Recent reviews by LSTR-512

Not much to say about a game that lasts an hour max. I think I understand why it took the internet by storm, but I like my horror to be a little more involved, certainly mechanically. Controlling that sub without crashing sure was scary, but also verged on annoying. I also think it might have been hard to make obscure Lovecraftian horror with an edge of discovery when all the major anomalies are already signposted, and I can't imagine secret hunting without any visuals being fun either.

But it was moderately effective horror! That last jump scare shouldn't have been this generation's Eternal Darkness bathtub scene, but it was!

It's about the journey, not the destination, I suppose. The Drifter's hooks are strong enough to carry an initially engrossing story that tackles pulpy depictions of sci-fi and horror tropes, marrying them with the underexplored and sympathetic perspective of a homeless man. There's notches of commentary on the material reality of poverty and our shared misunderstanding of it, as well as broader themes of responsibility and grief. The tension is palpable, the danger feels real even in a time-loop story, the main character's voice acting is top-notch. He needs more work. And while it does nothing to shake up the point-and-click formula, the first half's puzzles are intuitive enough to naturally grasp without too much pixel hunting.

Unfortunately, things start curdling in the second half on all fronts. The puzzles lean more into trial and error, blunt experimentation over natural intuition. The story climaxes into a small mess of sci-fi cliches with a couple of neat inversions of the time travel formula, but does nothing to plug the natural plot holes that brings. The tone flattens out into something altogether more generic, not helped by side characters far less engrossing than Mick Carter himself. Either the detective is voiced by ManlyBadassHero or he's doing an impression. Either way, he clashes hard with the Australiana of the rest of the cast. And while the narration is incredible, I can't help but feel like it covers for the inability, or expense, in animating way too many incidental interactions, where the screen just cuts to black instead, killing the atmosphere. Shame as the pixel art look works well.

It was a long wait from the demo to the full release, and while it was worth it for Mick's endless top-end voice acting, the story ultimately left me cold for how much promise it had. Barely ekes out a recommendation for adventure fans, but you couldn't say it was much less cheesy than The Dig or less ridiculous than Day Of The Tentacle, which was on purpose.

Was gonna hold off on marking this down until I beat the secret boss, but whatever. To me, Absolum is the RE4 Remake of beat-em-ups. 80% of the time, it feels great in the hands and the absolute top of its class in action gaming, but the 20% feels so much more frequent and egregious. Were this game simply a left-to-right sidescroller, I think that would solve most of my issues with sluggish movement and visual parallax error. As it is, moving up and down feels and looks like trash, and makes a parry-focused combat system more slapdash than it needs to be. When it works, it can feel amazing and lead to fun DMC-style combo shenanigans. At worst, it feels overly punishing, certainly in the boss department.

The addition of roguelike elements is also a mixed bag. Branching paths with their own sidequests and unlock trees give vital incentive to pursue different routes and playstyles, akin to Hades, but while the active bonuses feel great, a lot of the passive upgrades feel ineffectual. What good are HP and defense buffs when the time to kill is this low? Meta progression also feels slow and overly gated, and while the dark fantasy atmosphere is incredible, actual narrative nuggets are thin on the ground until maybe the 65% mark. The characters have panache for days, but not so much going on in their backgrounds.

But the story remains interesting enough regardless, with some fun cosmic horror turns on the backswing along with some good old moral ambiguity for good measure. The setting of Talamh trades on fantasy tropes of racism, magic being outlawed, old gods and so on, but has fun interpretations on pretty much all of them. Absolum also features great animation and Gareth Coker's best soundtrack yet (with Mick Gordon's wildest composition yet), so it's certainly a feast for the senses. Absolum has the markings of a modern cult classic, and while I was a little ways off of loving it, I am eager to see said cult develop, and to see where the devs go next.

The first release of Conscript was a rough diamond: a melting pot of survival horror cliches in a fresh WWI setting, but a bit too long and tedious to match the tightness of the best throwbacks of the genre. With the Director's Cut fixing the sudden bad ending, adding some shortcuts and cutting some of the fat, it is now very close to the top of that pile. The addition of a Dark Souls dodge roll with tight timing, a fun but difficult spin on the Crimson Head idea and a quasi-voxel aesthetic gives Conscript just enough flavour in style and substance, even as it trades on well-worn tropes of the genre like the merchant, gun upgrades, boulder insta-kill sequences and the MO Disk hunt in the endgame. The story's rough edges also feel smoothed over; while it's still missing an X-factor to really push it over the edge, it effectively demonstrates the idea of "war is hell" with some terrifying vistas and excellent audio design.

It lags well behind Signalis in political commentary and intrigue, and behind many a survival horror for its lack of puzzles, but when it comes to the pure thrill of resource management and the risk vs. reward of backtracking through enemy territory, Conscript is one of the best.

Its evocative setting and novel take on superhero media in both function and form elevate this beyond most Supermassive/Telltale CYOAs I've played recently, but the more I think about what Dispatch did that was truly stimulating or provoking (which the game really wants to do to your loins, geez. Cringiest romance options ever), the more I come up short. I would describe the plot as "fun, but extremely flaky". The appeal of managing a ragtag group of reformed villains wears thin when you can easily see who got the most attention in the script, and the ADHD gremlin with a potty mouth and a rough past but a heart of gold is starting to lose its edge, even with a wry protagonist to make a great foil next to the larger-than-life memesters surrounding him. While not the worst game to suffer from your choices being transparent and transient in their impact, it is disappointing that things haven't improved in 2025 from the Telltale formula of thirteen years ago. But with a setting more complex than simply zombie invasion, the plot holes are easier to see through too. If we're running a program to rehabilitate villains, why would we fire them in a way that just throws them back into villainy again? Not just immoral, but outright idiotic. Why is the main villain's name mentioned in the final scene as if we were meant to know his dramatic backstory? And so on.

"Novel but transient" is also how I'd describe the gameplay as well. The sim-lite management makes for a cool minigame and leads to a lot of fun, little emergent moments, but the difficulty curve flattens as soon as the game runs out of tricks, by which point the framework is just an excuse to run out the clock; otherwise Dispatch would be short even by Telltale standards. There's potential there, but it doesn't really match up with a This Is The Police or anything, let alone Disco Elysium for deconstruction or humour or memorable sidekicks. The very definition of a "wait for a sale" game. There's nothing quite like it, but it doesn't evolve past a curio.

So the gameplay is as good as it's ever been and it's probably even better. Boon pick-ups feel smoothed over and less exciting than the first game (siloing off crystal beams to an even more niche Hex, etc.) but double the biomes means double the enemies and bosses, which already makes it the better roguelike. The greater emphasis on meta-currencies and life-sim elements makes farming a bit more tedious, but also expands the pre-run set-ups you can do, which makes the baseline of each run feel more elastic and varied. More time with the post-game should elucidate more of my thoughts on the mechanics, which I plan to indulge in.

I also hope it changes my thoughts on the story, because right now it feels like a major step down from the first game. It takes too long to get going, the ending is at once predictable yet nonsensical, and relies too much on past glories and retreading old themes, which is disappointing coming from Supergiant; for a studio this lauded for ingenuity and craftsmanship in weaving storytelling and gameplay, a rather rote story that ends with seems beneath them. But basically all of the story's issues can be found in its protagonist. Melinoe is so much less interesting and dynamic than Zagreus that even Chaos themselves laments this fact. Zagreus' predominant character trait of empathy towards everyone (except his dad) made him a refreshing protagonist and gave the story a more modernist and optimistic slant on old violent Greek mythology. And I just can't think of anything in Hades 2's story or characters with that level of zest.

I think I was expecting a little bit more. Don't get me wrong, this is a hell of a way to tell a detective story, with a fairly unique setting to boot. The hook of exploring each crew member's single moment of death, and having to find all the breadcrumbs just from that, is an awesome way to prod an investigation. There's probably a little too much tedium in finding everyone's identity and not enough mystery in how everyone died, but I can accept that as yet more ingenuity in designing the sleuth-em-up.

But the game reveals the giant squid monster less than 20 minutes in, and the rest of the stakes can't really keep up from there. Call me cynical, but after Disco Elysium, I guess I expect more of a greater meaning or political angle, instead of basically relying on the mythos of Pandora's Box being woven into another fish monster story. Even next to Lucas Pope's previous hit Papers Please, it feels like a letdown that there's no X-factor past the gimmicky gameplay. It's a case where the journey beats out the destination for satisfaction, but what a journey. Very happy I finally sat down and played this. Never been happier to feel stupid at a videogame.

Probably a few steps below similar cosmic horror RPG Skald, and definitely less committed to its own aesthetic than 2D survival horror Yuppie Psycho, Look Outside still has plenty of thrills of its own, it's just that none really have anything to do with the actual gameplay. Aside from some party composition weirdness where finding new recruits is a byzantine process, nothing about the RPG Maker framework is challenged or offset by some mechanical gimmick. Guns are the closest thing to flavour in a very standard turn-based RPG. Survival mechanics, like hygiene and hunger, also seem a bit underdeveloped; you can't even track them through meters or anything like that.

But you come to Look Outside for the body horror and the monster design, and the art is filled with twisted imagery that knows when to hide the monsters and when to reveal them. Shockingly good stereo sound design for a 2D game, too. I do wonder if the pure horror tapers off into oddball weirdness and black comedy too hard; some areas and biomes seem like pure gimmicks, occasionally to the point of cliche, which undercuts the Lovecraftian mystery of it a little. But it does fulfill the macabre promise of a horror game in always giving you something new to see, a factor which is bolstered by many multiple endings, routes, solutions, characters and so on. Felt like I only saw a fraction of events in my first run despite combing the entire building.

System Shock 2 remains a classic, and this remaster has about everything you'd want. Easier access to multiplayer, controller support that doesn't feel awful (though still sub-optimal), and it looks and runs a bit better than last time, though because it's a 90s FPS it will have its odd issue with collision. That said, as someone who played it on and off as a kid, but only just beat it now, it may be sacrilegious, but I prefer the remake of 1 to the remaster of 2. It comes down to level design; the Von Braun isn't half as fun to navigate, circumvent or puzzle through as Citadel Station. For example, the second act of both games features a puzzle about finding parts of a code through pictures on a wall. In SS1, it's spread out across the station, but you know where each piece is. In SS2, it's on one deck, but the locations are arbitrary and not given out even in journal entries. One of the next levels requires shooting all sixteen eggs in linear corridors with turret placements you can't really get around. The "thinking man's shooter" portion of the imsim falls apart in the endgame as it turns into another corridor shooter, one that can feel punishing on Impossible.

And yet just about everything else still holds up even today. Some voice acting is stilted, but most is great, especially that of The Many, one of my favorite villains. Exploration is rewarded in both loot and story beats, and there are some fun toys to uncover between a wide arsenal of guns and an array of psychic powers. The soundtrack can be overbearing compared to the sparsity of Remake 1, but has some great tunes too. The atmosphere and sense of discovery still put other games of this genre to shame and carry the experience through its lowest point, even if next year's Deus Ex would blow it out of the water in terms of player agency.

But what low points there are. Even for 1999, who thought that ending was at all okay?

As a remaster/remake/port, no real complaints. They smoothed out the edges that needed smoothing and left everything else in for the experience to remain identifiably Oblivion; this is the definitive way to play the game. The level-up system is less stressful and more liberating, and makes getting to the fun scaled loot far easier, alchemy is better because there's no chance to fail a harvest, and there are little tweaks to movement and combat that make the experience...less lanky. But the rest is here and accounted for; the lovely but repetitive soundtrack, the main questline that starts strong and ends strong but is otherwise painfully boring, the more instantly gratifying but less open-ended design compared to Morrowind, the side quests that felt dated and boring even just a year after release, it's all here! I played Oblivion Remastered for the nostalgia buzz, and I got it.

It is a wonderful remaster and still worth playing, but it is difficult to say that old RPGs like Planescape Torment and Baldur's Gate weren't running circles around Oblivion even back then, to say nothing of The Witcher and even Mass Effect now.