Recent reviews by The Realism Devourer

Brigador is probably one of the best written games made in the last ten years. The world built by Stellar Jockeys is unique, complex, evocative, strange and familiar. Despite being set far in the future, it holds some palpable realness that so many other games set in that time period fail to muster.

The first game that comes to mind when I play this, is, oddly enough, F.E.A.R. I liked F.E.A.R. enough to play it and its expansion packs ( but not the sequels) several times over, and I firmly believe that if you liked F.E.A.R., you'll like Brigador as well. This is both an endorsement and a subtle warning: while I love both games to pieces, they are both unquestionably rather repetitive,

You pick a loadout, arrive in the district, and utterly lay waste to it. Then you do it again, and then more times. The reason why this is fun is that there is a staggeringly large variety of loadouts, and each one presents its own challenges: with three very different types of vehicle (tank, mecha, and agrav, which are essentially Floating Gun Platforms) control in a different fashion, and each have their own quirks: tanks are typically slow and strong, but can ram things with explosive resuts, mecha are easy targets but quite straightforward to use, and agravs can float over certain obstacles. Add to this the four different weapon types, bullets, artillery, cannon and laser; four different "special weapons"-- EMPs, smoke grenades, camo, and the audio-kinetic pulse (this is essentially a cone of noise that can level a building-- or foe), and you have a lot of choices.

Fortunately, in Brigador, the act of murder feels sublime. Stellar Jockeys have perfectly calibrated the interface between sound design, animation and damage level, so that landing damage typically feels amazing. If you are a fan of gargantuan tanks being worn down in a series of ambushes, before near-erotically exploding, this will be something you are going to devote a couple dozen hours to.

Speaking of sound design, while the 80s soundtrack is no Hotline Miami, it is certainly contains an earworm or two, and feels grimly suitable for what you're actually doing.

The "problem" with the narrative is a Marmite one: there's a lot of lore, and all the weapons, vehicles, and pilots have bios, but it's all sequestered away. If you demand your narrative and your gameplay synthesized, then you're probably going to be pissed off by this game, or at least disappointed. Which is a huge shame, because it's all really good, and I read all of it. In addition, none of the factions are shallow: each of the three are visually and thematically distinct, in refreshing ways. You'd think that a faction called "Loyalsits" would be boring but they aren't!

In short, for a first game by an indie dev, who clearly have put a lot of effort into making a memorable experience, it's pretty great, and at least worth a spin if you need to scratch that "stylish murder" itch. If you're looking for AAA fidelity, shiny graphics (in an isometric game lmao) or anything fancy, look elsewhere or be disappointed.

Darkwood is a beautiful, unique product of Polish culture. It's also mean, ugly and foreboding.

It bristles with mood and panicked energy- the game tells you that you have a curfew. Just try to stay out after dark, it says, I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ dare you. Nothing is ever entirely clear. The survival mechanics compliment, rather than detract from the gameplay. Every character you talk to is crazed, cruel, ugly, monstrous, or a combination of such traits-- and yet they're profoundly memorable; through crisp, brutal dialogue, and sharply designed and animated portraits. WIth so little, the good folks at Acid Wizard have done so much. The combat in this game is a messy affair; I'm reminded of the combat in Silent Hill 2, except in Darkwood, it's harder and deadlier. You must charge your attack to full before releasing it, which forces you to kite, to strategize, and to attempt to remember that you can dodge. If I have one criticism w/r/t the combat, it's that the weapons degrade at a pace that's just a little too fast for me.
However, like any other horror game worth its salt, it is the sound of Darkwood that what makes it shine. Whispers in the forest, your heaving breath, the growl of things that were dogs, the music that's so subtle you can barely call it that, all thrust you deep into the forest. There are few moments in this game that make you almost sick with panic, and one is stepping into the bear trap that you set yourself, as you flee from something, as night has begun to fall, to get home in time.

There are some aspects that make the game at times frustrating; and that's when you're playing on the easy mode, where dying means you drop a portion of your inventory, so you go out to recover it and are killed along the way because you were missing vital tools you kept in your inventory, so you go out to recover it and because the map doesn't show your exact location and you've go to use landmarks and navigate that way, you get lost, and wander into a field of poisonous mushrooms and die yet again.
It's great. I don't like it, but it's great.

In all, Darkwood is worth your time. The developers are wonderful people in that they took the huge risk of releasing a torrent version of this game, but nonetheless, you should buy it, ideally at full price, so that they can go make more excellent, ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up Polish content.

Speaking as someone with a deepset hatred of multiplayer games, Orcs Must Die! 2 is only fun when played with a pal, preferably in the same room as you. When you're on your own, it's a fairly compelling tower defence/third person shooter, with cheerful, cartoony graphics and some fun toys. It's fine. The weapons are for the most part generic, but some are strikes of brilliance- a staff whose main attack is a charged blast, and whose alt attack is mind control, or a blunderbuss, that, when upgraded properly, causes foes to fall over, in a "oh dear I've suddenly lost the bones in my legs" ragdoll fashion. The wind belt allows you to push foes back, with a gust of wind, ideally off a ledge.

The traps, however, are where the game shines, and there the traps shine are the springs. You'd think it'd get old to see foes get launched across the map and fall into a pit of lava or acid, but it simply doesn't. It's hilarious every time.

Alone, it's just serviceable. With Pal in hand, however, it's transcendent. The designers really understood how to make cooperative play not just enjoyable, but exhilarating. The shared experience of victory or defeat is made only more meaningful by the fact that you planned your loadouts, you scouted the map, you picked your weapons and chose your chokepoints. You sweated, panicked, strived and rebuffed, together. You synergized.

Seeing as the developers aren't going to remove head from anus and stop wasting their time on a MOBA for a while, enjoy this in the meantime.

The skinny: if you don't care about the world and just want to kill mobs because you're done with Diablo and pissed off and PoE, this is pretty good. If you're like me and actually want the world to make sense and have some measure of depth, don't waste your time.

The world of Cairn, to which the eponymous apocalyptic event occured, is fairly bizarre. It seems as though the designers had this deep hankering for a game with demons, unknowable abominations from beyond the stars, (this time with CRYSTAL GEM aesthetics!! (no, they're not here to save the day)), magic, kings and emperors, skellingtons, cowboys, witches, shamans, an iterent, persecuted race rather like the Romani, (indeed, the devs chose the name Rohwari, or Rovers, colloquially) cultists in service to the aforementioned demons, zombies, as well as an entirely original pantheon of deities, all at the same time. Spoiler: it doesn't work. Not remotely.

That wouldn't be a bad thing, if the writers had a vestigal at best understanding of how religion and faith works, and at worst are from the /r/atheism cadre of thought. The supposed "good" deity, insofar as he is the deity of light, order, and mercy, is called Empyrion, of all things. And the faction that represents him, are, of course, religious extremists. The dog whistle here is for antitheists- "Even the "greatest" of the gods, named after empiricism itself, has evil followers!" That isn't in itself a black mark against the game, but for that to be the game's chief foray into questions of faith, is something I'd expect from a flash game on Newgrounds.

That said, the game looks good. The enemy design is on point, especially the demons you meet in the latter part of the game, and the cosmic horror monstrosities (I hasten to say eldrich because that refers to something else, in game). Some of the places you visit in Cairn are deeply memorable, but many others are simply not, or, worse, cut and pasted from somewhere earlier. This dulls the impact of some of my favourite areas.

Almost all the place names are limp, and seem to be cribbed from the "Fantasy Place Name Generator 9001"- Homestead, Devil's Crossing, Wightmire, Arkovia, Asterkarn. Others, like Darkvale, barrel into the territory of "I am 13. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris are my heroes. I watched shoveldog and laughed. I DEMAND TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY!"

Furthermore, the world lacks any nuance. We are told that the Rohwari are considered petty thieves by many, but we're given no evidence. All but nobody says that they are, the game just tells you so. We're also told that they're good boys who are pacifists and who will never go to war due to their shamantic, animistic religion- yet like any other faction they're perfectly willing to pay you to kill things for them.
The "Death's Bannermen" former penal batallion, now ex-Imperial Fist (since the empire collapsed) and Humanity's Last Hope!! wants you to murder a witch due to supersititons, but they're never detailed further than "witch bad". Surely it would be better to perhaps cooperate with the witch, to set aside differences for the good of humanity?
In the third act, the game lets you choose between the religious extremists who I mentioned above, who've drawn their inspiration from a Tempar-style monastic military order, and The Order of Death's Vigil (yes, seriously), who are necromancers (also horribly persecuted). The former want to purge the world in healing fire. The latter want to ressurect the dead to aid in the reconstruction. And there isn't room for two of them in this 'ere Cairn.
Every rivalry, every character, every faction is contrived. Conflict is forced. The Aetherials, whose colour is (guess what?) electric-teal-green, aka Otherworldly Pigment #12, are in this world because something something long before humans something something perfect time to take it back, something something kill/enslave everyone. The Cult of C'thon are a comically, ludicrously evil blood cult who want to bring blood and obsidian demons into this world. Yet they seem to have a near-endless supply of members, parents and children, who have willingly signed up. That there are that many amoral, sadistic anti-natalists in Cairn is shocking. A cult that all but straight-up tells you that it wants you, so that it can drain you of your blood should not, in any situation, receive such a large number of adherents. Nobody has credible motiviations outside of survival.

And yet when you look past all this, there's something of an interesting world hiding in the cracks. I like the Devotion system, whereby you gain bonuses and abilities by alloting shrine points into constellations, making up some basis of a symbolic order. But that's all we see of it. I love it when worlds invent their own swear words. Taff, for instance, in Thief, is deeply charming. Here, the word is slith, meaning, well, I'm sure you can guess. Slith, ingame, are tribalistic snake people, the Frankenstinian results of man Dabbling Where He Ought Not To. They come out of holes in the ground, called slithholes. It's great. But then it goes away and is barely mentioned ever again. That's another common thread in this game. None of the plots, side quests, or characters have personality. Legendary items are only legendary insofar as they have good stats and a cool name. The reason I'm so hard on this, is that if you're going to spend about 80 hours per character in a world, it better be a place worth exploring.

But none of that is what you're looking for in an ARPG. You want Combat! Blood! Violence! Cool abilities that cater to your inner Timmy. That, this game has in spades. The Mastery system, where you pick two classes and make your build from there, is a handmedown from the sperm donor of this game, Titan Quest (that is, post the collapse of IronLore, some of the devs who worked on Titan Quest wanted to make another ARPG and did so). It's a handmedown, yes, but it's inspired, and pretty fun. The two other inherited traits from TQ (and also, therefore, from Diablo 2) are the resistance system, here fleshed out further, (there is fire, and burning damage, cold and forstburn, etc, and a whole pallette of resistances and corresponding ways to deal damage) and the loot system- Common, Magic, Rare, Epic and Legendary, in increasing order of scarcity and Ability to do Cool Stuff. It's a delight to find your first Epic weapon, but the joy soon dulls. Ibid for Legendaries. The combat is satisfying in the same way that a kebab is, at 2am, after the 5th beer of the night: great in the moment, something you find unsubstantial and feel disgusting about in hindsight. This is probably a problem endemic to ARPGs, due to the skinner box nature of the underlying mechanics. That said, I kept coming back to it, time and again.

So if you want a game for this summer that has enough depth to fool you into believing that there's something there, and is otherwise near mindless clicking- here it is. Come and play.

If you've just gone through a bad breakup, lost a loved one, had a pet die, or are otherwise in a bad place, this is what you need to do:
1) Set aside 15-ish hours of your life where you won't be disturbed.
2) prepare some light, bland meals and drinks for those 15 hours.
3) Play LISA. No breaks. No interruptions. No contact with the outside world for any reason.

It isn't going to make anything feel better, if anything it'll make you feel worse. But as you feel the inside of your soul rusting and peeling, you may find some shreds of catharsis. There are jokes, placed like a breadcrumb trail, to keep you holding on just so long to see what is going to happen to the sad, sad man you're spending your time with. At some point you may hit a wall and consider giving up. Don't. I played through the first 3-ish acts of this game, and then put it down for a year, and it still punched me in the gut when I went and finished it. I can't imagine how unpleasant it'll be to play it straight through.
But why am I telling you to play a game that makes you feel awful? Very simple: for the same reason that a cultured individual should watch Irreversible, or Come and See, or Magnolia or Requiem for a Dream, or read Exquisite Corpse or Funeral RItes. Because it's a stunning, beautiful piece of art, and sometimes, it's healthy to expose yourself to complicated, unpleasant, scary feelings. You will come out the other side purged.
Once you're done
1) Have a shower
2) Make some tea
3) Call your parents and tell them you love them

The only game that made me feel worse than LISA was probably Demonophobia, and I stopped playing that after twenty minutes when I realised that people were supposed to be getting off on it.

Strictly inF.E.A.R.ior to the original and its expansion packs, Progect Origin is a comedy wearing the skin of a relatively drab military shooter. There are numerous things missing from it that gave the original much of its charm- the fact that when you bicycle kick someone in F.E.A.R., their head spins round and round thousands of degrees. You can't peek around corners and the stealth system is gutted in favour of run-and-gunning. Even on the hard difficulty. The voice acting is a mixed bag. Enemies are terrible and unconvincing. Your allies are pretty good, though, despite that their personalites aren't explored further than the most elementary of brushstrokes. The gunplay feels weaker, despite that enemies do explode into giblets when you fire a shotgun in their direction and I'm not sure how that's possible, but there it is.
I mentioned comedy earlier: the "actual" plot- that is, the plot you get if you don't obsessively read all the pieces of intel- is a continuation from the first game, a horror-inflected, slightly dumb action-scifi. However, if you take the time to read the intel, it transforms into a sunday morning cartoon with more blood. I realised this when I got to the elementary school level, finding a log talking about the side affects of drugs that were put in the children's food. Drugs that caused projectile vomiting. Additonally, in the school office, the parents of children report that their darlings are having nightmares about being shown violent images, strapped to chair and jabbed with needles, and that the parents were at a loss because they never showed their children anything of the sort, and are SURE that they weren't exposed to such things in school.
Even the bullet-time seems dull in comparison. What they have improved on is the degree to which the environment is degradable, and given you the chance to pilot a stompy robot. But even stompy robots cannot save this game from its sheer mediocrity.
Don't waste your time. Replay the originals or watch a let's-play.

This game should be the face of everything I hate- blind production in the name of "research" so that you can produce more things at a faster rate. And exterminating the aliens of the planet you're invading because they have an issue with your rape of their landscape. That being said, it is extremely compelling. The game forever shows you that you can always do better. You can always build more efficient routes. You can be more elegant, faster, more productive. Suppose you wanted to make an inserter- a crane-like arm that can move an object from an adjacent belt and move it to either another belt, or a chest, or an "assembly machine"- a factory. To make an inserter, you need one iron plate, one iron gear and one electric circuit. The plate is the product of a forge, where raw iron is cooked into workable plates. Gears cost one plate to make. A circuit is a plate, and three pieces of copper wire, themselves made from copper plate. So to make an inserter you need one gear assembly machine, one copper wire assembly machine, one circuit assembly machine and one inserter assembly machine, plus the forges and coal to make the metal plates in the first place, and some sort of electrical power so that the inserters and assembly machines run. If this itself sounds dull, it is. What is fascinating is how to make it perfectly efficient and maximally productive. Playing this game is how I imagine how and engineer or someone who feels compelled to build pac-man in minecraft feels on a daily basis, seeing everything as abstraction, attempting to make everything perfect. It's a hellish feeling. I hate this game. But you should buy it if only for the experience and joy of doing it right.

The game does have a substiantial issue with pacing. In a campaign mission, there's usually at least half an hour of just plain waiting. The music is bad. Some of the recipes are unnecessarily obscure. The game isn't extremely keen on hand-holding, and likes a lot to trick you and point and laugh at your errors. Like failing to kill all the aliens before you start Big Industry. I would have appreciated a slightly more close focus to chemistry. Additionally, like in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, I'd have loved to be able to befriend the aliens.

In short, Factorio is a big playbox just perfect for someone who looked at Minecraft and thought, "This game needs to have all its charisma sucked out of it, and replaced by AUTOMATION. BLEEP BLOOP I HAVE NO SOUL."

When I was much, much younger, I went to a CofE primary school, and we sung hymns every morning. At the time, I hated it, but looking back, it was very good for me. One of my favourite hymns was "Here I am, Lord" by Dan Schutte.

Now, F.E.A.R. is one of those games that pretends to be horror. Now and again the spoops come out, the hallway spins, ghosts and cute little girls whisper at you. Blood fills the screen. Fires. Screaming. Then it goes back to normal. The normal of F.E.A.R. is frankly fantastic gunplay, with a wide variety of weapons that each feel distinct and powerful. The single pistol can be used for sniping. The shotgun feels orgasmic. The HV Penetrator nails people to walls with 20mm pieces of rebar. The weird, scifi guns are a bit of a waste of time as you don't get too much ammo for them, but are nonetheless fun.

The foes you fight are mostly five-to -seven man squads of highly competent soldiers. They try to flank you, communicate, supress you with fire, flush you out with grenades, and generally behave as soldiers hunting a highly armed and dangerous psyop would. It's a pleasure to fight against them as they actually pose a threat. Sure, they're easy to kill, but they put up a hell of a fight. They communicate through shouting to each other, telegraphing movements, grenades thrown, whether *you've* thrown a grenade, and most importantly where you are. They even tell each other to retreat.

Now, that snippet about hymns is relevant as one of the things they shout is WHERE SHOULD I GO!!? This is usually just before you kick them in the face so hard their head spins some 1240 degrees. And to that I answered, I HAVE HEARD YOU CALLING IN THE NIGHT- screaming, gunfire, robotic groaning- COVER FIRE- grenades- I WILL GO LORD, IF YOU NEED ME- crates falling-I WILL HOLD YOUR PEOPLE IN MY HEART.

11/10 religious experience.
Play on the hardest difficulty. It's worth it.

There have been extremely few places in video games to have genuinely scared me. The Ocean House hotel in Vampire: The Masquerade, an otherwise relatively goofy and slightly broken RPG based on the WoD roleplaying systems. A few spoilerrific rooms in Silent Hill 2. And here. This ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ horrifying space ship. I'm arachnophobic and so modded out the spiders- and even without spiders this place is still drowning in atmosphere and genuinely one of the greastest games ever made.

My Dad thinks that games are a waste of time and that one can have much more fun and growth from reading Thackery or Trollope. That being said, he must have put in several thousand hours into this game since he bought it for me around my 6th-odd birthday in 2001. Our primay form of bonding is talking Civ strategy.

He has no interest in 4, 5, BE or anything like that. Says they're not interesting like this one is. I'm inclined to agree. I think that Civ 3 is the essence of 4X, and that any designer wanting to know what makes 4x games great, should play this obsessively. There are a few things here and there that I think could have been expanded on- such as plague- and the fact that some civilizations simply have uninspired Unique Units with bland mechanics. Nevertheless, one of my favourite games ever. Now that Civ 6 is happening, I do hope that Meier et al look back to this one, for inspiration, on how a truly grand 4X should be.