Inside: Duskers, Golden Light, Earthlock, Surviving the Aftermath, Amnesia: The Bunker

Amnesia: The Bunker
First-Person Shooter/Survival Horror

This was astoundingly boring, which is a weird thing to say about a horror game. The premise is that you are trapped in a World War I bunker with a monster that hunts through sound and can’t be killed. It’s possible to briefly stun the monster with bullets, but if it catches you, you instantly die, which is really annoying because there’s only one save point and it’s in the center of the whole bunker.

My issue with this is that monsters in video games aren’t scary. When you’re immortal, violent threats are only ever inconveniences, not existential horrors. The monster was spooky the first time, but every time after that I genuinely only found it annoying. Your only ways of dealing with the monster are to shoot it, hide and twiddle your thumbs for ages until it goes away, or give up and reload your save. Only the first is engaging gameplay, but as a packrat I was rarely willing to do so, because you need bullets for lots of other things too and I didn’t want to run out. Pretty much the entire game is just running to a locked door, breaking it down in a way that attracts the monster, and then either you wait for the monster to go away or you die and have to do it all over again. The real horror was making me question why I was wasting my life on this Sisyphean task, I guess. I gave up after several hours of failed Maintenance runs, which is about the halfway point of the game.

The resource management aspect doesn’t work very well either, because by the time you manage a successful run you’ll have practiced on so many failed attempts that you’re likely to do it perfectly. Because most failure states are all-or-nothing, you rarely even have a chance to use things like healing items. (Doesn’t stop the game from throwing them at you, though; by the time I quit my storage chest was overflowing with bandages.)

The plot is bland as well, which is a particular disappointment when World War I is such a ripe setting for horror. The monster and other elements are just generic eldritch horror with no relation to the war going on outside. (Incidentally, obvious twist was obvious.)

Duskers
Strategy

This is barely a game. You pilot drones to scavenge derelict spaceships, which consists of slowly and meticulously combing each room. Occasionally you encounter other scavengers who can damage your drones, but you have an ability that tells you their location, so it’s trivial to herd them into a trap or space them. As long as you’re careful, there is zero challenge or difficulty. The whole thing felt like a chore more than anything else.

Golden Light
First-Person Shooter/Survival Horror

An FPS roguelike where you navigate a weird dungeon made of flesh in search of your lover, who is supposedly trapped there. I found the premise to be interesting, but the actual gameplay feels more like a proof of concept than a finished product. First-person navigation is difficult and disorienting at the best of times, but it’s particularly confusing for procedurally generated environments where everything looks the same. First-person combat is, as always, terrible, and monsters seemingly appear at random and can kill you in seconds. Even though the aesthetics were nicely spooky, it was just too unfun to actually play.

Earthlock
RPG

This game wasn’t even interestingly bad. The writing is terrible, the plot is generic, and the UI text is all plain font (even the area name in establishing shots), which is something I associate with shovelware. Despite this, the game is in 3D with unnecessarily detailed models. Just… Jesus, I put more effort into presentation in my text-only game. The gameplay is incredibly grindy, filled with “collect a bajillion randomly-spawned items from the overworld” type sidequests, and the battle UI maps abilities to face buttons, which I hate. (You’re supposed to be able to map two abilities to each face button and switch between sets, but I never figured out how.) The only semi-interesting gameplay element is that characters can spend a turn to switch between two fighting styles that each have different abilities, but most battles were so easy and over so fast that I never had reason to bother.

Surviving the Aftermath
Real-Time Strategy

This is an astoundingly dull and poorly-designed game. The tutorial frequently made incorrect assumptions about what resources were available to me and when (there were no shorelines in my starting area, yet the only free water source the tutorial gives you requires one), and it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out there were multiple screens to the tech tree. Your progress is constantly stymied by polluted areas, which can’t be removed until late in the tech tree; the game doesn’t tell you that upgraded houses are bigger than the initial houses, so if you initially packed them as efficiently as possible your grid is completely wrecked when you upgrade; and I never figured out how vehicles work.

Even aside from that, there’s just not a whole lot for the player to actually do. Every time a colonist gets attacked the game gives you an urgent-sounding notification to “Protect them however you can!” but there are so few colonists that can fight and they go after the enemies on their own anyway, so… what am I supposed to contribute here, exactly? Everything is like this. Your input is almost entirely limited to placing buildings; there’s almost nothing you can do to meaningfully react to anything that happens. So much of my playtime was just spent staring at the screen and waiting for my workers to gather enough resources; it felt like an idle game, not a strategy game.

All that and it made my GPU scream even with the minimum quality settings. How badly optimized was this thing?