Recent reviews by BinarySplit

I played and loved both World of Goo and Little Inferno. Human Resource Machine does not live up to their legacy - it has significantly less depth of story and gameplay.

HRM's story is just a linear sequence of predictable events. I'm going to ruin it for you: Something is wrong, robots are coming, robots have come, robots have taken over, you've been obsoleted by the invention of the computer.. That's it. Maybe you get another cutscene if you 100% all bonus objectives, but how inane the story is so far, I doubt it'd be worth it. (EDIT: With help from the forums, I 100%'d all levels and got all achievements - didn't unlock or change anything)

The gameplay revolves around programming a very simple computer - it gets some inputs, your program runs, and it emits some outputs. The inputs are numbers and letters. In a few levels, the letters actually spell something! Yeah, it's usually not very exciting. The problem is that the primary source of difficulty is how bad the programming interface is - you drag and drop instructions in a list. You can only see about 15 instructions on the screen at once, and you'll often end up with a big mess of overlapping arrows.

Finding solutions is easy, but inputting them into the computer is tedious. You're basically spending most of your time as the compiler, not the programmer. There are only about 5 levels that are actually difficult to find the solution to. The game is only 42 levels, of which roughly 20 are trivially easy tutorials, 17 are frustrating but not hard, and 5 are actually challenging.

The ending came very suddenly and left me thinking "WTF did I just pay for? That was barely a game at all!". I get that World of Goo took many years to build and Tomorrow Corporation are probably trying to make smaller/cheaper games faster, but HRM isn't a good small game - it feels like they took the design for a big game and cut it in half, leaving something that feels very incomplete.

I paid attention, I listened, I followed instructions, I explored when given the opportunity, and ultimately I gained nothing from this experience.

The Beginner's Guide tries to invoke emotion and teach a moral lesson. I won't go into details because spoilers will actually spoil the experience if you do decide to play it, and also it is open to interpretation - if I explain my interpretation, you won't seek to find your own. This part was basically lost on me - I found the narrator quite annoying, and lost interest in what he had to say and show.

More like "Inventory Space Engineers". The biggest challenge is putting up with how many trips you'll have to take from your cargo container to your work-in-progress constructions, due to how little your character can carry.

The single-player experience is similar to Minecraft, you get a tech tree and an open world, and it is up to you to find your way through the game. Unlike Minecraft, there aren't enough mods to redeem the shallow tech tree, nor enough happening in the world to justify exploration. Once you've built a small ship and a large ship, mined some asteroids and engaged some hostiles, you'll probably get bored and give up.

This game is might be better in multiplayer, that's not my cup of tea.

An absolute masterpiece. Similar to Anodyne, Undertale is an RPG with some puzzle and action elements, with an elaborate metagame to explore. I've played through Undertale 3 times now and every time I found enough new content to make it worthwhile each time. The characters are very well written and with every playthrough you learn new things about them.

Awesome two-player fun. If you have a couple game pads and a partner that is willing to try a co-op game with you, I highly recommend this!

Have you ever played an RTS where you get really immersed in building the perfect base, but every new level throws away your hard work and forces you to start again from scratch? Big Pharma is like a distilled version of that.

It has 35 levels, all of which start you near the bottom of the tech tree. Pretty much every level will start the same - 10-20 minutes of building low-level supply chains, trying to get a profit while you wait for research to unlock. To make matters worse, building the supply chains is actually really tedious as you have to jump through the menus to research each stage of the process before you build it. You're constantly fighting to make a profit, and many of the levels have time limits.

Don't let my high playtime fool you - I was afk for a lot of that. Big Pharma is only good for about 3 hours. After that, there's just too much tedium and not enough fun.

D4 is a very well made adventure game. I still have no idea what is going on, but the characters are great, the story is intriguing and the gameplay keeps me coming back for more. Even when not on sale at $15, it's worth the price.

I normally think saying "badly optimized" is a bit of a cop out for people who expect to be able to run Ultra settings at 144FPS, but I've got to make an exception here. My current GPU is 5x faster than the one that got me 60FPS in Rage, yet in Wolfenstein: The New Order, entering new areas will frequently cause my FPS to dip below 15, even on low graphics settings!

Besides that, the FPS gameplay is quite uninspired. Guns have awful accuracy, there are frequent cutscenes that interrupt gameplay, and levels are pretty linear.

For its price, it's an absolute bargain. Cradle has a very interesting and unique sci-fi story. The environments have an absolutely spectacular level of detail, providing you with more (optional) information about the setting than you'll be able to digest in one sitting. And while there are only a few characters, they have enough variety and character development to keep you engaged.

There are a few annoyances in Cradle that you should be aware of: The FOV is quite low and not configurable, mouse input has a weird smoothing applied to it and the first hour of the game is spent in a cramped indoor environment. If you get motion sickness easily from games, the first hour of gameplay will be pretty bad for you. Not as bad as Deus Ex: Human Revolution, but still noticeably bad. After you leave the indoor environment, it becomes a lot easier to deal with.

This game is about 4 hours long, but it has a satisfying ending and doesn't drag out any longer than it should. I'd say it's worth every penny.

I recommend you check back on this game when it's released. If you like exploration-driven adventure games, this one has potential. At the moment it feels like it's a bit low on content, but at the current rate it will likely be quite an interesting game when it's finally released.

You start off as a teenager packing their things and saying goodbye to their family house, about to leave for college. Depending on what you do and what you pack determines where your life takes you (you end up on one of several different "maps" for the second round of exploration). Where you explore and what you interact with determines how the rest of your character's life pans out.

It's less than an hour long per playthrough, but it's fun going back and trying different things to take your character through a different path in life.

In the game's current Early Access state (15 July 2015), it seems like all of the different life paths are implemented but it's still lacking enough detail to make some of the exploration parts interesting. I enjoyed my first two playthroughs of it, but there were some boring bits that I hope will be fixed.