Reseñas recientes de Tiamonster

Unique puzzles. Beautiful artwork. Relaxing music. Take a break from your important life and help this kid summon a kaleidoscope monster.

A satirical take on the Witness, which is a game that I love (despite its pretentiousness). This is free and funny and has good puzzles.

I think the best and most pretentious way to summarize this game is that Return of the Obra Dinn maximizes the mystery game experience using a minimalist approach. Other than a few pieces of dialogue at the beginning, you work in silence. No internal monologue sharing musings when you discover something new. No, "I should check my journal" reminders. Here's a body, look at it, explore the scene.

Each crime scene shares only the moment of death. Like the rest of the game, scenes are shown using an intense, two-color art style that I don't have the vocabulary to explain. It's a unique experience that explores the overused high-seas setting a welcomed way.

And it's not just the art. The game loves to take your expectations and twist or subvert them like this. From the moment you get on the Obra Dinn, you think you know what happened, and it's not until you're untangling gunshots trails and reading bed tags that you realize you don't.

That's because the game is more than the weird circumstances that led to the ship's disappearance. It's about each individual crew member's story. And this is where my adoration peaks. Every single decision made about this game contributes to this. It's all about details, and, as a detail-oriented person, I found myself willingly immersed in them.

This isn't a mystery game where you compare a page in your journal with something on screen. As far as I can tell, it wants you out of the journal as much as possible. The biggest complaint I've seen is that you can't easily access scenes after discovering them; you have to walk back to that location and activate the scene again. And, while annoying at first, that extra time makes you walk past things that might pull on a thread in your memory. It makes you see the same things over and over and over. Details you'd skip if given the opportunity. Details you'd forget as you moved further into the game. Details that tell someone's story. How someone you found hiding at the beginning of the game turns out (after you've put in a few hours of investigation) to be a traumatized hero that's finally broken. Or how a British seaman finds his place with foreigners. Or how someone's sacrifice to kill a monster wasn't motivated by bravery but by despair.

I'm a fan of Papers, Please (Lucas Pope's last game), but I don't necessarily think it's that accessible. It's not a game that I casually recommend to someone without first knowing their preferences. I will happily recommend this game to anyone and everyone. Including you.

I found Jotun disjointed in tone: the art style doesn't match the narration doesn't match the combat doesn't match the story. I'll usually force myself to play at least an hour of a game, but I'm sad to say I got bored. You wander around a map that's too big fighting bland enemies with one of your two attacks, while this beautiful music and narration play over a dark children's cartoon. I had no motivation to continue and don't think I'd recommend it to anyone I know.

I don't think I've ever played a game quite like this. It's a walking simulator, but it's cut with vignettes--almost like Mario Party minigames. But that's selling it short.

In one, you're a kid on a swing, going higher and higher. In another, you navigate a pulpy comic book story panel by panel. They bookended the game with the two most compelling vignettes, creating a strong introduction and conclusion with an occasionally inconsistent (but still compelling) middle.

Aside from some forced language that pulled me right out ("A smile with too many teeth." Really?), the writing immersed me in the weird history of the Finch family.

This is a dreamy exploration game stuffed full of story and mystery. It has a few weak points, but, if you like narrative-focused games, dysfunctional familes, and/or magical realism, I can't recommend it enough.

Great art design. Strong writing with realistic characters and decisions that keep you invested. Near-perfect pacing. Chill soundtrack. It's not my favorite walking simulator, but its a damn good one.

Sometimes, I ignore warning signs of a bad game just to give it a chance. I love the idea of the puzzle mechanic here, so I ignored the trope-filled, 1920s-era, circus-mobster-burlesque setting. I ignored the writing that gives you cringe-worthy gems like "carousel of broken dreams" and expected dialogue like, "Don't smooth talk me, Johnny."

I ignored all of that for over two hours and discovered a clunky mess of mechanics. So, unfortunately, there's nothing here except a great puzzle concept.

If you love A Link to the Past, you should get this. The world is more open, so getting lost and bogged down in repition is a danger; but it's wonderful. It's challenging and funny and weird.

I'm an Assassin's Creed apologist, and I don't even like this one. I'll finish it, of course. But it's not good.

I love adventure games, exploration games, and walking simulators. That is, I generally don't find them boring. I want to get that out of the way, because, if you're like me, you ignore reviews that claim a game is slow or boring. Many people don't have the attention span or patience for a meditative game. I'm not typically that type of person.

That said, Night in the Woods is slow. Too slow for me, at least. A game's pace should compliment the rest of the gameplay. In a story where you find a severed arm in the street, jump around on telephone wires, and play minigames that include fast music simulators and top-down hack and slash dungeon crawlers, this grueling pace doesn't fit.

I put in four hours, and, other than that initial severed arm, the story hasn't progressed. So, in spite of the great reviews and the promise of a story that discusses mental health and identity, I'm not finishing this. I want to like it, but I'm just not having fun.