Recent reviews by Kromblite

Beat the game and then built a fully automated factory that builds me infinite nuclear bombs, 10/10

This isn't really my genre, so I didn't get into the campaign as much as other people did.
buuuuut.... I still got hooked on the cybergrind. First time I've praised a wave-based arcade mode.

This is the best sonic game right here.

I'm not a big fan of the lack of narrative direction or the big exposition dump at the end, but the music and gameplay is fantastic. It takes all the best aspects of the 3d sonic games, removes a lot of major problems with them, and adds a few of its own twists to put a new spin on the genre.

And the last level, while a bit stressful, is a highly unique experience that was more gripping than just about any action-platforming segment I've experienced before.

Huge recommendation right here.

This game is a very short experience, but it has an interesting premise, with a great execution. The atmosphere is thick enough to cut with a knife, and the longer I played, the more I felt dread in the pit of my stomach. I loved it!

I really wanted to like this game. I really DID like most of it. But there was one big thing that absolutely killed the game for me.
The bosses.
The bosses grind the game to a screeching halt. They destroy the pacing, punish you for using non-meta builds, they're repetitive, tedious, they eat up your consumables, beating them often comes down to getting lucky...
and the game ends with a big long boss rush with 4 bosses in a row.

Everything else is great, but the bosses are such a huge problem that they overshadow the whole experience. Maybe they wouldn't be such a problem if they had smaller health bars like they did in the original dark souls.

A concept so weird, the dev needed to make a video essay to explain it.
This game does a fantastic job of exploring the concept of interacting with a hyperbolic world.

This is a pretty nice game to hold you over until someone successfully recreates paragon

Non euclidean waterfall puzzles. Yes please.

I was honestly kind of split on whether to recommend this game or not. And not because the game is some milqtoast run of the mill game- on the contrary, this game is a unique beast, for better or for worse. It has a lot of steep peaks and valleys.

The game is intriguing right from the start, getting you invested in a dark, dangerous world full of unpredictable monsters. It's also quick to throw unexpected curveballs at you during battle, distorting the screen, flipping your controls, and just generally subverting your expectations in really interesting ways. In addition, every battle is tied in to the music, which is really satisfying.

Once you get to the hub area, though, the game's atmosphere loses its luster, as it almost looks like a dev room with its blank black background and randomly strewn door sprites. The rooms that those doors lead to aren't much better in that respect, either.

I was also less than impressed with the story, but what made me prematurely uninstall the game was the final boss fight. It was hard, it was frustrating, and it was incredibly repetitive. It was honestly pretty painful to play.

Why do I recommend this game despite these fairly harsh criticisms? Because despite these problems, when this game occasionally gets its act together and does something cool, it's something REALLY cool. Something atmospheric, catchy, cathartic, and intriguing. Something utterly inspiring.
There's one part in particular where you return to the starting area, the camera zooms out, and you battle a hallucination of maya-esque glowing heads, that's absolutely gripping.

So despite having a lot of problems with this game, I'd still recommend it.

Despite the game's appealing art style and unique, interesting game mechanic, I actually had a bit trouble getting into this game at first. The game puts you in such an alien world that at first, the game seems to lack cohesion. It was still fun, but it seemed disconnected from itself, like I was jumping from one separate story to another.

The turning point for me was when the protagonist's mentor goes missing and you leave the main hub area to try and find her. Suddenly the story starts making major turns and you end up questioning your allegiances and learning more about the protagonist and her place in the world, which made the whole world seem more grounded, and heightened my investment into everything that was happening.
And once that happened, I gained a newfound appreciation for the clever puzzle design, the subversions of expectations with the core game mechanics I'd occasionally stumble into, the writing, the style of the game, and the exploration.