Drive Me to Hell

A very nice and short driving horror game. The first half of it is particularly good at building up tension and releasing it through some well timed jumpscares.

As for the second half, it has some really nice visual and environment design but I feel like its focus on the chase sequences kinda hurts it a little bit. Thankfully the short length of the game stops the chases from being too repetivive and tedious.

I really liked the general aesthetics of the game, but the really bad mipmapping really bothered me.

The twist the story sets up is kinda obvious from the very start of the game, but the storytelling process to get there is really nicely paced.

Overall I really liked this one and it was definitely a good way of spending some R$5 and 40 or so minutes

Violent Horror Stories: Anthology

Ok first of all, the name Violent Horror Stories already implies an anthology format, why does it have "Anthology" as a subtitle?

The launcher also felt annoying to navigate. I like each individual game being a physical VHS box that interacts with the environment, but they'd often fall in front of other boxes and block them from being clicked on. The "Play" and "Quit" buttons were also annoyingly hard to find at first. There is a large "PLAY" button on screen as you select a game, but rather than being a clickable button it is just an arrow pointing to the VCR prop, the actual play button. Similarly the "quit" button is not the actual "quit" icon shown on the TV, but the small red button below it.

The VHS boxes that serve as the game selection all look really nice (as do all the assets in the launcher really) but i really feel like its a waste to have the game selection process be "pick a box and then click on the VCR" if you're not actually gonna animate the tape being inserted onto the VCR and instead just fade to black

All along the toon tower

Cool little puzzle game about reorganizing frames of a cartoon to traverse through it. A lot of the puzzles are very timing-based which is something I don't particularly like, tho none of the puzzles feel particularly challenging.

The visuals are really trying to go for that early animation Fleischer-esque style, but I think it doesn't really manage to achieve it because it has this kinda very smooth extremely digital art look to it.

Overall I think the main thing going against this one is just the fact that, despite making up 1/4th of an anthology called "Violent Horror Stories" it is neither violent nor is the horror very present in it.

I ate old man's liver now this b***ch is mine

This one just feels really incomprehensible to be honest. To summarize what happens in it: Old Man makes fun of you for being a virgin then begins jerking off, you murder him and then dogs feed him his liver, you play subway surfers for a bit then the dogs eat you for being a beta male? I think?

One minor moment that has been stuck on my brain for a while due to how baffling it is is when the player character at a point describes his act of cannibalism as "better than sex". His sole and unique trait as a character is not having had sex before. Why would he ever describe it that way?

Maybe this incomprehensibleness comes from a cultural disconnect/subpar translation? All of the games in this collection are made by I believe russian developers? And most of them generally struggle with the sort of really flat and weird dialogue you get with subpar translation jobs.

But either way I think that might be being overtly charitable. Ultimately I just found it kinda gross and boring?

Also what exactly is the word being censored in the game's title? there's 3 censored letters in it so it can't be bitch

Sensation

Like the previous one, I also found this one kinda gross and boring, tho it is significantly more comprehensible

The gameplay in this one functions basically as a hidden object game, except that all the objects are extremely visible and you can only click on them when your camera overlay hovers over them, so it is basically just a game where you follow a square with your mouse until it hovers over a shiny object so you can click on it.

You have a specific list of objects you need to click on, but there are also "secret" objects (which, due to the big shiny glow, are not particularly secret) that give you extra lore. It's not a particularly interesting system, but it is a cool framework for the sort of interactive storytelling this game wants to do.

As for the storytelling, I really did not like it. You play as a failing news reporter trying to find some big story to revive your career, which ends up boiling down to just, stalking some random celebrity on vacation and then spooky things arbitrarily start to happen.

One of the weirdest and most confusing aspects of the game to me is how it is kinda just assumed every single thing you see out on the street must be somehow connected to this unnamed celebrity. A random child-like drawing stuck on a window is immediately assumed (correctly, somehow) by the player character to be a drawing made by the unnamed celebrity's child.

It really feels like the game is going for some commentary on celebrity gossip culture, like it's going to be about how the public considers itself entitled to know every step taken by anyone with who has been deemed a public figure, but the game's ending revolving suddenly around a ritualistic sacrifice and dead children kinda just completely throws that aside?

It's a weird one, probably my least favourite of the four games

No, i'm not a human i'm a ɿ̲̻ ʍ́ ρ̇̎Ծ̬͎Տ̯ͦ Ե̧͗_ͅ_̝̆ȝ̍ͯՐ͂͡

So this is the big game from this anthology that kinda took off and became its own big thing. This review is exclusively for the VHS:A version of the game, not the standalone one, which I have not played yet.

The ambience in the visual and sound/music design on this one is really great, and I'd wager the primary reason this one took off so much. The green tones of the night time do a really good job at creating a sensation of unnatural-ness, the art style used for the characters looks really unique and cool, and the OST does a really good job at supporting everything.

Everything else kinda falls flat for me tho. Having regular conversation actions and TV interactions cost energy directly de-incentivizes you from caring about anything going on in the story and with the characters. There is some strategic gameplay in evaluating whether or not you let someone in based on how many people you have currently in your house, but its ultimately kinda easy to settle on just making sure you have exactly two humans and then rejecting everyone else until FEMA takes someone away. As for checking the visitor signs, the game just outright tells you whether or not someone's picture matches the signs so there's never any need for the player to actually look carefully and do any sort of examination, which I feel is kinda the core of gameplay in this style of "papers, please"-esque games

As for the writing, it feels really poorly thought out. The text itself is kinda confusing and bland, but that might be a translation issue as mentioned previously. The thing that makes me not really enjoy the writing is just how little all of the game's concepts seem to cohere or even feel meaningful on their own. The game starts out with your neighbor barging and characters treating this as some kind of apocalyptic event even when the only current effects of the sun... blowing up? are "a really nice summer day out". There's never even any establishment of the visitors as any sort of threat unless they happen to kill someone in your house, nor even any actual consistence on what visitors actually are, or even why the impromptu airbnb is strictly necessary for anyone's survival except the player character.

With most videogames, there's generally a feeling that either the gameplay is developed in order to support the story, the story is developed to support the gameplay, or in rare cases that both complement each other perfectly. With this game I really felt like the story and gameplay were both developed to support different games entirely. The experience is definitely still worth it for the atmosphere alone imo, but the mess in everything else in this one has been stuck in my brain ever since i watched a video of it, and actually playing through it really reinforced it.

Overall

I definitely felt that the games in this collection are kind of a weird mess that I wasn't particularly into. Most of the games are at least interesting in concept, and the short playtime (~70 minutes for the collection in total) definitely stops any of them from actively feeling like they overstayed their welcome. I personally wouldn't have picked it up if it wasn't from the discount from being bundled with its sequel, but I imagine there's probably a decent amount of people who would be into most of these games, even if I wasn't.

Call of the Abyss

I simply adore games where you just slowly make your way down through some big unknowable structure and this one is a really good example of those.

It just nails its atmosphere both graphically and through its sound design. From the cold cold start down, the eerie green and purple glow of some sections, the pitch black darkness of some areas and the ruined underground city a bit over halfway through. Genuinely mindblowing to me that this game managed to have so much variety environment-wise and do all of it so well having been made in just 5 days

About the only thing which I ended up wanting more of was a sensation of genuine danger and consequences. The frequent checkpoints and lack of mechanical punishment on death meant that the climb down probably felt way less tense than it should have been.

Really great game tho

Camelot 10000CE

As a big fan of survival horror and weird movement systems, I really loved Endoparasitic (tho I still havent actually gotten around to finishing its sequel), so I was also really looking forwards to this game. And I did indeed really really like this one. The typing based movement leads to a lot of really tense combat situations, there are frequent moments of panic when I desperately try shooting at something but get the coordinates entirely wrong, and the typing for progressing through dialogue gives it a surprisingly unique feel. I played this on the hardest difficulty and I really liked the difficulty level in it, I'm not sure what it does or doesn't affect, but the resource availability felt really well balanced to where you feel genuine struggle and the time it takes for you to kill enemies (and for enemies to kill you) feels really dangerous. About my only 'complaint' about the game would be how the autocomplete upgrade system almost makes you less effective for some time after grabbing one due to muscle memory.

The writing and atmosphere are also really good. The boss dialogues in particular felt memorable, I love how it plays on themes of humanity and AI. The artstyle feels really surreal and beautiful, with the game's atmosphere and ambience shining particularly well in the Fortress of Grief.

A really lovely experience all around

Three Verses

Played the demo for this (including both the original jam version and the new demo) during the steam next fest. Amazing atmosphere. Really liked the sentence mechanics and the typing dungeon crawler section of the original game is really cool too. Looking forwards to Three Verses^3

Heavenstrafer

God this game rules. I love the artstyle, particularly the one used for the cutscenes. The usage of simple geometric shapes for the angels is great for making the extremely chaotic combat arenas super readable. There's a lot of great movement options. The weapon comboing mechanics creates this amazing rhythm in the combat. The character writing in between levels is maybe a bit hard to parse, but I'd say in a good way, where understanding the characters and story requires active thought. I kinda wish there was some more variety in the music, but god what a good game.

Death Stranding 2: On The Beach

Absolute Hideogame. Will probably write one or more blog posts specifically about it sometime so will not go into any more detail here other than I absolutely loved it

Cube Escape: Seasons

Really love this game's art and atmosphere. The puzzles were generally pretty nice, tho a few elements of how you interact with them were kinda frustrating, in particular, correcting the solution to a particular endgame puzzle if you get it wrong takes a lot of clicking back and forth between rooms and focusing on items just to switch things around

The Cube Escape/Rusty Lake series is something that I had been wanting to get into for a while now. Super glad to have picked up the full collection on steam and excited to try out the rest of the games.

Cube Escape: The Lake

I liked this one quite a bit more than the last one. It is significantly easier and shorter, but I feel like they just flowed a lot more nicely. The puzzle callback to Seasons as a way of getting the alternative ending was cool and also a pretty nice tie-in to the original game's time-travelling concept.

Cube Escape: Arles

This is the Cube Escape game I liked the least so far. The puzzles in this one are a lot more oriented towards tiny visual details in a way that felt extremely hard to keep track of to me. There were still some cool puzzles (the scales one was a pretty fun mathy one), but in the whole I'm lukewarm on this entry

Cube Escape: Harvey's Box

My favourite puzzles so far. The domino and flies/maggots puzzles were both really fun. The ending jumpscare got me a little bit but I do dislike the final fireflies thing, primarily because there's very little signaling that that's what you were supposed to use them for, but also because this is the only time in the games so far that timing is required for something, which is pretty frustrating.

Although I really enjoyed the puzzles, I also kinda think that maybe very standard logic puzzles are not the most interesting choice for these surrealistic and atmospheric games? idk

Cube Escape: Case 23

My favourite of these so far. The final chapter was a particular highlight. I complained about the timed puzzle in the previous one, but in this one not only is the timed component significantly more visible, but it also is just intensely good at creating a sense of dread and anxiety. The fish fly puzzle was the only one in this entry that I gave up and decided to look up a walkthrough for and I still don't get what's up with it tho.

Cube Escape: The Mill

Another really good one. Not a whole lot to say on it tho.

Rusty Lake Hotel

Much like the rest of the series, amazing atmosphere and art and generally really good puzzles.

Cube Escape: Birthday

The jumpscares on this one actually got me quite a bit. One of the flag puzzles seriously confuses me and I still do not get it even after having read through a walkthrough to solve it, but other than that I really liked them. The voice acting honestly kinda threw me off a bit and it's really funny to just spam click on the characters so their voicelines overlap lol.

Cube Escape: The Cave

This was a confusing one. A lot of the puzzles took up probably a lot more time than they should have and it felt really really long. There was a lot of lore which is cool though. Also I only realized I was supposed to play Rusty Lake Roots before this one immediately after finishing it so oops there goes the play order, oops.

Rusty Lake: Roots

New favourite Rusty Lake game! Love the long-term, montage-esque storytelling to this one, how every level slowly recontextualizes others, and how being able to do them in different orders adds to that. The puzzles were also all really good. Most of them required a decent level of thoughtfulness but only one got frustrating (the constelations puzzle). It was also definitely a lot longer than I expected it to be, but it did not feel padded at all. The inclusion of the emblems and a secret final level and ending which also adds some extra context to the story was also really good.

Chants of Sennaar

Amazing puzzle game. I had been wanting to play this for a while but always assumed the language learning mechanics would be a lot more intimidating than I was ready for, but they ended up being just simple enough to be approachable while still making for really good exploration puzzles. The languages kinda give the game a really cool core loop of your first half an hour or so in a new zone being focused almost entirely in exploration and trying to catch the meanings of a few words and how the language grammar works before you can actually start using that knowledge to properly solve the puzzles blocking your way into the next area.

My favourite part of the game by far tho was the little conversation translations you do at some of the terminals, where you need to translate both sides of a conversation. Most of the other language puzzles in the game involve deriving meaning from glyphs, so these puzzles create a fun test of your proper understanding of the languages by asking you to translate the given meaning into glyphs, while also keeping track of the individual grammar quirks of each language. They also do a really good job at conveying the game's themes and ideas regarding communication and connection through that gameplay. The art direction and soundtrack/sound design are also just gorgeous.

The few negative things I have to say about the game are pretty minor nitpicks. Some of the interfacing felt sorta annoying for me. The fact that, when you unlock a new journal page by interacting with an object, the page is only unlocked after you quit interacting with the object, so if you want to validate your glyphs while properly analyizing the object, you need to first focus on the object, acquire the glyphs, defocus from the object, wait for the journal animation and the journal to open, close the journal, focus on the object again and then you can open the journal with the new page felt pretty annoying. The pathfinding could on occasion be clunky, and most of the non-language puzzles felt pretty easy while also having some pretty lengthy animations that made them feel frustrating to solve just by the amount of time you'd wait between each step of the puzzle. The stealth was a pretty cool way to break up the game's pacing though.