Recent reviews by Dash Lambda

I honestly wish I could see the rest of it.

I want to like this, I really do. It's open source, free, has a nice and highly customizable overlay, a friendly developer, but it's... well, it just doesn't work.

It drifts like crazy. I play for 10 minutes and it's roughly 15 degrees off, I play for an hour and I don't know how far off it would be because I've already reset it twice. I trust TurnSignal to tell me, true or false, if I've spun around one or more times in the past half hour with relatively high accuracy. Beyond that I just have no confidence.

And it's not like this is an unsolvable problem. The cable untangler tool in fpsVR does it perfectly, and it's a relatively simple algorithm. The developer is friendly and communicative, and seems eager to improve it, but this problem has just stuck.

I tried TurnSignal because I was tired of trying and failing to keep track of how many times I spin around. I thought this would give me one less thing to think about, allow me to focus on my game... it ended up giving me one more thing to think about. I like TurnSignal's overlay, but until the drift is fixed, just use the untangler tool in fpsVR.

This game is absolutely delightful. It's adorable, shockingly polished, gives you a lot to do, and is fun to play every step of the way.

The gameplay is EXTREMELY similar to Super Mario Galaxy, except without the weird gravity mechanics. You unlock rooms/telescopes by gathering time crystals, slowly powering up your space ship and accessing new worlds as you go.

And the soundtrack is amazing. It's just... It's friggin' great.

This is one of those games that just makes me feel happy whenever I play it.

The mechanics are fun as hell, probably the best telekinesis I've used in a game. It makes me want to get the full game, but reviews on that are pretty bad... I recommend this demo, jury's still out on the rest.

This is one of my favorite games of all time.

I'm a sucker for non-euclidean geometry and space-bending architecture, and that is the entire point of Antechamber. You can't count on distance and location behaving the way you think they should, and that makes me giddy.

It's a bit short and quiet, I'm not sure I'd pay $20 for it, but my god is it a great game. I just want more.

If you like the humor of Justin Roiland and/or Crows Crows Crows, this is an absolute treat.

I prefer the locomotion (read: lack of locomotion) in this one compared to Accounting+, because environments just feel so much better when you know that everything's in your playspace and you can walk around.

This is a very good physics sandbox game, with a few major flaws.

Let's start with the good: Practically everything is an interactive physics object, and enemies take physics damage. That means if you're out of ammo you can grab the nearest brick or pole and start bashing heads in, or even just punch things (though good luck relying on your fists). Semi-automatic handguns also feel good to use. If you're holding something and come up to a door, you can push the handle down with whatever you're holding -little details like that make a huge difference. It's not super polished (the first time I tried to pull a drawer out of a filing cabinet and the entire cabinet flailed around made me realize why the cabinets themselves aren't physics objects in Half-Life: Alyx), but ultimately the mechanics are quite good.

The music is pretty good too. I don't have much to say about it, it's mostly just pleasant ambient stuff.

The bad starts with you. Or, more specifically, your body. The very first thing I noticed when entering this game is that my in-game arm stopped an inch or two short of my real arm when reaching forward. I spent most of an hour trying to figure out how to calibrate my body, because it just didn't make sense that they would let something so obvious and horrible continue to be a problem, but you can't. You can adjust the height, which also effects arm length -I think my arms were the correct length at about 8' (I'm 5'9"), but then I could never not crouch. This is the sort of thing that doesn't go away, I could never really get into the game because I had that constant reminder that this body is nothing like my own.

Then there's the movement. Lots of people praise it, but honestly I would've preferred the most rudimentary teleport to whatever they put into this game. It's floaty and disconnected, the jump is delayed, you have too much momentum, and there's a control to extend and retract your legs because they couldn't think of a better way to deal with dangling physics legs while you're climbing.

I could go on and on about the truly awful body, but that would make this way too long. The last bad thing I'll mention is the story. I actually haven't finished the story, because a couple hours in I realized I was aggressively bored. As in, so bored I was starting to get angry about it. I think all the unnecessary platforming with the disconnected movement wore me down and the lack of any real goal or character interaction hammered it in.

So why do I recommend the game? Well, it's a good sandbox. If you try to get immersed in it or care about the story you'll have a bad time, but if you just want to find a million different ways to slaughter a room full of aggressive balloon animals, it's great fun.

Do you want to sweat?

I play the first 6 levels of this game and I attack my water bottle like a rabid animal. Sure I'm a bit out of shape, but good god.

Anyway, it's a game where you shoot arrows at things that are also shooting back at you, and later on walking menacingly toward you. You've gotta duck and bob and sidestep while spinning around constantly because things are trying to kill you from all directions. It is stressful and physically exhausting and one of the most fun things I've done in years.

Definitely make sure you have a decently sized space, mine's about 2.4x2.4m and it's just big enough to not get in the way. I have to remove my bed from my room (a process I've streamlined) to get that though. And this is a game that will benefit greatly from wireless if you can swing that.

You never think you'll need Clovis reminding you how to breathe until you need Clovis reminding you how to breathe.

Breathe in, breathe out... Breathe in, breathe out...

I honestly wonder if everyone was playing the same game as me.

It looks like a fun escape room, visuals are fairly polished, interaction is crude but fine, locomotion is just as much as it needs, and the puzzles look fun... Only problem is, I've got some scared jerk on a monitor constantly screaming the solutions to the puzzles in my ear, all the while calling me an idiot and asking me why I suck so much.

A word to developers: Having a character scream at your player, tell them the answer to the puzzle before they have the chance to think about it, then berate them for being too stupid to figure it out on their own every 20 seconds is not fun. Not in the slightest.