Telling Lies
It took me four years to finish this game. I’ve been watching the Sam Barlow (and Tom Hulett) redemption arc for awhile and I just don’t get it. His work was fine in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories just not up to the level of the previous entries. SH:SM was a game that pissed off a lot of the fan base largely because it just should not have been a remake of the first Silent Hill. His writing consistently falls short of being engaging and his characters are both flat and, somehow, insufferable. His earlier work, Her Story, did not handle the main character’s mental illness well. This game was released in 2019 which is when another game with really weird morals, Life is Strange 2, came out. Maybe it was a product of the times, who knows.
Side note: There’s a line so cringe inducing in one of the endings it changed my view of the rest of the whole game.
Amnesia: The Bunker
I don’t want to sound too harsh on The Bunker because it does something I really want more games to do: be shorter. It has a very similar gameplay loop to all the other Amnesia games but something in the story is lacking this time not to mention an ending which is just mean and bleak. I’ve been playing this series since Penumbra was released back in 2007 and while this was not anywhere near the best of them (Soma is that game) it was a solid ‘Fine’ game.
System Shock Remake
I never got far in the 1994 or remastered version so this was a new one for me. For most of the game I felt lost and hunted and then at some point I realized I had memorized huge parts of the station and as a survival horror hoarder I had a lot of ammo. The gradual change from helpless to competent to overpowered is something that I remember being far more common in the past, even if I just remember it that way.
Then something happened during a Cortex Reaver fight and I realized that this game felt so slow on a 60hz display it seemed like I couldn’t respond fast enough. I’ve never had that experience in a game before and after changing over to my ‘gaming display’ and getting consistently over 100fps I was fine. This remaster could’ve done with some shortening of levels and by the end I was very ready to be done. The final boss fight was goofy. Would recommend.