Recent reviews by Red Sargassum Dream

this is the most i've ever felt genuinely insulted by a video game. some of the worst acting and dialogue i've ever witnessed. completely godawful writing. main character is a grizzled ww2 combat veteran that talks like the comic relief character in a marvel movie. within 10 minutes you have a granny shooting a bazooka at a bomber drone telling it to "eat sh*t and die".

one of the first things you do is look for a valve to open a sealed door. to do this, you climb on stacked boxes conveniently marked with Yellow Paint™ only to find that the valve is sitting on the ground, beside a dead body and some strewn detritus, encircled with white paint. the dead guy made sure his final act in life was to find a bucket of white paint to circle on the ground where he was planning to drop the valve he ripped off a nearby door for some reason.

i would refund this if i could but i bought it during the last winter sale. learn from my mistakes, people

this game is lightning in a bottle. i've never had a desire to play extraction shooters before but the lore, world, art, and aesthetics of Marathon are so incredible that it's making me wanna get good just so i can experience more of it

Honestly really pleasantly surprised by this one. Had it sitting in my backlog for a long time - I always thought it looked cool but heard that it failed to compete with other games that came out around the same time (which makes sense, 2023 was a crazy year for games). It's a pretty impressive output for an indie studio. Story is competently written, acting is great, and even if Jak is a pretty cliched devil-may-care-rogue-with-a-tragic-backstory he's actually not grating. Kinda shocked by that actually.

The environments are incredibly beautiful. I've spent a lot of time so far just exploring and looking around. The worldbuilding is surprisingly deep, and although the plot isn't breaking any new ground, the dialogue has a lot of heart. I've found myself chuckling at Jak and others addressing some of the tropeyness head-on, asking questions the players are surely asking ("You expect me to believe a General came down here to find me and train me personally just because she was around and happened to have some free time?").

The combat is exciting and innovative, enemy variety is enough to keep you engaged but not overwhelmed. The gear mechanics and talent tree are fairly intuitive. I feel like there's a nice balance of customization options to be rewarding and result in satisfying gameplay without getting you bogged down in stats.

Pick it up if you're curious, leave your baggage at the door and enjoy Immortals of Aveum for what it is.

Story is interesting enough, but the gameplay is dreadfully boring and repetitive. Talk to someone, identify plants, go to a location, get more plants, repeat. Nothing particularly challenging or requiring a lot of note-taking, which is good for a light cozy mystery game but I was hoping for something a little more engrossing. I can see some people enjoying the repetitiveness but it wasn't for me.

Nothing I can add to this that others haven't already said before. This game is a masterpiece, a true marvel of game design. Lightning in a bottle.

If you're the type of person with the determination to push themselves as far as they can go to put all the pieces together, this is for you.

I was 50/50 on whether I'd give this a positive review but I'll just leave it at two things:
1) Soma is the most philosophically interesting and existentially terrifying game I've played in a very long time, possibly ever. The story is phenomenal. At its core Soma is a game about the mind-body problem (Cartesian dualism, metempsychosis) and asks some profound questions about consciousness and perception while making you do some pretty awful things to try and answer those questions.
2) Soma has some of the most boring gameplay I've ever experienced. It is one of the walking simulators of all time. Sometimes you hide. Sometimes you do some light puzzle solving. But mostly you walk, and walk, and walk, and walk. It is agonizingly boring. If you can put up with the tedious gameplay, the story payoff is worth it in the end, but don't be surprised if you just can't bring yourself to slog through it to get there.

I cannot conceive of a game fumbling the bag worse than Detroit: Become Human. Up until the last act this game had the potential to be the best narrative game ever - sprawling decision trees with compounding butterfly effects of all your choices actually resulting in meaningful player-driven change, completely ruined by the most hamfisted and hilariously ♥♥♥♥♥♥ ending. You can tell David Cage really thought he did something profound here with all the explicit references to the civil rights movement, but it was less of an homage and more of a farce. Really genuinely insulting stuff. I am immeasurably disappointed at the squandered promise of this game.

Overall not bad. Cute cozy mystery game with a compelling story. The ending has some real problems though - the ways in which your actions influence the ending aren't just obtuse, they're pretty illogical and directly counter some of the advice you're given early in the game (e.g. don't throw away guests' belongings). As a result it seems most players come to a very dissatisfying conclusion without any kind of resolution for the characters involved. But I still think it was a good effort from the developer, and I hope their next games iterate on this formula a bit more.

I have no idea why this game is so well reviewed. Case of the Golden Idol was better in basically every way - art style, atmosphere, plot, and puzzles. In Case, there were some frustrating moments but every tiny breakthrough was inspirational and exciting, and you felt rewarded for thinking through them. This game is not that. Rise of the Golden Idol holds your hand through every step of each solution rather than requiring you to do any work on your own or make any meaningful logical inferences. The only "difficult" moments come from trying to figure out which combination of words the game expects you to use to say the exact same thing you were thinking of, basically requiring you to "grammar cheese" some solutions. In the first game, those moments were not solved with grammar, but by actually changing the entire meaning of the sentence based on your word choices, and once you actually *knew* the solution, there was only one possible input.

On top of those issues, the setting of Rise was incredibly boring and the story was just one chapter after another in a long and winding tale of ~zany mad science hijinks~ that culminated in an obvious and unrewarding "twist."

If you're a fan of Case of the Golden Idol and you buy this game, I can only hope you don't feel as insulted by it as I do.

Editing my originally positive review for this game. Initially I thought Remedy got off to a bad start with a rocky launch but that they'd get a handle on it and smooth out some of the rough edges to make this a great little horde shooter, but as time goes on and their attempts to balance the game get more and more desperate, it's become clear they have absolutely no clue what they're doing with this game.

At launch I think Firebreak was actually great. People complained about the economy and progression systems but I didn't actually think it was too grindy or anything. I had some minor gripes (e.g. having to unlock pointless cosmetics before you got the upgrades that actually made your kit work) but they seemed committed to working out those kinks. Admittedly the onboarding experience was rough but they've certainly made strides in the right direction since then.

However, since the massive player drop-off after launch that they never recovered from, the game is basically unplayable. Fewer players result in almost all jobs being solo-only at this point, and the game does not seem to compensate for number of players in a match in any way. Enemy spawns are way overtuned, enemy health seems like it was shadow buffed, and all the while you're trying to handle multiple objectives by yourself, dealing with hazards that were designed for 3 people to keep under control, constantly dying even on Normal difficulty. This isn't even accounting for a handful of persistent bugs that make the already-overwhelming gameplay even more difficult to navigate.

Firebreak had a lot of potential but Remedy completely squandered it by hitting a deadline to release a minimum viable product. A couple of months in early access/open beta could have saved the game. As a massive Remedy fan and someone who was really hopeful for this game, I can't BS anyone by saying that it's worth your time.