For a game with the words "Total Insanity" in its title, it's fair to expect a certain level of madness around every corner. The Flatout series' cornerstone has always been chaos on the racetrack and Total Insanity certainly is chaotic. Being Kylotonn Games' first Flatout, it makes sense that it would stick to the tried and tested formula. And it works, to a point. Races and the spectacle that ensues are wild and unpredictable in the ways they should be, but beyond the updated visuals, the overall package comes with a mess of annoyances. Uninspired presentation--poor music, bland menus, terrible engine tones--blends in with merciless AI and a broken sense of progression to make Flatout 4 seem more flat than fantastic.
As is standard in Flatout games, the aim of Flatout 4 is to race hard around a variety of open roads littered with objects to smash your way through, Demo Derby-style. You can do this a few different ways: career, Flatout mode, quickplay or multiplayer--either couch competitive or online. Car handling is simple but wildly inconsistent, allowing easy slides and handbrake turns but also leaving you at the mercy of the track. You might run over a small bump and not notice it one lap, only for it to roll you over the next. The AI racers are utterly ruthless--perhaps too much so--as they fling all sense of self-preservation out the window in relentless pursuit of destruction. It's a common sight to see an opponent fly overhead, upside down and facing backwards, crashing into the side of a house and bringing it down around them, only to land on their wheels and speed off. It's moments like this where the stars align and, just for that split second, Flatout 4 feels right. But that feeling never lasts long, quickly turning to angst at the idea of having to repeat the same races over again.
Of the four main modes, Flatout is by far the best, offering a series of challenges combining race, survivor and stunt events. It's the mode that makes the most sense as it's the easiest to get into, serving up a varied mix of race types, from standard races to the weaponised assault races, as well as different stunts and time trials. The cars are picked out for you, and the collective points you earn from each event tally up to unlock new ones. If only the same sense of urgency in getting you amongst the action existed in the other modes.
The career attempts to add some depth in the form of car purchases and upgrades, but the rewards it doles out for winning races versus taking down opponents is diametrically opposed, making progressing through each championship feel like a hefty grind. Points from wins unlock more races while cash, of which you earn a small amount for winning but a much larger amount for taking down opponent's mid-race, lets you buy better cars to race with. Often, especially early on, I felt like I was forced to make a choice between going for wins or takedowns; compromising between cash for new cars or points for new races, which is a weird choice to have to make. Rewards do get slightly better as you progress, but getting there is a slog.
If you ruin this part, it's hard to come back from it
The only way to unlock new cars is by winning consecutive gold cups, which is excessively demanding for a game that already asks a lot of you. Cars aren't just locked for career mode either, but most of the tracks and cars in quickplay are also inexplicably locked, with no indication as to how to change that. During the career, had the early game rewards and unlocks been more lenient, a new car or two could've spiced things up, at least for a few races. But thanks to the repetitive nature of the tracks, frugal rewards just add to the grinding nature of the game.
At least when you jump online into Flatout 4's multiplayer, you get access to every car and track, giving you an opportunity to test out the differences in each. Vehicle handling varies considerably, to the point where, if you play the game long enough, you'll want to exploit a different car for each track. Online multiplayer is fun in the right company, but some glaring omissions make it hard to come back to. The lack of bots to fill out empty spaces means, unless you have at least three other friends with Flatout 4, it might make for a pretty lonely experience. Public lobbies exist, but they have been practically empty since release day.
Sparks were flying between Gina Paintball and I
Visually, Flatout 4 impresses but doesn't dazzle. God rays poke down through the trees while sparks scatter brightly as cars rub and scrape, and there is no shortage of trackside details to smash through. It aims to hit 30 frames per second, but at least does so consistently, only dipping at the very start of a race when all the cars are bouncing off each other and exaggerated track particles are flung back into your face.
Flatout 4 doesn't bring anything noteworthy to the series, and while the Flatout and party modes are good for some low stakes enjoyment, the grind of single-player progression is too much to bare. The challenge is borderline unfair at times, and that wrecks the partytime nature that the series used to do so well.
Thimbleweed Park, a point-and-click adventure by famed ex-LucasArts duo Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick, rides a thin line between nostalgia and reinvention, balancing its remembrances for the time-honored genre with a sliver of modern sensibilities. It's a picturesque window into the past that's more than it appears to be. But at the same time, its adherence to the genre's long-held tenets is a firm reminder why adventure games alienated even their most diehard fans in the late '90s. Despite this, Thimbleweed Park is a journey well worth taking for experienced adventure game fans eager to solve its myriad puzzles and uncover its secrets.
The story begins with a murder in the small town of Thimbleweed Park, and two FBI detectives, Antonio Reyes and Angela Ray, are tasked with investigating the killing. The trail to the culprit leads them down a path of intrigue that has them unearthing dark secrets concerning the town's history and inhabitants.
Thimbleweed Park's premise screams Twin Peaks, though its quirky tone and hammy dialogue drive it more towards supernatural comedy than surreal, psychological thriller. It constantly breaks the fourth wall by reminding players of its pixelated art style and its idiosyncrasies as a point-and-click adventure--there's even a character whose primary motivation is to get a job making text adventures for a company analogous to LucasArts. These stylistic and charming touches enrich the narrative, giving the storytelling an air of lighthearted self-awareness that rides through up until its cataclysmic conclusion.
Further complementing the narrative is an eccentric cast of characters who, at each twist and turn, contribute a wealth of witty remarks and general ridiculousness to the proceedings. For instance, the town's sheriff attaches the phrase "a-reno" at the end of a random word in his sentences. The town's coroner shares this habit but affixes "a-hoo" to the ends of phrases instead. It's made obvious in the beginning that these two characters are in fact the same person, yet everyone in town seems to believe they're separate individuals purely based on the fact that they each use different end phrases. Gags like this are plentiful and exist in nearly everyone you meet. It's a driving force for every encounter, as you often look forward to seeing what peculiarity you're going to find next.
The game's puzzles accommodate a wide range of logic and observation skill levels, rarely requiring too much stretching of the imagination to solve.
Thimbleweed Park is less restricted than its linear contemporaries and predecessors, as it contains a fair number of puzzles and locations you can freely discover and tackle in any order you please. You start as Reyes and Ray, and can switch between them at will. But as you advance, you eventually control five characters, each with their own unique motivations and puzzles to solve. If you run into a bind with one protagonist, you're free to switch to another to try to make progress elsewhere. The high number of playable characters offers a welcome diversity to the experience that remedies the slog of figuring out what to do next.
Thankfully, the puzzles accommodate a wide range of logic and observation skill levels, rarely requiring too much stretching of the imagination to solve. While some are as simple as combining an object with another in your inventory, others are far more intricate. One sequence has you trying to lure a character out of their office so you can steal an item. But in order to do so, you need to have another character use a device elsewhere to convince them to check out a "situation" brewing across town. Despite how infrequently puzzles break away from the usual dilemmas you'd expect to see in a game of this nature, they still maintain a decent level of challenge and complexity without becoming too obtuse.
However, some are marred by design issues and contextual inconsistencies. While the game's open design is one of its strongest qualities, it sometimes impedes your ability to solve puzzles effectively--the freedom you have to solve them in different orders often results in confusion. For example, an item you receive from a character clues you in to a secret meeting somewhere in town. But the location of said meeting requires going back to a location you probably thought you were done with. The freedom you have to solve quandaries sometimes makes it tough to decipher the presented clues. And given that solutions are incredibly specific and occasionally require multiple steps, it's often difficult to figure out what to do as you accumulate more items and clues.
A lack of context almost constantly muddles the world's logic and occasionally complicates puzzle solving.
As you get deeper into the game you also start to notice that some solutions require intimate knowledge of a character's skills. For example, one puzzle has you leaning on a character's tech background to fix a machine critical to the murder investigation. While this makes sense in the context of the puzzle-solving process, there's never a revelatory moment that links her motivations with the agents she's helping. She fixed this machine, but why? The narrative eventually frames its five protagonists as a team working under a common goal to unravel the mystery, but it never acknowledges their feelings regarding this arrangement or even how it comes to be. In turn, this lack of context almost constantly muddles the world's logic and occasionally complicates puzzle solving.
In the face of its issues, Thimbleweed Park still manages to retain the charm of the era it evokes. Yes, it inevitably falls into the standard genre structure of adventuring to and fro, picking up items, and interacting with the environment to solve a bevy of problems that require highly specific solutions. And as you'd expect, the moments spent in between trying to figure out everything are just as irritating and demoralizing as you remember. It's unapologetic in how it caters to its niche audience more than anyone else. But when all of this comes to a head in the game's final moments, the experiences of your journey are forever changed. Without spoiling anything, something occurs that affects your entire perception of the game's events--and subsequent playthroughs. The revelation elevates the game beyond its retrospective nature and design.
We often yearn for a piece of the past, hoping for new experiences that channel the rose-tinted memories from our formative years of gaming, but sometimes what we end up getting isn't what we expected. Thimbleweed Park is a time capsule that reminds us what we love about the point-and-click genre while still retaining many of its unremedied issues. Its amusing open world is packed with infectious personalities and clever puzzles that magnify the joy of its experiences. And its efforts to shift beyond the template of its predecessors and contemporaries make it surprisingly affecting, especially if you're a longtime devotee of point-and-click adventures. The game's reverence for the past and its eventual conclusion could very well fly over the heads of the uninitiated. But make no mistake, Thimbleweed Park recaptures the charm of the games from which it draws inspiration, presenting a worthwhile experience for those who've been playing them since the beginning.
The cobblestone pathways and towering cathedrals of the eponymous Ringed City twist and melt into one another as they fall into oblivion. Here, at the edge of the world, an old woman quips that she feels like a god, looking over all creation as it races toward the end--of everything. These twisted landscapes make for a surreal backdrop and a fitting metaphor for the final chapter of Dark Souls. It's fortunate, then, that the Ringed City doesn't waste any of that creative energy.
As weird as the worlds of Dark Souls can be, their brutality tends to keep them grounded and tangible. With the Ringed City, however, those pretenses fall away. Your introduction shunts you through a series of monster-packed corridors interspersed with steep, bizarrely nonlethal drops down cliffs. These show your gradual descent into the nightmarish plane of the Ringed City--an apparent mosaic of the series' past settings now caked in ash and dust--and balance moments of desperation against bursts of fatalism. It's striking, tense, and emblematic of the expansion as a whole.
The Ringed City takes all of Dark Souls' ideas and presses them to their extreme. In previous games, high-risk, high-reward play was advantageous--but it's essential here. You won't find your first bonfire (a shelter from the universe's grotesque monsters) for quite some time, and even then it doesn't seem too useful. You'll rush out and die, without a chance to learn much.
Angels guard much of the area, and they can spot you from some ways off. The subsequent salvo of golden light-spears can tear through your health in an instant if you're not careful. And these angels can't be killed directly. At first, that seems like a breach of the series' guiding mantra of "tough but fair." However, it's there to upend expectations and encourage new styles of play--in this case, stealth--that the series had yet to explore. Once you know where and how to move, the area's still a challenge, but in true Souls fashion, it's far from insurmountable.
It's a shame, then, that The Ringed City's brisk pace just isn't enough to give these new ideas the attention they deserve. Just as each new concept starts coming into view, you move on. An undercurrent of weighty themes and a dense overworld more than compensate, however. As a send-off for this trilogy, The Ringed City has to tie a lot of disparate threads together, and it manages this by focusing on its characters.
City has a total of four unique bosses -- more than any other such add-on for any game in the series -- and each is a blast.
Figures like Patches--a deceitful, murderous thief--conclude their arcs here. People in the Dark Souls universe fade as their will does. Over time, they lose their minds and go "hollow." Throughout the series, this little bit of lore has been leveraged as an analogue for the player. If the game gets too hard and you give up, your avatar could be thought of as "going hollow" within your game world. It's telling, then, that on the precipice of the apocalypse, the folks who made it are dogged, albeit with banal drives. These games have always used conviction of purpose as an analogue for how a weak-willed person can persist in spite of suffering. Patches, while he lacks compassion and strength of character, lives on through greed and suffering--tortured though his soul may be. Unearthing what sorts of karma this world holds for cheats becomes one of many lenses The Ringed City holds up for you. In effect, it asks you to look back on your time with these characters and stories and reflect on what they've meant to you.
Those less interested in dissecting what it all means will have plenty to chew on as well. The Ringed City has a total of four unique bosses--more than any other such add-on for any game in the series--and confronting each is a blast. Nothing here is half-done, and it shows. As with the rest of the expansion, bosses here remix classic ideas and incorporate a bevy of new twists.
The last duel is a poetic conclusion, pitting you against a force tied to the fate of the world and one of the series' biggest mysteries--the story of the furtive pygmy. The fight is raw and chaotic, with your enemy mirroring the patterns and strikes of Artorias, a warrior corrupted by darkness and the central figure of the five-year old Artorias of the Abyss expansion. Exactly who the final boss of the series is, I'll leave out, but it does provide a perfect narrative arc for the franchise to end on.
Scenes like that are where Dark Souls succeeds best. It's not just inventive level design or epic boss battles or an engaging story--it's how they're seamlessly woven together. And that's made even more memorable when the choreography of a battle gives slight nods to its inspiration. Make no mistake, though: While The Ringed City, much like Dark Souls III as a whole, leans a bit on nostalgia and allusions, it earns an esteemed space alongside its forebears.
The Ringed City moves and ends a little too quickly--well before it gets all the mileage it can out of its setting and premises--but that's a small knock against what's otherwise an exceptional send-off. A well of inspired locales and a renewed focus on the series' obsession with cycles, death and rebirth, and the passage of time, plus a few spectacularly designed and animated foes round out a worthy conclusion to a storied franchise.
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