Reviews Rate the game you finished/retired

[fantomena]

Finished


Really fun walking simulator, but get's repetive after a while. Not much else to write, just play the game. It is full of secrets, weird stuff and a fun narrator.

Score: 8.3/10

 

[AHA-Lambda]

Retired Tales of Arise (PS5)


Ok this one hurts (between Scarlet Nexus and this I'm really on a roll...)

I estimate from googling I'm around the 60% mark of the story (just beat 4th lord); sad thing is the first 40% or so I really, really liked:

• Lovely artstyle, it's typical fantasy anime but it's very clean and highly detailed
• Nice soundtrack
• The combat is flashy and satisfying in its RPG DMC-like nature with high number of options available
• The story up until now has been interesting, driven by the pacing as slowly more of the world is introduced to the player, and more of the mystery behind the two leads backstory is unfurled, and on that I particularly liked the dynamic between the two leads
• It also felt refreshingly old school, this isn't a huge big open world, more like a series of connected smaller areas

But there has been one problem that seemed to rear its head early on which has only grown arms and legs since then, and that's the balancing around the boss battles and item resourcing.
The boss fights are very clear significant walls in difficulty compared to all other fights you face, nothing shocking there in principle for a boss fight to be harder than regular fights obviously. However, those bosses are massive damage sponges and most fights take a surprising length of time to actually complete, and what this has meant in my experience has been that most boss fights I get through I do at the cost of A LOT of potions etc.

Ok, what's the problem, just get more potiions?
Well they're all pretty expensive, the orange gel in particular (a pretty basic item for recovering the equivalent of MP) has reached near meme status in subreddits etc from what I can see given its comparatively high price.
Ok, then just get more gold? Yeah, there's the thing you can't earn gold from fights. You have to either find it lying around in the world, complete side quests, or sell off unwanted goods. The first 2 of those 3 are of course quite finite.
All in, this has meant that towards the point in the game I was at, I felt the need to spend literal hours to grind out extra xp levels and doing the fishing mini game for extra funds. Not fun.
Ok, just turn the difficulty down? Did that but at that point the game just becomes a mindless and unsatisfying button masher.

Perhaps there is something I'm missing (I don't think the game does a great job of teaching some of its systems, most especially the artes) but online it seems that this issue is one of the biggest complaints of the game, so I don't think I'm not alone, despite the cries of "git gud" from some and the suspicious offer of mtx for ludicrous amounts of gold.
But by the point I got to I seen I still had about 10 more bosses to fight before the end of the game and I just couldn't do muster the energy at that point to go on.
Shame I was really enjoying this one.

 

[fantomena]

Retired Tales of Arise (PS5)


Ok this one hurts (between Scarlet Nexus and this I'm really on a roll...)

I estimate from googling I'm around the 60% mark of the story (just beat 4th lord); sad thing is the first 40% or so I really, really liked:

• Lovely artstyle, it's typical fantasy anime but it's very clean and highly detailed
• Nice soundtrack
• The combat is flashy and satisfying in its RPG DMC-like nature with high number of options available
• The story up until now has been interesting, driven by the pacing as slowly more of the world is introduced to the player, and more of the mystery behind the two leads backstory is unfurled, and on that I particularly liked the dynamic between the two leads
• It also felt refreshingly old school, this isn't a huge big open world, more like a series of connected smaller areas

But there has been one problem that seemed to rear its head early on which has only grown arms and legs since then, and that's the balancing around the boss battles and item resourcing.
The boss fights are very clear significant walls in difficulty compared to all other fights you face, nothing shocking there in principle for a boss fight to be harder than regular fights obviously. However, those bosses are massive damage sponges and most fights take a surprising length of time to actually complete, and what this has meant in my experience has been that most boss fights I get through I do at the cost of A LOT of potions etc.

Ok, what's the problem, just get more potiions?
Well they're all pretty expensive, the orange gel in particular (a pretty basic item for recovering the equivalent of MP) has reached near meme status in subreddits etc from what I can see given its comparatively high price.
Ok, then just get more gold? Yeah, there's the thing you can't earn gold from fights. You have to either find it lying around in the world, complete side quests, or sell off unwanted goods. The first 2 of those 3 are of course quite finite.
All in, this has meant that towards the point in the game I was at, I felt the need to spend literal hours to grind out extra xp levels and doing the fishing mini game for extra funds. Not fun.
Ok, just turn the difficulty down? Did that but at that point the game just becomes a mindless and unsatisfying button masher.

Perhaps there is something I'm missing (I don't think the game does a great job of teaching some of its systems, most especially the artes) but online it seems that this issue is one of the biggest complaints of the game, so I don't think I'm not alone, despite the cries of "git gud" from some and the suspicious offer of mtx for ludicrous amounts of gold.
But by the point I got to I seen I still had about 10 more bosses to fight before the end of the game and I just couldn't do muster the energy at that point to go on.
Shame I was really enjoying this one.

Your issues is exactly why I love using cheats/trainers in JRPGs.

 

[Acidote]

METAL GEAR SOLID

You are Snake, a government agent on a mission to regain control of a secret nuclear weap

www.gog.com

Finished it on an original PSX in a CRT TV. Still a 10/10.

At this point there isn't that much left to say about it. Playing them again, (now I'm playing through MGS2:S in my good old Vita) one can clearly see how much was lost in the way starting with MGS4 and of course whatever MGS5 is.

 

[Cacher]

Finished it on an original PSX in a CRT TV.

Let me tell you. This line alone deserves a like.

 

[fantomena]

Finished


Very good story DLC. Took me 3-4 hours to complete. Great graphics, great level design, good sound, tight gameplay, story wasn't all that interesting though which drags it down as a found story in a linear SP game to be very important.

Score: 8.4/10

 

[Ge0force]

Finished Degrees of Separation


Beautiful and unique puzzle platformer, where you control two characters living in a separate dimension. Ember is living in a world of warmth, while Rime exists in a world of cold and ice. When both characters come together, a rift between the two dimensions appears, which can be moved and rotated by changing each characters position. This sounds more complex than it actually is, but the devs have used this mechanic to create a series of very creative puzzles that you have to solve to collect enough scarfs to enter the next world.

At first I was afraid that the puzzles would become repetitive after a while, but that didn't happen at all. Each world has a unique additional mechanic that requires you to think completely different. For example, in one world you can change the rift into a beam that you can walk on, but can not cross. The game can be played in co-op and the beautiful graphics and excellent music also add a lot of value to the experience. The only "issue" I had with this game is that some of the puzzles are really hard, but that's what guides are for. You don't even need to solve all the puzzles to complete the game. And last but not least, the game works like a charm on the Steam Deck. Very recommended!

Score: 8.4/10

 

[AHA-Lambda]

Finished The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe (Steam)


Ok, I'm going to be a little harsh here and put my impressions out on the basis of the new content.
The original game is a masterpiece imo, and you get that with this, so if you've never played it before then is an outright 10/10 game.

The new content I liked and found very funny, and don't want to say more than that given the nature of the game of course, but I can't help feel a little let down for 2 reasons:
1) this game has been in dev a long time and faced many delays, I expected more than what is here frankly, which leads on to
2)

Spoiler

the game likes to poke fun at audience expectations with sequels, very apropos for this kind of game, but I still can't shake off that at the end of the day A LOT of the new content is locked behind doing the original endings again with the only single difference being that there is what is essentially a binary switch now flipped

I still can't say it's not worthwhile though, I still recommend it to any fan of the original.

7.5/10

 

[Arc]

In the past two weeks I have played through Final Fantasy 13 and 13-2. FF13 is the worst mainline game I've played. All the jokes about corridor level design were true, none of the characters were particularly likable and the combat system was a massive slog, especially near the end when enemies have hundreds of thousands of HP. The nicest thing I can say about the game is that the FMVs still look impressive today.

13-2 is a better game, but still a fairly miserable experience. The combat is speedier and I was more invested in the story. Caius is actually a highly intriguing villain by Final Fantasy Standards. However the game has this lightning fast pacing (pun intended) and it just sort of ends. The ending sequence is also extremely bizarre.

I planned to start Lightning Returns, but I just can't do it. I need time to decompress from the Final Fantasy series as a whole. Basically what I'm saying is that I want my 56 hours back.

 

[Ge0force]

In the past two weeks I have played through Final Fantasy 13 and 13-2. FF13 is the worst mainline game I've played. All the jokes about corridor level design were true, none of the characters were particularly likable and the combat system was a massive slog, especially near the end when enemies have hundreds of thousands of HP. The nicest thing I can say about the game is that the FMVs still look impressive today.

13-2 is a better game, but still a fairly miserable experience. The combat is speedier and I was more invested in the story. Caius is actually a highly intriguing villain by Final Fantasy Standards. However the game has this lightning fast pacing (pun intended) and it just sort of ends. The ending sequence is also extremely bizarre.

I planned to start Lightning Returns, but I just can't do it. I need time to decompress from the Final Fantasy series as a whole. Basically what I'm saying is that I want my 56 hours back.

Can't agree more. FF13 is visually impressive, but everything else is incredibly boring and repetitive. Especially the automated combat, which feels like watching a stream on Twitch while pressing the X-button to prevent the screensaver from kicking in. 13-2 had a few promising additions, but was still extremely boring and the side-quests where you have to find invisible items are completely ridiculous. Both games felt like a huge waste of time to me, and made me decide to ignore the FF franchise completely.

 

[Virtual Ruminant]

Finished Assassin's Creed: Rogue (Ubisoft, 2014)

Yay or Shay?

Pro:

• Not as broken and buggy as its sister-game Assassin's Creed Unity...

Con:

• ... but a lot worse-looking (due to targeting previous-generation consoles) and still pretty buggy, and with almost equally bad mission design, and a campaign that's way too short, propped up with an incredible amount of collectible and side-mission grind. It has almost every system and mechanic of every previous AC title in it, too, and some of them fit in very, very badly.
• To my surprise (which turned into consternation pretty quickly), this game is also a major lore dump. You get an incredible amount of background information on all the historic and present-day characters of the whole Templar-Assassin conflict, and all it did was to finally and utterly alienate me from the AC universe. Maybe this is a case of fans getting their wish for more-more-more-lore and being off worse for it, or it was that the whole thing was handed over to a different team of writers with a different goal (get the story on track for an open-ended franchise with as many sequels as people are willing to buy), or it's just me who's changed. Whatever it is - for me, all this information, all the biographies, all the backgrounds, all the dots in the timeline just took away the one bit that made the AC universe interesting: The mystery. You read all of this, and there's really no questions left. Now the games have to justify themselves purely on gameplay. Welp.

2/5

 

[fantomena]

Finished


Only the story and certain side missions, haven't tried the DLC (need to do some uninteresting side missions to access the DLC). The game is very cool, the best thing about the game is the characters, the story and the world it self. It's fascinating and interesting, especially the bugsnax part which starts off as something cute and turns iinto something...not cute in the end. The characters are interesting and so is the story. The world map is built into different regions with different environments (beach, sand, snow mountain, town etc.) where the town is the game "hub" where all the characters ends up being in.

The negative part of the game is the graphics, didn't really like the art style and some of the quests, both side quests and main quests, ended up being quite repetive and boring, which is why I have yet to access the free DLC. It was no doubt the story, characters and the world that does the heavy lifting here. Still though, when I did receive good and fun quests, which there are thanksfully many of, the game is fun and good.

Score: 8/10

 

[Ge0force]

Finished Katana Zero


Very well designed action game, where you beat levels full of enemies using your katana and time manipulation. The combat is rather fast and very challenging since every hit kills you, but all levels are divided in small sections to prevent frustration. I really enjoyed the combat, except for the fact that your character moves toward an enemy when attacking. This often results in movements that you didn't meant to do, especially when attacking enemies that are above or below you.

But except for this minor flaw, the game is truly amazing. The pixel art is really great, especially the animations. You will also meet a bunch of interesting characters and your decisions determine the outcome of the story. Last but not least: the soundtrack is SO good! Very recommended!

Score: 8.0/10

 

[Ge0force]

Finished Drainus


Team Ladybug shadow dropped their first shoot 'em up on Steam, and damn, what a great and unique game that is! Your ship has a special collector that allows you to absorb light colored bullets for a short time. The energy that you collect this way results in powerful attacks and can be used to upgrade your ship with new weapons, shields, subweapons, special attacks and improved stats. This mechanic works really well and is a fresh breath of air in the genre. The level design, graphics and soundtrack are top notch, and the difficulty is much more forgiving than other shoot 'em ups, making it accessible for newcomers as well. Very, very recommended!

Score: 9.0/10

 

[Joe Spangle]

Not really finished or retired but ive seen enough of this to rate it....


My brain hurts.

If you like chess its a good twist on it with some mad mechanics that can have you head scratching for solutions. You end up playing multiple games at once after a piece is sent back in time. Can be quite confusing.
Well presented, easy to get into, hard to get your head around.

7.5/10

 

[fantomena]

Finished


Not mediocre, not great, something in-between. I actually enjoyed the game a lot and had a lot of fun with it despite it's flaws. It's flaws are that the story is pretty bad and the maps feels pretty barren often, but still exciting to find loot. The game is combat-driven and loot-driven and the combat is good and it's exciting to find more loot. The missions objectives are decent. There are 3 worlds to play through where all the quests are places in the same worlds with a 4th world as free DLC.

I enjoyed the game despite it's negative word of mouth. It was mindless fun. Graphics were also really good. A decent amount of end-game content too which I played a bit off, didn't play any side missions though.

Score: 7.7/10

 

[FunnyJay]

Finished

What a great game hindered by some questionable encounters in the latter half of the game. I really liked the story and the characters (even if Raz was a bit grating in the first half of the game), and the missions were diverse and interesting for the most part. And then you reach the back-half of the game were all the missions are up against super-powered tanks or valkyrias who can oneshot any characters, sometimes even passively. And a few of the missions are interrupted half-way through by the appearance of these enemies, making all of your earlier planning completely worthless.

So when I was on chapter 15 or so (out of 18 chapters) I was really ready for the game to end. It had outstayed its welcome and most battles left were of the puzzly boss-encounter type, instead of fun tactical challenges.

And also, something that I also really dislike, is locking the "true" ending of the game behind watching a few scenes previously hidden throughout the game and then having to replay the final mission on hard mode.
It totally disrupts the flow of the story, when you first finish it, but then have to go back and complete the final mission again.

If they ever make a VC5, I'm hoping they place less emphasis on boss-encounters and further emphasis on missions that force you to utilize all your different troops and troop-types.

But, even though all I've said, this is still an 8/10 game!

 

[Ge0force]

Finished Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma


I really enjoyed the first two games from the Zero Escape trilogy, but this last part was a disappointment for me. The "escape room" puzzles are still very well designed, but the story is complete rubbish, especially in the last part of the game. Not only is it unnecessarily complex, but it also doesn't make any sense why certain characters did what they did. Last but not least did I get stuck in the game several times, because I didn't know the answer to question where you have to "type" the answer, which is mentioned somewhere else in the game but isn't added to your files for some reason. What a shame...

Score: 5.7/10

 

[fantomena]

Finished

Kirby and the Forgotten Land (Yuzu)

Fun and casual action game overall. It's a Kirby game. 6 worlds, every world has it's own environmental theme (like desert, snow etc.), every world has 5 levels except for the last one with 6 levels. And one "post-game" world with a few levels in, but those levels are mostly just a mixture of the other levels, which Im not interested in, so didn't play that extra "bonus" world.

Every world has the 5th level as a boss level, you need to collect a certain amount of Waddle Dees (small helpers) in order to unlock the boss level to continue the story. Was never a problem to have enough, so that was nice. You find these helpers throughout every level, you automatically unlock 3-4 of them when you have finished a level and there are more to unlock in each level by finding them in hidden spots and doing certain smaller objectives in the levels.

Great music, so-and-so graphics, some places looks good, others (especially levels in the city) doesn't look very good. 10 abilities you can play with throughout the game and you can use money and rare stones (collectibles you find by finishing time trials, smaller levels in each world) that you find throughout the levels to upgrade the 10 basic abilities to make them stronger and more different.

Story is decent, nothing special. Gameplay is...well..Kirby, if you don't like the simpleness of Kirby gameplay you won't like this game either.

Overall a fun, good Kirby game with lots of variations and decent story and good gameplay. Nothing suprising, nothing innovative, but the game does what it want's to do. well.

Score: 8/10

 

[Ge0force]

Finished* Neon Abyss


Very decent 2D rogue-like, where you have to clear rooms full of enemies using a huge amount of different weapons, perks and companions. These companions can be earned by finding eggs, which have a chance to hatch if you clear a room. Each companion has a unique ability and can increase in level if you can keep it alive long enough.

Neon Abyss does a lot of things right: the controls are great, there's a huge variety in weapons, perks, enemies and bosses, the pixel-art is beautiful and the soundtrack is amazing. On the other hand, as in many rogue-likes, your chance to win depends heavily on the weapons and perks you find. Some of the weapons are really strong and can kill even the final boss without any effort. Other weapons require more precise aiming, and that's not easy in this game because the screen is often cluttered with bullets and your companions.

This said, I had many hours of fun with this game, so I can definitely recommend it to anyone looking for an arcade-style experience.

Score: 7.9/10


* Note: I've played Neon Abyss until I beat the first five "managers". After that, there are still variations of these managers to beat, but I felt I'd seen most what the game has to offer.


Finished Tooth and Tail


Tooth and Tail is another effort to make the RTS genre playable with a controller. Instead of using a cursor, you directly control the leader of your faction which acts as your "cursor". Controlling your other units is limited to "follow me and shoot everything" and "stop shooting and come here". However, the gameplay is cleverly designed around this limitation, and the campaign has a good variety in mission objectives. There's a decent story as well, and the 4 available factions all have some unique units and play style.

Still, being a veteran RTS player, the lack of direct control of my units frustrated me during the more difficult missions when they didn't do what I wanted them to do. The game also requires too much trial and error, because the information about the abilities, strength and weakness of each unit is sparse. Therefore, Tooth and Tail is only recommended when you're looking for a rather casual RTS experience.

Score: 7.0/10


Finished Wingspan


Very relaxing and unique card game, where you score points by playing cards, laying eggs and achieving randomized goals. The tutorial is the longest I've ever seen, but it does a great job explaining how the game should be played. Unlike most fast-paced card battlers, Wingspan requires you to think ahead and to keep an eye on what your opponents are dong. I like it a lot, although the limited amount of different cards makes the experience to grow old rather soon. Definitely worth playing for a few hours.

Score: 7.8/10


Finished 11-11 Memories Retold


This game was a huge surprise to me. It looks like a simple indie game with it's unique graphics, but it actually has the polish, animations and voice acting of a AAA game.

In 11-11 Memories Retold, you follow the stories of both a German and Canadian soldier during the first world war. Despite being enemies, they become friends when faith brings them together. This sounds cliché, but the story is truly excellent and has plenty of plot twists and touching parts.

The gameplay is a combination of a walking simulator, solving simple puzzles and making choices that impact the outcome of the story. The design of the game world is truly excellent: you're running through trenches while artillery explosions surround you and attack planes are flying over your head. You visit small French towns, where people are talking to each other and living their lives. You'll get stuck in underground tunnels, when bombs are destroying the battlefield above you.

All of this is shown with a unique graphical style, that makes it look like the game was painted with watercolor. The music and voice acting are also excellent; Elijah Wood is brilliant as the Canadian Solder and the German soldiers actually speak German!

11-11 Memories Retold is an amazing experience. I can't recommend it enough!

Score: 8.9/10

 

[fantomena]

Finished Far Cry 6 (PC - Ubisoft Connect)

This is a reskinned Far Cry 4 and 5 with different environments, new story, characters and weapons (still very sure a lot of weapons are reskinned from the previous games).

Gameplay is is the same, still boring and monotonous, story is meh, characters are decent, main-missions feels like side missions on steroids, boring game structure.

It really is just the same stuff as before.

Another thing, if you use a trainer and activate the "teleport to waypoint", as in, you teleport to where you put your waypoint on the map, like right beside a mission icon, you most likely cut your playtime by 60-70%. Feels like most of the game is just traveling. And traveling is boring.

Score: 5.9/10

 

[fantomena]

Finished


Fantastic game, fun all around, lots of freedom, great graphics, great music, great sound, interesting story.

Finished all the mission stories and will definetly be back to play it more. Lots of stuff still to explore and do.

Only negative is that I didn't find much gameplay changes in this one, bascially all the same gameplay from Hitman 2. Also a lot of other objects laying around in the environments are not usable, just the same stuff as with Hitman 2.

Score. 8.8/10

 

[Virtual Ruminant]

Finished Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty! (Just Add Water / Oddworld Inhabitants, 2014)

Abe 'unch of bullshit.

Pro:

• It's Abe's Oddysee, but remade in Unity as 2.5D! Same cutscenes though as in 1997 (re-rendered in higher resolution and widescreen aspect ratio).

Con:

• It's Abe's Oddysee, i.e. a worst-of-the-90s platformer bullshit game design extravaganza. The controls are actively hostile towards the player and are designed to make the game harder, there's fake inertia on the player character, you need to be pixel-precise with your movements to interact with platform ledges in the intended way and the mechanics of enemies or even things like boost-pads aren't consistent across the game, but can subtly change from screen to screen.

Got the bad ending and I'm never gonna go back for the good one.


2.5/5

 

[Ge0force]

Finished* Atomicrops


Funny rogue-lite where you have to grow vegetables and protect them against nightly monster invasions. You can also scout the environment the get more seeds, fertilizers, tractors and scrolls that help you to perform better. With the money you earn from selling your vegetables, you can buy new weapons and other stuff.

The game has a day-night routine that puts you on a tight schedule: during the day you have about 2 minutes to run around different biomes, shoot dozens of enemies and gather as much seeds and stuff as you can. At night, your crops are under constant attack from monsters or huge bosses. Somewhere between, you have to prepare your fields, plant seeds, water them, remove weeds and harvest full grown plants. This is very exciting to play, and the "twin-stick shooter" combat is lots of fun as well.

Sadly, there are a few annoying flaws. First of all, the pricing of the weapons you can buy is often much higher than the amount of money you have. This is a huge problem, because your chance of surviving the nightly attacks heavily depends on the weapon you have. Another problem is that several mechanics aren't explained in the tutorial, and aren't always easy to figure out for yourself. Reading a guide on Steam is very recommended. The game also doesn't show the selling price of the vegetables when you find a seed. I don't mind a bit of trial and error, but because this game forces you to be busy all the time, this becomes rather frustrating. Last but not least, the screen becomes VERY cluttered near the end of the year. It was very hard for me to see what was going on during the nightly attacks.

Tldr; fun but flawed.

Score: 6.9/10


* Note: Completed year 1. Other years are the same but with higher difficulty/rewards.

 

[Mivey]

Finished Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty! (Just Add Water / Oddworld Inhabitants, 2014)

Abe 'unch of bullshit.

Pro:

• It's Abe's Oddysee, but remade in Unity as 2.5D! Same cutscenes though as in 1997 (re-rendered in higher resolution and widescreen aspect ratio).

Con:

• It's Abe's Oddysee, i.e. a worst-of-the-90s platformer bullshit game design extravaganza. The controls are actively hostile towards the player and are designed to make the game harder, there's fake inertia on the player character, you need to be pixel-precise with your movements to interact with platform ledges in the intended way and the mechanics of enemies or even things like boost-pads aren't consistent across the game, but can subtly change from screen to screen.

Got the bad ending and I'm never gonna go back for the good one.


2.5/5

Never finished this one. The remake added analogue controls, but many of the puzzles require you to move in exact distances. They allow you to simulate the old PS1 style movement via the Dpad, but it seemed bugged when I played it, often moving me just hair beyond the place i should have landed if the game had proper non-analogue controls.
No clue how this game shipped like this, it feels unfinished.

 

[Virtual Ruminant]

Finished Hoa (Skrollkat Studio / PM Studios, CE-Asia, 2021)

Pro:

• Looks and sounds like a Studio Ghibli movie turned into a light metroidvania / puzzle platformer
• The gameplay is just about challenging enough (i.e. not very) to not get bored while playing and still leaving the player lots of time to take in all the great animations and character designs

Con:

• A couple of frame-rate drops during cutscenes
• Short (4 hours maximum even at leisurely pace), with little replay value

Absolutely gorgeous game every fan of pixel-art platformers needs in their collection - might want to wait for sales though.


4/5

 

[Ge0force]

Finished Hatchwell


Very charming adventure game, inspired by the early Zelda games. You have to save the people of Hatchwell from some evil force that spawns monsters all over the place, by finding six crystals in mysterious dungeons. Most of these dungeons are very well designed, with plenty of puzzles and unique enemies and bosses. Especially the water dungeon is amazing, and comes very close to the clever design of the Zelda games. The inhabitants of Hatchwell will also give you quests, and there are lots of secrets to find by exploring the environment.

Not everything is perfect tho; the last two dungeons are repetitive and the music sounds best when turned off completely. But for the first game of a single developer, Hatchwell is a great achievement. Recommended!

Score: 7.6/10
.

 

[Virtual Ruminant]

Finished AntVentor (LoopyMood, 2018)

Pro:

• Interesting art style - very cartoonish characters combined with photorealistic backgrounds.

Con:

• Pure bullshit comedy point and click adventure logic, but almost no actual payoff (game made me laugh exactly once)
• Very, very short (< 2 hours)

Why do I keep getting suckered into playing these kind of point and clicks? What's wrong with me?


2/5

 

[Virtual Ruminant]

Finished Golf Club: Wasteland (Demagog Studio / Untold Tales, 2021)

Pro:

• A 2D pixel art platforming golf game with outstanding presentation mainly in the audio part: There's a 2 hour long radio broadcast with original songs, a DJ and spoken segments recorded by an ensemble of voice actors, giving you some funny and some somber introduction to the setting of the game.
• The actual game part, if played in challenge mode where you cannot go over par on each hole of the "course", is actually challenging. Approximately 15 of the 35 levels are seriously difficult and had me shouting at the screen quite a lot. Interestingly though, the game puts the difficult part in the middle of the experience and then tones it back down as the story beats pick up again towards the end - and that's how the game got me back by the time the credits rolled, even though I was pretty pissed off intermittently.
• There's also a story mode with no stroke limit.

Con:

• Too much RNG in the difficult bits. Granted, randomized wind and a certain variation in the strokes is what you get in any golf simulation, too - but then this clearly isn't PGA Tour or The Golf Club, so why bother putting that in.

I went through three phases with this game: Being amazed by the radio show, baby-raging hard at the difficult levels, then actually getting sad from the story towards the end. That's a lot and quite a variety of emotion from such a short game (took me 4 hours to complete in challenge mode).


4.5/5


Previously reviewed in this thread here and here.

A follow-up game set in the same universe / scenario is currently in development and has a playable demo out during Steam Next Fests.

 

[FunnyJay]

Retired Metro 2033 original version.

This is the third time I've attempted to play this game since I bought it 10 years ago. I don't know. It just doesn't manage to grab me.

The graphics are fine and the story seems OK (I've read the book).
But it just feels so... scripted...

The enemies you face seems mostly like they are there to put on a show... If you fail to shoot them an NPC does it after enough time has passed instead.
The "stealth" doesn't really seem to work, since I've been noticed immediately and everything goes loud.

I think it's time to realize this one is just not for me.

(The S.T.A.L.K.E.R games are a lot better)

 

[spiel]

All three Hexcells game completed

Pretty solid trilogy that's basically minesweeper as a logic puzzle. I like how solutions can be derived without guessing. If I was stuck it meant I missed a clue, so even though some levels were really hard, it never felt unfair. The first game was ok, just a little on the easy side. The difficulty curve was much better tuned in the sequels.

Overall score: 3.5/5

Confession: I gave the original game a negative review and refunded it years ago. It was petty in hindsight. I have a disproportionate dislike of puzzle games having a scoring system based on mistakes, especially for logic games like sudoku/picross . Especially when playing with a broken mouse and not being able to recover fr0m misclicks. But it's only a problem if you're chasing 100% achievements. Which I'm not, so why was I so bothered by it?

 

[Virtual Ruminant]

Finished LEGO Builder's Journey (Light Brick / LEGO Games, 2019)

Pro:

• Great presentation - virtual LEGO bricks have never looked so good, especially when ray-traced lighting is active, with music and sound to match.
• Novel concept: Unlike the well known Traveler's Tales LEGO tie-in games, building with the bricks here is part of the actual game mechanics and not just a visual gimmick.

Con:

• The game spends about two thirds of the story mode on tutorials, then gets serious with the puzzling in the last third - but very often, the actual puzzle is of the "what am I even supposed to do in this room?" kind. I felt there's unrealized potential in the game concept. Maybe in a sequel?
• The creative mode isn't great - the building area is way too small and the brick set is too limited. This in part due to the fact that this game was ported from mobile (Apple Arcade). Everyone who was hoping for a virtual LEGO building sandbox to spend hundreds of hours in, look elsewhere.
• Short.
• Awkward mouse controls, due to the translation from mobile touch controls.
• Surprisingly poor performance (on PC).

I had good fun with this game, even though I got stuck a couple of times and had to just click around for ages until I realized what the game wanted me to do. Even so, the playtime for the whole story mode was just under five hours only.



3.5/5

 

[Ge0force]

Finished Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom


This is definitely one of the best 2D platformers I've ever played. Seriously, everything about this game is polished and cleverly designed, it's so much fun to play from start to end!

Because of some curse, you are able to change into different animals. Each animal has unique skills: when you're lion, you can dash through walls, while your frog form allows to swing on hooks and turn wheels. You can change between different forms at any moment, which the devs used to create tons of clever puzzles, platforming challenges and boss fights.

During your quest, you visit lots of different area's, each with unique enemies and challenges. There are secrets hidden in almost every corner, and the graphics and soundtrack are amazing.

My only point of criticism is that the last part of the game requires some unnecessary backtracking, and some of the bosses are a bit too much trial and error, especially the final boss. But please don't let this stop you from playing this almost perfect game. A must-play for everyone!

Score: 9.5/10

 

[Mivey]

I retired The Surge.

This a really pretty game from Deck13. I liked the combat, and it looks like a pretty decent Souls clone. But it just bores me. The game clearly wants me to keep running back to the same "station" to upgrade my items, create new items, yada yada. There's no story to speak of, no characters to speak of and the environmental story telling feels terrible. The use of audio logs is also just grating, would have loved some actual character who spoke with me instead of wasting spoken lines on something so boring.

I think I got this in a bundle or something, and I don't think this series is really my thing. Would be interesting to hear what others are thinking about these games. It's not that I don't like the game actively, it just doesn't feel like it's really worth my time, that I have better games to play than this.

 

[Virtual Ruminant]

Finished The Sojourn (Shifting Tides / Iceberg Interactive, 2019)

Atmospheric first person puzzling with a potpourri of classic and modern mechanics such as: Light world / dark world with various elements being only accessible in one of the two, teleporting, (sort of / kind of) pressure plates connected to gates, switches that need to be kept in line-of-sight to trigger, alignable energy beam emitters ...

Pro:

• Good puzzle design and smooth difficulty curve.
• 50 /50 mix of optional and mandatory puzzle challenges.
• Pleasant presentation that doesn't distract from the puzzling.

Con:

• Vague story that borders on nonsense and a boatload of shitty aphorisms which are your only reward (apart from achievements) for doing the optional puzzle challenges.

Looked like a good time for a first-person-puzzle fan such as me and that turned out to be true - but don't expect anything fascinating beyond that. I guess not every FPP can be a Talos Principle or Manifold Garden, but as long as the puzzling's good, that's alright with me.


4/5

 

[Ge0force]

Finished Trine 4: The Nightmare Prince + The Melody of Mystery DLC



I'm so glad the devs decided to go back to 2.5D gameplay, resulting in the best Trine game available. The story is funny, the puzzles are clever and Trine 4 has some of the most beautiful graphics I've ever seen in a game. The Melody of Mystery DLC adds six more levels and is definitely worth it as well. Very, very recommended!

Score: 9.0/10

 

[Virtual Ruminant]

Finished Macrotis - A Mother's Journey (Proud Dinosaurs / Orsam Bilgi Teknolojileri ve Danışmanlık A.Ş., 2019)

Pro:

• Presentation is pleasant, if nothing out of the ordinary - typical Unity side-scrolling platformer with levels modeled in 3D. Music and voice acting are good, even though the main character didn't sound very motherly to me - in fact, she sounded like a Friendship-is-Magic-style pony.
• The game starts out deceptively easy, but by chapter 3 (out of 4), I was cursing and shouting at the screen because the puzzles became quite challenging. And the hard bits really are pure puzzle platforming - there's the occasional section where quick skill platforming is required, but those are rare and not too difficult. So even though it may not look like it, there's challenge for the seasoned puzzle platformer fan here.

Con:

• Some mechanics could do with a little more polish: Movable rock blocks do have just that bit too much of unchecked physics on them and can get glitchy sometimes. And sometimes, certain place-able objects need to be placed with pixel-precision to make the intended solution to a puzzle work - an invisible grid to take care of the placement in marginal situations would have been good here.

After 100%-ing The Sojourn without needing to consult a walkthrough even once, I was feeling pretty good about my puzzling skills - this game grounded me in reality again, I needed walkthrough-help no less than four times to make it through this one, and it took me 9 hours to complete (but with 100% achievements as well). Interestingly, I never needed help for the optional collectibles, just for ordinary 'how do I progress here?!' situations ...



3.5/5

 

[Virtual Ruminant]

Also finished Event[0] (Ocelot Society, 2016)

A first-person sci-fi adventure game with a few sprinkles of action (no shooting - there are a few bits where you fly in an EVA suit, one of them with a timer running).

Pro:

• The standout feature of this game is communicating with a spaceship computer - by way of text-chatting with it in various terminals. Sadly this game was made just a couple years before it could feasibly hook an actual text-interpreting AI such as GPT-3 in, and so it's all just a more or less clever parser and lots of canned responses. It's still quite fun.
• Good soundtrack, including an original song.

Con:

• Nobody who has seen or read 2001 - A Space Odyssey should bother with this game - it's so heavily inspired by it that the story will be entirely predictable. There's a sprinkling of various other 60s and 70s scifi in there as well.
• Unlike 2001 - A Space Odyssey, the visuals here are nothing special at all - if they were, it probably would have helped, since:
• The game is very short - I clocked in at under 3 hours and I really took it slowly. The three different endings don't change that very much, since they are all triggered more or less by a few decisions right at the end.
• And speaking of the endings: Everyone who is still salty at the Mass Effect 3 endings should have a look at this for some real meh alternatives for wrapping up a story.
• And while we are talking about old Mass Effect 3 grievances: The game lets you pick a biography (and pronouns!) during a bit of multiple choice during the intro and then proceeds to do absolutely nothing with the choices you made.

I have a pretty low threshold when it comes to enjoying walking simulators, point-and-clicks and sci-fi, and yet this one missed the mark. Really the only positive thing I can say about it is that it's solidly made - it performs well and doesn't have any glitches or bugs. But I can only see an audience that has almost no reference to other scifi whatsoever enjoying this.


2.5/5

 

[Ge0force]

Finished The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit


Short adventure in the "Life is Strange 2" universe, where you play a young boy who escapes from reality after his mother died and his dad started drinking. The storytelling and characters are incredible, but the puzzles require A LOT of walking around to find every object you need. And the solution for unlocking the smartphone is BS. But in general, I enjoyed the experience and it even raised my enthusiasm to continue Life is Strange 2. Recommended, especially since it's free!

Score: 7.6/10

 

[pinson]

Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair

Fun platformer! A bit too long for its own good but an enjoyable experience nonetheless.

Pros

• The soundtrack was EXCELLENT. I can't believe that they managed to have the dream duo of Wise and Kirkhope work on this game.
• The level design was mostly good. Lots of subtle references to the DKC series in the way levels were designed, which I enjoyed.
• The overworld isometric puzzles were actually much more fun that they ever needed to be.
• The classic Rare style of humour was on point. I love this shit.

Cons:

• The Impossible Lair itself was bullshit. It felt like a sadistic and cheap version of a Tropical Freeze temple stage. Lots of "I died because I couldn't possibly have known that there was trap after that jump".
• It sucks that the the levels often locked you from going back to get a missed T.W.I.T. coin, forcing you to replay the whole thing. I think there's a way to design most levels without locking the player from walking back on their steps.

Overall, something like a 3.5/5. Contrary to most people, I enjoyed the first Yooka-Laylee more.

 

[fantomena]

Finished


Quite fun game, basically you are are cloud and you start off with the ability to rain down on people and objects. There are around 50 levels with different objects, lots of variation in every level. When you progress through the levels you start getting new abilities like snow, lightning and wind that you also can use. New game + involves extra harder objectives you can complete within the levels you have already finished.

It's fun, basic, yet somewhat difficulty, cute graphics. Controls can be annoying sometimes, sometimes a bit repetive and the camera work could have been better.

Score: 8/10

 

[Virtual Ruminant]

Finished A Way Out (Hazelight / Electronic Arts, 2018)

A coop-only (local or online, both splitscreen) action-adventure. Played online through EA Origin.

Pro:

• Great visual presentation and voice acting - both the interactive parts as well at the cutscenes (of which there are many) are superbly done.
• Gameplay-wise, this has a bit of everything - simultaneous exploring of environments and talking to NPCs (imagine a Dontnod game, but with coop), synchronized puzzle-solving and coop action sequences including straight up third-person shooting as well as Uncharted-style set pieces such as car chases. More or less all one could want out of a coop game.
• Interesting setting (early 1970s), characters and a story that holds up from start to finish.

Con:

• The music is not at all period-accurate and a bit on the generic side. You'd think after Mafia 3 and its soundtrack setting the bar quite high for cinematic games set in that time-period and Electronic Arts publishing, you'd get a little more in that department.
• There are a few missable/skippable side-story beats, often tied to achievements, which do provide a little replay value, as well as a few scenes which get triggered or skipped by consensus decision, but ultimately replaying this game will more or less be a similar experience to re-watching a movie.
• There isn't much of a challenge to any parts of the game and no adjustable difficulty either. On the other hand, this makes the game quite suitable for (adult) non-gamers or very casual gamers, too.
• No online multiplayer lobby - you can only play with platform friends (and worse, on PC this means being friends on EA Origin, even if the game was purchased on Steam or other storefronts).

This may seem like a lot of negative points, but they're all pretty minor all things considered. Coop games of this particular genre(-mix), caliber and quality are unfortunately still quite rare, and thus me and my coop partner enjoyed it very much.



4/5

 

[fantomena]

Finished


Short, but really weird, interesting and fascinating game, no doubt it comes from the creator of Inscryption. Nothing much to say about it other than it is kinda short and had some frustrating gameplay elements and you can actually skip some content without knowing to progress, sorta cool, game is quite "open" in that way.

Score: 8.3/10

Finished


Another short, but fun game. It's like a big minigame where you try to avoid discs in each section. The game is built like a map with lots of section and each section has discs you need to not be killed by for 10 seconds. Also secondary goals you can do. Leaderboards are for all sections so you can see how long people on the friends list lasted before getting killed by discs, so the overall goal is to last as long as possible. Different variation of dicsc and environments too. Get's a bit repetive after a while though and some secondary goals doesn't always make sense.

Score: 7.8/10

 

[Ge0force]

Finished Life is Strange 2


Excellent adventure about two brothers who are on the run, after their dad and a cop accidently got killed. The pacing is a bit too slow for my taste and there are some useless fetch quests, but most of the story and characters are the best I've ever seen in a video game. My favorite are the companions in chapter 3; they are SO incredibly well designed! I even wished I could live with these guys for a few weeks!

On the other hand, chapter 4 (the church) was a huge disappointment for me. The events and characters are cliché, and the weird ending isn't exciting at all. Luckily the last chapter is great again and the finale gave me goosebumps. Life is Strange 2 is not perfect, but it does so many things right that it's definitely worth playing. Very recommended!

Score: 9.0/10

 

[fantomena]

Finished


Fantastic photography focused game. Cute story and interesting characters you come across. A bunch of levels you progress through and each level giv es you a bunch of objectives to do. For each objective you do, you receive a stamp on card, to progress the story you need a certain amount of stamps, but it's very easy to get what's required and I often did more objectives than I needed to because the objectives are variated and fun to do. The game is all about photography, photographing certain objects, finding certain things, often hidded in the environments. The levels are made like "boxes". Every level is unique.

You can also find treasures that gives you different clothes and every objective has it's own story. It doesn't matter if you are into photogtaphy in real-life. You can also go back to previous levels to continue doing objectives, also after the credits. There are no enemies to die form and no countdown, so you can take your time. There is also a compendium where you can collect pictures of valuable animals you find. All pictures you take is also gathered in your album.

Overall a well-made, cute, calm and interesting game about life and photography. It's also like 3 hours long, so nice length.

Score: 8.9/10

 

[Virtual Ruminant]

Finished Hue (Fiddlesticks Games / Curve Digital, 2016)

A puzzle-platformer based around objects that blink in and out of existence depending which color the player chooses as the level background (in real time).

Pro:

• Minimalist but smooth presentation with very nice music and some voice-acting.
• Great puzzle mechanic that's easy to learn but enables some surprisingly tricky puzzles as you unlock more and more colors to play with.
• Very good and tight controls (but: controller-centric, the game explicitly mentions this on startup) that make sure the platforming never gets in the way of the puzzling.
• The main campaign/story is already challenging as it is, but there are also some well hidden optional collectibles to provide replay/continuation-value after the credits roll.
• Pretty meaty relative to the game's size (in megabytes) - I finished the main game in just over 10 hours.

Con:

• Mouse/KB controls might be somewhat less smooth than controller, but there aren't many super-tight skill-platforming sections anyway.
• I thought the story / voice-overs were just a tad too dramatic / try-hard, particularly relative to the very non-dramatic ending, but nothing to really complain about.

Wonderful little puzzle-platformer that's just super smooth and to the point while also being really compact (just over 300 MB in size) and low on hardware requirements - the only thing it doesn't have is Ori-style eye-candy.


4.5/5

 

[fantomena]

Finished


Sadly one of the worst boomer shooters I've played and I remember back at the game's release, the game was pretty hyped. It's a roguelike where the shooting doesn't feel impactful, confusing and uninteresting level design and mostly hordes of boring enemies. Sound and music is also very mediocre.

5/10.

 

[Mivey]

I finished Atelier Rorona - The Alchemist of Arland DX

My first Atelier title, which I bought ages ago and only finished thanks to the Deck. Playing this on a larger screen looked and felt atrocious (with the terrible pauses every time you open a menu). Not sure why, but on a smaller screen, it bothers me far less. I was also surprised by the time it took me to play through it once. Clocked barely 20 hours, according to Steam. Of course, I didn't really explore everything or saw every event with every character, but it's still surprising how short it was, because it sure didn't feel that way.

The actual gameplay is surprisingly tame, once you understand what it wants from you. You only really "need" to finish one assignment every 1 and a half month. And getting at least 3 stars is always completely trivial. Getting al 10 is a bit harder, but usually not by a lot. I think I got all 10 stars on 10 of the 12 assignments. The other part of the game is creating items for the citizens and your friends. The requests from citizens increase your "popularity" score, which is useful only for which ending you get (from what I can tell) and the requests from friends are needed to unlock their story events, allowing you to advance their personal stories.

A surprisingly chill and overall enjoyable experience, only held back by the terrible PC port from KT. I think I will give the other games in the series a chance too in time. Especially as the games don't seem to be particularly long.

 

[Paul]

Finished Enderal: Forgotten Stories

I am speechless really. Such an interesting story and characters, with an ending that...really deserves to be experienced.
I will post quite a few postcards from this adventure, but keep in mind that as gorgeous as the world looks, as amazing as its soundtrack is, and as fun as the exploration of Enderal is, the main star of the show really is the writing and quest design.

9.5/10

 

[spiel]

I can finally say Raft completed, as it's out of early access.

Raft veers towards the gentler spectrum of survival games. The beginning is the hardest, but resources are pretty generous mid-game. Eventually you're basically self-sufficient. The focus turns from keeping your thirst and hunger meters up, to progressing the story and decking out your raft. I played solo, and I liked the quiet, lonely atmosphere. Pre-update, it had a surprisingly engaging story with not-so-subtle commentary on climate change and classism.

I have mixed feelings about the finale. Additional features and QoL updates are always appreciated, plus it's nice to have closure for the story after two years. On the other hand, it revealed flaws with the progression system and some of the new content clashed with the vibe of the game. The final location, in particular, features terrible platforming and boss encounters.

END GAME LOCATION SPOILER RANT

Now, previous areas had platforming bits too but those mostly involved navigating your way around the environment and were at least integrated into the architecture/landscape. They also didn't require much precision (fortunate, because the controls have always been clumsy at best). This final platforming section was literally an obstacle course that came out of nowhere. It had such a huge difficulty spike that I ended up save scumming to preserve my sanity.

Then there was the bizarre shift to combat. Picture this: a room with infinitely spawning hyenas that attack you while you desperately try to stack crates to climb up to higher ground, while the villain is dobbing fire bombs at you. Then after you escape that terrifying place, you face a giant mutant hyena that spits toxic sludge. NOT. FUN.

I love Raft, but that last area really took the wind out of my sails.