The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners review

We all know how to kill a zombie in theory. It's easy, you just destroy the brain. A bullet will suffice, but guns are loud and zombies are attracted to noise. Ideally, you want to get in close and pierce the skull with a knife. Quick, clean, and silent.

In theory.

Here's what's likely to happen the first time you kill a zombie in Saints and Sinners. You'll get in close, you'll stab with your knife, but it doesn't go in. The blade glances off, leaving a nasty but ineffective scalp wound. Skulls! Who knew they were so hard?
Now the zombie has grabbed hold of you. You start to panic, jabbing away at its face like you're trying to pin down an elusive pea on a plate. All the while, your stamina's ebbing away. When it runs out, it's chow time for Mister Flaky. Finally, you pull your arm so far back your shoulder creaks, and with a sickening squelch the blade drives through bone and brains, slathering your arm with blood.




Relief flows through you as the zombie goes limp. You pull the knife, but it doesn't come out. The blade sticks. Now you're panicking because your only weapon is wedged in this corpse's head.  Meanwhile, two more zombies are shambling eagerly toward you, one of which is wearing a helmet.
Saints and Sinners' nuanced simulation of knife/skull interaction is as remarkable as it is harrowing. Not only does it make each zombie encounter slightly unique (and also fraught with apprehension) it also effectively communicates your personal journey as a survivor in The Walking Dead's world. After the messy horror of that first kill, you'll be buzzing with nervous adrenaline, certain the odds are impossibly stacked against you. Over time, however, you'll learn how to efficiently dispatch the walkers, leading with your off-hand to keep them at bay, perfecting the arc of your swing and getting access to bigger, nastier melee weapons.

This one mechanic is probably enough to carry Saints and Sinners on its own. But it's only a small part of the most mechanically rich VR game I've played yet. Set in New Orleans, it sees you play as a nameless survivor known as "the Tourist" on the trail of a military bunker called the Reserve. From your contact trapped inside the reserve (a man named Casey) you know it's filled with all the resources a survivor could ever want. But the Reserve is also slowly filling with floodwater, while the key to access it is held by a vigilante who won't give it to you until you help her exact revenge upon the Tower, one of two local factions vying over the city.

Saints and Sinners' nuanced simulation of knife/skull interaction is as remarkable as it is harrowing.

From your base located inside a cemetery, each new day sees you venture out to a different district of the city to complete a specific objective, such as retrieving parts to fix a radio, or collecting "intel" from inside a faction base. At the same time, you also need to scavenge whatever resources you can from the environment, grabbing everything from broken guns to discarded shoes and bringing them home to craft new weapons and equipment.
Saints and Sinners builds its game upon solid VR foundations. Most interactions demonstrate the same care and attention as the melee combat. If you're injured, you'll need to wrap a bandage around your arm to restore health, while you can "disguise" yourself from the zombies by pulling out their guts and rubbing them on your clothes and skin as in the comic. Ranged weapons are also pleasingly represented, with authentic reloading mechanisms for revolvers, double-barrelled shotguns, and so forth.





What elevates Saints and Sinners above other VR games, however, is how these individual interactions are baked into a longer experience featuring both a decent story and, more importantly, overarching game systems. With each day that passes, the available supplies in the world dwindle, while the number of zombies shuffling around increases. This means crafting new equipment is not simply a way to empower yourself, but imperative for keeping up with the ever-growing threat.

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A scintillating tension engine where every moment-to-moment decision you make matters.

This long-term issue exists in direct conflict with shorter-term dilemmas. When you're out in the world, you have roughly half-an-hour before the Tower rings every church bell in the city, causing the streets to swarm with zombies. You don't want to be around when this happens, so you can't be too picky about the resources you collect. When you get back to base, you'll then need to prioritise what upgrades to craft, whether it's a fancy new meat-cleaver, or home-cooked food that increases stamina without causing a health-reducing infection.
The result is a scintillating tension engine where every moment-to-moment decision you make matters. Although notionally a survival game, Saints and Sinners arguably has more in common with Dishonored. It's a game about blending stealth and combat in environments where the situation is always changing, about planning your actions and being surprised by the consequences. No matter how good your knife skills become, you're always playing with a knot of anxiety growing in your stomach, because there's so much you need to do, and so much that can go wrong while doing it.

There are set moral choices in the game too, such as choosing whether to help a Tower guard rescue his brother from another faction named the Reclaimed, or to kill the brother yourself and help the Reclaimed exact revenge upon the Tower. Yet while these choices impact the overall direction of the story, they're far more of an aside compared to Telltale's narrative adventure.

Through the Darkest of Times review

No matter how intelligent or empathetic you are, it's incredibly difficult—arguably impossible—to truly comprehend the enormity of the atrocities of Nazi Germany. Games usually seek to loosen your grip on the concept further, by saying little more than "go shoot every German you find in the face". This pigeonhole-defying game, while still failing to communicate the scale, opens your eyes wider in a very impressive way. It is, really, more an emotional journey than anything else.
You and your small band of resistance members are German citizens; names, attributes, and appearances randomly generated. The story begins with Hindenburg appointing Hitler Chancellor in 1933, and runs right through until the aftermath of the war in 1946. The story is firmly grounded in reality, so there's no chance of preventing WWII or having any effect at all on historical events. It's all about doing what little you can for the persecuted, trying to spread the truth of what the Nazis are doing… and looking on helplessly as huge amounts of the populace cheer Hitler on.
Each turn represents a week, and you need to decide which tasks to assign to each of your members. Success in each is determined, in part, by the total value of the relevant attributes offered by the characters you assign (e.g. Secrecy, Strength, Propaganda). Things aren't nearly as simple as that though, and not only because bringing certain items along can make things slightly easier or harder.

At the beginning of each week, I'm presented with three newspaper headlines. The news is historically accurate, and ordinarily details successes of some kind for the Nazi regime. My group's morale is reduced accordingly before I've even done anything, and I know that I'm almost certainly due for a little more morale reduction at the end of the turn unless I get some wins for the group.

Arrested development

That's not all. Even if an action is successful, there's a high chance that at least one member will start to gain the attention of the authorities. If I leave this unchecked, the Gestapo will arrest them, taking them out of action. Any heat on any members assigned to a task starts to increase the risk of failure. I need to select tasks to keep my ever-depleting supply of supporters up, too. If I lose too many supporters, or group morale hits zero, it's all over.
The mechanics are solid, and ultimately stat-based, but they melt into the background thanks to the storytelling. Although there are occasional stumbles with the text (seemingly translation problems), and the stylised art and swift pace prevent emotional bonding with any single character, I find that something cold runs through my chest at regular intervals. Paintbucket Games refuses to flinch from the realities of life in Nazi Germany, and it's the uncomfortable complexity of the situation that really gutpunches me.

Friends, neighbours, even children; nobody around me can be guaranteed immune to the toxic charms of the charismatic Hitler and his all-powerful party. Most of these supporters of fascism, rather than being cartoonish villains, are otherwise unremarkable and… nice. They bake cakes. Host parties. Talk to me politely. There are vocal and angry critics of the Nazi regime, but they risk not only arguments with their peers, but the potentially deadly wrath of the authorities. I need to watch what I do and say.

The steady drip-drip-drip of Nazi horrors through newspaper headlines pierces me with cold reality again and again.

When I come across strangers, I don't know whether I can trust them or not. How could I? Even when I find somebody that seems to offer a ray of hope—somebody that one way or another promises help from the outside world—little or nothing tends to come of it. Yet I'm emotionally invested enough to try my best. Early on, I come across a Jewish man being beaten by members of the SA. There's an option to ignore the situation but, even on a second playthrough, there's absolutely no way I can bring myself to do that.

Paper view

The first time around, it's all extremely powerful. The steady drip-drip-drip of Nazi horrors through newspaper headlines pierces me with cold reality again and again, while seeing people suffering in the story sequences urges me on to do whatever I can during turns on the map. A second playthrough however shows that the story is rigid, and the choices I make there often have little or no effect. I soon begin to skip huge swathes of text, and the emotional impact is reduced to a fraction of what it was.

There are a few rare occasions where the wording of the script strongly references Trump, and I really wish the developers hadn't done this. Partly because it sends cracks shooting through the atmosphere, but largely because it really isn't necessary. At times, the parallels are so strong, you would have to cover your eyes not to see them.
Each chapter has a few major blows to the Nazis available; getting a message out to the world, say, or a major act of sabotage. These require specific items which, in turn, require specific sequences of tasks to be successfully completed (and all this within a strictly set number of turns). I'm never able to complete any of these tasks, and I'm still not sure whether this is due to design or my own poor time management. Ultimately, it doesn't matter, because the message is the same. Small acts of rebellion under fascism are difficult and dangerous; spectacular acts of rebellion a hundred times more so.
Through the Darkest of Times is as dark as it is important. One side of the game explicitly tells the final chapter in Hitler's rise and fall, from the perspective of ordinary citizens trying to navigate the repulsive views of their friends and inconceivably horrific rumours regarding the regime. The other side forces you to juggle the urge for action with the need to care for your group, with no easy answers. It forms a cohesive, uncomfortable whole.

Kentucky Route Zero review

It's taken seven years for developers Cardboard Computer to release all five episodes of its otherworldly adventure. It was first Kickstarted in 2011. Chapter 1 was released in 2013, and the following acts have dropped sporadically ever since. Where games like The Walking Dead or Life is Strange will drop episodes at most months apart, Kentucky Route Zero would wander into your life with two hours of surreal, evocative story before disappearing once again—slinking back into the aether until it was time for the next episode.

It's strange having to review a game that I've been playing for over seven years. It's a weirdly nostalgic experience, a reminder that I'm a completely different person from when I started playing back in 2013. While I think many will have the same realisation, Kentucky Route Zero's message about the struggles of rural America and the working class are as relevant today as they were back then.
The story follows Conway, a truck driver and self-described drifter who delivers antiques. After the small antique store he works for shuts down, we follow his delivery to 5 Dogwood Drive, a place that noone seems to have heard of, but apparently lies somewhere along an ethereal highway called the Zero. As Conway searches for his destination, he is slowly joined by a number of fellow wanderers. The group travels across Kentucky together, looking for a place that may or may not exist.

Their road-trip is far from just tire on tarmac. KRZ takes you through a number of surreal pit stops throughout its five acts. A majority of the story is told through character dialogue and exploration as you point and click your way through different scenes. Rather than puzzles, though, the focus here is on weaving an evocative atmosphere and memorable scenes. An old cathedral that's been converted to an office building where you're not quite standing inside or outside. The basement of an empty gas station that's shaped like a horse. An eerie museum of suburban neighbourhood houses called the 'Museum of Dwellings'.



On KRZ's ethereal highway, a building is never 'just a building,' there's always a little poetic twist. I felt like I was a tourist, sightseeing Kentucky's strange little corners and the people who lived there. Although never fully sure where the story would land me next, I always looked forward to what was next down the road.

A building is never 'just a building,' there's always a little poetic twist.

As Conway's group grows bigger, each character fades in and out of the foreground. In the first act you control Conway, but as the story progresses you'll play different characters as they take centre stage. As you chat with different NPCs you're given choices that reflect a character's inner thoughts and, as you decide which of these will be expressed, it's like you're slowly moulding the character. These choices aren't just simple replies to a question, like your opinion on what's happening in the moment, but deeper and more meaningful. You get to decide if a character is completely over a lost lover, or still shaken by an event from their past. I always felt like I was making meaningful choices. While the road that KRZ takes is linear, but the decisions you make for these characters make them feel like your creations, their stories becoming yours.
Kentucky Route Zero is mainly an anthology of these small stories and you'll hear many of them through building descriptions, ghost stories, lore and mythos. They can be as simple as a description of a haunted arcade to as complex as a character's entire family history. The small and the big all together conjure up a bleak portrait of rural America and people trying to survive times of economic hardship. The stories of KRZ are from regular working-class people; bar staff, electricians, store clerks, truck drivers, and many more. It's not often that these stories get explored in games, and KRZ handles the topic with respect. Even with it's magical realist visuals, KRZ stays firmly grounded in its careful consideration for its stories. If anything the dreamlike, surrealist visuals actually enhance the message.

In one early scene, Conway's search for the Zero brings him to an abandoned mine where he meets a young woman named Shannon, the first character to join your group. As you chat with Shannon she begins to explain how she came from a family of miners, and how, due to corporate greed and neglected worker's rights, the mine collapsed, killing all of the miners inside including her family. As you explore the abandoned mine shaft, you can hear the ghostly sounds of metal hitting rock and there's a radio broadcasting the haunted singing of the workers within its static.
It's these moments that really grip you when you're playing. They're quiet, unexpected and steer clear from baseless bizarre weirdness. But, there were times when I got lost in KRZ's stories. A character would mention a name that I felt like I'd heard before or a place that rang a bell at the back of my mind, like remembering a dream after you just woke up. Following all the different narrative threads can be a bit disorienting but it never was frustrating—especially now I'm not forced to recount a story event that happened two or three years ago. I never felt that KRZ ever wanted anything from me, that I was just a casual observer in its ethereal world.

This ties in with the group that joins Conway on his search. They're drifters, pilgrims, loners, and wanderers. People with nowhere to go, no home, no boundaries. This wanderer lifestyle almost sounds romantic, but in KRZ these drifters reveal ugly truths about rural America. Stories of unpayable loans, never-ending debts, and people forced into difficult financial situations. These characters are individuals who, through choice or not, have been cast out or are in disarray with society, now left to wander the lost highways of Kentucky.
Kentucky Route Zero tells the stories of people and their collision with social or natural forces that they are powerless against. But KRZ isn't completely melancholy. The last chapter is warm, hopeful, and a finale that feels good regardless of whether it took you seven years or seven hours to get there. Its storytelling is slow but purposeful and blends fiction, history, lore and the supernatural to conjure up an intricate portrait of America and its wanderers. Kentucky Route Zero is a compelling tragedy that focuses on the smaller, but no less important, stories of its characters.

LUNA The Shadow Dust review

Hand-drawn animation has been making a resurgence in games recently and it's a more than welcome feature. There's something intimate and charming about 2D hand-drawn animation style and LUNA The Shadow Dust's artwork is a visual feast for the eyes. Its world invited me in and, for the most part, I was completely enchanted. But unfortunately, as much as LUNA looks amazing, there were moments where I felt lost in its puzzling world.

LUNA The Shadow Dust begins with a nameless boy falling from the sky. He drops like a stone through the air but, before crashing into the earth, is saved by a magical force that conjures a bubble around him, gently laying him on the ground. After he awakens he finds a rickety tower and, with his magical cat friend, begins to make his way through the rooms to get to the top. There's no text or dialogue to explain the story—it's all a bit mysterious. How high the tower is or what's at the top is not made clear, but LUNA's atmosphere and visuals proved more than enough to entice me inside the looming fortress.

As you explore the tower, each room is beautifully crafted from the get-go. The first room you enter is the hallway where a huge intricate mural depicting ancient lore decorates the wall. As you walk past it, colour begins to bleed into the images, like you're waking the tower from a deep slumber. The legends of this world are etched into every corner and open surface. The cosy kitchen, huge library, and flamboyant music room are all bursting with detail that made me look forward to what other rooms and secrets were hidden away.

Each room in the tower acts a self-contained puzzle. When you solve it, the door the next room will unlock, letting you progress further. The puzzles are in the same vein as other point-and-click adventures—doing simple actions in a certain order, pushing platforms, pressing buttons, and switching between controlling the boy and his feline friend.



Puzzle rooms aren't just  button pushing and lever pulling, though. Theres always a fun magical twist. In one room, your cat companion transforms into a shadow that can traverse walls, jumping on platforms formed by the shadows of other objects. Another room has a door that transports the duo to different seasons, and there's a corridor of stained glass windows that morph to show different saints. These animations keep the puzzles from being too static, giving each some flair and making them a joy to solve.

One major theme that is repeated throughout all the puzzles is symbol matching. Almost every puzzle requires you to match two symbols together or challenges you to look at how certain images relate to others. It would almost seem overused if it didn't fit perfectly with LUNA's silent story.

Large spaces of rooms are dedicated to intricate murals that not only give a backdrop to this fantasy universe but also tie in with the puzzle-solving

Similar to the mural in the entrance, there are numerous paintings and ancient symbols that depict lore and legends throughout the tower and they have a surprising amount of detail. Large spaces of rooms are dedicated to these intricate murals that not only give a backdrop to this fantasy universe but also tie in with the puzzle-solving. I found that if I was stuck on a puzzle, I could examine the environment and there would inevitably be a note, symbol or mural to guide me.
The only time where I felt frustrated with its puzzles—and unfortunately LUNA does have frustrating moments—is when these environmental clues were nowhere to be seen. Instead, I found myself randomly clicking and repeating actions in different arrangements until I found the right order.

LUNA runs into the same problem that many silent narratives fall into. If a game only communicates through wall murals and symbols, beautiful as they might be, details are going to get lost. Both LUNA's puzzles and its narrative suffer from this. The main story beats are clear, but the intricacies of this magical world are completely lost, especially towards the end where a clear understanding of the magical forces would have given the emotional finale more punch.
LUNA The Shadow Dust is a fun adventure with some stellar artwork. The puzzles and their magical twists were a joy to solve, even though there were one or two that left me floundering. As much as I appreciated its mysterious silent storytelling, it left me wanting more and not in a good way. I would have loved to know more about the roles that light and shadow play in this fantasy universe, and how all the gods and saints tie into this dark tower at the edge of the world.

Daemon X Machina review

Third-person mech blaster, Daemon X Machina, tells the story of a world recovering from a major catastrophe. The moon has crashed into the planet, and the resulting wreck has been emitting a strange energy that’s not only turning all artificial intelligence sentient, but also turning it against the human race. As luck would have it, this radiation has also heightened the abilities of a number of civilians, including your character. You decide to offer your services to help take down the ever-growing threat of AI robots via the tried-and-tested method of fighting them in big mechs.
After designing your unnamed mercenary in a passable creation suite, you find yourself in your hub area where you take on missions and customise your mech. Upon accepting a mission you have to watch a cutscene in which other mercenaries discuss the story with each other. The plot is one of the game’s main problems, particularly in the early stages, where practically every new mission introduces a new handful of pilots.
There are over 30 other mercenaries in total, and as you’re introduced to them all you’re also expected to remember them and their unique personality traits when they pop up again ten missions down the line. Granted, not every merc is as important to the overall story—and the more notable ones are brought to the fore as the game progresses—but there are a hell of a lot of names and faces to familiarise yourself with early on.

Luckily, it’s the combat that counts, and in that respect Daemon X Machina plays an entertaining mech ‘em up. Its pedigree is unmistakable. It's produced by Kenichiro Tsukuda, who also produced the Armored Core series. Mech designs are handled by Shoji Kawamori, who’s been creating the mechs in the Macross series since its inception in the early ‘80s.




Daemon X Machina is approachable enough to appeal to those with no previous experience with mech games. Controlling your mech takes one or two missions to get used to, but it soon clicks: flying is toggled on and off with taps of the jump button, the triggers handle your various weapons, the D-pad allows you to swap out different firearms on the fly.
Your mech is also armed with generous aim assist, which means you can pick of groups of five or six smaller enemies with ease by sweeping your crosshairs in their general direction. Purists may balk at such support, but considering you’re in a giant robot designed for combat it would be odd if it didn’t have the ability to unleash death on small-fry foes with ease. As battles became progressively more intense, and the skies started filling with lesser enemies, I was thankful for the help.
With a half-decent rig you easily can run Daemon X Machina on its highest settings. As entertaining as the game was in its original incarnation on the Nintendo Switch, it was locked to 30 frames per second. Soaring around at top speed in anything from 60 to 200 fps (depending on your settings) makes it immediately obvious that the PC is this game’s natural home.

Daemon X has its fair share of issues, however. The controls are streamlined and accessible to newcomers, but the HUD is a nightmare. It consists of around 20 different gauges keeping track of health bars, ammo, and more. It’s useful to know your mech’s left arm is slightly more damaged than its right, but it can be initially overwhelming, and seems at odds with the newcomer-friendly approach of the rest of the game.
It also gets repetitive. A great deal of your time spent on Daemon X Machina involves accepting a mission, watching some cut-scenes, completing the mission then choosing another. The missions aren’t identical, of course—one minute you could be defending key buildings from enemy attack, the next you could be taking on one of the game’s long boss fights—but the overarching routine doesn’t deviate.
When it all comes together, this shouldn’t matter too much. Daemon X Machina may lack an engaging storyline and a dynamic mission structure, but the action is entertaining and visually striking enough for fans of giant mech combat. If you love huge, destructive war machines, you can wring some fun out of the game before the formula gets old.

Lair of the Clockwork God review

Genuinely funny games are still something of a rarity. So without wishing to dismiss or overlook the structural ingenuity and genre fluidity of a game that fuses a traditional point-and-click adventure with a modern indie platform-puzzler, the highest praise I can give Lair of the Clockwork God is simply that it made me laugh solidly from start to finish. Its central pair—the witheringly sarcastic alter-egos of creator Dan Marshall and co-writer Ben Ward—would probably despise the phrase 'interactive comedy', so I'll just say that this is a gag delivery device with a seriously good hit rate.
The third game in the Ben and Dan series, belatedly following 2008 freeware debut Ben There, Dan That! and 2009 sequel Time Gentlemen, Please!, opens in a Peruvian jungle, where it immediately establishes its central hook. Ben remains dedicated to the conversational, combinational arts of the point-and-click, whereas Dan has decided to reinvent himself as a contemporary indie platformer hero, on a touching and emotional mission to recover a possibly metaphorical flower that can cure cancer. If you haven't played either of the two previous games, you could be forgiven for thinking you were in for some self-consciously edgy humour with a side of clever-clever postmodernism. But as an early wink to the narcissism of self-insertion proves, it takes care to position its leads as the butt of most of the jokes.

And when I say emotional mission, that's exactly what it becomes. Fast-forward two weeks and Ben and Dan wind up in London, where the capital has taken a turn for the apocalyptic. Here they discover a seemingly friendly AI, which sends them through a series of experimental constructs, harvesting their responses to emotional stimuli in order to better understand humankind.

What follows is an imaginative journey that involves plenty of character-swapping as you make use of their disparate skillsets. Dan can reach places his noodle-legged counterpart can't, while Ben can pick up and combine objects (though, as Dan notes, these days you have to call it crafting) to help his bouncy BFF, including creating a few power-ups—the method of obtaining the sticky gloves that give Dan the ability to wall-grab is one of several lowbrow highlights.




In truth, there are minor control issues with both characters. Ben is blighted by an interface that feels slightly fiddly whether you're playing with a pad or M&K—an imperfect solution to the problem of needing to incorporate Dan's conventional platforming setup. And while Dan's platforming sections are creatively designed, he's not exactly Madeline in Celeste in terms of precision and responsiveness. The profusion of checkpoints almost feels like a mea culpa in that regard.

Though the game smartly avoids the irritating pixel-hunts of many a classic point-and-click, the platforming does create a few extra sticking points. Giving Ben a piggyback as Dan speeds up your movement, but it's possible to overlook key environmental features or objects unless you periodically drop him off. You're not always confined to a small locality, nor will you always be aware of which character you should be controlling. Such moments are rare, thankfully, and the dialogue tends to subtly seed clues and hints—though there are a few occasions where you'll find yourself trying out every possible combination of objects in your inventory (not that you ever accrue an unmanageable amount).
Somehow, this stuff hardly matters. It helps that Dan's glee during the platforming set-pieces is surprisingly infectious—just witness his response to his discovery of "left gravity". Besides, any minor annoyances are quickly forgotten when you're rarely more than a minute or two from a witty pun, a snarky one-liner, or a creative sight gag. There are so many jokes that I'm not too concerned about giving a couple away as examples, but since everyone else will be doing that, I'll tread as lightly as I can. Suffice to say, I took notes of 19 different punchlines and payoffs and captured more than a dozen others for posterity as screenshots, and that's barely scratching the surface.
Its sense of humour might be too caustic for some, and its penchant for gross-out won't sit well with others. Still more might be uneasy with the idea of taking pot-shots at other games. Yet the tone is usually either cheeky, affectionate or both. As often as it takes the piss (and I mean that literally in a couple of cases) it actively celebrates the kind of games it's joking about. It doesn't stoop to that common example of videogame satire, where a game does the very thing it complains about, whether it be a tedious fetch quest or some other hackneyed mechanic—outside of one sequence that quite deliberately plays on that idea, where the payoff is the reveal of the emotion being tested.

At times, it feels as if Marshall and Ward are throwing as much as they can at the wall to see what sticks—and much of it does. There's a frankly brilliant section that interrogates the process of respawning. One chapter, where the two need to impress a social media feed of youngsters to get into a club, risks devolving into condescending references to young people and their weird lingo, but defies expectations with a self-aware twist. And one elaborately silly joke involves a punchline that's delivered piecemeal within the opening moments of a visual novel, Devil's Kiss, that's bundled with the game. It comes in three parts, and I was giggling from the first.
It's not always the dialogue that makes you laugh, either. There are moments of surprise and delight scattered throughout, involving one ingenious mechanical twist that's prompted by a bit of wilful misinformation. At another point, you'll find yourself fending off waves of piñata minions—pinions—with a gun that produces a violent screen-shaking effect to put Vlambeer to shame. Yes, it stumbles occasionally, and some gags fall wide of the mark. But Size Five's biggest and ballsiest adventure to date is the kind of game you'll be quoting for years to come.

Corruption 2029 review

Now this was unexpected: a new game from the creators of Mutant Year Zero: The Road to Eden, announced just two weeks before its release. I'm not sure what's more surprising, that developer The Bearded Ladies would drop a completely new game with almost no warning, or that it's another stealthy turn based tactics game that isn't a sequel to Mutant Year Zero.
Instead, Corruption 2029 is set in a dystopian semi-post-apocalyptic America, split into a forever war between two indistinguishable factions—the enemy NAC (New American Council) and the player-aligned UPA (United Peoples of America). These wars are fought between 'units', soldiers that have been so heavily cybernetically augmented that they have seemingly lost all free will and are controlled remotely by drone piloting commanders. It's a neat little meta commentary on the concept of the strategy game, and it's unfortunately about the closest the setting gets to being interesting.

There's a real lack of personality here, especially compared to Mutant Year Zero, whose cast of loveable anthropomorphic weirdos are far more memorable. Even by the standards of XCOM, Corruption is wanting. With no visual customisations, no permanent levelling choices and no permanent death, the Units are as interchangeable and unmemorable as the fiction says they are. There are three of them, and I have already forgotten two of their names.

There is some visual style in the unit designs—mash ups of light clothing, angular armour and robotic limbs that call to mind Titanfall as much as they do XCOM. Unfortunately, the environments are much less interesting, with the same handful of locations reused for multiple missions. You'll find yourself repeatedly raiding the same motel over and over, although with different guards and objectives, giving the impression that this entire continent spanning war is actually being fought in a single one horse town.




Once you dig into the tactical toolbox on offer, you'll find a lot of fun toys to play with. Each level has two distinct phases. Units can wander around in real time so long as they aren't seen, and then drop into turn based combat to fight. The first half of the level is spent carefully picking off stray enemies. The second occurs when you've finally run out of soft targets and have to fight the main enemy force out in the open. Again, this is very Mutant Year Zero, but the balance here is strong, and it's rare you manage to take out all of the enemy via stealth. There's always a fight in there somewhere.

Much of this first phase becomes an intricate dance where you carefully figure out just how to inflict the perfect amount of damage so that the enemy gets taken out before anyone notices. Weaker enemies can be killed by the handful of silenced weapons on offer, but tougher ones require tricks. Maybe you can lure them out of range of their allies, where louder weapons can be used, or perhaps you can hit them with a stun attack to get a precious second turn of silent shooting. Just don't give them a turn to act, or they'll radio in a whole map's worth of enemies. It can be a bit arbitrary, charging through a wall and knocking your enemy sprawling is apparently 'silent', but it's a fun puzzle nonetheless.
Levels are also littered with useful pickups that will aid you when the real fight starts. Often you might find a set of turret codes guarded by a couple of soldiers. Lure one away by turning on a radio, kill the other, and you can set up an automated turret to mow down a couple of enemies in the first turn after you go loud.
Inevitably, though, stealth will break down—or you'll simply encounter an enemy you can't pick off—and you'll have to go loud and start a regular turn based tactical fight. Here showier abilities come into play, carefully doled out over the course of the campaign. My favourite, one of the first available, is a giant bionic leap that can launch a unit across the battlefield and onto rooftops. Land on top of an enemy and you'll knock them out of cover. Place it just right and you can knock them off a rooftop, scoring a kill without firing a shot. Others abilities include shots that freeze enemies in place, charge moves, and a large variety of passive stat boosts. These can be changed and remixed as much as you like. Nothing about your units is permanent. They are completely interchangeable.

Enemies aren't terribly varied. There's the rifle guy, the rifle guy who inexplicably has twice as much health, the elite sniper guy, the elite armoured guy, the resurrection drone and the overseer, who throws weird seeker missile drones that attack you in melee. That last one is known in my games as "the bastard".
Between missions you'll find little of substance, with a very basic loadout screen asking you to re-equip your soldiers and pick your missions from a branching tree. Occasionally you'll be asked to choose between two largely indistinguishable missions and pick the one with better rewards. It isn't especially interesting.
I'd really love to know how Corruption 2029 came to be. It feels like a very stripped down, bare bones game—a space for the designers to experiment with concepts in a turn-based tactics space. The big problem with Corruption 2029 is that the same developer put out a very similar game with the same strengths and far fewer shortcomings only two years ago. Fans of Mutant Year Zero might want to check it out to get a bit more of that stealth tactics fix, but anyone else should opt for its more illustrious predecessor.

Bloodroots review

Left for dead with a bullet to the head, it's hard to think of worse ways to end a Friday night. Beaten and bloodied in the snow, Mr Wolf is thirsty for blood—taking you along on his gore-soaked quest for vengeance across a stunning, painted frontier. Here's the thing about revenge though. It might be sweet, it might even be best served cold. But satisfying as it may be, Bloodroots' cathartic quest starts to wear thin, fast.

This is some bloody gorgeous revenge, mind. Were it not for the buckets of viscera and constant cussing, you'd think was lifted straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon lineup. Kill Bill painted in the sharp, bold strokes of Cartoon Network's late-nineties heyday. Samurai Lumberjack.
Each act has Mr Wolf screaming murder towards one of his fursuited former friends—beating hundreds of their colonial goons into pulp in the process. It's crass, straightforward, but enough to drive another round of carnage. Eventually, you'll end up chatting to the gore-splattered ghosts of your former crew over a campfire that acts both as an exposition spot and your base of operations. It's from here that you're able to replay missions, try on new hats, and set out into the wilderness to paint the woods red.

Once you dive into that painted wilderness, though, all safeties are off. Each level is staggered into a series of arenas—farms, barns, townships and compounds packed with colonial goons. Everyone, yourself included works on the same one-hit-kill rules. It doesn't matter if you're bashing with your bare hands, a chainsaw or a fresh-picked cabbage. It's Hotline Miami for the Canadian frontier.




Whenever Bloodroots' bag of tricks starts to feel thin, it'll throw something completely new into the mix. Every other level brings a new twist to combat. Iron lads who take an extra hit to down. Cowardly snipers who'll fire highly-telegraphed rounds—bullets that don't distinguish between friend or foe, and will easily splat a baddie if baited carefully. This ain't a one-sided arms race though. As the enemy's arsenal ramps up, so does your own. New weapons start to litter the environment. Some of these—your axes and planks and such—are just more efficient at hitting things. Others are useful for keeping nasties at bay. Plungers stick on a poor sod's head. Hay bales stagger and confuse foes—unless, of course, you kick them through a campfire to set the poor lad ablaze.
The best tools, though, are the ones that completely change how you traverse the frontier's deathtraps. Ladders are great for thwacking things, yeah, but leaving one propped against a wall will let you dash to new levels. Rowing paddles make for surprisingly nifty pole vaults. Swords come with a gravity-defying dash for clearing gaps and rushing through traps—but, like axes—they can also chop down trees to open up new routes.

Even the arenas start to mix things up. Running atop barrels or tyres can get you across all those spikes littering the floor. Wagons can be looted for their wheels (useful murder frisbees that they are), but leave them on and any sod caught in their path is potential roadkill. Cannons are a nightmare to deal with, but kill the gunner and poor Mr Wolf can take on a new career as a human cannonball.
At their best, Bloodroots' arenas are brutal murder puzzles. Tight, multilayered compounds and cliffsides to slaughter your way through as optimally as possible. Untangling the game's violent loops is often delightful—diving head-first into danger, scouting new paths, planning and re-planning until you've nailed the right route with the right tools.

At their best, Bloodroots' arenas are brutal murder puzzles.

At their worst, though, the game is a repetitive slog. Bloodroots' arenas work when they're compact, but a little too often Paper Cult opt for a sprawling gauntlet instead, offering screen after screen of traps and ambushes where one missed grunt can send you reeling back minutes. More than once—to my embarrassment—I'd knock off the last geezer only to fall down a pit, or stumble into some spikes. Bloodroots doesn't autosave 'til a fight starts, so back I'd go to the very beginning of the slog. Rubbish.

That frustration peaked at the game's first boss. A portly fellow in a boar cap and piloting a flying contraption, you chase him through a straight-shot platforming gauntlet. It's rote memorisation, with save points too few and far between. It's naff, and I quit the game several times in exhaustion before finally knocking his head off his shoulders.
That's the problem, isn't it? Bloodroots looks phenomenal, and plays equally so in its best moments. But so much of the larger package feels careless. Some issues are small bugbears, such as a complete failure to show control prompts leading to an awkward moment where the prologue confronted me with an axe I couldn't figure out how to pick up. It's on the down arrow? Sure, okay. But that pacing's the real killer. Bloodroots' levels aren't long, but they're an awful slog. Even as the novelty of finding new murderous toys to play with ramps up, so does my exhaustion wear thin. I can't ignore that I'm quitting the game more often than not after the eighth or ninth run through the same compound or—worse—a lifeless, mandatory 'bonus' level.
Maybe the fairest thing I can say about playing Bloodroots is that it's a bit like looking after a dog. Not a well-behaved one, mind—a right mongrel. It's daft, loud, and I know that under all that grime and matted fur is a complex beast I want to love. But damn, if it isn't an exhausting thing to keep around the house.

Black Mesa review

One morning in the New Mexico desert, a 27-year-old theoretical physicist turns up late for work. The next thing he knows monsters are spilling out of portals from another world, turning his colleagues into zombies, and generally making a mess of the top secret Black Mesa Research Facility. The Half-Life series is really just one long bad day at work, and Black Mesa is a Valve-approved, albeit entirely fan-made, chance to relive Gordon Freeman's disastrous morning—but with prettier visuals, combat and physics lifted from Half-Life 2, bigger levels, and other upgrades.


Black Mesa sticks closely to Half-Life in terms of structure. You take the tram into work, watch in horror as the resonance cascade floods the facility with aliens, dodge headcrabs in the office complex, clash with the HECU Marines, deal with giant tentacles in the blast pit, fight through a warzone on the surface, navigate the radioactive Lambda Core, and finally visit Xen. But everything is huger, more detailed, and more dramatic, with production values approaching Half-Life 2, which breathes new life into the Black Mesa Incident.

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See how Half-Life's Xen compares to the remake in the video above.
Some levels have been remixed too, with redesigned, or in some cases completely new, puzzles and set-pieces. So even if you know Half-Life inside out, there'll still be some surprises here. However, purists may question some of developer Crowbar Collective's design and aesthetic choices—and some things are so detached from the source material that it occasionally feels like an entirely new game. Black Mesa is not a 1:1 remake, so it'll never feel as authentic as revisiting the original. But it's a fresh, modern, and lovingly made take on a landmark moment in PC gaming.
Half-Life is still great, but feels increasingly stiff and dated as the years roll relentlessly on. But Black Mesa being built on the foundations of Half-Life 2, borrowing its weapon handling and chaotic physics simulation, makes for a much more dynamic and engaging first-person shooter. And thanks to an abundance of movable and breakable objects, and devilish traps that frequently cause explosive chain reactions, the stricken research facility has never felt more reactive, unpredictable, or dangerous.

The stricken research facility has never felt more reactive, unpredictable, or dangerous.

But let's talk about Xen, because this is where Black Mesa makes its biggest statement. In the original Half-Life, Freeman's arrival on Xen was, for most players, something of an anticlimax. It's not as bad as people remember, but this otherworldly expanse of floating platforms, bizarre alien flora, and grubby textures is a low point for the game, with frustrating low-gravity platforming and a tedious boss battle against a giant testicle. But after years in development and several delays, Black Mesa achieves the impossible and makes Xen one of the best parts of the game.
The new Xen is stunning to look at, and feels genuinely strange and otherworldly—as this cosmic place-between-places should. Shortly after teleporting there, Freeman finds himself gazing across a vista of weird floating creatures and a swirling, vivid nebula. Comparing both versions of Xen side by side, it's almost comical how much of an improvement this is. What was once a rather lifeless, dreary place now sizzles with colour and detail, and the contrast between the comparatively banal computers, concrete, and vending machines of the facility has even more impact.

The new Xen levels loosely follow the original game in terms of theme and structure, but they're also a radical departure. The platforming is more fun and dramatic, and there's a lot more to discover in terms of world-building and environmental storytelling. Some locations have even been transformed entirely. In the Interloper chapter, Freeman encounters enslaved Vortigaunts in a factory-like cloning facility; however, in Black Mesa this section has been replaced by a bigger, much more evocative new location that really highlights the true misery of the Vorts' tragic enslavement.
The fight with the Gonarch is vastly more exciting too, with some really incredible animation and visuals, which elevate Half-Life's lamest boss battle to something quite extraordinary. And I'll let you see the Nihilanth for yourself, but it's safe to say that the new version is an improvement over the big floating baby of old. Some meandering level design and slightly unnecessary puzzling aside, Xen is a triumph—both in terms of its confident, dazzling art direction, and how it finally gives us an ending to Freeman's first adventure that doesn't feel wildly inferior to everything leading up to it.
It's amazing that something as elaborate and well made as Black Mesa is, essentially, a fan project. And doubly so that Valve allowed them not just to make it, but sell it on Steam too. This is a professionally made game, and arguably the best way to experience the events of the Black Mesa Incident on a modern gaming PC. For some the original will always be the best version of Half-Life, but this is a superb reimagining that uses the underlying systems of Half-Life 2 to great effect. Fighting through the Black Mesa facility as it falls to pieces around you is every bit as thrilling as it was back in 1998, and now the story ends with a bang instead of a whimper.

Ori and the Will of the Wisps review

As charming and fun as it often was, there was something off about my entire 15-hour playthrough of Ori and the Will of the Wisps. I wasn't sure what it was at first, but it was this: I had to walk directly over health and energy orbs to pick them up. Orbs land in all kinds of inconvenient places, scattering into traps and pits and beneath bulbous spider boss asses, and so it felt unnaturally restrictive. What kind of 2D metroidvania character can't vacuum up orbs from a distance? 

In hindsight, the orb magnetism ability that I missed in my first playthrough was not hard to find behind its breakable wall near the beginning of the game. In my defense, I hadn't expected anything so fundamental to be hidden in the tutorial area, where everything else was unmissable. Nothing on my map indicated that I'd missed anything, and so I played the whole game without a very useful ability. Oops.

Bigger and messier

Other inconsistencies and quirks rankled me throughout Will of the Wisps. It's much bigger and more complex than the five-year-old Ori and the Blind Forest, and, perhaps as a result, it's a messier blend of combat, exploration, and platforming—amazing fun at times, and gorgeous all over, but sloppy.
For instance, the new autosave system works fine most of the time, except sometimes when it doesn't save where I expect it to and I'm sent back a frustrating distance. I wound up peeking at the corner of the screen after every tricky bit of platforming to make sure the little rotating save icon appeared. And in a couple of spots, it respawned me in places that were impossible to escape, so it's a good thing I could quit to the menu and load a backup save.




The simple combat of Ori and the Blind Forest has been expanded, but it's not much fun. Enemies easily charge through Ori's light sword combos—hits don't interrupt them—and so I had to squint past my swings to gauge when I should leap out of the way. It can be a headache given how small Ori is, and how many bits of waving organic matter in the air and background provide visual interference.
When I could, I just cheesed enemies by leaping above them and repeatedly throwing downward strikes, which kept me hovering above their heads. But bugs with impenetrable shells have to be tricked into running into walls and dazing themselves—a tiring old enemy type—and there's also no way to cheese the annoying-ass mosquitoes that spawn until you destroy their nest. Some enemies are just mines that sit on walls and blow up when you get near them, and it's not as if the explosions  propel you away from the wall or anything—they're just there to be annoying.
I beat Will of the Wisps on the normal difficulty mode, which is the way it's "meant" to be played according to the menu, but I started it again on easy and definitely prefer playing it the way it's not meant to be played. Fighting the same handful of enemy types for ten-plus hours is not what makes Ori fun, so taking less damage and vaporizing all the crawling things with fewer swings makes everything a little better.

The run is mightier...

You can't always skip combat, but when you can I bet you will, because it's so much more fun to zip through the air. The basic jumping, double-jumping, and dashing is precise and satisfying, just like it was in Ori and the Blind Forest, and the abilities that made that game so fun are back. You can launch glowing energy rope at hooks and sling yourself into the air, chaining grapples like Spider-Man. You can freeze time when you're next to a projectile and then launch it and yourself in opposite directions, bouncing between glowing bullets as if you're ricocheting off of them. There are plenty of places to stop and rest, but you rarely have to give up any speed if you don't want to.
With 10 unique areas, there are a ton of special movement abilities and puzzle types, some more successful than others. Diving into sand pits and bouncing around like a pinball before shooting back out like a Dune worm is brilliant. The bits that take after Portal, meanwhile, are a little disappointing. They don't play much with momentum—for the most part, you just go in one magic blue hole and out another—and the most complicated it gets is a tedious puzzle in which you have to methodically guide a projectile between portal pairs.
Even the bits that are only so-so feel great to clear, though—like flawlessly running through an ultra-hard Guitar Hero song.

Aside from that good feeling, the reward for platforming victory doesn't have to be anything more than seeing what's next. I wish I could pluck some of the landscapes out Will of the Wisps and frame them, looping animations included. From the swamps to the mountains and the obligatory water level, they're all stunning—full of light and air and life.
The characters and their stories kept me going as well. Like Ori and the Blind Forest, Will of the Wisps is on a mission to pull both delighted and sad awws out of even the most determined grumps—and it does a better job of it. Ori is joined for a brief section by Ku, an owlet who hatches at the end of the last game, and whose curious and sad eyes are just so goddamn cute I almost resent them for manipulating me.
Not quite as cute but also fun are the Moki, creatures that look a bit like meerkats and pop out of the scenery to comment on Ori's journey, offer advice, and ask for help. Moki and other characters congregate in a growing village as Ori restores the forest, and little sidequests can be done to help them out. I found growing their little town and taking on their little tasks—like acquiring a hat for one and some soup for another—to be genuinely motivating. It also relaxes the pace a little, which helps counterbalance the frustrating bits.

Boss battler

The broader plot is standard forest spirit mysticism stuff—restore the light, restore the balance—and there's another nasty-but-sympathetic owl villain. The end may induce sniffling, but its success will depend on whether or not the boss fights and escape sequences have put you in a sour mood by the time you get to it.
The move-or-die escape scenes, in which you have to jump, dash, float, and grapple through collapsing structures while making zero mistakes—there are no checkpoints—are seriously annoying in places. There's a visually-confusing section near the end of one, and I had to replay the whole sequence several times to figure it out, letting myself die so that I could try to observe what I was meant to do. It's satisfying to clear these challenges, but in the same way it would be satisfying to stop punching yourself.

There are multi-stage boss fights, too—the kind with a big life bar that you have to chip away at—and they can also be frustrating. The escape sequences at least rely on the unbroken chaining of forward motion that makes Ori feel great, whereas the fights have you leaping around enclosed spaces trying to get sword whacks and ranged attacks in when you can.
Take the whole thing at a relaxed pace, though, and you'll collect lots of spirit money with which to upgrade Ori's abilities, reducing incoming damage and increasing outgoing damage. Hunting down energy and life cells throughout the world also makes things easier, so that if a boss is frustrating, at least you can go away and improve the math in your favor. And at least the boss stages are no less beautiful than the rest of the game—and also full of bitter-sweetness.
I prefer Ori and the Blind Forest for its compactness and simplicity, but Ori and the Will of the Wisps is also worth playing to the end. It trips over its complexity at times, and really doesn't need so much combat, but it's gorgeous, funny, and the triple-jumping could go on forever without getting old.

Besiege review

Besiege is notionally a game about engineering medieval siege weapons. But I think of it as a metaphor for the creative process. It begins with inspiration. "Egads!" you probably won't cry. "A mobile artillery platform with seven cannons running along a manually adjustable beam would bring down those wooden airships. It's genius."
With that, you grab your virtual hammer and set about erecting your ridiculous death contraption, fuelled by the thrill of early creation. You'll hammer out the frame, align the wheels, affix the steering block, and prepare to line up your cannons. This is it, your masterwork. History will remember you for this.

Then you slap your forehead. You forgot to add a pivot for adjusting the vertical aim! You fix this, but now your vehicle is taller than the level allows, so you need to reduce the overall height, which also means increasing the power of your cannons so their shot will reach its target.
Finally, you exit the building mode and press play. You move the machine into position and fire, at which point the force of your cannons shreds the machine apart, and it collapses into a pile of splinters and flame. Congratulations! You just finished your first draft. Now to turn that smouldering mess of ideas into something that actually works.



Of course, Besiege is hardly the first game to do this. Games such as Crazy Machines and Kerbal Space Program let players indulge their inner crackpot scientist, constructing wildly ambitious contraptions before scratching their heads and muttering "perhaps a little more hydrazine" at the resulting mound of slag. Yet whereas Kerbal Space Program is a feast of fudged rocket science, Besiege is more like engineering tapas, breaking its challenge down into tiny, yet no-less tasty morsels.

The premise is vaguely reminiscent of Dungeon Keeper. Besiege points you toward a perfectly nice fantasy realm and orders you to completely ruin it. Only instead of building dungeons, you're building siege weapons. This realm is split into four separate Kingdoms, each of which comprises around a dozen individual levels.
These levels are beautifully presented dioramas of death, with a handful of environmental details delicately painted onto a plain, blueish background. Each stage presents you with a simple objective, starting with destroying a house. Your building area is outlined in front of the objective, inside which is a single metal cube that will form the crux of your contraption.
Besiege's toolkit is less intimidating than that of Kerbal Space Program, featuring an intuitive, LEGO-like construction system that lets you hammer out the basic frame of your siege weapon in seconds. This is as well, because Besiege's tutorial is lacking. It provides some guidance on how to build a basic buggy, but that's pretty much it, while its guide on how to create a steerable vehicle is actually the worst way of doing it.
Fortunately, this doesn't matter too much, as the best and funniest way of learning in Besiege is through failure. The various objects and materials you work with mirror real-life physics. Wood may seem like a sturdy construction material in theory, but when building a three-storey high catapult, dead trees get surprisingly bendy. When my trebuchet wobbles into position like a Saturday-night drunk, I quickly soon realise it's a good idea to shore-up constructions with metal braces. Similarly, if you build a machine that's heavily front-loaded with weapons, it's important to add ballast to the back end, otherwise it'll tip over the moment you switch from drive to reverse.

The toolkit boasts a broad range of objects. Alongside all the weapons you can festoon your machine with, there are ropes and winches for constructing cranes, propellers and wings for building flying machines, even tools for automation and rudimentary programming. Besiege also lets you tinker with the parameters of these objects at just the right level of depth, adjusting the 'speed' of wheels, the power of cannons, and assigning actions to individual key-bindings.

Besiege is at its best when it's encouraging creativity, presenting you with a problem that can be solved in multiple ways.

While the title implies a focus on the destruction of fortifications, the objectives you'll face in the campaign are far more varied than that. One level could require you to cut down a farmer's crops, while another might involve stealing a crystal from a bunch of druids. In this way, it constantly pushes you into coming up with new contraptions. Besiege has a good line in humour too, from the daft trumpet noises made by heralds to the way enemy units hop around as if they're being moved by a giant invisible toddler.
Besiege is at its best when it's encouraging creativity, presenting you with a problem that can be solved in multiple ways. Levels which require you to build a specific type of machine (particularly flying machines) tend to be more frustrating. On some levels, the bounding box of the build space is deliberately restricted, nudging you in a certain direction in a way I found annoying. Fortunately, you can also save machines you're particularly pleased with and load them up later. This lets you establish a range of blueprints you can tweak to suit a puzzle, useful for quickly solving specific-build challenges.

There are a couple of other minor issues. It would be nice if you could click-and-drag lengths of wood as you would paths in Planet Coaster. Not only would this make construction quicker, it would also make editing contraptions easier, as you could adjust sizes without necessarily having to delete and then rebuild entire sections of your machine. The camera can also be finicky sometimes, particularly when you're trying to line-up shots or work on the underside of your machine.
Nonetheless, for a game that costs $10, there's an impressive amount on offer here. The campaign will keep you occupied for a good 10-20 hours depending on how efficient a builder you are, while the level editor offers unlimited creative potential. It also has a strong multiplayer community, playable both cooperatively and competitively in what essentially amounts to medieval Robot Wars. If that doesn't sell you on Besiege, I'm not sure what will. All it's missing is a Craig Charles voiceover pack.