Recent reviews by Bisqwit

An excellent remake of the original Half-Life, made with attention to detail with much effort.

It was pretty nice entertainment for three hours. Really good at teaching or refreshing your knowledge of digital gates, in a simplified form (no flipflops are created, the game provides one built-in).

Some minor usability bugs plague this game, and the lack of way to transfer text between the game and the outside environment (either by copypaste or files) is annoying when you want to get into optimizing the solutions.

The ending of the game let some to be desired; it sort of just ended, untriumphantly. Even as a programmer, it left something to be hoped: You create a CPU, and then you never see it used, never realize its potential. Also what did we create those MEM elements for? They were not used in the final puzzle(s).

Top of my head, a couple of ideas that would improve this game a great deal:
— Need support for selecting which monitor it fullscreens on
— Need possibility to copypaste or save/load from/to external programs
— Need possibility to create and save your own elements for reuse in puzzles; for example, I would have liked a MUX4W4B or MUX4W2B to optimize one of the puzzles
— Need possibility to create own testcases
— Need possibility to save several parallel solution attempts for the same puzzle (aim for a pure solution, aim for a pass-provided-testcases technically correct, etc)
— Need better ending
— Fix the bug where the game sometimes gets stuck for a few seconds
— Fix text editor bugs: Sometimes copypastes paste only a part of the selected text
— The game should automatically optimize and elide duplicate gates

Life is Strange™ is art. It is beautiful. Yes, the topic of game revolves around photography, but the development team really spent bucks on artistic values. It is beautiful, and the cinematography (composition of shots, lighting, direction, pacing) is nothing but excellent. You can’t help but marvel it throughout the game.

Categorically, this game is a high-school drama game, with a paper-thin layer of a science fiction serving as a plot device.

Voice acting: For the first two episodes, I thought the voice actors were average. Nothing in their performance cried out to me “wow, this is great”, but eventually you start to notice how it all just works. The voices are right. Towards the second half of the five-episode game, moments started arising where you enjoy the performance because of the depth of emotion put into it. It is told in the developer commentary and in Wikipedia that they spent majority of their budget in voice actors and writing. It was money well spent, in my opinion. In particular, Hannah (Max) and Ashly (Chloe) did really great. None of the others were bad, either.

Script and dialog: Overall the plot, per characters, is impressive. The plot device that drives the story and game is loose and never quite explained in the depth that it could and frankly should. Its implications are explored admirably though. In dialog, there were some lines that felt a bit tacky, but such is to be expected when the main character has to have words to say about everything for gameplay and usability reasons. There are some plot holes, and a lot was left to imagination, which, judging from the amount of fan-fiction written for this game, was the right and successful choice.

Choices: In many situations, the game offers you choice, and then immediately proceeds to throw doubt at your choice, urging you to change it. Originally, the game was called "What If". While the name was changed for marketing reasons, it is really reflective of how the game is designed. Basically you will be second-guessing yourself all the time, and the game does not waste a single opportunity to rub the consequences of your choice in your face. In the end, most of your choices are roleplay. The game is still heavily railroaded, despite any choice you make. The impact of your choices comes from the way the characters act or what happens to them, and it can be very emotionally taxing at times.

Character development: Through your actions in the game, characters develop. But some of those changes can be subtle, or they may be heavily overshadowed by all the action and drama that you forget to notice it. One of the tackiest moments to me is near the end of the game, where one of the characters basically says “look, this game has character development, have you noticed?” (not in those exact words). There is plenty of optional material in the game: diary notes, letters, posters etc. which shows that each character was actually carefully designed to be believable.

Bottom line: Unless you are a psychopath, you will enjoy this game a lot. And even if you are, you may still enjoy it although for different reasons.

This game is best enjoyed when you sit down and relax to absorb and enjoy each scene. If you are the type of a person who always seeks to rush to the next “trigger”, you may not necessarily enjoy this game. I hope you are not one of those people. Relax, sit down on the bench, and look at the squirrels.

The Turing Test is a very beautiful puzzle game that explores philosophical questions around the topic of machine sentience. It obviously draws inspiration from the Portal series, but it also has much in common with The Talos Principle.

Pros:

• Beautiful, quite beautiful
  
• Good puzzles with gentle teaching curves
  
• Good playtime (around 9 hours blind playthrough for all achievements)
  
• Nice story with a clever twist
  
• Much explorable extra content that is not mandatory and does not delay the game

Cons:

• Some bugs, game crashes, not too frequent
  
• Some design problems: Details are difficult to spot, redundant puzzle elements
  
• Mildly unsatisfactory ending where you feel lack of choice and achievement

Other:

• Game is completely linear; there is no backtracking, there is no out-of-order solving of puzzles
  
• There is no in-game reason why extra puzzle 1 should ever be possible to solve without brute force (requires prescience)

A cult game of 2015.
Pros:
　• Fantastic story-writing.
　• The developer thought of everything. You can make so many choices, and the characters are aware of your choices. Even when you think they could not possibly be.
　• Excellent music with professional attention to leitmotifs.
　• Game is small and runs not only on Windows, but also on Linux.
　• Minimal hardware requirements. Runs perfectly even on the slowest of modern hardware.
　• Excellent community support. Stuck in game? Questions about plot? Desperate for more content? You can find anything in the Internet about this game.
　• More than meets the eye. Way, WAY more.

Cons:
　• Graphics are rather bad, except in a few select parts.
　• Understanding the game’s plot requires commitment. If you are not ready for that commitment, the game will leave you with a bitter taste. But if you are willing to push through that, the game will reward you immensely.
　• Fanatic fans. If you letsplay this game, make absolutely sure you will NOT read ANY feedback until you’re through. They WILL be full of spoilers and aggressive back-seat gaming that DO ruin your experience and leave you with a bitter taste. Do NOT listen to them. You get so much more out of the game by discovering it on your own. I do mean that. The game is designed to challenge existing gaming conventions, and you get the best experience when you let it subvert and reshape your expectations.

Transmissions: Element 120 is a short game set in the universe of Half-Life 2.

In this game, you control a modified version of the Gravity Gun. It launches energy balls that create a large physics push effect when hitting something. These push effects are capable of launching the player character up in air a considerable distance, like a rocket jump, or killing several enemies at once.

Pros:

• A way to relive the world of Half-Life 2
  
• Game runs on multiple platforms, such as Linux
  
• The source code of the game has been published!
  
• The price is right
  
• The maps look impressive, like real Half-Life 2 maps.

Cons:

• Unintuitive level design. More than once in my playthrough, progress hinged on noticing some relatively insignificant detail, resulting in getting stuck for a long time. There were even red herrings. I thought I need to find a way to get back into the vents, so I can progress upwards which I could not do before. While this turned out to not be the case, this misunderstanding was further reinforced by the instruction plaque that suggested that a particular type of jump trajectories is necessary. Granted, some puzzles were very cool too.
  
• In the final scene, it is not obvious whether the game is regenerating an infinite supply of enemies (a notion reinforced by a previous sight of infinite supply of enemies (the scene with the three power plugs)) and stopping to kill them is just a waste of time and whether you should just find a way to progress somewhere and ignore the enemies. As such, it was totally surprising when the game suddenly ended. I label this as another problem with level design. The goals should be made clear to the player.
  
• You gain many weapons, but essentially you only need one.

In the end, the feeling was that the game was a gimmick without any motivation or purpose. While there were occasional clipboards that described exploits of other people, it did not have a satisfactory beginning, a satisfactory sense of buildup, nor a satisfactory closure. And therefore I will not recommend this game.

RimWorld is a colony simulation game where you can macromanage and micromanage. I know it is often compared to Dwarf Fortress, but having not played that, I will judge RimWorld based on its own merits alone.

RimWorld takes character simulation to a quite detailed level. Each character may have their own quirks and traits, such as gunshot wounds or nudism preference. They have numerous things that affect their happiness at any current moment, and they may be concentrating on multiple things both in the short term and in the long term.
The premise seems to be to build a stable colony, and survive it against dangers of elements, predation, and warring tribes. Maybe possibly send them back to space some day. The traits of the colonists, as well as the world, are generated procedurally pseudo-randomly. There is also an AI storyteller that pushes things forward.
It all seems fascinating.

Let’s document my feelings of the game at various points in the play.

AT 0.5 HOURS: Well, that is how much I gleaned from my first half a hour of the play. While the game does feature a number of tips and tasklists that appear at apparently predetermined times to guide you towards the right direction, my own experience at the game was that I had no idea what to do, how to accomplish it, and how to achieve something, and whether that would be enough or whether I’m just wasting precious time, certainly dooming my landing party. I was planning of making a video review of this game, but after that half a hour, I decided I would rather spare my audience from constant headpalming “why don’t you see that, why don’t you understand that obvious thing, it’s right in front of you for heavens’ sake”. In a way, I believe this game could use a tutorial system. For people who have not played this kind of games before, the entry curve seems to be rather too steep. And for that reason, my review veers heavily into the “not recommended” side. Mostly fixed in Alpha 15 release!

AT 8 HOURS: Okay I now get how the game works. Wow. The game is really set out to kill you. If not a constant barrage of raids, so that you have no time to heal, let alone build anything, then your own colony members go berserk and start murdering their mates, or maybe wandering in daze so that they will not tend to their mates, not put out fires, not repair broken coolers, etc. When you have a solar flare going on (which seems to happen like twice a week, go figure), a raid starting, and the only member of your colony who is not infected and incapacitated is wandering around mindlessly, the game is not quite fun anymore. And then there’s the toxic cloud that may last up to a month*. It is verily the RPG trope “rocks fall, everyone dies” to the letter. This is at the “recommended” difficulty level with the classic story teller. Also, for some reason I get an intense headache from playing it. Must be the persistent state of threat in the game.
Luckily the game does throw a bone once in a while. A traveller may join your colony, or a cargo drop happens. Or the prisoner you have been pampering for the last two months finally decides to join you.

*) To be fair, the toxic fallout event did not happen to me at the recommended difficult level. It happened about twenty hours later, when I was playing on the easiest possible setting with the relaxed storyteller. This was fixed in Alpha 14d release.

AT 30 HOURS: The game is very mood-centered. In my more recent colony with the easiest settings, one of my characters is volatile. This means that he breaks way easier than anyone else. One day his wife (who was also his friend, somehow) died. There was nothing I could do about this, since the wife was not part of my colony. This put a permanent penalty of −28 into his mood, with the effect that he was in “terrible mood” pretty much constantly. I made him a luxurious bedroom; fed him fine meals only, and made sure one of our slaves constantly cleans out every area he frequents to, so he can’t complain of hideous environment. Even then, he went berserk pretty much every day for more than a year. And there’s nothing you can do about it. You could draft someone and arrest him, but then he would turn into a prisoner, and it might take half a year before someone can convince him to join again. So basically every day begins with “Red alert: Stepan is in terrible mood”, eventually followed by: “Stepan went berserk. Reason: My wife Selma died.”, ready to reload a save in case things go way more south than they should. Did I mention this game causes stress?

AT >100 HOURS (incl. watching YouTube LPs), CONCLUSION:

Pros:

* The writing in the game is good. The starting scenarios (Alpha 15) are engagingly written, and the ending is thought-provoking. There is plenty of additional content in e.g. art that your colonists can create. The writing involves extensive vocabulary with English words you don’t see often.
* The music in the game is great. Sort of a western feeling. The sound effects are professional, too.
* The simulation system is very complex and multi-faceted.
* The simplistic graphics work very well, and some (such as huskies, since Alpha 14) are even cute.
* With architecting your houses, maintaining a complex animal farm, optimizing beauty, improving war tactics and strategies, and so on, it is not easy to run out of things to do in this game.
* Moral choices. Do you slave-market your prisoners, or harvest their organs? And more. RimWorld gives you the choice.
* The game is still being actively developed, which means that things mentioned in this review may have changed since I wrote them.
* The easily-accessed extensive developer tools, although considered cheats, can work as a safety net to people who are frustrated with particular features of the game.
* It runs on many operating systems. More games that run on Linux is always welcome!
* Once you get the hang of the game, you don’t want to quit. It is addictive.

Cons:

* The recommended settings (“The way RimWorld was meant to be played”) are a recipe for a disaster and rage-quit, especially for players who have never played games like Dwarf Fortress, Prison Architect, or The Sims before. Mitigated in Alpha 15.
* Current (Alpha 14e) in-game tutorial doesn’t tell how to do things, even though it tells what to do. This has proven to be a stumbling block to many new players. You pretty much have to watch someone else play it in e.g. YouTube to learn it first. Fixed in Alpha 15 release!
* There is no guarantee at all that you get a functional family on the initial character creation page. Basically you have to hit “rerandomize” plenty of times for each character with specific goals in mind. This can screw you over.
* Some of the random events, such as various parasites, or expensive equipment breaking down every 10 minutes, can wear you down. It would be nice to get a stable self-sustained colony where you can just leave the game running, but eventually they will run out of non-reproducible commodities like steel, components, and/or medicine because of these events.
* Some random events are totally unfair, such as the toxic fallout which just wipes out your colony unless you have already built it inside a mountain with hydroponics or something.
* Even though there’s like 30 songs in the game and none of them are bad, once you have play the game for more than 8 hours, all of those songs become repetitive.
* The constant state of threat can be a source of stress to the player with adverse health effects.
* Pawn AI is pretty stupid at times, and some moods/mental breaks don’t quite make sense.

AT >600 HOURS, ADDITION:

* Oh boy, the mods. There’s mods for everything.

After all this experience, I am ready to change the review to «recommended: YES», but that would mean losing all the ratings and the review sinking into oblivion. Hmph.

Duskers is a fascinating twist on the roguelike genre. In Duskers, you explore spaceships instead of dungeons, and you do so by remotely controlling robotic drones.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=713090327
Pros (as of version 1.03):
• Fascinating concept
• Simplistic graphics
• Gentle introduction to simplistic non-turingcomplete programming
• There is no reaction time involved, just your ability to plan without typos
• The noisy camera view, and the fact that catastrophic failure is nearly always one typo away, definitely helps set the scary tone
• Reasonable installation size for a modern game (around 250 MB)
• High compatibility: Works on Linux, Mac OSX and Windows, and hardware requirements are not high (requires shader support though, so older GMAs are out of question)
• Keeps you busy for dozens of hours, although I fear it might get a bit repetitive
• Game is still being maintained and updated, so new content and bugfixes are to be expected

Cons (as of version 1.03):
• If you get bad framerate, the game will randomly ignore your typed keys, making it for a frustrating game experience
• Game price seems unreasonably high (right now 17€ with discounts)
• Plot fails to engage the player early on
• No Steam trading cards
• No music

TL/DR: Pricey scary roguelike IN SPACE. Explore shipwrecks, control robots by typing commands. Works on any computer that can run Steam.

For me, the overall experience of Remember Me was very positive.

Pros:
-- The story is great and believable for the most part.
-- Certain scenes in the game are very powerful and emotional.
-- The music is absolutely fantastic. The game is worth buying because of the music alone.
-- The graphics are great. The developers went out their way to develop a new model of illumination and it shows. The textures are wonderful.
-- Some of the English voice actors, especially that of the player character, give a very good performance.
-- The unique game mechanics involving memories are fascinating and interestingly done.
-- The balance between puzzle and action is well done.
-- You can choose between three difficulty levels. The difficulty levels are well balanced.
-- The optional collection challenges are mildly engaging.

Cons:
-- The battle system is somewhat clunky and takes time to get used to.
-- Navigation actions like grabbing a ledge or climbing are strictly restricted to those surfaces that the game designers explicitly enabled at any given time. If for some reason an event code fails to run due to game error, you simply can't interact with some surface even if it's right in front of you.
-- Bugs. Especially on slower computers, events sometimes fail to activate, softlocking the game.

This game has an engaging story with many minute details. Lots of high-quality music and voiced dialog. The voice acting is mostly great, too. Graphics are not exactly modern, but for me it was only a good thing, as I don't have a modern gaming computer.

There were a few situations in the game where I had to resort to a walkthrough, because there was absolutely nothing in the game that would indicate that event B (required to progress in the game) is conditional to completing event A first. Things like a certain NPC appearing in a certain spot for instance. Sometimes the hotspots were really difficult to find, too.

Overall, despite the plot of the game leaving me a bit unsatisfied in the end, I enjoyed this game a lot.