Recent reviews by Ɛ Θuıȷα 3

came for the purge event, stayed for the bathroom

strikes that perfect balance of puzzle difficulty where you feel like a genius for solving something and then immediately feel like an idiot for not solving it sooner

idk what y'all are on about. this game unironically ♥♥♥♥♥

if lethal company was a movement shooter but without the shooting

australian beat dropped so hard the cats found me instead

you have no excuse not to play this game

looks nice, but that's about it. poor optimization, no keybind options, and a really unintuitive pause menu that makes you click through things multiple times to get them to work. there's barely any audio feedback for anything, including walking. and the mouse sensitivity is frustratingly slow. there are no settings for either.

the presentation is admittedly impressive, but as soon as you hit start, it pretty much instantly devolves into your average tropes. after being hit with the most poorly-translated intro text known to man, it throws you right into your standard linear hallway sequence where the monster crosses an intersection in front of you and vanishes when you try to follow it. after opening the only door that can be interacted with, you solve a rudimentary puzzle, and then you get chased in a straight line until it's revealed it was just a dream.

then you get to the titular island, and you interact with the first npc. this is where i threw in the towel, and where you most likely will as well.

honestly, i wouldn't be faulting the devs for the design or technical issues were it not for the final nail in the coffin: the store page does not disclose the use of AI voices and what i'm 99% sure is AI generated dialogue. like, it's comically bad. even if you're not a native english speaker, it's still not an excuse to use generative slop. hire actors, or don't have voiced characters at all. to be honest, i should've figured it out from the description on the store page, so that's on me.

basically, don't be fooled by the relatively low price, not even on sale. i really shouldn't have waited so long to play this, because otherwise i would've refunded it after five minutes. which, as you can see from my playtime, is the absolute most i was able to stomach.

avoid.

gotta beast em all

i want to recommend this game because it's an honest effort, but ultimately it's a boring experience at best and a frustrating one at worst. you can't be out in the cold for more than 30 seconds before your screen starts to distort, and you can only restore heat by backtracking all the way to your spawnpoint if you haven't yet completed one of the tedious and vague puzzles. (you can also heat back up with flares, but they only last about 15 seconds, and half of them can't be picked up anyway.)

on the topic of the puzzles, they mostly consist of slowly traveling back and forth between the same few locations while carrying a single object and hoping not to freeze to death along the way. you have an objective marker, but you can only use it when interacting with the place the object needs to be brought to, and it only lasts about 5 seconds so it's practically useless. placing and carrying objects in general is also clunky and unintuitive.

and then we get to the issue of the horror factor. the game gives you a gun at the start with only two bullets, but this doesn't matter because at no point during the majority of the game are you required to use it. the only time you ever need to shoot something is during the final (and only) fight, where a single monster attacks you in a tiny room. the game only provides you with enough ammo to do so in said room, which begs the question: why give the player the gun that early in the first place?

but even if these designs decision made sense, nothing would be able to compensate for how awful that brief moment of combat turns out to be. you can only shoot while aiming down sights, which takes far too long and slows you to a crawl. which wouldn't be so bad, if the gun's firing rate wasn't about 1 bullet per calendar year. this means that the intended way to defeat the monster is to run (walk) to the opposite side of the room, fire one or two shots if you're lucky, and hope you can exit the animation and move out of the way before you get slashed. which, again, wouldn't be so bad... if the monster didn't take 15 shots to die. so you'll eventually realize that the best way of dealing with it is to find the single place where the monster can't get you and fight it from there, which is on ground level because you can only shoot in a perfectly horizontal line.

i really want to like this, because it's not very expensive and has some good ideas. but, unfortunately, it's more likely to get on your nerves than scare you.

super fun game filled with lots of cute characters and a wonderful story about the power of friendship and imagination!