Recent reviews by Dave Mongoose

If I had to explain the game in three words, it would be "Firewatch but spooky".

The gameplay involves exploring an abandoned hotel and slowly piecing together a paranormal mystery, all the while communicating with another character via mobile phone. Unfortunately for such a dialogue-heavy game, the writing isn't great, but the voice actors do their best with what they've been given and it does become less noticeable once the story gets going.

The story itself is fairly simplistic and ultimately a bit unsatisfying, although it certainly surprised me at points. It also struck me as quite poorly paced, with a lot of exposition at the start and towards the end. Most of the time I was interested in seeing what new areas of the hotel I would be investigating more so than what plot revelations might unfold.

That brings me onto the strongest aspect of the game: the atmosphere of the hotel itself. Everything from the design and layout to the lighting and particularly the sound come together to perfectly induce a subtle unease. A dimly lit kitchen, a creaking floorboard down the hall, a deer skull hung above a fireplace... while you are never under obvious threat, these touches had me closing doors behind me and breathing a sigh of relief when I got back to the relative cosiness of the main character's bedroom - recreating that fear one can sometimes feel when home alone at night. The game makes very effective use of binaural audio, to the point where I had to pause the game on more than one occasion because I couldn't tell if a noise was coming from the game or was actually in my house.

Considering only what I've covered above, I would be tempted to recommend the game... but unfortunately, as other reviews have touched on, the game covers some fairly dark topics and just doesn't handle them well. Quite a bit of the story concerns a relationship where one individual was underage, but 1) this seems entirely unnecessary - the same story could be told if they were an adult, and 2) the older individual is, at best, not criticised for the relationship and perhaps even meant to be sympathetic. There are also some weirdly specific sensitive topics just thrown in as background details with little, if any, relevance to the plot (the main character went to anti-abortion marches, another character was dyslexic, etc.), and the topic of suicide itself is handled quite gratuitously.

The game provides a fairly hectic simulation of running a gas station; where you must balance manning the pumps, working the checkout, restocking, and performing car repairs in the attached garage. As you progress, your station attracts more and more customers but you also unlock various upgrades to make things easier, as well as the ability to hire employees who can each take over a particular duty for you.

The individual tasks each have a small mini-game and these are fun and mostly quick enough to not distract too much from the overall goal of keeping things running smoothly, although repairing cars often involves multiple steps and does get a bit tedious. There's also a lockpicking minigame to break into trunks that can earn you a bit of extra cash, but it suffers from a bug where you can often get kicked out of the minigame for seemingly no reason.

Bugs are, unfortunately, one of the two main reasons I can't recommend this game. It's crashed for me four times in less than 6 hours, and I've had issues with objectives not triggering, items being duplicated, physics glitching out, etc. etc. that really soured the experience.

The second reason I don't feel able to recommend the game is the structure of progression - upgrades to your station are gated behind not just a money requirement but also a checklist of tasks. The game will ask you to refuel 100 cars, serve 250 customers, etc. before you have the option to advance, and these really drag the game down to a tedious grind. Clearing one of these lists will unlock a handful of upgrades before you're presented with yet another list with even higher requirements. This also prevents you from specialising because you need to complete all of the main duties a specific number of times at each level.

If these objectives could be toned down and/or removed to allow for a more organic upgrade path, and if the bugs can be ironed out, then I think this could be a great game; at the moment I just can't recommend it.

Despite the typical tropes of its genre, Torment's world is in many ways more sci-fi than fantasy. Your character awakens amid the wreckage of advanced civilisations and you are slowly introduced to "The Ninth World" - a society built on a mix of medieval politics and scavenged technology. Many of the items you make use of are poorly understood relics, their original purposes forgotten.

Travelling through this strange world, you uncover a multitude of stories, characters, artifacts and locations which reveal more of the intriguing lore and legends from the past, the present, and even other dimensions entirely.

Mechanically, the game revolves around your character and a party of up to three companions. Each member of your party has three core stats (Might, Speed and Intellect), and these serve as point pools which can be spent to increase success chance on corresponding skill checks and attacks: breaking down a door with Might or pickpocketing with Speed, for example. Combat generally takes a back seat to dialogue and skills (depending on your choices) but is handled well with interesting abilities and set pieces.

As one might expect from a party-based CRPG, each of the 7 available companions has their own backstory and corresponding quest. These are relatively simple but heartfelt stories that often present you with moral choices that are genuinely difficult.

Aside from the companion quests, most optional quests still have some link back into the core plot. In general it's more focused than many entries in the genre, but this helps to prevent side-quest overload. My first playthrough took ~40 hours and concluded satisfyingly.

As someone who bounced off Pillars of Eternity because of its length and rather standard fantasy setting, Torment was both shorter and more interesting. My one criticism would be that it becomes a bit too easy towards the end - challenges don't keep pace with character advancement, particularly if you are doing the side-quests,

Vivid atmosphere, great setting, and excellent environments, let down slightly by the plot.

I've been eagerly awaiting this game since I first caught notice of it and for the most part I was not disappointed. For one, it's great to have a game set in Wales with Welsh voice talent! The end result reminds me a lot of the 90s mini-series "Invasion: Earth" because of it's framing of disaster coming to an otherwise uneventful village - if you like serious British sci-fi then read no further because you will enjoy the game no matter what.

Onto more videogame metrics, the mechanics of the game are simple but engaging - for the most part you are exploring areas and collecting useful items, but after a certain point you are also looking for clues about past events that fill in some of the details of how the central disaster unfolded. This drip-feed of optional story content was definitely among the strongest aspects of the game and had me scouring each location because the flashback scenes are very well-written and the voice acting is excellent.

The plot has touches of Lovecraft's "The Color Out of Space" (with an alien meteorite kicking off events) and a healthy amount of humour mixed into the sci-fi horror (particular credit must go to the Eastern European character who takes the piss out of the English bloke for being scared). For the most part it kept me very much engaged, particularly with the flashback mechanic mentioned above, but it did fall down a bit towards the end.

My chief complaints would be that (without going into details / spoilers) - 1) there's a character introduced fairly early on who becomes your 'guide' and reduces much of the mystery and exploration down to 'don't worry about that, just complete these objectives'; and 2) the plot has a lot of potential that's not really realised by the direction they take it in. With point 1, I would have preferred it if (rather than having an 'expert' character directing the player) perhaps notes or logs could have been a less obvious guide, and for 2 I would have liked more exploration of how the situation developed and what it's implications were, rather than feeling a need to connect it back to the player character.

A wacky, fun experience. While the gameplay is often frustrating, the excellent dialogue and interesting world more than make up for it.

The story takes place in a number of airports, each on a separate planet. These airports are populated by various (canine) characters who will typically have some dialogue and occasionally a quest. While there's really only one 'quest chain' required to finish the game, each of these side quests tells a small story and reveals more about the characters and the world.

Unfortunately, the majority of these quests just ask you to fetch one or more items, typically earned via another quest, given by a specific character, and/or found in a specific shop. Compounding this is a mechanic where, in order to fly between the planets, you need to locate the right boarding gate and then complete one of a small number of mini-quests to open it. These mini-quests are almost all fetch quests as well, and one of them requires you to complete yet another fetch quest for a different item in order to earn the item you need.

While the frustration of these quests can be mitigated somewhat by carrying multiples of each item, the inventory management is incredibly simplistic: you scroll through items one-by-one and there's no way to view a list of them. On top of this, a number of the items are never used and exist purely for flavour or jokes. This means that you have to balance the annoyance of scrolling through a longer list of items with the annoyance of needing to go get items if you don't have them on you. The airports are quite large and so needing to trek from your gate to a specific shop and back can be very tedious.

Finally, the graphical style is certainly not going to be to everyone's tastes - as the screenshots show, most 'characters' are simply 2D stock photos. I found this quite fun, and in a few cases it's used to comic effect, but I can understand why some people might consider it a poor or even lazy decision. On top of this, many of the models and effects in the game seem like they could have come from the unity asset store - the low-poly, bright-coloured look is clear and clean but feels a bit bland.

From the above criticisms, it would be easy to dismiss the game as not worth playing, but the dialogue is consistently funny and charming, and the 'lore' of the world that's drip-fed through conversations is fascinating (occasionally veering into cosmic horror territory!) The core story, without going into spoilers, concerns the relationship between the player character and their girlfriend and develops into a touching and very believable emotional tale despite the otherwise silly tone.

I got just shy of 7 hours playtime out of a single playthrough and, although I did complete all of the quests and met all of the characters, there's still a lot of dialogue I've not seen so I can see myself replaying it sometime in the future.

A bizarre but enjoyable mix of navigation and point-and-click-style puzzling. My only complaint would be that there isn't more of it! The game takes around 30 minutes to an hour, depending on how much you mess around and how long it takes you to work out the puzzles.

Pros:

• Really cool aesthetic
  
• Great soundtrack
  
• The titans are varied and interesting
  
• The open world is a good size with plenty of different landmarks so it feels like a believable place.

Cons:

• The voice acting is awkward
  
• Gameplay can be a bit tedious at times
  
• Vehicle controls feel off

This seems like it should be a tense action or horror game but it's actually very chilled, with an excellent soundtrack of tunes to listen to as you drive through the night in search of the titular titans.

Graphically it's not amazingly detailed but it makes up for that with style through its great use of lighting and a soft colour palette of greens, blues, purples, pinks and yellows. The game does a great job with the titans, understanding the golden rule of never letting you see the monsters too clearly.

The enjoyment is dampened slightly by some pretty poor voice acting - I would guess that neither the writer nor voice actor has English as a first language so I don't want to be too harsh, but the awkward grammar mistakes are a bit immersion breaking given that the character is meant to have grown up in the area. This isn't helped by the fact that the voice lines repeat if you perform the same action / go to the same place on a subsequent day, e.g. the first time getting into the car at the start of each day will always trigger the same line and awkward joke about hoping there's booze left in it. It would really help if the game kept track of which lines had already been said and didn't trigger them again.

The gameplay can also be a bit tedious - without going into too much detail, the first titan must be led from one location to another by activating a series of points and this takes quite a while and isn't particularly interesting. On top of that, activating one wrong point sends the titan right back to the beginning and you have to start again.

Overall I'd recommend it because it's a unique idea and the overall atmosphere makes up for minor annoyances.

As a long-time fan of the THPS games, this seemed like it could be a fun twist on that formula. Characters look great, for the most part, and while the 'birb' humour and puns may not be for everyone, I found it ranged from amusing to eye-rolling without dipping into annoying territory. The soundtrack is also good, with a selection of original jazzy/funk tracks as well as some licensed rock and punk songs.

Unfortunately, the game fails most with the core skating gameplay. The controls just don't feel tight enough and it's far too common to get stuck on bits of the scenery. Your skater also feels a bit weightless - sometimes just trying to corner will cause you to fall over, and going off a ramp at the wrong angle can send you into a barrel roll.

These issues with precision controls wouldn't be such big problems if the levels didn't become increasingly reliant on traversal to reach the next objective. Besides being more frustrating, later levels just aren't as interesting and reuse a lot of the same assets - I can understand a load of skater magazines in someone's bedroom but why are they also littering the office and server room levels? It's also a shame for a game about skateboarding birds to not feature any natural spaces - an actual park seems like an obvious choice, for example, and would go a long way to mixing up the visuals and colour palette.

Overall, I can't recommend the game unless the bird theme really sells it to you. THPS fans in particular should steer clear because it just doesn't measure up to the games that inspired it.

A fun little everyday life sim experiencing the life of an American teenager on summer break: think "My Summer Car" but wholesome.

The various games aren't particularly complex but they are well implemented and satisfying to play. It's easy to get into the spirit of things, too: there's a simple joy in hopping on your bike in the morning to do your paper round for some money then heading to the arcade or the fairground to blow it all on coin pushers and claw machines.

There are some big ticket prizes to aim for and a golf cart you can save up to buy, plus any prizes you win can be displayed in your house or around town. There are also leaderboards if that's your thing.

The game is still in active development (at the time of writing, a third arcade has just been added with minigolf and 8 new machines), and the dev has a lot more content and features planned, including multiplayer. If you're able to get it at the early access price then it's an absolute bargain, but even once the price goes up it will still be a lot of content for the price.

In terms of quality, this collection is shaping up to be the best yet: after completing half the games, I've not yet found a single one that wasn't entertaining and creative. The theme (spooky/cute or "spoopy") may put some people off and I was initially a bit cautious of it myself, but there's still a decent amount of horror here and the cuteness factor doesn't diminish that.

Particular credit must go to Matter over Mind (an excellent stealth / puzzle / action game), Submission (a fantastic game which keeps switching genres when you least expect it) and Eden: Garden of the Faultless (best described as FFVII's Chocobo races except with creepy bat demons).