Senaste recensioner av The MacGovern

For those who haven't played the original free version, Psychopomp GOLD takes you on a journey with a very clearly disturbed woman as she breaks into public government buildings in 'search' of the 'truths' they keep hidden from everyone armed with nothing but her trusty hammer. But there's stuff down there and beyond, things which make a little too much sense....

This game is a wondrous mix of insanity and horror, strangeness and humor. Of dungeons, both of the fantastical and the mundane kind. Characters from the mad to the normal to the eldritch. And there's a story here, too, if you're willing to search and read.

Plus, for those coming from the free game, there is a lot new here! Returning levels are cleaned up, given more detail and character, and made easier to navigate. The new levels, both hidden and available along the normal route of progression, are all as wonderfully-creative and strange as the old, just with the clear benefit of a budget behind them. And yes, they extended the epilogue into an actual teaser for the properly-numbered sequel. There's even some brand new extras for you to find!

Plus, even at its normal price of 9 USD, it's well worth it. Just a quality game and experience overall.

Disclaimer: This game was received as part of a PCGamingWiki assignment.

I have mixed feelings on this one. While the game does have a phenominal story and art style, blending gorgeous 2D art of different styles with realistic 3D visuals, the gameplay remains quite static: slash at stuff, rearrange sentences, solve a puzzle or two, even when it means stepping out of the book, and move on. Not only that, the puzzles are very simple, like "only a child would be stumped by this" kind of simple - and if you somehow get stuck on the solution, there's a built-in hint system.

Plus, the final act is increasingly buggy the further in you go. It's quite clear this part of the game didn't get the QA or polish it needed, and it can create frustrating situations where you should be able to progress, but the game won't let you because of either a legitimate bug or because you thought of a solution the devs didn't, unintentionally preventing you from completing a puzzle. Mercifully, restarting from the last checkpoint got me through all the issues I encountered here.

As for my final recommendation? If you find the story and art as great as I did, it'll be enough for you to ignore the servicable gameplay. Otherwise, I'd pass.

In this short Metroidvania, your character has entered a strange dreamworld. Now it's up to you to slay the one polluting it.

The movement is extremely responsive and the highlight of the game. You're able to easily chain leaps, wall jumps, wall riding, rolls, and so on in a variety of rewarding ways - and, if you're clever, can skip areas entirely. The combat is simple, but just as fluid.

And as for the progression? While it can be confusing at times, especially with how using black holes once you have the appropriate ability, they all tie into the movement extremely well.

Whether you want to just blow it all up or practice controlled demolition, Teardown is an excellent destruction sandbox. While the campaign is a bit uneven, especially in its first part, its difficulty is quite customizable.

Also, the game's modding capabilities are impressive - not to mention used by the devs themselves for official expansions. Do you want a Wreckfest-style racing game where virtually everything, including the buildings themselves, are destructable? You can do that. A first-person adventure game? You can do that. A rougelike modern military survival shooter with realistic gun mechanics, limb-based damage, and vehicles which can be customized using objects both crafted and found in the environment? You can do that.

A strange, unique adventure game, you are a Mongolian man, the last of his line, living in his ancestral yurt, in possesion of a inactive female android known as an m-body (no, she's not for that kind of use), and friends with a strange hawk named Ongots. The man knows all this, yet he doesn't know how. Thus does he begin his journey of self-discovery....

The story is a bit dense in places, really requiring serious study to make sense of. But what's there is fascinating.

The voice-acting is not the greatest, with the voice actors trying to inject emotion into their lines and occassionally succeeding, but otherwise sounding monotone.

And the puzzles? Because you can carry just about anything you see, the early puzzles can get quite confusing - especially since some objects can be both grabbed and looked at, depending on what part of the object you're aiming at. Not to mention the hint system assumes you know what things look like or whereabouts to go, only to get lost or unable to figure out what goes with what. A great example of this is the very first puzzle of the game: make Ongots the Hawk's favorite soup. Unless you happen to know the common modern language of Mongolia (I assume that's what much of the non-English text in the game is written in), you'll have no idea where the salt and pepper are - though mercifully, the game lets you dump all the seasonings in until you get the right broth coloration instead of forcing you to redo the puzzle - even if you've read the recipe, what the game counts as a "mortar" and "pestle" is strange, and you can wander the nearby lake, which is closer-looking to a swamp than a lake, for awhile before finally finding the one tree with berries. Also, as a nitpick, for those who've played more traditional adventure games, the complete lack of combining items in your inventory, instead combining them in the world itself, can be quite confusing at first, but I was able to get used to it quickly.

As for the game itself? It's jank. Every time the game changes locations or resolutions, it resizes the game window - not a problem back when exclusive fullscreen was the only way to game at max performance, but a pain for trying to set up a borderless windowed solution. Mouse movement feels sluggish thanks to forced negative mouse acceleration that cannot be disabled. Furthermore, the game chugs when loading in objects for some reason, not to mention the game has a horrible implementation of MSAA, meaning it tanks the framerate when enabled. The latter is easy enough to fix, just don't enable MSAA, but the loss of quality is definitely noticable.

Overall, it's a mixed bag, but you're willing to deal with some Slavjank, I think you'll enjoy this adventure game.

A 1990's-era X-Files-inspired game, you play as the titular Operator, one of many multi-talented personell tasked with assisting the agents of the Federal Department of Investigation (FDI), the fictional counterpart to the US FBI and, eventually, uncover a strange conspiracy.

The voice acting is excellent, really bringing life to all the characters. The puzzles are all logical and clever, especially if you keep track of prior cases.

The story is also excellent. It's only ~2 hours long, but it feels much longer than that, not because of padding, but because it manages to pack in a lot of meaningful intrigue and story beats in those 2 hours. It also has some excellent twists.

Would definitely recommend!

If you've played the game and found the ending lacking, good news: the end is not the end. All you need to continue the story is a web browser, a number found in a folder you can unlock earlier than normal with the right knowledge, and a key piece of information hidden in the Steam store page Metal Gear Style 1-style.

DISCLAIMER: This game was provided to me for free as part of a PCGamingWiki assignment.
Don't let the "Special Edition" part of the title fool you - this is very much a minimal viable product (e.g. "how little can we provide while still ensuring people will buy it") with extra steps, namely a mini-documentary on the original game's creation and high-res product assets, concept art, and video. The Carbon Engine isn't doing anything fancy here - it's just a frontend for those extra steps as well as the PCSX PS1 emulator for the game itself, with custom plugins for injecting new assets into the game.

The "remastered" soundtrack, a mix of actually-remastered versions of the original music and poorly done remixes, is awkwardly faded into the game - which is made all the more blatant when you switch to using the original soundtrack and it syncs up perfectly with the game. And, as others have stated, the remastered soundtrack will override the audio of specific cutscenes.

Furthermore, even though the game supports using DualShock 4 and DualSense controllers, both of which use the same button symbols as the PS1's OG DualShock and digital controllers and, thus, could use the original game's PlayStation button prompts, the game is now hardcoded to exclusively use Xbox button prompts. (To be fair, it seems the Carbon Engine only supports Xbox controller prompts, so they probably just decided to keep it consistent.)

As as for the game emulation itself? It's good enough. It's not accurate, and it can slow down in places the original game wouldn't, but it's not unplayable. Yes, it does have save states and rewinding, and yes it does have options for how the game outputs, but the first two are common in modern emulation releases like this, and the output changes are pointless as the game was never meant to be displayed in any aspect ratio other than 4:3, and even the downsampling mode, which very nicely smooths out the game's visuals, doesn't use 4:3 - it uses the unmodified output from the emulated PS1, meaning shapes that shouldn't be stretched are. Plus, those game output options are confusing themselves - the "fullscreen" mode in-game (not to be confused with the completely different "fullscreen" setting in the Carbon Engine's main menu) doesn't stretch the output to the entire screen, that'd be the "16:9" mode.

Tomba - heck, any commercially-released emulated game - deserves better than the barebones product Limited Run Games has provided here.

A goofy choose-your-own-adventure game staring the titular Space Bear. It's very fun and, depending on your sense of humor, genuinely hilarious. And the best part? The dev could've put a price tag on this - it's totally deserving of one - but made it free instead.

You are a budding cryptozoologist in a small Polish hamlet, thanks to loyally listening to the local cryptozoology station, Krypto FM. With the addition of an official web forum, other fellow listeners can come in and discuss the supernatural and make requests. At it happens, your little hamlet is home to some big things, both mundane and supernatural. And most importantly - you have both a camera and the will to venture into the unknown.

What will you find out there? The night is long, your batteries won't last forever, and your camera's SD card can get corrupted from things like, oh, power outages....

Recommend it as, if you can stomach the dread horror the game builds so well, you'll find a very different kind of horror game.

Stuck in a raging blizzard with a broken arm. Again. Nothing to do but search through the inexplicably-abandoned area and find a way to reach help. This is a time before smartphones, let alone the average person having a cellphone/dumbphone.

Very fun, Flash-era-style horror point-and-click with minimal jumpscares.