Recent reviews by Hug Sloth

So, I was recently gifted this game by a friend to do a bit of coop play. Initially I was skeptical because I had witnessed its disastrous launch and heard nothing but mockery toward its story. But the experience of going through the early game alongside a friend immediately endeared me to its concept, and the more I played, the more I came to realize, I actually really liked it. Across 200ish hrs, I encountered almost no gamebreaking glitches (besides the game loving to crash randomly), which is miraculous for a game in this engine. Online co-op worked perfectly, no lag or latency that I could tell among me and other players. The CAMP and building systems have become extremely robust; I love that I can be in the middle of an Expedition, in another map entirely, and people are still able to visit my CAMP, check out my Shelter, and buy from my vendors.

Reflecting the benefits of its continuous updates and patches over these past years, FO76 revealed itself to be a surprisingly strong game experience - one that, at least in my opinion, even exceeded Fallout 4's quality in many areas.

If you're reading these reviews just wondering if the 'barren' feel of the launch version has been fixed - the benefits of the Wastelanders update *cannot* be understated. The region now feels alive with activity. The only downside is that the game was obviously originally intended as a cautionary tale about over-reliance on automation, so bringing back all the people lessens the impact of that commentary just a bit.

My criticisms are pretty minor, like the whole final questline. The quest marked itself as completed without me launching a nuke, just because I entered the zone of someone else's fight against the Scorchbeast Queen, which was a bit underwhelming. Some sort of narrative slideshow ending and some credits would be nice, just to confirm to the player that the main story is now entirely over. As it stands, you kill the Scorchbeast Queen and that's just kinda it, no fanfare or anything.

Also, I was really hoping for more from Blast Zones in general. It reminded me of the Glowing Sea in FO4, but way less interesting because it's a glorified weather change effect and across like a dozen Blast Zones I have consistently struggled to find *any* enemies to fight at all. Stable Flux materials are by far the worst grind, which is lame since Blast Zones should be endgame content, but really there's barely anything to fight in them besides Scorchbeasts, and very rarely, a cluster of enemies with 1 High-Rad Fluids and 2 hardened mass between all of them. Though admittedly, this does make it even more satisfying when you finally create enough Stable Flux to make your first Jet Pack. Nothing is more freeing than coming to a cliff and being able to just fly up and over it.

But the community events and CAMP mechanics also make it so addicting just to collect Plans, and show off everything you've found. It keeps you busy long after the structured story quests begin to dry up, which is great. Jumping between Player CAMP builds is also really fun. The game is just really fking fun. It's not a giant mess anymore!

other small nitpicks to wrap up this review:
- what is the licensing cost on these 1940s songs, surely they can afford to at least have all the songs of the last few games. why are we still listening to butcher pete? i'm muttering atom bomb baby in my sleep. don't even have an ingame radio if you're gonna halfass it that much. Three-Dogg commented on your completed Quests as news, same with Mr Vegas, but all we get in 76 is some annoying girl who makes fun of every song. The Classic radio selection is even smaller, there are hours and hours of royalty-free classical songs you could put in with no licenses necessary.
- the Pip-Boy games are cool, but what would be cooler imo is a CAMP object that you can load the games you've collected onto and play that way. So maybe other people could see/play the games I've found and viceversa.
- the lack of any real consequence to death makes the absurd dmg some enemies put out, feel unnecessary. Also, the amount of HP some enemies have is just way too much, even with a full squad
- i swear every freaking questline in this game, is someone getting you/others to do things for them under false pretenses, or to fulfill some secret personal agenda. You're also frequently offered the option to lie to NPCs about various things, seemingly just for funsies, or to piss them off.


but minor complaints aside, overall 8.5/10 game, genuinely surprised me how invested i got.

It's a good Persona game, stretched out over potentially years of realtime. Each patch adds a couple hours of new content, either through events, side modes, or a story update for the current Palace.

This review is for Patch 2.6, 2025, which is coming up on the finale of Palace 3.

The story content and social link dialogue is all of the same quality you'd find in the other Persona games. Doesn't require you to pay money to keep up with things. If you really like Persona, you'll have a great time.

Basically the best Hogwarts immersive sim game that we're ever going to get. Graphics, music, character designs, magic battles, anything I don't mention below, it's good.

Negatives:
- no quidditch
- integrated mod system (not Nexus), meaning a highly curated and limited pool of mods to pick from, mostly outfits.
- not really any secrets to find in the countryside
- eats up a ton of CPU and has loading lag constantly (texture pop-in, being stopped at doors while the game loads inside/outside)
- way, way too many merlin trials (which are basically just Korok puzzles from BOTW)

I bought this game during a sale, based purely on the splash art and some of the gameplay tags. And there it sat in my Steam backlog, waiting. Now, having finally finished the game, I really wish I'd played it sooner. The atmosphere, story, and the environmental design are exceptionally good, for what your brain initially expects to be a bunch of crawling in vents in the dark and being jumpscared by Unreal shop asset zombies.

Instead, you explore a facility that realistically evokes the feeling of 'infestation', with this unearthed statue, Apsulov, having revealed Nordic magic to humans as something far more Eldritch and alien in nature. The Yggdrasill Tree's roots have then spread throughout their labs as enormous, pulsing veins, some of which also allow for passage through the various Norse realms. The framework of the plot, and its concepts, are extremely engaging and lure you to keep playing to find out the whole story. The limited combat is refreshing, as the sparseness of enemies in the facility means you will often be surprised when someone starts running at you out of the pure darkness.

Now, visuals. Firstly, the environmental design of this game is truly excellent. Getting around without a map is actually quite easy, and in my first run I found 24/28 of the game's collectables, along with every audio log, just by casually exploring as much as I could. The realms of Asgard that you visit through the roots are also gorgeously rendered, from the Jotunheim ice giants to the undead shades of Helheim. This, combined with crisp sound effects, create a mood of dread in every location. You will hear ambient noises and never feel quite sure if it was just ambient, or an actual enemy creeping up on you. Oftentimes, you will be in pitch blackness with only your "Sight" for visibility of the surroundings, which is quite tense.

Now with all my gushing about that stuff out of the way, I have to do a bit of nitpicking. Mostly just some design choices that confuse me, or simply don't feel 'as polished' as other aspects.

When talking about the gameplay earlier, I probably sounded like I was being vague, and that's because - aside from how little combat there is - the main mechanic ties directly into what is definitely the weakest aspect of the game, which is the narrative arc of the main character. So let's do a rough synopsis and I'll mix in the frustrating gameplay aspects there.

In this story, you are a lady. You are a very confused, partially maimed lady who awakens to a terrifying looking medical robot experimenting on you and shouting things at you. Then, after some time, you find yourself alone in a completely destroyed underground mining facility, and go exploring. Eventually, you find the CEO of the company, Henrik, who then replaces one of your arms with 'The Jarngreipr', a robotic 'Eitrium' arm that can do various things around the facility, as well as firing charged blasts at enemies.

The Jarngreipr serves all purposes in gameplay - it powers objects, it opens doors, it can fire energy pulses, and the charged shot will kill any enemy in a single hit (at the cost of most of your Eitrium charges). Using the arm, you are then able to explore more of the facility's areas, mainly seeking the remaining roots, with which to travel to the Asgardian realms whose artifacts Henrik has not yet located.

Unfortunately, Jarngreiper also introduces a very annoying gimmick - you have to manage the arm's energy. In theory, this could make sense as a balancing factor, since the charged-shot can be readied quickly and kills enemies in front of you instantly, but at a high energy cost, so you can't be allowed to spam it. In practice however, you will have no idea how much use is too much use, and the game will randomly go very long stretches without a 'recharging station' for the arm, often seeming to encourage repeated backtracks to charge the arm after a single charged shot many hallways away, so as not to waste a lot of your limited reserve of powercells. (And you better hope you're close enough for the charged shot to *hit* the enemy, otherwise it just blows a little gust of wind at them.)

If I had one particular criticism of the story, it would be that the main character doesn't have enough personality. Her tone always seems unsure what she's supposed to be feeling in the scene. She also sounds too similar to Henrik's wife Alice, who is often speaking in the same scenes, and for most of the game she just keeps asking people to explain what's happening (which they don't). The plot reveals in the back half of the game are mainly worldbuilding, and don't tell us much about the MC herself, other than the fact she is some kind of homonculus made from the flesh of Hel's corpse in Helheim.

OK, now I'm just gonna lay into a few things I found outright terrible. Not deal breaking, just kind of eye-rolling.

- The game cannot decide on a tone in its voice acting. Half the time they sound too upbeat, too 'wacky', for the situation they're in. Like, some of the audio logs are horrifying - people going insane from drinking the blood of the Yggdrasill tree, people being audibly mauled as they scream in terror. But then we meet Henrik, who sounds like he should be voicing a drug dealer in Vampire The Masquerade.
- The deer skull cultist guys... awful. They feel out of place, they run screaming straight at you on sight, and they look stupid. They remind me of so many bad UE jumpscare games and just look tacky. They are always placed in the most annoying, cramped hallways, and partway through, they also start respawning from charged shots. On the higher difficulties it's also instant death if they touch you. These guys are annoying right up to the very end of the game and I hate them.
- The part in the caves with all the slugs was a miserable slog, I think a smarter idea would have been to make Sight energy unlimited specifically while in Norse realms. Or maybe just a Sight upgrade that lets you to send out a small pulse that shows your immediate surroundings and how close the enemies are to you.
- If the devs make a sequel: Just make the arm's energy recharge really slowly. Remove the arm charging stations entirely. I would rather pay with my time to wait for a recharge, than feeling like I can't experiment because it's so costly. And if a charged shot is going to cost that much energy, at least make it work from further away.

So for starters I just want to say, I find the whole subject of Kowloon City fascinating. I still feel like there's great potential for a game that seriously attempts to explore it. Sadly, this game only depicts a tiny slice of it, and mainly exaggerates the filth aspect for purposes of horror.

Clocking in at just one hour, the 'gameplay' consists of walking around, and clicking on only a few interactible doors and objects. The character also turns extremely slowly, like they have chronic neck pain, despite the narrow environments being both winding and claustrophobic. There are a couple jumpscare moments, but the horror became very tacky towards the end. The 'story' is conveyed via random notes, managing to just barely make some commentary about the government causing intentional gas leaks to drive residents out of Kowloon, in its brief 1hr of gameplay. (One detail I will give the dev props for is, if you miss feeding the dog at the very end, the dog will show up immediately when starting a second playthrough so you can feed it without redoing the entire game.)

There was so much more they could've done here, not just with the Kowloon concept, but with the atmosphere in general. Instead it felt like the devs lost motivation midway and just released their vertical slice as the full game.

8/10 for potential
5/10 as an overall game

In terms of single-player, story driven games, GOTG is easily among Marvel's best efforts so far. Much like in the films and comics, there's just something about the sarcastic-but-trusting dynamic of the five Guardians that is always endearing. Solid character dialogue, at times comparable to (or exceeding) the emotional impact of the films that explored similar themes. Huge variety of costumes covering a long history of their various iterations. Gorgeous vistas and detailed setpieces make exploration thoroughly enjoyable, and there are many secrets to find. I'll sort my more specific thoughts into categories;

SOUND:
-The choice of licensed songs is a mix of tunes used in the movies, along with some 'meme' songs. This is generally fine, although if one of the goofier songs goes off when you Huddle Up against a major boss, it can deflate hype somewhat.
-Voice acting was generally excellent. Peter's "exasperated but willing to compromise" tone can get a bit grating after 10+ hours, though.
-The characters have a LOT of dialogue in battle. This can make long stretches of combat more interesting, but also causes a lot of overlapping soundbites, occasionally turning everyone's witty remarks into a catchphrase blender in the heat of battle.

COMBAT:
-Upfront, this game has very little genuine challenge even on higher difficulties, due to a combination of *very* simplistic enemies (which I will get into below) and lack of consequences for dying. If you are thorough about finding collectibles, you'll also quickly get the best abilities and upgrades.
-The enemies in this game are a bizarre assortment of lifeforms, but the most frequent mobs for the first half of the game are slime blobs and other exceedingly mundane things. They feel like things used in beta testing, that they just skinned over and put into the game.
-There is just something slightly awkward about the quick reload. I don't know why but I couldn't find the rhythm to it. (This made getting the Charged Shot kills achievement very annoying as well...)
-Huddle Up is a fun mechanic the first couple times you use it, but once the speeches start to repeat, it can get kinda tedious to activate it. (Also as mentioned above, there's a chance you get Rick Astley playing over what may be a serious situation)

STORY:
-This is one of the game's strongest aspects, achieving a pitch-perfect fusion of MCU's Knowhere with a more comic-faithful cast and narrative, that digs as deep as it can into the well of Guardians lore. Though, the result is a roller coaster of sights and sounds, that throws alien landscapes and strange monsters at you rapidly, almost making it feel like you're on some interstellar sight tour and they're hurrying you past the landmarks a bit too fast to fully appreciate them.

SUBSTANCE:
-Multiple scenes feature branching dialogue trees and arguments, which can change the outcome of several major parts of the story (though there is ultimately only one ending). This makes NG+ more worthwhile since you can explore alternate paths through the story.
-Befriending / charming other characters can have surprising benefits at unexpected moments later on.
-Costumes for all the guardians are hidden throughout the game, covering a wide variety of styles (my favorites were definitely the Apocalypse costume set).
-Robust photo mode, and costumes stay on in most cutscenes, good for screenshots
-Finding collectibles doesn't just fill a checklist, you can also examine the items back on the ship and have surprisingly in-depth discussions with the other Guardians about the meaning or symbolism of each one, and its relevance to their particular culture or history.
-Great for Marvel nerds who like namesearching obscure comic characters they've never heard of. Cameos and references galore.

OVERALL:
This game ought to be the standard that future Marvel standalone games aspire to. It doesn't try to do everything, but what it does do, it does quite well, with fast-paced combat, a story that keeps your attention, and environmental detail that is a true feast for the eyes.

Not as funny as the other Portal games, this is more of a semi-interactive vignette about a personality core trying to invent a turret-toilet. Very little in the way of fun details or interactivity - most of the buttons on your 'Desk' also don't do anything. It kills about half an hour, but I didn't get much out of it. The mantis civilization thing was cute.

Yuppie Psycho is an exceptionally full-bodied blend of great music, detailed spritework, and absorbing occult atmosphere, centered around protagonist Brian Pasternack's first day at Sintracorp. Upon arriving however, Brian instantly realizes something is seriously wrong, due to a supernatural corruption that has taken root somewhere in the office's depths. Sintranet's AI then tells Brian he's actually been hired to find and kill "the Witch" - the source of the building's corruption - while fulfilling his regular office work duties, and getting to know his coworkers. As Brian learn more about the Sintra family and the company itself, it becomes clear that nothing about his task will be simple, and worse, others may even be trying to stop him from discovering the truth.

Positives:
- Superb soundtrack, well worth listening to even if you don't play the game.
- Humor is light and well balanced with the horror aspects.
- Extremely rewarding to explore and scavenge, many collectibles to find. Even when you're revisiting a floor for the third or fourth time, you may still find something you didn't notice before.
- Strong Twin Peaks influence, especially with regards to the game's deeper secrets. Similar to TP, the fun is moreso in the journey of pursuing the mysteries, rather than being explicitly told what they are. Some questions are answered, some are left ambiguous.
- The game accounts for a rather surprising number of things the player may try at various points in the story, some of which can totally alter the final act of the game, or even end the game immediately (like quitting, or being fired). There are loads of hidden nooks and crannies, all of which are satisfying to find.
- Kate is very cute. Protect that smile.
- Worth exploring all of the 4th floor to find the hidden cameo by fellow Twin Peaks enthusiast, Swery.

Frustrations:
- Saving is a consumable item, which I don't really find fun or integral to the experience, especially when a large portion of this game's secrets are very easy to miss. Holding out on saving can be a gamble for blind playthroughs, due to the many ways you can be caught off guard and die suddenly, or take a bunch of damage accidentally, such as running into mines. I highly recommend using the Copier before the Dot Matrix Printer fight, one save on Floor 5 pre-birthday party, and one before the Yes/No prompt to be taken to the final confrontation. Most of YP's secrets, locations, or story-influencing choices will still be open to you at these points, which will help you backtrack to find other things you might have missed.
- Everything off the intended story path is very easy to miss. Without looking at any guides, you will likely miss the narrow windows of availability for various sidequests (hence why I suggest getting the 3 save points above).
- If you are trying to be thorough, you will be doing a lot of backtracking, often in pitch dark, mazelike environments. This is especially tedious if you want the Videoclub Misterio VIP or Lost Tape achievements, as just collecting the tapes isn't enough, you must also watch them all on the VCR before attending the office party.

I suggest playing through blind and then starting a fresh file with a guide open after. Trying to do everything in one first go turned out to be more stressful than fun at some parts.

It has a great visual aesthetic and tackles some pretty serious themes. But its gimmick is that you can only get one achievement or the other, because if you do the 'good' ending first, then do the 'bad' option, that revokes the prior ending's achievement. Never seen a game do that before... but thematically it does make sense, once you've played and reached that choice you will get what I mean.

one of the best video games ever made.

amazing modding scene, endless replayability, this game is just... peak