Recent reviews by blacker_

This isn't even a game, it's just a boring-chat simulator. I'm even baffled at how someone could possibly describe it as “one of those rare games that completely stopped me in my tracks.” It's neither particularly 'experimental' nor 'creative', and it's definitely not 'well written'. Lured by the positive reviews, as this thing has been sitting in my library for way too long, I decide to play as a female character chatting away with my 'buddy-bff' Emily, who has this tendency of disappearing for months every one year or so but nevermind we're best friends forever anyway. I listen to her problems, endure her swinging moods and provide the occasional advice or just a shoulder to cry on, when things look bleak as she suddenly gets dumped by her jerky boyfriend and all his jerky entourage of ex-friends. In one particular moment of sadness, she invites herself at my place to hang around together - thus basically forcing me to also cancel other plans I already had - but as the good sistah I'm trying to be I accept. When she finally decides to re-appear in my chat window after the usual few months, I learn she's developed some feelz for me after that one time we spent together just drinking booze at campus, and since I'm still her best friend forever but I want no benefits, now she's too depressed to even talk about it so bye bye Emily again for another half-year term. Next thing I know (come another couple of seasons), she's now back with her jerky boyfriend who dumped her long ago and her conversational depth has significantly dropped from the original -10 to below chatgpt standard, until I just have to say goodbye because that's the only option you get from the dev for the grand finale which is meant to teach you the greatest secret of all: people on social apps are boring on average when you're a teen, they keep being boring throughout all your twenties, and they can possibly get worse after your thirties, but thank god there's still that booze somewhere from campus and you simply stop caring after your fourties anyway because you're about to enter the magical goodmorning gif zone anyway. bye Emily, here have a goodnight gif

꒰ ꒡⌓꒡꒱ 𝔾𝕠𝕠𝕕 𝕟𝕚𝕘𝕙𝕥 ⋆｡ ﾟ☾ ﾟ｡⋆

Couldn't bring myself to finish the game honestly. Being the beautiful pixel art and all the cutie cat nonsense the only real positive aspects, all we're left with is an excessive quantity of frustrating puzzles (especially the 'timed' ones), some awful shooting/aiming mechanics, and a painfully boring text content - from dialogues to lore, it's an authentic snooze fest. Could have soldiered on through the trite narrative clichés and tropes about cops, detectives, mad scientists and robots, if only they were better written maybe. But I have to give up mainly because of that AND the dumb timed puzzles. Sorry. Probably better suited for a younger, more casual public.

Never played The Static Speaks My Name, but reviews and art style looked promising. Thought it might provide some food for said thought, or some edgy/provocative point of view, or even just pure gratuitous dark humour.. But no. Sadly, the game itself feels quite empty and somewhat boring in its gross attempt at 2deep4younness, with extremely rare funny moments (well just the waltz, really). I did appreciate the effort put in the making-of commentary tho.
Overall, however, the whole experience is not worth your time, therefore I can't say I'd recommend it.

I didn't even get a chance to finish Moebius, due to a very annoying game-breaking bug I ran into during one of the final chapters (Dominique's condo, for the record). I really wasn't motivated enough to go back to a previous save, as the mere thought of having to go through what felt like a very long, uninteresting, muddy slog all over again wasn't exactly appealing. The main issue with this game is not the ugly graphics (I really don't care much about how a game looks in terms of prettiness), nor the wooden animations (again, I couldn't care less), but the awful combination of both a poor array of very shallow puzzles and a core game mechanic which appears to be totally disrespectful of the player's time - and intelligence, if not already offended by the extreme dullness of said 'puzzles'.


Malachi is not a likeable character by any means: he's a self-centred, delicate snowflake addicted to Xanax who somehow tries to buy his way through pretty much everything, from relationships to personal health. In his twisted and convoluted world, it makes sense not being interested in politics while deliberately working for a major secretive government agency, while dealing with politicians of all sorts (but hey, he just does it for the money!), while it also makes sense jumping to odd and sometimes sexist conclusions about women, who are all depicted as either shameless gold-diggers or vain, men-hungry sluts. She's wearing a bright pink cardigan and orange lipstick? She must be desperate for a man! She's wearing thrift store clothes and listening to music from an outdated cd-player? She must be willing to flirt with some sleazy politician in exchange for a brand new ipod! Or maybe she's a retired old woman who had to sell everything to make ends meet? Well no problema signora, let's buy you an expensive necklace which looks exactly like the one you had to sell, so you'll just wear it and keep on indulging in your past memories while thinking of me as a true gentleman. The not-so-covert attempt to sneak some gay story into all of this comes out as awkward, as the numerous innuendos about Malachi's dubious sexuality when paired with his sudden attachment to the 'Warrior' David and compared with his low opinion of the rest of the human genre.

I must admit that Malachi's snark and cynical remarks, together with his funny compartmentalization of the world, are worth the occasional laugh, but most of the time he stands out as a plain hypocrite. The fact he often appears to lack any kind of basic logic to solve basic puzzles (lanyard and glue - as mentioned by someone - seriously?), while pretending to be such a brilliant Savant expert on almost everything, is not really his fault tho, isn't it?

And here's where probably the main criticism for such a badly written story must be credited to Jensen, who somehow tried to present a universe populated by horrible people (or just an America populated by snotty Newyorkers and the rest of the elitarian world filled with poncy ♥♥♥♥♥), all justified in their awfulness by this 'Moebius theory', which links all of these ♥♥♥♥♥ together in some mystical pre-destined magical chain of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, bound to repeat forever and ever.

However, plot and characters aside, the worst part is the above mentioned core mechanic: the game expects you to move (very slowly) back and forth through locations in order to retrieve items which are essential for the progress of the story; too bad these are often objects you already noticed somewhere but were prevented from picking up (Malachi will say he doesn't need them 'now'). This translates into a lot of backtracking, and into a lot of not-fun time. In some cases, items that weren't there previously will appear out of thin air after you exhausted all of the possible locations where they could possibly be found (like when Malachi needs 'something to illuminate the Catacombs', and suddenly a lantern appears in Le Chateau Campagne). Not to mention that very annoying instance where you have to climb a rope in Malachi's apartment to reach a balcony, and you're greeted by a very tedious mini pseudo-QTE thing, which was totally out of character and unpleasantly unexpected, for how the game instructed you on game interactions thus far. Puzzles are generally very simple and don't require this fantastic amount of thinking, some other times they're just absurd. The bug I encountered toward the end of the game occured becuase I failed to complete some actions (read: provide Dominique with all the goodies she wanted from me) in a very specific order - and I wonder what could have happened had I inadvertently chosen to follow a similar 'wrong order' in the previous chapters.

As much as I appreciated Jensen's previous works, I cannot really recommend this one, as it's definitively sub-par.

This game deserves some praise, since in my opinion is a wee little gem for all of those looking to scratch that turn-based tactics itch, while at the same time looking for a change of scenery from the whole aliens bonanza (hi XCOM) and any other strictly-come-fighting, war-related stuff. Phantom Doctrine has been for me a breath of fresh air in the genre, and although no perfection will be found here, you'll more than likely get your rts ocd fix - and a fair amount of fun too, if you learn how to play the game without wasting too much time.


You can tell much love went into the making of Phantom Doctrine - and a nostalgic one in particular. Phantom Doctrine offers a very immersive and credible setting, and a quite mature and adult one in that, enhanced by the beautifully rendered and detailed scenarios (where I wish we could have seen more of the hand-painted illustations which you can find for instance in character portaraits, or loading screens) with a plot that - while a tad confusing - still accomplishes to offer something I've rarely been able to find in recent games: an open invite for you to use your own imagination. The main story runs around some major Cold War conspiracy set in the year 1983, and for all of us born in that decade (or earlier, of course) even just mentioning Gorbachev triggers a whirlwind of memories and fuzzy TV news images. The game doesn't dig too deep into facts, people or places, but the mere fact they get mentioned, and many names get thrown around, appears to be enough to fabricate a 'believable fantasy' for those old enough to remember. The narrative might result unsatisfiying for some, since it's not fully articulated, but personally I find the formula to be quite fascinating, and very much reminds me of those Usborne Publisher books for kids from the 90s and their Graham Round illustrations, where a lot was happening but not much got said. The game just accomplishes this by throwing around bits and pieces of references to real life historical events, but never intends to elaborate: it remains a solid turn-based-tactics divertissement, where it feels like playing chess in an international espionage setting à la John Le Carrè (RIP). The fun part is that you don't have to complete your missions necessarily by killing everyone and their dog, but stealth is a valid option. In addition to that, you won't find any irritating 'chance-based', nerve-wrecking 'shooting percentage' (hi again, XCOM), because thankfully all hit/fire mechanics are regulated by skills and armour (presence or lack thereof), plus 'awareness' - which is something that took me a while to fully understand , hence..

Oh, manuals. I admit I never read them before playing a game, nor should anyone I guess. A truly fun game doesn't need much textual explanation. Thus said, if you wish to save time and skip the painful experience of losing your agents on the go, get hours of accurately planned stealth get busted because some detail regarding game mechanics got overlooked (due to lack of explanation during the somewhat skinny tutorial) or always being in a state of alert due to way too frequent 'enemy events' on the map or constant lack of resources.. Well, do yourself a favor and read the manual. Failing to understand some core mechanics, tho, will lead to an unnecessary repeating of many already seen missions (and maps), and you'll easily end up frustrated. Otherwise, it was still fun to dive into my first playthrough as a totally unaware, illiterate boor and yet managing to scramble my first win on Easy (as a bonus, it unlocks an 'extended' story mode, where you'll promise yourself to be wiser this time around, and a third agent background as well - which makes for replayability).
Developing your headquarters infrastructure or buying new 'tactical mission support' devices didn't seem to make a difference in my personal experience, and that's another aspect I wish were better developed and/or explained.
Also, there's a great skim on the 'detective' part, where I was naively expecting to draw conclusions on my own and run 3rd grade interrogations, and I was instead greeted by a messy 3rd grader board where all that was required from me was doing the monkey job of connecting 'same words'. A bit disappointing in that regard, but as long as you remember you're playing a strategy game and not Sherlock Holmes, everything's cool again.

All things considered, I really enjoyed my time with Phantom Doctrine, and I was pleased to find out that the devs are the same authors of Hard West (which I found entertaining as well, although maybe more present in terms of story but less refined in mechanics and gameplay in general), and I'm now looking forward to both Phantom Doctrine II and the apparently wordy I Saw the Night.

As many others said already, interesting concept but poorly executed. First playthrough throws you straight into unfolding events without enough guidance nor explanation, and quickly becomes a 'bad ending' by design, without teaching you anything new about game mechanics or anything. What was supposed to be a 'trial and error' approach, as a tedious substitution for a proper tutorial, turns out to be a massive waste of time for the player, forced to re-live situations in the mere hope that some correct random interaction with world objects will trigger some positive chain of events and therefore a positive outcome. There isn't really enough room to build a solid defense the way you'd like to, because the game will allow only a pre-determined set of combinations - regarding what happens in your given time and space - to be 'win material' for your cause. Not to mention the tediousness of trying again and again until you find - more by chance or exhaustion of possibilities rather than thanks to logic - one of those combinations. As a result, it feels like playing a very linear puzzle-game, but in the most confusing way possible.

You play as a human researcher sent on this mysterious island populated by mysterious cats to help out some professor with his mysterious research. The whole introduction drags itself for an almost unbearable amount of time, while suddenly you discover you've been scratched by one of these mysterious cats and now you're slowly turning into a cat yourself. However, the transformation doesn't seem to happen overnight, so you're given some time to look for an 'antidote'.
So far so meh.
Less than an hour into it, and I'm pretty much ready to give up due to high-school-level uninteresting writing - which I decide to endure anyway waiting for the 'plot' to develop - and what happens? It's game over. Because I didn't date any cat before finishing my research (which, for the record, was barely scratching the 50% mark when I got informed I was mysteriously done instead). At this point, once I've been kicked out of the island and not even sure if I'm finally turning feline or not (well I got shot anyway by the ferryman while in doubt, but wasn't the antidote ready because I finished my research too soon?? - I'm confused), the 'game' expects me to come back shortly after with some new character and do it ALL OVER AGAIN. Really?

As it's been already pointed out by other players, left-clicking again and again through all that incredibly boring description of every single non-essential thing is seriously not funny. But the major fault is not giving the player a real and good reason for dating cats. I mean, I'm there as a human, I'm told I'm gonna get 'catified' if I don't find a cure soon, and yet the game expects me to waste precious time flirting with pets, because..? Why should I even be attracted to cats if I haven't fully turned yet? And even if I did, wasn't finding a cure a matter of some kind of priority? This complete lack of logic in how the story gets presented turned me off instantly, and deserved an instant uninstall.

It's a fairly simple point-and-click: you play as a little boy who's got a lightbulb head, and could use it to solve puzzles. Some of them could get on your nerves - the Poop Monster fight, for instance, appears to be bugged if you don't complete the sequence of actions in that precise order, while the Sick Grandpa Monster fight turns out to be especially infuriating when it comes down to repeating the same instance over and over until you finally get it 'right'. The fact you can die ruins a bit the flow of the story and somehow breaks the atmosphere, but luckily the Autosave function works as intended, and will let you pick up where you left.
NOTE: Don't ever dream of clicking the top left icon with a broken floppy in the trash can, as it will delete ALL your saved files and you'll have to start everything FROM SCRATCH. Just don't. Because I did, by mistake. Lol.
Altho there are no spoken dialogues whatsoever, the game provides a reasonable amount of helping cues in form of small iconic drawings representing what you're supposed to do next. The only audible presence are the characters' funny mumblings and a nice soundtrack, with a few meme quotes here and there (one of them being the theme from Love Story after you sort of literally kill 'em with kindness..lol).

All in all it's a short&sweet couple-of-hours game, which deserves to be picked when cheap&cheerful.

+polished and pleasant graphic presentation, which pays great attention to details
+plenty of choice&consequence moments
+great overall atmosphere and sense of immersion
+lockpicking is a real thing
+the good ol' rewarding feeling of accomplishment
+it's a Joe Dever's Lone Wolf story.. yo, so 80s!

On a side note: personally I was quite pleased to find out this has been developed by an italian team. Wouldn't mama be proud? <3



-the massive amount of QTEs; not only they're at the core of the combat mechanics, but they're also basically everywhere else
-repetitiveness: you're going to face tons of Giak trolls in the beginning before you meet your first 'different' enemy, and even then nothing really improves on the diversity front
-redundancy: some actions will trigger almost always the same response: yet another troll fight..
-Cube puzzles: totally unnecessary, as they add nothing to the story or to your personal enjoyment, but further annoyance
-not a great deal of originality: if I weren't nostalgic of the genre I would have probably dismissed the whole thing as a trite re-hash of something already read/seen times and times again, but this wouldn't really be a con for 'new' players I guess
-clichés: as stated above, we all heard the story of the lonesome hero with a superpowerful sword who also happens to be lord of something - while the female character, when it's not a cold-blooded badass ♥♥♥♥♥, ends up weeping on your shoulder or moping around in a cellar door waiting to be rescued
-difficulty spikes: some early fights are quite hard to beat unless you resort to 'easy mode', or if you're prepared to try them again for 2-3 times - which is not that funny considering how repetitive they are

Overall, I'd recommend the game only to the true patient ones out there: it's not a bad game, it's actually entertaining for the most part, but it requires to be dealt with.

Well I tried hard to enjoy this game. I very much tried. But, despite its lovely, colourful graphics and its interesting base concept (rotating your 'world' as if it was a huge Rubik-ish cube, thus giving you everchanging platforming scenarios), some game design choices and mechanics seem to be there just to poke you in the eye with frustration. Some will say it's meant to be like this (infuriatingly frustrating), that it's catered to a more 'hardcore' puzzle-gaming audience, willing to endure the longest, most painful trial-and-error sessions just to get that warm fuzzy feeling of hardly earned 'accomplishment'.. Well I'm not like that. Sorry. And with Fez, after a reasonable amount of hours, and after running out of gods to curse, I could get no satisfaction.

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- TRAVEL: Biggest 'contra' here is the world map design AND mechanics. Once you clear up or 'finish' a level, there's no way to quickly go back where you came from, let alone fast-travel to an already explored location. You simply can't. You have to find your way back, somewhere, somehow (by chance? by memory? by filling notepads with memo hints just for a game - which is something I'm not willing to do..?). The fact that one door suddenly 'teleports' you to a new location without a clear indication of where you're headed or where you should go back to, altho it clearly wants to be original and give that matrioska/rabbit-hole feeling, in the end just adds to the confusion.

- WORLD MAP: As if Fez world isn't complicated enough already itself, its world map comes in the form of a user-unfriendly 3D tree-diagram which you can pan through and rotate as much as you like, but it only serves as a generic reference to let you roughly know where you're at, with a few small icons here and there to indicate the presence of gates-portals or treasure chests or secret doors. But no way to use said map to travel from one location to another. No-no.

- PUZZLES: Some puzzles are just pure time-wasting pain - at least for a casual gamer like myself. For instance, you'll find some random inscriptions depicting strange symbols. Some of them will glow when you hover the mouse over them. No further explanation, no more clues. Your faithful and useless brightly colored polygon spirit companion will often just utter something like 'Uh, I wonder what this means?', and that's it. You're on your own.

- STORY: There's a perceived decrease in motivation as you jump your way through the levels: ok I've got to collect all the yellow thingies, maybe some 'anti-cubes' too. And then what? Why am I even doing this? I thought there would have been some form of progression to the story, as you get introduced to the game with a few other fellow characters. But as you keep playing, every possible line of dialogue (usually provided by your polygon spirit companion) is so flat and vague - maybe in an excessive attempt to wrap it into 'mystery' - that loneliness and pointlessness can't help but sink in, and one simply loses interest.



+ GRAPHICS: You can tell the whole Fez world has been designed with love and great care for detail. It's cute, it's colorful, and also your main little guy couldn't be prettier, even in his 'sleeping' animation state. The little animals you bump into, the little things you find in little rooms, the beautiful shades of the sky, of the water. It's all very nice to look at.

+ PUZZLES: Some other puzzles are quite clever and entertaining instead. For instance, there's a level where some floating ledges you can jump on only appear visible when struck by lightning, or another one where you've got to pull a timed lever to make climbable greeneries appear, which is an interesting way to present the tried-and-trusted.

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All in all, considering I couldn't even bring myself to finish the game, I would assume there are more determined players out there who would consider some concept-design flaws as a challenge, and some impeding mechanics as an exotic distraction. Personally, there are other puzzle platformers I enjoyed much more than this one (i.e. Braid), but I don't feel like thumbing Fez down for what appears to be my own lack of patience.