Recent reviews by wavebeem

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It's like Super Mario Bros 3 but cuter

Really cute but kind of frustrating. Enemies seem tougher than they ought to be, and platforming feels a bit off. A bit buggy (vsync didn't enable the first time I turned it; frog mode crashed very quickly)

Love the graphics. Sfx are too loud but are cute. Didn't have very much fun though.

I am so conflicted on this game. On one hand it's about a queer roadtrip to defeat fascism, on the other hand, I absolutely cannot get into the combat at all.

For the most part I really enjoy the writing. That meme about writers who use subtext being cowards is totally relevant here.

I particularly enjoyed Act III for diving deep into Sam's psyche. I ran out of steam in Act IV, the final part of the game, against the final boss no less.

The combat system is... very weird to me. I've heard that it's like FFXIII, but as someone who hasn't played many FF games, this doesn't help me at all.

The tutorial is pretty short, and by Act III I had played the game so poorly I soft locked myself. See, I was like 4 levels below the boss I was trying to fight, so they literally instant killed all of my party members constantly, and I didn't have enough money to buy gas so I could keep grinding to level up. This game is weirdly a resource management game with the money in a way I've never felt so oppressed by before. I genuinely had to restart the game from Act I because I had been foolish enough to repeatedly save in the same slot, despite the game offering like 50 save slots or something.

So the second time around I minmaxed leveling as hard as I could... without making myself completely out of money since I could mess up the game again. AND I turned on Story Mode combat difficulty. Which, frankly I find the name a bit offensive. It's not like you can simply button mash your way thru boss encounters on that level, at least not the final one. See, the upgrade system is the whole way you level up, and there's lot of spells and if you don't read them all very carefully you can end up with a pretty ♥♥♥♥ build. I think that's what happened to me at some point and it was making the game a lot harder.

Sadly, the encounter rate just gets too high, and it literally interrupts party dialogue. Gracefully the game resumes conversations where you left off, but I found myself dreading the interruptions. Even on Story Mode where you apparently get more money, I constantly was running out of money for upgrades if i wanted to keep enough money to not run out of gas and lose the entire game.

Eventually I just looked up a Lets Play to watch the final boss play out. Also, apparently at some point the game was patched to prevent you from using your entire item collection during fights, because it was considered messy/confusing. As far as I can tell this was a massive nerf to your combat ability. You have to constantly remember to restock the items in your 5 slots, and it's hard to balance which items you want to take to each fight. In particular Act III and Act IV bosses have some items you really want to have around and I had to restart both fights because I hadn't taken the right loadout.

Anyways, the writing is definitely cheesy at times, but I like the parallels to fascism, LGBT rights, and ineffective liberal government "status quo" woes. Oh, and all the stuff about social media in Act III again was great.

Sadly, my lasting thought about this game is that it needs a massive balance tuning. Maybe I'm "bad" at the game or something, but it just didn't click and I kept feeling frustrated. I wish this game had just been a visual novel instead.

Incredible music and artwork though.

A cute little arcade game! Works well on Steam Deck too. Just make sure to enable "preserve aspect ratio" or the game will be stretched.

The art is adorable and the music is fantastic. The controls are simple but the movement takes some getting used to. This seems intentional, though. It's a very physics heavy game in a way that obviously rewards players for putting in the time to understand them at a deep level.

I have some quibbles with the default progression locking you out of later levels unless you mostly get 2/3 stars on previous levels, but I've enjoyed all the levels I've played so far.

It would be great if there was an update to put the delivery marker above the level timer, or make the level timer switch sides to avoid overlapping, because this confused me a couple times.

As for the difficulty, I think there's settings I could use to make it through the game easier, but I haven't messed with those yet.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ this game is so cute.

The vibes are off the charts. The art direction and rendering style are fantastic. The music always delights. The characters are cute and the dialogue is fun.

The challenge level is just right to keep you wondering and exploring without getting stuck too long.

This game is just about a little mushroom trying to get home to his family!

You collect lots of items, jump, glide, climb, and solve minor puzzles along the way.

This is a 5-10 hour delight. Maybe a bit more if you wanted to 100% the game.

There are lots of "skins" you can unlock... maybe like 10? I unlocked about 5 of them. Just adorable.

If you like old school 3D collect-a-thons, you should play this!

I mostly played on PC but it also ran great on my Steam Deck.

It's a cute little game about making graffiti!

It's charming and has enough tools to get the job done.

It's challenging to make things, but I feel like that's the point. If you wanted to make things easy you'd just open mspaint.exe and start drawing.

This is the kind of game that you could either get bored of quickly or play for thousands of hours, depending on your patience and creativity.

The controls are a little tricky for me to get used to. It would be great if it had some music. But it's a small indie game, so set your expectations appropriately and have a good time!

Quite rough around the edges. I gave up after beating the first chapter.

This game is really showing its age.

Horrible camera angles. Clunky controls. Fullscreen mode gets messed up a lot when you switch windows. The game turns down the difficulty without asking you when you lose. Extremely hard to navigate, extremely easy to get lost. Healing items are very expensive.

Just play DMC5, it's better in every way. And yes I played 4 before 5.

It's pretty good.