Recent reviews by Mikaeled

So happy I found this hidden gem! It's free and only 30 minutes, but it looks great and had me screaming in a good way. It's a single level and you can only rotate your body as zombies and creatures approach you, and you fend them off with a pistol, a shotgun or by throwing hands. The way things escalate in those 30 minutes is really impressive and had me on edge the whole time.

Ran without issues on my Rift S with RTX 2070 Super and i9 10900K

The closest we'll get to Xena: Warrior Princess: The Game

After the Y2K, seven video interviews of a lady get fragmented into hundreds of clips. Your task is to uncover the truth by searching for keywords and getting results from the computer's automatic transcription. YouTube should really adopt that tech as the transcription is spot on.

The game doesn't explain much more than this. By watching the clips, you uncover pieces of the story and find more keywords to try, like names of people or words that you think she used elsewhere. Search results are limited by 5 at a time, so you're forced to narrow searches down in some cases. This limited and unstructured stream of information makes for an unconventional experience. Fitting the pieces together and discovering the truth on your own was very rewarding to me.

Some were turned off by the at times awkward acting and some of the story's twists. I can see where they're coming from, but overall I thought this was a very enjoyable experience. The range of emotion from the actress is pretty impressive, and the story has enough depth that I could spend four hours looking for every clip to make sure I didn't miss anything!

I was very interested in a game where you play as a ghost detective solving your own murder, which made me jump on a preorder. I don't regret my decision, but it wasn't really what I expected.

It's a third person Unreal Engine game, which you've probably played a million times before. What's special about this game is that it's more about solving murders and gathering clues than hiding behind cover and shooting at aliens. Also, you're a freaking ghost. You can phase through walls, possess NPCs to read their thoughts or influence them, talk to other ghosts and stuff like that. You're a little limited in what you can do, but it's still a novel twist.

For the most part you're just walking around, picking up collectibles and looking at clues. Fair enough. I don't need complicated gameplay systems to enjoy my games. But what about puzzles? Detective work other than "look at X"? Challenges?
The game doesn't have much of that, and this is where it suffers. It tries to mix things up here and there with some ghost powers and some demons you have to get rid of, but it's not much. I'm guessing a lot was cut during development, to the point where the gameplay feels underdeveloped, or like this game would work better as a point-and-click adventure game or something more like an interactive movie. My thirst for collectibles (of which there are a lot in this game) and the well-paced story was what kept me going through most of the game.

You're not the first to be murdered by this Bell Killer guy, so you're sent on a chase that takes you to different locations to uncover more connections. The game has a pretty big arsenal of cutscenes that are generally well-produced. It was easy to get invested and want to see more. I lost this admiration a bit at the end when things got super cliched, but I know that for the majority of the game I was really enjoying the way the game was headed and happily followed where it wanted me to go. You really need this when the gameplay itself doesn't provide much challenge. The main story is fleshed out with collectibles that relate to the town of Salem (this game is set in Salem, speaking of cliches) and to the relationship between you and other characters including your recently deceased wife (very cute!).

The well-produced story and the novel twist on third-person exploration made this game worth playing for me. The part where it's supposed to be a detective game falls flat when the gameplay systems have been either underdeveloped or just assumes that the player is a child, so keep this in mind. Still, the good outweighed the bad for me, so don't be too scared by the lackluster reception.

On paper, this game has everything. It's a horror adventure game with an elaborate Twin Peaks-inspired story that takes roughly 20 hours to complete depending on how much time you spend doing sidequests. It's got an open world for you to explore, there's a bunch of ranged and melee weapons, puzzle sequences, hunger mechanic, you name it. The problem is that this game plays and looks like a Playstation 2 game. The graphics are outdated, which wouldn't be too bad if the design wasn't also outdated: it basically plays like a poor man's Silent Hill, and it is full of tedious missions and easy combat encounters.

This PC port is also a mess that is locked to 720p, lacks color filters that the console version apparently had and crashes regularly. You can fix all of this by installing three easy fixes that you can find on the forums, but still. If you want a game that works right out of the digital box and plays like a modern survival horror game, it's hard to recommend this.

Yet, I absolutely loved this game, and it is all thanks to the story and characters. You play as Francis York Morgan, an FBI agent who comes to the small town of Greenvale to solve the murder of a young woman. Sounds familiar? Yes, the game's story is basically a funnier Twin Peaks, and I loved it. It is at times super weird, super funny and super interesting, so it was easy for me to overlook all the shortcomings of the game. The dialogue, story beats and even the cheesy comic relief made this game so easy to enjoy. I just wish this "Director's Cut" had more stuff to it than extra costumes and some cutscenes, and also made the game look and play a bit better.

I got the game since it was real cheap and expected a decent, but not amazing third person shooter. For the most part my assumption was correct, but I was a bit pleased with the cutscenes and story. It certainly borrows heavily from other stories about robots and humans, like Ghost in the Shell, and it is laughably predictable at times. Still, the presentation and voice-over is quite nice, and I found the characters to be mostly likable and even funny. The attention to detail is not always great, but the game is good with mixing up locations and characters to keep the player interested. There's also a jet ski level for some reason.

It tries to do some interesting things with the gameplay with squad-based tactics and upgrades, but these seem a bit like an afterthought and don't do much to make the game more fun. For the most part the gameplay is pretty standard cover-based TPS stuff, but with some crazy boss fights here and there.

Overall, the campaign helped elevate the game from a mediocre shooter to a decent game that I found enjoyable. Not great, but worth a go.