Recent reviews by Typo

Seems like a good game. Tier 3 is clearly complete ♥♥♥♥ and waste of time.

More frustrating than fun. Whenever I stop playing, it's because I'm having a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ time and then I dread coming back to it. At this point I'm only playing out of loyalty to Hollow Knight.

Story and characters are not that compelling. Items are not thematically connected to locations of interest at all outside the drift cloak (for which you had to recover.. spines? ok) and the very pointless ability to play music.

Switching between crests changes your moveset drastically which makes it hard to get muscle memory working and at least one is completely unusable for the incredible amount of platforming challenges (beast).

Platforming challenges are much, much harder than HK and don't give you back any mana to heal. Healing in general is a complete nuisance since it takes a whole mana bar which you can't extend in any meaningful way--HK mana upgrades had you upping your mana by 33% base cap, but this game has 10% extensions (WTF?).

Bosses aren't that bad, but world traversal is a nightmare. All the mooks are giant sponges for some reason and damage upgrades don't exist in any real way. Mooks also have like 3-4 moves in their moveset and a ton of them are dealing double damage. Some of the zones have tiny enemies with 1 move movesets that you can use to charge mana, but other zones are just completely deadly with no way to charge mana safely. On top of this there are a huge number of arenas where you have to fight several of the superpower mooks at the same time, which are the largest source of my deaths.

Currency grinding is almost a necessity and I've never lost currency to death at this point. It's a frustrating waste of time.

When you die your cocoon spawns inside of boss arenas and mook gauntlets, so you can't just kill it and walk away, you need to walk into the arena, kill the cocoon, and then save/exit to your bench if you want to get out clean, which just feels bad.

Not a lot of content, but it's a very fun tribute to one of my favorite novels.

So much worse than the first game it's not even close.

Bad instructions, terrible UI, several incredibly tedious problems.

Just not finding the joy in this one. All the puzzles feel very samey. I don't like not being able to control when parts spawn in. I don't like having a single spawn location for each part. I don't like the infinite grid and infinite moves. The tools are weak and trying to construct assemblies where nothing intersects is just tedious. The UI is silly, the hotkeys are bad (WASD for the moveset is so weird!).

It doesn't seem particularly hard, I just don't care enough to actually play it.

I bought Luck be a Landlord twice and have played it more than most indie games, which makes this review pretty hard to write, but ultimately this feels like a concept which needed more time in the oven or to have been thrown in the bin early in development. As someone who has ended up committed to software projects that aren't good out of hubris and the need to not retroactively "waste" time, I have a lot of sympathy for the existence of this game, but I can't really recommend it to anyone.

The essential problem is that it's just a little boring. On a moment to moment basis, you're literally walking in circles around the map. Upgrades are not particularly transformative. Runs with different characters don't feel different because even when your weapons change it doesn't modify how you act in the game at all. It reminds me of how it feels to play Vampire Survivors after you find all the secrets, which is a game that I routinely start to fall asleep while playing because there's nothing to pay attention to.

It's a fine game to play while you're listening to podcasts or whatever, because it takes no thought whatsoever. But that's not exactly pure upside.

Visual clarity gets thrown out the window in worlds 3/4. It's incredibly tiring to play and doesn't feel very rewarding.

Stupid gacha ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

Every time I try to play this, I find myself restarting levels over and over to try to optimize them. On the one hand, the game explicitly tells you to not do the challenges it sets out for you, but it also has the optimization conditions sitting in front of you constantly taunting you, plus the end screen that only gives you kudos if you're efficient. Theoretically you'd plan out your actions like a tactical shooter game, but you can't see what enemies will be spawning from which doors or when until you've played through the entire battle once. It just feels so confused and I don't really enjoy it.

The writing is fun and I like the story, but on a moment to moment basis I'm constantly worrying about whether there's something I could have done better and I don't ever feel like I have enough information to decide if I have.