Recent reviews by Rheyan

Whilst this is a beautiful game and it's obvious that it is a labour of love, I cannot recommend it due to the very annoying gameplay. The basic premise of the game is to attract birds to your back yard which then generate eggs which is a currency you can use to buy feed to attract more birds, or various upgrades. The glaring problem with the game is that the birds will leave extremely quickly unless you click on them - we're talking just a few minutes.

The game is trying to be an idle game but it doesn't actually let you idle it. The only way you can keep the birds around for more than a few minutes is to buy the feeder and the birdhouse but both are very expensive and limited in the number of birds you can store which means the the mast majority of the gameplay you can't leave the game inactive or even close it or you will lose most of your birds. The rarest birds, the ones that generate the most eggs are generally the ones with the shortest timers.

Worse still, before you invest in the feeder, or if you have it but forget to press the start button, and then leave the game, you lose the whole damn lot - speaking from experience! It's at this point that I rage quit!

The game has potential but it's not tuned well for an idle game and there simply isn't enough to do for it to be considered an active game. If you have the patience to babysit it for several days then it's more playable but after losing all my legendary birds accidentally, that was the end for me.

Over the Counter is a frustratingly difficult game; be prepared to restart the game MANY times before getting a successful run! Although the mechanics are relatively simple when you get the hang of it, there's a depth to the game that isn't apparent at first. Many of the decisions you make will have long lasting ramifications that aren't immediately apparent.

For example, if you develop a very good drug that is very effective with few side effects, in a few years time you'll find that it isn't selling anymore because your drug was so good that there's no longer a demand for it. Thus to be effective you have to try to deliberately make BAD drugs that are either just not very effective or they have a ton of side effects that boost the sales of all your other drugs! (The game definitely casts a poor light on the pharma industry heh!) Similarly staffing decisions you make in the first couple of years can come back to bite you in later years. There are many more subtelties like this in the game.

I'm actually surprised this game is free. I loved the simple aesthetic, there weren't any bugs that I noticed and it seems generally well executed and polished aside from one glaring issue which you may have picked up from other reviews - it's overly random nature. Sadly you can't just rely on your skill at the game to do well... you need a lot of luck on your side and you can play the game for a few hours and think you're doing well and then a few unlucky events can destroy your run.

I managed to beat the "Average Joe" mode eventually but on the second one which uses marketing more effectively and only has 4 drugs to manage, I was doing pretty well and this mode felt a lot easier and then a few unlucky events just killed the run and I ended up rage quitting the game! But I had had 12 hours of free entertainment at this point so can't complain! If you can be okay with this frustration, there's a really good game here and it's free, so pick it up and have a go!

If we set aside the subject matter for a moment, and focus only on Change as a survival game with some rogue like elements, it's thoroughly entertaining. I was hooked immediately and had to keep restarting my run because it was really tough at first!

That's the point of course... it's supposed to be difficult and unfair and frustrating because I imagine that's the experience of a homeless person. I have no personal experience with homelessness but having played this game for 20+ hours, I think that if I was to meet any in real life I would be far more likely to actually stop and help if I could. I just feel more aware of their plight. The story that is woven into the game really adds to the overall feel if you take the time to read it. You can tell this game is a real labour of love and it absolutely won my heart,

So the game itself is fairly simple and can get a little bit repetitive but there are many ways to play and different scenarios to start off with. I played through about 4 times (after a few abandoned runs!) and I'm not done. Frequent perks and unlocks keep you coming back for one more run...I still have much that I haven't explored.

The pixel graphics for the city street were very well done, some of the animations were a little janky and I found the the ending sequence to be a bit jarring as it was very different and frankly, just a bit odd. There were a few minor bugs in places but nothing game breaking.

Overall, an awesome and moving game, well worth your time.

I don't like to leave negative reviews but I really can't recommend this game unless you're really bored and have nothing better to do for a few hours.

Anyway, the subject matter of hacking sounded interesting so I thought I'd give it a ago but "hacking" is very much a stretch... really you're just mostly reading email looking for a clue to a password for the next person to "hack". There's no real puzzle here, some guy likes baseball so his password is literally "baseball". Yup, it's that simple and other than a few mild deviations, that's the bulk of the game.

I guess it was mildly entertaining but the story that was uncovered as you progress is kinda silly. I know it's a free game and that is to it's credit, but still, there are many other free games out there that will give you far more entertainment value than this one.

I bought this game on a deep discount of 90% and it's on that basis that I write this review. If I had bought it full price, it would have been a "do not buy" review. What I liked about it is that it was simple, humorous and unapologetically silly. If you just want progress for the sake of progress, and easy achievements (it took me around 120 hours to get them all) then this game gives it to you.

However, there are some serious negatives. You have no clue what most of the stuff actually does - it's just a name and a number. Yes I know that's all that these games really are under the hood, but it was still annoying. Some of the items in the "Special" section were very unbalanced. For example there's a Hamster that I think cost a Trillion to buy but it only gives you 10k when you click on it, and this will be at a point in the game when you're making tens of millions per second, so it's utterly pointless.

Talking of which, the actual "clicker" elements of this game may as well not be there. They add so little and are not in any way satisfying. Really this is just an idler and there's not much to do, so I completed it because I like to finish things, but overall I just found the game pointless and boring. Really, the only reason to play it is the mild amusement from the poop factor, and the easy achievements.

Nice little incremental game. It could use a bit of a tutorial perhaps but it's easy enough to pick up. One thing I like is that in the options you can turn a bunch of stuff off which is handy when things speed up and get massively hectic!

It's got a lovely chill soundtrack, the progression felt really smooth, it was satisfying to play, and pretty easy to get all the achievements. The 56 hours gameplay is probably around a dozen hours of active play and the rest is letting the game idle in the background.

This is without a doubt the most emotional game I have ever played. I just finished my first playthrough which was utterly gripping... only for Anders to die in my arms at the last moment 😢 I was crying my eyes out! Of course, I will need to play again...

This is not an easy game to play, it's harsh, and every decision has real consequences that can sometimes run throughout the entire game. The writing is top notch, the art style is wonderfully cozy and atmospheric, and the music (which I turn off in 99% of games) is hauntingly beautiful and sets the tone of the game perfectly.

There are many choice points in the game, and even if I had saved Anders (honestly I thought it was a sure thing, I was stunned when he died at the end!) I was planning at least one more play through just to see different ways in which the game could play out and to experience more of the game.

I also felt like I learned a lot about the historic events that the game is based, but in a way that felt meaningful and personal, not like just reading an account from a text book for example.

The only criticism I had were that the intro sequence after the tutorial was a little long, and it would be nice if I could have been able to make Gerda move faster. These are minor ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ though, and I cannot recommend this game enough if you enjoy emotional story telling that tugs at the heartstrings.

Lovely little game, gets the point across in a simple and playable way. Nice ending... and great price! ;-)

I waited until the 1.0 release before playing Len's Island for the first time, though I had a good idea of what to expect from following the game on YouTube for some months prior to the 1.0 launch. There are many things that I love, a few things that I dislike, and some stuff in between.

My playtime at the time of writing this review is 46 hours but I should be clear that I'm still only on Act II of the main story as I re-started a couple of times to progress my character differently, and to experiment with different world settings. So right now, I have NOT experienced the full game. I may come back and edit this later on once I've experienced more of the game but I wanted to write a review to help the game out!

So I mentioned world settings - this is one thing that is brilliant! You can change so many things about the world you play in, in great detail so this really allows you to adjust the game to your playstyle. Len's Island is an ambitious game - it's a survival/craft game, a building game, and a dungeon crawler and even has tower defense if you want to partake.

What's great though is that you can opt-out of a lot of it. Don't like the tower defense? Just turn off the attacking enemies. Don't like the combat? You can change a whole bunch of settings to make it easier? Don't like easy mode? Crank up those settings in the other direction for a truly hardcore experience!

One thing you can't change though, and this is a negative point for me is that the world design, particularly within the dungeons include areas where you need to parkour to complete the dungeon. This turns these parts of the game into a kind of a platformer and for me, this part sucks! I love the farming, the building, the exploration and the dungeon crawling but I do NOT like parkour. Because it's built into the world design, it's not something that can be changed in the settings so you're stuck with it.

This is one of the reasons that I haven't progressed all that far in the main story. The dungeons are structured; each act has a main dungeon and to unlock that main dungeon you first have to complete three side dungeons so there's a general sense of progression within the game. Each dungeon rewards you with a loot chest at the end containing some powerful gear. You need the gear from the earlier dungeons to get powerful enough to complete the next one so there is a very linear progression here. The parkour though, irritates me and I've found myself just doing other stuff in the game instead.

One thing that I love is the art style of the game world. The characters are pretty poor (don't get me started on the main character who only has a male body type!) but the environments and all the building pieces are beautiful! It's a lovely world to wander around in and I was really looking forward to the exploration side of the game but this brings me to another couple of negative points. Firstly the camera - it's fixed in a very top down perspective making it difficult to see in front of you. There IS a mod that fixes this (I actually created a guide on that) and the devs have made some adjustments to the camera since launch but it's still very restrictive. I think they are planning on opening it up some more though.

The other issue, is that I just wanted MORE to explore. The islands feel very small. It can actually take a little while to navigate them but this is because you start out with a very slow run speed. Later in the game you can get upgrades and gear that let you move a lot faster but in the beginning it's artificially slow.

But the islands themselves are tiny. For some reason I was imagining in my head something much bigger - more like an open world sandbox style game but sadly, Len's Island just isn't that kind of thing. It's a relatively small world made up of a few tiny islands. Each time you create a new world the position of the islands is randomly generated but they are still the same islands each time but in a different place.

One area where the game really shines and has massive potential though is in the building system. You can create beautiful buildings right at the start of the game with the building materials you find in abundance around you. This is another area where the graphics are beautiful and a lot of care has gone into the building side of the game. Some awesome screenshots of people's creations are coming out. There are a handful of building styles to change the look. Len's Island has got the start of a brilliant system here but I do think it needs more - more styles, more building pieces, more decorations, if it really wants to shine as a builder game.

Lastly the combat - this is an area that you can really tweak to your hearts content. You can control with the mouse, keyboard, controller, some kind of combo and as I mentioned at the beginning there are many aspects of the combat that can be tweaked. There are several different weapon types and all of them felt very satisfying for me. When you charge in and destroy a huge horde of enemies in seconds it feels great. When a huge horde of enemies destroys you, not so much lol! But again, you can just change the settings if you want - you can literally change any setting at any time, it is not fixed at world creation.

Currently, I'm still playing the game but somewhat slowly. I'm keeping an eye on development, waiting to see what changes they will bring. I'll make my way through the story slowly but I'm not in any rush.

I really wanted to like this game! I absolutely LOVE the earlier Fallout games and it has to be one of my favourite game universes so the idea of an MMO set in Apalachia seemed like a dream come true!

I didn't play on initial release as I knew the launch was very rocky so I came to the game some years later when a lot more had been added to the game. I played quite a few months and as you can see from my game time, I gave it a good go.

First the positives - it looks gorgeous, it's got the look and feel of the single player games, there's a big world to explore and technically, there's a lot to do.

But the downsides for me far outweigh the positives - it's so repetitive! Most of the "story" is listening to tapes or reading old notes. Sure they added some new quests later with some proper voice acting but it's not a patch on the single player games. The events are just the same ones repeated over and over again. Yeah they're fun the first few times but after dozens of times it gets so boring. Yet, the game drives you to repeat all this stuff every day for the rewards. If you don't do it you feel left out.

It's marketing to our sense of FOMO at it's absolute finest! But it makes for a poor playing experience IMO.