Recent reviews by constantcompile

Hoco Poco can best be thought of in the same vein as Sokpop's Capy Hoky, which released in Season 4. It's a chaotic, fun little party game where half the fun is getting familiar with the controls. In terms of Single-Player, it probably won't hold your attention for long - I was done with it after about 15 minutes.

Strangely, the mana meter doesn't seem visible when I play, and I couldn't get the keyboard controls to work.

Recommended if you've got a few friends over and want a quick laugh.

I'm struggling to find much to say about visser. You grab your fishing rod, go find a bit of bait (your hook will bounce off the water without it), scare the fish away with your boat if you want and cast your line.

The fish behave similarly to Animal Crossing: If they take notice of the bait, they'll gnaw at a couple times before biting. When they do, the floater goes completely underwater. That's your cue to yank them out of the water, and that's, uh, that's the game.

I can't find much of anything to criticize about it. I completed the game in about 15 minutes, but I don't think making it longer would have improved it at all.

Recommended at a price point you think is worth 15 minutes, I guess?

Credit where it's due: Doler certainly nails the tonal atmosphere of being a mouse in a giant spooky maze.

Unfortunately, that's it's only strength. The enemies are too plentiful to maintain their eerie nature for very long, and too dumb to really be seen as threats - by fifteen minutes in, I saw them as little more than wandering hurtboxes, which would occasionally wander in my direction faster than I could move away. The message system clearly takes inspiration from Dark Souls, but that game had a larger population and didn't reset the environment every 24 hours, so the maze here is pretty devoid of clues.

Even if it weren't, the key problem is that there's no real positive feedback that you're moving in the right direction, as least none that I could find. If you do find the jackpot, you'll have to retrace your steps across the entire maze to leave a coherent trail - one that will be gone in less than 24 hours. It doesn't seem like other players are interested in doing that, and I don't blame them.

Not recommended.

Sokpop's games have a fast, one-man development cycle, so each one tends to have a central quirk that the rest of the game is built around. In Labyrinth's case, it's a camera effect that is admittedly novel, but it only appears for three rooms in the game, and there isn't anything very impressive that's done with it.

Aside from that, Labyrinth is a pretty mediocre isometric 3D collect-a-thon platformer that really drags when you're trying to make sure you didn't miss anything (attention completionists: You want to break the blue pyramid to get the gold key when you have 29 crystals).

It's not terrible, but there are definitely noticeable visual and physics bugs that detract from the experience, and it never really gets good enough for me to give it a thumbs-up.

Not recommended.

Have you ever wanted to familiarize yourself with Windows 10's Accessibility features? Here's your chance! Pear Quest renders the entire game map at approximately one-eighth of your monitor's display - and that's AFTER using fullscreen and 2x zoom!

Using its three-pixel tall font, Pear Quest ensures you will learn how to use the Magnifier! Learning is born from necessity! With a charming cast of characters and an approx. 1 hour long runtime (for first playthrough) it will be plenty of time to get comfortable with this user-friendly feature of Windows 10!

Recommended for fans of the Windows 10 Magnifier!

P.S. - With the Magnifier open, use CTRL+ALT+I to invert the colors on the screen! Instant night-mode!

There's a good concept here, but the execution is lacking. The movement mechanics are rough and imprecise, deaths are sudden and often aren't telegraphed, the "survival" and respawn mechanics seem half-baked, and it's totally bizarre how new objects simply spawn without warning at midnight.

I didn't enjoy this one, and I don't think you would either.

Not recommended.

Passenger seat tries to do too many things at the same time. The luck-based process of tracking down map pieces degrades the experience of people who like difficult puzzles like this one. The repeated attempts to emphasize the spooky graveyards degrades the intended relaxing tone of the game.

There are two games here: A basically non-interactive relaxing mood piece about chilling in the passenger seat, and a significantly difficult map-based puzzle where you're having to switch between looking at the map and tracking landmarks and turns. These two games clash with each other, and by the time I beat the game, I wasn't fond of either of them.

Not recommended.

I completed Pilfer in a little over half an hour. The problem with Pilfer is that its systems are TOO basic. A significant percentage of the homes are completely unoccupied at all hours of the day, despite what the description says about "Various NPCs with their own schedule."

There's a few NPCs, and if they spot you lockpicking or stealing, death is more-or-less instant. There's no way to get a real sense of where you're visible and where you aren't, and trying to get a sense of when to enter a particular house often amounts to boredly waiting to see whether anyone actually enters and exits.

There is some tension when you're lockpicking and not sure when an NPC might round the corner, especially when you've nearly completed your collection of loot. And the game is basically functional. I suppose for this price point, that's enough.

Tepidly recommended, provided you buy it at a price point you feel is worth half-an-hour of gameplay.

This game can be completed in less than a minute, and the key movement mechanic - the jumping - is neither novel nor enjoyable.

I'd say more, but I don't want to spend longer writing a review than I spent playing the game.

Not recommended.

Sunset Kingdom is a bite-sized kingdom builder that emphasizes the road networks connecting different villages. Unlike Simmiland, you don't have to deal with resources like faith, or wishes, or cards. Actually, if you just throw up three farms around your starting village and keep four farmers employed, you don't even need to worry about food.

This is the key problem with Sunset Kingdom, as it currently is: There's no incentive to expand, and no pressure to, either. In fact, the up-front costs of building new villages means you can quickly deforest your local woodlands, which means you're better off waiting until you can build the perk that lets you replant forests. And the bandits will hassle your people on the roads, which means you're better off having a small number of buildings connected by short roads to your main village.

I feel like instead of lakes, the gray-blue areas should be rocky terrain, which quarries would require in the same way lumberjacks require green forest terrain. I feel like it should be possible to destroy something you've constructed, like a road that curved into a bridge section for no reason, and that you should be able to demand planks and metal in increments of 10 instead of 1. And I feel like the entire threat system should be re-evaluated; it doesn't make sense to have new villages starving when others have 300+ food surplus, there should be a profession that solely serves to balance surplus food across all villages, and an easier way to keep your villagers safe.

All that said... I mean, it's not a bad game. For $3, or $1.50 for patreons, it seems a fair bargain. If you really love kingdom builders, you could even get a decent few hours of playtime out of this game.

Recommended - but don't expect to be blown away.

P.S.: It seems a patch has fixed the Capital-building crash that other reviews mention. The dev claims to have fixed the issue and I've never experienced any crashes.