Recent reviews by Karunamon

FTL meets Slay the Spire: A great concept with some beautiful pixel art let down by poor pacing and some incredibly questionable design decisions. Basically, this feels a bit like a early access title that needs to cook a bit longer.

!: Beautiful, absolutely gorgeous pixel art. I adore the aesthetic of this game.

!: Music and sound design is good.

?: Badly needs a "fast mode". You cannot click through or skip any of the cut scenes or cinematics.

?: Limited number of cards available. You will have seen most of what there is to see within a couple of runs.

??: No discarding; that is, you don't cycle through your deck like every card game in existence, instead you draw from your full deck every turn. Not only does this eliminate a good chunk of deck building strategy, and possible depth and card interaction, it gives you another opportunity to be screwed by RNG, in some cases drawing the same unhelpful cards over and over again. This is a baffling decision and has zero upside from a design perspective, and it really brings the game down.

??: Early pacing is a slog. Basically, you are incentivized to take as many fights in the first couple of systems as possible, to stack up both money and cards. The problem is that these fights are not fast compared to something like slay the spire, and starts to feel like an obligatory grind rather than enjoyable. The other problem is that, after a couple of runs, the first system and quite possibly the second one stops feeling like a challenge. The danger level is low and I had never felt actually threatened once I figured out how to build my ship.

Doesn't deliver on its premise.

Basically, the blurbs on the store page are about all you get. About 30 minutes start to finish, with a weak 'twist'.

I love this little game. Take an interesting story, some catchy 8-bit tunes (and graphics), and a gameplay loop that's workday-friendly, and you've got something that's definitely worth your time. Highly recommended!

Note: There's a right way and a wrong way to play this game. If you play it the wrong way, you will come off thinking it's grindy and disrespectful of your time. You'll see a lot of reviews calling this out. I don't like to spoil strategies in a review, but the 'right' way to play this game is to maximize the time spent on each loop. If you try to go fast, you're gonna have a bad time.

If you were a fan of the SNES original, stop reading this right now and buy it.

I came to this game looking for something like "X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter". Unfortunately the game has been so oversimplified that it doesn't really scratch the same itch.

Don't get me wrong, it's absolutely beautiful, but it's more of a VR toy than a serious game. Also, the online login that's required for single-player item unlocks is completely broken, the dialog cannot be clicked on or interacted with.

So basically, it's low-effort EA trash. Avoid.

A good concept with atrocious writing

This game has two big problems. The first of which is that during the dialogue sections your character, Jane Moon, is completely silent, that is, that when her name lights up on the dialogue screens there is no output. At first I thought this was a bug, but it appears intentional. I think they were going for a videogame silent protagonist thing here, but in this format it just doesn't work and makes it sound like you're hearing one side of a phone conversation all the time. Granted, they do use this trope later, and in that one point it makes sense. But, at all other times it makes it seem like there's a glitch with the dialogue. This is not good writing.

The second problem is that you're put into this computer interface called CIS which allows you to look up and cross reference various information about the cases you're working on. At first it looks very open-ended and powerful, but, as it turns out with most games that involve messing around with the English language, what it looks like you can do and what you're allowed to do are two different things. It feels like you're constantly being railroaded into selecting certain bits of information to drag on to other places on the screen, turning a good chunk of this game into a "guess what the game designers wanted you to pick" simulator. One particular case in the third chapter, come to find out, required you to drag a bit of text that is not called out as draggable (usually designated by being a different color). I spent a good amount of time on this case before looking it up on the forums and being gob smacked when I found out what you're actually supposed to do here. This is the kind of failure of conveyance that any game designer should want to avoid at all costs.

There is a good concept here. This is a police procedural game, kind of like what you would expect Gumshoe to do in Phoenix Wright, with a lot of time spent dealing with the ins and outs of the complicated legal system as it applies to police. Unfortunately, the execution is terrible and left me scratching my head in more than one place as to what I was expected to do (and avoid a bad ending in one place that came out of absolutely nowhere). Given that this game is clearly modeled on the Korean legal system, I can't help but wonder if some of this is due to a poor translation.

Either way, I want to like this game, but the design and writing just makes it too unenjoyable to do so.

Cannot recommend.

Can't recommend.

BS time-wasting mechanics like not being able to use a basic workbench unless you build a structure and enclose it (WHY?) and then half the time that fails with a "too exposed" message.
If you're going to critique my building skills, then explain what the hell it is I'm supposed to do instead!

Forum moderators are trash and gleefully lock threads for entirely real complaints.

Add to all that the fact that you will be mindlessly left-clicking (not even holding the button) trees and other things for hours? Hard pass.

Might be better in the future, but for a $20 early access buy, not worth it until the basics are fixed and the game becomes less of a mindless grind. There is a good game in here struggling to get out, but it needs to cook a bit longer and learn to respect the player's time.

Banned all mods, including harmless ones which give sorely needed QoL improvements, and issued legal threats against all of the developers.

The developers are clueless and malicious. Avoid.

...and other hilarious jokes you can tell yourself.

Another co-op FPS? Yawn.

Okay but this one isn't aggressively monetized. Meh.

It's got a good community Really?

The devs are awesome and keep adding content That's a bit rare!

It's PVE, the whole point is mining ♥♥♥♥ and killing space bugs Okay, i'm interested.

Each mission is procedurally generated :O

The sound design is amazing, punchy, and satisfying. Okay, I'll buy it!

Getting drunk before a mission is a game mechanic and actually can help you! ROCK AND STONE!

Highly recommended. A game like this doesn't come along all the time.