Recent reviews by tubs

Short, simple, and understated horror game with a fantastic premise and an I'm-not-sure-what-I-expected execution. I found it more interesting to hear Jacob Geller talk about this game and the wider hallway horror genre than to play it myself, but I don't regret trying it out myself to see the full range of anomalies and see whether or not I could do it. If you think you want to try it then you could do worse than this for this price. Mostly I'm writing this review to commemorate the numerologically exciting coincidence of my final playtime of 88 minutes.

A bite-size puzzle platformer where you contend with a cute little world and its bewildering jump mechanics: a standing jump with no ceiling above you is enough fall damage to kill you! And the deeper you go, the stranger it gets. Beautiful level design and very fun to explore and discover.

Main game only takes an hour or two of your time, but the DLC is a longer and harder second world that picks up where the first left off, definitely worth it if you're hungry for more. I liked the routing task of the speedrun cheevos, though they come with a hidden easy mode: you can quit to main menu and then continue to reset your in-game timer to the last checkpoint you touched, so you can redo segments as long as you don't respawn from a death or get a new checkpoint.

Forklift load is a humorous open world adventure where you drive around a forklift and move things from place to place. As is typical of a Kimidori game, it features finnicky controls and janky physics, and has plenty of tough yet ultimately surmountable challenges. It rides a fine line between bad and so-bad-it's-good, and for me it ultimately falls on the side of just bad.

The world is too large and the forklift is too unwieldy and slow-moving. The translated writing is too poor to enjoy, and I can't tell whether that's the fault of the writing or the translation, The ending was a little funny but not enough to explain or redeem the experience. Whoever created the gameplay trailer is a master of their craft because they zeroed in on the most interesting-looking parts of the game to show off: it does NOT get any better than that.

Sunfluffs is off to a fantastic start, and for a two-person team Nuclear Strawberry is punching well above their weight. Chapters 1 and 2 are packed with loads of creative locations to explore and encounters to have. The music and visuals were lovely. The set pieces capping off each chapter surprised and delighted me, and blew my expectations out of the water. There is an extremely evident commitment to and care for a high level of quality in just about everything in this game.

It was a little tough to figure out what to do at first, but there really is no pressure in the game at all to get started, and by the time it matters you'll have your bearings. The platforming physics did not feel as empowering as I feel I'm used to from faster-paced platformers, but once I slowed down a little it played great. I have no complaints! Excited to see the rest.

Nama Takahashi proves he can make lightning strike twice, by following up Elechead with a completely different, even puzzlier platformer. Öoo is just as clever and delightful as the first game, but slower paced and less reflex intensive, and consequently much more focused. He has honed his ability to present you with a seemingly insurmountable barrier, and then patiently and methodically teach you how to surmount it, to a mirror shine, and the resulting game is dazzlingly bright. If there's anything to complain about, it's that there aren't as many secrets to sniff out as Elechead---but in a game like this I think that would only be distracting. I can't wait to see what Takahashi does next!!

A simple and inoffensive Zachlike designed around ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ programming. Starts slow and ramps up slow but doesn't hold your hand or feed you many tips beyond that, even as it starts asking you to solve substantial tasks. As a training regimen for aspiring ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ programmers, it's pretty good, which is lucky because there is not much else it offers. I found most of the challenge scores outside of the early game were pretty easy to beat, so I wonder what the reference solutions were.

Cyber Hook is very straightforwardly a grappling hook speedrun game with synthwave aesthetics. I am a great fan of those things (grappling hooks, speedrunning, video games, and synthwave aesthetics) so I had a blast with it. It does just about everything right that you could ask for. The main menu is a grappling hook playground to help you warm up before some runs or just breeze through the air and luxuriate in the mechanics of grappling, which themselves are very fun and give you back as much effort as you put in.

The levels are fun and exciting to navigate and sequence break---there are a couple stinkers in there in my opinion but they are far outstripped by the plethora of fun challenges. The highest level strategies on some of the early levels are super skips that require masterful control over your momentum, which might feel a little disheartening, but I think this game shines brightest when you ignore that and treat it like a solo journey: explore the levels yourself and compete against your own times.

I loved every minute of this game that I spent reaching 100% completion and I expect to spend many more with it.

Kitsune Tails is a juicy platforming delight. SMB3 for lesbians born after SMB3 was released. It's extremely easy to play and nonjudgmental and starts real slow, but before you know it, the difficulty sneaks up on you, culminating in a postgame made out of kaizo levels. Part of what makes this so smooth is the retry loop is tightened extremely short.

The minigames are a blast. The story and voice acting are a little corny, but so joyous and deliberate that I grew to like them anyway. And the pixels are pixel-perfect. Every bit of this game was made by people who love the old pixel platformers and it really really shows.

Telling Lies is, by all accounts, a richer and more technically impressive game than Sam Barlow's previous oeuvre, but it can't assemble any of that power into a more compelling premise.

The acting is outstanding, especially Bishé and Sarafyan. The writing is nearly as good, putting together a wild and circuitous tale that keeps hiding surprises. It has some missteps, but even those feel almost like it's taking one for the team, setting up an idea or searchable connection to keep the story linked up right. Maybe I'm being too harsh on it: part of the concept is that Marshall-Green's character is a compulsive liar that keeps getting attached and wanting too much, and the other part is that he is the common nexus through which most of the game's conversations occur, so his mandated presence weighs a lot on how the game feels to watch/play.

But with the increased scope and technical proficiency, I have to ask: what was gained, and was it worth it? Of the quartet of main characters, three are women... but none of them ever speak to each other, only to the man. The myriad plots give you lots to chew on and discover... but you are still saddled with the same six hour timelimit. The one-sided conversation clips build suspense and naturally suggest their other halves... but they can't be played simultaneously even once they are both found.

And that leads me into an entire paragraph dedicated to the UX, because where in Her Story it was quaint, here it's almost insulting. I'm setting aside the glaring issue of being unable to play the two halves of a conversation simultaneously even after you've found and watched them both; I'm not even going to get into that. If you're not going to give play-from-start buttons, why would you still cowardly include a rewind feature that lets you go to the start, at a max speed of maybe 6x? If this is supposed to bet against the six hour timelimit, it didn't work, because the timelimit is broken and the game let me sit for as long as I pleased. Another thing: the date metadata is bafflingly deemphasized, even though it's one of the few things that lets you establish a chronology, and the timezone stuff is actually quite clever and demonstrates attention to detail.

So I think that's my takeaway from Telling Lies overall. It looks impressive to start but falls short on the last mile. It's good enough that you can catch glimmers through the seams and still have a great time, but if you want a sequel to Her Story, instead of spending six hours playing Telling Lies, you should start with just one or two, and then consider putting the next five into just watching the video files directly.

Splatter is a boldly overstimulated mess of an FPS and I love it passionately. It oozes clever writing and design out of every disgusting pore, and flopping and squishing and sloshing around in its digital realm was a delight. There are too many good things about this game to ever completely list but I'll try.

The main characters are mesmerizing distillations of instantly recognizable archetypes of terminally online people that are repulsive and revealing in equal measure. The music is hyperactive and groovy and excited, just exactly my ♥♥♥♥ from start to finish. The graphics are intentionally disorienting and epileptic, daring you to keep up. The gunplay is beautiful too, a vast array of hand-sign weapons with strange and unintuitive designs that nonetheless eventually convalesce into a very charismatic and memorable arsenal. The humour is dense and unpredictable and incisive. Okay that's enough.

Splatter is a very gamey game, cooked to perfection by a team of excellent devs and served, hot and bitter, directly into your eyes.