Senaste recensioner av Autrizzm

Haven't played much but as far as co-op survival games go I like the mechanics of this. I remember Don't Starve being punishing but fair, and my friends all starved come wintertime because we all forgot to make enough food. Punishing, hilarious, fair.

I remember this roguelite / tower-defense hybrid being fun

A fun hacking simulator that feels like it runs with the spirit of Uplink.

A breathtaking dystopia with punishing difficulty and tricky physics-based movement and combat.

Those are great, but what makes this game special for me aren't just those things. For one, the theme of reincarnation is generally under-explored -- not only by games (surprising, considering how almost every game's fail state is death and the very next moment is you being alive again) but also by media in general. Reincarnation is a wonderful theme that lets allows us to think about some of the grand, difficult questions. What do we value once survival is out of the equation? Of course, in the real world, every living creature dies, so survival isn't really out of the equation. Does that change our answer? Regardless, what do we make of the inexorability of real, permanent death? These questions linger in the air -- the weighty backdrop of every screen in Rain World. The game, elegantly, doesn't need to lean on telling you this through text. On your journey, the omnipresent pixel-art decay around you hammers these themes home; there used to be civilization here, and now there is not. At your destination, you've made a choice.

The game's themes of reincarnation, I suppose because their origins in eastern philosophy, come packaged with ecological themes -- this world will happy exist without you. In one the best display of this that I've ever seen in a video game, creatures will treat you (and each other) with varying (and rational) degrees of hostility. Creatures will fight each other. You're not the only creature near the bottom of the food chain in this world and you can occasionally see another creature become prey. The fact that all of this is systems-driven, not scripted, is wonderful.

I'm convinced Rain World is a beautiful thing. I just wish younger me believed in himself enough to git gud instead of watching the endings on YouTube.

Even as someone that played HL1, this doesn't seem to have aged that well. I feel a bit bad for saying that because so many people clearly love this, but I didn't have a great time. The maps in the current trailer honestly look a lot more fun than the maps I played, so maybe me and my friend were playing the wrong maps. Still -- it felt more like something that could be made more than something that should have been made.

Dead game that fails to appropriately refine what made its predecessors great

Still ticking, still blisteringly fast. Quake Live gave me my taste for fast FPS games

Bland enemies, bland loot, and unfunny jokes.

Fun enough but got boring pretty quickly, with most levels feeling the same. To be fair, I picked a hard mission and got salty that my run ended, but even that turned something up -- after mousing over every enemy in visible range, I couldn't find a source for the Unstable Current debuff that was shutting down my entire team. I'm left wondering: where was that coming from, and was the intended way to play against the endlessly spawning hordes to run past them? I moved on before answering either.

A soft recommendation. Very relaxing -- the core gameplay loop is excellent and the art and music are relaxing. The game also makes sure to balance your diving out with a healthy amount of downtime, which I really love -- serving up the sushi you catch in Bancho's little sushi place is great, and the game just adds more and more things for you to do as the days go by. There's even a neat cooking minigame for when Bancho is cooking for TV -- tons of little mechanical mix-ups keep the game fresh.

That said, the game is full of little annoyances. Tonally, the story's a little too feel-good for my taste, with most characters happily basking in laziness and ignorance. A special mention to the feel-good cutscenes and events, which often drag -- both you and the camera are fixed in place, which makes you feel like your eyes are being propped open by a failed ASMR voice actor sleepily commanding you to bask in the beauty of the ocean. And not all the variety that game game offers is good -- notably, the zombie section of the game is a pretty big drag that forces you do do a lot of pointless waiting.

My biggest problem with the game is that the management side quickly falls apart. If you're smart with your resources like I was, you realize that a few recipes are extremely OP compared to others, and start maxing out dishes that can be quickly farmed and cooked up with dispatch ingredients -- namely, shark/blowfish/tuna dishes. This, plus the paltry value of early-game fish and dishes (even upgraded) pigeonholes you into serving essentially the same food every day to earn the money you need to upgrade efficiently. The end result of this, given the game's length, is that by the time you get the steel net gun upgrade, farming rice, vegetables, fish and seaweed at a good clip, and sending staff to the branch restaurant, the game just abruptly ends, with nothing really to spend money on besides decor and maxing out the branch.

Several things could help fix this -- having dishes max out at level 5 instead of 10, nerfing the fish farm, buffing farming, lengthening the game by further padding out story missions, having more frequent events, and introducing the branch restaurant earlier. But maybe a better solution would be to have the game encourage you to serve a larger variety of dishes. Children/students/families that can't afford expensive dishes would help keep early-game fish relevant. Picky eaters would encourage you to prep a wide menu. I'm not sure, but at the end of the day, I'm tired of serving basic tuna/blowfish/shark dishes all the time. Potentially, higher (but capped) rewards for serving complex dishes would also help discourage hoarding for upgrades -- restaurant operating costs spooked me into attempting to get a tuna dish to level 10, something that I never managed to do for non-nigiri dishes.