Recent reviews by Ryuluce

Finished Chapter 1 at the time of writing. Superb animation and voice acting. It really does feel like walking into a Joel G video. Right now it's fairly short with just the one chapter, but brimming with potential. Some little hints here and there about the characterization and world building definitely have me hooked.

A solid re-imagining of a classic first person point-and-click puzzle game. The addition of VR and free-roam makes spacial awareness much easier, so I found navigation super easy compared to the original. Some puzzles are changed, and they lean into the free-look for some of these new puzzle designs.

Charming retro-style 3D platformer with some collectathon elements. The movement is pretty solid and the amount of secrets has a surprising amount of depth. The puzzles are pretty clever.

A strong action-platformer with a strong focus on parrying in combat and great art direction. The music, animation, story, and art of Nine Sols are all great and make the game very memorable. The combat has its difficulty spikes (two bosses in particular come to mind), but is most of the time not absolutely crushing like some other souls-like games. The focus on parrying may not be to everyone's taste, but it's implemented well here.

A short, but brilliant puzzle platformer. There is nothing you gain except knowledge as you play, and that is what allows you to progress further and further.

A solid older-style point-and-click puzzle game, **if you can get it working**. It takes some fussing around with graphics wrappers, launching through the executable and not steam, etc (personally I'm using dgVoodoo). If you're comfortable with getting old video games working on modern systems, then maybe consider picking Safecracker up. Otherwise, steer clear.

A really solid 3D platformer with a metroidvania style progression and map. The move set for the character is varied and super slick. So many options for how the player wants to take on the platforming challenge. The world's layout is kind of maze-like and so it's not hard to get lost (though apparently the developer is working on on an in-game map). It's not the longest thing, and the real appeal is the gameplay, less the plot. Definitely recommended.

Very charming and fun little metroidvania, taking me about 7 hours to beat with 100% file completion (though a few achievements missing. Haven't touched the boss rush mode yet for example). Some specific bullet points:

+ solid map design, and that includes the minimap (which features a zoom for more clear navigation)
+ cute, charming art style
+ fun progression of movement upgrades
+ backtracking was never too much of a hassle, good use of shortcuts and fast travel mechanics
~ plot is a bit simple, but does the job it needs to
~ some novel bullet-hell mechanics, which I had no issue with but may not be to everyone's taste

As everyone will tell you, this game occupies the same niche genre as "Return of the Obra Dinn", and it's great. The writing is quite high quality and the way the plot points unfold is very well done. While the replay value isn't super high (as is common with this kind of mystery plot), going back through the game still gives you a chance to notice all the subtle bits of foreshadowing and design.

It's hard to explain, but I quite enjoyed FixFox. I think it charmed me. If you're gonna like the game, I think you're going to like it for the style and the writing. The gameplay is cute with some fun ideas, but it gets same-y very often. Lots of repetition. If you're cool with casual games that are a lot of the same thing over and over, you can enjoy this game.

There were several bugs I encountered. When doing certain actions, if you tried to do something else too fast, the game would softlock. This, I suspect, is due to the game never leaving the animation state for the first action. This prevents screen movement and limits other certain commands. Most of the time this can be fixed by saving, quitting to menu, and reloading. A few times this did softlock me where I couldn't save and I lost some progress.

The ending won't be for everyone, as it uses a trope that is kind of controversial. I didn't mind it too much since there *were* some hints here and there.

I binged through this game 100% in 10 hours. It's very much not a perfect game, but it's one I enjoyed. It left me wishing for some more, but it was impressive for a pretty much one-man project. I'll be interested to see what comes from Rendlike next.