I normally like to do these double or triple or quadruple bill articles later in the year if possible, but in a year where a whole month has been dedicated to a move, I run the risk of falling way too far behind. So, here we are! In my time not dedicated to the move, I've delved into four indie titles that are, spoiler alert, all varying degrees of good. That's right, there isn't a bad game to be found in this article, and they're all relatively cheap! With that in mind, I suppose I'll just start with the one I have the least to say about and then go in order of quality.
Publisher: Studio Ortica
Developer: Studio Ortica
Platform: Microsoft Windows
Don't let the fact that I don't have much to say about Birds Watching mislead you into thinking it's somehow lesser. It's just that it's only about an hour long (or up to three if you're trying to get all the endings).
If the name "Studio Ortica" looks familiar to you, then you may be familiar with their 2025 release, Loan Shark. I reviewed that game and said that this tiny group of Italians was a studio to keep an eye on...and it appears I was right! With Birds Watching, the team shifts away from the fishing involved with Loan Shark and instead focuses on another cozy hobby: bird watching. But just like with Loan Shark, this is a horror game...and we'll get into that.
Before that, however, the premise is this: the world has largely been destroyed by an unending fire that wiped out all of humanity...that is, except for one man who happened to be at the top of a mountain when the fire started. You are that man, and you spend your days watching the nearby birds alongside your best bird friend, Bo. You can call the bird whatever you want, but that's the name I chose, so I'm going with it.
One day, your radio picks up a signal from Caio, the leader of a hitherto undiscovered militia that is going to march on the mountain within the day. If you help him, you may find a place amongst your kind for the first time in years...but if you fail in a mission he assigns you, you'll be killed.
However, there's another way. After your conversation with Caio, Bo finally reveals that the birds could talk all this time. The birds view Caio as the enemy, and if you can rally them to your cause, you can lead them in battle against him and fully claim the mountain.
Birds Watching features a better story and premise than Studio Ortica's previous work, but in terms of horror, you're going to find more disturbing iterations of some of the same beats, this time in a distinctly body horror vein. If you're familiar with the concept of Tusk, just think of that. None of it is shown, but the implications and the sound design do a lot of heavy lifting. You'l know if that kind of thing is going to be too much for you, so act accordingly.
That doesn't keep the experience from being somewhat held back by technical issues, however. This game doesn't get the worst report card in the world on that front, but what problems exist are pretty disruptive, and the game seems to decide whether or not you're going to have these problems from the moment you click "new game."
In my 3rd or 4th run, cinematic sound effects would play over and over again at increasing volumes until the scene fully transitioned. At first, that means sounds like a fire pluming up in the prologue. But as the plot progresses, it can mean sickening bone cracks. Just imagine that playing over and over and over again and getting louder and louder each time until you can button mash your way to the next transition. I didn't get that problem in any of the previous playthroughs, so it could very well be a problem that simply appears on compounding runs...but if it isn't that, I think it's worth noting due to how affecting it can be.
In my review of Loan Shark, I said that Studio Ortica was a developer to watch out for, and with Birds Watching, they've proven my point. It isn't a revolutionary game that's going to take the world by storm, but it is a nearly-flawless narrative experience with some effective horror and an intriguing mystery. So, as I've already implied, this studio is going places.
Let us review:
Technical woes - 1.0
The final score for Birds Watching is...
9.0/10 - Fantastic
Publisher: Blumhouse Games
Developer: Vermila Studios
Platforms: Playstation 5 (Reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows
Crisol: Theater of Idols has an elevator pitch that will completely captivate you if you're anything like me: Spanish Bioshock. I'm always a fan of games from foreign developers who bake their culture into their game worlds.
You are Gabriel Escudero: an army commander and devoted servant of the Sun. At the start of the game, you're sent to an island (loosely based off of 1980's Spain) that worships the Tides. This kind of blasphemy against the Sun obviously cannot stand, so it's your job to locate the Tides himself and kill him. And because I've already made a comparison to Bioshock, you can bet your bottom dollar things aren't quite as they seem.
Crisol wears its influences on its sleeve, but don't take that to mean its story is in any way derivative. There are some bits of dialogue that hearken back to Bioshock in obvious ways, but aside from that, this story and world are entirely original. It's also incredibly well-told, with each major revelation coming with a notable "oooohhhhh!" effect.
See, as a testament to his devotion to the sun, Gabriel uses special guns that use his blood as bullets. Each gun comes with some grisly method of drawing blood from his hand, resulting in a delicate balance where health is sacrificed to reload. If that sounds annoying, I'm happy to report that it isn't...or at least, it wasn't to me.
Normally these kinds of systems do annoy me, but the amount of health taken off is relatively small. Enemies hit hard, so it's not like the sacrifice is trivial, but it's not like you're going to be putting yourself at death's door very often. If you're careful with your shots, you likely won't get hit most of the time anyway. Enemies move fairly slowly, after all. Occasionally you'll have to deal with Hidetaka Miyazaki's favorite type of enemy (fire archers), but your typical combat arena is filled with enough cover to make this a non-issue, especially given that these particular enemies are often placed where they have no way to move.
You may be asking "why statues?" Well, Gabriel has the ability to drain blood from corpses to heal himself. So you'll find chicken or bull carcasses around the world and heal from those, but the whole "health for bullets" thing would be way too easy if he could kill an enemy and draw blood from them.
Apart from how cool the combat gimmick is, I also have to say that the "dismemberment" aspect of it all is especially cool.
Enemies are essentially broken up into easily-identifiable sections: legs, 2 separate arms, chest, and head. Blowing off a piece of an enemy doesn't automatically kill them, but it does change their tactics sometimes. Destroying the head seems to cause them to take increased damage (I could be wrong about that), destroying one or both arms causes them to drop their weapons, destroying the legs causes them to drag themselves toward you, and in my personal favorite case, destroying the chest makes them just a pair of legs that try to kick you. Dismemberment mechanics are nothing new in games, but in something as clearly AA-budgeted as Crisol, it's a level of immersion that you just don't see.
For starters, on PS5, the framerate never exceeded 30fps, and it would frequently drop below even that. It's not an impressive-looking game to begin with, and that lack of frames does that fact no favors.
I won't harp on this too much, but I will give you some examples of the lack of polish that I wrote down in my notes.
Firstly, after upgrading my pistol's ammo capacity, I would always load into the game with the default 10 bullets until I swapped to another weapon and then back to the pistol. When I did this, there would be room for however many bullets I'd upgraded to, but only 10 bullets would be "loaded." So, every time I loaded in, I'd have to sacrifice some of whatever health I'd left off with in the last session to refill the rest of the way. Again, this doesn't amount to too much health, but it's still an unfair bug to experience. And I experienced it literally every time I loaded in. It never went away, even after a patch went out.
Speaking of entering into the game, a second thing I noted was some weirdness with starting up for each session in the first place. Selecting "continue", for whatever reason, loads the latest auto-save (which doesn't happen very frequently) instead of your latest manual save (another thing that doesn't get to happen very frequently). So, if you select "continue," the game might load you in as far away as 10-20 minutes before you left off last time. This thankfully doesn't affect anything, though. Selecting "load" from the menu lets you continue from your manual save like nothing happened. But it's still weird on ice.
One last thing is even smaller than that, but I thought it was interesting. After reaching the end credits, I got an achievement for beating the game on the highest difficulty...I did not play it on the highest difficulty.
So, there's a lot wrong with this package, as the things I've brought up are only a small handful of the problems you're likely to experience. But you know what? This was supposed to be a small blurb, and yet I've spent much longer than I'd intended yapping about Crisol. That has to count for something, right?
This article is full of games that you've likely not heard of, so I'm going to treat Crisol: Theater of Idols like it's one of those. I highly recommend it if any of this has sounded good to you. I would, however, suggest getting it on PC (where you might be able to squeeze more frames out of it) if possible.
Also, I've made a decision regarding technical problems. Normally I only allow myself to take a single point off for any one negative in my scoring...but I've decided that technical state is important enough that I'll let myself punish a title as much as I feel is warranted from here on out. So don't be surprised by the higher-than-usual amount I'm about to take off.
Let us review:
Technical woes - 3.0
The final score for Crisol: Theater of Idols is an, I'd remind you, good...
7.0/10 - Good
Publisher: Fabraz
Developer: Fabraz
Platform: Microsoft Windows
I'm a former world record holder for certain levels in Demon Turf. This is true despite the fact that I never try anything speedrun-related. So, needless to say, it's one of my absolute favorite games of all time. I also never expected a sequel out of it, so imagine my surprise when one seemingly appeared out of thin air within the past month! Having now not only completed but 100%-ed this sequel, Demon Tides, I can proudly say that it, like its predecessor, is exceptional...but I like the predecessor better for mostly subjective reasons. We'll get into that, but for now, let's dive right in!
So, Beebz and company take a ship to Ragnar's ocean kingdom only to be treated like invaders. From there, our crew has no choice but to travel the ocean collecting golden gears to gain the means to reach Ragnar's floating castle.
I'll say this for Demon Tides: the story is significantly better than in its predecessor. Demon Turf's story was just "Beebz wants to conquer the turfs, so she does it." With this one, Beebz gets some character development. It's surprisingly good stuff, like questioning how can she judge her father for brutally conquering the people living on the various islands when she basically did the same thing to the turfs.
The story also explores ideas such as the selfishness of parents who intentionally make drastic choices for their children based on their own personal problems. And following that, the powerlessness that children can feel when both parents are guilty. There's also a healthy dose of the power of friendship, which I wasn't a fan of, but whatever.
Something I was even less of a fan of, though, was the distinct lack of attitude that came with this story. Demon Turf was a nonstop barrage of scratching turntable music with a level of aggressive angst befitting of its conquest-minded heroine. The levels were mostly dingy, grungy slums with the occasional break for crime-riddled cities.
In Demon Tides, however, there are only a few callbacks to the old style, with the rest of the tracks mostly adopting a reggae-esque flair.
Fitting for the setting? Absolutely...but the angst and the aggressive atmosphere was one of the things I loved about the original. So it's a little disappointing, but that's just a "me" thing.
Contributing to that lack of attitude is a new art style that eschews the original 2D character model/3D environment mix for an entirely 3D coat of paint. It makes the emotional highs and lows of this story pop, but I did feel like this particular presentation style was lacking. The 3D character models weren't particularly good.
Finally, there's returning character DK's pivot to gen Z slang. The cast make it a point to call it out for being cringe, but it still made me skin crawl every time.
So, the story is great, but its context takes away from the experience for me...that's about as much of a "me" problem as a problem can be, but I can only report on my own reactions.
For starters, combat isn't bad like it used to be. As much as I loved the original, the combat was awful. Here, though, the whole system is replaced by a single dash-attack system that simplifies things. It makes boss fights a bit hit or miss, but everything else is at least not a total hassle.
The platforming is another area where Demon Tides improves upon the original formula. The levels are just as malleable for Demon Turf experts like myself, and the movement is both faster and more precise. I'll say that this makes some of the levels far too easy, but in the second and third areas, the game more than makes up for this with new level concepts.
To give an example, there are areas made up of platforms that become invisible when you get too close to them. These force you to note the speed at which these platforms move as well as where they move and plan accordingly. Those gave me a particularly challenging time, but I always welcomed them as a mega-fan.
Then there are areas that give you level-specific augments to certain pieces of your move set. For example, while in bat form (meaning you've done a double-jump), you might gain the ability to aim yourself like a cannon and propel yourself in a direction of your choosing. These areas put your mastery of both the move set piece and its augmentation to the test, and they never stopped being fun.
Adding onto all of this is a far greater degree of customizability than in the original. In the original, you had a handful of passive effects you could equip to augment your movement (such as gaining a little height when you use your spin form), but in Demon Tides, the amount of customization options is truly staggering. You can have everything from that parenthetical augmentation I just brought up to an augmentation that turns water under you into ice, allowing you to keep your full move set even if you'd otherwise be slowly swimming.
However, for all these compliments, I only felt compelled to go for world records for one night. I managed to get into what was the top 20 at the time (it did not stay that way as word of mouth started to spread) in some levels, but I just never wanted to try it again. The levels were fun, for sure, but they never really felt like speedrunning levels.
In Demon Turf, the speedrunning criteria was "make it to the finish line as fast as possible." But in Demon Tides, there are no finish lines, so the criteria is "complete all objectives as fast as possible." In the original, I could skip combat sections or entire platforming sections without any bug exploits if I applied my skills in specific ways. It didn't feel like that here. If memory serves, one of my world records (again, without bug exploits) was something like 15 seconds (don't quote me on that). Looking at the world records for some of Demon Tides' levels, #1 spots were sometimes as long as 5 minutes.
You tell me: does doing something in 5 minutes sound half as fun as pulling it off in 15 seconds? I didn't think so.
So, the biggest draw of the original wasn't even remotely a draw here. See how that might put a damper on an objectively great thing?
Bugs, however, do impact the levels. There was one challenge area, for instance, where the camera swung around uncontrollably until I left the area and returned.
One other level was truly strange. In it, my controller would seemingly act on its own. I wondered if I was experiencing controller drift since the camera seemed to move erratically. But inputs would sometimes fire and cut out on their own too. I might be holding the spin button, for instance, and then I would get cancelled out of it randomly. In another case, I might be standing perfectly still and suddenly jump without having my hands on the controller.
This was not a controller issue, however, as this stopped entirely when I left the island after 100%-ing it (yes, with those problems). I wondered if it might have been one of the curse levels (levels that will hamper your move set by taking away your jump, for example), but that wouldn't have made any sense. So this was just one island that had insane technical problems I didn't see anywhere else in the whole map.
Despite my complaints, I'm going to shout "buy Demon Tides" from the rooftops. This saga is simply the best 3D platformer saga this side of Mario, and it needs far more attention so that the team over at Fabraz can continue to knock this genre out of the park. I might like Demon Turf better, and there might be some real problems here in addition to my personal gripes, but you're simply not going to find anything half as good as this out there. And while you're at it, check out Demon Turf too if you haven't already.
Let us review:
Atmosphere and "feeling" aren't as good - 0.5
Complete lack of speedrunning draw - 0.5
Technical problems - 1.0
The final score for Demon Tides is...
8.0/10 - Great
Publisher: Searching Interactive
Developer: Nicholas McDonnell, Mitchell Pasmans
Platform: Microsoft Windows
How about some more horror-adjacent stuff before we close out for today? I hadn't heard about Crabmeat until BigGaming64 started playing it on his channel, and I'm a cheap date: give me a boat and let me do stuff involving marine life, and you've almost certainly secured my money!
Crabmeat takes place in the arctic ocean. You are an unnamed prisoner having to work as an indentured servant for a dystopian future Australia, and your task is to catch a large amount of king crab in order to earn your freedom. You're given a dingy little boat and the basic supplies needed to accomplish your task, and from there, you likely know what you'll be doing. And if you've ever played a dystopian future working simulator where you need to earn your freedom, you also likely know where this is all going, so I implore you not to come to Crabmeat for the story.
The gameplay loop seems complicated at first, but it's also deceptively simple: you steer your boat and go to places on the map that have a lot of crabs, you grab some bait from the bucket, you put the bait in a trap, you go up to the crane, you have the crane pick up a trap, you swing the crane around to the side of the boat, you drop the trap, you go off and do something else (almost always going to another spot on the map and repeating all these steps), you come back to the spot but with the other side of the boat facing the traps, you use the wench harpoon to grab the trap from the water, you reel the trap in with the wench, you swing the wench around to the hopper, you leave the wench and go tap the trap to open it up and pour the contents into the hopper, you sort the king crabs through the keep gate and everything else through the discard gate, you go back to the wench, you swing the wench around to the trap belt, you drop the now-empty trap into the belt, and you go to wherever else you have traps waiting and do it all over again.
That was one gigantic paragraph full of a bunch of little bitty steps, and the first time you do it all, you're going to get confused and not know which end is up. You'll also almost certainly approach the deployed traps from the wrong angle or too close or too far away and things like that. But you'll quickly get into a good rhythm where you're flying between steps like there's no tomorrow. When this happens, it'll be downright relaxing compared to the stressful stuff.
Remember, you're into the arctic. That means that reaching these areas in your boat is never a straightforward task. The boat is unwieldy and analog, and the spaces between sheets of ice or rocky cliffs often seem impossibly small.
To go into a little bit of detail, you turn the boat with a combination of a speed lever on the right and your steering wheel in the center. The steering wheel determines your heading, but it isn't very precise. You can turn the wheel up to five lightbulbs either to the left or the right, or you can keep the light right in the center to continue straight in whatever direction you're facing. The speed lever obviously controls speed, which consists of three levels of increasing speed, neutral, and reverse. This is what I mean when I say steering is unwieldy. You'll be swapping between altering speed and adjusting the exact heading of the boat to consistently correct your miscalculations.
That is where most of the horror comes from. The act of navigating the ice is actually much simpler than it sounds, and I'm confident you'll surprise yourself with how well you do...but that doesn't stop the process from being chill-inducing.
And it isn't just the maneuvering that'll raise your blood pressure. You're also under a strict time limit...yeah...stressful maneuvering and limited time to do it? Hoo boy!
The time limit is, like everything else I've described so far, deceptive. The clock shows that you have 7 hours to meet your quota, and that clock counts down at a realistic pace. But once the timer passes into the next hour (i.e 6 hours left to 5 hours left), it starts from the 30 minute mark (so instead of 4:59 in that example, it starts from 4:30). This means you actually have about three and a half real-world hours. It's clearly there to stoke more fear, since you'll likely not realize that's what's happening unless you really pay attention, and you'll think "holy crap, I was sure I had longer than that, where did all that time go?"
Realistically speaking, the allotted time is more than enough. I had well over an in-game hour to go when the credits rolled, after all. But every time you need to turn around and go to the opposite side of the map, there's going to be a little nagging doubt in the back of your head that won't go away.
The biggest of these crabs can really take a beating, kill you in three hits, and sometimes come in pairs. In situations like that, you have no choice but to run until you're far enough away to prepare yourself.
Sounds par for the course, right?
Well, I haven't yet mentioned it, but this isn't a free movement game. It's point and click. So you'll be clicking on pieces of the ground in order to get away, which feels clunky and slow. And you'll hear the crabs shriek from behind as they chase you.
I've done nothing but glaze this game so far, but this combat is actually where I take issue with it. The act of switching to a weapon is slow-going, as is the act of healing yourself, as is the act of loading the shotgun. These actions are so slow that it doesn't really feel fair when you die most of the time, especially since you can't do any of these things as you run away. I get that like everything else, this is meant to instill fear, but this is the one area where I don't think the effect works.
Thankfully, some restraint on the developers' part keeps this complaint from being too large. This feels like the kind of game where a death would result in a significant loss of time, a loss of some of your crab stock, or even a full reset, but it isn't any of these things. Instead, deaths simply restart you from the last autosave. These autosaves have a habit of happening right before you do complicated maneuvering, which is annoying, but it's definitely preferable to any kind of tangible consequence.
There are other gameplay facets like repairing pieces of the ship that hostile crabs damage, but for the sake of time, the only thing I'll say is that this piece is also handled with a great deal of restraint.
From a technical standpoint, the only complaint I have is that aforementioned combat clunkiness. Everything else is rock-solid. There aren't any framerate drops or pop-in, I never had any crashes, and bugs were nonexistent.
Folks, I think that Crabmeat might actually be the most fervent recommendation I'm giving in this article. Even above Demon Tides, which is crazy to admit. It's a masterclass in delicious tension and atmosphere that kept me on the edge of my seat the whole time. The deceptive tactics through which it'll make you fear failure have the unexpected effect of making you feel oddly competent when you succeed without removing that fear at all. That one combat caveat is really the only complaint I have, and the only other caveat I'd offer to you is that you might want to steer clear if you have severe arachnophobia. Crabs obviously aren't spiders, but when there's a ton of them in the hopper and they're all squirming around rapidly, it gets the old spider fear-receptors firing on all cylinders. That's it, though. The more I've written about Crabmeat, the more I find myself thinking back on it fondly. If this sounds at all compelling, there's a free demo on Steam you can try out before you buy. So there's few reasons not to give it a shot!
Let us review:
Combat flaw - 0.5
The final score for Crabmeat is...
9.5/10 - Near Masterpiece
As always, thanks for reading, and look forward to the next review, where I'll be tackling Resident Evil: Requiem!
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