Recent reviews by Finale

A fantastic, chill puzzling game with a lot of content, all in service of a good cause. Be sure to check out the companion game as well!

A fantastic, chill puzzling game with a lot of content, all in service of a good cause. Be sure to check out the companion game as well!

A fantastic game with an incredibly strong awareness of how its narrative interacts with player expectations. Strongly recommended; go in blind.

Don't let the generic name fool you, this is a magnificently tight and fairly paced puzzler well worth your attention - all meat no filler, with an entirely fair curve that subtly teaches you every twist and never wastes your time. Also the soundtrack is fantastic.

Still in early access as I write this, Endless Dark is already an excellent and largely novel horror concept executed well with no significant issues. I will be continuing to pursue it as the developers add new playable characters and functions.

Strongly recommended for any fans of truly novel indie horror that does more than chase trends.

The conclusion of the faith trilogy does not disappoint, and the added modes are a real bonus on top for hardcore players. Strongly recommended for horror fans.

An excellently crafted and very fair game of deduction reminiscent of, and worthy successor to, Obra Dinn. Strongly recommended without reservation.

An excellent indie mascot platformer with a slightly steep curve. Continuous, attentive support from the small devteam has helped this game really shine. Definitely worth your time if you are a fan of the genre.

the game has an unresolved savefile override bug that will randomly softlock or overwrite your files. There is no known fix that does not involve major progress loss and setting your system clock forward in time whenever you want to play- and even that doesn't usually work.

General review:
It's never a good sign when the credits have a "project closer" title near the top.

Beyond the above, this game is severely buggy and shows signs of incomplete development (despite a very long development cycle). The sound system doesn't work, the maps don't work, the game doesn't properly maintain the state of enemy AI, detection doesn't work...the list goes on. To be clear, none of these are minor jank issues; each of them completely compromises the related systems and makes them work inconsistently at best. Moment-to-moment gameplay is a borderline excruciating slog as a result.

On top of that, the game failed in its direction and design in pretty much every angle. Many of the systems would still produce poor gameplay if they functioned as intended. Based on contemporary coverage, the devs basically did not have a clear vision of what they wanted to be, and also didn't understand what made prior entries in the franchise possible. A lot of different ideas, few of them functional, were thrown into the final product as a result. Much of the core narrative writing and direction of the game is also execrable, even before it went into some sort of late development blender. Side dialogue and writing can be good at times (and, as is often the case with this sort of mess, there are some incredible asset team contributions).

What good notions exist don't survive the many ways in which the game is broken. It's hard to want to try an iron man mode when the game can wipe your savefile, let alone kill you on a whim with bad collision detection!

Excellent minimalist play; I recommend everything by this developer.