wormrot
18 reviews liked by wormrot
Knuckle Sandwich
2023
I'm not sure what to think about this game.
The Earthbound/WarioWare/Mario RPG inspirations are apparent, and I was a fan of the combat at first, but it became more and more frustrating as time went on.
The concept of fighting and countering attacks using WarioWare-like minigames seemed brilliant on paper, but most minigames grew old fast. Not to mention that I was in a constant flux of feeling under-powered and over-powered at the same time. Fights tend to drag on a bit too long for comfort, due to the often low damage output from the player characters, the length of certain minigames, and most, if not all enemies act more than once per turn. Moreover, the minigames you play have multiple difficulty levels, which may be possible to beat unscathed at first, but become nigh-impossible to beat later on. This in combination with the fact that when you eventually fail these minigames and get hit by an attack, they hit like a goddamn truck, which further cements the feeling of constantly being weak. This issue can't be remediated by grinding either, since all enemies are static encounters that never respawn.
I did mention feeling over-powered too, right? Yeah, sometimes. The circle attack which is randomly selected among 3 normal attacks is more overpowered than it should be as pulling off a ridiculously high combo is way too easy. This trivialized the use of damaging skills entirely as these seldom reached the same damage output as the circle attack. There's also a super move that needs to be charged up passively that deals ridiculous amounts of damage. One use of the super move kills most enemies instantly and shaves off a great chunk of health off most bosses. The only downside is that it takes a really long time for it to charge. This becomes a problem during boss fights as it's seemingly expected that you're gonna use it at least once during the fight, due to the massive HP pools that they are given. This means that boss fights turn into a waiting game where you shave off what little HP you can while trying to stay alive until you can use your super.
So, I'm obviously not too happy with the combat, but what about the rest of the game? I'll start off with what I liked, and that would be the music and aesthetics. It has the general weird and quirky Earthbound feel, and I'm all for it. However, one quirk from Earthbound which shouldn't have been brought over is the limited inventory. It kind of worked in Earthbound without too much of a hassle, but it's just absurd here. I never bought anything in shops because I knew that I'd just have to throw whatever I bought away later to make room for something more important.
What about the story? I wish I could tell you about it, but it was such a mess that most of it slipped my mind. There's something something conspiracy, something something evil gang, something something solving the mystery, but I couldn't tell you more than that. All in all, it didn't strike a cord with me.
This was one of my most anticipated releases of 2023, and I'm sad to say that I almost quit on it halfway through out of frustration and lack of engagement. There's so much potential and charm here, but a lot of it falls flat on its ass.
The Earthbound/WarioWare/Mario RPG inspirations are apparent, and I was a fan of the combat at first, but it became more and more frustrating as time went on.
The concept of fighting and countering attacks using WarioWare-like minigames seemed brilliant on paper, but most minigames grew old fast. Not to mention that I was in a constant flux of feeling under-powered and over-powered at the same time. Fights tend to drag on a bit too long for comfort, due to the often low damage output from the player characters, the length of certain minigames, and most, if not all enemies act more than once per turn. Moreover, the minigames you play have multiple difficulty levels, which may be possible to beat unscathed at first, but become nigh-impossible to beat later on. This in combination with the fact that when you eventually fail these minigames and get hit by an attack, they hit like a goddamn truck, which further cements the feeling of constantly being weak. This issue can't be remediated by grinding either, since all enemies are static encounters that never respawn.
I did mention feeling over-powered too, right? Yeah, sometimes. The circle attack which is randomly selected among 3 normal attacks is more overpowered than it should be as pulling off a ridiculously high combo is way too easy. This trivialized the use of damaging skills entirely as these seldom reached the same damage output as the circle attack. There's also a super move that needs to be charged up passively that deals ridiculous amounts of damage. One use of the super move kills most enemies instantly and shaves off a great chunk of health off most bosses. The only downside is that it takes a really long time for it to charge. This becomes a problem during boss fights as it's seemingly expected that you're gonna use it at least once during the fight, due to the massive HP pools that they are given. This means that boss fights turn into a waiting game where you shave off what little HP you can while trying to stay alive until you can use your super.
So, I'm obviously not too happy with the combat, but what about the rest of the game? I'll start off with what I liked, and that would be the music and aesthetics. It has the general weird and quirky Earthbound feel, and I'm all for it. However, one quirk from Earthbound which shouldn't have been brought over is the limited inventory. It kind of worked in Earthbound without too much of a hassle, but it's just absurd here. I never bought anything in shops because I knew that I'd just have to throw whatever I bought away later to make room for something more important.
What about the story? I wish I could tell you about it, but it was such a mess that most of it slipped my mind. There's something something conspiracy, something something evil gang, something something solving the mystery, but I couldn't tell you more than that. All in all, it didn't strike a cord with me.
This was one of my most anticipated releases of 2023, and I'm sad to say that I almost quit on it halfway through out of frustration and lack of engagement. There's so much potential and charm here, but a lot of it falls flat on its ass.
Knuckle Sandwich
2023
This review contains spoilers
this is the most difficult negative review i've given.
it's so hard to say that i think this game is kind of mediocre, because so, so, SO much of it is worth your time that i think its worth people looking at regardless of quality.
i'll try to be clinical about this one, but first ill address the issue i have with the game that is sort of the root of many disappointments i have with the game: the hook.
it's not fair. i know it's not fair to judge a game for what it isn't rather than what it is. i know i wanted the game to be about you killing people and serving them as hamburgers because that's what the end of the demo implied. i know i wanted to see a story that was ABOUT keeping these horrible things from your three co-workers and the guilt that tore you up inside over it. the warioware sensibilities themselves would be almost a cruel mockery of what you did. the world stays twee and quirky despite the horrible thing you did.
but it wasn't about that. frankly, i don't think it was about anything.
right, clinical.
This game is exceptional in quite a few areas, and nearly all of them involve the game's audiovisual presentation.
The soundtrack, done by Andy himself along with nelward, the Gyms, Joe Aquiare, Barchboi and lizzy are all fantastic. Despite the wide range of composers, none of them ever felt out of place in any given situation. They all fit the surreal and absurd world of Knuckle Sandwich like a glove.
The visual style, the graphics, everything is presented with such candy-coated sweetness that even remembering some of the game's more questionable sections, I also remember how visually captivating the game's battle UI is, or the silly clay animations whenever you find a goblin, or even just the random, rainbow colored NPCs that speak gibberish to you. So much of this game is so, so wonderful to experience in the moment.
The game's combat centers around microgames, timed attacks, and timed dodges. I think the game succeeds at approximately 85-90% of the microgames, while the attack and dodge system never felt wrong to me. The game continually spices up the basic attack command through three different variants, all of which felt very satisfying to pull off (I got a x28 combo with the circle attack. Thank you, Hatsune Miku, for training me). The timed dodges, too, never felt non-intuitive. The moment I figured out an enemy's tell, I could always dodge their basic attacks.
ah
i really don't want to keep going
i really wish i could just stop and leave it there
it'd be so easy
but
There are two pillars of problems with Knuckle Sandwich as a game. That being its game design and its story.
Knuckle Sandwich's game design issues are cumulative in nature. A lot of small issues coagulating into major problems that make the gamefeel incredibly unusual. I'll list them here:
- Stat values feel almost entirely meaningless with the exception of your speed. This is the root of many of the game's issues regarding gamefeel.
- Buffing and debuffing skills, for the very few that exist, barely make any impact as a result.
- There is no skill that allows you to lower an enemy's Defense. This is a problem because of a point I will address later.
- There is no consistent curve of enemy Defense values, which means your attacks will rapidly oscillate between doing 20 damage to one enemy and then doing 1 damage to the next.
- There are never any shops when you actually need shops. I accumulated vast amounts of Fortune Rocks and rarely ever used them.
- The inventory system is genuinely abysmal. Each party member is given eight slots. The items that take up space include consumables, equipment, and key items.
- Armor and Weapons rarely make a significant difference in combat.
- Boss fights are more or less scripted encounters where the boss exhausts all of their dialogue and either reduces their Defense value drastically, or they remove the RPG elements entirely and just have the fight be a completely different game.
- Even in boss fights without these scripted elements, they are oftentimes meat sponges that will take upwards to fifteen turns to beat. This, to me, is unacceptable.
- The damage dealt by your special moves is oftentimes worse than your standard attack. Even if you perfect the microgame, you can easily outdo the damage without the EP cost by doing your timed attack.
- The defend action only recovers a single point of EP. This is completely worthless and only serves to waste an action.
- The only healing skill in the game heals 11 HP. This is almost completely worthless.
- Once you acquire all three party members, you cannot swap them out in combat if your party member has fallen. This, to me, defeats the point of that system.
- I only got one skill that afflicts a status effect. It never afflicted it once.
- Status effects feel meaningless when applied to enemies.
All of these issues are either the root of an issue or are the resulting issue. Even the novelty of new microgames with every fight wears thin when every fight feels at least two turns too long and there are so few skills I can use to meaningfully accelerate the rate of combat. It's hard to prepare for any given fight because there's so few equipment, and what equipment does exist barely makes a difference. I don't even want to use skills because the damage they do barely means anything, and there's a decent chance that doing high damage barely even matters in a boss fight anyways.
Perhaps it is a commentary on my lack of agency in the story. Let's talk about what the story actually is.
The game's hook, as I mentioned before, is perfect. After arriving in Bright City and going on a gameshow in an attempt to find a job, you are completely unqualified for anything and are forced to go elsewhere. You end up going to Gorilla Burger, a terrible fast food joint. At the end of the night, you're attacked by a knife-wielding gangster while taking out the trash, and you end up killing him. After the game's surrealism, this was a lurch. Even more of a lurch is when your boss witnesses a murder, and decides the best course of action is to cook him. It ends with him patenting this horrific act of cannibalism as the world's first...
Knuckle Sandwich.
It's flawless. It's immaculate. It doesn't come up again until the last hour of the game.
The actual story is that Bright City is in danger due to some sort of Anomaly. It's causing the world to go out of whack, and you need to figure out who's causing it. The problem is that a lot of people think that you're the Anomaly, and are trying to get rid of you as a result. There's also a group called the Brightfangs who have their own agenda. It's fairly self-evident early on that they are extremists working towards an ultimately positive end, and the people you and your co-workers ostensibly trust are actually not very trustworthy.
Oh, right. You deliver some food to a stupid billionaire named Mr. Apricot. He's useless, but you assume he's just some guy. There's also someone named Xander. He's a justice cop. He dies and was a stooge of the real villain, the gameshow host. He's the twist villain who is pulling the strings. Except it's actually his assistant, Prima. She's the real twist villain.
Throughout being pulled and crammed through all of these situations, there's barely a sense of friendship forming between you and your party members. This isn't an RPG where you get a character sidequest with your three co-workers that gives you some insight into them. They just exist alongside you. When the game killed them after revealing the second twist villain, I didn't feel much of anything. It was surprising, I suppose, but I knew they wouldn't commit to it. They didn't.
(Edit: There are apparently secret scenes that you get through means that are not intuitive to me and involve friendship variables. I saw the scene with Echo on YouTube. It was cute. It probably would've helped me feel a bit more for the characters. I wish they weren't so obscured.)
The point I'm getting at here is that none of this means anything. Nothing is ever developed to a satisfying conclusion. The final conclusion to the game is going back in time before the game began in order to rectify you killing the guy at the beginning and killing the Anomaly, the Tiny Baby, before it can do anything (also, the boss at Gorilla Burger had an arrangement with the gangster to kill employees and turn them into food beforehand. So it's not like the "world's first knuckle sandwich" was actually the world's first. He's been doing this the whole time to feed those rainbow colored NPCs. They're mutants, by the way. That was an okay twist that didn't amount to much).
Busdriver (the guy who occasionally pops in and goes "wow that's crazy anyways im working on goblins right now and spirit cells) helps you out at the very end and apologizes to you for ruining your life and dragging you through all of this. You're finally given the choice to either forgive him or not to forgive him, and then you can choose whether to stay in Bright City or work as his partner.
None of this means anything.
Your lack of agency in the plot is felt throughout the game in ways I would consider unintentional, and it is never directly addressed until the last minute of the game. I desperately wanted a moment where the protagonist acknowledged the ridiculousness of the plot and being shunted from place to place without any rhyme or reason. Even a brief moment of rebellion would've made it clear what a nightmare the experience was and would've given it more weight. The protagonist never did.
If the game was about overconsumption and capitalism, it failed at that, too. There was a brief flicker of hope when Prima, the second twist villain, casually asked for backup after the Anomaly escapes, and your party member asks "who's responsible for this," which she's been trying to figure out the entire game. Prima, at first, addresses the fact that there is no "one person" responsible for this. You think for a moment that she's pointing out that there is no "final boss of capitalism." It's a system. That might've saved it for me. But no. Prima is responsible for this. It's just her. She's the CEO of Capitalism, actually.
I'm still thinking about the hook.
Maybe it's actually fair to criticize the game for that hook. It had gold on a platter, showed it to me, then tossed it out in favor of semi-coherent surreal shenanigans. It's less of a "criticizing the game for what it isn't." That's more akin to watching a horror film and complaining it isn't funny enough. The film is about horror. Unless it makes itself known as a horror comedy, you can't really get mad that it isn't funny.
But attempting to be funny and failing in a horror movie would be perfectly reasonable grounds for criticizing it for that, in the same way introducing horror into a comedic game can be done poorly. If the horror is barely developed, either failing to be integrated into the game's comedy or failing to transform into its own, terrifying monster, then it fails.
You shouldn't have introduced it to begin with.
well
im gonna lie down. this was miserable. it's hard to convey how sullen this whole experience has made me.
sorry, andrew brophy
maybe next time
it's so hard to say that i think this game is kind of mediocre, because so, so, SO much of it is worth your time that i think its worth people looking at regardless of quality.
i'll try to be clinical about this one, but first ill address the issue i have with the game that is sort of the root of many disappointments i have with the game: the hook.
it's not fair. i know it's not fair to judge a game for what it isn't rather than what it is. i know i wanted the game to be about you killing people and serving them as hamburgers because that's what the end of the demo implied. i know i wanted to see a story that was ABOUT keeping these horrible things from your three co-workers and the guilt that tore you up inside over it. the warioware sensibilities themselves would be almost a cruel mockery of what you did. the world stays twee and quirky despite the horrible thing you did.
but it wasn't about that. frankly, i don't think it was about anything.
right, clinical.
This game is exceptional in quite a few areas, and nearly all of them involve the game's audiovisual presentation.
The soundtrack, done by Andy himself along with nelward, the Gyms, Joe Aquiare, Barchboi and lizzy are all fantastic. Despite the wide range of composers, none of them ever felt out of place in any given situation. They all fit the surreal and absurd world of Knuckle Sandwich like a glove.
The visual style, the graphics, everything is presented with such candy-coated sweetness that even remembering some of the game's more questionable sections, I also remember how visually captivating the game's battle UI is, or the silly clay animations whenever you find a goblin, or even just the random, rainbow colored NPCs that speak gibberish to you. So much of this game is so, so wonderful to experience in the moment.
The game's combat centers around microgames, timed attacks, and timed dodges. I think the game succeeds at approximately 85-90% of the microgames, while the attack and dodge system never felt wrong to me. The game continually spices up the basic attack command through three different variants, all of which felt very satisfying to pull off (I got a x28 combo with the circle attack. Thank you, Hatsune Miku, for training me). The timed dodges, too, never felt non-intuitive. The moment I figured out an enemy's tell, I could always dodge their basic attacks.
ah
i really don't want to keep going
i really wish i could just stop and leave it there
it'd be so easy
but
There are two pillars of problems with Knuckle Sandwich as a game. That being its game design and its story.
Knuckle Sandwich's game design issues are cumulative in nature. A lot of small issues coagulating into major problems that make the gamefeel incredibly unusual. I'll list them here:
- Stat values feel almost entirely meaningless with the exception of your speed. This is the root of many of the game's issues regarding gamefeel.
- Buffing and debuffing skills, for the very few that exist, barely make any impact as a result.
- There is no skill that allows you to lower an enemy's Defense. This is a problem because of a point I will address later.
- There is no consistent curve of enemy Defense values, which means your attacks will rapidly oscillate between doing 20 damage to one enemy and then doing 1 damage to the next.
- There are never any shops when you actually need shops. I accumulated vast amounts of Fortune Rocks and rarely ever used them.
- The inventory system is genuinely abysmal. Each party member is given eight slots. The items that take up space include consumables, equipment, and key items.
- Armor and Weapons rarely make a significant difference in combat.
- Boss fights are more or less scripted encounters where the boss exhausts all of their dialogue and either reduces their Defense value drastically, or they remove the RPG elements entirely and just have the fight be a completely different game.
- Even in boss fights without these scripted elements, they are oftentimes meat sponges that will take upwards to fifteen turns to beat. This, to me, is unacceptable.
- The damage dealt by your special moves is oftentimes worse than your standard attack. Even if you perfect the microgame, you can easily outdo the damage without the EP cost by doing your timed attack.
- The defend action only recovers a single point of EP. This is completely worthless and only serves to waste an action.
- The only healing skill in the game heals 11 HP. This is almost completely worthless.
- Once you acquire all three party members, you cannot swap them out in combat if your party member has fallen. This, to me, defeats the point of that system.
- I only got one skill that afflicts a status effect. It never afflicted it once.
- Status effects feel meaningless when applied to enemies.
All of these issues are either the root of an issue or are the resulting issue. Even the novelty of new microgames with every fight wears thin when every fight feels at least two turns too long and there are so few skills I can use to meaningfully accelerate the rate of combat. It's hard to prepare for any given fight because there's so few equipment, and what equipment does exist barely makes a difference. I don't even want to use skills because the damage they do barely means anything, and there's a decent chance that doing high damage barely even matters in a boss fight anyways.
Perhaps it is a commentary on my lack of agency in the story. Let's talk about what the story actually is.
The game's hook, as I mentioned before, is perfect. After arriving in Bright City and going on a gameshow in an attempt to find a job, you are completely unqualified for anything and are forced to go elsewhere. You end up going to Gorilla Burger, a terrible fast food joint. At the end of the night, you're attacked by a knife-wielding gangster while taking out the trash, and you end up killing him. After the game's surrealism, this was a lurch. Even more of a lurch is when your boss witnesses a murder, and decides the best course of action is to cook him. It ends with him patenting this horrific act of cannibalism as the world's first...
Knuckle Sandwich.
It's flawless. It's immaculate. It doesn't come up again until the last hour of the game.
The actual story is that Bright City is in danger due to some sort of Anomaly. It's causing the world to go out of whack, and you need to figure out who's causing it. The problem is that a lot of people think that you're the Anomaly, and are trying to get rid of you as a result. There's also a group called the Brightfangs who have their own agenda. It's fairly self-evident early on that they are extremists working towards an ultimately positive end, and the people you and your co-workers ostensibly trust are actually not very trustworthy.
Oh, right. You deliver some food to a stupid billionaire named Mr. Apricot. He's useless, but you assume he's just some guy. There's also someone named Xander. He's a justice cop. He dies and was a stooge of the real villain, the gameshow host. He's the twist villain who is pulling the strings. Except it's actually his assistant, Prima. She's the real twist villain.
Throughout being pulled and crammed through all of these situations, there's barely a sense of friendship forming between you and your party members. This isn't an RPG where you get a character sidequest with your three co-workers that gives you some insight into them. They just exist alongside you. When the game killed them after revealing the second twist villain, I didn't feel much of anything. It was surprising, I suppose, but I knew they wouldn't commit to it. They didn't.
(Edit: There are apparently secret scenes that you get through means that are not intuitive to me and involve friendship variables. I saw the scene with Echo on YouTube. It was cute. It probably would've helped me feel a bit more for the characters. I wish they weren't so obscured.)
The point I'm getting at here is that none of this means anything. Nothing is ever developed to a satisfying conclusion. The final conclusion to the game is going back in time before the game began in order to rectify you killing the guy at the beginning and killing the Anomaly, the Tiny Baby, before it can do anything (also, the boss at Gorilla Burger had an arrangement with the gangster to kill employees and turn them into food beforehand. So it's not like the "world's first knuckle sandwich" was actually the world's first. He's been doing this the whole time to feed those rainbow colored NPCs. They're mutants, by the way. That was an okay twist that didn't amount to much).
Busdriver (the guy who occasionally pops in and goes "wow that's crazy anyways im working on goblins right now and spirit cells) helps you out at the very end and apologizes to you for ruining your life and dragging you through all of this. You're finally given the choice to either forgive him or not to forgive him, and then you can choose whether to stay in Bright City or work as his partner.
None of this means anything.
Your lack of agency in the plot is felt throughout the game in ways I would consider unintentional, and it is never directly addressed until the last minute of the game. I desperately wanted a moment where the protagonist acknowledged the ridiculousness of the plot and being shunted from place to place without any rhyme or reason. Even a brief moment of rebellion would've made it clear what a nightmare the experience was and would've given it more weight. The protagonist never did.
If the game was about overconsumption and capitalism, it failed at that, too. There was a brief flicker of hope when Prima, the second twist villain, casually asked for backup after the Anomaly escapes, and your party member asks "who's responsible for this," which she's been trying to figure out the entire game. Prima, at first, addresses the fact that there is no "one person" responsible for this. You think for a moment that she's pointing out that there is no "final boss of capitalism." It's a system. That might've saved it for me. But no. Prima is responsible for this. It's just her. She's the CEO of Capitalism, actually.
I'm still thinking about the hook.
Maybe it's actually fair to criticize the game for that hook. It had gold on a platter, showed it to me, then tossed it out in favor of semi-coherent surreal shenanigans. It's less of a "criticizing the game for what it isn't." That's more akin to watching a horror film and complaining it isn't funny enough. The film is about horror. Unless it makes itself known as a horror comedy, you can't really get mad that it isn't funny.
But attempting to be funny and failing in a horror movie would be perfectly reasonable grounds for criticizing it for that, in the same way introducing horror into a comedic game can be done poorly. If the horror is barely developed, either failing to be integrated into the game's comedy or failing to transform into its own, terrifying monster, then it fails.
You shouldn't have introduced it to begin with.
well
im gonna lie down. this was miserable. it's hard to convey how sullen this whole experience has made me.
sorry, andrew brophy
maybe next time
Knuckle Sandwich
2023
Knuckle Sandwich is REALLY close to being an absolutely perfectly uneven game. If it pulled one or two fewer punches near the end I'd totally forgive it for how much the plot meanders from one rushed plot thread to another rushed plot thread, hell I'd even see the game's sometimes clumsy sometimes downright abrasive design as a plus not a minus. It's like, already in the range of simulating the confusing absurd agency-killing sometimes brutal mundanities of service industry life, if it could just take that laaaast stretch over the whole thing would fit like a glove and I'd call it a miracle game whose disparate pieces somehow manage to line up to a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Christ, it's not like the game doesn't deserve it, every bit of it is brimming with this loving attention to detail, all these new and fun and lively bits that just keep winning you back in every time the game feels like it's daring you to lose interest in it outright. I want for nothing else than for Knuckle Sandwich to be the kinda sleeper hit that filters everyone but the Realest Kinosseurs of true Ludonarrative Mastery.
... but the future refused to change.
... but the future refused to change.
Knuckle Sandwich
2023
Was waiting for this game for ages and I was pretty excited based on the demo and music. I want to like it a lot, but unfortunately it just didn't hit the expectations I had for it. I would still say it's exactly what I expected it to be, but the execution of everything but its presentation just feels off. It's very obvious what the game is taking inspiration from but the way it emulates them just isn't on the same level.
I'm no expert on storytelling but the game puts so much emphasis on being weird at the start that I feel like it skips over some steps in character and world building. As a result, some later parts of the game fell flat for me. There are opportunities to explore the map beyond the story bits, but I had zero drive to do so.
The combat is fun but I fear some of the fights go on for a bit too long. A lot of the special skills felt only marginally better than just doing the normal attack mini-games. Stat changes didn't feel impactful at all and offensive consumables never felt useful. Normal attacks get one of three seemingly random forms, but the circle one always felt like the weakest for the most effort.
The inventory is limited in this game which is BY FAR the worst part. Maybe the intent is for me to be using consumables more regularly, but it never felt necessary so my limited slots we're full 90% of the time. You get enough items that I kept finding myself having to decide which one I'm going to throw out. There are times where you find an item and you don't even know what it does, but you have to decide if you want to toss something for it or not. Even worse, sometimes you have to drop an item to pick up a necessary key item. There is an item storage system, but they're too few and far between even after a patch meant to fix it.
Didn't dislike the game, but I wish it resonated with me a bit more. As a full work of art it's really amazing, but the game itself is just okay. Music is really incredible though, and that'll stick with me.
I'm no expert on storytelling but the game puts so much emphasis on being weird at the start that I feel like it skips over some steps in character and world building. As a result, some later parts of the game fell flat for me. There are opportunities to explore the map beyond the story bits, but I had zero drive to do so.
The combat is fun but I fear some of the fights go on for a bit too long. A lot of the special skills felt only marginally better than just doing the normal attack mini-games. Stat changes didn't feel impactful at all and offensive consumables never felt useful. Normal attacks get one of three seemingly random forms, but the circle one always felt like the weakest for the most effort.
The inventory is limited in this game which is BY FAR the worst part. Maybe the intent is for me to be using consumables more regularly, but it never felt necessary so my limited slots we're full 90% of the time. You get enough items that I kept finding myself having to decide which one I'm going to throw out. There are times where you find an item and you don't even know what it does, but you have to decide if you want to toss something for it or not. Even worse, sometimes you have to drop an item to pick up a necessary key item. There is an item storage system, but they're too few and far between even after a patch meant to fix it.
Didn't dislike the game, but I wish it resonated with me a bit more. As a full work of art it's really amazing, but the game itself is just okay. Music is really incredible though, and that'll stick with me.
Videoverse
2023
Really liked this. A well made game about browsing an early 2000s gaming forum that’s close to being shut down, getting to know the users there through their posts and talking with them over DMs while trying to make the community a better place. Primarily though it’s focused on a user named Vivi, an artist you gradually get to know and bond with as the game progresses
The presentation and writing really does a great job making the Shark console and Videoverse feel convincing, and the focus on how positively affecting these awkward but sincere online friendships can be was sweet
The presentation and writing really does a great job making the Shark console and Videoverse feel convincing, and the focus on how positively affecting these awkward but sincere online friendships can be was sweet
Heart of the Killer
2023
First game to evoke the backrooms without being corny as hell good job game.
Pikmin 4
2023
I have a dream that one day my children will not be judged based off the color of their leaves but the quality of their dandori
Eyes of the Killer
2021
Stephen Gillmurphy does some of the coolest fixed camera angles this side of 90s/2000s survival horror.
Which reminds me that he uploaded art of BB as heather mason to his gamejolt page. it rocks. https://gamejolt.com/p/silent-kill-prutzkje
Which reminds me that he uploaded art of BB as heather mason to his gamejolt page. it rocks. https://gamejolt.com/p/silent-kill-prutzkje
It is an beautiful hazy morning and you are tasked with stealing the saxophone of Caetano Grosso, a former saxophone player and current owner of a pizzeria in the corner of July Avenue and Yam Street. To gain his trust you must infiltrate inside the pizzeria and while doing that you might even learn answers to big questions like should I add chocolate to pizza and what does grey matter taste like?
Oh and there is also this shadowy police force so its not all fun and pizza making.
Oh and there is also this shadowy police force so its not all fun and pizza making.
Final Fantasy XVI
2023
I finally got my sequel to Asura's Wrath but this time with narrative that throws some emotional punches as well.
For starters this is visually spectacular and I just gotta praise these character models. There are so many of them and all of the main characters with their Eikons look so stupidly cool and unique. Same goes for the soundtrack which is great especially with its epic battle themes.
Second strong point were the fights against Eikons which were always spectacles and they reminded me of Asura's Wrath which is always a positive in my eyes. The combat itself was enjoyable enough but I did wish it was more challenging. I found most of the enjoyment out of the Eikon system and trying to minimize downtime and maximize damage output. It felt more like a puzzle game at times when you add trying to stagger enemies as quickly as possible.
Now this is the stuff I don't really understand why it is even in this game at all and that is the crafting and shops. There is so much material and gold everywhere that you would think there is something to actually do with those but no, there is absolutely nothing to spend your materials or money. Only thing you can craft is items that increase either your defense or damage by couple percentage and I never felt the impact of any of these items. And shops sell these same items and potions. Now this also has the side-effect of making the sidequests feel almost pointless unless you are there for the lore as none of the rewards really matter. And as these sidequests lack any kind of imagination on their design I wish I had just skipped all of them except the ones with the plus sign.
For starters this is visually spectacular and I just gotta praise these character models. There are so many of them and all of the main characters with their Eikons look so stupidly cool and unique. Same goes for the soundtrack which is great especially with its epic battle themes.
Second strong point were the fights against Eikons which were always spectacles and they reminded me of Asura's Wrath which is always a positive in my eyes. The combat itself was enjoyable enough but I did wish it was more challenging. I found most of the enjoyment out of the Eikon system and trying to minimize downtime and maximize damage output. It felt more like a puzzle game at times when you add trying to stagger enemies as quickly as possible.
Now this is the stuff I don't really understand why it is even in this game at all and that is the crafting and shops. There is so much material and gold everywhere that you would think there is something to actually do with those but no, there is absolutely nothing to spend your materials or money. Only thing you can craft is items that increase either your defense or damage by couple percentage and I never felt the impact of any of these items. And shops sell these same items and potions. Now this also has the side-effect of making the sidequests feel almost pointless unless you are there for the lore as none of the rewards really matter. And as these sidequests lack any kind of imagination on their design I wish I had just skipped all of them except the ones with the plus sign.