Recent reviews by Ninn

I think a sizeable chunk of the poor reviews are from people who confused this with Heroes of Hammerwatch and thought this was supposed to be a sequel to HOH, and those who are having problems with the multiplayer. The game itself is honestly fine. Its biggest problems are that it won't be getting any more updates due to a publisher dispute or something, and that there's a memory leak that causes massive save/load times past the 2hr point, requiring a game restart.
If you liked the first Hammerwatch or its anniversary edition, and you only plan to play singleplayer, then you will probably like this game too. There are more open world RPG elements in between the dungeoneering with NPCs and quests and stuff, and the classes play closer to their HOH2 versions. If you liked HOH2 then it's basically that game but more of a straightforward RPG than a roguelike.

If you're having doubts then just wait for a sale or something. Even if you don't love it you probably won't actually hate it so long as you know what you're buying.

I've been playing through the HF2 main missions and this DLC dropped just as I was getting bored. What an excellent addition. Each level is extremely well designed, varied, and interesting, with a story that has a full Scooby Doo episode going on in the background, related to you via emails from the characters as you are hired to clean up after each of the mystery gang's escapades, kinda like Viscera Cleanup Detail with less corpses.

The final level is especially cool (MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD), as you are tasked with setting up an enormous haunted escape mansion, filled with themed setpieces featuring monsters from the show, and escape room puzzles which you must both build and simultaneously solve. It's an extremely creative and pretty ingenious way to mix stuff up in this game, and I hope they do more like this in the future. I really enjoyed figuring out what kind of room I was gradually building, like putting together various decor and lighting to realise that I'm supposed to be at the bottom of the sea, and working backwards through the puzzles to see how all these bits and pieces were intended to be laid out and fit together.

These missions also serve as tutorials for the DLC's cool new spooky assets, first just showing you the new furniture and decals and wallpapers, and ending up as tutorials for how to set up pressure plates and two-way mirrors and secret passages. There's an entire haunted funhouse's worth of stuff here, including statues of villains from the show who say stuff when you operate them.

I have one criticism. The writer is the same as the one as the main game, and that writer is bad. And usually it's not a thing, like no one is playing this for the story or characters (although some fun npcs would have been cool, NGL) so it's not a big deal that every single character in HF2 talks like an inter-office corporate email. But this is *Scooby Doo*, we all know what the characters talk like. And it honestly feels kind of lazy when the entire gang, even Shaggy, all talk in the exact same blandly upbeat voice like they're asking me about rescheduling their powerpoint presentation on Tuesday. These characters all have really distinct voices, they aren't hard to copy!

It was still a good time, but they've gotta have enough money to hire a real writer at this point, especially if they plan to release more licensed DLC.

It's exactly what it says it is on the tin. You get given a bunch of premade ships and you gotta take them apart piece by piece. Sometimes the ship is a big puzzle where you have to figure out how to take a certain area apart without electrocuting yourself or blowing the ship up or getting irradiated. It scratches the same itch as Hardspace: Shipbreaker. It's not quite as good, but on the other hand it doesn't have a story full of unskippable dialogue.

You really do need to have a high tolerance of jank though. It's a small team struggling to keep on top of the billions of ways in which this game can break, and oh boy does it break. Every time they release a big update of changes it will generally break a few things, and I wait a couple of weeks before trying out each DLC because of the multiple rounds of bugfixes it will need to make it playable.
The team *does* always fix the bugs eventually, it can just take them a while, so be patient.

Combines my two favourite things: stop motion animation and creepy little guys. Just a quick little game jam thing, more a proof of concept than anything, and takes 5-10m to play, but it packs a lot of atmosphere into those 5-10m, and I really hope the devs decide to make something bigger out of it. I want to play a game where I study creepy little guys archeologically and research all the ways they want to kill me.

edit: i just realised that the store page doesn't reveal that they use a ton of AI art, like really obvious AI art. That's a requirement of the platform guys either change the art or disclose that ♥♥♥♥ lmao


SOME MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD ABOUT LEVEL DETAILS

The Pros:
- Excellent level design
- Fun gameplay that's Viscera Cleanup Detail without the jank
- Unlockable skill trees that actually do stuff and make a difference
- Some interesting puzzles and secrets that reward exploration
- My personal experience was glitch-free
- You can't spend your money for plot reasons, but it's nice to see the character's home improve gradually over time
- Some interesting situations in the later levels and minor detective work where you can piece together what happened (I wish there was more of this)
- I finished the game wanting more levels! Apparently they're coming soon!

The Cons:
- Awful writing/translation, many jokes that just don't land or even make sense in English. Dialogue that makes you laugh with how bad it is. There's one level where I think clues are pointing to this terrible accident actually being a mass murder, but the writing is so bad that I genuinely can't tell.
- The character art is AI generated I think? Characters look different in every photo of them
- It's pretty much just a man's world with women there to be either rescued or victimised. There's one female murderer and she's a victim of mental illness.
- There's some fun stuff now and then, but it broadly lacks the humour of VCD. Some real dark ♥♥♥♥ in the early levels like you having to clean up after human traffickers or serial killers. Like yeah the perpetrators are dead, and your guy expresses sadness at what happened, but your job is to ensure that no one ever knows what happened to the victims.
- You own a dog and you can pat him but his bowl and water dish are always empty and you can't fill them. He always looks so sad!

I was able to look past the cons and enjoy the levels because the gameplay is actually really fun if you don't take the rest of it very seriously. But YMMV.

A lot of people are downvoting this because they claim one or more of the submarines can't be completed or that crane stuff has to be destroyed to remove hull, etc. This is straight up wrong - this DLC leans much more heavily into the puzzle elements where you have to plan ahead, and destroying floor parts unnecessarily will screw you over later. But you absolutely can 100% every submarine. I know because I have done it. It's a shame that the devs probably won't do this cool puzzle stuff again, because it's getting such a negative reception.

The inevitable game-breaking bugs that were here on launch have been patched out, so now this is my favourite DLC of the lot.

Gotta be my favourite set of levels so far. This was really fun even if Bill the Lizard's phonetic accent was kind of painful. The Cheshire Cat is a cool guy to hang out with.

I like this very much. Gameplay is reminiscent of the 00's era Flash puzzle games, the art has that kind of bleak surrealism that reminds me of Rusty Lake, and the whole thing is of a genre I tend to think of as 'heartwarming horror'. I honestly don't have much more to say about this - if you liked the art in the screenshots, and you liked Flash puzzle games when they were around, then you'll like this too.

Unfortunately, and I say this with deepest regret, the music is terrible. I couldn't put my finger on why I was finding this game to be so boring when it *seemed* like something I should really like, but it wasn't until I reached the museum and found myself listening to the WORST rendition of Erik Satie's Gymnopedie I'd ever heard (you know this song, everyone knows this song, google it) that I realised it was the damn music! I think it's intended to evoke feelings of dreamlike disassociation, and honestly it seemed okay at first, but after you've heard a couple more it quickly becomes dreary and grating, and makes the game seem far more bland than it deserves.

I really do like this game a lot! But if you want to play it, do yourself a favour and mute the music and play your own favourite weird songs in the background.

The only clicker game I've actually liked. Very cute with fun characters, extremely dark humour, and I'm pretty sure that one farmer questgiver is actually undead? It's not part of the plot or anything he just happens to be dead, like as a character trait? Anyway characters give you quests and you grow weird ♥♥♥♥ in your garden like red fruit and yellow fruit and tiny meat babies, and you click a bunch of times to tend and harvest them, and sometimes you can automate it a bit. I mean if you're reading this you probably already know if you like clicker gameplay or not.

I've been saying for years that someone needs to fill the cleaning sim niche left empty since Chibi Robo turned into its current corporate shovelware nightmare incarnation, but everything I found used the cleaning part as a framing device for a completely different game (Remu) or attached some gimmick to it (Visceral Cleanup Detail). Which is fine, but in this hellscape where we slave for hours doing pointless unsatisfying work, and can only afford to live in grotty living spaces made of garbage, it can be *very* satisfying to just plant yourself in your chair and spend a coupla hours making something disgustingly filthy look so shiny sparkling clean.

This is that game 100%. The stuff you can clean ranges from colourful temples to decorated fountains to vintage Bentleys and they are all very satisfying to make pretty and shiny (the treehouse sucks but whatever). The dev team went to extra special effort to zone off each cleanable object into separate parts, and label each little part so you know when you missed something (they get weirdly obtuse sometimes). There's a dedicated 'highlight dirt that I missed' button to avoid pixel hunting. There are no timers and no water limits unless you specifically want there to be, and it all works just how it should.

It's all the fun parts of powerwashing with none of the parts that suck, although a touch of realism is added as the rich dweebs who own the ornate beautiful buildings and vehicles you are cleaning keep trying to impress you and act like you're their best friend while you're just trying to do your damn job.

As of writing this, the game is still in freakin alpha, so when it comes out for full release (very soon) it should have even more levels and polish.