Recent reviews by HowDen『Van』

Knowledge Check: The Game

If you don't already know the ins & outs of the various NPC story lines, enemy placements or attack patterns,
you'll suffer until *you do know them*. Attacks are poorly choreographed, enemies are often placed in locations where you can't infer their existence until they inevitably jump out of their hiding spot & hit you - giving you that knowledge for when you get back there.

You can easily miss dialogue, entire NPCs and even the "intended" way of learning about the alternate ending.
Sometimes even the area is obscured from you (darkness / invisibility), so you feel extra safe in your lack of knowledge.

When you *do* know, then the game becomes an open garden with many paths, great experiences and a rich story, neatly packed action and a lot of options in how to tackle each fight.

TL;DR: great game if you have knowledge, cheap design tricks & poor player experience if you don't.

Absolute banger!
Fluid movement that rewards timing your landing to go with the flow.
Some rough edges like directions being somewhat hard to read at times, but if the final game is anything like the demo, it'll be a must-have!

(love the character designs!)

Great factory building game.

Has everything someone who enjoys the genre would want.
- Stunning visuals
- Bombastic OST
- Complex production lines
- Beautiful array of cosmetic build options
- A.D.A. sass :3

10/10 GOTY material.

3D harvest moon inspired game (especially e.g. how seeds are planted).
You take the role of the hero who saved the world, and now wants a quiet life.
some villagers will pick up on your past & there's even a fun little bullet-hell boss at the end.

+ cute style
+ automation lite, hire workers to automate planting crops & taking care of animals
+ managing your workers and their wages is engaging & fun
+ progression is somewhat well thought out
+ you can go into the mind of NPCs & steal their clothes for you to wear

- terrible machine translation filled with typos
- every other quest has at least a minor bug, some major ones like quest items not spawning
- it's super unpolished
- resource distribution is horrible
- no same-sex marriage
- sex-locked outfits
- merchant is the most carricature chinese salesman ever
- filled with random china-crap

5/7 will 100% it just for the jank

cool game to play w/ friends, randos are hit or miss if you get griefers, cheaters or actual people.

Huge negative: kernel spyware that wrecks my 4060Ti & my avermedia capcard even after the game's closed, only reboot fixes it. and it doesn't even help as there's still cheaters running around.

The quality picross series, finally on pc. <3

the only thing this "game" lacks is achievements.
cool little steam engine.

Backed it on Kickstarter because it showed promise.
Tried it again for the first time in a while.
Before I even finished my first battle, I already got microtransactions thrown into my face.

My first thought was "has this gone free to play?" - but no, it's 44.99€...
I can definitely, without a doubt, recommend to not get this. even for free.

It's a buggy mess, softlocked itself out of nowhere after 2 minutes of the tutorial.
Odd sidenote: starts SteamVR on boot for some reason...

Just a heads up for people that are prone to being sensitive to flickering lights:
you might wanna turn down brightness after "putting it in", or have someone else play that part for you until the lights normalise.

Pros:
- Engaging enemies that copy you, forcing you to either power through these tougher enemies,
or commit to not using certain tactics to have them be weaker for more difficult parts.
- Superb voice acting
- Smooth, responsive controls & UI
- Some great subversion of expectation at times
- Visually unique environments
- Constant switching between being able to see enemies, and lights out adrenaline pumping darkness

Cons:
- Unlike MGSV there's no adaption to stealth tactics, you can just choke out (almost) everyone you meet
- Blackouts happen after choking out 1 (with a bit of delay) or 2 (almost right after) echoes,
making it really easy to reset echoes to prevent them using certain things like elevators.
- *really* handholdy, outside of some "which mirrored side are you jumping down" sitations, you're almost on rails.
- Certain mechanics can be clunky at times, vaulting doesn't work when you're too angled, choking prevents already aggrod enemies from approaching, fighting off an enemy in your face can result in instant death if you have happened to shove another enemy right before that as they'll get up & get their turn right as the fighting off ends.
- Gun is almost useless, if you use it, you'll alert almost every echo in the room, and you'll usually sit at 1 shot. so you shoot, and then are a sitting duck for 5+ echoes.
- None of the half-walls are high enough to properly hide you when crouching, and every enemy just pretends to not see you.
- "we're talking, so we have to walk really slowly to prevent the player from accidentally walking into the next trigger".


If you can ignore the really minor issues like no anti-choking or that "just going around killing all enemies so you can explore the area in peace" isn't a viable strat,
then this is a really nice stealth game with a stellar story.
A tad short - though I'm sure if it was longer it would drag.
The atmosphere, especially in the first 3 chapters, is enthralling and pulls you through to the (imo lacking) endgame.
All in all, great game, definitely recommend it!