There's definitely a solid core of crunchy city-building within this game. The core logic of a hex-based map with various adjacency bonuses is smart, giving rise to a lot of emergent strategy out of a relatively understandable set of mechanics. But it fumbles many of the details that are necessary to grow that idea into a complete game, and ends up a frustrating shadow of what it could have been.

While my wife and I played this game together, we came up with a laundry list of complaints about it ranging from the control scheme (Why is there no hotkey for switching between planets?) to the UI decisions (Adjusting storage in a warehouse is a nightmare) to the onboarding (Why is there no Civilopedia equivalent? Why doesn't it explain core concepts like "an action"?). But ultimately, our biggest issues fell into two categories: transparency and suburbism.

The first is especially egregious in comparison to The Colonists, which is an excellent city-builder largely because it gives the player so much visibility into and control over the details of how resources flow through your civ. This is crucial for games like this, because it provides another avenue of emergent strategy, but it's totally absent in Before We Leave where you can see resources in motion, but you can't easily track them at rest or understand how their flow operates over time. It's hard to understand the paths your peeps travel even though the adjacency mechanics make this pathing critical to the player's success.

Specifically, passing near certain tiles (fountains, trees) improves the mood of a given peep while passing near others (tall buildings, pollution) makes them unhappy. Because housing imposes substantial tall building "gloom" penalties and the best food production produces pollution, you're incentivized to reproduce a suburban city layout with home, work, and food separated strictly by function. While this could pose an interesting mechanical puzzle, as a human player I want to build a city I'd like to live in. I personally love walking among mixed-use apartments, row houses, and restaurants and it's a bummer to play a game that frames that as bad.

Even the mechanical puzzle kind of sucks, though. The gloom mechanic discourages density of housing, but housing adjacency bonuses are so strong as to outweigh that completely—meaning that you just have an ambient gloom penalty all the time that you can't really address. As the game moves to later stages, this seems to be its constant theme: it keeps asking you to cram more and more things into the same number of tiles without giving you tools to improve efficiency or positive motivation to rethink layouts. (There is one notable counterexample, the step warehouse, which is worth highlighting because I wish the game had more improvements like that.)

This was a fun few hours of initial exploration, but the substantial amount of lategame content (including fighting off hostile NPCs which we haven't even talked about) just felt like a slog. And just to add insult to injury, the unlockable "reward" tiles like the Park and the Pond simply do nothing at all! What is the point.

Anno's slightly wonkier cousin. It's nice for a while, but gets a bit annoying later on because of some non-intuitive restrictions on what you can build and farm on each island, so at first you try to manage supply chains and then give up and let all items criss-cross everywhere. Interestingly enough, this city builder has a bit of a problem with its ending - space whales are attacking regularly but rarely over the course of your session, and you can build a super-intensive planet-wide energy shield which is pretty cool, or you just build a whale charmer and the game is won. It's not bad, but I'd just say to play Anno (1701) instead and ignore its war mechanics.

I thought this had some interesting ideas, and is certainly an ambitious project considering the clearly limited budget. However, the game's core theme of frustrating, dehumanising bureaucracy is barely represented in the majority of the game's platforming gameplay, only seeing some representation in the puzzles. At their best, the visuals do a better job with this theme, creating terrifying abstract worlds full of floating documents, lethal stamps, and a devilish furnace that wastefully burns up all that fresh paperwork. Unfortunately, the overall visual direction lacks artistic flair outside of these key moments, with flat uses of colour and even flatter textures. The narrative has its moments of intrigue and thematic coherence, but the endings both fail to capitalise on this solid foundation. Still, as mixed as my overall opinion is of Metamorphosis, I am glad I played it and respect the developer's vision.

Looking forward to a rather short puzzle plattformer like the first game I just finished last December, Creepy Tale 2 was actually a little surprise. Though I already had expectations that led me to buy the game early and discounted to 7,99€, still a lot as I had bought plenty on sale anyway that I could have played instead, this sequel changed game mechanics to an almost point'n'click adventure, adding depth to a simple left and right scenario.

No longer do you jump or randomly click to check for interactivity, as now there are hotspots allowing specific actions. And there is more than a vague story to Creepy Tale 2, actually even voice acted in English, with an eastern-european accent more or less. It does blend in however, because it is a sinister narration like fairytales before Disney added their formula just like it happened to Marvel and Star Wars more recently. It feels like at the adequate dark medieval place for a deceased mother and a little sister lost to evil forces.

When you start playing the boy Lars at his home, just like in Creepy Tale, there will be an expository, slight guidance at first, introducing the world and controls, but soon you're on your own, away from the house, looking for the remaining family. In case of Creepy Tale 2 though, due to the new hotspot system, I felt a lot less lost in what I was expected to do.

Good thing is, although you could play Creepy Tale 2 as a standalone title, it also delivers kind of an origin story to the build up mysteries from the first game without actually pushing it. It's up to your interpretation on the details found in both games, I guess, as I've read reviews telling there's no interconnection at all. Well, see for yourself.

Occuring in quite similar realms, it's no surprise puzzle design is rather familiar. It's basically a more polished surface with improved artworks reminding of old fantasy cartoons mixed with a beastiary and characters close to Creepy Tale. In the sequel, you find detail elements like glowing butterflies or dreamcatchers included just as puzzles will require a lot of trial and error, frustration and relief after learning patterns to hide from cannibal witches or opening locks.

Sadly the two options for an ending aren't too rewarding. In general I felt that from a gaming perspective it was actually anticlimactic due to the linear design and final decision happening way after quite some dialogue passed the screen. That's probably a matter of taste though, I just had a quite similar experience with The Whispered World. I would have preferred maybe just another little scene added before the credits roll in. It may contribute to the impression that the Switch version of Creepy Tale 2 omits the achievement system.

Technically, there's really just minor flaws to report from the game. I've heard the PC version had some bad freezing glitches that I didn't experience on the Switch. I had about five moments where it felt like the figure is stuck for a few seconds. There was no need for a reboot though. And then there was one puzzle that required me to learn I don't just move a switch back and forth horizontally, I can actually push and pull it vertically as well. That design didn't feel self explanatory enough.

If you don't want to play Creepy Tale 2 in English, you might want to check first, because when I left the default settings on German, the texts read like directly from Google Translate without having a native speaker related to the game looking over it. I could live with few sentences making no sense at all as I was listening to the English dub anyway, but when you read a diary a certain logic is mandatory.
In this case, and I switched to English text then, the month "March" for example was translated to "Marsch" from "the march" like in "marching soldiers" rather than the word "März" required here.

Creepy Tale 2 in a way still is a mixed bag, that you play as a fan of the atmosphere and story rather than looking for intelligent puzzles. Maybe I'm too used to moon logic here, but for instance I'd prefer finding actual solutions to clicking on a lock until it works. I also like to think forward, so stopping me from picking up an already highlighted item, that I will have to actually get, when I found out about it a few steps later does not work best with my way of playing.

I've read critique some walking back and forth is required due to clues being put on walls and other immobile objects, but as much as I understand a journal would help, as an old school gamer, I just rely on the secret technique of taking notes here. In fact, the old fart I am, just having a smartphone since about 15 month, I already moved on to creating a Google Docs file or even take a screenshot with the camera. I know, I could also screenshot with the Switch directly, but neither is the picture as easy to access during play, nor did they make transfer to my mobile device comfortable.

It's also a great addition for Creepy Tale 2 to offer more exploration through interaction, but that plus on the other hand also leads to that you might have to repeat the same combination a second time, so you've proven definitely, to find out you need to do it a third time, just for the sake of it. And then, when it's clear you want to jump on that item you just placed to cross water, you have to click that thrice as well, without anything to disturb you passing. It's nitpicking, but that really could be designed more convenient if there isn't supposed to be a challenge anyway.

But then you're just drawn into nightmarish conditions even forcing the young protagonist to kill sometimes. Creepy Tale 2 has a more than adequate score, I must add. In combination of sound design via headphones and the vibration of my pro controller some scenes literally felt creepy and in those rare moments when it's not only timing but time pressure the adrenaline level rises.

I guess after the blend of different situations in an eerie environment still created an interesting enough game with Creepy Tale, you can count the narrative development of Creepy Tale 2 as an improvement, whilst it's still stuck in the same kind of puzzle design. If that core would have evolved with the sequel, I would have called it a better game.

This way, I sure needed little more than three times the two hours it took me to complete the first game, but a lot of it went for narration I had no influence on other than to click it away, if I wanted to rush. I also wasted some time on puzzles that I possibly just was to lazy to find a clue for, but as they just required me going through a manageable amount of combinations I kept soldiering on.

Having paid a rather high price for me being a cheapskate, the effort put in to tell an actual story was required to balance the difference between the 2,99€ Creepy Tale cost me and the 7,99€ I spent on the sequel. Otherwise the lack of creativity in puzzle design would have felt close to the edge of what I'd be willing to waste on another random indie game, though in case of a then still quite new Creepy Tale 2 it really was the art and ambience I was after and I got that served well.

Misao, the mind-bending rollercoaster of fear! Step into the abyss, my friend, where reality unravels like a ball of yarn in the paws of a manic kitten. The pixelated horror, a symphony of screams and eerie tunes, is both nostalgic and nightmarish. The puzzles, ah, they're like riddles whispered by the ghosts of Rubik and Sudoku. The characters dance on the precipice of insanity, their development a ballet of chaos. But beware, for the repetitive gameplay might feel like walking the same plank over shark-infested waters. Multiple endings, like a choose-your-own-mind-melting-adventure. A chilling 7/10, because sanity is overrated, my friend.

Pretty good. I liked the music. The sprite art was also well done, but I can't tell if it's a default sprite sheet. I wouldn't be surprised if it was, as it reminds me of the default ones that come with RPG Maker and this was made in Wolf RPG, so IDK what their default tilesets look like, if they have any.

It's one of those 'million ways to die' games like Hello Charlotte Ch. 1 where interacting with the wrong thing can kill you. Luckily, this game has a quicksave function. On the other hand, some of the death cutscenes are wayyyyyy too long. And not even in like a 'wow there's a lot of steps in this one' way, but in like a 'why is there a five second pause here' way. Like, I already know I'm dead. Can you just show me how it happens so I can keep playing? It's also kind of lame though that it's both a 'million ways to die' and also a game where you're expected to check EVERYTHING in order to find what you need. Although I guess those two usually end up together in RPG Maker horror. And I usually think I'm pretty good about that, but I needed to pull up a walkthrough after rummaging around in the game for about 45 min to an hour?

And although the music was great, a lot of scenes (the car scene comes to mind) are just... silent? No music or anything. And on top of that, a lot of the sound effects are extremely goofy. I don't think it was meant to be goofy, but it definitely didn't help in making me want to take the game seriously. Like, the story is really dark, and yet (outside of the ghost stuff) really believable. Yet, the sound effects and the goofy death traps sit at tonal opposition.

But, it's still an RPG Maker (adjacent) classic.

What's bad about this game that hasn't been stated already? Absolutely nothing, every other review on this page sums up clearly the issues this project faces.

Allow me to give you a TLDR.

-Incompetent developer
-Janky gameplay
-Poor optimization
-Bad animations
-Boring. It's just so goddamn boring.
-Incomplete and it's going to stay that way. This man is never going to complete anything ever in his whole life.

I feel sorry for all of the unpaid volunteers that tried to help this game get finished and that poor outside developer that quite literally REWROTE the spaghetti code this game had only for the main developer to kick him to the curb because he didn't understand it. just get good bruh or hand it over to someone else you're just not good enough swallow your pride your fans are more important than your ego you asshole

also are we all really that surprised the developer has accusations against him this game literally has a panty shot mechanic for its HIGHSCHOOL characters and two of the rivals for the teen boy are teachers WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?!

anyway the concept for this game is good if anyone can do it better please do it better and dont set it in highschool leave teenage girls alone bro