Recent reviews by constantcompile

I'm rooting for Mike Bithell.

I loved Thomas Was Alone, I enjoyed the first half of Volume and I quite liked Subsurface Circular. All Bithell Games take place within a shared narrative, and it's very compelling to look for how the events of earlier games influence the context of later ones. After two "dialogue simulator" games, Solitaire Conspiracy seems to be an attempt to return to more gameplay-focused, uh, gameplay.

Unfortunately, that gameplay is pretty lacking. Most of the reviews so far can be summed up as, "Buy this game if you like Solitaire!" I would revise that to, "Buy this game if you love Solitaire." It's adequate, and the powers are neat, but so situational I often found myself using them only half the time.

The reward structure is so strange. In the main campaign, you earn bonus points for beating a level within a certain number of turns - but you aren't told what that number is, and there's no indication of whether it changes based on whether RNG gives you a tricky hand. (I encountered quite a few Aces stuck behind Kings.) Once you beat the game you unlock Countdown mode, which throws out the turn-based rewards in favor of a time-based reward system. Countdown is absurdly hard, by the way. I don't know what kind of Speed Chess savants are getting to the top of the leaderboard or whether it's just hackers, but less than half of the people who beat Wave 5 manage to get to Wave 10, and you need to get to Wave 15 to 100% the game.

The art is great, the flavor text is mostly good, the FMV acting is... fine? I saw the first twist coming even before the anagram, and the ending wasn't much of a shock. Greg Miller puts in a good effort, but most of the videos consist of him congratulating you for levelling up while the story is running in place, so there's not much for him to work with. Even the mission descriptions are often underwhelming. Between footraces, fistfights and general faffing about, quite a few of them seem to amount of the good guys getting into a measuring contest with the bad guys. Some are so bizarre (breaking fugitives out of prison in the hopes that they'll volunteer nondescript intel afterward?!) that I legitimately thought some of them might have been planted by the bad guys to dupe the good guys into doing their bidding. Unfortunately, nothing that interesting was going on.

There are so many events alluded to that sound more interesting than the card game you're playing. I wanted to read that manifesto! I wanted to see that space station break-in! But no; different flavor text, same game. It brings me no joy to say that I sometimes wished I was looking through a digital artbook or even a graphic novel rather than just moving cards around. Asking players to imagine that rearranging these cards represents the management and maneuvering of agents in the field strains credulity to its breaking point - and that's coming from someone who was 100% bought in to the idea of a small red rectangle being the liberator of artificial intelligence!

Ultimately, the entire experience left me unenthused, which is a shame. Mike Bithell is completely capable of making videogames that really impress me. Unfortunately, this one didn't.

Not recommended.

Credit where it's due: The premise and presentation of this game are certainly charming. The magic powers you get are useful without being broken, and the levels are varied in themes and mechanics.

The problem is that the systems of reward and punishment just don't feel good.

Losing a life is absolutely miserable. Not because lives are scarce - if anything they're over-abundant - but because it takes so much time to get your upgrades back. Quitting a world mid-run forfeits any gold you've earned retroactively. You want to help the village folk? Go ahead, but know that it will take you that much longer to 100% the grindy late-game achievements. You grinded out 50,000 gold? Congratulations! Go ahead and buy the most expensive item - all it will do is unlock a bad ending.

I am absolutely positive this game would be better reviewed if the progression was reworked as follows:

• All money is cumulative, and never lost (with the exception of gold earned in a single run being lost with a game over). Buildings are fixed (unlocked) in a linear order at logical increments, the final building being fixed at 30,000 gold or so.
  
  
• Instead of being re-purchased after each death, charms unlock when particular buildings are fixed, are not lost, and can be toggled from the pause menu. Stronger charms like magnet and multi-ball are unlocked when the last couple buildings are fixed.

Boom - with properly tuned number values, you've removed all need to grind from this game, made later levels feel less BS (because you're no longer doing them charmless post-death), and made the overall gameplay less punishing. It's too easy now, you say? Make charms enact negative multipliers to the gold earned, and make lives no longer retained across worlds. Now you've got the risk/reward back; you start each world with 5 lives and fewer charms give you more rewards, but a greater chance of game over, and losing everything you earned that run.

Instead, shops are largely irrelevant if you already have the charms, which usually makes them feel like a waste of time and a well-positioned orb. You're incentivized to not fix anything until you have the "Filthy Rich" achievement, and - again - losing a life just feels like you're being massively inconvenienced.

Real talk - if this were sitting at "mixed," I'd probably go ahead and give it a thumbs-up anyway. But at 77% positive, the lack of a horizontal-thumb rating means I'm gonna go ahead and say,

Not recommended.

Spaceland has the look and feel of an activity you'd find on the back of a cereal box. It's not going to blow your mind or anything, but it's a good way to spend 5-15 minutes at a time when you want something decently challenging, lighthearted, and forgettable.

Everything is small-scale. You'll be commanding 1-4 characters and engaging enemies at 1-4 tiles away (maybe up to 8 if you use the sniper). It's all very casual, but in a good way. Each level is self-contained, so there's no need to form campaign-long strategies or internalize byzantine systems of weapons and upgrade trees. I took a months-long hiatus from this game, and was able to pick it right back up, hardly missing a step.

Even at the full price of $15 I'd say it's a solid bargain for the 20-hour runtime. Getting it on sale is a bonus.

Recommended.

I think the best description of Crash would be to call it an interquel "mini-sode." It's about half the length of base Supraland, but because it's got more collect-a-thon fetch quest filler, it feels more like a third of the "stuff." The stuff itself is decent, it won't knock your socks off but it's solid. Lighthearted FPS exploration/puzzles/platforming/combat with occasional moments of frustration when you're stuck.

Commendably, the dev is paying keen attention to consumer feedback. He posted a postmortem analysis in the announcements feed (which I'd highly encourage everyone to read) and has now lowered the base price to a more reasonable $13.99 - unfortunately, this won't show up in wishlist emails the way a 35% sale would've.

Is it worth that price? If you liked Supraland enough that you've read my review thus far, and $14 for 7-13 hours of decent gameplay sounds reasonable to you, I would say yes. It tweaks lots of little things in the gameplay that make it feel distinct from Supraland while still feeling comfortably familiar. Not great, but good.

Recommended.

P.S. I completed the achievements in 12 hours. I have 10 bone-piles uncollected and 1 chest under the metal grates in the starting area that I have no idea how to access.

I think much of the appeal of E3 to laypeople was the sheer spectacle of it all; giant life-sized statues of videogame characters and sets designed to evoke the feeling of being inside the videogame world. Until VR rigs were on the market, it was the closest thing people had to actually inhabiting the virtual realm. Yet most laypeople couldn't access the event, and the professionals in attendance would be eviscerated online if they let the sheer joy of it all cause any hint of bias in their coverage.

Devolverland Expo is a commercial, yes, but it feels more... democratic, somehow. It is an opt-in experience, and it delivers a short but solid FPS/stealth/walking simulator arc. Whatever the budget of this game was, would those dollars really have been better spent purchasing airtime on television? Certainly not.

It's so good, in fact, that it wraps back around to being somewhat of a drawback, oddly. The lavishly-rendered viscera of Carrion's booth made the pixellated graphics of the real game look quaint. The humor of Shadow Warrior 3's goofball-esque trailer was underwhelming after the impressive and imposing environmental composition of its booth, which let the imagery do the talking instead of a weirdly-accented and unfunny protagonist.

After finishing Devolverland Expo, rather than wanting to play any of the featured games, I found myself wanting to play DOOM (2016) and A Machine for Pigs. Devolverland Expo didn't give me a taste of well-executed 2D platforming combat or isometric ARPG, it gave me a taste of well-executed first-person visceral action, and first-person stealth horror.

So now I find myself wanting more of that, which was probably not their aim.

Still. It's free, it's an hour long, and it's solid. Recommended.

P.S. You have to shoot the orange thingy to unlock the security door. Just FYI.

As other reviews mention, this isn't the prettiest game, nor is it likely to knock the sock off of anyone familiar with the genre.

Mechanically, though, it's quite sound. There are a variety of species that have significantly different mechanics, a rank-placement system to reduce grind (it's in the options menu), and a steady influx of new cards to keep things fresh.

Like all card games, the deck can feel overly generous at sometimes and fickle at others, which can result in very "swingy" gameplay when you only have six turns to work with. This swinginess extends to a few overpowered cards, in particular the ones that allow you to move 2 spaces with 1 fuel and the "free move off open space" card. One species is so dependent on a single card in particular (*cough*Normadic Tribe*cough*) that it can feel like success or failure in any given round depends on whether you pull it. But this is easy enough to forgive when the broader gameplay is well-balanced.

I unlocked all species and won 50 rounds in ~17 hours of logged time, I got to 100 wins in 34 hours.

Highly recommended.

It's difficult to review, let alone compare, systems-engineering games. Most Zachtronics games can run well into the double- or triple-digits, and this game inhabits a similar genre. That said, even a mere ~7.5 hours into this game, I'm baffled by the design choices that were made for the gameplay. Here's just a few reasons why:

• The difficulty curve is a nightmarish rollercoaster. Some of the most finicky levels I encountered were followed by single-step puzzles with a solution I'd previously learned.
  
• You're given tools that - so far, in my playthrough - you're very rarely incentivized to use, because they will always be far slower than the simpler functions.
  
• Lore-wise, you're given cutesy flavor text about programming self-driving cars for sentient cats in one level, then Orwellian descriptions of political imprisonment in the next. It's all over the place.
  
• No matter the data you're sorting in-universe, though, 99% of the time it shows up on the UI as red, green, and blue shapes - so why even bother?
  
• Why are performance upgrades even a thing? It raises doubts about whether gold medals can be earned on the first playthrough of the level with clever building, or whether the only choice is to return after upgrading.
  
• If performance upgrades ARE a thing, why also tie exorbitant amounts of money for cutesy decorative tat?
  
• Why are startups essentially "golden parachute simulator?" It isn't fulfilling to try to make perfect code the first time, discover the company is failing anyway, then try to bail before it crashes. Unlike every other level, you're not allowed to try again once the company folds, unless you start a new save file (but then you have to do all the other levels over again).
  
• Why are Schemes faster? Why are DLLs faster? Why?

I could go on. I want to like this game, and I admire the aspirations to educate that no doubt inspire it, but as a product - as a videogame - I'm not having very much fun so far. Looking at the reviews, most people also seem to hit a dozen hours or less before moving on.

I would implore the developers to get really good play-testing of this game, start-to-finish, asking at each point whether things are flowing smoothly. It's been rough going for me so far.

Not recommended.

I'll keep this brief, as I don't expect anyone to read this review, but with the Path of the Ferryman update I can now unreservedly recommend Iris and the Giant.

It's a really well-balanced turn-based deckbuilder with a serviceable story, albeit one that takes forever to fully unlock. I'm at nearly 18 hours and still have two memories to go.

I completed all achievements for this game in about 17 hours. Mercifully, the last achievement popped before I had unlocked every single card - it's possible the new post-launch cards count toward the original goal. If so, I hope that's not patched out.

Highly recommended.

If this game is Dark Souls, it makes me much less excited to ever play those games.

Brume is a game about punishing the player. You are punished for swinging your weapon while the enemy is just out of range, you are punished for blocking (even with full stamina, in some cases), you are punished for running instead of opting for the painfully slow walk, you are punished for dodging certain attacks too early, you are punished for dodging very similar-looking attacks too late, and you are punished for using a core mechanic in the game that you are forced to learn in the tutorial. A core mechanic that becomes next to useless in the late-game anyway, unless you feel like taking long walks back and forth to farm enemies.

Enemies in this game rotate instantly, some are capable of blocking less than a second after attacking (their recovery frames are fewer than yours, just... why?), and their attacking movement often places them at an uncomfortable distance where you have to move into range before attacking, giving them more time to block or counterattack.

And even if you put up with all of that, there's an achievement locked behind a mode where you do only 1 HP of damage per hit to the strongest enemies, meaning some of them could take forever to defeat even with perfect play.

What an unpleasant game.

Not recommended.

The Hour of the Rat takes place in a single level - in any other game, this would be the final level, where you put your knowledge of enemies, techniques and strategies to the test. This game throws you straight into the deep end and says "figure it out." This wouldn't have been so bad on its own - there's an element of satisfaction from incremental improvement, as the Rogue-like genre shows us.

But there is so, so much that gets in the way of having a satisfying experience with this game.

• The "skid jump" mechanic feels wildly inconsistent, resulting in unreliable jump length and speed
  
• There are many jumps that require a "double jump" item, which makes the standard jump feel inadequate and frustrating
  
• Half of the ninjas can't use the "double jump" item at all, and is difficult to acquire for the other half
  
• Roughly 1/3rd of the level cannot be accessed without either using the double jump or passing through the endgame area
  
• The platforming is unforgiving and will often plummet you to the ground, which only worsens the above problems

This is a rough game, in more ways than one. It's a shame, because you can actually see the seed of something really good, here. The Messenger, published by Adult Swim earlier this year, shows that games based off of the tight combat of Shinobi for the NES can be expanded and refined into really proper gaming experiences. It is really remarkable that The Hour of the Rat was developed by a single person over the span of a mere two months, and when it's good, it's great. I just wish it were consistently good.

Not recommended.

P.S. I wasn't a fan of the shaky-cam.