Recent reviews by JasonB

Pretty good DLC. Adds the Surgery Machine, new charms, and a lot of fuse charms from fusing together existing normal charms. The Surgery Machine expects fusion components to be inside your item drawers.

Sometimes, the fusions are pretty straightforward and add a little bit of every combined charm into one. Other times, a fuse charm can be quite different from their constituent components. Some fairly boring charms from the base game have good fusions that make them worth keeping.

You can also fuse any two or three charms that don't have a recipe into a permanent bonus (like permanent symbol multiplier) as a way of getting something out of excess junk charms you just want to get rid of (if you don't need tickets).

So far I'm enjoying tooling around with all the new fuse charms and have come up with a few cool builds with them.

My only complaint is that with this DLC, you'll be doing a lot more mucking around passing items between the table and the drawers; it would be EXTREMELY welcome if we could get a new QoL feature to let us swap a table/drawer item without needing to free a space up and run back and forth across the room. Managing items between the table and the drawers has always been potentially clumsy and tedious, but now that there's more reason than ever to move items around, that drawback of the game has become quite pronounced.

I played the original RE4 4-5 times through on GameCube and Wii. However, I'm not so blinded by nostalgia that I can't admit that the remake is just better in pretty much every way that matters.

Would recommend the game on a deep sale if you like The Room games but want to relax and explore something more narrative-driven. Its primary issue is that, while they leaned so heavily into storytelling in this game, they slashed away gameplay to "make room" for it.

Both Ghost Town and The Room VR take about the same time to complete - 4 hours - but Ghost Town has drastically fewer puzzles. DRASTICALLY. A couple of the chapters are heavier on the puzzles which is quite welcome, but for an example of how "bad" this issue can get, the last chapter has only ONE puzzle that I recall and it only takes about 1 minute out of the ~30 minutes that entire chapter takes. So when I say the game can be thin on puzzles to make room for storytelling... it's no joke.

It also has a "narrative game difficulty." So I'd say its puzzles are also easier than the ones in The Room VR. They don't really want you to get stuck ever and clearly want the pace to go on uninterrupted.

For what it's worth, the character animations are very nice. They remind me a lot of being in dialogue with characters from Half-Life Alyx. Had this narrative style been appended onto something with as much meat on it as The Room VR instead of replacing the gameplay, it would have been a great addition.

I would recommend The Midnight Walk especially if you're interested in looking at and admiring all of the photogrammetry claymation; everything is hand made and if you're the kind of gamer to just run past it all and go from one mechanical objective to the next with your eyes closed and your fingers in your ears, you'll miss out on most of the pleasure. I found myself constantly slowing down and sometimes stopping just to get a better look at things both nearby and far away.

Some bitter reviews have accused this game of being a walking simulator, but that's blatantly false. Although most of the puzzles aren't mind-bendingly original or difficult, you constantly have something new to do in each of the six chapters. Mechanics are introduced and bent up for flavor. Some mechanics carry along throughout the entire game, like the need to hide from monsters or ask Potboy to light distant fires.

The only thing I felt got thrown to the wayside a bit too much was the ability to close your eyes and hear secrets and audio cues for certain puzzles; there's rarely a reason to do this without the game directly asking you to for a puzzle, and closing your eyes unprompted hoping to find something hidden almost always results in detecting nothing. Unless you already know there's something around you to find, there's never much reason to do it. If you already know a collectible is around you, you probably don't need to close your eyes to find it.

The voice work is extremely appealing. I tend not to like overly produced, smooth and samey voice work in games and The Midnight Walk just has a lot of grit and gravel to it. Really unique sounding folks with really interesting voices, some standouts being the Soothsayers, the Soulfisher, and Moonbird.

I don't really want to get into the story because it's something I think everyone would really enjoy and should approach blindly. It's just you and your Potboy on the road to Moon Mountain, but you seldom stay on the road as you're always veering off to discover new places and precarious circumstances that need your flame. It's kind of a slice of life that shows you humor, fear, and sadness.

A lot has been said about the VR implementation being terrible and unplayable. I can't speak to that at the moment except to say I didn't notice anything wrong with the performance or controls after trying it out for about 10 minutes on my Index, though I did note that the visuals were unusually blurry. I don't know if this is because when running in VR mode it is perhaps inheriting my DLSS settings from flat play, but when playing in VR mode the DLSS settings disappear so I can't toggle them on and off easily to see if that's the culprit.

One of the very few VR games that:

1. Doesn't feel janky at all. Movement is beautifully fluid and the controls are well thought out. Nothing ever pops around weirdly or glitches out of place or anything like that. The enemies actually fight back, exhibit unique behaviors, and it isn't just a sandbox game that exists for mindlessly slapping ragdolls around.
2. Runs great, but didn't lean on an ugly untextured programmer art "style" like many lazier developers do to achieve good performance (I'm looking at you, TacAssault and others). It doesn't feel like it was cut down to achieve some sort of parity with subpar standalone hardware. The art is very competent and intentional as a cohesive style by talented artists. Not even the slightest hint of asset flipping in sight, which is also unfortunately common with VR these days.

The game is a small-scale mech fighting rogue-lite. You unlock parts for future runs to give yourself more options. It's almost exclusively a melee game, so you won't really be strapping gatling guns or rocket pods to yourself like in Mechwarrior. There's a good variety of weapons within the scope of melee mech combat though, like grabbers, buzz saws, flails, etc. Each hand can be decked out separately, so you might want to grab enemies, hold them, and saw into them for instance.

On an artistic and technical level, the game is nearly without flaws that I can notice. Of course there are things to wish for like more mech parts, more enemies, new arenas, etc.

There are some fantastic spectator view options. I'm actually a little jealous of how cool the third person in-cockpit spectator mode looks to people watching when I stream it.

The only thing I don't particularly like is just how dark the arenas are. It can be a bit difficult to get a read on what exactly is in the arena with you, especially when things are getting heated.

I'm not a fan of rap, but the rap in Underdogs is quite fitting for the style of the game. It has a very dark and driving mood that you might enjoy. If not, you could always disable it and play your own music outside the game.

This game is, as the title suggests, about looking outside. I woke up, went to my window to greet the day, and looked outside. My husk was lifted from my innards and I was free. It was my final vision. The game was over.

I wondered... how would things be different had I not chosen to look out the window? Where would I go? What would I do? Who would I meet?

As with life, we can only know about the path we chose and can only guess about the path not taken. But it's in the not knowing where we can speculate, share ideas, and commune with one another. It gives us space to dream and wonder. We can debate and extrapolate. With everything left on the table, there's nowhere we can't go in our imaginations.

You could say that to know is metaphorical to real death. When you know, there is nothing after. When you're dead, there is nothing after.

Score: 10/10
Total playtime: About 11 and 1/2 seconds

Played on Index.

It's nice that you can interact and hold pretty much anything, but your fingers jitter constantly while holding virtually all items. Hands bob around like they're on loose springs when you're holding an object and start walking.

Index finger doesn't begin bending until you start pulling the trigger, even though your other three fingers bend based on the capacitive grip (index finger does not care about capacitive touch on the trigger, it's just odd).

Hands can often start flying around and rapidly orbiting the tracking position at great velocity when carrying certain objects, making the hand go absolutely insane. Throwing feels terrible, no matter how or when I release a thrown object (even at a very obvious upward overhand throw), it always wants to go right down into the ground; objects I throw seem very resistant to lateral movement. If I were to perform the same exact throw in Alyx or Boneworks/lab, it would behave exactly as expected so this isn't me throwing badly. Possible contender for worst throw physics I've used in VR.

Some of the movement controls feel terrible such as being forced to click and HOLD the stick in to run (as it is, I always try to avoid stick clicking because it feels bad - holding it in while using the stick is so bad I just refuse to do it). This wouldn't be a problem except the movement speed is so incredibly slow even if you're tilting the stick all the way, and there's no way to change how it behaves.

Extremely bad shader compilation stutter the first time you enter certain areas.

Shattered a bottle and it turned into weird rocky chunks with a material that had a gray tile texture. I guess they didn't expect you to try and break the bottles.

There's potentially something here, but the VR fundamentals are so janky and neglected that I don't have much hope for it. I would offer my assistance at no cost or credit to fix most of these issues as I have extensive development experience and experience programming my own VR systems, but most VR developers are completely averse to outside help and don't care.

Great rogue-lite. Beautiful art style with pixelated textures that aren't jagged-looking, but nice and smooth. Because the style is what it is, you can crank up your HMD resolution and just enjoy perfect 120 FPS VR with no hitches.

There are I believe about 5(?) different "tile sets" that span across a full run of the game. There are a few mutators, but perhaps too few; guns get unlocked after reaching various milestones, and they keep the runs fresh, though I do wish there were something... extra. Not sure what; just something to make different runs feel more unique, or maybe to make it feel like you're building your character to do something in particular.

Most of the variety in the game will come from the guns you unlock. Shooting most of them feels good, and the reload functionalities of each is unique and very polished. Hands exhibit full Index finger position tracking (thank you, sir). It's not necessary in this game as it's more of a boomer shooter and so there is no real dexterity needed, but it's nice.

Levels can be shot up (papers flying, machines exploding), but I do find myself wishing that the levels had some more interactive elements to them like levers or buttons to expose secret rooms or set off traps for the enemies. There are one or two good ideas already in the game (like breakable glass tubes that spawn mutants) but those kinds of interactive level elements are few and far between.

Indeed, the reason I complain about having more stuff is because the game is great and I'm left wanting more. This is one of the only VR games I own that doesn't feel janky or jittery, where my hand is in the correct position, where physics objects don't just clip and explode, where the art style feels consistent (and not bought off an asset store). Bevan McKechnie didn't do any sloppy work here, and any VR game he releases in the future will likely be a must-buy.

$20 is probably the right price, but again, I wish there were one or two more updates in the pipe to add more mutators or ways to really freshen up runs (like branching paths into brand new tile sets). On a sale of course, the game would be a steal. For $10, literally everyone with a VR headset should own a copy of this game. At $20, I'd easily recommend it to anyone with a taste for boomer shooter rogue-lites.

Honestly, a good item extractor game that has good DNA and enough to differentiate it in the same way that REPO differs from Lethal Company.

Instead of extracting items for pay, you're searching for calorie-dense food to feed to the beast that has attached itself to your submarine so that it won't kill you.

For starters, there's a good emphasis on being able to actually use your inventory slots for useful gadgets as you're able to carry several items of food inside the vacuum tool, which is nice.

The monsters you encounter are interesting and mostly unique as well. Like in other item extraction games, trying to fight back against most things is very ill-advised and it's better to read their bestiary entry for information on how to evade them.

When embarking from your submarine into a dome, you have to find your way to the actual internal structures of the area. This is the only part of the game that I find is a bit frustrating, because these areas are basically pitch black save for some street lights and therefore have to memorize where to go to get to the entrances (if indeed you ever find them at all). Lethal Company makes you do this as well, but you can actually see where you're going, which helps learning the maps immensely. Here, the external areas are always pitch black no matter what time of day it is (as you're technically under the ocean). I don't really see the harm in maybe lighting up at least one main entrance for the player using a tall beacon or something so they can see where it is, as the new player experience for finding your way into a building is very frustrating (at worst in the more complicated levels, you might waste most of the day just trying to find the entrance).

When I mentioned good DNA earlier, I was speaking of Team Monumental's previous "game" that was essentially a morse code learning game. They actually fully integrated that here into Subterror; you can learn real morse code using bite-sized learning minigames. This will be useful for opening locked doors inside of the abandoned interiors as you will often either have to encode or decode (that is, input morse code or input translated morse code) into control room computers to open certain doors. All control rooms have a clipboard that tells you how to translate morse code, however it's a great way to give the player an actual learned skill that will help them play the game. If you take the time to learn morse code for real, you can get those doors opened fast.

For those familiar with Phasmophobia, there is even a (semi-hidden?) aspect of the game that utilizes the camera item wherein you can take side quests to photograph specific things. The nice thing about photos is that when you take your first photo, you get a photograph item and that photograph item will contain all of your photos, so you are incentivized to take several anyways. You can also do fun stuff like take goofy pictures and slap them up on the walls of your submarine.

When feeding the beast its calories or sometimes out in the world, you'll often get slop which is the currency for the item shop. Unfortunately, all shopping (even for basic items) is relegated to finding a merchant somewhere in the exterior area of the dome you're visiting. In some domes, the merchant is very easy to find, but in others they can be really difficult to initially find or at least difficult to remember where they are. I don't know if I like shopping being something you can't do in peace and safety, as in REPO and even Lethal Company, shopping is a pretty safe and accessible experience (in REPO you're taken to a whole different Shop level to do it, and in Lethal Company you can simply order items from the ship and pick them up just outside).

In summary, I actually think this is a very good item extraction game and justifies itself as a unique experience from the games it shares similarities to. My only real gripes are, again, that finding entrances can be frustrating and take up way too much time, and shopping for items is very inconvenient (I don't mind map vendors being hidden in interiors though) partly for the same reasons that it can be tedious to find entrances - the pitch black ocean domes with confusing layouts. The dome exteriors are not randomized, so in theory you could learn where the entrances are, but many domes I found too complicated to learn them. Maybe if I could see better they would make more sense, but in the dark I often went in circles.

The only other slight negative is that for a game based around being deep under the ocean in a submarine, there's a surprising lack of... ocean. Understandably you're inside a protective dome, but the edges of the domes are so big and tall (and therefore distant) that you can barely tell (it almost may as well be sky), and oddly despite wearing diving suits the players are almost never submerged in water. There are a few jump puzzle rooms that have a backyard pool amount of water under the platforms if you fall, but that's it. So, there's surprisingly little going on thematically around deep ocean in the actual gameplay.

Still, it's a lot of fun and it's well-made. I got it on a deep discount (and gifted a copy to a friend) and it was an absolute steal. I'd say it's definitely worth the full $8 price as well. I'm interested to see how the game can be improved and expanded.

If Lethal Company were a lot more dynamic in the way situations could play out and designed and polished really well, it would be REPO. If you wanted to call it Lethal Company 2, you certainly could.

Though it follows the extraction comedy horror formula Lethal Company popularized, there are some fundamental differences and those differences feel very fresh.

For one, loot value can be diminished by smashing it around, encouraging carefully moving things to extraction. This is expanded on by also having large loot items that require either clever manipulation or teamwork (think two dudes moving a couch) to acquire. The game is forgiving however in that loot dropped into a cart or extraction point doesn't seem to be damaged, even if you really smash it in. This encourages use of the cart especially for many smaller valuables. They can be in a little pile in the cart and still be moved around safely.

Hiding is a proper mechanic in the game and the primary way you deal with threats (especially early on). Cabinets, tables, chairs, beds, etc. can all be hidden in or under and most monsters can't find you as long as you lay low and keep quiet. Often you'll need to hide fast, and can do so by getting a running start and sort of "combat rolling" under something. This, as with all the movement in the game, feels very smooth and polished.

As days go on, you'll have to do multiple extractions on the same level. This means after you make quota for one extraction point, you'll have to brave the halls and find another extraction point and find even more loot to put in it. I think this is a great idea, and it ratchets up the tension knowing you need to brush shoulders with more monsters and walk through more unknown corridors before the day is won.

Tools and weapons already seem more varied in early access than Lethal Company does. There are mines, melee weapons, drones that can be stuck to objects (to impart zero-g, invulnerability, spinning), grenades, a few gadgets, and even permanent (for the rest of the run) upgrade kits you can buy that can enhance all of your core abilities such as grab distance, grab strength, run speed, health and stamina, and jumping.

The graphical presentation of the game is also very polished. The monsters (and really everything) are well modeled, the art style is really consistent, and the player characters are cute little robots with muppet mouths that flap when using VOIP. There's also a funny and creepy text to speech function.

The whole game is oozing charm and is a great "hilarious moments" generator.

In its early access state, I'd say the only thing sorely missing right now is level variety (I believe there are only 3 possible tile sets and I'd like to see that maybe doubled for release). But I definitely wouldn't complain about getting new monsters or types of items, though there are already a good handful of monsters as well (in truth, maybe on par or more than in Lethal Company already, which is great). Heck, maybe they should sneak a camera into the game and capitalize on the recent "evidence hunt" craze too on the sly.

Oh, and I'll echo everyone else and say please change the Steam store logo to something featuring the robots. That Photoshopped emoji face gives the impression on a cursory glance that the game is asset flip slop, which is so far from the truth.