That could work. But we have to remember that an adaptation must make concessions to the medium. Half-Life's AI was revolutionary in 1998, but it would feel very unimmersive to have members of the science team casually standing around after the disaster and refusing to come with Gordon because they can't climb ladders or complaining about the donuts in the middle of an alien invasion. But if they stick around and act rationally, he'll have fifty characters tagging along as he guns down soldiers and aliens.
And many of the sci-fi elements of the franchise are just weird. Like, how do we explain G-Man's role for audiences not familiar with the story already?
I don't know... if they adapted the story of the games into a TV series I might give it a try. But I just don't trust showrunners these days.
Edited by Fighteer on Apr 8th 2025 at 3:52:26 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"The things about games is that they're participatory, the player is an active element in the plot. Different games explore this to different degrees, but even the most linear FPS still goes to the effort of making the player feel like part of the action.
So when a game story is brought to a different medium, the writers have to figure out how to make it work without that participation element.
"Why are you still here?" Yahtzee askes Rebellion. More successful studios than them have been shut down by publishers recently. His sarcastic conclusion is that you can either make good games or be very business-savvy, and for those in the betting booths, Rebellion is the latter.
Atomfall is a... wait, let me get out my bingo card... "a first-person action stealth open-world RPG thingummy bumcake set in a retro-futurist northern England where exactly the same thing that happened in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. seems to have happened." Disaster occurs, anomalies pop up, the countryside is walled off into a survivalist RPG sandbox.
Guess what factions you can choose to side with? Yep: fascists or nutters. At least this time it fits the regional culture. The rest of the game is about as lazy, from the endlessly copy-pasted townsfolk to the design of the stealth, where you're only properly hidden in the one designated style of knee-high grass and if you aren't in that, you might as well be wearing a police siren.
The underground tech bunker that offers you an easily understood objective: get four batteries from the various factions and camps, we don't care how, is actually good game design, though. And the lack of objective markers is refreshing, forcing you to engage with the world instead of going to the spot on the map indicated by your retro-futuristic radar.
Sadly, it falls apart again at the end when the big secret is revealed: it's a MacGuffin that the various factions want you to do a thing with. There's a Bethesda-style ending slideshow and that's your lot. Oh, well. The Second Wind Discord anticipated this one and will have a fun time dissecting Yahtzee's opinions.
Edited by Fighteer on Apr 10th 2025 at 9:03:59 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Blue Prince | Fully Ramblomatic
Yahtzee starts off this review by getting introspective about how much he enjoys watching the light fade from young developers' eyes as he criticizes their games. He's talked in the past about how he unreasonably demands novelty because of his job. Well, this week's game manages to reformulate existing ideas in an genuinely unique way, meaning there will no doubt be three hundred imitators on Steam by next Thursday.
Blue Prince is a first-person, Roguelike puzzle game with resource management elements. You play as a 14-year-old delinquent who inherits a massive mansion with Chaos Architecture, and you don't get to keep it until you find the secret room that your weird uncle built into it. Each day the mansion rearranges itself, so you have to try to find your way around afresh. You get to decide the layout, in a way, because each door you open offers a choice of three rooms to place in the grid square. So, it's a self-torture simulator. (I kid, of course.)
It's the kind of game where you have to form patterns of association based on the things you see, which leads to intense paranoia and hilarious water-cooler moments when you learn that your friends have constructed a completely different elaborate theory on how everything goes together. Yahtzee notes that it can get frustrating when the house refuses to randomly cough up the one room that will solve its last puzzle, making you waste an entire day, but that "one more day" addiction is essential to the experience.
Overall, it's a recommend from our debonair dude because of the immense satisfaction the game delivers from solving its puzzles.
Edit: I have now found out that there is a game called Kraven Manor from 2014 that did the "creepy shifting mansion" idea already. Oh, well.
Edited by Fighteer on Apr 16th 2025 at 9:23:53 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Split Fiction’s Writing Is Bad, So Let’s Fix It | Semi-Ramblomatic
Disclaimer: Once again, these are Yahtzee's opinions, and nobody is obligated to agree with them.
He said in his review of Split Fiction that he hated the way the protagonists are written, and this is a deep dive into why. He chooses to highlight a specific scene after one of the characters (I believe it's the introverted one) has just undergone a traumatic cleansing experience and how the forced humor of the writing deflates the very real catharsis that the player should be vicariously experiencing in that moment.
He then goes on to demonstrate how the scene could be rewritten to be more effective, mostly by cutting out three quarters of the dialog and employing that age-old saw: Show, Don't Tell.
I'm reminded of a scene in Loki's first season, where one character offers to shake another's hand and instead the other character goes in for a hug. The wordlessness of the moment serves to emphasize the evolution of their friendship without the need for either to verbally explain to the audience what's going on.
Edited by Fighteer on Apr 17th 2025 at 6:48:30 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"South of Midnight | Fully Ramblomatic
South of Midnight is from Compulsion Games, which would apparently like us to forget that it also made We Happy Few. Fair enough, although does it still count as cultural appropriation when a Canadian studio makes a game set in the Deep South rather than in Ye Merry England?
We Happy Few attempted to sell itself on story and aesthetics rather than gameplay, and South of Midnight continues that trend. Protagonist Hazel Flood has her house washed away in a storm (lucky she wasn't named Hazel Earthquake or Hazel Asteroid Impact) and is transported to Oz... I mean Wonderland... I mean, has her eyes opened to the magical world that was already around her.
The story diverges a bit from those rather blatant inspirations by being really dark and sad: poverty, generational trauma, child abuse, dead babies, that sort of thing. Gameplay mainly involves beating up the trauma demons to restore the land to happiness or whatever, but it shoehorns in combat like an obligation rather than an essential element of this ghost-train ride.
The boss fights are pretty good, though, and Yahtzee takes some time to compliment the exceptional synchronization of the soundtrack. Overall, South of Midnight earns a recommendation for doing the themes and story really well and, unlike its predecessor, does the gameplay well enough not to make people want to microwave the game disc.
Edited by Fighteer on Apr 23rd 2025 at 4:29:20 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Yes, that's the joke I was (badly) attempting to make. Well, borrow.
Edited by Fighteer on Apr 23rd 2025 at 2:08:49 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Considering the main pick up is literally a white cotton like substance called Floof.....Yeah, very romanticized...
Edited by Demongodofchaos2 on Apr 25th 2025 at 12:33:27 PM
Watch SymphogearFrom the folks who brought you Unavowed (not Avowed, thank you Yahtzee for noticing the joke that everyone was making about those titles) comes Old Skies, a 2D point-and-click adventure game set in a futuristic New York City after the invention of Time Travel. Specifically, after time travel has become a tourist industry.
You play as an employee of ChronoZen whose job it is to escort wealthy clients to the past and make sure they don't muck up anything important. Then she goes back to her daily life and has to cope with reality changing constantly because of said time travelers.
Yahtzee takes some time out to criticize the art style employed in the game, with all of the characters having exactly the same posture and animations. He contrasts this with older 2D games that took time to give each character a unique design so we could tell the blobs of barely differentiated pixels apart.
He also criticizes the adventure game logic, in which environmental objects have precisely constrained uses and the game very firmly slaps your hand if you try to experiment. It's at least different from the classic Moon Logic Puzzle where you have to combine the discarded peanut shells with the rope ladder and the princess tiara to make a hang glider, but without the freedom to explore alternative solutions, they start to feel very contrived.
Quibbles about the design elements aside, Yahtzee does like the plot, especially the main character's progression: Eventually, she gets sick of being stuck in one place while everything else moves on and decides to screw this whole protagonist business.
Edited by Fighteer on Apr 30th 2025 at 11:29:59 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Oh, It's Another Roguelike | Semi-Ramblomatic
Is Yahtzee cynical and jaded in his senescence or is his general feeling of dread upon seeing Steam listings filled with "Roguelikes" coming from rational analysis? Well, we know he's cynical and jaded, so that's half of the mystery solved.
Part of the problem is that the term "Roguelike" has lost a lot of its original meaning. Yes, Rogue had procedural generation, and yes, it made you restart after each failure, but it also randomized a lot of its own rules, such as the colors of potions. Thus, each playthrough offered an opportunity for discovery and exploration. If you simply randomize each dungeon layout, have you actually gained anything other than a bit of time savings?
These days, procedural generation has become such a cliché that some games are advertising themselves as featuring "handcrafted levels", as though it's now some kind of cachet to have an actual level designer designing an actual level rather than throwing a pile of Lego bricks into a blender. (Yahtzee notes that someone still has to tell the computer how to assemble a functional level and is thus a "level designer".)
So, is this uniformly bad? Well, not really. Yahtzee muses that he's enjoyed quite a few Roguelikes over the years, even ones that don't switch up the gameplay dramatically with each playthrough. Hades, Balatro, and the recently reviewed Blue Prince are notable examples. It helps if there's a meaningful goal to strive for that can be advanced, and/or if the gameplay has synchronicity with the story.
Why the "Roguelike fatigue", then? Well, as he notes in the video, it comes down to volume. It's easier to design a game if you don't have to design half of it, and that allows for a lot more of them to emerge from the indie space. There's also a sense that the randomly assembled levels lack "creative spirit".
Edited by Fighteer on May 1st 2025 at 1:11:46 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Missed this one last week, might as well put it down now.
Viscerafest, Lab Rat, Bionic Bay, and Post Trauma | Yahtzee Tries
- Viscerafest is a retro pixel art boomer shooter that emphasizes fast-paced movement, bunny hopping, and dying a lot. Yahtzee is concerned for anyone playing it who suffers from motion sickness. There's a menu slider for how frequently the main character spouts one-liners. The constant menu-driven lore dumps would also make the game inadvisable to play for any narcoleptics.
- Lab Rat is a top-down, isometric puzzle game that Yahtzee immediately compares to Portal in terms of the cultural context that it is clearly attempting to fit into. It also copies the aesthetic, the protagonist, and the wacky AI computer voice. Where it changes things up is that the player is apparently supposed to be some kind of focus tester for video game concepts. Yahtzee also enjoys the humor.
- Post Trauma is a survival horror game wearing its PS2-era inspiration on its sleeve. You start in a derelict subway train with all the doors locked and are basically left to figure out the plot on your own. Yahtzee gives it 10/10 for "being a survival horror game" but is ungripped by what passes for the story. He compares it to a graduate project to prove that you understand the concepts of the genre.
- Bionic Bay is a 2D platformer in which you play as a tiny man trapped in the workings of an incomprehensible machine. It reminds me of Limbo and all the other atmospheric platformers out there where your main goal is to keep moving right while surviving a series of deathtraps. Yahtzee thinks it needs to pick a lane and stop trying to be every other game in the genre.
Edited by Fighteer on May 3rd 2025 at 9:48:22 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Is anyone still here?
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 | Fully Ramblomatic
Ah yes, this is one that a lot of people have been asking Yahtzee to review. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is... well, good luck guessing from the title, but it's a sci-fi story about a world in which everyone older than a certain age is murdered by a plot device, and each year that number ticks down.
The result is, as Yahtzee says, "What if a traditional turn-based JRPG was made by depressed, pretentious French artists," going on to admit that the use of "depressed" is redundant, as well as "pretentious". He's British, so he's allowed to be a snob towards the French, I guess.
As the title implies, the game starts as the number on the mountain ticks down to 33, setting off a Logan's Run style adventure, albeit one sadly lacking Jenny Agutter in a dress made of tissue paper. And boy does this get depressing, as the game can't wait to start murdering people we are invited to care about.
Despite all that — or perhaps because of it, Yahtzee likes the story as well as the visual design, and apparently the plot does answer its own questions. What he doesn't like is the gameplay. Turn-based JRPG battling is fine in and of itself. Persona does it, and Persona is Yahtzee's boo. But Clair Obscur wants to make everything as complicated as possible, and the result is a mess.
He notes that you can avoid most of the complicated stat optimization by dodging and/or parrying all of the enemy attacks, so... I guess that means it balances out. He would also very much like the dungeons to have maps but overall finds his recommendation thumb pointing upwards for this game.
Edited by Fighteer on May 7th 2025 at 12:34:05 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"It's certainly rare for Yahtzee to outright recommend a JRPG. I've heard about this game a lot lately, though until now comparatively little about what it's actually about. Christ knows the title and box art don't tell me a whole lot, which is all I'm going to investigate if I've never heard of a particular game before.
I don't know why so many turn-based RPG's feel the need to overcomplicate basic combat, but it's definitely a trend that I've seen. Perhaps with "action" RPG's becoming more and more popular lately, devs feel tempted to add more bells and whistles to their turn-based system to make it seem more interesting.
Feels like Dragon Quest is the only JRPG left that's not moving toward action elements, but then, it's been 8 years since their last main title.
My musician pageI'm going to come out and admit that I'm the kind of gamer who likes fiddling with complicated systems to optimize my performance, but to hear Yahtzee's description of this game, it seems like that may go so far as to detract from the experience. I've also never been terribly fond of turn-based RPGs that demand twitch timing to react to enemy attacks or enhance your own. Get your QTEs out of my analytic mental flow!
Bellular talked about Clair Obscur this week, as did Penny Arcade, and there seems to be a general feeling of celebration that a relatively small team of developers who "escaped" their AAA prisons managed to release something of this high quality as their freshman project.
Edited by Fighteer on May 7th 2025 at 1:31:02 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
x4 Sometimes, but not always, checking out the announcement trailer is a good idea. Expedition 33 has a great one (and was what generated buzz about the game to begin with), since it featured zero lies. Well... it features one lie for story reasons.
Edited by Silentedge89 on May 7th 2025 at 8:16:04 AM
I'm not sure who that's aimed at. We're talking about Fully Ramblomatic's reviews, not Steam trailers. Some people's first experience of a game will be a trailer, some will watch reviews, some will see it on streaming, some will hear word of mouth. There's no right or wrong answer.
Yahtzee says nothing about this game's trailer in his review, so why bring it up?
Edited by Fighteer on May 7th 2025 at 11:29:43 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Given the game's story is quite episodic, I think it would lend itself to a TV show most of all. I mean, an entire episode set in Ravenholm would make the whole thing worth watching in my view.