Recent reviews by LavenderTheLuminous

While I'm definitely still giving this a recommendation, it is a less enthusiastic recommendation than any of the other mainline games in the To The Moon series. Whereas the other games weave complex webs of interesting, layered mysteries that carefully manage emotions, intrigue, and sinister subplots, Beach Episode feels a lot more... tame.

It's not that there isn't a mystery going on; the premise is set up pretty early. My main disappointment is that it doesn't really evolve over the course of the game. You get a moment where the game reveals what's so strange about it, and then you just get hit with that same oddity over and over again. You don't really learn more about it until after the credits, where the game basically just stops and tells you the twist outright. And, to be clear, it's not a bad twist, nor is it poorly presented. It just doesn't hit as hard as any of the other games without the gradual process of discovery leading up to it.

The game is also considerably shorter; my playthrough was only 2.5 hours, and I dawdled quite a bit. There's a lot of cool stuff from past games to revisit, and little interactions (that are well written and beautifully animated, as always) to find. But, ultimately, this feels more like an epilogue than a proper entry in the series. The twist at the end gives a pretty good indication of what the premise of the next (and as I've heard, last) game, will be. And if I'm right on that, it will likely make this game feel even more like an epilogue. I just hope they're able to finish it off with one final truly great entry to close out the series. (Though I would always accept more followup games in this universe, even if they're following different characters. I love the way these games flow, and the stories are obviously incredible)

(Spoilery part here just for a gripe that I possibly just missed the follow up on:

Early on, you're told you should see bioluminescence in the water last night, next time. This clearly hints at the time loop aspect, but in the next loop if you go talk to her, she says there's a spot for you to watch it if you come back in a few hours. But if you continue up the elevator, you get locked into the twist ending cutscene for the rest of the game. Is there a way to actually see the bioluminescence that I missed? Or is that just a wierd plot thread that doesn't actually have a payoff?)

This is the slowest paced idle game I've ever played. If you're looking for a game that you interact with once for a few minutes and then get hit with a 12+hr cooldown before you can do anything else, this game provides.

Personally, I'd recommend against it. There are plenty of other idle/incremental games with more compelling gameplay and fewer, less-intrusive microtransactions.

I got this game like a year or two ago from a humble bundle It seemed like a neat Rust-like game, but the combat was extremely boring, so I gave it a break to see if they'd improve it. I tried it again today and I don't think anything has changed. Maybe some number tweaks or something, but the combat experience feels identical to my first time.
First of all, the guns are way too easy to hit with. To put it in perspective, I think I've gotten into 5 to 10 pvp encounters where both players had a ranged weapon, and across ALL of those fights, I've seen maybe 4 or 5 bullets miss, and almost all of those were from one SMG fight. There's nothing you can do to get an advantage over someone with even slightly better gear. You can't get a positional advantage by using cover (98% of the map has none) or increase your dps with headshots (they don't exist) or even stealth/ambush (anyone you can see can also see you). Also, it has an extremely high TTK, it takes several seconds of sustained fire to kill a single person in T4 armor with a T4 gun (You literally don't have enough bullets in a mag to kill, so you also need to reload at least once). This turns combat into a nothing more than a stat check: whoever's gun has higher effective DPS just wins unless someone goes AFK or forgets how to press the left mouse button. Maybe the combat gets better in the super late-game with large groups, but even if it does, I don't want to play 10+ hours of boring combat and grindy collection just to get to something that might be more fun.
There are games that do top-down pvp shooting well, such as Super Animal Royale, but these rely on quick kills and vision-blocking cover to keep combat dynamic and give opportunities for skill to matter.
It's a shame, too, because the rest of the game is pretty solid, and there are definitely ways that cryofall could improve its combat, but given how long it's languished in its current state, I strongly doubt it'll see much improvement.

I would say that this game is very close to being what it's trying to be, but I'm not really sure what that is, or whether it will be "good" when it gets there.
The game currently has a number of technical issues that impact gameplay, but I trust that these will be ironed out over the next few weeks, so I won't be focusing much on these.
What I will be discussing in more detail are some of the more inherent design decisions that I think could hamper the game in the long term.
1. Maps are big, and characters are slow. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it heavily limits your ability to rotate around the map, which means it's very hard to react to your opponent's actions. Although this could lead to some interesting strategies, I fear that this could lead to promote very passive playstyles that just focus on controlling harvesters and neutral enemies to gain a significant level advantage to sweep the endgame, robbing the game of the big, impactful teamfights it seems to market.
This also leads to many long, boring walks around the maps where nothing much happens except spamming your movement ability on cooldown. Shooters tend to avoid this with tight map design and fast movement, while MOBAs typically address this by allowing the user to automatically walk to their destination while the player is free to unlock the camera and look around the map to get a sense of what the other players are doing. Crucible seems to have taken the worst of both worlds in this regard, and doesn't really do anything new or interesting to counterbalance that.
2. Balancing feels impossible for many characters. The primary reason for this is the decision to include 2 primary modes; what makes a character good in a 4v4 map-control focused game is very different from what makes a good battle royale character, so I'm highly skeptical that it will possible to balance each character for one mode without massively under/overpowering them for the other.
One character I want to specifically point out is a sniper-style character, who has a 2.5x headshot multiplier. Why on earth is this multiplier so high? This means that people who are really consistent at landing headshots (occasionally really good players, but mostly probably cheaters) will have insane damage output compared to the average player. So you either have to balance around the top 1% and make the character useless to everyone else, or you balance around the average player and let faze clan and cheaters solo carry every game. This could obviously be fixed by buffing the base damage and lowering the headshot multiplier to something more reasonable, like 1.5x, but these tenuous balancing decisions lower my confidence in the long-term balance of the game even further.
3. I don't see many opportunities for interesting strategic decision making. The game lacks many of the strategic elements that are common in the MOBA and Hero shooter games it's basing itself on. For example, the game lacks "Ultimate" abilities (high-power abilities that must be used sparingly due to long cooldowns, high costs, or both). These are pretty ubiquitous in modern MOBAs and hero shooters, so their absence is surprising. These abilities are generally implemented to increase the strategic depth, since a well executed ult can turn the tide of a battle, and a botched ult can give the other team a chance to come back. Managing your ult cooldowns and controlling fights around them can win a game even if the enemy's raw mechanical skill is better, diversifying the skillset needed to perform at a top level.
Another major missing piece is the lack of meaningful character upgrades/specialization. You do get to choose 3 of your level-up perks, but these are typically just a small power boost for one of your abilities, and disappointingly they have to be selected before the match. This means that you can't make the strategic decision to take a defensive upgrade because an enemy keeps diving you, instead there will almost always be a objective "best" option with little reason to deviate. The fact that your team shares xp also means that power spikes are flattened out and more predictable when compared to other MOBA style games, limiting strategies that make use of power spikes to gain an advantage. All of this could be fine if there were other sources of strategic depth, but I don't see anything here yet.

Overall, the game was functional and had some fun moments; if you've got time to spare and are looking for another game to play, this can be a good time. However, there are several fundamental design choices that I feel reduce the strategic depth, and will likely cause substantial balancing troubles down the line. While these could, of course, be addressed through patches and content releases, it would likely require a pretty major shift in design philosophy, and a large effort to overhaul some of the game's core systems.
I'll probably still check back in on this game every so often, and edit this review if I feel it has changed for the better (or worse, I suppose).

This game is absolutely amazing, the best I've seen since spelunky. It takes a bit to get used to the gameplay, but once you do it's really comfortable, intuitive, and fair. The gameplay is Difficult, it took me an hour or so to beat the first zone, and a day or two to get to zone 4. But the fun does not stop after beating zone 4, there are plenty of other characters to play that each bring their own unique challenge to the game, and also a daily challenge mode that lets you compete with friends and the entire community for the top score each day. All in all, I would definitly reccomend this to anyone, regardless of interest in rougelike or rhythm genres.