Dark

You know something is up with a game when you hear the lead character's voice and you go "That's Geralt!" and you look up Geralt's voice actor's IMDB and there is no reference to the game in question. Hum. It's not even sort of vague, it's like they told him straight up to play Geralt. Either that or it's another voice actor very explicitly instructed "Geralt. EXACTLY like Geralt. Also the dialogue will sound like Geralt. Good. Good."

Actually you know something is up when a game asks you to login upon starting, while being a single player game. It doesn't press you about it, and then it does have a proper decent settings menu, so it's almost immediately conflicted.

Shortly after I got through the early dialogue, the hat trick was in the back of the net. I was sent to do the tutorial. Actually, I should point out the tutorial is entirely optional, it doesn't appear to be forced.

The weird 'head of security' character tells you there's some, you know, thugs hanging around the club. Maybe you should take care of them? God, why is this dialogue so weird. It's interesting realizing this is very, very much an over the shoulder stealth game with cover mechanics and neat sounding vampiric powers to interact with stealth and leaping through shadows, not a stagger around a club while Geralt whimpers about his headache simulator as it implied in the first twenty minutes. On the other hand, ten minutes later and I'd murdered a bunch of what is very apparently a bunch of homeless people.

That is the best name you could come up with?

I don't even know how to describe this game other than that completely weird contrast. There's the core of something good, immediately, someone talented worked on it. But then you're just casually murdering hobos and it feels all so entirely out of whack. I mean I guess the hobos had guns, but that just seems out of place as well. I mean it goes Why am I murdering hobos? oh because the hobos had guns wait who is arming the homeless like so...?

I was warned this is a bad game, but it's almost jarring how good/bad it is. It's not like Blood Knights, where the game is just so upfront about being ridiculous, but more ... Just bad, but still clearly a production people put effort into. The engine actually runs fairly well, and I don't think I've seen this art style applied to vampire/stealth games before, but it looks quite nice...

March into Bad Games month: Blood Knights

I was tempted to type out 'bad games mouth' but I'm not sure that joke has any teeth. I totally forgot to game over march anyway, so this review is coming out in April and oh well.

I noticed, around the time I was finishing up Dungeon of the Endless, that I felt like I'd been very hard on the recent crop of games I've played. I've played through some really good games since the start of the year, and not really very many games I've taken seriously that were seriously bad. I mean Final Dusk was sort of alright, but nothing really to digest. FF8 is a weird affair, but it's an older game that feels sort of patched together to accomplish its goals. So I set out to play two games I was under the impression were bad.

I believe I got Blood Knights from bundle stars, who sell bundle which are ... Generally not as well priced as IndieGala or Groupees bundles, but do seem to often have somewhat higher profile games in them. I actually had, at best, little idea what Blood Knights was. I knew it was relatively poorly rated, and also knew it was sort of silly and SteamShots had done a review ages ago. I assumed it looked B-movie as fuck and good lord if you like b-movie cheese nonsense, this is actually a game for you.

Blood Knights is a basic behind the back, god of war slash darksiders slash zelda or whatever brawler where you play as a crusader trying to fight the bad vampires. At the start of the game you are bonded to a vampire, who wears very little in the way of clothing but does look like she could throw a punch at least. Apparently this is cast on you by a priest, who seems oddly nonchalant regarding making some sort of blood pact between the commander of his knights and creatures of the dark. Though to be honest she mostly looks "mean" not really much else.

If you're playing the game two player, you divide up the characters, but if you're playing by yourself you can swap between the two. More on this later.

For the first little while the game hints that your character is unnerved by the blood pact and the vampiress is really hostile to the whole thing, but she's self-serving at best so doesn't really mind killing her former comrades to survive. You sort of get the idea it's going to have tainted feedback or you're going to be made ill by it and then NOPE another vampiress vomits on you and then you're a vampire. I'm not kidding. The scene is totally your dude being like 'oh god some of it got in my mouth aaaaaahh'

And then your second in command kicks you off a cliff. This pretty much sets up how storytelling works in this game. Right off a cliff and into the loo.