Recent reviews by Veles

From what little gameplay I saw of it prior to purchase, I thought this game be something along the lines of a Diablo-like. After that, I got into the game and realized just how core base-building was to the experience. "Okay, so this is a Minecraft thing", I thought to myself - though I still had an open mind, and I was still thoroughly enjoying myself. This game's opening act is indeed very strong.

Progressing further, I found that the game seemed to want to do nothing more than waste your time: for some reason, you cannot fast travel with certain resources in your inventory. "Can I turn this off?" I asked myself - turns out you can, in fact, turn it off, but the reasoning behind why it remained a default option eluded me.

Past that, my friend and I reached the midgame, and it dawned on us both: we're sitting here twiddling our thumbs for an inordinate amount of time waiting for a meter to fill up enough times until our resources are refined into something that we can actually use, but then those refined resources take *time* to craft into something usable, further compounding the issue, so the thumb-twiddling continues. On top of that, we spent hours running in a loop farming for research materials which, due to the RNG nature of the research system, didn't give me the armour set for my particular build until it was the last unlockable option. Grinding can be fun, yes, but only when the game is built around mastery of content. Running through the same village mindlessly grinding the same trash mobs waiting for them to drop research mats isn't *good* grinding - it's padding. If you want a good example of how to do grinding right, go look at Monster Hunter (although I have my fair share of grievances with MH, it at least handles grinding in a more enjoyable way.)

But then it dawned on me.

This isn't Diablo, nor is this Minecraft - this is just vampire ARK, Rust, or Conan. The game is built around PvP and big servers while solo or 2-player gameplay feels dull and monotonous. Even after maxing out crafting modifiers (which only seemed to make the crafting timer tick down faster without changing the displayed crafting time for... some reason), the crafting still felt sluggish. The default fast travel limitations? Meant to make resource runs feel more dangerous. The default crafting rates? Meant to give an edge to bigger clans - it all made sense.

And, as an aside, for whatever reason, there is absolutely zero possibility of resizing the UI so, if you're hard of sight like me, you'll be hard-pressed actually glean any info from the user interface. It feels like a good game marred by a lack of focus full of questionable UX. It starts out fun, but eventually, as you progress, the cracks begin to show.

Prey is essentially what happens when you give a bunch of ImSim devs a Triple-A budget, and that budget shows from the world design all the way to the interactivity present in the game world. It feels like the devs thought of almost every playstyle you could imagine and then some. Playing with weapon durability and no repair skill for whatever reason? You're in luck, because now all those useless weapons lying around that were basically junk items before are now your only lifeline and the only thing between you your alien adversaries. Never in any other game have I been so happy to find two basic shotguns in a single room.

Maybe you want to play the game without upgrades? You can do that. Want to play without alien powers? You can do that. Want to play with only alien powers and roleplay a space wizard? WELL OF COURSE YOU CAN DO THAT!

Even the little environmental details have lots of love put into them. The whole space station has this Neo-Art-Deco look to it that gives me the vibes of a more future sci-fi Bioshock, and much of what would usually get relegated to its own separate UI (interacting with computer screens and ammo counters on most weapons come to mind immediately) is a diegetic part of the game world - it's really top-notch stuff, and zooming in on little charts and whiteboards put into the levels is without a doubt going to show you something neat eventually (your observations may also be rewarded)

I can't say much about the sound design other than it's also suitably great - weapons sound punchy as they should, it's mixed well, and things overall sound how they should (though, some sounds like the sneak attack crit SFX can get repetitive).

Make no mistake, though, this game can be BRUTAL for new players, but don't feel discouraged - it's all a part of the atmosphere. As a bonus, the game runs practically flawlessly on Linux.

Recommended similar media: Dead Space, Deus Ex (2000), John Carpenter's The Thing, 2001 A Space Odyssey

What if you made Deus Ex, but we took out the streamlined level design, replaced the smart writing with memes and off-colour humour, and made the setting "Polish" to the point of feeling like disingenuous satire written by a foreigner?

You'd get Peripeteia.

Somehow, despite looking about the same as Deus Ex graphics-wise (worse in places, actually), it runs worse than Cyberpunk 2077.

Weapons feel wonky (the muzzle climb on some of these weapons, ESPECIALLY the Glock, is exaggerated more than your average "realistic" stalker mod; aiming down sights with the Tokarev may as well involve the character putting their nose on the front sight, etc), weapon inertia is exaggerated whenever you turn your body, and the inventory system adds unnecessary bloat between combat sections, and speaking of bloat between combat sections, I sure do hope you enjoy spending 5 minutes climbing stairs to find an item that seems to exist in its current position with a basis in logical consistency rivaling the average Fallout New Vegas weapon mod.

That's what this game feels like - it feels like someone's mod: down to the amateurish overuse of techno music blaring into your eardrums whenever you're around enemies signalling that they exist - it's like if Deus Ex constantly played combat music when you were sneaking around.

For $25, it's not worth it. Go play Deus Ex; go play Prey; go play Dishonored - don't play this.

A pretty fun little terminal game for when you're looking for something laid back and simple. Gameplay mainly revolves around amassing bigger and bigger armies to conquer increasingly stronger nations via text control similar to old text-based adventures. There's also arena betting and exploring the procedural wilderness (both done via text input, of course.)

Sound effects are passable for a one-man project, and the music fits the vibe (And you can always turn the music off if it's not to your liking.)

The procgen ASCII art here is impressive. It's hard to find two characters who look the exact same, and I've rarely had issues trying to figure out just what I was looking at.

I would highly recommend this game. It can be as casual or as involved as you'd like it to be, and as a bonus it runs pretty well on Linux (aside from the text constantly redrawing itself in the terminal window during animations, but that's easily overlooked).

I'd love to recommend this game, but unfortunately, I'm going to have to recommend against purchasing it.

Story is a shallow "corps bad, can't do anything, no happy endings, why bother" pastiche of Cyberbunk literature from eras bygone. If anything, this game seems to have taken some plot points from William Gibson's Neuromancer, but that's true for most display window Cyberpunk media.

The gameplay is hit or miss - either you play stealth and break the game with quickhacks (Rippler cyberdeck, buff quickhacks to hell and back with cyberware, memory wipe + synapse burnout everything), or you suffer through side content not built around going guns blazing and have the questgivers scold you for a lack of discretion.

Netrunning is so spectacularly broken, in fact, that during one of the DLC missions, I was faced with so-called "overwhelming odds" that simply felt like a point and click adventure. I would've thought this was a rank-and-file combat encounter had the presentation not drummed this up as overwhelming odds that you can only get out of via plot contrivances that exist to set up a boss fight that is nothing more than a game of Simon Says and pressing F.

Which leads into the next point: plot railroading. Why do things have to happen the way they do? In gameplay, my character can slaughter an entire room full of goons by simply looking around and calmly walking by - he can even do this as he's reeling from an explosion, mind, but the second a cutscene starts, the ability to fry someone's brain in a life or death situation simply disappears due to plot contrivance - it feels unsatisfying, and it stinks of presentation over player choice (which is awfully important in an RPG).

The visual design of everything is great, and the music is superb, but it feels more like a high-budget art project focusing on style over substance than something I'd enjoy sinking my teeth into.

Alternative media suggestions: Neuromancer, Serial Experiments Lain, and Blade Runner (both movies).

I really wanted to recommend this game, but I just can't.

The UX is... questionable, if I'm being generous: no pause button (coupled with no saving outside of checkpoints), menus that are a slog to navigate (and you'll be doing it a lot since this game only allows you to equip 2 spells and 2 weapons at once for some arbitrary reason), and a default control scheme that gives me severe wrist pains.

To explain, C and V are used to cast spells - these must be held during their entire charge period, or else you lose the charge and have to start all over again. You'll frequently be moving with WASD and jumping *while* holding said keys. This will force your wrist into an uncomfortable state of ulnar deviation at best and induce RSI at worst.

As a result, I tried to rebind the keys, only to be met with a *text file* in place of a proper key rebinding menu. As an aspiring game dev looking into UX for their own game, you *do not* do this. It feels feature-incomplete.

But there is some good in the game - I like the elements that feel vaguely immersive sim-like (I found a seemingly useless spell that summoned coffins and figured I could use it to mark paths I'd already explored and, to my surprise, they were persistent and could be used as markers), the soundtrack is pretty alright (albeit a bit out of place in areas), and the opening few hours are great.

I just wish the rest of the game were as good and the UX was given another pass.

I haven't had a game pull me in and immerse me this much since the first time I played Dark Souls back in the early 2010s. I haven't even scratched the surface of this game, but even 10 hours in I've done the following:

- Spoke with a sentient computer after falling through a hole in the ground into a vast cave system

- Spent an entire in-game month underground because I fell into the aforementioned cave system with no sign of an exit.

- Tried interacting with clams and subsequently got beaten to death by frogs

- Scammed a quest giver with a steel chair because he believed it to be an ancient artifact

It's a very evocative and immersive game. Ignore what people say about needing guides to enjoy it - just play with checkpoints and learn as you go. You won't regret it.

To preface this review: is the game slightly outdated? Yes, PCBS2 has a more up-to-date parts roster (but it's an Epic Exclusive, so if you're averse to that stuff, that might be a turn-off)

Regardless, somehow this game manages to hook me for some esoteric reason that escapes me. The "gameplay" loop boils down to clicking buttons in a UI, memorizing lists of customer parts, min-maxing profits if that's something you enjoy, and occasionally fiddling with the game's overclocking mechanic which boils down to trial and error with more buttons, but - and this is a big but - the experience is still worth it if you're big on the job sim genre.

Be warned, however, it's a very grindy game and it will take 10-15 hours of playtime before you unlock some of the more interesting mechanics (overclocking, custom water cooling, PC reselling, etc), so don't treat this as a game you need to grind out of obligation - pick it up every now and then, leave it for a bit, and come back whenever you're in the mood. If that sounds like your kind of game, I'd highly recommend this one.

As a bonus, it runs near-flawlessly on Linux (with the occasional crash that, from my experience, only happens if you alt-tab)

It's a quite high-quality script kiddie sim. As someone with *NIX experience, it's not the most realistic when it comes to terminal usage (no piping, aliases, Boolean operators, etc)

Regardless, I'd recommend the game wholeheartedly, but don't go into it expecting anything remotely realistic.

P.s. I absolutely adore the UI and wish my real desktop was this aesthetically pleasing.

There is a Mariana Trench under every Town