Recent reviews by Kavaeric

There are a great many things to dislike about Payday 2. The game does look dated, and it's only really made worse by some of the weird post-processing effects and grody sharpening filter. The engine is old and is particularly unsuitable as it was initially made for a racing game, despite the fact that when certain heists ask you to drive, it is horrible. Stealth is mediocre at best and infuriating at worst without mods. And although this is a co-op game, the anti-cheat implementation is laughably lackluster.

Despite all of the above, however, there are few games that bring you the joy of wading through a knee-deep sea of dead cops while you airlift gold bullion out of a bank vault you melted open with your friends.

⚠ This game does feature a lot of strong strobing lights that I don't really know how to reduce or turn off. If someone knows they can leave a comment below, but if you are sensitive to strobing (and I don't write these warnings lightly) I'd recommend discretion.

Observation (2020) isn't for everyone. It's a fairly slow burning work that is held up by narrative and atmosphere than its gameplay, and does kind of lack a bit of high-level thematic or charcater ambitions, but if there's anything it does well it's selling the atmosphere and tone of the story.

A disaster has struck the joint international Low Orbit Space Station (LOSS), maybe a collision with debris or a decompression. Dr Emma Fisher, the medical officer among the crew of six, appears to be only one left as she figures out what has gone wrong and where everyone has went. But you don't play as Emma., or any human character; you play as the Systems Administration & Maintenance operating system, or "SAM", the station's on-board experimental AI that Emma manages to reboot despite loss of system functionality and memory data. As such, everything is only seen through the perspective of onboard cameras and abstract digital interfaces. You "move" by switching cameras from module to module, and only exert action in a room by way of the peripherals and devices you can pair with in them, and scan environmental details like documents and photos as you try to recover mission memory and hopefully piece together what happened.

The game's at its strongest when it's letting the atmosphere and mood of its environments speak for themselves. It's mostly just you, a decidedly non-anthropomorphic entity simultaneously flowing through and trapped in your space station body looking at yourself. The cameras have just the right amount of distortion that really mimics the look of the fixed cameras on board a space station, without being TOO noisy to be a farce. The space setting is used appropriately as well: you have the existential dread of being extremely alone surrounded by nothingness, but the space station itself as an interior environment that does also sell this tone. It's claustrophobic, the cameras mimic lost footage horror films, and the lack of a definite "up" in the myriad of modules and their cluttered interiors means it—which, in this case, also means your own body—becomes disorienting to navigate in and around. Observation is really good at letting its tone steep and seep into your veins as you slowly pan cameras looking for clues. I'd like to compare it to games like Outer Wilds where the setting of space is used not for self-fellatio for tech dudebros but to convey mood or broader thematic ideas, and I'd like to play more games like this.

Observation does stumble a bit in that some of these puzzle mechanics are a little obtuse and irregular. Sometimes the game throws a deliberately difficult quicktime thing at you, which I guess is tonally appropriate for the situation but still throws you off guard, and might be frustrating for some players in an otherwise contemplative and slow game. And this might be a bit of a nitpick but the lip syncing isn't too great. It's not Life is Strange bad, but in a game that does sell the atmosphere so well otherwise it's a little disappointing to be drawn right out of it when the lacking facial animation department comes into focus.

Observation's biggest flaws for me are the fuzzy and unfocused nature of its broader thematic goals. It plays like a video game equivalent of 2001: A Space Odyssey, what with un-anthropomorphic AIs both confined and liberated by this space station body settled alongside a human crew, combined with literal cosmic horror, but it doesn't really seem to comment or explore on, say, Emma's relationship with SAM. That's not to say being an AI in this game is unjustified, since it helps the verisimilitude of why you're following the directions barked at you by the humans, but the nature of SAM as a character and its relationship with Emma could definitely have used some development, and the game's narrative feels a bit hollow because of this.

Really it's more in the vein of Alan Wake, in that it's a game that benefits from an existing interest in the subject matter draped in these horror themes that's based on telling this cryptic but not incomprehensible story. But while I disliked Alan Wake for its total reliance on needing to be familiar the things it's referencing (and I really don't like it when games make me do homework) and its insistence on composing itself largely out of dry over-the-shoulder shooter mechanics (as if it feels like its audience would be bored if it didn't cram Gears of War into itself), Observation avoids most of those trappings and I feel is more successful in telling its story and conveying its mood to an audience that is receptive to this type of game, subject matter, and setting.

My trouble with the game was that I was lost many times. Sometimes I didn't know what to do, I felt a little underexplained, and I needed a hint or something, that I felt a little set back by some of the controls (and a lackluster support of keyboard and mouse, of all things).

But I realise now that was what the game was asking for. Discovery and exploration was there, but only I had the power to go out and reach it. No one was going to do it for me.

The Outer Wilds is a game about space, but not in the same way Kerbal Space Program or Star Wars Battlefront or Mass Effect or indeed any "space" game is about space. It's space exploration distilled to its spiritual and soulful essence—space in The Outer Wilds here is not a thing to exploit, to colonise, to mine for resources until it is a husk, but a place to ask questions and pursue their answers. There are no upgrades to be had, no powerups, no novel tools or anything as vapid as weapons or a booster for your jetpack. You, as you are, as an explorer, have all the tools you need to get out there.

Everything will die in the end, yourself, everyone you love, the universe itself. But despite that, or maybe because of it, it is worth going out there too see it yourself. Like a quantum object, reality only made manifest when it seen and observed and experienced. The unwitnessed, the undiscovered, the unexplored effectively does not exist; it is your job to will it into existence by the act of seeing it. It is not merely that you, an explorer, are someone who discover the universe, you effectively create it as you go, in ways unpredictable but inevitably beautiful and captivating.

For what is a campfire with no one to enjoy its flame, or music with no one to hear, or a universe with no one in it to experience it? And at the very end, the very very end, you too can share what you have experienced and created with others, coalescing into one whole that will feel desperately incomplete should you remove any one piece from it. Eventually you will have to let go. Nothing will stop it—you will have to let it end and begin anew. But what mattered was what you learned, created, that experience and journey, your quest and discovery for answers as you geared up to set out after new questions. In the end you set out to discover and create, and shared a song around a campfire. A song of the creation of a universe itself.

This song is new to me, but I am honoured to be a part of it.

It's difficult to really give a short summary of what I feel about this game, because it's not a game that's abysmally bad, but one that has a frustrating and captivating kind of bad that disappoints you in every turn as it tries to reach for greatness. It reaches for ideas that are sound and sometimes even interesting, but then manages to punch itself in the face like a terrible suburban mum in an informercial.

Like an infomercial it is 100% technically sound. There is nothing wrong with its performance, it looks fine with competent cinematography, the message and writing gets the idea across. On a functional level of "tell a story and have gameplay and look nice", it is Fine. At times it's impressive for a first game by a new studio, especially in the visual department, the shaders and lighting of the environments and objects feel top-notch. For those with RTX cards, both DLSS and RTX raytracing are supported, although the latter feature I left off since I couldn't feel an appreciable difference. Again, it is technically sound.

It's not offensively bad nor is it an assault on the senses or sensibilities. For many people it could be the perfect thing to put on while they switch their brain into lower power mode for an afternoon.

But Deliver Us The Moon doesn't want to be just Fine and Functional and Technically Sound, it wants to be amazing, breathtaking, dramatic, emotional, and grand in its scope. But it falls short: its story is lackluster, its gameplay is uninteresting, its atmosphere and environment never quite reaches the desired sheen. It wants to—pardon the pun—shoot the moon, but only just ends up running supply mission to LEO.

The gameplay and puzzles are barely worth referring to as such. Puzzles are built entirely of trite busywork—think Half Life 2's seesaw or car battery conundrums, except without the rest of the game or atmosphere to support it. The "survival" system is just a three-minute oxygen supply that necessitates glowing yellow oxygen tanks strewn around that you slurp up like Pac-Man. A few times the game even gives you control of a moon rover, but it's only used as a vehicle to get from point A to B, because there's a gate in A and the journal says you need to go to B to open the gate in A and it's too far to walk, so you get in the vehicle to drive from A to B to align the dish before going back to A and that's that. All of it is too involved and time-consuming to feel like a periphery inclusion to control the pace or let the environment seep in, nor are they really engaging or deep enough to feel like interesting, engaging gameplay.

The writing? It's bad, really bad—the opening reveal that the lunar base's leader basically turns into a moon despot is some of the worst foreshadowing and environmental storytelling I've ever seen, complete with cartoonish Orwellian propaganda posters christened with terrible hack slogans like "THROUGH LABOUR WE PROSPER" and the moon KGB going around abducting colonists in security footage. It is trite and arbitrary, effectively just being the excuse to have an abandoned moon base so that the rest of the story can unfold, not that it's any better. Dialogue is delivered with all the affectation of an English JRPG dub from the 2000s up until the very end and none of these characters end up with connections between each other and you, and thus you don't feel anything for them when there's an attempt at a tearjerker at the conclusion of the game.

The game just wants to be the video game version of Interstellar, but none of the writing is of the quality to even begin to approach it: it's Interstellar but instead the film starts at the 40 minute mark with the rocket launch, never having shown the lived experience on this decaying Earth or any appreciation for the plight of those who live and suffer on it. It's Interstellar where Cooper is sent into space with no crew, never talks or expresses his feelings about anything, and has no emotionally built connections to anyone back on Earth. I feel that the devs perhaps watched that film but then had no idea what made it work, and so the five-hour story is just the general premise of Interstellar followed by a scramble to find things to pad out the runtime, including excising other moments from other works in the most superficial way, such as the tumbling-in-space scene from Gravity or the design of the personality cores from the Portal series. It's Interstellar but with the emotional core excised and replaced with menial chores and hack writing.

It is immensely frustrating because there's a lot of competency on the technical side of the game, again with the lighting and environments, but it's in service to gameplay and writing that absolutely does not feel compelling or natural. It wants to be important but it thinks it can do so by focusing solely on shiny rockets and raytracing.

If you are interested in the art of writing of any kind, I'd actually suggest you give this game a shot, if only a cautionary tale on a shot for the moon that crash landed back down with a whimper. But if not, and you're looking for the video game equivalent of Interstellar...I don't think there is one, actually, but this is not it.

I finished playing Alan Wake a few months ago but I still have no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ idea what to make of it, and I'm not sure the game knows what it is either.



Mechanically the game is not that memorable. Your primary enemies are the Taken, ghosts that have been enveloped by shadow, who are immune to your gunshots. In order to defeat them, you need to shine your torchlight on them to expose their bodies, before you can shoot and take them down. It's...unique, but for me this kind of just reads as you needing two weapons that function almost identically to take down each enemy. Point at shoot with the first weapon, then point and shoot with the second weapon, repeat ad infinitum for the rest of the game. That's it.

There is some, but very little variety when it comes to combat, it is just this same point-and-shoot point-and-shoot for the entire duration. The challenge you get in the later portions of the game don't really come from new enemies with resistances that require tactical awareness or forethought and strategy, but just by throwing as much crap at you all at once in a frantic but monotonous arena. Aside from some parts of the asylum escape and maybe the police evasion I have a really hard time trying to remember any of the fighting sequences. You fight the same enemies with the same tools over and over again, and it gets really, really old really, really quickly.

Worse, this kind of gameplay ends up completely undercuts any attempts at selling a survival horror mood. Wake doesn't feel like a normal dude thrust into a horrible situation, trying to survive supernatural dark forces beyond comprehension, barely escaping by the skin of his teeth, with cosmic danger ready to pounce out of the inky darkness at any time. Instead, he feels like a skinny pasty homeopathic version of John McLane who is a little scrappy but is ultimately an action hero protagonist and shoots things and blows up dudes like a cool hero does.

Compare fighting the Taken to something like fighting the mutant spiders that have made their home in dark underground rooms in the Metro 2033 games: the spiders are far more agile than you, sneak up on you, and come at you from any angle. They can be shot and killed, but your ammunition is strained as it is, and so your only recourse is to point your light at them in the hopes that would scare them off, becoming a terrifying fight as you enter a corridor with multiple entryways, frantically trying to shift your torchlight onto the spiders coming at you from all directions in the darkness. The Taken in Alan Wake, for comparison, feel like your standard video game zombies: numerous, but ultimately still cannon fodder to chew through. They are, by any gameplay metric, unengaging.

Wake in this regard feels less Alien Isolation survive and more Doom 2016 survive. It neither has the mechanical depth to make fights interesting, nor does it use its mechanics in any way to actually sell a sense of terror about your situation.



Story-wise, I have no bearing on what the narrative is trying to do. Is it a commentary on writers and the art of writing? Perhaps on literature as a whole, or maybe the nature of its industry? Is it doing so for worldbuilding, setting up a supernatural universe? I have no clue. It reads like a sort of Stephen Moffat style approach, where everything is set up to be cryptic and weird and oh-what-does-this-mean, but is mostly there for sizzle than for any motivated reasoning. The timeline jumps around and plays with expectations and boundaries between "what is real and normal" and the whole fighting-dark-ghosts-with-a-torch thing, but I'm hard pressed to figure out any reason for this toying aside from being just deliberately confusing or "cryptic".

The one thing the game does seem to (try to) establish is that the reason why Wake imagines lumberjack ghosts are trying to kill him with sledgehammers is because he's schizophrenic. Worse, the game just kind of...throws that in the middle of the story that it intensely focuses on for a chapter, and then basically forgets about after. It feels like they picked it because they can plant even more unmotivated cryptic-ness by going Ooooo He's A Mental. If that sounds insultingly shallow, that's because, as far as I know, it is. Additionally I have little idea how it ties into the whole plot about his wife probably dying/drowning/whatever aside from just more He's Hallucinating It Because He's A Schizophrenic. The longer I think about that whole mental illness inclusion, the worse it gets.

Oh, and Wake just has like, no personality. At all. I get no sense of what motivates him and makes him do the things he does, aside from "he has a wife". There's a motif about a light switch that his mum gave to him when he was a kid that would protect him from things he's afraid of, but what is he afraid of? What drives him as a person? Is he afraid of writing as a career? Losing someone he loves? Why? I honestly know more about his damned wife than I do of him, and she dies in the first 15 minutes.

What's almost tragic about the game is that, around the places you investigate, there are televisions you can find that play episodes of "Night Springs", a fictional in-universe kind of X-Files/Twilight Zone analogue, down to imitating the latter's intro sequence. It's telling of how little the game managed to impact me emotionally when I found the in-game fake parody TV shorts FAR more intriguing, sometimes terror-inducing, than anything the actual game had to offer.



All in all I feel like Alan Wake just reeks of people trying to make something that's Mature and Scary and Artsy from "most other games", but reveals itself to be devoid of any real substance and motivation into why it does what it does beyond just wanting to be "different". The gameplay feels like they stuck you with a revolver and a torch so that they can point to how they're not like those Other Games that hand you an assault rifle, but does very little to change the core action shooter loop aside from just making it more of a slog. The story wants to be a Stephen King novel but ends up more a terrible 90s Stephen King film adaptation, posturing itself to be thoughtful and mature and scary but then reveals itself to be constructed entirely out of Halloween decorations from aisle 11 of Dollarama.

The reason I say "I have no idea what to make of it" though is because it's rated highly positive on Steam and I was prodded by friends into buying on sale it before it was taken off the store, and so even now I am not sure if I "get it". And while I like to say I don't care that much about genre and like a good story no matter what form it comes in, I'm not well versed in the horror genre and its conventions, much less cosmic horror, and so I'm not fully confident in discussing it in that regard.

That being said, to me, Alan Wake feels like a middle schooler trying to show off that they're "mature for their age" by writing about Darkness and Mental Illness, using symbolism that claims importance, but then fails to demonstrate any understanding on how these would work in a functional, resonant story.

For now, though, even on sale, I don't think it has the substantiating thought-provoking story nor the engaging gameplay for me to really recommend to anyone, horror fan or not.