Recent reviews by SunsOfOld

I didn't exactly put a ton of time into trying this game but I'm guessing it doesn't change much. It seems to just be a friendslop zombie wave shooter. If you want one and don't have one, it'll fill that slot, but if you have one, you don't need another, really.

Do you have the first Wizard of Legend? Did you ever find yourself playing it and think 'Man, this game's mechanics are just too slick, and the animation style is just too elegant.'"? Did you find yourself wishing you could trade some of the mechanical slickness for solidly middling 3D graphics, though still made to imitate essentially the same 2D graphics, voice actors reading a hundred non sequiturs, but otherwise just the same game? Well, have I got a game for you!

TL;DR: If you have the original, go play it. If you don't and are considering this game, go buy the original.

Supremely mediocre

The combat is the same sky-skater stuff that has been around since the PSX days. The shaders are slightly better now. If you like these kinds of games, it fits in. I'm not seeing anything special, though.

However... You know in a movie where the POV character has gotten horribly sick or near-fatally wounded, and there's this sequence where they fade in and out of consciousness, hearing people nearby talking in out of context nonsense? That's the writing of every moment of this game. There is so little context for ANYTHING. Who is your character? Where are you living? What are you connected to? Who are you connected to? Who is letting some of these loonies have access to weapons? Is there anything happening in this GLOBAL CONFLICT that isn't firing at enemies or standing in the hangar, staring at the briefing station? It wouldn't be so offensive except that there is a 'conversation' that happens before and after every 'mission.' They could have set it in a VR world where there is no pretense of story. Pretense of context is actively worse than none.

I've played a number of hacking sims. Some of them are kind of disappointing. Drop is not.
When building a hack sim, some go technical, asking you to actually learn and type commands. This can be good after a bit but requires a bit of time to get into it. This is more of an arcade hacking sim. You won't need to memorize commands, just learn your controls and master them while you figure out the timing, almost like a platformer or the cooldown-based combat of some RPGs. I enjoy it.

I was hoping for lovecraftian horror. This disappointed pretty quickly. I played through the first two chapters but am dropping it.
Every part of the design felt very 'game-y.' Your character self-narrates obvious concepts to hold your hand. The environmental design is deliberately obtuse, reminding you it's a game instead of immersing you in a fictional space. Accessing computers is brutally absurd, barely even pretending to be anything more than a list of three documents and a button that could have been in the environment next to the various papers that litter what is supposed to be a space age habitat. Where are they getting all this paper, devs? Why would the designers of the habitat make the way to get anywhere like traversing a maze? Why would an experiment to study the growth of earth plants in martian soil grow plants hydroponically? These are not minor little quibbles. These are things someone should have thought about for 10 seconds before putting so much work into this game.
Quite disappointing.

Do you enjoy writing code to solve small puzzles for fun? (a la computercraft) Do you want to learn to code?
If yes to either: get this game.

This game is very nicely priced, free from glitches or distractions, and is generally good. Literally, the only criticism I might voice is that the documentation structure in the info panels is slightly obtuse, (one entry for unlocking a thing, another for the thing unlocked, etc.) but that's such a small thing that it should not discourage you from buying it.
At this point everyone should try something like this. Even basic programming understanding is a vital part of modern citizenship. (see: Program or Be Programmed by D. Rushkoff)

Amusing little procedural game. Wire this to that.
It's not as deep as you might worry/hope it might be, so that's either good or bad depending on your tastes.
I dug it.

It's piles and piles of paid DLC. Don't give them your money.
The community is loaded with toxic people who quit when the game isn't going their way.
Also, the game design is pretty stupid. If I didn't have other people who wanted to play, there's no way I'd bother.

In case any devs see this, get rid of flashlights, flashbangs, etc. Killers play to feel like an unstoppable juggernaut. Survivors play to be scared of an unstoppable monster. Nothing, and I mean nothing, a survivor can do should act as an attack against the killer. Lean into the strengths. Don't pander.

Boiled down? Passable, in both meanings of that word.
After years of gaming I am a bit jaded, so a game like The Gunk, if it were a food, would be essentially mashed potatoes. It's not junk food; there is something there to nourish one on a basic level. On the other hand it doesn't have a lot of flavor. It's good, and if you are HUNGRY for a game, it will serve well, but it doesn't seem to take any risks so it won't 'wow' anyone.

Surprisingly, it's not the idea of seeing a dog getting hurt that is making me turn away here. Sad as it is, while this game has loads of charm thematically, it is just awful mechanically.

This game suffers from the same issue that made me throw away a number of other games that use this particular mechanism. You are presented with choices in the form of prompts and a list of possible responses. However, those choices often don't make any sense, and ofttimes the little 1-2 word options don't really tell you what's on the far side of them:
Prompt: There's an owl. Response: Owls are cool. Result: Nope, owls are bad. Me: What?
Prompt: There's an owl. Response: You said owls were bad. Don't follow. Result: *run over by an elk* Me: What?
Prompt: There's a caribou. Response: Let's hunt it. Result: It didn't immediately keel over like this is some sort of video game. Secondary prompt: Do you want to shoot it again? Response: I guess I should preserve my bullets by tracking it and waiting for it to bleed out, like hunters do. It'll probably use time/energy, but I have enough to spend a point and this should be a lot of food. Don't shoot it again. Result: Choosing not to shoot again means leave it alive and wounded for some reason, wasting the bullet and leaving it to die pointlessly. Me: What? Why is that an option?

Even the little hunting minigame suffers from a similar lack of control. The only thing you control is one button to change the relative rhythm of a pair of UI elements and then you click when they overlap. It's just obtuse. What could be more controlled than using a long-barreled rifle to shoot something that's less than ten feet away? Is the bouncy circle my aim? Am I so drunk/inept that I can't just line up some sights on something at damn near point-blank?

The other issue is how it handles the roguelite element. You don't start out with all the tools to succeed and learn to use them, putting the onus on you to get better as a player. You are supposed to go through repeated failure from lacking tools and earn the tools through your pointless pain. This is just bad design.

It's one thing for a game to be difficult, but a game where the biggest difficulty lies in its intentional obscurantism is just annoying. It's like learning to play monopoly, but you have to lose enough times to start with money and you aren't allowed to read the properties before buying them.

I can't recommend this game.