Recent reviews by BinarySplit

It looks great, but sadly it's actually super boring. This game has no respect for your time. I've no idea how long it is, but my playtime so far has been ~20% play, ~80% waiting or grinding.

You'll spend most of your time holding W to fly in straight lines between places. You might think that the various upgrades to make you move faster will help with this, but they sync up with story progression making the effective play area proportionately larger. Once you get to mid-game it will take a minimum of 2 minutes of holding forward to get to each point of interest. Combine this with all the grindy resource collection and frankly this game is exhausting. There are not enough fun parts to balance out the boring parts.

I recommend you avoid this for now. Maybe check the reviews in 6 months to see if they've fixed the pacing.

The Room Two builds on everything that was great about the first game. Great puzzles and mystery themes with spectacular environmental design. Don't let my short playtime fool you, I used 4 hints (I'm a bit impatient), but even for a 3 hour game I'd happily pay full price again for another game like this.

If you loved The Room and The Room Two, skip this one. It's an unfortunate departure from the formula that made the first two The Room games amazing.

If you felt they were too hard and but really liked the incredible environmental design and pretty Rube Goldberg machines, then this is the game for you. They've massively increased the amount of that sort of content compared to the previous games.

I fall into the first camp. To me, this game was about 1 hour of puzzles, 4 hours of non-puzzle busywork, and half an hour of just waiting for the slow screen transitions. It was just such a slog to get through, and by the end I was audibly groaning every time there was an elaborate build up to a non-puzzle.

Fantastic puzzles with just the right amount of challenge. Don't wait for a sale, buy it now, you won't regret it

Fun and well-paced. The puzzles are just the right level of challenge, they weren't so easy to be boring, but I also never got stuck for too long.

I completed it in 3 hours, but approximately half of the game is split between 2 paths and I only played the blue path so I suspect the total amount of content is around 5 hours if you're a completionist. This is my only complaint about the game - I don't want to replay the easy parts just to get the last few bits of content, so I'm not going to see the red path puzzles.

Definite buy when on sale, but probably don't buy at full price - this wasn't as magical of an experience as some of the more expensive story-heavy puzzle games (Portal, Lightmatter, Outer Wilds), but when it's at a few bucks, this is absolutely worth your time & money.

Mixed review. While there were many puzzles that I really enjoyed solving, the experience was soured by me frequently missing items because of objects that appear inanimate unless interacted with in very specific ways, leading to me thinking they're part of the background clutter. There's a lot of puzzle items hidden in background clutter, so get ready to have to click on absolutely everything you see and still somehow miss stuff.

Took me 3 hours to beat, though I ended up using in-game hints twice to find the awkward interactable objects I missed.

The most memorable adventure game I've played in recent years. The puzzle design is fantastic, the story is fantastic, the gameplay is fantastic. Once you start, you'll have trouble doing anything else until you uncover all the secrets of the solar system.

14 MONTHS LATER UPDATE: Outer Wilds still regularly occupies my thoughts. I, like many others, am eagerly waiting for the day that I've forgotten enough that I can re-experience it from the beginning.

Mixed review. It had its good moments, it had some questionable moments. It definitely wasn't a bad game, but it didn't amaze me at all either.

IMO it's definitely not worth full price though. I'd be bitter if I hadn't gotten it cheap as part of a bundle.

I played it on Casual (i.e. easy) mode and had to use hints a few times. If I had played it on Gamer (hard) mode and couldn't use hints, I would probably have ragequitted a couple of times. I recommend Casual mode - the harder puzzles don't challenge your thinking ability, they challenge your patience.

I enjoyed the original HotK, but I can't give the same review for HotK:TLT1. The story is much simpler, with a less satisfying conclusion. The quests feel more grindy - lots of running back to the same vendors for more health potions, more torches, etc.

The two positives: It's the same sort of constantly rewarding/impossible-to-fail gameplay that keeps you hooked, with no microtransactions, and for it's length/quality it's appropriately priced.

Absolutely picturesque. There's so much attention to detail, it feels like not even a grain of sand is out of place.