Recent reviews by sluggard boy

Technically beautiful but ultimately regressive, repugnant art.

Film noir as a genre emerged out of a post-war fatalism that gripped America. What does life mean when so many were lost in war? Nobody Wants to Die takes up this mantle while applying an extremely milquetoast liberal critique of revolutionary violence.

The heavily critiqued tropes of film noir are uncritically regurgitated here: wife? fridged. system? corrupt. cops? corrupt but fundamentally good. What new things the game adds is a facile critique of the rich (that they are "jerks") and of revolution (that revolutionary violence only harms the poor and can't affect meaningful change). The moral choice system in this game constantly asks you to choose between exacting meager retribution against the rich, whose debauchery and violent excesses you are constantly submitted to, or staying stoically silent while atrocities erupt around you (the good option). A cackling, clearly evil figure constantly tempts you to violate the liberal principles of systemic change by doing something about the horrors of the world, underscoring it as the evil option.

This game might somehow be staying true to film noir by providing the player with impossible choices: either let violence happen, or do violence and become a monster for doing it. This cynicism grates on the soul. This is cowardly work that despite being science fiction, is completely regressive. Do not play.

One thing I appreciation about both Case of the Golden Idol and Rise of the Golden Idol is that they approach anticolonialism in different ways, each exploring how Albion and New Wells, respectively, exploit technology and culture of the colonized.

Where Case shows direct exploitation of Lemurian technology and wealth for military strength and social control, Rise shows exploitation for cultural legitimacy and commodity capitalism. The vanity and violence of this is underlined by the fact that basically every non-Lemurian who interacts with the idol is an absolute buffoon or is undone by buffoons.

The games manage to do this without I believe ever specifically stating that Albion/New Wells have colonized Lemuria, it is just heavily telegraphed throughout both of the games. Lots of games struggle to have as coherent a message on the violences of colonialism as both these games do.

Really lovely game. The setting is very unique for games: it takes place in a magical realist Latin America during Spanish colonisation and plays it as a sort of "inverted Western". The writing is just fair, but the setting more than makes up for it. The combat system also inverts the "real-time with pause" of games like the original Baldur's Gates or Pillars of Eternity and makes it instead "pause with real-time" a la Superhot and it's a lot of fun to play around with (I wish the game played back the combats in real time, which seems like a real missed opportunity. Give it a GIF export button, it'd be all over Twitter!) It also doesn't overstay its welcome, which is extremely refreshing. The weakest parts are the UI and especially the inventory, which feel particularly underbaked. The pixel art almost suits the game, but I also think it would be better with almost any other art style. The music is lovely, though.

The Crush House is a game with a major identity crisis, it's trying to be many things at the same time and as such falls short of securely executing any of the three.

The first thing it is attempting to be is a Pokemon-Snap-like set in a reality TV house, which is a really great concept. You film the contestants in the house and try to meet various audience demands of what they want to see. However, because the game also wants to be a procedural Sims-like dynamic relationship system (see below) you can't always guarantee you'll be able to film a particular thing (for instance, no romance might happen if everyone is enemies that day). Therefore, over half of the audience demands are for completely static features of the house, like the plumbing or gardens. This is sort of funny the first time it comes up, it's silly to be filming a garden while drama is happening, but what ends up emerging is that for consistent results, you end up pursuing the static objectives (if you fail, you get a game over after all), and you mostly ignore the reality TV part of the game and just cycle through the same maximum-points generating spots/camera angles that you've discovered.

The second thing it wants to be is a sort of Sims-like dynamic system where people fall in love, become enemies, and have silly conversations while you watch. Each contestant has a relationship with the others, and can be Enemies, Strangers, Friends, Flirting, or a Couple. There are several time-changes throughout the day where this can change, usually through a conversation. The game really cares about this system, and in much of its advertising really pushes the idea that you want to cast the show with certain personalities together that might meld or clash. Unfortunately, this does not really end up mattering and people will get together and break-up semi-randomly no matter what. The system becomes fairly transparent after awhile: the different characters have certain backend traits like "nerd" or "egotistical" and different canned conversations for different situations emerge when those tagged characters interact. I've heard the same breakup routine between two sets of completely different characters, the same flirting, etc. etc. Also because of the proceduralism, each relationship change is entirely self-contained. Nothing else that has happened in the house has any bearing on if two people stay together or break-up, which I suppose is a bit of the satire of the game. If it means to show that reality TV dynamics are thin, it certainly succeeds!

Finally, the game wants to be a sci-fi mystery where you are discovering a dark secret truth. This is where the game truly fumbles the most. The way I've made sense of this is that this mystery element must have been added begrudgingly, because the game seems to loathe to interact with it or pay it off in any meaningful ways. I feel like the developers wanted to make a game that was much more of the first two concepts but felt a mystery was needed either for "depth" (which I disagree with, personally, I would have loved that game) or to make it more "Devolver"-y. I don't want to spoil the mystery here, but if you play and you feel excited or interested by the breadcrumbs that are dropped: don't be. Many things are never returned to, and the endings are huge fumbles of potential. There's an ARG element that I haven't interacted with, but I shouldn't need to in order to feel good about a game I've played, I'd hope. I would have rather there been no mystery at all and more energy put into the other parts of the game.

I think this is much better as an art show/arcade game. Just have people play through one week, have it get increasingly harder and add in strange new audiences every time (there are a lot of fun ones the first time you see them!), and end it there at a tight experience. This is a game that's worth playing but absolutely not worth finishing.

I've seen some other reviews comparing Anger Foot to Hotline Miami, which is close but I think there's a better point of reference: Anger Foot is dirty Neon White.

Where Neon White has clean levels and minimal graphics, Anger Foot has levels full of chunky geometry, visual gags, and ragdolls flying across the screen. Where Neon White has a buttoned up anime-style story, Anger Foot has ♥♥♥♥ City. They both have fast paced, movement-centric combat, meaningful challenges, and amazing soundtracks. They both clearly love their artistic inspiration, from Neon White's PS2 import game to Anger Foot's blood-and-guts adult swim cartoon.

I keep being impressed by Anger Foot the more I play it. Just playing the game feels good, the core movement, kicking, and shooting is feels good to do. Levels are constantly exploding and changing and being torn apart. I've not played a game where destructible environments have felt as good and meaningful to be inside of in a long time. It's also funny in ways I keep not expecting. Not the writing, which is middling, but the visual gags continually get me. This is a game that, in a fast-paced level, is not afraid to force you to walk through a joke to get to the next part. In an office I saw the top of an enemy's head, then walked around the desk to see he was sitting on a toilet instead of a chair. It made me laugh!

The star-challenge system is also tuned extremely well. If you play this game you should absolutely try to get every star. They have a real range of purposes. Sometimes it's a speed run challenge that requires you to find a secret or some trick in a level to finish it. Sometimes it's a shoe-restriction that requires you to play the level in a totally different way. You're always solving some kind of puzzle. Okay, I need to kill 10 enemies with one explosion, how do I get 10 enemies to clump together? Or, I need to kill 15 enemies while drunk, I need to figure out where all the beer bottles are so I can stay drunk throughout this whole level. Sometimes it's as fundamental as, in this level I can't kick, how do I open doors? In very few games I've played have the "optional" challenges required thinking about levels in as many different ways as Anger Foot's do.

A great example of a game that knows what it wants to do and does it.

This game is a triumph. An intricate puzzle box with gorgeous artistic direction that tells a feminist narrative about art, trauma, and the auteur.

That being said, I do have to disagree with many of the other reviews I see here. One real strength of the game is the puzzle design, and I've seen many people talk about the piles of notes they generated to play the game. While you're entitled to note down whatever you want, I think a real strength of the game is that you DON'T need to take very many notes, the puzzle design is so elegant that you really don't need to. In my playthrough I took notes around 10 times total, and mostly to help memorize sequences of things that were longer than 7 units. In general, though, what you need to solve a puzzle is usually directly in front of you, and when it is not the game helpfully uses Lorelei's photographic memory to record everything you interact with to aid in puzzle solving. Very helpfully, if you ever interact with anything in the game and it ISN'T recorded by Lorelei, you know it is only meant to be used on a puzzle that's immediately in front of you (though beware: the inverse is not always true!). You end up accumulating a huge trove of information, but it's always easy to sort through and what information applies to which puzzle is usually extremely obvious.

There are a variety of puzzles, but many of them follow a general structure which is also very streamlined. They are by-and-large "escape room" style puzzles, with a lock-and-key approach. It flows like this: (set of information) -> (cipher or rule) -> (lock input). The puzzle design lies in figuring out elegant and intuitive ciphers or rules to apply to the information that forms the "keys", and the team has done an excellent job in figuring out straightforward and rewarding examples of this. I often found myself overcomplicating puzzles which were otherwise actually very straightforward. The ways they change this up throughout the game is also very elegant: there's a fun room with a bunch of locks where the code is always the same, but the way you input it into the lock changes.

Many reviews have also complained of the control scheme, which is a "one button" game (actually, it's one button plus directional input). These complaints consist of minor things like not being able to hit the B button to exit out of a menu and things like that. What this control scheme opens up, though, is accessibility. This game relies on pretty much 0 pre-existing game knowledge, and I think we'll see it becoming very popular with people who don't normally play games. It'll be a lot easier for those types of people to play it if they only need to remember movement and one button, as opposed to the normal controller or keyboard setup. It's a smart design choice which I hope will open up the game to a wide audience.

Overall, this is a real masterpiece. I do think the only prerequisite to enjoying this game is that you likely need to like puzzles at least a little bit.

This is a perfectly adequate metroidvania with some unique items. It's a rare thing to have a non-combat oriented metroidvania, and Animal Well pulls it off with atmospheric flair and charm. It's moody and dark and feels very rich as you move through the spaces of it, with the tinkling of lights and the rustling of plants.

The biggest and most egregious shortcoming of the game is the addition of quite a lot of Fez-style post-game puzzles for full completion and for a second, bonus ending. I think many would excuse these as optional, which they are, but game design is often a matter of placing effort and energy. How much energy went into hiding so many collectables and crafting the various arcane puzzles that could have been put into more spaces, areas, items, and, to put it bluntly, content that most players will experience as opposed to the puzzles that few players will? It would be like after the credits rolled on Elden Ring you entered into a post-game Mahjong tournament. If there were a games equivalent of Oscar-bait, I think these sorts of Fez-style post-game puzzles are GOTY-bait.

Metroidvanias and other genres often teach the player how to play them through their gameplay, which Animal Well does very well, but these extra puzzles are removed from the main game, and have been solved by brute force and data mining by the community. Even now, so close to release, if you're reading this review you will likely solve these puzzles with a guide rather than by yourself. It's very likely not what you came to Animal Well for, and it certainly won't reflect the great parts of Animal Well that came before it.

Enjoy the moody, non-combat metroidvania and take a hard pass on everything that comes after.

I'm writing this review as someone who actually really didn't enjoy Mutaizone (the previous game by this same developer) and I think they have really addressed some major design issues with that game in Saltsea Chronicles, really delivering on the strong writing and ideas that were already present in Mutaizone.

I really disliked my time with Mutaizone because while the writing was strong, it was also very SLOW. Not very much happens in Mutaizone, and you get this slow plot dripped out over very long walks across an island. I'm generally a fan of media that allows itself to linger in spaces, but Mutaizone really pushed that even for me. The garden planting minigame also always felt very shallow and simple.

Saltsea Chronicles, on the other hand, is fast and pacy. Things are HAPPENING, you're moving around often and plot is unfolding. You move around the various islands in a very fast way, and it's very quick to get the little drips and drops of writing. The writing is just as strong as Mutaizone, but is aided by the fact that you are actually doing something! Having a purpose gives all of the writing weight, even the things that don't directly move the plot forward matter more because there is a plot to be moved. I cried many times over the course of this game. That isn't to say the writing isn't variable, at its weakest it's reproducing very well-trodden queer romance tropes, and at its strongest it's plumbing the nuance of art, grief, and reparations. My biggest issue is that a game of Spoils (a trick-taking card minigame) takes three hands. It takes too long to play and disrupts the pace of the game too much. Even though I liked it I found myself avoiding it to not disrupt the game flow.

In concluision, I highly recommend, especially if you didn't like Mutaizone, as weird as that might sound.

This is maybe a harsh review, but I feel like I'm coming from a more coherent place than most negative Steam reviews which tend to just complain about performance or that the game released first on the Epic store or something like that.

I feel Pacific Drive is a really nice concept and world which completely undercuts itself by using proc gen and instanced play sections. To set up a massive exclusion zone with many anomalies really implies a sense of SPACE- the game is car maintenance and resource gathering, sure, but really the game needs to convey that space. Because each "level" has procedurally generated loot, nothing feels meaningful or important. Once I found my nth ARPA bunker I just didn't feel like I was in a real space anymore, it just felt like a distribution algorithm run over a map. The game tries to lean into this by making the impermanence and shifting nature of the world part of the lore, but it honestly feels thin.

Because everything is an instance, nothing feels connected in a meaningful way. It's like you just go through a portal in Crash Bandicoot into a single level and then pop out the other side. You can't ACTUALLY drive from one part of the map to another, the map doesn't exist! For a game ABOUT driving, losing out on the quintessential element of driving which is that it gets you from point A to point B is unforgivable to me. This is almost more like a mission-based mech game like the new Armoured Core than it is a driving game in any meaningful way.

The game is gorgeous, the art design is really fantastic. The UI is atrocious, there are honestly too many buttons and the menus don't hook together in a logical way. And it does that think there you need to hold down a button to cause an action to occur by default. The lore writing is all too verbose and purple prose-y, I honestly don't mind it when it's good, but all of this needed an edit to half the size (because it's not that good).

That's it, I really wanted to like this game and it has some neat ideas. I'm sure the instanced world is a time/energy/money constraint more than a really heartfelt design decision and I do respect that, but it does make the game not work, to me. The UI stuff is less understandable but is also more fixable in the long term. Kudos to the developers for giving this one a shot, it's a risky shot to take.

It's sad to say it, but it's just an alright version of Zeno Clash. The highlight of these games has always been the world, and the gameplay mechanics often being passable enough that you can get to the next interesting thing to see. This game still has that interesting world but feels worse to play.

The Zeno Clashes also have better rendering styles.

That said, it's worth a play if you're a fan of the series, but if you're new then just play Zeno Clash 1 or 2