Recent reviews by Kruh

I'm done.

I get it, but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, I'm done.

Look, I get it, it's fun unravelling mysteries, but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, this is so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ boring. They expect me to sit through 8-minute videos of people talking about nothing with awkward pauses in between, only for me to realize that, OH NO, this is only ONE side of the conversation so I have to sit through ANOTHER 8-minute video where they talk about nothing with awkward pauses in between.

I got the gist of the basic story around 45 minutes in, the rest of it was just...sitting around, watching boring long videos, being paranoid about missing keywords that would just lead me towards watching even more boring videos that would leave me paranoid about missing keywords.

Boring, boring, BORING. I am done with this boring game. The acting was FINE, the premise is FINE, but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ if this isn't the most boring execution of such a neat idea I've ever seen.

Fairly solid entry in Frictional games's catalogue. It didn't really do much for me in terms of scares, but it did have its tense moments. Though it does feel like it's more of a SOMA-esque story-driven horror rather than a survival horror, so take that as you will.

A very mediocre and frustrating experience. It has its good parts, like the dialogue system and just the overall feel of collecting evidence, but none of it really builds up to anything. I'd recommend on a 90% off sale, but otherwise it was fairly disappointing. I'd recommend playing the 2003 Call of Cthulu over this one.

Well, that's 11 hours of moral bankrupcy I'll never get back.

I think I first played SOMA in 2016. I was a pretty huge fan of PewDiePie and his letsplays of countless horror games, and that naturally means I watched a few of his Amnesia letsplays. So when I heard that Frictional was in development of another survival horror, I got excited to watch his letsplay of it, maybe it'll capture the horror magic again? Unfortunately, I kinda lost interest and the game launch sort of went under the radar, both for him and for me. Fast forward to a year later, I remember that this game existed. I watched about 2 episodes of Markiplier's letsplay to make sure it was a game I would enjoy, and I bought it and played it.

It's been three years now, and I still think about the game. I think about it a lot. I think it's a masterpiece.

What a game, man. I've been wanting to gush about this game for three years now, and it's such a shame so few of the people I know have actually played it. It's honestly my favourite narrative in a game ever. It's sad, it's scary, it's funny, it's dreary, it's so many things that are all perfectly knit together into a very satisfying 5-hour experience. The game explores so many themes, about existentialism, humanity, death, life, gender bending, world perception and so many more things. It's such a feat that games have come to this stadium, where people can finally consider them art, and not just another product of entertainment.

So, uh, I dunno what to say really.

Do I talk about the enemies, despite the fact that they're constantly being ♥♥♥♥ on for not being as scary as Amnesia? I dunno, the story was a bit more integral to the game in this case, so it makes sense for them to...downplay the monsters quite a bit in this one. Besides, there is enough variety in the monsters for it to not get stale, really.

Do I talk about the fantastic environmental design, despite the fact that the graphics themselves are just...okay? I dunno, how environments are built, how lighting is used, how the environment wordlessly tells a story by itself...I don't think SOMA really has a graphical issue, because most of it is brought forth by how everything around the graphics are built.

Do I talk about the lipsyncing? Well, I...Uh...Well, no, maybe not, lipsync kinda sucks.

Well, what do I talk about? Because all that I wanna talk about are just spoilers, spoilers, spoilers! Because the real meat of the game is the narrative, the fantastic narrative. So, rather than telling you why it's great, why not show you why it's great...by making you play it?

This game is probably gonna stick with me till I'm 150 years old. It's the best story I've ever experienced in a game, possibly one of the best stories I've ever experienced. I'm honestly shocked of how great of a job Frictional did with this game. All I expected was another Amnesia. What I got was something much, much more.

So, would I recommend it?

...eh, kinda.

There was a time a few years ago when I didn't really consider walking simulators as a genuine gaming experience. Games are an interactive experience, so why should you play what is essentially a glorified movie? In recent years I've come to change my mind, as games such as The vanishing of Ethan Carter, Dear Esther, the Stanley Parable and, of course, Draugen have convinced me that they're just as valuabe as a form to express yourself.

So what makes Draugen so great? Well, there are honestly a lot of great apects to this game. For starters, the game is visually stunning. The norwegian countryside is beatiful in real life, and I feel Red Thread has nailed the look of the game. Because of this, it never feels boring to walk around in. There's enough interaction with the environment for it to neve get stale, but it's just overall so peaceful and nice to look at. The more you discover in the game, however, the atmosphere changes from peaceful to eerily silent. Each day has a different weather effect to really nail down the mood of what the characters are discovering and the truth of the village. Rest assured, the game's graphics are very great.

The thing that struck me the most were the characters. Edward and Alice are great standins, and they have amazing chemistry. Edward is serious and lacks imagination or a sense of adventure, and Alice is the eccentric young spirit, ready to discover new things. They play off each other incredibly, and there's so much to learn about them from their optional dialogue. I don't really like how a lot of fiction handles exposition, but I think this one piece of exposition was handled brilliantly. When you discover the hanged man, Alice notes how suicides go to Hell, because that's what Edward's father told Edward when his mother drowned herself. What I really love about this scene is that the game has done such a good job of portraying Alice up to this point that it makes total sense for her to not dodge around it. She's often rude, quick to speak, and she is not afraid of speaking what she truly believes. Despite Edward's objections, she still brings up a tragic memory, not really aware of how she hurts him until after she's said it. It's wonderful, I gotta say. I heard that some people really didn't like Alice's voice acting, and I gotta say I can't really understand why. She was absolutely amazing. Her writing was very well done, and she did an amazing job portraying the character, with a lot of subtle innuendos in her voice to add to it. Edward was also pretty great. The voice actor did a great job portraying his stoic stubbornness, yet when he does emote he does so wonderfully. You can learn so much about their bond in the first opening hour that it's amazing how much they worked on these characters. I won't really go too much in-depth about the later happenings of the story, but it gets really interesting, how their bond changes.

Oh yeah, the story. It's, like a lot of this game, pretty great. It essentially tells two stories at once, one with Edward, Alice and Betty (Edward's sister), and one of the village. I did not expect it to end up like it did, but I think that the game ended in a very unique way that was kind of...unsatisfactory satisfactory? I have no problem with the fact you never got to see what was in the mines. The game makes a point at the end that you can sort of make up how the story ended. You can make the arguement that Ruth found some Viking treasure, played around and fell off the cliff, and you can make the arguement that Ruth found something sinister, ran away and got thrown off the cliff. There isn't really a clear-cut truth to the story, and that's something I don't really see in a lot of games. Edward was too focused on Betty to actually find out what was important, being hte lives of everyone in Gråvik, and that, I belive, cost him the truth of what happened. That's what Alice was trying to tell him, and he was too busy trying to find a dead memory rather than to listen. So yeah, the story is pretty great. People complain about the ending, but I don't really agree.

The only real complaint I have I guess have to be the lipsync. It's not awful, but it's just not as expressive that I'd like it to be. Which is a shame, since a lot of the game is spent looking at Alice. Lipsyncing is hard, I know, but when you have such a small-focused game that relies so heavily on characters talking to each other, I'd like there to be a bigger focus on things like that. I don't think this is a huge problem, but it is a problem nonetheless.

Also, the game is about 3-4 hours long. I don't really believe validating a game because of its playtime is a good thing to do, and in this case I think the quality of the game is worth the price tag. Sometimes it's quality over quantity, folks!

So yeah, I really liked this game. I might be a bit biased, since I'm norwegian, but I honestly think this is one of the better walking sims out there. I found it a lot more intriguing than Ethan Carter, and a lot...more than Dear Esther, and...yeah, I dunno. Great game, would recommend.

It's like an 8 or 9 out of 10, I dunno.

While the game certainly has a lot of great aspects to it, I can't honestly recommend Outlast 2, mainly because of one major flaw:
The game constantly shifts between enviroments. One is a scary village and one is a catholic school. However, in the second visit to the catholic school, I was sent to the music class. When visiting the music class, I immediately wanted to see what they were playing. The catholic school had arranged a band form of "Spatlin melody." Not only is that NOT a real song, but every single instrument had the same melody! Even the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ tuba was playing the G key! Literally every single instrument in the room had the exact same sheet with the exact same key! Not only is this insulting to people that play instruments of the lower octaves, since there is no way they can reach such heights, but I don't even think the majority of the higher pitched instruments could reach that level either! These catholic priests are literally putting the children up to an impossible task, and no one in the entire game has the decency to even mention it! I held my camera at those notes for hours, and I still didn't get a recording saying how outlandish this is!
I cannot in good consciousness recommend this game, as it is clearly unpolished and unfinished. Try harder next time, Red Barrels!

I rarely play horror games. I'm not the type of guy that enjoys getting scared. But I gotta say, Amnesia: the dark descent is a damn good game.

The atmosphere is absolutely fantastic. You always feel like something or someone is constantly keeping an eye on you, waiting to snap you at any second. This paranoid feeling made me traverse the game in extreme caution, although there were few times I actually encountered anything. The monsters are well-designed, scary and dangerous. They may not be as smart as you, but don't underestimate them. They will break you.
The story is pretty good. I'm always eager to find the next note, revealing more and more about Daniel's dark past. The way that the game slowly uncoveres the backstory as you progress is very well done, although I wonder why Daniel had to scatter all the notes over the entire castle.

Also, there are no cheap jumpscares. That's a win in my book.

This game feels like it was made in about 20 minutes. I know this game is more suited for little girls, but that doesn't excuse the poor quality of the game. The only goal in this game is to jump over fences, and blow wind on butterflies. That's it. The game doesn't delve further into any deeper mechanics like that (other than a few puzzles, which are pretty well made, to be honest) and the game is riddled with bugs! How can there be bugs in a game like this?!

This is a waste of money. I can appreciate that the developer actually tried to improve it upon feedback, (improving the loading times and adding a world map) but no matter how much he may try to improve, he can't escape the fact that this game is total ♥♥♥♥.

Systemtech, get your ♥♥♥♥ together.
3/10

While I did like the game as a whole...
To be honest...


It's not a very good RPG.