Raige

Duration: 5 hour(s) If you're expecting a game to play, go somewhere else. Raige is just a story that should have been a short story than a game. A story I'm not particularly fond of. Let's get to that part later though. We're going to talk about the game itself and its mechanics. The graphics and aesthetic are serviceable. The graphics are done in a faux PSX aesthetic, but way more retro and low-res than it needed to be. It’s not going to earn any awards, but it’s okay. If you like what you see in the trailers/screenshots, then what you see is what you get. Oh, and the animations are hilariously slow, but I guess that could be an aesthetic choice? They try to avoid showing those what they can, though. Mostly by teleporting the player to where it wants you to be and fades to black. So many fades to black. Oh, and the movement is pretty terrible and slow. Plus, every time you find stairs, you have to jump for each stair. There is no gameplay. It's barely even a walking simulator thanks to all of those fades. But you basically walk (teleport) from Point A to Point B with no real exploration, wait for characters to just talk and talk and talk, then repeat. You might be thinking you…

text randomly skips forward. invisible walls everywhere. broken game.

A mess, but an interesting one. You only really get something as bizarrely messy as this with indie games and I do think that’s kind of special. Starts off promising - very moody and unique, but pretty much as soon as a third main character gets introduced, it becomes increasingly clear that things in this story kind of just happen without rhyme or reason. I saw someone say “a slowburn needs the burn part” on a review recently and I like that, and I feel like it does apply here at times. It’s trying to be something artsy and deep - and far be it from me to say that something isn’t a piece of art just because it doesn’t fit with my or anyone’s preconceived notions of what art is - but it does generally lack an understanding of how to make itself feel as artistically rich as it clearly wants to. The last 20 or so minutes in particular very much lean heavily on exposition and creepypasta edginess, but I do hold respect for a game bizarre enough to go from a moody surreal horror story to an 80s action thriller to a meta techno thing, regardless of how rough it is. It’s certainly something that left me with more to chew on then a large portion of the soulless AA or AAA titles that strip…

Weirdest game i've ever played and i've played lot of weird games. It starts off really dark and disgusting, but man does it evolve out of its proportions gradually towards the end and the ending is just massive mindblow. Worst stairs i've ever seen in any game too. 4/5.

The oppressive dark of Raige spans every moment of its runtime, in service of its thematic exploration of despair and futility. This dark manifests in the lighting of the game, always cloaking the landscape in blackest black and denying even lit areas the comfort of soft natural lighting, instead blaring them in abrasive florescent hums, somehow making even the bright areas feel "dark." But the darkness also permeates the writing, narration, models, landscapes, and set pieces. Abandoned playgrounds and faceless inhabitants haunt the land set to the well-crafted ambient soundtrack by Xzayvion Exile, Ars Nova, and infy. This music harmonizes with the hints provided by the world to not only conjure the dark atmosphere which characterizes the game, but also point beyond it to the topics of reflection, longing, and perhaps hope which it draws the player through. In a similar vein, the game uses light excellently. Even in its gritty polygonal world which deteriorates into ambiguous pixels in the distance, paying homage to a beautiful era of gaming strengthened by its limitations, distance can be discerned by way of single-cut pinpricks of light. Plodding slowly towards a faraway lightbul…

This game is horrible, from start to finish. The writing is third-grade level at best. The cliche "God" AI sequence at the end with the fourth wall breaks made the psychological depth of the game as forced as could be. You're restrained to walking as slowly as imaginable in order to prevent you from finishing the game sub 30 minutes. Trying to walk from one terrain onto another will often result in your character getting stuck. So on and so forth. ...and yet, I couldn't stop playing. Recommended.