Recent reviews by PamBerry

I am unsure where to begin this review.

I suppose a summary would be nice, though I do already recognise the need for two rather than one. From a purely game review standpoint, this is a truly solid entry into the genre of adventure games. Awash in gorgeous visuals, hand-drawn backgrounds, and well thought-out puzzles, it manages to be engaging and satisfying without an excessive reliance on Moon Logic, or making me hate myself.

But here's the rub. I am obsessed with the 1950s and early 1960s. I write in a style deliberately reminiscent of the Beatniks. I worship the Beat, the Chrome, the Googie. For all intents and purposes, it is 1958, Eisenhower is my president, and boy howdy am I excited to vote for Kennedy next. And as someone who is so...uniquely broken, this game is...

My God, it's everything. The slang is incredible. It is dense, layered, and well-written, and incredibly authentic most of all. It references things I genuinely never thought a game would reference, such as the prevalence of minority artists in Beat, the propensity of Beat writers to type on scrolls, or the early San Francisco queer scene. The protagonists are an interracial couple played completely straight, replete with all the bigotry this brings at the time. There's a trans character! In a 1950s game! And she's portrayed as wholly authentic without an ounce of meanness!


I suppose I should not be too surprised. If you have been following Daedalic's work at all, none of what I just said will surprise you. They have a keen eye for detail in all things, and doubly so when it comes to historical games. However, the pedigree here is more than skin deep. Page one, the visuals. I mentioned how pretty they are earlier, but I should also point out that the artstyle - a blend of 2D sprites with 3D character models - works incredibly well. Despite how obviously stylised the individual character models are, they fit into the backgrounds at a glance. The animations are wonky, but charmingly so, and never to a point where they take you out of what is happening.

The music? Soft jazz. Orchestral 1950s tunes. Spielbergian breakout music. A single vocal number that is equal parts arrestingly pretty and thematically fitting. It fits every scene to a T, and I am very sad that they do not sell a soundtrack album to accompany this game.

As for the meat and potatoes of it all, the puzzles themselves are so clever, and the feeling of getting it right is just unbeatable. You can easily put two and two together, and when you do, you'll feel like a platinum million, baby. They even added a "snoop" button so you don't need to pixel hunt, but in my entire time playing this game I have needed it and used it exactly once. For an adventure game, that is a truly monumental achievement.


The plot here is a truly rare treasure. The protagonists are a married couple, and apparently happily so for most of the game. They are faithful to one another emotionally, maintain a healthy, physical openness (to the point where Christine will remark that she isn't sleeping around solely because she is busy, but that she's "not a square" otherwise), and will go the extra mile for each other always. The journey changes them, and it changes their view of one another, but it is up to you, the player, to make so many little choices for them. These are true choices, too, which felt really good in a game like this.

I digress. It's a jail break, of course. You have all the tropes of one, and doubly so as it is set in Alcatraz, but the game subverts many of said tropes readily and often. The guards are tough, but also wretched, obsessed with shallow physicality and peering eagerly at every inmate's letter for salacious details. The cops are rotten, but also soft, human, delicate. The mob is present, but subverted, shown to be a hollowed-out monstrous revolving door of human suffering, but one which is ultimately run by ineffectual bastards whose naked brutality masks a startling fear of the temporary nature of life.

And in-between there are meetings, moments, and B-plots which made me smile time and time and time again. I truly do not want to spoil anything, but trust me: there's some killer lines in here. The voice acting, especially from Joe, can be a bit bland at times, but nothing which breaks immersion.


Despite finishing the game, I unlocked no achievements. This troubles me exactly none, as the game will stick with me for the rest of my days, but people have complained about it, and rightly so. This is a very common issue with older Daedalic titles. I think I am either missing half or most of the achievement for both Edna games, for example, but again, I do not care. If you do, try some of the fixes, I guess? I haven't experimented.

Sometimes, the game will crash when alt-tabbing, and setting the resolution is painful. Characters tend to teleport around when switching scenes, and the whole process of switching scenes can have a delay to itself, as though the engine hangs for a second.

The puzzles all work. I felt at times as though I'd sequence broken the game, but that was not the case. A lot of stuff can be missed if you're insufficiently curious, especially when it comes to talking to people, so be careful.

And lastly, if you are not as immersed into the era as I am (read: clinically insane), you may find some of the dialogue hard to understand. I cannot gauge this with complete accuracy, as I am fluent in the slang of the era (to the annoyance of my peers, my rabbi, and my B-side hussies), but I could see some of the stuff not being completely clear from context alone. At the very least, you should know who the Beatniks were and what they stood for.


Buy it/10.

Buy it.

Picture this: It is 2010. You just completed Fallout New Vegas, such as it is, for the first time, and you feel the same way most people have felt upon completing it - you want more. You go back and play Fallout 1 and 2, and want more still. You want choice, you want depth, you want wonder.

Ten years later, a new game by Obsidian comes out. Not only that, but a game by Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarski. Depth, story, choice, but in space, and with a budget and time, now? You leap on the opportunity. Only to find...


This game feels like a phone left off the hook, like an endless re-iteration of the same numbing trill, protracted infinitely until it fades into tinnitus. I feel the need to address this first and foremost because, given who made it, I can scant believe it.

Outer Worlds is really, really ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ boring.

So much of this game feels lifeless and dull. The aesthetic is empty, gilded nothing, an affectless dialogue delivered amidst a shower of gilded ticker-tape and shredded post-its. The exploration isn't, the areas are tiny, the NPCs boring and annoying at best, and two-dee cardboard at worst. I had to play this game in one-hour bursts because the narrative was so exhaustingly dull that I could hardly push myself to expend more energy on it. It is also ugly. It is incredibly, painfully ugly. It hurts to look at. Do you have any idea how much effort is required to make a game hurt to play? Now I do. My God, now I do.


The principal gameplay innovations in New Vegas, and what stuck in people's minds by far the longest, was the way your spoken choices affected everything around you. Your role-playing had a profound and direct impact on the game world itself, and by engaging with people on the basis of what you knew and what you'd been told, you could impact the narrative in ways you couldn't anywhere else - especially Fallout 3. It was a true return to form. And the same is true for Fallout 1 and 2. These games thrive when you speak to people.

But the moment to moment experience? Calling it "bland" or "boring" is a compliment. Fallout 1 and 2 were at their worst when the combat was interesting - because you either powerscale to the point of mulching everything around you, or you plink away, often painfully, at enemies a dozen or more levels above you in the vague hope that you'll beat this encounter on the next quick-load, or the next, or the next, or... And New Vegas was no better. Fallout 3's horrendous Gamebryo gunplay, with its stodgy animations, arse-poor hitreg, and incomprehensible stealth had returned in grand style, now aided by the horsemen of bugged weapon reloads (some of which are broken out of the box to this day!), stodgy mod-like modelling, and a general sense of a slapdash mess held together by hope and that incredibly annoying musical sting you were deafened with every time you died and were punted into a third-person slow-mo view of your own corpse going a-flyin'.

It sucked. It just sucked. And it still sucks. Oh my God, it sucks.

In fact, it sucks so bad I have nothing new to say. The weapons are all the same. The armors are all uninspired. Every fight is a variation on "stand some distance away and left click on the lads until either they or you fall over." Your own companions don't even have knockdown animations. Instead, they just ragdoll, and because they are useless (as is tradition, honk honk), you will see them collapse a lot. And that's...it. That's all I have to say. In the nine point nine hours of my limited time on Earth that I invested into this title, that is the summa summarum of my experience with fighting in this game. There aren't even melee takedown animations. Instead, you just spam left click, and sometimes block, but that won't help you much, as the blocking is buggy and enemies can and often will simply shoot you.


Choices! Hell yeah! Choices, right? Oh, we love choices! And societal criticism? Oh you bet'cha. Fallout New Vegas is incredibly political, and so are the first two Falloutses. They're also quite nuanced more often than not, especially in how they approach the relationship between jingoism and capitalism, between war, peace, and compromise, and the notion of tolerance, as a paradox and beyond. And, regardless of where you stand on said games and their politics, you most certainly did not walk away unaffected, for better or for worse.

And, cards on the table: I am not some namby-pamby corporate bootlicker. Quite the opposite. As such, I find this game's politics bewildering. See, New Vegas tries very hard to make all sides of the argument appear rational. When the Legion unmasks itself as this monstrous horror of slavery, abuse, and fascism, you are already prepared - you were led there, and only your own personal biases will tell you whether such is a good or a bad thing. Same goes for the NCR, or the Boomers, or even the Khans. The ups and downs appear organically. To achieve such in a wholly interactive medium is nothing short of an artistic triumph.

But the Outer Worlds does not do this. Capitalism is bad. That is the headline, the big-bulbed neon sign in the sky, and you are beaten over the head with this every step of the way. Characters are caricatures, acting either out of a total and cartoonish sense of self-interest to the exclusion of everything else, a dejected servility which sits in total contrast to how anyone bar the most depressed people alive actually is, or a contrarian fire whose intensity would rival even the most zealous religions on Earth. Nobody talks like a person does. Motives are shaken out of people's pockets with zero subtext or nuance. You are told what is happening. Capitalism is bad. If you agree with this message, then the game is nothing more than a circlejerk, where nothing of value becomes nothing else of value as all the characters you are predisposed to liking move nowhere and learn nothing. They start out as freedom fighters, and end as freedom fighters. And if you disagree with the game's message, the experience is the same, but inverted. The villains remain the villains. You are a villain. Behold! Another person who is also a villain saying "My, it feels good to be evil, doesn't it? Let's hunt some labourers for sport."

Riveting stuff, messirs.


Have you ever done LSD? How about MDMA?

Things are very bright. Everything's fuzzy and cozy. Give me a hug, yeah? Oh, blimey, that's the stuff. Cuddles, please. Tee-hee. Cor. This carpet's soft, innit? Chuffed to meet you, Mister Pillow. Giz us a kiss.

The Outer Worlds is like that, to a tee. Everything is replete with soft angles, sharply contrasting colours, and patchy, juxtaposing texturework. It is some sort of cross between a magic eye picture and the immediate aftermath of a concussion. And as a result, after about an hour of gameplay, I develop a headache. I do so every time without exception, and am forced to stare at a beige wall for a bit to mellow out. And this is not just painful, but an actual impediment to gameplay. Enemies will simply appear out of thin air, rising from the polychrome miasma with their murder-stiffies at full mast and drilling new and fun holes in you. You may pop one or two, but if you're anything like me, you'll do so whilst leaning into the screen, your nose smack-dab against the LCD as you try to pick out the bad guys' heads in-between the neon-dappled polished brass trash cans, benches, and porta-loos.


Parvati is cute. I like that there is an actual paranoiac character in a video game. I feel represented. Then I have to get up and stumble around for a bit as I blink out the afterimages and yawn away the lulling effects of the BB-gun plink-plonk combat and absent, braindead story.

Avoid.

HAIL CHALLENGER
HAIL COLUMBIA

THE DREAM IS ALIVE!

Sniper Elite: Resistance is a title I cannot be objective about. I own Sniper Elite(s) v2 Remastered through 5 (with the exception of 3, which I own on Steam) on my PS4, and have played all of them to death. I have reached max multiplayer level in almost all of them, have done the requisite 100 invasion kills, and so on. There is nothing left for me to play of those titles. There is a Rebellion-branded cannula jammed firmly into my forearm, pumping me full of their specific brand of adrenaline.

And on that note, without much pomp or ado, I'll say this: Sniper Elite Resistance is the bewildering consequence of Rebellion's decision to saw Sniper Elite 5 in half and release the result as an expandalone. That's what this is. However, I'll present an addendum as well: just because the preceding statement is wholly factual does not mean that SER is meritless or not worth getting. Not at all, I would say. And so, in brief - SER is a fantastic stealth game, with expansive and well thought-out levels, fantastic stealth, and a decently interesting plot...by Sniper Elite standards. From the point of view of a miserable, simpering addict, I am thoroughly entertained.


The level design has been lambasted by some as being B-roll worthy, to which I say - poppycock. The maps are somewhat smaller, but not by a massive margin. There's still more than enough room to play around in, and some of the denser level design is downright helpful on authentic. And, to give a one-up on Sniper Elite 5, there is not a single base game level in SER that I viscerally hated. This is in stark contrast to 5 and Rubble and Ruin, which I would delete from existence without an ounce of hesitation. So, nothing on the level of Spy Academy (the bar is in Low Earth Orbit), but solid regardless.

The enemy AI is exactly as clever as it needs to be, and the new enemy models are well-designed and visually striking. The Gaswaffen are aptly terrifying and inhuman, and the armoured train you fight at the end of one mission is really well put together, model wise. The new weapons are fun, and the game itself is gorgeous as always. Again, nothing quite as pleasant as Festung Guernsey, per se, but wonderful-looking none the less. What can I say? France is a pretty country.


Rebellion continues to lean into the "play it your way!" guff, and I am not pleased by this. Authentic is insufficiently punishing, I feel. You can easily pop an unsupressed shot off and wait for the lads to line up single file. In fact, it is easier at times, because your secondary weapons are significantly overpowered. The AI has zero counterplay to you finding a nice loop around a building - like the church in mission 1 - and then gunning them one by one as you sprint in circles and replace your pilfered MP40 once it runs out. And this is not just an early-game problem. I have (experimentally) beaten mission 6 by doing just this, on authentic. The AI lacks the reaction time and damage output to kill you, especially if you stay on the move.

Ipso facto, the only way to counteract this nonsense is to basically promise to yourself that you will not abuse the stupendously OP secondaries and sidearms. The amount of attachments you have access too exacerbates the problem, most notably in how you can turn an M1911 from a pistol into a pocket sniper rifle. In fact, if you are a specific type of stealth player, this game may as well be called Pistol Elite. SE5 had this issue already, but I feel it is made worse in SER because of the somewhat tighter levels. It is very, very easy to make a single mistake which then cascades into your playing Call of Duty. And COD this is not. Let's face it v2 and 3 were much harder, most of all because your secondary and sidearm were just that - desperation fallbacks. Snipe or die should be the name of the game. Regrettably, it is anything but.


This is hardly an unpopular criticism, nor is it one which I feel detracts from the enjoyment of the game. Like my grandmother once said, since women like tall, dark, and mysterious men, you ought to stand on a chair, switch the light off, and lie. If you do, proverbailly or not, you will find SER to be a stunningly satisfying experience, with fun little asides, plenty of guff to find, and a multiplayer that is so fundamentally exciting that it leaves me breathless.

Well worth the full asking price, and doubly so if you get the season pass to boot.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I must punch Hans's happy memories of eating schnitzel out the back of his head.

Am I on crack? Are the other reviewers?

"ASCES/ATC is broken."

No? It isn't? I did three end to end runs with various locos and at no point did I get braked on unexpectedly? Just because a 45 restricted surprises you does not mean the ATC and ASCES don't work, it means that it is a crappy and outdated system.

Anyway, the route is solid. Downright good, even. The only bug I had was the annoying alerter beep when meeting oncoming trains. That can get irksome. The scenery is nice, the stations are nice, and the route's biggest sin is that about a third of it, namely the run to and from Trenton, is very boring. That's just the NEC. Straight line, count the bushes.

Promising. Adore the ALP46, adore the bilevels, adore me NJT.

Don't listen to the rest of the reviews, which I am frankly utterly befuddled by.

There is nothing wrong with this route. All scenarios and timetables and tutorials work as intended. The ATC and ASCES do too. It is entirely bug free. The only bug I have experienced thus far is that, in one of the services, my door operation on the M3 got stuck until I re-inserted the key manually.

Otherwise, this is a stellar short commuter route, hour-long runs either way, quite linear and somewhat dated scenery, but under the right conditions, extremely atmospheric. The physics on the M3 are good, but on the M7A, they're a bit go-kart-y. Nothing tragic, however.

Solid experience on sale, would thoroughly recommend.

Abysmal performance, oftentimes in the single digits despite every other route running at a steady 60, and the ATC/ASCES is broken. I was doing an F40PH run and every signal I passed kept punting me into 20 restricted, despite a clear aspect. It's a crying shame, too, as the trains are fantastic and the sounds are great.

Avoid until fixed.

The Cold War. Paranoia, secrets buried in forsaken bunkers, empires on the cusp of war and of humanity's maddening pace, hoping against hope to keep up with itself. It is, as Gramsci put it, a time of one world dying and another struggling, painfully, to be born; a time of monsters. The richness of stories you could tell in what amounts to a relatively brief fifty-odd year period is frankly incredible, and I am, time and time again, taken aback by how few games try to do so.

This is partly what drew me to Fallout. It certainly is not the story of any real place or places in time, but it absorbs enough trappings of the Cold War period to appeal to me for the reasons outlined above; appeal, and then overtake my very soul, and now, many years after the fact, it is one of my favourite IPs.

So, you can imagine the sort of reaction little old me had when they announced Atomfall. What's that? A Cold War narrative of an exclusion zone beset by monsters? Right, that's already good, but then - it's set in England?!

I pre-ordered. I pre-ordered the deluxe edition and spent the entire time giggling my way to the bank.


Bloody Norah, I love Sniper Elite. I love playing around with enemies in small zones, exploiting the geography to trap and massacre them, and being a right old pest about the lot of it. My PS4 is pretty much a Sniper Elite Machine at this point. I have shot, stabbed, set ablaze, thrown off rooftops, and otherwise maimed and hurt every German this side of Bavaria, and I utterly loved it.

What I loved about SE is present here, too - the zones are small, but they are hand-crafted. Their limited size allows every part of them to feel both believable and thought-out, and you'll be delighted to know that the approach of posting up in a choke point and letting the lads line up single-file for you works brilliantly. You don't have quite as many toys to play with as you do in SE, and the stealth is certainly more punishing, but the charm is all there.


Actually, let's circle back to that - the stealth in this game is very different to your usual fare. Whereas in something like SE, you can plot out this very meticulous stealth-only approach and destroy an entire base without even a single lad in it realising until they're face-to-face with the big schnitzel in the sky, in Atomfall you're expected to use stealth as a part of your kit, and not the whole of it. In fact, you're expected to play quite aggressively. Firearms are one-shot kills almost always, both for yourself and for the enemies. You have to, very carefully, execute sequences of murdering people from afar, from up close, and then hiding as best you can, until they lose sight of you and you can do so again. At its best, it feels a bit like a very visceral game of tag, or a perverse remake of the Goonies.

At its worst, well...it can feel clunky. The melee is a bit hit or miss for me. A lot of it feels like button-mashing, and whilst there is some tech - notably in pitching sickles, garden hoes, bits of wood, and God knows what else at the fleshier parts of your opponents' faces - it is, for the most part, a fairly standard affair of hit them twice, press S, hit them twice again. When you figure the melee out, it becomes almost comically easy to take the baddies out, especially as they will kindly line up for you single-file so you can bonk them in sequence.

Now, before you douse a bit of wood in pitch and get your pokey sticks out, please remember that this is very intentional, and that, were this not the case, you'd be turned into a pincushion in record time.


The plot is marvellous. The scenery is brilliant. At 150% render resolution, with everything set to ultra, she purrs away at a rock-solid 60 FPS on my 3060. Every tree, bush, bit of grass, brook, and pebble is fully and lovingly rendered. The effect is mesmerising. A walk through the woods feels like a genuine substitute for going outside.

Actually, about that: this is a detective game wearing the skin of an immersive sim. You do not have quests, you have clues. There is absolutely nothing at all stopping you from going anywhere from the word go, but because there are no quest markers, you are going to be poking, prodding, prising, and peering with an endless amount of questions, and I strongly advise you read every scrap and bob of paper you come across.

So much of it is steeped in Englishness. There's massive chunks of it that made me go "I recognise that!" and other chunks that made me go "I don't recognise that, but I am sure my nan would!" It adds to the atmosphere. This is unmistakably late 1950s Britain, in an aberrant sort of way, transplanted from time and manifested as such through a kaleidoscope of often anachronistic elements - none of them should work together as well as they do, and yet...


This is a short game. I am about halfway through it. I do not want it to be longer. I do not need it to be longer. This is fine. Not everything needs to be a 50 hour large-scale RPG. This will take you, supposedly, around 15 or so hours to finish. I am quite nearly physically middle-aged and psychologically elderly, and for me, that's bang on. I don't have time to learn a new language or how to play piano with my feet to get the true ending, and I like that a lot.

What I have played of this game, I will likely never forget, and I can easily see myself replaying it again...and again...and again.

And all because you can pour yourself a virtual cuppa.

Right, so, intro...intro...

How to do this without giving the jig away. Oh, I know! Right, so, do you like to drive? Do you like scavenger hunts? Do you enjoy games where you need to prioritise, think on your feet, and learn how to tackle specific situations on the basis of their broad similarities to other, previous experiences, but without anything to guide you in this process but your own lived experience?

That last one is a mouthful, but you know, it fits - Pacific Drive is a game about discovery. It is also many other things: a game about love and loss, about obsession and genius and the strain between the two, and how ambition can wreak havoc not only on the world at large, but on the narrow, raw stuff of human nature.

It is also one of the greatest video games I have ever played and, in my humble view, one of the greatest video games ever made, full stop.


I feel it best to get the negatives out of the way - or, more accurately, the negative. The one. Just the one.

At first, I struggled with running it. So, right off the bat: this game is horribly optimised when it comes to the shadows specifically. When setting the shadows to medium, expect the game to look and feel completely different to how it does with the shadows on high. I'd play with the latter setting but every time I tried, I ended up broiling my GPU in its own tears. As such, I bit the bullet and mulched on with medium. So bear that in mind.

From there, it's all incredible. The introduction gave me goosebumps. The soundtrack is, top to bottom, floor to wall to delightful ceiling, wonderful, and this is coming from me, a woman whose musical taste stops in 1975. When even I end up tapping my foot to it, I'm confident in declaring it good. You get a taste of it in said intro. One minor mechanical discombobulation later, and you're off to the races.


Some people on this forum like to whinge and moan and gripe about the game's lack of a save system, such as "respects your time." You, dear reader, may find this bewildering. I know I did. The game's save system is...fine? Let me explain, and handily pick apart the gameplay loop at the same time.

The game is divided into runs. Each run consists of several interconnected areas. Your only mandatory objective is to collect a resource needed to open the exit and leave to your garage (your "base") or, in areas which open onto other areas, to go through the exit to the next open area, with the aim of eventually exiting to your garage. That's your lot. Between entering a level and leaving it via the above described method, you are free to do anything you want. Loot everything in sight? Sure. Admire the view whilst jiving to the radio? Absolutely. Stick a hand down your trousers and play with your delicates like it's rebate yahtzee time at the vintage auto club and you forgot your dice? Weird and confusing, but by all means! The world is your oyster.

Lingering in an area for too long, round about twenty or so minutes, will cause the zone to start closing. Some people do not like this. They fancy they'd like to spend more than twenty minutes in a zone. That is...weird, in my view, as I have never needed to linger around that long, but I suppose it comes down to preference. The levels are on a timer, but it is frankly a generous timer, and meshes insanely well with the atmosphere of the zone as a hostile, inhospitable place.

But, see, the netizens which prowl this humble blogoblag that is Steam dot com have taken offense with another part of the game, and that is how it saves: only at the ends of every run. A single run can, admittedly, take up to two hours. This is at its most extreme, and a single run, where I am reasonably focused, takes me about an hour and a half. If you need to leave during this hour and a half and, for some reason, do not have the time to find the anchors needed to open an exit, you have to forfeit the run and all your goods.

I understand how this can be frustrating and empathise with those who find it to be such. However, if you have more than an hour and a half in single sittings to play this game during, this is...a bewildering non-issue. Even then, if you need to leave early, gathering the requisite exit resource requires, at its most extreme, around fifteen minutes. If you cannot guarantee that for yourself, then yes, I absolutely would not recommend this game. Is it bad that you cannot save in the middle of a run? Not...really. I get the argument, but it is not essential.

Strip away the complaints, and what you get is an incredibly solid core gameplay experience wrapped in a stunning presentation with wonderful plot and atmosphere and, once again, a tremendous soundtrack.


No.

I am not saying a damn thing. To paraphrase from Lin Hendrix, the unlucky USAF test pilot forced to fly the XF-84H Thunderscreech, you aren't big enough and there aren't enough of you to make me.

This is one of those experiences, like The Outer Wilds, where learning things for yourself is utterly essential. If it seems like I am deliberately and - somewhat clumsily - bouncing around the point, I am. Your first hours in the Olympic Exclusion Zone will be spent in a state of giddy, child-like awe, at the marvelous, weird, and inexplicable things around you, things which you can get the measure of solely by driving straight into them. The effect is immense - at once I understood that I was not, as ARDA had fancied themselves, a curious onlooker rapping against the glass enclosure of some unknown thing.

Rather, I was the thing, and the rapping, the thunderous clatter of a cosmic finger against a trap of my own making, was the echo of an incomprehensible and ancient power, before which I am so small and so insignificant that only my own desperate want to survive could provide any meaning. What I learn, I do so off the scars on my own hide, and off the happenstances I live through - at once awe-inspiring, intimately striking, touching and humbling and, most of all, deeply ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cool.

Play this game. Steal someone's computer and play it. Buy a PS5 just to play it. Play it, play it alone, and then obsess over it, and lament the fact that you can see the end, and that you may never go back and play it again for the first time.

Just trust me on this.

Okay, quick and dirty review. I have little to add about the overall quality of this addon in comparison to the other reviewers. The scenery is simple, the rolling stock is passable, though crude at times, and the scenarios are sometimes broken. Nothing new under the Sun.

But look, listen.

This route is set in the 1960s.

Please, click on any of the screenshots of this route that contain cars and zoom in.

Those are NOT 1960s cars. And you may think "so what? I am here to drive the trains. Who cares?"

I care. I care immensely. I live and breathe the 1950s and early 1960s. This route could have been so good. We were so close. But seeing a 2000 Cadillac Coupe De Ville drive past me slowly was genuinely rancid.

If there is a mod to fix this, I am begging you, drop it in the comments to this review. If not, by God, I'll make one myself.