Recent reviews by Opossumus Prime

Those who grew up on western RPG classics like Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and Planescape: Torment will feel right at home here. This is the same isometric style of RPG with a modern graphics engine and quality of life improvements. Inventory management is much more streamlined (all loot goes into a party loot pool), and your characters can sprint while out of combat. The environments are generally smaller than those in Baldur's Gate, but so many of the maps in that game were just empty wilderness full of random encounters that having smaller areas that are actually filled with things to do is much more refreshing. Between this and the aforementioned sprint function, the game moves at a more brisk pace. The rules aren't official D&D/d20, but hedge closely enough to them that you won't be lost if you are familiar with this type of game.

I particularly like how Hit Points are handled. In the old Black Isle games they were using straight D&D rules, so you would often start at level 1 with 10 HP or less. The early game was a constant struggle for survival, saving/reloading, and having to take a rest after nearly every encounter (at which point you would usually suffer a random attack in the middle of the night while camping). In PoE your HP is divided into two values; Endurance and Health. Endurance is your short-term injury capacity; once Endurance is gone, your character is knocked out. Most healing potions/spells/abilities replenish Endurance, and once combat ends, Endurance replenishes. Health represents long-term injury and how much damage a character can sustain before they are maimed or killed. Health can only be replenished by resting at an inn or in camp. Health and Endurance are lost simultaneously when a character takes damage, but a character has a MUCH larger pool of Health than Endurance (think 3-4x as much). The result is that your party can adventure for much longer between having to stop and rest.

If I have one complaint about this game, it is the pacing of the story. The game world was not an existing IP like Forgotten Realms where some familiarity can be assumed; there's a lot of lore dumping to wade through in the early going. I feel like your story hook should happen within the first hour or two of a game. In the first hour of Pillars your character is overcome by a magical effect of which they are the sole survivor. However, depending on how in-the-weeds you get with sidequests, it may be several more hours into Act 1 before you get a clear answer on what has happened to your character and the ramifications of it. This is when the stakes are finally established. Don't get me wrong, once you get there, it's pretty messed up. This is a dark and distressing game world and you can tell that Obsidian took advantage of the fact that they weren't answerable to someone at Wizards of the Coast as to what stories they could tell. I just wish it had gotten there sooner. I would much rather take a 30-40 hour RPG that moves at a better pace than a 80-120 hour grind. This may just be my middle-aged, toddler-having self talking, so take that critique as you will.

I don't hate this port, but I don't love it either. My recommendation is conditional. When it first launched, yes, it was an extremely rough mobile port that was full of bugs and lacked no-brainer features like controller support. I would not have recommended it at the time, but the backlash was such that Square did put some effort into fixing it. It received a series of feature patches and qualify of life updates that have rendered it both playable and a closer representation of the original product. Is it perfect? No. Little issues nag here and there; fog effects ripple and move far faster than they did on the original hardware, occasional graphical glitches persist, sound emulation for certain sound effects isn't quite 100% accurate, but nothing that prevents you from completing the game.

The Special Edition features of this release, I could take or leave. The animated cut scenes look great but when inserted into the game they can kind of break up the pacing. The new Dimensional Vortex area is somewhat annoying to play through and involves a lot of backtracking. The monsters within are all palette swaps of existing enemies with different stats. I don't want to call them more challenging, because you don't have to think that strategically by the time you get to that area. High level gameplay in Chrono Trigger is so broken that the only way the designers could make these encounters last is to give most of the enemies blanket immunity to certain types of damage so that you can't simply nuke the whole screen at once and keep walking. The items within the Dimensional Vortex, however, are for the most part more powerful than the original endgame items, so it is worth stopping in.

If you have never had a chance to play Chrono Trigger before and you're looking for a way to do it legally on the cheap, you can't go wrong with this $15 port. The tech issues that rendered it unplayable are now gone, and while I have a few purist issues with it, it's fine. If your desire is for absolute fidelity to the original release, you won't find it here; there's probably emulators that will do it better, or you can shell out for the original hardware and cartridge, those are pretty much your choices.

Revision is a free mod for Deus Ex that significantly overhauls the environments. Rather than being a simple cosmetic design change, the layout of maps and objectives are altered, as well as placement and routes of patrols. The result is that the game feels surprisingly fresh. I have played through Deus Ex I can't count how many times and had learned it and all of its secrets backwards and forwards, and Revision made me really slow down and PLAY the game again. This gave me time to appreciate the work put into the environments. There are WAY more nooks and crannies scattered throughout the levels and overall the environments feel more lived in. Some levels like the Knights Templar cathedral and the streets leading up to it I barely recognized. If you are going to reinstall Deus Ex again (which we all do at some point) give Revision a whirl.

Endless Sky is a clone of an old Mac shareware game, Escape Velocity. Escape Velocity was known for its simple but addicting gameplay, in which you start off as a captain of a shuttlecraft and dropped into a massive galaxy to explore and make a living as a trader, a pirate, or join in the war between the Confederacy and the Rebellion. It was an incredibly non-linear experience for its time, and later iterations of the game added more factions and alien races with their own unique ships, weapons, and hidden missions.

Endless Sky plays and controls almost exactly like Escape Velocity, though with some added menu functionality. Your map for instance will track prices of commodities on different planets, so that you can plan effective trade routes without having to consult a FAQ.

I have only put about 75 minutes into the game so far, and thus I have not fully explored the galaxy to see the full variety of factions and races at work, but I am getting that same old feeling from this game. The tone of the writing so far doesn't seem nearly as campy as that of Escape Velocity, and a lot of the planet art looks pretty mundane (the lone programmer isn't an artist, thus necessitating pulling a lot of resources from the public domain), but as this game develops and if it ever gets Steam Workshop support I have a feeling that there will be a great deal of new and improved content on the way. You could either spend another hour trying in vain to tweak Arkham Knight to run worth a ♥♥♥♥, or you could take a chance on this free game. Make the wiser choice.

Me: "Helmsman, set a course for DS3."
Helm: "Aye, Cap'n."
Me: "...A little more to port, Helmsman...no, MY port!"
Helm: "Warp?"
Me: "No, PORT."
Helm: "Roger."
Warp Drive: BRRRRRRRRRRRRWWWWWWWWWWWOOOO
Me: "FUUUUUU-MR ABRAMS, KILL ALL POWER TO THE LENS FLARES AND THE WARP DRIVES!"
Engineer: "...So am I Mr Abrams?"
Me: "You said your name was JJ, right?"
Engineer: "Yeah."
Me: "THEN YES, YOU'RE MR ABRAMS!"
Engineer: "Killing warp power, sir."
Me: "Jesus, thank you Mr Abrams. HELMSMAN! You're relieved from duty, report to the galley and bring daddy another beer."
Helm: "Sir, I'd like to lodge a formal complaint, I have a problem with the way you're running this crew."
Me: "SAYS THE GUY WHO WARP DRIVED US SO FAR INTO THE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ SPACE BOONIES THAT WE CAN'T EVEN FIND A SPACE WAL-MART!! You overshot DS3 by five sectors!"

Easily the best 35 bucks I've ever spent on a video game.

I am not entirely sure I can call this a game. While it looks and controls like a 16-bit RPG, it lacks any kind of discernable gameplay mechanics apart from moving and an interact key. Dialogue options seem to have no impact on the story. If there were any puzzles to speak of I might be inclined to call it an adventure game, but as-is it has more in common with walking simulators like Gone Home.

That said...still play this. It is affordable, only takes a few hours of your time to complete, and contains some surreal set pieces in addition to having a real tear-jerker of a story. I only wish the "game" part had been fleshed out a little more.