Recent reviews by Shadowspaz

It's been a long, long time since I've left a review for a game, but I need to leave one for Dead Letter Dept.

This is a phenomenal horror game. I've completed the game once in about two hours, but it was a dense two hours. At its core, it's kind of just a typing game, but the setting and the atmosphere pulls you in so well. You have to keep typing. You have to keep working. You don't have another choice.

Or do you?

Every step along the way, there are glimpses of other options. There are ways to take control of your own fate. The ending I got on my first playthrough felt organic, intentional, and like I was "beating the system." But this is only one of several endings, and there is so much more to discover with more playthroughs.

Don't look up anything else about this game. Just dive into it, and see how you get out in the end.

The game itself is fine. I'd recommend this game if it weren't for the servers.

Every time I've played with friends, I have gotten at least one disconnect error and have needed to rejoin the game. The last disconnect I had, however, stripped me of all of my gear and left my character permanently bugged- I can no longer connect to the servers at all.

All of my progress on this character is lost. I am not going to start a new character knowing this could happen again. And since I can't connect to the servers, I can't even play single player.

And this is after the patch that mentions:

Will Fix a multiplayer crash that could result in client players having their inventory wiped

I have refunded the game.

Online demo: http://www.kongregate.com/games/targaciej/klocki

This is a very nice little puzzle game that mixes a handful of simple mechanics to result in some fairly complicated levels. I was able to complete all the levels in under an hour (~80 puzzles), but it was a very satisfying, calming experience.

In addition, 27 levels were added at some point before my purchase, so it may not be unlikely that even more are added later.

For less than a dollar, it's a nice experience with a very clean presentation. Sell some trading cards. Try it out.

SOMA is a fairly intelligent survival-horror game that relies on atmosphere and psychological impact to be frightening- There are no jump scares.

• Amazing atmosphere
  
• Very unique concept (Which I will not mention, since a bit part of the intro scenes is the revealing of this information)
  
• Stimulates some deep questions

• Forced conversation, driving the expertly-crafted concepts into you via explicit (and clunky) narrative
  
• Missing impact from certain scenes that could have been more emotional.

Aside from the two listed, there is very little that takes away from the experience. The gameplay is pretty straightforward and the maps are linear, but there is enough exploration to find hidden nuggets of storytelling and enough dead-ends to become panic-inducing if you're too careless. Unfortunately, the intensity of the entire world follows a similar trend to Amnesia: The Dark Descent, where it starts to fall flat towards the very end. SOMA definitely handled it better, though, and I feel like this is an incredibly tricky thing to nail down anyway.

I don't usually give a specific score (Or even a pro/con list), but this game had me very specifically conflicted in the mentioned areas. They absolutely don't take away from the overall atmosphere, and the themes are vastly unique in the world of video games, so my recommendation stands.

I was hesitant to get this, due to some of the reviews I read, but I thoroughly enjoyed this game.

As far as programming games go, I'd say it's on the simpler side of the spectrum, but the difficulty and learning curve are very well done. I was a little disappointed with the limited commands in the game (There's no JNZ, for example), but happy to discover that some of the harder puzzles were basically built for more intricate commands. Because of this, you'll need to think outside the box more to find a solution, when you don't have the tools you'd usually have for such an issue.

I would not use this to actually learn Assembly at all, but as a logic-building exercise (Which is a crucial skill in this field), it works quite well.

The challenges on each level (Solve with < x lines, or with < x steps) resulted in me finding multiple approaches to many of the levels, and they never felt unrealistic to me at all (As with some other programming games). You can always optimise the code more and more, but in real-world applications, past a certain point, this becomes trivial. So it's nice that you can do this, but you don't actually need to.

Outside of the basic gameplay, the game has the same kind of whimsical-yet-heavy storytelling that Kyle Gabler's games so often have, and it doesn't beat you over the head with it. It's just kind of... there, offering you some speculative fodder and setting the tone for the game- Which it does very nicely.

If you're even idly interested in programming or code-based games, this is a good one.

This is, without a doubt, one of the best rhythm platformer I've played.

It is a short game - A couple hours in length - But the replayability presented by the sheer addictive nature of the music is surprising. I expect to put in at least a dozen hours before I tire of this.

When the game forces you to match all of your actions (jump, dash, smash) to the beat, it becomes a much deeper experience. Most other rhythm platformers have every obstacle move to some musical pattern, and this results in an experience that the player doesn't really need to take part in. You can flounder through 140, or any of the Bit.Trip games, without necessarily understanding the rhythms of the environment (I find both of those to be fantastic, by the way).

But when the player is required to map their dodging and movement to the beat, they are forcibly pulled into the musical world. This is a game that you will not be able to get through without entering the rhythm of it all, and it really makes it a much more satisfactory experience. You become the music.

And the music is really, really catchy.

Get this game.

Yes, it uses uPlay, but the game is so great I need to recommend it anyway.

Regarding uPlay: When it functions how it's intended to (as it did for me), after you set up an account and register the game via CD key, the game launches straight from Steam, and just leaves the uPlay window in the background. After some simple settings, the only interaction you need to have with it is closing the window when you quit the game.

Regarding the game: It's a pseudo-real-time turn-based RPG set in a fairy tale world, wrapped up in a fairy tale story with fairy tale narration. Everything is in rhyme, and while the story really isn't too complex or gripping, it has a gentle nostalgic feel to it. The timing of the combat adds a fresh twist to the stale formula JRPGs have used forever, making each battle feel more real and alive.

The cast is diverse, yet the characters are flat- I didn't especially care for any of them, and there was one in particular that just got on my nerves. But the simplicity of their design fits in nicely with the simplicity of the story, and they each have their own little story which helps flesh out the world a little more.

To put it simply- This game is like playing through a bedtime story. For the most part, there isn't much depth, but the game doesn't lead you to believe otherwise. All it asks of you is that you listen, you enjoy, and you embrace this enchanted world. It's a great, simple experience.

You can quack at ducks.

You can mind control ducks.

You can block multiple shotgun blasts with a sword before throwing that sword at a duck.

You can trap a duck in a net, throw that duck at another duck, and then throw the netted duck off the map.

You can spread the good word of Duck, turning enemies into allies.

You can get Duck Game for no more than 12.99 USD.

You can end up with more ducks in your life, today.

This is not a long game. I have completed it a dozen times, and I am not tired of it. That should express how satisfying the mechanics can be.

Not just that, but the optional modes - Hard, No-Roll, and Iron - Really force you to rethink your strategies. With Hard, anything the Titans did before, they now do more of. More projectiles, more attacks per cycle, faster movement, smaller windows to kill them in. It's more than just the "harder means quicker" formula most other games use, and it makes your approach much stronger by playing it. No-Roll simply limits your movement, but again, it causes you to restructure your strategy, since you now have an incredibly small margin of error.

Iron Mode is just one life. Standard addition to difficult games.

Killing things, though. This game makes it absolutely satisfying. 20+ hours later, and it still feels great to land that hit, dodging past an attack, and barely getting the arrow to hit at a steep angle. They did a solid job making the weapon feel impactful.

The one complaint I do have, though, is there is nothing to do in the overworld. No enemies, no puzzles. There is one area, where you need to light torches, and even though it's small, it's awesome just because shooting is so fun. But that was one area, one time. I wish there was more like that.

And, of course, as I said at the start of this review, it is short. It'll probably take the average player 3-4 hours to complete their first run, and maybe another hour to get the true ending. This is a game built for speedruns and for improving strategies. If that isn't what you want, I'll still recommend this on a sale. A 5 hour game, if that's all you play it for, is still worth 5 bucks.

The premise is a very unique and interesting- It's a puzzle platformer where the goal is to kill yourself. You play as a pig whose parents were sent to a slaughterhouse, so to reunite with them in animal heaven, you must use up all of your lives. Very bizarre, and the puzzles are decent at first, but halfway through the first level, they throw trick solutions at you that you have absolutely no way of knowing about.

Beyond that, though, this doesn't even stay a puzzle game. There are sections where the goal is to not die, and instead, you have to chase down a key through Super Meat Boy-esque areas. The key gets you farther along, eventually to a boss, which you must kill and, again, not die to. The bosses certainly don't factor in to the story, and they certainly don't fit the parameters the game already set up (Namely, the goal of dying).

So we're looking at a casual puzzle / intense precision platformer game- Two genres that are really at odds with each other. Unfortunately for the precision platformer moments, the movement is binary- You're either moving, or you're not. This leads to some punishing situations, if you lightly tap one direction or the other, and it is something that Super Meat Boy did a fantastic job of mitigating. In addition to that, the edge detection on blocks is unreliable, at best- There are numerous times where I've fallen before reaching the edge of a block, and other times where I've been able to jump a bit after I should have fallen. This makes any precision jumping an absolute nightmare.

And then there are the gimmicks. Now, this isn't a bad term. All games use gimmicks. Portal's gimmick was, well, portals, and it worked astoundingly well. But Squishy here just uses too many of them. Halfway through the first chapter, you'll discover that the only solution to a puzzle is by wrapping around the screen; a function that is rarely used since then. Towards the end, there will be a level where you can fly- No preamble, no use afterwards, you can just fly for that one level. For one of the boss fights, you can suddenly throw fireballs (Which is explained by a textbox right before, saying "You can temporarily use the power of fire!"), turning the game into very much an action platformer- Not a puzzle one, not a precision one.

On top of all of these, there are still teleporters, boost blocks, portals (As in, from Portal), forced darkness (Which obscures the ui, as well), and various other block types, most of which are only used in a couple of levels. Some of which are only used in one level.

Beyond that, I can't tell if the game takes itself seriously or not, with signs that mock the player, calling them a 'noob,' and stating that 'the following level will make them ragequit.' With regards to the former, hard for the sake of hard does not make a good game. Puzzles with trick solutions do not feel rewarding at all. Both of these points are valid at many, many points.

And then there are the bugs... So many bugs... I've gotten graphical glitches, inputs sticking, and other people have gotten game-breaking bugs, trapping them in an area known as the "secret hat shop." In addition to that, they apparently left in some debug function where you can right-click anywhere to teleport there. An incredible oversight, and I seriously wonder if anyone playtested this before sending it off to Steam.

All in all, this does not, in any aspect, feel like a professional game. I respect what the developers have done, and the fact that they have gotten their vision out on the market, but they have a looong way to go (Both in game design, and programming) before making a real gem. I hope they keep at it, because this game started with a really interesting premise. I wish they kept to that.