Recent reviews by aetergator

As we leave 2025, I thought it'd be nice to play this game as a bookend to last year, and so that I could metaphorically welcome 2026.

Unpacking is a puzzle game about moving into a new home, and needing to fit your possessions into your new home. I think everyone knows how therapeutic this process can be, basically zoning out thinking about the layout of the place you need to fit your items to. Cleaning is similar!

The basic game loop of Unpacking is that you're given boxes to sort through and figure out where each item goes. It's definitely a little tedious but that's just part of the experience you're buying into; no one said moving would be quick. I WILL SAY sometimes it's unclear where which item needs to go, but that's why we have the internet (the whiteboard goes on the fridge!!). When where these item's go are unclear the game becomes kinda annoying, having to just place the item in random locations until it magically fits. I don't really know if there's a neat solution to this problem, but quickly googling the solution for like 1 minute definitely broke my immersion into the game. I'm willing to forgive the game though cuz for one, I was just impatient, but it's more because the meat of this game comes from it's storytelling!

Unpacking is "show don't tell" in it's purest form. The aesthetics of the homes you stay at lull you into whatever mindset the character you're playing as is at. The slight differences between growing up and returning to your childhood home, having to place items between the possessions of another person, the ambience!! The ambience is so chill! I might have teared up at the final house a little bit, won't confirm.

I don't really have much to say about this game. It's a short game you can complete in one day, it executes the gameplay well enough, it's cozy, what else do you need? If you need to relax for a bit and want to zone out with a good puzzle, play this game!

3.5/5

Dredge is a fishing game set in the backdrop of a looming eldritch threat. You'll find yourself alone at night, exploring a world stained by a horrid corruption, fishing up catch poisoned by taint, finding your mind broken into shattered glass, and then sleep it all away ready to become pro fisher 10000 level mafia boss. And it doesn't even feel disjointed! The more lovecraftian parts of the setting are the spice that adds to the flavor of the exquisite meal that is this game's core gameplay loop.

It nails this dual feeling of lazily, almost unthinkingly, fishing up whatever you find, and realizing you stayed up too late and fearfully finding your way to the nearest safe port. The way this game plays with your (the player's) panic of the threats you barely see is great. Your control of what you can do in the night is incredibly small: you only have your ship's lights to guide you. Of course, as time goes on you'll discover more and more... things... but your movement is so incredibly slow, and the dark is so incredibly vast.

And then you sleep it all away, ready to fish up your next fish in your to-do list. I hear abyssal creatures that only appear at night, inside the rocky cliffs where guards are what you need! Ah, ♥♥♥♥!

Despite all this, the game never really veers into full on horror, which is something I appreciate! I don't do super well with full on horror, but... what I'm trying to get at is that this game's vibes are just, really, really great. It hits this perfect spot of cozyness amidst the, admittedly, nightmare scenario you're in. You gotta fish, after all. The soundtrack that changes between regions let you feel this sense of familiarity: "ah, this is what I will expect.". The NPCs you meet with their stories are all so so compelling, and their quests make you more and more familiar with the dark, to the point that you may even become more and more used to the dark. You upgrade your ship, increasing your capacity to fight against the dark, to speed up your time between light and dark, to free up more room for your fish, the fish, THE FISH! IT'S IN THE FISH! IT

its

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All that to say! This game is incredibly chill, fun to master, the story is good, there's a lot of fun to be had with this game. While it's not a game I'll obsess over, I can see myself playing this as time passes. There's nothing bad that I can think of with this game, it's just well designed! I'm sure someone else will find this game to be exactly their kind of vibe, fall in love with it, obsess over it, obsess over it, obsess over it, and so on and so forth. If that's potentially you, I hope this review helps you find what you're looking for.

4.5/5

So, this is obviously a great game. The beautiful art, the score, the way better tool system than Hollow Knight's, etc. etc., if you think the things you see from the trailer look cool, and you like metroidvanias/hollow knight, then you should buy this game. I've 100%ed this game and I agree with the consensus, this game is a masterpiece. End of review.

But... it's odd. Rain World, Getting Over It and Celeste are a few of my most favorite games and they were much more painful than Silksong. Somehow, I still detest Silksong's difficulty more. This game left such a sour taste in my mouth that my review is colored by the fact that I've had such a subjectively awful time by the end of it despite being an objectively masterpiece level of a game. Obviously, git gud, but that's a thought terminating bit of advice. I've played games more difficult than this, and I've gotten good at all of them. I've 100%ed Silksong, but still I had a worse time here.

I've had to sit with this thought, even talk about it with someone else, until I found a comment online. To summarize, everyone hits their breaking point in this game at different points. Some stop at the end of act 1, some complain about certain regions or bosses, some about a boss' walkback, some about the economy, some complain about certain endgame quests, but there's no one unifying "bad thing", just several smaller less bad things. It's a game that tests your patience multiple times over. The people who never find their breaking point will obviously rate this game in high regard, those who don't get filtered out.

I guess I never really expected this level of difficulty from Hollow Knight. It's difficult in a way that I didn't find fun.

So, for the person reading this review, take your time. This game is tedious yet beautiful, a prickly plant that blooms into a white flower. Your expectation for difficulty should not be in the level of Hollow Knight, but much higher. Be prepared to be unprepared. Leave a fight if you feel outmatched, take breaks whenever you can, even if it's just to pee or drink water. Don't play for long stretches of time.

All these things helped make my playthrough more manageable, but despite the difficulty, this game is, and always has been, a beautiful thing. Don't let the tedium blind you to the small things that make this game pop. The beautiful art, the haunting score, the moments of Respite. Every moment in this game, breathe it in. Take all the tools it gives you and live in it. A world full of wonder.

And strings.

The Hex is a mystery within a mystery. It tells you up front that there will be a murder, but dangles secrets that don't quite fit, or give false ideas of what they are, until you keep playing.

A lot of plot threads don't make sense until you get deeper and deeper into the game. You learn how exactly these characters connect, why they talk to each other as though they have history, how their own plot threads wring around each other's necks. You must keep learning.

My first Daniel Mullins game was Inscryption, and this game really has that one's DNA. That game really feels like a more evolved, more potent version of The Hex, but this game is still really good! The Hex succeeds in making the player feel involved, perhaps even culpable in the story. The player is not just a controller of a character, they are their own character that the narrative must account for. And you must watch.

The game also presents it's story pretty good! Six protagonists, six different games, six different ways to express the story. This game does feel slow to start, with the first two acts not really interesting me at first. As the story developed though, I got more and more curious. More Curious.

Overall, I enjoyed my stay in The Hex. It's a short game, that tells the story that it wants to tell. It's also a very meta game, which is fun! A lot of secrets to find all over this game. I used a video to find a lot of them, but they're very fun secrets that I wish I found earlier. And that ending... how everything connects. It was great. It's a very interesting game! It is imperative you stay interested.

...

so... go on! Play along.

🖐

Good ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Lord.

Even now, I'm really struggling to think about this game. It's a game about suffering in silence. It's being alone with yourself, keeping up facades. It's being homesick.

It gets so difficult for me to play at times, yet it's written so well that you're conditioned to move past. It's a really good game that places you in the point of view of a character who cannot take care of themselves. After all, you have a country to save. After all, you have to keep them safe. After all, you have places to be.

It gets so difficult for me to play at times, Sometimes things just happen. Sometimes, you see a ghost. Sometimes something slips just. past. your. vision. Sometimes you skip forward. Sometimes you need to skip forward, even if we, as the Observers we are, know that this is bad. Sometimes Siffrin does very hurtful things. Sometimes, my hands covered my mouth from the shock. Sometimes the script, the music, the lights are just slightly... off, and it gets you. It's really easy to get you.

Even now, I'm really struggling to think about this game. It had so, so, so many themes, but I wish it were more cohesive. It had colors, countries, and crafts but I think they could've been better synthesized. It had, right up until the end, make me think that something terrible would happen. It had, and then the story pivoted to something else. It had been good, still, but my point is that the writing could've been more tight, the worldbuilding made more relevant to the ending.

But this game still hits me. It's a very, VERY good depiction of mental strife. I could compare this to Omori... I think Omori was much more poorly paced compared to this game, but Omori's ending was much more impactful, at least in my eye.

But this game still hits me. It's heartbreaking. It's terrifying. It's beautiful. A must play for those who like this genre of story.

But this game still hits me. Even now, I'm struggling to--

Spoilers!

Vanilla was an experience about feeling lost in an unknown world that doesn't care about the player, a world whose ecosystem was impressively complex yet easily (mostly) interactable. It was an experience about stumbling onto great things much bigger than you, about finding people, godlike in comparison, and escaping the game and its systems and turmoils. Downpour iterates on this experience, focusing its lens on the iterators, the gods. It's a story told throughout time, as each slugcat experiences the world differently. It's a story about connection, about the things that came before and after, a story about two gods and their fates flipped.

Watcher iterates on Vanilla yet again, instead hardfocusing on pure, undistilled mystery. It's a game about exploring throughout space, with rifts that open themselves up and show the player a small yet wondrous new world. It's a game about the wonders of exploration, about chasing ghosts, about jaw-dropping set pieces, about letting go. It's the game's attempt of removing the karma system, and it's an absolute success in what it sought out to do.

Watcher is a completely different experience to Vanilla, in the same way that Downpour is a completely different experience to Vanilla.

That's not to say it's flawless, good lord it's full of flaws. For each thing it gets right, there's one thing that always irks me the wrong way. It manages to succeed in recapturing what made Rain World so mysterious, what made the player feel like they were exploring something alien. At the same time, how they present this mystery with the teleportation and rifts makes each region feel disjointed and separate from each other, something that I wish they kept somehow, even if it wasn't their main focus in this DLC. Each region is beautifully crafted, but these levels' layout scream "modded", instead of feeling like something the vanilla Devs would have made. The devs of this DLC were very addicted to rooms that you can only explore small parts of depending on where you enter, rooms that are functionally dead ends, and rooms that have strange geometry that I would have seen in Vanilla. The story is incredibly interesting, but frustratingly indistinct right up to the end, an end that, while incredibly impactful to both characters in the Watcher's campaign (I'm not discussing the alternate ending cuz I haven't done it myself yet), doesn't feel quite earned because how vague they've set up the campaign, because of the aforementioned disjointedness. The visual noise from using your powers could also be toned down by a lot.

At it's core, this is yet another strong addition to the Rain World experience, and it's another addition that will appeal to a subsection of the community, one that enjoyed the exploration and wonder the previous content gave them. If you're here to find jaw-dropping vistas, incredibly unique creatures, and worlds far beyond what you could ever imagine base game could achieve, this will be very fun. Pair that with some quality of life changes the devs should add in a later update (echo flash, rifts showing in the map, just generally a better in game map tbh), and this might just be your game of the year. For the others, come into this game with an open mind! I've enjoyed everything the rain world devs have given, and this DLC is no exception. Despite there being some fundamental choices the devs made to this DLC that I wish they approached differently, the direction they put themselves to is still strong, and as they continue to update this DLC I'm sure the experience will only get more and more polished.

That being said, if they remove Badlands in it's entirety I will switch up my review and make it only glowing recommendations 10/10 with no flaws

Update 4/20/2025 - They've fixed a lot of the stuff I've had issues with! (better in game map with rifts showing, Badlands locusts more in tune with being part of an ecosystem, Barnacles finally having an easy counterplay). I can only recommend this DLC even more now.

Animal Well is a bottomless pit of mystery.

The amount of depth with the mechanics and puzzles in display for what is ostensibly a short game is genuinely shocking to me. For every nook and cranny there are at least three different puzzles you are either solving or missing. Each room is packed with so many different secrets that you only notice the more you pass through them, and when I say packed, I genuinely mean *PACKED*. This game does this in such a way that, to me, doesn't feel overwhelming or too abstract. All of these puzzles are well made and easy to understand, and there are just. So many. I have to keep saying this, there is so much!

My only gripe with this game is that it can get annoying to find the one puzzle piece you're looking for in the map to find a secret. They're visible enough that you'll eventually find them, but you can just as easily miss them as you go across the map over... and over... again. This never got to me though, but it's something that people may get ticked off with. That's valid!

Otherwise, this game is a gold mine. There are multiple places you can find yourself and think "I'm satisfied with where I've stopped.", but if ever you want to continue digging there's always just this one more puzzle... one more nook that you haven't checked. Maybe now that you know about this interaction you can use it to get something new. And down and down we keep digging... it almost feels endless. It's a game that keeps bringing you deeper and deeper, how far does this go?

I've gotten very far: I've rolled credits, gotten the 64 eggs, and exited the well. And yet... there's more. 20 hours later and there's still more! I can't wait to see what I find.

Edit: I'm infinitely thankful that the deeper secrets of this game are all optional, only for your enjoyment/inner gratification. No external benefits (like achievements), or a more secret credits roll. Celeste does something similar with 202. A lot of the beauty of this game is that all these secrets are there if you look for them, but you don't necessarily *have* to. There's nothing lost, and even the act of learning about it somewhere else still gives you that "aha! I KNEW IT!" or "WHAT? THAT'S THERE?" moment.

Yeah, I searched up the remaining few bunnies (I think I had 4 left?), BDTP, and Layer 4. These are really difficult puzzles, but I know that these were meant to be more of a community effort given how obscure they can be. Even with searching, I don't think I lost any enjoyment from this game. My review still stands!

This game is a time capsule of secrets. Rarely does a game come around and give you the chance to feel like you've solved something truly difficult. Billy Basso has succeeded in making Animal Well's playerbase feel like a kid once again, learning how to walk, then run, then soar. The only games that have come close to that to me is Rain World and Outer Wilds. That's high praise for me.

Please, buy this game.

What if I wept?

Outer Wilds is a game about exploration. Each planet is a treasure trove of information and goals, linking with each other into a web of understanding and knowledge. All information are simultaneously hidden behind needing to know what to do, yet easily accessible such that you quickly realize you could have always done this. Every puzzle in the game is satisfying to learn and master, and no location in this game is filler and empty.

Outer Wilds is a game about player determination. There are no quests to fill, and rarely do NPCs explicitly tell you what to do. Every location, every piece of text, it all nudges you somewhere, but the brunt of figuring out what to do lies on you. You choose where to go, what to experiment with next. You choose what theories you want to apply. Success or failure, the choice to try was always there, and it is the fact that You understood the rules of this solar system in your own terms and words, it is your try, that is the most important.

Outer Wilds is a game about curiosity. It is a game where knowing the answer to the puzzle ruins the experience. It is an experience sensitive to spoilers, as there are no checkpoints nor key items nor power ups nor level ups nor experience points to receive. Progress is denoted by your understanding and theory crafting. As you understand the mechanics of the universe, and as you understand the tapestry each planet slots into, you continue to progress.

Until you find the beginning.

What if I wept?

With an ecosystem that cares not for the player, paired with an environment seemingly not built for you, Rain World strives to make you, the player, feel just as trapped as your character. Thrust into an unknown world, with only the vaguest idea of what your goal is, you struggle. You continue to struggle, trapped in an endless cycle of death and rebirth, dying and respawning back to where you were. The predators close in, the rain begins to fall.

And yet... you make it to your shelter, ready to start the process again. You become a little smarter, still dying here and there, but with each death you begin to master the act of movement. You dodge past lizards that once seemed threatening, learning their habits. The green ones are too heavy to climb poles, for example, allowing you to dodge them easily. You get better and better at staying alive, and you've mastered the game loop of sleep and eat. Despite this, survival is only half the battle, and to truly get your bearings, you need to pick a direction and *go*.

You move through the world, finding new regions, new enemies, and new opportunities to learn about the world you now inhabit.

You become a survivor.

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I'll be real, RW is a very hard sell. Its unwillingness to give direction and help to the player about the MANY, MANY different systems and quirks each creature has, paired with its harsh ecosystem that gives the player little leeway and saving graces has made the game infamous. I'm not going to deny any of these, they are true facts. At the start, you're going to struggle.

What you need to understand is that Rain World is not a "normal" video game, as pretentious as that sounds. To steal a message from the Rain World server, "Rain World is made to be *learned*, not *taught*" (@spolew). You survive not by gaining a power up nor skill, but by experimentation and learning. By learning about the threats the world throws at you, you become better at weathering these threats- You can't survive against a foe you don't understand.

Rain World is a game about writing a bestiary, learning each creature's habits and using them to survive. Rain World is a game about being thrust into the deep end, and swimming back to shore, against the tide, using your own strength. It's a game about learning, once again, how to live.


If all of that sounds like the kind of experience you'd enjoy, I'd 100% recommend it! Rain World is a very, VERY, interesting game, one not for everyone, but one I can wholeheartedly recommend.

ow my feelings