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More Steam Next Fest Recommendations
I’ve had time to play more demos on Steam Next Fest. In addition to my picks from yesterday, here are a few more that I really liked!
Signalis
I’ve seen this one recommended from numerous sources, but for some reason I kept putting it off, and yet it was amazing when I finally played it. Signalis is a top-down game that plays out like (the original) Resident Evil – limited ammunition, slow lumbering monsters, progress gated by item puzzles, little story bits laying around in discarded documents. The graphics are what I can only term as “lo-fi”, in that they’re evocative of pixelated retro games, but in a style that’s not really comparable to any game that I personally know from back in the day. The game takes place on a crashed spacecraft, and what I initially thought was straightforward scifi horror (like The Thing) took an unexpected twist toward the end. I highly recommend checking out this demo for fans of horror games.
Panic Porcupine
This game has one very clear inspiration, and that’s Sonic the Hedgehog. It has everything from a mad scientist who entraps the local wildlife in robotic eggs to a character that rolls up in a ball to gain momentum. That said the game felt very technique-driven when compared to Sonic. The player must really become skilled in using the character’s speed and momentum to clear each stage. So, it’s sort of like how Sonic should work in theory at least. I didn’t expect much out of such a blatant Sonic wannabe, but I was impressed by how fun this game turned out being.
Mothmen 1966
Another horror game with pixelated graphics. Unlike Signalis, this game is actually a graphic adventure that plays out mostly through text. It is very well written from what I experienced, creating nuanced characters as well as some really creepy situations. By the end, I definitely wanted to see where the story was going. This one releases in July, and I will definitely check it out later.
Exophobia
Yesterday, I wrote about Selaco, an FPS that appears to be inspired by the likes of System Shock and Doom. Exophobia takes it even farther back, clearly evoking the look and feel of Wolfenstein 3D – a run and gun shooter set in simplistic 3D environments. You can’t even look up or down in this game! Yet despite its primitiveness, I had fun exploring the large maze-like level in the demo. The game also has a slide move that helps the player dodge enemy fire and can be used to stun enemies if you knock into them, which adds a fun twist to gameplay.
The Fridge is Red
I vacillated a bit on recommending this game. It is a horror game set in the new creepy internet fad of liminal spaces – mundane settings that make a deeply unnerving impression. The game seemed cool to me, but I got nauseous while playing it and couldn’t finish the demo, so take that for what it is.
Steam Next Fest 2022 Recommendations
Last year I had a ton of fun with Steam Next Fest, a summer showcase event featuring a huge number of playable demos from indie developers. Unfortunately, the event only lasted a week, and not being prepared, I didn’t have time to try out everything I wanted to see. Now that Next Fest has come around again, I’ve had a little more free time this week, so I’ve been able to check out a lot more demos from this new crop of indie games. Below are my recommendations.
Escape Academy
This game was the highlight of all of the demos I played so far, and I was happy to find out it’s slated to come out in July, so there won’t be much of a wait. The game is basically a series of escape rooms set against the story that you’ve been inducted as a student into a secretive school that trains master escape room escapists. Why such a school exists is not really explained in the demo, but even if the story ends up being nonsensical, I think I’ll enjoy solving these puzzle rooms enough that it won’t really matter.
My only issue was that the game didn’t really run that well on my decently-powered PC. The frame rate was quite choppy while playing. Normally, I wouldn’t be so concerned with a game’s performance from a demo, but with it releasing so soon, it does make me slightly uneasy.
And as a heads up, there is another game with a similar title in the event called Escape Room Academy. Don’t get this confused with that!
Rog & Roll
I actually played this one last year and thought it was merely “okay”. I almost didn’t try it again this year, but I’m glad I did. This new demo shows that the game has made considerable leaps since last summer. Rog and Roll is a sidescrolling platformer that combines sprite-based characters with simplistic polygonal environments. The way it looks sort of reminds me of Kirby.
What I like about Rog and Roll is that it is a fairly straightforward platformer. Most platformers made by indie developers try to have something “extra”, like it has a heavy focus on puzzles, or it tries to tell a heartbreaking story, or it cranks the difficulty way up. Rog and Roll really just has a focus on platforming – running and jumping – which is not to say that it’s easy or lacking in intrigue. It has a difficulty level that is reasonably challenging, but nothing extremely tough, and the levels have enough branching paths and secret areas to make them interesting to explore.
Along with Escape Academy, this game was the highlight of the event. Can’t wait.
Ghost Song
At first, I didn’t really think much of this game – it’s another game wanting to be Super Metroid – there’s like ten of those released on a weekly basis. But it really grew on me. The combat is a mixture of melee and ranged shooting, and there is an interesting mechanism through which the game encourages you to mix it up between those two types of attacks. While it didn’t immediately feel particularly special, I think the lonesome atmosphere of the game eventually grew on me. It’s very very much like Super Metroid – a sci-fi warrior exploring a hostile, lonely plant – but with elements of Dark Souls and anime cyberpunk shaded in. I’m definitely intrigued.
Anger Foot
An indie first person shooter(/kicker). There are a lot of indie first person shooters coming out right now, but most of them are inspired by games like Doom or Quake and use graphics that strongly resemble those inspirations. Anger Foot looks quite a bit more modern. Playing the game reminds me of Hotline Miami in how the player is expected to just bust through the levels, making their way through using a combination of speedy aggression and trial and error. Enemies can do a lot of damage very quickly, so it often takes some experimentation with how to tackle the level before you can complete it. That said, the game is so fast paced that dying a few (or several) times doesn’t really become aggravating.
Selaco
In contrast to Anger Foot, there is Selaco, which is totally one of those Doom-inspired games I was talking about. It’s even built in the GZDoom engine (yet it still looks really cool despite the vintage software). That said, it was a cool run-and-gun game with a setting that reminded me of System Shock 2. Very interested to see how this one will turn out in the end.
Frogun
This game bills itself as a 3D platformer in the style of those that were on the N64 and PSX. Certainly, it looks a lot like a PSX game, but when I think about comparable games on the N64 and PSX, I think about stuff like Banjo-Kazooie and Spryo the Dragon, and this game is very “flat” when compared to those games. The “frogun” concept is that the character has a little gun that shoots out a frog tongue that can be used like the grappling hook in Zelda – it can pull the character to distant surfaces or be used to pull enemies and objects toward the character. It was kind of fun, although I worry that the gameplay might not have enough depth to sustain my interest through a full game. Still, I’m definitely interested to see how it turns.
I’ve played quite a few more Next Fest demos than what I’ve mentioned above, but these were the ones that I specifically wishlisted on Steam so that I could check them out when they release. The Next Fest event ends on Monday (6/20). I think it’s really unfortunate that they only let this event last for one week and not longer. There are just too many demos to try and one week doesn’t give me enough time in my busy schedule to check out everything. I’m squeezing in time whenever I can to try more of these, though.
Hidden Gem Recommendations for the 2020 Steam Summer Sale
In these deeply uncertain times, one thing you can always count on is Steam’s seasonal sales. Steam’s Summer Sale is ongoing now through 10:00 am PST on July 9th. I always enjoy the Steam sale as it’s a great opportunity to take advantage of some of the exceptionally low prices to take a risk on games I’m curious about but not entirely certain I’ll enjoy. As such, each year during this time I’ve made it a tradition to recommend lesser known “hidden gems” that go on sale for under $5. If these deals aren’t enough then previous years recommendations are, of course, still valid.
Nex Machina
$4.99
Nex Machina is a top down twin stick shooter from Housemarque, a group that is known for its arcade-style action games. In this game, the player fights an unrelenting horde of rogue machinery amidst a world streaked by the neon chaos of explosions, laser blasts, and voxelated destruction. As an arcade-style game, it’s relatively short, choosing to focus on high score and replayability, and some people may be turned off by the lack of a save feature, meaning that if the player quits their session, they must start over from the very beginning. This is a great game for people looking for fast-paced action and non-stop sensory overload without the trappings of more story-oriented action games.
Little Nightmares
$4.99
I’ve written about Little Nightmares before, and it’s now available at a great price. As a “nightmare” puzzle-platformer game, it’s impossible to not compare this title to the likes of Limbo and Inside. In Little Nightmares, a mysterious child navigates a dementedly distorted world using their wits to evade the grotesque monsters that hunt her at every step. Little Nightmares is a great game for players who enjoy puzzle-platformers with a focus on aesthetics and cryptic world building.
Gato Roboto
$3.99
Gato Roboto is a fairly recent release in the “Metroidvania” genre. After surviving an emergency crash landing while on patrol in space, a simple house (space?) cat dons high-tech power armor to explore a hostile abandoned installation to find help for its human companion. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the game is its stark monochrome visual presentation which can be a “like it or hate it” kind of thing. In-game collectibles can be found to unlock new color palettes, but they are all composed of simple 2-color variations. While the game has many elements of a Metroid-style adventure, it can be very linear in progression, so those that enjoy the sequence breaking and exploration focus of those games may need to look elsewhere. Gato Roboto is a good choice for players who like sidescrollers that are equal parts action and platforming. The heartfelt and goofy journey of this cat who becomes an unlikely mech pilot to save its human will also resonate with pet owners who love their companions.
1001 Spikes
$4.94
I wrote about this game a long, long time ago when I played it on the 3DS, and while I think it is one of the best sidescrolling platformers I’ve played in the past 10 years, it’s also a game that is highly divisive. 1001 Spikes follows Aban Hawkins as he explores dangerous, trap-laden ancient ruins in search of a long lost treasure. This game is hard, with as much emphasis as I can put on the word, and borderline unfair. It’s the “borderline unfair” part that makes the game so polarizing. Traps in the game are hidden incredibly well with only subtle hints to their existence (if any), often leaving the player with a frantically tight window of time to react when triggered. As such, it can often be viewed as a trial and error ordeal. The gimmick, though, is that the player starts the game with 1001 lives to complete the challenging quest, and after they run out, there is a reasonably generous continue system that only incurs a small penalty to progress. 1001 Spikes is a game for people who like super challenging platformers like Super Meat Boy and Celeste and have the patience and tenacity to stick with it.
Vanquish
$4.99
I try to keep this list to lesser known games, but that’s based on my personal perception, which is not always the best gage. With that in mind, Vanquish may be the most well-known game on this list as a product of the acclaimed director Shinji Mikami and Platinum Studios (of Bayonetta fame). Vanquish feels like Mikami’s attempt to do a cover-based shooter in the vein of Gears of War. Gears of War, of course, was heavily influenced by Mikami’s Resident Evil 4, so this is a snake eating its own tail situation. Vanquish involves the ultra-American protagonist Sam Gideon ona mission to reclaim an American orbital city colony (an O’Neill cylinder to be exact) from Russian androids. What sets Vanquish apart from other third person shooters is that Gideon has an extraordinary amount of mobility due to his ability to rocket slide around the combat zone. While the game has plenty of chest high walls to hide behind, Vanquish’s enemy encounters are designed in such a way that Gideon can’t stay in one place for too long, meaning he has to constantly rocket boost from point-to-point to evade enemy fire. The result is a more kinetic action game than was typical for games of that era. I recommend Vanquish to all players who enjoy big, bombastic action shooters.
Night Trap
$2.99
Another game that I’ve covered for Halloween, Night Trap is the legendary interactive movie from the Sega CD that heavily contributed to the creation of the ESRB in the US. Night Trap tells the story of a group of high school girls that have been lured to the trap-infested Martin house to be captured and fed to pseudo-vampiric entities known as augurs. The player is an agent of an outside security force that has hacked into the traps of the house and intends to turn them against the augurs. The player must cycle through video feeds of the house party, keeping an eye out for signs that an augur is preparing to strike and triggering the appropriate traps when necessary. In hindsight, the moral panic that surrounded this game was laughable due to how utterly tame the “violent” content actually is. Night Trap is goofy and cheesy, and I’ve found it to be fun while it lasts (which is really not very long). The brevity of the title will turn many people off, but I think this game is an interesting artifact of gaming history, worth it for those who are fascinated with the culture of gaming that existed in the ‘90s.
Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara
$4.94
Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara is a compilation of two arcade beat’em up classics, Tower of Doom and Shadow Over Mystara. These games are mostly notable for their relative depth when compared to other arcade beat’em ups of the time, featuring RPG mechanics, branching paths, and equipment and spell mechanics that set them apart from their contemporaries. For fans of the arcade originals, there are a fair few extra goodies to unlock. I recommend this compilation to anyone into ‘90s beat’em ups.
Serious Sam Double D XXL
$1.99
The Serious Sam series has had a few smaller spin offs made by indie creators in partnership with CroTeam, and Double D XXL is an enhanced version of the first of these spin offs to be released. The game reframes the Serious Sam formula as a 2D sidescroller similar to Contra. Serious Sam games are all about fighting off giant swarms of alien enemies that are advancing from all directions, which doesn’t necessarily translate perfectly when a dimension is stripped out, but Double D makes up for it with some of its own ideas. The most notable is their gun stacking system, that allows Sam to combo weapons together to equip as many at one time as the player wants. Serious Sam is a series known for its strange enemy design, but Double D XXL somehow manages to out weird the mainline entries in this respect. Mutant stacks of pancakes that blast vuvuzelas are seemingly too bizarre for even CroTeam’s main team to touch. I recommend Double D to players who are into tough, dumb, action games.
QUBE 2!
I love puzzle games, but that hasn’t always been the case. When I was much younger, the term “puzzle game” was more synonymous with falling block games, that is to say games that relied on the old Tetris formula in which the player’s goal is to arrange pieces of junk falling from the sky according to some idiosyncratic rule that causes the mess to disappear. I really liked Tetris, but I also got it for free with my Game Boy. It simply never crossed my mind to use the limited opportunities that a youngster has to get new video games on the numerous clones of Tetris that proliferated after its breakout success. Those types of games simply didn’t offer enough content in comparison to the action-adventure games that I usually picked up.
Somewhere along the line all that changed. The “puzzle game” term was commandeered by a different game and its numerous clones. That game, of course, was Portal, and it completely reinvigorated what had become an utterly sleepy genre. The term suddenly was used less to describe games about the strategy and reflexes of arranging falling blocks, and more to describe games in which the player sets about solving puzzles built into the environment of the levels they are meant to explore. And after Portal, there was a boom in indie groups taking advantage of new digital storefronts to release new games in the genre. One game that often stands out in my mind as emblematic of this boom time was QUBE, a game that could easily be described as a Portal clone, although a good game nonetheless, worth the time of anyone interested in such games. QUBE sort of came and went, and it seemed like it didn’t quite make the same lasting impression as some of the other big name puzzle games of the time, which is why I was happy when a sequel, QUBE 2, was released earlier this year.
QUBE 2, like the game before it, is set inside a massive structure made of white cubes, ominously implied to be of alien origin. During the beginnings steps of the story, the player discovers and equips a strange, technologically-advanced glove that allows them to manipulate the properties of the cubic building blocks of the surroundings. This is the primary means through which the player interacts with the environment. The glove can confer functionality to specific cubes with each functionality having a specific color coding. Red cubes expand outward, laterally from the surface in which they are embedded, to create steps or possibly obstructions. Blue cubes act like “ejectors”, forcefully expelling the player or any other objects that touch their surfaces in the opposite direction. Finally, green cubes become detached from the structure, creating a moveable object that can be used, for instance, to weigh down switches or act as stepping stones.
These are the only glove functions that are introduced to the player. With such a limited number of ways to manipulate individual blocks, I was initially worried that QUBE 2 might be too simplistic mechanically for a large variety of complex puzzles. Ultimately, however, I found that the game had a good ramp in terms of difficulty and complexity. While the player may only have three “powers”, the game continually introduces new elements and features to the environment that keep the basic formula of the puzzles from stagnating. And while I felt the game started off maybe too easy, the puzzles progress through a fair difficulty curve, and I think the puzzle design offered a very satisfying challenge without ever becoming unreasonably obtuse.
The first QUBE was completely devoid of story, and that’s not an exaggeration. As far as I can recall, the main character never spoke, was spoken too, or encountered other characters. He/she/it simply moved through the cube structures solving puzzles to progress. I think the game may have been criticized a bit unfairly for this, as the closest point of comparison most people have for this game is Portal, and many people play Portal for the story first, puzzles second. Eventually, a “director’s cut” version of the game was released that included new story elements, but I’ve never gone back to play this version, so I can provide no comment on it.
I can say, however, that QUBE 2 puts a fair bit of effort into its story from the get go. The player takes control of Amelia Cross, a woman who awakens on a desolated planet that has been overtaken by the eponymous alien cubes which have self-assembled into enormous structures that dot the world’s surface. Taking refuge in one of these structures, Amelia begins to explore its inner workings and sets about uncovering the true nature of the cubes and their potential as friend or foe to humankind. The story is metered out in the “radio play” style with all interactions between Amelia and the other characters being carried out over radio transmissions as the player goes about their business. I thought the actual plot that unfolds was merely decent. It’s not bad by any means, but for people who have read or watched a lot of science fiction, it will probably be easy to figure out where the story is heading. But as predictable as it may be, the story doesn’t really get in the way of the overall adventure, and I felt it gave some coloring to the experience that increased immersion, meaning I don’t feel that it was a purely perfunctory element of the game. But it’s important to understand that for the kind of person who plays Portal for the story and jokes and doesn’t really care about the challenge of puzzle solving, this game probably won’t be particularly engaging.
Speaking of immersion, I thought QUBE 2 was visually stunning in its own humble way. I feel like that’s kind of a weird thing to say about a game where the player spends their time exploring environments entirely made out of white cubes. But the image quality is really sharp, and lighting is used well to create texture and dynamism in the world. Later on in the game, bits of nature and greenery begin to encroach on the otherwise sterile environments, adding a small bit of satisfying diversity. There’s not a huge amount of variety to the setting, but I never felt bored or tired of the aesthetic, which is not something I can say of the first QUBE.
QUBE 2 is interesting because its predecessor is so quaint in comparison. QUBE was a simple $15 puzzle game released in the wake of Portal’s popularity. It was a cool game, but I never really thought the core concept could carry more than one title in a series. The team behind this game apparently had a completely different idea, however, and really doubled down on what they had. With QUBE 2, they took their humble indie game and blew it up into a significantly more expansive and polished product. QUBE 2 has more extensive content, slicker visuals, and a significantly more substantial story. I find it to be the often too rare kind of sequel that stands completely on its own, and in no way requires experience with the prior game in the series to fully enjoy. Personally, I often tend to be compulsively driven to play games sequentially in a series (i.e., I can’t play sequels until I play their predecessors). But with QUBE 2, I have no hesitance about recommending newcomers start here, and only tackle the original game if they are left wanting more.
Stories Untold!
Stories Untold is a series of four vignettes tinged with horror and modelled after classic sci-fi anthology series such as The Outer Limits and Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories. Each vignette is superficially a standalone experience with the commonality that they each feature stories in which the player interacts with an array of (by today’s standards) vintage electronics such as classic microcomputers, microfiche archives, radios, televisions, etc. The exception is the final episode which manages to tie together the seemingly unrelated events of the preceding chapters into a surprisingly cohesive whole.
Of the four episodes, I felt the first was easily the strongest. It’s also the only episode that I felt leant deeply into the horror genre. In this chapter, the player is rooted at a home desk with a “Futuro” microcomputer, which is essentially a fictionalized analogue of machines like the Amiga and Commodore 64. Loaded up onto the system is The House Abandon, a text adventure that is essentially a game within a game. The entire episode is spent at this desk playing this one text adventure game. The House Abandon begins as a seemingly warm and fuzzy story about returning to a childhood home, but eventually reveals itself to have a more sinister side. All of a sudden, the game turns a dark corner and begins distorting the in-game reality surrounding the microcomputer. While this might sound gimmicky and a little cheesy, I found it to be executed surprisingly well. The metafictional interplay between the reality of the humble desk and Futuro computer setup and the dark residential setting of The House Abandon is one of the most creative mechanisms of producing tension and foreboding that I’ve seen in a game, and the creepiness of the experience left a distinct impression on me.
The subsequent episodes, however, were not quite as effective in creating the atmosphere and mood befitting a horror game. The second and third episodes are more sci-fi oriented. Instead of a cursed computer game, the second episode involves the player operating lab equipment in a government research facility, and the third episode takes place in a radio outpost for an expedition above the Arctic Circle. Horror is subjective, of course, and while I could see how someone might consider these chapters to be eerie, I simply did not come away with that impression.
The fourth episode diverges significantly from the rest and serves as a capstone for the disparate stories that came before it. A more grounded tale, eschewing supernatural and sci-fi elements, the final chapter is, in a certain way, the most chilling episode and deals with tragedy and deeply personal torment. Not scary in the traditional sense of the oft-surreal horror genre, Stories Untold concludes with an upsetting story of loss and regret, real world horror if you will. Beyond that, the fourth episode manages to color the entire experience with an interesting perspective that attempts to elevate the game above the sum of its parts. The blurring of boundaries between layers of metafictional reality is a theme that permeates throughout, and this peculiar aspect of the individual vignettes serves as an important hook for the conclusion.
Surprisingly, the text adventure aspect manages to find its way into the story beyond the initial episodes. Of the actual interactive parts of the game, I found these segments to be the most enjoyable and interesting. Text adventures have a bad reputation of obtuseness due to how frustrating it can sometimes be to figure out the right wording of commands to enter into the text parser, but I didn’t find Stories Untold to be too much of a hassle in this regard. The other various tasks the player is given, on the other hand, can sometimes feel like busy work to fill in time between story beats. One part of the game has the player manipulating the various buttons, knobs, and levers of a microfiche display, and this activity was especially tedious.
Ultimately, I have no strong feelings toward Stories Untold. I can easily see that it’s competently designed with a well crafted story, but I simply did not resonate sharply with this game. I chose this as a Halloween game after seeing it on a number of horror game recommendation lists, but, honestly, I personally have a hard time characterizing it as such. The first episode featuring the cursed computer game was a great experience, but the remainder of the game felt like a different direction tonally. To me, the hook of the game is more for those interested in ‘80s nostalgia than it is for enthusiasts of the horror genre. (Which is ironic, because I felt that one of the main themes of the game was that nostalgia is a coping mechanism that deters us from facing reality.) As a ‘90s kid, I have little attachment to this subject matter, which is probably why the game didn’t leave as strong of an impression on me.
The Evil Within!
The Evil Within did not make a good first impression on me. I started the game on PS4 near the time of its release, played maybe three or four hours, decided I wasn’t having fun with the gruelling experience, and I sold it off. Years later, The Evil Within II came out to generally favorable impressions, and I thought I might give the series another try. But, I often get OCD around playing a series in order, and the first game was really cheap on Steam. What ultimately pushed me over into giving The Evil Within another shot was some encouraging words here on the WordPress community and elsewhere that gave favorable, if not reasonably measured, praise to the game. And I’m glad I gave the game another chance, as I found I enjoyed TEW after getting past the hump that I got stuck on earlier, and I feel good having seen it to the end. The game is a giant mess, of course, but it’s a mess that leaves a strange and surprising impression.
The Evil Within begins with Krimson City detectives Sebastian Castellanos (the protagonist), Joseph Oda, and Juli Kidman responding to an emergency at Beacon Mental Hospital. The lobby of the hospital has been the site of a massacre, and Sebastian is subdued by a strange assailant in a white robe. He wakes up chained deep in the bowels of the facility, the captive of a large blood-soaked man who has other corpses strung from the ceiling and looks to be cannibalizing his victims. Defenseless, Sebastian manages to evade and escape from his captor, but not before the hospital reveals itself to be filled with gruesome mechanisms designed to slaughter those attempting to flee. In the courtyard, he meets up with Oda and Kidman, and the group finds an ambulance to make their exit. As they race through the city, an immense earthquake strikes. Massive fissures open up in the ground, and buildings begin to tumble down. They narrowly avoid being consumed by the cataclysm that destroys the city, only to fly off the edge of a cliff when their driver loses control of the vehicle. After the crash, Sebastian wakes up alone in the dark countryside. With his colleagues having abandoned him and the overturned ambulance, he begins his long journey to survive the complete breakdown of reality itself.
That long and ridiculous last paragraph perfectly encapsulates the experience of The Evil Within. I feel exhausted just having written it. The game simply never settles down. I don’t think there is ever a moment when I thought to myself “I understand where this is going.” Settings are constantly being shifted, enemies are constantly changing, the story picks up in one direction only to abruptly change course. There’s never any moment of comfort to be found. There is never any expectation that will not be subverted.
There are many types of horror games that are distinguished both by theme and mechanics, and what makes The Evil Within incredible is that it basically tries to do everything a horror game can do. It manages to find a way to merge psychological horror (e.g., Silent Hill), supernatural elements (e.g., Fatal Frame), and science fiction elements (e.g., Resident Evil). Superficially, it is a game that focuses on action and shooting (like Resident Evil 4 or Dead Space), but it also attempts to prominently include stealth (like The Last of Us), run-and-hide sequences (like Amnesia), and survival and resource management mechanics (like the original Resident Evil). By trying to fuse together all of these different approaches to making a horror game, The Evil Within is at its best highly admirably for ambition, but also many times manages to go over the edge and collapse into a clumsy or confusing mess.
In his quest to figure out just what the hell is really going on, Sebastian Castellanos treks across a post-apocalyptic cityscape, an evil mansion, a depraved hospital, an infested sewer, dreamcapes carved out of nightmare, and essentially almost every other popular staple of the horror genre. Each of the different environments absolutely nails the aesthetics of its chosen subject and feature expertly designed atmosphere, mood, tension, and foreboding. The Evil Within never lets the player forget they are in a horror story. And despite each setting being radically different, they all feel as if they are a part of the same gruesome world. There is a distinctive aesthetic style to The Evil Within that it manages to maintain across the entirety of its expansive journey.
Principally, The Evil Within is the successor to Resident Evil 4, the prime connection between the two being legendary director Shinji Mikami. As such, the action focused parts of the game tend to dominate over everything else, which is to say that the player spends a lot of time shooting at pseudo-zombies and other warped creatures. Another important feature of the game are the stealth kills, whereby the player can sneak up directly behind an enemy and execute a sneak attack that results in an instant kill. I found this to be a fairly important element of the game considering that ammo is relatively scarce, and I also just personally enjoy games that let me sneak up on enemies like this.
But aside from these key components, the game introduces a ton of other mechanics. Some of them work really well. For instance, levels are wired with inconspicuous booby traps that can do a lot of damage to Sebastian if triggered. However, if the player is cautious enough and manages to dismantle these traps, they turn into spare parts which can be used to craft bolts for Sebastian’s crossbow. There are a handful of different types of bolts that deal different types of damage (for instance, proximity explosives, freeze bolts, etc.), so the player is offered the choice of determining the best way to spend the spare parts. My favorite aspect of the game, which I’ve never seen any other horror game do, are the matchbooks that Sebastian uses to set enemies on the ground on fire. So, for instance, if Sebastian knocks an enemy to the ground, he can light them on fire with one of the matches for an instant kill. If there are other enemies standing in close proximity to the burning hostile, they will also catch on fire and suffer the insta-kill. This also applies to corpses on the ground, which creates a fun strategy where Sebastian can lure enemies over to a defeated corpse which can then be set ablaze to chain together several standing enemies with the ensuing flames.
However for every good idea The Evil Within puts together, there seems to be at least one bad one. I thought one of the dumbest mechanics of the game were the hiding spots which presumably were meant to conceal Sebastian from enemies. Sebastian can hide under beds, under cars, in closets, etc., but enemies always seem to be able to find him in these spots. There is this one unkillable enemy that chases Sebastian through a mansion, and when I encountered him, I put some distance between him and I, rounded a few corners, and then went into a room and hid in a closet. About fifteen seconds later, the thing chasing me walked in, went directly to the closet, opened it, and insta-killed Sebastian. I looked up the best way to escape from this enemy, and most of the recommendations I saw told me to just circle strafe around him until he disappears. What even is the point of the hiding spots then? And this wasn’t an isolated incident. Each time I tried to make use of the hiding spots, the results were more or less the same: they do nothing to keep Sebastian out of sight.
One of the real highlights of The Evil Within were the boss monsters that the game is really good at building up. The bosses are all really well designed and creatively distinct from an aesthetic standpoint. The boss fights themselves tend to be more creative than simply requiring Sebastian to unload ammo into the creatures. Usually, they require the player to make use of aspects of the environment, almost like a puzzle. This tends to lead to a trial-and-error cycle, which can be frustrating at first, but I also felt was very rewarding once I was finally able to nail it. While there are a few boss encounters that just felt clumsy and confusing, on the whole, I thought these enemies were one of the high points of the game.
Sebastian’s journey took me approximately 16 hours to complete which seems to be typical going by howlongtobeat.com. That’s a huge amount of time for a linear action game like The Evil Within, and the entire quest definitely felt epic as a result. This is in spite of the story being largely meandering and insubstantial for the first three quarters or so of the game. Sebastian’s warped reality is constantly shifting, and at any given moment he can be teleported to a completely different setting with seemingly no rhyme or reason behind it. This results in plot threads being constantly interrupted with no resolution until the very end. In one moment, Sebastian will be trying to help a doctor and his patient survive a haunted village, and then abruptly the world will change around him, and he’ll be trying to survive an onslaught of monsters in the basement of a hospital, all with no thought given to the doctor and patient that were just left in danger in the countryside.
In this way, The Evil Within feels like a nightmare. A real nightmare. When I wake from dark dreams, for the fleeting moments I can remember them, I usually realize that they don’t have any form of sense. Nightmares and dreams are largely illogical, unstable, internally inconsistent experiences. The only reason they can feel the way they do is because the mind exists within them in a semi-conscious, semi-functioning state. When thought and reason are applied, they fall apart. Of course, I don’t necessarily think a desire to replicate the qualities of dreams was the intent behind the sloppy story of The Evil Within. I think they just had a lot of ideas they wanted to include in their game and gave no real thought toward creating more substantial connective tissue between them all.
Nonetheless, The Evil Within is best appreciated when simply opening oneself up to raw, uncritical, moment-to-moment experience is prioritized over the need for overarching narrative to create a coherent world. The Evil Within, as a story, is utterly unsatisfying otherwise. The last stretch of the game does begin to try to satiate the player’s need to understand the events of the game, and for the most part, I understood the broad strokes of the plot. But there’s still so many things I don’t understand, and I don’t know if they’re just the result of plot holes, or if there are things that just went over my head. The game has three DLC chapters that perhaps shed more light (I have yet to play them), but I find it unfortunate that the main game really left me with more questions than answers.
I have basically done a complete turn around on The Evil Within, and I’m glad that I gave it a second chance. It oozes style. It’s boss monsters are well designed terrors. It has a satisfying loop of stealth and action. It’s almost an encyclopedia of horror. However, everyone I’ve known who likes this game will immediately admit that it has numerous flaws and sharp corners. It’s incredibly ambitious, a creation that wasn’t designed to be restrained. This is precisely what makes the game special, as it wouldn’t have nearly the gravity if it wasn’t as expansive as it is. But at the same time, the game struggles under the weight of it all. It has a ton of weaknesses, and patience and perseverance is required to enjoy the totality of the experience. I’m glad I was able to finally get past all of these faults, but I don’t necessarily begrudge anyone who can’t.
Little Nightmares!
Each year for the Halloween season, I try to dedicate my playtime and writing to a selection of spooky games that I’ve always wanted to try. This time I’ve been really excited for these Halloween posts all year, and I feel like I’ve actually gotten a bit ahead on my plans for once, so I’m optimistic that this might be the best Halloween on the blog yet. Previous Halloween posts are all collected on this tab. This year, I’m starting off with Little Nightmares, a creepy adventure game that released fairly recently on basically every modern gaming platform.
A small child shrouded in a yellow raincoat awakens at sea on a mysterious ship filled with danger and foreboding. As she begins to explore her surroundings, she finds other children in cages and begins getting glimpses of the grotesque giants that crew the dreary vessel. The quest that follows pits the defenseless protagonist against the strange appetites of the pitiless but hapless denizens of this otherworldly domain.
Little Nightmares immediately draws comparison to Limbo and its pseudo-sequel Inside. It’s easy to feel like the former was inspired by the latter. All three are puzzle platformer games about a defenseless youth trying to survive in a strange and creepy world. Little Nightmares does, however, manage to differentiate itself from the other two with a few key new ideas. Most importantly, while Limbo and Inside are essentially sidescrollers that confine movement to a 2D plane, Little Nightmares offers movement in fully 3D environments.
Furthermore, while the game starts off mostly about solving environmental puzzles to progress in a similar fashion to Inside and Limbo, later portions of the game become heavily focused on stealth and evasion. The protagonist of Little Nightmares is a small creature in a world of giants. Everything in the world she is travelling through is oversized, both objects and people, very much like Jack and the Beanstalk. Thus as the game progresses, gameplay becomes less about Limbo-style puzzles and more about sneaking through this jumbo-sized world while evading, hiding, and sometimes needing to outrun the ponderous creatures that view the child as nothing more than a pest to be squashed.
Little Nightmares is scary like a fairy tale, not necessarily suspenseful in a traditional sense, but creepy and unsettling in how it contrasts innocence with monstrosity. The monsters the player faces are grotesque and unpleasant to look at, and their designs emphasize themes of decadence and depraved overindulgence. These giant beings don’t feel like highly threatening apex predators, as they’re rather hapless and clumsy at times. But the moments where the girl is discovered and pursued by these beings are tense thrills as she scrambles to find a safe hiding spot. I don’t really feel any reservations in calling this a horror game, even if it is an offbeat amongst the genre.
And while the game is not particularly scary in the same sense as most horror games, the final monster encounter was a surprising exception. While I tend to find that most horror games become less scary as the story progresses and I become more comfortable in the setting, Little Nightmares managed to end on a high note. The final section has an amazing sense of atmosphere and dread, but it was also regrettably the shortest part of the game. After seeing how capable the designers of this game were at creating such an unnerving experience, I kind of wish they had imbued earlier parts of the game with this kind of atmosphere.
However, my principle issue with Little Nightmares is the brevity of content. The game is roughly three hours long. I don’t necessarily think a game is bad if it’s short, but I do consider it a negative when a game feels short, and Little Nightmares definitely felt short to me. I thought the game really only scratched the surface of the concept and world it introduced. The ending felt like it came on way too abruptly. The final area of the game should have been a bit longer, and the game could have really used one more major monster to encounter. Frustrating the issue is that there is a $10 DLC pack that offers three additional chapters to the game’s original five and features a different character from the original story. (I do not own the DLC, so I can’t comment on its quality.)
I like Little Nightmares. I thought it was a cool game. But for the reasons above, I think it’s a little hard to give the game an unqualified recommendation. I find it hard to provide justification for purchasing the game at full price, and I would also recommend playing Inside, a similar game, first, as I thought it was a considerably better game, although it doesn’t lean as much into the horror genre. Little Nightmares is a good Steam (or PSN, eshop, etc.) sale game, interesting and fun and worth playing, but not necessarily worth paying full price, especially when the DLC is factored in.
Into the Breach!
From the makers of FTL: Faster than Light comes Into the Breach, a peculiar kind of strategy game that is completely unlike anything I’ve ever played before. In the far flung future, global flooding has left only four small islands as the last habitable land mass on Earth. Civilization continues on until a race of giant subterranean insects known as the Vek begin attacking the citizens of these new nations. After a long war, the remnants of humanity are driven to extinction with the exception of the last squadron of mech pilots who open a breach in the timeline to travel to the beginning of the Vek incursion and relive the war as many times as it takes to secure the safety of mankind.
Each mission takes place on small, randomly generated maps that fill up an 8×8 grid of tiles. The player is in command of a squad of three mechs that drop down onto each map and must defend cities from the onslaught of Vek emerging from underground. Each mission requires the player to hold out and survive for roughly 4 or 5 rounds before the Vek retreat. As such, Into the Breach is really a strategy game that is more about defense than offense. Whereas strategy games such as Fire Emblem and Advance Wars are mostly about eliminating all enemies in a given mission or capturing an objective defended by said enemies, there is no requirement to annihilate the Vek in Into the Breach. Missions are failed only when a certain number of cities are destroyed.
The acute scope and defensive nature of the game result in something that is a hybrid of puzzle and turn-based strategy elements. The puzzle-like nature of the game is strongly reinforced by the idiosyncratic way in which turns play out. In most strategy games, the player and opponent alternate moving and committing actions with their units. Not so in Into the Breach. Each round begins with the Vek moving into position and then indicating which tiles they plan to attack. After this phase, the player is allowed to move and take actions with their mechs. Following the player’s go, the round concludes with the enemies attacking the tiles they are targeting.
Since the player can see where the Vek are going to attack, they can effectively prioritize which enemy to focus damage on. Essentially, the player has the opportunity to sabotage the Vek before they can do anything. The Vek that are targeting cities are generally top priority in most sound strategies. The best thing about Into the Breach, however, is that the player is allowed to operate creatively in how they handle the situation. As an example, perhaps there is a Vek that is preparing to attack a city, and the player isn’t able to deliver enough damage to it to take it out this turn. However, most mechs have weapons that have some sort of knockback effect, so you can use that to knock the Vek away from the target. That seems simple enough, but it gets even more elaborate. Perhaps there is already an enemy on the tile you’ve knocked the first Vek into. The collision will do damage to both Vek, possibly destroying both. Or perhaps something even more interesting can happen, if there isn’t a second Vek already there. The first Vek is already committed to attacking the same tile relative to its new position. What this means is that if you knock the enemy 1 tile to the east, then the tile it’s targeting will shift 1 tile to the east. If there is an enemy on that tile, the Vek you moved will deal damage to this bystander.
The complex ways in which you can manipulate enemies makes Into the Breach feel like a puzzle game at times. Beyond the knockback effect I mentioned above, there are a large number of unlockable mechs that have special abilities that lead to even more strategically interesting effects. One of my personal favorites is a mech that can kick up dust storms on the tiles it attacks. These dust storms blind any enemy standing in them and render them unable to attack. This can be paired with another mech that confers electrical charge to all of the dust storms on the map, so anything standing in those storms takes damage each turn.
This is what really hooked me on Into the Breach. Experimenting with the various mechs and their abilities and discovering the ways in which their abilities can augment each other keeps the game from ever feeling stale. It is absolutely like a puzzle game. There are times when I would be in a difficult situation, on the verge of hitting game over, and I would spend several minutes going through the various possible moves in my head until finally I would have an epiphany and realize a way I could save myself from the situation. Of course, it’s immensely satisfying when this happens.
Like its predecessor, FTL, Into the Breach can be considered a roguelike game. That’s a bit of a nebulous term these days, but in this case it means that if the player gets a game over screen then all their progress is lost, and they must begin the game from the beginning. In the game’s story, this plays out as the mechs opening another temporal breach and time travelling back to the start of the war. I had mixed feelings about this when I started Into the Breach. In the past, I’ve really enjoyed games like this, including Spelunky and Rogue Legacy, but lately I’ve started to feel that this formula just isn’t for me anymore. The issue is really that I don’t have as much free time as I once did, and as roguelikes make you replay a lot of the early content in the game many times over, I worry that these games really aren’t the best use of my limited free time.
Fortunately, I feel like Into the Breach managed to narrowly sidestep this concern. There are a few reasons to which I attribute this. First, you reach a point where you can start on any of the game’s four islands. Initially, only the first island is available to play, but once you beat that island, the second island will be unlocked in all future instances that you start the game over. The same goes for the third and fourth island. Ultimately, you can play the islands in any order you please, and the final mission becomes available once you clear two islands in a given run (although there is a reason not to go the the final mission until three or four islands are cleared). Each island has sufficiently unique mechanics that choosing a different island to start on each time keeps the game from feeling stale.
It also helps that there is a wide variety of unlockable mechs that promote experimentation each time the game is started from the beginning. New squads of mechs are unlocked by completing special achievements in the game (similar to how starships were unlocked in FTL). Each squad comes with its own unique gimmick. The squad that is initially available at the start of the game are the Rift Walkers and are fairly straightforward, focused almost purely on direct damage dealing and some knockback effects. But then, for instance, there is another squad, the Flame Behemoths, that focuses on turning tiles into hazards by setting them on fire. My two favorite squads are the aforementioned Rusting Hulks, which are built around taking advantage of dust storms and electrical electrical damage, and the Zenith Guard, which make use of energy weapons that do chain damage to groups of adjacent enemies. There is a good variety of strategy represented by the different squads, and I feel like everyone tends to find their own favorite. It’s also just fun to experiment.
Into the Breach has a unique approach toward difficulty and victory. At the beginning of a run, a player chooses to start on any island they’ve completed so far. Each time an island is cleared out, the difficulty is increased for the next island the player chooses. After completing only two islands, the final mission appears on the map. The player can then proceed to this last mission or complete one or both of the remaining islands. Thus the game can be won in a two, three, or four island victory. Since difficulty increases based on the number of islands cleared, the two island victory is the easiest to achieve, while the four island victory is hardest.
I’ve honestly never managed to beat this game’s predecessor, FTL. I’ve made it to the final mission twice in FTL, and after the second time I realized that I would probably never be able to beat the game, simply because the final battle was so incredibly difficult. Into the Breach has a far more attainable ending, and the final mission is not nearly as insurmountable. In a way, this was a relief, because it meant I could obtain some closure on the game, but I can’t deny that it also felt a bit anticlimactic compared to the awe-inspiring final boss of FTL.
I actually managed to beat the final mission on my first try at it while going for a two island victory, but it was still a fair challenge. At one point, I was only a few turns away from victory, when I suddenly hit a wall. As I sat there strategizing, it suddenly dawned on me that every move I could think of would result in my team of mechs getting wiped out. Since I couldn’t see a way out, I was almost ready to resign myself to defeat, when I had a better idea. It was really late that night, and I settled on simply saving the game so I could come back with a fresh mind in the morning. (You can save at any point in the game and pick back up where you left off.) I came back the next morning, stared at the game for about 10 minutes, and then like a bolt of lightning, I was suddenly struck by a set of moves that would let me survive. With my persistence rewarded, I only had to survive a few more relatively easy turns before I attained victory.
Since then, I’ve also managed to achieve a three island victory. Someday maybe I’ll come back to try at a four island victory, but for now, I’ve set Into the Breach aside to move on to other games on my stack. In my post about Hollow Knight, I discussed how exciting and rare it is to find a game that isn’t merely just good, but is something that I truly love and hold in high regard as one of the reasons I enjoy gaming so much. Amazingly, I’ve played two games back-to-back this year, Hollow Knight and Into the Breach, that met this lofty standard. Years from now when I reflect on why I love gaming, Into the Breach will be one of the reasons. I think it’s that good.
Hollow Knight!
There were a ton of cool games that came out in 2017. I wasn’t anywhere close to playing everything that I wanted to play. Around November of last year, I sat down and wrote a list of games from the year that I wanted to complete or at least try, and Hollow Knight ended up getting the priority because I thought I could knock it out quickly. My expectation turned out to be totally wrong. Hollow Knight ended up being an epic experience that drove me deep into unraveling its secrets. It’s one of the best games that I’ve played in a long time, so much so that it actually took me a few months before I decided I was satisfied enough to move on.
Hollow Knight is the story of the fallen, subterranean kingdom of Hallownest, whose citizenry was composed of a wide range of sentient arthropods, principally a beetle-like race that are simply called bugs, but also spiders, mantises, moths, and maggots. In the distant past, Hallownest was a utopic nation that was beset by a strange infection that drove many of its inhabitants into violent insanity. Life has seemingly continued on at the fringe of the once great civilization, but the infection continues to slowly spread into this periphery. Upon this desolation enters the quiet, wandering Knight, who is drawn to the surface city of Dirtmouth, which serves as the entrance to Hallownest. From there, the player journeys as the Knight down into the kingdom’s ruins to discover and thwart the source of the infection.
Hollow Knight joins the huge pile of games that take their inspiration from Metroid’s large contiguous side-scrolling worlds. In the past few years, there’s been so many games coming out that use the Metroid formula that you would think Hollow Knight would have a hard time standing out, but I think its been fairly popular. Part of the reason for that is that its other big inspiration is Dark Souls. Mostly this is seen in how it takes place in a world built on the ruins of a once great civilization that fell to decay and madness and relates the ancient history of this culture through purposefully cryptic means. Fortunately, while the games that influenced Hollow Knight are clear, I found that this game managed to create its own identity and introduced enough of its own ideas that it didn’t feel like a cheap attempt to recapture the nostalgia of its inspirations.
For the most part, Hollow Knight is a fairly straightforward hack and slash game. Most of the game’s challenge comes from studying the enemies and bosses and then building a strategy around their strengths and weaknesses, very similar to how you would approach a Dark Souls game. It has an ethos that I describe as the best offense is a good defense. You must learn and understand enemy attack patterns so that you can identify when you have an open window to attack safely. If you attack carelessly, you will get utterly steamrolled.
While the Knight’s moves are fairly standard (slash left, slash right, dodge, charge attack, etc.), there were two aspects of his abilities that I particularly liked. The first was the way healing works. The Knight heals by casting a spell that must be charged first. He is immobile while charging the spell, and if he takes damage, the spell gets interrupted. This adds an additional layer of strategic depth to the game, since its important to understand when and where its ok to heal. The player needs to understand the enemy attack patterns well enough to know when they have an opportunity to safely heal and where to position themselves so they’re unlikely to get hit. The other thing that I really enjoyed is that the Knight can slash downwards while in the middle of a jump. This can be used to attack enemies beneath the jump, and the Knight gets a little bounce when he does this. Bouncing from enemy to enemy like this is a lot of fun, and the air time can be used to evade certain complicated attacks. Sometimes, it also allows the Knight to reach some hard to get to places that hold secrets. I love games like Duck Tales and Shovel Knight that have bouncy pogo moves like this.
The world of Hallownest was fun and interesting to explore and is dense with secrets to uncover. The exploration aspect of the game is probably what resonated with me most about Hollow Knight. Each area of the map feels visually distinctive and presents challenges and enemies that mostly feel very unique. Around the same time I was playing Hollow Knight, I was also playing Metroid: Samus Returns on the 3DS. While I kinda like that game, I have to say that everything in it just sort of blurs together. The levels and bosses I’ve played feel rather same-y and don’t leave much of a distinctive impression.
Meanwhile, I can easily recall most of Hallownest, because Hollow Knight does such a good job of creating a varied world with unique places to explore. My favorite area is Deepnest, the dark and deeply terrifying caves on the border of the kingdom that are overrun with a race of hostile spiders. Second would probably be the mysterious Ancient Basin, where the secrets of Hallownest’s godlike ruler can be discovered. I also have to mention that the White Palace has my favorite music track in the game, a somber melody that conveys the weight of the tragedy that struck the kingdom, and the area is also intensely and satisfyingly challenging.
Hollow Knight has a few different endings, but essentially there are just two. It has a few “normal” endings that are quite similar, and then a secret “true” ending that requires a great deal more effort and secret hunting to unlock. I went into Hollow Knight knowing this, but I expected that I would only bother to get the normal ending. As it turned out, I was so enamored by the game that I committed myself to unlocking the secret true ending. This was a bit fortunate as there is a significant amount of content in the game that you would only see if you went out of your way to get this ending. I’m talking about huge areas that you would never find if you only followed the path that the main story directs you through. But I have to be honest, I had to consult a guide to figure out the requirements to reveal the secret ending. There really is not a whole lot of explicit hints in the game that would give you strong suggestions as to how to unlock it. It took me roughly 30 hours to complete the game, but if I hadn’t used a guide, I could easily see it taking double that time to find the items needed to see the complete finale.
That said, it was totally worth it. Not only are the secret areas really great parts of the game, but I found the “normal” ending to be a bit anticlimactic. I felt it didn’t really do justice to the epic quest that preceded it. The secret ending, on the other hand, has a new final boss fight that takes place after the original final boss. I felt that the secret final boss was way more exciting and formidable and easily a major highlight of the game for me. In addition to revealing the true final boss, I just felt that the secret ending gave a bit better closure to the story. The normal ending would have felt rather abrupt and confusing without the extra context of the lore found in the secret areas. I really wish that they would have made the normal ending a little more worthwhile, seeing as that’s the only ending most players are likely to see.
Hollow Knight was a game that I was excited to play due to the strong word of mouth I had heard. There’s lots of popular games that I’m pumped to try, but sometimes I end up being let down by my high expectations for them. Often when this happens, I question whether gaming is still something I’m passionate about. But sometimes a game totally surpasses any expectations I had and reinforces the affection I have for gaming as a hobby. Hollow Knight is definitely that type of game. I had started out hoping to complete it quickly, but realized that I couldn’t do anything less than master it.
PSA: Unreal turns 20. Goes Free on GOG and Steam.
The year 1998 was a great time with a huge number of seminal games seeing release, such as Half-Life, Ocarina of Time, Resident Evil 2, and Metal Gear Solid. Of course, this means that a lot of classic hits will see their 20th Anniversary in 2018, a realization that dawned on me when Epic announced that Unreal Gold was going free on both GOG and Steam to commemorate its May 22, 1998 launch date. I had a blast with Unreal back in the day. I still have my original CD, but I was super excited to snag the download version for free. For those who are old time fans of the game or if you’re just curious about this highly influential PC classic, LGR did an excellent Unreal retrospective on Youtube that I think is well worth a view.
Before Unreal’s release, Quake II was basically the king of PC gaming, and Epic Games fully intended Unreal to be a “Quake Killer”. And they weren’t just making empty smack talk, either. Unreal ended up being an amazing game for its time. The graphics were well beyond anything that had come before, as enshrined by this now infamous magazine cover:
That might look laughable today, but in the late 90s, the visual splendor of Unreal completely warranted this kind of hype. And it used those graphics to create an alien world that had a level of atmosphere and immersion that was clearly raising the bar for video game settings.
Unfortunately, I feel like Unreal’s challenge to the computer gaming throne was really very short lived. Just a few months later, Half-Life came onto the scene, and while it’s graphics engine didn’t quite have the bells and whistles of Unreal, it quickly became the biggest game to play for a variety of other reasons. Honestly, I feel Unreal, as a game, has always been an overlooked masterpiece. It spawned the Unreal Tournament spin-off series, which was massively popular around the turn of the century, and the Unreal Engine, which has powered a ton of games over the years. But people hardly ever talk about the game that started both of these things, even though its stands well on its own.
Unreal is currently free on GOG and Steam for, I think, the next day. I will warn anyone who is interested that you can run into problems playing on modern PCs. Personally, I can’t boot it up using the software renderer, I have to use Direct3D instead. This was a bit odd to me considering that other old Unreal Engine games always crash in Direct3D mode on my machine, necessitating the use of the software renderer. When I run into issues with old PC games, I always seek help from the PCGamingWiki. Their Unreal page has a good list of mods and fixes that go a long way to getting this game running up to snuff.
The Maximum Utmost 