Press X to Not Die

Press X to Not Die

Introduction

Press X to Not Die is a quirky full motion video game filled with lots of humor and plenty of death. The game is a nice throwback to older games of this nature. Stuck in a world where everyone seems to have gone mad, you have to find away to not die through button mashing on your keyboard or controller. The game is a fun experience that can definitely raise your adrenaline, don’t blink or relax because you never know when you’ll have to press X!

Story

The game starts off like any normal day, that is until your friend rushes over stating that everyone is attacking each other and you have to press X to not die. From that point on you’re thrust into a world where your survival depends on your reaction time. But don’t worry, you’ll be dying a lot and actually this is the best part. All of the deaths are absurd as is the game itself. You have to rescue your girlfriend, find answers and get out of town in one piece all of this action packed fun is also helped with ridiculous dialogue which is funny and also meta. Don’t worry about the fourth wall, it’s been destroyed.

Real player with 10.2 hrs in game


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Grade = B. Worth a buy, for those who enjoy short funny consequences, gamepad challenge, score attack. However, for who want a high budget product, don’t buy it.

⚖️Check Scoring Scheme

| GRADE | SCORE (34) | WORTH BUYING? | OVERALL | DISCOUNT |

| A+ |

Real player with 6.8 hrs in game

Press X to Not Die on Steam

Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy Remastered

Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy Remastered

A cult classic with a unique approach to storytelling and a polarizing third act.

2005’s “Fahrenheit” or “Indigo Prophecy” (the latter was the name given to the censored version released in the USA and other countries) was marketed as the first interactive film. At a time where few games dared to be like movies, David Cage (who was lead director and writer) aimed to bridge the gap and show that video games can also tell deep and meaningful stories. Whether Fahrenheit actually did this successfully is up for debate, but what’s known for certain is that David Cage changed the landscape of video games in a huge way.

Real player with 32.0 hrs in game


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Information

Title: Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy Remastered

Developer(s): Quantic Dream, Aspyr

Publisher(s): Aspyr

Genre(s): Interactive movie, action-adventure

Release Date: 29 Jan, 2015

Mode(s): Single-player

Review

+ Merits:

When it comes to combining the cinematic media with the interactive storytelling genre, Quantic Dream unequivocally wins the gold medal. Instead of watching a movie and being constrained by what the writer intends, you are the one who pulls the strings of its events. Back in 2005, Indigo Prophecy was way ahead of its time in capturing the dramatic, pictorial elements of a film and implementing these elements in an atmospheric game that’s driven by a thrilling crime story to create a unique experience of cinematic gameplay.

Real player with 15.2 hrs in game

Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy Remastered on Steam

Ryse: Son of Rome

Ryse: Son of Rome

fun game that holds up today even though it was just a “tech demo” when release. decent story, solid graphics, and mediocre gameplay. plays like a simpler version of the batman arkham series. the only downside is that campaign is very short (4-6hrs) and the combat is repetitive. still, worth checking out since it plays like an extended action movie.

Real player with 60.8 hrs in game


Read More: Best Quick-Time Events Rome Games.


Contrary to what the game’s title might leave you believing, the protag’s name is not actually Ryse, but it’s actually Marius. Some characters do tell him to rise from time to time when he’s being a lazy slacker falling asleep in the middle of a war, and the subtitles use an i instead of a y, but that’s just semantics. I’d also consider the “Son of Rome” part to be a little inaccurate since a city can’t conceive people. Although people can be conceived inside cities, and Marius’s daddy-o, Leontius sure laid down the pipe on his wife Septima. And we have confirmation that he did so at least twice since Marius has a sister! I might be going a little off track here, so let’s get down to the game itself.

Real player with 21.8 hrs in game

Ryse: Son of Rome on Steam

Blue Estate The Game

Blue Estate The Game

First of all, I never really liked the original comics. Or “graphic novel” as they prefer to call them. The art style was all over the place, thanks to how different pages were made by different people, while the story was fully made of cliché. The only thing that used to make it special for people is the fact that it was all about Russian mafia fighting Italian mafia, but honestly, it was just the mixed art and a lot of cliché, nothing else. When you finished reading, you felt like you’ve experienced nothing new, so, it was really easy to forget about Blue Estate right the next day. The game, on the other hand, instantly caught my attention. Not only because we rarely see the games, based directly on comics without those being turned into the movies first, but also because it was a rail shooter. Back in the days the genre used to shine and we had many awesome games up to the PS 2 times, while after that the only console that tried to keep rail shooters alive was Wii. And after Wii died, there was literally nothing. And since yours truly is a huge fan of the genre since the NES times, when there were games like Freedom Force (not to be confused with 2002 game), you can easily guess that I was really glad to hear that there’s going to be another game of that kind, even though I really, really disliked the source material.

Real player with 17.3 hrs in game

So outside of an arcade, rail shooters are extremely hard to find nowadays, on any platform. It seems that fast paced multiplayer shooters (think Counter Strike and Call of Duty) or open world pseudo shooter/tactical games (think Day-Z, Far Cry, etc.) are the way to go for most developers nowadays. So it’s sadly pretty rare to find anything that breaks the mold, and when you do, the end result is not always that great.

With that being said, however, Blue Estate The Game was a welcome addition to my steam library and breath of fresh air after playing an endless stream of fast-twitch, zombie horde, open-world shoot ‘em ups. It’s actually based on a graphic novel of the same name, which I’ve read and definitely reccomend.

Real player with 5.2 hrs in game

Blue Estate The Game on Steam

Kate’s Test

Kate’s Test

Pros

-Engaging art

-Variety of different areas with their own feel and different gameplay mechanics

-Witty and humorous dialogue

Cons

-Less adult content than other titles by the developer and a patch is required, which is a pain

-Some of the areas are less fleshed-out than others

-Plot is fairly minimal

-No gallery

Conclusion

I enjoyed the game quite a bit. Bright and vibrant art as usual and a variety of different things to do. It is playable without the adult patch (and is a somewhat different experience). You do notice that some areas seem more developed than others. The Casino area in particular seemed a little lacking in comparison to the other zones. As an adult game, it has some issues (no gallery, need to install patch with weird process), but I enjoyed it overall.

Real player with 16.0 hrs in game

Если вы русский, или лучше читайте по-русски, а затем по-английски, пожалуйста, просмотрите полный обзор. Я перевел его лучше, чем ниже.

The game is a little short but funny, both the censored and uncensored have some good moments in them. The over all look of the art isn’t bad, a little cartoony, but is consistent in quality at least for the hand drawn assets. The puzzles are only hard if you don’t take a second to actually look at them, over all the combat isn’t hard either you just need to think it through. The only real thing I can complain about is that the last “Test” isn’t very clear on where to go if you forget to talk to the person by the bonfires in the camp/village place after each dungeon but by simply finding to other dungeons you very quickly figure out if you are missing something to finish it or not, other then that pretty soild game.

Real player with 8.9 hrs in game

Kate's Test on Steam

What’s Left

What’s Left

This is… a surprisingly impressive feat for one guy. After the halfway-point, Landon (the protagonist) has many physical changes, hair cut, clothes change, injuries, a completely new type of primary weapon, at one point getting straight up covered in blood… and I appreciate that the dev took the time to show all this in the pixel art. There’s WAY too much detail in the smaller areas here, for a game that’s been out for this long and received on the verge of literally no attention.

I have so many thoughts floating in my head about this game now that I’ve completed it, what made the story so baffling and what made the gameplay so… everywhere but here’s what I can really grasp:

Real player with 10.3 hrs in game

What's Left on Steam

The Director’s Cut

The Director’s Cut

Redefine your meaning of horror

The Director’s Cut is a story-driven psychological horror game set in a 1984, USA. Adam entering a reality show for a chance to be the next horror movie star. All he has to do is survive until dawn in a mansion full of traps and horror’s. it’s going to be a long night.

A modern take on classic survival-horror formula

• Fixed camera angles

• Cinematic cutscenes

• Inventory managment

• Dynamic QTE sequences

• Thrilling stealth gameplay

DREAMu | Remember something you never knew

This game using dreamulator or DREAMu. DREAMu is a built in system that imitate work of 5th-6th generation gaming consoles.

It’s has custom BIOS, in-game overlay, flexible graphics settings and many more features.

The Director's Cut on Steam

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow – Ultimate Edition

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow – Ultimate Edition

First off, I’m a huge fan of the Castlevania series. So that foundation may color my opinion of this game and it’s ensuing interquel and sequel (which I’m currently in the midst of). Something about medieval through Enlightment era Europe with a heavy gothic/baroque aesthetic, corrupted through dark forces that threaten the world? Awesome. Tons of monsters pulling on a multitude of inspiration from the myth cycles of antiquity through the modern Universal monsters? Yes, please.

Konami struck gold initially by creating these dark adventures that took a quite serious tone for the early Nintendo systems, offering a beefy challenge of vintage Nintendo difficulty through several increasingly impressive platformer games. They then evolved into the famed Metroidvanias with the release of Symphony of the Night on the Playstation - trading a bit of the reflex-intensive difficulty for massive sprawling environments that took forever to explore and fully unlock - and followed this formula with several excellent installments on Nintendo’s handhelds where they found their most sustainable home and success through the late 2000’s. Then Konami, sensing the increasingly stagnant nature of the series as it became mired in repeated iterations of SotN’s sprawling platformer/RPG hybrid, started searching for a way to revitalize the series again, just as SotN ignited a sort of Golden Age for the series.

Real player with 98.7 hrs in game

(Important note: This game, for whatever reason, doesn’t like being set to fullscreen + max res on a display other than that which Windows / your video card identifies as Display 1, regardless if it’s your primary display or not. Weird bug but easy to fix.)

Lords of Shadow is a flawed but polished masterpiece and a triumph of artistic direction. It’s shortcomings are forgivable. That said, since you can expect to sink upwards of 40hrs into this, I’ll go into some more detail.

Presentation wise, this game is stunning. Masterful visuals paired with smooth and optimized 4K performance make for an eye-popping experience. The art team went all out on this and it shows. I’ve never taken so many screenshots of a game before. Two major detractors though: 1. Some of the cutscenes were pre-rendered for console are unimproved by modern hardware (they still look passable but they’re jaggy af); 2. Godrays are a weak point. The score is powerful but not iconic; you’ll love it in the moment but try to recall the music later and you’ll likely struggle, for the most part. This isn’t objectively a bad thing, as it simply means it’s enhancing the experience without overpowering it but I was disappointed by the lack of iconic singles and the abscence of a Bloody Tears revamp.

Real player with 47.4 hrs in game

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow – Ultimate Edition on Steam

The Shadows of Pygmalion

The Shadows of Pygmalion

This VN is a straight up Magical Girls Fantasy, with attempts to deconstruct the MG genre much like Madoka Magica.

TL;DR version: Interesting lore, likeable characters, beautiful art, great music. Worth it purely for the length and depth of story-telling.

Story-wise, it’s elaborate and bittersweet, with plenty of emotional moments. However, it is also riddled with plotholes and unexplained motives/events, which makes it somewhat hard to immerse in the story. If you just enjoy it at face value, however, it is perfectly reasonable.

Real player with 77.2 hrs in game

The Shadows of Pygmalion is a Girls Love Visual Novel made by Propeller who is also known for Tokyo Babel which MangaGamer also published in English. There is no “All-Ages version” since there is no 18+ version, but there is still content that isn’t suited for people under the age of 15.

Pygmalion is a mostly linear story with only one choice that determines which ending you get, there are four endings, with the fourth unlocking after you finish the initial three. There are also extra character-based chapters that will unlock after you’ve finished the final ending, which gives more depth and story behind the more minor characters in the story. The Visual Novel is 15 chapters excluding the character-based chapters and endings, so I’d say that there’s at least 20 hours of content if you decide to read everything.

Real player with 46.5 hrs in game

The Shadows of Pygmalion on Steam

Black Dream Plus

Black Dream Plus

Play as a voluptuous supernatural investigator named Anna who travels to an amusement park constructed inside the imagination of a friendly gentleman who makes churros, cosplay outfits, and dances for her, where she decides to retire from her job and takes over the park, making that gentleman her father, and a self-doubting coworker tasked with detaining her into her boyfriend, while dealing with the mess a cute, awkward, and equally busty nightmare-fueled girl causes all over the place.

You basically get that and a whole bunch of other things in Black Dream, an adorable, fascinating, and overall sexy and strangely wholesome game. The protagonist is very whimsical but self-assured, and the characters have distinct personalities revealed with an incredible amount of original handmade full-screen pixel art scenes. It feels like something you would discover on the PC-98, or a classic OVA made into an interactive anime adventure. It’s not a visual novel, but not quite a regular RPG. To say it’s a hidden object game is not descriptive enough either I feel. Basically, Black Dream is like a toybox for you to uncover a ton of cute and well-made novelties that combine into an adventure with a comical, quirky, and surprisingly sentimental story.

Real player with 8.2 hrs in game

I absolutely love this game. The music is very well done, catchy and fits the mood. The art work is clearly done with verve and style. The story is fetching, amusing and takes a few interesting turns throughout. Combat is handled in several ways adding to variety. Anna, the main character is ultra cute, and dressing her up in the many different outfits is very rewarding as you see her in various and unique outfit-specific poses. Really fun game. I recommend 101%

Are you a dreamer?

Real player with 4.1 hrs in game

Black Dream Plus on Steam