Recent reviews by Corv

Brilliant, hilarious writing and clever puzzles, and the devs are very active in their Discord. The daily challenges are a great source of ongoing content, and they should be even more engaging when additional leaderboards open up.

It's easily worth the price for the main story alone, and if you stick around for the journey, it's an absolute steal.

I'm afraid I don't understand the critical praise for this game. I walked and listened to the narrative, as one does. I might have meandered more, but as I was restricted to that walking pace, I felt shackled to the obvious path.

From the story, I gained little. Yes, the broad strokes are apparent, that Esther died in a drunk driving accident, that the narrator intends to commit suicide. But, why? Why is this story being told? What about it should compel me? Why has this experience been crafted that obliges me to carry through those fatal actions? To what end?

For all of the craftsmanship of the environmental design, and the music, I still find myself asking of the game as a whole: so what? I'm disappointed, and not in the narrator.

Kickstarter backer.

As a foreword, all of these are patchable problems. I expect I'll check back in several months to see whether or not this game evolves into something fun to play.

The controls are not responsive, and I cannot do the actions I want to do. Nearly every action incurs a substantial cooldown before any other action can be taken. I often find myself getting hit by projectiles or enemies that I planned to hit because I cannot attack quickly enough.

The game seems designed around double-jumping constantly. Nearly all platforming requires a double-jump, and the first two melee abilities you purchase are only usuable from the double-jump state (not single-jump). The only unique aspect of the single-jump is a melee ability that is strictly inferior. Why is the doubled jump not simply the base jump in the game? Why force the player through such hurdles for basic navigation and combat?

The font used throughout the game is a multi-shaded mess. It fits the aesthetic, but it's barely legible simply due to the color choices. Similar problems crop up on the world map, and even within stages, where it is sometimes hard to read whether an object is interactable or mere background.

At stage 2:2, a sidescrolling shooter level, I hit my breaking point. The player's movement speed there is so low that reactions were of little use. Successfully navigating the level would have required dying repeatedly in order to learn the attack patterns.

I am disappointed but hopeful that these problems will be resolved.

Gorgeous pixel art. Otus's smile is deadly cute.

If you're compelled to hunt for full completion, I think this game is sorely lacking fast travel. There are shortcuts between regions that you'll discover, but I found them inadequate.

I felt that the ending came about too abruptly, and that the final resolution... wasn't. The character interactions throughout most of the game are excellent, but the core plot simply unravels at the end. The environments and final boss are extraordinary, which left me greatly disappointed that they were not better justified.

After an hour, I can't recommend this game. It's adorable and the story I saw looks like it's shaping up to be heartbreaking, but the gameplay is tedious and doesn't look to be evolving much.

I might continue to play after that, but for a damning, nauseating interface flaw. After each stage/level/room, the game returns to the main map, Unfortunately, when it does so, the camera always starts oriented "north" on the topmost part of the map, and then quickly pans and rotates to your current position. While you may not notice it during the few zones, as you begin to rotate around the centerpoint of the map, this becomes horribly disorienting and potentially nauseating, which is a first in video games for me.

I loved Morrowind. Played it for years, modded it to death and used countless mods made by others as well, adore it in all ways. Played Oblivion during a busier period of my life, but enjoyed it as well.

This is painful. In any menu, the cursor is unfixably prone to horribly "floaty" behavior. I've tried every fix I can google, from manually tweaking configuration files to disable XBox controller support, to disabling mouse acceleration, to altering mouse speed scales, even to disabling VSync against the strong warnings of educated individuals. I've cut all settings to minimum to eliminate framerate as a variable. Nothing works. Trying to navigate menus, when the cursor _will not_ agree with the motions of my physical mouse, is an awful experience best left to a cruel prank.

It's just a game, but I'm damned disappointed in Bethesda. The goodwill they earned on their earlier games has been pissed away by a crippled user interface, and the suspicion that a great game likely lies behind it... were I willing to sacrifice my mouse and keyboard for analog sticks.

This was my second attempt at playing the game, after my first play session ended with the same frustrations. I shelved the game long enough to forget why that was, but the game's title screen brought it back real fast.

If I'd bought this game today, I'd get a refund instead of pouring my anger into writing this.

Different in a lot of good ways; refreshing. Worth playing through to at least the "good" ending. The mechanics will likely grow stale by the time you push for the best ending, however, and the voice acting is a bit stiff.

Absoluely wonderful narration, but unfortunately, that's all this game has going for it.

Collision detection is finicky: moving platforms are very difficult to deal with, depending on their direction of movement. You cannot consistently jump off of a platform moving vertically, and will get stuck, in a jittery manner, if pressed against the side of a platform moving horizontally. Characters tend to slide off of one another when you attempt to stack them, and that stacking is a core mechanic of the game. This is a damning problem.

I found it slightly nauseating in later, larger levels, when the camera had to sweep across large distances whenever I cycled characters, but this I cannot promise that others will experience this difficulty.

More on the level of inconvenience, the levels sometimes provide no means to backtrack individual characters. That leads to a great deal of frustration if some portion of your team completes the level before another character becomes intractably stuck, forcing you to restart the level in its entirety. A separate, very small complaint is that navigating the game's menu is tied to slow animations. This would be a lesser sin, except that you only need interface with that menu when forced to restart the level, so that your frustrations pile on top of one another.

Thomas Was Alone has good ideas! The properties of the characters are interesting, and the final levels that utilize them differently are worthy of further developement. As said at the start, the narration is beautiful. The gameplay, unfortunately, does not match.

VERDICT: Watch a Let's Play or find the audio somewhere.