Recent reviews by DozeNaps

I noticed that they got a narrator/advisor that sounds a lot like the old one. Not sure if it's the same person or just convincing expy, but that's neat.

A lot of the basic mechanics of Majesty are here. At it's core, this game is majesty... but less colorful. With less flavor. Less funny lines.

I detect almost no sense of humor so far in the entire game. Not a single voice line even made me chuckle. They are.. functional. That's the best I can say for the voicing.

The AI needs some polish - especially in a game where you can't directly control the heroes, it's important that they not get stuck and jam, unable to complete tasks. I noticed it happening at least 4 times in the tutorial scenario.

Hotkeys are more limited than in Majesty. I used to be able to right click on things and get a bounty flag based on contexts (camps and enemies would spawn an attack flag, locations an explore, etc). That function doesn't exist now, you have to drag and drop every flag, which is annoying.

The UI is a little confusing, too. A lot of upgrades in buildings have unclear images, and there is no flavor text on anything. For instance, enemies used to have a little blurb about what they are that introduced a bit of humor or lore (like wolves being described as having heroes as their favorite food)

All in all, I would describe this as majesty flattened out and scraped away of anything resembling a personality that might make someone want to keep playing. Just buy Majesty, it's still for sale and only requires a little bit of reparative modding depending on where you get it.

An interesting little demo! Probably the thing I liked least about it is how quickly it was over. I'm dying to know what's with that bat knight, and if that lion mayor is secretly the villain (he's giving me secret villain vibes)

I get some of the criticisms of other negative reviews - I haven't played many souls-like games, but I know enough about them to recognize some of the signs of the gameplay mechanics. Respawn points,a resource that you lose if you die twice before retrieving it, which can even be stolen by the boss who killed you, preventing you from recovering unless you beat them on your second try. There's even something like estus flasks that refill every time you enter a respawn area.

Looking over the original kickstarter that I signed up for in 2022, I see a few subtle hints that I now understand to mean 'this game will have souls-like mechanics', but the game that I donated to the kickstarter of was mostly advertising itself as a zelda-esque game based on the aesthetics of the game boy color era.

I can't pretend I'm completely pleased with that, I suspect if they had been more transparent about their vision at the time, I might not have backed it. However, I don't exactly hate this game either. I had a bit of fun playing it, and would like to see more, but I do feel a little disappointed, as if someone had pulled a bait and switch on me.

Perhaps given that shovel knight shares some of these gameplay mechanics (such as loss of resources unless you can retrieve them before dying again), I should have expected this from the same developer, but it's still something I'm not a fan of, since the market is a bit oversaturated with this kind of game right now. Maybe 3 years ago, it wasn't.

Either way, I can't say it was frustrating enough in the small sample I got that I want to downvote it. So, this gets my tentative thumbs up, but with a slightly disapproving frown.

An interesting premise for a game - essentially, what if you crossed Paper Mario and Spiritfarer? Apparently, something like Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo. The basic premise is that you are in a sort of purgatorial afterlife zone called Limbo where souls who cannot pass on resolve all their leftover stuff.

Initial thoughts a few hours in - I have to admit that while I love this game so far, it can be a little hit and miss. The problem is that the tone is a little dissonant. On the one hand, you're dealing with leftover trauma and baggage of souls, and that is liable to make you want to cry - this can be a good thing if like me, you enjoy media that makes you cry.

On the other hand, they also cut in humor a lot. This isn't necessarily a problem - Spiritfarer also utilizes humor to good effect. The problem is the timing of humor in Kulebra. there have been several instances where something really tragic is going on, only for the game to suddenly turn silly, causing tonal whiplash.

I don't think this makes it necessarily a bad game - it's still fun, and I'm liking the story so far. But it does make it a bit hard to take some things as seriously when they oscillate so abruptly between silly and tragic.

All in all, I think this was worth kickstarting.

A very nice little game. It made me cry and have feelings the whole way through. An excellent example of storytelling.

... However, I honestly hesitate to really call this a game. There are... elements that are gamelike... and I think they made a stab at attempting to do puzzles with the cooking sections, but they are such weak puzzles that even a child would be able to figure them out.

That isn't to say it wasn't engaging. But this game in its entirety can be completed in around an hour (or less), and the emotional impact of the story far outweighs any token game elements.

Frankly, I wish it had been a bit longer. The story place over about 30 years of the family's life, but each scene is followed by a timeskip of about 5-10 years.

There really isn't time to experience the family or their cooking beyond these brief snippets of their lives, almost all of which revolve around cooking. There are less than 10 cooking events in the entire game. I still recommend checking it out, though.

I was originally drawn to this game because it was marketed as a spyro-like.

Unfortunately, upon playing it, I discovered that it WAS like a Spyro game, but not the ones I liked. Aside from a few small aesthetic choices, this game follows the path of the Spyro remake - rather than being a comedic platformer collection/puzzle game (as the original spyros were), this is a combat based action-platformer (akin to Legend of Spyro). Everything has health bars, and you have to button mash out combos of attacks to whittle down enemies.

And even if I had been interested in an action fighter, the actual combat is really bad. There doesn't seem to be any particular aiming or guidance system for attacks, so you have to fight with the camera and controls to even hit an enemy with your combos, many of which are direction based. The number of times I tried to do a combo that whiffed past an enemy got really annoying.

The voice acting was also a bit tepid. It's my understanding that a number of people worked together to provide voice acting for this game, and it's clear a lot of them were not exactly the most skilled at voice acting. Many lines come off very clearly as read off a script, and lack tonal context for the scene they are in. One of the dragons is voiced by the actor of Sly Cooper, and the writers were so excited about this they slipped in multiple references to this fact in the conversation, all but winking at the audience. It was very distracting.

Ultimately, I can't say that I recommend it, if you are looking for a classic Spyro experience. Those who liked Legend of Spyro might be into it, but I wasn't. I become bored of the monotonous combat and dull characterization a half hour in, but maybe I will try again another time.

It seems like the creator of the game released this as a standalone prequel game, since the original team and project was cancelled due to his inability to properly manage it (though I will give him points for doing this before he took the kickstarter money, rather than after...) There was talk about redoing the game in Unreal 5, but who knows if that will actually ever happen, or when.

I have mixed feelings on this game, but I'm going to downvote it because my overall impression was negative.

However, I will provide as complete a review as possible, good and bad.

From a technical standpoint, this game does some interesting new things I haven't seen before in other graphic novels. While I can't say I've read every one, this is the first one I've seen that implements narrative asides - both conversations that happen between your party members without you participating, and a sort of 'meanwhile' mechanic where you see things that happen far away from you between people you may not have met yet in game. It's an interesting way to tell the story, but the 'Parallel Chronicles" does somewhat suffer from a few limitations. For instance, all of them are bound to a specific location on the world map, and sometimes you have to backtrack to find chronicles you haven't seen before. You only find out because they are conveniently numbed to let you know you missed one when you see a new one available. It would have been much more elegant to simply have a screen where they are all shown and unlock as you progress the game.

They also sometimes undercut the narrative - there was one instance where the shadowy villain visits me in a dream to try and 'sow doubt' in me, only for me to shortly after see a scene where they congratulate themselves on doing so. You can't trick the reader and tell the reader about the trick after, that's like wanting to have your cake and eat it too.

There is also a 'book' system, where some locations will have a little bit of flavor narration about the world in the form of a 2 page entry that someone in the world wrote. They contribute very little to the plot, but are useful for expanding a bit more on the world you're in. It would be nice if there was a little more meat to them, but I guess they're sufficient as an exposition medium. What I do not like is having to pixel hunt for them. You know how many of them are on a given screen, and how many you have found, but not where they are. That is annoying, and distracts from the game's flow. Pixel hunts were not fun when were first conceived, they still aren't.

Let's move on to aesthetics. The art in the game clearly has some effort put into it, and many of the scenes can be quite pretty. However, the character design is something I find severely lacking. As far as I can tell, there are only two kinds of men in this word - skinny boys, and musclebound warrior men. There is no middle ground or variation beyond these two body types. No one is ever old, or fat, or infirm, or sick. No one has scars or missing teeth (but there is one pirate with an eyepatch. A pirate with an eyepatch, how exotic). At least half of them have exposed torsos and chests, so you can see their hot bods. There is only like 3 female characters in the game, so there isn't enough of a spread for me to make analysis on there.

Some times, their designs barely make sense for their role in the story. The 'elder' in your home village looks like he's in his mid 20's, and wears this sort of overcoat that covers his arms but leave his torso on full display. The high inquisitor villain only wears a couple of straps, walking around looking like he is naked except for the rare times you can see enough of his model to show that he is wearing pants. The prisoner character is somehow allowed to be dressed at all times in hotboy soldier armor that only covers his chest and shoulders and leaves his slim midsection open for you to oogle. At one point, a skinny character talks about how he 'used to be fat', and how he 'fixed himself', so I suspect there's a bit of body shape bias coming into the writing and design here.

These design aesthetics come off as powerfully horny to me, and it distracts from what is evidently supposed to be a serious story about war, tyranny, and deception. There is even one section where a side conversation between two characters drags the reader through a bit about one of them handling the other's sword in way that is clearly supposed to imply that he is touching their ♥♥♥♥. The joke is extremely unsubtle and played out at this point, we've all seen this gag by now. Is this a dating sim, or a story about war and rebellion? Maybe the lines are simply more blurred than I personally feel comfortable with.

So, that brings us to the characters themselves. They're... competently written, I suppose, if a cast of cardboard cutouts of different kinds of sexy men (and the 3 ladies) is something you find interesting to read about. They all have an archetype and stick with it, even if it isn't clear what the archtype is at first. Even the main antagonist goes through a pretty standard 'my evil masters betrayed me so I join the good guys' arc. There were a few surprises, I admit, but I dunno if there were enough to make this cast feel really fleshed out.

This appears to be one of those games where every cast member is a potential romantic interest, but given that two of them are questionably underage (people mention they look too young to drink at one point) I'm a little uncomfortable with some of those options. At least the two romance paths I did poke at seemed alright. Kinda felt like an afterthought more than a romance plot, though.

As for the story... the world exists as a series of flat paintings that a small cast people inform you about. This it difficult to feel empathy when they begin bemoaning the terrible things happening in the world. As an example, my two 'friends' often lapse into sad diatribes about how sad it is that our village is going to be destroyed but to me, the village in question is simply 5 or so background scene artworks and 3 people. I am supposed to feel sad, because they feel sad, and are informing me that now is the time to feel sad, about people that exist only in the narration. So much of what happens in this game you are simply informed of, rather than shown, and the game seems breathlessly eager to repeat and over-explain plot points as if it is worried you will miss them if it doesn't hold your hand the entire way.

This is really disappointing, because there is the skeleton of an interesting plot in here, about breaking eternal cycles of life and death and a conflict between ultimate evil and life. It's just buried under layers of meaningless padding.

But in the end, the most frustrating aspect of the writing of this game is probably that it refuses to let you make a single meaningful choice. Not one choice in the game ever lets you actually do what you wanted to and live with consequences. It frequently PRETENDS that it does, encouraging you to agonize about your choices, only to shortly after reveal some as yet unforeseen plot twist that means the entire binary option was meaningless, and everything returns to the status quo. There are SO many fake out deaths in this game, it's exhausting. SPOILERS FOLLOW:

The only time when characters actually start to die is at the very end of the game, and after fiddling around a little, I determined whether they die or not appears to be based on decisions you make, many shortly before the Final Battle. At yet, even with that single instance of allowing real consequences to occur, they ultimately take your final decision in the game away from you, making it meaningless. You are presented with a choice of ultimate sacrifice or self preservation, but don't be fooled - no matter which one you pick, after the epilogue there is yet another scene that completely robs the expected consequences of your supposed choice of any real impact.

The amount of time I have in this game is very small at the time of writing this review, but I feel like now is when I want to give my initial thoughts because I am already so fed up with this game that I can't have it open anymore. I received this game as a gift, mostly because I was anxious about actually purchasing this game due to the things I heard about it making me nervous I would not enjoy it. My anxiety has been founded so far.

There are positives to Settlemoon. It's got a cute art style, simple and pixellated, and given that I've met the artist for the game I know that's their strength, design wise. However, sometimes the designs can b a little varied in quality. I saw a really cute anteater holding a letter with a little hat and backpack, and it just about melted my heart. The vast majority of the sprites in the game are of somewhat less quality though. Many of them are just grainy pixel shapes that might be bugs or something, but I couldn't precisely tell you what kind. The scenery in the background is pretty, and there are some very pretty moths.

However, the real killer for me is the lack of player feedback and direction. I can handle a game that leave you to explore and puzzle out the world you are placed into in a diagetic way, sure. But the creator of this game has taken it upon themselves to make the game non-diagetically confusing, with even the UI elements being only partially explained. There is almost no text in this game with nearly all UI elements being presented as only buttons with images on them, and the tutorial section dispenses with text entirely directs you to what things to press by having a moth flutter around and land on buttons.

It's certainly a creative approach to a text free tutorial, but I did not find it sufficient. I am not the kind of person who enjoys being constantly confused and feeling lost. I would draw a comparison between this game and Tunic, a game which also plays with non-diagetic obfuscation of gameplay elements, but the problem is that unlike Tunic, which is an active game which provides you with something to do by capturing the drive to explore that Zelda games mastered, Settlemoon has made the choice to be an idle game, where the primary gameplay loop is waiting around for stuff to happen.

As such, after playing this game 10 minutes, and reaching the end of the bare bones tutorial, I know barely anything about how to play this game. I don't understand the UI, I don't understand the time frames I'm supposed to be sinking into this game or how often I should be checking back, and I'm left staring at a bunch of pixellated bugs clustered around a tiny house I made, doing bugger all. Did I do it right? Am I supposed to be something else, or just waiting? What is the purpose of the green stuff I put into a cup? Am I serving some kind of drinks? Is the tiny house a tavern?

The fact that I don't know anything about what is going on is a problem for me. I do not like being confused and uncertain of what I am supposed to be doing. To enjoy something, I need to be able to intuit a direction to go in, not just stare blankly at the screen in total bewilderment for minutes on end. If I was in Tunic right now, I would be hunting around for some hidden tunnel or chest I must have missed. But this is Settlemoon, and I don't even have pages from a game manual written in a made up language to try and decipher here.

There are clearly people that like this game, but it stresses me the hell out. I might poke at it later, to see if waiting changed anything, but I feel like it won't have.

I received this game as part of a humble bundle, so did not pay for it directly. Given that it's value was significantly discounted for me, I am inclined to be a little more generous to it than I would have been had I paid the retail price.

There's an interesting game in here, no doubt. Or rather, there are 5 smaller games with wildly different tones and themes stitched together as part of an overall narrative about the SCP foundation. One of them managed to make me sad cry, and I happen to be the kind of person who likes to sad cry in response to media I consume.

However, it must be said that my experience with the gameplay itself was less than stellar. There are several 'chase sequences' in the game, and none of them are done very well. Every time felt like it was trial and error figuring out the right way to run so the [redacted] didn't get me, and sometimes they seem to move faster than others, like their AI behavior is inconsistent and you just have to fail again and again until they go slow enough to let you escape. The game never supplies any context clues upon being caught by the [redacted] in question that could indicate the changes in movement speed are intentional or part of a behavior I'm misinterpreting, just a game over screen that 'helpfully' reminds you to run away when something is chasing you. THANKS, I DIDN'T KNOW THAT.

Over 4 times I was also forced to quit the game and start over due to bugs or performance issues such as falling through the floor into a grey void instead starting a cutscene, the game failing to load a new area and sitting eternally on black screen, and one part near the end where I was forced to abandon the game entirely, unfinished, because a room the game takes place in makes the game chug so badly that it grinds to a standstill and softlocks, reducing to less than a frame per second, with the audio jumping all over itself and skipping.

I honestly can't fathom what about that room was causing the issue. It was a fairly small, dark room with no complex animations inside it, all that was visible were two doors with a red and blue light over them (because they were making a tired matrix reference. Not even exaggerating, the phrase 'go through the blue door, and you'll stay in wonderland, and I'll show you how deep the rabbithole goes' is uttered by a voice actor in the game at this point). I tried rebooting the game twice to load that area, and both times the game just ground to a halt, unable to load the area, and had to be closed via task manager.

I guess 25 year old movie references were simply too much for this game to process, sad.

That experience being the end of my playthrough, I still can't say I disdain this game. There was some real effort put into creating these stories, and at times the art direction in the game is breathtaking... they pick an interesting medley of SCP entries ranging from mysterious existential dread, to scary horror, to goofy (but still deadly), to sad and whimsical. It's a real rollercoaster!

But they really, really needed someone more experienced in coding to go over this game and iron out the many awkward kinks and jankiness that's in it. It's definitely one of those games where there were great artists and writers involved but not the best coding team.

It seems like the producers broke up for unclear (and probably personal) reasons though, and this game is unlikely to get any further patches or content. Who knows, though. It's at least worth looking at as a piece of SCP gaming history.

In many ways, Dwarf Fortress is the Ur-example of an entire genre of games that may not have existed without its creation. We have this game to thank for excellent titles like Rimworld, Oxygen Not Included, and I suppose more average but not necessarily terrible titles like Gnomoria, Clanfolk and Caves of Qud (though I haven't really played either of those last two, so your own mileage may vary).

However, it must be said that being the primeval version of an entire genre of gaming does not necessarily mean it is the best version in all ways. Older is not always better, and in many ways, Dwarf Fortress has been left behind by modern iterations of its genre. The graphical edition on steam has made great strides to improving the UI of the game and make things more readable, but the underlying jank of the game is inescapable. Playing this game after playing Rimworld unavoidably brings to mind minor frustrations that the Dwarf Fortress game engine has baked in - why is it impossible to build flooring unless there is nothing currently in that space? Even a chair or door in the way will result in the game refusing to let you lay down flooring, and sometimes even dwarves (or kobolds, if you are using the mod) standing in the way can make construction plans suspend themselves. Construction is also impossible in diagonals, so many times your fortress will build around a corner and then be unable to finish the wall because the corner piece of blocked off, requiring you to disassemble a wall, finish the corner, then rebuild a new wall.

These are just small examples of QoL improvements that were added into newer iterations of the genre, but still haven't quite made it into Dwarf Fortress. Selecting building materials is another such hassle, as there are DOZENS of types of wood and stone in the game, and each one appears on a list of material options. Or you can just select 'pick nearest material' and watch a patchwork ugly floor and wall be constructed of 6+ different colored materials. I don't necessarily blame the dev for this - as I understand, Tarn was a solo dev for over a decade on this game. And it was the first of it's kind, so props to that.

However, I suspect that trying to comprehend and fix all the spaghetti contained within the code of this game would be enough to drive another poor soul mad. Mad!! What Tarn did wrong people were able to see and build better in later games, though.

That being said, if you can work around the jank of the clumsy systems in the game, in many ways it has more complexity and depth than anything else the newer games manage. What it lacks in polished systems and UI it more than makes up with in the scope of what is possible.

Where else can I build a fortress on the side of a volcano, dig deep underground and create a machine that, with the flip of a switch, floods the overworld with lava, melting those damn goblin raiders into slag? And should a forgotten monstrosity try to crawl from the depths into my fortress, they'll have to slither over half dozen fully armed traps stuffed with steel giant serrated blades. More like forgotten lunchmeat, am I right?

And there are many other delightful things you can discover hidden within the mechanics of the game. Do you want your fortress to become a bastion of learning, where scholars and sages come from afar to peruse your vast library and pen their own tomes within it? You can do that! Do you want to capture a dragon in a cage and use it to burn anyone who tries to enter your fortress? I wouldn't recommend it, it will very likely go horribly, but technically it's possible!

And that's really the core of the fun of Dwarf Fortress. There are so many creative ways to manipulate this vastly complex game engine to see and do things you wouldn't have expected. But the learning curve is very steep! You will fail very often, and in ways that are more esoteric and frustrating that anything you would see in Rimworld. Just wait until you have to deal with a werecreature plague that gets worse every full moon, an attacking bronze titan, or a loyalty cascade. Or you're going to discover what lies in store if you dig too deep!

You're going to ♥♥♥♥ up and everyone is going to die, multiple times! Over and over! But every time you will learn from the experience, and the next time, you'll do better. Unlike modern games, there is no difficulty settings. The only gameplay setting is Dwarf Fortress (I mean, you can edit the world settings during generation I guess, but that's not going to do a lot to change the overall gameplay).

That's why the mantra of this game has long been: Losing is Fun!

Buy it now and experience it for yourself. Do it. And get the kobold mod, it's really cute.

11/2/2024:

Review is being revised to include the latest DLC.