Recent reviews by Stringerplz

Recently discovered suika games, and thought I'd learned all about how big circles can get. Reader, I was wrong. Circles can get BIGGER. And they can make nice noises and clack beautifully together. This is a feast for the eyes and ears and makes me feel like a genius. Extreme recommend

Perfect length for a one-sitting experience; a very fun take on the game-as-escape-room / puzzle box event. Very well balanced between (my perception of) the game's budget and the impact it brought as a result. A couple of legitimately Very Impactful Scares, some of them tentpole moments and others just as flavor text. Well done! Excited to see more.

Rich, flavorful, satisfying. Provides so much more than the first in sheer options, activities, and Things To Do. Even in early access, with occasional placeholder thumbnails and "you've reached the end of this preview" portions, there's plenty to keep you invested, engaged, and busy while the devs finish cooking this feast.

This was a good-enough time, but extremely frustrating to figure out and slow to ramp up. I found myself picking apart little details - things like the fact your player character moves super slowly to start, and then gets...marginally faster, eventually.

But what really threw me for a loop, and honestly has sent me googling pretty seriously for a while, is the Autumn Town characters' whole patois. They are the only characters that use what sounds like Polynesian slang, and I don't get...why? It feels odd that no other locality seems to have its own accent or particular thing going on linguistically, and the fact that there's slang being used by a particularly impoverished, drought-ridden, "plantation town" setting just...sits strangely with me. I don't know, maybe I'm clutching at pearls here.

In general, games that are marketed as Will Bring You The Feels, Guaranteed(tm) are normally ones i do not purchase - I find them largely obvious, overwrought and self-indulgent. Spiritfarer managed to keep me fascinated, and interested, and compelled emotionally, through the act of managing a household of spirits.

I have spent the majority of my 41 hours in-game within the last 5 days, starting it up immediately after work and save/quitting only when it hit the wee hours of the morning. Every night, for one business week.

But here's why i recommend this obsessive behavior highly: Spiritfarer achieves what almost no other "feeling-forward" game has, for me - emotional impact that builds over time, plot that doesn't spell out its subtext in large neon letters, and use of metaphor that's somehow neither tacky nor obtuse.

You are told what you ought to know about the personalities you encounter, but what you learn about them, through interactions, mechanics, and sometimes just subtle environmental touches, is much deeper and more complex than I personally expected.

It's rare that a game is palpably complex and yet so pleasant to work through. Despite being one of those rare people who likes puzzle games but is not, necessarily, Good at Puzzles, I had more than a few moments where working out a solution made me feel like some kind of genius, without at all feeling like I'd been handed the answer. I played this within a set time limit, so I did find myself rushing to finish - but would recommend taking your time on this one, and fully feeling out how weird and wonderful it all is.