Recent reviews by Robin Banks

Hi! There's a lot of angry people in here and their review are extremely unhelpful. I'd like to try and distill the reasons why you may not want to buy this game from their criticisms.

1. Activision Blizzard is shady company: They've done a whole mess of unethical things that might mean that you may not want to support them monetarily or otherwise, they also hang as a sword of Damocles over the whole game. At any point corporate could demand that the devs ruin the game for one reason or another. And that's legitimately scary.

2. The monetization is terrible: Overwatch always had a predatory monetization strategy but the switch to a battlepass created more pain-points than it fixed. Hopefully the new implementation of loot boxes and some other features lessens the effects of this choice. This all said, its monetization is a damn sight better than a lot of other games out there. The only reason why the monetization should still firmly be considered a negative is the fact that some facets of it are outright scams. Specifically: Mythic prisms, don't buy them, just buy the battle pass and you'll get enough prisms through that to buy whatever you like. It will take time but just treat mythics like a progression reward, they're neat but that ♥♥♥♥'s not worth 80 bucks.

3. Blizzard has broken promises in the past: A long time ago, Blizzard made the frankly insane decision to promise a PVE expansion to one of the most popular PVP games of all time. This split dev time and led to a particularly bad period in the game's existence that lasted a particularly long time. In the end, the concept was dropped, whatever they could save was spread among a number of other, more interesting projects. It does suck that they promised something and didn't deliver. But all this happened 2 years ago and in the end we got one better game instead of 2 worse games.

4. The game is unbalanced: The game is more balanced than it's ever been. But it's always gonna be messy since new characters are added every 6 months and everyone is supposed to play completely differently from each other but feel fair playing against each other. Someone's gonna be broken, and they'll be broken for months at a time. This may make you not want to play. It may just become a part of the experience.

5. Previous game formats were better: Well you're new to this game so you don't remember the old format of 6 players vs 6 players (instead of the current 5 players vs 5 players). So you're not really missing anything. It was different and had different problems. The community seems to generally believe 6v6 was better for a number of reasons. They may well be right, having played both for a long time, I'm on the fence. Now that the devs have listened to the community (a new habit of theirs) they've run a series of tests of this other format and added it as its own game mode. They're currently playing around with just where and how to permanently implement it. Again, you don't care about this because you're reading a review, so you're new, so the fact that the format has changed slightly won't effect you until you're already committed.


So knowing all that, why SHOULD you play this game?

It's free, incredibly fun, spectacularly well made and supported by one of the most open, responsive, careful dev teams I've ever seen. Some of the above things may well frustrate you once you've put a few dozen hours in but Overwatch players seem to forget that they're so mad at Overwatch because there is something real in it that they truly love. It was a hard rec in 2016 and it's a hard rec today. Apparently it might not've been a hard rec for a few years in the middle there but today? It's the best it's ever been.

Hugs. And. Snickerddodles.

It's glitchy, short, rough around the edges and the puzzles can never find that place between simple and frustrating.

And yet...

The writing is goofy, the voice acting is fun, and the protagonist is... well... "too stupid to live, too horny to die" is an underrated trope.

Well worth the time, needs you to meet it halfway, snag it when its on sale.

The story is wonderful and the characters are great. If you just played through with a guide in your hand I wouldn't hold it against you and truth told you'd have a wonderful time. The real standout feature is the atmosphere, the sounds and enviroments are so engrossing and beautiful. All the locations (a small town, a university, a factory, etc.) could have been simple same-y labrynths but each has flair and unique elements that are hard to describe how they tickle your heart.

That's the good. The bad is that the puzzles tend toward being... bad. When the puzzles aren't "find key, put in key shaped hole" they can involve pixel hunting, revisiting old dialogue trees, remembering a throwaway joke from hours ago that was actually a clue, etc. Walking from one end of a map to another can often take 5 minutes so completing fetch quests is a drag and searching for items you may have missed is torture. And even if you know what you have to do, everything must be done in a specific order, you need to talk to the right people about the tirght things in the right order, look at the right things at the right time in the right place and only then can you implement the solution to a puzzle you already figured out 10 minutes ago. and god help you if doing something in the wrong order and being told "no" turned you off from the right solution.

It's beautiful and hugely influential and in so many ways it holds up today. But you will almost never be impressed by the puzzles so do yourself a favor and keep a guide handy.

The puzzles are extremely fun and interesting. With only a few frustrating ones and most of those are in the DLC. The story is incredibly charming. It's light enough to not get in the way, but involved enough to actually feel like a part of the experience. I thought I'd hate the timer but honestly I really liked solving all these puzzles under the gun. If you like first-person puzzlers, this one's up there with some of the best.

It's playable, and I'm gonna finish it. But after Hidden Folks this is a tremendous disappointment. The goofy sense of humor is still there but it falls flat when the environments feel so much less alive and clickable. They traded the quality of the content to simply have more content and it disappoints so strongly.

There are a lot better hidden object games out there. The clues feel like they were written by people that didn't know English very well, but at the same time they can require a pretty strong grasp on English to decipher. it's strange. Each of the 24 locations is fun enough but you need to play each level about a dozen times to get to the final puzzle. Which is a shame because that last puzzle is a lot of fun, but I can't say its worth it.

The best part of the game is the freeplay mode where you need to find every object in a level because then you at least feel some progress.

But there's so many better in the genre, I'd look elsewhere first.

Overwhelmingly good, Just really top notch stuff. The title sounds like a joke, and to a degree, it is. But it really does carry over a lot from chess to keep it feeling strategic while also being a rapid fire hero shooter with incredible variety. The chess framing to the fights means that you're not going to be restricting yourself to your main. If all you have to slow down the enemy queen is a bishop and you suck with bishop, it doesn't matter. You need to try.

Doubly impressive that such a smartly built game is a student project! Good on you folks. Hope you can patch out the bugs and give us more maps and other exciting content. If you ever want to slap a price-tag or kofi link on this game I'd be happy to show my support.

Wild how the GOTY dropped so early this year...

The atmosphere and storytelling is pretty impressive. It builds a world that's fun to explore and tells a number of interesting stories along the way. It's a shame we only get to meet the two demons because Malphas is visually striking and adds a fun character for Abby to bounce off of. It would be nice seeing Brumes overwhelming hostility or Paimon's courtly respect.
The puzzles, unfortunately, are the biggest mixed bag of them all. There's a fair amount of "key-shaped-object-into-key-sized-hole" puzzles, and a fair share of pretty rewarding head-scratchers. But there is also a distressing amount of puzzles that just feel plain unfair. These puzzles at their worst are the most unfair I've ever seen. They may have inconsistent rules with the rest of the game, they may just not tell you things, the clues you recieve may be overshadowed by other clues that could reasonably fit this puzzle but fit a different puzzle. There's one puzzle you need to solve twice in two different ways.
That doesn't make it a dealbreaker if you're interested in a slow, calm, sad story about demons and family history. Just keep a walkthrough close at hand.

I really liked this game. It's chill. It's sleepy. I liked waking up, wandering around, praying for luck at the nearest shrine. Burning crap I might need and keeping stuff that might be garbage. I liked learning about the little maze world of the spaceport, getting lost even after having played for hours, eating the cheapest food I can that won't cause me to vomit all over my shoes and need to give the last of my savings for something more nutritious that sounds disgusting. And I especially liked writing my journal at the end of each day, recording interesting happenings or discoveries as well as progress tracking. To me this game wasn't about the journey or the destination. it was in the routine. The meditative scanning of the ground. The many low-stakes choices that keep the game interesting but not overly taxing. It was the perfect sleepitime game. And one I heartily recommend if you're willing to engage with it despite the fact that oftentimes progress seems impossible and none of the words you're reading make sense.

It's a slow, chill, funny game with a lot of interesting feelings and ideas many faster ones are ill-equipped to give you.