https://store.steampowered.com/app/332380/Asguaard/

Asguaard is your average turn-based RPG. That announcement should come as either great or disappointing news, depending upon what you're looking for in your faux-Japanese fantasy material. As expected, you assume the role of a teenage boy, venture through a fantastical landscape along with a dwarf, a unicorn, and a girl who's obviously your love interest; and stave off the forces of darkness with the power of friendship. However, there's one huge difference here: you aren't playing the usual, spunky, over-eager adventurer that usually pops up in titles like this...

Let's face it: if any of us were to jump into our favorite pieces of media, we wouldn't be the badass characters we think we'd be. None of us turn out to be the master survivor during a zombie apocalypse or the spaceship captain who effortlessly outmaneuvers an alien battleship. In fact, we'd more likely end up one of the millions of zombies roaming the country or dead among the floating debris in space. The same can be said for the roleplaying genre, especially if we're talking about our fifteen-year-old selves being transported to a fantasy realm out of the blue. That's what happens to this game's protagonist, Glen. He turns out to be your average, moody teenager who's socially awkward and lacks confidence. Basically, he's me from twenty-six years ago...

Glen makes his diffidence known straight off. A dwarf named Grom informs him that he's been randomly selected from the world of humans to help fight off an evil plague threatening the land of Asguaard. He informs everyone that he's possibly the worst person for the job, but decides to go along with the plan anyway because what choice does he have? Throughout his travels, he consistently bashes himself, doubts his talents, and mocks his teammates as if he's projecting his own insecurities onto them.

During a key event in the proceedings, Glen doesn't get what he wants from a particular exchange and ends up lashing out at his allies. He often shows what appears to be his true, ugly character, but you have to consider that his contempt comes from a lack of experience. Often, his pessimism crops up only to be proven wrong. He ends up feeling a tinge of remorse for how he conducted himself, and after a while he begins to change his tune. Midway through the campaign, we see him shed his initial self-doubt and overly critical attitude and shape into a more rational, clear-minded traveler. Honestly, that's how angst-ridden, buzzkill-type characters should be handled: as more dynamic folks with plenty of room to grow and mature.

Unfortunately, Glen's arc represents only one small facet that Asguaard nails. The rest of the storyline offers mostly forgettable material, from a one-dimension antagonist and his minions to a handful of fair-at-best plot beats. Your voyage mostly focuses on locating some items needed to complete your main objective. Though it's easy to recognize the imagination and creativity that went into dreaming up the game's many scenarios, you still conclude each act feeling a tad underwhelmed. For instance, at one point you travel into the depths of the planet itself, and somehow you come away not feeling even a little awed. The thing is it's hard not to dredge up thought of titles that executed that concept with due grandeur, like Final Fantasy IV. As a result, this adventure at times feels all the more meager by wearing its inspirations on its sleeve.

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https://store.steampowered.com/app/1776160/You_Will_Not_Remain/

You Will (not) Remain is a (free) game about surviving the end of the world brought along by an eldritch abomination. Except, that’s just the background noise rather than the driving thrust of the game. There’s no controlling a ragtag group of misfits trying to take back control of their dying world, nor are you a desperate survivor sifting through the ruins to try and eke out a post-Apocalypse existence. There’s no need; you’re perfectly safe in your apartment. You have ample supplies, running electricity and a warm bed. To survive, all you have to do is stay there. The problem is, the only thing you have to do is stay there.

Going out to your balcony will give you a decent view of what used to be the city. The buildings are still there, but there’s a huge purple monstrosity nestled in among them now. That’s a cause for concern. Infrequently, your radio will splutter into life and warn you about it. You’ll be safe so long as you stay indoors, it tells you. Don’t go outside. Don’t have any contact with anyone who’s been outside. Just never leave your homes and don’t let anything in, and you’ll be okay.

It probably won’t take you very long to match Remain’s fantastical plight with the more mundane reality we’re all currently facing with that whole Covid-19 thing. That’s why it’s not about fighting monsters, but surviving the sudden isolation you’re forced into when the rest of the world is suddenly closed off to you. What’s left to try and fill your days? How do you cope when you used to have an entire world to explore, and now you’re limited to the tiny patch of it you call home?

You Will (not) Remain attempts to fill this with an easily exhausted list of mundane tasks. There’s a flower to water, I guess. And coffee to drink. You can turn the TV on, but there’s nothing going on there. Other than that, you can look outside now and then and see the world you used to be able to interact with. Quietly mocking you by existing. It’s very, very easy to consume the list of things you’re able to achieve, so why not just crawl back into bed and give up on the day? Give up on the week? Give up on the world?

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https://store.steampowered.com/app/470260/Event0/

by BrianC

Beyond graphical enhancements, programming and other aspects of video-games, artificial intelligence feels like the final frontier for games where its possibilities seem endless. The pursuit of greater artificial intelligence is not merely the means to add greater challenge or more immersion, but to explore the software’s innerworkings to discover how much of its creation is the result of precise coding and of accidental surprises in action. It is the one aspect of video-games that perhaps is the most tangible that will never truly snuff out the endless questions of its mystery, and Event[0], while not exactly revolutionary, goes to show the untapped potential of a dream in its simplicity.

As with any other artifice of fiction, the A.I. of E0 is a lot more idealistic than it could possibly ever be, and this aspect is its greatest shortcoming as a game. Through storytelling and gameplay, E0 seizes upon the primal necessity of fiction to warrant its existence. Eons since man first dreamed, fiction masquerades its true purpose of make-believe as a learning tool to explore possibilities either dreamed in the immediate or the impending future to persuade others to heed their warnings of what may come to pass. In the case of E0, the lesson it teaches is not to prevent the inevitability of A.I. but to understand its shortcomings, its potential and its value as the realities are less of a concern for the future but one of the impending present.

Artificiality and purpose are not only themes of Event[0] but they are also central to the illusions it creates in terms of innovative gameplay, which is a whole lot of smoke and mirrors to disguise tech, old and new, to create an actual companion who appears to have learning capabilities. The mechanics are taken from games like Wasteland and many Infocom text-adventures where player inputs are conveyed through typing responses with the modern conventions of walking simulators to add audiovisual elements and immersive qualities to enhance its gameplay. It is essentially a glorified ChatBot given its own game, but simply saying it repeats what has already been tried and true with the same benefits and flaws would be a mistake.

The genius element behind what makes E0 believable is not so much its accuracy in imitating intelligence but how it creates a persona to a degree that excuses its shortcomings. Knowing that the only character you associate is an A.I., this fact gives the player enough suspension of disbelief to work around the game’s shortcomings, which is the A.I itself. Kaizen, the ship’s A.I., manages to communicate with enough variety of his responses as well as demonstrate the illusion of understanding the connotations of words that you would have to intentionally type out responses to at its weakest moments to break the illusion. It demonstrates the ability to make inferences from sentences (ex. mentioning a name and then referring to that person as she/he) as well as building some sort of long-term memory about your interactions in its database.

Honestly, the illusion itself is so sophisticated I would have never understood it without the help of Mark Brown’s video, which explains how the A.I. responses operate under the guise of context clues that associate tags (nouns, locations, etc.) generating a list of variable sentences. Games of old were limited by their memory constraints to make these responses anything less than scripts that searched for keywords, but these additional changes is what makes the false appearance of human intelligence feel real. The limitations of Kaizen is similar to the Moravec Paradox mentioned by Steven Pinker, which in layman’s terms describes that it’s not teaching A.I.s how to respond that is the attribute of intelligence but providing the “fundamentals” we take for granted like the senses and applying them to make conclusions that demonstrate real cognitive thought. This method of learning, however, is the basis of imitating human thinking, and it’s the problem of creating these “fundamentals” (ex. How do you program the ability to see?) that is the next challenge. It’s a shame then that E0 is over before the game can really explore just how far it can keep up its pretenses.

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https://store.steampowered.com/app/262000/Gabriel_Knight_Sins_of_the_Fathers_20th_Anniversary_Edition/

A macabre string of murders plague the city of New Orleans. Bodies found gruesomely peeled asunder, ribcages cracked open and hearts removed. The police are stumped, eager to blame the spree on the city’s dark underbelly and almost desperate to relegate the eldritch tracings around each corpse as elaborate red herrings. The killers, they theorise, are trying too hard to make these look like voodoo sacrifices. It’s probably turf warfare, and who cares if a bunch of professional thugs off each other in manners most gruesome?

In this case, Gabriel Knight does. Not out of some sense of noble duty or righteous anger, but because he’s the owner of a failing bookstore doubling up as a failing author, and he’s desperate for new material. His childhood friend is the lead detective on the case, and Knight’s certainly not above manipulating the few associates he has in order to better his personal circumstances. He’ll stomp around crime scenes, looking for inspiration, or occasionally ‘borrowing’ evidence to better understand the situation. He’s not coming off as an archetypal heroic protagonist is he?

Maybe that’s a a little unfair, but in spite of his name, Gabriel’s no angel. Hidden behind his lazy southern drawl lurks no small measure of sleaze. The most foot traffic his forgotten bookstore sees is of a female persuasion, and they often bypass the easy reading sections and hotfoot directly to his bedroom out back. Early on, he visits the shores of a local lake in a setting that might be described as picturesque if not for the dismembered body nearby. He soon forgets his ill-deserved access to an area closed off from the public and whatever gains he may make by his questionable association as soon as a passing limo pulls over to make enquiries. He labels the passenger the most attractive woman he has ever seen and, for the time being at least, his investigations are entirely refocused elsewhere.

Spare a thought for Detective Mosley, forced to suffer Knight through an oft-tested sense of loyalty (and the dangled carrot of a juicy part in the crime’s novelisation someday), but spare a couple for Grace Nakamura. Forced to fail at being the common sense behind Knight’s egotistical snooping, she gets to sit in his empty bookstore all day, selling nothing and staying alert for when Gabriel skips up the store ladder to peek down her top for the nineteenth time. If Gabriel gets by on smarmy charm and cult of personality, it’s often built upon hard fact engineered by Grace’s research. She’s the wary caution behind his puppy dog enthusiasm.

Entirely warranted caution. Gabriel starts off with no intention of playing the vigilante detective; nibbling out little titbits of information purely in the hopes of finally writing a book interesting enough that people might buy it. He visits voodoo museums, attends lectures, piecing together the inklings of a horrific tale dismissed by the city. Soon, whatever material gains he hopes to harvest are replaced by morbid fascination which, in turn, becomes a deeply personal quest, forcing him to question the meaning of his own forgotten bloodline.

This was all true in 1993, when the game was originally released, and still is today. It debuted right at the end of the adventure gaming boom but still managed to be a critical and commercial success, and if retro snobbery is your jam, you can still play it now in all its pixel-painted finery. Still, it’s a creature of its era, and it does suffer from some hang-ups, such as ‘dumb icon’ interface, which demands your offer manual pretext to both your pointing and clicking. There’s a panel atop the screen offering you all kinds of exciting actions such as LOOK, ASK and WALK, meaning if you want to LOOK at something, ASK someone a question or WALK somewhere, you need to fiddle about with your options. Sometimes, it seems a particular irritant – why does ASK and TALK need their own distinct options, for example? Usually I would have no other choice than to try and talk this up as a product of the game’s times, and a bloody good job I’d do of it, too. But then in 2013, the entire game got remade from the ground up. For better and for worse.

You can read the full review by clicking on these words right here.[www.honestgamers.com]

This review is a part of Project: Horror, our attempt at providing a horror-themed game review for every day of October. It's a long, hard road and we could really use your help. Got a suitable review you'd like to include? Please let us know about it HERE.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/612070/Kios_Adventure/

The horror genre is old and often retreads concepts as a result. Sometimes such revisits of aged ideas earn the scorn of fans like myself, and we chide content creators for not feeding us original material. Meanwhile, we eventually tuck into derivative products that delivered the goods despite their lack of innovation. This might seem hypocritical, but the truth is there is no magic bullet when it comes to creating quality horror. You can churn out the most unoriginal dreck and still garner either a small fanbase or fierce defenders. On the flip side, unique pieces can still be questionable, even if they bravely explore unfamiliar themes or conventions.

Kio's Adventure snugly falls into the latter category, as it's an original game with some memorable moments. However, as a piece of horror entertainment, it peters out after you crawl past the midpoint. It kicks off with three teenage Japanese girls visiting a fast food joint. There, they chat about high school and boys, only to be rudely interrupted by an earthquake. One of them, Kio, awakens in a musty old dungeon, with neither of her friends in sight. Straight off, the campaign raises questions and captures your interest, beckoning you to continue so you can get some answers.

However, the early phases only conjure another question: WHY? This arrives after an ordeal that sees you escaping a spiked wall that attempts to crush you, only to end up in a torture chamber where you find one of the game's minor characters buck naked, strapped into a guillotine. They only have enough time to give you quick instruction before the blade falls, severing their head and leaving a geyser-like stump that sprays blood everywhere. After that, you view a few more horrific scenes before coming across an immense mound of writhing flesh, not to mention slithering, worm-like creatures apparently made out of human body parts. And all you can ask is Why? There's no rhyme or reason; it's all just random scary and nasty things happening one after another, from torture porn to haunted hallways.

Although these opening segments present some truly unnerving material, they lose their bite with each line of poorly translated dialogue. At first, the clumsy chatter easy to ignore, but then you start having Breath of Fire II flashbacks. For the most part, you can tell what the characters are saying, and that's good enough. Still, it's awkward reading a line like "We've got here long before you" and trying to "retranslate" it in your head as "We've been here a long time."

You can read the full review by clicking on these words right here.[www.honestgamers.com]