REDFALL

Redfall always looked like it was going to be very different from Arkane’s traditional offerings, but the general expectation was that, given the studio’s innate talent and impeccable track record, it would at least be a good, well put together game. In the end, it definitely wasn’t. Not only does Redfall almost completely lack the strengths one usually associates an Arkane game with, it’s not even good at the new things it tries, with everything from its open world and its co-op gameplay to its loot mechanis coming with major issues. Add to all of that some significan technical hiccups, and what you have is a game that woefully falls short of expectations for an Arkane joint.

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: GOLLUM

Let’s be fair here, no one really expected The Lord of the Rings: Gollum to be anything more than middling or passably enjoyable at best- but we also didn’t expect it to be literally one of the worst games in recent memory. Daedalic Entertainment’s stealth action-adventure game took its sweet time to finally release, and when it did, it stumbled with its first step and fell flat on its face. Nothing about The Lord of the Rings: Gollum works. It has boring quest design, little to no exploration, broken combat and traversal mechanics, and a deluge of technical and performance problems that make it nigh on impossible to get through. You don’t play The Lord of the Rings: Gollum. You endure it.

LAYERS OF FEAR

For a while, Bloober Team has been pumping out psychological horror games that range from middling to genuinely good, and this year, the studio went back to the very beginning to bring back Layers of Fear. Combining, connecting, and reimagining the first two games while adding its own new content on top, the new Layers of Fear looks excellent and has a fascinating premise- but as is often the case with Bloober, it doesn’t do justice to that premise. It ends up being a fairly dull, repetetive, and rote game that relies on its visual prowess to the exclusion of almost everything else. We can only hope the Silent Hill 2 remake fares significantly better.

TCHIA

We’d had our eye on Tchia for a while before it launched, with Awaceb’s tropical action-adventure game looking increasingly promising with each of its pre-launch showings, and though the final product is certainly not without its merits, it didn’t quite live up to our expectations. Yes, it has a gorgeous setting, and making your way around the island is fun, for the most part. But the game’s mechanics and systems never quite manage to get their hooks in, leaving us with a pretty but fairly unremarkable experience.

CRIME BOSS: ROCKAY CITY

Over the years, many have tried their hand at the co-op first person shooter heist genre, and very few have managed to enjoy the kind of success that the Payday series has seen. Crime Boss: Rockay City was certainly eyeing that throne, and with its star-studded cast of actors, it looked like it might actually take a big swing. The actual game itself, however, was not only disappointing, it was just downright terrible. Whether you’re playing its single player roguelike campaign or diving into its co-op offerings, the game’s aggressive mediocrity taints every second you spend with it, with its awful voice acting, bland design, repetitive loop, and boring core gameplay dragging down the experience into the doldrums.

RAVENBOUND

Ravenbound has a promising premise on paper as an open world roguelite set in a world inspired by Scandinavian folklore, but when you actually get down to playing the game, you realize that it’s woefully underbaked in almost every way that matters. Its world is a vast one, but given how empty, bland, and vapid it generally feels, exploration ends up being significantly de-emphasized. Combat can get repetitive instead of decent enemy variety, while the game also does itself no favours with its poorly balanced difficulty curve. Add to that an unfortunately healthy dose of technical issues, and you get a pretty underwhelming game.

FORSPOKEN

A big new AAA open world IP from Square Enix? To say that people were curious to see how Forspoken would fare would be an understatement, even back when it was called Project Athia, though unfortunately, it didn’t even come close to matching expectations. A premise that’s interesting on paper is let down by annoying characters and poor writing. An open world that should have been begging to be explored ended up being empty and uninteresting. The combat system, while flashy and enjoyable, failed to make up for deficiencies in boring quest design. The fact that Forspoken failed to meet Square Enix’s commercial expectations was, ultimately, not surprising in the slightest.

THE LAST OF US PART 1 PC

Frankly, we’re still baffled that this was allowed to exist. Naughty Dog, more than almost any other studio in the entire industry, is associated with an obsessive level of attention to detail and quality assurance. Polish and Naughty Dog go hand-in-hand- which is why it’s so surprising that The Last of Us Part 1’s PC port might be one of the worst PC ports in recent memory. Even looking at brief clips and individual screenshots, it was hard to believe that something this broken had been allowed to release. When you actually played it, it quickly became apparent that the state of the game was somehow even worse. It’s a real shame, too, because this will forever be remembered as the manner in which this legendary franchise made its PC debut.

LEGO 2K DRIVE

Unlike many other games on this list, LEGO 2K Drive is not without its merits. Its world is vibrant and colourful, it has an impressive suite of customization options for building any kind of car you want, and, as you’d expect from a LEGO game, it’s very kid-friendly and easy to get into. It is, however, also quite vapid. What you see is very much what you get, and with that lack of depth, LEGO 2K Drive ends up like a shallow experience that runs out of steam too quickly, whether that’s because of its how uninteresting open world exploration is, or its lackluster optional content, or any number of other issues.

LEAP

LEAP isn’t exactly a game that’s grabbed a whole lot of headlines, so to say that expectations were high wouldn’t exactly be fair. But this is still very much a game that doesn’t do justice to its interesting premise. The sci-fi competitive FPS boasts slick visuals and cool traversal options, but all of that gets bogged down in its tedious gameplay loop and how unsatisfying its moment-to-moment gameplay largely feels. Especially in a genre that’s this competitive, LEAP fails to make a mark in any meaningful way.

STRAYED LIGHTS

We don’t want to be unfair on Strayed Lights here, because for a game developed by a small team with a unique vision, it does actually get some things right. The story, the music, and the aesthetic, for instance, are legitimately solid and worthy of praise. There’s plenty else in the game, however, that drags the experience down, from its frustrating combat to the lackluster platform to its technical issues. The fact that there are parts of the game that are genuinelty good makes the parts that aren’t feel that much more frustrating.

STRAY BLADE

You’ll never see us turning down the chance to play a new Soulslike, especially one that’s trying to shake up the genre’s formula the way Stray Blade was promising it would. But though there’s something to be said about the idea of viewing the genre through a less gloomy lens, the actual execution of many of the game’s core pillars leaves a lot to be desired. The clunky controls, uninspired level design, and technical issues combine to make Stray Blade quite a frustrating experience, even if it isn’t one that’s totally without its merits.

CRASH TEAM RUMBLE

Again, in the name of fairness, it’s worth pointing out that Crash Team Rumble is definitely a game that you can have plenty of fun with- especially for fans of the series, given how well it translates that Crash feel into a MOBA experience. As it stands right now though, it’s also pretty barebones, with its launch offerings, especially in terms of the modes on offer, being quite limited. Of course, we’re hoping that Crash Team Rumble will be supported so well that including it on this list in retrospect feels like a mistake- but with live service games, you can never tell how long of a lifespan to expect.

GREYHILL INCIDENT

A small production in every way possible, criticising Greyhill Incident would almost feel unfair under most circumstances- but unfortunately, there’s plenty to criticize in this game. The core premise of a survival horror game where your main enemies are aliens is certainly an interesting one, but from its awful dialogue to its painfully shallow mechanics to the mind-numbing level design, Greyhill Incident messes up (to say the very least) in too many ways to be anything more than a disappointment. And even that might be a generous description.

RISEN (PS4)

In the many, many years since its launch, the original Risen has amassed a reputation as one of the RPG genre’s proper diamonds in the rough, though with its 2023 port, there was way more of the rough than there was of the diamond. Janky animations, disappointing and minimal updates to the gameplay and visuals, clunky combat, and technical problems combined to paint the ageing experience in what wasn’t exactly the most flattering light. Maybe this is one flawed gem that should have been left in the past.

Strayed Lights puts you in the shoes of a flaming spirit who awakens in a dark world only to be greeted by a powerful corrupting force threatening your very existence. After a brief encounter with that monster, you are plunged right into the deep end as you start your journey to free any and all corrupting forces in this land and ascend into a state of awakening. As you can already imagine, it’s a really ambiguous narrative setup that does very little to explain what’s actually going on. There are no names for the characters and enemies, and what little cutscenes there are, showcase the spirit interacting with weird crystals and jumping to and from magic doors.

The developers want the players to draw their own separate meanings from this intentionally vague story – but it ends up biting itself back in the foot instead. There’s no compelling hook or character to latch on to, and nothing really eventful happens here that would make you want to be invested in this story. Even the unlockable optional narrative bits are just art pieces that force you to use your imagination to make sense of it all. The game does use environmental storytelling to dish out some narrative breadcrumbs, but I failed to connect the dots and draw some meaning out of this adventure.

"The developers want the players to draw their own separate meanings from this intentionally vague story – but it ends up biting itself back in the foot instead. There’s no compelling hook or character to latch on to, and nothing really eventful happens here that would make you want to be invested in this story"

Strayed Lights’ gameplay on the other hand, puts forth a strong first impression with its suite of ideas – but it never really comes to fully realizing the potential that these ideas hold. Let’s start with the combat, which is entirely based around parrying attacks by pressing the right trigger just before the enemy attack lands. You also have the option of attacking an enemy with heavy punches of your own, but with windows of opportunities being limited to a bare minimum and these attacks not dealing enough damage – it’s best to rely on parries exclusively for most fights.

Every enemy has a Sekiro-Esque posture meter that slowly fills up with each parry, and once the threshold is reached – you can dispatch the enemy with a single special attack that only activates when enemy posture is at its full. You can also switch your spirit’s color from orange to blue and vice versa with the press of the left trigger – and ideally, you should parry the enemy’s attacks while being in the corresponding spirit color. Enemy attacks come in three different colors – orange, blue, and purple. The purple ones are unblockable and thus, must be dodged while others must be parried by juggling your spirit color accordingly.

Blocking attacks with the right color heals your character, which motivates you to keep matching attacks whenever possible. There are no healing supplies to speak of, so even if you get pushed to a corner – you just need to execute a few successful parries to get back in the fight. This lends a distinct sense of flow to the combat proceedings, and you can always crawl back up to victory in any given time and situation.

"Encounters start to become mundane after a couple of levels, and while there are less than a handful of enemy variations – none of them require any new tactics to take down."

But the game does very little to spice things and introduce some variety to the gameplay loop. Once you get past the learning curve, downing enemies becomes really easy – and even if you mess up, it doesn’t take much to turn the odds back in your favor. Encounters start to become mundane after a couple of levels, and while there are less than a handful of enemy variations – none of them require any new tactics to take down. In addition to this, they all look visually identical to one another which further adds to the mundanity of it all.

Bosses fare a bit better in this regard, but not by a huge margin. They have longer chain combos with delay attacks that can catch you off guard and drain your health quickly if you are not careful, but once you get the basics down – they also start to become pushovers. Since the levels can be tackled in any order you see fit, bosses and general difficulty start to plummet as you progress further which worsens this issue. And by the time bosses start to get interesting with new and imaginative moves, the game has already reached its climax – leaving a sour taste in the mouth.

Strayed Lights describes itself as an atmospheric adventure, and while the adventure element might not be up to snuff – it fares much better when it comes to the atmosphere. The art direction is fantastic, and the levels themselves look beautiful with great use of color gradients to depict an ethereal world brimming with a sense of wonder and mystery. However, there’s little variety among the many levels since they use the same handful of colors for the environments – which does hurt the game somewhat.

"The art direction is fantastic, and the levels themselves look beautiful with great use of color gradients to depict an ethereal world brimming with a sense of wonder and mystery. "

But as great as the world looks on the surface, those merits are heavily marred down by extremely linear level design. There’s always a strictly laid out path that you need to follow to reach the objective, and occasionally you will come across an alternative side path that will take you to precious orbs that can be used to upgrade your character via a simple skill tree. The blueprint essentially remains the same for the entire adventure – reach the boss, fight the boss, rinse and repeat.

As such, playing through Strayed Lights starts to get repetitive as you face encounter after encounter with nothing really motivating you to keep inching further towards the finish line. And that’s a big criticism for a game that has a comparatively short runtime. It took me around 5 to 7 hours to reach the climax, and I was already out of motivation by the time the game reached its latter half. Also, there are no new game plus or additional challenge modes to try out once you finish the story – so this is just what you get for the price.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this review, these factors come together to make Strayed Lights a bland experience. And that’s one of the worst places to be for any entertainment product. It doesn’t do anything exceptionally well, and it doesn’t do anything exceptionally bad either. It’s a mediocre product that fails to do anything to keep you interested in what it has to say. The parry based combat is interesting in concept, but falters in the face of repetitive enemy encounters and mostly lackluster bosses. The minimalist approach to the narrative feels like the game is trying too hard to follow in the footsteps of the likes of Journey – but fails to capture the magic of what makes those stories interesting in the first place. All in all, it’s pretty hard to recommend this game to most players which is all the more saddening because it could have been something special had it spent some more time in the oven.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 5.