Recent reviews by useoftoaster

great

I have played all 3 of the series and this is the best so far. Keep up the good work. Definitely worth $13.

It's a little more polished than the last 2 (not up to AAA standards, but not priced like it either). Most puzzles were fun and took about 20-30 minutes on average. One or maybe two were duds, but you're always going to have that in a game where each puzzle has its own set of rules to figure out.

Compared to a game like Portal or Talos Principle where every puzzle is a different configuration of a standard set of game mechanics, you get fewer puzzles this way and less consistent puzzle quality, but more of a fun sense of discovery.

For us, the weakest part of the game was chapter 4 (with the bridge) because it was mainly a puzzle for one player to do while the other doesn't have much input to offer. The one right after it was a little boring too, but from there it picked right back up. My favorite puzzles were in chapter 7, but 8 and 9 were very good too. 8 was a relaxing change of pace and felt like a fun callback to stuff from the previous games, with extra twists.

The environments in this game were more varied and interesting to look at than in the previous installations. I like seeing new stuff and exploring around a little.

Only negative I have is the load times were slow on my machine (but not for my buddy, probably because he installed it to an SSD), and the game disconnected us immediately upon completing chapter 9. It did save progress though so we were able to hop right back into chapter 10 and not miss a beat.

Fun as a pure puzzle game, and even more fun if you have a friend to compare notes with while trying to optimize your solutions for minimal cycle counts (not required at all to complete the game). You don't need prior programming knowledge: the TIS-100 only has 12 instructions, each of which can be described in a sentence. Most of the 14-page manual is just flavor text or explanations of special node types you'll encounter late in the game.

Solid puzzles. If you want more of a challenge you can go for all the stars, which I didn't - just got a few by luck. I enjoyed the story much more than I thought I would. You don't need to care about the philosophical parts to be moved by Alexandra's time capsules.

I loved this game; I think it's easily in the top 3 single-player games I've played. $30 is a reasonable price, if not a bargain.

I'm not the best at dealing with horror games, but I was too fascinated by the setting and story of this one to stop playing at the scary parts.

This is basically a game about story and exploration.

However, the story isn't interesting because it's not coherent, and the exploration isn't interesting because the majority of the map to explore is all the same.

You find a bunch of notes which you can piece together to gather some background information, but even that is just hinted at. There's certainly no conflict/resolution. You never get to actually understand what's going on. Full disclosure, I didn't find every note, but I did find a good number of them and they were far too vague to reach real conclusions from.

The narration and (disappointing) ending tell you pretty much zip about what you're actually interested in: "what happened here? why is this weird stuff happening now?".

Exploration-wise, there are some interesting landmarks you can often see from a long way off that give you motivation to keep going to try to reach them. You can also follow the coordinates on your map to get to some that are a bit more hidden. But those areas are small and there's not much exploration within them, and most of the map is very boring to explore because it's all snow, mountains, and trees. I actually got a "Tree" steam card for this game. I assume they have the other major characters like "Rock" and "Snow" too.

I realize that that's meant to be the game's atmosphere: bleak, snowy, windy, forboding. But it's just not that interesting to walk around in for 15 minutes at a time just getting from point A to point B.

The game looks good and they clearly put a lot of work into it, but for the reasons above I didn't find it fun to play. Maybe pick it up if it goes on sale for $5 or less.

I love this game's humor, and the developers have done a good job in providing different challenges throughout rather than merely finding a few types of tasks for the player to do and repeating them. The one downside is that the game is very short (2-3 hours), but on the other hand, its workshop support seems to be better than most, so that could provide some replay value as more content gets added by players.