Recent reviews by Caged Monkey Balls

Genuinely the best videogame story that I've experienced in many years. The kind of game that was sitting in my library for a long time and then when I played it, it just grew a space inside my head, where I'd be thinking about it between sessions, and have kept thinking about it long after completing it. Probably in my top 10 favourite games ever

From what I've seen, you're way more likely to think the game sucks if you were a kickstarter backer and care about "broken promises" like absent DLC characters even though the game already has WAY too many characters. I knew nothing about the game going into it except I loved the visuals, and ended up liking it a fair amount. But I got it cheap on sale.

The game is totally beautiful, no doubt. The animations are fantastic and I liked a lot of the characters and voice acting. The story is serviceable but not amazing, though sometimes there's some good character moments. I wanted to see what would happen next throughout.

I thought the platforming was pretty awesome. Sadly once you get to the end of the game though it becomes broken and you can basically fly across everything. But in the middle of the game there is a definite sweet spot where traversing the obstacles of the world is really fun. I love clinging my axe into a wall, jumping off of it, bouncing my spear on a floor of spikes, etc. It's no Celeste or Hollow Knight but sometimes I got a similar sense of enjoyment in clearing a difficult obstacle.

The combat is fun and visceral but also NOT finished. A lot of characters don't have any super attacks or really any distinguishing combat abilities, and there are way too many characters in the first place. It's definitely the weakest aspect of the game. It can be fun to just demolish enemies and the combat animations are fantastic, but there's not much in the way of challenge or strategy. It's a real shame that there's not more depth here.

I also had some experience with VERY long loading screens when freely exploring, and occasionally the visuals of a level would take a long time to load even then.

Overall, good game that's not finished. It could have been great if it was finished, but I still had fun with it anyway.

This game is oddly unpolished. It's full of typos and weird translations, you can't zoom in on objects that you pick up so it's practically impossible to read any newspaper clipping or other writing. When not holding objects and attempting to zoom in, your vision often blurs in a way that obfuscates the detail you were trying to examine.

The sound design was excellent, and the first half of the game had an amazing atmosphere. I like that there is some ambiguity with the story. The scene where you watch the VHS tape was phenomenal. That's where the positives end, and it's one of those games that is so confusing but in a way that doesn't feel deliberate. In fact it relies on many exposition dumps towards the end that don't make sense, the story seems to have been re-written a bunch of times because they didn't know how to end it, and the way it attempts to tackle themes of grooming were clumsy at best and offensive at worst.

I got it for £1.49 so I don't regret the purchase as it was an effective time killer for sure, but it's not worth full price at all.

This game is absolutely bloody bonkers. Has a Gman and he is so random.