Recent reviews by SchuhBaum

Fun little demo. Lots of things to discover and do. The game looks promising.

Thank you for taking the effort and making a demo!

I really enjoy this game.
The mechanics are very simple to the point where is it hard to imagine anything interesting going on. But then the game just escalates and you can spend a lot of time trying to figure out all these alternative paths and solutions.
The game reminded me of `Baba Is You`. With the positive difference that the game mechanics open up sooner.

Very interesting game. Paying attention to details in frozen scenes in order to uncover the identities of the crew members. This is what you do most of the time. The fates in most cases are obvious, although some of them are not. Other games try to make everything as obvious (or dull) as possible. I appreciate that there are games that treat the players as intelligent human beings that are able to make observations and come their own conclusions.
The presentation is pretty good. I like the visuals, the music and the voice acting. I liked the handling of the book as well. Menuing can be a drag. In this game it has some mechanics that make finding the necessary information fairly easy. All in all, definitely a game that others could take some notes from.

One thing that I strongly dislike in this game is the forced waiting. When you enter a memory you have to wait until the book page is revealed. When you find another body inside a memory you need to follow some smoke trail after you leave the memory. This trail leads to the location of the body. You already know where it is and the smoke trail only moves when you look at it. You can't even alt+tab and do something else. The game just pauses.
This is particulary annoying when you want to play it again to do it properly. I used the game mechanics in order to lock in some fates the first time. The game indicates when you should be able to identify a person. This helped in finding most (all?) of the details that I missed the first time. But you have to start a new game for that and wait again for no reason.. ugh.

I played some repetitive games before this. This is such a nice change of pace. Thank you! I would love to see other games paying more attention to their game mechanics.
It reminded me a little bit of Stephen's Sausage Roll. Although, it has plenty of it's own ideas and mechanics that you can try to wrap your head around.

There were some minor annoyances. Mostly on the world map. I had trouble getting used to what connections between ships were compatible. Leaving a level behind sometimes required some attempts to get back to later. Some QoL stuff (like save/load) for the ships positions would have been nice.

I strongly dislike this type of developement where you put things out half-baked and let the players hope that they mature with time. Don't get me wrong, the game now is definetly better than years ago. I simply dislike that for every feature you have a couple of annoying bugs that are in the way. Some of them are very old. It seems that putting new half-baked stuff out is much more important than fixing things.
Lets lists a bunch: Download problems (they don't use Steam for the most part -- genius idea), crashes, light flickering, buggy AI traffic, missing multiplayer interactions like ATC, ATC giving invalid commands, missing multiplayer aircraft lights or models, missing traffic information like distance (you always love to see your whole screen filled with other player name plates that seem to be billion light years away from you because you never reach them), and so on.

One of my favourite games. There are some rough edges but nothing that mods couldn't improve. You have to endure frustration at times. Still, if you like exploration of strange worlds and how they work then this might be a game and DLC for you.
When I hear DLC I usually have the expectation that you just get more of the same. Downpour is much more than that. New creatures keep things fresh. New mechanics keep things interesting. Plus, the story elements were far more connected to the world(s). Honestly, I didn't care much about the characters when playing vanilla. Now I care.

Truly one of my all time favourite puzzle games. The mechanics are super simple but generate such a wast variety of puzzles. The beginning was a bit dry for me. But then the game opened up. It was no longer just "winning" the levels.
I like it when games take their mechanics and generate a lot of different "flavours" with them instead of adding new ones. Otherwise games still stay shallow but get over-complicated.

I had a lot of fun finding and completing all the levels for the achievements.
GAME IS WIN

I love exploration games like this. This game has simple mechanics but a lot of interactions. Plus, this game is huge. I found much value for the money spend.
Some things I didn't like. It can be difficult to see what islands grant you access to new places. Sometimes I looked on the map and came up with a plan that worked. This felt really good. Othertimes I spend like hours mingling with stuff that didn't lead to anything. This felt frustrating. The "fog of war" wasn't helping in that regard.

I like the game design of having choices. I enjoyed the conversations. Most of them offered me suitable choices for what I wanted to say. I liked the variety of characters.
The fights were okay. I only felt bored when I had to clear another overrun facility with no survivors. I enjoyed sneaking around, hacking stuff and exploring my options. Unfortunately, the game is not always consistent with these options. There are, for example, terminals where a password is mandatory (no hacking) or a bossfight where sneaking was not possible.
All in all I had a really good time.

I liked the setting and backstory most. The visuals of the ruins and locations, and the size of the map surprised me multiple times. The rest was not really my cup of tea. I didn't enjoy the conversations. The combat at times was dull or frustrating. Mostly because everything has one and only one purpose. Once I knew what to do with the tools available, the fights repeated quickly. Besides that, I was missing tools for moving around and disengaging fights - like a smoke bomb or a grappling hook or a placeable shield. At the highest difficulty, the ressource and crafting management annoyed me a lot.
The best experience that I had was when I needed crafting materials from normal animals. They spawn anywhere and I roamed around the world. I got sidetracked a lot and would observe new enemy machines. I fought some of them and avoided others. That was fun.
But that is not what the game forces you to do most of the time. The design (of quests and the game in general) is quite linear. "Kill the machines" does not allow for overriding them. "Scan the battlefield" with your Focus does not allow you to just follow the tracks. Cutscenes won't play otherwise and enemies won't spawn. There are a lot of doors that magically open once a cutscene or conversation has ended. There are invisible walls. Things like that.