Recent reviews by willowbinder

Deeply uncomfortable! Reading so many of my own messed up deeply rooted inside thoughts and desires mirrored in a violent pastel car crash of a short story makes me feel nauseous! Had a great time.

I so wanted to like this one, when I started it up I was at the edge of my seat for the first several hours having geared up to play what looked on the surface like a really promising mystery/puzzle title, but with each passing hour the veneer was stripped away to eventually show how little 'game' there really is here -

*SOME GAMEPLAY SPOILERS FROM HERE*

The Seance of Blake Manor is a walking simulator with point-and-click elements, at times it's barely more than a visual novel, but all the same there is a story being told here and little actual gameplay to accompany it.

More than a puzzle game this is the sort of point and click adventure where the objective is merely to rub your face on every surface until the answers present themselves to you - bold, italicized, glowing and altogether unmissable even though many times I myself had figured out the answer to some puzzle or sub-plot but couldn't complete the objective to proceed as I had missed some mundane interactable that was required to spark the 'aha' moment for your character. There's *nothing* more aggravating in a puzzle title than having the solution yet being physically unable to solve the puzzle at hand.

*LOTS OF GAMEPLAY SPOILERS FROM HERE*

After playing for a couple hours you realize that Blake Manor is mostly a Breaking and Entering simulator where the majority of the gameplay loop is finding a key somewhere in the map that opens up a set of rooms for you to sneak into in order to solve the individual NPC storylines by sniffing around their belongings like a truffle pig, once in-room you'll have to find some code to open a lockbox to get an item, fill in the blanks for each Clue character's motive or desire, and then it's back to the map to find another key for your next set of B&Es. We're talking full blown on-rails Disney attraction.

There are so many pointless fluff interactables, recycled assets, and reused item descriptions that the gameplay loop really starts to become a drag after a short while. By the time you're down to solving your last couple mysteries the gameplay really boils down to sprinting around the map and poking your head in each and every doorway desperately trying to locate the few remaining characters you need to interact with who move around as time progresses.

The art in this game is pretty, and at times the story is really very compelling in terms of it's focus on Irish folklore and mythology, but digesting the moment to moment walking sim and watered down plot is such a bland experience that it's hard to recommend this title even if all you're looking for is a 'mobile game-grade' adventure title. A fantastic story would have been enough to drive this title home even so lacking in the gameplay department as it is but frankly I've played android Bejeweled clones and old PC freeware titles with more charm and intrigue in their stories than Blake Manor has all-in-all. I'm excited to see is this is only baby steps for Spooky Doorway and await their next release but I'm afraid this one just doesn't do it for me.

Meh. I was excited to play a fun little incremental upgrade time-waster but the truth is that there's barely a game here, for it to take any longer than a half hour to complete you need to make your own fun, create your own arbitrary little objectives. At that point why not just go outside and dig a hole?

I get what this is, how long it took to make, but for a few dollars (or less during sales) more I could be playing Minecraft, Terraria, Deep Rock, etc. I grew up with free games like Motherload that were a blast. The $1.99 thirty minute streamer game is dead, it now costs you $5, and I don't need to be stoked about it.

play as 'Puppy Who's Just Trying Her Best' and experience such feelings as:

she's just like me :)
and
oh. she's just like me :(

a VN tailored for a particular type of creature. I am that type of creature, and if you're looking at this store page it is possible that you are also this type of creature. it's a fun story, it's only a couple hours long, it's free. so play it.

I only wish it was longer by way of more fluff and padding, the story doesn't feel rushed but the tone tends to jump unexpectedly, like frames with no inbetweens, makes the game feel a bit dreamlike.

Yes... Ha Ha Ha... YEAG!

Dragon's Dogma 2 is hands down the best worst game I've ever played. Underneath an astronomical amount of jank is an, at times, incredibly engaging videogame about hiking across West Virginia and having a group of your closest friends who hit the penjamin too many times inappropriately comment about mundane things happening around you and provide unwanted anecdotes from their other friend groups. Occasionally they slip on a rock, fall into a river, and are consumed by a eldritch abomination.

I'm certain that eventually Dragon's Dogma 2 in its patch-heavy 'Dark Arisen' form will be a really fantastic game and well worth its sticker price. As the game is now there ARE moments of real visceral wonder and excitement but they're simply too few and far between, lost in a slog of repetition, awful balancing, and an unfortunately very weak story.




Here's some disjointed thoughts about the game:

Pro - You really lose track of time playing this game. You'll be trekking towards a quest objective when a giant monster with 6 health bars crashes down on your head and now you're locked in a fight for your life, while smacking this thing in the ankle out of the corner of your eye you notice the mouth of a cave though the trees and after barely managing to defeat the boss you decide to check it out (as a little detour). Turns out the cave is enormous and contains two more bosses and some items for another quest in your log. A half hour later you find the exit and decide to go turn those quest items from the cave in when suddenly night falls, now you're fighting your way through the darkness towards a nearby camp where you sleep until morning. Wait, what was I supposed to be doing again like an hour ago?

Con - By the above you would imagine that this game STRONGLY ENCOURAGES you to explore and get lost and do the story at your own pace, but the problem is that DD2 *also* expects you to not mess around TOO much. Side-questing too much means you will absolutely end up over-leveled for certain quests and areas, you start obliterating enemies in one shot. There's no real enemy scaling so as to preserve that RPG feel, but that's a feature, right? There is a NG+ for going back through and finding things you missed, doing quests you forgot about. The problem is that THERE'S NO REAL ENEMY SCALING! If you end up over-leveled on your first playthrough then the new game will not sufficiently challenge you. Becoming too powerful means you completely lose that weariness of the night, the fear of getting caught unprepared by a pack of dangerous enemies, fighting anything and everything is reduced to swatting away bugs. Even enemies resistant to your vocations' damage type start to crumple before you in seconds if not instantly. The magic of DD2 melts away the longer you play.

Pro - Pawn AI: Pawns can at times be incredibly useful, their varied vocations and personalities provide lots of flavor to your quest. Their ability to collect and share useful knowledge from other worlds feels exciting and can lead you to hidden treasure and new content you would have otherwise missed. Pawns stopping to dap you up after defeating a difficult enemy together never gets old. The fact that pawns can fill gaps left by your chosen vocation to access out-of-reach areas and defeat tricky enemies, catch you when you slip, assist you with operating tedious switches and levers, it all feels really fun.

Con - Pawn AI: Itsuno promised that pawns would have way more to say in DD2 than they did in the first game, the problem is the way Capcom went about it. Individual pawn personalities each have their own dialogue trees, certain things they like to comment on and unique dialogue interactions with other pawns. BUT, if you're not the type to switch out your pawns every 5 levels and you like to hang on to your team you're not going to be getting any variation, you'll be hearing the same several lines over, and over, and over. If your party is all women, or all different vocations, you're going to hear about it every time you blink. And if you venture within 50 yards of a ladder you WILL be promptly informed, every single time. Pawns learn from your behavior, if you try to avoid falling to your death then so will your pawns, but sometimes this just doesn't matter, your pawn AI hits a weird angle and off the cliff they go.

Lightning Round:

-Playing different vocations are fun, but they're just so horribly balanced as a whole. Some vocations and skills in particular are better served on Pawns, some are worse on Pawns, some are simply a WASTE on pawns.

-Some vocations are only obtainable in the late game and with the lack of enemy scaling this feels counter intuitive, later enemies ARE more difficult in ways but it's not really significant compared to your power scaling. If you want to get these classes earlier before you ascend to RPG godhood it's to youtube and the wiki with you to figure out how, which sadly just feels like way more of an inconvenience than going to GameFAQs did in the olden days. It feels like an oversight and not intended.

-The economy in DD2 was concocted by a psychopath, if you want to afford nice things you NEED TO SELL ITEMS, item hoarding habits cultivated by other similar RPGs will do you no good here, market participation is REQUIRED to afford gear and items you and your pawns need to succeed. Item pricing in shops feels very arbitrary and it's clear many things are priced insanely high even though they may be potentially easy to get somewhere in the world, but you often won't know that until way later, so it often just feels like a cruel developer gag.

Decarnation is a charming piece of multimedia art unfortunately mired by most of its gameplay elements. Clunky, awkward minigames and a laundry list of bugs shackle a superb OST, lovely spritework, and gripping story from achieving the greatness they aspire to.

The Good:

As an art piece, Decarnation is a stunningly good first effort by Atelier QDB. This is a game that looks great, sounds great, and is lifted high by a grim horror story that packs the same stomach-churning kinetic energy as a real pageturner thriller novel.

The sound design is really excellent and the often upbeat synth-pop tracks scattered about create a sort of dissonance that works wonders to lower the guard of the player for an effective scare or to build an uneasy tension.

The art is fantastic, plenty of eye-catching screens throughout. Stylish character designs and fluid little bits of animation feel properly emotive, expressive, and at times even relatable.

The plot is mostly well-executed and handles some very sensitive topics with enough grace that I wouldn't be too inclined to recommend most people away from playing it for content reasons, but exceptions should still be made for those with extreme sensitivities.

The Bad:

Unfortunately as seems to be the case, Decarnation feels like a real first-effort in the gameplay dept. for this studio. I experienced a staggeringly high amount of bugs and glitches in my playthrough, chief among them was a dev option I presumably enabled on accident that permanently watermarked the corners of the screen with the build version and current level screen name, a real bummer as this text was not only distracting but often spoiled the narrative metaphor or upcoming twist of the gameplay and I had to force myself to ignore it.

The mini-games were sadly pretty mediocre:

- The dancemania rhythm game was horribly off-beat and was a tad overused, I also found that with both a keyboard and controller connected it was impossible to hit clusters of notes, attempts counting as automatic misses.

- The 'purple creature' puzzles were so often unengaging and tiresome, either posing no challenge whatsoever or relying entirely on sheer patience.

At times the pacing drags and at other times it shifts into overdrive creating a sort of tonal whiplash, the freakiness starts up in what feels like an instant, the player is given little time to step into the shoes of the protagonist before things start going south. The game wraps up similarly quickly and the final few minutes feel unfortunately pretty weak in terms of closure.

Overall, Decarnation is a fairly solid entrance for a new indie studio. I'd say it's more of an art experience than a full-blown game and therefore not for everyone, but it's priced where it belongs and a steal if on sale, I'll be looking forward to what comes next from this studio.

7/10

An enjoyable story, a less than enjoyable game. I think this would have been WAY more entertaining as a graphic novel or short story, the point-and-click elements add needless tedium to the plot beats and intrigue of the story itself.

The puzzles are never puzzling but very often aggravating, requiring the player to look at *everything*, and in many cases, look at everything twice. Logic can be thrown out the window in terms of what might make the most sense, the only times I was held up while playing was when I made an incorrect assumption about what should or shouldn't be possible, where I could or couldn't go.

The game appears to be riddled with AI art, in the computer image data, in many of the drawings and posters around many of the areas. I've heard that others who've noticed the same and made mention of this in steam discussions have had their threads locked or deleted. I find this really off-putting.

These characters are so cliché it's almost hazardous to the mind, there is no real character development in Bone Totem, every person is, with the exception of your 'hacker', the same person at the end as when they started. The aforementioned hacker character does have some growth but is just so obnoxious and grating to listen to after a while that the expansion of their character is really overshadowed.

By the end of the game I was sick of plot-via-PDA. It got so tiresome having to halt all momentum to spend 5 minutes reading through twenty entries in a new journal for every 15 minutes of gameplay. I ended up skipping the last several PDAs entirely, for the most part they only contain the threads connecting events together, the main beats are all happening in overworld dialogue.

I don't think people *shouldn't* buy this game, I'm neutral about the fact that so many people seemed to enjoy it. In the end, it just wasn't for me. If it's on sale and you're a big fan of sci-fi horror and point-and-click games you might get some fun out of Stasis: Bone Totem.

arcsys said trans rights

Notice: I will change my rating of this game when and if it gets updated, I think it's got a lot of promise but was released in too messy a state.

Right away, I'm in love with the graphical style and sound design of this game, I think both are incredibly charming and remind me of an older era of games that Alisa is clearly trying to evoke. That's about the end of my praise for now, however, as less than an hour into the game I've encountered control bugs that have had me fiddling with keybinds to be able to even start playing, movement bugs where you get stuck on geometry, and animation bugs where you're sliding around on both feet as a static model.

The voice acting is all over the place, some characters sound campy-bad on purpose to fit a trope, some sound just plain bad like the voice was simply a friend of the developer with no experience voice acting, and most perplexing to me, some are fairly good, which begs the question as to why the other voices aren't good at all. The text dialogue has a lot of errors even early on which stick out like a sore thumb.

Some personal issues:

While I think the PS1 graphics can be very fun at times, there are other times especially when the character is at a far distance where they become pixel-crushed into an unrecognizable blob, then enter a new frame at close range and are returned to a high-quality model, creating a fairly jarring visual effect. Playing this game also makes me remember that tank controls going away isn't necessarily a bad thing, every inch of my weak, squishy, analog stick using hands scream in pain at prolonged D-pad movement in 3-D space.

I desperately want to like this game as I can tell it was a labor of love by the single developer, and I'm keeping this in mind writing this review, but there are just too many glaring flaws right out of the gate to suffer playing through the whole game as it is now. Looking forward to trying again when it's got a bit of polish on it, and giving it a better review at that time.