Recent reviews by caligan

This is a truly seductive love letter to System Shock 2, all grown up and modern, including innovations in gameplay, immersion, storytelling.... The attention to detail, well-handled in-game method of following up quests (that people-tracker is a brilliant idea I didn't use enough until mid-game), the creativity various 'weapons' make possible, all contribute to make this a really awesome game. If you loved SS2 to death like I did, play this. If you wanted to love Bioshock and just couldn't, this is probably what you really wanted.

Manages to be even more maddening than *that* level in Battletoads. Loved the first three-quarters. Wanted to throw the keyboard for the last quarter. Finished it anyway.

9/10. Only loses a point because I had several really nasty clipping issues that made me have to relaunch the game. Luckily it's very generous with save points and I didn't lose that much progress.

What an unexpectedly delightful surprise. I'd been whipping through a bunch of random free games, throwing most of them out immediately, and was just about to go to bed when I hit this.

If you hear "bizarre, trippy, creepy, requires figuring out" and your ears perk up, this is your sort of game. It's Mysty around the edges, Lovecraftian/bizarro-Celtic, and half of it is just trying to make sense of what you're expected to do.

It's got some odd control elements, but I got used to them well enough, and sometimes it throws a bit of not-exactly-action at you, but it's basically point and click.

Took me about an hour. No save option. And aside from one puzzle I kept overthinking, it didn't feel like it needed one.

Unexpectedly good fun. I don't usually have the patience to play all endings.

This was a last-moment addition to my Winter Sale grabs, and it's been the big surprising best of the bunch so far. This is an awesome little game. It's absolutely gorgeous. The controls are smooth and enjoyable. Additional abilities are introduced well, and at an easy pace. The plot develops through automatically played audio clips, but is expanded by optional written pieces you can find in various areas.

Don't go into it expecting high-difficulty play - just about anybody could finish this. However, the parkour aspect is handled well enough that you can put yourself to the test, and find complicated ways to do things that the game provides paths to do simply; climb tough areas just for the fun of it. There's pretty minimal replayability, but it really doesn't suffer from that at all - it tells its story and does it well.

My only real problem with it was that true save points are much, much too far apart. While when you die you respawn basically in exactly the same place, if you ever have to close out the game, you'll be restarted at the beginning of that area (although it does save collectibles progress) - and some of the areas are pretty sizable. It meant I was reluctant to start playing sometimes because I wasn't sure I'd have time to get to wherever the next 'stop' might be. Would've helped to have a proper save-at-this-spot mechanic.

Highly recommended if you like exploration games with enjoyable movement mechanics.

I love hacking games, and this one is just dreadful. There's no copy-paste, the instructions appear once and you MUST close them before continuing, and you then have to type out an IP from memory (20+ years of programming haven't made remembering 39.117.12....something anything I want to do for fun). I hoped it was an anomaly-- even though that's the first step of the tutorial-- but the very next step was the same thing.

Don't bother. This isn't even demo-level functional.

Needs a lot of work to even be a beta. The tutorial was confusing (I had to restart because I spent my money on goods and only then discovered you also have to buy furniture to display it on), the graphics are at best ignorable, but mostly the gameplay's... dull. The creator clearly had loads of ideas, but they're all barely sketched in. This wasn't ready for release.

Enjoyed the story, the exploration was pleasant and soothing (there are only the vaguest hints of actual scares). It's not goal-driven, there's no particular challenge, but it's an nice couple hours about a family told through scraps, letters, and random belongings. It is, however, very overpriced at $20 - it's about the entertainment equivalent of a light paperback.

This is Umbreon to Minecraft's Eevee.

Bullet hell combat, oldschool PC aesthetic, smooth gameplay. A sweet little short story of a game.