Tag: Survival

[LEGACY] Nightmare Never End

You wake up in your room and realize that something is very wrong. You’ve been tasked to review another horror indie game, and it already looks as if you’re going to be crying in frustration more than you are in fear.

In the last (or maybe first) review that you saw of mine, in the very first paragraph I mentioned the shovelware that has plagued Steam since Steam Greenlight was taken from us and “anything goes”. Well, here is your first example.

NMNE is a “horror” game, which in itself is correct. Any game which has the purpose of trying to scare you is indeed a horror game, but it spectacularly fails at doing so. Even trying to cut the game some slack by looking at horror sub-genres still greatly fails.

Survival horror? Yes, but either easily survivable or pure luck (based on unpredictable A.I. patterns and wall phasing).
Action Horror? Nah, not really.
Psychological Horror? It wishes, or at least it’s trying to be. It’s one of the many games where the protagonist is stuck in a coma, and it tries so hard to create this sense of dread but is entirely ruined by the next part.
Jump-Scare Horror. Which is badly done. Scares with no rhyme or rhythm. One of which, after being “scared” once, I know exactly what triggers the scare, which I then demonstrated that I knew as I had to replay the game when I got stuck.

There is no finer detail to this game. Every story aspect serves itself as it is, and it is what it is.

Pros: 

  • The game works as a game (most of the time)
  • Has grab and move physics
  • Actually made me jump (once)
  • I’m a sucker for trippy visualisations. Eyeballs coming out the walls, floating teacups, fleshy meatballs I need to stack into a bathtub? Love all that weird shit.
  • The game has a beatable threat (most of the game) but doesn’t seem too unrealistic to beat or not beat, reasonably easy.
  • You know exactly what you’re doing every time you’re faced with a “challenge” or scenario. Very self-explanatory, even though that’s probably just down to the game’s simplicity.
  • When you die, you get sent back to the last stage or beginning of the stage you’re on. Very unlike most trash indie games.

Cons:

  • I actually got stuck in the game twice, one was due to the lighting being terrible in a particular area that I couldn’t see the “solution” to the “puzzle”. The other was to do with bad A.I.
  • Grab and move physics are almost overused, to the point where I need to make bathtub meatballs a SECOND time in the game. I love weird shit but WHY. The lack of other mechanics and odd tropes hammers this almost-overuse in.
  • The game is not scary, honestly. The one scare that got me was because a bat flew into my face as I went around a corner. I didn’t even jump that much, but THAT was a proper jumpscare. The rest of which was The Rake, but like Shadowman squished up behind a door going *BSSHHHHHT* *Static Noises And Static Visual Effects*. I’m scarier behind a door making those noises.
  • The last thing that I came face to face with (whether it was the end of the game or not) was biscuit collecting??? Every time I collected a biscuit, noises, and sounds were added, enemies with AWFUL PATHING were added and it eventually killed me. Unlike the rest of the game, it did not revert me to the previous stage, it bugged and game over’d me. At this point, I’d already restarted it once, so…

Overall, this game is not great. If you want to be scared, this is not it. It seems like a first attempt at a game with minimal assets and minimal effort or people who seem to kind of know what they’re doing but don’t know how to pull shit together.

But, this is not their first game, nor their first horror rodeo. AK Studio, the publisher, and developer of this game, has made 5 games before this going back to 2019. Albeit, one of them not being horror but a Crossy Roads clone, by the look of it.

While practise is patience and practise improves things, you have to pay $100 (I believe, feel free to correct me) to publish a game on Steam. While it is completely free to publish a game on Itch.io or Game Jolt, GOG, or Gamers Gate.

I’m not saying, “TAKE YOUR TRASH AND PUT IT ELSEWHERE.” It is a better business prospect for games like this, where you can get traction and feedback without having to pay out your ass just to see if people will buy your game.

Even so, despite traction and everything, you can even have someone famous review or play your games. One of their previous games, “Ghost Stories” was obviously seen by someone quite famous on Twitch as on Nov 12th 2020 the view of the game on Twitch spiked to 4.7k. Despite that, and despite all the LOL GAME BAD = GOOD REVIEW that came from it, not much else came from it. Obviously, enough money to try it again, but it lucked out, and it probably won’t happen again.

The reason I’ve spotlighted this game in particular is for one reason. If rubbish is highlighted and praised for its stupidity, you can fool anyone into thinking that the market is successful and a feasible means of making money.

Price: £7.19
Time To Complete: N/A
Achievements: None
Cards: No
Worth The Money: Yes, play it again and again.

This game’s base price is £3.99, discounted right now at £3.19. That’s not a steal, and I doubt there will be a price suitable for the “content” that it brings. If you can get this for free, good on you, but I have no clue why you want it. Jinx from the present day here, this is ridiculous. I’m checking right now if they’ve made any updates since on this game because the base price has been raised from £3.99 to £7.19 as of a couple of days ago. Yeah, just as I thought. No official updates of patches since release in December 2021. I’m not altering the rating or anything to suit, just thought I’d chime in on this somewhere.

Zesty rating
1 Out Of 10.

A badly made, badly crafted excuse of a semi-psychological, shitty jumpscare “horror” game where discount RakeXShadowman squeezes into the most unscary, ridiculous places to scare you and defies physics just to be intimidating. 

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.
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[LEGACY] Receiver 2

I first went into Receiver 2 thinking that this was a first-person shooter game like any other, I was wrong. I’d read the blurb on how it teaches you vaguely how a vast array of guns work, in the most “This Does Not Qualify As Actual Gun Training” way as possible, but still thinking it was a progressive game.

I was also wrong.

You start off by getting this pistol, which it tells you how to fire and such in a tutorial area that’s in the construction site of a city. You’re facing off against robot turrets that have a line of sight you can see via the light it shines to see you. The light is blue when it can’t see you and promptly changes you yellow and starts firing at you when it can. Simple.
After the tutorial area, you’re then further up in a series of buildings full of machine gun turrets, learning how to use the next gun, killing more machine gun turrets, and finding cassette tapes.

From here on, the game is samey, samey, samey. You get to the end of the level, you restart in a different area with a different gun. You get to the end of the level again, restart again with another different gun, more robotic turrets, blah, blah blah.
There is nothing more to this game than restarting in the same building with a different gun each time, I got through about 5 guns until I’d had enough. I’ve actually got to in a point in this review where I’m uncertain if I’ve said the same thing over and over because that’s all there is. Nothing actually… happens…

Pros:

  • The game works, not graphical issues or game breaking bugs.
  • The game feels soooo sleek and smooth, everything about the game feels fluid and responsive, and is precisely what I’d love from a first person Hitman game.
  • The setting (while the same one every single time) is 100% spot on. Everything is believable in an abandoned office building, a work in progress. It’s not a forced scene and sets a really great atmosphere.
  • The actual implementation of learning how to use different guns and them all being finicky and different was appealing. Especially when I reset once and didn’t realise that I was using a different gun, as it looked vaguely the same until I had to reload it, and it was missing one chamber.
  • It gives a sense of infinite possibility to how you can approach how to finish the “level”. Walk down any corridor, up any stairs, and shoot the turrets from any angle.

Cons:

  • While the game works sleekly, and smoothly, it does have a few weird controls for a keyboard. More akin to a console controller. Like for sprinting, you need to ferociously tap the “W” key to start sprinting, and you need to keep it up to keep sprinting. Each action for the gun, firing, reloading, emptying the chamber, opening the chamber, have all separate keys on the keyboard, which makes for a “I need to look at my fingers” moment nearly every time. Not only that, but having to forget all of that for the next gun you use on the next level.
  • The setting is the same at every level, and not in a Groundhog Day way. You get to the top of the level each time and then suddenly appear back downstairs again with a different gun. The story I uncovered within does nothing to really explain why I’m here, but I know who I am. Despite being a well polished and believable building, seeing it for the 5th time was enough to know I would rather not see it again.
  • While I loved the intricacy of using different guns, the learning of it felt clunky and somewhat forced. It lacked the situational learning that you have in most other FPS games where when the player picks up new guns it slowly lets them learn everything. In this, you’re just handed the gun and multiple controls that you’re given to remember and gives you no repetitive learning time. But at the same time, the whole game is learning time, and you don’t feel as if it’s an actual game.
  • As much as I love the whole “telling the story through the tapes and notes” feature, it becomes semi-irrelevant if you can just miss them. This was something I thought about Amnesia as well until I realised that despite seeming like an open game, it wasn’t. This game, however, is very much open, and it’s easy to miss some notes and tapes. I didn’t feel as though I were getting the full story or experience. They’d do better with the Superliminal approach of areas you have to walk through which have the story in them.

Price: £15.49
Time To Complete: 7.5 hours
Achievements: 34
Cards: 5
Worth The Money: Not At All

Overall, there is not a game for me, to the point where I wouldn’t really consider it a game. It’s a simulation (as it’s advertised) but not as much of a game as it feels it is. It’s super polished and is really intuitive to play, and honestly feels like something I’d enjoy playing if the environment/world I was in was enjoyable. It has that high levels of “I am more in control of this character than other games allow me to be” but gave me nothing to do with it. Honestly, it’s not something I can recommend to most of my friends, as they would all get bored with it much quicker than I did.
For a gun nerd who doesn’t give a shit about a story or being entertained by changing aspects of the game, this is for you.

Zesty Rating
3.5 Out Of 10
It’s got the glitz, and it’s got the glamour, but it’s got as much weight as an inflatable hammer. An empty simulation game which gives you the story in miss-able drips and drabs, and really drags when all you do is train, again and again. I apparently felt like rhyming because the itchy trigger finger sends my frustration climbing.

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”.
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[LEGACY] Berserker’s Descent

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.
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[LEGACY] Fisherman’s House

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”.
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[LEGACY] Hidden Shelter

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”.
0

[LEGACY] Ratropolis

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.
0

[LEGACY] Midnight: Submersion – Nightmare Horror

I think the steam review by nbartley1998 sums this game up completely.

“Load game
Confused immediately
Walk outside
No directive
Get punched by slappy the dummy
Uninstall game
10/10”

Once again, another horror game that I was excited to play, once again another horror game that I have uninstalled and will never touch again.

Keymailer once again has supplied me with what I thought was going to be the next Kraven Manor, spooky mannequin-esque looking art puppets, littered around an abandoned and ruined town/village. Instead, what was delivered in this game was a walking simulator where you pick up pieces of paper with information and listen to a radio.
I say this because I didn’t get much further than the first area of this game; after having to play through the first area 3 times, I was almost already done.

You start off with the typical horror cliché of waking up somewhere that’s not your bed, I have nothing wrong with this cliché, I just have to point it out. From here you get a torch and are told to leave the room, I, however, could see nothing as when it had told me to grab a battery and to replace it, it was extremely lacking on the part of telling me how to actually “do the thing”.

Restart the game to try again.

Once again waking up, paying SUPER close attention to the instructions and picking up the battery, once again I stand right in front of the door that I assume I will be exiting the building via before my battery runs out. Assuming that this area, considering it was literally a wall of windows and the door itself had windows, maybe I’d be able to see? Nope, the lighting in this game is terrible.
And again, paying close attention to the instruction did me no service, the battery would not change in the torch, the light went out, and the door would not open. I got understandably irritated and started jumping everywhere around the room I was currently locked in, completely blind due to the lack of battery changing, and managed to glitch myself into a bed.

Restart.

Zoom, up out of bed I got, I picked up that battery and I looked everywhere. Anything, anything, have I missed anything at all???. I found nothing, it was only that one battery and only that one door, and as the torch started to fail on me, I did what I had before and darted back over to that door.
All this time, in all my “playthroughs” the music had been unnecessarily suspenseful, like the darkness was dawning on me, trying to eat me, but as much as I would’ve blamed it on my inability to change the battery it’s my 3rd attempt, the music is not phasing me any more and is actually annoying me.

The light went out, and I stood at the door, I reclined back in my chair, defeated. Gaining back some will to play, I pressed every button on my keyboard to no avail. My chat pointing out to me that the game was bad, all I can manage is a cynical and snarky “Yes, yes it is…”.

So once again I let out my frustration on the game, this time by pressing my “R” key just about as hard and fast as someone trying to take over their local Pokémon Gym on Pokémon Go, but with just a sprinkle of hate.
And suddenly, on maybe one of the longer pushes, or perhaps it needed to be hated, it worked.
Wow, amazing.

Okay, so I’m out now. What do I do?
The game has completely no directive or incentive to do something and has you aimlessly wander around gawking at things that aren’t scary (perhaps for people who’re afraid of mannequins, possibly…) and suffer the game’s fatal attempt to create a terrifying environment.

Don’t get me wrong, this game, without all its jumpscares and loud noises and blatant attempts to be scary, is actually very eerie. The setting and the placement of the mannequins really work, the environment outside the playable area is excellent too, eerie as heck. I feel like this game has done too much in some areas and not enough in others. Trying way too hard to be scary too early and not enough on the actual playability of the game and the ease of playing.

To put it down to a tee, this game has the makings of a standard horror game.
It uses tropes such as the refillable battery that has been overused since Outlast, the concept having existed before then, Outlast making every horror developer thinking they need it in their game.
You don’t need it in your game for it to be a good horror game.
Using wandering around with a semi-cut path for you, using the one road up the centre of the town/village to navigate your way through, finding notes with people’s personal logs and mostly irrelevant information.
Only one of these notes is actually helpful, being right beside the padlock with the number combination, a little too easy, but it’s the only one that actually was relevant.

After walking around the entire village, seeing a mannequin walk all creakily, rub my groin against every fence to see if I was missing a way out to get to the big factory behind the town, parkouring into ruined buildings that had nothing in it and getting right up in every mannequin’s personal space I was then socked in the face by the very last mannequin I encountered.
I’m calling him Barry.
Barry socked me in the face.
I’d walked past Barry before, and he was a regular mannequin, he looked as if he was having an argument with his mannequin buddies with the way he was posed, but I never went up to see what was happening before, other things took priority. On coming back to see if sticking my face in Barry’s face would advance the game any further, it initiated an in-game cutscene where he just started moving, grabbed me and socked me in the face. Rude.
Oh, and to note, this restarted the entire game and all my progress was lost. Barry, who looked like every other mannequin, has the ability to kill me and my game. With no warning or “eerie music” or anything to ward me away from doing such a thing, Barry has the ability to just smite me.

Screenshot from Kraven Manor, an infinitely better mannequin horror game.

There will be no pros and cons.
It’s unfair to list cons when the pros will hardly do me writing a list any justice. Especially when it will mostly just be “Game works and looks and sounds good, but that’s about it.”
So onto the little chart, conclusion and rating.

Price: £3.99 (Originally £6.99)
Time To Complete: N/A
Achievements: None
Cards: None
Worth The Money: No. This game was quickly reduced to £3.99 for a reason. If worked on, I’d say it has the potential to meet being worth it’s original price, but not right now.

Overall, this game is another one I add to the pile of games that could’ve been something great or even just “okay”, but falls so hard due to paying attention to one aspect of the game over more important aspects. With the massive potential to be another one of those great mannequin horror games that have become horror connoisseur household names, falling flat on it’s face at nearly every hurdle right off the bat. It’s honestly not worth trying to figure out how to progress to the next area.

Zesty Rating
1.5 Out Of 10. As full of flavour as that lemon I bit into at a showroom. Polystyrene.
Another indie horror game that falls flat at every hurdle it attempts right off the bat. Eerie and spooky mannequins, ruined by bad playability and trying way too hard to scare the player too early in the game. Barry slapped me good, right back to the start, so I said “nope.”.

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”.
0

[LEGACY] Unturned

Okay, so this game review is a long time coming.

Unturned is a game that I’ve spent countless hours in. Excluding the games that I used to play on my Xbox back in the day, when hours weren’t counted, and you couldn’t see how addicted to a game you really were.
It goes as far to say that after a year of playing Unturned, I was already satisfied with the product. Having downloaded it back in 2013/2014, (ass-end of 2013 or early 2014) by the time that 2015 rolled around I had already bought the “Supporter Pack”, or whatever it’s called (Permanent Gold Upgrade).

The Permanent Gold Upgrade was a $5 pack that was purely cosmetics (at the time) and the key purpose was to show your support to the lone, Canadian developer. I’m pretty sure I jumped on that about 3 months into the game.

Along comes 2015, and my first-ever review was for this game:

~“Unturned is an excellent game with great potential. With the latest updates, the games mechanics run much smoother and the crafting mechanics are much easier than first off. Servers are easy to access and a little less glitchy than before when hosting numerous players, but overall a brilliant game in the making, would’ve expected a game like this to cost money. I’m still playing this game after a good 2 years. It’s got better and worse in many ways. *cough cough* nerfing. But I still love the game.”~

I’ll leave in all the horrendous spelling mistakes and horrible grammar, as much as it kills me to look at it. That salt is hilarious, though.
This wasn’t actually my first review, as I believe that I’d made one before that, which was similar to, “its a good game :)”. Steam, however, didn’t have the function at that point where if you edited your review, you could quote the previous version.

After 7 consecutive years of playing Unturned, I am revisiting this review, and the game itself.
For the first year solid, I played entirely single-player, like the little idiot I was. Being 12/13/14, I had the most limited grasp on online lobbies and how it worked for PC. I was a console pleb and the only multiplayer I knew of, I only had to press one button to be opposite hordes of squeaky, screaming, cat-calling pre-teens and teens (If you guessed Call of Duty then you’re correct).

After that year, an update caught my attention, and for some reason I pressed multiplayer. Four years of my life, and it was the only game I played after pressing that damn button.
I found a clan of people that I got along really well with, who in turn really enjoyed the fact I was female, which in turn always got me staff in servers in less than 7 days.
And for the last 2 years playing, once the clan had disbanded as everyone had to go off and be adults, I played on and off after I got my orange beret (which you received after two thousand hours in-game).

This game is worth money, but it doesn’t cost money.

If you’ve not had a chance to play this game before, the best thing I’ve heard it be called is Roblox zombies. Which is somewhat of a compli-sult, really, but I’ll take it.
After playing many more games since then, I can tell you that it merely has the graphics of Roblox/Minecraft, but with that come the endless capabilities that these games ensue, with full moon mechanics like 7 Days to Die. The zombies raid your base, but at a less startling rate than what those of 7D2D do. They are, however, empowered by the moon and have glow-y red eyes, which for a newbie player and people easily startled can give them a startle.
The game is experience-based, and nearly everything gives you experience; from chopping trees, to mining to killing zombies, each gives a varying amount. The experience you then get, you can spend on levelling up skills and abilities, which makes traversing and surviving a lot easier, not only that but attacking, gun accuracy and damage output.
The game also comes with different levels of playing, easy, normal, hard, custom. Which not only alters physical difficulty but the scarcity of food, item drops, the condition of food and items and so on.

There’s definitely a reason as to why the developer was interviewed countless times for this game.

Of course, the game does have its issues as well, like any other game.
The fact that the game is free means that the game will always be populated to a certain extent. However, the numbers have been dropping for a good while.
In my opinion, it’s been dropping the entire time, but the biggest drop was when the “special” zombies were added and several names for zombies, map areas and guns changed.
At the time of the changes, there were a fair number of maps out, and the player-base was split across them in terms of favourites. There was one map; however, that was the least played on. The original map called PEI. There were major changes to this map, as well as most people’s favourite part of the map (a hidden bunker that everyone used to fight over) being completely deleted.
The special zombies that were added were different to the regular zombies. Regular zombies had 3 different types, standing, on all fours and crawling. Except for the “Mega Zombie” who was a massive zombie that could one-hit you with a punch or through a boulder in your general direction.
The special zombies, however, were weird. Introducing zombies that spit acidic goo as they walk, zombies that are coated in fire and explode in flames if you shoot them, and electric zombies that can zap you from afar. Most players at the time were more or less thinking “What the heck is that?” rather than “This is precisely what we need, fantastical fantasy-esque powers for the zombies that were already bordering on perfection.”.
What was messed with was an already fantastic formula of zombie-making, those bland and “usual” zombie designs were all that the games needed, no fantastical elements.

(Editing notes: Going back on this, the supernatural way that these zombies seemed to have these “powers” was what made them ridiculous.
Fire Zombies: Make sense if you’re in a burning building or near one a la 7 Days To Die style, different zombies, different biomes. Fire zombies in fire environments, burning cars, burning buildings, forests engulfed with fire. And would also make more sense as to the firefighter equipment being added. Being in a fire environment depleting the oxygen bar, but slower than when you’re underwater. Also adding to your disease meter, but slower than when you’re in a deadzone.
Electric Zombies: can’t find any reason for them to exist, honestly, but I’d honestly nerf them as they were perfectly capable of sniping you last time I checked.
Acid Zombies: Slightly alter them, instead of having a spitting attack, replace with a “semi-ground pound”. When a zombie falls from a height, have it splodge out “toxic goo” instead. Being in proximity of them causes disease to decrease slightly slower than being in a deadzone. Being touched by them not only taking the regular chunk out of your health but an even bigger chunk out of your disease, leaving also a residual timed effect of slow disease increase.)


If you’ve played a free game before, you’ll be aware of what comes with a free game is no pay-wall. Absolutely no filter to the type of people you come across in the game. This is good and bad in and of itself, but it means you have no idea the age or temperament of someone until their gun is up your arse, cursing, swearing, profanities and the occasional racial slurs.

In terms of bad things about the game itself, there’s not much. There are plenty of things that will be subjective, like the art style and the mechanics; like bullet drop and things. Things that are considered “controversial” within the game’s community.
However, there are certain problems when faced with multiplayer, as a lot of the maps used for single-player. While these maps great for multiplayer, they can’t cope with the number of people building things at the one time (aka Washington, and it’s Lag Wall).
There are unplayed maps like the barren, snow map called Yukon. Which I know many people like, but just not enough people like it for it to be used for any of the multiplayer servers.

Price: Free To Play (Can Buy £3.99 upgrade)
Time To Complete: N/A endless survival game.
Achievements: 63
Cards: 13
Worth The Money: It’s free…. Yes. If they charged the £3.99 for the game instead of an optional extra, it would still be worth it 100%.

Genuinely, if you’re looking at this and considering it, you should definitely pick it up and play it. I made some of the best friends and memories within this game, and I do not regret playing it one bit. I’m always looking forward to the next big thing from the developer of this game (and still waiting for Unturned 2 despite the fact it was supposed to be being released years ago) and cherish it with all my heart.

Zesty Rating
9 Out Of 10.
A free to play, open world survival, zombie game. Created by a lone developer and built with a lot of love and devotion, and it shows. One of the main reasons it’s still a very highly played game today, and has been for a long time. It sustained my interest for over two thousand hours, and if I got other people into it with me, I could probably play two thousand more. 

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.
1

[LEGACY] Árida: Backland’s Awakening

ARIDA: Backland’s Awakening is an open world game that I was really looking forward to, I saw on Keymailer and immediately requested it. It’s a desert/backlands survival game where you have to keep tabs of your food and hunger while trying to reach a specific place, also picking up side-quests along the way. (Reminding me a tad of the vibe of The Flame in the Flood)
It’s definitely not a catfish game, where it misleads me into thinking something it isn’t or saying that it’s something or not, but I still feel a little empty playing it.

ARIDA: Backlands Awakening starts off really well, having a good starting story and nice little picture by picture cutscenes, representing their situation really well. The town that the main character lives in, used to be a lush, bountiful town, producing lots in terms of cattle and food produce (as it would not make much sense to make a town in a barren wasteland). At some point, the town was engulfed with a drought which severely affected everything within the town. With limited water supply, they could no longer grow enough food, support the cattle they had, and everything eventually started withering and dying.

The town was, however, considered a holy town, and leaving it was taboo, until pilgrimages to a new town where it rained every other day started, splitting the community in two. Those who saw it taboo to leave the holy town, and those who saw the pilgrimage to the new town as a new holy journey and the drought a message from their belief to leave.

After being served the harsh truth about the world a few quests in, you’re also handed your situation, the pilgrimage that you were supposed to join already happened. Something else shit happens, which I’m not going to spoil, and you’re forced to make this pilgrimage all by yourself and leave the stupid priest to preach to an empty town. (sorry, but I think the priest is a bloody idiot, the town is dire, and he still wants to stay despite the conditions. I get being determined, but this is just blind stubbornness due to being overly invested in their religion and sacrificing themselves to trying to prove a point that will eventually kill them.)

So from here you mostly already know what you need to do, you can gather water, make campfires and cook food with the campfire to fill both your food and water bars. The game also has a “heat” meters (I forget what it’s actually called), so in areas where the heat is intense, your meters deplete faster.

As much as I love the absolutely dire depiction of this landscape, barns full of the corpses of dead cows and the horrid sound of swarms of flies in that area, this game “runs like an indie game”. Of course, we need to break the stigma of indie = bad, but when I say that “it runs like an indie game”, people know what I mean.
It’s clunky, unresponsive and when walking over objects you can pick up, or being next to them, the prompt to interact with them doesn’t always pop up.
Failing that, the crafting is a little weird, and using things from your inventory. I made sure to double-check it wasn’t my mouse being fuck-y (I’ve had mouse problems in the past from my Razor Deathadder, despite my Logitech G502 being a sexy fuck, I’d never question your loyalty to me my sexy, sexy computer mouse.) When trying to craft things, the crafting inventory was stubborn to come up, I had to trick it into thinking I wasn’t going to click it to sneakily click it and make it open. When using items in my inventory, for example the drinking water, I had 3 stacks, I clicked to consume 1, and usually, I’d consume 2, sometimes I’d consume them all?

Nevertheless, I feel that this would be a good game to continue and actually go back to if the potentially game-ruining kinks were ironed out. Maybe a solid 6 or 7 out of 10 if it worked the way it should. Currently, with this, and also being another game that kind of bores me after a great initial plot then suddenly bland side-quests and not a lot of urgency, it’s looking about as dry as the drought they’re having.

List, please!

Pros:

  • The game works, it doesn’t crash and has no audio or graphical issues. (As far as I saw)
  • The game is survival, crafting, which is a genre I really enjoy. It focuses on food and drink and not much else, which keeps it nice and simple. The type of crafting that happens is similar to Raft in the sense that there is not a lot that you can craft, but everything that you do craft is almost essential to the plot/survival of your character.
  • Things that can be picked up that are necessary for survival sometimes require an additional tool to harvest them, adding another layer to the game focusing on maintaining and crafting tools to aid in your survival.
  • There are two strong emotional elements at the start of the game involving goats and your grandpa, both really set the tone for the game very well, and just how dire the atmosphere is. For a family friendly tagged game, this game is super bleak, and I love it.

Cons:

  • While the game technically works, it has a few bugs as mentioned. Double-using items in your inventory when you only wanted to use one, being really tricky to operate menus, and being generally tedious in terms of the UI.
  • While the game is a survival game, and elements that are used to make the game harder in some aspects are great, the use of the heat to make things degrade faster is a little too strong (in my opinion). In comparison to the resources that you’re given to survive, I really don’t feel that it’s too balanced.
  • Things being picked up for intended use when crafting would be nice if the option to do so came up when it’s supposed to and not on your 5th attempt rubbing your crotch against it. The action buttons for the game aren’t very responsive, in the way that they don’t always appear where they’re supposed to. Me being a person who loves to pick everything up, this is both annoying, frustrating and tedious.

Price: £5.19
Time To Complete: 2.5 hours
Achievements: 26
Cards: 5
Worth The Money: Honestly, for about £5, yeah, go for it. It’s only a 2-3 hour experience and while it has its bugs, it’s still a reasonable game.

In conclusion, this game is a game that I want, but it’s missing a lot of the polish that I would’ve hoped it came with before being released. If the game was Early Access, then I could forgive it a little more, but due to being a full release, it’s a little more inexcusable. Sure, patches can come for games regardless of EA state, but purchasing a game that still is wonky enough to impact on a player’s experience isn’t something you should expect of a final product.
It’s gritty and realistic, while also being a bit unrealistic in some parts. Somewhat aimed towards a younger audience, with character design and simplicity of playing and language, but somewhat not with its realistic portrayal of death and what comes with drought.

Hands down, a game that should be experienced, but with a fair mind that it is wonky as shit.

Zest Rating
4.5 Out Of 10. It looks delicious on the outside, but disappointing on the inside. Like a white dragon fruit.

The type of game that I love and wished to see in this new, unique setting, let down by a handful of experience hindering bugs and slow pacing after the initial deaths. Bugs making me consume all my water instead of just one canister really hinder gameplay, as the character has sloshing sounds coming from their stomach as they walk due to water overindulgence.

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”.
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[LEGACY] Apsulov: End of Gods

Apsulov: End of Gods was a game that I was really excited to play. It was one of the first games that I’d received from Keymailer that actually looked worth the price that it was. Looking like a finely polished, first-person adventure which had very different elements to it than previous games. It struck my interest and when I actually received the game, I was genuinely shocked and excited considering that the game was released in 2019.

You’re dropped into the game with a very cranky-ass GLADOS repairing you and shouting at you for being a failure. This part of the game sets up the basics, walking, movement in general and interacting with things. Not only that, but gives you the tone straight away. Lulling you into a false sense of security with being nice, and funny, and then literally screaming at you for being a failure for reasons you can’t understand as the player. (which genuinely triggered some fear for me, a bit of trauma, but we okay). From there you escape into vents, run, and get sucked into a giant, glow-y, magical butthole then transported to the Ashlands where you’re attacked by Demodogs, they eat your arm, but you’re then rescued.

The man who rescues you infuses you with a weird robot arm, which you can conveniently charge up with green ion cells lying around everywhere. With said arm, you can unlock doors using biosignatures which you’ve stolen from the hands of dead corpses. Not only that, but you can also use it to force push people and things, and that’s how you solve a lot of the travel-based obstacles.

Honestly, I couldn’t really tell you what the plot was. I have no idea if I just wasn’t listening, or if I’d zoned out because I was bored, or if it was actually given to me. In my head, all I had was “Zap, Zap, out of battery, refill battery, Zap, Ooo that looks cool, Zap.”
Which is not an entirely bad thing.

The game tries to combine numerous things together, and as much as I enjoyed the game, I think that is its downfall. Once I stopped to breathe, or got tripped up on an obstacle I couldn’t solve it hit me, I don’t really know what’s going on.
This game is supposed to be horror, but I, personally, don’t find it scary at all. There was only one good jumpscare/scary moment, but I forget what it was and where it was.
The game also is supposed to be a mix between Sci-Fi and Viking themes. The humans within the game have “found Asgard” and therefore found items associated with the gods of that realm. Artefacts from the one that is known for raising undead, now there are undead everywhere. It’s a classic DOOM story, humans got too ballsy with their inventions, found Hell and were like “Yeah we could use Literal Hell to power our machines.” but instead it’s all the nasty Viking gods.
After DOOM, looking at this game, you could replace the fact it’s Viking gods with anything at all, or take it out completely. I love it, don’t get me wrong, but I’m more interested in why GLADOS is a dick because this robot thing is apparently sentient and really fucking pissed off at me for reasons I still don’t understand.

Pros:

  • The game works, no major graphical errors, bugs, or audio glitches.
  • The game looks absolutely stunning for being an indie game, and as visual quality goes, justifies the price of the game. It sets scenes amazingly and is not afraid to make things look grandiose, spectacular, and foreboding.
  • The use of colour in this game is also great, not in an atmospherical sense but from a game design perspective. You always know what something is due to the colour and the glow. The big purple horned monoliths are save points, the big green glowing items on the walls are cell refill stations.
  • All the controls are really intuitive and there’s no sense of mucking up what you’re doing. Everything is simple and to the point and is really “handy” when solving the puzzles.
  • The puzzles within the game are easy to spot, as always highlighted with light or made extremely obvious with a bright yellow valve or an obvious ladder you need to blast down to gain access.

Cons:

  • Despite wanting to be a horror game, the atmosphere just isn’t foreboding enough, and the enemies are not scary. There are no pivotal moments where you feel in imminent danger, apart from the cutscene where the demodogs are out to get you. Otherwise, the game is just dark corridors, boopy doors and the Iron Man gloves. The lack of fear this game supplied meant that things that I would usually find scary were just not doing it for me.
  • While it’s good that the exploring puzzles are easy and easy to find, so far, there is only finding the hand that opens a door, blasting a ladder down and blasting doors open. Otherwise, there is nothing else but exploring and picking up bits of dialogue from journal entries and other lore snippets.
  • I’m not sure what the game was really hoping to achieve. It mixes a lot of different cool elements that really catch your interest. I can’t help but feel as though it sounds like an unfinished thought, or a “what if…” statement that was expanded on but never solidified.
    As said before, it’s essentially DOOM, but instead of it being Hell that humans stupidly messed with, it’s Asgard and the world is at threat of the angry god people’s bad antics.
  • The story of the game, while convoluted, was also either barely present or easy enough for me to ignore. Generally, I was happy enough in this bliss of ignorance, happily zapping things, but when it came to puzzles that slowed me down, it dawned on me how empty the game felt.

Price: £15.49
Time To Complete: 5 Hours
Achievements: 39
Cards: 7
Worth The Money: No, but yes on a discount, putting it under £10, maybe.

Overall, this is a stunning looking and feeling game, which creates a great awe-inspiring atmosphere well, but not a scary or spooky one. It has great mechanics used for environmental puzzles and opening up new areas to explore, but no other puzzles that vary enough to excite the brain. A very mixed review from me, but it’s genuinely a game that if I got around to, I would try to finish it. It has my interest, but not my heart.

In conclusion, this game would’ve been a better game if they’d been trying to rip off DOOM in a way. Taking the fast-paced action and combining it with the “I don’t really know what’s going on because things are going super fast, but I’m having fun” aspect combined with quick and easy puzzles. Throw in a few horror aspects to have the player fuelled not only with the energy of excitement, but the energy of “Oh shit, OH SHIT, AHH! AHHH!” with some horror elements.

Zesty Rating
6.5 Out Of 10.
Stunning visually and gameplay wise, but the story is lacking just enough to make you feel something is missing. Interesting premise, but crams a little too much in, making everything feel a tad unfinished. Still a great game for mindless exploration of the fantastic environments created.

Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changed 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.
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