Recent reviews by Rine

A sequel to Coteries of New York, vastly improved in every way, the creators clearly having focused on what they were good at (writing a solid linear story). It even has a choice of endings, without playing at the blood/power usage options or multiple main characters. If anything it makes Coteries better in retrospect, but the problem is you have to play Coteries to get the full value out of it, and Coteries is still not a good game.

TL;DR: Coteries is a Visual novel where it starts off strong, but is completely deflated by the ending wrapping things up in all the wrong ways. At least its fairly short, but replaying through it just shows you how little choice you had in the matters. Full review below contains spoilers.

On a first play through, the game sells itself quite well for most of its runtime. You have two events per night you can do, sometimes taken up by a required task. You are told to gather up a coterie (allies), and there are four options all of whom have their own stories. There are three other optional stories as well, along with the main plot that advances no matter how your sidestories are going.

When you get to the ending though, it becomes abundantly clear absolutely nothing you did mattered. The allies you could have picked up? Show up in one scene before the final one to rescue you, then disappear. Did you complete the other side stories? Doesn't matter. Nothing you do in the final scene matters. Its a weirdly non-sequitar ending, zero lead up to it or any hinting. Just...dude shows up, says he's the real mastermind, you've met him once -maybe-, and he ends the story. His villain monologue is downright awful and makes zero sense. The ending literally could have cut to black before the final 'showdown' and I would have liked it about the same.

On replays, its clear everything matters even less. Other than just not getting a game over, nothing you really do in the game matters. Recruit no allies? Still get to the ending, zero real change. Be an obnoxious prick, try to buck the story, want to ally with one side or the other? Doesn't matter, no one asked you, as long as you don't get a straight up game over from blood you'll see the same ending. Which character you picked? Changes some optional power usage and which 'past life character' sidequest you get, but nothing else.

This game could have been made a kinetic novel, just told its stories one after the other, and you wouldn't have really lost anything.

TL;DR: An extremely short VN, very well written for what is there, but it ends right as it starts to really get going. Also lacking major QoL features for replays, such as save slots and auto-skips.

Normally I wait until I complete games, but I feel my overall thoughts on this game are unlikely to change as I occasionally try to tag the rest of the achievements.

Overall, a very solid visual novel...that stops before it actually goes anywhere. Its also lacking key features that make replaying it for the rest of the endings/options very annoying (No auto-skip, no saves).

So to get it out of the way first: Like I said, this game does not have two very important QoL features that are to be expected from visual novels.

You can not save to save slots. This means each playthrough is start to finish, no loading from a previous point. Fine for a game you intend to only ever play once...but this game is exceptionally short with a lot of stat-based variables.

No auto-skip. Yes, the game makes you pick a lot of options, that are somewhat automatic, but not even the feature to auto-scroll really quickly past scenes you've already seen before? Again, awful for a super short game you will want to replay.

The actual meat of the game is -really- good though. I legitimately enjoyed my first playthrough, was enjoying the story, kinda made me want to play Werewolf (The only WoD game I have played is old Demon). You follow your character who is investigating her connection to an old forest and its history, her family, etc. You meet activists who are fighting logging operations, and learn about the locals.

Spoilers Below

Eventually, obviously, your character finds out they are a werewolf, and are inducted into a tribe. The actions from before this point adjust your stats and relationships to characters, so some tribe choices will be unavailable, and your 'class' is auto picked from your highest stat. After that, you will get a trial, your choices again limiting / adding to which ones you can choose from. After your trial (pass or fail), you get one more scene...and then the game ends.

In a game about WtA...you spend 70% of the game leading up to becoming a werewolf, learn about werewolves, and then have maybe two scenes maximum where you are actually a werewolf making meaningful choices. They had a whole interface on which form to pick, but in the two playthroughs I did, I found there to be only one 'correct' choice.

And yes, I've played through it twice, because the first time I failed the test, and things finished with kind of a thud. I thought, okay, maybe there's more if you pass. It felt like the ending in some romance-themed VNs where you fail to pick a route and get a bad end. Second playthrough, full eco-terrorist, all sorts of new achievements unlocked for succeeding at things...same length of the game.

So, a visual novel where your choices determine your route, but the route itself is two scenes maximum? In comparison, this would be like in a romance VN if you got a character's route, had one scene with them, then a wrap up scene, and the game was over.

Full price, this game is ~15$, and it feels like half of a game, which is sad because the half of the game I did get was -great-. I wanted more, but not in the 'this was an awesome fulfilling experience', but in the 'you blue balled me on the rest of your werewolf game' sense.

TL;DR: A solid deck-builder rogue-like, but some flaws leave it not as solid or well-made as others in the genre. C+ in design, A+ in presentation.

Note, this review will compare Banners of Ruin to Slay The Spire in some mechanical aspects. If you want to know which is better, its Slay the Spire, go play that. If you're looking for something new, I'll be comparing the two so you know what to expect.

Banners of Ruin is foremost a -very- pretty game. The art is solid, the character models update for gear (including superior versions), the event and cinematic presentation along with music is very solid. The store screenshots if anything undersell it. I even loved some of the card art, along with how things were presented.

Mechanically, its clear they said they wanted to do something like Slay the Spire, but add some twists. Nothing they added was a bad idea, but a lot of the implementation was flawed.

Fundamentally, the biggest part they added to the formula is that this is a party based game. You start each run choosing two characters. In essence, you're just choosing which race of creature each spot is. The spots are always given the same gear (light armor + 2H sword, hatchet/shield + medium armor), you unlock more races as you go to give you more options. Further characters are acquired either through rare events, or just before each boss is an option to buy characters with currency. Notably, if a character dies it is gone for the rest of the run. It is best to think of the gear a character has as more akin to its 'role' in the party, and its race as what unique cards/passives it can bring, plus each race's unique power.

For example: Weasels, which carried most of my runs, are equally effective at tanking as a bear. Give a weasel a heavy armor and shield, and its a fine frontline combatant. The difference is in the racial power (weasel's can create 3 cards that cause damage/bleed, bears can cleanse debuffs and gain defense). A weasel will get more talents related to poison/bleed (talents are unique cards in your deck that only that character can use), while bears get some high damage or defense -> damage cards. The weapons each character carries are also effectively cards unique to them.

This starts to create problems. Most deck builders you want to make 'lean' decks, where you get your best cards more often. A lot of the best cards are weapon/talent cards. However, a few levels on each character, get near a full party, and upwards of 10 cards in your deck (two passives + 1-2 weapon cards per character, max 6 characters) are not shared, but need a character to use. Each character has their own mana to use, but since later characters are randomized in gear/talents, its -very- hard to purposely build a deck.

The game has the usual 'play more, unlock more' with regard to races and new cards/weapons/armor, but notably there isn't much of a rarity system. There are objectively better cards, but I found zero point in picking fights with elite enemies since they were just as likely to give me junk weapons/armor/cards as not.

If I'm so negative on the deck building aspect, why is it still a thumbs up? I did get a good solid and -fun- 10 or so runs before I beat the game. Once I beat it, 100%'ng all the achievements was just one more run with a purposely jank setup. After beating the game, it adds oaths (special challenges for more xp), specific challenges (unlock new cards unique to that challenge), and bounty hunters (new bosses for the 2nd act), along with what appeared to be new plot threads. There is a lot of content here, but I feel the lack of ways to purposely deck build inhibits the game in actually utilizing them. If I beat a challenge, I feel it would be a lot of RNG. As such, I finished it once, got all the achieves, don't feel the need to touch it again.

There is a solid 20 hour or so deckbuilder here, especially if the unique parts outweight the purity of the deckbuilding itself for you, but its maybe not a 20 dollar value. I'll amend my review if they start adding more solid things to do post game, but this is a solid C+ game overall. Not bad, not awful, above average mostly carried by the unique ideas and the aesthetics.

TL;DR: One of the truest conversions of a Call of Cthulhu-styled RPG to a CRPG format, great style and gameplay with some junk, but finishes at what feels like the halfway mark with a rush of remaining ideas.

With the caveat that I'm not actually sure the game uses any of the various Call of Cthulhu TTRPG rulesets, Stygian feels like the strongest adaptation of that kind of game to a CRPG format. The game is balanced that any sort of character you make could finish it, with lots of alternate methods to finishing puzzles, if not just skipping them.

Non-combat is very simple, skill checks to interact/get new conversation options, your typical conversation trees with quests. The game is very small, so you will travel back and forth over the same areas a few times, with new events that start quests here and there. Finishing quests, reading books and such gives tons of XP, and I played a non-combat skilled character (Occult, Speech, Science) and didn't feel at all like I had limited myself. A ton of options were solved by me being able to cast spells or take occult/science options, or be very talky.

Combat wise, its a classic AP system, with hexagon movement. Notably, sanity is another 'health' bar, used to cast spells, lost when out of combat or in combat events happen, sometimes usable to drive off certain enemies. Both sanity and health are healed by drugs, drink, or rest. Combat itself is notable in that you don't have to kill every enemy, you can get a 'progressive' win by doing enough damage and then reaching a certain tile. Doing this still nets you full xp, and the encounter being removed, but you have to combat loot any enemies.

Resting itself is a whole system, in its how you learn new spells, research relics (mystical artifacts with a positive and negative effect, which you only learn about with research), read books to recover sanity, or research new medical/science recipes. I often felt like I should have stopped the game for a bit and rested several times to learn more, but the game does limit you by requiring characters eat (and rest, but only a problem if you're far from a campfire/safe zone). In addition, chugging too much / taking too many drugs has addiction consequences, but lets face it, addicted to healing shots was the least of my problems.

The art and story design are perfect Lovecraftian. The story itself unlike other games isn't just mashing Innsmouth/Call of Cthulhu together, but is its own thing with other myths/legends/stories mixed in. I never felt like I got to a part and went 'Ok, here's where we play the entire plot of X story'. The art is beautiful, and while the animations are a little jank/puppety, they feel very in theme for the game.

On to the negatives: The game itself is a little jank. Clicking on boxes won't always work until you wiggle against them a while, right clicking to bring up the wheel isn't very strongly hinted at for some situations, and sometimes the interface stopped working and I had to alt-tab to make it revert. Nothing game ending, and only one crash to desktop (my pc is junk, so forgivable).

The biggest negative is half the game isn't there. You get to a 'no going back' point, with half of the prophecy you're supposed to fulfill undone and...its just a minecart ride to the end. The last major combat encounter is right before that point, anything else is entirely avoidable, and no skill checks are needed to finish the game after that. The only choices left are 'instant game over or get closer to the ending', and the final choice is 'which ending or instant game over' with no references to anything you've done, choices made, or skills acquired. The ending even says 'you have to do so much more before you get to...' and given the apparent development troubles, this clearly was a rushed job to get it out the door.

Still, overall I do reccomend it. If you want a solid translation of Lovecraftian work to a TTRPG, this is probably the best example. Its probably a 10-15 hour experience, first time through.

Completionist's notes: Beyond the normal stuff you get through the game, most achievements seem to be 'get all possible gameovers' 'max out all skills' 'get every possible' ending and all of that. Most of that does require multiple playthroughs, since some are choices at the start that aren't checked till the end.

TLDR: A 2d Zelda clone, with nothing to call its own and a sharp lack of polish. The only positive it has is its short, but even then I was annoyed and done with it before the hour was up.

I am befuddled by the amount of positive reviews for this game. It clearly wants to be Link's Awakening, but there is just nothing substantial here at all. Best reviewed in a list of the worst things about it:

-The overworld is needlessly large and barren. There are no enemies, 95% of the overworld map has literally nothing in it. Its needless padding to make walking between the five tiles with anything on it longer than it needs to be.

-Straight, linear game, no deviation or reason to replay. The only things you could miss are the health powerups, two of which are on the overworld, and the one 'joke' treasure chest that gave a single gold coin in the last dungeon, and only for those achievements.

-Each dungeon basically has two enemies in them, plus the ever-present bats. The combat is floaty, its hard to confidently swing and hit an enemy and not take a hit of your own. You get a shield, but it changes block directions when you move, so you can't use it well enough to matter. Most traps in dungeons are arrow traps, which is basically just 'you can't get the shield facing the right way, so just take a hit'. I -never- felt confident enough about my hitbox, and most of the time I was just chewing down healing items.

-You get tons of gold. There is one store to spend gold in, it has two healing items and arrows. You can not access this store between the second to last and last dungeon. I had 900 gold and would have -liked- to spend it on healing items, but nope.

-The last bossfight is him arrow spamming you with no way to block and still hit back, and you'll take 2-3 hits for every one you manage to land. They apparently decided to balance it by having waves of enemies that can drop a few healing items.

-There are way, way too many dark areas, and the lantern takes up one of two item slots. So can't lantern+shield+sword. Your weapons range is just slightly shorter than the light, so you will just walk into enemies or pits if you aren't inching around. Its extremely annoying.

In summary: No, pick something else.

TLDR: A very chill investigation game with no pressure to go about it one way or the other. Great music and overall story design means its a solid trip to either breeze through, or full on complete.

You definitely don't want to spoil too much for Paradise Killer, its a solid crime investigating game with the bonus of a great setting with a reason to limit your suspects to a very small pool, and a well done overworld. I never truly felt lost, or needed to consult a guide for the game, and you have a decent amount of agency in hunting down tips, exploring, getting collectibles, and how you prosecute the trial at the end. There are unlockable fast travel points and bonus powers that help finding everything if you are up to 100%'ng things like I am, and the only thing that requires a second playthrough is the speedrun achievement, which is also fairly easy (I did it first try, at a glance most do it second or third).

Fully recommend, hope to see more games like it.

TLDR: I 100%'d it, and I wish I could play more. A superb 3v3 monster raising game with a good metroidvania tacked on for traversal. Fully recommend, hope they make a sequel.

The best way to summarize Monster Sanctuary is to break it into its component parts. It is important to note though, every part of this game is well done. The story you can take or leave, its serviceable, but the amount of love and care put into descriptions of the monsters is enough to make up for it.

Metroidvania: The traversal mechanics are simple enough, with the uniqueness of most of your actual unlocks are monsters themselves. Sometimes this does mean you need to get a monster ability to progress, and that requires a few fights, but this is minimal. You do get a double jump, but most of the standard new mechanics are monster based. A monster will break walls, allow a glide, swim, burn vines, etc. The only negative here is I wish you could mark areas, as when finishing things up I would forget where the new ability I got could be used in older areas.

Monster Raising: Every monster has a skill tree. It isn't fully unique, a lot of skills are shared between monsters, but the exact layout and amount of abilities differs. There is enough difference and a hard cap on skill points that you could ostensibly build two monsters of the same type differently. In addition, there is gear, some with unique bonuses other than stats, and a later mechanic introduces a choice of two unique bonus options. Some of these are -major- and you build a team around them (Bleed stacks not going away for example, letting you stack up hundreds to slowly murder a defensive monster). Further in addition, if you make a mistake in a build, or want to change things out, there are items to reset skills, level up lower monsters and the like. I never felt like a bad choice locked me out of any potentials, and I could easily reconfigure my team. Lastly, every monster gets 1 of 3 unique 'ultimate' skills, which you can change between fights without an item. All of this adds up to a superb experience making unique teams and trying out new combinations.

Combat: The 3v3 style, along with the raising detailed above, means that you have a lot of opportunity for fun combat challenges. Some fights will be against one huge monster that acts multiple times, but often you will be facing a team of three. If it is an opponent trainer, you will 6v6, with three out at a time. Buffs and debuffs are very important, and some monsters are entirely built around healing when buffing, getting free buffs, spreading debuffs, super-stacking them, etc. You also heal to full after every fight, but there is a grading system based on buff/debuffs, rounds taken, damage, how 'efficient' you are that makes you want to do every fight well. The higher the grade, the better chance of getting rare items (including eggs for monsters to raise).

In summary, an amazing game, fully worth 100%'ng, and doesn't deserve to be compared to Pokemon. Its better.

TLDR: A very faithful rendition of the Pathfinder ruleset. Moment to moment gameplay is great, but how the game handles events and the sheer amount of major, important, missable things if you go too fast or too slow, or explore areas in the wrong order, make it unbearable to play blind.

I will basically just copy/paste my twitter thread, because I am too frustrated and angry to rewrite it into my normal format:

I have run into two things that I irrevocably missed because I...was too efficient at the game. Things that have permanently harmed my playthrough pretty strongly. It is really sad, because overall the moment to moment gameplay and the story/characters have evoked that feeling of a strong TTRPG. Its the things around the combat, the incentives and way it handles events, that ruins the whole thing.

Fundamentally, Pathfinder: Kingmaker pushes you to not waste time by constantly bringing up events that have deadlines. The first chapter is a deadline without your kingdom building, the second chapter introduces the kingdom part of it, but still with deadlines. If you've played the recent Personas, you know the deal. You have X days to solve a problem, and things will happen until it is solved. Not terrible on its own. The problem is what the game doesn't tell you...

This is that events will happen at some locations after a certain time...and if you've visited there already, there is no indication you should go back there. In addition, after a major event is resolved, some of those same events will not trigger anymore. So in summary, I visited a location earlier than intended, cleared it out, and thus when a party member's join event appeared there, I had no reason to go back. I then finished a major story event, and that character is forever lost.

Bonus fact: You need advisor's to fill special roles to raise your kingdom stats. This character was one of three economic advisors in the entire base game. The other can die very easily (and did in my game), and the third doesn't show up till way later. Economic advisors help you create more 'points' to spend on your kingdom...so I went for years with minimal income, because this role is hard to fill if you don't get the two very easily missable characters. So in order to avoid restarting and losing dozens of hours of progress on a playthrough I was otherwise enjoying, I did the dumb but still viable option: paid a ton of gold to get a custom NPC, that is ♥♥♥♥ at the job but can do it anyway.

Furthermore in the same googling I had been avoiding the entire time because I wanted a fresh, blind playthrough: I also missed another party member, because of the exact same reason. Missed event, finished the story without seeing it.

The final full breaking point was right after I figured that out, one of my characters pops an event, saying 'HEY! You haven't done my personal quest! I'm angry!' Her personal quest was 'find me a bigger thing to kill than last time' Trolls, hydras, poisonous doom hydras. Nope, she wants a specific creature to satisfy her quest. A specific creature that you...need to see an event to find out about. That event doesn't show up...after the same story event as the previous problem.

So yeah, I'm done. I wanted to play through a CRPG blind, figuring a modern game would be able to handle that. Nope, if you want to play Pathfinder: Kingmaker, you have to play with guide in hand or you can miss out on very important things, very often.

TL;DR: A game with no solid idea of what it wants to be. Too needy for an idle game, poor itemization, and very little to actually do in it to make it worth the time.

Above all else, SnS is a confused game. Not confusing, the base concepts are quite simple (equip adventurer with items, send them on auto-scrolling/fighting quest to collect loot, craft new items, repeat). However, it has a few things it wants to do, and does none of them well.

First of all, itemization is -very- poorly done. When you have one/two characters, it is quite simple. Craft an item, gather more stuff, craft second tier of the item, etc. Better stats mean you have a chance to craft higher grade gear, or get better random stats. However, after a few tiers, your options open up....and by that I mean like the big bang opened into the universe. You are thrown dozens and dozens of recipes for new items, no clear idea which will be better than each other. Worst of all, the random stats become more important, and an item you crafted three tiers ago with +basic stat x2 will be better than a modern epic item because it got frost resistance. You will get more recipes than you will -ever- need to craft, and half of the crafting you do is for money, not to actually equip. Most things you make are far, far worse despite all the time you spent getting the items.

The adventuring itself is....bad. It isn't engaging enough to require your full attention, but you can't just let them auto-run and come back an hour later. Every adventure you have to restart, click the heal, click the rest, click restart again. If you wait too long, they return home and you have to start them like new. You can't actually do much during the adventure to require you to pay attention, so its the worst of both worlds.

The fashion contests seems like it was supposed to be the thing that set this game apart, compete in contests with all these 100+ items we designed to show up on your characters! Except you can finish the fashion segment only halfway through the game, and bribe your way through every contest. There was never a reason to keep an item to meet a particular color/style, since I could sell it, and use the gold to bribe my way to winning a contest anyway.

Worst of all, the game has a main story that only lasts a decent amount of time due to the sheer grind to finish dungeons. There's only six areas + endless, and endless gives its last achievement at 50 and I saw no need to keep going. I 100%'d this game with 39 hours on steam, but that includes several days of leaving it on accidentally. 15 hours max if actually trying, if you could stomach paying attention that long.

Hard pass, not even worth it if free.