Recent reviews by Tetramoose

On August 8, 2013, Cookie Clicker is released.

200 years later, the Earth is destroyed in nuclear hellfire; over 2 millenia of progress is reduced to ash in a matter of hours. Pollution and radiation render the planet uninhabitable to all but the most resilient microbes and bacterium.

3,000 years later, a small team of cosmic archaeologists depart from a distant solar system to explore the remnants of human civilization, tasked with understanding how and why our civilization faltered. Despite the breadth of our history and culture, there is little to be found amongst the detritus, and our visitors begin to wonder if perhaps these ruins are the only evidence we existed at all.

After days of rummaging through ash and detritus, the explorers stumble upon a lone building, still standing amongst the devastation. It is in remarkably good condition, given the circumstances. After running a quick analysis with their scanners, the cosmonauts discover that the building is somehow still generating and consuming electricity. As they move in to investigate, they find something beyond belief:

A single computer still running Cookie Clicker. The last remnant of human civilization.

Suddenly, it all makes sense.

This is an incredible game with a ton of freedom and depth. It is essentially an RPG sandbox — there is no limit to the amount of different builds and strategies you can try. Testing new setups and refining older ones is incredibly addicting, especially when you stumble upon a very effective synergy. To keep things fresh, much of the game is randomized and procedurally generated so your experience will still be very different even if you re-use an old build. The writing is fantastic and the world is immensely fascinating. This is the type of game where you’ll constantly want to learn more about its world and will scoop up any bit of additional lore you can get.

That being said, Qud is not for everyone. It’s brutally difficult and has a very high learning curve — it demands the player invest themselves into learning its mechanics and nuances. Some players will also be turned off by the permadeath. In a sense, it is essential to the experience because it forces the player to truly engage with its systems in order to progress; rerolling and trying new things is core to the game. That being said, this is a long game and it can be very unfair if the player is unlucky with RNG. For many, losing a 15 hour run over something largely out of your control simply doesn’t feel good. Fortunately, Permadeath can be turned off and I actually recommend some players deactivate it until they are comfortable and understand what the game is going to expect of them -- having the freedom to experiment and explore without fear of losing significant progress may be essential to the learning process, depending on the person. Furthermore if you just want to play Qud like a regular RPG where you can save and reload as much as you want, you can do that and there’s nothing wrong with doing so. It’s simply a matter of preference.

The graphics may also seem off putting and overly simplistic, but really they are perfect for the overall atmosphere. Qud is full of beautiful, evocative prose and descriptive text that allow the player to create a mental image far more vivid than any graphics could hope to convey — you’ll have to use your imagination, but that’s part of the fun. This is aided wonderfully by the music, which is equally as atmospheric, surreal and evocative as the writing. Qud is honestly unparalleled in its atmosphere and there is nothing else that looks or sounds quite like it.

If you’re the type of person who likes to experiment with RPG mechanics and enjoys reading, you should absolutely give this game a shot. At 15$ is a steal as it already has hundreds of hours worth of content even in early access.

This is a criminally underrated and misunderstood game. When it came out, many called it a "walking simulator" and acted as though it had no real depth or complexity. In reality, this couldn't be further from the truth -- strategically planning your routes and trying to safely and smartly navigate the harsh terrain is actually incredibly engaging, fun and rewarding. It may be a "walking simulator," but it's easily the most tactical and mechanically deep walking sim ever made. The game offers a ton of different tools and gadgets you can use to keep the game fresh, and has an incredibly unique multiplayer system where the items you place also show up for other players. You can build and contribute to other player's bridges and highways; the entire game is essentially a collaborative effort to turn a ruined world back into civilization. If this wasn't good enough, the game also has really intense horror stealth segments with the BTs, and more conventional stealth straight out of Metal Gear with the Mule outposts.

The story itself isn't perfect, but it is incredibly unique, ambitious, and prophetic. Since the outbreak of COVID, a world where people rely entirely on UPS and are afraid to go outside suddenly makes a lot more sense. This game has a lot to say about isolation, social media, society, and video games in general. While most video games are about combat and competition, Death Stranding is about connecting with others, contributing to a community, and working together towards a common goal. This is not a game about making yourself stronger; it's a game about improving the world around you. The sheer ambition of the story does cause some issues overall though, as the narrative sometimes suffers from weird convoluted logic and plot holes. If you can bear with the absurdity, you'll find a lot to enjoy, and a lot to think about.

Overall, if you're interested in the core concept, this is a fantastic port and the game is absolutely worth full price. If none of this sounds interesting or appealing to you, you should probably wait for a sale. Overall though, I think this is one of the most interesting and thought provoking games in recent memory and it's an experience you certainly won't get anywhere else.

"When you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

Some people may have told you that Stardew Valley is a "chill" game about farming and making friends. Someone might have told you that this is an easy going, relaxing game that can be enjoyed by anyone, even those who don't normally play video games. Those people were wrong. For me, Stardew Valley is not really a game at all; it is a mirror, reflecting within it the darkness of the human condition, and my own inability to escape it.

At the time of this review, I have logged 114 hours into this game. I have completed the community center in it's entirety, and I have perfectly optimized my farm for brutal efficiency. I make millions of dollars each season, and, for no good reason, I continue pushing just to see how grotesque and gaudy my industrial hellscape can become. I have never spoken to a single member of the town who cannot benefit me monetarily; if you asked, I would likely only be able to name 5 NPCs at best. I almost never go to the town events and have often found them to simply be obstacles or annoyances in my personal quest for power. This game may be relaxed for some, but for me, it is war. There shall be no item left unpurchased, no crop left ungrown, and no slime left unslain. I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.

If you share a desire for ruthless expansion and power, this game is for you. Conversely, if you just want to have a cute little farm and role-play a simple but idyllic rural fantasy, this game is probably also for you. Either way, if you value your mental health, or maintaining *actual* productivity, the abyss is best left un-gazed upon.

truck game

One of the best and most interesting games of 2019. Anodyne 2 is a surreal, abstract, sometimes beautiful, sometimes philosophical little game that combines a PS1 style 3D platformer with concise, smartly designed 16bit Zelda dungeons. If you are a fan of strange and artsy games with interesting music and aesthetics, please give this game a try.

As far as I'm concerned, this is the only roguelike in competition with Binding of Isaac in terms of depth, content and quality. At 20$, this game is an absolute steal and can provide you with hundreds of hours of fun. It can be daunting at first, but if you take the time to understand the mechanics you'll see hours fly by as you try to get the perfect run. At times you’ll be frustrated when the RNG God decides to smite you, but you’ll also be rewarded with absurd runs where you are basically a god that can kill every enemy on screen without even pressing a button (seriously.) In terms of sheer chaotic insanity and fun, no game really comes close.

The core gameplay loop will at first seem very familiar to fans of the genre, but it’s actually very unique. First, the player must explore a large area where enemies continually spawn. The player kills enemies as quickly as they can to earn money and experience, and explores the map looking for chests and the teleporter to the next level. This probably sounds pretty simple and generic, but Risk of Rain 2 has a couple tricks up its sleeve. The first and most important one, is that difficulty increases over time. This creates an interesting dilemma, as the player has to choose between having a lower difficulty on the next level, or better items and a higher level character. Time is everything in this game, and striking the correct balance between time spent and items collected is essential to your success, as is knowledge of the maps.

The game also has an incredible variety of characters to pick from, and each of them are totally unique. You’ll start the game with Commando, who has the simplest moveset and is the easiest to understand. Playing him essentially turns the game into a simple third person shooter with a dodge roll, but as you play you’ll unlock continually more unique and esoteric options like Rex, a robot taken over by a parasitic plant that can continually steal health from other enemies but must also spend health to use his abilities. Other characters include Loader, who has a grappling hook that lets him swing across the map like Spiderman, or Acrid who focuses on applying poison and other DOT effects to large groups of enemies. Each character has their own, unique playstyle and ideal set of items, and mastering each feels incredibly satisfying and rewarding. To make things even more exciting, every character has a highly customizable loadout with several unlockable abilities to choose from -- some characters even have multiple different primary weapons to pick from. The amount of fun to be had here really is endless, and Hoppoo has done an incredible job balancing each character and listening to player feedback. For how large and expansive the roster and mechanics are, this game is immaculately balanced. The various items and passives are incredibly fun and interesting, and experimenting with different builds never gets old.

The other trick Risk of Rain 2 has up its sleeve, is the addition of a 3rd dimension. When it was announced Risk of Rain 2 would be making the jump to 3D (the original was a sidescroller,) I was skeptical. I didn't think the core gameplay could be translated to 3D and I was afraid the game would either be a total mess, or end up nothing like the original. I can safely say Hoppoo has proved me totally wrong; not only did they nail the transition to 3D, they improved upon the original formula in every conceivable way. This is, more or less, a textbook example of the perfect sequel, with the additional dimension adding so much depth and urgency to the core loop.

This game is, in my opinion, a total masterpiece and an absolute must play. Even when it initially came to early access, it felt like a highly polished game that was just lacking a bit of content. Now that the game is out of early access, I can safely say that Hoppoo has gone above and beyond in virtually every aspect. This game is worth every penny, every moment of intense rage after being one shot by a giant exploding electricity worm. Do yourself a favor and play this game as soon as possible.

My favorite part was when I played for 45 minutes and then lost all of my progress when I died in one hit from a giant electric worm.

I only got an hour in before I closed the game and accidentally shot my wife with a handgun. Would not reccomend.

Saints Row: The Third is not only a terrible sequel, but it is also a legitimately terrible game. I am not trying to be sarcastic or ironic with this review. Saints Row 3 is a lazy, incompetent mess that amounts to little more to a cynical cashgrab that panders to the hip internet crowd.

Let me begin by saying that Saints Row 2 is one of my favorite games of all time. Despite it's generic city setting, lack of polish and crass sense of humor, the game was clearly made with love. In addition to the 25 hour story mode, there were 14 different activities to be done.You could choose your own fighting style, your own walk, the kinds of cars your gang members drove and could pick from a variety of different themes for your gang. You could buy a variety of different cribs and upgrade them, turning even the smallest, cheapest safehouse into a fancy pad. The game map was actually quite large and housed an impressive number of easter eggs and fun things to do. Saints Row: The Third has very few of these things, and many of them are half baked and lazy.

Unlike Saints Row: The Third, Saints Row 2 never forced it's "wackiness" on players. You could, if you wanted, dress up in a hotdog suit and kill enemies with a katana, but the game didn't force you to. The story actually took itself relatively seriously while still remaining over the top and self-aware, and the fantastically animated cutscenes lent the game some cinematic flair. Saints Row: The Third, on the other hand, is constantly forcing you to play along with it's insipid "Family Guy" sense of humor. There is a segment where you enter a virtual reality system and your character is represented as a toilet. There is a character that speaks entirely in autotune. "What else did you expect from a Saints Row game?" you might ask? "Isn't the whole point to be as immature and over the top as possible?" No, it isn't. Neither of the previous games forced these unfunny jokes on the player. The tone of this game is nothing like it's predecessors. They had the capacity to be wacky, but only if you made them so. The games had a consistent world with consistent characters who served a thematic purpose. They weren't masterpieces of storytelling, but they were a far cry from having characters that speak entirely in autotune.

Saints Row: The Third seems extremely determined to pander to whatever was "in" with the internet crowd at the time. Dubstep plays on the menus and is directly referenced in the game. There is a mission with a tiger that is clearly a reference to the "Hangover" films. Tron: Legacy came out a year before this game, so they felt the need to put in a blue and orange virtual reality sequence that looks exactly like a set from Tron. Zombies were in way back in 2011, so the developers decided to throw in a segment with zombies, where every single hit from a zombie stunlocks you. This makes the game feel 10 years older than it really is.

Even with it's paltry 12-15 hour length (for a freeroam game,) the game is heavilly padded. Several activities are played off as actual missions or re-skinned to trick people into thinking that they are different. After completing the game, I went over to the wiki to count exactly how many missions are just recycled activities. I came up with 15 out of 48 missions, meaning 31% of the game amounts to nothing more than doing activities -- assuming you aren't also doing them outside of the main story. On top of this, there are 5 missions which are just short cutscenes that must be driven to. All of this adds up to very little substantial content.

To make matters worse, the game frequently recycles it's own missions. There are two occasions where the player falls from the sky with a parachute while fighting enemies. One of these encounters features a tank, and is admittedly quite fun, but it is still a repeat. There are two missions that take place at the same BDSM club, one where you have to free Zimos, the auto-tune speaking pimp as well as a stronghold mission that treads mostly the same ground. There are three missions which take place in the Saints Headquarters, one where the player has to take it from members of a rival gang, one nearly identical mission where the player has to defend it from invading ho's and ANOTHER where the player has to defend it from military forces attempting to take it back. There are two missions at the STAG headquarters/PR center -- one where the player must kidnap Nyteblade, STAG's PR boy, and another where the player must hack computers at the same headquarters.

Many of the enemies in the game are bullet sponges, taking almost an entire clip to kill, even with upgraded guns. The special enemies in this game become a chore to fight as they often take absurdly long to kill, causing every encounter to become nothing more than a drawn out game of peekaboo. The later weapons are mostly useless, as the fully upgraded starting weapons are often as strong, if not stronger, than the advanced futuristic weapons. The AI is often so stupid that their inability to get into a car will fail cause the player to fail the mission. This problem reaches dizzying heights in the final mission, which I failed several times solely because Pierce refused to get into the car Sometimes the AI would become locked in place and refuse to move or drive the vehicle or certain events would not trigger, forcing me to restart the mission. This happened so many times it made me seriously consider turning the game off and never playing it again.

It doesn't help Saints Row: The Third's case that the map is considerably smaller than it was in previous offerings. According to some quick online research, Saints Row: The Third clocks in at 10 square miles while Saints Row 2 adds up to a total of 14 square miles. This means that Steelport is not much larger than the Stillwater of Saints Row 1, a game that came out in 2006. The size of the map wouldn't be an issue if it weren't for the fact that it feels so incredibly empty. Often there would only be 3-4 cars on the streets at any given time, causing the city to feel empty and lifeless. Most of the stores in the game are Planet Saints, and all of the stores that aren't Planet Saints carry many of the same clothes. This is pure laziness from Deep Silver: not only is the map small, it's empty too.

The game also offers considerably less freedom in the order players can compete missions. Saints Row 1&2 allowed the player to take on any of either games three gangs in any order they pleased. This means the player could choose to take on each gang one at a time, focusing on only that specific story, or to take all three on simultaneously. This allowed the writers to create a narritive that was unique to each gang. Saints Row: The Thirdgives you a selection of 3-4 missions at a time, which can each be completed in any order -- but all three gangs are fought in a linear progression that the player is unable to control. This means that in order to progress to the next set of missions, you often must do a mission where you fight the Deckers and also a mission where you fight the Morningstar or another gang. This results in a much smaller amount of freedom for the player and also greatly hurts the pacing of the campaign, which meanders for the majority of it's runtime. While each gang in SR1&2 had what was the equivalent of a 6 hour campaign with their own story arcs, none of the gangs in Saints Row: The Third have nearly that amount of screentime, and none of them have their own independent story arcs. This greatly hurts the overall quality of the game and the players connection to the world and story.


Saints Row: The Third is a terrible game.