Recent reviews by CyberMermaidKomette_VT

I really enjoyed this game and am looking forward to playing it again.

I don't think my take necessarily reflects the greater Life is Strange fanbase though, as my order of preference of LiS games is opposite that of a lot of the community.

My personal order of preference for the Life is Strange games is as follows:
Life is Strange: True Colors
Life Is Strange 2
Life is Strange: Double Exposure
Tell Me Why (which I count)
Life is Strange 1
Life Is Strange: Before The Storm

So if you're a fan of the series, use that as some context for my review. ;)

Things I really enjoyed:
* I found this to have some of the more interesting characters in the series.
* The animation, face-tracking, and performances are absolutely stellar.
* The characters are really interesting and memorable. I'm particularly a fan of Gwen and Amanda.
- I love, love, love 28-year-old Max. I really liked her at 18, she was one of exactly three characters in LiS1 that i liked at all, and she feels like a natural evolution of who that sweet 18-year-old who was still trying to learn who she was. I also really, really love her evidencing her character growth as a result of the first game.
* The mechanic is really cool, and I love that you have a power that directly affects the world around you outside of dialogue for the first time since LiS1. The other games have good reasons to not offer something like that, but it's nice to have it back.
- I also really liked the way that your phone works given the effect of Max's powers.
* My choices felt meaningful. If I pissed somebody off, they stay pissed off and don't want to talk to me again.
* Overall I thought that the story was really, really good. The twist was really cool, and I'm eager to see what comes next!

Things that could have been better:
* There were quite a few side plots that weren't resolved. I think it's been set up for another sequel - and I'm excited to see it. Once that sequel comes out, this will be much less frustrating, but they're very...prominent for that, and the need for answers burns in my head.
* While I like it when games signpost their objectives well, I did feel a little bit too led-around-by-the-nose for my taste. That being said, I did also miss a few things, so maybe I just wound up taking the more brain-dead options where the game has to force me forward.
* I think my crackpot fan theory about why the ending of LiS1 was what it was has been crushed. Booooo! But maybe there's still hope for it yet, for the idea that the storm was caused by some conscious third-party trying to scare Max away from taking action! ... but I think that's not the case, and, boooo!

This is one of the best games ever.

It may not be Baldur's Gate-ian in length, but every minute will be packed with atmosphere, character, and emotion. You'll find a narrative in which nearly every decision has real, impactful results. It's a visual novel - style experience with horror elements and what we'll call a very nonlinear experience. The voice acting is stellar, the twists are amazing, the moments of horror are unsettling, the moments of glory are delightful.

I can only say so much without spoiling the game. But if you like any of the things I've said here, you owe yourself to play this. I normally don't like horror, but it didn't bother me at all in this game, though there were definitely some unsettling moments.

Be aware that the game opens with a slew of trigger warnings, and they are very real and valid. Content warnings from the game's official website:
General CWs: mild nudity; realistic depictions of mutilation; disembowelment; realistic depictions of knife wounds; loss of self; cosmic horror; existential horror; being eaten alive; disembowelment; suffocation; realistic depiction of acid burns; realistic gore; jumpscares; derealisation; forced suicide; loss of bodily autonomy; starvation; unreality; body horror; forced self-mutilation; forced suicide; realistic depictions of graphic violence; self-degloving; realistic flaying; self-immolation; realistic depiction of a bloated corpse; drowning; realistic depiction of burning to death; auditory gore; murder; death; loss of control; verbal abuse; gaslighting; dismemberment; graphic self-decapitation; realistic severed head

This is one of my favorite games. In its heyday, I met lifelong friends.
It's not what it used to be, back in the era where the developers could enter your online session and interact with you as characters from the world, progressing the meta-narrative that affects everyone based on the actions of what a single person that they might visit would take. (My friend got my god killed for everyone and I'm still mad at her about it! xD)

But it remains an amazing and atmospheric co-op horror-stealth game, with 1-4 player on your side, and optionally, in a mostly-opt-in format, up to one hostile player. The gameplay feels sort of like Thief: The Dark Project from back in the day, with combat as a possible and semi-viable option in the short-term if you're careful, but you really want to be stealthy. You can clamber around on buildings and outcroppings.

In The Blackout Club, you're a teenager going on short missions to uncover information or otherwise counter the activity of the cult that's taken over all of the adults in your small town in rural Virginia. You'll hide from adults, sleepwalking people not fully assimilated into the cult as well as waking cultists, and the monster that is only visible with your eyes closed. Yes, there's a button to close your eyes.

You have the advantage of items, from tranquilizer darts that will take an adult out of action for the mission, to flashbangs that will stun anyone who's grabbing you, to a drone that can be used to scout ahead while you yourself remain safe. You also have the advantage of a power that you select, from the ability to grab an adult from the front - as normally you have to be behind them to stun them down - to the ability to hack an adult's phone to distract them.

You'll be exploring a neighborhood that includes the interiors of all of a dozen or so houses, plus a small school complex, and an underground maze that hides some of the mysteries of the cult.

Each time you play, you'll also encounter a dream, revealing the enigmatic Voices that inhabit the world. Today you've missed a chance to participate in the ARG, but you'll often hear past players talk to those Voices, and their responses. The dreams will reveal the meta-plot, the mysteries that were solved.

Even today, post-ARG, I cannot recommend this game enough.

I didn't play through the game, I'll be the first to admit that. The pacing was *awful* and I just couldn't sit through the third cutscene, I barely made it past the title screen. Everything just plods along, and then it opened up to the most basic and boring brawler that I've ever seen.

Usually, a game will put its best foot forward first. I have no idea if that happened here and the whole game is this bad, but the cutscene I Alt-F4'd during was literally talking about how boring everything was, and the game evoked that in a way that I just couldn't keep sitting through.

WARNING: BEWARE IF PRONE TO MOTION SICKNESS!

This game is AMAZING. Mirror's Edge meets Superhot. The action is fantastic - fast, stylish, and full of fun little tricks! Wall-running, combat diving, sliding, double-jumping, and that's not even touching on the different ways you can attack your enemies!
As someone who really enjoys FPSes with interesting movement, this game has quite possibly topped my list, beating out Overwatch, old-school Tribes, just, everything.

Except...I get sick when I play it for long. So I need to remember not to binge it. But it's absolutely worth it!

This game is an absolute work of art, and the implementation of Mass Effect 2 - style conversation blockouts pulled me out of it terribly over and over and almost ruined it for me.

The art is gorgeous. The music is fantastic. Your control over the music, is phenomenal. The setting is clever and scintillating and I want to live in this world forever. And the characters feel so real, The voice acting is stellar, and the story is gripping and amazing.

But holy crap, I hate games like this, like Mass Effect 2, where I'm actively penalized for making varied and interesting dialogue decisions instead of being a one-note character. I've had dialogues where all of my options but one were disabled because I didn't have enough Charming points to say "it's awful that that happened to you," or enough Kickass points to say "I'm angry right now!"

If that doesn't turn you off, and it genuinely came close a few times for me, this game is a must-play. It goes in my list of games to show off to people who don't believe that games can be art, because this is nothing less.

A friend gave me this game as a gift. We're both big fans of games like Space Engineers and Empyrion and she'd hoped she'd found something that might be less buggy than Space Engineers that also has multiple grids.

She did not notice that a) the devs disappeared a year ago, and b) there's no multiplayer, and the devs once made a blog post about how that is not in the cards for this game.

After playing: it is not less buggy than Space Engineers. This is a shame, because the building is stronger than Empyrion, and the survival is stronger than Space Engineers.

And honestly the building looked to be on track to some day be better than Space Engineers - but it didn't get there. There are multi-grid blocks, but they're even buggier than Space Engineers'. Like modern (2022) Space Engineers, there's no collision damage, which is good because bugs cause collisions to happen constantly if you're using multi-grid blocks.

Better than Space Engineers, you can build a complex electrical system, turning off segments of your construction at a time instead of having to do it one component at a time. This is a ton of fun to play with.

Additionally better than Space Engineers, you can also bind arbitrary keys on your keyboard to actions for a vehicle. All cockpits on a given vehicle or base have shared keys and no toolbar or other indicator what you've bound to the keys, which you do from each component (or a terminal).

The wiki is horribly out of date.

I'd give this one a pass, in favor of Empyrion or Space Engineers, or possibly No Man's Sky.

MMORPGs are not exactly my jam, so I was leery at the game identifying itself as such. It sounded survival-craft-y enough that I wanted to give it a try, though.

I should have listened to my instincts. I usually try to play a game solo for a while until I'm literate enough with the game to feel comfortable before I interact with other people much. But this is a game about supply chains - about being a cog in a machine. Nearly the entire game is, or has been for me, sitting here and mashing the "craft (item)" button over and over to grind my skills up to the point where I can make the things I want to make. I've seen some structures others have built, but playing alone, it'll take me literally dozens of hours to get to the point where I can feasibly build them. The bottleneck for my build seems to be not being able to craft storage containers or carts, so I've spent most of the last six hours grinding my weaving up to the point where I can make bags.

I'm...almost halfway there? To be fair an hour of that was also trying to find a good spot to set up camp, then figuring out the resources I actually need to survive and then finding another good spot to set up camp.

I also didn't notice when I bought the game that it was first published in 2010. I'll bet that it looked only slightly dated in 2010! It looks... *very* dated today.

On the plus side, the community *does* seem very friendly.

I might recommend this to people who felt that ARK wasn't grindy enough.

Life Is Strange 2 is the fourth-ish entry in the Life Is Strange series, and in my opinion it's a very solid one. It's also an LGBT-friendly game - there's a happily married gay couple, a pansexual character, and the main character has romantic options with both a man and a woman.

It's a Telltale-style game, a narrative-based adventure game, wherein said narrative is dramatically impacted by the effect of the choices the player makes throughout the game. It's a tear-jerker that follows the 16-year-old Sean Diaz and his 9-year-old brother, Daniel, as they are on the run from the police after their father is accidentally killed by a cop, and Daniel develops a power that manifests at that moment, killing the cop.

Very different from the first Life Is Strange game, Daniel's power is telekinesis, so unlike the first game, you won't be rewinding time to fix all of your mistakes or poor choices. The effects of your choices may not all be immediately apparently, however - in addition to solving the problems in your face in a certain way, each choice you make also helps to shape Daniel's personality, from his hygiene to his moral fiber. By the end, he might reject your commands, if his personality has been shaped in a way contrary to what you're asking. This is an incredibly powerful storytelling device, and it's a sort of sense of agency that I haven't seen often in video games.

Life Is Strange 2 has some lovely visuals. They're not groundbreaking, but they do convey the beautiful artistry of the world well.

This game continues the series' trend of an absolutely spectacular soundtrack that includes ambient instrumentals as well as songs from independent musicians.

The voice-acting is as superb as I've come to expect from the series. Thankfully, the dialogue writing is *much* better than that of the first game, on par with the rest of the series.

The gameplay is decent for what it is. There's a sketchbook minigame that pops up every now and again that I found simultaneously interesting and boring - I loved watching the sketching, and loved having control over how much detail Sean would add to his drawing, but it often happened at a time when I didn't really want to sit down and sketch.

Which does lead into my one real complaint with the game, which is the pacing. There may have been times when I sat down to play this when I wasn't really in the mood for it, but I definitely observed frustration that the game wasn't moving faster ever here and there, and times when there were items in the world to examine, that I suppose I could have skipped had I not feared missing something important or meaningful, when I would have much rather moved on with the plot.

The characters and story are both solid. We see Sean and Daniel travel across the country, encountering some compelling characters and situations along the way. To be honest the timeskips between each episode grated on me a little, as the characters would talk about the weeks that I missed and I felt like there was important change implied during that time, but I suppose there's not a better way to do that. Ultimately, the choices made throughout the game come together in the ending in a way that I've never seen done so well in a video game, and I think that's a thing to celebrate.

It is also definitely worth mentioning that the Diaz brothers encounter a fair bit of racism along the way, and there are direct themes and, brief, discussions of the political climate in which the game was released in 2018-2019. Indeed, racism might be said to play a strong role in the events that kicked the entire story off.

All in all, if you like sad games with a very strong element of choice, an excellent narrative, compelling characters, and a pace that's at times a little slow, this game is worth your time and money.

ARRRGH CRAP CRAP CRAP I WAS DOING SO WELL YET AGAIN THEN THE WRONG HAND CAME UP AT THE WRONG TIME AGAINST THE WRONG ENEMY AND YET ANOTHER GLORIOUS RUN CAME TO AN EMBARRASSING END! FFFFFFFFFFFff

This single-player game is an excellent blend ofdeckbuilding and roguelike elements. The art really does it for me, though it might be too minimalistic for some. The characters feel very, very different, and each has at least a few viable strategies possible from their distinct card pools...and more than that depending on what events and relics you encounter.

Each character, as I've mentioned, has a distinct "class" card pool that they build decks off of. There is also a pool of "neutral" cards any can acquire, but encountering those are pretty rare and most of the time when you see them you'll have the option of instead acquiring cards from your deck, meant to synergize with the other cards in your deck.

You traverse a dungeon with branching paths you can't backtrack on to reach a boss. This happens on three stages, with each stage having tougher encounters and bosses. Each "step" in the dungeon might contain a common enemy that drops gold and a choice among 3 random class cards and sometimes a potion; an Elite enemy that drops a powerful Relic - more on that later - in addition to what common enemies drop; a shop at which you can spend your gold on relics, potions, class cards, neutral cards, and card removal.

Combat is turn-based. You have an energy pool that usually starts at 3 during each turn, and the objective is to make the enemies run out of HP, ideally without taking any HP damage of your own. Each enemy takes one action per turn, normally telegraphed over their head. You play as many cards as you choose out of a hand that defaults to 5 per round as long as you have energy left to play them. You can also play any number of potions on your turn as you choose that you've got in your potion slots. You start with three potion slots. Cards can buff, debuff, damage, and/or "block," among a few other utility functions. Block directly reduces incoming damage - so if you have 5 block up and you take 3 damage then 4 damage, you'll run out of block then take 2 HP damage.

It's ultimately very engaging, especially if you like roguelikes, deckbuilding games. Particularly if you're either less stubborn than I am (HARDEST DIFFICULTY ALL THE TIME) or more masochistic (...why do I keep setting it on the hardest difficulty when I just get mad when I die? D: )