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I first heard about Umurangi Generation from ErrantSignal on Youtube, and the premise of a photography game was interesting enough that I decided to buy it and try it. Gameplay wise, it's fine - the levels are small, but dense and varied and have a lot of detail for us to scour through. The bounties are fun, and while some of them are a bit arcane/obscure, it never goes into frustrating territory. The side-objectives are constant throughout all levels, but they are usually entertaining, although hunting for films is a bit of a chore in the darker levels. But again, never too frustrating. And I loved the music, it really complemented the whole vibe the games was going for. What felt really weak was the movement, which was quite janky and unenjoyable, too slow and too sensitive at the same time. You'll frequently be sent flying into the air for no reason, or fall through the geometry or get stuck under objects, but you'll usually be back at the game in no time and without much consequence.

And if the game stopped here, it would be a weak recommendation. Good premise, interesting levels, solid music, janky movement, charming overall.

But there is a deeper layer to Umurangi Generation, which requires knowing a bit more about some external factors such as the dev's history, the development context, but also take a deeper look at the events portrayed in the game and all the environmental storytelling. While it's never made extremely obvious, Umurangi Generation is a game about the end of the world, and how your government and the world institutions are failing the last existing generation, and this is all meant to reflect the current state of affairs in the present world. Made in 2020, after the Australian bushfires painted the sky red for weeks on end (hence the Umurangi - Red Sky in the Te Reo language) and, of course, the Covid pandemic hit and was mis-managed across the planet. Umurangi Generation explores the point of view of a generation that was born into those crisis, never were responsible for creating them, but are the ones that will experience the worst effects of it, while the earlier generations (Boomers and Gen X) created the crises, destroyed the world, and will be gone by the time the worst effects are felt. This is all enhanced by in-game grafitti, corporate advertisement, posters, newspapers, and the constant UN peacekeeping force presente throughout the levels. To quote SuperBunnyhop - "it's the angriest videogame ever made".

Once you know that, it becomes a bit easier to overlook the gameplay jank and focus on the storytelling and narrative design, and start to appreciate the game a bit more. It's a game that asks a lot from the player, and gets better the more you give to it. I recommend it regardless, but keep that in mind if you decide to buy it.

Incredible puzzler. Perfect for those 5 minute breaks where you can tackle one, two, or five missions. Difficulty progression is pretty good, with tricks learned early on relevant later on. Now for the real challenge, the OG game

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Played this 20 freaking years after it was released and it's still fresh as it was back in 2005. TLDR: Seeing a 20-year old game that costs $2 being better at almost everything than recent $70 titles is literally mind-blowing. RIP Monolith, you guys had gold here.

This game looks incredible, with the exception of some character textures that are noticeably low-res (in particular Norton Mapes) and some external areas (e.g. the city as seen from the chopper or from the rooftops). Outside of that, environments are beautiful, well-lit, and full of prosp that react to your gun fights. Enemy models are detailed and well animated, and the scenario is reactive enough that anyone walking into a room after a gunfight knows there was a gunfight - there will be bullet marks on the walls, scorch marks where grenades went off, broken glass and crates, exploded barrels, reams of paper on the floor, and viscera splattering the walls. It never ceased to amaze me how beautiful and cohesive everything looked like, even after hours and hours playing the game.

Not only it looks good, it also feels good. Damn, gunplay is so much fun, part because of the portfolio of guns you're given, part because of the enemy AI. No gun is wasted here (except, maybe, the SMG), and I felt myself using the akimbo pistols as often as I did with the plasma rifle or shotgun. My personal favorite is still the penetrator which nails enemies to walls, but all of them are useful and fun to play with. If I have one gripe, is that there are not enough scenarios where the ASP Rifle excels, and ammo for it gets very scarce towards the latter end of the campaign. Enemy AI has been talked about through and through, and what I can say is that the small enemy variety is more than compensated by how vicious they are. The fact you're usually fighting squads instead of single enemies always leave you on your toes, and the game is highly lethal, with a few mistakes costing you a lot. Luckily checkpoints and health pickups are plentiful. The only enemies that suck are the turrets (and the drones to a smaller extent), but they are not super frequent so that's fine. Enemies move very fast, so using bullet time is almost a requirement for effective gunplay, as well as leaning to avoid incoming fire.

The sound complements the atmosphere created by the visuals, and it's always fun to hear the chatter from the enemy squad once they see their numbers falling, followed by radio silence once all are downed. There's a plot here that justifies some creepy sequences, but if this game was a series of linear corridors with nothing more than squads to destroy, I would still love it. Play it now, play it again, and just keep playing, this is too good to be true

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Morbid is a mid-game that is almost acceptable, but falters near the very end. TLDR: beautiful to look at, a chore to play

Let's be honest, it looks great -- the artstyle is detailed and consistent throughout, and there is enough variety in enemy designs and locations that you almost always know where you are and what kind of enemy you can expect to find there. The maps are nicely done, not showing everything but showing enough to keep you entertained. The sound design is generic but not objectively bad. And the designer intentionally keeps the lore cryptic, delivered through item descriptions, which at this point is an old trope, but kind of works here.

But that's the extent to which we can praise the game. The most important part of any action game is the gameplay. I wouldn't really mind the lack of a proper plot that interested me if the moment-to-moment gameplay was good, but alas, it is not. Combat is incredibly simple, to the point of being boring and repetitive. There's very little variation on what you do in combat. It usually is a game of positioning instead of a game of timing and reflexes. Attacks are very high commitment and, for the most part, incredibly slow, so you need to know where you are in relation to your enemy and how long will it take for it to reach you, in order to know whether you'll have enough wind-up to hit your foe before it retaliates. Writing it that way makes it sound acceptable and even fun, but playing it is anything but. Besides a strong attack, you have no variation in your arsenal.

You do get a lot of different weapons, but all play the same and feel the same. Even in terms of power creep, you end the game fighting like you did at the beginning, with your health similar to what you had at the beginning, with similar damage numbers you had at the beginning. Enemies get more health and stronger punches, but you hardly get stronger as the game progresses. Sure, you have Blessings to customize your build, but it's so hard to upgrade them and they are so generic that one can't help but wonder if the game wouldnt' be better without them. You have dodge and parry, but parry timing is not super easy to crack and I always tried to avoid it when I could, except in some enemies that absolutely need it to close the gap (like the ones that shoot missiles up and Lady Tristana). Attacks take too much stamina vs. running and dodging, so you'll be out of stamina more often than not

Add to it a small inventory that can be completely taken over by three or four weapons you find in the path, a lot of buffs that only stack up to 10 so you'll be constantly using things you don't need to be able to pick up more, or leaving loot behind. There's a sanity system that adds close to nothing to the whole ordeal, and a very linear map that tries to pretend it's super interconnected, but it's just a bit annoying to navigate.

I would be willing to overlook all of that if it wasn't for the last battle. Not only it's a 3-phase juggernaut, it's just too slow to begin with, and when it picks up pace you'll probably already be tired of it and depleted of resources, at which point the difficulty just ramps to 11. I almost dropped the game after literally 7 hours because of how much I struggled at the last boss. It's not a challenging fight, it's just annoying and boring. Lady Tristana was the only fight I genuinely enjoyed in the game and she would make a much better last boss than what we have here.

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Surprisingly fun, for how bad it looks. This is proof that if you got a solid gameplay mechanic, you can make it work even when your graphics look like AI slop.

I assume that for most people, your first run will end up with you doing the Deed with your bare hands (because you forgot to pick a weapon), and then being found guilty after failing to hide hahaha either way, the game really starts on your second run, once you understand how it works and can finally plan for it. I ended up doing two runs and feeling satisfied, and positively surprised at how well the whole thing worked given how poor everything looked hahaha

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Axiom Verge was a disappointment. Widely claimed as a great Metroidvania, which is my favorite genre, I assumed there would be no way not to enjoy this game, right? But it fails at the three things that makes Metroidvanias incredible for me - combat, movement, and exploration.

Starting with combat. Axiom Verge gives you one option: ranged combat. You're stuck to the 8-way directional for aiming your shots, and while you have a huge range of weapons (I beat the game with 12 or so), most are useless or incredibly situational. You'll frequently be unable to hit enemies a bit above or below you because of the odd angles the 8-way directional forces on you, and while I can see this being an aesthetic design choice ("Look, we're retro, let's emulate Metroid"), I'm sure retro games would have preferred free aiming if they had the tech to do so at the time. Axiom Verge does, decides to not use it, and it's a lesser game for it.

Now, movement. It starts bad, like any other Metroidvania, but barely improves. There's no running, double jumping, wall climbing or hanging, dash, or any of the actual cool movement abilities you would expect. Instead, you get a janky-as-hell grappling hook that barely functions, yet is required to progress into many frustrating areas of the game; you get a teleport that also decides to work whenever it wants, not when you want it to; and finally, a spider drone, that half the time fails to launch and your character launches the hook instead. Not only is mobility limited, the limited mobility you have is also bad. Considering the absurd amount of backtracking and verticality on display here, it's wild they decide this was good enough. With poor combat and poor movement, you cannot create memorable boss fights or gauntlets, so the game doesn't have the same oomph that the Mantis Lords in Hollow Knight, Elsom the Oger in Ghost Song, or Granfaloon in Castlevania SOTN.

And finally, exploration. I didn't mind the lore at first, but it mostly went nowhere. I think my biggest issue here is that the world is uninteresting - it's very samey and barren. There are little to no NPC's, only the giant sleeping heads telepathically talking to you that I found very hard to empathize. You hear of the villain but don't see it or it's actions until the last 3 minutes of the game. There is little to interact with, no one to talk to, and all areas are kind of generic and similar, so it feels you're going around in circles while playing the game.

Sincerely, I have a very high bar for Metroidvanias, and Axiom Verge is far from what I would consider a good one. At least I also got Blasphemous, so let's see what it is all about shall we

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A short little game that manages to squeeze a lot of heart during it's short runtime.

It's visually appealing, with a simple, coloring book aesthetic focusing on pastel colors reflecting the tone of the scene. It has a simple soundscape, but that helps to keep the whole thing going without distracting or overpowering the rest of the scenes.

The main puzzle mechanic is simple enough that you can just pick it and play with it without tutorials or extensive guides, but there is enough depth that even by the end of the game the puzzles never become obvious, although they lean a bit on the easier side of the things - which is not a bad thing in itself. If they were much harder, they would start impacting the narrative, and I'm glad they don't go all the way.

The narrative itself is compact but smartly told. Pacing-wise, it's great, it's the kind of game that refuses to be put down once you start it. I probably won't be thinking about it for ages the way I did with Elden Ring or RDR2, but it was a game that was very enjoyable for the short time I spent with it and I'd recommend it to anyone (particularly on a deal, given the short playtime and lack of replayability)

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A decent, competent couch multiplayer game. The star of the show here is movement, which is surprisingly well-executed. Building on this foundation, the game introduces several modes, some based on combat and some based more on movement mastery. Add mines, shields and boosts to your arsenal and you're in for a good time.

It's one of those arcade games that are very easy to pick but has an absurd high skill ceiling. Visuals, sounds and UI are nothign ground-breaking but work well enough. This is great to play with friends, but tough luck going against the AI.

Probably I wouldn't pay the full price based on how thin the singleplayer experience is, but it's very worth on a sale or if you plan to play a lot in local multiplayer

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Children of Silentown is one of those mid-games that you just wish were a bit better - there's not much wrong with it, but for the most part it's really unremarkable.

I mean, the artstyle is probably it's best element, very reminiscent of Broken Age, but with slightly worse animations. It's still consistent and enjoayble all throughout the game's runtime, which feels great. I also imagine it costed 100x less to illustrate and animate than Broken Age, so one must wonder what Tim Schaefer and the gang were doing with their Kickstarter, but I digress. The music is unobtrusive and not bad, but also unremarkable. Sound effects for the most part work well, but you really wish dialogue was voice acted -- I think it would help to elevate this game from mid to solid.

Speaking of dialogue, it's mostly good - I never got tired of reading what they had to say, and the jokes / humor / tone landed pretty well. The problem is that this dialogue does not connect with an overarching satisfying plot. From a pacing perspective, the game spends a lot of time with setup and not enough with delivery. It hints and teases at a lot of psychological horror possibilities, but lands with nothing. The beginning of the game drags and the end rushes. It's just a weird pacing.

Besides the pacing, the game flounders a bit on the gameplay. It's more of a classic point-and-click rather than a modern one. You'll need to pixel hunt quite often, combine items in unexpected (and dare I say, unfair) ways, and backtrack to non-obvious places to figure out the non-obvious solution the devs intended. Having just played some Wadjet Eye Games, it's kind of jarring to come back to this classic P&C issues that drag the game even further into mediocre territory. Had it highlighted interactables, for instance, would already make it way, way less frustrating and probably dismiss the need for a guide. The singing mechanic reminded me a lot of Acquaria and it's fine, nothing too bad. The puzzles that accompany it take some trial-and-error (particularly the rotating tiles one), but they are still mostly enjoyable and I feel could have been used more often.

Overall, a decent artstyle and good world-buildign that is marred by antiquated P&C gameplay, poor pacing and little story development. I still recommend it, but don't expect a remarkable experience after all