MONITOR: The Game
EDIT: I have made a 100% guide for both the main game and the ALIX DLC (link can be found in main guide) http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1142352125 Now the review.
Amazing game with a great story, It kinda feels like an Escape the Room type game with all of the secrets in the room that aren’t apparent at all. The game has 10 endings 1 of those is the “best” ending, needing to find all the secrets and uncover the deeper story. Overall the vibe from the amazing music and the story make this a great game 10/10. EDIT: ALIX DLC Review; An amazing development in the story, great soundtrack and great writing to set tone of the add-on. More hands on choices with this one, and interesting dialogue Other DLC’s are readable and give more insight to the story as well as what happens after ALIX’s Best ending as well; worth a read if you enjoy the Game and DLC as much as i did
– Real player with 52.4 hrs in game
Read More: Best Choices Matter Free to Play Games.
TBH, even for being free, this.. isn’t great. The game’s hideous despite being in the unreal engine and making your graphics card run hot. Plot is. Strange? Voice work is the best part, but the game really could use some way to speed things along, and even the day select doesn’t make things less tedious. for some endings? I just. Let the game run while I read a book. Because I had nothing else to do after having listened to most of the convos already.
The Alix DLC is slightly more interesting than the game itself, but it’s also incredibly hideous. + Alix’s voice is grating even if Nathan’s voice is nice. If I’d recommend playing any of it, I’d recommend playing that? but. Yeah, skip this unless you just want free achievements, and play Unheard instead. Unheard has fast forward, pause, and rewind. + Unheard is just more interesting, AND far prettier.
– Real player with 7.4 hrs in game
Family Man
UPDATE #3:
Finished my fourth (and final) playthrough in record time. It becomes incredibly easy to do once you know all the ins-and-outs of every mission and the best practices for home management. This Angelic run felt the most muddied as the game often demands some negative actions (offset by donating foods) before you can do the ultimate good, so it didn’t feel truly pure. There’s also a lack of punch in the actual conclusion. I very badly wanted to
! confront Mr. Delroy directly, but what I got was a little more hollow.
– Real player with 13.1 hrs in game
Read More: Best Choices Matter RPG Games.
Played through this game and got one of the four endings. While the game can be entertaining at first, I really cannot recommend that you buy this game. There are multiple reasons for this. The first being the overall quality feeling of the game… The game feels like a half-assed itch.io game. I don’t know if the developers knew what they had in mind when they made the game, but the end product turned out to be a mess. The currency system feels unbalanced, the needs of your family are not difficult enough to make the game challenging, they only require you to do some really basic minigames over and over again to grind the stats, really distracting from the actual game, and very annoying. When I wasn’t trying to keep up with the family needs I just found myself running around the town looking for jobs to do. The jobs were always the same, “talk to this person, then talk to me” “Pick up thing from here and deliver it there”. No variety whatsoever. It just got really really boring.
– Real player with 12.3 hrs in game
Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier
Weak… weak… weak… I don’t support the game to anyone. Especially the die hard fans like me. There are much better “interactive film” type of games out there.
Let me explain it why.
Technical Issues
-Graphics and glitches kill your enjoyment in this game. Inconsistent FPS, constant drops… Really hard to get in the game.
-Sounds of the game are frustrating. It made me feel like only 4 high school graduates worked for the sounds of this game, after schools in the weekdays from monday to wednesday, for a class project. Let me give a clear example: Apes are in a cave. Apes raise their voices in a cave. What do you expect? An echo right? Not in this game. Echo sounds are not found at all. Another example, apes are in the field. No background noise. None whatsoever. It felt more like a dubbed french film than an original. And I hate dubbed french films.
– Real player with 25.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best Choices Matter Indie Games.
Wow this was a major disappointment. I’m a huge fan of the Planet of the Apes reboot films, especially War for the Planet of the Apes which is a masterpiece of filmmaking, so I was pretty excited to check this game out. Unfortunately, it’s a very basic interactive movie which offers nothing to make it stand out within the interactive drama genre.
All I can really say positive about it is that it looks solid and there’s some great animation work with the apes throughout. It’s only replayable because there are certain achievements locked behind choosing consistent options of a particular path throughout a playthrough. There’s a couple of memorable moments, but they are very scripted and do not change at all in response to the players choices. More negatives to follow:
– Real player with 14.0 hrs in game
She Sees Red - Interactive Movie
I liked Late Shift and I bought this game as it’s similar to that game, I finished my first play within 45 minutes and got a good ending don’t know if it’s best, this game has various choices to select like Late Shift but it’s shorter than Late Shift, when I started my play the game mentioned to play it twice to reveal more of the story.
As for the story it’s so fast players will be confused when they start the game as it progress they will get to know what is happening and what was this all about. There are around 15 achievements and I only managed to get 5 on my first time playing the game.
– Real player with 8.7 hrs in game
“She Sees Red” is a short, well-produced interactive movie that can take radically different turns depending on your choices.
The story is standard thriller material with murders in a nightclub, drugs, two detectives on an investigation, and some allusions to organized crime. The narrative is interesting and mysterious, particularly because you play both the detective and the killer. While you take moment-to-moment decisions like “fight or flee”, the motives of these characters remain unknown at first. But as you replay the game and discover more endings, secrets about each main character are revealed, until you understand the full picture.
– Real player with 6.2 hrs in game
Beyond a Total Loss
Just finished the the game and really enjoyed it, there are many details and a lot of effort was put into it. It was a great old school adventure with some interesting twists and funny dialogues. If you are not sure, there is a demo.
– Real player with 37.3 hrs in game
Beyond a Total Loss is good.
It’s about what you’d expect it to be based on the visuals, and is more or less what I love about indie games.
A quirky story about a man who ends up going through a series of unfortunate events.
– Real player with 35.4 hrs in game
TOKYO LOVE +
A very short VN with some rpg maker-like map that was founded on Kickstarter. I am one of the backers but I simply cannot recommend it.
The story, or rather ‘story’, is an incoherent mess. No character development or any development whatsoever, no explanations, no dialogues, and total nonsense. It’s just a series of choices which come out of nowhere, with no build up at all. Few events that just happen because. No continuity here. I have yet to see something less coherent than this. Sorry, this is worse than kindergarten level of writing. My guess it is a translation from japanese since english sucks badly and often makes little to no sense.
– Real player with 1.7 hrs in game
I love this Harem style visual novel. I played the demo on itch.io, I advise you to do the same if you are not sure you want to buy it.
The story is very romantic, there are several choices that allow you to discover new things.
In addition, the hero can turn on his computer in his bedroom and play very funny sexy video games.
Exploring the city from above is great.
I would like a sequel!
– Real player with 0.2 hrs in game
Crimson Gray
This visual novel is amazing. I’ve played through a number of endings so far, but haven’t gotten the best ending yet. I will get all of the endings one way or another. If I have to, I’ll download some sort of guide.
Yes, the game has a yandere, but this yandere is more likeable than most. This game is very much a character-driven game, and the two main characters felt more real than visual novel characters usually do.
I did see a couple reviewers complaining about a lack of choices. That isn’t entirely true. I think there were a sufficient number of choices for the length of the game, but most of the choices individually have only a small effect on the story.
– Real player with 15.6 hrs in game
HOLY EFFIN' SCHEIZE
THIS NOVEL IS SO SO SO
SWEET
CUTE
DEEP
AND TOUGH
(I had to save and take a break at the first choice in the chemistry class segment…)
So yeah
Worth to mention is that I played this on Newgrounds and that I bought literally after the demo ended.
! Sweet yandere-jesus… This
Now I’ve got a pros and cons here (comment going meta yaaay)
Pros
-
the Story
-
the Telling of said story (many games have good stories, let’s face it. Not everyone chooses their medium appropriately. Crimson Gray nailed this, this story is in it’s optimal medium.)
– Real player with 11.4 hrs in game
The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan
To be honest I heard bad things about this game a lot but to be fair I actually prefer it over House of Ashes.
Good things.
-I really liked how it based it off a real ww2 boat and how it really followed the myth of the Ourang Medan and how 22 crew mates died with no explanation to this day. (search up the name of the boat for more details)
-Setting, I enjoyed the idea of being isolated from land and the feeling of not being able to get out of this trapped nightmare.
-I know a lot people didn’t like the idea of the monsters being in their heads but I did as it was something quite different from being killed by monsters or humans.
– Real player with 39.1 hrs in game
Following the release of House of Ashes one can observe a steady increase in quality with each game starting with Man of Medan. While Little Hope and House of Ashes progressively improve the series' mechanics, gameplay, and storytelling, Man of Medan still stands as a fun time to share with friends. I love this game, and even if it could stand to be updated by Supermassive to compete with its sister games, it’s a successfully lays the groundworks and dives into the world the Dark Pictures Anthology seeks to build with each story.
– Real player with 30.6 hrs in game
The Church in the Darkness ™
A quick look at gameplay from THE CHURCH IN THE DARKNESS and analysis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIIPuXi6fNg
In it you’re trying to track down your nephew who joined a Cult and relocated with them to their own new “utopia” in the Jungle to become entirely self-sufficient. With the help of a number of sympathetic members and other oppressed cult members, you’ve got to locate him and make your way out of the camp before disaster of the usual paranoid “lets all die together” type occurs. Now, most people take that to be “drink the koolaid” voluntary sheep-to-slaughter mindlessness. Though the very premise of TCINTD shows that its certainly not all like that, with many who clearly don’t want to be there anymore, let alone die for the place. The “true story” of any death-cult isn’t of masses killing themselves blindly, it'’s how a concentration of power in the most deluded and devoted drags the rest into their graves with a mass-murder majority the minority is hopeless to defy.
– Real player with 8.9 hrs in game
I’ve actually been following the development of The Church in the Darkness for a few years now, so I was glad to see it release and snapped up a copy quickly. You can pretty much look at the product page and have a decent grasp for what this game is about, but I’ll go into my experience a bit regardless.
Story
You play as Vic, an ex law enforcement agent asked by his sister to sneak into the compound of a cult called Collective Justice Mission, led by Isaac and Rebecca Walker, to check on your nephew Alex who has joined and been living with the cult without outside contact for two years. This is about as far as the story gets without deviating based on a set of different preacher personalities that can have Isaac and/or Rebecca genuinely trying to provide a peaceful life for the cult members to wanting to watch the whole world burn.
– Real player with 8.3 hrs in game
Interactive Horror Stories
Story-wise, it’s pretty decent. The game offers a variety of stories to read, and I am a fan of CYOAs. For the horror genre, it does an okay job. However, there are a couple issues I have with the game, keeping it from being a great game. There needs to be some serious proof-reading in all the stories. They are littered with mistakes. Then the lack of sound is odd, really odd. There are some random sound effects in the game that feels more jarring than fitting (just because it’s silent for the majority of the game). Why the dev chose not to add any boggles my mind.
– Real player with 6.6 hrs in game
Stories had quite interesting themes, I really enjoyed reading through all of the endings. They were a bit predictable since I watched too many horror movies but nonetheless I would reccomend it for any horror story lovers! It’s also free so why not give it a try If you are into the genre? I was also glad the experience mostly consisted of just text over an image (except the oujia board story) because It would be a lot more scary If It had jumpscares in the form of popping images according to the way the story had progressed. But It’s safe to say there’s none of that! The text alone is enough to creep anyone out especially If you are reading it at midnight like me haha
– Real player with 4.3 hrs in game