Recent reviews by Baron

I started playing this with two friends and after 3 hours they were converted into enemies, 10/10 for starting people on their villain arcs. Looking forward to more maps!

A very goofy game that while initially plays like a typical store simulator game, has a lot more to it that you can do like run around and harass the local population, take the fight to totally-not-Netflix, or just find funny collectibles in the open world. Doesn't take itself seriously and I appreciate that as someone who just wants to mess around in a game like this with friends. As of the time of this review, there is very little in the way of graphical options outside of resolution and FPS limit, which did cause me some performance issues, but hopefully that is a simple enough fix and will be added sooner rather than later.

EDIT: Thanks to the developer helping out, my save was, well, saved lol, and I can proceed through the rest of the adventure of the game. For posterity sake I will leave up my initial review (and honestly it could have been a forum post but I was mega frustrated at the time). I will change my review from negative to an honest positive one as it does reflect my overall feelings toward the game.

That is to say, Onirism, does very much have its fair share of problems, absolutely, but it's also such a good game that stands out in spite of the jank. Whenever I do recommend this game, it's always with the note that "yeah it's kinda buggy and jank", and I have to do the same here in this review. The movement, the combat, the weapon variety, the exploration, even the story itself is, for the most part, really good and enjoyable! And the sheer amount of content found in Onirism is also something to note too, heavily inspired by many other games when it comes to its own take on zombie survival, wave defense, and classic deathmatch.

Yet there are a ton of very, very small issues that do plague the game (and in my former reviews case one or two big ones). Translation errors and mismatched subtitles, I can overlook. Enemies getting stuck on the environment or simply forgetting how to attack the player, funny but can be annoying looking for the last one in an arena fight to proceed if necessary. Being able to go outside of the level boundaries, genuinely fun, although it does feel weird to have a "return to the battlefield in 10 seconds!" mechanic later on to discourage going too far beyond the intended route. The game making fun of forced stealth segments and allowing you to forego stealth entirely for it, only to later on in the adventure hit you with an actual forced stealth segment that has enemies kill you instantly if they look at you too long is questionable, to say the least (and incredibly aggravating to say the most). Besides the save soft lock that affected me in my old review, the biggest bug would be me somehow getting Carol to walk around underwater without the need to swim or breathe, which while incredibly funny on the surface (no pun intended), there was one instance I fell into a watery area that I could not climb out of and was forced to reload my game to avoid that.

Obviously, someone's enjoyment of a game with bugs and jank to it is incredibly subjective, and in my own case, I do not mind it as much, so long as I can still beat the game eventually. In time, many of the issues I pointed out and more will be fixed, I have no doubt, but that being said, it does at the moment still feel like I am playing an early access game here. So, does being a little girl slaughtering hordes of enemies like Serious Sam sound like fun to you? Well it is! Just know, it's a little jank.


If you are reading this, take heed and DO NOT SKIP any cutscenes related to the Al Hibdae Library or after it, as this seems to be what caused a soft lock for me.

Wanted to love this game but my progression as of the time of this review is soft locked in the City of Al Hibdae. Even after forcing my way through the forced stealth segment, the story progression is bugged and I am unable to leave the stealth area (and even if I glitch my way out of it, the story still does not progress).

There are so, so many other nagging problems that I really wanted to overlook because the core gameplay of Onirism is really good! But this is quite simply not worth being called a 1.0 release state.

It's a janky experience alright but ya know what I could play far worse free games, worth checking out if you like survival horror stuff and some decent story telling, just take heed that some sections are frustrating as all hell to try and get through whether you're easily scared or not.

While fairly light on actual platforming, Ruffy and the Riverside is a welcome addition and a stand-out among the indie platformer crowd of games. The paper style character design blends well with the low-poly environment, the music and sound effects have a whimsical charm that always fits (although some character's dialogue and sound effects can get annoying as it continues over and over), and the story was oddly endearing especially as it got to the end.

The bulk of the gameplay uses the Swap mechanic, which allows to you swap the color or texture of what you aim at with nearly whatever else you aim at. This is mostly used either in traversal as you figure out how to get from point a to point b, or in puzzle solving where you swap one or multiple things around in an effort to solve whatever puzzle it presents you (for example, trying to match a pattern with a set of symbols given to you, or solve a math puzzle). Your reward for which is typically one of many collectables, nearly all of which don't really serve you any benefit aside from having to collect all of them for a quest and achievement. While there is combat, it is rarely ever the focus and in fact any hostile enemy can simply be walked around, save for bosses that you have to fight in order to proceed.

My most major complaint has to be the lack of any graphical options whatsoever; no settings for resolution, no options for fullscreen or windowed mode, texture quality, rendering scale, not even vsync as an option, absolutely nothing like that. I can only assume this was developed for console first and they simply forgot to have settings like that on PC (and thankfully I did not need any myself in order to run properly), but even so, to channel my inner TotalBiscuit (RIP king), PC games should have graphical settings like this as a standard.

In the end, Ruffy and the Riverside was a very enjoyable game, and aside from a few puzzles that stumped me due to not understanding them immediately, a very easy game at that. Easy enough that I could 100% it in under 20 hours, but I imagine dedicated players and speedrunners can manage to do so even faster than me. One NPC makes a joke about DLC, but whether we get that or an eventual sequel, I look forward to more adventures in the Riverside!

Scientifically speaking, I feel a stupendous amount of attraction and desire toward this game and find it intoxicating, to the point that I eagerly await the full release.

Non-egghead speak: Game is great, a ton of fun, charm and wit to it, feeling like a love letter to Half-Life.

A blast from start to finish, this is a video-game ass video-game in the best way possible.

Expands on the original while trimming some parts, I kinda ended up liking the remake more in the end but both games have their place in the Resident Evil series. Definitely worth picking up whether you're a classic or modern fan.

An extremely visually charming game to look at, can be surprisingly chill just making deliveries and taking in the scenery. Music could use a bit more variety but otherwise has a whimsy very fitting of the setting. Can be a little repetitive starting out as you're still growing your resources and brews, but once you get past that small early game hump, the rest flows naturally it felt like. I really enjoyed doing missions for the pilot/co-pilot pairings, made doing them worth it for the traits they gained.

My biggest complaint will be the use of AI generative voices. The developers (an extremely small team, at that) made their intentions in using it clear during the Kickstarter, but still. Rubs me the wrong way, and I can pick out weird line readings by the AI fairly often. Just use actual voice actors next time.

Despite appearances this is actually a Soulslike only instead of dealing with tough enemies, you have to deal with platforming obstacles and physics.

Deceptively simple looking and easy to learn game, yet hard to master. Dunno if I'll ever master it but it's still very rewarding to overcome whatever the next obstacle will be. Surprisingly rich with lore too. As of this writing, I haven't encountered any game breaking bugs, the only glitch so far is getting caught inside of a moving physics object and being unable to break free, however the checkpoint system of the game helps negate many frustrations on the recommended difficulty.

EDIT:
Upon beating the game, I can say this is one of the most unique indie games I've had the pleasure of playing. I never did master it, I feel, but instead was able to overcome many obstacles during the climb my own way. And while I did encounter a number of bugs during my full playthrough (both minor and major), the developer was very quick to patch the game to fix them, and even went so far as to help replace a corrupted save file.

It was a helluva climb.