Recent reviews by ConRaven

Great story-driven/objective-driven survival game set in a hand crafted world with a blend of Half-Life and SCP themes. Coop up to 6 people with a possibility to assume roles on the team (e.g. it's entirely possible to just be a dedicated cook for the squad without ever leaving a kitchen in your safe area).

Main downside is this game is on Unreal Engine 5, so expect the usual UE5 related performance issues, hiccups and unreasonable requirements for how the game looks.

Superb sekiro-like with metroidvania elements and a well-presented story wrapped in beautiful art and satisfying gameplay.

Runs perfectly fine on steam deck (lcd, uv 50mv) at 60fps, ~12w (1280x720, played on medium)

OOOOOOOOOH HERE COMES THE SAVIOR

It's like the first game but more, so if you liked the first one you'll most likely enjoy this one as well. So far dash is the most impactful change gameplay-wise, it's more deliberate and requires good timing compared to the first game where it was fairly easy to trivialize a lot of encounters by dash-spamming even on high heat, so you'll have to pay good attention to enemy attacks. Resources, while there are much more of them, are much less annoying to acquire compared to the first game and it is generally generous at giving you those resources. Keepsakes grind unfortunately makes a return, so that sucks, it wasn't particularly fun in the first game and neither it is in this one since the process is exactly the same. Artstyle, soundtrack and voice performances are excellent, no notes. Overall yet another masterpiece by Supergiant.

EM4 when? 👀

Welp they gutted this game for 1.0, not only performance is far worse (and it wasn't already all that great to begin with), but stuff also got thrown out of the game entirely so there's less content that there was in early access, like gamemodes are gone entirely for example. Swat AI is still at a thinking capacity of a potato, not sure what all that fuss with the rework was, suspects still do not surrender even when surrounded and taking shots and they do not have unique behaviors tied to their scenarios (gas station thugs feel no different from professional mercenaries, neither are willing to surrender more than the other and both operate guns just as good with lethal precision). Civilians are idling in the middle of gun fights with hardly any reactions. Weapon customization is barebone at best, very few parts and you'd just end up picking the ones that give you the best "stats", so everyone will end up rocking the same exact parts. Blowing up doors with c2 turns doors into hyper rubber which ends up ping ponging from every single wall and across dimensions while also blocking all of your shots and obscuring your vision. Evidence (guns) still phase through the ground and disappear forever so good luck with your rank. Trailers are not present in the game at all even though they are mentioned in the patch notes for the release. Morale "system" for your fellow squadmates is a joke since it doesn't do much but waste your time before starting a new mission: load back to hub, unslot "bad" squadmates, slot new ones in, and then you can proceed with missions (before you just picked a mission after a mission and just played the game). Reworked hub area is meh, it's far too big for what little there is to interact with, and it's hollow, it's empty. And that upgraded lighting and shadows? I saw a spinning ceiling fan with its shadow not only not following the fan movement, but it wasn't even cast to where its shadow would logically should've been, aside from that there's also a problem of image just being overblown in random places, making it difficult to see things. At least the new maps are decent.

A rather interesting take on the genre, fast paced bullet hell and boss hunting adventure where bosses are hunting you while you are hunting them. Excellent array of weaponry from standard melee and guns to bizarre and fun stuff like throwable rats or the shovel rifle combo that can send stuff flying (and there's still more I've yet to see), with a decent amount of modifiers to make their attacks go wild. Slight resource management is present, like having to leave ammo/durability pickups for later use so you can replenish during boss fights. Environment is entirely destructible, so there often will be a lot of empty space left after explosive battles, and you can also make shortcuts to other rooms or side paths to make it easier to deal with some roaming enemies if you have appropriate weapons. Accompanied by neat sound design and visuals, animations are expressive and well done.

Played on steam deck (lcd, uv 50mv), mostly stable 60fps, dips a little when there's a lot of stuff happening at once (most noticeable on higher difficulties where the game turns into utter chaos), 8-11w (1280x800)

nexusmods.com/phasmophobia/mods/
gonna cry?

Hoooo boy, Firmament... is sadly not that great. Buggy, numerous softlocks, optimization isn't good (especially in St. Andrew realm, nice 15fps on lowest settings with dlss), yeah this is not the kind of quality I'd expect from a Cyan game. Gameplay-wise it's mostly walking with very few actual puzzles, a lot of back and forth, majority of the interactions are just turn this thing, watch a thing happen and go walk towards another thing that you can turn. Severe lack of lore readables and interactables. Visuals and scenes are pretty cool though, but that's pretty much the only positive thing I can highlight.

Also ♥♥♥♥ that one underwater "puzzle" with pipes and heaters, utter mess of a glorified pixel hunt, none of it was fun or engaging, it was just annoying and frustrating and a waste of time.

The Cat Lady on steroids, phenomenal from start to finish.

It's neat, doesn't alter the experience too much, but still feels refreshing. Two drawbacks: the mod's hard difficulty is much easier than vanilla HL hard, secondly the hive gun projectiles no longer have bright trails which makes them stupidly hard to see when alien grunts are spamming at you and you're trying to not get hit by them.