Recent reviews by pplude

New World is an ambitious non-tab-targeting PVP-focused MMO that got just about everything wrong, with a worse development team around it.

AWS used their Alpha and Beta tests as QA for a long time. Basically ignored 90% of our reports, released with incomplete main story and broken major features. The issue with Outpost rush is instancing servers not being spun up or down in time. That's an AWS infrastructure problem. Something that's 100% in their control. They changed how servers worked from beta to release, and it broke a lot of stuff. Because there's no sense of change control.

They don't have a PTR or a large QA team to catch these sorts of things. They're trying to just throw more devs at the problem, which isn't always the proper answer. At this stage in the release, it's almost certainly the wrong way to do it. On top of that, they're having the devs handle community management, which is also taking away more time from dev/qa work.

So what's happening is it's the blind leading the blind. There's little prioritization of tasks, and it looks like devs are stepping over each other in the confusion. There's a scramble to fix known issues, but nobody herding the cats.

The latest update has introduced a remote code execution via the chatbox. This game is officially a security concern, and I've requested a refund. I can't in good faith recommend this game to anyone. It's literally dangerous to run at this point, and AGS has proven themselves to be incapable of fixing minor issues without creating new major ones.

This game really shines once you check out Spin Share - the semi-official user-submitted tracks. Starts up fast too, which is nice for the "I have 4 mins to play this before my next meeting" kinda people. I've played this with a few control schemes and here's my thoughts:

Mouse Keyboard: meh, it works
Thumb Trackball: Better than standard mouse, but barely
Hand Trackball: HECK YES. Outside of a DJ turntable, this is where it's AT
PS4 Controller: The assist is overtuned, you'll never do XD difficulty on it, but it's fine for casual play.

Also, as a blue colorblind person - thank you devs for putting AN ACTUAL COLOR BLIND MODE IN! You can change the colors og about everything. The pink/purple/redish color and the blue aren't great for my eyes, contrast wise, while moving, so it's now red and yellow on my game, and it helped out a ton.

Pleasantly surprised about this one. It's short, sure, but the story is compelling, and there are some unique narrative quirks, for example, when Jack is writing in the dark. I've been reading about people's confusion about who killed the dog and the perfect ending, here's my thoughts:

Anna killed the dog. That's the only way she would have known she was a wolf too. With how possessive she was of Jack, and how much it's alluded to that Jack loved the dog, she killed the dog so that Jack would only see her. As for the perfect ending - it's a dream, right as Jack's dying. He killed himself. He did actually love both girls, and in his dying vision, he sees them happy. How can you tell? Grace has no marks and her teeth back, and Anna doesn't want to kill her.

Now, for the characters. They did a great job setting up Anna as a creepy angel of death type figure, but it got oh so much worse as time went on. Grace is best girl, and that's a hill I will die on even if wanting to stab Anna was out of character a bit. . They could have done without that mentioned plot point entirely, and the game still makes sense. Not sure why it's in there at all.

That said, I'd recommend if you have a couple hours to burn, pick this up. There's a lot of comparisons to DDLC and other VNs, and in respect to DDLC (the free horror VN), DDLC went for a lot of shock horror, but this one was just creepy, in the best possible way. There's actually a mystery about this one, and Jack doesn't play the backseat "I have no memories" MC forever. He grows a spine and does something - and it's both terrible and great.

Great first showing from this VN author, and I look forward to seeing what they come out with next. Sure, a few more choices along the way would have been nice, but the choices allowed (all at the very end) are hugely significant, and most make immediate sense to Jack's character - except the perfect ending, but I addressed that above.

New Game + has no achievements.
No sync with mobile.

It was OK. 2/10