Recent reviews by jollymaxxer ori

Ghostlore is a fun quick game to play, casual diablo-like where you can get overpowered pretty early. It took me 8 hours to beat the whole game, id say wait for a discount maybe, its definately worth the time i spent (even if the last level is a bit on the long side)

Please knock on my door is a fantasic game that portaits the very real effects of depression on day to day life, and how mental struggles manifest physioligically, mainly by seeing seemingly trivial tasks eventually requiring herculean effort to accomplish.

I very much empathise with the person who thought about this game, because it looks and feels very realistic. From the "shower" eventually becoming "confort" to "embrace", to games becoming timewaste and numb, to prevent the MC from thinking. My personal favourite was how the mind would eventually start gaslighting itself by saying the twisted choices of the MC were right all along.

However I do find a few pitfalls in the overall thinking of said MC. My main disagreement is the conflict between the MC's solution. His solution is to make more friends, socialise and maybe find a partner, but he goes back and forth between this and wanting isolation. A similar game, depression quest, talks about the same thing, but there, the solution is always the same, the MC wanting to socialise, but the parameter is whether he can or cannot based on mental fortitude. The difference is that here, the MC cannot decide whether he wants connection or isolation. He also goes about blindly flaggelating himself by thinking he's useless even though he was told he was doing ok by his colleague. I am skeptical on this, because if the MC always self ruminates on how useless he is, and can't even think of a single good thing he's done, maybe he is right and should try to do something good.

I am also conficted on the ending. It looks like an outlook of depression from someone who has not been depressed themselves. While definately heartwarming, just because a friend came to take you for a bbq, having a good time doesn't mean depression will go away. In fact one could would assume the opposite effect, by making the MC feel even lonelier because no one can understand and no one would know about his struggles (he even mentions on bottling in his emotions).
A tangent on the ending. I got the evicted ending, where near the end you are told to overdose. I obviously didn't, and went to reply to the knock on the door. Apparently moving in this sequence makes the character panic, so you have to stand still and wait for the character to walk to the door on his own. Even after braindstorming I genuinely have no idea what the intended metaphor to this was. The closest I came to was that you cannot force the MC to go open the door, but he has to go open it on his own accord.



Unfortunately, this scenario, even if it is not perfectly realistic, represents a very much real side effect of modern society, of hyper individualisation at the cost of community, resulting to many scenarios similar to this. Optimism is good in these scenarios, but we must remember that depression is a war, and a single battle won will not make it magically go away.

Even though I have my fair share of criticisms, it is undoubtable that the developers put real soul into this game, from the menu asking you to take responsibility to the downright realism of the scenario, even if its not 100% perfect, it is good. Game felt a bit short and definately could be longer, but I digress. I 100% recommend it on a sale!

A unique game that (i think) satirises the meaninglessness of office work. From the identical scenery all throughout, to the pseudo psychotic messages on the computers, to random and pointless tasks, and lastly to the satirical fail states when you do something the company doesn't like.

My favourite bit that emphasises this is during 1 room where you are in a blackout, and suddenly see the people around you, walk around and see a tree, it was like a breath of fresh air, i go towards it and then the power is back and you are plopped back into the dull office space.
I can also appreciate the polish the dev put into the game, the ui looks and sounds very smooth.

I am uncertain whether I can define the game as "fun", it was definately a unique experience.

While everyone is out here bashing credit card companies for censoring games, I find the bright side in this phenomenon and beamline to anything they want gone, since if they hate it there's a pretty good chance your average normal person will like it.

In my opinion the game is more horror themed than psychological horror. Most of the [redacted] story bits are implied, which I had to search for an explanation to grasp the full picture. I did get bothered a bit by the jumpscares, since I assumed this game was strictly psychological horror, thus I assumed they would rely more on scaring you via the story instead of startles, or walking in pitch black hallways. Alas they weren't that bad.

The theme and atmosphere are great, with the assymetrical time jumps before and after the crash

In the worlds of an anon: "Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable". I think Mouthwashing succeeds in such a poetic way where you could attribute the push for censorship as a manifestation of this phrase.

A great short story that definitely brought out the detective in me to figure out the story. The UI was great and was a pleasure to use and the story was very good, however I got quite subverted as the plot twists slightly confused me at the end.

Most of my confusion happened for the following;
1. UI, while it looked great, a zoom out feature would greatly improve the experience. Trying to organise all that text without being able to zoom was quite hard.
2. Most names are in Korean, I'm not Korean, so following / connecting names was very challenging, (skill issue on my end)
3. on endings; The 2 endings are completely disconnected from each other, with the special ending invalidating the original, since it flips it around and changes who both characters are. That's why I'd suggest only seeing 1 ending, if you're not a completionist, I think the regular ending is better.
4. on story; The story talks about how missing children are connected with the same name, subverting you near the end and realising the culprit was actually the victim, with there being 2 daughters with the same name, with the plot twist being that the girl missing is actually unharmed comes at like 95% of the story completion. I am struggling so much to explain it because I had a very tough time following names.

In essence The story starts with you interviewing a father on his missing daughter and the teacher who confesses quite early to kidnapping her, and then at like 95% of the story finished you learn that the daughter we're trying to find is brought back safe and sound.

There is a lot of soul put into this game, I can definately see that, from the UI to the depth the story has, so I definately still recommend it for the unique story that is presented brilliantly.

A short game about a brother going through his rampaged home to find his sister. Fluid combat and 2D platforming with gorgeous visuals.

Took me 2 hours to beat. Definitely recommend. Great value if you get it on a deep discount.

Short review; AI limit is a fantastic souls-like with Bloodborne combat, Dark Souls magic and bosses in a futuristic post apocalyptic coating. If you like souls-likes this is a blind recommendation that will definitely scratch your souls itch. We don't have Bloodborne on PC yet but this is damn close.

It took me ~31hrs to beat the main game, being thorough with finding collectibles and beating all the hidden bosses.
It is quite evident that AI limit has taken a lot of inspiration from the Dark Souls series and Bloodborne, in some aspects its a bit too similar...

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The main innovation in AI Limit is the sync bar, a masterful execution that combines attack power, magic and a stun meter all in a single bar. In short, your sync bar (0-100%) has colors, higher bar color = more attack damage. Attack enemies and your sync bar goes up, get hit and it goes down. You also use sync to cast spells and weapon skills. If the bar drops below the grey zone (default threshold 50%), your attack power is decreased and you cannot cast spells/skills until your sync bar goes above the threshold. If it drops to 0% you're stunned for what feels like a decade and then it replenishes to 50%.

How this plays out is you spam attacks to get your sync up, and when you're high enough on sync you cast a few skills here n there to get some extra damage, maybe a spell to stunlock or a skill that covers your weapon with an element.

Combat is quite similar to bloodborne, no stamina, lots of quick dashes. You also have a spell frame arm, that has 4 abilities. The most important is the parry, by far the strongest skill, that has a low commitment with a very forgiving timing. Definately the intended way to play.

You can also swap weapons mid combat, to extend your stunlock combo which is quite useful, I used it quite a bit.

There are some great QOL given to the player that improve the whole experience. You want to know if you have enough crystals for a level up? The icon glows when you have enough bro. Want to teleport back to a branch? Here's an item that lets you do that for free bro. Want to respec and try out different builds? Here is a crystal that allows you to respec as many times as you want for free bro. Even though these are very minor additions they add a LOT to the experience, and reduce tedium.

AI Limit takes a rare to the genre generous approach to give the player a story without being cryptic or beating around the bush. There is ample dialogue between the people you encounter. You're a blader, an immortal warrior that conveniently has amnesia and has to go through the world whilst regaining their memories. In the journey you meet 4 different groups of people, humans, doing their best to survive, the necros and the church, stuck in a perpetual power struggle, and bladers, trying to find their way to their world each following their mission.

I also genuinely love how interconnected the NPCs are, mostly on how people are connected around Ursula. Millaire being in the trailblazers with her, Delpha being her partner, and then you fight her because Adrammelech deceived her and got mind controlled to fight you.

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Honestly my biggest disappointment with the game, because the potential for the magic system here is HUGE. I really enjoyed using spells to the point where I respecced into a spirit build after 40% of the game until the end, the spells look flashy and are fun to use. Unfortunately the magic system is not properly thought through, for the following reasons;

1. UI; You can only equip 1 spell at a time, and if you want to change, you have to pause, go to your spell bar, and scroll to find the spell you want to use. Absolute nightmare if you want to use more than 1 spell.
   
2. Spells cost way too much; Even using seals that have a grey zone at 40%, thats barely 2 mid game spells until you're in the grey zone and have to go melee to recharge.
   
3. There are only 5/32 weapons with spirit scaling, with only 2 worth using.

This leads to magic feeling underwhelming for everyone. Non magic users will never use them, and for spirit users the system is too clunky and expensive.

I can think of 2 ways to fix this.

1. Make a main seal for spell casters, add a scaling -10% spell sync cost, example -10%/-10.5%/-11%/-11.5%/-12%/-12.5%.
   
2. Add a flat sync cost reduction per spirit level. At 0.5% sync reduction per point, with 50 spirit that's -25% sync per spell. To keep it balanced you can make this affect spells only, not weapon skills.
   Both of these combined, you get a 37.5% spell reduction, which isn't too overpowered, giving people the option of a caster fighter type playstyle. Sadly with the current system you have too little sync to make a magic focused build viable. Shame because magic in this game is very fun, I definately recommend trying it after you get the sword holy ritual.

Elden Ring paving the future of how souls-likes enemies are made, and it cannot be more evident here. You don't get better by learning/mastering mechanics, but by memorising movesets, or more accurately, timings. There are a LOT of delayed snap attacks, and it gets progressively worse as you go into the endgame, for no apparent reason. Such as, "Aha, my ultra super charged attack, that I jump up and will swing now, but actually I will feign and hold my sword in the air for 0.5 seconds for no discernible reason rather than to screw up your dodge/parry timing, I'm so cool and quirky, don't you love difficulty?" Thankfully the forgiving parry + infinite stamina alleviates a lot of this BS. It is VERY infuriating when some attacks are so fast you cannot sight read it, and the ONLY way to react is to know the exact timing.

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1. The parry and "fatal attack" are excellent, they sound and look great. There is only 1 fatal attack, both for backstabs and parry counters, and its excellent. It is also indicated when you can do a fatal attack which adds clarity.
   
2. Music is kind of a miss here, at best considered a somewhat moody ambiance, nothing close to the peaks of Nier or Dark Souls.
   
3. A lot of text is not centrered, when you level up etc, AAAAAAAAAAAA
   
4. I have seen people mentioning how plagiarised the game is from other games, and I do see it, the first boss being literally artorias, the healing animation is almost copy paste from bloodborne, and many movesets from dark souls 3. I can assume there's more I missed but I personally didn't mind. The game is fun and it looks good, that's what matters to me.
   
5. I get that the game is souls inspired, but why did they also include the features most players don't like, like poison swamps and 0/10 long parkour sections...
   
6. Parry costing sync is a bit cringe, the seal that makes it cost 0 comes too late to matter. I'm neutral on this, i'd assume it was made like this to avoid parry spam strategies. Even when I got the seal I barely used it exactly because of parry spam, it incentivises sloppy play which doesn't feel that rewarding. Meh.
   
7. 4/32 weapons have an S scaling
   
8. no steam badges :(

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AI Limit is a thoroughly enjoyable souls-like with great combat mechanics, awesome looking skills, albeit somewhat uncomfortable to use at parts, that make even random enemy encounters a joy to fight through. The story is good enough and explained well to keep you interested, an outlier in this genre. I would honestly want to see more blader duels, since those were probably the most fun I've had with the game. If you want super fair and sight-readable attacks, this ain't the game, or more accurately, this ain't the genre anymore.

A short and beautiful short story on how life has tough choices for all of us.

Empty Shell, A gorgeous shell that is sadly quite indeed empty.

This game looked very interesting so I figured I'd give it a purchase and try it, and honestly I am conflicted, unsure and eventually disappointed with what the game tries to achieve.

- One of the most immersive and well designed UIs I've seen in a while, its stellar for the theme, honest 10/10
- Interesting view, graphics match the tone of the game well
- Shooting/inventory looks inspired by Signalis, and its fine, works okay
- Adding notes on the map is a very nice touch
- Using the terminal on the PCs looks incredibly well themed, albeit I didn't find any use on it on my playthrough besides adding some light irrelevant details on the environment
- Buying specific shields only after you finish a level is an interesting way to progress besides buying guns or ammo
- Few interesting puzzles, not too complex, simple and good
- The steam badges look really good

My main 2 issues are on story and difficulty.

Story
I get that the point of the story is to be light on details to keep you guessing, "super secret facility" and all that, but its a bit too light for me, it doesn't give you any reason to care besides "scary secret facility doing evil experiments because yes". Most of the story is teased via mostly irrelevant document snippets, which would be great IF there was a solid story behind it, with the snippets adding flavour/depth to the world, but with just the snippets alone its just not enough. Teasing barely 5% of the story via documents, and all you have to go with is "follow instructions X from people Y to do Z because you just have to", makes it really hard for me to care. Furthermore, there isn't any definite goal besides "go do X whilst killing anything that moves"

Difficulty
I honestly found the game quite hard even on normal, with a weird balance of difficulty being that small enemies get wiped out in 1 melee hit but then slightly bigger enemies/bosses being damage sponges that do a ton of dmg and take multiple mags to kill. Sadly its yet another "higher difficulty = enemies get +dmg and +hp" system, very boring, they could have made enemies slightly faster, or add more enemies, or later stage enemies appear in earlier stages. shame

- The game calls itself a roguelike with each run being a new character with a random selection of 1 weapon and 1 melee weapon, running the same level, which honestly I consider a joke, considering a single run took me over 4 hours to reach what I'd assume to be the HALFWAY point by looking at achievements.
- The only roguelite elements present is when you die you might find your old corpse in the level with some stuff you dropped to loot, and the fact that you restart on whichever level you last died on, everything else is roguelike.
- Due to difficulty the roguelike gameplay is a bit of a hassle, as when you do restart the same level, the generation is actually different, but at least I can find my old corpse and loot some stuff which is a neat touch, so I guess -1 & +1 = 0
- Character looks like a 32x32 when hes walking, but looks way more detailed when sprinting?
- Perhaps wrong expectations, but the game is a bit floaty, was expecting more snappy movement, there's some drift in character movement, if that was their intent I guess I'm fine with it
- Multiple mentions of people being alive and hiding in documents, yet not a single friendly on sight
- Money system gives you options to buy upgrades, albeit a bit limited, not many miscellaneous items besides health kits, ammo and the occasional gadget, impactful items come way later on and cost a lot, and if you don't play very effective that money is going towards health kits


I really wanted to finish the game, willing to see if it gets better, but after being in the "activate the lasers" level, activating the 2 batteries, the door locking behind me and getting flooded by 20 enemies that spawned instantly, killing me, I kinda gave up on trying to push through for the gameplay since there is no story anyways.

Empty Shell is a game with a stellar UI and a good atmosphere, with no main story and a roguelike experience that is too long paired with a surprisingly hard difficulty making for an unpleasant experience. There's simply just too much story missing for me to care.

A fantastic roguelike with very fluid and snappy combat, great graphics/sound design, with a very fair difficulty and many creative options to increase it further that's not just "more enemies", great passives and showdowns, all of them feel great to use.

I'd say my 2 favourite bits about the game were the curse that had faster enemy spawns + enemy team damage and the passive that made you reload faster with an empty mag, which synergised great with mag type pistols.

I only have 2 minor gripes with the game.
1. The first boss communicates way too poorly on how to beat him. It took me about 4 hours to realise you have to shoot the blue birds, I would just mag dump him hoping he'd get stunned, the latter 2 bosses do this incredibly better. Could make the blue birds protrude a bit from the rest so its better communicated, very easy fix.
2. The more complex enemy types are seen very little, they are only seen if you reach 600+ kills, or when you use the final pistol, which is a lot of wasted potential imo.

I would 100% recommend this game for the short, snappy and greatly detailed gameplay.