Telling Lies
It pains me to write a negative review for this game. I loved Her Story for it’s story and Viva Seifert’s incredible performance, even though the game play (you are a cop working with the world’s worst video archiving software) was maddening.
Telling Lies has much of the same strengths and weaknesses. The cast is terrific and the writing gives them a lot of meaty, emotional moments to work with. The plot is diverting, with multiple characters and scenarios popping up that you’ll want to spend time disentangling everything.
– Real player with 42.0 hrs in game
Read More: Best Music Thriller Games.
Telling the truth about Telling lies
I have a problem and I’m not alone. The whole game industry has the same problem: how to tell stories with games? A good story has its own laws. Ask any writer other than your 8-year-old little sister. The story has a build, thought out ups and downs, twists and turns, beginnings and endings. The game follows different rules. The player has to be an active doer, not just a listener, reader or a watcher. The players’ choices and actions will have to have an impact on the game, otherwise the experience is flat. Unfortunately these two collide. Where a good story demands a pre-defined route to work, a good game wants freedom and choices. It’s like marrying a feminist to a chauvinist. It simply does not work or at least has not worked so far and it’s not from the lack of trying. Sam Barlow’s Telling lies is another effort to marry the unwanting partners.
– Real player with 19.3 hrs in game
Bolt Riley, A Reggae Adventure
It would be in my best interest to give a glowing review since I want to see this game completed but I need to be honest about the progress made so far. I do realise this game is considered Early Access and I know the budget for this game is pretty small, and you should keep that in mind too (if you end up reading the in-depth review linked below), but ultimately, is it something I would recommend to my friends or the gaming public in its current state? Considering the artwork still needs some touching up, bugs were encountered way too frequently, the UI needs fixing and the first chapter is way too short, probably not. I’m hoping that Adventure Mob will eventually prove me wrong though, as I really want this game to succeed.
– Real player with 1.5 hrs in game
Read More: Best Music Colorful Games.
Bolt Riley is a well-intentioned but uniformly misguided proof of concept.
Presumably the developers naively underestimated the effort required to achieve the level of quality best suited to their vision. Instead, they opted to release an embarrassingly short and painfully butchered appetizer.
One should be easily inclined to forgive unrefined details in Early Access but no update in over a year severely burdens the game’s credibility.
– Real player with 1.4 hrs in game
Dominique Pamplemousse
The primary accomplishment in Dominique Pamplemousse isn’t gameplay. It’s character. Dominique Pamplemousse believes so strongly in its characters that everything else — even gameplay — is secondary. Tons of gameplay hours, plenty of missions and activities with an awesome collection of vehicles of various modes of transportation and a large array of firearms put the grandeur once again into Dominique Pamplemousse. This game deserves a better user score. I hope nobody takes it serious, because there are a lot of butthurt fakevotes.
– Real player with 35.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best Music LGBTQ Games.
I can’t in good conscience consider this a good game I can recommend, but it was interesting watching it fail at what it’s trying to do, and at least it’s an original concept.
The only way I can describe it is as a stop motion musical in a point & click framework. It mostly fails at all these three things, mainly by looking, sounding and playing as the work of an amateur. The art style is distinct, but the stop motion isn’t all that good. Still, it’s charming. The music and highschool-musical-theater singing are also kinda charming, at least once you realize that the singing is off key and rather bad “on purpose”, but you still can’t call them good. The point & click elements are barely there, with no real choices and no real puzzles, just serving to move you forward in the story.
– Real player with 2.8 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
Detective Butler: Maiden Voyage Murder
Nice detective kinetic novel for one or two afternoons I guess (yeah, there are actually no choices at all) and one that is completely FREE at that. It’s full of overused tropes and it doesn’t take itself seriously at times but I certainly wouldn’t call it bad either as it leaves some food for the thought in the end, so it’s probably somewhere in between.
So yeah - it was enjoyable yet also flawed experience for me. Women characters here are mostly likeable and detailed but all man except captain and protagonist father would benefited from more developement. The pacing was actually pretty good but the mystery was maybe way too easy for me as I guessed the culprit and how everything happend right after the murder happened. Which is good and bad at the same time but thankfully the rest of the story was interesting to follow at least. But the main flaws were probably both main characters - detective Butler and main character (Golder’s son) unfortunately.
– Real player with 10.3 hrs in game
Excellent! A free murder mystery visual novel. It’s apparently the first part of Misadventures of Detective Butler series. Originally released in 2013 and then got onto Steam in 2017 with some edits and improvements. I liked this a lot. Has a lot of personal moments and mystery itself is fairly interesting. Albeit I really would like to force detective to grow some beard first. You don’t get to choose anything in a game, which is shame, as I think they could at least test us with picking a suspect at the end of a game. But hey, at least it gives enough clues to solve it fairly before the murderer is revealed.
– Real player with 7.2 hrs in game
Fire Escape
I really liked this game and I thought it had a few strong points. Primarily, the voice actors and the motives for the characters were well thought out and added a layer of depth to the game which many AAA games lack. The concept of the game, the different windows and selectively learning information, was something that I had never seen before. My one improvement would be to add a function that (when not in VR) allows you to put the phone down when you are on a phone call. Past that I had a great experience!
– Real player with 5.1 hrs in game
Played it in standard mode as I don’t have a VR headset, but I’m not sure if having the latter would make a much of a difference. I was drawn in by the comparisons to Rear Window but the concept wears thin after a while because, as others have pointed out, there’s actually not much to do. Ultimately, there are only two endings to the story, with replay value heavily depending on how badly you want to collect all the achievements (meaning endless grinding and reloading of chapters).
Also, it made my computer crash a couple of times and once even made it inexplicably power off mid-game. I gave up trying to get 100% achievements after that. If you do really want this game, I can only recommend getting it when it’s on sale.
– Real player with 2.9 hrs in game
Bear With Me: The Lost Robots
This is a first impressions style of review, as I haven’t finished the game, and I’m part way through what I guess is the prequel.
Firstly, I love the art style. Growing up, seeing some Don Bluth animations, and Space Ace / Dragons Lair arcade games, the cartoon quality animations always made me go “wow”. Now we take it for granted. However this is one of those games that makes you go “wow”, with the film noir 1930’s / 1940’s style, with the modern animation. I really do like it. And surprisingly, the grey scale works amazingly well and fits in with the whole style.
– Real player with 26.8 hrs in game
A trully masterfully made little game that at first glance seem to have no right to actually be as good as it is.
Bear with me is a mix of a noir style detective narrative, with some clever humor sprinkled in that at times is way to cynical to be targeted at children, so don’t be fooled by the graphics style. To top the noir atmosphere there’s a very layered narrative that can be enjoyed both by kids on a surface level (with the cute looking characters) or on a deeper level by adults who might reminis about their past. The DLC even has a bit of twin peaks thrown in for good measure and is generally darker than the main game.
– Real player with 24.8 hrs in game