Recent reviews by electra heart

if you like rhythm games you have to try this. you'd think one button would make it easy but oh no it's very hard. probably the only rhythm game i've played that's like a "true" rhythm game -- you aren't really reacting to what is on screen, you absolutely have to be feeling the rhythm. the game is incredibly imaginative and plays with this concept (and ♥♥♥♥♥ you up with what the screen shows you) so much. i really love it. please please please please please play it please please please please try it please please!! oh it has workshop support too so there's a lot of super cool custom levels. man this game is hard

gotta be one of the best and most fun partner games out there. so good

i didn't know what to expect from this game and i was sooooo pleasantly surprised. it has a really awesome world, kind of like control mixed with severance. the gameplay is pretty fun too, it plays like a point and click game kinda, and the puzzles are fun and not too frustrating. theres one boss fight i dont really love, but otherwise the game is start to finish very engaging, interesting, fun, very funny, and just very cool and unique. i had an absolute blast playing this and ended up finishing it in one go because i just could not put it down

i think this might be the best deckbuilder i've played.....the depth and variety is through the roof as you have 4 characters to a party and they each have different builds AND they play off each other so shuffling your party, even just the party ORDER, can change the feeling of your playthrough. it has a ♥♥♥♥ ton of relics too, more than i really expected.

i think enemy/boss variety is a bit lower than id like for a game i want to replay as much as this one, but it's still pretty good and i haven't technically unlocked them all yet so maybe i'm just straight up wrong about this.

early access wise, this game feels pretty complete, so i wouldn't worry much about that. some of the UI could use work, and i really would like a non-mod way to see my discard/draw piles, but 90% of it is good

i don't love the writing, the character conversations especially at campsites feel really anime tropey in a bad way. but the story itself is pretty interesting and i'm really intrigued by it. its kind of an interesting twist to have 60-70% of the story presented in records, it causes you to bounce back and forth through the past and the present to understand the world. its worth it i think, its very interesting.

the music and the gameplay are the real standouts. i wish there were a few more tracks but every song on the soundtrack is firmly in extreme delicious territory

this is the only mmo ive ever really been able to fall in love with top to bottom. this is because it has so many ideas that are antithetical to other mmos, like no subscription fee and horizontal progression (this is the big one). i can take years off the game and come back and catch up without an issue, because i don't have to do much of a gear treadmill at all to do new content. i have problems with it, mostly around old bugs not being fixed, microtransactions being often predatory, but so much of the game is so great and so much of the bad stuff is optional or workaroundable its hard not to recommend this game to anyone who likes good combat in mmos and is willing to get past the medium-length slog of the base game story and hitting level cap (80, which has never been raised)

very obviously a love letter to, say, ps1 survival horror games. silent hill in particular has a ton of its DNA in this game. that is mostly for better, but also a little bit for worse -- the combat and boss fights are slow, clunky, and a bit painful. this is by design as it does a lot to add tension to the game. but it can be frustrating, especially on survival, when you die in two hits and you take contact damage from *everything*, it's hard to aim/lock on, and all resources are pretty low. the boss fights in particular i could probably do without also being in cramped environments. if you've played silent hill or older resident evil games you'll know what i'm talking about: bosses are damage sponges, it's dubious if you are even doing the right thing, you just kind of sprint away to have enough time to turn around and fire off a couple rounds. then repeat. it's not my favorite. i also really dislike that enemies resurrect sometimes. i know there's a way to deal with that, but it's very inventory intensive, and it really screws with my "i chose to use bullets to kill this enemy instead of avoiding it" calculus in a frustrating way.

but everything else, and i mean everything else, about this game is basically perfect. the music and atmosphere are incredible. the story is weird but familiar (very silent hill 1, again), but at the same time absolutely its own beast. the characters are so limited and yet so enthralling at the same time. i absolutely love the world building. i would play a sequel right away, but also would be really disappointed that the remaining mystery of the world was being revealed slightly. and that's the strength of this game narratively too; you get so much of what matters and what you need to understand...but its ultimately almost nothing about signalis's world at large. its enough to hurt you, really badly, but not enough that you aren't really aching for more. this fits nicely with the overall melancholic feel of the game (outside of the horror stuff, which is top notch). the gameplay (outside of aforementioned frustrations) is so tightly wound...it's limited because the game is short, but the pacing is so ♥♥♥♥♥♥ flawless. you pick up resources and "upgrades" and lore and puzzle keys at the exact moments to keep the game feeling very very brisk. it just feels good to play all the time even when youre mad that the same stork unit hits you every time you run past it.

if you like survival horror at all, or the types of narratives found in the nier games, you should really play this. its fantastic. an easy recommend to anyone who isn't going to shut the game off if combat becomes frustrating at the first boss fight.

these mechanics seem really familiar from other deckbuilders, but they're also totally fresh! love using dice, art and music area really good. fun and free with a real good tutorial, try it out!

i can't get enough of this game. i play it as often as i can, and i think about it constantly when i can't play it. the gameplay loop is so satisfying. hitting that flow state and using keyboard shortcuts to read 3 books, open 2 rooms, and craft 2 items all at the same time just feels incredible

the world and worldbuilding are pretty great too, though i admit i am not exactly reading all the books my character is. i think that's okay; im still absorbing the vibe and the depth of the lore makes the game feel like a proper, interesting world. but if you are a lore kind of person there's a ton of super interesting stuff here.

yes, you have to take notes. i am using logseq for this, and very quickly built up my own wiki. this has been essential for me to track what memories i can generate as necessary, and which books i still have to read and how hard they will be to read. i can't imagine playing this without notes, it would probably take 3-4x as long as it's taking me, and it would be very tedious. i've seen some people are organizing the books in the game by some scheme. i think that is smart and also cute and fun, but with my note-taking scheme that doesn't serve me much of a purpose, as i can instantly locate whatever book i need anyway. this is also a good thing because you can put as much effort into your notes and physical (virtual) organization of the hush house as you want. no two people are going to have the same system, and you have so much freedom to make it work for however your brain likes it the best.

this game is really really really good. it is simply just so fun to unlock things and feel really satisfied when you read a tough book that's been sitting on a shelf, taunting you, for several in-game years.

i tried out cultist simulator a few years ago, and i liked the concept and the world and the vibes and the mystery. but i did not like how repetitive it felt to die in an obtuse way and have to restart the run. i found that my starts of those runs were all kind of similar once i had it down, and i didn't enjoy losing so much time to replaying things. it took the mystique away for me. this game does not have death, there is no long-term time pressure at all. the game tells you over and over that it's a more relaxed experience than cultist simulator. and it's true -- and as a result, i like it a lot more.

TLDR it's everything i liked about cultist simulator and nothing i didn't like. excellent game, if you are okay with taking your own notes give it a try.

it's a little tough at first to wrap your head around, but by the end of the tutorial it all clicked into place for me. and it's pretty fun, though i will say it is still hard, because unlike sudoku it does actually involve doing a little math. it's not super difficult math, but in my experience i found it made it a lot harder to look over the board and intuit what was missing. this isn't necessarily a bad thing of course, and it feels really good to finish a puzzle.

music and visuals are top notch of course, i like the idea of unlocking color palettes as you go (but thankfully light and dark modes are there from the start).

i tried the non-number variants (wedges and blocks?) and found it made it much harder for me. but perhaps thats because i have some experience with binary and hex. maybe being able to see visually how the pieces fit together would actually make it easier to look over the board and figure out what is missing

real beauty, real fun