Recent reviews by Majorita

Spy Fox is not very fun, it doesn't look very good (in my opinion), and I think that the various references only adults will understand makes it less of a good children's game than say Freddi Fish or Pajama Sam.

I did go in wanting to like this game, expecting to like it, but I think in the end I have to say I didn't just because I found it a little tedious and tiresome. Certain concessions were made, but there's a surprising amount of backtracking in this game and it comes down to being because Spy Fox can only carry up to 4 gadgets at a time. There's no like, gameplay behind obtaining these either which I think is a bit of a miss, you just literally pick them out of a vending machine. There's 6 or gadgets, so to a degree you are just kinda left guessing which you need. Additionally, one of them I think is probably mandatory? This gadget also never leaves your inventory once you take it, limiting your inventory even further.

So, that just seems like some poor planning on the part of the developers. At the same time, I think it might be because, this is one of those games intended to be replayed multiple times, but they just give you all of the gadgets every run. That's how it seems to me, anyway.

The story I think was a real problem for me because it's just completely ludicrous in a way that is obviously impossible to take seriously, but more than that is just very strange. The concept is, an evil goat named William the Kid (aka Billy because he is a goat ha ha ha) stole all the cow's milk in the entire world and wants to destroy a city with cow milk so that everyone in the world will think the cows are evil and then no one will drink cow milk and it'll be time for goats and goat milk to shine...?

It's weird that this isn't the opposite kind of thing, it feels like in some other game it might be that goats or cows are being exploited and they want to smash the system and the protagonist maintains the status quo, but no, I guess to be milked endlessly and used for meat, milk and so is some sort of point of pride for cows and goats.

The graphics in this game, I would say, are pretty subpar. Some backgrounds look okay but I dunno, I just found the game a bit ugly, it has a very flat simple style to the art that reminded me of cereal box mascots, which I am sure seemed like a good idea at the time, but it isn't distinct enough to be interesting to look at. It stands out as a conscious choice, but it was a bad choice in my opinion.

Every character in this game by the way is an anthropomorphic something or other, which is just strange. It just seems odd to me that in this world every character would be drinking cow's milk. I don't know, for some reason I'm okay with everyone in Putt-Putt being a car with doors like for Humans, then there's no Humans in the whole thing, and I'm okay with Freddi Fish just being a bunch of fish, but this seems more odd to me.

As for the list of characters, so there's the bad guy, he's a goat, then there's Spy Fox, who is your protagonist who is always calm and unflappable, then there's Monkey Penny who is a monkey and she gives you hints and such, Dr. Quack or something, who makes your gadgets, and then some various townsfolk. Spy Fox is not that likeable of a character, and several others seem actually frustrated by him.

Most of the dialogue is a little too witty, I think, or at least trying to be, pretty much every single line is intended as some kind of a pun or joke, which gets tiresome actually after a certain point. I would love to know what children made of this, because I feel like this probably wouldn't have been popular.

It feels very weird to play a game like this that came out in the late 90s, aimed at children, so kids probably born in the late 80s, but using references from the late 60s and 70s, by adults who were probably born in the 50s. The structure of the game is intended to emulate a classic James Bond film, and in my opinion it kinda becomes both a pastiche and a parody of tropes and concepts and scenes from those movies.

This game came out the same year as Austin Powers, and I don't know but it feels to a degree that shows in the writing and the characterisation of Spy Fox himself. This leads to him feeling even more tiresome. Especially since as I mentioned before, a few different characters through the game, other than the villain, seem to be annoyed by him, including the stewardess at the start, Monkey Penny since he always gets her name wrong, and some others.

It just reminded me of how Austin Powers is kind of a nuisance in his own movie, and sort of only gets the job done almost by accident or coincidence, he's a buffoon, and while Spy Fox is always calm and collected, he is also something of a buffoon.

By the way, this game has a direct reference to Mata Hari, who was basically a stripper and a courtesan to put it politely and a spy for Germany during World War 1. Great. Other references include Star Trek with Captain Drydock and the SS Winaprize, and some voice actor doing an atrocious William Shatner impression. Which is just great and speaks to the age of the people who made this, because Star Trek TNG's stellar 7 year run had ended about 3 years prior to this game's release.

Anyway, I don't think I really enjoyed this game, there was a lot of back and forth going between areas talking to this character then that character, then like trying to figure out how to solve this puzzle or that puzzle, and then there were a couple puzzles that were WAY too easy, like a laser puzzle you can solve in about 4 very obvious clicks and one or two that I got stuck on for no good reason since I needed to get a specific line of dialogue or I clicked in the wrong spot.

Okay, well, I made it to Act 3 but I'm unsure if I'm gonna keep playing. It's currently Patch 0.2.

I'm playing a minion build. So let's start with that. If you like minions, you will hate this game. Every option you have just... sucks. Apparently most of the Liches playing at endgame right now used various other spellcaster builds to get there, then just respecc'd. That is how unplayably bad minions are right now.

I think basically once I reached the end of Act 1, Path of Exile 2 started to really wear on me, and once I was halfway through Act 2 I started genuinely to just feel bad. Like, frustrated, angry, upset, and even a little heartbroken. Because, my build isn't just like, bad, it feels like the developers completely misunderstood what I want out of a minion build.

I just had, while playing, this just sickening realization like... do you, the developers, really hate me that much? Like not me specifically, but players like me who run minion builds, THAT MUCH? Just... why? Like what did I do to deserve this? Why is everything minion related SO bad? It's not just bad, it's like even if you try as hard as you can you still just make a character that is 'barely playable' and it STILL takes FOREVER to win against bosses. There was a boss early in act 3 that took me 11 minutes from start to finish just to chip away his health bar, and he was pretty easy so I was hitting him CONSTANTLY.

Additionally, though none of the ascendancies for my class honestly seemed at all like they'd be all that useful, I picked Lich, played with my first 2 ascendancy points allocated, then unallocated Necromantic Conduit because it literally made my character unplayable. It made them WEAKER. So that should tell you everything about the balance in the game right now, way too much upside/downside. I'm now playing basically without my ascendancy just because it makes me worse. Wow.

I am sure there are many other builds out there that feel weak or lackluster too.

Anyway, aside from your character and their various builds, the game itself is dreadfully boring. It's indescribably bad, and I dare say anti-fun. I get what they are going for. It's just not fun. It just is NOT fun and possibly will NEVER be fun. And, despite being in beta, it is going to be extremely hard at this point to shift the entire concept of the game. Right now, POE2 is basically a Dark Souls clone with a different camera, complete with rolling.

The developers seem to think that 'players running past enemies' is a bad thing. So this means that your character is unbearably slow, every single area is GIGANTIC, and traversing them takes a very, VERY long time. Slowed down by the atrociously slow combat.

Enemies even respawn in POE2, which is just awful. it might not sound so bad, given enemies usually are a great source of XP and loot in these games, but at the moment, the loot rewards from killing just random monsters, is so bad, that monsters feel more like a nuisance than a threat.

This is a game where you have to play through the campaign a lot just to progress, and the idea is you are supposed to always be replacing your stuff. I am currently in Act 3, wearing gear I obtained in Act 1, just because the drop rates on items and currency is so bad I haven't found anything worth using. This might sound unbelievable but it's just literally the reality right now, especially if you need very specific upgrades or have bad luck.

Anyway, after about 23 hours I am still not even halfway through the campaign yet, since I gotta replay it twice here to reach endgame, and it's been an utterly miserable experience so far. Maybe I'll continue suffering through it, but I just want to say... if you are curious about this game, don't. Just don't.

POE2, I would guess, needs another 3-4 years of development before it'll be good. Maybe 1-2 years before it's playable. I knew that POE2 would be something different, but I didn't expect it to just be one of the most frustrating, awful, upsetting games I've ever played.

I think this will be a tentative recommendation.

I'm not sure where to start, with this release or the video game, but let's talk about the game itself I suppose.

So, Flashback is somehow one of the best selling French video games of all time, it has been released to many different platforms, and yet it's a game with only a little over 400 reviews on Steam at this time. It's an action-adventure game I suppose as the store page says, that much is true. It's also something of a platformer, because you will be doing a lot of running, jumping, and climbing up ledges.

Your guy, Conrad, can walk, run, jump, climb, and with his GUN he can shoot everything to death with unlimited ammo and you just have to hold down the fire button to get him to attack. This ends up being gradually more and more important as you play through the game.

The basic structure is, you are presented with a level. Then you do stuff in it. For the first half, it's something of a diverse experience. The first level is mostly exploration with some shooting here and there. The second level has you running a bunch of errands around town. After that, during the second half of the game however, pretty much every level and almost every screen, you are up against one or more enemies and you just have to hold down the shoot button most of the time to dispatch them. Certain enemies demand a little more from you, including using what is basically a parry (the Force Shield), and sometimes a whole lot of dodge rolling.

There's several different difficulties for this game. Easy, Normal, Expert. There's also 'rewind' and 'non-rewind' mode, which is a feature introduced with this port I suppose. I played on Expert non-rewind since the first level was challenging but I figured well, if I'm having this much trouble, Expert surely can't be that much worse. And, it turned out to be way harder than I was expecting, so if you DO play this game, I don't recommend playing on Expert.

I think that the main problem is with how combat-heavy this game gets later, it's shockingly uninteresting for the most part. Enemies in the last level in particular are just a nightmare to deal with. You basically get a means however, to restore your life to full whenever you want, though it's not completely free, it usually means you have to walk back to where you were fighting, it just takes a while.

So in Flashback, you die when you are shot 5 times. You can restore your hit points by interacting with a recharge station which fills up your shield. You need shield to survive hits.

Enemies in this game don't ever do more than 1 damage to you at a time, and you get very long invulnerability frames afterwards, which is nice. However, on Expert in particular, enemies take MANY many hits to actually kill (8, 10, 12 shots or something ridiculous for every enemy, I don't know, I never kept track, I just know it's a lot) and the game spawns WAY more enemies. There are multiple screens in the first level, on Easy mode, where there are no enemies whatsoever, and it's just your chance to explore. On Expert, all of these screens have anywhere from 1-3 enemies on them.

Enemy reaction times also increase based on difficulty, to the point where if you play on Expert, many enemies if they are on the same level as you for even a few frames, will instantly aim and fire at you and there's not a lot you can do except hope you are REALLY good at using your Force Shield at the right time.

The challenge in Expert also really just comes down to not losing focus, and not getting greedy. You're just constantly incentivized by enemies chipping away your health, to just go back to the nearest recharge station, get your health back, and return to chip away at the enemies. This is mostly very very tedious, especially when sometimes it takes multiple trips back and forth between recharger and battlefield to clear out a single room!

The way you fight enemies is generally very repetitive and simple. For every enemy, you just have to manipulate their AI and get them to stand where you want them to stand, so you can can shoot them to death as easily as possible. Any time an enemy gets away from you, very bad things happen, so it's mandatory to figure out the weaknesses in their AI. For example cops can't retaliate against you if you wait for them to step just barely onto the edge of the screen, then you shoot them.

The graphics and the animation in this game are really spectacular and every level has a unique look to it. You get enough of each one, and yet none really wears out its welcome. What felt like the longest level, the last one, doesn't at all get boring since it's so visually interesting. The animation is really smooth and it makes me wish that more video games today looked as good as this.

The main thing it seems like they actually remastered was the sound, or they tried anyway. I played with the oldschool soundtrack, which I think was the correct choice, since trying to make all new, high quality sound for an old game like that... well, it really just doesn't match, in my opinion. I like most of the sound of this game, except the music, because though there was some decent music in this game it's so sparse. There were many occasions when I was thinking, that, having a nice chill background track would be really good for some areas.

In Flashback as it is, music seems to only really play once in a while when you enter specific parts of certain screens, or, if you draw your weapon then sometimes it plays like a 16 second piece of music. I think it would have improved the game even if it just had blanket pieces of wallpaper music for each level, ideally unobtrusive stuff that just helps to set the mood.

Anyway, so the game is okay. It's not the best thing I have ever played, but it looks great and I think if you were playing on Easy probably also with rewind on, you might have more fun playing this game.

As for this release...

Well, it's kind of buggy. I already mentioned their remastered soundtrack kinda sucks. The awful filters they tried to add in the graphics menu can fortunately be turned off, but they default to ON if you select modern AND in my experience, Bloom and Antialiasing ALWAYS were on, even when they were not ticked in the options menu they STILL continued to be on, so you have to enable them then disable them again!

There's other bugs too, more troubling ones. Myself and several other players experienced, after a certain point, our save file moving from slot 1 to slot 3... it's pretty much inexplicable. Fortunately, I haven't heard of anyone's save data being corrupted but it's not something you really want to see. I'm also not sure if this means that your game always saves to slot 3 if you get to or past a certain point in the game? I just don't know.

The main menu, all of the menus in fact are INCREDIBLY slow. It feels like navigating the menus is as unresponsive as the 90s platformer man you control in this game. That's not great to say the least. Additionally there's really no special features to this game or anything, there's a weird 'street art' point system, but the points are completely bugged and will respawn whenever they feel like it, seemingly, so it's very easy to get more points than you need.

And what is this 'street art' point system? Well, it lets you unlock street art. Like, photos of 'street art'. Which appears to be just... someone made mosaics of Conrad's sprites and put them on random buildings and things and then took photos of that, and now it's just in the game.

I actually might have been interested in a developer commentary track, or even a short film in that vein, or something, but there's really nothing like that, it's just the game pretty much.

I think I got this game for $1 on sale, so, it's probably worth picking up. I think this is an OK game that is probably more enjoyable just for the aesthetics of the game, than the gameplay itself, which is only alright.

'Pajama Sam's Lost & Found' (as written on the store page at this time) is barely a game.

The screenshots, I should note, show 2 screenshots of a couple of the bonus games you earn from filling up the bonus meter, and then 2 screenshots of the actual game.

The actual game consists, unbelievably, of Sam riding Otto from the first Pajama Sam game, or later a cart or a forklift or whatever, from the beginning of an infinitely scrolling stage to the end. I say 'infinitely scrolling' and 'end' here because once you go far enough you just get sent back to the start of the stage again, unless you picked up all of 'Sam's Things' and then you beat the stage and it is over.

That's it for the gameplay basically. There's nothing to this game at all, and some stages can even be completed just by doing literally nothing, you just wait patiently and pick everything up because it's all on the ground. You can even beat most stages in this game just by hammering LMB for the entire duration of the level. There's nothing clever, there's no puzzles, there's no real hidden layers or depth to this game. You just watch Sam against a background, moving right, until you beat the stage.

I game overed pretty early on just to see how punishing it was, and quickly turned on infinite lives for this one. THIS game, annoyingly, has passwords, not just a level select screen, so you gotta constantly go back to the main menu then to the password menu just to go back where you were, so I said forget that and just turned on infinite lives. It still gives you a password every stage and I did appreciate that, also that I think many of the milestone stages (every 10 except 90, I dunno) have an actual 5 letter word as the password, like 'NIFTY' which I thought was... nice.

What else can I even talk about here... uh... well, the music on the title screen is recycled. I don't know where I have heard it before, but I recognize it, it's from one of these other Humongous titles. So that's cool.

I think that the inclusion of minigames as bonus games might have been added as a mitigating factor, so like when you look at the game and think "wait it's just a game where you go right" instead you might think "well at LEAST I get a memory card game with it too" - but if I wanted to play that I'd probably just play *that*. Humongous even made a minigame bundle that's JUST minigames, the Putt Putt & Fatty Bear Activity Pack which even included a card matching game that was way better than this one.

I was thinking in fact, Humongous... why didn't they just make a platformer or a puzzle platformer? I mean, this was 1998 right? Games likes Gex 2, Spyro, Crash Bandicoot were making their way onto home consoles or already on there, and Super Mario had been around for like nearly 15 years by that point. I know this game was made for very young children, like 3-8 according to the opening titles of the game, but... to make a game THIS basic and simple? To the point where you can win levels by doing LITERALLY NOTHING? That's not even a GAME at that point, that's just watching a movie.

The graphics too, while fairly good looking I think for the time, it feels like there's a lot of animation in here and a lot of situational animation for a variety of the hazards and things, I guess there's only a few different stages and stage types throughout the game. It's a small positive though, given the game is the important thing here.

The game itself feels incredibly slow. Like, this game feels like it's going at around 15fps at all times, so you move really slowly, the screen scrolls slowly, you jump slowly, gravity feels slow. It's nuts. Don't know if it's an emulation scummvm thing or what, but uh, it sure doesn't help anything with this game, that it feels exactly as exciting as staring at a landscape portrait. And not a cool one, with say Napoleonic soldiers in the distance firing at one another with cannons - no, a boring landscape portrait of an idyllic countryside. I'm trying not to resort to 'paint drying' here.

Anyway, NO I would NOT recommend this game. The little time I wasted beating this game wasn't worth it. Oh, also right at the end basically it felt like the game was insulting me for playing it, because Sam during the ending cutscene goes "but it sure was fun, wasn't it?" and I could only think no, no it was not, and you lampshading it like that isn't helping.

Mediocre! And VERY VERY BORING!

So the gameplay is basically, bubbles come up from the bottom of the screen, if they reach the surface of the water (which gradually lowers over time) then the bubble pops and you get nothing. Popping bubbles with your slingshot drops something. It could be just a little animated fish that does nothing then swims away, it could be a useful powerup, it could be an item you need to progress, or if it's a red bubble, it might be a hazard.

This game does not have 'over 100 levels' it just has 100 levels. I only really started to notice a difference in difficulty during maybe the last 3 or 4 levels of the game. I never lost a life my entire playthrough and ended with a score of about 72,000 or something with 54 lives.

By the way, the game has inherent autofire on the slingshot, so you just hold LMB for the most part. However, when you do that I think Luther gets tired, or something. However, the game only checks how long you've been holding the button, so if you have say a mouse macro that just spams M1 (this comes in handy in all sorts of games so I didn't make the binding for this one) then you never have to deal with Luther getting tired.

None of the hazards, interestingly, do anything to you. At worst, touching a large bubble disables you for a few seconds. Same with jellyfish. The other hazards do things like, just make Luther vibrate, and stun you for one second - which interestingly can be used probably unintentionally to knock you out of OTHER disables. For instance if you've been hit with a jellyfish, getting hit with a rock or a bowling ball from the pig, knocks you out of the jellyfish disable after you endure the 1 second stun from the rock or bowling ball.

So this game has the opposite problem of all the other minigame games by Humongous. This game has absolutely no challenge whatsoever, and is therefore incredibly boring. There's no puzzle elements. It's just really a lot of waiting. You need a certain amount of 'worms' collected to progress. Worms randomly drop from bubbles. You just wait for the bubbles with worms in them to spawn then pop them and pick up the worms. It scales up gradually from like 3 worms per level, up to 20 worms on the last level.

Oh, also playing the entire game was worth it because I can share that there's actually a Monkey Island reference at the VERY end of the game, the last 10 levels have a backdrop that contains a skeleton wearing a hat and a treasure chest, the chest has a plate that reads 'G. Th***od' and I can't imagine what else it would be other than Guybrush Threepwood. So that was cute.

If this was like a little minigame side thing in an actual Freddi Fish title, it'd probably be fine, but the fact it's a standalone game is baffling. I can't recommend anyone to ever play this unless you really want something VERY chill to do to pass the time while you watch a movie or YouTube or something, it has no substance, no story, nothing remarkable about the music, or anything.

Freddi Fish and Luther's Maze Madness is ATROCIOUS.

This might be the worst game Humongous has produced. It's ABSURDLY frustrating. You might look at it and go, oh well it's a kid's game right? It's probably not that bad, but oh let me tell you right now it's unbelievable.

Once again, like all these other minigame games Humongous made, you get 3 lives, if you run out you get booted back to the level select and your progress is reset. That sounds almost fair in some of the others, but in THIS one... in THIS game, because the levels eventually get so absurdly long, Freddi is so impossibly weak, and the enemies are so incredibly dangerous, THIS game very quickly after the first 20 levels or so grows from very difficult, into outright impossible.

I refuse to believe anyone actually has ever beaten this game before without using the 'junior' settings for infinite lives.

There's a variety of enemies in the game but once you get to a certain point, the game pretty much stops using the 'lower level' enemies that just meander aimlessly, slowly and randomly, and it starts almost exclusively using enemies that either, soft-target you when they aren't wandering randomly, i.e. chasing you if you're near enough or in their sights, or it uses enemies like the 'dogfish' that does, absolutely NOTHING but CHASE you, WHEREVER you ARE ON THE MAP, REGARDLESS of where you are in relation to it, or line of sight, or whatever, UNTIL IT HAS KILLED YOU!

And this is a game, if you don't know, if you haven't really played it or looked at the screenshots or whatever, where, THE ENTIRE GAME IS MADE UP OF ONE-WAY SINGLE TILE WIDTH CORRIDORS WHERE YOU CAN VERY EASILY BECOME COMPLETELY TRAPPED. So you die in this game, ALL the time, and sometimes it is completely impossible to avoid through no fault of your own, simply because the enemies decided to herd you around the level in a specific way.

Not only that, but it gets more absurd: the levels aren't just 'one' screen in this game. Oh no. No, they can be 'many' screens. The last level for instance isn't even the longest one, and it's about 4 or 5 screens. I was keeping track of one level I wanted to talk about, 24, but then it started to be more like I had 2 levels I wanted to specifically mention, then 3, then it was like the entire back HALF of the game is just an unending nightmare of completely unfair enemy placement, incredibly long levels, and levels made up of tedious gates within gates that you open to get keys to open other gates so you can open more gates.

The randomness in the enemy movements is one of the two things that completely destroys this game. All they needed to do was implement some rules for these enemies, and then have those be the challenge. For instance, imagine if sharks always turned left. Instead they just seem to do whatever they want, except if Freddi is within 3x3 tiles around them in which case they beeline her.

By the way, speaking of enemies, they are all completely unburdened by any of the stage hazards that affect Freddi. Of course, if you hit them with one of the boulders or rocks found in later stages, they do get flattened - temporarily. Yes, unbelievably, even if you hit an enemy with a hazard, THEY DON'T DIE. EVEN THOUGH ENEMIES ARE NEVER REQUIRED TO SOLVE ANY PUZZLES! You'd think they might have the tiniest bit of mercy, and just let you take enemies off the screen, but OH NO. THIS GAME is BEYOND HARDCORE for ABSOLUTELY NO REASON. I literally don't understand it at all.

The other thing that kills it, is the UNBELIEVABLY bad controls. I mean, you look at this game and you think, well it's probably not THAT bad, right? But it is. It's the worst. Freddi never ever stops moving basically except in very specific situations. There are even hazards in stages, that FORCE Freddi to move in specific directions, and these are everywhere, sometimes it just knocks you back, sometimes it forces you to move horizontally or vertically for a set amount of tiles, but either way, these forced moves combined with the fact you ALWAYS have to be moving and the completely incompetent AI of Freddi when you click in a direction, makes this game THE worst to control. It's insufferably infuriating.

When you click somewhere for Freddi to go, unless it's basically a completely open adjacent tile, you get NOTHING. Sometimes if you just didn't click nicely enough directly in the space you want to go, Freddi will completely turn around and just go the opposite way you want her to. It feels like playing an RTS where you control one soldier with extremely bad AI and incredibly unresponsive response times, because Freddi also does that thing where she kinda has to reach the next tile over before you can call her back, just like some other tile-based games from the 90s. Usually it's not something that kills you, but in this game it WILL kill you all the time.

There's no invulnerability states in this game basically ever, when it comes to animations. If an enemy ever comes into contact with Freddi's sprite, you lose a life. This is a big problem when it comes to using the portals in this game, because the animation for using the portal actually takes about a second to complete, and Freddi can actually die during that even though enemies otherwise have no interaction with portals, they don't go through portals or anything.

This game also has portals that take you to other portals on the same screen. These are just a nightmare to deal with, because as above, if you just clicked through one, and you're trying to exit it? If you click ANYWHERE but DIRECTLY on an adjacent space, Freddi just goes back through the portal, which in some cases could just literally kill you.

Though Freddi Fish and Luther's Maze Madness does have powerups, they're also THE worst, most miserly powerups I think I have ever seen. Not only do they last a truly incredibly short amount of time, the game only VERY rarely doles out any of them, and when it does, they often are placed somewhere optional, or, they are sometimes even put somewhere they just won't be of any use.

You can get a 'worm doodle' which is something from the other Freddi games, which gives you a speed boost for a short time. This might sound great, and it is on some levels, but many just involve having you sit there waiting for a wall to open up or whatever, so it's genenerally that helpful. There's the bubbles that you can blow to temporarily disable enemies for about 3 seconds, however, I still have no idea how to even activate them. It just seems like if you hold the mouse button down in the vicinity of Freddi, sometimes she shoots out bubbles in a direction, it's completely unreliable to even use, let alone hit enemies because they only go in a straight line, and as mentioned, the duration is so bad you only get a few seconds to swim past.

Then finally there's the 'big bubble'. This is different to the bubbles, because this one is basically like the power pellet from Pac Man. While you have it, enemies you touch get flattened. They don't die, or anything, they just get back up a few seconds later, and these are so scarce I think I only got to use it like 3 times over 50 levels.

The marketing on the store page also lies. It says 'over 50 maze-crazed caverns to explore' except there's only 50 levels in this game.

I don't think I have anything positive to say about this game, I pretty much hated every moment of playing it.

Firstly, I want to call attention to the fact that the store page LIES? It says, 'Over 100 levels of hound-hopping fun'. This is a lie. There are ONLY 100 levels in this game. I know because I just beat this stupid thing. I got to level 100, Putt-Putt announced it was 'level 100, wowie zowie' and then I beat it, and the game ends with an inexplicable cutscene that has nothing to do with anything that happens in the game.

Anyway, so this game, Putt-Putt® and Pep's Dog on a Stick, is one of the worst games I have ever played. Again! I come to you now fresh off Putt-Putt® and Pep's Balloon-o-Rama, which was also one of the worst games I have ever played.

This game, however, is much worse.

So the basic gameplay is just, unbelievably, Q*bert. It's Q*bert! You get put on a bunch of floating cubes in space basically, with an isometric camera, and you use the MOUSE to aim where you want to go, and you just click where you want to go, to hop around on these cubes. Wow. I was honestly stunned beyond belief when I saw that this is what they had come up with, but to actually play it is another thing entirely. I'm basically done talking about the gameplay because that's it, it's just awful.

What makes this the worst game ever is that there are enemies in it, sometimes TONS of enemies. There's pretty few enemy types, because many are just the same sort of deal, which is 'guy that hops between platforms like you' and a few of them have an extra gimmick, like pigs can fly (ha ha ha) so they ignore all tiles and just fly on empty space if they want, skunks leave behind bad smells that I guess probably kill you if you touch them, but all enemies instantly take a life on contact.

Oh yeah that is worth mentioning by the way. You die in ONE HIT. You get 3 lives, if you lose all of them you are booted back to the level select. That might sound like not the strictest thing but it makes actually finishing some stages a genuine pain. Most stages in fact, are a pain. I managed to breeze through this game in the span of 2 hours apparently, and let me tell you I was engaged during it, but it was the worst kind of engagement where I was angry the whole time because every stage is a test of your patience.

You might think looking at this game, and with the history of other Humongous games, that it's probably some sort of puzzle game and WRONG, SO WRONG. For some reason like 95 out of 100 of these stages are ALL action stages, very very few stages in this game actually rely on you to solve some kind of a puzzle, they tried to integrate 'puzzle elements' into some of the later action stages when the game was meant to get 'challenging' by just having buttons that reveal where the exit is (usually on the opposite side of the stage as far away from you as possible) but because enemy movement is random, sometimes you can just let the enemy do that for you.

Oh, and yes enemy movement and what they choose to do is random. This means sometimes you sit there and enemies just literally don't do anything to you, and some other times they will pretty much instantly beeline straight for you and sit on you until you lose all your lives. There are occasions too, because these levels are INCREDIBLY cramped, all of them, that enemies will actually either camp out on a path you have to take, or on top of the goal, or just AROUND it, or a button you want to press - by the way, enemies can press buttons, which is just great because this could do anything from killing you, to killing another different enemy, to just wasting your time because they turned off the goal tile and it's just gone now so you either have to go all the way back there to press it OR you wait for them to do it again for you!

Some enemies by the way, like the frogs, just don't even play by the same rules. Frogs can hop up to 2 spaces at a time which is just great, because sometimes you might think you're safe then they just leap somewhere you really didn't want them to be and you're in trouble all of a sudden, and there's NOTHING you can do about it. There's also the porcupines. I don't know if they are actually porcupines, but there's literal human-like bears in this game so I can't really call them bears. They, unlike other enemies, ALWAYS are hopping from tile to tile. Most enemies sit there on the tile for a moment just to think, which gives you time to get past. Porcupines, JUST. GO. They ALWAYS are moving from one tile to another, which makes them the most random and thus dangerous enemies in the game.

Which should be addressed - you get to be pretty much the weakest character ever in this game, which is just a great thing all children want to deal with. You die in one hit to everything, and there's no powerups in this game that I could find, except the hot chocolate, which just lets you move slightly faster - which in my opinion should have just been the default speed. You can also get the cape which turns you I guess into a very powerful dog that beats all enemies. However, you can still die if you fall off a ledge, and if you fall off a ledge you instantly lose your powerups and they DO NOT respawn unless you quit out and start the stage over.

Additionally, I don't know if they work on a timer or what, I never stuck around to see a powerup expire, but you can't carry powerups between stages in this game, unlike Balloon-o-Rama. This probably helps for the curated specially made levels in this game, for the sake of balance, but it's a hell of a lot less fun. This game also almost never actually puts powerups in levels, and, if they are even IN a level, you might have to go VERY far out of your way to even get it, to the point it's just not worth it! There's maybe one or two levels in the entire game where you NEED a powerup to progress and it is provided to you.

They seemingly had absolutely no ideas for this stupid game, because they only came up with like 4 different types of blocks, one kicks you to the next tile in the direction you are facing (oil slicks), one catapults you two tiles ahead which describes either the trampolines or the weird magic star platforms that force you to jump 2 tiles at a time for 3 turns, another is the portals that teleport you to another portal somewhere on the map, and then there's the kaizo blocks.

The trampolines and 'weird magic star platforms' are pretty self-explanatory. However, the others are worthy of mentioning for how bad they are.

Portals are random. Except one or two stages where they are not random. There's then again one or two stages where they are fixed, and you'll never really know which it is until you've gone through a couple. Portals take you to another portal somewhere else. They are just awful. I hated dealing with them. I don't know what else to say, except either you should never have random portals in your game if you really have to do this, it was a big problem in Sock Works where chutes randomly sent socks around the map and at a random output and it's a problem here too.

This game also has kaizo blocks, and while for the most part they aren't too evil, they're just a vanishing block that you jump on that then reappears somewhere else, and you usually just need to hop across one, stage 98 deserves special mention for being a stage that is ALL kaizo blocks. I literally could not believe what I was seeing.

You straight up have to do a Megaman style 'hop across all these vanishing platforms, jumping as it disappears onto the new platform appearing now beneath your feet' and do it perfectly all the way through, or you go all the way back to the beginning of the stage because you fell in the pit. It's unbelievably cruel. It is well past the point where this game completely gave up on being a children's game fortunately, so at that point I pretty much was prepared for it, but I was still just awestruck. stage and have to start over.

So yeah this game is a total bomb. The bonus stage sucks too. Would not recommend! To ANYONE! DON'T PLAY THIS JUNK!

Putt-Putt® and Pep's Balloon-o-Rama is one of the worst games I have ever played. This is one of the first and only games I think I have played where I genuinely was falling asleep while playing it, just because of how boring it is.

So basically it's like Arkanoid or Breakout. You shoot a ball and hit blocks, or balloons in this case, and break them. Break all of em and you win the stage. The catch is, once you fire the ball you have to keep bouncing it by moving your 'paddle' beneath the cursor under the ball to keep bouncing the ball bouncing around. If it touches the ground, game over. That's it. You get 3 lives to start, and an extra life at 1000, 2500, and 5000 points. That's it. If you lose all your lives, you have to restart the level, so it's not a great penalty but it resets your score.

There's a few powerups, but I think most of them actually are more harmful than good. Let me go through all of them here.

There's one which makes Putt-Putt, your paddle, a little longer. This means you theoretically have more paddle to hit the ball with. However, this game has stage hazards. Later on there's many many many stage hazards. Sometimes it's just things that lower your score, which is still annoying since you need score to get extra lives, sometimes it's a bucket or a bowling ball that disables you for a second or two, which is usually long enough to stall you so you drop the ball and lose a life. Long Putt-Putt just makes you weaker.

Then there's the hover boots for Pep, Putt-Putt's dog, aka the ball you're hitting here. The hover boots make it so every time Pep comes into contact with Putt-Putt he just hovers above you can you get the chance to fire him off again up into the air. This might sound useful, however there are many balloons in every stage that you can't get to by just your initial shot. So this powerup basically just wastes your time, and I never found a single instance where it felt useful.

There's the space helmet, which gives Pep low gravity when he's bouncing around the stage. This is somewhat useful, because it slows down your gameplay, and it does seem to allow Pep to bounce higher. You'd think this would basically be really useful for grabbing items and stuff when they fall - in actuality it really just changes the timing of grabbing stuff, it doesn't necessarily make it easier.

Then there's the cape. The cape is arguably the only unambiguously good powerup, because it lets Pep ghost through everything in the stage. This effectively turns him into a chainsaw where, once you have a good rally going you can just annihilate everything on the stage in a few arcing tosses while racking up huge points. So not only is it great, it's fun to use. Too bad like every other power up it's on a VERY short timer.

The thing about that is, powerups don't last until your next death or anything like that. Powerups only last a set amount of time. Interestingly, this can actually go between stages, so if you pick up a powerup in one stage, and move onto the next one quickly enough, you can have it in the next stage too. For a while.

This is one of the biggest things though that kills the game dead, and it's that every powerup is INCREDIBLY scarce. I think over 120 levels, all of which I played, I pretty much only had powerups for maybe 12-15 of those. It genuinely felt like I never ever saw them. But no.

So let's get into why this game is so bad.

First, the physics are just not very good. They're not fun to play with and it all feels weighted against the player, in terms of the fact that the ball rarely gets very long in the air.

It does not help that the stages aren't constructed for fun. There's no stage in this game, which you would expect, where you get to actually bounce the ball up to the top of the stage and watch as it bounces around on the top row of balloons. You'd THINK that'd be a stage in this game, right? Everyone knows that in Arkanoid, one of the most satisfying things you can do is to get the ball trapped at the top so it keeps bouncing around on the blocks and against the wall of the stage. This game, doesn't seem to understand that at all.

So the powerups suck and the stages aren't fun, what's worse than that? Why of course, incredibly annoying and tedious to deal with stage objects such as bumpers, that bump the ball back in the direction it came. There's also what I can only describe as spinning fans, if the ball touches them the balls gets sent in a random direction at a random velocity. This is about as much fun as it sounds.

And on top of that, there's also balloons carrying buckets. Buckets are COMPLETELY indestructible, you have to pop a balloon somewhere above the bucket, which means you have to approach that balloon from an angle. This is one of the most frustrating parts of maybe the last 20-30 levels of the game, but especially the last 10 or so, they start to REALLY overuse the buckets, to the point where there are several stages that are just wall-to-wall buckets with 1 or 2 very narrow gaps, and it's very nearly pixel-perfect to get the ball in there top pop the balloons carrying the buckets and begin to make any progress on the stage.

And all this in a game... for kids.

Somewhat like Pajama Sam Sock Works, this game pretty much completely gives up the pretense it was designed with kids in mind after a certain point, because it gets REALLY hard. I think they must have known that too, because, there's a cheats menu called 'junior helper' if you just hover the mouse at the bottom of the screen in the level select. 'Junior helper' seems very telling to me, because it probably means they realized late in production they made this game WAY too hard.

You'd think with a game like this, it'd probably be pretty easy, pretty fun, it'd have powerups every single level and every single one would just shower you in points. But no. For some reason, this game has the structure of an old arcade game, where you only get up to 3 extra lives from score, it actually tracks score, and your score resets on game over. It's bizarre to me, because this is obviously a game for your PC, it's made for very small children, and I literally can't fathom why they thought the levels should be designed the way they were. It's atrocious.

Even aside from the level design, just the utter tedium of sometimes just having to wait for the ball to bounce where you want it to go, is INCREDIBLY frustrating, the game's framerate and the general lack of responsiveness of the ball makes this game seriously sleep-inducing, and even the one one two quality music tracks in this game (low bitrate as they are) aren't enough to keep me interested. This game is, at times, exactly as exciting as watching grass grow.

I beat all 120 levels just because, I knew it wouldn't really be that long of a game and I was curious to see what else there might be to see later on, but there really wasn't anything interesting. I wouldn't recommend this game to anyone! Especially not kids.

Not too bad, but pales in comparison to the early Putt-Putt games, and the then contemporary Freddi Fish games it was seemingly competing with.

This really kinda delves more into fantasy than Freddi Fish, since it has the conceptual entity known as 'Darkness' as an actual character in the game, and Pajama Sam delves into a realm known as the Land of Darkness, wherein seemingly everything is alive and sentient. I think these ideas if done a different way, for an older demographic, they probably could be some sort of weird spooky horror game. But as it is, it's all pretty lighthearted stuff here, since it's for kids.

The structure of the game is like any of the other point and click adventure games by Humongous, this one however is a little bit lacking in my opinion, if only because you spend way too much time in the mines. There's a hub with three paths, and each of the three paths basically has several other branches further down the path, and this quickly gets a bit frustrating, and it leads to some lacking variety in backgrounds and visuals, which is a shame because I think the art in this game is... decent.

The backgrounds somewhat lack in detail, but I think it's because they're aiming for a 'comic book' type look, since Pajama Sam likes comic books (his favorite is Pajama Man). It's fine I guess, it looks better than the one Fatty Bear game they made, but I think the Freddi Fish games have a nicer look to them.

Anyway, because that's the structure of all these games (and a fine structure it is), you need to go find all of Sam's things. He needs his lunchbox, his flashlight (it takes two D batteries, you know) and his Pajama Man mask. Along the way you solve various puzzles. There's a lot of criss-crossing between each of the three branching paths, where you find an item in one place that you then need somewhere else, and vice versa. Fine enough structure for one of these games, but as I mentioned I just wish there was maybe 4 paths overall, and that they were each shorter.

By the way, as a side note, there are a couple locations where you can actually see other locations in the game from that location. For example, if you go all the way down the river, you find some rapids, then you enter a cave, and from that cave you can see up into the mines. If you then enter the mines and go down a specific rail, you then can see a brief background where you can see down into the cave. I think that kind of connection in the geography of the game was completely unnecessary, but it's great because it just goes to show they thought about where all of these things were in relation to one another. They didn't HAVE to do that, but I thought it was neat.

This kinda goes out the window, once you enter the weird room where every wall is a bunch of doors and doorknobs that clearly don't align with any real space, but... hey, still better than Dark Souls 2's Iron Keep elevator. In this case, it's clearly some sort of magic, given Darkness appears to be an alchemist of some kind. It's perfectly acceptable.

This is also the first Humongous game to include a collectathon. Sam lost his socks in the Land of Darkness, so it's your job to click on all 20 of them. They are scattered around pretty randomly, and some in very rude locations. For instance, while in the mines, there are several screens that you don't get to linger on, as part of a Humongous trope you basically are steering Sam down several different paths and thus you only get a few seconds to decide, but this means that since you also want all the socks for the 100% completionist true ending, you're going to have to go down all the different paths over and over again combing the screen for any hint of a sock, and some blend in REALLY well.

For instance, at least on this playthrough, all the 'red' socks I needed to find were in the mines, an area predominantly glowing with hot, warm hues like orane and red and yellow.

I think too, with the story, it pretty much goes exactly as you'd probably expect from a children's game, so that felt a little trite to me. I think it's a fine thing for kids though, since the entire point of the game is in the title there, 'don't be afraid of the dark'. That's perfectly fine messaging for kids, it's a simple message, and since all these games are designed to be replayed, you get reinforcement from that. In this way, you could even say it's one of the most effective humongous games, since it has one clear idea that goes a little beyond just simple edutainment.

Also, this game has one of the worst minigames they've ever included in a Humongous game, and one of the best. It has tic-tac-toe, aka cheese & crackers, which is just AWFUL, and it has 'Nuggets' aka the remote mining terminal, aka Snake. And Nuggets is pretty good. It has decent little graphics, it has what seems like actually designed stages and a fair few of them (I only beat the first 10 or so) and even though the controls are a little weird and tied to the frame rate in a strange way, it didn't hamper my enjoyment once I got used to them.

So, overall 'Pajama Sam 1' is an alright game, but if it were 1996 and I had to pick between this, and Freddi Fish 2 which released the same year, I'd pick Freddi Fish 2.

While I have basically a glowing opinion of many of the other Humongous titles, this one is a little iffy.

By the way, I am gonna assume most people who played this, didn't care to sit there and play all 100 levels. But I did. I played all of them.

So it's a puzzle game, ostensibly made for kids. While the first few stages are not too difficult, and they do the basic sort of thing a lot of games do where they have a few stages that just exist to show you what all the parts do one by one, this game I think gets started very quickly with just throwing every single mechanic at you, and that's not such a great experience. I will say though, even though there's 100 stages, I never really got bored or felt like I was just doing the same thing over and over.

You need to put the right colored sock in the right basket. The socks always are moving, either on conveyor belts or on chutes like you'd see at the airport (this game was built out of a minigame for an airport game Humongous made) so unless you can get the sock stuck somewhere between two belts, or confined somehow, you are ALWAYS juggling socks and this is where much of the difficulty comes in, because there are many stages later on where you might need to keep an eye on 2, 3 or even 4 socks all at once in every corner of the screen and their direction.

In my opinion, the game is probably way, way, way too hard for the ages this game seems to be aimed at. Because, while you might look at it and go 'oh well how hard can it be' and the first few stages are just free, like you don't even have to do anything, once you hit level 20 or so, the gloves are off and the rest of the stages generally required me to pause the game just to see what was going on before actually planning out routes for all the socks to get where they needed to go. There were some stages that required me to actually try multiple times, and one stage in particular (level 85) is just evil.

The game has some problems with its design.

For instance, chutes can output socks pretty much in any direction, which... I think was probably not intended by the devs, not explained to the people designing levels, and some levels probably had to be patched up during testing or something like that hastily and weren't just ripped out or redone or anything, which is a shame. It does, however, make some levels like 85 significantly harder than they otherwise should be. This also means that it's RNG sometimes whether or not a sock goes down the right chute, if there are multiple copies of that chute on the stage. For instance, there's 5 chutes labelled with a 'star' so, if a red sock goes down it, the sock could come out from any of the other 4 chutes.

This was however used to great effect on some stages to basically confuse the everloving daylights out of the player, so clearly some level designers knew about it and made use of it, and some didn't. It seems very apparent to me that this is the case, anyway.

I'm just going to label the conveyor belts, the chutes, the weird flippers and other puzzle elements collectively as 'blocks' here. I think that the variety of blocks is good. I think that there's enough variety there without it being too many to remember how to deal with each one, or too few. I think though, that the game might have been better off if broken into chapters, with each one sort of bringing in one block that starts off very simple, and then is expanded on and done more and more advanced until you get to the last one which is a big challenge with advanced concepts for that block. Then you could start again with another block, and go like that, including older mechanics until you get to the last chapter or few chapters which then start using everything together.

This might have been more kid-friendly too. As it is, I would suggest you keep children far away from this because this reminded me of Factorio more than anything. With the arrows scrolling on conveyor belt, blue belts, red belts, even the weird spring machines that kinda look like a splitter or something, yeah, I weirdly felt like I was trying to route belts in Factorio.

Anyway, I think I still would recommend it, but only barely. The concept is interesting, the execution is so-so, but I still managed to beat it and it didn't really feel like a chore, I did actively want to keep playing and I enjoyed seeing just how far the game went, and the fact that it kept challenging me actually did keep me engaged even though there were one or two frustrating levels in there.