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Man, Xen was fantastic. It made good on the tantalizing flickers of an alien world you saw throughout the game, and made it very clear that poo poo has reached its limits and drastic measures need to be taken. It's one of the few alien worlds in video games that feels genuinely alien, in large part because it is such a left turn from the rest of the game. Making progress there is all about experimenting and observation to figure out how the different devices and organisms work. In an era of corridor shooters and canned cutscenes, that deserves to be celebrated. I wasn't real keen on the bosses, though. The big crab was pretty bullet-spongy for what it was. The final boss required the same trial-and-error experimentation that the rest of Xen did, but the penalties were way too aggravating. It's easy if you know how it works, but getting to that point is such a pain.
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Aug 4, 2014 21:42
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Hakkesshu posted:I never thought Alan Wake was particularly scary, but it did have some good atmosphere. The pacing is my main problem with that game - it peaks about 3/4ths of the way through and then just keeps going long after I got tired of the mechanics. Yeah, Alan Wake owns but it's not a very scary game. Tense at best. It's like the Silent Hill version of Dead Space. I had a different complaint about the pacing...all those woods hikes in the first few chapters got old real fast. I thought it picked up from the trailer park and stayed solid for the rest of the game. The different environments were enough for me to keep me going. EDIT: It was also one of my favorite games to screenshot. Too Shy Guy fucked around with this message at 19:15 on Aug 21, 2014 |
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Aug 21, 2014 19:13
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Shattered Memories was meant to have a lot more depth to it, but development was extremely troubled and huge swaths of content had to be cut. The areas and echoes were indeed supposed to be reflections of Cheryl's life. Most of what was there was in from pre-alpha and was never tweaked or expanded on, so it ended up way more disjointed than intended. There were other plans like multiple paths through areas or multiple solutions to puzzles that all affected your profile more dramatically, but that was all cut. The game had more problems that would have hobbled it anyway. The lead designer was adamant that the real world and nightmare worlds be separate. Of course, the moment the player realizes this all the tension goes out of most of the game. The psych profiling was never going to live up to expectations either. Whatever you tend to pay more attention to shows up more later in the game, but you'd never notice unless you did multiple playthroughs. And it's not even scary or anything. You look at lots of beer posters, so more beer posters show up later. So what? The devs didn't think they needed to twist it around or anything.
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Aug 27, 2014 17:49
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Jimbo Jaggins posted:Are you sure about that? Seems odd that they'd get voice actors in to record 3-4 variations of every echo voice message for a pre-alpha. Yeah, I worked on the game. Proper VOs for the echoes didn't go in until late beta. Before that some of the devs did placeholder readings for most of them. A few like the sewer echo didn't go in at all until beta, but they were all planned and written back in pre-alpha. I think testers wrote a few bugs like "this has nothing to do with anything" but those usually got sent back with a snarky "you just don't get it" from the writer, who was at all times way too close to the project.
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Aug 27, 2014 19:22
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Jimbo Jaggins posted:Is it true he used the confusion at Konami due to William Oertel leaving the project to push through things that wouldn't have been signed off on otherwise? Also how much of 'Cold Heart' if anything is left in the final game? I was on the Konami side, so all I know about Climax is what they told us and what we could infer. We definitely noticed that Sam Barlow (the writer) had an unusual amount of pull, and stonewalled us on a number of issues he honestly should not have had the final say on. None of us were very fond of him by the end. He also had a pretty epic blowup in the comments of one bug that didn't do him any favors. Can you remind me what Cold Heart was? It sounds familiar but I can't recall it.
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Aug 27, 2014 19:40
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Clever Spambot posted:This may be a myth but i heard they were basically handed the prerendered cutscenes by konami and were told to make a game around that, which would mean that the not pyramid head wasn't really the devs fault. Not only that, they had like 6 months to make the game. It's a miracle 0rigins is as good as it is. Totally not feeling that Silent Hills trailer/movie/whatever, though. It's just a grab-bag of haunted house tropes. If they put something out that proves they can create an atmosphere with them, then I'm in.
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Sep 20, 2014 02:30
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Zombie Samurai posted:Deadly Premonition is a good game in a bad game's body.
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Sep 23, 2014 05:01
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A lot of times, the people who produce test builds and the people who arrange media demos have very little communication between them. It's dumb and an indication that the producers do not have their poo poo together, but it shouldn't be as black a mark on the game as people make it out to be. Sometimes the marketing team has to run with whatever they've got.
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Sep 29, 2014 18:56
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SolidSnakesBandana posted:Here's what you need to know going into Resident Evil 4: RE4 was the first Resident Evil I ever played, knowing nothing about anything in the entire series, and it's one of my top 10 games of all time.
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Oct 1, 2014 01:11
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I'm crossposting this from the Steam thread because in retrospect it probably fits better here, even if they're not all actually horror games. So I was thinking, this being October and all, about taking a break from Marvel Heroes and FarCry 3 and going through some of my Halloweeny games over the next few weeks. The Cinema Discusso does an October movie challenge to watch 31 horror movies over the course of the month, and looking at my backlog I think I could do something similar with my less-played games. I'd be starting a week in, but my goal would be less to play through the whole thing and more to get a spirited taste for the season. Also, I fully expect some of these to suck and force me to jump to a new game after a matter of minutes. 1. 1953 - KGB Unleashed 2. Adventures of Shuggy 3. Afterfall InSanity: Extended Edition 4. Alan Wake 5. Alan Wake's American Nightmare 6. Alien Breed 2: Assault 7. Alien: Isolation 8. Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs 9. Amnesia: The Dark Descent 10. Atom Zombie Smasher 11. Betrayer 12. Burn Zombie Burn 13. The Cat Lady 14. Closure 15. Deadlight 16. Eldrich 17. Ghost Master 18. Hell Yeah! 19. Home 20. Huntsman - The Orphanage 21. I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream 22. Infected: The Twin Vaccine 23. Lone Survivor: The Director's Cut 24. Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi 25. Organ Trail: Director's Cut 26. Paranormal State: Poison Spring Collector's Edition 27. The Path 28. Scarygirl 29. The Scourge Project: Episode 1 and 2 30. Shadowgrounds: Survivor 31. Velvet Assassin Would anyone be interested in writeups/impressions of these, here or in another thread? I've picked a bunch of games that I either never played, never finished, or wanted to revisit for one reason or another. I also have plenty more that would fit the theme if the unthinkable happens and I run out of games.
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Oct 8, 2014 00:55
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Hakkesshu posted:That's kind of a weird list. I don't really know how anyone would classify Velvet Assassin as being even remotely horror-related, and Scarygirl is just a lovely platformer with vaguely Invader Zim-like art. Shuggy's just kind of a generic looking puzzle game. This is why I hesitated posting here, because I picked some of these knowing full well that some are very tenuously "halloweeny". I admit I totally forgot what Velvet Assassin was when I picked it... I thought she was a vampire for some reason. I'll probably switch it out for Year Walk, which I completely forgot I had. The Saddest Rhino posted:I'm just going to point out some of the more questionable choices in your list: I appreciate the feedback, but I picked these with the intent of writing up and sharing my thoughts on them, positive or negative. I've already been through Afterfall and Home, for example, so I know what to expect there.
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Oct 8, 2014 04:38
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Playing with friends is the answer, and even if you're not trying to conquer your fears it's a lot of fun. I played the original Silent Hill and Fatal Frame with an audience (and I needed it for FF, Jesus) and we all had a blast. You still get scared if it's a good game, it's just way easier to laugh off.
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Oct 8, 2014 15:26
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 The 31 1. Alien: Isolation (There's already a thread for this one and it's a real slow burn, so I'll add more thoughts to this as I get further in.) This is probably the most gorgeous game I've ever played. The devs absolutely nailed the aesthetic of the first Alien movie, and it adds a significant amount to the oppressive atmosphere. You know how when you watch a good horror movie, and before anything bad happens you get that sick, uncomfortable feeling that everything's going to fall apart? Well, the first hour of Isolation is fantastic on that front. You almost want to sit around and stare at the little notebook doodles and cereal dispensers instead of getting to the meat of the game. There's also something about it that feels very... System Shock. The gameplay and the look lend themselves to a favorable comparison there. It's a little buggy so far, though. My flashlight didn't work in the scene where I was supposed to learn how to use it, and I had to restart one checkpoint very early on because a dialogue sequence didn't fire. The NPC models look amazing, but the animation is a bit stiff and the voice acting isn't the best. If they could get these guys together with the dudes that did the animation and acting for the newer FarCry games, they could bridge the uncanny valley, I'm sure. So far, super atmospheric and creepy as gently caress. 2. Year Walk This one caught me totally off guard. Year Walk is based on Swedish lore about vision quests. You embark on a long walk in the woods, looking for signs and meanings, and you come across some very strange stuff. There's a very dreamlike quality to the game where the odd glyph or ghost you run into feels almost expected, but it also serves to take you out of the real world and immerse you with very simple, beautiful graphics. This makes the horrifying bits all the more effective, because they come in rough contrast to the feel of the rest of the game. I won't lie, there have been a few jump scares so far, but the feel earned instead of cheap. It's like a nightmare intruding on the edges of a pastoral dream. Gameplay is simple, moving left or right through pretty landscapes, moving forward or backward to different areas, and clicking on things to interact. You have a useful map and an encyclopedia that helps flesh out the legends and signs you encounter. The game also has a very clever way of getting you to use the encyclopedia later on, which I found very effective. The puzzles are pretty simple as well, so don't go in expecting a lot of gameplay. It's mostly exploring the woods and delving into the myths you encounter, which for the price, I think is well worth it. An entertaining, chilling experience.
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Oct 8, 2014 17:01
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Anyone know where the Wii one fell in terms of quality? I know it never got a proper release outside of Japan. EDIT: Wow, I did not know a fifth Fatal Frame just came out in Japan like two weeks ago.
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Oct 8, 2014 22:21
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Forgot to post this here last night. The 31 1. Alien: Isolation 2. Year Walk 3. Deadlight I can sum this up real quick for you as Zombie Prince of Persia. Prince of Zombies? Zombies of Seattle? Also, I mean the old Apple II one. Deadlight is a 3D side-scrolling platformer with the same precise yet tanky controls from two decades ago. There's running and jumping and turning in place and stopping on a dime, and God help you if you flub a jump. You play Randall, a gravelly survivor of the zombie apocalypse who wishes he had half the gravitas as Bill. You must guide him as he mantles up and over the thousand fences, crates, and fire escapes of Seattle in search of his three survivor buddies and maybe his family? I dunno, I was too busy wrestling the terrible combat controls. Melee in this game is awful, as it only functions a certain distance from your character. Any closer and you harmlessly shove enemies away instead of whacking them. It makes mobs of zombies a proper death sentence, but in a game like this where it's easy to miss one running jump and land in a pit of undead, it can get frustrating fast. The gun is more effective but your ammo is rather limited and headshots are a must. I tended to do a lot more running from fights, which the game seems to support and often expects anyway. Do not buy into this one for the story, for it is terrible. The characters are incredibly one-dimensional and the writing is bad to the point of nonsense in some places. It is a pretty game however, in that lovingly-rendered hellscape sort of way. There's a lot of detail in the environments (so much so that it can obscure your path at times), and plenty of little collectibles hidden in out-of-the-way spots or obvious deathtraps. Looks to be about a 5-6 hour game, quicker if you don't bother looking for goodies. Decent playtime for the price, but the rough edges lead me to suggest a sale purchase if at all. If you thought Prince of Persia needed a modern reboot with zombies and bad combat, by all means give it a try.
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Oct 9, 2014 16:10
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The 31 1. Alien: Isolation 2. Year Walk 3. Deadlight I hope you guys can forgive me...tonight's games aren't horror in the least, but they still got a Halloween feel to 'em. 4. Adventures of Shuggy    I'm a sucker for cute games, especially cute platformers (thanks Kirby) and this is one of the better ones I've come across. Adorable little bat...thing Shuggy inherited a mansion from his uncle, but it's all haunted and stuff. To get the place in order he has to collect gems (it is ALWAYS gems) through more than 100 puzzle rooms and beat up some equally adorable bosses along the way. It's standard fare for a puzzle platformer, but what makes Shuggy shine is the variety in the puzzles. The devs took every gimmick they could think of short of an actual portal gun and mixed them up to round out the rooms. There are rooms with low gravity, reversed gravity, rotating gravity, rooms where you can fly, clones you can switch between, time travel, a personal teleporter, and my favorite, the magic rope. The rope trails out from a box in the room and you can use it to tangle up machinery, swing around like a monkey, and other neat tricks. In addition to the 100+ puzzles in the base game, there's also a fully separate co-op campaign and an additional level set that gives you an extra teleporter on top of the other gimmicks. All this comes in a charming package with sharp, colorful graphics and some sweet jazz accompaniment. It hooked me hard enough to finish all the levels in the base game and try my hand at the achievements, some of which are surprisingly challenging. For the money, it's well worth your time if you love adorable platformers at least half as much as I do. 5. Atom Zombie Smasher    Who remembers this one? Back from the olden days of Winter Sale coal and fresh indie zombie games. Actually, maybe it's more appropriate to ask if you remember that decade-old zombie simulator with the colored dots, because this is the fully gameified version of that. Humanity is on the retreat from the zombie hordes and it's up to you to evacuate the survivors from your region. You can select different infested areas from the strategic map based on the infection level (difficulty), and it takes you to a small city map where you have to plan the evacuation. You get a helicopter that airlifts folks (yellow dots) out every 20 seconds or so, and up to 3 mercenary units to help defend. These units are anything from soldiers and snipers to landmines and barricades. After each mission you AND the zombies get victory points based on the final number of survivors and zombies. New events occur as you both reach certain victory point milestones, and the first side to rack up the target number of points wins. Sounds solid, right? Unfortunately, this all comes together to form a strategy game that's mostly based on random chance. Just like the old simulator, humans turn into zombies instantly when touched, and you better believe the survivors clump up around the landing zones like delicious stuffing. All it takes is one zombie escaping your best-laid deathtrap to ruin an entire map. This is further exacerbated by the fact that your 3 mercenary units are randomized for each mission. So while you're in good shape if you get your mortars and zombie baits in one mission, you're boned if you get stuck with barricades, mines, and bombs, all of which are one-use tricks. There's also random variance in the performance of your units; soldiers can miss, and your mortars can go off-target, ruining that hail mary shot you needed to save the day. There are a host of other frustrations, like how you and the zombies get points for holding territory, but you only claim territory if you kill ALL the zombies on the map before sundown, which is ludicrously difficult even if you have the right mercs for it. It's a shame, too, because the presentation is stylish and weird, and there are some neat systems to explore like XP to improve your mercs and rescuing scientists to upgrade your other abilities. The story vignettes are compellingly strange as well and I still can't make heads or tails of the story, but I know Tesla and an antichrist baby are involved. Shame I'll never figure it out, because the game's just too drat discouraging and frustrating to get through. sticklefifer posted:If you're thorough you can find three old-rear end Tiger handheld games too. I found the first one, and that might've been the highlight of the game for me.  LCD Guitar Hero is addictive.
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Oct 10, 2014 08:20
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Alright, alright, I'll give AZS another go! I'm still not counting out the possibility that I just suck at it, though. The 31 1. Alien: Isolation 2. Year Walk 3. Deadlight 4. Adventures of Shuggy 5. Atom Zombie Smasher 6. Alan Wake's American Nightmare It would be hard for me to talk about American Nightmare without touching on the original Alan Wake, because it very much feels like DLC that got spun into its own game. Alan Wake's strengths were its story, pacing, and graphics. The combat was a bit of a toss-up between decent and monotonous, depending on who you asked. American Nightmare is a shorter, weirder story told across three mostly open areas that you visit multiple times. The visuals are still sharp, but lose a lot of the atmosphere that Alan Wake had... the open desert just doesn't have the same creep factor as the dark woods, at least not as it's shown here. Dialogue is pretty snappy and clever, but it's propping up a story that really adds nothing to the themes introduced in Alan Wake. So the main draw is the combat, and to its credit, it's a little more interesting than in Alan Wake. Enemy encounters are varied in makeup, and there are some new foes like ones that split if you shine light on them and creepy jumping spider things. All the original weapons are here, along with new additions like a nailgun, uzi, and carbine. You can unlock weapon cases with additional weapons by finding manuscript pages scattered around which encourages exploration, but honestly as large as the areas are, there's not much to find. Enemies only appear as you follow the main plot, and the game showers you with ammo and flare, more than enough to handle any situation. I tried playing on the harder of the two difficulties and the battles were still a breeze with all the resources I had, but I could be killed in just two hits which led to some frustration with unlucky hits at the ends of long fights. There's an arcade mode similar to the mercenaries modes in Resident Evil that's pretty fun, assuming you like the combat. And that's really what American Nightmare boils down to, did you like the combat in Alan Wake? If so, this is for you, but don't come looking for the atmosphere or story of the original. 7. Infected: The Twin Vaccine - Collector's Edition I've got a soft spot for hidden object games. They're a great way to relax, and they're often unintentionally hilarious. I reviewed Shadows: Price For Our Sins in the old Steam thread (entertaining but has some really lovely item hunts) which would be more appropriate for Halloween, but Infected is pretty entertaining in its own right. You play a doctor exploring the town of Oxford, where a mysterious disease has wiped out the population. You're looking for patient zero, a little girl, who is hiding behind some of the most hilariously contrived locks and barriers I've ever seen. Seriously, this game is straight from the old Resident Evil school of security. One of the first puzzles in the game has you removing a train crest from a train to get at a tractor key behind it, and then later you have to put the crest on a gate to activate the sliding ring panels that open it (second screenshot above). There's an apartment that only opens when you slot stained glass windows into the door, and a safe keyed to the genetic code of a hornet. It's bizarre as all hell, but as long as you examine every out-of-place feature of the scenes, you should have no problem finding all the crests and sigils you need to proceed. The actual item hunts, ironically, make more sense than in most games of this type. Instead of picking out a bunch of random doodads and shapes, every item you're ordered to find must then be used in the same scene to open up access to other items. It becomes this neat Rube Goldberg chain of unlocking that concludes with you getting a new key item needed to progress. I find myself really looking forward to the item searches in this game, because they feel much more like logic puzzles than idle clickfests, especially when compared to the contrived puzzles in the rest of the game. Overall the game has a grimy, late 90s feel to it thanks to some Harvester-level modeling and FMVs. There are a few characters you interact with that are caricatures of real people, but still entertaining for that same reason. I'm not sure where the story's going yet and I don't really care, because solving puzzles and clicking through the town has been a lot of fun so far. If you ended up with it in a bundle by all means give it a try, and if you enjoy hidden object games I think this is a decent one to pick up.
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Oct 11, 2014 19:46
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al-azad posted:I'm going to do my own Halloween roundup but with a focus on the weird and obscure just to set myself apart. My choices of games aren't necessarily "horror" in the strictest sense but include games heavily inspired by the horror genre. Oh man these are some awesome choices. Zombies Ate My Neighbors owns (and some of the levels are legit scary, like the hedge maze full of chainsaw maniacs), and Cosmology of Kyoto looks amazing. I can't wait to see what else you have to share.
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Oct 12, 2014 08:30
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Doctor Goat posted:I played a bunch of Deadlight and thought it was okay until you drop into a sewer where you do nothing but jump around on wooden deathtraps made by a guy who can help you, but will only do so if you get through them all. I went back to Deadlight last night and played through this part and it almost made me quit forever. The part after that with the instant death helicopter has not improved matters either. I'd like to finish the game but I feel like even if I do, at this point I'm not going to have anything positive to add.
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Oct 12, 2014 21:33
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Not intending to derail Evil Within chat, but hey I played a zombie game! The 31 1. Alien: Isolation 2. Year Walk 3. Deadlight 4. Adventures of Shuggy 5. Atom Zombie Smasher 6. Alan Wake's American Nightmare 7. Infected: The Twin Vaccine - Collector's Edition 8. How to Survive (No screenshots this time, my keyboard was bugging out) I decided to pick this up based on the replies in the Steam thread, and I'm glad I did. How to Survive plays like an isometric action game but with more emphasis on managing resources. The campaign strands you on an archipelago of zombie-infested islands, and you have to do quests for the other survivors to try to escape. Along the way you'll find tons of crafting materials to make weapons, armor, meals, tonics, and other goodies to help you survive. There's also a skill tree you progress through by leveling up and a full index of recipes to learn and rare flora & fauna to discover. The combat is solid if a bit floaty (kind of feels like Path of Exile if you could play it with a controller), and I especially like the ranged combat system. You aim with the right stick, and the longer you hold your aim steady, the more accurate it becomes until it becomes a headshot. Really makes fights against hordes tense as you struggle to make every shot count. The crafting system is very cool, with tons of options and things to discover, and also somewhat forgiving as it often lets you uncombine items if you don't like the results. However as one poster pointed out, the limited inventory REALLY works against the design. You won't really know what something is good for until you're able to combine it with something else, so naturally you want to hold on to one of everything. It's just like the crafting system in Teleglitch, actually... except here there's like 10x as many items to hoard, and just as little space. I'm starting to feel the frustration, and I think I'm going to have to bite the bullet and just dump tons of stuff if I want to finish this playthrough. I imagine once you have some experience with the game it's easier to know what to keep and what to toss. The story and writing are barely serviceable, but that seems a small consideration in a game like this. There's co-op and challenge modes if you tire of story mode, and each of the three playable characters (there's a 4th DLC character) is persistent across all modes. If inventory wasn't so limited I would be extremely pleased with this game, but as it stands it's more than worth the current $3.75 asking price (good for the next 10 hours!).
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Oct 14, 2014 08:18
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If you decide to do a game challenge it might seem like a good idea to include some bad games you can write off easily, but really they'll kill your will to play harder than anything else. I even took screenshots of today's games but they were so ugly and boring I didn't bother uploading them. The 31 1. Alien: Isolation 2. Year Walk 3. Deadlight 4. Adventures of Shuggy 5. Atom Zombie Smasher 6. Alan Wake's American Nightmare 7. Infected: The Twin Vaccine - Collector's Edition 8. How to Survive 9. 1953 - KGB Unleashed I actually had high hopes for this one. I'm pretty forgiving of point-and-click games, and honestly more things should make use of the brutal, almost alien Soviet aesthetic. It started well enough, with my character waking up in the bowels of some Cold War bunker with only emergency lighting to guide him. The rooms are pre-rendered and you can pan your view around to examine them, but movement is solely clicking through different static scenes. There is shockingly little to interact with in each scene, and your character will only comment on things that block his progress, and infrequently at that. The atmosphere starts out plenty oppressive and mysterious, but the puzzles and the terrible voice acting quickly do away with that. And my God, the puzzles. It took me over 10 minutes to solve the very first one in the game because you have to find a loose panel under your feet in the dark, and then solve a math problem based on a number you might not have paid any attention to. I quit in the area after that after finding a punch card, a pencil, a key that did not unlock any of the three locked doors nearby, and a radio that you could tune that might be a puzzle. I can't see anyone but the most meticulous puzzling grognards having fun with this. If your dream game is boring, obtuse Soviet MYST, then you might like it. Otherwise don't bother. 10. Burn Zombie Burn! How many zombie murderfest games are there on Steam now? Probably enough that you don't need to worry about one that came out over 4 years ago. Burn Zombie Burn has exactly one interesting mechanic, and that's that you get a melee attack that sets zombies on fire. Every zombie currently on fire adds one to your score multiplier, and killing a burning zombie can yield better powerups. However, burning zombies move faster, hit harder, and if they burn to death award you no points. So if you want to be grandmaster of zombie murder, you have to balance setting zombies on fire against mowing them down. Outside of that, you have a standard assortment of guns and chainsaws and bombs. There are some unique zombie types you've seen before like exploding ones and armored ones. You can trigger a special event for each level like the zombies doing the Thriller dance if you get high enough combos with a single weapon. The graphics are ugly cartoony, and the blood spray particle effect wouldn't render for me so I got black boxes every time I hit a zombie. Your character's hair looks like poop. Seriously, play something else.
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Oct 15, 2014 16:51
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Neo Rasa posted:Why would you do this to someone. One of the games on my list is The Path. Pretty sure anything will be a step up from that.
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Oct 15, 2014 17:28
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Neo Rasa posted:Well have I got a surprise for you!!!  Cardiovorax posted:The Path isn't even a game. This is gonna be a really short write-up, then. Okay seriously though, how is it that all the Tale of Tales games have middling to positive reviews on Steam?
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Oct 15, 2014 17:55
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Stubbs is great but feels super unpolished. It was also fatally buggy for me... I got stuck just after the dance-off against the general, and couldn't progress. Otherwise I probably would have finished it. As rough as it is, it's very unique. I'm going to hit on Eldrich too, I think it's a very interesting game with some very significant flaws. I haven't played it in a few patches either, so I want to see all the neat new stuff that was added.
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Oct 15, 2014 19:16
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Cardiovorax posted:I had no issues with bugs, but yeah, it is unpolished. It also gets boring really quickly. Still, for a while it's really fun, and it shouldn't be too expensive these days. Actually, as far as I know it's currently unavailable. Poor Stubbs was pulled from Steam long ago and doesn't appear to be on any of the other download sites.
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Oct 15, 2014 19:23
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King Vidiot posted:Has that issue been fixed where Stubbs absolutely will not install on any system that's Windows 7 64-bit or newer? I can't remember if it was a 64 bit issue or a Windows 7 issue, but the game never installed for me and I looked it up and apparently it just will not work with newer Windows OSes. It was the only reason I got rid of my game discs. I haven't tried playing it in years, but thinking about it this might be the reason it was pulled from distribution.
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Oct 15, 2014 19:33
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I didn't get to play any spoooooooooky games last night on account of spending 3 hours at a pumpkin patch with a gaggle of 2-year-olds. However, it's a slow day at work and there are some terribly Halloweeny games that I'm not going to get around to playing. So let's do a... The A. Painkiller: Black Edition    This right here is about the Halloweeniest shooter you're going to get this side of KISS Psycho Circus. It's a Serious Sam-style FPS with the look and feel of Quake, except with more colors and cooler weapons. The levels are super varied and interesting, sending you through an opera house, a hellish version of Venice, a snowy mountaintop outpost, and one of the coolest renditions of actual hell ever. You also get demon superpowers and collectable Tarot cards that give you new abilities. The monsters are crazy and the shooting is amazing. Oh, and the story is hilariously dumb but neat because it changes depending on the difficulty you play on. Black Edition also comes with the expansion, Battle out of Hell, which has more interesting levels but isn't quite as fun as the original. Pick this up if you don't have it... and forget anything else with the Painkiller name exists. Seriously. B. The Void    If you want something unique, atmospheric, and creepy, this should be right up your alley. The Void casts you as a lost soul lost in limbo, struggling to avoid final death. To do that you must grow color, the lifeblood of the world beyond. It plays like a first-person adventure game, with some exploration and combat, but much of the emphasis is on tending your gardens of color and dealing with the odd denizens of the void. It's the NPCs that make this game, because they are both very unique characters and VERY creepy presences. This is not a game where you follow quest markers and fill up a bar to win the game. Everyone in the void has an agenda and wants you to help them, sometimes to your mutual benefit, oftentimes not. You won't get a good ending the first time you play (unless you cheat and use a walkthru), but that's part of the allure, unraveling the mystery and deceptions. Definitely set aside some time for this one. C. Shadowgrounds    I'm going to hit on the sequel, Shadowgrounds: Survivor, later on in my roundup (spoiler: it's not as good) but I can't let this little gem go unmentioned. Shadowgrounds is an isometric action shooter that has you as a hapless maintenance man on a colony world where things go completely to hell. It's you versus hordes of aliens as you try to fight your way off-world through darkened bases and crashed ships. The atmosphere definitely borrows from both Alien and DOOM in places, with quiet spells and sudden ambushes punctuated by frantic shootouts with horrible monsters. You get a wide range of weapons as well, and can find scrap throughout the levels to upgrade them with new abilities (not just more damage!). It's a no-frills game with a serviceable story that you'll blow through in a few hours, but I guarantee it'll be a fun ride.
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Oct 16, 2014 17:48
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Two weeks out from Halloween, this thread really should be seeing more action. I guess the Alien: Isolation and The Evil Within threads hoovered up all the trending discussions. The Challenge Games 1. Alien: Isolation 2. Year Walk 3. Deadlight 4. Adventures of Shuggy 5. Atom Zombie Smasher 6. Alan Wake's American Nightmare 7. Infected: The Twin Vaccine - Collector's Edition 8. How to Survive 9. 1953 - KGB Unleashed 10. Burn Zombie Burn! Bonus Games A. Painkiller: Black Edition B. The Void C. Shadowgrounds 11. Home I think anyone who's ever played a video game has wished at some point to have some real impact on the story. That's why we make such big deals about morality systems and multiple endings, to feel like we actually have some agency in our pre-programmed experience. Home offers just that, the ability to shape the story through your actions, and decide the outcome. It's just so boring you won't even care. I don't want to get into too much detail about the gameplay because honestly, if you know nothing about the game and can immerse yourself in the experience, it's pretty effective the first time. The atmosphere is appropriately mysterious and oppressive, and there are a number of unsettling things to uncover. And there are a few scares to be had, but they're all just loud noise jumpscares that the game does not earn in the least. Aside from that, it's really just a low-res walking simulator. You walk right, you walk left, you go through doors and holes in fences and up stairs and down stairs, and you look at things. There's a lot of reading. A LOT. The variable elements of the story are based on what points of interest you actually examine during the game, and your responses to several Y/N choices upon finding certain things. At the very end there's a final sequence of Y/N questions that, unfortunately, kind of blows the entire premise. The first one has a right and wrong answer, and the wrong answer gets you a super lovely "I have no idea" ending. The questions after that affect your own fate, but in terms of the overall story just give you a super vague rundown of how certain characters might be involved. I've played through a couple times, and if there's a way to get a more satisfying ending out of it I haven't found it. If you've got it in your backlog you might as well give it a chance, but outside of the decent atmosphere it falls pretty flat as both a game and an experience.
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Oct 17, 2014 08:06
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al-azad posted:15. It Came from the Desert I read a very detailed LP of this long ago (can't find it anymore) that made it look like so much fun. If I recall correctly, it's pretty punishing until you get the hang of your capabilities and priorities, yes? Still, I'm right there with you hoping that it makes a comeback in some way, mainly because I wanna play it myself.
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Oct 18, 2014 01:19
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Daylight is indeed not good, which is a shame because it has one of the greatest gimmicks of all time. If you stream yourself playing Daylight on Twitch.tv your viewers get special buttons that mess with your game. They can trigger false footsteps, the static effect that signals a nearby enemy, and other effects to screw with you. Used in moderation, it becomes a very effective adversarial multiplayer horror game.
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Oct 19, 2014 03:59
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The Challenge Games 1. Alien: Isolation 2. Year Walk 3. Deadlight 4. Adventures of Shuggy 5. Atom Zombie Smasher 6. Alan Wake's American Nightmare 7. Infected: The Twin Vaccine - Collector's Edition 8. How to Survive 9. 1953 - KGB Unleashed 10. Burn Zombie Burn! 11. Home Bonus Games A. Painkiller: Black Edition B. The Void C. Shadowgrounds ----------------- 12. Huntsman: The Orphanage (Halloween Edition) Wow, Halloween edition! What a perfect October game! Let's just see what kind of game this is... The goddamned tagline posted:MORE STORY THAN GORY! A HYBRID OF ALTERNATIVE HORROR AND CREEPYPASTA... As far as indie horror games go, this one could be worse. You walk the ill-lit halls and environs of the unfortunately-named Grimhaven Orphanage with naught but your cellphone flashlight and your graspin' hand to guide you. The graphics are pretty sharp and the atmosphere is nice and lonely... until the ghost messages start up. Every time you get near an important item or location, some kid will pop onto your phone and whisper spooky clues to you. They're little FMV clips of (I assume) the developer's friends that carry absolutely no weight and blow the solitary feel of the game all to hell. But even ignoring the clips, exploring the grounds gets tedious fast. Huntsman purports to be a "non-linear" game, which basically means they made huge, wide open fields of brush to get lost in, and put about a billion little useless siderooms in the orphanage. You have to find 12 mcguffins around the place but without knowing what they are (the kids are pretty drat vague sometimes) they can be hard to pick out of the piles of copy/pasted detritus infesting the rooms. You can also only carry one at a time, so if you put one down, you better take note of where you left it. I had no idea what to DO with them either, at least until I read up on the goal on the game's store page. The titular Huntsman is actually pretty cool looking, and his introduction was appropriately creepy, but I never actually saw him again after that. Of course, I just wandered around with a toy frog in hand for about 10 minutes and gave up, so I might not have given him the chance. Honestly, you shouldn't either. 13. Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi I'm not going to beat around the bush: This game owns. It's a conditional sort of owning, the kind where the game itself is 13 years old and rough around the edges, but if you can get past that it is a fantastic experience. Your character is meeting your family at a totally-not-creepy-at-all eastern European castle for your sister's wedding, and you arrive in the dead of night to discover the castle is a den of horrors. It's a first-person action game that moves like the Quake II/Half-Life 1 era games, so be prepared for sliding around at 40mph with your cane sword and crucifix. You'll be glad of it soon enough, because the enemies are quick and relentless and you'll need to do some sidestep dancing if you want to survive. The big draw here is that there's a whole castle to explore to find your family members, and it's randomized with each new game. I've found the layout doesn't change too dramatically, but the locations of enemies and items (including essential items like keys) vary immensely. The first time I played, the East Wing key was sitting right out in the open for me to take, but the second time I had to delve into the cellars and wrest it from a pair of vampires. You find a wide assortment of weapons and tools with multiple uses, like stakes that can be used to pin bloodsuckers or burn as light sources. And you'll need to use them, too, because enemies in this game do not gently caress around. Again, this game is 13 years old, and looks and feels the part. But as long as you can get past that there's a deep game of terrifying exploration here. The atmosphere is excellent, with dramatic lightning and some chilling musical cues. This one's definitely a stand-out in my Halloween roundup. 14. Scarygirl Honestly, I was going to do one of the Amnesia games to round out the night but Nosferatu rattled me so good I decided to take on something lighter. And Scarygirl is nothing if not light. It's a platformer presented in colorful, cartoony 3D about a little mutant girl and her octopus friend who met a spiritual rabbit who sent them on a journey to the tree of oh dear I've gone crosseyed. The aesthetics are pretty far up their own rear end here, with a charmless British narrator telling a quirky story in a weird little Nicktoon world, but there's just no heart to any of it. There's not a whole lot to any of the game, really. You have light and heavy attacks and grapples with your tentacle-arms like some kind of sidescrolling Tumblr Kratos, but enemies are standard walk-left-and-right fare so you're going to annihilate them no matter what you press. The levels are simple with very little to find, though some branch into multiple paths which could theoretically encourage replays. You pick up gems you can use to buy new moves and attack upgrades with, and fish which restore your health because you're weird and scary I guess. There's not much else to say about it, really... everything it does has been done better by some other platformer. I think there's only around 20 short stages so I'll probably finish it, but knowing what I do now about it, Scarygirl wouldn't have ended up on my wishlist in the first place.
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Oct 19, 2014 08:36
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The Challenge Games 1. Alien: Isolation 2. Year Walk 3. Deadlight 4. Adventures of Shuggy 5. Atom Zombie Smasher 6. Alan Wake's American Nightmare 7. Infected: The Twin Vaccine - Collector's Edition 8. How to Survive 9. 1953 - KGB Unleashed 10. Burn Zombie Burn! 11. Home 12. Huntsman: The Orphanage (Halloween Edition) 13. Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi 14. Scarygirl Bonus Games A. Painkiller: Black Edition B. The Void C. Shadowgrounds ----------------- 15. I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream I can't properly describe the happy dance I did when IHNMAIMS got re-released on Steam a few months ago. As a young lad the demo of this bleak, creepy adventure game had haunted me, but never did I save enough allowance to buy the full game before it disappeared into the ether. Now, at last, I can revisit it and experience the horror for myself... and discover it's not all that horrifying. Well, the premise is horrifying at least. The mad supercomputer AM has obliterated humanity, preserving only five individuals to torture for more than a hundred years. Now AM wants to play a special game with them, one that could result in their freedom, if they can overcome their fears and regrets. Each of the characters has some dark secret that AM has used to torture them; one was a Nazi doctor, another had his wife committed, and so on. You chose which scenario to play through, and if you die (yes, you can die in this adventure game, but it's only a temporary setback) you get to choose again. The gameplay is what you'd expect of an adventure game, though my impression is that this one is lighter on the item collecting and combining and more on interacting with the scenery and other characters. It can be a bit of a pixel hunt at times, and some of the puzzles are a little obtuse owing to the nightmarish nature of the scenarios AM concocts. What really got me was the voice acting. I didn't even recall the game being voice acted when I was a child, and honestly the game is probably better served without it. The godlike supercomputer taunts his victims like a stuffy DOTA player ridiculing his team. The one woman of the group talks in some seriously dated 90s forced ebonics that gets pretty cringeworthy at times. The writing itself generally holds up, but there are occasional tonal shifts where a character tries to make a funny in the midst of confronting their horrors. Sadly, this one isn't quite as atmospheric and creepy as I had remembered, but so far it's a solid enough adventure game. And the world always needs more unique adventure games. 16. Closure Mmm, indie platformers. LIMBO wasn't the first, but it sure did spark a deluge of similar titles. Closure does a little more with its monochromatic precept and ends up a pretty unique experience, if a little thin on substance. The idea is that nothing actually exists in the darkness between light sources. There may be a bridge right in front of you, but if there's no light on it, it doesn't exist. Most of the time you'll be juggling hand-held light sources and keys, though you'll encounter other forms of illumination like glowing boxes and spotlights. This makes for all sorts of creative puzzles like warping through floors and creating your own staircases. Rooms are fairly simple (at least early on) and provide ample opportunity to get the hang of the mechanics. Respawning if you fall out of the universe is instant, and there's a button to instantly reset if you render a puzzle unsolvable. The aesthetic is sharp and intriguing, which makes the fact there's absolutely no story even more of a shame. You'll explore rooms of immense machinery and towering pipes as all manner of odd-headed, multi-limbed creatures, but never will you have any idea why or how. It's a bit of a waste, really, leaving you with just gameplay and style to hold your interest. I also found the music didn't quite fit the feel of the game either, though I can't really put my finger on why. Closure definitely isn't a spooky game, but the mysterious look and solid puzzles make it worth at least a little of your time.
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Oct 20, 2014 08:41
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Yodzilla posted:Speaking of permadeath, has anyone actually played Ghostship Aftermath and is it as tedious as the GB Quick Look makes it seem? I have access to this, so I'll swap it on to my list and write it up tonight or tomorrow. Just for you.  Clever Spambot posted:Real talk: as someone who generally hates overly actiony AAA horror games will i enjoy evil within at all? Depends. It sounds like you would enjoy the early game, which has you outnumbered and under-supplied for a good while. You can stealth kill enemies if you sneak up on them, but if they spot you they're rather hard to kill with your limited resources and do quite a bit of damage. You spend a good bit of time running for your life, wondering what the hell is going on, and using the environment to kill your enemies if you can. Over the course of the game you get stronger (via upgrades and new weapons) and the enemies you used to sneak around become cannon fodder in direct fights. This is probably the source of a lot of contention... the game very clearly shifts tone over the course of a playthrough. Personally, I think this works in its favor because your character gets more powerful and the fights get brought to the fore as you learn more about what's going on in the story. You shift from running from the evil to fighting back against the evil, and the gameplay reflects that. The problem is if you're coming to the game for just one or the other, and I think a lot of people preferred the tense, oppressive atmosphere of the first half. I can't blame them, because it's done REALLY well. al-azad posted:I've heard stories about Terminal Reality that amount to them having created loads of lore and notes for projects that never saw the light of day. They tried really hard to turn Bloodrayne into a big franchise but that kind of fell flat on its face. Oh well, RIP to a halfway decent company. Terminal Velocity/Fury3 was my poo poo. I got to work with Terminal Reality a few years ago, and this was exactly the case. They were super proud of Nocturne, and for good reason. Such a shame it didn't become a series. My dad still plays it from time to time and it scares the poo poo out of him.
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Oct 20, 2014 16:28
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The Challenge Games 1. Alien: Isolation 2. Year Walk 3. Deadlight 4. Adventures of Shuggy 5. Atom Zombie Smasher 6. Alan Wake's American Nightmare 7. Infected: The Twin Vaccine - Collector's Edition 8. How to Survive 9. 1953 - KGB Unleashed 10. Burn Zombie Burn! 11. Home 12. Huntsman: The Orphanage (Halloween Edition) 13. Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi 14. Scarygirl 15. I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream 16. Closure Bonus Games A. Painkiller: Black Edition B. The Void C. Shadowgrounds ----------------- 17. Alien Breed 2: Assault If you were around for the awesome summer sale with the tickets and prizes, you probably have this game in your backlog because I think it was the only full game you could get with tickets. Obviously I've been sitting on it for years, and despite its apparent similarities to Shadowgrounds (which I love, get it) I've never given it a try. But my internet was out last night and I didn't have much time to play so I figured it was finally time. Alien Breed is an isometric shooter from Team17, far better known for their excellent Worms 2, Worms Armageddon, and all the awful Worms games that came after those. This installment is the middle part of a trilogy whose story appears to be completely unimportant... I think my third screenshot above sums it up pretty well. Your grizzled spaceman is stuck on an exploding derelict ship that you need to either escape from, stop from exploding, or both. I got a little muddled in there because the cutscenes are voiced poorly and the in-game direction is just text. But you really need to pay attention to all that text because the majority of the game is backtracking and flipping switches. Seriously, in the 40 minutes I played I fixed like 5 doors, three valves, flushed coolant, refilled coolant, and started three backup generators, one of which exploded and had to be repaired. Your character in Shadowgrounds is an actual mechanic and you do less busywork fixing than your hard-boiled spaceman in Alien Breed. Interaction is the new standard "Hold X for 5 seconds to fix/open/hump" which REALLY adds up in this game. In addition, half of the things you interact with trigger boring in-game cutscenes of machines moving around that add up even faster. It's a shame too, because Alien Breed looks good for a budget shooter. It's built in Unreal3 and makes good use of the engine. The combat is good as well, but sadly not as varied as Shadowgrounds in guns or enemies. The main problem is that you start with a ridiculously effective assault rifle that can then be upgraded further, rendering most of your other weapons moot. There's a standard assortment of shotgun, flamethrower, minigun, and rocket launcher to pick up and upgrade, but outside of corner cases your AR is going to get the job done better. Plus you can pick up gear like grenades and turrets that further marginalize your other weapons. There are only a few enemy types to shoot and almost all of them are the "get up in your grillpiece" type, which only exacerbates things further because your assault rifle has a knockback effect. I really don't know what they were thinking with this thing. There's a story mode with all the switch-flipping valve-turning annoyance I mentioned, a survival mode where you just kill huge waves of aliens, and a co-op mode which I didn't even bother looking into. I don't know if Alien Breeds 1 and 3 are better balanced in terms of weapons and switch-flipping, but 2 here just wasn't doing it for me. If you don't have Shadowgrounds it might do the trick for you, otherwise I wouldn't bother.
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Oct 21, 2014 17:06
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Actually that's totally worth saying because I didn't even know the recent trilogy was a remake. The original looks rad too, I much would have preferred to play that.
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Oct 21, 2014 23:16
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RightClickSaveAs posted:You got farther than I did, I realized pretty quickly that it was just going to be a Space Janitor game and marked it off. It is a shame, because it still doesn't look bad graphically, and I like top down shooters. Shadowgrounds was great, the first one is a sort of top down Doom 3, where you have levels that feel more alive and you can make your way through them in a non-linear fashion. There were some space janitoring parts, but most of the objectives were a lot more interesting than that. That was the biggest disappointment about Shadowgrounds 2, they changed it to progressing through a series of rooms that would lock you in and spawn waves of aliens at you. I have so much to say about Shadowgrounds: Survivor. I'm just waiting for the right night to dig back into it. Crossposting from the Steam thread: Hey look, F.E.A.R. Online launched today. Just in time for Halloweenquote:Sadly, it's ruined by pay-to-win weapons. A real shame. Maybe this will get better over time, but right now, give it a miss. quote:I went in here with high expectations giving the F.E.A.R title was dissapointed with final outcome feels like a janky pay2win rip off game definatley not worth installing quote:There is no permanent way to buy a character (that I saw) only rentals. Meaning you have to keep paying for the enhancements your used to as each character has a different number of enhancements available. The crafting system looks lackluster at best, and at worst appears designed to draw you into buying resource packs. Nothing says spooky like gear rentals and cash for guns! Gonna put this on the list for tonight.
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Oct 22, 2014 00:43
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I've made a terrible mistake this night. The Challenge Games 1. Alien: Isolation 2. Year Walk 3. Deadlight 4. Adventures of Shuggy 5. Atom Zombie Smasher 6. Alan Wake's American Nightmare 7. Infected: The Twin Vaccine - Collector's Edition 8. How to Survive 9. 1953 - KGB Unleashed 10. Burn Zombie Burn! 11. Home 12. Huntsman: The Orphanage (Halloween Edition) 13. Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi 14. Scarygirl 15. I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream 16. Closure 17. Alien Breed 2: Assault Bonus Games A. Painkiller: Black Edition B. The Void C. Shadowgrounds ----------------- 18. F.E.A.R. Online gently caress this game. I sat here for like five minutes thinking of clever hooks to start this review with, but none of them could capture how F.E.A.R. Online truly made me feel. I love F.E.A.R., you see. It was one of the formative FPS experiences for me, the perfect merging of awesome guns, fantastic atmosphere, and ridiculous action. I never did get around to playing 2 or 3, and perhaps that is for the best. Because I have seen the absolute depths that the F.E.A.R. series can sink to, and there is no way they could ever compare to what I have just experienced. They will be all the better for it. F.E.A.R. Online is a free-to-play online FPS created by a Korean dev studio. If you have ever played a Korean FPS (Combat Arms, Sudden Attack), you'll find a lot of familiar problems greeting you. Technically, the game functions like a relic from a bygone era. You cannot change the graphics settings anywhere except in a lobby, and they're about on par with shooters from five years ago. The menus are a bloated mess of buttons including mailboxes and multiple store/equipment pages. The text is one step up from Google Translate. Your guide is a woman with possibly enormous breasts. Oh, and booting the game will gently caress up the Windows color scheme. Thanks, Korea. So how does it play? Again, much like every other Korean FPS, it's a Counterstrike 1.6 mod with a different coat of paint. Deathmatch is the main mode, wherein you scoot around a flat map and camp corners, spraying at head level at enemies that look just like you unless they shelled out for sexy lady models. There's no way to get back lost health or armor, so your goal is to kill at least one person before you inevitably die. There's also a co-op horde mode and a knife-only mode I couldn't be compelled to try. Then there are the scenarios, scripted missions you play through with three teammates for rewards. We tried the easy one, where you have to escape an exploding base. I think it's supposed to be like that one mode in F.E.A.R. 3 where you run from the wall of darkness, except this time it's fire, and it's virtually impossible to outrun. You have to spend tokens to attempt the scenarios; you start with 3 and you get a new token every 8 hours. I died on the easy one three times, twice because the fire wall claimed my team and left me to face the rest of the level alone. No rewards for me. Hey, remember that F.E.A.R. branding? Well, you get to enjoy it in the tutorial where Alma breaks you out of a operating room by doing a crabwalk jumpscare at you within the first 15 seconds. The rest of the tutorial alternates between killing braindead generic soldiers and watching Alma do spooky things every other room. It's ugly, ham-fisted, and boring. I saw some zombie-looking things in the scenario I attempted, but that was about as supernatural as things got. There's no slow-mo, no wily AI opponents, and very little crazy dismemberment. Every map is brightly-lit and the music is generic fighting crap. It's poo poo, it's not F.E.A.R., don't play it, and shun people who do play it. Yes, even me. I accept my fate. In fact, I'm so salty about this game I'm going to go on a F2P horror tear. That's right, it's time for another BONUS ROUNDD. Haunted Memories I got lured into this one by the screenshots, with their weird otherworldly blue hues. Turns out there's a weird-as-gently caress filter over the whole game, like some kind of blue-green 3D glasses thing. You play some guy wandering around a campsite in the dead of night for reasons unknown. You wander around for a bit, finding locked doors and dead generators and TVs in the middle of nowhere, until you run into the Slenderman. No, I'm not kidding. Interestingly enough, this turns into more of a game after you get through the first area. Slenderman gives way to actual enemies that you can fend off with a crowbar. However, the puzzles are obtuse throughout, featuring hard to find items and fidgety solutions even if you know what you're doing. Some of the areas have neat dreamlike qualities to them, and the ending isn't terrible, but the eye-searing graphics and terrible writing do more than enough to get in your way. There's a second free episode now with actual characters to interact with and more comprehensible graphics, but I was so turned off by this first installment that I just can't be bothered. E. Serena The premise was sound enough. You're a man waiting in a cabin for his wife Serena to return. The interface is like MYST, click to move through different scenes, and click on things to examine them. There's no inventory and no puzzles to solve. As you examine the contents of the cabin you learn more about the man's relationship, his feelings, and what really happened to his wife. It's solid, until you realize the only way to progress is to click on EVERYTHING that can be clicked in the cabin, then click on the plot point the game wants you to focus on, and then click on EVERYTHING again. I think 5 or 6 cycles of clicking on EVERYTHING gets you to the conclusion. It's not a bad experience and both the story and atmosphere are good, but you'd be lucky to get through it before the tedium takes hold. F. The Forgotten Ones This one's more of a game than the other two, but might actually suffer more for it. The story is some weird thing about the Holocaust and Nazi experiments, with you exploring an old manor in the mountains full of oddly aggressive corpses. You have an assortment of weapons to fight with and the level design is decent, but the enemies absolutely kill this one. They move cartoonishly fast, the hit detection is all over the place, and they are hilariously easy to confound by jumping up on a table or bookshelf. Coupled with poor writing and nonsensical cutscenes, there's pretty much nothing here worth seeing.
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Oct 22, 2014 08:35
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I'd say Outlast is worth $5. I only played it up to Doctor Pantsless but I liked how immersive moving around the asylum and working with your camera was. Some sequences fall apart if you fail them a bunch but it's good if you can get into it and dig the brutal aesthetic.
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Oct 22, 2014 19:25
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al-azad posted:19. Ghost Master Ahhh, you beat me to this one. I'll probably be a bit more critical of it, but it is indeed a little gem. It's like someone played The Sims just to kill their Sims and bring them back as ghosts and thought "This needs to be its own game". And they were right.
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Oct 22, 2014 21:15
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Yodzilla posted:Speaking of permadeath, has anyone actually played Ghostship Aftermath and is it as tedious as the GB Quick Look makes it seem? Boy, have I got a writeup for you. The Challenge Games 1. Alien: Isolation 2. Year Walk 3. Deadlight 4. Adventures of Shuggy 5. Atom Zombie Smasher 6. Alan Wake's American Nightmare 7. Infected: The Twin Vaccine - Collector's Edition 8. How to Survive 9. 1953 - KGB Unleashed 10. Burn Zombie Burn! 11. Home 12. Huntsman: The Orphanage (Halloween Edition) 13. Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi 14. Scarygirl 15. I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream 16. Closure 17. Alien Breed 2: Assault 18. F.E.A.R. Online Bonus Games A. Painkiller: Black Edition B. The Void C. Shadowgrounds D. Haunted Memories E. Serena F. The Forgotten Ones ----------------- 19. Ghostship Aftermath Of all the games I've played for this roundup so far, this one is the most interesting. It's very clearly a passion project that pushes some major boundaries, but also suffers for its ambition. Strap in 'cause I'm going over this one in meticulous detail. It deserves the attention. Ghostship Aftermath is the story of a two-man crew that comes across a huge derelict spaceship in the middle of nowhere. You are the adventurous one, donning a bulky spacesuit and delving into the ship only to very quickly discover that things have gone terribly wrong. Your partner stays behind to guide you in his impossibly snarky way, but is soon cut off by the ship's AI who warns you that your partner may not be who you think they are. Your job, then, is to survive the perils of the derelict while siding with either the man or machine to bring an end to the deadly infestation aboard. It's an interesting premise, and feels heavily informed by 2001: A Space Odyssey. The ship itself is a labyrinthine mess of halls and hatches. Much of it is locked down in the wake of the disaster that left it drifting, but it is so huge that the parts still open feel overwhelming. The ship is split into four sections, each with seven decks and plenty of elevators, stairs, and sublevels between them. Here the game feels like an open-world System Shock, with armories and medbays and cargo holds and engineering compartments to explore. Fortunately your allies provide you verbal guidance to your objectives, which you REALLY need to pay attention to because it is quite easy to get lost. There's a remarkable level of detail in parts of the ship, as well. The halls and chambers can get a bit samey, but smaller elements like debris and signage are worth paying attention to. Of particular note are the computer displays around the ship, which ALWAYS feature readable information. I'm not sure how useful any of it is, but it's a fantastic addition. You also experience the entire game through your suit, which has a HUD reminiscent of the cockpit in Descent. It's a little distracting, but once you get used to the size and locations of useful info it's good for immersion. Once you get the AI switched back on and the ship warms up, you find out this has roused the monsters that killed the crew as well. You're directed to a weapon which is effective but has VERY little ammo available. While combat is an option, you really need to run from what you can and save your shots for the things you CAN'T run from. I encountered three kinds of enemies as I played. One was slow but prevalent, easy to escape but I always had to be on the lookout for. Another was small and fast but easy to dispatch. And the third was quick and dangerous and had to be dealt with before it tore me apart. The creatures are scattered around the ship, just common enough to keep you on edge every time you turn a corner. I had a fantastic experience after I grabbed the weapon and was moving to another part of the ship. As I got to the airlock to the next section, I heard some kind of creature behind me. I ran and triggered the doors, and when I turned to look I saw the shadows of something lumbering down the hall. The airlock shut just as they were about to cross the threshold. The whole thing gave me shivers. All of this combines into a package that should rival the likes of Alien: Isolation... A huge open ship, a variety of monsters roaming the decks, NPCs you can't fully trust, and an atmospheric, immersive environment. And maybe if it was made by a AAA studio it would have been. But as I said, this was very clearly a passion project, and in this case that sadly takes more from the game than it adds. The game's engine is terrible. There's really no getting around this one, I'm afraid. It looks good to be sure, but everything outside the graphical polish is clunky to the point of being unworkable. The first warning sign was the options. Instead of a menu, it is a QUESTIONNAIRE, to be completed one option at a time. You can only pick one of two resolutions, neither of which were optimal for my displacy (1680x1050). Furthermore, the controls cannot be rebound. If you want to change something that isn't on the quiz, you're out of luck, and anytime you want to change one of those options you have to go back through and make all your choices again. Within the game, movement is the biggest problem. I know you're supposed to be in a clunky space suit and all, but this ship is HUGE and you tromp around at less than human walking speed. There is a sprint but you run out of stamina quickly and the view shakes so much that I literally got motion sick and had to stop playing. It's surprisingly easy to get hung up on geometry, and walking over debris on the floor can make you pop into the air or wiggle up and down like the game doesn't know where to settle you. The worst part is that this can affect the monsters as well, killing any sort of horror or tension they impart. Remember I mentioned a quick, deadly enemy that attacked me? The first time it pounced at me, it got stuck in the wall and stayed there for a whole 30 seconds, swinging at me impotently until it dislodged itself. All the terror I felt when it first attacked evaporated instantly. There are other annoyances, like strangely sticky mouse controls that slow way down as you move the view across eye level. Your weapon has a fixed aim at a point that is NOT the center of the screen and that you have to hold RMB to display the actual reticule for. There's no indication of what items can be picked up and interacted with, which can lead to some serious DOOM-style-secret-door-hunting wall humping. The writing is extremely amateurish and the voiceovers do it no favors, taking a lot of wind out of the interesting setup between your partner and the AI (the AI isn't bad though, having a cold, mechanical delivery to very clinical lines). But perhaps most damning of all is how the huge, open-world nature of the game actually works against itself. For as huge and detailed as the ship is, you're stuck traipsing through it at a snail's pace, struggling to remember where you're going or figuring out how to get there, and desperately looking for things to interact with because they are few and far between. Your first task for the AI is to get one of the ship's reactor's online. If you take the most direct route, you discover that the stairs in the Engineering section are blocked and you have to backtrack to another section to get into the sublevel access. This is after walking the length of the ship and waiting through 3-4 loading screens as you traverse each section. There are entirely too many loading screens as you play, having to sit through one every time you move between sections, decks, or key areas. I think there's something like 4 load screens just getting from your ship to the derelict in the intro, where all you do is put on your suit and exit the airlock. I honestly wish this was a better game. I think there's a good game in here, buried under a bad engine and suspect design choices. But this goes beyond something like The Witcher 1 or the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R., where a little patience will reward you with a deep and fascinating game. I just can't imagine putting the time in to learn the lay of the ship and how to deal with all the janky creatures. Not when Alien: Isolation hits all the same notes and does them so much better. 20. Hell Yeah! If you're still reading after all that, let's talk about a weird little platformer before you go. I was worried Hell Yeah! would be the least Halloweeny game on my original list, but it has enough blood and hellfire to count, I think. You play Ash, the skeletal bunny prince of Hell. Your dad croaked and some rear end in a top hat demon took scandalous photos of you so your mandate to rule is in question. The story is dumb and the humor errs on the side of trying too hard, but it's a good enough setup for murdering tons of demons. Which is your goal, killing 100 demons in all kinds of gruesome ways. Your main weapon is a sawblade (they call it a jetpack and I have no idea why) that lets you kill normal enemies by touching them and wear down the big named monsters. Once you wear them down you get a little WarioWare-style minigame to finish them off in some bloody, goofy way. The platforming is solid, though the emphasis seems more on exploring to find money and secrets for upgrades than on fighting. Combat really is mostly a non-issue since you kill things by touching them and you have a ridiculous amount of health. It's colorful and cute and a little gross and has a ton to unlock, so it's not bad if you want a light platformer with some goofy style.
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Oct 23, 2014 17:38
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