Recent reviews by Ivelieu

AI Generated: The Game

Just like any healthy modding community - the mods far surpass the originals in quality and depth, but all the publicity and funding goes back to the original developers... The story is average, but the puzzles and level design is amazing.

One of the best pixel art bullet hells. I cannot think of any potential criticism other than its difficulty, which is exactly what I want from video games.

Played this game since 2011, and *finally* got a win on normal mode 12-13 years later. This game got me into Roguelikes and I still appreciate its humor. This is the kind of game I think is rather hard to do well at without wikiwalking, and I for one appreciate that many forum posts from 2014 are still relevant for its strategy.

I seem to always come back to this as an arcade classic, I suppose in a similar way to how some people like the Mario classics. I highly value the precise controls and the randomized bullet hell.

This game teaches you how to use Linux. (I cannot get over that this was made by and for Windows >_<... But it runs well in Wine.)

Other reviews have covered the mechanics and story, which I think is great and very unique even in the unique genre of roguelikes. But there is something more special about this game to me. There are very few games which survive ten years of development (six of which was full time). And fewer even that have such a high quality blog documenting virtually every design decision. This game is a person's life's work, and that simply does not compare to most of the cash grab garbage that's churned through steam, especially from AAA companies. Reading through the blog, it's clear that the mostly sole developer has gone through *years* trying to design the best UI in a video game, in my opinion, ever.

It reminds me of when I was younger and getting into hacking, feeling inspired by games like Uplink, Hacknet, and later zachtronics games that I more just enjoyed for the challenge like TIS-100 and EXAPUNKS. Playing this game with its delicate animations and sounds, especially in keyboard-only mode, makes me feel like a hacker like when I did at first with those games many years ago - I think this is a level of immersion very few games can really invoke, of course it makes it very niche but also irreplaceable.

To be honest, I see this game's keyboard only mode having educational value teaching children how to use Linux. Of course, the keybinds are different, what is important is the mentality. I'd much rather learned with this game than all those dozens of touch typing flash games.

The only drawbacks about the UI, which seem to of been a constant source of dev struggle fighting against the terminal-based engine, are its limitations for zooming and resizing. Stuff looks too small, and this seems to be the only real long-running criticism of its reviews. But I can see a huge amount of effort has gone into trying to fix this, planning to be released at some point in 2024 along with exiting early access. It's rare enough to see a terminal-based game engine, especially a self-made one that's this performant and comes with its own ASCII editor REXPaint. I'm also surprised that they use yEd, which I've also used for years, although I'm a little sad they don't use the amazing Paint.NET with its plugin glory :)

One aspect that I find this deviates from the linux/vim/sublime text experience as a programmer myself is that the controls lack easy customisability. There are some hoops to jump through to change keybinds, and the high keyboard utilisation makes it somewhat hard to modify them without keybind conflicts. I'm thinking of the modded Minecraft keybind conflict menu which has saved me many times. In other words, while the physical screen size is very important for playing on a laptop, many laptops either don't have arrow keys or have 'half size' ones like mine does, meaning I either need to plugin a separate numpad module, use hjkl vi-like movement, or spend a while to setup my preferred ijkl movement.

Note: I don't have steam playtime because I use the DRM-free version. I'd recommend buying the game from the developer's website, as steam charges an absurd 30% revenue cut for almost all games on the platform, and you can get a steam key from the website purchase in addition to a DRM-free copy. for me at least, this would be the perfect game for playing during a long road trip or flight, plus I generally can't stand steam's bloat as an application. But I think writing a review here would just give the most visibility.

This game has been with me since my childhood. It is my all time favourite with great replay value and a basically limitless skill ceiling. After many years, I now play mostly on a mode called Coda No Return. It has to be one of if not the most challenging yet fair game modes among games I've ever played, and the modest community of Coda players I play with I hold dear to my heart.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is not a legal threat.
This game is terrible. In its story, game engine, several of the puzzles, and with predatory pricing. (The review has some minor spoilers.)

The puzzles use some creative mechanics, and the few puzzle mechanics it does have are well designed. My opinion is the puzzles have so much more potential and it's only barely explored, mostly spent on puzzles more focused on tedium and requiring precise inputs. Precise inputs for puzzles are bad game design, and as I was playing on a keyboard, I found some particular ledges to jump off were extremely difficult because the keyboard ledge momentum is handled differently for keyboard versus controller. There are long delays for animations for the mechanics later in the game, I found I was constantly fighting the camera well before the game mechanic which affected camera control, and the poor respawn placements for some of the longer puzzle chains made me feel like I was wasting time.

The game engine does not seem to be able to properly load saves. After loading a save, me and my friend experienced frequent screen tearing and frame skips. In some cases one of us would die because the game jumped ahead a couple of seconds. The options are extremely limited; just "display" (which I think is to select monitors in a multi monitor setup, as clicking it does nothing for me), language and two audio sliders. if you don't play on the popular 1920x1080 resolution it renders poorly as other reviewers have mentioned.

I suppose some people may find the story interesting, but right from the beginning it was incredibly boring to me. It felt like I was listening to an actual person's thoughts coming home from a 9-5 wage slave job. It really did not get much better; tropey, unimaginative dialogue that could have been written as a high school assignment. Arguably the best parts of the story started roughly 30% into the game in segments where players are shared with asymmetric information and told not to communicate, leading up to decisions both players have to make. But there are extremely few of these and they have basically inconsequential effects on the story.

Regarding predatory pricing: In a landmark 2017 Australian supreme court case, it was found that Valve misled Australian consumers by forbidding refunds, and from when it was initiated in 2014 to its resolution it has seen a ripple effect in Steam's new refund policy -- which I think without further context, players may mistakenly view it as Valve being benevolent when they just tried to avoid liability. What has happened for this game, is that the price during early access was twice of at its release with friends pass, meaning only one copy is needed. By changing it to require two copies to play and not issuing refunds to early access purchasers in Australia, the developers are likely to be violating Australian consumer law, which requires that Australian consumers "are entitled to a replacement or refund from the retail supplier of the video games for a major failure and for compensation for any other reasonably foreseeable loss or damage." Although this is a small indie game and unlikely to attract legal attention, I do think this bait-and-switch predatory pricing is becoming more frequent, and I wonder if in my lifetime I will see a new precedent set prohibiting it. The specific pricing of the game is irrelevant to the fact that at minimum, the developer's decision is legally questionable and morally reprehensible. Early access games are largely played, bought and viewed similar to full release games, they generally have no special legal liability exceptions, and it will take a long time for Valve to (if ever) really admit this but it's largely an open secret in my view.

To me, this game reflects the kind of quality that I would see in a free flash game in the 2000s. If the art direction was taken further, the story was less unbearably mundane+unrealistic+tropey and a sane game engine was used I think it would have far more potential.

Long time ror1 and modded ror2 player. When I first saw this game, I thought it was a cash grab (since most remasters are), but I heard from a friend it was okay so I hesitantly decided to get it.

I finish the game for the first time and decide to watch the credits. Roughly speaking:
risk of rain: 5 developers
risk of rain returns: 20 developers, 100 people on the marketing team, 150 people on the finance and administration team
"...and you, for playing our game. I still can't believe where we are." Yeah, neither can I... how disappointing... the bureaucracy only desires to grow, and corporatise all good things.
Now that risk of rain has been acquired by Gearbox Software (known for Borderlands), and they are promoting an outright gacha game for the risk of rain 'franchise', it dawns on me that in a way, risk of rain is essentially a gacha game. Besides some modest differences in abilities, the main gameplay loop (without artifact of command) revolves around mostly getting random items and hoping for a synergy. When I see it like that, risk of rain seems much more hollow to me. The community pushback to the minigames of the providence trials, especially requiring 15 perfect trials for an artifact, the poorly customisable the UI and zoom, using the same bad netcode as ror1, not allowing multiplayer rejoins, and a number of other areas lacking polish pointed out by other negative reviews, also reflects this.

I see this receiving comparable funding and bureaucracy bloat to a AAA game, and it really shows. Remasters just set a very low bar for innovation, and plenty of reviewers seem to be okay with this low bar when the potential for genuinely interesting mechanics (rather than just grindy unlocks) in a remake did exist.

Phasmophobia is the kind of software that gets worse as it gets (mandatory) updates. They add more and more bloat and never give the user a chance to opt out, and I find it predatory. In this instance, after a year, I wanted to play on Halloween with some friends. The first launch froze and crashed. The second launch I waited 10 minutes after freezing and the application finally woke up, but after I joined my friends and started a mission, it would not load in, and a memory leak crashed which somewhat surprisingly crashed my OS to forced me to do power cycling. On restart, my 1920x1080 monitor was forcibly locked to 1280x1024 and it took a couple hours to fix myself. There are endless resolution-related and graphics driver-related complaints for this game.

This is the kind of bloat that, especially on Windows, I would so much rather live without. I see too much of it already in my line of work, and it is disappointing to see more and more video games take away update control and user rights to control how software works on their computer. Eventually, the long term effect is that users gradually know less and less about how their computer works to the point where they cannot even fix basic issues on their own and require technicians and such for basic support. The attitude is totally different in most FLOSS communities - people learn how to and have the resources to fix bugs and make patches themselves. Anyway, this is now a game which will now reliably crash and cause endless issues for me, so I don't want to play it any more, even though I like some aspects of its game design I discourage others from risking their computer's integrity and their sanity. The perennial early access status is insufficient justification for such issues when it is sold at retail prices.