Recent reviews by BinarySplit

There is so much more gameplay than what's in the screenshots!

At first I thought this was a basic Terraria clone, but Planet Centauri avoids slowing down progression with annoyances (inventory limit, hidden recipes, equipment-dependent progression, linearity) so that the gameplay can take you so much further. You can tackle bosses & dungeons in any order, completely neglect parts of the tech tree, explore or not, etc. There's just a lot to do, all the time. I've played 20 hours now, but it feels like 20 hours of continuous progress.

Some reviews complain about bugs, but I've only seen 1 minor one: sometimes my selected toolbar item randomly swaps with another item in my inventory. No item is lost, it's just momentarily confusing. Has happened ~5 times in 20 hours and has been very easy to recover from. This game is not ruined by bugs as other reviews would imply.

I'm stopping now, not because I want to, but because I need to get back to IRL. It has been a lot of fun and I really wish I could keep playing and see what's next. There's still so much game I've yet to play.

It's hard! But fair. The puzzles need you to find the links between clues scattered throughout the apartment. They were all very different to any I've played so far, requiring different kinds of lateral thinking. I was impatient and used the guide a lot, but always came away realizing I had the information and just hadn't thought hard enough. The difficulty made the puzzles I figured out myself so much more satisfying though.

It's also a uniquely personal game. The books, the pictures, and furniture all feel like objects from the dev's life. It's a nice change from the typical fantastical environments in puzzle games.

Overall, I think patient puzzle gamers would enjoy this a lot. It's quite different from most "Escape Room" games on Steam, but if you've finished any of Myst, Schizm, Quern, etc. I bet you'd love this.

If you're not too familiar with point & click adventures or puzzle games, this is probably a much better fit for you. The Abandoned Planet didn't click for me, likely because I've played so many that my standards are high. Still, there was enough good there that I'm sure some people will enjoy it.

The art was fantastic. The sound and music were great when they were there, but it was a bit quiet at times. The character designs and world building were also really good.

On to the constructive criticism: I didn't enjoy was the gameplay. There was very little extra detail or interactivity in the world beyond what was used to string together the puzzles. The first 2 acts were far too easy and even forced hints on you, which felt like it was insulting the players intelligence. Moving around the world was a bit slow - it has that Nintendo-style issue of every interaction playing a little animation, so the gameplay is very click-wait-click-wait-click-wait, which gets annoying. The puzzles in the late game were a lot more enjoyable, but I feel they would have been more impactful if the game weren't sliced up so finely that the "keys" weren't so close to their respective "locks".

On the story side, I feel like if there was just a bit more lore-building that wasn't exclusively to advance the plot, this could have been something special. Like it was borderline "Outer Wilds"-style memorable, but just needed a bit more. I feel the missing piece was that other inhabitants didn't seem to have left a mark on the world beyond their contribution to the protagonist's journey. Perhaps writing a few short narratives from the perspective of the other characters that shaped the world would have helped?

Overall, do I recommend it? It depends: Have you already played most of the SCUMM catalog? Hard pass. Are you patient and/or relatively new to point & clicks? Go for it - it's good and priced appropriately.

It was fun but short. Good puzzles. My brain is feeling activated. I just wish there was more.

Solid escape room. Lots of puzzles that I didn't recognize, despite having played 45+ escape room games. I'd call this medium difficulty: the puzzles started easy but got harder as the game progressed. No puzzles completely stumped me but some required screenshotting and deduction. I finished in ~3h15m.

Great puzzles! All were challenging. Only one annoyed me enough to use a hint ( Finding the culprits - I'm not sure whether it was my very mild face blindness, or my apathy toward teenage partygoers, but I couldn't eliminate a single face ). I completed it in just over 4 hours, then redid it for the 100%. Definitely worth the price.

Only caveat: BIG COLORBLINDNESS WARNING I counted 5 puzzles that use colors, all using 4 to 6 colors, with one even requiring finding the links between 6 colors in several different lighting conditions. I didn't see any accessibility option or attempt to use symbols/textures/contrast to differentiate colors. IMO, these puzzles amount to ~20% of the fun. Sorry :/

Recommending because it delivered exactly what I expected from the description - up to 60 minutes of puzzles. I finished in 51.

I felt the format constrained it a bit. It was completely linear, and the puzzles were all balanced at a "not immediately obvious, but able to be figured out pretty quickly" level. The automatic hints when you spend too much time were unwelcome. I'd rather only begrudgingly manually request a hint after being stumped on something for half an hour, but I guess that's a recipe for disaster when there's a bomb about to go off...

Despite that, it was well built and did get my brain working a bit. A fun way to spend an hour.

There can never be a Half-Life 3, because Abiotic Factor is peak "oops we scienced too hard and now there's an interdimensional alien incursion."

It's amazing I'm still enjoying this game after almost 40 hours of in-game time, as I have very low tolerance for grind and games that don't respect my time. I'm playing single-player. Being able to turn off individual survival mechanics when they get annoying has helped keep it fun.

The environmental design and attention to detail is fantastic. It really feels like a science facility people live in. The gameplay just keeps developing. There's just so much to do, it has kept me well entertained.

Don't bother if you don't have/like controller. The keyboard & mouse controls are... worse than bad iPad controls.

Bunny is still awesome though. F***en' love that character. Cutscenes are great. I'ma go watch em on youtube because I just can't with the mouse controls T_T Go play the first game.

The world needs more kobold games