Recent reviews by TheGhostThatWas

The island is pretty nice looking despite the games age. The enemy AI is interesting and feels somewhat lifelike, often just moving about the island and scouting the world until they find players. They communicate with each other, growl and size up the player, climb trees and perch on rocks. The enemies are simple but reactive enough that they still feel like a challenge and interesting to fight. Those are just the regular ones too.

Great decisions were made to give players options to play in creative mode and disable building destruction.

But...


The sleep cooldown doesn't even line up with nighttime, so I have to wait like 5 minutes in the dark before I can skip back to day. Why is there even a cooldown on sleeping? if you simply must restrict the ability to sleep, why not just allow the player to sleep at night like minecraft?

This game is full of frustrating mechanics that seem to lack polish. Holding shift while standing still drains stamina. Sitting on a bench prevents you from crafting or using menus. Items sometimes can't be picked up. I can't pick up a story item because the item doesn't react to anything.
Cave jumpscares (bats usually) are louder than any other sound in the game for no reason. They play every time you reenter the cave or get near the entrance, and even though I know they're coming they're so loud that they still make me flinch.
Building mechanics sometimes just don't work for no reason. I can only build regular campfires in my treehouse, but I can't build standing fires (torches). I can't align stairs on the same height as my a platform, and even trying to line it up manually is impossible because the game doesn't let you orient objects on the Z axis separately from the X/Y axis.

This game is cool but every aspect of the game has some kind of problem attached to it. They all add up to make an aggravating experience. Hopefully the sequel is more polished after the release date has been delayed

Its ok

Generally balanced, but many unlockables have very, very large variations in the degree of difficulty it takes to unlock them, so much so that I'm positive many players will not unlock certain ones

This is quite a strange choice given the small number of unlockable items, and many characters core skills being locked

Mercenary is probably the worst character because you have to play prismatic trials to unlock his skills. just garbage

the core game is solid and because the items are so flexible the gameplay doesn't get too repetitive

I got to the end of the game and then went back to try and find some of the other endings. Turns out there are entire areas of the game I never even explored before. There's a lot more here than I realized.

You can play just the main path worlds to get to the endings, but if you end up liking it, I recommend going back and checking out some of the other parts you may have missed. There are a lot of secrets and probably more story hints than I'm still discovering on my second play.

Great game

I got 6 Benthic Blooms, which rolled me 21 Bottled Chaos, a number of Interstellar Desk Plants and Pocket I.C.B.M.s, along with 2 Gestures of the Drowned, which produced so many particles and effects my entire computer hard crashed and restarted.

10/10 Great expansion.

I do think the Void Fiend is kind of unfun to micromanage his charge, which becomes so annoying when he constantly has to stop and play an animation to change forms, even if I don't want to change. Pressing the R key every 3 seconds to stop him gets tedious quickly.

This DLC has a lot of positive and negative changes, but at least the negative ones can be mitigated by mods. Definitely worth getting if you're playing AB+, and then tuning the experience for yourself.

I think the changes to hard mode's shop seems to really undermine the whole mechanic of building the shop up to begin with. The changes to the Donation machine are "balanced" but unfun.
Several character's lost interactions that were apparently unintended, such as Keeper no longer gaining money from a Blood Machine or Swallowed Penny. These changes seem more like negative quality of life changes over anything else. Holy Mantle being intrinsic to the Lost is good.

Tainted Characters are neat. A lot of the new items are great.
All of the rebalances are interesting, except the devil deals. The broad nerfs to most devil items makes them all much less useful than angel items, which ended up causing the "meta" to be based on praying to RNG than an angel room spawns. The whole concept of angel rooms being a chance to replace a devil room which already only has it's own chance to spawn was always appalling to me, but now it's what the game seems to be telling players to do. The stacking RNG and the fact that all players aren't good enough to never get hit means that runs in Repentance will boil down to getting lucky instead of strategizing and making tough decisions.
The same can be said about Planetariums, the new room which also only has a chance to appear if you don't enter item rooms. This means that not only are the more common devil deals no longer a good source of items, but other sources of items are discouraged as well. Again, only for a chance at another item later. Which often will not pay off.

The alt path is very strangely balanced compared to the base game. Almost all of the new bosses don't feel like they belong in the same game as those from the base game. Although they do new things, many of them have attack patterns which can cause unavoidable damage or trap the player entirely to die. Even knowing their attacks might not help due to RNG or bizarre room design.
Mother/The Witness is a bit more difficult than I think it should be for the effort of getting to the boss, only because all the new characters in the DLC require you to beat her at the end of the alt path. The Beast, a boss which you fight after Mother, is strangely much easier. I would argue that the fight is actually too easy, but because it follows a sort of miniboss rush, it makes sense. It's just weird it felt easier than Mega Satan, and way less difficult than Mother.

I downloaded mods which revert changes to Devil Deals and shops, and that's enough to make this DLC a good experience.

Would not recommend the vanilla experience. It can generally be improved with the DLC and downloading mods, but you need to purchase DLC to use mods at all.
Also, purchasing the DLC might also make your game unplayable until you mess around with the files.
After upgrading to Afterbirth, and then again to AB+, both times I had to go into the apps data and delete old resources or the game would crash on startup. That's only the start of my issues.

Even a decade after release, the game is unstable as hell and constantly crashes. Generally there's no error or easily located log which might help you diagnose the issue. Mods which make the gameplay more fun are often incompatible with one DLC or another mod, which the user won't know until they spend hours testing every single mod they might want to use.
I'm now trying to play the Afterbirth+ DLC on my Macbook because Repentance isn't ever going to be released on Mac. Because I have Repentance save data on my PC and Steam Cloud, or because I installed a mod which I can't identify, the game now always crashes on launch on my Macbook. I suspect it's a mod issue, but the only way to figure it out is to unsubscribe from everything and go through one at a time to find the issue. There are no launch options that I can use to disable mods on just my Macbook. I cannot disable the mod with the ingame manager, which would at least allow me to keep using them on my other computer, because I cannot launch the game.
Using the game on more than one computer might be a fringe case, but even just using this game on one computer has already wasted a lot of time playing tech support instead of playing the game.

I highly recommend Enter the Gungeon for a more reliable and fun experience.

Like a lot of other people, installing AB+ caused my game to crash at launch.

Some googling does show some fixes online though.
Uninstalling all your mods and deleting your AB+ and AB+ mod folders in Documents/My Games/ fixed the crashes for me.

There's some okay stuff in here, lots of decent items and the two new characters are fun.

Plenty of imbalanced things too. Delirium sucks, the void (level) sucks, and the enemy portals are annoying and unfun.
On the plus side, anything that I found too annoying has a mod which either fixes it or replaces the enemy entirely, which is great.

Too bad there isn't a mod to fix my "skill issue"

Personally, I'd recommend just buying this to upgrade to Repentance, since from all account it seems like Repentance is better. I'm playing on this version just so I can unlock all the completion marks for the Lost on hard before they added even more bosses. (why is godhead locked behind this achievement, every other character just unlocks a co-op skin for the same achievement, like whyyyyyyyyyy)

It's been some years since I played this, but I haven't found another game like it yet which I enjoyed as much.

The mechanics and movement available to you are fun to experiment with, and there's many ways to reach the solutions to the puzzles the game gives you.
I found the game to be somewhat relaxing at times, but others were tense. Trying to stay hidden in some cases can push you to quickly run between guards or slip past a camera that is about to turn.

The game is limited by its 2d pixel direction, but I think that's its only limiting factor. The mechanics are fun, have a small sense of progression (if I rememberright, I think you unlock some new abilities later in the game), and are satisfying to pull off.

Game crashes on trying to play a new run after installing

0/10 lol

Very fun game. Apparently they made the missions easier since people complained, but I liked the difficulty back on rundown 3. My friends and I tried for hours to beat this one mission with only three people, and it was tough fun.

This game is probably one of my favorites just for it's universe building, but I'm worried that literally anything the designers make might not meet my expectations. All the mysterious buildup from the rundowns might lead to disappointment no matter what, simply because my expectations are so high. I have to praise them regardless, as the world, enemies, and very loose story are all incredible.

I'd love to convince my friends to play the game with me again, but they might not come back to it. I'm really disappointed I'll probably not be around for some of the rundowns, but hopefully I can drag them back.

I will say I'm not a fan of the rundowns being time limited. For someone like me, I'll never get to experience the end of rundown 3 because I couldn't get my friends back on. I'll also never get to play earlier rundowns, instead just reading about the plot of them. I hope that once the game leaves early access, we'll see all the rundowns unlocked again.