Recent reviews by Uncertain

It's so boring, oh my god it's so boring. Everything revolves around combat. I have been doing pretend combat for 35 years. You build guns to blow up a endless horde of rabid squirrels. You manually mine things by standing on them and holding space for like two minutes. They have made the standard survival-game process of mining so unengaging that I found myself thinking about my electricity meter readings. There's no reason to do any of it when you can easily let the squirrels eat you.

Alternatively you can take the squirrels out if you just want to make boxes appear on a screen.

It's technically quite good, I like the setting and the music and stuff, but everything to do with playing it is dismal. There's no sense of fun to any of it — and I love rain & storms. All text and tasks are dry as a bone. Complete a settlement or a full run and the game simply returns to the map without fanfare. Then you can spend your six hours' worth of spoils on a 2% increase to something too uninteresting to speak of, and like 20 spare grapes for the start of each new settlement. The rewards and progression are so dull my eyes glaze over, gameplay lacks any sense of joy or celebration, and winning doesn't inspire the game to play even a sound effect of acknowledgement. They also give you a pretend aunt who lives in the upgrades screen in order to patronise your progress and call you "kiddo", as if that wasn't bad enough. I'm ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ 38.

(Game v0.17:) I'm way into this one, after 100%ing Halls of Torment and playing tons of these games. It brings a bunch of well-thought-out additions and novel mechanics to the genre; the presentation is simple but very effective, and mostly visually clear; and the QoL is excellent. It has tooltips on most items etc., great controller support in menus, stats everywhere, it even has UI scaling. It feels well-balanced and very satisfying — human enemies gib! Most of them are just skeletons though, which happens to be fine by me. They're good skeletons.

My only gripes after ~2.5 hours are that it doesn't seem to utilise the D-pad, and I'd really prefer movement on the D-pad for comfort; and when enemies start firing arcing projectiles, I find it difficult to read their trajectory. Build variety looks somewhat limited based on the lack of tons of classes and so on (5 classes currently), but it's enough, and it's only version 0.17 thus far so I hope this might expand. There are many weapons and other minor unlocks to tweak characters with to a lesser extent.

It features a controversial Bleed mechanic (which you can disable): when you "die," you instead gain a stack of health degen. After ten "deaths," you lose and properly die. A Bleed Resistance stat combats the HP drain. I think this is awesome and I'm sick of games using exactly the same fundamental HP mechanics for decades on end. The gameplay begins immediately, so the refund window is wide open if you want to try it out — I'd say after three runs or so and one or two levels beaten you'll have a decent initial sense of how it plays.

This is 22 tracks long, not just a single theme as the title might imply. Lovely peaceful orchestral music, produced well. It has a somewhat generic movie/RPG style, but enough depth, care and creativity to be interesting without distracting. Good for listening to while working on stuff. It really reminds me of Fable.

A very good spin on This War of Mine, and of approximately the same quality given its 3D environments and added mechanics. It is on an 84%-off sale at the moment. Has two very distinct maps which balance the economy very differently, demanding different approaches.

I appreciate its having a greater variety of relevant resources to consider, whereas TWoM focused so heavily on wood and components. I find myself replaying it after completion for fun and achievements. Probably took me about 20 hours to complete the main story mode across both maps, although I'm not sure whether the second map may have been cut short.

The second map's ending seemed very chaotic, as if the scripts had become confused (I simultaneously won and lost one day out of nowhere), but I think that's the only problem I've had with it. The game does lack manual UI scaling, and instead seems to rescale the UI to fit a set portion of the screen regardless of resolution. Fortunately it hasn't been too small for me to read from afar.

40 hours in. The game eventually consists of clicking on a series of silos every minute. It is so tedious and empty that eventually when I see the silos rising up, expectantly waiting to be re-activated for the millionth time, I just leave them there and stare at it until I fall asleep because none of it matters.

Progression is obtuse, guided only by an irritatingly smug dialogue between two characters I can't stand, and introduces resource caps which punish the player by destroying previous progression. The story behind any of it seems to amount to train-of-thought nonsense that reads like a Reddit thread. The substantial unlocks throughout the game, the ones which actually impact gameplay, empower you with... basic quality-of-life features.

It's a cool concept and a new dimension for an idle-ish game, but rather than elegantly melding the clicker & factory genres, the design finds the cracks between them and makes them its focus. You can't finish your design because costs inflate so wildly that you need 60 billionty resources to build anything — but you can't just let it run and wait for more resources, because your factory stops working on its own unless someone regularly tells its component parts they'd actually prefer for them to continue to work. It's a fever dream, hours of watching rows of silos slowly pop up for you to push them back down, over and over, so that you might eventually upgrade another of them to a silo you have to click on less often. It's superficially pleasant, it's excruciating and addictive and I hate it.

Updating my review again: four months ago, I called this a fascinating and unique toy which could also be used as a fun game. It now generates genuinely compelling adventures, with flow and cohesion enough to foster real immersion and excitement. It is no mere toy.

The developer has been relentlessly plugging away at updates throughout the nine months since I bought it. Everything has come such a long way. The UI, gameplay features, backend generation models, story controls and support for optional third-party tools have all been considerably expanded and improved. The writing is (practically) as sensible and cohesive as the setting demands, and extended by features which inject fitting depth and options to the world, enhancing immersion further.

There are still notable rough edges — the very basic UI design, especially — but in a solo project which uniquely (and now very successfully) turns any arbitrary premise into a dynamic, high-quality text adventure, including pictures, quests, companions, farming, building, exploration and more, I can easily forgive them. The music is also genuinely nice to listen to — it always reminds me of the Fable soundtrack.

The developer's responsiveness and support for the game have also been incredible. I've found him friendly and very patient. A giant list of bugs I'd discovered and sent him have steadily been fixed; and while improving support for an external image-gen API, he happily considered the best approach with us at length in the forums.

Strongly recommended for readers, writers, people who enjoy creativity, and g4m3rz who want to experience interesting games.

(I have no idea why the store page images are still all stretched and squashed. There is no need for it, and you can change the image dimensions in the options if it somehow does happen. There's even a "how squashed/cut off do you want them if the dimensions are wrong" slider. And yet the store images show gangs of squashed pirates. It kills me.)

Relaxing, satisfying and easy to play. Playable characters are quite interesting and diverse. Feels like care and attention to detail have been put into it. Pulls off the Diablo 2 aesthetic well, though on a simpler scale. You can be a dude with a flamethrower. Contains skellies, shellies and jellies, among many other friends who can be burned and otherwise reduced to inanimacy. They can't wait. "Flamethrower Dude!" they sing. "Let's get on with it!"

An elegantly designed and charmingly presented game which knits contrasting genres into an innovative and addictive sock of fun.

Whether you want its main features or not, it adds a mod manager with save/load to the Create New World screen. Never again do you have to manually tell the game yes I WOULD like to very slowly order my mods to match the order it already knows they should be in because I WOULD like the game to work thanks. Praise the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ miners.