Recent reviews by Patola [Linux]

This game requires you to agree to an EULA and then to a "RULES OF CONDUCT" wall of text.

Basically, they require from the player ideological alignment and behavior for a SINGLE-PLAYER GAME.

This makes no sense. YES, I know that we "license" a game, it does not belong to us. But that is a whole different level. They put a leech on our necks and give themselves the right to look down on the player and revoke their license for whatever fake reason they come up with.

It is a SINGLE-PLAYER game. I should be able to interact with it in whatever way I want. We all know that in the power relationship between the developer and the player, the latter is much weaker, but this is beyond ridiculous. This is so disrespectful I don't even have words for it.

So after being outraged by these initial conditions, I learned that ReLU Games is famous for "sell for ad games". I should have researched better. What a huge disappointment.

I'm not putting up with that. Refunding ASAP.

Don't believe the people trying to dismiss the big problem here, specially ones that mention articles from corrupt gaming media like thegamer. This game has actually changed their terms of service imitating Nintendo's nasty forced arbitration clause, which legally prevents any gamer from suing, being forced to go through third-party arbitration which always benefit the publisher. The clause is right at the start of the EULA:

THIS AGREEMENT CONTAINS A MANDATORY ARBITRATION CLAUSE AND A WAIVER OF CLASS ACTION AND JURY TRIAL RIGHTS FOR ALL USERS RESIDING IN THE UNITED STATES AND ANY OTHER TERRITORY OTHER THAN AUSTRALIA, SWITZERLAND, THE UNITED KINGDOM, OR THE TERRITORIES OF THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC AREA.

And it's explained in detail further down. And yes, it seems that Take-Two is using that for all their games, since it leverages their power over their users so much.

We asked for it -- and Egosoft delivered: a mini-DLC with a ship from the X3 games. I recommend.

They might still have ties with the German government and those DEI obligations -- one cannot avoid the pattern recognition: it's always some "empowered woman" girlbossing the player around at the start of the quests, and they did not deviate from the protocol.

Still, this DLC is great, the ship is crafted with love, and it helps fund this wonderful game. A shiny recommendation. I bought it with its soundtrack, completing the anniversary edition. Also recommended because Alexei Zakharov is an incredible compositor.

The store page never tells that the game does not have curves. It's just straight lines. Every map. No tunnels either.
Although the game is pretty cheap and the graphics and effects are nice, it's barely a game without these elements.
Immediately refunded when I noticed that.

*** Played on Linux, Meta Quest 3 via WiVRn ***

A softporn shooter like Gal*Gun where you shoot girls that are trying to grab and... "kiss" you. Different from Gal*Gun this one has smooth motion and light RPG mechanics.

This game happens in the Japanese Edo Period and is more historically accurate than Assassin's Creed Shadows. It also features an anatomically more accurate female Shinobi which does not have a male name.

The game is made for the all-powerful Male Gaze™, which makes it 200% better right out of the box. The protagonist is a short child-bodied young man (over 18) with hair over his eyes which is magically transported to the Edo period by a lewd demon girl and is given a few weapons to fight some mind-controlled girls (all the men have been exterminated, it seems). The weapons rip their clothes off then make they climax and disappear.

I might be misrepresenting the story. It is somewhat convoluted. The characters act irrationally and there's some sort of plot twist at the end.

This game resembles Gal*Gun but it's way better, with weapon upgrades and smooth motion. You don't have a run or jump button.

You can buy upgrades for your weapons and attributes (like running speed and life) in the game's hub after each mission. There are 5 episodes, each with around 10 missions. Before each mission you can choose the difficulty easy, medium or hard. The missions are varied and with different objectives and each episode ends with a boss fight. There are missions to (un)paint the ground with combat, there are missions to go through some areas, there are arena missions, there are missions for collectable, and in the latest chapters there are special missions where you combat giantesses, mini-giantesses and the final boss is a mega-giantess that you fight in a chopper.

You also have a special power ("sage mode") that makes the world go in slow motion for a few seconds and temporarily gives you infinite ammo. Some stages have recharges for its meter, but it also refills with kills.

All weapons come with a given amount of ammo and you might exhaust the faster weapon if you don't hit much. You'd usually have a way to get around by with the secondary weapon. Some levels refill ammo at set stages.

If you are caught by the girls who chase you, they perform some lewd act on you and you have to get free by rapidly clicking the trigger button. This minigame is easy but the animations are quite varied and you can become mesmerized by them and just give up on the level to see how it ends. If you fail you can just try the level again.

When you get to the last chapter, you unblock a "gallery" feature that allows you to customize the main characters that interact with you and experiment with the game's several animations (specially if you used the nude patch). A very welcome addition and after beating the game you unlock all animations and cosmetic features.

The game has a big frame on the hub room with your challenges and achievements, but it does not have achievements on Steam.

It took me 7.5 h to finish the entire game. However it has a lot of replayability, so the short time is not a big downside.

The game caters to various sexual fetishes which were made popular by sites like deviant art and 4chan. You mind find them funny, pitiful, disturbing or exciting (in which case you are a pervert). Most are related to giant women. The ones I recognized are: (1) giantesses, (2) mini-giantesses, (3) feet fetish, (4) being stomped, (5) voreaphilia, (6) insertion/unbirth, (7) boob crushing. I'm not an expert, if you find more please leave a comment and I'll edit this review.

All the women are anime-styled, with giant flat eyes, oddly shaped heads, minuscule mouths and noses, colored hair and skin, with child voices and incessant giggling. There are different bodies but they vary in very few attributes, like breast size and height. Although it's part of the aesthetics, it's important to note that the style is completely neotenic, intolerant of adult or mature beauty. That might adversely affect the healthy sexual maturing of young men who play the game by making them fixate on this impossible archetype.

The game is classified as adult on Steam but doesn't have any nudity or graphic acts. But you can grab the developer's nude patch to add them to the game.

This is a very indie game and it shows. The animations are nice but they are full of shapes clipping into one another and might show a couple graphic artifacts too.

The background music is pleasant, soft and sticky. Appropriate to the game but it sticks for you the whole day. Apparently there are 10 different tracks.

The game has teleport and smooth move, they're not a configuration setting but a switch activated by the left thumbstick click. It's annoying because sometimes in the middle of a battle you might press it by accident and lose control of your motion.

It has no smooth turn, only snap turn in small angles. It works well if you choose to turn physically though.

Objects and characters aren't solid, you don't grab them (your hands clip through) and they don't have physics. You have very little interaction with the environments: you can click-grab your weapons (a big weapon, a small weapon, and a throwable) and sometimes you find some valves that you can turn with one hand in a few levels. You can also find some doorknobs that you just click to open. This is clearly an opportunity for improvement in next titles.

A worthy purchase even at full price if you're a perv and into the fetishes I mentioned. It will certainly work for your intended purpose, but please clean yourself afterwards. If you aren't into that, wait for a discount.

Some sample gameplay here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8RGAemu2Ug -- in retrospect, this wasn't very representative of the game. The painting levels are very few and the variety of character models in the actual game is a lot bigger than this video shows. In this video, the nude mod is not active.

While this software (an openXR and openVR runtime, along with many utilities) is kind of essential for many PCVR games, and started out as moderately good, it has become a bug-ridden performance hog of resources, so much that some games warn you to not use it and use something else instead. For example, Alien: Rogue Incursion promptly recommends you to change from SteamVR to OculusVR if you're using a meta quest.

From my name you can see that I only play games on Linux, so that makes it even worse because we're short of alternatives (there's no OculusVR or Virtual Desktop for example) and on Valve there is only one person dealing part-time with the SteamVR for Linux, so fixes are very rare and most of the updates in the last year broke something that was working.

I've played it with a lighthouse-based VR (the Valve Index) and Streaming-based ones (Meta Quest 2 and Meta Quest 3), the latter via an intermediary streaming software called ALVR. ALVR fixes many SteamVR bugs by its side (so the streaming experience is superior to the native lighthouse-based), but even their developer team got fed up with SteamVR and announced they'll abandon it by the next major version (we're at version 20, version 21 will not support SteamVR on Linux anymore). It is THAT bad. Valve really dropped the ball with this software.

SteamVR is also closed-source, so the community cannot see and modify the code by themselves. However, a new open-source software appeared called WiVRn that acts as an openXR and openVR runtime and doesn't require SteamVR to be run. It's still in its infancy, but it is robust and has a performance that can go from twice to ten times better than SteamVR, and with less bugs even. At this time it still doesn't run all the games, so far I'd say about 50% to 60%, but I am using it in every game I can since it's so much better than SteamVR.

Still think I'm exaggerating the situation of SteamVR? Read this comment on the bug report, https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamVR-for-Linux/issues/655#issuecomment-2532437544

If you use VR on Linux, unfortunately for some things SteamVR is still the only options. But not all.

If you still don't believe what I'm saying here, I can get a number of references as horror stories and bug reports to convince you the software is that bad. Please comment on this review and I'll update it with that. The bugs are moronic, like the one that makes the Valve Index knuckles stop registering the triggers if the game is in a prefix different from /home. Or the one that creates an unkillable black window. Or the one that logs to disk EVERY input event on the Index as an error, making every game stutter. These bugs linger for years and are never resolved.

Additionally, at this point in time, SteamVR for Linux STILL does not support Steam Link, taking screenshots with the controllers and the Valve Index passthrough cameras; and its hardware support is pathetic, like it supports the Valve Index and a couple of Vive models, there are some rough third-party open-source hardware drivers for the HTC Vive Pro 2 and Pimax (maybe) but Valve doesn't support neither makes them official.

I played this thinking I would get a decent full-fledged horror game. Instead, I got a cheaper copy of a pancake game:

- Much darker than the pancake game it's based on.

- Controls are worse than the pancake game, for example you have to really twist your wrist to rotate something, because the game doesn't allow different grab spots for the items.

- Few objects have interactive physics, and almost everything is firmly glued to the floor. Physicality of the game is quite low.

- Your character walks slower than a snail even at the maximum speed and turn speed setting. Who thought this would be a good idea? In the pancake game the character also walks slowly, but not THAT slowly.

- Performance is horrible even on a high-end rig (7800X3D, 6Ghz DDR5 RAM, RX 7900 XTX). And they stopped updating the game, apparently due to the release on the Meta store, so no performance fixes are planned.

Also, I have an issue with the puzzles once I started looking at them. Some are really nonsensical with moon logic, like the clock puzzle. And for a VR game, in which you go to shorter gameplay sessions, the checkpoints are just too spread apart.

Short review, I know, because I haven't played much. Maybe I'll come back to it much later. I'm refunding and I will possibly buy it again years in the future when it gets a huge discount.

A worthy spin-off successor of Alien: Isolation. Ties in indirectly with the pancake game, and brings it fully to VR, with tactile and physical gameplay, delightful combat, and a 10 to 20-hour campaign. I can highly recommend the game, I can even say it's my "VR Game of the Year" for 2024. But I have some criticisms, if you want to know them, read on.

For starters, the protagonist, Zula Hendricks, was not created for this game. She has debuted on the Dark Horse comics Aliens: Defiance in 2016 and took part of several other works: Aliens: Defiance - Extravehicular, Aliens: Resistance, Aliens: Rescue, the Alien: Isolation novel, Alien: Prototype and Alien: Inferno's Fall. She met and befriended Amanda Ripley from Alien: Isolation after the events of that game, so there's a tie-in, even if indirect.

Zula has a companion, Davis One, a former mass-produced combat android that somehow found a way to reprogram itself, got some kind of "humanity", and uses glasses to differentiate itself from the other androids.

I didn't find the story of the game to be bad. It's good, not excellent, and I'm a guy that will notice every detail, and I've also paid attention to every audio note I heard and I have read every terminal message on the game even with the alien danger looming around. These messages could be better, almost all of them are boring mentions that don't help world-building nor reveal anything interesting, and sometimes the messages are repeated in different places.

Alex White (in an interview about the game here) wrote the story, with the narrative lead being Zoe Quinn, of GamerGate fame when she traded some favors for favorable reviews of her game.

Yes and no. If you take into consideration the writers, it should be awfully replete with identity politics tropes. However, the game has kept these down to a minimum. Namely, maybe these parts:

* A female character, Eunice, with a female voice, has several repeated mentions of having a wife, as if nudging the player to understand it's a same-sex relationship. Curiously enough, today's sensitivity trainings usually say that "wife" is a loaded word that can trigger LGBT people.
* All female characters are virtuous. All the villains are male.
* Not sure if that counts but there's an android with a male body and a female voice, called "Helen".
* The choice of the character might be seen as a "diversity choice" but has a lot of plausible deniability going for it, since she's tied to Amanda Ripley and an established character in the alien universe.

As an anecdotal experiment, my wife is a black woman not too different from the protagonist, so to see if she liked being represented in an alien movie I insisted dozens of times to get her playing the game, almost to the point we had a fight because she didn't like the setting. So much for representation.

I also have read Aliens: Defiance to understand the character better but I found it so full of plot holes that it gave me trypophobia. Therefore, I couldn't bear reading the other books. The game is much better than the comics in that regard, but I still found a number of plot holes on it, not going to list them (6 or 7) because it would be spoilers and make this review too long.


The game has all the needed VR options, locomotion vs teleport, snap or smooth turn, the dreadfull vignette effect and a few others. During the game your hands don't pass through objects, many objects can be grabbed and thrown with realistic physics, many interactions are done with the hands like levers. Your inventory can be accessed with a button showing holograms of the items which you grab, and there are assigned slots on your body to draw your weapons/items from (shotgun from the left shoulder, rifle from the right shoulder, revolver from the right belt, grenate from the left arm, health from the left wrist, etc.). Reloading each gun is different, with a spatial sphere from your belt where you can grab the ammunition (which is a trainable skill you acquire since the volume is small). It fits the bill but I would constantly miss the location when doing it.

A big downside of the game, currently, is performance. It can get stuttery and lagged sometimes and I could not find the pattern for that, and a reboot usually fixes it. I am using Linux via ALVR to run the game but it seems to be the same on Windows and the developers recommend OculusVR or Virtual Desktop instead of SteamVR to play it for performance reasons. I hope they can optimize the game with newer patches.


They completely nailed the alien ambiance. The effects are good, convincing, resemble the movies and Alien: Isolation. The aesthetics is perfect and the environments realistic. The snow is very well done. The weapons and devices are the same as in the alien movies.

One thing that's not well done though is the gore. It looks made for small children, because none of the bodies show signs of having any physical harm and even the blood color is unrealistic. There are no dismemberments, guts, body parts or exposed wounds. At one point in the game there is an alien fetus extraction but the body cavity of the person shows just a fleshy hollow space with no organs, guts or even blood, it feels like a joke out of place.


That's fortunately the best part of the game. In Alien: Isolation you had for most of the game one alien alone that was immortal, so you just had to distract and hide from it. In this game they evoke the same kind of fear, but you are a fully armed (former) colonial marine and can fight back and kill aliens, but it's just that even a little distraction or timing mishap could mean your end. The battles with the aliens (and facehuggers) are tense and meaningful and the more progress you have, the more numerous alien batches you face. Ammunition is scarce and you need to learn to reload your weapons quickly. You don't battle androids or humans at any part, so enemy variety is low, but there is an alien boss fight.

The saving works by docking your tablet on a "panic room" computer. This is a perfectly safe room (when it's closed) where you can ensure you are not caught. Some segments save your game even when you are not in this panic room.

The tablet holds your information for the game. The unfolded map -- which you have to check manually, and that's a nice addition, make the gameplay much more immersive -- the inventory, and some notes. It would be good if it had a section for all the mails you've checked, since the moments you read these you are not safe and must read in a hurry.


A couple of the days before release, the developers changed the cover art of the game to instead of showing "Alien: Rogue Incursion", showed "Alien: Rogue Incursion - part I". This was a terrible PR blunder, but without going to the reasons of why they did that (which would be speculation anyways), I didn't find bad myself. The game ends with a cliffhanger -- as did Alien: Isolation in 2014 -- and I completed it in 20 hours, there are people saying they did it in 10 hours. It's a full game in VR, which has shorter gameplay sessions that a pancake game, so it seems the right size for me, specially for the relatively low price it has. I liked the cliffhanger ending and I am looking forward to play part II -- I was actually very happy that a second game was announced, and will buy it in pre-sales if they allow it. I don't want to wait 10+ years like in the case of Alien: Isolation.

I have some sample gameplay of the game in my youtube channel, for example this one. Browse the channel for more videos, including the ending with credits.

This game has a bug that on some setups brings the controller hands below the ground, preventing them from interacting with anything, even the menus. I am using one of those setups, and I can't play the game (Meta Quest 3 via ALVR).

This game has been abandoned and has no new updates. Which means this bug will never be resolved.

So I had to refund. Pity, and very unethical from the developers.

SUMMARY: if you REALLY want more starfield slop, at least wait for a good discount. Otherwise, don't buy it, use free mods for new quests.

- I have previously made a scathing negative review of the main game, so I tried to do my best to review this DLC fairly: I went back to the main game and played it for 40h to reacquire the skills and feeling to compare to the DLC.

- Then I went to the DLC and started it, spending 25h and doing 100% of it (all achievements, all places explored), not even leaving the planet (Va'ruun'kai). I only haven't read all the new in-game books, they are very boring.

Unfortunately, no, the DLC is not up to a quality level that I can recommend. It's not as disappointing as the main game, so I will list the pros:

- The starting 1/3 of the DLC is well made and engaging, with a different tone from the main game. The zero-G fights are specially good, this is a good mechanic from the base game that lacked game presence.

- There is a semblance of good quality quests, specially emotional quests in the DLC (an old man with Alzheimer using a "system" to remember stuff, a familiar ruse with brothers, an abandoned orphanage), so you can feel there is a heart somewhere in the game, but the way most of these quests end is disappointing, you cannot but wonder about the committee-led decision process on these stories, obfuscating individual talent.

- Graphics are great and high resolution, as in the main game. The new weapons are good, they are not only reskins of current ones. The new grenades are great.

Neutral:

- Curiously, the fake "serpent religion" of the game which was incredibly safely depicted and generic so far gets more serious and dangerously close to a real-life "religion of peace", to the point that it is difficult to deny it's a criticism of that religion, specially with the ethnic choices on its characters.

Now, the cons:

- No new starborn powers, no impact on the universe.

- The lighting is all baked-in, and actual lighting like your flashlight looks fake, unconvincing, unrealistic, contrasting heavily against the realistic graphics. I know this is the same as the base game but this DLC is specially populated with dark and creepy environments, a good flashlight would have made them much more impactful.

- I chose Andreja to be my companion to see what would be different with her (since she's from House Va'ruun) and there's half a dozen times she says something, and that's about it. Very disappointing.

- The story looks like it will give reasonable explanation or closure, but never gets to that, and in the end you just break some stuff in a very unsatisfying manner, with drawn-out battle arenas where some blue stuff is crumbling down. You never feel in control, and all your decisions are inconsequential.

- THE MESSAGE. Bethesda is well aware of the power of an immersive game to convince, and won't RELENT on using it as an ideological tool to indoctrinate people on woke ideology. No, really. They are RELENTLESS. The game is about religious zealotry and the fake religion of the game contrasts heavily with the fanatical, no-compromises woke religion they sport in every aspect of the game. In the long term that makes the game unbearable to play, you just feel antagonized at every playing hour.

- How brainless you have to be to devise a secluded religious community, isolated in a planet from every other human population for many generations, and they STILL follow the formula of round-robin ethnic and sexual diversity, instead of being an homogeneous people like EVERY known case in real life? I mean, EVERY FACTION, be it villains or heroes or inbetween in this game, has east-asian, blacks, arabs, indians, whites, gingers, latinos and whatnot, have an enormous percentage of women in power and completely embrace LGBTQIA+ rights. And they don't even mix after that many generations!

- Even though it is only 25h of content (at most, I really took an effort to explore EVERYTHING), the DLC feels drawn out.

Having said that, if you don't really pay attention to the story (which is difficult, the exposition is huge in every Bethesda game), ignore the clutter management and don't get upset with the indoctrination, you might have some good time with this DLC. The combat is not bad, specially if you have leveled up enough. Take note that the ending is drawn out and tiresome, though.