Recent reviews by Lython

you *should* play this, buuuuut

*spoilers ahead*

imagine a book with an odd structure, where you can skip to one of the last few pages by total accident, in such a way that makes the preceding 200 pages feel tedious and overlong because you already know they don't really matter at all.

this could've probably stood to be a liiiiiittle more linearly structured. I think i would've had the player start with every interview except the last one, piece them all together, then have the mail popup be like "hey! we found the last files on an old backup! hit "update" to link them into the viewer!" because spoiling yourself to the answer of a mystery without seeing most of the clues feels extremely anticlimactic.

fun concept, execution leaves something to be desired.

(Repurchased this game here after having beaten it way back last year.)

This is flatly one of the best video games ever made. There are few games that manage to stand so far apart from the mainstream model while also being impossible to replicate in any other medium.

It is completely unique, fully realized, and as close to my ideal game as anyone has ever gotten.

I am not going to say that this is a "bad game", but those casually interested, or new VR users, should understand that this game is somewhat unpolished and rough around the edges, having nowhere near the same level of consistency or immediate accessibility/immersion as games like Blade and Sorcery or Boneworks.

It is a very different thing, with a lot of stylistic holdovers from an older era of VR, and a control scheme that barely functions on Oculus Touch controllers. I recommend extensively studying the game and gameplay on YouTube before you commit to a purchase.

This is not to say anything negative about the devs: it is very admirable to actively supporting something for three years straight, and I wish I personally enjoyed it more.

(Played on the Oculus Rift S)

Really solid, excellent game here. Having just finished the campaign, I can say that with certainty. All the core things you probably care about - combat, weapon variety, puzzles, movement, etc. are all great, with a couple exceptions I'll get into below. In any case, I'd recommend this game to other VR owners without a doubt.

All that having been said, the big issue with this game are the roadblocks, areas or puzzles that take an inordinate amount of time to pass through, in a way that is neither fun, interesting, or apparently deliberate.

The two examples I'll give are later in the game, so I'll be vague. In "The T****" level, there is an object in the very first room, absolutely required to proceed, that I just could not locate my first time through. I'd chock this up to me being a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ dunce but I wasn't the only person that felt this way, either. Found several people online who'd been held up over an hour by this.

Then, the worst puzzle in the game, in the "D******" level near the very end, what should be a simple platforming task becomes needlessly complicated due to finicky physics repeatedly setting you back. This puzzle, involving hanging platforms, would be so easy to solve in any non-VR game due to the precision afforded, but in Boneworks, due to high focus on physical interaction, it becomes needlessly janky, for no great award. It is a puzzle that seems to exist specifically to highlight the weaknesses of the engine.

*SPOILERS BELOW*

My final issue is the ending, and story at large. The ending sequence, as a lot of people have pointed out, is overlong and doesn't have a great payoff. The "final boss" is genuinely bad and much too long, and there's a lot of walking/sucky climbing before and after it that, again, doesn't necessarily feel deserved or like it is building up to anything. It is content that could've been cut or drastically expanded, one of the two.

This ending caps off a story that I would describe as sparse, painfully so. I like a minimal/esoteric story that leaves a lot of gaps to fill in, but something about this one feels like a failure to me.

We start the story following the wall writing of someone who seems to know a lot more than you about what's going on, but after the first level or two, that writing become repetitive general warnings, or insane scrawling by other writers, with font differences seeming to be key. Half way through, any feeling that you're being helped is gone. There's a guy that talks straight to you, and a lady who talks very cryptically. They probably get less than 30 lines between them, put together. Worldbuilding loses its edge too. Early on, it seems a major plot hook is that the nullbodies are actually sentient, and have been exterminated/forced to live in shabby apocalyptic ghettos as a result. This is then, I'm fairly sure, literally never touched on again, and has no immediate relevance to the remaining plot or ending. The origin or purpose of almost all enemies goes unremarked on - you just kill them and run.

I'm not saying "I don't get it" because on the whole, I think I got the major plot beats figured out in my head. But I wish there was more to Monogon. By the ending, I had zero concept of what anyone's motivations were. Is Monogon a big evil Aperture style company exploiting people and technology for malicious ends, or are they just a regular VR company being maliciously targeted by outside forces because of unintentional immortality in their technology? What are your character's motivations? Are they the same from the start? Are we even actually playing the guy in the FMV cutscenes? Unfortunately, none of these elements ever coalesce into something more than their parts. By the end, you'll feel like the game is almost missing a story that it was supposed to have, and while I love and appreciate ambiguous, more experimental storytelling, I really wouldn't have minded a couple clear plot hooks in such a relatively long, involved campaign for what has been pitched as this big defining VR blockbuster. As it stands, Monogon and MythOS are very forgettable as story elements, and that's really just depressing.

Additionally, reused symbolism is now leading quite a few people to think that this game takes place in the SCP universe, and an MTF is running rampant around MythOS with you. While I love the Foundation, that does feel a little strange for what seems to be an original IP on this scale. If it isn't meant as a SCP story, did they have permission from the artist to use that symbolism?

I'm still recommending this, despite these issues, since it probably won't weigh too heavily on most players. I'd probably call it an 8/10, but it'd be easily a 9/10 with something that felt less annoyingly vague, and more genuinely mysterious at its core. Nobody ever fell in love with Portal or Half-Life because they got to the end and thought "Wow! None of that correlated in a way I could reasonably piece together as a narrative! Incredible!"

The breadth of content here is really special, and I'm remarkably surprised at how early in development it is. Keep up the good work, because I'm in love.

This isn't the most conventional review. It won't tell you, say, whether to actually buy Skyrim.

Skyrim doesn't really feel like a game anymore, to me. I'm not saying that it's transcended gaming, that it's so perfect and beautiful that it towers above all else.

I first played Skyrim when I was twelve. I remember never having heard of it before it happened to share the same release date as Minecraft. They're very different games, but to me since then, they've shared something important.

Skyrim feels like home.

You can only play so many hundred hours of a thing before you can walk through Whiterun blindfolded, know how to *actually* make a stealth character, a mage character, can name at least a hundred random NPCs that barely have an actual story to them.

I remember when I was a dorky kid, me and my friends would argue over who had the better wife, which house was superior, create elaborate backstories for beggars and the two-line nobodies that populate the towns. I probably know the layout of Skyrim better than my hometown.

That's not to say that any of this is because of the game itself. If I played it for the first time today, eight years on, I would maybe enjoy it, move on after a couple quests.

But there are special moments in your life, ones you can never recognize until you're long past, where your mind needs something to latch onto, focus on, just based on the evolution of your own self-image that comes with aging. Skyrim was there in that moment, inviting me to give days of my life to the arrangement of polygons that tricked me into thinking it was alive.

It won't really be a game to me anymore. I can't think of it that way. It's somewhere I lived, a long time ago, that I'll always want to go back and visit. I'll carry those memories with me, even if they're worth very little in the grand scheme.

*play "Carolina in my Mind" by James Taylor here*

Good!

it's delightful and content-rich and everyone involved did a great job. can't wait for the next few acts + hauntswitch. it's got a lot of the best bits of homestuck, though with a lot of the bizarro meta-humor stripped away. while that'll always be something i miss, this feels a lot more instantly accessible than homestuck, which is great because homestuck is one of the few things i've ever read with a steep learning curve in basic comprehension. anyway, you can tell a lot of real heart went into this. you should buy it and play it.

After about five hours of play at the time of writing, I still feel like I've barely experienced a FRACTION of what the game has to offer. Extremely deep, unique mechanically, and overall worth your money and time, whether you dig for treasure or soar into the sky.

https://68.media.tumblr.com/a6bb872139ba013dd819069a4b958d9c/tumblr_mz3tq37o2m1s7iwu7o1_400.gif