Recent reviews by Re-Crix

Five Nights at Freddy's is a series with no need for an introduction.

Ever since the series blew up onto the scene back in 2014, a VR entry was inevitable, and, oh boy, it did not disappoint! Regardless of if you're a fan of the original games tetrology, the subsequent games afterwards, or even a new player coming in blind, there is something for everyone to love. Amazing models, horrifying environments, a secret story, and even numerous endings can all be experienced with the games, as well as the crazy jumpscares people have come to know the franchise for.

If you are a horror fan looking for something new to experience, give this game a try.

Salamander Public County Television may look like an asset flip put out for a quick buck, but let me tell you, it's so much more than that...

I'm known for liking strange games, but what happens when you take a bunch of minigames with online leaderboards, a crazy and inventive style, and a wacky mystery where an entire town's population? You get this game. It is a blast to play, funny as hell, and downright wacky to its core. With unique challenge's given each day for you to complete to fill the days content quota for your television station, you're bound to get a good laugh from this.

The Exit 8 is a very subtle horror game where you are tasked with escaping an endlessly looping subway hallway located in Japan by trying to spot differences in the environment around you in order to escape. It does horror by using subtle details to carry much of what it has to offer and manages to do so extremely effectively.
If you want a subtle horror experience that breaks away from established conventions of the horror genre and manages to make the experience its own, play this.

Alice: Madness Returns is a surprising action-adventure platformer that aims to put a rather darkened twist on the traditional "Alice in Wonderland" story. A sequel to "American McGee's Alice" from the year 2000, this game still holds up well graphically to this day!

A mix of slightly challenging puzzle platforming, intriguing combat, vibrantly dark locals, and a story infused around psychological troubles, this game aims to appease to horror fans while playing into the happy go lucky nature of the world of Wonderland. It is seriously a game that is well put together with a ton of content and collectables to find, and if you're looking for something rather different from your Mario and Devil May Cry, then this is the game for you!

Put dice, pizza making, text-based RPGs, Weird Al, and strange assets in a blender. What do you get?

If you answered a bad protein shake, yes... but you also get this game. Holy cow, this is a title that's hard to explain, but to put it simply, imagine D&D skill checks using customized dice with Fallout's response system combined with numerous endings and throwing all logic out the window; that's what this game is. You gotta think weird to play it.

Overall, this game sees you undergoing a secret sting operation as a pizza delivery man in order to rescue your colleague from the dire circumstances he happened to be placed in. With so many different endings, ways to play, and dice to customize, this is a surrealist experience you don't want to miss.

Highly recommend if you are looking for a psychedelic and wild experience!

This game feels like a condom, it is over protective. Would recommend against child birth and fun.

Meow.

Buggy as all hell. I cannot even find many compliments to give this game, but let's start with a few just to give this game a head start.

The game has a lot of content for fans of past games, finding secrets that the series is known for is here (but done very poorly), and Ruin did amazing with the ambient horror and general fear factor.

That's it. That is all that is positive about this game. Now, let me tell why it's TERRIBLE. Aside from being the largest entry of the franchise by far, the main game and DLC are riddled with bugs. Game breaking bugs. Bugs that prevent progress. Bugs that drop you through the map. Lag spikes because the game fails to load areas and you can often outrun the speed of loading even with the horrible stamina limit in the game. It is unfinished and just not fun to play.

The entire setting doesn't fit the series up to this point and feels like it was meant to cater to children. The lore and endings? Terrible and make the game almost not worth playing. It's not scary, most of the obstacles (staff bots). And don't even get me STARTED on Ruin. The puzzles in Ruin are annoying and repetitive. The layout of Ruin has memorabilia from past games in places they shouldn't be and overall, none of it makes a lick of sense. The entire game is based on the concept of trying to instate horror in a place that was never scary, which while they managed to achieve it in an ambient sense, failed in every other directive.

The endings for the whole thing are just not worth the play time either. The puzzles in the main game to find most of the secret endings are terribly designed, and this is even considering Five Nights at Freddy's 3's secret you had to type in WALL TILES. The characters don't make sense, the "canon" ending ruins the already complex nature of the game, and overall, this never should have been attempted.

The factor there was such a fall from grace going from Help Wanted to this rubbish makes me scarred for future projects and I really hope a new developer gets brought on as this is just an abysmal attempt at milking a franchise that technically ended almost SEVEN YEARS AGO.

Do better.

This game needs no real introduction if you have scrolled this far, so let me cut to the chase.

I have made some of my best friends on this game, used it to enjoy content, play games, voice act practice, and even combat depression (however, not recommended as it is harmful.) I've played it for a decent amount of time so I think I'm allowed to say what I need to say.

The developers decided to remove any ability to mods through a abhorrent bloatware known as Easy Anti Cheat. Numerous quality of life functionalities that mods brought forth into the game have been failed to be replaced properly or at all. The addition of the anti-cheat has, for lack of a better term, been "justified" through malicious users, though that is not true.

I am still very unhappy with the actions put forth by the developers, despite all the good that it does bring and the people it connects. While it doesn't break the game, for someone who has been a player after year one and comes back around to it every once in a while, it hurts to see that this game, despite its improvements, has still failed to put forth the bare minimum for players.

How do I begin this.

In many, many ways I feel like there was a clear path that was set out for this game and there was definitely care into aspects of this. This was a nice scare, and a decent short story about a man slowly delving into obscurity as he forgets the things he once loved and cared about. This was a good horror game, but not a very good game about dementia.

Let me explain. Dementia is, for lack of a better term, complex. 6 stages full of unique aspects, losses, struggles, emotions, and a random nature. Dementia effects everyone slightly differently and takes away one's ability to express, not their identity. If one were to delve into the concept and reality of dementia via this interpretation, a lot of what makes dementia frustrating, horrifying and mortifying to the person diagnosed is lost.

The stages weren't really conveyed clearly. As I previously mentioned, there are 6 main stages to dementia. Each one becoming more difficult to remember basic tasks, dates, names, and things that happened earlier in your day. This would soon eventually lead to going through grief knowing that this marks the beginning of the end. You begin to regress into a shell of your former self to avoid the constant frustrations of not being able to recall or perform what most people would consider mundane tasks or memories. You begin to forget who you are, where you are, and what made you happy. You lose the ability to express yourself, to smile. Soon you can't eat, you can't drink, you can't walk...at that point, you're already dead.

Dementia by itself, if shown correctly, is terrifying. Knowing that people go through this should hurt you. People die not knowing the emotional distress they put on someone over a condition they can't control, unable to say goodbye. Unable to express themselves. Falling into nothingness as the world they once knew swirls and escapes around them, and then they're everywhere. All of this before the one thing that kept them awake at night consumes them and gives them mercy. With how terrifying this illness is, there should have been no need for jump scares.

I wish this was a better way of depicting the deterioration of the mind as you forget abilities, places, locations, names, structures, and slowly watch as the world around you and loved ones you care about become nothingness in your mind.

There were quite a few concepts and aspects done quite well. The voice acting for the old man was amazingly well done, the visuals were nice and vibrant, the way of recalling memories were quite clever, and the use of the fox as a representation of yourself was an interesting touch.

However, there were quite a bit of bad things. The way the memories were called later on felt rushed and lacked as much meaning, the effects were often overdone and instead of using lighter colored scenes with distorted static, or having a clear dissonance between things that were being forgotten and recalled, it was just an attack on the eyes. Stage two did this well with the initial pixelated blur effect, so why did it just become a mess of CYMK values? Furthermore, the music felt out of place, though I did enjoy it on it's own. I was well composed, but just Stage 2 didn't feel like it fit quite right. A use of a leitmotif would have been a huge benefit here as you could have composed a song into various versions as it slowly became unrecognizable, but the shift of songs from the first stage to the second just felt more jarring than anything else. Lastly, the eyeball. What was that even supposed to represent? Someone always watching you? The lack of clarity about the item just made it feel like it was only every around for a cheap scare, and nothing else.

Overall, I would give this a 5/10. You guys have a passion, and it shows. Please keep that. But when tackling something difficult like dementia, please understand that it is a massive undertaking that may seem easy to show, but is very hard to comprehend. I'm not one to be a pessimist, quite the opposite actually, but there is just so much to unpack when it comes to this illness that was fully explored or conveyed. I would love to see you guys take another stab at this concept, maybe even incorporating some of the criticisms and suggestions I provided. I really do think you have the ability to do this.