Recent reviews by Binary Clone

Dark Souls feels like 60% of a fun game. This is a long review in part because I feel like there's a lot of things that could have been changed or fixed to make this experience better, but the game itself feels half-baked right now to the point where I cannot recommend it. The other reason it's long is because I'm long-winded.


A lot of reviews here have mentioned that they didn't play co-op, so I was hopeful that, for a co-op game, actually playing it that way would make it a better experience and that the negative reviews were mostly because co-op is usually a fun multiplier.

Unfortunately, co-op made the game less fun for me and my friend. Another reviewer put it well when they said the game feels like it's covered in oil. The air control is very drifty with little control. Part of this too is that jumping forward and returning your controls to neutral does not slow you down at all - you maintain full forward speed unless you hold fully backwards.

This actually gets compounded in co-op, because you have collisions with your friends. You cannot walk past them, and when you are in the air you will jump off their heads or bounce straight off of them sideways. But the collision detection for these interactions also feels finicky, meaning even if you are anticipating a collision, you will often not end up where you expect to. Even worse, (in a game that has liberal screenshake and does use freezeframes for certain things) there are no animations or freeze frames for these interactions, which makes it even harder to react or even visually clock that a collision is happening.

With so much going on across the screen and often poor contrast between foreground/background elements/projectiles, those issues just get worse.

The long and short is that co op ends up feeling clumsy and frustrating as you are encouraged to interact with your friend as little as possible or else risk losing control.

Okay, so if the co-op can be frustrating, how's the singleplayer? Well, not that much better. The problems above are still there, except the game starts to just become less interesting. The number of upgrades available at the start of the game is vanishingly small. Like, five or fewer small. Unlocking new upgrades is also tediously slow, unlocking pretty much one per run if you earned the currency for it.

The balance between the characters, even out of the starting 3, immediately feels lacking. I didn't feel any reason to play a character other than the mage, whose bouncy projectiles are so flexible and spammable that they trivialize many encounters that the rogue and warrior characters need to work much harder for. The first boss is a great example of this, where the mage doesn't even have to move off of the top platform for the entire fight, since the projectiles can hit the boss from there no matter where it is.

Another issue is that the game doesn't feel like it does enough to compensate for the inherent disadvantage of autoscrollers - waiting. You will spend time in this game just staring at the screen as it scrolls to the next thing for you to do. Reach a shop? The enemies are all usually dead, but now you have to just stare for 5-10 seconds doing nothing while the screen creeps along until the shop is in full view, as you listen to the annoying goose sound effect that sounds like a car horn and is louder than half the rest of the game. The bosses also feel kind of goofy here as they slowly slide into view, and you just stare at each other for a while before the invisible ref calls start.

I would like to note that I have an hour of playtime, about half in co-op, and half in singleplayer.

In some weird specific circumstances, getting hit as the mage causes you to go invisible and for your shots to lose all horizontal momentum, so they just bounce in place on top of you uselessly until you stop firing for a moment so it'll go back to normal

If you're talking to the shopkeeper, your friend can still activate the autoscroller, leaving everyone blind with the menu on top with you frozen in place as the game scrolls and enemies start attacking you.

If you use keyboard, every NPC dialogue ends with "SPACE". Like, not as a little dialogue prompt underneath. The character will say, like, "Welcome to the shop!SPACE" inline.

After each shop, you're supposed to move to the right edge to restart the autoscroller. However, the next zone can spawn a wall at the very start. Which means you will walk to the right, you will collide with an invisible, offscreen wall, and the game will refuse to progress. Sometimes, this wall is too large to jump over with a regular jump, meaning you need to use a double jump ability to continue playing the game over a fully invisible obstacle. This happened to me multiple times in 1 hour of playtime.

There is a building that you go into between runs where you can buy upgrades and such. In co-op, you leave through the right side of this building to start the level, while a door in the center of the building allows you to change characters. In singleplayer, though, there is no right side exit, and the same door in the center of the building causes you to exit the building to the outside, where you then can walk to the right to start the game. This isn't gamebreaking or anything, but... why?

There are some weird interactions with movement in this game. For example, with the wizard character, if you stand on a platform, jump, then use your double jump ability straight upwards and hit the ceiling, you'll quickly drift to the right afterwards. If you're firing, you'll actually drift faster than your normal max movespeed while firing, and you can do all of this without holding any movement directions at all! Why?

The review is long because a lot of the problems with the game surprised me. The UI is not great. Very little about the game is clear or explained. Odd inconsistencies and bugs plague the experience, balance feels like an afterthought, and co-op managed to be less fun during our play session.

This game is awesome, what a great collection of ideas. A good chunk of it has the satisfying gameplay of Donut County, but slowed down and as the like 2nd layer of gameplay, which makes it feel fresh. I hesitate to call this an incremental game, simply because it feels like it has done so much to stand out from a genre that tends to feel a lot like a collection of menus - and I say that as a lover of incremental games.

I streamed my first gameplay session to a friend, and at the end she said, having been fully invested the entire time, "how did I just watch you throw berries into a hole for five hours??"

speedrun gonna go crazy

So, I got this as a part of a Humble Bundle, and in that context, the game was a good experience that was worthwhile. I don't think I would have felt the same way if I had paid full price, though.

In general, the game looks great, and I didn't experience any of the performance problems or softlocks that others mentioned. The world and the characters are colorful and endearing, and the core feeling of flying around on the broom is nice.

However, the story is still saccharine and hits predictable beats throughout. The writing isn't especially helped by the minimal voice acting, which is pretty much just a small series of grunts and "hey!"s that get fairly repetitive.

The main disappointment for me, though, was how much the game felt like a missed opportunity. Others have talked about how short the game is, but I was personally surprised at how little the game does with its own mechanics.

Flying around feels nice, but is mostly gliding. At first, you can only glide, losing altitude, but soon you gain the ability to boost yourself upwards vertically, sort of like a double jump. When I got this new ability, I was excited to see what else would unlock as the game progressed! Maybe a stronger vertical boost, or multiple boosts. Maybe a dash for a burst of forward speed! Maybe diving could start increasing your speed to give you better mobility. Maybe a button that lets you stall your speed and just drift to let you take tight corners more quickly.

But no, none of that ever happens. You get a little vertical boost, and future upgrades are pretty much just "you can carry more stuff at once". Most of the progression isn't gated behind movement abilities or flying better, but instead "turn on this machine that makes a wind stream that throws you over there". It doesn't help that some of these wind streams are somewhat inconsistent, too.

Another thing that doesn't help is the dungeons. I don't think these dungeons were a bad idea, but I don't think they were executed very well. They completely break the flow of the rest of the game, and feel out of place. But the biggest factor for that is that there's only three dungeons, and each dungeon is much too long for me. In the first dungeon, at the point I thought I was done, I was maybe a third to a half of the way through. After that I knew more what to expect, but it was still too much. The puzzles are time-consuming, often tedious, and sometimes not particularly clear about what they expect you to do. And it certainly doesn't help that leaving the dungeon means you'll need to start the entire thing over, so they really do grind the flow of the game to a halt. These dungeons would have worked much better if they were more spread out, maybe into three sets of five short dungeons instead of three dungeons that drag on.

Probably like a 6/10, I enjoyed it but the more I played, the more I felt like things were missing

Runs terribly, but more importantly, 17 hours in and my game now crashes every time I load my save, so the game is functionally unplayable now

A short VN about grief. About the complexities of grief, about remembering the bad that everyone else seems to have forgotten, about seeing intimately the good and the beauty that few others have noticed, about pushing the bruise, about slowly realizing the most important pieces.

It's two dollars - just get it.

easy rhythm game with mediocre mapping and one of the loading screen lines reads "How old are the girls? You're asking too many questions!"

there are a lot of rhythm games that have better mechanics, better mapping, and aren't creepy

Roboquest is like if Doom 2016 and Borderlands had a roguelite baby.

Lots of secrets/routes, great weapon variety, fantastic class variety, satisfying gameplay, speedy movement, mechanical depth, secrets and alternate routes through the game - Roboquest has it all. You have a sprint, a slide, grinding on rails for extra speed, jumping on enemies' heads for melee damage while shooting other enemies or reloading. Enemies stagger after taking enough damage or Impact. You've got Borderlands-esque weapons with random effects/affixes of different qualities. You've got elemental damage systems. You've got some classes with rocket jumps, some with melee attacks, one that summons minions, etc etc. And, of course, items to grant you more buffs.

I played in Early Access until I had beaten everything that was available at the time, and have come back to it recently for the full release. I was surprised at how stellar the felt in Early Access, and the game has managed to pleasantly surprised me again somehow coming back to it now.

Probably my only gripe is that when you haven't picked up a weapon yet, you can't see how big the magazine size is from the stats pop up, only that it's a mag type weapon vs an energy type weapon. Unless I'm missing something. That is probably the worst thing about the game for me, and it's pretty minor.

Roboquest is probably a 9/10 game for me personally at the moment, and could probably grow into a 10/10 as I play it more and discover the rest of the game. Co-op is a blast, but most of my time has just been spent in single player.

If you like Castlevania games, this will probably be a great time. It grew on me as I continued playing it, and while I don't see myself playing through again, I had a good time with it. Even as someone who does not play Castlevania games in general.

There were certain aspects of the game that just weren't for me. They aren't necessarily bad, just... not for me.

1. The massive clutter of inventory items. Man I did not expect to be spending so much time in my inventory. It's nice that there's a variety of weapons (though honestly I only ever really used the whips), but to me having all these armor types and pieces just meant a lot of pickups I didn't care about. Equip when numbers higher. There are definitely trade offs more significant than that, but it wasn't stuff I really wanted to bother with (and I didn't really have to, since it's not awfully hard.

2. The massive clutter of crafting systems. My god did I not imagine that a metroidvania needed the tedium of crafting random bits and pieces. There's a food crafting system that feels bizarrely out of place while at the same time completely useless and practically mandatory. Eating a new food for the first time raises your stats permanently, which means if you don't bother making food, you're missing out on potentially huge stat benefits. At the same time, it was literally just a chore I was doing every once in a while, since there's never a reason not to, but I also wasn't going to bother grinding materials because, again, the game isn't that hard.

3. Just how opaque some of the progression pieces are. Again, not bad, really, just definitely not for me. I looked up two major progression pieces and cheesed one before looking up how you're actually intended to do it. Remember that notable property of a single random room from 8 hours of gameplay ago? I certainly didn't.


On the other hand, like I said before, I overall enjoyed the game. I didn't experiment with all it has to offer, but the magical abilities have an overwhelming variety. Maybe a little overboard, since it was hard for me to justify experimenting much when I had a setup that worked for me and I wasn't about to optimize my setup or anything when the game isn't too hard.

The movement is fun, even if a lot of it isn't explained much - backdashing can be cancelled by crouch, so you can speedily bounce backwards through spaces with backdash cancels (but that's never explained); you can do a dive kick eventually (but that's never explained); and you can cancel an attack's endlag with a backdash (which I think is a loading screen tip). Landing with many weapons also cancels all endlag, meaning you can do tiny hops for all your attacks to massively increase your damage and maneuverability. These are all super fun, some of the most fun aspects of the game for me.

Because the movement is fairly fun, the combat is entertaining too. It's nothing I would call groundbreaking, but it executes on its style quite well. There isn't a huge amount of enemy variety, but I'd say there's enough, and while not all of the bosses were super interesting, there were a handful that were really unusual and unexpected in a really good way.

Overall, I would recommend this to fans of the genre. It's not going to win over a lot of new people who aren't convinced by castlevania-like games or metroidvanias in general, but it's worth playing if those games are something you're already fond of.

I bought a whole valve index and all I use it for is beat saber