Recent reviews by okcomputing

This game resonates with the core of my being. I've been looking for something to scratch that RIIIIIIDGE RACERRRR itch for a long time, and this does just that and then some. Incredibly fun drifting mechanics. I am absolutely in love with this, and I cannot wait for the full release. Please, give it a try. It has such a clever concept behind it.

Thematically, Trials of Harmony is a game in the vein of 999, VLR and other such escape room and visual novel mash-up games. Long story short, for what it tries to do within its scope, it's pretty solid. There aren't all that many western visual novels, so having a developer from a different background tackle this genre was refreshing in and of itself, as the game deviates a little from the usual VN formula. And while Trials of Harmony is certainly a variation on a theme, it's an interesting take with a more grounded approach than is typical for the genre.

First and foremost, the writing is pretty good! I don't have the vocabulary to really break it down fully, but I enjoyed reading through it over the course of a weekend. The characters generally talk like you'd expect from real people, which is a nice change of pace from a certain class of visual novels that takes a very maximalist approach to expressing emotions -- the written equivalent playing to the back row. You won't find a character dramatically whispering another character's name every couple of minutes, the game doesn't lean on titallation as a crutch to make up for weaknesses elsewhere, that sort of thing. Instead, the dialog is naturalistic and tends to flow together well. By and large, I was pretty satisfied with this aspect of the text.

It does take a little suspension of disbelief when, for example, someone sends a message that dramatically cuts off even though it's in an IM chat, but by and large I found it to be quite a breezy read absent of idiosyncrasies or stiff dialog. Some of the flair in the prose like the text-based emoticons feel a bit rooted in the internet culture of the aughts even though the game is set in 2021, but it wasn't all that distracting either. I came across a few grammatical mistakes here and there, but it's easy enough to attribute to it being framed through an IM chat window -- even though it was likely just a mistake.

In terms of plot, there are some moments that don't quite land the way I think they were intended or weren't as impactful as I thought they'd be. Some of the situations and devices it employs will likely be familiar to someone who has read 999. You can expect the usual multiple good and bad endings as well as a true ending, like many other VNs. None of the bad endings really lead to a distinct scenario, however. The game simply ends. At the same time, the "good" endings aren't significantly different from each other either. So if you're all about exploring branching paths in visuals novel, do set your expections accordingly. While the game does has a few neat tricks up its sleeve, it's played pretty straight for the majority of it. You won't have to look at your screen upside-down through a mirror while solving a picross puzzle or something, if you get what I mean.

A decidedly weaker aspect of the writing is its characterization of its cast and antagonist. It takes some time for the cast to become fleshed out, and a subset of those characters remain fairly underexplored or underutilized throughout. What I do appreciate is that they don't come across as one-dimensional cutouts in spite of that. So what some characters lack in definition, they make up in a (varying) degree of believability at least. A fair trade-off, I suppose. What I found more difficult to look past was the primary antagonist's motivations and general presence being a little undercooked. Of course, whichever way you try to explain why someone would create an elaborate death game is going to be a little ridiculous, but I would've appreciated a bit more flavor than the game has to offer in this respect.

The sound design in this is quite well-realized and punches far above its weight class, I'd say. The melodies and songs all sound great within their context. I hate to sound like a broken record, but it is reminiscent of the grungy industrial electronic music of 999. But in a way that I personally quite liked and was distinct enough to not feel too on the nose.

Gameplay-wise, it's not very complex. The few puzzle scenarios presented are fairly straightforward. It’s a "fill in the blanks" type of mechanic, whereby you either spell out what needs to be done out of a preset combination of letters or pick a certain answer. There aren't explicit spatial puzzles or anything more explicitly gamey, so don’t come into it looking for something like that. To make it a tad more engaging, I found it fun to try to figure out the solution myself before starting the "fill in the blanks" phase. As they're mostly logic-based puzzles, they're quite doable and fun brain teasers. Preferably, the puzzles would've been more organic in terms of how you'd solve them, but it is what it is. If you do take them on immediately, you can inadvertently fumble your way into the answer by way of trial and error. The plus side being that there's minimal friction between mechanics and forward progression.

More broadly speaking and at a more subjective level, I think the somewhat sparse presentation made it hard for me to see the characters as persons and place them in the setting. In a game like 999 or VLR, you have graphics that visualize the environment, character portraits have different expressions and so forth. With the game being presented through the lens of an IM interface, there aren't as many small touches like those to enrich the story and play. Given that it’s priced as reasonably as it is, and its budget couldn't have been even a hundredth of other well-known visual novels in this style, it makes sense.

I did encounter a few minor technical annoyances. The game will prompt you to open the IM interface to move the main character's dialog forward, even when there's only a single thing they can say -- which is more often than not. Having to click around and confirm your reply needlessly adds wasted time, and even discounting the minor annoyance itself, that lost time adds up after a while. It's a small thing, but I think the overall pace of the game would benefit from an option to automatically advance in the case of preset replies. Having the ability to pause the text to read older messages would've also been appreciated. If you'd like to do that, your only recourse is to wait until your character gets a prompt and avoid answering or to slow down the text speed as much as possible and hope the story doesn't advance too quickly. And, sometimes, when a prompt with different responses comes up, I wanted to read back what was said before, but it doesn't seem possible to back out and read before choosing a reply.

I feel like I began writing this with an overall more positive impression than I left on paper. I genuinely liked this game. A few issues here and there, but it was entertaining by and large. Characters being depicted in a naturalistic way was very refreshing and allowed me to round up the overall experience at times I perhaps wanted a little more. In terms of length, I got to my first ending at around 9 or 10 hours of play (while being a fairly slow reader, I should add). The remaining couple of hours I spent going through the bad endings and figuring out other good ending routes. A fairly painless process, as you can tell. While I was left wanting to learn more about these characters and some seemingly loose threads, I felt pretty satisfied about it overall.

I'm aware it's a boring conclusion to draw, but I think "fans of the genre" will get a kick out of this game. The wider audience, I'm not entirely sure. If you are interested in the concept of an escape room themed visual novel, but if the anime aesthetic and its associated tropes put you off, this is a good one of those that may be more to your liking. While there are a few gripes to be had about the overall experience, at this price point and with the amount of quality content you'd get out of the game, it's worth a shot for the curious, I think. I've paid a lot more for a LOT worse.

Hey, hey, you, you, this is still a classic.
No way, no way, you know it's not a secret.
Hey, hey, you, you, I think you should be playing this.

Played this to completion elsewhere, but I enjoyed it. Entertaining story with plenty of intrigue and an appropriately spooky ending that raises some fun questions. Great atmosphere, excellent visual and audio design, and writing that will keep you interested throughout. Definitely worth a try!

I have a high tolerance bar for repetition, trial and error, and so on, but Outer Wilds really got to me in ways that few other games do. And that was the last thing I expected of it. Okay, there's a time loop, but they add more time limits on top through an oxygen meter, a fuel gauge, crumbling environments, sand pouring in to close off areas and various scheduled events -- almost every planet has an additional internal timer of some sort. Compounding this, the game doesn't shy away from immediate failure states, requiring you to start over and regularly wait out another timer. It is so punishing for no apparent reason other than to further gamify what otherwise largely amounts to a "walking sim". I sorely missed mechanics that mitigated repetition (beyond taking a power nap), which can be found in games as old as Majora's Mask or as recent as Minit. At times, it feels as if Outer Wilds is not confident that its ideas can be compelling enough to stand on their own without these layers of challenge.

At a conceptual level, Outer Wilds does incredible things. However, my experience was that I was way into everything but playing it. I usually enjoy simply walking around in games like this -- exploration is fun to me in and of itself. Why they found it necessary to add pseudo-survival layers to it, I do not understand. It makes the play more explicitly gamey, sure, but the gauge and time management were not additive to me.

I feel like there needed to be further incentives on the other end and preferably more than notes with lots of proper nouns in them. I spent roughly seventeen hours to complete the game and encountered around three explicit puzzles. I wanted a more meaningful drive to push forward beyond a trail of notes with some exposition; I hoped for more interesting moments rooted in gameplay as I got further, but what I got were largely... notes. There were also stunning environments, which normally I would've found sufficient, but, as I said, I felt unable to fully enjoy them because of doom clocks, survival layers and the specter of repetition.

This also brings me to my greatest surprise: Outer Wilds doesn't really have puzzles as such, despite others describing it as a puzzle-exploration game. In my experience, it's mostly a quest to find a number of keys to open locks, whereby the keys are coded as knowledge (or, inaccurately, "clues"). Because that knowledge is often so singular in its use, there was little more puzzling needed than literally doing the thing a note told you to do. It rarely asks you to apply knowledge in creative ways and synthesize conclusions about mechanics on your own. That's what makes a puzzle to me -- not a binary state of being in the dark about something until learning exactly how it works.

Sometimes, if the game hasn’t yet spelled it out a dozen times yet, you can get a little creative but more often than not the game won't give you the chance to, so the end result is a game generally wanting in what I expect of puzzles. The amount of times this game circles around a certain phenomenon that you could conceivably figure out within less than an hour of playing is emblematic of the game's puzzle philosophy. There is a general lack of confidence in the player’s interpretive abilities and an overeagerness to show you new cool stuff at the cost of a more organic mode of play. And while there's a case to be made that you can experiment in certain situations, that once again leads me back to my initial point about the time loop making it frustrating, because each attempt is going to be prefaced by the dead air of redoing the steps you took to get to wherever you were previously.

Much of the game’s narrative is told through various types of notes that you pick up along your travels. An uninteresting and tired delivery system thereof, in my opinion, and the sheer number of notes you come across is overbearing. The time spent casually reading them also feels at odds with the sense of urgency otherwise pressing down on you, even though time stops as you do so -- a rare compromise for this game that begs the question why this wasn't extended to other areas of its design. Because the game has little sense of economy of information, I was grateful that the computer on your spaceship keeps track of notes and draws connections for you. Yet, I can imagine a version of this game that exercised more restraint and asked you to organically make those connections yourself. I think I may have enjoyed that more. But Outer Wilds often doesn't trust the player enough to allow for things like this.

At a more fundamental level, the spaceship and character controls can be a pain, but, okay, it's space -- fine. Accurately confounding. There are also things like the button layout being unintuitive. For a game without seriously disruptive technical issues, too often it "felt" bad when playing. It made basic things more difficult than I wanted them to be when I was already prickly about friction elsewhere.

There are many interesting concepts here, but for some reason it really makes it painful to get to them, and (the payoff of) cool concepts alone don't make a game for me. The "in between" needs to be compelling too. I think of experiences like The Witness, FEZ and The Stanley Parable in comparison to this, and they all have elements in common with Outer Wilds. Yet they have things like brevity or satisfying moment-to-moment mechanics to make for more well-rounded experiences. It has a bit of all of those games in its DNA, but Outer Wilds doesn't come together as neatly.

The coup de grace to my goodwill was delivered by its pre-ending sequence, which is one of the most profoundly disruptive things I've played in a long time. It combines the two factors I disliked most about the game in a neat package: timers and instant death states. As a result, I couldn't quite settle into the ending the way I'd have wanted to. And those closing moments were truly inspired at times, evoking a pitch perfect sense of fear and awe of the unknown -- something the game has a general vibe of throughout and is its greatest achievement, and it really shines in the end. However, the meat of the game being so unpalatable to me wasn't offset by audiovisual spectacles like these. It didn't redeem, justify or override all of that suddenly.

It's clear that players with different sensibilities than mine will get way more out of Outer Wilds, as evidenced by its overwhelmingly positive reception. I personally don't think it's a slam dunk of a game, and it has what I consider a number of deep issues that weren't addressed much in the reviews I had read. Hopefully this'll help some people make a more educated decision on whether this game is for them or at least help set expectations.

Lastly, I should add that I didn't go into this knives out and ready to rip on the game for contrarian cool points. I genuinely thought this would be my jam, because it had all the signs it would be.

Fun but overall not as good as DSR or DS2 SOTFS (even though it outshines both in some respects). and it doesn't quite deliver as a send-off for the series.

Almost everything its combat system does well is counterbalanced by the things it does not so well. The combat feels really inconsistent because of its poise system, most enemies attack at blistering speeds and ignore stamina rules, while you have a near infinite amount of rolls to avoid attacks. Because you're so easily staggered due to changes in its pose system, most engagements end as soon as they start; it comes down to who hits who first, which isn't fun. And because a lot of enemies have seemingly infinite stamina for attacks and gap-closers, you'll be rolling and rolling and rolling until you can get that hit in.

From probably made evade rolling take less stamina because you kind of need it. But it's a poorly considered solution to your character having a subpar toolkit, it dumbs down stamina management compared to previous entries and trivializes many encounters with basic enemies. And for what? The pace of the combat does not feel right in a Souls game. For as much dynamism they added to the combat in DS3, it's not very fun when it inevitably unravels in a roll spam fest because the enemy has a five-hit combo that he can follow up with another five-hit combo with about a fifth of a second of telegraphing. While I generally like that enemies have more complex and unexpected behavior, it's not always conducive to better gameplay or a sense of fairness that tended to permeate this series.

Dark Souls 3 is also the most linear game in the series. There's exactly one branch in the critical path, but even there you run into a dead end right as it branches, because all you need to do is get a trinket from one branch to proceed in the other. There's also exactly one built-in sequence break, behind which are two completely optional areas and one that is in the (later) critical path. The latter ends abruptly because the ninja who magically drops the key in front of the closed door (non-interactive, just a dead body) hasn't spawned yet. How quaint. Despite Dark Souls 2's structure not being quite as interesting as Dark Souls's, it was still significantly more open and left more space for player exploration than Dark Souls 3.

Apart from that, the overarching plot is weak and paced oddly, none of its primary characters are as richly characterized as Gwyn or Vendrick, the characters whose (preposterously obtuse) quest lines you follow have little depth or personality, its lore is more inconsistent than ever and large parts of it don't make much sense at all (including the manifold references to Dark Souls and very occasionally Dark Souls 2). This is probably the most disappointing thing about the game. It is confounding how just how much of a misstep the handling of this aspect of Dark Souls 3 is after two games that managed to do so much more.

The expansions, Ashes of Ariandel and The Ringed City, also buck the trend of Dark Souls DLC being excellent. Ariandel is often tedious, punishing; Ringed City, while being very pretty, desperately wants you to run from bonfire to bonfire with its overbearing enemy placements, and while it is at least capped off by one mechanically satisfying boss fight, it largely triples down on all the trends in the series I've disliked most -- resetting boss health bars, over-inflated health bars, infinite stamina mobs, swarms and proximity-based damage from enemies. Ariandel has a cool (looking) final encounter as well, but it reads like a meme boss with its two recharging health bars. They really pulled out all the creative stops for that one.

It kind of feels like From lost the plot by this game. And yet this is also the most popular entry, so clearly I don't get it. Ultimately, it's still a good game, and I like a lot of things about it. But that makes the things I don't think are very well thought out all the more difficult to swallow. I wish it was a more cohesive package.

A fun little game. Captivating visuals, pleasant soundtrack, charming and well-written characters, and a super relaxing atmosphere. There's not a lot to dislike about it. Neato!

A cool little vignette. Fun creepy vibes. Wish there was more of/to it, but it's neat for what it is!

Really cool. Has more personality than many games multiple times its scope. Super weird, surreal and out there. But really worthwhile. Also love the aesthetic. Reminded me of Echo Night. It has just the right amount of fidelity and abstraction. Excellent soundtrack and appropriately creepy sound design. Love this. So much flavor packed into a little game.

Excellent game with some strong characterization, a central story that's pretty grounded despite the fantasy genre and doesn't devolve into rehashing the same old tropes like many JRPGs do, a world that feels real and richer in history than what we learn, and a combat system that plays exceptionally well to this day. Perhaps the most impressive qualities of Final Fantasy 12 are its writing and performances by its voice actors. Stylistically, it may or may not be your thing, but I found it quite fitting with the general setting. The way characters speak evokes a time, culture and class in a way few other games do. The voice actors uniformly performed quite well, lending even minor roles a credence that may otherwise have been lost on paper. A real achievement. Its soundtrack has in the past been maligned somewhat, apparently. Why, I don't quite understand. Like the rest of the game, it is restrained rather than bombastic but nonetheless very evocative of a place or mood.

While I playing this, I was genuinely surprised at how composed, consistent and modern the game felt -- completely unexpected for something that released in 2006. I think a lot of JRPGs that have come out since then could've learned a few things from Final Fantasy 12 but did not, for some reason. It's odd, really. This seems to take the genre in a pretty bold and perhaps more mature direction, but there don't seem to be many games like it. Xenoblade Chronicles (the first one) comes to mind, but, like many in the genre, it also suffers from the weight of excess systems and storytelling that does little to surprise with the devices it uses or beats it hits. It's likely an issue of me growing older while the greatest hits in the genre continue to be made for a younger-skewing audience. Still, I do hope to see more games like this one at some point.

The only issues I have with the game are relatively minor in the grand scheme of things. The final stretch seems somewhat rushed or undercooked. I would've liked it if the game explored characters like Gabranth further, that we learn some more about Balthier and Cid, and so forth. It doesn't fall apart entirely, but I was left wanting more. Perhaps that's a sign that they were doing something right, though.

Another thing that I felt was a little disappointing was Ashe's character design. While she is established quite distinctly, is full of nuance and she is surprisingly well-rounded, none of her background, identity or character is reflected in what she looks like. In the other cast members, you can see parts of their characterization visualized -- either where they're from like Vaan, in the way that Balthier exudes a sense of gentility, etc. -- but Ashe's design seems to clash with just about every aspect of her character or background. In a game that is light on "fan service" and that sort of thing, it does stand out. Not a deal-breaker per se, but it seemed somewhat out of place. Perhaps it was a factor of focus testing or something along those lines, similar to how Vaan rather than Basch was made to be the player character to appeal to a younger audience.

In any case, Final Fantasy 12 is a wonderful game that deserves to be played. It holds up brilliantly even in 2020 and the richness of the world, characters and score justify playing it. It's not just for "fans of the genre" but for fans of the medium in general, and in that respect it truly lives up to the lineage of the Final Fantasy series.