Recent reviews by Nebu

This game is surprisingly hard, and that's coming from someone who played through most of the Zachtronic games, The Witness, and Baba Is You without any hints. Having played other "Lights Out" type games led me to severely underestimate how complex the variants that this game developer could come up with.

I definitely recommend it for people who enjoy hardcore logic-puzzles and budding puzzle-game designers, just to see how complex the variants can get.

There are bunch of minor quality of life issues with the game that are bothersome, but not a deal breaker. I find the whole "navigate through levels via minimap" system to be tedious and uninteresting. I'd prefer to just be presented with a menu listing all the levels, and I can click on the level I want to play next.

I'd like the developer to implement numpad support. That is to say, rather than clicking on the tiles or using the gamepad, I could just press buttons on the numpad to indicate which tile I want to activate.

The algorithm for sorting the leaderboard is unclear. When I solve the puzzle optimally, I seem to deterministically be put into 4th place. 3 people above me all have the same optimal score, and a bunch of people below me seem to also have the optimal score. Why was I 4th, and not 5th or 6th? Anyway, given how many people are gonna go for optimality, I think this leaderboard system does not make sense. Instead, I think they should implement a histograph of e.g. how many people solved the puzzle in the optimal number of moves, in optimal + 1 moves, in optimal + 2 moves, etc., and just highlight the bucket you fell into.

Nice casual "spot the differences" game. $5.99 is a little pricey for what you get, so I'm not super comfortable recommending the game at that price, but if it drops on sale to say $2.99, I think it's well worth it. Most of the content is indeed very obviously "AI generated slop", so if that bothers you, that might be a major turn off. But I don't particularly mind whether the art was generated by an AI or a human artist. The images are very cute and pleasant to look at too. It's just a nice chill way to relax.

Game does not feel ready yet. When the game comes out of early access, I'll try it again and might change my review at that point, but right now, it doesn't feel like the developer has "found the fun" yet. A lot of the game loop involves waiting around for queues to empty so that you can issue new orders, which is reminiscent of those free mobile games like Township or Farmville. However, the pacing is off and there's way less to do and way more waiting around in Starseed compared to those games.

Game seems extremely promising, but the tutorial does not explain the mechanics well enough. So you'll have to struggle at first trying to figure out how everything works on your own. That said, the autonomous nature of the workers seems to be a nice innovation relative to most other RTS/colony-management-games I've played.

Great world building and environmental story telling.

Seems to be a low effort asset flip.

There does not appear to be any goal or objective or story. There are 4 maps, you can choose any of them (they're not sequential levels or anything like that). When you spawn into the map, you can walk around and shoot zombies. No prologue text or story is explained. You don't know who your character is, or what you're supposed to do. Perhaps you attempt killing all the zombies. Nothing happens when you do. Perhaps you go looking for an "exit" to the level, or an item you're supposed to collect, but there is no such exit or object either. Instead, it seems like when you get bored of a level, you're just supposed to press the Esc key to quit back to the main menu and choose another level.

Assets of different art style are mixed together and clash aesthetically. Trees and water are placed haphazardly so that sometimes they're floating above the ground. The collision doesn't match the terrain, so sometimes you walk floating over a valley, or through a hill. Sometimes there's a collision-hole in the floor, so you suddenly fall through the floor into the infinite void and you're softlocked and must simply quit back to the main menu.

Game is pretty grindy and the gameplay loop isn't particularly fun. An NPC chef does the cooking, and there is no cooking mini game. You can take orders, carry the food from the kitchen to the table, and clean up the tables when the customers are done eating, but this isn't particularly fun either, so you'll likely hire an NPC to do it for you. Then all that's left is monitor ingredient stock and ordering more ingredients when they run low. You can carry the ingredients from the parking lot to the storage shelves, but again, this isn't all that fun, so you can hire an NPC to do that for you to. At that point, what's left? Just placing orders for more ingredients when they run low, I guess.

There's no real incentive for expanding your menu selection, because the more diverse foods you offer, the more stock levels you need to monitor. If you only offer one item, your highest margin item, the customers don't seem to care and they'll just keep ordering it. And even if you did offer a diverse set of food options, it's not like this affects the (non-existent) cooking mini game, or how you go about carrying the food to the customers or cleaning their tables, so there's no increasing depth of gameplay either.

This is fine as a student project -- where you just go to the game dev asset store and buy a "business sim template" and fill it out, but it doesn't work as an actual game. They needed to have found a fun core gameplay loop, which they could then iterate and build upon. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be a fun core here, so it doesn't seem useful to try to and find tweaks or adjustments to the game. I.e. I don't see this improving once the game gets out of Early Access unless the entire game is redesigned from scratch. The idea should have just been scrapped and new ones tried out until a fun loop was found.

Uninspired, and full of minor problems that show a lack of attention to detail.

The game is spooky, and there are jump scares here and there, but the overall narrative (and "plot twist" ending) was not very interesting. Gameplay wise, it's essentially just fetch quests where you have to go somewhere and click on something to set the internal flags that will advance the story. Occasionally, you'll see some numbers, so you'll have to remember them so that when you get a combination lock, you can enter in those numbers.

Regarding the "minor problems that show a lack of attention to detail":
- When you start the game, it shows some flavor text ("The humand mind is powerful. It can create amazing things, but it can also create nightmares." etc.) and then a single button "Skip Intro". What if you don't want to skip the intro? I guess you're out of luck. Also, if you click anywhere other than the "Skip Intro" button, the game locks up and you have to kill the process from Steam to relaunch the game.
- When there's a power failure, you can still turn on the TV, because I guess they forgot to check that.
- Sometimes, you can't access your laptop to watch the security cameras, but there's like no narrative explanation why. Just sometimes clicking on the laptop works, and other times it won't.

It's a pretty generic mobile time management game, similar to Township: You plant some crops, and then come back later (perhaps minutes later, perhaps hours later, depending on the crop) to harvest the crop, which then use to fulfill orders which gives you points. There's a harem system overlaid on top of this, where the points you earn go to a specific girl, and when you earn enough points with a girl, you get a bit of story and some art.

There is definitely a pay-to-win aspect, but it seems like the game is perfectly playable without spending a cent (though obviously, it's going to be a lot more slow and grindy).

The writing and art is lackluster, but it's a decent way to pass the time. I have this game as part of my rotation of idle/mobile games.

Extremely short visual novel, can be completed in a little over 10 minutes. Some of the sentences are ungrammatical or unintelligible,implying that the author was not a native English speaker. Story wasn't particularly interesting -- it reads like an Aesop fable.