Recent reviews by AbyssalSoul

Chuusotsu is a cute sci-fi slice of life medium length (by medium I mean between 8-18hs, anything above is already into the longer side) kinetic visual novel with a lot of layers behind the seemingly simplistic front.

You follow the misadventures of Marisugawa Arue as she tries to reform her life as a shut-in, reach her dreams and obviously make some friends along the way. However, things quickly take a turn into the weird and strange but thankfully with a satisfactory conclusion and lead up to the mini sequel.

What surprised me the most was the very dark, heavy and ominous tone going in the background, which I don't want to spoil much, but it contrasts heavily with the cheerful and carefree mood on the surface. The story is set in a near-future Japan after a massive global conflict has nearly destroyed the planet and reconstruction efforts led to a dystopian society not unlike the worst nightmares of sci-fi writers, including branding everyone with nanomachines that act as seals that determine what they'll do in life until they expire. The game does provide a very useful glossary of concepts and a short side story you can read to further understand the setting.

It's in that brave new world where Arue's struggles become more remarkable and where I feel the work shines as she quotes the infamous "human debris" concept and suffers through a society that rejects and even wants to make people like her disappear. It also makes the interactions between the main cast all the more entertaining as they acknowledge their outcast status and try to work together to stand up proud in spite of it.

Alright, enough rambling!

I usually take a moment to describe some of the technical aspects but, well, the game runs pretty well on pretty much low spec hardware so that shouldn't be a worry. It supports controllers and the Steam overlay also works so you can go wild with the screenshots. It is fully voice acted as well, which is a rarity for doujin visual novels and the quality of the voices was pretty good as well, with Arue kind of reminding me of Neptune's energy at times. The soundtrack is excellent as well and worth warranting a full package/bundle purchase for it. Most of the music is fairly chill out and energetic and the opening song is great as well.

All in all, quite recommended and thankfully not overly long so ideal for those looking for shorter experiences!

One of those pleasant indie surprises you get totally out of the blue. It seems the developer has a background story with the game and its inception so I'm glad it was able to materialize into a release. At first I thought it was like the Jet Set Radio series but, nope, it's a music-driven runner game wearing a neon/retrofuturistic aesthetic up its sleeve. Employing a soundtrack that utilizes rap overtones, big band, jazz, vocals and other more atypical elements through the 13 levels you go through.

Your goal? Keep on runnin' and lower that timer. You can unlock a few outfits and harder difficulty settings. In fact, I recommend if possible that you start straight on hard because Normal mode has an extreme slowdown that is meant to help dodge things much easily but, ironically, makes things harder and sluggish. Of course, the first time it's a very welcomed tool to avoid getting run over by the difficulty and reflexes needed to do the inputs. And that Bonus Level... Well, good luck there and you better account for input lag or the delay between moves or you're toast.

Performance wise the game isn't too demanding, the menu design is sleek and stylish and it supports multiple language. A controller is also very recommended. With the price being right, having a great OST, offering the right amount of challenge and not demanding you so many hours, it's hard not to recommend it if you want a quick dose of a runner that will not destroy your mind or ask you inhuman feats.

Definitely looking forward to a sequel or a game in a similar style/aesthetics.

Project Wingman is perhaps the nicest surprise I've had in a long time and certainly a 2020 GOTY contestant. At a fraction of the price of Ace Combat 7 it is just so good you could say it's the unofficial Ace Combat 8. It's simply amzing when the stars align like this.

This game pours passion in spades. PASSION in caps. These guys clearly love the genre. Every small bit, despite maybe some rough edges on the voice acting or random jank and performance issues (plus ORANGE), it all fits together to make something you just won't want to stop playing. Be it full price or on a sale, if you love exhilarating arcade aerial combat with enough missile trails to perform the most exaggerated Itano Circus shows, you won't regret it.

The mission briefing design uses the same style of the Ace Combat series with touches of FROM's own Armored Core titles with stylish and sleek maps detailing your objectives, the radio chatter with some hilarious and pretty well done moments with your waifu Prez (a meme of her own on a game that seemed to have developed memes faster than the missiles reaching their targets) when you use a two-seat plane, both enemy and allies comments in battle, it's all incredibly entertaining and it reaches peakes of greatness on certain missions. (Especially Mission 11, aka, Showdown, which you should absolutely play on Mercenary difficulty after clearing the game once in the other difficulties.)

The homages, tributes but at the same time doing its own thing (being able to pick your own weapon configurations without being as constrained as in Ace Combat for example) makes this such a great work. And while the final battle gets some flak and has thankfully seen some fixes, it's still a great moment.

Special mention to the soundtrack. Man, that soundtrack! It's already making me want to get a sequel for more musical goodness. It's available on Spotify and Bandcamp but I hope it's also released on Steam so I can have some portability.

So, enough of the praising and let's quickly venture into the technical details: the game supports VR and the devs have put out some patches to alleviate some issues (like the infamous orange glares) but you can play it in normal screens too. I can only imagine just how ridiculous the missile trails are in VR. Hopefully one day I can try it.

It works right out of the box with the Xbox One controller although the menus are clearly designed with kb+mouse nagivation in mind, much similar to the way No Many's Sky loads up a controller config by default.

Performance wise, up until the point where battles get insanely crowded, performance tends to be rock solid but the moment the particle effects and missile trails become too many you can tell the game it's having a hard time trying to get it all done, with pop in issues and big slowdowns. Perhaps high end PCs may be able to brute force it but something like Conquest on Red Alert on later missions are going to put most configs on their knees when the height of the battle is reached.

Outside of that, performance is usually fairly good and the game does look extremely nice (even incredible at some points, like during the crazy lock-on guided missiles aerial chaos), and especially factoring this was made by just 3 people.

Right now the game features a campaign and a rogue-like mode called Conquest in which you set out to control the Cascadia territory in up to 43 missions revolving around score attack, destruction of transports or highlighted targets or anti-air defenses. You can earn credits to power up a massive (and I mean massive, we're talking of over 30 planes and 4 mobile fortresses) airship fleet and buy more planes. However, if you die you lose all the fleet progress and have to start over. And you WILL die. Probably crashing against an enemy fortress like we all did. No shame in that, it happens! The replay value is guaranteed, although it will obviously get a bit repetitive after a while.

There also seems to be a lot of mod support for the game so we could potentially be seeing even more goodness rise from that front until they work on a sequel (how long before transformable Macross Valkyries or an Omega Boost mod?), which I hope will be just as good and lives up to the lighting strikes twice saying.

As a YouTube comment stated: "We tried to intercept the enemy transports, so they sent guys to intercept our interception, so we sent more guys to intercept the interception of our interception, and so on."

So, yes...

Why haven't you bought this game yet!?

This has to be one of the most pleasant surprise purchases I made. From what I read in the forums, this is apparently an Apple Arcade title that got then released on PC, set in the same universe as the Redout racing game. I come totally blind and not too knowledgeable of the development on Redout: Space Assault but I love arcade on-rails shooters like Panzer Dragoon, Star Fox, Rez, Omega Boost and many others so I felt right at home with the focus being heavily set on lock-on guided missiles, which is a primary element of the scoring in such games and a homage to the famous Itano Circus, the majestic missile dodging and soaring acrobatics that was polished with Super Dimensional Fortress Macross. And any title that tries to recreate that obviously has my attention!

Graphics wise, this game looks amazing with extremely colorful and pretty space vistas and fairly decent ship design. It's a shame the main character ship doesn't have one or two trails to further increase the sense of velocity, perhaps they can add it in a future update. There was a bug with HDR, along a lot of other issues that were fixed on a quick patch released shortly after launch so, using the latest version as the basis and having 100% cleared it, the game seems to perform mostly well now.

So, with that aside, let’s focus on the campaign, which is divided in several chapters each one containing a set of missions. This approach of quantity over quantity is what hurts the game the most. Unlike a majority of shmups or on rails shooters, which have 5-7 stages tightly designed for scoring with a distinct and "huge battleship approaching fast" at the end, you get defense, escort missions, some item hunting and others that kind of break the pace in favor of more story building within the missions. There are actually some cool capital ships you take on (in a rather odd change of controls that removes inverted axis flight in favor of arcade directions) and a big "shoot the core" moment but they get spread away due to the chapter structure. To make matters worse there are two missions that I take were added to harken to the original Redout where you “race” against the enemies and they are probably my least favorite and what may put some people off for sure even though they are (thankfully!) very short. I could do without those!

As an experiment to fuse genres I think it does fairly well, but that conflict of identity may end up being a deal braker for those looking for a full fledged space shooter or those looking for a pure arcade on-rails shmup with no filler, falling straight in the middle of both fields. The music is pretty good and it sounds great outside of the game too, although some of the tunes (like the menu one) are less than stellar. Would've loved something packing an extra punch since music tends to elevate shooters to greater heights.

With the amount of space sims around it's a breath of fresh air to have an arcade title that only has a few minor key upgrades (and you should probably just pump it all on lock-on missiles and the guns anyway) and focuses a bit more on enemy and bullet patterns. There are even are a few instances of small bullet hell! I wouldn't mind if they double down on all those elements and keep most of the story sections on cutscenes (or briefings/debriefings in the vein of those cool Ace Combat 7/Armored Core 4-5 ones) for a potential sequel.

In short, when the game clicks, it's great and it's a very nice surprise too considering how much I like on rails shooters. It’s also appreciated that it won’t demand much of your time either so that’s another plus in these busy days.

(Note: the game was played entirely using an Xbox One wired controller, which quickly loaded an official configuration.)

Very short game (don't mind the hours that appear displayed on Steam, that's because I played it while working, it's about 2-3 hours tops) in the vein of Mad Father and other horror RPG Maker games. I won't spoil much of the story if you're curious to try it so please be advised that when the dev warns the English translation is very rough, they weren't kidding: it'll help you understand the events but if you can play it in its native language (Chinese), do so as you'll get an overall better understanding. If you can forgive that aspect (the available walkthrough here on Steam helps a lot in that regard!) and fill in the gaps with your internal grammar corrector, you're golden.

You play as Xiaoqi, a young lonely girl who loves reading books and wakes up in a mysterious mansion where soon enough dangerous things start happening and, well, things go deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole. The story has multiple endings, good and bad and a true one but overall they carry a certain gravitas and mood to them that I really liked.

Again, it's a small game but it manages to click a few things, like the introduction of a sanity mechanic (which gets affected by gruesome or dangerous events), flashlight/lamp mechanics, very decent save point placement and even the ability to save at any time -although it's tied to some endings- that helps you cope with death, unlike many other RPG Maker titles that pull cheap deaths and moments that force you to backtrack a lot. It even has a splash screen mocking this so glad it takes it humorously. Basically, if you see a save point, save. You know death's round the corner. There are subversion of expectations moments too, which are really appreciated.

Finally, there also are a few minigames dotted here and there (mostly of the simple QTE type) and a few alternate paths and things you can do that are optional. Either way, it's a shame things are tied to the minuscule resolution of RPG Maker (remember ALT+Enter is your best friend) and you cannot take screenshots since the engine does not support the Steam Overlay (the only way is to do the screenshot folder trick) but on the other hand it means it runs on practically anything.

So, yep, recommended! (Again, use a walkthrough if you get easily frustrated and are playing in English.)

This was one of the surprise releases of 2020 for me. A Switch port that runs incredibly well even on lower configurations, with all the bells and whistles, it even supports 4k for that screenshot mania/Fashion Mecha at the highest settings.

So, what does DxM bring to the table? It offers some good mecha action from some of the developers of Armored Core. In lack of a proper Armored Core title developed by From Software, we take what we can, especially on PC where this genre is extremely underrepresented compared to the console front.

The meat of the game is in the extremely customizable mechs (called Arsenals here) that look extremely cool and can move incredibly fast with the right configurations. The collection of weapons and parts for your big robot is also a key part of the whole experience as you plow through the multitude of story and free missions, as well as online missions that can be played in co-op. (My only gripe in that aspect is the inability to change the color of the light from the arsenals, which is stuck at orange, same for weapon colors.)

Sadly, the online component will definitely require to coordinate with your friendlist since it's not very active at all nowadays but if you can get another 3 people or just another pal to play, the co-op missions are definitely a huge step up in challenge, especially after the addition of the new Eclipse boss. (Zeruchroar proved to be fairly difficult even though we were a full team and the Omega variations of the bosses can also get very challenging.)

The story has a few twists but the writing and character portrayal is not very good, especially in the way your character feels tacked on. It makes the same mistake as Xenoblade X and the MC there. Don't dive too deep, the concept was cool but sadly the execution left a lot to be desired.

Obviosly, we're not here for the story but for the robot battles and I do believe delivers them in spades. For those fans of the genre, it's a worthy pick up and for those unconvinced I would suggest waiting for a bigger sale. The DLC is all cosmetic so you don't have to worry about missing anything.

I truly hope we can get a much more improved and even better sequel that also comes to PC day one!

P.S.: Curse to all hell whoever devised the destruction achievements and decided to put such small AI enemy amounts in almost all missions so to make it just as bad as the "play x amount of hours" 'challenges'. The grind is real. If I didn't love mechs so bloody much I would not recommend it solely based on that.

The first in the Deep Space Waifu series! The titles harken to those old strip 'em up STGs that existed in the doujin sphere but it is all quite well presented, with easy to follow mechanics, challenging difficulty if you pick the highest settings and a casual, smooth sailing if you go for the more normal modes. The game "story" is what you would expect from this kind of parody/comedic type of shmup, which is a welcomed change of pace from all the seriousness.

There are bosses and mid-bosses, goals to achieve in terms of clothing destruction (quite hilarious to be talking about such a mechanic but hey) and multiple power ups to aid you in your quest for more skin and the perfect WAIFU.

System specs-wise the game (and its successors) are not particularily demanding but I don't think low end laptops can handle it that kindly, everything else will power through easily. I would recommend a controller although it seems you can only control the character with the left stick instead of the d-pad, which may throw off some STG players. Nothing some meddling with the controls or Steam Controller config can't fix.

With 69 achievements (because of course!) to get, trading cards and the right price, if you're skilled at shmups expect about 2-3 hours to get 'em all, a few more for thoes not as seasoned, especially for replays under the infamous "one handed mode", which enables automatic fire and lets you unleash your darkest thoughts, heh.

Either way, recommended! if you like it then I would recommend picking the rest of the series. Pity there isn't a bundle/collection to be able to get everything in one package but well, nothing a few more clicks can't solve.

Short but fun R-18 VN. It doesn't ask you much of your time and for those super busy that's a plus. The story revolves around you, the anonymous hero that can be named after your pervert self, sent to another world ("isekai'd") and dropped in the middle of a battle between two factions. You're saved and treated by a voluptuous, fun and sexy cat girl named Kiara who may or may not become your protector and partner. And that's all you need to know, cue the sexy times!

There are several costumes you can try on Kiara for your viewing delight and remember to press H to remove the GUI.

It helps that the titular Kiara is just really nice as a character (who's voiced as well) and the silly reactions of YOU (the MC) add to the ridiculousness (and awesomeness if you get what I mean) of the situations. If only more eroge would just focus on being vanilla fun now and then it would be nice. Props to a certain moment that's meant to trigger anger but quickly ended up bringing in a smile!

Add three endings to obtain and several extremely R-18 scenes, all pretty well done and presented without censorship, and it's hard not to recommend it, especially at this price. So yep, the art and presentation looks great. Thankfully steady sales will warrant a small set of trading cards and emoticons of Kiara because those would be nice, heh.

In short, give it a look if you don't mind adult-only games!

The Last Birdling is a fantasy story visual novel with multiple endings and choices to be made, set in a different world (with a mixture of east-meets-west). The story is narrated through two main POVs (Tayo, a human girl expert in archery and Bimonia, a young bird-like hybrid entity of a species that has been at war with humans) and your choices affect the relationship between the characters and how the endings will play out. I don't want to spoil anything so I'll skip that bit but, well, yep, better come in prepared as some bits, while not directly graphical, do contain some ghastly bits. Of course for fans of something like the Higurashi series, it's probably tame. In that regard, it shares a similar feeling as Cursed Sight (another work of the same dev, which I also recommend checking out), in that the world is definitely a cruel place and there are no magic tricks that can change that. There is a constant sense of foreboding, that something's not quite right and, well, stuff happens.

Anyway, being a visual novel you can imagine it runs fairly well even on a toaster and, well, that is the case. I used the Xbox One controller and Big Picture mode to play it and it was definitely a better experience thanks to that. The achievements are helpful to track your progress. There is also an extensive glossary that further helps with the world building and it may be good to give it a quick read before starting the game although you'll get prompts as you progress with glossary entries to check out. The overall presentation, music and sound effects are also well done and contribute to some of the more powerful moments. So, yes, very recommended indeed!

Fairly simple and relaxing city builder with a rogue-like/randomized component that generates a different island each time you play and jump to the next. Mechanically it's basically the city building equivalent of a caravan shmup where you aim to score the highest with the tools and combos you deploy on the surface you're given. However, that randomized componet will make it so that some runs will be far less optimal than others. Regardless of that fact the game is built in such a sleek and efficient way that you will overlook that bit. Most of the achievements are fairly engaging, nudging you towards the game mechanics (combos, speed building, clever building placement and terrain examination) so they are a good way to track your progress across the board.

There is a fair share of building combinations and types to keep you engaged for a while, just don't expect an hyper complex level of simulation ala Cities series or Sim City.

Performance wise it runs great without any hiccups, and at least on my configuration I required no tinkering in the options menu. I wish more things were this playable straight "out of the box" without long winded tutorials and such it's, bam, straight into the building. Overall, it may not last you long but the hours it offers are fun and relaxing. And if you're in doubt, pick it up on a sale, it'l lbe even more worth it. Recommended!