Recent reviews by Rubber Ducky

This is a cozy, casual puzzle game with a lovely aesthetic. Most the puzzles are fairly straightforward, but there are a few headscratchers. It doesn't overstay its welcome and is well worth your time.

Absolutely delightful little puzzle platformer with unique mechanics that keeps adding in fresh new twists for its ~1 hour play time. The graphics are pretty good retro 8-bit style and the music is great. The platforming mechanics are well-polished despite the fact that there's physics involved. The puzzles aren't very hard, but there's just enough challenge to keep it entertaining. If you decide to 100% it, there's still a decent bit of challenge to be had.

Try not to blink with tears in your eyes simulator. For added difficulty, try playing when you're really tired and your eyes feel like sandpaper.

Despite me playing this at exactly the wrong time, I had an amazing experience with it. The mechanics and the narrative work together so beautifully. There's something poetic about desperately trying to keep yours eyes open to stay in a moment, only to fail and blink through the next couple in rapid succession.

I don't know if it was intended, but there's a little something extra about tabbing out to recalibrate and just being confronted with your own face as you experience this narrative.

A beautiful cozy game that doesn't overstay its welcome. Aesthetically and in the sense that it's a puzzle platformer with backtracking, this reminds a lot of Ori, but that's about where the similarities end. This isn't a Metroidvania, and the platforming is not nearly as tough as Ori. Instead, this focuses heavily on the puzzle aspect. And, for a refreshing change of pace, it doesn't hold your hand. Sometimes it will give you clues for things that would be very obtuse, but generally it just puts you in an environment and lets you figure it out for yourself.

From a presentation standpoint, it's a notch below Ori. The painterly art and animation is phenomenal, but some of the particle effects don't mesh well with it. Also, the art is a little low res, probably meant for 1080p. This won't age well in the era of 4k, but it still looks passable at 1440p. The music is top notch and really elevates the experience, but the star of the show is the writing and voice acting. I really enjoyed both characters and they are brought to life perfectly by the voice actors.

The only other minor complaint I had is that some of the areas are really well fleshed out while others feel like they were running out of time and just kinda gave up. The summer shrine in the tree in particular felt laughably unfinished compared to the others. There are also a few bugs here or there, but nothing that negatively impacted my experience.

If you're looking for an artful indie platformer, this is one of the better, less-appreciated ones I've played.

If you like Symphony of the Night or other Igavanias, this game is for you. IMO, it might be the best one. There are only a handful of areas that aren't great. Otherwise, this scratches that itch perfectly.

Hoooo boy, did this game get under my skin, and not in the way it's meant to. I should preface this by saying I really loved the first one for being a solid-if-simple survival horror game with a laughably bad plot and translation. This game starts off down the same route but fell on its face for me really quick.

The game seems to be very similar to the first, but they've overhauled how the camera works. It's very inconsistent as to when it will and won't let you go into 3rd person mode. This isn't a huge deal to me, but I can understand that might be frustrating for others.

The plot and dialogue seem equally laughably bad as the first, and I was really looking forward to burning through this game for laughs. Unfortunately, in the second chapter, I got stuck at a door the was obviously the only way forward. I spent half an hour running around the level trying to figure out why the door wouldn't open for me. Eventually I caved and watched a walkthrough. The person in the walkthrough simply walked through the door without doing anything first. I read a text walkthrough, sure that I had missed something, and it said you just go through the door. I was on the verge of rage uninstalling right there, but I decided to reload a previous save and give it another shot. The door opened on the first try.

Maybe this was just a one off and wasn't going to happen again, but it put me in a horrible mindset for the next section. After a cutscene with some enjoyably bad dialogue, I went into another room with a certain selection of characters only to find out that I hadn't brought the right characters with me, and that I'd have to run back to the safehouse to get the right ones. On top of that, I got into a combat encounter that the game made it very clear (through a bit of dialogue) that I was going to need to rely on the game's AWFUL AI to help me out in a situation as I wasn't playing it co-op.

That was the last nail in the coffin for me. The game is set up so that there are environmental puzzles that only certain characters can solve, and it doesn't tell you which ones you're going to need in advance. To make matters worse, unlike the first game (at least as far as I can tell), there's no way to fast travel back to the safe area to change them.

Unless you've got unreasonable amounts of patience for backtracking and redoing things when your stupid AI companion doesn't help, you're probably gonna want to skip this one.

Resident Evil this is not. I loved it anyway, though. It's straight up earler 2000s survival horror and it's dated in a lot of ways that are really entertaining. The translation is hilariously bad (I think it was developed by a French studio), and it leads to some amazing dialogue and notes scattered around the game. The story at the center of it is also dumb, but in a very enjoyable B movie kind of way. You will probably laugh at this game multiple times.

The gameplay is about what you'd expect. Ammo is -somewhat- scarce, so you can't just miss a bunch and expect to find more ammo to bail you out. The aiming is automatic when you hold down the aim button, but you have to be in the correct range otherwise you're shooting at nothing. It takes a minute to get used to, but it works well enough. The puzzles are incredibly easy. There was no point during this where I felt totally confused, like you might at points during a classic RE game.

The graphics hold up alright, and this port is surprisingly decent. I had zero issues with it. The game itself is very short, as many games were around this time. Expect to get 3-5 hours out of it. It's got a few decent scares to balance out the laughs, and it's a breeze to get through. If you're looking for a decent survival horror game that you will spend more time laughing at than being scared of, this is for you.

Remedy does it again. They're some of the best story-tellers in the industry. While the story in the game is not perfect, it's a unique tale with well-developed, interesting characters. You have a small amount of agency in how the story plays out. The ending is always the same, but the differences that happen along the way recast characters and events in a different light depending on your choices. The show is handled very well, and it's a pretty interesting way to flesh out a story in a video game. There's only about 2 hours worth of the show, and if you really don't want to watch it, you can still just play the game and get ~80% of what's going on.

The gameplay is some of the best that Remedy has designed. It's their standard Max Payne-y third person shooter template, but this time you've got a whole host of super fun powers that make you feel like a total badass/allow you to get creative with tackling combat encounters. It feels like Max Payne on steroids. Most of the game is fairly easy, even on hard (in fact, the game is barely more difficult at all on hard). Despite that, it remains fun and fresh throughout. The only real stain on the game is the final boss fight. It sucks. But it's relatively short and does not diminish the rest of the experience.

The game is absolutely gorgeous. The time stutter effects look SO good. Remedy's attention to detail is also in full effect here. There are stair rods on a red carpet in one level. Who even thinks about stair rods existing, much less puts them in a game. This obsessive level of detail extends to the entire experience, and it really makes the game feel special. The big downside here is that the PC port is poorly optimized. It ran well enough on my high-end rig, but there were plenty of places where my framerate dropped. It's serviceable, but the game deserves a better port. Also, another minor gripe with the port is that the mouse cursor pops up every time you read a note in the world, even when you're using a controller.

Overall, this game is great, and you shouldn't sleep on it. If you like Remedy games, chances are you will like this one, too!

This is one of the best platformers I've played in a long time. The mechanics are solid (although some of the physics can feel a little meh at times), and they are explored to their fullest throughout its fairly short runtime. They're constantly introducing new twists on the mechanics, right up until the final boss. If you want a short bout of solid fun jump time, this is for you.

I was in love with this game for about 7 levels. Then, on level 8, it all fell apart. The game starts off as a seemingly fun, free-style trick performance version of Trials. Each level has three different difficulties which require you to hit different single trick scores, overall scores, and perform a specific trick. The game allows a lot of creativity in how you accomplish the overall score, which allows for some insanely fun trick combos.

However, the devil is in the details with this game. There's no restart button, so when you fail something, you either have to intentionally crash to get to the menu with a restart button or wait until your character sits still long enough to time-out. This is especially frustrating, because the game is extremely nitpicky about the tricks you land. For instance, if you have to do a 720 Old School -> Table, but accidentally land it with a manual, it doesn't count. To make matters worse, when playing with a controller, all of the tricks are executed by using the right stick in one of 8 directions. It's pretty easy to perform the tricks mapped to one of the four major directions, but tricks mapped to a diagonal can be maddeningly inconsistent. Numerous times, I performed a tailspin (pressing right) while attempting to perform an old school (diagonal up/right) and then chain into an old school while still holding the right stick in the exact same spot.

These issues could be forgiven were it not for the sudden and unforgiving rigidity in level design. The for the first set of levels, the first seven levels require a small amount of momentum management and the occasional jump that requires precision. The eighth and final level of the set then suddenly requires you to hit every jump nearly perfectly to have enough momentum for the next jump. This, combined with the occasional difficulty of performing the correct trick, makes for maddening moments of trial and error.

It would be one thing if you had to chain your jumps perfectly to maintain momentum and that took you a few tries or if you had to occasionally retry because the controller registered the wrong move. But when you've tried four times in a row to finally get through with enough momentum to perform the trick you need to perform, and then you suddenly find yourself performing the wrong trick due to the way the controls are set up, it gets a little ragey. Then, when you've gone through this loop half a dozen times and have finally performed the correct first part of the trick, but then have to press up two or three times to get it to start the next part of the trick only to crash because you no longer have enough air-time, you want to throw your controller across the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ room.

If you love games that are about levels designed in a way to demand insane precision in performance, you'll probably enjoy this. If you just wanted to fresstyle tricks, you might want to steer clear of this one.