Platform: PC

Aer takes a 1995 Zelda aesthetic and makes it into a boring slog. This game felt like a college game design project. The story is about ancient animal gods or something. You can turn into a bird and hold a lantern. The core of the game is exploring three simple dungeons to find the appropriate pads to stand on to get to the magic thing. Collect three magic things and you win!! The Epic game store is noteworthy for giving away free games but a lot of what they offer is this type of stylish indie game with no pay-off.

With this game I have finally played all the key 90s RPG classics. I attempted to play a few years ago but because the GOG version of the game ran so poorly in Windows 10, I gave up. This time around I found the Unofficial Arcanum Patch and that made most of the performance issues go away. That is, until the last stretch of the game in which characters began randomly to disappear from my party and saves became corrupted. I managed to complete the game by turning off the high-res patch and saving every few minutes, but, man, was that ever annoying.

The main selling point of Arcanum is its steam punk setting. It’s the technology of the Nineteenth Century mixed with magic and the stereotypical fantasy races. In the end it just feels like another D&D style fantasy game where you have to defeat the evil wizard, etc. I was a magic, sorry magick user so the technology stuff had little impact on my play style. Aside from the opening sequence, in which a blimp is destroyed by planes, and the occasional reference to trains this might as well have been Middle Earth. For a truly steam-punk RPG play the excellent Ultima: Martian Dreams.

The main quest line is okay. It does eventually degenerate into the aforementioned cliché of defeating the evil wizard but there are plenty of little side quests in every region to keep things interesting. Much like Fallout at the end of the game you get a recap of all the good deeds you accomplished, so it pays to offer your help wherever you travel. There are lots characters and lots of possible dialogue interactions, and, because I focused on charisma, I was able to talk my way out of many-a-problem. It could get a bit wordy at times but that can be expected of games of this vintage.

Arcanum uses the same engine as Fallout 1 & 2 but has a janky combat system that’s sort of turn-based and sort of real-time. It works most of the time, but once your characters are leveled high enough it just becomes, “point at the thing and it will die.” Despite its flaws I found the combat to be fun or, at the very least, satisfying.

The main problems with this old-school interface were inventory management (especially dealing with your party members), navigating the zoomed-out map, and moving around on screen with limited visibility. I think Arcanum is still worth playing if you can tolerate its technical flaws and its failure to live up to its setting’s potential.

I was quite a bit hesitant to get this game because I had heard that a big part of if was building and maintaining settlements. Along with crafting, this type of management system is one of my least favorite types of game play. The first few missions are all about teaching you to create and build settlements but there soon comes a point when you can ignore that part of the game in get to the really fun part: exploration and combat. Why would I want to maintain a farm when out can explode dudes.

The V.A.T.S. system is no replacement for the turn-based combat of the original Fallout games, but it has its own appeal that melds well with otherwise standard FPS mechanics. I never got tired of the slow-motion replays of the body parts flying everywhere.

The main story is the game’s weakest element. You awake from a cryogenic sleep to discover your infant son has been kidnapped. This plotline ends about halfway through the game and it shifts to working between the various factions of the wasteland. None of them seem particularly evil and yet you are tasked with destroying them by the various other groups. At that point I stopped caring.

The real fun of the game is exploring the massive open world. There’s a little story connected with every location. Sometimes its told explicitly, other times it’s gleaned from the items and messages that have been left behind. Very soon I was ignoring the main quest and just running off in random directions looking for adventure. Before I knew it I has sunk well-over a hundred hours into the game. I even started to enjoy the settlement building as I collected trophies and magazines from around the Commonwealth.

I finally completed the main quest after which the game wisely allows you to keep playing. I still think the original two Fallout games where the best in terms of narrative, but, of the three 3-D games in the series, this one was the most fun to play, and was the best looking (even though it’s still very gray and brown).

I don’t know why I keep thinking these Resident Evil games might actually be good. Everything about RE6 is frustration. There’s the odd camera positioning that gets all screwy in the many tight corridors of the levels. Then there’s the never ending boss battles in which you have next to zero ammo and have to trigger quicktime events while looking for minions to kill for resources. Checkpoint save locations are few and far between. The levels are tedious, gray, and overlong and there is very little variety in the action.

On top of all this is the decision to break the game into four separate narratives each of which is more confusing than the last. Not to mention you are forced to sit through a 5-10 minute credit crawl between each section. So lame. I bought this as a two-pack with RE7. Do I dare continue?

The third in the reboot series which is more or less the same as its predecessors. Excellent graphics, the usual fun mix of platforming, puzzles, and combat.

The story is the typical bad guys that want the object that will give them the ultimate power in the universe! Plans are thwarted and Lara triumphs! I was close, but I didn’t have the energy to 100% this one.

Prey takes a very ambitious approach to game play. There are always multiple paths towards achieving your goals and this goes beyond the standard stealth vs. guns blazing options. You can stack objects to get anywhere within the sizable, open environments. At times, this feels like cheating but there are sections that require it. Also, as an appeal to psychopaths, you can also kill any NPC you meet. I’m not sure if it’s possible to kill your way into an unwinnable state but I wasn’t about to waste my time trying. The problem with all this freedom is that half the time I really didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing. There are tons of special abilities you can unlock but they aren’t really required to do anything so I was never compelled to try any of them out.

The story is just as open as and free flowing as the environments. I found myself inundated with reams of boring backstory and world-building via various NPC e-mails and books. This has become a common story-telling trope that I am seriously sick of. This ain’t Zork and I want to live in this world and not read about it while monsters are cloaked and hidden everywhere. Despite all these attempts at fleshing out the universe, the story feels half-done and never really grabbed me.

Throughout the first half of the game I found myself getting beaten down constantly. Your character is so weak compared to the enemies and there is no proper tutorial explaining how you can use stealth and the objects lying around to your advantage. Maybe I just suck at this game, but I was constantly on the verge of rage quitting every ten minutes or so. I can’t say I completely hated the experience. When I did manage to defeat a particularly tough enemy in an unusual way it was quite satisfying but that wasn’t enough for me to recommend this game.

Thief 2 has not aged terribly well. I’m usually not one to complain about dated graphics, but in this case they affect the game. A core mechanic is hiding in the shadows, so when the game engine can barely render a shadow you’ve got a problem. I would plan my movements based on scurrying between dark areas only to discover that I would be running through a brightly lit hallway. There is probably a mod out there somewhere that fixes all this.

The guard AI is pretty janky too. Sometimes you could just clop around in your tap shoes and the enemies would be none the wiser, but then other times you’d turn your head and trigger their alerted state. Eventually I got used to just walking in a slow crouch all the time to avoid them.

There is a bit of a story here which is told as inter-level cutscenes. It’s not bad for what it is (sloppy amateurish art and all) but for some reason the main baddie is voiced in that Howie Mandel baby voice. So goofy.

With the completion of this playthrough, I have now completed all the Ultima games (technically I never finished Ultima I, but that one’s a bit too retro for me). Now, everyone says Ascension is the worst of the series, and I think I agree, but it is not as horrible a game as its reputation would suggest. Taken on its own, it is a playable and fun adventure RPG game that hints at what would eventually become possible in games like Skyrim, Fallout 3 and The Witcher. But let’s be clear here, this game is still a hot mess.

So, let’s quickly go over the major problems with the game. First, the graphics are buggy and you often find characters standing in odd places, items floating in mid air, and camera clipping all over the place. The controls are wonky with the right mouse button used to walk forward and a weird switching between mouse pointer inventory management and movement. Your character runs so slow that I would recommend anyone that wants to play the game to enable the fast walk cheat. The game crashes a lot. I couldn’t get it to play in-game cinematics on my Windows 10 PC. The story bears little relation to what has happened in the first eight games and is an unsatisfying ending to the Guardian cycle. Mainly, it just feels incomplete.

What the game has going for it is its ambitious, persistent open-world. You kill a bandit, he drops a sword. If you return to that spot days later, the sword is still there! This is both awesome and potentially game breaking. If you drop an important item in an obscure place, good luck ever being able to retrieve it again. The world is just begging to be explored, but unfortunately, like I mentioned above, the game is incomplete. There are only a few surprises to be found.

And, if you don’t know exactly what spell to cast at the exact time, you may never find that hidden weapon. I appreciated the lack of hand holding but felt no shame in relying heavily on walkthroughs to complete the game. Unlike most modern RPGs, the Ultima series leans heavily on puzzle solving. This can be quite enjoyable as you are forced to think your way through the various dungeons. Admittedly, by around dungeon #6 it starts to get a little old and I just wanted to bash monsters and get to the prize at the end.

The main complaint about the game is the lackluster story that just abandons the cliffhanger that was set up in Pagan. I did enjoy meeting all the old characters from the past, but there wasn’t even a slight attempt to flesh them out (perhaps except for Dupre). This should have been the cumulation of 20 years of world building and it just lands with a thud. There’s a cringey attempt at romance and plenty of interactions that lead nowhere.

However, if you are a fan of the series or even just a fan of mid-90s 3-D games, this might be worth trying out despite its many flaws. Just be patient and don’t expect too much from it.

This game goes out of its way to let you know that it’s about mental illness; and that they hired doctors and experts to make sure that got it right; and if you are a bit touched this may trigger you because it’s scary, intense and realistic! Well, as realistic as any game about fighting mystical Norse demons and beasts with a glowing sword. Not to nitpick, but I was really distracted by Senua’s period-inaccurate pristine dental hygine. When she’s not hearing disembodied voices she must be regularly brushing and flossing.

It takes a while for the story to settle in, but when the pieces start to come together it’s pretty satisfying. The basics are that her man has been killed and Senua is on a spiritual journey to release his soul or something. All the while she is taunted by the voices in her head that feed her with doubt and guilt over having possibly caused his death. Thus follows a series of levels that slowly build on puzzle mechanics and are punctuated with the occasional sword fight. The combat is pretty simple: dodge then swing sword. The puzzles are mostly built around spatial perception and, if you’ve played The Witness, it will seem like old hat to you. The Steam package also includes the VR version of the game which seems very apropos to the mechanics.

I, however, wasn’t completely smitten by the experience. At times its linearity makes it feel borderline like a walking simulator. There’s a bunch of boring, filler backstory about Norse gods and myths which is triggered by interacting with runes. And, I hate to say it, but the schizoid voices start to become a bit much after a while. I get it. That’s part of the point, but I hear enough from kooky-brained people in real life on my Facebook feed.

The original Mirror’s Edge was one of only a handful of games that I had gone back and replayed almost immediately after completing it. It was an excellent game that had you puzzling through levels using parkour skills. This sequel does not hold up to the original at all.

First, it’s open-world. I’m really beginning to dislike this gaming format. It tends to make games longer than they should be by filling game-play with mindless item collection and dull side missions. Also, in Catalyst every place in the world has the same white minimalist design so there is no way to get your bearings. It’s cool art direction but it hinders game-play.

That brings me my second gripe. The first game was built upon well-designed levels. A single object would be colored red and that would guide the player’s eyes in the proper direction. There was just enough there to make the player feel like they were instinctually finding their way through the world when it was all a finely crafted race course. The new game does this dynamically and it just doesn’t work the same. You follow a ghost image which is referred to as your runner’s vision. This really just ends up feeling like following a standard RPG quest arrow.

Finally, the story here is just a dud. Turns out this is a reboot and has nothing to do with the first game (which wasn’t exactly Moby Dick either). It’s not just a grittier retelling or something like that. Faith’s backstory has been changed and now major characters that were good are now bad guys. And, of course, in this world corporations are evil and have no incentive to be good to their customers (let alone not kill them). Lazy, lazy, lazy.

At least the parkour aspects remain pretty solid. I don’t think there have been many new moves added to your repertoire except for maybe swinging around corners and a grappling hook attachment. Combat has improved. There is no shooting and it’s all just fists and kicks. This makes mastering parkour a more integral part of fighting.

In the end though, completing the main mission was about enough for me. I have no desire to test my skill in all the user-created races that pepper the world. Races in which the leaderboard is always topped by some player that managed to complete a two-minute race in twelve seconds. Hmm.