Recent reviews by FefnirIRL

That Dragon, Cancer is a hard game to review. As a game, it may be sparse, but as an expression, it's a whole lot more. It's the intimate and personal tale of the brave Joel Green told by his father. The Green family immerses us in their loss by sharing vignettes and fragmented memories of their harrowing experience. I can't imagine how painful or therapeutic a project like this must have been.

Everybody deals with loss in some capacity at some point. Coping mechanisms are as varied and nuanced as the people who use them, but something like this is truly unique. You can debate and analyze the merit of something like this in the larger gaming sphere, or you can take it as what it is: a tribute to a boy taken before his time. I won't pretend that I was entirely entranced by the gameplay, but to complain about something like the controls in certain sections feels tone deaf.

This is a beautiful remembrance of a son who is very sorely missed, and I think everyone could find something cathartic in its reflection.

LISA the Joyful is a masterfully crafted conclusion. All I could think of when I finished LISA the Painful was, "What happens to Buddy now? Is she gonna be okay?" After the daring exploits of Brad Armstrong, I wanted to know that all of the pain and struggle was worth something. Lucky for me, my pleas were answered.

This time, you're playing as Buddy herself, shortly after the events of the first game. Buddy is no schmuck, and is more than capable of braving Olathe alone, though she somewhat reluctantly takes Rando as a companion. While you were playing video games, she studied the blade, and her studies rendered her a cold and efficient warrior. Her goal? To conquer and rule Olathe on her terms.

A shorter journey than the initial game to be sure, but it's focused. Buddy must track down and kill the six remaining warlords, usurping their thrones to unite the people under her own. The pace never falters as you race from lord to lord, making corpses of each. I like how this portrays Buddy's character through gameplay—she's on a mission, and nigh unstoppable in her conviction. You see exactly what happens to those standing in her way.

The Joyful also differs from the Painful in that only Buddy and Rando are playable here. Again, this just shows to me that Buddy isn't out to make friends. Brad had his faults to be sure, but above all else, he raised her to be strong and capable. This shows because Buddy feels just as strong on her own as Brad and company. I liked Rando for the vibes, but he never felt essential to climbing the ranks of the warlords.

I totally see why they released a complete edition containing both the Painful and the Joyful, because the DLC is truly essential to the narrative at large. I think anyone who played the base game and didn't come back for this did themselves a disservice, both for the lack of a complete story and missing out on more LISA weirdness and fun.

LISA: The Painful is aptly named. Games have been emotionally assaulting gamers for years, but none of them do it quite so viscerally as LISA.

In a post-apocalyptic world sans women, it's up to Brad to shelter the only girl left, his adopted daughter, Buddy. After years of hiding her identity as a woman, she's unluckily unmasked one day and that's when LISA truly begins. You take control of Brad, a Joy addict in the throes of withdrawal, forced to pick up his old bad habits to get her home.

LISA is absurd. The music is goofy and groovy, the character designs are wacky and weird, and the gameplay is funky and fresh. The surreal world you find yourself in is dichotomized by the somber and serious story that you experience. You might kill a man with a big-ass fart in one beat only to then watch a man kill himself by your command. It kept me on my toes the whole game, crying laughing one second, then just good old-fashioned crying the next.

LISA is fed to you in the form of a turn-based RPG, but it's far from typical. There are 30 possible companions, which is great until you find out any given party member is just one slip-up away from permadeath. Characters can suffer from withdrawal, or excel while inebriated. You have to find a balance between helping your party or enabling their addictions while juggling your meager Joy and alcohol supplies. Who matters to you? Who doesn't?

Being responsible for the safety of the sole surviving woman in a world of angry, violent, and drunk men lit a fire in me to get Buddy back safe. But LISA begins to ask you how far you're willing to take that. Would you, say, sacrifice a teammate to dodge a fight? When asked to give up your own flesh or have an innocent pay the price, what will you answer? LISA makes you complicit. You're not watching a story about a man doing bad things. You're choosing to do them.

I loved my time with LISA. It was fun to play, listen to, and look at, but underneath the colorful and vibrant surface, it forced me to think, too. About what's right or wrong, what ends justify the means, and even about my own humanity. It takes a great game to hit such diverse highs and lows, but LISA never misses.

F.E.A.R. is dope. It does a great job at balancing polar opposites—the feeling of being a bona fide badass mowing down baddies in this ♥♥♥♥♥ and the feeling of being a little pee pants baby. There's a beauty in being the belle of the ball only to immediately be reduced to a rat in the next instant.

As we know, F.E.A.R. is no spring chicken. Some mechanics do feel slightly dated, most of note being the inability to aim down sights. Not a necessity by any stretch, but it feels very odd to not be able to just look down the scope. Luckily, being the elite gamer I am, I was still an incomprehensible force of nature, but it didn't escape my notice. Other than that, the game felt smooth. The movement is what you'd expect in an FPS—you can walk, run, and jump, and interacting with the map is intuitive and breezy. Guns feel heavy, and the ability to slow time for short bursts makes for some cinematic ass-blasting—just the way I like it.

Really, the levels can be slightly circuitous; I'd often find myself dropping into a corridor or rounding a corner and—oh, I've been here before. This was a little frustrating, but it would only last until I saw a stray flicker of light or heard footsteps pointing me in the right direction. The environments were excellent. You go from labs to offices to derelict buildings, each with plenty of heart. The lighting and textures sold the mood hard—tensions are high, and you're never sure you're safe, constantly on the watch for spooks and soldiers.

There's a lot of love for the enemy AI in F.E.A.R. and that's because... it's also dope. In gunfights you're forced to dart to and fro around cover, or enemies will make efforts to flank you. They'll also call out to each other to flush you out, cover them, contact made—of course it's an illusion, but it's so well-crafted that you fall for it easily.

Story is where F.E.A.R. hides most of its horror, centered around Alma Wade. She's the little girl who will haunt your visions, showing you hallucinations of freakish and gruesome scenes scattered across the game. There are a few enemies that lean into the motif, blending in with the shadows or vanishing into thin air, but I think the separation of church and state (horror and action) works in the game's favor by not diluting either half.

The first letters of each paragraph spells FARTS, lol. Anyway, I think F.E.A.R. has a lot to offer for both action and horror enthusiasts, and I'm excited to see what the rest of the series has to offer.

I feel like these "work-the-counter-while-unknown-threats-abound" type games are starting to become a little formulaic, and I think Kiosk is one of the worst offenders. This premise isn't awful, but without making a clear and present threat or escalation of any kind, this one falls flat.

There's a shell of a game here, for sure. But it's not a horror game. It's a goofy cooking game. The mechanics work so well for this being that you can only throw and drop ingredients, and there is no grace in your handling. The easiest way I found to fulfill orders was to throw a ton of raw ingredients on the floor from the walk-in and use it as a large-storage shelf of sorts. Doing it any other way felt entirely obnoxious and burdensome and so, the floor was my store.

Now that my methodology has been revealed, let me reveal this: 90% of the game is a plain and undressed cooking sim. Customer comes, they order, you make it, they leave. Through a handful of different lines, you find that the prior worker of the kiosk had been murdered and the guy is on the loose, but these little snippets are so far and few between that it feels like an afterthought more than a deliberate narrative. It's so removed from what you're actually doing that you never feel like it's a legitimate threat.

On the technical level, this game does work, but being an actual player of it just feels so boring and pointless. You're under no pressure, the tension never rises, and the horror elements are shallowly tacked on. Scrap it, keep the bones, make a silly cooking sim. Commit to the bit.

Arctic Eggs asks the age-old question: Do you think you can fry an egg on Mount Everest? You're given plenty of time to ponder as you walk through a futuristic and dystopian Russia. You are the Poultry Peddler, a man whose existence has become cooking eggs (and various foods) for the street people, sating the masses. Your goal is to become so renowned that the Saint of Six Stomachs finally pays you notice and allows your leave from the city. Get cooking, comrade.

There are a handful of areas you roam in search of mouths to feed. You simply spark up conversation with every denizen to hear their needs. Some of them are simply looking for an ear to listen, telling you their woes or memories of Russia long past; maybe they teach you email etiquette or educate you on the Great Flamingo Ban. You can listen politely, or click past it all in search of the next mouth. It's when these hungry souls reveal themselves that you're put to a test of your culinary mettle.

A man, a pan, and a plan. Pan laid out in front of you, your purpose is simple: cook what is placed upon it. It could be an egg. Two, perhaps. A cigarette here or there. Cockroaches, beers, pufferfish—the scope of your work is quickly expanded as you meet the diverse and funky people of the land. Each item requires specific care to make correctly, and your mouse is simply an extension of your pan, you rotate and swirl and scroll and the pan moves in tandem. What initially looked like a very clumsy control scheme turned out revealing a very intuitive and responsive frying simulator. I liked it.

The charm here is the sheer absurdity—honestly, it evokes the same humor that something like Jazzpunk did. One second I'm laughing, the next, listening, absorbing the life story of the digital soul in front of me. Arctic Eggs' legacy to me is not endless praise and admiration, but a fond memory and a laugh now and again. It was a couple of hours that I was happy to spend in the freezing wasteland, warming people and their hearts one egg at a time.

I'm a sucker for a "sit here and listen" type game when it's done well. Adios tells a tale of leaving the mob through the eyes of a pig farmer, one who lent his livestock to body disposal. Mistakes were made, regrets have been regrut, and a man starts to reckon with his legacy and what truly matters. When that happens, sometimes you've just gotta say *title drop*.

If you're gonna tell me to shut up and listen, then one thing is paramount: good voice acting. And Adios has it! Both the farmer and hitman are voiced with excellency, and have a believable back-and-forth chemistry that draws you in with even the most mundane conversations. Why the hell do I care about this guy's vending machine repair hobby? Because you made it sound all nice and purdy-like.

Coming second to vocals is visuals. I'm stuck here listening to you, but what are you showing me to sell me on it? The art style in Adios is a cel-shaded and cartoon-y representation of a Midwest farm. And it plays. I have no complaints about the vibe as a whole, but unfortunately it does fall apart in some places. For instance, when a character is talking, their mouth isn't working in tandem with their voice, it's more reminiscent of Pac-Man, where it will simply open and close. And even then, it will open, the whole sentence is played, and then it closes. Not a dealbreaker, but in a game like this, it becomes very obvious very quickly, and does throw off some of the immersion.

Ignoring the minor hiccups with a little bit of mental fortitude, I had a good time going through the game. At several turns, you have a choice in the dialogue, so it keeps you as an active participant rather than solely an observer. You may notice that some dialogue options are greyed out, and when you attempt to speak them, are met with a "Hmm" or "Mm" instead from the farmer. What I guessed to be a representation of how sometimes you think something but can't bring yourself to say it was confirmed by the developer, which I found really cool. They stated all dialogue options are the farmer's thoughts, so even if you don't say something distasteful, the farmer was still thinking it. He's not a paragon of virtue, but he tries.

All told, you're looking at about an hour of shooting the ♥♥♥♥ with your old buddy and coming to terms with what needs to be done, one way or the other. It was a fun narrative setting, and in the short time I spent with it, I was able to empathize with both parties. Sometimes we can all use a reminder of what it looks like to try to be better, and something like Adios is as good of an example as any.

That said, I got this game for essentially a buck or two in a bundle. At a price tag of almost $20, I can't recommend it. On a sale for $5 or so, maaaybe $10 if you're feeling generous, sure, go for it, but the asking price for such little content is pretty egregious.

I like boba. I can't say I've ever wanted to run my own shop, but I didn't shy away after finding The Boba Teashop. What I wanted was a fraught narrative dealing with the nagging, suspected threat of strangers while working alone. But instead, the game reduced itself to a generic and unexplained ghost story, leaving it mediocre and flavorless.

Making drinks was alright. As you go through the days, your menu expands, and you're asked to make more and more complicated drinks. Awesome. As a former server, I prided myself on only hearing my digital customer's order once before delivering to perfection every time. On its own, that makes for a decent game, memorizing recipes and juggling drinks to get everything out on time.

However, our protagonist is stressed from working the shop alone, and starts seeing ghosties haunting the place. These ghosts will blur and darken your vision if you see them for too long, ultimately leading to you blacking out and starting the day over. This was an interesting concept, but because the ghosts were anchored to static positions, it just boiled down to "learn how to work the counter while looking at the floor", which in practice makes for a boring game.

Day after day, the light in your shop also dims to an annoying degree. This all culminates in the final night, with your shop practically unlit and infested with ghosts. So you're squinting at the screen, fulfilling orders while staring at the ground, grabbing cash, and instead of being scared, all you think is, "I can't ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ see." Do something to remind me I'm supposed to be scared at least. I can't look at the enemies, so they don't scare me, they don't move, so they don't scare me, and all I can do is look at the floor, so I'm not scared. Give me a reason to be scared.

The twist ending, admittedly, wasn't bad. I liked the trope flipped on its head a bit, but even then, there wasn't enough explanation to everything leading up to it. So when they say, "Bet you didn't see that coming, did you?" all I could come up with was, "But why?"

Buckshot Roulette is a gritty and dark depiction of a 1-on-1 showdown against a body-less nightmare in Russian Roulette. The twist? You play with a shotgun. The premise is creative, mayhaps even enticing, but the execution? Meh.

The game opens in a bathroom, graffiti'd and ominous. You're sat against a toothy demon of sorts and told to play his game. 30 minutes later, win or lose, credits roll, and you're out. What is this place? Who is this guy? Why am I here? Answer none of these questions and more in Buckshot Roulette!

The gameplay is simple, but satisfying to master. A number of rounds are loaded into the shotgun per round and you're shown how many are lives versus blanks. You must mentally keep track of this number while using items granted each round to eject the round, check the casing, and other effects. By the end of my duel with the Dealer, I felt I had achieved some sort of mastery, but unfortunately, this also spelled the end of the game, and that skill went to waste.

I think this game could've benefited a lot from a little exposition maybe, a few more challengers perhaps, another couple of items and combos to use... I'm told that's basically Inscryption, but this isn't Inscryption. It's Buckshot Roulette, and while it's cool on a conceptual level, it feels unfinished and closer to a stylish demo.

Daemonologie oozes gothic and creepy style, from the stilted stop-motion cutscenes to the authentic and stylized olde English. It's a game that confidently asserts itself as a time piece and uses every tool at its disposal to sell it. Unfortunately, it stumbles a bit on the logical storytelling it fails to capitalize on and the ending, but I was fully invested in getting there.

You play as a witch hunter with four days to investigate and find a culprit, then identify the heretic on the morning of the fifth and watch them hang. This investigation is done by either talking to or torturing the townspeople for information. As a non-psycho, torture was not the first thing on my mind, but as soon as the second day, the dialogue options began to feel limited, with characters not responding to certain shared info or just refusing to hold a conversation.

This could've been a cool mechanic meant to make the player engage with their sense of morality and examine what lengths they would go to in order to squeeze out any extra info. Unfortunately, the way it was implemented felt more like violence-gated dialogue than a true choice of whether or not you'd sink to these methods.

In the end, you make your accusation, the town trusts your authority entirely, and you watch your witch hang. Then you leave. Not a single word describing the aftermath, not a scene depicting what was left behind, and not so much as a "nice job, you got 'em" or "wrong lmao, try again". This feels hollow and open-ended, and while I'm sure it's intentional, I didn't feel I was left with enough substance to even come up with my own interpretation. Ultimately, I was left holding the bill on what could've been a very cool, if brief, period game.