Recent reviews by BroWren

The Evil Within is an amazing, visceral horror action game, a genuine classic of the style that you should not sleep on. The studio deserved way better treatment than it got from Microsoft.

If you enjoy buggy games with ♥♥♥♥♥♥ game mechanics, bad QTEs, and stupidly scripted fights, this is your jam.

I'd recommend this just for the soundtrack, but everything about it is excellent. If you liked The Great Ace Attorney, you need to play this too.

Runs wonderfully on Linux/Proton and on the Steam Deck as well!

Story is alright, game performance is meh. If you dig the combat system you might replay for multiple endings but for me, it is just too much time investment, and too much repeat visits to the same areas to invest another week going for an ending that might be marginally better.

Starts out awesome, becomes very, very unfun after about 5 hours when it stops being about interesting platforming and just becomes patience-testing.

This game is excellent, PLAY IT.

To the developer who made the "let's walk on narrow beams around ranged enemies" section of this game:

I know you probably will never read this, nor will it matter to you, but I strongly suggest you consider a different career. Perhaps you'd be better suited to be a professional Dominatrix, or maybe you'd find more joy in life as a Baby Seal Clubber, a Dog Catcher, or perhaps a truly sadistic career, like being a TSA inspector or a student loan debt collector; I do not see how creating levels intended to frustrate people to the point of tears could bring you pleasure or joy, as you are not present to see them.

I do, to some degree, blame other gamers for encouraging a person like you to become a game developer - the entire "get gud" mindset, clearly the work of masochists, must have been a very strong attractant. Consider, though: you hear our suffering only indirectly, through negative reviews, and perhaps messages like this one. It lacks the visceral enjoyment you'd get from experiencing our rage and dispair firsthand.

Please quit.

It's a gorgeous game with a very hard first hour or so, but the lack of any kind of autosave coupled with stability problems totally ruined it for me. I lost nearly an hour and a half of progress when the game half-crashed. I fired at a monster, the controller seemed to lock up because of the vibration from the shot, and then the game disconnected my gamepad and popped up an error dialog *under* the game's main screen. The game itself continued running, and I got killed by the monster I had just shot, with the game being completely unresponsive to any controls, likely due to the dialog box. :(
This would not be such a big deal were it not for the game's lack of autosave; while I completely understand the appeal of the old-school item-based save limitations, recovery from a crash is not save-scumming, nor does everyone have sufficient time to play the game in two-hour-sized blocks, be it other things to do, or the lifespan of one's Steam Deck.
If you have the time and patience to deal with the save system being problematic, it's a lovely game, but I just don't.

I went into this game hopeful that the plot would be worth dealing with the technical problems other people are seeming to have with the game. But I am not having technical issues - the game runs fine for me. Instead it is the plot and annoying QTE design that I am dinging the game for, in particular, the irony of mocking horror movie tropes like "clueless protagonist" while simultaneously hard-embracing them fully. In the sequence that made me finally quit playing the game, there were no less than four obvious opportunities the protagonists had to incapacitate the villain and they did nothing.
The QTEs use small, non-obvious icons positioned away from where the action is occurring. Also, it's 2023, QTEs were maybe new and cool back in the 80s when Dragon's Lair was a thing, maybe, but nowdays they're just lazy and annoying game design, and, like most QTE-based games, the game eventually devolves into a sequence of scripted fights where your inputs don't actally make any difference plot-wise.... which is unfortunate. The plot was actually good up to that point.
The one thing that does shine through here is the motion capture and voice acting - which just really cements my opinion that this should have been a 2 hour movie, instead of a 6-8 hour slog through bad QTEs.

It's Overwatch. You know what you're getting.
If you wanted to play on Steam Deck this makes it easier, and you don't have to install Battle.net either, so if that bugged you, go for it.