Shiftyvee

Just a short one today, but this is a fine little experience. It's a simple walking simulator where you navigate some caves in search of missing people, with the environment itself slowly growing and shifting around you until it resembles more of an organism than a cave. That's quite the neat idea, making the setting of the game interesting and a little fun to explore while simultaneously adding to the feeling of nervousness. Additionally, some of the ambient noises are effectively creepy and will have you checking your back at first due to being played out of view. It seems to have taken inspiration from the classic Minecraft cave sounds that notoriously scared its players, they felt pretty familiar to me anyway as a certified victim.

While hardly special, I think Cave Crawler did enough right to have warranted a positive score if not for a couple of issues. Firstly, the camera controls are just too slow and the actual movement is a bit too restrictive. It doesn't always get in the way much, I wouldn't think kindly of this game if it did, but you will feel it and it can be especially intrusive when having to do any backtracking for something that you missed. The other issue is a bit more inconsequential but I wasn't a fan of the occasional shadowy figure jumpscares that this game has, they feel out of place and a little cheap, like they're there for a youtuber to react to. Kind of weird how that continues to be a problem I bring up in these posts isn't it?

Major Spoilers

For a game that is very clearly inspired by Iron Lung and trying to recreate that kind of experience, hell maybe even due to that fact and the higher expectations I had for it, I found myself super underwhelmed by this one. It doesn't show much understanding of what made Szymanski's game work and so while it might have some nice elements, it's an ultimately disappointing and tedious experience.

As an example, the main flaw of this game is its ship mechanics. All of your functions run on a separate power system that you need to manually toggle on and off, depending on how much power is available. This is relatively fine while you can have almost if not everything active at once, but the increased menu scrolling and finicking as you go along is a very annoying way of "increasing difficulty". I suppose they had no choice considering they made navigation itself manual, which is a shame because controlling the ship could've been an actually decent mechanical aspect.

Your objective is to photograph and record audio for planets and then send your work in, which is quickly turned into a bothersome process as you're forced to repeat the task many times over with lower power. The horror aspects, being any unnatural audio and visuals you capture, take a bit too long to get started and spread themselves way too thin over the course of the game. As a result of everything, it ended up feeling way longer than it actually was. It didn't take me long to stop feeling unnerved and start feeling bored.

Your ship interior is also completely useless. You're allowed to look around and it is kind of cool looking, but being able to view your ship doesn't provide anything of use because nothing happens to it. I needed a lot more to be immersed in this experience and make up for the lack of visual information, and they did not help me feel confident in the quiet vacuum of space working for this gameplay style.

It's not completely devoid of good things. I did like how the predator disguised itself as a safe planet and do prefer the concept of being pulled in like that while being functionally restricted to the camera to Iron Lung's fish jumpscare, even if the journey to get there was so much worse. The lore and files are fine, there's some nice foreshadowing. I also appreciated how the monitor degrades due to radiation, though it also made files inconvenient to read so yeah. Maybe my final score is a little harsh but this was just a really disappointing game that I only liked less and less as I wrote this.

My space-obsessed friend watched me play, and was able to catch when the radio wasn't authentic, so maybe he and other nerds had/would've had a better time with this than I did. However he also got bothered by the inaccuracies present in the game, as well as the missed potential of not using red dwarf systems for atmosphere, so it's a bit of a double-edged sword.

This was such a pleasant way to kick off my 2026 backlog. It's not uncommon to find horror games that masquerade as cute or harmless at first, I've played a few myself, but a cute game that "pretends to be scary" is a much rarer experience that I thoroughly enjoyed. There's never any danger, not much that could even be classed as a jumpscare, and yet there are just enough little tricks being played or things you're yet to understand to unsettle you at first. Silly player, there's nothing evil in the never-ending dark pantry with constant disturbances, that's just Goober and he likes to make a mess.

I adore the aesthetic of Creature Kitchen, combining a fairly ordinary setting on a spooky night with a lot of magical fantasy elements that create a really cool map. There are many fun surprises, whether it be a creature or a location. You'll be in the middle of making food for simple dogs and raccoons when a little armless ghost knocks on the door. You'll finally get the key to a shed that was completely ordinary when you first got here, only to find it to be impossibly large inside like the Tardis, stars looming over you.

The critters that you interact with are also very fun. Most have their own gameplay quirk or some other attribute to make them memorable, like the Mice that scrounge up anything that you drop or the Moth that speaks to you and thanks you for your services. The cute designs and extra bits of personality give you a bit of an attachment to these little guys, taking more pictures than the game needs you to for the sake of fun or intrigue.

Narrative elements are pretty simple and scattered but also rather heart-warming. You're in charge of feeding all the animals that were previously taken care of by the house owner who had documented preferred tastes and behaviours. There used to be a bit of a community in the woods here, and making every little fellow happy will allow you to be accepted into this odd family that was brought together by the previous owner. Pants is one of the best examples of this feeling of belonging, as you cater to it as one might cater to a child. The somewhat bittersweet ending you get for all your efforts is the cherry on top.

The gameplay is fine, but this will be where I start my criticisms of it just not being detailed or expanded enough. I did enjoy many of the puzzles, especially the clock one despite it being a little awkward to interact with, but it is weird that it almost feels like the puzzle elements take up more of the game's focus than the cooking you expect from it. Using your kitchen often requires little input or room for error, and I just wish that it felt like I was more involved in making the meals for the animals that I care about.

Similarly, I would have loved for there to have been additional interactions and incentives present to have you spend more time with critters post-feeding. If this was the case, the already sweet story about bringing the family together would've been so much more satisfying. This game was definitely going for very easy and approachable mechanics, and there's nothing wrong with that. Unfortunately, I can't call it peak while it felt like it was missing something to up the quality and really tie the experience together, especially when it feels like more gameplay depth was easily possible without sacrificing accessibility.

8.5/10

Not many horror games that I've touched have managed to top the claustrophobic dread present in a blind playthrough of Iron Lung. You get no consistent visual connection to the world outside of your submarine, instead relying on sound, motion sensors and a slow acting camera to attempt to understand what's going on around you.

Combined with the eerie and mysterious apocalyptic setting, you're left with so many questions and so much uncertainty. Are all of these long groans coming from the instability of your ship or something lurking in the ocean with you? Why are the sensors being tripped so suddenly, and is it worth trying to nab a picture of whatever it might be? Are you even sure you know just what you're looking at through that grainy filter?

The fear of the unknown is always nagging at you and the scares are really effective, being common enough that you're never getting too complacent but also not too common to the point that you're overexposed to the horrors of the deep. The mechanics of the ship navigation system work perfectly with some of the tricks this game plays.

This is a great experience and one that I'd highly recommend to anyone that hasn't played it or heard much about it.

9/10

Do You Copy is a unique and atmospheric horror short that I've played multiple times over the years and always had an appreciation for. Your goal is to guide a lost camper through the woods at night, tracking his progress and adapting to any interferences with the map on your wall. Not all of your choices will be easy to make, as the monster hunting him down and the campers own voice can be quite hard to tell apart at times. I love using the pins to mark the man's journey, as well as the time you get to see him out in the woods. It's a very charming game, managing to be creepy with its uncertainty, some of the sound design and the lore you get to read between conversations. It certainly feels good for a title made in 2 days for a game jam.

The circumstances of its creation are what likely held it back from being a great however, as there's a lack of refinement that you'll get familiar with as you play. There are some notable bugs related to the comms, seemingly no way to go back to the main menu after ending the game, a cheap looking entity when it finally shows up, and some dialogue and line deliveries that are a bit more cheesy than the devs probably intended. I wouldn't say this game needed to be massively expanded, though I'd hardly complain about having a full-length execution of the concept, it just needed to be polished.

I'm pretty sure that this is the oldest game I've ever played to completion with the exception of the original Pokemon. I bring this up as a disclaimer that I am very inexperienced with the 90s catalogue and so I have little understanding of what a game from this period could and should be like. Because of this, my final rating could end up going up or down as I further explore older titles in the future.

I think it's worth mentioning before anything else that I found this game absolutely hilarious at times. It's likely the years of memes that I've absorbed with dubbed cats, crowbar noises and other shenanigans but some of the dialogue and sounds in this game, especially from the scientists, are an absolute treat. There are so many funny and memorable lines from the NPCs that were only made better with the lower fidelity audio. The fragile collision also created some goofy moments and good laughs on occasion, like a guard opening a gate for me and then exploding the moment it touched him.

I really like the way Half-Life looks. Something about the retro graphic style really appeals to me, and it helps to sell itself as a good looking game with some strong environmental design, the industrial factory and Xen being major highlights to me for their aesthetics. There's also a handful of good looking and sounding creatures, which I truthfully wasn't expecting from a low poly 90s game. The Headcrabs are obviously iconic but I'm more attached to other aliens like the Houndeye, with both its "fake" mouth and eyes and its high pitched calls. I also love Snark, shoutout Snark.

Level design was varied enough for me to appreciate the differences of many locations, and I was surprised to see how many people seemed to dislike the 'On A Rail' mission considering it was one of the levels that stood out to me the most. I liked piloting the cart through and around different hurdles, making pitstops to unlock new areas and switching between new carts and tracks as you go. I liked stealthing around a military helicopter using large rockfaces and other obstacles to conceal myself, not knowing that you could destroy them yet. I like the way that many of the boss fights encouraged or forced you to find unique solutions compared to just dumping your magazine into them.

I thought the story was pretty solid but the show was definitely stolen by The G-man, who was one of the most memorable aspects of the entire game despite his low screentime. His character model stands out among the others from the very beginning, and as you notice him throughout the game you start to wonder about the amount of times he was present without your knowledge. He helps bring an unsettling mysteriousness to the game and his ominous dialogue regarding unnamed employers is elevated by some amazing voice work.

It's safe to say that I think Half-Life is pretty cool with a lot of things to like about it, and a game that I have respect for. It is even more unfortunate then, that I can't say that I enjoyed my time with it during a large portion of my experience. The gameplay, or at least how it interacts with certain segments, is ultimately what left me feeling conflicted with this title, and the reason why I can only bring myself to give it this high of a score right now.

First of all, the movement. While the smooth way that you kind of slide around tends to feel nice as you're simply exploring the facility or doing simple jumps across gaps, it can start to feel like it's working against you the moment you have to do anything that requires precision. Many of the tighter parkour segments, even ones that would be trivial in any other game I know, can feel bothersome to get through due to how easy it is to accidentally throw yourself off of something while trying to position yourself during/after a jump, among other grievances like narrow pathways above chasms. There is a walk option which helps in some cases, admittedly I rarely used it, but I don't think that actively disengaging with the pace of the movement system is a satisfying fix.

My other big issue is the combat. I lost count of the amount of times where taking damage felt borderline unavoidable when entering a room or turning a corner for the first time. Enemies like the military and grunts were very accurate for their health pools and the only safe way to approach them was often to pick them off from an angle/distance they can hardly react to. This slowed a lot of what I thought was meant to be high octane shooting into just being peek, shoot, duck, repeat. In moderation this is okay, like how you play against Vorts, but feels poor when it impacts large portions of gunplay. Not to mention the amount of times enemies would spawn mid-combat, even behind you, and get off more mostly free damage or kill the NPC you're with.

The spread of heals and resources also felt wildly inconsistent throughout the game, with some areas having much more than you can even hold and others making you go long, gruelling stretches with little to no top-ups. This could make using your best weapons as a solution to rough enemies unreliable and unappealing. Both of these aspects accumulated in the most disgusting save scumming I have ever done in a videogame, and rarely did it feel unjustified. Way too often did this add a high degree of frustration and tedium to what was already a gameplay style I wasn't enthused with.

That said, the gameplay is hardly bad as a whole and I did of course touch on some of the positives earlier. I think the movement strafing feels nice on enemies that aren't so pinpoint, crouch jumping past the attacks of the spider boss felt cool, the aim assist feature was pretty convenient for some of the fast paced parts and peeking enemies, and there are a strong variety of guns and other tools to use. Enemy AI was also generally better than I expected, with some dynamic behaviours from the human soldiers like throwing grenades behind cover, and a spec ops variant that actively try to play around line of sight to ambush you. Progression felt natural and satisfying without having obvious objective markers placed everywhere, and I only felt like looking up a few things during my entire playthrough where I'd soon realise how fair/obvious the answer was.

If this game could have only patched up the many areas where its gameplay goes from decent or even a little fun to downright obnoxious, I might have loved it. Regardless, I'd say that I ended up really appreciating Half-Life in spite of its quirks. It's just one of those titles that I'll be much more likely to consume through fan content than by giving it a replay any time soon.

7/10

So I played a game called Burning Snow on itch last month. I didn't bother reviewing it due to a lack of things to talk about, but I bring it up here because it shares some noticeable similarities with Rental. They are both very short experiences that were advertised as atmospheric horror, with low poly graphics and a cute animal character front and center. I enjoyed Burning Snow because, while being incredibly simple, it delivered just fine on what was promised. It didn't need to be impressive for me to have a decent time and for it to make me smile.

Rental was the opposite. It somehow managed to fail at everything I was led to believe about it and got on my nerves in spite of being a mere 20-odd minute experience. This game is not about "the dangers of renting a house in an unknown place" as stated by the steam description. This would imply that it's a more grounded story that's likely about a shady owner or a break-in. It instead focusses on the supernatural, with a ghostly owner, shadowy figures and some sort of curse that keeps you trapped inside. Of course it's not unheard of to use supernatural elements to represent real dangers, but with the owner being completely harmless and the game focussing all of its time on completing a ritual to escape, it doesn't capture the description through this lens either.

I initially got excited by the semi-fixed camera angles, just for them to handle it with no grace or understanding of how you make it effective for horror. Much more often than not, they aren't used to show off interesting environments, create scares or highlight important objects. Some interactables are even partially obscured to the player through camera positioning.

The actual "horror" of this game boils down to a single entity that shows up consistently as you roam the house and vastly overstays its welcome. This is partly because it never actually does anything, just standing around, and partly because they made it lock you in place for a few seconds each time it shows up.

I'm probably not the only person to have discovered this game through the gif that has been shared around twitter. with the bunny character holding a candle in a dark hallway. This isn't really the game's fault but I was looking forward to that moment my entire playthrough, so imagine my disappointment when it was actually a random fan's creation from the steam forums that eclipses the final product in eeriness entirely.

The gameplay wasn't just simple and unimpressive, but actively bothersome to get through. You spend most of the game worming your way through a house and interacting with everything until you find the items you need, wonky angles included, with one in particular being shoved underneath a specific pillow on a specific couch that wasted a bunch of my time trying to find. Not to mention the shadowy figure from earlier that got in my way too.

Afterwards comes an additional item fetch quest in a maze section, with a visual design and camera controls that make it super confusing to navigate as pretty much every turn looks exactly the same. For the cherry on top of everything that this game did wrong and disappointed me with, there's a generic 'just a dream' style ending waiting for you after you finish trudging through it.

1/10

Arctic Eggs is a game I feel like I should've ended up loving for its surreal dystopia with strict laws and body horror elements, with all of its often pessimistic conversations surrounding the purpose of living, dreams of the future or the state of the past, and with its unique world that seems to present itself in puzzle pieces to put together. I'd like to think that this would be right up my alley, which is why it slightly confuses me that nothing about this game really stuck. I don't know if I have a concrete reason as to why, but there'd be no point in writing this review if I didn't try to make sense of it.

This game feels too wrapped up in its quirkiness, jumping between wacky characters that talk, move or look peculiar, maybe being interesting or funny in the moment but rarely memorable any more than 10 minutes later. You often don't even spend long enough with those who capture your attention the most before moving on to the next person.

Those puzzle pieces previously mentioned didn't seem to amount to a larger picture. This might be me outing myself on having forgotten some of the dialogue, not that being easy to forget is much of a saving grace here, but most of what I remember are comments on the laws of what is or isn't allowed to be eaten, past stories of the city leader that didn't provide much real insight, and references to your punishment for crimes committed against the state that I also never recall being elaborated on.

Overall, Arctic Eggs came across as being more committed to a vibe than a substantial experience. It has a nice aesthetic, music and some good sound design, but not much more beyond that. The cooking gameplay can be satisfying and I don't mind the challenge, but it's also a lot more clunky and obnoxious at times than what I'm willing to tolerate. I believe this could've played into being more of a horror game, it was tagged as such on steam which came across as a little misleading, and I would've enjoyed it more than I did. I wish I could share the enthusiasm for this game that many other people have.

A beautiful game that utilises a minimalist style with some pretty backgrounds and unique geometry to create many strong settings for its small bundle of levels. These visuals combine extremely well with the large role that perspective shifts and optical illusions play in the game's puzzles. It already looks great, but sometimes you need to put a piece of the world back together or look at things from a different angle for it to really shine. Sound design was quite clean and soothing on top of that.

The actual puzzle content and difficulty was very friendly for somebody that never engages with these types of games. I found myself able to figure out the solution to any problem with relative haste regardless of how tired I was from staying up late. Even the hardest levels were very easy to stomach, but I still felt satisfied when things fell into place and I progressed through the game.

I also liked some of the level gimmicks. There are crows that scream at you for invading their personal space and need you to time your movement, and there's a polite helper that you get to ride on to help solve puzzles. Then, to tie everything up, is a simple but appreciated narrative of returning what you stole to the people that you wronged. What's not to love?

9/10

I generally don't want to just dismiss a product with "what's the point of this? who asked for it?" when trying to write a review, but I could not stop asking myself these exact questions while sitting through my 6+ hour playthrough of Atom Eve.

They seem to want to provide insight into Eve's character through her teenage years, as well as perspective on some of the events from the story. You will quickly learn however, that this game is not canon to either the comics or the show and so anything that it would bring to the table is dubious at best. However, there's also enough spoilers for the actual story that using this game as a way to hook new readers is somewhat counterintuitive to any potential it had as an entry point.

Even if it was hypothetically canon, it doesn't do nearly enough of what I had expected from it. You don't spend that much time with the teen team at all, and even less of that time is spent prior to the start of the main invincible story, which begins as soon as the 2nd chapter. Multiple of what seem to be some important characters, ones that could've benefited from this type of spinoff, don't feel particularly fleshed out either. Eve's perspective on season 1 is also not very refreshing, with the sole exception of giving an outside glimpse into the final confrontation.

What you're left with for Atom Eve is a story that's just kind of alright, it didn't do anything for me at least, and a lot of missed potential. Not to mention that the music can feel very repetitive and while the comic book style is fine the character posing is very stiff. Instead of experimenting with something like the AU where Eve is a freedom fighter, you have more of a generic dating simulator with the Invincible branding.

While I seemed to have missed many optional story elements on my run, and they might provide something more of value, I also have no drive to play through this game again. For starters, there are no options for skipping/speeding through dialogue and cutscenes. Secondly, it seems like almost all of the different choices I made when scoping out alternate endings led to the exact same outcome. And of course, I would have to play through the very unengaging battles again, because they decided that mandatory but shallow turn-based combat was a great addition to the game.

Even if you love Invincible, you can skip this and miss out on nothing important.

3/10

A great game that would've been fantastic if it lasted longer.

It has a really pleasing stop-motion look and combines that with its point and click controls to feel oddly nostalgic to me (perhaps my memories of some old flash games). Reading up on the history of the artifact is interesting, with the actual clues not being very hard to find but still feeling satisfying to engage with.

The way the artifact devolves and the horror ramps up is also fairly well done, I just wish it was more gradual. This ties into my only issue with this game, being that I wish there was more of it. I'd love to learn a lot more, solve more little puzzles and of course have the tension build up more.

Being among the first videogames that I ever played, and having returned to both it and its sequels/spinoffs many times over the years, it should go without saying that this game is pretty special to me. However, I've returned to a lot of childhood media and been unimpressed before, so it'd be both incorrect and a disservice to chalk my love for PvZ up to nostalgia.

The presentation of this game is top tier and incredibly charming, with a cartoon art style that stands out by still holding on to a degree of seriousness, highly satisfying sound effects that never become grating no matter how busy the field is, mind-infecting tracks to vibe to in almost every level that even change dynamically based on in-game context, and a whole goofy vocal performance waiting for you at the end of the campaign.

It's also filled with small details that are there just to get a smile out of you. The almanac holds some funny and clever pieces of text surrounding certain characters, you can scroll to the other side of the planet through the achievement section, you can pick the flowers off of the extra menus, and the 'help' menu is just a handwritten note from the zombies encouraging you to lose (which works out since the game's mechanics are already taught, on top of being simple and easy to understand).

This game is rather well balanced in its core modes, often not letting you lose focus of the level (at least before you set up fully) without it having the capability to spiral into disaster, but also rarely ever being too challenging that there can't be something done to rectify it. Most of the plants and also keep their relevance instead of outright outclassing each other as you progress due to the pretty carefully crafted stats, use cases and resource management, with many of the more situational/replaceable ones still sticking out when they're available. The zombies however will come and go more often, keeping the stages feeling fresh due to enemy variety while still having those familiar faces that pop up everywhere.

Finally, the additional content. So many unique experiences are provided by the minigames in PvZ, such as the simple satisfaction of wall-nut bowling, the slow and strategic challenge of iZombie, and the crazy RNG of vasebreaker. There is so much more for you to get out of an already great game and it's wonderful.

My only issue, and why I considered marking it down from a full score, is that its quality is not consistent enough throughout the game. For example, I think that the night pool stage is much weaker than other stages due to the fog removing a lot of the visual gratification from the game, and there being minigames like 'slot machine' and 'seeing stars' that are just kind of boring to get through. It's fantastic otherwise.

10/10

If any bog standard shooter game was as consistently poor with balance, servers, polish, community behaviour, developer responses and just the overall speed at which the game improves then it would likely be a contender for the worst multiplayer game of all time.

Luckily for DBD, it came equipped with a genuinely engaging style of PvP that is only really soured by the above issues, with matches coming down to a coinflip on whether it'll be incredible or miserable (unfortunately often landing on the latter). It's hard to look past how fun and interesting chases and macro play can be in this game, with a general concept that is consistently trying to be replicated but never seems to be able to capture people the same way.

It's also incredibly expansive and customisable, with new uses for powers or perks constantly being discovered. Stuff like this, alongside the insanely cool mashup of horror franchise IPs, are why this game sticks out to so many people and why I will likely always come back to it despite it certainly not being a good game.

3.5/10