Control (2019) by Remedy

As someone who loves a game with great atmosphere, I can recommend Remedy's Control wholeheartedly. This game absolutely bleeds style and a sense of otherworldliness. The sound design is exceptional, lighting and particle effects look absolutely fantastic. The design of the setting, too, is carefully crafted—lots of sharp angles, lots of really polished color palettes going on. You can tell the minds at work designing this world had a specific aesthetic quality they were going for, and I appreciate that. They've succeeded in spades, although some of the ham-fisted referential treatments inspired by governmental bureaucracy were a bit hokey for my tastes.

Apart from the artistic design of its spaces and lighting, the game is an absolute powerhouse technically, particularly with its lighting and reflections (check out the reflection of the desk lamp on the whiteboard—chef's. freaking. kiss.) Ray tracing is utterly amazing and some of the graphics I've seen in this game are unmatched by any game I've ever played. Slick, oily gray hallways whose only sources of light are cream-colored desklamps pouring through plate glass; a sickly looking industrial maintenance room lit by wan, elegiac yellow-greens; or inky basalt corridors bleeding with the warm orange glows emanating from the larger room ahead. The stuff they do with lighting in this game is absurdly gorgeous, with a touch of the morbid and weird. I love it. In general, it looks incredible; but I did have to rely a lot on DLSS (Nvidia's cutting edge AI upscaling technology) to do some heavy lifting, and its implementation in this game is not perfect. There are certain instances where textures are mucked up by DLSS, which seems that it can't quite manage full resolution images in certain cases; namely with certain paintings on the wall, and some decals which appear regularly. You're going to want to play in DirectX 12, though, and enable DLSS despite these issues, because ray tracing makes this game look so incredible that it's worth the drawback. I ticked down shadow resolution to help with framerate, but left most other settings on Medium to High. I am playing on a I9-9900K @ 5.0ghz and an RTX 2080 Super at 1440p and saw between 60-80 frames per second with mixed Medium/High settings. Your mileage may vary.

If you're looking for a good third-person action shooter, you're going to love this. The game seems to balance its pace between exploration—in which you exist within this compelling, affecting atmosphere and learn more about the lore behind the game's events—and all-out gun battles with challenging enemies, including boss fights that should satisfy most players. There's a significant ramp-up in difficulty here from other shooters you may be used to, and that leads me into my biggest criticism of this game.

The checkpoints. Oh, the checkpoints. Those buggers.

For some background: I hate checkpoints. I hate them universally and I hate them fiercely. I wish they didn't exist. I wish every developer allowed me the opportunity to save whenever I wanted, as many games do.

Checkpoints are always bad in my book. But! Sometimes checkpoints are not horribly, experience-destroyingly bad. Unfortunately with Control, this is not the case. Your checkpoints are limited to certain areas within the game, and the setting tends to be a bit convoluted and not so easy to navigate. While this imparts a genuine, lived-in feel for most of the game, it really becomes frustrating when you spend a lot of time hunting for goodies, checking all the nooks and crannies and not paying much attention to where you are... Only to get killed and have to respawn across the entire level to where that one point you saved at was, back 45 minutes ago.

These checkpoints are putridly awful because, not only do you have to traverse across territory you've already seen, but you've now got to fight additional peon enemies to get back to where you were. I'm all for challenging the player and punishing them when they make a mistake, but so much of my enjoyment of Control came from being fully immersed in its weird, creepy atmosphere, and helped along by its incredible visuals. Many times I found myself manually walking, fully in character, trying to figure out what the heck was going on here. When I died and was forced back to where I was half an hour ago, I was immediately pulled from the engrossing experience I was having and simply sprinted through these amazing environments, no longer caring about it and just wanting to get back where I was. It wasn't something like in From Software's Dark Souls, where each route was a challenge to be overcome by learning more and more—rather, in Control, it's a jarring interruption filled with disposable enemies, and dying, instead of being a learning experience, only served to make the gameplay a jagged, regular shift between being fully immersed and doing busywork walking from place to place. It seems the devs insisted on aping the bonfire system from Dark Souls without realizing what made that system so compelling and addictive.

This is a problem solved relatively easily. Checkpoints in Control are too few, too far between, and, in my opinion, it harms the experience as-is. A simple way to fix this would be to rely on a more precise, arbitrary checkpointing system rather than the rigid system in place. Remove the respawn functionality strictly tied to Control Points, and use them just as fast travel beacons and level-up hubs (which they already feature), and simply spawn the player at the beginning of the room before which they just died, and allow them to continue their progress sans tedium. But perhaps this would make the experience a bit too easy? Again, your mileage may vary! This may not bother you, but it substantially harmed a lot of the experience for me. I'm a bit embarrassed to say I've used the Assist mode more than once to bypass these frustrating instances so I could get back to doing what I enjoyed most in this game: Wandering around, being weirded out, and being constantly made tense by this wonderfully crafted setting. I know, I know: I'm not a real gamer; I'm a disgusting loser and I should get good. Noted.

Despite some of my harsher criticisms, if you're looking for an action-packed technical specimen of a third-person shooter, a graphical work of atmospheric art, or a weird, creepy story penned by Sam Lake which will keep you guessing, you should pick this up. It's worth it—if your machine can handle it, and if you can handle its putrid checkpointing.

⭐⭐⭐

Prey (2017) by Arkane Studios

There are a lot of things Prey does really well that made me want to like it. I love its cousins, Dishonored and its sequel, and I was hoping for a similar experience when I picked up Prey. Prey features a lot of the same things that Dishonored does well and even though they're different games I couldn't help but to compare the two while playing through Prey.

Prey features the same stunning level design and environmental art that Dishonored does so well. Places function as well as video game levels as they do immersive areas. Each locale feels like a real place with functional design, looks beautiful, and works extraordinarily well as a level. It's an impressive feat pulled off by the developers. The graphics are fine, with some great lighting effects. And the story is just intriguing enough to keep you moving forward, though devolves into fetch quests and "go here to fix this door" a bit too often.

My biggest problem with the game is that playing it just doesn't feel good. This is because there seemed to be very few efficient solutions to a lot of the problems it presents. In Dishonored you're given an ample amount of tools with which to overcome the different challenges the enemies provide, whether you wish to play stealthily or loud, lethally or nonlethally. However I couldn't shake the sense that with each enemy encounter in Prey I was doing something wrong. Bullet-sponge phantoms took multiple magazines to bring down, poltergeists left me missing them and wasting most of my ammo just to bring them down. I put the game down for a long time just 6-7 hours in because of this and picked it up again recently and put about 20 more hours before putting it down again for the same reason. There were times I'd try to sneak past encounters as well, treating the game more like horror, but even that fails to work at times as certain enemies seem to auto-detect you no matter how many skill points you have in stealth. I'd google strategies to kill certain enemies only to find that-- Surprise! There are none. Want to sneak by it instead? Well, the phantom patrols and now you're missing out on exploring and taking in good environmental storytelling and looting half the level, which is your driving force for exploring these spaces to begin with since the story missions are uninspired at best.

The game gives you an unlimited amount of tools to accomplish the problems it presents in clumsy, unsatisfying ways.

There's a reason many people complain about this game's difficulty. I played most of the game Normal, but even on "Story" mode enemies too often feel like bullet sponges. Something about playing it just feels off, whether you're tackling it as a shooter or a stealth game. Clearing a room just doesn't feel satisfying. Even after dealing with enemies and solving a problem presented by a monster in a room, I couldn't shake the fact that I had done it in the sloppiest, most inefficient way possible. This had me replaying rooms, trying different tactics; sometimes for half an hour at a time, but it always felt similarly unsatisfying. For a while this kept me pushing forward in search of unlocking new skills, until I had unlocked enough Typhon abilities to summon the Nightmare, another bullet-spongey enemy which I googled to learn would continue to appear every 20-30 minutes for the rest of the game. It was at this point that I lost my drive to play the game completely and finally put it down for good.

Dishonored felt fresh and challenging and even when I mucked up an encounter I could clearly see where I'd made my mistake, and would focus on doing better next time. And it was extremely satisfying to sneak past a room full of enemies, or take them out, or use the environment to my advantage. I never felt this playing Prey. Not one single time. I felt like a bumbling idiot, relying on my upgraded shotgun and combat focus to deal with nearly every challenge. While the levels can feel like a fun sandbox I ended up feeling that none of the tools they gave me to play with were very effective at dealing with any of the problems provided, so I resorted to smashing through it with the proverbial hammer (or in this case, shotgun) instead.

There are some other things that bothered me about the game as well. The sound mix is absolutely terrible, which I remember from day one but still hasn't been patched to adequacy yet. You can be hugging a wall in a room and hear electricity from a broken wall in the room adjacent and above you, or hear a fire that you passed 20 minutes ago still raging two floors below. Certain instances of dialogue are far too loud or sound like the mic was too close to the actors' mouths when they were recording their lines. Gunshots don't sound loud enough for what they are, and space doesn't sound quiet enough.

In addition to this, Mick Gordon, who was perfectly at home doing the Doom soundtrack, just doesn't feel like his music fits Prey. There are some nice tracks here and there but subtlety is definitely not his strong suit, and that's what I feel this game required. Though this is very much a matter of taste, and I am in the minority: Most folks liked the score.

I also had an issue with the annoying, lazy, scripted jump scares that permeate this game and was surprised that other outlets did not mention them. I'm not talking about happening across a mimic, which is an organic part of the game. I'm talking about scripted sequences such as the "Touch Me" calibration screen scene in Psychotronics, which was so infuriatingly lazy and offensive that it actually led to me to halt playing the game for the night. Or the theater screen screeching to life in Crew Quarters with no warning. There are numerous instances of this crap, and the awful sound mix only serves to deafen headphones users, which is where my key gripe comes in. It's not just startling, but literally painful due to the ineptitude of the sound mixers. If you crept up behind me while I'm at work and blew a damned air horn into my ear I'd probably jump a mile, too. Is that good horror? No. It's a lazy prank. It's annoying and infuriating, and it had me hating the moronic developers who'd think up such a rote, lazy tactic that's been ruining Hollywood horror films for decades now.

For the record, there are instances of real horror and tension in this game that are actually quite enjoyable. A great example is the morgue scene in which you're creeping along into the morgue only to see a suspended body slip off the rack and slump quietly to the floor. You're sure there's a mimic in there somewhere, so you cautiously creep into the room, searching for it, on edge the entire time and filled with suspense... Only to find nothing but some supplies and notes inside. This is great horror, and the fact that it's often mixed in with lazy jump scares only serves to show how frequently the game fails. It seems to me that the developers strove to add a horror element to the game, but were unskilled in specifically how to do it and perhaps unfamiliar with effective horror, relying instead on recent experiences they've had in theaters.

In a word I'd describe the game as uneven. At its best it's hitting the same heights as other great Arkane games, but at it's worst it comes off as incredibly lazy and uninspired, which is a shocking imbalance for a game that does so many original, inspired things. I had some great times with the game but couldn't shake the fact that it just did not feel good to play most of the time. If you're looking for a horror game then I suppose you might like this, but it doesn't feel great to play as a shooter or a stealth game, so I'm not confident in recommending it.

I do hope Arkane takes another crack at it with a sequel, because there are some really great ideas at the core of Prey that I'd like to see polished up a bit in another effort.

⭐⭐

Playtime: 32 hours

Doki Doki Literature Club! (2017) by Team Salvato

Those of you familiar with my reviews know I almost always run up to the character limit in every review I write. I'm not going to do that this time, because I can't really review this game in-depth without spoiling everything, and I believe going in completely blind is imperative to ensure that this game has the biggest impact possible upon you.

What I can say is that these characters are incredibly well-written, to the point where even though I'm a Visual Novel neophyte I'd assume that they would stand up to characters in other games of this type. This game dives quite deeply into the themes it chooses to explore. It doesn't rely on any sort of cheap gimmick to heighten its impact, it has such an impact because it builds from the ground up using great characterization as its bedrock and taking things in unexpected directions from there. If you find the game a bit tedious to begin with, just continue playing. It will surprise you with its depth in the second hour, and it'll surprise you with some truly innovative story and writing beats afterwards.

In terms of the medium, this is one of the most inventive games I've ever played. I don't particularly care for the majority of horror subgenres, be they slasher, monster, body horror, etc. I have always, however, been a great fan of psychological horror (eg. The Shining, Rosemary's Baby, Psycho). And I can say with confidence that this is the single best psychological horror game I've ever played in my life. I'm an "old guy" among online gaming communities (I'm in my mid-30s and have been gaming for over 30 years) and I can confidently say Doki Doki Literature Club! is absolutely one of the most unique and worthwhile experiences I've had with a game, period.

Not a fan of anime or manga? Neither am I. Never played a dating sim or even a visual novel in your life? Me neither. And I still went through this experience in absolute disbelief of what Dan Salvato and co. were able to create here. This is a mind-bending, genre-defying treat, and the fact that it's free boggles my mind.

Don't read any other reviews, don't read anything about the game. Download it and play it through to completion. Demographics don't matter, tastes don't matter. Everybody needs to play this game.

Get out of my head.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Playtime: 6 hours