Recent reviews by Dogstomp

While some of these games flop, MANY of them are pure gold, and the story they tell of a Nintendo-like video game franchise that never existed is one-of-a-kind. Might be my highest recommended game of 2024.

The first 2 cases I did were... fine, and then I couldn't solve the 3rd no matter what I tried. That's fine, I'll wait until another murder. - It's his neighbor and it's apparently the same murderer because there are still no clues. Wait for another. This time it's again their neighbor and there are still no clues. If I play the game any more, and it gives me the same worthless case again, I'm done.
Every person you talk to is uncooperative and nobody has information relevant to your case.
There doesn't seem to be a way to get into the crime scene without upsetting the police who always have to sit outside.
The non-murder missions are all "Find a person with brown hair, blue eyes, and size 10 boots" AND THAT'S IT. There are hundreds of people in the city and you just want me to LOOK for a dude based on his EYE color??
If this game is ever going to be good, it needs to reign in the random generation just enough that it's possible to play.

Frustrating and unsatisfying game. 4/10

Would have paid for this.

Best roguelike nobody has ever heard of. I played 93 hours of this game and it never got old. I uninstalled it because I needed to stop playing it so often.

Feels like Bomberman 64 + Prince of Persia: Sands of Time + Metroid

The puzzles are balanced to be easy enough that I can finish many of them in 1 or 2 tries. Not because they're simple, but because they're readable. The controls and mechanics are all familiar enough that I felt skilled at the game within minutes. A mechanical familiarity, not at all an "Oh I've done this all before" familiarity.

That being said, it has 3 primary flaws:

1. the combat sucks, but that didn't matter much, because it's usually quick and over with, or enemies are entirely possible to ignore and run past.

2. There's no indication on the map which rooms still have secrets in them, so without a walkthrough and unless you've been keeping a checklist since the beginning of the game, finding those missing powerups to 100% the game means rechecking every room in the game one by one. I'd suggest the devs try Super Metroid's solution.

3. It takes only about 8 hours to 100%. I wish there was a lot more.

Highly recommend.

I would have trouble listing all the things this game does right.

The comedic mood of the game is perfectly balanced with the horror.

The creature designs (and there are many) all work together to make something players can never be really prepared for.

Don't even get me started on how much the proximity mic adds to the experience.

You'd think the goofy items, tunes and animations would cheapen the scares, but they somehow add to it.

And how everything works together, it often feels like what happened must have been carefully scripted. But it wasn't.

Zeekerss has a real understanding of what makes horror fun.

The only reason I'd recommend this game is that the story is engaging, but beyond that, the fun doesn't last. If you go the normal weapons route, it's pretty much a standard shooter, and going the hacking route is mind-numbingly unengaging. Staring at people and watching loading bars rise above their heads until they take damage. Rinse repeat a thousand times.

I want to finish the story, but I don't know if I'll ever get around to it.

The longer I play this game, the better it gets. They give you so much freedom to approach missions any way you want.

Just for fun, I accepted a glory mission (which is the hardest they come.) My objective? Rescue someone on a massive, very heavily guarded ship, and take them back to base. But instead of boarding the ship like usual, I boarder a different ship and used its weapons to fire missiles at the ship holding the person I was rescuing. When their room was destroyed and they were sucked into space, I remotely piloted my smaller rescue pod to pluck them out of open space and escape.

Don't have the equipment to deal with personal shields? Shoot out a window and jettison them into space.

So you used stealth to cross a large distance without harming anyone, but now you can't carry the person you've captured back to your pod without being seen? Shoot some explosives to destroy an entire room and create a new more convenient access point for your ship to dock to.

Pros: Solid combat. Extremely solid base building. Exciting exploration. Satisfying progression. Surprised me a few times. Lots of unique adventures.

Cons: Trying to retrieve your lost equipment after death can be extremely frustrating. Mining ores or cutting down trees can be repetitive and time-consuming, but the way ores at each progression level are found in different ways keeps it fresh.

This game has no business being this fun.

I've played 10 hours. All in one sitting.