Heya!
So last year I tried to do a thing where I wrote a review for every game I beat and then published them all in one big "ranking all the games I beat in 2021" list right at the end of the year. I, uh, did not get anywhere near being able to achieve that goal. Given, though, this current thread and the fact that I haven't actually been able to stream anything in a bit because work has been giving me full time hours in the middle of the night, I figured I'd maybe check through these, see which ones I felt were decent enough to post, and publish here! Some (most, actually, I think) of these were stream games, some of these were not. idk about whether I'm going to add the stream games covered here to the current ranking as of yet, but otherwise, without further adu:
Corpse Killer (1994)
Developed by: Digital Pictures
Played Before? No.
So this was kinda stupid but it was also pretty fun? The short of it is that this is an on-rail zombie shooter kinda like House of the Dead but done entirely in FMV. You're in a jeep, travelling horizontally across a landscape, shooting zombies that are layered
very poorly over the background. You basically keep going on the same route towards a fortress four separate times in an attempt to defeat Dr. HELLMAN, broken up by optional sidequests and cutscenes where this rasta guy and this Generic Girl talk to you about how cool you are. It's... not exactly a great gameplay loop by any means — the first 90% of the game is literally just doing the same levels over and over again — but I won't lie, it was kinda fun to shoot zombies and the cutscenes are exactly the right kind of 90s cheese — the actor who plays Winston deserves props for being so consistently entertaining the whole way. I don't exactly feel like there's much reason to play it again, but... it was a nice distraction for 80 minutes and that's all it really needed to be.
6/10.
Death Trips (2018)
Developed by: Forameuss
Played Before? Saw a YouTube playthrough, but never played it myself until the Hallowstream
so this game is literally just the one joke but also the one joke is very,
very funny.
6/10.
Burger and Frights (2021)
Developed by: Donitz
Played Before? Saw a YouTube playthrough, but never played it myself until Hallowstream.
This... is pretty short (like, 20 minutes at most) but it was a pretty fun time! The short of it is that you're a dude on his bike heading home after picking up a burger on the roadside and finding yourself constantly looping back to the parking lot. The two things I loved most was the artstyle and control scheme, the former — while it's kind of a popular artstyle among indie horror games these days — really making something aesthetically engaging out of what's supposed to pass as PS1 graphics. The control scheme, in addition, does a really good job at simulating what it's like being on a bike: really fun to go fast on, makes you feel like you're cutting through the breeze, but also really hard to control and really easy to crash and burn while attempting to make a quick turn. There's a nice slow escalation of dread that starts from the beginning and lasts to roughly the halfway point, but when that peaks and the next three loops just become chases with some evil force I started tapping out a bit — it leaned into having to deal with the deliberate flaws with the controls and also got a little bit monotonous. It ends strong, after that, but I'd say that whole second act prrrrobably drags the game down a good deal. Still, it's free, only lasts like 20 minutes and the other two acts are a blast, so I'd say check it out if you're interested!
7/10.
Song of Horror (2019-2020)
Developed by: Protocol Games
Played Before? Saw Lore stream a part of Episode 2, but otherwise no.
I heard that when Resident Evil effectively codified the survival horror genre a lot of its flaws became deliberate inclusions because those limitations were what made RE's atmosphere and gameplay so memorably scary.
And if that doesn't work as a lead-in for Song of Horror I don't know what would. The game has
so many ideas that make me go "why" at their inclusion but fuck me if they don't fulfil their purpose of making the game feel legitimately stressful to play. Like, for example, I don't exactly think "maze with walls you can only see via still, oddly angled images right at the beginning of the gauntlet and also if you touch the walls three times you're permakilled" is exactly fair or fun, but it's certainly scary in a way that goes beyond just the story or presentation of the game. If something bad gets included as a method of successfully achieving what the game wants to achieve, does that make that inclusion good, ultimately?
What helps make considering this game a whole lot less complicated, though, is that it's largely pretty good otherwise. The game goes like this: you are trying to solve the mystery of a being hunting you down called 'The Presence,' and trying to find traces of those who have previously encountered it. You and your group of closest confidants and also random people who stumble onto the scene must head into an archetypal horror environment, solve puzzles and achieve your objectives fixed-camera-survival-horror style all while The Presence hunts you down and makes you play minigames, lest the character you play as get killed forever. In this vein, the core gameplay really works. Environments are large and explorable but condensed enough that it's unlikely that you'll find yourself lost or in a room that doesn't serve a greater purpose. The many characters you can choose from are distinct in how they react to the environment — while I really think there could've been room for divergence for how the level changes based on the character you play (why does Erika, for example, need to get the components for a puzzle box which she then needs to solve to get the keys for
her own apartment), the differing motivations and reactions of each character give a bit of value to going through episodes multiple times. The minigames themselves really help add tension even to otherwise quiet segments, as the fact that they're effectively randomly deployed means that you're never sure whether you're safe or what's going to happen just around the corner.
There are unconditional problems though, too. Episode 2 as a whole really brings the whole game down. While all the other levels have simple, one-word descriptions which tell you exactly what they are and are good prompts for puzzles endemic
to those sorts of biomes, Episode 2 is... an antique shop which is connected to a series of apartments which is also connected to a storage facility which is a fucking labyrinth, and I think that lack of identity really leads into its problems: its more generic puzzles, the huge amount of areas and things that don't do anything and the
horrid storage maze that functions as the climax. The game also doesn't do a great job at tutorializing certain mechanics: the stats that define each character never get explained at all (I still don't know what "Stealth" does) and the tutorials the game gives really do not do a good job of indicating what the player has to
do — I almost failed the breathing minigame the first time because of this and I never really figured out how exactly the door minigame was actually supposed to work. The jank definitely does contribute to the atmosphere, but I did get frustrated from dying/nearly dying from things I felt could've been avoidable had the game taught me better.
Ultimately, though, the game is complicated... but also good, I think. It falls wayyyyyy short of 'great' given how as a game a lot of its mechanics and setpieces set out to frustrate the player, but as a horror experience, I can't deny that it worked exactly as intended.
7/10. If you wanna try it out for yourself I'm reasonably sure Episode 1 is out there for free so, like, check it out. At the very least, you won't regret it.
The Open House (2020)
Developed by: corpsepile
Played Before? Saw YouTube playthrough, otherwise no.
The first half of this was a blast. The short of it is that you're doing a virtual tour for an open house, exploring the whole place at your own pace while listening to what the virtual real estate agent has to say about the place. The mood — the writing of the agent, the use of a stock asset house, the stock piano music playing overtop — creates a pretty great image of something funny-in-a-low-effort kind of way as the game starts going weird and the horror elements start popping up. The second half is... less than amazing — there were a lot of sections where I was just kinda standing around really not sure on how to progress, and it's generally kind of hard to follow up in these slow-buildup kinds of games when you hit the peak — but the ending is absolutely hilarious and a great, brief return to form for the humour that was super present in the first half of the game. This one's only like, half an hour at most and also free so if you're interested, go check it out. Can't say much without spoiling but it's a pretty unique experience.
7/10.
Perfect Gold (2021)
Developed by: Yangyang Mobile
Played Before? No.
This was a nice and cute way to spend three hours on a weekend. It's... effectively your average VN in terms of gameplay — make choices that change the ensuing dialogue slightly and ultimately determine which of the two endings you get, but as a short game that works well enough and the presentation/artstyle is
gorgeous enough to kinda make you forgive/forget the more simple design compared to Yangyang's previous efforts. The story's also nice — I really like the use of dual perspectives between friends-turned-enemies Marion and Audrey: it helps give both of them separate arcs and subplots and makes the issues/differences between them grey enough that you're rooting for the two to overcome them and get back together again. There's... small issues — the worldbuilding/magic system is wayyyyyyy too complex for what is a three hour game which left me with too little info about certain things (what's the stigma against healers?
why specifically would it be a problem if Audrey wants to be a healer?) and some of the choices listed aren't exactly indicative of what they actually mean, but those are mostly small gripes. It's ultimately a really nice little coming-of-age story which while maybe not being enough to reach the level of something like The Letter is still absolutely worth your time if you ever happen to get it.
7/10.
Jack Orlando: A Cinematic Adventure (1997)
Developed By: Toontraxx
Played Before? Watched Let’s Play of it, but otherwise no.
Honestly, after all the varied and actually-kinda-fun-in-a-bad-way games I've played this year I've come to realize even more that the absolute worst thing you can be is boring.
Because, like, even if you're a complete and total failure in basically every way it's still at the very least for me a worthwhile experience just to see where exactly things go wrong. It's personally fun for me — even if the actual game isn't fun to play — to look at the aspects of bad things as I go along to try and figure out
why specifically, it doesn't work, and how it could be improved or whether it could've been good in another game or circumstance. There's a lot of ways to learn what to do through seeing how something falls, and something with no 'good' elements can still be educational so long as you're willing to look from a bit of an analytical lens, and also have fun at the game's expense.
It can't, however, if the most you can really say about a game is that it's... really dull, more than anything.
I mean, it's
possible to place emphasis on how the game dives headfirst into the worst aspects of 90s adventure games with too many items (especially ones that you don't ever actually use on anything) and mechanics that the player can use at a time, really confusing puzzles that no-one in their right mind would be able to intuit, and game design where it's very easy to softlock and render the game unwinnable if you don't know exactly what's coming, but even then it's not especially egregious in a way other bad adventure games aren't. You
could talk about how Jack Orlando is just a really unlikeable protagonist who antagonizes near everyone he meets, but, like, aside from near the beginning he isn't even an asshole in a fun way — he's just dour and randomly rude and actively bigoted at points and it fucking sucks to play as him. The plot theoretically, is absolutely ludicrous and stupid, but because it's a
noir it just takes itself so serious and dour the entire time — you just talk to greyscale characters and then talk to greyscale characters sifting through dialogue that's absolutely dull and aside from a couple of moments which are hilarious it's just...
dull. It's
boring. I played this game with friends and nearly all of them left before the end because absolutely nothing was happening.
And that's the main reason why I consider Jack Orlando to be among the worst games I've played. I've played through boring before, but generally at the very least those games are at least competent enough in some aspect that they're able to just be mediocre and not actively bad. I've played through bad, but at the very least most bad games are bad in a way that makes them worthwhile/educational. Jack Orlando, though, hits the Venn Diagram where none of its aspects really work at all but also aren't really all that fun to see
how they fail — this is just a game where you trudge through a dry and monotonous 1930s prohibition-era noir plot trying to exonerate and give this actively awful person his redemption while you basically have to follow a walkthrough because there are
so many items that are there and do nothing and
so many puzzles that don't have a clear solution at all and
so many ways that you can get softlocked into a bad ending because of this design. It's a slog, more than anything else, and given how the game... really doesn't have anything going for it?
Yeah.
1/10. I wouldn't even say, like, watch a video to see what this game has to offer without spending your money — you really do just get nothing out of this.
Broken Dreams (2016)
Developed by: Mihai Norosaru
Played Before? Watched YouTube playthrough, attempted (and failed) to get through the flash version
I think when Retsupurae covered this the guy playing the game for them put it best when he said “AKA: Super Creep Boy.”
Because maaaaaaaan this game isn’t good. It’s legitimately wholesale a ripoff of this flash game called The Company of Myself down to plot structure, narrative framing, and even the main core mechanic but while Company of Myself is a really clever little thing that has enough to be able to give you a little bit of impact, Broken Dreams is… not that. The sprite art is ugly and clashes both with the probably-free-on-backgroundpngs.com backgrounds and the platform environments — you can loosely tell they had to quickly change the sprites for the steam release since previously they were just stolen Maplestory sprites. The gameplay takes the base idea of controlling your former selves from Company of Myself and reduces it to “go to space and deploy shadow person. reset and wait for shadow person to move to space. go to next space and deploy shadow person.” in such an unimaginative way that going through the puzzles is just simultaneously braindead and absolutely tedious. The story… thinks “boy meets girl. boy loses girl. boy tries to get the girl back” is a lot more grandiose than it is, and between the goofy way it has to intermingle explaining gameplay mechanics with telling the story and how absolutely creepy the boy comes off (“I used WASD to control her and she did everything I liked. It was so unreal.”) the plot gets twisted into, like, the story of this incel who inexplicably has shadow clones trying to get back the girl he abandoned and who we’re supposed to root for and, like, man, nothing in this game works. It gets a bonus point for being mercifully short and the way it ends being absolutely perfect (if very likely unintentionally so — it’s probably meant to break the player's heart or something but lmao, no, this guy deserves it) but otherwise… yeah. Just watch the Retsupurae video instead.
2/10.
Beverly Hills Cop (2006)
Developed by: Atomic Planet Entertainment
Played Before? Saw the club level get played through and absolutely
knew I had to play it for myself
So this game is, uh, pretty obviously not great. You gun and stealth your way through levels with absolutely broken gun and stealth play and use the absolutely revolutionary revolver conversation system to randomly select responses to a conversation that run the gamut to "instantly get a game over" to "get caught in a shootout where you're shot multiple times before you can even get your gun over to an enemy." Game overs, mind you, put you back at the very beginning of a level because there aren't any checkpoints, meaning that if you don't quite get that you're supposed to shoot the helicopter to stop the final boss from escaping rather than catch up to it (which is what the game signposts) whoops! You're set back, like, 30 minutes of progress. Wanna figure out how the stealth mechanics work during a dedicated stealth segment and an enemy even so much as looks at you? Better hope you get used to seeing the intro cutscene for the level repeat over and over again. It's wayyyy too punishing and it makes an already broken game worse. The game as a whole isn't completely irredeemable — the core gameplay loop of staying crouched to block 90% of bullets, shooting enemies who can't hit back to dead silence is way more fun than it should be, ironic or not, and its short enough that it doesn't wear out the little welcome it has — but, uh, yeah. Maybe not "the 9/11 of video games" like the founder of Giant Bomb purported it to be, but still pretty bad.
3/10.
Sonic.EXE (2012, I think?)
Developed by: MYSTCrimson
Played Before? No.
you don't spend five minutes running through a completely empty level as tails before anything actually spooky happens, completely inaccurate adaptation,
0/10.
I guess for more serious thoughts, uh... yeah, not really much to say. This game mostly just exists to inadvertently show just how comical the original story is by showing what a game like this would actually look like — shockingly, Earthbound music and the Kefka laugh aren't actually as scary in practice as they weren't on paper. I'll confess to the production value and some of the spritework — it's, like, a perfectly functional game, even if it's a joke — and that it was a fun stupid thing to do for 20 minutes which I don't really hold any actual dislike for, but, uh, yeah, again, not much to say. It's a kinda stupid thing which is an adaptation of a really bad creepypasta and there's not much more about it than that.
4/10.
Maquette (2021)
Developed by: Annapurna Interactive
Played Before? No.
man what is it with indie developers and thinking 'story about a relationship that went sour narrated by the man' is in any way unique or subversive
Like, okay, I'll give the game some things. The art direction is
gorgeous — a core and actually distinct theme in this otherwise trite story is that both parties involved are artists and view the world through the lens of art and while the conversations themselves don't have a lot of worth (i want a fridge that's sideways instead of vertical because i'm quirky xd! this is the part in the story where we're deliriously happy with one another so that when juxtaposed with
the very next chapter when we hate each other and break up this'll ring as bittersweet in hindsight) the visual of the drawing slowly coming together was mesmerizing and really did sell me on the game's art direction. I also was interested in the central conceit of the gameplay — messing with the maquette to make objects bigger or smaller, breaking through the boundary of the world to make
yourself smaller is conceptually interesting, but in practice the game doesn't teach you any of its mechanics which made me have to check the walkthrough frequently to know where the puzzle even was and to see what obscure mechanic from two chapters ago was being brought back and many of the solutions themselves were fraught with slowness, tedium, and brute-forcing against the game's physics engine until things arbitrarily worked. Always frustrating, never really fun.
I would've maybe given this game a borderline pass if one of its aspects really worked beyond the conceptual level, overall, but between a story that's not as distinct as it thinks it is and puzzle gameplay that should work more than it actually does, art design and presentation are only barely enough to stop this game from being bad.
4/10.
Sonic Forces (2017)
Developed by: SEGA or Sonic Team or whoever
Played Before? No.
I think the moment that's most emblematic of Sonic Forces as an experience is this one point where Shadow appears in a cutscene, All Hail Shadow begins to play, but before the lyrics can come in and all the buildup can pay off the song just ends and gets replaced with generic dramatic score.
I mean, that doesn't really get into how passive and boring the game feels to play but in terms of what's actively objectionable I think that's a good lead-in. The game teases
so much in regards to celebrating the 25 years of Sonic but then proceeds to do absolutely nothing with it: nearly all the unique, varied baddies from Sonic's history come back, but they have barely any presence and are written out by the halfway point in favour of a new guy whose entire character is basically "i'm not owned! i'm not owned!!!!!!!!!" There's the premise of a Sonic game where the bad guy actually manages to win and where the good guys are on their back foot, but its attempts at taking that darker approach are just laughably edgy (sonic was tortured in Eggman's base for a year) and once again it eventually just centralizes around a villain who's just not that interesting and leaves Eggman,
the actual main antagonist and final boss as an afterthought. The game promises a hybrid of 2D and 3D Sonic levels to directly follow up from Generations (the best Sonic game), butttttt every stage just ends up following the pattern of "start 3D ---> go 2D and never leave" unless its 2D from the start.
Which I think leads to why actually going through the levels just felt so boring. There's a whopping
thirty total story stages, wayyyyy more than any other sonic game, and I think it's this level of quantity which leads to why the stages don't feel so quality. If the game focused on cutting down the number of stages to make each one larger and more frenetic and fun to play then maybe there'd be something here, but instead every stage lasts like two minutes and the ones that don't stand out for good reason. It's less actively un
fun, but... man did I absolutely get nothing out of the gameplay here. It just felt so
passive.
There's... minor upsides, though. Namely with the OC. It was way more fun than it should've been to design my very own Sonic character and the way you consistently get new bits of clothing means you're constantly in the design booth touching up your character making it look like the most cursed thing it can be. Linking unlocking new clothes to getting higher ranks on the stage is a great motivator to replay stages (or at least it
would if the stages were fun), and overall it's a great innovation that really helps give this game a little bit of identity among the blandness. I hope SEGA brings it back for whatever the next game is.
But overall... bleh. Not really a recommendation. Just... incredibly boring gameplay which takes every good thing it has for it going in and manages to mess it up. There are some interesting things in here, but otherwise...
4/10
Emily is Away <3 (2021)
Developed by: Kyle Seeley
Played Before? No.
WARNING: SPOILERS FOR WHOLE GAME BELOW. I DON’T REALLY RECOMMEND GOING THROUGH IT ANYWAY BUT, LIKE, JUST IN CASE YOU CARE MAYBE SKIP THIS REVIEW OR SOMETHING
So this was far from the worst game I actually played in 2021 but god was it the game that left me the most mad.
Because it starts out
so well. You start off with a pretty funny and on-point parody of what Facebook is like nowadays before zooming back into the past and giving the player a snapshot of what it — and the internet in general — was like back in 2008. That, as a whole, is where this game is at its greatest. Leaving the game window to go onto a simulation of early-era YouTube, all the little things like pokes that you can't do on Facebook anymore, the general sound design... this game is the best kind of nostalgia trip, and even as someone who was too young to really be on social media in 2008 I was still really immersed in what the game was trying to recreate — I spent a long while in those YouToob playlists and it turns out I'm a lot more into that era of music than I realized. Roughly half of what goes into this game is interface and atmosphere, and to that effect the effort pays off: the vibe is what makes this game.
So to that effect it didn't really matter to me that the story was mostly just a slice-of-life graduation story — it didn't really need to be anything higher-key than it actually was. The characters that were given to me were fun representatives of certain 08-era cultures (dorky girl who's just a little bit random xd, hard-edge punk rocker) and it made me feel bad that you lose the chance to even just be friends with the one you don't choose to romance at the end of chapter one (which... reads worse knowing the general way this game treats women/relationships, but we'll get to that later). There's a charm to just hanging out with this girl on facebook, planning meetups, getting into poke wars, eventually developing a serious relationship with this girl, and even though there were minor annoyances (I hated having to manually mash my keyboard every time I wanted to say something, really wished there was an option to just have you say the dialogue option instead) by the end of chapter three I was really high on this game, and given how I was promised my choices would matter (and how the previous game in this series actually made
good on that promise, unlike the first game) I was excited to keep going and see how it all ended.
And then I found out that you can't get the good ending for someone on your first playthrough no matter what you do.
And that the only way you can actually
get said good ending is to get the bad ending, then replay the entire game dating the other girl instead, then do the same steps to get the bad ending you got the first time.
And that the other girl's route is functionally THE EXACT SAME as the first girl's route. you do the same things. you go through the exact same events at the exact same time they happened attempt #1. The only functional difference is that some names are different and the girl you romance is a different 00s subculture.
And what happens on the route to the bad ending you're forced into is so asinine. The short is that (at least, this is what happened in nerdy girl's route because fuck me was I not replaying
the entire game again just to arbitrarily get the good ending the second time) your GF gets assigned some study partners for an English class you're not in, friends them all on Facebook and starts chatting with them there. You're okay with this for a couple of months until your BRO messages you like "bro wtf look at what she's posting on his wall" so you log into his account and actually she's been kinda getting
really close to him for a while behind your back. You confront them about this, to which they explain to you that she and he are just friends, and that she's been spending time with him because he's going through mental health stuff and really needs people to be there for him, explicitly asking you to drop the topic. You then have the option to back down and apologize, or to keep going and press her harder.
The option that leads her to her breaking up with you/the bad ending is if you choose to back down and apologize to her in the face of that information. i.e what anybody who isn't a controlling asshole would do in that exact situation.
And what happens is also so infuriating. One day after you two graduate she messages you and is all like "I still explicitly love you but suddenly I don't really want to jump your bones anymore I think don't think I can love you anymore. I'm really happy being with you but also I don't want to just be stuck dating my high school sweetheart forever" and no matter how much you try to convince her otherwise whoops your choices don't actually matter, the conversation just goes round in circles until you either decide to take a break or break up entirely. You do so, talk with your bro and the other girl for a bit, and then it turns out... your girlfriend was actually in love with the other guy this whole time and she was lying to you when she said he was just a friend.
And
God
You know what game basically went the exact same way as this? Emily Is Away, the first game in this series. The game lies to you about how your choices matter and has a really sudden turn when your love interest just suddenly becomes a really awful person in order to justify the unavoidable bad ending you get where you don't get the girl and all the people who've been manipulated by this game go on about how it's absolutely heartbreaking and the saddest thing they've played. The second game was an exception — you could end up on good terms with both girls so long as you didn't try to two-time them — but in general this series/this developer just
really has a problem with women, huh? They're easily emotional, they'll very quickly dump you then immediately move on to a different guy they've been pining for all this time (and that's not limited to you — there's a storyline where your bro is depressed and deletes his account because his ex abruptly dumped him then immediately started dating someone else), and they'll very quickly try to paint you as The Bad Person if you don't side with them or if you call them out for being shitty. I don't really like making aspersions about someone I only know through their work, but when 2/3 of the works they've made do this exact thing... I'm beginning to see a recurring theme. And it's not a good look.
And honestly? I think I'm done with this series. At least for the time being. There's absolutely a talent for emulating the old days of the internet and using that to create an immaculate atmosphere (seriously, what makes these games is concept and visual and sound design) and I'd still at least bat for the second game in the series for actually diverging from the norm, but until this developer actually starts writing a different story instead of relying on the same old schlock which starts off great then falls apart hard for the sake providing the audience the manipulative ending it'll happily eat up, I'm out.
5/10.
ALONE (2021)
Developed by: DakeCraft
Played Before? Watched a YouTube playthrough.
man the real horror game is just how shitty the apartment you live in is, like seriously the first ten percent of the game is just coming home, doing the rounds, thinking something spooky's about to happen in your apartment but then realizing that no your laundry's eminating smoke because your apartment's just that shitty. it's hilarious
Otherwise... there's at least a neat concept here. You enter your home, find out somebody's murdered your girlfriend, and that you have eight minutes to figure out who they are and find a way to defend yourself before they come over to your place. It's a cool concept, and I like the feeling of frantically rushing around your shitty apartment trying to remember (or, well, find in this case, but it's the main protagonist trying to remember) where you put all your previously useless garbage... the main problem is that it takes half the game to even reach that point, and then three-quarters of the actual gameplay is spent trying to figure out who it could possibly be trying to kill you (when from the opening cutscene the culprit is INCREDIBLY obvious) instead of doing things like trying to run, blockade your home, try to figure out an escape route etc. etc. It's a neat concept wasted on something a bit too bogged down by a story that... doesn't need as much there as it does (seriously, why is the mystery aspect there at all) and combined with a really poor English translation and confusion as to who's speaking during some of the cutscene... my time with this game was okay enough, but I can't help but feel like there's potential for this game to have been a lot better.
5/10.
Gunman Clive 2 (2015)
Developed by: Horburg Entertainment
Played Before? No.
My thoughts on Gunman Clive 1, in brief, is that it's, like, solid. It's a quick little game where you're a cowboy mega-bustering your way past bandits and bosses to save your wife. You run through levels, you pick up powerups, it's nothing really _amazing_ but it doesn't need to be — it's a nice way to kill an hour or two on your 3DS when you're bored and don't really want to commit to a bigger game.
Gunman Clive 2... tries to be more than that — more mechanics, more spectacle. It... doesn't really work out all that well. The loose way I can describe it is... if it kind of went for quantity over quality. You know (well, you probably don’t, but whatever) how Gunman Clive had that one vehicle level which was a fun little change of pace that still kept consistent with what you'd been doing up until then? Well now a quarter of the entire game are vehicle levels which throw new shit at you and all control like ass. You know how when the first game brought in new mechanics they stuck around often just played a little bit with how you were already doing things? Here there are new mechanics that barge in, completely force you to change the way you play, then disappear right afterwards. It creates a really uneven experience, where you can't actually apply anything you learn because it's rendered moot by future levels. The original Gunman Clive allowed you to become better in order to combat the harder challenges up ahead — this game just keeps you at the same level, which makes the endgame a process of you throwing yourself against the wall trying to break your way through the new mechanics that keep getting introduced
there as well.
And it's a shame, because the strengths of the original are still present here — I like the artstyle and music, combat against enemies and bosses remains a highlight, and there's a certain joy in figuring out the path of least resistance as you try a level over and over again... it's just that this time this game's particular flaws magnify the flaws of the original game: getting sent right back to the beginning of a level when you die is extra punishing when a lot of the individual levels are gauntlets — especially with the vehicle levels where you can't go faster than the game allows you to. Controls still aren't amazing, and get even worse when you have to re-learn them on the fly or there's a new fancy gimmick which requires preciseness in jumping the 3DS analogue stick isn't built for and the first game never required from you.
But in general, like,
man, I really wanted to see the changes made as an improvement on the first game — I'm all for sequels that experiment rather than just being the same thing again — but given how a lot of the expansion is straight up a downgrade... I think if I wanna kill time for an hour but don't want to commit to anything bigger I'll just stick with Gunman Clive 1.
5/10.
And that's everything I felt was portable here from 2021. Might come back sometime this week to post the stuff I have from this current year but otherwise next up should still be Shadow of Destiny!
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