vehemently
A good game, with fantastic game feel, but you can really tell there was a focus on multiplayer.
Enemies tend to swarm you and bosses have tons of additional enemies. The procedural generation feels pretty pointless and actually kind of weakens the whole experience. There's also some weird imperialist undertones in the game that just left a bad taste in my mouth.
At the end of the day, through, the combat just feels good. Dodging, rolling, shooting. It's a visceral satisfaction that's hard to explain. I feel the action in my gut.
Worth checking out, especially if you have folks to play with.
Enemies tend to swarm you and bosses have tons of additional enemies. The procedural generation feels pretty pointless and actually kind of weakens the whole experience. There's also some weird imperialist undertones in the game that just left a bad taste in my mouth.
At the end of the day, through, the combat just feels good. Dodging, rolling, shooting. It's a visceral satisfaction that's hard to explain. I feel the action in my gut.
Worth checking out, especially if you have folks to play with.
Game so good it broke games discourse permanently
2013
I'm not giving this a low rating to be contrarian or whatever. Genuinely think this is a bad video game.
It starts out really strong then immediately nosedives into a corridor shooter, and soon nosedives once again as the narrative pivots to just terrible territory.
Absolutely dreadful by the end.
It starts out really strong then immediately nosedives into a corridor shooter, and soon nosedives once again as the narrative pivots to just terrible territory.
Absolutely dreadful by the end.
2015
I know that as a Super Metroid fan I'm supposed to love this game, but it just feels soulless to me. The story is pretty nonsensical and the art is pretty garish in my book. The combat is pretty damn boring, and climaxes in truly awful bosses. I can recognize the craft in many elements of this game, but I just felt totally unmoved by the end of the experience.
2018
The only masocore platformer I know of that's more than just hard.
2019
A game with an incredible world, fascinating lore, and stunning aesthetics, but where the gameplay is shy of anything worth writing home about.
2019
what a good little friend
I have very mixed feelings on this game. The art is obviously stunning, and the game feels good. But some of the level design is a bit bewildering.
It's a game about boss battles, first and foremost. Some of the boss battles feel kind of repetitive and slow. It also completely botches the final boss battle, which was a huge let down. That being said, one of the bosses, Kaunan, was absolutely phenomenal and was an absolute blast to fight. So that's something, I guess.
It's a game about boss battles, first and foremost. Some of the boss battles feel kind of repetitive and slow. It also completely botches the final boss battle, which was a huge let down. That being said, one of the bosses, Kaunan, was absolutely phenomenal and was an absolute blast to fight. So that's something, I guess.
I recognize that there is great artistry in this game, and that it is high quality, but I just never really clicked with it. As much as I adored the art style, I just never really felt sunk into the feel or world the game presented to me.
2015
I can recognize the craft here, but wow, did this game bore me to tears. Got up to the third act before I realized there was nothing up it's sleeve to excite me. It really is just not a game for me. Maybe it's for you. Who could say?
2013
Don't bother. Skip straight to Dragonfall and Hong Kong.
2015
A smart, clever game that's still not clever enough to pace itself. The puzzles get incredibly difficult incredibly fast, without enough on-boarding to guide the player.
2013
“An American tragedy. An odyssey of debt, of grief, of broken promises, of hope. A painful, melancholic fable composed of fables and more fables, spreading out and weaving in and out of itself. A dream ebbing back and forth between memory and fantasy. A plea for you to care about something.”
...This was my original review for Kentucky Route Zero. I still think it’s a good description. But on consideration, I feel as though I need to be bold and say it: Kentucky Route Zero is not only one of my favorite games, but one of my favorite things ever made.
This is not an assessment of quality. I am not telling you what to feel. I am telling you how I feel. And Kentucky Route Zero makes me feel a way.
I specifically say “Favorite Thing”, because Kentucky Route Zero doesn’t affect me like a game. When I think about many of my favorite games, I often think of them as games. They are full of mechanics, of challenges, of systems. That’s certainly not all games are, and games can be many things, but in the capacity that they affect me, enchant me, or fascinate me, it is often within this vague category of “game”. But Kentucky Route Zero is different. To call it “my favorite game” and leave it at that misses something. It’s certainly a game, but it doesn’t make me feel the way games usually make me feel. First and foremost, Kentucky Route Zero is a story. It’s unlike most. The main body of this story is a game, but it’s also a multimedia saga. There’s something quintessential permeating my experience of Kentucky Route Zero that transcends that category.
It is a hauntological melancholy. It conjures a world more like a memory than a reality. Kentucky Route Zero tells the story of people who seem familiar but you’ve never met, with jobs that were never really secure, in situations that could never happen, in a version of Kentucky that has never existed. Magical realism constructs a vision not of reality, but of memory, of a sensate fabric that you swear could have been but never was. Americana is a mythic entity made visible, standing in front of me within Kentucky Route Zero, and it’s on its last breaths.
It’s a hopeful story. That doesn’t mean it’s happy. The world around you is a wasteland. Everyone is dying. Everyone is suffering. Everything is weighed down by debt, pulled deep down into pools of darkness. To live is to work, work, and die. Except… there are other ways to live. There always have been. Should we move on? I think the answer is clear. But that doesn’t make the pain go away. We have to be willing to feel both grief and hope in the same breath.
All of its blemishes are dismissable. Fleeting problems with UI, incidentally clunky writing, weird mechanical tangents, overwhelming scope, these melt away when I take a moment to remember what Kentucky Route Zero is and feel the frisson travel up and down my skin. I'm trying to not be too longwinded here, but it's hard. I can't get into specifics. So I wax poetic instead. I could write thousands of words on every minute I spent with Kentucky Route Zero and still feel like I was forgetting to say something. It is a multitudinous masterpiece, refracting and reflecting endlessly, timelessly, quietly.
Kentucky Route Zero is one of my favorite things.
...This was my original review for Kentucky Route Zero. I still think it’s a good description. But on consideration, I feel as though I need to be bold and say it: Kentucky Route Zero is not only one of my favorite games, but one of my favorite things ever made.
This is not an assessment of quality. I am not telling you what to feel. I am telling you how I feel. And Kentucky Route Zero makes me feel a way.
I specifically say “Favorite Thing”, because Kentucky Route Zero doesn’t affect me like a game. When I think about many of my favorite games, I often think of them as games. They are full of mechanics, of challenges, of systems. That’s certainly not all games are, and games can be many things, but in the capacity that they affect me, enchant me, or fascinate me, it is often within this vague category of “game”. But Kentucky Route Zero is different. To call it “my favorite game” and leave it at that misses something. It’s certainly a game, but it doesn’t make me feel the way games usually make me feel. First and foremost, Kentucky Route Zero is a story. It’s unlike most. The main body of this story is a game, but it’s also a multimedia saga. There’s something quintessential permeating my experience of Kentucky Route Zero that transcends that category.
It is a hauntological melancholy. It conjures a world more like a memory than a reality. Kentucky Route Zero tells the story of people who seem familiar but you’ve never met, with jobs that were never really secure, in situations that could never happen, in a version of Kentucky that has never existed. Magical realism constructs a vision not of reality, but of memory, of a sensate fabric that you swear could have been but never was. Americana is a mythic entity made visible, standing in front of me within Kentucky Route Zero, and it’s on its last breaths.
It’s a hopeful story. That doesn’t mean it’s happy. The world around you is a wasteland. Everyone is dying. Everyone is suffering. Everything is weighed down by debt, pulled deep down into pools of darkness. To live is to work, work, and die. Except… there are other ways to live. There always have been. Should we move on? I think the answer is clear. But that doesn’t make the pain go away. We have to be willing to feel both grief and hope in the same breath.
All of its blemishes are dismissable. Fleeting problems with UI, incidentally clunky writing, weird mechanical tangents, overwhelming scope, these melt away when I take a moment to remember what Kentucky Route Zero is and feel the frisson travel up and down my skin. I'm trying to not be too longwinded here, but it's hard. I can't get into specifics. So I wax poetic instead. I could write thousands of words on every minute I spent with Kentucky Route Zero and still feel like I was forgetting to say something. It is a multitudinous masterpiece, refracting and reflecting endlessly, timelessly, quietly.
Kentucky Route Zero is one of my favorite things.
2017
Full of lovely art and neat ideas. So... why on Earth did they make it a Rogue-like? Doesn't fit the loop of the game at all.
2018
A beautiful game with a lot of great mechanics that's just... missing something. I enjoy playing it, but don't come back to it often. Combined with a few design weaknesses, it just doesn't really sing like it could. It's just not quite there. Quite fun regardless! Worth playing if you love these kinds of games like me!