Análises recentes de TheGhostThatWas

A blend of precision platforming and roguelike elements that successfully combines the least fun problems from both genres.
The game has a lot to love in the artwork and setting, as well as fun and diverse enemies. The story is barebones but not really what people play the game for.
It's an odd game because it encourages players to "get good" at precision platforming by punishing the player hard for simple mistakes. Any slip up means you will probably lose your run immediately. It then tries to walk this back by giving the player a health bar with four hits, in order to be more forgiving. Unfortunately it then walks this back again by stun locking the player every time they are hit, so if you slip up once, youll probably be damaged multiple times from one enemy, making the entire health bar completely meaningless as a mechanic. Besides enemies, there are dozens of statuinary traps which instant-kill the player. They're actually less frustrating and pretty balanced for what they do.
The roguelike elements make the game very frustrating in comparison to others in the genre. The level generation doesnt seem to be very careful about making the floors actually playable. Getting stuck in a poorly generated room without the consumable tools to escape means you have to just restart your run. Some floors generate so you cannot progress without taking fall damage, because there's literally nothing to jump on. Sometimes the only jump down is into a spike pit, so you don't get to continue playing now. Many problems like these can be mitigated by using your consumables, but the random nature of a roguelike means you might go the whole run and never get more than you start with at the beginning.
Every run shouldn't be an easy win, but I should at least be losing because of my own mistakes. Using my consumables sparingly and still not having enough to progress doesn't feel like a "get good" issue, just a design problem.
Beside consumables, there are other items you can purchase at shops. Some shops randomly generate, others are always on the same floor every run. It can be frustrating, but at least thr game concedes some consistency.

I want to like this game more, since it's a lot of fun with friends in co op. The co-op mode has its own drawbacks though, in that you have to start from the first floor every single run, and it can get a bit chaotic with more people. Similar to Lethal Company, having things go terribly wrong can be fun with friends, even if the game restricts players from accessing late game together without sloughing through an entire run.

Single player is pretty awful. Due to the nature of small mistakes almost always killing you, the lack of reliable resources, and the difficulty of navigating the random floor designs, playing alone usually falls somewhere between bashing your head against a wall repeatedly and making small amounts of progress only to die to a randomly generated problem which you couldn't foresee or plan for.

The game is so comically RNG dependent that any real improvement in your platforming doesn't result in better performance on average. At the highest level of play (speedrunners), this can be overcome, but for the majority of players, the game is just not rewarding to even try.

An OK game, but unfortunately still buggy years after release.

I got soft locked in my third ranked KOTH match, preventing me from even competing after spending over an hour on the REQUIRED campaign you have to play every time to build a team. I won the match, then the game didn't register my win, so I was just stuck in an empty room til I restarted or exited to the menu. There goes all that planning and progress!

The game is on season 20 and still has game breaking random bugs like this? Actually insane. Why should I even put in the time to compete if there's a chance the game flat out doesn't work?

I like it as a single player rogue like, but definitely not for $20. The campaign is short, the actual gameplay is basic deck building, and there's not a lot of lore that I can really identify besides what is surface level.
The soundtrack is absolutely great though, the writing is charming and the art direction and animations are just excellent.
If you get this, probably good to wait for it to be on sale since what you get will be limited enjoyment and replayability.

The game has a ton of character but not much content to back it up, and what's there is apparently broken. I wish it had been a fully single player game that was more fleshed out than a broken competive deck builder. It deserved to be better

Very accessible for a horror game. The fact that dying isn't super punishing is nice, Although some of the puzzles take long enough to solve that dying halfway through can be very frustrating.
The characters are pretty well written too. They have actual conversations and thoughts, even if sometimes it drags on a bit long. But I didn't find any of the writing cringey or completely dull.

Tldr: The game has been in early access for several years, and few updates have added very little content. There's still only a small amount of possible events which gets stale fairly quickly. Many bugs have been present since near launch which are still unaddressed.
I'm just not sure the great art is worth it for the limited playtime, frustrating grinding, and unaddressed bugs it forces you to slog through.

Anyway I love this game and I'm irrationally angry it's not perfect.

Edit: as with many rng based games, large amounts of content are locked behind low rng to force grinding and pad out playtime. I'm trying to unlock my first character right now which requires me to go to an otherworld location called the Upper Kingdom. After collecting two different key items, you must find the correct encounter which gives you a chance to roll to try and reach the Upper Kingdom. This is the amount of time it takes to unlock 1 character:

Current number of rolls which failed to go to Upper Kingdom while I was carrying the Goblet: 26 31 34 36
Time spent: 6.5 hours
Runs wasted trying to unlock: 6

Rolled the Upper Kingdom on the 37th portal

Long version:
All this is said with the thought that the game is still being made by 1 person. If the dev has hired more help by now, all of my statements here are either wrong or somewhat inaccurate, besides my critique of the lack of content and bugs.

I wish the developer would hand off the game to someone else. It's been long enough that the original excuse of personal issues has worn thin, and they either don't care or aren't able to put work into the game to make it a full functional product. It's supposed to be released within the year, but honestly unless it doubles the amount of content I don't see it being worthy of a "full release."

Dozens of things still do nothing or don't work. Saving has been broken since release, the Eldritch Statuette and Forest Tapes key items still do nothing, large sections of the hospital serve no purpose, and the pharmacy just doesn't appear in the game until you unlock City planning, despite it being one of the default options. You still cant see your current luck stat in the status menu (you can only view it after a roll for luck.) Some rolls are missing the text to tell you what sat your roll passed/failed on. many chapters take you to locations where they forgot to include a rest area.

Speaking of, the amount of unique areas is getting out of hand since they are entirely separate from the town. They cut you off from using almost all of the resources the game is built upon, such as shops, your house, recruiting allies, etc. It's possible for more than half of your missions to be in these disconnected places, so you'd better hope the devs remembered to include an area you can heal from in some of them, or you'll just die. Many of these areas lack a rest area, or a place to access your storage. If you don't remember that in advance, you will absolutely waste the run because you'll die or you can't access key items for the chapter if your backpack is already full.
This wouldn't be a problem except that you can't access shops and things unless you're currently in a chapter. During the in-between sections where you're at home, you can't leave to stock up or visit locations. I don't know what reasoning there must be behind this feature.

The most annoying bit is that you cannot skip the opening cutscene and tutorial windows, and they will play every single run. It's annoying it doesn't remember the last picked settings so you have to set up every custom run from scratch as well.
The game also has 2 secrets and an EXP boost in the first room of every run, so if you're into min-maxing you'll have to go through those steps every single time as well.
This all adds up to spending 60-90 seconds setting up every single playthrough, which is just a ton of friction for users before they can even play the game.

A few elements are still completely boring RNG, including ghost enemies and unlocking achievements. I failed 18 (so far) Otherworld rolls to find the Upper Kingdom. 18 event checks which cannot be affected by any stats or any player input. Its not good gameplay to blindly fumble with luck for hours and hope. Its just about as fun as losing in most slot machines.
One heavily RNG element is a special enemy called "Something Truly Evil." It's a fourth wall breaking RNG based encounter. If you're unlucky and RNG makes you fight it, it's impossible to kill unless RNG makes the enemy spare your life. It's basically a run killer if you just have bad luck.

Besides "Something Evil," there are other minor things that basically end your run if they occur, either by RNG or from player choice. Simply put, if youre a new player, the game has certain items or choices you can make which immediately cripple you to the point you cannot continue a run. You must remember all of these to play the game or you will immediately lose. (Ie wearing and removing the Crestfallen Mask reduces every Stat by 2 permanently. You will now fail most Stat checks in the lighthouse.)

One missing feature is the ability to speed up text and skip cutscenes. Especially with the lack of diverse events, the fact you have to wait for the text to play an animation to appear gets very, very annoying. Especially while grinding the RNG, it wastes so much of your time with text and mini-animations, like the school window jumpscare visitor. Its a 10 second animation which equates to "take 2 reason damage."

The visual style of the game is one of the most impressive I've found from indie horror games. Charming illustrations drawing inspiration from artists like Junji Ito (who actually makes an unofficial appearance as an unnamed side character) wrapped up in a retro Gameboy-era package. The illustrations somehow work in pixel art form, which is incredible compared to a lot of the more generic pixel art games available. The game also allows you to swap between 1-bit or 2-bit color, which adds an extra level of shading to all of the artwork in the game. Combined with the choice of different color pallets and the game hold up well in all of them. Graphically, it's very impressive from an artistic standpoint.

Imo the game is probably only worth its current price tag ($15) at its beat, but now that I've played it for more than a few hours I don't know if I would even pay that much. Maybe $10?

The one positive is that it can apparently be molded, but I have no experience with that. Also pushing development onto the community instead of fully fleshing out your product is incredibly lazy, but there's no proof that's what the intention was. Honestly if the dev opened the door to modding, I would hope they could find someone who could assist in finishing the official content.

Honestly the dev might do better just being an artist for other people's projects, that way either someone else can do a better job coding, or there will be less pressure so the scope of the game can actually be larger.

Tldr: The "game" is hardly even playable due to the lack of any real choices or ability to change the outcome of a given run. Glorified dice roll simulator, but all its marketing claims it to be more like a roguelike. Unlike games like the Oregon Trail, in which the point is RNG, this game puts a central focus on looting and shooting gameplay which is rarely offered, and discourages players from actually fighting. The game is so hostile to players stretegizing that often you are offered no choices to your next action, and even when you are, you're just choosing between blind dice rolls. Somehow Dungeons and Dragons has less dice rolls and more opportunities for creative play than this.

Long version: the game takes elements from the orgegon / organ trail games and (imo unsuccessfully) tries to stack a roguelike on top.
The choice based events are usually just "bad things happen, choose what resource you lose".

The combat and salvaging parts are few and far between these "choices" so you will not be able to restock. If you notice you are going to run out of something, it might be 6 more choices before you are allowed to go searching for more resources. So there is no way to strategically plan for these events, or collect what you need.

The worst part is that the game presents you with "funny" choices, all of which are bad. Trying to pick any of the silly choices in events results in either instant death or multiple injuries. Jumping a flooded road with your car, wrestling a moose, calling someone a funny name, etc. They all kill or injure you. Its like the game acknowledges it could be fun, but refuses to be.

Healing is awful. You can find medical supplies sometimes, they're actually quite generous. But everything in the game deals damage, and most of the time you aren't dying in combat, you're dying to a dice roll event. Trying to heal is also equally frustrating, as the characters do it automatically to each other without any user input. You don't get to choose who to save, the game does. The priority seems to just be leftmost character on the UI first, to the right. Even if the fourth character is near death, P1 gets healed first. Like anything that might give the player a strategic choice, this is taken out of your control.
The devs actually had the foresight to make characters with medic perks use less health kits AND have priority to apply them to everyone, so at the very least they could figure out how to do that.

The combat is boring and sometimes buggy. It's not supposed to be the focus, instead it's better to just try to avoid the zombies. Oftentimes my attacks simply don't register. There is a cooldown on attacks, but because of imputs sometimes not registering, I have found little choice but to mash the buttons in order to actually have them attack reliably. I have lost characters already because they simply didn't fight back.

Unfortunately, seige events happen. In which you are trapped in a room and must fight until a timer runs out. These random events can either be fair, or outright impossible. As far as I can tell, they are a "progression check" to see if players have bought enough upgrades in the long term progression system. If not, your game ends when you get to a harder one, regardless of your own skill or weapons.

The game has many, many systems which are only explained through hints, or from the main menu. During a run, there's no way to check what certain perks or items do, and the UI is missing basic features like what your current characters remaining health is. I assume you're supposed to keep track of this, but each characters starting health is random based on their stats, so it's not simply "count how many times I've been hit", because each character won't be able to take the same amount.
This applies to other systems too, like if you're bleeding, what your damage is, if your exhausted. There are visual hints (like dropping blood) but no UI elements to speak of. Beside this, I have no idea what these status effects actually do.
The worst part of that is that you can't even see how much longer it is to Canada, the end of the game. There's a counter in one of the menus for the days, but that doesn't illustrate how many "events" are remaining. It seems entirely random. I've played for almost half an hour on these runs and it turned out it had been only 4 days out of the fourteen. If I had to guess, it must take near a thousand or more fuel just to get there, much less hundreds of food. But I honestly have no idea because there's no real in game clock to tell me how time is passing.

The characters stats are always randomized. Including the characters you make. From my experience, they all always start at -2 to -3 on most stats, but you can choose perks which increase one or two of your stats to a normal value, or slowly improve them over the run if the game decides it will allow you to do so.
However, you can't see what your stats are until you "discover them" through an event. Every single run. Most of the time, you won't see what you have to work with, because each character has 10 stats, and you rarely unlock the ability to view them. So you'll make it to the end or die before you can even see them.
There is literally no point to this system if you can't see them. Any time you're presented a roll based on a Stat which would let you discover it, you risk dying instantly or losing supplies. You can't craft a build around these stats because they are both random and invisible. This system is completely redundant because it just further obscures the results of the dice roll system by adding a modifier that players can't see without intentionally punishing themselves by choosing bad rolls.

Some of these random stats just harm you without any benefit. "Composure" affects the dialogue options you are offered. If your character has low composure, they'll get angry and start picking fights. You cannot control it. It is entirely random and you will lose the game if you have a bad roll. Which, I emphasize, you CANNOT see until the game presents the opportunity for you to discover it. Usually by having your character get into a fight and losing health/morale/or the entire run.
Having a character with low loyalty (of course, hidden) usually results in the character sabotaging your run somehow. Often they just take everything and leave, sometimes they just ignore your choices in a roll and do something else.

The only way to get rid of characters after you find out they're actively working against you is to wait for a combat encounter and walk them into a horde. If you do it with the rest of your party, it'll probably get them killed since they follow you.

As for the side characters, the AI is so terrible that at times it feels like having multiple characters means more enemies to fight. They cannot do anything but attack, and use all items immediately.

Losing your car, which you will since you aren't allowed to restock gas unless the game eventually decides to let you salvage, punishes you harshly. All the random events immediately switch to hurting your characters or doubling your supply loses. And because you can't choose to try and find gas, you can't choose not to be punished. The trailer for this game shows the characters walking on foot for quite a bit, but ironically if you are ever on foot youre going to have a bad time. You'll instantly start tripping and walking into rivers and seeing "rocks which might be cars in the distance" and losing all your morale.

Overall, the game just decides when it wants you to lose, and there's nothing you can do to plan or play better to avoid it. The long term progression is the only way to improve, which just seems to pad out game time, without actually making you feel like you're the one getting better at the game.

On the bright side, the music and art is quite charming, despite the game being awful to play. The limited writing is witty and funny

No pressure game with a surprising attention to detail and interesting art direction. Good to chill with

Can be frustrating to get ingredients and keep them stocked. The "story" of making the Philosopher's stone is a bit tedious, but theres no pressure to finush it

Future content updates look good

My friend had been trying to get me into Dark Souls 3, but when Elden Ring came out, I finally decided to givd the genre a shot.

As my first Souls game, I'm glad I got to experience the game.
However, after playing the game on my Steam Deck, I was banned for cheating, despite never modifying the game or tampering.


2024 review: seeing if I get re-banned again two years later when playing on the Steam deck. Hopefully it's been patched by now

The base game is extremely fun, but everything after act 1 is grindy, boring, or lore related cutscenes which seem incredibly unnecessary and weaken the cool setup the game had

The base game gives the player plenty of opportunity to experiment, deck build, and gives a balanced experience, while also rarely letting you get a broken deck.
I think death cards are a little overpowered, but they do help the player progress the story.
Act 2 is stupid because your starter deck can make it way harder to beat your first boss, and the player doesn't know what 3/4 of the decks contain. Also unless you know how to use the training dummy you're going to get screwed.
Act 3 is a grind. Almost an RPG that repeats act 2s story. The bosses were very cool though, and the finale was neat.

The lore of the YouTuber was very cringy. The acting was convincing enough, but the script given was so bad. The ARG was very complicated for a single player game, but the community solved it. I don't think it was very impressive compared to what the game had.

Locked in a cabin with a creepy guy holding you hostage. Play a game about how you got here. Horror ensues. That was cool.
Not "ooo my dead girlfriend haunted a floppy disk of a video game on my YouTube channel, sp00py!"

Kaycee's mod, the post game content, is incredibly stacked against the player in RNG, and the devs removed or nerfed most strong strategies. I played about 10 runs and only won once on the first run. I'd like to see what new content there is but the enemy AI uses better cards, more cards, and the player has to choose a handicap to earn points to buy any of said new content.

It seems like the mode is made for hardcore strategists, but I'm extremely saddened because I actually enjoy the game and would have liked to replay it as an infinite roguelike, which is what the mode was supposed to be. Nerfing player strategies but also wanting a tougher opponent can't both happen in a game heavily reliant on RNG, or else you just get a "throwing ♥♥♥♥ at the wall" simulator and hoping you win sometimes.

Anyway I like it a lot and wish it were perfect


Edit: I've found that restarting Kaycee's mod without playing a bad run to losing punishes you in future runs by taking cards away. This is so user hostile I'm changing my review to negative. How on earth can you make the game less repayable than making a rogue like where you have to play a game you know you'll lose?
Then making your players lose more because now they have to play a punishment?
Its like when Bethesda asked players to write apology llessays to them asking to be unbanned. Good job making me actually disgusted by a game I liked initially.

tl:dr It's finally a fun experience, but it desperately needs bug fixes and QOL improvements. The exploration and discovery the game is based on is discouraged by enemy design which punishes you for exploring
I wish the developers would stop adding new features and fix the ones they've implemented.

I've swapped my review from positive to negative because the bugs keep coming

The game suffers from numerous design decisions which have either not been caught in testing or were ignored. It's probably worth getting if you don't think you'll get bored of the core gameplay too quickly. It has many small issues which are incredibly annoying when repeatedly encountered, but overall is a neutral to good experience.


Enemy design is questionable.
Simply playing the game; building, mining, and exploring are the things that aggro enemies. The game has a GTA police style wanted level, and you have no choice but to run and hide once enemies appear. After your wanted level goes down, from that point any further actions that you make will aggro the enemies again, so you might as well just leave and give up whatever you were doing. (they don't go away, or if they do it takes a long time.)
The only positive is that enemies spawn only on some planets, so to have fun you just have to ignore a large portion of planets in the game and only go to the ones you're allowed to play on.


My first death was caused by a bug. I tried to land after defeating sentinel ships, but the animation cancelled in the middle of landing which meant more enemies spawned, and I wasn't allowed to land at all after that.

I'm not even sure if I "died" because the screen abruptly switched to a philosophical quote? No animation or anything? Then the game crashed?

***

List of Bugs and QoL suggestions (Updates in comments as I find more bugs)
I'm only reporting bugs that majorly affect gameplay.

Found a terminal that failed to give me a reward for completing it, so I could complete it an infinite amount of times without disabling it, which let me max out my rank with the Gek faction

Trying to craft is impossible without one open slot in your inventory. Even if crafting an item consumes 10 slots worth of items and opens up all that space, you need an 11th extra slot to craft.
This has caused me to throw items away at least a dozen times already, because it's just easier than travelling for five minutes to access my ship storage

Opening geodes also require open space, even if the contents of the geode are already in your inventory and are added to the stack you have. Also doesn't let you open them if there's 1 geode remaining, which opens up a slot as you open it

Players can pay for maps to items on nearby planets. You might have to solve some kind of "puzzle", which really boils down to choosing an action from a list of actions.
Choose wrong, you get nothing and you wasted all the money you spent on your map.
The best course of action is to reload your save as many times as it takes to guess the right choice. This is a waste of the players time and causes unnecessary frustration.

Several features require holding buttons down for several seconds (flying the ship, scanning.) This gets really annoying when you have to continue to stack what buttons you're holding for a long time, when it could be lowered to one.
(IE: scanning requires you to hold F and then click the mouse. It could be reduced by allowing the player to release the F key while a scan is active without it lowering the visor. QOL issue)

You cannot teleport to your home ship (your freighter). Therefore best practice is to park it in front of a space station and never move it, because otherwise it'll be more difficult to fly to manually.
This also makes it less desirable for me to bother with the missions on the freighter, because it wastes minutes of my time going back to it repeatedly. I'd rather just not bother using it at all and build a base on a planet which I can actually access.
You can teleport to any other base, whether or not your base even has a teleporter built. Since The Desolation update from 2020, you can also build a teleporter on your freighter to leave it, but you can't teleport back, despite the patch claiming you can warp back.
I found a 2+ year old discussion asking about this, and it still hasn't been fixed, so I can only assume it's intentionally difficult for players to access.

You cannot view the map unless you are in your ship and your ship is in space. This prevents you from seeing what galaxy your objective is in unless your're flying outside, which means you can't see it while on a planet trying to figure out where to go through a teleporter.
So to check your map, you have to lift off (wastes fuel), fly to space, check the map, fly back, THEN use your teleporter. I cannot express how aggravating and time wasting this process is.

Many map icons and markers aren't labelled, and there is no in-game legend. Luckily, users have made lists of what they mean and there is a wiki for the game.
However, requiring users to have a wiki open at all times to learn these icons defeats the purpose of having icons at all, which is to make things easily identifiable and understandable.

My base computer lost the ability to access the Base Computer Archives, and required me to build a second one to continue the quest line. It claimed "Your base is in another star system," while I tried to access it.

Random pirate encounters are broken and don't reward bounties for fighting them.

Selling ships is broken. When trying to sell my ship, the game stated "7 Inventory slots are required to scrap your ship." The wording is very important. 7 slots are required. I freed up 7 slots, as requested. The game then stated "Inventory full." It stopped telling me how many inventory slots I needed. I threw away an item and had 8 open slots. Still received the error. In desperation, I manually flew to my freighter to access my storage and place every item in storage. After a 10 minute exchange, I could sell my ship. Selling my ship placed 9 items in my inventory.
Nothing about this process was correct, and every step wasted more time. I can only guess how many slots I'll need if I ever sell another ship, because the game doesn't even know.

After about the 30+ hour mark, any object that isn't world geometry hasn't loaded in a texture. Everything is visually broken, and numerous users online complained about it since launch, and is hasn't been fixed.
Some have found success restarting the game/computer, but neither of those have solved it for me, after multiple restarts.
---After reading dozens of comment threads, on the Steam version, it seems this can be fixed by going to the Steam settings and disabling Shader Precaching. Although I don't know if this solution will last or it will eventually break again.
But I don't know how console players will be able to fix it, or if it's permanently broken on console.

The Base computer archives quest broke again. One of the milestones requires crafting an Appearance Modifier, and the quest does not register that I've crafted it. I crafted 5 to be sure it was broken. I don't see a solution to this problem online, so the quest may be soft locked now.

I received 102 of a rare resource instead of the 2-4 I was supposed to receive. The stack itself was also glitched, since the item is only supposed to be stackable in groups of 15 at max.

Taking a screenshot might crashes the game.

Alien ships at trading posts fall through the world when they leave.

Binding a key to change the multi tool model is broken in the quick menu (X). Binding a key to switch the multi tool just plays an error sound when pressed. Therefore its only possible by navigating the menu manually, which isn't exactly quick with how many sub menus it's buried in.

more bugs in comments

Pretty much suffers from all the same problems as the first game

Biggest complaint would be some repetitive or badly written dialogue. A lot of the time the characters feel lifeless and stupid when they talk, like they have no individual thoughts or feelings. This seems to clash with the games theme of individuality and unique designs for the cast.

If you like the first game you'll probably like it.