Recent reviews by BinarySplit

It's addictive, but not fun. You keep making progress and unlocking things, but they hardly change anything.

There are very few viable strategies for wiping out the earth, and often it comes down to luck. Basically, soon after your disease is detected, earth starts researching a cure. This starts a timer - you have to infect and then kill everyone before the cure is made, because once there's a cure it's impossible to win. There's no fighting against treatments or disease resistance or immunity or anything like that - you just spread, kill, and hope that you're faster than the cure. It's incredibly repetitive.

The ape and vampire campaigns are a bit different and a bit more fun - you can actually undo some of the work toward a cure by destroying labs. But there still isn't that enough interactivity with the world to be fun - you just choose the right upgrades at the right times, and occasionally attack specific targets as soon as they appear.

The most frustrating bit is that is often you'll get to the end-game and suddenly you'll stop receiving DNA to buy upgrades. You could be the most successfully contagious disease on earth and suddenly be unable to evolve any lethality. Losing always feels so arbitrary - as if you were playing an RPG and you kept getting one-kit-killed by invisible enemies.

It's interesting and quite unique, but there were enough annoyances that this would be a negative review if it had cost me $5 instead of $1.

There are bugs, the translation is pretty bad, and the ending leaves a lot unresolved. That said, it has surprisingly high production values - awesome visual effects, great music, very interesting characters and setting.

I'd recommend this if it's still $1, but if not, then it's definitely worth checking the forums to see whether they've fixed the bugs & translation shortcomings. I really hope the sequel FLUTONIUM is released in a better state, because they've made such a cool universe and it's just the rough edges that you'd think would be easy to fix that are letting it down.

The first couple hours were an awesome and unique experience that I totally recommend experiencing. The world in DoaSJ is bustling and full of alien culture (music, religion, etc.) that will draw you in. It's very enjoyable and I highly recommend it if it's at a price you're willing to pay for 2 hours of fantastic game.

After the 2 hour mark, however, the game loses its shine. There are a lot of optional things you can do (e.g. finding the right vendor to sell the things you pick up) that actually aren't worth the time or effort required. You end up just becoming a minmaxing grinder because it's the only way to get through the story in a reasonable amount of time. It's a bit sad - I was really hoping that the world would develop, or the story would unfold in unexpected ways, but hours 3-7 were just a repetitive slog with no reward.

I still recommend playing a couple hours of DoaSJ, but don't expect to finish it - once the game stops being enjoyable, it doesn't recover.

It's exactly what it looks like, and more than I expected for that price.

Short game, but super depressing and will make you question why you live your life. 10/10 would die a little on the inside again.

Good hacking game!

There's really not much more to say - hacking games all seem to have the same premise. I got a bit bored after 90 minutes because I've already played quite a few very similar hacking games. But if you haven't already played a hacking game, Hacknet is a great one to start with! It's a fun experience incomparable to traditional genres of gaming.

It might have been interesting back in the day, but these days everybody has played much better runner games.

If you like the cat aesthetic from the screen shots, check out this developer's more recent game Hot Tin Roof. It has much more interesting gameplay.

A pretty decent adventure game. Good investigation puzzles, good length (~5 hours), good characters. Puzzles were the right difficulty - many were easy, some were challenging, and I only had to look up the answer for 1. I wasn't completely rapt, but this is certainly one of the better point & clicks I've played in recent years. Would recommend it for adventure game junkies.

I played Else Heart.Break() to completion. It took about 8 hours.

I really like the premise, but there are a few big problems that really make it hard to recommend:

• The start can be exceptionally slow. You have to run into the right people at the right time to actually start the main story. This is based on luck and exploration, and can take up to two hours.
  
• At the start you are taught to explore everywhere and talk to everyone. But after this initial segment, pretty much all the NPCs won't speak to you or won't have anything interesting to say unless they're part of the active mission.
  
• It's very easy to sequence break or get powers that the dialog options you have seem to be oblivious to.
  
• There are hints of optional stuff to do, but I only found 1 such thing that actually lead to a reward. It's just annoying having all these things that look like the start of sidequests, but actually are just clutter to make the world look interesting.
  
• The ending is disappointing. It feels like they're setting you up to outsmart the game and get a better ending, but even the dev has confirmed there is no hidden ending.

This is a mixed review - I recommend The Witness with caveats. I haven't beaten it and probably won't return to it, but the time I've spent playing has been magical.

Pros:

• Holy cow this is an amazing puzzle game! I've played it for almost 2 days solid and spent every other waking hour thinking about it. Every puzzle seems to have just the right level of challenge. Despite appearances, there is a huge amount of variety in the puzzles, there's hundreds of puzzles, and there's plenty to do in-between puzzles.
  
• I had no performance issues at all. I have a GTX970 running at 1080p. I just started the game up, it defaulted to High settings, and everything played incredibly smoothly.
  
• The island is jaw-droppingly beautiful. This is probably the most beautiful full-3D game I've ever played. The amount of effort that went into making everything so picturesque AND making all the puzzles line up is truly incredible.

Cons:

• The price. It's probably a fair price if you're one of the people who ends up loving everything about this game, but I had to stop playing early. I would have regretted paying full price if I hadn't gotten this as part of a bundle.
  
• It's very hard to stop playing. This is not a veiled complement. You can uninstall the game, but your brain will keep trying to solve the puzzles. The Witness will find its way into your life in ways you never expected, and that can be quite horrifying. Unfortunately I had to stop playing after realizing that this was happening. I cannot risk my sanity further.
  
• Some puzzles rely on color and sound. If you're deaf or colorblind, 90% of the game will still be accessible to you, but you'll want to check the forums first to see which areas you're going to have to look up solutions for.