Recent reviews by Thonkeline

I didn't really know what to expect going into Her Story. The game is certainly interesting and has a lot that it is doing in an interesting and thoughtful way. The game consists of a computer terminal the player must sift through to uncover the details of a disappearance of a man named Simon. The terminal is filled with short clips that you must search through. This terminal interface is really fascinating as a mechanic, but also is the source of a lot of my frustrations with Her Story. The terminal forces you to listen carefully to each piece of dialogue, as each next search term will be constructed of details you've gotten from the previous one. My frustrations lie in both how annoying the interface is to use, and how little the game actually communicates to you what progress has been made. I'm not even sure if I actually finished the game or not to be entirely honest. I think Her Story is meant to be more open ended than I as a player would like it to be, and think from that it is simply not to my particular tastes. The performances of the lead actress are great, and she shows a lot of versatility in her ability to express different moods and tones through her speech. Overall, I'm glad I played Her Story, but I don't think its a game I'll be coming back to (5/10)

After my disappointment with Her Story I went into the next Sam Barlow game, Immortality, unsure of whether I'd like it. I'm happy to say that not only did I like Immortality, I loved it. I really appreciated that instead of searching a database like in Her Story, you click on items in the frame, and then the game attempts to send you to a different clip that looks similar. This system worked a lot better for me, as it still incentivizes paying attention during the clips for items to click on, while also making it difficult for you to get truly stuck. Immortality is a game that is staggering in scale; its one of those games where you keep looking at it and finding new things. They have essentially filmed 3 full movies and put them inside the game. The performances were fantastic across the board, but I really want to highlight the performance of the lead actress Manon Gage who played Marissa Marcel. She brings such an incredible energy to every single scene she is in, and feels perfectly in place in the world that the game has constructed. Its hard to talk more about Immortality without spoilers, but it really impressed me and I'm so glad I gave it a shot. (9/10)

Despite a few frustrations, I overall really enjoyed Ori and the Blind Forest. The game starts out pretty slow, and initially I was really worried that I wouldn't enjoy it. The lack of abilities in the earlygame makes traversal feel not very good, as there just aren't a lot of options to be creative. As I unlocked new abilities, that potential finally unlocked itself, and I ended up liking the game's movement quite a bit from then on. Ori is really good at chaining movement options together, and gives you lots of different ways to use all your different movement abilities in different contexts. The game's soundtrack is truly iconic, and I would wager it is at least half of why the game ended up being so successful. The artstyle is nice, but personally I wasn't a super big fan of the low framerate animations. My problem with these animations is that some animations don't appear to be low framerate while others do, meaning that in practice I found myself often wondering if the game was lagging because of these weird animations. The camera was a sore spot, and was often at least part of the problem in the most frustrating sections of the game. At the end of each of the three sections of the game there is an escape scene, and while these are cool and well done, the camera is consistently a problem in these sections and makes sightreading them incredibly irritating and difficult. I wasn't a huge fan of the save system either. I don't like losing progress, and I often had to redo sections simply because I forgot to save after collecting something. Despite my gripes, I still enjoyed the game quite a bit. (8/10)

I went into crow country knowing next to nothing, and was pretty happy with my experience. Crow Country is very much inspired by the resident evil series, and because I haven't played those games before, its a bit hard for me to adequately review this game. One of my favorite parts of Crow Country is its sense of humor. For every moment I was running away from some abomination in panic there was another of me enjoying a silly piece of writing. Crow Country's artstyle is great, and beyond looking distinct, the artstyle really enhances the gameplay. The heavy fog and low fidelity makes it so you really have to pay attention to what's happening on the screen to not get suddenly attacked or poisoned. I played on normal mode, which may be sacrilige to some but I found it to be a really nice difficulty for me personally. The only thing I struggled with were a few of the lategame puzzles, and for most of them it was usually me not paying enough attention and walking right past the thing I was supposed to see. Overall really enjoyed it. (9/10)

I'm really glad I went back and replayed 1000xResist. I think my slower approach this second playthrough gave me a chance to see just how good the writing is in the game. 1000xResist feels like a story that should fall apart at the seams, yet somehow despite its high complexity it manages not only to function as a story but deliver incredibly heartfelt and personal moments throughout. 1000xResist is a sci-fi story that understands that the true value in the genre comes not from convoluted explanations of the precise functioning of fictional technologies but through telling unique and deeply human stories. One of my impressions coming out of my first playthrough was "this game feels like it's about everything" and I still very much stand by that. Its a game deeply rooted in the asian diaspora, while also being incredibly universal in what it has to say on loss, sacrifice, tradition, cycles of violence and pain, and so much more. A lot of the initial frustrations I felt on my first playthrough were still there, and it's hard for me to call this game a 10/10 when at so many points I experienced weird bugs and jank. Regardless of these issues, 1000xResist is a deeply singular game with so much to offer to those willing to push themselves to listen. (9/10)

What a weird game. Signalis is a game I respect the hell out of for just how ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ strange it all is. it was often really hard for me to figure out what was happening in the story, but the visuals are so spectacularly done that the scenes are still able to communicate a strange kind of emotional truth regardless. The visuals really are the standout part of the game for me in Signalis, with constant switches between many different visual presentations that somehow work even despite how jarring they can be. The gameplay is pretty standard survival horror, with many of my frustrations with the genre as a whole being present here. I don't like how the Resident Evil style of survival horror incentivizes a playstyle in which if you take too much damage in a certain section it becomes advantageous to simply die on purpose instead of dealing with the lower number of resources. It creates this really weird dynamic with death that makes the enemies feel more tedious than scary. Signalis' maps are really well designed, and do a great job of having distinct enough rooms that you can create a mental map of the floors after enough back and forth passes throughout them. The inventory system was another point of friction that once again comes with pros and cons. On the pro side, a limited inventory makes you spend a lot of time thinking about what to carry with you. It also creates an interesting risk reward in which a player can forgo things like healing items in order to have an extra inventory space. The problem I had with the limited inventory is that story items, like keys, take up inventory space, and can't be picked up if your inventory is full. This creates frustrating scenarios in which you reach a particular room and find an important key item only to realize you don't have space, leave, then forget about that item and wonder why you can't solve any of the remaining puzzles. Speaking of puzzles, I found them to be of okay difficulty. Some were a little opaque, but for the most part they were pretty well balanced and fun. Overall, I think Signalis is working with a lot of really interesting ideas. Its very messy, often frustrating, frequently inscrutable, but despite all of that there's something undeniably fascinating about it. (8/10)

It's hard not to feel a sour taste in my mouth after finishing this game. There are parts of Sable I absolutely adored, and that I think are a shining example of what games as a medium are capable of, but there were also so many unignorable problems that almost ruined my experience. I'll start with the good. There's a moment at the end of the opening area where a big gate opens and the open world finally becomes accessible. It's legitimately one of favorite moments in this whole backlog journey I've gone on so far. When the gate opens, the song "Glider" starts playing and you can finally explore the rest of the world. It's an absolutely perfect moment; It's this beautiful merging of my two favorite aspects of the game, those being the wonderful soundtrack by Japanese Breakfast and the fantastic graphic-novel-esque visuals. Both are on full display here, and the moment set me up to think I was going to love the game. The game's characters aren't anything to write home about, but they have enough personality to be memorable. I really like the lore of Sable, and think its world building around gliders and all the different types of masks and their corresponding roles is a really cool way of communicating the central themes of the game. The climbing mechanics were basically just like they are in most Breath of the Wild type games, with the standard stamina system that replenishes when walking or standing still on the ground. Although it wasn't the most in-depth mechanic, the climbing system is enough for what Sable is trying to do. I really appreciate that Sable's developers resisted the urge to add combat or health based mechanics into the game. By not having those mechanics, Sable's exploration feels much more relaxed and calm. The world feels less dangerous, which lends the game a nice cozy feeling when exploring. Unfortunately, all of these good parts are surrounded by a sea of technical problems. I experienced constant visual and audio stuttering, janky menus, buggy animations, visually distracting texture pop in, and even a softlock at the very end of the game. The stuttering is a particular problem because it's worse when driving the glider around. This isn't just a nitpick: the constant stuttering during the glider sections of the game fundamentally shifts the tone of these portions from a relaxing exploration of a beautiful world to a frustrating and often disorienting experience. Sable is a game I absolutely wanted to love but left only mildly enjoying it. For that, I think it's a bit of a disappointment. (7/10)

Jusant is, much like many games released in the past few years, a game about climbing a mountain. The thing that makes Jusant stand out from the crowd is the way in which you climb the mountain. The mountain in Jusant features a series of grabbable holds, and its controls use the left analog stick to grab the next rock and the left and right triggers to grab with the left and right hands respectively. Many games claim to be better on controller, but few are completely transformed by the control scheme like Jusant is. Jusant's Controller binds create a really satifying tactile feel to every ledge grabbed and every jump landed. Much of the writing about this game focuses on this aspect, and for good reason. The controls make you and your playable character feel intertwined by creating a strong correlation between the physical movements you do on your controller and the resulting movements your character does. The controls, mixed with excellently dialed in controller rumble, allow the game to feel incredibly immersive and engaging. The only downside of the controller scheme is that it is quite taxing on the hands especially if you decide to play for longer play sessions. By the end of the game my hands were pretty worn out. Another strong point of Jusant is its graphics, which fully utilize Unreal Engine's detailed shadows along with stylized texture work. The textures themselves are fairly low in terms of detail, but they're done in such a way that your eyes are able to fill in the gaps without it feeling distracting or cheaply done. Although none of the unique mechanics from each chapter wowed me, there's still enough variety there to keep each chapter feeling distinct. The music is solid, and sufficiently sets the mood on each stage of climbing up the mountain. The story is in a similar camp: not mindblowing, but it does what it needs to to make the game come together nicely. One aspect of storytelling I particularly liked was the seashells, where you get to hear what the place you're standing in used to sound like. They give you just enough information to be able to put the pieces together on what used to exist here, and I found it to be a really effective way of worldbuilding. My biggest complaint with the game is that there is a decent level of jank that shows up every now and then. There were quite a few places where my character got stuck in the floor for a second, and I had to jump out to continue moving forward. I also had one annoying softlock(?) where I got stuck in a pit that was so dark I couldn't escape it and had to reset. Another janky mechanic is the jump, which I found to be very inconsistent and frustrating. Despite these gripes, I still very much enjoyed Jusant. Overall, if you're looking for a game with Journey-like vibes and some fantastic feeling climbing mechanics, you can't go too wrong with Jusant (9/10)

Perfect. Best writing I've ever seen in a game. Extremely tightly written and no moment is wasted. Very thematically dense story with lots of important ideas. (10/10)

Immaculate vibes. Cool puzzles. Funny but also spooky. Wonderful. (9/10)