01 – Gridlines
22 - Dead End

This is 1 hour long if you beat it once and ignore the achievements mind you. I spent like 10 hours on this DLC to 100%. That’s because in this DLC, we drive a car between scavenging and you only have one passenger and you will meet a lot of different survivors but can always take one with you. To 100% you need to reach last level with each survivor and once completely alone. My rating is also based on just one playthrough. If you are about to play it, I recommend this guide to save yourself some time.

We play as seemingly another survivor we met in base game, but our guy was little paranoid and expected another visitation. We have a sports car in a good condition, we just need to gather food, water and medkit from our apartment block and ready to go. You only have a baseball bat and find a gun later on (it’s revealed in base game via passenger that guns were banned nation-wide, hence our paranoid guy only has a baseball bat). Scavenging is almost identical, but this time you cannot leave until you find bottled water, food and a medkit. But on some levels they are found pretty early on, on some you need to traverse like 90% of the level. You only get to spend your money at two spots and you can only buy more medkits or ammo, no weapon upgrades this time. Also your passenger is responsible for crafting and when you find someone you get information about their crafting and healing skills. Yeah they can also heal you while traveling so you save a medkit. Depending on their skill, it can be 20hp to a whooping 80hp, almost a full heal.

Each passenger gives you some information, more or less useful. So if you want to find out about story as much as possible, you will want to play it with having every passenger at least once. But prepare for boredom because you will see same level +10 times. I would recommend a youtube video instead if you don’t care about achievements.

You will find out a little more about story and the world regardless of what passenger you find. It answers some small questions, but I think it also raises more than it answers. And you will only find out about why “The Only Traitor” is a traitor if you take a specific passenger who seems to have some inside information.

There are two more enemy types never seen in base game. One that spits green goo at you, has no melee attack so will run away from you if you get close and if you time it, you can block his spit with your baseball swing. Another one that seems to have a small head, big body but once you hit him he enlarges and attacks really fast. I also feel like they changed something and you cannot stun-lock enemies so easily as in base game, I would sometimes die because they somehow broke from it. Oh and now there are human enemies too! They are members of some cult that was sometimes mentioned in base game but we never saw them, but turns out they play a pretty big role in all of this.

Ok DLC, but achievement hunters prepare some podcasts or albums to listen while you 100% this.

A short, episodic genre mashup that was the biggest surprise in this batch.

“Stories Untold” consists of 4 episodes, at first seemingly unrelated, and each plays very differently. In the first episode you play a text adventure game similar to something like Zork. Second stars you in some kind of experiment, where a scientist tells you what to do via speaker and you have to look up manual on the terminal to fulfil his instructions. Third episode, my favorite, again puts in you in a desk in front of a terminal in some kind of arctic station. You are again given instructions via speaker but this time you’re putting on coordinates into the terminal. The last episode combines all previous episodes to reveal how all of it is connected and what’s the story about.

Sounds kinda boring huh, just sitting and staring at terminals? But this game has great atmosphere, some genuinely spooky moments. The first episode Is set what looks like an abandoned house and in the adventure game you visit an old family house. Second has some kind of alien artifact and later on it turns into text adventure again but this time it’s not really a game. Episode 3 has you typing coordinates for perhaps? maybe? nuclear strikes, there is something or someone outside and you crew mates in other stations start to disappear one by one. It seems to pull a little from different horror/thriller genres. Spooky houses, aliens, secret military facilities, but the true meaning behind it is just a sad human story. I enjoyed this one quite a lot despite simple gameplay.

Decent boomer shooter. Though I had slightly higher expectations.

This game is a love letter to old FPS-es like Heretic, Hexen, Blood, DOOM etc. There are plenty references to each game mentioned and more, from weapons to enemies and so on. There are good references to movies and books too, like Antarctica level that has enemies from H.P. Lovecraft “In the mountains of madness” and one enemy that’s similar to alien from John Carpenter’s “The Thing”.

Game is split into 5 worlds, each different thematically and enemy wise. Enemies generally serve one role and you’re supposed to prioritize which to kill first but I find that even on hard difficulty (my first playthrough) it didn’t really matter. You want to kill enemies that charge at you first and then it didn’t matter. There are no hit-scan enemies here except the industrial level if I remember correctly, so just focus on moving around and shooting and you’ll be good.

Even on hard difficulty game starts to be pretty easy somewhere near the end of 2nd world. At least to me, if you pick a certain perk, which gives you HP boost and reduces all dmg received by 30%, it’s pretty difficult to die. And it seems like a very good idea to get it, since the game is actually hard at start. I had to be really good with dodging and keeping enemies at bay, because it was easy to die. But you level, get more points in HP and that one perk and it really changes.

I do like the weapons and various upgrades that are available. There are over 12 weapons or so, and each can be upgraded once and you get two choices. For most it’s either “change its look and make it more powerful” or change it into something else. So for example you can turn pistol into either a magnum gun or a flare gun (like Caleb from Blood). Turn your uzi into akimbo uzi’s (Lo-Wang style) or into a nail-gun and the nails can ricochet of the walls. Change your axe into a bloodthirsty axe that heals you slightly when you kill something or soulstealer that gives you mana. Oh and speaking about mana, you can have spells that do various things, do massive damage, give defense boost, freeze enemies etc. The problem is you only start with a weak spell that gives you a magic torch for dark areas (but it’s useless, since everything is pretty well lit) and you only start getting interesting spells somewhere in 3nd world. And to add to that, you use upgrade points to unlock them after you find a spellbook, but you also need upgrade points for weapons. And so early in the game you have just two spells that don’t do much and I ask myself what’s the point in getting them. Later on you get better weapons and when finally some interesting and more expensive spells are on the table, I had dilemma whether to go for weapons or spells and I went all in on weapons. Was it a good choice? Well after I beated the game, I played around with them after enabling cheats and 2-3 of them are really fun and useful, the rest not so much. I would probably go for weapons again and 2 spells if I had to play again. So that whole system feels like a wasted opportunity to me.

Soundtrack is pretty good. It’s free on steam and it has OVER 100 TRACKS! Achievements are easy for most part, using cheats actually doesn’t block you from getting them, so you can easily get anything you missed on first run. Level design is ok, nothing spectacular. There’s some typical stuff happening from the era this game copies. E.g. there’s a pickup in middle with lots of pillars, you pick it up, pillars descend with enemies inside. If you never played these old FPSes you’ll learn pretty quickly where to expect a trap. There are key cards to be found and several buttons to press to progress further. And secrets, tons of secrets! If you just stick to walls and keep mashing “Use” key you’ll find like 90% of them. You can also see if there is a secret behind, walls with secrets have a slightly different look to them, different on every world.

Game is horribly optimized or something else is going on. For a pixel art game I had to set almost everything to low to get +60 FPS. Also if you watch the clip, it doesn’t look very smooth, like there are mini-stutters every now and then. That’s how it plays sometimes, especially on later levels it loved to do that, I don’t know why. Looking at steam discussion it seems a lot of people experience that and more often than me.

But in the end I enjoyed the game. It’s a good game but never goes beyond that. It often got me into the zone where I just mindlessly pushed forward, dodging and shooting and I like this type of experience. It was smooth for most time and problem less. I think I only got stuck two times.

A second game by Mike Bithell, the mind behind “Thomas Was Alone”. This is a pretty big switch from his last game. For a start, we’re no longer in 2D, we are now playing in 3D! Secondly this isn’t a heartwarming story about overcoming obstacles and self-acceptance, but a stealth game set in a corrupted and fascist England.

The monarchy and the government are in pocket of one rich guy with kingly ambitions, everyone is corrupt and everything seems hopeless. This is where our guy steps in, a hacker who only has 2 hours or so left before police track him down. Using some kind of VR setup, we hack into various locations and steal information or currency? I’m not entirely what exactly I saw this whole time, but as you can tell by the rating, this game is quite enjoyable.

There are over 100 levels and half dozen gadgets to play with. When starting a level you don’t start with gadgets, you find them and each level is built with that gadgets in mind and you can always hold one. If a situation requires a different gadget, it’s always nearby waiting for you, so you always have the right tools in hand and it’s up to you to do things right.

There are also different type of enemies to deal with. Since this is a stealth game, you will obviously try to avoid them and the most damage you can do to them is stun them for few seconds with one gadget. Each type of enemy has its own vision cone and range. The basic enemy has a short cone around 45 degrees wide and runs as fast as you, so you can’t outrun it. Sniper can see ridiculously far but their vision is very very narrow and they move slow. If you get caught you have few seconds to save yourself, like I do in clip below.

When new gadget, enemy or mechanic is introduced it’s either in a safe environment or it’s filled with enemies/gadgets and/or familiar layout so you it’s something you know with that new element stacked on top of it. Gadgets include stuff like mimic, blackjack to stun enemies, something you throw and it makes a noise when you press LMB, disguise. You can also whistle at any moment to get enemy attention, it has small range but they can hear it through walls. Generally I found it to be pretty easy to learn and the whole game didn’t give me a lot of trouble. There was ONE level I wish I wrote down its name, but the ending was so utterly broken and frustrating I almost closed the game.

I went through 95% of the game with ease and it was fun stealth/puzzle game. Difficulty curve is great, level design is pretty good and every now and then they throw a little more challenging level at you but nothing too hard. Soundtrack is very good too, sometimes too dramatic or orchestral for a game like this in my opinion, but great nonetheless (I wanted to put some tracks at top, but there’s only one video on YT without timestamps and for some reason the creator doesn’t have it listed on his bandcamp, so no samples sorry :/). I mentioned at start our hero has 2 hours before he is found, when inside simulation the time runs slower in real world, so the 2 hours is just for story, there is no time limit on the levels or anything like that. There are par times and leaderboards, if you’re into that.

02 – Gris, pt. 1
15 – Karasu
25 – Gris, pt. 2

Very pretty platformer! The whole game is visually almost stunning, everything seems hand-drawn yet all animations are very fluid for most of time, it reminds me of Hollow Knight in this regard (apart from cutscenes, they play more like standard animations in ~30 fps). Soundtrack is very beautiful too, something I’ll definitely grab later :)

GRIS is a story of depression and coping of losing someone very close to you. One might even describe it as a video game form of “5 stages of grief”, as game hints at that with its achievement descriptions, but I’m not sure if it fits, some stages in game definitively give me that feel like the desert level for “denial” or underwater level for “depression” but forest level doesn’t fit at all.

As you progress in the game you gain new abilities, you start with just basic movement and jump. First you learn to transform your coat into a cube that protects you from desert storm but later the game shows you that you can use it to break weak floors or weight objects down. Though this is the only ability that I found to have such a wide range of use, later you get double jump but well, It’s just a jump. Late game you learn to sing to bring life back around you, but this has singular use too. Basically it’s a pretty simple platformer, puzzles are present and they’re not too hard.

Still I liked it, presentation is great and carries this game a lot. It has a lot of cool and small moments, like a forest friend you meet and help him grow or these little sentient rocks on tiny legs in desert level. Later levels have a gimmick where gravity changes when you cross a certain line, I liked that too. I think this game relies heavily on emotional response and since I personally never lost someone this close to me like the heroine, I can’t fully relate.

Debut game of Danish indie studio. A game heavily inspired by Portal 1 & 2 and the devs aren’t shy about it, thanking Valve and main writers of Portal 2 in credits, and the game’s equivalent of Cave Johnson even jokes how terrible Aperture Science is.

But the twist here is instead of portals, we use lights. Some experiment has gone wrong and shadows can dematerialize any living being. You just happened to be on a tourist tour in facility when the entire underground facility was shaken and quickly evacuated and you missed the last train. So now stuck here, you are guided by the CEO of Lightmatter company who only helps because he wants to fix the whole mess and thinks you will only cause trouble. If he already sounds mean, he is and will really start hating you over time as he starts to think you’re someone, that I’m not sure if we actually are or if he made it up? Anyway he is an asshole. Another element borrowed from Portal 2 where you’ll have a voice constantly patronizing you, but I found GlaDOS to be kinda funny despite insulting you over time, whereas this guy not so much. GlaDOS also had a backstory and she has a human side to her in Portal 2, here this guy has almost no redemption.

Back to lights – to stay alive you need to be constantly in light. If you stand in shadow for just a second it will kill you. You don’t have any flashlight or torch, but there are limited number of lamps that you can move around. Later on you’ll find lamps that are powered by crystals and as long as they have a line of sight with another lamp like this or a huge crystal that powers them, they’ll give a small light around and the beam that connects to other lamps/crystals gives light too, so they create a path for you.

Most puzzles are pretty clever and some of them made me feel dumb, but I think the difficulty curve was weird sometimes. There were puzzles that I had no problems with, then something much harder, then again it would sometimes jump to hard, back to easy. There was one chapter, or maybe two, where the harder puzzles were at the beginning, easier in middle and ending with something again hard. But your experience may differ, maybe I’m just dumb in a different way.

This game is GORGEUS! I love how this game looks, it’s really beautiful and I would often stop and just look around at pretty environments. Everything that’s cowered in shadows has this nice, greyish outline and all light sources cast this pleasant white light. For a game all about dark & light they really nailed the look of it.

I wish it had better story and characters. Better difficulty curve and puzzles would be plus too. They are very open about Portal 2 as their inspiration but unfortunately it is nowhere as good. But whether you’re undecided, interested or not interested, there’s a free demo you can try.