Recent reviews by Tortolia

9 Years of Shadows is absolutely in the "It's fine" tier of Metroidvania. Great visual style, solid music, plays well, doesn't overstay its welcome. It's not too hard due to a bit of a "shield" type mechanical system for dealing with damage that it's got going on, but a few bosses required a few attempts to get the patterns down. The Obligatory Traversal Upgrades they designed and their interplay with the elemental armor system were pretty nice and I enjoyed those.

I think the biggest problem I have with the game is that pretty much all upgrades are a function of finding items or specific collectibles and spending those to buy more shield/HP upgrades or perform one-time upgrades to each armor set. This isn't an inherently bad thing, but enemies respawn as you go between rooms and the lack of any sort of character leveling progression or item drops (outside of coins, which you get in excess) meant that after a while it didn't feel particularly worthwhile or rewarding to fight as I moved along, I just had to clear enough gaps to get to where I was going. Fast travel options also tend to be a bit limited, which exacerbates that issue.

It may not be worth full price as it's relatively brief, but it's certainly worth a look on sale or in a bundle if you enjoy the genre.

Is Animal Well an interesting experience? Yes. The aesthetic is great, it plays well, it's alternately gorgeous and creepy, and it's open-ended in a way that shows a real sense of how to give players a small toolbox with multiple ways to use them and let them loose with nothing more than a general goal to pursue. And for the first 5-6 hours of the game as you work through and complete "layer 1", it's amazing.

Layer 2, or the first stretch after the credits, initially starts similarly strong. You realize that things have opened up yet again, you start to get new ways to interact with the environment, and roaming around doing that is, if less directed, similarly entertaining. Unfortunately this starts to sour after some more time; you start having to work to get the full set of a particular type of collectable and while some of them are very satisfying to figure out, or showcase the new tools or new interactions of ones you have, the game starts taking a pretty significant swerve into microanalyzing the map for tiny gaps that might be indicative of a new route, or pixel hunting room by room for things that you missed (or couldn't previously interact with and had no reason to think would actually be worth making notes for). There's also the further complication that there's often no indication if something is pertinent to the current goal, instead tied to one of the broader community puzzles that serve as further layers to the experience, or perhaps something that you can't actually interact with because you missed a speedrunner threshold or died somewhere along the way.

I'm sure there's some neat things in layer 3 and beyond, and I'll keep tabs on what people find, but ultimately the experience of trying to finish layer 2 without looking things up ended up pushing me to a point where I'm happy to just put the game down. It's a great effort from a solo dev, and probably worth a look on sale if nothing else, but the actual value of this is going to come down to whether hunting for secrets is something you enjoy in your games or not. If Steam reviews weren't a binary yes/no I'd probably be a bit more muted on this one, but I can't say it's worth a thumbs down; maybe just not an enthusiastic thumbs up, either.

I didn't know much about Touhou going in, I certainly don't know much about Touhou now, and that's fine. Touhou Luna Nights is a nice short little palette cleanser of a Metroidvania with a few fun gimmicks and a breezy playtime. Boss difficulty can be a bit high at times but nothing unreasonable. Worth a look but maybe not at full price.

Icarus is a bit of a dark horse in the survival genre, but it's pretty solid, if you have a tolerance for jank.

Icarus has two main pillars. There's the standard open world, where you set up a persistent world to build and develop. You can take this as far as you want, with a huge fixed map to explore, develop, and exploit. There's also missions, which were the original core of the game. Missions (some of which can be launched and run from an open world you're in, but many cannot) drop you in a fresh temporary instance and task you with miscellaneous objectives. Some are basic building or gathering, some require you to go hunt particular wildlife, others might even see you testing out new experimental technologies. Missions are interesting in that by depositing you in a fresh instance, they force you to learn and become familiar with all levels of the standard survival game technical and gear hierarchy, versus something where you set up your map and you go through the low level starting process once ever and forget about it. As you get more familiar with Icarus, you learn the more efficient ways to set up those mission encampments, identify what tools and structures you need to make, what's probably overkill to build, and tap into different aspects of the map design. You'll appreciate when you can run a mission in your developed open world map and just take your preexisting setup out into the field, but having you interface with both sides of the equation is pretty savvy design.

All this feeds into an overall development process for your character ("Prospector"). As you play the game, you get experience, which levels you up. Leveling gets you talent points (which are a limited resource, though you can respec if desired) and blueprint points (which are effectively infinite, as you never stop earning them) to learn new technologies. There's also a separate "solo" talent tree that gives you extra talent points to spend that only apply in solo play, which helps compensate for lack of efficiency from being by yourself. Missions also earn you currencies for Workshop tech, which are a set of items that you can take with you into missions. While the number of things you can take is limited, it reinforces the overall mission loop by letting you work towards a standard kit (armor, some tools or weapons, building facilities, etc) that rewards you for playing the game via improved efficiency and streamlined progress. Workshop tech is in most cases inferior to what you can ultimately build on-planet, but being able to drop in with a full set of armor, a solid weapon, and some mid-level tools really helps keep things flowing.

All the while, you're going to benefit from the developer's extremely aggressive development and patching schedule. As best I can tell there's been weekly updates since the game launched, and they're still going strong. Sometimes those updates are minor additions of a few pieces of furniture or a new tool, other times it's new creatures (the bee invasion of Week 112 claimed many lives and buildings), others they're full out system overhauls and reworks. These don't always go smoothly, as you'd expect for such a fast-paced release schedule, but the devs are responsive to feedback for those releases and the game I'm reviewing now is definitely in a much different and better state then when I picked it back up in December.

I'm not about to claim Icarus is a perfect game. There's definite and obvious gaps all over the place in terms of tools and technologies. The game can be laggy or crashy. Our open world still has a permanent grave marker from a corpse that fell through the terrain and was unrecoverable. Balance of tools, gear, and talents are all over the place. If you dislike games without a high level of polish, Icarus is just never really going to fit your needs because of their development and iteration processes. It's also not a game that I think would be great for a solo player; it can be extremely unforgiving, and the sheer scope of technologies and resources means that having only one set of hands is going to spread your blueprints and focus extremely wide and thinly, and some of the fights versus large swarms or boss type creatures are going to be very difficult alone.

I can't speak towards the history of Icarus; my understanding is the game's current design ethos does not really match the mission-first presentation from the Kickstarter and really disappointed some of the backers, and given some of the gaps and systems jank I still see two years after launch, I imagine the early going was really, really rough. That said, it's a good time currently if you've got friends to play it with, and there's a ton of content in the base game alone; I don't think it's coincidental the overall reviews have trended upward over time. Give it a look if you and some friends are looking for a new survival game to poke at and want something that's not in the earliest stages of EA release.

Afterimage is a good but not great Metroidvania for fans of the genre who want something that's not leaning on the Souls formulas. It's bright, it's colorful, it's generally cheery. The soundtrack isn't amazing but has a few extreme high points. The map is huge and full of secrets and items to find, and Afterimage isn't afraid to give you all of your favorite Metroidvania tools - double and triple jumps, wall clinging gloves, aquatic traversal, dashes, teleports between zones, and even a vertical super jump in the lategame. Combat too follows a mostly straightforward paradigm, with six main weapon categories, a few special attacks for each, and the ability to use two weapons at a time. There's also various forms of magic as a supplement, though they're not a primary tool by any means. Afterimage is just a whole lot of game, and running around exploring and fighting is a treat.

It's certainly not perfect, though. It's maybe a bit too much game; you keep finding new areas and they're all expansive but the game wouldn't hurt to be about 20% or so smaller. There's a lot of hidden items, but many are just generic potions or uninspired rewards that don't feel particularly good to hunt down. Combat difficulty on the normal setting is mostly trivial with a few difficulty spikes in the late-game or if you're pushing into a harder zone than you're ready for. There's an extensive talent tree but most of the nodes are minor stat bonuses that aren't especially interesting. Progression is often extremely hands off and it can be difficult in the later game to determine where to go unless you're being obsessive about map coverage. Lastly and probably most problematic, the localization. Afterimage really wants to be a story driven game, and the localization is not up to the task; it almost feels like a game that's in a licensed setting and assumes you already know the important points, because it doesn't really tell you what's going on but instead just namedrops a bunch of items, concepts and people and hopes you can keep up. By the end you have a general sense of what's going on, but it doesn't actually coalesce into an interesting whole. There's also a lot of uncertainty about the items and skills you're unlocking; it's sometimes unclear what's important, what's not, and what can be safely ignored or disposed of.

If you're a fan of the genre, Afterimage is worth a look, but know going into it that the pacing and localization isn't great and set your expectations accordingly.

Chaos;Head Noah is an unpleasant experience that could have worked, but doesn't. The raw story components - an examination of social isolation, ostracization, paranoia, and the power of delusionary thinking - are fine, and actually a solid framework. The presentation values are good for a VN. The game legitimately has creepy and horrifying moments; the content warning on launch is not there without reason. The way the game presents the murders at the core of the plot and the way they impact society around them is actually interesting.

The main problem is that the point of view character is awful. Chaos;Head Noah puts you into a scenario where you're spending 20ish hours listening to the internal monologue and voice of a character that is utterly repulsive from the jump and never really gets better. Prepare yourself for hours of whining about other people, the merits of 2D women over 3D women, talk about how he just wants to go home and wank to his favorite anime waifu, blaming everyone else for his problems, and so forth. This doesn't even get into the delusion system, which lets you trigger either positive or negative delusionary scenes at certain points; the positive ones tend to either be fantasy "and I lived happily ever after" ones or those that practically adopt a script from a hentai game; the negative ones usually turn violent quickly. The character specific routes you go through to reach endgame vary but are often similarly unpleasant, and we won't even go into some of the delusions the MC has about his biologically related sister. By endgame, when the protagonist demonstrates some actual degree of initiative and agency, it's built off so much garbage that there's no catharsis or excitement from it, just vague surprise that he's actually doing *something*. It's not that stories inherently need to be based around fully functional human beings, but if you're going to center your narrative on a broken individual, then the character growth they experience needs to be commensurate to the struggles they have, and CH;N whiffs badly in this.

If you want to try to play through CH;N just to see what it's like or to take a completionist approach to the Science Adventures titles, grab the Committee of Zero fan translation patch, and just buckle up; you're in for a bumpy ride.

Gnosia is a bit of a rough little gem - an attempt to take a game framework that relies on human social deduction and interaction and turns it into a single player affair, to largely successful results.

At its core, Gnosia is effectively a Very Weird Sci-Fi take on a Werewolf/Mafia simulator, where you play through a number of loops of the game with a variety of NPC crew members present; the gameplay revolves around debate sessions where the crew decides who is a probable Gnosia (the werewolf analogue) and tries to stop them by voting them into cold sleep, while the Gnosia eliminate people off the board each night. As you go through these loops and various permutations of role assignments for the crew, you see a number of events; some give you background on the crew, some teach you skills you can use during the debates, and some flesh out the broader mystery of why you and another crew member are time looping and how to stop it. There's also the complication of a special non-human/Gnosia role known as the Bug, effectively a walking paradox; if the Bug makes it to the end of the round without being put into cold sleep or scanned by an Engineer, they win by destroying the entire universe. It's an interesting twist to throw a role into the mix that the standard "teams" are both required to play around and address ASAP.

In the moment to moment, Gnosia is a fun game. The actual debates can get a bit repetitive in terms of dialogue since there's a relatively limited pool of statements each character has, but the developers did a really great job at actually designing the characters and giving them specific strengths/weaknesses and personalities that you have to learn to work with - and around. One character is incredibly adept at spotting lies but is effectively doomed the moment they have to try to tell one. Another character has high overall stats but is erratically insane so he doesn't use any of them well - but can still surprise you with his skills. Another character has good logical and analytical capabilities but is so abrasive that they'll often get voted out purely because nobody wants to deal with them. Another plays almost entirely on emotion and if you get on her bad side, regardless of whether or not you're on the same team, look out. Learning the character styles fleshes out the debates, because you have to decide how best to handle each round - who's a threat, who's a potential ally and who's just acting weird. If someone everyone tends to hate suddenly has a bunch of supporters this round, they may well all be Gnosia - or if everyone is dogpiling someone it's entirely possible they spotted something about their behavior that you missed. This ties into the fact that you get to choose your own stats and build and decide the approach you want to take; I went extremely high in intuition (spotting lies), performance (telling lies) and logic, but was generally weak in terms of keeping below the radar and lost a bunch of sessions because I made too many folks angry even when I was right about something. You're not locked in though, with a fairly easy set of criteria to trigger a character stat reset to allow you to change what you feel isn't working.

Ultimately, Gnosia is worth a look if you're curious how a well handled single player social deduction game would play out, or if you just like weird sci-fi settings and narratives. The cast and crew are very interesting and fleshed out well and it's fun to just interact with them even if one of them might stab you in the back the next day. The art and character design is bright and colorful and neat, and the music is gorgeous and strange with just a hint of friction. Gnosia plays well and each loop is pretty speedy, and the game has a nice feature where you can have it set specific round parameters that can potentially trigger new events for you to help you progress. It is, however, very much not a visual novel at its core and just uses some of the trappings; Raging Loop is the flipside where the focus is the VN and the Werewolf games are more set dressing. Approach Gnosia as a cool framework for a set of variable logic puzzles and you'll have a good time.

I don't think I've ever been so accurately and thoroughly called out by a video game before. Bravo, Danganronpa V3, bravo.

(Also, the presentation is great, the characters are fun, the music is awesome, and the trial minigames have never been so well executed, along with some genuinely clever murders. You really should play DR1 and 2 first, though.)

It's exactly what is says it is, 20 small mazes. They're very good mazes and this is a fun little diversion.

It's extremely good and you should play it as blind as possible. And you absolutely should play it unless you hate solving puzzles in games.