Recent reviews by BinarySplit

The first couple hours were an awesome and unique experience that I totally recommend experiencing. The world in DoaSJ is bustling and full of alien culture (music, religion, etc.) that will draw you in. It's very enjoyable and I highly recommend it if it's at a price you're willing to pay for 2 hours of fantastic game.

After the 2 hour mark, however, the game loses its shine. There are a lot of optional things you can do (e.g. finding the right vendor to sell the things you pick up) that actually aren't worth the time or effort required. You end up just becoming a minmaxing grinder because it's the only way to get through the story in a reasonable amount of time. It's a bit sad - I was really hoping that the world would develop, or the story would unfold in unexpected ways, but hours 3-7 were just a repetitive slog with no reward.

I still recommend playing a couple hours of DoaSJ, but don't expect to finish it - once the game stops being enjoyable, it doesn't recover.

It's exactly what it looks like, and more than I expected for that price.

Short game, but super depressing and will make you question why you live your life. 10/10 would die a little on the inside again.

Good hacking game!

There's really not much more to say - hacking games all seem to have the same premise. I got a bit bored after 90 minutes because I've already played quite a few very similar hacking games. But if you haven't already played a hacking game, Hacknet is a great one to start with! It's a fun experience incomparable to traditional genres of gaming.

It might have been interesting back in the day, but these days everybody has played much better runner games.

If you like the cat aesthetic from the screen shots, check out this developer's more recent game Hot Tin Roof. It has much more interesting gameplay.

A pretty decent adventure game. Good investigation puzzles, good length (~5 hours), good characters. Puzzles were the right difficulty - many were easy, some were challenging, and I only had to look up the answer for 1. I wasn't completely rapt, but this is certainly one of the better point & clicks I've played in recent years. Would recommend it for adventure game junkies.

I played Else Heart.Break() to completion. It took about 8 hours.

I really like the premise, but there are a few big problems that really make it hard to recommend:

• The start can be exceptionally slow. You have to run into the right people at the right time to actually start the main story. This is based on luck and exploration, and can take up to two hours.
  
• At the start you are taught to explore everywhere and talk to everyone. But after this initial segment, pretty much all the NPCs won't speak to you or won't have anything interesting to say unless they're part of the active mission.
  
• It's very easy to sequence break or get powers that the dialog options you have seem to be oblivious to.
  
• There are hints of optional stuff to do, but I only found 1 such thing that actually lead to a reward. It's just annoying having all these things that look like the start of sidequests, but actually are just clutter to make the world look interesting.
  
• The ending is disappointing. It feels like they're setting you up to outsmart the game and get a better ending, but even the dev has confirmed there is no hidden ending.

This is a mixed review - I recommend The Witness with caveats. I haven't beaten it and probably won't return to it, but the time I've spent playing has been magical.

Pros:

• Holy cow this is an amazing puzzle game! I've played it for almost 2 days solid and spent every other waking hour thinking about it. Every puzzle seems to have just the right level of challenge. Despite appearances, there is a huge amount of variety in the puzzles, there's hundreds of puzzles, and there's plenty to do in-between puzzles.
  
• I had no performance issues at all. I have a GTX970 running at 1080p. I just started the game up, it defaulted to High settings, and everything played incredibly smoothly.
  
• The island is jaw-droppingly beautiful. This is probably the most beautiful full-3D game I've ever played. The amount of effort that went into making everything so picturesque AND making all the puzzles line up is truly incredible.

Cons:

• The price. It's probably a fair price if you're one of the people who ends up loving everything about this game, but I had to stop playing early. I would have regretted paying full price if I hadn't gotten this as part of a bundle.
  
• It's very hard to stop playing. This is not a veiled complement. You can uninstall the game, but your brain will keep trying to solve the puzzles. The Witness will find its way into your life in ways you never expected, and that can be quite horrifying. Unfortunately I had to stop playing after realizing that this was happening. I cannot risk my sanity further.
  
• Some puzzles rely on color and sound. If you're deaf or colorblind, 90% of the game will still be accessible to you, but you'll want to check the forums first to see which areas you're going to have to look up solutions for.

It's interesting. Not the best sentient acrobatic vehicle game out there, but probably top 5.

The story seems decent, but the gameplay is painfully repetitive. They introduce new enemies and stuff, but it's all just a couple boring basic attacks, traffic dodging, and QTEs. It would probably have been better if they just cut out the gameplay and made a movie.

It's 2 hours long and completely linear with very few puzzles. It's important to highlight that this isn't an "adventure game" - it's interactive fiction. You don't explore, you just point the character to their next objective, which is always something obvious.

The value of the game depends entirely on whether you appreciate the story, the voice acting, the art and the music. Did I enjoy them? Not really. There were good bits (the main character's voice acting & back story), adequate bits (art and music), but the story and the other characters were disappointingly flat and underdeveloped.