Eldest Souls

A pixel art boss battler with Souls-y combat, huh. Where have I seen that before….

Titan Souls

Titan Souls is a simple yet captivating boss battler where the main conceit is that everything dies in one hit. It’s not that long, but it provides a healthy serving of bite-size boss battles.

Blasphemous 2

Blasphemous 2 might be the sequel closest to its predecessor that I’ve ever played. Sure, there’s lots of little tweaks and differences, but the vibe, the aesthetic, the experience are all exactly the same as the first. Which is great, because Blasphemous is fantastic.

Monster Sanctuary

Monster Sanctuary is a great monster-catching metroidvania. That’s two distinct genres, so let’s break down how to intersect.

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 Surge

The Surge is a sci-fi horror Souls-like that does everything competently but not memorably. The game takes place several decades in the future when Earth’s atmosphere has gotten too polluted to support life, but a company called Creo has developed several marvelous technologies in response, including Resolve, which is able to cleanse the atmosphere, and exo-rigs, which are basically personal mecha suits that can enhance a person’s strength, agility and stamina.

We play as Warren, a wheelchair-bound man and new Creo employee. He goes through the process of receiving an exo-rig (which involves having the suit grafted onto him without anesthetic in an absolutely brutal cutscene), and when he wakes, the Creo facility is a wreck, and the other employees appear to have essentially become zombies that attack everything on sight. Warren needs to fight his way through and out of the Creo facility and discover what caused all the mayhem.

Salt and Sanctuary

If I told you to image a 2D version of Dark Souls, you’d probably come up with something extremely close to Salt and Sanctuary. It’s hard to give a more concise summary of Salt and Sanctuary, because “2D Dark Souls” really sums it up. But what makes Salt and Sanctuary special is that it isn’t just Dark Souls flattened into two dimensions, but a conscious conversion to take advantage of the changed context while maintaining the spirit of Dark Souls.

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.)

Gloomhaven

Gloomhaven is a dungeon-crawling fantasy board game. First released in 2017, it revolutionized the genre and was hailed as one of the best co-op board games of all time thanks to its intricate mechanics, deep customization, wealth of secrets to unlock, and branching story. In 2019, Flaming Fowl Studios released a digital version (in early access, which was completed in 2021), which I played, so I can now confirm that the accolades Gloomhaven received are undoubtedly well-earned. While the digital version massively streamlined many points of the experience, it also introduced a few annoyances.

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!

Overcooked! 2

I’ve taken down zombie hordes with nothing but some guns and parkour, faced down mad gods in decrepit, abandoned space stations, and battled otherworldly horrors in the darkest recesses of humanity’s subconscious, and yet… And yet, the most intense co-op experience I’ve overcome is cooking in a silly kitchen.

Chronos: Before the Ashes

When playing Chronos: Before the Ashes, my initial impression was that it’s basically baby’s first Souls-like, although as I dwelled upon it, I began to wonder… Is Chronos even a Souls-like? While “Souls-like” is a famously nebulous sub-genre, Chronos certainly feels like a Souls-like on the surface. It’s an action RPG with a stamina system and penalty for dying. That’s enough for a Souls-like! Right?

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.