Recent reviews by Trent

The French have been cooking again. Or baking, rather. Cairn is another game by French studio and indie darling The Game Bakers. The success of their intense and demanding boss rush extravaganza Furi echoes to this very day. And now they release a game about... mountain climbing? Hang on for a bit.

The premise is as simple as it gets. The fictional Mount Kami stands unconquered, claiming the lives of 149 mountaineers. As the player character Aava, you set out with the goal to be the first one to make it to the summit.

While climbing in games has been more of an afterthought, it is the mechanical focus here. When facing the mountain, you can move Aava's limbs around and place them where you assume she has a safe hold to avoid slipping. What seems straight forward at first becomes increasingly difficult as you progress. The safest path may not always be the most obvious one. Sometimes the mountain baits you into going for an easy route only to turn into a dead end halfway through, leaving Aava with strained stamina and a long climb back. Planning your route becomes increasingly important. Just as important is paying attention to Aava's body since it serves as your health bar of sorts. Aava will comment if you get a good grip, but her arms and legs will wobble and jerk around if your hold is unstable. Once she starts breathing heavily, you are only moments away from making Aava fall to her death.

The game also understands the body as a climbing tool that needs to be maintained. As such, Aava has several attributes that decrease over time and need to be taken care of. Otherwise, her climbing performance suffers, and increase the chances of her becoming number 150 on Mount Kami's victim list. So you scout the areas for nutrition and water, which the mountain provides thankfully - and sometimes you scavenge them from the bodies of dead mountaineers. Combining ingredients often leads to better results than consuming things raw, but ultimately your resources are finite. It amounts to a certain kind of pressure. You will find yourself evaluating if the trip to a certain location will be worth it or not given the current amount of resources you have. Taking things slow and methodical is preferable, but limited resources always encourage you to climb faster than you should.

Cairn's cell-shaded comic look is serviceable and rewards you with some nice vistas occasionally. However, you will be staring at rock for most of the game. All while soft ambient music is playing in the background.

As you continue to reach the top, conditions worsen and put quite the strain on your patience and resources. The game really sells the idea of Mount Kami being this final boss of mountaineering. Near the end, it becomes a profound reflection on obsession - or indomitable will, depending on how you want to read it.

I strongly recommend Cairn. Especially if you can't recall the last time a game genuinely lit a spark in you.

Boo! Another remake. The topic of remakes has been discussed to death. Declaration of creative bankruptcy to some, companies will pump them out because they sell on name recognition alone. With the current state of the risk-averse industry, remakes are here to stay, whether you like it or not.

This time it's everyone's horror darling Silent Hill 2 that gets the remake treatment - as it happens one of my favorite games of all time. Ambivalent feelings towards remakes notwithstanding, one might as well treat it as an opportunity to re-experience the game like it was the first time again.

First impressions were solid. As everyman James Sunderland, you traverse through the eerie town of Silent Hill looking for your dead wife who may be alive after all. Thick fog makes it impossible to see further than an arm's-length ahead of you, and the town seems abandoned apart from a couple of other weirdos and some overworked nurses trying to kill you. What's that, there's a locked door between where you are and where you need to be!? Time to search the immediate surroundings for an item you need. Sometimes it's a key, sometimes it's a combination. And sometimes it involves a logic puzzle. Then ♥♥♥♥ gets rusty and all doors are locked.

Noticeable right away is the over the shoulder perspective - no more fixed camera angles. While it makes the game feel less cinematic, it gives the player more direct control over James. Tank controls are replaced with regular third person action game controls as well. James is also more agile now since he is capable of dodging attacks, Dark Souls style. And he needs to since enemy encounters are far more frequent than in the original game, and enemies have learned a few tricks of their own. But as far as progression goes, it's classic Silent Hill. The map will turn into your best friend since it does a great job of tracking sites of interest. The remake even lets you explore more of the town than the original used to. And if you were ever puzzled why game characters never break car or shop windows to scavenge for supplies - James can actually do that. Which feels slightly comical at times since he will often break car windows to jam random syringes into his arm - like he turned into a murderous junkie hobo of sorts.

Combat was seen as one of the weaker aspects about the OG Silent Hill 2. Tank controls combined with the fixed camera angles made it a slow and awkward ordeal. However, in what you might want to call a happy accident, it made the player feel more vulnerable, thus strengthening the horror aspects. Enemy encounters were also relatively scarce. Your radio emitted static whenever a creature was nearby - terror through anticipation. The remake has the same feature. Except enemies are so numerous that there are sections where the radio doesn't shut up. It's almost like Bloober Team was trying to overcompensate for one of the original's perceived flaws. It's understandable to a degree they wanted to showcase what they thought were improvements. In the end, the devs exchanged one brand of awkwardness for another. Especially when it comes to melee combat. The rules say hitting the enemy should interrupt their attacks, but sometimes they just don't and enemies power through your attacks anyway. Before you figure out there's a certain rhythm to it, you won't walk away from encounters without chugging a healing drink afterwards. To Bloober Team's credit: melee combat is surprisingly functional even without a lock-on system and feels vicious through a combination of sound and animations.

The game is far more focused on combat this time around. It's among the reasons why James practically trips over healing drinks and ammo every few steps. Efforts were made to make enemies feel more threatening. For instance, there are many occasions where mannequins will hide somewhere in a room you're exploring and jump at you from the dark, essentially turning it into a jump scare you need to watch out for the entire playthrough. Here's the thing though: Silent Hill 2 was not that kind of game. It was not a game that actively terrorized the player with jump scares, loud noises and gory details. It was more about creating thick atmosphere through subtle means - like a gloomy and oppressive blanket that wraps around you whenever you boot up the game. And prolonged, awkward slap fights with mannequins are detrimental to the whole experience. You are not scaring me. At best, you are startling me. And you're not even doing it well since the frequency of this little game of hide and seek makes it predictable. Once the credits roll, you will have depopulated three classic Silent Hill games worth of creatures.

For all the volumetric fog and high definition mold textures, the remake somehow manages to be much less atmospheric. You can tell a lot of love and care went into it as it makes you re-experience every single iconic and not-so iconic moment from the original. However, the more Bloober Team injects their own ideas into the game, the worse it becomes. I actually had to laugh out loud when the remake introduced spider mannequins that crawl on the ceiling and make clicking sounds like the Predator. Silent Hill 2 understood there is power in suggestion. It used subtlety to make you feel like you were truly alone in a strange, otherworldly place. It used the same kind of understatement to make statements about the characters and their mental state. Bloober Team's approach to horror feels more generic and admittedly, a bit cheap. Here, the most bizarre occurance on my mind was the framerate stuttering for seemingly no reason. Still, by itself the remake is a mechanically solid horror game. Easily Bloober Team's best so far and (mostly) respectful to the original. Even if it doesn't sound like much of an endorsement: it could have been so much worse.

Video games are an interactive, audio-visual medium. As such, visuals matter. Before you catch even a minute of footage, the game will introduce itself through still images, screenshots or thumbnails. It's quite telling that developers will pour a lot of resources into making the visuals stand out from the competition. Presentation is important. But are visuals enough to carry a game?

Scorn has been infamous for several things, one of them being its troubled development history. Serbian developer Ebb Software was formed in 2013 and Scorn has been effectively in development ever since. The idea was to create a game with the aesthetics of two particular artists - one being H.R. Giger, most famous for his xenomorph creations, and the other being Zdzislaw Beksinski, a surrealist painter. Giger's biomechanical designs dominate the visuals. Interiors and machinery are made out of organic matter and fuse with the player character, blurrying the lines between one and the other. Traces of Beksinski's nightmarish, decaying visions can be found as well. The art style does a fantastic job of evoking both influences while maintaining its own personality. It's strange, it's disgusting and it looks unlike any other current release.

Praise for Scorn's interactive elements is much harder to come by. Playing Scorn, you can't shake the feeling it was designed with visuals in mind first. The actual game part seems like a mere afterthought. When you're not trying to find your way through the maze-like environments, you solve logic puzzles or engage in combat. While functional, you've seen it all before and most likely better executed elsewhere. Especially the combat stands out due to its exaggerated sluggishness. Simply dodging a slow-moving enemy projectile can become a nuisance, especially when there's more than one enemy present. Most of those encounters don't feel tense or exciting. They feel like annoying obstacles you want to get done with.

Scorn is strange by design. You get thrown into its bizarre world without any explanation. Everything about it feels alien and weird, and yet you are expected to function in it. Except for a few button mappings, there are no hints. No objective marker and no map will guide your way. No NPC will blabber in your ear and tell you what to do. There won't be any audio logs to collect providing any sort of backstory or context. You don't even get item descriptions. You are pretty much left to your own devices in a world you don't understand. In a way, this approach feels refreshing in how radical and uncompromising it is. It certainly helps conveying a bleak and strange atmosphere, something the developers were clearly after.

So Scorn is just an interactive art exhibition then? How much you value art is certainly a factor in how you will experience the game. It is glaring that Ebb Software failed to marry their artistic vision with the interactive elements of a video game. As a game, Scorn is rather mediocre. Regardless, I'm still giving Scorn a recommendation because there is nothing like it out there. So many games have the tendency to explain themselves away, so many writers can't help themselves oversharing insights they deem valuable. Meanwhile, Scorn simply exists in its nightmarish aesthetic - cryptic and alien, indifferent to the player or tired horror conventions. In an industry where so many releases are barely distinguishable from one another, that alone is a quality worth praising.

Elden Ring is Dark Souls if it was an open world game. In that regard, it's pretty much what you would expect: an action RPG featuring dodge-heavy combat, stamina management, stat progression, cryptic lore and creepy NPCs. Elden Ring has it all. However, it comes with the benefits of an open world game. Meaning that if you do see that mountain, you CAN climb it. The whole scale of this game is flat-out insanity. Areas are not just interconnected anymore. They are parts of a much larger world that seems to stretch on eternally. As a result upgrades, spells and weapons that used to be carefully placed around major dungeons now get their own mini-dungeons, which are sprinkled all over the map. Apart from combat, exploration is what really sells Elden Ring because there's always one spot on the map you could have missed.

Unfortunately, Elden Ring inherits some of the less likeable traits of an open world game as well. Due to the game's ridiculous size, recycling assets can't be entirely avoided. It also means not every area has the same level of detail or care put into it. While the visual quality of the levels ranges from pretty to downright impressive, it tends to fluctuate a bit into the nether regions as well. The mini-dungeons in particular feel uninspired at times. Due to the new format, progression also feels weird at times: you enter a new area and the enemies make you eat ♥♥♥♥ relentlessly, making you seriously question your skills or wonder if you were supposed to be there in the first place. Turns out you don't have to do anything and you can just go somewhere else until you found better gear or leveled up a bit.

A word on difficulty: I played a pure melee build and managed to breeze through most of the game. People enjoy a good challenge and winning when the odds aren't stacked in their favor. Generally it felt like Elden Ring followed the unspoken credo of Dark Souls: "challenging, but fair." At some point however, the game abandons that approach. The last stretches of Elden Ring feel like an exercise in frustration filled with every cheap shot in the book. To give you a taste: you're in a tight area littered with enemies capable of killing you comfortably in two blows or less, even with your vigor stat at soft cap. There are environmental hazards like poison, or you are in constant danger of falling to your death. The enemies have large health bars and thick armor while you deal very little damage. Fighting one alone already seems tough because of that. When you fight them, they flail around erratically or they delay their strikes seemingly at random. Their strikes cover a large area around them and often they use aoe attacks. They bridge gaps with ease, they have projectiles and they work in teams. All while a sub-boss turned regular enemy is patrolling the area.

In a way, it makes sense. We've all played Dark Souls several times now and we're used to the fun stuff From Software puts in their games. Individually, that is. It feels a bit like they're struggling to keep things challenging and show players something they haven't seen before. So they go through their greatest hits and stack them up.

It genuinely soured the experience for me. What I enjoyed about Dark Souls is in here. In fact, Elden Ring feels like three Dark Souls games in one. But too much of something nice can still feel awful. Don't get me wrong, Elden Ring is a phenomenal game. But towards the end, its crap got so tiresome to deal with. After a long honeymoon period, I only wanted it to be over. So if you venture into The Lands Between, you better pace yourself, or you might burn yourself out on the game.

Sekiro is not a Souls game. This can't be stressed enough. Attempt to i-frame dodge through the game and you will get your ass slapped all the way back to Lordran. While it borrows certain elements from Souls, like the checkpoint system or cryptic NPC questlines, it's pretty much its own beast. And what a beast it is.

It's one of those good news, bad news situations. Good news: the days when you needed to keep an eye on your stamina for every attack, block or dodge are over. Bad news: that doesn't mean the game is any less challenging. Quite the opposite, actually. Wolfie goes down in two hits tops, and at all times he's either heavily outnumbered or he gets crushed in the health bar measuring contest. And the absence of stats, gear and online co-op means there are no shortcuts. You won't be able to overlevel, no Solaire will come to your aid. It's either nut up or shut up.

Luckily, there are ways to put you at a lesser disadvantage. Sekiro features a rudimentary stealth system and enough freedom to thin out your enemies' ranks one by one. Most of the times you can clear entire areas just by being sneaky. Apparently, Sekiro started out as a Tenchu game and I totally believe it, considering how far stealth will get you. But eventually a direct confrontation will be unavoidable. And where Souls games required you to only land that one parry, Sekiro demands that you time your blocks near perfectly several times per exchange. Combat is fast, fluid and demanding enough to make you break a sweat.

While the areas are open and generally well-designed, they are not exactly eyecandy. Souls games are known for their sinister beauty, but that is largely absent in Sekiro. Some areas look flat-out rough. Only rarely will you get the urge to stop and soak in the atmosphere. A missed opportunity, really. And while the environments leave room for exploration, the absence of cool gear makes it feel strangely unrewarding. Also, due to the nature of combat you will see the same instakill moves and finishers quite often. A bit of variety would have been nice.

Like the player, Sekiro faces its own set of challenges. Developer From Software has been around for over three decades, but only since the release of Demon's Souls the studio has gained a larger recognition in the West. Ever since, most of their games have been Souls games either directly or in spirit. Being widely known as the developer of Souls games came with the issue that they were expected to make nothing but Souls games - a curse, if you will. Sekiro marks the first time in a while that a major From Software title branches out far enough to be called its own thing - and be accepted by a large audience. With that leap of faith out of the way, it'll be exciting to see what they will come up with next.

Sometimes things just happen at the right time. Take the free week for Quake Champions as an example. It came along just as I was getting tired of tactical team-based shooters and showed what has been missing all this time: some fast-paced fraggin' of ye olde! Enough with the snail pace and the demented teammates! Just give me a rocket launcher and I'll sort this out by myself! Granted, the absence of a server browser is a bummer and the game has this ugly Free to Play smell to it, but other than that it scratches the arena shooter itch nicely. It is without serious competition in its niche, anyway. Unlike other attempts at reviving arena shooters, this one has legacy behind it, so it's most likely to stick around for a while.

See you in the pit, laddy!

A redout occurs when negative g-force pushes blood from the lower regions of the body into the head. Since this is where the eyes are located, the vision will turn red - hence the name. Redout also happens to be the title of a futuristic racing video game. And boy, is the title on-point.

The developers make no secret of their influences. Games like Wipeout, F-Zero or Rollcage are explicitly mentioned on the store page, so Redout's direction is clear from the very beginning: maneuver your anti-gravity vehicle at breakneck speed while electronic background music gets you amped even further.

Compared to the more naturalistic role models, Redout sports a minimalistic, blocky visual style reminiscent of shaded polygons. Although it may not be everyone's cup of tea, it does a great job establishing the game's own identity. It's bright, it's colorful and beautiful enough to look at. Not that the game leaves you many opportunities, but still.

Redout doesn't pretend you're steering an "actual" glider that needs to be panned and tilted constantly. Imagine piloting a speeding bullet. As such, your main goal is to stay away from the track barriers since even grazing them penalizes you hard enough for every pilot on the track to pass you in the blink of an eye. Easier said than done at ludicrous speed, even more so when the track throws you curve balls by including sudden turns, jumps and loopings. Overcoming those obstacles while maintaining speed is part of the thrill.

There are a few things that bring the whole experience down a bit: Maybe it's a result of the art design, but the tracks can be confusing to navigate at times due to the amount of geography and lighting effects being thrown in your face. Also, the racing tracks later in the game rely on jumps too much as a cheap means of increasing difficulty. Your vehicle's jet motor sound is practically nonexistent and even after several patches, gamepad buttons stop working in the menus for a few seconds.

Regardless, where Redout excels at, where it REALLY excels at, is conveying speed. In that regard, it may even surpass the games it set out to pay homage to. The soundtrack, most of which is psytrance, is decent as well. So if you're a speed freak and haven't gone fast for some time, Redout might be your fix.

Hellblade centers around a Celtic warrior named Senua, who travels to the north in order to revive her lover with the help of Norse gods. It's a classic hero's journey, but not quite what you'd expect based on this description alone. In several ways.

A game with a title such as "Hellblade" can only be a hack & slash game. There's simply no other way. But here's where Hellblade already defies expectations: While the game does feature combat, it takes a backseat in favor of some good old puzzle solving. The puzzles consist of finding runes and scanning your environment for matching patterns. Basically, the player progresses by looking at things. When you do get to slice up foes, the dance of blades is meaty and graceful, but overall rather simplistic. Light attacks and parries for regular enemies, heavy attacks for larger enemies, guard breaks for foes bearing a shield - you've probably seen it all. Plus, there's walking. Lots and lots of walking. Genre-wise, Hellblade can be best described as a mix of third person action, puzzle game and one of those infamous walking simulators.

Mechanically speaking, Hellblade would never set the world on fire. And yet, it's weirdly captivating. The reason for that is the game's gripping atmosphere. Everything about the game is dripping with gloom and the visuals only emphasize that. Of course, there's also the character of Senua. Promotion material already makes a big fuss about her mental illness. The twist is that Senua's journey to hell in order to overcome grief is symptomatic of her psychosis, from her obsession with patterns in mundane objects (see: puzzles) down to her delusion that a Norse god might bring her lover back from the dead. It's nothing American McGee hasn't done already, except Hellblade goes one step further to put the player in the shoes of such a troubled individual. The player will frequently encounter visual glitches or whispers mocking, confusing, sometimes encouraging him. Said whispers also serve as audio cues for when the player is stuck, or during combat when an enemy is about to strike from off-camera, which is pretty much the only trouble you will have in this game.

For the most part, developer Ninja Theory treats the topic of mental illness with respect. There is no easy solution, no tear-jerking and no pretense - like Senua, the player has to accept it for what it is. You won't gain any new insights on the topic of mental health either. It would be the wrong medium, anyway. And apart from a few hammy moments, Hellblade also works well as a psychological drama, although cutscenes tend to occur more often and run longer than they should. Plus, though Hellblade is lovely animated, in those cutscenes Senua has a weird habit of exposing her front teeth for no reason, which looks off.

If you can enjoy a video game for something other than how they play, Hellblade might be worth a spin. It offers an atmosphere that is as depressing as it is absorbing, conveyed primarily by the game's visual and audio design as well as by dealing with rather dark topics like mental illness. On top of all, it's a journey that feels personal. Hellblade's themes would be easy to dismiss as a mere gimmick if they didn't tie in beautifully with the game. It's just sad there's not more of a game in here.

On a different note: VNV Nation during the credits? Oh Tameem, will you ever grow out of your goth phase?

Resident Evil has been so many things: a survival horror adventure, an action-packed third person shooter, a lightgun shooter, and even a fighting game if you count the appearance of RE characters in games such as Marvel vs. Capcom. And with so many other media set in the RE universe such as comics, movies or novels, that's just the tip of the iceberg. A full-on first person shooter, however? That's new.

Considering the direction the series has taken with the last couple of games, you'd expect RE7 to be much more action-oriented, but its pace and overall progression rather resembles the original's. Slowly you work your way through a large mansion while managing your limited inventory, scouting the place for items, solving "put the correct object in this slot" style of puzzles and greeting horrible abominations with one bullet at a time. It’s as Resi as it gets without bringing back zombies and pre-rendered backgrounds. New to the series are prolonged, scripted sequences that are supposed to advance the storyline, which are prominent especially in the beginning hours, but quickly make room for some old-fashioned key hunting. Also, the mansion’s residents follow you around for a good part of the game, like RE3′s Nemesis back in the days, although they never come close to being as annoying.

RE7′s brand of horror can be best described as a wild mix between Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Evil Dead and The Ring, combined with the series’ trademark jump scares and body horror elements. The environments in and around the house located in some backwards Lousiana swamp are so pretty and detailed that you can almost smell the rot in the air. Atmosphere is tight, but even then, the game is lacking some straight up terror.

Overall, RE7 positively surprises with consistency and throwbacks to older titles coupled with a few fresh elements. Truly a return to form after the series displayed an outright identity crisis in RE6. Groovy!

Intense arcade game that blends genres like top down action, twin stick shooter and bullet hell into one stylish package.

Furi is built around the best parts of any game - the boss fights. There are no fillers here: no faceless henchmen, no long platform segments and cutscenes prolonging your way to the ten unique boss characters the player is meant to overcome.

You'd think that such a game might be over in an hour or two, but Furi is freakishly hard in an oldschool kind of way. Each fight consists of multiple phases which get increasingly harder, demanding for the player to master every tool at his disposal. Most often, the key to success is learning your enemy's attack patterns. You will rarely nail them during the first encounter, so expect to die. Horribly. And most of all, repeatedly.

My only gripe is that certain attack phases are significantly harder than others and often they are located at the end of a long six phase battle, meaning you will have to redo the entire battle several times until you have the pattern down, which can be a little discouraging. Apart from that, Furi is an absolute delight from start to finish.

Straight up gucci, baybeh!