The Captain is one of those games that takes me back to the old days of NewGrounds and Armour Games, a plethora of flash games, all of my favourites being point and click adventure games. (I tried to recreate that magic on Twitch once by only playing flash games on Fridays, but I can safely say that no one was interested.) Despite the very long intro with screeds of text that I ended up skipping most of, I was taken back to that era rather abruptly so that it gave me a bit of whiplash.
The Captain starts out with a whole bunch of story I didn’t ultimately read, but I got the fair gist of it. Bad people have a big army and are going to use a weapon to destroy the sun surrounding a planet of great stature, Earth. To make the shield, that was created to protect the sun work, a costly and time-consuming battery must be made at this station that’s on the outer rim of the galaxy. In the process of transporting this cell back to Earth, something unfortunate happens with the experimental “warp hole” technology, which leaves your protagonist stranded on the outer rim of the galaxy without the cell and a broken ship. The BBEG is still en route to s’plode the sun, so you now need to grab the cells and head home ASAP before the sun goes splat.
The reason this game gave me whiplash, however, is because during one of the very first choices, a person died. A person died because I can’t lie to people, in-game characters or not. I’m not a liar, and especially with a situation as dire as it was… I just can’t lie. Spoiler. It hurt my soul so much. This reeks of early point and click games, throwing you into situations like that so quickly and without any forewarning. This game went from boring, clicking through all the dialogue that I’m not concerned about, to “Fuck, I almost cried.” Not everyone will have the same reaction as me, however, as I feel things too deeply, but I love it when games take me off guard.
Pros:
The game works.
The game’s art style is another one I love. Tiny pixels all arranged to make a detailed picture, but still pixelated. I love pixel art so much, as there’s so much you can do with it.
The characters are believable, and the situations are gritty and dire, in the best way. Challenging dilemmas that really have you trying to think so widely out the box, but you struggle to know what to do as it’s the first playthrough.
The concept of time in this game is handled great. There have been so many games that I’ve played before that I felt handled time and time-based challenges in such a shit way. (Dead Rising 2) I genuinely felt as if I was racing against time in a way that I could genuinely handle, but also felt I had absolutely no grip on. Nothing I could do would give me more time, I just had to make the best use of it.
The puzzle elements to this game are VERY flash point and click game. Combining and searching high and low for things. No hints, but the solutions are simple once you get around to them. Minimal puzzles, but always very meaningful.
Cons:
Once again, the text in this game is overbearing. There is a lot of dialogue in this game that’s not very much needed. It does give depth to the characters and everything that’s happening in the game, but the amount necessary is way less than the amount provided, and it’s somewhat of a drag.
The game is predominantly made for replayability. Any game that has the number of choices, consequences, outcomes and just sheer “anxiety via indecision” inherently wants to be replayed. What lets the game down is the lack of a skip button for things that you’ve already seen and experienced.
I genuinely can’t think of any more cons for this game. This is literally one of the first games that I have ever played that one of the people watching me at the time came back to me and said, “Yeah, I went and bought this after I saw you play it.”
Price: 15.49 Time To Complete: N/A Achievements: None Cards: No Worth The Money: Yes, play it again and again.
In conclusion, it’s not the best game there is out there for point and click adventures. It also certainly doesn’t rival any of my favourites of the flash era, but is it good? Yes, undoubtedly so. It’s more than definitely worth buying and playing, as it promises a better playthrough every restart and multiple different routes to the path of success. It’s not the most riveting or inspiring, but it’s another good space story that I can easily say is worth the money and the time you put into it. If you want something that’s as close to a 5/5 as I can give, then try the Don’t Escape series. It’s honestly gamegasm material for point and click adventure/puzzle games.
Zesty Rating 7 Out Of 10 A refreshing return to flash point and click routes. Gripping and gritty decisions ensue, with lots of space travel and sci-fi themes. Replayability is off the charts, make your horrible decisions all over again…
This instance for me was a first from Keymailer. What I’d done was go through my entire Steam Wishlist (Over 2k Games, it’s a story for another time) and requested EVERY KEY that I could for all the games on my wishlist. This took mostly the entire night until 4am in the morning, provided that I’d also watched my friend’s stream until midnight that night, and was also being distracted by everything and anything. Lo and behold, I get not one but two games from the same dev, both being the same franchise and being from as early as 2017.
Alwa’s Awakening is the first of two games, the other being Alwa’s Legacy, which I am yet to play and review, and should promptly be doing it this week. From looks only and the trailer, it looks to be a nostalgic revisit to the old 8-bit platformers coming out nearer the end of the 8-bit era, graphics and movement promising to be an absolute gem and reprise many people’s memories. I was met with this, but also met with the other thing that happens when I go back and play old games. “Hmm, something’s not right. Something just feels a little off, like something is missing. It has everything I knew it would have, but why don’t I enjoy it?” But this isn’t an old game? It’s not something I played in my childhood, yet it comes with that anticipated nostalgia haze, with the emptiness ensuing.
You are this fabled character that’s supposed to save this village/town/city of Alwa. I read the plot and one part said city, but the image was literally like 10 houses, and it threw me off, I think. You go through a mass dungeon crawl where there are enemies everywhere, destructible objects and permanent powerups that unlock more sections of the map for you to explore and conquer. It gives exactly what’s promised and delivers exactly what’s expected, but why do I feel so let down?
Well, I think after going back to the game after the stream and literally meditating on it, which you’ll never get me to do for anything else, I’ve put my finger on it. Most of which are things that other games do, but I think the overall combination of these things are what brings it down to a boring, grindy, flavourless halt. So from here, instead of doing the pros first, here come the cons.
Cons:
Most of the platforming requires pixel perfect jumping. I found the platforming some of the easiest to control out of all the games I’ve received from Keymailer, but it takes the happiness of finally having that away from me when showing me the platforms. Granted, not all the jumps are hazardous, death traps, but the ones that are the furthest away from the checkpoint always are, and it hurt my soul.
Speaking of checkpoints, Red Cap Zombie Hunter, eat your heart out because you have NOTHING on the placement of these checkpoints when it comes to distance. The overall arrangement of the checkpoints is actually acceptable, and is not as chaotic as the haphazard tornado light show by Red Cap. However, the distance is actually heartbreaking and forced me to recline in my chair on multiple occasions.
So if it wasn’t for the amount of dying I was doing sending me back, I also have to do A LOT of backtracking as well. I know it was very common in most older platformers, but with everything combined I genuinely felt as if I was losing the will to live, passing the same area so many times with nothing to gain from it. I only found out that there were quicker ways of going around things, like hidden walls/doors/ceilings/floors, yet I wasn’t to know as they looked the same as everything else!
As if backtracking and losing progress on things wasn’t enough, your character is also very slow in comparison to big empty and expanding rooms. With not much filling them but maybe one or two measly enemies which will be super stingy about their drops.
I could probably think of more, but I honestly think that’s enough to rag on the game to make you have a second-hand experience of what happened. I have hope for playing its successor as it too also has a good amount of positive reviews. I’m hoping the next game will have expanded on these Pros I now have to list to keep the review balanced.
Pros:
The game works. 💖
The art style is cute and nostalgic with appropriate colour palettes, nothing is ugly or “meh” to look at.
The music fits the purpose. It’s chiptune and 8-bit, and most soundtracks fit the appropriate setting they are put in. Boss battle areas seem to lack a little, but most of the others are great.
There are NPCs all over the map that all have some sort of dialogue (whether relevant or not) which really brings a bit more life to the otherwise empty feeling game.
The powers learned by the protagonist within the game (specifically the first one where you summon cubes) were generally surprising to me and a lot more refreshing than the generic powerups most games would give you to get around obstacles.
Not all enemies are the same one. There are different enemies and also different variations of the same enemies that take more hits to kill. That and the bosses are interesting and, while not spectacular or grandiose, were still a nice bunch of pixels.
This is honestly a review that I did not want to do. When I look at this game from afar when not having played it, I see what I want. An enjoyable look back on a previous era of gaming, brought back into the modern day, but when played it brings back all the same problems that early day gaming had with it. While £6.99 is a great price for a game with 5 – 10 hours of playtime it’s honestly, mostly filler, retracing your steps, taking the wrong route that leads to nowhere, being punished and not liking it.
Zesty Rating 4 Out Of 10
A great-looking and sounding game, but that’s about it. Has everything about a game from the 1980s including all the unintuitive and punishing game design. Nostalgia-vision encapsulated, leaves you tired, sapped of your enjoyment because it’s not as good as you remember it being, despite never having played it before.
Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented. Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.
Saying this right here first before I write anything, as I know that the amount I write can prevent people from seeing how I feel about this game.
Do not buy this. At any cost. Do not. If you’re an unlucky sod who has this in their steam library already due to buying 150 game bundles from dodgy Russian game-code websites, then do us a favour. This game only has 4 reviews, write one. Even if it is only “This game is very bad.”, just be honest. In aide of mindless fools who would buy a game just because it’s on sale, turn them away with the sight of red. (Negative rating).
This game is a shill, a shell, and a bombshell all at once. Now, it’s not outrageously bad as the game actually functions and does not crash in the middle of playing like so many AAA games, that’s a plus, so we are now up to at least a 1/10. Then there is the matrix-like binary code type theme, which I’m fond of. I’ve always liked the green text on the black background aesthetic. The generation of money is also interesting, it is your standard “currency is click=dollars”. To level up, you purchase bits bytes and kilobytes to auto-collect your money. So now we are at least at a 2/10. (If we were giving out pity points, that is).
As soon as you enter the damn game you are hit with a wall of shattered expectations, no ear-blasting music, no cheesy copyright free music, no music that breaches copyright laws, nothing. None of the buttons make noises, nothing makes a noise. It’s just you, the button and the noise of your mouse endlessly clicking as you try to figure out why life has doomed you to this fate. Not of this game, but why you even thought this game would even be worth playing in the first place. Silence of the void, asking you the crushing question of why you even bothered to buy/download/play this game in the first place.
The fun stuff is, is that this game is so easy to replicate. It’s so un-unique. You get maybe 10 “enhancers” to your click bonus, and you’re just left to fend for yourself with your underpowered clicking and the severe lack of money to purchase your next 10 megabytes. Yes, the binary and computer theme is cool! So what? A mindless clicking game was made with visually intriguing aspects, not visually appealing ones, and boom, done. Perfect. You’ve got yourself what the developers consider a “game” worth “money”.
Do all these images look the same? If the answer is “Yes”, or any variation of agreeing, then ask yourself this: “Did you expect anything less?”
Pros:
It functions as a game, no crashes, major bugs with visuals or audio.
Computer Theme/ Binary Theme/ Matrix Theme
Cons:
No Music
No Sounds
No Effort
No Imagination
Nothing Unique
No payoff for all the time you’ve wasted clicking at binary.
This game is nothing.
Oh, and the achievements are borked.
Price: £0.79 Time To Complete: There is no completion. I have 6.9 hours in the game for the “lols”, but it probably only took 1 – 2 hours to max everything out. Achievements: 5 Cards: N/A Worth The Money: It’s not worth wiping your arse with.
If you recognise this image, then you already know what I’m implying. Play it instead if you want a clicker.
This game is a shell of a clicker game, so much so that I don’t even consider it a game, as there’s no payoff. There’s no effort, no life, and no reason to play it. So, therefore, there is no reason to buy it or to endorse the “maker” of this “game”.
Zest Rating 0 Out Of 10. I’m drinking bleach for a pallet cleanser after that. The endless void which is the expanse of my life can’t hope to be just as dull, empty and meaninglessas this game. It’s devoid of passion, creativity, and meaning. Honestly, describing myself as well, but at least I have really nice eyes, the game can’t boast the same.
Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented. Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.
NOTE: There will be a few spoilers in this review. Not major spoilers, but more to do with the core functioning of the game and not to do with the story. Mentions: EXP, LV (LOVE), Training Dummy, Nature of the game’s “life lessons”, all gameplay routes, that some characters die (but not specified which do), and a brief explanation of the first 5 – 15 minutes of the story.
Undertale is a debated masterpiece by tobyfox, spanning a fandom which has been thriving for years (7 to be generally correct) which still, to this day, sparks the creative fires of its fans.
The last time I played this game was years ago, getting through the game on a pacifist run and getting really fucking stuck on the dummy level. At that point, I didn’t appreciate the music as I was too busy getting super aggravated at the bloody cheating dummy. If I went back to it now, I’m not certain how well I would fare. I’d possibly do better or there is the possibility I’d do worse, as over the years my style of gaming has changed considerably. (From being a COD and Halo player to Skyrim, Oblivion and Indie games).
Undertale is one of those games that tries to teach you life lessons, but has trouble deciding which life lesson to teach you, as there are so many relevant ones. But also, you are changing all the time as well, and what you consider to be the best decision may not be the same as what you once thought. It’s not the most groundbreaking game in terms of “I did a wonderful thing, why did things turn to shit?”, no, no, that award goes to the first 15 minutes of The Captain and a few other games I’ve forgotten.
You can play Undertale one of three ways, kill everything in sight (Genocide), kill every minor enemy in sight and spare every major enemy that has a personality (Neutral), or reason with everything and kill nothing (Pacifist).
What the game does, is set you up.
It gives you the basics of the game. Kill things, and it gives you XP, when you level up, you increase your HP. The point that this game makes however is that it never told you to do those things, and further on you can discover that killing people and the creatures you come across is bad (believe it or not). How bad? Well, if you go on the Genocide Route, one of the main characters reveals to you that EXP is an acronym for “Execution Points”, a commentary on how you’ve mercilessly slaughtered everyone. Okay, that’s pretty bad, but when you get enough EXP you increase your LV, which is short for LOVE, that can’t be bad, right? Nah, bro, you still fucked up. “LOVE, too, is an acronym.” Apparently standing for “Level Of Violence”, you’re executing of all the innocent creatures and people, levelling up just how much of a violent threat you are.
The neutral path isn’t that much to speak of, characters make remarks about your killing of the minor enemies of the world (which are classed as their citizens, no matter how ugly they are or if they attack you). The major characters will not really be pleased with these actions and will make some, but not all, friendly interactions unavailable, especially with the lawful good-type character.
The pacifist route is probably as you would expect, and while I do love grinding for EXP and advancing my levels, knowing that I can be friends with everyone instead is just so heart-warming. There are honestly a few minor characters that have my heart, one in particular is apparently always made fun of for its appearance, and is crying in its sprite (not the drink, the character sprite). You can console it and tell it that it’s good-looking, and the fight will stop because you’ve cheered it up! Just getting your first little “Awh…” moment is always great. Especially when coming to the big bosses as well, you will feel compelled to fight as each of the bosses (which is basically every main character) throws everything at you. You almost feel like turning around, saying “This bitch…” and using ye olde Attack button. Dodging every attack and appealing to their humour or trying to calm them down. Rinsing and repeating this a good few times can have you on their good side, and if you’re lucky, you could get a date with someone really great.
The story, as spoiler-free as I can put it, goes as so. You are a human child who, one day, when frolicking in the land humans occupy, fell into a deep, deep hole, onto a very convenient bed of flowers. Your character, who is called Frisk, apparently, wanders around until she runs into a very nice lady. The thing about this lady is that she’s a monster (but she looks super cute though, so she passes), she nurtures Frisk and looks after them until your character starts wanting to leave. The very pleasant monster lady, Toriel, panics and informs Frisk that they can’t leave. The only way to get back to the human world, above, is to go through the land of monsters, and they will try to kill any human they see.
Of course, the story can’t progress if you just stay, so you push on. Toriel isn’t having any of it, and this becomes your first battle. I’m sure she says something like “I can’t let you leave as they’ll kill you…” and makes reference to her doing it herself, so it’s less painful?? I’m not certain, I have a weird memory of that happening. After you decide whether your child character kills the very nice Toriel or not, you’re out into the land of monsters. From here you meet plenty of other monsters, minor characters, random chance enemies and major characters. Your main objective being “Escape”, but it’s so leisurely as while the monsters are struggling to survive underground… it’s such a beautiful and unique place. You find out how the world of the monsters works and the lengths they go to pursue and catch you, their hopes and dreams, and their ambitions and morals. They see you as a morally evil being due to the stories that were told about humans and their traumatic history with humans. No wonder they’re hell-bent on killing or capturing you.
Make friends or enemies along the way, discover horrible truths about monsters in general and about others more specifically. Even the practise dummy that you were told to hit by Toriel has beef with you, and it’s super pissed. But the end of this game is not the end, as, debatably, the best feature of this game is in its replayability.
From what I could tell, this game does not encourage you to replay the game, but it has a strange tone about you from the start, almost speaking to you like an old friend. But upon restarting the game, it’s immediately made known to you that the game knows you’ve restarted the game and will make commentary on your actions within the last run. Whether you killed everyone, killed no one or didn’t finish the game, it’s onto you. It turns out that you’re still playing the game, the choices that you’ve made impact your next play too. Though this is a “new” playthrough with a “new” Frisk, it’s hinted at that this is the same Frisk. Time rewinds and Frisk has full recollection of what happened in the previous game, whereas only a few of the monsters do, the rest of them are reset and have no memory of what happened. Even dying if you killed them the first time around. I’m sure at one point, a character you killed in the game before said something about dying in a dream when you start a new run. One of said characters directly calls you out on this with it’s always snarky tone, and one alludes to knowing, and depending on the route you take, will reveal to you how much they know.
This game is an expertly crafted machine.
However, the dark side of this game does not really come from within the game itself. People can find this game unappealing if it’s not the type of game for them, they may find the game ugly, or uninteresting, which are all perfectly valid. (But how can you not enjoy the music? I listen to this on repeat unironically.)
The real problem with this game is the toxic fandom. Real, great things come out of the fandom, going on from being completionists to lore hunters and theorists. Branching off that into discussing alternate universe versions of the characters and shipping other characters and art and… I could go on. Fandoms are wonderful. But one thing that this fandom is the absolute worst for is toxic backseat-gaming.
We will look at the case of Markiplier (yes this is the second time I’ve mentioned him in my reviews, I used to be a gigantic fan, leave me alone) and his Undertale experience. Not the video itself, but the mass number of comments in his videos relating to the toxic fandom attacking him over his choices in the game.
Markiplier, of his own volition, heard about the popularity of Undertale and decided to see what the fuss was about. What he was about to learn is that the overwhelmingly positive feedback of the game had led to overwhelmingly expectant fanatics of the game.
“Undertale is just oozing with charm, so get ready for an adventure! Moreover, my friends would not shut up about it, so I had to see the game for myself!”
Alas, he made the mistake of recording it and putting it on YouTube.
He managed to get a few playthroughs into the game before his choices enraged the overly expectant section of the fandom. Bear in mind, like in all cases, political, cultural, religious, fandom-based, the majority are usually never the “problem” when it comes to issues “created” by said group. Instead, it is usually those who shout loudest, the vocal majority that are usually the issue (as typically, the true majority of these groups want to be left to enjoy their shit in peace.) The vocal majority of the Undertale fandom is comparable to the stereotype of ‘feminism’ used to denigrate it, or the many “Karens” used to justify why your cousin’s newborn daughter shouldn’t be called that. So, when people mention the “Undertale Fandom”, they immediately think about the vocal majority, instead of the true majority.
“Everyone was disappointed in the way I was playing it, and ordinarily I would just be like: ‘Y’know, I’m doing it my way. I’m gonna do this,’”
Markiplier only got two videos into Undertale before the pressure of the wave of toxic fans of the game had completely overrun his comment section. A combined total of almost an hour of video, and Mark reading out all the dialogue to make it entertaining, had meant he’d not reached the first town yet. Which, on a solo playthrough without an audience to entertain, would take a lot shorter of a time. Mark did not get to really even experience the game, as something he’d done within the game, had made the toxic fandom so mad they had to harass him.
He gave a fan-favourite character… a “redneck voice”. Oh, the humanity! How dare he give a character which has no voice, a voice that is the wrong voice! How is it the wrong voice? It just is!
Oh, and he’s doing the genocide route instead of being a pacifist and completely missing all the friendships that he could’ve made, and that’s not how the story is supposed to be canonically… Wrong! You HAVE to play it pacifist first so that you can feel the PAIN of killing everyone and tugging at your heartstrings, oh my goodness, it’s just so wrong.
There are more threatening comments than this. This one was the more “on the fence one” before it got nasty.
The wave initially overflowed his chat with a wave of insults towards the voice and the fact that he was killing things because it’s not the way that they believe the game was intended to be played. There were then people trying to “reason with Mark” by pointing out why he should do the pacifist run instead. These explanations were overly detailed and spoiled a lot of the game for him.
“I’m not having fun making these videos because I know that no matter what I do, everyone will think I’m wrong.”
“I feel like I missed out on [Undertale] because people ruined it for me… Even though this game is wonderful, I feel like I missed out on it because people tried to control it too hard. And that’s a lesson to learn about something that you care for very deeply. Allow other people to experience it in the way that it should be because that’s what the game is about. That’s a lesson to learn for both the community that facilitates around Undertale and life in general in anything that’s not Undertale. Let it have room, to breathe…trust the people that you care about to find their own way, and make their own mistakes, and discover new things you may have never seen. It’s about trust, you know?”
~Markiplier at the second attempt of playing through it on a livestream.
It wasn’t only Mark who was affected by this onslaught of negativity, it had hit the entire side of YouTube that was playing the game the way they wanted to. People who had newly started the game, knew nothing of what they were “supposed to do” and were going into it blindly, as you should with games. Attacks were being felt on all fronts. And you can tell how bad a fandom is when it garners the response of the creator.
There is more than this from TobyFox on the whole “bad fandom” thing, but I could only find the one where people were spoiling the game. Which is bad enough in itself, but not as bad as harassment.
I won’t go on for much longer about the fandom, as it’s honestly not something that’s wrong with the game itself. It’s actually a sign as to how, when something is so good, that it brings together everyone to be so passionate about the game. It’s just unfortunate that they turn into mindless drones of “You’re wrong, this is the right way to do it.” Tobyfox was probably one of the people who were most affected by it, seeing their creation as an instrument used to excuse why people are turning so sour against people who are only trying to enjoy the game.
At one point, I’m confident that TobyFox even reached out, on Twitter, to condemn this behaviour. If not, there was something said, as I remember the massive uproar from both sides of the community.
However… In conclusion, this game is a subjective masterpiece. Not everyone will like the game, and not everyone will like certain parts of the game, be it pacifist or genocide. But this game, single-handedly, made such a significant dent that the impact of it will be felt until the next considerable upset. A game with a core that powerful that it drove people to be toxic (who were probably already just as vain/toxic and needed something to latch onto) to passionate levels and seek those who were in the wrong. All that mattered to me was the tricky boss fights, the freedom to choose and the epic music (which I listen to unironically).
Zest Rating 9.5 Out Of 10. Golden Lemon, super Zesty. This game is a look into the masterpieces that TobyFox can achieve. I’ve still not played deltarune and need to. Powerful enough of a story to give toxic fans a backbone to aggressively backseat regular players. The outstanding soundtrack and plot-loop is genius. I would stream the game, but we all know why I don’t.
Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented. Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.
Keymailer strikes once again with a lovely looking indie game for me to have a look at, and this time, when a game says it’s “hand-drawn” you can just about smell it through the screen.
Berserker’s Descent is a 2D sidescrolling, zone arena-type game. In each instance of the game the map and what you face will be randomly generated as you make your way through, the amount of enemies and the enemies you face will be generated via RNG as well. You make your way through small segments of the level, parkouring and smiting enemies in your way using the variety of attacks you possess, until you reach a combat zone.
Just before this combat zone, the souls you will have picked up along the way and earned via slaughtering your enemies can be used to buy abilities or to heal your character. It’s up to you to spend them wisely before you enter the place of your possible, imminent demise.
From here, you will be limited to the one area while enemies spawn and crawl on from offscreen, multiple attacking you at one time. Here, you can see where the game really picks up. Using different combos of your varied attacks and keeping the kill combo going, you can rack up lots of souls in a single wave. After going through a number of these arena zones, you’ll eventually be confronted with one of these zones having a boss. Each zone gets progressively harder with damage modifiers, you get offered more power-ups and things become more expensive. This game is a roguelike game, however, so your progress does not save, and when you die you are returned to the very start of the game. Your progress is stored on a leaderboard though, which is a nice feature, making the game more repayable with the added competitiveness.
Before moving onto the pros and the cons of this game, I’d like to address the game’s art style. This game is not the best looking game ever, and in terms of visuals it’s very simple. A lot of reviews for this game on steam regard this game as ugly or looking unpolished, the latter I can agree somewhat. To say this game is ugly, I think is a bit of a fetch, while this game doesn’t have the most detailed visuals or the nicest artwork, it still serves its purpose in a clear and concise way. It’s overall, a very decent attempt at game artwork and is nothing short of acceptable. If you want an ugly game then might I refer you to Spherecraft, there is absolutely no reason why Spherecraft should exist.
Spherecraft – Minecraft worked because with cubes you don’t have gaps.
Pros:
The game fully works, no audio or graphical glitches/errors/bugs.
The game has mechanics for both attack and defence, both have many different combos and with the added power-ups and special attack move styles make for really addictive gameplay. Not only do you have to use different keys for different attacks, but also need to use specific keys for directional attacks as well. An addicting challenge to master.
The added power-ups pre-zone creates for so many styles of gameplay, leading to character types. While the RNG prevents you from being able to get exactly what you want, you can create similar character builds most of the time, making it really fun to test different methods of approaching bosses.
The game has online co-op, I’ve not seen it played nor did I find anyone online that wanted to play it with me, but imagining tackling these bosses and levels together with someone else is definitely interesting, and I would love to feel just how powerful we are with two people.
Cons:
The platforming rooms are the weakest part of this game, the character is quite heavy and can land quite quickly after having a floaty jump. Enemies in this area are hard to dodge too, or are just placed in difficult areas for you to hit them from. These resulting rooms feel slow to the rest of the game and contribute to you getting a lower score due to it killing your combo.
The hitboxes on some creatures are way off, on others it’s slightly off, while on most it’s fine. It’s one thing that you feel as if you get used to, up until you come across a new enemy type, but there are a lot of times in the game you’re swinging and missing despite the character’s sword visibly swing through the enemy.
The early game bosses are punishingly hard. I will admit that if I wasn’t so interested in the game, I may have given up in my first playthrough due to the first boss’ difficulty. It is a learning curve, and it does beat you down, and as much as I can say that it’s part of the game, and it’s to make you step up your game a little in regard to skill, it can be really off-putting to come up again something that hard that soon.
I do not consider this a con, but as it’s a con for a lot of others in the steam review section, I’ll pop it here. The game doesn’t look the best. It looks like a game that you wouldn’t look at a second time if you had a quick glance. This is largely to do with the dark, grim and bland colour palette that’s displayed in at least 65% of the game. (I feel as though the colour choice is apt, and the grim, scruffiness of the artwork is charming and fits) The artwork is heavily under-polished, and regarded to as ugly a lot of the time.
Price: £7.19 Time To Complete: N/A Achievements: 27 Cards: No Worth The Money: Not quite. With a decent discount, yes.
Overall, this is a neat little game. While not having a lot to do entirely and everything being down to RNG, it’s set up in a way where it gives a lot of replay-ability due to the permadeath nature of the game, leaderboards and the addicting difficulty of “Maybe if I’d just taken that power-up instead”. The dark theme and design, coupled with the almost bedraggled state of the artwork, create for a dire looking game with the bleakness of your chance at victory with your huge, dull sword.
Zesty Rating 4.5 Out Of 10 A small roguelike game where you run and slice everything in site, referred to as an “ugly” game, but instead in its roughness I see character. Difficult and unforgiving, challenging to it’s core. Could do with some refining in animation and cleaner hitboxes.
Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented. Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.
I am an avid lover of horror games, ever since way back in 2012 I found Markiplier’s first ever SCP – Containment Breach video, where he had streamed his very first interaction with the game. Since then, I was a regular watcher of not just his content, but horror game content in general. Watching people play Cry of Fear and Resident Evil games. I remember specifically going onto Wikipedia and searching “All Horror Games” and looking at each one of them on YouTube to find playthroughs of them all, because at the time I was limited to my Xbox and Xbox360 which never had “a lot” of horror games despite having things like Dead Space.
From there to here, I’ve had an obsession with horror games, having now got a PC and not just having the full extent of Steam to explore, but GOG and Epic Games Store (despite Epic Game Store being quite barren apart from their exclusives IMO). Not just that but sites like Itch.io and Gamejolt where people upload their creations, and you can access them for free most of the time.
So, when it comes to Keymailer, the moment I see a horror game, I throw myself at it. Fisherman’s House is no different to that, I threw myself right on that game hoping that by the looks of it, it was another Granny game. While I was correct, it was not only a complete rip-off of Granny while also completely failing to do what Granny did.
Fisherman’s House is a game where you don’t wake up in your own room, or your own house. Spend the best of 5 minutes at the start, looking for your torch because it’s very obscurely placed in your room, while being groaned at from whatever direction the “Fisherman” is. From there, you will wander around the house aimlessly looking for what you can assume is a means of escape, finding various things such as a generator you need to get working, a sledgehammer, a crowbar, and a paddle. You need to figure out how all of these things fit together in order for you to escape not only the house but the vicinity as well.
The items used in the game are set out the exact same way from Granny, which is not too bad, Granny however has sequels where the mechanics and gameplay have been massively improved on. However, Fisherman’s House falls flat in the entirety of the rest of the game. Where other games have tension and add fear, Fisherman’s House does not build on it, nor does it add any. You are pretty much always being chased when you’re close to the guy, walking slowly does nothing, nor does losing him in a loop, he will always know where you are when you come within a certain distance of him. Once you realise that there is no consequence for getting caught, the game crumbles. I was caught for the first time very quickly into the game, as that’s how I deal with my games, the first try is always to test your limit, test the enemy and see what you’re up against. I was jump-scared, despite already knowing the Fisherman was running right at me, then left. The Fisherman just left me, exactly where I was, after saying (not literally) “Ooga-booga” in my face and running away. There was no sign of me being injured or my character suffering from acute shock that they needed to recover from, I was free to move again immediately.
Is this game possible to win and finish? Yes, I do not doubt it. The A.I. may flip dramatically between extremely stupid and constantly on your tail, but this game is simple enough to beat. However, it’s more of a test of whether you can be bothered or not to actually finish it due to the lack of fun and fear. Did I finish it? No, after completing the game nearly halfway, I got extremely bored and leaned into my audience at the time questioning whether you can really die in the game or not, considering I seemed to have no consequence of being caught. The answer was “Yes”, I could die, but only after I’d been caught at least 7 times. At that point, after the Fisherman ran away from me after catching me, I ended up chasing him, to find he always “restarts” his behaviour in the same area, right outside the attic. Lazy A.I. programming.
Pros:
The game works, has no visual or audio bugs from what I’ve found
The starting atmosphere is genuinely unnerving, and the first sighting of the “ghost” Fisherman is actually really good for what it is.
The actual level design is okay, it feels like a believable house with lots of floors. Maybe not your standard British house, mind you, but I’ve definitely seen layouts similar to this in big American country estates.
The item placement being random gives a good level of difficulty to the game, not just being able to go to where you know everything is, proving a challenge that every instance of the object placement will be different each game.
The game provides loops and hiding spaces very frequently to avoid the Fisherman, letting you (in theory) manoeuvre around with ease.
Cons:
The atmosphere completely disappears, however, after your first encounter with the Fisherman, as nothing happens. You get a spook and that’s it. The atmosphere and the sight of the Fisherman does nothing anymore as the stakes are not high enough.
No consequences are where this game fails massively, as said before it takes away everything this game builds up and doesn’t even give you a slap on the wrist for being caught. I was caught at least seven times before I actually died. There was no “You have a boo-boo from being caught” or “You’re now so close to death that the next capture will make you die.”, absolutely nothing to hint to the player that being caught is bad, just endless chasing and jump-scares.
The A.I. for this game is horrible, as said before, once you got into the vicinity of the Fisherman he would “just know” you’re there. In a game like Granny, it made sense as Granny is visually impaired yet has enhanced hearing, the entire floor of the game either being covered in something like glass or twigs, or the floorboards being squeaky. Fisherman’s House offers absolutely none of this and resorts to just chasing you when you’re in range. This doesn’t cause as many you, many you problems as you might think however, as the Fisherman constantly walks into walls and even if you hide while he’s looking right at you, he’ll treat you as if you’ve just disappeared, even if you’re shining your torch right in his face from under the futon.
While RNG creates an amazing aptitude for challenge, it can also really take away from the game if applied incorrectly. Developers not taking into account what bigger items like the “generator” looking like in the same place as the crowbar, making the graphic glitch uncontrollably, is something that may have happened. Or maybe just the fact that items randomly move around the house to places you’d never consider keeping those things, but it’s a game, why should things make sense?
Some items are broken, I believe, as during my playthrough there were named items such as the “crowbar” that I couldn’t pick up, despite seeing in the trailer that you can utilise that tool. It seems to be a persistent problem within this game.
Price: £3.99 Time To Complete: N/A (Could probably speedrun it 10 min) Achievements: 7 Cards: None Worth The Money: No, as cheap as it is, I’d rather play Granny at the exact same price.
Overall, this game is a shadow of the game it draws inspiration from. While it does all the same things as the role-model game, it does them in a more lacklustre way, lacking in nearly every aspect in comparison. While I can appreciate that this is the developer’s first game (on Steam), Granny was also a “Dev’s First” game as well, and it’s significantly better at what it does, while also being the exact same price as Fisherman’s House. Fisherman’s House is just another one of the Granny clone games that come with the flood of the game’s popularity, as soon as a game/show gets popular you can sit back and shake your head while you watch the cheap rehashes and clones appear everywhere. This game is no different.
Zesty Rating 2 Out Of 10. When a game becomes popular, you’re hit with a wave of copies and shameless rip-offs, this is one of them. Literally the same price as all the Granny games, just go and play that instead. Bland, boring and not scary after the first encounter. Just another RNG-based, find-em-all to find-a-way-out, best to be ignored.
Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented. Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.
NOTE: This game is flagged as “Retry”.
Back ages ago, I played a game called Pacify with one of my old buddies on her stream. She absolutely crapped herself, while I remained completely calm for most of the game. Also, under reacting to the ghost chasing me, which led to my friend getting more of a fright due to “…oh” not being much of a hint of “We should run.”
Hidden Shelter immediately reminded me of this game, but not in a good way.
Hidden Shelter is a game where you and your 3 buddies are in a car driving somewhere, the car crashes and one of your buddies seem to walk off on their own into the woods that the car tumbled into. From here, you and your wuss of a friend (whom both of you have no “inside voices”) venture off from the wreck of the car to find the lost friend. You come across a spooky mansion in the neck of the woods with its lights on and the door unlocked, the wuss character rightfully asks if it’s okay to “just go in without permission”, which your character swiftly disregards. Entering the mansion, the pair think it’s a great idea to walk around shouting and yelling, eventually believing that there’s no one there and start walking around looking for their friend.
From here is where the game turns from interesting, with it’s rendered cutscenes and spooky atmosphere, and flops completely. This game is now a mess of unhinted mini-cutscenes, which will not activate until you get close enough to an object. This in turn forces you to rub your balls on every possible piece of furniture and anything that looks vaguely intriguing to see if it triggers one. There was a point where I had been around the entire house around 3 times, looking for something, anything, and accidentally triggered a mini-cutscene that offered nothing to the game by standing next to a plain stool. It’s, honest-to-god, bullshit.
The reason Pacify comes to mind when thinking about this game is due to the fact that every door in this damn mansion is locked. Big Wuss actually comments on with “Why would you lock every door in the house you live in?”. I wonder why, Big Wuss, I wonder why… Not only this but everything is such a needless trek, why oh why do I need to find this key, to open this door, to find another key which opens this door, to find another key to open this door which helps me un-barricade another door which leads back to the main room? In Pacify, it was fun, okay? In Pacify we were being chased constantly, and the key finding was a race of sorts. Finding the keys was crucial to our survival and if one of us died during finding the keys, we had to be so much quicker to find the rest! If we slacked on finding the living room key which allowed us to find the bedroom key, which in turn led to us finding the attic key which gave us the basement key, we wouldn’t be able to open the door to the room in the basement that allows you to revive! It was the rush, the panic, and the intensity that made Pacify work for that stupid “domino of keys” formula that it used.
Hidden Shelter has none of this. It has no presence after the first few scenes and atmosphere changes.
There are encounters with a ghost, of sorts, which makes use of the 3D objects which have gravity by throwing them at you or using its weird wind powers to make things get in your way as you run. My first gripe with the monster, or whatever it is, is that it’s odd wind power is complete bogus. I’m pretty sure that on death, the physical objects that get thrown around do not reset, either that or the peculiar wind powers randomly chucks things around meaning that whether things get under my feet are not is just luck. This causes me to get caught a lot, but being completely out of my control. The lighting in the game is terrible, so I cannot see if anything is actually on the floor to trip me up, and sometimes I can’t see where I’m going. But, what fucks things up the most is that instead of doing the regular thing that games do and let players make their own mistakes, if the player goes the wrong way during a chase they are immediately caught. For example, in the kitchen scene, I was chased by the monster. I ran out through the corridor and ran into the dead end as per usual out of panic and general… Directional confusion… Correcting myself and running out of the right door, I spin around to try and quickly close it to attempt to slow the creature down (completely disregarding Big Wuss’ safety). Not thinking “I need to run outside because the front door will still be open.” because since when do horror games just let you run out the front door? I run for the stairs to try and maybe find a closet, so I can hide Ao Oni style, but as soon as my foot touches the stairs I get pulled into the mandatory death cutscene. Okay, so perhaps my fumbling in the dead end is what fucked me up there, okay… Let’s try again. Next time, I went straight out of the right door and went straight for the stairs. Mandatory jumpscare again. I tried this a few times, believing that it was me, and if I was just fast enough I could probably make it. It was only when someone in my Twitch chat at the time suggested that I ran outside instead, I actually survived. Not only was this monster not fast at all, but even after tripping on boxes and then waiting in the hallway to test the theory, slowly activating the stairs’ death was it clear that, yes, this is indeed bullshit.
There is obviously much more to this game than what I played through. After wandering through the entire house, clicking on all the doors to find that 3/4 doors gave me the “This Door Is Locked” response, the rest having nothing to say at all, I’d rather not continue. That and that I had to quit the game due to what I found was a checkpoint trap. The ghost had chased me into a room (which was scripted, as if you try to run the wrong way then you get “auto-deaded”) and you’re given no clue what to do in the room but “escape”. Doors were bugged closed from what I could tell, and there was no other way to escape, so I had to quit the game.
Pros:
The game works, and has no graphical or audio bugs from what I can tell.
The game is fully voice acted, which adds a nice feeling of effort put into the game, which most indie horror lacks (from what I’ve played recently).
The game tries hard to convey the feeling that Amnesia brings with its puzzle-like environment and room unlocking.
Big Wuss (secondary character) addresses a lot of the common horror tropes in his questioning of the mansion and the main character’s actions, which is honestly a big plus for me, as I love it when idiotic shit is called out on.
The atmosphere at the start of the game is eerie and actually draws you in, especially with the addition of the rendered cutscene, which adds some intensity as well.
Cons:
Despite having no graphical or audio bugs, the game does suffer from game-breaking glitches and game-cues not activating. A part I got soft-locked in was exiting through the conservatory door in the kitchen, not allowing us to leave. Due to the horrible A.I. pathing the monster couldn’t figure out how to get round the corner of the corridor.
Effort and trying your best to draw inspiration from games is something I can admire. However, despite all the effort put into a game, it doesn’t save it from falling flat at the hurdle it tried so hard to create and jump over. This game tries to feel like Amnesia (I’m not sure if it drew inspiration from it or not, but it’s the closest I can relate it to) but fails considerably at the start of the game. Lost is the atmosphere and intensity with the meaningless wandering, unthreatening monster and lack of actual puzzles.
All the notes that are scattered around the mansion are completely incoherent and do nothing to service the story, atmosphere, or the mood. They don’t help progress anything, offer any combination to locked doors, provide hints, or even really provide any interest whatsoever.
The A.I. pathing is terrible. When you’re doing maths in school, you learn about a certain way to calculate things according to maps, distances and real life where there are buildings and walls you need to walk around, completely erasing A to B values. You need to maybe need to include C as well if you need to turn a sharp corner or additional other points if you’re avoiding something. The monster however (from the best I can tell) still uses A to B tracking, leading to it walking into walls as it tries to follow you. Going as far as getting itself stuck if you’re fast enough to run down a corridor and turn a corner.
The lighting is terrible… I wouldn’t list this as a graphical issue/error as I believe that it’s intentional, but god-damn, things are so dark, and you hardly have any light. Sometimes when Big Wuss walks up behind you, and you see him out the corner of your eye, it’s like an oil/tar rendition of the blob monster.
The optimisation of the game is terrible as well. When starting up the game I almost cried a little as for the past couple of times I’ve been reviewing games it’s been sucking up a lot of RAM due to unoptimised shaders. The menu was the worst by far, taking up a lot, but when starting the game it got better. However, I still had to lower the settings a bit due to me running on a lovely 30fps with full quality despite my fully capable PC.
The game gives you no room to fail naturally, if you go the wrong way within the game you’re given a game over jumpscare immediately. It makes sense for JRPGs maybe, but for a game like this (where we’ve already walked up and down that staircase 4 times trying to figure out what to do) there is no justification for it. The A.I. is weak, yes, but at least let the player wander around with the blaring chase music wondering where to go until they get caught or, even better, realise they need to leave the building.
Quick note: all images that I am using in this review are all areas that I have seen, but also picked to highlight just how bad the lighting in this game is. There are better pictures of this game (mainly the one used as the very first screenshot the player sees when looking at this game on Steam to create the false illusion that the game will always look like this) which I will show, but the rest/most of the game just looks like all the pictures above.
I tend to always use only areas that I’ve seen in the game to use in the reviews as it, sort of, concludes my experience. My experience was infinite darkness and weak jumpscares.
Price: £2.99. Previously £7.19 Time To Complete: N/A Achievements: 12 Cards: None Worth The Money: If the game worked, possibly. Because it soft-locked for me, no, not at all.
In conclusion, this game is a product of what happens when two inspired devs take on the role of making a big horror game with inspiration from big games titles and bit off more than they can chew. I feel bad saying that, honestly, but it’s a case of too much being focused on one thing and not in another. A lot of time and effort spent building the area, flooded with ideas and then creating that surprisingly great cutscene, to then flop on the execution. A restrained gameplay, a weak atmosphere after all pouring their work into building it up, and a drab way to execute initial puzzles and consecutive door unlocking. At its price right now, it would be great for the more lenient and less critical horror game enjoyer to play, but due to bugs and game soft-locks, I’d tell most to avoid it.
Zesty Rating 2.5 Out Of 10. Apples that you bought last week but never touched, but now you need to eat them because you bought them. A game with effort from a small dev team. Inspired from bigger games, but lacks at the execution. Bad A.I. pathing, lighting and lack of atmosphere after the initial introduction. I honestly prefer collecting coins to collecting the keys to all these locked doors.
Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented. Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.
NOTE: This game is flagged as “Retry”.
Ratropolis takes the cake from Castle On The Coast from me for “best game I’ve received from Keymailer yet.” in the grounds that I am playing this game off-stream and really am enjoying it. Castle On The Coast is still by far a better game, but due to me getting motion sickness and Ratropolis being the extremely simple game that it is, makes for a super addicting, challenging but fundamentally easy game to come back to.
Ratropolis is a card battling game, where you use the random draw of the cards to build and upgrade your settlement, all while tower-defencing at either side of your settlement, fending off zombie rats.
You start off the game by choosing which leader you wish to play as (at the start, only being able to pick from a few due to you needing to win games to unlock them), each leader having different advantages to playing them and different powers which you can use to give yourself a boost mid-game. From here you can also choose where your settlement is located, there are a few areas such as the forest, the coast, and desert, each having their advantages and disadvantages.
From here you’re presented with your “town hall” and a few cards to start you off with, a few army cards, a few cheese cards (when played right give you money), labour cards and house cards. You gain money in the game via using cards that grant you money or from the tax that’s collected every 5 seconds in-game. You also have a limited number of mice (citizens) at your disposal, which you can increase and decrease with a good strategy. Every 15 seconds you can reshuffle your deck and draw new cards, the natural amount being 4–5 cards, reusing ones that have multiple uses and using up ones that are one use only. The game gives you the option to reshuffle a lot earlier than this but at the cost of your money, which the cost increases for every wave that passes.
The game is “over” once 30 waves of enemies have been defeated, from here you can choose to exit the game and claim your rewards to keep playing, despite there being no additional rewards. Things get excruciatingly tougher from there, no news is good news and everything that happens is bad. The game really tries to kill you if you decide to continue, to the point where I only survived an additional 5 waves after winning.
Each cheese costs 40 gold, but gives you 30 gold for every cheese in your hand when it’s played. There are 3 cards in hand, so the player gets 90 gold. But when only one cheese card is present, if the card is played, the player makes a loss of 10 gold.
This game is honestly a treasure, I’ve actually not found a lot wrong with this game, and I’ve clocked at least 16 hours into this game by the time I actually get this review done, and possibly by the time that the review comes out I could be at between 20 and 25 hours. Each game is roughly about an hour if you make it to around the 30 wave mark, so maybe I’ll have unlocked everything by then.
Pros:
The game works, there are no graphical or audio errors.
This game masterfully combines card battling and tower defence in real time in a way that forces you to be strategic but also fast thinking, the enemies come in waves all the time, and you can refresh your hand often with more money, making this game fast-paced and challengingly stressful.
The art-style is cute and cartoony, lending itself to the people centred in the game, the mice. When the rats come on screen, the cute art-style lends itself to making the rats oddly more grotesque.
Each leader has a completely different playstyle as they all have different buffs and super abilities. Not only this, but they also tend to have their own range of cards that appear too, making it feel like you’re running a different kind of settlement with each different leader.
The game produces different waves of different enemies after every 5 levels or so, throwing bosses, mini-bosses and different species of enemy at you. This adds a lot of variety and gives a feeling of progression.
Once you’d beaten wave 30 it’s not over! You can continue afterwards on the same game and the game will outright try to slaughter you, or you can exit to the menu and start another settlement with the same character to unlock more cards and in the same area to increase the overall difficulty.
So that you don’t have to click everything or scroll/drag around the settlement, the game has easy shortcuts to do things in game. Pressing [Tab] moves you to the latest event, like the merchant appearing or your cheese is ready. Pressing [Space] will reshuffle your cards and [R] will use your ability.
Cons:
The tutorial leaves a lot to be desired. I feel as if it taught me all the basics, but when it came to the rewards from the reward chest, I saw “Increase Leader Level” as one of the options and felt like the game had completely skipped out on explaining what that was. Also, a few other small things as well, like the bounty system (for the war leader) and the souls system (for the spirit leader) that were never explained or told where to look or what to do with it.
The game is a tad unbalanced, from waves coming too quickly sometimes due to the enemy number increasing every wave, so by the time you’re done with one wave the next is already attacking the other side. Some leader’s abilities are a lot more useable than others, the newest leader that was added not too long ago probably needing a tweak. The overall game is focused heavily on the RNG of everything, especially the cards, which will sometimes blow an entire game out of the water.
The interface of the game isn’t the best. I personally would like a tab I could pull up mid-game that show all my stats (maybe not pausing the game but slowing the time down to the same as when placing the cards), or possibly an easier function for moving your military mice around. What this game excels at in ease of play, it loses in the finickiness of everything else.
The settlement is initially set up like so; Town Hall-esque building, lots of space either side and then your walls. Once those walls fall you’re done for, you have to then sit and watch the enemy tear through every building between the wall and your town hall before smacking the town hall a few times, and it’s game over. I feel like the last stance should be at the town hall, give it some more HP, some walls, allow me to place troops at it or move troops to it. (Maybe I’m salty because I know that I easily had enough troops to finish off the remaining enemies, but they wouldn’t attack because they didn’t have a wall to defend, and I was on wave 30 and could’ve won, but I think it’s definitely a thing that should be considered.)
Price: £13.99 Time To Complete: N/A Achievements: 46 Cards: 6 Worth The Money: To the people who really like this kind of game, yes, definitely. On the current sale at time of review publication (£9.79), it’s certainly something to be picked up by anyone.
Overall, this game has stolen my heart and my free time. Over the course of writing this review, I’ve gone and played it multiple times when I should’ve been writing more. Looking back and forth between the achievements and my game to see what I’m missing and what I still need to complete the glossary. It’s still being updated to this very day, which is why I think it’s done so well. If you’re interested in this tower defence, card-battling deck-builder, settlement building simulation game, I’d absolutely say it’s worth a look.
Zesty Rating 8.5 Out Of 10. A lovely little card-battling, deck building, settlement management tower defence indie game with a lot to offer to those who seek the challenge of not only keeping a colony alive, but keeping on top of tax, and amassing a formidable army. With new and interesting features attached to every different leader, and different ways to die in each different biome, this game is honestly a breath of fresh air.
Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented. Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.
Huge Enemy is one of the games I’ve purchased in a Fanatical Bundle ages ago, more than likely at a cost of £4.99 for 12 games, or something along those say lines getting this game at a steal at that time. Now the game is free for anyone to play, which I think is a great thing in regard to the negative attention this game has had in the past. In spite of those past reviews regarding the game, which a lot of I agree with, this game at least deserves some attention because it is good. It’s maybe not great, or fantastic, but it’s good. The visuals are definitely the best thing about this game,“Paid For” and when this game was “Paid For”, the visuals were what you were paying for.
This game is a good, avoid ’em all, R-type clone, side scrolling sci-fi game. It hasn’t got much of a story to it, you’re essentially a newbie pilot straight off the bat, they pulled you into that position because they need more pilots and after one training session they set you off into the real world. From there you’re doing that bullet-hell thing, you start blasting, and you don’t stop (until the enemies randomly stop) until you reach the boss and blast the boss as well. The game is a little inconsistent with its difficulty and the amount of enemies on the screen at one time, but while it’s difficult, it’s still somewhat manageable.
Pros: — It functions as a game with no audio bugs or game-breaking glitches. — The intro and the splash screen are really cool aspects to the game and set the player up to feel that this is a game of epic proportions. — The game does well of setting up that tension and combination of feeling hyped for what’s to come but still filled with anxiousness as you know it’s just going to unleash hell on your unsuspecting self. — The game has a vast array of weapons which keep gameplay fresh and allow the player different methods of getting around problems and overall game completion. — The artwork in this game is exactly the type of design I love, gritty and detailed, which both looks and feels great when you’re playing it. The bright flashing of the lasers, the explosions and worn battleships all combines to paint a picture of almost hopelessness against the masses that oppose you. — All music and sound effects are chosen well and fit their purpose.
Cons: — The upgrade system kinda baffles me, I maybe misread or didn’t see where it told me what to do, so I went a few levels without upgrading a thing. — Some audio effects were unbalanced in volume, some were really quiet, then the voice-over would boom in. Likewise with in-game, I’d feel as if my guns were so much quieter than the enemies. — Not so much a con, but this game used to sit at £23.99 back in 2018, so a lot of disgruntled reviews are due to its old price. It came down in price to £3.99 before the pandemic, which is a lot more reasonable. — Also not so much a con, but the game is pretty difficult, or at least for me who is pretty bad at these types of games, found even the first level (not the tutorial) quite challenging. I couldn’t really get a hold of the default controls of switching guns and also switching which way I’m firing. — And the last con is kind of a mishmash, the game is a bullet hell, and not, sometimes the screen is too busy, sometimes there’s hardly anything, sometimes bosses are hard, sometimes they’re not, sometimes a level will feel like it lasts seconds, some will feel like they last forever. The game seems to lack consistency, which makes it a bit of a slog to get through.
Apart from all that, there’s also some stuff with graphical errors, nothing game-breaking (or at least from what I found). That and the guns didn’t turn to face the way I was aiming, which I only noticed until after I’d read a review that was a little too upset about that.
Price: Free Time To Complete: N/A Achievements: 19 Cards: None Worth The Money: £23.99? Not at all. £3.99? Yes, to those who like R-Type Bullet-Hell. For Free? Yes, why not? Dip your toes in it.
Honestly, the game is pretty good despite its flaws, and really, there’s nothing stopping you from trying it out to see if the cons I listed do actually affect your gameplay “immersion”. Maybe my cons are a bit too harsh on it because I don’t usually play bullet-hell games due to never being able to have my eyes keep up with what’s onscreen. Overall, it’s free. Which doesn’t mean that flaws are okay, but considering it came from a very dear price down to a more reasonable one, to nothing at all; I can say it’s more acceptable now than what it was before. As if it was still at its original price, I probably would score this game so much lower.
Zesty Rating 4.5 Out Of 10 A game that shouldn’t be passed up, especially while it’s still free. Japanese influenced bullet hell R-type game. While I don’t tend to like or have the ability to keep up with these kinds of games, I can appreciate that the artwork is amazing, and behind its cons is a playable/enjoyable game.
Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented. Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.
20,000 Miles Under the Sea is, thankfully, a game that I’m pretty sure has always been free. To even call this a game is honestly an insult to even the top-tier trash games, such as ABST Clicker Farm and Abscond (Not the actual Abscond Game, but the “developer’s” audacity to release it as their game).
If you’re like me, and you have irritating, but very true thoughts pop into your head now and again, then you’ll know that there’s a certain point in life where the question: “How high can you count?” goes from being a matter of knowledge to a matter of will.
That is this “game”.
This “game” is just a test of mental endurance to see how long you can last, staring at a screen, while you lethargically descend into the depths of the ocean. There is not much to look at, you can’t look around or explore really. The only option you have in the game is “Auto-swim”, where you just descend, and “Not Auto-Swim” where you just descend, but you can sluggishly swim forward. Shoals of fish randomly spawn in and out with glitchy animations and bad implementation overall, phasing through solid rock and coral. Even Mario 64 had fish that you could interact with.
Of course, you can’t have an underwater game without having a horror element! So, only in the description of this game on Steam will you see that:
This is a simple idle horror game, and all that is required of you is to observe the life of the underwater world and wait.
Continued with:
But please remember that you are not alone – a terrible creature inhabits this abyss. If you’re too scared to meet this monster, you can tap out any time you like…
Ooo spooky, so where is this terrible sea creature? It doesn’t exist. All it is, is a terribly done jumpscare, which is easily avoided in one of two ways. Keep auto-swim on, as if you’re in auto-swim mode it doesn’t touch you for some reason (either that or the RNG was super unlucky), or moving away from the obvious red dots.
What also doesn’t exist is this bullshit.
This image showsthe developer of the game claiming that the first person to reach the bottom of the game will receive $20,000.
Yeah, I don’t think you’re fooling anyone with this.
This image shows the developer admitting that there is no cash prize of $20,000, and that money will only be handed out if people buy the music.
Yeah, you weren’t fooling anyone.
As far as I could tell, using all the resources that I could, the soundtrack was not bought once. Checking Steam sale records and various other 3rd party sites that track information like this, I found absolutely nothing. This was a clear attempt to get people to play it, so they could get better feedback for the game (which never happened) and get some pennies back. As discussed in the Abscond review/investigative piece that I wrote, it costs around $100 for developers to publish a game on Steam. It makes sense that the devs would make a desperate grab at their financial loss of a release.
Aside from this, what else do we have in the game?
Horrendous crashes that persist after the developer has updated/patched the game twice to “fix” these errors. Happening so often that I experienced at least 5 crashes within the 24 minutes I was able to hold out.
No option to mess with the sound. If there is, I cannot find it. Pressing the escape key, in hope that it would bring up a menu, took me out of the game and “marked my name” where I stopped. I had to start all over again. Thanks, this is undoubtedly what I wanted.
No clear indication, in the game, of how to play or that you have to avoid the red dots, or how to avoid them. Nothing telling you what or how to do things at all.
The “game” is so mind-numbing that the developer themselves instruct you: “you can minimize the game and continue to go down, doing other things.” if it’s too “tiring”. Just leave the game on, minimise it and do something more fun is their advice. Thanks, again. Brilliant game.
To add to the last point, the game is so badly optimised. Not to mention the crashes again, which are probably partially caused by this issue, but this “game” eats up all of your resources because of the bad optimisation. GPU? Gone. RAM? Gone. Shaders people! Fix your fucking shaders!
And to top it all off, is the most annoying part of the game. The name markers. So, you accidentally exited out the game, or you’ve had enough, and you exit the game. That’s a name marker added with your name on it, but it’s not just you who can see it. Everyone can.
And you can’t turn it off.
You must sink, 20k feet, staring at the blur of mashed up names as so many people either crashed or gave up within the first 5 minutes. It’s then evenly spacing out a bit more until you reach the 30-minute mark, and another massive mash of names again where people have taken a gigantic sigh and turned the game off.
This, but thousands more names overlapping each other, covering the entire screen.
The “beautiful, underwater scenery” in this game, you want to see it? Too bad, you’ve got to stare at this clusterfuck of names. Thank goodness, the game doesn’t “start” until you get past this absolute mess, although, I doubt you’ll be paying attention to find that out.
Price: N/A Time To Complete: Apparently around an hour. Achievements: 28 Cards: N/A Worth The Money: It’s not even worth being free, to be honest.
It’s not worth a fun rating.
0 Out Of 10
While it is not the country of origin that defines the type of game a developer produces, you will find that a lot of “Shovelware” comes from Russia. People who are well versed in Steam and cheap games will know this already. I can only see so far, and my scope is limited to so many, different variables: — Time of purchase — Impulsivity — Jumping on bundles/sales — Complete disregard for my own enjoyment, just to sate an urge to buy something that looks bad.
Yeah, I’m bullshitting, but it’s a half-truth. There have been Brazilian games and Portuguese and English games I’ve played that all fit these categories. Cheap games, made to barely hold themselves together, to sit on Steam and slowly farm pennies until the $100 is paid back before Steam finds the game and deletes it. But not as many as I have Russian. This is predominantly because of where I bought these games initially, and where I get them from now.
DailyIndieGame is one of the big reasons as to why I have a lot of these (apart from the few times I went to Russian sites and paid £10 for 250 games) games are in my Steam library. The promise is, from the site, to highlight creator’s games. Giving them out in bundles for small prices. It’s honestly a decent way to do things, but after a while I had to take a step back and check what I was actually buying because… ehhhhhhh. I maybe just paid £0.66 for The Wasteland Trucker, but… Yuck, I paid THAT, for THIS??
Another culprit (of no bad means) is Steamdb’s Free Game activator. Any time a game goes up for free, whether just newly released for free or discounted to free, it will activate it on your account. It’s responsible for the fact I have over 11k items in my library now and if you load up my steam games list IT WILL CRASH YOUR CLIENT/BROWSER.
It’s safe to say, you can expect a lot more Shovelware reviews. We’ve got my whole library to look forward to reviewing.
Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented. Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.
jinxlgamez
Doubtful Player 