Recent reviews by PaperShyguy

I played the whole thing in about an hour, in one sitting. One hour because I am at least moderately okay at puzzles built on whimsical dream logic, one sitting because I was compelled to do nothing else until I finished the game.

Look guys, this is a good game. It's also one of those games where the less I tell you about it, the better your experience is going to be. It's visually gorgeous, tonally soothing, intellectually stimulating, and with a totally unique core mechanic for its puzzles. Don't let the playtime fool you, this is worth experiencing.

This game came out in 2017. As I write this in mid 2024, I don't see that the creator has released any other titles, at least not that I can find. I hope they're doing well and still doing things they love, no matter what form that may take.

"It tells the story of a person struggling to deal with something they do not understand"

The Beginner's Guide is a short, moving art game. I'll avoid too much detail, but if art games are even kind of your thing, I highly reccomend this one. It frames itself as an exploration of a single developer's body of work over a period of several years, whose games are meant for largely himself, with no intended audience. You'll follow this developer's creative trail from basic CS:S Modding to his final work and, frankly, you might cry.

For people who fancy themselves good at peering into the minds of others.

I didn't like it. While historically significant to the early 2000 period of game design and culture, it doesn't seem to hold up any longer under the harsh glare of ten years of progress and trend. Not a bad game per se, but no longer deserving of the praise it still regularly recieves.


We finished Resident Evil 4 just a day before this writing. We'd started it because I had always wanted to play it, but couldn't get around the tank controls when I was younger and was also a giant wuss.

Now I'm older, it's not really scary anymore, and I've figured out tank controls. Turns out, I just don't like Resident Evil.

It's got its strong points; the opening in the village was a great tone setter, the controls are actually pretty reasonable once you figure them out, and knowing what era this comes from, I was happy to have never really fought with the camera once. Aesthetically it's aged pretty well and it's visual themes are all pretty well developed and cohesive. Sound design, as well, deserves high praise; every bit of ambiance was a note of what was hiding around the corner and the music, when applied, was superlatively oppressive, foreboding, and gothic in the classical sense. I can see why this game gets so lauded; the bones of older Resident Evil games have been cut from the fat, and rehoused in a sleeker, better-designed chassis. Gunplay is more responsive and meaningful, it's no longer about how many shots you put into them, but where, and the upgrade system makes sure you've always got something useful to dump your pasetas into.

But...it's a slog. Not just slowly paced, but actively slowing you down, and then going on for a bit longer than it probably should. There's a boss fight, specifically, at the end of the Castle section where it feels like the game should have ended, like that was where it was meant to have ended, but no, there's a whole additional area to go through. At this point, I've had my thrills, I've fought the antagonist, and I'm ready to move on. But no, there's more game. From that point onward, it became increasingly difficult to care.

I found myself also kind of bogged down by the inventory. Most modern horror games have done away with things like resource management outside of a scant one or two things (flashlight batteries, lamp oil, so on) and having played this now, I think that's mostly the right decision. Knowing I only had 9 shotgun shells left didn't enhance my sense of dread, it just made me sort of annoyed and anxious; "Well, ♥♥♥♥, looks like I'm fighting the next room with Pistols in case something big comes along," I would think. It allowed me to make strategic decisions, yes; weighing cost and risk on an uncertain path, but infrequently meaningful ones, regardless. This, on top of that in\famous tetris inventory system which I can't actually bring myself to dislike, but was also responsible for multi-minute breaks in gameplay to make sure everything was as neatly sorted as possible, so as to ensure no wasted space.


The difficulty curve starts out on-point, before wobbling a bit and settling on "a bit easy, until you get to the bosses." There's a crecendo bit near the middle of the Castle section where I hit peak frustration--incidentally, also where I discovered that you could shoot Ashley, your AI companion, resulting in an instant failure--but then after that the difficulty had a pretty steady decline, particularly for the lowest class of enemy, the Ganados or "Cattle." There's a few changeups here and there; flying mosquito monsters, Regenerators who slowly advance towards you while growing back appendages, but Ganados are the bread and butter and that's kind of the problem. See, once you figure them out, Ganados are seriously no big deal. Like, trivial. Which makes it a problem when you're passing through rooms and Ganados are the only thing slowing you down from this door to the next, or keeping you from solving the puzzle you'd rather be focusing on, or heck, just walking. They start out as this pretty unsettling, more-intelligent-than-a-zombie enemy, but are pretty much just fodder by chapter 4, no matter what weapon you're holding. They become nothing but a time sink, a way for the game to say "But waaaiiit, don't you want to play some mooooore? You don't have to rush to the next story bit yeeeeet...."

Screw you, game, yes I do. I've got better things on my agenda than clump-shoot-kick-repeating my way to the next door.

It's not even necessarily that the game is too easy, just the Ganados. I died multiple times to non-Ganado enemies and when I didn't I had plenty of close calls, all of which goes double for the bosses. I scraped and I counted shots, and I broke all the crates and it was really close in a lot of places. It's not the game that was too easy, it was the Ganados; trivial to dispatch (usually in great number) but still time consuming to do so. Just, getting in the way.


Look, I can see why this game is so well remembered; it absolutely revitalized a franchise by rebuilding it almost from the ground up and was probably the last, best horror game of the early 2000's until the indies took it over and started making Amnesias and Slendermen, but look...listen...it just doesn't stand up. Not anymore. We've really mostly moved on from the era of games enhancing scare factors by kind of being a ♥♥♥♥ to you sometimes and I think we're the better for it. Not once was I scared by this game, but I did swear at it many times.

An aged, but well-preserved adventure with a story that's brimming with charm, a uniquely realized world, and some good old-fashioned dev logic.

I never played Grim Fandango at it's original release; my PC gaming days were too far off yet, and frankly the lo-fi paper skulls aesthetic would have put me off at at age when I was pretty sure better graphics made better games. I entered into Tim Schafer's vision of the Land of the Dead with virgin eyes, unburdened by the heavy lenses of nostalgia, unchained by any sense of loyalty to the characters and stories and with a keen ability to criticize Mr. Schafer, despite liking much of his work.

Which is why I'm glad to say that Grim Fandango is absolutely fantastic. Super duper. The tits. Not without reservation, but it's a game that easily landed on my "must replay" list; almost without even trying. Let's break down why.

Graphically, it's impressive how little was remastered for this version--better shading on the character models, a bit of uprezzing for HD, but not much else--and even more impressive how well everything still holds up. It's rare for pre-rendered backgrounds to age as immaculately as these have, but here they are, twelve years old and still looking good. On a technical aesthetic level, Grim Fandango is a stellar example of a game that traded fidelity for style and traded well. That's not to say it doesn't show its age, a wonky animation here, that weird stutter any time something pre-rendered has to move, the slight jar for whenver it has to go from in-engine static images to fully animated cutscenes, but those were infrequent and unobtrusive. Everyone is paper maché paper skulls and it works. It just works.

What works slightly less is gameplay. the oft-bemoaned tank controls have been removed (though can be turned back on for you purists) and while that's great, it also means that Mr. Calavera can fall prey to the "walking, walking, scene change, camera flip, TURN AROUND! walking, walking, repeat" problem. Left between that and tank controls, I decided tank controls were worse, but I still did occasionally suffer from a break in the action to stop and reorient myself, when I could have been moving on. This, compounded by things like that the inventory menu, while clever, made it difficult to consistently locate items in a timely manner or that the second major area, Rubacava, is uncomfortably huge, and it takes a not-insignificant amount of time to traverse it, even once you've figured out where everything is. All of that, on top of a healthy serving of Dev logic sprinkled throughout. Oh yes, we're going there.

Grim Fandango, despite how well it's aged, is still a game of its time. Grim Fandango's time, as it happens, share a lineage with Secret of "Attach rubber chicken to pulley"Monkey Island. I wont spoil any of the puzzles in this game, but I encourage you to spoil them for yourselves. Maybe don't look everything up right away, sure, I didn't. Explore, learn, try to puzzle it out for yourself, but keep a guide on hand for when you can't, because there's a pretty good chance you'll hit that point more than once. I'm not just talking like hard puzzles, mind you, I'm talking things that are just unintuitive, going to places you have no reason to be, looking at things you would otherwise pass up, that sort of thing.

So why do I still reccommend Grim Fandango, a puzzle adventure game, so strongly despite its flaws being so harshly concentrated around puzzling and adventuring?

It's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ great, that's why. The land of the dead is colorful, varied, and fascinating, the characters are all well-drawn, with special attention to the extra dimensions of the main cast, and the writing is surprisingly mature for Tim Schafer, and not just in the "They kill people sometimes" sort of way. Manny Calavera is palpably not a good guy, but neither is he especially bad, just unscrupulous and a little desperate. Meche Colomar starts as a very good guy, girl, person, but later develops a very real (and thankfully not overdone) edge to her. The world itself has that great quality of showing you lots, while still hinting that there's so much more just beyond your horizon and it's all. Just. So. Fantastic.

Look, do you like adventure games? Do you like funny things? Do you like Mexicana, even Americanized, kinda whitebread Mexicana? Do you Like Tim Schafer? Lucasarts? Do you like Skulls? If you answered yes to any of the above, get this game, download a guide, and give it a go. You won't regret it.

A competent, but grating, hack-n-slash with a solid, well-realized Todd McFarline-style aesthetic that never quite manages to get past being just kind of okay. Wait for a sale if that sounds like something you're into.

I want to say that Darksiders has a lot of ideas, but that would be lying; Darksiders has very few ideas. It does, however, have the ideas of other games that were popular at the same time as its development and release. So what happens when you try ape the combat from God of War, the dungeoneering and item collecting of The Legend of Zelda, and the portals of, well, Portal?

eehhhh.....

I'll start with the good. Aesthetically, it's pretty solid. Main character War, of the four horsemen, is a giant, hulking badass, angels have a nice techno-magic style going on, and demons are pretty viscerally demon. If I could describe it in one phrase, I'd say it was Metal as ♥♥♥♥. Everything has that wonderfully overdesigned fantasy feel straight from a metal album, and even though it's not horribly original, it's all well done enough that I'm not really all that bothered by it. It's nice. It shows its age and definitely shows that it's a console port, but at the very least it's well drawn.

Music, as well, is pretty good. Not in that "go buy the game soundtrack" way, but it appropriately accompanies all the onscreen action and while I struggle to recall any individual pieces, I also don't ever remember it for any of the bad reasons. Not great, but generally inoffensive. That's going to be a theme.

The actual game itself is...ehhh? Darksiders borrows mechanics from contemporaneous releases heavily and the shortcuts taken in creative thinking show in this case, sometimes quite badly. I mentioned before that it attempted to meld God of War combat with Legend of Zelda Dungeons and Items and while I think that's a possibly just fine marriage, neither are developed enough here for any of the synergy between the two designs to really pay off. The combat is...Okay. They give you plenty of combos and special moves and I almost never used any of them. I had no reason to when slash-slash-uppercut. slash-slash-groundpound got me through most of the grunt type enemies and slash-slash-dash was the most effective combo for anything bigger. I felt bad for not learning how to utilize all of these undoubtedly cool combos, but I also essentially had no reason to; I made it through the whole game without having to change tactics much at all.

The adventure side of it, the Zelda bits, if you will were also....Okay. To their credit, the dungeons (Term being used loosely here) rarely repeated a trick outright, and it was infrequent that I felt lost, confused, or misled, but they were also mostly unremarkable and very padded with combat encounters. I was happy to see that they didn't fall prey to the trap of the Zelda Non-Puzzle ("Hit this switch right HERE to solve the room!") but then again, a lot of it wasn't puzzles at all as much as stretches of corridor between enemy encounters with maybe a key or something at the end and a vine wall to break it up.

The one thing I did really, genuinely hate about this game was the last dungeon, The Black Throne. This dungeon is so long. So very long. We weren't counting, but it felt like hours and easily three times as long as the other dungeons. It was a slog. By this point, I had long-accepted th game's unoriginality in design, but audibly groaned when I unlocked the Portal Gun (Sorry, "Voidwalker") and realized that the rest of the dungeon would include Darksiders' awkward, slow aiming mode. Thankfully, it saw little use afterwards, but Jesus. The portals were even blue and orange. And then? after this huge slog with a frustrating boss that requires you to accurately shoot your portals at his mace or face his difficult to dodge attacks? Game's not over. You have to ride all over creation to find the seven shards of the MacGuffin Blade so you can beat the real bad guy and save the day. Woo!

I mean, after this point, the game picked back up again, but it was just so hard to get right back into game after playing through what felt so much like a hard-earned finale. I would have even accepted a cliffhanger at that.

And that's kind of my whole experience. Okay. Not usually bad, not memorable, but an alright timewaster. I'm going to go play something else now.

Note: As of this writing, I've only beaten the Shovel Knight main story, not Plague of Shadows. I'll update this when I've done that.

It's a fantastic game. If you like platformers, buy this game. If you grew up playing platformers, buy this game. If you grew up playing Mario, Ducktales, Castlevania, Megaman, or even Karnov, buy this game. This is more than your standard lo-fi retro platformer, it's a genuine love letter to an era of gaming largely gone by; The aesthetic and design of ~1988-1993 with 2015 polish.

I'll be relatively brief beacuse everyone already reccomends this game. Shovel Knight is a game that oozes old school charm in a way that many similar games have failed to. In an era where retro 2D platformers are a dime a dozen (and frequently worth about that much) Shovel Knight somehow manages to avoid riling the kind of fatigue that's associated with this genre right now. It's hard to put my finger on, but if I had to guess, I'd say it's because Shovel Knight seems to be going for more than just an aesthetic; Yacht Club games pulled not just the art and music from the era, not just even some tropes, they went back to classic sources and distilled the good, designed around or cut out the bad, and from it produced a game which is nearly 100% made of the stuff you remember loving about your old games.

Gone is the unforgiving opacity of Castlevania, but what remains is the clever design around items that turns every encounter into a live action puzzle. Gone is the "strategic" wrote memorization and sometimes arcane boss weaknesses of Megaman, but what remains is a level design that teaches you how to play from every jump and a feeling of real progression with persistent powerups. It's really hard not to feel good about Shovel Knight.

Is there anything bad about it, then? Sort of, but nothing truly objectively bad. If you're bad, like me, then getting all of the items can be kind of a grind. Yacht Club does their best to mitigate that with bonus treasure levels and replayable stages, but that can be somewhat hamstrung by being awful at the game. While I'm still kind of in love with their checkpoint system, punishing death with money loss (frequently retrievable as it may be) means that players who deathspam their way through levels may find themselves hard up for cash when it comes time to upgrade.

That's an incredibly minor grievance and having now beaten the game, I genuinely can't think of any others offhand. It's a good game--nay, it's a great game. It's design borders on perfection, it's incredibly easy to pick up and put down as needed, and it is clearly a labour of love in the best of ways. For the love of god, buy this game and support Yacht Club Games. Work like this deserves success.

Shadow of Mordor is a solid-but-thin spectacle brawler, which I generally reccomend with some huge caveats. Wait for a sale price of at least $30 or so.

I'm going to spend some time focusing on the good things about Shadow of Mordor before acknowledging the elephant in the room. So here it goes. I generally like this game. The fighting is quick, punchy, and easily sets you up to do cool things, the visual design is fantastic, lending a huge amount of character to the orcs, and the story, at least in concept, is a solid tap into one of the most established fictional fantasy universes of the 20th century. It's game world is pretty full of things to engage with, from side missions to hunting orc captains to just messing around with low-level grunts; you're never very far from something to do at any given point, and if you're not especially close to anything that interests you, there's a competent map and fast travel system that'll get you towards a goal you'd rather pursue. Those orcs I mentioned, by the way, are the real star of the show. Each of their variations have been lovingly constructed for semi-random assembly to result in a genuinely diverse looking rabble of green and grey monsters. The captains are especially great, with a wide variety of styles, combat types, and even personalities.

And that's about as far as I can get, saying only good things about Shadow of Mordor. The rest of it, even the good bits, unfortunately, are tied up in the very real feeling that the developers ran out of funding and had to snip it off prematurely to get a finished game out the door. This feeling touches almost every aspect of an otherwise very good game and it absolutely pains me to say that.

The much-touted chain of command system, comprised of a hierarchy of orc captains to hunt, kill, or brand to claim for yourself is a fantastic idea! Except there's really only two ranks (captains, subordinate to Warchiefs) and your interactions with them are limited to "TELL ME ABOUT THIS OTHER CAPTAIN!" or "FIGHT THIS OTHER CAPTAIN!" You can also instruct them to become bodyguards of a warchief, but that's about as far as it goes. The unclaimed captains will never challenge a warchief themselves so once you've got one, he's safe for all time; the utility of this figure begins and ends to ensuring backup when you, and only you, challenge the warchief yourself. And that's it. No further depth required.

There's three overlapping progression systems--one traditional RPG-style tech tree, one more linear tree for your wraith powers, and one for runes to engrave into your weapons for buffs, all of which is cool but, again, feels untapped with potential. The traditional, so-called "Ranger" tech tree is deceptively linear, with most useful skills being unlocked along story progression, a few useful non-required ones, and a few less useful-to-useless skills, like one that lets you instantly kill all nearby branded orcs because...screw them, I guess? The more linear Wraith tree is better, but also smaller, focusing on the limited number of vectors involved in your wraith powers, such as magic ghost bow and unlocking rune slots on your weapons. It's nice, but very expensive, requiring you to do special side missions to upgrade it which can at times be tedious. Finally the runes themselves were...underwhelming. It is, again, a cool idea; you kill captains and they drop randomized runes based on their level. Unfortunately, a lot of them are kind of rubbish, I suspect because some interested party, not naming names, wanted to keep the good ones behind DLC paywalls, for about a dollar each. No, really, that's a thing.

The story, finally, is complete garbage. It starts out absolutely fine, compelling even. You are a ranger, running from his past, banished from death, trying to avenge your family, all with an ancient elven wraith trapped in your head. Cool, right? Well, until the game gets about a quarter of the way through its second act and throws up a blink-and-you'll-miss-it ending. Literally, the flow of it is like this:

• less-than-inspired boss fight with "The Tower"
  
• You ship your orcs off to...somewhere
  
• They fight some guys
  
• You and your orcs go...somewhere else.
  
• They fight more guys, who are apparently really important, but were never really mentioned until now.
  
• You Fight the Final Boss
  
• Final Boss is a Quick Time Event
  
• No, really, he's a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ quick time event.
  
• Incomprehensible gibberish that's supposed to explan what happened.

And that's it. At this point, the game has spent about twenty hours getting you to almost like that one woman and the dwarf guy, then you part ways and fight the end of the game yourself against enemies who never really had time to be established as being...anything. It's lazy, ♥♥♥♥♥♥ writing that almost always stems from being told that you need to wrap it up before you've even really gotten warmed up. From what I've heard, the Bright Lord DLC does something to alleviate this, but that's no excuse; nobody should have to pay ten dollars for closure because Monolith wasn't able to finish their story.

All of these shortcomings in mind, why do I still recommend Shadow of Mordor? Because despite it's many and sundry flaws, it's still a fun, solid brawler about some very well-characterized orcs. It's still slick as hell to leap off a ruined building onto an unsuspecting Uruk's back to scare the hell out of his friends into abandoning their captain, your quarry, who you've got a score to settle with over some punishment he dealt out to you earlier. And I still think that, if you go into the game knowing what to expect, and what not to expect, there's at least the labeled time of ~24 hrs worth of good times to be had here, even more of you're a completionist. The game sells for $50 and that's frankly too much for what they've given to us, but that's not to say it's not worth anything. Wait for to to on sale for $30 or so and you'll get your money's worth.

I'll write this with the caveat that this game isn't finished being made at this time and is still in Alpha.

That said, I wholeheartedly reccomend it. As a citybuilder/manegment game Stonehearth shows great promise and while it's a bit thin in its currect state (Alpha, so missing a lot of features/content) it's still pretty competent overall. Oddly, my favorite feature isn't the game itself, but the team behind it; Radiant. Those dudes have some of the best community outreach in the business and they are always putting out dev blog updates, keeping the content comming at a pretty good clip and letting you know what's on the horizon when they can't do that. It's cute, it's chirpy, it's got the foundation for a truly great town manager. I particularly love the ability to build custom buildings with relative ease, though style options are slightly limited, what with still being in development.

There are a few Cons though; one, it's a slow game. Incredibly slow. Pace is apparently something on their list to work on, but as it is, I can only bear to play on fast and even then I feel like there should be a faster setting. There also aren't really any options for stockpile flow--the ability to have a particular stockpile pull from others, and it's one of the major things that's keeping Stonehearth from being truly great. This is also impacted by the speed (since your hearthlings have to walk AAAAALLL THE WAY to the stockpile, then ALLLL THE WAY back) which becomes more problematic as your town gets bigger.

I imagine some of the problems I have will get resolved as the game works its way through Alpha, and I'll update this review as new things get added, problems arise, and good stuff crops up. If you're hard up for a city builder, I only see this one getting better over time. If you're a bit more skittish, that's fair; but keep at eye on this and I encourage you to give it a shot when it's more complete.

It's just a crappy, crappy port. The resolution is TINY which I could forgive; I forgive tiny resolutions all the time, but there's so much else wrong with this port that it's just ♥♥♥♥ sprinkles on my turd cake. There doesn't seem to be any native controller support which is pretty important for fighting games in general, unless you hate yourself. I do not, so it's a well-missed feature. Once I figured out how to navigate menus (which I normally wouldn't have had trouble with, except the select button can sometimes change from menu to menu), lo and behold the button icons were still the PS2 symbols. So I'm thinking "Alright, I'll just quit out real quick and look up a fix or something. Where's the quit button?" So I search for a solid five minutes thinking they hid it somewhere. There was no quit button. Pressing escape quits the game out immediately. This, again, by itself wouldn't be a huge deal; kinda sloppy, but not huge, except it does it no matter where you are or what you're doing. In a fight and just want to pause? Don't press escape. Finger slips? Don't press escape. Cat jumps up on the keyboard? YOU BETTER HOPE THAT CAT'S ASS DOESN'T END UP ON ESCAPE OR YOUR MATCH IS OVER. DRAW. FIGHT CALLED ON ACCONT OF ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ CAT.

Look, I'm not normally a Guilty Gear player; this was my first in fact and I would have loved to tell you what I think about the game but...At this moment there's too much in the way of me enjoying it. Making games is hard, even bad games, and even just ports; it's hard to do, and I get that but this? This just feels unloved. Like they did the minimum amount of work to make it stable and technically playable on Steam. In this day when console games are being lovingly ported and even sometimes recreated for PC, this game just doesn't fly.

Weird, fast, and violent. Hotline Miami gives you some precision controls, hard-as-nails boards to clear, and an easy enough reset time to not make the (uncountable) deaths feel overly frustrating and with a dash of 80's flavor "What the ♥♥♥♥?" manages to make a game entirely worth the ten dollars they're asking. The story is good, the gameplay is great, the tone is so weirdly flashy and dark at the same time that you could be mistaken for beleving the whole experience takes place in a disco while on acid (part of it does!)

Buy it. Buy it now and play it and love it. If you want to make games, study why this game is so good. Hint; it's at at least partially to do with exploding skulls.