boss and prevents you from playing the game. Some mechanism for discouraging this would go a long way.
* The art direction for the templated dungeon system that backs a lot of the small side dungeons relies a little _too_ much on repeated assets. Some mechanism for switching it up a little would have helped a good bit in making each feel more distinct and as part of the broader zone they're found in - the enemy variety and game design behind their layouts is fine, they just need a bit of architectural/textural/scatter flavor to differentiate them.
* The weapon/spirit upgrade system disincentivizes experimentation a bit too much, in my opinion. Even if you have the required stats to effectively equip a weapon, it's going to be largely irrelevant if it's not upgraded to your currently highest-available upgrade tier. For standard weapons, this can take 12 each of the 8 tiers of normal smithing stones, plus one of the super-limited top tier stones. In the end-game, with some heavy farming, I found weapon setups that I actually liked more than what I cleared most of the game with, but which I couldn't really comfortably experiment with until the game was basically over. Halving the number of stones required for each upgrade would have been nice.
* Fall damage has a very narrow window between "does no damage" and "explicitly fatal". Fall damage reduction items are pretty much worthless due to that. A wider window of _some_ fall damage would have been better, imo.
* If you actually go around and do all of the side content before progressing the main content, you'll probably end up pretty over-levelled for the title boss fights, which is a bit of a shame - the designs of these fights are pretty cool, and it's a bit disappointing when you don't get as good of a fight as you'd like since you're just a bit too strong. You don't want to do these fights _too_ early, though, since they're the most common trigger for causing failures in quests that you haven't progressed far enough.
* The incantation/spell list is a bit wide-but-shallow. The vast majority of spells are various shapes of damage spells, or apply a status effect. Incantations have a lot more variety - heals, buffs, damage, and some control. I would have liked to see a bit more variety in incantations - give them some polymorph/mind-control/movement/metamagic, and it'd feel a little more varied.
* Miyazaki added hidden walls that take multiple hits to reveal.

Short and sweet. Valve should make more games.

As a fun little puzzle game that doesn't overstay its welcome, Superliminal hits a lot of nice high points without getting too bogged down in details.

Pros:
* There's a lot of clever puzzles and shenanigans with perspective throughout the game, which make for an entertaining experience.
* The writing is sufficiently humorous to work for the game without being full enough of itself to over-saturate the experience.
* Workshop support means that the real puzzle was within you all along.

Cons:
* There are a number of parts of the game where you basically have to pixel-hunt for "what can I interact with here", and once the pixel hunt is done the solution is obvious. I'd have preferred if this was trimmed a little in favor of more focus on puzzle gameplay.
* There's some achievements that drag a bit. There's a set for pulling all fire alarms and emptying all fire extinguishers in the game, and if you're looking for those as you go along, it will likely reduce your enjoyment - just ignore this one, and if you _really_ need to 100% the achievement list for the game, go back with a guide. Similarly, there's a few "find the hidden object/area" achievements that really could have done with at least telling you in what level they can be found. Imo there's a fine line between exploration achievements that are too explicit (go exactly here), and ones that are so vague that they heavily encourage jumping to outside guides.
* There are segments, especially towards the end, where the game is just a walking simulator without significant gameplay for long stretches.

Deathloop is a pretty fun game. On a lot of levels it feels similar to Prey: Mooncrash; you have a similar loop mechanic, can eventually start out loops with additional gear (to avoid the start of each loop getting stale), and have a variety of objectives and a big systemic world to explore and fight your way through.

While I think it's good overall, there's definitely a couple failings:

• There's a combination of regular AI-controlled enemies, and a potentially-player-controlled one (the main antagonist). The regular enemies are generally clueless mooks and are easily dispatched, while the player-controlled ones are significantly more challenging, especially since the people who are into PvP are likely to go for loadouts and specs that are tuned for that (while you may have something more utility-oriented as the campaign player). This leaves a bit of a cap in the difficulty curve that's a bit hard to overcome, since you can't easily know at any time how good an invading player is, and the inner loop of doing attempts of such fights is very long (since you have to be ~randomly chosen to hit it). You can disable the ability for players to control the enemy in question, which makes it fall back to a far weaker AI version, but it'd have been nice if this gap had been better-covered. It works nicely in Dark Souls because there's a good smattering of enemies that work like you do and are reasonable challenges for a novice-intermediate player that are actually aware from the get-go that combat is happening (as opposed to here, where you can largely take them out stealthily).
  
• The game is pretty tight on how it wants you to accomplish the overarching objectives to complete the end-goal of the game. Loosely put, you need to fill out a checklist to complete the game, but have to line things up with your movement through the loop to make it possible to check all of your boxes in a single run, groundhog-day style. There's really only one way to line them up, though, as far as I can tell. It would have been nice to have a few alternatives available, potentially with different endings? I can see why they might have avoided this - it'd make the game a little more confusing, and the signalling that I'm getting (from how bluntly they tell you what you need to do to finish) is that a lot of testers had serious issues figuring out how to clear even the one path that we ended up getting. On top of this, compared to the more-generally-freeform gameplay of the exploration phase of the game, the execution of the checklist is much more regimented, which can be less compelling.
  
• There's not huge variation on the mooks. It'd have been interesting if we had some that carried around ability-suppressing fields or pieces of cover; for the most part, they just have some primary firearm and roughly run at you with it until within range. A well-placed sentry gun is absurdly effective.

That being said, there's some solid Pros:

• The writing is fantastic in Deathloop for the primary character. There's not really much in the way of a character arc, but the interactions between Cole and some other characters happens throughout the game and is genuinely funny without breaking the feel of the game or feeling like some Marvel quipfest (*cough* BF2042 *cough*). It's well-voiced on top of that, and really helps sell the atmosphere of the game better - this game's a good deal more cartoonish than the dreary environment of Dishonored or the sterile, mostly-dead rooms of Prey (2017), and having a silent protagonist would have clashed against that.
  
• The gun/ability play of the game is very solid, as we'd expect from Arkane. There's a pretty wide suite, and both collecting the ones you want, as well as the resources to save them for future runs, makes for a much neater collect-a-thon than scouring rooftops for 100 banners or the like. You basically get to trial a bunch of different kinds of engaging minute-to-minute gameplay, and then decide for yourself what subset of that you'd like to keep available. It's really neatly done, and pushes you to actually explore what's on offer. In Prey (2017), it was easy to fall into the comfortable space ability-wise of "use shotgun"->"oh, I can take a chance on this unknown ability, or I could take the ability to improve 'shotgun'" -> "huh, well, I have a few points invested in it, so I should really go further down 'shotgun' before risking on something unknown" -> "ok, I've maxed 'shotgun', time to invest in other stuff - huh, why does it feel so inconsequential compared to 'maxed shotgun'?". While the other options in that game were also fun, the lack of a neat ability to try them out before investing in them made the breadth less available than it should have been. In Deathloop, though, you get pretty easy access to...just about everything, and you're much more encouraged to test things out.
  
• The environment is nicely realized and generally somewhat interesting, both aesthetically and for gameplay. It's mostly not stuff that'll individually 'wow' you, but it's consistent and feels like it all belongs together. There's a lot of alternative routes strung throughout most levels, without feeling like they're too shoehorned-in (generally - there's some suspect vents).

All-in-all, I found this an enjoyable game to play.

tl;dr the game could easily be half as long without losing anything significant, and would be a better experience for it.

To put some positive notes first:
1. The space wreckage largely being set up as a series of dioramas, small fixed scenes of corpses and machinery, was a nice design decision and made me look forward to seeing what the next one was.
2. A lot of the game looks nice - the art team did good work, and the art direction is consistent.

And now, the not-so-positive:
1. The first half of the game is an open-world survival crafting game where the only real limiting factor on your exploration is an objective sequence for reducing an arbitrary world boundry, and oxygen capacity. There's some enemies, but they're pretty much just decorative - they're easily sidestepped and removed. If you do get this game, upgrade your air tanks as soon and as often as possible.
2. Moving to the second half of the game puts you into new areas with different gameplay. You'll still need some resources, but you won't know how much, so the game encourages you to transport all of your stash to one point in the first area, so you can take it with you. There's no faster way to transport it other than manually carrying all of the items in your inventory (although you can ride on a vehicle). This is a bit of a drag, because the game pushes you towards pretty boring "gameplay" for shuttling everything to the transfer for the next area.
3. The second half of the game is a series of _awful_ relatively-linear corridor walking sections. You move much slower inside environments with artificial gravity, which was ok when it was just inside your ship or small safe zones, but for the long treks through these hallways it's boring. Each of the zones here should be halved in size. There's a lot of repetition of scenery seemingly just to pad the runtime - maybe the voice lines take a lot longer to say in one of the offered languages? The sprint speed could be a little higher too.
4. Compounding on the overly-large buildings in the second half is the durability system. All of your usable items have durability limits that count down for every use, and there are points where pretty far into a station the game will expect you to have a lot of durability left on one particular item (with no indication beforehand of what item it might be). If you run out of durability on that item, you have to walk _all_ the way back to your ship to build a new one - no on-site repair of the old one, or assembly of a new one. Worse, sometimes the game lets you get deep into a station, before simply presenting you with the blueprints for a new item that you need to make to progress - which typically just means "walk back to your stash, build it in 10 seconds, and then return to this point".
5. The games humor gets _really_ grating towards the end. The suit's jokes are a bit one-note, and I feel like if the game weren't as horribly padded, then it'd have gone over better, since I wouldn't have had as much time to get tired of it. It's a little annoying that the partner AI continuously insults the player for the implementation of things in the game (the devs try to structure it as the AI insulting the player character, but the player character has no...character, so it doesn't really stick there). The constant stream of "you're so dumb" is a bit annoying.

Since there's the typical comparisons to Subnautica, here's my take:
I think the biggest thing that Subnautica does well that Breathedge does poorly is the persistent sense of unknown danger. Subnautica's active threats (local wildlife) combine well with its oxygen meter giving you a passive pressure (and progression limiter). Breathedge doesn't have the local wildlife threat, and the things that _can_ attack you are minimal and static - I think there are maybe 2 enemies in the game that you can encounter "on-foot" that actually have movement AI. By about 30 minutes in you've pretty much figured out the oxygen system in Breathedge, and made it more of an exploration limiter than a real "threat".

Base-building does more for you in Subnautica because it's something that's somewhat useful persistently throughout the game. A good base there will generate all of your persistent needs - food, air, power, and water. This is important as you get further from your normal supplies of all of that. Breathedge...probably shouldn't have added a base-building system in its current state. The blueprints for the only _really_ useful parts of the base are easily missable other than the 'research station' (which allows you to spend resources to get some blueprints instead of finding them - but crucially, not base blueprints), and the base doesn't really...do much. You can get free heals (there's abundant health kits) or reduce the cost of food (there's abundant ready-made food). The best part of the station is the storage locker, simply because there's so little fixed storage in the game, but that just becomes a liability later on when you'll want to transfer everything out of the first area to the next area's transfer point. And that last sentence hints at the next rub - base building is only really available in the first area. Once you're past that part of the game, you can't build new bases.

Looking back at both games, I also think that Breathedge would have done better by not having combat really be a thing, much like how Subnautica did it.

<spoilery bit>
It somewhat (unintentionally?) plays with this with a section ripping off of Ridley Scott's Alien, where you're confronted with an overwhelming alien that you know you won't be able to fight successfully. Unfortunately, at this point the game had already pretty strongly established boundaries for "what happens in cutscenes" and "what happens in gameplay", so I felt no threat from this creature, since all of the signs were pointing to it not appearing outside of cutscenes, so I could just gallavant around until the next cutscene would play. And that's unfortunately how later scenes with enemies tend to play out - they're either fixed-position turrets, or they're handled for you in cutscenes (outside of the two boss fights).
<spoilery bit>

The other side of not having a combat be a thing is that the implementation of the weapons in the game ("on-foot") feels pretty bad. You get a pistol that is honestly one of the worst implemented weapons I've seen in a recent game. It doesn't feel like it has any weight, impact, or presence in the environment. Moreover, it takes a bunch of shots to do anything, and you'll often burn out a gun _entirely_ after a few targets (depending on range) due to the high spread of the shots and number of hits required. There's only minimal interaction with cover - being able to crouch while in gravity would have been nice - but that doesn't really matter since enemies are fixed, and can't take advantage of it. If the time can't be put in to make the gunplay satisfying in a game, I don't think it should be included.

Finally, Subnautica didn't go out of its way to break immersion all of the time. The devs of Breathedge stuck in a bunch of references to other works for largely their own amusement. I feel like this is a poor move for a survival sandbox, though - ideally, a player would be immersed in the threat of the environment and would take on the feeling of some of that pressure and tension. Coming across a figure that is _intentionally_ acting as if it's physics-glitched halfway into a rock and _by design_ is flapping around rapidly disrupts that - and the game delights in making tons and tons and tons of these sorts of inclusions. I think that the tone that this game was going for - a bit of gallows humor and cheerful AI shenanigans - is doable in a survival crafter sandbox, but I don't think that going for all of these references really helped.


All-in-all, I don't think it's really that good of a game in its current form.

The Witness is one of the most interesting takes on metroidvania that I've seen in a while. Similar to Toki Tori 2, it's entirely based on increasing player understanding of the game's systems, and there's no combat. It's just peaceful exploration of a world and puzzles within it. It all builds from a simple concept beautifully, and each expansion can get complex, but remains well-integrated into the whole. On top of this, the world you explore while going through the game is stunningly constructed and full of detail. I certainly recommend this one - it was a very pleasant experience the whole way through.