This reminded me of the old Descent video game from back in the day, the earliest game that offered true 3D combat in a spaceship. It was incredibly easy to get lost in the labyrinthine corridors and could be a nauseating experience. Chorus is much more forgiving as it mostly takes place in wide, open areas and has a very simplified control system that even occasionally corrects your rotation by itself. I’ve found that an old-fashioned mouse and keyboard system works better than a gamepad and there’s no question of trying to use a joystick. While it doesn’t have a realistic flight model, it excels in making you feel like an awesome starfighter pilot standing alone against an entire enemy fleet. It’s very lore-heavy but the story isn’t too bad at all and I’d say the game is just about the right length.
As usual, I’m way late to the party on this one, so late that I bought this a while back on Steam and still hadn’t played it when Epic offered it for free. I did read up on opinions about it when it was first released and now that I’ve finished it, my thoughts are largely the same. It’s a fantastically original take on the turn-based tactics type of game that are now sometimes called the XCOM alike. But it has a staggering amount of out-of-combat story and exploration content that is way out of whack compared to the tactical gameplay. This ended up being a commercial failure which is why it was offered for free on Epic so quickly and that’s a real shame because the gameplay is really good and this is an excellent use of the Marvel license.
This was another free game on Epic that I picked up some time ago and would never have bought on my own. It’s amusing because gamers have been talking up the potential of post-apocalyptic builder games for ages and now we have a whole bunch of them coming out. Unfortunately this one is as bland as you can get, with mechanics similar to any other city building game and very few elements that are in-theme. I spent some time getting to know how it works but the whole time I was thinking how much better Frostpunk was in every way and so dropped it pretty quick.
Like so many others, I was enthralled by the ridiculously over-the-top trailer for this game. I’ve never played any of the Forza games before and sure it uses arcade physics but I can put up with that in exchange for an awesome presentation and hundreds of real world cars, right? Unfortunately no. The physics are so unrealistic that I quickly gave up on using a driving wheel and switched back to using a controller since that is clearly what the game was designed for. I also found the story missions to be asinine and nauseating. The racing events were enjoyable enough once I adapted to the simplified physics and avoided the fastest classes of cars but this was a game that never stopped irritating me.
This is the famous visual novel that outwardly resembles one of those popular dating simulators but is actually a horror game. That’s hardly a spoiler as you need to wade through some pretty serious content warning messages before you can start playing and the game is so well-known. People reference it so often that I thought I should just get around to completing it myself. It’s free anyway and very short.
I’m in no hurry to get through the games in my backlog as usually production values are so high now that they’re just as good whenever I get around to them. But this is one case where I might have left it in the oven for too long. Playing a 2017 game in 2024 is kind of pushing it but I think this never looked very good even back then. I added this to my list a while back because it has a lot of many passionate fans and it adds old school shoot ’em up elements to the action genre. But I ultimately found it to be an underwhelming and overrated game.
I loved Cultist Simulator so when I saw another developer taking the same mechanics and apply them to the life of an artist, I knew I just had to buy it. This is a much more modestly sized and consequently shorter game however. Like its inspiration, this is quite a handful at first as your fledgling artist must grapple with poverty and mental illness. But once you understand the basic loop, you only have to search for a victory condition and go straight towards it. It’s not actually very difficult but there’s much more randomness than in Cultist Simulator and once you achieve one, there’s not much difference in going for another victory type so I doubt this has much replay value. Still, I love its theme and I want to reward developers who make quirky games like this.
