Recent reviews by Rex Mundane

I enjoyed this game so much it made me wish I were better at writing reviews. But here I am, making *you* wish I were better at it too, so let's go.

Good News: The Vibes, as the kids say, are Immaculate. Goofy Sci-Fi satire, jokes landing more often than not, charming as all hell, minimal "moon logic" requirements, and pleasantly, much more reliance on bespoke setpiece-style puzzle solving than the guess-the-random-interaction-or-inventory-combination-to-proceed type. For the kind of game it's trying to be, it's a hoot.

That being said, the Early Access version needs a lot of polish still, and even when done it's still likely be left with some... lets call them structural issues? Nothing to dwell on here, but you will, as in all things, want a walkthrough on hand.

Bottom Line: A delightful old school point'n'click'em'up for any of you Questing Spacers out there.

Extraordinary. Smarter people than I will be able to get into how well it works mechanically, how well written and acted, how effective the existential/cosmic horror is, and may even do so without saying something banal like "Stanley Parable but Kafka"
and by all means go read them. But for my take, extraordinary. Just damn extraordinary.

I like to think I had reasonable expectations of a game made by a two-man team when I backed it on Kickstarter. I'm sorry to say that the game, as released, did not meet those expectations. Bugs, I can forgive. Gameplay being generic, no trouble. Graphic/music assets becoming repetitive, I can work with. Platforming mechanics feeling unintuitive, I can handle. Infuriating difficulty in later levels, I'll power through. But all of it put together becomes increasingly hard to justify.

I'm inclined to speculate that the game wasn't really even playtested (no testers are named in the credits at least), which, if true, might be a forgivable amateur mistake for an itch.io release. But frankly, asking $9.99 for a game in this condition suggests a kind of baked-in thoughtlessness and/or cynicism that runs through the whole experience, and makes it impossible to recommend.

If I have one hesitation about recommending this game, it's that it almost feels so hand-crafted to be on *my* wavelength specifically that I'm hard-pressed to imagine it's on anyone else's. But if you're like me (and heaven help you) and you're a fan of point'n clicks, platforms, the jumping thereof, actively hostile puzzles, and jokes so awful I still haven't stopped laughing, then you absolutely need to get this game.

This game, in the form it was released, would barely pass muster as an "Intro to Unity" weekend class project. I must have got it in some Fanatical bundle years ago and not bothered touching it until today, but it looks like a Game Jam entry from someone who didn't want to participate in it. Music is unbearable, art assets are non-existent, and the core "auto-shooting, mouse-moves-ship, dodge-forever" game loop is phenomenally awful. I have no idea what low-effort swindle the devs are running by retailing it for $100 and dumping it into bundles for pennies, but I genuinely hope it fails them.

Ten years old and still one of the best racing games out there.

I respect the idea of what Foddy's attempting here. Working through punishingly difficult-to-master gameplay has been a throughline in all of his most notable work, from QWOP to GIRP. In those games, the challenge usually came from the interface giving you such literal, direct, deliberate control over what the player character did, and your struggle to negotiate with it, that the failure felt entirely your own, for you to iterate on and do better next time.

In "Getting Over It," however, there's no consistency of player control over themselves. The hammer you use to climb the mountain will clip through objects randomly, gain and lose friction seemingly at random, and most damning of all, control over it seems entirely arbitrary. Gamepad controls don't move it fast enough to be usable, mouse controls never map 1-to-1 with the position of the hammer's maul. And because there's no option to, say, loosely swing the hammer into a new position at speed, you'll find that with nearly every errant two-pixel flick of the mouse, you'll launch yourself at full force, uncontrolled, 20 feet in a direction you would never have intended. And when nothing about moving around the screen feels deliberate, the failures and victories can never truly feel your own, so the "lesson" of the game breaks down.

The end result is that, as you climb an impossible mountain, with an interface that isn't just counter-intuitive but outright broken, with a narrator (Foddy himself) who spends as much time reading beat poetry about his elevated view of the state of gaming today as he does skimming an "inspirational quotes for utter twerps" book he presumably found in a friend's bathroom, the image becomes less of a creator trying to craft a meticulously cultivated, yet deliberately brutal challenge, and more of a self-righteous elitist, high on the smell of his own pretension to the point that he fails to tell the difference between a game that's difficult, and one that's broken.

The platforming is fast-paced, the art is just delicious, and the structure of the rogue-like elements are the first time in recent gaming for me that I felt they added more than they subtracted. Love it.

First thing to get out of the way, this is much less a game than a sort of passively-interactive story experience. That's a hard sell already since it's so easy to fall into the trap of pretense that confuses itself for depth, and there are few examples within the genre that work that well. Dear Esther is similarly set up, and likewise beloved by critics to the point of impossible standards for the average player to meet, and while this game adds more interactivity and active exploration of the environment, it still falls through some similar pitfalls.

Without any puzzles to solve or zombies to punch, the story itself becomes the entire thing then, and frankly it's not all that compelling. I ended up getting more wrapped up in the player character's post cards, the stories of the family's past, the father's book deal and the mother's co-worker, than I did in the sister's difficulties with love. It says something remarkable about the game's authors that the background stories are fresh, curious, and fascinating, while the primary narrative tastes like a re-heated leftover that doesn't really do anything new with the genre of "I'm 18 and found my soul-mate."

While the subject matter of teenage romance has been retread numerous times already, the game's main problem here is the pacing and setting actively interfering with the story. At times where keeping track of the order of events becomes necessary, it got difficult to keep tracking of life events for the family, and I had forgotten what the date was that I, the player, was meant to be exploring the house, until finding a calender in the locked off kitchen about 90 minutes into the story. Further, the atmosphere of the game, a big, creaky, un-lit house in a thunderstorm, alongside the frequent mentions of a past tragedy and possible hauntings, exploring long disused basements and the "secret in the attic" end up putting you in a mindset where you're anticipating something quasi-horror-tragedy-ish the game never had any intent to provide. The result is a story that builds up to a "everything coming together" climax, and that ends with me asking "...what, is that it?"

And yet, at the end of the day, I still appreciated what Gone Home is trying to do, and the moments when it works to bring me deeper into subtler stories that inform the background white noise of the narrative, and still manages to immerse you in the lives of this family, even though the focal story, while not exactly bad, is much less than captivating. I certainly wouldn't say it's worth $20, but if you can get it on a good discount (as low as $3 during the summer sale) it's definitely worth your time, and arguably, for all it's flaws, one of the best examples so far of interactive environmental storytelling.

This is a review for game called The Stanley Parable. Many people by now have heard of The Stanley Parable, and already typed their opinions about the game into various comment boxes and reddit threads, and many people do enjoy the game, but so many people who review the game have said the same thing: that you cannot describe the game in even the most basic terms without spoiling what makes The Stanley Parable such a remarkable experience. Even this review is struggling to come up with a way to describe the game, but shall work diligently in order to do so, while keeping such spoilers to only the second and third paragraph of this review, so that the overly cautious reader may skip ahead to the forth, self-assured their experience won't be tarnished by foreknowledge, while the bold and reckless can sally forth to discover the true nature of The Stanley Parable.

As the second paragraph of this review for The Stanley Parable has begun, the reader is advised to have prepared themselves for the reality-shattering spoilers that may momentarily ensue. The Stanley Parable is about a man named Stanley who breaks free of the forces controlling him. To do so he will explore the conference room, cherish the break room, fly through the air, discover the secret of the missing pancakes, press the wrong button, break the copier, lock the cat in the broom closet, explore a meaningless death, finally be free, incinerate an infant, shout at a computer, and never feel true love. Or he might do none of those things at all. It's all down to choices, you see, and freedom, and Stanley makes those choices because of who Stanley is, or does he?

I mean clearly he's not making the choices, it's all a game and you're going to play it, unless you don't choose to. And if you did are you really free? If this review has convinced you to buy the game then was it really your choice? And if so, will you force yourself to find all the things it had previously mentioned? Are they all in the game? I mean okay, the pancakes and the infant are a bit ridiculous, probably an invention, but what about the copier? Can it be broken? How would you even try? Does the fact that it hasn't been done yet mean it can't be done, full-stop? But why would this review even mention it if the person writing it hasn't worked out whether it's possible or not? Am I even fully in control of the review I'm writing? Could I stop now even if I wanted?

Did you skip to this bit? Well I can't completely blame you, I still haven't come up with anything useful to say, which is a shame because I really do think The Stanley Parable is a remarkable experience, well deserving of your time and attention. It's as though The Stanley Parable is hardly a proper game after all, or maybe a thought experiment about games? Or somehow, is it all games at once, in some sort of metaphysical... no, that's pretty silly I suppose, no point in getting all philosophical about things. This is a game after all, or possibly not.

And $15 too, that's a bit of a steep barrier to entry for a game that only has this sort of vaguely positive word of mouth about it. Maybe it's not a game at all, maybe that's the problem. I certainly don't think I've finished yet and I've put hours in, but loved them all. It's wonderful but so terrible to try and describe, and you really do just have to trust that you'll be able to enjoy it. Maybe if you get it wrong the first time you can try again or something. If only there were some way to...

The Demo! I had completely forgotten about the demo! The Stanley Parable experience is hardly complete without the demo, isn't it? You should give that a try if you're still on the fence. I really do think it manages to communicate what the The Stanley Parable is, certainly more effectively than I could. Well, thank goodness I remembered that, I should have just told you about the demo from the start instead of this long-winded failure of a review. Would have saved us both a bit of time.

Probably.