Justin Mercer
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Writing For
Twinfinite
Gamer EscapeLatest Reviews
Despite an overly lean narrative and an overlong middle section, Bionic Bay’s particular blend of fluid platforming, physics-focused puzzles, and gorgeously surreal aesthetic results in a highly engaging experience. More than that, it’s tight pacing and interest in surprising the player keeps things feeling fresh throughout. If you’re on the lookout for a new puzzle-platformer, it’s well worth your time to run and jump your way through it.
Look Outside is a unique and dense experience. It leverages its relatively short runtime by being fit to bursting with interesting mysteries, meaningful gameplay decisions, characters both eerie and endearing, and a horror aesthetic that knows when to depict its grotesqueness outright and when to leave things up to the player’s imagination. Its mashup of survival horror resource gathering and turn-based combat is less successful for the way the former garners more satisfying engagement than...
The Stone of Madness isn’t perfect by any means, but its successes readily outweigh its missteps. Its emphasis on real-time stealth and simultaneous control over three distinct characters at a time work to create some very hectic gameplay situations, naturally encouraging the player to learn and improve. Infusing this rewarding gameplay with a striking art style and a tinge of dark humor makes for a unique experience worth looking into, even if the controls can be clunky and the guards can ...
For those of us that love engaging with punishing mechanics and feeling a tangible sense of improvement with each failure, Kill Knight is simply excellent. It offers a constant barrage of split-second decisions for the player to make, greatly rewards both heat-of-the-moment reaction time and preparedness in remembering which enemies are coming up next, and wraps it all up in an atmospheric pixelated hellscape. The result is an addictive twin-stick shooter playing out at a breakneck pace, and ...
And yet I still struggled to put the game down for most of my time with it. The game’s world is just gorgeous, lovingly put together, and more than that, is built to the scale of a proper MMO worth your time to try for the price of free. I can very much see Throne and Liberty finding its fans for the things it does well even if it isn’t sweepingly innovative for the genre as a whole, and that’s more than you can say for a lot of new MMOs and MMO-adjacent titles.
If you’re already a fan of Supermassive Games or Dead by Daylight you’ll probably have an enjoyable enough time here. There are some exciting sequences when you’re playing The Casting of Frank Stone, but even for their positives, they never coalesce into a strong experience in the long run.
Unfortunately, the success of its world and characters belies a relatively stale gameplay loop that fails to shake things up enough as the title’s runtime increases. There’s an awful lot of content and mechanical ambition in Outlaws with its reputation system, and it’s fun enough to experience most of it, but it still isn’t able to prevent things from blending together once you’ve spent an extended amount of time with Kay and her crew.
To be clear, there’s still a decent horror game to be had here for fans of the genre, but by the time the credits rolled, I found it difficult to not feel a tinge of disappointment in seeing just how much further the characters and concepts could have been taken to create something truly unique.
Dread Delusion offers an interesting universe and a gorgeous art style, but both are thoroughly wrapped up in a mechanically thin and ultimately unsatisfying RPG experience. The Oneiric Isles capture the spirit of the RPG worlds of the past, and there’s a wide breadth of content and characters to learn more about throughout them, but Dread Delusion’s decided lack of difficulty, one-note combat, and widespread balancing issues actively distract from its highly enjoyable world.
If you’re fan of snappy, unique puzzle gameplay and short time commitments, Children of the Sun is going to absolutely be your jam. By consistently introducing new gameplay twists and building on its complexity, it creates an addictive gameplay loop where each stage asks the player to do a new kind of problem-solving and utilize the tools they’ve unlocked in a different way. Your mileage may vary depending on how much you enjoy trial and error, and the game could certainly have kept the b...