Recent reviews by Jobko

The VR experience is not the greatest, and for a game that charges extra money for its VR, I heavily recommend against buying it.

The first issue I noticed was pixelation. The visuals looked extremely low resolution, and upon setting it to 4K, I only removed about 80% of this pixelation. I tried messing with Steam VR settings to fix this, but for some reason Steam VR couldn’t even adjust the resolution, or at least the slider wasn’t changing anything.

The next issue was subtitles. The subtitles are permanently in the outer rim blur, at the very bottom edge of my view. When moving my head to see the subtitles better, they tracked my head movement and moved with me. In short, you’re having to painfully look down at blurred subtitles, with some of them even being cut off at lower FOVs (my headset has a 90 degree vertical FOV).

Then a few menus popped up, and I couldn’t use my analog stick to go through them. I tried a custom community control layout using Steam input, but it didn’t fix this issue. I had to grab my Xbox controller just for this part.

The gameplay itself is fine, fun even. However with all these other issues I can’t in good faith recommend this experience.

A unique puzzle game that allows you to rotate, move, and connect pieces of a map, changing the very world around you. Carto was a lot longer than I had anticipated, but it never felt like it overstayed its welcome – with each location and puzzle feeling different, and every character flaunting their differences. The visuals are cute, the music is relaxing, and while first and foremost a casual game, Carto’s puzzles can be quite challenging.

You’ll know if this is your kind of game. No real criticisms. Pick up on sale if the price point feels a bit much for a 5-7 hour experience.

Extremely addicting and competitive

Terrible controller support without using Steam Input to rebind (fixable)

Every little detail matters. Ib is a game with multiple endings, requiring multiple playthroughs. Through each playthrough you’ll have to play differently, and for 100% completion almost every interaction matters. This makes Ib a memorable experience, with every area, puzzle, painting, character, and dialogue sequence being ingrained in your brain. This level of careful attention to detail, and overall quality of that detail, makes Ib one of the best RPG Maker games to date.

The story itself is unique, and multi-layered, with repeated playthroughs containing details you’d miss on first glance. The game is also rather short, not feeling like a burden to repeat. The endings and extra interactions/dialogue sequences you’ll experience enhance your overall connection to the games characters and story. As someone who came into this with no expectations or prior knowledge, I’m ecstatic. Goosebumps covered me upon experiencing the true ending, overwhelmed with joy due to the trials needed to unlock it.

While the gameplay is simple, given it’s a RPG Maker game, Ib manages to explore various different puzzles, each unique, culminating to the completion of each area. These get progressively more challenging, with some even requiring the use of multiple characters to finish.

The games True Guertena Exhibit is the icing on top, as you explore an exhibit featuring all the games art work, music, and endings, requiring 100% completion to finish. Also the bonus content you unlock on second playthrough feels like a sizeable expansion to the games content/story, so you have more to look forward to outside of whatever ending you’re going for.

Ib is one of those games that feels “perfect”, with no real issues outside of personal taste or nitpicks. An indie classic that needs to be experienced.

Imagine this: You slowly open your sons bedroom door, and on the other side you catch him in the “act”. In this brief moment he quickly reaches over to his school notebook to pull it over his crotch, and simultaneously he grabs his pencil and proceeds to rest his fingers on his chin, as to ponder. You know he wasn’t doing his homework, but nonetheless you pretend you didn’t see anything, release a sigh and close the door. This is the Palworld experience.

The Pal’s are useless. You teleport into your base to watch them looking at walls, picking up the same stone over and over, woodcutting thin air, and taking the longest possible pathway to any destination. Like your son, these Pal’s aren’t doing their work, but they sure as hell like to pretend they are.

I can’t get over how useless they feel. If you need something, go get it yourself. The only Pal’s that actually serve a purpose are the ones you have in your party, like Digtoise with his signature item that allows him to tear through stone/ore/coal like it’s nothing. While your base will accumulate stuff passively, it’s nowhere near as quick as it needs to be. I set up two mining bases, one for ore, the other for coal. These bases would sometimes net around 160 ore, but most times only around 70 ore a day, and in one trip I can get more than an in-game days worth of passive mining. I don’t know if this is a bug, or what’s going wrong, but no matter how many ways I try to optimize these bases, they feel useless. To see if my theory was correct, I played a second character, and while it took me easily 20+ hours to get to level 30 on my first character – the one where I relied on my Pal’s – it took me just over 7 hours to make the same progress on my second character, where I rushed a Digtoise and primarily did all the mining myself. Now I know this is early access, but these Pal’s need serious work on their AI, and I’d say gameplay wise this is one of the primary issues I’ve experienced.

On top of this, servers have huge issues with lag and server memory leaks. There is an infinite load bug, and many ways to have your character stuck in an animation, with no way of switching weapons/firing and sometimes moving. You get these problems back to back, where the servers lagging, you get stuck in an animation, relog only to get stuck in an infinite load screen, restart game just to temporarily fix these issues only for them to happen an hour later.

If these major bugs/performance issues get fixed, as well as Pal AI, the game is actually really good.

The visuals, gunplay, and feeling of chucking a sphere and catching a Pal – this is the core of the games design, and they really nailed this part. The exploration, while simple in scope, really works, and even has some “wow” moments with massive landscapes unveiling themselves behind steep mountains/cliffs. The game isn’t just a joke or a bad clone of the games its heavily inspired by. It’s genuinely really good, and with enough time you’ll learn to appreciate the thought that went into Palworld’s progression, map layout, and spawn locations.

However, gameplay wise there are a few things I didn’t quite enjoy. Base building requires a tedious amount of steps and cursor placements to make things connect. You have a lack of parts to really make your dream building come to life, and most of the time it will come out looking like a stubby stone cube. Not only that, but good luck with raids, as future raids will setback your little condo completely, with fire that your Pal’s aren’t smart enough to put out. Pal’s also need a lot of stuff spaced out for their AI to work properly, as well as flat land with no steep drop-offs for them to get stuck in.

Another issue is climbing. Unlike Breath of the Wild, you cannot use jumping to grab onto the ledge at the last moment. Instead your character just slides down the cliff face.

Balancing in Palworld is weird. Grass types have practically instant animation attacks that shoot really fast, but pretty much every other type doesn’t. Making them super annoying to fight, regardless of level. Leveling up stats is super unbalanced. If you don’t focus on weight/health you’re going to slow the game down a lot, making multiple trips back due to being encumbered/dead. In fact, weight is so important because wood/stone/ore/coal is ridiculously scaled, where even at the start you’ll struggle after cutting down a few trees/rocks. Stamina and damage on the other hand feel useless to get up, because mounts remove stamina issues, and you never want to overkill enemies you’re trying to catch for leveling.

Last point is music/sound effects. While not an issue regarding bugs/gameplay, I feel like there needs to be more variety and less repetition to these sounds. I’m becoming increasingly more aggravated by the battle music/crackling fire sounds as I play. Also picking up multiple items will blast out your ears with 100 sound effects stacking on top of each other.

Overall, the game has a lot of issues, but it’s an early access title and the developer seems aware of a lot of these issues already. The game is good despite all of this, and I’d even go as far saying it’s better than any Pokémon game I’ve played in the past decade. While it doesn’t carry the same charm as the Pokémon series does, if you want something akin to a real time Legends Arceus or Scarlet/Violet, with better exploration, more gameplay loops, more fun to be had with friends, and in some cases better optimization (singleplayer definitely the case), Palworld provides that experience.

Unpacking is a charming game – one that targets a specific type of audience. Whether you like interior design, or you’re OCD, or you just want to have a relaxing casual gaming experience, Unpacking delivers flawless execution within its niche. The music, pixel art, small interactions, and thought that went into every possible placement makes this game feel “perfect” at what it does.


If there were more interactions, levels, and maybe even custom levels, co-op, etc., it would start to show its worth, but seeing as I 100% the game in 3.1 hours, it’s questionable why the asking price is so high. Not that the game is in anyway bad or not deserving of a high price, but it’s double a blockbuster movie in pricing, or a third of a triple-A game (roughly) - which is something to consider. I could see myself putting in more hours just to get each layout looking picture perfect, but even that would only maybe take an hour or two.


The gameplay is as it shows: you unpack several boxes, making the house a cluster of different items you have to sort into different locations around the house. Some are obvious where they need to go, others are not. While the game is quite lenient on placement, meaning you could just spam paraphernalia around, there are certain specific story related placements or things that just wouldn’t cross your mind. One in particular, without spoiling anything major, would be a picture you put on a picture board, however you pin it up by stabbing through the face of someone in the picture, giving you a clue as to what you might need to do with this particular item. Also, as you progress, things that were deemed okay placements before, are now seen as bad placements as you get more room to store items. It’s not hard to figure things out for the most part, and all achievements are quite obvious/easy to get. If you take your time, and you really put thought into your design, you should have little-to-no issues, and the game might be even more enjoyable that way. Or you could be like me, and try speedrun each level, ending up with a sense of “chaotic order” by the time you're done with them.

Unpacking has a lot of LGBTQ+ themes, and I’d argue that while the story itself explores other areas of life, and the overall game is about progressing through life as a whole, the LGBTQ+ narrative is the most overarching. This might be a turn off for you, or maybe something that you’d enjoy – however it’s not obvious, with it being its 15th tag, and subtly hinted throughout each level. It’s up to you whether you care about this or not, but I thought I’d add this to my review, as politically divisive messages like this might not be everyone's cup of tea.


Unpacking is a cute and casual game, one that covers a woman’s life, with each object you unpack telling its own story. The music has a certain melancholy to it, giving a sense of nostalgic depression, as you interact with all her belongings – some new, some old, some upgraded, some hidden, some forgotten, and some destroyed. Explore the different hobbies, lifestyle choices, passions, jobs, and relationships, as you organise her into each new house/space. I thoroughly enjoyed my experience, despite how short it was. It made me reflect on my own life and the different objects that have passed through it, and the stories that they tell.

I recommend getting Unpacking on sale, and spending time with it, not rushing the experience; think about each item, and try to uncover the stories hidden within...

I was initially interested in checking this game out because it was one of David Szymanski’s first titles published on Steam. From a gameplay perspective there really isn’t much going on, as you walk aimlessly on an island, clicking objects, mostly to gather information about who, what, where, and why. However, the pacing and story is dictated by how you explore the island. Text appears when in certain spots or when clicking on certain objects, making the whole game a walk and stop experience, as you walk, have text appear, and then stop to read it before continuing to walk. If you don’t stop the text disappears before you have enough time to read it. This hurts pacing and gameplay. While the writing itself was interesting, and the story intriguing, I did find it hard to get invested enough to actually piece together the information presented to me. It is a mystery involving multiple characters, and while I had some idea of what was happening, I felt lost as I got to the credits without having a moment of disbelief or any enhanced feelings at all. “Was that truly the story?”, or did I miss something? This does put a damper on an otherwise great atmospheric title, and I definitely think that the issues I faced were more so an outcome of this being early on in David’s career as a game developer.

The sound design, music, visuals, all create an amazing atmosphere, filled with well written paragraphs, that come together to give you an experience. I think ‘The Moon Sliver’ is largely what you make of it, and if you pace yourself well and try to get as immersed as possible, I bet you’ll have a better experience than me. Even knowing this I am reluctant to go back in for a second playthrough to try “get it”, which is heavily influenced by it being a slow walking simulator – not exactly my cup of tea. However, the game is cheap, and a better experience than most games at this price point, so if you’re still interested despite my criticisms, I recommend giving it a go.

From the royalty free music, to the Photoshop filtered backgrounds, to the length of each playthrough being around 4 minutes long... I simply cannot recommend this game. Maybe for less than a dollar or free, but I just don’t see the appeal. The writing is very direct and simple, the art isn’t anything interesting, the background music is annoying, the game lacks any settings that mainstream visual novels have, there really isn’t any redeeming factors.

This comes across as a game devs first attempt at making a game, something they would upload for free. From that point of view, I don’t want to be overly harsh, but at this price to effort ratio I feel like you’re getting ripped off regardless of what you could possibly get out of this experience.

Very fun; you hit things.

Battle Leap ability is useless once you get high movement speed. Battle Pound ability stops his normal attacks, and has too big of an animation to be worth using. Tornado Stance is extremely good for wave clearing as his normal attacks overkill enemies, meaning its reduced damage is worth it to be able to hit more enemies faster. Turtle Stance and Siphon Stance are really good for ogre fights if you’re losing health a lot, and Hawk Stance is really good for extra damage against ogres – however if you are using a controller, sometimes it’s too finicky to go through the radial menus to activate these stances mid fight, so this class is better suited for mouse and keyboard. Lightning Stance is the most confusing, as I don’t really see much use in it, especially with how many mobs have lightning resistance. If you build into health, damage, and movement speed, and let your equipment fill out the other stats, you should be clearing really fast, but not fast enough to solo the bigger maps, as you have no towers. Health is arguably the most important stat on the highest difficulties, as you can easily just upgrade your weapon damage to make up for lack of damage, and movement speed the next best stat so you can clear faster to make up for lack of towers.

Overall, Barbarian is a fun class, but his abilities aren’t well thought out, and due to lack of towers I recommend having at least one other person to play with.

Monster Hunter: World’s greatest strength is its ecosystem. Dense environments layered in gatherables, such as rocks, bugs, geodes, bones, and various flora. Among these environmental details you have small monsters, both flying and ground, who inhabit these environments, interacting with it and occasionally attacking each other. Then you have large monsters, the forefront of most quest, who battle other large monsters, but also fight packs of small monsters. Sometimes you have walls you can break, creating floods that push monsters off cliffs. Other times you can shoot down trees, creating vine traps for large monsters to get caught in. The environment and its flora and fauna are all intractable, and all interact with each other, creating a symbiotic relationship between player, environment, and monster. This is the thing that sets Monster Hunter: World apart from other games, and it was the first thing that really caught my attention. It creates a layer of immersion and detail that feels fresh, and something I’ve wanted out of most games, as it deepens your love for the world and its inhabitants. In other games the monsters would be brainless AI that only attack the player, and the environment would be a non-interactive backdrop.


Now, I might not be popular in saying this, but I do wanna stress how convoluted and clunky this game is. If you want to sprint, climb, use items, or do anything other than attacking or rolling, you have to first sheath your weapon. This means that for basic movement options, lets say sprinting out of battle or into battle, or climbing up a vine to get to a monster, you have to go through an animation. Not only this, if you want to heal, you go through a sheathing animation, then you go through a drinking animation, and then you have to wait for your health to heal over time, and any attempt to go back into combat will cancel the heal. If you run out of stamina, you get caught in an animation of resting. You have to sharpen all the time, and this only gets better late game when you get more weapon durability, and bonus stats that speed up the sharpen time. Attacking monsters at low rank has a lot of bounce-off low-damage attack animations, unless you’re on green sharpen level, making this even worse/necessary. Monsters scream all the time, sometimes multiple times in a row, making you dizzy and not able to move or do anything. There are some spots you can just run off/jump off, but others you have to hug the edge, wait for a prompt, then click a specific button to jump off.

You could argue that a lot of these tedious features, especially the sheathing and multiple animation cycling, are what makes Monster Hunter, Monster Hunter, and what keeps it being difficult/challenging. However, after playing FromSoftware’s Souls series and souls-like games, I find that not having this speeds up gameplay a lot, while still having punishment windows if executed poorly (sprinting takes up stamina, drinking still has a small animation/punishment window). You can have both your cake and eat it to so-to-speak. It’s funny, because sprinting already has the punishment of stamina drain, and climbing can be done with certain weapons – just a lot slower than normal… So it’s not like the game doesn’t have ideas around this, it just really wants you to sheath for whatever reason.


After each quest, you have to talk to between 1-6 NPCs for different tasks/hand-ins each time, with each NPC having a tedious amount of dialogue to spam through.

I don’t want to go to resource center, spam click to turn in everything, then select new missions, then go to ecological research to turn in research, and then go to the lift, select workshop to go craft/upgrade gear, then go to my item box to sort my inventory, then go to crafting list in item box to craft, then go to the cats to buy a meal so I’m ready for next quest, then go to quest board/expedition gate to do next quest (this is not including botanical research/tailraider safari)… This is way too many steps that just feel so unnecessary, and could all be done in one main menu. Sure, this would take away from the immersion of wrapping around the NPC circuit of the main hub each time, but it would also mean I’m in and out of quest much quicker, and actually playing the game.

This does get better in Iceborne's main hub, as everything is a lot closer together, but having to go to your room to do tailraider safari is still a pain.


Every UI menu option is lines of text, splitting every UI menu into its own separate window, instead of having an all encompassing menu system. Essentially, you press start, go through multiple tabs that each have multiple lines of text, each one a new window/system, and when you go into each of these windows, you’ll find even more tabs and line of text that go into more pop-up windows. I’m no game expert, but games like “Cyberpunk 2077/Baldur’s Gate 3” have UI menus that combine most windows into one (sometimes with tabs), only having separate menus for distinct functions, and ‘mostly’ feature a visual UI instead of a text based one.

For example, just the item box alone has manage items, crafting list, sell items, change equipment, customize bowgun, set decorations, sell equipment, change armor pigment, layered armor settings, and pendant settings, as their own separate options/windows, with different functions. What doesn’t make sense about this, is that most of these functions/windows could all be combined, with different tabs/options when right-clicking an item, instead of having to go into a window, wait to load, then do what I need to do, then go back to previous tab, wait to load, then go to the next menu, wait to load, and so on. It doesn’t help that some of these functions are locked to the item box instead of just a main menu. Also, if you want to craft from the crafting list, you don’t go to the crafting list tab within items and equipment, because that only crafts from the item pouch, but instead you have to go to the item box crafting list option to craft from item box – also this does not craft from pouch, so you first have to deposit items into item box before doing this. Pretty much every menu for every NPC is like this also.


This is a small point, but I still need to address it. Multiplayer is great, but only once you’ve completed the start of the game. The reason for this is that each quest you go on will have a cutscene, and each cutscene is required to view before you can call an SOS or have a friend join you. This means that your friend will have to wait for you, and at times cannot join you at all for the whole quest.


Despite all of this, Monster Hunter is a good game, with lots of items, quest, monsters, objectives, and very entertaining fights. It is also very good looking with the high-resolution texture pack (that you can download for free), and has a lot of charm in its settings/world – I especially like the Palico’s. You’ll easily get your moneys worth out of it, and a lot of what I discussed may not even be an issue for you, as these are all very personal gripes, influenced by games I’ve played before. I’m hoping the next big installment will address some of these gripes, but I personally still really enjoyed my time playing this game regardless. If you want a game with lots to do, that’s fun with friends, and has exciting and well-telegraphed fights against huge monsters, this is the game, and there really isn’t much competition within its genre. Monster Hunter is the king at what Monster Hunter is, so if you’re looking for that experience, this is it, and “World” is probably the best installment in the franchise.

What personally keeps me coming back is its combat, progression, music, world, charm, and seemingly endless goals.