Recent reviews by TwoDee

Obsidian's The Outer Worlds is a backwards-looking game in a lot of ways. Although it brags of its pedigree -- the game is by Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, creators of Fallout and Vampire: the Masquerade Bloodlines -- it feels like these two legendary creators are playing it safe. The Outer Worlds has basically the bare minimum that you'll expect if you've played "Bloodlines" or Fallout: New Vegas. It's got solid and consistent worldbuilding, witty sardonic dialogue, anemic and floaty action combat, and several ostensibly-important stellar factions whose very life and death can be measured in the presence or absence of a five-second ending slide during the credits.

Maybe the New Vegas spitshine has rubbed off, but it's all a little shallow, isn't it? It doesn't help that in addition to being backwards-looking in a "just do Bloodlines again, it'll be fine" way, The Outer Worlds is also backwards-looking in that distinctly 2010s-RPGs way where designers focus test their mechanics for the lowest-common-denominator idiot. Compared to something like New Vegas and especially like old-school Fallout, the RPG mechanics here are extremely limited: 'Perks' upon level-up offer simple quality-of-life bonuses like extra carry weight or a small percentage of damage reduction, rather than anything characterful or specialized. Meanwhile, character skills like "lockpicking" and "handguns" run from 1-100 with bonus perks automatically unlocking every 20 ranks.

This means that aside from maybe a minor difference in carry weight or how far away enemies appear on the compass, any character with an 80 in 'Long Arms' is going to fire a gun identically to any other character with an 80 in 'Long Arms' because they'll both be unlocking the same Long Arms perk set, which takes a lot of the fun out of character building. The game's six Bethesda-esque companions are lightly-characterized sacks of hit points who each have a special ability that boils down to 'makes a Big Attack with their signature weapon,' even though you could otherwise give the machine gun companion a pistol and the pistol companion a machine gun and they'd perform identically to one another. Companion inventory has been nixed for streamlining purposes: instead, each companion just expands your inventory weight limit passively.

This leaves the most meaningful 'gameplay' in The Outer Worlds as the combat, which is deeply mediocre. This is an Obsidian RPG in its bones, not a shooter, and so every gun from a magnum to a shotgun to a flamethrower feels less like a powerful weapon and more like a hose to dispense little numbered damage ticks onto a health bar that is moving towards you. The game embraces the Cain and Boyarsky Vampire: the Masquerade: Bloodlines philosophy in the worst way: write up a whole bunch of smart, snappy dialogue for questgivers, and then have every quest be a bland combat gauntlet that doesn't play to the strengths of these designers.

The thing about Bloodlines, and about the 'Original-creators Fallout Trilogy' of 1, 2, and New Vegas, is that these deeply uneven games have gone down as 'flawed masterpieces' because they were ambitious. Each set out to push the boundaries of role-playing game scope and immersion, and part of the charm of each title is how that mission slammed into reality, sometimes to the degree that the product shipped was outright broken. Here, there's no ambition: despite the fun, original 'Gilded Age Space Western' setting and the consistently solid writing that we've come to expect of Obsidian, the scope is limited to a green planet, a yellow planet, and a blue planet populated by the same five enemies and the same three reused 'space house' interiors.

If I finish this game, it's going to be as something to occupy my hands while I listen to audiobooks, and that should be terribly insulting when you're talking about a game by the creators of Fallout. It's a 5/10. Easily skippable.

Do you remember "Face Lift,"[www.mariowiki.com] that Mario Party minigame where Mario or Bowser would strike a weird face and you'd have to click and drag their features to match? Indie developer Garage Heathen clearly detected a nugget of fear in that concept, and based a whole game around it: a murder-mystery possession yarn where your character's reactions are determined by the expressions you amateurishly plaster onto his features, no matter how inappropriate they are to the situation.

Beyond its excellent gameplay hook, Who's Lila? is a very competently-constructed indie meta-horror title of the Doki Doki Literature Club or Inscryption variety, where to convey the idea of something unknowable and beyond-the-pale the "gameplay" extends out of the game executable itself and into messing with the game's save logic, searching through game files, or reading through quasi-fictional exchanges between characters on Twitter. Where it stands out from the indie meta-horror crowd is that Who's Lila? is themed less after the works of H.P. Lovecraft and more after the works of David Lynch, whose surreal offerings the developer clearly holds in worshipful esteem. In one particularly unsubtle sequence, player character "William" even reenacts a scene from Lynch's film Blue Velvet[en.wikipedia.org], in a room with a Blue Velvet poster on the wall, and idly comments that "the poster is the only cool thing in this apartment."

Because Who's Lila? is so clearly aspiring to be a Lynch film, that means that it's deliberately agnostic to any one coherent reading. There are sixteen endings, and although several of them give the player a more-or-less definitive answer to the title question, these answers are more about artful allegory than they are textual diegesis: "Who's Lila?" is answered extensively as a statement, but not answered comprehensively as a question. I got through about nine of them before I started to get a little bored; I get that it's an artistic statement to have no simple in-universe answer to the title question for us rubes, but that is a little against my expectations for what makes for a satisfying point-and-click mystery game.

I suppose that does make it good art, though, and that's what earns Who's Lila? a thumbs-up from me. Worth playing for a solidly unusual, auteur experience.

It's my 100th Steam Review, and I can't think of a more deserving title.

ARC Raiders is probably the most pure distillation of the "prisoner's dilemma simulator" concept in contemporary extraction shooters. Compared to Tarkov or Arena Breakout, the NPC enemy AI is very erratic and dangerous and -- at the higher end -- basically insurmountable for a solo player to take on without teaming up with others or getting third-partied. Compared to Hunt: Showdown, where the singular objective of the boss token puts all players into direct conflict, the idea of competing for generic resources is more abstract. The local voice chat and canned voice prompts are similarly geared towards communication and collaboration. But also, you're keenly aware at all times that if you enter that looting animation to check a closet, any cool chatty Raider you come across can and will just magdump into your back and freely get anything you're carrying. ARC Raiders cultivates a friendlier atmosphere than other extraction shooters, but with that friendliness comes a constant, uneasy paranoia where it always feels like a coin flip if a collaboration will end in betrayal.

This generates a rich depth of ambiguous player interactions that I can sum up using the most fun solo run I've had as an example:

> Spawn into Dam Battleground at the red lake
> Use the canned "Greet" response on another nearby solo, causing him to spray a few shots in my direction, panic and run away
> Don't sweat it, walk past testing annex, giving it a wide berth because somebody's aggro'd an ARC Rocketeer and that ♥♥♥♥ will kill you dead
> Head to scrapyard, where I have to do a quest
> Guy pops out of the rubble and aims his gun, demanding, "Friendly? Friendly?"
> I respond "yeah, I'm just doing the scrapyard quest" over voice comms
> We both interact with the quest items and silently go our separate ways
> I start heading for center extract because I have to bring out three items from the scrapyard quest and I don't want to do the whole rigmarole all over again
> A Ferro shot lands at my feet with a BANG and I hear a distant voicechat announce, "THAT ONE WAS A WARNING! I'M EXTRACTING HERE. WALK AWAY."
> Don't want to fight a Ferro uphill, so I voicechat back "okay, I'll go annex" and double back to the annex
> That guy trying to fight the Rocketeer is having a bad time of it. See the 'zap' of it popping his shield when it plonks a rocket into the annex building
> See another dude with a Toro go sprinting into the building
> Smell a rat, make to follow
> Hear the 'BOOM' as he murders the guy fighting the Rocketeer while the poor dude is healing
> Round the corner and magdump my Rattler into him as he tries to loot the corpse, yelling "I SAW WHAT YOU DID, YOU MURDERER! GUARDS! GUARDS!"
> A full mag of Rattler does 90 damage. He has 100 health. Thankfully for me he doesn't realize I have to reload and freaks out and starts running through the building on his last health
> I sprint after him, reloading as I run and yelling "GUARDS! THIS MAN IS A MURDERER! GUARDS!"
> He stops to shoot an ARC Pop that aggro'd and was about to cherry-tap him, giving me the opening to put four more freshly-reloaded bullets into his back and drop him
> Beat him to death with my crowbar while going "Nyeh! Hahhh! Have at you, fiend!"
> Loot both him and his victim, pack my bags full of Tier IV guns that both of them had in both slots
> Trundle down to annex extract and get shot in the back by an extract camper who's been bush wookieing all game
> Another guy rounds the corner, mows down my killer with a Burletta before he can finish me, and then calls the extract elevator for me before saying "I saw what you did up there, that was ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hilarious."
> He doesn't finish me off and we extract together with my backpack full of guns while I'm in bleedout

Absolutely peak multiplayer gaming. You meet the best and worst of humanity and everyone in-between in every raid.

Huniepop is a lightweight, but quite good match-3 puzzle game tied to a h-dating sim with a very flippant, tongue-in-cheek presentational style. The sense of humor demonstrated by the dialogue is very '2010s South Park Millennial,' and the overall aesthetic, handling, and art style reminds me strongly of early-aughts Newgrounds.com porn games, but elevated in polish.

I can't say that I found it particularly arousing -- particularly given that the love interests are deliberately written to be humorously-abrasive and the pornographic content consists exclusively of racy HD stills and clicking colored dots while the voice actress makes orgasm noises -- but I did find it oddly cozy. It's weird to recommend porn based on "it'll give you nostalgia for an earlier era of the internet," but if you were the kind of kid who spent late nights in the 2000s trying to defrag your parents' hard drive after downloading sketchy hentai .mkvs, Huniepop will give you the warm fuzzies.

Worth what I paid for it (free) and probably worth the $10 now.

You've tried "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics," now try "Escape from Tarkov with Chinese Characteristics."

Inkulinati is Worms with medieval marginalia. It's a lightweight turn-based-tactics battler where you're trying to beat up the other player with your little army of doodle men before they can beat you up with their little army of doodle men. Status effects and especially positioning are extremely important, as the battlefield is rife with dynamic hazards that units can push each other into.

The presentation is extremely charming. Everything is rendered perfectly as the scribbles of bored medieval monks, right down to the player's hand coming down in first-person and scribbling things on the screen. As you battle, gothic script comedically writes out an account of the battle across the screen. Hildegard of Bingen -- one of the coolest medieval saints -- is one playable character, and Andreas Mahler from Pentiment is another. Dead doodles leave ink splotches that are harvested to spawn more units from your pen. It's all perfectly on-theme.

However, after a few gos through its branching campaign, I felt like I'd exhausted the extent of my enjoyment with the gameplay loop. I felt like I'd basically seen everything there was to see in the game in 4 hours, which makes it a steep ask at 30 bucks (thankfully I got it on a deep sale).

It's cute. It was cute and worth the (small) price I paid for it. Get it on sale.

This is kind of redundant to say, but Weird West is a weird game. Right out the gate: although it looks and handles like a topdown shooter, this game is an Immersive Sim first and foremost, and concerns itself with world consistency more than gameplay fidelity. Specifically, Weird West advertises itself as an Immersive Sim "from the co-creators of Dishonored and Prey," and it certainly aspires to be a lot like Prey in more than just its general apocalyptic vibes. Like in Prey, the player is dropped into a wide-open, hostile environment that's chock full of physics-based objects and collectible junk and set loose to tell their own story, and also like in Prey, the game's denouement is a kind of navel-gazey retrospective where the game comments on itself as a game to make an artistic statement about games and the people who play them.

What Weird West doesn't have, though, and I hate to be shallow, is Prey's budget. Where Prey opens up its stellar narrative campaign by giving the character an adhesive "gun" multitool that cannot permanently kill enemies but which also allows the player to climb on blobs of spent ammo to access hidden spaces and sequence-breaks, Weird West opens the first of its five narrative campaigns by handing the player... just a gun. The game consistently feels like it's biting off more than it can chew in terms of scope, despite its bare-bones twin-stick-shooter haptics. Weird West's many visitable locations, accessible via a Fallout 1 overworld map, do have clever alternate paths and sneaking routes, but you'll see them repeat because WolfEye could only afford about six tilesets to construct them all from (desert, forest, cabin, boomtown, mine, temple). Weird West has NPCs who get married and take each others' surnames and who get buried at Boot Hill with headstones with their names if you kill them, but what it can't simulate is more than a few lines of repeating dialogue for them. It may keep track of the exact in-game hour and minute of the day and show this on in-world clocks, but this doesn't matter to gameplay beyond nighttime giving a minor stealth boost and causing store owners to close up shop. Enemies may have dynamic infighting behaviors on the rare occasion that they overlap, but they're so strategically placed in discrete "dungeon corridor" type spawns that this rarely-if-ever happens.

In short, Weird West promises a fully simulated Wild West world, but due to budget constraints and limited scope it ends up coming off more like Peter Molyneux's Fable, a very "video gamey" video game with weird little simulationist details, than it does like Red Dead Redemption 2, which burned hundreds of millions of dollars and the souls of its developers to create the definitive, exhaustively realistic Wild West sandbox.

The high point of Weird West is its story, which I thought was Neat. Over the course of five journeys that initially seem disconnected, the player is made privy to a sweeping plot that ties all the campaigns together, and this campaign even interrogates the notion of a player (you) embodying a character. As the characters of subsequent campaigns, you can visit the player characters of earlier campaigns, who are textually aware that they're no longer the protagonists of the story in a very meta sense. This repeated theme of embodiment, role-playing, and what it means to be a character versus simply stepping into the shoes of one, has an extremely abrupt and philosophical conclusion that's highly reminiscent of Prey's ending, although I'm not getting into the particulars for obvious reasons.

A good on-sale title. I wish it polished its basics better before moving on to extraneous simulationist systems, but those systems do have a certain charm. I'd give it a sideways thumb if I could.

Evil West is a very nostalgic game. It's not nostalgic in the sense that it's a Weird Western. No, the Wild West setting is totally unexplored conceptually or tonally, and basically just exists to add a little artistic flair to what is otherwise a very standard fantasy monster-fighting romp.

Rather, Evil West is nostalgic because dev team Flying Wild Hog are clearly trying to channel the energy of late-aughts PS3 and XBoX 360 "B-Game' hack-and-slash titles like Dante's Inferno, Darksiders, and Splatterhouse (2010). If they'd shot for God of War (2005) or Bayonetta they might have fallen short; those are games with a ballet dancer's sense of balance whose buttery-smooth gameplay loops have stood the test of time. By aiming for the slightly janky midcard feel, though -- a little sloppy, a little sophomoric, a little crude -- Flying Wild Hog have created what is essentially an "anyone remember this cult classic from 2010?" game, except in 2022.

Evil West follows protagonist Jesse Rentier and his steampunk techno gauntlet as they battle their way through linear corridors that are broken up by large circular combat arenas. In these circular combat arenas, Jesse fights increasingly ludicrous hordes of vampires with an equally-increasingly-ludicrous arsenal of weapons, then walks down the next corridor to the next circular space. Sometimes the corridors and arenas are presented as organic features of the environment, but whether Jesse is fighting through a canyon, a swamp, a ghost town, a Back East factory, or any other iconic Wild West location, the layout is always that same series of linear hallways connecting the same circular arenas to fight vampires in. As he moves between combat arenas, Jesse drops sarcastic "Marvel Movie" dialogue with a Wild West twang. Periodically, he interacts with four or five major named NPCs. All of these other characters are also functionally just sassy superheroes who fight vampires. Occasionally one of them will pay lip service to this ostensibly being the 1800s, such as when the team's bad-cop Harrow will say overtly misogynist things at the team's singular woman, Emilia, to remind us that women couldn't vote in the 19th century.

All of these characters have the busiest, most Liefeldian pouches-and-greebles character designs you've ever seen in your life, rivaled only by the vampire enemies who appear to have gone on a shopping bender at whatever Halloween Store Diablo's enemies thrift at. Vampires come in several varieties of big, small, batlike and humanlike, and many of them are filled with bugs that spill out when you punch them, adding an extra ooey-gooey gross-out appeal to snapping them in half.

Despite the uninspired setting and design, or potentially because of it, the combat feels really, really good. The player has the stock-standard combo attack available to all protagonists of late-aughts hack-and-slash games, but also a revolver, a rifle, a shotgun, a lasso, a crossbow, a flamethrower, dynamite, and a gatling gun, which can be swapped-between more-or-less seamlessly during fights to counter different prescriptive enemy weaknesses. For instance, several enemies have unblockable attacks that always hurt Jesse unless they're shot with a rifle headshot during the wind-up anim, which is easier said than done when the player is bogged down fistfighting a dozen lesser ghoulies. Thankfully the game features generous autoaim for ranged attacks and generous hit tracking for brawling, alongside a Dark Soulsy dodge and parry feature. There's almost too much to keep track of at any one time between different weapon and enemy varieties and their interplay, but since all weapons are on cooldown timers rather than packing 'ammo,' it avoids being too cognitively overloading and the player can ultimately just mash a button until the ability comes off-cooldown.

It is this combat loop that is basically the game's only selling point amidst its messy character designs and uninspired snarky-cowboys-fight-vampires story. Thankfully, it's a very fun selling point.

More thumbs-up than thumbs-down, but only just. Buy it on a deep sale or as part of a bundle.

I've been on a mecha kick lately, and I was ready and willing -- hoping, actually -- for this Switch original IP to wow me. Instead, I ended up getting bored of it pretty quickly. DAEMON X MACHINA is colorful, it handles well, and it's got a great character creator and mecha designer, but I feel like once you get past the surface-level appearance and basic haptics the experience falls apart very quickly.

In my snap impression of the game I called DAEMON X MACHINA "Japanese in the worst way," which I'll moderate here to "action-RPG in the worst way." My experience with it was short and repetitive and looked like this:

• Watch a static cutscene with annoying anime characters saying things about the mission objectives like "I'm gonna skate up to that data library and put my tags on it, for real!"
  
• Start the mission
  
• Experience 30 seconds of spamming anemic weapons at enemies as numbers appear on everything
  
• You win! You get an inscrutable mission rank.
  
• Sort through your weapon drops from the mission: five of the same gun you're already using, except one of them is 0.085% better so you manually equip it.
  
• Watch another static mission briefing with more annoyingly anime, "I'm not strong enough... I have to train if I want to be as good as the Bullet Kings!" dialogue.
  
• 30 more seconds of nonsense particle spam where you just click left and right bumper and win.
  
• On your way to the opaque ranking screen, be treated to a tooltip reminding you that if you repeat the 30-second mission you just played, you'll have a 2% chance of getting a gun that is 0.95% better and then you can get an S rank!
  
• Another cutscene plays: this one has an anime girl whose gimmick is that she's the edgy rival, so she says stuff like "I'll kill anyone who stands in my way. I'll kill you. Believe it, rookie."
  
• Look the game up on HowLongToBeat and realize this "30 seconds of gameplay, five minutes of nonsense" game loop goes on for 15 hours
  
• Uninstall

It's absolutely not worth full asking price, and to be honest it wouldn't have made the Humble Bundle I got it in worth it without Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader. A safe skip, which is unfortunate when it's got such a cool look and there aren't enough good mecha games out there.

Look Outside is a beautiful game, and not just because of developer Francis Coulombe's distinct, "Junji Ito does the Garbage Pail Kids" pixel art style. It's a beautiful game because it's probably one of the most direct inheritors of the spirit of Mother / Earthbound. It takes that franchise's formula, philosophies and themes, and meaningfully comments on them to create a nostalgic, iterative experience that is at once dreadful and kind of cozy. The allusions don't stop there: obviously, one look at Look Outside will show how liberally it pulls from the oeuvres of David Cronenberg (particularly Videodrome) and Junji Ito (Hellstar Remina and The Enigma of Amigara Fault, likewise), and paints these aesthetics over the postmodernist-retro-JRPG framework of Fear & Hunger or Lisa the Painful. However, Look Outside always remains something delightfully itself, with its commitment to exploring the sort of positive nihilism embodied by Earthbound with an even more deeply flawed cast of characters.

Look Outside is a retro, RPGMaker JRPG that takes place after the functional annihilation of the Earth's biosphere and the human species. You play as Sam, an ugly NEET living on the third floor of an apartment building in what is implied to be Montreal... or what was Montreal, anyway. Something has appeared in the sky that turns every living thing that witnesses it into a ravening, insane mutant with supernatural powers. This has happened instantaneously to every human on the planet who had the misfortune to be outdoors, but also to anyone who had a window open, hence the title Look Outside. The only recourse is to stay indoors and wait for this whole thing to blow over... a notion that becomes increasingly absurd as news websites and your own experiences scrounging neighboring apartments for supplies clearly illustrate that humanity in any meaningful sense is over. The NEETs, basement dwellers, and other perennially-indoors specimens of the species may have survived, but they're not going to inherit the Earth: that goes to the screaming, inside-out horrors that now hunt them.

However, that's really only half the story. Seeing the outside has changed your neighbors and driven them insane, but "insane" doesn't necessarily mean "hostile." There's still humanity to be found in even the most warped morphology, and as Sam can discover over the course of the game, this apocalypse affords him an odd second chance for fundamental human connection and friendship. This isn't a "revenge of the losers" fantasy -- Sam is often the weakest link in the game's Earthbound-esque JRPG battle system, befitting a horror protagonist -- but it's something more constructive. Look Outside is a fantasy of giving the horrors of the world the benefit of the doubt and trying to make room for communication and understanding... even if this often ends in naive Sam getting devoured by some capricious monster.

The combat system is pretty pure JRPG orthodoxy: unlike its most direct RPGMaker contemporary, Fear & Hunger, Look Outside does have a conventional XP-based leveling system and a clear progression of boss battles intended to be conquered based on level, not meaningfully distinct from something like Shin Megami Tensei or, of course, Earthbound. Look Outside's biggest innovation to adapt JRPG mechanics to the horror genre is its clever save-room system. Time passes during battles and when exploring new rooms of the building, and Sam will pass out and be eaten by the monsters if he stays out past bedtime. However, the game can only be saved in Sam's apartment and, cleverly, the player is awarded scaling XP the longer that they've spent away from the apartment. Therefore, if the player is playing only a few encounters, or opening only a few doors, and then running back to the save room, they level slower and start to fall behind the power curve of the apartment building's monstrous denizens. By contrast, if the player takes the whole in-game day in one long marathon, staying out and surviving purely on the items they can find in the building, they'll get a windfall of experience and level-ups... provided that they don't stumble into a killer encounter on the way back home and die prematurely, losing everything.

There were a few occasions where I would get too big for my britches, lose a few party members to a surprise encounter, and then realize that I hadn't actually visited the save room in -- in real-world time -- an hour and a half. While I was cursing and swearing and mashing the button to attempt to run away from battle, the game really did feel scary despite the goofy art style and dated combat system. It's a clever way of building the player's own hubris into the survival horror genre's balance of risk and reward.

I'll be a little scant here because I really think that you should play this game yourself, but I mentioned that Look Outside embodies the "positive nihilism" of Earthbound, and I think that makes it a novel entry in the post-apocalyptic, cosmic horror space. Where the works of Lovecraft emphasize human smallness in the face of indifferent or malicious alien gods, so too does Look Outside, but where Look Outside differs from Lovecraft is that it never depicts kindness and connection as futile endeavors in the face of cosmic insignificance.

To paraphrase the Strugatskys' Roadside Picnic, humanity in the world of Look Outside may be so insignificant before the being that is Outside that we are like ants crushed beneath a shoe, but to lose each ant is tragic, and the game always depicts its tragedies in human terms even when the victims and perpetrators are abstract body-horror monsters. If you squash a roach in your apartment, Sam may think in the shower the following night, "I felt bad when I squashed that bug and I don't know why." Sam may not, but the player does: it's because every life cut short, every perspective ended, is a loss for all of us who remain, no matter how meaningless the life was in cosmic terms. Yes, even the roaches: if you refrain from squashing them and leave out enough TV dinners overnight, they pile into a trenchcoat and decide to be your friend.

The game's "true ending" doubles and triples down on these themes, emphasizing the paradox of existing as a cosmic speck, but still having agency and meaning even if it's only important to yourself and those in your immediate perspective. It's well worth the effort of figuring out how to achieve it.

Look Outside is a really brilliant little horror JRPG and a true triumph for Coulombe and his team. It's my fondest hope that the viral buzz generated around this title, which dropped with no fanfare last month, precipitates further content within this world and even a sequel. It's something refreshing and new and lovely in the very tired 'RPGMaker JRPG' space and it's brimming with a soul that games a hundred times its size and two thousand times its budget wish they could have.

Buy it now.