Justin Mercer
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Writing For
Gamer Escape
TwinfiniteLatest Reviews
Mortal Shell II offers an immediately intriguing twist on the soulslike, asking you to swap between different characters with their own unique abilities and progression in addition to outfitting yourself with the itemization more typical of the genre. They also serve as a nifty little revive mechanic, allowing you to...
Which unfortunately makes the more unexciting mechanical execution of the puzzles themselves stand out all the more. It’s still fun to guide Sophie to safety through puzzle and pursuer alike thanks to a decent mystery and neat camera angles, but a more challenging level of difficulty and a more thorough...
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...
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...
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...
The successful execution of these elements is almost enough to distract you from the game’s highly basic and low-impact gameplay for a while, but not entirely. Even with the introduction of more minigames and narrative situations, the game remains a highly consistent experience for better and worse. Still, if Shin...
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...
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...
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,...
Even with those concessions, however, Volgarr the Viking II’s appeal is still just as bespoke and specialized as it was in the 2013 original. It has a very particular audience in mind, and if you’re a part of said audience, you’ll have a great time improving through every death. And...
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...
