Recent reviews by Razzmatazz

A boring, clunky, incomprehensible mess of a game. It doesn't know what it wants to be, every single element pulling in a different direction, all of them subpar by themselves and made worse when put together.

Gameplay
So it's a shooter, right? And the game keeps rewarding you with new guns, it's the only kind of progress there is. Except then the game doesn't want you using the guns, and will actively chastise and berate you and lock you out of the good ending, for no good reason if you use them at all. So, stealth it is. Except the game is not really built for stealth. Bushes don't cover you, enemies can spot you through walls, once one of them gets a whiff of you every enemy on the level knows your exact location and they all start firing at you at once. Also, you get a non-lethal takedown, but it turns out the game doesn't like that either. What do you even want from me, game?
A bunch of detective-like tools are introduced as mechanics on the first level, and it seems like they'll be of significance. Only to never really be used again pretty much throughout the rest of the game.

Visual Design
You've got themes of virtual reality, dreams, unreliable narrators, faulty memories. So what do you do with your level designs? Only the dullest, most basic, most repetitive environments. An empty abandoned building. An empty office building. A parking lot. What a waste.

Story
Get Even's biggest flaw in regards to its story is not even that it's a convoluted boring mess made up of nothing but plot holes, it's that it can't even have a minimum of joy in how dumb its own premise is, and takes itself way too serious at all times. Also, the voice acting is bad, making the bad dialogue even harder to get through. Having a narrating character constantly nag you throughout the entirety of the game is especially grating.

What even is this
It tries to be Condemned, by being worse than Condemned in every possible way. It has some themes of memory reconstruction and tampering, like games like Remember Me have done before, but being worse than any of them in every possible way. The story gets in the way of the gameplay which gets in the way of the story, and none of it is good or fun and there is no payoff at the end. It's frustrating, uninspired and boring to look at. 10/10

Stela is a visually spectacular story. The pointed use of color and scale creates impressive moments, greatly enhanced by an amazing soundtrack (very reminiscent of InterStela). There is a lot of care both in the bigger scale in its grand set pieces and in the smaller scale, in tons of tiny details in the characters' animations. It's low on puzzles but it doesn't really matter, the game doesn't want you to dwell on any one scene but to keep going. It's less "Inside", more "70's hard sci-fi fever dream version of the original Prince of Persia".

Pros
* Stela looks great in her white disco outfit and I love her.
* You can yell out her name like Stanley Kowalski.

Cons
* Stela has the unfortunate tendency to faceplant in the dirt during important story beats when I want her to look elegant and dignified.

Addressing some of the most common criticism I've seen,

What this game isn't
An action game. All action moves (climbing up, down, shimmying across a ledge, etc) are performed automatically after walking up to the prompt.
A puzzle game. There's some very light puzzling going on, but I'd say they're rather more like "interactions" with the environment. Other than a couple of branching paths, the game is pretty linear.

What this game is
Think Bioshock + Metro 2033 + Gone Home.
It's a narrative heavy exploration + observation game. Or, a "walking sim". We all know at this point what the genre is and what it isn't. This game focuses on what it wants to do, and does it marvelously. The main mechanic is observation. The visual storytelling is superb, rivaling Bioshock at its best, the environments are impressive and varied, and careful exploration is always rewarded.
Every scene is a joy to explore. The music is great at setting the mood as well. I thought the walking speed was just right for the type of gameplay that is being encouraged, you're not meant to get anywhere in a hurry. That said,

The weaker points
The game bites off more than it can really chew on its grander themes, its lore and world-building. The personal story of the protagonist is compelling, but the bigger story of how things came to be is confusing and weak. I've seen mentions that there's documents released outside the game that should fill in the gaps better, but I really don't want to do homework to play a game.

The voice acting. Dear god the voice acting. The adults are fine, but the kids' voices are dreadful. Especially the one character who, sadly, gets the most lines in the entire game. She reads her dialogue so awkwardly, like she learned the script phonetically, but doesn't really understand the words she's saying. It's a shame because it really brings the emotional weight of the writing down.

That Said
I'm very glad I played this. I love environmental storytelling, and I really loved seeing it applied so carefully to grand stories like this. Go into it knowing what this game is offering and what it's not, and you might love it as well.

Weird difficulty spikes, requiring pixel perfect accuracy while the same music loop BLASTS through the speakers with no volume control in-game, only to get the 17th dialogue whining about not being a good composer from a viscerally uninteresting character. I don't even know if it was a glitch that he kept talking about the same thing for so long but at this point I don't even care to find out.

is not something I particularly relate to, but I appreciated what this game was trying to do. It's short, it's sweet, it has a clear point of view, told in interesting ways.
Now, to some particulars:

+ The environments, especially the outdoors, and just the general atmosphere are remarkable. One of the best visual representations of the ocean I've ever seen in a videogame.

- The human characters are a little too nondescript. It's absolutely an aesthetic choice, but one that I feel ultimately didn't serve the game too well. The style works great for the environments, and at times even does an okay job with the human characters in the wide shots, but then you have full closeup scenes intended to be relatable or emotional entirely acted out by stiff ghoulish unblinking mannequins.

+ The story is good. It's well thought-out and well paced.

- The dialogue is not bad, but it isn't great. I'm guessing it was done for the sake of brevity, but several characters just appear and immediately blurt out their life philosophy unprompted. It ends up being pretty awkward at times.

+ The sound design is great.

- The game controls like absolute, unadulterated ass.

In Summary
You know what type of game this is. You know what to expect in terms of pacing, action, interactivity, themes. This game is that, and it does a fine job at it. It's even more original than most of its genre.

To be concise, the art is very pretty, there's a significant amount of care in every scene, and the music is fantastic. All of this is, sadly, in service of telling a non-story. This is a narrative-centric game, so the fact that all it has to show for a narrative is girl meets boy, they begin a relationship, they break up, they get over it is honestly embarrassing.
And I actually happen to like these kind of soft indie art games, but jesus is this story tired. It's not just the fact that it's the exact same story that is the go-to for these games when they don't want to hire an actual writer, it's also that it has nothing new to say about any part of it. Adding insult to injury, the entire thing seems to be entirely made up of tired clichés. Girl crushes on a street musician? ✓ check. They have their meetcute when she clumsily falls in front of him? ✓ check. He buys her a little box of watercolors to encourage her to go back to doing art? ✓ check, check, check.

Conclusion
If you enjoy the art in the screenshots and the music in the trailer, and expect nothing more, it's fine. It's not even very long, and going by the other reviews some people seem to have gotten a lot more than I did out of the story so hey YMMV. For me it's just not enough to overlook the fact that (allegedly) the founder of the studio made the other developer's lives a living hell while making it.

The game, about a personality-free heroine surviving in the dullest post-apocalyptic landscape, is divided in four unsatisfying mechanics:

Exploration
where you look for largely useless collectibles in inexplicably large maps, comprised of 20% light brown rock, 80% nothing, in eye-searing white. Gameplay feels like trying to read the tiny print on a lit light-bulb. More than once ended up with a headache after playing for a while. The rest of the time is spent in dungeons that come in two varieties: Nondescript cavern and uninspired sci-fi factory.

Combat
Even with a sort of progression system, combat remains pretty much unchanged throughout the entire game. There's some 5-6 enemies total in the entire game, too, so the only variety comes in the form of recolors and bigger numbers.

Robot Building
This was supposed to be the big highlight of the game, but it ends up being just as unsatisfying as everything else. Crafting is done through the clunkiest, most unhelpful menus possible. Switching your robot companions parts only changes their stats and nothing else. Well, it also changes how they look, but it's not like you even get to see them in the confusing mess that are the battles.

Platforming
Platforming is fine for the most part, but you spend most of your playthrough wishing you could just move faster. It's mostly doable except for the the very end of the game when difficulty of the platforming sections spikes through the roof.

Overall
For a Definitive Edition, it sure feels very unfinished. Hints of neat ideas are there, but never implemented well. The game keeps getting in its own way in everything it tries to do. It tries to be a colecta-thon, but the maps are huge and empty, making going out of your way to find the collectibles a slog. You also have a limited inventory for some inexplicable reason, so if you haven't gone back to empty it for some time, you just can't collect things anymore until you do. There's the robot companions that can help traversing the map and finding new things, but you're always limited to taking only two at a time, so it's highly likely you just won't have the one you need when you're out exploring. There's crafting, but the menus never give the info you need, and you're being held back from trying new things constantly. The game tells you to go out and explore, but also go back to your base all the time to do any of this.
It starts out fine, but it really ends on a sour note. The last dungeon to get the ending is long, dull and grueling. The game decides to suddenly throw at you a seemingly endless gauntlet of platforming puzzles of a difficulty never before seen anywhere on the game, something that should've been an extra challenge mode instead. It kinda feels like they knew they did not have a decent ending for the story so they tried their best to keep you from reaching it.
Also, unskippable credits. No, you don't get to hijack my computer until I see the name of the assistant to the senior regional marketing director.

Final Thoughts
It's fine. Try it out for yourself if it's free or close to that, and definitely do not try to 100% it.

The case for
Detective Di: The Silk Rose Murders is a murder mystery game, so the first, most important question should be: is the mystery engaging? And it is, which is why it earns my thumbs up. The plot is intriguing and the pace is generally good all throughout the game. It tells several short stories, with an overarching plot connecting all of them and ending on a satisfying conclusion.

The case against
When compared with other murder mystery games, like the Gabriel Knight, Sherlock Holmes or Laura Bow series, in Detective Di there's surprisingly little detectiving to do. There's a clue board that fills up as you uncover relevant information, but you don't have to actually figure out what clues are relevant or how they connect, as the game does all of this automatically, and once you reach the end of the chapter and the board is full Magistrate Di will make all the connections himself and explain his conclusions to you. All the actual detective work in the game is done automatically.
Also, sometimes the plot relies a bit too much on coincidences, and the killer could've been introduced earlier in the story, rather than being a complete unknown until the very moment you meet him.

The art was a miss for me. Sure, it's clean, it's serviceable, but it's also supremely uninteresting. I love pixel art and the style in general suits point n click adventures well, but I don't think it was the right choice for this one. Having all of your characters be faceless does very little to help keep track of who all your suspects are, and when the roster starts expanding significantly throughout the chapters the fact that most characters are virtually indistinguishable from one another really hinders the experience.
Another thing that some "retro" games tend to forget is that actual games of that era tried their hardest to do the absolute most within the technical limitations and some were incredibly detailed. In contrast this game just looks plain and visually uninteresting. Locations are too big and empty, with very little elements in them (and even then including copy-pasted assets in neighboring screens or even within the same screen) and even less that's actually interactable. Pixel density is all over the place, switching from screen to screen seemingly for no reason other than poor planning, sometimes even having wildly differing pixel sizes within the same screen. Animations are few and generally stiff. Maybe there were serious budget constraints, but playing it, it all just feels rather lazy, especially when some details could've been done more care.

The verdict
While I wish some aspects could've received a bit more love in development, it's still a decent mystery story that is worth the time and the asking price.

Should I play The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark?
‎‎‎‎      ↓
Have you played The Darkside Detective 1?
      
↳ NO: play that one first and come back.
↳ YES: then yes, quickly.

Anyway, stan The Darkside Detective.

... which is no small praise, considering most "comedy" point & click adventures are perfectly fine with just being vaguely zany to excuse poor puzzle logic and shallow writing and just call it a day (looking at you the entirety of Daedalic's library).
HMS is very dry, aggressively British and really funny. It's a bit on the short side, sure, but I understand that there were probably some budgetary constraints (the achievement for finishing the game is called "That's all we could afford"...) and with that in mind they managed to provide a full adventure that looks great, packs in plenty of good gags and even manages to be endearing at times. Here's hoping there's lots more of this in the future.