Recent reviews by Uverage

This definitely canon sequel to The Witness delves into areas of philosophy that the original was afraid to explore. The ending is an emotional roller coaster that really makes you think.

It's neat to see which word you get in each game and to compare to other people who also try this.

1. Greed
2. Stranger
3. Trusting

A neat little game that's maybe 30 minutes but worth the price.

Secret word: Stranger

A short little game that takes 20 minutes and is about the right price given what it is.

Secret word: Greed.

If I could sum up this game in one sentence, it would be "Don't be sad that it's over, be happy that it happened."

Outer Wilds made me feel things I never thought I would.
I now understand that art is supposed to not just show you sights and sounds you've never experienced before and that you didn't even imagine could exist, but also emotions that you never knew existed too.

If you wanted an example of how video games could be real art in that regard, I don't think you could find a better one here. I don't think you'll find a more bittersweet ending.

Because nearly all the progress in the game is your knowledge of it's mysteries and mechanics as a player, once you experience it once, you can never experience it again. Thus, the game has no replay value. My hope is that the game will make you feel at peace with that once you are done.

If you decide to try it, here's my pieces of advice:
-Play for more than 22 minutes, no matter what. If you still don't like it after that, fair enough, but you owe it to yourself to play at least 22 minutes.
-Don't look up spoilers or puzzle solutions if you can at all help it. You will be robbing yourself of an experience that you can never get back if you do. I'm not bullshitting you. If you had to pick one game that you genuinely stuck by not spoiling for yourself, make it this one. Don't even look up the game on Wikipedia. I'm not aware of any piece of media you will benefit more from going in as absolutely cold as you can.

I used to think the fact that we die robs our life of meaning. This game taught me that doesn't have to be true.

The game designers aren't afraid to expose how the mechanics of the game work via the tutorial because they know the game is still fun even if the player understands the mechanics behind it. The AI of Jimmy the antagonist is decently done without ever seeming unfair.

The developer seems to know the difference between actual tension and jump scares, and the game is able to maintain that tension. There's almost an overuse of audio stings when you catch glimpses of Jimmy, but it's not too overdone.

The blending of the FMV elements and CG environment is REALLY well done. I also enjoyed the other game by this developer, Contradiction, and we need more mid-range games like this. I'm excited to see what the they come out with next.

A solid little puzzle game. Completely playable without a VR headset, but the controls are clearly designed for VR.

TLDR summary---
Interesting premise. Straightforward gameplay that stays interesting for a majority of the game. Could have been a bit longer, but still worth the price. Recommended.

Premise---
In Carrion you play as a blob of blood and guts trying to escape from the lab where you've been imprisoned.

Mechanics---
Your health is represented as how much biomass you have, which can be increased by consuming the people working at the lab (some of whom are armed), and decreased by taking damage. As you progress, you collect more and more abilities, some of which are only available if you are a particular size. Bigger is not always better in every situation!

Gameplay---
Some areas of the game world are locked behind gates which require a particular ability to unlock, similar to metroidvania games. While this has the potential to be frustrating if implemented poorly, I found as I progressed that the obstacles I encountered were consistently well-matched to what abilities I had at the time.

Several encounters act as puzzles that you have to use various abilities in combination to solve, which helps gameplay feel fresh. Other encountered seem designed to have more than one solution to them, depending on how you want to approach them. (Usually it's frontal combat vs a more strategic approach utilizing your abilities.)

What they got right---
The art design is pixel art evocative of the style of sci-fi of the late 1970's and early 1980's, with large industrial machines with a patina of rust and large cavernous networks of passageways and plumbing. The visual and sound design do a good job of communicating what you can and can't do in the game, while still making it worthwhile to explore and experiment.

The feel of the Carrion creature you play is spot-on. The physics of your creatures body change as you grow bigger. You really feel like an absolute chonk of a unit when your biomass is maxed out, like nothing can stop you. Some puzzles require you to reduce your size to small afterward, which really causes you to notice how much faster and more agile you feel compared to when you are a behemoth.

The sound design is also excellent, with subtle things like the sound pitch of your tentacles changing depending on how large you are. The music and sounds you make when taking damage are clearly inspired by the Alien franchise, but the design of the Carrion creature is unique, and so it feels both completely fresh and appropriate.

What they got wrong---
Because you don't have any kind of map, it can become confusing to know which way is the direction of progress after a certain point in the game.

The game is long enough to be worth the price, but feels like it could have gone on a bit longer. Most of your abilities are designed to be hard counters to obstacles you encounter, while some aren't really necessary for gameplay, and so it would have added to the game if there had been another area or two containing puzzles that required the more under-utilized abilities.

Length and Replayability---
I finished the game in about 5 hours.
There's not much replayability once you finish it as far as I can tell, unless you feel like repeating those 5 hours again.

Welcome to the Game is an interesting attempt at combining horror and hacking, but it feels unfinished and doesn't do either very well.

The mechanics of the game, while grounded in gameplay balance, seem arbitrary and unjustified. A 30-day time limit is revealed early on in the game, but why a time limit, and why 30 days?

The core of the game is visiting random websites and simply seeing what you can find, eventually hoping to find fragments of the URL to the Red Room website. Most of the links at any given time are dead, and are apparently only operational during certain hours of the day. Why this is the case is never explained. Most of the game for me consisted of trial and error in trying one link, finding a 404 page in the vast majority of cases, and then going back and trying the next one.

At random, hackers will try to "hack" you, and you have to complete one of two minigames to resist. The minigames themselves are challenging and infrequent enough to be servicable, but why do hackers care enough about you to bother in the first place?

You have the ability to step away from your computer and look around the room you're in, which you will need for the kidnapper mechanic. When you start a new game, a russian guy starts creeping around in an attempt to kidnap you, which results in a game over. To prevent him from finding you, when you hear noises from around you that sound especially kidnappy, you turn round in your chair and turn off your room lights and wait an indetermininant amount of time before flicking them back on and continuing to play the game. I'm not kidding. Why someone would want to kidnap you specifically is unexplained, so I guess he was so busy kidnapping everyone in the world who starts using the deep web, he didn't have time to buy a flashlight.

I can see the potential of kidnapper mechanic, but it quickly becomes more annoying than scary and feels more like an arbitrary interruption to playing the game than part of it.

The writing in a lot of the websites kept my interest, but in the end the biggest flaw this game has is that at it's core it's more tedious than it's worth. When clicking a link you have to wait a few seconds for it to load, and the trial-and-error nature of the links and puzzles results in you waiting for that loading bar at the top of your browser again and again.

This game was less than $2 for me on steam, so it's not exactly a purchase I regret but for all the potential it has, it feels incomplete. They should have spent 2.5 times the effort developing the game and sold it for $5, and I hope they do just that should they ever make a sequel.

At it's price it won't really be a waste of your money, but it will be a waste of your time.