Recent reviews by Phenotype

This game was so boring that I think it weakened my immune system enough for me to catch COVID for the very first time.

It sums up this game to say that the main companion Sarah has a big butt, but not a particularly nice butt. It's like the developers knew people want big butts, but they didn't bother to figure out how to make actual nice butts, they just checked off "big butts" and moved on.

Trover is a competent but simple VR action-platformer that leans pretty heavily on its setting, art, and humor. Mechanically speaking, it steals heavily from Moss, to the point where it's hard to talk about it without making direct comparisons. You play as a "Chairorpian", a human-like alien who always sits in a chair and moves around by teleporting the chair between set teleporter nodes, and you take command of Trover, who runs around the levels killing enemies and doing all the legwork, including activating the teleporter nodes so you can catch up with him. It's a pretty simple control scheme for Trover -- he jumps, he does a 1-2-3 sword slash combo, and that's just about it. Just like the guardian spirit in Moss, you take a third-person view of the proceedings as the Chairorpian, and help Trover out by lifting rocks and throwing stuff around. The puzzle-solving and interaction is not nearly as intricate as Moss, though, Trover feels much simpler in comparison, and Moss is probably the objectively better VR action-platformer based on mechanics.

The "draw" of the game, though, is that Roiland plays the roles of just about every character in the game, and they all keep up streams of Justin Roiland's nonsense improv dialogue for the entire runtime. If you're a fan of his, you'll probably enjoy it -- it held my attention for the entire game, whereas I got bored with Moss after a couple hours. I could have completed the game a good hour faster than I did, but I spent a lot of time listening to skippable dialogue between the idiot guards or the weirdo Abstainers. Fun game, but probably not worth retail price unless you're a fan of Justin Roiland's work.

The story seems really interesting, and the art is amazing. However, the combat is mediocre for a TBS game, and most of the choices you make are essentially flipping coins -- there is absolutely no information to distinguish the possible outcomes of one choice over another, and so I didn't feel like I was guiding my tribe as much as I was just getting a random journey by doing my own RNG generation.