Reviews – Savior Gaming

Sleep Awake Playstation 5 Review

Sleep Awake is a psychological horror game from Blumhouse Games that they were kind enough to send me a copy of to check out. Now, most of you can probably figure out that Blumhouse Games is connected to Blumhouse Films. With that knowledge, you can probably figure you are in for a ride.

The story is simple: you play as Katja, a citizen of the last known city on Earth. Everyone is attempting to stay awake to avoid The Hush. The Hush is a weird phenomenon where anyone who sleeps disappears. Everyone in the world suffers from sleep deprivation; many can’t tell the difference between reality and make-believe. Some are running different types of scientific experiments to stay awake, and others swear pain is the saving grace for staying awake.

I won’t go more into the story than that because this is a game you HAVE to experience with as little knowledge as possible to truly enjoy. Suffice it to say if you see the trailers or enjoy Blumhouse movies, there is a good chance you will enjoy the game.

Instead, I want to focus on the gameplay and music. First, the music. Robin Finck of Nine Inch Nails does music for this bad boy, and it is truly worth listening to. Each track lends itself to truly making the environment as eerie as possible when it needs to be, and when it doesn’t need to be, you feel like the world is as empty as you would imagine it to be. It isn’t the best music in gaming lately, but it is up there.

The gameplay itself is nice. The Puzzles aren’t hard for no reason, but they also don’t insult your intelligence. The maps leave you with room to explore without feeling empty and needlessly big. Stealth sections can be a challenge, but I never felt like the game shoehorned me into following an exact route or getting killed by a cheap enemy. Speaking of death, I never died and lost a ton of progress.

The game admittedly isn’t for everyone, but for people in this niche crowd, it is an 8/10 experience. So turn down the lights, and prepare to get creeped out. Best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Dungeon Rampage Steam Review

Some of you may remember the good old days of flash games; Facebook was full of them. Dungeon Rampage was quite popular, and it has returned to Steam. Gamebreaking Studios was kind enough to send me a copy to review.

The game is quite simple: 1-4 people hack and slash their way through levels to find gold and treasure chests. You can use that gold to buy keys to open those chests to get powerful weapons and items. The experience you gain from this will also help you level up, and each time you level up, you will gain 5 gems. Gems can be used to buy new characters and cosmetic items for them, such as outfits.

This is where the flaw comes into an otherwise decently fun game for $10. The original version of the game was free to play, and like many of those games, it was essentially pay to progress. If you weren’t willing to sink potentially 100 or more hours into the game, you weren’t unlocking everything. The real money aspect has been completely removed; you buy the game, and you can play it as much as you want.

The issue is that they do not seem to have rebalanced the game. After the first hour, you will have more chest than you can open. Without the option to buy gold as the game intended, you start collecting more than you can open. Relying on leveling up and daily rewards to get gems also puts you on an extremely slow path to unlocking characters. The archer character is the cheapest to unlock, costing only 150 gems, which isn’t bad. The next 2, however, cost a whopping 800 each. That’s roughly 350 levels, which is way too long to be playing a game that doesn’t have a ton to offer to begin with.

The game does function as advertised, if that is worth playing or not is completely debatable, and I legitimately worry they will eventually turn it back into a pay-to-progress situation. It is a 5/10 for me. It functions, but I can’t recommend it. Best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake Playstation 5 Remaster Review

Dragon Quest 3 HD 2-2D Remake is one of those games that truly show how these games should be done. They don’t try to change the original, they simply improve the orginal by updating it for a modern audience while keeping what people loved about the initial release.

For starters, you will need to create your own character, take a little quiz, and find out what your personality is. This will help determine your stat growth. When you make your group, you will essentially be assigned random ones as you choose a vocation for each member. Don’t worry, there are plenty of ways to change these during your adventure, and you can even swap out people pretty easily. I definitely recommend keeping a monster rangler with you at all times, however. I didn’t do this, and finding friendly monsters to help me in the arena became annoying. There is an item known as Musk that can help replace them, and a move the thief learns also helps, but it is easier to just have a wrangler.

The story itself is nice, but it is the typical you are the child of a great hero and go on a quest to defeat a great evil. You will spend part of the game finding orbs and following in your father’s footsteps. I won’t say more than that because I don’t want to spoil anything, but most of you will already know where this story is going.

The combat is also a typical turn-based adventure, but it is also one of the more challenging games in the series. The difficulty spikes can be brutal if you aren’t expecting them, and when you change vocations for your other characters, they restart at level one and lose half of their stats. This is a great way for people to build an extensive spell and ability list, and a character that has reached level 20 in two different vocations will absolutely be stronger than a character that has reached level 30 in one. (It takes a similar amount of experience to do this.) So it is worth doing this, but choosing when and how is important.

As always, killing metal slimes before they run away is important for leveling

If you had any reservations about picking up the HD remakes of Dragon Quest, lay them to bed and pick them up. They are fantastic, and are easily up there with Suikoden 1 HD Remaster Review in quality of Remakes and Remasters. Best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

The Conjuring: Last Rites

The Conjuring: Last Rights is basically the perfect example of how to not make a AAA horror movie. As I do every year around my birthday, I crashed at @torstenvblog house, ordered pizza, and we watched movies. Nine this year to be exact, and I am sure you will be reading about the rest soon enough from him. This one, however, I insisted on writing about myself.

The movie itself mostly revolves around the Warren family and how Ed and Lorrain had a daughter, Judy. They had stopped their investigations for years by the time the Smurl family haunting had taken place, and they were focusing on Judy’s upcoming wedding.

This obviously has nothing to do with the Smurl house, but they did shoehorn Judy having visions and whatnot into this about the Smurl house and the demon that is haunting the family; they came from a mirror shown earlier in the movie connecting the Warrens and Smurls. This never happened in real life, by the way.

In fact, the entire movie never even bothers to make you care about the Smurl family. You spend very little time with them. The little kids are mostly shown running around, playing. The older kids scream a bit about how they can’t keep living like this, but outside of a few scenes, they never really show what this even is. We do get a couple of great scenes towards the end where one daughter finds a video from her birthday and is chased by a crazy ghost with an axe, and this is the same night we see the father molested by one. This, however, is after she screams about living like this; what was going on before then is very little that is even mentioned.

Even ignoring that I come from the same area as this Smurl house (I’ve literally driven past it more than once in my travels) and shared emails with people who lived there while working on a book and helping a friend with a podcast (decades of people who lived there have denied anything happening there, going all the way back to the 1980s) and even ignoring the fact I personally think the Warrens are probably frauds, the potental for this to be a good movie exist. The first two Conjuring movies are good. This movie, however, does everything wrong, and nobody should ever watch this pile of garbage. Best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

My Wife Threw Out My Card Collection (So I Bought a Dump to Find Them All) Steam Review

My Wife Threw Out My Card Collection (So I Bought a Dump to Find Them All) might be the game with the longest name I’ve ever reviewed, and was sent to me by the nice people over at Polden Publishing.

The game is quite simple, your wife tossed out your prized card collection, so now you are combing through the garbage dump you bought to find them all. So you spend your time filling a garbage bag with bottles, ammo boxes, and various other garbage, then tossing them into what appears to be a mimic for money. When you run out of energy, you grab some beer from a nearby vending machine to get more.

Every so often, you will come across something of real value that you can sell in the online store for a bit more money than the garbage sells for. This can be used to buy various upgrades, such as a bigger bag, more energy, better beer, or even a dog. This will let you rummage through your garbage piles faster, so you can find more cards or valuables.

You can also occasionally find birds and return them to their nest. The game loop can be fun, and honestly, for $8, you will get some decent time and laughs out of it. Nothing about the game is groundbreaking, but it is still a fun little title. Graphically, it is cute, and the sound isn’t bad at all. It is a solid 7/10 title that will give you a good bit of fun for the money you spend, and that is really all you can ask for. Best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Pirates Outlaws 2: Heritage Steam Review

Pirates Outlaws 2: Heritage is an upcoming deckbuilder from Fabled Game Studios, for which they were kind enough to send me an early copy. You play as a young child who survived a catastrophe and is following in the footsteps of their parents to be a famous pirate adventurer.

All the usual tropes of these games are here: build a deck, travel on a map to different locations, fight monsters that grow stronger over time, and try not to die. This time, it is all pirate-themed. Of course, you will eventually die, and when you do, you can spend gold on perks to come back stronger than ever and do better on your next run.

There are some added things this time around, however. You can get some different companions to help out, for example, my first one was a chicken. I picked him because he was cute. There is a black market that allows you to ban cards you don’t like using, or a workshop that enables you to upgrade cards, making your starting cards stronger.

Another nice touch to the game is that you have to manage supplies throughout your run as you sail around. This isn’t some huge issue; it isn’t a survival game after all. Pay attention and make stops here and there to restock, and you are fine. You can also heal in much the same way. The downside to doing this is that it takes time, and elite enemies can disappear while you do this, costing you valuable rewards.

The biggest downside to this game, honestly, is that it is fun and can be challenging. The game doesn’t really bring anything new to the table or do anything we haven’t seen before. It also doesn’t do anything better than any of the other 50 games in the genre already available. To give credit where it is due, it also doesn’t do any of it worse. The game is fun, and I would definitely recommend it to fans of the first game in the series or the genre as a whole. It also isn’t a bad starting point for people wanting to get into the genre. But if you are specifically looking for something new and fresh within the genre, this isn’t it. It is still a solid 7/10 game that’s worth playing. Best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Vaesen: Castle of Gyllencreutz

As some of you may be aware, not long Free League Publishing sent me a PDF of their Starter set for Vaesen. If you want more details about what is in that, you can read about it here. A few weeks after that, I got home from work to a package on my doorstep, and it was the physical version of that same starter set and the core rule book. Now it is an excellent starter set, but I got to wondering, can someone with no experience playing this game, truly get a group together and play this game? So I gathered the women in my life together, a case of our prefered alchol, and got started.

Beautiful cover art for the core rule book. I didn’t use this for my experiment

The first thing I did was have everyone blindly choose one of the 5 playable characters that the set came with. My daughter decided to play as a rugged Soldier named Fronz who couldn’t read. I don’t know why she decided he couldn’t read, but I just went with it. The other ladies chose the 2 ladies in the group; they have names, but admittedly, that isn’t important. By not important, I mean I forgot their names.

Now, the Castle of Gyllemcreutz story that comes with the set is a great starting point that introduces you to the basics of the game. I don’t want to get too in-depth with what is involved with this story because it is easy to give too much away. Much of the story involves investigating a large castle to find clues on how to solve the mystery involving ghostly lights and missing people.

Dice rolls are all based on rolling a D6; players need to roll a certain number of 6’s to succeed. How many completely depends on how difficult the task is. There is also very little combat in this module, but the person running it could easily change that if they chose to. Nothing is stopping them, and all the information needed to do it is included.

But how did my players do? Well, they never were confused on how to play; they made their way through the castle with very little coaching besides trying to get them to stop goofing off, and the big finale of the whole thing was figured out before we figured out how to finish off a case of alcohol in 2 hours between the 4 of us.

I would absolutely say this starter kit provides everything you need to get you started playing Vaesen with limited or no experience. Best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Forever Skys PS5 Review

Forever Skys was released by Far From Home earlier this year on consoles after being in early access on Steam. They were nice enough to send me a copy recently to check out, and I have to say it is one of the more original survival games I have played.

All the typical survival types are here: gather food and water so you don’t die, build a bed so you can sleep. The usual suspects. Even having a special gun and scanner to discover new things to build isn’t new. It is all very well done, however, which is important.

What is new, however, is that instead of building just a base somewhere, you are building an airship. Yes, it is fully functional, needs engines and fuel, etc, to fly, and you will fly it yourself. It can be damaged, and you can fall off of it. You also gather food by fishing off the side of it.

The game really picks up when you have to find bigger and better things in the underworld. See, the game does have a story, and that story is basically to save humanity. And while you are pretty much safe while flying through the sky on your ship, traveling below the clouds is when it gets dangerous. This will require special preparation, because most things down there want you dead.

This brings me to my only real complaint about the game: getting around can be annoying if you are an idiot like me and don’t put the radar somewhere easy to see while flying. Don’t worry, I fixed it. Even then, a lot of the map looks the same regardless of where you go, and I just wish there was some sort of variety. The game is still an 8/10 survival game, and the ability to build and fly a ship from the start is nice. Best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Demonschool Playstation 5 Review

DemonSchool from Developer Necrosoft Games and publisher Ysbryd Games is a tactical RPG, and proudly wears its Persona and Italian horror roots on its sleeve. Thankfully, they sent me a copy to check out.

The combat is interesting; unlike most of these games, you won’t simply be moving a few squares, choosing an attack, gaining levels, and learning new skills. Every character simply knows the attacks they will know. You, of course, can learn new skills throughout the game, but these work like buffs. Your healer learns to weaken enemies, or your attackers can learn to also stun enemies, things like that.

Killing enemies will see them explode into blood

The other interesting thing about the combat is that you move in directions, not to spaces. This may sound odd at first, but it works out very well and creates an interesting dynamic. This becomes even more true when you realize characters like Namako will move through a group of enemies, stunning them just to end up on the other side of them. Faye can then attack that same group and create a combination attack with Namako.

Bosses create an entirely new situation, however. They are all very large and have their own gimmicks to overcome. Many, if you stay in a certain zone for too long, will kill you in a single shot. This works in both directions, however, and trapping an enemy there will also kill them. Each boss has their own reason for existing and is part of the story attached to them.

Now you will notice I haven’t touched on the story yet, and that is intentional, as I don’t like to risk spoilers. You play as Faye, probably one of the only people left in the world who knows about a prophecy that demons will return to start the apocalypse. She journeys to this college on an island in an attempt to stop it. She teams up with Namako right away, another person with demon hunter blood in her family, despite her initial refusal. There are several tone shifts throughout the game, and they are all amazing.

The writing can be a bit cliché and silly at times, and it won’t be for everyone. The game, however, is a solid 8/10. The battles can be a bit redundant, but I enjoyed them. Best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

JDM: Japanese Drift Master

JDM: Japanese Drift Master has finally come to Xbox after being long available on Steam, and Gaming Factory was nice enough to send me a copy to check out. First thing I have to say is the game is beautiful. There is just no way around that fact. The map is based on real-world Japan, and just driving around it, you can see the inspiration and even some real-world places. Just driving around, drifting for no reason, can be fun. The cars themselves are some of the best I have seen in a video game.

The story itself plays out in Manga-style cutscenes. Don’t worry if you have never read one; the game has a handy help system for that. This, I thought, was a nice touch and really just steered into the Japanese aesthetic. More games really need to do this, I think.

All of that truly doesn’t mean much if the controls aren’t good. As someone who isn’t huge on racing games but has played some, they are fantastic. You have two different modes to choose from. A more arcade-style for an easier beginner person, and a sim mode where pretty much all the help options are disabled. This makes the game more approachable for everyone.

Now, some of you may be wondering, does the game support steering wheels? The answer is no. It was designed for a controller and does not support steering wheels. This may be a deal breaker for some of you, and I understand that. I do find it odd myself, considering it is a single-player game and they don’t have to worry about someone having an advantage in multiplayer.

At the end of the day, it is a 9/10 racing game. Drift fans will love it, many of whom have long waited for their chance to play this game that has been trapped on Steam. Is it easy? No, there is a ton to learn and get used to. But it is beautiful and fun to play. Best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.