Recent reviews by Sketched

the best way i can describe this game is that feeling you get when you discover a certain quirk of an item that seems unintentional and lets you use the item in all sorts of crazy ways, except in this case its totally intentional. the game has captured the term "exploration" in a really awesome way that avoids a lot of the common pitfalls of open-ended metroidvania games, and the tools at your disposal really let you explore the world however you choose.

i've seen some people compare it to the feeling of wonder and mystery that retro games used to have when everything was obscure, there weren't guides online, and finding hidden secrets always had an extremely rewarding feeling to it. i think that is pretty accurate to the soul that embodies this game

While the client itself seems to run very smoothly (at least compared to Realm), I can't help but notice in that making itself a Realm-like game, it has also inherited the poorest design choices from Realm and hasn't particularly improved on them.

The leveling experience is still abysmal.
Levels are still hardcapped at 20 for some reason, which isn't enough to make it a meaningful experience, but just enough to continue to have it as an annoyance into the lategame.
Many bosses and dungeons have questionable patterns and design choices. Many of the bosses shot patterns seem to go a little too fast for the amount of Speed that is given.
Soloing dungeons is a bit of a pain, many enemies have too much HP for their own good. You end up dealing 50-80 damage per shot while bosses have upwards of 50k HP and it makes it feel like a slog to get through.

Technically speaking, the game has a very solid base in terms of what can be accomplished with the systems present here. I just wish the design of the game's content was up to par to match.

This will probably improve over time, but for now I don't find a particular reason to play this over Realm.

good

CEO hates women

A very solid and well-rounded experience. The third portal is a great addition that allows for many more unique puzzles, but none of the puzzles ever feel overbearing or over complicated. Things are kept relatively smaller in scope to account for the fact that you effectively have twice the puzzle to think about. This doesn't stop the difficulty of the puzzles from becoming pretty significant later on, though.

Pretty much my only gripes with the game are a few graphical issues/oddities here and there, but they can be easily be excused as this is completely free, and not a paid product.

If you have played and enjoyed any of the Portal games, I highly recommend this.

It's a bit hard to describe how I feel about this game. I think that it is a good game, though as the years have gone on it's confused itself, and there are glaring issues about the game that need to be resolved for me to be able to recommend it to others.

First off, the engine. It's no secret that this game is terribly unoptimized and full of hackers. This is largely due to the fact that it is running on adobe flash of all things, and it's really quite impressive how much they've done on such a bad engine for games of this scale. Though the game is being ported over to Unity with countless improvements as I'm writing this, it's currently still on flash and thus suffers because of it. The game will likely become so much better just from this port alone and I'll probably update this review after the unity port is completely done.

Second, it's revenue model. This game makes its money off of dungeon keys, pets, and quality of life buffs like vault chests and character slots (I wouldn't really call these quality of life as a certain number of them are essentially required to be able to fully enjoy the game, but I didn't know how else to describe them.) While some of each of these are given out for free every once in a while, there are still some that you are probably going to have to drop some cash on to get full enjoyment out of the game. You start off with one character slot and one vault chest. Character slots are self explanatory, and vault chests are places where you can store items between characters so that you don't lose them when you die. It is extremely difficult to enjoy this game when you can only use one character at a time and can only store up to 8 items at a time. In order to try any other characters or other classes, you have to kill your character. This is why it is basically essential that you drop some money on character slots to enjoy the game. Additionally, once you get further into the game, there are a lot of good items that you are going to want to store in your vault, yet you are only given 8 vault slots to do so. Lastly, dungeon keys. A lot of in-game events rely on the sale of dungeon keys. Basically, people sit in the Nexus, the game's safe haven or lobby area, and wait for people to open dungeons using these dungeon keys. It completely skips the step of having to go out into the realm and fight enemies in order to have a chance of the dungeon spawning, and makes it much easier to get good loot when participating in these events. Unfortunately, this results in much of the gameplay these days being you sitting in the Nexus waiting for dungeons to be popped due to how common these events are.

Next, on to pets. Pets give you buffs such as healing you insane amounts every couple second and restoring your mana points insanely fast. Pets are able to be levelled up without paying a dime, but the grind is an insane amount and these days, it's very hard to enjoy the game as a new player without a pet because most of the new content in the game revolves around the idea of you having a high level pet to keep your health up. Though pets are what saved the game from shutting down in 2014 by the revenue they generated, they ultimately hurt the game by making most of the game's content redundant and extremely easy.

DECA took over the game in 2016 and have been good, for the most part. I believe that there has been some mishandling of the game here and there, but it is clear that their intentions are good and they're doing as much as can be realistically expected with their resources to allow the game to continue thriving. In order for the game to be successful in the future, it all depends on how they continue going forward from now. The unity port will be the largest determining factor for the future of this game, and it should be a clear sign of how they are going to handle it going forward.

Final Verdict: Keep an eye on the game, wait til the unity port to get yourself invested. Expect to have to drop some cash here and there to have a fun experience.

If this game would work for me I would play it.

EDIT: It works. Its good. Get game.