Recent reviews by Jekadu

Very tentative recommendation -- the game is incredibly deep and the concept is great, but the difficulty feels like it was tuned for people who played the game a lot during Early Access. When a run can take up to eight hours to complete, making the baseline difficulty such a hard nut to crack feels excessive. The game does feature a "no limits" setting and doesn't judge you for using it (aside from missing out on a few Achievements), but it's a shame that the recommended settings are so rough.

Will you have fun playing the game if you buy it? Yes, but expect a lot of frustration.

Sound the Horn of Reviewing! *Horn sounds*

A fun, lightweight strategy game that borrows a lot from XCOM. Very much an "easy to learn, difficult to master" kind of game where a casual player can breeze through the game while only interacting with the bloodline mechanics as needed, while an advanced player derives replayability from the same mechanics' considerable depth.

The story is mostly there as a framing device, but the writing is, as per Double Fine standards, both compelling and interesting in its sparsity. The Chalice is voiced by veteran voice actors Simon Templeman and Anna Graves, and they both do an excellent job (good voice direction being another Double Fine staple). The minimalist stylized graphics are a treat to look at and the music, when it deigns to play, is excellent.

Is it a shame that the game's scope is a bit constrained, and that it doesn't look like we'll ever get the expansion or sequel that it deserves? Sure, but such is life. What's there is still a great game.

Overall, the game calls for the Horn of Recommendation. Blow it! *Horn sounds*

Believe it or not, Wasteland still holds up today. Games from this particular era come with a lot of expected baggage, such as inscrutable user interfaces, obscure important mechanics and an unfair difficulty curve. Surprisingly, none of this holds true for Wasteland. The interface, while clunky and ugly by modern standards, is reasonable enough to navigate. There are no hidden mechanics that will sabotage you at the wrong time. And most importantly, the game is very forgiving: it is very difficult for player characters to die, making a "bad" build will at worst mean you have to spend a little time grinding experience points to fix it, and there are no timed quests. I'm not even sure if it's possible to lock yourself out of the main quest -- though just to be certain it's probably best to play with a guide at hand!

This particular version of the game features a soundtrack and some voice-acted narration, although I would not consider either of those to be particularly critical to the experience. The soundtrack loops through a handful of songs and the voiceover is, or at least was when I played this when it came out, comically poorly implemented, with the actor occasionally reading the wrong lines or even stopping halfway through to redo the take.

Overall, though, it's a solid enough game that has stood the test of time and manages to still be fun enough that you can get sucked in and forget that you probably only started it up because you were curious what an epic CRPG looked like 35 years ago.

This review is a reminder to my future self why I decided to put this game under Favorites:

Enjoyed it for its weirdness, aesthetics, and how successful the UXD is at making you feel like you're on a tropical island. Killer (hehe) soundtrack as well.

The writing is okay, but the prose is often too functional to be interesting. Production values bounce between "indie low-poly weird" and "freeware VN placeholder JPGs". The finale is fairly brief and would have been more rewarding if it had been more mechanically interesting.

If Hyperion were a trippy videogame

Sometimes I think about this game and then I want to cry because I know that I will never in a thousand years make anything a tenth as good.

All Walls Must Fall is a game that is almost impossible to describe. You are guiding a time-travelling bear (a burly gay man) as he investigates a bombing that took place 24 hours in the future by visiting the gay night clubs of East Germany in a dystopian future where the Cold War never ended. It's a Rogue-lite strategy action rhythm-based imsim-lite with time travel mechanics and a "Cold War Berlin Wall spy yarn" story aesthetic.

It's an intensely stylistic game and while it runs out of new things to show pretty quickly, it's also completely unique and has a great soundtrack that incorporates your actions as percussion during fight sequences.

Dresden Files meets Bioware party shenanigans in a point-and-click adventure game. The game pulls it off.

Need I say more?

An excellent sequel to Sunless Sea, one of the games that have most affected me in the last five years.

West of Loathing is fun, funny, big and clever. Its focus on letting players pick the solution to a problem they want is particularly endearing—many encounters can be resolved peacefully, puzzles can be circumvented and there are secrets to discover everywhere.

The tone of the game is somewhat more serious than that of Kingdom of Loathing. While everything is still a joke in some way, the world building is consistent and characters have serious motivations. Unfortunately, the story just sort of ends suddenly, in an abrupt enough manner that I spent the better part of an evening exploring the post-game wondering if I had missed something.

I hope the game sells well enough to justify further development. An expansion would be nice, and a New Game+ mode would fit the game very well.