Recent reviews by Derpy

Maybe instead of marketing on youtube, the devs should focus on making a good game.

Seven years. Seven years of waiting. Seven years of memes, of fake Nintendo Direct leaks, of grown adults whispering “Silksong soon” like a prayer. And what do we get after all that anticipation? A game that looks at Hollow Knight and says: “Cool, but what if we made everything cost rent money and turned exploration into a pyramid scheme?”

Welcome to Silksong, where your true enemy isn’t the bugs, the bosses, or the spikes, it’s inflation. You want to open a Stag Station? That’ll be 80 rosaries. Want to buy a map so you don’t wander around like a drunk moth? 90 rosaries. Want to sit your ass down on a bench you just bled for? 60 rosaries. You’ll quickly learn the game’s main theme: you are always broke. Half the enemies don’t even drop rosaries; instead, they drop a knock-off currency that exists solely to refill skills you already paid for. Oh, and it caps at 400, because of course it does. Imagine grinding Monopoly money just to unlock coupons for skills you don’t even want to use.

But hey, maybe the combat makes up for it? Nope. You’ve got a whopping five masks of health, which would be fine if enemies didn’t slap you for two masks of damage each by the second zone. Most enemies require 5–8 hits, don’t stagger, and love to travel in packs of three. Toss in environmental hazards that also deal two masks and congratulations - you’re dead, again, and poorer than when you started.

Your soul arts? Trash. Heal if you dare, or lock yourself into an animation that does less damage than your auto-attacks. Tools? Bound to finger-breaking inputs that are about as reliable as a politician’s campaign promise. And the crest system? Oh, you liked Hollow Knight’s brilliant charm system? Too bad. Now you get “classes” - except they suck. Half of them actively make you worse (angled pogo jump, what the hell were they smoking?), and by the time you scrape together enough rosaries to upgrade one, you’re too Stockholm-syndromed into sticking with it.

Exploration? Forget winding caverns and organic secrets. Instead, imagine if Path of Pain was the main design document but with non-optional bosses waiting at the end, because Team Cherry apparently decided frustration is the new fun. And don’t bother looking to bosses for cash - because they don’t drop rosaries. Why are we even killing them? Oh, right, for the LoReEee, written in cryptic gibberish that only the same five Soulsborne essayists will pretend makes sense.

Even the launch was a joke: no pre-orders, servers collapsing, game unavailable for hours. It’s almost like they knew.

Silksong isn’t the triumphant sequel we waited nearly a decade for - it’s a frustrating, exhausting downgrade that mistakes grind for depth and punishment for challenge. Do yourself a favor: replay Hollow Knight. At least that game respected both your time and your wallet.

Eldest Souls is what happens when someone reads a Dark Souls wiki, snorts a line of pixel-art nostalgia, and says, “Yeah, I can make that - but like, only the boss fights.” From the get-go, the game flaunts the LORE, only to hand you what feels like a collection of discarded Tumblr poetry and cryptic monologues stapled together with dramatic lighting. It desperately wants to be Dark Souls - but without the actual soul. No world to explore, no chilling quiet ruins to stumble into, no optional horrors waiting beneath a crypt. Just corridors. Corridors leading to bosses. And then more corridors. It's like walking through an empty house where the only difference is the color of the walls. “But it’s a boss rush game,” they cry. And yes, I do love some good boss rushes. I crave punishment. But this isn't punishment in the fun, “I'm getting better” way. This is punishment in the “I forgot to pay my taxes and now the IRS is here with a sledgehammer” kind of way. Every boss is a bloated meatball with two moves: "insta-kill you" and "be invincible." Occasionally, you get a quirky twist - like the room is the size of a postage stamp or they develop a second phase just to remind you your mouse has a “throw against the wall” function. Oh, and remember Iudex Gundyr from Dark Souls 3? Yeah, he's back - just legally distinct enough to avoid copyright. Mechanically, visually, spiritually... he’s here, again, like an ex who won't stop DMing you. Waiting for you right at the beginning of the game. The game teases you with weapon variety and customization, but only after completing very specific challenges - like beating bosses while doing yoga blindfolded. By the time you unlock that cool new weapon, Stockholm Syndrome has set in and you’re too committed to your basic blade to care. The dash system? Just no. Limited uses, trash range, and 85% of the time it deposits you directly into the boss’s colon. Combine that with molasses movement speed and a healing system stolen from Bloodborne - but nerfed into complete irrelevance - and you get a combat system where your options are to either not get hit at all or slash at the boss senselessly in a poor attempt to outheal them.

I wanted to like this game, I really did but in the end, Eldest Souls is like that guy who shows up to a Soulsborne party in full armor, quoting Miyazaki, and then proceeds to trip over his own sword. It wants so badly to be brooding, brutal, and profound - but ends up feeling like a parody of better games, stitched together with boss fights and bravado.

Mahjong is a beautiful, 200-year-old game. In this masterpiece of a creation, you will constantly find yourself losing to Asians who somehow manage to pull a 1-in-330,000 hand back-to-back—twice in a row. This is a game where the majority of players will try to convince you that you simply need to “get better” and that you're just being salty, not realizing they themselves have succumbed to the bribery, denial, and desperation subconsciously implanted by this Chinese corporation. This game completely surpasses all expectations—of gameplay, monetization, and statistics—because trust me, after playing it, you’ll be left questioning: “How is it possible that all my opponents, the ones with expensive gacha cosmetics, have a 40% first-place rate?” In the first 20 hours, you'll be scouring the internet, trying to comprehend the convoluted ruleset and scoring system, which feel like they were written on the fly during the first game so the creator could always stay in first place. Who would have guessed that a game combining an ancient yakuza pastime with a modern money-laundering scheme known as gacha could evoke feelings comparable to grinding your face with 60-grit sandpaper? And if you ever decide to amplify your daily dose of masochism, good news—this game is also available on mobile! Double the Mahjong, double the regret! The “casual” tag is a lie, because this game will become the reason you wake up and go to work—to buy the new Fate skin line, hoping that one day you’ll hit that Yakuman hand like your Asian peers. If you’ve ever wanted to understand how someone becomes racist against Asians, just play one game of Mahjong Soul.

9/10 cute anime girls included.

The visuals and the narrative of the game tell a very interesting history of the Czechoslovak Velvet revolution. However the gameplay has nothing to do with it. It can essentially be boiled down to a game of Where's Waldo with uninteresting scenery, mainly just very simular looking people standing next to each other on a square. The game isn't educational, just the wrapping is. It's as if you took Tetris and by reskinning the tiles into a brick texture claimed it's an educational historical game about medieval castles.

As much as I wanted to like this game it was a massive pain in the ass. What you are promised is a game about gambling, cheating and how it affects humans in part of history defined by social turmoil. And the narrative of this game delivers that! But that's about it, the gameplay is just awfull. You are stuck doing repetetive series of Quick Time Events based on finesse movements with very little space for error. While the game tells you that it is meant to be played with controller, it isn't very honest, because saying that beating the game without one is impossible would be more fitting. Another problem in this game is that if you fail one of these QTE mayhems you are met with a unique post-death dialogue which afterwards brings you back to the last checkpoint, however fail too many times and you'll have to go throught the entire game again. A game which is 70% made of dialogue boxes, so you will essentially have to click throught them all, reading information you already know, occasionally doing the same tidious QTE to get to more boxes so you can get back to where you were. So while the story of the game is amazing, the actual game is a headache of non-entertaining meaningless musscle memorry tasks.

Finally learned to pull out. 10/10

So calming I left my oven, didn't hear the alarm and my house burned down.

10/10

78 hours in, still don't know all the controls.