Platform: PC

The first few hours of Alien: Isolation are some of the most nerve-racking gaming I have ever experienced. It’s a stealth game in which you are mostly defenseless and must hide to survive. There’s no sneaking up behind enemies and stabbing them in the back. The enemies aren’t just some dopey guards walking in a set pattern that you are trying to avoid. It’s one of the most menacing monsters in cinema history. One wrong turn or overly loud noise and you are facing its dripping double jaws in seconds.

All this wasn’t helped by the fact that Alien was one of the scariest movies I saw as a child. My parents let me watch it way before I should have. I was so traumatized that, a few years later, my parents took me to see E.T. and I was terrified of his long head. It took more than a few Reese’s Pieces to calm my nerves.

I initially tried playing Alien: Isolation in a dark room with headphones on. I couldn’t do it. The sound design is excellent and the environments are dark and claustrophobic. Every little thump had me breathlessly spinning around and around looking for danger. Eventually the game settles in to a more predicable pacing and the tension begins to lift. If anything, it’s the sameness that begins to lessen the impact of the game. Eighteen hours in and I was still crouching and and hiding behind crates.

The writer do a good job in constructing a story that sorta-kinda works with the films. Unfortunately, there is a sequel-begging ending that doesn’t give any sense of closure.

Vanquish is a third-person action game that has little to offer in terms of plot or characters. Its story feels like every other Japanese console game. Devil May Cry 4 comes to mind, and if you liked that game, you have a problem. The dialogue is all painfully cliché and tries very hard to be hip with nerdy allusions to action movie lines and bad-ass hero shots. Pretty cringe inducing.

But all this is moot. This game is really about its fast-paced game-play and mechanics. While certainly not revolutionary, the ability to skid around the map at hyper-speed is fun and challenging. Add on top of that a little bullet-time and you have an enjoyable but mindless way to pass a few hours.

At this point I think we can all basically agree that every game that Wadjet Eye releases is going to be worth buying right away. This is Dave Gilbert’s first game as lead designer since Blackwell Epiphany. There is overlap with the Blackwell universe, but it is definitely a departure from those games.

Possibly taking a lead from Telltale, there seems to be a more deliberate attempt to make your choices affect the story. This manifests itself first in that you choose one of three origin stories for your player character. Then, throughout the game, each chapter ends with you deciding the fate of an adversary. The consequences of your decisions don’t really ripple throughout the game. They mostly affect the end-game sequence. Still, it’s a worthy attempt at adding a little variety to the experience.

The farther an adventure game gets from being a pure puzzle-solving endeavor, the more these types of ludic story-telling tropes become important. For the record, the puzzles of Unavowed are not very puzzley at all. In most cases, the path is pretty clear and, if there is any doubt, just talk to everyone, including your squad-mates. The game is mostly a matter of understanding the abilities of your friends and using them appropriately.

But all this is moot if you are just willing to sit back, click away, and let the story develop. There’s enough good story-telling and pretty visuals there to make it worth your while. However, I don’t think all the effort that went into creating branching narratives will really justify multiple plays. At least not for me. I think I’m fine with just turning on the commentary and racing through a second go-around. You know how much I love hearing about color theory and how voice actors are the salt of the Earth.

I think with this I have finally played through all of the original Infinity Engine RPG games. Icewind Dale I & II are still my favorites of the bunch. Those were about building up characters and skillfully fighting though areas. Torment is all about story, story, story. Normally that’s a good thing, but when that story is told via an endless scroll of text and dialogue trees is gets really tedious. I may have been able to deal with all the text with a more adventure game style interface where you get animations of who’s speaking and some visual cues as to their emotions. Why can’t dialogue be fun or gamified somehow? Instead I sat in a daze as thousands of lines of text flew by waiting to hit the 1 key until I was out of options.

I guess the story is unique. It’s not your standard “defeat the evil creature” narrative. You must find out about your forgotten past lives and solve the mystery of your identity… eventually, by defeating the, um, evil creature.

Your character is immortal and can’t be killed. Instead you are respawned every time you die without consequence. I’m not complaining too much. I don’t long for the good old days when games were hard to beat, but there has to be some motivation for improving your character and doing well in combat. Eventually, you run out of immortality. In fact, at that point in the game I was in an unwinnable state and wasn’t about to go back to an old save to relive the joys of scrolling through the same text again. I had to revert to a god-mode cheat for that penultimate battle. I don’t know. That just makes a game feel broken to me. I was able to kill the final boss without cheating. So that’s something.

Ubisoft only knows how to make these open world games with paper-thin story lines and lots of side challenges that don’t amount to much. I had already played the sequel (which I got for free) before I had played Watch Dogs (which I also got for free). Apparently, if you wait long enough, all Ubisoft games will eventually be free. I knew what to expect going into this: lots of “hacking” which consists of vaguely Pipe Dreams style puzzles or, more often, just holding down the “Q” key. My main reason for not passing on this was the prospect of exploring a virtual Chicago. Turns out in Montreal they think Chicago is surrounded by rolling hills and filled with exploding steam pipes.

The game does what it does well enough. I suppose I could have spent hours and hours finishing side missions, but the fact of the matter is that much of the tasks are just not very interesting. Taking down gang hideouts is fun and a few of the racing challenges are okay, but that’s about it. Some of the more hacker-ish things are just about looking for the correct camera or following glowing wires until you reach a box with a “Hack” icon above it. Watch Dogs 2 is superior in most respects. In that game you get drones and other tools to exploit. There is far more variety and fun to be had in virtual San Francisco, so skip this one and play the sequel.

I’ve been playing this off and on for the past few months. This is supposedly designed as a multiplayer experience and have been playing it as such. The campaign is not at all interesting narratively. It has something to do with a bad guy with a space hare lip controlling an orb thing that grants powers to the good guys. I lost interest in the first cut-scene.It’s all very pointless and boring.

But the multiplayer game-play is crazy fun, right? Not exactly. The game doesn’t really do anything original with its mechanics. Just a basic FPS with game modes that amount to defend this thing, destroy this thing or capture that thing. There is no satisfying end goal. The hook is supposed to be finding exotic weapons and gear. Who cares? Borderlands did this but it didn’t take itself seriously. It was fast and fun. Destiny 2 tries to pass itself off as an MMO or something but it just manages to make the game bland and repetitive.

This game is a bit of a mixed bag. I really like the main characters and it has some genuinely funny moments but there are weird tonal shifts. One moment characters are bloodletting themselves to please an ancient Mayan god, the next you are walking around asking people to comment on the panties you found.The big issue with most point and click adventures is whether or not the puzzles make sense. Again, Broken Sword 2 is hit or miss. When your goal was clear, the puzzles made sense and had just the right amount of challenge. But many times you were put in a situation where there were no clues as to what you even should be trying to do. A few times a puzzle’s solution involved talking to a random person one more time after you thought you had exhausted all your dialogue options. Thankfully, there is a pretty robust in-game hint system. Spoiler alert: you never need to use the panties.

Despite the flaws, all the chaotic threads come together in the climax and I ended the game thinking that I wanted to play the sequels.

This one was a freebie from GOG.com of which I knew nothing about before playing it. Turns out, it is a 2.5-D platformer—meaning, it’s a 3-D rendered game but you only move in the standard two dimensions of a classic platformer. I’m not a huge fan of platform games, I’m not very good at them. Thankfully this one is slow-paced, not too twitchy and yet, it’s not quite a puzzle platformer either. There is just enough action and thinking to keep an old-timer like myself interested for a few hours.

There is a little bit of a story which is told mostly through comic style art cut-scenes. There is also plenty of junk to collect if your the type of OCD gamer that goes for that sort of thing. Exploration is limited and it doesn’t take much effort to uncover secrets. Overall, and enjoyable game that doesn’t overstay its welcome.

A while back I gave this game a spin during a Steam free weekend and ended up setting it aside I guess because I couldn’t quite grok the stealth mechanics. On this second go around I’ve realized that it’s all about using your magic skills for just about every encounter. In fact, by the end of the game the player is well-nigh invincible will his arsenal of teleportation, mind control and time dilation. I’m too old to be wasting my time mastering a video game, so I welcome it when games feel like they get a little easier as I go along.

There’s enough of a thread of plot to keep it engaging to end. It’s all a pretty basic damsel in distress narrative with the usual litany of video game story-telling cliches. At least it is set in an interesting steam-punk world. Or more appropriately, whale oil punk.

I managed to finish the game only having to kill two characters, so I got the “good” ending. Hurray! I suppose.

Games journalists (I can’t believe that’s really a thing) seem to love this game, I thought it was tiresome. Every game a new world is generated that you’re supposed to jump around looking for treasure, secrets and rare upgrades. If you die, that’s it. Permadeath. A game for shut-ins and the insane. So, why didn’t I like it? My problem is that I don’t find you basic platform-game mechanics all that interesting and, without a narrative hook, I lose interest fast. Believe me, I tried to like this one but no thanks. Sayonara, uninstalled-ed!