aughhhh
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75 Reviews liked by aughhhh
As eye-catching as this title may be, the game feels a bit like a poor new-age impression of John George Jones Games (Definitely recommend a read there, interesting insight into his works). "Go to Hell" felt like it had this petty hatred to the player that it kept through as you pushed through literal hell, while "Fucker Gamer Scum Get Stabbed" is explicitly made to feel juvenile and amateurish to the extend that I think this was intended to feel like it was made by a 14-year-old angsty boy. Which is fine, I guess.
Airstrike Frederick is a perfectly viable strategy and that baffles me.
i've played this 3 times and could not tell you anything about what happens in it
Bayonetta 2
2014
The combat is slightly worse than in the first game, the story is just as bad, but the gimmick levels are much better so it evens out
Overwatch
2016
Was pretty fun at first and then they decided to balance around the competetive meta with no regards for fun so I stopped playing
Triangle Strategy
2022
why wasnt this called salt & iron
This is one of the best sci-fi stories I ever experienced, and if you love sci-fi stuff then I think you owe it to yourself to play this game.
I am glad I introduced myself to the VN novel right before this game caught my attention, because that’s the only thing that would have stopped me from trying it otherwise, and this game being largely a VN is the only reason why I may not recommend it to someone.
Truly, I think this game is a masterpiece.
I am glad I introduced myself to the VN novel right before this game caught my attention, because that’s the only thing that would have stopped me from trying it otherwise, and this game being largely a VN is the only reason why I may not recommend it to someone.
Truly, I think this game is a masterpiece.
Truly did not expect this to be the best one.
Peak fiction. The best story i have ever experienced.
Unlimited SaGa
2002
society wasn't ready for a game this good
Persona 5
2016
Gameplay is great. The story is about these teens are going to change society for the better and will punish rotten adults but in the end all they do is preserve the status quo and one of them becomes a cop.
Monster Prom
2018
It's pretty fun. I like the characters, I like the artstyle, I like the writing. The idea of a "competetive dating sim" is interesting, but in practice, there aren't all that many tools to interact with other players so you just end up each going for a different character.
Also once you figure out how encouters are resolved in this game it loses a lot of its charm.
Also once you figure out how encouters are resolved in this game it loses a lot of its charm.
Bloodborne
2015
This review contains spoilers
Bloodborne is one of the best games I have ever played, but it has too many flaws for me to call it perfect
The game takes the Souls formula, which I already love, and then makes some major improvements to it.
I was never a fan of blocking in video games. I feel like an attack is about to come, so I start holding my “stop taking damage” button and once the attack is over, I stop holding that button. This is just not how I like playing games. So I really enjoyed that this game just did away with blocking altogether. The more generous parry windows encouraged me to actually try parrying for once and it’s super fun. Quicksteps feel much better than dodge rolls to me. The rallying system is amazing at encouraging you to play aggressively early in the game though later in the game it becomes less relevant as enemies get longer combos and deal more damage.
The level design is also top notch. Central Yharnam probably has my favourite layout out of any action game I ever played, but the rest is great as well. Forbidden Woods is probably the only level I don’t love.
But as mentioned before, the game is full of flaws. For all the great improvements the game made to combat, it has surprisingly few bosses that really let these changes shine, especially in the late game (not including the DLC).
I also dislike the changes to how the online systems work. I like being invaded occasionally and that just doesn’t really happen in this game if you’re not doing coop or hanging out in one of I think 2 very specific spots. And coop isn’t very fun to organize either. I mentioned this in my Elden Ring review already, I like incidental coop, i.e. I’m already in the online state and then I see someone’s summon sign and think “sure, why not”. In Bloodborne it’s even worse than in Elden Ring because you don’t even see if it’s a busy area or who you’re going to summon or something, you just ring your bell and then hope for the best. Neither coop nor pvp feel very rewarding either, you just get some blood echoes and a single insight. It’s also very strange to me that there’s barely any NPC summons, but they didn’t entirely cut the feature either.
Speaking of NPCs, the NPC quests are atrociously obscure as always. Not as bad as in Ds2 or Elden Ring, but still really bad. I think I completed only Alfred’s quest without a guide.
The game is also a bit lacking in build variety in the early game. Yes, all of the various trick weapons are cool, but you start with a selection of only 3. It takes many hours before your build actually starts feeling unique from all the other builds you’ve done before, something that heavily discouraged me from doing multiple playthroughs. Only getting one (two with dlc) of the highest upgrade material for free also discourages experimenting within a playthrough, at least in the lategame.
Chalice Dungeons are an interesting idea but the execution is pretty awful.
Lanterns are just a big mess. I do not understand why they didn’t just copy Bonfires, those worked perfectly fine. It sucks that you have to go through the Hunter’s Dream whenever you want to teleport or respawn enemies for farming.
Which brings me to my biggest issue with the game. Farming for Quicksilver bullets and blood vials. Yeah, I get it, I’m giving in to the hunt by killing these beasts over and over again, ludonarrative resonance, whatever. I don’t want to pause in the middle of my attempts at a difficult boss to farm. It ruins the pacing and I still haven’t beaten the Orphan of Kos because I keep running out of vials and I at one point just got tired of constantly farming for them. It would probably be fine if the prices didn’t increase as you progressed through the game and you could just buy hundreds at once in the lategame.
Despite all of this, I really love Bloodborne, and that is in huge parts thanks to the story. If it was just “Victorian werewolf horror but then it’s revealed to actually be Lovecraftian horror” that would have been super cool already. But it’s even better than that.
Something a lot of Lovecraftian horror gets wrong is that the eldritch monsters aren’t supposed to be malicious killer gods. They’re just so far above humans that their motivations are entirely incomprehensible to us. Bloodborne goes one step further. The Great Ones are, generally speaking, mostly benevolent. They’re just entirely incomprehensible to humans, and they overestimate humans, so despite (almost) everyone’s best intentions, things end up going horribly wrong. If there is any other eldritch horror piece that explores this idea, I have yet to find it.
I am now noticing that I spent more than half of this review talking about the game’s flaws, and that feels a bit unfair to me. It’s just that I have a very clear idea about what I dislike about this game, while the things I love are a lot less clear. But damn, I love this game.
I am constantly tempted to up my rating of it to 5 stars, because it’s easy to forget about a game’s flaws if you’re not playing it right now, while the great things have completely infested my brain and I constantly think about them. I really hope this game gets a PC port someday, so that more people can appreciate this masterpiece.
The game takes the Souls formula, which I already love, and then makes some major improvements to it.
I was never a fan of blocking in video games. I feel like an attack is about to come, so I start holding my “stop taking damage” button and once the attack is over, I stop holding that button. This is just not how I like playing games. So I really enjoyed that this game just did away with blocking altogether. The more generous parry windows encouraged me to actually try parrying for once and it’s super fun. Quicksteps feel much better than dodge rolls to me. The rallying system is amazing at encouraging you to play aggressively early in the game though later in the game it becomes less relevant as enemies get longer combos and deal more damage.
The level design is also top notch. Central Yharnam probably has my favourite layout out of any action game I ever played, but the rest is great as well. Forbidden Woods is probably the only level I don’t love.
But as mentioned before, the game is full of flaws. For all the great improvements the game made to combat, it has surprisingly few bosses that really let these changes shine, especially in the late game (not including the DLC).
I also dislike the changes to how the online systems work. I like being invaded occasionally and that just doesn’t really happen in this game if you’re not doing coop or hanging out in one of I think 2 very specific spots. And coop isn’t very fun to organize either. I mentioned this in my Elden Ring review already, I like incidental coop, i.e. I’m already in the online state and then I see someone’s summon sign and think “sure, why not”. In Bloodborne it’s even worse than in Elden Ring because you don’t even see if it’s a busy area or who you’re going to summon or something, you just ring your bell and then hope for the best. Neither coop nor pvp feel very rewarding either, you just get some blood echoes and a single insight. It’s also very strange to me that there’s barely any NPC summons, but they didn’t entirely cut the feature either.
Speaking of NPCs, the NPC quests are atrociously obscure as always. Not as bad as in Ds2 or Elden Ring, but still really bad. I think I completed only Alfred’s quest without a guide.
The game is also a bit lacking in build variety in the early game. Yes, all of the various trick weapons are cool, but you start with a selection of only 3. It takes many hours before your build actually starts feeling unique from all the other builds you’ve done before, something that heavily discouraged me from doing multiple playthroughs. Only getting one (two with dlc) of the highest upgrade material for free also discourages experimenting within a playthrough, at least in the lategame.
Chalice Dungeons are an interesting idea but the execution is pretty awful.
Lanterns are just a big mess. I do not understand why they didn’t just copy Bonfires, those worked perfectly fine. It sucks that you have to go through the Hunter’s Dream whenever you want to teleport or respawn enemies for farming.
Which brings me to my biggest issue with the game. Farming for Quicksilver bullets and blood vials. Yeah, I get it, I’m giving in to the hunt by killing these beasts over and over again, ludonarrative resonance, whatever. I don’t want to pause in the middle of my attempts at a difficult boss to farm. It ruins the pacing and I still haven’t beaten the Orphan of Kos because I keep running out of vials and I at one point just got tired of constantly farming for them. It would probably be fine if the prices didn’t increase as you progressed through the game and you could just buy hundreds at once in the lategame.
Despite all of this, I really love Bloodborne, and that is in huge parts thanks to the story. If it was just “Victorian werewolf horror but then it’s revealed to actually be Lovecraftian horror” that would have been super cool already. But it’s even better than that.
Something a lot of Lovecraftian horror gets wrong is that the eldritch monsters aren’t supposed to be malicious killer gods. They’re just so far above humans that their motivations are entirely incomprehensible to us. Bloodborne goes one step further. The Great Ones are, generally speaking, mostly benevolent. They’re just entirely incomprehensible to humans, and they overestimate humans, so despite (almost) everyone’s best intentions, things end up going horribly wrong. If there is any other eldritch horror piece that explores this idea, I have yet to find it.
I am now noticing that I spent more than half of this review talking about the game’s flaws, and that feels a bit unfair to me. It’s just that I have a very clear idea about what I dislike about this game, while the things I love are a lot less clear. But damn, I love this game.
I am constantly tempted to up my rating of it to 5 stars, because it’s easy to forget about a game’s flaws if you’re not playing it right now, while the great things have completely infested my brain and I constantly think about them. I really hope this game gets a PC port someday, so that more people can appreciate this masterpiece.
Indivisible
2019
Why do the enemies have SO MUCH HEALTH
start writing a review
I was a teenage exocolonist (which I will call “exocolonist” from now on because that name is too long) is a beautifully queer game.
Just how queer it is becomes obvious immediately during character creation. The game not only lets you choose your pronouns, it lets you customize them. You can have neopronouns. You can have he/him pronouns but use feminine terms like girl and mother. You can have she/they pronouns and use a mix of feminine, masculine, and neutral terms. Literally every single instance of this game using gendered language to refer to the mc is customizable. And your appearance and physical sex are customizable separately from all of this.
The relationships you can have with the other characters (and that they can have with each other) are also beautifully multifaceted. No romance option is gender locked. Some characters will start (queer) relationships on their own, no one is throwing themselves at your feet. There are multiple trans and nonbinary characters. One character is aroace. Not every romance starts at a high friendship level. Not every “romance” is a romance, some characters are happy to be your friends with benefits. Multiple characters are polyamorous. And some relationships in this game are queerplatonic, which is what queer people call relationships we can’t describe properly but they’re really beautiful.
Exocolonist has the best portrayal of gender, love, and sexuality out of any game I’ve ever played, except for maybe Heaven Will Be Mine.
is that what I want my review to be about? Isn’t this game so much more than just a dating sim?
start writing a review again
Exocolonist is a beautiful game about growing up.
Your experiences shape you. The memories you make become the cards you end up using to win the challenges later in your life. I wish the game wasn’t as committed to being a game in some parts because removing some treasured memory because I need to optimize my deck kinda sucks.
This alone already tells a beautiful growing up story, but what makes the game really special is how your relationships to the world, and especially the other children around you change. You start out doing either simple tasks or learning in school and end the game doing things that require highly specialized skills. Most of the adults go from treating you like, well, a child to treating you like an equal.
Your childhood friends will all develop in vastly different directions. Friends thought to be inseparable become bitter rivals. Some go down dark paths and you desperately try to stop them, not always succeeding. But some also grow to lead happy lives and you’re happy for them.
Exocolonist portrays the journey from child to young adult, both the good and the bad.
did I just write this entire review without mentioning that this is a cool science fiction story?
start writing a review again
Exocolonist is a beautiful political science fiction story.
You live in a Utopia that is unlike anything possible with our current technology. There are some interesting political thoughts in this game like how to encourage art in a (mostly) moneyless society, but it unfortunately doesn’t ever dive too deeply into any of them.
The game is also kinda weird about violence. It presents the positions of “violence is good when justified”, “violence is always bad”, and “violence is always bad but sometimes it is still necessary and justified” but there are multiple instances where you are forced to choose between the first two.
As a sci-fi story it has everything you could want. You’re one of the first children born in space, you and everyone else has cool genetic enhancements, you are part of a small group who are trying to be the first humans to life on an alien planet, there are cool aliens and the story explores the theme of living in harmony with nature or bending nature to your will and there’s a cool AI you can befriend and a wormhole and…
A wormhole
Yes, a wormhole. What was so special about this wormhole? Come on, tell the people
Yes, I know how to review this game now, but I’ll have to spoil a game mechanic that you might discover as early as reloading an old safe or as late as starting your second run. I had it spoiled for me before I started playing the game and didn’t mind at all but if you want an unspoiled experience I recommend you stop reading and start playing now
start writing a review again
Whenever a game has multiple routes/endings, people will replay it over and over. Some games use this to pad their playtime, some use it to tell the same story from different perspectives, and exocolonist deconstructs it to a degree.
In exocolonist, the mc retains some knowledge from previous playthroughs when you start a new game. This allows you to save people you couldn’t save the first time, take shortcuts to things that took a long time to solve previously and just generally makes your life easier.
This recontextualizes replays from being something you the player are doing to see all the content in this game to something the mc is doing to improve their life. No ending is perfect (though some are much closer to perfect than others) so there is always a reason to come back and try something differently.
Unfortunately for this game I played it after I played Everhood, so now a story about constantly relieving your life to chase after some unobtainable perfection feels slightly wrong to me. There is a way to break this loop, but the game portrays this as a bad ending and offers you to restore the loop with basically no consequences.
I’ll just pretend that after I got the ending that is as close to perfection to me as possible, the mc decided to stop this loop. I won’t replay the game again anytime soon. Solana’s happy.
That’s a pretty decent review but I still feel like it doesn’t do the game justice
start writing a review again
No review can do this game justice. It is far greater than the sum of its parts. It’s a queer dating sim, it’s about growing up, it’s a political sci-fi story and it’s a cool meta game, but it’s so much more than this.
This game is really special. Go and check it out.
I was a teenage exocolonist (which I will call “exocolonist” from now on because that name is too long) is a beautifully queer game.
Just how queer it is becomes obvious immediately during character creation. The game not only lets you choose your pronouns, it lets you customize them. You can have neopronouns. You can have he/him pronouns but use feminine terms like girl and mother. You can have she/they pronouns and use a mix of feminine, masculine, and neutral terms. Literally every single instance of this game using gendered language to refer to the mc is customizable. And your appearance and physical sex are customizable separately from all of this.
The relationships you can have with the other characters (and that they can have with each other) are also beautifully multifaceted. No romance option is gender locked. Some characters will start (queer) relationships on their own, no one is throwing themselves at your feet. There are multiple trans and nonbinary characters. One character is aroace. Not every romance starts at a high friendship level. Not every “romance” is a romance, some characters are happy to be your friends with benefits. Multiple characters are polyamorous. And some relationships in this game are queerplatonic, which is what queer people call relationships we can’t describe properly but they’re really beautiful.
Exocolonist has the best portrayal of gender, love, and sexuality out of any game I’ve ever played, except for maybe Heaven Will Be Mine.
is that what I want my review to be about? Isn’t this game so much more than just a dating sim?
start writing a review again
Exocolonist is a beautiful game about growing up.
Your experiences shape you. The memories you make become the cards you end up using to win the challenges later in your life. I wish the game wasn’t as committed to being a game in some parts because removing some treasured memory because I need to optimize my deck kinda sucks.
This alone already tells a beautiful growing up story, but what makes the game really special is how your relationships to the world, and especially the other children around you change. You start out doing either simple tasks or learning in school and end the game doing things that require highly specialized skills. Most of the adults go from treating you like, well, a child to treating you like an equal.
Your childhood friends will all develop in vastly different directions. Friends thought to be inseparable become bitter rivals. Some go down dark paths and you desperately try to stop them, not always succeeding. But some also grow to lead happy lives and you’re happy for them.
Exocolonist portrays the journey from child to young adult, both the good and the bad.
did I just write this entire review without mentioning that this is a cool science fiction story?
start writing a review again
Exocolonist is a beautiful political science fiction story.
You live in a Utopia that is unlike anything possible with our current technology. There are some interesting political thoughts in this game like how to encourage art in a (mostly) moneyless society, but it unfortunately doesn’t ever dive too deeply into any of them.
The game is also kinda weird about violence. It presents the positions of “violence is good when justified”, “violence is always bad”, and “violence is always bad but sometimes it is still necessary and justified” but there are multiple instances where you are forced to choose between the first two.
As a sci-fi story it has everything you could want. You’re one of the first children born in space, you and everyone else has cool genetic enhancements, you are part of a small group who are trying to be the first humans to life on an alien planet, there are cool aliens and the story explores the theme of living in harmony with nature or bending nature to your will and there’s a cool AI you can befriend and a wormhole and…
A wormhole
Yes, a wormhole. What was so special about this wormhole? Come on, tell the people
Yes, I know how to review this game now, but I’ll have to spoil a game mechanic that you might discover as early as reloading an old safe or as late as starting your second run. I had it spoiled for me before I started playing the game and didn’t mind at all but if you want an unspoiled experience I recommend you stop reading and start playing now
start writing a review again
Whenever a game has multiple routes/endings, people will replay it over and over. Some games use this to pad their playtime, some use it to tell the same story from different perspectives, and exocolonist deconstructs it to a degree.
In exocolonist, the mc retains some knowledge from previous playthroughs when you start a new game. This allows you to save people you couldn’t save the first time, take shortcuts to things that took a long time to solve previously and just generally makes your life easier.
This recontextualizes replays from being something you the player are doing to see all the content in this game to something the mc is doing to improve their life. No ending is perfect (though some are much closer to perfect than others) so there is always a reason to come back and try something differently.
Unfortunately for this game I played it after I played Everhood, so now a story about constantly relieving your life to chase after some unobtainable perfection feels slightly wrong to me. There is a way to break this loop, but the game portrays this as a bad ending and offers you to restore the loop with basically no consequences.
I’ll just pretend that after I got the ending that is as close to perfection to me as possible, the mc decided to stop this loop. I won’t replay the game again anytime soon. Solana’s happy.
That’s a pretty decent review but I still feel like it doesn’t do the game justice
start writing a review again
No review can do this game justice. It is far greater than the sum of its parts. It’s a queer dating sim, it’s about growing up, it’s a political sci-fi story and it’s a cool meta game, but it’s so much more than this.
This game is really special. Go and check it out.