Contradiction - Spot The Liar!
This is a FMV detective & mystery game developed by Baggy Cat, created thanks to a kickstarter campaign. Since I love detective games and tv-shows I decided to give this one a go. This is a lovecrafted masterpiece, great from start to finish. I’m gonna try to explain why.
You play as detective Jenks, investigating a girls suicide in an english village. Mysteries surrounding the suicide quickly leads to a murder investigation. Jenks only have a day to solve the mystery. He quickly finds out about a private school for adults called Atlas that uses some questionable methods, and you learn more and more as you go. Every chapter is an hour in the game, but every chapter took me more then an hour each. It’s a pretty tricky game, but you can use clues if you get stuck.
– Real player with 15.2 hrs in game
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TL;DR: It’s a very fun and interesting game,
! with a very, very, VERY bad (and extremely) unsatisfying ending
I’m probably very late to the “reviewing contradiction” party (what a weird party), the game being almost 6 years old now and having been talked about in the ExtraCredits YouTube channel (the reason why I bought it in the first place!), but I’m gonna have a go at it anyways.
Contradiction is an FMV game where you must investigate in one night a supposed suicide in a small village. The investigation is done almost entirely by talking to people (i.e. watching small bits of questioning), though some evidence is found by walking and snooping around (in fact, I’m no lawyer or law-enforcement officer, but I feel like a quite a few of the evidence found wouldn’t be admissible in court!) But the main aspect of the game is asking people about things, which can directly lead you to new evidence, but will always lead to a set of statements from each person. This is where the main mechanic of the game comes in: you can select two statements (they must be from the same person though, hold this for later) that contradict each other and if they do, indeed, you get a new line of questioning where detective Jenks brings up the contradiction to the person in question, usually leading to new evidence. When you reach key milestones in the investigation, the time moves forward, and some new witness can become available (or unavailable), and going certain places can unlock certain events that can give you new evidence to ask around about.
– Real player with 13.7 hrs in game
The Deed: Dynasty
Apparently, the Bruce family is just plain murderous, and somehow they’ve managed to pass their bloodlust along to subsequent generations. TDD improves upon the original game by offering three different scenarios that take place in different time periods. As with the original game, your goal is to successfully murder your target while framing someone else for the crime. Talking to different people and examining your surroundings provides you with the information you need in order to get away with murder; it’s just a matter of selecting the right evidence/murder weapon and bringing everything together during questioning.
– Real player with 23.0 hrs in game
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The Deed is a murder mystery, except this time you’re the Murderer and you have to get away with it! If you enjoy the idea of making the perfect kill, evading and fooling the police and getting away scott free, then you should take a closer look at this game.
This release was a quite a suprise to me, I enjoyed the first game, but never expected a sequel. Fortunately its a good suprise, and anyone who enjoyed the first game will enjoy this game, with more refined gameplay and three scenarios to play instead of one.
– Real player with 20.7 hrs in game
Mafia II (Classic)
Mafia II is one of the best organized crime games, especially if we take realistic games with organized crime as the main theme. It’s also one of the best third-person shooter, and aged very well, even a decade later, it still feels as good as back in 2010.
Story
You play as sicilian immigrant, Vito Scaletta, whose family traveled to the USA looking for a better life, but reality turned out to be more grim and harsh than Vito’s parents imagined. Seeing how his father lives a miserable life and became a drunkard due to his hard job and poverty, Vito decided to not repeat his mistakes. His father eventually dies during the accident at the docks. He met Joe, a local bully and a cool guy, and eventually, due to lack of jobs and poverty, the two decided to become a small time criminals, thieves, essentially, during one such operation, Vito got caught, and between going to prison or helping USA with the invasion of Sicily, as a native italian speaker, he decided to go to war. And that’s only the beginning of his life path.
– Real player with 105.5 hrs in game
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“I BECAME A CRIMINAL BECAUSE I DID NOT WANT TO BECOME A VICTIM”
Welcome to Empire Bay. Sunny place full of opportunities for those who can take them. Yes, I’m talking to you Vito & Joe. Yes, you too Mr. Vinci. I see you over there Alberto Clemente. Yeah, that’s right Carlo Falcone. I can keep on naming these fellas over and over again because this game was filled with gentlemen like these.
Vito Scalleta got tired of bureaucratic bullsh*t so he got shot right in the butt, that he could leave Europe and go straight back to Joe, so these two can put in the work, get up in the Mafia hierarchy, sky rocketing up in the mob family ladder so he can get what they all want - THAT GREEN THING.
– Real player with 62.2 hrs in game
Adios
Target Audience: Subtle Story Lovers who want something down to Earth.
Summary:
Adios is one of those games where you wish that there was a bit more of a budget for the game to work with, because you know that there’s a solid foundation at the surface here, but it can only get so far with what it has to work with. The game’s biggest selling point is its story, which isn’t bombastic or over the top like you may think with the game’s store page and the crime aspects related to it, but is a character study of how one man deals with life pushing at him from every angle, and how he responds to trauma. It’s emotional in the right ways, and some stellar voice acting from our two main leads helps propel the game forward and make you look into every conversation and its subtext. Subtlety isn’t exactly a common skill in writing like this but the game pulls it off wonderfully, and it’s a game that you’ll sit and think about for hours after you play about what you’d do in the situation, and the themes surronding it.
– Real player with 16.8 hrs in game
Adios
A really interesting concept that almost delivers, but ultimately is let down by the lack of vocabulary choices, a clunky interface, and a questionable turn of events.
Story 📕
You’re a pig farmer in Kansas. For the last fifteen years you have helped feed chopped up body parts to your pigs for the Mob.
Today, you have decided to quit. You are no longer comfortable with letting the mob use your pigs as a way of disposing of victims.
– Real player with 7.2 hrs in game
Crime Reaper
It’s a neat game, but 2 things it could really use are a harder difficulty than the current expert and a way to note which locations you have eliminated for a particular symbol. The current expert difficulty is still only 2 minute puzzle once you get a bit of practice and the greatest challenge is honestly when you need to keep more than 2 clues in your head in order to figure out where to put the next symbol.
– Real player with 106.5 hrs in game
It’s murder sudoku! The difficulty is fun (although I’d like there to be a harder difficulty setting, but I’m also a sudoku veteran, so there’s that), the rules are clever, the writing is… I’m sure I’ll get to it, once I stop clicking fast through it to get to more puzzles :D Very addictive, very nice UI, all in all, I highly recommend this for logic game aficionados.
– Real player with 43.8 hrs in game
Mafia III: Definitive Edition
After 3 playthroughs, I decided it’s time to give this game a review. a different one from the majority of “Not Recommended” you see here. Mafia III Is deeply flawed and after the Definitive Edition upgrade, it yet remains the same but it had something special that kept me playing it for such a long time, I simply couldn’t leave a thumb down on it.
Story
🔹Mafia III tells the tale of Lincoln Clay, a colored man who got screwed by the greed of the Italian mob ruling the fictional New Bordeaux based on New Orleans. He loses his family and father figure and now he’s out for revenge. However, this is not your average vengeance story that ends just with killing the bad guy. Lincoln wants to take everything Sal Marcano the mob boss has worked for, makes him suffer just the way he did by busting up his rackets, taking over the city district by district and killing closest to Sal including his wife, son, and brothers. Throughout the game, after each main mission completed comes up a cutscene where the people who knew Lincoln the most are participating in a documentary show on his life and actions, picturing real-life photos and videos. This is where is the story shines the most as you realize piece by piece on Lincoln’s background and the damage he inflicted on the mob.
– Real player with 149.9 hrs in game
After putting in 85 hours into this game, I think I finally have a pretty good idea why I like it and why I hate it at the same time.
TL;DR: Great story and themes, horrible game design with repetitive gameplay, bad graphics and horrible bugs and performance.
Mafia 3 is a massive great tasting shit sandwich! It deserves the hate, yet it’s hard not to love at times. The solid writing and great characters with really good voice acting and pretty good facial animations, accompanied with great shooting mechanics and some improvements over the last game are spoiled by remarkably repetitive game design and the usual “open world” clutter of useless collectibles.
– Real player with 87.7 hrs in game
Presence
Short review: I bought this game at a discount. She disappointed me! Standard graphics in real engine, I tried to play on 3 devices, 2 of them lagged very much, every 10 - 15 seconds! In steam, the passage of the game (community content) is completely different, in the current version, the game leads me to no clear place and does not allow me to go further! What struck me the most was that when trying to collapse the game and go to the desktop, there is an icon of the engine on which the game was made, and the program itself is displayed as “Myproject9” - it’s a shame, I put 2 stars, just because it works. It seems to me that the reviews are screwed up…
– Real player with 2.3 hrs in game
When you’re gonna ask people to pay $6 dollars for a game that can be completed in a half hour (my actual runtime was 32 minutes), you really need to pack it with an experience. Unfortunately, this game is minimal on just about everything. The game goes like this; go to room, read note, go to room, get key, go to room, read note, on and on and on. You probably spend more time reading notes than playing the actual game. In terms of scare attempts, there’s virtually nothing. Some loud noises in the background, a boy standing in a doorway, and a hanging body that occasionally swings. The build-up doesn’t even lead to a climax; you simply move into the last room and the game is over.
– Real player with 1.6 hrs in game
Rules of The Mafia: Trade & Blood
Feels like a concept/mod for improving the old gangsters by adding infiltration options for your gangsters. Though that’s it, just the mod alone. You instantly bribe or kill officials and replace with people with your own. no election or other factors even. Game is a ‘clicker’.
Last waiting part of game after having replaced mayor holding office for x time is waste of time.
Most events are plain annoying like raids that take your money and kill all your guards at shops.
Bugs: you drag a portraits around in the attack screen, then they disappear from screen, never to be seen there again. as result, I never attacked places. Just bribed them back.
– Real player with 1.9 hrs in game
Just as many people I was also hyped before the release because th game looked very promising to me.
What I then got was a game so basic, that even my Grandmother could have played.
Basically the whole purpose of the game is, that you (A premade Mafia Boss) controle all the City Buildings and the City Government.
You do this by raiding the Buildings or buying them and Bribing or threatening Government Officials so you can then install your own people.
Sadly that is all to the game and it is pretty much the same throughout every walk, which makes it pretty boring after just one game which you can easily win in 20-30 minutes.
– Real player with 1.4 hrs in game
The Deed
You play as Arran Bruce, part of a noble dynasty which goes back hundreds of years, and you’ve returned to the family home, Dunshiel House. It’s a place which doesn’t hold many happy memories for you growing up. It’s a miserable night, the raining is siling down and you’ve got to face your family whom you’ve not seen for many years. It’s your father’s fiftieth birthday but it’s not the real reason you’ve decided to come back to the family home.
– Real player with 7.2 hrs in game
Meet the Bruce family. Son, Arran, soon to be disinherited (usurped by his sister) with murder on his mind. Father, Malcolm, violent tempered, oppressive, abusive. Mother, Gloria, in deep and utter denial of the dysfunctional Bruce family. Sister, Jennifer, violent, cruel, insane and about to die. Dunshiel House staff: one butler and one maid/cook.
A classic “who-dun-it” from the murder’s point of view.
Storyline: Estranged Arran Bruce returns home for his father’s 50th birthday with the sole purpose to murder his sister, Jennifer. Motive: Money, of course. The father, Malcolm, is about to disinherit him in favor of his sister. The question is: How to commit murder and still walk away a free man. 10 murder weapons, and 5 other people who can take the blame, assuming one does not get caught. Of course, there is always the “mysterious” intruder too. (Lizzie Borden will have good company if one manages that.)
– Real player with 5.2 hrs in game
Condemned: Criminal Origins
“You belong to us, Ethan. You have always belonged to us…”
Playing this game as a teenager on a PC that could barely run it made me think that it was the scariest game I’d ever played. Ten-plus years later, I’d pick it up again and play through it from start to finish, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how well it’s held up. While some aspects of it have dated pretty hard, the overall package has aged quite well, a fact owed heavily to its core gameplay, which still shines, even in today’s market. Or, perhaps, because of it.
– Real player with 22.6 hrs in game
An absolute gem of a horror game.
I remember first hearing about Condemned in the Xbox magazine when I just started High School. Practically every student I talked to was stoked for the new Xbox 360 and were hyping up the new launch titles and I couldn’t help but join their enthusiasm as me and a few buddies overlooked a magazine in the school library. One game in particular caught my eye, a game simply called “Condemned”. Accompanying the blurb was a series of grungy pre-release screens of gnarly enemies and at the time STUNNING lighting effects. The next month was a full-on rundown of the games mechanics, graphics and horror elements that ended with the writer admitting at the end of his demo that he fired his last shotgun shell into an enemy that wasn’t even there.
– Real player with 11.1 hrs in game