Recent reviews by miscu

Going against the grain to say that while there's a lot the game has to offer, like the fun schmovement tech and the goofy comedic sensibility, the high-level design just isn't there.

Even if you play totally efficiently, you are likely going to lose unless you adhere to a limited set of viable builds due to how quickly the game scales enemy health and damage. Weapons like Dexecutioner are practically guaranteed wins. Almost everything else is a total struggle to clear tier 1 of each level. By nature, this is a genre that has very little mechanical involvement from you, so it's crucial to encourage build diversity so that every run isn't just building the same few weapons (made even worse when unlocking items, thereby polluting the drop pool with undesirable options).

Aesthetically and sonically it's generally great. The movement feels pretty good, though I'm not a fan of how quickly momentum gets cut off when going from sliding to running. There's *theoretically* a lot of variety in unlockable characters and weapons, and a host of optional challenges to clear. It's just a shame that all of those positives are let down by the game's meta being so narrow and boring.

My advice to the dev would be to take a close look at items that players often don't pick and rarely ever clear full tier 3 runs with. Figure out ways of creating more powerful synergies that encourage players to experiment. It's okay if the game becomes a little easier as a result, and obviously people will always sus out the most optimal build anyway, but that doesn't mean every other build should be completely non-viable. I'll likely be dropping the game until there's some sort of design overhaul, though I'm not confident that will happen with how much glowing reception the game has gotten thus far.

This is a one-shot seemingly funded by a Polish government art grant. It's extremely short, basically one time-shifting puzzle and a playable music video. I'd probably play an entire game that refined these ideas, but it's a neat little experience that gives a bite-size view of a potentially bigger story. I'd love to have more experimental stuff like this.

I'd already gotten spoiled on the game vis-a-vis the Eyepatch Wolf video, but despite that, I had a great time combing through it on my own.

The quick and dirty is, this is a sokoban-esque puzzler where you move around tiles in each level to reach the exit, but have to work around severely limited movement options. This whole part of the game is catnip for anyone who loves these block-based puzzles, and even as they get deviously difficult later on, I was still savoring the process of finding the solution after dozens of hours.

And the other part of it, which is best to know as little about, is the meta information discovery a la Fez, Tunic, Outer Wilds, etc. You stumble upon cryptic information and need to slowly piece together the clues to discover secrets that totally reshape the entire game. I can't say for certain if I would have figured these out without consulting external wikis/guides, but I do love how clever most of them are.

I won't say much about the story other than it's a dark yet cute tale of a mother and daughter and the extradimensional sapphic nightmare polycule who terrorize them. It's good.

If I had one major critique of the game, it's that I wish there was a "please stop closing the game all the time" option since it does get pretty overused as a presentational tool. Otherwise I can't recommend it enough. Go in with as little information and take notes whenever you can, it's a fantastic little nesting doll of a game.

Still working through it and generally enjoying the game quite a bit, it's a solid brawler with some Power Stone influence (an easy appeal to me). Good music all around and I'm a fan of the voice cast here, though cutscenes can drag a bit. The gameplay is a bit floaty and the bosses are a little trial-and-error, but I'm not the sort who minds having to replay levels in order to redo the boss fights.

Nitpicks: I wish you could navigate menus with the dpad and that getting in and out of episodes was less cumbersome. Small bugs here and there.

Now, seeing the game and the other reviews here, you're probably wondering, "was this made by—and for—gay furries who like chunky dudes?" Yep! This is a game stewarded by several established gay furry porn artists. And you, as a theoretical person interested in the game but not the cheesecake, might be like, "ew, why's it gotta be so horny with all the chubby, banana-hammocked guys," to which I would say: that's tough titties, friend.

How often have you seen a non-pornographic game (or any piece of media in any medium for that matter) where the dudes are unambiguously objectified in this very earnest way? Cho Aniki type of stuff doesn't count—that's portraying the idea of sexualized men as comedic (you see a similar thing with characters like Roadhog in Overwatch). Your Kratos's and Marcus Fenixes of the world aren't meant to be sexy, they're meant to empower a presumed straight male audience (though if you are the type who is into dudes like that, more power to you).

And now how many times have you seen, in both western and eastern media, the cases of artists who previously worked on straight porn bringing that energy into their non-pornographic works? An entire series like Food Wars hinges on the absurdity of ladies making o-face when eating. A lot of 2000s era games from studios like Team Ninja would push how far you could show breast and labia without getting an AO rating.

I've been a prude about that stuff in the past, but as it turns out, I was just sour about never seeing that kind of objectification for males in pretty much ANY media growing up, which sucks! While I wouldn't say that Kings of Hell is some kind of incredible transgressive work of art for bucking the trend, I do really, really appreciate the brazenness of a group of gay furries going, "let's make a beat'em'up and then make all the men as eroticized as we want". That's a genuine creative risk because I think this level of male sexualization is still considered pretty icky by a primarily heterosexual audience.

Big props to the devs for doing that, here's hoping that more creators feel galvanized to bring this kind of horny gay energy to their games.

(Also if you're looking for a version of this that is just outright porn, check out Oh So Hero)

The high-level pitch is, "what if Metroid 1 but with the design DNA of Fusion and Dread, plus a little bit of other indie games like Axiom Verge, too". There are some pretty severe difficulty spikes and some of the late-game upgrades can lead to your character feeling a bit sticky to control, plus the music is just alright most of the time, but otherwise this is a highlight of the year.

This does a similar thing to Axiom Verge where you're unlocking multiple weapons over the course of the game, though in this case I'd say they have much more distinct strengths and weaknesses compared to the ones in that game. The movement abilities are on the more novel side of the metroidvania genre, avoiding falling into too many of the well-worn archetypes of double jumps and state transformations.

The big, big standout here is the boss fights and the reserved storytelling. Most of the fights pull double-duty of being tough, multi-stage battles with wild twists, but also helping to tell the narrative of various alien forces descending on this planet. You'll be fighting an enemy bounty hunter, only to get interrupted by a rampaging monster. I love how over-the-top they get presentationally in the latter half of the game.

The one critique I have is that I wish the fights didn't feel the need to chop themselves up into overly forgiving checkpoints. If they dialed down some of the intensity on some of the bosses and removed the checkpoints, they would strike a much better balance of challenge. A bonus boss forgoes checkpoints entirely, and it was a more rewarding fight as a result.

Most of my qualms are quashed by how much potential replay value it gets via challenge options for subsequent playthroughs. Zexion is definitely on the upper end of my personal tier list for the metroidvania genre.

This is one of those porn 2D brawlers with ho-hum combat and pretty basic metroid-y level design. There's a bit of that incongruity of "you want to see the sex animations but some of them are attributed to a negative gameplay state" but you take very, very little damage from the dom-grapple attacks and it's easy to get health back so it's a relative non-issue.

There's not much else out there in the porn games sphere that does this exact brand of pudgy furry dudes rawdogging each other. It's hot af, what else can I say? Also pretty chill music.

Still very early in my playthrough so I can't give a thorough impression yet, but I want to leave a positive review so more people will see this game. The most succinct way I can put it is, this is far closer to the charm and the snappy pacing of Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga than any of that game's sequels.

There's an immediacy to every action in combat, where attacking and defending require timing-based inputs that are all quite brilliantly tied to the rhythm of the combat music. You play as a single character, but each of the four instruments changes not only the battle theme, but also significantly mixes up how you approach fights. The equipment and deckbuilding systems are also tied to each instrument, giving tons of build customization options.

The pixel art animations are phenomenal. Most character animations out in the field evoke the outrageous expressions you'd see in the original Monkey Island games, while the special attacks in combat seem to borrow from 'sakuga' sequences in contemporary animated shows. It's doing far, far more than you'd expect to be possible with this art style.

I'll update this review with more in-depth impressions once I've finished the game. For now, this is one of the year's biggest hidden gems, and I hope it gets more attention despite releasing in an unusually busy summer season in gaming.

Super polished arcade-like rhythm game. I'm sitting at around difficulty 29 to 30, and averaging into top 100 in overall score ranking. Still a lot of room for improvement, but I'm enjoying every step of progress I've made so far.

Conceptually similar to something like Sound Voltex, though mechanically more along the lines of Beat Saber as far as having a discernible "line" that you follow throughout a track. The spin notes are a wicked fun idea done really well, the only tiny complaint I have is that missing one can totally throw you off the line unless you've already got a solid grasp of the situation.

Soundtrack ranges across the major EDM subgenres like trance, dubstep, trap, house, to funk fusion. Pretty solid array of names here like Nitro Fun, Hyper Potions, 2 Mello, etc. A lot of Monstercat musicians. The mod scene is very well supported by the devs, and loading custom tracks is easy as can be. I wouldn't mind more electro swing in the vanilla game, though.

The difficulty can get pretty high, I'm almost done with the hardest tracks in the base game. Since release, the devs have implemented bonus community charts that start pushing into DJ Max territory which I'll probably be chipping away at for quite a while. It's not the hardest in the genre, but the ceiling is appreciably high.

Given the sale price the game often goes at and the amount on offer here, I think this is up there as one of the best rhythm games on Steam. I highly recommend it.

This game feels like if you took some of the more arcade/arena shooters of the 6th console generation and, instead of just bumping up the graphics more and more, you instead massively increased the scale and scope of both the world and the fights. It's sort of a hybrid of FEAR, Titanfall, and a Call of Duty kill montage video.

While the map is humongous, it doesn't take long for you to start traversing it at breakneck speeds. It only took me about 4 hours to finish the main story (I imagine it'll take a handful more to reach 100% completion) but that time was utterly jam-packed with some of the most fun movement shooter combat arenas I've ever played.

You've got the six FPS game archetypal weapons (pistol, SMG, shotgun, rifle, sniper, and grenade launcher), a grappling hook, a hoverboard for wall-grinding, and a handful of throwable items you unlock over the course of the game to explore more areas. Each island in the world usually involves taking out waves of enemies and gaining various rewards for each arena cleared.

By a couple hours into the game, I had movement tech that was letting me reach outrageous speeds. Like, moving too fast for the LODs to catch up. This isn't a flaw IMO, I wish more FPS games involved this kind of insane momentum. It's great.

Genuinely pretty challenging, too. Enemies are easy to gun down initially but gain additional tricks as the game goes on like shields, turrets, vehicles, and such. The "Hard" option presents a good difficulty curve throughout, I never felt like any death was out of my control. Boss fights too are a good challenge, offering huge scale fights against moving colossi in the vein of Breath of the Wild.

The aesthetic details like story, art direction, level structure, etc are very workmanlike and minimalist, which is just fine with me. This is a game that never gets in the way of its own pacing, and it doesn't take itself too seriously. And it's got a rad DnB-laden soundtrack like a game straight out of 2003.

Had a ton of fun with this one. Big, big recommend for movement shooter fans.

Fair warning that Nixxes ports are pretty heavy on any system and if your setup isn't airtight, you might see some weird performance behavior with the game. I also don't think this necessarily should be Steam Deck verified since I've seen it have some out-of-memory crashes on that system.

All that aside, as someone who's been a fan of the series from the very beginning, it's a pleasure to have it finally be put in front of a PC audience. The hybrid of platforming and third-person shooting has always been fantastic, the weapon leveling system introduced in Going Commando lends the games an addicting quality that encourages you to use the full breadth of their arsenals, and the writing is almost always super charming and funny.

Rift Apart is also a downright gorgeous game regardless of if you can toggle on all the fancy ray-tracing features or not. An SSD is heavily recommended since the setpiece sequences involve a lot of quick hopping between different environments, which lends them a frenetic energy that I haven't seen in any other game. Personally, I think this is the most visually impressive title from any of the most recent offerings from PlayStation studios.

The story is a continuation of the Future trilogy from the PS3 (which introduced a new canon from the PS2 originals), but outside of some fanservice here and there, players brand new to the series probably won't have much trouble keeping up since this game focuses on an entirely new dimension in the setting. You don't need a backstory explainer video to get up to speed with this one.

The one aspect of the series that I think has gotten weaker over time is the music. After Up Your Arsenal, the games moved away from the slick space techno soundtracks to more of a generic epic orchestral affair. It's better in Rift Apart, but it's still pretty homogenous with the other PlayStation published games.

While the game has sold a healthy amount over time, it's still a fraction of Insomniac's Spider-Man series. Don't get me wrong, those are good games, but Rift Apart is such a fantastic entry in the Ratchet & Clank series and it'd be a shame to see it have the same fate as other discarded PlayStation IPs like Ape Escape or Sly Cooper. If you've got a solid PC, I can't recommend this game enough, not only because it's great but because I hope it'll continue to do well enough to eventually justify Insomniac returning to the series.