Recent reviews by Annoying Old Party Man

Very fun and cute retro platformer. I remember getting into arguments with one of the devs about which Mario game was better, SMB3 or Super Mario World. You'll find out which one she prefers within 5 seconds of booting this one up.

E: Now that I've cleared the game, I can make this review more comprehensive. Kitsune Tails has a charming retro aesthetic, great voice acting and a catchy soundtrack. The difficulty curve of the game is mostly great, with only a few obnoxious spikes in difficulty in the later stages. The design of each stage is quite interesting, as each stage has its own obvious gimmick, but the gimmicks are never in the way of the core mechanics, instead building on them and complementing them.

As you progress through Yuzu's story, you'll unlock more power-ups she can use, and each of these is quite fun to learn to get the hang of, and to understand when best to deploy them from your inventory. The 3 tiers of difficulty are an exccellent idea that lets beginners and pros alike enjoy what this game has to to offer. The various minigames included are very fun, and their rewards are extremely useful (unless you crap out at the roulette minigame).

While the game's story is simple, it is very cute, and the visuals and voice acting bring it to life. Yuzu in particular sounds very animated and fun, and you understand why she quickly becomes the focus of a love triangle. And despite the simplicity, the characters are very fleshed out and it's easy to get invested in their situation.

The game isn't quite perfect though. While the vast majority of the game looks and sounds amazing, some of the art and sound assets are noticeably shoddy, leading to a sometimes inconsistent aesthetic experience that reminds you this was made by a very small indie team. In particular, the death music sounds like it could've been ripped from an RPG maker sound library. There also could definitely be more tracks in the game, as the stage themes in particular get repeated dozens of times. The high quality voice acting also made it stand out when a particular character made "fox noises" in their text box but it was accompanied by no sound effect whatsoever, not even a stock fox whine.

But these are minor issues, obviously.

Overall, it's a fantastic experience, but to get more into it I have to get into spoilers.


Once you've cleared every stage as Yuzu, you unlock Kiri as a playable character. Her moveset is a bit surprising in a game that wears its Mario Bros influence on its sleeve, as she plays a lot more like Zero from the Mega Man X games. She has a variety of air movement options and melee attacks that let her blaze through most stages, in exchange for starting each life with a single health and losing access to most of Yuzu's power-ups.

While I found playing as her quite fun, the fact that you're immediately asked to clear the entire game again while playing as her to reach the ending is a bit obnoxious. There's a reason most games let you choose to start a new game as the unlockable characters instead of gating the ending behind forcing you to do so.

When reading the negative steam reviews, I saw a few people mention collision issues. I had no idea what they meant until I played as Kiri. While everything works fine when fighting normal enemies with her, problems arise with the bosses. The momentum of many of her attacks will slide her inside the hurtbox of bosses, and while damaging them very briefly disables their hurtbox as they display a stunned animation, it reasserts itself well before their stun ends, which means you'll end up dying a lot because you slid into an enemy that should by all rights not be able to hurt you.

Even worse, many of the boss attacks have inconsistent hurtboxes themselves, which you'll only notice as Kiri since you're more likely to be standing in front of them rather than flying off them with a bounce. The water guardian killed me multiple times with attacks that were absolutely nowhere near me, and in one case I died before he'd even brought down his sword, seemingly killed by the impending strike while he had his sword held up behind him. These issues don't make the bosses impossible by any means, but they do discourage you from using much of Kiri's arsenal while engaging them, restricting yourself to bounces or slashing them from a safe distance, which is a bit unexciting and disappointing for a combat focused character.

Hopefully these hitbox issues can be patched out.

My last complaint is with the extra stages you unlock upon defeating the last boss. I'm perfectly fine with how difficult the first 4 are, as they are clearly inspired by the Special Stages in Mario World, which were similarly challenging. To make things even tougher, using your item inventory is disabled and you start each stage in Yuzu's default form. Again, that's fine. But stage 5, the Goblin Cave, decides to add instant death to the mix, and requires you to master this game's version of Shell Jumping, a pro strat from Mario 3 and World. Simply put, this is asking too much of the player. Navigating these incredibly tough platforming challenges while being asked to repeatedly pull off an incredibly precise exploit is very unreasonable. Even worse, the NPC who teaches you how to do it claims the Goblin Cave is "optional" and has "no reward", but that's a lie. You're required to clear it to progress to the other special stages, which hide a special dev room and an achievement. I'm not sure why the game felt the need to gate content behind this kind of absurd skill level or why it lies to you, but needless to say I wasn't a fan.

Having said all that, this is still a B+ game, that might become an A+ one if some of the issues get patched. It's more than worth the asking price, especially if you've go a penchant for cuteness or challenging gameplay.

I want to preface this review by saying this isn't a bad game. I don't recommend it, it has many issues, but it's perfectly acceptable. But I'm disappointed enough with it and feel the issues I have with it are numerous enough that the only honest review I can give it is a negative one.

I'm a lapsed wrestling fan and I have very fond memories of playing various wrestling games, and I quite enjoy turn based RPGs. So when this game was announced I immediately wishlisted it. The idea of an indie RPG about pro wrestling, which has the actual Macho Man and other famous wrestlers in it, sounded right up my alley.

So I'll start with what I like about the game. The combat is pretty excellent. It's simple but engaging turn based rpg combat, every character has unique skills, the various moves and status effects all have a strategic use, there's fun synergy between various abilities, characters and status ailments. It's not super complex and some of it feels half-baked but it works. You can even pin people, good stuff.

The pixel art is also great. It's gorgeously animated, every cameo is recognizable, and the grapples are mostly readable despite the chibi style.

The music is also quite good. It sticks in your mind and has a lot of energy.

There was also a storyline in the middle of the game featuring a luchador having to choose between being a good family man and his career that I thought was quite well done.

Unfortunately, that's the end of my positive feelings about this game.

The first and foremost complaint I have about the game is in its writing. In a word, it's bad. To start with, the dialogue constantly feels stilted and unnatural. Run-on sentences, inconsistent speech patterns, awkward turns of phrase, lifeless punctuation, samey voice for every character, inelegant exposition dumps, bad grammar.

Even when specific celebrity cameos come into the game, the simple way their dialogue is written out creates an uncanny feeling that it's not really them talking. This game's story is almost entirely delivered through text, so this is a big problems.

You also get really tired of hearing the canned audio lines each character has. They're too long and elaborate to be as frequent as they are, and distract from the text.

You wouldn't know it from the advertising, but this game is about toys. Every character is a toy, every city is a playset, there's constant jokes and references to plastic and bootlegs and toy-ness. This is weird and makes the world and story feel a bit incoherent. I'm not meeting Macho Man, I'm meeting a Macho Man toy. There's so much emphasis placed on the toy stuff that it detracts from the wrestling stuff.

I also hate how this game incorporates real world cameos. There are hundreds of them, but you're never given context for who they are, and most of them don't really fit into the story. I'll see an npc with an oddly realistic character portrait who'll say something that seems to be a catchphrase. Clearly I'm supposed to know who this is, but I don't. And it happens constantly. Most of them are podcasters or retired wrestlers, and I'm lucky I recognized half of them.

Who the hell is going to know who Konnan is just from the name and one text box obliquely namedropping his podcast? I watched him in his prime and I barely remembered him. Is this game only meant for extremely online wrestling podcast nerds? A casual or non wrestling fan will get absolutely nothing from these cameos. But will those huge wrestling nerds need to constantly get wikipedia summaries of the real wrestlers who are featured as summons and quest NPCs?

The story and characters are also just kind of boring. Really one dimensional stuff, peppered with unfunny jokes and dumb references. Oh, the canadian wrestler is a moose. He talks about maple syrup. The mexican one talks about hot peppers. Street Fighter would call this stuff tired and stereotypical. And they have no depth to get attached to them as people, either.

The world isn't fleshed out and you don't understand the relationship between any of the wrestling organizations and characters enough to care about the stakes. At one point I was in the land of giants. Apparently giants exist in this world! No one else ever mentions giants and once you do a single quest there you never hear of them again. There's techno cities but also post apocalyptic wastelands but also horror themed regions. It's justified as being toy stuff but it just feels like bad improv.

The story constantly gets distracted from the main quest to engage in dumb toy related sidetracks. If the story is supposed to be climbing the ranks of pro wrestling and defeating rival organizations, why am I dungeon delving into playsets to get macguffins? Every random encounter is just random 'wild' toys or wrestler toys just kind of deciding to fight you for no reason.

The game also treats wrestling as a scripted show but also constantly has real fights between wrestlers. Which means you can't get interested in either version of the story because the other version constantly undercuts it. And the main character seems unaware that wrestling is fake, which stops being funny the 11th time it comes up.

It seems very easy to write a rags to riches wrestling story or a story about an evil wrestling empire muscling out all the smaller federations, but this game totally bungles it.

There's also an annoying and pointless framing device where podcasters recount the events of the story and comment on them between chapters. These sections add nothing and are totally lifeless, which I assume is a bad representation of the real life podcast.

The dungeons are also boring as hell. Most of them are straight lines with samey combat encounters, sometimes if you're lucky you'll get a bad switch puzzle or a Simon Says section. The game also keeps switching the story perspective and playable party on you without warning you, which is kind of annoying and disorienting. You wanted to do a sidequest after this boss? Too bad, you're playing as other people on the other side of the world for the next half hour. It's also annoying in the sense that you can go from level 12 to level 3 between chapter transitions without warning.

Traversal sucks. You eventually, very late in the game, get to use teleporters from a teleport hub to revisit locations, but for dozens of hours you'll just be walking across large empty maps, forced to re-traverse dungeons blocking your way to revisit cities during sidequests or to shop. And you also have to take slow boats to reach different continents. At no point do you ever get a chocobo or airship equivalent.

There's some very undercooked mechanics. You can choose an entrance theme, fireworks, & taunts, and you unlock options as you progress in the story, but all any of them do is give you a tiny hype bonus before a fight. You also get to use it so rarely that it feels pointless to even have the mechanic at all.

There are Paper Mario style button prompts in combat, but the game pauses and shows a timer every time, which makes missing them nearly impossible and greatly slows down combat. Even worse, the game is balanced around the idea you'll miss some of them, since they nullify some enemy attacks completely and give you crazy damage bonuses. The fact you're guaranteed to hit almost every one makes combat completely trivial.

Theres some jank here, too. Sometimes animations play wrong. You can switch party members around but most cutscenes won't play if the main character isn't in the lead. I picked up a move meant for one character with another and it just kind of vanished into thin air. I also got trapped in a wall once and if I hadn't been rotating saves I would've been completely unable to progress.

Bottom line, this game is completely lacking in charm, heavy in tedium and I don't know who it's for. It almost feels like the creators wanted to make a toy RPG but thought the online wrestling nerd would be easier to market to.

It's exactly what you think it is.

It's fun to jump and shoot

Very fun, it's exactly what it says on the box - an adventure game about Dangeresque. A bit on the short side, even with the hidden challenges, but the price reflects that. My only real criticism is that the puzzles could be a lot puzzle-ier. It seems the brothers chap made this game thinking that getting stuck and confused is a bad thing, which makes the game very easy and go by even faster. Please to make it a little more challenging next time.

Extremely good game. CRPGs have traditionally struggled to have rewarding and engaging combat, so this one just took it out entirely and focused on the medium's strengths - dialogue, worldbuilding, themes, characterization, quest structure, player agency, and more. The Planescape Torment influence is beyond obvious for those who've played it, but it would be a serious error to think this game is derivative and has nothing new to say. One of the best games of all time, one of the best entries in the genre, one of the best stories ever told.

It can get a little bit glitchy at times, but it's nothing gamebreaking, so don't panic if things start janking out. Just save and quit, and reload.

And one last piece of advice: do let failed rolls play out instead of save scumming.

Great game, horrible company. I'm glad I got this for free.

While the bones of a great tactical experience are still here, and the Breaching Phase is a very fun innovation for this game, this game falls short of its relatively modest goal of being a cute side game to the main series that gives individual soldiers more personality. While most of the worldbuilding in this game follows appropriately from the previous two entries, the tone of the dialogue and characters in general is completely off. Everyone speaks like a Joss Whedon-written teenager, which is especially jarring considering most of the cast are mutants and aliens who've only been part of earth society for a few years at most. While there's always a place for humor, even in a setting as potentially grim as X-com's, the flippancy and junevile quipping do nothing but take you out of the experience and make all these characters fairly unlikeable.

All of the character beats and running gags in the game would've worked much better if the dialogue was more appropriate to X-com, because then you'd have a contrast between these hardened professional soldiers and these silly conversations. But everyone's just a little too zany and sarcastic.

In addiition, while most of the game's abilities are quite fun and balanced well enough, the choice to make an enemy take a turn every single time one of your soldiers takes a turn is incredibly frustrating compared to the main series' much more sensible "each squad plays out a full turn, then the other side reacts" system. With the breach mechanic and the tactical options on offer, it's clear this game is setting the gold standard of play as taking out every enemy before they have a chance to react, but the way turn order works makes it nearly impossible to do so. Not that the game is particularly challenging otherwise, but this isn't so much an extra hurdle to clear as it is a rock in your shoe during the race.

You could do worse than buying this game on sale, but honestly you might as well just skip it and hope the next X-com game is better.

Dwarf Fortress is the best video game.

As a huge fan of Lakeview Cabin Collection, I was looking forward to this game. The concept seemed fairly interesting, some sort of mix of a pixelated grand theft auto game and a mystery game, with some gameplay and visual elements similar to Lakeview Cabin, all set in a very obviously Twin Peaks inspired location. The problems all lay in the execution of these ideas. There's a lot of tedium in this game, most of it stemming from the basic gameplay idea of having events tied to real time passing, forcing you to be in the right place at the right time or wait for certain events to trigger, combined with the time loop plot mechanic. In theory this all sounds like it could be interesting, but in practice it means a lot of trial and error, a lot of waiting, a lot of redoing things you've already done just to try to get a slightly different result, and it also affects the storytelling (which I'll get to) because it means major story elements are revealed to you in a pretty random order depending on your actions.

The pacing of the gameplay and story and how they interact is another major problem. This game has life simulator elements, which isn't a bad thing, and like I said it's very inspired by Twin Peaks. In games like Stardew Valley or dating simulators, you grow attached to the characters through talking to them during their routines, ultimately triggering special events as time passes and you get to know them better, which means you like them even more. And in a good horror story, you'd grow to like the characters before anything too horrible happens to most of them outside of the inciting incident. But, small spoiler below:

this game kills off the entire population of the village after only a few in-game days, meaning you'll see all these characters die off horrifically well before you even get to know any of them particularly well. Then you're sent back to the start of the week and get to try other paths to avert this outcome or find answers to the mysteries of the town. This storytelling decision is honestly not very good at all, and probably stemmed from wanting to have a lot of branching story possibilities and encourage people to try tons of different things without burdening the story with the consequences of those actions, allowing you to start fresh and try other things.

But what it really does is make everything you do in the game feel utterly meaningless, which very much takes away from the horror of anything going on, if we're meant to take the horror elements even a little seriously (this game does have a sense of humor, after all). And it makes it hard to care about any of the characters if you can be extraordinarily cruel to them, hurt their feelings, tear them apart with your own hands, watch them get slaughtered by monsters, see them tormented in hell, and then just hit the reset button on everything.

Beyond that major issue though, the writing is also kind of... quite bad. Lakeview Cabin had very minimal storytelling, as all the characters are mute and the stories are meant to be very simple slashers that copy their premises from popular franchises (admittedly with a clever metanarrative running through it all), but here there's extensive dialogue with every character and they're all characterized relatively deeply. The problem is none of their characters are very good or interesting. As well as just being obviously amateurish writing, there's a big current of misanthropy going through how everyone talks. Almost every character is meant to be pathetic or despicable, and it makes it really hard to care about any of them.

Again, in a life sim, you grow to care about all the little virtual people that live in your town. And in Twin Peaks, everyone had their own little inner lives you were privy to, and you cared about almost all of them, even the villains. You won't care about any of these ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, and you won't want to save them. And honestly, some of the content of the game is just in bad taste, even for something meant to be horror. I won't go into detail, but it's something that would be more appropriate in an edgy teenage south park fan's crappy short story than an official game. You can explore gross and taboo topics in the horror genre, but you need to do it with a modicum of tact, and here these elements just feel like they're thrown in gratuitously and without any thought beyond trying to shock you.

So yeah, it's a repetitive game where you try to solve a mystery you don't care about to save a town full of people you don't like, where nothing feels like it matters and the stories being told are pointless, uninteresting and somewhat gross. I definitely don't recommend it, and it makes me somewhat dread the next Lakeview Cabin game if this downward trend in quality continues.