Recent reviews by Daes

I want to start my review by saying that I haven't beaten the game yet. Hell, I've only gotten through the first level!
But I feel like I already have a lot to say about it, so I'm writing the review now, and I'll edit it once I finish the game.

I've only been a fan of Script's games for a few years, Don't Escape: 4 Days to Survive is the first game of his that I played, and I really enjoyed it. It was a really great and Polished experience, and I've enjoyed all of my playthroughs of the game. I eventually got around playing the other Don't Escape and Deep Sleep games, and really liked them. Script really has some skillful hands when it comes to creating a great world with a great atmosphere.

When I heard that he was working on a new Deep Sleep game, I wasn't sure if he was gonna be able to outdo himself, after all, Don't Escape 4 was an amazing game. But the more we got to see of the game through its development (with screenshots, trailers, etc), it became clear rather quickly that this was really gonna be not only his greatest games yet, but just an amazing game overall. And man, I think it has surpassed all of my expectations!

There's so much to unpack in this game, it looks beautiful, it sounds beautiful, it's very fun, it's full of detail, it's very large... you really do get a lot of bang for your buck here.
I knew this game would be more complex than Don't Escape 4, but I didn't expect it to be in this level.
The game has advanced quite a lot on every aspect, graphically, sound-wise, content-wise, and, most surprisingly, gameplay wise. At first glance, you might expect this game to play similarly to Don't Escape 4, but there are so many unexpected complex mechanics here. I think the combat system is the most surprising of all, whereas previous games didn't really have any combat at all, this game has some rather complex turn-based combat, with many decisions to be made on how you will handle fights, what resources you will use, how you will gather them, how the enemies work, etc.
It's a lot of fun to play and experiment with.

The rest of the gameplay also has a lot of layers to it. The game is essentially divided in two sections, the dreams, which are really the meat and bones of the game, and the waking world, where you get to make decisions that will affect the dream sections. Here, you will get to walk around the protagonist's apartment, which has a really nice atmosphere, combining the work game's composer, Carlonec, with Script's beautiful art, to create a really nice looking place. I mean hell, I really just want to step through the screen and spend some time chilling in there, looking at the city below while drinking some coffee on the balcony... it's great. I love moments like this in horror games, where you get to take a break and get a glimpse of the protagonist's ordinary life.
Anyways, when you're awake, the game is somewhat similar to the Persona games, if you've played them, as you basically have to choose an activity to do for the day, which will grant you bonuses in the dream sections.
There are several options to choose from, so you really get you experiment and adjust your resources how you want.

You will also find a computer here, where you get to use the points you earn through the dream sections to unlock new abilities and items to craft.
Now, normally I don't like these kind of systems in videogames, but I think it's done rather well here. It's simple enough to not be overwhelming, but also complex enough to be very fun and let you play the game how you want. And all the things you unlock really do feel important and useful.

Then come the dream sections, which play quite differently from Script's previous games. The gameplay is a little more like a traditional game, mixing RPG and Survival Horror elements. You'll definitely feel at home if you like games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill. You get to explore large maps, finding resources, solving puzzles and fighting or avoiding enemies.
So far, none of the puzzles I've encountered are particularly complex, reminding me more of Resident Evil's puzzles than Silent Hill, but still, I enjoy this kind of thing and it feels right at home here. The game's resource management system is very interesting, feeling like some sort of middle point between the classic Resident Evil games, and something like Resident Evil 4, as you get to upgrade your life bar, inventory size, etc, but (at least so far in my playthrough), you don't really become overpowered.
Through the game you will find multiple items that can be used as weapons, and each of them work differently, for example, some weapons may deal more damage, but also let your enemy skip a turn. Or, you might find a shield that blocks some of the damage you take, and at the same time hurts the enemy once they attack.
The combat is turn-based, but not in a traditional "the player and the enemy each get consecutive turns" way. Enemies take a certain amount of turns to attack, so deciding when to attack, when to block and when to use healing items or craft stuff is very important.

The game's crafting system is very nice, it's fun to use but again, not particularly overwhelming. Essentially, you get a certain amount of charges during a dream, that you can use to craft things like healing items and weapons. There are ways to restore your charges for the night, but they may not always be available. You can also increase the maximum amount of charges you can have with the computer, using the soul points you get through the game. Basically, it's a sort of currency, certain actions give you some soul points, although the main way of earning them is through completing the dreams and main objectives. These are what you later use in your computer to unlock new abilities and items to craft.

As for the game's story, well, I can't say too much yet, as I haven't gotten too far yet (really, most of the playtime I have right now is just me exploring and fooling around with the game), but so far it's really intriguing and really makes me excited to get through the game to learn more!

Overall, this is just a great game. It's a really fun experience, and you can tell Script has really poured all his soul into it. You can just feel it in every design, every piece of dialogue, every little nod, either to previous games or the real world, as this game is still set in the 90s and so you'll find a lot of cool details to old technology here (I might just be a really huge nerd :P). It's a game that, of course, every Scriptwelder fan NEEDS to experience, but at the same time, any fan of horror games, graphic adventure games, survival horror games, really should try out, because aside from being this developer's best game so far, it's also just a really well done game on its own. It feels really professional, and you will not regret your time with it.

this game sucks

this game sucks

Not worth your money. Simple as. I frankly can't be bothered giving more details, seeing as people dismiss every single one of this remaster's problems as "nitpicking". Waste your money as you see fit.

:,(

It pains me to give this game a bad review, I was really looking forwards to it. But this is just not worth the money, at least not at the moment.

I was expecting to play a game that I could have fun for hours and hours, like the classic Atari games it's based on. But it just has nowhere near the replay value of those. The concept is great, I liked the idea of a microgame collection based on Atari games, but the exeuction just... lame. Yes, there are around 150 microgames here, but they are really short and they have no replay value individually. Some of them change a little bit each time you play, but the change is so minimal it's barely noticeable.

Atari devs from back in the day used to talk about how randomness is really important for the replayability of a game, and it's really ironic that this wasn't really taken into consideration here. Once you've played a microgame 2 or 3 times, you know how to beat it each time, whenever the game doesn't glitch out or the controls don't work, of course (yes, the glitches are minor, but when you're playing games that last for seconds and you can't afford mistakes, it is quite noticeable). And the thing is, even if there are many microgames, many of them are just slight variations of one another, I mean, I've lost count of how many Pong variations there are. Sure, you get to play as different characters and stuff, but it doesn't make much of a difference.
Some of the minigames are also so easy to beat, like, just press the button a couple times at the start and you've won. Great...

The "caretaker" section of the game isn't that great either. There isn't much to do aside from getting to section to section. You solve some puzzles but they're pretty mindless, and there's an attempt at exploration by locking certain sections with items that you find later on, but it's so simple it's barely anything worth noting. You can't interact with the scenary around you, and the characters you meet just repeat the same text once you're done with their cutscenes. A really big missed opportunity, it would've been so neat to learn about the games by talking to characters or inspecting furniture, but no. Nothing.

And then there's the collection aspect. It's... barely worth mentioning, honestly. You can find box art lying around, and you get the manuals for the games if you beat the mice's minigames (which aren't unique at all, they're the same ones you play when fighting the bosses or when using the arcade machines). But... you can just easily find this stuff online. Like, great, I get to read the same manuals I've read over a hundred times already. Was it too much to ask to let us unlock the actual games this is supposed to be celebrating? Of course, that's reserved for the upcoming Atari 50 collection, no way they could've included it here!

And this costs 20 bucks! That is, quite honestly, way too much for what this game has to offer. About 150 minigames that don't play that great, don't really look that great either (am I the only one who's really tired of this "neo-retro" style? It's just so generic and overused, I would've quite honestly rather get graphics based on the original games), and most of them are just slight variations of one another. You get to see boxart and manuals, which you've probably already seen a dozen times, and you don't even get to play the actual games. Until this drops in price, it's just not worth the asking price, I'm sorry.

For 10 bucks it might be a good deal. But for this price you may aswell just get Atari Vault, where you actually get to play the games you see here. Without any time limits, without broken controls and collision, and you even get the manuals and boxart there too! I think I'll be getting a refund...

Honestly, this game would've been better if it was just actual, full remakes of these original games. You know, without the time limits, with all the game modes and features of the games, not just simple microgames.

I've seen a lot of people in these reviews mention that they expected maps based on the Ps1 games, like the Spencer Mansion, RPD, Raccoon City's streets...
My expections weren't even that high. I just expected this to be a bunch of maps from Resident Evil 4, 5, and maybe Revelations. But no, as has happened time and time again, Capcom has managed to destroy my expections in such a way, that I felt like an idiot when I finally played the maps.

You pay 5€ for 4 ♥♥♥♥♥♥ maps. Yes, 4 maps. Not even the default 6 that you'd expect. And you don't even get to play them on the maximum difficulty. Great!

But at least the maps are good, right? No! They're not even maps from Resident Evil 4 or 5 as I expected, it's 1 map from Revelations and 3 maps from Resident Evil 6. What kind of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ throwback is that?! Revelations 1 was just 3 years old when this dlc released, and Resident Evil 6 wasn't even 2 years old yet. Not to mention, most Raid mode maps were already taken from Resident Evil 6, and a couple from Revelations. What the hell, Capcom?

And the maps themselves are honestly very ♥♥♥♥♥♥. The Revelations 1 map is really small, it's just the golden main hall, I had some hope that you'd at least get to explore the Solarium, because the door can be opened at the end, but nah, you don't even get that. You just fight a few dogs and that boss from Revelations 1. It doesn't even add any new enemies or nothing.

And the same goes for the other 3 maps from Resident Evil 6. Not only do they add nothing new, they also like to repeat 2 or 3 enemies all the way through. The mines level is the one with the most variety, but it's not much. The one with the town is basically just a bunch of the blob guys that throw that ♥♥♥♥ that blinds you, and the Jelly guys that are annoying as ♥♥♥♥. The party room stage from 6 is basically just enemies from the first chapter.

Not only that, but because it's only 4 maps, they decided to increase the enemy count to pad out the length, with some maps having 40 enemies and others having 60. Each one basically takes 10 minutes to beat, which is way too much for levels that pretty much have only one room.

This is garbage. It's only worth it if you get the deluxe edition which comes with it. But even then, you probably shouldnt' even bother playing them.

Damn, this sucks. So in this DLC you play as Moira and the old man from the sewers trying to survive in the island for as long as possible.
Now, that may sound like a great concept, and it is!
But how's the execution? Absolutely terrible. So you first start the game and you get to pick between easy and hard... that's great right? So you choose hard because you think that easy might be too easy. What could go wrong?

And the first section of the DLC is actually pretty fun. You go around the forest with the old man, you have some limited time to hunt down some animals to get food, which you later learn acts as basically a lives system. This doesn't sound bad at first, until you realize you can only have up to 5 lives, and it really takes a lot of animals to fill that up. Oh well, you probably won't need more, right?

So then you get to the second section, and suddenly the game decides it hates you. Enemy after enemy after enemy, all of them are bullet sponges and pretty much never get stunned when you shoot them. But it doesn't stop there, of course not, the game spawns one of the bosses like 3 times. And by the time you get close to the end, you run out of bullets. And where do you get more bullets? In the first section of the game, of course! But now you can't go back.
Eventually, you end up losing all your lives, and you don't get to replenish them because there are no rats or anything where you respawn.

So what happens when you run out of lives? You lose ALL your progress! Great! It's like an Nes game, very limited lives, only getting easy and hard difficulty levels, and if you run out of lives, you go back to the start. No continues.

And so, you go back to the start of the game, and this time, you make sure to grab every single item you can find, and not waste a single bullet on any enemy. Or at least, that's what I did. I used Moira's flashlight all the time and then hit the enemies with the crowbar. Which works... sometimes, other times they just refuse to get stunned and just hit you. I finished the first section being nearly dead, but thankfully the game replenishes all your health after each chapter.

Now you're back at the sewers. You manage to just barely survive, with no healing items left, barely any bullets and probably only like 2 lives. But at least you got through the worse, right? I mean, what could be worse than having to fight 3 of the fireball guys?

A stealth section. With the wiggly jelly guys from Barry's campaign. Great! So you try to go around silently, find some animals which always run away as soon as you get close to them, so no extra lives for you. And then you get spotted by one of the monsters through a fence while you couldn't see them. Nice! So what happens when you get spotted? You get 20 seconds to run to... some spot. Which spots? I have no clue. You'll never get there anyways, because these things run much faster than you can.
Well, to be fair, I did get to the spot once. It's that path that goes uphill. Problem is, I got there at the exact same time the timer ran out. Moira started to talk as if I had just barely managed to get there, but the game still told me I had run out of time and had to restart.

And of course, once you run out of lives, it's back to the very beginning. By then you'll think to just switch to easy mode. But I have a better idea, how about you switch to a better ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game? Or play raid mode.

So yeah, it ain't worth it, unless you hate yourself. If you thought you were gonna get some kind of survival-like dlc, you'll be completely disappointed. The whole survival mechanic is just an excuse to extend the playtime by making you have to start the dlc all over if you run out of lives.

♥♥♥♥ off Take Two, I hope you go bankrupt.
Stop the lawsuits.

So you pay 5 bucks for a 28 years old game, and what do you get?
A Dosbox emulated version of the game that crashes when you try to change any of the emulator's configuration.
That's a new low.