Recent reviews by 74 prairie dogs in a trenchcoat

Wrath of the Goose King is overall a very solid roguelike, I'd say it's worth at least a couple playthroughs. Definitely worthy of more attention than it's gotten at the time of this review, "profile features limited" is sad to see on a game with fundamentals this solid. Is it the art style? I know it's a bit 2000's flash game, but it still sort of works with the tone of the story, and it's far from the most important thing to get right in this genre.

The animations/text speed can be a bit slow on the default settings, but these are very customizable and the fastest options are virtually instant. Cutscenes auto-skip after the first time you see them, with an option to reset your story progress to replay them all. The writing is pretty decent, vaguely humorous but nothing that will really stick with you. That's perfectly fine for a roguelike though.

The main gameplay loop is balanced around a risk/reward system, where you pick one of 3 encounters per node with the enemy layout and type of reward displayed in advance, and if you win you can either move on or stick around to fight the rest, but each successive fight gives the remaining enemies higher stat bonuses. It's an interesting approach and I think this game makes it work pretty well. The only real flaw is that there's (currently) no reroll feature to help offset poor RNG in either the reward offerings or the reward you're actually given, but it's quite rare for this to break a run - usually when I lose it's because I just got too greedy, and my first successful run also had the most mediocre RNG I've seen so far in this game.

Characters. spells, and relics are varied and interesting, as they should be. A lot of weapons/armor give minor boring stat boosts at lower rarities but higher rarity variants can actually be quite powerful. Jewelry is a bit mixed, some of it is pretty good but most of it has too steep of drawbacks to really be worth using despite the benefits.

Money is less impactful than you might think, it's mostly for shoring up particularly poor RNG since shops have limited stock, only stock 2 of any type of gear at a time, and only sell the lowest rarity of gear. The spell store has a wider selection but also uses a much rarer currency for everything but its potions. The game is definitely balanced around this system though and I never felt screwed over by shop RNG.

There's a little bit of roguelite in the game in that you can buy boosters that carry over between runs. Each character can only equip two of them though, and you can only buy each booster once, so you'll still have to make choices and have a fairly strict cap on how much power you can get in this way.

Once you've beaten the game the first time you unlock several challenge modes for bonus endings, plus another alternate challenge mode that turns one of your starting character's booster slots into dead weight, locks both of their booster slots for the whole run, and replaces the boss fights with entirely new high difficulty ones. So there's plenty of replay value to be had here.

The dev continues to update this game despite the tragically low attention it's gotten, and has confirmed that a jewelry rework and a reroll feature are both planned for future updates. I hope that they can receive the success and attention they deserve, if not with this game then with future projects.

They responded to the criticism of the first game for being too short for the asking price by taking the roguelike mode that was a free DLC for the first game, giving it an actual map but not randomizing it at all beyond a couple elevators that take you to one of a handful of premade rooms, tacking on a killscreen timer to make sure it would take twice as long to finish as the first game without actually having more content, adding in a gun that mocks the critics who said the first game was too short, and selling the whole thing for the same price as the first game. That sure is a response.

Other less important problems include window settings that don't load properly when you relaunch the game, a phone UI that's glacially slow to scroll through its various menus, a couple dozen hats mailed to you in a random order one at a time when half of them are just recolors of the same flower crown (we have had the tech to give the player multiple items at once since the NES), some "break X enemies/objects" quests with high enough numbers and late enough availability to add an hour (25% of the game's runtime) to 100% completion, and a final boss sequence that dragged on for way too long.

Vegetable payday 2 is an OK way to spend a couple hours if you get it in a bundle, but I wouldn't recommend buying it with any other method.

It's a really cool concept, but there's not a lot of depth to it. The gameplay never really evolves beyond running through mazes fighting humans with armor and melee weapons and avoiding the same 5 or so traps, and it was already starting to feel old after I cleared my first wing of the castle. Enemies tend to be trivial to fight since they don't really parry or dodge and don't move a lot mid-swing, so you can just charge up attacks and back in and out to kill them in about 5 seconds every time, unless it's a boss in which case it just has 10 times the health but isn't any harder.

Also, there are a couple bugs I encountered that are kind of game breaking. One of the levels in the sewer path has a corridor in one of the left side rooms that opens into the void, and if you go in there the game softlocks, which isn't exactly great. But what frustrated me enough to quit was, there's a guy in jail in the Northern Crossroads right next to a patrolling enemy. Well, he'll try to run at that enemy through the locked gate despite being unarmed, and that enemy's attacks can kill him through the jail walls, and he stays dead even if you reload your save. It wasn't my fault he died, game! Don't permanently lock out content when I had no way to influence the outcome!

I appreciate this game existing as what it is - it's clearly a student project or solo dev without much experience, and by that standard what's been done here is very impressive and a good portfolio piece. But I can't recommend it outside of that lens.

This is exactly what a sequel should be. Ender Magnolia improves on the original Ender Lilies in almost every way, and the few ways it doesn't are mostly sidegrades. The only major flaws I can think of are:

- Some fights (almost all of which are minibosses) have excessively long runbacks, with one extremely annoying miniboss taking 2+ minutes to return to.
- A couple of boss fights around 2/3 through the game feel like they're expecting you to be better geared than is actually possible at that point in the game.
- One of your Homunculi doesn't show up until almost the very end of the game, and despite him enabling an entirely different playstyle you probably won't ever use him. You probably won't want to bring two of his homunculus type at once, yet all that's really left is the final boss who, narratively speaking, you'll want to fight with a different homunculus of his type.
- Some animations seem like they should have a sound effect, but don't.

Assume anything I didn't mention is good, and this game's an easy recommend to anyone with even a passing interest in soulslike metroidvanias.

I really want to like this game, but as much as it pains me, this is a "no", at least for now. The bugs are just too severe.

When you can load a game you saved-and-quit at the boss bonfire and find yourself all the way back at the start of the region, with all of the bonfires relocked, all the dungeons decompleted, your spells and hats lost, and your stats decimated (I was investing everything in my magic and got it to at least 30, now it's 12 which is below my 18 attack, and I swear it was 15 at the start of the game), while still having the map itself uncovered, something has gone horribly wrong with the code.

Edit: The devs got back with a hotfix in less than 12 hours, which is a good sign for any game. My save is still bricked, but I'm willing to start a new playthrough and see if it goes better this time.

While I didn't feel like my time spent playing this game was wasted, I also can't really recommend it to anyone else. Its main positive quality is being pretty.

- The story is a bit too simple and predictable for its own good, and is not at all subtle about which emotion it intends for you to be feeling right now. Special mention to the ending cutscene, which failed to elicit any emotional response from me whatsoever other than annoyance because of how hamfistedly it was trying to direct my emotions when I already knew how the entire cutscene would go before it started.

- The puzzles (such as they are) are mostly extremely easy yet fairly time consuming to solve, and when they're hard it's almost never from having to figure out what to do but because the game's expecting a level of precision and timing that's utterly at odds with the artistic (i.e. slow) movement and climbing animations. The result is that people who have any experience with puzzles will be mostly bored, and people who are new to video games will get stuck. I'm baffled that a game this clearly focused on the Cinematic Experience over smoothness of gameplay also has an achievement for beating it deathless.

- The kind of QTEs this game uses felt dated 20 years ago.

Chrysolite feels more like a competent student project than anything else, and it's OK to decent by those standards. Hopefully the dev can leverage this into a good career. That said $15 is definitely way too much for a game this short, but it's worth a try if it's $5 or less or you got it in a bundle.

* Tags don't make sense at time of writing. This is a basic platformer with a single permanent powerup (a ranged attack), a handful of temporary ones (potions of healing/dash/jump/slow), and save points at the start of each level. No RPG or souls-like mechanics to speak of.

* Controls are janky and awkward but not quite to the point of frustration.

* Story is extremely barebones but serviceable.

* Utterly basic moveset, but that's fine for a game this short.

* Extremely short runtime to the point that a refund speedrun is on the table for even mediocre skills in 2d platforming, but for this sort of project any longer could have become tedious.

* Almost no bugs, which is particularly impressive from this sort of project - the only ones I found were achievement related. I got the crush achievement while I was halfway across the level from the princess, and I'm genuinely unsure whether or not I should have qualified for the all potions achievement since the potion of slow I found was essentially in a secret area so there could easily have been other secret colors.

Ogu and the Secret Forest is a game in the style of the 2D Zeldas and is a very good game in that genre, easily worthy of the Overwhelmingly Positive rating the game currently has.

Unless you go for the true ending, which involves about 99% game completion and dumps all the fun into the landfill.

- The big problem with the true ending is that you need to fully complete all the museum collections. Some of these are reasonable, but the fish and especially the bugs are reminiscent of the figurine collections in Wind Waker and Minish Cap. To be fair, there is a mechanic that makes it easier to collect the bugs/fish you're missing; unfortunately, this mechanic is unlocked by for collecting the two sigils that I did last, is still infuriatingly random and prone to giving you the wrong item, and you still have to suffer through the other categories.

- You also are locked out of obtaining an entire category of museum collectible without a specific upgrade from a specific map region, which happens to be in the same region as the sigil I did last. I want to be very clear on this: the ability to do the middle 4 sigils in any order is great and something a lot of 2D Zelda fans will love, but there's a hidden "correct" order to do them after all and that turned the whole thing sour for me. I might not have had to grind nearly as much if I'd picked the "correct" region to do first.

As for the rest of 100% completion, there are a couple additional problems that crop up if you're foolish enough to think the worst is over:

- The biggest offender is the tennis minigame, which has an achievement (the rarest in the game, for good reason) awarded for not letting your opponent score a single point. The problem is twofold: your hits always send the ball within 5 degrees or so of straight down the court while your opponent can hit at any angle they so desire, and this is the one part of the game where the hit detection on your attacks breaks down entirely because sometimes the ball just goes through your net and you lose a point for no good reason. It took me 15 minutes of attempts just to get a successful normal victory, which is first to six points; I didn't even bother trying for the achievement.

- The next rarest achievement is cooking every dish. This requires catching a whole bunch of max level (i.e. ultra-rare) fish due to the surfeit of recipes that require one (or even two). It also involves pure guesswork for some of the recipes, particularly the fried salt (which has no use whatsoever aside from padding out your recipe book). I only got this achievement because I won the last specialty dish I was missing from a randomly-spawning minigame, I have no idea where you're supposed to get its recipe from normally. For reference, the third rarest achievement after tennis and cooking is completing the pottery display, which requires doing the pottery minigame 50 times or so and is time consuming but trivial and RNG/guesswork free.

- Upgrading your hats is unreasonably grindy for no particular reward. We're talking stacks of 5-10 very rare drops and 15-20 ores that need to be crafted through a minigame one at a time. Or 20-plus pieces of fancy grass from a plant that only drops like 1 or 2 pieces from every 100 plants you cut. Meanwhile the only upgraded hat I ever really used was the angry monkey mask that gave attack/speed buffs, and I honestly could have just used food instead.

Oh, and if I ran this game at the same time as any other programs like my web browser or Discord, either the game would crash while loading my file or the other programs would crash while the game kept running. My best guess is this is some kind of memory allocation issue, which it's truly bizarre because a 2D game should not be nearly intense enough to cause this sort of behavior when none of the 3D games I've played in the last several years had problems like this.

I did genuinely enjoy most of my time with this game, but because of the endgame grind (and minor technical problems) I can't wholeheartedly recommend it to people like me who like seeing the full endings to their games.

Gedonia plays like a singleplayer MMO. Unfortunately, that MMO happens to be one of those trash F2P ones from the mid '00s, with no story worth mentioning, painfully generic enemy/world design, incredibly janky controls, an unshakable feeling that the world is far more empty than it should be, and none of the basic QoL features from the last 20 years such as: fast travel that isn't either garbage or build-exclusive, easy respeccing, functional quest markers, or advancing through cutscenes line-by-line rather than having to sit and wait if you didn't want to skip the whole thing.

Early quests in the faction quest chains that I tried all either involved running repeatedly back and forth over large stretches of the map, or demanding you use skills that you hadn't purchased because they didn't fit the character you'd envisioned. And none of the (crumbs of) dialogue I read during this process were even the slightest bit interesting.

Dialogue choices are way more railroady than they should be. I didn't want to bully the monk into leaving the monastery to follow me, but that was the only choice I had after a chain of 10 or so single-dialogue-option text boxes that started with "How's it going?". He wasn't even helpful for my build, and dismissing him would've sent him to the house I didn't even have rather than back to the monastery.

AoE skills all seem to travel forever (if ranged) and hit friendly/neutral NPCs as well as active hostiles, which is unfortunate because 95% of the encounters are against groups of enemies. Most fights devolved into circle strafe running away regardless of the build I tried and that's just so boring.

The world doesn't seem to react to anything you do. There's an early quest you can get where one path involves poisoning at least one of the villagers in your hometown in front of everybody, but nobody cares. Join the necromancer faction, run around the village with skeletons and dig up the cemetery in broad daylight, everyone just goes about their day. I know this game plays like a 20 year old MMO but at least make some of the villagers hide in their houses or something if I'm being blatantly evil, c'mon.

Skill trees are pretty blatantly unbalanced at a glance, mostly because of arcane magic. Arcane magic has free food, teleportation, flight, non-garbage fast travel, quadruples your mana regen, and lets you use MP as a second health bar. That last one is one of the very first skills on the tree, by the way. Hope you put at least 2 points into INT at the start of the game!

I can respect that this was a solo dev effort and that it's cheap as hell, but that just makes it a good portfolio piece. I can't recommend playing it for fun.

The Mobius Machine is overall an okay metroidvania. I had to think hard about whether to give a thumbs up or down, as this game has plenty of faults and I tend to find negative reviews more helpful for the consumer since positive ones tend to be just gushing or memes for most games, but ultimately given this game's current review score and the fact that I was willing to play to 100% completion I decided to recommend.

So let me go over what I liked real quick:
* the art style was pretty good overall
* enemy placement almost never felt unfair outside of the homing turret sections (which were used sparingly and still had some counterplay)
* the weapons all felt distinct and they all had their uses (aside from maybe the mortar, since by the time I got it all the enemies I might want to use it on had anti-cheese force fields)
* the story was mostly perfunctory but still functional enough to establish the premise
* the upgrades were all solid and I even figured out a hidden tech for one of them that expanded my options a bit
* the extrapolators are a good way to mitigate the upgrade starvation of the early game
* the map layout did its job of making exploration satisfying with a few secret areas for some extra spending money that I was able to find just by being observant

With that all said, the rest of this review will be a bit critical - again, I do think the game is overall okay and worth your time if you enjoy metroidvanias.

TMM is very heavy on shooting, to the point where it's one of the few metroidvanias I'd honestly recommend playing with mouse&keyboard rather than controller. The enemies are spongy and the weapon upgrades don't seem to do much to improve your damage, mostly just your range and projectile speed, maybe fire rate too. I think the shotgun does get an additional projectile at max level, but that's an endgame thing.

The standardized block design of the level geometry is good for readability, and (at least for the natural and human-made parts) makes sense in-universe, but it also makes everything look kind of the same and some level design elements wear out their welcome hard by the end of the game. (Oh boy, another shaft full of green tentacles that you have to alternate between the left and right sides to traverse!) Not all of the block colors are distinct in all lighting, either; I'd expect colorblind people to struggle hard with telling apart the two kinds of blocks that break when you step on them in certain regions.

Resetting your energy to zero whenever you load a save sure is a choice. I don't know if it's just a retro mode thing or if it's common to normal mode as well, but it was definitely a source of needless annoyance. Energy usage is pretty basic, too, your only choices are healing and increasing your shot damage. Healing being over time and requiring you not to get hit afterward as well as during is interesting enough, I guess.

The first boss is way harder than the ones that follow it. Like, imagine in Hollow Knight you have to fight a Mawlek as the very first boss, and then the next two bosses are Gruz Mother and Flukemarm. I'm really not sure why the devs did it this way, other than to make the achievement for killing the first boss hitless an actual achievement.

100% completion requires purchasing every upgrade from the shop. Unfortunately this seems to require farming - in my playthrough I killed almost every enemy I came across and I found quite a few of the secret areas (don't know if I found all of them, there's no upgrade that points out fake walls to you and shooting every wall in the world is just another kind of farming), but after scouring the map I still had 134 credits to go before I could buy the last upgrade. This isn't quite as bad as it could be - most enemies only drop 2-3 but elites drop like 20 or so, and area 4 has a pretty good density of both types of enemy. Still, it would've been better to not need to farm at all.

Lastly, a couple nitpicks: weapon selection being only a scroll wheel thing is kind of awkward, some of the shortcut locks are questionable (area 2 underwater tunnel where both sides have to be explored before you can go underwater at all, area 3 shortcut with generator on one side and panel on the other that I first encountered from the panel side), the area 4 boss is a massive troll thanks to the arena design appearing to forbid healing while the runback is looooooong even with the dash upgrade, there probably could have been more lenient coyote frames, and there were a few too many enemy types where the solution is "avoid their charges by jumping/dashing and shoot them until they die".

Thanks for coming to my TMM talk.