Recent reviews by TheGhostThatWas

Sad and unsatisfying. Leaves many questions unanswered. But left my mouth cleaner with a fresh blue artificial flavor.

Very difficult, but amusing.

I think it leaned too hard into the Oregon Trail theme in that it's near impossible to win, but it's definitely a fun experience for a few hours.

The art is good, the events are funny, but the RNG is downright unfair.

Similar to Death Road to Canada, I think there's only so much of this you can play before dropping it, but its priced reasonably for that. Definitely worth the $5 or less on sale, just for the effort that went into such a funny parody with so much love and attention to detail.

the game changed the trajectory of modern internet horror. take that as you will

I thought this game would be funny for the memes but it's both unfunny, and really dated.

The jokes are entirely stereotypes or political issues from the late 90s to 2000s, and they dont even tell jokes. They just make the characters extremely annoying parodies of something, and the Postal Guy says an unfunny quip like "♥♥♥♥ you, you're a hippie." Otherwise, the game just uses offensive stereotypes as targets for the player to kill because"they deserve to die" for whatever dumb ideology that have.

The game wasn't that much fun as a sandbox either, feeling like the concept has only been done better and funnier in games like GTA.

The actual gameplay was easy with moments of difficulty spikes due to the jank of old controls. It might have played better with a PS2 controller, but it felt clunky.

Occasional funny moments were only caused by ragdolls or minor glitches. The voice of the Postal Guy was pretty funny still, the only thing I actually enjoyed. But nothing like I hoped, as most of the time he didn't actual have any good lines.

Definitely a game I don't think is worth trying to replay in the modern day.

At least it's not Skyrim.

Definitely early access, but could be great once finished, if it gets finished.

I think the biggest things holding it back are is the duration of matches being insanely long in addition to perma death per round. One of my friends dying means they get to sit out for maybe 45 minutes while the rest of us try to complete tasks.

The dead players can control monsters, but the monster they get is incredibly broken. It's health scaling is insane, when my friends and I tested it the dead player said our bullets do almost no damage at all to them. Those monsters also two shot humans and are about twice as fast as them, as well as heat vision to prevent living players from even hiding.
So your options are to let dead players sit out, or have the first dead player kill everyone else in about 30 seconds regardless of how prepared the rest of you are.

Even with all that, the guns don't aim accurately. I guess it's "horror" themed that your characters don't know how to handle them, but it just feels like it makes the game worse to play. It's not scarier to encounter enemies, just more frustrating and potentially ruins matches.

The perk system is pretty useless as it stands as well, so it could use an overhaul as well. Half the perks seem to be useless or come with crippling downsides, so they aren't at all worth equipping. Plus you have to randomly find them every match in a slot machine, instead of just having the option to equip one or two before the match.

Reviving players, balancing player controlled monsters, and improving how you can control the character with their items would make the game mostly playable.

If it's going to go a step further, more than one map will be top priority. More item and monster variety would be a nice addition as well.

Lastly, being infected is somewhat advertised like you're joining the monsters team in the trailer, but that's not true. It just means you lost. That should either be changed to reflect that in the trailer, or being infected should actually reward players for joining the other side and leaning into social deduction. Not that you need to make the game into Among Us, but it seemed like there's no reason not to "trust your friends" when no one wants to play for the other side.

An excellent PVE class based shooter.

I don't think I have spent enough time playing to write a full critique, as I think there's a high skill ceiling and a lot of nuance that I haven't seen to the game.

But the limited roster of classes are well balanced and work well together, and the variety of game modes are very fun.

I do think the game feels too dark, but it's a mechanic of the game itself so I don't know how to remedy it. It can be very annoying to deal with the lack of visability in the dark caves.

It would also be nice to have the option to increase the player limit above 4. Although the game isn't balanced for it, maybe an "achievements disabled mode" with the ability for 6 or more players would be fun. Just so I could party up with more of my friends at once.

Great game anyway. Rock and stone, we're rich, etc etc

Every aspect of the game is polished to the highest possible degree.

All the items synergize with each other somehow. All the weapons offer differing playstyles and dramatically change the gameplay to keep it fresh.

The story, artwork, music, voice acting, gameplay, and game balance are all incredible, and the game lasts a decent amount of time without any part getting too stale.

Sometimes visibility can be a problem when there's a lot of projectiles and enemies on screen, which can feel unfair. It can be tough to see what's even happening through it all, but it's not always like that.

Enemy shields are a bit frustrating too, since they can't be stunned by attacking them. Depending on the enemy, that does make fighting them a bit of a chore because just meleeing them won't stop them from hitting you back while youre stuck in the attack animation.

Overall one of my favorite games

Infuriating, badly made platformer with a very good horror plot buried underneath. I've only played the 2023 version so far and this already has been terrible to play.

Fail one minigame, and you have to restart the entire game. The volcano erupts instantly and it wipes your save file. What's even the point of saving at all then?

I was on the last minigame too. There's no checkpoints in it, so an extremely tight triple jump at the very end of the minigame makes you redo the whole thing if you miss it. And if the timer runs out, you lose. So now I have to do the entire game again because I couldn't make one jump. Actually comical the amount of time this just wasted.
I discovered I can force close the game to stop it from deleting my save data.
After over an hour of attempts on the specific minigame, I still haven't finished it. Every time Bucky either walks off the edge I'm trying to jump off of, or doesn't grasp the ledge where I'm landing, or suddenly loses all his momentum on a triple jump so he falls like a rock. The last jump in the stage is a long triple jump which is so precise it requires perfection, and if you miss it there is absolutely no collision on the walls below to try and save yourself. The time limit prevents you from even trying again because it takes a minimum of 3 out of your 5 minutes to reach the ending again.


I don't care how good the horror is later. The actual platforming, what the game mainly is made of, is so bad that I dont think it'll be redeemable. Most of my two hours of playtime has been only dealing with the base game and it's so bad I think this is better experienced watching a YouTube video about it.

I bought myself a copy and gifted it to a friend because of the coverage it got. I did that because I wanted to support indie devs making cool projects. This took the developer some 5 or so years to make, but Im convinced that was spent on the storytelling and not the actual game. I truly regret purchasing it, but am outside my refund window so Im doubtful Ill get my money back, and can't refund the gift.

This game is truly a better experience watching a Let's play than forcing yourself to deal with the clunky slippery platforming and lack of attention to detail in the gameplay. The puzzles and lore are the highlight, and you don't need to buy the game to experience it. In fact, playing the game has only detracted from the experience for me.

It's a good game, but gets progressively less fun the longer you play. As you play more runs, you start to realize just how little power you actually have to deck build or how little skill expression there is.
The TLDR It's an excellent game and has great visuals and a banger soundtrack though. It's just not infinitely replayable and you might get sick of it after 20ish hours.

To go in depth, the game struggles to find a balance between the randomness of playing cards with the tactical nature of deck building. Players are incentivized to spec into a type of poker hand, but actually trying to build a deck that focuses on one hand or another is entirely down to RNG.

The game of course has to have RNG; it's a card game. It makes sense to shuffle the deck every round. But trying to upgrade your deck with Joker cards is entirely reliant on finding the Jokers you actually need in the shop for your builds. Of course you won't know what will appear in the shop, so you're actually discouraged from specing into a type of hand because you probably wont find the upgrades you need to actually finish the build after buying your first card.

Of course, can you just be flexible and change Jokers later? Not on higher difficulties!

The difficulty scaling clashes against the entire nature of the game. It becomes increasingly strict and punishing if you don't build you deck correctly. High difficulties require much more points to progress, and give you less money to spend on deck building.

See the problem? In a game where your potential is limited entirely on the RNG of what you can purchase to build you deck (the luck of the draw, if you will), you shouldn't punish players for not building a strong enough deck when the game doesn't give them the opportunity to do so.
In addition, Infinity Jokers become a problem; Jokers which can't be sold/discarded. Any Joker in the shop can randomly be marked as one. This means that you CANNOT respec out of whatever build you have chosen if it's not working. You can choose to ignore I-Jokers in the shop and just not take them, but by doing so you might not be able to buy anything at all, and your run will die because you had to abstain from building you deck at all.

Higher difficulties don't make the game "harder" by requiring more strategy from players; they're harder because players have to restart runs more often since they didn't get lucky and draw enough strong cards on the first two or three Antes.


This is an incredibly frustrating problem because beating harder difficulties unlocks more content; new types of decks. If there wasn't content locked behind it, I wouldn't try the harder modes at all because they just lead to dozens of restarts until I can leave Ante 1 with enough rare cards that I might not
die by Ante 4 or 5. It feels like I'm wasting my time grinding instead of having fun like in the beginning.

I don't know how to solve these design problems because I think RNG is intrinsic to the game. But I think altering higher difficulties would be a good step in improving things.
Reworking Infinity Jokers would be a good step, since they severely limit what you can take from the store (Most Jokers might not be worth keeping for a whole run). Maybe adding a timer to some that means you can't remove them for a number of rounds, letting players eventually remove them. This would lean into the whole risk/reward idea of them without discouraging players from selecting 0 Jokers early run. Or even making them self-destruct after a number of rounds, making players look for an alternative (this might be too annoying though).
You could also allow one Infinity Joker to be exchanged for another, but not for a regular Joker.
There's plenty of options to balance them without having them completely screw over the players at higher difficulties.

Higher difficulties also reduce how much money you recieve from Round 1 of each Ante. This further limits the players ability to deck build. I would suggest removing that entirely because it amplifies the problems the game already has as the score requirement on higher difficulties rises.

It would be nice to see boss modifiers utilized more on higher difficulties instead of just giving the player less options. Toning down the boss modifiers and applying them to Rounds 2, 1, or both on progressively higher difficulties would be a more fun way to make the game more challenging, and give every round something to keep players adjusting their strategies.


To summarize, making deck building harder and then punishing players for not deck building good enough when its reliant on RNG is a bad system to increasing difficulty, as it makes the entire challenge reliant on luck. I hope this game gets future updates that might reconsider the state of higher difficulties.