Recent reviews by Dr. Blue

It has a very well polished gameplay loop, and I've never seen a gameplay mechanic centered around item management like this. It's charming, every run is unique and the depth around backpack organization makes for a ton of replayability.

That said, the 1.0 could have been much more polished. I've had runs with impossible dungeons with no staircases.

I wish I could leave a neutral review, though on net I'll say it's positive. Impostor Factory is easily the weakest entry in the To The Moon series, and this episode is not a stand alone: I don't believe I would have understood what was going on if I didn't know the lore. But if you do care about the lore, you must play this one.

I made it through the entire game without crying and that's a bit of a disappointment for a Freebird Game. There are certainly sad things in the game, but nothing actually raised to the level of sobbing that the previous games induced.
The graphics and engine are better than the previous games, and that's appreciated. Gameplay wise, there's a lot of just moving right through a corridor, with no other interactivity, which is a regression: there's very little exploration of the scenes. The music is lovely as always, but there's no stand out theme. There was no "For River" or "Faye's Theme" that were immediately unforgettable.

There is no way to talk about the story and why it's interesting without total spoilers, so spoilers ahead:

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In the end, everything takes place in one of SigmundCorp's machines. Neil Watts' mother, Lynri, was involved in building some of the scanning technology used across the series and left Neil a copy of her emgrams. Neil is now apparently experimenting on his mother's brain scans on his own time, and that scan is apparently conscious. Even though Neil appears to be doing this to give his mother a posthumous equivalent of what he and Eva have given dying patients in previous games, there's questions about whether Lynri consented to any of this and thus Neil might be committing a mindcrime on a copy of his mother.

There's also the question of what happens to two conscious minds at the end of the game. If they're terminated, that should be read as Neil committing murder, as they're running on Neil's hardware instead of on a decaying human body. But if they're left alive...then the To The Moon universe has reached a civilizational victory condition: mind uploading plus out-of-body simulation.

If you still needed a meat brain to run a human mind, SigmundCorp's services in To The Moon and Finding Paradise make sense. But if you don't, taking a scan right before death is a straightforward path to digital immortality...and it questions what SigmundCorp is even doing in the first two games. Lynri's scan is done before the events of the first two games, so brain scanning in enough detail could have been done for River or for Colin. Faye shows up on Neil's terminal so maybe they did.

But if so, why isn't this mentioned in universe? Why does SigmundCorp have the business model that it does? "We will scan your brain on your deathbed since the invention of running uploaded scans is imminent" would be a much easier sell than "We will modify your memories at the end of your life."

The first ten hours are fine. It's a cute, if mechanically simple building game. If you decide to play, consider quitting once you get married and calling that the end.

The end game is a ridiculous grind. The mechanics of "click on these nodes for random drops" becomes tedious since you'll need random drops which might only be available in other seasons. The game economy is fairly broken: first you'll be cash strapped no matter what you do. Once you get an upgrade to your Tavern, cash becomes completely meaningless and you'll be item strapped. Then once you get one of the final upgrades, you get unrelated drops in ways that make no sense, such as getting fish when you cut down a tree. You'll still curse the low drop rates here. I burned out at this point.

A solid entry in the Metroidvania genre. Very good and polished, but not a masterpiece. It leans very heavily on the accumulated design tropes of the Castlevania series, along with the map design. If you played SoTN, the castle will vaguely conform to your expectations. Comfortable, but not ground breaking.

The visuals and the music are spot on for the a e s t h e t i c that the developers are obviously going for. Web 1.0 mixed with vaporwave mixed with early chat rooms. The game is imaginative in its location designs and it's obvious that the developers put a lot of heart into this game. Look at the screenshots: if the art style catches your fancy, it's probably for you.

It's not perfect. The the last fifth of the game has a very abrupt tonal shift while also cranking the difficulty. A few of the endgame "hookshot" sequences feel unfair. This is forgivable, but it is a minor blemish. A less minor blemish is the control scheme: the bookmark controls are confusing and will cause you to teleport when you didn't mean to, and there aren't the normal configuration options PC users are used to, most noticeably mouse sensitivity (which probably why I found the hookshot sequences so hard).

Also: Please release a soundtrack.

A pretty good Diablo like with many quality-of-life features, an interesting alternate progression system with the constellations and beautiful graphics.

A rather beautiful title that you should play if you have a VR headset. It's short and I completed it in about 3 hours, but given the sheer quality of the graphics and the music and level design are worth the price of admission.

Platforming where you're an observer of a diorama leads to some great level design set pieces. You control the character with the touchpads while still manipulating objects in the world with the tracked controls. Several of the environments are gorgeous. I'm looking forward to developers exploring this new design space.

So what's bad about it? The controls. If you are using Vive controllers (and if you're reading a review on Steam, you're highly likely to be using the Vive), you are going to have a bad time. You are going to miss jumps you feel like you should have made and walk off ledges when you didn't really mean to. It is a testament to how good everything else about the game was that I stuck with it.

The story is basic, but competently executed. I don't like that it ended on a sequel hook for a game which might not come out.

So positives? The character pixel art is nice. The music is nice.

The biggest issues is the level design: it is extremely rudimentary. The first area is a set of linear outdoor corridors based around grabbing ledges, making movement feel slow and awkward. The second is the same moving platform jumping challenge copy-pasted several times, leading to an area gated by literal key cards instead of new movement mechanics. In a Metroidvania. In 2018, this is just inexcusably lazy. Next up is one linear corridor, but this time on a motorized walkway, leading to a tower maze which makes little sense.

I gave up at about the hour mark due to a combination of lazy level design, pretty bad writing, and technical glitches. If you have backup software running (like Resilio Sync), you may need to turn it off to save your game; otherwise I got the in game messages "Failed to save game / The application is not authorized to write files." This is the only game I've ever seen this happen in.

This game is an example of why I stopped Kickstarting games; poor execution all around.

"Mixed" is right.

The pixel art is gorgeous. The game itself is meh, but was decent enough to hold my attention until the end. So thumbs up, but marginal.

There's a lot wrong though: the procedural map generation made a map with way too many long coridoors in my playthrough, the timing on the backdash means that it's better to just try to tank hits than avoid them, there's no reason to use anything other than the knives as your magic spell, and while I have a screenshot claiming I have 100% map completion, the achievement for it never popped.

Still. If you don't have anything to play, and it's on sale for $5, the game is at least functional and completable and contains some very beautiful art. Don't pay full price for it though.

Simply amazing. The graphics are beautiful. The game play is wonderful--it's as you remember System Shock, but modernized.

But the real triumph is that the ending to Prey works. I won't spoil it, but Prey is one of the few rare stories which uses an ending trope that I won't spoil, and is actually able to use it without annoying the player. I urge you to go for this ride spoiler-free.