Recent reviews by ShyGuy

Absolutely not worth a dime of its full price unless you absolutely want a fix of a new 2D Sonic game. Pick Mania over this, or many of the other 2D Sonic games that exist. I literally played this game with a roommate on their account, 100%ed it through family share on my own, and then bought it just to reaffirm to others that this is a very poor execution of what 2D Sonic could and should be and that they should look elsewhere.

The gameplay is pretty standard for Sonic, you go fast toward the right side of the screen. The problems, however, begin when you attempt to perform this feat. Level design is very unappealing and gimmicky, and riddled with obstacles that are placed in such a way that it's entirely unfun to hit something that you would not have reacted to while running at mach 20. At the very least, we should have a more zoomed-out camera so that it's fair game to see and dodge things that are placed directly in your way. This all becomes 10x worse in the second story, where they just spam spikes and bottomless pits and more dangerous enemies far more frequently than before. IF you play the game enough to know the levels, then a clean playthrough can look and even feel pretty convincing, but the road to that memorization of each level is not pleasant.

Of the five characters, only two are anything to write home about. Sonic plays about as well as you'd expect. Tails is very good, and has more horizontal movement speed when descending during flight, which you can take advantage of. Amy is fine, and her double jump can be welcome, but she's not going to keep up with the previous two. Knuckles was torn apart in this game, and is horrendous to play as, and will have you wondering why they even allowed him to remain the way he is. The new character is fun, and a welcome addition to the cast.

Boss design is baaaad. A couple exceptions exist, they're not all terrible, but by and large the bosses are unfun to fight, take forever to allow you to hurt them, and are painfully long as a result. Several just have instakill attacks because why not, including the late and/or final bosses which are 10-minute-long slogs with narrow damage windows and potentially minutes-long downtime between being able to hurt them in the first place.

The music is largely forgettable, though you'll probably find yourself unable to forget the title screen and/or super theme after playing for long enough, which are a lengthy 30 seconds before looping for you to get your fix.

The multiplayer is ridiculously poor. Singleplayer is already rough enough just for playing through the game, but when you add more people the camera can't figure out who to follow. I've played with two, three, and four people locally, through the entire game, multiple times, and the camera never understands the assignment. You'll be booted offscreen for being last in line about as often as you'll be booted offscreen for being first in line. During any automated sections, only one person will remain visible as the others mash A in order to attempt respawning over and over and over again only to fly offscreen again within a second or two.

This is the second-worst game I've ever played and completed.

Fun game, nearly 30 hours so far in playing multiplayer with friends (and some solo) and I still feel like I'm far from discovering everything. In atypical-to-roguelites fashion, you have quests that give you some variety in how to play, for a while. The classes are fun and different, and their abilities have plenty of ascensions and augments so they don't feel too samey across several runs. The turn-to-turn "puzzle" of figuring out the right order of operations for you to balance your damage output versus staying out of harm's way at the end of it all, is very enjoyable. Not everything is perfect, but we have a fun game here that's certainly worth its price, though whether it's "just" worth it or WAY worth it may vary from person to person.

Plenty to say about the gameplay: it's fun, if you are a fan of positional turn-based combat to begin with. There's a mild puzzle which I mentioned, which is the phase of your turn where you think about how you are going to utilize your movement, your cooldowns, and the orb spawns to reduce said cooldowns/provide extra movement, in order to get the most damage out while avoiding being hurt by the end of it. You are given all of the information for what each enemy will do on a turn, and it's up to you to choose how to react to this—I believe a strong factor in your success in this game is having good target selection. Not every enemy on a turn will be directly attacking you, so you may want to focus on the ones that are. If none are, you might just want to pick off the ones you know will be directly attacking sooner than others while removing yourself from in the way of their indicated attacks.
As far as enemies go, they are all predictable. I've noticed that they behave the same way (aside from where precisely they move) most if not all of the time. Each enemy, from the turn they spawn, will perform the same order of actions on a loop, so part of learning how to improve as you scale to higher difficulties is recognizing which enemies are most dangerous right away and which aren't going to be for a couple turns, and acting accordingly. The biomes are similar. After enough experience, you can acquire the knowledge for what kinds of enemies are going to appear in a biome, similar to Isaac. If you think a specific biome's enemies or boss will be difficult for your current build/run/team composition to deal with, you have two other options for where to go. I think all of this works in favor of the player and is a positive for this game, because the difficulty would certainly spike if 6+ enemies could suddenly be attacking you directly and unavoidably in a way you couldn't have predicted, given the limitation on actions. Thankfully, that isn't the case here. Learning the enemies and their attack patterns is massive, especially as difficulties ramp up.

All good roguelite players understand that there is skill to mitigating the randomness of your run or simply being good enough to make even subpar item combinations work. Plenty of people have complaints about the RNG of the game, but personally I believe that these players rely too much on tactics and not enough on strategy. Time will tell, though, and as of right now I feel confident that it is very much in the player's hands to decide whether they'll succeed or not.

The audio is pretty good, but to me, not memorable. I don't mean to say that the audio or art or voice acting is poor, it just doesn't quite stand out. The background music feels just like background music and not something I'd ever pay attention to, the sound effects are quite good but lack an individualized punch to make you feel like you're engaging with something unique. They're just sounds and songs that play while you do stuff. I'm somebody who adores great soundtracks and loves when a game's audio compels me to keep playing it just to have my eyes and ears further blessed, but I don't see that in this. Thankfully, the mechanics and combat, which is the meat of playing the game for me, pulls it right back.

The voice acting is great and I am glad they chose to go with it for a game like this, because is genuinely feels like anything less than every line being fully spoken wouldn't quite fit with the rest of the effort put into the non-gameplay aspects here. Huge props to voicing it all.

The story is... I'll be honest, I don't really know, nor do I terribly care for it. The settings are nice to look at, and the characters say a lot of stuff, but I've gotten to the point where most of it seems like worldbuilding without a definition. We don't really know what's going on aside from the fact that we're a being who was inexplicably spawned out of the ink ocean and immediately serves the greater good of saving the world. It seems like a shame to me that they chose to dress up the narrative so much without actually having a story to tell. I find it to be entirely ignorable. The characters talk a lot about themselves and their surroundings, but you're never really drawn into anything greater than quests, which are fine, but can get annoying if you just want to unlock stuff but need to go through potentially several runs of just not getting what you need in order to complete their requirements.

All-in-all, money well spent, and I see no point soon where me or my friends will stop playing it. Eventually we'll get there, because the runs do seem samey due to a lack of... well, variety content. What's there is good and what's there is enjoyable, but there could stand to be a lot more there. Six biomes (of which you go through two in a single run) and three final bosses just seems sad, I guess. Here's hoping to more content in the future, because more content along the lines of biomes, enemies, bosses, classes, draftable abilities, and vestiges, would do a lot for the game. Borrowing a page from Risk of Rain 2 and offering an alternative binding or two for each slot of an aspect's base kit that you can choose between would be stellar. I believe that the game needs that kind of choice in fundamental gameplay of aspects to keep things fresh and keep players experimenting.

Crab Souls was a fun experience, providing me overall with exactly the kind of pains that a traditional Souls game does but wrapped up in a silly, cartoony, genre-savvy shell.

The narrative! It's lighthearted and entertaining, and they did a great job with the writing right off the bat. You're just a guy who had his day interrupted and wants nothing more than to get his shell back so he can go back to relaxing alone. Eventually, as one might expect, it takes a darker turn, especially nearing the end, as the topic of the ocean being polluted so heavily is more directly tackled.
It was interesting, though, that I never felt like the game specifically told me "we should stop polluting the ocean," rather it instead showed the ramifications of the ocean's pollution and allowed me to derive the message for myself. Not that it's a hard message to grasp, but that presentation certainly means something.

The gameplay? Honestly, if you've played one soulslike, you know what you're getting into. This game is far easier than any others in the genre, so I would consider it a great point of entry if you're concerned about the difficulty. The shell mechanic is by far the most unique thing about the game, as it makes you feel like you're finding and deciding to switch to a new shield every so often, which has its own innate ability. There's a high degree of personality your playthrough can have based on what shell(s) you prefer to use.
The studio has released one game prior to this, which I've played and 100%ed as well, and let me tell you, the physics jank is something you'll just be living with. There's a not-insignificant amount of moments where I know I got screwed by hitboxes or some collision with the environment or enemies that didn't make much sense. That being said, fighting remained enjoyable enough that these moments didn't deter me from wanting to engage with it.

The music was kind of hit-or-miss, I think, which is a shame because of just how much a good OST can contribute to the quality of a game. A couple tracks I can think of are memorable and will stick with me for a bit, but most of them are just part of the background and don't particularly hit you with any impressive vibes.
I may be in the minority for this part, but the voice acting felt about equal to the music for me. A few of the characters had very good voice acting that accurately matched what you see, and for such a small team you could say that having a diverse set of voices to work with is still very good in and of itself, which I agree with, but I found that probably half of the voiced lines had me wondering more when they'd stop talking.

Overall though, very fun game. The downsides definitely detracted from how wonderful the experience might have been, but for such a small dev team to put out what we did get is still fantastic. I can't wait to see what they'll be able to do next, especially if they decide to increase their team size and budget for more depth in the future.

This is an unfortunate decision to have to make right now, but I can't recommend the game in its current state, on-release. Several reasons why:

1. The physics. We play platformers for reliable physics, right? But we don't really get that here. In the four hours I've played so far, there have been numerous, regular occasions of the game not behaving consistently in terms of what any one action should do. You go for a dash into a yoyo ride, and sometimes you maintain your dash speed (which is the intended purpose of doing this) and sometimes you just go right back to walking speed. Sometimes when you try to yoyo ride in midair, your yoyo pulls you to the ground quickly and you begin riding it (the intended outcome) and sometimes your yoyo comes right back to you and you just drop standing completely still. Those are just a couple examples of input-related physics, but there's also collision being wildly off for some obstacles, seemingly-random instances of objects whose hitboxes are larger than they look, and more. Also, those rotating cylinders you're supposed to traverse in star-1? Their physics are unbelievably bad, you get magnetized to them as they rotate and just get stuck upside-down only to fall to your death just for attempting to walk on them normally, and the worst part is I really can't tell whether it's intended for you to get magnetized to them and rotate fully with them and THAT'S what's broken, or whether you're not supposed to at all and the fact that you stick to them at all is what's wrong. It's baffling how anyone played these levels and thought the physics were ready to ship.

2. Input reading. There's a lot of times where I simply want to do an air dash into a yoyo ride and the game just doesn't recognize one of the inputs. There's a lot of times where I have to press the same button multiple times to get the intended response and perform an action. The timing with which you have to press your throw button the second time in order to get your dash isn't consistent, so you often just end up throwing and not following up.

3. The bugs. Everyone's talked about the softlocks in world one, where you get stuck infinitely on a sloped roof, but thankfully you can just restarts from a checkpoint to resolve that. There's also many instances of clipping through the floor or walls or obstacles entirely and audio delay in the cutscenes (despite their simplicity, essentially just being panning images), at least as far as I've encountered.

I can deal with most of this, and will continue to because I'm just a fan of platformers and a completionist and find it somewhat enjoyable in spite of these major, glaring flaws. So I'm going to finish the game. But I'm not very satisfied with the quality or the polish of the game, at the end of the day it just seems rushed, which sucks because there was a lot of faith in the devs before playing.
This doesn't mean there aren't things to like about the game, but these problems definitely shine far brighter than anything else right now. I hope they fix the game, but for its current price point and the state of its bugs and physics inconsistencies, I wouldn't feel right telling others that this is something they should buy.

EDIT: After 100%ing the game, I think the charm grew as time went on. The music was great (though there should have been more, honestly, one song per entire world seems lazy), the environments were interesting, and it's all visually just fun to look at. Plus, some of the later levels had cool ideas and themes.
I'm not changing my rating, because though there was plenty of non-gameplay reasons to enjoy the game, all of the issues I mentioned above only increased in quantity as it became necessary to perform slightly more precise platforming and traverse slightly more difficult obstacles throughout levels. The issues I found with the game didn't go anywhere, the general appeal of the non-gameplay elements just went up, which is nice, but it didn't make the game feel better to play.

I will say, I love the game, and I love the DLC for the plot development and the continuation of this developer creating puzzles and boss fights. I will say, though, that you will need to do some grinding (not very much, to be fair, but just enough to get annoying depending on what gear you want) in order to scale well into the endgame.

All that being said, if you've enjoyed the game until its non-DLC ending, are invested in it, and want more of it, absolutely, 100% get this. The price is staggeringly low for what it offers. I'd gladly pay double.

I haven't yet completed the game, currently about (what I think is) 2/3 of the way through, maybe 3/4 if I'm being generous to myself.

I first started this game impressed in the first couple hours by the strength of the UI design, sound direction, and fluidity of the gameplay. That didn't change for the first 20 or so hours, with me getting used to the addition of new mechanics, abilities, and the fun and challenging puzzling and combat present.

Now, 35 hours in, I'm enjoying the hell out of the game. Somewhere around the halfway mark, twists and revelations in the narrative have elevated it to the point where I feel like I'm in it more to see what happens next to the characters, and see their interactions and development more. The gameplay is still great, and has been doing a great job of keeping me happy and satisfied with the gear building and scaling of abilities over time, but the cast and plot is becoming a strong part of my motivation to keep on playing.

It's fantastic, overall. Play this.

As far as rogue-lites go, I'd consider this an enjoyable middle ground. The gameplay loop does get a little bit samey after you've experienced one dungeon enough times, but the writing keeps it going.

The witty and sarcastic humor and characters feel like a reward for completing a run, as events occur and new voice lines show up whether you succeed in your dungeon or not. I'm actively entertained by the dialogue, and have audibly laughed at some of it, which is typically uncommon, at least for me when playing a game.

The between-run progression is not slow, and you're given a good amount of tasks from the characters that will have you occasionally revisiting dungeons you may or may not have cleared in order to gain useful perks from them. In my experience, most of them are fairly useful, though you can only pick between one character, each of whom has several effects that unlock as you complete their tasks.

Though I still recommend it solely due to the fact that the writing absolutely carries the content, I have to address my largest gripe with the game, which is the abilities. I really was hoping that we'd have more depth to them. While I'm a huge fan of passive upgrades, very few of them feel actually impactful to your run. Virtually every upgrade is basically a "take because it's another upgrade" rather than a "take because/if this works well with your run." The abilities lack synergies and unique depth that might make them stand out to you otherwise, or have interesting effects when paired with other abilities.

The game definitely doesn't lack in charm and entertainment value, and it does a good job of keeping you busy while you're looking forward to either winning or losing your run in order to see what the characters will have to say to you next. The downfall is in the lack of depth when it comes to abilities, and the actual in-run gameplay feeling quite samey run-to-run as a result, but at the end of the day it balances out to be fun and worth the cost.

It gets better after 3,000 hours

Nep nep nep nep