Recent reviews by impeus

Very laid back, chill game. Sweet stories in a lovely little community.

But despite the slow, relaxing pace, and small scale of the mechanics and setting - it stays interesting and compelling.

I am delighted by how 99% of the books are completely real (the ones which aren't are designated as such with ex libris stickers to avoid confusion), enjoy spotting some of my favourites in there - and have definitely added to my TBR based on the brief synopsis for each book given in the game.

Lovely :)

Absolutely lovely game. Adorable and fun and really sweet.

I've played several games over the years which feature photography, but in this game it's the core (almost the only) feature, and it does SO MUCH MORE with the idea. Really original.

Absolutely ridiculous.

Exactly what I needed today. Small bit of joy.

It's fun whether you are making TERRIBLE SOUNDS or perfect animal noises or inappropriate jokes.

It's all good. Best two pound fifty I spent in a while.

I first met this game as the physical version, with the dice and wipe-clean boards.

This digital version is faithful to the original, and I like the addition of the daily challenges.

The leaderboards encourage replay as well, so you can (hopefully) see your score improve against everyone else's.

A lot of recent reviews seem to mention server issues, resulting in the daily challenges being absent. I haven't seen this issue - the game has been completely reliable for me to date.

It would be lovely to see some of the other expansions (as well as the desert & forest ones currently included) added to the game, too.

Oof. Awful. Feel actually sick.
Horrible. And I'm not even sure who was what. Grim.

By the end I just wanted to throw myself down the trash chute.
Awful. Horrible. Grim. 10/10

Apparently it has taken me 14 years to complete this game.

It would appear that back in 2010 I refused to incinerate my companion, quit the game in impotent protest, and it's taken me until now to brave the dilemma again.

I don't RECOMMEND the game as such - it's more that playing Portal is an absolute necessity.

10/10 would incinerate my only friend again. Perhaps I'll be back in 2038 to complete the advanced levels.

(note: that will be 20:38 tonight after dinner, yes please thank you.)

I first played this game back in 2013, and loved it. A perfectly evocative slice of the nineties. I loved the realness and the music. I'm pretty sure that at the end of the game, I cried.

It felt like a really sad slice of what it was like to be queer (and a teenage girl) in the nineties. I wondered at the time if it was still like that now (then). I guess it is for many.

It's now 2024, and I replayed the game.

Sam's story is still there, and still very 1995. It's now almost thirty years later, and I would like to think that the Sams and the Lonnies of today would have an easier time of it. That in 15 years time, if someone wrote this same story but set RIGHT NOW, it won't hold that same familiar feeling this does to all the kids growing up right now.

BUT - the point of me writing a review today wasn't really to comment on Sam's story. It was about the other stories around the house. Did I miss them last time? Did I just not care as much?

Possible spoilers here maybe? I don't know.

The father's struggles as an author. The rejection from the publisher. The notes about his job as a hi-fi reviewer. The note from his father! The will. The evidence of his time as a child spent in this house, and its apparent abrupt end. The uncle's successful pharmacy, and his abrupt exit. The mother's job history. The small sneaks we see of her colleague. The book about marriage problems in their bathroom.

I don't know how I missed these last time? Or maybe I didn't, but they hadn't left such an emotional impact on me at the time. I'm coming back 11 years later, and now I guess I'm the crumbly old parent whose mundane life I overlooked before.

All these small hints building up pictures of these lives and relationships. Their conflicts and troubles.

And then the resolutions which start to tie it all up at the end.

A hopeful game. I'm going back in to find the last journal entry I missed...

I've left the house such a mess. Teenage me is actually feeling a bit anxious about the parents coming home & seeing all the opened cupboards, lights left on, items misplaced, evidence strewn on the bed.... maybe I'll go tidy up as well.

Though I suspect the parents will have larger concerns than where their concert stubs and notes on bookmarks ended up while I was rifling through all their possessions...

Important context: I have been playing AtS for 9 months now, with over 400 hours in game. I love it.

This is actually a really impressive piece of complex game balancing. There are quite a lot of moving parts in any AtS settlement, due to the effects of RNG on species types, biome, glades, blueprints, orders, events, etc. etc. etc.

It's A LOT to keep track of, and A LOT to effectively balance.

The base game comprises 5 species, the DLC adds one more.

Given that any particular settlement contains three of these species, with the base five, there are ten different combinations of species possible. These interact in various ways with synergies and contrasts across their varying needs and preferences, strengths, comforts, and service requirements. Balancing those ten combinations across the range of other variables must be really difficult, and I've always admired the way the dev team have taken that balance seriously throughout the game's development from Early Access to where we are now.

Adding one more species, to bring the total to six, actually increases the number of possible species combinations to TWENTY - that's twice as complex.

Not only have they had to balance the game with six species, they have also had to ensure that all the changes brought in to update 1.4 to manage this STILL leaves the base game balanced with the original five species.

This is an amazing accomplishment, and I think they've done it really well.

The new species and biome add a really nice twist. It's a thoughtful addition to the game. I'm glad I bought it.

Gameplay: late 90s/early 00s FPS arena-style combo-em-up
Visuals: mid-late 90s Quake clones
Level design: Roblox Studio on rails

I'm enjoying it though. And I'm progressing though really not sure how - I'm probably too old for this now. Blam blam blam flip ting mousewheel boom.

Am I likely to finish it? Hmm. I suspect I'll hit my skill ceiling soon. But... off to die trying, anyway.

**Editing to add some new comments after having now spent more than 400 hours in the game.**

My original comments about the gentle way you're eased into the gameplay still stand. It's a very tailored route into the game mechanics, avoiding the overwhelm / confusion which could be possible if dumped directly into EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE.

I am someone who has Too Many games on Steam. So many that there is no real way I ever have chance of completing them all. As such I tend to be a dabbler, and I have a casual dalliance with a game before moving on to another. These days it's quite rare that I spend so much time in a game that I finish it at all, never mind more than once. Very fickle.

And yet Against the Storm has managed to captivate me for both HOURS and MONTHS.

It has depth and complexity. It has forgiveness. It has challenge and novelty and familiarity and surprise.

I originally completely misunderstood the difficulty levels, thinking that once you've got to Viceroy or Prestige, anything after that was unnecessary posturing for gamer brownie points. As such, I probably spent longer than necessary at some of the lower levels before recognising the benefits (and necessity) of ramping it up to get further out on the map and attempt the higher level seals (and ultimately the additional game mode which unlocks later on).

But. I'm glad I stuck around long enough to fall in love with the game, and start progressing as the game designers intended.

The second the DLC dropped, I bought it no questions asked, zero regrets.

The dev team is active in the game's discord channel and hugely responsive.

Not long after a major update, I noticed a (very very minor) bug. My bug report was immediately picked up & verified, and I could then watch it progress through stages of resolution. Within hours, a fix had been written, and queued for the next patch. Absolutely brilliant team. I work in tech (though not game related) and so work with and around a lot of tech/dev teams and companies. It is an ABSOLUTE RARE DELIGHT to see a team who are so invested, responsive, and effective.

It's clear that the team care a lot about game balance, and while they listen seriously to feedback from the community of players, they recognise that their audience is not solely comprised of a few intense hardcore gamers, and tread an amazingly thin line which allows them to somehow cater to the type of gamer who trawls data & tests scenarios to produce masses of game stats & probabilities - and yet also stay accessible to the rest of us.

I don't even know which of those boxes I'd put myself in now - but I know that had they not catered to the potentially casual part-time gamer at the start of the game, I wouldn't have stayed around long enough to turn into the person who pulls a calculator out mid-game to aid decisions.

Oh, also, it's fun and engaging yadda yadda yadda. It looks good, and when you zoom in, you realise how absolutely gorgeous it really is.

tl;dr - hard recommend, big fan.


** ORIGINAL REVIEW, WRITTEN AFTER TWENTY SOMETHING HOURS OF PLAY **

Enjoying this! The random map generation means that it's always fresh and unpredictable, but each settlement is finite and fairly short. This (in theory) helps to prevent me from staying up until sunrise as it provides plenty of sensible break points.

It feels like there's lots to get into - but at the same time it hasn't been so overly complex as to create a high barrier for entry. It breaks you in quite gently, and then the randomness of the resources, events, settlers, and building blueprints (as well as the individual goals throughout each game) actively prevents overwhelm as it takes a while before you can thrown in loads of production buildings that you can't keep track of.

Excellent. I've played for hours already.