Recent reviews by BinarySplit

It's frustrating. The gameplay seems to rely more on trial and error than technique. There isn't much else to keep you interested.

The whole experience felt like it was missing something like World of Goo's "Project Z" moment. Play that instead if you haven't already. It's an incredibly good example of how to make innovative but not exceptional gameplay highly compelling with a good story. Basically it's the Portal of 2d-physics-puzzle games. Throughout the game the difficulty curve ramps up at exactly the right pace, each gameplay element unfolds in many different ways as the brilliantly designed levels nudge you toward figuring out new tricks yourself, and the story is just so unique you can't stop thinking about what might happen next. Damn, I think I'm gonna have to go play it again now.

Zeran's Folly is pretty good as a story-oriented metroidvania. Similar to, but not quite as good as, Wuppo. I enjoyed it, and on a 50% off sale I'd say it's well worth its price.


+ Interesting characters, good story
+ Enough optional content, but not so much that 100%ing it is out of reach
+ Reasonably fun gameplay


* The writing is not for everyone. It's very crude at times. Characters openly talk about sex, rape, incest, child molestation, etc. Nothing graphic happens or is implied to happen during the course of the game, except a boss and several costumes have exposed breasts. It just is a part of characters' backstories & motivations. I imagine some of it could be shocking if the internet hasn't already desensitized you to everything though.



- It's very hard to control. Most attacks involve some sort of movement, but their behaviour changes dramatically depending on if you're in the air, and if you're "Focused". If you're hovering by repeatedly using an Up+Attack move, but your feet touch the ground for any reason, your Up+Attack move won't get you back in the air, but instead will send you rocketing across the screen. If you fall into a pit of spikes, you'll take damage and lose Focus, which means you lose most of your mobility moves until you've managed to avoid damage for ~1.5s. Without your mobility moves, it's hard to avoid damage, especially when you're stuck in a pit of spikes.
- Because of the control issues, it's not a precision platformer. I played on Easy, so I had enough health to survive most of the times I got f***ed over by the controls. However, if there were more difficulty, I imagine it would be more of a frustrating challenge than a fun challenge.
- The dungeons are a bit too long without much enemy variety. By the end of the game I was just cheesing the fastest characters to breeze through them.

I recommend you check back later. In it's current state, it's unfortunately rather shallow. There's plenty of stuff to do, but it doesn't really build up to anything greater. It's just a handful of small supply chains connected by A LOT of manual busywork. You'll quickly find the optimal strategy, and then it's just a matter of repeating the same actions and waiting your way to success.

The foundations of a good game are certainly there, but they need to find a way to make it less of a linear march towards wealth.

I played this back in 2010 and just found I hadn't left a review. Aquaria has left a lasting impression on me - it is an incredibly polished game that will leave you wanting more.

Aquaria is basically a Metriodvania-style game, but without gravity you have a lot freer movement and don't have to do any platforming. Its world is beautiful, filled with secrets and collectables. You can collect pets and learn to craft recipes for health. The story is relatively engaging, though there will be times when you just want to ignore it and go exploring for collectables.

I haven't found a game since that scratches the same itch as Aquaria - 2D Metroidvanias without platforming elements are very rare, and the level of polish in Aquaria cements it as one of the best games of all time in that genre. Every few years I check back hoping that the developers will be working on a successor.

Short and unfortunately dead. It seemed pretty interesting, but ends abruptly after 30 minutes of gameplay. While I hope that the devs come back and finish this, I can't recommend a game where 30 minutes is considered enough content for one episode.

Fantastic translation work if you're learning another language and want to practice (I played in German), great if you like story-driven games, pretty tedious if you expect any sort of action or gameplay.

The good: Good story, cool setting, awesome premise. You're a ghost detective investigating real-world crimes. You can walk through walls, read peoples' thoughts, mess with cats, etc. There are numerous optional side stories described in the in-game lore that contribute towards the main story, and it is all neatly wrapped up with a satisfying ending. While the gameplay isn't point-and-click, it gave me the same enjoyment I'd get from a good Wadjet Eye story-focused point-and-click game.

The bad: It's a collect-a-thon, and the detective gameplay is weak. Most of the game is just looking around the environment finding clues. About 3/4ths of the clues are for backstory or side quests. With main quest clues you occasionally have to solve a puzzle by selecting the right clue to answer a question, but you get unlimited retries and often you'll be left wondering how you could have known which answer was correct. The "survive demonic spirits" parts were thankfully short, as they were just boring stealth sections that didn't really add anything.

The ugly: The high price & short length. Don't buy it at normal price, it's only 7-10 hours long. Wait for one of the 85%-off sales.

Recommendation: If you're practicing a supported foreign language, absolutely get this game. Otherwise it all comes down to how much you like story-focused adventure games. Regardless, wait for a sale.

My Time at Portia is pretty amazing. It's basically 3D Stardew Valley - you adventure, craft, farm, socialize, mine and fight to help progressively improve the community you've just moved in to. It's so much fun it has been ruining my sleep schedule.

It's surprisingly complete for a game that has just hit early access, but there are a few rough edges and a few places content seems to be completely missing. I got 10h of gameplay before content seemed to start slowing down, but at 19h I've yet to hit the wall where content runs out.

I highly recommend My Time at Portia, but even though it's one of the better early access games, whether you should buy it now or after release depends on whether you're willing to start playing it again in a few months/years when it's released.

BUY IT ON GOG, NOT STEAM. The Steam version is broken and nobody bothered fixing it. You can't get in-game, it just crashes.

As for a review, I remember playing the demo ~15 years ago and being completely rapt by the game world. However, trying to play it these days is an exercise in frustration due to the controls. Your character moves like a tank. Strafing is possible, but so slow you'll regret even binding those keys. I really love this genre and have enjoyed the crap out of some of Piranha Bytes' other games, but Gothic's control scheme is just too annoying for me to recommend it.

To address all the people saying this game is "abandoned" - as far as I can tell after 10 hours, it's a mostly complete game. There are a few bugs, a couple unimplemented items that say "(SOON)", but it seems like everything you need to play the game is there. I don't know if there's an ending because I'm never going to get that far, but I get the feeling that a lot of people are salty that the devs didn't spend years and years adding new free content like Terraria.

That said, Edge of Space isn't terribly fun past the first 5 hours. At the start it's very similar to Terraria - you kill, mine & craft your way up the tech tree. However, the higher you progress, the more you get bogged down with useless items, needing to use many different machines to craft each of the different alloys, clunky menus, stale combat, mining scarcer and scarcer materials, etc. Basically after 5 hours it becomes a joyless grindfest - higher tiers of tech stop bringing new mechanics and instead just bump up the numbers, but each tier is progressively harder to achieve than the last.

Was it worth the US$3 I paid for it? Yes, it was fun for long enough. But it would have been a Recommend if it were just a 10 hour fun game, instead of being 5 hours of fun, and probably 50ish more hours of grind.

It's a great puzzle+comedy adventure game, and I hope they make many more. It's not in the same league as masterpieces of fiction such as I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, or The Longest Journey, but it's certainly at the top of the league of puzzle+comedy adventure games, giving me more enjoyment than Full Throttle, Day Of The Tentacle, and almost all of the other SCUMM games.

One thing to note: The Casual difficulty doesn't just make the puzzles easier, it also cuts out about 1/3rd of the game's content, leaving many plot threads unexplained. Unless you're going for every achievement (takes ~18 hours, vs ~9 for one full playthrough on Hard), I'd recommend you only play on Hard. There's a very good built-in hint system if you get stuck, but most of the puzzles are at just the right difficulty level that you won't need to use it often.