Recent reviews by Τhe Rolling Cheese Wheel

Riven is a sequel to Myst, an old school click adventure game that revolves solving intricate puzzles and exploring surreal worlds created from linking books.

First off let me tell you that Riven is not revised for modern hardware, as such, some feature set is very archaic. The save menu operates like a word document save menu. The resolution is stuck at a piddly 640x480 resolution, this makes playing the game on modern monitors an absolutely awful visual experience. To makes matter worst, the game cannot be set to windowed mode without some major .exe hex coding voodoo. That set aside, the game is still worth playing. After all with the limitation of Riven’s game engine, which is essentially one huge powerpoint slide, it’s not too strange that the game is limited in resolution. The game is a little over 3 gigabytes and it’s 33% of 1080p. Keep in mind that this game was created in 1997, which equates to a 5 CD game. Had this game release at 1080p, it would’ve been around 15 CD’s. Have fun switching and keeping track of that many disk while playing!

Low resolution doesn’t necessarily mean the graphics in Riven are at all bad. In fact, Riven’s pre-rendered graphic looks awesome! It doesn’t look plastic like you would expect from a game from this era, but fairly photorealistic. The graphic looks crisp, and the surreal architecture of the buildings and environment in game brings a sense of wonder and mystery. Very few games in 1997 can blow you away graphically, Riven is one of those games that will leave you in awe at the beauty of 1997 technology.

The music and ambient track in Riven is absolutely amazing on a beefy surround sound system. Visually I was put off by the gigantic black bounding box on screen but the sound immersed me enough for me to overlook the huge dark void surrounding the game. The sounds from a water creek would fade in and out as I get closer or farther away from the source. The sound of machinery is so crisp I could believe I have such machinery in my house.

Riven isn’t for casuals or the easily frustrated. The puzzles in this game are one of the most mind bending and complicated in any game I have ever played. This is probably the first game ever that I got lost even with the assistance of a walkthrough. It’s not that the puzzles are too obscure to figure out, it’s because the logic behind them and the reference to them is sometimes hard to pick up. The map and locale of Riven is also massive so backtracking for clues can become a headache. With the limited screenshot capabilities of the game, it’s even harder to remember specific details about clues without jotting down rough notes to what you see. For casuals and unclean masses who have never played an adventure game before, this game is a deathwish. Veterans of the point and click genre will definitely be challenged.

Riven regardless of it’s age is still well worth playing for veterans of point and clicks. It aged relatively well even with it’s hideous resolution. If you’re itching for a masochistic slideshow adventure game, you won’t find a better one anywhere on steam.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=212209116

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=191597405

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=185754315

Garshasp: The Monster Slayer is a hack and slash game in a similar style to God of War. Unfortunately for this indie disaster, it only shares the same genre as God of War and none of the polish, breathtaking visual polish, and satisfying combat. The world of Garshasp is bland and boring, the story is generic, and the protagonist is the illegitimate child of the Prince of Persia and Kratos.

The combat in Garshasps is absolutely dreadful, the combat feels slow and repetitive. The lack of combat animation variety was pretty jarring even for a game that only lasts three hours. This is magnified further by the developer's arrogance to create zoom in effects whenever Garshasps does a grapple kill. It looks awful enough from a distance, it just looks downright funny close up. The sound effect also does the combat no credit. Everything sounds muffled and of low quality, combined with the fact that weapons clip through enemies makes it very difficult to feel any sort of satisfaction when smacking baddies around.

The puzzles and platforming in Garshasps, while bad, is still more serviceable than the combat. Moving obstacles have these huge boundary boxes that pushes you away if you get to close to them. This makes traversing areas with loads of moving traps tough because you can't predict when you'll get hit. You have to leave huge arbitrary amounts of space between Garshasp and the trap in order to avoid getting hit. It's still doable, and areas without any traps is a treat to run through. The wall sliding on the other hand is rage quit inducing. The sliding is incredibly fast and hard to deal with when the controls are unresponsive.

Shockingly enough, Garshasp does have some redeeming qualities. The game itself has a generic world but it is a well designed generic world. The swamp foliage and boss art design looks fantastic even without anti-alias, the textures didn't look half bad for a budget title. The story has a good origin in Iranian mythology, but delivered poorly through un-epic writing and very poor narration. Garshasp: The Monster Slayer is a stellar example of when good ideas can't formulate good games.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=103845447
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http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=103845478

Overpriced DLC, Pay2Win garbage, can't believe I actually paid for this before it went f2p.

Risen is an RPG that continues to follows the same theme as the Gothic series. The story is generic high fantasy with forgettable characters with even more forgettable quest and storyline. Like most of Piranha Byte's work in this genre, the combat is abysmally bad. Risen would've been at the very least acceptable if it wasn't such an unnecessarily long winded and bug ridden game.

Risen is chock full of bugs, many of which will break quest line. I personally couldn't finish this game without the use of console commands to fix certain quests. The game becomes an absolute cluster poop once you hit the volcano mid game as important quest npc's get stuck or the lever that was suppose to open gates stopped working. Console commands can fix some of these issues, but the customer shouldn't have to resort to cheats to proceed in a video game.

I can only think of one other RPG with combat that is even worse than Risen and that is Gothic 1. Coincidentally that was also made by Piranha Bytes. The combat in Risen is reliant on a very bad target locking system; it locks on the closest target, and you cannot change targets manually. This means that if a enemies groups up on you, you are going to be swinging at the air as the bull poop lock-on system wildly changes targets automatically. You will then proceed to die as enemies stun-lock you in to oblivion.

The game store page indicates that this game is 60 hours of game play, which is mostly correct if you consider that 40 of those hours are spent wandering aimlessly to find the next place to turn in your quest. The directions in the dialogue are outright terrible and the lack luster quest marker made the questing even more tedious and boring. Now compound that with the fact that Risen is comprised of mostly fetch quests and you have a recipe for one of the most boring RPG experience ever.

Risen is basically Dark Souls with none of the awesome or the refinement in game-play.

Gun Bullet Children is bad in almost every respect. It lays the exact blueprint for how to not make a bullet hell game. This game is as conventional a japanese bullet hell game as they come, but the devs took few a quite terrible misstep when it comes to the art design and several game mechanics.

First and foremost this game is a very poor localization effort to bring it to the Western audience. The only thing in the entire game that is english is the menu screen, everything else is in Japanese including the voice acting. There are no translation subtitles. The music, while mediocre generic nonsense is nonetheless appropriate for this game because it too is generic nonsense.

The developers who appear to be creatively bankrupt also appears to have also completely lost their ability to properly use color on their art in GBC. The game bullets are a heavy shade of red and the hud text is also red. I can handle really big sky and beat hazard level of crazy colors, but GBC’s ridiculous color theme hurt my eyes after a while.

To further add to the ugliness, the games bullet looks like they were designed in MS paint, every single bullet looks extremely low quality. The fact that there are only two different shapes for bullets in a bullet hell games makes me wonder what on earth the developers were doing with their art asset.The bullet coloring and design problem is magnified further in the game’s bullet pattern sequences. There are many sequences where the bullets are just thrown on the screen with no rhyme or reason; the screen just becomes one huge blob of red. It also doesn’t help that the game has unresponsive controls. Side strafing is alright, but vertical movement is frustrating to control.

For a game that was made many years after many iterations of the epic touhou series, you’d think the developers would know how to make GBC as aesthetically pleasing and playable as possible.. This is the worse of the exceed series, and in my opinion the worse bullet hell game on steam.

Tale of Tales continues its trend of creating crappy pretentious video games. The developers of this game is akin to Jackson Pollock throwing paint onto a canvas, severely lacking talent.

I have played most of the Tale of Tales series, while Bientôt l'été is not nearly as awful as The Graveyard, it comes pretty darn close. The game is apparently suppose to simulate distance dating, but I couldn’t connect to a single human being throughout my game time. I was forced to deal with quite frankly one of the dumbest A.I. on the planet through a series of dialogue controlled by playing some bizarro version of chess. I’m calling it chess, but it isn’t really chess, it’s just chess pieces being plopped onto the board at random. Here is a sampler of the dialogue.

Me: “I look at you”
A.I: “I think a lot about you since have seen you again”
Me: “I would like a glass of wine”
A.I: “How odd I have no desire to return”

Every other line of dialogue follows the same trend of uninspiring and mundane one liners.

Once outside you will immediately notice the artsy fartsy graphic style. The colors are super bright and the film grains a plenty. You can collect items outside which will reward you with a rather lame fly by cutscene of the item. That is it, that is the entire game.

You want to play a game like Bientôt l'été? I suggest chatting with cleverbot, I assure you the conversation with the bot would be much more fun and enlightening than playing this game.

Sam and Max is a moderately funny click adventure game that features a bunny and a dog as detective. The puzzles are simplistic, the humor is simplistic. If you are looking for profound dialogue and/or puzzles, you will not be finding it in season one.

I was not too surprised to find out that Sam and Max, like most other click adventures, have no re-playability. However, I was surprised to find how dull episode 1,2,3 is in this series. The three episodes are chock full of simple fedex delivery puzzles with esoteric solutions. Good luck solving them without a walk-through. Luckily the game does pick up it’s pace by episode 4, and the game took a turn for the best. Puzzles solutions remain esoteric, but the results of solving the puzzles can create quite amusing consequences. You also will not remain stuck at your boring ass apartment block which is a plus!

Telltale nailed the voice acting in this series. Intentionally annoying characters have intentionally annoying voices; you will feel like punching the screen every single time the soda poppers talk. Humor is not universal, so the jokes in this game can either strike you as “ROFL” quality or downright immature. Luckily none of the jokes are nearly as stupid or overused as the ones you find in Duke Nukem Forever.

I recommend this game solely on the basis that’s a very well polished click adventure with a unique brand of humor. It’s not immersive or challenging, but it does make for a fantastic change of pace in between long sessions of Elder Scrolls, Counter Strike, DOTA 2, etc.

Alien Hallway is a strategy game that follows the tug of war formula presented in popular games such as Swords and Soldiers HD. Unfortunately for Alien Hallway, the game contains bare minimum of features presented in a tug of war game.

The maps are hilariously small, with no branching paths. This means that for the majority of the game, you are left sitting on your ass spamming buttons until either you or the alien opponent is defeated. There is no strategy involved in this setup, the miners cost a whopping 10 energy which can be spammed right on cool-down in conjunction with whatever space marine(s) you wish to summon.

The polish is absolutely abysmal in this game. Some aliens, specifically melee ones, do not have attack animations. They do damage by simply running or walking into your soldiers. Along with low production value, the game appears to have performance and frame-rate issues when there are too many soldiers and/or aliens on screen at once. This makes Alien Hallway virtually unplayable in the endgame.

I pity the fool that spent money on this game. Yes I pity myself.

Worms Crazy Golf is basically challenge mode ripped out of classic worms and presented as a full game. While it still retain the absolutely flawless physics from the previous games and the very familiar controls, the game’s focus far too much on challenge goals and not enough on insane and over the top worms weaponry and humor. Sure there is parachuting golf balls and reverse gravity, but those are far tame compared to the signature holy grenade, super sheep, and the banana bomb. Level designs are extremely poor with course objective such as coins placed in ridiculous, and in lot of cases, impossible places. I suppose it’s not really a surprise that this is actually an IOS ported to pc. The final slap in the face is that this version is 3 times more expensive than the IOS edition.

Fantastic, another game I bought that went "f2p." ♥♥♥♥ you tripwire.