Incredible art direction; the pixel art is moody and detailed with clever animations - at the expense of visual clarity. In some places, it's hard to make out the characters from the environment. The dungeons are quite bland compared to the home/hub areas and occasional setpieces.

Mixed bag of sound design; the narrator is phenomenal and probably the most delightful aspect of the game, especially for the first few hours and you receive constant commentary and lore. The music is fitting. Ability and enemy sounds are bland, even grating at times.

Gameplay is the biggest weakness - which is unfortunate for a roguelike with heavy repetition. Dungeon layouts are simple and predictable. Lots of character classes, but their playstyles don't have much chance to shine against such boring enemies. You'll spend a lot of time kiting in circles. You can also just run straight past without much issue if you don't need to grind. It's leaning on the classic isometric action RPG formula but lacks the necessary tuning and polish.

Beautiful, frustrating, boring. Check it out for the art and narrative.

SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY COME ON DOWN TO WALMART AND GET YOUR BARGAIN DIABLO YES THAT'S RIGHT IT'S WALMBART DIARBLOOOOO~

DECKARD CAIN? STAY A WHILE AND FUCK OFF, THANK YOU! NO ROOM FOR STORIES HERE! WHO NEEDS CHARACTERS OR WORLDBUILDING WHEN YOU'VE GOT ACID RESISTANCE GEAR TO COLLECT! YOUR WHOLE LIFE YOU'VE BEEN SPOILED BY LUSH CUTSCENES AND METICULOUSLY CRAFTED SOUND EFFECTS, NOW IT'S TIME TO GET YOUR BUTT INTO THIS OLD CLUNKER AND RELIVE THE EXPERIENCE OF GOING TO YOUR FRIEND'S HOUSE TO PLAY NINTENDO AND BEING FORCED TO USE THE BUNKHOLE WILDCATZ CONTROLLER!

WAS DIABLO THREE TOO POLISHED FOR YOU? DID YOU FIND YOURSELF UNNERVED BY THE CONSISTENTLY THOUGHTFUL AESTHETICS OF DIABLO TWO? THEN BUY YOURSELF A COPY OF WALPMART DIABLOW TODAY YOU CHEAP PIECE OF SHIT!

i'm out of bullets so i can't silence the camera quickly enough before it alerts security. the doors lock me in with a Screw, who i'm trying to kite around the room as a turret spits rockets at me. i'm nearly out of oxygen so i open up the map in between dodging rockets to find a clean route to the atmo room. i bumble into more turrets and use my last 2 zapper shots to disable them, but now the Secbot has caught up with me so i have to keep sprinting as i refill my air.

when this game gets going, there's so many panicked improvisations and fast decisions to be made. it's run-n-gun while lost in a maze. it pushes you hard enough that you aren't always sure you can pull it off, but somehow you make it through with a sliver of health and a few seconds to spare, and it feels fucking incredible.

the comic book art direction is brilliant and permeates the whole game; this is what borderlands wishes it could be. the megacorp satire shtick is perhaps overdone, but it's still done well and i chuckled at the enemy voice responses from time to time. the visual design is clear and well-organized, which is crucial for a game that wants to push you. there's many strategies to take and styles of play, but it's not some deus ex choose-your-hallway bullshit.

It's a wonky little guy, but I had fun with it for a bit. Exploring the world gives you that distinct feeling of setting out on a brave expedition. It's kinda satisfying to trade up into better boats and a bigger fleet so you can haul more trade cargo.

But the star of the show is the class system for your characters. Leveling up feels great because you're progressing through this tree and long-term investing characters into certain skill paths. But once you have multiple classes learned, you can mix and match all the skills to create these delicious hybrids. I was ready to dump hundreds of hours into min-maxing all of my characters.

Unfortunately, the combat is fairly easy and the game doesn't seem to want to admit that land combat is its biggest strength. There just isn't much to explore on land - you'll end up fighting in just 3 or 4 different area types overall. Naval combat isn't great.

If you like tactical strategy RPGs, this is worth trying out. But it did leave me unsatisfied.

if you immerse yourself into this game -- and i mean total submersion, an unwavering commitment to efficient, effective cookie clicking -- you will come face-to-face with one of the primordial elements of Game. contained herein is the purest distillation of the Skinner box, that most animalistic, Pavlovian instinct buried inside each of us that lights up our synapses every time the number gets bigger. your eyes will reach superhuman attenuation to the slow pseudorandom fade-in of each precious Golden Cookie. you will turn the wiki upside down in a ravenous hunt for the power of cookie knowledge. you will experience billions of years of hunter-killer evolution bearing down on your left mouse button when you encounter your first Click Frenzy x Fever with its utterly broken, overpowered 5,439x cookie multiplier. in time, you will process all of this with the cool demeanor of a professional, unperturbed and unwavering in the quest for exponentiation.

yes, this is a profoundly stupid game, but it is no more absurd than any other game; it is simply honest in its embrace of numeric pornography

I had avoided buying this initially because I figured it was gonna be like Meatboy, where most of its sauce is spent on difficulty and punishing challenges. I picked this up after I heard someone describe this as "purely focused on movement", and I think that's accurate. It's a simple game with a lot of tiny flourishes. It's good - but not quite great.

The core gameplay loop of dodging, bobbing, and weaving is strong. The first few hours are challenging but not frustrating. You don't have to survive that long on any stage, and the timing/spacing on everything is more forgiving than you might expect - it feels just right. Each stage has its own gimmick to keep things fresh. If you don't like the gimmick, you can skip ahead and come back later. Whatever stage you spend time on, you'll be improving at the whole game since it's all about the same thing - movement and tracking. Awesome art direction and sound design keeps it pleasantly entertaining the whole way through.

What holds this back from greatness is the tuning and randomness. No stage is deterministic - which is totally fine for some stages, but quickly devolves into chaos on harder stages. It's a frustrating experience to go from one stage where you generally feel responsible for your successes and failures, to another where you're basically grinding it out until you get a nice pattern. The overall design of this game is so tight! I really wanted to dump more hours into this to set record times on every stage, but eventually decided the process would feel less like mastery and more like grinding.

There's also a missed opportunity with the abilities. They're all excellent twists on the gameplay, but most of them have significant drawbacks that make them difficult to rely on - they're slow, costly, and sometimes unpredictable. I was initially excited to unlock these and experiment, but usually found myself leaning on the basic dash since it's so reliable. And it's a good dash! I just wish I didn't have to choose between such an important movement mechanic and other more experimental options.

It's great fun and I recommend this to anyone who enjoys tight movement - you'll get 4-6 hours of proper fun. The ingredients are here for a timeless game that could eat up hundreds of hours of a perfectionist's playtime, but it needs some mechanical tuning to simplify the stages and give the player more control over their fate.

You know that feeling you get in a game when you're not sure if you're going the right way? Like when you've managed to climb up some cliff and you're not quite out of bounds but you suspect this wasn't the intended path? That slight unease and mundane mystery is most of what I felt while playing this.

It's a unique experience, mashing together memories of early 3D collectathons with the intentionally vague, sometimes off-putting aesthetics of arthouse media. It's not an exciting game, but if you've got a bit of patience, it'll tickle your brain and stir some feelings.

Thoughtful introspection into psychotherapy and tech work - recommended for anyone that's spent time in this industry and struggles with the many ethical problems around tech culture and tech work. It strongly resonated with me personally because it spoke to many of my exact circumstances, but it's unlikely to have such an impact for everyone.

The writing and voice acting are good, but the story itself is not strong - exemplified by the rather sudden and pointless endings it has to offer. It asks a lot of questions but offers no advice or answers. It's surprisingly linear for a visual novel, where I would usually expect a little more variation given the number of dialogue choices to make throughout every conversation.

Another game where the binary yes/no just doesn't fit. This is a unique experience that won't jive with many, but might be some player's favorite game.

This game simulates the experience of being a helpless creature in a dangerous jungle. It feels awkward and slippery at first, but the controls are actually quite fair - once you learn them. You'll need to understand the details of the environment and the different paths you can take to avoid danger. You'll hide in a hole and watch new creatures with fear and suspicion as you try to understand how to snatch your food or escape to your nest. This game is at its best when you're exploring new areas, tip-toeing delicately until you bumble into a predator and scramble away to safety.

Unfortunately, this experience only lasted a few hours for me. Areas are gated based on your survival success - a great mechanic for initial exploration, but terrible for backtracking, which this game has a good bit of, unfortunately. There was a lot of initial satisfaction in learning the movement, environments, and enemies, but eventually it starts to feel grindy as I struggled to move the progression forward.

The art and sound design are brilliant and the world is exciting to explore. It's worth playing, but I wasn't able to finish it.

Stunning aesthetic and conceptual achievement. Moving through living artwork at every moment. So many moments of genuine awe - breathtaking.

While the puzzles do provide an excuse to explore some mechanics of the world, it's cheap and hollow compared to the simple experience of floating through the infinite landscape. It takes you away from the world and focuses you on these annoying little gadgets. This should have been a platformer, not a puzzler. Thankfully, they're mostly easy to solve and you can keep moving unhindered most of the time. If you're stuck, don't feel bad looking up the solution - this is primarily a visual and kinesthetic experience.

I had planned on skipping this because I played the first one already, and didn't feel the need for more Ori. This looked pretty much identical. I underestimated how much fine-tuning of the fundamentals here would improve the gameplay. This elevates a game that was loveable-but-janky into perhaps the best platforming experience ever crafted. It takes the handful of ideas that made the first game work and polishes them until they shine oh-so brilliantly.

Once you have all the tools of movement at your disposal, it feels incredible to zip through the terrain at lightning speed. The controls are tight and intuitive - I rarely struggled to execute any maneuvers. The pace of learning is just right - they give you just enough time to master your current tools before adding more complexity.

It's flexible and forgiving, too. You can smoothly cancel out of nearly any animation, which gives you this incredible dexterity with a low barrier to entry. Most challenges can be accomplished using a variety of methods, allowing you to develop your own style. An extremely generous checkpoint system encourages you to fail and experiment freely without making you feel coddled.

Combat still isn't great, but it's better than before and totally passable - especially early on where enemy design is simpler and more focused on encouraging dynamic movement. Attack animations, particle effects, and hitboxes are just too loose and hard to interpret to make the combat feel anywhere near as tight as the movement. I didn't care for the bosses, and the boss races make an unfortunate reprisal. There are also unclear rules around when you can bash through enemies, which leads to a some frustrating moments in late-game battles.

But most of my time with this game went towards exploring the map and time trials. I'm dedicating an entire paragraph to the time trials because they're so fucking good. The length is perfect - each course can be easily completed in under 40 seconds, which is just long enough to feel like a satisfying journey, but not so long that it's a struggle to keep the whole course in your head. Each one teaches you how to master a new mechanic, and by the end you'll have that skill fully incorporated into your toolkit. They're easy to learn and difficult to master, all of them are finely-tuned, dynamic, and a shitload of fun.

One of the best metroidvania platformers ever made. Easily recommended to most folks.

I feel the raw creativity pouring into every square inch of this experience, and I live for that shit. It's so densely packed with moments of hilarious ingenuity. The loading screens alone are worth the price of admission, but I had a great time with the missions, the achievements, and exploring the delightful verticality of each level. The kick/gunplay feels good; fueled by the excellent sound design, it taps right into that little peanut of violence lurking at the center of my brain. The boss fights maybe not so much, but I respect the effort.

I see a lot of folks complaining about the price-to-content ratio - I say this calculus is warped. This is a unique piece of artwork, a visceral creative expression only made possible through hundreds of hours of raw labor. Many folks gladly pay $15 to see a 2-hour movie that will be forgotten in a week - for me, this was far more thrilling and memorable. Perhaps storefronts should provide some up-front info about expected playtime, but to call $10 an unfair price for any piece of art demonstrates a lack of respect for the work it takes to create great experiences. Spare indie games from this consumerist entitlement.