hb_robo
Bio
a normal dude trying to remember what I played.
10: masterful
9: brilliant
8: accomplished
7: interesting
6: neutral-positive
5: neutral-negative
4: clumsy
3: failed
2: insufferable
1: loathsome
a normal dude trying to remember what I played.
10: masterful
9: brilliant
8: accomplished
7: interesting
6: neutral-positive
5: neutral-negative
4: clumsy
3: failed
2: insufferable
1: loathsome
Badges
Full-Time
Journaled games once a day for a month straight
2 Years of Service
Being part of the Backloggd community for 2 years
GOTY '22
Participated in the 2022 Game of the Year Event
Best Friends
Become mutual friends with at least 3 others
Listed
Created 10+ public lists
Elite Gamer
Played 500+ games
Gamer
Played 250+ games
Noticed
Gained 3+ followers
N00b
Played 100+ games
Liked
Gained 10+ total review likes
Roadtrip
Voted for at least 3 features on the roadmap
On Schedule
Journaled games once a day for a week straight
Favorite Games
794
Total Games Played
000
Played in 2024
1810
Games Backloggd
Recently Played See More
Recently Reviewed See More
This review contains spoilers
Great platformer, mechanically and in its challenge design. Poor narrative vessel, especially in its character roster. It nails the pathos, though - the angst, the self-loathing driven by the awareness of the angst, the lack of purpose, the fixation, the stubbornness, the perseverance. Pushing the player to great lengths in order to synchronize their achievement with Madeline's is genuinely quite inspired, but having to see Oshiro again in the epilogue takes the wind out of the sail.
Axiomatic truth: give me little guys that are hard or unusual to control and I will give you a good review. Co-op is a natural extension of the chaos, forcing not only precision with your steps and grabs and lever pulls, but a coherent rhythm from both players.
Biped gets a lot of grief for its length, but I think it's fine to leave a nontraditional experience before it wears its welcome; what I jive less with is the lack of room to breathe and just play with the weird bodies you inhabit. Instead, the Biped equivalent of fidget spinners dot the landscape, hoping to distract you just long enough to mentally realign you back to the main objective. These impulses become obligatory, eventually more of a distraction, where a grander sense of imagination and whimsicality and freedom could have both soothed players after tough challenges and given them room to develop mastery of the bipedal movement.
Oh well, they can't all be Snake Pass, I guess.
Biped gets a lot of grief for its length, but I think it's fine to leave a nontraditional experience before it wears its welcome; what I jive less with is the lack of room to breathe and just play with the weird bodies you inhabit. Instead, the Biped equivalent of fidget spinners dot the landscape, hoping to distract you just long enough to mentally realign you back to the main objective. These impulses become obligatory, eventually more of a distraction, where a grander sense of imagination and whimsicality and freedom could have both soothed players after tough challenges and given them room to develop mastery of the bipedal movement.
Oh well, they can't all be Snake Pass, I guess.
A B-grade co-op physics puzzler interspersed with C-grade pure platforming, tagged along by a complete mess of a narrative about... two friends doing things together? A horrifically ugly bloom-and-blur hyper-realistic art direction interweaves a pitifully morose score. The tutorial level in particular is so depressing that less than a third of a third of all Steam players make it to level 2. How unsurprising.
Unravel Two genuinely has its moments when it reveals its craft in the two-player puzzles, all of which revolve around using your conjoined tether in interesting ways, but it is woefully distracted by compulsive desires to become a Spectacle Game, one where the levels have all-caps meta subtitles and the story contains Dark Scenes. This effort lands so embarrassingly flat and abruptly that it hardly feels like anything happened at all. It sort of feels like the game version of Oscar bait, where every design decision is made to generate a murmuring respect from inexperienced eyes and not to actually achieve anything of merit.
To capstone your adventure, a credits sequence overflowing with insecurity begs the players to not come down so harshly by showing how cool and worker-friendly Coldwood Interactive is-- then, right on cue, a huge EA logo scrolls up the screen.
Unravel Two genuinely has its moments when it reveals its craft in the two-player puzzles, all of which revolve around using your conjoined tether in interesting ways, but it is woefully distracted by compulsive desires to become a Spectacle Game, one where the levels have all-caps meta subtitles and the story contains Dark Scenes. This effort lands so embarrassingly flat and abruptly that it hardly feels like anything happened at all. It sort of feels like the game version of Oscar bait, where every design decision is made to generate a murmuring respect from inexperienced eyes and not to actually achieve anything of merit.
To capstone your adventure, a credits sequence overflowing with insecurity begs the players to not come down so harshly by showing how cool and worker-friendly Coldwood Interactive is-- then, right on cue, a huge EA logo scrolls up the screen.