Recent reviews by BinarySplit

A great factory builder, that builds upon the lessons of previous games in the genre! If you enjoy Factorio, Satisfactory, FortressCraft Evolved or Dyson Sphere Program, you'll probably enjoy Techtonica. It's a mix of all the good elements from those games, streamlined, in a new setting, with a good voice-acted story.

One of the things I really appreciate is that the main story doesn't force you to build duplicates of factories, or rebuild them because upgrades change machine sizes. In the end I was still using my original metal mine/smelter line designs with some upgrades, and I think there was only 1 task (iron/copper frames) where I felt I needed duplicate assembly lines to avoid waiting hours.

I didn't finish all the missions, but I did get to the end of the Early Access storyline, and 24 hours with options to keep playing is a pretty good length for the price & gameplay quality.

Regarding performance, I'm on a 3090 Ti, running at 1440p, and at the end my base was dipping to 50FPS on highest settings, but it was still surprisingly smooth at sub-60 FPS. IMO, this is acceptable for an EA game on highest settings, but lowest detail mode really needs more work - it doesn't add many frames. If you have an older card, you'll need to turn down the resolution too. I doubt 120Hz during end-game is even possible with any available hardware.

Review: Mixed.

The art, setting, voice acting, anomaly design, and concept are exceptional. No notes. These had me hooked from the beginning and are the reason I kept playing to the end.

The gameplay has some great bits, but it's also super grindy and repetitive. You have to repeatedly drive through the same low-level zones with every expedition, and unlocking a new zone on the world map requires doing a full trip through all the early zones to first scout out the path, then another trip to actually get to the new zone. You'll spend hours driving just for the sake of unlocking bits of the map so that you can progress the story or get to higher-level zones. This. Is. So. Boring.

Late-game you get an upgrade that promises to let you skip some of the redundant travel. It barely helps. It just converts the easy zones into straight-line highway zones. They have almost no content in them, and take 2-3 minutes to drive through. It still takes a long time just to get past the low-level zones to the level-appropriate areas, and you have to do this over and over.

The pacing is bad. There was one period where I didn't get any story progression for 5 hours because of a couple deaths and all that repeated travel (and preparing for it). Then once I got used to blitzing through the boring bits, the ending came all at once. Even though I did a LOT of scavenging, apparently I found less than 1/3rd of the collectables & audio logs. I would have loved to pimp out my car and hear those audio logs, the customization was neat and the story was pretty intriguing, but I'm not spending another 40 hours after the ending hunting for them.

Do I recommend it? Only if you have time to burn and you're ok with lots of grind. The setting is amazing, but by the end I just wanted to skip the gameplay to see the end of the story.

It's Pokémon crossed with Genshin Impact with a morbid sense of humor. Pretty awesome if you just want turn-your-brain-off entertainment.

In terms of Early Access, I haven't hit a single crash, game-breaking glitch, or not-yet-implemented section of game world in 20 hours. The only signs it's incomplete are that there's not much music and there's basically no story after the first big milestone. Still, these things don't stop you from enjoying all the progression, exploration & monster collection. Just beware that there's probably no ending - you'll probably just stop when you get bored, hit the level cap, or capture every kind of Pal.

There's more than enough polished content to justify its price already.

This is my GOTY for 2023.

TTP2 is more great puzzles of increasing difficulty like TTP1's (or The Witness's, or Relikta's, or Portal 2's), but where it truly shines is in its story. I found TTP1's story was kinda meh, like distant philosophers yelling parables at me. TTP2 puts you right in the middle of a world where the philosophical and pragmatic arguments matter, and you have every reason to engage with its questions. It has actual characters and societal problems and diverse opinions. It never feels like it's forcing a narrative. It poses some very timely questions on the future of society as our technology progresses, and gives you a lot to think as you're solving the puzzles.

On to the details - the worldbuilding and graphics are jaw dropping for a puzzle game, the sound design is superb, all characters are fully voiced, the puzzles are well done and most engage my brain without ever making me feel completely stuck, and the pacing is perfect - just as you feel there's a lull, there's a new twist to keep you interested.

IMO there's no need to play The Talos Principle 1 first. Maybe it's even better to play TTP2 first to give you a reason to listen to the story in TTP1.

It took me 35 hours to do all the puzzles and get the good ending, needing only 2 hints. You could finish it in 25 hours if you were willing to skip puzzles, but who plays these games and skips puzzles?

If you're reading and looking for a game, at this price, you'd be insane not to insta-buy it. It's a masterpiece, utterly packed with high quality content.

0 Deer Soft is in a league of their own when it comes to escape room puzzle games on Steam. Their quality, quantity, and price-to-game-ratio are unmatched. I've enjoyed every game they've made and eagerly await more. They consistently invent new kinds of puzzles that I haven't seen in other games. They're challenging, but always fair.

This is one more in a series of great games. Play this, then check out all their others.

This was fun! A good variety of puzzles. I had to break out pen & paper a couple times, and one puzzle almost had me stumped, but I pushed through and finished without hints and with about 8 deaths.

The timed death system makes you consider every movement you make, but it's not bad like the other reviewer said. There's an in-game checkpoint system (putting keys in the clock) and you only lose progress if you don't use those checkpoints. Tip: There's no bonus for using fewer checkpoints.

Price-wise, it feels like it should be more around the $10 mark to match other games in the genre. At that price I'd recommend it for escape room enthusiasts.

Surprisingly polished: awesome world design, fair puzzles, great difficulty progression. I enjoyed this. It gave my brain a good workout.

Compared to other games, I'd say this is a bit expensive, but on a 50%-off sale it'd be well worth it.

On to the bad side: though the puzzles are polished, there are a lot of technical annoyances: as soon as you start interacting with puzzles your mouse sensitivity drops massively. It feels awful. Some puzzles had me picking up my mouse to move back to the other side of the mouse pad several times just to drag something half-way across the screen. Also, performance is bad: In some areas even a 3090 TI will fall below 50 FPS when shadows are set to High. Switch to Medium and suddenly it's smooth 120+FPS. The game physics seems to have a different frame-rate. Sometimes the graphics were at 120FPS but half the things on screen were juddering as if it were sub-30FPS. Sometimes I would enter the right input for a puzzle and it wouldn't be recognized because something was invisibly slightly out of place.

Also, if you know anything about electronics or quantum computing, you'll find it a lot easier as the puzzles mostly resemble textbook exercises from those fields. I still enjoyed the brain workout despite it not introducing any new concepts to me though.

It's a great game, full of interesting characters and engaging gameplay. Even among other RPGMaker-style games set in imaginary worlds Omori has built its own unique niche... But I have to vent: It's too damn long.

I loved it up until the ~18 hour mark, and then Humphrey happened, followed by the black space key hunt and collecting memories along the highway and suddenly at what was supposed to be the most emotionally impactful part of the game I felt bored out of my mind because the story points were interspersed with highly time-consuming linear segments. Furthermore, the last ~20% of the game disregards most of your effort so far (the RPG side - side quests, character advancement, overworld exploration) so the only thing motivating you to get to the end is to wrap up the story. This part is just hours of walking from thing to thing hoping the next interaction will advance the plot.

Recommendation: Play it, but be prepared for it to slow down near the end. If it gets boring, don't be afraid to stop playing and watch video analyses of the endings. You won't miss anything. The endings are all very linear did not need to be so long.

It's remade but not improved.

Do I recommend it? Yes, but only because the original was already great and this version is faithful to it.

Am I disappointed? Yes, because this had the opportunity to go so much further, either updating the game design to make it more fun, or going full ham and making the gameplay even clunkier in a tribute to the original. This version is essentially an HD mod of the original.

TBH I recommend playing System Shock Enhanced Edition first. Even though it's objectively harder to play (horrific mouse controls), the retro style let my brain overlook all the jank and I actually found it more immersive, scary, and fun.

It has very few actual puzzles. The few puzzles it has are very straightforward. Nothing builds upon knowledge you gained from previous puzzles. Many of the puzzle-like scenes actually just require you to brute-force something to figure out the sequence. I think only about 20 minutes of my playtime required my brain to wake up.

The vast majority of the game is pointless interactions, and they're not even satisfying in a The Room kind of way. It's very linear - there's usually only one or two things to do at any point in time. You don't feel like you're exploring, the game just hands you key-like objects one at a time and you have to figure out where to put them. The limited camera angles force you to only look at relevant places. It's just busywork.

I enjoyed THoDV1, but this just felt like a completely different game. As if they streamlined it to push the story, but in doing so cut all the fun parts out.

If you're looking for mental engagement here are some games that do this style of puzzle box/escape room interactions better: Gordian Rooms, Machinika Museum, the First Class Escape and Escape Memoirs series, and The Inheritance of Crimson Manor to name a few.