Now that I’ve finished gushing about a good survival horror game, allow me to not say much about a survival horror game I don’t like. It’s a cool concept that’s worth checking out, especially for fans of the genre. Having limited resources is the keystone of survival horror, but this is the only game I know of where the limitation is physical wellbeing rather than the standard ammo and lifebar. You actually have to save your energy for when you really need it and to use strength as a last resort. The aspect I’m most impressed by is the physicality of the protagonist, who doesn’t have the endurance to constantly sprint everywhere and fend off monsters, which is a given in most games. For such an ambitious concept to be executed in a way that holds up to this day is an amazing feat. Not only did Clock Tower do mansion-exploring horror before Resident Evil, it was pioneering a stealth-focused style of horror almost a decade before Haunting Ground.
Given that Clock Tower was released on the SNES, it’s pretty easy to see why that perception is incorrect. Resident Evil is embedded in the popular consciousness as the starting point of the survival horror genre. Even though I truly love parts of this game, the ball and chain of melodrama weighs it down too much to recommend it to anyone but an extreme visual novel enthusiast. If this long-winded drama was just as good as the humor, maybe I could have finished the whole thing, but it wasn’t even close to the same quality. There are no decisions or interactions, it’s just a direct telling of one character’s tragic backstory.
To give you an idea of just how straight-faced I’m talking about, finishing the game unlocks an animated prequel story. However, starting at about the halfway point, the humor and charm this setup is made for gets replaced by straight-faced drama. Instead of being a strictly linear narrative, you swap between various characters to see different perspectives of the plot, so you have a perfect setup to enjoy the intrigue and dramatic irony. Sure enough, my first few hours were a blast. Even without the prestigious context, a quirky live-action visual novel was still unique enough to be worth a buy.
#Yomawari night alone random freeze Pc#
428: Shibuya Scramble got a better reception than either of those games, and was finally brought to the PC late last year, so I had to pick it up.
#Yomawari night alone random freeze full#
These guys also developed Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, which had me completely gripped for a full twenty-four hours. Visual novels aren’t typically my thing, but Spike Chunsoft’s Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors is in a cozy spot on my top ten. If you can logically assess the quality of the gameplay, this game can be enjoyable, but the huge amount of awkward missteps prevent anything but the weakest of recommendations. The flicker of appreciation that had begun to grow was immediately stamped out with yet another out of place gag. The best encapsulation of these issues is how a beautiful and well-executed setpiece is followed up by the game literally stating “that event alone is totally worth a second playthrough if you ask me!”. The inelegant merging of ideas extends to the writing, which flips between clever banter and referential meme humor. You can just get hints that tell you exactly where to go and it’s the same as before. It’s all about exploration in the second half. Starting from the basics, it’s a 2D Ninja Gaiden style platformer… until it isn’t. It’s a bad sign when the game I sit down to review on this beautiful October afternoon is one I have a hard time saying anything about. I'm not including replays like Shatterhand or games that don't have a defined end like Starcraft 2. Just like last year, the table of contents is alphabetized so you can find the games you're interested in quickly, but the paragraphs are ordered by when I played them so you can see my memory resolution increase over the course of the document. This year my retro-game-safari really took off, and I got to hit a lot of the games I had been meaning to play for years. A Look Back at about 11 Games from 2019 and 77 That Weren't
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