Recent reviews by Museko

All I can think about while away from this game is how I can further optimize my farm. The farm productivity MUST be min-maxed. If I am un-optimally sorting my cacti, I am a failure. If I am only doing left-hand rule for solving mazes, I am a disappointment to my father. If I am not learning from Snake Speedruns to harvest dinosaur bones at ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ PEAK EFFICIENCY, WHY EVEN LIVE?!

If you're looking for strong character development, tons of quests with multiple choices and outcomes, varying insane endings, well-hidden secrets, and cosmic horror done right... then this is the game for you. Look Outside is a phenomanally well-crafted story-driven RPG indie horror game. Compared to games that employ cheap jump scares to cause fear, Look Outside makes you feel the real weight of its horror instead. Your choices matter and there are a LOT of choices to make. What are you paranoid about? Who will you trust? What will you do with your life? This game will ask you all these questions while giving you solid RPGing, exploration, and puzzle solving.

The battle mechanics are the standard RPG mechanics, but they are very solid even if they don't innovate too much. The resource management (even on harder difficulties) felt more fun than frustrating. I felt like I had another puzzle to solve and none of the pieces were missing. Exploration through the twisted hotel building warped by... The Visitor... is exciting and properly fear-inducing. The ambience and music tracks further add onto the setting to give you a healthy dose of adrenaline. I won't write much about the story and characters due to spoilers, but every character is grounded and has a purpose within the world of Look Outside. There are many endings and the ones that take a lot of effort to reach are very rewarding storywise.

One thing that may cause annoyance is the save system. The intended way to experience this game is to play on Survivor Mode, which requires the player to return to their apartment to save. The player can only save after sleeping or exploring enough to raise their danger meter a certain amount to unlock saving. The required exploration amount is not that much, but it's still a requirement. You can make a lot of progress but get lost in a large environment and die and lose all of that progress. This can be frustrating, but there is an easier mode the player can set when starting a new game, Explorer Mode. Explorer Mode affects a lot more of the difficulty than just making some enemies less dangerous, including letting the player save at any time through the use of the menu. The one point of annoyance does have a solution, but many stubborn players who want to play on the intended difficulty mode will 99% of the time experience at least one frustrating loss of progress during their first playthrough. There are even some dialog options that can cause death so good luck! :)

All in all, this game is a must play and is well-situated within my top 10 games of all time. I have been pleasantly surprised by its themes and use of cosmic horror. This game does NOT cop out on any of those. Please, make it a priority to experience the story of Look Outside.

The review has been updated as I have 100%'d the game and done all endings and I STILL can't believe this is real. This game is harder than Hollow Knight yet has a higher skill ceiling and allows for far more expression in combat through many more different builds and combos.

The basic movement abilities and unlocks mesh very well with all of the tools. These are either charms like the first game or consumables that can be crafted at benches granted the player has enough shards. The fluidity in combat is on such a high level that I'm surprised this game didn't take longer to develop. No spoilers, but every movement ability, tool, or silk ability you get just opens up so many more possibilities in combat. If a player is struggling, it's usually because they aren't utilizing their kit effectively. Expect to die on a lot of the bosses or combat rooms at least once. I have only beat several bosses on my first try. There's even a few bosses that will brutalize you for a while, but nothing is unfair or impossible and the feeling of victory as you triumph against the odds feels amazing.

As for artistic direction, this game is extremely detailed. The backgrounds and styles are expertly executed and the world feels that much more alive. Looking back at the original game, you can see the difference clearly from how much more care was put into leveling up the scenery and ambience. Some areas even change slightly based on how far you've progressed. This dynamic feeling extends to pretty much every NPC and even a lot of the quests. The music and sound effects also have a nice coat of iterative paint that the first Hollow Knight worked so hard to create a solid foundation for.

Every system in this game strives to go that extra mile in making a sequel that can stand on top of Hollow Knight's shoulders. The story is phenomenal and, just like the first game, offers several endings, all satisfying to achieve. The art and sound plunge the player into Pharloom. The quest (called tasks in-game) further immerses the player and hooks them into the world by letting them aid the various beings along different parts of their journey all across Pharloom. The characters have a lot of depth and are well-written. The lore is well-placed, but aside from some main and side plot points, won't be in your face. This allows for the player to investigate and discover the deep intricacies from one area to the next. Every reward and bit of knowledge in this game is earned as a result of thorough exploration and player skill. The DNA of Hollow Knight is very much alive, but it has evolved and marinated in a cocoon for 7 years before splitting open into something truly magnificent.

Am I dreaming? Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. Don't wake me up. DON'T WAKE ME UP. DON'T WAKE ME UP. DON'T WAKE ME UP. DON'T WAKE ME UP. AAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This game really is an introvert socialization training ground...

This low-poly, fishing, chatroom game is a very chill game that anyone can immediately jump into and start playing. The relaxing visuals and old school nostalgia-inducing music tracks add a lot to that feeling of fishing into a particularly niche yet relaxing corner of the internet. I've gotten far more enjoyment out of this game than the last Animal Crossing game even though this game really is just "fishing" (this has been my elevator pitch to friends to try the game). There's a few more small activities that really elevate the social aspect of this game, such as drawing chalk with friends, boxing your buds, playing music with the in-game guitar, and exploring out-of-bounds. lamedeveloper, the developer working on Webfishing, even incorporated an out-of-bounds area and made it into a real and intended mechanic, which is pretty extraordinary and extremely cool to see from a developer. Embracing community-made urban legends and enhancing their game is something more developers should use to add content to their games.

I am a bit saddened by how easy it was to exploit this game and ban users from their own servers as well as corrupt saves, but I can give the benefit of the doubt since I'm sure this developer wasn't ready for this game to be as popular as it has (just be sure to make save backups and don't accept mail from suspicious people). One thing that actually does ruin the mood a bit is removing flag linking. Before, you could get to CRAZY out-of-bounds areas and place two flags to link them together so you can get all of your friends from spawn to join you in one of those areas (see my screenshots for a few examples). I had an absolute metric ton of fun exploring out-of-bounds areas with friends. However, flag linking was intentionally or unintentionally removed and due to how the new out-of-bounds area was created, it is A LOT harder to get yourself and friends out-of-bounds to the areas that you could go to previously.

Overall, this game is very very very well worth that $5 cost seeing as how many hours I've gotten out of this game with fishing, shooting the ♥♥♥♥, and talking to deranged psychopaths at 3 AM.

Games that are challenging because the controls are very hard to make your character go where you want them to are not fun. Redactem is unfortunately one of those games. The character is very slippery and is very hard to accurately control within the game world. Many times, you will accidentally run into traps because your character is constantly slipping on ice cubes and bananas. A little bit of slipperiness and momentum are good, but this game takes it to the extreme, an extreme which is very unsatisfying to play with when a lot of the jumps in later levels of this game are so precise.

As for the starting levels, you are explicitly told the controls for how to move, jump, wall jump, sprint, reverse gravity, and reverse time. It is up to the player to use these controls to complete various puzzles within the world. For the most part, the puzzles are actually pretty decent, minus the missile ones. I'm looking at you, world 2, level 6. For this level, you have to reverse gravity to land an item on a missile and thread a needle to get this item to fall onto a switch. Does that sound incredibly precise? It's because it is. It makes it all the worse due to the game having physics entirely dependent on frame rate, which makes certain levels COMPLETELY UNPLAYABLE unless the user goes into their NVIDIA Control Panel (or whatever the AMD equivalent is) and caps the game's frame rate. I found that the game is completable on 60 FPS, so if anyone is reading this, this is how you beat the levels and get those achievements. I have seen videos of others with missiles moving faster, so it might be achievable with a higher frame rate as well, but a frame rate in the hundreds will render this game infeasible. This game really should've came with some kind of frame control set at 60 by default or found in the settings somewhere. One more level I have a gripe about is 3-3. In this level, you have to travel within a sort of S-path between a myriad of sawblades and small platforms sandwiching an opening within the walls of saw blades. On paper, this sounds challenging but not too bad. The problem I have is that the solution to this level is to reverse gravity and then to perform an upside-down wall jump. No where else in the game is there any telegraphing or tutorializing on upside-down wall jumps allowing you to travel further than regular wall jumps. I threw my head at a wall for quite a bit of time until I watched a few videos of this game, with only one of them showing the proper solution. One video had someone stuck on this level for around 30 minutes, never figuring this movement tech out. Placing a little bit of text at the beginning of this level (similar to the beginning of the tutorial world) or if the player dies a lot of times in this level would've helped to alleviate this issue.

Overall, the game seems like some beginner or even intermediary game developer project. It's quite evident that the developer is also quite a decent programmer since all the mechanics work pretty well, but the game design as a whole is quite lacking. It's a decent starting or midway project, but as a final product, it falls short. There could've been so much charm within the world of Redactem and some hidden story behind game design and the character's powers. If the game was kept simple without this, it should've had its movement more properly developed. If both of those were present, this would be a much more positive review, but as the game stands, this is much more frustrating than rewarding to play.

I totally crashed a game of Chinese players (there were no English lobbies!) and they were nice enough to wait until the game was over before they kicked me. How sweet!

This game is such an amazing King's-Field-type bop. It shoves this huge slab of ambience down your throat and makes you explore like Christopher Columbus disgustingly exploiting the natives for gold in order to make you slowly digest it over the course of many hours. This isn't a fast-paced, adrenaline-pumping, thrill-seeking game. It's a slow descent into the world as you go deeper and deeper, looking for answers. At first, the area you start in feels relatively normal if not a little maze-like and there's always that feeling of "What's next?" or "How do I get past this?" that gives a strong sense of wonder from exploring a new world. Then, the game opens up. The world becomes this sprawling underground area with a surprising amount of differently-themed areas. There are now many feelings of wonderous ponderings and I-must-get-past-this-nesses and you are now in the middle of it all, like a toddler abandoned in that giant Walmart you once went to.

The music is extremely fitting and atmospheric. Sometimes the game hits you with ambient_cave_noises_1.wav, other times it hits you with distressing_tunes_from_the_dead.wav, and at certain areas, you get that straight up, straight down to funky town GROOVY.wav. There are also some phenomenal boss tracks, but I don't want to spoil even a single note of those. You'll have to play the game to experience those vibes. Anyways, the regular sound effects are pretty simple but don't detract at all and further enhance the already existing ol' CRT nostalgia of the gaming days of old.

The combat is simple, but it doesn't need to be more complex. The resistance system is very straightforward and most enemies have a few attacks to prevent significant cheese. Most enemies will also be pretty simple to beat, but every once in a while there is a challenge lying in wait. The weapons and spells that are found by those with avid eyes will keep it fresh enough, but at the end of the day, you are pretty much just clicking mouse 1 and spamming spells a bunch of the time. For a game such as this, that is fine. I do appreciate that there are a bunch of utility spells and some of those aren't that obvious on how they should be best used. Additionally, if the player REALLY wants to, they can powerlevel and grind to their hearts content, but I recommend trying not to do so too much unless the basic enemies in a new area are cutting off your hands à la a certain explorer. A significant amount of levels and their RPG skillpoints will be given to the character just by exploring and backtracking. One thing to keep in mind though is making sure to save often because if you die, you'll be brought to your last save point. This can be frustrating and there are probably better ways of punishing the player other than progress loss, but I myself feel that this system works alright due to the nature of the game. There is almost always at least one large shortcut a player will find far along a path that bring you back to the start of an area where a save point is.

At the end of the day, if you are into low-paced games with lots of ambience and lore pieces to put together, get this game. I would even recommend this to those who aren't a fan of the genre to branch out and to try this game. However, there are some out there that this game probably isn't for and that's OK.

It's a pretty fun game, but honestly, the difficulty level ramps up wayyy too hard on level 27, then it calms down on 28-29, and then level 30 is amazingly frustrating and this is coming from someone who did all the C-Sides on Celeste. There's a handful of frustrating levels that I'll mention later, but now is a good time to talk about movement through the lens of level 30, which I feel like my main problem stems from. The main movement is pretty decent, but I feel like it could be tuned a bit. It feels very generic and floaty. In the water, the movement problems are exaggerated A LOT. I feel like if one of either of these are addressed, then the game would be much more enjoyable:

1. The spike size is slightly reduced
   
2. The ball size is slightly reduced (when I say slightly for these, I mean probably about a 5-10% size decrease)
   
3. Or most importantly, the water movement is improved. Gravity feels like just a slowed down version of gravity out of it. I feel like an easy way to fix the movement in water is to either add a way to swim downwards or give the player a variable jump size based on how long they press the button (i.e. like how Mario has short and long jumps). The second way would probably be the best way to fix the movement, since it seems a lot of puzzles are designed difficulty-wise around the fact that you can only press space to move up in water and then let the gravity pull you down.

I would prefer probably a mix of both paths in solution 3. The movement feels close to being good, but it gets frustrating to work with. Other than that problem and some very frustrating levels that appear after several easy levels, the game is pretty decent, but those issues just take too much away from it for me. The sound design is pretty average for an indie game and there could be a few more sound effects for when the ball is jumping and interacting with the environment, but I do love the music a lot. Furthermore, the Steam Achievements and Badges is a plus, but I hate the achievement for beating the game without dying since so many levels are ridiculous. I feel like some people have cheated that achievement in with SAM. This game doesn't do anything original, but it offers some fun platforming for those who can't get enough. I'm open to changing my score if the movement can be tweaked and some level frustrations are looked at.

A few more things I forgot to mention is there is a semi-annoying bug that I found in level 30, where if you press jump and hit a horizontal platform's corner at a certain angle, you get boosted up at a far higher speed than your initial jump speed and this has killed me several times. I've gotten this to happen on level 30 after you get through the first maze and have to go back up the pathway on the right side to the exit. The first platform ceiling inside that pathway is where it has occurred a few times. It seems like this can also happen when falling down onto corners too, but I haven't had that occur as much because you are more likely to hit corners going up than down. The next thing is another difficulty scaling problem where levels 31 to 34 are very easy and then 35 gets frustrating a bit, but not nearly as level 30. Level 36 gets pretty frustrating as well at the beginning until you learn that you can use gravity to get the ball to fall through the water faster, but this isn't tutorialized that much, so it can be a tad bit rage inducing the first time through with those moving spike pistons. This also feels like a bug, since when you enter the water normally, you start falling slower, but if you enter at a high speed, you just keep going faster and faster like the water isn't even there. The end of this level also kind of sucks. The spike pistons move WAY too fast and I couldn't beat it until I learned that I can just travel around the downwards gravity pushers by going off-screen. This feels like a bug too, but again, without it, the end of this level is FAR too frustrating and feels like you need almost frame perfect movement. Level 37 is horrendously precise and frustrating at the beginning. This was all done on "Easy Mode" by the way. I'm not sure how the difficulty affects the game, but I suspect it might just get faster. The next issue that probably needs tweaking is the clarity of the player's ball with the background. It can get pretty hard to see, so I would either add an outline to it or make the background a bit darker. Lastly, I have a very modern CPU and GPU (Ryzen 9 5950X and a 4070 Ti) and I have experienced several crashes. One was when I turned the game on for the first time and my entire computer crashed (wtf?) and another when I've crashed several times in a level but my computer was fine.

Overall, the sound effects are decent enough and the music is quite nice, however, the game is weighed down by its movement, especially in the water. I weight the movement a lot because it is a platforming game, and good movement is imperative to a user's enjoyment from them. There are also several crashes I've experienced, one of which crashed my entire PC, which has pretty new hardware. This game needs a bit of work, but it has some good bones.

This game... is quite impressive. This game feels like playing Minecraft for the first time again, but with a bit more. It also has a very nice Breath-of-the-Wild-like feel to it.

PROS:

1. I have not found ANY major bugs and I have been playing ~14 hours on my friend's multiplayer server in another country. I have never been disconnected due to the game.
   
2. The progression has an EXTREMELY nice flow where you unlock a nice chunk of items to play around with at a time. This has the advantage of not overwhelming the player while also not spoiling them of any future items unless they're able to piece together the lore from the stone runes.
   
3. The combat is fairly basic but very solid. Everything feels fluid and there are several weapons to pick from when upgrading to a new tier of materials.
   
4. The graphics are top tier. The pixel styling of the graphics combined with 3D modeling ties in retro with modern in such a satisfying way, I orgasm every time I play this game. The lighting engine just works. The water just works. THE DAY AND NIGHT SYSTEM JUST ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ WORKS!
   
5. The music soothes my cold, dead heart and my pitch-black soul. It reminds me of Skyrim at times but sounds very fresh and non-repetitive. Both games have wonderful Nordic OSTs, but Skyrim sounds more melodic while Valheim sounds more harmonic and more about creating a nice ambience while letting the player be the melody.

CONS:

1. We don't deserve this game.
   
2. It's really an extremely stable Early Access game. How in Valhalla does this exist?!?!?!?!
   
3. No cons, perfect game. Pack it up boys and girls because no game will ever be as solid as this one.

Cons for real? The only cons are the spear being kind of hard to hit some lower enemies, a small saving lag spike (I think, I elaborated about it more below), and the fact that I can think of some nice QoL changes for future updates:

1. Allow the player to trash items easily instead of letting them rot on the ground for eternity.
   
2. Increase the time it takes to save so the game doesn't have small hiccups of lag. This doesn't happen often and may just be some odd bug, but it is so quick, it doesn't cause much of an annoyance. This might only exist when on a multiplayer server.
   
3. Make it so when placing items with a hammer, one can see the ratio of materials needed with the total that they have. I.e. when making a portal, if you have 84 Greydwarf Eyes, you can see you need 10/84 to construct a portal.
   
4. Let multiplayer servers allow waypoints placed on the map to be shareable to other players.
   
5. I get the gameplay idea of having it be tedious to transport ores from far away back home, but I feel like it could make it a little more enjoyable to allow the player to transport ingots through portals. With two servers, one can already just go mine anywhere and have a full inventory of 1000+ weight in ores and then just load into another server to transport all of the ores to their base without any hassle.
   
6. I may have found a rare very minor glitch with being able to put 26/25 ores into the smelter. It was on a multiplayer server, and I'm not sure if something else was going on while this occured. Devs, you might want to put another mutex lock in the smelter code or any other code where you can spam click buttons to load materials into objects.

Conclusion? This is a $20 game that is worth more in quality and quantity than many Triple-A games. Stop what you're doing and play it now.

I feel as if I was too harsh reviewing this game originally, so I am rewriting my original view in a more positive light and actually recommending the game now. Moving on from my previous position, here is my new review:

This game operates with players having two roles: crewmates and impostors. The crewmates' jobs are to navigate around a map and complete their tasks until they can all finish and effectively repair the facility before enough of them are murdered for the impostors to win. The impostors must fake their tasks and deceive their crewmates into thinking that they themselves are crewmates all the while murdering and sabotaging various facilities around the map to make their job easier. Sometimes, a clever play and a sabotage can win the game without killing all the players that will need to be killed for the impostors to win. This leads into the main aspect of the game. The fun comes from the implicit social nature that this type of game has. Playing the game with random people by joining lobbies in search of a good game can be fun for a bit, but to make the most out of this game, one should get a full group of people that will communicate via voice chat. Only then is this game at its peak. It seems a bit weird, why recommend this game if you can't enjoy it constantly? That seems a bit silly... BUT OH BOY, does this game hit some satisfying peaks whether you are a crewmate or impostor if you can satisfy these conditions. The amount of entertainment you get out of this game is fairly proportional to the moods and attitudes of those playing. Even if you know someone well enough to point out the various idiosyncrasies in their behavior or you don't know the people whom you are playing with at all, as long as the people you are with enjoy communicating, you will receive a lot of enjoyment out of this game. There is enough degrees of freedom concerning strategy and creativity in this game to allow it to be replayed for game night with your buds for a long time. The devs keep updating the game and providing new maps while ironing out bugs. There is no need to pay for servers and there is only one transaction inside the game for buying a few cosmetics to support the devs. The only real cons are a few connection errors that occur fairly rarely and the game being able to hit its peaks dependent on having a full lobby of people voice chatting and being respectful enough to realize that it's just a game and not rage quitting when something doesn't go their way.

This game is amazing, but two mods can add a lot of quality of life functions and a new way to play. These are less mods and more so just additional programs, but I'll call them mods for ease of use. There are probably others that help, but I would make sure these two are known since their functions are very useful. They are:

1. Crewmate (Discord bot). This is a bot that can be added to Discord that will monitor the game state provided the code to the game and make sure to appropriately handle the communications between players. A round is in progress? This will mute and deafen all the players except the ones who are dead. A discussion is occurring due to someone reporting a body or slamming down on that juicy red meeting button? The reverse will occur. This ensures that no one will accidentally forget to mute and give away something by snickering, chuckling, cursing, etc. This is a very nice QoL addition that reduces the overhead of the game. It would be nice if the game handled this already, but this doesn't take much to setup and both the mod and creating a Discord server are fast and free to setup.
   
2. CrewLink (GitHub repository with straight downloads). This performs similarly to Crewmate but allows proximity chat. This makes for a new experience and a slightly different game and social aspects. If you haven't played this game with this mod, I highly recommend it. I believe this can also allow ghosts to communicate with the impostors that killed them with a "quiet echo-y dead voice", which can allow you to troll and angrily haunt the impostors.

Conclusion? I recommend this for anyone who can get a squad or who knows how to operate a computer such that they can join the Among Us Discord and join a random group of players that are using voice chat. The game has gained a lot of traction and is fairly ingrained into young pop culture due to the fun nature of the game relying on the social environment constructed uniquely from each individual in a match. This is due in no small part to the game's design and ideas facilitating these interactions smoothly.