Recent reviews by Tem

Very charming, very sweet, very endearing. Lil Gator Game takes the best parts of the Switch Legend of Zelda games (the climbing, gliding and terrain-surfing) and tells a sweet story about childhood. The characters are delightful, the movement is a joy, the pathos feels very real, and the dialogue hits home.

The DLC could be a *tiny* bit easier to navigate -- I found myself getting turned around so much that I ended up resorting going topside quite a few times when I needed to switch areas, as you don't have the tall landmarks or clear shoreline to help orient yourself when underground. That's it, that's my only criticism.

Short and sweet. I finished in just under 3 hours, getting everything but one health upgrade. It's a bite-sized Metroidvania, more or less what you'd expect. The trailer makes it look somewhat more intense than it actually is, with some of the more intense sequences involving the player taking unnecessary risks. It has some challenge to it, with a few bosses that were satisfying to die to before learning to master their attacks. Areas are self-contained, so you won't have to do much backtracking.

It has its rough patches: the dialogue is a bit generic throughout, there's places where I wish they had tried to show without telling, the floaty controls can get you killed, and there's one jump over a pit full of instant-death frogs that's a bit too rude for what it is. Still, it gets the core elements of a bite-sized Metroidvania right, so if that's what you're looking for, go ahead and grab it.

A word of warning: When the game tells you there's a point of no return, they really, actually mean it. Unlike most games, even once you beat the final boss, you aren't going back.

I can't believe I paid money for ice sliding puzzles. Incredibly, impossibly, the devs took my least favorite puzzle mechanic and made an intense, excellent puzzle game. It's one of those puzzle games where you keep thinking you know all the rules, only for the game to bake your brain in some new and twisted way. Great, and maddeningly complex for a game with such simple basic rules. Thumbs up.

Absolutely charming. A delightful treat.

I initially left a very salty review based on a bad experience I had with the crossover. While that experience WAS still very bad, I've experienced enough good with the game now that I'm going to update my review. I'll leave the salty negative stuff at the bottom for posterity.

In brief: the story and characters are excellent, the world is intriguing and the gameplay is fun, albeit one with a steep learning curve and way more going on than I can reasonably parse all at once. The voice acting is also genuinely some of the best I can think of in any video game I can think of: the world of Limbus Company is a deeply disturbing one, and the voice actors manage to deliver on sounding deeply distributed, truly mournful, absolutely thrilled, terrified, etc. It's genuinely impressive. Plenty of games have good voice acting, but I can't think of a game that has actually sold me on a voice actor conveying the despair of seeing his family die in front of him, or the excitement in the voice of a passionate character unexpectedly meeting their idol.

The combat system is A Lot. Every attack has a damage type, which enemies can be weak to or resist, so be sure to bring the right ones. Every attack has a sin type, which enemies can be weak to or resist, so be sure to bring the right ones. But the different sins also generate different sin resources, which are used to power-up super powerful moves, so you probably want to take diverse sins. But you also get a bonus for using the same sin type repeatedly in a single turn, so you probably want to focus on just a few. Passive abilities also require you to a specific amount of different sin resources, so you'll want to make sure the resources you're generating line up with those, too. There are also different buffs and debuffs, which tend to be self-synergistic, so you'll also want to focus on one of those.

The difficulty curve can also be all over the place. There are a lot of battles that required zero thought from me, to the point where I could just let the computer pick my matchups while I sit back and watch the fireworks. Then there are battles that can fall apart because of a single mistake: fail to win X clash or stagger Y opponent, and you're dead. You better be reserving your best skills, taking advantage of resonance, managing your SP, thinking about each sinner's specific buffs, taking stock of every enemy attack, planning for each of their gimmicks, etc. It's not surprising to all but breeze through the game up until 5-30, and then that ONE fight is an order of magnitude harder than anything that came before.

It's very involved, and at its best, battles can feel like intricate puzzles. It doesn't ALWAYS work -- some bosses end up being tedious slogs, or overtuned, or a matter of very tediously checking seven separate skills against seven different attacks one-by-one to see which match-ups work. When it works, it's good, but I also don't think you can realistically keep EVERY factor in mind. I try to be thoughtful and understand the mechanics as best I can, but there's a point where I just have to go with your gut about what works.

When a fight is difficult, it's very easy for it to snowball. Get a few bad coin flips, and now your sinners have low SP (which makes their future coin flips worse), debilitating debuffs and/or are outright Staggered, making their next turn even worse, going further downhill with every turn. Thankfully, there's minimal penalties for losing (unless you spend a bunch of the roguelike metacurrency, then get stonewalled by the first fight, as happened to me), but it _can_ feel bad when a fight spirals out of control not because you made a bad decision, but because of some weird bad luck. I guess that's the nature of games with such horror-themed settings.

The gacha system is neither the most generous, nor the cruelest. Coming from Arknights, the chances of getting a specific thing you want directly from the gacha feels really low, but there is a robust system for simply getting what ID/EGO you want after enough pulls. Building a single themed team feels approachable, once you've gotten a few random good hits from the gacha. There isn't the same feeling of "pull X from the new banner NOW, or you won't have another good chance for a year" that other gachas have.

For me, the story is the draw. If the story was bad, the times that the combat was good still wouldn't be enough of a selling point for me. As it is, I'm willing to put up with some degree of frustration to learn more about the story. The setting, the characters, the voice acting and the integration of the story with the climatic battles sell it.

And now for the negative rant I initially posted:
--

Loved the story and the characters that I saw, but I can't say I'm a fan of games that expect you to crawl through a two-hour long dungeon slog only to lose to the final boss because of one errant click during a single attack, forcing you to replay the whole thing.

This was on the heels of losing a bunch of a hard-to-get resource used for the roguelike mode because for my very first fight, the game decided to drop one of the hardest encounters on me. But at least that was over after a single 15-minute long horrible fight and not literally two hours of slowly pushing through fights with dozens of enemies to slowly burn down each.

I don't think the devs understand the idea of a collab made to hook new players in the slightest, because there's no reason to take a moment of absolute cinematic glory and have the boss simply slaughter all your characters, before reapplying a shield that takes half a dozen turns to churn through in the best of circumstances.

(Also making the collab EGOs really hard to get feels like a tremendous mis-step, too. I get why they're not all trivial, but I absolutely don't understand why they kept the odds so low when making them easier to get would be such a hook for onboarding Arknights players.)

Again, enjoyed the story/characters. I enjoyed the main story so far, and I can tell a lot of thought was put into the Arknights collab with regards to making the settings mesh and making the EGOs extremely fitting for the characters.

But I've never had an experience soured so completely and utterly. I made one tiny mistake (accidentally reassigned an attack to check something, making it the skill I was clashing with instead of my best skill for clashing, after what had already been a ~30-minute battle) and that was it, two hours of playing erased. What a baffling decision for the devs to make. I wish I could say "the attack instantly kills you," but no, the attack just instantly ruins your chances of winning, while still dragging out your slow and miserable defeat over the next 15 minutes. An utterly horrible experience.

Fun game, with some low points. The game's biggest selling point is that the main mechanic is inherently fun to mess around with. It is always at least a little delightful to apply a photo and see how the geometry of the level has changed to accommodate the new reality. It's not a long game (I got all the collectibles, all the camera filters and most of the achievements in ~6 hours), and it felt like very little of that time was spent actually being stumped by a puzzle. There were only two puzzles where I really had that "wait, I genuinely don't know what to do" feeling.

There are some low points as well. The game can be cloying at times, both towards itself, and towards you. It praises itself -- having a character being wildly impressed with the photo mechanic, and again when a monorail arrives, even though neither of these things are inherently impressive in the context of a simulated reality. It also offers you praise that feels exaggerated and unearned: saying things like, "witnessing your creativity is a marvel to behold" after executing what is clearly the intended solution for a basic puzzle. Most of the dialogue and supplementary worldbuilding grated on me, with pseudo-scientific nonsense strewn about. I didn't need four chapters of "the people who lived in this space previously were super super smart science genius smarty people." I didn't need to find six post-it notes per puzzle saying things like "account for variables??" and "try revising prototype!" I had to take a break from the game after finding a journal that insisted "sound travels faster than light," only for a character to repeat that a minute later. All to set up the game's worst puzzle mechanic, which had nothing to do with sound traveling faster than light. Despite each world being based on one of the game's main characters, supposedly showcasing their personality and interests, I never really felt like I got to know them on more than the most superficial of levels.

At least it ends on a high note: I really liked how the very final puzzle in the game broke away from tidy little solutions and instead simply gave you resources and then let you spend them across puzzles as you saw fit. And the ending did the best it could with the build-up it had.

All in all, I think if the mechanic looks like you'd enjoy just playing with it, and you don't mind a short game or putting up with "cringe" dialogue, I can reccommend this game to you. If you want hard puzzles, or something more mind-bending, or something with an engaging plot, or with likeable characters, you can do better elsewhere.

Lovely RPG that never fails to hit its high notes. The strength of the writing, the humor, and the endearing characters is the core strength of the game, but the plot, the pacing and the combat system are extremely solid as well. The combat system becomes engaging extremely quickly compared to similar games, You know a game is superb when the emotional implications of "changing the arrangement of your characters on the battle screen" hits hard. Absolutely recommended for any fans of RPGs, and/or Lesbian Animals.

I will say that RPG veterans won't find the game hard, if that's important to you: On Normal mode (there is also an Easy mode), there was only one stretch of the game where I felt like I was in any real danger, and even then, I could have just dipped into my consumable items more.

There were still decisions for me to make on every turn of combat except the first (which I used to set up my basic strategy), so it was still engaging, it just didn't feel threatening. It also felt like there were certain fun mechanics (such as trying to figure out which side of an enemy would be most vulnerable to one of Allison's skills, based on their sprite) that felt irrelevant in the face of a dominant strategy that emerges about halfway through the game. A bit of a shame, that, but oh well.

The game is extremely friendly with its mechanics, such as heal spells always getting to go first in the turn order, and access to an ability to restore a chunk of your party's MP. I think it's good design! It allows a wider audience access to SLARPG, and that's a good thing. If you _need_ an RPG to show you its fangs, SLARPG won't scratch that itch. For everyone else, you'll still have a great time.

Definitely hoping we get to see the Novas again, in whatever form that may be. Highly recommended.

Star of Providence is incredible. I'm very particular about bullet hells, and I can't get enough of Star of Providence. The controls are fluid and tight, the aesthetics are pitch-perfect and the gameplay manages a lot of tricky balancing acts in an impressive way.

For example, runs can snowball to some degree: doing well on the early floors means more max HP and more scrap to spend at shops, giving you an advantage going into the later challenges, making good early play meaningful. But it doesn't fall into the trap of dooming a run if you make mistakes. The game gives you space to claw yourself back from the brink while also making your early decisions and mistakes meaningful. (This is helped by the genre: because it is possible (if not reasonable for most players) to beat any boss with no upgrades and the default weapon, the advantages you do gain over the course of the run can be kept very significant but not success-defining.)

This is a minor detail, but it does so much for the flow of the game: most pickups disappear when you leave the room, allowing you to not have to spend any mental load on them. Ammo pickup? Grab it. Health? Grab it. No need to weigh the pros and cons of grabbing something now vs. having to remember to come back to pick it up later. That kind of decision is left to important things. And to add to this, no pickup is ever truly wasted: grabbing ammo without a gun to feed it to grants you currency instead, while grabbing healing at max health contributes towards increasing your max HP. (This is part of what makes good play rewarding without making a bad start a guaranteed loss.)

The mechanics just all feel like they're geared towards giving the player a good experience. And that, in turn, makes it feel like a game that WANTS you to improve and defeat it, even as it throws increasingly daunting challenges at you. It's a game that's been extremely good at making me go, "I'll never beat X, I accept this" to "Well it's still fun to TRY to beat X" to actually, eventually, overcoming X. And then realizing that X is only the beginning.

And the game excels at surprising you. Just when you think you've seen everything, it'll throw some new enemy, some new boss phase, some new thing to explore at you. It feels endless in the best possible way.

On top of this, there is actually some really interesting lore, slowly revealed to you from a variety of sources. It doesn't put any of it in your face, but there's a lot to uncover if poking at the weird, mysterious edges of games is your thing. You wouldn't think a game about spaceships shooting one thousand ghosts and funny machines good have good characters, but it does.

I like to throw in a few quibbles with any review to give the reader a sense what the worst elements of the game are (what's the opposite of a backhanded compliment? A fronthanded insult?), and I'm struggling to come up with anything worth saying. It CAN be frustrating to do a 40-minute run, only to trip over the same final boss and end up back at the hub with no material progress to show for it. The final floors CAN be especially brutal, with some rooms PERHAPS bordering on unfair. There is one attack in the game I feel like deserves more a telegraph than it has. Those are the worst things I have to say about the game.

10/10, super excited knowing that D-13 plans to add MORE to a game that is already packed to the brim.

I have mixed feelings about the original Everhood. I felt like there was potential there, but a lot of it was squandered with inconsistent characters, a failure to care properly about setup or payoff, and some of the worst messages I've seen in a video game ever (in particular, a suicidal character who praises you for killing them, stating they lacked the courage to do it themself). And yet I was still charmed by the music, the character designs and the feeling like the developers had a good message they wanted to share, only for them to fumble it. Despite all that I didn't like about the original, I had high hopes for the sequel.

I don't even know where to start with the sequel. I can't think of a single example of good setup and payoff. I can't think of a single character I found endearing, that I wanted to spend more time with. The whole thing just felt incoherent. Yes, I know the whole thing is supposed to be "psychadelic," but I just felt lost and confused the entire time, like I was waiting for the real game to start. There is so much that is just utterly devoid of anything substantial. I can't even really feel like I beat it. Everything was so hollow and unresolved that my brain refuses to accept it's over.

There are so many baffling decisions. It's like the devs' goal was to make sure no one could find the game fun.

There are random battles now, as if playing the same song five or eight or a dozen times is supposed to be fun. The combat system is frustrating, asking you to absorb dozens of the same color note in a row, with any mistakes (getting hit, absorbing a note of a different color) erasing your combo utterly. There were far too many cases where I would lose my combo for some stupid reason: the absorb button not responding like I expected to, some visual noise hiding a attack, or the cast button failing to respond in time.

The game's trailer makes a big deal out of "playing as your soul color," but this is determined by a pre-game personality quiz, and no relevance is ever given to what soul color you end up as. The game makes a big to-do out of letting you equip different weapons, but there are so few weapons, and I never felt like what weapon I was using mattered at all. You don't get a second weapon until a significant way into the game, at which point you're giving a choice of three weapons... only for two of those options to turn out to be fake, with the game always giving you the same weapon no matter what you chose. Why? What's the point?

In the end, you get four different weapons, all of which feel basically the same. The different attacks on the different weapons supposedly have different effects, but the game never bothers to explain what any of the statuses mean, and ultimately every weapon has a useless attack, a bad attack you can use in a pinch, and a good attack (that requires you to build a long and fragile combo chain).

The main way to become stronger is to acquire power gems. Your first quest makes it seem like power gems will be significant items, figuring into the setting in one way or another (e.g. being used to power a device, having a place of importance in a temple, etc.) But after that first quest, nearly all of the gems you find will just be in random treasure chests. Every chest in the game is either an increasingly meaningless amount of EXP, or a rare and limited way of upgrading your weapons. It's like they had a decent idea, but then got tired of it one area into the game.

Nothing ever felt like it made sense or was satisfying at all. You visit a Vegetable Kingdom and (after an interminable trudge through the desert followed by an interminable boat ride) end up getting looped into a plot to depose the Veggie King. But then you're caught while invading the castle, and are forced to enter a fighting tournament. You win the short and anti-climatic tournament, and that's it. There is no Veggie King. Nothing that happens in that sequence matters. The game just felt like one anti-climax after another. It all feels sloppy.

There was one character resolution I was interested in, and I accidentally triggered a sequence that forced me to leave the area where I could get that resolution, with no way to return. It feels like a sick joke.

There's no memorable song I can think of, not one memorable battle (aside from the stupidly hard battle the game keeps trying to force you into, before giving up and just letting the plot to progress regardless). There isn't one character who I felt like I enjoyed. There is no sequence I'd want to replay, no challenge I really enjoyed, no resolution I found satisfying, no cool beat I feel like sharing, no detail of the setting I'm curious to learn more about. There's a parade of betrayals in the game, and I could not care about any of them, because it never bothers to develop the characters or even make their relationships clear. It's nothing. It's all aggressively meaningless.

And on top of it all, it actively undoes the resolution at the end of Everhood 1. I genuinely don't understand who the devs thought this was for. With Everhood 1, it felt like the devs managed to stitch together a bunch of cool moments without giving proper thought to how to build up to those moments, or how to make sure characters had consistent motivations, or how to sell the metaphor of stagnation vs. death/change they clearly wanted to pursue. With Everhood 2... playing it feels like someone incoherently rambling about a setting they're trying to develop, forcing you to nod along. It's someone slamming their OCs together while yelling "DUALITY!!" at you.

I can't tell why this game was made. For people who didn't like Everhood 1, this game will make it look good by comparison. For people who did like Everhood 1, this game will laugh at you for thinking it had a meaningful conclusion. It's a game calibrated to piss you off at every turn and then mock you for thinking anything in it was ever going to matter.

It's not even bad in a fun way. It is not some deep meditation on nihilism. It's just tedious and pompous.

Edit: Upon further reflection, the ending is SO bad that I'm going to say the game actually, for a brief moment, becomes brilliant. What a perfect way to end a half-assed game than to drop down below quarter-ass for the finale.

If I give the devs the full force of my benefit of doubt -- more benefit of the doubt than I have ever afforded anyone in my life, even myself -- I _think_ I can glimpse a good message about rejecting nihilism and refusing to let others tell you what's meaningful. The game tries to come across as meaningless; but if you care, then you care, no matter what it says. I will forever be enamored with Rasta Beast showing up for the Reconciliation no matter what Everhood 2 has to say about Everhood 1.

...but that doesn't change the fact that the game feels incomplete, rushed and unwanted. It doesn't feel like the devs wanted to make it; it feels like they got pressured into doing it. The tedious battles, tepid soundtrack, hollow characters and incoherent plot don't suddenly become good because the game tells you it was always supposed to be terrible in the last minutes of the game. I think the "actually you're supposed to reject the nihilism presented by the game" theory would work better if the game were actually good. As it stands, the game doesn't give you a reason to reject the nihilism it presents. You're right, Shade. It was never going to mean anything.

Hands down, the most fun I've ever had with an idle game. Absolutely charming and engaging from beginning to end. There are so much love and care put into this game, so many great moments, so many tiny details that are just delightful. The art is endearing, the background music lovely, and I'm in love with its approach to storytelling/world-building. Everything is just so expressive.

A major part of the game is that it is deliberately somewhat obtuse at first. Nothing feels bizarrely or unfairly obtuse: there's just elements of the UI and basic mechanics that become clearer as you progress and experiment. If you want a game about strict optimization, this won't scratch that itch. But if slowly delving into a game's mysterious elements -- its lore, its mechanics, its UI -- is up your alley, you'll love this.

One thing this doesn't have which fans of idle games might expect is the kind of super explosive growth that you get from games like Cookie Click, Universal Paperclips, etc. Your growth is linear and reasonably bounded. There is satisfying progress to be had, but if the joy you get from idle games is going from making 1 cookie a second to a quindecillion cookies per second, you won't find that here. (Play it anyway, though.)

As my final endorsement, this game got me to make two documents and a spreadsheet out of appreciation for it, as well as physical notes on the game's conlang (which is not in any way necessary to decipher to play, but adds some additional texture to the visual backstory you get). I have a document for recording every instance of the conlang in an attempt to better understand it, another that puts the backstory in chronological order, and a spreadsheet that I used to track things I was working towards and basic economic things I noted. (This turned out to be unnecessary: the game's economy is chill, and going on vibes is totally fine.)

10/10 game.