Recent reviews by Narayan

Phenomenal exploration platformer experience. Awe inspiring visuals. Emotionally charged. It resonated really well with me.

Candleman is a beautiful 3D platformer journey of a little candle that wants to shine as bright as a lighthouse. There are 12 chapters, each featuring different mechanics over few stages. Each has its own distinct ambiance & theme revolving around various sources of light. To name just a few, you'll be seeing glowing dust, luminescent flowers, lanterns, fireworks, flames, light bulbs, etc.

The game is not overly difficult, and its main gimmick is that you can only light up your little candle protagonist in quick bursts, as you're allowed to burn a total of 10 seconds throughout a single stage before you melt completely. You also have 10 lives per stage (that I never ran out of), and a checkpoint usually around the the middle or before more difficult section, to make things even more forgiving. For extra challenge you can try to locate and light up all the candles scattered throughout. And after you finish the game, a beat-the-timer mode unlocks, which is also pretty lenient on how fast you have to be in order to make it.

Overall, it was such a pretty and delightful experience. :)

Written after completing the game with 8.7 hours played & 19 of 19 (100%) achievements earned.

I’ve played Planescape: Torment long time ago in ye olden days. I was completely enthralled by it, and it made a lasting impression on me. Going back to it after all those years, I made a surprising discovery that in the span of over 15 years no other computer RPG seems to have surpassed it for me. There were many I simply enjoyed, some even came close, but sadly P:T still blows vast majority of modern ones out of the water, and none of them had the same level of profound impact on me like this one. Sadly, because I could always use more outstanding cRPGs in my life :) But it’s also weirdly comforting to learn that this game holds up so well after all this time.

Planescape: Torment is a kind of RPG that focuses on actual Role Playing, which means inventing the type of character you wanna be, and actually embodying that role. You can be absolutely anyone - good, evil, lawful, chaotic, all shades in between. You can soak in any of the in-game ideologies, and try to uphold their spirit. And because of many philosophies permeating P:T, the choice how to act is rarely binary.

There is lots and lots of reading involved. The writing is excellent. The game features a cast of truly memorable characters, places, and concepts. Things you do here border on the investigation/ puzzle side - you’re encouraged to think and solve problems creatively. The more details you notice & the more you pay attention to everything, the more you get out of the game and enrich your own experience. Depending on a type of character you’re roleplaying, the combat (and gear to some degree) can be quite unimportant, as you’ll be able to talk yourself out of most situations (or act out via dialogue when certain skill checks are involved).

The journey of the main character is personal, focused on self discovery, and the way he affects the planes and others around him. The game mechanics goes hand in hand with how the world is designed, how the npcs act. Everything synergises nicely, nothing feels out of place.

The Enhanced Edition is basically a well put together and much more polished version than a set of user mods that you had to install previously over original P:T in order to make it usable on modern machines. I was quite satisfied with this EE. The game looks great (even considering the age), and it's effortless to use. I did experience crashes though, usually 1-2 per few hour gaming sessions, but with quicksaves rotating on 4 slots, and my own often saves, I never lost more than few mins progress. The game launches quickly, so it wasn’t even much of a nuisance. I definitely would recommend this version over the user mods, even if you already own the original.

Written after beating the game with 70.7 hours played & 47 of 50 (94%) achievements earned.

Hob is an open world metroidvania experience, in a form of an isometric platformer focused on puzzles and exploration. The game also features combat, but as long as you figure out how to tackle each creature type then it's not complicated, and for the most part it can be avoided if someone chooses to rush past enemies.

Visuals are simply gorgeous. The atmosphere is great. The world is excellently crafted. It's a sort of bio-mechanic creation, where entire areas can rise up from underground. Figuring stuff out is satisfying. And even though there is not a single word spoken, it gave me a lot to think about. :)

I explored everything thoroughly, found all the lore & secret passages, collected every power-up & upgrade, and visited each imaginatively framed vista. Essentially, I enjoyed this game quite substantially and wanted to savor the experience. :)

Written after beating the game with 18.5 hours played & 33 of 37 (89%) achievements earned.

This looks like a cute little game on the surface. You control both the Lumbermancer and the logs he summons. There are 4 kinds - a shovel log which only purpose is to grow raw logs used as a consumable for summoning, a sword log that does melee damage, a torch log that’s used to rekindle Lumbermancer’s lantern (if it goes out, whole screen goes dark) but can do some damage as well, and an archer log that does ranged damage. What you need to do is to fill a sandwich shaped hole in main character’s tummy, by beating 4 areas in the woods, along with their respective bosses that drop ingredients for his lunch. Quirky and charming, right? Unfortunately under the hood it’s a complete mess.

You control both the Lumbermancer and the log that is currently active. I would expect the logs to act as at least semi independent summons, but nope, it’s all manual. It’s hard enough to fight with one and avoid damage with the other, but to make the matters worse - the controls are not rebindable. Personally I would have swapped few things around to make it more comfortable if I could, but instead I was forced into someone else's clumsy preferences. Your characters move slowly and can block each others paths, which makes controlling them even more clunky. At first it’s not a problem, but then more and more enemies show up, so it’s hard to outmanoeuvre them and kill them in a timely fashion, thus you end up with a total ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ on screen[i.imgur.com].

The game does not feature any options, neither graphical ones, nor of any other kind. It runs in a window, which doesn’t even use system style & colour scheme, and default steam screenshot button opens some sort of dev tools or something. There is no steam overlay integration, but screenshotting is a force of habit for me, so I ended up with weird additional windows few times.

The cherry on top is, that you can entirely circumvent the core game mechanic, to the point of playing entirely different game than the devs intended. There are several spells your character can learn in exchange for the souls of defeated creatures he gathers. One of the cheapest spells are a mermaid attacker thing, and a pig. You cast them by pressing directional buttons, for example right-down-up-down. I’m pretty sure that was supposed to make the player use them scarcely, but all it takes is to practice a spell few times, and then you can flood the screen with the mermaids, that actually move independently on their own (so much more convenient than logs) and mow down everything they touch. As there is no cost to using spells (as opposed to summoning logs), there is no reason not to do that. And in later stages, what you’re basically doing is fighting a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of enemies with a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of spawns of your own.
The pig (2nd spell) when killed gives the Lumbermancer health. You can spawn the pig, then instantly kill it by spawning a mermaid on top of it, and there is no cost to that either, and no quota of how much health you can have, so you can make the protagonist basically immortal, and proceed to faceroll everything with mermaids. Aside from being forced to spawn the torch log for light from time to time, there is no need to play as intended, especially that it feels so clunky and inferior to spell spam. The core mechanics seemed like a nice idea, and maybe with some tweaks here and there, it could have been fun to use, but unfortunately this aspect of the game was totally botched up.

I also experienced a recurring bug that made Lumbermancer stuck still not moving for no apparent reason. The arrow keys that control him worked (because I still could spawn spells with them), so the game accepted input, but he was just rooted in one spot. Once it happened at the boss, and after killing the boss I couldn’t go up and pick up the ingredient for sandwich :/ The little logs, while still mobile, weren’t coded to interact with it, so I had to repeat entire area. Oh, and if you save in the bugged state, you’re gonna load the exact same bugged state (saves are also manual btw). It won’t restart you fresh on the same stage or anything.

After you collect all ingredients and let the Lumbermancer consume his sandwich[i.imgur.com], an endless mode unlocks, but I wasn’t interested in playing that anymore.

Written after beating the game with 2.7 hours played.

htoL#♥♥♥: The Firefly Diary is a puzzle game with light platforming elements and indirect control of the main character. I kinda had a love-hate relationship with it, cause vast majority about it is just great. The story is intriguing, layered and every time you think you’ve figured it out, the game unveils new hidden depth. All of that is sprinkled with enough vagueness and that nice kind of Japanese weirdness, to make you think a lot, even after you’ve stopped playing. Visuals are hand drawn and really pretty. Many puzzles are engaging, and thoroughly varied.

So what was wrong with it? Ugh, controls. You control a cursor (standard mouse pointer), when you click, a light spirit Lumen flies up to it. It never sticks to the pointer, always lags behind and even if you keep the pointer in one place it jitters all around it. All of this causes various issues on its own. But most of the time it’s not Lumen who you want to do stuff with, it’s Mion, the protagonist. And Mion follows Lumen. So you have indirect control squared - main character following light, which follows the cursor in turn.

Many puzzles require great deal of precision and timing, so it felt as if someone wanted to perform a heart surgery by directing red dot of the laser pointer in general chest area, and have a cat with a scalpel taped to its paw do the impossible. Much frustration ensued. Add to that random elements in some puzzles, and some others requiring lots of trial and error (so much repetition, oh joy), that if not for the whole atmosphere, story and general creepy cuteness that I really enjoy, I wouldn’t probably torture myself with it.

Playing through the game from start to finish in linear fashion is not enough, as the reward for it is a looping faux ending. In order to get the true ending, player needs to collect all memories scattered throughout the game, and find entrance to a secret stage hidden in one of the earlier levels.

Recommended only if you can handle the terrible control scheme.

Written after beating the game with 11.3 hours played & 22 of 24 (92%) achievements earned.

Figment is an isometric puzzle adventure game, probably aimed at a younger audience, but I really enjoyed it nonetheless. It features fairly easy combat elements, and some platforming sections that do damage, but is quite forgiving when protagonist dies (it will instantly restart you from often checkpoints). It's mainly focused on puzzles, interactions with environment, and narration.

Above all, this game is so joyful and uplifting. The visuals are so creative & colorful. The puzzles were fun, and while not hard, they were varied and engaging for me. Overall it was nice to play, and contained many aspects that kept me smiling most of the time, like for example bosses singing insanely catchy tunes while battling them. Hard to keep straight face :) I had a really pleasant time with this. Basically, it's a feel-good game. Even the ending that is more on a heart-wrenching side, carries a positive message.

Written after completing the game with 7.7 hours played & 23 of 23 (100%) achievements earned.

RiME is a 3rd person exploration platformer, and graphically a feast for eyes - such vibrant colours, beautiful stylized environment, lots of stunning vistas, changing night/day cycle. Top notch aesthetics! There are few locations visually quite distinct from one another. And while I did prefer chapters 1 & 3 for their brighter palette, all of them painted a really nice atmosphere.

The game features some puzzles too, but if you're following the main route, they are all quite easy and fairly obvious to figure out what needs to be done. The difficulty raises only if you decide to go for all the collectibles - many of them are tricky to obtain & hard to spot. Although there are way too many sets of objects to collect that don't serve any other purpose than collecting for the sake of collecting. Only few types were useful, like outfits, lullaby song parts (such a beautiful tune btw), or metaphorical story panels. But I can stand behind making the difficulty dynamic depending on how the player chooses to play :)

The story was vague and enigmatic most of the time, but when the reveal came at the end it turned out to be very emotional. I quite enjoyed the game overall. Personally, I do like exploring breathtaking & well crafted surroundings in a non-verbal setting, but I recognize that might not be enough for everyone.

Written after completing the game with 9.5 hours played & 31 of 31 (100%) achievements earned.

Peregrin turned out to be more of a visual novel (with clicking to progress through lines of text) than a puzzle game, which I did not expect. I thought the story would be serving as a background to the gameplay, but in fact it was the puzzles that were very easy, and their purpose was to add variety and reinforce the narrative, rather than be the main focus. There was enough to do, so I didn’t mind :)

Visuals are on the artistic side, focusing on artwork and aesthetics rather than fidelity. Atmosphere resonated well with me. It was melancholic, with sad undertones, taking place in a world after a cataclysm, exploring how the regressed remnants of humanity filled in the blanks of what happened, mostly resorting to mysticism, when most of the knowledge was lost. Generally it was an interesting experience, as the tale is told from the point of view of the protagonist and what she and her tribe believe. At the end it’s contrasted with what really happened. The story was well put together, and I enjoyed it.

Written after completing the game with 4.4 hours played & 27 of 27 (100%) achievements earned.

EARTHLOCK: Festival of Magic is a nice throwback to the old school style of jRPGs with turn based combat. The mechanics isn't very complex, but that also means it's not a convoluted mess either, as it sometimes happens with those. That is not to say it's trite either. You can expect few layers of complexity with stances, super charged specials, paying attention to elemental & weapon weaknesses, talent system including not only passives, but also global modifiers as well as character specific skills. And on top of that bonuses from bonds between characters.

Best part of it is that none of that is set in stone - you can swap around party members (for their abilities, as well as different bonds bonuses), you can swap around skills, most of the talents, and switch stances. Which on its own provides quite a lot of variety already. But the game capitalizes on that immensely, requiring you to swap for different strategies vs different types of opponents. And while it was more forgiving to fight regular mobs, although still quite challenging, fighting bosses was an absolute must to prepare tailor made group wide build against a specific boss. Usually few attempts at a boss were needed to get it right. I also very much liked that overleveling content basically did not provide advantage against bosses, only figuring out the combination of talents, skills, group members & stances, plus carefully considering every move during the battle itself. It was almost like figuring out a solution to a puzzle. Very neat.

The story itself is unremarkable. Some characters are cute, but not really fleshed out. There are hints here and there that there is more than meets the eye & them having potentially interesting backstories, but I guess it wasn't added into the game in the end. The visuals are really pleasant. And there isn't too much grind for the amount of content offered. Doing everything including achievements was manageable.

Overall I had nice time with it. But had I known there is an updated and more fleshed out version coming at the time I played, I would have waited for the final one. And I suggest you do the same if you're interested in the game. Owners of EARTHLOCK: Festival of Magic will automatically receive the new version for free, so me writing here is not a total waste of time ;) The developers are calling it "Should-have-been-edition", so that suggests it will be a game they wanted to make in the first place but didn't have time or means to do it the first time around. If enough new content is added, I will probably play the re-launched EARTHLOCK as well :)

Written after completing the game with 35.3 hours played & 25 of 25 (100%) achievements earned.