No matter if this series is ironic or sincere, you need to have a specific kind of fucked-up-ness (like the "Euphoric Brothers") to develop, publish, charge 5 bucks for the bare minimum viable "product" of a mascot horror game where neither the mascots nor the settings don't make sense at all in the grand scheme of things (It's a Kindergarten, but the architect really must have loved them sterile SCP-ass laboratories) and where every facet of the game is a rush job, like the models. A brain blender of a game, uninspired and braindead. Bizarre, only for the MatPats of the world to grossly consume it's bare intestines for other content.

TL;DR
When the Josh be Jumboin, numba 2

Knees buckle before the great expanse
The threshold of ruin overtaken
Thoughts locked into hypnagogic trance

The foundations of reality thoroughly shaken
World screams out a final anguished cry
Searing pain on a land forsaken

A corpse whimpers a final lie
Phantasmagorical tears in space time abound
Clouds frozen in the blackened sky

Trembling ceases within the ground
Destruction slows into the still then
Atmosphere pierced by the soundless sound

A people denied their sundering end
Void spaces of slumber again and again

(spoilers)

Finally finished this! It's a 2D platform exploration game where you'll use a wide variety of tools in a sandbox-like manner to seek out other items (to help you uncover more secrets). The most 'straightforward' goal is to defeat 4 bosses to reach the final boss, but there's an entire storyline (and arguably the focus of the game) revolving around learning about the characters who made the game. The platforming game itself is fun - it's a lot more playful with platformer conventions than say the standard metroidvania. The main movement technique is "Lime", which lets you ignore gravity but preserving your momentum. It comes into play in a wide variety of ways and was fun to learn the nuances of its movement.

I could list out the other fun platforming mechanics but it's fun to puzzle the uses out yourself. I like this space of platformer where there are sandbox elements, but there's still enough of a designer's hand that you're getting a sense for the designer's tastes and world designs.

Anyways, the story - I didn't know it had a story at first but you end up unraveling a story of the 5 developers (in the same school club) who made the game together. It's both a literal 'behind the scenes' dev commentary, but it goes a step further and turns it into a slice of life/romance story, and ties the world together in a nice way.

Check it out!

I don't really get into sandbox-y games, usually because they expect long play sessions or learning a large bank of knowledge... and I want to be done with a game after 4-5 (maybe 8-10) hours rather than 'just getting started!'

But this sandbox-y platormer game centers physics-based 2D platforming, and the items you're given to clear levels are randomized and you're basically left to try and solve an open-ended puzzle with your toolkit of fish and boxes.

If you get stuck in Mosa Lina, you probably just die or try again with different items. So even though it looks like apuzzle platformer, it's not a 'pure puzzler' with designed solutions, which I'm not usually that into unless the puzzles are in service of something else (e.g. platforming puzzles in a story-focused game or something)

In Mosa Lina, with each cleared stage you're learning a little bit about whatever tool you used and maybe some object in the environment. So there's an interesting sense of growth, but instead, trying to solve a single level, you can just give up and try with a different set of 3 items.

The game is still sandbox-y though, it expects you to make your own experience. Sometimes the items you get are pretty ill-suited to some of the challenges, and you have to be okay with resetting.

That being said I find it's well-balanced overall and an amazing achievement. Even with a bad hand it seems like if I just keep dying/trying enough I can eventually get a roll that'll let me clear it, with enough ingenuity. Definitely a game I'll be thinking about and even coming back to for a while!

-

My only real complaint is that the hitboxes of the spikes is a bit fiddly. They feel a lot bigger than they look and I find a lot of my deaths to them to be a little unsatisfying - either from failing to clear a jump by a pixel, my foot slipping, etc...

Take my review of this game as a note on the whole series.
The writing in these games is unbearable to the point where I would always play these games with the sound off while listening to my own music, and this is not something i say lightly as someone who thinks it's important to experience games in all of their facets. I have played these games a lot, but now I'd like to think my brain has healed enough to where the "number go up" form of game design just isn't doing it for me anymore without anything else substantive backing it up and I can finally put this series to rest. So with that being said, fuck Borderlands I am extremely over it.

Uh, a few months ago I was really excited for Baldur's Gate 3, and figured I'd try Starfield out because I have gamepass, but honestly I didn't think I'd like it very much. Now, here I am, finding BG3 middling, but being able to connect with Starfield in a way Bethesda games rarely hit for me. It's certainly no perfect game, in fact it's kind of deeply flawed all over the place. But somehow it manages to have a weird charm to it, like working on an original setting gave a huge boost of life to the team over at Bethesda.

I'm actually not even sure how to talk about the game. I could put it in the context of Bethesda's other games, but there's some snags. Really, all you need to know is that it's a Bethesda game, most similar to Fallout 4, but without pretty much all of the annoyances I had with that game.

I think I'm just gonna start listing things I liked about the game.

First up, when you create a character, you get to choose a background! And a TRAIT THEY BROUGHT TRAITS BACK HELL YEAH! If you don't know, traits are something Fallout 1 and 2 and NV have that you choose at character creation, where you get a bonus depending on which trait you choose, but you also get a corresponding weakness, like if you choose Introvert you get a bonus when you don't have a companion, but a penalty when you do have one. In a similar vein, some features that are usually compulsory in Bethesda games (for example, stealth meters) aren't unlocked by default.
That's something a lot of people are gonna hate, but I'm insane so I like the specialization it implies lol. The game doesn't bring RPG stats back into Bethesda games, but it feels like with these design decisions they're trying to work real character specialization into their perk-based system.

I also just love the new setting. It's a bit firefly in parts, sure, but while it's not a crazy original setting (not to mention just how American of a setting it is), it's just lovingly thought out. Honestly, I wish less effort had gone into the game's scale, and more had gone into crafting these cities and towns and the cultures that inhabit them. Then maybe they would've broken the mold a bit more, or maybe there would have been a less cliched faction. Still, what's here feels like it was done with love.

I also just loved some of the companions here, which isn't something I usually like about Bethesda games? I liked the detective guy in Fallout 4 I guess? Here though, there were solidly 3 or 4 I really liked, and my favorite two made some events in the game hit so much harder than they could've. I think having the companions also be your crew makes it easier to form relationships with them, to get to know them, and it really helps the game.

The plot's not that much of a plot, but I do love that it's one of the few times where, rather than just being a save the world/chosen one-style plot, this really puts exploration first. And I mean, every game from this company should do that. It's the whole draw of their games! There's also some light philosophical questions and interesting lore-history diving threaded throughout, which is great cuz that's my SHIT! Even if the philosophy was pretty shallow. I appreciated the effort lol.

Honestly if this wasn't set on being a game where you can explore an entire galaxy, and was instead like a bit bigger than The Outer Worlds, with all the extra effort going into varied stories and maps instead of just more. But that's AAA game dev for ya I guess.

Anyways, I really wasn't expecting to get so into this game. It's bloated in exactly the way you think it is, and there's tons of systems that aren't there for anything besides customizability. You can go through the game without interacting with the ship builder, or the outpost builder. The core experience though, that's what's really strong I think. The themeing, the design, hell the writing is the best they've had in years. If you want to play an explorer of the cosmos, you could not do much better. Just know that's not the same thing as actually exploring the cosmos.

All of the let's play narration for these random-build-focused slot-machine-action-games is like 'ohh after your 50th run you'll have enough gopher coins to now unlock the Zuckerberg's Icon so now when you play Billy Boy and choose the Steven Stone for your 14th Arcana Tier you'll be able to Yummymax your way past the 4th Tier of Encroachening when you face the waves of 23 Yeti-men. Make sure to spend you 1.0% APR Slammy Shards only on Subtle-enchanted Attack Boosts to make sure the chance of reaching Heaven is fulfilled on a blue day! Like comment and subscribe

I spent an hour in the first level, beating my head against the moon logic puzzles and repeatedly behind harassed by a child who was not scary. The game then caused several key items to clip out of the world, making the core puzzle impossible to solve. Restarting the level, I managed to solve the rest of the puzzles in the first level after an hour or two, but the child kept catching me out of nowhere, repeatedly resetting the objective slightly. This was not scary. This was not fun. This went on for 3 and a half hours before I gave up.

I think there are worse games than this, I wanted to go in and appreciate what it did well. Instead I was in a hell of my own devising, slowly whittling away any joy I was feeling and leaving me a desiccated husk.

Thank you KiwiVee for gifting me this game! It's possibly the worst thing I've ever played.

Hold down the W-key with the entire, clenched fist.
Ram some Nails directly into the brain-juice leaking ear canal, after the Post-Void headache's single repeating riff shredded the scalp off the temporal skull. Maybe just nail the W including Keyboard to wooden desk board that gets scratched around on, to save time and that brittle table.
Not blinking till the eyes bleed out of the nessecity. To catch the first glance of the gun slinging amalgamation and the eyes their ichorous break in a blood bath.
Hydrate with gore. It's some little shit's stipulation inside this Post-Void.

Smoke unfiltered pervitin with the aim-trainer gods, as the carpet flooring starts pounding waves around us.
The chamber transmogrifies with each new hit to the face.
The Reload-Key gets spammed only to reload the run, never the gun. No need for that kind of tactic in the compulsion feeding demand by the Head-explode-simulator. Though, occasionally the pinky might spread it's leg to shift shape and gear.

Yea. This game is pretty good. I kinda suck at it lol. Only rushed past stage five once in my four-five hours of play, but I'll keep trying. Reaffirming my complete switch from controller to KBM with this game feels like an insanly chop headed idea, but also like an acceleration of that process. The first few runs I thought this game was impossible, but after staring directly into the LCD sun long enough, I realised that piece of shit plastic controller cursed me with blindness and now I finally see the light.
Still hurts to look at for too long tho.
I think I legit never had this much fun in a game with an average of fourty-five second long runs. (I really suck)
It's also absurdly simple in it's mechanical components, there is a slight risk of it getting stale for some, but for a quick half-hour+ of play it is highly nutritious in value.
The player can only carry one gun, can slide to go faster / dodge a bit and can choose an additional effect after each completed stage, but the game violently just screams "Aim for the head you fuck and never stop running for your life" at me and all I can do is blush and keep fingering my Reload-Key.

Play Post Void if you like breakneck shooters,
need a rougelite clicking-on-heads laboratory
or want to be visually overwhelmed in the best way possible a non-epileptic, Videogame enjoyer can get for only a couple bucks.

Perfect Vermin is only like three cigarettes long and I puffed two of them just to spite the no-smoking sign at the start of each office.
When the ending and that last line hit,
I was like:
"Damn."
coughes up burning hot tar

I am filth.
Perfect Vermin was cleansing.
I wished smoking, whichever brand is the cheapest currently, wasn't sometimes as fun as smashing up a printer with a sledge hammer tho.
Okay, it isn't nearly as fun as that, I kinda hate doing it actually.
There is a normalised routine in my addiction (and in my country, we had the most % of smokers in our population worldwide for quite a while) which sometimes let's me forget how fucking damaging and stupid it actually is.

I think I just need to stop wanting to destroy myself fr fr
If not for me, than at least for the people around me who I love and involuntarily inhale these clouds of cancerous shit.

Fuck.

What is a healthy addiction to have?
I need a substitution.

The first ever shot I took in my first ever game of any Counter Strike, which I fired completely haphazardly out of my hip, turned out to be a piercing double kill with a single AWP sniper bullet to end the round as the second to last guy standing.
One eastern-European sounding guy in the voice chat went nuts and the next round the entire squad followed me.
I should have just quit playing right then and there, while I was still riding that high, because they soon realised what a fucking noob I actually am and I remembered why I normaly, preemptively choose to mute my squad-fill in most online games I suck at.

Also, as an Austrian guy who loves to paint, I hate that there is an instantly recognisable, shitheaded implication in the gamer tag "Austrian Painter" which was next to the muscle flexing profil picture of a sly nazi, at least -sympathizer, idiot, who hard-carried me the entire next game.
Or maybe he meant Schiele or Kokoschka we'll never know. He might enjoy going to the museum after working out or headshotting some shitters like me.
Nah, we all know who he meant.
I just hate that we all know who he meant.