Recent reviews by John the Baptist

crack

great writing other than the netflix-esque dialogue, animation so good i forgot this was a game a few times, gameplay was .... well its a "telltale" game in the same sense so the bar wasnt high. exceeds expectations.

drug

i am the greatest delivery man who ever lived, and the baby is my little bro

I feel really bad for not recommending this game. I love imsims, and everything in the store page suggested i would love this game. I wishlisted it and got it as soon as i had the money to pay for it. I was really happy to start playing. I started the tutorial and the player character made some comment. thats fine, im not big on voiced protagonists, but I appreciate that the developers put in the effort to flesh out this character. Then two seconds later she made another comment. and then another.... and then another. I played for five minutes and dont think i had five seconds without some painfully unfunny quip.

whats worse is that the quips were adding context to every single thing on screen, the instant they were visible. I couldnt begin to take anything in or have the opportunity to think for myself without the player character telling me what i was looking at. environmental jokes that would have been hilarious if i was allowed to have two seconds to stop and put the pieces together myself, but instead came across with the energy of a frenetic child who insists on explaining the joke before you can laugh.

this is definitely a subjective thing. if this kind of thing doesnt bother you in your games, then this game should be great. unfortunately for me, when im playing these kinds of sandbox imsim, im playing because i want to figure things out for myself. I want to stop and think and come up with a solution on my own terms, and while the answer to the one "puzzle" in the tutorial wasnt explicitly stated to me, the player characters constant quipping and explaining every single thing makes me feel like the developers have ZERO confidence in the players ability to think or connect any dots on their own. its infuriating and insulting, on top of being unfunny.

i remember seeing a suite of accessibility options. if this game had an option to make the player character shut up outside of any cutscenes or whatever, I probably would have LOVED this game. but it doesent, so instead it feels insufferable. maybe this is just for the fifteen minutes, and then from then on shes a mute or something. I dont know. but even if that were the case, those first five minutes left a shockingly bad impression and i dont think i could bring myself to bear another ten, even if the rest of the game was brilliant.

again, this is all subjective, you might like this sort of thing. I know a lot of modern AAA games are like this, so i guess someone has to like it. I dont. again im sorry.

I cannot recommend anything that i find this distasteful.

i certainly dug a hole

Its a lot like Kenshi

sword

you know what the ♥♥♥♥ this is

its fine as a horror game, but the horror is mid tier
its fine as a waifu simulator, but theres no real simulation
that being said, its much more than the sum of its parts. tense and engaging from its horror, but shameful and gratifying for its other aspect. invites you to indulge then calls you out for doing so in a way that doesnt feel underhanded.
the art style and mechanics feel limited at times, but then you remember that you're stuck in a mobile game and realise this was probably intentional (good choice for a very small indie studio)
its also fun