Recent reviews by Jaedar

Very solid action/survival game. Enjoyed it more than I expected.

This game is ok, but I can't recommend it. The gameplay is fine, but nothing particular. Combat is basic, and it's often best to just run past enemies (even if you get a hit once or twice because of it) instead of actually engage with the combat due to limited ammo. Puzzles follow the typical moon logic of point&clicks, but they're ok. The story is completely obtuse, and the criteria for what ending you get are ridiculous.

Not quite as good as talos 1, and I would recommend playing that first. But still a fun puzzle game.

This is not really a game, it's a cyoa. And not one of those complex cyoa's with lots of variables and pseudo-rpg elements, you could probably track the whole gamestate in less than 10 variables (with the exception of which of the optional dialogue options you've already picked in the current scene).

So you're not here for gameplay, you're here to experience a branching narrative. Is it a good narrative? The writing is quite sharp, there are lots of flavorful branches and the voice acting is quite good and snappy. The artwork is also quite good. But I also feel that the story doesn't have much to say so there's not much to think or say about it in after you get to the end. The game describes itself as both a horror game and a romance story. Maybe my heart is shriveled and my brain desensitized (there is some stuff that's clearly meant to be scary and horrific and if I really squint romantic), but the primary emotion I experienced was laughter (intentionally comedic on the games part, the horror isn't that poorly made).


I did enjoy reading it, for what that is worth, so if you are in the market for a 3 hour long vn you could do a lot worse. If you want to see all branches I guess you'd get something like 10-15 hours out of it, but the ending hasn't really left me craving more.
(I would have made this review recommended = true, but 96% positive ratings is too high)

A neat detective game. It's fairly short with only about a dozen murders to solve, and a bit on the easy side. I was stumped in a few places, but in the end I got by with a little bit of trial and error.

Each murder has a different amount of scenes to investigate (only one at the start, 4 at the most) where you investigate for clues and find keywords while trying to figure out what is going on. Then you fill out the blanks in a form with the keywords (many of which are names of the people involved) to demonstrate you have correctly deduced what happened.

Each murder has multiple forms, and the forms are either validated as entirely correct, 1-2 errors, or 3+ errors, so while it often feels overwhelming when you stare at 30 blanks, it's pretty surmountable as soon as you find somewhere to start.

At probably slightly less 5 hours of playtime you might want to wait for a sale.

Would try to get through as fast as possible again.

Short and sweet open world exploration game. Find a sword, kill the cultists, loot their stuff. Find some secrets, kill some bosses.

It's good.

I would like to recommend this game, but I can't really in its current state.


It starts great as you take command over an illuminati-type org trying to enforce its agenda on the world in the wake of an impending alien invasion. Cajoling nations to your cause, redirecting research and funds, wars, taking over NGOs, even assassinations and coups. And then slowly starting to step into space, building space stations and mines on the moon and beyond.


But then some very questionable balancing comes up: Your ability to control more of earth is mostly limited by your administration capacity and not by your shadowy manipulation skills. You suddenly have twice as much research as all the other factions combined. You have more space resources than you know what to do with, because spending them makes the aliens take steps against you personally. So you feel very artificially constrained on multiple fronts, while some gameplay elements become irrelevant.


And after that, you reach the slog that is the endgame: Nigh indestructible alien stations, year+ travel times to get anywhere and just needing to slowly grind out a victory against human factions that have been made utterly irrelevant, and aliens too afraid of your fleets to take offensive action, and too cheaty to be dealt with via attrition.


And some issues are just game long. The interface is poor, and so much of the information you need is hidden in different submenus or not filterable. It also lags something fierce, with just opening or closing the *reduced* tech tree freezing the game for seconds. Menus are also grouped seemingly at random, and with no consistent sorting/filter options/defaults. And some obscure mechanics as well, such as having your armies instantly go from modern to WW1 relics because you peacefully united two countries.


The combat also deserves special mention for being cool in theory (newtonian ships with somewhat realistic heat dissipation issues) but a complete nightmare to control. You can design your own ships, but there are dozens of nigh identical modules (do you want gas, molten, or a solid core fission reactor? Or maybe not even fission at all?) and lots of dubious numerical problems: your phaser point defence will claim to have twice the range of particle point defence, but in actual combat the opposite is true due to something something optics.

There were some funny jokes, and some good puzzles.Lots of bad puzzles too but I guess that is part of the joke.

Free is always a good price.