Recent reviews by DocTato

s n a i l

It's buggy, the controls are poor, everything looks low poly and not in a PS1 nostalgia kind of way, the story is generic "uh oh we made a dimensional oopsie woopsie" horror, the storytelling is incredibly direct (you're just told a bunch of things happened plus some "oh no I am being killed by a monster" type psychic imprint flashbacks).

I played through the first five or six checkpoints and maybe this gets better but I can't be bothered to walk through this low quality digital haunted house to find out.

A great addition to the survivors genre, countless ways to build, and the price is very cheap.

Can't wait for the full game to release~

It's the day after launch, and this game has some pretty basic issues. For instance, if you have the spacebar bound to any key that needs to be pressed in a quick-time event, that button is not displayed and even if you know you need to press the key assigned to that particular action, you can't. I had to plug in a controller and play with it just to get through a stuck door. Later, I died to a little worm because a quick time event is all that separates you from instant death in a long, unskippable cutscene.

Speaking of unskippable cutscenes, there doesn't seem to be any such thing as a skippable cutscene in this game, or maybe there is and they just didn't consider that I might actually rebind my keys.

This game is super preachy about the game industry. By the end of the game, even though I agree with the author's sentiments, I got really tired of it.

That said, what did I REALLY expect from a game where you start out buying the ability to move left?

Crappily made game, horrible interface, corny jump scares, and unintuitive game play coupled with crappy or non-existent tutorials make this a frustrating experience that doesn't pay out with plot, well-crafted horror, or really anything.

Please don't buy this game.

Only an hour in but I know I'm going to put in many more. Beautiful art, fluid controls, combat that makes you feel like a badass ninja, simple mechanics that are easy to learn and tough to master, plus a rogue-lite system of permanent unlocks that make you stronger and deadlier over time.

If you like platformers and rogue-lites, please get this game. It's a bargain at $15.

A friend of mine gifted me this game, since I am a big fan of ultra-hard platformers. For context, I have over 50 wins on Getting Over It and have completed Chapter 9 of Celeste. I am familiar with high difficulty games and I like them.

This is a game that had glorious aims, and could have been really great. It combines ultra-hard platforming with bow and arrow trick-shots and I was very excited to play it. Unfortunately, through a combination of ham-handed, uneven application of difficulty, and a lack of polish, it fails to achieve what it could have been.

* From the start, you can tell that the game fetishizes difficulty: The two difficulty settings are called "Goddess" (it is Artemis you're playing, after all) and Little Girl. Little Girl is more like normal difficulty, as other reviewers have noted, but the game is pretty condescending about you choosing what seems like a sane option once you start playing. In Goddess mode there are no checkpoints, enemies react faster, and there's threats sprinkled throughout the levels that make you take the hard way around everything.
* The movement is fast and uncomfortable, and it feels like balancing on a log at times, where the smallest input will cause you to overshoot, and you'll overcompensate in response, and it's a feedback loop from there.
* The tutorial explains the mechanics, but not well. It seems almost like the designer realized that there needed to be a tutorial, but didn't put much time into it because the rest of the game was already finished. For instance, the "air jump" mechanic isn't really an air jump, per se. It's a second jump that resets when you touch the ground or stick to a wall. If you jump off a platform, you get one more jump in the air. If you fall off a platform, you get TWO air jumps.
* Enemies require a faceshot to kill. If you are too close when you miss a shot but hit the enemy, it kills you instantly. If the enemy's projectile misses you, but you are too close to the object it collided with, there is a splash radius many times larger than you that will also kill you instantly.
* The game doesn't do a great job of making threats and powerups visible. There is a jump counter reset represented by a white, glowing bird, and a checkpoint represented by a white, glowing raven, which would be much easier to see if the background wasn't filled with white, glowing fog. In every level. There are what look like trees in some of the levels that are apparently knife trees or something because while they look like nice background details, they'll actually kill you.
* It takes a really long time to die and respawn, considering the game makes you die and respawn constantly.
* The default controls are counter-intuitive. Spacebar makes you draw your bow, and right click is jump. I switched the two after a few minutes and instantly the game became much more playable.
* The first level is very hard, there is a very steep learning curve.

I modded the game to make it run at 70%, and it makes the game a manageable sort of difficult. I may revert it to normal and play once I'm a bit more experienced with it, if I play it for that long.

This is a fantastic game, from the art to the music to the gameplay to the story.

What I find most awesome about this game is the difficulty system. If you want to increase the difficulty, you can go for strawberries. They literally do nothing, and they are hard to get. If the strawberries are not enough challenge, you can seek the hearts and cassettes in each chapter. If you unlock more hearts, you get access to the eighth and ninth chapters. The cassettes unlock the "B-Sides" of each chapter, which are extra hard versions of each chapter. If you unlock and complete all B-Sides, you get access to "C-Sides" (this is not how cassettes work but screw it) which are very short but insanely difficult levels.

Chapter 9, Farewell, is insanely difficult but totally worth it. I spent eight hours and thirty-two minutes completing Farewell for the first time, and the last screen took me over an hour to complete.