Recent reviews by kuncendorfs

TLDNR: Dead engine. Everyone moved to Godot.
trends.google[DOT]com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F02ph70,%2Fm%2F0_x6l2s,%2Fg%2F11f2gsc5yy,%2Fm%2F0h3nys_

2004 - Mark Overmars releases Version 6 with a DirectX wrapper functions that add 3D capability.
Engine is ridiculously slow at this point - math is roughtly 700 times slower than on C++
For comparision Ruby 1.8.1 based RPG Maker XP (2005) is about 300 times slower than C++
2006 - Mark Overmars in colab with programmer Jacob Habgood (Hogs of War, Actua Soccer 2)
publish "The Game Maker's Apprentice" book, which describes v6.1 of engine in elaborate detail
and walks reader through the process of creation of several games.
--- Golden Age (2007 - 2011) ---
2007 - Mark sells a part of company to YoYo Games and version 7.0 is released with rudimentary changes.
Full version now costs $20. YoYoGames Sandbox website and Community Forum are launched.
Thousands of projects are uploaded on Sandbox. At the end of 2008 there are more than 30k files hosted
and by the end of 2011 this number grows to 125818. Game mechanics are explored and discussed on forum;
source code is shared; fan recreations of popular games are made, plugins that expand functionality
of GM are created and shared, for example fast 3d renderers, other language integrations,
such as Lua or even Assembler. Also during this time more than a dozen electronic fan zines
are created by community, including: GM Tech (2007), GMItalia (2007), Markup Magazine (2007),
GMM (2008), GMIndie (2009).
2010 - Game Maker 8 is released at $25. Originally Pascal engine is now rewritten in C++.
There is quite significant performance increase over v6 & 7 putting GM8 on par with RMXP,
which was launched 5 years earlier. RMVX Ace (2011) does math x6 faster.
Jacob Habgood & Nana Nielsen publish 2nd book "The Game Maker's Companion" now GM8 based.
The quality of described games is increased, particularly "Shadows" & "Zool" throughly explain
the principles of platformer game design.
2011 - Patched up Game Maker 8 is released as 8.1 and price is bumped up from $25 to $40
Some quite successful games made with GM start to appear: 8Bit Killer (2008), Spelunky (2009),
L'Abbaye des Morts (2010), Super Crate Box (2010), Hotline Miami (2012), Risk of Rain (2013), Gunpoint (2013).
--- Silver Age (2012 - 2016) ---
2012 - GameMaker Studio is released. Price is increased yet again to $100 effectively locking out
most of the enthusiast user base, who would either leave or continue to use older versions.
Previous engine versions are removed from sale. Marketplace website is introduced for sale of GMS assets.
Studio is much more restrictive but has an ability to import older projects. Old plugins don't work anymore.
Performancewise GMS does calculations about 115 times slower than C++, which is still worse than RPG Maker Ace.
To illustrate how horrible performance is, imagine a calculation that takes 1 second in C++,
it would take 2 minutes in GMS... You see, Game Maker was never a game engine, it was a game creation
learning aid sort of a glorified stack machine that they tend to draw on a whiteboard in a programming class
designed by one man - a programming teacher - Mark Overmars. And it was fine as that.
But now there's a corporation behind it and corporation needs money. So at this point they have bumped price
up fivefold and position it for semi-professional market, kicked off by recent indie acceptance on Steam.
Gradually ability to export to multiple platforms is added. Also, as a side-effect to multi-platform expansion,
an ability to produce compiled code with Visual Studio instead of running usual VM bytecode is introduced.
It is marketed as YoYo Compiler (YYC) and costs extra $200. Full package with all the features now costs $800.
YYC increases performance about 5 times over VM, so YYC compiled exe would be about 22 times slower than C++.
Nobody buys GMS.
2015 - YoYo Games sells to on-line gambling company PlayTech for 16.4 million.
During the last 4 years of Sandbox from 2012 to 2016, when it would eventually be closed down,
the number of hosted projects increase only by 25 thousand. All the fan-zines are gone by 2012.
No good books are written about GameMaker Studio or following GM incarnations for that matter.
This loss of knowledge is a problem, since GameMaker uses custom GML language and Drag & Drop programming
that is not described outside of GameMaker community.
In fall of 2015 "Play and Create with GameMaker" bundle is launched on HumbleBundle for $12 and it includes
GMS Pro license ($100) + Androind export module ($200) and source code for 13 commercial games.
About 75 thousand copies of this bundle are sold.
2016 - 2nd "Humble GameMaker Bundle" drops. It costs $15 now and includes more export modules
and source code for another 12 commercial games. 232 thousand copies sell. This bundle is brought back in 2017
and sell another 64 thousand copies. So 375 thousand combined. Enthusiasts are brought back, new blood injected
into community and games made on Studio start to come out: Downwell (2015), Nuclear Throne (2015),
Undertale (2015), Deadbolt (2016), Hyper Light Drifter (2016), AM2R (2016), Caveblazers (2017).
--- Bronze Age (2017 - 2019) ---
2017 - Studio 2 is launched. It basically is just a bug-fixed Studio 1, with project structure changed
from XML to JSON, newer shaders and an idiotic touch-screen GUI tacked onto it. It costs $100
and UWP and Mobile export DLCs go for $400 each, bringing total price to the all time high
with less export platforms than in Studio 1. Studio 1 is removed from stores including Steam along with Workshop,
which served as sort of a cheap Sandbox replacement. GMS1 is locked out of YoYo Marketplace.
Seeing that GMS1 bundles were a rug-pull, people leave. Until December 2019, when v2.2.5 is released,
Studio 2 updates are essentially just bugfixes. Notable games that came out at this time:
Death's Gambit (2018), Forager (2019), Katana Zero (2019)
--- Decay (2020 - now) ---
2020 - 2.3.0 branch of Studio 2 starts to get feature updates, which tend to break things.
During this time half-broken arrays with a 32k limit are finally fixed. Ability to import
GMS1 projects is removed. Performance doesn't improve but can in fact degrade, due to fact that more things
are getting tacked onto now 10 years old GMS1 stack machine engine. Legacy posts going back to Game Maker
before Studio 1 are deleted from community forum along with hundreds of projects, tutorials, etc.
2021 - PlayTech sells YoYo Games to Opera for 10 million (40% value lost, disregarding inflation).
GameMaker adapts a Subscription Model. Now $100 fee should be paid every year. People leave in mass,
particularly to Godot, which has started to make rounds around this time.
Mention of Godot and some other engines on forum or Reddit gets you banned.
'GameMaker Studio 2 Bundle' launches on HB. It costs $25, offers a year of subscription
and has no source code projects in it. This bundle sells little short of 4 thousand copies.
2022 - GM Studio 2 rebrands as GameMaker. There is no qualitative change - it still is a continuation
of 2.3.0 branch of Studio 2, which in turn is a warped Studio 1 from around 2012
with some stuff nailed to it. Old Studio 2 is removed from Steam.
2023 - Couple days after Unity runtime fee anouncement GameMaker posts an offer of 3 months of free
subscription. Since subscription is now $10/month, this would save you $10 over previous $100 permanent license,
if you can get your game finished within a year. Nobody is impressed. Most Unity refugees go to Godot or other
open-source projects. In November YoYo Games announce GameMaker going "free" for non-commercial use.
When people inquire, it is explained that acceptance of donations or YT ads would qualify as commercial use.
Permanent commercial license costs $100 once again. It is clarified, that devs,
who paid for the old Studio 2 license will have to re-buy it at full price.

Deletes your account after a period of inactivity
Why? Because this game is a loot box trash
This has been an issue for years, as can be seen from 9 page forum topic from 2020
forum.gameloft.com/viewtopic.php?f=2031&t=707500&start=90
That forum is gone now, remaining only on WayBackMachine
All they have now is a faking Discord channel

- Requires Microsoft account to spy on you
- After playing for several hours: "Corruption detected in your account save" and game won't start anymore. Fortunately this happened to me early on and now I backup saves. The game is made in such a way that it auto-saves frequently and overwrites single save all the time without backups. So, if something goes wrong with this single save - you're screwed. Could happen 40 or 100 hours in.
- By the time you get to your Leader's Legacy, game gets very repetitive. You basically constantly run fetch quests. Story is very thin. This is no GTAV, but price is about the same.

nothing short of amazing

So it looks like Alone in the Dark or Resident Evil (or maybe Alan Wake / Evil Within more recently), right? But, well, it isn't. This game is more alike classical Sierra adventures e.g. King's Quest or Space Quest, where you pick up every item you can and run back and forth and try everything on everythig and, each time you make a mistake, you die. In those games you could save anywhere. Here all you have is autosave and when you die, you die - you have to pick a different character. This might sound interesting, but then you notice, that to keep this going, game introduces disposable characters in every chapter and stats that each character have are largely useless (they are more like lives, really). This hurts story and immersion. Also there are no enemies except QTE. Things that you learn not to do in first chapter, because they result in your character's death, turns out you should do later on. It's like this game was designed to be suffering. This will make you either play on low difficulty or look up a walkthrough. Still recommendation from me, because it was made by a small team and I know how hard it is to get any game done and I just love AITD too much and enjoyed all the refferences. In decimal I would give it 6/10. And I hope that they'll make a sequel which would be more alike classic survival horror games.

This game is about filthy girls who just won't do their chores.
But more seriously it feels like a love letter to Italian 80s Giallo movies and specifically Dario Argento's Phenomena and Suspiria, which were also an inspiration for Clock Tower and Haunting Ground. So, if you like those things, you'll probably enjoy this game.
My complain is a lack of synth music.

edit: So I've played through it 3 times now. Initial play to just enjoy the game and 2 more times to get all the achievements. I absolutely love this game. More than 1st part. So I want to address some of negative reviews. There are a number of complains about stealth mechanics and bugs. It crashed for me just once when I was alt-tabing a bunch from full screen mode to a item location guide. That's all and that's not unusual, maybe engine's problem rather than game's. Could be that it was patched recently. About stealth: it is not Metal Gear, that's true, however I thought it was fine. Stabbing can be a bit wonky but you can play through the whole game without stabbing anyone. I think developers intended for people to explore the house and craft items rather than try to just sneak up and stab enemies. When you stun an enemy with an item stabbing works fine. Maybe it could have been communicated better - that you should stun an enemy if you want to stab it. While milking achievements I also discovered some unexpected mechanics, e.g. enemies can hurt each other and you can knock out two guys with one stun grenade so for me even getting that 50 stab achievement was fun. So don't think of this game as Metal Gear and enjoy story and atmosphere and if you come from 1st part, think of this as Aliens to Alien or Terminator 2 to Terminator - less horror, more action and plot twists.

Absolutely adorable little game. Reminiscent to how games were in 80s and early 90s where you could lose yourself in a cute pixel world and didn't need endless tutorials or a manual the size of encyclopedia or a dedication to invest 40 hours. You discover mechanics as you play and it is actually fun and not a chore. You will die a bunch but it's ok, because next time you will make it further.
From more recent titles I would compare it to The Count Lucanor, Minit or The Last Door.

Good Game.

This game is the dumb sister of Haunting Ground. Still kinda ok. Not worth $20, though - it's just for one night.

Ugh. Let's say I enjoyed it more than I didn't - 6/10. A slim recommendation.
CoC tries to do a lot of things but falls on its nose and doesn't do any of them better than average. So you do something different in each chapter: search for objects/dialog choices based on skills/FPS/stealth/Ethan Carter ghost thing.
I think CoC would have been a better game would it have one polished gameplay mechanic throughout entire game, like for instance The Council does.
Nevertheless if you are craving occult mystery first person adventure game with multiple endings largely set in victorian mansions on an isolated island, could grab it on sale.
If you were a fan of original Alone in the Dark, you might be more inclined to enjoy it, as looks like CoC draws some inspiration from it.