Recent reviews by indieCatapult

Great little thing. Will take you all of an hour to finish. But damn... I just wish they'd develop the universe and take it further...

Aside from one or two bugs, this was the best narrative driven game I've ever played, bar none.

I was playing Sunua's Sacrifice yesterday and all through my firewatch playthrough I just wished that Campo Santo had have been involved with the other game.

Damn. Epic.

A wonderfully imagined, praiseworthy, moving experience marred by rage inducing bugs.

Unfortunately I'm 6 and bit hours in and I'm rage reviewing the game because of a bunch of game breakinng bugs. Stuff that I've managed to get past after conosulting the community forums or redoing entire parts of the game.

I mus be part of a sad minority of people who are coplaining about these bugs, because I can't imagine how they wouldn't have been fixed yet...

Doors tht won't open unless you're in exactly the right place when you press interact... Visual puzzels the freeze you in place and leave the game unresponsive once you've solved them... Man...

I'm going to play through and finish it, because I love the subject matter, but damn, fix dem bugs!

Hollow Knight is a game that grew on me. Frustrating metroidvania tropes and some questionable design desicions make the early game something of a chore, but if you stick with it, it really grows on you. It's like learning to drink beer, first you're all like "Dear god what is this noxious bubble filled hell!?" Years later your waxing lyrical about the vitues of ever more hopps... "The bitterness will sort the men out from the boys and all that... Jolly good show!"

So my first hour was allthrowing my arms up in the air, shaking my head in disgust and wondering why in gods name everything that touched you had to violently bump you backwards off your hard won perch atop a somewhat uninspiredly classical metroid like level. Jump up to the left, jump up to the right, get hit by some flying thing, fall down... Rage, threaten to give up, then remember The Game That Must Not Be Named and keep goinng because deep down you like to suffer.

Unlock a few moves, begin to dash, hit further, resist knockbacks and vaguely feel like something that's not going to fall off every platform at the slightest sneeze from an unterrlly unfrightening enemy. Ahhh, now we're talking. Too bad it took 4 or five hours toget here and thank god the decor is varied and stunning and the sound design akin to sitting next to a babbling brook from one of those Romantics poems about nature and rejeuvinating one's soul.

In spite of a rigid adherence to an outdated style of handicapped charater progression, the game has me humming the Cartographers tune, while wandering the streets. I'm eager to spen more time with it, if not reluctant to start ffrom scratch. It's deeper than the blueest blue of the Antartic Ocean in summer, so dive in and discover what's hiding below.

Pros:

• This is just effing amazing!
  
• Amazing art and music. The ambience is just sublime.
  
• Combat is fun.
  
• Exploration is amazing.
  
• All in all it’s my GOTY for 2016

Cons:

• Background foreground differentiation a little bit blurry sometimes.
  
• Sound glitches detract from beautiful soundtrack.
  
• No maps for items.
  
• Sometimes the game just refuses to recognise my controler (xbox 360 or steam).
  
• There’s one secret that I can’t get because something that should be in screen is not.
  
• All of these are minor details.

I have to say that I love everything about this game. I’m sitting here trying to think of something that I don’t like… I’m drawing a blank.

Let’s start with the obvious, it’s gorgeous. The color scheme and the artistic direction of the game are right up my alley. Each part of the world has a particular handcrafted feel that makes you want to explore, just for the pleasure of looking around. The attention to detail, the way secrets are hidden, but just visible enough to be found by the attentive explorer… The only gripe that I have is that sometimes the background and the foreground are difficult to tell apart, which can have you spending precious life jumping of ledges, just to make sure.

Next the sound design and the music of the game. Fantastic. The music and the graphics come together in a harmonious ensemble that is nothing short of breathtaking. The only gripe I have here is that sometimes the game inexplicably glitches the soundtrack, so you get this funny little cutout wobble thing going on. Minor details…

Gameplay… Everything comes together here. This is the real stand out part of the game.

Combat: The combat is interesting and fluid, with each upgrade contributing to the feeling of mastery of the game. There’s nothing better than striding confidently into an area you have already cleaned out, that was quite difficult before and finishing it without being touched. At the same time the game avoids the sometimes frustrating need to learn every pattern of by heart before you can advance past a new enemy, making the game more fluid and easier to get to like.

Exploration: The visuals of the game combine with immaculate level design and intriguing lore to present you with a world that is yours to explore. I must have been back over every inch of the world 2 or 3 times and I still get a little thrill when I find an item that had previously eluded me, or remember the way the things were placed in plain sight in order to conceal.

Length: The game is rather short, at 5-10 hours of playtime on your first run to finish the main story line, however this can be overlooked when you consider the story of the developer and the overall quality of the game. I mean damn!

All in all I spent a little over 24 hours with the game in a weekend. I could not look away. I know that i’ll be back further down the road to test out the co-op options as well as launching boss rush and ng+, but even if the game didn’t have any of this it would still be my GOTY for 2016. Wow, just wow!

TLDR:
Caution, dissenting opinion incoming.

Pros:
• Amazing aesthetic, beautiful graphics and lovely feel good characters.
  
• The soundtrack is fantastic, so relaxing and happy.
  
• The core mechanics are fun.
  
• The amazing depth of the game is just… Wow.
  
  Cons:
  
• The graphics could be better, the perspective is a little basic and the 2d is very flat and a bit weird, plus the animations are a bit light on.
  
• The soundtrack would be cooler if there was more of it and the missing SFXs are conspicuous by their absence.
  
• The mechanics can become tiresome and frustrating very quickly.
  
• All of this is hampered by the controls which are, unfortunately amateur.
  
  Overall:
  
• Still haven’t gotten that far into it, but I really want to like it. However I’ve had a few, oh god why moments that are close to rage quit material for me, all of them linked to the controls.

First things first, at the time of writing i’m only 10 hours into the game. I think you could easily blow 100 plus hours before you came close to finishing the game, so take my opinion for what it’s worth. I love resource management and simulation games, so I was pretty keen to try this out. I’m going to run through what I liked, what I didn’t and then give you my final thoughts on all of this...

The game is beautiful. Its pixel art and sound design come together to make it into something that is just a pleasure to sit and look at. I really did appreciate watching the cutscenes and walking around exploring each new biome, talking to new characters and just breathing in the peaceful country air.

In terms of the core mechanics of the game, there are plenty of them and they’re plenty fun. Whether it be farming, through crops, animals and produce or fishing, mining and foraging, there is a stack of things to do.

In fact the depth of the game is one of its major draw cards, when you buy this, you know you’re going to sink 30 hours into it no problem. The fact that there are just so many things to do and so many different ways that they can be done, is a testament to the vision of the developer and his desire to make an experience rather than a game. It’s a work of art and it’s almost perfect. Almost…

There are however some things in this game that I really just can’t dig. First and foremost, the controls. I really can’t understand why the motor that runs the controls is so poorly written. Clunky is an understatement, it’s downright infuriating to see how your character reacts to your input. If a control system should disappear into the background and allow you to get on with your game, this does anything but that. Given that the entire game is clicking repetitively on a bazillion in game items… It’s an unforgivable lack of attention to a critical detail.

Next up are the core mechanics. Largely due to the subpar controls, some of the tasks become artificially difficult, combat I’m looking at you, or just altogether frustrating, ploughing your fields or watering plants for example. This is the heart and soul of the game. If you can’t bring yourself to go and sow some seeds because the actual process of planting things is so painful that you want to rewrite the control system yourself, (i.e. learn to code, learn to gamedev, then fix the controls) that’s not cool.

The next points are really nitpicky, but they’re here anyway. I think the art and animation needs a solid polish from a trained artist/animator. I don’t see why 2D has to mean flat, perspectiveless front on pixel art and don’t see why you can’t make animations for digging or chopping on an angle. I would also have liked to have more music, and the fact that there are certain animations that have no SFX at all is just weird.

While I’m aware that this game was a labour of love, and that the developer worked his ass off for four years, the control system is so poor that I’m going to have to disregard the cool back story and focus on the product, which is a game with a ton of potential that is marred by a shortcoming in one critical area. All in all, I’m giving this game a negative review and hoping that Concerned Ape uses some of his newfound resources to invest in making Stardew Valley the flawless farming game that it deserves to be. By fixing the control issues and looking at ways to make the core experience more fluid and enjoyable, this game can go from being good, to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ awesome!

I've hit 50 hours with my girlfriend on this game and we're still at it. It's soooo much fun. The guys at Klei are doing a wicked job on the development through the eary access platform and I hope other devs pick up on this approach.

The pros:
- Endless gameplay and continual updates mean that you've got a LOT of playtime ahead of you.
- So much depth to the crafting system.
- Rogue-like. This really changes your play style. It makes the survival aspect of the game real. If you do something rash, bah you might regret that. A lot.
- Caves, Ruins... Just when you think you've discovered it all there's another entire world to explore.
- Cute art.
- Great sound design.
- Lore of the game is super interesting.

The cons:
- No saving, although you can get around that if you want to. The rogue-like thing can be a real ball breaker.
- No achievements. Jesus it's the perfect game for this!
- Sometimes the server lag can kill you, which because of the perma-death is really really frustrating. But this i a very very rare thing.

Al in all this is the only sandbox, survival, online multiplayer, crafting (♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ no more of these games on steam please) that I actually like and play. Get it, play it with your friends and try not to starve. Or get eaten...

So far I've read a lot of reviews that say the game is frustrating and or stupid/boring. I'm writing this to respond to those reviews and maybe offer a point of view that looks at the issues with the game from a different angle.

First of all the Pro & Cons:

Pros:
- Visually gorgeous.
- Great music and sound design.
- Engaging and amusing game design.

Cons:
- Die and retry. Make a mistake, die, go back and figure out why you died. Die again.
- Lack of depth. You'll probably get less than 10 hours out of the game before you've done everything and it just becomes achievement grinding.

Now let's look at why the cons up close.

The game suffers from that whole purist "no tuto, learn how to play yourself you lazy bastard" thing that seems to be sweeping the indieverse at the moment. But the problem with this is that it's an artificial way of lengthening the play time of the game.

Essentially the mechanics of the game are simple, like really, really simple. I've seen people complaining about how "the castle only gives you one coin at max level so everything takes so long.... whinge whinge", well folks if you believe that, you haven't got it. In fact you probably suck at games and should go back to banging your head against the bars of your cage and drooling.

Once you have actually understood how it works though, you can beat the game in like, 2 hours. So if you're the type of person who likes to read guides or watch videos, you're not going to get a lot of time out of the game. If you're not this type of person and you just want to 'figure it out', you're gonna die. A lot. This approach makes the game seem slow, repetitive and even boring.

So all in all, it's a great simple little game that's fun to play and worth every cent if you get it on sale. Just don't expect some epically long game with tons of replayability.

So far so good. New secrets to unlock. I love that there's no wiki for this yet! It's all up to us to figure it out... Another bunch of weekends just went down the hole. Hooray!

Meh. Glad it was 19c. Lackluster art, mechanics and overall game. If you're awake at 4AM for some unknow reason you might spend half an hour on it.