Report 46: Edge, Edgy’n’Edgier
It was supposed to be a 4-games-report as usual, but I’ve kinda stopped feeling like playing the fourth one for now. It’s been maybe the worst month of my life for various reasons and I just switched to something more usual (The Binding of Isaac: Repentance DLC) and comfy (I’m playing Talos Principle now) for me.
This is a spiritual successor of the first Postal game that involves pretty similar gameplay but a much darker tone. It sure made a lot of noise back when it was released.
And let’s adress the elephant in the room - this game feels so edgy for me I actually consider it hilarious. These dumb one-liners MC spouts on occasions and the ways this game strives to be as gritty as possible is just too much to take seriously. I see Hatred as something more like a statement about violence in videogames, an experiment, rather than an actual game. It’s still fun to play it though.
Gameplay-wise there’s much more tactic involved. I’ve beaten the game two times - first time on Hard and second on Insane difficulty, and if Hard can be pretty simple to beat, you have to cheese the SHIT out of the game and enemies’ dumb AI in particular. I’ve beaten the hard difficulty in its’ entirety without using crouch and looking ahead with RMB (because I skipped the tutorial and completely forgot about it lol). Crouching is essential and easily the most overpowered technique you’re going to need if you want to tackle Hatred’s higher difficulty settings. The environment is also very destructible and you can use it to your advantage (it may as well screw you over though).
Grey colour palette took a while to get used to, but playing the fullcolour mode after this felt very weird and wrong.
The insane difficulty denies you respawns, forcing you to complete the whole level with just one life. It’s really, really hard, but after a few tries you start to realize that it’s not impossible.
This is yet another game with the achievement for playing it for much longer than you’re supposed to. Hated that, as usual.
I often encounter opinions about the game being boring, and I can’t say I agree with them. Weird.
Overall, it’s a rare kind of game with somewhat disturbing concept that is so over-the-top-edgy you can’t take it seriously.
This is a second atmosperic point’n’click by Harvester Games, and if you played Downfall or its’ remake, you’ll know what to expect.
I got to admit, I find the story concept insanely interesting here, and it was really entertaining to play through the horror segments, but this game isn’t without its’ flaws.
The most glaring part would be voice acting quality. Pretty much all of the actors sound amateurish - some of them more than the others (mc is consistently good, though) - but it’s passable and they’re trying to deliver the lines they’re given (and the lines aren’t always good, mind you, but I’ll talk about that later). The actual - technical - audio quality can be quite bad and jarring, especially when the actors resort to yelling.
I didn’t mind the artsy-fartsy feel and this game’s take on drama, but boy, was some of the lines kinda cringey. That goes both for oneliners that were trying to be cool and occasional purple prose-tier lines in dialogues.
Despite all that, devs clearly got their own style and they stick to it. As I also mentioned, I liked the story.
Overall, it’s a great point’n’click if you’re looking for something dark & disturbing.
Harvester is a very gory and satirical take on violence in media with bits of cold war era American culture satire sprinkled throughout. It’s also an old FMV point’n’click with combat mechanic (yep).
The first half of the game is fairly easy, even if it startles you right off the bat with the sheer amount of places you can visit. It’s all pretty simple, but just exploring might take more time than you’re supposed to spend. There’s plenty of characters to talk with and there’s ton of things that are completely optional and irrelevant for your walkthrough. Conversations use a system of topics (you can choose the one mentioned in the dialogue or type them in. Typing is mostly useless) and sometimes give you dialogue options. It’s clunky, but it (barely) works. Same can be said about the game as a whole. The second half takes a very sudden dive into irrational territory (yeah, even more irrational compared to the first part) and that’s when the combat system truly kicks in with 80% of the game’s gory stuff.
While there is some cartoonish violence here and there, they really did a… good? job with gory and disturbing scenes - there’s a LOT of this stuff. If you like dark comedy like I do, you’ll love some of the scenes, but then there’s occassional morbid stuff. Playing this sure was a… thrill?
So yeah, the combat. Just like everything in this game, it functions as clunky as you would’ve thought - I mean, it’s a combat mechanic in a point’n’click. There’s a weirdly wide variety of weapons you can use and you can also restore your health with some of the items. This game doesn’t pull any punches, though - you might want to be conservative about ammo and picky about your weapon of choice if you don’t want to be stuck with the enemy you can’t kill with the weapons you have, you go down pretty quickly.
I mostly liked the plot, the setting, the characters, and pretty much all of my complaints are about technical stuff. I loved how intentionally cheesy the FMVs are.
It’s a pretty disturbing game, but it is what it is by design. There’s nothing like it out there.
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