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3 days ago


3 days ago


TheYeti followed Ens1s

3 days ago



TheYeti completed Rubber Bandits
Rubber Bandits is the anti-Smash Bros in good and bad ways.

The gameplay is not really at all similar to Smash but it’s a good point of comparison for this kind of multiplayer experience. While Smash Bros is high-skill, highly competitive, highly customizable, and not very forgiving of skill gaps between players, Rubber Bandits is designed to be simple and easily-accessible so that players of all skill levels can jump right in and play without getting totally smoked. It makes for a fun experience with friends. I just wish there was maybe a bit more to it - like the ability to do custom games. All you can really do is pick from 8 different game modes that sometimes have fun, random modifiers and then you’re thrown into a random map. Custom modes and settings would do wonders for this game.

+ Great, easily-accessible game for players of all skill levels
+ Decent progression system that has you constantly unlocking more ways to customize your bandit
+ Fun visuals and animations

- No custom game modes or settings
- “Story” mode is pretty bad
- Frequent online MP connection issues

6 days ago


TheYeti completed Strange Horticulture
A really neat mystery puzzle game wrapped up in a spooky plant lady vibe that sadly doesn’t always execute on some of the cool ideas it attempts and is burdened by poorly-designed UI/UX.

Strange Horticulture is, at its core, a deductive reasoning puzzle game that has you solving clues to identify plants and seeking out new plants to expand your collection. Most times, that loop of looking for a plant based on a vague description and trying to narrow it down using context clues or sketches can deliver a familiar satisfying rush that comes from puzzle games like this. Other times, “solving” a puzzle is just reading through 60 plant descriptions until you find one key word like “stranger” or “smokey” buried in the text. That’s not a puzzle, it's just tedious. The story, told through the visits of customers, is neat and the choices along the way (that set up multiple endings) made me feel invested in the twisty tale that was being told. After finishing the game, I enjoyed going back and seeing how some of the other endings played out.

Later in the game, once you’ve identified most of the plants, occasionally a customer will ask for one specific plant of the 77 unorganized plants on your shelf. So you’ll slowly scroll left to right looking for the one plant you need, but if you scroll too quickly, the label open/close animation won’t react in time and you’ll miss the name. Some method of auto-sorting your plants would have been a welcome addition to the game.

When not identifying plants to help customers, you’re following clues and solving riddles to visit specific locations on a map and find new plants to add to your collection. It’s a pretty fun idea in theory, but the map is quite large and the writing on it is often difficult to read, requiring constant use of the game’s dedicated magnifying glass button - a baffling game decision.

Searching for plants in your massive collection, reading too many descriptions, navigating around a map, and just interacting with your inventory are all things that shouldn’t be annoying but are due to the game’s poorly designed interface that is only made worse on consoles. I can only assume that this game was designed to be played with a mouse and keyboard on a 40 inch computer monitor that your face is 4 inches from at all times, because nothing else really makes sense. The script-like font is small, requiring frequent use of the magnifying glass just to be able to read literally any of the text in the game. There is an “easier to read font” option, that makes all the text more legible, but the interface does not adapt to the new text size, so conversations with NPCs constantly fall off the screen as you’re trying to read them which results in battling the scrolling dialogue. Additionally, while the “legible text” option does improve most of the menus, the map does not benefit from the cleaner text, so that continues to be difficult to read without the magnifying glass. Even with the magnification, the rivers are actively impossible to read due to the weird font choice. Controlling the game on console is a nightmare as the cursor is mapped to the left analog stick with a set cursor speed of “excruciatingly slow”. There are labels in the game so you can make notes of all the items you’re finding, but that feature is predictably a pain without a dedicated keyboard to use.

The thing that makes these pain points more frustrating is that I actually really enjoyed most of my time with Strange Horticulture, but it constantly felt as though I was fighting against the game to find the fun. Underneath the poorly-designed UI and weird design decisions is a pretty great game! Finding that game, however, takes some work. And maybe a lot of work if you’re playing on console.

+ Satisfying deductive puzzle solving
+ Great spooky vibes
+ Fun, creative plants with interesting descriptions
+ Great story choices throughout the game that set up multiple endings

- Terrible UI that often feels anti-player for the sake of “theme”
- Console/controller support is all around terrible from UI adaptation to controller use
- Some puzzles are more tedious reading than actual puzzle-solving

6 days ago





TheYeti is now playing Strange Horticulture

10 days ago


13 days ago


TheYeti earned the Busy Day badge

13 days ago


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