blabberblah

Another Factorio clone. It's decent fun but I got bored after a while.

Surprised the anime aesthetic didn't scare him off from this one. If anyone likes this game, the devs previously made a Shin Megami Tensei metroid-style game. It's freeware, I think it was a promo for Strange Journey's release or something. It's quite good. Think it was called Synchronicity, been a long time since I played it.

The gameplay is fun but development has been excruciatingly slow for a long time. Wish it had better custom map support, the community is active enough that it'd have plenty of content.

Solid Factorio clone. I like the visuals and the flying to different planets, but I can't help but feel like you might as well just play more Factorio instead.

The gameplay itself is fun in a vacuum, but god the awful performance makes it hard to enjoy it.

It's derivative of Journey, which some might be fine with given it shares some staff with that game, but it does make it ring a little hollower if you've played Journey before. That said, it's gorgeous and mellow, it's a good game to recommend to people who are usually more into adventure games and slower paced fare in general. I have to say though, there are moments that fill me with intense pit-of-your-stomach dread that I don't think were intended to do so, particularly the bit with the blue whales and the first time you are out in the open ocean and you can't see the sea floor without diving for a couple minutes.

Excellent game, can't recommend it highly enough. But it's a game very easily ruined with spoilers, so if you have any interest in it, ignore everything anyone has to say about it and just play it as soon as you can to avoid accidentally seeing spoilers.

Found it pretty janky, very first thing I did in the game was hit a wall with the axe and I was greeted with the damage decals z-fighting. Also, a Wolf3D engine game should not have framerate issues. The repetitive tiles made it a pain in the ass to navigate the levels. I didn't really like wolf3D in the first place, and this game has the same problems.

It's a very solid tactical RPG but everything outside of the gameplay is totally flavorless. The characters, the world, the art, it's all totally forgettable. Really solid gameplay and encounter design though.

I've had a fantastic time with this game but I'm not sure I could really recommend it to anyone. The kingdom management is kind of barebones, the characters generally aren't that interesting (though I like Harrim), and it's extremely slow paced (my campaign took about 120 hours). More than anything else, it's just a really solid adaptation of Pathfinder, I'm glad the studio is making more Pathfinder RPGs because they have a great foundation to work with here. Surprisingly well balanced too for the most part, there was only one segment I thought was kind of bullshit, when you face the troll and kobold kings (though I suppose it was just an attempt to teach you that you really need to focus on applying buffs).

Except it absolutely is relevant. You're out of your mind, there's nothing inherently faster or even different about hitting a mouse button vs hitting a keyboard button, the only rational reason to want mouse support in a game is if the MOVEMENT of the mouse could be bound to something useful in the gameplay. Is it that much of a struggle for you to spend ten minutes adjusting to a different control scheme than what you're used to? The idea that "it has tangential influence from souls games, therefore this 2D platformer should control exactly like a 3D over the shoulder action game" is idiotic.

Fantastic game, can't recommend it enough. It does require you to be interested enough to experiment with wands though if you really want to have fun.

It's pretty good, they gave it away for free on steam once. It's got a great aesthetic and the whole Ikaruga style gimmick is pretty clever. Fun time overall, worth a play, but it probably won't blow you away.

I had a good time with the game though I never finished it. Worth playing if you want a good action platformer with some exploration elements. More focus on being a challenging action platformer than the exploration though.

It's subpar knockoff Zelda. Not worth playing.

Level design is pretty decent but the gameplay and entire structure of the game are rotten to the core. To be fair though, they've patched it a bunch and I haven't played it since launch day. I donated to the kickstarter since I'm a big fan of Ultima Underworld. This doesn't even come close to living up to it. Play an Arkane game instead.

Was really looking forward to this one since I'm a big fan of Insomniac but it ended up being really tedious.

How would one even use a mouse in a game like this? There's no manual aiming for any of your abilities. The only thing the mouse would be useful for is menus, and it's not as if the menus are all that cumbersome.

Found it very derivative and it had a lousy ending you can see coming a mile away.

I'm surprised so many people dislike it. I thought it was wonderful. It and Dropsy are the best adventure games made since the Lucasarts days as far as I'm concerned. I never really felt like the game was illogical, in fact I felt the opposite, I thought it had more emphasis on logic puzzles than most games in the genre. The only real issues I had with it were the slow loading and how long it can take to navigate certain areas late in the game.

I had a great time with it for the most part, but the ending was such worthless trash that it ruined the whole thing. If you want awesome visuals, play it, but don't expect a good resolution to the story. It has the most cliched possible ending for a story of this type.

The Void is a perfect execution of what its going for. Unfortunately, what it's going for is making you feel sad and tired. If you want some high quality despair, this game has you covered, but I had to give up on it when I realized the game had tricked me into trapping myself in a no win scenario (like a sierra game except not pointlessly dickish). I think it's an excellently designed game, but I don't think I can recommend it to anyone. Absolutely fantastic visuals though, Ice Pick Lodge are a treasure.

Nurses regularly have to move people who weigh upwards of 300 pounds and who are basically incapable of moving themselves. You bet your ass they would be pressured into augmenting in the HR universe.

Maybe the original release of the game had a bug like the original X-Com did? In the original X-Com, a bug resulted in the easiest difficulty being chosen no matter what option you picked when you made a new game (that's why TFTD is insanely hard, people complained the original was too easy). If the freeware version is easier and no reviews of the game seem to mention the insane difficulty, maybe whatever release Ross got was just bugged and irreversibly set to some insane level of difficulty. There certainly seems to be SOMETHING wrong with the game, I can't imagine that difficulty spike is intentional.

Arcanum is definitely great, I don't even like steampunk but Arcanum is just so perfectly lived-in. There's such a rich history to everything and it always feels like NPCs are actual people and not just blank slates that say one line of dialogue (except unfortunately, most of your companions other than Vergil and the Dwarf). Gothic 1 and 2 are pretty great too, not because its super unique, its just a typical fantasy setting, but its atmosphere is just top notch. Again, the whole world feels really genuine, all the NPCs have realistic schedules and jobs and the world/level design is fantastic. My favorite setting though is actually from a JRPG, Trails in the Sky. The setting is insanely detailed, and NPCs have so much optional dialogue. Even though it lacks the npc scheduling/simulation of something like Gothic or TES, everything feels like its constantly in motion because all the npcs have their own names and little stories that have nothing to do with you and they act them out whether you're paying attention to them or not. Probably my favorite part of the two games was a sidequest in the second one where all you had to do was teach a sunday school class to a bunch of kids and it basically ends up being a pop quiz on various bits of trivia about and the history of this fictional setting, it was amazing. I could list great game settings all day though, Dishonored, Thief, Darklands, Wolfenstein TNO, Shadowrun, Alice, FFIX, Sunless Sea, etc. As for settings I dislike, can't really say I'm a big fan of Divinity's, just kind of a goofy generic fantasy world with a comedic bent to it, kind of like Xanth. Not a big fan of Frozen Synapse's setting either, just super generic cyberpunk, great game but boring setting and story. Mostly those are just kind of boring though, the only one I can think of I really hated was Valdis Story's setting, felt like a 12 year old wrote that game and it had really boring level design, fun combat though.