Recent reviews by RePlay.be

I'm a sucker for platformer/collectathon games, and Tinykin certainly delivered. I thoroughly enjoyed playing it!

The movement feels good, especially the "soapboard" to move around quickly. (think skateboard, but instead it's a bar of soap 😋) There are even races you can do with it, if you're into that.

The art and sound are all very cute. And the soundtrack is nice too. I still have one of the songs stuck in my head. 😁

Because of the genre, I wasn't expecting much in the way of story. But I was positively surprised, intrigued and even a little moved at the exposé at the end of the game.

Before playing the game, I prepped myself by rewatching the first two movies. I'm a big fan of the original movie, but less so of the second.

All of the iconic set pieces of the movies are featured in the game: the police station, OCP headquarters, ED 209 and Robocop 2. They even got the original voice actor back for Robocop!

The game does a great job at making you feel like the badass that Robocop is. That does mean you are quite overpowered from the start, making the game quite easy. But it's not so bad that you are practically invincible.

Where the game fell short for me were the boring side quests: get a towel for a guy who's in the shower, go around the station to get people to sign a card, diagnose and fix a car at the mechanic, ...

When Robocop is policing minor crimes around town, he has some pretty cringy voice lines too. It felt like the lines in the second movie where Robocop gets brainwashed to be softer on people. An example from when Robocop is writing a ticket for a parked car where the parking meter has expired: "For some to learn how not to lose the track of time, is to learn how not to lose their money."

But overall it was still an enjoyable game, and a great homage to the movies.

The game crashes a lot and performance tanks when a lot of enemies show up.

TL;DR: visually it's a very appealing game, but mechanically Little Nightmares leaves a lot to be desired.

To start, the game doesn't have a consistent design language. What do I mean by that? In most games you will often see things are color coded, like edges of a wall painted white, indicating you can climb onto them. Or interactable objects are visually distinct in some other way. I always thought that was silly, but this game has now convinced me otherwise. Little Nightmares makes this even worse by never explaining anything, you have to figure out all the mechanics yourself.

Picture this: you're in a room with seemingly nowhere to go. There is a fridge in the middle of the room. There is a mechanic where you can grab and hold onto objects. So you figure out that you can open the fridge door. But the fridge is empty. What now? Solution: you jump and climb the shelves of the fridge.

Check points however were my main gripe with the game. They are usually placed too far back and in illogical places. You would expect a checkpoint when you enter a new area, but that's usually not the case. If you die during a boss fight, you have to do the run up to the boss fight again and again. Want to take a break from the boss fight and exit the game? Well next time you will have to start even further back in the level than the previous checkpoint you had!

At one point I got to a T-junction. I took path A and found a big monster and died. So next I went to see what path B was about, in case I needed to do that first. Path B brought me back to the start of the level with no way to return, wrote over my checkpoint, and forced me to redo the start of the level all over again. Great.

Among some of the other annoyances I had was a boss that can spawn behind you and instantly kill you. Or a scene where some plot is being shown in the background while you're walking on a pipe to the right. So you hold the right button and watch what unfolds. But because you're not paying attention on walking, and it's a 2.5D environment, you don't notice you can slip off the pipe and die in a scene with no enemies or traps...

Basically a lot of stuff that could easily be fixed by the devs if they wished to do so.

I've barely been able to play this game because it just keeps crashing, it's unreal. (Ha.)

From what I've seen this is a carbon copy of Phasmophobia with better graphics. Except a lot of things aren't implemented, like lobby filtering and Steam invites. And lots and lots of crashes.
Get kicked? Crash. Load a game? Crash. You can't rejoin a game after crashing either.

I love the game's cute graphics and sound. The gameplay however is braindead simple and extremely repetitive: you get the same core quests for each island you visit, plus a few extras.
What kind of quests? Collect 30 or so bugs, play volleyball, fishing, and a few puzzles where you plant flowers in patterns.

If you're looking for a cute platformer/collectathon game that offers a bit more of a challenging gameplay, then I would suggest this publisher's other game instead: A Hat in Time.

The game is good.
But to buy the game you need to buy in-game coins.
The in-game coins can only be bought with Steam Wallet funds. If you're short a few cents you'll still have to top up your Steam Wallet with at least 5 Dollars/Euros/Monopoly currency.

They should just sell the game normally and the expansions as DLC. Those purchases can still be tied to an account for cross platform gaming.

I enjoy these "collectathon platformer" games, like Spyro and MediEvil. In fact its resemblance to MediEvil made me interested in the game in the first place. 🙂
This one will keep you busy for about 5-6 hours. The level design is great, it somewhat reminds me of Rayman 3.
You would not be able to tell, but the game was mostly worked on by just one developer, a very impressive feat!
Besides showing how much the developer has managed to do on his own, I like that the credits have various screenshots of how the game looked throughout its development.

A few negatives then.
Some bosses are not that fun and overstay their welcome a bit too long. One of them even reappears later and you have to beat him in exactly the same way as you did before! 😒
As for the collecting aspect: there are 20 collectibles in each level and one hidden extra. Most are not very hard to find or are straight up on the main path. Unfortunately if you've missed one, you typically will not be able to backtrack to get it. Instead you will need to replay the whole level. There are no chapters for levels either. Annoying if you've only missed one or two collectibles like I have.

A recommendation then from me! Maybe pick up the game on sale if you have a problem with the game's play time.

I played Spyro when I was a kid, but back then I didn't have a memory card, so I had to start over every time. xD Unimaginable today, but kids have infinite patience. 😋
I had a blast replaying this and was happy to finally finish it! I even went for all collectibles which I normally never do. 🙂

Playing Spyro 2 for the first time, sadly it's not as good as the first. There's a lot of backtracking due to areas that are not accessible until you unlock more powers. What powers you may ask? Well, you need to pay some guy a few hundred coins to teach you how to climb ladders... 🙄 Oh and you can only do that when you "finished" all the levels and have progressed to the next world.
I ended up dropping Spyro 2 halfway through because of this and the cramped level design.

Continuing on to Spyro 3, it was thankfully a nice return to form with only a few minigames I didn't enjoy (buggy skateboarding challenges 😛). Despite these I enjoyed the game overall and even went for the full completion again. 😁

Definitely give these a try if you have a controller. They're a nice relaxing distraction where you can just turn your brain off. Good way to decompress after work or whatever. 😊

This game is adorable AF! The hand drawn art is very pretty, it's all just very cute, charming and funny. It was a delight to play. :)
And there's cats! https://www.youtube.com/embed/p4ylLdZwBvM?start=2941&end=2963 (no spoilers)