One Happy Team…

Category: PC Gaming

Об играх

  • Cyberpunk 2077

    Completed Cyberpunk.
    I can’t complain much about the arsenal, there are plenty of cool and fun unique weapons to play with. Only category that puzzles me are the machine guns: there are just two types of LMGs, the second was added in the DLC, I think. And there is exactly one HMG type in the entire game. And it’s not a minigun. Was it even worth having it as a category?
    If you side with Arasaka, you discover that the Patriarch was preserved as AI. He takes over his son’s body as a punishment, and continues to rule the corporation. Arasaka can’t help you, but offers to turn you into AI until they find you a suitable body.

    Adam Smasher is not a bad boss, but also not a very good one. I think that the weak points were added only with Phantom Liberty expansion. Without them, it would be a slog, because he seems to be immune to headshots, my forte, and is a complete bullet sponge. At least he can’t kill you at this point.
    The problem with the story is that it’s wide, but not very deep. There are just a few quests on the main plot line, the last time you saw Smasher was some 60 hours ago, and the only reason you fight is that he’s the bodyguard of Yorinobu. Nothing personal.
    If you side with Rogue, then you go through the same “jungle” in the Arasaka Tower, then Smasher kills her, making it a bit more personal. Alt says that either V continues to deteriorate or Johnny takes over his body, and V becomes an AI. They really needed to make AI out of V, it seems.
    If you side with Panam, Saul dies instead of Rogue, then again you get the choice who inherits the body. If left it to V, and he escaped with Panam across the border to live whatever he has left.
    (more…)

  • Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty

    Completed Phantom Liberty by siding with Songbird all the way, because I thought it will be the most difficult. You get number of options to betray her in the process, and then you can shoot Reed dead in a cutscene. It’s a good spy thriller, and the best Cyberpunk 2077 story, but every Cyberpunk 2077 story has to be a W40K story: meaning it all has to return to status-quo.
    One nice detail. If you side with Songbird, Alex survives, and she actually calls you later.
    Whole Panam romance didn’t work for me. I’m not gonna analyze why, just gonna say it worked in Metro Last Light, and hell it worked in Kingdom Come, and even Wolfenstein, but not here.
    (more…)

  • Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty

    The Brazilian spies sidequest is what I’d expected from more quests in this game. You’re asked to track a spy that was MIA half a year ago, but not his tracker came back online. Only it’s not the spy, but his interrogator who fell out of favour that activated the tracker. You’re asked to kill her, but you also can let her go. Then one of the spies asks you to destroy the tracker, because it all was a government coverup, while the second spy wants justice.
    What really sets the main story of Phantom Liberty apart is the murder of the French twins. And I’m sure it’s deliberate, as you have voice lines to protest it. By that point, you’ve killed a thousand people, probably, but most of them faceless. But the twins, you get to know, they are funny, and not even particularly evil, just kid hackers. Then your companions murder them.
    In any case, Songbird gets possessed by a rogue AI. Either you help her, female spy assassinates the colonel, and you escape with Songbird, or you try to incapacitate Songbird, colonel kills Alex, Songbird goes full Darth Vader, and you escape alone. The benefit of the later is that you get to fight and kill Hansen yourself, and it’s a good boss fight. He chases you with a machine gun, then throws his unique Yakut knife at you and tries to beat you in a hand to hand combat. Fun times.
    (more…)

  • Myst 2021

    Another point’n’click adventure that I found extremely obscure back in the day, this one a 1st person as well.
    First I tried the Masterpiece Edition, which, although it works, is basically unplayable. There’s a Windows 3.11 border, blurry prerendered graphics and discrete movement that induces motion sickness, because you rotate at arbitrary angles, depending on the “room” you’re in. Sometimes you’d do 90 degrees turn, sometimes 180, because it’s a “corridor”. Unsettling, and not intentionally.
    The remake on Unreal Engine is much more playable than the original, in my opinion. It solves the issue with disorienting navigation, as it turns the game into a typical walking sim, most of which use Unreal Engine anyway, and it’s pleasant looking too.
    The game itself is the most difficult point’n’click I’ve played so far. Not that I chase difficulty, quite the opposite.
    It’s just the first game I can’t even understand what’s a puzzle I supposed to be able to solve, and which I need more hints.
    You can rotate the lighthouse, and when pointing to another puzzle, it will show you a solution: which time to set on the clocktower, or what’s the code for a safe in the boiler room. Are those hints? Or is it the proper logical solution?
    Also, it spills on you four graphomanical stories about a man travelling between worlds. Are those hints? I don’t know, for how much text there is.
    (more…)

  • Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty

    The problem with Cyberpunk story that it’s gameplay is in dissonance with it. The story is that Relic is killing V, and he doesn’t have much time left, but in reality, you can play however much you want. Of they wanted death breathing down the neck, they could just do time limit like in Fallout 1.
    Story of Phantom Liberty is pretty good, though. Songbird is a superhacker working for the US president, and like V, she’s dying due to access to Forbidden Knowledge. She strikes a deal with Hansen, a bald rogue colonel who controls part of Night City. A clear reference to Kurtz from Apocalypse Now. A bald rogue colonel. President’s jet is downed, but she also makes sure president is rescued, by guiding you towards an undercover agent, Reed, whom she and the President betrayed some years ago.

    Cyberpunk-2077-Screenshot-2026-08-19-22-41-49-03
    There’s a lot of “power fantasy” for sure, “gun porn”, to be exact. The marvel at the “Sam Fisher’s” gun, or how you can unplug a unique sniper rifle and carry it away.

    Cyberpunk-2077-Screenshot-2026-08-19-21-56-14-67Cyberpunk-2077-Screenshot-2026-08-19-22-29-08-42
    (more…)

  • Neverhood

    Another point’n’click I remember from my childhood. The navigation is discreet first person, though. There’s no inventory, character just uses the item when needed. No active zone highlighting on the other hand. Puzzles are simplistic so far, except for the music puzzle. Although I might be just not very good with music puzzles in general, as I also had to look up a solution for it when I played Sanitarium.
    It feels like they didn’t want to make as much of a game, as a Nickelodeon style animation. The escape from crabmonster scene is unnecessary long for a game to justify another simplistic puzzle, but makes total sense if it’s an animation that’s all about slapstick humor, like bumping into a door you just closed.

    Scummvm-Screenshot-2026-08-18-15-56-24-31
    Also, either they wanted to troll the player or to prolong the game, possibly both. If you eat 3 “apples”, there’s a video playing for a literal minute of protagonist barfing. Then there are literal 50 screens of poem you need to cross in the “museum”.

    Scummvm-Screenshot-2026-08-18-11-56-47-71
    (more…)

  • Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty

    Before getting to Point of No Return, I need to finish Phantom Liberty DLC. It replaces Johnny with an Asian chick, Songbird.

    Cyberpunk-2077-Screenshot-2026-08-11-22-36-37-33
    The story is that you need to save one girlboss, the President, whose plane was shot down, while getting instructions from another girlboss.

    Cyberpunk-2077-Screenshot-2026-08-15-18-32-47-12
    Because it’s an end-game content, and the character is maxed out most likely, they introduce a new perk tree, that can only be upgraded through perks you find in the new zone, Dogtown. A lot of the new perks are focused around buffing the cybernetic weapons you can install in your arms, as they are indeed pointless. Whole point of them could be that they are concealed, but then you are rarely penalized even for carrying an antitank rifle in public.
    The way they recreated the fight with a robot tank from Ghost in the Shell is great. It’s a good boss all in all, that has weak points and multiple phases, but you also can just whack it little by little.

    Cyberpunk-2077-Screenshot-2026-08-15-20-02-04-40

    (more…)

  • Dig

    Completed The Dig.
    Didn’t look into walkthrough once, which is a good result for the game. Although two episodes did get me stumped for quite a long time. First, I thought the lightbridges need to be activated from both sides, or in some order. Turns out, you just need to hold the mouse button while activating them, a mechanic that the game never uses again, and I haven’t seen in any other point’n’click. And second, is that in order to deactivate the forcefield, you need to talk to Maggie about a specific object in that specific location.
    Initially I praised the story, but having finished it, I must say it’s a disappointment. I remember how confused I was while reading about the game that there’s an instance when you need to saw off your crew member’s hand. But it all comes quite out of the blue: Brinks, the resurrected junkie, gets his hand stuck without any good reason, and this is the only bloody violent episode in the entire game, added for pure shock value. Later he tries to kill you and falls off a cliff, but lacking an arm doesn’t have any relation to that.
    Then there’re the aliens. They went to a higher plane of existence, while their bodies and planet deteriorated, and now they are bored and long to return, but they can’t. Sounds like a good story of civilization that is too evolved for its own good, and “be carefult what you wish for”. Only the protagonist manages to not only to pull them back, but return them their physical bodies, without any explanation. Also, both of his companions are miraculously resurrected, although Brink is unexplainably aged now?
    (more…)

  • Dig

    I’m surprised how much I managed to progress without a guide, considering how unhelpful the game is.
    We revive Brink, the archaeologist that falls to his death early in the game, and he gets obsessed with the crystals we used to revive him, as well as some ancient machine, so he isn’t much help at all.
    The only puzzle I kind of remembered from reading about the game was recreating the turtle. You have fossil in one room, and bones you can place and rotate in the other.
    There is a lot of find password, go back to nexus, open new door. And at one point, you just have to try all the passwords you have acquired in order to proceed.

    (more…)

  • Dig

    As with Orion Conspiracy, I didn’t play The Dig when it released, only read some reviews. But I did try it maybe 10 years ago, and found it very difficult. Not so much now, for some reason. The trickiest part so far is the dialogs. You get a set of icons, but it’s not clear which are necessary to progress, and which are just flavour, so you end up listening to everything. And there is a lot of voiced dialog in this game, because besides Lucas Arts, which were at their peak, it has also Steven Spielberg and Orson Scott Card. And you can tell how bold the writing is. You have five astronauts sent on a mission to alter the course of an asteroid that’s about to collide with Earth. In half an hour, you lose contact with two of them. In another half an hour, you lose the third character.
    The asteroid turns out to be an alien lift, that takes the astronauts that weren’t waiting in the shuttle to an alien planet. And that’s not the only civilization, there’s a wreck of at least other space ship that isn’t human.
    There are a few mechanics that make this game difficult. First, not all objects are active. Early on you need to use an alien compass to discover a place to dig. Second, you can’t simply exhaust your options. There’s a puzzle where you need to program a probe to pick up a lense, then put it in its place. And it can take up to 50 instructions, although you need around 10. Third, you have doors with codes, but you have no idea which code fits which door, so you have to try them all out.

    (more…)

  • Orion Conspiracy

    Completed Orion Conspiracy.
    Head of Security discovers that his Deputy is an alien, and gets paranoid, pulling a grenade. Pilot wrestles him, and both get blown, and one of the scientists gets crushed, and her husband decides to stay with her as they get sucked into space. Pure comedy.

    Wolfenstein-3D-Screenshot-2026-08-12-18-43-32-77
    The blast also damaged the propulsion system. We can recover another one from the probe. There’s a lengthy animation that mirrors Danny’s death at the same probe, but this time his father managed to recover what he needs.
    As we return, the rival corporation tries to take over the station, killing Head of Scientists. We fly out again, place one of the mines that killed Danny on top of their lab and blow them.

    Wolfenstein-3D-Screenshot-2026-08-12-18-54-22-95

    Turns out, they discovered shapeshifters slumbering in the asteroid, and colluded with them.
    We hunt Security Deputy, which turned feral and ate his dog for some reason, then we bobbytrap selfdestruct before turning it on, and fly away with the black Mechanic and femail Captain.

    Wolfenstein-3D-Screenshot-2026-08-12-21-22-20-01

    I genuinely expected a final scare in the form that she’s also a shapeshifter, but no.
    On one hand, the game is quite easy. I’m bad at point’n’click adventures, but I had to look in the guide just once. Also, you never need to go through your inventory, as if you have the item, the character will use it automatically, or hint that it can be used, but not in this order.
    On the other hand, there’s a surprising number of red herrings: there are communication terminals and air conditioners in almost any room that you can interact with, but never have to, the entire game, not once. Also, there are two dogs running through the station, that serve zero purpose.
    But as it’s mostly logical, and the story is genuinely good, I can forgive how much you have to walk back and forth.
    (more…)

  • Orion Conspiracy

    You discover that at the time of the incident, sensors detected an explosion. Two crew members had access to explosives: Captain and Chief of Security. But you can’t confront either. Instead, you need to perform first “leap of faith”, which I had to look up in the guide: suggest to Lazy Technician that he’s ill, to get the doctor out of her office, to check the medical records on Chief of Security, to discover that he was under anesthesia, so it’s the doctor who took the explosives! That’s a lot of logical leaps, to be fair.
    We blackmail Second in Command with the knowledge she’s pregnant and get access to letters to Danny. Turns out he was gay (I remember reading that back in the day).

    Wolfenstein-3D-Screenshot-2026-08-11-23-31-08-78

    You confront his lover, and the next moment he’s killed and you need to break out of a cell. Then you discover that Gates, the black intern, is in fact Internal Security, she wrote the original letter to you. She suggests to meet at shuttle bay, so I thought I need to find some clues on the lover’s body. But no, you need to go straight there to discover the shuttle is not full of alien cacoons. Doctor appears, and turns out she’s a shapeshifter, and cacoons are replicas of other crew members. She kills Gates, and we burn her, blowing station’s fuel in the process.

    Wolfenstein-3D-Screenshot-2026-08-11-23-56-52-43

    Well, that escalated quickly.
    Lazy scientist hears the explosions, panics and attempts to flee in the shuttle with the cacoons. With blow him from a turret, so the aliens don’t reach the Earth. Then Captain confronts us. I thought that Danny was killed to cover up something. Turns out, Captain blames McCormack for his wife’s death, and just wanted revenge. So McCormack was wrong to assume it’s Doctor that killed Danny, despite her being an evil alien. Mechanic intervenes, and Captain is killed during the struggle.

    Wolfenstein-3D-Screenshot-2026-08-12-18-22-05-80
    Funny bug there: you can talk to the Captain corpse, and the game will hang, since he can’t answer…
    (more…)

  • Cyberpunk 2077

    One sidequest that annoyed me was when a husband asks you to assassinate the killer of his wife who’s getting released early. Only the husband gets killed in the assassination attempt instead. Turns out the killer is participating in a reality show since he Found God. What annoyed me is not the theme or the characters, but the fact that the only way to progress is to follow the crew around. I’d rather shoot Joshua and just complete the contract, because that’s who my V is. I remember Witcher to be more nuanced, but maybe it’s just me.
    I’m pretty sure the sex scene in the tank is a direct reference to Hardwired, the first cyberpunk I red without knowing what cyberpunk is.
    Judy says that after I kicked Maiko, the Tiger Claws gang trashed the brothel, so she’s leaving town.
    The serial killer quest is nice. And by that I mean unsettling, all the visions of cows with gas masks.
    One thing that disappoints me slightly is weapon variety. On the surface, there are lots of weapons: regular firearms, smart autoaiming ones and tech that can be charged and shoot through walls. But enemies mostly drop the regular ones, and I have seen only one kind of LMG the entire game. Would be nice to have a smart LMG like in Aliens, I kind of expected that.
    (more…)

  • Orion Conspiracy

    Playing Mouthwashing reminded me of another game set in space I’ve read about as a kid, but never played: Orion Conspiracy. It’s a murder mistery point’n’click. You play as a veteran, who’s sun, Danny, was working as a technician on a space station and died in an accident.

    Wolfenstein-3D-Screenshot-2026-08-09-18-37-51-43

    Only after the funeral he receives an anonymous note that it wasn’t an accident.

    Wolfenstein-3D-Screenshot-2026-08-09-18-43-33-89
    You get access to all floors of the station at once, and no idea where to go. Moreover, they all look quite the same, there is no map, and the rooms don’t even have signs of them. So I had to write down my own map to navigate.
    On the positive side, all 20 characters are voiced well. And it’s a very adult game: there’s racism, sexism, all the cool words from 2020, but in a game from ’95.

    Wolfenstein-3D-Screenshot-2026-08-09-21-53-25-57
    The station is home to two corporations. One supposed to investigate a black hole that appeared 12 years ago, and another explores the meteorite the station is attached to. Both were at war with each other some years ago.
    Most of the game is walking, there are a lot of corridors that should be in the station, but don’t serve any purpose in a adventure game sense. Some characters also walk between locations, which I haven’t seen in any other adventure game I can remember. It did bit me badly, though, when I needed to bribe a scientist with a pie, only I couldn’t find him either in the lab or in his quarters, or in cafeteria.
    (more…)

  • Mouthwashing

    Completed Mouthwashing. It’s a short game, less than 3 hours total.
    There are a couple of inventive episodes. One set in a nightmare warehouse, where you have to sneak from a giant blind horse head, only there is no sneak, you just have to stop when you hear static and keep walking when it stops. Another is in a graveyard, where you need to let Swansea get close, then shoot him a couple of times.

    Anya locks herself with Curly in Medical. Jimmy gives Swansea a boozy cocktail to knock him out, and sneaks into Utility with Daisuke, convincing him to get through airduct shaft into Medical and open the door from inside. Daisuke injures himself, and Swansea finishes him off with an axe. Anya overdoses on painkillers.
    Swansea chases Jimmy with an axe, blaming him for Daisuke’s injury, and Jimmy shoots him with captain’s gun. Or maybe he just ties him and executes him in cold blood. Jimmy is not a trustworthy narrator after all. It was he who crashed the ship and not Curly, after all.
    (more…)

  • Mouthwashing

    Not very distant future, you’re a captain, Curly, of a freight ship with a crew of 5. And you decide to crash it into a meteorite for some reason.
    It plays as a walking horror, akin to Layers of Fear. Prologue is endless corridors that become filled with more and more workplace safety posters, and mascot manequits of antropomorphic horse “chasing” you.
    Two months later, the crew discusses what to do with the cargo. We play as Jimmy, copilot, one of the crew members who’s now the captain. Since there’s food left for 4 months, it’s time to break into the cargo hold and see what’s there. After the incident captain is a husk with one eye, no hands or feet.
    Main gameplay mechanic is using a special scanner only captain has to reveal emergency codes, that are used to open everything.
    The cargo hold is full of mouthwash. At least they have 14% ethanol.

    (more…)

  • Cyberpunk 2077

    Got my first Sandevistan from a inconspicuous sidequest regarding capturing a snuff movie director titled Monster Hunter. It’s a legendary cyberware featured heavily in the Edgerunners anime, and basically the best slomo in the game. There’s also a quest referencing Edgerunners, that awards you… a jacket.
    Since meeting with Hanako is
    From Panam’s quest line got a unique silenced sniper rifle. It’s a big deal, as usually you can’t put silencers on them.
    Most of the quests are entertaining, but quite linear. Taking over Clouds brothel is as bit more nuanced. It’s run by Tiger Claws gang, and you sneak into mansion of its owner while two more of the gang leaders are present. Maiko, one of the prostitutes, has change of plan, and proposes to replace the leader with her. I don’t like change of plans, so Maiko went down. Killing her for good makes good-hearted Judy very upset, but I was lucky I kept a non-lethan revolver from my “replicant” hunt.
    (more…)

  • Cyberpunk 2077

    Since I mostly focus on sniper rifles, Oda boss fight gave me a lot of trouble. Two things surprisingly helped, though: you can double jump above most of the attacks, and the double barrelled rifle I’ve got from Panam’s questline had a damage-over-time, so I could see where he’s hiding to regenerate, since he was still losing HP.
    You get your revenge on Woodman for Evi pretty quickly. No dialog or anything, just a shot on the parking lot.


    Fist fight questline is common: Witcher 3 had it, Kingdom Come had, probably other games I’ve forgot. But that is the first time I received a howitzer for my troubles 😅

    Cyberpunk-2077-Screenshot-2026-08-01-22-53-05-23

    Found Skippy Smart Pistol, which is a fun reference to Microsoft Office assistant, but as far as Smart Weapons go in Cyberpunk, they don’t kill enemies fast enough. It does give you a choice of targeting limbs or the head, and I hoped it will help me with capturing cyberpsychos, but it just shoots them in the limbs until dead 😬

    Cyberpunk-2077-Screenshot-2026-08-01-17-56-07-75

     

    (more…)

  • Cyberpunk 2077

    The rogue limousines quests line is also fun. Here’s the thing. The goal can stay always the same: return a rogue AI car to the fold. But the story is always different. One bitches about how Father AI doesn’t love it. Another sets an ambush for you. Third engages in good old ramming. And they all have different personalities.
    One aspect that the game doesn’t explain well, is that you can have either “spells” or slowmo, but not both. Or more precisely, controlled slomo, because there are also implants that trigger it at the start of combat or when your health drops dangerously low.
    Once you get a sniper rifle, most of the encounters become much easier. You can also get a smart sniper rifle, and yes, it can headshot for you. The only downside is that it’s a single shot. Or even better, you can get a tech sniper rifle that shoots through walls.
    Ev offs herself in a bathtub. As Johnie says, so much for saving her.
    Cyberpsychos questline continues to deliver. So far there was a ninja revenge story from the 70s, a prepper that overdid it and blew his family with a misplaced mine, and a guy trapped in an exoskeleton against his will.
    Out of the implants, the double jump really stands out, as you can get over most fences easily, or on a roof to get a respite from enemy fire.
    (more…)

  • Cyberpunk 2077

    Curious that the story repeats “Gladiator”: no-good son kills his Emperor father in a fit of rage, then puts the blame on the protagonist.

    “Magic” is surprisingly effective, considering I’m not running a hacking build. As you don’t get slomo right away, bringing up magic menu is a good alternative to assess the situation, and you don’t need to aim precisely for the “spell” to hit.
    Since it’s an ARPG, not a shooter, head shots aren’t guaranteed kill. But I did try to boost them with perks as much as possible.
    As you try to locate Evelyn, there are morbid detail that’s easy to miss: the prostitute you were talking to earlier was taken to be disposed there too. Another reason not to spare anyone in the Power Plant.
    Maybe I went to haitians too early, but in the Mall I managed to barely scratch the Sasquach miniboss. Luckily it’s possible to sneak past her, and then to make a deal with the agent, as I didn’t find a reason to kill him.
    Annoying haitian hackers all get fried, and I dealt with Placide myself.
    My favorite line of sidequests is catching cyberpsychos, a major theme in the Edgerunners series. Each has a little narrative, my favorite so far is “Smoke on the Water”, which is basically “Taken”, but with no happy ending. You’re supposed to only incapacitate them, which can prove difficult, and only later I joticed that rhe turret psycho did diez despite me finishing him off with fists. But it was too late to reload and the quest chain didn’t fail outright.
    (more…)