Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £16.66
Where To Get It: Steam

One element of good horror is to take the normal… And bend it. Make it unwelcoming, emphasises what’s frightening about it, and emphasise its isolation. And there is little that isn’t already terrifying to the initiated than… A corporate office, or other appendage of a large company.

After all, a company often already has a friendly face, but behind that face, the lies are revealed for what they are. Ohhh, yes, we get diversity, but there’s no need to make emotional decisions. We understand that people get sick, often in arbitrary ways… But you have taken quite a few sick days working for us, and I’m afraid that we can’t employ someone who’s sick more than once every few months. That overtime? Oh, no, it’s not mandatory, you can… Ahaha, you want to work normal hours? That’s going to look bad on your performance review compared to the rest of us!

And that’s without me trying to think of examples. Oh yes, the Company can be a terrible place. The addition of some nameless “Witch”, corrupting the company from within for decades, causing insanity and mutation… Well, that just makes the horror all the more clear. Cue our protagonist, Brian.

Brian, despite being a low grade member of society (and judged, right from the beginning, to be scum because of this) is, somehow, hired by Sintracorp, the most prestigious company on the planet. Although one has to wonder how this has happened, considering that, in a blackly fitting symbolic twist, the company is a meatgrinder of psychosis, supernatural mutation, murder, and paranoia. And, honestly, a part of why this works so well with the way it plays is because, on some level, it echoes the worst excesses of a corporation gone wrong.

Here, the milling, endless crowd of Induction, forever stuck in the limbo between internship and actually getting paid. There, the Archives, a system so archaic it has taken on the aspect of a Resident Evil puzzle lock, and the Library is overseen by horrors long forgotten in the dark by its parent organisation. It wouldn’t surprise me to discover, later in the game, that the office cougar met early on is a literal man-eater, as opposed to a figurative one. And the employees are, relatively speaking, okay with this, because eh, it’s a living… Horrifying.

And, in the middle of this all, Brian, who has been hired as a Witch Hunter, despite having no qualifications for this, to fix a problem that, in all likelihood, Sintracorp created in the first place. This is one of the reasons it works so damn well. It helps that it’s a pretty accessible game, with its horror well paced against its lighter moments. Aaand then right back, as some of the light hearted things show their grue-filled core.

Besides a few hitches in early cutscenes, funnily enough, it works pretty well. The exaggerated art style of the characters works well to express both the light and dark sides of things, and adds that needed clarity for puzzle elements. To be both expressive and clear is a good look, especially when darkness is also a core element of the game. Puzzle wise, I’ve come across nothing cruel in the puzzles, with there always being something to help ameliorate it.

A good example: Early on, you’re left in the dark by a Mysterious Asshole Coworker, in the vicinity of some quite nasty, and ever exploding “Mines.” Thankfully, the mines light up when you’re near them, only arming when you’re closer, and exploding when you’re close, so the puzzle is, interestingly enough, made a little easier by the very things that will kill you if you screw up. You still feel cool for having survived, and you knew that the little helping hand was by no means a guarantee of safety.

Yuppie Psycho is, overall, a clever and interesting horror game, using its environment well both metaphorically and literally. Like other survival horror titles, it does have a single, limited save system (Requiring a photocopier, ink in that photocopier, and some Witch Paper to photocopy your souuuuuul… Oooowooooo!), but these seem reasonably placed, and I’d definitely say that this is one of the good horror titles of the year.

The Mad Welshman wants to stay the heck away from the Hell Offices. You can help do that via the support links. This has been your company memo.

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £7.19 (£9.51 for collector’s edition (Artbook, Soundtrack, Game))
Where To Get It: Steam

Hazardous Space, if I was given an elevator pitch, would be an okay game. Arriving at a station which has been infested by zombies, a group of three spacefarers has to make their way through the station, fighting and looting along the way.

And then it makes some odd decisions, and what would be an okay game turns into… An okay game with elements that bring it down. Like most of the conversation being about as far away from your centre of vision as humanly possible… In the top right, as opposed to everything interactable, which is… On the bottom half of the screen. So you’re wandering, picking up items, and, at points, text is auto-playing… And largely gets unnoticed. It’s not great writing, to be fair, and the auto-play, itself, is a bit of a problem, but… A definite low point.

Another odd choice is to split the game into “parts.” A more accurate term would be “Difficulty levels”, as each is its own run, but each has its own ending, goes on for longer, and extra equipment (with some extra enemies and story segments.) Since progress on blueprints, notes, etcetera, seems to be incremental, this… Does get easier and more do-able the further you get, but then we hit the final problem, and…

…The fact is, it’s kind of dull. Weapons have roughly the same impact feeling (Some), but not a whole lot can fix that the core loop. Try to go right (Up, down, or, in extreme cases, left if not possible), taking 5 energy loss per room, maybe have a fight, walk into a trap, find some stuff, rinse, repeat. Sometimes the items are useful, more often they’re vendor trash. Sometimes the enemies feel impactful, mostly… They’re obstacles, things that pad out time. And through it all, a single track plays, seemingly emphasising the grind.

“Feel”, while a nebulous term, is, in fact, very important, and what it feels like, when playing, is that none of this is terribly important. The characters do get somewhat serious later, but it’s just another day, another chance to shit-talk each other, and get to know each other more. The enemies start getting more serious, but the tension in fighting them… Just isn’t really there, and the narrative, while meant to be about a terrifying sci-fi event where an Umbrella style Cacklingly Evil Corporation has done bad things, just… Falls flat, due to a lack of tension.

Hazardous Space does do some interesting things, tying energy to exploration and levelling up (Run out of energy, run out of life-support, die, a-la Deep Sky Derelicts), and it does allow for some adjustable difficulty options that, genuinely, make the game a little more accessible (Such as turning the CLOUD OF DEATH, that means you can’t go back very far and have to reach the exit quicker, off), but overall, it feels grindy, and oddly arbitrary at times.

The Mad Welshman punched his monitor, and it burst into flames “Burning Does Not Work!”

Sure seemed like it did…

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Source: Review Copy
Price: £13.49
Where To Get It: Steam

When you’re a data daemon down on your luck, sometimes even the shittiest of opportunities is a godsend. So it is for Elijah Gale who, having blown his last paycheck on a data daemon race, gets thrown into the world of… Rhythm racing hacking?

Bloody techno-capitalism, making programs that make no sense to the uninitiated…

Joking aside, Sequence Storm is, as noted, a rhythm racer, in which you are juggling inputs that race toward you, hitting them (or holding them) at the right times so as not to damage your racer, and do jobs for corporations. Although the default keyboard layout is a relatively sensible one, controller is still recommended, as there are a total of 9 things you have to keep an eye on (four bars, four lines, and a jump… Not to mention having to steer when you boost), and hitting buttons and triggers feels somewhat more intuitive than “Shift up one key, quickly right one key, wait, two keys right, yada yada.” And, while the tutorial does a really good job of letting you know what’s what, it also lets you know that the gloves are going to come off relatively early, leading to hectic times. Helpful tip: The bars to jump seem to be at a slightly later point than either the lines or blocks.

So it’s kind of nice, then, that the early tunes are among the most relaxing synthwave beats I’ve listened to in a while. Makes a nice counterpoint to my swearing when I inevitably screw it up. A good soundtrack, with intuitive beat markers, is a hallmark of a good rhythm game, and Sequence Storm definitely provides on that front, whether that’s the lighter tracks, or the grim saws and bass. Aesthetically, it also works pretty well, whether that’s the comic style story segments (In which Elijah is trying to make his way in a world where AI have taken all the jobs), or the race segments, which have a low poly, visually clear charm.

Now… The thing is, the gloves come off early, and the game is not forgiving. Jump bars, in particular, don’t give much room for error, and I very quickly found that anything less than good, long streaks is going to fail me a run. Although it doesn’t look it at first, it gets twitchy, and it gets twitchy pretty quickly. Does that make it a bad game? No. Its inputs are responsive, and you can, over time, build up that muscle memory, even with the track twisting and turning in an attempt to throw you off, but it’s definitely going to throw off newcomers. Add in a challenge mode later, and… Well, it’s a tough game, and I don’t think it makes any bones about that.

Still, personally, I see myself coming back to it every now and again, despite finding it somewhat unforgiving, as the tunes are excellent, the visualisation is clear (and minimalist enough that there’s few distractions), and the story, equally minimalist though it is, is interesting. I would maybe like beginner mode to be a liiiiittle more beginner (Okay, a fair bit more beginner), but that is, honestly, me.

The Mad Welshman does not dance. Well, not often, anyway. But he does like a good tune.

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £15.49
Where To Get It: Steam
Other Reviews: Early Access

There is something deeply cathartic about smacking things with mechanical rocketfists. It doesn’t matter that it’s turn-based, and that this rocket-fist has been carefully considered after a couple of minutes. It doesn’t even matter that this is presented as the same comic frame for this move, repeated every time I choose it. The power of a good comic frame, really… It entertains even when you’ve seen it multiple times.

Similarly, that presentation helps make Deep Sky Derelicts as fun as it is. Which, when you think about it, is quite the achievement, considering it’s effectively a turn-based dungeon crawler where you want pretty numbers to go up. Consider: What I just said, compared to “You are a trio of convicts from diverse backgrounds, in a dystopian future, tasked by the Station Manager to find an ancient mothership by hopping from hulk to hulk, solving problems and being menaced by a variety of deadly aliens, mechanoid horrors, and environmental hazards.”

Makes all the difference. As does one of its little mechanical touches: Energy. Even though it’s rarely truly threatening, thanks to various means of getting it and conserving it that are open to characters, it’s never far from your thoughts, as it goes down with each move, each combat turn, each time you want to see just that little bit further… And if it goes to 0, you all die. Because it’s your suit energy.

As mentioned, though, the energy economy in the game is quite good, so it’s mostly inattention that gets you there. No, where the game gets you is when the enemies decide to take their gloves off. Because when they do, they do it hard. Summons. Armour. Miss chances, misfires, radiation… That last one, especially, is evil, because normally, your shields regenerate, and can easily be replenished, unlike your health, which stays gone, and can only be fixed up back at home base for prices best described as “Exorbitant” (Even in the midgame, when you’re getting a lot of stuff to sell, it can hurt.) Even with a mode where you can freely load from your last save, and death of a party member is reversible, around level 5, it starts getting tough.

Aesthetically, it comes together quite well. Comic book stylings (complete with frames that pop in for your moves) mesh well with a solid UI, marred only by some odd control issues (Sometimes, the mouse fails to register clicks until you move it, once you’ve left an event, for example) , and equally odd choices (Scanning should be default when exploring, but it’s a part of your PDA, and so… Don’t close your PDA out of inventory, save some time and click the “Scanner” button instead.) It has some nice dark tones going on with the music, and the events that are scattered around the various hulks are varied and interesting, such as the morally grey tale of the man who wants to be an AI, or the lighter events where a giant pest can be dealt with… Well, differently to your usual solutions of “Hack it, shoot it, hack it in the swordy type sense.”

As to problems, well, apart from the aforementioned oddities, it should be noted that the game’s fast music somewhat belies its slowish pacing (and loading.) It’s turn based, and, while the hulks do have enemies, events, and later environmental hazards and traps, early on, they feel empty, and later on, you sometimes find yourself wishing they were a little more empty, as the difficulty spikes around the aforementioned level 5 mark. Thankfully, one of my other niggles is somewhat dealt with by mousing over cards (When your hand gets big enough, it’s hard to see the cards), but never entirely goes away. Otherwise, it does something a little different with a formula that’s become all too familiar, and it’s a solidly presented game in an interesting world. Worth a look.

The Mad Welshman reminds you that exploring old hulks is dangerous. Old games, less so.

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £19.49
Where To Get It: Steam

2018 continues to be a year of firsts for me saying words I never thought I’d say. In the case of Distance, spiritual successor to Nitronic Rush, those words are “Wow, I never thought I’d see a good horror game in the Future Racing genre.”

And yet… Here we are. A Future Racing game involving a car that can fly, tumble, and make sharp turns without braking… Also being a game with horror stylings, unsettling the player with strange vistas of a world gone horribly wrong, shining hope transmuted to despair. Without a single human character, only a car, a road that inexplicably seems to want you dead, a teleporter, and a rogue machine… OR IS IT?

Okay, so it gets a little odd and ambiguous at times, and I’m not 100% sure I can give the game props for horror writing when I haven’t completely played through the second campaign, but moodwise, it definitely creates feelings I’d associate with horror: Uneasiness and dissociation, asking myself… What’s really going on?

It also helps that it’s a smooth game. While I would recommend controller over keyboard for Distance, if only because the control scheme is a little odd, the keyboard controls are, nonetheless, quite smooth, and I only ever felt a little put out during the quicker, more difficult segments by the aforementioned control scheme (Quickly hitting SPACE, A/D, and SHIFT in the right timings was a little bit frustrating. Only needed late in the main campaign, and I’m sure rearranging keybinds could help.)

Aesthetically, the game is on point pretty much throughout. Good signposting, clear visuals, and a dystopian retrofuturist aesthetic that works well whether it’s ruined or not, I never felt distracted. Musically, it switches well from pumping electronic beats to more ambient, horror styled soundscapes, and the sound effects and voice work well.

So… So far, I’ve been pretty glowing about Distance. And it is a good game. It helps that it also has a track editor and Workshop support, but one thing I will say is that I don’t really feel like the campaign added a whole lot to flying before it’s taken away from you for the majority of the rest. Part of that, I get, flying is hard, and inverting the vertical controls is a bit of a shock if you aren’t prepared for it (My exact words were, as I recall “Friends don’t let friends invert on you.”), but it was somewhat disappointing to see flying under-represented. But other changes from the original formula, such as a “down” thrust (that’s “down relative to your car”) are definitely welcomed, and I did, overall, find enjoyment in doing some of the silly things you can do with your jumping, thrusting, tumbling electronic car before the end of its main campaign.

And that, honestly, is about all I can say, because the game is simple and tight, elegantly tutorialises, and is fairly accessible to boot. It’s got some interesting horror elements that feel natural, and is well worth a look from the Future Racing crowd.

No, for reference, Twisted Metal doesn’t count, because it’s a Combat Racer. Small diff.

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