Reviews

A Mortician's Tale is a game about death, funerals and everything no one seems to want to talk about. The gameplay, which bears similarities to the "make-up" browser games, is minimal. The narrative and art style compliment the gameplay, but are nothing to write home about either. But you should play this game anyway. Because it was never made to be a dazzling spectacle. It is supposed to educate you about what happens after someone dies, and help you formulate your own values, priorities and rituals. And it is perfect exactly for that reason.

In A Mortician's Tale you play Charlie, a newly appointed Mortician in a Funeral home. You get lead through all the steps in preparing bodies for the funeral or cremation. There is no real challenge here, no choices: you follow the instructions, and make sure the body is handled as requested. Afterwards you get to talk to the family, and learn a bit more about the life and death of the person you cared for.

I was surprised at how informative A Mortician's Tale is. The developers have clearly put a lot of effort in their research, and that has seeped through into the narrative. The emails you go through every morning contain a lot of educational information about death, it's rituals, and your options. The game starts a conversation about what your values are, and where your ethical lines lay in regards to the last wishes of the deceased. And in doing that the game also manages to hold a surprising amount of emotion, especially for a game in which you, as the player, have so little control. I found myself caring more than expected about the workplace culture, representing the wishes, and making sure that each person got a respectful send-off. 

My only gripe with the game is how passive the player is in the story. I want to be more involved in the process - talking to families and comforting them, deciding how to handle the wishes of the deceased, and perhaps slowly working towards my own company. All of these are handled without any player input. This feels like a missed opportunity to make a bigger impact by involving the player in the story, and letting her make a stand for her own beliefs.

Overall I recommend that you give A Mortician's Tale a shot. It is the best kind of educational game: playful and extremely informative without the player realising. Although it will only take an hour or two to play through, I provides a lot of value larger in the context and knowledge you take away from it. So if that is something you are interested in (and you should be), go play A Mortician's Tale!

After 20 hours I am so tired of Assassin's Creed: Shadow of Arkham that I am uninstalling it. I have no intention to return to the game and regret the time I spent with it. 

Gameplay
Gameplay-wise, Shadow of Mordor is an exhibition of achievements of game development of the past few years. Roughly speaking, it's 49% Assassin's Creed, 49% Batman Arkham series and 2% of its own.

The Assassin's Creed part is effortless parkour, climbing towers and “synchronizing” for fast-travel and stealth with a few ways to distract and eliminate foes. Although I must admit that stealth here is more inventive than in AC, it's not just whistle, wait, one-button kill, rinse and repeat. At least later in the game you'll be given more tools to assassinate: such as poisoning the beverage and controlling uruks.

If you fail at stealth, here comes the Batman Arkham part. The combat is a shameless copy-paste and works like this: counter every time you see a prompt, attack every time no one is attacking you, perform a special attack every 5 blows, rinse and repeat. 

Nevertheless, I must give credit that the combat is actually fun and made me stay with the game for so long. It feels good to chain combos, the killing animations are satisfying and varied and there are quite a few special moves that you are going to like to perform. But when it's the only thing that makes you stay, it starts feeling repetitive after a while too. I can ruin this for you before you play, just watch the 404 hits combo below and you'll know just about everything the combat has to offer.
Story
The 2% come in the Nemesis system, the gimmick that journalists went on and on about and that actually made me play the game. It generates random uruks for each playthrough, bestows unique strengths on them and cripples them with unique weaknesses. These uruks have been fighting for power and will always be, and you act as a disrupting force which shakes up their hierarchy as you please. The problem was that I didn't want to. 

I read dozens of nemesis stories on the web before playing Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, and all claimed what a unique experience it was to gain a mortal enemy that kept coming back from the dead to face you once again or to bind with an uruk and stay in this love-hate relationship for hours. Perhaps I was too good at the game, was I? I never had an uruk to live long enough for me to get to know him. They all were just expendables, and I cut through the cannon fodder of Mordor with ease. To be honest, I died more from the deadly fauna of Mordor than uruks. At the same time, bumping up the difficulty seemed strange as I understood that more hit-points would not be likely to breathe in more personality into random-generated uruks.
What's left from Shadow of Mordor if you remove the “make your own story” gimmick? Not much, I must say. The characters were uninspired, the storyline was hard to follow and slow to progress, and the twists were simply not there. The story is pieces of Tolkien fan service scattered around the dull bloody cursed land. The first major character you meet is, of course, Gollum with the exact voice, moves, and looks of that from the film. I completed more than half of the storyline and Shadow of Mordor was a parody of Tolkien which distorted every stylistic or narrative trope of the source material. It's not necessarily a bad thing and I, in fact, have never been a fan of the Lord of the Rings universe, but it was a weird mix of fan service and negation of Tolkien at the same time.
Atmosphere
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor is a very stressful game. It has no ups, the music is always tormented strings and dark ambient effects. It makes you paranoid, you scout for safe places when you start playing but soon you realize that the only places where you can rest are forge towers (fast-travel points) and the pause screen.

Does it make you FEEL like you are in Mordor? Yes, and this is a good thing. Does it make a game enjoyable? No. 
This was, perhaps, the main reason I am dropping the game with no intention to play it. I don't mind repetitive and plagiarized gameplay, after all, there are only so many things you can do in action-adventure games targeted at a wide audience. I can tolerate the dull story and even no story at all in an action-adventure game. But I can't play something that is so hostile, unwelcoming and unrewarding. You can't conquer this world, you can only make a dent in the army of Sauron, which will soon be replenished by new random-generated uruks.

I am a fan of Sherlock Holmes. I've read many stories, I've seen lots of movies and TV-series with Sherlock, and finally I got to play this game. My wife is even more of a fan than I am, which means we played it together sharing the gamepad and at times she completed entire chunks of the game and retold me the story later. 
What can I say? This is a fantastic detective game but it falls short if you expect it to be more than that.

I haven't played the previous part of the series, but it seems that the overarching story picks up right after it. But it's easy to follow and, dare I say, it's less complicated than any case that you have to solve in the game. You see where it's going right from the very beginning. But at least the story is serviceable to stich together the cases and it culminates in a grand cinematic finale.

As for the cases, all of them are very well written, the puzzles always felt logical and fair. I loved the deduction system, which is a simple yet effective tool to show how the clues leead you to the solution. The feeling of going through all clues, notes and signs before picking the guilty one really makes you feel like Bat… I mean, Sherlock. There was one case when we spent a good quarter of an hour deciding whom to blame. And yes, we solved all cases perfectly on the first try, which was also quite satisfying.
All the secondary characters are well-written too, and you can easily memorize them throughout the cases. The main characters are solid, yet closer to americanized Sherlocks. Think Guy Ritchie's films for reference rather than anything else, only there's less action and cursing. 

As for the action parts, as I said, it's a fantastic detective game, so when it comes to fighting, dodging bullets or solving laracrofty puzzles, you'll probably be annoyed by QTEs, illogical solutions, and clunky animations. It's up to you to decide whether this can hinder the enjoyment from playing Sherlock Holmes: The Devil's Daughter.
Some mechanics feel that they could be developed further, like the disguise system. It is used in just a couple of episodes, and yes, there's one that is simply hilarious, but I felt that there could be more to it. Perhaps it's a good sign that we never felt bored of repetition, but I guess we'll never get to know that.

If you are looking for a good modern adventure game to train your brain, this might be a perfect game for you. I would recommend it to anyone who likes a good whodunnit. Just don't expect it to be a jack of all trades.