Silent Hill 2 (ps2)

 

Silent Hill 2 is notoriously ranked as one of the greatest horror games ever, or even one of the greatest video games of all time. Of course I had to play it at some point, But i wanted to wait until I had a proper retro setup with a CRT tv and original ps2 and a physical copy of SH2. Finally I got it all and was able to sit down in pitch blackness with the audio up to experience what everyone is talking about.

The game has an iconic start where your estranged wife writes you a letter to come find her in Silent Hill. You start off in a bathroom of all places and slowly wander around in the fog until you come across the city. The atmosphere and artstyle is very unique and unmistakable, especially the fog and surreal otherwordly ambience, music, and atmosphere. It feels like you're playing a dream or something, they nailed that aspect.

The mechanics are pretty minimal. It's a sort of mix between classic Resident Evil and other more point & click adventure games. Where you have these tank controls by default, that you can actually switch to more modern style controls in the menu, and you also have an unlimited inventory where you need to extremely carefully exmaine the enviornments to find required items to progress. You also get a decent selection of weapons from melee to guns, the controls for the guns are pretty similar to classic RE, albeit a bit less restrictive as you have more mobility and theres even a quick-turn button.

When you start the game you get TWO difficulty selections. One for combat, and one for 'riddles'. Its pretty amazing that you can actually adjust the puzzle difficulty, and apparently everytime you play through the game the numbers/codes for the puzzles are randomized so you cant just look things up online mostly, forcing the player to actually figure it out themselves for the most part. That's a good and immersive touch.

But in terms of overall combat difficulty, on the default setting Normal, its not a very hard game at all. There is a huge abundance of ammo and medical supplies, and its incredibly easy to just run past 90% of enemy encounters in the game. That's not to say the threats arent heart pumping, its almost better this way where its not constantly frustrating trial & error, instead its always this looming nearby threat you have to worry about.

The way combat works for the most part is whenever you enter an area, its almost like enemies just constantly respawn, except sometimes they don't. I'm not sure, I couldn't really figure out the rhyme or reason to it. Like certain areas there will always be respawning enemies, and others there wont be? It's weird, its not really that bad, but for much of the game I figured there just wasnt any point to kill enemies because they'll just respawn anyway. But as I played more I found some enemies/certain areas where enemies dont respawn and warranted using ammo to get rid of them. Its fun and satisfying to use guns like Shotgun/pistol and then kicking them when theyre down to permanently kill them.

The core of the gameplay here is going into new areas, and constantly pulling up the Map Screen because as you check doors and explore, little scribbles and markings get dynamically added to your map so its imperative to be constantly checking the map screen to try to figure out what to do next. This is a decent system, but I do have some complaints. For one thing it takes way too damn long for the map to be pulled up, its almost like 4 second load/animation everytime you pull in and out of the map screen, which you do CONSTANTLY, like youll be looking at the map once every 10 seconds atleast in a lot of cases. Another gripe is the map screen is , at first, really confusing and hard to make sense of what any of the scribbles mean. Its not until you put many hours in until you start to figure out the method of how these scribbles work. Which in one sense is kind of immersive and fun because it helps the confusion and sense of being lost in this scary place, but also doesnt really make sense because if you yourself were the one scribbling markings on the map, you'd atleast know what your own markings mean.

There are these frequent big red pages which are save points, the saves are unlimited unlike RE, and the save screen is creepy and this intense bright red color with James staring at himself which is quite haunting. So you never feel like you're really losing progress, because its pretty hard to die actually. I don't think I really died at all during my plathrough unless it was on purpose or something.

So you start the game wandering through this forest, to a graveyard, then arrive at silent hill, you walk around the town until you get inside of the Apartments.

The Apartments is the first real area of the game where it will test if you can get through this game or not. Actually, I played this game once before many years ago, and got to the beginning apartmnts area, got so lost and confused that I just dropped the game out of apathy towards it

Coming back to it later, yeah this area is kind of bad.
For starters its extremely dark, like not just my TV, just in general the game can be so pitch black you genuinely cant see much of anything.

That by its self wouldn't be so bad, but in this apartments area, literally every single room and hallway looks exactly the same. It's literally like the same hallway/room copy pasted 50 times. No joke. What the fuck were they thinking? Couldnt they have made set pieces or more individual places stand out more? It's a mess. If they were trying to go for some fever dream where youre stuck in a loop and at a total loss, I guess it worked, but at a certain point its just fucking tedious and annoying to play through.

But slowly as you start to figure out that you NEED the map, and you NEED to stare at the map screen every 10 seconds, you start to make your way through this place.

The map thing is especially make or break because you have to PICK UP the maps before you can even use them. Usually they're at the beginning of the area, but sometimes they're not. And that brings me to another really bad gripe I unfortunately have with this game:

Items are REALLY hard to see for the most part.

In a game all about finding KEY items to progress, its incredibly easy to just run right past an important item because they are so tiny or are actually just hidden somewhere you can barely see.
Eventually I figured out that the characters head actually turns and looks towards items in the room, but that too is really easy to miss, and doesn't even happen if you're sprinting.

So combine extremely dark enviornments, with miniscule tiny items that dont shimmer or gleam or do anything to look distinct and are incredibly easy to miss, it starts to be a nightmare, for better or worse.
 
Ontop of that, when you DO find the items, some of the puzzles required to progress are just flat out bullshit.

Overall I actually had a good time with most of the puzzles, and could figure them out myself, but theres a handful that are just stupid, unintuitive, or the games mechanics just fuck you over and is bullshit.

For example, inside the apartments, you find the item 'Pack of juice'  so I'm like, ok, pack of juice, what is that health or something? Well I eventually cleared every single room in the apartment and got stuck for progress, missing a crucial item. It turns out you're somehow supposed to know that you need to find a Garbage chute, and Use the Pack of Juice on the Garbage Chute to unstick some key item from the chute and then go get it. I even found the garbage chute and inspected it, but the hint wasn't very clear.

Other example of something bullshit that makes no sense
Early on in the apartments you find a handgun, but you CANNOT pick it up until you find the flashlight.
I found the handgun first, and for 5 mins was spamming all sorts of angles to try to pick it up. Nope. Very stupid.

Some other examples of bullshit puzzles:
Later on in the game theres a room that deliberately breaks your flashlight when you enter it, then locks you inside. It spawns nonstop bugs that crawl on you and damage you. I quickly learned that i can turn off my flashlight to avoid the damage. Well it also turns out that unless you turn the flashlight on, you cant interact with the keypad by the door. So for 15 mins I would just wlak around the room spamming Interact and nothing would happen , because the game taught me to turn off my flashlight to avoid damage. Wtf?

Other examples of cryptic bullshit that barely makes sense:
Later on in the game in the Prison area, theres a locked hatch on the floor. I cleared the entire prison area, got a bunch of items. Tried using the items on the floor, nothing worked. It was like a piece of hair, a horse shoe, and some doll or something. Apparently you're somehow supposed to know to combine ALL 3 of these items into a Handle for the chute. How does that shit even make sense? Mind boggling.

Also, in this prison area, the map is REALLY badly hidden and almost impossible to see. So I ran around the entire prison without a map and obviously couldn't make sense of anything or figure out where to go, so had to kill myself and look up online where the fucking map is. Why cant they just give you the map or make it more obvious? It's just annoying.


Almost done naming off the bullshit parts

ANother one:

Towards the end of the game in the hotel, theres a dining room where you have a cutscene with a piano.
The first time I was in this area, I walked around the whole place spamming Use on everything to make sure I didnt miss anything. Ok

Then I explored the whole hotel until I got stuck, couldn't progress
Turns out there was apparently a fucking key somewhere in the dining room on a random plate? Yeah, COULDN"T see it. The items are MINISCULE and really easy to miss. Why!?

Lastly, in the hotel area, theres a music box that needs 3 boxes.
Well guess what, one of the boxes is OUTSIDE THE HOTEL ON A WELL, so if you ran past it and cleared the whole hotel, who the hell would think to leave the hotel and backtrack through the game looking for it? Just bad.

And finally, when you do get all 3 music boxes, you'd think you just walk up to the pedistal thing and press Use on all 3, but nope, you have to somehow know to walk on all sides of the pedistal and put all 3 on each side. Except the camera angle is fucked up and you can barely tell that theres anything on the sides.

Oh yeah and when you do finally put all 3 pieces on it, it asks you a puzzle that requires trivia knowledge of random childrens fairtytales like Little mermaid and shit. And theres nowhere in the game that tells you the answers. So you have to either go watch 3 fairy tale movies, or google the answers. Bad.


With all those gripes out of the way the game is still amazing.
Once you get past the apartment things do pickup and get unforgettable. You  slowly start to uncover more and more of Silent Hill, getting dozens of maps of new areas. You go to a Hospital, Apartments, Explore the whole city, This crazy underground labyrinth/prison area, it does feel like you go on a journey.

The plot/characters/cutscenes/voice acting are equally bizarre, hilarious, and disturbing. You find all sorts of weird characters that just act off, theres this crazy suicidal weird woman called Angela that gives you her knife that apparently does nothing? theres this other guy who at first is just a normal dude you find him puking inside a room in the apartment, then later on he goes crazy with a gun saying hes sick of being picked on and kills someone and tries to kill you, you find this almost clone of your wife Mary, called Maria, which is just really bizarre and she ends up tagging along with you almost like an escort mission but not really. And of course all sorts of strange things happen with them. The voice acting is kind of terrible but in a campy, enderaing B movie way. At times it can be great and convincing, but other times just sounds hilarious and has laugh out loud moments where you'll be laughing at how edgy or blatant some of the writing is. Like early in the game in the Apartments, the first time you discover Pyramid head cutscene, it almost looks like hes raping another monster or something! what the fuck! crazy stuff.

The monster designed is twisted as well, almost literaly. Because some of the monsters will  have legs where their torso should be, they look disturbing and creepy. Theres a decent variety too, you have those guys, these zombie type nurse things, the weird monsters that crawl on the roofs/under the fence floor things, its kinda hard to explain the monsters in this game they just look really nightmarish and well done.

One of the greatest things SH2 does is the sound design. This is some of the greatest audio design i've experienced in a game. The ambience and sound effects/music are amazing. When you go through the various enviornments there will be many points where random sound cues will trigger or just weird noises or spooky things and you have no idea what it is, if its coming for you, or what. Like theres an are in the prison where certain places will trigger a sound of this creepy groaning noise, but you never find out what it is. Another place plays sounds of a baby crying, another place you can knock on a bathroom stall, and after a few seconds it knocks back at you. Just little things like that. The music is very well done with disturbing swells of creepy droning ambient music that are just perfect. Theres also many uplifting/nostalgic/melancholic sounding songs that play throughout various parts of the plot.

For me the game was constantly engaging and I wanted to keep playing to figure out what Mary meant by 'Find me in my special place in Silent hill'  the more I played, the closer I got to her. Towards the end of the game you find out shes in the Hotel on the third floor, and when you get up there you just find a VHS and put a tape in and you uncover some disturbing stuff. Apparently theres an insane amount of things that affect the ending, such as small things like examining  certain items too much, or not healing yourself enough, stuff like that.  The ending I got was the one where the reason James goes to Silent hill , is to commit suicide to be with his dead wife..pretty grim and edgy, the  game isn't afraid to be very gritty and dark in tone. There's still a lot to discover with the plot, by the end you're still not sure what the hells is going on, or what Silent Hill even is, is James just gone insane and imagining it all because he killed his wife? Who knows. I like that its ambiguous.

The game has a few boss fights but they're not much of anything really.
The first encounter with pyramid head you're locked inside a room where he just keeps swinging at you with his sword, you try shooting at him but it makes a metallic noise like nothing happens. So you just have to run around in circles for literally like 5 minutes and then he runs away and you can progress. I thought this part was pretty stupid, especially because for 5 mins I was running around wondering "What the fuck do I do, is this what im supposed to do?" Yeah I looked it up online, and yep, youre not even supposed to shoot at him, it does nothing. Just wait it out. Which would be fine, but it takes WAY too long. Should be like 90 seconds, not 5 mins!

The other boss fights are much better, theres a part with these crazy monsters on the ceiling you blast with shotgun, later on you get a boss fight against the previous human friend guy, then you get a fight with 2 pyramid heads where you have to use their sword against them that one was pretty fun and took some skill, then you have the last boss which is like your wife attached to some thing on the ceiling where you just blast a few times.

Even though the game has annoyances, frustrations, and flaws, I can see how people think its one of the greatest games of all time. They're actually remaking this game soon, now that I have the original one completed I'll be interested to see how that remake goes..

8/10

Kholat

 

Kholat is supposedly highly influenced by a true story of so called Dylatov Incident where in a group of experienced mountineers went missing on their expedition and their bodies turned up in gruesome unexplainable ways.

In this game I'm not even sure who you play as, I don't think you're playing as one of these people from the real story, but instead you're someone who goes in to try to figure out what happened? I don't really know, the narrative and plot is very sparse and hard to follow.

Kholat starts off with absolutely zero narrative or direction, really. You get a few short digitally drawn pictures with a brief talking about the incident, and then you suddenly start playing the game, at a train station, walking around in some village. From the moment you start playing, you're already lost and confused, and you're not even on the mountain yet! I think the devs purposefully tried to make the game as confusing and feeling of being lost as possible because even from the very beginning I had to wander around aimlessly for a good 20 mins before I could even find how to progress onto the actual mountain.

Once you make it onto the mountain you find your first campsite, where you get a compass and map, and this is the only sense of direction you have in the entire game. You get a journal and a tiny 'tutorial' trying to tell you what to do, it tells you about your flashlight, it hints that turning off your flashlight makes you harder to spot, it mentions something about "Setting your destination before travelling" which initially had me super confused because the map says 'Press A to set destination" but I was spamming it like crazy and it does nothing - Turns out later in the game you unlock additional campsites, and what this really means is when you rest at a campsite, you can fast travel to the other campsites youve unlocked by pressing A, thats it.

So being very bewildered and not knowing what to do, I kind of just aimlessly wandered around in the winter mountains for an hour or two. If the game wants to be a sort of simulation of what the real event was, I guess this is pretty close. Completely confused and lost, wandering around in the freezing tundra, hearing crying wolves and frostbitten wind blaring against my eardrums, its pretty immersive and the graphics are well done.

But quickly I ran into frustration, I suddenly kept running into these orange monsters which would spot me and instantly annihilate me. The thing is, theres no way to manually save in this game. The game only saves when you pickup these Pages, or discover a campsite. So for a good hour or two, the game only saved when I picked up some random page, and I would go running around for 20 mins, then suddenly run into one of these monsters, die instantly, and then would have to reload at my previous save. It was just so stupid, It felt so bad having walked around aimlessly for 20 mins only to turn a corner and instantly die, then have to do it all over again, try to memorize where I went. I was about ready to uninstall the game and just giveup on it cause I thought the save system was so awful. Like why does a game like this need to be so punishing and waste your fucking time like that? Why cant I just wake up somewhere nearby, not be forced to reload a previous save way back? It adds nothing to the game but frustration and takes you out of the immersion.

Since the game has such sparse direction, what I really did was basically accidentally keep running into the hardest most endgame part of the map. So yeah, barely knowing what I'm doing, not knowing what to look for, made this a really sour introduction to the experience.

But regardless, I pushed on. I then realized that it only saves when you pickup these pages, which is something inspired by Slender games or some shit which isn't a good sign really, but it became my perogitive to find these pages, if only to save the game more often.

At this point I realized maybe if I turn off my flashlight the monsters wont find me as easliy, and yeah, it really does. If you have your flashlight on, its like the monsters instantly find you, then turn from this black shadow, into this bright orange and chase after you - But if you just never turn your flashlight on, they barely find you unless youre pressed right up against them. So for the rest of the game I never turned my flashlight back on, its a super bright snowy mountain anyway so the flashlight is just pointless and gets you killed.

From here I realied on the top left of the map screen is a list of coordinates, and these are the main objectives. So I started on the first coordinate and tried to work my way down.

This is the real bulk of the game, the map system tries to be very realistic, to where you cant even tell where you are with any sort of indicator, except for the markings you get on your map when finding various things, or coming across coordinates scribbled on rocks that tell you where you are. At first I didnt know what these coordinates meant, I thought it was trying to tell me secrets or something, Thats because even the compass in the game is obscure in the fact that its not even in english, the North and South is in Russian, so for like the first half of the game I mistakenly had North and South mixed up and was going all the wrong ways.. Surprisingly it didn't really screw me up that much, as I was steadily making progress accidentally stumbling upon some of these main page objectives, but still it was shocking that I had it wrong for so long.

So everytime you get a page, or campsite, or find major points of interest, your map does update and you can use these icons to try to figure out where you are. From there you have to try to plan out a mental image of which direction to move towards to try to make it to the next major coordinate. This in its self is a pretty fun and engrossing task, making you really feel like youre stuck in this mountain trying to find your way around, using a map and compass old fashioned like you may have to in real life. Few other games are this realistic and brutal and without direction, its an interesting change of pace. Because the game is also sort of 'open world' in that there isn't a linear progression at all, you start at a campsite in the middle, and from there you can go to the list of objectives in any order you want, and its a big sprawling huge mountain wasteland you have to discover and explore without handholding.

That's about the bulk of the game, constantly opening the map and compass, trying to find the next main objective, there are notes that you can find that arent a part of the main ones, these serve for additional flavour text but more importantly also give you saves, so I was extra careful to try to find these.

It's a short game, about 4-5 hours, and you don't come across threats or monsters all too often, you go through a few caves here and there which are pretty spooky, and one major complaint is when you do come across a monster, its like they spawn directly right in your fucking face barely giving you any time to react before you die, so its really imperitive you try to find as many saves as possible because its super frustrating randomly dying and then losing 30 mins of wandering around like a jackass.

But yeah I think another major complaint I have is that it never really actually felt like I was discovering or playing the actual Dylatov Pass incident. You never find any of the bodies of the original people from the real story, and it seems the logs and plot you do discover is more about some secret government operation or something like that, it wasn't all that fascinating and probably the weakest part of the story. At times your main character mumbles some shit to himself but its kinda just cryptic bullshit. I can imagine a much better and intense way the story could have been done, like for example if you were playing as one of the people from the original expedition, in the beginning youre with your friends, then some crazy shit happens and your friends start disappearing or you break off from the group, then you start finding their bodies and you know, just more things about the actual original story. I didn't feel like much of this games plot had anything to do with the details of the actual Dylatov pass story, which is so bizarre because the game is supposed to be based on it. Maybe it would be too disrepsectful to the family of the decased or something thats why they didnt do it, I dont know, but it would have been way better. You never really discover anything shocking or alarming, you kinda just wander around and find pages, then at one point go into a military bunker for a few minutes just to find another page, then after you find all the pages you kinda just walk back to the beginning and the game ends..its super anticlimactic and almost has nothing to do with the actual story that its based on, I feel its a total missed opportunity. The game is still worth playing, and decent, for the way it captures perhaps some of how it may have felt to be one of those people lost on that mountain, with the total lack of direction, even in the beginning of the game it sets you up to expect zero direction, relying on your compass and map to try to make sense of the harsh land around you, but the game could have definitely been better, maybe less emphesis overall on finding pages like its a Slender clone or something, and also the story and plot could have been more directly similar to the actual real story, also the save system sucks.

6/10

Blair Witch

 

I had seen the original Blair Witch film many years ago and it stuck in my head as a unique idea, the found footage, first person perspective horror. That's basically where all these new games are getting their inspiration from, these horror games where you have a video recorder and its in first person, that idea originated in the first Blair Witch movie.

In this game it loosely follows the ideas of the movie. You go into the forest to find a missing child, thats where the game starts. There is a search party and youre a part of it, you've got a cell phone that you can pull out anytime, which has all sorts of settings on it you can press like phonebook, text messages, you can even play cell phone games and change your ringtone which is pointless, but it adds to the immersion. So you're in the forest, you get cell phone calls from the Sheriff who leads the search party, you also call your wife a lot to relay how things are going as you search around the woods finding clues. However theres one drastically important detail - You also have your pet dog Bullet with you for almost the entire game. Unlike other games that have quest markers, or quest logs, or arrows telling you where to go, in this game the dog pretty much acts as the quest log/guide. You have this dog that follows you around, or frequently will keep barking for your attention and then tells you where to go and leads you to progress. You can press a button to pull up a radial menu to give the dog different commands like 'Seek' to try to find objects or progress, you can Pet him which apparently influences the ending in some way, and a few other things like that. This dog becomes integral to the identity of this game, and becomes one of the main focus of the narrative. There's a lot of voice acting and you constantly talk to your dog, and theres even a mechanic where if you get seperated from the dog for too long then you start to go insane from isolation or something.

So you're initially just wandering around the forest in the daylight, looking for clues, but soon you find yourself a VHS camera and then you go around finding tapes to put into it. These tapes reveal creepy things happening in the vicinity, and they even have this mechanic where you play/pause the tapes at certain times and it unlocks progress in the game world. I thought this mechanic would suck at first, and be confusing to figure out where to pause, but it wasnt too bad and you don't have to do it too often.

Quickly things turn weird, you start to get all sorts of flashbacks from some kind of middle east war, hinting that you were a soldier and you have PTSD or something, you get yourself into all sorts of surreal situations such as this part where you have to turn on car lights and you can listen to the radio and the people on radio are hinting something isnt quite right, you come across a lot of these twisted stick figurines which scare your dog, you can destroy them. The atmosphere is very engrossing and immersive, the daylight quickly turns to night and you spend most of the rest of the game blindly wandering around in the forest, with only your dog for support. You start to feel a sense of bonding with this dog too, and dont want anything bad to happen, cause the animation/sound effects/dog reactions are very well done.


The writing at times can be a little stupid, for example your main character is hell-bent on staying in this forest and finding the lost child, he wants to be seen as a hero or something, I don't know. Because multiple times you have cellphone reception and you can simply call 911 to let them you you've discovered some insane psychopath lurking in the woods and thats why the kids gone missing, but you dont. You call your wife multiple times and shes telling you to come home, but you wont. Despite having witnessed so much crazy shit, why wouldnt you just call for backup? Not sure if I missed something but it didnt really make sense.

As the game progresses you come across a few threats such as these weird grass monsters which are just like a blowing ball of grass that instantly kill you, they were kinda stupid but they dont last long. You get into segments like the movie where you get trapped in a loop unless you go a certain direction, and you have to stop and listen and follow your dogs barking, then other times you have these super fast monsters that stalk you in the woods that you can shine your flashlight on to stop them from attacking you, but other than that theres not really all that many threats or monsters in the game, only a few times you encounter anything threatening. The game isn't much viseral threatening horror, but a slow buildup of tension and suspense with atmosphere and immersion, making you feel like youre actually lost in the woods and something sinister is taking place.

It's a short game, and theres not all that much to say, the bulk of it is walking around in the forest with your flashlight (which has infinite batteries) so theres nothing to collect really, a few times I was annoyed by how stupid and specific points of progress were, for example one point I saw an object under a wall which I should easily be able to crawl under and grab, but no - you have to stand at a specific point outside a window then an icon of a dog pops up and you tell your dog to get it for you. The game could have used a bit more intense horror segments, as much of it really is just walking around doing nothing basically. The game definitely has a ton of elements of Psychological Horror where things keep messing your mind and youre not sure if its real or not, such as getting fake phone calls / text messages from people, getting texts saying "look up" , stuff like that. Other times you get weird flashbacks and start talking to yourself like youre someone else, but really I think the highlight of the game is the last hour or so, when you find the old house and go inside which turns into this long looping endless maze of psychological terror, getting all sorts of crazy flashbacks and visions, having to look at the night vision on your camera to avoid monsters looking at signs on the floor, getting taunted by the witch to do certain things youre not sure if you should do or not. This segment is a long, drawn out oppressive trial of nonstop horror I thought it was pretty well done. Yeah maybe its a bit too long, but I can see the purpose of that too, trying to make you feel drained and lost, like the films a key point of the plot is that youre stuck in a loop and need to get out.

The thing that I'm undecidied on if I like or not, is that the game purposefully misleads you at multiple parts. Its virtually impossible that anyone will get the Good ending on first playthrough, because in order to do so, you have to somehow know to NOT destroy any of the stick totems, NOT shine your flashlight at any monsters, stuff like that. And the whole game youre basically being told to do these things, by the dog being afraid of the totems, by shining the light at the monsters working, etc. There is also another segment where your dog gets injured, and for 10 minutes straight youre just stuck in a loop carrying him, seemingly not making any progress, even with writing all over the walls to "Let dying dogs lie' the game TELLING you to just drop the dog, but actually if you just keep walking around in a loop for 10 mins straight you pass out and the dog survives. Luckily I just kept walking, but yeah the devs/game is purposefully trying to set you up for failure.

Of course I got the bad ending, like everyone else the first time around, where you turn into Carver, the bad guy, but atleast my dog survived. Yeah the ending stuff is weird because like I said no one is getting good ending first try, but also you can find a battery at the end of the game, but the only way to use it is to do another playthrough and use it in the bunker at the beginning of the game. Like what? how are you supposed to know that? I guess the devs really want the game to be similar to the sprit of the movie where you really are stuck in a loop replaying the same thing over and over, but I don't know i dont wanna actually play the game half a dozen times, they could have done this differently. 

The games graphics are presentation are mostly stunning, thats the thing about these 'walking simulator games' - a large part of why they work is because they have top notch graphics that really pull you into the world and make you feel like youre inside the game world. Its like one step away from VR experience. The sounds, visuals, especially playing in the dark, all help to rope you in. Its got some amazing shaders and shadow technology, and the way the trees wrap around you does make you feel dazzled and lost in the forest to some unknown threat.

Thats another thing, when you do die in this game, its not like you get a big GAME OVER screen and have to reload and wait for 40 seconds, like some other games (beast inside..) - Nope, when you die in this game, you kinda just instantly wake up a small distance away from where you were. I actually like this, because it doesn't really take you out of the immersion and feel too gamey. You sorta feel like youre still in the game world, but just the ghost is fucking with you. In these kind of horror games, dying over and over and watching 'game overs' and loading screens actually takes away the horror for me, I lose suspense, I lose the tension, I lose fear. It starts to feel like a stupid arcade game, but Blair Witch doesn't do this -it keeps you in the immersion, doesn't rip you away to see a loading screen or tell you game over, it keeps you immersed and treats death as yet another psychological phenomenon.

Overall I actually like that its a short game, about 4-5 hours, you can beat it in a session or two, and its packed full of atmosphere and good voice acting, the dog mechanic is unique and immersive because instead of quest markers you have this dog that helps you, but yeah I think there could have been more in your face horror, and maybe some of the monsters arent really true to Blair Witch, they don't look all that terrifying really. I know the movie doesn't really have any monsters, does it? But still I think they could have come up with something better than Leaf monster and some humanoid thing in the bushes. The being forced into bad ending thing is offputting, I'm not sure what I think about that, its kinda funny that the devs troll you like that, but also feels kinda shitty knowing there was no possible way I could have gotten the good ending 1st time around

7/10

The Beast Inside

 


The Beast Inside is a weird coincidence, considering I recently finished Amnesia:Rebirth and this game directly copies many of the motifs from that game. The premise is something like; you move into this house in the countryside with your pregnant wife, you work for a Spy agency or something, and weird shit starts to happen where you're being spied on.

But it didn't take long for my opinion of this game to start to sour.
Right from the first few hours of the game, I was thinking to myself "is most of this game going to spent outside in broad daylight doing menial tasks?" - The answer unfortunately, is YES! What were they thinking!?
The way the game works is like this:

You play one chapter in 'present day' wandering around in broad daylight, doing ordinary literal chores like talking to your wife, painting the walls, going to get things from the shed, going into the attic to find something, bringing boxes upstairs. Literally just walking around, talking to your wife, doing house work. Or, if you get a few hours in, instead of going around your house, you instead wander around the forest behind your house using this really awful, tedious, sci-fi looking tracking device where you have to stare at some mini-screen and follow its signal and then 'scan' the area for clues, as well as randomly having to do some fucking stupid, bizarre, minigame where you shoot 'anomolies' in the sky with your sci-fi gun beams. I mean, what? so god damn stupid, all of this shit just feels like a massive chore and waste of time.

Its like you do one 'ordinary present day' chapter, then the next chapter:
you 'wake up' in the past, like 17th century, as some alternate version of yourself or something, wander around in the dark in old houses , inns, or mines, getting jump scares, and having spooky atmosphere.

Thats how the game ALWAYS operates.
You do one ordinary, broad daylight, present day chapter
Then the next chapter afterwards is always in the past, and horror

It revolves this way for all 13 chapters.

And let me tell you, every single present day broad daylight chapter is a total fucking slog and complete boring bullshit. The first half of them, like I said, you do literally nothing but menial housechores and talking to your wife, or doing some awful overly complex puzzles that make you stare at cryptic journals and scrolls for 30 mins straight before you figure it out.  Or, you wander around the backwoods of your house doing more boring bullshit like turning off powerlines, using your stupid little sci-fi scanner gun to follow some trail, theres like ZERO interesting moments. The game is so god damn boring, I was thinking to myself what the fuck am i playing frequently? Why do I have to do these boring broad daylight bullshit chapters where NOTHING happens, you just walk around and mumble bullshit to yourself with god-awful voice acting that sounds so bad you'll be either cringing or laughing at how retarded it sounds. You can clearly tell the voice actor is hastily reading off a page, without even using proper commas it sounds janky, and they constantly swear and it just sounds so unnatural and stupid. Terrible voice acting.

I mean I can't emphesis this enough, I couldnt wrap my head around why half of the game I'm just walking around in broad daylight doing absolute bullshit FOR HALF OF THE GAME. None of it is interesting! I just finished the game and I can barely remember anything about it, it was that boring. All I can remember is staring at this stupid tracking device thing and walking around in circles trying to find the next 'scanner' point where I can progress, often times getting lost, running in circles, not finding where it is, running it glitches and bugs where I have to reload previous checkpoint, or missing something like having to walk up to this specific bush I can chop with a machete or some bullshit. Its just terrible.

The game is basically a clone of Amnesia, you have the exact same control scheme where you walk up to objects in the enviornment and a hand appears and you use the same sort of physics system to move it around, but its just not as well done in this game. The controls feel clunky and janky and something about the mouse movement is just off, even with mouse sensitivty cranked you still have to swing your arm around like a jackass to do anything or operate any of the levers or tools or whatever shit you have to do. Feels awkward and not as It should. It even has some of the same puzzles as Amenesia:Rebirth such as the one in the mine where you have to push the cart into a wall.

Ok so half the chapters you're doing menial housework, in broad daylight, talking to your wife about bullshit, or wandering around in the woods in broad daylight, with zero horror. So what about the 'horror' chapters in between?

Yes, these are definitely better, and more interesting. In the horror chapters you spend them at night, in old victorian places, playing as some sort of alternate version of yourself, you talk differently and youre recounting some events of this top hat guy that goes around killing people but saving you or something. Look, the story is terrible. The character models, voice acting, and writing just feels so amateur and low budget. The wife character model looks like something straight out of unity asset store, it looks like an asset flip or some shit. The character models look terrible. The graphics in general arent awful, its got some impressive lighting and specular effects, but overal the game just looks extremely geneirc and bland, like something default in Unreal engine. It just has no character or soul. Its not as graphically impressive or polished as other similar games, for example objects in the environment frequently wont react to you, like if you run into a chain on the wall it just stays a static object, things like that. The environment is mostly static

Right, so in the horror chapters, things are a bit more interesting. Another reason its an Amnesia: Rebirth clone in particular is because you even have the same matches and lantern system, and lighting candles on the wall in the exact same way. Though this mechanic is incredibly trivial because I barely ever felt any need to use it, and by the end of game had like 100 matches and dozens of lantern refills.  The game isn't that dark even on low gamma settings.

But yeah in these horror chapters its the typical stuff, walking around victorian houses and hearing creepy noises, mostly the only forms of horror you get are these jump scares of some white ghost looking thing crawling fast at you, or jumping in your face briefly, atleast for the first half of the game. But as the game progresses, you start to have to actually avoid enemies, where you get a bunch of these "Run!" sections where the enemies keep popping up left, right , and infront of you and you have to think quick to take different paths, this quickly becomes trial and error bullshit, and the game has really long load screens so that gets old quick.

But yeah, some of the atmosphere in the horror sections are pretty decent, atleast early on. There's not all that many memorable momenmts in the horror chapters either, unfortunately, you dont come across any gruesome sights all that often, a few times you see a corpse here and there, or do a cutscene stabbing some monster, but its nothing shocking or anything youll remember in a few hours. The game is just incredibly boring and generic, nothing stands out. Towards the end of the game you start doing this Mine section where you go underground and have to find your way through this maze where it keeps resetting unless you take the right path, this part was an absolute fucking slog because youre getting chased by a monster the whole time and youll be dying and reloading A LOT, because you know that part in Mario 64 with the endless staircase? Its like that, except you have to take the right paths to get out. And you have a note in your inventory you have to keep opening and staring at to figure out the right path, its just an absolute chore. Its scary the first 1-3 times, but I had to try over and over again like 20 times to where it just started to become a massive slog. Fuck that part.

Then afterwards, you get to a swamp area, where its trying to clone something from Amnesia: The dark descent, the monster in the water, and you cant touch the water for too long or you get eaten, yeah I found this part pretty annoying too but it wasnt as bad as the mine. Then right after that you go into a house with this old witch lady in it and you have to sneak around and grab the keys from off her, but she keeps chasing you, and yeah this took a lot of trial and error too.  Like its not terrible, I get that horror games need to have stuff like this, but I dont know the stealth system is just extremely barebones, you cant hide anywhere, it just plays a sound when youre spotted and the music ends when youre safe thats about it.

And yeah you do all this, snapping in and out of modern/present day, trying to follow some story about 'commies spying on us'  no really, he keeps saying "fucking commies" so apparently the main character is a spy and is also being followed by spies, but also some shit about family drama and your father and your child, but its just a total snoozefest plus the characters and voice acting are laughably stupid and cringe I could hardly give a shit. By the end of the game its revealed you murdered your wife because you thought she was a spy, because youre in a mental hospital and youre just going mad with paranoia, but that could be the bad ending I dont know or really care. The main anagonist isnt scary or shocking or threatning at all its just some idiot in a tophat, lame.

Like I said this thing where you keep snapping in and out of modern/present day with each chapter is just such a stupid design choice. Atleast during the modern sections it should have some horror, but no, its just this really boring 'detective simulator' except the gameplay is really snooze and you barely do anything, there are frequent extremely crpytic puzzles where everytime I saw one of them i just went "ugh not this again" cause I knew I had to labour over some cryptic bullshit for dozens of minutes, its just not fun. By the end of the game I looked up the answer to one of these puzzles cause I just didnt want to anymore and wanted the game to be over.

Oh yeah, its also a relatively  long game, compared to other horror games in the genre, where most horror games you can finish in 2-6 hours, this one took me over 9 hours to complete, which isn't good because atleast half of the game sucks (present day chapters) and the other half is mostly suck with a few decent moments and atmosphere. Atleast its slightly better than Amnesia Rebirth just because it takes place in a variety of different locations, doesnt make you go to sci-fi stupid alien spaceship lands, and you dont play as a overly whiny obnoxious pregnant woman the whole game, and it doesnt take place in the desert but in victorian gothic era + in the forest, so I guess for that the devs can compliment themselves as a job well done?

4/10

The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope

 

Theres been a style of games in recent times ever since probably Heavy Rain released on ps3, where the focus isn't so much on gameplay but its basically just a movie you can sometimes interact with and make multiple choice selections to influence how the story goes. Dark Pictures Anthology is this kind of game. I finished 'Man of Medan' with a buddy and thought it was fun enough so we eventually got the second one called 'Little Hope' 

The way this game works is you watch a lot of cutscenes, then you get selected to play as one of the 5 characters seemingly at random, and you can make choices during conversation to the other characters. You frequently do have sections where you can freely walk around, in third person, using keyboard or controller. At first, we were playing with keyboard and mouse, and it plays like a Point and click adventure game, which didn't feel or play that great. Also, there are frequent quicktime events which by themselves have some problems, but its made even worse by choosing to play Keyboard & mouse because the icons arent very clear and its much easier  to fail them. However, we quickly switched to Controller and to our surprise no longer do you have the Point & click style of controls, but full analog stick movement like a typical third person game! this feels much better, its mindboggling why the devs chose to default to the shoddy point & click controls when this style is much more immersive and clearly superior. So using the controller you frequently get to walk around the enviornments and interact with things, marked by a sparkling glow, you pick up objects and can turn them over and read things, but thats about all there is to interact with. 

The bulk of the 'mechanics' in the game are : 

- Making multiple choice decisions, which affects your relationships with order characters, marked by a green UP arrow or red Down arrow when depending on your choices. I'm unsure exactly how the relationship choices affect the game, as I played through the game twice and got basically the Good and Bad ending, but couldn't really tell much of a difference in the relationship choices besides the initial reactions. Not sure if theres any long lasting effects, but it was fun deciding what to say and seeing the reactions, laughing at some of the dialogue, and seeing those Green or red relationship arrows.

-Walking around with traditional third person controls, interacting with objects, sometimes there are even fixed camera style graphics which are pretty cool and immersive. 

- Quick time events. Lots of these, and failing a single one can DRASTICALLY alter the game. I'm talking you can easily get one of the characters permanently killed if you screw one of these up. Thats cool, but unfortunately the quicktime icons/interactions are really confusing and not as intuitive as they should be. For example, theres a Heartbeat minigame type QTE where you have to tap a button when it lines up with the heartbeat, but as soon as the meter pops up, it will briefly display "PRESS A!" and if you press it too soon, then it FAILS. But it looks like youre suppose to press A, just like the other non QTE ones. Its very confusing and you can easily screw up, not because you have bad reactions, but just because the graphic for some of the QTE doesn't make much sense. Another example is if youre using keyboard and mouse, this same heartbeat QTE, initially it will be press Left mouse button, but then halfway through it will switch to Right mouse button , but the graphic almost looks exactly the same. Its really hard to tell that  its even changed, its not obvious at all. Of course this led to failing. Then we switched to controller and atleast this prompt is more obvious because the buttons are colorful and different looking when it switches.

Another example of the QTE graphics been unintuitive, confusing, and stupid, is this other style of QTE where you have to drag the cursor to the middle of the screen and press right trigger - BUT it doesnt even tell you that you have to press right trigger AND you have to know that its the RIGHT stick, not the left stick. So the first few times this pops up, you have maybe 2 seconds to do it, but your first reaction is to try the Left stick (movement stick) , it wont work, then you have to fumble and realize its the RIGHT stick, then you move the cursor to the middle and think "Ok, I did it!" - NOPE then you fail, because you actually have to put it in the middle and press RT...but it doesn't even display 'press RT" or the 'RT' icon. WTF! How hard is it for them to just show a RT icon once you drag it in the middle? Its especially insane because if you fail one of these, like I said, a character permanently dies for the rest of the game. Severely punishing to fail one of these and theyre designed like shit! 

Well we beat the game twice

And on the first time, whatever happened, we just let happen. We ended up finishing the game with basically no one left, and then right at the end of the game they all died anyway cause we made a bad choice even though it seemed obvious (burn the 'evil' kid) 

But on the second playthrough, we tried to do as many 'good/right' things as possible, save everyone,get all 'positive' relationship arrows, and get the best possible ending. Thankfully we found out that you can revert a previous chapter so if you accidentally get a character killed, you can reload and try again. So we did that the few times we fucked up on the 2nd playthrough and ended up getting the best possible ending/saving everyone, which was pretty enjoyable, and the 2nd time around the dialogue and game was changed enough to where it was worth playing through again.

There's just enough 'real' gameplay that it doesn't feel like youre just watching a movie, it is pretty immersive and you do get a sense that youre actually in the world playing as one of these guys, not to mention the whole thing is a cooperative horror experience and youre playing random characters so youre trying to work together with your buddy, relaying information to eachother, you frequently get split up and youre always asking eachother "What are you doing now" and telling them what you saw and stuff, its pretty fun. 

I notice how I havnt talked much about the actual story, thats intentional cause I'm not about to do like a 'book review' and review the entire story or something, but I'll just say its sort of generic BUT very well done. Theres nothing nessesarily wrong about being unoriginal, as long as its done good enough. The story is almost like something out of Silent Hill where at first you see this young guy accidentally burn his house down, killing his whole family, then later on you see a bus crash and you wake up with a group of people being one of the bus passengers, going around in this really foggy outback/village area that looks like something out of Silent Hill, trying to piece together why you cant leave this place, because the fog keeps returning you making you walk in circles, being chased by really awesome detailed looking monsters and spirits all intertwined with flashbacks of some like 17th century burning witch trial stuff. It's engrossing and the characters have enough individuality and funny/interesting dialogue to where you wanna know what happens next and you dont want any of the characters to die because each of them actually add something to the story and if they die you feel like youre losing out on a lot of interesting writing and dialogue and their backstories. Though I will say that the whole game leads you to believe that the little girl is the main evil villian, giving you a choice to burn her at the end, but in doing so , no matter how many people you saved up to that point, if you burn the little girl, it kills all of the people you save and leaves you by yourself giving you basically the worst ending - All by one single decision right at the end, that felt kinda fucked and unfair. So much so that we played through again. But even so, the ending didn't change all that much, and thats because this game does the cliche thing where "WHAT A TWIST! It's all in your head.. you just were going crazy!" ... right? I'm pretty sure thats what the ending is, the only thing that makes me question it is theres one point where the 'imaginary' characters throw darts at a board, but then the only other real person, some guy at a bar, takes the darts out of the board as if they were actually thrown by a real person. I gotta say its an interesting story despite the cliches and unoriginality. 

The graphics and facial animations are really impressive, it feels like a super high budget movie youre watching, so thats really good because if that stuff sucked the game would be a flop, they had to nail this part because the game is basically just a movie, lets be honest. But yeah like the sections where you can walk around freely, you have a flashlight you can swing around with the right stick and youre always in some dark place to where it definitely has that horror atmosphere, theres tons of jumpscares but they arent too bad, everytime you get jumpscared its because it brings you back into a flashback of the witch trial stuff which is really interesting. 

Oh yeah and unfortunatley the game is extremely buggy and has no buisness being so. Theres barely any mechanics, how is it so buggy? We frequently lost connection, or when we would try to pickup the game from last session and just load our save, it would just freeze and not work, having to reload previous chapters to fix it, all sorts of bugs. Like the last session we played we had to ALT+f4 quit the game like 10 times just to be able to load successfully and keep playing, it was a mess. Why is it so fucking buggy? The steam forums is full of complaints of people saying they  cant load their save and their shit is ruined, crazy. Doesn't seem like the devs gave a shit to fix it, but oh well , it is what it is.

For actual co-op horror games, or interactive experiences, with a full story and ending, its slim pickings. This is one of the only ones out there, most horror cooperative games are stupid deathmatch shit, not actual campaigns. So thats one thing to keep in mind. For what it is, its a good experience, good enough that we played through it two times just to see what was different and because the story was interesting enough we actually cared and wanted to see the other parts we missed out on. Though the Quicktime icons/graphics could be way better, especially with how unforgiving they are, and it needs a lot of bug fixes, its still not a bad choice if you just want to have a casual sit down with a friend and playthrough some cooperative horror experience without having to be good at video games or anything.  

7/10

Rage 2

 

Having played and finished the first Rage game, I had Rage 2 on my radar for awhile but never got it until I saw it was on sale for like $10 so figured good enough time to pick it up. Didn't know anything about it going into it except that its sequel to first game, even though I wasn't the biggest fan of the first game.

Unlike first game, this game has a lot of differences and has taken a lot of liberties in the 'formula'
The first Rage, was kind of semi-open world but still mostly linear, you cant really go too far off the beaten path, there are towns and NPC's but its not like the typical true open world you think of like GTA or Elder scrolls. However, In Rage 2 they took the route go to completely cookie cutter, generic, copy paste open world. Just like Far Cry's , Assassin's Creed, Skyrim, modern GTA, it takes the easy route and does this bland sort of open world with tons of side 'activities' to do, chock full of all sorts of different upgrades and things to unlock.

The game was initially incredibly confusing, frustrating, and stupid. Its got one of the worst interfaces and menus I've ever seen. None of it is intuitive or makes any sense or operates how you think it should. For the first half of the game I was basically confused as to how to even do the main fucking missions.

For starters, you open the map menu, and youve got so many fucking icons you can't make sense of anything. Which one is the main objective? You see these orange markers that say 'Objective' , ok those must be the main missions right? Well first of all, you cant even select one at a time. You literaly cant even select to track one mission at a time! its extremely confusing. You go to the mission log, then theres even more confusing clusterfuck menus with all sorts of different 'allies' with their own 'level' and missions, so you want to just pick one, but you cant. You cant just show 1 orange icon on the map and track it, it always shows you every avalible mission, and when you select 'Track mission' on one of them, it only gives you a waypoint and puts arrows on the road (which looks terrible and too arcade) and when you 'arrive' at the desintination, it gets rid of the tracking - making you go to the menu again and track it again.

To make things worse, theres a compass on top of the screen which is supposed to help you track things, but theres so many god damn icons on it it makes your head spin trying to utilize it for anything. Like I said previously, you cant just select one thing to foucs on, so on the compass it will always show you dozens of all sorts of random bullshit like side objectives, locations, NPC's, everything - so good luck trying to consistently use it to track the main objective.

To make things EVEN worse, not ALL of the orange 'objectives' on the map are actually a part of the main story!!! I only found this out about halfway through the game, where I selected one of these 'objectives' and found myself in some Sand worm place where I'm fighting an insanely hard boss dying over and over, only to find out I'm doing some random DLC that youre basically not supposed to do until after beating the game? What? So fucking stupid. Theres no way to know without googling what the main missions are, and by the way - theres only 8.

Thats only one of the complaints of the interface, all the other menus and interfaces are absolute mind boggling trash too. The game literally has like 20 skill trees, you got all sorts of skill trees per 'ally' and 'ally level' which are these NPC's that have activites attached to them on the map, and you go around doing things like clearing out generic copy paste bandit camps, fixing blocked roads, or destroying these stationary huge Sentry turret things that have insane amounts of health and kill you in like 2 hits and I kept running into these stupid side missions at the beginning part of the game feeling really bewildered cause my guns did next to zero damage to these things and they kept killing me. Figured to just ignore the damn things for the rest of the play through until it forced me, by the halfway point of the game it stops you from being able to progress the main story until you go around and complete these copy pasted side objective things until you get all your allies at 'level 5' Its just a really terrible system the game would be way better without any of this shit or atleast dont make it optional.

And the side content really isn't optional. You know why?
Cause the first half of the game is incredibly hard.
Theres like 6 difficulties, I picked difficulty 3/6 'Hard" i think it was.
But yeah, its only hard if you dont grind for upgrades.
In the first half of the game, your guns do no damage, you die super easy, and its really hard to regain health.

Theres a bunch of different types of upgrades. You have 'nanorites' which is for upgrading skill trees, you have 'Felrite' i think it was, which is this blue gemstone juice that drops out of enemies and find it in chests in the world, which is like upgrade juice you use to upgrade generic damage on your guns and stuff, theres like 5 other types of upgrades that you can get for other shit like adding weapon mods, or going to this really poorly explained and random Doctor in one of the cities that you can use to upgrade your health or damage permanently. Way too convuluted and stupid upgrade systems, matched with a really shit UI. Took me until half the game to make any sense of it.

But once you start to figure out how all the stupid menus work, all the terminology for all the different upgrades  - The game becomes trivial! you start killing everything super fast, enemies drop those blue crystals which also give you health, so you start to regain tons of health just by killing enemies, you stop running out of ammo. The difficulty curve is absolutely fucked. Why are modern games like this? The beginning of the game is 10x harder than the middle/end. Very stupid game design. By the end of the game I was half asleep just holding the shoot button blasting everything without giving a single fuck, defeating the last boss 1st try, infinite health basically. But the first quarter/half of the game I was dying almost every checkpoint, getting stuck on the first boss, the Cybermech thing died like 50 times in a row to that thing, no ammo in the arena, killed me in 2 hits, did zero damage. Really fucking dumb difficulty curve.  The main things that made the difference was fully upgrading the health tree, fully upgrading the assault rifle, and going to the Doctor and getting the generic 5% damage bonus a bunch of times. After that ,the game became piss easy.

Theres like atleast 20 different skill trees.
You have skill trees for each of the 'allies' with all sorts of useless shit I didn't care about, like entire skill trees for each of these superhero abilities. You can hold Ctrl and press various keys like F,E,V whatever and you do shit like 'Slam ground and enemies fly in the air' or like 'Create a vortex' and shit, butBut these abilities just seemed like gimmicky filler and I never used any , or wanted to, I just wanted to play a shooter not some like superhero bullshit.
Theres a 'overdrive' mechanic where when you kill enough enemies , or something, it lets you press a button and go into overdrive mode where you do more damage and get more health or something? It was kinda fun but not something I really cared much about, more like just extra bonus thing here and there. So you have individual skill trees for each of these abilities, and then individual skill trees for each of the allies, stuff like combat abilities, sprinting faster, more health, that stuff is useful obviously. But then you have entire trees for stuff like making searching areas easier like giving you trackers for Chests , which is basically mandatory in my view. For example whenever you go into an area and hold Ctrl 'Focus' it gives you a list of stuff you can get in the area, How many chests, data pads, stuff like that - And initially you just have to comb through the area for like half an hour like trying to find a needle in a haystack. That was terrible, I did that a few times and was really not having fun. But once you get the ability for tracking these chests, it gives you a little Signal icon on top of your screen letting you know how far away you are from a object of interest, and you can hold the Focus button to see through walls and track it super easy. Once I found that out, and got the upgrade, it became sort of fun looking for these chests, and is super rewarding allowing you to do many of these upgrades easily.

Once I figured out the upgrades, it was almost fun to go around collecting these chests and trying to find upgrade materials to make my stuff better, but after upgrading a few things, I quickly got to a point where nothing else seemed appealing and I was already strong enough so I kinda stopped caring. Whats the point of the open world after that? I already have the upgrades I want, why would I go around the rest of the open world when its just the same copy pasted bandit camp over and over, theres nothing to see or do, nothing stands out. But for a minute there I was kinda having fun looking for upgrades.
 

More about the graphics and open world...its not a appealing game to look at, to say the least. The actual world is very bland and generic, just a giant ruined wasteland, but for some reason its smeared with random colors of Pink and purple all over the place, in typical modern game fasion. I dont know why this 'look' is so trendy, Far cry new dawn did it, and a few others. It just looks stupid, unnatural, and terrible. Its way too 'gamey' and makes me feel stupid for playing such childish games, Yeah it just looks childish, really. The art design, character design, and writing is just awful. Its got the whole "lol so randumb" Borderlands shit going on, and I'm just not a fan. Constant cringe writing and characters, most of the characters in the game are women , fine whatever, but they make them so insufferable and stupid, they all look like lesbians, and have wacky dumbass humour, its insufferable. One specific noteworthy is the 'mutant bash' gameshow place , theres some weird BDSM cringe shit going on and the host is this lesbian looking woman with a goofy ass haircut talking like Shakespere or something its just so stupid, theres so much crap like that its like just stop. Do something else please. All the characters look fucking dumb, when you walk around the few major 'towns' they're wearing goofy clothing and giant helmets it just looks dumb. Very unimmersive, I don't want to be a part of this world, just want to get it over with its so unappealing.

Theres a few major towns but theyre all extremely forgettable, generic, and uninteresting. I didn't do anything in any of them, nothing stands out, I barely even realized there were multiple towns it just seems like the same shit copy pasted a few times.

Fast travel mechanic is terrible and doesnt make sense either, I was trying to figure out how to fast travel for the first few hours of the game but couldnt. You can only fast travel to major towns, whne youre not in combat. But theres only 3 major towns and theyre pretty far away from various objectives so you spend a lot of time just mindlessly driving around the gameworld, falling asleep, doing nothing.

The story is completely trivial and generic, its just like "Evil cyborg guy wants to erase humanity and take over with his race instead" - K. Never gave a shit about anything in the game or any of the characters. None of the characters stand out, I cant remember a single one, and by the end of this game some character named 'Lily' comes to save you, I had no clue who she was.

Of the 8 main missions, baiscally none of them are memorable. They barely even feel like main missions. You talk to some NPC, they tell you to drive to a location, you get there, go inside and kill enemies or talk to another NPC, drive back and talk to original NPC, and you do that a few times, then the quest is over. You do that 8 times, fight a few bosses, with the same boss fight copy pasted 3 or 4 times (cyber mech thing) , fight the last boss - then the game is over and you can freeroam and do more sidemissions if you want. Really forgettable main missions.

The vehicles are just sorta there. Just to get from point A to point B. There is a main vehicle, which you can upgrade, but I never got a single upgrade for it cause I never cared or wanted to focus on vehicles. Theres not much to say about it, theres a huge menu for vehicles, you can spawn them anytime you want, but I mostly just used whatever vehicle for the whole game just to drive from one objective to the next. Halfway through the game I randomly unlocked a helipcoptor thing and that vastly speeded up how fast I could get around the world, this thing controlled really weird like it automatically scaled mountains and stuff but kinda just felt glitchy and stupid. The actual driving controls feels alright, theres a turbo button which is kinda fun to use, but overall its just meh. I dont wanna play a driving vehicle combat game, so whatever.

Alright so, its got a terrible interface, a stupid generic open world with cliche side missions like typical Ubisoft bandit camp bullshit, its got convuluted upgrade systems and skilltrees, the difficulty curve is very stupid, the world is boring and nothing stands out, the story sucks and characters forgettable, the graphics and artstyle is lame and unimmersive.


Is anything even good about this game? Well thankfully the actual combat is pretty damn fun. Thats mostly in part due to the enemies reactions, when you shoot enemies theres a very satisfying physics engine where they react intensely and get ragdolled, stand back up, have a lot of fluid motion when you shoot them. They also say a lot of shit, and have constant streams of dialogue, where its fun to engage in combat. Or maybe the Assault rifle and Shotgun were just fun to use. There are apparently all sorts of guns you can get, like Rocket launcher, classic BFG, Laser gun, Dart gun thing, but I never found them. You find these 'Arks' randomly in the world, that unlock guns or upgrades, I found a bunch of them, BUt I guess I just never found the ones for the RPG and a few other guns.
But mostly for the entire game I used the Assault rifle and Shotgun. Mostly the assault rifle.
The guns dont look great, they're covered in sci-fi shit and I prefer more realistic guns, but the sound effects are impactful, and when you shoot enemies it of course gives you hit markers, but when you kill the enemy it gives a skull icon and makes a crunchy noise to where it feels pretty damn satisfying to do combat. Theres a few sorts of different enemies, you have normal punk guys, then you have guys wearing plates of armor you can shoot off piece by piece, then theres mutants, then cyborg type guys. Variety is alright.

That's mainly what saved this game from being terrible. Just the viseral feeling of fluid and smooth combat, sprinting around, jumping around, hip firing assault rifle at enemies, seeing the skull icon when you kill them, seeing the blue health/gems fall out from them, hearing the crunches and impactful sounds, its an ID software game so it feels like one of the newer Doom games in the actual combat. Its obviously a highly expensive game to develop, a lot of money has went into it, you can tell in the controls and the combat. But yeah, virtually everything else sucks. Like I keep saying with these games, if the open world was just deleted and it was a more typical mission to mission campaign, with these controls and more grounded weaponry, it would be a better experience. But I guess at that point I'm just talking about the modern Doom games. I don't know where Rage has a place, then. It feels like Fallout mixed with modern Far cry mixed with Skyrim mixed with Borderlands, but all in the worst ways, and none of it works to its favor. Its like theyre not doing out of passion to develop an actual good game, but more like that formula is just whats trendy and popular nowadays and thats what would sell better? well they were wrong cause apparently most people think this game sucks too, its not just me.

Oh yeah, its also a really buggy frustrating game too. Multiple times I'd have objectives just not show up or tell me where to go, and I'd have to watch on youtube exactly where I was suppose to go, or sometimes it would say the objective is Above me when really it was below me?? just really buggy and nonsense parts at times. Caused quite a bit of frustration.

I dunno, its not a terrible game where It was painful to get through, well maybe the first quarter I was getting really pissed off and annoyed, cause of the stupid difficutly in the beginning. But once I got past that it was almsot enjoyable, the combat mostly, but yeah I dont know all the other things about the game is just trash, characters and dialogue and the artstyle just so stupid makes me feel dumb for even playing the game in the first place. I was thinking about giving this a 6 but now I'm starting to think its more like a 5. Did I mention the box art? Yeah, just look at the box art. Thats all you have to know. What the fuck were they thinking? Very meh game overall.

5/10

Outriders

 

I'm always looking for co-op games to play with a buddy so naturally I found Outriders which is some kind of campaign third person cover based shooter so that alone made me pick it up

Outriders is summed up as like Gears of War meets RPG-Lite looter shooter meets Open world. Its semi-open world its more like open-instanced where you have a world map, then in every location theres a Camp which has NPC's you can talk to to do upgrades, travel, shop, etc. Then you can fast travel to other instances on the world map. But you cant actually freely wander around to other locations, its always intermediated by a travel NPC.

So you have that as a framework for selecting and travelling to missions or side missions, then you have a bunch of RPG mechanics which is where the game tries to be appealing to the modern audience I guess. You have the typical loot of armor parts like Boots, gloves, helmet, body armor, killing enemies will randomly drop out loot, doing some side missions will give you random loot, but other than that theres not much of interest. When you go to the inventory screen (which isn't very well done, frankly) you see the loot is different color 'tiers' like Diablo or something, purple, brown, grey etc. Apparently the different loot has abilities like adding fire, or adding explosions or something, but its actually hard to tell what these abilities are or how they work, I think its just automatic. But mostly it has the typical green arrow letting you know this particular piece of equipment is more effective.

So basically the whole game you just keep collecting random loot, open inventory, loot for the green arrow telling you the item is more effective, and equip it. Thats pretty much all there is to the loot, atleast for me. The weird and stupid thing is, for armor, apparently youll have a green arrow telling you a piece of armor is more effective, but armor is actually directly tied to your health points. So youll equip some 'better' armor, but youll lose like 500 health points. Its kind of stupid, and I couldnt make any sense of it. The loot is not great, its just there to keep you busy and have something to do besides mindlessly shooting, but its really not the star of the show, and isnt a good example of loot done well in modern games. It feels shoehorned in like the devs were thinking "oh, its a modern game, So we gotta make it a looter shooter, thats what the kids are into nowadays' Like soulless without passion.

Theres all sorts of more RPG style mechanics, Like you even pick between 3 or 4 different classes when the game starts, which were really confusing and none of them seemed appealing and it wasnt clear what any of them did so we had to google it and still it was confusing. Its like some classes specialize in snipers, or assault rifles, but not really because all classses can use all weapons but some are more effective because their skill trees are more suited for particular guns? Dont know, its pretty stupid and bad.

The skill trees are generic and nothing amazing, typical stuff like gain X more health, X more damage with 'assault weapons' or 'sniper weapons' - but this wording in particular is really strange and obtuse because for the first half of the game I wasnt really quite sure what counted as a "Assault weapon" because theres all sorts of different looking weird guns. Like for example, I wanted to use rifles that didnt have scopes, but on the skilltree there was points for "X damage with sniper weapons" - but I wasnt sure that since the rifle I'm using doesnt have a scope, is it still classified as a 'sniper weapon' ?  Well I found out later that you can press a button to go into more details for a weapon and it will tell you the category the gun is, but even then it was still a little mystifying. Its just not very well done.

For my skilltree I just went towards getting assault rifle damage shit, and also 'toxic' abilities which is a skill point you can use that tempoarily boosts your weapon damage, thats kinda all I did.

Which brings into the next RPG mechanic, it has like MOBA style abilities where you have 3 main abilities you can press. You can go into the menu and choose from something like 10 abilities, but can only have 3 slotted at any time. You can change these abilites whenever you want, but can never have more than 3.

Theres different categories of abilities like 'Freeze'  'Turret"   "Decoy" "Interrupt skills" but I dont know the system isnt that appealing and its just all kinda meh. The main abilities I used were things that froze enemies, and the ability to add toxic to my weapons to tempoarily buff them. Didnt find the skills all that enjoyable, It kinda just turns into something like World of Warcraft where you have your skills on 'rotation' and youre constantly just spamming numbers waiting for the cooldowns to come back. Kinda stupid.

Next, you have the setting, characters, plot, dialogue etc.
It's completely devoid of soul or meaning or anything interesting
All the characters are as cookie cutter as possible. Like AI generated levels of mundane and dull.
Token nerdy black guy, feminist strong women characters, like i dont got a problem with any of that shit nessesarily, but the characters are so lame and boring you quickly pay any attention to anything theyre saying. TO make matters worse the story is really dull and boring typical sci-fi crap like "Ohh we're the chosen ones to save the earth and save humanity" or some garbage nonsense. NO depth or complexity to the morality or anything its just "LOL youre the chosen one, go save the world" K, dont care. There's a few funny cutscenes and stupid voice acting but other than that its just one ear out the other.

The combat is the main saviour of the game. It plays much like Gears of War style snapping into cover, blind firing, great fluid responsive controls, diving all over the place sprinting etc. The guns all have different mechanics and recoil patterns and characteristics, theres a lot of different kinds of guns and its almost like every 5 mins youre equipping some new gun to play with. They have different magazine capacities, firepower, spread, etc. Lots of different designs too so it keeps it fresh. You have more RPG shit like numbers flying out of enemies when you shoot them indicating how much damage youre doing so you can try to determine which guns are better. The combat is pretty fun for the most part, guns sound good and theres enough variety to keep you interested. Theres a decent variety of enemies youll find monster mutant animal types, then the next moment fight demonic grunt guys with guns, the enemies are hard to describe but theyre like weird humanoid aliens with guns.

Though the combat isnt without major flaws, like I said before, its got those MOBA abilities where youre constantly spamming abilities from cooldown like youre playing WOW or some shit. That just feels wrong, I dont need that in my shooter games. But worst of all, there can be some types of enemies that are like mini-bosses that are SUPER bullet sponge. Im talking youll be dumping thousands of rounds into these guys from a LMG before they die, and it just feels stupid and cheap. To top it off, they can also cast these MOBA bullshit abilities where they spawn shields, spawn fucking stupid spinning lazer beams that murder you quick, and they can even do abilities where they fully regenerate all their health after youve been mowing them with bullets for 5 mins. Really stupid! Youll be running in circles shooting thousands of bullets into some of these guys and you just think "What the fuck am I doing with my life? video games are kinda dumb sometimes" . You might be able to chaulk it up to me not fully understanding the mechanics, or the gun statistics or whatever else shit, but I dont think so, I was constantly upgrading my guns and getting all sorts of new gear, I just think some of the enemies are stupit bulletsponge nonsense.

This gets weirder because the game doesn't ask you to select a difficulty in the beginning really, instead, it has this 'World Tier' system where as you kill more and more, the game automatically increases the difficulty, thereby making better and better loot drop, but making the enemies harder and more bulletsponge. There are 15 total 'difficulties' and near half of the game or a bit more we had the difficulty maxed out. And I have a big problem with this difficulty system, it just seems all wrong. You can change the difficulty at any time, reduce it down, and then the enemies drop worse loot again. But the whole interaction between difficulty level, and enemies dropping loot, it just feels like a bad design. Like its all so meaningless, the only difference is a stupid stat-check of how much DPS my random generated gun does, not my actual skill. And once you got the difficulty on 15 (max) the game is still pretty damn easy, most enemies die fast  - BUT you have these random miniboss guys that are insane bullet sponges that spam MOBA bullshit abilities at you, that regenerate health, that spawn stupid spinning lasers, that TELEPORT you across the arena, its a fucking mess. And the only enjoyable way to deal with them is to turn the difficulty down, its just stupid. I would have prefer the game to drop this convuluted dumb psuedo-difficulty system and instead have the traditional "Easy/medium/hard" right as the game starts, and thats it. So its a coherent, consistent, progression and system without these stupid designs. Its like oh Im stuck at a part? Ok ill just increase the difficulty and grind enemies until they drop weapons that have a green arrow telling me its better so the enemies stop being bullet sponges. What? I dont like it at all.

The variety in 'levels' is really small. Basically every 'level' is just a circular/square arena with a few pieces of cover that you walk into, you go around the deathmatch arena killing waves of enemies, then you walk onto the next one. Thats how the whole game feels. Its not like youre walking into real curated locations with personlaity and character - No, its just one deathmatch arena after the other. For literally the whole game. The main missions are so soulless and devoid of personality and character that whenever we played the side missions, we were wondering if we were playing the main missions or not. The side missions feel like main missions! and thats not saying side missions are good, thats saying the main missions have so little personality that theyre no different than the optional content. You go to a few differnet locations, like snow and desert stuff, but it still all feels the same. I beat the game an hour ago and I cant really remember a single unique mission or location, it all blends together into the same generic deathmatch arena after the other without any identifiying uniqueness to any of the missions. On one hand its a good thing that the game constantly puts you into the action, theres rarely a moment where youre just standing around doing nothing, theres no exploiration to do really, theres no puzzles to solve, the cutscenes are relatively minimal and infrequent, its just one action packed arena after the other, its kind of a good thing cause you cosntantly get gameplay, but it also like I said is way too repetivie and without any differenciation. It feels like the whole game is almost a bunch of random multiplayer deathmatch maps with bots thrown in. Not good, really, if you want a memorable, unique, handcrafted campaign.

Theres no shortage of content, atleast, theres tons of side missions and we almost beat them all, but yeah theyre even more dull and boring than the main missions. Its just go to X and kill this General, which is kind of cool because everytime you kill the general it gives you a cutscene executing him, that was kinda fun. Other than that its like go to X and collect this item or kill this boss or clear out this place. Really standard stuff. Then you go back to town and get an item reward or something. Nothing much to say about it.
But when I say 'more content' I mean that even after you beat the game, it introduces all sorts of new mechanics and systems like 'Expeditions' and different 'World tiers' and levels for you to do. I never did any of it, but its there if I want it.

But really its a co-op campaign game. Those arent all that common. So thats a massive bonus. Just the fact you can play through an entire action packed Gears of war style clone with a buddy, getting loot, leveling up, laughing at cutscenes and shit together, that already makes it a decent experience. I think the game could of probably been way better if they scrapped the whole psuedo open world bullshit, scrapped the leveling up, scrapped the loot system or heavily changed it to be more interesting, scrapped basically all RPG mechanics, and just was a honest bonified Gears clone like it actually is at heart. As it stands its a somewhat enjoyable, co-op action experience, with heavy flaws and reeks of generic 'sellout' modern game design.

6/10

Outlast 2

 

Since its October I'm just looking around for any immersive good graphics scary game to play. I searched Steam by amount of reviews and went through the top reviewed games, Outlast 2 was the first real candidate so I bought it just because of that mainly, but I also beat the first one and thought it was pretty good.

Outlast 2 has a pretty vastly different premise than the first game
In the first game it takes place in a mental asylum
Outlast 2 starts off in a Helicoptor with your wife (?) and the helicoptor gets shot down(?) or crashes. From there on the entire plot is just wandering around some weird outback redneck villages and forests , kinda like Resident Evil 4, looking for your missing wife. You soon discover you're in a fucked up place cos theres all sorts of random crucified people and decapitated heads and warnings all over the place , and thats where things really take off.

You have a video recorder with Night vision which is essential, and batteries which drain. You can also turn on a microphone for the camera to help track where enemies are, but other than that theres not much more to itemization or mechanics. You can sprint, slide, climb, look behind your shoulder, use a bandage when you get hurt, but thats about it.

Where the game really sells its self is in the graphics and attention to detail.
The enviornmental storytelling is kinda top notch too, frequently I found myself just stopping to zoom in on random things in the enviorment with my camera, just admiring all the details and piecing together things. It's a visually impressive game and theres tons of things in the enviornment to just stop and look at and get more info from. You sometimes get teleported to a dreamlike school enviornment randomly , and theres papers all over the walls like in a typical school and stuff, papers on the desks etc, and you can zoom in super close and read everything in perfect detail, its cool and immersive.


The game even subtly rewards you for doing this because there are moments where you can 'record' key points by looking at them with your camera, then a red circle appears and it captures it. You can then press a button to open your camera and re-watch all the key moments you've recorded, with additional commentary from the main character.

 
There's a ton of gore and its some of the most over the top creepy stuff i've seen in a game, faces peeled off, dismembered, eyes being eaten by insects, its like the whole game is a full motion Cannibal corpse album/album cover. You can zoom in close to see the insects moving on corpses in full detail, the textures in particular are super high quality in this game which really adds to the enviormental storytelling. It's extremely explicit with full nudity, torture scenes, dead babies, penises hanging out on dismembered and crucified people, its intense. Maybe one of the most shocking games I've ever played. I was skimming the Steam forums and one of the top posts was "How is this game not banned?" Yeah, I can see how someone would think that. It's on the same level as depraved horror movies like Salo 120 days of sodom, Human centipede, Cannibal holocaust tier of shock value.

The story is simplistic but immersive the whole way through. You find notes scattered about that have great writing and tone about two cults the Christians and the Heretics who are at war or something, but also the Christians want to prevent the birth of the antichrist(?) so they go around killing every baby and child(?) they can, its crazy and dark edgy stuff. You find pits of dead babies and watch torture scenes and at one point you even get crucified yourself its pretty intense. But the story isn't like a massive exposition of dumping information at you,it always keeps it brief and isn't very involved or anything, I think its well done. The dialogue on the notes is crazy and very well written.

The gameplay has some questionable and frustrating parts, however.
Unlike other horror games, theres virtually no puzzles.
There is no inventory, there are (almost) no items to pickup or collect.
Only a few times will you have to go around and find a specific item to progress, maybe 2-3 times.

Other than that the bulk of the gameplay is sneaking past enemies.

However, they try to make up for the lack of puzzles with frequent chase sequences, where you automatically get caught, and have to escape. This would be fine if it happened rarely, but it happens so frequently that you start to get desensitized, and it becomes a constant trial and error deathfest where you keep dying over and over until you find the exact specific path it wants you to go down, which is extra hard because the game is so fucking dark even with night vision on. Dying multiple times per checkpoint really does make the game less scary because you lose the suspense and "what if" and it just becomes something you expect, so you lose that anticipation. The game does too many of this "Haha, gotcha, you died!". Too much trial and error.

This is made even more frustrating because its actually the most visually disorienting, confusing game I've probably ever played. There are CONSTANT visual effects all over your screen. Especially any section with water or rain, your screen becomes so damn blurry and covered in water effects that its very dizzying and nausating to play. I get physically nauseated and get a headache playing this game. Its SO dark that for most of the game you'll be walking around in complete pitch black running up against walls and trees hopelessly trying to find where to go. On the one hand it makes for a sort of terrifying experience, but on the other hand it just feels bullshit when you have enemies chasing you and you're left feeling like you drank a bottle of whiskey stumbling around like a moron without being able to see anything. The night vision effect also tends to make the graphics super blurry too so it all gets added ontop of eachother to be a really confusing mess to navigate.

There are a few sections in particular that was just very bullshit and frustrating.
One of them is the infamous 'cart scene' where you have to push a cart up against a fence and jump over, but as soon as you touch the cart there is a pitchfork lady enemy that automatically spots you. From there on you have to run around, hiding in barrels and random places, waiting for the music to stop, go back to the cart, and try to push it without being caught. Problem is, every single time you seem to push the cart she INSTANTLY teleports to you or knows where you are. VERY hard section. Probably took me like 20-50 deaths/attempts to get past it, and I only did it by basically figuring out the AI is stupid and doesn't crawl under fences so I exploited the AI pathing to do it. Really unfortunate the game has problems like that and it seems like at certain times the AI just teleports to you no matter what, like I said it makes the game actually lose horror because you get in this stupid loop of dying over and over again to where the suspense is lost.

There are multiple difficulties , I think I picked difficulty 3/5 but I don't know what it does. I think all the difficulty does is lower the amount of batteries and bandages you get, how fast your night vision drains, and how many hits it takes to kill you? Well I was dying in 1-3 hits, and I never once ran out of batteries so I don't know. I almost think the game would be MUCH scarier on the easiest difficulty, because atleast you wont be constantly in these trial & error death loops where it just feels stupid and bullshit - instead you'll be in a state of constant progress and suspense wondering "what if I do get caught, oh shit!" . Its weird that thats how it would probably work out, and in my opinion its kind of a design flaw if you want to make people scared, they're probably not going to assume that picking the easier difficulties is whats gonna scare them.

Theres a lot of enemy variety, you have outback village people type, but as the game progresses you find more and more twisted and fucked up beings, like guys that look like they blew their face off with a shotgun but are still alive in weird animal form chasing after you, weird zombie type things, I dont know how to describe it , if its supernatural or what, but the monsters are very well done.

You dont only crawl through forests and villages , though, frequently like I said  earlier youll be 'bursting' in and out of this dreamlike school sequence, running through brightly lit halls with supernatural things chasing after you, or monsters. Other times towards the end of the game you go across a lake in a longwinded raft sequence , almost like something out of RE4 again. Theres snowy areas in the dreamlike world. There are blood red raining skies, churches, chapels , those sorts of things. Its varied enough where it doesn't feel like youre just doing the same thing the whole time.

Its pretty funny how I played Amnesia: Rebirth before that, while that game was terrible, its a really funny coincidence I just happened to pick two games back to back that have a plot about pregnancy, and even have childbirth scenes! What are the odds! I was blown away when I realized that, like what the fuck are the chances of that. I will say the childbirth scene in this game is WAY more intense and graphic and disgusting, this game makes Amnesia:Rebirth seem like PG13 family friendly and Outlast is like underground deep web snuff film or some shit in comparison.  

Though all in all its a pretty great horror experience with some stupid trial and error and a few other minor visibility issues. The enviornmental storytelling and plot is good enough that I'd even consider playing this game again, its like the perfect game to play if you have guests over, its like watching a horror movie with them but even more intense and immersive. There are enough details and graphical fidelity that playing it through again just to look around, zoom in at all the objects and crazy gore and weird things, that it would still be interesting. The graphics are awesome, I kind of like that it doesn't have a hardcore emphesis on puzzle solving like other horror games, thats really refreshing, though the game could have been better if some of the AI teleporting shit was gone, or the automatic chase scenes were a bit less janky, not knowing where to go, running into dead ends while being chased cause the visuals are so disorienting.

8/10