LeVengeurSlippe
11 reviews liked by LeVengeurSlippe
I am SO conflicted on this game. And my thoughts are a mess. So imma just list some things I liked and some things I didn't... beginning with the latter.
Negative 1) I have never seen a single piece of media where chapter title cards seemed less appropriate. Every single time one popped up, I gasped in annoyance. The name of every chapter is cheesy at best and I think they want to convey a certain... epicness? Which does not fit the tone of the game at all.
Negative 2) I've also never seen a game that made me like it much less in the last five seconds of ingame footage. Seriously, the last five seconds before the ending (of course, with a chapter title card) made my rating at least half a star more negative, I think it kinda clashes with the vibe of everything that came before.
"Negative" 3) Also yea, gameplay-wise it's not terribly inventive, but it works. A little jank here and there, but it's fine.
Positive 1) I reaaally like the enviroment design and effect work in the game. Both are really well done!
Positive 2) I also eally like the German voice work. The voice acting in general is really good.
Positive 3) The second half of the game are wayyy better than the first half. They subverted some expectations and avoided some harmful tropes in the process (sadly not completely, but it's quite good in that aspect).
So yea, SOS is.. fine. It has some interesting ideas. It's kinda fitting that Quantic Dream handled the Directors Cut, as the worst elements of this game are the . This game is the best thing that godawful studio/publisher has associated with their name. Honestly... Quantic Dream did not deserve it.
Negative 1) I have never seen a single piece of media where chapter title cards seemed less appropriate. Every single time one popped up, I gasped in annoyance. The name of every chapter is cheesy at best and I think they want to convey a certain... epicness? Which does not fit the tone of the game at all.
Negative 2) I've also never seen a game that made me like it much less in the last five seconds of ingame footage. Seriously, the last five seconds before the ending (of course, with a chapter title card) made my rating at least half a star more negative, I think it kinda clashes with the vibe of everything that came before.
"Negative" 3) Also yea, gameplay-wise it's not terribly inventive, but it works. A little jank here and there, but it's fine.
Positive 1) I reaaally like the enviroment design and effect work in the game. Both are really well done!
Positive 2) I also eally like the German voice work. The voice acting in general is really good.
Positive 3) The second half of the game are wayyy better than the first half. They subverted some expectations and avoided some harmful tropes in the process (sadly not completely, but it's quite good in that aspect).
So yea, SOS is.. fine. It has some interesting ideas. It's kinda fitting that Quantic Dream handled the Directors Cut, as the worst elements of this game are the . This game is the best thing that godawful studio/publisher has associated with their name. Honestly... Quantic Dream did not deserve it.
I played this game back in 2021, so apologies if my memories of this game are a bit murky. I'd like to dive into this game a bit more thoroughly, but that would require a second playthrough, the time investment of which this game does not deserve.
Sea of Solitude was the sort of game that, as someone who only has access to games on Switch and Mac for the time being, repeatedly taunted me from the corner of my eye for a couple of years before its eventual port to the Switch with this version of the game. In that time, I heard lots of good buzz surrounding it! The fuzzy impressions I got was that it was one of those narratively deep, gameplay-lite, emotionally rich experiences that indie games so love to attempt. While the phrase many might associate with this category would be "walking simulator", for this specific sub-category I tend towards "Journey-like. The sort of game that shoots for the ceiling, that you know for a fact will make you cry. So with this in mind, I followed up on the studio's socials, and patiently waited for a few years, knowing that eventually a good game would wash up at my feet.
When I finally booted it up for the first time, I was immediately met with about the harshest slap to the face an unassuming gamer like me could expect: The QUANTIC DREAM logo. I had just given $25 to David Cage and I didn't even know it. I later discovered the director is a "big fan" of his work. For a game so primarily about abuse it's a bizarre thing to read.
As someone who somewhat actively seeks out games that I think will make me cry, I can pretty quickly pick up on a particular tone where I can tell that this effect is something that the game really wants to achieve, but doesn't have too much experience or confidence in delivering it. Sea of Solitude wants to touch on quite a few heavy topics (divorce, bullying, and bad relationships to name a few!), and while these ostensibly seem to be drawn from personal experience from the game's writer, the final product, disappointingly does not hit a single one of these notes correctly when their times come.
It seems that its creators almost completely lacked the self-reflection to realize that, as it stands, the depictions of these subjects range from goofy to outright offensive. A giant lizard that represents the main character's father speaks in the most pedestrian voice imaginable about how unhappy he is with his completely adequate marriage and his shitty kids who he hates. A swarm of shadow-children chase you through a school and repeatedly call you a "sissy". I didn't cry. I laughed. The harder this game thought it was hitting me with its deepest moments, the harder I kept laughing.
Of course, it goes without saying that this is the sort of stuff that doesn't deserve to be laughed at, but Sea of Solitude's execution is so wildly mishandled it didn't really leave me with any other possibly appropriate human reaction. I felt like I was experiencing something about as nuanced as the ABC direct-to-TV film "Cyberbu//y", if not worse.
What I find especially curious is that what I played is "The Director's Cut". After the original release, the developers rewrote the game's script, and this is supposedly the improved version of what they originally shipped. Jesus Christ! I shudder to imagine how much worse it was before if this is what they did with a few years of hindsight and the opportunity to redo some of their worst mistakes...
I'll end my review with one more slap in the face just as I had at the start. Did you know that the mother in this game is directly modelled after US Vice President Kamala Harris? I am not joking. Apparently the director is a "big fan" of her work as well, though what that could possibly mean aside from heinous cop shit I can't remotely imagine. For those looking for a game that explores the themes that Sea of Solitude does, you're not going to find it on the other side of anything starts with a Quantic Dream logo. When that day comes, shoot those guys $25 instead of these clowns.
Sea of Solitude was the sort of game that, as someone who only has access to games on Switch and Mac for the time being, repeatedly taunted me from the corner of my eye for a couple of years before its eventual port to the Switch with this version of the game. In that time, I heard lots of good buzz surrounding it! The fuzzy impressions I got was that it was one of those narratively deep, gameplay-lite, emotionally rich experiences that indie games so love to attempt. While the phrase many might associate with this category would be "walking simulator", for this specific sub-category I tend towards "Journey-like. The sort of game that shoots for the ceiling, that you know for a fact will make you cry. So with this in mind, I followed up on the studio's socials, and patiently waited for a few years, knowing that eventually a good game would wash up at my feet.
When I finally booted it up for the first time, I was immediately met with about the harshest slap to the face an unassuming gamer like me could expect: The QUANTIC DREAM logo. I had just given $25 to David Cage and I didn't even know it. I later discovered the director is a "big fan" of his work. For a game so primarily about abuse it's a bizarre thing to read.
As someone who somewhat actively seeks out games that I think will make me cry, I can pretty quickly pick up on a particular tone where I can tell that this effect is something that the game really wants to achieve, but doesn't have too much experience or confidence in delivering it. Sea of Solitude wants to touch on quite a few heavy topics (divorce, bullying, and bad relationships to name a few!), and while these ostensibly seem to be drawn from personal experience from the game's writer, the final product, disappointingly does not hit a single one of these notes correctly when their times come.
It seems that its creators almost completely lacked the self-reflection to realize that, as it stands, the depictions of these subjects range from goofy to outright offensive. A giant lizard that represents the main character's father speaks in the most pedestrian voice imaginable about how unhappy he is with his completely adequate marriage and his shitty kids who he hates. A swarm of shadow-children chase you through a school and repeatedly call you a "sissy". I didn't cry. I laughed. The harder this game thought it was hitting me with its deepest moments, the harder I kept laughing.
Of course, it goes without saying that this is the sort of stuff that doesn't deserve to be laughed at, but Sea of Solitude's execution is so wildly mishandled it didn't really leave me with any other possibly appropriate human reaction. I felt like I was experiencing something about as nuanced as the ABC direct-to-TV film "Cyberbu//y", if not worse.
What I find especially curious is that what I played is "The Director's Cut". After the original release, the developers rewrote the game's script, and this is supposedly the improved version of what they originally shipped. Jesus Christ! I shudder to imagine how much worse it was before if this is what they did with a few years of hindsight and the opportunity to redo some of their worst mistakes...
I'll end my review with one more slap in the face just as I had at the start. Did you know that the mother in this game is directly modelled after US Vice President Kamala Harris? I am not joking. Apparently the director is a "big fan" of her work as well, though what that could possibly mean aside from heinous cop shit I can't remotely imagine. For those looking for a game that explores the themes that Sea of Solitude does, you're not going to find it on the other side of anything starts with a Quantic Dream logo. When that day comes, shoot those guys $25 instead of these clowns.
NieR Re[in]carnation
2021
![NieR Re[in]carnation](https://images.igdb.com/igdb/image/upload/t_cover_big/co7bm4.jpg)
This review contains spoilers
first of all it's not a video game. removing the gacha elements only makes this more clear. the only mechanic is Number Big? if number big, you win. if number not big, pay up. in its final pre-cancellation form they let you skip that and in so doing only reveal there was never anything there in the first place, it was alwasy only a series of whale checks in front of that sweet sweet yoko taro lore you crave. the craven cynicism of it all is existentially destructive for the work, as taro's already tiring eccentricities of hiding crucial details in the least accessible of places now become vectors to leverage for the direct exploitation of his audience into a gambling black hole. better hit the pulls so you can upgrade enough bullshit to see the dark memory that reveals the connection to drakengard 3 that makes everything click into place!! don't want to be left behind!!
but that is known. the game is a gacha and more than that it is a bad one even by the exploitative standards of a blighted genre that shouldn't exist, and that's why it's shutting down. nier reincarnation will forever live on as a series of youtube videos where fans can experience the story fairly close to how it was originally intended, and that's more than you can say for japanese exclusive yorha stageplay number squintillion. so how is that?
bad!! very bad!!! the game takes one of the weakest elements of the nier games, the sidequest and weapon stories all having the exact same tragedy monotonously drilled into your skull over and over and make it the entire game. no weiss and kaine bantering to prop all that up with a jrpg party of the greatest oomfs ever pressed to a PS3 disc, no experimental presentation of combat and level design, just storybook tragedies presented at such arch remove you don't even learn the character's names until you check the menu.
it is ludicrous. it is hilarious. there's one where a kid joins the army to get revenge on the enemy commander who killed his parents, only to as he kills him discover with zero forshdaowing that the commander is his real father and his parents kidnapped him as a child. there's one where a perfect angel little girl's father is beaten to death by his own friends so she runs home crying to her mother, who is in the middle of cheating on him, and is like sweet that owns and leaves lmao. they do the who do you think gave you this heart copypasta!!! and you'd think with such ridiculous material that it would be played with a coens-esque A Serious Man type wry touch, but it isn't at all, it's thuddingly earnest throughout as every tragic story plays out to overwrought voice acting and a haunting sad piano.
it is impossible to take seriously, and by the time the twelfth playable character has experienced a tragic loss and succumbed to the anime nihlism of I'll Kill Them All, another more fundemental question arises: what does all this lore actually give you, as a function of storytelling? the yokoverse is an intricate and near impossible thing, spanning multiple decades and every kind of storytelling medium imaginable, and reincarnation references damn near every single page of it, grasping onto the whole thing and framing it as a sprawling multiverse of human conflict across infinite pasts and infinite futures, with decades of mysteries to unravel and connections to make and characters to ponder and: why? for the exact same No Matter How Bad It Gets, You Can't Give Up On Hope ending that every anime RPG has? that automata already did? the plot is vast and intricate but the themes are narrow and puddle deep.
the more nier blows itself out to greater and greater scales the smaller it feels. in earthbound you fight the same ultimate nihlism of a the universe and then you walk back home again. and you say goodbye to your friends. and you call your dad. and it makes me cry like a fucking baby every time. the original nier, for all its faults, had that specificity. that sense of a journey with characters you loved that overcame the generic nature of its larger plot. here, you heal all the tragedies and fix all the timelines and everyone continues to live inside the infinite quantum simulations that will never end as you strive to find a way past the cyclical apocalypses past and future that repeat for all eternity, and i feel absolutely nothing. a world of endless content and no humanity. how tragic. how so very like nier.
but that is known. the game is a gacha and more than that it is a bad one even by the exploitative standards of a blighted genre that shouldn't exist, and that's why it's shutting down. nier reincarnation will forever live on as a series of youtube videos where fans can experience the story fairly close to how it was originally intended, and that's more than you can say for japanese exclusive yorha stageplay number squintillion. so how is that?
bad!! very bad!!! the game takes one of the weakest elements of the nier games, the sidequest and weapon stories all having the exact same tragedy monotonously drilled into your skull over and over and make it the entire game. no weiss and kaine bantering to prop all that up with a jrpg party of the greatest oomfs ever pressed to a PS3 disc, no experimental presentation of combat and level design, just storybook tragedies presented at such arch remove you don't even learn the character's names until you check the menu.
it is ludicrous. it is hilarious. there's one where a kid joins the army to get revenge on the enemy commander who killed his parents, only to as he kills him discover with zero forshdaowing that the commander is his real father and his parents kidnapped him as a child. there's one where a perfect angel little girl's father is beaten to death by his own friends so she runs home crying to her mother, who is in the middle of cheating on him, and is like sweet that owns and leaves lmao. they do the who do you think gave you this heart copypasta!!! and you'd think with such ridiculous material that it would be played with a coens-esque A Serious Man type wry touch, but it isn't at all, it's thuddingly earnest throughout as every tragic story plays out to overwrought voice acting and a haunting sad piano.
it is impossible to take seriously, and by the time the twelfth playable character has experienced a tragic loss and succumbed to the anime nihlism of I'll Kill Them All, another more fundemental question arises: what does all this lore actually give you, as a function of storytelling? the yokoverse is an intricate and near impossible thing, spanning multiple decades and every kind of storytelling medium imaginable, and reincarnation references damn near every single page of it, grasping onto the whole thing and framing it as a sprawling multiverse of human conflict across infinite pasts and infinite futures, with decades of mysteries to unravel and connections to make and characters to ponder and: why? for the exact same No Matter How Bad It Gets, You Can't Give Up On Hope ending that every anime RPG has? that automata already did? the plot is vast and intricate but the themes are narrow and puddle deep.
the more nier blows itself out to greater and greater scales the smaller it feels. in earthbound you fight the same ultimate nihlism of a the universe and then you walk back home again. and you say goodbye to your friends. and you call your dad. and it makes me cry like a fucking baby every time. the original nier, for all its faults, had that specificity. that sense of a journey with characters you loved that overcame the generic nature of its larger plot. here, you heal all the tragedies and fix all the timelines and everyone continues to live inside the infinite quantum simulations that will never end as you strive to find a way past the cyclical apocalypses past and future that repeat for all eternity, and i feel absolutely nothing. a world of endless content and no humanity. how tragic. how so very like nier.
May appeal to younger audiences with its cute aesthetics and varied gameplay mechanics. While some levels offer enjoyable experiences, others feel repetitive, especially the baking and detective segments. Despite lacking depth, it's a decent entry-level platformer with charming boss fights.
Balatro
2024
When are we going to get a mahjong roguelite?
It's still pretty early to give a proper opinion, but I really liked this. It's not perfect like I thought it would be with the demo since it seems to lean on a lot from Slay the Spire. The stakes (difficulty system) are really pretty harsh, and it seems very hard to ever come close to consistent wins there. Lots of runs will just die so early if you don't get anything to help you survive. I think doing the highest difficulty really did drain me from how helpless it feels. It also just feels like such an excessive grind for each deck to have its own stake progression. 15 different decks (a good number of them are really interesting though), each with 8 stakes, is kind of insane when I compare it to the two big games I've spent the most time on: Monster Train with 12 (2 dlc) different champions all sharing the same progression up to 25 covenant ranks, or Slay the Spire with 4 (1 new) characters and 20 ascension levels for each. Since these decks need you to unlock stake levels too, it made me feel like I should incentivize 1 deck rather than going for the variety like in MT (rotating every champion to 25).
The unlocks lean more on that too, with some strange out there requirements that pretty much force you to go look up each one if you truly want to get everything and set up your run in a specific way while hoping to get lucky. Not to mention, you can also sticker every joker at every stake level (insane). I ended up winning with every deck at various stakes and got a couple of decks up/at to max (lvl 8), but I didn't really go for insane scores. I can see just playing lower stakes and going for score/variety being a lot more fun. Anyway, this is only after about a week of playing, and I'll definitely get back into it in the future since there are other games I want to play. Maybe I'll go back and joker/voucher hunt the final ones. Maybe it was better to just get every joker before going to stakes. Maybe there will be some new stuff to see, and they will ease up on some of the other things.
It's still pretty early to give a proper opinion, but I really liked this. It's not perfect like I thought it would be with the demo since it seems to lean on a lot from Slay the Spire. The stakes (difficulty system) are really pretty harsh, and it seems very hard to ever come close to consistent wins there. Lots of runs will just die so early if you don't get anything to help you survive. I think doing the highest difficulty really did drain me from how helpless it feels. It also just feels like such an excessive grind for each deck to have its own stake progression. 15 different decks (a good number of them are really interesting though), each with 8 stakes, is kind of insane when I compare it to the two big games I've spent the most time on: Monster Train with 12 (2 dlc) different champions all sharing the same progression up to 25 covenant ranks, or Slay the Spire with 4 (1 new) characters and 20 ascension levels for each. Since these decks need you to unlock stake levels too, it made me feel like I should incentivize 1 deck rather than going for the variety like in MT (rotating every champion to 25).
The unlocks lean more on that too, with some strange out there requirements that pretty much force you to go look up each one if you truly want to get everything and set up your run in a specific way while hoping to get lucky. Not to mention, you can also sticker every joker at every stake level (insane). I ended up winning with every deck at various stakes and got a couple of decks up/at to max (lvl 8), but I didn't really go for insane scores. I can see just playing lower stakes and going for score/variety being a lot more fun. Anyway, this is only after about a week of playing, and I'll definitely get back into it in the future since there are other games I want to play. Maybe I'll go back and joker/voucher hunt the final ones. Maybe it was better to just get every joker before going to stakes. Maybe there will be some new stuff to see, and they will ease up on some of the other things.
The First Tree
2017
This game was fine enough until I got stuck for more than a minute or two and then the desire to play it left me, never to return. I liked the narration stuff, but didn't want to wander around in the woods to get to hear more of it.
The First Tree
2017
Oh god, this looks so harsh; it kinda is. This is the quintessential gamedev marketing tutorial game, and I don't think this is a good direction at all. I remember seeing footage of it in various subreddits, either for gifs or games or gamedev. It had a certain recognizability, mostly by having polished visuals and having some form of art direction which the usual in-progress video typically lack in these communities (which isn't a bad thing!). This has since been covered by the author in talks involving the marketing, and it really feels mostly like an assembly of trailer material.
Despite the serious topic, it doesn't manage to translate it to its visuals or gameplay at all and remains utterly unmemorable and shallow. I don't remember the dialogue being particularly bad, but I barely remember that it had any dialogue and I'm not even sure why - it mostly stems from the blandness of the gameplay that you're trying to push through while a podcast-like narrative is happening. While the stylized visuals lend themselves to social media marketing content, they're oversaturated in practice, until you don't even notice them and everything feels same-y. This is actually visible in many indie games, where you pick a color theme and run with it.
Even the overall theme doesn't evoke anything interesting or great or new. Nature is a metaphor, you gotta collect nature things and reach a nature goal and at some points, the reality bleeds through. But having experienced many adventures, in comparison I'd say that running through stylized environments collecting things doesn't suddenly translate into dealing with death or any of the supposed darker themes.
Especially considering its release date, it doesn't try anything new and barely tries to venture outside the established playing field. I should probably play the author's first game to see if it's better and maybe see where they went wrong. Because unfortunately, this game remains uninteresting and unmemorable in its entirety. Play RiME instead.
Despite the serious topic, it doesn't manage to translate it to its visuals or gameplay at all and remains utterly unmemorable and shallow. I don't remember the dialogue being particularly bad, but I barely remember that it had any dialogue and I'm not even sure why - it mostly stems from the blandness of the gameplay that you're trying to push through while a podcast-like narrative is happening. While the stylized visuals lend themselves to social media marketing content, they're oversaturated in practice, until you don't even notice them and everything feels same-y. This is actually visible in many indie games, where you pick a color theme and run with it.
Even the overall theme doesn't evoke anything interesting or great or new. Nature is a metaphor, you gotta collect nature things and reach a nature goal and at some points, the reality bleeds through. But having experienced many adventures, in comparison I'd say that running through stylized environments collecting things doesn't suddenly translate into dealing with death or any of the supposed darker themes.
Especially considering its release date, it doesn't try anything new and barely tries to venture outside the established playing field. I should probably play the author's first game to see if it's better and maybe see where they went wrong. Because unfortunately, this game remains uninteresting and unmemorable in its entirety. Play RiME instead.
The First Tree
2017
I know it's hard to justify the connection of gameplay with story. It's supposed to be a dream that the protagonist, but the collectibles kinda ruin that premise. Even though, there's something in its story and its sincerity that I can't look past to.
The First Tree
2017
Obviously some guys first game. Very boring with a mildly touching narrative. But the narrative didn't map onto gameplay well.
Framed Collection
2018
Novel idea but the individual set pieces are very hit or miss. Some extremely easy, some stupidly hard to solve and some the right amount of challenge. Part 2 introduces a different city with plenty of potential for the visuals but you still solve puzzles around boring grey industrial zones that could be anywhere in the world.