Recent reviews by Mean Mr. Mustard

It's Riven, almost how I remember it but not exactly how it was. Fans of the original game will find delight and nostalgia in exploring the beautifully rendered world, and there's plenty of surprises to give you that thrill of discovery all over again.

This is a great way to lose track of time. The game is simple at first as you only control movement, but it quickly begins layering on complexity as you collect the massive amount of unlockables. There is meta progression between runs, from buying stat upgrades with the gold you collect, to unlocking new characters, weapons, accessories, or the powerful Arcana cards. There is a ton of room for build crafting which really seals the deal for the replayability.

The game also plays amazingly well on the Steam Deck!

So far this is an excellent Minesweeper-like logic game. Each puzzle is hand crafted and can be solved entirely through logic.

Considering the game is free you should absolutely give it a shot if you like puzzles.

A great first-person puzzler for two players. You and a friend are separated and can't see what the other player sees. Communication is key and both players will need to pay close attention to their environment and explain to each other what they're seeing and experiencing. Most puzzles have a fail state that will reset them and randomize the solution so you won't be able to brute force it, you'll need to figure it out.

The game doesn't overstay its welcome or repeat puzzles. The first playthrough took us around 2 to 3 hours to clear and a second playthrough with reversed roles took another 90 minutes.

If you can look past the My First Unity Project aesthetic the gameplay itself is actually pretty fun. I love me some airshots.

This game sets the bar for VR shooting. The developer set out to make the best guns in VR and everything else in the game is wrapped around that.

Each weapon is incredibly satisfying to use and they feel like actual machines with weight to them instead of remotes you just click on targets with. It can seem complicated at first to operate each weapon but it's rewarding to learn them and the game offers plenty of ranges and scenes where you can play in the sandbox and learn them at your own pace. Once you've got a little experience under your belt you can try your skill at the modes with enemies that fight back and ammo that isn't bottomless.

These challenging modes are where the game really shines, it's no longer just a shooting gallery and you have enemies coming for you and every bullet matters. Reloading your shotgun or bolt-action rifle is easy. Reloading them while hiding from incoming fire or while sprinting from a horde or zombies is much less so. It's fun to John Wick a bunch of poor Sosigs, but it's just as amusing to recover when your sausage fingers drop a magazine in the middle of a fight and you have to improvise.

This game is packed with content, and the developer support is outstanding. If you like shooting guns and you have a VR headset then this game is a must-have. The only downside is that playing this game will make the shooting in many of its VR peers feel simple and lifeless.

Fun flight through a futuristic city. Great scenery to take in. Finding upgrades for your turbo and landing to refuel is the extent of the gameplay, for the most part you're just there to explore and not crash. Watch out for the motion sickness though.

This is one of the best games I've ever played, VR or otherwise.

The freedom of movement is unmatched and navigating the impressively massive environment is an absolute blast. If you're someone who grew up playing the Tribes games you'll feel right at home skiing, jetting, grappling, and impulse-jumping all over the place.

The objective is to take out the giant worm floating through the sky, but you'll first need to take on the 3 smaller but still absolutely massive bosses first. As you explore the environment you'll find optional enemies that reward you with upgrades when defeated. I got to around 90% completion in around 3 hours and I'm still missing an upgrade or two. I haven't found a single one of the hidden orbs that unlock modifiers, so there's plenty of reason to jump back in.

So yes, the game can be pretty short if you go right for the last boss and call it a day, but there are enough reasons to jump back in and fly around once more.

The highest praise I can give this game is that it's the spiritual successor to System Shock 2 I've waited so long for. Don't miss out on this game if you're a fan of System Shock or the "Immersive Sim" genre.

The Witness is a puzzle adventure game set in an open-world and built around solving grid-based puzzles that are spread around the landscape.

The puzzles require you to draw a line from a starting point to an end point. As you explore the island you will be introduced to new symbols that place requirements on how the line must be drawn. You will need to explore the island to find areas that ease you in to the new mechanics and symbols. There is no item collection or inventory, so progress is gated only by your knowledge of these mechanics.

Paying close attention to details in the environment is critical to progressing through the game. Most of the game is hidden in plain sight and you just need to look at things from another point of view. Highlights vs shadow, positive space vs negative space, foreground vs background, color, reflection, even sound, you will eventually change the way you look at each scene because the game makes use of it all. There are over a hundred puzzles that are hidden in the world that you will walk past dozens of times before you look at them in the right frame of mind. The observation-based puzzles are absolutely masterful and by far the best part of the game.

Another chunk of the puzzles are purely based on learning the logic of the different board symbols and mastering them. This was the part of the game that I disliked the most. I found a few of the mechanics very frustrating to work with which made progress through certain areas slow. What made things worse in comparison was that many of these sections were there only for the puzzle boards and they lacked the same relationship with the environment that most of the other puzzles had. The environment didn't play into the puzzle board, and the puzzles didn't change the environment short of enabling the next puzzle.

Thankfully when all was said and done the excellent observation-based puzzles far outweighed the puzzles that I hated. After spending hours scouring The Witness for the last of the puzzles, I've found myself doing double-takes at familiar shapes both in other games and in reality. It was worth it.