Recent reviews by gt4

TL;DR Prodeus is of the best retro shooters on market. If you like retro shooters - it's a must.

+ Intense gameplay with great gunplay while there're tons of difficulty levels so you can make it more challenging.
+ Very well adapted oldschool visuals (surprisingly, my eyes didn't bleed after a couple hours in the game)
+ Nice soundtrack.
+ Great balance between retro shooter mechanics and innovations.

And most importantly, it's fun to play. Even if you never played retro FPS before but looking for some intense action - Prodeus might be a good pick for you.

Transient is a narrative driven walking simulator with puzzles in cyberpunk setting with some lovecraftian vibes. The story here isn't bad, but it will be interesting mostly for people who like such setting. The exploration is rather limited and mostly related to some collectibles, but I highly recommend to actually read notes/documents that you may also find in locations.

Puzzles are nice. I can't say that puzzles are outstanding but they are mostly creative and entertaining, with a good diversity. Hacking mini-game is fun.

All technical aspects are decent in general, but there's somewhat inconsistent quality of visuals. Most of the time game looks good but some scenes/cutscenes look significantly worse.

All in all, Transient can entertain you with some decent puzzles and it will be interesting for players who like horror adventures in cyberpunk and/or lovecraftian setting.

Long story short - Ghostrunner is quite amazing, but it's not a game for everyone, at least some people would enjoy it a lot more than others.

It's a katana-sword melee combat game with tons of platforming/parkour. Technical part is very solid - visuals, sound/music and controls are amazing. All mechanics are fair to the player and almost perfectly polished. There's a lot of cool details like secrets and even talents/perks are implemented in a very creative way here.

Ghostrunner is relatively hardcore - you'll die a lot in this game, but at the same time there're no really hard areas to beat if you're using your abilities/cooldowns correctly + checkpoints are generous.

I'd say there's too much platforming outside of combat to the point when it starts to be annoying. Shielded enemies mechanic is not fun either. Actually fun, intense and challenging fights are rare, and it's the main reason why I don't really want to replay Ghostrunner after completing it (in 6-7 hours). Maybe I'll replay it again some day.

Ghostrunner is a perfect game for people who enjoy semi-hardcore games for speedruns or no-death challenges -- here're more than enough opportunities for it. For everyone else it could be a hit or miss. Again, it's a great game, but an actual gameplay could be very different from what you expected after watching trailers or reading a description. 8.5/10

It's hard to say much about The Sojourn as it's a puzzle game without actual storytelling and it doesn't show us anything that we haven't seen in other games before.

It's that type of game where you can't say anything bad about it but at the same time it's rather tedious - it's very unlikely that you'd want to complete it in one play session. It has nice visuals, it's polished and there's pleasant music most of the time. However, there are better alternatives like The Witness that was available for many years, or great puzzlers with more entertaining gameplay like Lightmatter, or dozens of minimalistic puzzlers that may provide a similar level of challenge with simpler but smoother gameplay.

All in all, it's a decent game with good puzzles, nice visuals/atmosphere and slightly outdated game design/presentation so I'd recommend it to people who enjoy puzzle adventures with walking simulator mechanics and looking for more games of this genre. An easy skip or purchase with a solid discount for everyone else. 7/10

Mafia: Definitive Edition is a remake that feels like a completely new game based on original one. It took the best aspects from the controversial Mafia III and mixed those with a story from original Mafia.

The game looks great and technical aspects are impressive, especially cutscenes. Shooting is close to what we saw in Mafia III with some more oldschool tweaks. Also, there's a "Classic" difficulty setting that is much closer to the original game.

I remember the original game quite well and there's plenty of minor but important changes to characters and story, so overall impression/emotions after some scenes are different. Not particularly worse, but different. With that in mind Mafia: Definitive Edition can't completely replace the original game if you want to experience it again or if you never played it and want to try this classic. But it's still a great standalone game that would be appealing to people who never played original as well as to people who played the original game bringing them a lot of nostalgic memories and providing a new look for familiar situations.

BPM is a roguelike FPS with optional rhythm elements. Yes, exactly optional as you can disable the rhythm thing in options. Is it still a good game without this feature? Yes, it's still good - I've played with and without rhythm requirement and it looks more like an additional challenge rather than an essential feature to enjoy this game. And all the positive and negative aspects in this game are not related to it. Personally, I've played only ~2-3 hours with rhythm requirement after I got used to other mechanics but then I turned it off again - I'm not a huge fan of it and how it's done while I liked most of the other things here.

First of all, BPM is a roguelike, with all random stuff that you can expect from it - chests, coins and ways to spend them, randomly generated dungeons, random loot, shops, relics, upgrades, weapons etc. Get lucky and you will be destroying everything. Sometimes it creates weird situations when you know for sure that you will slaughter everyone while you may still be on the first level of Hard difficulty. Almost every time the first 2-3 levels were harder than later ones, because you can kinda faceroll everything after obtaining certain items and a decent HP pool. At the same time, the game would be rather challenging if you didn't get good upgrades/items early.

+ Gunplay is mostly enjoyable. It's fun to shoot enemies here.
+ Different guns and abilities create relatively unique experiences when using and combining them. Your "rocket launcher" playthrough experience will be different compared to revolver or something else.
+ The game is polished really well in every technical aspect. I never experienced lags/bugs or glitches in BPM.
+ Soundtrack is actually good but, unfortunately, there're not that many tracks.

+- At first I wanted to complain about the amount of content but there's some replayability actually. When you beat the game for the first time on Hard (that you can do in one hour, but more likely in 2-4 hours) - that means that most likely you've seen like 90% on the game content and gameplay experience. But there're 5 Valkyries (heroes) in total and some of those provive slightly different gameplay experience and it's fun to try to beat the game as each of those. There're also some challenges to do. Even though there's not that much of variety - I still wanted to replay this game over and over again.
+- Bosses are kinda meh -- only 2 out of 8 bosses require some actual efforts/strategy to kill them, but only when you're unable to annihilate them fast enough (that is often possible to do). But in general bossfights are not that bad.

- Probably one of the most annoying reload mechanics in the history of shooters. In short, you have to press the R button two-three times to reload. It's soooo fun when you have 4 (or even less) bullets in your gun. In addition, reloading also goes poorly with other actions. The hardest thing in this game is to constantly think about reloading and it's definitely not a fun way to make your game harder. And yeah, if you have a revolver/rifle then you're welcome to reload each bullet manually, yay! You can get used to it and it's even immersive at times but it's not fun.
- Some essential objects are barely visible. For example, altars where you have to donate coins to get upgrades. Honestly, on the last level it looks like bad trolling - I can't imagine that people who tested this game never mentioned it. Not much better on other levels though.
- Poor description for several items, bad variety of items and questionable balance between them. I still don't know how exactly some items/mechanics work after 10+ hours in the game (and some of those are impossible to guess for sure, without exact numbers/descriptions). Poor variety/amount of items is another reason why you won't be able to have any "build" that would provide a different gameplay experince that you can often expect in other roguelikes (there's one specific build that you can do around one ability and it'll be rather effective but that's it I believe). All you need is to get an overpowered shield with HP regen + a decent weapon and you're good to go.

All in all, BPM: BULLETS PER MINUTE is a fun and somewhat unique game. It's cool as a shooter, it's decent as a roguelike, the rhythm feature fits well enough and you can always disable it if you don't like it. While it's challenging and fun to play, don't expect a huge variety of gameplay experience besides weapons - almost every (successful) playthrough would be very similar here. I have A LOT of questions about balance in this game but I guess balance is not that important if the game is still fun to play. I just managed to beat the game as 5th Valkyrie without taking any damage and it was a really awesome experience, so 8/10 for BPM from me while I understand that it's far from perfect.

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is a game about 10 million years evolution of humans where you'd start with discovering basic interactions and exploration. It's an interesting and unique concept with lots of cool features and ideas. Then you'd be able to kill a sabertooth tiger with a stick and chop him with a meteorite stone at some point. Cool stuff.

It's a great game if you're into crafting/survival and trial and error gameplay doesn't scare you. However, there's 2 major gameplay issues that could be more or less obvious depending on your playstyle and luck. Freedom of what to do and where to go is an illusion here. I had to abandon my 6 hours playthrough because I became da best the last monkey in the jungle and new ones didn't spawn (I've checked almost the whole map). This was reported a year ago (one year beta-test wasn't enough) as I've checked forums and many people had this issue but it happened. When I encountered the same problem for a second time then I decided to only follow "the orders" (there's something like a super weird quest order tab but only to some point). So I don't really believe that any playthrough here will be unique.

Even if you'd be lucky enough to not end up in a situation when you'd have to abandon your 6 hours save - you'd still experience a lot of annoying/frustrating mechanics with clunky controls. I'm not talking about things that are here for immersion, only about poor adaptation to mouse + keyboard and non-intuitive mechanics. There's nothing challenging in this game. I've never had this feeling during 70 hours in Death Stranding on max difficulty while I was constantly annoyed in Ancestors and wasn't able to get used to some things even after 10 hours in the game.

All in all, Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is a fun and unique game - I'm mostly enjoying it so far. At the same time this game may heavily disappoint you if you're not ready to google what to do in a certain situation and if you're not ready to follow in-game instructions to a certain point, because as a "sandbox" experience it doesn't work too well while "trial and error" method may end up in a completely lost progression. This is a first game where I had to backup saves and it's definitely not adding up any fun. 8/10 for the game itself and 3/10 for poorly implemented mechanics.

The Dreamcatcher is a walking simulator, almost without a story, that makes it an "experience". Technical aspects are decent - nice visuals and sound, good level design and overall performance. It's just boring too often and it offers not that many interesting moments as an "experience" as it should.

After 1 hour in the game I caught myself thinking that making the "sprint" button 2 times more effective would make this game 2 times more fun. I believe it describes gameplay better than anything else.

Game was (much) better closer to an end, but I'm not sure if I wouldn't drop my playthrough earlier if I didn't decide to write this review properly. I saw 2 endings as (thankfully) it was possible to load save right before (the only?) meaningful choice in the game. I'm not sure if there's more endings but I doubt that there's any other variety in the game. It took me less than 2 hours to do it. Imagine playtime if there was an improved sprint button though.

All in all, The Dreamcatcher feels like a decent but outdated walking simulator. I do not recommend this game for a full price, but you may find some fun here with a good discount. There're some good scenes/moments but most of the time it's just too simple and slow. There's nothing really bad in this game but at the same time there's nothing exceptional that may catch your attention and worth your time. 6/10

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Dreamscaper is an ARPG with roguelite progression and hack'n'slash combat. There're 2 major parts in the game - dreams where all action is happening, and real world where you can interact with some characters and get some bonuses for your future battles in your dreams.

An overall quality of the game is quite amazing and there's a lot of cool features:

+ Great combat system. It's challenging and rewarding - well timed attacks are way better than button mashing. There's also a decent amount of different weapons that are suitable for different playstyles.
+ Well designed enemies. There's not that many of them, but each of those feels unique and requires a different approach.
+ Simple but entertaining puzzles. Solving a puzzle will reward you with equipment.
+ Very nice music in the game.

+- Real world part feels more like a tool (for roguelite progression) and wasn't really interesting for me. Luckily it's skippable and doesn't take much time.

Currently I believe there's enough content for ~15 hours. It's not a game that you'd want to replay over and over again after completing it, but there should be more content added later on and it's still a lot of a quality playtime.

Dreamscaper is very polished for an Early Access release and it's really fun to play. An easy recommendation for fans of ARPGs/roguelikes. 8.5/10

Creative and immersive, that's how I'd describe What Happened. This game is a journey through anxiety and depression of a high school student, Stiles.
From a gameplay perspective it's a Walking Simulator/Psychological Horror. What Remains of Edith Finch is probably the closest similar game that I remember, but What Happened is definitely a unique project.

Pros:
+ A lot of creative decisions for visuals/atmosphere/gameplay. Intuitive level design.
+ Great visuals/sounds and technical part as a whole. Good voice acting.
+ A solid lenght (5+ hours) for a game of this genre, with a great variety of events/locations.

And a few words about the story before mentioning things that I didn't like. This story is about anxiety and depression, bullying in school and personal tragedies, friendship and betrayal, your own demons and suicide. While all these topics are rather serious and were depicted quite well in the game, personally, I did not get enough details of the story to dive into it more fully and to understand the characters (and game ending didn't help me at all).

Cons:
- I didn't like all the characters. I wasn't able to empathize MC while I totally understand the game's message. From the store page - "The empathy you show for the character will subtly affect the outcome of his journey." Yeah, I got a bad ending, heh.
- A common issue for any walking simulator - replayability. I've missed some achievements and there's 2 other endings, but replaying the whole game while being unable to even skip cutscenes would be too much for me, at least for now. I actually started a new game after completing my first run and I had some hopes that it's possible to at least get a different ending faster somehow. But it seems like there's no way.

All in all, What Happened will be interesting for people who like walking simulators and psychological horrors. I enjoyed it mostly because of an impressive technical part and creative game design decisions, while the story itself wasn't that interesting for me. 8/10

P.S. I don't think that it was an actual reference but a couple of scenes heavily reminded me of a "house" from Lars von Trier's "The House That Jack Built".

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