Recent reviews by Gabriel Knight

The high production value and great pace make this an essential addition to the Half-Life extended universe. Superb script, exciting action, and lots of fanservice. Would have happily paid money for it!

I don't know what this says about the state of VR, but Walkabout Mini Golf is probably the best VR game on Steam next to Half-Life: Alyx. It is a remarkably polished experience. The putting is intuitive and the physics are realistic, making for a smooth and fun experience. The maps are beautifully imaginative, while avoiding the exaggerated gimmicks of many popular non-VR mini golf games. The base game and its DLC are also very reasonably priced. I love playing it while listening to podcasts.

Time-looping detectives who solved the mysteries of The Last Express and Outer Wilds will also enjoy their stay in The Forgotten City.

Setting and plot are fresh and continue to surprise (no spoilers here). The premise makes for some interesting puzzle solving. You immediately get drawn into the world, there are no fillers, everything is meaningful. The game finds, to my taste, the right balance between allowing for free exploration and not having the player get lost on their journey.

While the Steam algorithm wants you to either celebrate or hate a game, things are not that one-dimensional. Some things I did not like:

• While the characters each have their own personality, and their problems or "quests" feel meaningful, I did not like the writing as much as others did. In some instances, the characters use vocabulary completely outside the historical discourse (especially in the realm of psychology), and why this may be explained with some odd Latin–English auto translation lore, it sometimes ruined the immersion.
  
• It took me less than six hours to find the perfect solution, which I find an excellent length for a game, but for which the full price may be a bit excessive depending on your personal situation.
  
• Although you freely navigate inside a small open world and it is up to you whom to meet and care about first, the quest lines are rather linear. There is rarely more than one way to solve a problem. With all the philosophical talk about how ill-defined morality is, I would have liked more options to tackle the issues. Sure, there is at times more than one way to enter an area etc., but these choices don't make a lasting difference. There are, of course, different endings, but it is clear that only one of them is the 'real' ending and the rest are more like accidental game overs.
  
  Despite these smaller critical remarks, I can highly recommend the game. It is one of the rare gaming experiences you will not forget easily, and makes for one of the finest games I have played this year. If you are into character- and story-driven detective games, don't miss out on this one.

An emotionally powerful, extraordinarily well-written finale, that lets the series reach a late high point.
I love you, James

What an odd game. Story is well written, graphics are well crafted, apart from some control glitches, this feels like a surprisingly polished AA game. But that is not the problem.
Yes, the game totally feels like an immersive sim - but it does not understand what immersive sims actually are. For starters, the game does not feature any immersive systems. The most systemic it gets are some patrols wandering around and, sometimes rather randomly, catch you while sneaking around.

Immersive sims live from experimenting, from reaching your objectives in different ways. Here however, what you get are a number of side-objectives and a timer pressuring you to solve these objectives in a limited time frame. This concept might still kind-of work (see The Last Express), but this game does not allow you to save. It is not even auto-saving. It is not even saving between all logical segments (which can be over an hour long). Within the 5.5 hours of the playthrough (more or less the same for everyone, as the game runs on a clock), the game informs you that it was kind enough to save for you four times! This is

1) utterly disrespectful towards the players' choice and flexibility of how they can and want to use their free time, and

2) runs contrary to the basic concept of the immersive sim, where the idea is to try out and experiment what could have worked differently.

By the way, the game is also front-loading. Things you can do in the levels get less as time goes on.

Then, the last actual level is completely bogus, as you don't know what to do (or how any of what you are supposed to be doing is supposed to make sense within the 1987 setting), but the moment the guard spots you, the game immediately skips the rest of the final level and basically robs you of the good ending. Sure, you could reload the last of the four generous save points, but is that really worth the effort? For me, it was not.

Playing The Witness was an enlightening experience. While the game looks like a homage to Myst (and partly is), it is actually a much more thought-through realization of what the developer has once called "designing to reveal the nature of the universe." This may sound esoteric, but the very few rules that form all the hundreds of puzzles will subtly guide you to epiphanies that not only concern the puzzles themselves, but flow over to the exteriors inside and outside of the game. The game is a true masterpiece that showcases how complex ideas can be conveyed through light-weight game design, thus providing hope for the medium.

Just an uninspired version of the last Tomb Raider game. The story is your typical TR blueprint (forgotten about it already), added a completely irrelevant sidekick you will never care about. Devs should go back to the drawing board and make Lara's character coherent for more than an hour, and have her character make sense when she is actually playing a gun-wielding, murdering tomb robber.

While the puzzles are an upgrade to last time, the climbing passages (especially in the DLCs) are way less readable, and you often plummet to death just because you have no chance of knowing what you are intended to do in advance.

Then there is the whole ray tracing thing that was promised and never delivered.

Better play a game that you will actually remember, or maybe replay Rise. I worry about the next Deus Ex if it's in the hands of Montreal.

Take Hitman 2's Isle of Sgail setting, travel back in time 220 years, change the genre to Telltale, and add an RPG skill tree – voilà, welcome to The Council! The rich and powerful of the 1790s join for a secret meeting to lobby for and against the purchase of Louisiana, while your occult mother has become missing...

Good things first: As a player who often feels like games are stealing my time, I was very happy with the way the dialogues are written. I never skipped a line (if that is even possible), as everything said is importance for story progression and character development. Every character reveals different points of vantage that you can make use of in dialogues to manipulate their will – that is, if you have trained your conversation skills in the appropriate categories such as diversion, psychology, or politics.

Let there be no misunderstanding: the game is far from perfect. The skill system is completely misbalanced. After the first few chapters, you will have become a jack of all trades and collected so much junk potions that you will never again fail an encounter. The story starts very promising with an exceptionally well-written character cast, but some people will find the later supernatural elements hard to swallow.

I hope the developer and others find the opportunity to build up on the system. The mix of Telltale adventure, and pen and paper cRPG has a lot of potential. As it stands now, the game is well invested time, but lacks the certain something to be long remembered.

Hitman No Subtitle™ 2 is the logical successor to 2016’s reboot. It builds upon what worked for the last game (immersive systems, situational humour, Sapienza-style level architectures) and reforms what did not work two years ago (levels too grey and aggressive like Colorado or levels too schematic like Bangkok and Paris). The gameplay additions are limited but well-chosen: suitcase, vegetational concealments, tripwires. It’s what a second season would have been and that’s all I ever asked for.

The five new sandboxes feel more rounded than 2016’s line-up, probably due to the general supervision of Torbjørn Christensen, of Sapienza and Hokkaido fame. The levels are larger and more integrated – granted you sometimes wish for a bicycle or motorbike, as the walking distances can feel a bit tedious. The verticality of Mumbai and Sgail is one solution to this problem and it’s what makes them the best levels of the game.

Then there is ghost mode, which holds so much potential. The chaos and tension created by having to compete in assassinations under a time constraint is unique and makes for a lot of fun. I hope the developers will soon unlock this mode for all levels and expand on the system, as this mode could become a selling point on its own right.

With the predecessor being contained within the second game, new elusive targets and escalations being released weekly, and two expansions incoming, the value of this package is immense. Here is hoping more players will give the game a chance than last time, so that we may see a Hitman 3 eventually.

While this is not the first Final Fantasy I played, it is the first one I actually finished.

There are many aspects of the game you have to be forgiving about: First: While grinding is no longer necessary (nor useful?), the side quests feel like a chore, sharing more similarities with an MMORPG than with the creativity and rich storytelling of recent Western RPGs like The Witcher 3 and Assassin's Creed Origins. Second: While there are open world areas, the actual narrative is completely linear, and the gameplay does not allow for any experimenting (opposite to recent Japanese developments, e.g. Metal Gear Solid 5 or Breath of the Wild). Third: You can witness the game's decade of development hell anywhere you go; the game feels stitched together, quirky, incoherent, unsure about what it wants to be.

So why did I enjoy this game? I want to highlight two reasons: First, the absurd production value. There is attention to detail you might find in 8-hour long AAA titles, but usually not in 40 hours JRPGs. There are so many unique assets, hours of fully voiced-over dialogue, and optional content. Second, the interaction between the game's four main protagonists. I do not recall any other game which displayed pure friendship in such a believable and relatable way. The boy band dynamically comments about each other's actions, has small talk, shows affection for each other. The grand epic story, archenemies, and love interests seem to be nothing but a pretext for a road trip and the interaction between four guys, who are the real center of the game.