After finishing Death Stranding, I went back to smaller games, here's what I playd since then:
CULTIC: this game is incredible, "boomer shooter" fans should not skip this one. The first and most striking strength the game has is the presentation, pixel-art and stripe goodness, just check the screenshots below, it's so pretty to look at that my friends got immediately interested and wanted to know more about the game just from looking at a couple screenshots I sent. The gameplay itself is great as well, gunplay is badass, with a surprisingly brilliant level design that elevated the game even more with masterful moment to moment action, like, at times it fels as if Valve made a horror game. The soundtrack and sounds in general were great as well, just all around brilliant game.
Despite being "chapter one" only, I'm already satisfied with my 9 hour playtime, and even though the second chapter will be a separate purchase, which at first I didn't like before playing the game, now I'm right behind this solo dev and I'll be buying it for sure.
Lost Ruins: this is an alright slightly-perverted Metroidvania that feels like its the devs first foray into making games, it's especially evident in the amateur-ish story. a couple hours in I was going to flush the game because it wasn't really interesting to play but just as I was about to turn it down for good, the gameplay got good enough just enough to keep me interested to keep playing, it's a short one too so I just decided to keep going. The highlight here is some of the quests and how they affect the ending of the game in a surprisingly cool way, it's just a shame since the rest of the game wasn't on the same level, I didn't catch on and didn't bother to do these story-altering quests. Like I said it's just an okay game, if one likes Metroidvanias, I guess you'll stay interested for the 6 hours or so this has to offer, nothing outstanding though, I even forgot to take screenshots.
Next up: the original Mafia and SOMA, both of which I already started, won't share any initial thoughts now, it'll have to wait till full overview in the next couple weeks.
Managed to finish both games on the same day 2 days ago. As holiday is already over, finishing games will take much longer time from now on.
Mafia (2002)
This game is the reason why I created my Steam account when they gave it away for free in 2018, long before I ever thought of getting serious into PC gaming as I was on PS4 at the time, it was a "just in case". Only took 6 years to get here and sit down and play the game, lol.
Even though I'm burnt out of the gangster organized crime stories in film and television, I was immediately hooked here, the devs knew exactly what they were doing. I really liked the way the game starts with this big shot made man submitting and giving it all up to the detective to save his family, and the fact the levels you play are just the retelling of his story to the detective.
Now the game as a game played in 2025 is admittedly on the tough-to-swallow side, on one hand, it's absolutely marvelous in areas such as the city and the attention to detail that went to capture that 1930s New York vibes with excellent soundtrack, world design and art direction. The locations, the people, the music, the cars, the heaters, it's all spot on. This alone carries a lot of weight when playing the game, it adds a lot to immersion. There's also the open ended nature of some of the levels which I really enjoyed especially as it goes in line with the story, being told through the chaos and uncertainty within the open and rapidly chainging events. The story itself and characters for the most part are great too, most of the time the game plays like the best Italian mobster movie you've never seen.
On the other hand, this is clearly a third person PC game that came out in 2002, controls are dumb, the PC build is crap with weird bugs like settings not saving when you close the game, and many softlocking bugs that are easy to trigger and just force you to restart from an earlier save. Beyond the technical issues, the game is just difficult as hell, half the missions I couldn't finish in one life because it's that hard to stay alive, in all of the combat levels there's barely any medkits to heal, so for the majority of the game it was me restarting a checkpoint over and over with like 4HP trying to clear out a level basically without getting hit, and there are no manual saves so no save scumming here. There's also the filler segments where after every mission, you have to manually drive back to HQ, instead of just the mission ending where it ended with a cutscene, there's a lot of this in the game where whole 'gameplay' sections feel better off if they were just told through cutscenes. The difficulty did get frustrating once, where I thought maybe I should just go boot up the remake, but I was really interested in seeing how Tommy's story will end, the plot was the main driving force for playing this game to the end, because it's a damn captivating one.
The story and characters, while great, are also inconsistent, one of the things is that the missions feel too episodic, which makes sense narrative wise as they're just key events that future Tommy is recalling to the detective, but the game flow does suffer from it, like sometimes I'd be finishing a dramatic and impactful mission, then the next cutscene would start as if it has been months with a new gig at hand, it felt abrupt at times. Furthermore, the writing isn't always there, it is great in key moments, but sometimes it feels cheesy and kind of weak. The ending I really liked, especially the 'moral of the story' message that Tommy narrates, apparently the remake changed this for some reason which feels dumb to me, like it's perfect why would you change it? Other changes that I found I didn't like such as Tommy's character design and voice work, in the remake it makes him look more like a tough guy already looking for trouble before it came to him, rather than the original being a softspoken cab driver who was a victim of circumstances.
All in all, this is a great classic that despite all its issues, tough levels and padded segments that basically made it 6 hours longer that it could've, I'm still glad I pushed through and played the original, instead of playing an altered version in the remake that the more I read about, the more I appreciate the intentions and effort of the original team in '02.
SOMA
Frictional Games are just the masters of psychological horror, they do not miss. Back in the day, Amnesia was just too scary for me to finish as a kid lol, I should probably try it again now.
So with their reputation and me always reading about how this is one of the best horror games out there, what I didn't expect is a seriously great and impressive narrative game with interesting and captivating philosophical themes. Now unlike most people online who apparently the game changed their opinion on the meaning of life, my faith is not that flimsy. It's still highly entertaining and I think it was well executed by the devs. The narrative is so good, that it feels like it's a story focused mystery game that just happened to be horror by accident, sort of like Subnautica, but this is still horror game by design. The best kind of horror, is the organic and naturally occurring one.
The ending was incredible and amazingly bleak, I'm not too sure about the post credits segment though, I don't think it was really necessary, and the game should've stopped at the dark conclusion before the credits.
Onto the gameplay, since this is a Frictional game, you better expect interactive objects, I think I spent at least half and hour on the first level at the flat, just messing with the physics and picking up and throwing shit, it's so fun why don't all games do this, fuck all these new and shiny ray traced static worlds that get made these days, this 2015 game that can run on a toaster looks stunning
and you can pick and mess with just about anything you see. Until the very end of the game I'd pick random shit up and have fun with the physics, it never got old.
This is a brilliant, chef's kiss game, and I'm excited to play their The Bunker entry and see what the team had in store for us in their latest endeavour that came out in 2023. Possibly even go back to The Dark Descent at some point as well.
Next up: Thief Gold and Black Mesa. See ya in a few weeks.