Recent reviews by Fable

Now that I've finally reached the peak, I feel like I can review Peak.

This is one of my favorite games of the last few years. It is so, so incredibly close to being perfect. No matter how many players you have (1, 2, 4, more with mods), it scales incredibly well (I'm sure there's a point where it doesn't, but most of us aren't playing with *that many* people).

The thing that makes the game so incredibly good is that it's practically a board game. There is almost no twitch skill involved in playing this, other than maybe catching yourself when you fall. If you can jump and hold left click, that's it. That's all you need. The other 99% of the game planning and resource management, just like a board game. And, like a good board game, it gives you a new map that follows the same theme with zones that generate using similar rules, but are never exactly the same.

There are also a lot of nice details when playing co-op. You can help friends up. There are tools that are only helpful when playing with others. It has proximity chat and, when you reach a certain distance, it echoes.

The one major failure is that the zones are practically the same every time. The Tropics occasionally being purple and the Alpines alternating between giant icicles and more cave-like ice caves are nice touches, but I would have appreciated if they had a few more zones that had a chance of replacing those two altogether. The shores are where you land and the Caldera and Kiln are necessary thematically, so those two would be the ones to replace, if any. This alone is keeping it from being five stars.

Very worth playing, solo or co-op. Also, very happy that the devs have fully embraced mods and are even fixing bugs that are causing problems for popular mods.

Split Fiction is easily one of the best games I've ever played. Unlike It Takes Two, which had some of the greatest co-op gameplay at the time, but a truly awful story, Split Fiction delivers both great gameplay and a great story. It leans a lot heavier towards action gameplay and runner sequences for the first two-thirds or so of the game, but what's there is nearly perfect. There are also so many subtle, well-done references to so much of gaming history throughout.

It's the last third of the game that is truly great, though. The puzzles start to become more complex, using some really unique mechanics in the process, and the action sequences get more challenging and have more depth to them. There are so many different styles of gameplay on display over the course of the last few levels. They took the overarching concept and ran with it.

The final boss fight, however, is where the game truly shines. That fight is made up of so many different sequences of innovative gameplay, some of which I've literally never seen another game do. The creativity on display is unbelievable. The game is worth full price for this fight alone.

I was also impressed with how well the game handled discussing trauma. From the symbolism to the discussions between the characters of their respective trauma, this is one of the few games I've seen handle this even remotely properly. I attribute that to the fact that the writers were unafraid to really show players trauma in a realistic way. Most other games chase that big budget movie feel when it comes to showing traumatic events, which ends up ringing hollow. Split Fiction opted to let the characters feel their feelings and it's a memorable experience as a result. It is one of the few games I've played that truly matches the emotional depth of other mediums.

Surprisingly, despite being split-screen almost the entire way through and having modern graphics with beautifully rendered scenery, it ran fine on the highest settings on my now 8-year-old PC with a GTX 1080. There were a few moments where I lost a few frames, but it ran at a solid 60 frames per second throughout otherwise. It really puts other recent AAA releases (looking at you, Monster Hunter Wilds) to shame.

Buy Split Fiction. It manages to match the emotional depth of other mediums, provide a more cinematic experience than many other games, and offer great gameplay at the same time. There likely won't ever be another game quite like it.

Since Lethal Company was released, a lot of games have copied its basic formula. It's a simple, logical format to copy, hitting on the high notes of co-op and emergent gameplay that relies heavily on comedic events. So far, we've had games that take the basic concept and apply it to content creators with a death wish, investigative journalists, delivery drivers, and even spies.

R.E.P.O. stands apart from all of those by being polished and cohesive, even in its Early Access state. Its aesthetic is nearly perfect. The sense of scale is perfect. The environments are well-populated with objects that you can traverse more fluidly than in similar games. Environments are similar, but never feel repetitive in the way that they do in other games, as level generation seems to do a lot better about ensuring that you aren't seeing multiples of really recognizable set pieces like the broadcasting studio in The Headliners.

It also innovates in a number of ways. The entire game is heavily physics-oriented, down to having a dedicated button to throw yourself with. Objects have to be carefully carried with what is essentially a tractor beam, complete with the ability to adjust the distance that the object you're holding is from you and its rotation. Each object has a monetary value and, if you hit it against anything (or even drag it along the ground in some cases), it can lose value or even break. This adds a simple and intuitive, but still difficult, layer to gameplay.

The hide-and-seek gameplay of dodging monsters is much improved from similar games. Rather than just running away and trying to hide by closing doors, which are also physics-oriented and can be broken in R.E.P.O., you're required to hide under objects like tables and beds or even hide in cabinets to avoid monsters. This provides a much more reliable way of surviving.

That being said, survival is still challenging. The variety of monsters in the game is already significant and each one has its own twists. Some can chase you under objects, while others can't. Some have to be grabbed to kill them, while others will attack you if you grab them. It's a much more varied and unique set of monsters than I'm used to seeing in similar games.

There are also weapons to help with killing monsters, but I've yet to use them very much, as many of them are expensive and so are health packs.

Of course, it's often the small details that really make a game, especially a game like this, memorable, and R.E.P.O. has quite a few of them, be it the giant eyes on each player character staring awkwardly, the items that, when picked up, affect the player in different ways, or enemies that affect the player character in different ways. Your character will also move its head like a cartoon character when you talk and there's a text-to-speech function that is quite amusing.

It's clear that the devs of R.E.P.O. have been watching this evolving subgenre of games and have been taking notes. The game is already way beyond even modded Lethal Company in terms of unique features and the devs even went out of their way to make lobbies 6-player, rather than 4-player. And it's only in Early Access. I'm really looking forward to seeing what the final game looks like.

This may very well be the end of my time with Dead by Daylight. I finally crossed the 1000 hour threshold, so it's kind of fitting that I'd stop playing it here, but that's not the reason why I'm quitting.

Starting at the end of last year and reaching a fever pitch over Christmas, the number of killers that are truly terrible people who insist on wasting your time and making you feel like ♥♥♥♥ for daring to play Dead by Daylight is simply way too high. At its worst, something like 4/5 matches that my partner and I played were against someone who simply wants to make survivors feel bad. More than one of them literally slugged the last person, put them in the exit gate, then either grabbed them right before they could escape and pulled them back until they could Mori them or Moried them right before they could escape.

And this is just the norm now. People who run any of the myriad perks that will either make them have no heartbeat or allow them to consistently see survivors' auras and then will slug entire lobbies. People who will toy with you for no reason. People who will ensure that, if you get put in the basement, you're never getting out. There are no "goofy" killers anymore. There are no killers who seem like they want to be known as skilled anymore. There are simply psychopaths who want to torture people. Whereas you'd see these people sometimes before, you see them all the time now.

The part that makes it worse is it is at its worst in event modes. The people playing event modes during the last two major events are some of the worst people I've come across over several years with the game. Imagine being that much of an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in an event mode. That's insane.

On the off-chance that you don't end up against a psychopath, you usually end up with people who are actively trying to ruin your time on your side. We've had an increase in the number of people who will point you out to the killer, people who will simply do nothing as you die on the hook, people who will actively run the killer to you, people who will actively let the killer pull them off of gens and other interactables, and people who will play duos and, instead of trying to get anything done, alternate who gets hooked as they keep pulling each other the moment the other gets hooked.

Despite what anyone will tell you, this game has always been killer-sided. The way the game is designed, if an average of two survivors are dying in a match, it is balanced as intended. Way too many matches are starting with those two survivors dying at 4-5 gens, with my partner and I basically being stuck 2v1.

This game is not fun anymore. And the reason isn't because the game's changed, but simply because the problems that the community was aware of this whole time and kind of had an honor code about are being exemplified by either new blood being truly awful or renewed interest in being terrible people from the community at large, which may or may not be due to boredom, a natural progression for online games when people are bored, but refuse to quit and let everyone else have fun. However, the game's design also doesn't let the devs do anything about the problems at hand. Unless they were to completely rebuild it, this is just the game. As such, I'm done.

I decided to give the new update a shot.

The new UI is...awful. The biggest problem is that, while all of the components of the new UI look nicer than they did before, it is genuinely less functional, especially for editing loadouts.

In the old UI, you used to constantly have your loadout visible on the right side of the screen. You could click any slot to change the slot you were editing and it took a very short amount of time to build out a tools loadout, especially. Skins were shown either under the item itself (in the original format) or you could very quickly and easily click arrows on the item's info bar to change the skin.

In the new UI, you have to select a loadout slot, get taken to a completely separate screen with massive buttons for each icon, painstakingly scroll through all of them, hit a button to select a skin, get taken to yet another completely separate screen to select the skin, then back all the way out to the loadout menu and choose each new slot as you build your loadout, all while not being able to view your loadout as you're doing it. These new menus look more like what you'd expect an encyclopedia page for different types of items/skins to look like, not the loadout selection menu.

Other parts of the new UI are also annoying, such as mode selection having dedicated lobbies now, but the loadout UI is by far the worst. I like to build different loadouts based on what playstyle I feel like going with, how many people I'm playing with, and what they're carrying. I do not like using presets. Setting up a new loadout now takes 3-4x longer than it did with the old UI and is generally just extremely frustrating to actually manage.

That being said, the new map is beautiful. Finally, we get a map with dense tree coverage, natural mountain paths, and believable brush and debris. The map looks closer to something you'd see in theHunter than Hunt and that is a good thing. It feels much, much more natural than previous maps, has great verticality, and generally feels more theme-appropriate. This feels like the kind of area that would have a logging company based in it, way more than the old maps did.

The rest of the game is practically the same, so I'm still giving it a recommendation. Just wanted to give a fully qualified explanation of why the new UI is bad, rather than just saying it's bad, for anyone who might be interested in getting into the game post-1896 update.

EDIT: It's come to light that the devs are extremely sexist, so I can no longer recommend this. Give your money to other devs who respect women.

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This game is everything I wanted PlateUp! to be. The management aspects are great and the difficulty ramps up nicely over the course of the game. The gameplay modifiers for different difficulty levels are also fantastic and add a ton of replayability. I'm also a huge fan of roguelites and really enjoy the surprisingly thematic way that roguelite progression was implemented, as a combo of leveling up your characters (where levels are called "promotions" in-universe) and improving your house.

The devs apparently run an actual drink shop in real life and you can really tell that that's the case. There's a lot of care that went into designing this game that you just won't get elsewhere. For me, this is the pinnacle of the genre and I doubt we're going to see another game like it any time soon.