Recent reviews by Syntax Error

Cute little town-painting program that isn't really a game. Plop a patch of land in the water. Click it again to add a building. Click some more to grow it upwards or outwards. Delete parts to put it on stilts or create arches. It's nice, it's a time waster and it does what is says on the box. That's all it does so it's hard to say "Spend money on this" unless you think point-clicking little artsy towns into existence is something you'll enjoy doing. You'll probably enjoy it at least once although you might want to try the online demo version first to see if it clicks for you.

Dog sled racing simulator and story. Well, the story is you wanting to be a dog sled racer and win some big race and get some famous dogs, I'm sure. Anyway, the biggest issue with this game is that the dog sled racing wasn't much fun. You're constantly trying to lob dog biscuits at your team's heads while micromanaging clicking dogs to untangle their lines and dragging them forward to keep the lines taunt and it just felt much less like managing a sled team (in even a game-sim way) but rather just spammy clicky arcade play. If the sled racing portion isn't going to keep me interested, the rest won't matter much.

Picked this title up for the "lolwtf?" factor but found it entertaining and certainly more interesting than other games in its price range. Using a female perspective, you traverse your way through a variety of sexual situations using a tarot card format, picking between two options to get a result and open the next set of choices until you reach the end (typically climax). Despite the overall idea, it's not especially titillating or "naughty" but I did largely enjoy going through the scenarios. Most of the scenarios are presented in a largely positive way but there is at least one that is a bit disturbing, albeit accurate in its message. For the record, I have no idea what level of female input went into making this game; the lead dev on their website is a male and there's various women with notagamestudio but I don't know anything else.

My main criticism came with the ending. Throughout the game, there is a sort of phonetic-text cypher thing going on with letter replacement leading to statements like "YOO ARE CVMMINK" that are largely legible and understandable. The dev says it has something to do a statement about censorship but it doesn't get in the way. The final chapter though is a whole alphabet soup of illegible text. This is a shame since I enjoyed the narratives in the previous nine chapters and this turned into an exercise in just brute-forcing cards until I reached an unsatisfactory ending. A posting in the discussions has someone saying he completed all the achievements and still gets the same so it doesn't seem to be a matter of discovering some unlocking secret. In any event, if there was a "message" to it, it missed the mark and had me leaving the game disappointed. Overall though, I enjoyed it and found it worth playing so I still give it a thumbs up (though with an asterisk).

Essentially a visual novel in that all you'll do is hold the mouse button to advance dialogue and there is no actual game play or choices involved. As it says on the tin, you've overdosed on some low quality drugs and are dying on a street corner. The next 30 minutes or so are spent being harassed by various people, real or remembered, and getting the general story of your downfall. I wouldn't say it's terrible but I didn't get a whole lot out of it either and couldn't recommend that someone spend money on having the memory of their sixth grade teacher say how disappointed she is in you.

To be fair, the game description fully warns you that there is no game play and all you'll do is read for a half hour. So no foul play on the part of the dev. I just didn't end it feeling like I could tell anyone else that it's worth paying time/money for the experience when it's done.

Stylish and fun so far. Will it hold up? I dunno yet but Steam is making me write this review now for nominee credit so here's another pointless "review" to clog up the pipeline.

Hellblade tells the story of Senua, a young Viking lady who suffers from psychosis and is near constantly accompanied by a chorus of voices in her head. You'll want to play this game with headphones as these voices will be your companions, regularly offering taunts, suggestions or bits of history as they float around your aural perception. Senua has had a tough life, being considered cursed by her father and her village but found solace in the love of one man, Dillion. After Dillion is killed, Senua decides that it's easier to lop off his head, stuff it in a bag, tie it to her belt and hike off the underworld to bring her love back than it is to start dating again. And so your story goes: unlocking challenges, solving puzzles and defeating enemies to gain access to Hela's realm. Luckily, Senua is a competent swordswoman, having both watched Dillion train and her own mind "identifying patterns" (plus your head-voices telling you when to evade a blow from behind)

To start, the world is very atmospheric. The voices around Senua haunt and compel and the visuals are well done although there's usually some sort of film grain or other effect keeping things from being as crisp as I'd like. Game play is extremely linear with few chances to leave the beaten path and even less to discover when you do. There are no skill trees or crafting or weapons to be located. You regularly encounter puzzles which are in the form of "Locate these runes" where you hunt for shapes in the landscape, mixed up by things such as gates or arches that subtly (or dramatically) change the world, fractured views of architecture that come together from a certain angle and other tricks. Much of the game is walking along, hearing the story come together and solving these riddles.

The other part is combat which is... okay? When it works, it works splendidly and looks great. Senua flashes her attacks, parries in dramatic fashion, kicks opponents to knock them off balance and the visuals of her fighting 7' tall animal-skulled wraiths is a delight. When it doesn't work, you'll find yourself swearing at the small arenas you fight in, the camera that is behind a tree as you're getting crushed or that the game's idea of making a challenge harder is "Add more guys". I found myself both looking forward to combat to break up the puzzles and dreading it as it often felt like a crap shoot.

All in all, Hellblade gets my recommendation. If you're looking for an "experience", it delivers in spades. If you want a technically impressive game, it has that. A puzzler, it seems pretty good. Probably the most well acted and best story I've gotten from a video game in a long while. If you're primarily interested in slaying enemies, you'll probably be left wanting.

50 Years is a minimalist empire simulator meant to be played in small doses. You pick your empire (with its bonuses or negatives) and then try to hold off invading forces for fifty turns. In between you buy more troops, buy buildings to collect resources or build troops and have a few special encounters as your 'scouts' locate caves and swamps outside your kingdom. As you win fights or over turns you accumulate Faith which allows you to select religious bonuses such as more money per turn, extra troops or troop bonuses. Game play happens entirely over maybe five different screens and battles are automated.

As you may have guessed, this is not a complicated game. But it is attractive and fun, offering a number of different paths to try from game to game. It is likely not a game with tremendous longevity since the game play is limited however it's fun when played as a time killer.

(I played off-line during a cable outage, thus the short time; actual time to finish was ~5.5hrs)

A nicely made exploration game with platforming, shooting and light puzzle elements, Valley puts you on the search for the mythical Lifeseed in the Colorado Rockies. Along the way you investigate the ancient ruins of a past civilization and unearth the story of a 1941 military operation which attempted to exploit them. The story is told via audio recordings and letters scattered about which is nothing new but still works well.

The main gimmick of the game is the LEAF suit, an exoskeleton which allows you to leap great distances, run quickly and harness the power of life and death, literally taking life force from the plants and animals of the Valley or else restoring it to the dead. Even upon your demise, the suit will drain the flora and fauna around you to prevent your death at the cost of the Valley's health. Fortunately, power can also be found in floating orbs as well as mechanical contraptions left behind and you can manually restore what you took, tree by tree if you desire.

The suit is a treat to use, evoking the same fun as I've felt in games such as Prototype and Saints Row IV where you are suddenly able to make great jumps and later perform feats such as running up walls, swinging from grapples and even skimming along the surface of lakes. The platforming is pretty casual and I rarely missed a jump and never the same location twice. Similarly, my only deaths were from missed jumps and although you'll be given some antagonists to fight, they never present a serious challenge. This game is more about the exploration of the Valley and its story than a true platforming or shooting experience. But the world is well made, the story entertaining, the music enjoyable and the LEAF suit is fun to wear. As a casual story that won't demand too much time or skill, Valley is a fun recommendation.

A sleeper for 2017, Prey is worth playing offering a strong single player plot-based story and solid game play in an interesting environment. You are placed in the role of Morgan Yu and find yourself aboard the space station Talos I, invaded by strange alien life forms and with the crew largely dead. As you explore the station, you'll find the usual array of side quests, puzzles and bits of story to help piece together what happened to the station and how you will prevent the alien threat from reaching Earth. A set of skill trees, both mundane and exotic, will help you build a character to sneak, shoot, repair, hack and perhaps take on bizarre new abilities.

Although it's not "new" at this point, the retro-futuristic 60s inspired decor is well done and consistent, blending LCD touch screens with rotary desk phones and chunky tape drives. Views from the outside of the station are suitably impressive, lending a sense of scale to the structure as you explore. Keeping with its suspense/horror theme, resources can be rare and you'll be scavenging odds and ends as you travel to place into handy Recyclers which can turn that junk into the raw building blocks (literally) to Fabricate into ammunition, medicine and other gear. This means spending some time on inventory management although I didn't find it overly onerous. At the default difficulty, alien threats were tough enough to take seriously but fairly easy to handle with some forethought and increasingly trivial once weapons and skills were upgraded.

Prey holds a self-contained story and environment to explore in a gaming scene largely full of "open world" wanderers. It's also almost all game with few cut scenes and no QTEs. It's a game style becoming increasingly hard to find and well worth playing.

We purchased and played this game as a joke and never expected it to be "good" but it was bad in some bizarrely unexpected ways. From the controls being listed on a briefly seen splash screen to the monster's comically slow banking turns to the terrible grain filter (which can be turned off but why is it even there?) to incomprehensible cursor prompts, Bloody Boobs is a frustrating experience. It's technically playable if you excuse things like map holes and loading in to be frozen in place or potentially needing to force Vsync in your GPU utility to avoid crashes, but it's not much fun except as a brief train wreck. Not worth it from a "so bad, it's good" standpoint when Steam has literally thousands of "good because it's good" games to spend your time and money on instead.