Recent reviews by heteroclinic

There has been a lot of controversy about this game, I won't attempt to change your deeply held convictions about that whole issue with one Steam review out of respect for your maybe not being a small child.

Incidentally, if you are not a small child, don't play this game.
I spent thirty minutes being handheld...err..railroaded through a /terribly/ animated and acted walking cutscene which somehow had real cutscenes nested inside of it and then placed in a room and told whom to talk to. When I refused, and instead went down a single half-flight of stairs to stare at a locked door to the wide world outside, I was immediately told to return to the Designated Common Room (tm). A 30 second timer started, after which I was immediately killed and placed atop the stairs again where I was /supposed to be/. This game claims to be for persons older than three but it won't let you leave the supervised play area for any amount of time and won't let you use any more powerful magic than a simple zap without the whole world treating you like a pariah. Call me old fashioned, but you know what I call someone who wants to use powerful domination magic to shift time and space to his very specific will whenever he deems it appropriate? A wizard! Back in my day, their spells were called things like "Fireball" and "Stop Time" and "Power word: sh*t yourself" and "Summon Greater Aorta Crawler IV" and not things like "wetus floorvinius slightus" and "Woooo aaaah you now have an eyelash in your eye and when you try to massage it out you'll get more in there somehow (except in Pig Latin)." Seriously...with attack spells like these you might as well just use your hands. I get that this is a sort of in-universe thing to keep well-tempered, well-meaning wizards from becoming gods, but that sort of control is in my mind exactly what the word "wizard" is synonymous with, and it's going to take a lot more than just taking away all appreciable advantages of using magic and forcing me to use it all the time to convince people like me otherwise (and there are DOZENS of us)!
This reigning in of the player's capabilities also makes for less interesting and tactical and much more boring enemy encounters. Fighting becomes a game of "put up your shield two whole seconds before someone telegraphs an attack, wait another two seconds for them to finish telegraphing, then stun lock them and then maybe at some point walk right past them if they are slightly in your way." While I find it incredibly polite of the enemies to apologize in such a manner before casting or otherwise attacking, it always feels like such a chore to have to hit them back with magic. The clear balance they've tried to strike is to make the enemies damage sponges and nerf your attacks so they don't do anything. Meanwhile RPGs with design docs written by real, sentient people turn you into a demigod and the high level enemies into demigods, so the playing field is fair...until it isn't, which is sort of the point (and the excitement) of playing a magical character.

In this game you are not such a character; you are a two year old child who must be supervised and bottle-fed his Weak Sauce lest he fall off the training wheels and also prison-shanked by an army of dumb statues built by vaguely sinister industrial-era bank-gnomes all done up in the garb of the Monopoly Man in corny one-at-a-time Bruce Lee movie fashion for what are apparently unrelated reasons. If you are a real CRPG fan (who wasn't paid to review the game), and who, like many others, was disappointed with the conclusion of the Harry Potter franchise and the way in which it has aged like store-brand M&Ms in a hot vineyard, then this game is not for you. If you are a child and need your preferred playstyle dictated to you, or if for whatever reason you enjoy locking targets, dodging, and feebly zapping largish but unthreatening monsters so much that you'd prefer a wizard game that lets you do those things to a wizard game that lets you play as a wizard of any appreciable talent, there are still games that do all these things better made by truly competent animators. Maybe try Zelda?

GOTY 2020
GOTY 2021
GOTY 2022
"Two middle fingers up"

Obviously not quite finished yet but already soo atmospheric, can't wait to play more.

Also, Voltage High Society == VHS totally just realized that today...

The story is kind of all over the place but it's definitely a solid game, and a refreshing challenge.

Is blender.

First, a caveat: my only experience with this game is on a private server I run on my VPS. Playing on the official servers is a whole other ball game, I'm sure. I'm probably not going to mess with that for a while.

I'm probably going to update this review eventually once my friends and I start getting more into the competitive aspects, but, suffice to say, I recommend it for anyone who knows how to code, appreciates strategy games, and wants a nice break from the sort of click-heavy, fast-paced titles that dominate the RTS genre. The API is a little clunky and javascript is a poor choice of language for this type of application, but, once you get used to the environment, there are a whole host of interesting mechanics that make this game insanely fun to play. It's complex, to be sure, but not so time-consuming as you might be led to believe---often, you don't have to do more than a quick check every now and then followed by a short bugfix or livecoding sprint to introduce a new unit type or behavior. It's easy to get sucked into it late at night, but, other than that, pretty low-maintenance overall. I could see playing this game with a full-time job and kids, which is not something I'd suggest about most games on the market today. Again, that doesn't necessarily hold true for public server play, which requires payment of a large subscription fee I suspect the experience isn't worth.



If you don't know anything about code whatsoever, I'd learn that first. This is not primarily an educational game. That said, expertise with javascript /per se/ is optional; it's more important to have a basic understanding of how the game logic works, and ---I cannot stress this enough---to have read the manual and played the tutorial.

I am going to copy-and-paste from the_simian's review because it really perfectly summarizes how I feel about the game.
I will then supplement it with my own notes.

"Lydia is a very short point-and-click style game, very much in the same format as the Telltale games. If you liked those games, you'll likely like this one too. I'ts amazing that a small team can release such an atmospheric title. The best parts of this game are the art and the sound design. It takes a lot for me to praise music and sound design, as I also have done work as a sound designer and am probably picker than most. It really is excellent, and makes the game good, from the sense of 'space' it provides, to the adorable babbling of the children - it works really well."


-The sound design was also what sold me on the game. It's not just the music...it's not even primarily the music, though that is really good, it's the way it's mixed and the ambient noises and everything. I don't know much professionally about sound design but I am also very picky about music. They did an ace job.

-The illustrations (and it is fair to call them that, they serve a similar purpose and have a similarly sparse composition to the pictures in a children's book) are always engrossing the player and driving the atmosphere. They are amazingly well crafted. The animations, especially, are perfectly rough around the edges and sparsely keyframed so as to give the player a sense of dreamlike existential depression, which is not just a tagline.

-The descriptions on this site don't do the game justice--I don't know how they could! But if their elevator pitch scares you away, just remember: I know what the word "poshlost" means, and I still liked the story a lot. Just when you think it's about to turn into a cliche message-story, it maneuvers perfectly ieither into half-charming, visually rich dark comedy or some sort of bizarre magical realist horror tale, and then everything turns back to normal just to string you along. It's quite clever and very imaginative in a way even I didn't expect.

11/10, but in the most literal sense possible. Only thing it's missing is a follow-up title.

I assume the reader is vaguely familiar with the game mechanics. If not, go watch a youtube video or so...

The problem with making a game about things which are hotly debated matters of public policy is that the player does something expecting one thing to happen but the designer programmed in another consequence and it's not clear which one makes more sense. Of course, the devs tried to compensate for that by tellling you what does what in the menu, but that just complicates things (and hot damn, is it confusing to read). These things should be simple and obvious, that's the hallmark of good design.

Amazing world-building. Interesting combat mechanics venture too far into number-crunching territory at times but generally stay out of the way of a great atmosphere. Poor map design but all-in-all a wonderful reimagining of the old IE games.