Recent reviews by Lita

I can get behind a surreal experience usually, but this just wasn't it for me. It felt confusing, nonsensical, and most of all, painfully slow. I did my best to try to give this game a fair shake, but I just couldn't give it any more of my time. You break your leg midway through Act 1, and it slows you down in what is already a slow game. Interacting with objects often requires you to move to a rather specific spot and sometimes these spots don't make sense for where the object is. The game seems to give incentive to explore but, what you find is usually just more of the same nothingness, while you wait for your character to slowly move towards it. I got to the beginning of act 2, and after learning that my character's leg was still broken, and needing to spend about 5-10 minutes to look at some TV's that, again, had interaction spots that made no sense, meant that I was spending more time walking than reading, and what I did get meant nothing. The leg break doesn't serve a purpose to the story, other than to slow you down, and really makes me feel like the developers put it in as a rather condescending 'Are you taking in the environment? Are you appreciating the atmosphere?', like going to a flower garden and the attendant forces you to put on heavy iron shackles so that you stop to smell the roses just out of pure exhaustion. Maybe I'll come back and give it another shot but, I seriously doubt it.

This game is fantastic, and its a shame I haven't seen it spread very far. For those who are rhythm game nerds like myself, its got a very nice skill ceiling, the 'Unbeatable' difficulties feel very smooth and don't extend the difficulty beyond what could be reasonably found in the rhythm of the actual song (if you want that kind of thing, the game does have a Double Time mod. In my opinion it's kinda ridiculous, and I figure it's probably there because it was very easy to create that mod even if it is truly unbeatable, at least to me.), unlike some other rhythm games where the gameplay feels like its running four times faster than the actual song. (For comparison, to two of my favorite rhythm games, it's difficulty is higher than Cytus II's average 'Chaos' difficulties, but lower than Osu's 7-10 star range.) The soundtrack, while small, is complete in its quality. Whenever I sit down to play, I'll usually go through every song once, if not twice or three times, and all the tracks are of a similar (very high) quality, so if you like one song, odds are you'll like all the others. ('Proper Rhythm' has a different genre from the others, but I love it just the same.) The actual gameplay is very smooth, and the sound effects are simple but very satisfying when you start getting the rhythm down perfect. Readability is pretty good, only a couple charts on 'Unbeatable' had sudden changes that I felt were unreadable. A good example is the intro to 'Proper Rhythm (Must Die Remix)', which has a repeating pattern that suddenly switches to the top row for one measure after a side change. First time I saw it it completely blindsided me, and despite being completely in tune with the rhythm, I fumbled it hard and had to restart the track.

Overall, a great game,

I only have a single complaint: Make the fps cap setting default to 60 or 120. I didn't realize it defaulted to 'Unlimited', and I accidentally left the game running when I went to work. By the time I got back, my GPU was going nuts and was a nice, steamy, 150 degrees F, 66 degrees C. Essentially, if you leave the game in 'Unlimited' mode, it will suck up just about every GPU resource it can find. That probably knocked a month or two off it's lifespan. So developer(s), if you read this, definitely put *some* kind of cap on it, or make FPS limit a default option, since most people probably won't realize its running their GPU's at maximum.

In short, this game is amazing. The style of play could be summed up as top down tank controls combined with simultaneous typing to open doors or run functions to try to escape whatever horrors you find beyond the doors of the hollow starships. This game creates an amazing atmosphere by tapping into the fear of the unknown. Alongside excellent audio and visual design to increase the tension, the game has several different types of enemies, and it wont tell you what type is beyond the door. You might find any type of enemy, or combination of enemies, and each has its own AI, and without knowing what it is you will have to rely on luck, what little information you can gather, and quick thinking to not die. This game could stand alone as just a simple run and loot adventure, however the game is sprinkled with cryptic and corrupted messages that have missing or unintelligible words in order to attempt to understand the overarching mysteries of the game, all in all I wholeheartedly recommend this game.

EDIT: 5 years later, and I still come back to this game from time to time. I may not have as many hours in this as other games, but it certainly has staying power due to its unique and enjoyable gameplay.

Original Review:
Please make a explore/create mode, where you can turn off blood moons or just an outright option!
I have so much trouble learning the ropes when i get mauled on night five or, if I'm lucky, night ten, so please make it disableable, it should be a challenge mode type thing, not a normal feature that even the Newbies have to deal with!

Unless this is somehow changed I'm going to have to not recommend this otherwise original and amazing game!

If you ignore this fact then the game is AMAZING and I could totally see myself spending hours playing it, but unfortunately I can't right now.

Edit: I would come back to this game from time to time, but even after all this time, I don't believe I've ever gotten past night ten, and night twenty in Kingdom: New Lands. As mentioned however long ago, blood moons are a brutal feature. Most nights aren't too challenging, and then suddenly a wave of monsters will appear that can threaten to wipe you out if you relaxed for even a moment on all those days where the attacks at night weren't so difficult. As evidenced by my original review, for a new player this is brutal. You'll think you're excelling at the game, relax a bit, and get absolutely decimated on night five. Go into this game being ready to never relax, because that's the level of stress that comes with it. I'm still very on the fence about this negative review, but I'm afraid I have to leave it because I was never able to enjoy the game because of that mechanic.

****
Original Review, No Longer Indicative of Current Game State;
****
This game is not what it says it is.

- The controller support is non-existant

- The "local co-op" barely works because it gets stuck on 1 players turn no matter how many times I click "end Turn"

- Join servers takes forever and you end up with a game that ended 30 minutes ago or someone flips the table for no good reason

2/5 stars

****
EDIT:
Going back through my old reviews, saw this sorry sort. According to replies from devs, all these issues have been corrected. I can't verify this myself, because all my hours in this game after this point were with M+K on online multiplayer. I can verify that online multiplayer has improved dramatically. I haven't tried it with random people, but playing board games with friends through this was enjoyable. Unlike other games with 'Simulator' in the name, this game is genuinely a tabletop simulator. You just emulate board games virtually, if you're going into this looking for that kind of experience, I think you'll find it worthwhile. I wouldn't recommend this for D&D type tabletop stuff. We considered this for a campaign once but it was just too much hassle trying to just get the controls to cooperate in order to do that sort of thing, though I wouldn't be surprised if that's improved over the years also, it's been a long while since we attempted that. For traditional board and card games however, this definitely works. Lots of people on the workshop have recreated their favorite games, with some even featuring scripting to remove busy work, making this option even better than doing in real life in some cases. For example, I remember Markiplier did a game of Settlers of Catan that had scripts to highlight which space the dice roll corresponded to. As someone who can never get anyone to play SoC with me, I would definitely choose that over a real life game.