Recent reviews by constantcompile

Wild-9's first playthrough should take you roughly half an hour, as it says in the description.

Adding a speedrun achievement to this game, in my opinion, was a mistake. Your speedrun attempts will expose many of the flaws in this game. First, deleting your save and starting over is very likely to generate a broken seed that doesn't spawn any enemies - you can check this almost immediately by noticing the absence of the first enemy you're supposed to encounter. If you want to start a new run, you need to close out and re-open the game first. Second, you'll come to rely on a highly-exploitable quirk where enemies will teleport back to their starting position if they wander too far away from it, where you can basically spawn-camp them. (Better than them getting lost, though.) Third, upon each death, you'll respawn at your spaceship with a scooter, but not necessarily the same class of scooter you had - meaning you might get a free upgrade. I also encountered a CTD on my first run of the game, none afterward though.

With the speedrun, this will probably net you just over an hour of playtime. Do I still recommend it? Ehhh... Not at full price, that's for sure. If you don't have the subscription, you should pick this one up on sale - ideally as part of a discounted bundle. It's worth your time, I'm just not sure it's worth your money.

With that huge caveat, recommended.

Alba: A Wildlife Adventure is a short 3rd-person exploration and photography game that's perfect for kids and pleasant for adults. You follow on-screen prompts to the next person or animal that needs your help, and you help them. You look around for the next animal you haven't photographed yet, and you photograph them.

The 3-4 hour runtime is quite short, probably closer to 3 hours or less if you don't plan on cataloging all of the animals (there's no achievement for doing so, mercifully). It's not going to be anyone's GOTY but I quite liked it.

Recommended at whatever price point you think is worth ~3 hours of wholesome goodness.

Post Cards has three parts that can each be beaten in about two minutes. I would hesitate to even call these "mini-games" because that would imply a higher replayability factor than they have. These "micro-games" aren't bad, but they are extremely short.

Recommended at whatever price you think is worth six minutes of play.

Paradise Killer's core strengths lie in its character writing, visual aesthetic/presentation, and story. This isn't a Myst type game - although there are a ton of worldbuilding details, most of it is superfluous and can be ignored, if you choose. The environmental puzzles are all quite simple, and the collectibles serve little purpose.

This is ultimately a detective focused game, and it executes that quite well. I found all of the investigative work to be well-done and the overall story was very satisfying.

Recommended.

Deckbuilders and turn-based tactics are two of my favorite genres, so FiTS was an immediate purchase. 13.5 hours later, after a handful of properly failed runs and one shamelessly-savescummed successful run, I think there's enough to recommend here.

The Good:
FiTS definitely delivers on the trailers' promises of stylish turn-based combat. The aesthetic is somewhere between Superhot and Canabalt; I dig it. The different enemies you encounter are distinct and have strong motifs, and the ability to view replays is a great touch. Repositioning an enemy so they attack another enemy never fails to feel satisfying.

The Bad:
Make no mistake, you'll need to do a lot of that repositioning. Unless you're finishing up a level, you'll rarely have less than three enemies to deal with simultaneously. Their damage output quickly ramps past the point where tanking multiple foes' hits is possible, and they also become too spongy to defeat in a single (or even in a few) turn(s). The default five-card hand feels very restrictive in the late game, and many of your starting cards are so weak that your best move is to pay to remove them. The margin for error is tiny in most circumstances, and unless you deliberately craft a very lean, very strong deck, you'll be depending on the relocation of enemies and yourself to survive.

The Ugly:
Nowhere is this more apparent than with enemies you encounter approximately 2/3rds through the campaign that pack assault rifles, as well as the "Overwatch" ability from Spacehulk. They will shoot you anytime you move in front of them or attack in front of them (even if you're not attacking them, which is unusually strong by itself), plus they will turn to face you if you get to either side of them. The level where I had to fight two of these Terminators was - no exaggeration - the hardest level in the game, easily harder than the final boss level. And it was halfway through the third campaign! They're so difficult to deal with that you start to wonder why your character isn't packing heat of his own, which pulls you out of the whole experience. And while I'm at it, the banality of the "You Failed Your Mission" pop-up leaves a really bad taste in your mouth at the end of an unsuccessful run. (The victory screen isn't much better.) I feel like other roguelikes have more encouraging end-of-run screens that make players feel better about the loss.

The Verdict
Despite that, this is still a solid game, provided you have the disposition to focus on enjoying the journey rather than the destination. I look forward to the devs adding more content; in particular, I feel like a female character model for the main character would be a good addition. The level generation is strong enough that you could probably sink dozens of hours into this game before it starts feeling stale, and there's always the daily leaderboards if you're into that sort of thing.

All-in-all, this feels worth what I paid.

Recommended.

Absolute Drift provided a surprisingly robust simulation of the interaction between tires and terrain, considering it was the work of a single creator. Now, that creator has taken that simulation and applied it to a rally format. Rather than the abstract dreamscape of its predecessor, Art of Rally sees you carving your way through more realistic outdoor settings, and more carefully recreated real-life tracks. Overall, the level of visual fidelity is a mark above Absolute Drift, even if it's not quite as a e s t h e t i c.

In order to earn first place - even on normal difficulty - you'll need to develop a keen awareness of how road types and elevation change effect your traction. This is not an "arcadey" racer; in fact it's quite punishing compared to many titles in the genre. That's where some of its more irritating aspects become more visible.

Glancing a guardrail will frequently bring you to a dead halt, rather than merely slowing you down while you slide against it. The curved terrain outside the track is many polygons short of smoothness, creating jagged edges that kick you into the air if you contact them. Worst of all, the off-road area to either side of the track has invisible boundaries that - if crossed - will fade out the screen, put you back in the center of the road Lakitu-style, and penalize you five seconds. There is no consistent indication of where these boundaries are. They are not a set distance from the track - they seem wider on the outside of turns and more restrictive inside of corners - and even in the late-game I found myself accidentally crossing them, without having lost control of my vehicle. Penalizing me for cutting corners is fine, but at least give me a visual indication of how much cutting is too much for each turn!

There are also, it must be noted, a couple of really grindy achievements - one which requires you to drive 555 km in one of the cars, and another which requires you to complete 1000 races (for context, it takes <250 to complete career mode).

If you want the mechanics of a proper rally game with a low-poly aesthetic, Art of Rally is the game for you. Just be prepared for frustration with the track boundaries.

Recommended.

Majora's Mask, Sexy Brutale, and Outer Wilds are among my all-time favorite games. Pocket Watch is not as expansive, as impressive, or as complex as any of those games. It's not as expensive, either. That's why placing Pocket Watch in their ranks makes sense.

I believe this is, without question, the best Time Loop game three dollars can buy. If any of those games had been made with the dev team, budget, and timeline that Pocket Watch had, I'd be shocked if the final product were as cohesive and charming as this one. Honestly, considering it's less than a third of the price of Minit, I'd say it's the better value proposition between them.

The graphics, uh, take some getting used to, the physics aren't flawless (AFAIK you'll need to exploit that for the speedrun), and the fixed camera angle makes some platforming rather finicky. Nevertheless, this was a great little world to inhabit, explore, and conquer. Probably one of Sokpop's best titles, and well worth full price.

Highly recommended.

You've played Space Golf before, right? This is that. You can finish it in 15 minutes if you speedrun your first attempt.

Would I pay $3 for this? Absolutely not. But if you can find a price you're comfortable with for that runtime, it's decent.

I feel bad giving this a thumbs down, but anytime I find myself looking at my phone instead of at my computer, that's a mark against whatever I'm playing. And that happened several times with this title.

There is no game: Wrong dimension is a point-and-click adventure - complete with moon logic. Your tolerance for dealing with obtuse puzzle solutions may differ from mine, but I frequently found myself more irritated than entertained by the time I worked them out. Each problem only has one solution, and the mechanics for how "physics" determines the interaction of different objects frequently changes.

That by itself would be fine, but the unskippable cutscenes just drag, and while I give full marks to Pascal Cammisotto for the love and effort he put into this title, his voice acting... is not pleasant to listen to for hours on end. He spends nearly half the time berating you, and nearly another half with his "whoops, accidentally gave you a hint!" shtick (which gets old very quickly). I honestly think I'd like this better if the virtual entities all spoke the Bebebese of the RPG hero and I had to read subtitles on the screen.

There have been many digitized voices in media, and there's a reason why C-3PO and GladOS have achieved wide popularity: striking the right tone, inflection and pronunciation for a cybernetic character is a rare skill. A skill Pascal Cammisotto - again, with respect- does not have. And you will spend several hours listening to him if you buy this.

Will you still like this title regardless? Maybe! If you're a fan of point-and-clicks, I'd say go ahead and pick it up. But personally, I wish I'd spent my time and money on something else, and for that reason I have to say:

Not recommended.

Down in Bermuda is - by time - about 75% hidden object game, 20% puzzle-box game, and 5% boss-puzzle game. On the first level, you receive an item that locks you out of an achievement for your entire run if you make the mistake of using it. Likewise, there are achievements for completing certain puzzles "perfectly" that you'll likewise need to wipe your save file for if you do them sub-optimally.

That aside, how is it? Fine, I suppose. The artwork is charming enough. The minimal story is serviceable, but introduces many questions that never get satisfying answers. If you like 3D hidden object games, you could do worse - but the trailer focuses on a couple of cutscenes and the relatively sparse puzzles, when the majority of your time with this game will be spent looking for small sparkling orbs. Even the sale price of $12 feels exceedingly steep for what you're getting, nevermind the MSRP of $20, which is absurd.

Not recommended.