If you know me, you know how much of a Resident Evil fan/nerd I am. I fell in love with it since after experiencing the Director’s Cut of the first game back in 1997 or so, but of course it doesn’t mean that I like all of the games in the series. There are games that I like less, games that I like more, game that I have replayed countless times and games that I rarely revisit. Yet in all this time Requiem might be the first time ever that I have finished a Resident Evil game and immediately uninstalled it. And have no desire to play it again.
Tag: game review
In love with: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
So, I’m not the biggest fan of turn based RPGs, as I always say when I’m about to talk about one. Neither am I that huge of a “jRPG” fan. I’ve played all of the numbered Final Fantasy games and like most of them, Chrono Trigger is among my favorite games, Parasite Eve is fantastic and all that, don’t get me wrong. But back when the whole PS2 era of Japanese Role Playing Games was happening with dozens of games coming out, I have played almost none of them. Why am I talking about it? Well, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a huge love letter to that whole era of RPGs.
In love with: Look Outside
Look Outside is a very unusual type of game. Horror theme in roleplaying games is quite common and some of the most famous examples of the genre and its many subgenres are horror themed. But going beyond just the theme, building mechanics to evoke fear and tension? That’s far less typical. Think of Sweet Home, a Capcom action adventure RPG that is also often considered to be the very first survival horror. A game that is far more of an action adventure than an RPG, basically. Not many games attempt that. From Software experimented with it a bit. There’s the Shadow Hearts precursor Koudelka, of course. Parasite Eve 1 and especially 2. Recently, there has been a resurgence of these types of games, often built with RPG Maker. But they often focus on things that are either too action adventure and barely RPG at all, or vice versa. And those that do focus on being role-playing games often take their main inspiration from titles like Lisa: The Painful or Fear & Hunger, focusing on delivering the brutally hard difficulty, rather than some fun experience.
Now, Look Outside isn’t easy either and I could see influences of Lisa or Fear & Hunger in it. In fact I have played the game on the easier difficulty after attempting to complete it on the normal one first, but I’ll delve into it later. But that’s not the focus nor the selling point of the game. Instead, this game brings the experience that a lot of immersive sims and open world RPGs strive to have – building a personal story in a strange world. And it does it with a lot of style, variety, surreal creativity and fantastic tunes.
Happy about: CULTIC (both chapters)
I am very happy about the rebirth of classic FPS popularity. That said, not many games that attempt to recapture the simplicity and excitement of that pre-Quake/Quake era of titles end up being worth playing. To the point, where I sometimes start to wonder – with how few actual classics there were that passed the test of time and are still beloved, perhaps the “dungeon crawling with guns” approach to FPS is too limiting?.. But then countless imaginative WADs for Doom appear and I come around something like Cultic and my doubts dissipate – no, there’s still a lot of fun and creative stuff that can be done withing the classic limitations. And while I didn’t love Cultic as much as many people seem to, especially the recently released closing Chapter Two, this is a really cool FPS.
Happy about: TR-49
While I didn’t care about most of their projects, inkle have established themselves as a small but inspired team that always tries to find new ways to make narratively driven games mechanically interesting and non-linear. My only proper experience with their titles has previously been Heaven’s Vault, which I found to be highly flawed, but also very cool and definitely unforgettable. With TR-49 the team is doing something that is a bit easier to explain and understand, especially if you have played Her Story and The Roottrees are Dead.
Thoughts on: Keeper
Just a couple of months ago I was talking about Herdling and mentioned how these types of atmospheric journey action adventure games are surprisingly easy to fail. They usually have very little in terms of “challenge” or problem solving, so they need to either do something interesting with their mechanics, or at least know how to be short and beautiful enough to be a fun distraction. Where Sword of the Sea has extremely fun movement tech, Herdling has the herding mechanic, Keeper has basically nothing. But it is, thankfully, short and beautiful enough to at least be alright.
Thoughts on: ROUTINE
Now that I’ve played ROUTINE, after over a decade of waiting, I can safely say that the story of waiting for the game turned out to be far more interesting than the game itself. Announced back in 2012, the game looked very promising. It seemed like curious continuation of ideas from System Shock 2 and Doom 3, mixed with more modern (for the time) approaches made by Frictional Games with their Penumbra and Amnesia titles. But also mentioned some more unconventional concepts, like the idea of a permadeath or highly non-linearity… Then, development troubles ensued and after moving from Unreal Engine 3 to 4, then to 5 and changing quite a bit from those initial trailers, the game is finally out.
During the years of development, the craze for the Amnesia: The Dark Descent-like games have died out, as did the “scarecam” popularity of YouTube videos. In fact, streaming or recordings of streams seem to be far more popular for games nowadays than pre-recorded videos. A lot of the elements that people were hoping to see in Routine were realized to great effect in the fantastic Alien: Isolation back in 2014. And in 2017 Capcom revived the proper classic survival horror with Resident Evil 7, with the genre still being popular today. All of which would be hard to ignore going into Routine. But even if I did, even if I would imagine this game coming out in 2013 the same way it came out today, I’m not sure the game would’ve felt any less mediocre.
Happy about: Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut
Over the years I’ve grown extremely tired of open world games. It’s very rare that the prospect of playing one excites me, especially if the title is clearly inspired by the type of open world design that Ubisoft have popularized with their Assassin’s Creed titles. But I still find interesting titles from time to time and Ghost of Tsushima had a lot of positivity about it from people I tend to share opinions with. After ignoring the PC release of the game for over a year, I’ve decided to give it a shot and while the game still has a lot of faults, it did end up among the better examples of the genre.
Thoughts on: Tormented Souls 2
Four years ago Tormented Souls became quite a pleasant surprise for me. I still maintain that if it were to be released during the heyday of classic survival horror, it would’ve been mostly forgotten by now, but in the current period of this genre revival the game was among the best independently released titles. A lot of it was by the books survival horror, the story was nonsense and the combat wasn’t great (but it wasn’t terrible either), but it clearly showed the developers understanding of the genre, which is not very common among releases that attempt to follow the classic survival horror pillars. The fact that a direct sequel to the game with such a dumb story was announced, was somewhat surprising to me, but if it meant more good gameplay, I was up for it. Unfortunately, while Tormented Souls 2 has some improvements over the predecessor and isn’t a bad game to experience, it is far less enjoyable and considerably more frustrating.
O tempora: Sweet Home
O tempora is a series of retrospective posts where I play games from ages before to see if they stood the test of time.
I’ve talked about movie tie-in titles that became instrumental in shaping the future of gaming when I was exploring The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. But this time, we are going even further back in time to 1989, to a horror themed action adventure turn based party based RPG Sweet Home, developed by Capcom as a tie-in to the movie of the same name. It was released on Famicom exclusively in Japan and has never been officially localized or re-released. Yet, this game and its unique blend of game mechanics are incredibly unique and have never been recreated to this day. And it is also the reason Resident Evil exists.