Recent reviews by Zephyrtf

Not terribly far in yet, but so far it feels like a pared-down halfway between fire emblem and some elements of Advance Wars. The pixel art has a charming imprecision to it, with characters wildly bouncing and flouncing around while still maintaining recognizable traits. It feels like the artist stopped before the refinements process, but in an intentional way I think works well for the tone. It's a good quality, I'd say.

The writing isn't really all that good, and often feels like a patronizing children's cartoon. It may just be that I'm out of the intended demographic, though. The dog general's mission is part of what makes this stick out so much, but there's other weird elements like villains being within five feet of the protagonists a number of times after fights and just... not facing consequences? It's somewhat strange in a way I don't think we're supposed to actually question, yet I still find myself questioning it.

There's also at least a couple fights early on that feel unnecessary and narratively costly because nobody even TRIED to talk things through, which is always a frustrating moment in any medium.

Overall, if you need a simple fix of classic wargames fare, this'll scratch the itch. There's also a modding scene, so there's plenty of bonus content if you tire of the campaign.

Aside from a STARTLINGLY abrupt ending, this really did feel like the gooey bite of portal japery I needed. Great mod, great characters, great concepts all around.

Looking forward to more work from these devs, consider me a fan!

I recommend this with the caveat you give it no money. the season pass/microtransactions are utterly amoral, and the use of AI voiceactors is pretty noticeable and itself unethical. The game itself, great, albeit without much real depth. The destructible environments make for excellent strategic considerations, and it's the first of these I've played in ages where the small maneuverable attack class feels properly balanced when pitted against the bigger heavier lads.

As is, I think all it needs is a bit more work on optimization and letting it run better on lower-end systems, right now it requires a prohibitively modern rig.

This is a fascinating example of good budgeting in your art. Don't judge this at a glance, this game's atmosphere is excellent and there's a lot to like here.

Although the moment to moment pixel art is very poor/simplified, it actually winds up adding to the themes of the game since that low-quality look makes it feel like a rushed corporate product until the rather excellent cutscene work hits. Naturally, since this is a horror game about the horrible experience of working in an office setting, that's EXTREMELY appropriate.

Gameplaywise, apart from one or two annoyingly easy to miss secret-steps to the special endings, the game delivers good variety. It's not terribly challenging (and in fact, a good Hard Mode option that trims down some of the item pickups and enemy layouts wouldn't go remiss) but this doesn't wind up holding it back much since the real challenge of it comes in managing those secret ending steps.

The writing ain't half bad either, I quite enjoyed some of the less prominent ideas and how understated they are, notably that our main character maaaaay just not be as heroic as he first appears. The monster concepts and uneasy body-horror are also fascinating as they are obvious in inspiration, which I exclusively mean as a compliment. There's something very familiar about horrifically sick employees refusing to stay home just so they can deliberately puke on you.

Ultimately, I favorably compare this to Yahtzee's "Cthzo Mythos" series for those familiar. Similar approaches to its limitations, and equally excellent use of sound design and tension-building.

I went in mostly unspoiled and man, I was just handed stinker after stinker here.
The gameplay loop is well enough, you figure out where your tools spawned and then go through the embalming checklist as hauntings progress and you find more clues as to which demon is riding which corpse so you can burn them back to hell. Cool idea!

However, major caveats ensue. The scares are usually kinda banal, and at times outright comedic.

This game contains a number of outright terrible depictions of addiction and mental illness. One of the big scary reveals is that your character takes antidepressants, and at one point you are made to go through the motions of doing heroin.

There's an interesting concept here, and certainly some budget and effort went in, but the hackneyed faith-healer nonsense underpinning a lot of it makes it feel so much cheaper than it might have otherwise been and every time I found myself in a setpiece haunting I quickly found myself just hoping I'd find an exit sooner than later.

I'm glad the devs succeeded, the effort IS on display, but I sincerely hope they've improved their scope of the world and life experience since then because man these themes are blowhole booty butt cheeks.

This is a party game for you and three friends, not a horror game as advertised. I won't pretend it has the deepest or most realized mechanics on earth, but for a bite-size fun time with friends, it's more than serviceable.

Nothing will ever beat ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ around with your friends in a corridor only to watch as one of them gets instagibbed by a thumper you didn't know was there, or pulling off a clutch beehive snatch after someone dies just outside the ship door with it.

I really want to like this. It's a good game at its core, with absolutely phenomenal technical skills with both spritework and character design. The story is well-crafted (albeit somewhat predictable) and there's an interesting theme of grief throughout.

What bothers me, though, are the environments. As well-realized as they are on a technical level, I find that they're quite dull to explore since they're mostly just going to be cave systems and stone ruins with some aesthetic rejiggering between them. They're very fancy rocks to be damned sure, but you can only look at rocks for so long before you get bored of them and with some exceptions its all you're really offered.

The pirate ship areas are certainly more interesting to look at with the wood and clockwork theming, and I certainly enjoyed the final area, but I never found myself really going "oh, that's neat" despite orchestral swelling trying to cue me into an emotional response.
This lack of forethought results in areas feeling fairly unimpressive unless you have a deeper appreciation for the technical skill on display. Which as a pixel artist, I do! And I've learned a lot about my own craft playing it! But I still can't help think what more it could have been with just a bit more effort spent on putting the excellent art direction of the characters into the environments more.

I also think the core mechanic of free-flight held the game back significantly, Otus and friends certainly control well but you can feel a TON of places throughout the game where the designers were struggling to really balance that freeform movement, often relying on simple timing puzzles and narrow navigation corridors to funnel you into properly engaging with challenges. And it doesn't always succeed, or specifically has to cheat sometimes to make it work.

An example that comes to mind are bomb enemies in a narrow vent system. Normally, these bomb enemies can be stunned with one of your buddies, and you ARE able to summon your buddies when on the vertical stretches since there's room to summon them. However, the bombs are special ones that cannot be stunned, which feels like a strange choice since there's not really much challenge to them already. Why NOT let players get a bit of fun juice out of circumventing a very minor navigation puzzle?

The bosses are also somewhat of a balancing roller coaster. The hardest boss in the game is about 3/4ths of the way through the game, and the final boss though VISUALLY spectacular is kind of easily defeated by just spamming attacks at them. It actually undercut some of the finality of the ending as well.

The story is also odd. There's a major secret you can only get on newgame+ that just unlocks some story lore, but the lore that it gives you is just minor background context to smooth over some of the evident plot-holes. They do a fine job at this, and there's even a fun bit of prophetic misdirection if you're really paying attention to the wording and story, but it also feels like a strange reward for going so out of your way. Feels like that secret was meant to be a bit more than it was, but had to be cut for time. I suspect there's an unused boss lurking in the files somewhere that just didn't get completed.

Also, that cannon minigame is atrociously difficult. It feels like there were supposed to be more of them that got scrapped to get you used to the mechanics, but only the most difficult version wound up making it in, and even after numerous attempts I found myself failing to reach the end. You also only unlock faster movement after a 100% completion on coin collection, which winds up pretty grindy and obnoxious after a wpell.

Overall, I think this is an interesting game to play if you have an interest in pixel art. There's a lot to learn about subpixel animation, detail clustering, and dither patterns if you are willing to study what you're seeing. Otherwise, I can't honestly recommend it beyond a 6/10 rating. It's certainly above average, but small areas of low polish and underbaked concepts hold it back.

This is already a fantastic game.

One of the first thing it introduces to you is a seemingly-redundant unarmed combat system, which is immediately invalidated by having any guns whatsoever. This is a trap you should not fall into, because actually learning how to use that combat system is INTEGRAL to having the most fun possible with the game.

I'd compare it to the way Mirror's Edge feels better if you eschew guns entirely to focus on outmaneuvering and decking the cops in their piggish little faces. The same principle applies here in spades. You are BETTER than they are, and you will prove it with nary a bullet spent.

That's not to say there's no challenge, enemies ARE a threat and if you run out of heals and ammo you're gonna need to backtrack a bit as punishment. This, however, is a disguised blessing too since there's so many different avenues of attack you can discover in the process. For example, if you get outside for a space-walk, you can easily spend some of that ammo taking out some of the turrets so you can backtrack easier through certain areas.

This is a fantastic game on such a fundamental level I can't help but fully endorse it, even in early access. All it has to do is keep adding more excellently planned levels and fun new ideas.

This game is a feature-incomplete buggy mess. Prisoners will reliably starve themselves, either because a guard couldn't figure out the pathing to a cell or because the prisoner got stuck in a wall and couldn't path out. This would make sense if someone was walled in somewhere, but this will happen on random props and even with plenty of canteens and kitchens fully staffed out with sinks and extra cooks, there never seemed to be enough flow for them to reach the food.

There's also such a dismally limited tileset of options to pick from, and a user interface that is clunky and hard to read.

I really wanted to like this because I love this kind of top-down infrastructure game, but the execution of this thing is just really terrible and I can't in good conscience reccomend it to people.

It is CRIMINAL how under-played this is. This game is utterly fantastic, buy it immediately.
I have seen three unique rpg mechanics within my first hour of playing and there's so much variety in the design that I'm still getting surprised by more hours in.

This feels like a worthy successor to the original paper mario series.