Recent reviews by cold.fire

First off I just want to say that I really like the concept of this game. The visuals are quite good, and the customize-able airship is fantastic! Very cool vibes overall too... flying between ruined skyscrapers and wind turbines and the like. It really is a nice setting for an atmospheric survival game (heh, see what I did there?)

That said, at the time of writing this review, this game is pretty devoid of content. After really sinking my teeth into it, there is sadly very little to do. The announcements say that Forever Skies is set to leave early access later THIS YEAR. I honestly don't see how that's possible unless there's a HUGE update in the works. In its current state, I was able to complete all the available content in this game in less than 1 in-game week. And that INCLUDES all the time I spent customizing my airship... There is very little diversity in the types of towers you can find, and the landscape is basically an endlessly procedurally generated assortment of mountains, ruined skyscrapers, and towers of various types. It's visually quite nice, but in terms of gameplay there just isn't enough to do on these towers to keep your attention for long. Normal towers come in 3 types, and each type has about 3-5 varieties that you can find. At one point you can enter a 4th type of tower that houses an elevator that goes below the "dust" layer that prevents your airship from descending too far. Unfortunately, every "underdust" environment is exactly identical to each other, meaning once you've seen one you've seen them all. Same is true for the other tower varieties. After only a dozen or so hours of playing I became quite familiar with everything that I could possibly encounter along my journey.

Story elements are also fairly minimal. There are some data pads to find along the way that help you understand a bit about the history of the environment you're exploring, but it's not very deep or surprising. Environmental catastrophe, nature reclaimed the planet, yadda yadda yadda. There are also some collectible objects and posters you can find randomly within the towers that you can then use to decorate your airship. After playing for a bit, I started to find a lot of duplicates of these objects, indicating that there isn't much variety to the cosmetic aspects of the game either.

At the end of the day, I still had some fun playing this game, and I understand it isn't yet finished... but it just feels unusually empty for a game that is supposedly close to a final release. I look forward to seeing whatever gets added next, but I don't have high hopes for this game feeling "finished" within the next year. Compared to many of the other survival/crafting games I've tried, this one needs a lot more content than it currently has if it's going to get a recommendation from me.

Absolutely FANTASTIC remake of the original Half-Life game. I played Half-Life a lot back in the day, and I finally got around to checking out Black Mesa, and boy was it a trip down memory lane! I appreciated the nostalgia of course, but the updates are also much appreciated! The soundtrack is beautiful and so is the redesign of Xen (I don't remember as much of the original Xen, but it couldn't have looked anywhere near as gorgeous as the Black Mesa version).

Cyan has had a place in my heart for their stylized puzzle games ever since the original Myst when I was a kid... While not related to Myst, this latest addition to their catalog does not miss the mark! I was lucky enough to be able to borrow a VR headset from a friend so I could play this game in VR, and it was totally worth it, although there were a few puzzles that made me a little nauseated... I'm probably just sensitive though. (I have very little VR experience) Either way you play, it's definitely a game worth your time!

The narrative is intriguing and mysterious with a nice, albeit expected, twist/reveal near the end. The puzzles are very satisfying also and I was able to complete most of the game without any hints. The voice over work was also very nicely done and I enjoyed hearing her describe insights into the world I was exploring all along the way. Lastly the gameplay was very different in this game compared to their previous work, but it was still intuitive, and the VR element made it even more fun. I also appreciated how the Adjunct worked in VR to make it almost entirely unnecessary to reach around the room for objects to interact with (except for ladders) since all interactions were handled through a universal tool interface that could be operated at a distance. Very nice mechanic!

Overall I'd rate this game pretty high, among some of my other favorites from Cyan. If you've enjoyed games like Myst, Obduction, and others in the genre... then I think you'll enjoy Firmament.

Stray has been making the rounds because it's one of a small niche of games where you get to play as a CAT! It is also a sci-fi game set in a post-apocalyptic future, which is a rather unique twist. This game is also fairly short and can be completed in only a few hours.

Story: 5/5
I loved the story to this game most of all. Yes, the cat is very cute... but the world you find yourself in is a fascinating look at a post-apocalyptic future where robots have survived their creators and started to "evolve" on their own.

Gameplay: 5/5
Control scheme is pretty simple... run, jump, interact. I also love that there is a button dedicated to "meow." Overall the gameplay was fun and rewarding. Lots of characters and objects to interact with and the level design was excellent! Thinking like a cat is so very different from thinking like a humanoid.

Soundtrack: 4/5
Music was appropriate and atmospheric, but not very memorable.

Achievements: 3/5
Several of the achievements are time-based or luck-based, which I abhor... If you enjoy speedrunning games, you may feel differently about this.

Graphics: 4/5
No RTX compatibility, but otherwise I thought the environments looked beautiful!

I was intrigued when I saw the trailer for this game, but was left feeling disappointed. The gameplay is kinda boring, the block puzzles are really dumb and feel totally out of place in this type of game, and the story... well the story is actually pretty interesting, but it cuts off at the end with no resolution and no answers to all the questions that had been building throughout the narrative. That's pretty UNsatisfying if you ask me.

If this felt like more than half a game, I'd give it a recommendation despite the awful block puzzles (they weren't really all that hard, they were just annoying and repetitive). Unfortunately, at 5 hours of gameplay, it doesn't really seem finished. There is so much more story there... so who knows, maybe there will be a sequel to continue exploring the lore of this strange world? But as it currently stands, Cradle felt like just a small drop in the bucket and totally left me wanting.

In order to organize my frustrations with this game, I'm going to break this review down into a few categories. I was also going to spoiler tag comments related to the ending or other significant plot reveals, but Steam said my review was too long, so I had to post my full review here instead:
https://justpaste.it/8921v

Below is the shortened version of my Jedi: Fallen Order review...

Story (5/5)
See full review for my comments (WARNING: some spoilers are included in Story section).

Gameplay (2/5)
Lets just say, if there is ever a sequel to Jedi: Fallen Order, I don't want to play it but I probably will just for the story. Seriously, Respawn, if I wanted to play a FromSoftware game, I would have bought Elden Ring. I greatly dislike that style of game because why waste my valuable time doing something over and over again, banging my head against the wall.... FOR FUN?!? The difficulty curve on games like Dark Souls and all the other offshoots it spawned is simply not enjoyable for me. Even when I learned some of the moves and got my timing down, there were multiple times while playing that suffered from bad camera angles, or jumping glitches, or control inputs not working when I pushed the button on the controller... stuff that usually isn't all that detracting from the experience of most games, but in a Souls-like game, you are PUNISHED for any failure to press a button at the right time, or for a mis-timed jump, or if you CAN'T SEE the opponent you're fighting because you got backed up into a corner and your camera is halfway in a wall for a few seconds. These types of things make the gameplay feel a lot less like I am fighting the difficult enemies, and more like I am fighting the game itself. It is maddening! For this reason, I wound up quickly putting the difficulty on "Story Mode" to avoid breaking my controller (and my spirit).

Level Design (1/5)
Combat in this game can often be hampered by the layout of the environment, but that by itself can be forgiven as it is fairly common among action style games such as this... However, that is not the only complaint. Level design in this game was an absolute DISASTER. I suspect that, once again, in an effort to pad out the amount of hours it takes to get through the game, some studio exec had the devs put in a lot of backtracking. Backtracking in a game is not by itself evil... there can be very good narrative reasons to revisit an area you've been to previously in a game. Sadly, this is not one of those games! Most backtracking in this game was necessary only to access a previously blocked area because you needed a new ability or upgrade to access it (kinda like Metroid or Zelda). Unfortunately, backtracking in this game is particularly laborious for a variety of reasons, which I dive into in my full review at the link above.

Music (5/5)
See full review.

Achievements (3/5)
See full review.

Conclusions
If this game had been anything but a Dark Souls clone with gameplay padded out by needless backtracking, I think I might have loved it. But sadly, no... EA/Respawn gotta ride that cash cow of "what's popular right now" as if people need yet ANOTHER Dark Souls game. I have played almost every Star Wars video game out there. This is one of the worst ones I've played, hands down. Story and music are not enough to save a game on their own, sadly. EA has continued to lay ruin to the Star Wars gaming scene, and Jedi: Fallen Order is just the bitter icing on the massive turd cake of Star Wars games they have published and released. I enjoyed the story of Cal Kestis, but I am SO glad to be past the frustrating gameplay experience and total failure of level design that is J:FO. Wake me up when the KotOR remake drops... I need a taste of sweet nostalgia to cleanse my palate after this one.

This game looks and feels fantastic. I would describe it as a sort of sci-fi Zelda game, but without the combat. So, a much more casual Breath of the Wild, if you will. I absolutely adore the art style and the music, however the gameplay I found to be somewhat buggy.

Let me preface this next section by saying, I have not found ANY game-breaking bugs whatsoever. Sable is totally playable, and still very enjoyable... however, after playing through the entire game, I have to say the experience is severely lacking in polish. Audio bugs are the worst here, with sound effects stuttering and sounding distorted quite often. I also noticed numerous graphical bugs, like with animated textures being rotated the wrong way and other such visual oddities. There were also several weird UI bugs, such as your equipped mask not being remembered when you reload the game, instead defaulting to the first mask in your inventory. And lastly, there is some bugginess with the physics, which affects climbing more than anything. You do a lot of jumping and climbing in this game, and there are occasions when it is hard to grab onto a climbable surface for no particular reason. Thankfully those issues did not happen too frequently.

I would still recommend people try this game, because it is a very beautiful and relaxing experience. I just wish it didn't feel like an Early Access title. I know this game is still somewhat recent, so hopefully the developers can patch some of the bugs in a future update.

I initially got this game because it was compared to and in the same "puzzle" category with games like Myst and the like. The first thing I have to say as a huge Myst fan, is that this game is NOTHING like Myst in any way, aside from being an exploration-based click-to-navigate puzzle-solving game with some text to read.

The main difference from a narrative perspective is that The Eyes of Ara has a relatively shallow story that takes place entirely via written journals and such, never actually showing you an image of what the characters look like or revealing what happens to them... which I find somewhat hollow and disappointing. The story feels very much like an empty excuse the developers came up with to throw a bunch of puzzles at the player that don't make much sense from a "real-life" perspective, rather than being an immersive, fully fleshed-out world like I was hoping for. The other difference between games like Myst and The Eyes of Ara is that the vast majority of things to find in this game are simply collectibles for acquiring achievements, rather than actual puzzle or story elements. (Thank GOD achievements didn't exist yet when Myst was made...)

Only some of the puzzles actually advance the story of the game, and while there are many I actually found to be somewhat difficult or complicated, the reason was usually because I had missed an important clue, or the clue was too vague, or because the puzzle was of a style that required brute force rather than clever thinking. Aside from the handful of challenging puzzles, most of what you'll be doing while navigating through the castle is trying to locate pages, pictures, coins, gems, orbs, levers, or buttons hidden around in the environment. The clues to solve some of the puzzles seem unnecessarily obscure, and other puzzles required for finding collectibles are so simplistic that I wonder why there was even a puzzle there at all since the main difficulty is just spotting the place to click on to find it. In fact, that is the part of this game that I found the most tedious... finding things in the environment. THIS is really the sort of category I think this game falls into: "hovering your mouse pointer over every square inch of screen until the cursor changes so you can find the thing you needed to click on for a hint to solve the puzzle you can't figure out." And sadly, even that strategy failed numerous times.

Like Myst and other story-driven games without audio narration or character interaction, there are also numerous texts to find throughout the game. Some of these are journal entries from 3 of the 4 characters, others are clues to puzzles, and then there are some "red herrings" that don't seem to have any purpose whatsoever aside from being "another thing to find for an achievement."

My last complaint is about the navigation style this game uses... similar to the original Myst games, there are only a few spots in the environment that you can stand in to interact with the room you're in. In fact, in each room/screen there is only ONE or TWO spots that you can view the space from, and that's not all... you can't easily control which spot you stand in! Apparently, when there IS a second standing position, the only thing that determines which of the two spots you stand at is which door you used to enter the room. There is no other way to control your position! From each of the available spots you can find various different interactive objects or items, or doorways to walk through, but you can't necessarily interact or observe every object from just one location, which is pretty frustrating given the lack of manual control of your position. I really don't understand the purpose of implementing a navigation style like this and NOT giving the player direct control of where they are standing in the space!

Well, sadly this is not the kind of game that I was sold on, which is why I can't recommend it. If you actually like games where you have to struggle just to find all the hidden objects to progress... then by all means, go for it. If you are only in it for the challenging puzzles, it has a few moments I think are worthwhile... but if, like me, you are expecting a story-driven narrative puzzle exploration game similar to Myst or Quern, then I would give The Eyes of Ara a hard pass.

First, the positives: This game has a very nice story and a rather unique storytelling method. Another BIG plus is the score. This game has a cinematic soundtrack that really makes the story sing (no pun intended). I have a 12-year-old computer, so it ran a little bit choppy, but overall not too bad! I was expecting it to not run well at all, but was pleasantly surprised. The environments and effects were all beautifully done and I wish I could have seen more of it, but unfortunately I was getting bored of how slow the player's walking speed is... more on that below.

Now for the negatives: Story-wise, I had some difficulties following who all the characters are since you can't actually see what anyone looks like... they appear as swirly lights in a sort of flashback/vision kind of thing. Since the game takes place in the UK, the accents might have made it more difficult for me to tell people apart since they all speak with the same kind of voice... though if you are from the UK you may not have the same issue as me. Aside from voices, the only way to tell who was who was by the occasional reference to their name, but with at least 12+ characters to remember, I was frequently forgetting who was related and what their relationships were since you only get glimpses of bits and pieces of their lives and the glimpses are not necessarily in chronological order.

As walking simulators go, this one feels very very slow. By that I am mostly referring to the SPEED of walking. There is a "sprint" key/button, however it doesn't speed things up very much (more like a "jog" button) and is oddly unavailable when you are viewing certain story elements or moving indoors. There are many achievements that unlocked after finishing the story (for replay value I assume) and several of them are centered around exploring the environment thoroughly... however due to how slow the player walks, I honestly cannot see myself going for any of the extra achievements, or even replaying the game for any missed story elements because of how much time it takes just to get around the map. I think the developers were going for a "realistic" walking/running speed, but for anyone accustomed to playing video games, usually those speeds are quite exaggerated for the sake of making things not take SO LONG to get somewhere! There were many occasions where I wished I could move faster to just get to the next piece of story since there is literally no other interactivity in this game other than walking and clicking on things to open doors, activate messages, trigger story segments, etc.

TL;DR - Aside from pretty scenery, the walking parts are rather boring and take way too long.

Without going for any extra achievements, this game took a little under 5 hours for me to complete on my first playthrough. If I could have walked or ran faster, I suspect it may have shaved a good hour or two off of that total. If you enjoy walking sims and well-written stories, I'd recommend this one... just for the story/soundtrack and visuals. if you are more into running through stories quickly or completing 100% of the achievements, I'd give this one a pass.

I nominated this game for the "Defies Description Award" because it is quite literally that... a game that must be played to be understood. However I will give it a try...

Antichamber is at its core a puzzle game, however they are not simple logic or physics puzzles as many puzzle games would employ, but rather Antichamber is akin to a labrynth of the mind. There is no logic in the world of Antichamber, but through the course of the game you must learn to navigate the labrynth using your brain and a special tool to unlock passageways and maniuplate the environment. Over the course of the game you will find upgrades to your tool 3 times, the final upgrade allos you to access the final area of the game or the "exit" of the labrynth if you will.

Overall I think this game was executed amazingly well and the combination of atmospheric music/sound and mind-bending puzzles was a lot of fun to explore and solve. If you are a fan of conventional puzzle games, give this one a try... it may surprise you!