Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £14.99
Where To Get It: Humble Store, Steam, GOG

When the apocalypse hits, when humanity’s light darkens, there shall be a cry, and it shall be louder than all the panicked screaming and dying and fire. And that cry will be “010000010100001101001011!!!”

Night doesn’t screw around, and nor do the enemies throughout the game.

So it is with The Signal From Tölva, the latest offering from Big Robot games. A game where you may die a lot, but hey, it’s the journey, not the destination or the cycle that counts. So let’s talk about that.

The Signal From Tölva is a space opera first person game (Which happens to have a lot of shooting) in a setting where machine intelligences grew from humanity, grew away from humanity, and finally kicked humanity to the kerb when humanity objected. They then splintered, because they were designed by humans, even down to that tribalist instinct. This is the story of one of those factions, the Surveyors, who wanted to find an intelligence more ancient than they were, and find their search leading them to a small world called Tölva, owned by the Cathedral, aka the Zealots… Who worship the planet and happen not to like visitors.

The game is tightly designed, with minimal mechanical complexity, and every tool used. You start as a drone in one corner of the map, explore, try to collect datacubes, and kick out anything that objects to your presence with guns and other drones. If you happen to die, well, no problem, you just download your constantly backed-up intelligence to another drone, somewhere you control, and awaaaaaay you go again!

The ship and robot designs are wonderful, but equally wonderful is the *scale* . You are a very small cog indeed, my friend.

It’s also a subtle game, in many respects. The information dripfeeds hints at the history, but equally, so do the many wrecks, occasional weird sights, and more common weird Sites hint at a world that has not only seen a lot of destruction and cosmic horror in its time, but also held a civilisation that somehow had power over space-time on a local level, and it’s only the sight of your own bigass technology and technical immortality that makes you think “Yeah, we can handle this.” Visually, a lot of the designs remind me of Chris Foss’s classic science fiction artwork, and the sound design only occasionally tries to get musical at you, even then in the most ambient manner. It’s good stuff, and I kept coming back, “one more hour”, to unravel the eerie mystery that is Tölva.

And then I triggered the endgame a bit early. You see, there’s also things going on under the hood, and one of them is that the enemy factions scale with you… But one of the other things is that, once you’ve got the means to reach the final sites, the final missions… It’s tough, folks. The Zealots get more defensive, and you will want to be on top of your game before getting there.

…And not only are you a small cog, you certainly haven’t been the first machine intelligence to try deciphering the mystery.

In summary, The Signal from Tölva is a mostly enjoyable, only occasionally stressful, and interesting journey right up until the very end, and then it becomes… A bit more stressful. Not a whole lot more stressful, but you’re definitely dying and redownloading more. Sniff the robotic flowers as much as you can, because, if you like first person exploration and/or shooting games, then it’s well worth a go. It helps that the game comes with a cool and interesting lorebook, helping expand the universe without giving too much away. The cosmic horror aspect of it is subtle, eerie, and well done, and I could definitely recommend this to folks.

The Mad Welshman likes the robot flowers. There’s just that hint of ozone to them that makes his circuits run elegant algorithms.

Filed under: Game Reviews by admin

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Source: Review copy
Price: £29.99
Where To Get It: Steam

Review – Senran Kagura Estival Versus

Senran Kagura, in a single phrase, is clunky and internally inconsistent. It wants to be humourous, and also to be a grim tale of women ninja fighting against yomi (Evil spirits.) It wants to be a Musou game, but also an eroge with what I’m assuming is meant to be women who are comfortable enough in BDSM to be completely open about it with each other (While also freaking each other out, another level of inconsistency), and also having RPG elements that, to be honest, only add grind and reduce clarity. It’s a game where even people who have noticed I disliked the game along the review process have been inconsistent in where they defend the game… From saying it’s “light hearted” to “surprisingly dark”, to saying the comedy’s bad, but it is a comedy (but it also isn’t), and giving me varying points at which it “Gets Better”, all of which, funnily enough, start about four or five hours into the game.

This is one of the points at which the game allegedly “Gets Better.” I wish I was joking when I said this.

Enough. Senran Kagura is inconsistent. Its combat flow is often broken up by the Shinobi Transformations (Which enemy named characters can do while you’re in the middle of a combo, throwing off your combo because hey, there’s a fifteen second animation playing in between your blows… It can be skipped with the Start button, much like the sometimes cringey cutscenes, but that doesn’t really solve the problem that it breaks gameplay flow), it has trouble telling you about your new moves, and the writing…

…When you have a game with several characters (At least twelve, it’s somewhat hard to keep track), you can’t help but either pad out the story (Which runs the risk of you forgetting what the hell is up with anyone) or painting characters as simple caricatures (Which runs the risk of those caricatures being, put bluntly, a bit shit.) As far as I can tell, both are happening here, with two chapters seemingly devoted to our heroines winding up on a beach world because… Reasons (Which aren’t made clear, even three hours in) and deciding “Hey, let’s do beach things, disregard these resurrected (Also all women) ninja that are trying to beat us up, and let’s… Beat each other’s clothes off, teehee!”

This is the *core* of the game, but… Everything else fights with this core for prominence. To the detriment of the whole.

Oh, did I forget to mention that, like Akiba’s Trip, the objective is to beat the clothes off fellow women ninja, while not losing your own clothes? Unlike Akiba’s Trip, though, this is dressed up in shallow BDSM talk that, at times, just makes me cringe. And I say that as a dom. Ryona, the extremely unsubtle hyper masochist, and Murasaki, the self-hating shut-in, are perhaps the worst offenders here, as something that I’m pretty sure is intended to be “funny” not only falls flat, but makes me say “WHOAH, CALM THE FUCK DOWN, SENRAN KAGURA, THAT’S NOT ON!”

But, of course, it “gets better”, as unlocks range from several varieties of clothing (mostly underwear) to beat off, special arena defeat cutscenes that range from the “Blah” to the “Oh, for the love of… [Facepalm] “, and, of course, the groping game. There’s a helluva lot of missions, and more in DLC that’s free or otherwise, but it seems that they all boil down to “Beat up everyone as quickly as you can while getting hit as little as possible”, and many of its mechanics are either explained in flow breaking, unskippable text boxes, or not explained outside of loading screen hints.

There *is* a reason this happens. The tone *does* change somewhat. But this, trust me, is in the middle of a *lot* of teeheeing.

As such, I really can’t recommend Senran Kagura Estival Versus, as it just has too much bad design, inconsistent writing, and, to be honest, cringey writing that just leaves me, not even chuckling, but coldly judging. Oh, and for those curious, this game might as well be controller mandatory, as the base keyboard binds make this a very difficult time on base KB+M (I’m sure a gaming mouse would help somewhat, but naw, stick to controller.) It’s not that good an eroge. It’s not that good a musou game. Its design elements conflict with each other, and honestly? I’m glad to be shot of it, now this review’s out.

The Mad Welshman is free. He can move on. His spirit is lightened. And he is grateful for this.

Filed under: Game Reviews by admin

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