Recent reviews by sloppenheimer jones

COCOON's gameplay revolves around carrying orbs that contain miniature worlds inside of them, with the player being allowed to enter and explore each orb-world and unlock its special ability by defeating a boss. Eventually this leads to putting worlds inside of other worlds and merging abilities in all sorts of creative ways to solve increasingly mindbending puzzles.

The worlds within COCOON all have their own color palette, their own soundscapes, their own unique puzzles to solve, and their own badass superpowered bugs to defeat. Every time I started to think that I was getting used to the puzzle logic, a new mechanic or combination of abilities would get thrown my way and change up everything about how I approached the game, constantly challenging me to experiment with the meta-world mechanics. And in my opinion, the difficulty curve of COCOON is perfect - it starts off easy, teaches new puzzle mechanics to the player without needing any HUD or text onscreen, and got quite hard by the end but I was just barely able to finish the game without ever using a guide. On top of the great puzzle design, I loved the glossy ambient soundtrack, buttery smooth animation style, and colorful, abstract visuals - this game looks and plays like a dream, and everything down to the menu UI is super satisfying to control.

COCOON isn't without its flaws, though. There's some tedious moments here and there when having to switch around the order of the orbs for late-game puzzles. The visual, dialogue-less story exists more to service the aesthetic rather than to convey a memorable message (as opposed to more meaningful games in this subgenre like INSIDE/GRIS). And even though I didn't encounter a single gameplay/animation-related bug in my playthrough, this game started stuttering A LOT about halfway through. Luckily, decreasing the FPS cap in the game settings to 60 instantly fixed all the stuttering - despite the game not taking up much resources and the refresh rate of my monitor being higher than 60... so this might be some graphics-related bug. Keep in mind, these issues are all very minor compared to how great the aesthetics and puzzle design are. I'd still recommend buying the game, although maybe get it on discount because it's only ~5 hours long.

Overall, I'm very impressed with COCOON, and I'm now convinced the universe we live in is actually an orb controlled by a giant grasshopper. 8/10

I'm psyched I finally got to play MGS3 without having to buy a PlayStation (I've never owned one) or use an emulator (I'm lazy). The stealth-action gameplay is awesome, with more items and weapons than the first two games plus a dynamic camera system that makes the overall experience much smoother. The story also gives off a James Bond-esque spy-thriller vibe, with lots of crazy plot twists, memorable characters, badass bosses, great voice acting, and incredible music.

There are a couple issues with this Master Collection port, though, but these problems can luckily be fixed without much hassle. The base game's resolution is locked at 720p, but I was able to easily change this to a native 1080p resolution with a mod from github. Plus the audio is compressed and WAY too loud in-game, to the point where Windows can't handle it and everything becomes distorted - but these audio issues can be fixed by downloading a mod for the audio files and turning down the application volume in the Windows sound mixer.

Konami definitely could've done a better job with this port, but even with its flaws, this is well worth the money if you don't have any other platform to play MGS3 on, or if you just prefer playing games on PC like I do. Hoping they port over MGS4 + Peace Walker next!

I'm really glad I finally got to play MGS2 without having to buy a PlayStation (I've never owned one) or use an emulator (I'm lazy). The slick, dynamic stealth-action gameplay and off-the-wall insane story hold up really well after all this time since the original release.

There are a couple issues with the Master Collection version, though. The base game's resolution is locked at 720p, but I was able to easily change this to a native 1080p resolution with a mod from github. Also there's no mouse support for aiming - which I'm okay with because I wanted to play through these with a controller anyway, but it kinda sucks for people who are exclusively used to keyboard-and-mouse shooter controls. And I've also heard from a friend that save files can sometimes get corrupted. I never had this particular problem, but even if you do it's easy to circumvent by using a new slot every time you save.

Long story short, this is a pretty lazy port of MGS2 HD, but it's still MGS2, and it's awesome. Buy it.

Alien Hominid has held up extraordinarily well considering it's around twenty years old now, and I'm pretty sure it's the only game where you can eat KGB agents as a Yeti, shoot down FBI laser satellites, collect flamethrower power-ups from kids eating ice cream, and blow up giant vultures outside of Area 51.

Seriously though... this game is chock-full of creativity and challenge, and The Behemoth has done a fantastic job porting this gem to Steam (as it now supports ultra HD resolution and uncapped framerates). It's an absolute steal at only $12, so if you haven't played Alien Hominid before, or if you have and want to replay it, this is the definitive way to experience the game.

A solid port of an excellent remake of an unforgettable, groundbreaking game.

There isn't much I need to say about the story or gameplay of TLOU1 that hasn't been said already - this game is amazing, and I loved the heartbreaking post-apocalyptic story and tense stealth-action gameplay the whole way through. Performance-wise, it is worth noting that the shaders for this remake took about 30-40 minutes to load the first time I booted it up, but ever since then the game has ran smooth as butter (and the shader loading wait-time only happened once and didn't require waiting at the menu on future startups).

I've never owned a PlayStation and I'm so glad that Naughty Dog decided to finally put this legendary title on PC, despite the rocky launch and performance issues that apparently plagued players earlier this year. Hope they can move Part II to PC soon!

Amnesia: The Dark Descent, the predecessor to this game, is one of the most deeply disturbing horror titles I've ever played. TDD had a brilliant way of making the player feel the main character's fear with its revolutionary "sanity" mechanic, which warps the first-person perception and controls if you stay in the dark for too long or see something unsettling. Frictional Games didn't just want players to be scared of getting caught by a monster in Dark Descent - they wanted players to be scared of even looking at the monster, or seeing a door creak open, or being in the dark for too long.

It's the single greatest example I've seen of a horror game that purposefully makes the player feel powerless. And on top of all its great horror elements, TDD was able to do a lot with a limited supply of controls thanks to its creative physics-based puzzles, and had a constant sense of urgency and tension with its limited amount of tinderboxes, lantern oil and healing items. The game ain’t perfect, but it’s a genuine survival horror classic.

It's a linear walking simulator through an 1800s factory full of pigman creatures, and lacks almost every feature that made The Dark Descent scary or fun. And despite its short 3-4 hour length, A Machine for Pigs feels incredibly drawn-out and is an absolute chore to play.

To give A Machine for Pigs some credit for what it does right:

The pig-head guys are funny.

...That's all the praise I have for this piece of junk. Now here's everything wrong with it:
- No sanity mechanic. So looking at enemies or walking around in complete darkness is 100% safe, completely removing the constant tension that defined TDD's approach to psychological horror.
- No tinderboxes, lantern oil, health items, or any inventory system at all! Which makes side exploration pretty much meaningless and compounds upon the linear map design to make the whole experience feel even more one-dimensional.
- Enemies are SUPER easy to avoid and there are very few of them. I only died once in the whole game, and it was because I intentionally jumped onto a pigman’s head to see what would happen. The AI is also dumb as rocks, I once crouched directly in front of an enemy for a full five seconds before it noticed me and then was STILL able to run around it and get away.
- The story is original with its grotesque premise, but ultimately falls flat on its face with its reliance on lengthy exposition dumps during phone calls to the main character.
- The scares are, for the most part, very predictable and scripted - and I bugged out one of the encounters by following an enemy to where it despawned.
- No voice acting for notes found in game - unlike TDD, which had great voice acting for notes that made sense of the “amnesiac” plot.
- Most objects can't be interacted with, even objects that clearly aren't glued to the environments (like books that slide around in drawers). It was really fun throwing around inkwells, rocks and bottles and trying to break stuff in TDD, but this game doesn't have anywhere near that level of flexibility. (You can even pick up chairs, but not other free-moving objects that are on the chairs... were the interactable vs non interactable objects picked completely at random??)
- Frame drops on this old-ass game from 2013. My PC is pretty high-end and has run games like Red Dead 2, God of War, and Spider-Man Remastered flawlessly, so performance issues on a decade-old walking sim like this is ridiculous. Also, the motion blur effect in foggy areas makes the whole screen turn into an indistinct dark mush and made one particular area near impossible to navigate.
- Puzzles are very easy, but sometimes rely on journal notes that are never shown to the player unless they read through walls of text (which again, are NOT VOICE ACTED). I even did an unintentional skip on one section because I platformed over an area that wasn't supposed to be jumpable.
- The game slows down the walking speed at many points so that the characters can get extra preachy with the dialogue. And the motion blur kicks in as well during these sequences, making them even more annoying.
- And finally, near the end, the game crashed during an alt+tab and my save file got corrupted, making me reload an autosave from earlier in the same area to finish this dumpster fire of a horror game.

I have pretty much nothing good to say about A Machine for Pigs. It’s not survival horror at all - the survival is a given, and the horror is a joke. It’s simple and repetitive, grotesque yet laughable, and story-driven but still completely incoherent. If you want a good Amnesia game, play the Dark Descent. A Machine for Pigs is a horrible sequel and fails to stand on its own. I'm gonna go uninstall it now. 0/10

Despite its aggressively minimalist control scheme and visual design, THOTH has a lot more going on under the hood than I first thought. It's short but far from simple, with a wide variety of enemies and mechanics in its one-hour length that are always communicated effectively through visuals and trial and error rather than through tutorials. It's challenging and (usually) fair, and mixes strategy well with the knee-jerk reflexes needed to get through each of these increasingly difficult twin-stick shootouts. And the simple, colorful artwork strikes an interesting juxtaposition with the unsettling sound design that sounds like it belongs in a psychological horror game.

I don't really know how to rate a game like this on my typical 0-10 scale, and I don't feel like I fully understand what I just played. But I'm glad I bought this bizarre gem. Thumbs up from me.

The unique aesthetics and approach to storytelling of Psychonauts have benefitted quite a bit from being brought into the modern sphere, and this sequel improves on its 2005 predecessor... a lot. The combat is more fluid than the original's, with a variety of psychic powers that can be used strategically against the uniquely themed enemies like "Doubts", "Panic Attacks" and "Judges", and these abilities also tie into the level design and platforming in all sorts of creative ways. The colorful modern graphics accentuate the unique character designs and trippy mental worlds. The puzzles are far more intuitive than the original's obtuse puzzle logic, while still being thought-provoking. And the constant stream of collectables (all of which tie into the different level themes) are woven into the upgrade system in a way that encourages the player to look for secrets and rare items hidden in these intricately designed worlds.

There are some rough edges to the movement and animations from time to time, plus a few tedious sections of the game, like missions in the main hub world that involve lots of drawn-out dialogue options. Even with these occasional annoyances, though, I had a blast playing through Psychonauts 2. For anyone reading this who's new to the duology, the first one still holds up well today and I would recommend playing the original first - but this sequel outdoes the first game in a lot of ways, and this has got to be one of the most freakishly creative 3D platformers I've ever played. 8/10

A lot of Dead Space's continued relevancy can be owed to its moody, atmospheric approach to horror that's full of little immersive details not seen in many other horror titles. The most innovative of these details has got to be the way gameplay and HUD elements are seamlessly woven together. Health and stasis charges are shown on the back of the protagonist Isaac's armor, and floating holograms for ammo, maps and inventory slots adhere Dead Space's gameplay systems perfectly to its in-game world. In addition, all the gameplay and cutscenes are woven together in a single unbroken camera shot, adding to this cohesive flow that fully immerses the player in the dark, brooding wreckage of the USG Ishimura.

Sadly, the majority of the overall story arc isn't on par with the ingame atmosphere. Most of the characters feel generic, the dialogue is forgettable, and the main and side objectives all blend together into a soup of story-driven chores. Luckily, though, Dead Space is smart enough to tell most of its story through moment-to-moment gameplay rather than through cutscenes. It establishes its thick horror atmosphere by simply letting the player explore and find the bloody aftermath of the horrifying Necromorphs lurking in the shadows, with detailed visuals and clever sound design adding to the ominous mood. And what few cutscenes there are rarely take the player out of the driver's seat - as Isaac can still be controlled while watching his video-call hologram or witnessing a major event ingame, and I usually just tuned out the audio calls and logs that pop up from time to time.

The combat is... absolutely brutal. Dead Space's unique combat system encourages the player to shoot or cut off Necromorphs' limbs to conserve ammo, giving the TPS combat a hack-and-slash-y feel with a variety of unique weapons that all feel specifically designed to rip these disgusting monsters apart. Also, time slowdown and telekinesis abilities play off the game's goofy physics and zero-gravity areas, and these features are also woven into simple but effective puzzles that add some variety to the combat/exploration loop.

This remake is by no means a masterpiece, though, and most of the issues I have with it can be summed up in one word: uniformity. Even though Dead Space's core gameplay loop is fun, briskly paced and super immersive, the environments (and even characters) feel kinda... recycled. The metroidvania-esque map design is great in concept, but is unintuitive to navigate with all of the homogeneous metal hallways and darkly lit control rooms. They look great, fit the industrial theme well and are full of lots of little details that make exploration fun, but these areas are really hard to distinguish from each other after a while. There's even a "Locator" feature where you can press a button to show a line pointing you to the next objective, and I ended up pressing this constantly because I kept forgetting where I was. And like I said before, the characters (with a couple exceptions like Dr. Mercer) all blend together due to very predictable writing - and while there were some major plot twists that caught my attention near the end, the first two-thirds of this game's story felt very formulaic. I can only take so many dark metal hallways, flesh monsters, and generic scientists before my brain starts hurting from a lack of variety.

Despite these issues, I still enjoyed Dead Space. There are a lot of amazing ideas here - such as the hack-and-slash-y shooting mechanics, the cohesive sense of immersion, the detailed visuals and sound design, and the space setting combined with zero-gravity physics. But there isn't enough variety in environments and story beats to keep Dead Space's gameplay loop from getting a little repetitive, and it would probably make for a more consistently exciting experience if the 12 hours of gameplay were whittled down to a 7-8 hour long title. As it is, though, Dead Space is still a really solid horror-shooter that's worth the time of anyone who's in the mood for slice-and-dicing some Necromorphs. 7/10

Red Dead Redemption 2 features the most gripping narrative I’ve ever seen in a video game. The epic journey of Dutch Van der Linde's gang of outlaws is full of so many jaw-dropping, cinematic, action-packed moments, but still stays believable as the protagonist Arthur Morgan slowly frees himself of his life-long gunslinger ideals. And every character in the Van der Linde gang’s saga feels remarkably human, thanks to fantastic writing and voice acting that perfectly complement this game’s stunning visuals, detailed animation and beautiful music.

All of these elements combine to make the world of Red Dead 2 come alive in a way that no other open world game does. The massive five-state map is incredibly dynamic, with missions, side quests and random events of equally high quality perfectly interwoven into an enchanting world that constantly changes with the flow of the main story. And there are so many little details throughout this game - from memorable NPCs to colorful customization options to fleshed-out minigames - that make the experience feel authentic.

Even though I absolutely loved the phenomenal story and atmospheric world of Red Dead 2, the gameplay mechanics can seem shallow when taken out of context. Granted, there’s nothing wrong with the core controls - the shootouts are fun even on controller thanks to the Deadeye time-slowdown ability, and riding around on a horse is simple but satisfying. However, responsive controls are sometimes de-emphasized in favor of handholding gameplay and "realism" in regard to difficulty and mission structure. Horses automatically steer themselves on rough terrain, animations make looting and crafting take longer, many missions include trailing sections so the player can get where they need to go… et cetera.

Usually, when a game prioritizes realism over immediate gameplay like this, there’s a weak link somewhere that breaks my immersion - such as bad voice acting, weak writing, faults in sound design or visuals, or spacing of content around the map. And this usually results in these “realistic” game mechanics becoming more tedious than they are immersive, distancing me from whatever atmosphere is trying to be established. But.. this isn’t the case with Red Dead Redemption 2.

The immaculately detailed world and unbelievably human characters of RDR2 breathe life into in-game tasks that I would normally consider boring, like trailing missions, herding animals and catching fish - making even these less inspired gameplay segments pretty damn fun. The gameplay mechanics aren’t untouchable on their own, but the sixty-hour-long story pretty much is, and it’s paired with an intricate portrayal of 1899 America that makes the narrative just as enthralling as some of the greatest movies and TV shows ever made. This commitment to realism and thorough storytelling makes even the slower paced segments of the game exciting, and the intense parts (like shootouts) more meaningful.

I’m already partway through my second playthrough now, and I’m having even more fun this time around trying to dissect the incredible character dynamics and details of the open world now that I’ve beaten the game already. The more I play Red Dead 2, the more fascinated I am with the spectacular story and cast of characters - and the few issues I originally had with the mechanics have become less and less noticeable in the grand scheme of RDR2’s monumental scope. Rockstar has created a true masterpiece here, and the gripping tale of outlaw Arthur Morgan is a story I’ll never forget. 10/10