Recent reviews by A Little Hyena

You wait around for ten minutes getting no evidence and then the ghost kills you, then you wait around as a dead guy until the end of the match. For a game about ghosts, being a ghost really sucks.

When I play adventure games, usually I like to play a compelling protagonist, solve ingenius puzzles, and meet a colourful cast of interesting characters. Unfortunately, Runaway fails on all counts, and then finds some more levels to fail on, in case I was not sufficiently put off from it with it's sheer audacious ineptitude alone.

The art, while competent in it's backgrounds and interesting in the execution of the cel-shaded comic style, fell short when rendering the characters, whose bodies float around while their mouths snap into keys, a discordant, stilted animation method that only serves to both highlight the failings of the watery bodies and the limited mouth animations. The character designs ranged from by the numbers boring, to overwhelmingly offensive and reductive. Racist stereotypes pop up again and again, gentle and unassuming, as if the writers thought nothing of their inclusion, with a literally yellow faced asian lady at one juncture, and a Tojo-style bucktooth japanese stereotype popping up later. The game seemed to take great pleasure in exaggerating features that weren't part of the caucasian face. While Brian and Gina were bland to the point of soporific, some of the supporting cast were so caricatured as to make them inhuman. The resulting mashup was incredibly distracting, and often insulting. It didn't fit together well.

The puzzle design was some of the worst I've ever seen - and unquestioned in it's sociopathy. Oftentimes the solution to a puzzle is to destroy some great work of art, or a career, or simply make someone's life worse for Brian's gain. Other puzzles involve leaps of logic so great as to bring into question the world this game was made in. Filling lipstick tubes with gunpowder, for instance, apparently makes for bullets. In what sane universe would this not just melt the lipstick and cause a jam in a gun? And Peanut Butter made by heating butter with some peanuts. Not only do the puzzle solutions often not make sense, but are literally antithetical to the goal you are trying to achieve. Brian will, at times, do something that is counterproductive to his aims for no real reason other than to prolong the game's running time. He is also an incredibly inconsistent hypocrit, refusing to steal some things because "he is a decent guy" and gleefully stealing and destroying other items because "they won't miss it". The amount of unquestioned property damage in this game is staggering. I was actively rooting for something horrible to happen to the protagonist by the end, as he got everything he ever wanted and more, as he complained about being lied to while lying out of his ass at every opportunity, and as he made everyone's lives a living hell while they did nothing but be accomodating to him.

From the very beginning, the insufferable Brian Basco comes across as a bland, entitled dudebro, whose complete disregard for his fellow human beings' safety is only matched by his lack of personality traits. I can only sum him up as some kind of dark, unfathomable void-beast who wants to go to Berkley University. In his quest for getting the female supporting protagonist, Brian poisons, strongarms, and causes the death of all who get in his way. He is unaffected by the death of friends, loved ones, and nothing bad that happens around him ever seems to stick - upon being told to not mourn by a Hopi Ghost, for example, he instantly feels better and snaps back to being the insufferable twit that he normally is.

Mentioning the Hopi, an important point has to be brought up. The Hopi, in the game's setting, appear to be a extinct tribe that have only a presence through spirits and ghosts, when in reality the Hopi are still a political presence in Arizona, with several towns. It reinforces the awful "Native Americans are Already Dead" tropes that resonate throughout media, which is part lie and part incredible racism, of which this game has in spades.

The story is at it's heart, forgettable, but only through Brian Basco's audacious awfulness is it elevated to a travesty. The twist in the plot takes five out of six chapters to come to fruition, and it is such a damp squib of a twist that you question why you even bothered with the game in the first place. The game's setup promises intrigue that the game ultimately does not deliver on. It barely engages more than morbid curiousity, let alone any proper intrigue. The game sets up a mystical element that ultimately only serves to give our hero yet another item and a pat on the back when he loses something. The love interest element is sickeningly underwritten and overemphasised, mainly when our hero reminds the supporting cast, and the player that he is not gay. His love interest spends most of the time unconscious, indisposed, or absent. What spark they could have had is never shown on screen, just that he thinks she is beautiful, and ergo he needs her. And she wants him for an unknown reason, probably because he hit her with his car and she needs protection. She is an eternal damsel, and her story is never expanded upon, even though it is far, far more interesting than his,

Describing Runaway as a power fantasy would be completely apt - Brian Basco represents the nadir of the human being, but still gets everything he ever wanted while reassuring himself, and being reassured, that he is the Decent Nice Guy Who Gets The Girl. It is almost sickening how pornographically this game presents us our "hero", in the sense that everything he does brings him everything he ever wanted, he never faces any real, lasting trauma or tragedy. No character development, just a stagnation into the awful person he always was, and will always continue to be.

Runaway is exactly what you should do when faced with this game.

A captivating, incredibly detailed adventure game that builds upon the shreds of mythos presented in the first game and weaves a tale that will keep you hooked from beginning to end.

I must admit, I began this game with some reservations, having suffered through the tedium of the first game and it's bland presentation. But as soon as the game began, it dropped twists, turns and plot bombshells, and never relented until the very end, keeping me on the edge of my seat while presenting an expanded world with deep characters and a merciless deconstruction of the Black Mirror Mythos. All questions brought up by the first game are answered, and more questions are posed that kept me guessing until the very end.

The puzzle design in this game is top notch, with enjoyable puzzles that make sense, and the protagonist's exhaustive notes and little flairs of genius don't feel like they come out from the void, but rather from his own character. Each solution feels natural and like it is part of a believable progression of his character arc. I particularily enjoyed the non-item based puzzles, as they were often layered and presented with a code to break before the mechanical part of the puzzle even began. Richness of puzzles like this are incredibly rare, and should be valued. The puzzles, also, felt well rooted in the world, and even the most arbitrary sliding puzzle becomes a charming character trait for one of the many well-developed characters.

The game's aesthetic is a huge step up from the previous game, creating lively and deep locales to explore that straddle the line between photorealistic and oil painting. The lighting effects, in particular, are fantastic, lending an authentic spookiness to what could otherwise be a bland set. The effects are simple, often just a alpha channeled overlay or a translucent image, but the game does marvels with what it has.

My only criticism of the game's aesthetic would be the relatively stiff and mannequin like character models. Though an improvement from the last game, a lot of the models seem to look rather dull and lifeless, especially when viewed from close up. There isn't much in the way of expression, though the game goes out of it's way to find alternate means to portray the characters, such as novel camera angles, good cinematography, and dramatic body movements that don't rely on facial expressions. In all it wasn't distracting.

The game's writing is fantastic, though suffers from occasional translation weirdness, as the characters refer to things in esoteric or crude ways that a native speaker would not do (such as referring to thermite as "welding powder", which, while accurate, is not the way a native english speaker would refer to it). Mostly, the voice acting covers for the minor typographical errors in the text, but this is not really a problem.

I couldn't recommend this game enough, though in order to fully appreciate it, you'd need to play the prequel, Black Mirror. Black Mirror II relies on a lot of callbacks, and references to gameplay mechanics, and story elements that would be sorely missed if you didn't play Black Mirror. So if you can suffer through the original game, you will be rewarded immeasurably by this sequel. That alone is worth the price of entry.

Black Mirror is a game that has a lot of promise. It contains several interesting plot elements that barely germinate, and some interesting puzzles bookended by thousands of very bland ones.

While not incompetent, the writing in Black Mirror is little more than functional, imparting no character on the cast and switching awkwardly between useless vaguery and overblown exposition. The character of Samuel Gordon, in particular, is a complete and utter void, so any plot twists involving him are dulled and ineffective as he never establishes who he is beyond "The Protagonist of An Adventure Game". Even the game's main twist does nothing but slightly raise an eyebrow. One wonders whether part of the problem is in the translation from the game's native language to English.

The graphics are likewise, functional, but like the rest of the game's production, feels soulless and by the numbers, serving only as a backdrop that functions, rather than a world to explore. Every prop, item, and furnishing does nothing but exist, informing us of nothing about the characters, and leaving us dead to any event that might happen.

The puzzles are mainly variations on fetching some sort of key, unlocking a door, or asking someone to unlock a door. The myst-style puzzles, such as the puzzles presented on plynths, are far more fascinating, presenting the player with an actual challenge and being a compelling and welcome change from use-key-in-door.

However, there are plenty of puzzles that aren't these few rare gems, and some of them involve callously attempting murder, in the guise of getting past unwitting bystanders who act as obstacles. The game never discusses these, nor does Samuel ever think twice about poisoning or electrocuting someone. His entire motivation is to advance the plot, thus we are robbed of character development through puzzle design. The nadir of the puzzle design comes when you need to "wait" for someone to get back to you with information. This happens twice in the game, and due to the game's linear nature, by the time you've gotten to that point, there is literally nothing you can do to allievate the boredom. All you can do is wait. Wait and visit every single room in the game multiple times in the hopes of triggering the next part. Patience is not a virtue I would like to experience in a videogame where I am forced to not play the game for long periods of time.

The voice acting is dull and lifeless, with some characters acting barely above a Text-To-Speech program, reading their lines with the same vitality as Microsoft Sam. Every dull line made me dread yet another long monologue delivered by the characters.

The highlights of the game come in the Mine sequence, and the mystery surrounding the manor itself. However, the delivery muted my excitement and dragged a potentially interesting story out over five interminably long and tedious sections.

Unless you are a hardcore adventure game player, to whom bad puzzle design is familiar, avoid this game. It offers nothing that other games have not achieved with defter grace and polish. Even to the hardcore adventure crowd, there is little here for you.

A bizarre and incomprehensible computer program I can only assume was an attempt at mimicking a video game. This game will sap your sanity and make you lose your mind, just like the works of HP Lovecraft it oft porports to be inspired by. However, this is not because the game is scary, but simply because it's puzzles are so mind-numbingly boring, tedious, and oftentimes unsolvable by way of infuriating bugs and awful game design. The characters in this game, such as they are, are even flatter and less believable than Lovecraft's own, with stilted voice acting and stuttering, puppety models that look like they were all controlled by tiny spiders, rather than any kind of individual personality. The most competently voice acting role in the game comes in the form of a brain in a jar, whose performance is the most human and sane of all of the characters. However, even a stellar performance (of which this was not) could not save the droning, boring dialogue the actor had to read.

The story, which I am assured exists, judging by the story credits that come with the game, is a completely incomprehensible retelling of the Case of Charles Dexter Ward. There are several discrepancies that point towards the creator of the game being ignorant of occult symbology, such as the inclusion of the Star of David as an evil, occult symbol. I am convinced that this was an inclusion made from a place of ignorance rather than malice, as there are no signs of any Zionist Conspiracy theory that I could understand within the game's text.

The graphics, though spartan and often incomprehensible, a running theme with this game, are also bland and inoffensive, lacking even the slightest spark of art direction or competency.

The most notable aspect of this game is the bugs. Several, large, game-breaking monstrous bugs that thankfully render the game unplayable past the library scene. Having watched a longplay of the remaining gameplay, I felt truly blessed that I did not have to suffer the game further.

On a more positive note, having played several other bad games recently, this game has made me think twice about their quality. They shine in comparison to this one, and I will count my blessings every time I suffer through another bad game, because truly they could not have been as bad as this one.

Like the titular Necronomicon, this game contains ye liveliest awfulness, and perusing it for more than a couple of seconds will destroy a man's soul and render him insane. For that, I commend the creators, for they have crafted an experience of mind-destroying awfulness and incomprehensible realities which man was not meant to view. Beware, player, for if you dredge this awful beast up from it's essential salts, have on hand something that you can put it down with.

Whilst the concept is promising, and the art is attractive, Evoland fails to be anything but a bland mess. It starts off with high hopes for itself, unlocking different technologies and gameplay mechanics, but never uses these in any significantly clever way. You unlock SNES-era graphics before fighting the first boss, and 3D immediately after, without exploring any of the pre-3D game eras in any depth, reducing the "Evo" part of Evoland to a lame gimmick.

The game itself is a shallow parody of RPGs, where the only tactics you have during the Final Fantasy sections are "Clink attacks, the girl heals". There is no strategy involved, just pure grinding. Even when you get an attack spell for her, it's completely pointless, as healing will make you untouchable. The Zelda parts are better programmed, but suffer from a lot of technical issues, such as poor telegraphing of enemy attacks, camera angle issues, projectiles blending into background objects (such as fire over lava), poor telegraphing of trapdoors (that will instantly fall away when you are close to them, rather than at a distance where it is comfortable to react to them), and a lack of reach on your weapon, which barely covers one player length.

In general, the camera is too tightly shot, making the player character huge in comparison to the screen, leaving the player to feel claustrophobic even in the most cyclopean vistas. The enemies have very poor attack patterns (the red wizards in particular, whose attack comes directly after they teleport with no antipatory action, and their teleporting away comes directly after that). The final fantasy sections have the random encounters ramped way up, and with no strategy for dealing with the enemies, it becomes boring and grindy almost as soon as you realise there's no way to defeat said enemies apart from bashing them with your sword.

The Diablo area is a huge mess, using the Legend of Zelda mechanics to bitterly jab at Diablo's loot-centric and many-enemy mechanics. It is clear that the game designer doesn't like Diablo, and hasn't played for more than ten minutes. The only way to complete that area is to stay back and use the otherwise pointless combo attack, which locks you into attacking straight in front of you without invincibility frames. I would have liked to have seen a spinning attack, since the game cribs on Legend of Zelda in every other regard anyway.

The final boss is a boring slog, again, too fast and not telegraphed enough for it to feel natural playing against it.

The game had potential, but squandered it by not having any decent game mechanics, or a story that wasn't slapped together in five minutes to brainlessly parody Final Fantasy. If you watch the trailer you've practically got everything the game has to offer.

Stay away from this non-game.