Recent reviews by WHAM

"Och aye Loch Ness widdly-peep fanny!"

Fleeing crimes he's committed, Still Wakes the Deep finds the player character taking on a job on an oil rig in the 1970's in the hopes of buying himself some time to sort himself out before facing justice. Alas, justice decides to follow him, he gets fired from his job and then the world ends over the course of about four hours. What a thursday!

The game looks and sounds quite nice, especially with some very finely cast voice acting, but due to Unreal Engine shenanigans it was a pain to get running properly. Mirrors don't work, shadows look awful and the framerate tanks at seemingly random times just to make sure any immersion is regularly shattered for the player. Still, the visual designs do earn a special mention, with the oil rig looking and feeling exceedingly detailed and accurate, while the various monsters that spew out to infest it and hound the player look appropriately macabre and twisted.

What the game lacks, then, is a game. There are almost no real mechanics to speak of, no real challenge to deal with and a player with even the most basic understanding of videogames will breeze through the game without any challenge. Monsters are rarely present and easily distracted and an inordinate amount of playtime is dedicated to walking, climbing, holding down buttons and repeating interactions that do not challenge or even have a way to fail them.

As for the story, the game mostly comprises of smaller character stories that begin and then unceremoniously end. Towards the end of the game people are killed off at such a rapidfire pace that it becomes a chore to sit through the (certainly well written and acted) "forgive me for I couldn't save you" -speeches. Especially since the game is so short that we really don't have the time to bond or begin to care for any of the characters in a way that would justify these scenes for the player. As for the main story, the game is purposefully vague and leaves much unexplained and open to interpretation.

Was it all a dream?

Probably, actually. That'd make the most sense.

Being so short and not really fun to play, I can't really recommend the game. You'd get just as much out of the experience by watching someone's longplay video of Still Wakes the Deep, and save yourself a bit of money doing so.

Playtime: 4+ hours (A single playthrough)

Ratings (1-10)
Visual: 8
Audio: 10
Story: 4
Gameplay: 3
Overall: 4

"One little peek couldn't hurt, right? RIGHT?"

You wake up in your apartment with an urge to LOOK OUTSIDE, but a whispered voice warns you not to do that. Outside, in the hallways, those who did look change into horrible meat-creatures, twisting and sprouting eyes and appendages, becoming something utterly inhuman...

Look Outside is a rare example of a game that can take a template and an engine, the RPG Maker to be specific, and turn it into a compelling experience through immaculate writing, theme and artwork, while adding some of its own twists on top of some basic JRPG styled mechanics, such as the traditional turn based combat.

The game sets you up with a challenge to survive in your apartment building for 15 days, managing your time, food, resources and medicine, while encountering your neighbors and visitors who come knocking on your door as you try to pass some time by playing videogames or browsing social media. Stepping outside you'll often find your surroundings changing day by day, new doors opening, new monsters emerging. All the while a mysterious group of astronomers seek your assistance on their effort to understand what is truly happening outside to cause all this chaos.

I've just spent three paragraphs describing the game, but I still feel like I've only scratched the surface with how rich this game is with interactions and events.

All of the above is wrapped in a lovingly crafted package of art. Thematically appropriate music, while not outstanding, manages to regularly set the mood just right, and the monstrous and unnerving sounds added on top do fine work at feeding your imagination. The massive amount of unique pixel art for all the different characters and entities is also incredibly well made and encourages further exploration just to see what new monstrous designs you might witness behind the next corner.

There's plenty of reason to recommend Look Outside with all of the above, but a special mention is needed for the story and theming of the game. The way characters are written, the dialogue and the genuinely disturbing moments that manage to hit just that little bit deeper with how the writing allows you to really feel the distress the characters in the game are experiencing, it's all exceptionally well done.

I cannot recommend Look Outside enough, and at the time of writing a new update just dropped, so: go give it a try!


Playtime: 15+ hours (A single playthrough)

Ratings (1-10)
Visual: 9
Audio: 8
Story: 9
Gameplay: 8
Overall: 9

"It's all random!"

Amnesia is a fairly well established horror franchise known especially the first game of its line, which has a somewhat legendary status. Frictional games has developed other highly praised horror games as well, such as SOMA, and is well known for twisty and interesting narratives and high-tension gameplay that is designed to a T.

And then there is Amnesia, the Bunker, a game so far removed from the other Frictional developed games that I was genuinely shocked by how poorly it seems to work! The Bunker abandons linear storytelling and most of its narrative for the sake of randomness, openness and replayability, with the last one being a particularly baffling concept for a horror game where, once you've dealt with the monster once, the horror is significantly reduced. As an additional gameplay quirk the Bunker pressures the player with strict time limits that encourage abandoning stealth and caution and rushing everywhere so as not to run out of fuel for the all-important generator.

It feels like every mechanic designed for this game is fighting against the very core concepts of horror game design, leading to an experience that flops on its face.

So what else is there? Visually the game is okay at best. Grimy and dark and moody at times, though so often the players vision is blurred and foggy or just obscured by the lack of light that there is very little to see. What few character models we get to glimpse are fairly crude, save for the monster which does seem to have a fairly neat design. Sound is by far the strongest aspect of the game, with the monsters and rats crawling about, the artillery outside thumping and shuddering the walls and the generator sputtering as it peters out.

As for story, there is almost none to be found, especially compared to the Amnesia games of old. The Bunker suggests a few loose events but provides very limited detail and the only two voiced characters clear up any mystery or surprise from the game early on through their journals and notes. There was so little to discover that, upon completing the game, I went to look over the achievements to see what I'd missed. Surely there was more to the game than THAT!?

No there wasn't. Just an endlessly replayable randomly laid out mode to grind out over and over. I'm sure that has its fans, but I can't really count myself among them, and thus cannot recommend the game.

Playtime: 5+ hours (A single playthrough)

Ratings (1-10)
Visual: 8
Audio: 9
Story: 3
Gameplay: 5
Overall: 4

Having driven a handful of races in the 2-player career mode during the free weekend, I can confirm that F1 25 is F1 24 which is F1 23. Very little has changed, aside from some visual polish, driver updates and tweaks to car handling. Many of the old bugs have carried over as-is from the years-old versions:
- Starting grid can be malformed and cars may start in incorrect positions or on the wrong lap
- Race engineer messages are a random jumble
- Goals and objectives can randomly fail to trigger correctly
- Notifications and dialogue related to career events can be sent to wrong player or not be related to actual events
- AI pit strategy remains confused (AI can still happily pit for from inters to wett on the last lap of the race, surrendering 25 seconds of pit time instead of driving 2 seconds slower for a single lap)

Some new oddities have also popped up, such as repeated approval requests for driver rating updates, often multiple times per session, despite showing no changes as far as I can tell. Unskippable tutorial messages, awful music, ruthless cross-promotion of the F1 movie, it's all here.

All in all, my review remains unchanged from the previous entries. If you have any of the recent games, there is no real need to update to F1 25. If you want multiplayer, almost anything else is better, unless you are specifically looking for the full weekend structure and long career mode racing with a friend. F1 remains the only game to offer a 2 player career mode, and that feature alone might be worth it for some people to buy in, at least on a heavy discount.

"Whack! Bonk! Chop! Crush! Smash! Clipp!"

Dysmantle is an odd breed of a game, combining elements of comfy games with zombie survival crafting, top-down open world exploration and a fairly mindless number-go-up mentality. The result is a nice enough game for when you really feel like shutting your brain off and just passing some time with a rather chill bit of inoffensive entertainment product.

The game has you roaming around a fairly large island, comprised of all the usual suspect regions: city, town, village, forest, desert, ice and mountains. You use your weapons to whack zombies, collect resources, unlock new areas and level yourself up with upgrades. The key thing that sets Dysmantle apart is its destruction. Everything that isn't part of the base terrain can be broken up into materials. Walls of houses, cars on the street, trees in the forest, if it's a 3D model you can and eventually will break it into bits you can then use to make other bits. Nicer bits! Shinier bits!

Expansion packs add some new content which I also explored, though I can't really say how much value they add to the experience. Some new areas to explore, pets to keep you company and some lore that the game really doesn't do all that much with, as Dysmantle is not really the kind of game that seeks to mentally challenge its player, but rather prefers to let the player zone out while turning an entire cityscape into a rather satisfyingly clean and flat piece of land.

Definitely not for everyone, then, but Dysmantle tickled a nice spot in my brain for a while and thus earns a recommendation. Though a fair warning: towards the end the game began to demand quite a few materials that take a LOT of grinding and farming to accumulate, so if growing your own potatoes by the hundreds does not strike your fancy, maybe reconsider before taking the plunge.

Playtime: 45+ hours (A single playthrough)

Ratings (1-10)
Visual: 7
Audio: 6
Story: 6
Gameplay: 8
Overall: 7

"The Rat knows what you've done. You do not."

So this is a game in which you have a rat, You can shake the rat and the rat screams. Sometimes the rat talks to you so that the game can pretend in has an actual story to tell, but as you might have figured out from the fact you can shake a rat, this game isn't exactly trying to be serious.

Beyond the rat there is an assortment of drab, brown and ugly environments to roam around, some switches to flip in order to open doors and make progress, a few loose attempts at scaring the player and then it all ends in a way that doesn't even really do anything fun with the rat.

Cannot recommend, unless you really, REALLY feel like you need to shake a rat.

Did I mention the rat screams? It screams a lot.

Playtime: less than 2 hours (A single playthrough)

Ratings (1-10)
Visual: 5
Audio: 6
Story: 2
Gameplay: 3
Overall: 3

"I guess we're walking some more..."

Pacific Drive boasts a really neat concept at first glance: a lonesome road trip through the haunted roads of a mysterious walled-off exclusion zone, where the player must evaluate their routes, scavenge for supplies and maintain their vehicle in order to achieve their goals and escape.

But once the game gets going the reality of what this game offers turns out to be something rather different. Pacific Drives gameplay quickly boils down into a fairly short and repetitive cycle. You spend an inordinately long time fixing up and maintaining your car in a garage, then drive off. You then drive for a distance so short you'd probably have made it faster on foot before having to dismount to explore and collect stuff, then hop into the car again, drive another short hop and repeat, repeat, repeat.

The act of turning the engine off, putting on the parking brake, opening the door, exiting the car, closing the door and doing all that again in reverse order is what most of the time in this game seems to be made up of. It gets tedious quickly and the rewards gained don't really make it all feel worthwhile.

The game tries to spice up its gameplay with obstacles and anomalies, unpredictable dangers to the players progress, but these also become known, repetitive and dull very quickly as it becomes clear the challenges are quite static and easily avoided. Sure, you'll get zapped or bumped from time to time to ensure you'll need to repair your car or replace a part, but it never really felt truly threatening as the difficulty level seems quite low by default.

Story and character mostly come via radio conversations you get to listen in on as the silent protagonist. Scientists who chose to stay inside the walled off Zone ramble off technobabble, bicker and argue and act shocked and surprised at every point of story progression, but their lack of direct involvement in anything makes what story and drama there is feel distant and hollow, the characters forced stereotypes crafted to fill out base archetypes.

While I did complete the game, it left me feeling quite disappointed and exhausted, and I can't really recommend Pacific Drive in the end. The game never cashes in the promise of a haunted road trip, but instead turns a fairly basic scavenging game into a tedious hassle with the inclusion of a car that feel unnecessary and tacked on, rather than feeling like the glorious centerpiece it should have been.

Playtime: 18+ hours (A single playthrough)

Ratings (1-10)
Visual: 8
Audio: 7
Story: 4
Gameplay: 5
Overall: 5

"Awooo~"

The people waited for a long, long time for this one, so Silksong had some major expectations to fulfill as it finally came out. And it fulfilled those expectations neatly, and then some!

Gorgeous visuals, intricate animations and perfectly befitting soundtrack tickle all the same spots that the now legendary Hollow Knight did back in its day, showing Team Cherry has been putting all of their time and effort into fine-tuning their latest creation, building on top of a solid foundation that has had all the time in the world to mature now. There is very little new I can say here: if you've played Hollow Knight, as you surely should before getting into Silksong, you'll know what awaits here.

So, what's actually new here?

Silksong puts us in the chitinous boots(?) of Hornet, a character from Hollow Knight, as we explore a new time and place beyond the familiar realm of Hallownest, finding ourselves instead escaping captivity into the unfamiliar lands of Pharloom. In gameplay the key difference comes from a wider variety in movesets available to the player, as well as from the greater emphasis on movement, platforming and acrobatics. Especially the pogo-jumping from Hollow Knight is expanded on here, becoming an integral mechanic in traversing many of the levels. Equippable tools, effectively sub-weapons with limited uses and a material cost for using them, allow players to further fine-tune their builds to their preference. Another difference is the way quests are more clearly defined, objectives labelled and highlighted for the player to complete. Some of these quests (or Wishes) can be quite a challenge to complete early on, and the game seems to be built with the idea in mind that the player is to explore and roam around, finding materials, equipment and upgrades to help deal with the more notable challenges ahead of them.

In the end my greatest gripes come from the story of the game. While Hornet, unlike the little knight we played as in the previous game, is a speaking protagonist and readily comments on many characters and events, the player is often left out of a conversations deeper meaning. Hornet clearly has some deeper insights and secret knowledge that their dialogue alludes to on several occasions, but the player is not brought up to speed sufficiently, leading to some conversations feeling quite frustratingly vague despite being given an air of grave importance to the story. In the end, then, then game also seems to end with something of a whiff as the ending cutscene is similarly wordless and open to interpretation as those of the first game in its day, choosing not to make use of Hornets’ vocabulary in any way, shape or form to convey any deeper story as part of its conclusion.

All in all, Silksong is easy to recommend for all who have played through Hollow Knight. It presents a hard but fair challenge and a heaps of content for a remarkably fair pricepoint even outside of any potential future discounts. I look forward to seeing what Team Cherry comes up with next, maybe around 2034 next time?

Playtime: 36+ hours (A single playthrough)

Ratings (1-10)
Visual: 9
Audio: 10
Story: 7
Gameplay: 9
Overall: 10

I was coaxed into installing this and giving it a go since it's "free". The intro sequence works hard to introduce you to gambling mechanics, and seems to spam you with endless glittery icons with zero gameplay for what seems to account for at least the first hour. Everything is geared towards gambling addicts getting pulled in by pretty girls with squeaky voices and the monetization is obviously perdatory.

Gacha games are gambling and gambling has no part in videogames. This should not be on Steam.

"The pot of disgusting things was macabre and I didn't want to think about it, just like the sixteen other unpleasant things in this room. I'd run out of ways to describe them hours ago..."

I was one of the earliest backers of Asylum, back in the days when Kickstarter was still a brand-new thing. For the game to then spend well over a decade in the oven and coming out in a state where it could have done with quite a bit more baking is, and there really is no way to sugarcoat this, a disappointment.

So, what are we looking at here?

Asylum is a very traditional point and click adventure game with a first person perspective and a focus on horror as a theme, developed by folks that worked on a game called Scratches, which as a bit of a cult classic reputation. Asylum mimics the stylings of Scratches in several ways, while trying to add new features like non-player characters we can directly interact with, a larger setting and a bit more of everything.

Visually the game struggles a lot. Despite each viewpoint in the game being what I assume is a static 2D image with some Unreal engine particle effects and shaders overlaid on it, the game struggles and has even a modern GPU like the RTX 3080 ti churning hard and hot for seemingly no reason other than Unreal Engine being what it is. The scenes and especially the scene transitions seem to have weird flaws and oversights and the 3D scenes that were baked into the games 2D backgrounds are occasionally missing textures or stretching textures out in an ugly way. Characters animate with the expected stiffness and while some of the first person cutscenes and objects look fine, the stiffness of everything bleeds out any emotion or immersion fast.

Much like its predecessor, Asylum does a lot better with its audio. Ambience and music work well to build tension and suggest at what might lie behind the corner, keeping the player anticipating scares that may or may not manifest. Sadly the voice acting of the characters in the game is also struggling both in actor delivery as well as in the technical department. Either different hardware or configuration was used to record different characters voices and the result is noticeable and takes a lot away from the atmosphere. Unsurprisingly the game seems to want to limit our interaction with characters towards the end.

The core of the game is figuring out and solving various puzzles ranging from the most mundane and obvious to fetch quests to using the key on a lock. Only one or two puzzles felt in any way challenging and numerous puzzles seem to solve themselves or lack any kind of implementation at all. Clues are given and dialogue seems to hint at more complexity than there really is sometimes.

While nostalgia and the urge to see more of this genre might have led me to give this game a recommendation, the story is what finally leads me to turn that thumb down on Asylum. With such a long development time one would imagine that if anything there had been ample time to figure out the story of the game, how it is structured and delivered to the player, but this does not seem to be the case. Numerous story paths and ideas are alluded to in recorded audio and written text, but much of this serves only to pad out the game or add relatively mundane context to unimportant things. The main story itself seems to abandon many of the plot threads that have been laid out during the earlier parts of the game, and the game ends in a rush that seems to skip over several puzzles that are suggested and likely were planned at some point, but which have no implementation in the final game. It feels to me like a lot of ideas were scrapped here, left out and the final version of the story seems to wrap itself up with a shrug and a 'figure it out' rather than any concrete resolution that the player could figure out just by playing the game.

The fact that, after finishing the game, I saw that the longest forum thread for this game is people discussing, debating and being generally confused by the ending makes this ever more obvious: whatever the devs may have wanted to convey to us players never really lands or ends up making sense as a story.

Asylum is a great bit of horror ambience and atmosphere that fails to go anywhere all too significant as the developers seem to have bitten off more than they could chew. As much as I'd love to see more from these creators in the future, the long dev time and final state of Asylum leads me to think there is a need to cut down on scale and focus on simpler ideas, or try something entirely different in the future.


Playtime: 6+ hours (A single playthrough)

Ratings (1-10)
Visual: 7
Audio: 9
Story: 4
Gameplay: 6
Overall: 6