The Thaumaturge

Earlier in the month I reviewed a Polish adventure game with RPG elements and a sci-fi setting 100 years in the future, so this time I thought I’d shake things up by writing about a Polish adventure game with RPG elements and a historical fantasy setting 100 years in the past.

Wictor (pronounced “Victor”) Szulski is the titular Thaumaturge, a person born with the special ability to wield magical powers through a connection to a demon known as a salutor. Wictor is drawn to his hometown of Warsaw after the death of his father, bringing him within the crossroads of various historical forces as well as a blood vendetta involving his family.

The Thaumaturge is fun, sweeping you into the world of early 20th-century Warsaw while wearing the pride and love for its Polish heritage on its sleeve, yet ultimately you do little more than run around Warsaw and then watch an ending cutscene; by constraining itself to historical fiction, The Thaumaturge doesn’t give its plot enough space to do anything, leaving what should be a story-based game feeling like it doesn’t really have one.

Gamedec

As it says in the blog description, I’m just a guy who likes mysteries, games, and mystery games. So you’d think Gamedec, a mystery game about mysteries in games, would be right up my alley, but there are just too many rough edges for me to recommend it. I wish I could, and the pieces are there, but they just clash with each other in a way that prevents the game from coming together as a cohesive whole.

AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative / AI：ソムニウムファイル ニルヴァーナ イニシアチブ

When I first finished AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative, my feelings were a lot more positive than those for its predecessor, AI: The Somnium Files, which is admittedly not a high bar. (Boy are those names a mouthful.) But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that pretty much no individual component of NI was better than TSF… except for the fact that the main characters weren’t absolutely insufferable. So NI may not be more well-crafted than TSF, but the fact that we don’t play as Date still makes it way better in my book.

The Quarry

I hope you didn’t think I was done with Supermassive Games just because I finished reviewing The Dark Pictures Anthology! Just like any good horror movie monster, just when you think it’s over we’re coming back for one final scare.

The Quarry is another narrative horror game from Supermassive, in the same vein as previous entries but a bit closer to Until Dawn than Dark Pictures in that it’s longer, has a larger cast, and focuses on single-player rather than co-op. The game is fine at what it does, but misses some opportunities, and in particular how difficult it is to replay the game and explore other choices.

The Devil in Me

The Devil in Me is the grand finale to “season one” of The Dark Pictures Anthology. While it’s larger in scope than the previous games and unquestionably boasts the greatest technical leap in the series, it feels like that came at the expense of the story. That doesn’t mean it was bad, because it wasn’t. There’s very little in the game that I would call bad, but also very little I’d call great. It’s a decent entry in the series, but the high point of season one remains House of Ashes.

House of Ashes

House of Ashes is the third game in the The Dark Pictures Anthology, after Medan of Medan and Little Hope. The first two games were fun but flawed, and the premise of House of Ashes seemed a bit lackluster… but it ended up being the strongest game so far, showing that Supermassive is not content to rest on its laurels and is aiming to improve with each iteration of the series.

The game takes place in Iraq in 2003, near the beginning of the US occupation shortly after Saddam Hussein was deposed. We (mostly) play as a group of US military operatives searching for WMDs. However, during a skirmish with some Iraqi soldiers in a small village, a chasm in the ground opens up, causing members from both sides to fall into the ruins of a long-forgotten Sumerian temple. The former enemies will need to learn to work together to overcome the horrors of the ruins if they want to have any hope of returning to the surface....

Little Hope

Four college students and their professor are involved in a bus crash on a field trip, dumping them outside the small town of Little Hope in the middle of the night. Thankfully there are no serious injuries, but things become strange when a mysterious fog prevents them from heading away from town. With no other options, they venture into Little Hope—where they see mysterious visions of the past and are chased by monsters. As a result, the group must investigate their strange connection to the town while staying alive long enough to find help.

Process of Elimination / 探偵撲滅

Process of Elimination is another Danganronpa wannabe from Nippon Ichi Software, following in the footsteps of Exile Election. Process of Elimination and Exile Election feel like together they form one Danganronpa: Exile Election focuses on a death game and trials, while Process of Elimination has quirky gimmick-based characters and murder mysteries. However, despite my flippant first sentence, I liked Process of Elimination a lot. It’s unquestionably lacking in certain respects, including providing comprehensive fair-play mysteries, but is so earnest in presenting a story about detectives that I can’t help by enjoy it.

Man of Medan

The elevator pitch for Man of Medan (and The Dark Pictures Anthology) as a whole is that it’s a horror B-movie you can play. If you’ve played Until Dawn or The Quarry, you should already have a pretty good idea of what Man of Medan is like (they’re all made by the same company, Supermassive), although Man of Medan is a bit shorter and more focused on co-op. Man of Medan isn’t an amazing game, but does what it sets out to do, and beggars can’t be choosers within the realm of branching co-op horror narrative adventure games.

Man of Medan begins with four friends who have chartered a small boat for a vacation going diving in the South Pacific. However, things quickly go south (Pacific) when the group is attacked by pirates, and then brought to a ghost ship known as the Ourang Medan that allegedly houses “Manchurian Gold.” The group must contend with both the pirates and something far more sinister if they wish to escape the ship with their lives… (As a side note, “Ourang Medan” roughly translates to “Man of Medan,” so the title doesn’t refer to an actual person.)

Special Report Division / 特殊報道部

Who doesn’t like a good conspiracy theory? There are plenty of allegedly supernatural phenomena out there. Personally, I’m a skeptic. Despite the fact that there are now significant portions of the world where almost everyone has a camera on their person at all times, concrete proof of such phenomena has yet to emerge. But the allure of these types of mysteries is undeniable, and Special Report Division is a fun excursion into a world where these stories are more than just urban legend.

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light is a isometric action-adventure puzzle game. The story involves Lara finding an ancient Mayan artifact, the Mirror of Smoke, which releases Xolotl, an evil spirit bent on destroying the world, as well as Totec, the titular Guardian of Light. Lara and Totec team up to track down Xolotl and save the world. The plot is pretty basic because the focus is on gameplay, where the game delivers on its promise of a fun co-op adventure.

Stray

Stray got a lot of hype. If you were completely oblivious to internet discourse in the weeks leading up to its release, allow me to provide a comprehensive explanation of Stray’s features and how they interacted with the main underlying currents of pop culture at the time in a way to produce one of the most anticipated games of 2022:

In Stray, you play as a cat.

…Hm? No, that’s it. Were you expecting more?

Huh. When you take a step back, that’s actually a pretty small base to place so much hype on, isn’t it?

So, how was it? Is Stray the cat’s meow, or does it belong in the litter box?

Let’s just say I’m more of a dog person.

Vaporum

It always begins with a man and a lighthouse… We play as a man with no memories who washes up on at a tower in the middle of the ocean. Upon entering, he finds a retro-futuristic steampunk dystopia that, based on audiologs scattered throughout the facility, appears to have resulted from the study of a mysterious miracle substance gone wrong. In other words, it’s… Vaporum!

Operencia: The Stolen Sun

Operencia: The Stolen Sun is a first-person grid-based dungeon crawler, which readers of the blog may already know that I love. While Legend of Grimrock is focused purely on exploration, combat, and puzzles, Operencia is a bit more well-rounded, with actual characters and story, and a more fleshed-out combat system. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean Operencia was better. It was fun, but it wasn’t great—it held itself back. But we’ll get to that.

The Silver Case / シルバー事件

The Silver Case takes place in 1999 in the (fictional) 24th Ward of Tokyo, where the murderer Kamui Uehara committed the titular Silver Case twenty years prior. He's thought to now be harmless, until he escapes from the mental hospital at which he's being detained. We play as the unnamed sole survivor of the unit first dispatched to recover Kamui, who then finds himself swept up into the 24th Ward's Heinous Crimes Unit, which investigates... heinous crimes.

Legend of Grimrock II

Legend of Grimrock II is a masterpiece. Go give the developers your money.

Observation

I’m going to just come right out and say it: I didn’t like Observation much. It’s a sci-fi mystery thriller game with a rote linear plot and confusing controls. Honestly, if it just stuck to regurgitating 2001: A Space Odyssey I probably wouldn’t have minded it that much; it’s doing so with such a horrible control scheme that irks me.

Call of Cthulhu

1920s New England. A hardboiled private investigator from Boston travels to a small town off the coast of Massachusetts to investigate mysterious happenings. The villagers are secretive and distrustful of outsiders, otherworldly cults plot dark magics in the shadows, and our hero must battle his own mind as—

Hold on, am I going crazy, or did I already do this review? Let's see, according to my notes, the answer is... both.

The Sinking City

1920s New England. A hardboiled private investigator from Boston travels to a small town off the coast of Massachusetts to investigate mysterious happenings. The villagers are secretive and distrustful of outsiders, otherworldly cults plot dark magics in the shadows, and our hero must battle his own mind as he hunts for the truth.

Welcome to The Sinking City.

(Note: In this review I discuss the structure of the game and the nature of the ending. This review doesn't reveal anything that I think would reduce anyone's enjoyment of the game but, because there is technically a discussion of the ending, I want to make this disclaimer to ensure no one feels "spoiled" by the review.)

428: Shibuya Scramble / 428 ～封印された渋谷で～

428: Shibuya Scramble is an amazing game. It's a visual novel whose gameplay consists solely of reading and making choices, yet despite being a relatively reserved format, it feels like 428 was developed with the guiding principle of making as many components of the game as possible provide entertainment in some way, which is what allows 428 to transcend the bounds of the format.