by Chezni I shot a dinosaur in the face today. What did you do?
ORION: Prelude. Wasn’t this that game that was so bad that en mass game purchasers demanded refunds in droves when it was released? And then, apologetically, the developers went into overdrive and fixed up their game to be semi-decent? Apparently I missed all that because according to my Steam purchase history, I bought this game 3 years ago and haven’t played it until today. I also payed $0.81 for it. Mk.
by LepcisMagna 
Everything is an unusual game. It’s also a game that is far too easy to make jokes about – so much so that even the initial loading screen does it: “Everything is loaded.” After you pass the loading screen, you are dropped into the mind of an animal on a rocky planet. And, true to the name of the game, you eventually find yourself hopping from animal to animal, letting you play as everything. Soon, I controlled a fleet of animals and we galloped across the plain:
by LepcisMagna 
This game is a lot like Gone Home. So much so that if you have played Gone Home, that’s all you really need to know to decide if you like this game. The differences are primarily in format – Gone Home had you walking through your childhood home, while A Normal Lost Phone has you, as you may have guessed, looking through a phone you found. To actually beat the game, you need to be a bit more invasive than a normal person might be – and it requires guessing the owner’s passwords. It’s not a bad experience, but Gone Home is a little better executed since you are placed in the position of a relative, so it feels less invasive than just browsing a stranger’s phone. Tier Two.
by LepcisMagna 
Brought to you by the Summer 2017 Steam Sale and bad impulse control.
I am of two minds about ABZÛ. On the one hand, it’s a quiet, contemplative, and very pretty game. Extremely pretty. I mean, look at that. There will be a heavy sprinkling of screenshots just because this game is so pretty. It’s clearly intended as a meditative game…perhaps suggested by the various meditation spots throughout the game. You play as a creature of some description that is as at home in the water as in the air. The whole game is perfectly backed by chorals and strings, and is generously sprinkled with hints of a long-forgotten civilization’s ruins and Babylonian creation myth. Honestly, all that on paper makes up what would seem to be a game I would love.
by LepcisMagna 
Mobile Gaming
Typically, I stay away from mobile games. It’s hard enough to get people to pay 99¢ for a game on mobile, so either development costs have to be irrationally low or the developers have to monetize the app through micro-transactions and/or ads. The control scheme is necessarily limited, since your only easy input is touch – which means all controls need to be accessible all the time. Worse, the average time in a mobile game play session is measured in minutes (if not seconds) rather than hours, so complex mechanics also get thrown out. The cherry on top of this particular sundae is the remarkably terrible interface associated with the iOS app store which makes it nearly impossible to find good games. These factors have lead to what I consider to be an extremely hostile environment: a responsible developer won’t be able to recover their development costs (unless they get very lucky or also have a port on PC/Mac/Playbox DS 3½), and an irresponsible one will often lead consumers to spend tens, hundreds, and even thousands of dollars on their “free” app.
by LepcisMagna Dipping people into molten bronze and trying to summon dark spirits just never works out. Welcome to Kraven Manor.
I think this game proves that I just don’t like horror games. Much like Amnesia, this game creates a great mood. I think this game even one-ups Amnesia in terms of the puzzles – I didn’t feel like they were insultingly easy or just reliant on you being scared of them. Not only that, there is a very cool feature which lets you move around rooms of the manor. At the center table, you put pieces of the manor in different locations to enter new areas and unlock other areas by finding the right room piece within the already accessible rooms.
That’s a cool concept, and you can even see how many rooms you expect to find. The trouble is that while I like playing puzzle games and I like playing games with horror elements, I don’t like them together. In these games, if you don’t immediately see the solution there’s either no real danger to begin with or you die almost immediately. That’s a problem unique to games since books, movies, and television just don’t let you have direct control over the protagonist’s actions. Still, Kraven Manor is a good (though apparently short) game – deserving of Tier Two. Just because I’m not a horror game guy doesn’t mean everybody else isn’t.
by LepcisMagna These are couple games by the same guys that would go on to make Trine: Shadowgrounds and Shadowgrounds: Survivor. Shadowgrounds is a top-down shooter heavily inspired by the Alien franchise (well, at least as far as enemy design and general horror theming). There’s a lot to like here, and (right now at least) you can get both for $2.00. Even only counting my first impression, that brings my cost/hour down to $1 which is hard to argue with.
That isn’t to say that Shadowgrounds wouldn’t be worth it otherwise. On the contrary, there are a many features that I particularly liked. For one, (and as you can see in the screenshot above) your flashlight casts strange shadows all over the place. This is a fantastic effect, and makes the environments and enemies far creepier than they would be otherwise. The story may be generic, but the characters have just the right amount of camp to draw you in. The levels are organically designed and feel like actual buildings: there isn’t just one entrance and one exit and exploration is rewarded with ammo and health.
If I had one complaint, it’s that the boss I encountered near the end of my hour was really just a bullet sponge – made worse by the imprecise combat. The previous sections had taught you to be conservative with your ammo, but the boss requires you to pour all of your ammo into it. This turned me off a bit, since the boss wasn’t particularly difficult – it just had far too much health.
It was a fun hour, but I think this will also need to go into Tier Two – just barely missing Tier One since I wasn’t really compelled to keep playing. It will likely be a game I pick up if I find myself with nothing I particularly want to play some day.
That brings us to the sequel/spin-off named Shadowgrounds: Survivor. While the original narrowly missed Tier One, this one narrowly misses Tier Three. While similar to the original, Survivor does many things a bit less well. The biggest issues here come from the less sympathetic characters, less open level design, and even less precise combat. Combat in Shadowgrounds was already sloppy: your camera and aim were tied together, and the aliens don’t typically “pop” enough to distinguish them from the background. That was mostly acceptable because it was a horror-like game, and you were playing an engineer who might jump at every shadow. In the sequel, they unlocked the camera from the aim – only turning your view when your reticle was near the edge (shown below).
It may seem a small thing, but I can’t stress enough how terrible this felt. Thankfully, they provided an option to undo this, which immediately made aiming and movement better. Even so, just that doesn’t fix the other issues with combat. First, there are just too many things on-screen (to the point that my frame rate dropped to unacceptable levels on a 10 year old game), and it is entirely impossible to tell the enemies from the background – even when looking directly at them. Worse, the enemies seem to have a lot more health. They tried to counterbalance this by giving you more ammo, but having so many combat options all the time just made it feel less suspenseful and more like a generic third person shooter.
Not everything is worse, which is why it avoids Tier Three. There are a lot more enemy types (or they’re introduced quicker) with unique attacks and movements. My favorite was a poisoning enemy which twists and turns your view; but while that was interesting, the effect was lessened since combat was already hard to control. I wanted to like this game, but it just doesn’t have the same draw as the original for me.
by Chezni INTRODUCTION
Well, I had to do them eventually, right?
Civilization has been a sort of slow chugging but ever strong steam engine within the last 20+ years of gaming history. Always on the edge of popularity but never in quite the main limelight, the Civ series drew in a unique but loyal crowd of fans. Those who loved playing militaristic board games like Risk or Axis and Allies, historian buffs with a love for all the diverse cultures throughout time and those who just loved games about starting out with a few resources and ending with a massive collection of stuff to manage were all counted among these fans. Finally, a game existed where these people could gather together and begin answering previously un-answerable questions like, “What would happen if George Washington met Genghis Khan?”
by LepcisMagna 
Horror is a hard thing to do right. Worse, even when it is done right, it has to be accepted by the viewer. Amnesia: The Dark Descent is a puzzle/physics/horror game set in a castle somewhere around the mid-19th century. Your mentor must be killed, but a shadow is hunting you. From what I understand, Amnesia is well done horror. And the first time I played Amnesia (some years ago), I think I felt that. This time, I did not. I don’t think it’s entirely Amnesia’s fault – I think I’ve just been exposed to more video games since then and am more aware of the imperfections. It probably didn’t help that I was going in to it for a First Impression, either.
Whatever the reason, I didn’t find myself immersed in the world this time around. Instead, I found myself solving puzzles I didn’t realize I was solving and a little frustrated at my walking speed and camera angles. The first part I am okay with – if I were truly terrified, there is no doubt I would have trouble solving those same puzzles. The walking speed is easily circumvented since you have unlimited stamina (which is a bit of an odd choice), and encouraged me to go speeding around the castle to make the most of my lantern time.
I feel quite bad that I didn’t find myself experiencing what so many others have (and I am only picking at the game because it is well-designed). Indeed, my only real frustration was the “puzzle” I got stuck on at the end of my hour. An invisible water monster was chasing me (indeed, the first enemy that seemed capable of doing damage) and you can only escape from it by hopping on top of boxes. Unfortunately, there’s a hidden switch somewhere in the corridor that I just couldn’t find because I had just run out of lantern oil which made everything very, very dark (as you can see in the screenshot).
Stuck hopping from box to box, I was unable to find the switch to open the path forward. Eventually I struck up a conversation with the invisible water monster, asking him why my sanity wasn’t draining like it does in every other part of the game when you are trapped in the dark. Then I considered that I was talking to an invisible water monster, and realized that I, myself, must have already gone insane – so I congratulated Amnesia on its success and closed the game.
by LepcisMagna The trouble with drawing a series in our Steam roulette is that it really puts a dent in my enthusiasm. There’s always so many games to review all at once. Sure, I could review them one at a time, but then I won’t really be able to compare them accurately. Then, because reviewing multiple games takes a lot of time, I put it off and just don’t play anything (well, except Android: Netrunner). So it went with Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six. Finally, I got around to it; and right off the bat, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six seems to avoid many issues I have with FPSs – at least early on.