Platform: PC

This is definitely the weakest season The Walking Dead games. Apparently, halfway through development Telltale went out of business and the game had to be taken over by a new company (made up of many of the same crew).

On the plus side, we are back to focusing on Clementine’s story by directly controlling her and her choices. One the minus side, most of the characters are dopey teenagers that are all, for the most part, kinda friendly with each other. There isn’t that slow boil conflict between survivors that was in the last game.

Your job throughout has shifted from survival to focusing on influencing the development of young A.J. At one point in the game he makes an unbelievably stupid choice and there’s no getting around it. It’s just a means of adding conflict between the main characters without any grounding in how real people behave.

Despite this annoyance, the story moves forward and we get some nostalgic scenes with characters from Clem’s past. It all leads up to an ending that feels about right and manages to pull the heartstrings (and the zombie guts). They’ve also added a “collectibles” aspect to each episode and the quick-time event sequences are as jarring as ever. All-in-all flawed but worthy conclusion to this excellent series.

It’s about time that I got back into this excellent series. I had forgotten how stressful these games were. There are never any good choices, and, just when you think you’ve found one, something goes wrong and messes everything up. I wasn’t too happy about the focus on the new character Javier instead of Clementine but there’s enough interaction with her (and a couple of flashbacks where you control her) to make it feel like you are still affecting her character in a meaningful way. After years of the T.V. series and all these games the stories and characters tend to fall quickly into tropes. There’s always the guy who can’t keep his cool or the group leader who seems to have brought back civilization but ends up being a wacko.

I forgot how much I like these Choose Your Own Adventure style Telltale Games. It didn’t help that the last one I played was the weakest release in the series. Given the “meh” taste that one left, I may not have picked The Expanse up, but I recently finished reading the books and I wanted to linger in that world a little longer.

The Expanse video game is a stand-alone story of Camina Drummer before she joined Fred Johnson, serving aboard a ship of Belt scavengers. They discover the location of what could be their biggest score only to run afoul of space pirates, suffer inter-crew drama, and the usual space opera fare. The plot doesn’t really tie-in to the grander themes of the series and books. It feels more like one of the many Expanse novellas. The stakes aren’t as big, but it was an entertaining story nonetheless.

As far as the “game” goes, the choices weren’t quite as dire as other Telltale games. Usually these games throw in a difficult “choose who dies” moment at the end of the first act. We didn’t get that here. In fact, one of the later episodes almost felt choice-free and was more like a non-violent version of Dead Space‘s haunted ships. I didn’t mind it so much, but that sort of sequence would have more appropriate in an RPG. But still, there was enough interaction here to keep it engaging through to the climax.

Resident Evil 7 is a stark departure from the most recent games in the series where the emphasis has been on action. This a return to the more pure survival horror roots of the franchise, but as played from a first-person perspective. This means lots more pure horror atmosphere in which the best strategy is to conserve ammo and run away when you can.

The story draws a lot more from Texas Chainsaw Massacre than from the generic bio-weapon zombie plots of the past (I would have preferred if it dug deeper into the mythology of The Ghost and Mr. Chicken). Only in the last act does it start to tie in with the other games in the series. Most of the time you are trying to defeat a family of evil rednecks in order to save your (possessed) wife.

The early parts of the game, when I didn’t really know what to expect, were genuinely creepy. It’s loaded with jump scares that are even more effective from a first-person view. But, in the end, I was never a huge fan of the old-style Resident Evil. I really just want to blast monsters and not continuously be searching for ammo.

At its worst, the game can be more stressful than fun. But once I got a handle on my inventory and the game world opened up a bit, I started to enjoy it for what it was.

When Steam launched in the early 2000s and everyone hated the idea of downloading their games, there were only a handful of games available. I remember Dark Messiah being one of the first non-Valve games on the platform. It had a demo which I tried and enjoyed. You were able to kick enemies and watch the physics engine do its magic. I thought, “this is cool” and then promptly forgot about it for a couple of decades.

Well, I’ve finally played the game in its entirety and doesn’t quite stand the test of time. Despite using the Source Engine, it has some pretty bad performance issues. In theory, I should have been able to play this at 1080p with all the bells and whistles turned on. I had to down-res it and go to medium settings and it still had below average frame rates.

Then there is a sluggishness to the controls. Every attack is prefixed with a swirling weapon flourish that just makes everything seem unresponsive. The kicking and throwing physics attacks are still okay, but they are under-utilized and less effective than they could be. Half-Life 2 did it much better.

All that said it’s not unplayable. The levels are (thankfully) pretty on-rails making it a more casual gaming experience than a modern open-world RPG where you are forced to follow quest arrows and talk to boring NPCs. In a bit of a twist, your character isn’t necessarily a good guy. There is a “good” ending, but where’s the fun in that? There’s a lot of unrealized potential in this game and it’s too bad it doesn’t hold up.

The Crimson Diamond is a throwback to early Sierra 3-D adventure games like King’s Quest and Space Quest. Unlike their far-more refined contemporaries at LucasArts, the Sierra games still used a text-based parser instead of a pure point-and-click interface. The text input allows for much more detail in the way puzzles are structured, but it also introduces some major annoyances in terms of guessing verbs in hopes of instigating a particular action.

The Crimson Diamond attempts to mitigate some of these known problems by including quite a few quality-of-life improvements like a notebook and shorthand commands for common actions. Overall the game manages overcome most of the limitations of the mechanics. As far as adventure games go, it was not as difficult as any of the original Sierra titles were but there’s a bit of a twist to that assessment that I will discuss a bit further down.

Much like the very first graphical adventure Mystery House, this is a murder mystery. You play as a mineralogist assigned to investigate if diamonds indeed exist in the remote Canadian forest area of Crimson. You find yourself in a lodge filled with suspicious characters and then shenanigans ensue. The setting is mostly limited to the lodge and grounds around it and the game-play is very process oriented: collect fingerprints, identify footprints, and eavesdrop on conversations.

It’s all wonderfully illustrated and written with quite a few memorable characters. The art style mimics that second wave of Sierra games starting with (I think) King’s Quest IV in which the graphics are still pixelated, the palette is limited, but a slightly higher resolution allows for more detail. That three pixel blob is now a seven pixel blob and it kind-of/sort-of looks like what it’s supposed to be.

Aside from some technical problems (which are slowly getting fixed with each release) my biggest problem with the game was its end-game. I was not prepared for the final interrogation in which I was supposed to type in the names and actions of the guilty parties and much more. The idea here is that it will add replay-ability as you realize all the clues you missed, but I do not have the patience to replay most games, especially an adventure game. I would have preferred if the game had a similar, lower stakes version of this interrogation in the first act to prepare me in advance and make me more aware of the importance of note-taking and the thorough investigation of everything.

But, overall it was enjoyable and more detail oriented players will probably like it quite a bit.

Part two is more of the same from this Mexican brawling platformer. You explore the world and as you complete sections of the game you are given fighting powers which open up more areas. The combat is fluid and controllable and has a gentle ramp-up in difficulty where you constantly feel as though you are improving.

The world is open to explore, but backtracking is kept to a minimum. Only at the very end of the game did I find myself retreading completed zones in search of missing collectables. For the first time ever, I’ve played one of these games to 100% completion and, let me tell you, some of those final challenges are insanely difficult, requiring every bit of skill I had mastered until that point.

Again, nothing revolutionary here, but my tempered expectations left me much more satisfied in this second iteration of the game. Yeah, I got the good ending!

It’s Portal with cubes! Not quite, but it’s still a spacial puzzle game in which you are trapped in a bleak lab environment and must puzzle your way to the exit. This tenth anniversary edition adds a story via voice over communications with outside entities. It helps to give some context to the levels, but it’s not really critical to the game.

The main course is the puzzles. The idea here is that there are various colored panels that perform distinct actions: red creates a pillar, yellow a platform/staircase, blue a springboard, and green generates a moveable cube (with magnets! How do they work?). The first dozen or so levels are ridiculously easy. Eventually new twists are added like rotating walls, magnets, guide-able laser beams, rolling objects, and automatons. You slowly build up the skills to manipulate these new elements using those initial four building blocks. By the end, some of the puzzles can get pretty spatially mind-bending. The minimalist story comes to a nice little conclusion that makes it all feel worthwhile.

A Borderlands 2 stand alone expansion that is more of the same from this franchise. In this one, you are playing a game within a game as Tiny Tina DM’s a table top RPG filled with dragons, wizards, and other fantasy archetypes. There is very little to distinguish it from the other games in the series other than the grenades now act as missile-style spells. You are still collecting randomly generated guns and pairing weapon types with various enemy types. The main reason for playing this is to get the usual doses of comedic stories and characters. Claptrap is searching for his wizard beard, Torgue is a jock looking to gain nerd-cred, etc. A worthy expansion if you like the series.

Skald was one of handful of Kickstarter projects that I have backed. It is a throwback tribute to 80s role playing games like Ultima or Phantasie with a heavy emphasis on pen-and-paper dice mechanics. Watching the game’s development has been pretty interesting. Early builds of the game look very much like the PC version of Ultima V. As the months (and years) went by that art style became much more detailed and modern stuff like weather and lighting effects were added. The final product is an incredibly detailed pixelized world to explore.

So much care has gone into every single map tile. There is an overwhelmingly brown and gray tone to the art. I think this is trying to be reminiscent of the Commodore 64 palette but at times, especially during nighttime battles, it became difficult to discern friend from foe from foliage. The art style extends into several lovely “cutscene” graphics and various dialogue screens. There are even fanciful medieval drop-cap letters in the text display.

All of this is in service of a Lovecraftian tale of dark fantasy in which various old creatures are emerging back into the world and corrupting the minds of men. As far as I could tell, there wasn’t much emergent gameplay. The story is pretty linear despite the initial open-world feel of the map. I am playing this just coming off of re-playing the first two Fallout games and perhaps I expect a bit more player choice in the narrative. But, to be fair, the Ultima games were basically adventure games with role-playing mechanics thrown on top.

The role-playing here is mostly about building the skills you can use in combat and navigating the world map. Many tasks in the game will require a stats checks and Skald literally shows dice rolling as it checks for success. As experience is gained and characters level up, the player can assign points to stats trees that differ based on class. Spells are gained, new attacks are learned, and various combat skills become unlocked.

Skald is at its best during combat. It recreates the turn-based strategy of the early Ultimas in which you control the actions of every character in order of initiative. It isn’t quite as tactical as the Wasteland sequels but there is a fair amount of positioning, spellcasting, ability management. Keeping everyone alive is a challenge and those battles that end with just a couple of party members still standing are exhilarating.

Skald falls short of greatness in that it does not quite live up to the potential of a next-gen 2-D RPG. Hopefully the engine will continue to be developed to add more environmental interactivity, a better dialogue system, and a more expansive and explorable over-world. During the Kickstarter there was walk of releasing development tools. I’d love to see what the modding community can come up with using this system.