Recent reviews by Steppewalker

I have long cherished the memories I made in Neverwinter Nights, a roleplaying game (really a combination of hack-and-slash dungeoneering using 3e rules and thoughtful conversation abound) from the fabled hinterlands of the 2000s. I used to play it a lot about fifteen years ago. It was a place I went to in order to explore the world of Dungeons & Dragons, which I couldn't play at the time and I didn't know much about. I have a lengthy, lengthy backlog, and I decided that in 2025, what better way to start clearing it a bit than by visiting a module I picked up for the game and had never played before.

Pirates of the Sword Coast is... fine D&D. It presents a swashbuckling adventure, where you are given some legitimately fun roleplaying options - but rarely did I feel that my choices mattered all that much. I could see the stitching and the seams - which, given the adventure is dirt cheap, makes sense. It's about six or seven hours long (that's how long I spent on it, anyway), which seems a great price-to-time ratio, if you care about that kind of thing. I probably missed a few things too in the main hub area of this module, so probably about eight or nine hours at most.

There's a lot to enjoy here. The diversity of locale and situation is great. From the port of Neverwinter to being marooned on a desert island, having to fight boars with sticks, to recruiting your own pirate crew in a pirate town, Pirates of the Sword Coast is a fun romp. It does struggle to deliver a cohesive theme, and the end is... rushed and poorly balanced, to say the least. Beating the final boss was a real struggle, even as a Paladin specced into fighting.

If you're already a fan of Neverwinter Nights, I honestly fail to see how you can go too wrong here. It's a well-developed module with good pacing that has secrets and fun little conversations tucked behind every corner. I was impressed by the level of minute detail (the companion dialogue can be surprisingly responsive), and wished that it had just been a little longer or a little more able to sustain its clear ambitions.

But it's good, fun Neverwinter, and after a crushingly long 2024, this was a lovely way to begin the new year - fighting sharks outside a sunken temple of ancient evil. I mean - really - how can you go too wrong with that?

2025 Backlog Clear: #1

I am a big fan of Puppet Combo and their Torture Star label, which is why it is so disheartening to leave a negative review. But this game plays like a demo or a prototype for something that may or may not ever exist.

You play as Larry, a serial killer that goes around killing men, women, and children as they scream for mercy. Even putting aside the hollowness of the game's story and the pettiness of the violence on offer, the violence just isn't very good. The knife often misses its target, the throwing knives randomly sail in the wrong direction sometimes, and the final weapon is so janky you can often kill yourself with it.

Christmas Massacre is a game that has very little to say. You are rewarded for killing people as quickly and as brutally as possible. I have played a lot of horror games, and I am not opposed to horror games where you commit foul deeds, but the game does nothing with its framing narrative. It just has nothing to say. Games don't have to be moral vehicles, but when a game is presenting classrooms full of children as an objective to kill, I wanted more thought or reflection from the game itself on the matter. Sometimes, the game threatens to do something with Larry and his character, or make an interesting level, or something, anything... but it never does. It never manages anything close to fun or entertaining. The shock value is all it has going for it. If you like shock horror, then maybe this is for you? But it's not really worth it. A game like this doesn't have to be fun either, but it should at least have mechanical robustness, or a story worth telling. Larry has no substance, and the gameplay is so simple that it wears out its welcome on the first level. A huge shame.

The strength of a game developed or published by Puppet Combo is often in the way the horror unfolds in real time. The Nun in Nun Massacre is unpredictable, and can appear anywhere at any time. The game is always tense because you never know what comes next, and the threat is adequately dangerous.

In Bloodwash, the threat doesn't become real until the last ten minutes, and by that time the weirdly breakneck pacing has destroyed the game's first hour of expert atmosphere building. It is genuinely a joy to wander around the awful laundromat and the surrounding stores, chatting to the weird inhabitants and watching trailers for horror movies on the tiny laundromat television. It is in atmosphere building and creating a sense of place that Bloodwash succeeds.

Which is why it's such a shame that all of that wonderful work is undone in the game's last twenty minutes, where all jumpscares are telegraphed, taken out of your hands, and are just so predictable. There's no sense of threat, just repetitive shock value "ooh look at that gore". The final boss is just so lame, too - shoot them a few times, then it's over.

I normally treat these games as a bit of a guilty pleasure, which is why it's such a shame to realize that it just falls flat right at the end. A real shame - but still potentially worth playing if you don't mind a lack of actual scares, or you just really like the atmospheres that these kinds of games set up - dilapidated 80s run through crusty 90s video game graphics. Enjoyable, but ultimately disappointing.

LEGIE is an odd game. A combination of grid-based dungeon crawler and 3D adventure game, the game's strengths lie in a powerful atmosphere. You click around on the game's screen to move automatically to the next "tile" (even if the game does a good job in some areas making them not actually feel like rigid tiles). Despite the game's brevity and relative lack of assets (the game is about fourteen megabytes in size), it manages to make the medieval Czech town of Jilemnice feel oppressive. Everything is falling to bits, and people would rather drink their sorrows away than face the world. That's where you, the assistant at a local tavern, come in.

The game is perhaps strongest in its first ten minutes, where you are listening to the depressed miners and their stories, wiping vomit up from the floor, picking up chairs they've toppled over, and putting up with the would-be poet in the corner, trying desperately to earn a living. All the while your boss berates you for what a terrible job you're doing. It is a stellar opening to a game all about the misery of life and the temptation of greed. You really get the sense that the world has fallen apart outside your tavern - so when you get to step outside, it is quite cool to see those expectations fulfilled.

The game "opens up" a little into a dungeon crawler with some combat, but it's not stand-out or anything. Once you get a shield, combat basically can't be lost. One plays LEGIE, then, not for the combat or the action, but for the world and the weird characters within it. It is that tangible sense of place and belonging that makes the game so worth diving into and playing for oneself. If you enjoy that kind of thing in video games, this is an easy recommendation. But for those looking for a solid dungeon-crawler will be disappointed - those elements are there, sure, but they aren't challenging. The dungeon crawling is more in service of the game's weirdly effective mood and tone. You're the only one being proactive about anything - everyone else is struck by deep malaise.

Before I finish this review, however, it is worth noting the game can only be played in a 512 * 512 window, and cannot be made full screen. This may be a deal breaker for some - but let me say that the game is still incredibly immersive, even with this limitation. But if you like adventure games (and don't mind backtracking and sometimes scratching your head about what to do next), and/or you are nostalgic for 90s 3D polygons, you will find yourself having a fun, immersive time in LEGIE.

Despite having an exquisite presentation, good soundtrack, and a clear inspiration from classics in the genre, Lamentum is a game that sadly fails at much at what it sets out to do. I really wanted to like this game, but was struggling by the midway mark to find a reason to care.

Its plot is entirely derivative of Silent Hill 2, and misses much about what made that plot work. Victor, the protagonist, is painfully unlikeable, his dialogue feeling very bland and flat. The story is also painfully predictable, layered in every trope of the genre you can think of. Dying wife that exists only to motivate the protagonist to get involved with some horror stuff? Check. Eerie manorhouse with an equally suspect person living there? Check. Eldritch horrors that reveal themselves in painfully melodramatic ways? Check.

The presentation, again, is gorgeous. It is hard not to love the evident painstaking effort that was put into the entirety of Lamentum. But even the small amount of potential that exists for novelty in the premise of a Resident Evil clone with a Silent Hill plot in the 1700s is squandered by bizarre design decisions. Why are survival horror games still so set on making keys or other important items take up inventory slots in this day and age? Why is every enemy's combat strategy the same (back up and swing, back up and swing)? Why are secret (read: the best) endings locked behind inventory items that can be missed (and will be missed if you aren't doing inventory management correctly)? Why is the game's obvious main villain revealed to have a dramatic and awesome final transformation design, only for him to fall off of a bridge and die in the most anticlimatic way possible? Why is he replaced by some guy we saw in like one scene? Why does Lamentum not even hint at the solutions to puzzles? Most of the puzzles are fantastic and self-evident (genuinely some of the best parts of this game are the puzzles and the general exploration of the luscious pixel-art environments), but one right at the end of the game just needed a prompt to say "if only I had a digging tool...".

Why does the game take itself so painfully seriously when it is very, very clearly just a transposition of Resident Evil and Silent Hill into a less modern setting? Why can it never poke fun at itself? Why are the monsters all so painfully ineffective? Why does the map barely mark anything for you? Why is one ending selected based (as far as I could tell) on a single dialogue choice made in the first hour of the game? Why does Victor provide the dullest narration possible, and has no emotive relationship with any character? He is so genre-blind it is almost physically painful. I get that he's meant to be grieving or in a mental fugue state, but man, there are some things that just made me facepalm.

Thematically, the game is held together with the thinnest, weakest threads. Not that games have any obligation to be moral vehicles, but the game's message (if it even has one) is utterly incoherent. A plot that seems on the face of it to be about the process of grieving and giving up those we have lost is, of course, undermined when the early "leave" or escape ending offered to us is presented explicitly as a coward's way out.

In the end, Lamentum is no fun to play. Great presentation and decent environmental design and puzzles are no substitute for a weak, shaky plot, a dreadful main character, and unfun combat, which plays out the same literally every time. I hope very dearly that the developers got the Resident Evil and Silent Hill out of their system, because I think if they were to try and make another horror game, they could knock it out of the park. But as it stands, Lamentum is not worth struggling through. It contains too many disappointments and gameplay / story lowpoints for it to be worth your time. The developers, evidently hard workers and passionate about their craft, deserve support, but this game is, frankly, not good. And that's no fun at all to write.

A solid, atmospheric folk horror game that never quite manages to land "scary" but is always a little spooky and is definitely always immersive. It's hard to tear yourself away from the Swiss Alps as presented here; the quaint little houses and piles of hay give way to ski fields and harsher climates the higher (and deeper) into the mountains you go.

The story is engaging and the characters surprisingly easy to attach yourself to, especially Flurina, the young girl who never says a word (or does she?), whose occasionally cheeky presence in the story allows for needed moments of levity as you pursue the mystery of who burned your grandfather horribly to death. The areas really are fun to explore, with a collection of houses and plenty of little optional side paths where you can get collectible items - such as coffee to harden your nerves against the haymen and beemen who apparently your character finds so terrifying.

The game is most successful in its attempts at simulation, and at constructing a cohesive, realistic world. The fact that you can brew coffee might sound trivial, but you do have to complete all the sensible steps to brew it. You need a pot, you need to fill it with water from a clean source, you need firewood, you need matches, you need to light the stove, you need to put the coffee in the pot, brew the coffee, then you need a cup out of which to drink it. You're not an animal, after all. This adds to the feeling of a real world inhabited by real people, and is a great contributor to its feeling of immersion. The gorgeous and uniquely styled pencil graphics are just the icing on the top.

The biggest flaw with the game, beyond it not producing any real scares, is the combat. The protagonist, upon seeing any enemy, will sway backwards and forwards as though, when scared, he becomes dizzy. He can barely aim, and his movement is already a bit slow and clunky (though at least it doesn't do that bad horror game thing where they tire after five seconds of running), meaning combat is never satisfying. It also feels strangely bereft of tension, since sometimes it's just hard to tell what the heck an enemy is actually doing. Most enemy attacks also slow you down even further, turning the whole experience into an unresponsive slog at its worst. At its best, it is just serviceable; a kind of scrappy pitchfork fight on a mountainside. A shame pitchforks break after like five or six hits.

Overall, a wonderfully immersive and novel folk horror experience - this kind of theme and setting is rarely seen in a horror game - but just lets itself down with clunky and poorly thought out combat. Don't let that dissuade you though - if you like to inhabit rich virtual spaces, and unravel folkloric mysteries, Mundaun is for you.

Backlog Clear: #6

It took me five years to see the conclusion of Half-Life 2 through. I played Half-Life 2 in 2017, and then randomly leapt into Episode One in 2021. Now, finally, I am here, clearing out my awful backlog, and I am finished. It took me that long to see it through in part because first-person shooters aren't my favourite game genre, and I have to be in a particular mood to see them through. But when I jump into a Half-Life game, I remember why I enjoyed the other entries so much too, so much so that I could hardly put any of them down til I had finished. Episode 2 goes from strength to strength, with memorable level design, strong set-pieces, and the classic gunplay that makes the series stand out today.

The characters are each memorable too, even with little screentime. The game never really lets the pace flag, letting each chapter move smoothly on. There's not much more I can say - this is much better than Episode One, and perhaps even more enjoyable than the base Half-Life 2.

I guess now I will join the legions of people waiting for a third game that will probably never materialize. Whether it ever happens, the fact that these remarkable shooters were ever produced, and are still accessible, and are still fun, is the most important thing of all. It's easy to get hung up on hypotheticals, but if you've never played these games, and are even tangentially interested in FPS games, or heck, even video game history, then Half-Life 2, as a complete package, still very much deserves your time. Remarkable games that are well-designed from top-to-bottom; I am very glad I was eventually able to see them through.

Backlog Clear: #5

Gotham Knights is really a bit of an odd beast. For a game ostensibly inspired by the Arkham series of video games, my favourite superhero games ever, it feels at times oddly bland. This is due to I think the general impression that the developers at one point managed to only just step back from the abyss of a live-service game and just make a Gotham City RPG-lite, which has a bit too much spongy combat by the end for my liking. Keep in mind that the game's biggest pros, the fact that the characters and DC universe are lovingly (if frequently cheesily) written and rendered, are rendered basically null (or might even be a negative) if you aren't a fan of the comic book characters already.

The game assumes a certain level of familiarity with the Batfamily. One thing I did really appreciate about the game though was that it didn't take itself too seriously or too grittily. It's a game with a love for the slightly campy source material, and the four playable characters always play off of each other really well. Each and every cutscene and voiced line of dialogue is slightly different depending on what character you brought along to each mission, and that's something I really appreciate as a player. I will admit that the dialogue could sometimes border on cringe-worthy, but I mean, it's a comic book game. If you've ever read a comic book before, I'm pretty sure you can deal with what you hear here.

I took everyone for a spin, and I was surprised to find that not one of them was too powerful. Robin is probably the most situational (being a stealth character in a game with combat-mandatory bosses), but he's still a lot of fun. I mainly played Batgirl and Red Hood, whose movesets felt a bit more useful more of the time. The stealth is basically as you remember from the Arkham series (though with Batman's core moveset split a little across the four playable characters - Robin is the only one who can do a vertical takedown), and remains just as satisfying as you pick enemies off in the shadows before making your move on the ones you can't figure out how to sneak up on. That's when combat comes in.

Combat is also surprisingly a lot of fun - I was floored a little actually by how much I enjoyed it for about 75% of the game after the reviews I read before going in. It plays a bit like Insomniac's Spider-Man, with dodging instead of countering being the main focus, and the characters darting around like a pinball around rooms of enemies. You have a few supermove-style ultimates to choose from, each useful in their own way, and the standard heavy/light attack style of fighting.

Where we start to run into real problems is with the game's levelling systems. Simply speaking, this game didn't need to be an RPG, with craftable suits and weapons. I never had a single shortage of supplies, and was always comfortably powering myself up. But it felt a bit like meaningless busywork. The suits (which look awesome) could have just been cosmetic unlockables instead of things required to equip to keep yourself level with random crooks. Thematically speaking, having to craft new suits from blueprints and items found after solving random crimes is weird, really, and never really worked for me. Gotham City sadly felt a bit generic to me as well. There was nothing about it beyond the characters that really screamed "Gotham" to me.

By the end of the game, even as I was overlevelled, enemies had way too much health even on Normal difficulty. It was taking ages to take down the miniboss enemies, and I was getting a bit sick of the combat because I felt I was doing everything possible to deal as much damage as I could, and was still wasting way too long on the final few hurdles.

Gotham Knights best moments come when the characters are interacting with each other, and when you're going after the big villains. There are three side-villain case files that punctuate the experience, and those are all memorable and a lot of fun, at times probably better than the main story, which struggles a bit to build a compelling villain (though finally manages in the end), whereas Harley Quinn, for instance, is immediately compelling. The game is fun, but also hamstrings itself by forcing the player to grind random crimes or waste time in submenus crafting new stuff to just keep pace with the criminals.

I think it's an odd game that could have been much better if it cut out some of the excess stuff, got a tighter story and script, and made Gotham City a bit less dull - oh, and made the Batcycle faster. If you are a fan of the DC Universe however, this game is definitely worth buying on sale. It's fun and feels like a homage to the comics rather than any gritty movie-universe, and as such the theming feels like a breath of fresh air in the face of the two very tired types of superhero film - ultra-gritty or "wink at the camera, how silly is all of this eh?" kind of thing. It exists as an actual comic story and a mostly fun game, and that's worth a recommendation. Maybe about a 65%, in my eyes? It's by no means revolutionary, but it was what I was in the mood for, in amidst all the more experimental games I play. Probably if you play more games like this, this will seem much worse.

Backlog Clear: #4

A poor start to a series of five chapters. Telltale's sequel to the original and much beloved (by myself included) Monkey Island games falls flat on several fronts. The first are the game's controls - the inventory screen requiring an extra click to mouse off of is annoying, the way Threepwood moves is annoying, and the camera is wonky. Also, why should I have to interact with the well with the map to start the map puzzle? It's just frustrating.

The second is the dialogue - why give me separate dialogue options if Guybrush isn't even going to say them, instead just saying the same dialogue whatever you chose? It's senseless and immersion breaking. Even if the game doesn't remember choices or whatever, fine, but I'd like to hear Guybrush actually use the quip I chose.

Thirdly, the game is pretty unreliable on modern systems. It crashed several times during loading screens, and once refused to save my game. Not a great start. The game is longer than the 104 minutes I have played, but I played the middle sections of the chapter in offline mode, and came back to finish it off today after a long hiatus from playing it. Absence did not make the heart grow fonder - in fact, it made me wish I was playing the originals. Hopefully the later chapters redeem themselves with smarter humour and more engaging puzzles... but somehow, I doubt it.

Backlog Clear: #3

Korpus: Buried over the Black Soil is a short but clever game, with a pertinent reminder about an event that has been neglected in western history. The game's main pull - that the house reshapes itself depending on the notes you've read - is sadly a little underexplored, given that notes are seen only in a linear fashion, so the game has zero replay value. The game also falls prey to that all-too-common horror game trope wherein the main protagonist can only run for five seconds before wheezing and slowing to a crawl.

However, the way the house does reshape is very clever, the graphics and atmosphere are impeccable, there are some very, very good spatial puzzles, the story is neat, and the game is a decent length for the price, provided you got it on sale. I think this game has been unfairly overlooked (probably due to the price), but it is worth a look. It is well made, even if some of the chase scenes are a bit lackluster (especially the last one, with an enemy who looks a combination of spooky and absolutely ridiculous). Very much worth it on sale, hopefully the developers (who seem to be from Ukraine) have another go at horror.

Backlog Clear: #2