Recent reviews by Count_Zero_Interrupt

Cairn is gonna stick with me. Beautiful visuals, simple but addictive gameplay, and a minimalist story that perfectly fits the theme. One of those games that makes you feel as if you've truly undertaken a journey. And a perfect ending.

Don't pick up this game unless you intend to play multiplayer. Singleplayer sucks, including the campaign. It was obviously designed from the ground up to have three human players working together, calling out targets and carrying complementary weapons. I'm constantly getting pelted by ranged units that my AI squadmates mostly ignore, and if I stop to try and focus on distant targets, I start getting swarmed in melee. Meanwhile, my AI squadmates are across the map standing in front of a staggered warrior that they refuse to execute for some reason. Warriors are constantly interrupting my combos when I try to clear out hormogaunts, and hormogaunts are constantly interrupting my parries as I try to deal with warriors. Doing damage to targets doesn't hinder them in any way, so I can be shooting a warrior in the face or wailing on it with my chainsword and it will just continue dishing out damage, unbothered.
Ranged options all feel disapointingly weak, and melee is boring and repetitive.
It feels like this was intended mainly as a multiplayer, live-service, DLC cash cow, with the ability to play solo tacked on as an afterthought, Which maybe is fine with you if multiplayer is what you're after. I was hoping for a cool, cinematic, challenging solo campaign, and did not get it.
The one good thing I'll say, the game looks visually stunning. It really brings the WH40K universe to life, and makes me want to play a better game set in it.

The first Silent Hill thing I've loved since 3. Personally, I think they captured the vibe and essence of SH, while taking it somewhere new and experimenting with the mechanics. Awesome setting, gorgeous visuals, amazing writing. Made me believe great Silent Hill is possible, again.

This is going onto my list of all-time favourites. It's a work of art. Visually, stunning. A mesmerising soundtrack, moody, melancholy, wistful and dark. The world is weird and dreamlike, striking exactly the right balance of creepy, absurd, charming, and sad. I loved every character, and literally every moment of the perfectly written and delivered voice acting. I spent a significant amount of play time just soaking in the ambience, gazing out over the many weird vistas and letting the music wash over me. It's worth taking your time with this one.
The only thing I'll say is that it's fairly light in the gameplay department. The mechanics are quite simple, as are the puzzles, and there's very few moments of actual challenge. It's really more about the journey and the experience. Which I think it pulls off beautifully, I only mention it as a warning to go in with the right expectations.
It's fairly short, but I don't subscribe to the idea that play time correlates to value. I haven't stopped thinking about this game since I finished it, nor have I stopped listening to the soundtrack almost daily. I'm giving it time to breathe, and looking forward to playing it through again.

I love the vibe and style, but the mechanics are spotty. Aiming and shooting is awkward. The camera angle is extremely bad for trying to line up shots. Not being able to run while injured sucks. It slows you to a crawl that's annoying even when you aren't in combat, and basically forces you into using medkits to avoid taking even more damage from reduced mobility. Enemies can easily mob up and trap you, leading to a quick death, and it's also easy to get hung up on environmental objects while trying to evade.
That said, the puzzles are good - I found them to land in a sweet spot of being tricky enough that you feel a little clever when you solve them, but not so hard that they slow down the game. Which is honestly what I want from puzzles in a survival horror. And the story is simple but pretty cool. By the end it answers enough questions to be sastifying, but also preserves some mystery. I won't spoil details, but it's nice to have a survival horror plot that doesn't revolve around some irredeemably insane and/or evil villain trying to rule the world, summon an evil god, or create supersoldiers.
It's a little short, and the structure of the game is built on backtracking back and forth across a pretty small overall area, which wasn't my favorite thing. But it's still a good time and definiitely worth playing if you're a survival horror fan.

I am always on board for a good walking simulator. I have no problem with an interesting narrative dressed up like a game. The thing is, there needs to be a *little* bit of interactivity and freedom, to push the feeling that you are participating in a story, not just watching it happen.
The Invincible is super hardcore linear. As expansive and as beautiful as the alien vistas are (and they are expansive and beautiful), the gameplay area you can actually access feels very much like a straight road. There are a few twists and turns, a few choices between a right turn and a left, but none of it dispels the feeling that you're on a track.
And that extends to the interactions. The game is full of beautifully designed retro-futuristic gear and gadgets and vehicles, and they're all practically bristling with tempting buttons, levers, handles and valves. From time to time you get to actually touch them, and it's a pleasure to listen to the satisfying clicks and kerchunks and hisses of machinery engaging. But the only stuff you get to touch is the stuff the plot specifically needs you to. Everything else is dead scenery. Stacks of crates you can't open. Drawers you can't root through. Lockers you can't snoop in. Doors you can't unlock. Switches you can't throw. This more than anything kills the feeling of inhabiting a world, for me.
You also get a handful of cool gadgets with some interesting functionality. But again, the only time there's any sense in using them is when the plot requires it, and it will directly let you know. There's nothing else to discover. No little side mysteries to come across, or puzzles to solve. You use a gadget when the game tells you to, and you walk forward until you get an interaction prompt. I thought the drone control was a particularly underused feature. They have cameras, and you can fly them around, but you mostly use them to just immediately land them to get their photo records.
I know the focus here is not on mechanics. It's a walking simulator. A graphic novel in game form. And that's totally cool. But I wish the devs had fleshed out the world a bit more, so that it felt less like a static stage. There's one or two random bits of in-universe lore you can find and read - this game needed way more of that. Let me find more notes, photos and reports, hell even the somewhat overplayed audio log would have been a welcome reward for poking around. Let me feel clever by using the Detector and Tracker to find out-of-the-way secrets.
Finally, the story. It starts off super strong. I was engrossed for the first half of my playthrough. But in my opinion in slows down a lot in the second half, and the climax doesn't feel much like a climax. The huge lore dump at the end, where it suddenly just explains in detail exactly what's happening, felt particularly jarring. I kind of wish there was more early game, before things get dire, and a little less late-game, where you spend a lot of time walking between sparse interaction points by yourself, almost certain you aren't going to encounter anyone.
So why the "yes" recommend? It's a beautiful game, and I'm glad I played it just for the retro-futuristic aesthetic. It's very well done, very cohesive with lots of personality. I want to spend more time in this universe. And although I think the plot gets weak in the latter half, the writing overall is extremely good, and the voice acting mostly excellent (another reason I'm sad the cast of characters is so small for most of the game). My main complaint is that I just wanted MORE. So I do recommend, with the understanding that it's a very limited walking simulator. Go into it with that expectation, and maybe grab it on sale, and I'd say it's worth your time.

I think this game is absolutely awesome, up until you reach room 46. But after that, it starts to grow a little tedious and repetitive.

Due to the RNG of drafting rooms and managing resources (steps, keys and gems), you can't always go where you want to go or try what you want to try. Progress often requires certain items, certain rooms, and even certain rooms placed in relation to each other. But in the early hours of the game, this isn't as much of a barrier, as there are so many puzzles to work on and new things to discover that, no matter how the randomness shakes out, you can find something interesting to do every day. And it IS impressive how the game keeps expanding, as you discover more and more rooms, items, secrets and even entire areas.

The problem is that the RNG DOES become a irritant in the late game, when you have less things to do. When you only have a few puzzles going, and you need specific rooms and/or items to show up in order to work on them, it's extremely annoying to go through a day without getting what you need and feeling like your time was wasted. Towards the end of my time with the game, I was sometimes drafting almost a full house and not getting the things I needed.

Add to this that some of the late game puzzles are extremely devious. Which meant that when stumped, I'd spend ages drafting as much of the house as I could, just to re-examine rooms for clues and info I'd missed.

Eventually I was spending so much time making so little progress that I decided to call it. And I'm glad I did, because upon reading spoilers I realised that I probably would have NEVER solved some of the remaining puzzles, despite banging my head against them for hours.

Overall I'd say this game is great, as long as you're willing to put it down once it starts to feel too repetitive and tedious, even if that happens before you've actually finished it. At the very least, I think it's worth completing the initial objective of reaching room 46, and then seeing if any of the loose ends you've go dangling intrigue you enough to keep playing.

What's really needed is some sort of mechanic designed to guarantee certain rooms during a specific run. Let me keep a room in my back pocket, to draft exactly when I need it. That alone would go a long way toward easing the repetitiveness.

Totally linear, with no decisions to make, and no gameplay mechanics beyond perfunctory quick-time events and instant-death chases and stealth sequences. I've played, and loved, my fair share of walking simulators (including walking simulators in the horror genre), but the problem here is that the story isn't interesting enough to carry the experience. There basically isn't a story - the anomaly simply occurs, and then you go on a series of errands to throw various switches and press various buttons. Other games fill out an experience like this by giving you log entries and documents to read, audio recordings to listen to, and/or interactable objects that give you fragments of the story to slowly assemble to learn what's happening. But not here. There's no mystery to piece together or narrative to theorize about. It's very straightforward, in a kind of disappointing way.
There are a few cool moments, and the characters are well-written and well voice-acted. But it's a very limited experience, that doesn't do anything particularly exciting compared to other titles in this genre. I wouldn't necessarily say avoid it, but there are much, much better options out there.

Seems like the kind of game where you have to make your own fun. There literally is nothing to do but survive. After several days of creeping around, gathering food and water, collecting weapons, I faced the prospect of surviving another day by doing all the same things all over again and thought: why bother? Got bored really quickly.
I like survival games, but they need goals above and beyond simply not dying. Give me a reason to get somewhere, do something specific, find certain information, etc. Also, games where you're guaranteed to die are only fun if it can happen in a variety of ways. Like Rimworld - the list of disasters and misfortunes that can befall your settlers is long and entertaining. Here, you're just gonna eventually get bit by a zombie and die.

It's a great concept for a game, and I had high hopes coming into it. But it's a mixed bag.

Mainly, the tone is all over the place. One second, someone is being brutally murdered on the air, the next Peggy and Nash are joking around and hamming it up. It really wrecked my sense of immersion that nothing really seemed to be taken seriously, and it never really ratchets up the tension or the stakes.

Early on it also seems like you're going to need to worry about keeping the show running smoothly and to remember what all the station controls do, but it doesn't actually matter. Everything you need to do is prompted, and most of the time the game just waits for you to progress by pressing the right button.

Some of the puzzles are decent, but many are way too simple and easy.

It's a short game and there's not much to it. Although I like the concept, I don't think it was executed super well. I think it's worth playing as a little diversion, but you might want to wait for it to go on sale.