Recent reviews by Zephyrtf

This is a very small game with some limited modding support and a hell of a lot of potential. There's rarely a point I died where it felt like anything less than my own damn fault, and I died a LOT. if that sounds like a good time to you, and you have no small amount of gunwank lurking in your soul, give it a shot.

Easy Anticheat is a bloody cancer that causes a bunch of stability issues with this game because it detects DISCORD of all things as a security violation. This, for a game I want to play singleplayer! Absolutely hate this always online nonsense, #stopkillinggames can't come fast enough.

A decent, if very short, metroidvania-esque dig-em-up. for the price, you're getting a decent game. Just don't expect too many frills.

This is so close to being good, but it gets done in by a few inches of bad ui and terrible pathfinding.

In particular, the pathfinding lost me more than one game as my units failed to navigate around an obstacle to reach an emergent breakout in time, and several of the single-unit mission failures were because of characters getting stuck on obstacles or, worse, completely unclear visual range on explosives. I don't think there's anything more frustrating than the lack of proper visual guidance in the build mode, you have to effectively guess the range of several building types and explosive ordinance ranges since there's no information provided by the interface as to what that range might be once they're placed. EXTREMELY annoying lack of quality-of-life there, especially with how strict some of the goals can feel even early on.

The voice-acting is also so bad that I had to fully disable unit voice in the settings. It feels like the actors were professional enough, but didn't have any direction whatsoever. Lines that are meant to be sassy or enthusiastic all come off as flat or too quiet, like someone trying to voice a character without waking their parents in the other room.

ON THJE GOOD SIDE: I like the strict goals mentioned earlier. Even early on, the game is teaching through failure. Walls aren't optional, for example, get those up quick or they're just going to go around them. And you better be segmenting your society, or one munched tent is going to quickly become a horde of infected. The cascade failures are a wonderful element of the game, and it really sells the concept. More ways to HAVE cascade failures likely would have made this game work a bit better, too, since a key aspect of steampunk is having to manage inefficient technology. As it stands, it's little more than set dressing, and comes off as a somewhat derivative warhammer-like setting, complete with shoutouts of "for the emperor!"

I think if they can fix the pathfinding this game would be worth playing, but as is, I think these small frustrations outweigh the promise this has.

aside from a painfully slow run speed, this is a very charming puzzle game about building and re-building your mansion inherited from your somewhat sketchy dead uncle. If you're put off by adventure book tropes like mild racism and imperial politics, there's a bit of that in here you'll have to tolerate, but the fiat of the story makes it come off less as genuine author presentation and more a consequence of you exploring a dead old baron's mansion.

That aside, the puzzles are well-put together outside of a couple that feel a bit too arcane or RNG based for their own good. Make sure you take notes as you play, and don't be afraid to look up some guides if you've more or less solved a puzzle but completing it calls for some acceleration, you're rarely missing out on much. I reccomend the IGN guide since its split into individual aspects.

Look outside is fantastic, and if you like horror-comedy that doesn't skimp on the horror element I highly suggest getting into it. It's not perfect, but it's VERY enjoyable and I found myself immersed hard into it in very short order.

The pros: the game has a gorgeous art style, clever writing, and some truly fascinating moments to share. All of your recruitable party members are memorable freaks, be it the Janitor that treats his job as a life purpose fight against entropy or the pair of rude punks that kick you out of your own bedroom when you give them shelter. It's also getting regular balance adjustments currently, which have mostly improved the game.

The cons: I think the game can be deterimentally arcane in nature at times. The disc puzzles, for example, are a lot of trial and error if you're not taking notes for yourself on what values they have, and even finding that information is a bit tricky. This arcane design is intentional and rewards experimentation more often than it doesn't, but definitely feels like it makes the game inaccessible to those not deep into games to begin with.
I think some quality of life elements are hard to do in an RPG maker joint though, so there's only so much they could accomplish there.

There's also a number of small bugs and some unfinished assets still in there, but they don't hold back the game nearly as much as you'd imagine. Great stuff!

Post-apocalyptic magic soccer game with excellent narration and character writing. Don't expect a lot of gameplay complexity, but if you're good at juggling character controls you'll have a great time with this.

This is just... kinda basic in a way I don't think works against its contemporaries.
Really good stylization, decent enough platforming flow, but it's basic to the point of being shallow. It's a very early-indie-gaming title in that way, feels at home among games like Fez or Braid but doesn't offer enough complexity to hold me unfortunately.

This is an utterly fantastic game. Feels like it's pulling from the best aspects of Dangan Ronpa, Phoenix Wright, and just a little dash each of Persona 5's visual flair and Deus Ex's lorecrafting to create a very stylish, cynical, and ultimately believable cyberpunk dystopia for our protagonist to gamble with lives in.

I never found myself glossing over incidental information, since the ideas they were laying down were so believable that it really held my interest in a way the cyberpunk subgenre has been failing to do, self-referential as it can be, and it's very refreshing to see someone bringing new takes on these ideas to the table while still delivering that grimy future aesthetic I still love seeing.

I recommend playing the demo without watching the trailer.

This has some clever gameplay ideas and a really well crafted narrative. Unfortunately, it's held back by somewhat uneven gameplay difficulty (the tunneling minigame is very difficult for me, even on easy) and a somewhat grating soundtrack that often undercuts the mood it's trying to create.

It's times like this I really miss star ratings.