Recent reviews by Rememb3rd

Cute little game 💜💜💜

A simple concept that quickly blossoms into one of the most complex CYOA games ever made.
The storytelling is wonderfully woven into a striking and grungy art style, lovely soundtrack and a minuscule cast of characters that are as scary as they are hilarious and wholesome as they are disturbing and cold.
One of my most favorite games in recent memory and I will remember it forever.

Mother
heccin'
💜 BAABAAS AND MOOMOOS 💜

This is the best thing I bought since Silent Hill 2 Remake. 💜

Pretty neat

It's Soul Reaver 1 and 2. What more do you want?

I went from boycotting to loving it. Spoiler-free review will follow.

Cons:

- Pricetag. Unarguably overpriced. 70 bucks for a digital release, and 80 bucks for Deluxe -- whose only value comes with the soundtrack, artbook, and a Pizza Box Pyramid Head hat; Not worth the extra 10 for so little, and right now you can't get the Mira The Dog hat because it was a pre-order bonus (though I'm sure it will be released as standalone DLC as per standard shameless greedy gaming industry practices). Shame on Konami for being so greedy. I bought Standard on sale for 56 and I say that's still too much. "Deluxe" version is completely pointless. It might've been worth it if it also included the original game's soundtrack and sound effects, but, alas.

- Little to no extra content. Upon beating the game, you unlock New Game+, in which you will find the Chainsaw early on just like in the original game, and access to 2 new endings unique to the Remake (as well as all the original bonus endings), and some (terrible) screen filters. And that's it. No hats, no costumes, no 'Born From A Wish' scenario, no Hyper Spray. No Great Knife (as a usable weapon). This lack of content further exacerbates the shamelessly steep pricetag.

- Lots of stuttering and performance issues for many people, regardless of their hardware. Seek performance-enhancing mods immediately. Also, there may be frequent 'white flashes' of... whatever graphics poking in and out of the screen, and the presence of constant ghosting is baffling.

- Some of the lines of dialog and brief moments in cutscenes suffered from... I'm going to call them 'bad direction' -- NOT to be confused with bad acting. For the most part, the new actors and performances are spotless. However, the introduction scene of Maria is probably the absolute worst scene in the game.
But while these missteps are few and far between, it might make or break the game for some people, and I would be happy to talk about them but I'd rather keep this review spoiler-free.


Pros:

- The spirit of the original SH2 is in every facet of the Remake that matters. The story is lovingly retold and reshaped into a new era. This is the most important aspect to get right in a Silent Hill game and doubly so for a remake, and I'm proud to say Bloober Team did a fantastic job!

- Special acknowledgment of Scott Haining's performance as Eddie; his stellar, absolutely spotless performance will go down in Silent Hill history as the best to date. David Schaufele must be so proud!

- Gianna Kiehl as Angela is my second favorite performance; it must not have been an easy role to play and she did it perfectly. All other actors delivered fantastic performances... but as I've already alluded to, certain moments were diminished by certain changes in direction.

- The original endings are preserved, including the bonus endings, and the new endings are excellent.

- Combat is pretty good and does get more challenging on Hard mode.

- Exploration is very much encouraged. Environments are lovingly detailed and there are so many new locations to visit.

- The differences in Puzzle difficulty are very welcome, making them Easy for Dummies, or Decent Brain Teasers on Hard. However, it should be noted that the solutions will not change for subsequent playthroughs, not even for padlock/numpad/etc numbers; once you know the number for that difficulty setting, it will always be that number. I don't really consider this a con because nobody likes RNG on repeat playthroughs (or maybe it's just me?). There is only one exception to the rule and that is one particular numpad, which I will not spoil here, but if you played the original, you might have a 'cockroach' of an idea...

- The new/remixed music is wonderful, and in my opinion, on par with the original. Some people will not agree with that. I think they're crazy.

- While the game is lacking in extra content, the base content of a single playthrough is stunning; expect a first playthrough to be around 25 hours long, especially if you're exploring every single corner.


Final thoughts: I'm still sort of struggling to accept just how wonderful this remake is, especially considering I was 100% expecting it to be a trash fire, but Bloober Team knocked it out of the park. It is just such a sad thing that it's being dragged down by this horribly and shamelessly greedy pricetag and there's just no way to say it: Konami does not deserve anybody's money. While it's worth playing and appreciating, I cannot fully support the current cost, so please, wait for a sale, like I did.

Overall, I'm really happy with this game. The way that it handles horror just hadn't been seen in similar fashion since Eternal Darkness -- and in many ways, this is so much more effective as a horror game than that. I'm so impressed with the sheer volume of possible scares and events, and I'm so happy that this exists. This is the best horror game I've ever played since Amnesia The Dark Descent. It's such a simple core idea, but full of depth, and I'm anxious to see what the genre will look like going forward. I sincerely hope this game does not go unnoticed in the industry and big companies take notice of how to take the genre further, because The Mortuary Assistant is HUGE, bigger and more ambitious than the silly haunted house simulator that was P.T. (and the only reason people went crazy about it was because of Kojima and the Silent Hill brand attached to it, it was otherwise grossly uninspiring). It may not seem like it on the surface, but the more I play, the more I see what makes it tick, and every night shift brings more appreciation out of me.

Pretty good, pretty fun.

It's the best game ever made