Wednesday 29 March 2023

Waiting for Duviri: The Frightening Fifth

After all that fighting it's horror time!

Slain - Back from Hell

This pixel platformer beat em up is basically the same plot of Altered Beast, but with a more metal backing track and less impressive graphics and game play. That's kinda sad as Altered Beast was released in 1988.

Rising Hell

Another pixel platformer with a very vertical slant as you need to escape from hell by going UP while taking souls on the way. Interestingly you get a power up shop to spend said souls almost every 30 seconds which is awesome and goes a long way in breaking the tedium of doing the same thing over and over. Now you get to do the same thing over and over... with breaks!

Darkwood

A top down horror survival where you must scavenge for gear and can only see active threats the direction your character is looking. This means checking your pack and crafting lets you see NOTHING. The lack of color is certainly a stylistic choice, but one that makes the game very bland to look at. That said if you like skulking around dangerous places and having to board up your doors and windows at night (because that's when they come for you) and don't mind a non-intuitive interface and clunky combat this might be for you.

Hell is Others

In this top down horror shooter (which has the same visibility constraint as Darkwood), you need to feed your bonsai with blood while doing a bunch of fetch quests in the horrifying city streets prowled by monsters and "others" (other people: because PvP is easier content to create). Luckily bullets grow on plants because you'll need them... if the matchmaking ever finishes loading. LOL. Should be renamed, Hell is Matchmaking.

Doom64

Ever miss the days in a FPS where you didn't need to reload guns that were smart enough to shoot up and down without you looking up or down, where pistol ammo was the same as chaingun ammo, and where pushing on every wall was the way to open secret passages? If so this nostalgia trip is for you. It's just Doom, with new maps.

Ring of Pain

This is a strange game that displays your encounters as a ring of cards and you can either deal with or try skip a card on the left, or a card on the right which rotates the entire ring. Finding the exit card brings you to the next ring and so forth, provided you are still alive by then as the monsters get very dangerous quickly - and you'll probably only be wielding a bent spoon and have rainbow socks for armor when you meet them. Props for a different idea and art style but not one that could hold my interest for long.

Amnesia: Rebirth

It's time to forget again! After Dark Descent and A Machine for Pigs, this new protagonist suffers the same memory loss as the previous ones but her story has much better graphics, much better dynamic lighting and ... much more boring!? What? Yep, a stupid protagonist and way too much walking to make space for narrated exposition doesn't help - to the point that I lost interest in it entirely. If you are looking for short and sharp horror, this isn't it - instead go for the original game with the Justine DLC which remains my favorite, proving again that simple and elegant will always beat something fattened with filler.

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