Recent reviews by WitchTaunter

Surprisingly shallow for being in season 7 of development. Does the bare minimum you'd expect for a pirate game. A massive game with barely anything to do, and poor motivation to do it.

Unsurprisingly, most of the map consists of an ocean, but for some reason the game does not offer that much to do while sailing. Directing the ship does not take that much effort, so you are left to either play an extremely simple fishing minigame, stare at food while it cooks, or play one of the dozen or so songs that you'll get tired of in an hour. None of which are that productive or engaging.

The game features repetitive quests of predetermined objectives ad infinitum. Combat has very few options, and feels extremely floaty - guns are slow and have no kick to them alongside enemies barely reacting to attacks, and sword swings have no weight while only featuring at most 3 moves. Swing, Block, and Big Swing. Most combat encounters also have no stakes to them. Death has no penalty against any non-player, non-ship NPC, besides a brief wait time. You can just keep throwing yourself at whatever until you win. The only possibly highlight would be ship battles with a crew, in which a team must coordinate between steering, combat, and fixing the ship. These can be slightly engaging. Then, gathering treasures and rewards is a tedious process of finding the most efficient way to drag everything you've earned back to your ship, one item at a time (maybe 3 if you have a spare chest). After the resources have been gathered you must repeat the process at the outposts to sell it.

That is also hoping that you are not hunted down by other players for your loot. Playing single player makes you an easy enough target, but regardless of your crew count, you can be attacked by players of varying skill, and should you be unlucky you can have all of your work plundered, leaving you with nothing but a few hours of completely wasted time.

All of this effort is to be able to afford pretty much only cosmetics. They all kind of blend together as generic pirate gear, with all the best and most unique gear and additions being locked behind premium currencies, or they require a very long period of grinding. There is very little reward or sense of growth given for completing the same-y quests.

And possibly worst of all is the extremely slow development of the game itself. Half of each addition is just cosmetics, but the developers are also slow to dish out quality of life additions, or even stuff you'd expect in a game like this. The most recent update featured the ability to buy and name your boat, which seems like it should have been a given. It also featured the ability to sell loot to a single individual rather than each vendor respectfully, which relieves only a bit of the tedious loading and unloading of treasure. All this, 7 seasons in.

This is just an extremely shallow game with very little reward for tedious gameplay, a constant threat of other players ruining your day, and far too slow development. I find very little of this game actually engaging, and would only possibly recommend it with friends. Even then, it is asking for $20+ for a grindfest that still implements premium currencies. It is unworthy of your money.

A rouge-lite platformer that tickles your brain very nicely with constant growth and increasing challenge, making the first playthrough very worthwhile. You constantly grow stronger, learn more about the world, befriend colorful characters who talk to you after each run, and experience a variety of challenging bosses. Will likely satisfy a 20-50 hour run, which makes it very much so worth the price.

However, after that first run, the growth and new experiences offered by the game slows to a crawl. NG+ ensures that enemies, areas, and prices will scale with you, which means subsequent playthroughs will take only slightly less time as the first, while only offering at most a bit of lore and one new harder boss fight per NG+ playthrough. You likely will have seen the exact same areas and enemies for dozens of hours by this point. By NG+3 (70 hrs) I was tired of the game, and NG+5 (100 hrs) I'd had about enough of this game for a lifetime, but still haven't been granted the true ending.

Good game, but be warned of the crazy amount of padding and repetition in NG+.

Review made after completing the normal route. Might update after playing a second playthrough.
Omori is a great RPGMaker game held back by an unfortunate amount of lackluster filler that is most comparable to a poor man's Undertale. Still a good game with moments of intense storytelling and character growth, but not nearly as funny, engaging, or as groundbreaking as games before it like like Earthbound or Lisa.

The game clearly flaunts its dark themes through several warnings, so while the main world/characters for a majority of the game are cutesy, childish, full of humor, and incredibly saccharine to the point of diminishing most the stakes while there, it is clear that something is happening below the surface that the entire game is building towards, and that melancholy hidden under the surface was borderline enjoyable enough to counter the pretty massive flaws this game has.

The biggest is that so much time is dedicated to this cutesy world. Anyone who anticipates the darker tones, or plays about an hour or so into the game will see that this world is merely a dream where everything that occurs within it is more a representation of in-game real-life events rather than it's own cohesive universe. Because of that, there is little to get attached to, characters never really grow or learn, progress never amounts to any tangible change, threats can usually be brushed off because a wholesome dream world like this wouldn't allow for anything really bad to happen to characters we are supposed to care about. It is thematically appropriate, but incredibly boring to play through as everything is detached and no secondary characters were explored enough to make me really care about them, unlike something like Undertale.

To make things worse is that these areas are filled to burst with self-aware humor, constant lampshading, and randomness for the sake of randomness, and references. I have no doubt that this will satisfy a large portion of people who buy this game, the overwhelmingly positive reviews show that much already, but for me this humor was extremely tiring. It didn't have the subversive touch Undertale did, or the cynical tone of Lisa, it was just pretty standard jokes that I rarely found amusing. Humor is incredibly subjective though, so I guess take this with a grain of salt unless you have similar tastes to myself.

The art style also takes a bit of a hit from the RPGMaker limitations. Characters are often portrayed as very tiny which keeps things from being too expressive regarding their movements in the overworld. Only the main cast of about 4-5 characters are given portraits to fill in the blanks, but the dream world's pink pastel color scheme makes them all sort of blend together. We can once again compare this to Undertale (I'm sorry, this might not be fair but it really is the best comparison in terms of style) where almost every character has a portrait with multiple expressions, while also having far more striking color differences in their design (Papyrus is red, Sans is Blue, Alphys is yellow, etc).
The positive above all this is Omocat's original art and animations, which are very impressive and of high quality. It makes the battles far more appealing, and once the plot really gets going the animation and art is used expertly to service the story.

Combat really only expands in the dream world too, and it is just serviceable. It has this 3 way, rock-paper-scissors formula regarding emotions, but during my playthrough it never became relevant at all. The game is pretty easy, but not without complete thought. Through proper use of skills and follow-ups I was able to take out everything that came at me without ever once utilizing emotions. That said, it plays like any other turn-based RPG. It has a few ideas that make it unique, but they don't actually alter the gameplay much, if at all. Perfectly serviceable.

So for the most part this review sounds negative, and up until this point it kind of has been. I was not a fan of the dream world and because of how much time it eats up I can completely see if it is enough to turn someone off as it took up about 13-15 hours of my 20 hour playtime. This review is still positive because of the rest of the game.
(Slight spoilers for fairly early game, if it isn't already too late to say that.)

Outside of the dream world you are sent through foreboding nightmare sequences with a tone that appealed to me. As a fan of horror, this stuff was my jam. Beyond that are real-world sequences, segments where the real-world counterparts to dream world characters show up and actually grow and reveal their backstory. These segments reflect an incredibly touching story about children learning how to deal with loss in multiple forms, how their lives were affected by losing someone they care about, and how they each tried to move on. It was an extremely charming story that made me anticipate these moments the entire time I was in the dream world. Even the humor here was stronger for me as it mostly reflects how children and teens act.

And then without any spoilers, the ending offered up a real horror experience that left several gut-punches in a pretty crazy final climax. Is the ending worth the rest of the game? I'm not sure, but it certainly was a high point. I definitely feel like this game would be significantly stronger if it just focused on the real-world and kept the dream world to a minimum.

Omori is a good game, but it could have been a great game. While it is comparable to games like Undertale or Earthbound, it is clearly going for something different in the grand scheme of things. If it focused more on the things it did differently, ie the real world emotional drama, it might've stood much taller, but instead a majority of it just ends up feeling like Undetale-lite. If you want an emotional story then I'd recommend this game, and if your sense of humor is as I described then this is definitely for you, but don't go in expect Undertale 2 or something like that, because it isn't.

EDIT AFTER COMPLETING THE HIKIKOMORI ROUTE, MILD SPOILERS AGAIN:

The hikikomori route was certainly testing my patience as I had to play through the entire game again in order to meet its requirements. Since I already said I wasn't a fan of a dream world, this was by far my worst experience in the game. You never realize how long it takes to get through all the dialogue, animations, and camera pans until you are just holding B to make it go by as fast as possible. The only moments of reflection I had were during the nightmare sequences, where I had a chance to try and reinterpret what I may have missed for the first time (I'm pretty sure it all is either too vague for me, or complete nonsense.)

Anyway the hikikomori route only changes things in the endgame. A majority of the changes take place in the dream world, offering conclusions to the inadequately developed side-characters. None of this was worth my time in the slightest. Again, I can look at the story as a whole and appreciate the themes it is going for, but actually playing through it is another matter.

On the other hand, this is where the game's combat actually shines. Many of the bosses you fight here are genuinely difficult and use the emotion system is either creative of necessary ways. I did have to utilize emotion altering moves and items here, as well as managing the rest of my items and movesets even more effectively.

Aside from that is a decent amount of secret moves, items, and locations to find by exploring previously visited areas and checking for changes. The problem is that it really isn't enough, and the main thing about this route is it skips the real world segments, which were the best parts of the normal route. This is a route that should only be played second by the diehard fans. It kind of feels like a hastily put together DLC to close loose ends, and I didn't care for it.

Fun in short bursts, tedious in long stretches (at the moment).

75% of all the minigames need some sort of rework.

Early game race maps need random factors to make replays feel varied and unpredictable while not being too punishing since they are the first levels.

Survival games like Roll Out, Block Party, or Perfect Match need to always end based on eliminations, and they need to be faster and harder as right now they are so easy they are a chore.

Team games are basically a random chance that takes 3 minutes to determine whether you won or not because your team's performance is irrelevant to your own individual one. Teams can also be uneven, making your random chance even lower. Fall Ball is also incredibly common because of it's flexible player count requirement, and I'm absolutely sick of this minigame. These are the worst and need to be their own game mode separate from the other game modes.

Right now there are only 3 final levels, Fall Mountain is a race where more often than not the person in the lead stays in the lead because there aren't enough factors to mix up player positions. Royal Fumble is basically luck based depending on whoever in the cluster**** manages to grab the tail within the last 5 seconds. Hex-A-Gone is actually really good. Make these better by transferring survival games here and making them progressively faster until only one person is left standing.

All these minigame problems could be alleviated by just having more games though. If you lose on a random chance you could at least look forward to what new games you'd play next round, but since things are repeated so often many of the maps feel like a chore. The number of levels increasing is likely to become the case as time goes on, but at the moment it Fall Guys biggest problem.

Some kind of visual variety in the maps would be appreciated too. After 10+ hours of play the bright colors are all tiring and none of the levels stand out as very unique or creative.

The game also has microtransactions which kinda inherently sucks, and there isn't enough of variety or customization options for costumes to really make you unique and stand out. Every Gordon Freeman costume wearer looks the same, excluding the face color, regardless of your pattern or color. Again, this will hopefully be fixed as more content is added over time.

Most of this review sounds negative, but because of how much fun I had playing it and how much potential it has for the future I think this would be a good game to support and maybe play in moderation right now. If you think the repetitiveness of the maps will be too much for you then hold off for now. The goal is to have this review become outdated simply by adding a substantial amount of new minigames. If this goal is achieved I genuinely think this game might become one of my favorites.

A more in-depth review that goes into every minigame specifically can be found here:
https://youtu.be/u8VbvotlvlI

This is a very short horror game with tons of bugs and a nasty habit of crashing on load screens.

You are some guy who is supposed to watch some old man's home. You are given a set of tasks, but these are mostly ignored for the rest of the game, except one instance where you picked up a parcel and nothing happens. The atmosphere is pretty good at first, the lighting is consistently good for most the game and if you don't know what will happen next it can be suspenseful, but that changes about halfway into this about hour long game.
After about 30 minutes of wandering the tiny house you get a gun and everything changes after that. The threat is a bunch of pitch black models with glowy eyes, and that is the only threat. They are all the same. Using your gun you can kill them in about 2-3 shots, so this changes from a horror game to very dark shooter. Everything kinda changes once you know you can fight this mysterious evil force with a basic firearm and it stops being scary whatsoever. There are also several times that the monsters would fail to chase me and just run into a wall, severely breaking the tone. The enemies can kill you in one hit which isn't a challenge, it is just annoying. Every encounter is just seeing their eyes in the dark, firing into them, and if you are unlucky then you die. Several times I died I didn't end up back at the menu, but instead I just floated in place, unable to move, making me pause the game and load my last save manually.
Everytime you die or go through a door you have to sit through a loading screen. As everyone else has pointed out, this game crashes a lot during these loading screens. You pretty much have to hold your breath and hope it doesnt crash. With the enemies damage being so unforgiving, this can be a huge problem.
This game is very short, full of bugs, and the ending just sort of happens suddenly, with no real build-up. It isn't the worst horror game on Steam, it atleast has some original stuff to enjoy, but it still wasn't very fun or scary. This game is definitely not worth $5, if you do get it try to get it at a reduced price.

Don't buy this game, I'll just tell you the entirety of the things that happen in the game:

You walk down stairs for about 10 minutes at an agonizing pace.

After about 10 minutes a scratchy film overlay is put over your screen.

You see the static model of a monster facing away from you, this is what it looks like:
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=755223411

The model does not move in any way. If you touch it, the game will say "Your Are Dead" and you have to start over. If you just walk around it you keep walking down the stairs, the monster gets left behind and the screen looses the scratchy film overlay.

After about 10 more minutes the walls get slightly darker

After about 10 more minutes you see the same monster again. It still doesn't move in any way, just move around it or kill yourself by walking into it.

After 10 more minutes an image of a ghost or a girl or something shows up on screen for a second and then you get a game over. The game over screen looks like this:
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=755223455


That is the entire game. It is tedious, boring, not scary, and poorly-made. Don't buy it.