Recent reviews by Bean Sídhe

You want to fix her, but your every attempt crumbles to ash. You hurt her too much, or you coddle her too much. You make her love you too much, or too little.

Could be hell of a lot easier to break her instead. It takes just a tiny little push.

You're not so different, after all.

Does the idea of a train filled with ore arriving to be processed excite you? Read no further. You have finally come home.

There's really no other game quite like Factorio, and I doubt there will ever be. Albeit the concept of managing supply chains is nothing new, and coupling them with automation has predecessors as well, Factorio manages to rise above them as well as its followers through painstaking attention to detail and optimization.

Albeit some will feel that this has come at the cost of meaningful additional content, of which there has been very little over the years (artillery wagons have been implemented in 2017, which I would say are the last new additional supply and logistics chain), the game's excellent mod support gives anyone who's bored of what the baseline game has to offer an opportunity to browse through tens of thousands of mods ranging from quality of life changes to complete overhauls.

Some games are very clearly dolled up prototypes made for a game jam, and Please Don't Touch Anything is no exception. Not to say that limitations themselves are not known to instill creativity — many a twitter post would be much worse if allowed to expand beyond 140 characters into a whole standup routine. Nonetheless, it is what it is: the primary force behind PDTA is "What if someone made a game where the entirety of it takes place on one screen?"

What resulted is, essentially, an escape the room style puzzle game where, instead of finding the sole way out in a sequence of puzzles, you reach individiual endings by reaching one puzzle at a time, rarely sequencing two or three together. The challenge lies not in finding an ending, but finding every single one of them. Being stuck in classic point and click adventures has a frantic feeling of frustration to it, "what else did I not try yet?!" This is that feeling, but an entire game!

It's also fairly short, too, and took me less than an hour (my playtime is from two playthroughs plus frantic retries for a particularly annoying achievement), but, again, with puzzle games most of the playtime comes from you thinking of how to solve something anyway.

This being said, it's a fairly neat little toy. Playing it feels like disassembling and reassembling a ballpoint pen when you're eight. I recommend that you check it out on sale, or you might as well grab it full price if you have the cash to spare. 7/10

Here we go again. You stare at an empty screen, unsure of what to write. The whir of your radiocomputer gently bites your ears and the light of your screen further grinds your already-red eyes.

Still nothing. Nothing comes to your mind.
How did it all end up like this? You have a good idea, but you are trying not to admit it to yourself. You were bristling with creativity a decade ago, weren't you? Or was is just a macabre puppet show of plagiarism half-heartedly borrowed from the works of art that you have played back then?

You don't even know what to start with, except for this self-pitying dreck. "The graphics are okay, the music is good, the story is good, overall 8.8/10"? ♥♥♥♥ that. You refuse.

Disco Elysium is not about its surface detail. It refuses to be categorized traditionally. It's so unlike what you have played before, yet so familiar. It is first and furthermost a labor of love, a brain-child of idea men obsessed with their half-painted world for a decade, but also a rigorous critique of every surface level ideology known to man. A warning sign against destroying yourself. A reminder that the little pale blue ball we're all stuck on is long overdue for a term of endearment. A tale of connections, of how you pass but leave people around you changed, for better or for worse. A love letter to the games you have loved so much as a child - clunky, wordy, at times amateurish, but so endlessly compelling. Not a pale imitation, but a true inheritor.

Home. You are finally home. That's what it is. You've been waiting for so long.

You shiver, and the city shivers with you.

Klei's foray into the realm of colony simulators, depicted via the expected cartoony slapstick style, feels different from the get-go. After the short initial phase of establishing food and bedding for your duplicated mercenaries, whom the game affectionately calls "dupes", is over, you will not be really under threat of hostile fauna attacks, random natural disasters, or any other neat stuff like that.
What will end your playthroughs is, most likely, you - your justifiable desire to expand ever outwards, print more dupes to fuel your habits without balancing it out by properly expanded food production, dig into a dangerous biome without sufficient preparation, chewing through available resources too quickly and suddenly finding your power station without coal and your sewer system without water, striking a tile that turns out to have contained a volcano of molten gold, and ever-increasing heat production suddenly making your greenhouse too hot to grow much of anything. Thermodynamics and mechanics of gas and liquid play a huge part in this game, and not paying attention to them can set up disasters hundreds of ingame days in the making.
Your desire to set up ambitious projects is, as of now, somewhat saddled by the game lacking a true endgame as of now, with your goals oftentimes being "more of what i already have", by the artificial nature of some systems (decorating your dupes' abodes eventually turns into a quest to shove as many sculptures and paintings into every room as physically possible, in a race to mitigate absurd morale demands that lategame jobs have), and many an expedition leader will find themselves plagued by bugs and glitches. Nonetheless, I'd recommend this game to any fan of the genre.

The recent years have been kind for us in regards to 4X games, and Endless Legend is no exception.

The word I'd pick to describe it would be "beautiful", I think. The soundtrack mostly isn't outstanding but serves as a mood-setter and not a distraction. Fascinating lore serves as an interesting sideline and provides insight into motivations of the races, which are highly diverse, even unusually so for a 4X game - where most games give you a unit set and calls it a day, EL only provides three unique units and instead, say, takes away the ability to wage war, research new technology, or farm. The shift to district-based approach as opposed to the classic Civilization-style single tile "hub" with buildings in it is interesting as well, and satisfies the Sim City fan in all of us.

The major downside of the game would be the combat, unfortunately, as orders are pre-queued at the start of each mini-turn, but executed in order of initiative, meaning that one often has to struggle with their own units' AI, trying to guess what they will do if their target dies or moves out of range beforehand. The approach to DLCs is also questionable, mostly introducing a new gameplay element (such as espionage) and also a race that excels at that element to the extent that it dominates it absolutely, but is not very interesting outside of that element (Forgotten). This makes it convenient to skip DLCs that introduce something you don't care for, as I did with Tempest, but also makes the whole lineup sound kind of piecemeal.

The AI is nothing to write home about, but that's not surprising, because we took many years to write a halfway decent AI for Go - a game with a very limited array of choices and zero hidden variables - and, as always, multiplayer is highly recommended, assuming you organize games with friends.

Overall, I highly recommend the game to anyone who's interested in 4X games and turn-based strategy in general.

8/10.

Messiah is a pretty interesting game overall. Taking control of a child who could possess any person as long as they are unaware, you could traverse intricately designed locations in order to learn an unusual story. A downfall of that game was only that it came before its time.

Stacking, however, isn't Messiah. Its characters are completely flat, the story left me failing to care, and, worst of all, even though you anticipate an intricate game of expertly using your matryoshkas like a point and click adventure inventory, Stacking is not an adventure, it is simply a collectathon.

An example of what I am talking about: a room is filled with malodorous gas, which has to be bypassed. How to solve it? There is a hazard suit literally directly opposite to the room. Puzzle solved. Congratulations. This is a late-game puzzle. There are about four of these per chapter, for a total of four chapters.

Where is the content coming from, then? Alternative solutions to the puzzle that are just as simple: such as using the doll whose farts smell wonderfully to override the order.

Collecting unique dolls, such as a doll whose farts smell wonderfully. You will generally find all of these over the course of just solving the story puzzles.

Hi-jinks, such as using the dolls' ability to fart on other dolls.

In case you didn't know, there's a lot of farting in this game.

The ability to use one doll's ability instantly after the other to provide a "combo" is acquired extremely late into the game, is not particularly substantial, and, yes, you guessed right, half of those involves farting.

Music is the same three piano tracks over and over, the overall attempt at storytelling kinda tries to be a silent movie and fails, and the only thing noteworthy about this game is the interesting matryoshka art.

Overall, I rate this game a f4rt/10 and cannot recommend it to anyone.

4/10

Interesting game.

A preface: If you expect Bastion 2, then no, this game is completely unlike Bastion in most ways. I will, however, be comparing the two.

The art is gorgeous, as expected, and Logan Cunningham's narration is stellar - Rucks was a more interesting character than Triangle Jacket Guy (TJG for short), but that issue lies with writing.

The combat system is, honestly, the best I have ever seen in a combat-centric RPG, bar none. Often-criticized by the number twinstick shooter combat system got replaced by something completely new, and with stellar results. Unique blend of pausable real time and action points, and your character's strength relies on your ability to come up with useful spell combinations: if the process of looking what you can come up with isn't enough on your own, the game encourages you to try every spell in every position by rewarding you with character info and worldbuilding (and, obviously, achievements, but whatever); punishing the player for failure by taking away their strongest attack is ingenious as well. Honestly, the only downside is that the player is completely helpless while their pause button is on cooldown, as that makes their spells go on cooldown also. The logic behind doing this decision is unclear, and the game would only benefit from allowing the player to freely use spells: animation times would suddenly start mattering, for one; some interesting new combos would appear (like a Get()-enhanced projectile into Cull(), which can't be pulled off in pause) and, honestly, waiting for your turn tor recharge just plainly isn't fun.

Speaking of things that are not fun: the enemies. All of them. They start innocent enough, but by NG+ you're so tired of playing keepaway with Fetches and waiting for Men to go out of stealth that stacking maximum damage modifiers to hit them several times the total amount of health they have is catharthic, and even if you aren't interested in catharsis, the encounters are designed around instantly taking out high priority targets, and so the game's very many nifty AoE tools go to complete waste. The end boss is the ultimate example of this approach to encounter design and, yes, can be trivialized.

The game is this time completely and utterly linear, fully devoid of choices. One can only make short detours from the railroad to read some logs or get some bits of fanservice or whatever. Or to participate in challenges. Unlike Bastion, where one could access challenges at any point between story missions, in Transistor you have to actually find a door to the hub with sets of challenges per door. Are they missable? Of course. Can you reload an earlier save if you realize you've missed a challenge? No can do. Can you at least backtrack? That would be nice, but we can't have nice things. Really, rebuilding the eponymous Bastion building by building or choosing which route to take would eventually lead to the same outcome in the end, but it sure felt like your choices mattered, that you, the player, mattered.

And so you walk alongside the story, knowing nothing about the place you're going next outside of some postfactum commentary, exploring the city that the game fails to make you care about. In fact, the game lacks narration per se, and that is the TJG's function: commentary. All the fascinating info like postmortem obituaries, news feeds and such, is accessed only via text logs and is purely optional. Ultimately the story reaches its climax, attempts a gameplay and story integrated moment like the much-praised Zulf sequence in Bastion, falls flat on its face because the endboss is trivial, and rips your heart out with an ending. That's it. Now you can start new game plus, if you want to, but it mostly just sort of throws Men at you. The entire story can be summed up in two sentences, or at best a short paragraph. What have you been doing for the past three hours then? Filler.

Transistor shows a lot of promise, but its downsides are plenty and it seems to end about 75% into. I suspect troubled development.

Ultimately:

Transistor proves that Supergiant Games can make something other than Bastion, although it fails to copy things that made the game succeed as a game. Either way, it is worth one playthrough.

7/10.

The Deponia trilogy dumps you right onto the surface of the eponymous junkyard planet - several times, usually badly charred and at terminal velocity - puts you into the shoes of our hero Rufus and then expects you to escape its gravity well using your awesome powers of kleptomania, sexism, egoism, general stupidity, the uncanny talent to befriend enemies and alienate friends, McGuyver skills, and an awesome scarf, on your quest to save the world. Just kidding, screw the world, the agenda is to get out of here and hopefully win the affection of some space ladies.

Gameplay-wise, if you have experience with point and click adventures, you have already played this game. The controls are the pinnacle of the genre and its final evolution (disregarding weird experiments like Broken Age's dragging items from the inventory instead of clicking them like a rational human being), complete with a dedicated button to highlight active zones on the screen if you don't feel like pixelhunting. Albeit your pixelhunting skills will prove useful as there are easter eggs that can be collected only by doing so.

The story is certainly interesting, and jumps from old-fashioned slapstick to serious themes, the resulting emotional rollercoaster never failing to give you whiplash. It's got plenty of filler, but the characters are memorable and plotholes few.

It is also a sort of a character study of Rufus, examining his motivations and constantly putting him into the dark to ask what he is. The answer to the question is always the same. What is the answer? You're going to have to find out.

8.5/10

Little Inferno is certainly a unique game.

From beginning to end, you only have two interactive screens - the fireplace and the shopping catalog, as well as two actions - placing newly purchased things in the fireplace and burning them.

Unfortunately, the latter somewhat limits the former, as, if you hoped for an interesting sandbox where you watch elaborate structures collapse and crumble, Little Inferno is not it: too much time is spent waiting for things to arrive, restocking, collecting money for the next purchase, not enough things that can qualify as building blocks in the first place, and the physics are somewhat cartoonish. Rather, the sandbox part of the game is reduced to placing items one by one in the fireplace and watching them burn. Or freeze. Or other neat stuff like that. Unfortunately, a huge number of avaliable items qualify simply as fuel, and novelty wears off somewhat quickly, too quickly to qualify as cathartic.

Really, the actual game is a puzzle rather than a sandbox: you are offered a list of 99 combos of two or three items that can be burned together. There's usually no interesting gameplay interaction between these two or three specific items, which is rather disappointing, instead these items are related to each other by a provided clue (for example, the LOLcat combo consists of a cat plushie and a camera). Some of the clues are obvious and some are downright cryptic.

You know inventory puzzles in point and click adventures? You, the heroic kleptomaniac, accumulate a number of random items and use one on another? Little Inferno is this as an entire game, except you have to wait before items arrive or use coupons for instant shipping that are in limited supply, and sometimes the items are annoying to combo burn properly.

There's also a story unlocked as you progress through the game through a series of letters, it is, much like the actual game, kinda unique but nothing to write home about.

I have acquired this game in a bundle and beaten it in about two hours, but for the price avaliable in the shop, or even at a standard discount, I cannot recommend this game to be purchased by anyone.

5/10