Until Dawn - Review | A Uniquely Chilling Horror Experience

Note: Until Dawn is best enjoyed going into it completely blind. This review has minor spoilers for specific situations and outcomes but does not spoil any main plot elements or twists.

Until Dawn is a cinematic horror game in which you play as a group of teenagers attempting to survive the night in a snowy mountain lodge after their winter getaway takes a sinister turn. Returning to the same lodge where two of their friends went missing one year prior, the group reunites and soon finds themselves trapped on the mountain with a murderous psychopath who's trying to torture and kill them off one-by-one. You play as one character at a time, usually partnered with someone else, switching characters between chapters and even between scenes, with a main objective of trying to make every character survive until dawn. To do so, you'll have to make smart decisions with quick reaction speeds, as the game's "butterfly effect" system can create far-reaching consequences for seemingly innocuous decisions that could ultimately lead to a character's death. The game plays like an interactive movie, where the bulk of the gameplay consists of making decisions and reacting to quick-time-events during cutscenes, alternating with sequences that give you freedom to explore your surroundings for story clues while trying to complete an objective. While lacking conventional survival-horror mechanics like health bars or resource management, each character has various stats that can be influenced by your decisions and which can affect the outcome of certain interactions. Ultimately, the potential life and death of each of the game's eight characters acts as a sort of resource management system of its own, and it's here where the game derives most of its survival-horror tension, since you'll fail the game (or at least get an unsatisfying ending) if none of them make it out alive.

I'm a huge fan of horror in all forms of media, and yet despite my love for the genre I find that horror games can be really hit or miss, usually missing more often than they hit for me. Part of the problem is that I'm just so desensitized to the genre that the usual tricks of jump scares, violent gore, and spooky imagery just don't phase me much; while I appreciate a good horror aesthetic, I find that I need strong gameplay mechanics to invoke a sense of fear or dread in me, which often isn't the case with a lot of modern horror games that basically amount to "haunted house ride, jump-scare simulators" where you walk around creepy environments while scary things happen at you. With Until Dawn's heavy reliance on cutscenes, quick-time events, and gameplay sequences that border on "walking simulator" territory, I was a little worried this might be the case, but it turns out the game's central "butterfly effect" system, coupled with the fact that the characters can all die in a variety of different ways, at different stages of the game, actually made this one of the more tensely engaging horror games that I've played in a long time.

Gothic Remake Playable Teaser - Feedback and Review

In a surprise news release that seemingly no one saw coming, THQ Nordic announced that they're looking to remake the original Gothic, and released a lengthy demo (or as they call it, a "playable teaser") as proof of concept, available for free on Steam to anyone who owns any of Piranha Bytes' games on Steam. This news follows seven months after THQ Nordic acquired Piranha Bytes, the small German studio responsible for the original Gothic trilogy, making them and all of their IPs official subsidiaries of THQ Nordic. The remake, however, is not being designed by Piranha Bytes, as they're presumably busy working on Elex 2 -- rather, it's being handled by THQ's Barcelona studio. The demo opens with a few slides of text from the designers stating that they're huge fans of Gothic and wanted to revamp some of its clunkier, more out-dated designs while "maintaining and strengthening" the "amazing atmosphere" of the original game, but rather than simply doing a straight one-to-one remaster, they wanted to treat the project like more of a re-imagining, adding a bunch of new content and expanding on existing ideas while putting their own unique twist on what they consider to be a "legendary game." The purpose of the demo is to showcase early ideas they're working with and to gain feedback from fans about the direction they're going with the remake -- upon completing the demo, it actually links to a survey where you can fill out responses and grade them on their efforts.

In essence, this development process feels like a more open form of Early Access and will hopefully provide the Barcelona studio the opportunity to shape the remake into something that will live up to the great legacy of Gothic, and which will satisfy fans of the original game while also introducing it to a new audience. While the demo showcases some promising new ideas, and I'm absolutely ecstatic for the opportunity to play a brand new Gothic game heavily-inspired by the original, the current version of the demo isn't really what I would want out of a Gothic remake, or even a re-imagining. Supposedly they're still very early in the alpha stages of development and nothing is set in stone -- a full release isn't even a guarantee at this point -- but early impressions suggest to me that, although they may have a lot of love and respect for Gothic, it seems like they don't fully understand what it was that made Gothic so unique and special in the first place, because there are a lot of design elements that seem to go directly against the core design philosophies of Gothic and which make it hard for this demo to truly feel like Gothic.

Metroid: Samus Returns - Classic 2D Gameplay with a Modern Finish

Metroid is one of Nintendo's most iconic and long-running series, though its releases have been somewhat sporadic over the decades, with frequent gaps between major installments and with development largely being handed over to studios outside of Nintendo, starting in 2002 with Retro Studios taking the reigns for the Prime trilogy, Team Ninja handling Other M in 2012, and now MercurySteam (known for their Castlevania: Lords of Shadow games) developing Metroid: Samus Returns, a 2017 remake of 1991's Metroid 2: Return of Samus. Starring the usual series protagonist Samus Aran, Galactic Federation bounty hunter, Metroid 2 takes place after the events of the first game, and sends you to the metroid homeworld, planet SR388 to wipe out the rest of the metroids. With that simple premise, Samus Returns plays like any typical Metroid game, where you explore a series of complexly-interconnected levels while gaining assorted power-ups that grant access to new upgrades and new areas, in addition to opening up new gameplay possibilities, all in the form of a two-dimensional puzzle-platform-shooter.

Risen - Review | A 10-Year Retrospective

Risen is a fantasy-themed open-world action-RPG by Piranha Bytes, a small German studio who were previously responsible for the first three Gothic games -- the first two of which are some of the best RPGs of all time. Following the colossal mess that was Gothic 3, Piranha Bytes split from their publisher, JoWood, who retained the rights to the Gothic name, thus forcing Piranha Bytes to create a new series which would serve as a spiritual successor to their beloved Gothic series. As such, Risen sticks pretty closely to the formula set up by Gothic 1 and 2, so if you're at all familiar with those games then you should know pretty much exactly what to expect with Risen.

Link's Awakening: A 25+ Year Retrospective

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening was originally released in 1993, and I vividly remember playing Link's Awakening on that bulky, unlit, green-screened Game Boy while sitting in church and on long car rides as a young boy. It's probably safe to say that it was one of my favorite games in my early childhood, and I was overjoyed when it was re-released on the Game Boy Color a few years later with extra content. With the 2019 remake for the Nintendo Switch coming out, I figured it was time to go back and re-examine a classic that I used to love so much as a kid, and see how well it holds up 25+ years later.

As it turns out, Link's Awakening is still really good. Surprisingly good, actually, considering it's one of the oldest games in the series on one of the most primitive Nintendo devices. The only thing really holding it back is the sheer limitations of the Game Boy, only being able to render a very small resolution and only having two buttons to work with; otherwise, the actual game designs feel timelessly classic, which makes sense seeing as later games in the series seem to have taken a strong influence from Link's Awakening. Its impact on the series is especially noteworthy considering it originated a lot of elements that have now become Zelda staples, like playing songs on the ocarina for various effects, trading sequences, collectibles that lead to extra rewards, fishing, owl and companion characters, and more. It is, as far as I'm concerned, a quintessential Zelda game and ranks among the series' best, easily making my top five, and maybe even having a case for top three.

Gothic 3 Sucks -- A Critique From a Longtime Gothic Fan (Updated Ver 1.1)

Note: This article was originally published in January 2018, but has since been updated with extra content, including a full video review.

Gothic and Gothic 2 are two of my favorite games of all time, being two of the games that had the most influence on my young and developing mind when I first played them in the early 2000s. And yet I harbor virtually no love for Gothic 3. I've barely mentioned it in any of my Gothic articles because I don't even like to consider it part of the series; it doesn't connect to Gothic 2 very well, and the whole gameplay formula is a radical departure from what made Gothic and Gothic 2 so great. Even though it was made by the same developer, Piranha Bytes, Gothic 3 feels like a different game by a different group of people who had only a vague understanding of what the Gothic games were, and who were told to make everything "bigger and more epic" in order to compete with the likes of Morrowind and Oblivion. Spoiler alert: they failed miserably.

Gothic 3 is a classic case of a game being ruined by ambition, of a developer trying to reach beyond their own means and biting off more than they could chew. The game, besides being unfinished and under-developed, was a buggy mess upon its release, and it took years of fan-made patches to supposedly "fix" the game and make it functional. The community patch is now almost one-third the file size of the base game, and contains numerous bug fixes and stability tweaks, and also attempts to completely redesign and rebalance the combat system. I played the game at launch (late 2006) before the community patch even existed, and again a few years later with it, and while the patch truly does a lot to improve the game's overall playability, it doesn't (and simply cannot) fix the core gameplay design and story problems, which are the real reasons Gothic 3 sucks -- not just the bugs and broken combat that the patch supposedly fixes.

Normally I'd be content to dismiss the issue and move on with life (the game's over a decade old, after all, and I haven't even played it in about eight or nine years), but I find it surprising that, even today, people still speak highly of Gothic 3. With the recent release of Elex, newcomers to Piranha Bytes games frequently ask about their previous games and which ones are worth playing, and people readily leap to defend (or even recommend) Gothic 3, usually with the caveat that you need to play with the community patch. That's sound advice, of course, but I just can't justify recommending Gothic 3 to anyone because of how bad of a Gothic game it is, and how mediocre it is, just as a game in general. So in this article I'll be explaining my opinion on Gothic 3 and why I think it sucks.

My Personal Ranking of the Soulsborne Games

Dark Souls has been one of the most culturally significant video game series over the last decade, spawning a new sub-genre of games like it and basically setting a new standard of comparison for melee combat, level design, and difficulty. The series has been so popular that it really needs no introduction -- if you haven't heard of Dark Souls by now then you've been living under a rock, and even if you've never played any of them you surely know what kind of games they are. I began playing the series with the original Demon's Souls and have kept up with every release since, though it took me a while to get around to Bloodborne and I still haven't played Sekiro, although from what I understand Sekiro is more an evolution of Tenchu than Dark Souls, so it maybe doesn't fully belong in the "Soulsborne" category of games. With each release of a new Soulsborne game I usually find myself having mixed opinions -- while usually enjoying each one, there's usually some aspect that leaves me a little unsatisfied or subtly disappointed. So I thought it would be fun to review all five games against one another, comparing their relative strengths and weaknesses while attempting to rank them in terms of my personal favorites.

When brainstorming this list and trying to figure out how I'd actually order them, I went back and replayed large chunks of each game, just to refresh my memory, and so I decided to base these rankings on a combination of how much I remember enjoying each game the first time I played it, how much I enjoyed replaying it, and finally how well it compares to the other games in the series mechanically. So in other words, this is not a purely objective ranking of how good the games are technically, since I'm putting a lot of weight in my own subjective feelings in addition to their more technical design elements. If it were purely objective, then believe me they would be in a very different order. All of which is to say that this is my personal opinion, so don't get offended if I don't have the exact same feelings as you do.