Source: Early Access Backer
Price: £14.99, £18.99 with soundtrack
Where To Get It: Steam, Humble Store, GoodOldGames

Darkest Dungeon is a game I like… But I can’t really recommend. It’s kind of an odd position to be in, really. But then, Darkest Dungeon is pretty much all about oddness, so I guess it’s kind of fitting.

This… Is the essence of “IKR?” in Darkest Dungeon.

For those who haven’t seen me talk about Darkest Dungeon before, it’s a gothic Lovecraftian strategy RPG with procedurally generated elements, where you, the inheritor of the [Insert Doomed Family Lineage Here] mansion, must cleanse the dark taint of your now corrupted home with the aid of adventurers who are going to become diseased, raving, and dead in their droves as a result of your relative’s delving into Things Wot Man Was Not Meant To Know. But that’s fine, they’re assholes anyway. Good example, each game starts with Reynauld the Crusader, who is a God-Fearing Kleptomaniac, and Dismas the Highwayman, no longer allowed to gamble in any township he visits because he’s a widely known cheat. There’s some customisation allowed from the get-go, and random chance begins affecting you from the first dungeon, making no two playthroughs exactly the same (I’m playing from the beginning again right now, and, after finishing the tutorial, Reynauld got a -5% to his ranged skills, a much better result than last time, where he became a God-Fearing Kleptomaniac who wouldn’t pray… Making it impossible for me to let him regain sanity until I unlocked the Sanitarium, several forays later.) To make it extra amusing, there is an achievement for keeping these first two the whole way through.

Kleptomania commencing in 3…2…1…

And this is where “I like it” and “I can’t really recommend it” start to conflict. Even in the early stages, Darkest Dungeon was not the friendliest of games, and as time has gone by, it’s only gotten more complex, more difficult… Which is awkward, because it started somewhat challenging, and has proceeded to “Even after you understand the game, you’ve still got a chance of losing enough folks and quests to set you well behind the game’s difficulty progression, leading to a slow, graceless fall into the realisation you have to restart.” But, equally, I can’t deny it’s one hell of a ride down, with the game oozing atmosphere from pretty much every pore. The funereal town music, the heavy inks of the visuals, leading to a grim, Mignola-esque feel to the visuals that… Well, is really praiseworthy, and the narrator… Ahhh, Wayne June as the narrator deserves great things, for making the defining character trait of “Dull Hopelessness” both an entertaining and emotionally affecting experience. You can feel the weight throughout the game, and so the narrative mixes well with the story (Which, hey, is about trying to complete a hopeless, madness inducing task!)

Oh… Yeah, arachnophobes might not want this game. Just sayin’ …

Unfortunately, that weight, that sense of grim restraint, also affects the game in its rules. Some characters do well in the light, some in the dark. Most classes do particularly well in only one or two positions out of the four adventurers who enter a dungeon, and being surprised can ruin pretty much any party’s perfomance. Some items in the dungeon can be neutralised or improved by using inventory items, and they’re often specific to the dungeon type (So locked chests, for example, require keys, which is obvious… But Iron Maidens can give treasure instead of tetanus with the use of medicinal herbs). Afflictions and Diseases change the character, and stress can, if you’re not careful, quite literally kill your characters… Which can definitely be gained more easily than lost. All the while, money is a problem, and the over cautious player must, paradoxically, take greater and greater risks to stay afloat, the larger the dungeons get. Meanwhile, recovery not only depends on those ever dwindling funds, but on whether the Caretaker, that sad, broken soul, isn’t currently trying to drown his woes in the particular brand of solace you specifically needed for one of your better adventurers. This, and much, much more, has to be remembered and kept in mind often if you really want to complete The Darkest Dungeon… Hence why I can’t really recommend it.

I will, however, say that sometimes, its worth it, to see a grand horror surprised by your ultimately futile resistance.

But hey, even though I can’t recommend folks buying and playing it because, in a very real sense, the game resists it with the sheer amount of things to keep track of that can screw you over with a moments’ inattention (Or lack of awareness), I’d still say to watch a few playthroughs and ask around, because the atmosphere, at the least, deserves to be experienced. Even if the game wants you to suffer when playing it.

The Mad Welshman is aptly named. He has seen things… Things behind the cackling facade we call reality. Entire worlds, between one quad and the next. And behind it all, the RNJesus, bubbling and fluting madly away, uncaring of humanity…

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Source: Cash, ‘cos, like, I couldn’t not support the developers of this one!
Price: Iunno, it says £14.99 for the game, and, like, £18.99 for the game and the soundtrack and stuff?
Where To Get It: Well, Steam  has it, you should, like, totally check it out… If it’s your thing, y’know!

Okay, so, listen up. This is a game about, like, teens. Also spooky scary ghosts, but mostly teens. Y’know, with the awkwardness, and the sentences that are either, like, way contracted, or run on for ages and ages and ages… You, like, remember being one of those, right? Or maybe you are one? Y’know, when you’d say like, and y’know, and gaaaahd? Or be totally quiet? Oh, yeah, sometimes you’d forget words you totally use all the time, like… Well, totally!

See? Like, teen stuff, like Truth or Slaps, which is kinda like Truth or Dare, but with less butthole licking, like he said!

I’d like to tell you this is a game about happy endings. But that’s literally up to you. Like, literally. Your choices actually lead to things, because there’s only a small amount of things it can lead up to. And most of it has nothing to do with whether you, like, save the world, or whatever. Because it’s entirely possible you can do that. Although it’s also totally possible that none of it actually happened, or all of it happened, and, like, keeps happening, because timey wimey stuff is involved. Also it hella reminds me of The Fog… Oh, wait, you might not have seen the fog, it involved radios too, and creepy voices, and a shipwreck of some sort… Unless it’s the new one, in which case it was a bit weirder, and not as cool. But either way, things happen, and you kinda have to keep everything together when… Well, things really… Really aren’t together, do you get that?

Anyway, the point is that there are drama bombs, and if you’re not ready for those, or the fact that, y’know, it starts slow? Maybe this isn’t the game for you. Because these teens, they’re like… Their concerns are what you might call “Boring teen drama”, or you could, like, remember when all of that stuff was super important, I mean, universe endingly important. That’s kinda what I did, and I spent the whole game in various states of “Oh… My… GAAAAAHD!” or “OH NOES!”

This is, like, most of the teens, something like halfway through the night, I guess? I mean, look at how they’re tryin’ to be brave, and totally sucking at it!

Because the game definitely does a lot to give you a bad case of the Oh Noes. It, like, threatens your friends, or… Well, they’re not your friends, but they kinda are, because you’re a girl called Alex, even if, y’know, you’re not a girl, or a Person of Colour, which Alex also kinda is? Either way, it was really cool to see these teens being treated as… Well, people, not just scream queens or puppy princes or whatever. They make dumb choices, like eating space cakes at bad times, or bring out their drama, and half the drama comes from… Well, maybe they’re not all there in ways that aren’t related to those cookies that make you hungrier the more you eat them, y’get what I’m saying?

The game looks kinda cool, although it’s hard to see things on a big monitor, and the characters look kinda small, but that’s okay, because the island is really cool too, and the music that plays, all the sounds and voices and weird effects are good too, as is, like, how easy it is to work out how to use the radio to, y’know, do spooky things (because there are spooky radios), because when you get on the right frequency for, like, things to happen, something obvious usually comes with it, like a light, or triangles, or whatever.

I’ve only done one run through of the game so far (The game pulls a really, really mean trick to show multiple playthroughs. Like, what the hell, Night School, I was all “NUUUUUUUU!” when you pulled that!), and it took me, like, four whole hours to get through it once, but I liked it, and I’m gonna try and see what happens if I do things differently, because there’s, like, hidden achievements for drama choicey stuff and not-so-hidden achievements for finding letters and backstory and stuff, which would be cool, because your first time through, you’ll kinda be all “Whuuuuuhhhhhh?” for at least the first half, maybe more if, like, you don’t get it?

What Jonas is saying is, like, my reaction through, like, the ENTIRE game. With, y’know, a lot of “Oh cool!” too…

Article Translation/Summary: If you like adventure games along the lines of The Cave or the newer Telltale stuff, with well written teenagers being well written (And voice acted) teenagers in a spooky situation that, on your first run through at least, is going to leave you with lots of questions, then this is definitely a good purchase, and well worth checking out. Just be aware that the slow start is just a build up, and stick with it, you might find it worth it. Also please be aware that there is death and teenagers (rightly or wrongly) blaming each other for some of the shit they did, space cakes (That’s “hash” browns, emphasis on hash, to many others), and it is a horror game. Thanks for reading through what I felt was a fitting style of reviewing for the game!

The Mad Welshman is totes a cool dude who, like, isn’t a freak or a… Wait, are we even allowed to say freak anymo-ooooh, these cakes taste so good….

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £10.99
Where To Get It: Screwfly Store , Steam

The Fog hates you. Nobody really knows what happened. Nobody really knows what caused it. After all, The Fog just… Happened. But there is hope. A slim hope, in the form of a train. It may be… Just may be… That The Fog can be escaped, and the nightmares can end. And Screwfly Studios are quite fine with helping you achieve that.

The map is one of three tools you’ll be looking at a fair bit. This is how it looks with Maxed Radio. :V

A little backgrounder before we begin: Screwfly have experience with strategic, procedurally generated survival horror games, with their first game being Zafehouse Diaries (Zombies!), and their second being Deadnaut (Eldritch Horrors From Outside Space-Time, Bug Hunts, Super-Soldiers Gone Wrong, among others.) Their games generally involve interpersonal relations, unorthodox control schemes that are nonetheless quite atmospheric, and hidden mechanics. Fear Equation is possibly the most atmospheric yet. Fortunately, I remain a filthy lucker. Let’s go through my first game to show both this, and why the game is worth checking out.

It began with a train. A steam train, from the looks of things, a junker… But thankfully, a sturdy junker with an emergency flare. This is always the first step: Summon some survivors with the beacon. It’ll generally be between 2 and 5, and the first group, at least, is generally cohesive. From there, the ride truly begins. A hellride through an unreal fog that makes nightmares real, with no guarantee of survival. I get three this time.

I look at the map… There’s a few buildings nearby, and so long as we go slow, we won’t run out of fuel doing so. I can plan where to go at any point in the day, but when we reach it determines whether we’ll have to stay the night. So I decide to hit up a small village along the way, with a Pub, a Supermarket, and a School in easy reach. My radio defaults to “Looking for Signs of Survivors” (HELP), but I switch it to Supplies. Believe me, survivors aren’t too tough to come across. Fuel, on the other hand, is going to be a constant worry.

Always keep an eye on the dreams of each carriage. Preparedness means less visits from… THE SALESMAN.

Having decided my destination, I set up The Lottery. This train isn’t a democracy. I, The Driver, secretly control what’s meant to be random chance. I have to, because if people are sent into the Fog too often, or don’t get what they want, or just decide they think they can run the train better, they’re going to try and rebel. And I want them to survive… Even if they’re idiots. Right now, though, there’s no point. Starting survivors, with whatever skills they have, are going to have to make do until we find more.

With the lottery over, I can order them to do several things. They can move supplies between carriages, move people between carriages, and either build defenses against the coming nightmares, indicated by their dream diaries, or upgrade the train. The first night, I opt to improve my Radio. The bigger my coverage, the more of the map I can get a handle on ahead of time. I could have improved fuel, carriage strength, the amount of power my train generates, or even medical facilities… But I go for radio.

It takes two days to get to the village, and I’m attacked on the second night. This time, it’s spiders. Folks are injured. Not a good start. But the fog is, thankfully, still weak, and I try to explore. The school has survivors, and… The first group doesn’t want any of them. All four go to different carriages. Carriages with neither food nor defenses. Sadly, I can neither move them or give them food until the morning (One of the few flaws with the game), but, being both brave and foolhardy, I explore the other two buildings, and food is obtained for them. I don’t lose anybody, although I come damn close.

They’re going to die. At least one of them died that very second. And all because I was too gutsy.

Much like Deadnaut, I don’t have high tech equipment. Some LEDs, a barometer (Which shows how dangerous the Fog is getting), and a greenscreen CRT are my window to the survivors, and, like Deadnaut, it’s surprisingly tense to watch those little radar blips move around a building plan, with the radio occasionally telling me things (Mostly plans of sedition and cries to shut up about said plans.) I will never know what they face, and, in a sense, I’m glad. As it is, the Nightmares make me cower in the head carriage… I don’t want to know.

By the time I’m halfway across the map, I have lost some survivors, but gained quite a few more. Mostly, when I lost them, it was because I ran out of fuel. Running out of fuel is Bad. Not only are you defenseless, you have to send your survivors out to gain fuel in the middle of nowhere, and they are much more likely to die. I’ve had attempted rebellions, things are tense… And there are flags on the map. I find out what the flags mean in short order…

…They’re the military. And, for some reason, they don’t want me to leave. They bombard the train. Luckily, nobody is injured… But there are more flags on my planned route.

There’s more, of course, but this is the game. You grab what survivors you can, make compromises and enact dirty tricks to manipulate the survivors… Sometimes, you deliberately send people to get killed to quell rebellion. The Driver is an Old Testament God. Maybe this ark will save humankind… But you can guarantee that sacrifices will be made.

Nightmares… Are real. I only hope we propitiated the dead enough.

If you like strategy games with unorthodox UI, atmosphere out the wazoo, and the feeling of commanding lives from a distance, maybe Fear Equation is for you. It’s definitely not for everybody, but it’s worth at least a look in. There are lots of things I haven’t mentioned, like the variety of fears (from Soldiers, to Chinese Ghosts, to the SALESMAN and The Engineers, each with their own atmospheric touches), special crew (Who fully upgrade a section of your train as thanks for rescue), and other fun stuff.

The Mad Welshman sighed as he looked at the lottery card. Taking his eraser, he rubbed out the name of the new folks, and added in the troublemakers. There were four buildings here, a rare opportunity. Either they’d prove themselves, or they would die after bringing in some useful supplies. So long as The Train survived…

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £3.99
Where To Get It: Gamersgate

Technically, this should be a Going Back, as Cursed Mountain originally released 6 years ago, on the Wii, but the PC Port has finally arrived, courtesy of its main publisher/developer, Deep Silver, only this past month. Was it worth the wait for mountain climbing, Buddhist hungry ghost shenanigans on PC? Well, only kind of.

But what could *do* such a thing? SUSPENSE!

You see, apart from the control scheme, and adjustable resolution, it’s a straight port. So saves are strictly checkpoint only, the graphics are much as they were on the Wii (Running at around 30 frames a second, it doesn’t look bad, per se, so much as slightly dated), and there are a couple of quirks that I find a little amusing, and occasionally frustrating. For example, you always attack in the camera’s direction, so sometimes, to break a pot nearby, you have to get out of the fixed camera zones the game has.

Of course, part of the problem is that the game was designed with the Wii in mind, so there are things that you’re going to be missing out on (And I honestly couldn’t work out how to get a Wiimote connected to a PC to see if that functionality is still there.) For example, the Wiimote acts as a walkie talkie at one point, and that segment… Slightly loses out. Other features, however, become much easier. Combat, especially.

Y’see, combat in Cursed Mountain used to have some fairly janky Wiimote detection, leading to problems, as putting ghosts to rests, whereas, in the PC version, things definitely appear to be friendlier. Now, instead of having to follow lines closely, or flick your Wiimote, it’s “Mouse over these in roughly the right order, and flick your mouse in directions while doing stuff.” Much easier to deal with ghosts now. Speaking of ghosts, let’s talk story.

It can’t be understated that the game maintains an oppressive feel quite well.

The game is set in the 80s, in the vicinity of Chomo Lonzo (Bird Spirit, so named for its appearance), and you are Eric Simmonds, a scottish mountaineer searching for his brother… Who, as it turns out, has not been very respectful of local tradition, with the disastrous result of a plague of ghosts from Bardo. Buddhism is one of the main themes here, and I’m honestly not qualified to say whether it’s a respectful treatment or not (Although many folks seem to think it is), but I am qualified to talk about the pacing, how it makes you feel, and the like…

…It’s not for everybody. Survival horror generally isn’t, but the pacing in this one is slow and deliberate, although when it starts ramping up, it doesn’t screw around. Personally, though, I like it. Eric is a skeptic, and the game sort of reflects this. I say ‘sort of’, because “It’s a hallucination” is something Eric says all the way through, and you get the feeling that, as much as you’re playing along to see where things go, so is Eric… And he seems to cling to the idea of a hallucination more as a defense mechanism than any actual belief. Still, it leads to some interesting moments, like where meeting Edward Bennett doesn’t… Seem like a real thing that happened, thanks to the design of the static cutscenes. And yes, there are static cutscenes, but they’re really not that bad.

AND SUDDENLY DEATH AND BLOOD

What I did find bad, however, was that early areas made it very hard to see some things. “They didn’t even have time to bury the bodies.” Er, what bo- Ohhhhhh, THAT body! But, otherwise, the design is pretty consistent, the game is somewhat easier as a result of the port, it has an interesting premise, and the voice acting is… Alright! There’s definitely a sense of oppression in the game, and I kinda like the religious/spiritual elements (Although, as noted, keep in mind I am not qualified to say whether it’s appropriating rather than being respectful.)

But, also as I said, it’s definitely not for everybody. Some will be put off by the slow pace. Others will be put off by what is effectively QTEs for unlocking secret doors, boss fights, and making fights go a lil’ quicker. Others still will be put off by the lack of graphical options. The price of £4, as such, doesn’t really feel like a cheat to me, because it does interesting things, in potentially interesting directions, and the pacing doesn’t put me off. But, as mentioned… Your mileage will vary on this one.

The Mad Welshman sighed as his ice pick cast another soul back into the cycle. So much pain and suffering, and for what? A man’s pride? 

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Screwfly hate you. They love you, but at the same time, they hate you (Well, not really… But it seems that way when you play sometimes. ;D ). They want you a gibbering wreck on the floor, babbling about the dark between the stars, or, in the case of their first game, Zafehouse Diaries, about how the dead won’t stop moaning and scrabbling at the walls outside. Screwfly make Legit Hard Games. And I want to celebrate this, by talking about Deadnaut, and how the game supports the mood it wants to invoke.

You can create your own crew, but monitoring and equipping them from then on is up to skill *and* luck.

Deadnaut is not a game I’m good at, and I don’t think I’m meant to be good at it. The game, in a sense, resists it. But this is one of the rare cases where I find myself more immersed in the experience because of obtuseness, not less. Why?

Because in Deadnaut, I’m a Lieutennant Gorman, watching my own maladjusted crew of misfits and criminals attempt to board supposedly long dead alien ships that, you guessed it, aren’t long dead after all. Not for me the experience of directly seeing what’s happening through amazing Commander Vision. Oh no. That would imply we’re valued, and have the technology. No, we, the characters (And, by extension, the player’s unnamed and invisible character) are the dregs, the people Humanity would rather throw in a meat grinder. So we have three screens we can switch between. And, bad commander that I am, I’d rather get fucked than micro manage anything.

Pictured: Me suffering because I was weapons-free in a heavily damaged hulk.

The three “screens” are pretty simple in theory: The left shows the team, their equipment, their stats, their quirks and flaws, and their health, mental and physical. Being a Gorman, I don’t really look at that too much in missions, and panic when the suit-breach alarms are going off. The right shows information we’ve gathered, giving me clues as to the threats we’re experiencing, the ship and crew logs we’re salvaging, and the security/power status of the ship we’re entering. I only look at this between missions, even though it could give me early warning that no, our guns won’t work in this situation.

The middle screen, for me, is where it’s at. The buttons sometimes bewilder me, but I know enough to push NET to see the Watchers, automated, roaming antivirus programs gone wrong, as they go about their not-so-merry business of Keeping Things As They Were (to my detriment); LOC , which lets me see how damaged an area is, and occasionally, when the situation demands it, PWR, which lets me see if a turret I’ve noticed is powered up or not. I know enough, being a greedy corporate scumbag, to turn the signal booster dial to SIGnal, and leave it there, even if it dooms my crew because I can’t see what’s happening (VISual) and can’t give them orders (AUDio). The more signal I have, the more KnowledgeBux we get from looting these rotting hulks, and the better I can equip my poor, doomed squad for the future.

Hell, sometimes, I’m nice enough to resurrect one, if I can afford to do so. So, as you might have guessed from this description, there’s a lot to take in, and not a lot of it is in easy reach, having to switch between screens to see things, having to, god forbid, split the group so we can keep the Watchers from resetting that turret that almost chewed the squad up when they opened the door, or use the special abilities of the Shield and Sensor suits to scan ahead, plan, and protect team-mates from the dangerous conditions created by nigh-destroyed rooms (Because our vacuum suits are cheap, and don’t protect against space worth a damn.) This is a game where, if you’re good, you can micro, switching between screens to gauge threats in a safe moment, pair up team-mates efficiently (This one hates this one, don’t keep them close. This one hates open spaces, try and keep them in small rooms. This one doesn’t like open spaces, use them as a rearguard)

This screen may not make much sense… Until you realise I’m being screwed around with by ancient space-ghosts.

But this game, in a sense, doesn’t want you to do that. Watchers and Signal Dampers can mess up your visuals (Leaving you nothing but static) and audio (Leaving you unable to even warn your team of nearby threats, or tell them to get the fuck out of there right now before it collapses). Your guns are useful, but also damage the ship, so sometimes, you will have to order your squad not to use their weapons… And it won’t always help, either, because sometimes the enemy has guns. And sonic shockwaves. And plasma bursts. Melee weapons exist, but I’ve never seen them used very well. And the game’s controls don’t help either, there are very few hotkeys, so nearly everything is “Click shield person, right click this person we want to shield” or the like.

Despite that, I love the game. Why? Because, with its flaws, it makes me feel like a Gorman, and, on a good day, like a Corporal Hicks. The game, through its flaws and hateful moments, creates exactly the feel it’s aiming for: That moment where everything is going wrong, and you have to act and oh god someone’s dead what the hell do I oh god another beep beep beep BEEEEEEEEEEEEE-

I have precisely one criticism of this game: I’d like to actually read logs, instead of being unable to look at any screens the moment I either win (By completing a set number of missions), or lose (By all my squad dying before extraction.) I know the logs, just like the diaries of Zafehouse Diaries, are also procedurally generated, and so lose their lustre if you look at them too closely, but I still want to see. I want to see what I missed, why I failed. I want to reread the last communications. I want to know.

All of the buttons on this right screen provide potentially useful information. It is not a good idea to check it mid-battle.

But if you want a good example of a game that accurately creates the feel of being the inept (or life saving) commander giving orders from afar in a sci-fi action horror, then Deadnaut is pretty bloody close. You can even, if you’re feeling particularly sadistic, make your friends in the game as crew members (Although I’m not sure how many people you know who have the drawback of fucking up radio reception randomly wherever they are, as an example), and forever voyage with those instead of procedurally generated crew.

Me? I like the procession of badly mismatched crew. Makes me feel better on those rare occasions I win. There’s even the promise that some Deadnauts can be given parole from their forever deadly duties. I have yet to see it. One day, I may be a Good Commander, and have that happen.

Hahaha no. They’re all screwed, every time. Because I am Gorman, and I love to panic. I’m an asshole that way.

Deadnaut is available on Steam for £6.99. I have also recorded some LP type footage of it here.

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