Deity
This game combines the beauty of meditative relaxation with a playable video game experience.
You’ll start off as a Deity within the void, an area which exists outside of space and time. From within this void you’ll have access to a range of different worlds where you can embody a unique creature in each.
In each world you’ll be able to explore the environment accompanied by a plethora of meditative music. Once traveling to the final warp gate in each world you’ll be sent back to the void and allowed to enter a new world as another creature, until of course you reach the final level.
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Euclidean Skies
The levels of the game are interesting and will be quite difficult later on. The game itself looks nice, but at first the controls are weird. I’ve lowered the sensitivity of my mouse almost as far as I can. After a bit of practice, I didn’t have any problems.
– Real player with 6.5 hrs in game
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I almost didn’t recommend.
The UI is simply terrible. Rotations are all but intuitive. One hardly ever knows which blocks are going to move, in which direction, around which axis precisely… Visibility is also suboptimal. That often transforms puzzle solving into an exercise in randomness, occasionally with moments of frustration.
On the other hand, I don’t completely dislike the chaotic nature of the game. And the art has kept me curious for the next puzzle, so far.
As a result, I can’t usually play more than 1 puzzle or 2 in a session, but I keep coming back for 1 more every few weeks, when I’m in the mood.
– Real player with 5.4 hrs in game
Zeno Clash
xeno- prefix. from Ancient Greek ξένος (ksénos, “alien”) a. Having to do with foreigners, as in xenophilia, or more commonly, xenophobia. b. From a foreign place, as in xenolith.
clash noun. onomatopoeic a. A skirmish, a hostile encounter. b. Opposition, contradiction, such as between differing or contending interests, views, purposes etc.
In my imagination, the development of Xeno– sorry, Zeno Clash – started when folks at Ace Team got together, got high, and got onto the subject of ancient mythologies (Roman, Greek, Norse, etc.) and how weird they all were. I mean, if you want crazy characters and crazier stories, you need look no further than some of the gods and goddesses traipsing around back in the day. Athena, birthed fully formed out of the sweaty forehead of Zeus; Pan, the goat-god of wanton sex; Artemis, goddess of the hunt, who for some reason was depicted in various interpretations as being literally covered with breasts; Medusa, she of the stylish snake perm and stony gaze, being some kind of metaphor for psychosexual wackiness (I’m pretty sure we can blame Freud for that); Jeff, the God of Biscuits; and even some nutter who told people to eat some bread and drink some wine and pretend it was his flesh and his blood… I mean, ew, dude. I’m sure we have enough problems without adding cannibalism to it. So anyway, the developers were shooting the breeze about Gods and Golden Fleece and rivers of blood and whatever until one guy, as I imagine it, stood up and went, “Yeah… but like, what if… Dude! What if there were, like, aliens, right? And they were weird, like totally, heh, but then, like, THEY also had myths and shit! I mean… dude…”
– Real player with 92.2 hrs in game
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Over the years I occasionally return to this game to replay it for a bit (or sometimes, in its entirety), on one hand because the gameplay is genuinely fun, and on the other, because the world design slaps hard.
Running on the Source Engine, it runs buttery smooth and doesn’t need any sort of config editing or patching to make it support high refresh rates and high resolutions.
Saying this, you might expect some big budget title with huge production quality, but the reality is that it’s still very much a small indie game. The voice acting ranges from charmingly hammed up to okay to “literally random person we sat into the studio”, because that’s essentially what they did. No seriously, check the voice credits, most of it is just the development team and everyone is doing double or triple-duty. The character with probably the most lines, the protagonist, thankfully is voiced by a professional voice over guy.
– Real player with 18.8 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
GRIS
A great game if you like simple platformers without complicated puzzles.
A terrible game if you like good puzzles where stuff happens. The puzzles are very simple, you often have to just press a button and wait for your character to walk somewhere, and the beautiful artstyle gets really boring once you realize how often everything repeats itself.
– Real player with 25.8 hrs in game
A lone female character facing off against enemies that represent mental illnesses while usually in a dim, black and white/grey, or colourless world isn’t anything new. Far from it.
There are plenty out there (Little Nightmares, Shady Part of Me, Celeste, Child of Light, Hellblade, Amnesia Rebirth, Ib, Limbo (but a boy), and more)
So with that in mind I wondered what Gris (apparently pronounced “gree”) could add to the already overcrowded, overdone trope/setting.
It was fun while it lasted. Great art and animation. Nice soundtrack. You can’t die so you go at your own pace. It was a nice day playing it (about 6 hours to 100%)
– Real player with 8.2 hrs in game
Starlight of Aeons
Negatives:
Main program is flagged as a malware by Windows Defender so you have to get around that to install this.
No full screen support
No text speed option
No framerate lock
4 hr kinetic novel with full Chinese VA (none on 3rd story, “1/30000 Days to Love” though). There are 3 stories, but the first 2 just make one story together. Good writing/narrative, characters, and art. Great soundtrack. Philosophical.
– Real player with 7.4 hrs in game
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– Real player with 5.2 hrs in game
The Procession to Calvary
(No spoilers.)
An absolutely fantastic game that’s just dripping with style. It’s borrowed style, but in this case that’s even better! Watch classic paintings come to life to tell an absolutely ridiculous story. Perfect for Easter (in a deeply-irreverent sort of way)!
Put more directly, the art is top-notch, the animation is hilarious, and the (also-borrowed) musical pairings are perfect.
The puzzles are all fair, ranging from several strictly-logical affairs to a handful of clever head scratchers. Nothing is so difficult or random that it should drive you to a walkthrough, and I suggest you avoid looking up the solutions to any puzzles lest you shorten your total gameplay. (If you ever get stuck, just revisit areas you haven’t been to recently and look at things fresh. That should generally do the trick.)
– Real player with 41.8 hrs in game
If you liked Four Last Things then you are a shoe in for this game. If you haven’t played Four Last Things then GO AND PLAY FOUR LAST THINGS!
Seriously. Play Four Last Things first and then if you like that come back to this after that.
PROS
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amazing visuals. The entire game is renaissance art from start to finish and is amazingly mashed up together.
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hyperbole….“You wasted amazing on a basket of chicken wings!?” This game is hilarious. Some of the dialogue is so funny I made a noise out loud. There are some strange references. The descriptions of the paintings in the gallery were fantastic. The game’s humour is on point for the kind of folks that have an interest in British humour or enjoy intelligent sarcasm.
– Real player with 5.1 hrs in game
Chimeras: Cherished Serpent Collector’s Edition
This is the first game I’ve played in the series. I don’t know if it is the beginning, middle or the ending, but what I can say for sure is that not a single HOPA game I’ve played so far tackles with the basilik. An ancient creature; this being is said to be half rooster, half dragon. Just like a manticore; it is made of different body parts belonging to two up to four animals. Here, in this game, you must defeat two basiliks. As a cryptozoologist, you must put your knowledge at work in order to save the people of Serpent Hill.
– Real player with 3.2 hrs in game
the lag and freezing was bad but it was a great game
– Real player with 1.4 hrs in game
DEEMO -Reborn-
DEEMO -Reborn- is a musical, beautiful & charming experience, in which it combines
rhythmic arcade-ish gameplay (hitting keys at the right time, in the same essence as OSU!mania/DJMax etc)
& solving clever and semi-demanding riddles/puzzles, so that you can unlock more songs to play, more areas to explore
& to progress the story further.
The Story is quite mystical & very emotional, with many but short cutscenes and a few dialogues that explains what’s going on. Voice over is only in Japanese (with english subtitles ofc)
– Real player with 77.5 hrs in game
I’m honestly so split with this port of the game. I feel like it’s a lot easier to play with keyboard, which is both good and bad. I’m glad it makes it more accessible to others, but now this is just like the NS port all over again. If you play on this version people are more likely to think you aren’t as skilled because now you can just hold SPACE and don’t have to wiggle joysticks.
Plus the fact that VK songs, Cytus 1 & 2, Egoist, AND Rayark 3 packs aren’t available is extremely disappointing. Because of the loss of almost 20 songs, the game feels a lot more empty and I’m just more tempted to boot my PS4 up to play Alone with you or Parousia.
– Real player with 55.1 hrs in game
Hope
The music is great, really atmospheric and fits perfectly. The storyline is ok. The puzzles are also ok and engaging. This game is a bit glitchy and not intuitive at all. Support told me where to find the menu, there are no clues to that, maybe that is part of the puzzle. It crashed a couple of times for me and I got stuck in a few places, not knowing if it was me or a glitch. Support are lovely and with a bit more development this will be a much better game.
– Real player with 4.3 hrs in game
One of the most depressing and PUZZLING games I’ve ever played and a realistic portrayal of slowly losing your mind - realistic as in there are barely any “horror game insanity effects”, but rooms suddenly lead to unexpected rooms, people you once loved are there for a moment and then gone again. Often you’ll feel trapped and don’t know what’s expected of you in these strange escape rooms featuring cold, technical CAD graphics overlayed with crayon characters, a contrast that in some rooms works quite well and in others only looks jarring.
– Real player with 2.5 hrs in game