Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £29.99
Where To Get It: Steam

Spike Chunsoft, much like their serial antagonist of many faces, Zero, has left me in a bit of a pickle. Thankfully not one involving Running Man style exploding collars, or deathtraps, or locked rooms, but one involving that most dangerous of minefields for a reviewer. SPOILERS.

…Oh, it might be, it might not be. Every screenshot potentially is for me. 😛

Beyond what I just said, and the fact that I think the game is quite interesting and cool (And that it’s good news that the other two games, 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and Virtue’s Last Reward), you won’t find any. Or maybe you will. It can, in the middle of play, feel as confusing as whether this game is a sequel, a midquel, a threequel, or all of the above… Although I’m moderately sure “None of the above” is not a valid answer, leading only to the Bad End of dubious canon. I’m only going to tell you what you need to know to make a decision.

First up, it’s a voiced, 3D visual novel with puzzles that remind one of earlier games like The 7^th Guest and Myst, where skipping dialogue for the first time through is not recommended, and where philosophy, Pop Quantum Physics, and death all reign. There are six billion lives at stake, and this is not a spoiler because you’re told that in the first minute or so of the bloody game. Click on things, move things, escape from rooms, and make choices that will have a momentous effect on the game’s world… Or not. If the Pop Quantum Physics mention didn’t clue you in, not everything is as it appears at first.

And that’s actually the second important thing to note that isn’t a spoiler. The game is, for the most part, non linear. Even in the middle of a puzzle, you can, for the most part, sod off to a different, unlocked part of the story, and the game relies on this for multiple reasons. At first, you will get annoyed at unlocking Bad Ends (Some messier than others), but as the game progresses… As more of the timeline unlocks… Those “Grr”s will soon turn to “Ohhhhhh”s and “Wait, WHA-”s. More of the former than the latter, which is a credit to the writing team.

…For example, even this beginning segment says things. 🙁

Similarly, the voice acting team and musicians deserve kudos, because the English dub of this game is not bad at all. The VA in general is well delivered, the music is mostly fitting to its atmosphere and well crafted (The exceptions not actually being the musical and VA teams’ fault, as there is, unfortunately, a currently unpatched bug that sometimes cuts the music out before it’s meant to end, and if you don’t turn the music and SFX down a little, it sometimes overrides the voice acting), and, while the SFX aren’t always that great (About on par, I would say, with the aforementioned FMV adventure games of days gone by, so still alright), the visuals and area design managed to keep my interest for 8 straight hours in a row, helped along by an intriguing story with twists and turns aplenty.

Of course, no game is perfect. There are bugs, but thankfully not many. Some of the dialogue, due to the non-linear nature of the game, will feel repetitive even with the best VA and writing (And, often, the VA and writing dip into “Only fair to good”, with the occasional pun that even makes me groan. I’m not kitten…) Finally, it’s not greatly intuitive how to unlock certain scenes (Suffice to say, the triggers are sometimes spread across more than one scene), and that can lead to some frustration around the midgame.

Pictured: Not The Midgame, But Somewhat Eye-Murdering.

But, as far as adventures go, this one is a corker. There is an internal logic, and it can be discerned, but exploration is a must, both through space and time. So long as you understand that, I think adventure fans and VN fans alike may well enjoy Zero Time Dilemma, and, while I wouldn’t call it a great introduction to either genre, if you feel like a challenge, this is well priced.

The Mad Welshman is now going to tell your future. You are going to scroll down from these words… Or up from the previous article in the list, and be injected with Rad-Spoiler-7. Fortunately, Rad-Spoiler-7, while 100% fatal otherwise, is the only known antidote to Irritato-BadEnd , which is 75% fatal.

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £10.99
Where To Get It: Steam
Other Reviews: Release

Siralim 2 is, if you’ll permit me to be blunt, a Skinner Box. But it is a moderately entertaining Skinner Box in its present state, and while not much of it is original, it’s pretty competently put together, and takes its ideas from sources that have pretty much already refined the concepts it’s using.

I’ve unlocked a few things. Y’know, simple things: A Chef, few tens of citizens, a pub, breeding ground, alchemy lab…
…Simple things.

So I’m going to get this out of the way right now: If you do not like grind, stop reading. It’s a grindy game, nearly everything about it is grind, and the words “Skinner Box” should have clued you into this from the word go. Do badly, too quickly, no cookie for you. Do well, repeat your tasks in the manner intended, get various kinds of game-related cookie.

From Pokemon and the SMT games comes breeding and evolution. From other JRPGs comes magic, magic items, not-so-magic-items, and turn based combat in a first person perspective. From games like Dark Cloud comes building up your home base, so as to better equip, customise, and breed your monsters (Which, naturally, involves grind.), and, also from some other JRPGs comes Deity relations. Which involves grind.

This is not to say there isn’t game behind all this. There’s a story about an evil demigod that wants to go full deity, and must take McGuffins to do so… So obviously, our job is to get them first, and become a God(dess) first to beat the stuffing out of evil thing. The more deities on your side, the more monsters you own, the better equipped you are once you’ve gotten all the orbs, the better your chances will be. There’s a combat system involving physical attacks, magic, and special abilities such as casting an area effect Cold spell 1 in 5 times when you’re hit at no cost. You can revisit earlier levels if the current ones are too tough for your current party, and, since the levels are essentially small, procedurally generated theme arenas, with a deity somewhere, a quest for that deity (Usually involving getting X things or killing X things), an overall quest, and boss fights. There’s even the thing that the Pokemon games, and other linear progression RPGs would do, where there is the plot appearance of urgency, but in actual fact… Yeah, go hog wild, fill out your breeding library, get friendly with all the gods… It just takes longer if you don’t unlock the higher levels to level your beasties more efficiently.

Imagine a Carrion Worm smacking an Ebony Ent. Forever.

And this is precisely the problem with critically engaging with Siralim 2. It’s competent. It does its job okay, and, beyond a common problem that the game has also inherited (Monsters at higher levels tend to just be palette-swaps with different powers), it’s actually somewhat difficult to judge how well or badly it’s balanced, because if something is too difficult? Use an earlier level to grind up your captured monsters (Told you it was a bit like Pokemon and the SMT games!), and you can nearly always guarantee your creatures will be able to beat a boss sooner or later. I highly suspect I’m overlevelled for the next three or so boss fights, and only my desire to find breeding combos and new monsters to gawp at is stopping me from going to town. Once you’ve seen all the themes the game has to offer, it doesn’t seem to come up with new surprises so often, but, again… Too busy grinding up new monsters. And their breeding combos, because the monsters vanish once they’ve bred, probably to limit you just banging different rocks together until something happens.

So if you like that sort of experience, where, on the one hand, the gameplay can feel a little flat if you’re too efficient, and there’s grinding for new things out the wazoo, then good. If not, it’s possibly not for you.

Sometimes, you get extra bosses. I like to call them “Loot/XP Pinatas”

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I just found out I can make a new kind of Angel, and it looks like it might have some cool powers later down the line.

We haven’t seen The Mad Welshman for a week. Could somebody knock on his door?

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £9.99 (£3.99 for the Soundtrack, which definitely ain’t bad)
Where To Get It: Steam 

When I got the email that the developers of UnEpic were making a new game, I was both excited and nervous. Excited, because UnEpic did interesting things. Nervous, because it was also referential as hell, dumb in places, and stupidly hard and grindy in others.

This, er… Makes slightly more sense as a joke once you’ve played UnEpic and seen the bits before this… :/

For good or for ill… Little has changed. The references are somewhat less forced, the story veers wildly between pulpy silliness, philosophical discussion, and blatant referential humour, and the grind?

Oh yes. The grind remains. And it remains my problem with Ghost 1.0, because, to me? It’s just not fun to repeat alarm lockdowns for Energon-Cubes-As-Currency, so I can get better weapons that, really, I should be earning more organically. And this is a damn shame, because, for all the bitching, there has been improvement over the UnEpic formula, with fluid movement, a better overall story (Involving the enslavement of androids by an evil corporation… Hey, I said better, not amazing), and some cool stuff hidden in there… But, even past the halfway point, I’m not sure it feels worth it to continue. Boss with nigh unavoidable paralyzing shockwave, making it a damage race? Check. Instant death laser segments that, while using the cool idea of controlling robots with cyber-psychic powers, uses it for tedious, “Do it right or do it again” segments involving scientist robots with no offensive abilities (Read: Forced puzzle-stealth segments.) Check.

Not cool, Fran, I totally made my Dexterity Check!

There’s fun in there. Really, there is. The second boss, for example, is fun. The first boss, once you figure it out, is fun. The interplay between Ghost, Boogan, and Jacker (The latter two technically making a return from UnEpic) is fun. But it’s buried beneath a game that feels like it’s run by an adversarial GM who still thinks OD&D is the best thing since sliced bread. And this is such a core problem, and obviously deliberate, that I unfortunately can’t get past it.

So, when it comes to the question of “Is Ghost 1.0 worth playing?” , two questions have to be asked. The first is whether you like metroidvanias. A simple enough question, but the next is harder: Do you find grind and “death makes things harder on you” fun? Because, regardless of the good voice acting, the fair animation, the interesting toys (Once you’ve earned them), and the story that definitely has interesting elements, if the answer to that second question is “No, not really”, or some variation thereof, I really can’t recommend Ghost 1.0 to you.

The first boss, about to get a schooling from an awesome cyber-psychic merc lady. Who still died five times while getting the cash for the gun she’s using… >:|

The Mad Welshman is hacking Ghost 1.0 to provide a “Less Grindy” mode, but he’s hit Alarm Level 9, and the respawns are getting a bit tiresome. 

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Source: Kickstarter backer.
Price: £15.99 (£3.99 for Ray expansion)
Where To Get It: Lots of places.

Hoo boy. Having had a troubled release (Which I sort of missed), I had some trepidation going into Mighty No. 9. And I was right to do so. This is one review where I’m not swimming against the tide, because, as you may have gathered from the almost unanimous opinion, Mighty No. 9 is aggressively mediocre, and a lack of effort shines blearily through every muddy moment.

It is the year 20ZZ. Facial expressions are forever frozen. Brains, brains, brains.

So much so, that I can’t really think of anything nice to say. If I was extremely charitable, I’d say it looks kind of nice… Except that facial animations, even “Mouth opens and closes”, was apparently too much effort, and, much like some games I’ve seen over the years, the game’s look has become actively worse since the early days… Somehow. It mystified me with Breach and its UI. It mystified me with Colonial Marines. It mystifies me moreso with Mighty No. 9 because… For fuck’s sake, it is a Megaman variant. You run. You jump. You shoot. You dash. How can you screw that up?

By not pacing well. By making your power somewhat dependent on a combo system that… Seems only to be based on a “No hit” rule, because the enemies are too widely spaced for anything else. The voice acting may not be quite as awful as some folks have suggested, but it’s actively made worse by the aforementioned lack of facial animations… And dashing into bosses to hurt them? Is an idea that works erratically, depending on which boss you fight. Said combo system is unclear, to boot. Why did I get that piercing shot boost for five seconds again?

It’s depressing. Even taken on its own, it’s a slow game, with lacklustre animation, level design, and sound design, and I can almost feel a collective shrug-and-meh from IntiCreates… Through their game. And it would be less depressing if it weren’t for the fact that all the interesting ideas seem to have been dropped, in favour of…

I feel you, Round Digger.

…Well, “Better than nothing” has almost become a meme (Along with some cringeworthy marketing later in the process), and it would sum up Mighty No. 9 well, except for a tabletop truism that applies equally well to computer games.

Better no game than a bad one. Don’t bother, if you hadn’t already.

The Mad Welshman sighed. He didn’t even feel strongly enough to come up with something amusing to do after the review. Even kicking puppies felt pointless.

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £14.99 (£18.99 with More To Explore, £5.29 for More To Explore if you have the base game already)
Where To Get It: Steam

I missed Renowned Explorers the first time round, somewhat irritating considering I liked their previous offering, Reus, enough to put in 41 hours and 71% of the achievements before annoyance set in. Thankfully, with the DLC, I get to review not only this charming explore-em-up, but the DLC, adding two expeditions, some extra mechanics, and bonus treasure effects and events in the form of the Campfire Tales. So, before we begin, a quick summary of what Renowned Explorers is, for those who haven’t played.

My first main team. I have all of them as Captains now, but still have some fondness for playing this lil’ group. I mean, how could I not?

Renowned Explorers is an adventure strategy hybrid, where you pick three explorers, a Captain and two Crew, from a pool of 16 choices (Although only 4 of them are available as Captains from the beginning.) Once chosen, their skills and stats work along one of three complementary paths: Aggression (Beating the tar out of things), Deceit (Making people feel bad, lying, cheating, etc), and Friendship (Being the Good Example to all tiny Explorers and Natives everywhere.) None of these paths are, strictly speaking, closed off to you, and good strategy involves mixing the abilities of all three to maximum effect (Only Friendship skills, for example, seem to heal, while Aggression Skills can lay the hurt on a number of foes), but it’s important to know your strengths, because by playing to them, you’re going to do so much better in beating your rival Explorer groups to the top spot, unearthing ancient artefacts, and discovering awesome things, sometimes involving sheep drugs.

No, I’m not entirely joking with that last sentence.

…sometimes, the implications of the unique game overs makes me want to go have a lie down [fans self]

…And also kick righteous buttock, such as out fighting Tommy, the not-bright, but tough member of the Rivaleux, out charm Cassandra Shafiq, the temptress of the same team, deal with a possession by the evil Erzbet Bathory (She of the controversial Virgin Bloodbath Makeover Treatment), and rob tombs all over the world, from Ireland to the Andes…

FOR SCIENCE, HELL YEAH!

…So if you like feeling like a combination of Carmen Sandiego, Indiana Jones, and Lara Croft, don’t mind turn based combat, and love a good procedurally generated exploration story game, then Renowned Explorers just got more awesome, and while the DLC isn’t necessary to its enjoyment, it most certainly helps, and is worth a look!

The Mad Welshman is currently on indefinite vacation with Erzbet Bathory.

Let’s end it on a high note. FRIENDSHIP!

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