Recent reviews by Dranzer

It's almost impossible to talk about my main issue with this game without spoiling it.

There's a game you've probably seen called "Getting Over It" - a weird sort of 2D physics platformer featuring a man in a cauldron with a sledgehammer trying to scale a mountain using a horrific control scheme. It's a ruthless game that I ultimately didn't have the inclination to play through, although I did watch it on youtube. The message of that game was somewhat pretentious, but in a sense it did feel earnest. It was very clearly an open-faced message aimed at a particular group, I just wasn't a part of that group. And you know what? That's fine. I can get behind that. I think there's a definite place for weird biographical games or games where the author talks directly to the audience about their thoughts and feelings and philosophy and such. The interactive equivalent of a video essay.

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The biggest issue I have with TBG, then, is that the game initially presents as non-fiction, but eventually descends into a weird sort of character story featuring a somewhat unreliable narrator. I spent a good part of the game being slightly suspicious - suspecting that there was going to be a subversion at some point. As the game went on, I kept hoping that subversion wouldn't happen. Or, at the very least, that the subversion would have some kind of straight reveal at the end. A sort of confession of "Okay, yes, this is fake, but it's an interesting message don't you think" kind of deal. Instead, I got a weird sort of meta-narrative about the creator having a mental breakdown that didn't become apparent it was a narrative until about three quarters of the way through.

In a sense, it kind of felt like a bizarre inversion of having my suspension of disbelief broken. Like I went in with an open mind, and then after a while the game just sort of said "okay, so I've been lying to you this whole time, but if you could just start suspending disbelief now that I've broken your primary form of emotional investment, that'd be really convenient for the upcoming emotional climax."

And the thing is, it's actually not a terrible narrative in and of itself. It's a neat story presented well with some interesting messaging underneath. The acting is decent, and there are a couple of good twists. The problem is that it exists in a bizarre sort of "Catch 22" where the narrative is only really interesting if you assume it's biographical, but it can't be biographical, because if it were biographical its very existence wouldn't make any sense. It's a playable paradox, and not in a clever subversive kind of way, but in a fundamental structural failure kind of way.

In spite of my playtime, I choose not to refund this game, because even if I think it failed in its execution, I can at least respect what I believe it's trying to do. It's an interesting experiment, and it's good to know some people got something out of it.

I considered making a joke about subversion somewhere in this review, but I felt it would have been trite.

C for effort.

So it's a couple of days after release. Sale numbers have just hit 4 million. I've played nearly 30 hours since its release, which is a heavy burn, even for me. I've been enjoying it. Everybody's talking about it. My friends are playing it.

In spite of this, I genuinely don't recommend it. It's nothing to do with the various complaints about the developer having dealt with AI or having abandoned previous titles. It's also not about the derivative nature of the game's aesthetic - it knows what it is, and I see no reason to harshly judge a game for hitting its intended target. It's also not because of the natural early access jank - I have a reasonable amount of confidence that the AI and geometry bugs will be ironed out, and that certain somewhat temperamental systems like base building will get a solid overhaul.

If you're the kind of person who'd be really into this game, you've probably already bought it. This review is one part warning for the latecomers, one part critical analysis, and one part prediction of the future. Also, for the duration of this review, I will be referring to the creatures as Pokemon, because I have little to no tolerance for pretense.

I believe Palworld will be a flash in the pan. A blinding flash, to be sure. It's sold 4 million copies so far, and I won't be surprised if it hits 5. I genuinely believe it'll start a mass rush of open world monster taming games in the industry in the same way Minecraft put destructible terrain on the menu and Stardew Valley seemed to get everybody into farming. But I don't think it'll have any real staying power in and of itself.

Palworld is, fundamentally, an open world survival crafting game similar to Ark or Rust. You're in a world, you punch some trees to get wood for a workbench, you build a little outpost and start picking away at a tech tree. It's also got a bit of that Breath of the Wild style climbing and gliding going on. The main gimmick is that there are Pokemon. And, honestly, that much is a really fun and cool. There's a very definitive moment just after you first craft a bow where you first nail a Pokemon to the floor before belting it in the face with a Pokeball. That, right there, is the immediately satisfying interaction that you never knew you wanted. It's quick, it's snappy, it feels good. That's basically the "hook" - Pokemon dropped into a wilderness survival game, and it plays out exactly as you'd expect.

In game, your Pokemon serve three main purposes. The first is what you'd expect from a game like this - they're combat pets. They operate fairly autonomously with little room for direct control. They're more akin to an MMO pet than an actual Pokemon. The second is as a sort of crafting automation tool - You have various crafting stations, and you can release Pokemon into your base to have them craft items or harvest resources and whatnot. They require some minor babysitting, but they generally just do work where available. Their third and final purpose is as mobility tools - ground mounts, flying mounts, aquatic mounts, and also an automatic glider replacement.

The problem with these kinds of games, and Palworld in particular, is the inevitable loss of momentum. There's a moment at which the game stops surprising you, and Palworld hits that point remarkably quickly. The Pokemon themselves perfectly capture the essence of the real thing, which is to say they haven't been interesting since I was a teenager. The world itself does not feel especially alive. An idle glance over the tech tree just after the early game will eliminate most of your curiosity. The combat is remarkably shallow. Guns are cool, but shooting Bootleg Xerneas in the face while dodge-rolling fireballs is only so compelling after the first couple of instances. The level grind will also start getting pretty tedious past a certain point. If you're playing with friends, these issues won't be felt quite as harshly, but I'm afraid Pocket Pair don't get to take credit for my friend's insightful philosophical musings regarding the nature of goats.

I don't think it'll be long before other people start noticing these issues, and I don't think these are problems that will be fixed in any meaningful way. When it comes to early access, there are two kinds of issues that can be resolved: Lack of content, and lack of stability. But the fundamental underlying structure being poor? That's not something you can really fix after sales begin.

I don't regret buying the game, I don't regret playing it, and I'll probably get a bit more fun out of it yet. I'll probably even pick it back up again later after some updates hit. But if it's a couple of months after release, things have gotten quiet, and you're reading this because the initial hype wave didn't ensnare you and you're wondering if it's worth the purchase? Honestly, you could probably give it a pass and not miss out on anything remarkable.

I look forward to seeing if time will make a fool out of me.

Heh that's a pretty small ship for a shopkeepeOHGOD

For any game that features automation as a prominent feature, there is always a critical question: Is the process of automating more fun than the process of just sitting on your ass grinding out resources by hand?

In Satisfactory, I frequently found myself deciding that it'd be easier to just stand in front of the crafting bench watching numbers increase for a couple of minutes than to go through the misery of setting up infrastructure in a 3D environment where the structures are huge, building placement is finicky, and it's extremely difficult to get a good overview of things. It's like trying to rearrange your living room with a laser pointer while crawling around on the floor.

Ironically left me feeling extremely unsatisfied.

I think if I could describe Dredge in one word, it would be "inoffensive". Decent gameplay, enough direction that you don't get lost, just enough plot to keep you moderately intrigued, and no major annoyances otherwise. It's not winning any Game of the Year awards, and it feels a little overpriced for what you get, but I enjoyed it in spite of the fact that I have little interest in horror as a genre.

Ehhh. It's a cute concept, and it's not a bad game per se, it's just too short and shallow for the price they're asking. Consider it only at a significant discount, and even then only if you're really into the aesthetic.

Updated Review (21st of August, 20230:

When I first reviewed this game, I gave it a tentative thumbs-down, primarily for its lack of polish. Months later, while there are still considerable issues with performance and stability, I feel like I've played it enough that it warrants a thumbs up. But more than that, I actually wanted to write about the game beyond a simple blurb about its blemishes.

While most of what I'm about to write is going to seem critical, I want to make it clear that I still very much like the game. It's probably my personal GotY for 2023, surpassing even TotK. I've played it a lot, and I'll likely continue playing it.

That said, I do have some criticisms to level, and they're not superficial.

Shadows of Doubt is a very complex machine, but if there's one thing it seems to critically lack, it's emergence. People go places and do things, but little of consequence ever really seems to happen as a result. When a murder happens, as far as I can tell, it's because a random citizen gets struck with murder-itis, picks one of a handful of murder types, goes and kills somebody, and that's about it.

There's only ever one murderer at a time. If you don't catch them within a certain time period, they go and murder somebody else. It's like there's a ghost that goes around possessing people and turning them into serial killers until they're arrested, at which point the ghost moves to a new host.

When I said they pick a type of murder from a small pool, I wasn't kidding. Business Card, Lipstick, Anagram, and.. I think that's it? Each murder can be solved trivially: Find the single telltale clue, scan for prints, search either the victim's place of work (business card), their address book (lipstick), or the city directory (if you've been given an anagram); You'll find the killer pretty quickly. If you want, you can go to the murderer's home, club them over the head, cuff them, search them for the murder weapon, and earn yourself a little bonus. The only time I've ever failed is when the telltale clue has spawned in a wall or some such.

The side cases are slightly better in that they're slightly less rote, but the issues with those are kind of the opposite. Besides stolen item cases (which are picked from the victim's address book), most of them are "Find-a-person" challenges. You're given some random details and told to go find a person and either arrest them or steal something from them. You're given a selection of random factoids: The clues will always match exactly one person, but sometimes the clues are still useless: It may be the case that there's only one person in the city with AB- blood, green eyes, and size 11 shoes, but good luck actually finding them. If you get some kind of location or name, it's usually absolutely trivial - finite locations can be searched, and even partial names can be dug up either from directories or the government database, but otherwise you're looking for a needle in a haystack. It's very all-or-nothing.

The sad part is, I actually have my doubts these issues will ever be meaningfully resolved. While I'm certain more case types and side missions will be introduced, I somehow doubt the simulation will increase in fidelity in such a way that the world feels more organic. And you know, maybe I'm asking too much - Maybe these are even things the dev couldn't do for practical reasons; Maybe there's a ton of complexity that I'm just not seeing, or maybe the crimes were originally far more organic but it was too hard to actually interact with the system. Maybe every murderer leaves a tell-tale sign because otherwise they'd be impossible to catch. How would I solve, say, a random break-in gone wrong? Prints or a security camera? That's organic, but it's not necessarily interesting. Maybe it's really hard to organically generate leads that are neither blatant nor obtuse. The murder leads are blatant. Some of the side mission leads are obtuse. Maybe it's a fundamental problem. I don't know.

It's a great game, and I hope it goes great places, but I do have my concerns. At any rate, it's absolutely worth playing, so if you're interested, try not to let my ramblings deter you.


Original Review (24th of April, 2023):

First thing's first: I really like this game. I played the demo a ton, I had full intention to buy it on release, and I have no regrets about doing so. That said, as it stands, I do not recommend this game if you're even a little undecided, at least not yet.

Leaving aside the bugs (which are to be expected for a game like this), this game needed a performance pass yesterday. At the bare minimum it needed a render scaling performance option before EA. The indoor environments aren't too bad, but the performance hit outdoors is horrific. I don't know what kind of machine the dev is running on to be able to get a 60 FPS gameplay trailer, but I suspect it's getting taxed for carbon emissions.

I fully intend to update this review after a few patches once things have improved.

If you're the kind of person who gains fulfilment from slowly chipping away at an extremely difficult and frustrating task, I can wholehearted recommend pursuing a creative hobby such as art or music.

Years ago, I dismissed this game as a casualized Dwarf Fortress clone. I toyed with it, but never got deeply involved. Recently, I saw DF was coming to Steam. About a week from DF's release, I decided to get myself "in the mood" for DF by giving Rimworld a genuine chance. I found myself enjoying it a lot more than I expected. Then, a week or two prior to me writing this, DF actually released.

Leaving aside for a moment that DF's new UI is less polished than RW's (and that's not minor - in a colony management sim, the interface is most of the game), playing DF again gave me an appreciation of a concept I had not fully grasped: While it is undeniably true that DF is more complex than RW, just because something is complex, doesn't mean it's more interesting. I always balked at the fact that you have only a tiny handful of pawns in RW, but what I didn't realize is that when you have dozens of dwarves, their complexity becomes white noise. In any game like this, the more colonists you have, the harder it is to make meaningful decisions about them as individuals.

I dropped DF almost immediately, and continued playing RW. I recognize that DF essentially birthed the genre of colony management sims, and for that I will always be grateful, but I think I'll be sticking with RW for the foreseeable future.

I haven't even gotten into the DLCs yet.

It's funny, and it's clever,
but it's not that funny,
and it's not that clever,
and unfortunately, there's not much else to it.

Writing a negative review often feels like a pointless exercise, but for a two-and-a-half-year-old niche indie title that has received mostly positive reviews, it feels almost petty. I can't imagine it'll make a difference in anybody's purchasing decision, and it feels a little late to be offering constructive criticism. But I've been thinking about this game ever since I finished it a month or two ago, and I'm trying to nail down exactly why.

I think it's about The Swindle.

The Swindle is another game by the same developer. It's a Roguelite Stealth Platformer. It's novel, it's entertaining, and it got a score of 62%. The Swindle is not a 62% game. It's a 79% game with some jank that could be ironed out to bring it up to an 86%. This game, meanwhile, is not a 94%. It's a 73% riding mainly on a small dedicated fanbase. Something is wrong, and I'm racking my brains trying to figure out what has happened here, and why.

I understand this is preposterous. I understand my subjective views are of no real merit. I fully entertain the possibility that I am just a weird guy who likes certain kinds of genres and that The Swindle is made for me and LotCG's humour just doesn't land with my specific psyche. But none of those answers are satisfying to me. I feel like I'm missing something.

There's this part of LotCG that involves thematically frustrating platforming. As in, the theme is that the platforming is meant to be frustrating. In actuality, the platforming was not frustrating, which I assume is by design. The thing is, that brief section was the single most enjoyable experience I had in the game. I don't know how big SFG is, or how the labor is distributed, but I'm starting to suspect they may be good designers, but bad writers.

I believe, genuinely, that videogames are a terrible narrative medium. I think a good narrative requires author control, and a good game requires player control, and that these two factors are at direct odds with each other. I realize this is not a popular opinion, especially amongst game designers with a narrative background. I wish LotCG had changed my mind on this. It didn't.

I kind of want to go over the rest of SFG's catalogue just to see if my suspicions about their areas of competence hold true. I also hope that their next game leans heavily on gameplay and less on writing. So if you're from SFG, and you're reading this review as part of some masochistic self-debasement ritual, if you could maybe devote the next several years of your life to addressing the barely-substantiated criticisms of a random lunatic in your review section, you'd be doing me a real solid.