Recent reviews by captainktainer

Quite frankly the game never really clicked with me in the first place, and now that it turns out that financially supporting this studio helps fund a real life game where terrified women are stalked and hunted down for financial gain, the whole thing is just in really, really awful taste.

The Swapper was short - under 8 hours played for me - but it was absolutely packed with quality. The claymation visuals are the initial, obvious selling point, and they work incredibly well, but other things stick with me more. The soundtrack was beautiful, matched by the punchy sound design. The puzzles were a little mind-bending, in a good way, but not impossible (although sometimes very hard). What really got me, though, was the writing. You do certain things throughout the game, repeatedly, but you don't really think about the implications until the game slowly makes the truth dawn on you. The game meditates on identity, alien life, death, morality, companionship, and more. It really made me change my mind about "art" games, and I still count this one of my favorite games of all time more than three years after release. I still think about it from time to time; it blew my mind that hard. I encourage you to try it too.

You are not allowed to say good things about this game unless you break Steam. I tried to say nice things about this game. I'm done. The text is useless and shows every sign of being written by someone who is mentally retarded. The graphics are worse than a mid-90s mod. The sound effects are so stupid that when the game was over, I got angry and tried to say something nice about these people, but my positive review was rejected. Steam said I wasn't allowed to say nice things about the idiot who made this game. So here is my judgement: Your game was awful. I tried to say nice things about your game, I tried to say that maybe your game could be worth something if you decided to grow up, but no. I'm done. This game had terrible writing, no mechanics at all, the worst graphics possible, and sound effects out of a toilet. Don't do this again.

I'm not going to claim this is the best VN of all time, but for the price, it hits way above its weight class.

PROS:

-Really lovely background art. Although everything has a slightly sketchy quality, it adds to the otherworldly, paradisicial feeling of the setting - appropriate for an unnamed, mystical Mediterranean island. I want to really especially give a shout out to the artist for the lovely stained glass, and the interplay of shadows and light. This may spoil VN fans on background art for a while.
-Reasonably forgiving of mistakes. Whether you're going for the good or bad end, you can deviate a bit where you feel it's necessary to slip into your character.
-Male or female protagonist. Ultimately, it doesn't matter, and it only changes a few pronouns in a couple places, but I think that's the point. You're as much of a person, good or bad (and in the bad playthrough, you're a socially awkward neckbeardy jerk whichever gender - I love it) no matter which gender you are, and I like that.
-Perfectly competent, and even catchy, music. Again, in keeping with the theme of the artistic parts of the VN being top-notch, I'm pretty sure I'll have the main theme stuck in my head for a while. The rest of the music didn't distract from the plot, which is good.

CONS:
-Length. This is the big one. Thankfully, the creator has priced the VN appropriately, but I actually finished all of the game before I finished getting all of the cards. If you're a fast reader, you're looking at about $3 for an hour of entertainment, which seems about right for the quality.
-Character design. This comes down to personal preference, but I personally was not a fan of Kira's face. Your mileage may vary. I did like how your Cthulhu girlfriend's eyes literally expand as she starts sucking out your soul to feed her demonic pact master; the effect worked really well.
-Writing. There are good moments in the writing - the ending is handled well despite your girlfriend turning into Cthulhu after you kiss her - but there are many cases of thesaurus syndrome. The writing works best when it conveys the simple, enchanting nature of the setting, but reaching too far for something more "advanced" actually pulls the reader out. There are also many breaks in the narrative, where an unspecified amount of time passes and advances are made in your relationship with Kira, but there isn't any transition.
-Achievement issues. If you care about achievements, there seem to be some issues with triggering them.

Ultimately, I'm glad I played this. For an hour I was whisked away to a lovely Mediterranean seaside village, and I got to kibbitz with a beautiful-if-weird-faced-waifu about the nature of humanity, and then decide the fate of humanity and an ancient sea goddess who trafficks with immortal beings that demand SOULS.

Controls are slow and unresponsive, backgrounds are sad, gameplay is sad and pathetic. Some people claim "the music makes everything!" Uh... have you listened to the music? It's generic as hell. I once tried to exit this thing that people might call a game, and it took thirty minutes of wrestling with my operating system to end the process that the self-aggrandizing jerkface of a developer marked "highest priority." So that's life in InFlux World.

I don't know what life you might live where InFlux is worth your time compared to the many things you can get for free or low cost. If this is genuinely fun for you, all power to you. But there is nothing from the beginning to the end worth your time. Read a book from the library, even if you're in Nebraska and you have to drive one hundred miles to get to a library. Eat a taco from the taco truck that may or may not be at an intersection within one hundred miles of you. Get a pogo stick. Find a hearing put on by your local government, sit through it, and offer feedback to the certainly bemused local bureaucrats. Argue on the internet. Buy one of the $.50 bundles on Groupees, or something. Games ought to have something remotely resembling fun. No matter what you do that isn't InFlux, it's better than this.

I really gave this a shot. I restarted more than twice, just trying to get through the tutorial level. And... nevermind that the requirements for a *basic* shelter are really hard to satisfy, I wasn't having any fun. Everything takes forever, and not in a "I am living in a simulation" satisfying way.

I had dwarves coming out my rear before I could build a shelter - the basic walls of which are apparently advanced technical knowledge; in this universe, iron forging is less complicated than shoving some logs together - and the shelter stopped working if I tried to add new levels or dig underneath or... well, anything that games like Terraria solved literally years ago. I keep seeing people saying they had fun with this, and I'm genuinely at a loss. The tutorial doesn't work right. You can't build basic shelters until after you've discovered the Bessemer process. Just... why?

Took too long to get it running, the tutorial was inadequate, my laptop repeatedly crashed, crushing the cities felt like trying to pop a zit without any feedback about how I was being awesome for targeting infrastructure. I wanted to play this for fun. I played it for trading cards.

Not having had any part in the Gametap drama, I guess I was able to come at Grimm with fresh eyes.

PROS:
-Entertaining and surrealist art style
-Dark and morbid humor and visual gags
-Well-written and funny cutscenes explaining the fairy tale and the new, subverted tale you create in each episode
-Self-contained, short episodes, broken up into short scenes that can be replayed to find secrets, improve times, etc.
-Oddly satisfying gameplay with tangible results on the world

CONS:
-Graphics are clearly pretty dated
-Graphics settings are not saved between episodes, meaning that you will be changing your resolution to 1080p at least 33 times throughout the game.
-Serious stuck-on-geometry issues, especially when the aging engine has to deal with curved (really, semi-curved) surfaces, necessitating a restart of the entire scene
-Lack of complete subtitles for intro cutscene and for in-game audio

Overall, Grimm is a good experience that I'm still having fun playing. Grimm is an entertaining, if crude, protagonist, and the subversion of classic fairy-tale tropes is wickedly entertaining. I'm not sure I'd pay the full $12 for it (I got it on sale or in a bundle; I forget), but I definitely recommend it.

I'm so glad I only got this as part of a bundle. No players, no servers, no ability to play vs. AI - it's garbage.