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.

SKALD: Against the Black Priory

SKALD: Against the Black Priory is a neat little retro-style RPG all about doom and destruction. It employs a unique RPG system built from familiar DNA, with a well-woven story that knows exactly when its welcome has worn out. The biggest issues are the clunkiness of the battle system at early levels (which arguably only enhances the game’s theme and atmosphere) and depressing plot. Skald is not a grand 100+ hour JRPG, but a short and competent RPG module.

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.

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.

Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition

Icewind Dale is the final game created in the Infinity Engine using Dungeons & Dragons 2e rules, after Baldur’s Gate and Planescape: Torment. Despite being made after those games, it doesn’t stack up to any of them. Baldur’s Gate provided a balanced experience and Planescape: Torment focused heavily on story. Icewind Dale, on the other hand, is a combat slog, and that descriptor should tell you what I think of it.

Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition

While I enjoyed Baldur’s Gate I & II and understood why they made a big splash when released, they were notably dated and I didn’t think they rose to the level of a masterpiece. Planescape: Torment, the next game developed in the same Infinity Engine, is a masterpiece. It’s also notably dated and far from perfect, but it explores weird, interesting and unique ideas with intelligence and well-crafted writing.

Baldur's Gate (I & II)

In discussions of CRPGs, Baldur’s Gate is often held up as the holy grail. It was celebrated by its fans for being expansive and deep, and maintained a dedicated fanbase through its modding community. Release of the Enhanced Editions in 2013 helped maintain modern interest, and Baldur’s Gate 3 proved to be a massive hit. By how well do the original games hold up now, especially without any nostalgia to view the games through?

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.

Druidstone: The Secret of the Menhir Forest

The only reason I bought Druidstone: The Secret of the Menhir Forest is because it’s by the same people that made Legend of Grimrock. (I’d do anything for those guys.) Druidstone is not Grimrock—which I knew going in. It’s a puzzly tactical RPG that takes place in a Tolkienesque fantasy forest; a competent-built challenge with a fun aesthetic.

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.

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.)

Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane

Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane is, as you might surmise from the title, an Ace Attorney-inspired murder mystery video game. (Games in that sub-genre are never particularly subtle about their inspiration.) The main feature that differentiates Tyrion Cuthbert is the fact that it takes place in a fantasy world with magic. Well, I suppose technically Ace Attorney has already done that, but unlike that game, where the use of magic itself was the crime, here we’re solving crimes that just happen to take place in a world with magic.