Kotti's bad takes on games


Previously played

Date 🔻GameRatingCommentsFinishedSneakyVods
Ongoing or soon™
Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem (2002)
No vods available
23 Mar 2023
Filcher (2021)
6
- One of the rare games that goes for the sounds/shadows stealth of Thief, and does it mostly well
- Pretty good level design with different paths and a nice variety of locations
- No mid-mission saves meant that a small mistake could be very costly and not in a fun way as you'd just end up repeating the exact same steps. I like having some limitations to saves to avoid save scumming, but this was not the right way to go about it.
- Sound propagation didn't quite work in all situations, especially foot steps on metal were always very loud and it was practically impossible to tell which way people were moving or where the sound was coming from
- I appreciate the fact that there was a rating system and that it was explained, just a shame the stealth portion of it was very binary
Finished (5.5h)✔️
19 Mar 2023
Gothic (2001)
7
- Really good lore and setting
- Unique and functional control scheme
- Everything felt simplified to a fitting degree (only one slot for armor, very few stats, reasonably small world, no lengthy exposition dumps)
- Level ups and gear upgrades felt like they were making a significant difference and you were getting stronger
- Janky as hell, both in good and bad
- Lots of time wasted on traversing the world, another fast travel point would've been nice
- Individual quests were often pretty lackluster, either they felt unfinished or too video gamey. While the overarching story was good, the moments in it felt mediocre
- Combat was alright, but fell apart when fighting groups of enemies
- An hour in a blacksmith glitched out and showed me a vision of what was going to happen 24 hours later. Peak Jank.
Finished (25h)
12 Mar 2023
Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood (2002)
5
- Like Commandos and Desperados, extremely clunky and mechanically poorly aged
- Maps are much smaller and missions easier/shorter than in Commandos/Desperados and that's only a good thing in this genre
- The environments look good, but often end up making important things hard to see
- I like how it reuses maps in multiple missions, but unfortunately a lot of the missions feel very linear and devolve into big man with a stick knocking everyone out in 1vX combat
- The forest missions and much of the camp are unnecessary filler and there's a ton of it
- The combat is amusing when it functions, but too often you end up not being in control of whether you're in combat or not, and that makes it a horrible experience
Medium (16h)
06 Mar 2023
Cryostasis (2009)
5
- Body/room temperature mechanic was an original way to handle health
- A couple of neat sections like some stormy exteriors and the movie theatre
- Good setting with the nuclear icebreaker
- Repetitive combat that started off promising but quickly declined
- Flashbacks got very tedious and had too much trial and error in them
- Story came across as pretentious or nonexistent
- Felt like it had the pieces to be a mix of Condemned and Obra Dinn, but wasn't very good at being either
Finished (6h)
27 Feb 2023
Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened (2007)
5
- Sherlock versus Cthulhu is a really good idea
- Some of the lore/backstory was interesting
- The puzzles and the plot points often made no sense, even if Sherlock claimed it was all logical
- Not as insane as Mystery of the Druids, and not as coherent as Gabriel Knight 2, in a way fell short in both ways
Finished (9.5h)
25 Feb 2023
Blood: Fresh Supply (2019)
6
- Levels flow nicely and I like how they often have a sense of place and connect to one another
- Good setting and style
- Lightly Broiled felt comparable to UV in Doom which is good, I don't think dealing with all the hitscanners would've been fun on a higher difficulty
- The limited enemy/weapon variety made the first two episodes pretty weak. Episode 3 on the other hand was far better than any of the other ones, both in terms of setting and gameplay.
- Doom 64 is still my favorite of the few boomer shooters I've played and I don't really get the hype around Blood as whole, but episode 3 is maybe my favorite set of levels in these games.
Lightly Broiled (6.5h)Not streamed
18 Feb 2023
Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010)
9
- Very strong atmosphere
- Great pacing, both in terms of scary/safe and open ended/linear
- Insightful developer commentary
- Very Lovecraft-esque story, down to the writing style. Protagonist only talked during flashbacks which was a nice way to build character and story without spoiling the immersion.
- Puzzles made enough sense, good by survival horror standards
- No separate audio sliders and the dialogue (including the dev commentary) was a bit too quiet. Also no subtitles for the commentary.
Normal (7h)✔️
14 Feb 2023
Nobodies (2019)
4
- Murder scene cleanup is an interesting idea for a point-and-click game
- Being split into chapters made each puzzle nice and self contained
- Looks pleasant enough
- Kinda clumsy controls
- Most of the puzzles felt really convoluted and not in a fun way. It really kills the puzzle when you spend a lot of time trying to accomplish something arbitrary for an unknown reason before even figuring out what you're trying to do. The first puzzles were fine, but the longer it went on the worse it got.
Finished (4h)Not streamed
11 Feb 2023
Commandos 2: Men of Courage (2001)
- Played the remastered version, spent 1h in the tutorials and 2h in one (1) mission
- Aged like already slightly rotten eggs, to able to follow Shadow Tactics this was in need of a full remake rather than a simple remaster. Convoluted controls where almost every small action required either its own hotkey or Ctrl/Alt/Shift as a modifier, clumsy camera controls, extremely lacking object highlight options, and tutorials that missed a huge amount of key mechanics.
Did not finish (3h)✔️