Recent reviews by BinarySplit

It might have been interesting back in the day, but these days everybody has played much better runner games.

If you like the cat aesthetic from the screen shots, check out this developer's more recent game Hot Tin Roof. It has much more interesting gameplay.

A pretty decent adventure game. Good investigation puzzles, good length (~5 hours), good characters. Puzzles were the right difficulty - many were easy, some were challenging, and I only had to look up the answer for 1. I wasn't completely rapt, but this is certainly one of the better point & clicks I've played in recent years. Would recommend it for adventure game junkies.

I played Else Heart.Break() to completion. It took about 8 hours.

I really like the premise, but there are a few big problems that really make it hard to recommend:

• The start can be exceptionally slow. You have to run into the right people at the right time to actually start the main story. This is based on luck and exploration, and can take up to two hours.
  
• At the start you are taught to explore everywhere and talk to everyone. But after this initial segment, pretty much all the NPCs won't speak to you or won't have anything interesting to say unless they're part of the active mission.
  
• It's very easy to sequence break or get powers that the dialog options you have seem to be oblivious to.
  
• There are hints of optional stuff to do, but I only found 1 such thing that actually lead to a reward. It's just annoying having all these things that look like the start of sidequests, but actually are just clutter to make the world look interesting.
  
• The ending is disappointing. It feels like they're setting you up to outsmart the game and get a better ending, but even the dev has confirmed there is no hidden ending.

This is a mixed review - I recommend The Witness with caveats. I haven't beaten it and probably won't return to it, but the time I've spent playing has been magical.

Pros:

• Holy cow this is an amazing puzzle game! I've played it for almost 2 days solid and spent every other waking hour thinking about it. Every puzzle seems to have just the right level of challenge. Despite appearances, there is a huge amount of variety in the puzzles, there's hundreds of puzzles, and there's plenty to do in-between puzzles.
  
• I had no performance issues at all. I have a GTX970 running at 1080p. I just started the game up, it defaulted to High settings, and everything played incredibly smoothly.
  
• The island is jaw-droppingly beautiful. This is probably the most beautiful full-3D game I've ever played. The amount of effort that went into making everything so picturesque AND making all the puzzles line up is truly incredible.

Cons:

• The price. It's probably a fair price if you're one of the people who ends up loving everything about this game, but I had to stop playing early. I would have regretted paying full price if I hadn't gotten this as part of a bundle.
  
• It's very hard to stop playing. This is not a veiled complement. You can uninstall the game, but your brain will keep trying to solve the puzzles. The Witness will find its way into your life in ways you never expected, and that can be quite horrifying. Unfortunately I had to stop playing after realizing that this was happening. I cannot risk my sanity further.
  
• Some puzzles rely on color and sound. If you're deaf or colorblind, 90% of the game will still be accessible to you, but you'll want to check the forums first to see which areas you're going to have to look up solutions for.

It's interesting. Not the best sentient acrobatic vehicle game out there, but probably top 5.

The story seems decent, but the gameplay is painfully repetitive. They introduce new enemies and stuff, but it's all just a couple boring basic attacks, traffic dodging, and QTEs. It would probably have been better if they just cut out the gameplay and made a movie.

It's 2 hours long and completely linear with very few puzzles. It's important to highlight that this isn't an "adventure game" - it's interactive fiction. You don't explore, you just point the character to their next objective, which is always something obvious.

The value of the game depends entirely on whether you appreciate the story, the voice acting, the art and the music. Did I enjoy them? Not really. There were good bits (the main character's voice acting & back story), adequate bits (art and music), but the story and the other characters were disappointingly flat and underdeveloped.

If you're reading this, boy are you late to the party. Hack 'n' Slash had some pretty novel game mechanics when it came out, but it's kind of dull now-a-days. The Magic Circle pretty much has the same game mechanics with a more engaging story. Go check that out instead.

I'm a huge fan of single-player FPS games. I grew up playing Doom II, Duke3D, Unreal, Half-Life, Serious Sam, etc. I love this genre of games, but 45 minutes into Doom I can tell I'm not going to get any enjoyment from it.

Doom seems to be confused about what it's trying to be. It's too slow and the environments are too cramped for it to be a good deathmatch/arena shooter(like Doom I & II, Unreal or Quake 3), and the enemy placement is too chaotic and the environment is too open for it to be a good linear/corridor shooter(like Half-Life or Gears of War). Depending on your upbringing, when you see an enemy you will either (a) circle strafe, which doesn't work well in Doom because you are slow and the environment keeps getting in the way, or (b) duck for cover, which doesn't work well in Doom because randomly spawning enemies will quickly flank you.

I recommend watching the first episode of a Let's Play to see if you'd like ETO. This is the video that sold me on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNKq8IBDddY

The gameplay is relatively easy, but novel enough to keep you engaged. The characters, the music, the art, the "realness" of people are where Even the Ocean shines.

I'm a massive fan of the original Deus Ex, and after Human Revolution I thought Square Enix had permanently derailed one of my favorite game series. Mankind Divided isn't perfect, but unlike the last game it actually lives up to the legacy of its source material.

The maps are sprawling mazes of alternate paths, filled with side missions, lore and secret stashes. There are numerous conspiracies and depictions of how modern society is being corrupted. They've done extraordinarily well considering that this game is a prequal to the original game, meaning they have little room for making new plotlines without rewriting the history explained in the original game. That said, I really wish there was more. The first game was a prescient literary masterpiece, but Mankind Divided is a lot less ambitious with its writing and predictions.

I recommend you buy this game, but wait for a sale. It's a worthy Deus Ex game, for sure, but there are enough flaws that would make you regret your purchase if you paid full price. There are many little annoyances like bad pacing, unnecessary padding, DLC, etc., but overall this is a game that all fans of conspiracies or cyberpunk dystopias should play.