Nidhoggr

Okay. I just watched the whole review. First of all, Ross, thanks for the great video! My initial motivation of playing the game was: “Okay, let’s play that one, so I can finally watch the second part of the episode”. Now I’m happy I played this masterpiece. I think the idea of Vic's father being a killer is interesting, but has a few contradictions of its own. Yes, he probably would have access to the morgue since the log says he is a district attorney or something (that would also explain why he has such a nice house, I guess). But... you can see the killer has dark hair in the video. Also Clare states that in her report. Unless Vic's father was wearing a pretty realistic wig, it kinda rules him out sadly. Richard could have access to the police station because, as we know, Browning is also in the club, so he could easily get him access. However, the club journal also kinda rules Richard out too. Remember Victoria saying to Browning: “A-ha, I know you’re in that journal! Gotcha!” Wouldn’t she really notice her own *boyfriend* or her *father* being in that journal? I doubt so. The log though explicitly says that killer spared Vic's life on the roof (which is not clear from the video itself). So it must be someone who knows her and likes her. It's not Browning then. I think I would rather concentrate on the MO of the killer. Yes, he copies Ackerman’s style, yet he has his own feature — drowning instead of slashing a victim's neck. Also... Who’s the crow man in all this? He’s giving me Jack the ripper vibes, yet being quite nice with McPherson and even giving him back the ring. I guess he’s not really happy with somebody else copying his style, huh. As for the game, the contrast you mentioned makes it feel so much alive, I'd say. People cannot always be grim and dark or talking about the job all the time. And cops do celebrate Christmas and eat cookies like other people do. I know a few people who worked in the law, and... they tend to be rather fun and joking. Maybe it's a defence mechanism or something? In the game, when they are discussing personal stuff without really giving a context or exposition to the player, makes it look like a real conversation. Very well done. It's more 'conversation-like' approach rather than 'movie-like' as in many other games.

There's certain advantages in being ill. I finally had some spare time to beat Still Life and now finally can watch the Ross's review! It is such a beautifully crafted piece of art. I'm feeling a bit depressed now cause it ended so quickly :-) Guys, I've heard that Post Mortem and Still Life 2 are bad games and not really connected to the story. Should I play or skip?

There’s not much “adventure” in this game tbh, I’d say it’s closer to a visual novel. The art-style is nice though. From the story perspective it’s one of those “by the way, I’m gay” indie games, the main plot itself is shallow and simple, though the main idea of a memory clinic is nicely executed. Since I said “though” twice in two sentences, I guess it puts the game in mixed category to me. Anyways I would recommend it for cyberpunk adventure appreciators because it has some good atmosphere and it’s short. Give it a try.

Same. Once a friend gave me a game magazine CD (yes, that was a thing in early 00s) and there was a bunch of demos on it: this game, Earth 2150, etc and I remember liking it, but I ended up buying 2150, which is also good but that's another story.

Wow, thx for the info.

In short, a Twin Peaks little sister. Played it right after "Whispers of a machine". Albeit the latter is more polished, I think "Kathy Rain" is more intriguing and cool in terms of the story: weird stuff happening in a provincial town... trying to solve some family mystery... meeting creepy people... Honestly, I think the main character, Kathy, is great. You just need to play little more to see what she's been through and why all this behaviour. At the end I ended up liking her. Also to mention some others: Technically, there are some problems due to that you can freely travel between locations and talk to people but sometimes you just need to do something in a correct order and given in mind that there are unskippable animations etc. the game pace is kinda slow. But overall it's 4.5/5.

Just beat it! It is a very solid adventure, what respects a player's time. There are no "find a pixel" or "combine everything" tricks, the interface is more polished than in most of titles. Also somehow it gave me Syberia vibes. It all goes around a small cold town in a middle of nowhere, rusty machinery, strange inhabitants and so on. Watch out for the augmentations though, you will be granted by some of them by the start and there will be an additional one what you can kinda choose. There are a couple of situations where you will be like: "What the hell am I supposed to do here!?". Probably it means that you need to use your new special ability. Additional pros: there's Ned Flanders in the game. You will probably immediately recognise who I'm talking about when you see

Thx to Ross I've tried this and other cyberpunk point-and-click "Among Thorns". Well, I think the other one is better. Here a nice story in general ends kinda stupid and abrupt and the game doesn't really respect your time: you need to wait, wait and wait for slowly scrolling text, actions, etc. But! This is only a demo of the full game, "The Red Strings Club", and I hope to try it soon and write a short review!

It's hard to say something about this game. Obviously I like the setting, the music is nice, the style is great... but it's not really a game more like a demo only about an hour long (at max). I think if you're a fan of William Gibson like me, you may try it, but don't expect too much. I just wish the authors would make a solid adventure of it, but it seems that it's not gonna happen

Probably. But I can't say for ubuntu. I've never used it and I don't know which screen utility it uses and how. I just know that downscaling should be possible on linux.

xrandr '--scale-from' and '--transform' (transformation matrix) flags allow to scale screen buffer basically from any size to any size. Probably '--scale 0.75x0.75' will work too. I don't know how difficult it would be to set up on Ubuntu or such system. On Archlinux it should be pretty straightforward because you need to configure xrandr by yourself anyway ))) Sadly I don't have Arch at the moment and can't check this out. But I do know that when misconfigured the screen may become kinda blurry. So mb it could count as antialiasing... ?

I loved the first in series but sadly it's almost not runnable on modern computers. For me the fascinating part was that the Universe here really lives. The armies really battle over sectors, pirates do pirate stuff, inflation is present etc. You hardly find it in games because usually the world is static, playing the hedgehog day over and over again, but here it may change regardless of player's interference, so you can loose (or win - depends on a difficulty level) by just doing nothing. Also the Russian version had kinda funny dialogues and text quests, I believe they f***ed them up in the English version though.

It's one of my favourite. You know, the game is very simple made, but omg this sound! Also the programmers did a great job using non-standard approach to music. Usually they create a "battle theme", "wander theme" etc. and trigger them by some conditions. And this is different. You almost never hear the whole theme, but rather various mixing of its tracks. The game just shifts a mix ratio according to the progress which adds to atmosphere a lot. I've unpacked the game files and the soundtrack is indeed is stored as multitrack i.e. each instrument in a single file. But here you can hear it as a whole: [youtube] Full soundtrack: https://bandcamp.antonriehl.com/album/receiver-music-from-the-game

To be fair, these sections with driving aren't easy to work with I guess.

Yes, literally it's "the orderlies of dungeons", which is based on "wolf - the orderly of the forest" idiom. I don't know have it ever been translated to English. Actually the game don't have much in common with the book plot. And probably (as in most Russian games of that period) the English translation and voicing is very bad. So I wouldn't recommend it unless you know Russian ?