Recent reviews by Hazmat

This is certainly a game of all time. It's short, it's unreal engine 5, and it's a bit buggy. I would give this an entirely neutral review if I could.

Been playing with early versions of All Bones Jones' fan translation project on itch io, and this might be on par or even better then Black Souls 2 in regards to combat and exploration.

Legitimately one of my favourite RPGs I've played, with SO much to explore and so many weapons and potential character builds.

Cheap as hell for how much there is to this, if you DON'T pick this up on sale, shame on you and your entire family.

Elin is the prequel to an old freeware roguelike known as Elona. If you played Elona, you know basically what to expect here, just add in a rather deep crafting system, town management mechanics, and a fully translated story with some interesting ideas.

For those who haven't played Elona, Elin adheres to one very important roguelike aspect: the game is actively unkind to you if you dont take the time to understand it. Beyond the learning curve, Elin is a whimsical game with an air of hidden malice and nigh infinite grinding.

Lots of classes and races to choose from on character creation with feats that mean your choices will immediately matter in how you play the game.
Start out as a fairy thief and you'll be very fast, lucky, and able to steal right out from under people, but only be able to wear incredibly light gear. Say goodbye to that adamantite mace you were eyeballing.
Start as a Juere pianist, and roam the lands plying your bardic skills while your audiences tell you you're ♥♥♥♥ and throw rocks at your skull. Gain a cult following like any good musician, and eat lots of dead slimes to keep that charisma score rising.
Or play as a snail tourist, take 3 months to go from your house to the nearest town for groceries, and immediately die when a local janitor throws salt on you.

Life in Elin is what you make of it. Become a farmer and produce fruits and veggies so nutritionally dense that a single one of your potatoes could meet the nutritional needs of an entire country.
Become an adventurer, delving deep into 'Nefia', randomly generated dungeons that burst forth to the surface from their long buried states as the world seismically shifts.
Become a fisherman who turns all of his catches into bonito flakes... On a sawmill?? And then ferments the bonito flakes into wine in a brewery barrel to sell?
Drink from a well and suddenly break your legs losing 10 speed?
Fight an alien and become pregnant when it forcefully injects an egg down your throat and into your stomach??
Worship an advanced tech God who used to be human but ascended to godhood to try to kill all the gods himself because you saw he had a sweet shotgun and you want it???
Buy a few mermaids off a slave trader and scrape the scales off of their tails once a week to use them to craft mermaid leather handbags to sell en masse to a rabid consumer base????

There's a LOT you can do here, and a good chunk of it feels pretty unhinged when you think about it. 10/10 would feed a mermaid her own egg in omelette form again.

This is an absolute BLAST of a roguelike / roguelite dungeon crawler. The characters are entertainingly written, the art is fun, the soundtrack is good, and oh man the combat! The character skills and itemization allow for a good amount of strategezation in battle. Definitely a recommendation from me.

Cool game! Neat ideas! Fun anxiety! But I softlocked myself by ticking over into anxiety death via time anxiety at the same time the game moved into the next day, and now I'll have to restart the game.

Having played through it, I would have been happy with the experience given even if the game cost $15-20. The game is relatively short at 4 ish hours, and while some things aren't obvious, it's a fun experience and I had a good time. There's some yume nikki inspiration, and some really good music to accompany an irreverent story of a seemingly depressed game dev? postal worker.

As an extra, pay attention to the bands and music Kick recommends in the early parts of the game. They're real bands and songs. I figured they were just made up bands to match the game, but no. They're real. Thanks for the music recommends!

Already it's easy to see this is Elona, but MORE.
Build a town, bribe residents to join, craft all sorts of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, delve dungeons for gear and money, get a prostitute to join your town who has "personal pleasure" as both their job and hobby, purchase a tyrannosaurus rex from the 'slave trader' and ride it into battle, create a berry farm, grind those berries into a smokeable powder, sell that powder to make big dosh, pickpocket a guitar from a guy, so on and so forth. So much to do, so little time, and we're still nowhere near looking at the finished game.

As of writing, the game has been out for less than 2 full weeks, and we've seen close to 2 patches per day fixing bugs, adding more content, and so on. As it stands, things are looking good for the future.

I've gotten one ending so far, and will likely end up going back to find others. The game is unnerving, beautiful, and... unfortunately quite fast at points. Makes it a little hard to stream the game and read out what's being said by the characters, but that really only affects you if you're a slow reader or are reading aloud. The gameplay loop is pretty simple, but doesn't feel boring or repetitive.

The beauty of the game alone makes this a pretty easy recommend.

Enjoyed every second I had with Orbo's Odyssey. The game itself isn't super long, but for the price the humor and gameplay (and if you're into achievement/secret hunting, good luck!!!) make it one I have no hesitation recommending. Some of the secrets here also refer back to past or future Feverdream Studios games. If you want the secret lore, you're gonna have to look into Lets Go Baby, Peeb's Adventure, and the upcoming Nowhere, MI. Have fun!

This was easily most most looked-forward to game since it's announcement. EASILY. I played this for 5 hours in one sitting, and got through what I think is roughly half the game, not trying to particularly rush it. This is everything I could have hoped for in a modern JSR sequel. The music is funky and boppin', the gameplay is smooth and flows (aside from a few small hiccups), the story is more than expected. It OOZES style. I cannot recommend this game enough.