The Exit 8

The Exit 8 is a small indie developer distorted reality game where you are looking to leave an underground passage at exit #8 -- the problem being every time you see an anomaly you need to turn around and go in the opposite direction.

The anomalies can be obvious, like all of the lights turning off - or very subtle, like the man passing you eyeballing you as he goes by, or even occur late in the hallway - and you are given a limited amount of time to assess and run back if necessary.

I ... struggled ... with some of the less obvious ones because you're not told what you missed, you only see that you failed after you turn through the tunnels and realize that you're back at the starting location without the ability to go and assess.  Super frustrating when you get to 7 and feel like you saw nothing ... perhaps it was because I had failed so many times previously that I had seen all the anomalies, but I lucked out at the end of my first playthrough with two rather obvious ones at the end.

RoboCop: Rogue City

Robocop: Rogue City feels like an 80s movie that you are participating in.  That's with the good and the bad of it -- you are Robocop, and you clonk around like a tank, but you also stand toe to toe and deliver some massive cannon blasts from your pistol to a seemingly never ending supply of bad guys.

These are bad guys ripped straight from the 80s, punk bikers with spiked hair and simply "anarchy" on their minds and overly high pitched voices discussing said anarchy.

I was enjoying the story, but it did get a bit long in the narration exploring Murphy's psyche, and I found myself skipping or bypassing all of that.  Plus it falls into the video game tropes of "I'm about to walk into a briefing room where I am the one person who can take on a deadly menace, and you want me to first take a greeting card around to the rest of the office and have them sign it for you because you're too busy?" missions.

The story is fairly predictable, and you get a bit of a denouement at the end where you see where all the people you either helped or harmed ended up getting on with their lives.   I helped everyone except the reporter and the psychologist are still suspicious of androids because I just couldn't bother anymore ...

Worth it for sale price.

Project Zomboid

Project Zomboid is early access despite first releasing over 10 years ago - it's a 3/4 view zombie survival game that has a surprising amount of depth for the relatively simple interface and gameplay.

You spawn in a house, gear up with what you find, and try to reclaim the world.   Everything is important to keep your character alive, do not stay wet for too long or you might get sick, be careful what foods you eat, make sure you have tweezers in your kit to pull out shards of glass if you climb through a window that you haven't cleared.

There is base building and barricading, there are multiple cities to visit including many fun POIs like prisons and malls and military encampments, it's really a game that you can lose hours with and never ever get to that point of "safe".  The jump scares make sense and they will still shock you when clearing unknown buildings.

I have hundreds of hours invested in this game, not all of it idling time like some ... 

Dredge

 Dredge is a simple game that has you take the role of a fisherman/delivery person, upgrading your ship and town and avoiding hazards (especially at night) as you do so.  

This game seems like one designed for playing on a phone or tablet, it has a good amount of content though -- about 5 different areas that you travel through as you upgrade your boat and fishing supplies and work your way through the quests from the various townsfolk.

This effort is all for a mysterious person in a shack who you are looking to retrieve for magical trinkets.  (each of which enhance the power of your ship)  I am writing this a bit after my playthrough but I believe that if you end up returning all of the trinkets it's not a good thing ... more of a world ender IIRC.  I remember restoring my game and then going and doing something other mission that I was midway on. 

This is a toilet reader of a game, fun to play if you have time to waste.

Disco Elysium

Disco Elysium is a game that I avoided playing for a long while.  It is a dialog heavy RPG where you are a down and out detective trying to solve the mysteries of a sleepy seaside town.  (I might get specific details wrong as I'm writing this well after playing...)

What hooked me is the writing for the intro, it was brilliant - and the way they carry the storytelling technique forward in the story adds to the hilarity of it all.   Effectively you have voices in your head that represent archetypes of your personality (or pretty much anything, you're obviously crazy) that are not necessarily to be trusted ... your cop intuition might be great, but your confidence might coax you into hitting on the suspect, or fleeing from paying for your room rent.   It's done brilliantly.

I got to a point in this game where I feel like I did a few choice wrong things, you only get so many dialog options and I expended them before I had the skills that validated some choices.  In the end I couldn't find someone to talk to that would allow my story to progress and I felt like I was just wandering looking for the one thing that would link me back up with some sort of chain of events.

Fun, but I'm not going to try and find the thread ....

The Director's Disorder

The Director's Disorder was another recent free single-player psychological horror game I tried recently.

You are Coal, an actor that has gone to your grandma's house and are tormented by someone as you try to sleep through the night.  It's a terrible "director" making you do terrible things, like desecrate your mothers grave or cut off your finger -- logically you resist but I couldn't figure out a way to progress without leaving into the woods and eventually dying.

On a restore game I just did everything the director wanted me to do so he wouldn't shoot my grandmas dog (asshole), including burn down her house.  There was a montage at the end that tells you what an asshole you really were, hating your sick mother, cheating on your pregnant wife, stealing from needy children, your drunkenness creating unsafe situations for everyone - and killing someone in a hit and run.  You were at your grandmothers house to hide out.

Kind of decent "shocking" twist I suppose ... I had to fight through the denial in much the same way someone this messed up might have to.

I Won't Forget Hue

This was a free game that was suppose to have a bit of a scare element.  I'm really not a big fan of scary games, so I shocked myself by adding a few to the cart recently.  

The scare in this was mild enough for me, effectively you are trapped but by wearing different glass lenses, you can see doors that weren't there, planks that span gaps, etc.  But you also uncover some demons chasing you as you wear these.  They can only get you while you wear their colored glasses, but the level design is such that you will have to sneak/run past with or just be in the room with them.

The collectibles along the way are bits of a torn up photograph, the big reveal is that the torn up photograph is your family, with the end being turning around and seeing the demons, who I guess were your family "look, he sees us now" ... perhaps there was a story somewhere that I missed in audio cues as to why they would be demons ... dementia maybe?