I’ve been absolutely hooked on this. It looks and sounds amazing, and is constantly keeping you guessing with twists and new ideas. There’s a constant sense of suspense and mystery, and can be genuinely scary, particularly early on when you know less. But it retains the personality and endearing humour of Alan Wake and Control. Shooting is still just ok, but I appreciated the perspective shift and focus on storytelling and suspense over waves of enemies.

There’s a lot to unravel, which is fun to ponder on, but also a bit too convoluted for me by the end. Not everything connected or paid off as well as I’d hoped. But a lot of it did, and the promise of a new game plus that reveals further mysteries does appeal to me, if not immediately. I’m also glad I played Alan Wake and Control, as I’d have been lost otherwise. It was easily my favourite of the three, and made up for its imperfections with just how impressive and inventive it is overall.

Time really has destroyed the thematic material of Spec Ops: The Line. The biggest issue with the game's defining moment (the white phosphorus scene) is a simple one: you have literally no choice but to make this decision. There is nothing around the usage of white phosphorus - you either commit this terrible war crime, or you don't play the game. And yet, this railroading decision undermines the weight of the game's overall message about accountability. How am I supposed to take accountability for making a terrible decision I actually had no choice but to make? Sure, I could have just "not played the game", but how is that a viable alternative when I literally paid money to actually play this game in the first place? This reminds me strongly of The Last Of Us 2, which tried to be a critical thinkpiece on violence and brutality and yet the only way to progress the story was by slaughtering dozens of random people. But at least TLOU2 didn't necessarily call out the player themselves for indulging in virtual violence. Spec Ops: The Line does - it is blatantly obvious that the criticisms thrown at Captain Walker are thinly-disguised meta-criticisms being levied at the player, criticisms that feel unearned given that the player has no choice but to partake in war crimes. Why does the game hate me for doing what it literally wants me to do? Why does it think I could have avoided this at any time when the only alternative is "don't play this game you paid money to play"? It's so genuinely confusing, like the game's biting the hand that fed it in the first place and chastising you for just playing a linear narrative.

Spec Ops: The Line probably could have benefitted from having moral choices if it was going to be a metanarrative about player choice and accountability, but if it absolutely had to be a linear game that way you could directly experience the more psychological setpieces the game has in store for you, then I think the game should have dived further into its anti-war messaging & commentary than its 'subversive' shattering of the fourth wall. Because I think the choice to loosely adapt Heart of Darkness into a modern military setting actually has a lot of merit to it. The story that the game sets up for its main antagonist, Konrad, is a surprisingly thorough and fleshed-out examination of corrupt military practices, and the late-game twist that Konrad actually committed suicide out of guilt for what he'd done and out of horror in regards to the brutality of the military and the CIA's handling of Dubai and its people? That's some great stuff! A lot more could have been done with that. Konrad's suicide is a poignant idea, because you spend the entire game looking for this guy, and discovering he's been dead for a while now renders all of the war crimes you'd done up until that point totally meaningless, and that could have been used to illustrate the hollow, mindless brutality of war crimes and interventionism in a way that directly challenges not only the military-shooter genre, but military practices and politics as a whole.

Perhaps Walker and his squad should have instead been painted as a bunch of gung-ho psychopaths that indiscriminately slaughter in the name of the American Dream and only fall further into an abyss of violence & death as the game goes on. Or, at the very least, make Walker's squad a bunch of psychopaths and have Walker slowly realize they're fucking crazy, that way you could still have an audience surrogate and still have Walker undergo his psychological character arc. You know, like Haze. Except Haze's theming is consistent and latches onto some interesting ideas about war profiteering, propaganda, and experimentation whereas Spec Ops doesn't even latch onto the most interesting thing about its narrative, instead honing in on a more visually-interesting but narratively dead-eyed 'psychological' story, much to its detriment.

There are some strong plot beats, but Spec Ops ultimately has nothing to say because instead of looking inward, it lashes outward and thrusts its anger onto a wholly undeserving player, calling them a monster when the player was just trying to finish the damn game. If this had been a more salient criticism of military shooters, using its own linearity as an inside-out examination of how linear shooters use war crimes to violently progress their plots, then Spec Ops' railroad-y narrative could have actually worked. There's a lot of ways this game could have clicked and said something profound, and pretty much all of it has to do with the anti-war stuff this game initially seems interested in covering. But somewhere along the line, Spec Ops decides it's much more interested in treating the player like the devil than it is in criticizing the actual devil in the room: military shooters themselves, a subgenre of video games that are nothing more than Pentagon propaganda made to indoctrinate teens into wanting to join the US military and commit war crimes for the Stars and Stripes. The fact that it's attached to a bland third-person shooter with underdeveloped sand mechanics is just the cherry on top, really.

guess what another porn game to add to the list of absolutely unhinged furry nsfw VNs i read on a daily basis whats good yall also i had to get the game added because backloggd is homophobic and furrophobic i dont like it in here

ALERT THIS IS A GAY PORN GAME ! which means I will be talking about my private time experiences with the material and the licentious content of this game that might hurt your over religious conservative puritan homophobic beliefs or maybe you just dont want to read about what turns me on and I don't fucking care you've been advised

i was browsing itch io for some good good quality content for a jerking off session and i stumbled into this one now probably the most interesting part of the game is the art which is honestly pretty great for a game like this and even though youre just gonna see a few designs from the artist theres definitely a lot of effort put into this although the result may fall off in some ways but rest assured these hunks are still a damn good view nonetheless theyre gorgeous but thats subjective im a furry i dig this shit

now this is a pretty short novel and i cannot even begin to tell you what its about because the main storyline is theres a warrior from a ??? dimension in a ??? era getting his ass whooped until he gets isekai ed into another place where suspiciously everyone is a big hung and huge breasted minotaur which already feels pretty weird if it werent for the fact that the writing also adds to the whole idea of this being a weird place since the minotaurs pass their days sucking each others nipples or if its an odd day each others dicks and what actually comes out of these suction sections is a lot of milk that they use to produce fucking dairy products that they also eat to stimulate the production of more breast and dick milk i swear to fucking god this is literally what happens in this stupid game when i saw the cheese wheels i was gagged im not gonna lie here

so even though this story is absolutely nuts its not the main focus anyway because the important stuff are the main protagonists that are gonna have a lot of fun together with recreational activities like breastfeeding handjobs and occasionally hands free colonscopies . a joy to witness i kid you not so as i was saying the art style is damn good and the characters are all hot the protagonist after the minotaur ification ends up being a huge fucking hunk and the other two are still a joy to see im a big fan of the guy with the hair on his face because i always liked those kinds of characters that says a lot about my tastes actually even though the other guy has a lot to unpack too

so theres some great assets for a great autoerotic experience but what i realised too late is that the game only includes one set of porn CGs and all the other sex scenes dont have CGs theyre just text and some really weird slurping and gasping and moaning audios probably made from the creator(s) which made me really uncomfortable at times but i guess we wont judge but whatever its absolutely fucking illegal to have text nsfw scenes without CGs i would sue SUREEEEEEEEEEEE i did jerk off during that ONE scene but im known to be insatiable do you think i will be content with just that one little scene when theres a lot of flavor text here that could be turned into cool CGs and when you think this is already a pretty short game at least it should be worth the 15 minutes or however long this is but i guess it was A BIT worth it to see what the artist was up to and it was definitely a pretty charming experience albeit weird as shit

so ugh good enough i went on and tried deers and deckards the next and longer VN from the author and im enjoying my sweet time with it lots and lots of jerking material so thats probably gonna be the next one in the line of embarrassing reviews to make on this site peace

I feel that fight Club and Doki Doki Literature Club share a similarity more than just sharing the word 'club'. The first rule of Doki Doki Literature Club should be not to talk about it.

Now I don't mean that in the general sense, after all that's how I heard about the game in the first place but I refer to the details of what this game is. I went into it blind knowing nothing about it (despite it being out 5 years) other than it was a freeware visual novel initially on PC before getting a console release and it gained a lot of traction. That was the best way as it both was and yet wasn't what I expected. I didn't like the game at all at first but by the end was impressed by the angle it was going for and some of the very clever things it was doing. I gather the PC version is even more effective in that regard.

It's hard to talk about anything else in Doki Doki Literature Club. I can talk about the cute character art, the surprisingly good music, the rough length it takes to finish but honestly I feel this is a title that you just need to try for yourself to understand why it became popular.

Recommended

Cult of the Lamb is likely not exactly what you think it is. While the flashy roguelike action has drawn a lot of comparisons to Hades, it’s not really the crux of the game. At its core, developer Massive Monster’s new ultra-cute cult simulator is just that - a simulation. Players will spend around 75% of its 14 hour runtime playing a masterfully designed city-builder/management sim, with bursts in between of mediocre roguelike action that far out stays its welcome weighed down in poorly paced progression systems.

In Cult of the Lamb, you’ll become a lamb sent to slaughter in the name of a false god. On your way to hell, you’re rescued by a demon called The One Who Waits, who has been shackled between the surface world and inferno. In exchange for sending you back to the world above with its remaining power, it tasks the Lamb with creating a cult in its name, in the name of the Red Crown. There are four bishops, who serve as the bosses, that the Lamb must defeat while managing their cult compound to free The One Who Waits from its demonic chains.

I first want to speak about the thing that draws the most attention in Cult of the Lamb - the art style. It’s beautiful, it’s colorful, it’s easy to distinguish in the heat of combat, and most importantly it’s consistent. Even during the garish occult rituals and demonic summonings, the presentation of Cult of the Lamb never, ever wavers. The artists and animators are 110% dedicated to making this the most adorable Satanic ritual you’ve ever experienced, and do not back down. The contrast of the subject matter and art style is not just something to catch players eyes - it’s an aesthetic decision that was made with purpose.

As I mentioned previously, Cult of the Lamb is a management sim supported by small chunks of roguelike action. You’d be forgiven for thinking the management part is secondary based on the trailers, but really the game is about growing your cult and making them more powerful while the runs through the four procedurally generated biomes serve to help you gather followers and materials for building. Each run is actually quite short, depending on what you run into; I had some that were as quick as 3 minutes, with the longest being about 10.

Cult of the Lamb, like any good management sim, is made up of a dozen interlocking systems, each one both feeding and being dependent on several others. As the game progresses and your cult expands, you’ll be able to automate these processes so you can focus on more high level planning. It very much has the cadence of a city-builder RTS like the Tycoon games, but on a much smaller and more palpable scale for newcomers to the genre.

After inducting your first few cultists (those are freebies), you’ll need to construct your most important structures - a shrine and a temple. The shrine is the beating heart of your cult, and is where your followers will worship you so you can gain power over the course of your journey. The temple is the brain, where you will make the decisions that affect your followers, tell them how to live their lives, dictate their eating, sleeping and working schedules, and more.

From there, you’ll branch out and need to collect rocks, wood, grass, flowers, seeds, food and a variety of other materials so your cult can thrive. There’s three meters you’re trying to maintain - loyalty, hunger, and sickness. If your loyalty depletes, your followers will revolt and declare you a false prophet, leaving the camp. If your hunger depletes, your followers will begin to starve and die. Likewise, if the sickness meter hits 0 disease will begin to spread and followers will be similarly snuffed out.

There are nearly two dozen systems running in the camp by the time it's operational, and it is frankly mind blowing that they all work together so well and never become overwhelming. Like any good management game, it’s all about getting better stuff so you can automate your basic systems, then automate those systems, and so on and so forth. At first you’re scrounging for berry seeds to put together meager meals for your cult, but 6 hours later you’ve got an industrial farm complete with fertilizer and irrigation automation.

You’ll construct housing for your followers, decorations to brighten the place up, and lots of idols to increase the amount of faith you’re collecting each day. All of these systems lead directly into leveling up your Lamb. Each day, you can host one sermon, which feeds skill points into a tree that increases your attack power while increasing loyalty. You can also declare a new doctrine if you have enough tablets, which are gained by doing nice things for your followers. They’ll age and die and you’ll find new ones over time, and restart the cycle.

New doctrines can either be passive buffs for your camp or active rituals that can be cast with a 2 day cooldown. Roughly half these doctrines aid you in leading by way of love, and the other half by way of fear, so you can definitely choose what kind of cult you would like to run. I only picked the love-based doctrines because I am a merciful god Lamb and would bestow my grace upon this flock. But you can go full dictator on it if you wish.

One of the best parts of Cult of the Lamb is that you can name and customize your followers, so, like most everyone, I named them after my real life friends and asked everyone which animal and what color they’d like to be. Everyone had a good time watching their antics as one friend would report another as a traitor, or when two of my friends who barely know each other fell in love, or when one of them showed up at camp covered in blood and just died without explanation. There are certainly other games where you can name characters, but the concept of the social interactions takes the interesting part of Miitopia and Tomodachi Life and puts it into a good game instead.

Now it’s time to talk about the mediocre part of it - the roguelike action stuff. At the beginning of each run, you’re given a weapon and a curse, which is a magic spell. Defeating enemies gains fervor, which is in turn used to cast spells. Simple enough. You’ll unlock tarot cards that give small buffs, like turning your weapons to poison or raising your crit chance, and collect a different assortment on each run. And that’s it. The color palette changes between the four biomes, and there’s a few monsters that are unique to each, but they all effectively do the same thing. As I was spending just a few minutes at a time in combat before heading back to the farm, it didn’t hit me until about 7 or 8 hours in that the combat had not changed. The way that it feels at the beginning is the way it will feel in hour 14, just with new (mostly worse) weapons and upgraded versions of the same spells. The combat is smooth, quick, and certainly eye-catching, but without any additional layers it grows boring after a time.

This leads to my next, much bigger issue: progression. The management sim in this game was not designed with me in mind, who put 20 hours into Factorio over just two days and who builds large scale automated mining operations in Minecraft for fun. As i normally would with a game in this genre, I optimized my followers and automated them, then automated the automations, and so on. I ran a sermon every day, ran as many rituals as possible, upgraded my worship speeds right at the beginning to accrue faster over the life of the game, and talked to every follower to inspire them every single day and extort resources from them. I also mostly ignored the side quests, because mathematically the amount of loyalty you lose for accepting and then not doing them can easily be made up with a single ritual the next day.

There’s a saying that if given a chance, players will optimize the fun out of a game. Well, I did it, and I did it barely halfway through. As I was early on in the third biome, I completed the doctrine tree, the sermon tree, the fishing quests, the mushroom quests, and everything useful in the camp tree. What this resulted in was no progress for the last 5 hours of the game. I had already finished everything the game had to offer, so the next few hours were just maintaining my camp for no reward and outputting resources that would never be used. It slammed to a crashing halt. There is a difficulty modifier for combat, but god I wish there had been a hard mode for the management part of it. I never struggled with collecting enough of anything, and if I didn't have enough resources my automated systems would have it ready for me in just minutes regardless. Perhaps I got too eager, but as a fanatic lover of management games and city builders this was hugely disappointing. Imagine playing Fallout and hitting a level cap halfway through the main story and having to continue without the small reward of simply leveling up.

Another issue that really put a damper on my experience was the requirement to have 20 living followers to fight the final boss. The second biome required me to have 9 to enter, the third required me to have 10, and the fourth required me to have 12. However, to face the final boss I needed to find 8 more. This was such a strange ramp up in requirements I did not expect. In addition, one of the features of the fourth biome is that your followers are summoned and possessed and you must kill them to progress, so right after losing 4 followers in this way I was presented with a gate telling me to find 8 more to proceed.

It’s not actually all that simple - you can buy one follower a day from a spider nearby, but you cannot just fast forward through the days and buy them because your followers will continue to age and die. Rather, I had to basically speedrun 4 more runs hoping that my current elderly followers wouldn’t drop dead any second so i could grind out more cultists. It was not fun in the least. While narratively satisfying, the final boss was also a disappointing fight that lacked a single new combat element.

The first 8 hours of Cult of the Lamb were magical, and if the game had ended somewhere there this review score would be a 10. But it doesn’t, and it goes on and on and gets less and less interesting as it reaches the conclusion. With progression systems that are way too easy to bust and combat that goes stale halfway through, my time with this game did not sustain the high I felt at the beginning. But there are strokes of a masterpiece in here, with excellent music, whimsical characters, starkly themed visuals, just enough narrative push, and management tools that allow for the player to really experience their own story. If you don’t optimize the fun out of Cult of the Lamb, there’s an incredible amount of it to be had.

Whilst in the middle of playing Cult of the Lamb I spoke to a friend who, and I quote said "Isn't that the poop farming simulator?" Apparently when just casually speed skimming through a video about the game that was the core of what he picked up about it. In some ways he isn't wrong though, you see Cult of the Lamb is a weird mixture of base building for your expanding indoctrinated cult and Rogue Like dungeon crawling to get resources to keep them fed, clean and happy as they are mostly incapable of doing that on their own apparently.

It's two games merged together and while certainly fun, neither feels as fleshed out as it needs to be. Your cultists will just dump a poop out anywhere, some food will make them do it faster, they'll leave it, get ill and possibly die from hygiene issues, literally. That means in between dungeon runs I was running around cleaning poop. You can eventually get the ability to build an Outhouse but I had mines and a church before that which seems completely nuts on the village building priority scale for what unlocks. Even then though it's my character, the head of the Cult of the Lamb cleaning out the Outhouses. It's just odd the way it all works, there is no way to automate another character to cook or clean the outhouse I could find, you have to do it all or use a ritual to make them fast. Buildings will break for no reason, like beds and tents specifically just fall apart because "reasons" forcing you to rebuild them. Adding to the headache of cult managing, the layout is in a diagonal grid scheme in which trying to build next to other items in situ is so difficult I actually didn't think you could for about 5 hours. It's terrible. I also barely had to use most of the buildings available. I tried a couple that seemed like they weren't worth the effort, destroyed them and never looked back.

The dungeon crawling is kind of similar in that it feels a bit underbaked. It's a Rogue Like that mixes up the rooms you get going from the start to a boss or mini boss each time in one of 4 different areas. There is so little variety per run though it may as well not bother. Everything just looks and feels the same, there are maybe 4 weapon choices that can have a variety of modifiers based on what you've unlocked like poison etc. but they are much the same. The only other thing you can do is use Curses which feel kind of underpowered or all kind of the same that once again it feels like any would do. Each room is so noisy for things going on and so small in most circumstances simply using your weapon is enough, I beat the game and barely used a curse, it was rarely worth it. There was just a lack of variation or strategy required to get through each level. To add to this each time I was in the dungeon you get messages about your cult members dying of old age, getting angry or sick as it continues to flow whilst you're not there and they are completely incapable of looking after themselves unless you set up rituals to keep you covered.

I also had technical issues playing the PS5 version. Every time a new day came the game freezes as it works things out, moving in the dungeon too fast like rolling to get through fast and it hiccups and jitters. I had one hard crash and once my followers all went and stood in the same location morphing into each other and wouldn't do anything forcing me to turn off the game and restart (I was worried it was a game breaking glitch but did carry on fine after) which all hampered my experience as well.

I've been pretty negative so far but I did actually have a good time with cult of the Lamb. It's got a great atmosphere with these super cute anthropomorphic animal people mixed with this satanic sacrificial dark undertone. Making your dead followers into meals for others, sacrificing them to an eldritch tentacle when old rather than have them die in your village is all entertaining stuff with a really nice art design and soundtrack to boot. It just isn't balanced enough with how the Cult building works and not deep enough or varied enough in combat where it needs to be. It's got a lot of character however which does make up for that somewhat.

i find myself endeared to this weird glitchy surreal world, with its opaque theology and its cutesy inhabitants. i really love the art style, and all the individual images that come up during bad endings or cutscenes.

there are frustrating moments, for sure. save as often as you possibly can, because you never know when you'll examine something and immediately die. opened the wrong door? immediate death! i don't mind that sort of thing, once i know it's that type of game. additionally, there's a maze with a bunch of enemies with random movement patterns, and if they touch you you have to start over from before a scene where you need to select the right dialogue options, but it's just that one area so keep pressing on. i recommend looking up a guide (there's one on steam for ep1 and ep2, just have that open if you start feeling annoyed, it's very light on spoilers).

should you play this game? if you've played and enjoyed yume nikki and the games it inspired, and you find yourself drawn to the art style, absolutely. if you played nier automata and were delighted by ending k, absolutely. if you grew up in the newgrounds/deviantart/invader zim/keenspot era, absolutely. plus, it's free, and the other eps are only a couple dollars.

i'm looking forward to playing the rest!