Recent reviews by Max Keller

(I really loved it but there were some bugs; see below.)

Great isolated horror setting, great detailing and theming of the world, really intriguing and novel plot (a good blend of physical danger, psychological elements, and undercurrents of the unknown). It's good to see a game conveying things using the environment, rather than relying heavily on written documents. I also loved the use of sound effects for voices, and I think it actually works better than voice acting here. I was very impressed for the most part, and I'm not easily impressed by horror games. I'm eager to see more.

Now, about the bugs. The first one happened while I was using the password-locked computer. I had been trying to guess the password because I hadn't found the clue yet, and when I stopped using the computer, I found that my cursor was still hidden in all other zoomed-in interaction scenes, like it is while typing the password. Even in the pause menu, I had no visible cursor (the buttons highlighted when my cursor was over them, but the cursor itself was invisible). By blindly moving my mouse, I managed to quit to the main menu, and when I resumed the game the cursor was working again.

The second bug happened when I replayed the demo after completing it once: when I examined the fuse box for the first time, I found that I could pick up the fuse in the Dorm slot and put it in my inventory, but the fuse would visually remain in the slot, and I could even power up 2 floors without collecting the actual second fuse. This bug also prevented me from opening the door to the storage closet where the second fuse is. I could still access the Deck area, so I may have been able to complete the demo anyway, but I didn't try to. I quit to the main menu and resumed the game (which reloads to the alarm clock) a few times, and the bug happened every time. I deleted my save file and started the demo again, and this time no bugs occurred and I completed the demo.

I then played the demo again to see if the same bug would happen, and it somewhat did: this time, the fuse in the first slot was invisible, while another fuse was in the Deck slot. Again I was able to power up 2 floors right away, and the storage closet remained locked. But this time I kept playing, and I was able to complete the demo despite the fuses being bugged. When I reached the cockpit, I noticed that the navigation cartridge was in the machine used to find the coordinates, instead of being on the desk. So from this, I'd surmise that some object states are being carried over from the previous playthrough when starting a new game, leading to the bugs with the fuses and the navigation cartridge.

After I finished this and learned that there hasn't been another Dread X Collection released since, I was a little bummed out but certainly not surprised. There are some decent games featured, enough to justify scooping it up on a deep discount -- Karao is my favorite, and HUNSVOTTI, Vestige, and Resver are also worth playing -- but even the high points are not especially high in this one, while the low points are brutal. I don't recall any game in the previous collections being nearly as bad as Spirit Guardian, and INTERIM would also land somewhere in the all-time bottom 5.

As for the rest, there are some good ideas crying out for better gameplay design (Gallerie), storytelling (We Never Left) or both (Ludomalica), and other ideas that just weren't too interesting to begin with (Rotten Stigma, The Book of Blood, Beyond the Curtain).

While it's not one of the worst games in the collection, I want to call out We Never Left as a great example of why you shouldn't set a story in a specific time period (1983 in this case) unless you have a fairly solid idea of how people talked back then, what kinds of technology they might've had, and so on. I was born in the '90s, but even I know that a software developer would not own a cell phone of any kind in 1983. And I highly doubt that he would throw around the word "gaming" like he does, or that his therapist would use expressions like "circle back." There are many other examples I could name in both the therapy tapes and the diary pages -- mostly small, but in combination they're more than enough to destroy any illusion that these people are living in the '80s. Yeah, maybe the average player won't notice as many anachronisms as I do, but the fact remains: the value of a historical setting is largely wasted if the characters don't talk or act any differently than people do today.

Me while playing For Daddy To Work: "Why are people giving this negative reviews? I like it!"

Me after getting the baby taken away from me for the first time: "This seems like it might get a little annoying."

Me after getting the infernal screeching baby taken away from me for the 9th time after wandering through identical hallways with randomly-generated room numbers for an hour: "Video games are bad."

If a chain of corny jump scares is what you want from a horror game, there are plenty of games that do it better than this (free ones, even). And if you want a free Half-Life horror mod inspired by Silent Hill, you'll have a much better time playing Alchemilla, because the creators of that actually understand what makes Silent Hill good.

I didn't really mind paying for the previous Dread X Collections, even though the quality of the games never quite matched Haunted PS1's free demo discs. But this one is very skippable, with the weakest selection of games yet and a greater focus on an interactive hub world that I lost interest in midway through.

There is a Free Play mode, which gives you access to all of the games up front -- however, The Hunt (i.e. the overarching game that takes place in the hub) is still worth commenting on because it's a very prominent feature of the package, something that would ideally justify the collection's price tag. To be fair, it obviously cost some money to produce, but unfortunately the extra expense didn't add any value for me. A good deal of voiced dialog (technically monologue, I guess) is used to try and flesh out the protagonist and make players care about her, but as with previous Dread X hub content, it's just not written very well and becomes a serious drag on the experience. It felt like taking a nice scenic train ride, except the random person sitting next to you is talking non-stop about themselves and their life, so instead of enjoying the scenery you just keep wishing they would shut up.

It doesn't help that the crop of games in this installment is worse than usual. None of them are terrible, but very few of them are good. If I were to rate all seven games, there are two that I would consider giving 6/10 (Rose of Meat, Black Relic), maybe a 5 for The House of Unrest, and the others would be 3s and 4s. Apparently the developers were given twice as much time to work on their submissions as compared to previous collections, but I suspect that this extra development time did more harm than good, as it encouraged the devs to spread their ideas too thin, or to get ahead of themselves with bigger ideas that needed more refinement than they got. It also may have resulted in buggier games, as I ran into major, progression-affecting bugs in more than one of them. In Uktena 64, I got stuck in the geometry inside a camper in the next-to-last level, and I was convinced I'd gotten soft-locked, but I somehow managed to escape after 1-2 minutes of desperately flailing around.

I don't want to sound like I'm railing against this collection -- as I said, none of the games are terrible. It's a shame, too, because between the Arctic base setting and David Szymanski's involvement, I had expected this to be the best Dread X Collection yet. But I have to recommend skipping this entry, as you really won't miss much.

Like any good symbolic horror fiction, it makes itself interesting and evocative independently of how the player may interpret the symbolism. The delightfully grimy, murky aesthetics and presentation, combined with the measured escalation of everything going bad, make the experience worth having -- and because of that, I voluntarily thought about what it all meant as I played. I didn't come up with a specific answer, but I believed that there was a specific answer, which is the ideal balance to strike in many cases.

The addition of combat is a very good idea, and for the most part it's implemented well. I do think that the quickest of the enemy attacks could stand to be tweaked a little -- I felt like I needed just a few more milliseconds to react to it, whereas the timing on the other attacks is quite easy.

As "phantasmagorical party aftermath" games go, I must say that I prefer Nobody's Home, but Barbotine is a very solid addition to the genre.

I've played some Backrooms-themed games before, but none of them really "got" the appeal of the Backrooms concept. This one very much does. You're not finding notes or anything to tell you what is creepy about the setting (at least, I wasn't) -- instead the environments speak for themselves. Yes, they recreate much of the best-known imagery associated with the Backrooms, so you will stand in one spot and say "Oh yeah, this view is from that picture/video," but they fill in the gaps and flesh out those 2D non-interactive depictions so that it feels like the Backrooms could be a real place.

It's kind of like you've seen photos and travel videos of famous sights in Paris, and then you play a VR simulation where you can walk around the Louvre, the Champs-Elysees, the Eiffel Tower, and so on. That VR simulation is not based on the specific photos and videos you've seen -- it's just that it's all depicting the real city of Paris. This game feels like a virtual tour of the "real" Backrooms, and not one that's strictly confined to the "sight-seeing" spots, because some areas feel very big, like you could go on indefinitely and get lost (which isn't really true, but that impression is successfully created in many places). Any good Backrooms thing needs to convey those feelings of endlessness, and being unsure if you've gone this way before, and the layout of the place being so illogical and counter-intuitive that it somewhat impedes your sense of direction. The Complex: FF does a great job presenting you with inexplicable architecture that looks and feels wrong to varying degrees, while layering in normal-looking areas as palate-cleansers. At the same time, it avoids being so confusing that you wander around for 20 minutes looking for the next (very minor "spoiler") elevator, which could have ruined the experience.

The soundtrack and sound design are also good, meshing well with the environments and enhancing the creepiness of everything, without it feeling nakedly choreographed like "you will now be spooked because Spooky Noise 12 played, and then you will feel suspense due to Suspenseful Music 03." I did wish for more context-appropriate sound effects in spots, like wet-sounding footsteps and dripping for a while after you walk through water, or (minor spoiler) snow crunching under your feet, but hey, it's a free game.

This is of course a prologue to The Complex: Expedition, which I have yet to play, but this is such a good thing on its own, I'd happily pay for a gussied-up version with more sound effects and sound settings, some light graphical upgrades and extra options, and a little gameplay customization (a faster walking speed would be nice). Maybe also some kind of indicator of which areas you missed, visible after playing through it once. Or to go a step further, there's a wonderful foundation here for an Exit 8 type game: take pictures (or sound recordings?) of anomalies to break out of a loop and get access to the next area. That would take some careful thought to do it justice, largely because this setting is littered with "anomalies" by definition, but I'd love to see pgWave or a collaborator attempt it using these assets.

Again, I've yet to play Expedition, or other promising games like Anemoiapolis or Dreamcore, but of all the Backrooms media I've seen so far, this is easily the best. If someone asked me today what's the deal with the Backrooms or what's creepy about it, I would skip the OG images and the Kane Pixels videos and just show them this.

HROT is a sharply designed and well-paced shooter with tons more character than its muddy visual style suggests. It may look like a Quake clone at first, but it's a pretty different kind of game, and in fact I personally enjoyed it more than Quake. The action is simple but satisfying, with the parameters dialed in so well that even small encounters can provide a nice challenge. Its levels are always fun to explore because they're full of detail, including a variety of interactive gimmicks and clever secrets. It has a great sense of humor that's dark, wry and absurd in just the right amounts, and gets into some delightfully weird post-Soviet satire.

Unexpectedly, it reminded me of some of the good fan-made level packs for Doom II. The compact and densely detailed maps, the secret areas and gimmicks made ingeniously with a limited toolset, the dry touches of humor in the margins -- I kept wondering if a known Doom mapper was somehow involved with the project. At a certain point I was like "Wait, Gusta worked on this, didn't he????? IT ALL FITS" and of course that was a complete delusion. But it made sense at the time.

Play the demo, and if you like what's in there, the full game won't disappoint you.

Though I understand the perspective of people who love this game, I think the mixed reception is totally fair. You can go into it ready to be confused and not expecting to have your hand held, like I did, and still not be satisfied. Side A really is cool, but to me it suggested things about Side B that ended up being mostly incorrect.

I wanted to let the game speak for itself, so I didn't look at reviews or guides until after I'd spent a long time on Side B. I made a solid effort to "finish" the game by finding the anomaly, solid enough that the guide I eventually read didn't tell me anything new (except about one non-essential button on the ship). I never did find it, just because I was tired of the process - and especially tired of using the sluggish map controls to hunt down a specific planet that I'd lost track of. Would a simple bookmark system have been too hand-holdy, really?

I wish I had seen the Steam reviews first, because they make very clear something everyone should know: if you've visited something like 10 planets and you're still having fun, then that's cool. But if you're getting bored, you will probably stay bored.

This is a fun game with a lot of charm, so I was really disappointed that it soft-locked on me several times. Some of these were because I pushed an object against a wall and couldn't move it anymore, but there were also some funky respawns. Like after I got the gun, I died in the next room and the gun just disappeared. Luckily it was near the beginning of a chapter so I didn't really lose progress.

Judging by the screenshots, the long arena battle near the end is supposed to culminate in a boss fight. For me it culminated in a dialog box that I couldn't dismiss (ironically it was a joke about the progress bar being stuck at 99%) and that's about where I lost interest.

But I did enjoy what I played, and you can't beat the price, so I still recommend it. I just hope the developer's next game is not a solo project.