Recent reviews by IS-0023

my experience with The Watcher has been mostly pretty bad. while I was wowed by some pretty area and creature designs, the horribly slow and unnecessarily difficult start definitely soured me towards being disappointed afterwards.
let's start with the fact that it took me about 4 hours of play just to actually start Watching. to put that in perspective, four hours is plenty of time for Homestuck to get good. in four hours, you can watch an entire Tarkovsky movie with breaks. in four hours, you can finish Rivulet.

the reason for this slog starts with being given vague and contextually misleading directions. the game begins with a Saint flash, which for Saint indicates an echo in the region. this instantly threw me off; with this I expect that echoes are important, yes, but this flash is not used again afterwards, leaving you completely dry on direction other than "look for echoes, maybe." it also made me start asking myself if there WAS an echo in the industrial complex, the area you enter into, which there isn't.

i'll be real with you: i had only memorized one of these echo locations. so it was a search anyway, and it's not a fun search, either: you have no abilities and act the same as Survivor, except that creature spawns are, for some reason, tuned towards Downpour slugcats, meaning you'll be meeting red lizards. actually, it's even worse: it seems like scavengers hate you from the get-go, no matter how many gifts i've given and how little i've killed them.


now, past all of that... it certainly seems true that this campaign is as long as Downpour. which is a shame, because I'm just really not intrigued by it. in Downpour I could skip Gourmand and leave Spearmaster alone after I was done, but here I'm stuck with my slugcat, and I don't actually like my slugcat.

The Watcher's central ability is being allowed to just not interact with other creatures for a while, through turning invisible. on top of that just being a fundamentally unsatisfying thing to do, cutting much of the joy of the game, the act is slow and awkward. this cuts the tension, this cuts the immersion, this cuts the skill. yes, there is a downpour character that can do something similar, but there I feel it is far, far more narratively resonant, interesting to employ, and available for an appropriately short amount of time.

in addition to this, your character gains multiple entire new abilities as you progress the story. personal opinion, but i don't like this. i like rain world as a tight and immersive creature adventure where skill is largely mechanical and you need to think on the spot, not a cryptic and technical metroidvania requiring me to take notes, tab out of the game, and do a lot of backtracking.

worthy of its own mention is an early creature whose entire existence and purpose is to randomly block your way forward if it feels like it, being very difficult to dislodge if you don't happen to have the right item at a random time.
this is, genuinely, stupid. you place obstacles intentionally. when you want to have a Seaweed Grabber Freak in a level, you put spears and such nearby, so that a player can get past it if they know what to do. having your cycle ended by something so arbitrary that it makes quitting the game a valid choice, is incredibly reckless design.

while the first new region was PRETTY, at the second I started to wonder what i'm even playing for in the first place.
The Watcher is the most divergent narrative by far, seemingly going against all of the base game and Downpour. i'm just not impressed by what's in its place! rain world and downpour's narrative is really good! here, we hop between completely disparate worlds, leave them behind in search of an entirely new world and narrative, remaining elusive. and as hard as it already is to sell me on that... it hasn't actually been fun.

what IS the appeal of these disparate worlds? i like rain world for rain world, not super mario world. with a slugcat i don't enjoy playing, in beautiful but frustrating environments, without any of the characters and story I enjoy... i'm just not excited to sink 20, 40 more hours into this guy.

I enjoy the game a lot, but I don't recommend it.
Executives at Capcom decided that optimization was just not something they were going to do before releasing the game.
It is completely unplayable unless you have very modern hardware that can do BOTH frame generation & upscaling, and even then, it runs badly and looks bad.

vampire survivors walked so picayune dreams could run.

it's really quite rare for a direct iteration upon a smash-hit to reveal the "original" as immensely wasted potential.

picayune dreams kicks its ass with much more interactive & dynamic combat in a far better paced gameplay loop, where instead of intentionally devolving into dopamine-farming idle game ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, the game has a well-defined start and end that doesn't go ridiculously out of bounds (but you can do that, if you want to.) boss fights are also really quite fun... so fun that i really wish there was more of them! if there's anything about the gameplay i don't love, it's that i have mixed feelings on the meta-progression, but i ultimately don't think it is super consequential.

instead of frankly ugly and generic assets, picayune dreams has a really slick, intense and actively intriguing presentation, with some REALLY nice accompaniment by milkypossum. breakcore or whatever isn't really even my thing, and i was surprised at how much i liked it. presenting upgrades through code for you to interpret is REALLY cool! if you end up with a weird sense of paranoia, a feeling that there's a bunch of secrets hidden in the game... there are. there's quite a few and i am very sure i haven't found most of them.

and if all that's not enough, it also has STORY and CHARACTERS which INVITE INTERPRETATION? there's yume nikki-styled walkaround sections in this that, while they may not be to everyone's taste in breaking up the action, are perfectly paced and do a great job adding depth to the game.

man it's impressive. i didn't expect all that much and it only kept getting better.
don't miss out on this!

I wouldn't say I don't recommend this game for this price, but it definitely could have been a lot better exactly in spite of being so derivative. The artstyle's great, the conceit of the game itself appeals to me personally, and I am a fan of scrolling around on webSDR. No bugs or technical issues.
Unfortunately, you can sum up all of this game's story and events in just about two sentences, and there's a lot of buildup for just one good scare, one scary monster.

The crime isn't that this game is short, but rather that it doesn't use its time as well as it could, it's not paced well. Everything either looks and sounds normal or is obviously messed up: there isn't much nuance, the metaphorical kind of darkness that lets the mind wander to fear and the unknown. That might be a personal issue: as a webSDR fan I know that a lot of the radio sounds in this are very natural and normal. But it became pretty obvious what the horror creature is quite quickly, and how you'd recognize it. I think for sure the developers could have playtested the horror more: as a player moves through this game and responds to events that happen, what do they expect to happen next? After the first meteorite impact I got my camera and thrusters primed and ready whenever I was travelling, to catch whatever hit me next time. That never happened.

Unfortunately, there was a lot of cases where I expected something to happen and nothing did, and only a few glimmering moments of genuine surprise. I'm sad to say that being able to look around inside your metal coffin is a red herring, never utilized at all. That's a terrible shame: Iron Lung letting you walk around made the environment something you could interact with, and placed you in a wider context than just the screens. A horror game will train the player as they go, and I feel like the developers here were not aware of what they were training the players to do. When I tried going against what had become a predictable script (most notably around the ending) I had no room at all to play in.
Taking pictures of a planet's dark side fails to progress the objective: thus, most players will gravitate towards only visiting the light side, as that not only is guaranteed to reveal something new, but also progresses the objective. Disappointed to read now that there was something to see in the dark sides later on; not replaying the game for that.

Overall, it's okay. It should have spent more time in the oven, because while it's functional and on a great foundation (though many could argue the power mechanic is nothing but tedious) it just doesn't draw out its potential far enough, and relies far too much on a monotonous kind of scare.

if zelda was actually fun

I can't recommend Lightfall for its incredibly fun new subclass, large structural improvements, challenging & cool patrol space and exciting new gameplay opportunities, when its campaign -- the six-hour opening that you have to replay TWICE to unlock all your Strands -- is the biggest letdown from the narrative team that Destiny 2 has ever had.

There's no end to what's wrong with the story; an extremely vague central Macguffin reminiscent of wizards from the moon, tone-deaf and uninteresting characters such as Jar Jar Binks, Borderlands-esque quips making up half the dialogue, and a setpiece that's fascinating on paper, but was completely let down by the writers.

I can't recommend Lightfall because Destiny is a story and character-driven game, and impossibly bad writing makes ALL of the expansion hard to enjoy for everyone.
I'm not having as much fun with Neomuna as I could because basic information about it doesn't appear in the campaign, but as LOADING SCREEN TIPS. When I get cool payoffs for really old lore stuff, like Soteria or Asher Mir, it's dampened by the fact I don't really know what exactly a Cloud Strider or Veil is.
After the narrative success that was Witch Queen, how did this even happen?
It's embarrassing, even as a player.

We know the devil.

this is by far my favorite italian game of 2022. it absolutely rules already. this ♥♥♥♥ is going to go places

savathussy

this game sucks but i love it. honestly my one biggest complaint is that so many of the players are very toxic and intentionally ruin the game experience and the devs dont do anything about it but if you can bear that its good