Recent reviews by dylandylandylan

The Painscreek Killings is a murder mystery set in a tightly woven web of people who once lived in a tiny, now empty, European-style village.

The gameplay style has no quests, map pointers or set order of events; you discover and catalog clues based on what you can access at the time. This establishes a rough order to the game, since you won't be able to get to certain clues until you've solved preceding ones and gained the keys, puzzle clues, etc necessary to get there. However, it's also possible to miss important items and clues along the way.

Much of the story is told through diaries, which are plentiful; most main characters have at least three. (At times, it can feel like a little too much storytelling is offloaded to the diaries, rather than being done environmentally.)

There are also keys, tools, and occasional puzzles to use to get to the next step. You will have a camera you can use to take photos, but you have no in-game notebook or way to tag or catalog items or photographs in-game, so you'll need an actual notebook for the many hundreds of possible data points: People's names, roles, personalities, addresses, dates of birth and death, timeline and relationships.

This was a game made with a lot of care by a small team, and it has some strengths and weaknesses. I appreciated the sheer complexity of it - the amount of data and the open-ended gameplay style lets you act like a real detective. At times, that can be frustrating when you just don't know what to do. Perhaps you missed a clue or a key at some point, but you have no way of knowing what you missed or where it is. Several times, I looked up answers rather than try to fruitlessly backtrack through dozens of locations.

This took quite a bit longer than I had anticipated, which means that you'll probably be spending a lot of time in Painscreek. It's a pretty town, but it can be repetitive when you've logged ten hours into a game that takes place entirely in a small, static town that has no day/night cycle - or anything to break up the time.

I would definitely have appreciated some elements to make Painscreek feel more real - day/night; more environmental sounds; more atmospheric effects; a "home base" to return to at night; perhaps another song on the soundtrack; and a way to organize and annotate my clues in-game. Scott had a bulletin board -- what about me?! I would love for this game to have felt a bit spookier - and it could be accomplished in simple ways. That one jumpscare when the electricity shuts off at the hospital was incredible - I was hoping for more of that! Feeling watched and seeing small changes that you didn't make yourself would be very unnerving.

This game, as I mentioned, looks like it's set in Europe, but it's supposedly in the United States -- an odd detail that I never fully got over. If this was done intentionally - why? All I can imagine is that Painscreek is some kind of private, thematic corporate "village" that is very different from the surrounding area -- but if so, this is never mentioned.

Lastly, I am a proponent of not doing things if you can't do them well - and Painscreek Killings chose to integrate some elements into the endgame that they weren't able to pull off with the same level of skill as the rest of the game. Endgame spoiler under the cut: The chase sequence felt like it had been coded in 1993, let's be honest. I think if the devs didn't have the software or skills to pull it off, it would have been better to end in a different way, more in keeping with the mood of the rest of the game.

Overall, this game lands in the middle for me. Overall, it felt too long for the amount of interest and enjoyment I was getting out to it, and so I have not recommended it. However, I feel like it is rare in the way it really lets you operate like a detective without handholding, and some people are looking for exactly that.

Surroundead has been out for almost a year in Early Access, but to me still feels overly simple, with some gameplay aspects feeling hard to figure out or awkward to navigate.

As a general issue, the interfaces to help the player understand ammo, weapons, weapon condition, building and more do not provide enough guidance to new players. Weapon condition, for example: Some weapons are "broken." It's not clear what this means: Do they do less damage? Are they unusable? How can they be repaired? It seems simple enough to provide a little more information on-screen, but it's not there.

I struggle with ammo and reloading. Some guns seem to need you to go to inventory every single time you want to fire them and manually drag one bullet into the gun, which seems a little insane. Other guns don't require this and can be reloaded by pressing the assigned yet. In another case, I have a gun which displays 000 ammo, and underneath displays "006", which in most games indicates that I have 6 bullets but they are not loaded. Pressing R does not load them, and I can't find them in inventory. It's all very opaque.

I'm a player who would prefer to reload a save if I die, but this option-- a pretty basic one -- is not available without quitting to the menu first. There's no quicksave or quickload, and loading a save isn't one of the options presented if you die. The loading screens are surprisingly long for such a simple game. I have a gaming PC and most games with much more complexity load faster than this one.

There's quite a bit of countryside in the game, which doesn't really have anything going on. Locations are sparse and zombies stick to those locations.

Overall, I'd like to see more dense locations and interesting things to explore, and more guidance for the game's dynamics, like crafting and infestations.

My review takes into account that this game was just released in early access. I believe with time it will become an incredible game.

Right now, it's a beautiful world with some new and impressive additions over the original game, but with kinks to work out -- especially in survival dynamics and enemy attack frequency.

As a fan of the Forest, the first thing I noticed was this game feels in sync with the original, but visually and environmentally, things are kicked up a notch - impressively. The weather and seasons look and feel so real. The environment is stunningly beautiful.

Many of the familiar elements of crafting and survival are here, but the building options have exploded in possibility. You can now use the same materials like logs and sticks, to build an infinite array of structures. The game provides structure to building in a way that helps you build straight and true structures that look good, but otherwise there are few limits aside from physics.

I love the addition of other characters that can keep the player company and help. The system for instructing Kelvin is brilliant and makes him very useful in the same way a real human would be. Building structures together with Kelvin is pretty cool and it helps get things done in a very real way.

Now, a few of the ways that I think this game can, and I think will, improve:

A.) When starting out, you are apparently there to locate some missing people. However, the rest of the backstory is missing.

I found myself wondering what my character does and does not know. Does he know that there's mutants and cannibals here? Does he know why he's finding dead people? What was he briefed on about experiments or labs?

I'd love for him to get a more in-depth briefing. This would deepen the roleplaying when we discover things. I'd like to imagine how my character would feel seeing a secret lab or a cannibal camp for the first time!

B.) Enemy attacks. I have now played on Normal difficulty and on Custom with Low enemy aggression. In both cases,by days 10-13, if I had built a base, I was being swarmed with cannibals and mutants every hour of the day, every day.

They will harass you like a swarm of gnats. This feels pretty different from the subtle anxiety of building a base in The Forest where you might get attacked once or twice per day. In Sons of the Forest, they never leave. It either becomes annoying or impossible to get anything done.

They can quickly ruin structures built of logs if you have structure destruction turned on. The doors don't lock, and there are no gates. It's unclear how we're meant to use base-building to defend ourselves. Why build a cabin if mutants can just walk in the front door? You'd be better off staying under the radar with a tarp!

It's clear that this development team put so much attention into expanding the base-building, but you can't really do it, because cannibals and mutants react so aggressively to the presence of a good base. The more you build, the more they swarm you. In this way, the game actually discourages base-building.

C.) Games, and survival games in particular, tend to have a white male default protagonist/player character. While we can't undo the fact that, like virtually every other game, Sons of the forest launched with a white male player character, I hope future updates will add another option. The Long Dark added a woman playable character for survival mode after launching in Early Access with just a man. Even better, Subnautica launched with a man of color protagonist and the next installment featured a Black woman. More of this, please!

D.) I have no doubt that future updates will include more animals to catch and eat and adjustments to other survival dynamics. For now, traps seem buggy and many small animals can no longer be killed and eaten.

Much of the worry around survival is gone, because Kelvin can catch endless fish in no time at all. Why develop the skill to hunt or fear going hungry- just ask Kelvin to grab fish out of the water :) This could definitely use some tweaking!

I'd say grab this game because it's impressive and it will only get better.

I've heard a lot of good things about this game and wanted to give it a try. I'm a huge fan of other post-apocalyptic/ post-nuclear disaster games. And STALKER is an OG in the genre plus its said to offer a lot of choice, realism and roleplaying potential.

I am not excellent at video games, but I usually finish most FPS or similar games on regular difficulty. With Stalker, I play on Novice and I still die constantly in some areas. There doesn't seem to me to be much difference between Novice and Stalker (regular) difficulties - enemies can still pretty much one-shot me in the early to early mid game, and that's not good when I'm facing three or five of them at a time with very few medkits, no throwables, and weapons that don't seem to be much use or very accurate.

Unfortunately i can't comment on a lot more than this, since I'm having trouble progressing. I'll return to it later and see if I can do any better but for right now I'm not able to progress the game and would have been better off sticking with a later title.

Arid has a storyline, crafting system and survival dynamics that are challenging and well-balanced. For appreciators of The Long Dark, there is familiarity here - Arid uses a similar system of thirst, hunger, tiredness, overall condition and stamina, as well as some story and setting similarities.

Your journey takes you from your plane crash-landing in the Mojave, through various interconnected settings such as caves, abandoned encampments, factories and farms. As you travel and survive, you'll learn about what happened to the people who were here through notes and letters, and face some of those dangers yourself.

Building is accomplished by repairing various structures -- campfire, bed, crafting table, traps, and some unique items too. The crafting system, accessed via the crafting bench, is actually very well-developed and immersive. Multi-step crafting includes tool building and use of the campfire in some cases. Foraging for supplies is challenging but possible.

Visually, I thought this game was impressive especially considering it is a student project. The environment is so interesting and the skies and vistas are really beautiful - especially sunrise. You will want to explore.

There were a few issues which affected the game negatively. One, crashing and bugs are plentiful. I don't hold that against them, as huge studios release games that are almost as buggy. But as I played I became accustomed to having a couple of crashes per session. Crashing can occur randomly, but I also frequently had it happen right after I saved manually. I also lost some of the game sounds at times, and at one point Arid crashed my whole computer and required restart.

Lastly, in this game, you walk slow. And there is no auto-walk function, so you may find, as I did, that your hands were aching from playing this game. The discomfort and "heavy" feeling of the constant slow walking was enough to dampen my enjoyment of the game, so I mentioned it here.

Overall, I really enjoyed it and commend all the developers on such an amazing student production. I rarely keep games installed or replay them after finishing, but Arid is an exception. It makes me want to replay and get more achievements (if my hands will cooperate).

Overall, this was a surprisingly short campaign (it came in at 11 hours for me). However, it was really a good experience in every way, the story was complete and impactful, and there was a reasonable variety of different interesting challenges for the pilot and pilot/titan to navigate.

I enjoy being able to choose approaches and playstyle, which is possible with the titan loadout options. I especially enjoy the thermite (Scorch) titan loadout, which allows you to set and detonate traps.

Weapons are fun and had a good feel too. You won't be hanging on to weapons for long usually, as you can pick up new ones all the time. I prefer to have a larger inventory and get attached to a couple of weapons that I keep for a longer period of time, but it's definitely not a dealbreaker. Throwables worked well, weapons felt great, everything just works well for an FPS.

Good story, great visuals, and a lot of fun!

im in spaaaaaace!

This is a really interesting, short, cinematic game. I finished it in 5.7 hours over two days. So not a lot of playtime, but I think it has a lot to recommend it.
If you're a fan of The Long Dark or The Forest, I think you'll enjoy this game, even though it offers tremendously less content, it has beautiful nature immersion and an engaging storyline. For the most part, the physical exploration felt on-rails to me; you can really only take specific paths, your objective for the day is always predetermined, and you can't accidentally fall off a cliff (whether that's for the best or not is up to you). What it does provide is an immersive, meaningful and very unique story that is at times touching and scary.
Your choices will be in the form of dialogue that shapes your relationship to Delilah. To what extent those choices shape the game, I woudn't be able to say.
Ultimately this game really impressed me because of the storytelling, which is extremely well-crafted and engages thematically with the characters, location, and conflicts in the story. It's a video game that could certainly stand up to a literary reading, and I think it will leave an impression. I found myself thinking about it when I wasn't playing and couldn't wait to return to it to continue the story.

First, the good: I really enjoyed this game despite not favoring the third-person perspective in games. It's atmospheric to the maximum, with a beautiful score and challenging combat. (Too challenging for me, maybe, but I'll get into that after.)

Your tasks will take you all throughout different quarters of the city, but your home base is at the hospital. It's also a safe district for you, where you can rest and not be attacked on sight. Outside of that zone, some people will recognize you as a vampire when you get close and initiate combat. There are also creatures and other sorts of vampiric beings that will fight you.

The game offers a branching system of skills and the skills are pretty cool, decently powerful and can be combined; you can be more of a specialist in biting and draining blood in combat, for example. You can also choose whether you want to feed on innocents to become more powerful.

The trouble, and beginning of the end, for me came when I reached a point where I couldn't defeat a specific enemy as part of a quest, no matter how many times I tried. During a quest, you can be limited to a specific area of the map; in this case, I couldn't make the choice to feed on am innocent citizen to become stronger and gain a huge influx of experience that could be used toward the skill tree because there weren't any citizens on this map. And, game difficulty can't be changed mid-game. So I'm stuck with no way to move forward.

Aside from this, I recommend it - but I would love if developers added the ability to change difficulty mid-game, because the only safe option I see right now would be to use a low difficulty that may quickly become too easy. I should have chosen a lower difficulty for my game, but that wasn't apparent until much later when I was already deep into the storyline.

I'm definitely a fan of the sci-fi genre, but new to the Mass Effect series. This game had a lot of interesting things to explore, a good story, and I really enjoyed the combat dynamics. While there wasn't really much stealth to speak of, the combat had fun opportunities to use different powers and combine them into combos, level up your companions' different skills and deploy them where you need them.

The visuals are pretty impressive, especially the vaults. The story is interesting - you can help unravel a galactic mystery here, and the dynamic between the Andromeda races felt fresh and novel to me.

Despite this, I didn't personally find this game immersive and never lost myself in it. Also, it wasn't clear what impact my choices had on the story, but from early on it did appear to be limited.

The next part of this review deals with spoilers in terms of how many endings there are and what impact choices have on the story (but I left out most details.)


Ryder fulfills his/her role as Pathfinder, and doesn't have the opportunity to deviate from it or get involved in factions in a significant way. I read in a review that this may be because MA: Andromeda is intended to be the starting point for a number of other games/other media. There is only one ending, and the choices made by Ryder have only a minor impact on how that ending plays out.

Ryder makes several choices during the game - which cryo pods to activate, whether to designate a settlement military or scientific, which leader to back - which will have a fairly minimal impact. I would have liked to have had a bigger impact on shaping the ending, though I get that that might be impractical if this is to be the starting point for other games.

The major drawback to this game for me was the number of bugs. I encountered several different bugs during playthrough and some of them affected multiple saves and affected Priority (main story) quests. With affected saves, I was able to go back through my saves until I found one that worked.

This game has a romance component with the companions; I think there are a few interesting choices to romance, but none of the male romanceable characters were appealing to me.

Despite this, I did have a fun time with this game and would recommend it for the interesting story and fun combat. Beyond just combat I really enjoyed the motion of the characters - jumping and grabbing in the exosuit armor is really satisfying! There are a couple of good combat consumables, but not so many that it got complicated to use them. Some people don't like the favorites wheel; it personally worked great for me, maybe because I pause to switch weapons, etc., a lot during combat anyway rather than using hotkeys.