Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden

Banishers is a game with a lot of promise and a good story, but falls a little bit short in the execution. 

You are the surviving part of a ghost-banishing duo, and are given the option through your helping of New Eden whether you want to "Ascend" the ghost or "Banish" and steal it's life force.  If you banish enough people you will be able to bring Aentea back to life using the life force you steal - but the agonized screams of the first I banished (he deserved it) made me rethink the plan.

The ghost stories were intriguing, but the process of retrieving every clue and getting a nice bow tied around the story didn't make me feel like I was making the tough moral choice with 80% of the facts.  Everything is laid out before you so you can make that final judgement - so you question your brutality with the result vs. questioning your moral judgement.   

Great game I suppose in the end -- I was feeling it when I had to say farewell and immediately went to look at the alternate endings to see if I messed up with my choices.

Little Nightmares

 This game was received free when purchasing Little Nightmares II, so I figured it appropriate to play first.   You're a side scrolling little dude in a house full of creepy things that eat little dudes.

It's quick and thankfully the puzzles are not difficult to execute or understand, so it was really a matter of wandering and running through a house trying to escape and not be caught by the giant gangly residents.

My favorite part was trying to escape a horde of corpulent eaters falling over each other and flopping on the floor after me.   They really dressed the set ... wonderfully gross?   Quick play - 5 hours total without purchasing DLC.

Star Trek Voyager: Across the Unknown

I was pretty jazzed about the idea of this game, making decisions as captain of a Star Fleet vessel and the potential moral compromising you must do when your choices affect the galaxy and your crew being able to get home.

This was an independent developer, so it did not have a lot of depth for the breadth that it covered - you adventure across 12 different sectors for a total of 7 years in a loop of harvesting resources to repair/upgrade your ship while surviving these encounters in an attempt to get home.

Pretty well done, though the game play loop got boring at times - there were good decision loops, oftentimes it's somewhat impulsive to choose the most viable result as far as % success, but you had to weigh each option - because it IS easier to nuke the station and create a black hole, but then ... black hole.

 

Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster

This was the first game in the Dead Rising franchise and the reason I kind of stuck with Xbox 360 in the console wars.   I never actually finished this first one, so when the Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster came out I was excited to play it.

The way they use Psycho's for the main villains of the game as you are rescuing survivors in a mall is fantastic, though this one does feel a bit raw - like a bands first album, it felt like wearing an old comfortable sweater getting back in and swinging a katana.

A lot of people seemed to be upset that the remaster didn't add anything new, even though they re-recorded voices, they left the awkwardness of the dialog in -- to me that's just original charm sauce.

Voidtrain

Voidtrain is a game that has a lot of promise but not a lot of direction.

It was an early access game that hasn't been touched in a few years, presumably abandoned by the developers?  "Something happens" and you find yourself sucked through a portal on a train going through the void with creatures that can attack you.

The gameplay loop is pretty similar to Raft, you spear things from the train until you make it to the next station and upgrade.   There are creatures that can help gather and automate some train management tasks, but all in all it was a bit .. boring? until they add purpose and a quest other than upgrading.

The Quarry

The Quarry is a game that has you play as a team of camp counselors who get stranded at camp one extra day after locking up and it's a full moon ....

The gameplay was similar to a Telltale game that had quick-time events interspersed to handle any dramatic scenes.  The character acting was fantastic, but honestly having a whole scene set around me choosing decisions in a campfire truth-or-dare episode felt a little corny and boring.

The game has a lot of endings, and there are ways to save everybody, but you would have to do counterintuitive things at times and  I felt like I played it as the characters would and not as "gamer who knows it's a horror game", which helped.   I don't think I'd play again though just to see what else they came up with on alternate paths

Pacific Drive

 Pacific Drive is a game about about exploring and upgrading with a car in a chaotic world gone wrong.

The map you drive through gets progressively more chaotic as anomalies and storms interfere with your exploration, eventually resulting in a radiation storm to force you out one way or another.  

The nugget of idea it is very solid, and this could probably have been a great game if they had figured out a decent story to tell with it, and made the map a little ... more ... meaningful?  The story delivery was all through the radio and various tapes you would find somewhere in the world, and honestly was a bit ham fisted - drive to these places and flip some switches to stabilize something.    I'm being both sarcastically vague and 100% accurate.

I didn't have anything more to unlock or a reason to play beyond the credits rolling when they did.  Because .. I drove somewhere and flipped the switch to stabilize something.