Recent reviews by rick diculous

(Note: Gametime does not include the 1 hour playing the limited time available(?) demo and the save carried over to the full game)


Retropolis 1 was a game I only recommended one deep sale. It was enjoyable, had great aesthetics, but very expensive for less that an hour of gameplay. It's a slightly silly Noir mystery in a world of robots that never leans too hard into the ridiculousness. I quite enjoyed the story presentation - which was quite impressive for such a small dev team. It's also a very comfortable VR experience that's easy to play seated and feels like a classic point and click game.

Retropolis 2 continues the same story and feel, but is also over 4 times as long as the original. The game, however, is front-loaded with more puzzles. Chapters 2-4 are more cinematic, but a bit light on the puzzle content compared to the first chapter. The quality of the puzzles, however, are consistent and good. For experienced tradition adventure gamers, the difficulty is about medium. For players new to adventure games, there's a full walk-through available by devs. So, you'll only be stuck on a puzzle for as long as you want.

(Note2: The game was quickly patched and these issues have been fixed.)
At launch, there are some bugs. Another review mentioned the character model being partially shown in front of your view for a few sections of the game. I had the same experience - annoying, but still playable. I played the game fully for one ending of the game. As a nicety, the game offered to let me return and make a different choice. The game, however, always crashes when using an item on an electrical plug. So, I've technically finished the game, but I'm unable to finish an alternate ending. I'll be waiting for a patch to finish it.

Beside a few technical issues, my only other complaint would be the price. 25 bucks (20 for introductory sale price) is a bit high for a 4 hour game. It's still a quality indie title, with a great sense of humor and excellent presentation. Let's just hope there's a quick hotfix for the game-breaking issue.

The Escape Room games from mc2games is one of my favorite indie puzzle series. So, when a new one pops up, it's an instant buy for me. I know what to expect: well designed puzzles and a paper thin story that does just enough to set up the theme. Wizardry School is no different. If you're expecting a grand adventure with deep exploration, this isn't that type of game. It's all about the puzzles.

Of the five games in this series, Wizardry School is my 3rd favorite or maybe tied for 2nd. It's a bit easier than others, but you'll still need to take notes. It's not casual by any means, but experienced adventure gamer players will progress at a constant pace. Everything you need is directly in front of you. There's no hidden objects, but some puzzles will unlock items needed for other puzzles.

The game structure is very similar to previous games. You're presented with several puzzles in an area and you have to figure out the order to solve them. You can usually infer an order, but some puzzles will explicitly tell you when you're missing items to continue. Each level is self contained, so there's no backtracking to previously solved areas. All puzzles and clues have an icon that's clickable, so you don't have to guess what's decoration and what's part of the game play.

I do have minor complaints. Your character's movement has weird acceleration and deceleration. So, it feels a big sluggish and mushy. This might be an issue for people that get motion sickness (thought I'm not one of them). Also, when you alt-tab out of the game and alt-tab back in, interactable icons disappear. This issue has existed in previous games as well, but you can press ESC to exit the current puzzle and get your icons back.

Bad navigation/locomotion and questionable design choices gets in the way of enjoying this game. Making the player row/swim for an extremely long time with no feedback of progress isn't fun. Doing so without any save system is even worse. I've tried the game twice (before an after smooth locomotion was added) and the buggy traversal is just as terrible. A physics bug caused my character to slide of rocks and caused it to fling me in a random direction. Getting to the top of a long climb only to lose all progress due to bugs is a terrible experience.

The game does look good and the narration is great, but when the basic fundamentals aren't present, it's hard to have faith in the game to not screw you over.

This had all the framework for a neat indie game. However, for every good idea in the game, it was hampered by 2 or 3 terrible implementation. The wooden toy blocks was a great idea that I had no idea required keyboard input. There's no keybindings and a slow walk speed. In order to get almost all of the story (told only via lore), you have to backtrack to the beginning with the slow walking.

Some puzzles are quite good, while others are random or nonsense. The file cabinet block a door was well done and even gave you a hint for how the mechanic worked. The water fountain was terrible and wasn't even physically possible or intuitive. The radiator puzzle is just completely trial-and-error random. I've already mentioned the toy blocks above as good, but with terrible visual ques.

The game just feels incomplete, with placeholders instead of fully developed areas/puzzles. Even getting the game with a deep discount, I feel disappointed. It's short, indie jank, and neither the puzzles nor the story are good enough to make up for all the shortcomings.

If you can forgive the indie jank, there's plenty here for fans of classic adventure games. There's lots of little areas of the game that need polish, but the game is playable from start to finish.

Even though there's not much in the way of a story, the game does have a great sense of style and aesthetics. It's low-poly and simple, but very effective and sometimes creepy. It also looks quite neat in VR, which is highly recommended as the way to play this game.

The puzzles are a bit basic for veteran of the genre, but this is a positive - the game has good pacing. There's always a sense of progression and the puzzle level is usually just high enough to be engaging. Besides the piano puzzle, veteran adventure game players won't have much problem solving them. Since the game is divided into chapters, there's little time spent aimlessly walking looking for the next clue of a puzzle. For the most part, the puzzles fit the "theme" of each level, so there's a bit of variety despite the puzzles being straight forward.

Valley is a game that doesn't do anything right. Almost nothing is polished or even well thought out.

It lacks the most basic settings, like gamma, and others just don't work. This game is hard to see often even with the brightness blasted, and there's not even in-game control settings. The menu select noise is extremely loud, no matter what you choose for the audio settings. The music blares so loud that the audio logs aren't even distinguishable. When setting the music volume, the current music track just stops playing.

Valley can't decide if it's a platformer, a parkour game, an exploration game, a shooter, or a puzzle game. It tries to borrow ideas from Bioshock, Portal, Metroid, but all ideas are incomplete toughts. Breifly, it has its moments. For example, a new upgrade is introduced - a "power" - and it's fun. It is only used in one level and never used again. There is no clear foundation of gameplay to build and design a solid experience. The game can't even decide if falling pits are used for instant death or for changing levels, so it does both.

The story is told by audio logs and text messages that just start playing when you reach a part of the map. There's almost nothing to tie it into the gameplay or the location. It feels like someone randomly picked spots in the game to interject story as an afterthought. The transitions are often jarring and almost always bothersome. Objectives are done the same. For barely any reason at all, you'll be given an objective or complete an objective simply by reaching a part of the map. It just feels random.

Navigation is mostly completely linear. Since there is no map/mini-map and no reason to backtrack and explore, this is the only style of game that makes any sense. Early in the game, energy balls are places like breadcrumbs to nudge you towards a specific direction. There are almost no branching paths, optional areas, secrets, or any reason to do anything but follow the path the game wants you to follow. This makes most of the flow of the game uninteresting.

There is no economy or balance. Valley hands out energy like candy and it only has a few uses. You can shoot enemys or charging stations and that's all that is needed. You can shoot dead things to revive them, but there's no reason to do so - save for a few gates. The life-bar mechanic really isn't used at all, since the only deaths are from cheap falls. The combat is drop-dead-easy and mostly just a hastle. It's easier to just run away than be bored with the combat. The game also has acorns and medalions as collectables. The acorns open doors that seem to only offer more suit upgrades, which aren't needed. I only found a single door that was opened with medalions, but didn't have enough collected to open it at the time. Much like the audio logs, it feels like these mechanics where added after the maps where made.

The maps are sparse and bland. There's so little to do in these areas, and there's no reason to absorb the atmosphere. There are only two enemy types and one boss battle. Nothing in the game felt like it would have a boss, since combat is so little of the actual game. The style of map and the gameplay chosen doesn't make any sense.

TL;DR - nothing makes about the design of this game. It feels like 4 teams of people in separate parts of the world were tasked with creating part of a game and never communicated with eachother.

Can't think of a better game to nominate for "The best use of a farm animal" award.