Vessels
Wow. Was going through my steam discovery queue and saw this odd title that didn’t have a lot of players but had 100% positive reviews. I had to try it and boy oh boy I do not regret it. I couldn’t put it down until I did everything I could thing of to get a different ending. This game is so unique with the way you get to play as the antagonist while the antagonist itself is a separate being from you. This entity gifts you with abilities that I don’t want to spoil but I think I can say that you will be able to influence what people on the ship are thinking and talking about in a way that selfishly benefits you. It’s a bit of a puzzle that involves starting with no memory of your past and trying to piece together information in a way that allows you to at least convincingly pretend to be the crew member who everybody remembers/suspects. Otherwise, you’ll get ejected out of the airlock!
– Real player with 5.4 hrs in game
Read More: Best Atmospheric Exploration Games.
Quick:
5/5. What an amazing game. Vessels is one of those games that comes along every now-and-then, and just knocks it out of the park. I played the game through from beginning to end in one run. Admittedly, it is a short game. You can complete a play-through of this in roughly three to four hours. I was completely engaged from beginning to end, and I would have stuck with it for another four hours. The choices in the game gave me the impression that there are different endings and scenarios to experience, but I do not know this for sure.
– Real player with 5.3 hrs in game
If On A Winter’s Night, Four Travelers
This was a wonderful point and click experience. The pixel art is really beautifully done, great story telling, fun puzzles. I will definitely be purchasing the supporter pack. Great job and thanks 3
☾ DIFFICULTY ☾
🔲 Easy
✅ You have to use your brain
🔲 Normal
🔲 Hard
🔲 Dark Souls
☾ GRAPHICS ☾
🔲 Bad
🔲 Okay
🔲 Good
✅ Beautiful
🔲 Masterpiece
☾ MUSIC ☾
🔲 Bad
🔲 Not special
🔲 Good
✅ Excellent
🔲 Best
☾ STORY ☾
🔲 No Story
🔲 Bad
🔲 Average
🔲 Good
✅ Very Rich
☾ PRICE ☾
🔲 Perfect price
✅ Cheap (It’s free!)
– Real player with 6.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best Atmospheric Dark Games.
“If on a winter’s night a traveler, outside the town of Malbork, leaning from the steep slope without fear of wind or vertigo, looks down in the gathering shadow in a network of lines that enlace, in a network of lines that intersect, on the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon around an empty grave - What story down there awaits its end? - he asks, anxious to hear the story.”
“If on a Winter’s night, a traveler” is a novel by Italo Calvino and possibly one of the greatest italian literary works published in the last two centuries. Each chapter consists of the beginning of a new novel, in a search for the pleasure of reading.
– Real player with 5.1 hrs in game
Chasing Static
I have mixed feelings about Chasing Static. It is a very well designed game with detailed scenery, excellent voice acting, and a conplicated story. The story is told through ‘echo’ flashbacks which you locate with a Receiver Device that you use to find specific frequencies. The order of these story bits are revealed according to your path so their chronology remains a bit elusive and I am not 100% sure (after playing through 3 times) exactly what took place before my arrival.
Much of the game is spent wandering the landscape, receiver in hand, searching for signals. There are a number of inventory items to find but these tend to be located in close proximity to where they are first used. On my first time in the game, the receiver instructions did not spawn so I spent more than an hour wandering with the Receiver device improperly deployed.
– Real player with 16.2 hrs in game
Read More: Best Atmospheric Walking Simulator Games.
Pitch-perfect Horror
Horror is not my preferred genre. I’m a total wimp in this regard, and have been since I was very young. However, I’ve had my eye on Chasing Static since it was first announced. This is a major change of direction for multi-talented solo dev Nathan Hamley of Headware Games, but his previous game, a lighthearted 2D pixel art point+click adventure called Guard Duty, is one of my favorites. It must have been a pretty big leap to decide to experiment with a brand new set of tools and a total shift in direction and tone for this project, but here it works really well.
– Real player with 5.8 hrs in game
Forgotten Fields
Forgotten Fields
Forgotten Fields drags you into the story with its cinematic and interactive approach. I was captivated from start to finish.
Brought to you by the same developer who made Rainswept, Forgotten Fields is an atmospheric, narrative driven, cinematic experience, chronicling the events of one Summer in a quiet town. The inspiration gained from the developer’s own home town near Goa, India.
– Real player with 10.5 hrs in game
I loved Rainswept so I had high hopes for Forgotten Fields. For me, it fell short in a few areas. You control Sid - a 20-something guy with a deadline and a case of writer’s block. His mother is selling the family home and he is at that cusp in life where each of us recognizes that we are going to have to be a grown up. Much of the story and dialog is between a set of friends who are about to step out into ‘real life,’ each in their own direction.
In parallel, Sid is writing a story about a princess in a fantasy world. About half the game is controlling the princess within her own adventures. There are definite tie-ins between the choices facing the princess and the choices facing Sid.
– Real player with 10.5 hrs in game
RUSA Odyssey
RUSA Odyssey is a third-person exploration game set in the post-apocalypse world. Play as a lone deer and travel to the unknown world. Discover the story and mystery that lies along the way.
Note: “Rusa” means deer in Malay/Indonesian.
Nyaa-kuza!!
The UI, level hub, and main menu art assets are absolutely gorgeous, and it seems like there’s a lot of content to play through. There are a ton of different characters in the dialogue sequences but I don’t think it gets to the point of being overwhelming. I also really enjoy certain aspects of the combat, like choosing between different kinds of weapons (including a catzooka??!), and the falling clothesline; I hope there’s more interactive environments like that. It’s so obvious that hours and hours of love went into the making of this game.
– Real player with 1.4 hrs in game
I love the art style of the menu and character portraits as well as the music, however the sprites for the fight section just don’t really match everything else. In fight segments, I found you can easily just push against enemies and swing your katana at them which prevents them from attacking back. The boss fights however gave a better fight.
Personally, I think it would work better with a non pixel-like look for the fight segments and change the fights to just boss fights, each with their own moveset as even on Hard, the regular enemies were no threat at all.
– Real player with 0.7 hrs in game
The Pale Beyond
Five years ago, The Viscount and its crew set sail into The Pale Passage in search of absolute magnetic South. The ship and its crew were tragically lost to the ice, never to be seen again. Her sister ship, The Temperance shall follow in her path, hoping to find answers where The Viscount failed.
You didn’t ask to lead this expedition but here you are: stuck in the ice, Captain missing, miles from civilization and everyone looking for you to lead. Manage your meager resources, balance safety and morale, make the hard calls and head in the only direction you can - into The Pale Beyond.
A polar exploration game set in an unforgiving frozen wasteland where you embark on a treacherous voyage across the ice and into the Pale Beyond. It’s a stunning yet harsh landscape that can change at any moment.
Every decision matters. As the expedition unfolds and the winter approaches, every decision you make will have a meaningful impact on the story as you navigate a way over the ice.
After the Captain mysteriously goes missing, you unwillingly take the position of Captain. You didn’t ask to lead this crew but here you are: stuck in the ice, miles from civilization and everyone looking for you to lead.
Keeping the crew and sled dogs safe, fed, and warm during an expedition is key for survival. Surviving the ice will matter little in the face of a mutiny, every vote will count. So keep the crew on your side.
Inspired by Victorian etchings and historic paintings of the time depicting the ice, each character and environment has been drawn by hand. The result is a unique artstyle with an expressive cast to see you through the cold and grim environment of the ice.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1266030/The_Pale_Beyond
The Plane Effect
I loved this game for a great many reasons and I hope you will too!
At its core “The Plane Effect” is a mystery puzzle game that unfolds as you meander through a dreamlike state, which often borders on the surreal and even nightmarish. One should note that this tale is depicted with an amazing artistry that stands unique even among the countless other “artistic indie games” out there, enacting a style that does not act simply as window-dressing but contributes to the experience on a fundamental level. Unlike many games it does not feel as if an artist was just asked to throw some pretty graphics on top of a game but rather that the art was always a core consideration when each of levels were designed.
– Real player with 17.3 hrs in game
The game is superb, it takes you in a world with an exclusive atmosphere. It’s peculiar and strange. The aim of the game is making you feel lonely and disoriented. It gets his objective completely. If you feel too much alone you can opt to use the GUIDED feature that helps you to overcome every kind of difficulty you may face. The puzzles are ok, the sound controls are missing.
– Real player with 8.6 hrs in game
Heaven’s Vault
Imaginative, innovative, and very immersive
Heaven’s Vault is a narrative game with meaningful choices that lets you explore a fascinating and beautiful original world and its history. One of its main mechanics involves deciphering words and sentences in a foreign script, which is implemented in the best way I’ve ever encountered in 35 years of gaming - find details below.
Let’s first talk about the setting though. The game takes place in a unique world where humans live on a couple of small “moons”, which are connected by “rivers” that defy our laws of physics, but can be sailed nonetheless. You play as Aliya, a young archaeologist who has found a working age-old ship and explores this strange universe, trying to uncover its forgotten history.
– Real player with 115.2 hrs in game
Introduction
I love Heaven’s Vault. I love this game so much that I replayed the game in the New Game+ mode, which I rarely do. Playing the game brought back memories of my days studying the Classics – translating text, learning word etymology, reading Roman and Ancient Greek mythology and history, and so on. Given that, I was easily convinced to play Heaven’s Vault again, just so that I could learn more about the in-game history, further explore the game’s world, and solve its central mystery by approaching it from different angles.
– Real player with 59.3 hrs in game
Kentucky Route Zero: PC Edition
I’ve been putting off writing a review for this for literally years, because I have no idea how to describe it any better than anyone else has. But Kentucky Route Zero has been my biggest source of inspiration ever since I stumbled upon it seven years ago. In that span of time, every act released was better than the last, every character more in-depth, every location more mysterious. So let’s start there: I’m in love with this game, and have been from the start.
You play as a number of drifters in Kentucky. All of them are homeless, some have debts, most don’t have much family. Your job is to get them to Dogwood Drive, an address that is incessantly difficult to locate, and is only accessible by a route that takes you deep, deep underground.
– Real player with 138.4 hrs in game
**“We lay on our backs looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when he made life so sad and disinclined. ”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road**
I don’t normally start my reviews with book quotes but when I do you can be assured that I mean business or I am trying really hard to look smart. Kentucky Route Zero is not for everyone. Its heavy on reading walls and walls of text and building your own story of interwoven threads from multiple characters that all knit together into this Kerouac beat style prose or in some other moments a Murakami-like flurry of surrealistic philosophy where things are real…but not quite real enough. There was a point where I had given up on this title and had no confidence that it would ever get finished but they did and I am glad, if only to give closure to the swathes of fans that waited almost 10 years for this to come to fruition.
– Real player with 41.9 hrs in game