Recent reviews by Sirlion

This game is so cute :3 Spent 3 hours making a cozy lil coffee shop and I'm not even done decorating the northern wall yet. The fact it uses AI to enhance textures and even producing 3D objects is mindblowing, finally a product that introduces actual meaningful resources based on AI tools (because these are 'tools', not instruments of propaganda and plagiarism like many still believe).
For being an erly access title it's definitely worth some money and time spent.

This is the Xbox 360 version of the 2011 remake, for the longest time locked in Japan and finally translated. A very much needed, streamlined version of the original Ever17 with better pacing and a bit less prose. It gets the point across straight away without dragging the text too much which is highly appreciated. There are a couple factors a bit too "in your face" that may make the basic gist of the plot too obvious this time around but I still consider it a step up. Plus, the original script had been translated not too greatly in the physical release so this is an update all round.

One big downside is the exclusion of the 3D models used in the original 360 remake in favour of upscaled sprites and backgrounds, I wish it had a separate option for that.

The price is also a bit steep, most likely because Mr. Uchikoshi's name is attached to it - but this is much more of a Mr. Nakazawa's baby than Uchikoshi's due to him only writing the scenario. As a matter of fact, if you've played other works from Mr. Nakazawa such as Root Double Before Crime, you'd immediately recognize
Blick Winkel because they're essentially the same plot with different protagonists and a slightly altered setup. That is not to say Uchikoshi doenst repeat himself - hell he does, a lot, with various degrees of success. So overall I'd recommend because this is, ultimately, a piece of history, a pretty important relic from ages ago. But at a discount.

This is an amazing little game. The small size and scale of its core mechanics only enhance its charm further.
It is, in essence, just what it says on the tin: a russian roulette minigame with a logic puzzle attached to it. 3 standard rounds, players have a fixed amount of health (which can be customized for individual lobby play), a set number of specific objects that can be pulled out from a box each turn, every item with its own percentage of likeability to appear. A shotgun is placed at the center of the room, with its bullets randomized. Players can see how many blanks and live rounds there are beforehand, but the order in which they will be chambered is random. Luck, deduction skills and... "teamwork"(?) lead to very interesting situations.
Very much enjoyable, smart opponents can lead to very long sessions or incredibly short ones. Frustration is there of course, as certain combinations of items will grant either you or your opponent massive advantage that has a potential to not even let you play one turn in a whole set (it happened heh) however, that is part of its charm. One night you'll be sitting there twisting your thumbs waiting for a chance that will never come, the next you're king of the table.

Needs at least (AT LEAST) one more year in the oven. Tutorial is awful, pausing the game does not stop enemies from shooting you, animations are incredibly janky and the cutscenes feel extremely amateurish. Honkai Impact 3rd has better cutscene and production value than this, let that sink in.

And that is "without" mentioning the monetization crap.

Probably one of the biggest disappointments in gaming history. Good? Yes, excellent level design, even though a couple (route kanal and the whole street fighting section) were rage inducing even back then. What I mostly dislike about HL2 which I have played very little compared to HL1, is that 99% of the promo material came from the beta which looked, sounded and behaved much better. I bought the game back in 2004 convinced that I would get the same atmosphere and feel of the beta, when none of that was preserved. It felt like a happy-go-lucky version of what HL2 was supposed to be, complete with memetic power and very bright skyboxes. In terms of story and pacing, what raising the bar showed was immensely more appealing, the levels at the end of the day were the biggest offenders, incredibly less interesting to look at than the promo material. Here's generic eastern european city with some alien tech. No air exchange mega structures, no semi-fascist architecture, way less oppressive and not in line with what HL1 was going to show.
Also I will never get over how broken the Source engine was. What a mess of an engine, the stuttering, the endless loading, the crashes, HL2 on release was swiss cheese, holes upon holes for months on end. The fact that the levels do not stutter after loading in 2024 is amazing. Kids these days will never know the struggle.

I didnt know the author's previous works at all, Steam recommended this product to me. So this is a genuine thumbs up because I have no context, and even then the game was good enough to keep me entertained. It's a visual novel with a smaller minigame attached and a few choice-based paths, lots of endings and cute characters, simple but fun concepts and an overarching mini story that makes you love the silly little animations provided as a complement to it. I dont stand by the anti-AI propaganda, which I hope was just satire and any artist worth their salt would agree with this I believe, but I'll give it a pass because its a game and it fit the theme.
I'm also glad it didnt overstay its welcome, the pacing was just perfect for what it was. It was surely playtested, is what I'm saying, which some people take for granted, but its not.

Disclaimer: this is a review of the ""remaster"" port here, not the game itself which I really liked when I first played it on emulator and still play to this day no problem.

This is a barely justifiable emulated version with marginal improvements. I was expecting at least fully redrawn backgrounds and sprites as Capcom does for other franchises, namely the excellent remastered versions of the Ace Attorney series, however there is zero, nada, nothing in here. Just a filter for scanlines, selectable background images to fill the screen as the original resolution is poor, a single save state slot (laughable) and controller prompts, oh did I forget to mention that there are no Playstation icons for when the player uses a DS4?
To call this port barebones would be an understatement. There is no excuse in 2024 for this kind of treatment, especially with the rising popularity of AI which the devs might have at least used to polish up the backgrounds properly.
To add insult to injury, I experienced a freeze while playing in "original mode", the game just refused to move on albeit the options menu activated with the bottom trigger worked.

Unless you want to farm achievements save your money and wait for it to be 5 euro.

I went in blind, as a dedicated Persona fan, expecting the best JRPG Atlus could ever make according to critics. It didnt take two hubs to change my opinion.
The pros: Artstyle is fantastic and memorable, great palette choice, well designed characters (visually); Soundscape and music seem on par with older entries and generally pleasant. Combat system (as far as the first dungeon) responsive, same-old-same-old with different names and no fusions, but overall expected and liked.
Everything else, namely the story and characters' personalities... hooo boy. To say they feel cliché would be an understatement, this is a tropefest. Not to mention the graphics: It took me one minute to figure out that the city area was a giant square void of anything interesting, no animations going on around the player, no carriage \ wagon traffic, nothing meaningful at all to make it feel more alive. And then a few steps forward and it's a loading screen. And then five more steps ahead and its another loading screen.... this game looks and feels like a PS2 era type RPG fresh off a 2005 shelf discount at GameStop.
Regarding the story I got immediately taken out of it because of the banal starting premise and the carousel of copy-paste one-dimensional characters. "Oh you're the companion dude, okay. Oh you're the goofy fat man who's all talk no bite, gotcha. Ah you're the supportive girl that will stick with me for the whole game, sure". The main antagonist couldnt be more on the nose if he tried, the camera angles and intentional shadowing of his face is hilariously corny. I think I got more than enough experience on my gaming baggage to say that this is not a masterpiece in its current form and it's worth waiting for a large discount. I've seen and played the same story one too many times to make the same mistake again.

The Last Autumn is a very unique take on the basic premise from Frostpunk. The player is starting the construction of the first working Generator as everything falls apart around them and the frost slowly takes over the world. For one, the atmosphere and the writing are both superior to the base game. The pacing is also better, and the mechanics are more refined. Motivation replaces Hope and is massively valuable since the people under the captain's control are victorian workers who have recently discovered Labor Unions and that's really not good in a time of global crisis. Unlike the desperate rabble of the base game, victorian workers will go on strike, demand better working conditions and accommodations, fight for their rights (lol) and do all the sneaky anti-capitalist stuff you'd expect if the player leaves them unchecked. The player here is given a real choice, unlike in the base game, to play it nice - but very strict and methodical, with mandatory deadlines - or rough, with penal colonies, stripping people of their rights and killing dissident leaders to disband strikes immediately, beat people up to force them back to work or pump them full of experimental drugs to keep them from getting sick in the cold instead of offering hygienic solutions.
I really enjoyed this expansion a lot, it adds value and lore to the world and the base game while also showing how difficult the process of assembling a Generator truly is and the absurd amount of patience and endurance human beings have to preserve to keep working together as a team and not merely petty rivals driven solely by egotistical needs.

Frostpunk is, in essence, a visual novel with stats. Yes I'm not afraid to say it. The game is railroaded, scripted to the core, with a solid foundation for a decently strategic gameplay but at the end of the day the player is in for the emotional punches and the attachment to their settlement while it slowly expands outwards (not too much given the size of the environment). In the game you'll be taking the role of a captain who fled London with a maniple of desperate people who want to find a safe place from the New Ice Age which is plaguing the Earth at the end of 1800. In this alternate reality automatons and a special resource called Steam Core (essentially a giant battery) have given the world a new spin on how to construct facilities and solve common issues. The player is asked to create a city for their people and make them prosper for a time.
"For a time" is not to be taken lightly: the main campaign lasts about 40 days, every so often the temperature will go down till dangerous levels and the captain will be responsible for the people's wellbeing as they plan ahead to build shelters, homes, resource depots and steam-powered drills to penetrate the dense ice and extract resources. Everything is tailerd to appear as an overhead strategy game where the player creates buildings and manages resources, but really the "strategic" aspect is just a facade. The story is set in stone, events are meant to convey a sense of urgency or give small bonuses along the way, and the ending is... not very good. I get why the developers made it like that, but I cannot praise them for it. The whole game creates a small sense of accomplishment every time the player completes an objective, so I think it would have been fair for the last days to be really dramatic and show SOME loss.

On average difficulty, beating the game is pretty easy since all it requires of the player is to be a decent manager and know how a basic city works. There is little incentive to replay the main story since the events presented are always the same and thus the consequences also never change. I dare say that the player is being railroaded to victory, which was a bit disappointing. Surely a bit of artificial losses at "survival" mode would benefit the one in search of drama but that defeats the purpose of the whole ordeal in my opinion.
Keeping people happy is also pretty easy and managing hope is not as vital as Motivation in the expansion-prequel The Last Autumn. I'm sure Endless mode would titillate the most masochistic gamers though I would gladly pass since the main driving factor in this game is the story.

Pretty decent game, provided that the player is in for roleplay and the worldbuilding rather than the purely game-y aspect of it all which is, to be frank, not very exciting.